No, free markets create problems like this. In a truly free market, you have no legal recourse if you are sold a defective product, and as Windows demonstrates, market forces do not stop poor-quality products from dominating the market. What is needed is less protection of corporations, as you said -- and more protection of consumers. Microsoft should be legally obligated to immediately patch any bugs that are reported. Unfortunately, singling out Microsoft wouldn't solve the problem, and a general solution to the problem would ruin the open source movement. The only actual solution to this problem is better education -- so that consumers are educated enough to choose the best software available, which would force publishers (including FOSS publishers) to patch quickly, or lose market share. Standards help, too.
This would only make sense if the game item in question was actually being sold (as happens quite often). You might be able to make a case if the item was stolen somehow while you were in the process of selling it for real money; our courts do not have any interest in a virtual world, only a real one.
Mainly that the users are not made aware that they are renting, not buying. These stores bill themselves as selling music, not renting music; you should have complete control over something you buy. DRM deliberately controls what somebody can do with they computer that they do own, which does not sit well with the basic theory behind open source software (which is based on the idea that you should be able to do whatever you wish with the computer that you own). Finally, there is the question of portability -- when you purchase/rent DRM'ed music, there is a limitation on what devices you may play it on. This ties you down to a specific company, and often it is not made clear to the end user that this is the case. I have encountered, on several occasions, friends who asked why they couldn't play music from some random music store on their iPods...
You don't purchase content from private libraries. Realplayer's music store is a better example of a private library, because you are actually paying a monthly fee for access. On the other hand, iTunes charges you per song, giving one the impression that they have actually purchased music from Apple -- when in reality, they are also renting the songs, but it is not billed that way. The chain analogy is perfect; it is a book store which doesn't allow you to truly own what you purchase.
Unfortunately, I haven't heard many success stories from kde-cygwin, and I doubt that I will. I think that a while ago, I came across a project that was porting Konqueror and KOffice to OSX (without X11), but I guess that doesn't really apply to you.
The laptops, if there is some use for them, should be the property of the school, monitored by the teachers, with many restrictions on use. Unfortunately, paying Dell to do this would cost quite a bit more, and nobody working in the education system of my city (New York) is prepared to do that...
No, it is not. Actually, 27,000 genes is better proof of evolution than the existence of humans, since it just adds new stuff to the same organism. Extra genes can get added during DNA replication, this is know, but usually they are useless...and then sometimes, they are actually useful!
Name something that the business world needs, and I can name a dozen open source apps, and a dozen more *nix apps, which do it. Sometimes, better than whats on Windows, sometimes not, but the core OS doesn't really stop one from doing what one needs to do.
How about remote desktop? It deliberately disables the ability to have multiple users connect to anything lower than Windows Server 2K3 (that's right, even with XPPro, you don't get useful things like that).
Re:Don't Understand?
on
Steal This Film
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You don't believe the researchers? Contact them about it. You cannot site a single study to support your point of view, but you are making blind assertions based on the statements of biased parties. Whether or not you believe actual research, the numbers show that P2P networks, including Napster, have not had a statistically significant impact on content sales.
You saw small CD stores close down between 2000 and 2003? Guess what? There were hard economic times! I saw many, many, many small businesses close their doors back then, CD stores among them. The fact that P2P networks were at their height at that time is pure coincidence. Plenty of other fads were occurring, and it is as ludicrous to blame P2P networks on CD stores closing as it is to blame the rise of blackberries. Unless you can find some basis for making this claim, other than "they happened at the same time," your opinions bear no relevance.
Kazaa outdid Napster's popularity, with Napster peaking at under 30 million registered users and Kazaa peaking at over 50 million. Kazaa is also a far more efficient network than Napster was and it scales better. The RIAA has been 100% ineffective at preventing P2P traffic. This cannot be explained by anything other than people who cannot afford to buy CDs going to P2P networks instead. How is this different from the pre-Napster days of burning copies of your friends' CDs?
In fact, P2P filesharing is no more dangerous to profits than CD burners, which were lobbied against, or FM radio, which was lobbied against...the RIAA has a history of vehemently opposing any new technology that allows people to hear music when they could not have afforded to otherwise. It is a group that is led by millionaires, who can afford to buy whatever music they wish to hear, not average people who have to be scrupulous in their buying decisions.
Actually, P2P is not a threat to anybody at all. A recent study (http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_Marc h2004.pdf) found that downloads had no impact on CD sales -- in theory, this is probably because the amount of work needed to download and organize one's music wouldn't make sense if you could just afford to buy a CD. This same logic applies to DVDs; if you have the money for a $50 DVD, you will most likely just go out and buy it, especially considering the immense amount of time needed to download a 2+ hour movie. P2P networks really served as a way to just increase the number of people listening to music and watching movies, and didn't really deprive anybody of sales. The fact that sales went down around 2002 is irrelevant, since ALL businesses were suffering back then, and the content industries are not some special exception. During Kazaa's most active period, CD sales were actually on the rise...
Or just not using the PC architecture when that happens. Sun still produces SPARC workstations, Apple still produces its computers, and a dozen more companies with an interest in Open Source can fill any hardware void Microsoft seeks to create. The best part is, Microsoft will never be able to make it to those platforms, but we already have. Unfortunately, many of these companies also support the TPM, which leads me to wonder if we will actually be able to get a computer without that waste of electricity installed.
Total Annihilation employs a different model than Starcraft, to make strategies more interesting. One of the most annoying strategies in a game like Starcraft is attrition, that is just playing defensively until the opponent runs out of resources. In TA, you never actually run out of resources to mine, so playing defensively is actually a losing strategy. Also, don't play the campaigns, they are the worst part of the game (what the hell were they even thinking when they made those??) -- play in skirmish mode against a few computers, or multiplayer with a few friends. It even allows for a LAN spawn if you happen to be playing over a LAN with a single CD. Personally, I cannot play mutliplayer anymore, because I have modded my TA install too much (I installed a third "race", called The Lost Legacy), but the 3rd party AIs I installed actually provide some challenge, at least when 3 or 4 computers are allied against me.
...I still play Total Annihilation. The interface is simple and easy (although there are many, many multiplayer commands you should learn). I think I typically count 2 mouse clicks to launch an attack, maybe a click and a keystroke, and rarely will I exceed 200 mouse clicks in a single skirmish.
Actually, evolution is a facet of any system in which things have a tendency to reproduce, but do not necessarily create perfect copies of themselves. It started as soon as a molecule that had a tendency to produce copies of itself was formed. Think of a hash that assigns a specific number to each molecule (and different numbers for different isomers) -- such a self-replicating molecule was as likely to form as choosing its hash out of a very big pool of numbers. It was not necessarily bound to happen, but it was more likely to happen than not. Of course, evolution didn't really kick in until such a molecule formed which also had another facet that gave it an advantage over its neighboring molecules. It took a very long time until anything even resembling a cell actually formed, but it was all due to advantageous traits accumulating.
Language is another example of evolution. It is reproduced when a baby begins to learn to speak, and the copy of language is slightly imperfect, with new words added or old words forgotten. You will notice, however, that advantageous trends form in languages -- the words for common things are not particularly long (e.g., "water"). Do opponents of biological evolution also insist that languages were created by some intelligent power?
Except that will still cause you to run into problems, unless you only need to deal with rational numbers. It will work for financial stuff, sure, but for video games and scientific computing, this is not an acceptable solution to the problem. Even Mathematica, which is also a symbolic program, can be tricked into erroneous output (try plotting the function F[x] = Sin[1/x]), because at some point the division will have to actually be performed.
Of course, if you are guaranteed that you will only be dealing with integers and rationals, you can get away with using remainders when you perform the actual division. In fact, this will also work for nth-root computations, although it won't be particularly useful except as a technique for expressing the degree of error.
Legalization doesn't make it easy to obtain Marijuana, nor does keeping it illegal make it harder. In fact, the legality of the substance has had virtually no impact on demand...kinda like alcohol during the 1920s. The legal history of Marijuana is rife with racism, propaganda, and business interests. Actually, until the 1980s, most popular drugs were made illegal for political or racial reasons: cocaine was popular among jazz artists (BLACK!), LSD was popular among hippies (they oppose the government), opium had created problems in the far east (money money money), marijuana was a somewhat viable alternative to alcohol during prohibition (citizens circumventing the law?!), and alcohol had been lobbied against by groups like MADD. One of the only drugs which is actually dangerous to use is methamphetamine, and the danger has nothing to do with "addiction" -- rather, it has to do with the metabolic breakdown of methamphetamine, which creates free radicals in the brain and damages neurons.
Then, in the 1980s, an actor named Ronald Reagen, ascending to the office of president from his former job as governor of California, where he knocked the state university down a few notches, decided that America needs to spend all the money it gave back in tax cuts on arresting people who use drugs. Furthermore, we would begin saturating our children with anti-drug propaganda, riddled with half-truths and missing information but disguised as legitimate findings. We would adopt the Christian 12-step programs' philosophy of lifetime addictions ("addiction" has no agreed upon medical definition, by the way. Doctors use the terms "abuse" and "dependence" to describe specific behaviors), then tell the parents that if their kids become intoxicated with any illegal substances they will be lying in the gutters and become complete failures in life. Then, we use this theory that if a drug is illegal it is fundamentally bad in order to justify keeping all drugs illegal, until a new generation arises that grew up surrounded by the propaganda who won't even think to question something that they have been told since the age of 5.
Don't believe me? Consider a substance known as Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA; street name is ecstasy). MDMA was sometimes used by psychiatrists for its ability to help people open up, and some research indicated that small amounts of the substance (below the threshold for getting high) could help cure cluster headaches. Then, a couple of techno fans discovered that the high from MDMA was kinda cool at their parties, and soon MDMA became the most popular party drug after alcohol and marijuana. The response of the US government? Reschedule MDMA as a "schedule I" substance, which classifies it as having no known medical use, and tell everybody that MDMA is the new plague threatening their kids. Tell all the kids that MDMA is going to get them in a lot of trouble in life, but don't bother to tell them what effects MDMA actually has, and create mass hysteria about the substance. Then, perform an experiment on primates that shows MDMA is as neurotoxic as methamphetamine is, and then hide the face that the research was recalled because instead of using MDMA, the scientists accidentally used methamphetamine. Result? People are taken about at the suggestion of legalization.
The funny thing is that nobody ever needs to present any evidence to support a claim that drugs are a plague to our society. The claims don't even have to make sense: many people believe that crack is a worse substance than cocaine...because nobody informed them that they are the same drug, taken in a different form (crack is smoked and therefore absorbed faster; but cocaine can be injected, and absorbed still faster). What is the difference between morphine and heroine? One is prescribed by a doctor, one is not (pure heroine and pure morphine have similar effects, both physical and mental). Why isn't alcohol demonized the way other drugs are? What about caffeine, don't people become dependent (physically and ment
Shouldn't we be suspicious that the government has never openly declared critical Linux updates an imperative?
Two reasons for this: market share and business interests.
Windows simply has a bigger market share, which makes critical flaws a far bigger threat. It is just easier to gather up a botnet of 50000 Windows machines before somebody notices than to get that many *nix machines.
And the government is interested in what businesses need. Microsoft has been campaigning for years against Linux, which gives the government an impression that Linux presents a serious threat to Microsoft. Since most people have the impression that FOSS is anti-business, even people in the government, there is no pressure to pay any attention to it.
And there is also the question of visibility. How many times have you heard of a major *nix virus in the news? How many times has it been Windows or MS-Office?
I have noticed more stability in XP, at least over the 3.1-98 line (2k had comparable stability). The real issue I have with XP is that, after having switched to a Linux system running KDE 3 years ago, I find that I am limited in what I can do with XP. For example, it is not possible to have more than one person connect to an XP system at a time, and there is clearly no technical limitation the remote desktop software (since 2k3 will allow, for a fee, many users to connect). Explorer simply doesn't have support for things that are useful to support -- like the ability to edit files over an FTP connection (why has this been left out?). It's not a question of stability for me, it is a question of usefulness. I do a lot of work involving remote filesystems, and I do not usually get to choose how I will be connecting to them (usually it is either FTP or SFTP, neither of which explorer does a good job with).
The general design of Windows is limited in scope to a very specific situation, but Microsoft has marketed Windows as a one-size-fits-all OS. It is great for use as a simple office computer, as you might find at a secretary's desk, but for anything more sophisticated I would avoid Windows as much as possible -- I certainly wouldn't use it for developing anything other than Windows applications.
Of course electronic voting is not verifiable -- but after the numerous attempts to actually verify the vote in Florida back in 2000...
George Bush barely made it into the white house to begin with, and congress is on his side. Why would anybody be worrying about a paper trail, when verifiability very nearly cost him the election back in 2000? With this new system, the supreme court will never have to instruct a candidate to stop requesting recounts, because there will be nothing to recount. But here in America, only the minority of well-informed citizens even recognized the need for a recount in Florida -- the rest were busy behaving like 5 year olds.
Slashdot Mirror
Better than nothing (Mandrake's kernel panics).
No, free markets create problems like this. In a truly free market, you have no legal recourse if you are sold a defective product, and as Windows demonstrates, market forces do not stop poor-quality products from dominating the market. What is needed is less protection of corporations, as you said -- and more protection of consumers. Microsoft should be legally obligated to immediately patch any bugs that are reported. Unfortunately, singling out Microsoft wouldn't solve the problem, and a general solution to the problem would ruin the open source movement. The only actual solution to this problem is better education -- so that consumers are educated enough to choose the best software available, which would force publishers (including FOSS publishers) to patch quickly, or lose market share. Standards help, too.
This would only make sense if the game item in question was actually being sold (as happens quite often). You might be able to make a case if the item was stolen somehow while you were in the process of selling it for real money; our courts do not have any interest in a virtual world, only a real one.
Mainly that the users are not made aware that they are renting, not buying. These stores bill themselves as selling music, not renting music; you should have complete control over something you buy. DRM deliberately controls what somebody can do with they computer that they do own, which does not sit well with the basic theory behind open source software (which is based on the idea that you should be able to do whatever you wish with the computer that you own). Finally, there is the question of portability -- when you purchase/rent DRM'ed music, there is a limitation on what devices you may play it on. This ties you down to a specific company, and often it is not made clear to the end user that this is the case. I have encountered, on several occasions, friends who asked why they couldn't play music from some random music store on their iPods...
You don't purchase content from private libraries. Realplayer's music store is a better example of a private library, because you are actually paying a monthly fee for access. On the other hand, iTunes charges you per song, giving one the impression that they have actually purchased music from Apple -- when in reality, they are also renting the songs, but it is not billed that way. The chain analogy is perfect; it is a book store which doesn't allow you to truly own what you purchase.
Unfortunately, I haven't heard many success stories from kde-cygwin, and I doubt that I will. I think that a while ago, I came across a project that was porting Konqueror and KOffice to OSX (without X11), but I guess that doesn't really apply to you.
The laptops, if there is some use for them, should be the property of the school, monitored by the teachers, with many restrictions on use. Unfortunately, paying Dell to do this would cost quite a bit more, and nobody working in the education system of my city (New York) is prepared to do that...
...but 1.5 turned me off to Mozilla. Konqueror loads a lot faster, and uses less memory.
The funny thing is that I am sitting in a class right now (Formal Languages and Automata). Slashdot is actually helping me learn...really!
There seems to be a lot of useless technology in the news today. The New York Times is covering a breaking story about downloading movies http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/technology/31bas ics.html?ref=technology.
But you are violating the DMCA (copyright law).
No, it is not. Actually, 27,000 genes is better proof of evolution than the existence of humans, since it just adds new stuff to the same organism. Extra genes can get added during DNA replication, this is know, but usually they are useless...and then sometimes, they are actually useful!
Name something that the business world needs, and I can name a dozen open source apps, and a dozen more *nix apps, which do it. Sometimes, better than whats on Windows, sometimes not, but the core OS doesn't really stop one from doing what one needs to do.
How about remote desktop? It deliberately disables the ability to have multiple users connect to anything lower than Windows Server 2K3 (that's right, even with XPPro, you don't get useful things like that).
You don't believe the researchers? Contact them about it. You cannot site a single study to support your point of view, but you are making blind assertions based on the statements of biased parties. Whether or not you believe actual research, the numbers show that P2P networks, including Napster, have not had a statistically significant impact on content sales.
You saw small CD stores close down between 2000 and 2003? Guess what? There were hard economic times! I saw many, many, many small businesses close their doors back then, CD stores among them. The fact that P2P networks were at their height at that time is pure coincidence. Plenty of other fads were occurring, and it is as ludicrous to blame P2P networks on CD stores closing as it is to blame the rise of blackberries. Unless you can find some basis for making this claim, other than "they happened at the same time," your opinions bear no relevance.
Kazaa outdid Napster's popularity, with Napster peaking at under 30 million registered users and Kazaa peaking at over 50 million. Kazaa is also a far more efficient network than Napster was and it scales better. The RIAA has been 100% ineffective at preventing P2P traffic. This cannot be explained by anything other than people who cannot afford to buy CDs going to P2P networks instead. How is this different from the pre-Napster days of burning copies of your friends' CDs?
In fact, P2P filesharing is no more dangerous to profits than CD burners, which were lobbied against, or FM radio, which was lobbied against...the RIAA has a history of vehemently opposing any new technology that allows people to hear music when they could not have afforded to otherwise. It is a group that is led by millionaires, who can afford to buy whatever music they wish to hear, not average people who have to be scrupulous in their buying decisions.
Actually, P2P is not a threat to anybody at all. A recent study (http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_Marc h2004.pdf) found that downloads had no impact on CD sales -- in theory, this is probably because the amount of work needed to download and organize one's music wouldn't make sense if you could just afford to buy a CD. This same logic applies to DVDs; if you have the money for a $50 DVD, you will most likely just go out and buy it, especially considering the immense amount of time needed to download a 2+ hour movie. P2P networks really served as a way to just increase the number of people listening to music and watching movies, and didn't really deprive anybody of sales. The fact that sales went down around 2002 is irrelevant, since ALL businesses were suffering back then, and the content industries are not some special exception. During Kazaa's most active period, CD sales were actually on the rise...
Or just not using the PC architecture when that happens. Sun still produces SPARC workstations, Apple still produces its computers, and a dozen more companies with an interest in Open Source can fill any hardware void Microsoft seeks to create. The best part is, Microsoft will never be able to make it to those platforms, but we already have. Unfortunately, many of these companies also support the TPM, which leads me to wonder if we will actually be able to get a computer without that waste of electricity installed.
Total Annihilation employs a different model than Starcraft, to make strategies more interesting. One of the most annoying strategies in a game like Starcraft is attrition, that is just playing defensively until the opponent runs out of resources. In TA, you never actually run out of resources to mine, so playing defensively is actually a losing strategy. Also, don't play the campaigns, they are the worst part of the game (what the hell were they even thinking when they made those??) -- play in skirmish mode against a few computers, or multiplayer with a few friends. It even allows for a LAN spawn if you happen to be playing over a LAN with a single CD. Personally, I cannot play mutliplayer anymore, because I have modded my TA install too much (I installed a third "race", called The Lost Legacy), but the 3rd party AIs I installed actually provide some challenge, at least when 3 or 4 computers are allied against me.
...I still play Total Annihilation. The interface is simple and easy (although there are many, many multiplayer commands you should learn). I think I typically count 2 mouse clicks to launch an attack, maybe a click and a keystroke, and rarely will I exceed 200 mouse clicks in a single skirmish.
Language is another example of evolution. It is reproduced when a baby begins to learn to speak, and the copy of language is slightly imperfect, with new words added or old words forgotten. You will notice, however, that advantageous trends form in languages -- the words for common things are not particularly long (e.g., "water"). Do opponents of biological evolution also insist that languages were created by some intelligent power?
Of course, if you are guaranteed that you will only be dealing with integers and rationals, you can get away with using remainders when you perform the actual division. In fact, this will also work for nth-root computations, although it won't be particularly useful except as a technique for expressing the degree of error.
Then, in the 1980s, an actor named Ronald Reagen, ascending to the office of president from his former job as governor of California, where he knocked the state university down a few notches, decided that America needs to spend all the money it gave back in tax cuts on arresting people who use drugs. Furthermore, we would begin saturating our children with anti-drug propaganda, riddled with half-truths and missing information but disguised as legitimate findings. We would adopt the Christian 12-step programs' philosophy of lifetime addictions ("addiction" has no agreed upon medical definition, by the way. Doctors use the terms "abuse" and "dependence" to describe specific behaviors), then tell the parents that if their kids become intoxicated with any illegal substances they will be lying in the gutters and become complete failures in life. Then, we use this theory that if a drug is illegal it is fundamentally bad in order to justify keeping all drugs illegal, until a new generation arises that grew up surrounded by the propaganda who won't even think to question something that they have been told since the age of 5.
Don't believe me? Consider a substance known as Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA; street name is ecstasy). MDMA was sometimes used by psychiatrists for its ability to help people open up, and some research indicated that small amounts of the substance (below the threshold for getting high) could help cure cluster headaches. Then, a couple of techno fans discovered that the high from MDMA was kinda cool at their parties, and soon MDMA became the most popular party drug after alcohol and marijuana. The response of the US government? Reschedule MDMA as a "schedule I" substance, which classifies it as having no known medical use, and tell everybody that MDMA is the new plague threatening their kids. Tell all the kids that MDMA is going to get them in a lot of trouble in life, but don't bother to tell them what effects MDMA actually has, and create mass hysteria about the substance. Then, perform an experiment on primates that shows MDMA is as neurotoxic as methamphetamine is, and then hide the face that the research was recalled because instead of using MDMA, the scientists accidentally used methamphetamine. Result? People are taken about at the suggestion of legalization.
The funny thing is that nobody ever needs to present any evidence to support a claim that drugs are a plague to our society. The claims don't even have to make sense: many people believe that crack is a worse substance than cocaine...because nobody informed them that they are the same drug, taken in a different form (crack is smoked and therefore absorbed faster; but cocaine can be injected, and absorbed still faster). What is the difference between morphine and heroine? One is prescribed by a doctor, one is not (pure heroine and pure morphine have similar effects, both physical and mental). Why isn't alcohol demonized the way other drugs are? What about caffeine, don't people become dependent (physically and ment
Two reasons for this: market share and business interests.
Windows simply has a bigger market share, which makes critical flaws a far bigger threat. It is just easier to gather up a botnet of 50000 Windows machines before somebody notices than to get that many *nix machines.
And the government is interested in what businesses need. Microsoft has been campaigning for years against Linux, which gives the government an impression that Linux presents a serious threat to Microsoft. Since most people have the impression that FOSS is anti-business, even people in the government, there is no pressure to pay any attention to it.
And there is also the question of visibility. How many times have you heard of a major *nix virus in the news? How many times has it been Windows or MS-Office?
The general design of Windows is limited in scope to a very specific situation, but Microsoft has marketed Windows as a one-size-fits-all OS. It is great for use as a simple office computer, as you might find at a secretary's desk, but for anything more sophisticated I would avoid Windows as much as possible -- I certainly wouldn't use it for developing anything other than Windows applications.
Of course electronic voting is not verifiable -- but after the numerous attempts to actually verify the vote in Florida back in 2000... George Bush barely made it into the white house to begin with, and congress is on his side. Why would anybody be worrying about a paper trail, when verifiability very nearly cost him the election back in 2000? With this new system, the supreme court will never have to instruct a candidate to stop requesting recounts, because there will be nothing to recount. But here in America, only the minority of well-informed citizens even recognized the need for a recount in Florida -- the rest were busy behaving like 5 year olds.