On the other hand, a small point that the MPAA has is that without an easy distribution system it would be harder for the people at fault (the person that encoded it, the numerous people that distribute it and the person that downloads it) to spread it around. That said I hardly think they can say piracy really affected them in any great way when they had the biggest opening day in history.
This doesn't mean that a script from the web won't do it for them. If they don't know they need the permission, often they don't need the permission and shouldn't have it.
Case and point, I set my wife as a lua user on our windows xp box at home and she still hasn't noticed any difference.
Even if user data is the most important thing, if you run as root on a multi user box you put every users data at risk instead of only your own.
The other thing, and this isn't easy to do in many OS's, that would be nice is granular escalation of privledge. As you point out in your SQL example, if you need someone to do inserts you shouldn't have to allow them to delete.
Thats because when you leave the choices totally up to the user with unsafe defaults, the world complains that the product is very very very unsecure and needs to be fixed.
Of course now that the defaults are in a more secure state the people that weren't complaining before start to complain.
The bad part of the new version of windows is the apps that don't work correctly with it. Its too bad that the apps were unable to be updated in a timely manner.
Has anyone looked into writing a script that sets the registry keys that MS uses to check for the existance of SP2 to say that SP2 is already installed? This would block it from automatically installing I think.
Because in general when the grammar is abiguous the grammar checker doesn't seem to make any suggestions. I think this is because in the past when there were more strict rules people (I know I did) got upset that the tool keep insisting on the sentance saying something that didn't mean what you meant. I don't think its horrible to have the grammar checker return things that it is sure of the right suggestion as an aid to the writer and let the writer find the rest of the issues.
Actually google gives a very large (what that means I don't know) bonus to a person that made a very successful project. The problem is this generates a culture of people that get a project to beta, get the money and then drop development in order to get a new project into beta. Its one of the reasons why google has so many beta projects and finishes only a few of them.
Why does nearly every fancy feature of DirectShow used by other applications come with instructions that windows media player must be installed on the machine?
I've always disliked this about Microsoft but every little piece of thier software builds off other pieces. To get the full functionality of anything you need to install a whole number of MS applications (the thing I always hated was spellchecking in outlook express required MS Office).
I'd bet that what MS did to comply with the EU orders was to unregister all media playing classes in the media playerless version. This would have the effect of "removing" them from the OS as no applications could find them. Following from that it is no big leap to realize that with no media classes registered no media plays. Real's "fix" was more likely a hack where they figured out that many of the dll's were still present but unregistered and decided to register them. Of course I can't no this because the article neglected to tell us how real "fixed" the OS.
The bottom line is if you don't want media playing functionality in the OS don't bitch when its really not there. Also realize that Office was never able to play media files, it was just really clever at loading up other software seemlessly to do the task for you. That is the whole idea of ActiveX (otherwise known as OLE). Word docs are giant containers of activeX controls some of which allow you to play media but if you remove the binaries that do that work office will no longer play the files. This is not evil, this is what happens when you remove stuff that really was benificial to people.
The real question I have is why won't real spend the time to implement the interface to these controls (its "docmented" in the class registry on a working version of windows) on there own media player and register it in place of WMP. Things would start working at that point and there would be real honest to goodness competition.
I'd like to know what real did to get office to play media files (I will admit right now I did not read the article). If they loaded the codecs and related media playing dlls and registered them then what they did was 99% of installing windows media player which is what Microsoft was asked not to do.
I'm sorry but you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want a medialess windows it won't play media without doing the work to get it to run. What someone needs to do (maybe real, though I wouldn't run there software for the life of me, I've had more crashes caused by real player than by anything else in windows XP other than beta ATI graphics drivers) is write there own dll's that duplicate the DirectShow functionality and offer that as a download.
As it is, DirectShow is a feature of Windows Media Player (at least as far as I've ever understood) and if you take out media player the fancy DirectShow offerings fail to work. Seems simple and not blatently sneaky.
I'd like to see you install linux without the GNU tools or X or any other application level stuff and see how useful it is. Probably not very (though I'll claim not to be an expert so I may be wrong).
In.NET 2.0 partial classes will help some with separating generated code from your hand written code through the use of partial classes. Hopefully it is implemented in a way that lets it be fully flexible but still allow the editor and you to be happy together.
Why would you compile code on a lowly single proc tablet PC when the real tool to do the job is a multi proc desktop monster? Its called using the right tool for the job.
A 1.4ghz tablet would be perfect for checking e-mail away from the desk, taking notes in a meeting and marking up a document sent to you for review. I just wish I could convince my manager that I reviewed enough documents and spent time in enough meetings to warrent getting one of these.
One problem is deciding which skills are important. Before calculators were popular it was important to be able to add and substract in your head and on paper. I maintain that it is still important to have that skill to a level sufficient to decide if the answer given by the machine is in the right ballpark but we no longer need to spend the first 6 or 7 years of our schooling learning these ultra basics. Let the calculator do that stuff and learn algebra and whatnot that much sooner. Good produtivity gained.
Computers are a different deal all together. They don't directly replace a single easy to define function so they will be harder to give a good fit in our education/lives. Add onto that the HUGE distraction factor they provide and wow what a problem. That said we need to figure out how to properly fit the devices into our lives as a useful tool.
My first suggestion is to take the computers completely out of the normal classroom and put them into labs (thats the way it was when I was in school anyways) where the time spent on them can be limited so as to not distract from the normal teaching.
Next suggestion is to NOT hook up the internet to the lab computers EXCEPT during specially designated internet times. I think the internet is a most amazing tool but it is a HUGE distractor much of the time. If the task at hand doesn't need internet connectivity, just turn it off. Along with that the software available to students should be limited meaning no IM programs ect. I'm not against getting new software but that software needs to be evaluated for usefullness at the current task by someone qualified to evaluate (ok I know, how do you really define that) it.
Finally come up with useful and realistic activities to be preformed on the computer. In science classes show how the computer can be used to assist with collecting and analyzing results of experiments. In math classes show how the computer can be used to calculate and visualize more complex things. In english/writing/literature classes show how the computer can be a research and writing tool and teach how to properly use spellchecking and grammer assistance but not rely on it as gospel. Also in the writing classes don't force handwritten copies because I hate to say it but we are very close to not requiring hand written copies of 99.9% of correspondance. Its one place (like calculators) where computers are definitely replacing an old skill with a new possibly more productive one. If cheating is a concern with the written documents, employ some sort of watermarking or (I know/. will hate it) DRM to maintain ownership of the file from start to finish.
Anyways, I agree with most/. readers that computers are hear to stay and need to be fit into our lives in a productive way. I also agree with the article that if used improperly (which may unfortunately be the majority case at the moment) computers can cut productivity rather than raise it. We just need to figure things out.
Unfortunately I think that Daimaou is in a bit of a pickle here and in all reality the situation is of his own doing. He signed a contract that transferred rights to a company on software that he was not legally allowed to transfer rights on. This is especially bad if he did not disclose this fact at the time of hiring. I am fairly certain that this company cannot obtain rights to the software in question because of the GPL (or at least they must abide by the GPL even if they do get rights) but I am also fairly certain that the company may have legal recourse against Daimaou because of it.
Also, just because everyone has to say it, IANAL but I do have a bit of training on what my companies policy is on hiring people with past work and what obligations each party has.
I think that Microsoft mentioned wanting to build some of these pieces and the world freaked out. I think it was to be the.NET revolution hallmarked by Hailstorm.
Frankly I don't trust Google to have these systems any more than I would trust Microsoft.
Re:What's the system called?
on
Sunlight in a Tube
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· Score: 2, Informative
Windows don't work too well on interior rooms. Just ask that guy in the inner-inner office at work how much outside light he gets.
I sort of like the subscription model of Napster right now. I don't know if the price is right (its right for me when I have spare money but its also the first luxury I cut) but I do like the fact that for a reasonable fee I have access to any song I like so long as I'm at my PC (a big restriction for some people). Napster to go alieviates this and would be the perfect way for me to go, for a slightly higher monthly price and the correct media player (one that supports MS Janus tech) I can carry any song I want anywhere at any time. I calculated it out and if I filled up the normal media player (1000 songs) I could listen to the songs for 55 years on subscription before I would break even with the cost of buying the music outright. Seems like a reasonable deal to me.
I will admit that there is a risk that I get into this 10 years and $1800 (the napster to go price is $15 a month) and napster disappears I have nothing. The person that spent $15 a month to buy 15 songs would have 1800 songs at that point so they would be ahead of me but they wouldn't have nearly the choices I have as I can change my songs to the newest and best as soon as it comes out and I don't have to feel all that bad about dumping out songs I no longer listen to.
Anyways its an interesting model that I like. The service seems worth it to me. Why hasn't the record industry looked into this? I doubt it would have much effect on cd sales because to burn to CD you would still (possibly) have to pay for the song outright.
I agree with you in theory on this one but the question is how do you get person one to pay the development cost on a product that person 2 will get for zero cost?
Of course this is a bad question to ask because if the cost to person 1 is lower than the lost opportunity in not having the product then they should pay for it regardless of who else gets it for free, but I don't think that human nature thinks that way.
I think that consulting is the way to make money developing open source. You provide a service to the customer but you write the contract to say that all code you produce is GPL. Then the person you wrote it for gets a ton of rights they may not have gotten (if you kept 100% of the rights on the code you wrote and only gave them binaries) and you are allowed to reuse any of the code for your next customer. The key is not making a "product" but make a number of similar pieces of software that are customized to each new customer. That way you can provide value as a service that you can get compensated for and still have the open source code you desire.
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That isn't necessarily true in regards to content which is what I'm certain the article was speaking about being "cleaned up".
You don't wipe your OS if you have been rooted? How do you know that there isn't something in there waiting to bite you?
What I've read is that the PCI-E 16x bus is the only one with enough bandwidth to support SLI in the way that NVidia has implemented it.
On the other hand, a small point that the MPAA has is that without an easy distribution system it would be harder for the people at fault (the person that encoded it, the numerous people that distribute it and the person that downloads it) to spread it around. That said I hardly think they can say piracy really affected them in any great way when they had the biggest opening day in history.
Case and point, I set my wife as a lua user on our windows xp box at home and she still hasn't noticed any difference.
Even if user data is the most important thing, if you run as root on a multi user box you put every users data at risk instead of only your own.
The other thing, and this isn't easy to do in many OS's, that would be nice is granular escalation of privledge. As you point out in your SQL example, if you need someone to do inserts you shouldn't have to allow them to delete.
Of course now that the defaults are in a more secure state the people that weren't complaining before start to complain.
The bad part of the new version of windows is the apps that don't work correctly with it. Its too bad that the apps were unable to be updated in a timely manner.
Has anyone looked into writing a script that sets the registry keys that MS uses to check for the existance of SP2 to say that SP2 is already installed? This would block it from automatically installing I think.
My point was partially that by making the checker detect more flaws that it can't suggest a fix for it might make it worse rather than better.
Because in general when the grammar is abiguous the grammar checker doesn't seem to make any suggestions. I think this is because in the past when there were more strict rules people (I know I did) got upset that the tool keep insisting on the sentance saying something that didn't mean what you meant. I don't think its horrible to have the grammar checker return things that it is sure of the right suggestion as an aid to the writer and let the writer find the rest of the issues.
Actually google gives a very large (what that means I don't know) bonus to a person that made a very successful project. The problem is this generates a culture of people that get a project to beta, get the money and then drop development in order to get a new project into beta. Its one of the reasons why google has so many beta projects and finishes only a few of them.
That said it does actually free up some physical ram to get rid of the swap file (at least it did on the PC I tried it on running windows XP sp1).
I've always disliked this about Microsoft but every little piece of thier software builds off other pieces. To get the full functionality of anything you need to install a whole number of MS applications (the thing I always hated was spellchecking in outlook express required MS Office).
I'd bet that what MS did to comply with the EU orders was to unregister all media playing classes in the media playerless version. This would have the effect of "removing" them from the OS as no applications could find them. Following from that it is no big leap to realize that with no media classes registered no media plays. Real's "fix" was more likely a hack where they figured out that many of the dll's were still present but unregistered and decided to register them. Of course I can't no this because the article neglected to tell us how real "fixed" the OS.
The bottom line is if you don't want media playing functionality in the OS don't bitch when its really not there. Also realize that Office was never able to play media files, it was just really clever at loading up other software seemlessly to do the task for you. That is the whole idea of ActiveX (otherwise known as OLE). Word docs are giant containers of activeX controls some of which allow you to play media but if you remove the binaries that do that work office will no longer play the files. This is not evil, this is what happens when you remove stuff that really was benificial to people.
The real question I have is why won't real spend the time to implement the interface to these controls (its "docmented" in the class registry on a working version of windows) on there own media player and register it in place of WMP. Things would start working at that point and there would be real honest to goodness competition.
I'm sorry but you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want a medialess windows it won't play media without doing the work to get it to run. What someone needs to do (maybe real, though I wouldn't run there software for the life of me, I've had more crashes caused by real player than by anything else in windows XP other than beta ATI graphics drivers) is write there own dll's that duplicate the DirectShow functionality and offer that as a download.
As it is, DirectShow is a feature of Windows Media Player (at least as far as I've ever understood) and if you take out media player the fancy DirectShow offerings fail to work. Seems simple and not blatently sneaky.
I'd like to see you install linux without the GNU tools or X or any other application level stuff and see how useful it is. Probably not very (though I'll claim not to be an expert so I may be wrong).
In .NET 2.0 partial classes will help some with separating generated code from your hand written code through the use of partial classes. Hopefully it is implemented in a way that lets it be fully flexible but still allow the editor and you to be happy together.
Why would you compile code on a lowly single proc tablet PC when the real tool to do the job is a multi proc desktop monster? Its called using the right tool for the job.
A 1.4ghz tablet would be perfect for checking e-mail away from the desk, taking notes in a meeting and marking up a document sent to you for review. I just wish I could convince my manager that I reviewed enough documents and spent time in enough meetings to warrent getting one of these.
Computers are a different deal all together. They don't directly replace a single easy to define function so they will be harder to give a good fit in our education/lives. Add onto that the HUGE distraction factor they provide and wow what a problem. That said we need to figure out how to properly fit the devices into our lives as a useful tool.
My first suggestion is to take the computers completely out of the normal classroom and put them into labs (thats the way it was when I was in school anyways) where the time spent on them can be limited so as to not distract from the normal teaching.
Next suggestion is to NOT hook up the internet to the lab computers EXCEPT during specially designated internet times. I think the internet is a most amazing tool but it is a HUGE distractor much of the time. If the task at hand doesn't need internet connectivity, just turn it off. Along with that the software available to students should be limited meaning no IM programs ect. I'm not against getting new software but that software needs to be evaluated for usefullness at the current task by someone qualified to evaluate (ok I know, how do you really define that) it.
Finally come up with useful and realistic activities to be preformed on the computer. In science classes show how the computer can be used to assist with collecting and analyzing results of experiments. In math classes show how the computer can be used to calculate and visualize more complex things. In english/writing/literature classes show how the computer can be a research and writing tool and teach how to properly use spellchecking and grammer assistance but not rely on it as gospel. Also in the writing classes don't force handwritten copies because I hate to say it but we are very close to not requiring hand written copies of 99.9% of correspondance. Its one place (like calculators) where computers are definitely replacing an old skill with a new possibly more productive one. If cheating is a concern with the written documents, employ some sort of watermarking or (I know /. will hate it) DRM to maintain ownership of the file from start to finish.
Anyways, I agree with most /. readers that computers are hear to stay and need to be fit into our lives in a productive way. I also agree with the article that if used improperly (which may unfortunately be the majority case at the moment) computers can cut productivity rather than raise it. We just need to figure things out.
Unfortunately I think that Daimaou is in a bit of a pickle here and in all reality the situation is of his own doing. He signed a contract that transferred rights to a company on software that he was not legally allowed to transfer rights on. This is especially bad if he did not disclose this fact at the time of hiring. I am fairly certain that this company cannot obtain rights to the software in question because of the GPL (or at least they must abide by the GPL even if they do get rights) but I am also fairly certain that the company may have legal recourse against Daimaou because of it.
Also, just because everyone has to say it, IANAL but I do have a bit of training on what my companies policy is on hiring people with past work and what obligations each party has.
Do you use Tivo? You might want to start making a place for it on the curbside.
But would you trust Google with your e-mail just because they SAY they won't use the information they mined from it for bad things?
Frankly I don't trust Google to have these systems any more than I would trust Microsoft.
Windows don't work too well on interior rooms. Just ask that guy in the inner-inner office at work how much outside light he gets.
I will admit that there is a risk that I get into this 10 years and $1800 (the napster to go price is $15 a month) and napster disappears I have nothing. The person that spent $15 a month to buy 15 songs would have 1800 songs at that point so they would be ahead of me but they wouldn't have nearly the choices I have as I can change my songs to the newest and best as soon as it comes out and I don't have to feel all that bad about dumping out songs I no longer listen to.
Anyways its an interesting model that I like. The service seems worth it to me. Why hasn't the record industry looked into this? I doubt it would have much effect on cd sales because to burn to CD you would still (possibly) have to pay for the song outright.
Of course this is a bad question to ask because if the cost to person 1 is lower than the lost opportunity in not having the product then they should pay for it regardless of who else gets it for free, but I don't think that human nature thinks that way.
I think that consulting is the way to make money developing open source. You provide a service to the customer but you write the contract to say that all code you produce is GPL. Then the person you wrote it for gets a ton of rights they may not have gotten (if you kept 100% of the rights on the code you wrote and only gave them binaries) and you are allowed to reuse any of the code for your next customer. The key is not making a "product" but make a number of similar pieces of software that are customized to each new customer. That way you can provide value as a service that you can get compensated for and still have the open source code you desire.
Thats fine, add/remove your files in the gui and edit them in another tool.
That said the newest versions of Visual Studio are text format project files now.
Did you read the FAQ? I did.
It doesn't record QAM (digital cable at least in most places) or digital satellite.