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Domain: poliglut.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to poliglut.com.
Comments · 59
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Just last nightI run a small consulting company and needed to do payroll last night. We use QuickBooks, which forces you to buy their tax table service or compute tax withholding manually. They charge 50-60 a year IIRC for this service which is nothing but a set of tax tables. They are making more money on this deal than Best Buy does on extended warrantees. No way could they get away with this except that they have a monopoly on small business accounting software. But I digress.
The problem was that we don't have internet service right now thanks to the twin horrors of Northpoint going out of business and Ameritech being predatory (that too is another story though). QuickBooks, which I remind you is accounting software, requires an internet connection to run. I cannot tell it to just use the old tax tables for this cycle, I cannot tell it to use a disk. It requires an internet connection.
Worse still is that I called to find out what the deal is and, at 5:30 PST, no one could help me. I was told that I must call the tax table people during business hours the next day.
So, my $350 ripping cool accounting package had me resorting to looking up peoples last checks, writing down the deductions (fortunately salaried staff, not hourly) and manually entering them into the forms (oh, another thing. I had to write them down because QB makes the paycheck detail a modal window so I can't open two of them and just copy from one to the other. I had to open one, copy the info, then open another and type it in).
Thanks for the great service guys! I appreciate it.
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Poliglut -
NonesenseTypical Salon shalow thinking...
Thanks to the Felten fiasco, the EFF and 2600 Magazine have a new weapon in their legal arguments against the loathed copyright law: The RIAA has now, in effect, used the DMCA to stifle academic research. As Roger Parloff and Charles Mann pointed out in Inside.com, even the authors of the DMCA didn't intend for this to happen.
The point of the DMCA, in the eyes of those who authored it, is not just to stifle hackers, but also to prevent academic research. Academic research is, after all, absolutely as dangerous to their property as Captain Crunch doing the same work. They aren't going to care one whit whether the research that millions of script kiddies are benefitting from was done at Princeton or the food court at the local mall. The fact is, they are still owned. And by their logic the monetary losses start at that moment.
I'm sure they'll explain that in detail in court.
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Poliglut -
At least their thinking outside the boxIt's good to see a major company finally trying to get away from laying off it's most experienced staff...
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Poliglut -
The killer appCombine this with stereoscopic imagers and eye tracking. Now the box can map in a virtual environment everything you are seeing in 3d. The next steps are obvious. My favorite is new 'skins' for the things (read, people) around you. Imagine if you could make your boss look like Devin during those hard to stay awake during meetings about the marketing strategy for the new site.
Add wireless networking and instead of having to look for a band on someones sleeve during a firefight at the local paintball field your box could show everyone who isn't on your team (cause remember it knows where everyone *on* your team is) with their entire body covered in a big bulls eye (hmmm, have to make it smart enough to not do that for the ref I suppose).
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Poliglut -
Re:This is sillyAny serious researcher would have done this to limit his liability, right? So I would expect that the researchers in question did not in fact agree to SDMI's terms.
Apparently not in this case. The researchers were registered with the game.
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Poliglut -
This is sillyThis isn't an interesting use of something the hackers owned. They agreed to a specific and narrow license as part of a contract. The paragraph from the RIAA covers this:
As you are aware, the Agreement covering the Public challenge narrowly authorizes participants to attack the limited number of music samples and files that were provided by SDMI. The specific purpose of providing these encoded files and for setting up the Challenge was to assist SDMI in determining which of the proposed technologies are best suited to protect content in Phase II products. The limited waiver of rights (including possible DMCA claims) that was contained in the Agreement specifically prohibits participants from attacking content protected by SDMI technologies outside the Public Challenge. If your research is released to the public this is exactly what could occur. In short, you would be facilitating and encouraging the attack of copyrighted content outside the limited boundaries of the Public Challenge and thus places you and your researchers in direct violation of the Agreement.
I say, just re-attack when the stuff is released and publish the results. There is little moral or ethical in agreeing to the terms that these people must have as part of the challenge and then turning around a violating those terms.
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Poliglut -
Re:A serious (rather unpopular) hope...The reason it's unpopular is because it would require a performance hit for no significant gain.
The header climits tells you what the range available is in a platform independent manner. If you think you will not be able to control that your program be compiled on a 32 bit platform then check out INT_MAX and make sure its big enough for what you want to do.
I can't comment on the C99 standard and what they think the gains would be from such a scheme. Though I wonder if those are really fixed bit width types? Can you talk more about that?
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Poliglut -
Re:�Ultra-rich ARE the majority
And that makes their vote more important than yours or mine? Yes, that is a correct assertion; however the spirit of the Constitution comes up, which our Supreme court Justices are supposed to protect. That's why I'm not sure if I like Justice Antonin Scalia (check out this this little gem which I found at poliglut.com to see more. To quote: "My Constitution is a very flexible document,' he told an audience Friday night at a conference on James Madison at Princeton University. `You want a right to abortion? Pass a law. That's flexibility.`"
He makes it sound easy that you and I (as citizens) are able to have laws passed at the drop of a hat. Not Joe Average Citizen. But your favorite megacorp can buy a new law (ahem, Disney, ahem RIAA/MPAA, ahem Citigroup *can you say Banking Reform Act of 1999?*). Thats bullshit. When the Constitution was written, remember that the men who wrote it became outlaws of the British, they wrote it to protect all (American) people. Supposedly, the Constitution serves us all, rich and poor, black and white, young and old, ALL alike. Anyways, thats my 0.02. -Bob -
For the love of the gameIt strikes me as kind of amusing to see many of the same folks who support open source software, or even worse the ones who prefer FSF, saying you can't make a go of commercial free webbing.
The same forces apply in both scenarios. In most cases, the software not only has the hours of free time put into it, but a free web site to support it. So clearly it can be done.
For me, and my web site Poliglut it boils down to the 'love of the game' or 'gift culture' mentality. I enjoy politics, so I simply use the reading that I would already be doing as a boostrap to putting together a site. If people like it (and so far they seem to) great! I'll keep doing it. If not, that's ok to. Kind of like any one of dozens of open source projects. Most of them are junk. The few that are *really* good tend to be the ones put together by a passionate few.
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