To summarize: if your code is slipped into another product and not clearly mentioned in the license and listed in the installer, or if it phones home without telling the user that it's going to do it, IMHO it is spyware. WildTangent (as it was bundled with AIM) fits both those conditions.
Maybe you're not selling spyware anymore, but you did in the past, and on slashdot that reputation takes a *long* time to live down. Just look at any thread about Realplayer...
While it is true that the code is released under the LGPL, this does not prevent the company from discontinuing its use of the format, using a new format, and then not releasing that under the LGPL.
The AOL example is bad, because everybody's apps had to interact with AOL's server. File formats are different. Even if the original app that used the file format is long gone (or moved to an encrypted, patented, DRM encumbered, demon possessed.666 file format) you can still use that format to transfer data between two other apps. Look at dbase 4.dbf files. Ashton-Tate has been gone a looooong time, but the easiest way to get small data tables into ESRI's GIS products is to convert them to.dbf with Excel, and import them that way. Besides, if the ability to switch to another file format makes the current one less than open, then there are no open file formats at all. Who can say with absolute certainty that gcc won't drop support for.c files in the future, and transition to encrypted c# instead?
And another similar instance wherein publication was halted and pages were ordered torn out of a medical study which showed people of Jewish ancestry to be significantly genetically linked to the Arab and Palestinian population.
Why bother suppressing it? I thought that was pretty common knowledge.
Maybe it's not, that would explain why hardly anyone else finds it funny when someone accuses an Arab of being anti-semitic...
It's not just the intrusiveness, it's the idea that Valve could take back games that I paid for without any sort of compensation that bugs me. If the game stays under Valve's complete control after I buy it, what the hell are we paying $50 for, anyway?
The fallacies have been pointed out ad nauseum ever since Napster reared its ugly head. Just because the original still exists means nothing; one can extrapolate that fallacy to justify counterfeiting, too.
No, you can use it to say that counterfeiting isn't stealing, which is true. That doesn't *justify* anything. You're missing the entire point of the "copying isn't stealing" argument. I don't think it's ethical or legal, I just don't think stealing is the right word for it.
at a bare minimum music sharing is the stealing of royalties and profits.
Nope, sorry, it's not. Music sharing is violating the rcord label's legal monopoly on distributing a copyrighted song. If we grant that copyright infringment is theft, where does the stupidity stop? Do we redefine homicide as theft of life, assault and battery as theft of health, public drunkenness as theft of peace and quiet, speeding as theft of highway safety and so on?
Unless you're prepared to point out specific fallacies in the grandparent post's logic, it's probably best to keep accusations of sophistry to yourself.
This is my dim recollection of econ 101, so take it with a grain of salt...
Most of a bank's money isn't stored in the building, they're required by law to keep a percentage of their assets on deposit with the Fed. That means banks can settle transactions without physically moving cash by electronic transfers from one bank's Federal Reserve account to another bank's account. The only time a bank would have to move currency to or from the Fed would be if their account balance fell below the legal minimum, or if they needed extra cash on hand to handle a high volume of withdrawals.
Re:Corporate-to-English translation
on
Craig and his List
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Q: Why does eBay lack morals? Is this simply a matter of size == tyranny?
No, it's a matter of looking at how eBay runs PayPal, and worrying thet the same sort of "screw customer satisfaction, we're the only game in town and they know it" attitude will infect craigslist.
...when "standards brokenness" is a better for business! For Microsoft, "new and different" *is* better. "New and totally incompatible" is even better still.
They know that IE still has 90% of the browser market. That means web developers can't ignore IE and tell their users to download Firefox. If IE 7 is totally incompatible with current standards, and only renders sites written in mshtml#.NET, the vast majority of web developers will work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to rewrite their entire site in mshtml#.NET. Mozilla, Opera, and Safari users would get screwed, web developers would get totally screwed, and IE would get it's 99% market share back.
It's *really* poor taste for major airline employees to brag about all their great perks in front of the people whose taxes are paying to bail out the airline industry's multi-billion dollar debt.
"...and it leads me to wonder: will we soon need firewalls for Windows Embedded?"
Not soon, you need them now! If a device has a public network interface, it needs a firewall. It's not just a matter of Windows sucking, PalmOS, Symbian, Linux, etc. devices are going to have exploitable bugs (and therefore need firewalls) as well.
Maybe Redhat will want to customize gnome from it's origonal state to make it more user friendly, while slackware wants to keep it the stock power/elegant/simple gnome. The point is that we should give the people a choice, rather than preassume that all vets have suddenly dropped ten years in experience and now need to rely on the bloat that if we wanted, we could find in Redhat.
Oh yes. Let's go back to the bad old days when application foo was "certified" for a years-old version of RedHat and steadfastly refused to run on anything else. That's exactly where having every distro installing different Gnome/KDE components is going to take us.
I know I am! With the hype machine running flat-out this far before the launch date, Longhorn is starting to sound like Microsoft's version of Copland...
When I find out that it's cheaper to use my wife's car to power my house all day than it is to use electricity off the grid, I'm going to do it.
Don't worry, it won't be cheaper. There's a reason people aren't generating their own power from gasoline right now. The cost in fuel and maintainence is a lot higher to operate your own gasoline/diesel generator than to buy electricity from the local utility. That price gap is only going to get bigger as the price of oil goes up relative to other energy sources.
Now, when natural gas fuel cells come to the mass market, it will be different. You'll be using the same fuel as the big electric companies, and generating near the point of use. The economics would probably go in favor of generating your own power then, as you would avoid the distribution losses inherent in a massive power grid.
The problem isn't that they don't like the idea of a screw that works itself, it's that the screw only works itself when presented with the correct encrypted commands. Nothing infuriates your average geek like a door or a box or a bit of hardware they're not allowed to open up and look inside.
Now a self propelled screw that listens to a well-documented command set would be really neat...
Are you really trying to pimp a porn site (and one hosted on geocities, at that!) by linking to screenshots of spam mail, in a slashdot comment about something totally unrelated to porn or spam? Can internet marketing possibly sink any lower?
What really irks me is that rather than invent new solutions to existing problems, the free software community waits for a commercial vendor to implement a solution, and then copies it.
In general, you're right. In this specific case, you're totally backwards. SPF (most of what is now sender-id) was published as a free and open standard months before AOL and Yahoo got on board. Microsoft has only been participating for a very short time, compared to how long SPF has been around.
We don't have a manned vehicle that can reach the lagrange points anymore. The shuttle was never made to leave LEO, and we threw away the blueprits for Apollo. Soyuz could make it, but relying on the Russian government would be politically unacceptable. Even if the ISS somehow survived the trip, there would be no way to re-crew.
Artists give us interfaces like ATI's TV recording software. All flash and no function. The more artistic freedom an app gives to skin designers, the more time I have to spend squinting at the cryptic emblems and trying to click on the 3-pixel-wide "play" button. Look at an old version of Windows media player (before v6), and marvel at how much easier it is to use than WMP 9 or Winamp 5. It uses the same widgets as the rest of the desktop, so you don't have to spend any time at all trying to decide where to click to activate each button. Artists understand what looks good, but very few of them have a grasp of what's easy to use.
It's better to write everything for a standard set of GUI widgets, and provide a mechanism for theming those standard widgets to look cool. That way, all your apps look consistent, and you can change the look-and-feel without having to re-learn all the interfaces.
Slashdot Mirror
...it's opt-in targeted e-marketing!
To summarize: if your code is slipped into another product and not clearly mentioned in the license and listed in the installer, or if it phones home without telling the user that it's going to do it, IMHO it is spyware. WildTangent (as it was bundled with AIM) fits both those conditions.
Maybe you're not selling spyware anymore, but you did in the past, and on slashdot that reputation takes a *long* time to live down. Just look at any thread about Realplayer...
While it is true that the code is released under the LGPL, this does not prevent the company from discontinuing its use of the format, using a new format, and then not releasing that under the LGPL.
.666 file format) you can still use that format to transfer data between two other apps. Look at dbase 4 .dbf files. Ashton-Tate has been gone a looooong time, but the easiest way to get small data tables into ESRI's GIS products is to convert them to .dbf with Excel, and import them that way. Besides, if the ability to switch to another file format makes the current one less than open, then there are no open file formats at all. Who can say with absolute certainty that gcc won't drop support for .c files in the future, and transition to encrypted c# instead?
The AOL example is bad, because everybody's apps had to interact with AOL's server. File formats are different. Even if the original app that used the file format is long gone (or moved to an encrypted, patented, DRM encumbered, demon possessed
And another similar instance wherein publication was halted and pages were ordered torn out of a medical study which showed people of Jewish ancestry to be significantly genetically linked to the Arab and Palestinian population.
Why bother suppressing it? I thought that was pretty common knowledge.
Maybe it's not, that would explain why hardly anyone else finds it funny when someone accuses an Arab of being anti-semitic...
It's not just the intrusiveness, it's the idea that Valve could take back games that I paid for without any sort of compensation that bugs me. If the game stays under Valve's complete control after I buy it, what the hell are we paying $50 for, anyway?
The obvious counter-argument to that would be that it's very difficult to "deter" someone who wants to die for his cause.
Anyone who can afford a Mac probably has a computer already...
The fallacies have been pointed out ad nauseum ever since Napster reared its ugly head. Just because the original still exists means nothing; one can extrapolate that fallacy to justify counterfeiting, too.
No, you can use it to say that counterfeiting isn't stealing, which is true. That doesn't *justify* anything. You're missing the entire point of the "copying isn't stealing" argument. I don't think it's ethical or legal, I just don't think stealing is the right word for it.
at a bare minimum music sharing is the stealing of royalties and profits.
Nope, sorry, it's not. Music sharing is violating the rcord label's legal monopoly on distributing a copyrighted song. If we grant that copyright infringment is theft, where does the stupidity stop? Do we redefine homicide as theft of life, assault and battery as theft of health, public drunkenness as theft of peace and quiet, speeding as theft of highway safety and so on?
Unless you're prepared to point out specific fallacies in the grandparent post's logic, it's probably best to keep accusations of sophistry to yourself.
How about Taiwan, Kurdistan, and Gaza? ...and be sure your answers don't offend anyone!
Or am I risking a flame war here....
Yes, but only because you didn't RTFA...
This is my dim recollection of econ 101, so take it with a grain of salt...
Most of a bank's money isn't stored in the building, they're required by law to keep a percentage of their assets on deposit with the Fed. That means banks can settle transactions without physically moving cash by electronic transfers from one bank's Federal Reserve account to another bank's account. The only time a bank would have to move currency to or from the Fed would be if their account balance fell below the legal minimum, or if they needed extra cash on hand to handle a high volume of withdrawals.
Q: Why does eBay lack morals? Is this simply a matter of size == tyranny?
No, it's a matter of looking at how eBay runs PayPal, and worrying thet the same sort of "screw customer satisfaction, we're the only game in town and they know it" attitude will infect craigslist.
...when "standards brokenness" is a better for business! For Microsoft, "new and different" *is* better. "New and totally incompatible" is even better still.
They know that IE still has 90% of the browser market. That means web developers can't ignore IE and tell their users to download Firefox. If IE 7 is totally incompatible with current standards, and only renders sites written in mshtml#.NET, the vast majority of web developers will work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to rewrite their entire site in mshtml#.NET. Mozilla, Opera, and Safari users would get screwed, web developers would get totally screwed, and IE would get it's 99% market share back.
It's *really* poor taste for major airline employees to brag about all their great perks in front of the people whose taxes are paying to bail out the airline industry's multi-billion dollar debt.
"...and it leads me to wonder: will we soon need firewalls for Windows Embedded?"
Not soon, you need them now! If a device has a public network interface, it needs a firewall. It's not just a matter of Windows sucking, PalmOS, Symbian, Linux, etc. devices are going to have exploitable bugs (and therefore need firewalls) as well.
Heck, I'd be happy with someone making Honda Civics more silent...
All you have to do to make them more silent is replace the chromed cofee can under the back bumper with a factory muffler.
Maybe Redhat will want to customize gnome from it's origonal state to make it more user friendly, while slackware wants to keep it the stock power/elegant/simple gnome. The point is that we should give the people a choice, rather than preassume that all vets have suddenly dropped ten years in experience and now need to rely on the bloat that if we wanted, we could find in Redhat.
Oh yes. Let's go back to the bad old days when application foo was "certified" for a years-old version of RedHat and steadfastly refused to run on anything else. That's exactly where having every distro installing different Gnome/KDE components is going to take us.
I know I am! With the hype machine running flat-out this far before the launch date, Longhorn is starting to sound like Microsoft's version of Copland...
When I find out that it's cheaper to use my wife's car to power my house all day than it is to use electricity off the grid, I'm going to do it.
Don't worry, it won't be cheaper. There's a reason people aren't generating their own power from gasoline right now. The cost in fuel and maintainence is a lot higher to operate your own gasoline/diesel generator than to buy electricity from the local utility. That price gap is only going to get bigger as the price of oil goes up relative to other energy sources.
Now, when natural gas fuel cells come to the mass market, it will be different. You'll be using the same fuel as the big electric companies, and generating near the point of use. The economics would probably go in favor of generating your own power then, as you would avoid the distribution losses inherent in a massive power grid.
The problem isn't that they don't like the idea of a screw that works itself, it's that the screw only works itself when presented with the correct encrypted commands. Nothing infuriates your average geek like a door or a box or a bit of hardware they're not allowed to open up and look inside.
Now a self propelled screw that listens to a well-documented command set would be really neat...
Are you really trying to pimp a porn site (and one hosted on geocities, at that!) by linking to screenshots of spam mail, in a slashdot comment about something totally unrelated to porn or spam? Can internet marketing possibly sink any lower?
Or was that meant to link to a different image?
What really irks me is that rather than invent new solutions to existing problems, the free software community waits for a commercial vendor to implement a solution, and then copies it.
In general, you're right. In this specific case, you're totally backwards. SPF (most of what is now sender-id) was published as a free and open standard months before AOL and Yahoo got on board. Microsoft has only been participating for a very short time, compared to how long SPF has been around.
We don't have a manned vehicle that can reach the lagrange points anymore. The shuttle was never made to leave LEO, and we threw away the blueprits for Apollo. Soyuz could make it, but relying on the Russian government would be politically unacceptable. Even if the ISS somehow survived the trip, there would be no way to re-crew.
I plan to create the outstanding *fixes* for correcting the buttonorder in the upcoming days
Since when does being an "expert to Unix" imply that you want your buttons in Microsoft order rather than Apple order?
No no no!
Artists give us interfaces like ATI's TV recording software. All flash and no function. The more artistic freedom an app gives to skin designers, the more time I have to spend squinting at the cryptic emblems and trying to click on the 3-pixel-wide "play" button. Look at an old version of Windows media player (before v6), and marvel at how much easier it is to use than WMP 9 or Winamp 5. It uses the same widgets as the rest of the desktop, so you don't have to spend any time at all trying to decide where to click to activate each button. Artists understand what looks good, but very few of them have a grasp of what's easy to use.
It's better to write everything for a standard set of GUI widgets, and provide a mechanism for theming those standard widgets to look cool. That way, all your apps look consistent, and you can change the look-and-feel without having to re-learn all the interfaces.
Was there supposed to be a point somewhere in that post?