A lot of people ranting about how Vista isn't as good as XP are probably the same ones who were ranting about how XP wasn't as good as 2000. In reality, XP was better than 2000, and has almost completely replaced it now. Vista is better than XP, and in a few years will probably have largely displaced it too.
Since when is a price tag an effective means of combating malware?
I imagine it can actually be effective in combatting some forms of malware. If only 10% of users buy the high-priced version, only 10% would be vulnerable to any malware targeted at it. This would make it much more difficult for malware to spread, especially the sort that spreads from one infected machine to another.
What's artificial about it? Users have different requirements, and are willing to pay different amounts, so can naturally be grouped into different segments. Targeting different products at the different segments, with appropriate prices, will lead to greater economic efficiency. Any competent manager would use this approach where possible.
Luckily, many of those laws are already in place since the days when Standard Oil, AT&T and others tried to abuse their respective monopolies.
Interestingly, I recently read an academic paper suggesting that one of the reasons the American telecoms sector is so relatively backward compared to telecoms in Europe is because AT&T was broken up. The telecoms monopolies here in Europe were allowed to remain dominant for much longer, so were able to force standardisation of infrastructure for mobile phones, for example.
If a market is a natural monopoly, trying to force it to operate as a competitive one isn't generally a good idea. The issues with efficiency (in the economic sense, which is a very specialised usage) can be managed through regulation and taxation, and won't necessarily be solved by forcing competition. The supernormal profit earned by monopolies isn't necessarily bad either, if it's used to fund research that drives technological progress, which is the basis of economic growth in the long run. As an example, consider all of the innovation from Bell Labs, which was part of the AT&T telecoms monopoly.
A content indexing and search service has been a standard component of Windows since Windows 2000, and the service itself was first released in 1996 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_indexing_serv ice). With Vista, Microsoft have replaced the old Indexing Service with a new Windows Search Service, but the most important change is just that they made it much easier to access.
The idea that indexing content for searching is something Google (or Apple) came up with before Microsoft is just flat wrong. Microsoft had it years before Google or Apple, but just didn't provide a good user interface for it.
Except it does trigger in normal usage. Strange as it may seem, apps written in the past have no foreknowledge of that which one day Vista deems illegal.
Good developers tested their software as a normal user all along, which means it won't generate any UAC popups. I can't think of a single application I use on Vista that generates UAC populs under normal usage. I only have to see them when installing/uninstalling software or changing system settings.
Also, the heavy DRMing and MAFIAA compliance annoys me terribly.
Could you elaborate on this? I'm using Vista, I don't use DRM for most audio/video I play, and all of it works, without any problems. I've noticed not a single difference between Vista and XP with respect to DRM.
Their marketing consists of things like "look, shiny!", "better security!", and "you're a dinosaur!". The first one won't get them far, especially with Apple around. The second one is completely intangible, and the third one is actually an insult to the customers.
I'm not sure you're right about the first one. I'm running Vista, and everyone who's seen it has been impressed with how pretty the UI is. I'd guess that's the main reason most users are opting for Home Premium instead of Home Basic. Mac OS X had a better looking UI for a long time, but compared to Vista, even Leopard looks stale and tired, even if the Mac hardware is still better looking than anything I've seen on the PC side.
Re:This is what I HATE most about FOSS
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And you care what the FSF says exaclty why?
I can't speak for the previous poster, but I care what the FSF say because a lot of people listen to them, including people who have influence on the development of policy and law in the EU.
Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft
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I'm not sure what your point is in being obtuse about definitions. If you look at the law, it defines property rights, both physical and intellectual. The common definition of theft is taking/using property without permission, and this is applied in official EU documents to both physical and intellectual property. If you won't accept that, OK, but your refusal to recognise standard usage of a word doesn't change it.
Don't buy the equation yet. I see S as just more C.
It's very simple to understand. If two software programs are combined, the combination may, and often does, create more economic value than each individual part would by itself. If you want to play Stallman's game and redefine everything to be what you'd like it to mean, in this case claiming economic value that doesn't accrue to you personally, or to your community, isn't actually value at all, then there isn't any hope of coming to an agreement on anything, so I might as well give up now.
What I mean is that the people who get my work are Free to do certain things with it. That comes with or without copyleft. Copyleft is an attempt to protect that freedom once given rahter than letting it be removed by less well intentioned players.
No, that's done even if you put it into the public domain. What you're talking about is the exchange you're willing to make, i.e. that you'll only share your work with them if they agree to share their work (or potential work) with your community. It has nothing at all to do with freedom, it's just terms of agreement for an exchange of intellectual property.
Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft
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The enforcement of intellectual property rights is discussed in Directive 2004/48/EC. The violation of intellectual property rights, like the violation of physical property rights, is generally referred to as theft, for example, as discussed in the 2000 EU report on organised crime.
Fine, but that value comes from... Their customers. And those customers do not get any such value.
No, the issue is the value created, not to whom it flows. If you have publicly available software P, and closed software C, the total value of combining them, V, isn't V = P + C, it's V = P + C + S, where S is the additional value created by the combination. If you restrict the combination of P and C, you reduce the size of S, and thus of V.
The question of whether the GPL would be preferable to the BSDL in the long run depends on how the benefits of relatively larger increases in P over time, derived through persuading some who would otherwise close their work to open it, compare with the losses incurred by not allowing P to be combined with C.
No, not at all. Even if all I ever do is write and release Free works, and never use anyone else's Free works, I can still be concerned with Freedom.
What do you mean by 'Freedom', other than making your sharing conditional on an agreement by those you share with to share in return? As I said before, it need not be individual: your requirement may be that they share with a community you belong to, such as the 'Free Software community'. This isn't an issue of freedom in any normal sense of the word, i.e. nobody is being forced to do anything against their will, or prevented exercising their fundamental rights.
Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft
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I agree with some of your points, but there are a few I'd like to comment on:
Mind you, if someone violates your copyrights, they are not stealing from you either, but that is a different issue.
I suppose it depends on the jurisdiction. Under EU law, for example, there is the concept of intellectual property. Violation of copyright is viewed as theft of intellectual property, so yes, if someone violates your copyright, they can be said to be stealing from you.
I would say rather that [those who use BSD-style licences] may want to maximise the amount of value first generation others get from it. (Or I guess, really, up to the generation where it goes non-Free.)
When I refer to the value, I mean the value to everyone, not just to the open source community. Closed source code generates value for its owners, even if not for the open source community, at least not directly. The intuitive view is that BSD-style licensing will probably lead to more value overall, since more people will be using it, but less value for the open source community. It is of course possible to imagine models in which using the GPL will lead to higher total value in the long run, or indeed in which BSD-style licensing will lead to higher value even for the open source community.
"People who use the GPL are not giving away their work, they're making an agreement to exchange it for the work of others."
Not quite. Some view things long those lines. Others see things along the lines of ensuring the freedom as oposed to allowing someone to reduce them beyond what is necessary to ensure them.
To me, this just looks like a more confusing way of saying the same thing. Isn't what you call 'freedom' just the concept that 'I'll share with you if you share with me', with the 'me' possibly referring to a community rather than an individual? If so, it's just an issue of the terms under which a voluntary exchange is made, not anything to do with freedom.
This is another example of why it's important to ensure that corporations aren't allowed to collect and store huge amounts of data about individuals. The fact that they can analyse it in some way or another is irrelevant if privacy is respected in the first place.
Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft
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GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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It should be noted that people who do this do so in the hope that others will do the same, and the amount of respect you get in such a community relates very closely to the amount that you give.
Yes, although this isn't so in all cases. The BSD work done at the University of California, Berkeley for DARPA, for example, didn't involve any such aims. Its objectives were practical, i.e. to make available a reference implementation of TCP/IP on common hardware, and it did the job brilliantly. Bill Joy then went on to co-found Sun Microsystems and develop a closed source derivative, SunOS.
It's a gift economy, and it works pretty well when the cost of giving a copy is so small.
It does seem to work rather well, both the BSD and GPL forms, the latter however with less emphasis on the gift idea. I actually find it quite interesting, and can imagine models in which using either BSD-style or GPL-style distribution would maximise value added in the long run. However, like a lot of these issues, it's easy to come up with hypotheses, but extremely difficult to actually test them.
Re:This is what I HATE most about FOSS
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GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A list of ingredients is not the same as a recipe, any more than a list of machine code is the same as source code. A recipe tells you how to create something, whereas a list of ingredients just tells you what it is.
What is the freedom supposedly being violated if you choose to eat at a restaurant where the staff refuse to give out a recipe along with the food? If you demand recipes, what's stopping you eating somewhere else, or even preparing your own food? Nobody's forcing you to do anything or preventing you doing anything.
Re:This is what I HATE most about FOSS
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You go to a restaurant for dinner, and get something you cannot identify. When you ask what this is, you get the answer 'food'. Does it violate your freedom, when you are asked to eat or pay for something you don't know?
Of course not. My freedom would be violated if, for example, someone forced me to eat it. If I choose to eat there, and then find the food and/or service is of poor quality, I'm free not to eat the food, not to go there again and indeed to refuse to pay the bill. There is absolutely no violation of freedom involved in your example.
Re:This is what I HATE most about FOSS
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GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 2, Informative
What I find so exasperating about every GPL vs. BSD debate is that each one seems to break down into a ridiculous argument about the meaning of the word "freedom".
Well, you can blame Stallman for that. He's the one who insists that the issue of source code distribution is somehow a matter of freedom. Hardly anybody who hasn't already accepted Stallman's ideology would think of it that way. I mean, if you go to a restaurant for dinner, do you complain of your freedom being violated if you're not given the recipe for what you're served? The whole idea is ridiculous.
Re:"consumer products" only
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The interesting part of it is that if you can reliably control what is run on the hardware, the costs can be transferred from the buyer/user of the hardware to others. This means the hardware can potentailly be sold at a lower price than more open hardware, allowing it to gain a competitive advantage if the reduction in functionality is smaller, in monetary terms, than the reduction in the price. If this is the case, both the buyer and the seller can also be said to be better off.
Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft
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Yes, that's a better way of putting it. The key is it's an exchange, even if typically a very uneven one.
Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft
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GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you really wanted an open source OS that you could steal code from look at BSD.
If someone gives you something, you're not stealing from them. People who use BSD-like licences are giving away their work, usually because they want to maximise the amount of value others get from it. People who use the GPL are not giving away their work, they're making an agreement to exchange it for the work of others. The two objectives are simply different. Why is this so hard for some GPL advocates to understand?
Freedom of speech is right up there with the freedom not to be raped. Posting photos is free speech.
Freedom of speech doesn't grant the right to violate other rights. Incitement to violence, for example, is not included in free speech, and neither is defamatory speech, speech that violates privacy, etc.
The simple issue here is there are two rights conflicting, and one has to win, either privacy or free speech. I'd argue individual privacy is more important than the right of a corporation to publish photos of people in their homes, taken without permission and with addresses identified. You disagree. If the relevant courts, in this case the US courts, rule these photo vans violate privacy rights, then their activities can be curtailed by law. Even if they're not viewed as violating privacy in the USA, if Google try them here in Europe, the answer could be different, because there are often differences in views of fundamental rights between the USA and Europe.
Clearly my example isn't a real case. It illustrates a principle: freedom is more important than the ability of the majority to impose their will.
Not really. You just came up with an absurd example of majority rule, which does not remotely reflect the way majority rule works in practice in Western democracies, and tried to claim that because the absurd example is rejected, that majority rule must in principle be rejected too. It isn't a very convincing argument.
Also, I think privacy has very low value, but freedom has very high value.
Your view isn't the norm in Western societies, where privacy is typically considered a fundamental right, just like freedom of speech. As a result, behaviour that is judged to violate privacy rights will often be banned or curtailed. You may not like it, but that's the way it is.
Democracy does not necessarily mean granting absolute power to a 51% majority. There is generally a distinction between fundamental law, defined for example by a constitution and treaty obligations, and ordinary law, which is subject to change by legislative majorities.
As an example, all members of the Council of Europe must accept the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which defines basic rights and freedoms the state is obligated to protect. A national parliament cannot pass laws that violate the ECHR, without the government of that country first withdrawing from the Council of Europe.
Procedures for constitutional change typically involve much more than a simple legislative majority too. Examples include referenda with specific participation requiremnts and/or supermajorities, legislative approval before and after a general election, etc. Ultimately, however, these all depend on the democratic will of the population. Non-Western societies, for instance, often have very different ideas of fundamental rights to Western societies, and so democracy has different results in such countries.
Your example is, I would say, a case of reductio ad absurdum. The right of an advertising firm to go round photographing people without their consent, and to post those photographs to a website, with addresses linked, has to be balanced against the right of individuals to privacy in their own homes. It is not a clear-cut case, and certainly not a basic human right, like the right not to be raped.
I'm not bitching, I'm merely trying to get the point across that we haven't embraced this relatively new 64-bit technology in the desktop market. Now microsoft are trying to look past the 64-bit advantage and go to a multicore operating system.
It just seems stupid to me.
The issue of 32-bit versus 64-bit is more or less irrelevant. Hardware is moving from 32-bit to 64-bit CPUs, and over time, as driver support improves, users will move to 64-bit versions of Windows. All PC CPUs, however, are going to increasingly be multi-core, whether 32-bit or 64-bit, and that's where the performance improvements will come from.
The difference between 32-bit and 64-bit is essentially the amount of virtual address space available to applications. It doesn't necessarily make things faster. It can offer some performance advantages if the address space is getting too crowded, but it can also degrade performance in some cases, because addresses take up twice as much space, so there's more memory pressure.
I pose a follow up question then, what would be faster? 2 dual-core cpu's in a computer system running at 32-bit (hardware, OS and programs), or a single core computer system running (hardware, OS and programs) using 64-bit?
This is easy. All things being equal, unless the task is completely serial, two 32-bit cores will be faster than one 64-bit core, by about the same degree that they're faster than one 32-bit core. If the task is completely serial, they'll be about the same speed, and about the same speed as a single 32-bit core.
The exception would be software that has to jump through a lot of hoops managing memory, because 2-3GB of address space isn't enough, but that applies to only a small number of things today, and the two 32-bit cores might still be faster. On the other side, avoiding all of those hoops would make the software simpler, potentially reducing the number of bugs.
Sorry, Windows NT has never run on the '286, or any other x86 chip less than the '386, because it requires a flat 32-bit address space, or 64-bit since 2001 or so, when the Itanium version of Windows 2000 was released.
The 'NT' name supposedly comes from the fact that the original target CPU was the Intel i860, although this was later changed to MIPS. The i860 simulator used by Microsoft for early testing was code-named the 'N-Ten' (probably because 860 is 86 times 10), and that's where 'NT' came from. The 'New Technology' name was a backronym, but not for anything related to the '286.
that's because nt and 2000 and all later NT based windows OS' were designed properly. win95/98/me was a continuation of windows 3.1 which did not separate application memory space. in other words, when you ran an application and it attempted to write to memory other than what it allocated, it was a crap shoot if the system would hang or if the program would GPF.
It's not actually a question of being designed properly or not, it's a matter of what hardware the software was designed for. MS-DOS and the original versions of Windows were designed for 8088/8086-based PCs, and if you're familiar with the x86 line, you'll know the 8086 didn't support memory protection. The '286 added a convoluted memory protection scheme, but it wasn't until the '386 that memory protection in the modern sense, with a flat address space, was available on the x86.
Support for memory protection was gradually added to Windows 2.x, 3.x and 9x, as the '386 (and earlier the '286) gained market acceptance, so that Windows 9x was not quite like you're suggesting. At the end of the day, however, the lack of memory protection on the original hardware made it difficult to add it without breaking compatibility, and the architects of Windows 3.x/9x put compatibility and performance ahead of taking advantage of hardware improvements. This was arguably what the market wanted, so the right choice.
Windows NT solved the legacy problem to some extent by using a virtual machine, but this led to 16-bit software running much more slowly under NT than under Windows 3.x/9x, and also dramatically reduced NT's compatibility with it. NT only really caught on, in the form of XP, after 16-bit software had ceased to be important.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people ranting about how Vista isn't as good as XP are probably the same ones who were ranting about how XP wasn't as good as 2000. In reality, XP was better than 2000, and has almost completely replaced it now. Vista is better than XP, and in a few years will probably have largely displaced it too.
What's artificial about it? Users have different requirements, and are willing to pay different amounts, so can naturally be grouped into different segments. Targeting different products at the different segments, with appropriate prices, will lead to greater economic efficiency. Any competent manager would use this approach where possible.
If a market is a natural monopoly, trying to force it to operate as a competitive one isn't generally a good idea. The issues with efficiency (in the economic sense, which is a very specialised usage) can be managed through regulation and taxation, and won't necessarily be solved by forcing competition. The supernormal profit earned by monopolies isn't necessarily bad either, if it's used to fund research that drives technological progress, which is the basis of economic growth in the long run. As an example, consider all of the innovation from Bell Labs, which was part of the AT&T telecoms monopoly.
The idea that indexing content for searching is something Google (or Apple) came up with before Microsoft is just flat wrong. Microsoft had it years before Google or Apple, but just didn't provide a good user interface for it.
The question of whether the GPL would be preferable to the BSDL in the long run depends on how the benefits of relatively larger increases in P over time, derived through persuading some who would otherwise close their work to open it, compare with the losses incurred by not allowing P to be combined with C.
What do you mean by 'Freedom', other than making your sharing conditional on an agreement by those you share with to share in return? As I said before, it need not be individual: your requirement may be that they share with a community you belong to, such as the 'Free Software community'. This isn't an issue of freedom in any normal sense of the word, i.e. nobody is being forced to do anything against their will, or prevented exercising their fundamental rights.This is another example of why it's important to ensure that corporations aren't allowed to collect and store huge amounts of data about individuals. The fact that they can analyse it in some way or another is irrelevant if privacy is respected in the first place.
What is the freedom supposedly being violated if you choose to eat at a restaurant where the staff refuse to give out a recipe along with the food? If you demand recipes, what's stopping you eating somewhere else, or even preparing your own food? Nobody's forcing you to do anything or preventing you doing anything.
The interesting part of it is that if you can reliably control what is run on the hardware, the costs can be transferred from the buyer/user of the hardware to others. This means the hardware can potentailly be sold at a lower price than more open hardware, allowing it to gain a competitive advantage if the reduction in functionality is smaller, in monetary terms, than the reduction in the price. If this is the case, both the buyer and the seller can also be said to be better off.
Yes, that's a better way of putting it. The key is it's an exchange, even if typically a very uneven one.
The simple issue here is there are two rights conflicting, and one has to win, either privacy or free speech. I'd argue individual privacy is more important than the right of a corporation to publish photos of people in their homes, taken without permission and with addresses identified. You disagree. If the relevant courts, in this case the US courts, rule these photo vans violate privacy rights, then their activities can be curtailed by law. Even if they're not viewed as violating privacy in the USA, if Google try them here in Europe, the answer could be different, because there are often differences in views of fundamental rights between the USA and Europe.
Not really. You just came up with an absurd example of majority rule, which does not remotely reflect the way majority rule works in practice in Western democracies, and tried to claim that because the absurd example is rejected, that majority rule must in principle be rejected too. It isn't a very convincing argument. Your view isn't the norm in Western societies, where privacy is typically considered a fundamental right, just like freedom of speech. As a result, behaviour that is judged to violate privacy rights will often be banned or curtailed. You may not like it, but that's the way it is.As an example, all members of the Council of Europe must accept the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which defines basic rights and freedoms the state is obligated to protect. A national parliament cannot pass laws that violate the ECHR, without the government of that country first withdrawing from the Council of Europe.
Procedures for constitutional change typically involve much more than a simple legislative majority too. Examples include referenda with specific participation requiremnts and/or supermajorities, legislative approval before and after a general election, etc. Ultimately, however, these all depend on the democratic will of the population. Non-Western societies, for instance, often have very different ideas of fundamental rights to Western societies, and so democracy has different results in such countries.
Your example is, I would say, a case of reductio ad absurdum. The right of an advertising firm to go round photographing people without their consent, and to post those photographs to a website, with addresses linked, has to be balanced against the right of individuals to privacy in their own homes. It is not a clear-cut case, and certainly not a basic human right, like the right not to be raped.
The difference between 32-bit and 64-bit is essentially the amount of virtual address space available to applications. It doesn't necessarily make things faster. It can offer some performance advantages if the address space is getting too crowded, but it can also degrade performance in some cases, because addresses take up twice as much space, so there's more memory pressure.
This is easy. All things being equal, unless the task is completely serial, two 32-bit cores will be faster than one 64-bit core, by about the same degree that they're faster than one 32-bit core. If the task is completely serial, they'll be about the same speed, and about the same speed as a single 32-bit core.The exception would be software that has to jump through a lot of hoops managing memory, because 2-3GB of address space isn't enough, but that applies to only a small number of things today, and the two 32-bit cores might still be faster. On the other side, avoiding all of those hoops would make the software simpler, potentially reducing the number of bugs.
The 'NT' name supposedly comes from the fact that the original target CPU was the Intel i860, although this was later changed to MIPS. The i860 simulator used by Microsoft for early testing was code-named the 'N-Ten' (probably because 860 is 86 times 10), and that's where 'NT' came from. The 'New Technology' name was a backronym, but not for anything related to the '286.
Support for memory protection was gradually added to Windows 2.x, 3.x and 9x, as the '386 (and earlier the '286) gained market acceptance, so that Windows 9x was not quite like you're suggesting. At the end of the day, however, the lack of memory protection on the original hardware made it difficult to add it without breaking compatibility, and the architects of Windows 3.x/9x put compatibility and performance ahead of taking advantage of hardware improvements. This was arguably what the market wanted, so the right choice.
Windows NT solved the legacy problem to some extent by using a virtual machine, but this led to 16-bit software running much more slowly under NT than under Windows 3.x/9x, and also dramatically reduced NT's compatibility with it. NT only really caught on, in the form of XP, after 16-bit software had ceased to be important.