Well, I honestly don't remember hearing about them before today. That doesn't really mean much though, especially if they mostly appeared on YRO stories, which I've been blocking from the front page view for years.
I agree, although historically these orgs tend to be good counterbalances to large corporations and they are usually understaffed and underfunded. At least they're being upfront about it, they could have called Google yesterday and "suggested" a donation in exchange for a more lenient press release or something. And it's not like Google can't afford to take a $5M write off and look good in the process.
That said, I have no idea how well established this organization is. If they're just a fly-by-night deal then of course no one should be paying attention to them, let alone giving them money.
Why is it so difficult to understand that breaking the law does not equal committing a crime? Would you be OK with the police putting you away for a year because they caught you going 5mph over the speed limit? After all, you did break a law by doing so.
A criminal conviction can result in prison time, execution and/or a fine. A civil judgment will never land you in jail, it will never get you killed (although it can bankrupt you) and it does not imply criminal behavior in any way. It only means you were found to have broken the law in some way.
Microsoft was found to be in violation of antitrust law because they abused their position as a monopoly. They were never "convicted" of anything, and the legal proceedings against them were civil, not criminal.
If you think that's a semantic point, consider having a felony (murder) on your record, as opposed to a misdemeanor (jaywalking). Then try passing a background check the next time you are up for a job.
So are you suggesting that there was no law, that breaking the law did not cause injury to any member of the public, or that it was not punishable by a fine
I didn't "suggest" anything. All of that is true, except:
imprisonment
That being the difference between a civil and criminal process. Unless you can produce proof that Bill Gates or anyone from Microsoft spent time in jail for violating the Sherman Act, or that the antitrust trial was anything other than a civil case.
It is if you're emotionally predisposed to consider the circumstances a "crime", but that doesn't make it a criminal proceeding or finding. If you like, it's the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor, I suppose. May I suggest catching up on how this works? This is a good starting point, although I'd go for the references there more than the contents of the article.
Copyright infringement is also "breaking the law", yet I'd bet you'd argue to no end that it is not a crime, either.
When you insisted that I was somehow backpedaling and not even referring to the EU case in the first place, you were just picking a fight and trolling.
I don't care what you think I'm doing, as long as you understand that you're wrong, slashbot moderation notwithstanding.
Can you point me to a legal document that characterizes the EU legal actions against Microsoft as a criminal matter? I'm more than ready to be proven wrong.
Now you're just trolling.
No, I'm correcting you. If you don't like it, feel free to offer evidence to the contrary, or stop trying to argue something you clearly don't understand. There's a difference between facts and fallacies of relevance (argumentum ad odium in this case).
Since Microsoft wasn't "convicted" of anything, I don't see what has anything to do with supporting them.
Although expecting the government to support a large corporation is probably a bad idea anyway, be that Microsoft or anyone else. Any kind of bailout (direct or indirect) is harmful in the long run.
You just said, "downloading music is illegal", which is obviously a wrong statement.
The semantic gyrations and disingenuous arguments used by some people when discussing this issue never cease to amaze me. No, it's not illegal to download an MP3 from Magnatune. But you and the OP know exactly what I was talking about.
Like any other OS, Windows also buffers. But the buffering on NTFS is far less aggressive or done differently than Ext4, apparently.
The other small difference between Ext3 and NTFS is the fact that the FlushFileBuffers API flushes the data for a specific file, whereas Ext3 with the ordered data config on (the default as far as I can see) flushes all the data in the cache. For all the applications on the box. That's brilliant! It's probably why the KDE devs didn't even want to call fsync() to begin with. I think that was a huge problem with the performance of Firefox's new SQLite subsystem on Linux as well.
Ahh yes, I love developers like you. You assume your app is the only one running, and it must have full access to the entire IO bandwidth an HDD can provide.
No, not really. I do assume that writing 40 small files to disk immediately instead of waiting 10 seconds to do it is not going to task a modern system in any meaningful way, so the file system shouldn't be trying to "help" me by aggressively buffering that sort of trivial operation.
As for your data point, I probably wouldn't code for the event of a disk physically dying, and I don't think developers are "shitty" because they don't plan properly for that. That's a very different scenario than the power going out and the computer shutting down immediately, just in case for some reason you stupidly managed to confuse the two. You know, because the applications are also gone, so no one is trying to write or read from the disks to begin with.
I then asked if they believed that downloading music is a criminal offense that can result in arrest
I hope they answered "yes", because it is. Followed by "however, the copyright system is completely broken and you shouldn't go to jail or otherwise punished for that". Under current law however, you can be punished for it.
There's a difference between how you want the legal system to function and how it actually works.
The idiocy is in expecting the FS to do something it was never asked to do.
The idiocy is really breaking existing applications that used to work, simply because you're following a spec. As usual the whole point of computing is lost on many people here. Users expect their data to be safe, and they use applications, not file systems. If some distro "upgrades" me to Ext4 and I start losing data because the power goes out (for example, I live in Latin America where the grid sucks), do you think I'm going to shrug and praise the lord because they cleverly decided to ship it with a default that better expresses the super goodness of POSIX, or just be pissed that "the computer" is failing where it used to succeed?
If KDE used to work fine under Ext3 and is suddenly broken under Ext4, then as far as I'm concerned that's a problem with Ext4, and you can be sure I'm never going to switch to it, no matter how much POSIX bliss it happens to embody or how many howling monkeys are telling me that this is "the way it's supposed to be".
Back when 10MB HDDs with 100ms access times where prevalent and floppies were all the rage, buffered I/O was a good idea. If I find that an application is somehow overwhelming my 3.0GB/s SATA bus and 10,000 RPM hard drive, I'll be sure to turn this "feature" on.
If I want asynchronous or lazy writes to the disk, I'll code that myself. The filesystem should be hitting the metal about 0.001 microseconds after I call write() or whatever the function is. I cannot believe this is actually being spun as a "feature" that application developers should code against. It's just mind boggling.
What Ext4 is doing is 100% respectful of the spec.
The idiocy of the filesystem venting your data to space because it's following a "spec" does not strike you as odd, I guess?
There are many situations where I'm supposed to follow an API or risk dire consequences. "Don't write too many little files" coming from the operating system is probably not one of them. Especially on any Unix.
You'll have to excuse me for chuckling a bit here, but if NTFS or the filesystem for OS X (whatever that is) had this problem and someone suggested that it's an "application problem" they'd be stoned to death.
As an application developer, the last thing I want to worry about is whether or not the fraking filesystem is going to persist my data to disk. That's why I write applications, and other people write file systems and kernels.
You can talk to me about good practices when doing I/O on any given platform, but please don't insult my intelligence by claiming the FS layer's failure to do something is due to my saving lots of little files, or lots of big ones, or anything in between. That's just stupid.
The sticking point will be what Microsoft does about compatibility for ActiveX apps.
That's not going to be a problem, I think. They're being phased out all over the place in favor of Ajax foofyness. By the time IE8 is EOL'ed, I hope ActiveX will be long gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I honestly don't remember hearing about them before today. That doesn't really mean much though, especially if they mostly appeared on YRO stories, which I've been blocking from the front page view for years.
Wah, wah.
I agree, although historically these orgs tend to be good counterbalances to large corporations and they are usually understaffed and underfunded. At least they're being upfront about it, they could have called Google yesterday and "suggested" a donation in exchange for a more lenient press release or something. And it's not like Google can't afford to take a $5M write off and look good in the process.
That said, I have no idea how well established this organization is. If they're just a fly-by-night deal then of course no one should be paying attention to them, let alone giving them money.
Why is it so difficult to understand that breaking the law does not equal committing a crime? Would you be OK with the police putting you away for a year because they caught you going 5mph over the speed limit? After all, you did break a law by doing so.
A criminal conviction can result in prison time, execution and/or a fine. A civil judgment will never land you in jail, it will never get you killed (although it can bankrupt you) and it does not imply criminal behavior in any way. It only means you were found to have broken the law in some way.
Microsoft was found to be in violation of antitrust law because they abused their position as a monopoly. They were never "convicted" of anything, and the legal proceedings against them were civil, not criminal.
If you think that's a semantic point, consider having a felony (murder) on your record, as opposed to a misdemeanor (jaywalking). Then try passing a background check the next time you are up for a job.
I didn't "suggest" anything. All of that is true, except:
That being the difference between a civil and criminal process. Unless you can produce proof that Bill Gates or anyone from Microsoft spent time in jail for violating the Sherman Act, or that the antitrust trial was anything other than a civil case.
It is if you're emotionally predisposed to consider the circumstances a "crime", but that doesn't make it a criminal proceeding or finding. If you like, it's the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor, I suppose. May I suggest catching up on how this works? This is a good starting point, although I'd go for the references there more than the contents of the article.
Copyright infringement is also "breaking the law", yet I'd bet you'd argue to no end that it is not a crime, either.
I don't care what you think I'm doing, as long as you understand that you're wrong, slashbot moderation notwithstanding.
http://dictionary.law.com/default2.asp?typed=conviction&type=1&submit1.x=0&submit1.y=0&submit1=Look+up
Try to use the proper tool for the job.
I wouldn't trust Wikipedia any further than I can throw it, but in this case I know at least this piece of information there is correct.
Can you point me to a legal document that characterizes the EU legal actions against Microsoft as a criminal matter? I'm more than ready to be proven wrong.
No, I'm correcting you. If you don't like it, feel free to offer evidence to the contrary, or stop trying to argue something you clearly don't understand. There's a difference between facts and fallacies of relevance (argumentum ad odium in this case).
The EU case isn't a criminal matter, either, and I doubt you were referring to it in the first place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
United States v. Microsoft was a set of consolidated civil actions filed against Microsoft Corporation
Hope that helps.
Which isn't remotely close to a criminal conviction.
Since Microsoft wasn't "convicted" of anything, I don't see what has anything to do with supporting them.
Although expecting the government to support a large corporation is probably a bad idea anyway, be that Microsoft or anyone else. Any kind of bailout (direct or indirect) is harmful in the long run.
In all that we definitely agree.
The semantic gyrations and disingenuous arguments used by some people when discussing this issue never cease to amaze me. No, it's not illegal to download an MP3 from Magnatune. But you and the OP know exactly what I was talking about.
Yes... because everybody knows that the vast majority of material on P2P networks is just good old public domain music, videos, software and books.
Like any other OS, Windows also buffers. But the buffering on NTFS is far less aggressive or done differently than Ext4, apparently.
The other small difference between Ext3 and NTFS is the fact that the FlushFileBuffers API flushes the data for a specific file, whereas Ext3 with the ordered data config on (the default as far as I can see) flushes all the data in the cache. For all the applications on the box. That's brilliant! It's probably why the KDE devs didn't even want to call fsync() to begin with. I think that was a huge problem with the performance of Firefox's new SQLite subsystem on Linux as well.
No, not really. I do assume that writing 40 small files to disk immediately instead of waiting 10 seconds to do it is not going to task a modern system in any meaningful way, so the file system shouldn't be trying to "help" me by aggressively buffering that sort of trivial operation.
As for your data point, I probably wouldn't code for the event of a disk physically dying, and I don't think developers are "shitty" because they don't plan properly for that. That's a very different scenario than the power going out and the computer shutting down immediately, just in case for some reason you stupidly managed to confuse the two. You know, because the applications are also gone, so no one is trying to write or read from the disks to begin with.
I hope they answered "yes", because it is. Followed by "however, the copyright system is completely broken and you shouldn't go to jail or otherwise punished for that". Under current law however, you can be punished for it.
There's a difference between how you want the legal system to function and how it actually works.
The idiocy is really breaking existing applications that used to work, simply because you're following a spec. As usual the whole point of computing is lost on many people here. Users expect their data to be safe, and they use applications, not file systems. If some distro "upgrades" me to Ext4 and I start losing data because the power goes out (for example, I live in Latin America where the grid sucks), do you think I'm going to shrug and praise the lord because they cleverly decided to ship it with a default that better expresses the super goodness of POSIX, or just be pissed that "the computer" is failing where it used to succeed?
If KDE used to work fine under Ext3 and is suddenly broken under Ext4, then as far as I'm concerned that's a problem with Ext4, and you can be sure I'm never going to switch to it, no matter how much POSIX bliss it happens to embody or how many howling monkeys are telling me that this is "the way it's supposed to be".
Back when 10MB HDDs with 100ms access times where prevalent and floppies were all the rage, buffered I/O was a good idea. If I find that an application is somehow overwhelming my 3.0GB/s SATA bus and 10,000 RPM hard drive, I'll be sure to turn this "feature" on.
If I want asynchronous or lazy writes to the disk, I'll code that myself. The filesystem should be hitting the metal about 0.001 microseconds after I call write() or whatever the function is. I cannot believe this is actually being spun as a "feature" that application developers should code against. It's just mind boggling.
The idiocy of the filesystem venting your data to space because it's following a "spec" does not strike you as odd, I guess?
There are many situations where I'm supposed to follow an API or risk dire consequences. "Don't write too many little files" coming from the operating system is probably not one of them. Especially on any Unix.
You'll have to excuse me for chuckling a bit here, but if NTFS or the filesystem for OS X (whatever that is) had this problem and someone suggested that it's an "application problem" they'd be stoned to death.
As an application developer, the last thing I want to worry about is whether or not the fraking filesystem is going to persist my data to disk. That's why I write applications, and other people write file systems and kernels.
You can talk to me about good practices when doing I/O on any given platform, but please don't insult my intelligence by claiming the FS layer's failure to do something is due to my saving lots of little files, or lots of big ones, or anything in between. That's just stupid.
That's not going to be a problem, I think. They're being phased out all over the place in favor of Ajax foofyness. By the time IE8 is EOL'ed, I hope ActiveX will be long gone.