I've been a ham since I was 12 (in 1989) and got seriously sidetracked with writing code over the past 12 years or so. It's been absolutely *amazing*.
However lately I set up my old station again, upgraded to a new Elecraft K3 transceiver, and have been having a blast. The Elecraft K3 has the best receiver ever tested by most of the labs that have run tests on it. It's an ingenious hybrid of analog and digital circuitry, created by a company in Aptos California. Until recently most of the highly desirable gear was from Japanese manufacturers, and with all the advantages in manufacturing that exist in Asia, I thought it unlikely that US firms would be able to continue to compete. But Elecraft has done a remarkable job.
Getting on the air again after about a decade off the air, I've noticed that CW (morse code) is more popular than ever. And better receiver tech has made it even more effective than it was in the past. Much of the equipment used by hams today has DSP, and for the first time I'm seriously considering getting into low power (QRP) operation just b/c of this. Finally, probably thanks to the removal of the requirement, morse code is appreciated as a fun activity.
Some fun things to do: HF Contesting is my favorite, particularly on CW (morse). Much like meditation, it clears the mind of distractions and I come away from it feeling refreshed and exhilarated. And CW is quite musical compared to RTTY which I find fatiguing to hear -- even though the computer is doing the "work" of decoding it, some audio is needed to help zero beat signals.
I've noticed that there has been a big movement toward scientific thinking about radio performance and antenna performance. Antennas and propagation are full of mystery, but they are ultimately constrained by the laws of nature, and hams are doing away with superstition and using antenna modeling software and the scientific method to create very cool designs, particularly with under-appreciated low-loss feedlines.
There is a young ham radio superstar, callsign NO3M who has destroyed the competition in some of the most hard core CW contests. This guy apparently races motorcycles as well. Highly impressive. This guy is the DHH of ham radio.
I think that among the type of people who love building things, who love understanding things, tinkering, etc., ham radio will always have an appeal. Worldwide hams are extremely nice and friendly people, who are always willing to help someone new. Sure there are a few kooks on 75m but I think 75m can safely be ignored except during (and immediately after) contests;) The rest is pure awesome.
In case you missed it, Wells Fargo was unable to process check card transactions on business accounts for over 48 hours a few weeks ago. Nobody there knew what was going on, and it cost a lot of small companies a LOT of money.
The main reason CSS has taken off is that one can feasibly write one sheet that mostly works in the mainstream browsers.
Back when one had to code for multiple versions of IE with poor CSS support it was just easier to hack together a mix of HTML layout and some inline CSS embellishments.
IE7 still has some significant CSS issues, but we're getting much closer.
Imagine when IE8 and Firefox 2 both support CSS3 nearly identically!
The CEO's job is not to sleep at night. If he's sleeping through the night then he's not doing his job.
You are the idea guy, so relish that position. Your job is to come up with the ideas and the CEOs is to make sure they HAPPEN. You can basically hang any operations/execution failure over his head, and he should welcome that responsibility and accountability.
One idea would be to have a scheduled change of CEO one year from now, and plan on shifting the executive roles among the two of you. Titles are fairly meaningless anyway.
Good luck!
Re:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole
on
Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1
·
· Score: 1
dude, what are you smoking?
Ajax sites dont have to be the least bit insecure... unless you code them that way. Rails makes it VERY EASY to code a secure Ajax app... RTFM
You are obviously just in a crabby mood and trying to start a flame war.
-- You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but you can let him out when he starts complaining about Rails.
Customers demand two things, good content and convenient content. DRM makes both of those possible.
Firms have no incentive to release content only to have it pirated. If you think about it, the more electronic distribution we get, the more content will be available and the easier it will be to obtain it.
How would you like it if someone stole your work and flooded the market with copies of it so that you couldn't make money from it?
Music piracy is stealing, plain and simple.
DRM systems that are inconvenient are simply bad business b/c they turn off customers.
DRM doesn't matter for serious pirates b/c there's enough evidence (and they make enough profit) to make going after them through the legal system make sense for victims of their theft. It's the million people stealing a song or DVD that necessitates DRM b/c it's not worth it to the company to go through archaic enforcement procedures (filing lawsuits, etc.) to recover the $15. That's why DRM is so great, it saves all kinds of money that would otherwise be spent on regulation and enforcement.
Already Microsoft has created subscription DRM that allows me to pay $6 per month through Yahoo Music Engine and download over 1.5 Million songs. That is unprecedented value to the consumer. For $100 I can buy a device that lets me bring a few gigs of this music around with me and plug it into my car or into my top-end stereo system or into headphones.
Without DRM this service wouldn't exist and I'd either have had to restrict my consumption of music drastically or else spend significantly more money on it. To me, the ability to make copy of all of my albums for 2000 friends isn't of enough value to make me want to resort to buying the music w/ traditional CDs.
The DMCA doesn't make sense because it introduces regulatory cost into the mix and creates a disincentive for DRM to truly evolve as a technology.
DRM is the future of content, and the future of content is for all prices to approach (but not possibly fully reach) absolutely free.
I agree with you that DRM shouldn't be protected by laws.
You are free to make your own purchasing decisions, and since there is clearly a demand for convenient and unrestrictive DRM, that will clearly be the future of DRM.
I think your notion will soon be refuted by the impact of competition on the DRM space.
We all know the RIAA is somewhat clueless about how things should be, and iTunes is the one DRM provider that has made the most concessions to the RIAA. I use iTunes because (due to the concessions) it has significantly more songs than the other services.
Yahoo Music engine is getting better and better, though, and it supports subscription DRM (which lets me re-download the content as many times as I want).
Yahoo has a minority market share now, but as better windows compatible mp3 players are built (to compete with the iPOd) and more content gets licensed via subscription DRM, Apple will be forced to play along and create customer friendly DRM.
The question to ask is, why hasn't apple already embraced subscription DRM as a way of blocking out competitors such as Yahoo?
I think the answer is that if it did that Apple would potentially get in hot water with the DOJ for anticompetitive practices, considering its present market share.
I just lost $300 in iTunes music that I had paid for when my hard drive crashed. Fortunately I had most of my music backed up. There's a chance Apple may let me download it again, but it's unlikely.
Truly good DRM won't create this kind of problem or the ones you describe. The technology and related infrastructure isn't quite there yet, but it will be soon. Ultimately, DRM will make it possible to put far more content online and for there to be a bigger incentive to produce innovation than there otherwise would have been.
That said, if it costs an organization or individual $300 for software and $300 again when the hardware dies, the product is a lot less competitive than a non-DRM'ed product. In order to compete, vendors using DRM will have to improve drastically. Subscription DRM (Yahoo Music Engine, etc.) is one huge innovation in the DRM/licensing space. It's not perfect for everyone, though, so further innovation will result in far more business for the company that is able to innovate the DRM approach that actually works.
I think the answer is to allow the reselling of purchased content. This would be possible using cryptography, so that the seller could be credited and the original owner could be compensated from each transaction. That would allow the forces of supply and demand to act on DRM'ed content in ways that they cannot now.
First off, I am a huge fan of Cato, and I subscribe to several of its publications.
But, the blurb is misleading. The DMCA isn't DRM technology it's simply regulation.
I do not like the DMCA, but I do like legitimate DRM technology. If someone engineers a product to make it difficult to copy, that is their business. If you copy it and violate copyright, that's their business, but we don't need an intermediate law saying it's illegal to even attempt to crack the DRM scheme.
In other words, the technology should stand on its own.
The idea of the.NET framework is to make it easy to create robust applications quickly, writing as little code as possible.
The goal of Operating System code is to be as fast as possible.
The two goals aren't best solved in the same way, which is why MS didn't solve them that way. The important thing is that you can use.NET to add on functionality to the core OS seamlessly.
Nobody has pointed out the biggest problem with PHP5, and it doesn't appear to be addressed in PHP6: Exception handling.
PHP5 came with exception handling like that found in most mature object oriented languages, but the problem is that most PHP functions do not use exceptions, they simply return false.
This makes it difficult to use exception handling at all, because you have to mix the old way and the new way if you want to leverage PHP's huge library of functions.
I think the solution would be to implement standard exception behavior for all of the old libraries and add a setting in php.ini to turn the behavior on or off.
It's easy to write a PHP script that will fail without throwing an exception or returning a boolean value that can be handled. This makes PHP very difficult to use if you need your code to be very robust and solid. I've resorted to using classes and putting some code in the destructor to clean up if the script terminates unexpectedly, but this is ugly and should be something that one can handle by enclosing the error-prone logic in a try/catch block.
Needless to say, this problem isn't always a major issue for websites, but if you're doing anything more complicated than simple db lookups and printing HTML, robustness matters and PHP's shortcomings really stand out.
Partially due to this problem I recently switched a fairly large project to Ruby on Rails and have been EXTREMELY pleased with how fast development has progressed. I was able to reproduce 2 months of PHP development in rails in 2 weeks, learning curve included. Ruby is a joy to program with, way easier than PHP, C#, Python, etc.
The fact that this topic is still under discussion shows how rediculous the FSF folks are to be pushing for a major fork in the open source community right as open source is starting to see some significant success.
Linus deserves tremendous credit for not backing down and for telling it like it is.
If you have any doubt about Linus' statement about RedHat's private keys, or if you disagree with him on that point, it's just further proof that V3 is a poorly worded, confusing mess.
Why segment the Open Source community like this? DRM is not a bad thing, and I truly resent those trying to push their Anti-DRM agenda because I think it fragments the community unnecessarily. Linus had the sense to invent Linux, and now he has the sense to defend it from those who want to capitalize on disagreement.
P.T. Barnum said, "If you want a crowd, start a fight". That is exactly what the FSF is trying to do.
Note to the FSF: Stop trying to start a fight and let Open Source proceed to dominate as a method of software licensing as it is on track to do if you don't fragment it unnecessarily.
iTunes isn't perfect. I just lost $300 worth of music that was on my iPod when my machine crashed that I hadn't otherwise backed up. Very annoying.
Why should my iPod's 30GB hard drive not be a fine "back up" for my music? Apple says it isn't, and so I lost the music. Even if you reinstall iTunes with the same user account it tries to format the iPod when you plug it in. It actually went in and deleted the music off the iPod behind the scenes even though I said not to format.
But sooner or later Apple will offer Subscription DRM, which is better than what it has now.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a ham since I was 12 (in 1989) and got seriously sidetracked with writing code over the past 12 years or so. It's been absolutely *amazing*.
However lately I set up my old station again, upgraded to a new Elecraft K3 transceiver, and have been having a blast. The Elecraft K3 has the best receiver ever tested by most of the labs that have run tests on it. It's an ingenious hybrid of analog and digital circuitry, created by a company in Aptos California. Until recently most of the highly desirable gear was from Japanese manufacturers, and with all the advantages in manufacturing that exist in Asia, I thought it unlikely that US firms would be able to continue to compete. But Elecraft has done a remarkable job.
Getting on the air again after about a decade off the air, I've noticed that CW (morse code) is more popular than ever. And better receiver tech has made it even more effective than it was in the past. Much of the equipment used by hams today has DSP, and for the first time I'm seriously considering getting into low power (QRP) operation just b/c of this. Finally, probably thanks to the removal of the requirement, morse code is appreciated as a fun activity.
Some fun things to do: HF Contesting is my favorite, particularly on CW (morse). Much like meditation, it clears the mind of distractions and I come away from it feeling refreshed and exhilarated. And CW is quite musical compared to RTTY which I find fatiguing to hear -- even though the computer is doing the "work" of decoding it, some audio is needed to help zero beat signals.
I've noticed that there has been a big movement toward scientific thinking about radio performance and antenna performance. Antennas and propagation are full of mystery, but they are ultimately constrained by the laws of nature, and hams are doing away with superstition and using antenna modeling software and the scientific method to create very cool designs, particularly with under-appreciated low-loss feedlines.
There is a young ham radio superstar, callsign NO3M who has destroyed the competition in some of the most hard core CW contests. This guy apparently races motorcycles as well. Highly impressive. This guy is the DHH of ham radio.
I think that among the type of people who love building things, who love understanding things, tinkering, etc., ham radio will always have an appeal. Worldwide hams are extremely nice and friendly people, who are always willing to help someone new. Sure there are a few kooks on 75m but I think 75m can safely be ignored except during (and immediately after) contests ;) The rest is pure awesome.
wake up and smell the github. Forking is not bad.
In case you missed it, Wells Fargo was unable to process check card transactions on business accounts for over 48 hours a few weeks ago. Nobody there knew what was going on, and it cost a lot of small companies a LOT of money.
Wells Fargo just had an outage lasting over 48 hours that impacted a huge number of customers.
Reading your comment and realizing that it comes from a proud Democrat or a proud Republican makes me cringe.
Are you really pro-War? Your party is (assuming you are a Republican or a Democrat)....
Do you really think the abortion issue is the most important social issue? Your party does.
Libertarianism (small-l, not the party) is simply the application of the scientific method to policy. Anything else is faith-based.
Small l libertarianism (not the party) is simply the scientific method applied to policy. All other approaches are faith based in one way or another.
Or view the speech and rebuttals here: here
you can add metadata... in the mime header!
Standardization, my friend. Vendor neutral. It will happen on the web soon. Microsoft will have no choice.
The main reason CSS has taken off is that one can feasibly write one sheet that mostly works in the mainstream browsers.
Back when one had to code for multiple versions of IE with poor CSS support it was just easier to hack together a mix of HTML layout and some inline CSS embellishments.
IE7 still has some significant CSS issues, but we're getting much closer.
Imagine when IE8 and Firefox 2 both support CSS3 nearly identically!
The CEO's job is not to sleep at night. If he's sleeping through the night then he's not doing his job.
You are the idea guy, so relish that position. Your job is to come up with the ideas and the CEOs is to make sure they HAPPEN. You can basically hang any operations/execution failure over his head, and he should welcome that responsibility and accountability.
One idea would be to have a scheduled change of CEO one year from now, and plan on shifting the executive roles among the two of you. Titles are fairly meaningless anyway.
Good luck!
dude, what are you smoking?
Ajax sites dont have to be the least bit insecure... unless you code them that way. Rails makes it VERY EASY to code a secure Ajax app... RTFM
You are obviously just in a crabby mood and trying to start a flame war.
--
You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but you can let him out when he starts complaining about Rails.
Customers demand two things, good content and convenient content. DRM makes both of those possible.
Firms have no incentive to release content only to have it pirated. If you think about it, the more electronic distribution we get, the more content will be available and the easier it will be to obtain it.
How would you like it if someone stole your work and flooded the market with copies of it so that you couldn't make money from it?
Music piracy is stealing, plain and simple.
DRM systems that are inconvenient are simply bad business b/c they turn off customers.
DRM doesn't matter for serious pirates b/c there's enough evidence (and they make enough profit) to make going after them through the legal system make sense for victims of their theft. It's the million people stealing a song or DVD that necessitates DRM b/c it's not worth it to the company to go through archaic enforcement procedures (filing lawsuits, etc.) to recover the $15. That's why DRM is so great, it saves all kinds of money that would otherwise be spent on regulation and enforcement.
Already Microsoft has created subscription DRM that allows me to pay $6 per month through Yahoo Music Engine and download over 1.5 Million songs. That is unprecedented value to the consumer. For $100 I can buy a device that lets me bring a few gigs of this music around with me and plug it into my car or into my top-end stereo system or into headphones.
Without DRM this service wouldn't exist and I'd either have had to restrict my consumption of music drastically or else spend significantly more money on it. To me, the ability to make copy of all of my albums for 2000 friends isn't of enough value to make me want to resort to buying the music w/ traditional CDs.
The DMCA doesn't make sense because it introduces regulatory cost into the mix and creates a disincentive for DRM to truly evolve as a technology.
DRM is the future of content, and the future of content is for all prices to approach (but not possibly fully reach) absolutely free.
I agree with you that DRM shouldn't be protected by laws.
You are free to make your own purchasing decisions, and since there is clearly a demand for convenient and unrestrictive DRM, that will clearly be the future of DRM.
I think your notion will soon be refuted by the impact of competition on the DRM space.
We all know the RIAA is somewhat clueless about how things should be, and iTunes is the one DRM provider that has made the most concessions to the RIAA. I use iTunes because (due to the concessions) it has significantly more songs than the other services.
Yahoo Music engine is getting better and better, though, and it supports subscription DRM (which lets me re-download the content as many times as I want).
Yahoo has a minority market share now, but as better windows compatible mp3 players are built (to compete with the iPOd) and more content gets licensed via subscription DRM, Apple will be forced to play along and create customer friendly DRM.
The question to ask is, why hasn't apple already embraced subscription DRM as a way of blocking out competitors such as Yahoo?
I think the answer is that if it did that Apple would potentially get in hot water with the DOJ for anticompetitive practices, considering its present market share.
Copyright is just an extension of the social contract to intangibles, DRM is a non-governnmental enforcement mechanism.
I never said that current DRM was good DRM...
I just lost $300 in iTunes music that I had paid for when my hard drive crashed. Fortunately I had most of my music backed up. There's a chance Apple may let me download it again, but it's unlikely.
Truly good DRM won't create this kind of problem or the ones you describe. The technology and related infrastructure isn't quite there yet, but it will be soon. Ultimately, DRM will make it possible to put far more content online and for there to be a bigger incentive to produce innovation than there otherwise would have been.
That said, if it costs an organization or individual $300 for software and $300 again when the hardware dies, the product is a lot less competitive than a non-DRM'ed product. In order to compete, vendors using DRM will have to improve drastically. Subscription DRM (Yahoo Music Engine, etc.) is one huge innovation in the DRM/licensing space. It's not perfect for everyone, though, so further innovation will result in far more business for the company that is able to innovate the DRM approach that actually works.
I think the answer is to allow the reselling of purchased content. This would be possible using cryptography, so that the seller could be credited and the original owner could be compensated from each transaction. That would allow the forces of supply and demand to act on DRM'ed content in ways that they cannot now.
I agree
First off, I am a huge fan of Cato, and I subscribe to several of its publications.
But, the blurb is misleading. The DMCA isn't DRM technology it's simply regulation.
I do not like the DMCA, but I do like legitimate DRM technology. If someone engineers a product to make it difficult to copy, that is their business. If you copy it and violate copyright, that's their business, but we don't need an intermediate law saying it's illegal to even attempt to crack the DRM scheme.
In other words, the technology should stand on its own.
The idea of the .NET framework is to make it easy to create robust applications quickly, writing as little code as possible.
.NET to add on functionality to the core OS seamlessly.
The goal of Operating System code is to be as fast as possible.
The two goals aren't best solved in the same way, which is why MS didn't solve them that way. The important thing is that you can use
Seems strange to just halt the interpreter under any circumstances. Why not give the programmer the choice about what happens?
C# support exceptions very similar to Java's and they're not required, but they are available to create robust code when it is needed, unlike PHP.
Ruby also has a similar mechanism with slightly different syntax; optional but highly useful.
Nobody has pointed out the biggest problem with PHP5, and it doesn't appear to be addressed in PHP6: Exception handling.
PHP5 came with exception handling like that found in most mature object oriented languages, but the problem is that most PHP functions do not use exceptions, they simply return false.
This makes it difficult to use exception handling at all, because you have to mix the old way and the new way if you want to leverage PHP's huge library of functions.
I think the solution would be to implement standard exception behavior for all of the old libraries and add a setting in php.ini to turn the behavior on or off.
It's easy to write a PHP script that will fail without throwing an exception or returning a boolean value that can be handled. This makes PHP very difficult to use if you need your code to be very robust and solid. I've resorted to using classes and putting some code in the destructor to clean up if the script terminates unexpectedly, but this is ugly and should be something that one can handle by enclosing the error-prone logic in a try/catch block.
Needless to say, this problem isn't always a major issue for websites, but if you're doing anything more complicated than simple db lookups and printing HTML, robustness matters and PHP's shortcomings really stand out.
Partially due to this problem I recently switched a fairly large project to Ruby on Rails and have been EXTREMELY pleased with how fast development has progressed. I was able to reproduce 2 months of PHP development in rails in 2 weeks, learning curve included. Ruby is a joy to program with, way easier than PHP, C#, Python, etc.
The fact that this topic is still under discussion shows how rediculous the FSF folks are to be pushing for a major fork in the open source community right as open source is starting to see some significant success.
Linus deserves tremendous credit for not backing down and for telling it like it is.
If you have any doubt about Linus' statement about RedHat's private keys, or if you disagree with him on that point, it's just further proof that V3 is a poorly worded, confusing mess.
Why segment the Open Source community like this? DRM is not a bad thing, and I truly resent those trying to push their Anti-DRM agenda because I think it fragments the community unnecessarily. Linus had the sense to invent Linux, and now he has the sense to defend it from those who want to capitalize on disagreement.
P.T. Barnum said, "If you want a crowd, start a fight". That is exactly what the FSF is trying to do.
Note to the FSF: Stop trying to start a fight and let Open Source proceed to dominate as a method of software licensing as it is on track to do if you don't fragment it unnecessarily.
the parent is Wise! mod it up if it gets below a 5!
I think you just proved my argument.
iTunes isn't perfect. I just lost $300 worth of music that was on my iPod when my machine crashed that I hadn't otherwise backed up. Very annoying.
Why should my iPod's 30GB hard drive not be a fine "back up" for my music? Apple says it isn't, and so I lost the music. Even if you reinstall iTunes with the same user account it tries to format the iPod when you plug it in. It actually went in and deleted the music off the iPod behind the scenes even though I said not to format.
But sooner or later Apple will offer Subscription DRM, which is better than what it has now.