All Things Microsoft > Microsoft Software
Windows Geniune Pain in the Arse
Kintaro:
The Austrians like Hayek and Mises have the clear lead in being able to accurately predict the business cycle through understanding the conditions which create them. This is an incredibly long discussion. In terms of an economy serving consumers and producers - it needs to support the decisions of the individual participants. That is what objective law and the courts provide alongside individual rights. Central planning doesn't add any wisdom to an economy, for example. What it does is shut participants out of making decisions regarding their own things. Socialism removes intelligence from the economy by restricting thousand of actors, and thus thousands of minds replacing their decisions with a select group of bureaucrats with unearned power attained through a popularity contest rather than achievement.
To me what makes something 'economical' is as many consumers being producers as possible with the conditions of their employment to only be created by other producers acting freely with no Government intrusion into the economy except for indirect taxes and service based fees (contracts and the courts). I don't see it as a utopia - because the very idea of a utopia is about about stunted human development and a world with no innovation or changes whatsoever to avoid 'conflict.' Quite frankly I am tired of this 'the ends justify the means' holier than thou bullshit in the background of every economic discussion. What are the ends? To create a society that has no war, no hunger, and no suffering at all. Yet by what means? By destroying anything that might effect the balance, anything that might create the pain of a lesson to be learned, stifiling the imagination. This hedonistic short term goal of peace and conformity is about as sustainable as a hit of meth on a persons happiness. Once it is realized that creativity is forbidden, another type of suffering will become rampant through the utopia: oppression of free expression through censorship and oppression of private activity.
Generally for something to be truly economical in a utilitarian and subjective sense it needs to work for the desires of the participants in society. I like systems that account for scarcity and necessity through a bartered means of exchange: ie capitalist systems. For example I like to live a very relaxed life at the moment while managing a few portfolios for people. I actually don't have that much money, but my necessities by my own values are provided (food, internet, rent, power, gas, water, and such). I do a lot of things that don't involve either of these things, my writing, etc. These activities should be able to be anything a person wants that doesn't harm others directly yet still covers their own survival.
Microsoft's management should be able to hide their code, as it is their decision to do so. Ubuntu's team should be able to share their code. This is the most important thing about freedom of contract - but copyright should be only about that. It's pretty disgusting the way corporations use Governments to gain revenue through the barrel of a gun courtesy of the DMCA. It is worldwide and it is more corporatist and fascist than anything Hitler and Stalin could ever dream of. For anything else, to prevent things being distributed on ISOHunt or the pirate bay, it should be left to the distributor to require and use hardware and software that restricts its ownership. That is all voluntary activity and by doing anything about that on a Government level you commit the same crime as the companies using the DMCA.
At the same time, you should have the option of buying hardware that is TPM free and makers should have the option of building it free of coercion. This is why companies will produce hardware that can still run untrusted code. The project has never stated otherwise and doing so would be impossible anyway without coercive intellectual property law, because others will be free to create systems that either don't have TPM do both. We already have the software and the hardware - what we lack is a liazze-faire legal structure that prevents coercive laws of monopoly being used to have us all stuck with trusted code. This is the fatal consequence of copyright and patents in the traditional sense now that we have this kind of cryptographic technology.
Generally I think it will really only be closed-source application code and multimedia that will exist as trusted code. People will still be recording shit from TV as untrusted and so on. I personally like the implications of this for privacy and evasion of censorship and Government. Along with trusted code and such, it generally allows for trusted data in general. This could be your bank account, or it could be your will and signed you and a lawyer. The possibilities are endless, and anyone who is sinister of TPM should be equally as sinister of dm-crypt.
At the end of the day, I don't care how smart they are or you are. Others have the right to use TPM and others have the right to avoid it. If you really think openness and all that works - there should be no reason you can't convince people with reason to do things your way. Just get rid of the coercive big Government bullshit. I'll try to convince them otherwise.
Also you are wrong about the gigs. I for one multitrack and will never play a gig in my life. Mike Oldfield couldn't just do tubular bells right up as a gig. Also the money is far far less.
Aloone_Jonez:
Just about every form of copy protection can be cracked or circumvented one way or another, if it's nor possible to do it digitally the analogue method can be used.
Copyright law is an artificial control on the economy which distorts the market, making people pay for pieces of plastic or zeros and ones. Laws restricting the transfer of information are more in line with totalitarianism than democracy.
Musicians who don't perform live would no doubt still exist if copyright didn't exist and they would no doubt still make money.
Kintaro:
I agree, copyright is physical coercion - Activiation, WGA, and TPM are not however.
This doesn't make activation reasonable though and I'd like to get back onto that subject. With Windows 2008 Server R2 you get an evaluation period of sixty days. This is pretty nice of them really, but you also get to rearm that period five times giving you three hundred days of shareware Windows. Microsoft offer this extremely generous freebie yet at the same time they are strict on protecting intellectual property with activation bullshit that breaks the system. They even provide a handy script you can schedule to rearm the servers trial activation those fives times automatically in their support section.
The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, but in any case the system shutting down like it does really pisses me off. You can tell its probably the kind of thing the programmer who implemented hated, but the middle manager insisted "oh noez, shut that fucker down." It would make more sense to just allow trial users to use the system for free but limit the amount of connections. That way its easy to give a quick test for deployment without buying it, and for Microsoft to enforce intellectual property on big companies so they can make a sale and keep developing this otherwise great system.
Clearly though, Microsoft want to be primitive cunts with licensing and I think this is why Linux rules the server world. To learn Linux you don't need any money, you don't even need a good computer. Microsoft has students and developers jumping through hoops that Linux does not.
Kintaro:
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/06/copyright-elephant-in-middle-of-glee.html
Calum:
at the moment, there are many competing theories about copyright and making money from your work, and unregulated copying etc.
Basically there's not enough real long term case studies for any one point of view to win out at the moment. In an effort to apply other models to this issue, here are my fairly scant opinions:
prohibition of something that many people are doing "illegally" never works. The only solution, whether it's morally right or wrong, is to legalise it, and licence it. Not sure what this actually means when applied to "illegal copying" though, i'm afraid. Does it mean the industry should take action in the countries where copying is more widespread? There are plenty countries where copying without paying the rights-holders is the norm. Perhaps the level of illegal copying going on in "the West" would actually be acceptable if this were applied across the board instead of having large areas of the world with basically 100% copyright violations.
Obviously this issue affects me in terms of the music industry much more than the software industry, and i've read a lot of opinions and still don't entirely know ehere i stand on this (which is remarkable since i'm usually so opinionated). Here's a really interesting article and associated discussion thread about this:
http://www.newmusicstrategies.com/2008/04/03/should-i-be-worried-about-piracy/
and here's another thread where we talk about this with regard to music ("we" being a community of songwriters, who are, i think, entirely hobbyists)
http://fawm.org/forums/thread/1257/
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version