Actually, this is misleading. I don't believe that any version of Windows prior to 95 had a trashcan of any sort. The suit by Apple was over much more general elements - the WIMP interface metaphor. The judge, rightly, told Apple to bugger off - they couldn't claim ownership of an entire metaphor just because they sold it first. At the time, look and feel lawsuits were a serious problem - those weren't there only examples, they're just the most clear-cut. Most look and feel lawsuits had about as much backing (and, unfortunately, success) as the patent and trademark shit flying around now.
1 gigabyte per day doesn't sound very bad at all. Even for anime addicts, that's far more than you're going to download (or upload!) in a day. This sounds like a very good deal, as long as they don't use it as a starting point and then push even further down from here.
Oh yes, I'm not doubting that its possible. However, the guy also probably leaked it anonymously, which means that anything said in the memo should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, there's no proof that it wasn't entirely made up. Maybe he "leaked" a "memo" because he wanted to get his point across to management.
However, it seems that few posters here have recognized this. All the 3+ comments I saw were taking the memo's contents as undoubtable truth. Always a bad thing.
How come I've not seen any comments questioning the authenticity of this memo? All we've got is the word of some site that this memo actually came from inside Sun. Presumably, they had it leaked to them by an anonymous source. Now, lets think about this for a second. What "anonymous source" has lots to gain (potentially billions of dollars) by disgracing Java? What "anonymous source" has a history of lies, deciet, astroturfing, libel, and other shady or illegal practices?
I'm not saying that Java doesn't have problems. But still, it pays to take this information with a grain of salt until its source is proven. Which means until Sun officially says "this is true", as there's few (or no) independant tech news sources that don't get loads of advertising from the "anonymous source".
Yes, but this is DIGITAL. Like software, that means you have to keep the reciepts forever and ever, or you must have stolen it!
Who they stole it from way back in 1996, I'm not sure. But I'm sure ICANN can find someone willing to claim that the UK Government is squatting their domain.
To say nothing of how hard it is to move to a European country, or the United States. Or Japan. I'm not sure about India, but given their population pressures, they'd pretty much have to have some strong immigration laws. (Or they will, in a few years.) Unless you happen to be a rich executive or marrying into a country, moving there is very, very difficult.
Because Congress is concerned with PR, PR, and only PR. Failures in manned space flight are very bad PR indeed - the media uses them to make space flight sound inherently unreliable and dangerous. (Well, to be fair, it is. But so's sitting down here on Earth.) Which, in turn, gives Congress a very nice excuse for slashing NASA funding and dropping the "recovered" cash into their favorite pork-barrel project. It happened after Challenger, its happened after every unmanned probe failure, and its going to happen again.
Actually, what's more likely to happen is what other posters have predicted. The multinational companies in question (any non-multinational going along with the outsourcing "trend" will be run out of business and/or acquired by a multinational) will continue to hire workers in India until the Indian standard of living (and associated wages) have risen to a certant point. This point will almost definitely be lower than American wages now. At that point, they will start the outsourcing "trend" again, targeting a different country this time. (And maybe even a different industry) India's economy will nosedive, just like America's.
End result? Multinational corporate leeches with total economic control. High wages for CEOs, presidents, and upper-level executives, virtual slavery for everyone else.
Stop it before it spreads. Push for real globalization - not just corporate globalization. If companies can shop for workers wherever they want, we should be able to freely move around to wherever there's work. And buy from anywhere - no more region coding or fake export restrictions. (Japan and PS2s, for example)
Yay! Now we can finally find out which game IS better!
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
Copyright Rumblings
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Not only that, but if we give them everything they want, that means literal enforcement of the DMCA. Which means its illegal to break, attempt to break, or describe possible methods to break Digital Rights Infringement technologies. Which, in turn, effectively gives them indefinite-term copyrights.
No thanks. We need to return to original terms and laws and reconsider what copyright should cover (for example, should it really cover software distributed without source?). No negotiation should be considered. These companies have made it clear that they want an eternal monopoly on our culture and our minds.
I'm going to have to disagree with you. My home library is filled mostly with fiction, I tend to get higher scores on literature-based standardized tests, and while I do better in math courses, my marks in lit courses aren't bad at all. And looking around my CS class, this isn't abnormal. A lot of the good programmers have a wide variety of interests - physics, religion, philosophy (especially philosophy, for some reason), literature, chemistry, mathematics, economics, politics....
The same tends to be true for people in hard sciences, engineering, and mathematics. They all seem to love to learn, about anything and everything.
Meanwhile, most arts students have an incredibly narrow focus. They're scared of learning about math and sciences.
An excellent point, and probably one I should've considered. A lot of the co-op jobs (basically an internship, for those who don't know) offered at my university weren't programming jobs. Most were tech support or IT (management) jobs, which the CS department offered no training for.
Of course, this is completely apart from the issue of whether or not CS should be doing this at all. The idea of universities being for "job trainign" is a bad one, and the idea that CS is "programming job training" is even worse. That's part of most CS programs, but most don't do a very good job of it. IMHO, CS needs to be separated out from Software Engineering, too.
I agree, that's the myth that needs to be dispelled. And its already not true, mainly because of the large numbers of uneducated CS grads that are flooding the job market and making the numbers look bigger than they should be. This is what's slowly driving wages down, and the low quality of coders produced is (IMHO) one of the things driving companies to outsource to offshore interests.
I'd say that doesn't just apply to girls. I'm in the third year of a CS degree (though taking some time off to work) and I'd say that a good 80% of the class has no idea why they're there. And had no idea of what CS was about when they signed up for it, but were probably expecting something like the bird courses from high school, or possibly an easy route to a three-figure salary.
Lets face it, most of these people shouldn't be in CS. CS entry rates should be a lot lower than they are, at least if we want the job market to get better and the field to advance. And most of the women who do get through tend to be the ones who like coding, software design, etc. and are good at it.
Doesn't matter. If it was originally written in English, its not worth the paper its printed on. Most are by an American wannabe manga author from the early '90s who thought that manga was all (note: all. As in, nothing else. Ever) about big breasts and scantily-clad females. Oh, yes, and Tenchi Muyo/Ranma ripoffs. And believed that there was one definitive manga style. There's not. Look at something by Leiji Matsumoto, three things by CLAMP, and one by Yu Watase. The art has nothing in common.
What is described in the article is a bastard half-closed connection, which is completely unnecessary unless your goal is gratuitous violation of the TCP spec.
You know, I seem to recall some guy saying that Microsoft's long-term goal was to embrace, extend, extinguish TCP/IP. And that they'd start by making tiny little changes so that Microsoft programs talking to Microsoft programs worked much better than Microsoft/non-Microsoft. He got booed down quite loudly - everyone claimed that they could never try anything like that. It'd be noticed immediately and they'd have a PR disaster.
The odd thing? He was half-right. He was wrong only in saying that they hadn't done it yet.
Since we're already paying for piracy on blank audio media, then we should be allowed to pirate.
Exactly. And in Canada, you are. I can lend a CD to a friend and that friend can use their CD burner and their (taxed) audio CD-R to burn a copy of it. Someone in the Canadian Copyright office snuck that in after the record companies pushed the tax through, and I seem to recall that they've spent the past few years quietly trying to get rid of it or increase the tax.
As for the audio-VS-data thing, the difference is that data CDs are supposed to have some sectors "burned out" that audio CD players need to work. So you can record data on them, but can't record audio in a way that allows them to be played on ordinary CD players. Fortunately, few CD-R companies follow this practice (I don't remember the exact loophole - something to do with importing the discs, I think) and so you can use most "data" CDs to burn "audio" discs.
Its supposed to. Very few CD-R companies follow the law in this respect. (At least in Canada) I seem to remember that there are also taxes on VCRs or VHS tapes, but I can't remember.
The other thing to remember is that "web standards" tend to be widespread, and get used in other things. Take HTTP, for example. Or HTML, or XHTML. Or URLs. Or Javascript. (See Mozilla) There's lots of places where "web standards" were found to be more universally useful than just browsers.
And, completely independant of the GPL issues, this stands to block that, restricting the scope of patented standards to web browsers. This excludes any sort of automation, or even web servers!
Yes, and do you know why their profits keep going up? Because they keep crying wolf. That makes politicians fear for the economy and thus, their jobs. Which means that the entertainment industry gets to virtually dictate legislation. Ever wonder how the "blank recordable media" tax came to be?
They get the best of both worlds. The technology adds value to their business (after, of course, the original innovators are crushed and the tech is in the hands of safe companies) and they get legislation to "protect" them from the technology by strengthening their monopoly.
Yes, of course. Seriously, where do you think boy bands and most other "music stars" come from? You don't think they'd risk their investment on something as chancy as natural reproduction, do you? The result might actually have free will! Or singing talent!
He's not saying that they get less valuable with time. He's saying that companies PERCIEVE them as doing so. They see no advantage to experience in any position that's not management (as, after all, they are managers). They do see people demanding higher salaries and going home to their wife/husband and children at 5:00.
The fact that these people generally do better work is beyond them. And hey, if the machine falls apart under stress and kills people, its not their fault. The operator was obviously incompetent.
Its worth noting that IBM had Microsoft's "good will" too. Then they got burned on OS/2, not once but twice. Once when Microsoft stole the code to make NT, and once when Microsoft threatened to stop selling IBM Windows if they continued their development efforts on any completing software. And they didn't break the law "on occasion", they broke it every single chance they got.
Sorry, but history shows that having Microsoft's "good will" is nothing more than a one-way ticket to an unpleasant death.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is misleading. I don't believe that any version of Windows prior to 95 had a trashcan of any sort. The suit by Apple was over much more general elements - the WIMP interface metaphor. The judge, rightly, told Apple to bugger off - they couldn't claim ownership of an entire metaphor just because they sold it first. At the time, look and feel lawsuits were a serious problem - those weren't there only examples, they're just the most clear-cut. Most look and feel lawsuits had about as much backing (and, unfortunately, success) as the patent and trademark shit flying around now.
1 gigabyte per day doesn't sound very bad at all. Even for anime addicts, that's far more than you're going to download (or upload!) in a day. This sounds like a very good deal, as long as they don't use it as a starting point and then push even further down from here.
Oh yes, I'm not doubting that its possible. However, the guy also probably leaked it anonymously, which means that anything said in the memo should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, there's no proof that it wasn't entirely made up. Maybe he "leaked" a "memo" because he wanted to get his point across to management.
However, it seems that few posters here have recognized this. All the 3+ comments I saw were taking the memo's contents as undoubtable truth. Always a bad thing.
How come I've not seen any comments questioning the authenticity of this memo? All we've got is the word of some site that this memo actually came from inside Sun. Presumably, they had it leaked to them by an anonymous source. Now, lets think about this for a second. What "anonymous source" has lots to gain (potentially billions of dollars) by disgracing Java? What "anonymous source" has a history of lies, deciet, astroturfing, libel, and other shady or illegal practices?
I'm not saying that Java doesn't have problems. But still, it pays to take this information with a grain of salt until its source is proven. Which means until Sun officially says "this is true", as there's few (or no) independant tech news sources that don't get loads of advertising from the "anonymous source".
Yes, but this is DIGITAL. Like software, that means you have to keep the reciepts forever and ever, or you must have stolen it!
Who they stole it from way back in 1996, I'm not sure. But I'm sure ICANN can find someone willing to claim that the UK Government is squatting their domain.
To say nothing of how hard it is to move to a European country, or the United States. Or Japan. I'm not sure about India, but given their population pressures, they'd pretty much have to have some strong immigration laws. (Or they will, in a few years.) Unless you happen to be a rich executive or marrying into a country, moving there is very, very difficult.
Because Congress is concerned with PR, PR, and only PR. Failures in manned space flight are very bad PR indeed - the media uses them to make space flight sound inherently unreliable and dangerous. (Well, to be fair, it is. But so's sitting down here on Earth.) Which, in turn, gives Congress a very nice excuse for slashing NASA funding and dropping the "recovered" cash into their favorite pork-barrel project. It happened after Challenger, its happened after every unmanned probe failure, and its going to happen again.
Actually, what's more likely to happen is what other posters have predicted. The multinational companies in question (any non-multinational going along with the outsourcing "trend" will be run out of business and/or acquired by a multinational) will continue to hire workers in India until the Indian standard of living (and associated wages) have risen to a certant point. This point will almost definitely be lower than American wages now. At that point, they will start the outsourcing "trend" again, targeting a different country this time. (And maybe even a different industry) India's economy will nosedive, just like America's.
End result? Multinational corporate leeches with total economic control. High wages for CEOs, presidents, and upper-level executives, virtual slavery for everyone else.
Stop it before it spreads. Push for real globalization - not just corporate globalization. If companies can shop for workers wherever they want, we should be able to freely move around to wherever there's work. And buy from anywhere - no more region coding or fake export restrictions. (Japan and PS2s, for example)
Yay! Now we can finally find out which game IS better!
Not only that, but if we give them everything they want, that means literal enforcement of the DMCA. Which means its illegal to break, attempt to break, or describe possible methods to break Digital Rights Infringement technologies. Which, in turn, effectively gives them indefinite-term copyrights.
No thanks. We need to return to original terms and laws and reconsider what copyright should cover (for example, should it really cover software distributed without source?). No negotiation should be considered. These companies have made it clear that they want an eternal monopoly on our culture and our minds.
I'm going to have to disagree with you. My home library is filled mostly with fiction, I tend to get higher scores on literature-based standardized tests, and while I do better in math courses, my marks in lit courses aren't bad at all. And looking around my CS class, this isn't abnormal. A lot of the good programmers have a wide variety of interests - physics, religion, philosophy (especially philosophy, for some reason), literature, chemistry, mathematics, economics, politics....
The same tends to be true for people in hard sciences, engineering, and mathematics. They all seem to love to learn, about anything and everything.
Meanwhile, most arts students have an incredibly narrow focus. They're scared of learning about math and sciences.
An excellent point, and probably one I should've considered. A lot of the co-op jobs (basically an internship, for those who don't know) offered at my university weren't programming jobs. Most were tech support or IT (management) jobs, which the CS department offered no training for.
Of course, this is completely apart from the issue of whether or not CS should be doing this at all. The idea of universities being for "job trainign" is a bad one, and the idea that CS is "programming job training" is even worse. That's part of most CS programs, but most don't do a very good job of it. IMHO, CS needs to be separated out from Software Engineering, too.
I agree, that's the myth that needs to be dispelled. And its already not true, mainly because of the large numbers of uneducated CS grads that are flooding the job market and making the numbers look bigger than they should be. This is what's slowly driving wages down, and the low quality of coders produced is (IMHO) one of the things driving companies to outsource to offshore interests.
Damn, I really need to learn to proofread more closely. Make that six-figure salary.
I'd say that doesn't just apply to girls. I'm in the third year of a CS degree (though taking some time off to work) and I'd say that a good 80% of the class has no idea why they're there. And had no idea of what CS was about when they signed up for it, but were probably expecting something like the bird courses from high school, or possibly an easy route to a three-figure salary.
Lets face it, most of these people shouldn't be in CS. CS entry rates should be a lot lower than they are, at least if we want the job market to get better and the field to advance. And most of the women who do get through tend to be the ones who like coding, software design, etc. and are good at it.
Doesn't matter. If it was originally written in English, its not worth the paper its printed on. Most are by an American wannabe manga author from the early '90s who thought that manga was all (note: all. As in, nothing else. Ever) about big breasts and scantily-clad females. Oh, yes, and Tenchi Muyo/Ranma ripoffs. And believed that there was one definitive manga style. There's not. Look at something by Leiji Matsumoto, three things by CLAMP, and one by Yu Watase. The art has nothing in common.
What is described in the article is a bastard half-closed connection, which is completely unnecessary unless your goal is gratuitous violation of the TCP spec.
You know, I seem to recall some guy saying that Microsoft's long-term goal was to embrace, extend, extinguish TCP/IP. And that they'd start by making tiny little changes so that Microsoft programs talking to Microsoft programs worked much better than Microsoft/non-Microsoft. He got booed down quite loudly - everyone claimed that they could never try anything like that. It'd be noticed immediately and they'd have a PR disaster.
The odd thing? He was half-right. He was wrong only in saying that they hadn't done it yet.
Since we're already paying for piracy on blank audio media, then we should be allowed to pirate.
Exactly. And in Canada, you are. I can lend a CD to a friend and that friend can use their CD burner and their (taxed) audio CD-R to burn a copy of it. Someone in the Canadian Copyright office snuck that in after the record companies pushed the tax through, and I seem to recall that they've spent the past few years quietly trying to get rid of it or increase the tax.
As for the audio-VS-data thing, the difference is that data CDs are supposed to have some sectors "burned out" that audio CD players need to work. So you can record data on them, but can't record audio in a way that allows them to be played on ordinary CD players. Fortunately, few CD-R companies follow this practice (I don't remember the exact loophole - something to do with importing the discs, I think) and so you can use most "data" CDs to burn "audio" discs.
Its supposed to. Very few CD-R companies follow the law in this respect. (At least in Canada) I seem to remember that there are also taxes on VCRs or VHS tapes, but I can't remember.
The other thing to remember is that "web standards" tend to be widespread, and get used in other things. Take HTTP, for example. Or HTML, or XHTML. Or URLs. Or Javascript. (See Mozilla) There's lots of places where "web standards" were found to be more universally useful than just browsers.
And, completely independant of the GPL issues, this stands to block that, restricting the scope of patented standards to web browsers. This excludes any sort of automation, or even web servers!
Yes, and do you know why their profits keep going up? Because they keep crying wolf. That makes politicians fear for the economy and thus, their jobs. Which means that the entertainment industry gets to virtually dictate legislation. Ever wonder how the "blank recordable media" tax came to be?
They get the best of both worlds. The technology adds value to their business (after, of course, the original innovators are crushed and the tech is in the hands of safe companies) and they get legislation to "protect" them from the technology by strengthening their monopoly.
Yes, of course. Seriously, where do you think boy bands and most other "music stars" come from? You don't think they'd risk their investment on something as chancy as natural reproduction, do you? The result might actually have free will! Or singing talent!
He's not saying that they get less valuable with time. He's saying that companies PERCIEVE them as doing so. They see no advantage to experience in any position that's not management (as, after all, they are managers). They do see people demanding higher salaries and going home to their wife/husband and children at 5:00.
The fact that these people generally do better work is beyond them. And hey, if the machine falls apart under stress and kills people, its not their fault. The operator was obviously incompetent.
Its worth noting that IBM had Microsoft's "good will" too. Then they got burned on OS/2, not once but twice. Once when Microsoft stole the code to make NT, and once when Microsoft threatened to stop selling IBM Windows if they continued their development efforts on any completing software. And they didn't break the law "on occasion", they broke it every single chance they got.
Sorry, but history shows that having Microsoft's "good will" is nothing more than a one-way ticket to an unpleasant death.
You Slashdotted the good, old-fashioned Griswold family Christmas!