I'd add that some software, free and commercial, is not only useless, it is worse than useless in that it soaks up the time of the user without warning for no return.
In those circumstances I have no problem complaining about the fact that it is time stealing.
If it is well documented that it is in an unusable state before download/purchase then no problem.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
I think most of our problems will be solved when the patent lawyers, processors, and laws are re-educated, updated and fixed.
You are being very naive. It is physically impossible for a small government office to realistically assess all human knowledge to assess whether a particular invention is obvious to somebody skilled in the art. Only a scientist with a lifetime's experience can do that and even then they make mistakes.
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
One piece of open source math "software" I haven't seen mentioned yet is Planet Math, a math encyclopedia and community. Highly recommended and with a snapshot download if you need it.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
try learning what things are really like in an industry before you condemn it.
Unlike almost any other industry the ad industry is in-your-face visible to almost everybody. Everybody knows a hell of a lot more about the industry than you give them credit and you can get off your high horse.
Watch TV anytime and you will see hundreds of deceptive and dishonest ad's, everything from car ad's that state anything but facts, toiletry ad's that promise a perfect sex life, fast food ad's that promise their food is good for children and infomercials designed to deceive the less educated and the young.
And lets not get into the fraudsters who do paid advertising on slashdot and elsewhere without acknowledging who's paying them. Free clue: The print media have phrases like "This is a paid advertisement" for a reason. It's a real shame the law is an ass and can't effectively cope with such fraud.
90% of modern marketing and advertising is little more than an arms race to get mindshare. Everybody loses except advertising companies. Advertising people are in a race to the bottom as far as ethics is concerned.
There is a very small percentage of ethical advertisers, I hope you are in that category, however usually it is just people talking the talk not walking the walk. Like the saying says: "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that you've got it made."
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Just seemed odd to me that they wouldn't support Windows,
There are many reasons they might not want to support windows:
They don't want to waste time on proprietary software crap like unfixable bugs and encoders/decoders with crap licenses.
They don't want to dilute the effectiveness of their development team.
Their technical expertise is primarily in Linux.
Maybe they have lots of manhours available and not much money and don't want to waste the money on proprietary (and probably buggy and unfixable) software libraries and development systems.
They are a small organisation that cannot compete directly with the bigger players in the windows world, particularly with all the marketing dross in that space where the technically best product often does not do well.
They'd like to make the world a better place and not contribute to the M$ $35,000,000,000/year lockin.
They don't want their business so beholden to other businesses due to software dependencies and patent/copyright lockin.
This commercial release is a side-effect of a research project and they don't want to invest much more effort in it.
etc.
You are being a little blinkered when you say not supporting windows might be "spite" or because "they haven't gotten around to Windows".
---
Company scammers who do paid-for posts on weblogs without attribution (i.e. This is a paid advertisement) are criminals and should do jail time for fraud.
Since you do not know what their business goals are that sentence is meaningless.
---
Company scammers who do paid-for posts on weblogs without attribution (i.e. This is a paid advertisement) are criminals and should do jail time for fraud.
Company scammers who do paid-for posts on weblogs without attribution (i.e. This is a paid advertisement) are criminals and should do jail time for fraud.
Could it be that by smaking a big deal of unimportant issues (like software licensing
I disagree. Patent and copyright law is a thing that is going to affect everybody for generations to come, even if most of the electorate doesnt appreciate the importance.
As people move into an increasingly virtual world (with everything from books to movies to MMRPGs to online bank statements) IP touches everybody in a major way.
How the law is structured will have a major affect on every citizens life. Do you want to live in an M$ controlled world or a democracy? I vote for a democracy.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
IP producers are consumers as well. And everybody, producers included, consume far more than they produce.
I am hopeful this means they will eventually become more socially responsible, though as usual the rich can buy themselves out of any problems the rest of us might have with bad law.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'm friends with someone in marketing for a _large_ multi-national organisation and I know for a fact that they use upwards of 50 people in their marketing campaigns to visit websites to post innacurate information. "Buy product X. It's better than product Y. I've used it and it's true!"
If there actually were law "by the people, for the people" rather than company-bought law those 50 people would be doing time for fraud. Company astroturfers are just the organised crime of spam and the police should be prosecuting them. Yet another reason why people have no respect for the law, particularly IP law.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
A lot of people think they understand economics, certainly. But sorry, you really don't.
And your authority is? I don't respond to argument by assertion. Your post is littered with it. I'd suggest you learn a little more about logic.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Hmmm. Honestly, your statements are so ignorant of basic economics and wrong in so many dimensions that I don't know where to begin.
Nice ad hominem. I know a lot more about economics than you appear to believe.
[Can I repeat my call that economics should be taught ALL FOUR YEARS of high school and should be a fundamental subject drilled into people? That would solve so many problems in the world. But I digress.]
Typical zealot mantra. If everybody was educated (i.e. blinkered) like me then the world would be a better place. Many people have goals other than money and economic reward. I for one want a world that doesn't squeeze them out. Deal with it.
I don't really feel like unraveling all the wrongness, but here's a couple of points:
Everything that doesn't follow a zealot's mantra is wrongness to the zealot.
The pie is not limited. Microsoft has created an enormous amount of wealth, beyond even what's in their coffers. The world is far better because of Microsoft on balance, even with their relatively minor (and I mean/really/ minor) monopolistic practices.
Nonsense. We have no way of knowing what might've happened in a 25 year old competitive computer industry not dominated by a monopolist. For all you know M$ has stifled what might have been. About the only positive thing M$ has done has been to impose a few standards. A pity most are closed and not subject to realistic competition as a result. $35,000,000,000 per year is not even a remotely minor monopolistic practice.
Second: 27 billion dollars in a single charity can do a lot of things that 27 million $1000 donations can't.
Yep, and the opposite is also true. Your point?
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I am not a US resident so most of your options are useless. In any case, even for US residents they are nowhere near as easy as buying in a retail store.
You appear to be, possibly deliberately, missing my main point: Why should M$ be given a free ride when it comes to marketing and manipulating people in their favour? If they are allowed to do it why shouldn't anybody else? Until M$ cleans up it's act I have no problem fighting fire with fire.
That's a favourite tactic of business zealots and astroturfing parasites, to claim that a company is allowed to do anything legal as long as it makes money but that any time a citizen does similar things they are anti-business and therefore wrong. Nonsense.
Who defines too much? The same people who define 'decent?' The MPAA is all assed up, but you picked a shitty non-reason to hate them.
Just because it's hard to judge a gradation is no reason not to do it. The law makes such distinctions all the time. I for one want to live in a reasonably fair and just society, not a winner take all society. IP law, as it is currently structured, is unnecessarily unfair with two companies doing similar work and getting vastly different rewards. I don't mind a 50:1 difference to encourage competition and hard work but a 10,000:1 difference is just stupid. The world is unfair enough as it is without deliberately making it more unfair.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
then those billions wouldn't exist in the first place!
Wrong. The billions would exist, not in the pockets of a convicted monopolist, but in the pockets of millions of people and companies, allowing them to improve their own lives in innumerable small ways, including donating to charities if they so choose.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
When I can easily buy a general purpose PC keyboard that doesn't have the M$ Marketing Keys (tm) or a PC that doesn't have the "Designed For M$" (tm) marketing sticker trash then I for one will be happy to stop writing "M$" in my comments. Until then, forget it.
Those who want others to be polite should try cleaning up their own house first.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
The argument of the commercial vendors is that OSS costs more to maintain in the long run.
"Sticker price" was shorthand for the way that vendors do their damnedest to keep customers uninformed about both the short and long term costs of commercial software and the benefits of having access to source code. Like the way they try to get a customer emotionally committed before quoting the price. In other words, get the customer to do an incomplete evaluation and stack the deck in the commercial software's favour. People familiar with open source and freeware know better.
All else else being equal, open source must, by definition, be at least as good as closed source for the customer since everything the customer can do with closed source they can do with open source but not vice versa.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
There are a lot of open source tools that get the job done quite well, and I use those. But there are also occaisions where proprietary software gets what I need done quicker and easier, so I'll use that.
Fair enough. But make sure you take into account all the costs and benefits of using proprietary software versus open source. Quick fixes often have long term costs.
---
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.
This is only true if you include all costs and benefits, not just the sticker price.
Commercial vendors would love for customers to consider only the sticker price without taking into account the many hidden and recurring costs in most commercial software solutions.
Inside a program is (in theory) a controlled environment. Whenever getting information from an unverified source (whether the environment, file, net, signals, pipes, semaphores etc.) verify the information is within the domain your program can handle and that you the programmer understand (e.g. URL lengths, file line length's, escape characters, environment PATH's etc.) and reject appropriately. Most cracks are due to crafted inputs. The program should be rejecting those crafted inputs as soon as they arrive. By concentrating on the inputs you drastically reduce the size of the problem you're dealing with and hopefully improve the reliability of the result.
---
Patents restrict distribution by definition and are incompatible with standards which by definition promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
Yep, it is easy to, whenever writing any line of code, to ask "How can this line, by accident or design, be compromised?" It is not necessary to have a program global view except to stop DOS attacks caused by individual lines of code bailing out.
Too many slack, so called "productive" programmers, don't do that and push their problems on to the rest of us.
One common example in C is printf's/scanf's where the programmer doesn't check the status return. Is it so hard to wrapper it and check? I've lost count of the number of programs that behave badly if the disk is full or an input file is truncated, both common occurrences. Grrr.
---
Patents restrict distribution by definition and are incompatible with standards which by definition promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
Reminds me of the crusty old Republican grandpa that attended all the Democrat conventions. His reason? "Just ta keep ma disgust afresh"
Attendence does not imply support. I'd probably attend such presentations. Anyway, like all good universities CMU supports a variety of viewpoints, not the mono-culture that M$ would like to impose.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
You are ignoring the fact that by colluding the companies now have the financial resources to swat any startup that would dare to interfere.
Those that have the gold, even if ill-gotten, make the rules.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I have no problem configuring locate/updatedb the way you describe. Running it at night is pointless, I only turn on my machine when I use it and I don't want updatedb wasting my time when I use it. Most laptops have slow hard disks and updatedb can soak up all disk bandwidth for minutes. I find in practice that I almost never use locate because I'm searching based on file contents not file names.
All I'm saying is that by default it should be turned off; for most users it's causing more problems than it solves. My next door neighbour running on a low-end desktop machine had her machine slowing to a crawl every day for no good reaon. She didn't like it and doesn't even use locate/find.
To the wider issue of cron and polling interfaces. Every day updatedb is potentially scanning the entire storage hierarchy just so that the few dozen files that have changed are indexed. The correct solution would be that each non-temporary file is indexed in the background when it is changed, both so the index is up-to-date and so every directory on the disk isn't being re-read again and again.
Polling interfaces are fundamentally inefficient and why interrupts were invented. They are always a "race" condition because the time of the poll only accidently matches the times of changed server state and the times of client query. Instead, state should be pushed/pulled depending on whether client queries or server state changes are more frequent/expensive.
I think polling (and the related concept of timeouts) should only be used as a last resort. Sometimes there is no alternative but time is wasted because of it. It frequently causes reliability problems because different systems have inconsistent views of the world.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Hollywood makes the USA visible but I wouldn't be so sure the USA is the "center". The USA doesn't have a monopoly on diversity and other good things. The USA's population is also only 4.6% of the world's population, by some measures statistically insignificant.
Reminds me of Britain and the British Commonwealth, the empire where the sun never set, early in the last century. Britain had a policy of having a navy more than twice the size of the rest of the world put together. Look at where they are now.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd add that some software, free and commercial, is not only useless, it is worse than useless in that it soaks up the time of the user without warning for no return.
In those circumstances I have no problem complaining about the fact that it is time stealing.
If it is well documented that it is in an unusable state before download/purchase then no problem.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
I think most of our problems will be solved when the patent lawyers, processors, and laws are re-educated, updated and fixed.
You are being very naive. It is physically impossible for a small government office to realistically assess all human knowledge to assess whether a particular invention is obvious to somebody skilled in the art. Only a scientist with a lifetime's experience can do that and even then they make mistakes.
See also:
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Broken slashdot link quoting Planet Math
One piece of open source math "software" I haven't seen mentioned yet is Planet Math, a math encyclopedia and community. Highly recommended and with a snapshot download if you need it.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
try learning what things are really like in an industry before you condemn it.
Unlike almost any other industry the ad industry is in-your-face visible to almost everybody. Everybody knows a hell of a lot more about the industry than you give them credit and you can get off your high horse.
Watch TV anytime and you will see hundreds of deceptive and dishonest ad's, everything from car ad's that state anything but facts, toiletry ad's that promise a perfect sex life, fast food ad's that promise their food is good for children and infomercials designed to deceive the less educated and the young.
And lets not get into the fraudsters who do paid advertising on slashdot and elsewhere without acknowledging who's paying them. Free clue: The print media have phrases like "This is a paid advertisement" for a reason. It's a real shame the law is an ass and can't effectively cope with such fraud.
90% of modern marketing and advertising is little more than an arms race to get mindshare. Everybody loses except advertising companies. Advertising people are in a race to the bottom as far as ethics is concerned.
There is a very small percentage of ethical advertisers, I hope you are in that category, however usually it is just people talking the talk not walking the walk. Like the saying says: "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that you've got it made."
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Just seemed odd to me that they wouldn't support Windows,
There are many reasons they might not want to support windows:
You are being a little blinkered when you say not supporting windows might be "spite" or because "they haven't gotten around to Windows".
---
Company scammers who do paid-for posts on weblogs without attribution (i.e. This is a paid advertisement) are criminals and should do jail time for fraud.
Since you do not know what their business goals are that sentence is meaningless.
---
Company scammers who do paid-for posts on weblogs without attribution (i.e. This is a paid advertisement) are criminals and should do jail time for fraud.
This news item is little old. Many nigerian scammers have been prosecuted.
---
Company scammers who do paid-for posts on weblogs without attribution (i.e. This is a paid advertisement) are criminals and should do jail time for fraud.
Could it be that by smaking a big deal of unimportant issues (like software licensing
I disagree. Patent and copyright law is a thing that is going to affect everybody for generations to come, even if most of the electorate doesnt appreciate the importance.
As people move into an increasingly virtual world (with everything from books to movies to MMRPGs to online bank statements) IP touches everybody in a major way.
How the law is structured will have a major affect on every citizens life. Do you want to live in an M$ controlled world or a democracy? I vote for a democracy.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
IP producers are consumers as well. And everybody, producers included, consume far more than they produce.
I am hopeful this means they will eventually become more socially responsible, though as usual the rich can buy themselves out of any problems the rest of us might have with bad law.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'm friends with someone in marketing for a _large_ multi-national organisation and I know for a fact that they use upwards of 50 people in their marketing campaigns to visit websites to post innacurate information. "Buy product X. It's better than product Y. I've used it and it's true!"
If there actually were law "by the people, for the people" rather than company-bought law those 50 people would be doing time for fraud. Company astroturfers are just the organised crime of spam and the police should be prosecuting them. Yet another reason why people have no respect for the law, particularly IP law.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
A lot of people think they understand economics, certainly. But sorry, you really don't.
And your authority is? I don't respond to argument by assertion. Your post is littered with it. I'd suggest you learn a little more about logic.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Hmmm. Honestly, your statements are so ignorant of basic economics and wrong in so many dimensions that I don't know where to begin.
Nice ad hominem. I know a lot more about economics than you appear to believe.
[Can I repeat my call that economics should be taught ALL FOUR YEARS of high school and should be a fundamental subject drilled into people? That would solve so many problems in the world. But I digress.]
Typical zealot mantra. If everybody was educated (i.e. blinkered) like me then the world would be a better place. Many people have goals other than money and economic reward. I for one want a world that doesn't squeeze them out. Deal with it.
I don't really feel like unraveling all the wrongness, but here's a couple of points:
Everything that doesn't follow a zealot's mantra is wrongness to the zealot.
The pie is not limited. Microsoft has created an enormous amount of wealth, beyond even what's in their coffers. The world is far better because of Microsoft on balance, even with their relatively minor (and I mean /really/ minor) monopolistic practices.
Nonsense. We have no way of knowing what might've happened in a 25 year old competitive computer industry not dominated by a monopolist. For all you know M$ has stifled what might have been. About the only positive thing M$ has done has been to impose a few standards. A pity most are closed and not subject to realistic competition as a result. $35,000,000,000 per year is not even a remotely minor monopolistic practice.
Second: 27 billion dollars in a single charity can do a lot of things that 27 million $1000 donations can't.
Yep, and the opposite is also true. Your point?
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
When I can easily [whine deleted] forget it.
You are calling me a whiner? Classic!
I am not a US resident so most of your options are useless. In any case, even for US residents they are nowhere near as easy as buying in a retail store.
You appear to be, possibly deliberately, missing my main point: Why should M$ be given a free ride when it comes to marketing and manipulating people in their favour? If they are allowed to do it why shouldn't anybody else? Until M$ cleans up it's act I have no problem fighting fire with fire.
That's a favourite tactic of business zealots and astroturfing parasites, to claim that a company is allowed to do anything legal as long as it makes money but that any time a citizen does similar things they are anti-business and therefore wrong. Nonsense.
Who defines too much? The same people who define 'decent?' The MPAA is all assed up, but you picked a shitty non-reason to hate them.
Just because it's hard to judge a gradation is no reason not to do it. The law makes such distinctions all the time. I for one want to live in a reasonably fair and just society, not a winner take all society. IP law, as it is currently structured, is unnecessarily unfair with two companies doing similar work and getting vastly different rewards. I don't mind a 50:1 difference to encourage competition and hard work but a 10,000:1 difference is just stupid. The world is unfair enough as it is without deliberately making it more unfair.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
then those billions wouldn't exist in the first place!
Wrong. The billions would exist, not in the pockets of a convicted monopolist, but in the pockets of millions of people and companies, allowing them to improve their own lives in innumerable small ways, including donating to charities if they so choose.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
When I can easily buy a general purpose PC keyboard that doesn't have the M$ Marketing Keys (tm) or a PC that doesn't have the "Designed For M$" (tm) marketing sticker trash then I for one will be happy to stop writing "M$" in my comments. Until then, forget it.
Those who want others to be polite should try cleaning up their own house first.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
The argument of the commercial vendors is that OSS costs more to maintain in the long run.
"Sticker price" was shorthand for the way that vendors do their damnedest to keep customers uninformed about both the short and long term costs of commercial software and the benefits of having access to source code. Like the way they try to get a customer emotionally committed before quoting the price. In other words, get the customer to do an incomplete evaluation and stack the deck in the commercial software's favour. People familiar with open source and freeware know better.
All else else being equal, open source must, by definition, be at least as good as closed source for the customer since everything the customer can do with closed source they can do with open source but not vice versa.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
There are a lot of open source tools that get the job done quite well, and I use those. But there are also occaisions where proprietary software gets what I need done quicker and easier, so I'll use that.
Fair enough. But make sure you take into account all the costs and benefits of using proprietary software versus open source. Quick fixes often have long term costs.
---
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.
"is $x > $y?"
This is only true if you include all costs and benefits, not just the sticker price.
Commercial vendors would love for customers to consider only the sticker price without taking into account the many hidden and recurring costs in most commercial software solutions.
---
Astroturfers are scum.
I'd emphasise another point:
Don't trust the inputs.
Inside a program is (in theory) a controlled environment. Whenever getting information from an unverified source (whether the environment, file, net, signals, pipes, semaphores etc.) verify the information is within the domain your program can handle and that you the programmer understand (e.g. URL lengths, file line length's, escape characters, environment PATH's etc.) and reject appropriately. Most cracks are due to crafted inputs. The program should be rejecting those crafted inputs as soon as they arrive. By concentrating on the inputs you drastically reduce the size of the problem you're dealing with and hopefully improve the reliability of the result.
---
Patents restrict distribution by definition and are incompatible with standards which by definition promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
Yep, it is easy to, whenever writing any line of code, to ask "How can this line, by accident or design, be compromised?" It is not necessary to have a program global view except to stop DOS attacks caused by individual lines of code bailing out.
Too many slack, so called "productive" programmers, don't do that and push their problems on to the rest of us.
One common example in C is printf's/scanf's where the programmer doesn't check the status return. Is it so hard to wrapper it and check? I've lost count of the number of programs that behave badly if the disk is full or an input file is truncated, both common occurrences. Grrr.
---
Patents restrict distribution by definition and are incompatible with standards which by definition promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
Microsoft presentation is standing-room only.
Reminds me of the crusty old Republican grandpa that attended all the Democrat conventions. His reason? "Just ta keep ma disgust afresh"
Attendence does not imply support. I'd probably attend such presentations. Anyway, like all good universities CMU supports a variety of viewpoints, not the mono-culture that M$ would like to impose.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
You are ignoring the fact that by colluding the companies now have the financial resources to swat any startup that would dare to interfere.
Those that have the gold, even if ill-gotten, make the rules.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I have no problem configuring locate/updatedb the way you describe. Running it at night is pointless, I only turn on my machine when I use it and I don't want updatedb wasting my time when I use it. Most laptops have slow hard disks and updatedb can soak up all disk bandwidth for minutes. I find in practice that I almost never use locate because I'm searching based on file contents not file names.
All I'm saying is that by default it should be turned off; for most users it's causing more problems than it solves. My next door neighbour running on a low-end desktop machine had her machine slowing to a crawl every day for no good reaon. She didn't like it and doesn't even use locate/find.
To the wider issue of cron and polling interfaces. Every day updatedb is potentially scanning the entire storage hierarchy just so that the few dozen files that have changed are indexed. The correct solution would be that each non-temporary file is indexed in the background when it is changed, both so the index is up-to-date and so every directory on the disk isn't being re-read again and again.
Polling interfaces are fundamentally inefficient and why interrupts were invented. They are always a "race" condition because the time of the poll only accidently matches the times of changed server state and the times of client query. Instead, state should be pushed/pulled depending on whether client queries or server state changes are more frequent/expensive.
I think polling (and the related concept of timeouts) should only be used as a last resort. Sometimes there is no alternative but time is wasted because of it. It frequently causes reliability problems because different systems have inconsistent views of the world.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
Hollywood makes the USA visible but I wouldn't be so sure the USA is the "center". The USA doesn't have a monopoly on diversity and other good things. The USA's population is also only 4.6% of the world's population, by some measures statistically insignificant.
Reminds me of Britain and the British Commonwealth, the empire where the sun never set, early in the last century. Britain had a policy of having a navy more than twice the size of the rest of the world put together. Look at where they are now.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.