Before Android and iOS, those "millions and millions of people" were using regular cellphones without "app stores" or touch screens. Nobody cared about app stores a decade ago, when even the idea of putting a camera on a phone would lead to "Why? What for? But I already have a camera!"
If some new sort of smartphone could introduce a new killer feature, like (for instance) the ability to run all desktop PC software, then that might well leave Android and iOS behind, just as the non-smart cellphones have been left behind. That is, PC compatibility could become a must-have feature like "app stores", "touch screens" or "cameras".
Then again, PC compatibility might be a genuinely unimportant feature for a cellphone. Like WAP or IrDA.
The fact is, we just don't know. Nobody has made a PC compatible cellphone... yet. I personally think it would be pretty useful. I wouldn't need to carry a laptop - I would have a tiny x86/Windows netbook in my pocket. One less heavy thing to lug around... and one that gives me access to an even larger (and potentially more useful) app ecosystem than iOS/Android.
Actually I work at a university, in a CS department.
It would seem unfair to require students to buy software or computers simply in order to get their degree. Any policy that indirectly required this would attract complaints, and in my view those complaints should be upheld.
Therefore, our labs are open all day, and there is plenty of time between lectures and teaching lab sessions to use them. Not only that, we do have two ways that students can "borrow" software exactly like a library book. Firstly, they can connect via rdesktop to a terminal server and use the software there. This is useful when the labs are closed. Secondly, they can install some programs locally, and then access the floating licence server via VPN. We provide free copies of software that can be used in this way.
Maybe your university didn't work like this, but it could and should have done.
But you did have other choices, as you say. You could have used the software in labs if you didn't want to buy it. Even today, degree courses do not even expect you to have your own computer, let alone one that can run the course software.
It's just like course textbooks. They're typically expensive. But if you don't want to buy them, you can find them in the library.
I think you are overcomplicating things that are actually quite simple.
You are right, our principles are very different. Your principle seems to come from your belief that copyright "is unjust and damaging to creativity and culture". This is debatable. Furthermore, you appear to think that if you disagree "with what [a] licence represents and says", then you have the right to ignore it and use the software anyway.
As it happens I do think that copyright terms are too long and agree with reform. But the question of whether publishers and authors are keeping their side of the copyright bargain is completely separate from the question of whether bargains should be respected. If you do not like a particular software licence, then don't use the software!
I wondered if this might be the case, but I didn't want to jump to a conclusion. If we cannot even agree that GPL violations are wrong ("just doing math"), then there can be no agreement at all.
You say I'm misrepresenting the argument, but you appear to be restating exactly what I said, as we are both talking about a situation where copies of creative works are (effectively) free. Furthermore, we also agree that financing creativity is important.
But there is clearly still some disagreement here. Let me try to find out what it is. Do you agree with the idea of software licencing, i.e. that the right to use a particular program is dependent on possessing a valid licence for it?
If so, then consider an authorised copy of a CD, a DVD or a Bluray disc as a copy that includes a valid licence. An unauthorised copy may be bit-for-bit identical, but it is not the same, as there is a moral difference - the licence is missing. It does not carry the approval of the publisher and the author.
I believe that selling licences, sometimes (but not necessarily) in combination with physical copies, is a perfectly valid way to finance creativity. Sometimes it is the only one available, or at least the only one that makes sense. It is not as if Adobe can fund Photoshop development by going on tour, selling some T-shirts, or even putting a Paypal tip jar on their website. Wouldn't you agree?
I completely disagree. I think this is a matter of principle, and you're making an arbitrary distinction between two situations which are very similar, in which the rights of the author and publisher are not being respected.
The point is that the value of information is not the same as the cost of copying it.
That's something that Van Gogh understood, but piracy advocates choose not to. I thought the quotation illustrated this quite nicely, since it is all about the value of intellectual property. The paint and canvas only became valuable when Van Gogh added his IP. And yet, according to piracy advocates, that IP is just as worthless as any other IP, whether it's run out of copyright (as it now has) or whether it was painted yesterday.
"~1% of losses," you say? Doesn't this rather depend on the number of people who are pirating?
I notice that your Ebay business depends on most of your customers being honest. If they all behaved like the bad customer you mentioned, then you wouldn't have made $5000. It would be a big problem for you if all your customers suddenly believed that honesty wasn't important.
If piracy really is at "~1%", then this is only because ~99% of customers are still basically honest.
In another reply to my post, someone else says that
You know, there are a lot of other types of "worth", not just monetary.
They're right... but I never said otherwise. What I am talking about is licence violations in general, not just those involving money.
If the source code licence says you have to pay Microsoft $1 for every copy you sell, and then you don't bother, then that's a licence violation.
If the source code licence says that your code has to be released under the GPL, and then you just sell binaries and don't give anyone the source, then that's also a licence violation.
So you see, these are both actually the same situation, in that part of the licence has simply been ignored. I don't see what "tremendously long copyright lengths" have to do with anything here.
I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint.
-- Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
Van Gogh's famous prediction was correct, if somewhat arrogant, since his pictures became extremely valuable after his death.
But something has changed, and now we are told that the pictures are in fact worth much less than the cost of the materials. They are, after all, just information, and according to piracy advocates, the cost of producing the information is limited to the cost of copying it. Never mind the cost of R&D, never mind the time spent getting the artwork just right.. it's not "stuff", it's just information, and if you can copy it in a second, then that's all it's worth.
Seems like something of a backward step to me. And what's more, we all know it. We know that piracy is wrong. There is outcry at every GPL violation because someone else's work has been appropriated, and they get nothing for all the time they put into making it. If we were consistent, we'd be equally angry at every commercial licence violation, instead of making excuses.
Indeed, hardly unusual. At the very beginning of opencores.org, which was certainly around a decade ago, there was a project of this sort. "ORsoc" ran Linux. The CPU was an Opencores design named OR1200, with a completely custom instruction set and a fork of GCC/glibc to support it. Everything was open source: the peripherals, the CPU, the video drivers, even the USB and Ethernet cores.
That SoC worked on FPGAs, but there were also ASICs, and I think it even turned up in some commercial products.
I suspect that this project is probably reusing quite a few components from Opencores. That Wishbone bus looks awfully familiar...
Wouldn't it be even more reasonable to require web browsers to use the sort of restricted cookie settings that you personally use? As in "block by default". The EU already demonstrated that it can force major browser makers to do weirder things. If IE starts blocking third-party cookies and demanding confirmation for first-party cookies, then every other browser will be able to do the same thing too, because websites will quickly adapt to the new way.
Going after websites is stupid because the law is unenforceable, and in any case only applies to websites in one part of the world. Security (and privacy) should be a default on the client side first. The opt-in should be within the browser.
It's a question of definition. To me, a roguelike gives you as long as you want to make a move, and then allows you to specify exactly what you want to do. It's therefore neither real-time nor multiplayer. But clearly other definitions exist if (as some claim) Diablo is a roguelike.
Pause isn't the same as turn-based at all. In a real roguelike, you get infinite time to consider your next move. And then you press a key and get exactly the move you wanted. This is the main reason why you can't have a multiplayer roguelike.
More popular, so they'd passed through more hands...
...and yet the discs are also newer, so they've passed through fewer hands...
...and perhaps less commonly rented, so fewer copies are available and a single copy goes to more places...
...and yet fewer people own players, so fewer people have rented them anyway.
Basically, who knows? Only the rental companies have data like this. If one disc had failed on me, then that would seem unlucky, but two or more suggests something a little more significant which is surely worth mentioning in a discussion about why BD isn't as successful as DVD. Nothing like this ever happend with DVD, not even once. If there's an error on a DVD disc, which is rare, I can just skip past it.
I assume that the discs must have been damaged by an earlier customer. They appeared to have both scratches and smudges; not enough to prevent the movie playing at all, but enough to stop it after (case 1) 30 minutes and (case 2) 75 minutes.
Poor-quality player software may have made it more difficult to recover from the errors once playback had been disrupted. Power-cycling the device did allow a third movie to start playing when previously it crashed after the trailers.
Maybe you treat your discs better than most people.
I have rented about ten BDs from Lovefilm and three had playback problems. Two failed in the middle of the movie and it was impossible to continue. The other took several attempts to get going*.
I compare this to the 20+ DVDs I have rented from the same place, all of which worked perfectly, and I can only conclude that for whatever reason, BDs are not as robust as DVDs.
I am now hesitant to rent BDs because of these bad experiences. A 20% failure rate is unacceptably high for entertainment technology that should "just work".
Plus, I have reservations about the Internet-connectivity on these discs. I buy a disc because I want the content forever. Is that content really forever if I have to download it from Sony each time I want to watch it? Can they use the connectivity to violate my privacy?
My Bluray player has never been connected to the Internet. It's optional. If you need firmware updates you can put them on CD-R or on a USB stick.
Other than that, you are spot on.
My big gripe with Bluray is that the discs are so fragile. I've received a few from the Lovefilm rental service that have stopped working halfway through the movie, apparently due to disc damage. This has never happened with a rented DVD, or with a BD that I own. And yet the discs are handled in exactly the same way. It seems BD is much more sensitive to scratches.
So these days I mostly rent DVDs, because I know that BDs are risky, and there's a good chance that a BD that comes through the post will not play properly. A shame, because renting a BD costs the same as a DVD, and if the things worked properly, I'd get much higher quality for the same price.
There's more than one sort of stability. Not crashing with a BSOD is only the most basic, essential form.
The next level is stability for developers. You have to have ABIs and APIs that don't change between versions, so that developers can use the old API and be sure it will work into the future. Linux itself has this, if you disregard the kernel's internal APIs, but desktop environments built on top of Linux typically don't.
After that, there is stability for users. You have to ensure that the new version is easily usable by people who are used to the old version. Linux desktop environments fail massively at this. Just when things have reached a stable baseline, like KDE 3.5 or GNOME 2.x, the developers decide to break everything to "improve" the user experience. The result is Unity, or KDE 4, and always annoyed and angry users.
The second and third types of stability are now a huge problem for Linux. One means that third-party applications require continuous maintenance if they're built on top of GNOME or KDE libraries, while the other means that users must relearn everything about the UI whenever a new version comes out. These are bad things.
Microsoft has always understood the second and third types of stability. When the UI of a Microsoft product changes, it's tested extensively with real users, while the APIs and ABIs remain backwards-compatible. This is a huge benefit to users and developers, and one that is simply absent from Linux, where stability just means "doesn't crash".
Microsoft will end up specifying a particular reference platform. Those of us who have NDAs with MS will get the details in the next little while. I even know which variant of ARM is going to be used, though of course I can't say what that is right now.
Good to hear. ARM has needed this for a long time, and since Google didn't do it for Android, the task falls to Microsoft.
Ironically this reference platform will make Linux on ARM an attractive prospect, unlike the current situation where your kernel has to precisely match the hardware you want to use, which makes everything very difficult for both users and developers.
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Before Android and iOS, those "millions and millions of people" were using regular cellphones without "app stores" or touch screens. Nobody cared about app stores a decade ago, when even the idea of putting a camera on a phone would lead to "Why? What for? But I already have a camera!"
If some new sort of smartphone could introduce a new killer feature, like (for instance) the ability to run all desktop PC software, then that might well leave Android and iOS behind, just as the non-smart cellphones have been left behind. That is, PC compatibility could become a must-have feature like "app stores", "touch screens" or "cameras".
Then again, PC compatibility might be a genuinely unimportant feature for a cellphone. Like WAP or IrDA.
The fact is, we just don't know. Nobody has made a PC compatible cellphone... yet. I personally think it would be pretty useful. I wouldn't need to carry a laptop - I would have a tiny x86/Windows netbook in my pocket. One less heavy thing to lug around... and one that gives me access to an even larger (and potentially more useful) app ecosystem than iOS/Android.
Actually I work at a university, in a CS department.
It would seem unfair to require students to buy software or computers simply in order to get their degree. Any policy that indirectly required this would attract complaints, and in my view those complaints should be upheld.
Therefore, our labs are open all day, and there is plenty of time between lectures and teaching lab sessions to use them. Not only that, we do have two ways that students can "borrow" software exactly like a library book. Firstly, they can connect via rdesktop to a terminal server and use the software there. This is useful when the labs are closed. Secondly, they can install some programs locally, and then access the floating licence server via VPN. We provide free copies of software that can be used in this way.
Maybe your university didn't work like this, but it could and should have done.
"The value is not related to the price. I feel sorry for you if you can't find value in something that wasn't expensive."
Why do you assume that I don't understand this? Is it because I used "value" in the sense of "price", like "the value of this transaction"?
What I reject is the belief that the price of something should be set by pirates, i.e. at the cost of copying, ~$0.
But you did have other choices, as you say. You could have used the software in labs if you didn't want to buy it. Even today, degree courses do not even expect you to have your own computer, let alone one that can run the course software.
It's just like course textbooks. They're typically expensive. But if you don't want to buy them, you can find them in the library.
I think you are overcomplicating things that are actually quite simple.
The paragraph you quoted here confuses "ideas" and "information". The two are not the same.
You are right, our principles are very different. Your principle seems to come from your belief that copyright "is unjust and damaging to creativity and culture". This is debatable. Furthermore, you appear to think that if you disagree "with what [a] licence represents and says", then you have the right to ignore it and use the software anyway.
As it happens I do think that copyright terms are too long and agree with reform. But the question of whether publishers and authors are keeping their side of the copyright bargain is completely separate from the question of whether bargains should be respected. If you do not like a particular software licence, then don't use the software!
I wondered if this might be the case, but I didn't want to jump to a conclusion. If we cannot even agree that GPL violations are wrong ("just doing math"), then there can be no agreement at all.
You say I'm misrepresenting the argument, but you appear to be restating exactly what I said, as we are both talking about a situation where copies of creative works are (effectively) free. Furthermore, we also agree that financing creativity is important.
But there is clearly still some disagreement here. Let me try to find out what it is. Do you agree with the idea of software licencing, i.e. that the right to use a particular program is dependent on possessing a valid licence for it?
If so, then consider an authorised copy of a CD, a DVD or a Bluray disc as a copy that includes a valid licence. An unauthorised copy may be bit-for-bit identical, but it is not the same, as there is a moral difference - the licence is missing. It does not carry the approval of the publisher and the author.
I believe that selling licences, sometimes (but not necessarily) in combination with physical copies, is a perfectly valid way to finance creativity. Sometimes it is the only one available, or at least the only one that makes sense. It is not as if Adobe can fund Photoshop development by going on tour, selling some T-shirts, or even putting a Paypal tip jar on their website. Wouldn't you agree?
I completely disagree. I think this is a matter of principle, and you're making an arbitrary distinction between two situations which are very similar, in which the rights of the author and publisher are not being respected.
The point is that the value of information is not the same as the cost of copying it.
That's something that Van Gogh understood, but piracy advocates choose not to. I thought the quotation illustrated this quite nicely, since it is all about the value of intellectual property. The paint and canvas only became valuable when Van Gogh added his IP. And yet, according to piracy advocates, that IP is just as worthless as any other IP, whether it's run out of copyright (as it now has) or whether it was painted yesterday.
"~1% of losses," you say? Doesn't this rather depend on the number of people who are pirating?
I notice that your Ebay business depends on most of your customers being honest. If they all behaved like the bad customer you mentioned, then you wouldn't have made $5000. It would be a big problem for you if all your customers suddenly believed that honesty wasn't important.
If piracy really is at "~1%", then this is only because ~99% of customers are still basically honest.
In another reply to my post, someone else says that
You know, there are a lot of other types of "worth", not just monetary.
They're right... but I never said otherwise. What I am talking about is licence violations in general, not just those involving money.
If the source code licence says you have to pay Microsoft $1 for every copy you sell, and then you don't bother, then that's a licence violation.
If the source code licence says that your code has to be released under the GPL, and then you just sell binaries and don't give anyone the source, then that's also a licence violation.
So you see, these are both actually the same situation, in that part of the licence has simply been ignored. I don't see what "tremendously long copyright lengths" have to do with anything here.
I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint.
-- Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
Van Gogh's famous prediction was correct, if somewhat arrogant, since his pictures became extremely valuable after his death.
But something has changed, and now we are told that the pictures are in fact worth much less than the cost of the materials. They are, after all, just information, and according to piracy advocates, the cost of producing the information is limited to the cost of copying it. Never mind the cost of R&D, never mind the time spent getting the artwork just right.. it's not "stuff", it's just information, and if you can copy it in a second, then that's all it's worth.
Seems like something of a backward step to me. And what's more, we all know it. We know that piracy is wrong. There is outcry at every GPL violation because someone else's work has been appropriated, and they get nothing for all the time they put into making it. If we were consistent, we'd be equally angry at every commercial licence violation, instead of making excuses.
Not true.
Firstly, you can run Silverlight applications on Linux and Mac with Moonlight.
Secondly, in the case of C# applications that use Direct3D you can use Wine and Mono together.
Thirdly, for phones, there is Mono for Android, and iOS support on the way, as described here.
Indeed, hardly unusual. At the very beginning of opencores.org, which was certainly around a decade ago, there was a project of this sort. "ORsoc" ran Linux. The CPU was an Opencores design named OR1200, with a completely custom instruction set and a fork of GCC/glibc to support it. Everything was open source: the peripherals, the CPU, the video drivers, even the USB and Ethernet cores.
That SoC worked on FPGAs, but there were also ASICs, and I think it even turned up in some commercial products.
I suspect that this project is probably reusing quite a few components from Opencores. That Wishbone bus looks awfully familiar...
Wouldn't it be even more reasonable to require web browsers to use the sort of restricted cookie settings that you personally use? As in "block by default". The EU already demonstrated that it can force major browser makers to do weirder things. If IE starts blocking third-party cookies and demanding confirmation for first-party cookies, then every other browser will be able to do the same thing too, because websites will quickly adapt to the new way.
Going after websites is stupid because the law is unenforceable, and in any case only applies to websites in one part of the world. Security (and privacy) should be a default on the client side first. The opt-in should be within the browser.
It's a question of definition. To me, a roguelike gives you as long as you want to make a move, and then allows you to specify exactly what you want to do. It's therefore neither real-time nor multiplayer. But clearly other definitions exist if (as some claim) Diablo is a roguelike.
Pause isn't the same as turn-based at all. In a real roguelike, you get infinite time to consider your next move. And then you press a key and get exactly the move you wanted. This is the main reason why you can't have a multiplayer roguelike.
More popular, so they'd passed through more hands...
...and yet the discs are also newer, so they've passed through fewer hands...
...and perhaps less commonly rented, so fewer copies are available and a single copy goes to more places...
...and yet fewer people own players, so fewer people have rented them anyway.
Basically, who knows? Only the rental companies have data like this. If one disc had failed on me, then that would seem unlucky, but two or more suggests something a little more significant which is surely worth mentioning in a discussion about why BD isn't as successful as DVD. Nothing like this ever happend with DVD, not even once. If there's an error on a DVD disc, which is rare, I can just skip past it.
I assume that the discs must have been damaged by an earlier customer. They appeared to have both scratches and smudges; not enough to prevent the movie playing at all, but enough to stop it after (case 1) 30 minutes and (case 2) 75 minutes.
Poor-quality player software may have made it more difficult to recover from the errors once playback had been disrupted. Power-cycling the device did allow a third movie to start playing when previously it crashed after the trailers.
Maybe you treat your discs better than most people.
I have rented about ten BDs from Lovefilm and three had playback problems. Two failed in the middle of the movie and it was impossible to continue. The other took several attempts to get going*.
I compare this to the 20+ DVDs I have rented from the same place, all of which worked perfectly, and I can only conclude that for whatever reason, BDs are not as robust as DVDs.
I am now hesitant to rent BDs because of these bad experiences. A 20% failure rate is unacceptably high for entertainment technology that should "just work".
Plus, I have reservations about the Internet-connectivity on these discs. I buy a disc because I want the content forever. Is that content really forever if I have to download it from Sony each time I want to watch it? Can they use the connectivity to violate my privacy?
My Bluray player has never been connected to the Internet. It's optional. If you need firmware updates you can put them on CD-R or on a USB stick.
Other than that, you are spot on.
My big gripe with Bluray is that the discs are so fragile. I've received a few from the Lovefilm rental service that have stopped working halfway through the movie, apparently due to disc damage. This has never happened with a rented DVD, or with a BD that I own. And yet the discs are handled in exactly the same way. It seems BD is much more sensitive to scratches.
So these days I mostly rent DVDs, because I know that BDs are risky, and there's a good chance that a BD that comes through the post will not play properly. A shame, because renting a BD costs the same as a DVD, and if the things worked properly, I'd get much higher quality for the same price.
There's more than one sort of stability. Not crashing with a BSOD is only the most basic, essential form.
The next level is stability for developers. You have to have ABIs and APIs that don't change between versions, so that developers can use the old API and be sure it will work into the future. Linux itself has this, if you disregard the kernel's internal APIs, but desktop environments built on top of Linux typically don't.
After that, there is stability for users. You have to ensure that the new version is easily usable by people who are used to the old version. Linux desktop environments fail massively at this. Just when things have reached a stable baseline, like KDE 3.5 or GNOME 2.x, the developers decide to break everything to "improve" the user experience. The result is Unity, or KDE 4, and always annoyed and angry users.
The second and third types of stability are now a huge problem for Linux. One means that third-party applications require continuous maintenance if they're built on top of GNOME or KDE libraries, while the other means that users must relearn everything about the UI whenever a new version comes out. These are bad things.
Microsoft has always understood the second and third types of stability. When the UI of a Microsoft product changes, it's tested extensively with real users, while the APIs and ABIs remain backwards-compatible. This is a huge benefit to users and developers, and one that is simply absent from Linux, where stability just means "doesn't crash".
Microsoft will end up specifying a particular reference platform. Those of us who have NDAs with MS will get the details in the next little while. I even know which variant of ARM is going to be used, though of course I can't say what that is right now.
Good to hear. ARM has needed this for a long time, and since Google didn't do it for Android, the task falls to Microsoft.
Ironically this reference platform will make Linux on ARM an attractive prospect, unlike the current situation where your kernel has to precisely match the hardware you want to use, which makes everything very difficult for both users and developers.
1. Do you really mean "Joules" or "Watt-hours"?
2. Are you sure you are taking all the costs and subsidies into account?