The author, Petzold, has been mentioned on /prog/ before, but AFAIK only in the context of his MS Windows books.
This one is different, because it helped me understand the nature of information, how it is part of reality and was so even before people existed. In that way, it helped me understand what functional programming is. (I'm sure that there is more than one path to that place, but this is the one I took.)
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 1:33
>>1
Thanks for the download dude, I've been meaning to buy this...
Too infringed intellectual property rights, didn't read.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 7:15
>>3,5
You should have skipped the moment you saw amazon.com. Shame on you.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 7:19
>>5
Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as “intellectual property”—a term also applied to patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law. These laws have so little in common, and differ so much, that it is ill-advised to generalize about them. It is best to talk specifically about “copyright,” or about “patents,” or about “trademarks.”
The term “intellectual property” carries a hidden assumption—that the way to think about all these disparate issues is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our conception of them as physical property.
When it comes to copying, this analogy disregards the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be.
To avoid spreading unnecessary bias and confusion, it is best to adopt a firm policy not to speak or even think in terms of “intellectual property”. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
>>15
A PDF is not a book, it's a sequence of ones and zeroes.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 13:36
>>13
It's not stealing because you are not depriving anyone of their property. You are using a work made by an author without giving the author compensation. If alternatively you would have never bought the product for as long as you lived, then this makes no difference to author. But, if pirating has exposed you to material that you otherwise would not have taken the risk of buying, and if you later pay for the product or related products made by the author, then pirating actually helps the author. The increase in circulation makes the work more popular and makes its probability of being bought higher. This is assuming that there are people that still buy things they could otherwise pirate, or people that don't know how to pirate but are exposed to the products that are pirated by other.
tldr; pirating increases consumption and circulation. As long as everyone doesn't pirate, it can help get your product in use and more likely to be bought.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 13:39
>>16
That's like saying, "music files aren't really music. They're just stored as 1s and 0s!! Herpa-derp-a-derp!"
You can pirate electronic music. You can pirate electronic software. You can pirate electronic books.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 13:45
>>18
ARGG!!1 I'M A PIRATE!! CHECK OUT ME EYEPATCH AND PARROT!!
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 13:46
ninjas > pirates
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 13:47
Because I'm lazy and I don't want to waste my hard-earned NEET time reading a book that might be terrible, can someone write up a quick mini-review of this book and what it's about? Going by Amazon's description and reviews, it sounds like it might be incredibly dull or one of those stupid attempts to make something deep, man.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 13:55
robots > ninjas > pirates
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 14:07
pirates > niggers
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 14:08
>>21
it's a book about how computers work from how electrons represent information to chips to HLLs.
it is very interesting if you like computers.
Name:
Barney McGrew2012-10-20 14:10
There's no theft if you don't trick yourself into thinking there's property. Do you think Earth claims ownership of the beings it constructs? Will Earth try to imprison Mars if Mars happens to take one of its cute little creatures? I don't think so! The Earth doesn't even try to imprison you when you take a large branch from it, carve it into a dildo, and put it in your anus. If the Earth can be so kind as to allow us to do these wonderful things, why can't we learn from its example?
Similarly with 'piracy', you can only believe in it if you also believe in 'intellectual property'. The kool thing with 'intellectual property' is that it also relies on the concept of property, then twists and stretches it in a bunch of weird ways just for the sake of fucking with The Human and laughing at how easily it can be deceived.
BUT THESE IDEAS ARE BAD FOR INNOVATION, DAMMIT! HOW WE GONNA GET ON MARS IF WE BELIEVE IN A BUNCH OF HIPPIE-CRAP?
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 15:11
>>14,16,17,25
Sorry, stealing is stealing. You're utilizing someone else's hard work and give nothing in return. Plain and simple really.
>>34
The problem is that if I alias fonts to some metric equivalents, then my browser does the same thing (I don't want every website to use Bitstream whatever or some crummy X bitmap fonts because they match "Helvetica" or "Arial"). I could do some complicated fonts.conf wizardry, but Debian's font packaging team are cunts and they keep adding/changing configuration files that clash with mine.
If you want PDF to be truly portable, you should embed fonts. It's the only way to make sure it'll actually appear the same way across a variety of systems and printers.
Name:
Barney McGrew2012-10-20 16:03
>>26
Donkey excrement. Who do you think has the privilege in the exchange of a program for money? Certainly not the seller. Those vultures are picking 'your' bones dry.
>>brainwashed
Thanks for "stealing" todays forecast, the street names, even the TCP/IP communication on protected board called shii-chan. Imbeciles. Donations/Contributions are always welcomed.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 16:32
>>18 That's like saying, "music files aren't really music. They're just stored as 1s and 0s!! Yeah, that's the idea. Unfortunately it seems a lot of people don't want to get it.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 16:35
"Invention patents? You can't steal an idea. It's just an intangible thought."
"Musial copyrights? You can't steal a piece of music. It's just a collection of sounds."
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 16:39
I'm sure you guys who doesn't recognize intellectual property haven't produced anything worth selling intellectually. Stay mad, mediocres!
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 16:43
I recognize copyright and patents if limited to 3 years, and I entirely reject patents applied to software or genetics.
>>42
Actually, the most brilliant inventors don't seem to have any problem releasing their ideas to the world.
Most people ferociously defending copyright are the epitome of mediocrity themselves and know all to well they won't be able to keep producing valuable output, so they desperately cling to live off their one-hit wonders.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 16:45
>>42
Did you enjoy today's SSH sessions on any of your machines? If so, please donate to the OpenBSD project. We worked very hard on this, but allowed you to make free copies at no expense to you.
Oh, And we have silly licenses on it that we have to keep to defend ourselves. Any questions?
>>18
B-b-but computer programs are a sequence of mathematical instructions! They follow a certain syntax that makes a particular piece of software! Are you telling me that music and works of literature do that too?! Preposterous!
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 16:48
For the record I recognize copyright but thinks software patents are absurd. Oh and stealing someone else's ebook is still stealing.
>>47
Note that this paragraph is strictly about copyrighted content whose main target audience are private individuals for non-commercial uses. I'm a hungry hungry student, and while it might be acceptable for a middle class kid to pay $40 for a textbook, that's a bit more than what I spend on food every week. We already know it is perfectly impractical to eliminate file sharing (short of severely cutting down on civil rights), and that all that DRM does is annoy paying customers. So why not do something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DADVSI#The_.22global_license.22 instead?
>>48
I entirely agree. If the bulk of your paying customers (i.e. the people/companies who actually have money to pay you), stay off the backs of poor private individuals.
I entirely agree. If the bulk of your income comes from paying customers (i.e. the people/companies who actually have money to pay you), stay off the backs of poor private individuals.
self-fix
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-20 18:38
>>50
$40 for a textbook? You dickface, we have to pay hundreds per text in the US.
>>50
Now we're getting somewhere. Just because you can't afford something, stealing it doesn't stop it from being stealing. If you were a hungry hobo and you stole a bread, that's stealing and you're a thief. Again, it's plain and simple.
>>68
It's year 4e5 BC. A tribe of Homo Erectus has just discovered how to make and master fire. In order to maintain an advantage, they keep fire-making a secret and sell lit torches to other tribes. A neighbouring tribe purchases a lit torch from the fire masters' tribe, then makes it into a big fire and gives it away to other tribes for free; is that stealing?
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-21 0:18
>>69
Why can't people just admit it's stealing? Just because stealing is something undignified, you can't redefine what stealing is and is not just because you're also doing it. That's makes you even more of a scum than a petty food thief. At least he knows and admits it's stealing.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-21 0:21
>>70
No, and it's not analogous to pirating books, music or software. Dumb question.
>>72 "Piracy" Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. Based on such propaganda, they have procured laws in most of the world to forbid copying in most (or sometimes all) circumstances. (They are still pressuring to make these prohibitions more complete.)
If you don't believe that copying not approved by the publisher is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “unauthorized copying” (or “prohibited copying” for the situation where it is illegal) are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”
>>70 Homo erectus died out long before 4.02e5 years ago
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-21 0:31
>>71
Fuck off, troll. Come back with logical arguments.
>>72
Yes it is, and it's a perfectly valid metaphor. Both fire and information can be shared without affecting the original. Sharing information ,,devalues'' it in a scarcity economy, the same way that sharing fire in the metaphor devalues it for the fire masters. However, neither sharing fire or information is stealing.
The wood is like the clock cycles remaining on your computer, a physical non-duplicable contraption that required direct exploitation of the environment to acquire.
The burning is an application running on it which is a duplicable process. Sounds like a strong analogy.
But its a stronger case against patents since it is a process and not a literary work, if patents existed in 4e5 BC this would be patentable.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-21 0:40
>>75
Books, music and software among other things are creative intellectual works. It takes effort to create one. If you go down the path of equating them to mere patterns of 0s and 1s then you're belittling the authors and not compensating them for their work. That's stealing.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-21 0:41
You're both wrong. It's a simile.
Name:
Anonymous2012-10-21 0:49
>>82
I didn't say they shouldn't be compensated for their magnificent intellectual work, I just said file sharing isn't stealing. Criminalizing information sharing isn't the only way to ensure compensation, you know. Read up about the ,,global licence'' system that was proposed in France.
>>79 Mr. ESL
Actually, it's my third language, so that's quite complimentary. Thank you!