The only reason IE puts up with it, as best as
I can tell, is that MICROS~1's software produces
some of the most broken HTML I've ever seen.
Ever export an all-text Word document to HTML?
Should be as simple as putting <P> tags
in there, right? Ha!
A linux glibc is a compatibility library when uses on a FreeBSD system. A compatibility library is anything that allows an application meant for one system to be run on another.
No, you missed the point. A compatibility
library is a library other than the native library
that the application was created with that exists
to map the API the application expects to a foreign API that was not considered by the application. It gives the illusion to the
application that it's running on its native
platform, but meanwhile the compatibility
library pulls shenanigans to emulate the original
environment's behavior.
A Linux program running with Linux GLIBC on
a FreeBSD box is not running with a compatibility
library. A Linux program running with a FreeBSD-specific "glibc workalike" library
that's intended to look like GLIBC to the application but is not actually an implementation
of GLIBC is running with a compatibility library.
I believe Slashdot limits the depth of reply
trees to prevent trolls from making super-wide
screens by replying to themselves over and over.
In Nested and Threaded modes,
deep nests can really be a problem.
I notice that the Linux Kernel archives I occasionally visit seems to do the same with
its message threading. After about four levels
of indentation (I think it's four, maybe more),
it stops threading and leaves everything at the
maximum depth. Slashdot seems to be doing
the same.
That doesn't work for me. It says "connection refused" on my Linux box. I believe the script is only listening on my ethernet interface. If I put the IP address of my ethernet interface there, it answers, but then redirects me to the address of my firewall. So, I have to actually change the
address that the script thinks it's listening on
before it works.
To follow up on my statement, when "properly configured", it works more or less. I get truncated pages, and I'm not sure why, but by and large I can browse my hard-drive with minimal effort.
So.... If it doesn't work for you, you either have Java disabled, or the BOHTTPD is misconfigured.
(Do a "View Source" on the page which loads the applet to get an idea of what it's loading and how it's configured.)
They seem to work incorrectly if you're behind a firewall, since the script picks up the IP of the firewall rather than of your machine, and so the server redirects you incorrectly if you do manage to get it to answer.
I haven't had time yet to determine how it behaves if I manually "configure" it, and I don't care to run it at all on my firewall. (I'm curious, not st00pid.)
Joe, you've made this claim a few times here (also in post #121) yet you've completely failed to explain why you think that people would inherently be motivated to share their code in the absence of copyright.
Yes, I did, and yes, my position is largely based on opinion and I don't have a room full of hard
data to back me up. I'm not sure you completely understood what I was saying, but still, you did point out that I have some hidden assumptions I'm making. I don't believe they're entirely unreasonable.
First, let me point out that I did not say that people would be motivated to share source. Rather, I said they would be less motivated to sit on it. It's an important distinction. I still believe there are cases where companies would sit on their source code, for good reasons or bad, but in the grand scheme of things, there would be sufficient shared software that the unshared portions would be a minority of all software, rather than a majority. In the long run, that may cause things to shift so that companies are motivated to share their source as well, but that's a ways off. In general though, things will be more open.
Why do I feel this would be so?
When you look at the current state of intellectual property laws, all of the current pieces have grown up together in an intertwined fashion, such that it's often difficult to tell where one set of laws ends and another begins. (Notice how people invariably confuse copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, even here on Slashdot. Each is a distinct concept, but they all protect intellectual property in some way.)
Because all of the pieces are built on each other, you cannot remove one piece without changing the others accordingly. A political climate that would result in copyright being pared back to its original scope (limited monopoly on creative output, rather than the unrestricted monopoly in perpetuity that it is becoming) would inherently also see patent laws weakened somewhat. To compensate, likely trade-secret and trademark laws may offer more protections, but with greater restrictions and/or finer-granularity of control rather than the broad claims that are allowed presently. Mainly, you'd see the focus shift from "protecting the past" to "protecting the present and future". By this, I mean that we would no longer focus on protecting Steamboat Willy (one of the first Mickey Mouse cartoons) or even Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy, but instead on protecting whatever I've created today or will create tomorrow.
In the present market, copyright protections actually favor existing works over new works, since existing works have proven commercial viability whereas new works do not. New works can be phased in as they prove their commercial viability, and then milked for all they're worth
once proven, or buried when shown to be unviable in the volumes that big business desires. The current
copyright protections (many of which will extend
into our grandchildrens' and/or great-grandchildrens' lifetimes for works that
are being created right now) build an artificial market around nostalgia, and also serve to bury many aspects of our culture. Witness all of the recent hub-bub about arcade and video game emulation for games written 20 years ago. Those games are a huge part of our culture, but sharing them is illegal. Game companies today are only interested in selling you new games, because the old games don't have a broad-enough appeal, but simultaneously, they must fight illegal ROM distribution lest it erode their intellectual property rights -- they want / need to "bury" these old games.
The current copyright protections also act as a rudder that allows the larger companies which are producing content to steer our culture as they see fit. I don't particularly like that, as it means that themes which are unpopular with the content producers never get aired to any large extent. It also means that they can effectively control the speed of the so-called consumer treadmill. How often have you been forced to upgrade hardware because software vendors refuse to sell the older versions of their software that work fine for you on your old machine? What if I was happy with WordPerfect 5.2 running under MS-DOS 3.3 on a 286? Well, if I wanted to build that setup, I could legally acquire the 286, but I'd have a difficult time legally acquiring WP 5.2 or MS-DOS 3.3. (With most computer licenses these days, you couldn't even sell me your copy if you happened to have a copy -- even if you transferred all documentation and media to me!) I'm forced into
a computer upgrade. Same story for musical tastes. What if I'm into a particular genre of music? If the group isn't a chart-topping million-seller, I'm going to have a difficult time finding their music. Even if I know someone who has a copy of the music, I can't make a copy of their music for myself legally, even if the group has been dead for 20 years. I need to stay inside the lines drawn for me by record companies.
One result of this over-protection is that most new works are often not all that great. They often don't represent great advances on any axis -- instead they're careful extensions of what's known to work.
New software titles often seem to be the same as the old title, only with more useless eye-candy thrown in. (I probably use 1% of the new features in Word97 vs. Word95. Why should I need to upgrade?) Same with other media -- you end up with the vapid top-40s hits we have today, as well as uninspired movies and TV shows. (Exactly what percentage of sitcoms can be described as "put N quirky people into X awkward situation and wackiness ensues"?)
Another problem with the current copyright protections are that they prevent society from
building on its past works to create new interpretations / derivations. This is an important creative avenue that one can only
travel if one's pockets are deep enough. This
again takes a measure of control out of the individual artists' hands and puts it in the
"property" holder's hands. If I want to write
a piece of fan-fiction, or write a new feature
in a word-processor, or sample an existing song
in a new song I'm making, I can only do this
if I work for the right people, or can buy the
rights to do so.
With shorter copyright protection, the emphasis
shifts from "reproducing what works according to
time tested formulas" to "let's do something new,
because we no longer can keep selling the same old stuff." The very few new things we get
these days are total crap-shoots (such as South Park). Where current copyright protections keep old works from competing with new, lesser copyright protections would add new competition in these markets. (Recall, as many have pointed out, Microsoft's largest competitor is itself. The same is true in all media, actually.) Now, companies would have to do more than just add a little more bloat in order to justify making a new version of software. Rather, they would actually have to add something truly useful and valuable to entice people onto the new platform. Disney might actually have to come up with something other than Mickey or one of their formulaic "Take characters from ancient story, write our own feel-good story around them, insert some talking animals for comic relief and sell to the masses." Creativity might actually return to media!
In a different vein, genres such as hip-hop / rap that were built on sampling and reusing old works as a substrate for new composition could return to their roots and sample once again. This flavor of music deserves special attention, actually, since it builds on sounds and samples which are familiar, but adds new lyrics and interpretations that truly are creative. After some landmark copyright lawsuits in the late 80s/early 90s (forget exactly when), this entire genre has been stifled. Albums such as the Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique aren't even possible nowadays, because, in the band's own words, it'd be too expensive to make. More limited copyright protections would enable these sorts of creative works (which, incidentally, bear only minimal resemblance to the originals and truly are new creative works) to be made once again.
Think about it. How many modern works incorporate
various classical works, ranging from paintings such as the Mona Lisa, to songs (such as the Epson radio commercial which features music by Mozart), to sculptures (such as The David)?
Now considehr ow many modern works will be able to incorporate anything since World War II. Not many, unless you're doing under the auspices of Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, or a handful of other media moguls.
Where does software fit in, and why would sitting
on code be less important, then?
In much the same manner as General Motors provides detailed repair instructions for classic cars (largely to keep customers from bugging them I'm sure) and doesn't prevent people from sharing
these with each other, software houses would have a vested interest in reducing their support burden for old versions of their software. Since old versions of their software would persist, one easy avenue would be to open-source it and say "We're not supporting this, but anyone who wants to may tinker with it." They would and should be too busy working on actual innovations to worry about the old software. This is the model that idSoftware follows with their software. They're busy making the next big game engine innovation (even if they're not changing gameplay much), such that the new game is quite a step forward from the one they've just open-sourced.
You mention dongles and other mechanisms (either legal or physical) for locking down software. Those mechanisms will certainly exist, but their scope will remain small as non-restricted software will always catch up. And if it doesn't, that's fine too -- the state of software has advanced rather than stagnated, and we're in good shape.
At any rate, customers will find these restricted solutions less appealing than non-restricted counterparts,
and the restricted versions will die a natural
death unless they consistently deliver significant value over non-restricted versions. (How many people switched from Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel or Quattro Pro just to get around stupid interactions between COPYHARD.COM and disk defragmenters / backup-restore utilities?)
Lack of planned / forced obsolesence becomes a selling point for software in such a market, as
customers become accustomed to preserving their investment. They already do this today with in-house packages. (My employer, for instance, used the same internal email system for about 20 years, since they controlled it -- in contrast, since we use MS-Word for word processing, we have to upgrade whenever Microsoft tells us to, since it's nearly impossible not to. If solutions that offered more control were widely available, I'm sure we'd shift towards them over time.)
We're starting to see some of this with open-source software already, with companies and countries going with open source solutions in order to keep control in their own hands rather than in someone else's. With lesser copyright controls, you've removed some of this artificial control from the copyright holder's hands, and you've made having your own control a selling point.
Anyways, I've rambled enough on this point.
Let me address one more:
While I'm sure you'd love to write off the "GPLNet" guy (cid #17) as just a simple troll, this isn't the case.
As with all good jokes, all good trolls are built around a kernel of truth. However, trolls are constructed in such a way to incite rather than to inform or persuade. The original post is a troll. It does not seek to discuss the issue in a positive manner. I didn't feel the need to feed the troll all that heavily so I keep my original reply short and sweet.
So anyways, that's my reasoning. Not necessarily an irrefutable tower of formal logic, but not necessarily a complete morass of unsubstantiated bunk. I'd like to think I am advancing the discussion at least a little bit.
This is neat, I've seen this same post on two different articles, and both times it's gotten mod'd up as (+1 Insightful). We have ourselves
a new troll, the GPLNet troll. It's Saturday, I'm bored, I'll bite.
It definitely comes across as a "witty retort" to the GPL
flag-wavers that also enjoy getting their music and pr0n for free off the net.
What you're failing to realize, of course, is that
if the copyright system weren't so overly biased towards Big Business and the general trend was towards sharing rather than hiding information, then licenses such as GPL wouldn't be necessary, and something like "GPLNet" would just be silly.
While true on a pedantic level, the reality is, in the absence of copyright, authors of software would have many fewer reasons to sit on the source if they're distributing the binary.
I think the general arguement in favor of distributed computing in a businees environment is cost.
Of course, that cost equation rarely has a term for the amount of employee time spent working around Windows' features.
I put a script on my PC at work which counts the number of times I've rebooted. (It's a crappy little QBASIC program that's in the Startup folder, so it only
counts successful boots.) You can tell when I've been using my PC vs. when I've been using my Unix
box just by looking at the log. I generally end up having to reboot that PC multiple times if I'm doing any heavy-duty work.
Annoying.
Almost as annoying as the time I accidentally dragged a menu option out of one of the menus in
Microsoft Word, and had to spend a good part of a day figuring out how to put it back. First, I had to convince myself that the option had been there to begin with, and that I hadn't entered some mode in which "Insert Character..." had not been disabled for some silly reason. Turns out, I had to drag the option out of the "Customize" dialog (used for configuring tool bars) in order to get it back.
I'd never learned how to use the configurable tool bar, so I
didn't think to check the tool bar configuration stuff to determine why my menu option had gone away. Pull-down menus in MS Word are now just tool bars with text instead of icons, effectively.
So, when people talk about the cost-effectiveness of PCs, I bring up these stories. I also sometimes bring up the relative cost of the applications I would use on the PC if I had to
(Visual Studio, Outlook, etc.) vs. the cost of the
tools I do use on Unix (gcc, mutt, etc.) (For bonus points, I mention the net revenue loss for each should a macro virus come through.... Big $$ for Outlook, $0.00 for mutt.)
Actually, I envisioned the Blue's Brothers. "We're on a mission from God." Granted, RMS is apparently atheist, and RMS is one person, so you get back to the quote "I'm on a mission."
Actually, it's not/.'d, but rather, it's Junkbuster/Cookie-Dropping/Netscape incompatible. On my machine, it just keeps reloading, reloading, reloading, reloading, reloading in the background with an endless series of redirects to an ever-lengthening URL.
IIRC, bonnie uses the stock getc() and putc(), which under Linux are threadsafe. These functions acquire a lock in userspace, and so have more overhead than is necessary for a single-threaded application. As Doug Ledford explains on this page, bonnie performs much more realistically when modified to use the non-threadsafe versions (which is a valid thing to do in a single-threaded application).
--Joe --
Re:How many domains do I need to register now?
on
Fake PayPal Site
·
· Score: 1
Should MS grab mlcrosoft.com?
No, that'd be MICROS~1.COM
--Joe --
Pre-emptive Grammar Counter Attack
on
Fake PayPal Site
·
· Score: 1
Actually, MS-NBC is not down (as far as I can tell). Rather, the page keeps reloading in the background, appending "&cp=1" or somesuch to the URL,about once every four seconds. I think it's because Junkbuster snips the cookies. If I have Javascript enabled, I get to see the URL growing in the Location: field. If I have it disabled, it just looks like the page is taking forever to load, but careful observation of the status line on the bottom of the screen reveals that browser is ping-ponging between two webservers with a period of about 4 seconds.
Same thing happens on the last MeSs-NBC article I tried to read. I figure if they're site is broken, I'm not in a hurry to fix it for them.
Hate to break it to you, but they may have a singular antecedant. So says my dictionary. It's also great for getting out of those circumstances where the gender of the singular antecedent is inspecific. Rather than saying "he" or "she" or "he/she" or "she/he" or "sie" or whatever's in vogue with the P.C. crowd, you can simply say "they" and offend no one. (Except, possibly, grammarians whose grammar sense doesn't evolve with the language.)
Specifically, in Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, the entry for they states, under sense 3:
the person or group just mentioned; used sometimes as a generic form with a collective antecedent such as everyone, somebody, or no one to avoid the masculine implications of generic he.
Therefore, the author you were replying to was consistently referring to the MPAA in the singular sense.
Seriously, the only reason public-domain is miscible with GPL is that the GPL authors can take the public-domain code and release modified versions under GPL that aren't public-domain. Therefore, a GPL program which includes some public-domain pieces is distributed with all pieces under the GPL, and none remaining in the public-domain.
This isn't flamebait. It's just one of the primary issues I have with public-domain.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason IE puts up with it, as best as I can tell, is that MICROS~1's software produces some of the most broken HTML I've ever seen. Ever export an all-text Word document to HTML? Should be as simple as putting <P> tags in there, right? Ha!
--Joe--
No, you missed the point. A compatibility library is a library other than the native library that the application was created with that exists to map the API the application expects to a foreign API that was not considered by the application. It gives the illusion to the application that it's running on its native platform, but meanwhile the compatibility library pulls shenanigans to emulate the original environment's behavior.
A Linux program running with Linux GLIBC on a FreeBSD box is not running with a compatibility library. A Linux program running with a FreeBSD-specific "glibc workalike" library that's intended to look like GLIBC to the application but is not actually an implementation of GLIBC is running with a compatibility library.
--Joe--
I believe Slashdot limits the depth of reply trees to prevent trolls from making super-wide screens by replying to themselves over and over. In Nested and Threaded modes, deep nests can really be a problem.
I notice that the Linux Kernel archives I occasionally visit seems to do the same with its message threading. After about four levels of indentation (I think it's four, maybe more), it stops threading and leaves everything at the maximum depth. Slashdot seems to be doing the same.
--Joe--
Erm... That's a disturbing feature to have in any application.
--Joe--
Why, but of course! Everyone always forgets the second 'n' in both Guin n esses.
--Joe--
That doesn't work for me. It says "connection refused" on my Linux box. I believe the script is only listening on my ethernet interface. If I put the IP address of my ethernet interface there, it answers, but then redirects me to the address of my firewall. So, I have to actually change the address that the script thinks it's listening on before it works.
--Joe--
To follow up on my statement, when "properly configured", it works more or less. I get truncated pages, and I'm not sure why, but by and large I can browse my hard-drive with minimal effort.
So.... If it doesn't work for you, you either have Java disabled, or the BOHTTPD is misconfigured. (Do a "View Source" on the page which loads the applet to get an idea of what it's loading and how it's configured.)
--Joe--
They seem to work incorrectly if you're behind a firewall, since the script picks up the IP of the firewall rather than of your machine, and so the server redirects you incorrectly if you do manage to get it to answer.
I haven't had time yet to determine how it behaves if I manually "configure" it, and I don't care to run it at all on my firewall. (I'm curious, not st00pid.)
--Joe--
And I have two hosts, one at 127.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.6. ;-)
--Joe--
Yes, I did, and yes, my position is largely based on opinion and I don't have a room full of hard data to back me up. I'm not sure you completely understood what I was saying, but still, you did point out that I have some hidden assumptions I'm making. I don't believe they're entirely unreasonable.
First, let me point out that I did not say that people would be motivated to share source. Rather, I said they would be less motivated to sit on it. It's an important distinction. I still believe there are cases where companies would sit on their source code, for good reasons or bad, but in the grand scheme of things, there would be sufficient shared software that the unshared portions would be a minority of all software, rather than a majority. In the long run, that may cause things to shift so that companies are motivated to share their source as well, but that's a ways off. In general though, things will be more open.
Why do I feel this would be so?
When you look at the current state of intellectual property laws, all of the current pieces have grown up together in an intertwined fashion, such that it's often difficult to tell where one set of laws ends and another begins. (Notice how people invariably confuse copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, even here on Slashdot. Each is a distinct concept, but they all protect intellectual property in some way.)
Because all of the pieces are built on each other, you cannot remove one piece without changing the others accordingly. A political climate that would result in copyright being pared back to its original scope (limited monopoly on creative output, rather than the unrestricted monopoly in perpetuity that it is becoming) would inherently also see patent laws weakened somewhat. To compensate, likely trade-secret and trademark laws may offer more protections, but with greater restrictions and/or finer-granularity of control rather than the broad claims that are allowed presently. Mainly, you'd see the focus shift from "protecting the past" to "protecting the present and future". By this, I mean that we would no longer focus on protecting Steamboat Willy (one of the first Mickey Mouse cartoons) or even Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy, but instead on protecting whatever I've created today or will create tomorrow.
In the present market, copyright protections actually favor existing works over new works, since existing works have proven commercial viability whereas new works do not. New works can be phased in as they prove their commercial viability, and then milked for all they're worth once proven, or buried when shown to be unviable in the volumes that big business desires. The current copyright protections (many of which will extend into our grandchildrens' and/or great-grandchildrens' lifetimes for works that are being created right now) build an artificial market around nostalgia, and also serve to bury many aspects of our culture. Witness all of the recent hub-bub about arcade and video game emulation for games written 20 years ago. Those games are a huge part of our culture, but sharing them is illegal. Game companies today are only interested in selling you new games, because the old games don't have a broad-enough appeal, but simultaneously, they must fight illegal ROM distribution lest it erode their intellectual property rights -- they want / need to "bury" these old games.
The current copyright protections also act as a rudder that allows the larger companies which are producing content to steer our culture as they see fit. I don't particularly like that, as it means that themes which are unpopular with the content producers never get aired to any large extent. It also means that they can effectively control the speed of the so-called consumer treadmill. How often have you been forced to upgrade hardware because software vendors refuse to sell the older versions of their software that work fine for you on your old machine? What if I was happy with WordPerfect 5.2 running under MS-DOS 3.3 on a 286? Well, if I wanted to build that setup, I could legally acquire the 286, but I'd have a difficult time legally acquiring WP 5.2 or MS-DOS 3.3. (With most computer licenses these days, you couldn't even sell me your copy if you happened to have a copy -- even if you transferred all documentation and media to me!) I'm forced into a computer upgrade. Same story for musical tastes. What if I'm into a particular genre of music? If the group isn't a chart-topping million-seller, I'm going to have a difficult time finding their music. Even if I know someone who has a copy of the music, I can't make a copy of their music for myself legally, even if the group has been dead for 20 years. I need to stay inside the lines drawn for me by record companies.
One result of this over-protection is that most new works are often not all that great. They often don't represent great advances on any axis -- instead they're careful extensions of what's known to work. New software titles often seem to be the same as the old title, only with more useless eye-candy thrown in. (I probably use 1% of the new features in Word97 vs. Word95. Why should I need to upgrade?) Same with other media -- you end up with the vapid top-40s hits we have today, as well as uninspired movies and TV shows. (Exactly what percentage of sitcoms can be described as "put N quirky people into X awkward situation and wackiness ensues"?)
Another problem with the current copyright protections are that they prevent society from building on its past works to create new interpretations / derivations. This is an important creative avenue that one can only travel if one's pockets are deep enough. This again takes a measure of control out of the individual artists' hands and puts it in the "property" holder's hands. If I want to write a piece of fan-fiction, or write a new feature in a word-processor, or sample an existing song in a new song I'm making, I can only do this if I work for the right people, or can buy the rights to do so.
With shorter copyright protection, the emphasis shifts from "reproducing what works according to time tested formulas" to "let's do something new, because we no longer can keep selling the same old stuff." The very few new things we get these days are total crap-shoots (such as South Park). Where current copyright protections keep old works from competing with new, lesser copyright protections would add new competition in these markets. (Recall, as many have pointed out, Microsoft's largest competitor is itself. The same is true in all media, actually.) Now, companies would have to do more than just add a little more bloat in order to justify making a new version of software. Rather, they would actually have to add something truly useful and valuable to entice people onto the new platform. Disney might actually have to come up with something other than Mickey or one of their formulaic "Take characters from ancient story, write our own feel-good story around them, insert some talking animals for comic relief and sell to the masses." Creativity might actually return to media!
In a different vein, genres such as hip-hop / rap that were built on sampling and reusing old works as a substrate for new composition could return to their roots and sample once again. This flavor of music deserves special attention, actually, since it builds on sounds and samples which are familiar, but adds new lyrics and interpretations that truly are creative. After some landmark copyright lawsuits in the late 80s/early 90s (forget exactly when), this entire genre has been stifled. Albums such as the Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique aren't even possible nowadays, because, in the band's own words, it'd be too expensive to make. More limited copyright protections would enable these sorts of creative works (which, incidentally, bear only minimal resemblance to the originals and truly are new creative works) to be made once again.
Think about it. How many modern works incorporate various classical works, ranging from paintings such as the Mona Lisa, to songs (such as the Epson radio commercial which features music by Mozart), to sculptures (such as The David)?
Now considehr ow many modern works will be able to incorporate anything since World War II. Not many, unless you're doing under the auspices of Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, or a handful of other media moguls.
Where does software fit in, and why would sitting on code be less important, then?
In much the same manner as General Motors provides detailed repair instructions for classic cars (largely to keep customers from bugging them I'm sure) and doesn't prevent people from sharing these with each other, software houses would have a vested interest in reducing their support burden for old versions of their software. Since old versions of their software would persist, one easy avenue would be to open-source it and say "We're not supporting this, but anyone who wants to may tinker with it." They would and should be too busy working on actual innovations to worry about the old software. This is the model that idSoftware follows with their software. They're busy making the next big game engine innovation (even if they're not changing gameplay much), such that the new game is quite a step forward from the one they've just open-sourced.
You mention dongles and other mechanisms (either legal or physical) for locking down software. Those mechanisms will certainly exist, but their scope will remain small as non-restricted software will always catch up. And if it doesn't, that's fine too -- the state of software has advanced rather than stagnated, and we're in good shape. At any rate, customers will find these restricted solutions less appealing than non-restricted counterparts, and the restricted versions will die a natural death unless they consistently deliver significant value over non-restricted versions. (How many people switched from Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel or Quattro Pro just to get around stupid interactions between COPYHARD.COM and disk defragmenters / backup-restore utilities?) Lack of planned / forced obsolesence becomes a selling point for software in such a market, as customers become accustomed to preserving their investment. They already do this today with in-house packages. (My employer, for instance, used the same internal email system for about 20 years, since they controlled it -- in contrast, since we use MS-Word for word processing, we have to upgrade whenever Microsoft tells us to, since it's nearly impossible not to. If solutions that offered more control were widely available, I'm sure we'd shift towards them over time.)
We're starting to see some of this with open-source software already, with companies and countries going with open source solutions in order to keep control in their own hands rather than in someone else's. With lesser copyright controls, you've removed some of this artificial control from the copyright holder's hands, and you've made having your own control a selling point.
Anyways, I've rambled enough on this point. Let me address one more:
As with all good jokes, all good trolls are built around a kernel of truth. However, trolls are constructed in such a way to incite rather than to inform or persuade. The original post is a troll. It does not seek to discuss the issue in a positive manner. I didn't feel the need to feed the troll all that heavily so I keep my original reply short and sweet.
So anyways, that's my reasoning. Not necessarily an irrefutable tower of formal logic, but not necessarily a complete morass of unsubstantiated bunk. I'd like to think I am advancing the discussion at least a little bit.
--Joe--
Makes sense. Thanks!
--Joe--
I Am Not A Lawyer
The one I haven't been able to figure out is HTH. In my best Ben Stein voice: Anyone? Anyone?
--Joe--
This is neat, I've seen this same post on two different articles, and both times it's gotten mod'd up as (+1 Insightful). We have ourselves a new troll, the GPLNet troll. It's Saturday, I'm bored, I'll bite.
It definitely comes across as a "witty retort" to the GPL flag-wavers that also enjoy getting their music and pr0n for free off the net. What you're failing to realize, of course, is that if the copyright system weren't so overly biased towards Big Business and the general trend was towards sharing rather than hiding information, then licenses such as GPL wouldn't be necessary, and something like "GPLNet" would just be silly.
--Joe--
While true on a pedantic level, the reality is, in the absence of copyright, authors of software would have many fewer reasons to sit on the source if they're distributing the binary.
--Joe--
Of course, that cost equation rarely has a term for the amount of employee time spent working around Windows' features. I put a script on my PC at work which counts the number of times I've rebooted. (It's a crappy little QBASIC program that's in the Startup folder, so it only counts successful boots.) You can tell when I've been using my PC vs. when I've been using my Unix box just by looking at the log. I generally end up having to reboot that PC multiple times if I'm doing any heavy-duty work. Annoying.
Almost as annoying as the time I accidentally dragged a menu option out of one of the menus in Microsoft Word, and had to spend a good part of a day figuring out how to put it back. First, I had to convince myself that the option had been there to begin with, and that I hadn't entered some mode in which "Insert Character..." had not been disabled for some silly reason. Turns out, I had to drag the option out of the "Customize" dialog (used for configuring tool bars) in order to get it back. I'd never learned how to use the configurable tool bar, so I didn't think to check the tool bar configuration stuff to determine why my menu option had gone away. Pull-down menus in MS Word are now just tool bars with text instead of icons, effectively.
So, when people talk about the cost-effectiveness of PCs, I bring up these stories. I also sometimes bring up the relative cost of the applications I would use on the PC if I had to (Visual Studio, Outlook, etc.) vs. the cost of the tools I do use on Unix (gcc, mutt, etc.) (For bonus points, I mention the net revenue loss for each should a macro virus come through.... Big $$ for Outlook, $0.00 for mutt.)
--Joe--
Actually, I envisioned the Blue's Brothers. "We're on a mission from God." Granted, RMS is apparently atheist, and RMS is one person, so you get back to the quote "I'm on a mission."
--Joe--
Actually, it's not /.'d, but rather, it's Junkbuster/Cookie-Dropping/Netscape incompatible. On my machine, it just keeps reloading, reloading, reloading, reloading, reloading in the background with an endless series of redirects to an ever-lengthening URL.
Quite annoying.
--Joe--
IIRC, bonnie uses the stock getc() and putc(), which under Linux are threadsafe. These functions acquire a lock in userspace, and so have more overhead than is necessary for a single-threaded application. As Doug Ledford explains on this page, bonnie performs much more realistically when modified to use the non-threadsafe versions (which is a valid thing to do in a single-threaded application).
--Joe--
No, that'd be MICROS~1.COM
--Joe--
s/they're site/their site/
Ooops.
--Joe--
Actually, MS-NBC is not down (as far as I can tell). Rather, the page keeps reloading in the background, appending "&cp=1" or somesuch to the URL,about once every four seconds. I think it's because Junkbuster snips the cookies. If I have Javascript enabled, I get to see the URL growing in the Location: field. If I have it disabled, it just looks like the page is taking forever to load, but careful observation of the status line on the bottom of the screen reveals that browser is ping-ponging between two webservers with a period of about 4 seconds.
Same thing happens on the last MeSs-NBC article I tried to read. I figure if they're site is broken, I'm not in a hurry to fix it for them.
--Joe--
Hate to break it to you, but they may have a singular antecedant. So says my dictionary. It's also great for getting out of those circumstances where the gender of the singular antecedent is inspecific. Rather than saying "he" or "she" or "he/she" or "she/he" or "sie" or whatever's in vogue with the P.C. crowd, you can simply say "they" and offend no one. (Except, possibly, grammarians whose grammar sense doesn't evolve with the language.)
Specifically, in Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, the entry for they states, under sense 3:
Therefore, the author you were replying to was consistently referring to the MPAA in the singular sense.
--Joe--
Hey, wait a minute! I wasn't born yesterday! ;-)
--Joe--
Seriously, the only reason public-domain is miscible with GPL is that the GPL authors can take the public-domain code and release modified versions under GPL that aren't public-domain. Therefore, a GPL program which includes some public-domain pieces is distributed with all pieces under the GPL, and none remaining in the public-domain.
This isn't flamebait. It's just one of the primary issues I have with public-domain.
--Joe--
Liar, huh? Scroll down and see that, yes, I have a significant other. And a beautiful and lovable one at that.
Yeah, whatever.
--Joe--