With the recent articles about EU-vs-MS type dealings, I just wanted to talk about this breifly. I've worked at the Microsoft Campus in Copenhagen. I would wager that Microsoft is putting more money into the EU economy than you are. Copenhagen is just one of the cities in Europe where MS has a presence that puts money into the local economy. (I mention this because now that I think about it, I don't recall if Denmark is an EU member state or not..) I would say that Microsoft has a rightful stake in how the EU develops its business climate - just as being a citizen of whatever country you're in gives you some right to vote there (unless you live somewhere odd:)
a) Yes it is (a member of the EU, that is). b) We have a Microsoft Campus here? Wow - who knew? c) To suggest that putting money into an economy gives you the right to direct how that economy develops its business climate is a dangerous move. It's tantamount to buying votes - M$ (dollar sign used in context) could be construed as attempting to turn the whole of the EU into a Rotten Borough (or would that be a robber button?). Something I'm sure they wouldn't wish to be seen to be doing.
What you have to remember is that a business is considered under the law as an individual. Microsoft is not a citizen of Denmark, but were it to be, it would entitle Microsoft to one vote. The same as e.g. A.P. Møller has one vote. And I have one vote*. It would also have to make a choice as to where that vote would be cast. It's over 18 years old now, so can't hold dual nationality under US law;-).
Proportional representation is not proportional to your bank balance, and the major corporations of this world would do well to remember this. What the bank balance gives you is a loud voice, and this voice can be heard doing good or evil. Once we start accepting that more money gives you more rights, then we will all of a sudden start losing those rights we have. I don't want that, and I doubt you do either.
*(note to my SOH - I'm the least well-off of these three examples. Don't go shopping!)
M'lud - we move for summary dismissal on medical grounds. The accused suffers from not only an article deficiency, but also a form of schizophrenia known as fragmentation. If we examine the statement from by the Grammar Police this is really self-evident.
Their index is comprised of only torrents they index on their tracker, but don't worry because there the tracker has almost 350,000 torrents.
Also: -
Torrent Portal is famous for there a large following of faithful uploaders
The defence rests, whilst awaiting the completion of the defendants fragment upon return of their original personality.
I hope that, for the sake of our collective Cox, manufacturers can sort out these battery issues.
Note to parent: please read postings out loud before hitting the send button. I just sprayed tea all over my keyboard! Of course, if that were your intention - bravo, sir!
Elite may have been technically impressive, but the gameplay was abysmal. You spent 50% of your time spinning round in circles avoiding pirates, and the other 50% crashing into the spacestation.
You're kidding, right? So software companies sell the first copy for 2 million dollars and every one after for the price of the plastic it's printed on?
That would be a stupid stupid way of doing it, wouldn't it? No-one in their right mind would even contemplate doing business that way. No I'm not kidding. And no they won't sell the first copy for 2 mill, and every one after that for the plastic cost. That would be dumb. They work out roughly how many copies are going to be sold, how much it's cost to produce the software, divide one by the other and hey presto! Then factor in some profit, and out comes the price per copy.
Btw, I'm against copyright, so I'm advocating charging for creation, not for distribution.
Ah of course, how sensible. So they should sell the first company for 2 million dollars, and every one after for the price of the plastic it's printed on? (see above).
Companies way overshoot the price, because it is outragous to pay for the right to use the distributed content, instead the actual production costs of the given content.
Two things. One: it's not outrageous to pay for the right to use the distributed content rather than the actual production costs of the given content. Have you ever played a game, watched TV, gone to the movies? How much do you think it costs to produce the content you're watching? You get insane value for money when everyone chips in. That's how these things work. Two: not piece of software developed makes a profit...taking games for instance, on average it's between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10, depending who you ask. These profit makers need to recoup the losses of the others. It happens that these blockbusters *do* make an insane amount of profit on them, but thank heavens they do, cos they pay for the others that fall by the wayside.
Yeah, companies wouldn't be able to nail outrageous profits either, they'd just revert back to standard profits a painter has to be content with, rather than royalties every time someone looks at the walls he painted.
Ah - you're a painter rather than a content creator. If you're in Copenhagen, my spare room needs redecorating. I'll burn you a copy of Kubuntu in exchange, yeah?
Nah. Pirates sell software for EXACTLY what it's worth. Companies are those who sell them for more than it's worth.
Not really. Pirates sell software for as much as they think they can get away with. People won't spend more than about 10% of shelf-price because buy and large they require a hefty discount to salve their consciences over (pretty much always) knowingly breaking the (albeit relatively minor) law.
Companies are those that sell it for a price that will cover the costs of producing the software. Writing software is an expensive business - it takes lots of people lots of time to do. People take up space in offices, use electricity powering the computers that need to be bought for them to write the software on. Salaries need paying, taxes need paying on those salaries (the employee isn't the only one to pay income tax - in the UK at least, the employer also pays tax on your salary as well as you) and so on. The company also needs to promote the product so the end consumer actually hears about it. After that, the company then needs to invest in research & development of future products and heck, maybe even turn a profit. They also have to indirectly cover the earnings lost through people buying their product through pirate channels - those that would've bought it if they had no other alternative for getting (yes these people do exist!).
The large-scale software pirate has none of these expenses. All they need is a broadband connection, a china-hosted spam server and a disc duplicator.
Ouch! Oh no - the pain, the agony! Please stop Mr. A. Coward, for I cannot withstand the onslaught of your loquaciousness and mastery of the fine art of debate. See me prostrate myself before your mighty intellect and insightful witticisms, not to mention your deft and creative turn of phrase - the creative of course referring to your ability to turn a five letter word into a four letter word. Unless, of course, you were intending to compare me to some Thai condiments. Oh - how I tremble in fear at even the remotest possibility of meeting you in a scrabble competition.
Now please move along, buy yourself a dictionary, learn some manners, discover the courage of your own convictions, and post as something other than Anonymous Coward in future.
So they're offering the domain name to a trademark owner at an inflated price? No, they're not. There is no holding companies to ransom for their domain names - hell, if you look at the.cm registration page, they aren't even listing "premium" domain name pricing, or auctioning off domain names. You want it and it's not registered, it's all one price. It's a manual paper-based registration process, which could make it a bit of a...BIND...(sorry - couldn't resist!).
They are the legitimate TLD holders for the.cm domain. Would there be this fuss if the typos got redirected to http://info.intelcam.cm/? I somehow don't think so.
The real problem here is that the Cameroon govt. has worked out a deal where they can supplement the income of the country through advertising revenue, and the great and the good that sit in judgement every day here on/. don't like it, because Profit == BAD. Mark me down as troll if you want here, but Profit != BAD. In fact, Profit == GOOD. If the company I work for didn't make a profit, then I'd have no job, and the same goes for most of you out there. Now, the actions of the.cm TLD administrators may well have unforseen (to them) consequences wrt spam filtering etc., but there's nothing inherently wrong in the motives of what they're doing.
Nnnnoooooo - it's *not* domain squatting. The following cut'n'pasted from wikipedia: -
According to the U.S. federal law known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, Cybersquatting is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price, an act which some deem to be extortion.
They're not domain squatting.
The following (also) cut'n'pasted from wikipedia: -
Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, is a form of cybersquatting which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. Should a user accidentally enter an incorrect website address, they may be led to an alternative address owned by a cybersquatter.
They're typo squatting the whole of the.com domain.
Unregistered domains shouldn't resolve. All sorts of things on the internet rely on being able to get an NXDOMAIN response. It's typo squatting on a huge scale. But it's *still* typo squatting.
They domain-squatted.cm? Who else apart from the Cameroon do you feel should own the TLD? Did Cameroon think "hey - there's a TLD that (insert the "legit." owner of the TLD here) neglected to register....here's a chance to make a quick buck. Now......where's the countrys CmEx(*) card?".
They may be typo-squatting.com, but they're certainly not domain-squatting.cm
-- (*)Cameroon Express - don't leave home without it!.
define: explotable - an exploit native to Windows and Linux machines which enables an attacker to remotely detonate the target machine, e.g. as if it were a bomb
Dell *do* offer both Linux and Windows as OS options, you know.;-)
[rant] They obviously didn't ask *my* SOH. Here I sit in front of 5 TFT monitors, 3 computers, hi-def projector, a plethora of consoles, and is she content with that? No! She still wants the diamonds! I mean - seriously! Where did they get these mythical women from? Shoes?! Don't even get me started on shoes! Have you seen our shoe closet? It's applying for its own post code next month. You can see it from Google Earth. And TFA wants me to believe that women would choose to have tech *instead* of holidays, shoes, gems? I call foul, I tell you - FOUL! They want the lot! Tech and shoes. Shoes and tech. Techy shoes would have my grrl in a shopping frenzy. Ohgodohgodohgodohgod can you imagine? The horror! THE HORROR!!!!! (5 exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind) *ahem* [/rant]
But the problem didn't really exist publically before then, did it? In April, VMware and XenSource were both allegedly "fine" about the change. Greg Kroah-Hartman only announced the problem last week *after* the alliance had been announced. Now there's going to have been problems either side of the dates, but I really don't think that XenSource ran away to play with MS just because VMWare joined the club, do you?
Now I really don't want to sound like a typical/. anti-MS troll, but I can think of harder ways of MS winning the marketshare than buying off XenSource and causing a big dissention in the linux virtualisation camp.
While the warm and fuzzies are indeed why many get involved in OSS, it's not the whole reason behind it. OSS is a perfectly valid business model, and once it becomes a business, then the ego is (or at least, should be) more professionally controlled. There is definitely a boss who makes the final decision of right or wrong.
As soon as it becomes a business, the difference lies in how you make your money out of the software that you write, not whether you make the money.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh - I take it you mean it became "haute couture" after the Norman Conquest?
Oh, and I for one may or not have welcomed our Norman overlords.
a) Yes it is (a member of the EU, that is).
b) We have a Microsoft Campus here? Wow - who knew?
c) To suggest that putting money into an economy gives you the right to direct how that economy develops its business climate is a dangerous move. It's tantamount to buying votes - M$ (dollar sign used in context) could be construed as attempting to turn the whole of the EU into a Rotten Borough (or would that be a robber button?). Something I'm sure they wouldn't wish to be seen to be doing.
What you have to remember is that a business is considered under the law as an individual. Microsoft is not a citizen of Denmark, but were it to be, it would entitle Microsoft to one vote. The same as e.g. A.P. Møller has one vote. And I have one vote*. It would also have to make a choice as to where that vote would be cast. It's over 18 years old now, so can't hold dual nationality under US law
Proportional representation is not proportional to your bank balance, and the major corporations of this world would do well to remember this. What the bank balance gives you is a loud voice, and this voice can be heard doing good or evil. Once we start accepting that more money gives you more rights, then we will all of a sudden start losing those rights we have. I don't want that, and I doubt you do either.
*(note to my SOH - I'm the least well-off of these three examples. Don't go shopping!)
(oops - please insert this apostrophe (') in the appropriate location in previous reply - the precise location left as an exercise for the reader).
M'lud - we move for summary dismissal on medical grounds. The accused suffers from not only an article deficiency, but also a form of schizophrenia known as fragmentation. If we examine the statement from by the Grammar Police this is really self-evident.
Their index is comprised of only torrents they index on their tracker, but don't worry because there the tracker has almost 350,000 torrents.
Also: -
Torrent Portal is famous for there a large following of faithful uploaders
The defence rests, whilst awaiting the completion of the defendants fragment upon return of their original personality.
I put this to George, and asked whether it was possible.
He said that it was tricky, might take some time......about 7.5 million years was his best guess.
I personally reckon we need rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.
Note to parent: please read postings out loud before hitting the send button. I just sprayed tea all over my keyboard!
Of course, if that were your intention - bravo, sir!
I don't get it.
That would be a stupid stupid way of doing it, wouldn't it? No-one in their right mind would even contemplate doing business that way.
No I'm not kidding. And no they won't sell the first copy for 2 mill, and every one after that for the plastic cost. That would be dumb. They work out roughly how many copies are going to be sold, how much it's cost to produce the software, divide one by the other and hey presto! Then factor in some profit, and out comes the price per copy.
Ah of course, how sensible. So they should sell the first company for 2 million dollars, and every one after for the price of the plastic it's printed on? (see above).
Two things.
One: it's not outrageous to pay for the right to use the distributed content rather than the actual production costs of the given content. Have you ever played a game, watched TV, gone to the movies? How much do you think it costs to produce the content you're watching? You get insane value for money when everyone chips in. That's how these things work.
Two: not piece of software developed makes a profit...taking games for instance, on average it's between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10, depending who you ask. These profit makers need to recoup the losses of the others. It happens that these blockbusters *do* make an insane amount of profit on them, but thank heavens they do, cos they pay for the others that fall by the wayside.
Ah - you're a painter rather than a content creator. If you're in Copenhagen, my spare room needs redecorating. I'll burn you a copy of Kubuntu in exchange, yeah?
Not really. Pirates sell software for as much as they think they can get away with. People won't spend more than about 10% of shelf-price because buy and large they require a hefty discount to salve their consciences over (pretty much always) knowingly breaking the (albeit relatively minor) law.
Companies are those that sell it for a price that will cover the costs of producing the software. Writing software is an expensive business - it takes lots of people lots of time to do. People take up space in offices, use electricity powering the computers that need to be bought for them to write the software on. Salaries need paying, taxes need paying on those salaries (the employee isn't the only one to pay income tax - in the UK at least, the employer also pays tax on your salary as well as you) and so on.
The company also needs to promote the product so the end consumer actually hears about it. After that, the company then needs to invest in research & development of future products and heck, maybe even turn a profit. They also have to indirectly cover the earnings lost through people buying their product through pirate channels - those that would've bought it if they had no other alternative for getting (yes these people do exist!).
The large-scale software pirate has none of these expenses. All they need is a broadband connection, a china-hosted spam server and a disc duplicator.
Scum.
But 7 years? That's OTT.
There's a technical term for this behaviour. It's called stalking.
Hmm....don't agree with the crowd => victim of system.
;-)
Let's see if we can't find some prior art on this.
1. Nelson Mandela
2. Ghandi
3. Jean D'Arc
4. Jesus
I doubt even Billy G. is going to be able to rip this patent out from the hands of the Vatican
Just north of the capital city of the 51st state (Wimbledon, London to be precise)
Like OMFG you're a grrl?? Really??!! Send pic N0Wz0rz!!!!!!!!!!! a/s/lhangonaminutethisisslashdotnevermind....
--
See what happens when you *do* join in?
"The games you pwn end up pwning j00"
Ouch! Oh no - the pain, the agony! Please stop Mr. A. Coward, for I cannot withstand the onslaught of your loquaciousness and mastery of the fine art of debate. See me prostrate myself before your mighty intellect and insightful witticisms, not to mention your deft and creative turn of phrase - the creative of course referring to your ability to turn a five letter word into a four letter word. Unless, of course, you were intending to compare me to some Thai condiments. Oh - how I tremble in fear at even the remotest possibility of meeting you in a scrabble competition.
Now please move along, buy yourself a dictionary, learn some manners, discover the courage of your own convictions, and post as something other than Anonymous Coward in future.
Dont let the door hit in the ass on your way out.
So they're offering the domain name to a trademark owner at an inflated price? No, they're not. There is no holding companies to ransom for their domain names - hell, if you look at the .cm registration page, they aren't even listing "premium" domain name pricing, or auctioning off domain names. You want it and it's not registered, it's all one price. It's a manual paper-based registration process, which could make it a bit of a ...BIND...(sorry - couldn't resist!).
.cm domain. Would there be this fuss if the typos got redirected to http://info.intelcam.cm/? I somehow don't think so.
/. don't like it, because Profit == BAD. Mark me down as troll if you want here, but Profit != BAD. In fact, Profit == GOOD. If the company I work for didn't make a profit, then I'd have no job, and the same goes for most of you out there. Now, the actions of the .cm TLD administrators may well have unforseen (to them) consequences wrt spam filtering etc., but there's nothing inherently wrong in the motives of what they're doing.
They are the legitimate TLD holders for the
The real problem here is that the Cameroon govt. has worked out a deal where they can supplement the income of the country through advertising revenue, and the great and the good that sit in judgement every day here on
Nnnnoooooo - it's *not* domain squatting. The following cut'n'pasted from wikipedia: -
.com domain.
According to the U.S. federal law known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, Cybersquatting is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price, an act which some deem to be extortion.
They're not domain squatting.
The following (also) cut'n'pasted from wikipedia: -
Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, is a form of cybersquatting which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. Should a user accidentally enter an incorrect website address, they may be led to an alternative address owned by a cybersquatter.
They're typo squatting the whole of the
Unregistered domains shouldn't resolve. All sorts of things on the internet rely on being able to get an NXDOMAIN response. It's typo squatting on a huge scale. But it's *still* typo squatting.
They typo-squatted .com by domain-squatting .cm.
.cm? Who else apart from the Cameroon do you feel should own the TLD? Did Cameroon think "hey - there's a TLD that (insert the "legit." owner of the TLD here) neglected to register....here's a chance to make a quick buck. Now......where's the countrys CmEx(*) card?".
.com, but they're certainly not domain-squatting .cm
They domain-squatted
They may be typo-squatting
--
(*)Cameroon Express - don't leave home without it!.
Not to mention spam filters.
define: explotable - an exploit native to Windows and Linux machines which enables an attacker to remotely detonate the target machine, e.g. as if it were a bomb
;-)
Dell *do* offer both Linux and Windows as OS options, you know.
http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=33321
Wait ... I'm confused .... this *is* /. isn't it? How was that modded funny instead of insightful?
[rant]
They obviously didn't ask *my* SOH. Here I sit in front of 5 TFT monitors, 3 computers, hi-def projector, a plethora of consoles, and is she content with that? No! She still wants the diamonds! I mean - seriously! Where did they get these mythical women from? Shoes?! Don't even get me started on shoes! Have you seen our shoe closet? It's applying for its own post code next month. You can see it from Google Earth. And TFA wants me to believe that women would choose to have tech *instead* of holidays, shoes, gems? I call foul, I tell you - FOUL! They want the lot! Tech and shoes. Shoes and tech. Techy shoes would have my grrl in a shopping frenzy. Ohgodohgodohgodohgod can you imagine? The horror! THE HORROR!!!!! (5 exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind)
*ahem*
[/rant]
But the problem didn't really exist publically before then, did it? In April, VMware and XenSource were both allegedly "fine" about the change. Greg Kroah-Hartman only announced the problem last week *after* the alliance had been announced. Now there's going to have been problems either side of the dates, but I really don't think that XenSource ran away to play with MS just because VMWare joined the club, do you?
/. anti-MS troll, but I can think of harder ways of MS winning the marketshare than buying off XenSource and causing a big dissention in the linux virtualisation camp.
Now I really don't want to sound like a typical
While the warm and fuzzies are indeed why many get involved in OSS, it's not the whole reason behind it. OSS is a perfectly valid business model, and once it becomes a business, then the ego is (or at least, should be) more professionally controlled. There is definitely a boss who makes the final decision of right or wrong.
As soon as it becomes a business, the difference lies in how you make your money out of the software that you write, not whether you make the money.