It's very very simple. One of the -- when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time. You can sit there and talk about how this is great for up and coming artists or for unsigned bands, but a big counterargument that nobody gets is, me and you could form a band together, and we could like, make a demo and then we could put it up on Napster. Who is going to give a fuck? Nobody's going to care, because they don't know anything about what sets my and your band out from the gardener and the guy who cleans my pool's band.
Thank you Lars for backing up my suspicions with hard data. For a while now on Slashdot I have heard people justify Napster by saying that it is a way for unsigned artists to get recognition and it has always seemed like B.S. to me. Napster is primarily a search engine, meaning that people already now what they are looking for when they use Napster. People who maintain that Napster will somehow free the unsigned artist fail to realize that there already is a service that does this and as at yet it has not created any house hold names nor spawned any artists who have quit their day jobs to pursue music fulltime with the revenue from MP3 sales. It is abundantly clear now that besides good music, an artist needs good promotion, music videos, radio airplay, etc. or else the artist will wallow in obscurity despite being extremely talented and having their song on the internet either via Napster or MP3.com.
The upshot of this is that record companies will probably never really fade away and instead will always be necessary maybe in a different form but ever present. Good knows that without record companies all of the really successful bands today would be much less successful (especially the Britney's, Backstreets and N'syncs of this world).
Okay everyone take a deep breathe and reread the article. They aren't giving patents for natural smells but instead allowing companies to trademark the combination of their product and a particular smell (e.g. the smell of beer on a dart, the smell of grass on a tennis ball and smell of roses on tyres). This is very different from the company being giving a patent on the smell of grass.
PS: It is still an unsavory practice that may lead to an unwelcome trend in the future but in its current incarnation it isn't as bad as most slashdotters are making it out to be.
You must be a college student or probably just learned how to program. An IDE is a tool, that may simplify certain tasks in certain environments. You contradict yourself by asking two contradictory questions. If the question is "Do you consider an IDE useful?", the answer is definitely yes. All it takes is trying to manage a project with 20 - 50 files each with a 1000 or more lines of code to quickly turn one against bare bones editors and towards IDEs. Now if you are asking which is better to learn a language with then the answer definitely should be a bare bones editor so that certain quirks of the IDE do not seep into one's programming style. Novice programmers are fond of using IDEs as a crutch and more than once I've seen kids crash and burn when removed from the Visual Studio world and transplanted into a Unix environment. I hope this answers your question. Of course questions like yours ignore the fact that a programming language is merely a tool used to perform a task and not a religion or esoteric art to be mastered in all its minutae. Frankly anything that makes you more productive gets an A in my book.
Now so as not to be marked offtopic by some anal retentive moderator here are my comments about the article, clientside perl will be welcome addition to the scripting arena, it is really cool that Mozilla's original plan to be more than a browser and instead to be an engine/building block component similar to MSFTs COM components is working. Go Mozilla!!!
Why does everything have to be a war with you people? Why can't they simply sell a piece of software. What side is Carmack on after all he sells Quake on windows? What side is Linus on, after all he's said that he uses Powerpoint? Zealot posts like this are what make it embarassing to read slashdot sometimes.
PS: I have triple digit karma so moderate away if you are offended by this post.
*sigh* You've missed the point. I'm not saying that less college students buying CDs will bankrupt the record industry nor am I saying that college students wouldn't bootleg music if not for Napster. I'm saying that the RIAA getting into a tizzy because a few more college students are not buying CDs is stupid because these same students will eventually make money and are potentil lifelong fans. After all, the Grateful Dead let all sorts (including college students) bootleg their work and in return they had constantly sold out concerts and masive merchandising. Groups like Metallica may live to regret their actions...
Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students. This is not FUD this is fact. I'm in college and I know several dozen people who have massive MP3 collections who have cut down on the amount of CDs they buy, myself included. For every person I have heard say, I buy more CDs because I find more groups (how does this happen? Napster is a search service or do people type random names in the search box?) there are five people who say I probably will never have to buy a CD again.
Personally, I like the argument put forth that even though college students pirate stuff now with MP3s that this will benefit record labels in the long run. The RIAA seems to forget that college students grow up and leave college to become adults with lots of disposable income. After all isn't it former bootlegging college students that pay an arm and a leg to see the Who, Rolling Stones and even Metallica in concert. The proliferation of music on college campuses will create life long fans who will eagerly start spending money on the artist once that disposable income comes around. After all that is the rational behind banks trying to attract college students with various student accounts even though it is a well known fact that college students a perenially broke. If the RIAA had any sense, they wouldn't be trying so desperately to alienate fans because this may come back and bite them on the ass.
.... if folks have a link to confirm or deny this, that'd be keen.
Here's an article in the New Scientist on various kinds of encryption methods for use with quantum computers. Here's an excerpt:
The one-time pad cipher is so called because each key used to be written on a separate sheet of a pad of paper. After being used once, the sheet was torn off and destroyed, leaving the new key on the next sheet ready to encrypt the next message. Despite being theoretically perfect, the one-time pad cipher suffers from several practical flaws, which have prevented its widespread use. Making random keys is a difficult task, and making a new one for each message is time-consuming. The real killer, though, is distributing the keys. After Alice has manufactured a random key, encrypted her message, and sent the encrypted text, she somehow has to get the key to Bob so that he can decrypt the message. She cannot send the key unencrypted because Eve will steal it, and she cannot encrypt it because she then has to tell Bob the key she used to encrypt the key that she used to encrypt the message.
The key-distribution problem was traditionally solved by employing trusted couriers to deliver the keys by hand, but this solution doesn't have much appeal in the age of satellite communications and e-mail. It is here that quantum physics comes to the rescue. In the early 1980s, Charles Bennett, an IBM researcher, and Gilles Brassard, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal, proposed that Alice and Bob should use individual photons to exchange their key. By operating at the quantum level, they argued, Alice and Bob could exploit the laws of quantum physics to protect the key.
Bennett and Brassard proposed using photons polarised in different directions to represent 1 or 0. If Eve tried to intercept the key, she would have to measure the photons, which would effectively mean absorbing them. To avoid being spotted, Eve would have to retransmit the photon to Bob. However, because of the strange way that quantum particles work, Eve does not always measure the same polarisation that Alice sent. That in turn means that she cannot be sure that she is retransmitting the correct orientation. Thus Eve's interception will inevitably affect the transmission of the key, and Alice and Bob should be able to spot this, discard the key, and try again with a new one.
That is not necessarily true. Read the article and the links on quantum computing on Grover's page. This article states that IBM researchers claim that Quantum computers will be so much faster than conventional PCs that searching eight trillion bytes of data searching for one word may take a month but a Quantum computer could do this in 27 minutes. This means that quantum computing algorithms can therefore be much more complex than regular algorithms with imperceptible speed difference on a quantum PC while the same algorithm would be horribly inefficient on a conventional PC. For example a sequential search is considered horribly inefficient on conventinal PCs but with the speed of Quantum computers, it would get the job done in a speedy enough manner. (I haven't studied quantum computing besides reading a few articles so please forgive me if my example isn't technically accurate, maybe a grad student somewhere can shed light on this?)
Interestingly enough the USDA has patented the technology I wonder if this was alos a defensive patent? If not who is to say that other companies beside Monsanto will not start using terminator seeds in third world countries?
Don't forget, companies like IBM make far more money off their professional service department than they do off of selling hardware or software. This doesn't change whether you're using Linux or some propietary software.
That's the point, it does. Let me ask you this, do you think that there is a market for selling Apache support? Selling support for Open Source Software doesn't work as an exclusive business model because unlike proprietary software most people who have jobs working with OSS have a clue and they have the source or at least have access to people who have the source. This means that unlike IBM and MSFT who can rest assured that if there is a problem with their software their users will have to call their expensive support lines, users of OSS can simply fix the code or ask on a newsgroup and get a faster and sometimes better response from some enterprising hacker than from some tech support flunkie. I see selling Linux support being like selling toys online, anyone can do it but the market will only support one or two major players while the rest will flounder and die.
The Rich Get Richer and Screw the Poor
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Universal Access
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· Score: 2
Jon Katz, if you define Universal Access to computing as companies like Ford and Intel giving money to employees then maybe you need a redefinition of what the word universal means. Anyone who works for Ford or Intel can already afford a computer (especially now with Gateway and others creation of payment plans) and more than likely works with a computer daily at work. Universal Access will only occur when concrete moves are made to put computers in public schools concurrently with teachers being trained in how to use computers and internet technologies. Until then all that will occur is that the digital divide will grow larger and differences between the haves and have-nots will only increase.
I have been thinking about the current marketing paradigm amongst OSS companies which is making software a commodity and then charging for support. The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel. According to Open Source main proponent, ESR, Open Source is a superior engineering model than Closed Source and hence Open Source Software should be more reliable and stable than most Closed Source Software. This means that Open Source Software should need less support than Closed Source software. The upshot of this is that Open Source companies will never be as attractive to investors as closed source companies because closed source companies will always have larger profit margins, for instance, MSFT charges exorbitantly for it's software as well as for support (which is necessary with MSFT shitty software) while Red Hat charges only for support (which isn't necessary with a clueful admin or if one just reads USENET). Obviously even if they were the same size and sold the same amount of software MSFT would make more money and hence be more attractive to investors than RHAT which would eventually MSFT would grow larger than Red Hat. IMHO the recent downturn in Linux stocks seems to be based on this kind of reasoning especially since Linux stocks really became hot when it seemed like MSFT was not going to avoid being found guilty by the DOJ.
For the above reasons I have very little faith in any Linux company or other OSS pure-play ever becoming a very dominant company or even surviving for very long. The MSFT Halloween documents got it right when they regarded the commoditization of software as a death knell. VA Linux has found this out the hard way, what it sells is a commodity (a free OS and PC hardware) and now that other PC makers (who have more money, better distribution channels, more marketers, etc) now sell Linux boxes it turns out that VA Linux can't sell more boxes than anyone except Fujitsu Siemens. Now back to OSS companies before I drift way offtopic, companies that sell commodity software aimed at a market of experts then expect to sell support need to have a large source of income in the first place to create a large, well developed support network. Unfortunately, since their only source of revenue is from support but yet has to pay for both development costs and support the chances of such infrastructure being put in place is slim.
To make money from Open Source and become a successful company, a business needs to rely on more sources of income than support for software that is better engineered than its counterparts. Multiple revenue streams are required or else it is all for naught.
*sigh* Saying common carriers shouldn't store user info simply because people can make anonymous calls via payphones is an argument that does not bear serious scrutiny. After all payphones that are consistently used for illegal activity are tapped as well as put under surveillance in some situations, why should the Internet suddenly absolve people of responsibility for criminal activity?
What is wrong with this? Napster users violate copyright law while Napster claims that it wants to be a common carrier (i.e. safe harbor). This means Napster does not want to be held liable for copyright infringements, thus the users must be held liable and sued if necessary. This can only be done if identifying information is collected. What has happened is that Napster wants to eat it's cake and have it too, it cannot on one hand claim to be a common carrier and then on the other have anonymous users. Phone companies and ISPs have identifying characteristics of users (i.e. so that obscene phone callers, or death threat mailers can be found) so why should Napster be any different?
Here's a sample scenario to throw dust in your eye and that of all the other Napster apologists. Let's say Napster expands it's service to include all file types and the same time that a very efficient file compressing algorithm is discovered that can compress files to a 20th of their regular size no matter what type. Now what happens if I start sharing stolen copies of MSFT Win2K, MSFT Windows ME (before it is released), Quake 3, Star Office, Transmeta's patented code morphing software source code etc. With Napster's current argument (and yours) all the affected companies are S.O.L. unless Napster feels like banning my account (which they don't have to by law) in which case I can get another in 2 minutes and start sharing stolen/pirated material once more. Clearly a solution is needed and PPI's is a rather good one.
Give people the ability to target theives that use your service
if you want to be a common carrier or else take the heat for them
There should be a maximum time frame for removing the offending material. After all Napster, could have procrastinated as long as possible with regards to banning the user accounts or may even have asked Metallica to provide more information or used other time delaying tactics if they had so desired. Simply because Napster behaved promptly this time does not mean that limits should not be placed.
Judges should be able to decide whether to give an injunction after hearing both sides of the story instead of trying to write laws for specific instances of copyright violations because there is no way the laws will keep up with technology
Frankly I feel these are all good suggestions and are much better than the copyrights be damned attitude of both Napster and a majority of slashdot users. I plan to work for a software company in the future and I'll be damned if it is deemed OK for people to rip me off simply because it's convenient, thus I support artists in their stand against copyright violation after all it should be their choice how their music gets distributed.
From the article poster: For the opposition, the Progressive Policy Institute has written a report that recommends extending the DMCA to explicitly outlaw technologies like Napster.
From the PPI site: PPI proposes the following changes to the DMCA:
Require internet service providers that wish to qualify for safe harbor to collect personally identifiable and verifiable information from their users. Napster currently allows its users to sign on anonymously, making it impossible for rights holders to track down the infringers.
Establish a time frame for the "notice and take down" process for removal of infringing material. The law as currently written has no set time table, consequently service providers with a vested interest in the infringing activity of their subscribers, like Napster, have no incentive to act in a timely fashion.
Give judges the flexibility to grant injunctions against service providers whose services are substantially used for copyright infringement. It may be impossible to write a law that accounts for every conceivable technological innovations, however a judge will know an illegal act when she sees it.
From what's currently on the PPI site I cannot see how this is supposed to be outlawing technologies like Napster. Instead it seems to me like PPI has found the perfect median position in the Napster vs. RIAA debate. Let me explain how I came to this realization.
1.) Napster wanted to claim that it is a common carrier under current law and thus should not be held responsible for the actions of it's users. What Napster has forgotten is that all common carriers (e.g. phone companies and ISPs) have personal information about their users so that if they are involved in illegal activities the users can be prosecuted. The PPI's first point is simply that if a company or service wants to claim innocence as a common carrier then it should be ready to cough up user info if the users participate in criminal endeavors through their service. After in the U.S. obscene phone callers and people who host illegal material on their ISP pages can be dealt with through their service providers, so why should Napster be different?
2.) What's wrong with a reasonable time frame for cease and desist? I see nothing wrong with a law that explicitly states how long service providers can give users to remove illegal material (especially since it would take 5 minutes in front of a computer to do this) as long as the time frame is suitable.
3.) Agreed. Make the law general enough so that it evolves with technology instead of creating a specific law to handle Napster, then another one to handle digital movies when bandwidth becomes ubiqitous and another to handle whatever else the future brings. This is very logical, after all the U.S. constitution is over 200 years old and has mainly survived due to it's general nature while countries with constitutions containing massive specificity and minutae seem to be in constant turmoil and have to deal with constantly changing laws and environments.
Basically, I can't see much wrong with PPI's recommendations and it certainly is a whole lot better for everyone than Napster's proposals (leave us alone, so our users can keep ripping artists off) or the RIAA's (explixitly ban anything that affects our bottom line) plus if implemented properly will also be able to deal with whatever other disruptive technologies that may appear in the future.
I just found out about bitchslapping from this post on sid=moderation, I only have 1 comment "Bitchslapping is wrong.". It seems that if you moderate someone with high karma's posts down as a troll, you're karma drops to a negative amount, this is stupid. I have triple digit karma, does this mean that I can't post blatantly inflammatory material from my account? No. So why shouldn't people be able to mod me down? Rob malda has some explaining to do.
In the recent "Our Attorney's Response To Microsoft" article, the Andover attorney stated that "as a general matter, it is the policy of Slashdot not to interfere with or censor the communications of its users." This is a blatant lie. "Bitchslapping," and "lameness filtering" ARE interfering with the communications of Slashdot's users.
How is this a lie? Slashdot employees don't moderate, slashdot readers do. I just moderated yesterday and I certainly don't work for Andover or Slashdot. Read the moderation page sometime to see exactly how slashdot moderation works. Moderation works like elections, a few do it and they represent the whole (yep, the same way the U.S. president gets elected by the electoral college and not the American public). If you have a problem with slashdot moderation (specifically bogus +5 scores)don't blame Rob Malda, blame the real culprit the average slashdot reader, moderation selects people at random and asks them their opinions, unfortunately as Signal 11 has shown the average slashdot reader is into demagoguery and dogma, not criticism or conflict.
Frankly if you want to discuss moderation I would suggest visiting the Slashdot Moderation Forum instead of posting offtopic rants to news articles.
From the article: As chief financial officer of media company Landmark Communications, Ritter watched his company miss out on a golden opportunity to invest in Linux software seller Red Hat way before its successful initial public offering. Now he hopes to catch the second wave of the open-source software trend. ... Great Bridge, though consisting of only four employees today, has grand ambitions, including a planned expansion to 120 employees and the ultimate possibility of going public, Ritter said. But the biggest challenge will be taking on giants such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Informix and Sybase, each of which have their own proprietary database programs.
First of all, a proclamation like this seems to me more like jumping on the open source bandwagon and hoping for a successful IPO (with no long term prospects of giving investors return on their value) than as a project that is destined to make Oracle and Sybase quake in their boots. It is particularly interesting that the a company that is supposedly Open Source oriented is stating all sorts of plans about IPOs and such and little or no talk about technology.
Hopefully I am wrong and this will be a company that will give back to the community in spades as opposed to a bunch of opportunists. Oracle databases currently cost several thousand dollars ($20,000 minimum price) while MSFT's cheap SQL server is about five thousand dollars. If a company can be created that will produce software as robust and functional as Oracle software (believe me that is a daunting task) and yet charge only support costs they may well sweep the DB market especially for small businesses. Of course, it will take a phenomenal amount of work (mayhap an impossible amount) for a four man company to compete with a company that has $6 billion in revenues and one of the most robust products in it's area. I wish them luck.
Um... what have you just proved? Simply because you can use hacks and kludges to simulate objects in Scheme does not make it an OO language. The fact that I can write recursive C code without assignments or global variables does not make C a functional programming language. Neither does that fact that I can create structs with function pointers make it an OO language.
For "real" OO, one must go to high-level languages like Smalltalk and Lisp
The above comment just defeated any hopes of you being taken seriously by anyone with a clue. Lisp is a function al programming language and not an object oriented language. Functional langauges emphasize a lack of state (no global variables or assignment operations) and referential transparency (functions always do the same thing if passed the same parameters) which is in conflict with Object Oriented programming concepts. The chances of Lisp being mistaken for an object oriented language by anyone who actually knows about Object Oriented Programming is zero.
Personally I hate SmallTalk. As the first post to this article indicated OOP's forte is solving large scale problems, primarily because it turns out that C becomes very difficult to maintain past 50,000 to a 100,000 lines of code. The typelessness of smalltalk (as exemplified by Squeak) makes one rely on the documentation practices of other programmers way too much. Typelessness means that if one does not choose variable names that are highly indicative of the the type purpose of an object as well as comment the code properly it will be difficult for maintainers to update the code. In programs with a high degree of coupling this can be extremely aggravating. Several times while trying to write applications in Squeak I hit my head against the brick wall when trying to find out what types a function accepted or what types it returned simply by looking at the code for the function. Sometimes it would take looking through methods in 4 to 6 classes before I could figure exactly what type had been passed to a function and what it returned, of course by then I would have forgotten why I was looking in the first place. Imagine reading a man page with all the types Xed out. AAAARGH.
From ABCNews: The suspect was tracked down by locating the phone line that may have been used to inject the virus into the Internet. Am I the only one that gets a mental image of a lurking figure with a big syringe sticking a needle into a router in the middle of the night?
Question: If Irene has confessed to writing the Virus why is her husband being arrested as well?
Actually, there is a reason. The stock values of many of these firms is based heavily on the expectations of future earnings. The lesson of the Microsoft case is that if a company is too successful, it will be punished.
FUD, FUD, FUD. Cisco (CSCO) is America's most valuable company and can be considered more successful and monopolistic than MSFT in every sense of the word. MSFT was punished not for being to successful or even for being a monopoly but for using it's success unfairly to damage competitors. Cisco (as well as Intel after making deals with the DOJ) is more successful than MSFT and is a technology company, yet it is not being harassed by the DOJ because "crush the competition by any means necessary" is not their guiding principle of operation.
a provocative, even scary new book by Yale economist Robert J. Shiller -- is sending shock waves through Wall Street. Shiller argues that the techno-fueled stock-market boom is based on emotion, rumor, pyschology and herd instincts (like excitement about the Net), rather than on any rational facts or data -- and that it can't last.
Duh. Most people realized this in 1999 and if they didn't then they would have after the dot com massacre of a few weeks ago. All it takes is one question to make people realize that the market is no longer fueled by hard facts but emotions and rumor.
Q: Why does the fact that MSFT is being split up mean that the shares of Yahoo, Oracle, Red Hat, Amazon, Sun etc. should all fall 10 to 25 per cent?
A: There is no logical reason that can be backed up by financial data or hard facts. But there are several emotional reasons why this could occur, chief of which is "If MSFT shares are falling then the shares of the stock I own will fall as well, I better sell.".
1.) CGI and C: Even though I am comfortable with C, I felt very uncomfortable using C to handle server side processing. C's little idiosyncracies (no array bounds checking, poor text processing, almost non-existent exception handling capabilities, etc) made it a poor language (in my opinion) for creating a large, maintainable, complex user-driven web experience. Also the fact that an SQL pre-processor is needed to deal with handling database interaction is also rather annoying.
2.) Java Servlets: Java's extensive libraries make it possible to develop the entire web experience with Java. This allows one to design the entire site from the ground up in a proper fashion (Yes, design with UML diagrams even). Servlets are rather slow the first time they are used because they have to be loaded into memory but after the first user hit, they execute very quickly (as fast as or faster than most CGI by certain benchmarks). Exception handling is another boon that allows even the most unexpected problems to be handled properly. For example, when developing a recent project I wrapped the entire program in a try...catch block which sent me an email with a stack trace whenever a run-time exception was caught, I also printed a message to the webpage with the a hyperlink informing the user to mail the error message to me just in case my mailer failed. This proved to be a whole lot more useful than the default message screen Apache provides on script errors and would have been impossible in C. The database interaction via JDBC was rather smooth and could be modularized into special DB accessor classes and servlets objects could be modularized for later reuse. The ability to use other aspects of Java easily (e.g. the XML parsing API) is also a big bonus. In fact mail.com now uses Java extensively on it's site.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just see it now. A manager at Google walking over to a developer's PC and seeing this sticker and saying,"Why not?"
:)
Now all that's needed is for thinkgeek to claim responsibility for this action.
It's very very simple. One of the -- when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time. You can sit there and talk about how this is great for up and coming artists or for unsigned bands, but a big counterargument that nobody gets is, me and you could form a band together, and we could like, make a demo and then we could put it up on Napster. Who is going to give a fuck? Nobody's going to care, because they don't know anything about what sets my and your band out from the gardener and the guy who cleans my pool's band.
Thank you Lars for backing up my suspicions with hard data. For a while now on Slashdot I have heard people justify Napster by saying that it is a way for unsigned artists to get recognition and it has always seemed like B.S. to me. Napster is primarily a search engine, meaning that people already now what they are looking for when they use Napster. People who maintain that Napster will somehow free the unsigned artist fail to realize that there already is a service that does this and as at yet it has not created any house hold names nor spawned any artists who have quit their day jobs to pursue music fulltime with the revenue from MP3 sales. It is abundantly clear now that besides good music, an artist needs good promotion, music videos, radio airplay, etc. or else the artist will wallow in obscurity despite being extremely talented and having their song on the internet either via Napster or MP3.com.
The upshot of this is that record companies will probably never really fade away and instead will always be necessary maybe in a different form but ever present. Good knows that without record companies all of the really successful bands today would be much less successful (especially the Britney's, Backstreets and N'syncs of this world).
Okay everyone take a deep breathe and reread the article. They aren't giving patents for natural smells but instead allowing companies to trademark the combination of their product and a particular smell (e.g. the smell of beer on a dart, the smell of grass on a tennis ball and smell of roses on tyres). This is very different from the company being giving a patent on the smell of grass.
PS: It is still an unsavory practice that may lead to an unwelcome trend in the future but in its current incarnation it isn't as bad as most slashdotters are making it out to be.
You must be a college student or probably just learned how to program. An IDE is a tool, that may simplify certain tasks in certain environments.
You contradict yourself by asking two contradictory questions. If the question is "Do you consider an IDE useful?", the answer is definitely yes. All it takes is trying to manage a project with 20 - 50 files each with a 1000 or more lines of code to quickly turn one against bare bones editors and towards IDEs. Now if you are asking which is better to learn a language with then the answer definitely should be a bare bones editor so that certain quirks of the IDE do not seep into one's programming style. Novice programmers are fond of using IDEs as a crutch and more than once I've seen kids crash and burn when removed from the Visual Studio world and transplanted into a Unix environment. I hope this answers your question. Of course questions like yours ignore the fact that a programming language is merely a tool used to perform a task and not a religion or esoteric art to be mastered in all its minutae. Frankly anything that makes you more productive gets an A in my book.
Now so as not to be marked offtopic by some anal retentive moderator here are my comments about the article, clientside perl will be welcome addition to the scripting arena, it is really cool that Mozilla's original plan to be more than a browser and instead to be an engine/building block component similar to MSFTs COM components is working. Go Mozilla!!!
Why does everything have to be a war with you people? Why can't they simply sell a piece of software. What side is Carmack on after all he sells Quake on windows? What side is Linus on, after all he's said that he uses Powerpoint?
Zealot posts like this are what make it embarassing to read slashdot sometimes.
PS: I have triple digit karma so moderate away if you are offended by this post.
*sigh*
You've missed the point. I'm not saying that less college students buying CDs will bankrupt the record industry nor am I saying that college students wouldn't bootleg music if not for Napster. I'm saying that the RIAA getting into a tizzy because a few more college students are not buying CDs is stupid because these same students will eventually make money and are potentil lifelong fans. After all, the Grateful Dead let all sorts (including college students) bootleg their work and in return they had constantly sold out concerts and masive merchandising. Groups like Metallica may live to regret their actions...
Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students. This is not FUD this is fact. I'm in college and I know several dozen people who have massive MP3 collections who have cut down on the amount of CDs they buy, myself included. For every person I have heard say, I buy more CDs because I find more groups (how does this happen? Napster is a search service or do people type random names in the search box?) there are five people who say I probably will never have to buy a CD again.
Personally, I like the argument put forth that even though college students pirate stuff now with MP3s that this will benefit record labels in the long run. The RIAA seems to forget that college students grow up and leave college to become adults with lots of disposable income. After all isn't it former bootlegging college students that pay an arm and a leg to see the Who, Rolling Stones and even Metallica in concert. The proliferation of music on college campuses will create life long fans who will eagerly start spending money on the artist once that disposable income comes around. After all that is the rational behind banks trying to attract college students with various student accounts even though it is a well known fact that college students a perenially broke. If the RIAA had any sense, they wouldn't be trying so desperately to alienate fans because this may come back and bite them on the ass.
Here's an article in the New Scientist on various kinds of encryption methods for use with quantum computers. Here's an excerpt:
That is not necessarily true. Read the article and the links on quantum computing on Grover's page. This article states that IBM researchers claim that Quantum computers will be so much faster than conventional PCs that searching eight trillion bytes of data searching for one word may take a month but a Quantum computer could do this in 27 minutes. This means that quantum computing algorithms can therefore be much more complex than regular algorithms with imperceptible speed difference on a quantum PC while the same algorithm would be horribly inefficient on a conventional PC. For example a sequential search is considered horribly inefficient on conventinal PCs but with the speed of Quantum computers, it would get the job done in a speedy enough manner. (I haven't studied quantum computing besides reading a few articles so please forgive me if my example isn't technically accurate, maybe a grad student somewhere can shed light on this?)
You're right Monsanto did drop the technology which is good for several reasons.
Interestingly enough the USDA has patented the technology I wonder if this was alos a defensive patent? If not who is to say that other companies beside Monsanto will not start using terminator seeds in third world countries?
Don't forget, companies like IBM make far more money off their professional service department than they do off of selling hardware or software. This doesn't change whether you're using Linux or some propietary software.
That's the point, it does. Let me ask you this, do you think that there is a market for selling Apache support? Selling support for Open Source Software doesn't work as an exclusive business model because unlike proprietary software most people who have jobs working with OSS have a clue and they have the source or at least have access to people who have the source. This means that unlike IBM and MSFT who can rest assured that if there is a problem with their software their users will have to call their expensive support lines, users of OSS can simply fix the code or ask on a newsgroup and get a faster and sometimes better response from some enterprising hacker than from some tech support flunkie. I see selling Linux support being like selling toys online, anyone can do it but the market will only support one or two major players while the rest will flounder and die.
Jon Katz, if you define Universal Access to computing as companies like Ford and Intel giving money to employees then maybe you need a redefinition of what the word universal means. Anyone who works for Ford or Intel can already afford a computer (especially now with Gateway and others creation of payment plans) and more than likely works with a computer daily at work.
Universal Access will only occur when concrete moves are made to put computers in public schools concurrently with teachers being trained in how to use computers and internet technologies. Until then all that will occur is that the digital divide will grow larger and differences between the haves and have-nots will only increase.
I have been thinking about the current marketing paradigm amongst OSS companies which is making software a commodity and then charging for support. The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel. According to Open Source main proponent, ESR, Open Source is a superior engineering model than Closed Source and hence Open Source Software should be more reliable and stable than most Closed Source Software. This means that Open Source Software should need less support than Closed Source software. The upshot of this is that Open Source companies will never be as attractive to investors as closed source companies because closed source companies will always have larger profit margins, for instance, MSFT charges exorbitantly for it's software as well as for support (which is necessary with MSFT shitty software) while Red Hat charges only for support (which isn't necessary with a clueful admin or if one just reads USENET). Obviously even if they were the same size and sold the same amount of software MSFT would make more money and hence be more attractive to investors than RHAT which would eventually MSFT would grow larger than Red Hat. IMHO the recent downturn in Linux stocks seems to be based on this kind of reasoning especially since Linux stocks really became hot when it seemed like MSFT was not going to avoid being found guilty by the DOJ.
For the above reasons I have very little faith in any Linux company or other OSS pure-play ever becoming a very dominant company or even surviving for very long. The MSFT Halloween documents got it right when they regarded the commoditization of software as a death knell. VA Linux has found this out the hard way, what it sells is a commodity (a free OS and PC hardware) and now that other PC makers (who have more money, better distribution channels, more marketers, etc) now sell Linux boxes it turns out that VA Linux can't sell more boxes than anyone except Fujitsu Siemens. Now back to OSS companies before I drift way offtopic, companies that sell commodity software aimed at a market of experts then expect to sell support need to have a large source of income in the first place to create a large, well developed support network. Unfortunately, since their only source of revenue is from support but yet has to pay for both development costs and support the chances of such infrastructure being put in place is slim.
To make money from Open Source and become a successful company, a business needs to rely on more sources of income than support for software that is better engineered than its counterparts. Multiple revenue streams are required or else it is all for naught.
*sigh*
Saying common carriers shouldn't store user info simply because people can make anonymous calls via payphones is an argument that does not bear serious scrutiny. After all payphones that are consistently used for illegal activity are tapped as well as put under surveillance in some situations, why should the Internet suddenly absolve people of responsibility for criminal activity?
Here's a sample scenario to throw dust in your eye and that of all the other Napster apologists. Let's say Napster expands it's service to include all file types and the same time that a very efficient file compressing algorithm is discovered that can compress files to a 20th of their regular size no matter what type. Now what happens if I start sharing stolen copies of MSFT Win2K, MSFT Windows ME (before it is released), Quake 3, Star Office, Transmeta's patented code morphing software source code etc. With Napster's current argument (and yours) all the affected companies are S.O.L. unless Napster feels like banning my account (which they don't have to by law) in which case I can get another in 2 minutes and start sharing stolen/pirated material once more. Clearly a solution is needed and PPI's is a rather good one.
- Judges should be able to decide whether to give an injunction after hearing both sides of the story instead of trying to write laws for specific instances of copyright violations because there is no way the laws will keep up with technology
Frankly I feel these are all good suggestions and are much better than the copyrights be damned attitude of both Napster and a majority of slashdot users. I plan to work for a software company in the future and I'll be damned if it is deemed OK for people to rip me off simply because it's convenient, thus I support artists in their stand against copyright violation after all it should be their choice how their music gets distributed.For the opposition, the Progressive Policy Institute has written a report that recommends extending the DMCA to explicitly outlaw technologies like Napster.
From the PPI site:
PPI proposes the following changes to the DMCA:
- Give judges the flexibility to grant injunctions against service providers whose services are substantially used for copyright infringement. It may be impossible to write a law that accounts for every conceivable technological innovations, however a judge will know an illegal act when she sees it.
From what's currently on the PPI site I cannot see how this is supposed to be outlawing technologies like Napster. Instead it seems to me like PPI has found the perfect median position in the Napster vs. RIAA debate. Let me explain how I came to this realization.1.) Napster wanted to claim that it is a common carrier under current law and thus should not be held responsible for the actions of it's users. What Napster has forgotten is that all common carriers (e.g. phone companies and ISPs) have personal information about their users so that if they are involved in illegal activities the users can be prosecuted. The PPI's first point is simply that if a company or service wants to claim innocence as a common carrier then it should be ready to cough up user info if the users participate in criminal endeavors through their service. After in the U.S. obscene phone callers and people who host illegal material on their ISP pages can be dealt with through their service providers, so why should Napster be different?
2.) What's wrong with a reasonable time frame for cease and desist? I see nothing wrong with a law that explicitly states how long service providers can give users to remove illegal material (especially since it would take 5 minutes in front of a computer to do this) as long as the time frame is suitable.
3.) Agreed. Make the law general enough so that it evolves with technology instead of creating a specific law to handle Napster, then another one to handle digital movies when bandwidth becomes ubiqitous and another to handle whatever else the future brings. This is very logical, after all the U.S. constitution is over 200 years old and has mainly survived due to it's general nature while countries with constitutions containing massive specificity and minutae seem to be in constant turmoil and have to deal with constantly changing laws and environments.
Basically, I can't see much wrong with PPI's recommendations and it certainly is a whole lot better for everyone than Napster's proposals (leave us alone, so our users can keep ripping artists off) or the RIAA's (explixitly ban anything that affects our bottom line) plus if implemented properly will also be able to deal with whatever other disruptive technologies that may appear in the future.
I just found out about bitchslapping from this post on sid=moderation, I only have 1 comment "Bitchslapping is wrong.". It seems that if you moderate someone with high karma's posts down as a troll, you're karma drops to a negative amount, this is stupid. I have triple digit karma, does this mean that I can't post blatantly inflammatory material from my account? No. So why shouldn't people be able to mod me down? Rob malda has some explaining to do.
In the recent "Our Attorney's Response To Microsoft" article, the Andover attorney stated that "as a general matter, it is the policy of Slashdot not to interfere with or censor the communications of its users." This is a blatant lie. "Bitchslapping," and "lameness filtering" ARE interfering with the communications of Slashdot's users.
How is this a lie? Slashdot employees don't moderate, slashdot readers do. I just moderated yesterday and I certainly don't work for Andover or Slashdot. Read the moderation page sometime to see exactly how slashdot moderation works. Moderation works like elections, a few do it and they represent the whole (yep, the same way the U.S. president gets elected by the electoral college and not the American public). If you have a problem with slashdot moderation (specifically bogus +5 scores)don't blame Rob Malda, blame the real culprit the average slashdot reader, moderation selects people at random and asks them their opinions, unfortunately as Signal 11 has shown the average slashdot reader is into demagoguery and dogma, not criticism or conflict.
Frankly if you want to discuss moderation I would suggest visiting the Slashdot Moderation Forum instead of posting offtopic rants to news articles.
From the article:
As chief financial officer of media company Landmark Communications, Ritter watched his company miss out on a golden opportunity to invest in Linux software seller Red Hat way before its successful initial public offering. Now he hopes to catch the second wave of the open-source software trend.
...
Great Bridge, though consisting of only four employees today, has grand ambitions, including a planned expansion to 120 employees and the ultimate possibility of going public, Ritter said. But the biggest challenge will be taking on giants such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Informix and Sybase, each of which have their own proprietary database programs.
First of all, a proclamation like this seems to me more like jumping on the open source bandwagon and hoping for a successful IPO (with no long term prospects of giving investors return on their value) than as a project that is destined to make Oracle and Sybase quake in their boots. It is particularly interesting that the a company that is supposedly Open Source oriented is stating all sorts of plans about IPOs and such and little or no talk about technology.
Hopefully I am wrong and this will be a company that will give back to the community in spades as opposed to a bunch of opportunists. Oracle databases currently cost several thousand dollars ($20,000 minimum price) while MSFT's cheap SQL server is about five thousand dollars. If a company can be created that will produce software as robust and functional as Oracle software (believe me that is a daunting task) and yet charge only support costs they may well sweep the DB market especially for small businesses. Of course, it will take a phenomenal amount of work (mayhap an impossible amount) for a four man company to compete with a company that has $6 billion in revenues and one of the most robust products in it's area. I wish them luck.
Um... what have you just proved? Simply because you can use hacks and kludges to simulate objects in Scheme does not make it an OO language. The fact that I can write recursive C code without assignments or global variables does not make C a functional programming language. Neither does that fact that I can create structs with function pointers make it an OO language.
For "real" OO, one must go to high-level languages like Smalltalk and Lisp
The above comment just defeated any hopes of you being taken seriously by anyone with a clue. Lisp is a function al programming language and not an object oriented language. Functional langauges emphasize a lack of state (no global variables or assignment operations) and referential transparency (functions always do the same thing if passed the same parameters) which is in conflict with Object Oriented programming concepts. The chances of Lisp being mistaken for an object oriented language by anyone who actually knows about Object Oriented Programming is zero.
Personally I hate SmallTalk. As the first post to this article indicated OOP's forte is solving large scale problems, primarily because it turns out that C becomes very difficult to maintain past 50,000 to a 100,000 lines of code. The typelessness of smalltalk (as exemplified by Squeak) makes one rely on the documentation practices of other programmers way too much. Typelessness means that if one does not choose variable names that are highly indicative of the the type purpose of an object as well as comment the code properly it will be difficult for maintainers to update the code. In programs with a high degree of coupling this can be extremely aggravating. Several times while trying to write applications in Squeak I hit my head against the brick wall when trying to find out what types a function accepted or what types it returned simply by looking at the code for the function. Sometimes it would take looking through methods in 4 to 6 classes before I could figure exactly what type had been passed to a function and what it returned, of course by then I would have forgotten why I was looking in the first place. Imagine reading a man page with all the types Xed out. AAAARGH.
From ABCNews:
The suspect was tracked down by locating the phone line that may have been used to inject the virus into the Internet.
Am I the only one that gets a mental image of a lurking figure with a big syringe sticking a needle into a router in the middle of the night?
Question: If Irene has confessed to writing the Virus why is her husband being arrested as well?
Actually, there is a reason. The stock values of many of these firms is based heavily on the expectations of future earnings. The lesson of the Microsoft case is that if a company is too successful, it will be punished.
FUD, FUD, FUD. Cisco (CSCO) is America's most valuable company and can be considered more successful and monopolistic than MSFT in every sense of the word. MSFT was punished not for being to successful or even for being a monopoly but for using it's success unfairly to damage competitors. Cisco (as well as Intel after making deals with the DOJ) is more successful than MSFT and is a technology company, yet it is not being harassed by the DOJ because "crush the competition by any means necessary" is not their guiding principle of operation.
a provocative, even scary new book by Yale economist Robert J. Shiller -- is sending shock waves through Wall Street. Shiller argues that the techno-fueled stock-market boom is based on emotion, rumor, pyschology and herd instincts (like excitement about the Net), rather than on any rational facts or data -- and that it can't last.
Duh. Most people realized this in 1999 and if they didn't then they would have after the dot com massacre of a few weeks ago. All it takes is one question to make people realize that the market is no longer fueled by hard facts but emotions and rumor.
Q: Why does the fact that MSFT is being split up mean that the shares of Yahoo, Oracle, Red Hat, Amazon, Sun etc. should all fall 10 to 25 per cent?
A: There is no logical reason that can be backed up by financial data or hard facts. But there are several emotional reasons why this could occur, chief of which is "If MSFT shares are falling then the shares of the stock I own will fall as well, I better sell.".
I have used CGI and C as well as Java servlets.
1.) CGI and C: Even though I am comfortable with C, I felt very uncomfortable using C to handle server side processing. C's little idiosyncracies (no array bounds checking, poor text processing, almost non-existent exception handling capabilities, etc) made it a poor language (in my opinion) for creating a large, maintainable, complex user-driven web experience. Also the fact that an SQL pre-processor is needed to deal with handling database interaction is also rather annoying.
2.) Java Servlets: Java's extensive libraries make it possible to develop the entire web experience with Java. This allows one to design the entire site from the ground up in a proper fashion (Yes, design with UML diagrams even). Servlets are rather slow the first time they are used because they have to be loaded into memory but after the first user hit, they execute very quickly (as fast as or faster than most CGI by certain benchmarks). Exception handling is another boon that allows even the most unexpected problems to be handled properly. For example, when developing a recent project I wrapped the entire program in a try...catch block which sent me an email with a stack trace whenever a run-time exception was caught, I also printed a message to the webpage with the a hyperlink informing the user to mail the error message to me just in case my mailer failed. This proved to be a whole lot more useful than the default message screen Apache provides on script errors and would have been impossible in C. The database interaction via JDBC was rather smooth and could be modularized into special DB accessor classes and servlets objects could be modularized for later reuse. The ability to use other aspects of Java easily (e.g. the XML parsing API) is also a big bonus. In fact mail.com now uses Java extensively on it's site.