So what OS do you use? because even Amiga and BeOS have their own share of fantards, BSDs' are roughly the same as Linux, and for Windows and OSX they're a dime a dozen.
Why shouldn't people be allowed to access the first episodes of General Hospital freely? why shouldn't a band be able to play one of Iron Maiden's debut songs without worrying whose lawyers they have to pay?
If they're still creating content, let them live off those royalties and give the public access to their older works. I simply can't see the problem with that scenario.
So, every single person in the world is either a perfectly law-abiding citizen who would *never* think of using his weapon for an illegal end (such as, say, intimidating his unarmed wife during a domestic dispute), or a hardened criminal ready to take anybody else's life as long as he can profit from it.
Personally, I believe that if you really wanted to be a "good samaritan" you'd be carrying a knife, not a gun. Not only is it infinitely more useful in everyday situations, but there's significantly less chance of accidentally killing somebody with it. Because no matter what you may believe after your monthly hour at the shooting range, against a live person out to kill you you can (and probably will) miss, and that bullet doesn't vanish into nothingness midair.
Whatever symphonies cost, it seems it's less than what they get from doing actual performances and from selling their records through an indie label, because it's been nearly a decade since I last saw a RIAA-backed classical album and they seem to be doing just fine.
Hell, rock is the only genre where's easier to find indie music than classical. Don't believe me? just browse through Magnatune, around half their catalogue (and sales) are classical. So no, they're not a concern.
It reminds me of the RIAA and indie labels. You may have a better product, for a better price, available under less restrictions and in more convenient formats, and Joe Average *still* buys the other guy's product simply because he assumes that more money spent on marketing means a more polished end-product, and when he finds out how shitty the product they bought is, they only think "gee, if this is so bad, the other product must really suck!".
Like many indie labels, however, while Linux would benefit from the extra market-share of the drooling masses, they're doing just fine so far and so there's little practical reasons for us, people who know better, to worry about it.
Best of luck to the guys participating in Software Freedom Day. I appreciate the work you guys are making, but personally I'd rather laugh at the incompetent masses rather than educate them. I'm an elitist, lazy bastard like that.
Nor is it working telling people to go into the registry and edit a few keys here and there.
Which is why most people have to *PAY* other, more experienced people to help them with their computer problems. Or they just learn to live with those problems, its usually one or the other but few times they fix it themselves.
The real challenge to good software is to make things as easy as possible, and make it so the complicated doesn't interfere with the simple.
When they're designed for ease of use. When they're designed for *efficiency*, however, as ViM is, the challenge is to keep the complex possible while making the simple as fast as you can. How easy it is to learn never enters into the equation.
The editor designed for *power* is Emacs, whose LISP interpreter can't be beat in that department.
I'm confused by magnatune they advertise that they give 50% to artists, but taking a 50% cut for hosting & selling music seams excessive (AFAIK they don't do brick and mortar sales)
It's not excessive when you take into account that:
a) people can pay as little as $5 per album, and the credit card company gets their cut as well, b) they have free streaming for all their music, c) downloads are unlimited, and d) they not only make OGGs and MP3s available but also FLACs and uncompressed WAVs.
Don't underestimate the importance of the last point, most of their customers are classical fans so you can bet they're taking advantage of it, and 600 MBs is a lot of bandwidth to pay for.
There's plenty of problems with your argument, but let's start with the most obvious one: it puts Windows 3.1 in the Public Domain in the year 2092, five years *LATER* than when we'd get it under the current copyright regime. It's already outdated and practically useless today, just imagine how its gonna be in 80 years.
No, the ideal copyright system is the one that's been proven by independant studies to be optimal: 15 years, no extensions, no exceptions. It lacks the "incentive for murder" of life-depending terms, it doesn't put large companies at an advantage over individuals, it's long enough that it won't damage book profits too greatly, yet short enough that software will become free before being relegated to a museum piece.
Except that even a 10-years-old computer running Linux provides a far better experience than the best of "cloud computing" today, and that's unlikely to ever change.
If whoever was helping with the "extracurricular" learning knew a large amount about pretty much everything, and could generate interest in all of history, politics, math, literacy, science (how to use experiments and record-keeping to assist curiosity), the various trivia that we learned from science (earth goes around the sun), basic accounting, etc.
Except most of us don't learn about everything in school, for many subjects we just memorize the bare minimum to pass and have forgotten about it by next year. Or as a friend liked to say, "passed subject is forgotten subject".
Hell, many people even apply that philosophy to university. If you work as a software developer, try asking your fellow workmates to solve a differential equation or simply construct a formal proof for a basic math theorem. You'll be surprised.
They filed for plenty of patents but donated many of them to OSS-related causes, and I'm not aware of any patent lawsuit they had initiated (they countersued a couple times, though, but that's perfectly acceptable IMO). Propietary software, sure, but standards-compliant so no worse than Opera et al, and IIRC the PPC architecture was as open as the x86 one though I could be wrong on that.
So essentially, post-MS IBM wasn't Red Hat, but it was also no worse than your average corporation and in some ways even better. Pity they just *had* to change that and go back to Big Blue's old ways.
IBM is still evil though. Anyone old enough to remember when IBM PC *was* a personal computer can back me up on this.
I'm old enough to remember that time, and until yesterday I would've disagreed with you and pointed at all the Open Source projects IBM collaborates with, if not created them outright.
Since you clearly *have* taken a few lessons on the various types of patents et al, let me ask you: forgetting about copyright and trademarks for now, how much would I need to change Google's homepage not to infringe on their design patent?
If Microsoft simply sat on their patent portfolio and used them only for countersuits against those threatening them, they'd have a *lot* more fans around here.
No, I don't like this move by Google, but Microsoft is still in a whole different class of Evil(tm).
Being descriptive enough that somebody can easily recreate it or something similar is the entire point of patents, so if you can't your patent is too vague and shouldn't have been accepted in the first place.
So how to determine obviousness? dunno, an idea would be to delay approval by at least a year, and see whether any competitor is able to create the same without access to the patent spec. Reverse engineering would be troublesome, of course, but I think that anything that can be easily reverse engineered isn't deserving of a patent.
Yeah, every one of the 6 billion people without iPhones on the planet are just idiots. If only they had consulted you before making the boneheaded move of not purchasing such a wonderful device...
Or perhaps argumentum ad populum is just as invalid as it's ever been.
The USA is not the world. If patents are so stifling, why aren't great new drugs and technology coming from places that have no patent protections?
There's plenty, it's just that since most companies big enough to be noticed by the mainstream are multinationals, the fact that they aren't US-based isn't as obvious.
Dunno if its really faster than Firefox or Chrome but it's certainly an order of magnitude faster than Opera 9, both in rendering speed and just general UI responsiveness.
Don't you just love it when newer versions of software are faster than the previous one? I wish it was always like this, though I know it's an impossible dream.
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So what OS do you use? because even Amiga and BeOS have their own share of fantards, BSDs' are roughly the same as Linux, and for Windows and OSX they're a dime a dozen.
Minix, perhaps?
Why shouldn't people be allowed to access the first episodes of General Hospital freely? why shouldn't a band be able to play one of Iron Maiden's debut songs without worrying whose lawyers they have to pay?
If they're still creating content, let them live off those royalties and give the public access to their older works. I simply can't see the problem with that scenario.
So, every single person in the world is either a perfectly law-abiding citizen who would *never* think of using his weapon for an illegal end (such as, say, intimidating his unarmed wife during a domestic dispute), or a hardened criminal ready to take anybody else's life as long as he can profit from it.
Personally, I believe that if you really wanted to be a "good samaritan" you'd be carrying a knife, not a gun. Not only is it infinitely more useful in everyday situations, but there's significantly less chance of accidentally killing somebody with it. Because no matter what you may believe after your monthly hour at the shooting range, against a live person out to kill you you can (and probably will) miss, and that bullet doesn't vanish into nothingness midair.
Whatever symphonies cost, it seems it's less than what they get from doing actual performances and from selling their records through an indie label, because it's been nearly a decade since I last saw a RIAA-backed classical album and they seem to be doing just fine.
Hell, rock is the only genre where's easier to find indie music than classical. Don't believe me? just browse through Magnatune, around half their catalogue (and sales) are classical. So no, they're not a concern.
It reminds me of the RIAA and indie labels. You may have a better product, for a better price, available under less restrictions and in more convenient formats, and Joe Average *still* buys the other guy's product simply because he assumes that more money spent on marketing means a more polished end-product, and when he finds out how shitty the product they bought is, they only think "gee, if this is so bad, the other product must really suck!".
Like many indie labels, however, while Linux would benefit from the extra market-share of the drooling masses, they're doing just fine so far and so there's little practical reasons for us, people who know better, to worry about it.
Best of luck to the guys participating in Software Freedom Day. I appreciate the work you guys are making, but personally I'd rather laugh at the incompetent masses rather than educate them. I'm an elitist, lazy bastard like that.
Nor is it working telling people to go into the registry and edit a few keys here and there.
Which is why most people have to *PAY* other, more experienced people to help them with their computer problems. Or they just learn to live with those problems, its usually one or the other but few times they fix it themselves.
The real challenge to good software is to make things as easy as possible, and make it so the complicated doesn't interfere with the simple.
When they're designed for ease of use. When they're designed for *efficiency*, however, as ViM is, the challenge is to keep the complex possible while making the simple as fast as you can. How easy it is to learn never enters into the equation.
The editor designed for *power* is Emacs, whose LISP interpreter can't be beat in that department.
If you care about the name, you're not part of their target market.
Close, but not quite. It's "less is more", and if you knew anything about software development you'd know how productive such a philosophy is.
I'm confused by magnatune they advertise that they give 50% to artists, but taking a 50% cut for hosting & selling music seams excessive (AFAIK they don't do brick and mortar sales)
It's not excessive when you take into account that:
a) people can pay as little as $5 per album, and the credit card company gets their cut as well,
b) they have free streaming for all their music,
c) downloads are unlimited, and
d) they not only make OGGs and MP3s available but also FLACs and uncompressed WAVs.
Don't underestimate the importance of the last point, most of their customers are classical fans so you can bet they're taking advantage of it, and 600 MBs is a lot of bandwidth to pay for.
There's plenty of problems with your argument, but let's start with the most obvious one: it puts Windows 3.1 in the Public Domain in the year 2092, five years *LATER* than when we'd get it under the current copyright regime. It's already outdated and practically useless today, just imagine how its gonna be in 80 years.
No, the ideal copyright system is the one that's been proven by independant studies to be optimal: 15 years, no extensions, no exceptions. It lacks the "incentive for murder" of life-depending terms, it doesn't put large companies at an advantage over individuals, it's long enough that it won't damage book profits too greatly, yet short enough that software will become free before being relegated to a museum piece.
Except that even a 10-years-old computer running Linux provides a far better experience than the best of "cloud computing" today, and that's unlikely to ever change.
Latency is a bitch, y'know.
If whoever was helping with the "extracurricular" learning knew a large amount about pretty much everything, and could generate interest in all of history, politics, math, literacy, science (how to use experiments and record-keeping to assist curiosity), the various trivia that we learned from science (earth goes around the sun), basic accounting, etc.
Except most of us don't learn about everything in school, for many subjects we just memorize the bare minimum to pass and have forgotten about it by next year. Or as a friend liked to say, "passed subject is forgotten subject".
Hell, many people even apply that philosophy to university. If you work as a software developer, try asking your fellow workmates to solve a differential equation or simply construct a formal proof for a basic math theorem. You'll be surprised.
And finally put it together when he was 10.
My childhood in a nutshell ;)
They filed for plenty of patents but donated many of them to OSS-related causes, and I'm not aware of any patent lawsuit they had initiated (they countersued a couple times, though, but that's perfectly acceptable IMO). Propietary software, sure, but standards-compliant so no worse than Opera et al, and IIRC the PPC architecture was as open as the x86 one though I could be wrong on that.
So essentially, post-MS IBM wasn't Red Hat, but it was also no worse than your average corporation and in some ways even better. Pity they just *had* to change that and go back to Big Blue's old ways.
IBM is still evil though. Anyone old enough to remember when IBM PC *was* a personal computer can back me up on this.
I'm old enough to remember that time, and until yesterday I would've disagreed with you and pointed at all the Open Source projects IBM collaborates with, if not created them outright.
Today, however...
Since you clearly *have* taken a few lessons on the various types of patents et al, let me ask you: forgetting about copyright and trademarks for now, how much would I need to change Google's homepage not to infringe on their design patent?
If Microsoft simply sat on their patent portfolio and used them only for countersuits against those threatening them, they'd have a *lot* more fans around here.
No, I don't like this move by Google, but Microsoft is still in a whole different class of Evil(tm).
Everything is derivative. If you haven't learned that yet, you mustn't work in any creative field yourself.
Being descriptive enough that somebody can easily recreate it or something similar is the entire point of patents, so if you can't your patent is too vague and shouldn't have been accepted in the first place.
So how to determine obviousness? dunno, an idea would be to delay approval by at least a year, and see whether any competitor is able to create the same without access to the patent spec. Reverse engineering would be troublesome, of course, but I think that anything that can be easily reverse engineered isn't deserving of a patent.
Yeah, every one of the 6 billion people without iPhones on the planet are just idiots. If only they had consulted you before making the boneheaded move of not purchasing such a wonderful device...
Or perhaps argumentum ad populum is just as invalid as it's ever been.
Why invest in expensive and high risk research at all? just let universities take care of research, and delegate production to for-profit businesses.
Yeah, we may (note: may) get a slower pace of advancement, but in return we'd get much, *much* wider availability, a worthy trade-off in my mind.
The USA is not the world. If patents are so stifling, why aren't great new drugs and technology coming from places that have no patent protections?
There's plenty, it's just that since most companies big enough to be noticed by the mainstream are multinationals, the fact that they aren't US-based isn't as obvious.
Why should other fields of technology enjoy patent protection, but not software?
Why should other fields of science enjoy patent and/or copyright protection, but not mathematics?
Answer that, and you'll find your answer for software.
Dunno if its really faster than Firefox or Chrome but it's certainly an order of magnitude faster than Opera 9, both in rendering speed and just general UI responsiveness.
Don't you just love it when newer versions of software are faster than the previous one? I wish it was always like this, though I know it's an impossible dream.