Copy protection that inconveniences the honest user will:
[ ] make some of your honest (and now inconvenienced) users walk away [ ] make pirates come to you so they can pay and have a less comfortable (but legal) copy
Why worry about the physical format? You can pretty certainly still find a 3.5" floppy disc drive today, if you really need to. It'll be some hunting, but you'll manage.
But try getting hold of a copy of DOS 5.5 and Word 1.0 to actually read the files you saved there.
So will DVDs still be around? Maybe the discs will. But I doubt the codex will still be the same.
The first "real" PC I ever had was a souped-up Zeos Pantera 486 with 16MB of RAM, a Diamond Stealth64 sporting an amazing 4MB of VRAM, a SCSI card with a 105MB HDD on top and - get this - a gynormous 17-inch monitor. I paid close to $6K back then for that. Today I can put together something that is for all purposes a super computer compared to that, for about $600. The reason for that is and always has been Microsoft Windows. The reason is first and foremost Moore's Law. Windows is the reason that it's still $600, and not $500.
Would the PC market have exploded like this if MS hadn't been there? We don't know. But anyone who says "no" is lying. We simply don't know. From what we know about how markets work, it is very likely that with the demand being there, some supplier would have been there. Things wouldn't look the same today - maybe better, maybe worse - we simply don't know.
Is there still space in that parallel world you're living in? It sounds lovely.
You see, in this world, a company curiously also called "Microsoft" has produced some of the worst offenses to user-interface design that were ever forced on users. They also make something they call "Office", though if it resembles their office in any way, then they must have a torture room where we put the printers. Word, for example, is a horrible piece of crap that claims it's a text editor, but it really resembles a teenager's re-implementation of Emacs more than that (it tries to do a thousand things, and fails at most of them). Excel in it's - what is it now? 8th? - current version is considerably worse than some competitors 1.0 releases, especially regarding the user interface.
Which, in this world, they also tend to change every now and then, just for the fun of it. I'm not sure where in the "what users want" part that fits in, maybe in the same place where "let's make our API incompatible with last year's and also keep some of the more interesting stuff secret" fits to the "developers, developers, developers" chant.
So, as you can see, your parallel world appears to have split at some quantum event early on in the life of Bill Gates, and thanks to Chaos Theory, that changed a whole lot.
Of course, they will support ODF. It's too big a thing to ignore.
Also of course, their implementation will have a few... quirks. You know, implementation bugs that happen symmetrical on both import and export, so they never show up to you, as long as you stay within the MS world. Meanwhile, everything someone with a different ODF implementation sends you will show up buggy, and everything you send them will not quite properly work.
Details, of course. Like footnotes misaligned, or small formation differences. Just enough that nobody calls it bugs, just "quirks", but enough to make sure nobody within a corporation, for example, uses something different.
Maybe we were just well-off, but in my school, most of us owned a small number of games. I still have those C64 originals, out of nostalgia. My tally was three games ("They stole a million", "Wasteland" and the first Lord of the Rings game). So among the lot of us, there were about two dozen original games. Many didn't have copy protection. Some did, and we cracked it ourselves mostly (some we couldn't, and that only raised our respect for the cracking groups). Some had hardware copy-protection - code books that wouldn't copy on a photocopier (not enough contrast), or those code wheels. I actually developed a small process/algorithm for translating those code wheels into lookup tables that were faster to use than the code wheels themselves. That was when I first realized that sometimes, the pirate version could be more convenient than the original.
That is exactly what we did in World War 2. It is why it ended in only six years. Rhetorics 101, lesson 3: You can not justify every bullshit with past success. Especially not when the cases are not even remotely comparable.
when they refuse to abide by the Geneva Convention and fight in uniform, away from civilian population centers. It's easy to demand everyone play by the rules when you control the playing field. It's also cheap. If they did what you want them to do, you'd call them stupid fanatics.
Take a long hard look at places like Somalia or the disaster in Bosnia and then tell me there are realistic options other than the judicious application of force. Since you asked for it, here's your other option. For your right-wingers, it's straight from Reagan after the Beirut bombing: These people are nuts, let's get the hell out of there.
There will always be those that choose to pirate software (it's not stealing unless you pick a box off a shelf in a store), While you're nitpicking: It also isn't pirating unless you board container ships at sea.
Even when I was pirating stuff years and years ago it was NEVER directly copying the original from a friend. 20 years ago, it was. Disks (floppy discs, not CDs) were swapped in the school yard, both copies and originals. When someone bought an original, someone else in the school cracked it and everyone else got a copy. There were BBSes, but few of us had a modem, and those went at 300 baud.
Looks like the software industries threat model is terribly outdated.:-)
It's not even a race anymore, the cracks come out so fast, I wonder why the game houses even pretend to put up a fight. Because not all gamers are tech freaks anymore. A lot of gamers today know little more about computers than what they need to reinstall windos every once in a while. They don't know how and wouldn't dare to download some random binary from the Intarweb and patch their local copy.
Copy protection is fairly effective against those guys.
So? We live in a capitalist world, so vote with your money, go to the competition, choose the better product - get a pirate copy today, it's more user-friendly.
I don't think it's the software, either. That's just part of it. It's the user-friendliness. The iPhone is easy to use, it integrates well with everything else (that's the software part) and it has all the right features in the right places. One example I occasionally mention is conference calls - setting one up on an iPhone is dead simple. Setting one up on a Nokia - according to people who've done it - is just a little short of voodoo.
Yes, it is. But even the (comparatively) simple AK-47 requires a little more than the tools you'll find in your average person's garage. That was the point. We agree on everything except the nitpicking.:-)
or paying off enough disgruntled Russian scientists and engineers Err... don't you think you're about a decade late for that? I'd be surprised to find any russian scientist today who is disgruntled to the point of being buy-able, and hasn't been bought already.
The real question is: Whose agenda does it fit to reveal this, and now.
See, nukes aren't that complicated. Most of us learn the basics at school. Assuming the blueprint is genuine, and of a tested design, that's a piece of valuable work, but not groundbreaking. There is no threat of any living-in-caves terrorists coming up with a nuke due to some blueprints. Funny how all this fearmongering always forgets the amount and quality of equipment you need to actually turn a blueprint into a working bomb.
It's roughly comparable to having a blueprint of a machine gun (available in most libraries, and Google will probably give you a hundred of them at least), and an actual working machine gun. You just can't build one in your garage, there's a little bit more specialised precision equipment required. And then you'd still need the ammo.
So who is trying to get a bigger budget for what? That's the question we should be asking.
He's not lying - he really thinks he's right and that's what makes these people dangerous.
See, in case of invasion, Habeas Corpus shall be suspended(1). There is an invasion - the US has invaded Iraq. The clause doesn't require that the invasion happens on US soil.
(1) actually, that's not a proper reversal, either. Tricks within tricks.
Imagine a person at the movies. The theater forces phones to be shut off. The email from someone's alarm system saying there is a fire is never received. When they get home the fire and police departments take them to the hospital so they can watch their two small children die of burns. Yeah, that will work out nicely in the papers. Being able to come up with a constructed, unlikely, hypothetical example of what could perhaps, maybe, theoretically go wrong does not make a proper counter-argument.
Besides, how about the speed limit on his way home to save his kids? He'll not get there in time unless he goes at least 100 kph in the inner city. So by your logic, we should remove all speed limits everywhere, because you never know when someone has to get somewhere in a real hurry.
Finally, if you wire up your fire alarm system so that it tells you, but not the fire department, you're a ridiculous dumbfuck.
Note that this is modern paper. Ancient chinese paper was manufactured differently, and kept the fibres largely intact. It was strong enough that there were paper armours manufactured, which could stop an arrow.
Industrial production of paper used a different process, was a ton cheaper, and thus drove the ancient methods to extinction.
Seriously. So the guy's a murderer. That doesn't diminish his filesystem skills in the least, if you ask me. Why this obsession that good people must be all-around good?
Slashdot Mirror
Copy protection that inconveniences the honest user will:
[ ] make some of your honest (and now inconvenienced) users walk away
[ ] make pirates come to you so they can pay and have a less comfortable (but legal) copy
Hint: Only one answer is correct.
Why worry about the physical format? You can pretty certainly still find a 3.5" floppy disc drive today, if you really need to. It'll be some hunting, but you'll manage.
But try getting hold of a copy of DOS 5.5 and Word 1.0 to actually read the files you saved there.
So will DVDs still be around? Maybe the discs will. But I doubt the codex will still be the same.
Would the PC market have exploded like this if MS hadn't been there? We don't know. But anyone who says "no" is lying. We simply don't know. From what we know about how markets work, it is very likely that with the demand being there, some supplier would have been there. Things wouldn't look the same today - maybe better, maybe worse - we simply don't know.
Is there still space in that parallel world you're living in? It sounds lovely.
You see, in this world, a company curiously also called "Microsoft" has produced some of the worst offenses to user-interface design that were ever forced on users. They also make something they call "Office", though if it resembles their office in any way, then they must have a torture room where we put the printers. Word, for example, is a horrible piece of crap that claims it's a text editor, but it really resembles a teenager's re-implementation of Emacs more than that (it tries to do a thousand things, and fails at most of them). Excel in it's - what is it now? 8th? - current version is considerably worse than some competitors 1.0 releases, especially regarding the user interface.
Which, in this world, they also tend to change every now and then, just for the fun of it. I'm not sure where in the "what users want" part that fits in, maybe in the same place where "let's make our API incompatible with last year's and also keep some of the more interesting stuff secret" fits to the "developers, developers, developers" chant.
So, as you can see, your parallel world appears to have split at some quantum event early on in the life of Bill Gates, and thanks to Chaos Theory, that changed a whole lot.
Rich CEO says success of his company is due to his own smarts and foresight. News at 11:15 (we need the other 15 minutes for the dupe).
Of course, they will support ODF. It's too big a thing to ignore.
Also of course, their implementation will have a few... quirks. You know, implementation bugs that happen symmetrical on both import and export, so they never show up to you, as long as you stay within the MS world. Meanwhile, everything someone with a different ODF implementation sends you will show up buggy, and everything you send them will not quite properly work.
Details, of course. Like footnotes misaligned, or small formation differences. Just enough that nobody calls it bugs, just "quirks", but enough to make sure nobody within a corporation, for example, uses something different.
Because it took how long until this was noticed? They almost certainly made their domain-registration fee back and then some.
Short-living business strategies work, if you chain them together.
Maybe we were just well-off, but in my school, most of us owned a small number of games. I still have those C64 originals, out of nostalgia. My tally was three games ("They stole a million", "Wasteland" and the first Lord of the Rings game). So among the lot of us, there were about two dozen original games. Many didn't have copy protection. Some did, and we cracked it ourselves mostly (some we couldn't, and that only raised our respect for the cracking groups). Some had hardware copy-protection - code books that wouldn't copy on a photocopier (not enough contrast), or those code wheels. I actually developed a small process/algorithm for translating those code wheels into lookup tables that were faster to use than the code wheels themselves. That was when I first realized that sometimes, the pirate version could be more convenient than the original.
Looks like the software industries threat model is terribly outdated.
Copy protection is fairly effective against those guys.
So? We live in a capitalist world, so vote with your money, go to the competition, choose the better product - get a pirate copy today, it's more user-friendly.
Let the market solve things, right?
You're right that it isn't the touchscreen.
I don't think it's the software, either. That's just part of it. It's the user-friendliness. The iPhone is easy to use, it integrates well with everything else (that's the software part) and it has all the right features in the right places. One example I occasionally mention is conference calls - setting one up on an iPhone is dead simple. Setting one up on a Nokia - according to people who've done it - is just a little short of voodoo.
Yes, it is. But even the (comparatively) simple AK-47 requires a little more than the tools you'll find in your average person's garage. That was the point. We agree on everything except the nitpicking. :-)
Frankly, I wouldn't use a cell phone ringer as trigger. You'd just hate for the thing to blow up in your face because some telemarketer called.
The real question is: Whose agenda does it fit to reveal this, and now.
See, nukes aren't that complicated. Most of us learn the basics at school. Assuming the blueprint is genuine, and of a tested design, that's a piece of valuable work, but not groundbreaking. There is no threat of any living-in-caves terrorists coming up with a nuke due to some blueprints. Funny how all this fearmongering always forgets the amount and quality of equipment you need to actually turn a blueprint into a working bomb.
It's roughly comparable to having a blueprint of a machine gun (available in most libraries, and Google will probably give you a hundred of them at least), and an actual working machine gun. You just can't build one in your garage, there's a little bit more specialised precision equipment required. And then you'd still need the ammo.
So who is trying to get a bigger budget for what? That's the question we should be asking.
He's not lying - he really thinks he's right and that's what makes these people dangerous.
See, in case of invasion, Habeas Corpus shall be suspended(1). There is an invasion - the US has invaded Iraq. The clause doesn't require that the invasion happens on US soil.
(1) actually, that's not a proper reversal, either. Tricks within tricks.
Frankly, I'd mod it Troll as well, due to the whole "The Creator" nonsense bullshit propaganda idiocity.
What makes someone a Troll often isn't what he writes, but how he does it. You can write a perfectly good Troll with almost any argument.
Besides, how about the speed limit on his way home to save his kids? He'll not get there in time unless he goes at least 100 kph in the inner city. So by your logic, we should remove all speed limits everywhere, because you never know when someone has to get somewhere in a real hurry.
Finally, if you wire up your fire alarm system so that it tells you, but not the fire department, you're a ridiculous dumbfuck.
Note that this is modern paper. Ancient chinese paper was manufactured differently, and kept the fibres largely intact. It was strong enough that there were paper armours manufactured, which could stop an arrow.
Industrial production of paper used a different process, was a ton cheaper, and thus drove the ancient methods to extinction.
Why?
Seriously. So the guy's a murderer. That doesn't diminish his filesystem skills in the least, if you ask me. Why this obsession that good people must be all-around good?