I would rather have free sites with advertisements than for-pay sites.
I would prefer not to pay twice: my time to watch/avoid the ad and my money for the increased, ad supporting price of the product.
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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 Google should track and zero expired domain page ranking. The page rank is meaningless for an expired domain. Just a bunch of parasites taking advantage of an error.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Why does everything these days have to be about the "power of OSS" or some like minded politco statement?
Whether you like it or not every action is a political action that has ramifications above-and-beyond the immediate. OSS is largely about correcting the short-sighted view. Get used to it.
To block them most certainly violates the social contract.
Nonsense. Not doing what they want doesn't make you a criminal or even a jerk. It makes you a free agent, a citizen, making a personal choice. In a free country one of the choices you are legally allowed to make is to ignore advertising, whether by technical or other means. Calling this a "social contract" is just a marketing 'droid trying to, as usual, manipulate people by manipulating the language.
Some good points. Even for web sites payment can be aggregated in multiple ways, not just with advertising:
Over time - pay for a year's subscription.
Over space - pay to see many sites simultaneously.
Over the currency - buy a micro-currency in bulk and electronically account for it exactly as is done with ad impression payment now.
By donation - a small fraction of visitors pay a larger fraction of money.
By loss leaders - later content cost is bigger to pay for the free earlier content.
Advertising is a double cost - pay once in time to see the ad, pay again in the price of the product to pay for the ad. It is an insanely inefficient industry with only a minute fraction of unsolicited ad's that are seen by a potential consumer being useful to them. The first coca cola ad you saw when you were a child was useful, every other one was a waste of your time. And the time of your life is the most valuable thing you have.
90% of the advertising/marketing industry, mainly on TV, has become an arms race, where the only winners are the arms dealers (advertising/marketing companies). Everybody else loses. The industry should be more regulated but the players have control of public opinion via the mass media, and in a democracy that unfortunately gives them substantial control of the law. I'd love it if they even took truth-in-advertising laws seriously. Coke adds life? Bullshit. I would severely restrict unsolicited advertising/marketing while promoting classified advertising (including general, "surprise me" classifications).
You've just added $10k to the cost of hiring someone.
That's an exaggeration. As this article talks about training costs for a modern linux system release like SuSE are minimal. There are good reasons to be careful about installing Linux on a company desktop but training costs are not one of them. That has been my personal experience also - training on the Linux KDE/Gnome/OpenOffice/Evolution GUI is simply not an issue for standard office work.
Administrators sometimes under-estimate the general intelligence of users (partly because they are over-exposed to the dweebs) and lose sight of the fact that the Linux GUI's for day-to-day work are very similar to the MSWindows GUI.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
We can focus on your points about Microsoft's actions and the debate surrounding the different parties and be open to new ideas... or we can be distracted by your interesting use of the dollar sign and what you mean by it.
Or we can do both. I'm surprised you even care about it in this forum. Depends the context: I probably would not use the abreviation if I was putting together a business proposal unless the targets were exceptionally laid back or fanatically anti-M$.;-)
I use it on/. mainly to counteract the M$ propaganda most people see on their PC keyboards every day. M$ knows the value of commercial propaganda and mindshare (look at the number of times the the word "Microsoft" appears during M$Windows boot and elsewhere!) and I see no reason not to do my bit to neutralise that. I'm inspired a little by Adbusters magazine and culture jamming though I'm not sure where I saw it first.
I see the extremists belittle, spread FUD, and incorrect information.
That's true, microsoft.com is getting really bad. Their Get The Facts site is particularly extreme. According to them Linux is never the correct choice.;-)
Remember, somebody needs to balance out the M$ marketing fanatics.
Do you value your time so little that it's worth going through the hassle?
As a single purchase it is not worth it but if a few thousand people do this it could trigger a reform of the whole industry. That allows millions of people using linux (out of the hundreds of millions of people using windows) to avoid the M$ tax and also encourages openness and competition. For the industry as a whole it is worth it in the extreme. On a personal note I just want to be able to walk into a retail computer shop in a year or two and be given the option.
I guess if you're extremely principled, I can see doing it.
Just volunteering to help the community. No extreme principles required.
The vendor themselves can be relied upon to talk about the positives. Somebody else needs to talk about the negatives and slashdot is it.
Slashdot is not a monoculture and talks about a variety of things when something is released, including the freedom or otherwise. As long as the slashdot talk is fact based that is a good thing. I hate to think what a world that only talked vendor press releases would be like. Double-plus ungood.
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90% of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race and so purely parasitic.
Either way making up juvinile insulting variations on the name doesn't help your cause, it just makes you look immature.
Not true. Marketers and politicians know how important language is - it literally defines the terms of the debate. Use you're opponent's terms and you've already lost the debate, as this article discusses.
M$ would love it if everybody compared open source with M$Windows as a simple short-term TCO business decision, not as a long-term political decision. They'd love if it people ignored the long term, lockin and democracy compromising results of a private, unaccountable vendor monoculture and control. They'd love it if people continued to be good little consumers paying their $35,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with the most complicated bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties.
Sorry, but I for one am not going to play their game. If that alienates some people then so be it - at least it encourages people to think about why M$ has so many enemies and about the M$ market manipulation e.g. bullshit like the pre-install contracts, icon management, deliberate incompatibility, keyboard keys, stickers, oh-sorry security problems and "accidental" web redirects. There's good reasons why people hate M$. M$ strategy has changed in emphasis now they are an established monopoly but they're still hugely benefiting from the legal but unethical tactics they've been pulling for decades now.
they're competitive advantages is based on trade secrets.
Not true. Both ATI and NVidia have the resources to have cleanroom engineering groups that reverse engineer their competitor's new release's improvements within days, if not hours. The only thing stopping them from using their competitor's tricks is compatibility with their own product, copyright and patents.
The "secrecy" that binary-only software provides is a joke - it just makes everybody's life harder, including the original manufacturer since users won't be providing bug fixes. Which they'd realize if they had any sense.
If my experience is anything to go by I suspect the main reason that many manufacturer's don't release their source code is that they're embarrassed by the quality of it and they might get a tiny revenue stream selling the source separately for special purpose applications in big government/business.
But they can't because of some of the technology that they license from other companies.
If ATI/NVidia do not publically state precisely which "IP" agreements are stopping them from open-sourcing their drivers then what you are saying is just marketing FUD. If the open source community knew what agreements are causing problems they could/would go after the companies concerned instead of the ATI/NVidia, thus getting the "monkeys off their back".
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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.
why not simply use the existing and tested open sources already in use in the vast majority of VTC solutions?
Simple. Because non-windows users want to be interoperable with large numbers of windows users. Remember interoperability? Any claim to windows being sold in a free, competitive market is nonsense if interroperability is impossible.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Let me correct your blatant commercial propaganda for you:
They were also professions largely consisting of two classes of people: the idle rich and the dedicated artist who was willing to live often quite well. Copyright law has made it possible for very few normal people to at least make some money off of their creative works. The vast majority of normal people are negatively impacted by excessive copyright law.
The question is to what degree should we give legal protections? It's not all or nothing, the logical fallacy of a false dilemma. I happen to support the RIAA lawsuits since I realized that most of the people who I saw doing the file sharing when I lived on campus were students who could afford the real deal. Just because they can afford it doesn't mean it's right.
Go ahead, get rid of copyright law and you'll not just get rid of a few artists like Brittney Spears who depend primarily on marketing, not copyright, but also probably a few bands you like but who will usually make money on live performances. Without copyright law, people would have less incentive at all to write music since some people would play it without paying them. So much music today is written by separate song writers who aren't affiliated with the band that you're basically proposing that new song writing be work for hire like most other jobs on the planet..
Btw, getting rid of copyrights will also destroy no open source project as some greedy company can't easily rip off the hard work of the developers. They come in once the project is mature, can't make it proprietary, close their version of the source which is immediately reverse engineered if necessary and sell it at a profit tied to something cool that sells. And good luck to them. The small developer needs no legal recourse since there is no copyright law at all to protect their creation or the software component of the "rip-off" company.
In summary, please take your commercial propaganda elsewhere. In some ways you're worse than a communist - at least they try to be honest.
It's not a question copyright or no copyright. More correctly called copy-restriction-privilege (CRP) there is a world of possibilities. Just one example I would like to see is that, like trademarks which become generic, CRP should lapse on anything that's become an industry standard (including music that's become a standard). Other changes might include drastically shortening the time period of CRP, CRP not applying for non-profit use, CRP not applying if the item in question is not widely available for sale and using CRP to block most forms of interroperable competition being highly illegal. The legislators and the lawyers are asleep at the wheel at the moment.
Reform IP law to stop M$ abuse? RIAA I understand but what is your complaint against microsoft that IP law would remedy.
M$ and the RIAA are both taxing the world for huge sums of money. Not because they're earning it ($35,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with the most complicated bits, the device drivers, been written by third parties? Come on!) but because IP law is currently putting a very small section of society in a privileged position with no realistic competition.
IP markets have largely failed because of the way IP law is currently structured. It's winner-take-almost-all, mostly due to the economic network effect, the importance of standards and interoperability and the inability of current anti-trust law to even remotely manage
technical tricks for getting rid of competition .
Are you bothered that you can't legally pirate windows or get it from a friend?
No, I'm bothered that there is no price competition. The marginal, per-copy price of windows is about $1 yet they are able to sell it for about $200. Why? The market has failed and IP law needs to be fixed.
I honestly didn't think this was a real complaint anymore. I mean there is a real alternative that does allow such things.
Aren't you bothered by the fact that the only way people can even remotely compete is by giving it away? A market this broken needs to be fixed. Markets are not the simple things free market ideologues would have you believe; they are complex beasts with complex laws involving many tradeoffs to encourage hard work, discourage parasitic behaviour, direct resources to where they are needed and to help/protect the young/naive/less fortunate etc.
And I highly doubt companies are legally required to maximize profits. All sorts of companies have major charaties associated with them. Yes that lowers the tax burden but I'm pretty certain the Ronald Macdonald House costs more than it could possibly save or make in free advertising.
I phrased it badly. As pclminion notes a company is required to be responsible to shareholders. Just making the point that a company's objectives are usually different from that of an employee.
Then why do CEOs, etc receive large (some would say outrageous) performance bonuses? If a low-level grunt invents the Next Big Thing, and makes the company millions, why doesn't he get the large bonus? I guess it was the brilliant "Mission Statement" the CEO came up with that really lead to the success.
Those with the gold, make the rules. In this case, those with the decision making power decide what is "best".
No, public corporations are required to be responsible to the shareholders. In practice, nearly everybody cares about profit above all else, so that's what gets pushed the hardest.
There is no law on the books which states, literally, that corporations must make as much money as possible.
True, my phrasing was poor. In practice it'd be almost impossible to mandate profit maximisation anyway because, amongst many other things it depends on when you want the profit and how risk averse you are.
... incentives programs do not typically account for the value of the patent to a company.
Public companies are required by law to maximise their profit. Profit is not usually maximised by giving large bonuses to employees.
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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.
Anyway, I'm just saying. I don't think MS *could* open the format -- at least not as regards document embedding.
Even if everything thing you've said is true, your conclusion is unjustified.
M$ is getting $35,000,000,000+ per year. They could reverse engineer and document their own format with their small change, even if it was serialized Brainfuck. To claim that because it involves activex controls this somehow makes the format undescribable is simply wrong. If the format contains state, that state can be described. Period.
If M$ is claiming what you say they are then they are lying. To technically naive people. Business as usual for them.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
Flagrant, organized, and large scale willful copyrignt infringement.
Yup, and in this case the world is a better place because of it. Funny, that.
Definitely room for major improvement in current copyright law.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It is very possible there is benefits tied to economies of scale for large companies.
True. It is also very possible that big companies suffer from the same problems of bureaucracies and command economies that big government does.
It is one thing when these large companies put up barriers of entries to their markets or when the government does it for them, but if these companies get this big naturally, good for them.
Not if they are big enough that they can run at a loss for long enough to block other players even trying. Markets can and do fail when any one player gets big enough to engage in potentially non-competitive tactics such as cross-subsidisation, mindshare advertising and other forms of market manipulation. Anti-trust law stops this in theory but in practice has proven hopelessly inadequate to deal with the market sophistication of modern corporations.
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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.
What is it about binary versus text formats that brings out the religion in people? Almost as bad as vi versus emacs.
I am happy to use binary formats when they have clear, measurable advantages but, like programming languages, readable data formats have advantages for debugging and understanding that need to balanced against. YABFF (Yet Another Bloody File Format) syndrome also needs to be considered here. To the extent that XML is a general purpose file format I am happy to consider yet another binary file format but the onus is on the proponents to show it has measurable advantages compared to text compressed with an existing, general purpose compressor like gzip. Binary formats can be considered to be domain specific compression and if there's one thing the compression literature has taught us it is that it is usually hard to beat the general purpose compressors with special purpose compressors on real data by more than a few percent.
Good parsers are damn fast and can operate in O(n) time.
And n is smaller for binary data;
It can be. Not necessarily because numbers in text form are variable length (1/2 bytes) and typically will be shorter when compared to 64 bit integers.
in a best-case situation (XML document consists largely of tags rather than text, tags are 10-20 characters but can be reduced to single bytes in a binary encoding), that would mean that switching to binary data would give you O(n/10) parsing, i.e. an order of magnitude faster.
Not compared to text compressed with an existing general purpose compressor rather than YABFF. With a good parser that takes only a few microseconds per byte. Parsing time, for a good parser/compressor, will almost always be dominated by the IO time.
Ergo, binary XML could theoretically give you a considerable performance enhancement.
Probably some enhancement, yes. But enough to outweigh the support overhead of YABFF? The necessity of supporting convertors, documentation, education, opaque data formats, potential inconsistency, binary corruption/recovery, debuggers etc. etc.? That is the question here.
I've lost count of the number of binary formats I've seen that in hex dump had vast numbers of zero bytes and were thus highly inefficient. The people who work at a "high level" designing such file formats without checking such simple things are poor programmers.
You demonstrate your ignorance once more.
Not really. I'm well aware of the tradeoffs. It is you that appears unable to grasp that YABFF requires a significant and measureable advantage to outweigh support costs.
Those vast numbers of zero bytes will be being used to pad records to equal lengths. This can make lookups O(1).
Pointless if a random access will take milliseconds. Usually faster to just slurp the whole thing in and interpret it there. Depends on the file system, the block size of the file system, the seek times of the disk, the read times of the disk, the size of the disk caches and the size and fragmentation of the file amongst many other factors.
Those vast numbers of zero bytes (a) compress better than ASCII text in any decent compression program (so gzip would do much better on those formats than text-based XML)
This assumption is incorrect. My experience has been that gzip does a better job on text based file formats; not surprising given the extra redudancy. Depends on the file, file size and statistics of the file of course.
and (b) take up NO SPACE AT ALL on any modern file system that can handle sparse files.
In a file system that supports sparse files only if the zero's are not written. I'm also not just referring to zero's but to constant values and patterns. On a compressing file system a text file will be compressed as well as a binary file. Compressing file systems may require extra disk accesses making their advantage minimal.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
I like this idiom:
find . -type f -name \*.txt -exec grep -H xxx {} \; -print
I never use locate. Too inflexible and too out-of-date.
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Large public or private organisations paying per-seat licensing for software are being economically stupid.
I would rather have free sites with advertisements than for-pay sites.
I would prefer not to pay twice: my time to watch/avoid the ad and my money for the increased, ad supporting price of the product.
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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 Google should track and zero expired domain page ranking. The page rank is meaningless for an expired domain. Just a bunch of parasites taking advantage of an error.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Why does everything these days have to be about the "power of OSS" or some like minded politco statement?
Whether you like it or not every action is a political action that has ramifications above-and-beyond the immediate. OSS is largely about correcting the short-sighted view. Get used to it.
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DRM - destroying free markets one step at a time.
To block them most certainly violates the social contract.
Nonsense. Not doing what they want doesn't make you a criminal or even a jerk. It makes you a free agent, a citizen, making a personal choice. In a free country one of the choices you are legally allowed to make is to ignore advertising, whether by technical or other means. Calling this a "social contract" is just a marketing 'droid trying to, as usual, manipulate people by manipulating the language.
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Keep your options open!
Some good points. Even for web sites payment can be aggregated in multiple ways, not just with advertising:
Advertising is a double cost - pay once in time to see the ad, pay again in the price of the product to pay for the ad. It is an insanely inefficient industry with only a minute fraction of unsolicited ad's that are seen by a potential consumer being useful to them. The first coca cola ad you saw when you were a child was useful, every other one was a waste of your time. And the time of your life is the most valuable thing you have.
90% of the advertising/marketing industry, mainly on TV, has become an arms race, where the only winners are the arms dealers (advertising/marketing companies). Everybody else loses. The industry should be more regulated but the players have control of public opinion via the mass media, and in a democracy that unfortunately gives them substantial control of the law. I'd love it if they even took truth-in-advertising laws seriously. Coke adds life? Bullshit. I would severely restrict unsolicited advertising/marketing while promoting classified advertising (including general, "surprise me" classifications).
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DRM - destroying free markets one step at a time.
You've just added $10k to the cost of hiring someone.
That's an exaggeration. As this article talks about training costs for a modern linux system release like SuSE are minimal. There are good reasons to be careful about installing Linux on a company desktop but training costs are not one of them. That has been my personal experience also - training on the Linux KDE/Gnome/OpenOffice/Evolution GUI is simply not an issue for standard office work.
Administrators sometimes under-estimate the general intelligence of users (partly because they are over-exposed to the dweebs) and lose sight of the fact that the Linux GUI's for day-to-day work are very similar to the MSWindows GUI.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
We can focus on your points about Microsoft's actions and the debate surrounding the different parties and be open to new ideas... or we can be distracted by your interesting use of the dollar sign and what you mean by it.
Or we can do both. I'm surprised you even care about it in this forum. Depends the context: I probably would not use the abreviation if I was putting together a business proposal unless the targets were exceptionally laid back or fanatically anti-M$. ;-)
I use it on /. mainly to counteract the M$ propaganda most people see on their PC keyboards every day. M$ knows the value of commercial propaganda and mindshare (look at the number of times the the word "Microsoft" appears during M$Windows boot and elsewhere!) and I see no reason not to do my bit to neutralise that. I'm inspired a little by Adbusters magazine and culture jamming though I'm not sure where I saw it first.
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
I see the extremists belittle, spread FUD, and incorrect information.
That's true, microsoft.com is getting really bad. Their Get The Facts site is particularly extreme. According to them Linux is never the correct choice. ;-)
Remember, somebody needs to balance out the M$ marketing fanatics.
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Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
Do you value your time so little that it's worth going through the hassle?
As a single purchase it is not worth it but if a few thousand people do this it could trigger a reform of the whole industry. That allows millions of people using linux (out of the hundreds of millions of people using windows) to avoid the M$ tax and also encourages openness and competition. For the industry as a whole it is worth it in the extreme. On a personal note I just want to be able to walk into a retail computer shop in a year or two and be given the option.
I guess if you're extremely principled, I can see doing it.
Just volunteering to help the community. No extreme principles required.
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DRM - destroying free markets one step at a time.
it's "not free enough".
The vendor themselves can be relied upon to talk about the positives. Somebody else needs to talk about the negatives and slashdot is it.
Slashdot is not a monoculture and talks about a variety of things when something is released, including the freedom or otherwise. As long as the slashdot talk is fact based that is a good thing. I hate to think what a world that only talked vendor press releases would be like. Double-plus ungood.
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90% of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race and so purely parasitic.
Either way making up juvinile insulting variations on the name doesn't help your cause, it just makes you look immature.
Not true. Marketers and politicians know how important language is - it literally defines the terms of the debate. Use you're opponent's terms and you've already lost the debate, as this article discusses.
M$ would love it if everybody compared open source with M$Windows as a simple short-term TCO business decision, not as a long-term political decision. They'd love if it people ignored the long term, lockin and democracy compromising results of a private, unaccountable vendor monoculture and control. They'd love it if people continued to be good little consumers paying their $35,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with the most complicated bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties.
Sorry, but I for one am not going to play their game. If that alienates some people then so be it - at least it encourages people to think about why M$ has so many enemies and about the M$ market manipulation e.g. bullshit like the pre-install contracts, icon management, deliberate incompatibility, keyboard keys, stickers, oh-sorry security problems and "accidental" web redirects. There's good reasons why people hate M$. M$ strategy has changed in emphasis now they are an established monopoly but they're still hugely benefiting from the legal but unethical tactics they've been pulling for decades now.
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zealotry n : excessive intolerance of opposing views.they're competitive advantages is based on trade secrets.
Not true. Both ATI and NVidia have the resources to have cleanroom engineering groups that reverse engineer their competitor's new release's improvements within days, if not hours. The only thing stopping them from using their competitor's tricks is compatibility with their own product, copyright and patents.
The "secrecy" that binary-only software provides is a joke - it just makes everybody's life harder, including the original manufacturer since users won't be providing bug fixes. Which they'd realize if they had any sense.
If my experience is anything to go by I suspect the main reason that many manufacturer's don't release their source code is that they're embarrassed by the quality of it and they might get a tiny revenue stream selling the source separately for special purpose applications in big government/business.
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Keep your options open!
But they can't because of some of the technology that they license from other companies.
If ATI/NVidia do not publically state precisely which "IP" agreements are stopping them from open-sourcing their drivers then what you are saying is just marketing FUD. If the open source community knew what agreements are causing problems they could/would go after the companies concerned instead of the ATI/NVidia, thus getting the "monkeys off their back".
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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.
Censorship can occur because of too much noise as well as too little information. A good librarian can improve the ratio.
For example 90% of modern mass marketing is the suppression of free, useful speech. Just look at the typical informative (ha!) car or shampoo ad.
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Are you a creator or a consumer?
why not simply use the existing and tested open sources already in use in the vast majority of VTC solutions?
Simple. Because non-windows users want to be interoperable with large numbers of windows users. Remember interoperability? Any claim to windows being sold in a free, competitive market is nonsense if interroperability is impossible.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Let me correct your blatant commercial propaganda for you:
They were also professions largely consisting of two classes of people: the idle rich and the dedicated artist who was willing to live often quite well. Copyright law has made it possible for very few normal people to at least make some money off of their creative works. The vast majority of normal people are negatively impacted by excessive copyright law.
The question is to what degree should we give legal protections? It's not all or nothing, the logical fallacy of a false dilemma. I happen to support the RIAA lawsuits since I realized that most of the people who I saw doing the file sharing when I lived on campus were students who could afford the real deal. Just because they can afford it doesn't mean it's right.
Go ahead, get rid of copyright law and you'll not just get rid of a few artists like Brittney Spears who depend primarily on marketing, not copyright, but also probably a few bands you like but who will usually make money on live performances. Without copyright law, people would have less incentive at all to write music since some people would play it without paying them. So much music today is written by separate song writers who aren't affiliated with the band that you're basically proposing that new song writing be work for hire like most other jobs on the planet..
Btw, getting rid of copyrights will also destroy no open source project as some greedy company can't easily rip off the hard work of the developers. They come in once the project is mature, can't make it proprietary, close their version of the source which is immediately reverse engineered if necessary and sell it at a profit tied to something cool that sells. And good luck to them. The small developer needs no legal recourse since there is no copyright law at all to protect their creation or the software component of the "rip-off" company.
In summary, please take your commercial propaganda elsewhere. In some ways you're worse than a communist - at least they try to be honest.
It's not a question copyright or no copyright. More correctly called copy-restriction-privilege (CRP) there is a world of possibilities. Just one example I would like to see is that, like trademarks which become generic, CRP should lapse on anything that's become an industry standard (including music that's become a standard). Other changes might include drastically shortening the time period of CRP, CRP not applying for non-profit use, CRP not applying if the item in question is not widely available for sale and using CRP to block most forms of interroperable competition being highly illegal. The legislators and the lawyers are asleep at the wheel at the moment.
Reform IP law to stop M$ abuse? RIAA I understand but what is your complaint against microsoft that IP law would remedy.
M$ and the RIAA are both taxing the world for huge sums of money. Not because they're earning it ($35,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with the most complicated bits, the device drivers, been written by third parties? Come on!) but because IP law is currently putting a very small section of society in a privileged position with no realistic competition.
IP markets have largely failed because of the way IP law is currently structured. It's winner-take-almost-all, mostly due to the economic network effect, the importance of standards and interoperability and the inability of current anti-trust law to even remotely manage technical tricks for getting rid of competition .
Are you bothered that you can't legally pirate windows or get it from a friend?
No, I'm bothered that there is no price competition. The marginal, per-copy price of windows is about $1 yet they are able to sell it for about $200. Why? The market has failed and IP law needs to be fixed.
I honestly didn't think this was a real complaint anymore. I mean there is a real alternative that does allow such things.
Aren't you bothered by the fact that the only way people can even remotely compete is by giving it away? A market this broken needs to be fixed. Markets are not the simple things free market ideologues would have you believe; they are complex beasts with complex laws involving many tradeoffs to encourage hard work, discourage parasitic behaviour, direct resources to where they are needed and to help/protect the young/naive/less fortunate etc.
And I highly doubt companies are legally required to maximize profits. All sorts of companies have major charaties associated with them. Yes that lowers the tax burden but I'm pretty certain the Ronald Macdonald House costs more than it could possibly save or make in free advertising.
I phrased it badly. As pclminion notes a company is required to be responsible to shareholders. Just making the point that a company's objectives are usually different from that of an employee.
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DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
Then why do CEOs, etc receive large (some would say outrageous) performance bonuses? If a low-level grunt invents the Next Big Thing, and makes the company millions, why doesn't he get the large bonus? I guess it was the brilliant "Mission Statement" the CEO came up with that really lead to the success.
Those with the gold, make the rules. In this case, those with the decision making power decide what is "best".
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DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
No, public corporations are required to be responsible to the shareholders. In practice, nearly everybody cares about profit above all else, so that's what gets pushed the hardest.
There is no law on the books which states, literally, that corporations must make as much money as possible.
True, my phrasing was poor. In practice it'd be almost impossible to mandate profit maximisation anyway because, amongst many other things it depends on when you want the profit and how risk averse you are.
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
Public companies are required by law to maximise their profit. Profit is not usually maximised by giving large bonuses to employees.
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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.
Anyway, I'm just saying. I don't think MS *could* open the format -- at least not as regards document embedding.
Even if everything thing you've said is true, your conclusion is unjustified.
M$ is getting $35,000,000,000+ per year. They could reverse engineer and document their own format with their small change, even if it was serialized Brainfuck. To claim that because it involves activex controls this somehow makes the format undescribable is simply wrong. If the format contains state, that state can be described. Period.
If M$ is claiming what you say they are then they are lying. To technically naive people. Business as usual for them.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
Flagrant, organized, and large scale willful copyrignt infringement.
Yup, and in this case the world is a better place because of it. Funny, that.
Definitely room for major improvement in current copyright law.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'm neither libertarian or socialist.
It is very possible there is benefits tied to economies of scale for large companies.
True. It is also very possible that big companies suffer from the same problems of bureaucracies and command economies that big government does.
It is one thing when these large companies put up barriers of entries to their markets or when the government does it for them, but if these companies get this big naturally, good for them.
Not if they are big enough that they can run at a loss for long enough to block other players even trying. Markets can and do fail when any one player gets big enough to engage in potentially non-competitive tactics such as cross-subsidisation, mindshare advertising and other forms of market manipulation. Anti-trust law stops this in theory but in practice has proven hopelessly inadequate to deal with the market sophistication of modern corporations.
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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.
What is it about binary versus text formats that brings out the religion in people? Almost as bad as vi versus emacs.
I am happy to use binary formats when they have clear, measurable advantages but, like programming languages, readable data formats have advantages for debugging and understanding that need to balanced against. YABFF (Yet Another Bloody File Format) syndrome also needs to be considered here. To the extent that XML is a general purpose file format I am happy to consider yet another binary file format but the onus is on the proponents to show it has measurable advantages compared to text compressed with an existing, general purpose compressor like gzip. Binary formats can be considered to be domain specific compression and if there's one thing the compression literature has taught us it is that it is usually hard to beat the general purpose compressors with special purpose compressors on real data by more than a few percent.
Good parsers are damn fast and can operate in O(n) time.
And n is smaller for binary data;
It can be. Not necessarily because numbers in text form are variable length (1/2 bytes) and typically will be shorter when compared to 64 bit integers.
in a best-case situation (XML document consists largely of tags rather than text, tags are 10-20 characters but can be reduced to single bytes in a binary encoding), that would mean that switching to binary data would give you O(n/10) parsing, i.e. an order of magnitude faster.
Not compared to text compressed with an existing general purpose compressor rather than YABFF. With a good parser that takes only a few microseconds per byte. Parsing time, for a good parser/compressor, will almost always be dominated by the IO time.
Ergo, binary XML could theoretically give you a considerable performance enhancement.
Probably some enhancement, yes. But enough to outweigh the support overhead of YABFF? The necessity of supporting convertors, documentation, education, opaque data formats, potential inconsistency, binary corruption/recovery, debuggers etc. etc.? That is the question here.
I've lost count of the number of binary formats I've seen that in hex dump had vast numbers of zero bytes and were thus highly inefficient. The people who work at a "high level" designing such file formats without checking such simple things are poor programmers.
You demonstrate your ignorance once more.
Not really. I'm well aware of the tradeoffs. It is you that appears unable to grasp that YABFF requires a significant and measureable advantage to outweigh support costs.
Pointless if a random access will take milliseconds. Usually faster to just slurp the whole thing in and interpret it there. Depends on the file system, the block size of the file system, the seek times of the disk, the read times of the disk, the size of the disk caches and the size and fragmentation of the file amongst many other factors.
This assumption is incorrect. My experience has been that gzip does a better job on text based file formats; not surprising given the extra redudancy. Depends on the file, file size and statistics of the file of course.
In a file system that supports sparse files only if the zero's are not written. I'm also not just referring to zero's but to constant values and patterns. On a compressing file system a text file will be compressed as well as a binary file. Compressing file systems may require extra disk accesses making their advantage minimal.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.