Is it okay to trade mp3s on Napster simply because Metallica is rich?
Very few people exchange (not trade) Metallica mp3's. The fuss the band is making is just a marketing stunt - necessary, because their music has been so pathetic for the last decade or so.
This translates to: a network that allows totally anonymous warez, which in reality has nothing to do with Free speech.
The distinction that exists in law between speech and information and their distribution is somewhat arbitrary.If I read a hex dump of a copyrighted program (or mp3, whatever) out aloud in front of someone and they typed it into their computer, re-constructing the file, would that be illegal copying, or would it be free speech?
Copyright law must provider for a broader meaning of "fair use" in order to avoid conflicts with free speech. A distribution should be considered a copyright violation should only in case of for-profit distribution of the copyrighted works.
if they at least proved again that you can sell anything to a bunch of technology-illiterate journalist freaks and dilbertian IT managers as long as you sweeten it with enough buzzwords and slam it in their face at the right time.
That gives us hard working people some hope for pulling off such a thing at some point as well.;-)
...At which point, you walk out the door and buy a hammer elsewhere.
If you stick with this as an analogy, there are no hammers available on different terms. You'll have to build your own. Or, you'll have to wait for a bold hammer manufacturer to step forward and just sell a "hammer" for a reasonable price and without a license, and then hope that he'll survive the first round of lawsuits from people who smashed their fingernails...
But there is no access to the software if the "I Agree" button is not clicked or if the software package is unopened.
Well, let someone who has no interest in using the software do it. They will waive their rights, you will use the software and keep the rights. Perhaps you can get your trained cat to press the mouse button or the Enter key.
Since software vendors can effectively avoid any liabilty with regard to their products - they go as far as denying suitability for a particular purpose in their licenses - this means that there's no warranty for the customer. In other words, you get the software, but you can't be sure about what it does.
I always thought that shrink-wrap licenses are a joke, designed to scare away uneducated customers from enforcing their consumer rights. That's how it works in Europe (even though the licenses are very common here as well - SuSE Linux 6.4 has a seal on the CD case that says "by breaking this seal you accept the non-liability statement printed on the cover").
It seems that there is plenty of room for a new software industry that produces reliable code and has the guts to say so. Would you buy a car that says in the manual "the manufacturer doesn't guarantee the suitability for driving"?
Java is fast enough for many things, but many implementations are still slow (e.g. FreeBSD's stock JDK 1.1.8), especially at tasks for which other languages have extremely fast built-in functions (while for a Java solution, Java code has to be written). For example, try to sort a string array quickly in Java (not uncommon for text processing such as for HTML) and then compare with perl's extremely fast and elegant sort() function. Also, Java's strings are Unicode strings, so they occupy twice as much memory as Perl strings (interesting if you're caching lots of stuff and for some reason don't want to store everything as byte[] - what a kludge).
The builtins (esp. those of PHP3) also save you a lot of typing. The great advantage of Java Servlets (over mod_perl and PHP3) at this point is, that it's so easy to share data among Servlet threads, so they are much more memory-efficient if used correctly.
Konqueror may be an excellent browser (I've yet to see a recent version), but the KDE project's parts are very dependent on each other, so there is only a small chance of getting an alternative standalone browser from it. You'll have to swallow the whole bulk of KDE (or a large part of it) in order to be able to use Konqueror at all.
This is very bad and it violates the Unix tradition of having many powerful, independent tools. Then again, so does Emacs....
The future language of the Internet will probably be a heavily acronym-based derivative of (American) English. The list of frequently used acronyms is already very long and the idea mixes well with the use of buzz-words and technical terms like mp3, html etc.
... that some bands produce so much shite these days that the only way they can sell albums at all is by having their label spend huge amounts of money on advertising. Incidentally, some of them sued Napster.
I'm so tired of reading how making a 1:1 digital copy of something is theft of that piece of information. It isn't. Robbery has nothing to do with it either - the proper analogy would be someone making a 1:1 "copy" of my property/home/whatever. Fine, the only problem I'd have with that would be privacy concerns, but we're talking about information that was made public voluntarily.
The sensible thing to do would be to turn his back on that country he lives in, since there it seems to be perfectly normal to take the 1st Amendment Rights away from someone after he has served his time in prison. He could speak freely in other countries of the world.
Just watch TV for a couple of hours and count all killings, beatings and stabbings. I've done it and they're much more frequent than you might think (it varies with what you watch, of course). In most of the modern "action" movies there are more than 30 such events per hour and that's nothing compared to your average Schwarzenegger etc. film.
Even if 200.000 was an exaggeration, it wouldn't make much of a difference if 20.000 was closer to the truth. It's enough to make killings, beatings and stabbings a common sight for children.
I must admit that I got bored while reading the first page of the GA-Source review, so I only had a quick look at the second. I've read that thoroughly as well now, and I'm not impressed. I played Elite something like 15 years ago and I would have expected something better than 1) improved graphics and 2) multi-player mode as the main differences from Elite, especially with all the hype. The NASA guys were impressed with the HUD, eh? Wow...
I don't mean to offend or provocate, but there simply isn't much that is original in this game. Perhaps the AI is better than I can imagine from reading the review, or maybe the review is just badly written, but... I see so much hype about "newtonian physics", "dynamic economy" and "cool HUD" that it makes me wonder whether there is anything interesting in that game at all, because those things certainly aren't. I hope the gameplay is good.
Why are bands and artists who have only produced junk in the last few years always the first to sue? Paul McCartney and Metallica both haven't released anything worthwhile in years, yet they call for bans. They should hope that someone still listens to their stuff, not try to prohibit it. Desperate old fools.
You complain about stupid arguments that are being repeated over and over again, but you do exactly the same thing buy arguing that copying digital information is the same as stealing it. To "steal" means to "take away", not "copy". The information/music/whatever isn't lost for the legitimate owner. At least you underline your weak points with strong language, a sure sign of lack of confidence in your thoughts. How honest.
X servers for other OS's don't prove anything (after all they are using the built-in network transparency of X). Let's take a real world example: remote viewing of NT sessions. The NT GDI was not written with network transparency in mind. So if it is, as you claim, " very simple" to add it later, why are all the solutions so clunky? VNC, PC Anywhere and Citrix don't even come close to the smoothness of X.
X servers for other OSes just implement the X protocol, which is fine for that sole purpose (network transparency), but not for a local display. The solutions which you claim to be clunky just implement a simpler protocol, but they do not compete in the local display arena anyway. The simple protocols have other advantages - you can use them with very little memory (my DOSVNC viewer fits in a 400KB disk space comfortably, with all necessary drivers and runs with ~1MB RAM), so they trade off speed for size and stability (don't tell me how stable X is - I've had enough X crashes, on workstations and even NCD X terminals).
The only way to get more efficient is to move the display system into the kernel (ala Winxx and WinNT). It would save you context switches.
No, there are many ways to implement more efficient protocols for local displays than the X protocol, which is "optimized" for network transport and architecture-independent. Then again, drivers are a kernel issue, so the display system belongs there anyway.
The essential questions are:
Is the built-in network transparency of X necessary? Answer: no, it can be added later, basing the whole design on network transparency makes sense only for environments where network transparency is actually used most of the time (and that excludes most PCs/workstations these days), in all other cases it isn't worth the performance degradation and design complexity.
Is X flexible enough to support modern hardware's capabilities without a messy heap of extensions that aren't accessible to existing programs? No, it isn't - e.g. I can't even switch the bitmap depth of the display without restarting all applications (this could have been fixed a long time ago, but for various reasons it hasn't been considered worth it, I suppose - the visuals would have to be "emulated" using quantization, dithering etc., since older applications can't be told that the depth has changed).
If X was stable and efficient, the disadvantages could be tolerated, but unfortunately it is neither. It's one of the major causes for the slow adoption of Unix/Linux in the desktop market. It's time to think about a new design, it can't be too difficult (look at BeOS) and X servers for other display systems are easy to write, so you could still use your favourite X programs, like xfontsel (blergh).
MIT-SHM is useful for transferring bitmaps, but only programs that need to do this quickly bother to use it. Most applications transfer their icons etc. without it. It isn't used for common tasks such as text output or mouse input (well, last time I checked).
Calling X an extensible framework is a bad excuse for holding on to a design that is too limited from the beginning (if it's so extensible, where's the antialiased truetype font support that has been available for so many other GUI frameworks for such a long time? Perhaps no applications would support an extension?).
X required in excess of 16MB on 1MB video cards and it wastes a lot of memory in case programs try to use pointless "optimizations" like loading pixmaps into server memory because it's the fastest way to move them on your *local* display (pointless, because a better protocol could have avoided this waste).
As others have pointed out, the userspace argument isn't true. I have to add that:
framebuffer-based apps don't necessarily miss out on multihead, truetype, modular driver and OpenGL support. Especially OpenGL and Truetype are already available.
It has advantages to have a GUI toolkit that is display driver agnostic. QT apps will compile for both X and the frame buffer device. The claim that you can't have many GUI toolkits on the framebuffer device is also simply wrong - you just need to port the toolkits or use an X server or X protocol proxy on the framebuffer device.
It is a common misconception that network transparency must be built in the display server/driver. It's very simple to add it later, as the X servers for other OSes prove, and much more efficient. Why do X applications need to convert all GUI-API calls to a protocol suitable for network transport, send the data over a Unix domain socket and convert it back to internal API calls for the X server? This is a great waste of resources and absolutely unnecessary.
X has very bad limitations that may be fixed only using X protocol extensions (which have the drawback of not being supported by existing software)
You're right in that no GUI is perfect for everyone. However, we're far from perfect anyway, and many GUIs designs have elements that are so broken, incomprehensible and obscure that they are bad for everyone. For example, noone benefits from menu entries that don't do anything but aren't disabled (greyed out, whatever), or keyboard shortcuts that noone else has used before.
Perfection is an admirable goal, but let's reach the point where such mistakes are eliminated first.
I wonder how far away the "don't breathe! air contains toxic gasses" and "warning! living might result in death by aging" warning labels are. What a wimpy society. We need information, such as where the closest nuclear plants are, what the air pollution is like in a certain area etc., so we can decide ourselves whether we want to take risks, but we don't need the patronizing warning labels for idiots which have as their sole purpose to protect the corporations from indemnification.
It seems to me that the stuff that is missing can be summed up as:
100% Compatibility with Microsoft's proprietary file formats (Excel, Office, Windows Media Player). Star Office is getting there (except for the Media Player).
Support from the software vendors (games etc.) who only care about Windows.
There are also minor cosmetic issues, such as that the GUI is 4-5 years behind Windows (no antialiased fonts and all that), but those aren't necessities.
If the 4.86GB laptop drive is the same as the one in my laptop (IBM DBCA-24860, I think), then expect this to make so much noise that you'll want to smash it to pieces.:-) I can't stand the noise that drive makes, it's much louder than modern 3.5" drives and the fact that the laptop's thin plastic case (HP Omnibook 4150) doesn't isolate noise well doesn't help either...
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Very few people exchange (not trade) Metallica mp3's. The fuss the band is making is just a marketing stunt - necessary, because their music has been so pathetic for the last decade or so.
The distinction that exists in law between speech and information and their distribution is somewhat arbitrary.If I read a hex dump of a copyrighted program (or mp3, whatever) out aloud in front of someone and they typed it into their computer, re-constructing the file, would that be illegal copying, or would it be free speech?
Copyright law must provider for a broader meaning of "fair use" in order to avoid conflicts with free speech. A distribution should be considered a copyright violation should only in case of for-profit distribution of the copyrighted works.
That gives us hard working people some hope for pulling off such a thing at some point as well. ;-)
If you stick with this as an analogy, there are no hammers available on different terms. You'll have to build your own. Or, you'll have to wait for a bold hammer manufacturer to step forward and just sell a "hammer" for a reasonable price and without a license, and then hope that he'll survive the first round of lawsuits from people who smashed their fingernails...
Well, let someone who has no interest in using the software do it. They will waive their rights, you will use the software and keep the rights. Perhaps you can get your trained cat to press the mouse button or the Enter key.
I always thought that shrink-wrap licenses are a joke, designed to scare away uneducated customers from enforcing their consumer rights. That's how it works in Europe (even though the licenses are very common here as well - SuSE Linux 6.4 has a seal on the CD case that says "by breaking this seal you accept the non-liability statement printed on the cover").
It seems that there is plenty of room for a new software industry that produces reliable code and has the guts to say so. Would you buy a car that says in the manual "the manufacturer doesn't guarantee the suitability for driving"?
The builtins (esp. those of PHP3) also save you a lot of typing. The great advantage of Java Servlets (over mod_perl and PHP3) at this point is, that it's so easy to share data among Servlet threads, so they are much more memory-efficient if used correctly.
This is very bad and it violates the Unix tradition of having many powerful, independent tools. Then again, so does Emacs....
The future language of the Internet will probably be a heavily acronym-based derivative of (American) English. The list of frequently used acronyms is already very long and the idea mixes well with the use of buzz-words and technical terms like mp3, html etc.
... that some bands produce so much shite these days that the only way they can sell albums at all is by having their label spend huge amounts of money on advertising. Incidentally, some of them sued Napster.
The sensible thing to do would be to turn his back on that country he lives in, since there it seems to be perfectly normal to take the 1st Amendment Rights away from someone after he has served his time in prison. He could speak freely in other countries of the world.
Even if 200.000 was an exaggeration, it wouldn't make much of a difference if 20.000 was closer to the truth. It's enough to make killings, beatings and stabbings a common sight for children.
I don't mean to offend or provocate, but there simply isn't much that is original in this game. Perhaps the AI is better than I can imagine from reading the review, or maybe the review is just badly written, but ... I see so much hype about "newtonian physics", "dynamic economy" and "cool HUD" that it makes me wonder whether there is anything interesting in that game at all, because those things certainly aren't. I hope the gameplay is good.
The graphics of "Terminus" look nice, although it seems to be yet another uninspiring space shooter.
Why are bands and artists who have only produced junk in the last few years always the first to sue? Paul McCartney and Metallica both haven't released anything worthwhile in years, yet they call for bans. They should hope that someone still listens to their stuff, not try to prohibit it. Desperate old fools.
Oh, it's so funny. The same company that (among others) initiated the DeCSS fiasco, is shooting its own knee by releasing a DVD piracy tool.
You complain about stupid arguments that are being repeated over and over again, but you do exactly the same thing buy arguing that copying digital information is the same as stealing it. To "steal" means to "take away", not "copy". The information/music/whatever isn't lost for the legitimate owner. At least you underline your weak points with strong language, a sure sign of lack of confidence in your thoughts. How honest.
The essential questions are:
- Is the built-in network transparency of X necessary? Answer: no, it can be added later, basing the whole design on network transparency makes sense only for environments where network transparency is actually used most of the time (and that excludes most PCs/workstations these days), in all other cases it isn't worth the performance degradation and design complexity.
- Is X flexible enough to support modern hardware's capabilities without a messy heap of extensions that aren't accessible to existing programs? No, it isn't - e.g. I can't even switch the bitmap depth of the display without restarting all applications (this could have been fixed a long time ago, but for various reasons it hasn't been considered worth it, I suppose - the visuals would have to be "emulated" using quantization, dithering etc., since older applications can't be told that the depth has changed).
If X was stable and efficient, the disadvantages could be tolerated, but unfortunately it is neither. It's one of the major causes for the slow adoption of Unix/Linux in the desktop market. It's time to think about a new design, it can't be too difficult (look at BeOS) and X servers for other display systems are easy to write, so you could still use your favourite X programs, like xfontsel (blergh).Calling X an extensible framework is a bad excuse for holding on to a design that is too limited from the beginning (if it's so extensible, where's the antialiased truetype font support that has been available for so many other GUI frameworks for such a long time? Perhaps no applications would support an extension?).
X required in excess of 16MB on 1MB video cards and it wastes a lot of memory in case programs try to use pointless "optimizations" like loading pixmaps into server memory because it's the fastest way to move them on your *local* display (pointless, because a better protocol could have avoided this waste).
Perfection is an admirable goal, but let's reach the point where such mistakes are eliminated first.
I wonder how far away the "don't breathe! air contains toxic gasses" and "warning! living might result in death by aging" warning labels are. What a wimpy society. We need information, such as where the closest nuclear plants are, what the air pollution is like in a certain area etc., so we can decide ourselves whether we want to take risks, but we don't need the patronizing warning labels for idiots which have as their sole purpose to protect the corporations from indemnification.
There are also minor cosmetic issues, such as that the GUI is 4-5 years behind Windows (no antialiased fonts and all that), but those aren't necessities.
If the 4.86GB laptop drive is the same as the one in my laptop (IBM DBCA-24860, I think), then expect this to make so much noise that you'll want to smash it to pieces. :-) I can't stand the noise that drive makes, it's much louder than modern 3.5" drives and the fact that the laptop's thin plastic case (HP Omnibook 4150) doesn't isolate noise well doesn't help either...