It's pretty effective. The prices for blank media didn't go up dramatically, and until this article, it was easy to forget I was even paying it.
Unfortunately, this is one of those issues that you need to be partisan on; the NDP is currently the only political party in Canada that is publicly against any kind of copyright reform. Unfortunately, their plans include things like this. Still, I'd rather the NDP get their way than the Conservatives, who have already twice tried to slam the Canadian DMCA down our throat.
I don't understand the "coming soon" part. American policies have been this way since 2001. Don't ever forget that the PATRIOT act was used to hold at least one American citizen without trial for at least a year. If that's not censorship, I don't know what is. And that's only the one we know about. Obama needs to lift the curtain on Gitmo, make some public anti-torture statements, and put this whole PATRIOT mess behind us.
Yea, but YOU didn't get to write the laws. Funny how "unlawful" can sometimes be synonymous with "unpopular". Given enough emergency powers and enough time, they are no longer synonyms.
I always enjoy the hypocrisy of people like Schwartz. It's Apple and Microsoft that made Sun unprofitable, not Schwartz. Sun had some pretty nasty, predatory business practices too, and loved to lock people into their big iron. I've seen companies jump ship to Microsoft, not because Microsoft was great, but because they were sick of Sun. Whether it was a smart move on the customers' part to do so yet remains to be seen (I guess not), but Sun drove away a lot of potential customers by being dogmatic and predatory.
On the other hand, some of the better choices Sun made: OpenSolaris, open source Java and StarOffice. While it's true that these products in themselves don't actually generate profit, they generate consulting opportunities. IBM doesn't seem to have a problem with this business model, but Sun certainly had one. Adopting a more knowledge-based company instead of hardware/software specialization would have been much better for Sun. After all, they supposedly know more about J2EE than anyone else out there, and there's a lot of J2EE consulting being done.
Overall, I can understand Schwartz's frustration. It's like he made decisions about open sourcing Java and StarOffice too late to capitalize on them. Certainly, Sun eventually made a lot of good decisions, and received very little reward for them. I hope that the influx of cash from Oracle makes the new company a viable competitor to Microsoft and IBM, and I hope Schwartz doesn't lose too much sleep over things. Sure, you can point the finger at Sun for a few bad decisions, but overall they were not rewarded for making good decisions as IBM has been.
Definitely good times. And I can't even talk about the stuff we did without implicating myself and a bunch of coworkers in unethical behavior. And, one day, it was just over. I ended up working in a parking lot and becoming one of the used bookstore's best customers. I've never quite gotten back there...
Having a good reason to commit a crime doesn't make it not a crime. It might, in some circumstances, get you leniency in sentencing, but it's still a crime.
Not going to disagree with you there, but willingness to commit crime can sometimes be the moral action when the law protects the immoral. There are few people that are so brave, and their actions should be lauded regardless of their criminality. One man's villain is another man's hero. Of course, the only positive thing that can be said about moral, criminal acts is that you get to be self-righteous. If you get caught, you still go to jail. On the other hand, King Richard eventually pardoned Robin Hood. Good people are eventually vindicated.
They are just declaring their intention to no longer subject new features to the "omfg how the f*** can I get this to work in this fscking old Microshit browser???!!" gauntlet of pain.
I'm surprised at the rather meek response to an obvious troll, but what the hell. I'm assuming that since you ask this question, you're likely not going to accept what little I remember from my linguistics courses as truth, so here's Wikipedia on the subject.
Burnett was the first to discover that primitive languages create unnecessarily lengthy words for rather simple concepts. He reasoned that in early languages there was an imperative for clarity, so that redundancy was built in and seemingly unnecessary syllables added. He concluded that this form of language evolved as a method of survival when clear communication might be the determinant of avoiding danger. He demonstrated that he was aware of the advantages to those peoples who could develop superior language skills. This quasi-evolutionary idea, whilst common today, was then unusual.
I can't find the exact examples I'm looking for, but it looks like my belief in an evolution of natural languages is well supported. I distinctly remember being told about a primitive native language that didn't even have temporal concepts. All concepts were expressed in the present. Tell me that doesn't make a language more primitive.
...of object-oriented and functional programming languages would be one without any functional perspective. I've learned both, I've managed both, and OO didn't drive me insane. Functional-based programming languages are syntactically inferior to OO ones, just as natural languages have features that make some more primitive than others.
I've opted for the large desktop option in general. This is better than the alternative since it requires less technical know-how and screwing around in the terminal. I use the following script to switch between the two display modes:
#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "" ]; then echo "No display mode given" fi if [ "$1" = "Media" ]; then cp -f/etc/X11/xorg.conf.Media/etc/X11/xorg.conf fi if [ "$1" = "Default" ]; then cp -f/etc/X11/xorg.conf.Default/etc/X11/xorg.conf fi if [/etc/X11/xorg.conf -nt/etc/X11/displaymode-stamp ]; then touch/etc/X11/displaymode-stamp /etc/init.d/gdm restart fi
I have two custom application launchers on my panel, one for each of the following commands:
gksudo/etc/gdm/set-display-mode Default
gksudo/etc/gdm/set-display-mode Media
This generally works well. However, all the caveats posted above regarding the differences in resolution between the two displays apply: XRANDR does not work with my multi-screen display, so compiz effects are reduced to their minimum, and many applications do not work correctly as they rely on XRANDR.
I used to have the two commands above on the gdm login screen, but Ubuntu 9.10 dropped support for custom commands in the gdm greeter. The custom launchers are a usable hack. MPlayer is set up to automatically play video in fullscreen on the television display. The real solution, however, is to get dynamic layout switching into xorg. I'm not sure of the technical barriers, but having to log everyone out just to change screen layouts seems like overkill. With laptop media centers becoming more commonplace, I look forward to this feature, and hope that everyone agrees that it is the best solution to this particular problem.
It's all politics. The majority of people in Ireland don't see a problem with their theocracy. And it's not like they're using it in an aggressive manner; the fact that most people in Ireland are Catholics doesn't change their foreign policy. Ireland is, and always has been, a neutral country. I grew up in that culture, was even taught by nuns. For me, this was a good experience. My suspicion is that while blasphemy laws supposedly protect all religions, in practice it will be generally applied only to anti-Catholic speech. Every country has a right to protect their culture. Just because the rest of the world is secular doesn't mean Ireland has to be.
Oh, and nearly forgot to mention a key point. Perl 5.8 has support for code that looks object-oriented, and supports namespaces to help with organization, but it is not truly OO. There's some syntactic sugar added to make things work generally like an OO language, but there's a lot of hacks that don't exist in a real OO environment. Manipulating the ISA array, for instance, makes non-OO things possible. Even with 'use strict', it leaves a lot to be desired. I can't speak to Perl 6, though. I've decided on Java as my language of choice, and I'll even work in C# if I don't have to work for Microsoft drones.
Heh. Check out the Chess module on CPAN. I most certainly do know what I'm talking about. And yes, the Perl programmers I've had the misfortune of working with have been bad to awful.
It's clear you will play the bureaucrat, requiring all red tape to be completed in triplicate before one may use the stapler. You will never pay me because I will never work for you. If you're going to manage people, you have to understand how they work, and even if you think you do, even if you were once in that position, it's obvious you either forgot or learned in a different era.
Beautifully worded rebuttal to this cynical greybeard. I'm surprised his post didn't end with "Get off my lawn". I don't want his reference, or to work for him. I don't need to get paid to find code to write, and it's infinitely more enjoyable than the business ideology of how software development is supposed to work. Software engineering is a new discipline, and there's still a lot of arguments from both sides to be considered. OP is assuming as fact many things that are still being examined.
Lest people think I'm am simply trolling, I'm not saying that software engineering has no purpose, and that it's always wrong to use those methodologies. But a corporate intranet application is not software for the Space Shuttle.
It really depends on what language you write your code in. Object-oriented languages in general require less documentation since good design and properly named methods and properties do document things relatively well. Class-level documentation is much more important than documenting the details of the methods themselves. Java and.NET require much less documentation to maintain. I've looked over Java code I wrote years ago, and it still makes perfect sense, even though I've only really documented the API and not the details. Perl and C code, on the other hand, can be unmaintainable even with a number of comments, because the old functional design is not easily maintainable. Consider rewriting these in a more modern language.
Call me a hotshot if you want, but I shouldn't have to assume that the person maintaining my code is a moron, nor that my non-technical manager needs to understand every single statement I wrote. I play nice with QA, and happily write test cases for my code. That's as far as I'm willing to go to ensure that my code quality is good, and that I can leave without the possibility of my code degenerating into the spaghetti-like mess I've had to clean up on a number of occasions. Sure, I don't get hired to write code anymore, but I don't care. Software Engineering and overdocumenting every single tiny intranet project is wasteful. Cleaning up after morons who believe that their engineering background can make up for their lack of talent and experience is aggravating. Answering to them is intolerable. There's other things I can do with my technical background that don't involve butting heads with people who dogmatically apply software engineering methodology to everything they do. It's their loss, not mine.
I don't know too many of the details here, but I'm glad someone is buying Sun. I'd heard rumors of a Sun/IBM merger a while back, and seen the signs that Sun was struggling financially. I think that an Oracle/Sun merger creates a better balance of power in the IT industry. Sun has done many good things for the Open Source community, including StarOffice, a truly open sourced Java, and OpenSolaris. However, unlike IBM who has prospered despite their many public contributions, Sun has suffered lately. There's a growing trend away from Java and toward.NET, as well as replacing old Unix servers running Solaris with new Intel machines running Windows Server.
Oracle throwing it's weight behind Sun technologies will reverse the trend, making Java applications popular again. I think Java is the superior solution. Not only available long before.NET, it was ripped off poorly by Microsoft (as usual) and marketing took care of the idiots making the decisions. It won't be long before Oracle creates a WebForms application based on the J2EE framework. Unlike.NET, however, the generated code can be hand-crafted to communicate with those old Unix boxes that won't be/haven't yet been replaced. J2EE is the superior web framework because its design incorporates a heterogeneous network, whereas Microsoft technologies are a monolith where you are unable to replace any one piece because Microsoft won't support other technologies.
Since many companies haven't yet transitioned to the really expensive.NET technologies, this merger will prevent many more idiots from choosing.NET just because it's sexy. I'd say now that you can't really go wrong buying IBM, Sun and Oracle in whatever quantities suits your organization. Just stay away from that Microsoft shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. NOW you're thinking like the NDP :-)
It's pretty effective. The prices for blank media didn't go up dramatically, and until this article, it was easy to forget I was even paying it.
Unfortunately, this is one of those issues that you need to be partisan on; the NDP is currently the only political party in Canada that is publicly against any kind of copyright reform. Unfortunately, their plans include things like this. Still, I'd rather the NDP get their way than the Conservatives, who have already twice tried to slam the Canadian DMCA down our throat.
Oops. Thanks for that.
I wasn't blessed with a color card. And I'm sure that's not actually any real dialect of assembly, but you get the picture.
I don't understand the "coming soon" part. American policies have been this way since 2001. Don't ever forget that the PATRIOT act was used to hold at least one American citizen without trial for at least a year. If that's not censorship, I don't know what is. And that's only the one we know about. Obama needs to lift the curtain on Gitmo, make some public anti-torture statements, and put this whole PATRIOT mess behind us.
That's not even funny!
Yea, but YOU didn't get to write the laws. Funny how "unlawful" can sometimes be synonymous with "unpopular". Given enough emergency powers and enough time, they are no longer synonyms.
I always enjoy the hypocrisy of people like Schwartz. It's Apple and Microsoft that made Sun unprofitable, not Schwartz. Sun had some pretty nasty, predatory business practices too, and loved to lock people into their big iron. I've seen companies jump ship to Microsoft, not because Microsoft was great, but because they were sick of Sun. Whether it was a smart move on the customers' part to do so yet remains to be seen (I guess not), but Sun drove away a lot of potential customers by being dogmatic and predatory.
On the other hand, some of the better choices Sun made: OpenSolaris, open source Java and StarOffice. While it's true that these products in themselves don't actually generate profit, they generate consulting opportunities. IBM doesn't seem to have a problem with this business model, but Sun certainly had one. Adopting a more knowledge-based company instead of hardware/software specialization would have been much better for Sun. After all, they supposedly know more about J2EE than anyone else out there, and there's a lot of J2EE consulting being done.
Overall, I can understand Schwartz's frustration. It's like he made decisions about open sourcing Java and StarOffice too late to capitalize on them. Certainly, Sun eventually made a lot of good decisions, and received very little reward for them. I hope that the influx of cash from Oracle makes the new company a viable competitor to Microsoft and IBM, and I hope Schwartz doesn't lose too much sleep over things. Sure, you can point the finger at Sun for a few bad decisions, but overall they were not rewarded for making good decisions as IBM has been.
Definitely good times. And I can't even talk about the stuff we did without implicating myself and a bunch of coworkers in unethical behavior. And, one day, it was just over. I ended up working in a parking lot and becoming one of the used bookstore's best customers. I've never quite gotten back there...
what happens if you write/contribute to open source?
As everyone else is pointing out, that makes you a Communist.
Or an anarchist
ARRRR! indeed =D
Having a good reason to commit a crime doesn't make it not a crime. It might, in some circumstances, get you leniency in sentencing, but it's still a crime.
Not going to disagree with you there, but willingness to commit crime can sometimes be the moral action when the law protects the immoral. There are few people that are so brave, and their actions should be lauded regardless of their criminality. One man's villain is another man's hero. Of course, the only positive thing that can be said about moral, criminal acts is that you get to be self-righteous. If you get caught, you still go to jail. On the other hand, King Richard eventually pardoned Robin Hood. Good people are eventually vindicated.
They are just declaring their intention to no longer subject new features to the "omfg how the f*** can I get this to work in this fscking old Microshit browser???!!" gauntlet of pain.
There, fixed that for you :-)
AI is here... it's just hiding!
Burnett was the first to discover that primitive languages create unnecessarily lengthy words for rather simple concepts. He reasoned that in early languages there was an imperative for clarity, so that redundancy was built in and seemingly unnecessary syllables added. He concluded that this form of language evolved as a method of survival when clear communication might be the determinant of avoiding danger. He demonstrated that he was aware of the advantages to those peoples who could develop superior language skills. This quasi-evolutionary idea, whilst common today, was then unusual.
I can't find the exact examples I'm looking for, but it looks like my belief in an evolution of natural languages is well supported. I distinctly remember being told about a primitive native language that didn't even have temporal concepts. All concepts were expressed in the present. Tell me that doesn't make a language more primitive.
...of object-oriented and functional programming languages would be one without any functional perspective. I've learned both, I've managed both, and OO didn't drive me insane. Functional-based programming languages are syntactically inferior to OO ones, just as natural languages have features that make some more primitive than others.
I've opted for the large desktop option in general. This is better than the alternative since it requires less technical know-how and screwing around in the terminal. I use the following script to switch between the two display modes:
I have two custom application launchers on my panel, one for each of the following commands:
This generally works well. However, all the caveats posted above regarding the differences in resolution between the two displays apply: XRANDR does not work with my multi-screen display, so compiz effects are reduced to their minimum, and many applications do not work correctly as they rely on XRANDR.
I used to have the two commands above on the gdm login screen, but Ubuntu 9.10 dropped support for custom commands in the gdm greeter. The custom launchers are a usable hack. MPlayer is set up to automatically play video in fullscreen on the television display. The real solution, however, is to get dynamic layout switching into xorg. I'm not sure of the technical barriers, but having to log everyone out just to change screen layouts seems like overkill. With laptop media centers becoming more commonplace, I look forward to this feature, and hope that everyone agrees that it is the best solution to this particular problem.
It's all politics. The majority of people in Ireland don't see a problem with their theocracy. And it's not like they're using it in an aggressive manner; the fact that most people in Ireland are Catholics doesn't change their foreign policy. Ireland is, and always has been, a neutral country. I grew up in that culture, was even taught by nuns. For me, this was a good experience. My suspicion is that while blasphemy laws supposedly protect all religions, in practice it will be generally applied only to anti-Catholic speech. Every country has a right to protect their culture. Just because the rest of the world is secular doesn't mean Ireland has to be.
Oh, and nearly forgot to mention a key point. Perl 5.8 has support for code that looks object-oriented, and supports namespaces to help with organization, but it is not truly OO. There's some syntactic sugar added to make things work generally like an OO language, but there's a lot of hacks that don't exist in a real OO environment. Manipulating the ISA array, for instance, makes non-OO things possible. Even with 'use strict', it leaves a lot to be desired. I can't speak to Perl 6, though. I've decided on Java as my language of choice, and I'll even work in C# if I don't have to work for Microsoft drones.
Heh. Check out the Chess module on CPAN. I most certainly do know what I'm talking about. And yes, the Perl programmers I've had the misfortune of working with have been bad to awful.
It's clear you will play the bureaucrat, requiring all red tape to be completed in triplicate before one may use the stapler. You will never pay me because I will never work for you. If you're going to manage people, you have to understand how they work, and even if you think you do, even if you were once in that position, it's obvious you either forgot or learned in a different era.
Beautifully worded rebuttal to this cynical greybeard. I'm surprised his post didn't end with "Get off my lawn". I don't want his reference, or to work for him. I don't need to get paid to find code to write, and it's infinitely more enjoyable than the business ideology of how software development is supposed to work. Software engineering is a new discipline, and there's still a lot of arguments from both sides to be considered. OP is assuming as fact many things that are still being examined.
Lest people think I'm am simply trolling, I'm not saying that software engineering has no purpose, and that it's always wrong to use those methodologies. But a corporate intranet application is not software for the Space Shuttle.
Parent marked troll? I think it's very funny.
It really depends on what language you write your code in. Object-oriented languages in general require less documentation since good design and properly named methods and properties do document things relatively well. Class-level documentation is much more important than documenting the details of the methods themselves. Java and .NET require much less documentation to maintain. I've looked over Java code I wrote years ago, and it still makes perfect sense, even though I've only really documented the API and not the details. Perl and C code, on the other hand, can be unmaintainable even with a number of comments, because the old functional design is not easily maintainable. Consider rewriting these in a more modern language.
Call me a hotshot if you want, but I shouldn't have to assume that the person maintaining my code is a moron, nor that my non-technical manager needs to understand every single statement I wrote. I play nice with QA, and happily write test cases for my code. That's as far as I'm willing to go to ensure that my code quality is good, and that I can leave without the possibility of my code degenerating into the spaghetti-like mess I've had to clean up on a number of occasions. Sure, I don't get hired to write code anymore, but I don't care. Software Engineering and overdocumenting every single tiny intranet project is wasteful. Cleaning up after morons who believe that their engineering background can make up for their lack of talent and experience is aggravating. Answering to them is intolerable. There's other things I can do with my technical background that don't involve butting heads with people who dogmatically apply software engineering methodology to everything they do. It's their loss, not mine.
Up Yer Kilt?
I don't know too many of the details here, but I'm glad someone is buying Sun. I'd heard rumors of a Sun/IBM merger a while back, and seen the signs that Sun was struggling financially. I think that an Oracle/Sun merger creates a better balance of power in the IT industry. Sun has done many good things for the Open Source community, including StarOffice, a truly open sourced Java, and OpenSolaris. However, unlike IBM who has prospered despite their many public contributions, Sun has suffered lately. There's a growing trend away from Java and toward .NET, as well as replacing old Unix servers running Solaris with new Intel machines running Windows Server.
Oracle throwing it's weight behind Sun technologies will reverse the trend, making Java applications popular again. I think Java is the superior solution. Not only available long before .NET, it was ripped off poorly by Microsoft (as usual) and marketing took care of the idiots making the decisions. It won't be long before Oracle creates a WebForms application based on the J2EE framework. Unlike .NET, however, the generated code can be hand-crafted to communicate with those old Unix boxes that won't be/haven't yet been replaced. J2EE is the superior web framework because its design incorporates a heterogeneous network, whereas Microsoft technologies are a monolith where you are unable to replace any one piece because Microsoft won't support other technologies.
Since many companies haven't yet transitioned to the really expensive .NET technologies, this merger will prevent many more idiots from choosing .NET just because it's sexy. I'd say now that you can't really go wrong buying IBM, Sun and Oracle in whatever quantities suits your organization. Just stay away from that Microsoft shit.