Re: Java and avoiding software piracy?
"Twisted" <twisted0n3@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1185008125.904134.221990@57g2000hsv.googlegroups.com...
Oliver Wrong wrote:
The way you phrase this paragraph makes it sound like you're
egocentric pirate: "I should be allowed to download all movie,
software,
games, etc. I want, because I wasn't gonna pay for those things
ANYWAY, so
it's not like they're losing any profits, etc."
Your putting words in my mouth does not a cogent argument make.
This wasn't an attempt at a making a cogent argument: If you read the
next line, you will have seen that I was explaining how I misunderstood
you. I.e. I'm saying you sound like an egocentric pirate, but later on, it
turns out this is what you're really meant. I'm criticizing your ability
to express yourself. You make understanding your arguments unnecessarily
difficult.
(Incidentally, I thought I'd mention that you seem to take an overly
America-centric view of things).
I'm fairly sure UK copyright law is binding on third parties,
I don't live in the UK either.
You're the one suggesting that information products be treated
specially by disallowing making fully-substitutable products.
Factually false. I'm guessing what you're referring to is my
argument
that software developers should be allowed to charge money for their
software. I have nothing against other software developers making
competing products, even when those competing products are
"fully-substitutable" (though in practice, virtually no software is
fully-sbustituable with another software unless the two are
identical).
Exactly my point. IN PRACTISE the only alternative a user has is to
"buy from the company store".
Factually false.
Consider Firefox vs Internet Explorer, for example. I prefer Firefox.
Firefox is not fully-substitutable for IE, because it does not suffer from
all the bugs that IE has. That doesn't mean I must now give up on FF.
This is a common mistake: to assume that games are interchangeable
or
fully substitutable.
It's also a mistake I never make.
A lot of community content sucks.
A lot of community content rocks.
Do you have a point here?
Read the next paragraph I had written in the post you were replying
to:
The vast majority
of games (and I'm counting a player submitted mod as a "game") I've
played
were free, and yet the vast majority of games I've actually enjoyed
cost
money.
90% of everything is crap. You've proven nothing, save that you make
more careful decisions about spending serious money than you do about
using small amounts of bandwidth and time, which is perfectly normal.
You just avoided the vast majority of commercial games that were crap
and a smaller fraction of the free ones that were crap, because trying
free ones cost so much less.
This is simply not true. I make equally careful decisions about
whether to try a commercial game as I do a free game, because in actual
fact, they both cost the same to me: they're free. One of my friends is a
game reviewer and gets several games sent to him for free. Another one of
my friends is just plain rich (family of an important political figure).
Between the two of them, I very rarely ever need to buy a game myself to
merely try it.
My point is that the ratio of crappy games to good games is much worse
for free games than for commercial games. Perhaps 90% of all games are
crap, but that would be because 99% of free games are crap and 70% of
commercial games are crap, and it averages out to 90% (since there are
more free games than commercial games).
In other words, there's something about commercial games that make
them less likely to be crappy. I suspect it's the fact that money is
involved and that you can hire talented people using money.
What "price-protection" do you perceive for games? The request
from
the developers to not make copies of their software and distribute it
over
the internet?
The request from the developers (and its being enforced by the fucking
government!) to have an effective noncompete agreement with everyone
who happens upon a copy, and therefore a monopoly, yes.
The sole effect of allowing arbitrary use and redistribution by users
would be that market forces would drive the price of a copy down to
zero. Therefore trying to strongarm this into not happening is an
attempt at price protection, nothing more and nothing less.
If you consider any efforts to not have the price of your products to
go down to zero to be a form of "price protection", then I think that
"price protection", under your definition, is not necessarily a "bad
thing".
Note that people who have a copy of the game are free to compete, in
the sense that these people are allowed to make their own game and try to
sell it: If I buy Quake 3, that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to work on
Unreal Tournament 2008. So you are highly misrepresenting the facts when
you say that there is an "effective noncompete agreement" involved in
buying games.
A free market would let everyone choose whether to use something
with
Big Brother features or not. We don't have a free market. Some stuff
requires recent versions of Windows that cannot legally be had
without
the Big Brother features, so Windows can be indispensible and not
substitutable with a non-Big-Brotherish alternative.
Windows is not indispensible. Many people make it through life
just
fine without ever owning a personal computer (I'm not counting things
like
computers which may be in their wristwatches or microwave ovens),
nevermind a copy of Windows.
Strawman argument. Windows is emphatically indispensible for certain
things or under certain circumstances.
I think you don't know what "Strawman argument" means. A Stawman
argument would be an argument in which I had misrepresented your
arguments. It seems clear to me that you actually did claim that Windows
is indispensible (and in fact, that you are claiming it again now), so
when I portray your arguments as if you were claiming that Windows is
indispensible, this is a very accurate portrayal.
Again, Windows is not indispensible. Go to comp.os.linux.advocacy if
you don't believe me.
I think we're talking past each other, then. I'm trying to tell
you
what the world is like right now, and you're trying to tell me what
you
think the world should be.
Nice try. No, you're not merely telling me what it's like right now,
you're defending that state of affairs as somehow being right or just.
I disagree that I'm defending the state of affairs as it is now.
I'm pointing out that it isn't, and why it isn't by the principles of
the capitalist democracies we live in.
Yeah, I know. I just told you that.
Can you produce a screencast demonstrating the problem? I can't
reproduce your bug on my WinXP SP2 machine.
That's impossible, since you're using the same software I am, and
there's no logical reason for this behavior to depend on the hardware
or things like the MAC address or the user's name or anything.
The software can be configured in multiple ways. For example, whether
or not you had eye-candy enabled might affect the bug. As a software
developer, you should be aware of this.
So in other words, "no". And you wonder why your bug (which I'm
unable
to reproduce) hasn't gotten fixed for over 10 years?
Same reason almost none of the others have --
I think you don't know what "almost none" means. Windows XP SP2 was
released in 2004. In 1994, people were running Windows 3.1.
Do you *really* mean to claim that the amount of bugs fixed between
Windows 3.1 and Windows XP SP2 is "almost none"?
If you relax your statement a bit, to something like "It's
unnatural
for information to not be free", then there's the usual counter of
"lots
of things humans do is unnatural, such as developing cure for
diseases,
etc."
There's the double-counter that "curing diseases is not harmful;
curtailing peoples' freedom to do harmless things is".
And then there's the triple-counter of "Forcing all information to be
free is not necessarily harmless". So there. =P
You really should read the labels on buttons before you click on
them.
I suspect the button you had clicked on had a label like "I AGREE" or
something similar. This is the deal that I'm talking about.
That's not a deal, that's interacting with an insentient piece of
software. A deal requires that I communicate with a living sentient
being my understanding and acceptance of foobar, in return for
quuxmumble.
You have a different definition of "deal" than I have, for example.
When I interact with a vending machine, I am not directly interacting with
any human, and yet the terms of the deal are clear: I have to put $1 into
the slot, and I get a drink or candy or whatever it is that the vending
machine is offering. The fact that you require a living sentient being
present is unecessarily restrictive.
The argument "it's a piece of dumb software and it's not possible
to
make a deal with it any more than it's possible to make a deal with a
rock" is invalid. The analog would be "This so called 'contract' is a
dumb
piece of paper. It's not possible to make a deal with a piece of paper
anymore than it's possible to make a deal with a rock."
Clicking a button, unwitnessed, in a solo interaction with a piece of
software and signing, with a witness, a document after negotiating
with somebody are two very different things.
What about signing a document without a witness? I do that very
frequently: for example, whenever I file an income tax return, I'm signing
the document, and there's no one around to witness my signing the
document. Do you think the government takes this document any less
seriously simply because there were not "living sentient being" around to
actually see my sign it?
This applies to you in the UK too.
I'm not from the UK.
Yes, I think you do have a "weird" idea of what actually
constitutes a
deal, in this context at least. First of all, a deal is not
necessarily a
"binding contract", as you seem to imply.
A deal that isn't a "binding contract" is not legally enforceable.
I never claimed otherwise.
[..]
I never claimed what you were doing was illegal. You're just
unnecessarily bringing in irrelevant points into the discussion,
things
which are not even under dispute.
You certainly appear to be disputing them.
No, I think maybe you're in a certain frame of mind (we might call it
"argumentative"), and your frame of mind forces tones onto the text you
read which are not present. You frequently think I'm disputing a lot of
things which I'm not actually disputing, and you think people are
insulting you, when they're not, and you think people are hacking you,
when they are not, etc.
Of course, you've made it fairly obvious that you have a vested
interest here.
What do you think my interest is?
And now you've accused me of having an agenda beyond
simple argumentation and bogosity-combat.
I did not intend to make any such accusation. Your train of thought
interests me. I hesitate to tell you why, as I suspect you'll interpret
the reason as a form of insult. I'm asking you about your motives out of
sheer curiosity.
On the other hand he should
have no right to tell me what I can or cannot do with the copy I got
from Kevin, as I never signed any contract with him and I never
received anything from him (I received something from Kevin).
Well, here I think the water gets muddier... Earlier, you
mentioned
that matter-based products and information-based products should
receive
the same treatment, right? Well, if someone acquires a laptop
illegally
(e.g. it fell off the back of a truck), and then sold it to me, and
the
police eventually track down the laptop to me, they are allowed to
confiscate it from me to return it to its original owner even if *I*
personally did not break any laws (that's the law in my country,
anyway).
[snip one interpretation; the one which favors Twisted's arguments, of
course]
The question is what is the closest analog to this when applied to
information-based goods?
If I take Kevin's CD without asking, and sell it to Katie, the police
can take the CD from Katie and return it to Kevin.
Back to your laptop scenario, if Alice has a laptop, Bob takes it
without asking, and Bob sells the stolen laptop to Charlie, the police
can take the laptop from Charlie and return it to Alice.
What happens if, instead, Alice has a laptop and Bob buys parts and
builds a clone of Alice's laptop with them, then sells this new laptop
to Charlie? Is there any logical reason for the police to take
Charlie's laptop and give it to Alice in this scenario?
Perhaps if the configuration or technology used the laptop itself is
that which is valuable. That is, the information of the laptop is more
important than the matter which makes up the laptop. Or perhaps, the
laptop harddrive contains senstive information, such as govermental
records, and in the process of cloning the laptop, you've also cloned the
contents of the harddrive.
The police would probably not want you to have that information. And
society in general would probably not want you to have that information
either.
Is there any
logical reason for a sane and just society to empower them to do so?
Yes, see above.
I personally don't see the relevance. Let's say I agree with you
and
that yes, businesses are trying to create a "no-lose" situation. So
what?
This doesn't conflict with anything said earlier.
It means it's not a proper free market, which is bad, mmkay?
I'd just like you to take note that I am not disputing the idea that a
no-lose situation is not a proper free market, nor that having a non-free
market is bad.
In a smoothly functioning free market, a company that puts in Y effort
to make a product Foobar, then sells this at price P and puts in Z
*more* effort to make a crummy Foobar Lite to sell at price Q << P, is
going to be eaten alive by a competitor that puts in Y effort to make
a product Bazquux interchangeable with Foobar and sells Bazquux at
price Q. It has more power than Foobar Lite, and the same power as but
a lower price than Foobar, which makes it compete successfully with
both, one on quality and the other on price. Both companies are
putting in at least Y effort but Foobar's maker is putting in more.
Bazquux's maker is putting out a product that by itself is superior to
TWO of Foobar's maker's products with lower operating costs, which is
an obvious case of superior efficiency.
You're falsely assuming that it takes a competitor the same amount of
effort to make the same product as the original company.
For example, Microsoft makes Windows a certain way. They make some
internal design decisions which ends up with Windows having a certain set
of features, a certain specific behaviour, and so on. For a competitor to
make an competing product of Windows which behaves identically is
extremely difficult, unless they had access to the original internal
design decisions. To make a fully-substitutable product, you'd have to not
only duplicate all the features of Windows, but also duplicate all the
bugs, including the ones that Microsoft themselves don't even know about.
And this is even if there were no pressure (legal or otherwise) from
Microsoft to discourage the competitor.
It doesn't have to involve copyright. Before Intel had competitors
like AMD making interchangeable CPUs, they made the 486DX, at a
certain amount of effort Y per chip. Then they put in effort Z on some
chips to damage the FPU component and sold those more cheaply as a
486SX. Unless they were selling the 486SX at a loss, which I doubt,
they could have not crippled them and still been profitable. That
means the difference in price between the SX and DX was pure rent. If
AMD had been around then, they'd have put in Y effort to make a 486DX
clone and sold it at the SX price point to eat Intel alive. Intel only
dared do something this awful to its customers (give them less while
doing more work) because they had a monopoly at that time on x86-
compatible CPUs. You don't see them pulling these kinds of shenanigans
now, do you?
Yes, I do. When they fab the processors, they don't all come out
equal. For example, one processor from a batch might run fine at 3Ghz,
while another processor from the same batch might only be able to manage
2Ghz. So althought they all come from the same manufacturing process, some
processors will be (correctly) marked as an inferior product, and sold at
a lower price.
In the specific case of the 486SX, they may have found that in some of
their batches, their FPU components were naturally failing as part of the
manufacturing process, and they figured they could sell that processor at
a lower price. Then, as demand picked up for the cheaper processors, they
had to actually disable the FPU component to meet that demand.
The same thing happens with clockspeeds in processors. Sometimes,
there's a lot of demand for a lower clockspeed (and cheaper) CPU, but it
just so happens that the manufacturers were "lucky" this time around, and
all of their batches produced very high-rated processors. So to meet the
demand, they have to actually downclock some of their processors and cell
those.
It's exactly the same thing which happens when you buy "Extra extra
virgin olive oil" instead of "extra virgin olive oil". By paying a
premium, you increase the likelyhood that you're getting the best from the
batch. If you pay a lower price, you may still get the best from the batch
(e.g. if all items in the batch were equally good), but you run the risk
of getting something slightly worse.
Everything experts have written about Vista indicates that it's a
steaming turd-pile.
That's factually false...
No, it's factually true.
It's factually false
Fuck you. This is unproductive and it's insulting. You're basically
calling me a liar, and in public too.
So are you. I can deal with it. Can't you?
I claim that there are other "experts" (but note that you've
avoided
answering my question as to what criterias you consider an necessary
to
receive the title of "expert") who support Vista.
Name an "expert" (IYHO) who publicly claims Vista is a better choice
for the average consumer than XP SP2. (Any SP2, including regular,
pro, media center edition, 32-bit or 64, etc.)
First list what criterias you consider necessary to receive the title
of "expert".
Would you consider me an independent, consumer-minded software
evaluator? Why or why not?
Of course not. You're a pro-Microsoft nut. I don't even know why
you're hanging out here rather than at the C# newsgroup. Or maybe it's
because C# doesn't rate its own newsgroup yet? (Does it, in fact, have
one yet?)
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but in USENET, newsgroup are not
"rated".
I subscribe to the C# newsgroup, but I don't post there frequently,
because I don't have any questions (not interested in learning it right
now), and I'm not very knowledgeable in C#, so I can't answer many
questions.
If you ask a question which is based on a false premise, how am I
supposed to answer it, except to tell you that it is a false premise?
You could start by making a cogent argument stating what the premise
is and your reasons for believing it to be false, instead of making a
blanket assertion that some unspecified premise somewhere in what I
wrote is false without evidence.
I've started to do that, but often times, I suspect your "premises"
are facetious. Things like "Vista objectively sucks", which I suspect no
rational or honest person would actually believe.
[...]
I could have responded to your WHOLE POST with "Based on a false
premise and nonsensical." since I disagree with just about everything
in it, but I chose to give a detailed response instead. For that
matter, you could have responded to any of mine in like fashion, since
you seem to disagree with everything in them, yet you choose to do so
only in response to a narrow subset of paragraphs in each of my posts
and give detailed attempts at rebuttals to the rest.
The problem here is that you assume I disagree with everything in your
post. I don't. I agree with a lot of it. I only disagree with a narrow
subset of paragraphs, and those are the ones which I sometimes respond to.
Other times, I feel it would be too difficult to explain to you why I
disagree with your claims, and don't bother to respond.
So in other words, if I say I disagree with something, then I disagree
with it. If I don't say whether or not I disagree with something, then you
have no information as to whether or not I disagree with it.
I find this
interesting and will now be looking for patterns in which you respond
to with argumentation and which you respond to with a handwave that
essentially just means "I don't agree".
Well, I hope I didn't spoil your fun by explaining the mysteries
behind it in my previous paragraphs above.
Note that I'm working under the assumption that you're not open to
alternatives to your beliefs, so I'm not trying to "convince" you that I
am right or anything like that. I am very interested in your beliefs,
however (in fact, I was speaking about the plausibility of a world without
intellectual property with some friends of mine last night over dinner,
and I repeated a couple of your arguments to defend the plausibility), and
I'd like to hear more about it.
This is why when you say something which really doesn't make sense to
me, I reply to it, explaining the problems I see. I tend to assume that
most people are logical or rational in most aspects, and so if they say
something irrational or illogical, I can only assume I must have
misunderstood something. I'll state what I see to be a logical
inconsistency, to give the other person (you, in this case) a chance to
clarify what was meant.
So when I do that handwaving "I don't agree" thing, it means I believe
that I fully understand this portion of your belief, but I don't choose to
believe in it. When I give a rebuttal, it means I suspect I don't
understand your belief, and I wish for you to explain it to me in greater
detail.
I'll try to explain my thoughts to you more explicitly from now on, to
avoid further misunderstandings.
Everyone that matters (professional, independent-minded web site
administrators whose primary concern is the site working properly
and
who aren't required to toe some MS-only line by management)
If that's your criteria for "everyone that matters", then I've met
some counter-examples to your claim.
BTW, my criteria for "everyone that matters" is "the people who
are
making the buying decisions"
Well, it's easy to see where you went wrong, then. The original
question was which was the superior Web server, IIS or Apache?
That was not what I perceived the original question to be.
Obviously the one that works better when employed as a Web server. The
one that crashes less, screws up responding to requests less, admits
fewer intruders that proceed to deface the site or add spam or a 1x1
iframe that loads malicious code when visitors subsequently arrive who
have vulnerable browsers, and so forth. Which happens to be Apache.
IIS admits far more intruders, crashes all the time, screws up (with
e.g. spurious 500-series errors) more often, collapses under heavy
traffic and stops responding at lower traffic volumes given the same
hardware strength than Apache ... Every benchmark, every security
comparison, and the everyday decisions of millions of web masters all
point to Apache being superior. It's also worth noting as I've said
before that it's the only one of the two with the property that a
substantial fraction of web masters feel proud enough of using it to
trumpet the fact publicly on every page of their site.
Yes, I know. Maybe I should state explicitly that the claim "Apache is
better than IIS" is not one that I disagree with.
since the context that generated this
subdiscussion is you're wondering whether Microsoft is seriously
trying to
compete against Apache using IIS.
You're making that up out of whole cloth. You claimed that Apache was
not superior to IIS, which I am rebutting.
I disagree that that was my claim (and I'm leaving it at that, because
I don't really care whether you believe me or not).
Apparently because I'm not
only right, but cleaning your clock in that particular department,
you've decided to try to redefine it to be about something that I
never argued against.
If you say so.
Microsoft is, of course, seriously trying to compete against Apache
using IIS, albeit miserably failing.
Good, then we are in agreement.
[...]
Also, not true, and I recommend you read the Corporation, a book I
had
recommended to you earlier this thread.
If you know of a download URL (cannot be behind a paywall or
registerwall) of the full text of the book I may well do so. Otherwise
you cannot use it as that's not fighting fair. I'm certainly not
paying money (and for all I know, it will end up going to you!) just
to debunk some of the BS you've been posting in cljp lately! Letting
you cost me money would also be letting you win.
I'm not recommending the book to you in order to "win" this argument.
I'm recommending it to you because I am too lazy to explain why I disagree
with your claims with respect to corporations. I had suspect that maybe
you were interested in the behaviour corporations, and so I recommended
this book because I thought it might interest you.
If you are so concerned with winning this argument, then allow me to
state right now: I have lost the argument, and Twisted has won. Twisted
has defeated me in this thread.
In any event, the logic in the paragraph I wrote that you quoted
directly above appears to be impeccable. If you have a reason to
believe it is flawed, provide some reasoning rather than handwaving it
with a reference to a (probably unfree) document that none of the rest
of us has likely ever read and that none of the rest of us likely have
ready access to.
You should really read the book if you're interested in the detailed
explanation. As I mentioned earlier, I am not particularly interested in
convincing you of my position, and for this particular topic, the
explanation is long and I am lazy. So I'll summarize the explanation as
"The emergent behaviour of many people acting together in a corporation is
not necessarily one that any individual person would agree to or support".
Again, if you want more details, read the book.
Regardless, the corporation itself should have had the information
that this couldn't go undetected and the perpetrators uncaught, and
acted to self-maximize, per your theory. It didn't.
I disagree.
It's your theory. If you disagree, are you therefore abandoning it and
capitulating this silly fight? If so, I win, and feel free to shut up
now. :)
Yes, you've won.
If you mean you don't think that it torpedoes your theory, think
again. A rational self-maximizing corporation would not embezzle from
itself and then get totally destroyed while hemmorhaging money,
ticking off customers, ruining shareholders, and ending up a smoking
pile of cinders, which is what appears to have happened in this case.
Regarding it as a monolithic entity, it appears to have spontaneously
decided to commit suicide one bright sunny day without any prior
warning or any obvious intolerable externally-imposed circumstances
that might provoke a rational being to make the pain stop in the only
way they could.
Notice that it was not the corporation that was embezzling money from
itself, but a few select directors. The directors were not doing what they
were supposed to be doing (maximizing shareholder profit).
A person in good health, with no problems at work or in their love
life, millions of dollars, no skeletons in the closet or legal issues,
and many years of these remaining true to expect statistically, jumps
to their death from a 17th-story balcony. Was that person rational? If
you say they were, please justify this with some reasoning.
I suspect a more accurate analogy would be a person in good health,
wealth, etc., suddenly gets sick and dies. Their heart was not doing what
it was supposed to be doing.
[...]
Later on, I said (but cannot find the exact quote, so this is a
paraphrasing): "A Rational utilitarian is a better model for
corporations
than an emotional anthropomorph".
Don't tell me this is you redefining "better" again.
In this case, I use "better" to mean "has less inconsistencies with
reality than". I suspect this is equivalent to "makes better predictions
than", but I'm not sure about that.
Earlier you
redefined "IIS is better than Apache" as "IIS is marketed more
aggressively than Apache", for all intents and purposes, and switched
to discussing how Microsoft is trying aggressively to compete with
Apache as if that somehow proved your claims.
This is not true. Here's what was written in the thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/ae0f50c93643baec?as_umsgid=1184290322.272667.164930@q75g2000hsh.googlegroups.com
<quote speaker="Twisted">
Microsoft is learning this lesson right now. They're reaching
for any legal bludgeon they can invent (software patents for example,
or a "trusted computing" mandate) to kill open source competitors by
criminalizing them, all because they cannot compete in a fair and open
market.
</quote>
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/browse_thread/thread/100ee519f0335092/e19c3cf4da3a40bc?lnk=raot#e19c3cf4da3a40bc
<quote speaker="Oliver">
They [Microsoft] break the law when the profit they gain
from doing so outweighs the penalties they'd pay. They embrace Open Source
when it's profitable to do so (Windows XP has some BSD licensed code in
it, for example), and they try to stiffle competitors of all form (open
source or otherwise) *when it is profitable to do so*. Honestly, I don't
think Microsoft is very concerned about losing the desktop market to
Linux, so they aren't spending much resource in fighting it there (the
reason being the expenses paid in "fighting" Linux will be greater than
profits from the marketshare regained). They might be more concerned with
Apache vs IIS, and so you do see a lot of marketing in that area (I see a
lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for example).
</quote>
<quote speaker="Twisted>
(they [Microsoft] can't compete -> observe Linux server-side
market share eating Windows alive; ditto Apache vs. IIS and JSP vs.
ASP; law-buying, well, just look, the campaign donations are a matter
of public record. No I don't know the URL offhand.)
</quote>
<quote speaker="Oliver">
Your evidence doesn't support your assertion: "Compete" doesn't mean
"Win". Maybe they [Microsoft] are simply competing and losing.
</quote>
<quote speaker="Twisted">
Given the shoddy quality of e.g. IIS, do you really think they are
trying to "compete" in any arena that doesn't involve either lawyers
or lobbyists?
</quote>
<quote speaker="Oliver">
Question is based on false premise, and is therefore nonsensical.
You're assuming that IIS is perceived to be shoddy by everyone.
</quote>
<quote speaker="Twisted">
Everyone that matters (professional, independent-minded web site
administrators whose primary concern is the site working properly and
who aren't required to toe some MS-only line by management.
</quote>
<quote speaker="Oliver">
BTW, my criteria for "everyone that matters" is "the people who are
making the buying decisions", since the context that generated this
subdiscussion is you're wondering whether Microsoft is seriously trying to
compete against Apache using IIS.
I'm genuinely surprised that you think Microsoft is not trying to
compete against Apache. You think Microsft just enjoys throwing their
money away on IIS developers and marketing?
</quote>
So as you can see, I never said IIS was better than Apache. I simply
said that Microsoft is attempting to compete with Apache, and cited the
advertisement as evidence of this.
Are you now claiming
that your model is "better" because you are trying aggressively to
compete with my model, or something like that, rather than claiming
that it actually makes better predictions?
No.
[..]
If they thought the Bush Administration would protect them with
probability 60%, and that the utility they'd gain is 100 "profit
points",
that's an expected utility of 60pp. If the alternative was a more
conservative approach which gave a 90% probability of gaining 65
"profit
points", this alternative action gives only 58.5 utility. Better to
take
the first action.
Yeah, and going to jail has a utility of minus how many pp?
Very low magnitute, because when you have billions of dollars, you can
negotiate or bribe your way to a very comfy prison cell.
Are you arguing that these traits (whether or not we agree that
the
corporations actually have them) make it such that the "emotional
anthropomoprh" model is more accurate than the "rational
utilitarian"
model?
See below.
After scanning below, I don't see an answer. Typing either "Yes"
or
"No" would have taken less effort than typing "See below." So which is
it?
Is it "Yes"? Or is it "No"?
What you didn't see below was my mentioning that my model predicts
Enron-like events to occur frequently and yours predicts them to occur
rarely; in fact they appear to now occur frequently, but didn't
apparently used to.
I've never quite agreed that my model is best described by the term
"emotional anthropomorph", but to the extent that it isn't, your
question above is irrelevant and can only serve to attack a straw man
instead of what I have actually said here recently.
So in other words, "no".
Good, we're in agreement, then.
This is a scathing indictment of the current law then.
Yes. [Attempts to sell me something again -- I think]
If you agree, then why are you continuing to argue against my
suggested reforms and reasons for these to be superior to the current
legal landscape?
I'm not. Go for it. All the more power to you. I support your cause at
the general abstract level, although I disagree with some details within
it.
(1) The profits from outsourcing support (in the form of
reduced
support costs) exceeds the cost of outsourcing support (in the form
of
lower customer satisfaction).
I know of no case where this is actually true except where customer
loyalty is a complete non-issue. One-off products might qualify.
Anything with consumables or upgrades to generate a future revenue
stream is clearly a nonstarter here.
This is your guess. You don't have actual figures.
It is a very strongly educated guess. We have all of the following
evidence:
[snip evidence because I understand your points, I disagree with them, and
I am not interested in explaining my disagreements. So again, you win this
argument.]
I'll just mention to you that I've worked in offshore support, and
most Americans I spoke to never even realized I was offshore. Notice how
you had automatically assumed I was American, and later British, in this
thread.
Some offshore support places are very effective in hiding the fact
that they are offshore.
I said I didn't see the banners and you should really get Adblock,
on
the grounds that I figured you found constantly being bombarded by
distracting flashing animated things while you're trying to find and
read information online was annoying.
Apparently you are crazy enough that:
a) You don't find it annoying.
I'm amused that you find natural immunity to ads to be a form of
craziness.
What natural immunity? You noticed and remembered the extravagant pro-
IIS claims in a bunch of them, so you're hardly naturally immune to
their somewhat-dubious charms.
And what claims would that be? I don't believe I've ever cited any of
the pro-IIS claims that the ad produced, because in actual fact, I don't
recall what they were. What I do remember is this largish man crying of
joy (presumably because of all the pleasures IIS brought him?). It was an
amusing sight.
:P You went on to dispute my claim that
Apache is a better choice of Web server software,
Notice that what I disputed was the claim that Apache is perceived by
everyone to be better than IIS (or more accurately, the IIS is perceived
to be shoddy by everyone).
What you're doing is strawman: misrepresenting my arguments.
b) You actually believe what the flashy thingies whisper in your ear
while someone tries to stick their hand in your pocket
I don't know how you concluded this. There was no evidence for
that in
my post.
Your defense of IIS over Apache despite its obvious inferiority is
evidence aplenty.
The only defense of IIS I stated was that there exist some people who
like it. I'm pretty sure that's factually true. There must be at least one
employee of Microsoft who likes it, for example.
Maybe I should state explicitly that I personally prefer Apache over
IIS. I hope this will eliminate any false assumptions you may have made
about my position regarding these two servers.
c) You actually therefore believe that IIS is superior to Apache.
I don't know how you concluded this. There was no evidence for
that in
my post.
I said that IIS was worse than Apache and you disagreed. I call that
evidence.
You said that IIS was perceived universally as being worse, and I
disagreed. I personally think IIS is worse than Apache, and I suspect you
do too. But I don't believe that everyone in the world thinks IIS is worse
than Apache.
I claimed that Vista WAS a downgrade, not that it was PERCEIVED by
any
particular group to be a downgrade.
Hmm... Well, I disagree with your claim, then.
That's as insane as disagreeing with my claim that IIS is inferior to
Apache. I already TWICE mentioned that you can do less, more slowly,
with Vista and given hardware than you can with XP SP2 and the same
hardware,
Yes, and I've heard your claims. Notice that the more times you make
those claims doesn't necessarily make it more and more true each time.
[...]
I don't know what the
fuck it would take to convince you that it was.
Documented evidence of
a computer bursting into flames shortly after Vista was installed
perhaps?
Even then, only if there were evidence to believe that the bursting
into flames was caused by Vista. If, for example, you had a video of kids
installing Vista onto a computer, and then detonating a firecracker within
it, this would not cause me to like Vista less.
it shouldn't be hard to find as
much Vista-linked porno for pyros on Youtube as it will take to
convince you. Search for some ... I dare ya. :)
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vista%20porno%20for%20pyros
<quote>
No Videos found for 'vista porno for pyros'
</quote>
At the Turing-Equivalent level, it may be true that Vista doesn't
let
you do anything which XP doesn't let you do. From a more practical
perspective, your statement is false. I'll give you one example: The
Vista
start button now has a search feature...
I just clicked the Start button. The second to last item on the right
hand side was Search, with a cute magnifying glass logo next to it. On
a WinXP SP2 box I keep around.
This is why I find it amusing when people who have never tried Vista
criticize it. The search feature doesn't do what the button on XP does.
The Vista one is much more useful: You type in a substring of a name of a
program, and the contents of the start menu will update with a list of
programs and documents containing that substring. So for example, you can
type "not" to see "notepad.exe" and "Death Note Episode 28.avi" and so on.
There's many small improvements like that sprinkled all over Vista
which makes me long for it whenever I'm stuck on an XP machine, and have
to actually search through the start menu to find the shortcut to the
notepad program, for example.
Well, not anymore. I got kind of fed up with their rhetoric
tactics by
the beginning of the third chapter. I think the line that really got
my
eyes rolling was:
<quote>
Competition is a good thing. That is why the NBA and the
Tour de France are so popular, and why we give our all at the
annual interdepartmental basketball game.
</quote>
You're going to ignore tons of cogent arguments because you don't like
the authors' *style*? That is irrational to the nth degree.
I didn't see tons of cogent argument. I think I saw 2 cogent arguments
after 3 chapters.
Oh, well. Your loss.
fallacies sprinkled throughout their treatise. "Hey, I love
Basketball! I
guess I should support the abolishment of intellectual property too!"
Straw man, caricature, and about ten other things. They never
suggested such a chain of reasoning was valid and you know it.
What was the point of bringing up basketball, if they were not
suggesting such a chain of reasoning, then?
And what information have you perceived to be "bogus and
inaccurate"
so far in this thread, other than perhaps my claim that "Vista sucks"
is
subjective?
Oh, such bogosity as suggestions that copyrights aren't bad, claims
that IIS is better than Apache (not just better-marketed), and
accusations that I lied (once) or wrote "nonsense" (numerous
times) ... that kind of thing. The usual twaddle and BS you run into
on usenet despite having killfiled every blatant spammer you saw.
Of these, the only one that interests me is "copyrights aren't bad",
so you will probably see me do lots of hand waving "I disagree" on the
other topics, if indeed I do disagree with what you write.
BTW, congratulations on winning the argument. Can you give me a P.O.
box to which I may mail you a prize?
- Oliver