As has been mentioned, radio stations pay to broadcast stuff, and that makes the broadcast (and listening) legal. Copying it is still illegal as far as I understand, but nobody really cares too much given the relatively low quality of most broadcasts. (Sadly, the FM standard allows for better than is used.)
And as an aside, your post took me back quite a few years--I remember setting up my Candle tape player up beside the speaker to record my brother's Heart albums. Now, a quarter century later, I bought the same albums (Dreamboat Annie, Dog & Butterfly) on CD for about twice as much as I spent on the blank tapes back then.
"Copyright infringment happens at libraries and on the Internet, but neither the library or the Internet are at fault. The users are."
That is exactly - EXACTLY my point!
I honestly don't see that the tax difference is a relevant issue--Either system provides material, neither system validates copyright enfringement. If the material is available, then some people will violate the copyright. Those people are at fault. The internet isn't at fault. The libraries aren't at fault. The violators are.
Gah! People keep getting hung up on the differences in medium!
You go to the library, you check out an album, and you rip it at home. Or you download a song, and keep it. THERE'S NO DIFFERENCE! Furthermore, internet file sharing is no more guilty of destroying sales than libraries. People downloading albums instead of buying them MIGHT affect sales (negatively), but no more than libraries.
Now what the RIAA did to villianise file sharing brought it so much to the forefront that there's a significant difference in effect. That's what did it though--the publicity of the RIAA caused massive music piracy--not the internet.
Indeed, it IS what sampling is all about. That was indirectly my point, even as I attacked it.
The thing is, people sort of imply that they download a song once to specifically decide whether they'll buy the album, and delete it immediatly if the answer is no. That's obviously BS for most (again, I said most--don't harass me you utterly moral 1-3% of the population) people.
I disagree that radio is a better analogy though. Either one is a (loosly speaking) playback device--the medium is irrelevant. The critical difference is the CHOICE you have with selecting your own tunes from the library vs. listening to whatever is on the radio. The internet is definitely closer to the library in this case, especially since copies are made from the radio, the internet, and the library materials equally in the end.
At any rate, I was making the analogy for exactly the reason you indicate--there's nothing particularly nasty or new about P2P file sharing.
OK, most people don't REALLY plan on buying more than one album in 10, 20, 50, 100 that they sample. It's not that they're saying to themselves, "Well I'll listen to this song and the maybe buy the album." No, they say "I want to here some 'X' today." Sometimes 'X' blows them away, and they DO buy the album.
The internet file sharing model isn't 'listen and buy,' it's just 'listen.'
The question we should be asking ourselves is why exactly is this any different from the library?
Re:Loss of jobs and a nightmare thread of thought
on
U.S. Jobs Jumping Ship
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OK unlike most of the other pro-US comments, this one isn't stupid, rabid, paranoid, or racist.
However, I still think it's wrong.
Let me throw some company's names at you: Sony. Hitachi. Toshiba. JVC.
How much of the technology of the last 40 years has come from the US and how much from Japan? I'd say the US has the edge, but not by much, and certainly not a VAST edge.
So there's advanced technology (including R&D) in Japan. And in India. US companies are outsourcing there, to their own subsidiaries which pay about 5x what local companies can pay. (which is still 1/7 what they'd have to pay local Americans.) Those workers CAN'T easily walk away from the jobs because they won't be able to afford it. (Fundamental rule of economics: Whatever your salary, you can't go back again. As a general and broad rule, it's almost flawless). If they do, and nobody else is skilled enough and willing enough to step up to the plate and get paid 5x what they were yesterday, then the companies have no choice but to bring the work back into the US. And hire US workers again.
Unlike with oil, this is possible with skills. In fact, moving the resources around the world is dead simple when you're dealing with people and skills, instead of fixed items (oil, lumber, etc.). This is not that alarming of an issue.
Besides, this is a period of transition. Every time there's a period of transition (particularly true in the US right now--more than any country or time since WWII), people get worried about how it will destroy the entire economy. It doesn't. The economy plods along, new jobs become available (witness the HUGE tech market, when it was once expected that high-tech would make 3/4 of the workforce unemployed), and society changes. Yes if YOU get laid off, then it's hard on YOU and your family. Not the country though, you.
As a final note, I take exception to your last comment:
"We need to show what made the United States a great country - hard work, perserverance, and a good brain."
When the US was a great country (I'll withhold judgement for the moment on whether it still is), these three were crucial factors--along with personal responsibilty. Nowadays however, the US is notorious for demanding instant gratification, and not being willing to work for it. YOu've still got good brains, but your politicians and media would LOVE to destroy them. When you have zero out of three (or four), then what?
Frankly, I'd worry much more about your psychotic lying dictator and the xenophobic media you have than any long-term job drain. They're going to destroy the US far faster and more effectively than a help desk in India.
Bug-free software is obviously an ideal goal, but it's not the only thing that measures code quality, in my mind.
Do you forsee any metrics in the (near) future to measure other aspects of code quality? Performance is obviously important, but what about things like code style, modularity, and 'cleanliness?'
Hmm. Interesting stuff. Don't know where to agree or disagree exactly, but...
On the illegality issue, are you sure? Not being American, I'm not familiar with the R-P act, but from a cursory read of it, it sounds like it allows this sort of behavior. Different time frames or circumstances lead to effectively different consumers. If ALL other factors are equal, then charging two consumers different prices seems illegal. If (in the airline case) someone buys for a higher travel period, and/or books a short time ahead instead of giving months of lead, then the circumstances are different, meaning that the product sold is different.
As for the 'pissing people off' factor...
I live close to a resort. In the summer, it's a hiking mecca. In the winter, it's skiiers paradise. In spring and fall, hotel rooms sell for half of their "normal" price.
I travel in the fall. Am I going to complain? No. The people who come to ski know that they're coming in the peak season. Are they going to complain about getting a room? No.
Understand here, that I don't necessarily disagree with you. I'm curious about the legal aspects, and am...undecided on the rest.
"...the whole KDE vs Gnome thing is completly stupid..."
YES!!! Yes yes yes yes YES!!! At least one other slashdot reader gets it!
Religious wars over OSes, apps, or anything else in the computer world are completely stupid! Infighting, underhanded competition, and general nastiness are the things that drive people AWAY from otherwise good solutions.
Ummm...that's exactly what I was saying. That it WAS nonobvious.
It's obvious now. So are digital storage, hard drives, and LCDs. Everything is obvious in retrospect. At the time, all of these things were ground breaking discoveries or ways of thinking.
Honest and (maybe) balanced comments...
on
Another Garbage Patent
·
· Score: 3, Informative
OK, does anyone remember when Apple came out with the garbage can? I'll give you a hint: It was part of the whole package which signalled an entirely new era in computing.
That's significant. A new era! The beginning of something other than EVERYTHING that had proceeded it. (Yeah, Xerox notwithstanding. That's another story.) The garbage can WAS a completely different, new, and innovative idea.
Do they deserve a patent for it? Hmm. Tough call. Would I be as fair to Microsoft if they'd invented it? Tougher call--I've tried to be fair to MS when they do something creative or right, but it's been such a rare event that I can't promise unbiased commentary.
But as long as a general patent like this is legally valid, I'd say that this specific patent is valid. At the time, it was creative enough to change computing, and that's impressive.
I don't see why Linux has 'a much larger market appeal and following than any commercial UNIX.' I'd love to know what _precisely_ you mean by this, and see some evidence to back it up.
Solaris is free for single-processor machines. Solaris is free if you buy a system from Sun. HP-UX is free, with the ownership of an HP server. Solaris x86 is free. Which brings up another point...
You can run Solaris on a commodity Intel machine. And if you're going to be running a commercial server, Sun/HP/IBM equipment isn't really any cheaper than REAL Intel-based server equipment.
With Linux, you are in charge of your computer, whereas on most UNICES you are typically confined to be an "l-user"
I don't even know what you mean here. If you've got root on your own machine, you've got root on your own machine be it Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, *BSD, or whatever. It's a flat playing field.
"Linux feels very much like DOS/Win in the 80s/early 90s, but is much sturdier and richer, while a typical UNIX account feels like a mainframe from the 60s/70s."
Ditto. GNOME 2.0 is the same on Solaris or any other platform as it is on Linux. CDE is nasty, but it's a long long long ways from the mainframe world. You said yourself, "Command-line-wise, almost none...GUI-wise there are also no major differences"
"Linux is more for an average Joe who wants to run his own small server or engineering workstation."
Not really. Linux is more for an average hobbyist/geek who wants to play with a Unix-like system. It's got a few small niche roles in production where it fits beautifully, but it's not a professional OS. It's still predominantly a hobbyist toy.
The "old" open source stuff that's been borrowed is probably the stuff that works best. Top, BIND, etc. etc. work just fine on almost any platform now.
However, many of the recent OSS tools (i.e. since Linux became popular and OpenSource became a religion) suffer from one problem: They were written ON Linux FOR Linux by programmers who don't know anything BUT Linux. The preliminary action for building too many of these tools seems to be "on any system other than Linux, install all of these other tools to make it behave just like Linux." gcc is required. GNU Make is required. Some set of obscure libraries is required.
I'm not saying that these people are bad programmers or that the tools are bad, but there's far less of an emphasis on the ability to cross-platform compile than there used to be.
Or in other words, don't blame HP-UX for not being Linux.
He points out specific items which HE considers weaknesses of GNOME. Many of them are more things he doesn't like, rather than things that are really wrong with GNOME.
And while it's true that he does make some relevant and important points, they're overshadowed by the sophmoric tone of the article. Saying "GNOME sucks, and so it should be called LAME" is well...lame. Pathetic. Beavis-and-Butthead intelligence.
Understand that I'm not trying to be an apologist for GNOME. It does have flaws. It isn't perfect. It should be improved. The same is true for KDE and any other product on the planet for that matter. This article, even if it did bring up a few relevant points, did so in an entirely immature and nonconstructive manner. That's my big objection.
Oops. Right you are. Lorne Elliot is another Canadian Lorne, who hosted "Madly off in all directions," and wrote such classic songs as "When grandpa played the six-string, he sucked!"
The scripts are already written. I can't imagine any other reason to revive it.
stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid!!!
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
OK, I like GNOME. I'm a Solaris admin, and it's a great desktop to use daily, vs. the horror of CDE.
This guy doesn't like GNOME? Fine! Go away! Use KDE! Use a command line, use CDE or Openwindows (in the Unix and Sun world), use whatever you want. I don't give a shit what you use, or why you don't like GNOME! Nobody else does either.
Somehow too much of the Linux community has turned into evangelical zealots, bent on conquering the world. At one point the Linux cry was that it was all about CHOICE! Now that they're gaining strength, it's all about CRUSHING THE EVIL MS EMPIRE. Drill one level down, and it's all about CRUSHING THE OTHER UNICES (Sun, HP, IBM, etc.). Beyond that, it moves to CRUSHING THE INFIDEL DISTROS which happen to be everything other than the one you use. Then we get to the level of CRUSHING ALL PRETENDERS TO THE ONE TRUE DESKTOP.
Well bugger it. Variation is good. Non-uniformity makes for healthy competition and robustness. Did this guy read about one of the root servers being changed away from BIND? Did he understand WHY they did that? (Hint: It wasn't because BIND was inferior)
This stupid squabbling is pointless. Articles like this shouldn't even be published by a supposedly newsworthy organisation.
Understand that this opinion is coming from a stalwart 'real books forever!' type. I've never liked reading documentation on a computer, when a book is available. (and don't even get me started on proofreading onscreen vs. a red pen and a cup of coffee.)
This sounds like a cool idea for tech books. There are too many books I've spent LOTS of money on that I use for six months, and then dump. The StarOffice 5.2 book (at $80) was a fine example, except that I gave up on the whole damned program after about six weeks. (and wanted to after six days).
Tech moves ahead, and too many books get obsolete fast. Just go to a used bookstore and look at the useless old crap books (50 copies of DOS 5.0 for dummies) that consumed trees. This is clearly a Better Way, and it sounds like they've done a good job of implementing it.
But the pop music industry is. "Hits" are cranked out to sound just like MORE OF THE SAME, and then mercilessly pushed onto radio, through bribes and strongarming. There is no art, no craft, no chance in the pop industry. This program just aims to streamline that path.
And me? Well I'm listening to Blonde on Blonde at the moment. Tom Waits later. Thank God for the music industry making Tom Waits a household name! Oh, wait...
I've seen quite a few comments already about people who are willing to turn the other cheek, because it's Google.
This is wrong. If a patent is bad, it should be slammed no matter WHO gets it.
BUT...the counterpoint is that this is NOT a bad patent. You may all remember when google first came out. We were using it early on, because even in early beta, it was MILES better than any other lousy search engine. (not even considering the cleanliness of the page.) What they had was an innovative, new, and non-obvious way of searching the web. That's patentable stuff!
FURTHERMORE...this isn't directly a software patent--it's a patent on an algorithm. That gets into a morally squishy area for some, but it's a clearer area at least than patenting a piece of software.
So let's not turn the other cheek--let's put the Google patent under the knife, and find that it comes up...acceptable.
I'm not the original poster, but I can offer an opinion.
War in Iraq is now inevitable. Let's just get that out of the way now.
But in the first place, there was never a reason to start the process that's now leading to war in Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction? So how come the US can have them, and Iraq can't? How come North Korea isn't even getting slapped on the wrist for restarting their nuclear program, against UN directives?
The biggest argument against war with Iraq is that there's no reason for it, unless you're willing to apply the same reason equally across the board and label everyone else equally guilty. Iraq has oil, Iraq has a dictator that takes pride in annoying/embarassing the US, and Iraq is a good focal point to distract the populace from the failure of taking down al Qaeda (particularly bin Laden).
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, it did. Although perhaps a lesser one.
As has been mentioned, radio stations pay to broadcast stuff, and that makes the broadcast (and listening) legal. Copying it is still illegal as far as I understand, but nobody really cares too much given the relatively low quality of most broadcasts. (Sadly, the FM standard allows for better than is used.)
And as an aside, your post took me back quite a few years--I remember setting up my Candle tape player up beside the speaker to record my brother's Heart albums. Now, a quarter century later, I bought the same albums (Dreamboat Annie, Dog & Butterfly) on CD for about twice as much as I spent on the blank tapes back then.
"Copyright infringment happens at libraries and on the Internet, but neither the library or the Internet are at fault. The users are."
That is exactly - EXACTLY my point!
I honestly don't see that the tax difference is a relevant issue--Either system provides material, neither system validates copyright enfringement. If the material is available, then some people will violate the copyright. Those people are at fault. The internet isn't at fault. The libraries aren't at fault. The violators are.
Gah! People keep getting hung up on the differences in medium!
You go to the library, you check out an album, and you rip it at home. Or you download a song, and keep it. THERE'S NO DIFFERENCE! Furthermore, internet file sharing is no more guilty of destroying sales than libraries. People downloading albums instead of buying them MIGHT affect sales (negatively), but no more than libraries.
Now what the RIAA did to villianise file sharing brought it so much to the forefront that there's a significant difference in effect. That's what did it though--the publicity of the RIAA caused massive music piracy--not the internet.
Indeed, it IS what sampling is all about. That was indirectly my point, even as I attacked it.
The thing is, people sort of imply that they download a song once to specifically decide whether they'll buy the album, and delete it immediatly if the answer is no. That's obviously BS for most (again, I said most--don't harass me you utterly moral 1-3% of the population) people.
I disagree that radio is a better analogy though. Either one is a (loosly speaking) playback device--the medium is irrelevant. The critical difference is the CHOICE you have with selecting your own tunes from the library vs. listening to whatever is on the radio. The internet is definitely closer to the library in this case, especially since copies are made from the radio, the internet, and the library materials equally in the end.
At any rate, I was making the analogy for exactly the reason you indicate--there's nothing particularly nasty or new about P2P file sharing.
OK, most people don't REALLY plan on buying more than one album in 10, 20, 50, 100 that they sample. It's not that they're saying to themselves, "Well I'll listen to this song and the maybe buy the album." No, they say "I want to here some 'X' today." Sometimes 'X' blows them away, and they DO buy the album.
The internet file sharing model isn't 'listen and buy,' it's just 'listen.'
The question we should be asking ourselves is why exactly is this any different from the library?
OK unlike most of the other pro-US comments, this one isn't stupid, rabid, paranoid, or racist.
However, I still think it's wrong.
Let me throw some company's names at you: Sony. Hitachi. Toshiba. JVC.
How much of the technology of the last 40 years has come from the US and how much from Japan? I'd say the US has the edge, but not by much, and certainly not a VAST edge.
So there's advanced technology (including R&D) in Japan. And in India. US companies are outsourcing there, to their own subsidiaries which pay about 5x what local companies can pay. (which is still 1/7 what they'd have to pay local Americans.) Those workers CAN'T easily walk away from the jobs because they won't be able to afford it. (Fundamental rule of economics: Whatever your salary, you can't go back again. As a general and broad rule, it's almost flawless). If they do, and nobody else is skilled enough and willing enough to step up to the plate and get paid 5x what they were yesterday, then the companies have no choice but to bring the work back into the US. And hire US workers again.
Unlike with oil, this is possible with skills. In fact, moving the resources around the world is dead simple when you're dealing with people and skills, instead of fixed items (oil, lumber, etc.). This is not that alarming of an issue.
Besides, this is a period of transition. Every time there's a period of transition (particularly true in the US right now--more than any country or time since WWII), people get worried about how it will destroy the entire economy. It doesn't. The economy plods along, new jobs become available (witness the HUGE tech market, when it was once expected that high-tech would make 3/4 of the workforce unemployed), and society changes. Yes if YOU get laid off, then it's hard on YOU and your family. Not the country though, you.
As a final note, I take exception to your last comment:
"We need to show what made the United States a great country - hard work, perserverance, and a good brain."
When the US was a great country (I'll withhold judgement for the moment on whether it still is), these three were crucial factors--along with personal responsibilty. Nowadays however, the US is notorious for demanding instant gratification, and not being willing to work for it. YOu've still got good brains, but your politicians and media would LOVE to destroy them. When you have zero out of three (or four), then what?
Frankly, I'd worry much more about your psychotic lying dictator and the xenophobic media you have than any long-term job drain. They're going to destroy the US far faster and more effectively than a help desk in India.
I'll tell you what's bizarre about this story. The fact that /. is spending SOO much time talking about it, and discussing the implications.
/. is famous for beating trivia into the ground, but expending effort on this story? That's BIZARRE!
I mean sure
Bug-free software is obviously an ideal goal, but it's not the only thing that measures code quality, in my mind.
Do you forsee any metrics in the (near) future to measure other aspects of code quality? Performance is obviously important, but what about things like code style, modularity, and 'cleanliness?'
Hmm. Interesting stuff. Don't know where to agree or disagree exactly, but...
On the illegality issue, are you sure? Not being American, I'm not familiar with the R-P act, but from a cursory read of it, it sounds like it allows this sort of behavior. Different time frames or circumstances lead to effectively different consumers. If ALL other factors are equal, then charging two consumers different prices seems illegal. If (in the airline case) someone buys for a higher travel period, and/or books a short time ahead instead of giving months of lead, then the circumstances are different, meaning that the product sold is different.
As for the 'pissing people off' factor...
I live close to a resort. In the summer, it's a hiking mecca. In the winter, it's skiiers paradise. In spring and fall, hotel rooms sell for half of their "normal" price.
I travel in the fall. Am I going to complain? No. The people who come to ski know that they're coming in the peak season. Are they going to complain about getting a room? No.
Understand here, that I don't necessarily disagree with you. I'm curious about the legal aspects, and am...undecided on the rest.
"...the whole KDE vs Gnome thing is completly stupid..."
YES!!! Yes yes yes yes YES!!! At least one other slashdot reader gets it!
Religious wars over OSes, apps, or anything else in the computer world are completely stupid! Infighting, underhanded competition, and general nastiness are the things that drive people AWAY from otherwise good solutions.
Ummm...that's exactly what I was saying. That it WAS nonobvious.
It's obvious now. So are digital storage, hard drives, and LCDs. Everything is obvious in retrospect. At the time, all of these things were ground breaking discoveries or ways of thinking.
OK, does anyone remember when Apple came out with the garbage can? I'll give you a hint: It was part of the whole package which signalled an entirely new era in computing.
That's significant. A new era! The beginning of something other than EVERYTHING that had proceeded it. (Yeah, Xerox notwithstanding. That's another story.) The garbage can WAS a completely different, new, and innovative idea.
Do they deserve a patent for it? Hmm. Tough call. Would I be as fair to Microsoft if they'd invented it? Tougher call--I've tried to be fair to MS when they do something creative or right, but it's been such a rare event that I can't promise unbiased commentary.
But as long as a general patent like this is legally valid, I'd say that this specific patent is valid. At the time, it was creative enough to change computing, and that's impressive.
I thought it said the dominatrix!
Now I'm all hot and bothered.
Oog. Where to start?
I don't see why Linux has 'a much larger market appeal and following than any commercial UNIX.' I'd love to know what _precisely_ you mean by this, and see some evidence to back it up.
Solaris is free for single-processor machines. Solaris is free if you buy a system from Sun. HP-UX is free, with the ownership of an HP server. Solaris x86 is free. Which brings up another point...
You can run Solaris on a commodity Intel machine. And if you're going to be running a commercial server, Sun/HP/IBM equipment isn't really any cheaper than REAL Intel-based server equipment.
With Linux, you are in charge of your computer, whereas on most UNICES you are typically
confined to be an "l-user"
I don't even know what you mean here. If you've got root on your own machine, you've got root on your own machine be it Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, *BSD, or whatever. It's a flat playing field.
"Linux feels very much like DOS/Win in the 80s/early 90s, but is much sturdier and richer, while
a typical UNIX account feels like a mainframe from the 60s/70s."
Ditto. GNOME 2.0 is the same on Solaris or any other platform as it is on Linux. CDE is nasty, but it's a long long long ways from the mainframe world. You said yourself, "Command-line-wise, almost none...GUI-wise there are
also no major differences"
"Linux is more for an average Joe who
wants to run his own small server or engineering workstation."
Not really. Linux is more for an average hobbyist/geek who wants to play with a Unix-like system. It's got a few small niche roles in production where it fits beautifully, but it's not a professional OS. It's still predominantly a hobbyist toy.
I think I can answer that question.
The "old" open source stuff that's been borrowed is probably the stuff that works best. Top, BIND, etc. etc. work just fine on almost any platform now.
However, many of the recent OSS tools (i.e. since Linux became popular and OpenSource became a religion) suffer from one problem: They were written ON Linux FOR Linux by programmers who don't know anything BUT Linux. The preliminary action for building too many of these tools seems to be "on any system other than Linux, install all of these other tools to make it behave just like Linux." gcc is required. GNU Make is required. Some set of obscure libraries is required.
I'm not saying that these people are bad programmers or that the tools are bad, but there's far less of an emphasis on the ability to cross-platform compile than there used to be.
Or in other words, don't blame HP-UX for not being Linux.
Nice reply.
The parent is half right. The apology is funny on its own. The apology as delivered by Rick Mercer is downright hilarious.
Was that really worth calling someone an asswad for?
I disagree, for the most part.
He points out specific items which HE considers weaknesses of GNOME. Many of them are more things he doesn't like, rather than things that are really wrong with GNOME.
And while it's true that he does make some relevant and important points, they're overshadowed by the sophmoric tone of the article. Saying "GNOME sucks, and so it should be called LAME" is well...lame. Pathetic. Beavis-and-Butthead intelligence.
Understand that I'm not trying to be an apologist for GNOME. It does have flaws. It isn't perfect. It should be improved. The same is true for KDE and any other product on the planet for that matter. This article, even if it did bring up a few relevant points, did so in an entirely immature and nonconstructive manner. That's my big objection.
Oops. Right you are. Lorne Elliot is another Canadian Lorne, who hosted "Madly off in all directions," and wrote such classic songs as "When grandpa played the six-string, he sucked!"
No that's wrong too. His name was Lorne Greene. If you're going to correct someone on spelling, please get it right yourself.
Lorne Greene...GREEN card! Coincidence?
Lorne Greene...Lorne Elliot! Coincidence?
The scripts are already written. I can't imagine any other reason to revive it.
OK, I like GNOME. I'm a Solaris admin, and it's a great desktop to use daily, vs. the horror of CDE.
This guy doesn't like GNOME? Fine! Go away! Use KDE! Use a command line, use CDE or Openwindows (in the Unix and Sun world), use whatever you want. I don't give a shit what you use, or why you don't like GNOME! Nobody else does either.
Somehow too much of the Linux community has turned into evangelical zealots, bent on conquering the world. At one point the Linux cry was that it was all about CHOICE! Now that they're gaining strength, it's all about CRUSHING THE EVIL MS EMPIRE. Drill one level down, and it's all about CRUSHING THE OTHER UNICES (Sun, HP, IBM, etc.). Beyond that, it moves to CRUSHING THE INFIDEL DISTROS which happen to be everything other than the one you use. Then we get to the level of CRUSHING ALL PRETENDERS TO THE ONE TRUE DESKTOP.
Well bugger it. Variation is good. Non-uniformity makes for healthy competition and robustness. Did this guy read about one of the root servers being changed away from BIND? Did he understand WHY they did that? (Hint: It wasn't because BIND was inferior)
This stupid squabbling is pointless. Articles like this shouldn't even be published by a supposedly newsworthy organisation.
Understand that this opinion is coming from a stalwart 'real books forever!' type. I've never liked reading documentation on a computer, when a book is available. (and don't even get me started on proofreading onscreen vs. a red pen and a cup of coffee.)
This sounds like a cool idea for tech books. There are too many books I've spent LOTS of money on that I use for six months, and then dump. The StarOffice 5.2 book (at $80) was a fine example, except that I gave up on the whole damned program after about six weeks. (and wanted to after six days).
Tech moves ahead, and too many books get obsolete fast. Just go to a used bookstore and look at the useless old crap books (50 copies of DOS 5.0 for dummies) that consumed trees. This is clearly a Better Way, and it sounds like they've done a good job of implementing it.
Music is not a science, true.
But the pop music industry is. "Hits" are cranked out to sound just like MORE OF THE SAME, and then mercilessly pushed onto radio, through bribes and strongarming. There is no art, no craft, no chance in the pop industry. This program just aims to streamline that path.
And me? Well I'm listening to Blonde on Blonde at the moment. Tom Waits later. Thank God for the music industry making Tom Waits a household name! Oh, wait...
I've seen quite a few comments already about people who are willing to turn the other cheek, because it's Google.
This is wrong. If a patent is bad, it should be slammed no matter WHO gets it.
BUT...the counterpoint is that this is NOT a bad patent. You may all remember when google first came out. We were using it early on, because even in early beta, it was MILES better than any other lousy search engine. (not even considering the cleanliness of the page.) What they had was an innovative, new, and non-obvious way of searching the web. That's patentable stuff!
FURTHERMORE...this isn't directly a software patent--it's a patent on an algorithm. That gets into a morally squishy area for some, but it's a clearer area at least than patenting a piece of software.
So let's not turn the other cheek--let's put the Google patent under the knife, and find that it comes up...acceptable.
I'm not the original poster, but I can offer an opinion.
War in Iraq is now inevitable. Let's just get that out of the way now.
But in the first place, there was never a reason to start the process that's now leading to war in Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction? So how come the US can have them, and Iraq can't? How come North Korea isn't even getting slapped on the wrist for restarting their nuclear program, against UN directives?
The biggest argument against war with Iraq is that there's no reason for it, unless you're willing to apply the same reason equally across the board and label everyone else equally guilty. Iraq has oil, Iraq has a dictator that takes pride in annoying/embarassing the US, and Iraq is a good focal point to distract the populace from the failure of taking down al Qaeda (particularly bin Laden).