It's not just "can't play clips without a media player". It's "can't play clips WITH a media player unless that media player is the one from Microsoft".
Yes, libc is a neccessary component of a unix system (except maybe in some oddball embedded setup where the kernel just launches one small program on a PDA or vending machine or something like that.) The point is that, in exactly the same way, IE is also - becuase too many other apps make calls into it's DLL's to remove those DLLS. Remember what the article is about - the MS person claiming that because IE is on top of the OS that it isn't part of the OS. Well, if libc is a neccessary part of unix, then IE is a neccessary part of Windows in precisely the same way.
For sarcasm to work, the reader has to respect the writer enough to know the writer wouldn't say something dumb and actually mean it. For some random person you don't know on the internet, you can't make that assumption. Sarcasm fails on the internet because genuine morons exist on the internet, who's genuine opinions are indistinguishable from jokes.
Adding more visual and multimedia content is a good thing, although it can be mis used just as plain text can be misused.
Yes, and that misuse is exactly what everyone here is complianing about - misuse like requiring you to wait for a flash anaimation even when you've seen the damn thing already - or requireing graphics for what is a non-graphical task.
The attitude that space and bandwith are infinite wastable resources is always, always wrong. There will always be circumstances when you want to use that bandwith and space on something else, and circumstances where you are 'roughing it' by using other connections like a PDA. Those are nice things to be able to do. Since you posted a "you and your ilk" line of bullshit, let me return with this: You and your ilk are the main reason portable computing isn't that useful, and you call this innovation.
You claim taking my code does not deprive me of property.
NO - listen to what people are saying. They're saying that "copying" and "taking" are two different things. "taking" implies a transfer of a single object - wrong for TWO reaons - one being that a person got the fruits of your labor without your permission, and another, totally unrelated reason, being that you had you've been deprived of your property unfairly. So "taking" implies the dual problem of freeloading AND deprivation of your property. What happens when someone copies is just one half of that picture.
If deprivation does not occur, then "taking" also does not occur. The words were invented long before the technology to make quick instant perfect copies of things was available. So the distinction didn't matter before. Now it does, and the cartels are using the old connotations of the terms to their advantage - trying to make people associate file copying with that feeling of having been deprived of property that is associated with theft.
Does this condone the behavior of the copyright violators swapping files - no, actually. I agree that that's wrong. I just disagree that it should be prosecuted as theft. It's not. It's a brand new kind of crime, one that is mild but has large consequences when done in bulk. And if the law and the cartels insist upon prosecuting it as a larger crime than it is, then nobody will ever respect them, take the problem seriously, and stop doing it. They mock the law because they know it's wrong. And they're right.
Copyright violation is not theft, any more so than jaywalking is murder. Don't punish a minor crime with a major crime's sentencing.
If it works like the conversation has gone numerous times in the past, joe average will end up thinking there is a flaw in linux whenever there is an incompatability between it and microsoft, even if that incompatability is microsoft's fault. You can't win that argument because people don't listen to rational arguments. If it gets called "trusted computing", joe average will end up believing it. I don't know why this is. If a car dealership calls itself "honest Joe's" everyone gets suspicious of whether that's true or not. If a business advertises itself as having the "lowest rates around" people don't generally believe it without checking up on it, but when Microsoft PR says something, people go ga-ga and believe it automatically and assume anyone who does not is part of the tinfoil hat crowd. It's damn frustrating.
The libertarian ideal is that it is impossible for a company to survive if it does things detrimental to its customers, and therefore government regulation is unnecessary and wrong. The proof that this is false is Microsoft. The problem is the two-party system. I vote libertarian only because they are the biggest third party with the best chance to upset the two-party status quo, NOT because I think they understand the nature of the problem. They don't.
The reason sarcasm is hard to detect is that real morons do in fact exist.
For sarcasm to work requires that you respect the speaker enough to know they aren't that dumb. For some randomly chosen internet person, that's not an assumption you can make.
For example, I've tried to satarize fundamentalists, but it just doesn't work. No made up caricature can succeed at being more silly than the real thing.
It's not opt-in once it becomes ubiquitous enough that all major content on the net is delivered needing it. The goal is to get to the point where to opt-out of TRM, you have to opt-out of participating in society.
Games violate this abstraction by taking over the entire computing interface.
Yes. And people don't seem to mind it for some reason. The notion that every program needs the exact same interface or users will running around like utterly helpless confused little children is obviously not true.
The level of similarity of game interfaces to each other (yes, including things like solitaire and minesweeeper) is no more so than the level of similarity between, say, a randomly chosen Windows app, Mac app, and Linux app. You click on stuff. you drag stuff. A hotkey kills the window. The similarity between them ends there. (For example, a rightclick in minesweeper lays a flag - definately not the expected bring-up-a-context-menu that other programs train you to expect - and yet people don't seem to mind this in the slightest.)
And the reason is that if a program is doing a different type of thing, it makes a lot of sense to use a different type of interface if need be.
I didn't say most "made". You added that condition.
And even if games were only, say, 30 or 40% of what a user users on the computer, it would still be true that this proves that the "every app must have the same interface" people are wrong. Not only do people tolerate vastly different interfaces in games, they actually seem to enjoy them.
I keep hearing about this alleged problem firefox allegedly has allegedly rendering slashdot, but I've been using firefox for a couple months now and I don't see it rendering any differently than it did in other browsers (other than the default font choices and the button styles of course).
What exactly is this alleged problem and how do I see it?
Instead of taking a random sample of 100 developers, take a random sample of 100 Windows users, and ask what software they installed over the last 2 years. The "vast majority of software" means that 100 installs of one program counts just as much as 1 install each of 100 different programs.
I do concede that the majority of unique software packages are not games, if you don't weigh it by number of installs.
In terms of what the user experiences, and even more importantly, in terms of what drives people to choose one OS over another, games availability is a huge factor. And they clearly have voted with their wallets to say that they don't really give a crap about user interface uniformity.
With Xorg you wait less time before getting support for new graphics cards than with Xree86. Whatever they did to their internal development model, it made it so that it is updatable at a faster rate.
And don't use MS as an example of non-forking. 95.98,NT,2000,Me,XP - are a big convoluted forking tree.
the vast majority of Windows apps DO look the same
No. The vast majority of Windows apps are games. And they have very unique interfaces. (That always shoots a hole in the whole "We have to have the same interface or users will hate using the software" argument - entertaining games each have a custom interface and people still seem to like them anyway.) Now, the "you waste less memory if everyone shares the same widget library" argument is still true, though - but of lesser importance.
If I believe what I'm saying, then I'm not lying. And I believe what I'm saying, that the judges only have the power the PATRIOT act claims they do on paper and not in the real world.
you have already proven you have a problem with truth, so I should not be surprised.
No, I've proven I don't agree with you about what the truth is in this case. You have every right to disagree. You have no right to lie about my honesty while doing so, you slanderous asshole.
If you say "two plus two" and I say "He said four", I'm not lying, I'm summarizing truthfully. It's the logical outcome of putting together what you said - just like the inability of judges to stop warrants is the logical outcome of the patriot act when taken in toto, and not just the one little piece of it is looked at myopically.
Continiue to live in your imaginary world where this isn't a flaw in the patriot act. I'm sure you're much happier there.
I'm not lying - I'm pointing out the uncomfortable truth thaat you can't pass judgement on the validity of a warrant when you have no information of why it's being issued. Therefore the authority that the law claims on paper that the judges have, in practice they do not.
Under Jim Crow Laws, blacks were allowed to vote - but that existed on paper only, not in practice. This is much the same. Taken in a vacuum without looking at the rest of the act, it looks like the judges have the authority to deny the warrants - only if you put blinders on and ignore the rest of the act.
The difference between "illegal but undiscoverable" versus "legal" is practically nil. For example, lots of places that show tolerance to gays still have anti-sodomy laws on the books - why? because since violations of the laws are not discoverable anyway (unless you are also guilty of indecent public exposure), then there's no practical difference between having the law there and not having it there, so the law goes unused and gets forgotten about.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just "can't play clips without a media player". It's "can't play clips WITH a media player unless that media player is the one from Microsoft".
All users want seamless use.
False.
Seamless use is the reason for most of the security holes.
Windows is a johnny-come-lately. The term "shell" already had a meaning before they tried hijacking it.
Yes, libc is a neccessary component of a unix system (except maybe in some oddball embedded setup where the kernel just launches one small program on a PDA or vending machine or something like that.) The point is that, in exactly the same way, IE is also - becuase too many other apps make calls into it's DLL's to remove those DLLS. Remember what the article is about - the MS person claiming that because IE is on top of the OS that it isn't part of the OS. Well, if libc is a neccessary part of unix, then IE is a neccessary part of Windows in precisely the same way.
For sarcasm to work, the reader has to respect the writer enough to know the writer wouldn't say something dumb and actually mean it. For some random person you don't know on the internet, you can't make that assumption. Sarcasm fails on the internet because genuine morons exist on the internet, who's genuine opinions are indistinguishable from jokes.
Explorer.exe, KDE, and Gnome are not shells. The windows shell is called CMD.EXE and it's crap.
Adding more visual and multimedia content is a good thing, although it can be mis used just as plain text can be misused.
Yes, and that misuse is exactly what everyone here is complianing about - misuse like requiring you to wait for a flash anaimation even when you've seen the damn thing already - or requireing graphics for what is a non-graphical task.
The attitude that space and bandwith are infinite wastable resources is always, always wrong. There will always be circumstances when you want to use that bandwith and space on something else, and circumstances where you are 'roughing it' by using other connections like a PDA. Those are nice things to be able to do. Since you posted a "you and your ilk" line of bullshit, let me return with this: You and your ilk are the main reason portable computing isn't that useful, and you call this innovation.
You claim taking my code does not deprive me of property.
NO - listen to what people are saying. They're saying that "copying" and "taking" are two different things. "taking" implies a transfer of a single object - wrong for TWO reaons - one being that a person got the fruits of your labor without your permission, and another, totally unrelated reason, being that you had you've been deprived of your property unfairly. So "taking" implies the dual problem of freeloading AND deprivation of your property. What happens when someone copies is just one half of that picture.
If deprivation does not occur, then "taking" also does not occur. The words were invented long before the technology to make quick instant perfect copies of things was available. So the distinction didn't matter before. Now it does, and the cartels are using the old connotations of the terms to their advantage - trying to make people associate file copying with that feeling of having been deprived of property that is associated with theft.
Does this condone the behavior of the copyright violators swapping files - no, actually. I agree that that's wrong. I just disagree that it should be prosecuted as theft. It's not. It's a brand new kind of crime, one that is mild but has large consequences when done in bulk. And if the law and the cartels insist upon prosecuting it as a larger crime than it is, then nobody will ever respect them, take the problem seriously, and stop doing it. They mock the law because they know it's wrong. And they're right.
Copyright violation is not theft, any more so than jaywalking is murder. Don't punish a minor crime with a major crime's sentencing.
If it works like the conversation has gone numerous times in the past, joe average will end up thinking there is a flaw in linux whenever there is an incompatability between it and microsoft, even if that incompatability is microsoft's fault. You can't win that argument because people don't listen to rational arguments. If it gets called "trusted computing", joe average will end up believing it. I don't know why this is. If a car dealership calls itself "honest Joe's" everyone gets suspicious of whether that's true or not. If a business advertises itself as having the "lowest rates around" people don't generally believe it without checking up on it, but when Microsoft PR says something, people go ga-ga and believe it automatically and assume anyone who does not is part of the tinfoil hat crowd. It's damn frustrating.
The libertarian ideal is that it is impossible for a company to survive if it does things detrimental to its customers, and therefore government regulation is unnecessary and wrong. The proof that this is false is Microsoft. The problem is the two-party system. I vote libertarian only because they are the biggest third party with the best chance to upset the two-party status quo, NOT because I think they understand the nature of the problem. They don't.
The reason sarcasm is hard to detect is that real morons do in fact exist.
For sarcasm to work requires that you respect the speaker enough to know they aren't that dumb. For some randomly chosen internet person, that's not an assumption you can make.
For example, I've tried to satarize fundamentalists, but it just doesn't work. No made up caricature can succeed at being more silly than the real thing.
It's not opt-in once it becomes ubiquitous enough that all major content on the net is delivered needing it. The goal is to get to the point where to opt-out of TRM, you have to opt-out of participating in society.
Games violate this abstraction by taking over the entire computing interface.
Yes. And people don't seem to mind it for some reason. The notion that every program needs the exact same interface or users will running around like utterly helpless confused little children is obviously not true.
The level of similarity of game interfaces to each other (yes, including things like solitaire and minesweeeper) is no more so than the level of similarity between, say, a randomly chosen Windows app, Mac app, and Linux app. You click on stuff. you drag stuff. A hotkey kills the window. The similarity between them ends there. (For example, a rightclick in minesweeper lays a flag - definately not the expected bring-up-a-context-menu that other programs train you to expect - and yet people don't seem to mind this in the slightest.)
And the reason is that if a program is doing a different type of thing, it makes a lot of sense to use a different type of interface if need be.
I didn't say most "made". You added that condition.
And even if games were only, say, 30 or 40% of what a user users on the computer, it would still be true that this proves that the "every app must have the same interface" people are wrong. Not only do people tolerate vastly different interfaces in games, they actually seem to enjoy them.
I keep hearing about this alleged problem firefox allegedly has allegedly rendering slashdot, but I've been using firefox for a couple months now and I don't see it rendering any differently than it did in other browsers (other than the default font choices and the button styles of course).
What exactly is this alleged problem and how do I see it?
Instead of taking a random sample of 100 developers, take a random sample of 100 Windows users, and ask what software they installed over the last 2 years. The "vast majority of software" means that 100 installs of one program counts just as much as 1 install each of 100 different programs.
I do concede that the majority of unique software packages are not games, if you don't weigh it by number of installs.
In terms of what the user experiences, and even more importantly, in terms of what drives people to choose one OS over another, games availability is a huge factor. And they clearly have voted with their wallets to say that they don't really give a crap about user interface uniformity.
With Xorg you wait less time before getting support for new graphics cards than with Xree86. Whatever they did to their internal development model, it made it so that it is updatable at a faster rate.
And don't use MS as an example of non-forking. 95.98,NT,2000,Me,XP - are a big convoluted forking tree.
the vast majority of Windows apps DO look the same
No. The vast majority of Windows apps are games. And they have very unique interfaces. (That always shoots a hole in the whole "We have to have the same interface or users will hate using the software" argument - entertaining games each have a custom interface and people still seem to like them anyway.) Now, the "you waste less memory if everyone shares the same widget library" argument is still true, though - but of lesser importance.
A consortium of companies competing with Linux said don't use Linux. There's a surprise.
And of course there's no way in the world that you could possibly be wrong.
Idiot.
Believe what you will. You don't matter.
If I believe what I'm saying, then I'm not lying. And I believe what I'm saying, that the judges only have the power the PATRIOT act claims they do on paper and not in the real world.
you have already proven you have a problem with truth, so I should not be surprised.
No, I've proven I don't agree with you about what the truth is in this case. You have every right to disagree. You have no right to lie about my honesty while doing so, you slanderous asshole.
If you say "two plus two" and I say "He said four", I'm not lying, I'm summarizing truthfully. It's the logical outcome of putting together what you said - just like the inability of judges to stop warrants is the logical outcome of the patriot act when taken in toto, and not just the one little piece of it is looked at myopically.
Continiue to live in your imaginary world where this isn't a flaw in the patriot act. I'm sure you're much happier there.
I'm not lying - I'm pointing out the uncomfortable truth thaat you can't pass judgement on the validity of a warrant when you have no information of why it's being issued. Therefore the authority that the law claims on paper that the judges have, in practice they do not.
Under Jim Crow Laws, blacks were allowed to vote - but that existed on paper only, not in practice. This is much the same. Taken in a vacuum without looking at the rest of the act, it looks like the judges have the authority to deny the warrants - only if you put blinders on and ignore the rest of the act.
The difference between "illegal but undiscoverable" versus "legal" is practically nil. For example, lots of places that show tolerance to gays still have anti-sodomy laws on the books - why? because since violations of the laws are not discoverable anyway (unless you are also guilty of indecent public exposure), then there's no practical difference between having the law there and not having it there, so the law goes unused and gets forgotten about.