offer them an alternative, that is worth the money
I really doubt that they'll be able to find an alternative that millions of kids will find as good a deal (worth more than) "free" - which is what those kids perceive the pirated stuff to be.
So, you can't imagine any circumstance (say, on your private property) where an animal or group of animals you care about was being threatened? Whether by man or beast? So, do you care so much about animals that if your own favorite animal was being cornered by a rabid badger, you'd love the rabid badger too much to hurt it? How about your collection of milk-providing goats, being regularly slaughtered by coyotes? How about a suburbanized bobcat killing the chickens from wich you get your eggs?
Do you love deer so much that you want them to live in hugely over populated numbers to the point where they destroy all of the sustainable grazing plants that could support them, thus leading to massive, miserable die-offs in the winter, and even more incursion of into roads and back yards?
But more importantly, do you love family and friends so little that you can't imagine ever wanting to prevent them from being harmed?
True. In Grokster's case, of course, there was ample proof of their deliberate intention to support infringment (and infringers). I would imagine that anyone putting together a new P2P client/system would go to a lot of trouble to document (a la in their charter, etc), and on every scrap of information that they produce, and on every screen that they render, that they strictly forbid use of the platform/tools for infringing purposes. That would make any suit re: inducement much more likely to be thrown right out.
That makes very little sense. The only purpose of a gun is to kill someone
You need to get out more.
I have used guns for:
1) Working within my state's highly managed process for thinning out the grotesquely out-of-balance whitetail deer population (currently numbering, along the eastern seaboard, in the millions than before the colonists appeared 300+ years ago). I love eating lean (pretty much fat-free), un-medicated, delicious venison, and put as much as possible in the freezer every year. The local population is still out of control, so much of the counter-balance continues to be in the form of smashing in the fronts of cars - unpleasant for everyone, alas, and not legal to eat, which is a real waste.
2) Hunting pheasants, quail, partridge, dove, turkey, ducks, geese - all manner of meat-on-the-wing that's much better tasting and better for you than anything you'd get from the grocery store (no matter now "organic" and "free range" they say a chicken is, it can't compare to a wild bird).
3) On a farm, ridding pasture and crop land of invading populations of praire dogs, groundhogs, and similar pests. Given the unfortunate decline of natural predators, these kinds of animals again are out of balance. Their digs can break cattle's legs, promote horrible erosion problems, and greatly reduce the efficiency with which a farmer can make the use of a given acre of land and the water used to irrigate it. Traps and poison are bad ideas around crops and livestock, so it's precision shooting that works best, and it's an instant end for the animal. On a similar note, growing packs of coyotes are a real threat to livestock births, and farmers absolutely need to be able to control that population.
4) Sporting use. Some people like to smack little white balls with clubs, some people like to throw pointy darts in bars, some people like to knock down wooden pins with big balls, and some people would rather watch large sweaty people wrestle over a football. Some people like archery. Personally, I like the applied physics, chemistry, history, and skill required to shoot targets. Trap and skeet are extremely challenging (see the Olympic team for a wild display of talent), and help hone skills used in the field. And if you haven't spent an hour with a.22 plinking rifle and $5.99 worth of ammo chasing a few cans around a dirt mound in a quarry someplace, you've missed out some fun.
5) Self defense. I was very, very glad to have a gun at hand when a (as it turns out) drugged up crazy was trying to beat down our back door with a pipe in the middle of the night. The only thing that kept him out of the house (with his large steel pipe) during the seemingly eternal 10-15 minutes while we waited for the police was his visual recognition of the gun I was handling. I'm a large guy (6'-2", 250 pounds) and I watched three cops struggle with this guy. My 5'-2" wife was not amused. She is, though, an excellent shot, and likes to practice so that she wouldn't be unsure of how to handle a weapon under such circumstances. Firearms are used over 2 million times by civilians in the U.S. every year to deter or end violent or potentially violent episodes. Roughly half of the 10,000 people murdered each year in the country (many, many fewer than are killed by, say, negligent drivers) are killed by guns - up against nearly 100,000,000 guns owned. That's less than one hundredth of one percent of those guns - and the vast majority are those that are involved in crime are possessed and/or carried illegally anyway. The other tens of millions of legally owned, and regularly used guns are scarcely purchased to go out and kill people. Get a sense of porportion here. If you're really worried about destructive things that people buy, with which they then kill people, worry about knives. Two deaths here in my county in just the last couple of weeks - idiots (students!) killing people with knives over things like who spat at who. Incredible - and certainly no po
When your money is "working for you", it really means someone else is.
You're right, but not in the way you think you are.
When you have wealth, that gets you nothing unless you put it to work. The way that's done is through investment. That capital goes towards the formation and growth of businesses, and that's where jobs come from. Yes, someone else is working, but in most cases, they're working at jobs that wouldn't exist without that investment.
Why sholud I try to come up with something when I know it will wind up bringing me to court from some other company? US Capitalism is slowly turning into communism.:(
I don't think "communism" means what you think it means.
Regardless, there are thousands of small companies started every year. Most fail, usually because of poor management, overly optimisitic forecasts, and undercapitalization. But all sorts of small companies start, grow, and thrive in this country. Some end up buying out older companies, or merging with them, or just putting the older ones out of business. It depends on whether people with money to invest are impressed enough with the business plan. Simple as that.
It's worth mentioning that small businesses sue both large, and other small businesses too - sometimes such suits are their business. But communism? Hardly. I don't see any taken-over-by-the-state, or productive people give up all of their output to non-productive people issues (um, other than taxes) at work in this particular topic.
Most any tool, be it software or hardware, is capable of being used illegally
True, but creating a piece of software and a network tool that, without question, is designed to find its primary audience among people that are seeking to pirate material... and to know that it wouldn't even be worth the bother to produce it otherwise... that's a lot different than making office copying machines, which have immediate, obvious, and overwhelmingly non-infringing uses.
Mind you, I get involved in this sort of thread all the time, with respect to gun use. Guns are designed to hurl a piece of metal through the air at high speeds. But there is a huge market for that without needing, say, murderers to be the primary buyers. eDonkey, on the other hand, knew exactly who their primary audience was. Different situation.
--The FUD's an anachronism.
it's spelled 'acronym'
No, "anachronism" is spelled "anachronism" and "acronym" is spelled "acronym." Gee, it's almost like they are two different words, and I picked the one I used on purpose or something.
Pronunciation: &-'na-kr&-"ni-z&m
Function: noun
Etymology: probably from Middle Greek anachronismos, from anachronizesthai to be an anachronism, from Late Greek anachronizein to be late, from Greek ana- + chronos time
1 : an error in chronology; especially : a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other
2 : a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place; especially : one from a former age that is incongruous in the present
Hence my point. People talk about years-old Windows server behavior as if it's happening regularly right now, and then use that time-twisted comparison up against this week's flavor of some highly tuned Linux distro running on just the right hardware. Throwing what used to happen on NT boxes running on clunky hardware into the discussion is using anachronistic anecdotes. As for using a commonly used acronym in a comment... well, I don't find it necessary to explain that. *sigh*
So you have uptimes of less than a month every month because you religiously and with great superstition observe Black Tuesday and Windoze update.
No, just like Linux users, I review the updates and apply only those that seem to be needed based on what the machine is doing. Many Windows patches are related only to desktop-ish type stuff, mail clients, browsers, etc. Servers are rarely impacted by those things, but when they are, I apply patches and move on. Not all MS patches are to the OS, but are for apps/services that may or may not have any bearing on the OS, and being thoughtful about which are which means that a production server can indeed go many months between any need for an administrative boot. I'm more likely to be replacing a drive array element, or sticking in a fancier NIC, or some other task that might require a shutdown. I don't think "superstitious" means what you think it means.
The only FUD here is "unreliable Linux".
About which I said nothing. My point is that there are plenty of people doing mission critical things with MS-run servers that don't break, and sure as hell don't crash "periodically and predictably" as the commenter said. If that's his standard, and I haven't seen a BSOD (other than something like a motherboard or controller failure - which would stop Solaris, etc., in its tracks, too) in years now, then you could just as easily say that Linux is unreliable, because the standard being used makes no sense.
Of note, I wasn't calling your personal experience FUD, I was referring to the often-uttered sentiment (mostly from Linux folks with an axe to grind) that Windows, left to its own, will just crash, periodically and predictably. I can see that on certain machines, with certain hardware using flaky drivers, etc... but where the recipe is correctly set up (just like you'd have to have on RH or Gentoo or anything else), it's very stable and has been since the first SP or two on Win 2K.
Just my observation on the larger groupthink in general, not on your specific circumstances. I know what it's like to run a lemon, and if it happens to be running Windows, then that's an official PITA, no question. Mind you, it might be annoying trying to run your favorite Linux distro, too... and that was really my point.
SAP is one of the biggest software companies in the world. Very, very heavy duty business apps for large companies. Factories. Big retailers, etc. All sorts of "vertical" apps in everything from apparel to insurance.
One doesn't usually run anything from SAP without a small army from SAP (or one of their annointed consulting firms) completely stroking the install. They don't usually tolerate failed installs. And there's usually a LOT of money involved in these installations, and a lot at stake. SAP products are rarely used with modifications and customization to both the infrastructure and the apps themselves.
whereas you can expect windows to core dump periodically and predictably
You know, I've had that happen enough to care about - years ago, with older copies of NT, running on flaky/overheated/bad-sectored hardware. But I run things like SQL, or file services, or IIS under 2000/2003... and have machines that cook along without me doing anything month after month after month. No BSDs, etc. Yes, patch = boot, and that's a few moments of taking a machine out of a cluster for a minute... but not because the machine hangs while doing anything routine. For that matter, not even when I'm doing something non-routine.
This whole "Windows just crashes all the time" stuff, especially on the server side, is pretty much FUD. Bad RAM and drives can piss off Linux, too. Flaky commercial third-party apps can gum up any OS. But I sure don't have anything like the problems that so many people love to rant about - and even though I only have a running sample of a few dozen specific machines that I actually consistently lay hands on every week, you'd think that the mythical "predictably, always crashing" Windows server would rear its ugly head at some point. But it doesn't. The FUD's an anachronism.
And now this..... individual is going to sue people because the movie didn't make as much *money*?
Wow, you're pretty worked up for someone that didn't even RTFA. Where did you get the idea that Lucas was suing over the money the film did or didn't make? From the slashdot summary? Sucker! You've fallen for the editorial spin, and then added your own.
How about this as a reason to sue: when someone is making and marketing a large, expensive movie, he actually has some plans about how he wants that to hit the market. Part of that process is the very controlled, signed-for, private distribution of screeners for review by the press. He trusts people in that loop, and they agree that there are consequences for violating that trust (and the copyright).
If an artist or a film company conveys private material under a non-disclosure agreement prior to public access to that content, and some ass breeches that agreement without any consequence... what's the result? More of the same. Lucas isn't in the mood for it, and neither should be any other author, filmaker, musician, game studio, etc. Get a grip.
Illegal and other buzzwords are used to grab the attention of the sheeples that consume most news here in the US.
Riiiiight. I presume, though, that you mean the sheep that assume that since all of their friends are BTing copyrighted material and not paying for it, that "file sharing" is, baa-baa-baa, just what all the rest of the sheep are doing. So, maybe it's worth mentioning, in a supposedly authoritative piece of journalism on the subject, that walking off with a stolen ROTS screener and pumping it out onto the internet is... Not OK?
Right... as in (from TFA), "unrelated case." Charge stacking?
Kind of like the other unrelated case mentioned in the article, where another guy was printing up phony DVD labels and selling counterfeit copies.
Unwarranted search and seizure
So, none of this had anything to do with actual infringing distribution of the private material?
How about allowing for the fact that a reporter might use the term "illegal file sharing" so that it's not confused with "legal file sharing," which does exist. You know - using adjectives to actually clarify the use of another word or phrase.
Further proving my point! A note pointing out that a flamebait mod was merely a kill-the-messenger bit of childishness is greeted by... a flamebait mod! Of course! Now why would anyone in the business world ever come to the conclusion that some people preaching Linux are in any way... shall we say, not ready for prime time? Ok, mod this as flamebait! You know you're obliged to.
Modded flamebait. Are the Linux fans in the audience so insecure about the fact that their favorite son is not completely un-assailable that they're willing to kill the messenger? I guess so.
Yes, war does drive a lot of research and development. But not the sort of war that's going on in Iraq, mind you
Do you have any idea the sort of field-testing that remote imaging, remote control, combo intertial/gps/multi-sensor guidance, distributed networking/comms technology is getting in a place like that? How about the huge portion of the Pentagon's budget that's going into building Iraq a this-century telecommunications system, real water treatment, decentralized power distribution/management, and so on?
The only people "mindlessly killing" anyone over there are the hardcore Islamo-fascists that want to reinstate a Sunni-esque pan-Arab caliphate, just like the good old days several hundred years ago. If simply bombing a place like Fallujah was at all helpful, there would be no Fallujah standing (never mind that we're busy there building infrastructure now that the large strongholds of insurgents have been removed from that town).
Of course, the US, Britain, etc., are still getting their asses kicked daily by the citizenry of Iraq
Actually, no. Citizens of Iraq are being murdered by insurgents, mostly made up of, and certainly funded/armed/trained by non-Iraqis (Syrians, Jordanians, Saudis, Iranians) that don't want to see a forward-looking democracy take hold there. The Iraqi police and military are not able, yet, to deal with the fact that their own people are being killed by car bombers and the like, or that Al Queda is killing people who do things like work on the country's new constitution. It's very similar to the years that Britain spent unable to completely stop the IRA from killing people there (though the IRA was at least somewhat less likely to deliberately kill school children, and rarely used suicide bombers - at least, not on purpose).
Some US and British troops get killed while supporting and training the local forces, and while handling that which the local forces are not yet anywhere near taking care of on their own. This is hardly "the Iraqi citizenry" rising up against the troops. Ask those very same citizens if they think more, or less of them would die at the hands of crazies like Bin Laden's head boy in Bagdhad, Zarqawi, with fewer US/British/other troops helping out. There's a reason that the majority of the people in that country realistically understand that they very things they've most recently done (like elect their own representatives - something that Zarqawi is preaching as "un-Islamic" and evil) simply would not be able to happen without the stability provided by armed forces. To the extent that those forces cannot be entirely Iraqi, they have to be from someplace else. To the extent that the US, Britain, and the rest of the civilized world benefit from the spread of democracy in that vital, fragile part of the world - we absolutely should be stepping in and staying in until guys like Saddam, and the murderous mysoginistic punks who would like to fill his shoes, are just a bad memory.
How do we do these things as carefully/surgically as is militarily possible? High tech tools. They're being tested and improved every day, and things that weren't even on the drawing board a few years ago are being prototyped and tested in the field where they can do the most immediate good. That R&D absolutely spills over into other areas - even into relief efforts (as supported by new imaging platforms and mapping integration techniques) in the hurricane-struck Gulf Coast area.
What is this actually going to pay for? Their expenses and plane tickets to meet with execs while they try to push BT? Or is there some actual technical innovation that this is going to pay for?
I hear this sort of thing a lot, and it always makes me remember why not very many high-tech nerd-types end up running successful businesses. You can have the greatest technical innovations in the world, but if you don't win over the big customers and make friends in the industry you're trying to woo, you've got nothing. Sometimes it's a good thing to have a pocket full of cash designated exactly for that purpose, and even some professional schmoozers who know how to get it done. That always pisses off the techies, but a lot of the dot-com bust was the failure of techie-led companies squandering other people's money on poor business (not always poor technical) concepts.
So really, anything particularly special that Bittorrent manages to do, can't anyone else just copy it?
Not so much. Because it sounds like the investment is less to develope the technology than it is to credibly beef up a corporate structure and credibility that will get Real Businesses trusting them with their releases. If BT and their investors are the first people to do a nice job of packaging up that in nice box for the legal content market, then they'll have some contracts that other immitators won't be able to get. There are only so many big-league sources of entertainment content that would benefit from having a third party help them out with this. First come first profit.
Well, first come with a workable, cleverly-priced service, anyway. You know... The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
but I sleep soundly at night with a serene conscience
While you're sleeping, repeat this softly to yourself:
"it's" means "it is"... as in, "It's a nice day outside."
"its" is possesive, as in, "The car is losing air in one of its tires."
My point is that when you're making a long, elaborate, articulate point about MS and the rest of the industry, a lot of people that care about syntax will be completely distracted (or be annoyed) to the point of missing your point when they read phases like:
Imagine waking up tomorrow to see MS touting it's new open documant formats
And, because of the established use of the that word, are hearing
Imagine waking up tomorrow to see MS touting it is new open documant formats
In a case like that it's pretty easy to understand the meaning of the sentence even with the error, but sometimes that misuse can completely distort the essence of the comment you're making. Go ahead and be annoyed with me, but I'm just trying to do you a favor and tell you that people sometimes discredit what they read when they see a simple syntactical system used completely backwards, several times in the same comment. It just seems like a bad fit with the otherwise thoughtful (though I disagree with you) things you're saying.
Slashdot Mirror
offer them an alternative, that is worth the money
I really doubt that they'll be able to find an alternative that millions of kids will find as good a deal (worth more than) "free" - which is what those kids perceive the pirated stuff to be.
Which explains the conclusions you're drawing about how others can or should use what tools for what tasks.
So, you can't imagine any circumstance (say, on your private property) where an animal or group of animals you care about was being threatened? Whether by man or beast? So, do you care so much about animals that if your own favorite animal was being cornered by a rabid badger, you'd love the rabid badger too much to hurt it? How about your collection of milk-providing goats, being regularly slaughtered by coyotes? How about a suburbanized bobcat killing the chickens from wich you get your eggs?
Do you love deer so much that you want them to live in hugely over populated numbers to the point where they destroy all of the sustainable grazing plants that could support them, thus leading to massive, miserable die-offs in the winter, and even more incursion of into roads and back yards?
But more importantly, do you love family and friends so little that you can't imagine ever wanting to prevent them from being harmed?
True. In Grokster's case, of course, there was ample proof of their deliberate intention to support infringment (and infringers). I would imagine that anyone putting together a new P2P client/system would go to a lot of trouble to document (a la in their charter, etc), and on every scrap of information that they produce, and on every screen that they render, that they strictly forbid use of the platform/tools for infringing purposes. That would make any suit re: inducement much more likely to be thrown right out.
That makes very little sense. The only purpose of a gun is to kill someone
.22 plinking rifle and $5.99 worth of ammo chasing a few cans around a dirt mound in a quarry someplace, you've missed out some fun.
You need to get out more.
I have used guns for:
1) Working within my state's highly managed process for thinning out the grotesquely out-of-balance whitetail deer population (currently numbering, along the eastern seaboard, in the millions than before the colonists appeared 300+ years ago). I love eating lean (pretty much fat-free), un-medicated, delicious venison, and put as much as possible in the freezer every year. The local population is still out of control, so much of the counter-balance continues to be in the form of smashing in the fronts of cars - unpleasant for everyone, alas, and not legal to eat, which is a real waste.
2) Hunting pheasants, quail, partridge, dove, turkey, ducks, geese - all manner of meat-on-the-wing that's much better tasting and better for you than anything you'd get from the grocery store (no matter now "organic" and "free range" they say a chicken is, it can't compare to a wild bird).
3) On a farm, ridding pasture and crop land of invading populations of praire dogs, groundhogs, and similar pests. Given the unfortunate decline of natural predators, these kinds of animals again are out of balance. Their digs can break cattle's legs, promote horrible erosion problems, and greatly reduce the efficiency with which a farmer can make the use of a given acre of land and the water used to irrigate it. Traps and poison are bad ideas around crops and livestock, so it's precision shooting that works best, and it's an instant end for the animal. On a similar note, growing packs of coyotes are a real threat to livestock births, and farmers absolutely need to be able to control that population.
4) Sporting use. Some people like to smack little white balls with clubs, some people like to throw pointy darts in bars, some people like to knock down wooden pins with big balls, and some people would rather watch large sweaty people wrestle over a football. Some people like archery. Personally, I like the applied physics, chemistry, history, and skill required to shoot targets. Trap and skeet are extremely challenging (see the Olympic team for a wild display of talent), and help hone skills used in the field. And if you haven't spent an hour with a
5) Self defense. I was very, very glad to have a gun at hand when a (as it turns out) drugged up crazy was trying to beat down our back door with a pipe in the middle of the night. The only thing that kept him out of the house (with his large steel pipe) during the seemingly eternal 10-15 minutes while we waited for the police was his visual recognition of the gun I was handling. I'm a large guy (6'-2", 250 pounds) and I watched three cops struggle with this guy. My 5'-2" wife was not amused. She is, though, an excellent shot, and likes to practice so that she wouldn't be unsure of how to handle a weapon under such circumstances. Firearms are used over 2 million times by civilians in the U.S. every year to deter or end violent or potentially violent episodes. Roughly half of the 10,000 people murdered each year in the country (many, many fewer than are killed by, say, negligent drivers) are killed by guns - up against nearly 100,000,000 guns owned. That's less than one hundredth of one percent of those guns - and the vast majority are those that are involved in crime are possessed and/or carried illegally anyway. The other tens of millions of legally owned, and regularly used guns are scarcely purchased to go out and kill people. Get a sense of porportion here. If you're really worried about destructive things that people buy, with which they then kill people, worry about knives. Two deaths here in my county in just the last couple of weeks - idiots (students!) killing people with knives over things like who spat at who. Incredible - and certainly no po
When your money is "working for you", it really means someone else is.
You're right, but not in the way you think you are.
When you have wealth, that gets you nothing unless you put it to work. The way that's done is through investment. That capital goes towards the formation and growth of businesses, and that's where jobs come from. Yes, someone else is working, but in most cases, they're working at jobs that wouldn't exist without that investment.
Why sholud I try to come up with something when I know it will wind up bringing me to court from some other company? US Capitalism is slowly turning into communism. :(
I don't think "communism" means what you think it means.
Regardless, there are thousands of small companies started every year. Most fail, usually because of poor management, overly optimisitic forecasts, and undercapitalization. But all sorts of small companies start, grow, and thrive in this country. Some end up buying out older companies, or merging with them, or just putting the older ones out of business. It depends on whether people with money to invest are impressed enough with the business plan. Simple as that.
It's worth mentioning that small businesses sue both large, and other small businesses too - sometimes such suits are their business. But communism? Hardly. I don't see any taken-over-by-the-state, or productive people give up all of their output to non-productive people issues (um, other than taxes) at work in this particular topic.
Most any tool, be it software or hardware, is capable of being used illegally
True, but creating a piece of software and a network tool that, without question, is designed to find its primary audience among people that are seeking to pirate material... and to know that it wouldn't even be worth the bother to produce it otherwise... that's a lot different than making office copying machines, which have immediate, obvious, and overwhelmingly non-infringing uses.
Mind you, I get involved in this sort of thread all the time, with respect to gun use. Guns are designed to hurl a piece of metal through the air at high speeds. But there is a huge market for that without needing, say, murderers to be the primary buyers. eDonkey, on the other hand, knew exactly who their primary audience was. Different situation.
--The FUD's an anachronism.
it's spelled 'acronym'
No, "anachronism" is spelled "anachronism" and "acronym" is spelled "acronym." Gee, it's almost like they are two different words, and I picked the one I used on purpose or something.
Pronunciation: &-'na-kr&-"ni-z&m
Function: noun
Etymology: probably from Middle Greek anachronismos, from anachronizesthai to be an anachronism, from Late Greek anachronizein to be late, from Greek ana- + chronos time
1 : an error in chronology; especially : a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other
2 : a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place; especially : one from a former age that is incongruous in the present
Hence my point. People talk about years-old Windows server behavior as if it's happening regularly right now, and then use that time-twisted comparison up against this week's flavor of some highly tuned Linux distro running on just the right hardware. Throwing what used to happen on NT boxes running on clunky hardware into the discussion is using anachronistic anecdotes. As for using a commonly used acronym in a comment... well, I don't find it necessary to explain that. *sigh*
So you have uptimes of less than a month every month because you religiously and with great superstition observe Black Tuesday and Windoze update.
No, just like Linux users, I review the updates and apply only those that seem to be needed based on what the machine is doing. Many Windows patches are related only to desktop-ish type stuff, mail clients, browsers, etc. Servers are rarely impacted by those things, but when they are, I apply patches and move on. Not all MS patches are to the OS, but are for apps/services that may or may not have any bearing on the OS, and being thoughtful about which are which means that a production server can indeed go many months between any need for an administrative boot. I'm more likely to be replacing a drive array element, or sticking in a fancier NIC, or some other task that might require a shutdown. I don't think "superstitious" means what you think it means.
The only FUD here is "unreliable Linux".
About which I said nothing. My point is that there are plenty of people doing mission critical things with MS-run servers that don't break, and sure as hell don't crash "periodically and predictably" as the commenter said. If that's his standard, and I haven't seen a BSOD (other than something like a motherboard or controller failure - which would stop Solaris, etc., in its tracks, too) in years now, then you could just as easily say that Linux is unreliable, because the standard being used makes no sense.
Of note, I wasn't calling your personal experience FUD, I was referring to the often-uttered sentiment (mostly from Linux folks with an axe to grind) that Windows, left to its own, will just crash, periodically and predictably. I can see that on certain machines, with certain hardware using flaky drivers, etc... but where the recipe is correctly set up (just like you'd have to have on RH or Gentoo or anything else), it's very stable and has been since the first SP or two on Win 2K.
Just my observation on the larger groupthink in general, not on your specific circumstances. I know what it's like to run a lemon, and if it happens to be running Windows, then that's an official PITA, no question. Mind you, it might be annoying trying to run your favorite Linux distro, too... and that was really my point.
I think you meant "... are rarely used without modifications and customization ...".
Thank you. I did, and I'm sorry to anyone who was confused by my witless typo.
SAP is one of the biggest software companies in the world. Very, very heavy duty business apps for large companies. Factories. Big retailers, etc. All sorts of "vertical" apps in everything from apparel to insurance.
One doesn't usually run anything from SAP without a small army from SAP (or one of their annointed consulting firms) completely stroking the install. They don't usually tolerate failed installs. And there's usually a LOT of money involved in these installations, and a lot at stake. SAP products are rarely used with modifications and customization to both the infrastructure and the apps themselves.
whereas you can expect windows to core dump periodically and predictably
You know, I've had that happen enough to care about - years ago, with older copies of NT, running on flaky/overheated/bad-sectored hardware. But I run things like SQL, or file services, or IIS under 2000/2003... and have machines that cook along without me doing anything month after month after month. No BSDs, etc. Yes, patch = boot, and that's a few moments of taking a machine out of a cluster for a minute... but not because the machine hangs while doing anything routine. For that matter, not even when I'm doing something non-routine.
This whole "Windows just crashes all the time" stuff, especially on the server side, is pretty much FUD. Bad RAM and drives can piss off Linux, too. Flaky commercial third-party apps can gum up any OS. But I sure don't have anything like the problems that so many people love to rant about - and even though I only have a running sample of a few dozen specific machines that I actually consistently lay hands on every week, you'd think that the mythical "predictably, always crashing" Windows server would rear its ugly head at some point. But it doesn't. The FUD's an anachronism.
And now this ..... individual is going to sue people because the movie didn't make as much *money*?
Wow, you're pretty worked up for someone that didn't even RTFA. Where did you get the idea that Lucas was suing over the money the film did or didn't make? From the slashdot summary? Sucker! You've fallen for the editorial spin, and then added your own.
How about this as a reason to sue: when someone is making and marketing a large, expensive movie, he actually has some plans about how he wants that to hit the market. Part of that process is the very controlled, signed-for, private distribution of screeners for review by the press. He trusts people in that loop, and they agree that there are consequences for violating that trust (and the copyright).
If an artist or a film company conveys private material under a non-disclosure agreement prior to public access to that content, and some ass breeches that agreement without any consequence... what's the result? More of the same. Lucas isn't in the mood for it, and neither should be any other author, filmaker, musician, game studio, etc. Get a grip.
Illegal and other buzzwords are used to grab the attention of the sheeples that consume most news here in the US.
Riiiiight. I presume, though, that you mean the sheep that assume that since all of their friends are BTing copyrighted material and not paying for it, that "file sharing" is, baa-baa-baa, just what all the rest of the sheep are doing. So, maybe it's worth mentioning, in a supposedly authoritative piece of journalism on the subject, that walking off with a stolen ROTS screener and pumping it out onto the internet is... Not OK?
nailed him for something completely different
Right... as in (from TFA), "unrelated case." Charge stacking?
Kind of like the other unrelated case mentioned in the article, where another guy was printing up phony DVD labels and selling counterfeit copies. Unwarranted search and seizure
So, none of this had anything to do with actual infringing distribution of the private material?
How about allowing for the fact that a reporter might use the term "illegal file sharing" so that it's not confused with "legal file sharing," which does exist. You know - using adjectives to actually clarify the use of another word or phrase.
Further proving my point! A note pointing out that a flamebait mod was merely a kill-the-messenger bit of childishness is greeted by... a flamebait mod! Of course! Now why would anyone in the business world ever come to the conclusion that some people preaching Linux are in any way... shall we say, not ready for prime time? Ok, mod this as flamebait! You know you're obliged to.
Modded flamebait. Are the Linux fans in the audience so insecure about the fact that their favorite son is not completely un-assailable that they're willing to kill the messenger? I guess so.
Yes, war does drive a lot of research and development. But not the sort of war that's going on in Iraq, mind you
Do you have any idea the sort of field-testing that remote imaging, remote control, combo intertial/gps/multi-sensor guidance, distributed networking/comms technology is getting in a place like that? How about the huge portion of the Pentagon's budget that's going into building Iraq a this-century telecommunications system, real water treatment, decentralized power distribution/management, and so on?
The only people "mindlessly killing" anyone over there are the hardcore Islamo-fascists that want to reinstate a Sunni-esque pan-Arab caliphate, just like the good old days several hundred years ago. If simply bombing a place like Fallujah was at all helpful, there would be no Fallujah standing (never mind that we're busy there building infrastructure now that the large strongholds of insurgents have been removed from that town).
Of course, the US, Britain, etc., are still getting their asses kicked daily by the citizenry of Iraq
Actually, no. Citizens of Iraq are being murdered by insurgents, mostly made up of, and certainly funded/armed/trained by non-Iraqis (Syrians, Jordanians, Saudis, Iranians) that don't want to see a forward-looking democracy take hold there. The Iraqi police and military are not able, yet, to deal with the fact that their own people are being killed by car bombers and the like, or that Al Queda is killing people who do things like work on the country's new constitution. It's very similar to the years that Britain spent unable to completely stop the IRA from killing people there (though the IRA was at least somewhat less likely to deliberately kill school children, and rarely used suicide bombers - at least, not on purpose).
Some US and British troops get killed while supporting and training the local forces, and while handling that which the local forces are not yet anywhere near taking care of on their own. This is hardly "the Iraqi citizenry" rising up against the troops. Ask those very same citizens if they think more, or less of them would die at the hands of crazies like Bin Laden's head boy in Bagdhad, Zarqawi, with fewer US/British/other troops helping out. There's a reason that the majority of the people in that country realistically understand that they very things they've most recently done (like elect their own representatives - something that Zarqawi is preaching as "un-Islamic" and evil) simply would not be able to happen without the stability provided by armed forces. To the extent that those forces cannot be entirely Iraqi, they have to be from someplace else. To the extent that the US, Britain, and the rest of the civilized world benefit from the spread of democracy in that vital, fragile part of the world - we absolutely should be stepping in and staying in until guys like Saddam, and the murderous mysoginistic punks who would like to fill his shoes, are just a bad memory.
How do we do these things as carefully/surgically as is militarily possible? High tech tools. They're being tested and improved every day, and things that weren't even on the drawing board a few years ago are being prototyped and tested in the field where they can do the most immediate good. That R&D absolutely spills over into other areas - even into relief efforts (as supported by new imaging platforms and mapping integration techniques) in the hurricane-struck Gulf Coast area.
What is this actually going to pay for? Their expenses and plane tickets to meet with execs while they try to push BT? Or is there some actual technical innovation that this is going to pay for?
I hear this sort of thing a lot, and it always makes me remember why not very many high-tech nerd-types end up running successful businesses. You can have the greatest technical innovations in the world, but if you don't win over the big customers and make friends in the industry you're trying to woo, you've got nothing. Sometimes it's a good thing to have a pocket full of cash designated exactly for that purpose, and even some professional schmoozers who know how to get it done. That always pisses off the techies, but a lot of the dot-com bust was the failure of techie-led companies squandering other people's money on poor business (not always poor technical) concepts.
So really, anything particularly special that Bittorrent manages to do, can't anyone else just copy it?
Not so much. Because it sounds like the investment is less to develope the technology than it is to credibly beef up a corporate structure and credibility that will get Real Businesses trusting them with their releases. If BT and their investors are the first people to do a nice job of packaging up that in nice box for the legal content market, then they'll have some contracts that other immitators won't be able to get. There are only so many big-league sources of entertainment content that would benefit from having a third party help them out with this. First come first profit.
Well, first come with a workable, cleverly-priced service, anyway. You know... The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
but I sleep soundly at night with a serene conscience
While you're sleeping, repeat this softly to yourself:
"it's" means "it is"... as in, "It's a nice day outside."
"its" is possesive, as in, "The car is losing air in one of its tires."
My point is that when you're making a long, elaborate, articulate point about MS and the rest of the industry, a lot of people that care about syntax will be completely distracted (or be annoyed) to the point of missing your point when they read phases like:
Imagine waking up tomorrow to see MS touting it's new open documant formats
And, because of the established use of the that word, are hearing
Imagine waking up tomorrow to see MS touting it is new open documant formats
In a case like that it's pretty easy to understand the meaning of the sentence even with the error, but sometimes that misuse can completely distort the essence of the comment you're making. Go ahead and be annoyed with me, but I'm just trying to do you a favor and tell you that people sometimes discredit what they read when they see a simple syntactical system used completely backwards, several times in the same comment. It just seems like a bad fit with the otherwise thoughtful (though I disagree with you) things you're saying.
Yup, I shouldn't feed the trolls.