Why Windows 7 sells to 300 million users and takes a 23% market share.
Yep, it's easy to that when you have alley cat ethics and a naive captive market.
True free markets depend on informed actors and actual competition. Because of the economic network effect, and the complexity of software, the M$Windows market, security or otherwise, is neither.
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Adopt an astroturfer. Make their life hell.
but you are entitled to your opinion.
Anonymous paid propaganda is not an opinion. I live for the day when the law catches up with these lowlifes. Fraudulently feigning perpetual ignorance for years and endlessly spamming simplistic propaganda to drown out more sophisticated debate.
Propaganda has only a tenuous relationship with the truth and is designed to manipulate to increase their profit and not to inform. In addition shills seem to be fond of creating manipulative analogies that have little relationship to reality or their true opinions. Probably regard themselves as "creatives" when they are the exact opposite - vandals.
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Adopt an astroturfer. Make their life hell.
-if there were no pirates to begin with, we wouldn't have DRM.
Don't be silly. DRM has little to do with piracy and everything to do with maximizing the revenue stream. Pirates who would not have paid are irrelevant.
Do I understand why companies feel they must spend resources trying to stop people from stealing their stuff? Yes.
"Must"? Don't make us laugh. DRM is simply a means to manipulate what would otherwise be a free the market, that's all.
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Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD too.
Who do they call for support?
Troll.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
There are no royalties on internal use of H.264 video.
There are costs to everyone. It's just hidden in the cost of device and media purchase and the lack of free/open competition, that's all.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Things like ADS provide a way to store data about a file which doesn't have an integrated mechanism to store metadata (e.g., EXIF). Keeping it in a separate name and using an alternative API call makes sense from a compatibility and a simplicity point-of-view.
No it doesn't. It increases the complexity of every program that deals with the file, makes both the files and the accessing programs less portable, hides things from the user they may need to know (mystery program behavior anyone?) and generally just puts a spanner in the works.
Things like ADS provide a way to store data about a file which doesn't have an integrated mechanism to store metadata (e.g., EXIF). Keeping it in a separate name and using an alternative API call makes sense from a compatibility and a simplicity point-of-view.
No it doesn't. Storing the "metadata" under a separate name/label (ie. in a file with a related file name) may make sense but using a separate OS call doesn't because the OS is providing no additional service. OS calls are expensive and non-portable and should be kept to a minimum. If you insist on trying to hide such attributes from calling programs then it should be a compatibility layer on top of the OS, not in the OS itself.
Users largely don't care if metadata is lost because a file is copied to an incompatible filesystem on a flash drive, synced to Dropbox, emailed to a friend, or maybe even printed out.
Actually they do. So-called metadata is often just as important as the data itself for everything from backups (users are going to be real happy if they discover their data missing because the incremental backup lost it due to bad file dates) to file names (users are real happy when they try to type in or copy some file name/label in their native language and the OS comes back with some cryptic error message) to sorting (users are real happy if they have to deal with a thousand out of order items due faulty character set handling). As just one example amongst many VFAT's poor preservation of metadata like file hierarchies, character sets and links has caused problems for millions.
but losing the 200 page thesis is unacceptable.
Losing all user data is unacceptable, whether it's called metadata or not. You're right that some data is more important than others but metadata is there for a reason and deleting it causes all sorts of user-visible furfies. And that is bad. Computer interfaces are unusable enough as it is without introducing even more problems.
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Are you one of those programmers who expect their users to be mind readers? Think about how your code is going to be used step-by-step!
You can't deny they have an interest in being sure that their investment pays off.
"Having an interest", financial or otherwise, is not a justification for unethical behavior. Ever.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
If you post good videos, they're still good regardless of who you are, your agenda, or if everything in your profile is made up. I don't see how they're manipulating anyone.
WTF? They are doing the whole thing to manipulate, in this case deliberately diverting people from possibly better alternatives. And because it's advertising drivel it's sure to be content free and emotionally manipulative.
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Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
Plus they kinda are showing us who they are advertising for...whether or not they are being paid shouldn't be an issue
Would consumers behavior change if they knew it was paid for? Yes? Well then it damn well is an issue. Whatever the viral marketing parasites would like to believe. Bunch of lowlifes stealing millions (billions?) of hours of peoples' time and attention for nothing in return.
Even if they are being compensated, we don't know whether or not they themselves are such fans of the company they work for that they wouldn't enjoy doing this irregardless.
Don't make us laugh. Pretty much nobody advertises other people's companies for fun.
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Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
ADS was introduced for one reason: to allow NT servers to support Apple clients, without the server needing to do some crazy transforms
Umm, ADS is doing crazy transforms. Some would say giving it a different name and use different OS calls to access different data is worse than using different names and the same OS call to access the different data.
Some people, programmers or otherwise, can't tell the difference between giving something a different name/label and actually doing something different.
This problem is endless in the computer software industry, mainly because of the amorphous nature of software. e.g. redoing OS apps inside a web browser or reinventing file systems inside databases or reinventing hierarchical file systems inside XML and calling it all "new" and "innovative". While there is some invention going on in web browsers, databases and XML, most is just reinventing the wheel. Such software is often necessary for compatibility reasons but recognizing that it is a compatibility layer and putting that compatibility layer at the appropriate interface is the important skill.
Or in other words meta-data is data. Sorry, but until you understand that in your bones you are not a decent programmer.
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Has the Least Patentable Unit reached zero yet?
but from actual patent holders
They are a rather small fraction of society who have a rather large vested interest. One of the big problems in this area is PTO who have a highly unbalanced view of the world due to the people they are exposed to every day. A bit like regulatory capture.
who have innovative technologies
By who's definition? I certainly hope not the PTO's!
I want to see objective, scientific evidence, not vested interest's talking points, about why we should block the free speech of billions of people so that a very small fraction of society should have additional benefit.
Just for a start; until the PTO take independent reinvention seriously, can separate the invention of words from the invention of ideas and has a reasonable definition of what an invention is rather than some minor tweak, they are not to be taken seriously.
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I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate.
Stop lying. You know full well it's potentially "... less reason to innovate", not "... no reason to innovate".
Patent proponents continue to push this line even though it's obviously wrong which suggests they are either engaging in fuzzy thinking or are bad faith actors.
In any case protection may only be needed when the necessary "innovation quantum" is sufficiently large to require a significant investment to make the leap. When innovation can be gradual, as it is in software and many fields, first mover advantage is all that's needed to reward those gradual innovative steps. As with business in general.
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Patents and copyrights - blocking billions of peoples' free speech so that one person can have increased profit.
Or it's the same concept but with a different name/label. Until the PTO can cope with natural language, the invention of words and how this is different from the invention of underlying concepts then the PTO is just handwaving. Not to mention their ongoing empire building by saying that ever more insignificant conceptual differences are significant.
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Has the Least Patentable Unit reached zero yet?
And this AC has a mod of +0 compared to the PP's +5. Funny that.
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Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
