Viviane Reding, European IT commissioner, says that if a multilateral approach cannot be agreed, countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and some Arab states could start operating their own versions of the internet and the ubiquity that has made it such a success will disappear.
Personally I can hardly wait. Although the majority of people in these countries are probably very nice I don't think China, Russia and Brazil have contributed to the success of the Internet. American built the Internet with DARPA funds (okay some ideas can be traced back to research in the UK and lets not forget CERN's contribution). European and other countries have contributed to the Diaspora.
Viv obviously isn't too good at negotiating. Its like saying "you do what I want and I will keep sh*tting in your back yard".
Anyway it is all hot air. With outsourcing going on at full speed these countries would be mad to cut themselves off from the rest of the world. Viviane Reding is an idiot. Sorry but that's my conclusion.
Erm. Just because you can recognise a sequence of characters and deliniate between tags and data and what the data types are doesn't mean you can understand and parse a Microsoft or even Open Office docuement. Unless someone publishes a spec giving the intent of each tag and how they interact, binary or XML, you are up the Swanee.
Or, even things that aren't illegal might run you some trouble.
That's correct. Julia Sommerville, a British primetime newscaster, got busted by the cops after sending prints of her young daughter to be developed by a UK high st chemist (Boots). In some shots the girl was naked in the bath. After the police released Sommerville someone at Boots leaked the story and photographs to the UK tabloid press.
One thing that annoys me about MySQL is the way OS programmers drop it into nearly every project that needs to store something in a structured, but not complicated or relational way. I don't like the new licensing or the SCO deal either.
As an early adopter of Postgresql (I even made a port to Windows back in '97 sometime) Postgresql seems to be the way to go if you want free. It supports a lot of stuff you would expect to be there in a professional RDBMS. We were able to port our app from Oracle to Postgresql and a lot of the stuff mapped over. My boss was happy no longer paying Oracle licenses anyway.
If you are doing Java and want some simple SQL/RDBMS support try HSQLDB.
Re:40 - average workweek
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> From my humble experience, these guidelines help with the subject of the article
I will add one, don't say anything about your boss or coworkers to a third party that you wouldn't say to their face.
Basically the above poster is right, work comes down to timekeeping. Get in on time and your boss won't hassle you too much no matter what "career development" you do during slack periods.
Come in "late" on a regular basis and you are trouble and lazy. No matter how good or hard you work or how many hours you really put in.
> Nonsense and falsehoods are quickly spotted and fixed back.
The problem is not so much the obvious vandalism and falsehoods but the seemingly plausible but incorrect information that people put in and some over zealous "guardians" who protect pages from any evolution.
> How the hell do you practically determine (let alone contact) the current copyright holder for books that have long been out of print?
Wait till the work goes out of copyright and don't pander to ridiculously long copyright limits. 50 years from the creation of the work seems reasonable to me, maybe less for pop music.
> Amazon hasn't faced this problem because they actually sell books. Amazon is only scanning and making searchable those books that it can obtain and sell -- and hence can contact the publisher.
Amazon Search Inside relies on the rights holder contacting and sending a book to Amazon.
> It's not an issue of Amazon being "honorable" and Google not.
Erm, you should maybe go read the article. They are scanning in copyright works without the rights holder's permission and then making snippets available for gain.
> So, by using up bandwidth to display portions of books that search results match, and providing links to Amazon and so on where you can buy the books, all on pages without ads... how exactly is this making money for Google again?
You are obviously not good at business, probably why you are not working for Google.
They make money when you buy a book from Amazon etc, it is called an "affliate programme". They make money from the advertizing, it is called AdSense in case you are not aware of it.
If rights holders want to upload books to Google Print that is all fine and dandy. Google, you know, that big huge evil public company, should not just be scanning other people's work without asking permission. Opt-out sucks and is evil.
Google are 100% wrong on this, they are stealing other people's work to make money for themselves. If authors or publishers want to use Google print they can, but it is completely wrong for Google to rip-off other people's work without permission.
Google should concentrate on the opt-in Google Print service rather than stealing other people's intellectual property.
> This is not necessarily a good thing. I've read that Ebola and other very nasty diseases don't spread as far as they might, because they wipe out their carrier population too quickly. As opposed to HIV, which has time to slowly spread out.
Fortunately/. readers are well protected against both computer viruses and HIV!
I wonder how much control the Taikonauts have over their capsual? Are they like Russian comonauts - mere passengers under control from the ground or could they decided to land in the good ol' USA if they chose. That would be cool - Levi's Jeans, Nike Trainers and Coke here we come.
Yes, my point, which you seem to have missed, is that a manned space programme is not necessary for launching weather satellites etc. It is just another p*ssing contest with the Americans.
More interesting to me, anyway, is private manned spaceflight.
> I wonder what China's plans are as to space, and whether their centralized government will be able to make better progress than the American system.
So far, like with much of what the Chinese do, they are just repeating what the American's and Russians have already done using 2nd hand Russian rockets. A big waste of money for a country with lots of problems. I think some of the ground breaking work done by ESA and NASA with unmanned vehicles is much more useful and exciting.
Still if over evolved chimps in space is what floats your spaceship then fine.
Regarding Chinese plans - I think they talked of the Moon - whoopeedo, that's just so 1960s.
If you get the BBC by satellite has a really good series about the space race starting this Wednesday evening (GMT).
I just think Apache group is using its near Web server monopoly (for what is a great product) to extend and embrace into other sectors - like Open Source JVMs where they have no track record. Unless of course, it is all really funded by that other old monopolist, IBM, to annoy Sun.
> unfortunately, with the state of higher education in the UK, you're lucky to come out of your first degree without at least a £10,000 debt.
I'm only glad I did my degree alongside the likes of Alan Turing back in the days when we used to get jolly nice government grants and accomodation for doing a computing first degree and were guaranteed a job for life turning out a bit of Fortran for the LEO I computer for the next 40 years.
> You can't have a monopoly on Linux. Thats is most of the point. As open source it will never be locked to one vendor.
That's not really true though. Take Apache, they are an effective monopoly in many areas. The mere sniff that Apache may be considering doing a version of your project and interested and developers dry up - much like if Google or Microsoft had done the same.
An example? Take Harmony (remember that?) an Apache OSS effort to build a Java Virtual Machine ahd Class Library. Just the announcement has been enough for people to lose interest in other OSS JVMs - we're waiting for Harmony they say. The fact that Harmony has gone, and seems to be going, nowhere doesn't matter (they are currently tied down on coding standards rather than coding).
The Apache guys have every inch the arrogance of Microsoft or Google coders. GNU Classpath - "a misdesigned crock"... other JVMs "could be coded on a Sunday afternoon".
Yes yes I understand the legals, you can just fork but when you have a mindset as strong as say Apache it is hard to make any independent headway.
You know, I've worked on teams where I wished some of the coders just didn't work at all and spent all day on the net. Every time they hit the keyboard they added bugs to the system that I would eventually end up fixing along with the rest of the stuff I had to do. Coding just isn't like building Chevvys.
and in other news, Microsoft Lawyers have launched a suit against the humble threadworm for infringement of their business patent covering "influencing the mind of hosts to do really really stupid things".
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I can hardly wait. Although the majority of people in these countries are probably very nice I don't think China, Russia and Brazil have contributed to the success of the Internet. American built the Internet with DARPA funds (okay some ideas can be traced back to research in the UK and lets not forget CERN's contribution). European and other countries have contributed to the Diaspora.
Viv obviously isn't too good at negotiating. Its like saying "you do what I want and I will keep sh*tting in your back yard".
Anyway it is all hot air. With outsourcing going on at full speed these countries would be mad to cut themselves off from the rest of the world. Viviane Reding is an idiot. Sorry but that's my conclusion.
> XML is designed to be human-readable
Erm. Just because you can recognise a sequence of characters and deliniate between tags and data and what the data types are doesn't mean you can understand and parse a Microsoft or even Open Office docuement. Unless someone publishes a spec giving the intent of each tag and how they interact, binary or XML, you are up the Swanee.
That's correct. Julia Sommerville, a British primetime newscaster, got busted by the cops after sending prints of her young daughter to be developed by a UK high st chemist (Boots). In some shots the girl was naked in the bath. After the police released Sommerville someone at Boots leaked the story and photographs to the UK tabloid press.
Offtopic hardly, off-language maybe.
One thing that annoys me about MySQL is the way OS programmers drop it into nearly every project that needs to store something in a structured, but not complicated or relational way. I don't like the new licensing or the SCO deal either.
As an early adopter of Postgresql (I even made a port to Windows back in '97 sometime) Postgresql seems to be the way to go if you want free. It supports a lot of stuff you would expect to be there in a professional RDBMS. We were able to port our app from Oracle to Postgresql and a lot of the stuff mapped over. My boss was happy no longer paying Oracle licenses anyway.
If you are doing Java and want some simple SQL/RDBMS support try HSQLDB.
I'll have what he's smokin'
> From my humble experience, these guidelines help with the subject of the article
I will add one, don't say anything about your boss or coworkers to a third party that you wouldn't say to their face.
Basically the above poster is right, work comes down to timekeeping. Get in on time and your boss won't hassle you too much no matter what "career development" you do during slack periods.
Come in "late" on a regular basis and you are trouble and lazy. No matter how good or hard you work or how many hours you really put in.
> Nonsense and falsehoods are quickly spotted and fixed back.
The problem is not so much the obvious vandalism and falsehoods but the seemingly plausible but incorrect information that people put in and some over zealous "guardians" who protect pages from any evolution.
> How the hell do you practically determine (let alone contact) the current copyright holder for books that have long been out of print?
Wait till the work goes out of copyright and don't pander to ridiculously long copyright limits. 50 years from the creation of the work seems reasonable to me, maybe less for pop music.
> Amazon hasn't faced this problem because they actually sell books. Amazon is only scanning and making searchable those books that it can obtain and sell -- and hence can contact the publisher.
Amazon Search Inside relies on the rights holder contacting and sending a book to Amazon.
> It's not an issue of Amazon being "honorable" and Google not.
Erm, yes it is.
Erm, you should maybe go read the article. They are scanning in copyright works without the rights holder's permission and then making snippets available for gain.
> So, by using up bandwidth to display portions of books that search results match, and providing links to Amazon and so on where you can buy the books, all on pages without ads... how exactly is this making money for Google again?
You are obviously not good at business, probably why you are not working for Google.
They make money when you buy a book from Amazon etc, it is called an "affliate programme". They make money from the advertizing, it is called AdSense in case you are not aware of it.
If rights holders want to upload books to Google Print that is all fine and dandy. Google, you know, that big huge evil public company, should not just be scanning other people's work without asking permission. Opt-out sucks and is evil.
Google are 100% wrong on this, they are stealing other people's work to make money for themselves. If authors or publishers want to use Google print they can, but it is completely wrong for Google to rip-off other people's work without permission.
Google should concentrate on the opt-in Google Print service rather than stealing other people's intellectual property.
> This is not necessarily a good thing. I've read that Ebola and other very nasty diseases don't spread as far as they might, because they wipe out their carrier population too quickly. As opposed to HIV, which has time to slowly spread out.
/. readers are well protected against both computer viruses and HIV!
Fortunately
I wonder how much control the Taikonauts have over their capsual? Are they like Russian comonauts - mere passengers under control from the ground or could they decided to land in the good ol' USA if they chose. That would be cool - Levi's Jeans, Nike Trainers and Coke here we come.
Yes, my point, which you seem to have missed, is that a manned space programme is not necessary for launching weather satellites etc. It is just another p*ssing contest with the Americans.
More interesting to me, anyway, is private manned spaceflight.
> I wonder what China's plans are as to space, and whether their centralized government will be able to make better progress than the American system.
So far, like with much of what the Chinese do, they are just repeating what the American's and Russians have already done using 2nd hand Russian rockets. A big waste of money for a country with lots of problems. I think some of the ground breaking work done by ESA and NASA with unmanned vehicles is much more useful and exciting.
Still if over evolved chimps in space is what floats your spaceship then fine.
Regarding Chinese plans - I think they talked of the Moon - whoopeedo, that's just so 1960s.
If you get the BBC by satellite has a really good series about the space race starting this Wednesday evening (GMT).
BookFinder4u
You should write up your idea and submit it to the US patent office.
> System and method for obtaining information relating to an item of commerce using a portable imaging device.
So now if you want to browse around a store with those portable imaging devices in your head you will have to pay Amazon for the priviledge!
What next? An organic pump like system for circulating a nutrient and oxygen transpoting liquid in a living organism
> Only those with severe medical or physical problems are no longer "able" to reproduce
/. readers of course :-)
not forgetting
I just think Apache group is using its near Web server monopoly (for what is a great product) to extend and embrace into other sectors - like Open Source JVMs where they have no track record. Unless of course, it is all really funded by that other old monopolist, IBM, to annoy Sun.
> unfortunately, with the state of higher education in the UK, you're lucky to come out of your first degree without at least a £10,000 debt.
I'm only glad I did my degree alongside the likes of Alan Turing back in the days when we used to get jolly nice government grants and accomodation for doing a computing first degree and were guaranteed a job for life turning out a bit of Fortran for the LEO I computer for the next 40 years.
> You can't have a monopoly on Linux. Thats is most of the point. As open source it will never be locked to one vendor.
That's not really true though. Take Apache, they are an effective monopoly in many areas. The mere sniff that Apache may be considering doing a version of your project and interested and developers dry up - much like if Google or Microsoft had done the same.
An example? Take Harmony (remember that?) an Apache OSS effort to build a Java Virtual Machine ahd Class Library. Just the announcement has been enough for people to lose interest in other OSS JVMs - we're waiting for Harmony they say. The fact that Harmony has gone, and seems to be going, nowhere doesn't matter (they are currently tied down on coding standards rather than coding).
The Apache guys have every inch the arrogance of Microsoft or Google coders. GNU Classpath - "a misdesigned crock"... other JVMs "could be coded on a Sunday afternoon".
Yes yes I understand the legals, you can just fork but when you have a mindset as strong as say Apache it is hard to make any independent headway.
You know, I've worked on teams where I wished some of the coders just didn't work at all and spent all day on the net. Every time they hit the keyboard they added bugs to the system that I would eventually end up fixing along with the rest of the stuff I had to do. Coding just isn't like building Chevvys.
> Microsoft outsourcing 1000 jobs to China equates to about 1.75% of its work force. (57,000)
> In addition, it's very probable that most of those jobs are for non-critical, non core projects.
In other news, Microsoft hires 1,000 Chinese to work on the Windows security overhaul.
and in other news, Microsoft Lawyers have launched a suit against the humble threadworm for infringement of their business patent covering "influencing the mind of hosts to do really really stupid things".