No, companies don't really care if they need to pay a few hundred to get the programmer Visual Studio and increase his productivity by 1500% instead of using the free Dev-C++.
Same thing as most companies working with graphics aren't shy to buy Photoshop instead of frustrating their workers with GIMP.
Especially if their worked had lots of practice with the product already. Training usually was with a pirated or free version of the product however, which is exactly Microsoft strategy. So both points are somewhat true. The commercial product is better funded, and is indeed frequently more productive. Its use free of cost however, pirated or free, is questionable. It does steal attention from alternatives which compete based on cost or other factors, such as being open source, rather than design. So piracy is anti-competitive, yes, frequently *in favor* of the copyright owner, in the case of a monopoly.
Something is wrong with the way we keep using the phrase "downloading copyrighted material" like it implies something illegal is going on.
It illustrates how industry lobby manages to mold what we say and think through repetition of a term or opinion thousands of times. It's not our opinion, but we usually say what we have read somewhere. And indeed, digital information in general has been productized, everything is now interpreted as a priced, owned, sold, market-valued product even if it isn't a commercial product or even a product at all.
More methods of funding, encouraging, and generally promoting open source development are indeed necessary. Google Summer of Code is great. I think something like programming Lan Parties are great too. Perhaps some longer term events though, like summer-long camps, including more activities to make it healthier.
I live in Sao Paulo, in a middle class neighborhood where the law sort of works, work in a cyber cafe. I have had policemen, who can barely double click an icon, walk in insinuating they will confiscate everything because there is pirate software. They are often paid to go away, they want money. A cybercafe owner told me he once had all hard drives of the place confiscated for months, because they found a few mp3 files on hard drives. Been to places where downloading *all* mp3 files is banned. All access to CD burners or pendrives is blocked out of fear of the copyright police. Cybercafes typically have no software at all on workstations, only duly-licensed windows xp, costing half a month's pay for the typical worker, and OpenOffice. Nothing else. So what I see is, copyright law results in driving access to digital information underground. Linux is rare in private-run cybercafe's, because of ActiveX, MSN messenger, and user culture hooked on ms-windows. Government-sponsored net cafes do run linux, and are full, mostly because they are free, but there are not many of those. Cybercafes on the outskirts of town, poorer neighborhoods, have all kinds of software, all pirated. everything in these places is pirated, the net connection, the electricity, even the land usually has no title. Result --- piracy = free intelectual property = low costs = competitive advantage. Go China!
The common ground may be what's politically realistic in the short term, that's just a given. Best solution is usually something else however. In the case of IP, it would involve aiming to modify laws. In my opinion, restricting the validity of IP would be a good start compromise.
Jeff Raikes, head of the company's business group, said at a recent investor conference that while the company is against piracy, if you are going to pirate software, it hopes you pirate Microsoft software. ---
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070312/165448.shtml
Is there hope for a merge of all virtual fragmented universes into a single universe? We we can explore strange new worlds; seek out new life and new civilizations; boldly go where our avatar hasn't gone before?
If it were about prices or products and not patents, it could be seen as anti-competitive I think. In my view, given that copyrights/patents effectively function as a privatization of public property, (thought and ideas), for large organizations to merge these properties is akin to creating a monopoly of ideas and thoughts. If they were to include a few other large organizations and aggressively and cooperatively enforce all their intellectual property rights, they would create an unassailable monopoly on products, both new and existing. Anyone outside their covenant would have a hard time selling any technical products, as just about anything could be interpreted as infringing on some patent or the group. A monopoly created by IP law. Come to think of it, perhaps we already have some of that situation, given these groups already refrain from suing each other all the time for every single possible issue, a protection not granted to smaller groups which can't counter-sue. Or to use the proper terms, counter-attack.
I'm for a one-law constitution. Absolutely no violence against human beings. Violence against other things is also discouraged, but less so. Everything else is legal. Society will have to learn to define for itself what is violence, what is human, and not. That debate is not simplistic and bite-sized for the attention-grabbing media, politicians, or the poor people attempting to learn something from the entertainment-gossip-*news*. You will need some scholars. And engaging in violence won't get you sent to prison, but to a society where the violent go, a distant island where... umm... wait a minute... well I did have a point somewhere.
Lots of politicians do this stuff. Turn full-force against some virtual, pointless "cause" that won't bring any real opposition, so it's easy, yet scares lots of voters with silly issues, so pleases them that "someone is doing something". It's the same as railing againt immigrants, movie or tv violence, or "crime", "communists", or "terrorists". There will be no real useful work done for anyone, but will get attention and votes, and since the opposition is voiceless, powerless, very distant or inexistent, the campaign is successful -- politically. Socially, it's a disaster, gets all of society hysterical and confused over a non-issue, but that's not what they care about. If they were to do something about health care, pollution, corporate crime, political or police corruption, education, etc, it's likely some real opposition would appear, frequently from deep-pocketed lobbyists, who would finance ads and opposition to them and their efforts. Not to mention stop financing them, making the political campaign a true disaster. No good deed goes unpunished, in this society ruled by self-serving groups. So, those without scruples simply do none.
You can't stop reading slashdot. Full of nonsensensical arguments, but you read on, your brain oozes, your eyes are red, dry and hurt. Still, you read on, and participate in the debate. You don't recognize your odd behavior. There's a sequel reply injected into your brain. It's a slash dot sequel brain virus injection. There's no cleaning utility, you will need to reformat your brain.
I wonder what consequences will website-imposed browsers have. Perhaps we're heading towards some kind of content - terminal matching OS, where all content will come with terminal specs, and you basically install a dozen terminal emulators on your systems. Kind of like thinstation. x86 is pretty much becoming a kind of terminal, with hypervisors. And win32 or Linux a kind of content-packager-gui or something.
The problem is much greater than drivers. You can't even copy a phone contact list to anything else easily. It's just name and phone number, but you need to be pretty skilled to be able to copy it over anywhere. There's little discussion or respect for standards, testing, etc. Data standards, interface standards, software standards, cable standards, power standards, few things works together. USB and Bluetooth were pretty good standard inventions. The complexity of the mix of all things on the market is just completely overwhelming any consumer or tech. The big deal with Apple is basically that they control all their variables, and make things work more simply and easily. Yes, you could do it in Linux, or anything else, but it takes a lot more time and effort.
Well, it is Italy. Perhaps the victim will sue for having had his only chance at five minutes of fame nixed by Google. The mob-perpetrators will sue the state and the media for slander because they were just doing their job. Everyone will get killed. Then, there will be a marriage, a party, everyone will go to the beach, and confessions will be heard on a rock by a Catholic priest, you will be absolved if you are in scuba gear or have killed enough people.
flamebait it is. But it would be news if they told how they did it, disclosed the methods of obtaining the skimmers, drew us some diagrams and maybe upload some spec sheets on the various pumps and the dimensional drawings. Then it would be tech news.
Just get a maintenance job for the things or make friends with the guys that do it..
That's the part that need to be fixed in open source, and society in general. Rewarding efforts needs to be more linked to the benefits produced for society, not on the ability to wring, extract, or corner rewards from society. Don't know how the details of that should work, it's not too easy, but it is where debate has to go I think.
I don't like cars. I mostly walk. But yes, I have always lived in a big city. And occasionally I use taxis, buses, trains and airplanes. Even motorcycles and bicycles. But never cars. Do some math and you might find the same. I do use cars when the system gives me no other alternative, it happens often, no need to be fanatic...
Indeed ActiveX, IE, IIS,.net, ms-java, directx, exchange, outlook, visual studio, msn messenger, etc were all designed to create a big windows-lock. And it works - locks very well. Allied to their openly admitted strategy of charging for it whenever possible, if not encouraging it to be used and pirated comfortably. Until this basic dual-legality strategy is attacked somehow, it will be very hard to dethrone windows. Hard to admit, but Apple is actually making more headway than Linux on the desktop, competing based on good design, good experience for users. I love open source, but unfortunately there is still more work to do to match the desktop experience. As for price, well, counting piracy reality, open source costs the same. As for features, all good open-source apps generally work on windows too, but the opposite is not true. So people format their store-bought cheaper Linux boxes and install whatever runs their apps and is easy and free. Piratows works great, like it or not. And to be honest, I think to compete Piratinux will be necessary. Allowing integration of Linux with piratewarez even more easily and comfortably. Otherwise it simply becomes incompatible with users reality, which is what it is now. Wine isn't good enough yet, nope, and probably will never be.
However, it didn't detect: the wifi adaptor the ethernet adaptor the sound
If there's one thing that would make the computer industry move ahead faster, it would be more standards. Why on earth can't simple mundane things like ethernet, sound, etc interfaces come with some sort of descriptors or standards which allow at least basic functionalities to be found more easily by an OS? Couldn't chipmakers, driver and OS writers try to save some work for themselves and talk? Every new OS version has to re-create, re-test, etc every driver for every device on the planet. The mere discussion of standards seems to have been killed by the whole 'de facto' notion, which is basically quitting. Even if we exclude MS, there enough active people now to have some debate over some driver and chip detection standards. VMware, linux, xbsd, the livecd scene, motherboard, device, and chipmakers, etc.
Christ, what ever happened to basic responsibility? Or buy beware? How about reading reviews before buying something or returning the product if you don't like it? Is lawsuit now the default action?
That depends. How much time, money, friends and enemies do you have? Mostly money and enemies, or friends and time?
Slashdot Mirror
No, companies don't really care if they need to pay a few hundred to get the programmer Visual Studio and increase his productivity by 1500% instead of using the free Dev-C++.
Same thing as most companies working with graphics aren't shy to buy Photoshop instead of frustrating their workers with GIMP.
Especially if their worked had lots of practice with the product already. Training usually was with a pirated or free version of the product however, which is exactly Microsoft strategy. So both points are somewhat true. The commercial product is better funded, and is indeed frequently more productive. Its use free of cost however, pirated or free, is questionable. It does steal attention from alternatives which compete based on cost or other factors, such as being open source, rather than design. So piracy is anti-competitive, yes, frequently *in favor* of the copyright owner, in the case of a monopoly.
Something is wrong with the way we keep using the phrase "downloading copyrighted material" like it implies something illegal is going on.
It illustrates how industry lobby manages to mold what we say and think through repetition of a term or opinion thousands of times. It's not our opinion, but we usually say what we have read somewhere. And indeed, digital information in general has been productized, everything is now interpreted as a priced, owned, sold, market-valued product even if it isn't a commercial product or even a product at all.
More methods of funding, encouraging, and generally promoting open source development are indeed necessary. Google Summer of Code is great. I think something like programming Lan Parties are great too. Perhaps some longer term events though, like summer-long camps, including more activities to make it healthier.
I live in Sao Paulo, in a middle class neighborhood where the law sort of works, work in a cyber cafe. I have had policemen, who can barely double click an icon, walk in insinuating they will confiscate everything because there is pirate software. They are often paid to go away, they want money. A cybercafe owner told me he once had all hard drives of the place confiscated for months, because they found a few mp3 files on hard drives. Been to places where downloading *all* mp3 files is banned. All access to CD burners or pendrives is blocked out of fear of the copyright police. Cybercafes typically have no software at all on workstations, only duly-licensed windows xp, costing half a month's pay for the typical worker, and OpenOffice. Nothing else. So what I see is, copyright law results in driving access to digital information underground. Linux is rare in private-run cybercafe's, because of ActiveX, MSN messenger, and user culture hooked on ms-windows. Government-sponsored net cafes do run linux, and are full, mostly because they are free, but there are not many of those. Cybercafes on the outskirts of town, poorer neighborhoods, have all kinds of software, all pirated. everything in these places is pirated, the net connection, the electricity, even the land usually has no title. Result --- piracy = free intelectual property = low costs = competitive advantage. Go China!
Somewhere in the middle is the common ground.
The common ground may be what's politically realistic in the short term, that's just a given. Best solution is usually something else however. In the case of IP, it would involve aiming to modify laws. In my opinion, restricting the validity of IP would be a good start compromise.
Jeff Raikes, head of the company's business group, said at a recent investor conference that while the company is against piracy, if you are going to pirate software, it hopes you pirate Microsoft software. --- http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070312/165448.shtml
http://digg.com/tech_news/Bill_Gates_Piracy_Confession
A nice debate on the relationship of open source and ignoring copyrights (aka "piracy") would be interesting.
If you are dumb, powerless or too involved to deal with real crime, start fighting virtual crime.
Is there hope for a merge of all virtual fragmented universes into a single universe? We we can explore strange new worlds; seek out new life and new civilizations; boldly go where our avatar hasn't gone before?
If it were about prices or products and not patents, it could be seen as anti-competitive I think. In my view, given that copyrights/patents effectively function as a privatization of public property, (thought and ideas), for large organizations to merge these properties is akin to creating a monopoly of ideas and thoughts. If they were to include a few other large organizations and aggressively and cooperatively enforce all their intellectual property rights, they would create an unassailable monopoly on products, both new and existing. Anyone outside their covenant would have a hard time selling any technical products, as just about anything could be interpreted as infringing on some patent or the group. A monopoly created by IP law. Come to think of it, perhaps we already have some of that situation, given these groups already refrain from suing each other all the time for every single possible issue, a protection not granted to smaller groups which can't counter-sue. Or to use the proper terms, counter-attack.
Isn't there a game called "Australia"? There's like an island with a society made up of criminals? Then they form a government and an army?
I'm for a one-law constitution. Absolutely no violence against human beings. Violence against other things is also discouraged, but less so. Everything else is legal. Society will have to learn to define for itself what is violence, what is human, and not. That debate is not simplistic and bite-sized for the attention-grabbing media, politicians, or the poor people attempting to learn something from the entertainment-gossip-*news*. You will need some scholars. And engaging in violence won't get you sent to prison, but to a society where the violent go, a distant island where... umm... wait a minute... well I did have a point somewhere.
Lots of politicians do this stuff. Turn full-force against some virtual, pointless "cause" that won't bring any real opposition, so it's easy, yet scares lots of voters with silly issues, so pleases them that "someone is doing something". It's the same as railing againt immigrants, movie or tv violence, or "crime", "communists", or "terrorists". There will be no real useful work done for anyone, but will get attention and votes, and since the opposition is voiceless, powerless, very distant or inexistent, the campaign is successful -- politically. Socially, it's a disaster, gets all of society hysterical and confused over a non-issue, but that's not what they care about. If they were to do something about health care, pollution, corporate crime, political or police corruption, education, etc, it's likely some real opposition would appear, frequently from deep-pocketed lobbyists, who would finance ads and opposition to them and their efforts. Not to mention stop financing them, making the political campaign a true disaster. No good deed goes unpunished, in this society ruled by self-serving groups. So, those without scruples simply do none.
You can't stop reading slashdot. Full of nonsensensical arguments, but you read on, your brain oozes, your eyes are red, dry and hurt. Still, you read on, and participate in the debate. You don't recognize your odd behavior. There's a sequel reply injected into your brain. It's a slash dot sequel brain virus injection. There's no cleaning utility, you will need to reformat your brain.
I wonder what consequences will website-imposed browsers have. Perhaps we're heading towards some kind of content - terminal matching OS, where all content will come with terminal specs, and you basically install a dozen terminal emulators on your systems. Kind of like thinstation. x86 is pretty much becoming a kind of terminal, with hypervisors. And win32 or Linux a kind of content-packager-gui or something.
The problem is much greater than drivers. You can't even copy a phone contact list to anything else easily. It's just name and phone number, but you need to be pretty skilled to be able to copy it over anywhere. There's little discussion or respect for standards, testing, etc. Data standards, interface standards, software standards, cable standards, power standards, few things works together. USB and Bluetooth were pretty good standard inventions. The complexity of the mix of all things on the market is just completely overwhelming any consumer or tech. The big deal with Apple is basically that they control all their variables, and make things work more simply and easily. Yes, you could do it in Linux, or anything else, but it takes a lot more time and effort.
Well, it is Italy. Perhaps the victim will sue for having had his only chance at five minutes of fame nixed by Google. The mob-perpetrators will sue the state and the media for slander because they were just doing their job. Everyone will get killed. Then, there will be a marriage, a party, everyone will go to the beach, and confessions will be heard on a rock by a Catholic priest, you will be absolved if you are in scuba gear or have killed enough people.
flamebait it is. But it would be news if they told how they did it, disclosed the methods of obtaining the skimmers, drew us some diagrams and maybe upload some spec sheets on the various pumps and the dimensional drawings. Then it would be tech news.
Just get a maintenance job for the things or make friends with the guys that do it..
That's the part that need to be fixed in open source, and society in general. Rewarding efforts needs to be more linked to the benefits produced for society, not on the ability to wring, extract, or corner rewards from society. Don't know how the details of that should work, it's not too easy, but it is where debate has to go I think.
I don't like cars. I mostly walk. But yes, I have always lived in a big city. And occasionally I use taxis, buses, trains and airplanes. Even motorcycles and bicycles. But never cars. Do some math and you might find the same. I do use cars when the system gives me no other alternative, it happens often, no need to be fanatic...
Indeed ActiveX, IE, IIS, .net, ms-java, directx, exchange, outlook, visual studio, msn messenger, etc were all designed to create a big windows-lock. And it works - locks very well. Allied to their openly admitted strategy of charging for it whenever possible, if not encouraging it to be used and pirated comfortably. Until this basic dual-legality strategy is attacked somehow, it will be very hard to dethrone windows. Hard to admit, but Apple is actually making more headway than Linux on the desktop, competing based on good design, good experience for users. I love open source, but unfortunately there is still more work to do to match the desktop experience. As for price, well, counting piracy reality, open source costs the same. As for features, all good open-source apps generally work on windows too, but the opposite is not true. So people format their store-bought cheaper Linux boxes and install whatever runs their apps and is easy and free. Piratows works great, like it or not. And to be honest, I think to compete Piratinux will be necessary. Allowing integration of Linux with piratewarez even more easily and comfortably. Otherwise it simply becomes incompatible with users reality, which is what it is now. Wine isn't good enough yet, nope, and probably will never be.
However, it didn't detect: the wifi adaptor the ethernet adaptor the sound
If there's one thing that would make the computer industry move ahead faster, it would be more standards. Why on earth can't simple mundane things like ethernet, sound, etc interfaces come with some sort of descriptors or standards which allow at least basic functionalities to be found more easily by an OS? Couldn't chipmakers, driver and OS writers try to save some work for themselves and talk? Every new OS version has to re-create, re-test, etc every driver for every device on the planet. The mere discussion of standards seems to have been killed by the whole 'de facto' notion, which is basically quitting. Even if we exclude MS, there enough active people now to have some debate over some driver and chip detection standards. VMware, linux, xbsd, the livecd scene, motherboard, device, and chipmakers, etc.
Christ, what ever happened to basic responsibility? Or buy beware? How about reading reviews before buying something or returning the product if you don't like it? Is lawsuit now the default action?
That depends. How much time, money, friends and enemies do you have? Mostly money and enemies, or friends and time?
Are games so lazily programmed that they don't take advantage of that either?
Obviously it's not exactly easy to make programs that can run either on multiple cpu's or a single one just as well.