Keep in mind that it's not gibberish, it's just not what I'd call beautiful prose That's good: the Semantic Web will eat you alive.
They have become a fashion craze both because of their appearance and the messages they impart
This is a totally unverifiable statement. This is the sort of thing that the Semantic Web is designed to pick up on. Now you'll have to support the statement that wearing those bracelets is, in fact, a fashion craze. Presumably you'll do that by following the Church of Scientology method of Google hacking, by creating a bunch of sites hyping the bracelet, thus supporting the claim that the fashion craze exists.
Your consistent use of the parenthetical statement now tries to correlate the term you're trying to position with the terms "rubber wristband" "awareness bracelet" and several other combinations that are similar. This can cause one of two problems on the Semantic Web: 1) you're overloading a term that you invented, thus requiring you to support the term by creating multiple websites supporting the fact that such a term is, in fact, useful; or 2) you're trying to make an association that the rest of the web disagrees with. Either way, it's pretty clear what you're trying to do and that your page really contains no valuable information.
Just to respond to some of your other responses in place: I'm glad that you take the web seriously and make a living at it. I'm glad that you're making money doing something that most of us wouldn't want to. I'm glad you can provide for your family. I'm especially glad that Google will evolve faster than you or your ilk. Seriously dude, you need to learn how to write that "beautiful prose" if you expect your business model to last more than another 5 years.
Well, if there is a patent involved in this "click to call" thing, and it turns out to be popular, I think there could be lots of dollars out there.
No matter what happens, there is no possible way this could be a new patent. "Click to call" is just a concrete instance of a hyperlink, which is covered in a dozen different patents all claiming to have invented the WWW. I can't conceive of how it could be argued that this hyperlink is so amazingly different that it isn't covered by one of the other patents. OTOH, the USPO is gaining a reputation for granting duplicate patents, patents for which there is a considerable amount of prior art, and just generally not reading the patent application at all.
I think a lot of viral marketing is based on the idea that there's no such thing as negative publicity. Judging by most people's reactions when they find out about such ploys, there really isn't. Someone always apologizes for the marketer, or talks about how clever the campaign was, or simply refuses to believe that the marketer is doing anything unethical. As someone pointed out, there *is* something unethical about these campaigns; they abuse the trust we place in someone for appearing to be independent from the organization, thus enabling them the ability to give what appears to be an unbiased review.
The only negative publicity we can deservedly give these hype-sters is non-publicity. Don't go nuts when a fraud or hoax is exposed; simply ignore it. You'll probably forget all about it in another week.
I've not run into anything specific to 5.0 as it is likely too new for people to write books given the consulting opportunities available. I found the O'Reilly "Enterprise JavaBeans" 3rd. Ed. to be quite useful in wrapping my head around the overall architecture. "J2EE Design Patterns" (also O'Reilly) has some good pointers about applying design patterns to a J2EE application. Sun has their J2EE core blueprints in both web and print form. I notice that there's another O'Reilly about "Designing J2EE Applications".
J2EE knowledge is tough to come by as it is the primary source of income for many people. Google has very little -- most of the Google hits I found were on various mailing lists looking for configuration help for a specific app server. However, synthesizing information from multiple sources still allowed me to answer both general and specific questions I had about J2EE architecture and APIs.
Unix people will note that it has been possible to set up network rules based on OS fingerprint for some time now. PF (used by OpenBSD) has a feature which identifies what OS it is communicating with and allows you to set rules accordingly. The "Building Firewalls with PF and OpenBSD" (2nd. ed.) contains an example showing how to restrict the bandwidth available to machines running Windows operating systems. If Vista brings about a whole bunch of networks that refuse to talk to Linux machines, a concerted OpenBSD action (which they've been known to do in the past) could bring about a whole bunch of networks that refuse to talk to Windows machines. Of course, you'll be able to get around it by installing a patch for your Windows machine that fakes its TCP packets to look like a Linux machine;)
Hmmm. I think I'll have to agree with the "crappy public transit" comment. I live a considerable distance from work, and I like where I live and where I work, so that's not likely to change. All things being equal, the car is about 5-10 minutes faster for my commute. That means it would be 40 minutes in a car vs. 50 minutes or so by transit. All things are usually not equal. Yes, it affects transit too, but when it does, I've got this new gadget to keep me occupied. I can't really divert my attention from the road for too long at a time, even during a traffic jam. Also, the frequency of a traffic jam during rush hour versus problems with the train clearly favours the train rider. A normal commute of the length I'm talking about will hit a traffic jam on average 3 out of 5 days. That typically means there's no real difference in length of commute. Keep in mind that I can be comatose during that ride too, which is my normal morning state. I don't understand how the transit can be so bad as to have such large discrepancies in commuting time. Aren't the same roads in use? Isn't there a train system of considerable length?
BTW, my immune system is really tough. Turns out that being exposed to all the bugs on the train keeps my immune system up-to-date with all the latest antibodies. I suppose someone else might still pick one up from me, though. Maybe I should start working from home to be more considerate.
I never said I couldn't afford it. I just said they are a waste of money given the lack of stress and general efficiency of public transit. Of course, I can understand that the brainwashed masses might have an emotional attachment to their vehicles which they have worked Oh So Hard to pay for. Enlightenment is difficult to acheive, n00b.
I'm also skeptical of this report. 10 years ago it was the hole in the ozone layer that was melting the ice in Antarctica (which was later found out to be a natural phenomenom more than human influence). I try to put things in perspective: how much has the Earth's climate changed in the last 6000 years? Compare that to how much the Earth's climate change between 6000 and 12000 years ago. I'll admit that humanity has a significant impact on the Earth's climate, but I'd wager that there'll still be a significant chunk of ice left above the Arctic circle in 2040.
There's public transit where I live. Personally, I'd rather spend 45 minutes of stress-free commuting playing with some techno gizmo than worrying about paying for and maintaining an SUV. In Vancouver, the trains don't even have drivers. I think this classifies as "driving itself". I guess the point is that our future doesn't necessarily have personal cars, but rather entertainment to while away the minutes of our commute.
That's only the best case scenario for a would-be IT hire. Imagine this slightly more realistic scenario: The person hiring the 3 new people also gets a bonus for saving money on these hires. Since it's been decided that hiring people with lots of skills is a bad idea for the reasons outlined above, then you can really save some money by hiring someone that's totally incompetent. The savings get passed onto the Development Manager who did the hiring as a nice bonus cheque.
Here's the tricky part now: keeping your job even though you hired techies that are only slightly more skilled than a helper monkey. It's easier than you think though: the only people I've seen in hiring roles have no real technical skills to speak of. They seem to spend all their time helping the business forecast the rate of software development. This involves going to a lot of meetings and making up a lot of excuses both for yourself and for your team. Just come up with a few basic excuses, schedule a few system outages to compound problems, and now you've succeeded. You spend $10k less on hiring, continue to develop software at a miserably slow pace, and no one notices your team's incompetence as it's all chalked up to one of a dozen things that just go wrong daily. It's a nice gravy train if you can get on it in the hiring role, but the best opportunity for a skilled techie is to become an unskilled techie.
This sounds like a useful script. I know people who manage Windows Updates for corporate networks, and they've mentioned these sorts of ISOs before. Effectively, it allows an admin. to read the KB articles on microsoft.com and pick-and-choose which updates to make available to the corporate network. There's a lot of updates! A backup ISO of the updates you've chosen to make available allows you to easily rebuild the update server if anything happens to it, and to build update servers for other networks based off work you've already done.
As to circumventing WGA: it's already been circumvented for XP SP2. You actually have to download and run the WGA executable to destroy a cracked XP SP2 install (Windows Update doesn't push it to you). Vista may be a different story though.
Microsoft has a history of obtaining things through unscrupulous means. For those of you who don't know the story about DOS 6.0 and Stacker, I'm going to tell it quickly because I think it highlights very well how Microsoft does business. Basically, drive compression became very popular during the DOS 5.0 days, and a company named Stacker produced the most well-known product (called Stacker, surprisingly enough). Microsoft decided that DOS 6.0 needed drive compression built in, both to put Stacker out of business, and to improve their own product. After Stacker refused to sell (if Microsoft even made the offer), Microsoft simply stole it and repackaged it as DriveSpace. Sure, there was a legal settlement (a couple million, IIRC) but it was hardly fair, given how much people thought DriveSpace was great and used it to market DOS 6.0. Stacker should have received royalties from every copy of DOS 6.0 that was ever sold. Instead, they dried up since there product was rendered useless. Remember: It was proven that Microsoft illegally obtained this code!
This kit and it's associated distribution requirements smacks of the same sort of thing; watch people make stuff, steal the best stuff and sick the lawyers on the poor sucker who was dumb enough to do something useful with a Microsoft tool. I hope the best developers stay away from this latest attempt of Microsoft's to find cool stuff to steal.
mandelbr0t
I don't think that journalism is the only profession that has been radically changed by the introduction of the Internet as a distribution medium. The same argument about distribution being within the reach of the unwashed masses still applies to pretty much anything that involves distributing some kind of content to an end-user. We were worried about indie artists obsoleting the Big Music Industry, amateur filmmakers taking money away from Hollywood, traditional news sources becoming obsolete, FOSS obsoleting commercial software development. And yet, none of this has happened.
To some degree, the work of amateurs has been more widely viewed and accepted due to things like blogging, YouTube, online photo galleries and more. And FOSS is a serious competitor for all kinds of business applications. In the end, however, there's a few things that keep the pros in business, and likely will continue to do so. Professional content creators (just to keep things generic) have experience, reputation and capital. Most amateurs are lacking in at least one of those areas. In the rare and brilliant case where an amateur lacks none of the above, they remain an amateur because they've chosen to commit the bulk of their time to some other profession.
Only when experience, reputation and capital have nothing to do with successfully creating unique and interesting content do I see the pro's job in danger. The Internet has enabled more amateurs by reducing the capital required to enter the market, allowing for one to gain reputation in a myriad of online communities, and experience by contributing freely and easily to the public domain. All of this free content is simply competition for the pros, who are pros (presumably) because they are one of the best. Conclusion: The Internet does enable amateur content creators to succeed, but the pros will continue to succeed by improving the quality of their work.
It's good to see that it didn't take India long to start turning over IT staff at an alarming rate. I was a sucker for a good 2 years before realizing that loyalty to any company or employment agency just limited my chances, and clearly reputation means nothing in a disloyal, mercenary environment (since any given company will attempt to destroy it when you leave, regardless of how good your work was). I really don't care where the IT work ends up; I just want a company that pays a reasonable wage for work done, or a contract that doesn't blatantly favour my client.
The solution to the problem is probably one of education. My experience is that the business community fosters this disloyal, mercenary environment because they want to reinforce the idea in the IT contractor's head that they are replaceable, and not worth that much. However, if the business community is saying that India isn't viable for the same reasons that North America isn't viable for software development, maybe a reality check has hit home. I suppose it's possible that China might be filled with people that respond to these incredibly negative business practices, but my guess is not. I hope your average CIO learns very soon that 1) he needs to more clearly understand the skills of the people he employs and 2) no matter where he employs them, a fair rate for the expertise needs to be paid.
Well, the IBM consultants are at least implementing Open Standards. They push Linux servers, WebSphere for J2EE environments, and (OK there's one proprietary thing here) DB2. I'd rather pay the consultants for providing me with an accountable amount of service (how often were you in the office, what meetings did you attend, where's our new server, etc.) rather than some unknown amount of proprietary closed-source code that took some guy 2 days to write, but we have no idea what it is since source isn't provided. IBM is my favourite vendor these days, what with the pushing of the Linux and the SCO-whomping in the courtroom. A vendor this large that's pro-GPL might actually have some concept of why Open Source (and Open Standards) work.
The real issue here is how the RIAA is choosing to enforce their copyrights. We don't see parallel cases in Canada because the CRIA (the Canadian equivalent) does not have such wide-reaching powers. KaZaA users were discovered by invading a reasonable expectation of privacy. Like our telephones, we should be able to use our computers in the privacy of our homes without worrying about some kind of wiretap (unless we were involved in some kind of criminal activity where a warrant for this tapping could be issued.)
I've read through the complaint, and it's cohesive and exhaustive. It doesn't just charge the Sharman defendants with being misleading (that's only one of the counts). It logically describes the sum total of the actions taken by the defendants which caused her and others to unwittingly expose themselves to litigation. Sure, there's a good chance that a large portion of the Class named in the suit were fully aware that they were breaching copyright, and given the large number of hammer-to-kill-a-mosquito sorts of activities that the RIAA was well-known to be engaging in, should have expected the litigation. However, the charge that uninstalling KaZaA did not stop you from violating copyright is particularly telling. It means that even the knowledge that you had been duped by Sharman did not give you any way of preventing the activity you would be sued for. The count of Unjust Enrichment is also very strong; it seeks punitive damages to Sharman because they got rich by exposing others to a product of low-quality that exposed them to considerable liability. (BTW, this is the only count that seems like it could have been influenced by the RIAA).
In short, as much as people like to beat up on the KaZaA users and say "shoulda read the fine print" and claim that "Only in America could this lawsuit happen", I'd say that's not true. If the CRIA were able to obtain the sorts of records that the RIAA obtained to launch their myriad of legal actions, we'd probably see a lawsuit of this nature eventually, simply because it's the only legal recourse that the suckers who used the product have. Unlike the crack dealer who can be imprisoned, the only thing left to do with the Sharman defendants is to take away all their money and give it to someone else. It doesn't really solve the problem, but at least a judgement is made which will clarify what sorts of caveats a software vendor is required to publish.
I think everyone's just jealous coz someone who's pirating music might actually make some money:P
mandelbr0t
I'm sure everybody here has seen the ST:TNG episode where walking on the grass carried the death penalty. AFAIK, the point of law is that the punishment fits the crime. If I write a Proof-of-concept of a vulnerability in a system with the intent of showing that it's not worth buying as the manufacturer has failed to provide a product of useable quality, and there is no clear law indicating that such writing is illegal, then I shouldn't be punished for writing it. I also shouldn't be punished for distributing it; that's my goal as a writer. There are notable exceptions; distributing hate literature is illegal in Canada, USA and all of Western Europe. (I'm sure the scope is larger)
At this point in time, I'd say that there's a huge area of poorly defined behaviours that simply can't be made illegal with the current laws. You say "free commerce" and I say "spam". You say "cracking", I say "I'm just making consumers aware." You say "borrowing", I say "plagiarism" (or "break-and-enter"). Until there's clear jurisdiction and clearly defined illegal 'net-behaviours', and a clear chain of evidence proving said net-behaviours, it's just a jungle. I certainly don't condone distributing proof-of-concept virii, but there's certainly a philosophical justification for it.
I also don't want the USA to be the only police. I don't know what legal and political things have to happen to make the 'net less of a jungle, but I know they won't happen tomorrow. I also know that everything is a he-said, she-said situation right now, and the people who claim to be making laws for "the greater good" are responsible for a great deal of unwarrented discrimination to show just how powerful they are.
It seems like such a small step from SCSL to GPL, but it really isn't. GPL'ing Java will ease development on platforms that formerly relied on things like Blackdown to have any kind of Java support at all. The gcj project will move forward more rapidly, providing native code compilation of Java on hundreds of platforms, many of them embedded systems. In many ways, removing distribution restrictions from one's product is a leap of faith. It takes confidence that Java is a mature product that will keep Sun's legacy through its transformation into truly Free Software. Kudos, and my sincere hope that Java becomes the dominant multiplatform solution of the future.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a totally unverifiable statement. This is the sort of thing that the Semantic Web is designed to pick up on. Now you'll have to support the statement that wearing those bracelets is, in fact, a fashion craze. Presumably you'll do that by following the Church of Scientology method of Google hacking, by creating a bunch of sites hyping the bracelet, thus supporting the claim that the fashion craze exists.
Your consistent use of the parenthetical statement now tries to correlate the term you're trying to position with the terms "rubber wristband" "awareness bracelet" and several other combinations that are similar. This can cause one of two problems on the Semantic Web: 1) you're overloading a term that you invented, thus requiring you to support the term by creating multiple websites supporting the fact that such a term is, in fact, useful; or 2) you're trying to make an association that the rest of the web disagrees with. Either way, it's pretty clear what you're trying to do and that your page really contains no valuable information.
Just to respond to some of your other responses in place: I'm glad that you take the web seriously and make a living at it. I'm glad that you're making money doing something that most of us wouldn't want to. I'm glad you can provide for your family. I'm especially glad that Google will evolve faster than you or your ilk. Seriously dude, you need to learn how to write that "beautiful prose" if you expect your business model to last more than another 5 years.
mandelbr0t
No matter what happens, there is no possible way this could be a new patent. "Click to call" is just a concrete instance of a hyperlink, which is covered in a dozen different patents all claiming to have invented the WWW. I can't conceive of how it could be argued that this hyperlink is so amazingly different that it isn't covered by one of the other patents. OTOH, the USPO is gaining a reputation for granting duplicate patents, patents for which there is a considerable amount of prior art, and just generally not reading the patent application at all.
mandelbr0t
I think a lot of viral marketing is based on the idea that there's no such thing as negative publicity. Judging by most people's reactions when they find out about such ploys, there really isn't. Someone always apologizes for the marketer, or talks about how clever the campaign was, or simply refuses to believe that the marketer is doing anything unethical. As someone pointed out, there *is* something unethical about these campaigns; they abuse the trust we place in someone for appearing to be independent from the organization, thus enabling them the ability to give what appears to be an unbiased review.
The only negative publicity we can deservedly give these hype-sters is non-publicity. Don't go nuts when a fraud or hoax is exposed; simply ignore it. You'll probably forget all about it in another week.
mandelbr0t
I've not run into anything specific to 5.0 as it is likely too new for people to write books given the consulting opportunities available. I found the O'Reilly "Enterprise JavaBeans" 3rd. Ed. to be quite useful in wrapping my head around the overall architecture. "J2EE Design Patterns" (also O'Reilly) has some good pointers about applying design patterns to a J2EE application. Sun has their J2EE core blueprints in both web and print form. I notice that there's another O'Reilly about "Designing J2EE Applications".
J2EE knowledge is tough to come by as it is the primary source of income for many people. Google has very little -- most of the Google hits I found were on various mailing lists looking for configuration help for a specific app server. However, synthesizing information from multiple sources still allowed me to answer both general and specific questions I had about J2EE architecture and APIs.
mandelbr0t
Unix people will note that it has been possible to set up network rules based on OS fingerprint for some time now. PF (used by OpenBSD) has a feature which identifies what OS it is communicating with and allows you to set rules accordingly. The "Building Firewalls with PF and OpenBSD" (2nd. ed.) contains an example showing how to restrict the bandwidth available to machines running Windows operating systems. If Vista brings about a whole bunch of networks that refuse to talk to Linux machines, a concerted OpenBSD action (which they've been known to do in the past) could bring about a whole bunch of networks that refuse to talk to Windows machines. Of course, you'll be able to get around it by installing a patch for your Windows machine that fakes its TCP packets to look like a Linux machine ;)
mandelbr0t
Hmmm. I think I'll have to agree with the "crappy public transit" comment. I live a considerable distance from work, and I like where I live and where I work, so that's not likely to change. All things being equal, the car is about 5-10 minutes faster for my commute. That means it would be 40 minutes in a car vs. 50 minutes or so by transit. All things are usually not equal. Yes, it affects transit too, but when it does, I've got this new gadget to keep me occupied. I can't really divert my attention from the road for too long at a time, even during a traffic jam. Also, the frequency of a traffic jam during rush hour versus problems with the train clearly favours the train rider. A normal commute of the length I'm talking about will hit a traffic jam on average 3 out of 5 days. That typically means there's no real difference in length of commute. Keep in mind that I can be comatose during that ride too, which is my normal morning state. I don't understand how the transit can be so bad as to have such large discrepancies in commuting time. Aren't the same roads in use? Isn't there a train system of considerable length?
BTW, my immune system is really tough. Turns out that being exposed to all the bugs on the train keeps my immune system up-to-date with all the latest antibodies. I suppose someone else might still pick one up from me, though. Maybe I should start working from home to be more considerate.
mandelbr0t
I never said I couldn't afford it. I just said they are a waste of money given the lack of stress and general efficiency of public transit. Of course, I can understand that the brainwashed masses might have an emotional attachment to their vehicles which they have worked Oh So Hard to pay for. Enlightenment is difficult to acheive, n00b.
mandelbr0t
...blind Texans does it take to shoot out a light bulb?
(sorry, it's the best joke I could think of)
mandelbr0t
I'm also skeptical of this report. 10 years ago it was the hole in the ozone layer that was melting the ice in Antarctica (which was later found out to be a natural phenomenom more than human influence). I try to put things in perspective: how much has the Earth's climate changed in the last 6000 years? Compare that to how much the Earth's climate change between 6000 and 12000 years ago. I'll admit that humanity has a significant impact on the Earth's climate, but I'd wager that there'll still be a significant chunk of ice left above the Arctic circle in 2040.
mandelbr0t
There's public transit where I live. Personally, I'd rather spend 45 minutes of stress-free commuting playing with some techno gizmo than worrying about paying for and maintaining an SUV. In Vancouver, the trains don't even have drivers. I think this classifies as "driving itself". I guess the point is that our future doesn't necessarily have personal cars, but rather entertainment to while away the minutes of our commute.
mandelbr0t
That's only the best case scenario for a would-be IT hire. Imagine this slightly more realistic scenario: The person hiring the 3 new people also gets a bonus for saving money on these hires. Since it's been decided that hiring people with lots of skills is a bad idea for the reasons outlined above, then you can really save some money by hiring someone that's totally incompetent. The savings get passed onto the Development Manager who did the hiring as a nice bonus cheque.
Here's the tricky part now: keeping your job even though you hired techies that are only slightly more skilled than a helper monkey. It's easier than you think though: the only people I've seen in hiring roles have no real technical skills to speak of. They seem to spend all their time helping the business forecast the rate of software development. This involves going to a lot of meetings and making up a lot of excuses both for yourself and for your team. Just come up with a few basic excuses, schedule a few system outages to compound problems, and now you've succeeded. You spend $10k less on hiring, continue to develop software at a miserably slow pace, and no one notices your team's incompetence as it's all chalked up to one of a dozen things that just go wrong daily. It's a nice gravy train if you can get on it in the hiring role, but the best opportunity for a skilled techie is to become an unskilled techie.
mandelbr0t
This sounds like a useful script. I know people who manage Windows Updates for corporate networks, and they've mentioned these sorts of ISOs before. Effectively, it allows an admin. to read the KB articles on microsoft.com and pick-and-choose which updates to make available to the corporate network. There's a lot of updates! A backup ISO of the updates you've chosen to make available allows you to easily rebuild the update server if anything happens to it, and to build update servers for other networks based off work you've already done.
As to circumventing WGA: it's already been circumvented for XP SP2. You actually have to download and run the WGA executable to destroy a cracked XP SP2 install (Windows Update doesn't push it to you). Vista may be a different story though.
mandelbr0t
Microsoft has a history of obtaining things through unscrupulous means. For those of you who don't know the story about DOS 6.0 and Stacker, I'm going to tell it quickly because I think it highlights very well how Microsoft does business. Basically, drive compression became very popular during the DOS 5.0 days, and a company named Stacker produced the most well-known product (called Stacker, surprisingly enough). Microsoft decided that DOS 6.0 needed drive compression built in, both to put Stacker out of business, and to improve their own product. After Stacker refused to sell (if Microsoft even made the offer), Microsoft simply stole it and repackaged it as DriveSpace. Sure, there was a legal settlement (a couple million, IIRC) but it was hardly fair, given how much people thought DriveSpace was great and used it to market DOS 6.0. Stacker should have received royalties from every copy of DOS 6.0 that was ever sold. Instead, they dried up since there product was rendered useless. Remember: It was proven that Microsoft illegally obtained this code!
This kit and it's associated distribution requirements smacks of the same sort of thing; watch people make stuff, steal the best stuff and sick the lawyers on the poor sucker who was dumb enough to do something useful with a Microsoft tool. I hope the best developers stay away from this latest attempt of Microsoft's to find cool stuff to steal.
mandelbr0t
I don't think that journalism is the only profession that has been radically changed by the introduction of the Internet as a distribution medium. The same argument about distribution being within the reach of the unwashed masses still applies to pretty much anything that involves distributing some kind of content to an end-user. We were worried about indie artists obsoleting the Big Music Industry, amateur filmmakers taking money away from Hollywood, traditional news sources becoming obsolete, FOSS obsoleting commercial software development. And yet, none of this has happened.
To some degree, the work of amateurs has been more widely viewed and accepted due to things like blogging, YouTube, online photo galleries and more. And FOSS is a serious competitor for all kinds of business applications. In the end, however, there's a few things that keep the pros in business, and likely will continue to do so. Professional content creators (just to keep things generic) have experience, reputation and capital. Most amateurs are lacking in at least one of those areas. In the rare and brilliant case where an amateur lacks none of the above, they remain an amateur because they've chosen to commit the bulk of their time to some other profession.
Only when experience, reputation and capital have nothing to do with successfully creating unique and interesting content do I see the pro's job in danger. The Internet has enabled more amateurs by reducing the capital required to enter the market, allowing for one to gain reputation in a myriad of online communities, and experience by contributing freely and easily to the public domain. All of this free content is simply competition for the pros, who are pros (presumably) because they are one of the best. Conclusion: The Internet does enable amateur content creators to succeed, but the pros will continue to succeed by improving the quality of their work.
mandelbr0t
It's good to see that it didn't take India long to start turning over IT staff at an alarming rate. I was a sucker for a good 2 years before realizing that loyalty to any company or employment agency just limited my chances, and clearly reputation means nothing in a disloyal, mercenary environment (since any given company will attempt to destroy it when you leave, regardless of how good your work was). I really don't care where the IT work ends up; I just want a company that pays a reasonable wage for work done, or a contract that doesn't blatantly favour my client.
The solution to the problem is probably one of education. My experience is that the business community fosters this disloyal, mercenary environment because they want to reinforce the idea in the IT contractor's head that they are replaceable, and not worth that much. However, if the business community is saying that India isn't viable for the same reasons that North America isn't viable for software development, maybe a reality check has hit home. I suppose it's possible that China might be filled with people that respond to these incredibly negative business practices, but my guess is not. I hope your average CIO learns very soon that 1) he needs to more clearly understand the skills of the people he employs and 2) no matter where he employs them, a fair rate for the expertise needs to be paid.
mandelbr0t
Well, the IBM consultants are at least implementing Open Standards. They push Linux servers, WebSphere for J2EE environments, and (OK there's one proprietary thing here) DB2. I'd rather pay the consultants for providing me with an accountable amount of service (how often were you in the office, what meetings did you attend, where's our new server, etc.) rather than some unknown amount of proprietary closed-source code that took some guy 2 days to write, but we have no idea what it is since source isn't provided. IBM is my favourite vendor these days, what with the pushing of the Linux and the SCO-whomping in the courtroom. A vendor this large that's pro-GPL might actually have some concept of why Open Source (and Open Standards) work.
mandelbr0t
The real issue here is how the RIAA is choosing to enforce their copyrights. We don't see parallel cases in Canada because the CRIA (the Canadian equivalent) does not have such wide-reaching powers. KaZaA users were discovered by invading a reasonable expectation of privacy. Like our telephones, we should be able to use our computers in the privacy of our homes without worrying about some kind of wiretap (unless we were involved in some kind of criminal activity where a warrant for this tapping could be issued.) I've read through the complaint, and it's cohesive and exhaustive. It doesn't just charge the Sharman defendants with being misleading (that's only one of the counts). It logically describes the sum total of the actions taken by the defendants which caused her and others to unwittingly expose themselves to litigation. Sure, there's a good chance that a large portion of the Class named in the suit were fully aware that they were breaching copyright, and given the large number of hammer-to-kill-a-mosquito sorts of activities that the RIAA was well-known to be engaging in, should have expected the litigation. However, the charge that uninstalling KaZaA did not stop you from violating copyright is particularly telling. It means that even the knowledge that you had been duped by Sharman did not give you any way of preventing the activity you would be sued for. The count of Unjust Enrichment is also very strong; it seeks punitive damages to Sharman because they got rich by exposing others to a product of low-quality that exposed them to considerable liability. (BTW, this is the only count that seems like it could have been influenced by the RIAA). In short, as much as people like to beat up on the KaZaA users and say "shoulda read the fine print" and claim that "Only in America could this lawsuit happen", I'd say that's not true. If the CRIA were able to obtain the sorts of records that the RIAA obtained to launch their myriad of legal actions, we'd probably see a lawsuit of this nature eventually, simply because it's the only legal recourse that the suckers who used the product have. Unlike the crack dealer who can be imprisoned, the only thing left to do with the Sharman defendants is to take away all their money and give it to someone else. It doesn't really solve the problem, but at least a judgement is made which will clarify what sorts of caveats a software vendor is required to publish. I think everyone's just jealous coz someone who's pirating music might actually make some money :P
mandelbr0t
I'm sure everybody here has seen the ST:TNG episode where walking on the grass carried the death penalty. AFAIK, the point of law is that the punishment fits the crime. If I write a Proof-of-concept of a vulnerability in a system with the intent of showing that it's not worth buying as the manufacturer has failed to provide a product of useable quality, and there is no clear law indicating that such writing is illegal, then I shouldn't be punished for writing it. I also shouldn't be punished for distributing it; that's my goal as a writer. There are notable exceptions; distributing hate literature is illegal in Canada, USA and all of Western Europe. (I'm sure the scope is larger)
At this point in time, I'd say that there's a huge area of poorly defined behaviours that simply can't be made illegal with the current laws. You say "free commerce" and I say "spam". You say "cracking", I say "I'm just making consumers aware." You say "borrowing", I say "plagiarism" (or "break-and-enter"). Until there's clear jurisdiction and clearly defined illegal 'net-behaviours', and a clear chain of evidence proving said net-behaviours, it's just a jungle. I certainly don't condone distributing proof-of-concept virii, but there's certainly a philosophical justification for it.
I also don't want the USA to be the only police. I don't know what legal and political things have to happen to make the 'net less of a jungle, but I know they won't happen tomorrow. I also know that everything is a he-said, she-said situation right now, and the people who claim to be making laws for "the greater good" are responsible for a great deal of unwarrented discrimination to show just how powerful they are.
mandelbr0t
It seems like such a small step from SCSL to GPL, but it really isn't. GPL'ing Java will ease development on platforms that formerly relied on things like Blackdown to have any kind of Java support at all. The gcj project will move forward more rapidly, providing native code compilation of Java on hundreds of platforms, many of them embedded systems. In many ways, removing distribution restrictions from one's product is a leap of faith. It takes confidence that Java is a mature product that will keep Sun's legacy through its transformation into truly Free Software. Kudos, and my sincere hope that Java becomes the dominant multiplatform solution of the future.
mandelbr0t