The RIAA and MPAA have successfully created a tremendous opportunity for some totally obnoxious person to exploit the hell out of the DMCA and recently enacted IP legislation. These things always have unintended consequences, and this one really seems prone for huge ones. Rather that fight it, look at ways to get rich by restricting the distribution of "something that shouldn't be restricted" such as EULAs, news stories, terms of service agreements, proper names, religious texts, or anything else that has been copyrighted yet gone nowhere commercially.
The fastest way to end this is to find a way that the little guy (read: unemployed lawyer) can get rich off it.
If you want to grow up to be a great prolific coder, follow these two rules --
1) do anything that makes you want to write code
2) don't do anything that discourages you from writing code
Coders cease to be coders because they fail to follow these two rules, and many find themselves in marketing or customer support. Some even wind up in sales.
USENET was being used to distribute pirated software and other copyright protected digital content. The download restriction was being bypassed using utilities that could break-up and reassemble large files. It was slow, but it worked and stayed below the radar for a long time.
OS/2 was originally designed to run on a 80286 but was redesigned as a 32-bit kernel (Warp 3). One advantage that it had over Linux and Windows was that it was solely designed for the Intel platform and fully used the processor's ring architecture to protect memory. Unlike Windows and Linux, the OS would prevent applications from overwriting protected memory, accessing I/O devices directly, or reprogramming the interrupt controller. Even the video system was not in the kernel mode (ring 0), and performance was one of the reasons that Windows beat it (the other technical reason was Vista-like device support, but biggest reason was IBM treating OS/2 more like MVS that DOS). By using Call Gates to control memory access, performance suffered. On a 30MHz 80486 with 4 megabytes of memory, that was a big deal. On today's 3GHz P6 with 4 gigabytes of memory, it would probably be more efficient than the kludges such as Windows Security Center, Defender, and 3rd party virus 'protection'. However, it is too late for either Windows or Linux, since millions of applications are tied to their APIs and schedulers. OS/2 was written before MMX, SSEn, HT, or the 64-bit extensions and would be more easily rewritten than 'upgraded'.
BTW, I heard that IBM had ported OS/2 to Power PC just before they discontinued it. That fork might have been the last straw. Either way, the OS was doomed by the Windows juggernaut, just like NetWare, UNIX, and many less popular works.
I had the initial OS/2 developers kit. I remember it arrived just before their first OS/2 conference in Seattle (at the Westin). I didn't even have time to load it on my new IBM PC/AT before driving up there. They showed the Presentation Manager even though the kit had only shipped the character mode UI. The hint of things to come was that Bill Gates did not attend the Conference. Steve Balmer ran the show and was not very convincing. When I got home and started up the $3,000 SDK, it would not even compile "hello world". After dealing with several releases, I gave up on OS/2 and programming in general.
Yeah, I've bought off eBay and gotten some real deals too. I found a 3.2GHz Prescott for $80 when they were selling at NewEgg for $200. Four years later it is still working BTW.
You need to be careful and know exactly what you want. Refund/exchange policies are like a Turkish bazaar, and I often get that "back of the truck" feeling. But hey, you want cheap, they got cheap. They also have lots of EXPENSIVE, but that is what sorting by price is for.
Not too long ago, it was not possible to sue the government or for a dead person (i.e., his/her estate) to sue others.
California could make a novel argument such as "the People need to have a copyright on their laws so no one else (e.g., China) can have such a copyright." Stranger things have happened with this Supreme Court, such as the second amendment (see: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment02/).
As for global warming, I was reminded by a friend that "the maximum temperature of Earth can be no higher than the maximum temperature of an equivalent black body, and the earth is approximately spherical and receives light from the sun on a cross-sectional area of a circle, but radiates thermal energy from the area of a sphere. The ratio of the spherical area to the circular area is four. Dividing the incoming energy flux by that gives the Earth an approximate maximum temperature of 285Kelvin. Again we have another inconsistency as this maximum temperature is below the widely reported global average temperature of 288Kelvin (17C). The maximum temperature found on the moon is approximately 390Kelvin."
On Earth our maximum, like that of the moon, could be 117C. The official highest is around 57C, so we have another 60C possible increase!
There is a ton of advice here, and almost all of it is good. But it all comes down to two realities -- (1) the company feels like it does not have a problem and (2) you do. So fuck 'em. If you are right, you are working on the Titanic, and they will tie you to the bow as they approach the iceberg. If you are wrong, then they will eventually fire you for it.
You may like the people and the work environment, but if either of the two points above are true, then that will change. So, use your initiative to go work for a competitor and show them how to exploit weaknesses like those at your current job. Believe me, your current employer has absolutely NO loyalty to you. They deserve no more from you. It is easier to find a job when you have a job.
Actually, the concept of events occurring due to human conspiracy is a bit of hubris. We are really not that good, as much as we would like to believe otherwise. Random things happen all the time that seem so 'improbable' because we notice them, not because we created them. When we are sure that it could not have been a conspiracy, we claim that it is a miracle or an act of the devil (depending on the consequences). Ignorance is something that is very hard to tolerate. When we can't understand the true nature of something, we create stories that relieve us of some of uncertainty's burden.
You obviously haven't run Vista (smart move). It is going to take more cores than an Apple orchard to get that OS off the ground. In this fat world of ours, Vista has a BMI of a googleplex.
More secure financial transactions run through mainframes than all the LAMP servers combined. The performance between financial system on a mainframe with a TP monitor & hierarchical database compared to a LAMP cluster are like comparing a jet plane to a glider. All the memcache in the world wouldn't help either. Relational databases are slow and do not scale worth shit compared to a hierarchical transaction processing database. The #1 hierarchical database, IMS, maps right on top of the file system, VSAM, and runs just as fast. The downside is that application development is slow, and it takes real programmers (not script kiddies) and DBAs to do it right.
I thought that the Internet world was going to catch up with XML databases that could basically operate hierarchically and map directly to file system architectures. It didn't happen. I guess an XML schema is too daunting to those who see the answer to everything in a table.
EULA (End User LANparty Agreement). You can take it out of Microsoft Vista's Final Agreement User Should Take. Don't worry about copyright, it is open sourced by Goethe.
Actually, you don't have to look far to see a way for the government to compel compliance -- the same legal concept that the IRS uses to compel tax filing. It has to do with who is in possession of the facts. The one who controls possession has to use them to counter allegations. If they take him to court with the hearsay testimony of the ones to saw the content on his machine, the judge may admit their testimony as evidence and the presumption would be that they were telling the truth. The onus would then be on the owner of the PC to unlock the machine to prove them wrong. If he refused, the jury could assume the worst. If you don't believe this can happen, then you have never been to tax court.
I recently assembled a PC using an old Asus P4C800-E Deluxe with a 3.2GHz Prescott, Asus/ATI AH3650 (512MB, DirectX 10.1), 4GB OCZ platinum DDR RAM, and a 1TB Maxtor drive. I admit, this is not a state-of-the-art machine, but the video is excellent, and a 3.2GHz HT P4 with a megabyte of L2 cache is nothing to sneeze at.
Well, after a clean install of Vista with the Asus/ATI video drivers and SP1, the system is so low that I cannot use it. It reminds me of when I loaded W2K on an old Thinkpad with only 96MB of RAM (a real trick with no CD on the 233MHz Pentium X560). In fact, I'd say that the laptop was faster (until you loaded something like MS Word).
BTW, I loaded XP on the Asus first, and there were no delays for anything. Runs every app with no problem. With Vista, however, it is too slow to load an app to test.
You might think that the Vista machine had a virus or some other malware, but I have not yet put it onto a network. So, unless the Microsoft or Asus discs had a bug, then this machine was clean.
I am not disappointed by this, I am amazed. How can Microsoft live with these kind of results?
You must write this patent, and do the best job that you can! This is the natural order of things - to exploit a niche in the system that allows an 'unfair' advantage. The only way this will reach an imbalance necessary to force a new equilibrium. The longer we put this off, the longer it will take to correct. The same goes for global warming, which is now inevitable. We could speed this along too if everyone would just burn their house down.
I am trying to do my part by writing a patent on a method for computers to write patents without the aid of human intervention. I call these processes 'patenators'(tm). Once they begin their unstoppable march toward filling the patent office with googleplexes of patents, humanity will change their concept of intellectual property and reach a new equilibrium of freedom in the exchange of ideas. BTW, I will be richer than Bill Gates, King Saud, and Exxon at $4M/barrel, but that is another equilibrium problem . . .
It seems that Laura did not like him either -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk5ynzxTo9Y . Of course, she was the one that night who told the joke about GWB masturbating a stallion. You gotta wonder where her daughters came from (Dick Cheney?).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't sit down at the table unless you can afford the stakes.
The RIAA and MPAA have successfully created a tremendous opportunity for some totally obnoxious person to exploit the hell out of the DMCA and recently enacted IP legislation. These things always have unintended consequences, and this one really seems prone for huge ones. Rather that fight it, look at ways to get rich by restricting the distribution of "something that shouldn't be restricted" such as EULAs, news stories, terms of service agreements, proper names, religious texts, or anything else that has been copyrighted yet gone nowhere commercially.
The fastest way to end this is to find a way that the little guy (read: unemployed lawyer) can get rich off it.
If you want to grow up to be a great prolific coder, follow these two rules --
1) do anything that makes you want to write code
2) don't do anything that discourages you from writing code
Coders cease to be coders because they fail to follow these two rules, and many find themselves in marketing or customer support. Some even wind up in sales.
Dickheads Running Marketing
USENET was being used to distribute pirated software and other copyright protected digital content. The download restriction was being bypassed using utilities that could break-up and reassemble large files. It was slow, but it worked and stayed below the radar for a long time.
Yeah, I heard they were going to use Borg Cubes with subspace uplinks. Resistance will, of course, be futile.
OS/2 was originally designed to run on a 80286 but was redesigned as a 32-bit kernel (Warp 3). One advantage that it had over Linux and Windows was that it was solely designed for the Intel platform and fully used the processor's ring architecture to protect memory. Unlike Windows and Linux, the OS would prevent applications from overwriting protected memory, accessing I/O devices directly, or reprogramming the interrupt controller. Even the video system was not in the kernel mode (ring 0), and performance was one of the reasons that Windows beat it (the other technical reason was Vista-like device support, but biggest reason was IBM treating OS/2 more like MVS that DOS). By using Call Gates to control memory access, performance suffered. On a 30MHz 80486 with 4 megabytes of memory, that was a big deal. On today's 3GHz P6 with 4 gigabytes of memory, it would probably be more efficient than the kludges such as Windows Security Center, Defender, and 3rd party virus 'protection'. However, it is too late for either Windows or Linux, since millions of applications are tied to their APIs and schedulers. OS/2 was written before MMX, SSEn, HT, or the 64-bit extensions and would be more easily rewritten than 'upgraded'.
BTW, I heard that IBM had ported OS/2 to Power PC just before they discontinued it. That fork might have been the last straw. Either way, the OS was doomed by the Windows juggernaut, just like NetWare, UNIX, and many less popular works.
I had the initial OS/2 developers kit. I remember it arrived just before their first OS/2 conference in Seattle (at the Westin). I didn't even have time to load it on my new IBM PC/AT before driving up there. They showed the Presentation Manager even though the kit had only shipped the character mode UI. The hint of things to come was that Bill Gates did not attend the Conference. Steve Balmer ran the show and was not very convincing. When I got home and started up the $3,000 SDK, it would not even compile "hello world". After dealing with several releases, I gave up on OS/2 and programming in general.
Yeah, I've bought off eBay and gotten some real deals too. I found a 3.2GHz Prescott for $80 when they were selling at NewEgg for $200. Four years later it is still working BTW.
You need to be careful and know exactly what you want. Refund/exchange policies are like a Turkish bazaar, and I often get that "back of the truck" feeling. But hey, you want cheap, they got cheap. They also have lots of EXPENSIVE, but that is what sorting by price is for.
Not too long ago, it was not possible to sue the government or for a dead person (i.e., his/her estate) to sue others.
California could make a novel argument such as "the People need to have a copyright on their laws so no one else (e.g., China) can have such a copyright." Stranger things have happened with this Supreme Court, such as the second amendment (see: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment02/).
You'd probably panic if you were only spotting every month. If the sun ever has a period, we are all fried.
She is right about the moon, which on average is a much hotter place. We might not see 60C increase, but it might explain Mars.
Has anyone asked Ken Shatten about this? For the latest weather on the sun -- http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/.
As for global warming, I was reminded by a friend that "the maximum temperature of Earth can be no higher than the maximum temperature of an equivalent black body, and the earth is approximately spherical and receives light from the sun on a cross-sectional area of a circle, but radiates thermal energy from the area of a sphere. The ratio of the spherical area to the circular area is four. Dividing the incoming energy flux by that gives the Earth an approximate maximum temperature of 285Kelvin. Again we have another inconsistency as this maximum temperature is below the widely reported global average temperature of 288Kelvin (17C). The maximum temperature found on the moon is approximately 390Kelvin." On Earth our maximum, like that of the moon, could be 117C. The official highest is around 57C, so we have another 60C possible increase!
Perhaps this is proof the Mad Cow Disease has spread into the judiciary.
There is a ton of advice here, and almost all of it is good. But it all comes down to two realities -- (1) the company feels like it does not have a problem and (2) you do. So fuck 'em. If you are right, you are working on the Titanic, and they will tie you to the bow as they approach the iceberg. If you are wrong, then they will eventually fire you for it.
You may like the people and the work environment, but if either of the two points above are true, then that will change. So, use your initiative to go work for a competitor and show them how to exploit weaknesses like those at your current job. Believe me, your current employer has absolutely NO loyalty to you. They deserve no more from you. It is easier to find a job when you have a job.
Actually, the concept of events occurring due to human conspiracy is a bit of hubris. We are really not that good, as much as we would like to believe otherwise. Random things happen all the time that seem so 'improbable' because we notice them, not because we created them. When we are sure that it could not have been a conspiracy, we claim that it is a miracle or an act of the devil (depending on the consequences). Ignorance is something that is very hard to tolerate. When we can't understand the true nature of something, we create stories that relieve us of some of uncertainty's burden.
You obviously haven't run Vista (smart move). It is going to take more cores than an Apple orchard to get that OS off the ground. In this fat world of ours, Vista has a BMI of a googleplex.
More secure financial transactions run through mainframes than all the LAMP servers combined. The performance between financial system on a mainframe with a TP monitor & hierarchical database compared to a LAMP cluster are like comparing a jet plane to a glider. All the memcache in the world wouldn't help either. Relational databases are slow and do not scale worth shit compared to a hierarchical transaction processing database. The #1 hierarchical database, IMS, maps right on top of the file system, VSAM, and runs just as fast. The downside is that application development is slow, and it takes real programmers (not script kiddies) and DBAs to do it right.
I thought that the Internet world was going to catch up with XML databases that could basically operate hierarchically and map directly to file system architectures. It didn't happen. I guess an XML schema is too daunting to those who see the answer to everything in a table.
EULA (End User LANparty Agreement). You can take it out of Microsoft Vista's Final Agreement User Should Take. Don't worry about copyright, it is open sourced by Goethe.
Actually, you don't have to look far to see a way for the government to compel compliance -- the same legal concept that the IRS uses to compel tax filing. It has to do with who is in possession of the facts. The one who controls possession has to use them to counter allegations. If they take him to court with the hearsay testimony of the ones to saw the content on his machine, the judge may admit their testimony as evidence and the presumption would be that they were telling the truth. The onus would then be on the owner of the PC to unlock the machine to prove them wrong. If he refused, the jury could assume the worst.
If you don't believe this can happen, then you have never been to tax court.
I recently assembled a PC using an old Asus P4C800-E Deluxe with a 3.2GHz Prescott, Asus/ATI AH3650 (512MB, DirectX 10.1), 4GB OCZ platinum DDR RAM, and a 1TB Maxtor drive. I admit, this is not a state-of-the-art machine, but the video is excellent, and a 3.2GHz HT P4 with a megabyte of L2 cache is nothing to sneeze at.
Well, after a clean install of Vista with the Asus/ATI video drivers and SP1, the system is so low that I cannot use it. It reminds me of when I loaded W2K on an old Thinkpad with only 96MB of RAM (a real trick with no CD on the 233MHz Pentium X560). In fact, I'd say that the laptop was faster (until you loaded something like MS Word).
BTW, I loaded XP on the Asus first, and there were no delays for anything. Runs every app with no problem. With Vista, however, it is too slow to load an app to test.
You might think that the Vista machine had a virus or some other malware, but I have not yet put it onto a network. So, unless the Microsoft or Asus discs had a bug, then this machine was clean.
I am not disappointed by this, I am amazed. How can Microsoft live with these kind of results?
You must write this patent, and do the best job that you can! This is the natural order of things - to exploit a niche in the system that allows an 'unfair' advantage. The only way this will reach an imbalance necessary to force a new equilibrium. The longer we put this off, the longer it will take to correct. The same goes for global warming, which is now inevitable. We could speed this along too if everyone would just burn their house down.
I am trying to do my part by writing a patent on a method for computers to write patents without the aid of human intervention. I call these processes 'patenators'(tm). Once they begin their unstoppable march toward filling the patent office with googleplexes of patents, humanity will change their concept of intellectual property and reach a new equilibrium of freedom in the exchange of ideas. BTW, I will be richer than Bill Gates, King Saud, and Exxon at $4M/barrel, but that is another equilibrium problem . . .
But instead you can legally own enough firearms to kill a heard of dear. Yeah, you could also kill a herd of deer.
Not true, I heard that his first girlfriend was Ada Lovelace.
I believe IBM did something like this is the 1990s. Obviously not as slick, they didn't have as many CPU cycles.
It seems that Laura did not like him either -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk5ynzxTo9Y . Of course, she was the one that night who told the joke about GWB masturbating a stallion. You gotta wonder where her daughters came from (Dick Cheney?).