No, quite honestly I'd prefer for the RIAA to go away, die completely, and let the actual content producers (read: "artists") take control of their own product back.
The content producers who own their own copyrights have spoken loud and clear about how they feel about sharing music.
I have no idea where the mistaken assumption comes from that artists are OK with their music being pirated. it's just one of those slashdot myths I guess.
Honestly, though, I hope this guy fights back like a sunuvabitch and hits as hard as he can. Illegal or not, I absolutely can't stand some big nasty company (or gov't agency) strongarming someone just to "make an example" out of him/her.
This student was no different from the average w4r3z d00d. For the past few months Slashdotters
have been saying the RIAA shouldn't go after Napster because they are providing a service, now the RIAA goes after a person who is distributing thousands of MP3s of copyrighted work and advertizing for his wares in chat rooms and the RIAA is still wrong?!?
What the fuck do you want? The RIAA shouldn't go after a service that is a haven for music piracy and they shouldn't go after music pirates?
Maybe you'd like them simply to spend millions of dollars producing, promoting and distributing music then give away CDs just like AOL.
Frankly as a college student, who frequently sees network bandwidth eaten up by people like this kid who had 10000 songs on his hard drive then advertized for total strangers to come saturate his campus' network, I have no sympathy for him.
Why am I feeding this troll?
on
Kuro5hin Update
·
· Score: 4
Until the day I die I will never understand people like you. You claim the story is unimportant and isn't news for nerds but probably spent at least 10 minutes of your time composing a post just to tell us this instead of ignoring the story. I'll leave you with two axioms my mom used to tell me If you have nothing good to say then don't say anything and It is better to keep silent and people think you are a fool than to open your mouth and confirm their suspicions.
Now about why kuro5hin is news for nerds. It is a much geek news site than slashdot which is easily witnessed by the fact that I have seen slashdot's own authers (e.g. micheal) post more on kuro5hin than I have on slashdot. Here are just a few of the reasons why kuro5hin is much preferrable to slashdot.
Everybody in the community has moderator access
all the time and thus everyone moderates posts so there is less chance of the moderator abuse that is now so frequent on slashdot. The score of a post then accurately reflects what the community as a whole feels about it.
Stories were voted on by members of the community before being placed on the front page, so
slanderous, unresearched, and flamebait articles never made it to the front page because they were voted down by the community.
Troll posts were deleted by the admins so there was no incentive for Penis Birds and other such spam to exist on kuro5hin.
The writeup on most articles was much higher in both quality and quantity primarily due to the fact that story authors realized that the stories would get voted down if they were not.
PS: That said, I read both sites several times a day and have nothing against slashdot but simply feel that kuro5hin was/is of superior quality.
You might as well ask "why don't more people use any functional languages?" The simple fact of the matter is they're a lot more difficult for people to wrap their head around at first. This may have something to do with the fact that most CS curriculums start students out with procedural languages (C, C++, Java) and barely give them a cursory glance at functional programming (which is kind of a shame).
You are wrong on several counts.
Smalltalk is an Object Oriented Language. As are C++ and Java. C is a procedural language.
Having used all four I can state that in my opinion the reason Smalltalk has never caught on is due to a.) Lack of speed b.) Lack of libraries
c.)lack of decent IDEs d.) Lack of compilers e.) Lack of good books/documentation (this in my opinion is the biggest flaw).
I've read your post a six or seven times and I'm amazed at the amount of circular logic
that you used in your argument. The only reason I didn't respond to your post that replied mine is because I left my PC shortly after posting to Slashdot and hadn't checked my users.pl page until
a few minutes ago.
I will only comment on the most unrigorous of your comments.
>>The RIAA rips off artists. So if they are already getting ripped off then that makes it OK for you to rip them off?
>Huh? MP3s get ripped from the ripper off-ers.
Ripping Off means "to cheat".
Ripping in some circles means obtaining an MP3 file from a CD track.
>>if it is OK to pirate music then it is OK to pirate software after all the rhetoric is the same and information
>>wants to be free.
>not exactly right, but you are on the right track. It's OK because it is not piracy to steal from pirates.
This is beyond illogical.
>And a number of the points I raised speak to the actual circumstances, not just the fact that people are selling
>copyrighted material.Look at video rental: nobody bothers to rent and copy videos because they don't cost much.
Music on Napster is free. Are you suggesting that artists should spend time and money creating music simply
to give it away to satisfy your need for free music?
No matter how cheap music becomes nothing changes the fact that it is FREE on Napster.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Now to comment on your the post I am replying to.
>Witness the open software movement: now those
>are artists who produce because they can't do >anything else. seems to me intellectual property
>laws protect the uncreative, it's the straw they
>cling to.
Bullshit. These so-called artists work at jobs that use Intellectual Property frequently to restrict the free flow of information, they merely give away their hobbyist work. The most notable example of this is Linus Torvalds that works for Transmeta that has PATENTED the various processes in the Crusoe implemnentation.
By the way, patents are the MOST restrictive form of IP.
PS: Then again maybe this validates your claim that Patents are used by the uncreative;-)
Enough is enough. Anyone with a brain can tell that Napster is not about free speech, consumer/artist rights or civil disobedience but about robbing people of remuneration for their time and expense.
For months I have watched people on Slashdot justify violating copyright with crap like
CDs cost too much
There's no law that says you must own all the latest music. Humanity has lasted centuries without Metallica and Britney Spears, and the fact that you can't play their music at anytime will not kill you. People in third world countries don't hear the latest songs and I don't see them dying of "lack of music" so where does this feeling that you have to have popular come from.
Information wants to be free.
What the fuck does this mean? If it costs money to produce then money will be charged for production (this is ECONS 101). It costs a doctor nothing to look at a rash on my hand or listen to my cough and get a diagnosis, but it costs money for me to get this service. Guess why? It cost a lot of money to imbue the doctor with his knowledge and to provide the doctor with medical equipment. The only information that wants to be free is information that is valueless.
Indie bands give away music
Yes, to gain mindshare. Every indie band that is doing so, is doing this so as to obtain mindshare similar to all the Loss Leader dotcomms whose business plans are routinely trashed on slashdot
The RIAA rips off artists.
So if they are already getting ripped off then that makes it OK for you to rip them off? The current system favors independent artists who instead of selling their souls to the RIAA create their own brand and market themselves. Such as myfavoritelabels. The Napster regime will only favor Napster.
The artists make no money while Napster reaps funds from selling demographic info and advertising to 20 million users.
This is my response to all the Napster loving slashdotters. If it is OK for you to violate copyright laws by illegally downloading RIAA sponsored music, then why isn't it OK for corporations to incorporate GPLed code in their closed source products? After all information wants to be free and they should be free to do whatever they want with the information in the GPLed code.
I guess that violates the intention of the authors of the code similar to how downloading copyrighted music from Napster violates the intentions of the copyright holders.
PS: Supporting Napster is no different from supporting w4r3z d00d5. If it is OK to pirate music then it is OK to pirate software after all the rhetoric is the same and information wants to be free.
I read the SecurityFocus article and was impressed by how the article pinpointed what I have begun to fear is a major blight on software development. More and more software is being developed haphazardly without a clear design, coherent engineering or a well defined development roadmap. This is will only get worse with the growing number of people who refuse to go to college and learn how to engineer software and instead believing hacking code is all there is to software development.
Unfortunately instead of the article to then discuss ways to attack the cause of the problem (badly engineered software), it describes ways to attack the symptoms (release the source so bugs can be found).
There is more to creating robust software than simply testing most the bugs out of a system. Proper engineering practices need to be set in place to allow the extensibility and modularity of the code. Releasing source code may catch buffer overflow exploits and the like but it doesn't solve problems like improper interfaces/protocols being chosen and several other bad design decisions.
Mozilla has already proved this with the fact that it is a complete rewrite of the original Netscape code. After a year wasted hacking at the code, the Mozilla developers realized that all the Open Source in the world could not change the fact that Netscape Navigator was badly engineered software. Mozilla is better than Netscape not simply because it is Open Source and all bugs are shallow but because it is being properly designed and engineered instead of being a series of unmaintainable hacks like Netscape's Navigator.
As the saying goes you cannot make a silk purse out of pig's ear.
This is a short list I composed after reading a similar article on kuro5hin.
Algorithms and big-O notation
When, how and why to normalize a database
Compiler theory, parsing and grammers
How to elicit a requirements document from a customer
Various software development models from Waterfall to Spiral
How to write a design document for a 3 tier project including UML diagrams, Entity-Relationship diagrams and architectural diagrams
How to work well with others (numerous team projects)
Time management skills
Distributed computing (CORBA/DCOM/Java-RMI)
How hardware works down to the most miniscule level
The above list is stuff I have learned in 3 years of college that I am very sure I would not have learned if I rushed off into industry to become some C++ developer.
Ask yourself this question, how far do people without college degrees go in industry? Besides the prodigies who create their own companies (e.g. Shawn Fanning, Bill Gates, etc) most people who rush into industry will spend their lives as code monkeys instead of software engineers. Companies rarely high school/college dropouts project managers or lead developers and when they do that is usually their glass ceiling.
Frankly my time in college has given me a larger skill set and more knowledge than if I was just cranking out C++ for some company for the past 2 years. This means I am more valuable as an employee and more able to set my own career path unlike a high school graduate who knows how to hack C/C++/Java but not how to engineer projects or exactly how and why certain things work.
And why is there a shortage of people with experience--it's the old saw of not being able to get a job without a experience and not being able
to get experience without a job.
If you had read my post you would have realized I said competence and not experience. I've interned at two companies the past two years and made a decent amount of money and I am still in college (i.e. I have less than 6 months of work experience), this didn't stop me from being able to turn down internship offers from Intel.
Most of my friends who have guaranteed offers from the companies they interned with also have little or no work experience besides the classes they've taken and stuff they've done in their free time.
The problem is that a lot of people believe that once they've learned one technology that they've earned a right to stop learning. Frankly this is B.S.. I learned Java a year ago and mostly from the Internet and was working a well paid job this summer writing Java code. While at this job I picked up Perl and now have reasonable experience with it. The job market is currently tight enough for self-motivated people to gain jobs without needing years of experience as long as ythe have ability.
A labor shortage is... an inability to find workers who will work unlimited unpaid overtime for extremely low wages.
H-1B visas are... a way to create a class of workers who don't have the same constitutional rights (or what's left of them) as the average American citizen and will be beholden to the companies that hire them not only for their job but for their continued residence in the US.
Before I start I guess I should proclaim that I am a student on an F-1 visa and if I do end up wotking here it will be on an H-1B visa.
Now here goes. There are several indicators that there is a labor shortage in IT for competent developers.
In the past five years college graduation rates for computer science have been relatively flat (addmissions are up though). This means that in a time of the biggest boom in IT jobs in history there hasn't been an increase in supply only an increase in demand.
Interns make real money. In other fields of endeavor people intern for free while Computer Science interns aren't only paid but sometimes get stock options (e.g. Cisco interns). From my experience $3000 ~ $4000 a month plus travel and housing expenses is fast becoming the norm. If this isn't an indication of shortage then what is?
Even with all the generous packages many companies are having difficulty finding
competent developers and are having to either relocate entire departments overseas or fill them with foreign born workers. The company I worked for this summer was having difficulty finding developers for their large scale, distributed applications and this has nothing to do with poor work conditions. Everybody there set their own hours (foreign or otherwise even interns), some telecommuted and showed up once a month to the office, the pay was generous (by indust ry standards) and the work was fun. Yet HR is constantly struggling to fill jobs and people are given several thousand dollar bonus for recommending friends.
There is a perception that the IT pool of workers has increased but this is primarily due to the fact that a ever since the 'net boom there has been an increasing pool of unskilled/semi-skilled workers (HTML jockeys, Javascript whizzes, SQL lords with no DBA knowledge, Visual Basic dukes) while the supply of
real developers has remained stagnant or dropped. Skim the resumes on Monster.com or Geekfinder or any of those other sites and the amount of people with the aforementioned trivial skills is large but those with experience in writing C/C++/Java, DBAing Oracle/DB2/Sybase, creating distributed components in COM/CORBA/EJB, etc is relatively small.
From my experience most of the foreigners being hired usually have M.Sc's,Ph.D's or years of experience doing serious development before being hired in the U.S. This means they usually make more money than the trivial skillset IT workers (HTML/Javascript kiddies) and this is beginning to create a xenophobic cult in the IT industry who feel they should unionize, save their precious jobs and get the foreigners out.
How is it that they've been chosen to be included in this?
Remember all those highly moderated posts on the numerous DCMA articles on slashdot exhorting us to write congress, etc.
These are the people who actually wrote and called instead of karma whoring on slashdot and preaching to the choir.
This is absolutely not normal business practice in retail stores. The issue here is not that Amazon is analyzing the buying patterns of consumers in the aggregate and changing prices based on this information. The problem is that they are using some secret criteria to charge people different prices as individuals.
So you are saying this is exactly like buying a car from a car dealership?
After reading some of the comments and the article posters blurb, I clicked the link expecting vitriol and flame but all I see is reasonableness and calmness on the part of the KDE developers.
All they've said is that RMS claims that before KDE can switch the license on the code, all copyright holders need to explicitly approve it ("grant forgiveness"). KDE claims that most have (since they are KDE developers) except for two modules that weren't written specifically for KDE but can be rewritten if need be to make sure all of KDE is compatible.
Heck, they even list modules and email addresses of developers so they can be contacted to make sure that they actually OK the license switch and thus noone's copyright is being violated.
All in all, reasoned and mature reactions. Kudos to KDE.
From the article: Microprocessor startup Transmeta Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has quietly changed its business plan. The company has bought back its two main technology-licensing agreements from IBM Corp. and Toshiba Corp., and now plans to market products on its own as a fabless chip supplier
Looks to me like Transmeta jumped the gun on their speculative announcements and have realized they cannot put their money where their mouth is.
Unfortunately since this is Slashdot and Linus works there, its likely that this post will get moderated down and even though people here slaughter Intel when it comes to bad news, this will be glossed over. *sigh*
It's real money when it comes from their pocket? then it's real money when it comes from mine. End of argument.
I have said this earlier in this thread but just in case you missed it. Your posts are juvenile and moronic. Where is it written that everything should be affordable by everyone? Because you can't afford it does not mean anything except you can't aford it.
Enterprise databases often cost several thousand dollars and even if it is free or relatively cheap support costs are massive. Heck, even recently open sourced Interbase charges over a thousand dollars a year for support.
PS: Your clueless Linux mongering posts are one of the reasons I permanently started reading at +3.
PPS: If you are going to bitch about shit you can't afford why not complain about the fact that a Ferrarri costs over a hundred thousand dollars, or Sun servers cost several thousand dollars when Linux x86 boxes can be obtained for a few hundred, or that a Cray mainframe costs more than you make in a year or... (you get the point)
The software is targeted at businesses and vs. Oracle 8i and IBM's DB2, Microsoft SQL Server not only is much cheaper but according to the Transaction Processing Performance Council tests performs comparably.
This software is targeted at businesses that routinely pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for software. Not college kids who want a DB to host their guestbook application.
What was the purpose of your post besides displaying your ignorance?
These are some of the questions that come up to my mind:
Be able to migrate IIS to Apache first, and still be able to access the MSSQL databases (FreeTDS?)
Use a scripting syntax similar to ASP so that the programmers don't have much of a headache learning new stuff (PHP looks like a solution).
Java Server Pages will solve both problems. Sun has worked very closely with the Apache project on making JSP run well under Apache including giving away code and contributing to projects a la Tomcat. Here's a site to give you a quick overview of JSP.
Migrate MSSQL 7 to MySQL, PostgreSQL or other (Which one is better for web development?)
Depends on what kind of Web development you are doing. For the kind of work I have done which is both mission critical (eliminating MySQL) and requires speed (eliminating PostgreSQL) commercial databases have always been the correct solution to solve my problem. Both IBM's DB2 and Oracle 8i are available for Linux and are also very friendly with Apache and Java.
If your site does not traffic in mission critical data (e.g. a bank, major e-commerce company) then MySQL may be the solution that you seek. It is quick, fairly easy to use and heck, slashdot uses it.
Web log reports (I need to generate reports on the web site usage. What weblog report generators are available for Linux? Which ones do you use? Are there any that generate graphs, charts, etc..?)
They were volunteers. Nobody conscripted them, no one put a gun to their heads and no one is to blame for their being overworked except them.
Analogy: I volunteer at a local middle school for 10 hours a week and eat free meals in the cafetaria there. This translates to 50 cents an hour. Following your reasoning and that of the frivilous litigators who were formerly AOL volunteers, I should sue the school for back pay.
But the effect of the minimum wage law is to prevent immigrants, teenagers, and poor people trying to escape welfare from getting established in the labor market.
What are you talking about? So you think if companies weren't forced to pay people $5.25 an hour they'd pay more. Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahah.
If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale, real cheap too.
PS: Have you ever heard of a sweat shop? That's what happens when there's no minimum wage law. Slavery.
Frankly the lawsuit is the most frivolous lawsuit imaginable. These people volunteered to monitor chat rooms and the like for AOL and one day suddenly realize that they would rather have gotten pay and sue AOL. From this story it seems that other companies are reviewing their volunteer policy based on the frivolous lawsuit because if someone can volunteer to do work and later sue for back wages, then someone else who receives non-financial payment for services rendered has an even stronger reason to sue for back wages because they are more likely to have been thought of as employees deserving payment by a court than a volunteer.
Your argument is illogical to the point of madness. Stealing music harms the artist by denying them a source of revenue especially since there are opportunity costs to creating music (studio costs, time spent practising/learning music, instruments, promotion, etc). Simply because people are not claiming that they created the stolen music does not somehow lessen the impact of the fact that IP is being misused and is harming the artist.
On the other hand copying the HTML on a page doesn't do jack shit to whoever's site the HTML was copied from.
Yet CmdrTaco feels that his Intellectual Property in the form of his webpage design (i feel stupid just saying that...) somehow deserves more protection than an artists means of providing a living for (him|her)self
Slashdot authors believe in selectively applying IP as they see fit.
I have read most if not all of the Napster editorials by Hemos, Jon Katz, and CmdrTaco and there is a stong tendency to make it seem that musicians should just roll over and face the fact that people will steal their music and they should get other jobs.
Yet once the shoe is on the other foot (and doesn't even harm them financially as opposed to digitally available music[0] which harms artists revenue streams) they scream and bitch about IP.
[0]Even if it doesn't seem like that now, once high bandwidth, reasonably priced MP3 players and home networking standards are prevelant there'll be a sharp drop in the revenue of professional artists, if services like Napster still exist. Even worse instead of the creators of the music being paid, fat cat venture capitalists will reap the fruits of their labor. Anyone can see this coming.
Besides the fact that this is glaring hypocrisy. Slashdot bitches about the fact that Metallica don't want people ripping off their music then wants people to acknowledge the fact that they copied some HTML??? What the fuck?
It's freaking HTML. It's not a big deal, it didn't cost you any money to produce nor is it any skin of your nose if someone else uses it, so what's your problem? It's not like it cost Slashdot thousands of dollars to market, produce and distribute the HTML so what's the big deal?
Before corporations got here, the Web was a place where people shared stuff and information was free, now we see people trying to claim ownership on stuff as intangible as the HTML that a website is written with or for it's look and feel?
B.S.
I almost expected to see CmdrTaco claim that people are stealing his intellectual property.
By the way, for all the Open Source guys out there, forcing people to advertise slashdot simply for using it's HTML or look and feel is counter to the spirit of the GPL. After all, Slashdot isn't forced to display powered by Apache or running GNU/Debian Linux or served by MySQL. So why should people be required to display a logo based on the most intangible and flimsiest part of the site, it's HTML?
I know a few people that have worked there and a bunch of them are proficient in *nix and also are smart enough to realize when their products are inadequate. Here's a conversation I had with a friend.
me: So how do you guys manage to use Visual Studio Source Safe to manage all those millions of lines of code in Win2K and Office?
friend: we don't.
These same people admit that NT sucks [but evangelize on Win2K]. Frankly I can believe that internal memos circulated about the stability of Win 2K, after all didn't it once have 65,000 known issues.
It seems that MSFT employees simply choose the best tool for the job, and if it isn't their product, tough shit. Frankly I respect them for this a lot more than most rabid slashdotters who can't admit that Linux/Unix is not the end-all and be-all of computing and sometimes Windows or a Windows application would be a better choice.
Slashdot Mirror
No, quite honestly I'd prefer for the RIAA to go away, die completely, and let the actual content producers (read: "artists") take control of their own product back.
The content producers who own their own copyrights have spoken loud and clear about how they feel about sharing music.
I have no idea where the mistaken assumption comes from that artists are OK with their music being pirated. it's just one of those slashdot myths I guess.
Honestly, though, I hope this guy fights back like a sunuvabitch and hits as hard as he can. Illegal or not, I absolutely can't stand some big nasty company (or gov't agency) strongarming someone just to "make an example" out of him/her.
This student was no different from the average w4r3z d00d. For the past few months Slashdotters have been saying the RIAA shouldn't go after Napster because they are providing a service, now the RIAA goes after a person who is distributing thousands of MP3s of copyrighted work and advertizing for his wares in chat rooms and the RIAA is still wrong?!?
What the fuck do you want? The RIAA shouldn't go after a service that is a haven for music piracy and they shouldn't go after music pirates? Maybe you'd like them simply to spend millions of dollars producing, promoting and distributing music then give away CDs just like AOL.
Frankly as a college student, who frequently sees network bandwidth eaten up by people like this kid who had 10000 songs on his hard drive then advertized for total strangers to come saturate his campus' network, I have no sympathy for him.
Now about why kuro5hin is news for nerds. It is a much geek news site than slashdot which is easily witnessed by the fact that I have seen slashdot's own authers (e.g. micheal) post more on kuro5hin than I have on slashdot. Here are just a few of the reasons why kuro5hin is much preferrable to slashdot.
PS: That said, I read both sites several times a day and have nothing against slashdot but simply feel that kuro5hin was/is of superior quality.
You might as well ask "why don't more people use any functional languages?" The simple fact of the matter is they're a lot more difficult for people to wrap their head around at first. This may have something to do with the fact that most CS curriculums start students out with procedural languages (C, C++, Java) and barely give them a cursory glance at functional programming (which is kind of a shame).
You are wrong on several counts.
Smalltalk is an Object Oriented Language. As are C++ and Java. C is a procedural language.
Having used all four I can state that in my opinion the reason Smalltalk has never caught on is due to a.) Lack of speed b.) Lack of libraries c.)lack of decent IDEs d.) Lack of compilers e.) Lack of good books/documentation (this in my opinion is the biggest flaw).
Of course, the Squeak Project plans to change this.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/09/09/15522 57&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=threa d&cid=193
:
;-)
I've read your post a six or seven times and I'm amazed at the amount of circular logic
that you used in your argument. The only reason I didn't respond to your post that replied mine is because I left my PC shortly after posting to Slashdot and hadn't checked my users.pl page until
a few minutes ago.
I will only comment on the most unrigorous of your comments.
>>The RIAA rips off artists. So if they are already getting ripped off then that makes it OK for you to rip them off?
>Huh? MP3s get ripped from the ripper off-ers.
Ripping Off means "to cheat".
Ripping in some circles means obtaining an MP3 file from a CD track.
>>if it is OK to pirate music then it is OK to pirate software after all the rhetoric is the same and information
>>wants to be free.
>not exactly right, but you are on the right track. It's OK because it is not piracy to steal from pirates.
This is beyond illogical.
>And a number of the points I raised speak to the actual circumstances, not just the fact that people are selling
>copyrighted material.Look at video rental: nobody bothers to rent and copy videos because they don't cost much.
Music on Napster is free. Are you suggesting that artists should spend time and money creating music simply
to give it away to satisfy your need for free music?
No matter how cheap music becomes nothing changes the fact that it is FREE on Napster.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Now to comment on your the post I am replying to.
>Witness the open software movement: now those
>are artists who produce because they can't do >anything else. seems to me intellectual property
>laws protect the uncreative, it's the straw they
>cling to.
Bullshit. These so-called artists work at jobs that use Intellectual Property frequently to restrict the free flow of information, they merely give away their hobbyist work. The most notable example of this is Linus Torvalds that works for Transmeta that has PATENTED the various processes in the Crusoe implemnentation.
By the way, patents are the MOST restrictive form of IP.
PS: Then again maybe this validates your claim that Patents are used by the uncreative
For months I have watched people on Slashdot justify violating copyright with crap like
There's no law that says you must own all the latest music. Humanity has lasted centuries without Metallica and Britney Spears, and the fact that you can't play their music at anytime will not kill you. People in third world countries don't hear the latest songs and I don't see them dying of "lack of music" so where does this feeling that you have to have popular come from.
What the fuck does this mean? If it costs money to produce then money will be charged for production (this is ECONS 101). It costs a doctor nothing to look at a rash on my hand or listen to my cough and get a diagnosis, but it costs money for me to get this service. Guess why? It cost a lot of money to imbue the doctor with his knowledge and to provide the doctor with medical equipment. The only information that wants to be free is information that is valueless.
Yes, to gain mindshare. Every indie band that is doing so, is doing this so as to obtain mindshare similar to all the Loss Leader dotcomms whose business plans are routinely trashed on slashdot
- The RIAA rips off artists.
This is my response to all the Napster loving slashdotters. If it is OK for you to violate copyright laws by illegally downloading RIAA sponsored music, then why isn't it OK for corporations to incorporate GPLed code in their closed source products? After all information wants to be free and they should be free to do whatever they want with the information in the GPLed code.So if they are already getting ripped off then that makes it OK for you to rip them off? The current system favors independent artists who instead of selling their souls to the RIAA create their own brand and market themselves. Such as my favorite labels. The Napster regime will only favor Napster. The artists make no money while Napster reaps funds from selling demographic info and advertising to 20 million users.
I guess that violates the intention of the authors of the code similar to how downloading copyrighted music from Napster violates the intentions of the copyright holders.
PS: Supporting Napster is no different from supporting w4r3z d00d5. If it is OK to pirate music then it is OK to pirate software after all the rhetoric is the same and information wants to be free.
I read the SecurityFocus article and was impressed by how the article pinpointed what I have begun to fear is a major blight on software development. More and more software is being developed haphazardly without a clear design, coherent engineering or a well defined development roadmap. This is will only get worse with the growing number of people who refuse to go to college and learn how to engineer software and instead believing hacking code is all there is to software development.
Unfortunately instead of the article to then discuss ways to attack the cause of the problem (badly engineered software), it describes ways to attack the symptoms (release the source so bugs can be found).
There is more to creating robust software than simply testing most the bugs out of a system. Proper engineering practices need to be set in place to allow the extensibility and modularity of the code. Releasing source code may catch buffer overflow exploits and the like but it doesn't solve problems like improper interfaces/protocols being chosen and several other bad design decisions.
Mozilla has already proved this with the fact that it is a complete rewrite of the original Netscape code. After a year wasted hacking at the code, the Mozilla developers realized that all the Open Source in the world could not change the fact that Netscape Navigator was badly engineered software. Mozilla is better than Netscape not simply because it is Open Source and all bugs are shallow but because it is being properly designed and engineered instead of being a series of unmaintainable hacks like Netscape's Navigator.
As the saying goes you cannot make a silk purse out of pig's ear.
Algorithms and big-O notation
When, how and why to normalize a database
Compiler theory, parsing and grammers
How to elicit a requirements document from a customer
Various software development models from Waterfall to Spiral
How to write a design document for a 3 tier project including UML diagrams, Entity-Relationship diagrams and architectural diagrams
How to work well with others (numerous team projects)
Time management skills
Distributed computing (CORBA/DCOM/Java-RMI)
How hardware works down to the most miniscule level
The above list is stuff I have learned in 3 years of college that I am very sure I would not have learned if I rushed off into industry to become some C++ developer.
Ask yourself this question, how far do people without college degrees go in industry? Besides the prodigies who create their own companies (e.g. Shawn Fanning, Bill Gates, etc) most people who rush into industry will spend their lives as code monkeys instead of software engineers. Companies rarely high school/college dropouts project managers or lead developers and when they do that is usually their glass ceiling.
Frankly my time in college has given me a larger skill set and more knowledge than if I was just cranking out C++ for some company for the past 2 years. This means I am more valuable as an employee and more able to set my own career path unlike a high school graduate who knows how to hack C/C++/Java but not how to engineer projects or exactly how and why certain things work.
And why is there a shortage of people with experience--it's the old saw of not being able to get a job without a experience and not being able to get experience without a job.
If you had read my post you would have realized I said competence and not experience. I've interned at two companies the past two years and made a decent amount of money and I am still in college (i.e. I have less than 6 months of work experience), this didn't stop me from being able to turn down internship offers from Intel.
Most of my friends who have guaranteed offers from the companies they interned with also have little or no work experience besides the classes they've taken and stuff they've done in their free time.
The problem is that a lot of people believe that once they've learned one technology that they've earned a right to stop learning. Frankly this is B.S.. I learned Java a year ago and mostly from the Internet and was working a well paid job this summer writing Java code. While at this job I picked up Perl and now have reasonable experience with it. The job market is currently tight enough for self-motivated people to gain jobs without needing years of experience as long as ythe have ability.
H-1B visas are... a way to create a class of workers who don't have the same constitutional rights (or what's left of them) as the average American citizen and will be beholden to the companies that hire them not only for their job but for their continued residence in the US.
Before I start I guess I should proclaim that I am a student on an F-1 visa and if I do end up wotking here it will be on an H-1B visa.
Now here goes. There are several indicators that there is a labor shortage in IT for competent developers.
- There is a perception that the IT pool of workers has increased but this is primarily due to the fact that a ever since the 'net boom there has been an increasing pool of unskilled/semi-skilled workers (HTML jockeys, Javascript whizzes, SQL lords with no DBA knowledge, Visual Basic dukes) while the supply of
- real developers has remained stagnant or dropped. Skim the resumes on Monster.com or Geekfinder or any of those other sites and the amount of people with the aforementioned trivial skills is large but those with experience in writing C/C++/Java, DBAing Oracle/DB2/Sybase, creating distributed components in COM/CORBA/EJB, etc is relatively small.
From my experience most of the foreigners being hired usually have M.Sc's,Ph.D's or years of experience doing serious development before being hired in the U.S. This means they usually make more money than the trivial skillset IT workers (HTML/Javascript kiddies) and this is beginning to create a xenophobic cult in the IT industry who feel they should unionize, save their precious jobs and get the foreigners out.How is it that they've been chosen to be included in this?
Remember all those highly moderated posts on the numerous DCMA articles on slashdot exhorting us to write congress, etc.
These are the people who actually wrote and called instead of karma whoring on slashdot and preaching to the choir.
This is absolutely not normal business practice in retail stores. The issue here is not that Amazon is analyzing the buying patterns of consumers in the aggregate and changing prices based on this information. The problem is that they are using some secret criteria to charge people different prices as individuals.
So you are saying this is exactly like buying a car from a car dealership?
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After reading some of the comments and the article posters blurb, I clicked the link expecting vitriol and flame but all I see is reasonableness and calmness on the part of the KDE developers.
All they've said is that RMS claims that before KDE can switch the license on the code, all copyright holders need to explicitly approve it ("grant forgiveness"). KDE claims that most have (since they are KDE developers) except for two modules that weren't written specifically for KDE but can be rewritten if need be to make sure all of KDE is compatible.
Heck, they even list modules and email addresses of developers so they can be contacted to make sure that they actually OK the license switch and thus noone's copyright is being violated.
All in all, reasoned and mature reactions. Kudos to KDE.
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Dude there's a +50 karma cap. What the heck do I care about whether my posted is moderated up or down?
since you don't attend Transmeta board meetings, I'm sure they know a lot of things that you don't know...
So this means I cannot make observations based on the evidence that is available for all to see?
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From the article:
Microprocessor startup Transmeta Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has quietly changed its business plan. The company has bought back its two main technology-licensing agreements from IBM Corp. and Toshiba Corp., and now plans to market products on its own as a fabless chip supplier
First a major investor,Toshiba,claims that their chips are more hype than substance then they buy back their technology licenses from IBM and Toshiba?
Looks to me like Transmeta jumped the gun on their speculative announcements and have realized they cannot put their money where their mouth is. Unfortunately since this is Slashdot and Linus works there, its likely that this post will get moderated down and even though people here slaughter Intel when it comes to bad news, this will be glossed over. *sigh*
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It's real money when it comes from their pocket? then it's real money when it comes from mine. End of argument.
... (you get the point)
I have said this earlier in this thread but just in case you missed it. Your posts are juvenile and moronic. Where is it written that everything should be affordable by everyone? Because you can't afford it does not mean anything except you can't aford it.
Enterprise databases often cost several thousand dollars and even if it is free or relatively cheap support costs are massive. Heck, even recently open sourced Interbase charges over a thousand dollars a year for support.
PS: Your clueless Linux mongering posts are one of the reasons I permanently started reading at +3.
PPS: If you are going to bitch about shit you can't afford why not complain about the fact that a Ferrarri costs over a hundred thousand dollars, or Sun servers cost several thousand dollars when Linux x86 boxes can be obtained for a few hundred, or that a Cray mainframe costs more than you make in a year or
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The software is targeted at businesses and vs. Oracle 8i and IBM's DB2, Microsoft SQL Server not only is much cheaper but according to the Transaction Processing Performance Council tests performs comparably.
This software is targeted at businesses that routinely pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for software. Not college kids who want a DB to host their guestbook application.
What was the purpose of your post besides displaying your ignorance?
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These are some of the questions that come up to my mind:
Be able to migrate IIS to Apache first, and still be able to access the MSSQL databases (FreeTDS?)
Use a scripting syntax similar to ASP so that the programmers don't have much of a headache learning new stuff (PHP looks like a solution).
Java Server Pages will solve both problems. Sun has worked very closely with the Apache project on making JSP run well under Apache including giving away code and contributing to projects a la Tomcat. Here's a site to give you a quick overview of JSP.
Migrate MSSQL 7 to MySQL, PostgreSQL or other (Which one is better for web development?)
Depends on what kind of Web development you are doing. For the kind of work I have done which is both mission critical (eliminating MySQL) and requires speed (eliminating PostgreSQL) commercial databases have always been the correct solution to solve my problem. Both IBM's DB2 and Oracle 8i are available for Linux and are also very friendly with Apache and Java.
If your site does not traffic in mission critical data (e.g. a bank, major e-commerce company) then MySQL may be the solution that you seek. It is quick, fairly easy to use and heck, slashdot uses it.
Web log reports (I need to generate reports on the web site usage. What weblog report generators are available for Linux? Which ones do you use? Are there any that generate graphs, charts, etc..?)
Look on Freshmeat.
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They were volunteers. Nobody conscripted them, no one put a gun to their heads and no one is to blame for their being overworked except them.
Analogy: I volunteer at a local middle school for 10 hours a week and eat free meals in the cafetaria there. This translates to 50 cents an hour. Following your reasoning and that of the frivilous litigators who were formerly AOL volunteers, I should sue the school for back pay.
Sounds moronic doesn't it?
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But the effect of the minimum wage law is to prevent immigrants, teenagers, and poor people trying to escape welfare from getting established in the labor market.
What are you talking about? So you think if companies weren't forced to pay people $5.25 an hour they'd pay more.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahah.
If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale, real cheap too.
PS: Have you ever heard of a sweat shop? That's what happens when there's no minimum wage law. Slavery.
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AOL volunteers have already sued AOL, it's even been on here on slashdot.
Frankly the lawsuit is the most frivolous lawsuit imaginable. These people volunteered to monitor chat rooms and the like for AOL and one day suddenly realize that they would rather have gotten pay and sue AOL. From this story it seems that other companies are reviewing their volunteer policy based on the frivolous lawsuit because if someone can volunteer to do work and later sue for back wages, then someone else who receives non-financial payment for services rendered has an even stronger reason to sue for back wages because they are more likely to have been thought of as employees deserving payment by a court than a volunteer.
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Your argument is illogical to the point of madness. Stealing music harms the artist by denying them a source of revenue especially since there are opportunity costs to creating music (studio costs, time spent practising/learning music, instruments, promotion, etc). Simply because people are not claiming that they created the stolen music does not somehow lessen the impact of the fact that IP is being misused and is harming the artist.
On the other hand copying the HTML on a page doesn't do jack shit to whoever's site the HTML was copied from.
Yet CmdrTaco feels that his Intellectual Property in the form of his webpage design (i feel stupid just saying that...) somehow deserves more protection than an artists means of providing a living for (him|her)self
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Slashdot authors believe in selectively applying IP as they see fit.
I have read most if not all of the Napster editorials by Hemos, Jon Katz, and CmdrTaco and there is a stong tendency to make it seem that musicians should just roll over and face the fact that people will steal their music and they should get other jobs.
Yet once the shoe is on the other foot (and doesn't even harm them financially as opposed to digitally available music[0] which harms artists revenue streams) they scream and bitch about IP.
[0]Even if it doesn't seem like that now, once high bandwidth, reasonably priced MP3 players and home networking standards are prevelant there'll be a sharp drop in the revenue of professional artists, if services like Napster still exist. Even worse instead of the creators of the music being paid, fat cat venture capitalists will reap the fruits of their labor. Anyone can see this coming.
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Besides the fact that this is glaring hypocrisy. Slashdot bitches about the fact that Metallica don't want people ripping off their music then wants people to acknowledge the fact that they copied some HTML??? What the fuck?
It's freaking HTML. It's not a big deal, it didn't cost you any money to produce nor is it any skin of your nose if someone else uses it, so what's your problem? It's not like it cost Slashdot thousands of dollars to market, produce and distribute the HTML so what's the big deal?
Before corporations got here, the Web was a place where people shared stuff and information was free, now we see people trying to claim ownership on stuff as intangible as the HTML that a website is written with or for it's look and feel? B.S.
I almost expected to see CmdrTaco claim that people are stealing his intellectual property.
By the way, for all the Open Source guys out there, forcing people to advertise slashdot simply for using it's HTML or look and feel is counter to the spirit of the GPL. After all, Slashdot isn't forced to display powered by Apache or running GNU/Debian Linux or served by MySQL. So why should people be required to display a logo based on the most intangible and flimsiest part of the site, it's HTML?
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I know a few people that have worked there and a bunch of them are proficient in *nix and also are smart enough to realize when their products are inadequate. Here's a conversation I had with a friend.
me: So how do you guys manage to use Visual Studio Source Safe to manage all those millions of lines of code in Win2K and Office?
friend: we don't.
These same people admit that NT sucks [but evangelize on Win2K]. Frankly I can believe that internal memos circulated about the stability of Win 2K, after all didn't it once have 65,000 known issues.
It seems that MSFT employees simply choose the best tool for the job, and if it isn't their product, tough shit. Frankly I respect them for this a lot more than most rabid slashdotters who can't admit that Linux/Unix is not the end-all and be-all of computing and sometimes Windows or a Windows application would be a better choice.
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