In short, they asked a small group of users for the number of applications installed on their computer (ignoring free applications like Firefox, WinAmp, etc.), used the average number of applications per PC thus obtained to extrapolate to get the number of applications installed on all PCs bought in the country and subtracted the actual sales of applications to get their figure for the revenue lost due to piracy. Very bad and rather disingenious use of statistics that doesn't even stand up to common sensical analysis. So The Economist naturally called it a load of crap.
This apparently enraged the BSA which promptly wrote a gem of a letter that appears in the latest issue and that is worth quoting in its entirety:
SIR - Your article on software piracy was extreme, misleading and irresponsible (``BSA or just BS?'', May 21st). The headline was particularly offensive. The implication that an industry would purposely inflate the rate of piracy and its impact to suit its political aims is ridiculous. The problem is real and needs no exaggeration.I found the deadpan assertion of the penultimate line rather funny.
Beth Scott
Business Software Alliance
London
The Economist also had an article on the recently released OECD report questioning the music industry's dubious assertions that the loss of sales of music CDs is entirely due to file sharing via P2P applications (and not at all due to the alarming lack of quality of the "music" churned out by the industry) which it then uses to convince legislators to come up with draconian laws limiting file sharing.
Et Cetera.
I guess women would not really get worried about these things till these vile manufacturers start sneaking in Dihydrogen Monoxide into their cosmetics!
Judy Arrays
A single data structure that allows ultra-fast searching, takes very little space and is also cache-friendly? "Judy Arrays" could to be the answer.
Profound Statement of the Day
"One man's beard is another man's velcro."
Thus spake Lola Kutty.
So we have had intermittent power, noisy telephone lines, now you see it, now you don't cable TV, no internet connectivity, etc. in our house. Many people were much worse off. I hope this week would bring better weather.
As if this was not enough, the software engineers of Bangalore now have their lives made even worse by robbers. In the last few months, quite a few techies have been increasingly becoming the targets of robbers and muggers who perceive them to be "soft targets" with loads of money and offering little by way of resistance. In the last month alone, two people from my office were mugged in two separate incidents in the vicinity of our building in the night. Call centre and BPO workers have also been hit similarly. To make matters worse, the police commisioner thinks Bangalore has actually become safer in the last few years and quotes some questionable statistics to prove his point. We have already given up on our government which seems more eager to cling on to power by appeasing its coalition partners than bother to develop the state and the city.
Thanks to Saju for the explanation and to Rahul for bringing it to my attention.
As was also observed by someone else, I find it rather amusing, and sad, that several years of effort on GCJ, Kaffe and Classpath did not seem to generate as much buzz as a single announcement of an intention by the ASF to create a J2SE 5 implementation.
"Technology and Courage"
"Technology and Courage" (PDF) by Ivan Sutherland. (Thanks Prakash!)
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!