Even a horrendously slow XML parser operates in O(n) time.
True. I just wanted to make the point that a well written/generated parser is not only fast but scales well.
---
Patents by definition restrict distribution and are incompatible with standards which by definition are supposed to promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
If you can't comprehend that binary is much faster to parse than XML theres nothing I can do.
Where is your numerical proof that binary is much faster to parse than text? It is amateurish to just assume this is true. Good parsers are damn fast and can operate in O(n) time.
Of course binary may be faster. I doubt that it will be much faster when compared to a decent parser and when you realise that the binary format should be platform agnostic for word size, endianness and forward and backward compatibility.
For instance, gzip'ed text files can sometimes be much faster to access than uncompressed binary files because it reduces the amount of file IO. e.g. 64 bits of binary to encode the number 1 rather than 8 bits of text.
While compression increases the CPU usage because the disk is so much slower and because the CPU might otherwise be idle waiting for the disk it can lead to an overall win. The same may apply to a slow network link. Unless you measure it is difficult to know. 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. Even when using indexes the saving of a single extra random disk/network access can sometimes justify a huge amount of CPU usage.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Then perhaps we can have a fair and equitable system of patents.
A fair system may involve no patents at all. For example, I think a system that did not give exclusive rights but limited rights only, and shared those rights amongst all independent inventors of the same thing, would probably be more equitable.
Not necessarily disagreeing with your point but the standard of public debate on "intellectual products" and how to legally manage them is abysmal. All that people on the net, lawyers or otherwise, seem to be able to talk about is current-copyright-law and no-copyright-law, current-patent-law and no-patent-law. Theres been very little scientific study of the value of patents/copyrights and related subjects by objective scientists, let alone deep debate about the issues.
This is blinkered. Both the law and "intellectual products" are pure products of the mind. There is a universe of possibilities out there and we are barely scratching the surface. I think it's pretty sad the way we are so severely restricting what could be done. As it is the entrenched players are getting all the cards.
For example, here are some things I can think of just off the top of my head. I'm not saying these are necessarily a good ideas; just possibilities to talk about and build on. I'm sure others can think of many more:
No patents. Inventions are registered with the government, anybody can license them in a fair-and-equitable manner and the government refunds part of the taxes of those who've registered inventions.
Patents are automatic, like copyright, and allow more than one inventor if copying cannot be explicitly proven.
As now but a company or group of people can pay a fixed sum of money to the government to put a patent or copyright in the public domain, thus putting a cap on the benefit to an individual and the damage to society at large of any one patent/copyight.
Make patent office employees sue-able to give much needed accountability. They are making multi-million dollar decisions behind closed doors.
Stop treating the economic network effect as an externality. The public at large should be charging (taxing) it.
When patents are first published the results, not the method should be made public. Competitors should be given a 6 month window; if they can duplicate the secret method to give the same result then its obvious to an expert in the field and the patent aplicant should pay all costs and the patent rejected.
Do a major scientific study to analyse the optimal time period for copyrights and patents. Stop handwaving and stop pretending the patent office itself is not an entrenched interest.
Like trademarks, and for much the same reasons, copyrights and patents should lapse if they become industry standards.
etc.
---
Patents by definition restrict distribution and are incompatible with standards which by definition are supposed promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
This isn't only about short term profits. Strategically, it is bad news for IBM to be paying millions of dollars per year in licensing fees to their main competitor which their competitor can then use to "compete" back at them.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Read the patent claim. It specifies "Using a Firewall". VisualRoute does not use a firewall, so they have nothing to fear.
WTF did a specific instance (geographically mapping incoming connections on a firewall) of the common existing case (geographically mapping all connections on a general purpose computer) even make it past a first reading at the patent office?
It's so bad I'm starting to think the patent office examiners are being paid off. With the stroke of a pen the gnomes at the patent office get to decide the outcome of multi-million dollar businesses. There needs to be much more accountability.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If you had, you would know that just about all researchers file patents before they publish these days.
LOL! Thank you for the best laugh I've had all day.
With some honorable exceptions patents are actually a pretty good indication that the research is of little value. Most good researchers avoid patented areas like the plague. Lawyers and the patent office have an extremely biased view of the research community. Mostly, the only researchers they see are the ladder climbers who don't give a shit about the quality or otherwise of their research work and are happy to spend their time on the paperwork instead of the research, as long as they can bulk out their CV and get brownie points from university admin.
In addition patent boosters tend to forget that quality research requires the free exchange of ideas. The paperwork and lawyers associated with patents pretty much stops that cold.
If you work in an unpatented area you may be repeating another's work (remember the "re" in research) but at least you're less likely to have misguided lawyers ruining your day.
The "experimental use exception" you mention is useless. It's just too dangerous to do anything in an area where patents might be a problem and just too easy to switch to a related area.
---
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.
... in order for companies to be profitable, they need to maximize profit...
I don't think you said what you meant to say.
In any case 90% of modern mass market (TV) advertising is an arms race to get mind share, not about informing the customer. Think Coca-Cola or Ford. Everybody loses except the marketing industry (the arms dealers) and as such it is largely parasitic. Advertising and marketing in other media is less parasitic but it's not all roses either.
Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition.
In the real world that is so rare as to be pretty much non-existent. Rare cases should not be driving law for the common cases. Most software inventions are incremental improvements or gee-that's-neat ideas requiring little investment.
... shouldn't enjoy a temporary monopoly from the fruits of his labour and research...
In nice small sentences so maliciously obtuse people like you can understand:
The entry bar to software inventions is very low.
There are 6,500,000,000 people in the world.
With that many people (and increasing!) and the low entry bar it is a statistical certainty that most software inventions will be independently invented by more than one person.
Creating artificial scarcity when something is likely to be independently invented multiple times is economically stupid.
Well formulated copyright protects actual investment.
Oh, and also:
Temporary in the software world means 6 months not 6 years.
Lack of prior art does not mean an invention is in any way innovative and deserving protection. Many inventions are simply for ideas "whose time has come" and are going to be independently invented many times because the conditions are right. In a democratic country no one inventor should be entitled to a government subsidy at the expense of other inventors.
It is not humanly possible for a small government office to check all human knowledge for prior art. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Only a scientist with a life time's experience in a narrow field can do that and even then they make mistakes. If a patent office can't realistically assess prior art what is the point in it existing at all? Just rubber stamp patents like copyright.
Patents are bad until proven otherwise because every new patent is a new law and every new law is government interference in the citizens' business. And another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the rest of the community.
Patents are bad law because persons who infringe patents are assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Yes, I know it's more complicated than that but that's basically what happens.
One software package can potentially infringe on thousands of software patents even though the developers have worked independently and done absolutely nothing to deliberately infringe. What is fair about that?
Patents should not be protecting development and marketing work, that's what copyright is for.
Language in the software world is a mess. It is ambiguous and overlapping. It is abstract and not grounded in physical realities like non-software inventions. One man's hash table is another man's index. The patent office has proven completely incapable of distinguishing between a new invention and new terminology for the same thing. Not surprising; attorneys are very word minded for obvious reasons and not good at thinking about abstract concepts unrelated to language.
The onus should be on the patent office to prove they have the right to interfere in the citizen's business, not, in a free country, for citizens to have to justify why software patents should not exist. The patent office has provided bug-all proof that software patents help the industry (in fact quite the reverse!) and until they do they should be told to butt out.
/ incidentally, any "all patents must be abolished" responders need not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.
"Premature optimisation is the root of all evil" as somebody once said.
True for code/peephole optimisation but less true for functional/design optimisation.
Too many software projects assume that any functional design will be fast enough. For instance, they often don't appear to understand the difference between an O(n^2) algorithm and an O(nlogn) algorithm, nor the major timing differences between a polled interface and a callback/callforward interface, nor the way many small delays accumulate into a large delay.
If a project makes bad organisational decisions at the start it can be hard to fix later without breaking backwards compatibility.
Both the desktops are putting more effort into optimisation now they have most of the functionality required.
Yes, it is. Adding extra libraries not only increases resource usage (agreed, not particularly important) but also fragments the code and slows load and execute times. That is important.
Both gnome and KDE take far more time than they should to do simple operations. It needs to be fixed.
Same as always - the customers. If they want something not already available, they pay for it. They will be paying a lot less than the $35,000,000,000+ per year that M$ alone is currently raking in. Lucky customers, it's about time it became a commodity market.
This isn't about producing an app, it's about making an app work on a large scale with support, distribution and future developement. Your rant is the sad reflection of a lack of contemplation on the subject.
Yep, linux, apache, open office, samba, other high profile open source projects, the 35,000+ projects on freshmeat.net the 90,000+ projects on sourceforge.net and the 221,000,000+ pages about Linux on google are just a figment of my imagination. Open source existed long before closed source and works just fine without closed source.
I'm sure you know nothing about my education either.
True, just commenting on the consequences.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
And besides gaining more support for open source what other reason would someone else bother with such a project? There certainly won't be a paycheck involved if you're not worry about profit. Good intentions are fine but it doesn't pay the bills.
Gross generalisation. Open source often pays
the bills. When one developer can develop a
software used by millions of people the marginal
cost per person is in the noise. Broken per-copy
IP licensing models break this simple truth.
With 6,400,000,000+
people in the world it is a statistical
certainty that for popular software somebody
somewhere will have both the means and the motivation to write good software.
It may be a government department not wanting their citizens to send millions of dollars overseas
when a taxpayer funded programmer can do
it for a few thousand. It may be a researcher
who wants to investigate the technical aspects.
It may be a teenager who wants to show how
hot they are. It may be a retiree looking for
something to do and wanting to contribute back
the community. It may be a contract programmer
in between jobs wanted to keep their skills up.
It may be a third world programmer looking to
make contacts in the first world. It may be a commercial software consumer not happy with
what's available, rolling their own and not
wanting to become a vendor because they prefer
the good will. It may simply be a programmer
pissed off with the junk available in the commercial arena.
Fact is, your rant about money being the
only motivator is pathetic and a sad reflection
on your tunnel-vision education.
If you're RMS, you probably believe that no one has the right to own anything and all inventions and ideas belong to the public,
Nonsense, RMS has never said that. Please read a more widely before making such malicious accusations again. Don't buy into M$ marketing smear and FUD campaign.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
since no one else has done additional jpg compression before,
You're kidding, right? Don't buy into the patent office's self-serving assumption that software ideas are hard and deserving of government intervention. With 6,500,000,000 people in the world and the low entry bar for software it is a statistical certainty that most software ideas will be thought of by more than one person with no one person deserving protection.
---
Patents by definition restrict distribution and are incompatible with standards which by definition promote distribution.
Hey, you guys like to say exploits in Linux widgets like XPdf aren't Linux flaws, so it cuts both ways.
Bullshit./. has 1000's of readers. Some refer to Linux-the-OS, others refer to Linux-the-kernel. No double-standard, just a variety of opinions. As you'd expect on a discussion site that isn't a lying marketing tool.
I for one want some balance against the river of crap coming out of M$ every day. When M$ stops those bullshit TV spots, stops branding most PC keyboards with their idiotic Windows keys and stops using it's monopoly power to kill competition then I think we can revisit the question of whether/. is balanced or not.
You're either in marketing or you've bought the M$ marketing drivel hook, line and sinker. If you're in marketing then I suggest you get a real job. You know, one where you contribute to the community instead of being a parasite. You'll have more of the things that matter. If you've just bought into their marketing line then I suggest you make a point of reading a variety of viewpoints and learning to think critically rather than uncritically accepting the self-serving crap put out by companies like M$.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
As another poster says, it's all about passing the buck.
I've been on the client and vending end of hundreds of support contracts.
Hardware support contracts can be expensive but are worthwhile if uptime is critical, mainly because you tend to get fast access to spare parts.
Software support contracts however are a complete waste of time and money. About all they're good for is couriering replacement media. If the software has a heisenbug it will never be fixed ("we can't reproduce that bug"). If it has a design bug it will never be fixed ("that's not a bug"). If it has a functional bug that requires more than a one line change it will never be fixed ("here's a really hacky workaround. Oh, you're already doing that?"). If it has a functional bug that can be fixed with a one line change then, if you're lucky, you'll see it in the next major release of the software in 6 months time, at the same time as the other customers not on a support contract ("we're regression testing the fix...").
If you don't have the expertese to support it yourself then you certainly don't have the expertese to know when your vendor is bullshitting you. As they certainly will because they're trying to maximise their profit and minimise their costs after getting their hooks into you.
Employing a third-party part/full timer for software support is far more cost effective, flexible and fast.
Open source wins for support. People who talk about closed source software vendor support contracts being worthwhile are either clueless or in marketing.
Amazing how many that bash that extra in Belkins hardware so redily yet maybe 1% have actually seen it.
In what universe does an unethical action that affects only 1% of the population somehow become ethical? Belkin has the ethics of alley cats.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Companies want to maximise their profit. Profits are not maximised by wasting time on bugs not known to the public.
For many companies the only way you're going to get such bugs fixed is by making the bugs public, so that it impacts their bottom line.
Most major M$windows based software companies follow M$'s lead and have the ethics of alley cats. The above definitely applies to them. Depending on the company and the bug warning them first may or may not be a good idea.
One of the reasons I like open source, the people you deal with just tend on average to be more ethical.
Also, the option to disable this was one of the first things on the first page in the setup utility.
Unbelievable! This is basic theft of somebody's time and attention. Providing an opt-out option doesn't somehow make it okay, nor give back the lost time and attention.
Apart from anything else this may break automated systems that use http to access data over the net via the router.
Some of the marketing parasites on/. really are just that; parasites. They do not give a shit if they stuff other people up.
... all that matters is whether Wikipedia is reliable or not. Under the current system, it isn't.
That is a matter of opinion. It is not yes/no. In my opinion Wikipedia is reliable enough. Often better than EB, which is frequently hopelessly out of date and has poor coverage in many areas I'm interested in like programming and current affairs.
Slashdot Mirror
Already available. Bit difficult to backpack though. :)
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
Even a horrendously slow XML parser operates in O(n) time.
True. I just wanted to make the point that a well written/generated parser is not only fast but scales well.
---
Patents by definition restrict distribution and are incompatible with standards which by definition are supposed to promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
If you can't comprehend that binary is much faster to parse than XML theres nothing I can do.
Where is your numerical proof that binary is much faster to parse than text? It is amateurish to just assume this is true. Good parsers are damn fast and can operate in O(n) time.
Of course binary may be faster. I doubt that it will be much faster when compared to a decent parser and when you realise that the binary format should be platform agnostic for word size, endianness and forward and backward compatibility.
For instance, gzip'ed text files can sometimes be much faster to access than uncompressed binary files because it reduces the amount of file IO. e.g. 64 bits of binary to encode the number 1 rather than 8 bits of text.
While compression increases the CPU usage because the disk is so much slower and because the CPU might otherwise be idle waiting for the disk it can lead to an overall win. The same may apply to a slow network link. Unless you measure it is difficult to know. 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. Even when using indexes the saving of a single extra random disk/network access can sometimes justify a huge amount of CPU usage.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
How about the old "we have licensed tech in there that disallows us from opensourcing it" line.
That one made a bit of sense.
It does if they explicitly state what the "licensed" tech is that's blocking the opensourcing. If they don't then it's just BS.
---
Are you a creator or a consumer?
Then perhaps we can have a fair and equitable system of patents.
A fair system may involve no patents at all. For example, I think a system that did not give exclusive rights but limited rights only, and shared those rights amongst all independent inventors of the same thing, would probably be more equitable.
Not necessarily disagreeing with your point but the standard of public debate on "intellectual products" and how to legally manage them is abysmal. All that people on the net, lawyers or otherwise, seem to be able to talk about is current-copyright-law and no-copyright-law, current-patent-law and no-patent-law. Theres been very little scientific study of the value of patents/copyrights and related subjects by objective scientists, let alone deep debate about the issues.
This is blinkered. Both the law and "intellectual products" are pure products of the mind. There is a universe of possibilities out there and we are barely scratching the surface. I think it's pretty sad the way we are so severely restricting what could be done. As it is the entrenched players are getting all the cards.
For example, here are some things I can think of just off the top of my head. I'm not saying these are necessarily a good ideas; just possibilities to talk about and build on. I'm sure others can think of many more:
---
Patents by definition restrict distribution and are incompatible with standards which by definition are supposed promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
This isn't only about short term profits. Strategically, it is bad news for IBM to be paying millions of dollars per year in licensing fees to their main competitor which their competitor can then use to "compete" back at them.
---
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.
Read the patent claim. It specifies "Using a Firewall". VisualRoute does not use a firewall, so they have nothing to fear.
WTF did a specific instance (geographically mapping incoming connections on a firewall) of the common existing case (geographically mapping all connections on a general purpose computer) even make it past a first reading at the patent office?
It's so bad I'm starting to think the patent office examiners are being paid off. With the stroke of a pen the gnomes at the patent office get to decide the outcome of multi-million dollar businesses. There needs to be much more accountability.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If you had, you would know that just about all researchers file patents before they publish these days.
LOL! Thank you for the best laugh I've had all day.
With some honorable exceptions patents are actually a pretty good indication that the research is of little value. Most good researchers avoid patented areas like the plague. Lawyers and the patent office have an extremely biased view of the research community. Mostly, the only researchers they see are the ladder climbers who don't give a shit about the quality or otherwise of their research work and are happy to spend their time on the paperwork instead of the research, as long as they can bulk out their CV and get brownie points from university admin.
In addition patent boosters tend to forget that quality research requires the free exchange of ideas. The paperwork and lawyers associated with patents pretty much stops that cold.
If you work in an unpatented area you may be repeating another's work (remember the "re" in research) but at least you're less likely to have misguided lawyers ruining your day.
The "experimental use exception" you mention is useless. It's just too dangerous to do anything in an area where patents might be a problem and just too easy to switch to a related area.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I don't think you said what you meant to say.
In any case 90% of modern mass market (TV) advertising is an arms race to get mind share, not about informing the customer. Think Coca-Cola or Ford. Everybody loses except the marketing industry (the arms dealers) and as such it is largely parasitic. Advertising and marketing in other media is less parasitic but it's not all roses either.
---
DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition.
In the real world that is so rare as to be pretty much non-existent. Rare cases should not be driving law for the common cases. Most software inventions are incremental improvements or gee-that's-neat ideas requiring little investment.
You are being hypocritical: your 'significant investment' clause, OTOH, is pure evil and one of the worst ideas I have heard in a long time. It is anti-democractic, anti-individual (vs big business) and absolute nonsense..
In nice small sentences so maliciously obtuse people like you can understand:
Oh, and also:
/ incidentally, any "all patents must be abolished" responders need not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.
Typical straw man argum
"Premature optimisation is the root of all evil" as somebody once said.
True for code/peephole optimisation but less true for functional/design optimisation.
Too many software projects assume that any functional design will be fast enough. For instance, they often don't appear to understand the difference between an O(n^2) algorithm and an O(nlogn) algorithm, nor the major timing differences between a polled interface and a callback/callforward interface, nor the way many small delays accumulate into a large delay.
If a project makes bad organisational decisions at the start it can be hard to fix later without breaking backwards compatibility.
Both the desktops are putting more effort into optimisation now they have most of the functionality required.
Glad to hear it. :)
---
Are you a programmer-bureaucrat?
time is expensive
Yes, it is. Adding extra libraries not only increases resource usage (agreed, not particularly important) but also fragments the code and slows load and execute times. That is important.
Both gnome and KDE take far more time than they should to do simple operations. It needs to be fixed.
---
DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
I have a feeling this will be a bunch of +5 Funny Microsoft-bash posts.
And also a bunch of posts from people like you who think free speech is optional.
Personally, I like an alternative viewpoint. If I wanted marketing dross I'm quite capable of reading the source material at microsoft.com thank you.
---
zealotry n : excessive intolerance of opposing views.Who's going to pay the bills?
Same as always - the customers. If they want something not already available, they pay for it. They will be paying a lot less than the $35,000,000,000+ per year that M$ alone is currently raking in. Lucky customers, it's about time it became a commodity market.
This isn't about producing an app, it's about making an app work on a large scale with support, distribution and future developement. Your rant is the sad reflection of a lack of contemplation on the subject.
Yep, linux, apache, open office, samba, other high profile open source projects, the 35,000+ projects on freshmeat.net the 90,000+ projects on sourceforge.net and the 221,000,000+ pages about Linux on google are just a figment of my imagination. Open source existed long before closed source and works just fine without closed source.
I'm sure you know nothing about my education either.
True, just commenting on the consequences.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Attorney's don't make patent law.
Are you sure?---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
And besides gaining more support for open source what other reason would someone else bother with such a project? There certainly won't be a paycheck involved if you're not worry about profit. Good intentions are fine but it doesn't pay the bills.
Gross generalisation. Open source often pays the bills. When one developer can develop a software used by millions of people the marginal cost per person is in the noise. Broken per-copy IP licensing models break this simple truth. With 6,400,000,000+ people in the world it is a statistical certainty that for popular software somebody somewhere will have both the means and the motivation to write good software.
It may be a government department not wanting their citizens to send millions of dollars overseas when a taxpayer funded programmer can do it for a few thousand. It may be a researcher who wants to investigate the technical aspects. It may be a teenager who wants to show how hot they are. It may be a retiree looking for something to do and wanting to contribute back the community. It may be a contract programmer in between jobs wanted to keep their skills up. It may be a third world programmer looking to make contacts in the first world. It may be a commercial software consumer not happy with what's available, rolling their own and not wanting to become a vendor because they prefer the good will. It may simply be a programmer pissed off with the junk available in the commercial arena.
Fact is, your rant about money being the only motivator is pathetic and a sad reflection on your tunnel-vision education.
---
DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
If you're RMS, you probably believe that no one has the right to own anything and all inventions and ideas belong to the public,
Nonsense, RMS has never said that. Please read a more widely before making such malicious accusations again. Don't buy into M$ marketing smear and FUD campaign.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
since no one else has done additional jpg compression before,
You're kidding, right? Don't buy into the patent office's self-serving assumption that software ideas are hard and deserving of government intervention. With 6,500,000,000 people in the world and the low entry bar for software it is a statistical certainty that most software ideas will be thought of by more than one person with no one person deserving protection.
---
Patents by definition restrict distribution and are incompatible with standards which by definition promote distribution.
Say no to patents in standards.
Hey, you guys like to say exploits in Linux widgets like XPdf aren't Linux flaws, so it cuts both ways.
Bullshit. /. has 1000's of readers. Some refer to Linux-the-OS, others refer to Linux-the-kernel. No double-standard, just a variety of opinions. As you'd expect on a discussion site that isn't a lying marketing tool.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
"weeeeeee don't have those kind of problems with oooouuuuurrr OS!"
Bullshit.
Yet when similar issues crop up in Linux, you never hear about it.
Bullshit.
True zealotry
I for one want some balance against the river of crap coming out of M$ every day. When M$ stops those bullshit TV spots, stops branding most PC keyboards with their idiotic Windows keys and stops using it's monopoly power to kill competition then I think we can revisit the question of whether /. is balanced or not.
You're either in marketing or you've bought the M$ marketing drivel hook, line and sinker. If you're in marketing then I suggest you get a real job. You know, one where you contribute to the community instead of being a parasite. You'll have more of the things that matter. If you've just bought into their marketing line then I suggest you make a point of reading a variety of viewpoints and learning to think critically rather than uncritically accepting the self-serving crap put out by companies like M$.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Anything less is unacceptable.
As another poster says, it's all about passing the buck.
I've been on the client and vending end of hundreds of support contracts.
Hardware support contracts can be expensive but are worthwhile if uptime is critical, mainly because you tend to get fast access to spare parts.
Software support contracts however are a complete waste of time and money. About all they're good for is couriering replacement media. If the software has a heisenbug it will never be fixed ("we can't reproduce that bug"). If it has a design bug it will never be fixed ("that's not a bug"). If it has a functional bug that requires more than a one line change it will never be fixed ("here's a really hacky workaround. Oh, you're already doing that?"). If it has a functional bug that can be fixed with a one line change then, if you're lucky, you'll see it in the next major release of the software in 6 months time, at the same time as the other customers not on a support contract ("we're regression testing the fix ...").
If you don't have the expertese to support it yourself then you certainly don't have the expertese to know when your vendor is bullshitting you. As they certainly will because they're trying to maximise their profit and minimise their costs after getting their hooks into you.
Employing a third-party part/full timer for software support is far more cost effective, flexible and fast.
Open source wins for support. People who talk about closed source software vendor support contracts being worthwhile are either clueless or in marketing.
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Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
Amazing how many that bash that extra in Belkins hardware so redily yet maybe 1% have actually seen it.
In what universe does an unethical action that affects only 1% of the population somehow become ethical? Belkin has the ethics of alley cats.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
Sending an e-mail to the maker is one thing,
Companies want to maximise their profit. Profits are not maximised by wasting time on bugs not known to the public.
For many companies the only way you're going to get such bugs fixed is by making the bugs public, so that it impacts their bottom line.
Most major M$windows based software companies follow M$'s lead and have the ethics of alley cats. The above definitely applies to them. Depending on the company and the bug warning them first may or may not be a good idea.
One of the reasons I like open source, the people you deal with just tend on average to be more ethical.
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DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
Also, the option to disable this was one of the first things on the first page in the setup utility.
Unbelievable! This is basic theft of somebody's time and attention. Providing an opt-out option doesn't somehow make it okay, nor give back the lost time and attention.
Apart from anything else this may break automated systems that use http to access data over the net via the router.
Some of the marketing parasites on /. really are just that; parasites. They do not give a shit if they stuff other people up.
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Copyright is a privilege, not a right
That is a matter of opinion. It is not yes/no. In my opinion Wikipedia is reliable enough. Often better than EB, which is frequently hopelessly out of date and has poor coverage in many areas I'm interested in like programming and current affairs.
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Copyright is a privilege, not a right.