The thing that bugs me about the arguments about intelligent design is all the pot-shots taken at bad religious arguments that the design must be comprehensible to (mortal) humans.
The argument for intelligent design was originally just an example of one way to argue against a bad argument against the existence of God. Bad argument is bad argument. Disproving bad argument against a hypothesis does not prove the hypothesis.
God, if he exists, must do so in a state of perfection that would be well beyond anything that we can easily recognize. If God designs things, it would be expected that the design would appear natural.
Real art cannot be made in a vacuum, no matter how much money you throw at the artist.
That aside, DeVotchKa may or may not be good. I haven't heard their music. But I can guarantee you there are lots of bands just as good and better, many of them making less money than them, who have been stabbed in the back by the very artists associations who are leading the putsch against a free (as in speech) internet.
You can't sell your work if you can't get it into the market. That's what this is about. Those so-called artists' associations are fighting to keep control over a market they never should have had control over.
And it's the people trying to keep the market controlled that are keeping the local bands from making as much as they should.
(But I still don't see anything wrong with artists having to have day jobs. It keeps them in touch with the real world, keeps their art meaningful.)
If you seriously think this is about money, you've really got your head in the sand.
This is absolutely about control.
Some artists hate losing control over their work.
And the so-called artists associations very much enjoyed believing they had the power to set trends and the like. (Think Partridge Family and the like.)
In addition to what everyone else is saying, the real solution is to use sub-addresses, as mentioned in threads above.
It's something I didn't know ISPs were doing, but since I now know google is, I'm going to use it.
I have been slowly working around to where I can run my own domain name and do something similar, but dyndns puts a limit on the number of e-mail addresses they will resolve in a month, so I have been hesitant to actually start using that.
When all the ISPs either provide sub-addressing or provide actual domain names to each of their customers so the customers can make up addresses on the spot when they give them out, and thus trace the leaks, and thus filter out the stuff they don't want to see, random junk e-mail will cease to be profitable, and junk e-mail will of itself will subside to reasonable. In the meantime, sub-addresses can help me filter stuff out.
I would love to have a system that charged bulk senders for every mail returned. But, as has been pointed out, for that to work requires a major change in the e-mail standards, and the cooperation of lots of big companies, and is way open to being gamed.
I would also love to have some automatic way for semi-legitimate companies sending me bulk mail to be informed that I deleted the mail without even looking at it. That would put a huge dent in the profits of those who do random bulk dumps and sell address lists and such. But that is also way open to being gamed.
I am working on a private mail protocol and browser. But that will never work to communicate with anybody but a small number of my friends whom I can convince to use the software, so I may never finish that.
So, groundbreaking in some minor ways, but really just a continuing in the same efforts at formal proofs which have been going on for thirty or forty years now.
Perhaps they are groundbreaking in that they can be applied to MSWindows 7, whereas the previous methods were more taylored to previous MS OSses (or to other OSses).
Yes, you understand the fundamental problem in proof. If we can prove the program's correctness, we can program it correctly, but we still (after all these years) don't know how to define the correct solution to most of the problems we are writing programs to solve, including all of the most interesting problems.
Writing the programs is part of the math we are doing in our attempts to solve these problems. Necessarily, we are going to run down a lot of blind alleys as we go trimming leafs of the solution tree, so to speak. Sometimes, entire systems have to be lopped off when we backtrack.
And we need to learn to quit hanging on to those dead-end systems, or to turn them over to those who find more value in them than we do.
*** This is actually the whole point in free and open systems, one man's dead end is another man's current valuable solution. ***
What would really be ground-breaking for Microsoft to research would be this --
First, they must make a license comparable to Apple's Public License version 2 and start moving everything under it. Even though Microsoft can't feasibly put everything under the GPL or a BSD-style license, they can start pushing what they have towards open access.
Microsoft's resources were built in cooperation with a lot of people under a tacit bazaar, and the company is not showing any appreciation of where their value came from. They are killing the goose that laid the golden egg by trying to close things off, and they need to quit that, and promise not to try it again. Otherwise, they are doomed to become an ivory tower permanently.
Maybe you're wondering what this has to do with research, and with fixing the problems, so I'll tell you.
It requires a lot of technical expertise to extract technology from closed licenses. That's why I'm saying Microsoft's research branch must be an essential part of it.
The reason it has to be done, well, like you admit, correctness is impossible to prove unless you already know what is correct.
Figuring out what is correct requires the application of an external point of view. (That's a big part of what we mean when we take about "many eyes".)
Correctness is highly context dependent. Which means, you might get a word processor that is perfect for Microsoft's internal use, but when you take it to a customer, that customer finds all sorts of bugs. (We've seen this this before, right?)
This is not just a problem of design and implementation. The fixes for some of those bugs, relative to customer A, turn out to be bugs by definition for customer B. Maybe you can find a compromise fix for customer A and B, but then that conflicts with Microsoft internal and with the requirements of customers C, D, and X.
Some bugs cannot be fixed without customization, and customization requires opening things up on some level.
There's another thing Microsoft could research, well, several things --
A database, or several databases that would define contexts in which various customizations can be applied. (Huge research there.) Then you could seriously streamline MSOffice and other products, including their OS, and let the customer dig up the add-on modules they need.
(Monetizing the selection of modules is a temptation that must be avoided, which is one problem with most of the current crop of networked application frameworks. Charging per module kills the whole thing. That's another place where research could be useful.)
They need a system for determining which modules can be loaded compatibly with which. That would be re-inventing what the Linux community has several versions of already, but that's okay. The system, of course, needs to be open
The constitution and the law specified a cure that went about as far as we dare.
The courts dropped the ball.
This idea that a judge who admits in public to having a personal opinion should automatically be recused is stupid. They have opinions. Admitting the opinion is better than hiding it. The issue is whether the opinion is biasing, and, in this case, even though the opinion was strong, it was not out of keeping with the facts presented.
I'm almost unwilling to assume that money did not exchange hands, or that some form of illegal pressure was not applied, to force the change of judges.
The courts dropped the ball, so the cure didn't work. If I could afford the lawyer, I'd be pushing to re-examine all of that.
Anyway, yeah, making new laws would do more damage than good.
I'm not saying it's okay to copy when the artists say they don't want that.
Yeah, others are saying that, but I'm not.
I'm pointing at a couple of big gaps in the argument. First, the "rights" organizations no longer really protect the rights of the artists. What they are doing is wrong. It may be legal, but, if it is legal, it is still based on bad, unconstitutional law.
They could have approached the copying issues in a much better way, if they had simply recognized the realities of the market.
Zeroeth: you can't sell music you don't let people listen to. On their own terms. (That's why I quit listening to radio. And it's why I quit listening to music, except what my kids play, except what the school band plays, except at church, that kind of stuff. Even the indies are mostly not putting out music I want to hear any more.)
Artists have the right to be prima-donnas. We don't need to think it's an insult to call them prima-donnas, but we don't have to think we owe them a market they aren't willing to get themselves into.
Getting into the market requires letting people listen. For free. On the individual listener's terms.
You cannot mechanically suppress the free downloads and keep the free market healthy. You can't shut off the bit-torrents and keep the free market healthy.
The solution was/is plain. The RIAA should be cooperating with Pirate Bay and the others, to use the free downloads as ways to expose potential customers to the artists products. That does mean that artists have to work to make a living, producing more, producing more of different kinds of things, maybe even doing things besides their art. That's always been the way it is with art.
Historically, art has been one of the hardest ways to make a decent living. That is why art is art. That is what separates art from craftsmanship, and, really, what separates craftsmanship from assembly-line manufacturing.
It's an unfortunate fact, but artists really have to starve and scrape by and be rejected and all that to produce real art (of a general nature). Or they have to be willing to produce less "perfect" art and live by some other means, which is a road to a different kind of perfection.
The fact that society has been traditionally way too hard on failed artists is a separate question, and that cannot be addressed by anything that the "rights" organizations are presently doing.
There are lots of things wrong with the economy, but shutting down the markets is not how to solve the problems.
Well, Microsoft researchers are involved, to some extent, in some research that is, well, extending some old stuff in ways that might be new. Groundbreaking, maybe, to some people.
Maybe these tools will help generate "correct" code for some definition of correctness. But have these guys defended their choice of definition of "correctness"? Have they shown how it applies to the real world? Is the application field a niche field, or will it help with OSses and general end-user applications? But, to me, it just seems to be heading the wrong direction. I've been there. All I could find down those paths is more of the same blind alleys. Maybe they'll find something interesting, if so, good for them.
Does it really help solve the problems were are facing in the current market? How does it help users solve their junk e-mail problems? How does it clean up the botnets? How does it prevent users from clicking OK and adding to the botfarms?
How does it give users safe, secure, _minimal_ browsers for checking their bank accounts and making payments for purchases?
Research is all well and good, but this is not what the market needs now.
Most of the people I know who download music either 1. would never buy it in store, so that's not money they lost
According to who? The person who pirated the music? I've got news for you. People rationalize their actions. All the time.
True, but does rationalizing necessarily equate to sinning^H^H^H^H^H^H^H committing the crime?
If tomorrow it suddenly became physically impossible to listen to music without paying for it, would these friends of yours all sit in silence for the rest of their lives? No.
Hmm. You know, I quit buying music shortly after I quit listening to "free" music. (Broadcast radio. Various reasons I got turned off the radio stations.)
I've got a few albums I bought because I thought I liked the band. About half of those, I decided I no longer liked the band, even the the songs on the albums that made the charts were the ones I listened less to. I've got a few albums I bought on recommendation, but none of those (except the classical stuff my Mom recommended) ended up being albums I listened to. Most of the albums I've bought, I bought because I wanted the songs on them, because I had heard the songs on them. Taped the songs off the FM.
I suppose, maybe I wanted to support the band. More like I wanted to spend money on something I liked, and I recognized that buying tapes and recording off the FM did not really save me all that much money. Having both the tapes and the albums was much more flexible, if time-consuming. Made a lot of dance mixes, some that my friends liked and some that they didn't like. But my friends ended up buying the music I played at our church dances. (I'm not sure I think that's a great thing, but it demonstrates the principle.)
They'd buy some music. Not nearly as much as they're willing to take for free, but some.
Lemme fixat for yah:
They'd buy some music. Not nearly as much as they're buying now when they can listen for free if they want to, but some. Maybe.
The damages the RIAA sues for are obscenely inflated, but to claim that piracy does zero damage to them is simply dishonest.
Well, if by honest you mean recognizing and telling the whole truth, yeah.
But focusing only on the damage is even less honest.
Maybe your friends aren't willing to be honest about it, but I'm man enough to admit that I have pirated music which I would have paid for otherwise. And I am 100% certain that I'm not alone.
Uh huh.
I don't know about you, but, to be honest, I am just not interested in the "music" the big companies promote any more. The only way I could be persuaded to buy it would be to hook me on it. That means making^H^H^H^H^H^H letting me listen to it. Free.
And I know a lot of people who are like me. Normal people. Functioning members of society people. Not geeks, not particularly fans. The majority of the people I know.
And most of the geeks I know, the ones who do most of the freeloading, are precisely the ones who are introducing me and the majority of the people I know to music. (Like I used to introduce my friends to music.)
Sure, maybe free downloads do some damage.
Shutting off the free downloads does a lot more damage.
(I must admit, if the big "rights" management companies can just be convinced to keep their laws away from the indies, I'd just as soon they destroy themselves by closing off the loopholes and sinking into their legal black holes.)
The fact that big companies can't be nimble seems to me to be the primary reason big companies should not exist. Or, if they must exist, they should not have research departments pretending to work on leading edge.
The research I would like to see from Microsoft would be actual introspection. There actually is stuff _in_ their products that could be usefully extracted and used, outside of their products, if you could only find it, if you could only use it without using MSOffice's truly baroque framework, if you could only examine it for ideas, if you could only modify for your own stuff.
Sure, there is MSDN, but you have to buy MSDN, both with your money and with your mind. Once you've bought into the Microsoft way enough to be able to get around in MSDN, you've forgotten what it was that made you and/or your company unique.
MSOffice automates like Microsoft thinks Microsoft should automate. Not every in the world wants to do it that way.
From my point of view, what they contribute is mostly experimenting with and implementing stuff that smarter people have already seen the problems in and set aside.
Exploring blind alleys is not a bad thing, if they could only resist the temptation to try to present them as potential products instead of as demonstrations of why the market should do something else.
And if they could only resist the temptation to actually turn some of their blind-alleys into products, or into permanent features of their products.
Sure, there actually are a lot of moderately cool gadgets in Microsoft's products. But finding the gadget you want and actually using it is so much of a pain that you end up wanting to build a separate gadget, which is really what should have been done in the first place.
Microsoft is a bazaar, but it's a bazaar run by the mob, so to speak.
If you can't see what's going to happen in your mind, pull out a credit card or something and actually do it. Try the gestures for moving the pointer, selecting, clicking.
Compare this in your mind with having a trackball in the center of the back of the screen.
Microsoft's "research" always misses or ignores details that become obvious on a walk through or an unbiased test of a prototype. They are always implementing the stuff that smarter people know enough to leave alone.
Sometimes that's not a bad thing, but then they go and mass-produce these and the products just clutter the market, clutter the office and home, and then clutter the landfills. Waste customers' money and time, and clog the market so valid products have a hard time competing.
"Occupation, work, or trade in which one is engaged." Sure, they are occupied in some sort of work or trade, but what does that say about balance?
"Specific occupation or pursuit." Sure they are pursuing a monopoly. What does that say about balance?
"Commercial, industrial, or professional dealings." Commercial, industrial, yeah, but I'm not going to give you professional, unless you mean in the sense of the boss who says to sacrifice the entire spec for that ephemeral market window. There is some sort of profession of some sort of something in that attitude, but I don't see it as a profession of any sort of service.
"Commercial enterprise or establishment." Yeah, they have established an effective monopoly, and their current enterprise plan is to extend the monopoly as far as they can, even if they destroy the market and hobble the industry.
"One's rightful or proper concern or interest," or "Something involving one personally." Maybe you believe Microsoft has some natural right to the monopoly?
"Serious work or endeavor." Serious like death? If they were serious, they would not be hell bent on destroying the market for the sake of their monopoly.
"Affair or matter." You find some sort of excuse here?
"[Filler material in some sort of entertainment.]" I don't find it the least entertaining, and I don't even find the value of filler material in what they produce. Filling in with trash just makes the rest of it stink.
"Abuse, scolding." It says, "verbal," but I've given the business with the business end of a belt, too. And Gates and his buddies somehow avoided being given the business in the anti-monopoly proceedings. And now they think they can continue to get away with what they are doing, but the economy itself will destroy them if they don't quit.
"Condition of being busy." Says that one is obsolete, I don't know why. They definitely are busy doing things they shouldn't.
I don't see anywhere in there about monopolizing the market or industry. Are you going to argue that they have some sort of excuse for maintaining their effective monopoly? Where is there any balance in the current market? Are you going to argue that there can be balance in a monopoly market?
I don't care what business they give you in business school, a business that is not interested in the health of the industry and market in which it operates is not a business. A market out of balance is not healthy. That's the whole problem with every current implementation of communism and most implementations of socialism and nationalism -- there is an implicit monopoly, no reason or room to compete, no reason or room to improve.
About nine or ten years ago, Microsoft was defending their monopoly under some sort of PR campaign claiming they had some natural right to "innovate" or something, implicitly at the expense of everyone else. It's a sick idea, and if the market follows it, the market may seem to boom for a while, then it busts. Do you not understand that Microsoft is at the center of the current failure of the economy? Their business ideas poisoned the rest of the "business" market. Everybody wanting today's bottom line to rule the world.
I don't suppose you're still reading, but in case you are, the argument you give about most users not knowing how to use the internet is the very reason Microsoft should not have enabled naked network connectivity in MSWindows 95. That "engineering" attitude is the very center of the current trouble with malware that gets spread, automatically or by social engineering, mostly through MSOutlook or MSOutlook Express and through MSInternet Explorer.
Sure, the average user will be dazzled by the mail attachment that automatically starts running. That's the whole problem. Even Linux does not yet have the necessary protections to allow that kind of "interactive" application safely.
Likewise for web pages that have a lot of bells and whistles and stuff that
From my point of view, they are paying with money they should not have.
Their software, rushed to market before the underlying infrastructure was ready for it, not to mention rushed to market with half-baked and half-complete features that exacerbated the problems the software caused, is costing us all.
Sure, there would be malware and spam even if Microsoft had had the patience (and engineering fortitude) to wait to get the software mostly right, and to limit it to run sensibly within the scope of the RFCs, but the scale would be orders of magnitude less.
And the cost due to their bad engineering is closer in scope to their corporate worth than it is to the cost of this bridge.
No, they don't get brownie points for this bridge, even if they foot the whole cost.
If Microsoft were showing the slightest interest in restoring balance to the marketplace,
If Microsoft were showing the slightest real interest in undoing the damage their software has done to the internet,
If Microsoft were showing the slightest indication of getting away from the sieve security models they've been using to enable bad software to keep running in spite of the damage it has already done (and will continue do) to the internet,
If the money they have hadn't been taken by fraudulently selling feature lists instead of real features,...
The problem is Microsoft. Where they are a burden to the infrastructure, they should foot the bill for fixing the problems they've caused.
Trying to remember the contexts where I've read, heard, used the word elite.
My friend who joined some elite branch of the military is probably the most representative instance. (The branch where they pick up their agents with bungie cords dangling from reconnaissance jets or something like that.)
If your friends call you elitist for naming the failings of MySQL, maybe you need to spend time with different friends.:-/
I don't exactly disagree about MySQL not being good enough, but then most software really isn't good enough, either. PostGreSQL is a good direction to migrate if migration ends up being necessary, but I was mostly commenting on the word "elite".
Myself, I'm from the camp that believes that ++i is more often what people mean when they write i++, and that people would benefit at a fundamental level to understand what they are saying, especially when writing software. MySQL used to be much easier to get started with than PostGreSQL, and most people who thought they wanted a database, seemed they really mostly expected some cheap semi-persistent content-addressable store.
It's a different world now. MySQL has improved their underlying tech, PostGreSQL is easier to get started with and has improved the underlying tech. The money Sun spent for MySQL was a huge mistake. Unbelievable mistake, typical of what tends to be done just before the stock (etc.) market starts a major correction.
But, I'm not sure the investment should be just abandoned. There is market value in the brand, still, and the licensing compatibility issues (among other things) prevent Sun from just bolting a compatibility interface on top of PostGreSQL.
The ability to understand the difference between ++i and i++ comes by experience to those for whom it makes a difference. The ability to recognize and appreciate a decent RDBMS comes by experience to those who use such. We can talk about such things, but, as is typical, the set of those who talk and the set of those who do tend to be somewhat disjoint sets.
Designation as elite comes from the person so designating himself, or, perhaps, some certifying organization which certifies primarily based on tests. Experience is a hard thing to measure, and an even harder thing to certify meaningfully. Tests can only certify a baseline competence.
Elitism tends to declare itself beyond competence. Thus, elite is mostly hubris.
Hubris (in the sense of self-confidence) is not entirely evil, and I may be conflating "l33t" with "elite" to an extent with which you would not agree, but elite is still mostly hubris.
I would rather talk about dedication to ideals such as constantly refining one's skill set, and service.
Some people call that professionalism, but that's yet another word that means different things to different people. (Some managers think it's unprofessional to perform uncharged service, for instance.)
If only one person is listening to each radio, it's not a public performance any more.
And the stuff can listen to what they like, since they really don't like the classical. (Although, she would then have problems with some staff playing head-banger music loud enough to spook the horses through the plugs.)
I agree with the gp. I've fought the hazards of "interpreted" urls since way back before IE market penetration went over 50%.
Current browsers have way too much function, and this is yet another example of a security hole waiting to be entered. We have a separate search field, at least move the command interface over there.
Or maybe require something like
command://
to switch on the command interpretation, if you simply have to have it in the url field.
Slashdot Mirror
:-/
The thing that bugs me about the arguments about intelligent design is all the pot-shots taken at bad religious arguments that the design must be comprehensible to (mortal) humans.
The argument for intelligent design was originally just an example of one way to argue against a bad argument against the existence of God. Bad argument is bad argument. Disproving bad argument against a hypothesis does not prove the hypothesis.
God, if he exists, must do so in a state of perfection that would be well beyond anything that we can easily recognize. If God designs things, it would be expected that the design would appear natural.
Real art cannot be made in a vacuum, no matter how much money you throw at the artist.
That aside, DeVotchKa may or may not be good. I haven't heard their music. But I can guarantee you there are lots of bands just as good and better, many of them making less money than them, who have been stabbed in the back by the very artists associations who are leading the putsch against a free (as in speech) internet.
You can't sell your work if you can't get it into the market. That's what this is about. Those so-called artists' associations are fighting to keep control over a market they never should have had control over.
And it's the people trying to keep the market controlled that are keeping the local bands from making as much as they should.
(But I still don't see anything wrong with artists having to have day jobs. It keeps them in touch with the real world, keeps their art meaningful.)
If you seriously think this is about money, you've really got your head in the sand.
This is absolutely about control.
Some artists hate losing control over their work.
And the so-called artists associations very much enjoyed believing they had the power to set trends and the like. (Think Partridge Family and the like.)
In addition to what everyone else is saying, the real solution is to use sub-addresses, as mentioned in threads above.
It's something I didn't know ISPs were doing, but since I now know google is, I'm going to use it.
I have been slowly working around to where I can run my own domain name and do something similar, but dyndns puts a limit on the number of e-mail addresses they will resolve in a month, so I have been hesitant to actually start using that.
When all the ISPs either provide sub-addressing or provide actual domain names to each of their customers so the customers can make up addresses on the spot when they give them out, and thus trace the leaks, and thus filter out the stuff they don't want to see, random junk e-mail will cease to be profitable, and junk e-mail will of itself will subside to reasonable. In the meantime, sub-addresses can help me filter stuff out.
I would love to have a system that charged bulk senders for every mail returned. But, as has been pointed out, for that to work requires a major change in the e-mail standards, and the cooperation of lots of big companies, and is way open to being gamed.
I would also love to have some automatic way for semi-legitimate companies sending me bulk mail to be informed that I deleted the mail without even looking at it. That would put a huge dent in the profits of those who do random bulk dumps and sell address lists and such. But that is also way open to being gamed.
I am working on a private mail protocol and browser. But that will never work to communicate with anybody but a small number of my friends whom I can convince to use the software, so I may never finish that.
So, groundbreaking in some minor ways, but really just a continuing in the same efforts at formal proofs which have been going on for thirty or forty years now.
Perhaps they are groundbreaking in that they can be applied to MSWindows 7, whereas the previous methods were more taylored to previous MS OSses (or to other OSses).
Yes, you understand the fundamental problem in proof. If we can prove the program's correctness, we can program it correctly, but we still (after all these years) don't know how to define the correct solution to most of the problems we are writing programs to solve, including all of the most interesting problems.
Writing the programs is part of the math we are doing in our attempts to solve these problems. Necessarily, we are going to run down a lot of blind alleys as we go trimming leafs of the solution tree, so to speak. Sometimes, entire systems have to be lopped off when we backtrack.
And we need to learn to quit hanging on to those dead-end systems, or to turn them over to those who find more value in them than we do.
*** This is actually the whole point in free and open systems, one man's dead end is another man's current valuable solution. ***
What would really be ground-breaking for Microsoft to research would be this --
First, they must make a license comparable to Apple's Public License version 2 and start moving everything under it. Even though Microsoft can't feasibly put everything under the GPL or a BSD-style license, they can start pushing what they have towards open access.
Microsoft's resources were built in cooperation with a lot of people under a tacit bazaar, and the company is not showing any appreciation of where their value came from. They are killing the goose that laid the golden egg by trying to close things off, and they need to quit that, and promise not to try it again. Otherwise, they are doomed to become an ivory tower permanently.
Maybe you're wondering what this has to do with research, and with fixing the problems, so I'll tell you.
It requires a lot of technical expertise to extract technology from closed licenses. That's why I'm saying Microsoft's research branch must be an essential part of it.
The reason it has to be done, well, like you admit, correctness is impossible to prove unless you already know what is correct.
Figuring out what is correct requires the application of an external point of view. (That's a big part of what we mean when we take about "many eyes".)
Correctness is highly context dependent. Which means, you might get a word processor that is perfect for Microsoft's internal use, but when you take it to a customer, that customer finds all sorts of bugs. (We've seen this this before, right?)
This is not just a problem of design and implementation. The fixes for some of those bugs, relative to customer A, turn out to be bugs by definition for customer B. Maybe you can find a compromise fix for customer A and B, but then that conflicts with Microsoft internal and with the requirements of customers C, D, and X.
Some bugs cannot be fixed without customization, and customization requires opening things up on some level.
There's another thing Microsoft could research, well, several things --
A database, or several databases that would define contexts in which various customizations can be applied. (Huge research there.) Then you could seriously streamline MSOffice and other products, including their OS, and let the customer dig up the add-on modules they need.
(Monetizing the selection of modules is a temptation that must be avoided, which is one problem with most of the current crop of networked application frameworks. Charging per module kills the whole thing. That's another place where research could be useful.)
They need a system for determining which modules can be loaded compatibly with which. That would be re-inventing what the Linux community has several versions of already, but that's okay. The system, of course, needs to be open
The constitution and the law specified a cure that went about as far as we dare.
The courts dropped the ball.
This idea that a judge who admits in public to having a personal opinion should automatically be recused is stupid. They have opinions. Admitting the opinion is better than hiding it. The issue is whether the opinion is biasing, and, in this case, even though the opinion was strong, it was not out of keeping with the facts presented.
I'm almost unwilling to assume that money did not exchange hands, or that some form of illegal pressure was not applied, to force the change of judges.
The courts dropped the ball, so the cure didn't work. If I could afford the lawyer, I'd be pushing to re-examine all of that.
Anyway, yeah, making new laws would do more damage than good.
I'm not saying it's okay to copy when the artists say they don't want that.
Yeah, others are saying that, but I'm not.
I'm pointing at a couple of big gaps in the argument. First, the "rights" organizations no longer really protect the rights of the artists. What they are doing is wrong. It may be legal, but, if it is legal, it is still based on bad, unconstitutional law.
They could have approached the copying issues in a much better way, if they had simply recognized the realities of the market.
Zeroeth: you can't sell music you don't let people listen to. On their own terms. (That's why I quit listening to radio. And it's why I quit listening to music, except what my kids play, except what the school band plays, except at church, that kind of stuff. Even the indies are mostly not putting out music I want to hear any more.)
Artists have the right to be prima-donnas. We don't need to think it's an insult to call them prima-donnas, but we don't have to think we owe them a market they aren't willing to get themselves into.
Getting into the market requires letting people listen. For free. On the individual listener's terms.
You cannot mechanically suppress the free downloads and keep the free market healthy. You can't shut off the bit-torrents and keep the free market healthy.
The solution was/is plain. The RIAA should be cooperating with Pirate Bay and the others, to use the free downloads as ways to expose potential customers to the artists products. That does mean that artists have to work to make a living, producing more, producing more of different kinds of things, maybe even doing things besides their art. That's always been the way it is with art.
Historically, art has been one of the hardest ways to make a decent living. That is why art is art. That is what separates art from craftsmanship, and, really, what separates craftsmanship from assembly-line manufacturing.
It's an unfortunate fact, but artists really have to starve and scrape by and be rejected and all that to produce real art (of a general nature). Or they have to be willing to produce less "perfect" art and live by some other means, which is a road to a different kind of perfection.
The fact that society has been traditionally way too hard on failed artists is a separate question, and that cannot be addressed by anything that the "rights" organizations are presently doing.
There are lots of things wrong with the economy, but shutting down the markets is not how to solve the problems.
Okay, I guess I'll do it for you.
SLAM
BLAST
yogi
pldi
popl
Well, Microsoft researchers are involved, to some extent, in some research that is, well, extending some old stuff in ways that might be new. Groundbreaking, maybe, to some people.
Maybe these tools will help generate "correct" code for some definition of correctness. But have these guys defended their choice of definition of "correctness"? Have they shown how it applies to the real world? Is the application field a niche field, or will it help with OSses and general end-user applications?
But, to me, it just seems to be heading the wrong direction. I've been there. All I could find down those paths is more of the same blind alleys. Maybe they'll find something interesting, if so, good for them.
Does it really help solve the problems were are facing in the current market? How does it help users solve their junk e-mail problems? How does it clean up the botnets? How does it prevent users from clicking OK and adding to the botfarms?
How does it give users safe, secure, _minimal_ browsers for checking their bank accounts and making payments for purchases?
Research is all well and good, but this is not what the market needs now.
Most of the people I know who download music either 1. would never buy it in store, so that's not money they lost
According to who? The person who pirated the music? I've got news for you. People rationalize their actions. All the time.
True, but does rationalizing necessarily equate to sinning^H^H^H^H^H^H^H committing the crime?
If tomorrow it suddenly became physically impossible to listen to music without paying for it, would these friends of yours all sit in silence for the rest of their lives? No.
Hmm. You know, I quit buying music shortly after I quit listening to "free" music. (Broadcast radio. Various reasons I got turned off the radio stations.)
I've got a few albums I bought because I thought I liked the band. About half of those, I decided I no longer liked the band, even the the songs on the albums that made the charts were the ones I listened less to. I've got a few albums I bought on recommendation, but none of those (except the classical stuff my Mom recommended) ended up being albums I listened to. Most of the albums I've bought, I bought because I wanted the songs on them, because I had heard the songs on them. Taped the songs off the FM.
I suppose, maybe I wanted to support the band. More like I wanted to spend money on something I liked, and I recognized that buying tapes and recording off the FM did not really save me all that much money. Having both the tapes and the albums was much more flexible, if time-consuming. Made a lot of dance mixes, some that my friends liked and some that they didn't like. But my friends ended up buying the music I played at our church dances. (I'm not sure I think that's a great thing, but it demonstrates the principle.)
They'd buy some music. Not nearly as much as they're willing to take for free, but some.
Lemme fixat for yah:
They'd buy some music. Not nearly as much as they're buying now when they can listen for free if they want to, but some. Maybe.
The damages the RIAA sues for are obscenely inflated, but to claim that piracy does zero damage to them is simply dishonest.
Well, if by honest you mean recognizing and telling the whole truth, yeah.
But focusing only on the damage is even less honest.
Maybe your friends aren't willing to be honest about it, but I'm man enough to admit that I have pirated music which I would have paid for otherwise. And I am 100% certain that I'm not alone.
Uh huh.
I don't know about you, but, to be honest, I am just not interested in the "music" the big companies promote any more. The only way I could be persuaded to buy it would be to hook me on it. That means making^H^H^H^H^H^H letting me listen to it. Free.
And I know a lot of people who are like me. Normal people. Functioning members of society people. Not geeks, not particularly fans. The majority of the people I know.
And most of the geeks I know, the ones who do most of the freeloading, are precisely the ones who are introducing me and the majority of the people I know to music. (Like I used to introduce my friends to music.)
Sure, maybe free downloads do some damage.
Shutting off the free downloads does a lot more damage.
(I must admit, if the big "rights" management companies can just be convinced to keep their laws away from the indies, I'd just as soon they destroy themselves by closing off the loopholes and sinking into their legal black holes.)
I don't think I can really agree.
The fact that big companies can't be nimble seems to me to be the primary reason big companies should not exist. Or, if they must exist, they should not have research departments pretending to work on leading edge.
The research I would like to see from Microsoft would be actual introspection. There actually is stuff _in_ their products that could be usefully extracted and used, outside of their products, if you could only find it, if you could only use it without using MSOffice's truly baroque framework, if you could only examine it for ideas, if you could only modify for your own stuff.
Sure, there is MSDN, but you have to buy MSDN, both with your money and with your mind. Once you've bought into the Microsoft way enough to be able to get around in MSDN, you've forgotten what it was that made you and/or your company unique.
MSOffice automates like Microsoft thinks Microsoft should automate. Not every in the world wants to do it that way.
but what, exactly do they contribute?
From my point of view, what they contribute is mostly experimenting with and implementing stuff that smarter people have already seen the problems in and set aside.
Exploring blind alleys is not a bad thing, if they could only resist the temptation to try to present them as potential products instead of as demonstrations of why the market should do something else.
And if they could only resist the temptation to actually turn some of their blind-alleys into products, or into permanent features of their products.
Sure, there actually are a lot of moderately cool gadgets in Microsoft's products. But finding the gadget you want and actually using it is so much of a pain that you end up wanting to build a separate gadget, which is really what should have been done in the first place.
Microsoft is a bazaar, but it's a bazaar run by the mob, so to speak.
Reach for a corner.
If you can't see what's going to happen in your mind, pull out a credit card or something and actually do it. Try the gestures for moving the pointer, selecting, clicking.
Compare this in your mind with having a trackball in the center of the back of the screen.
Microsoft's "research" always misses or ignores details that become obvious on a walk through or an unbiased test of a prototype. They are always implementing the stuff that smarter people know enough to leave alone.
Sometimes that's not a bad thing, but then they go and mass-produce these and the products just clutter the market, clutter the office and home, and then clutter the landfills. Waste customers' money and time, and clog the market so valid products have a hard time competing.
Okay, business,
"Occupation, work, or trade in which one is engaged." Sure, they are occupied in some sort of work or trade, but what does that say about balance?
"Specific occupation or pursuit." Sure they are pursuing a monopoly. What does that say about balance?
"Commercial, industrial, or professional dealings." Commercial, industrial, yeah, but I'm not going to give you professional, unless you mean in the sense of the boss who says to sacrifice the entire spec for that ephemeral market window. There is some sort of profession of some sort of something in that attitude, but I don't see it as a profession of any sort of service.
"Commercial enterprise or establishment." Yeah, they have established an effective monopoly, and their current enterprise plan is to extend the monopoly as far as they can, even if they destroy the market and hobble the industry.
"One's rightful or proper concern or interest," or "Something involving one personally." Maybe you believe Microsoft has some natural right to the monopoly?
"Serious work or endeavor." Serious like death? If they were serious, they would not be hell bent on destroying the market for the sake of their monopoly.
"Affair or matter." You find some sort of excuse here?
"[Filler material in some sort of entertainment.]" I don't find it the least entertaining, and I don't even find the value of filler material in what they produce. Filling in with trash just makes the rest of it stink.
"Abuse, scolding." It says, "verbal," but I've given the business with the business end of a belt, too. And Gates and his buddies somehow avoided being given the business in the anti-monopoly proceedings. And now they think they can continue to get away with what they are doing, but the economy itself will destroy them if they don't quit.
"Condition of being busy." Says that one is obsolete, I don't know why. They definitely are busy doing things they shouldn't.
I don't see anywhere in there about monopolizing the market or industry. Are you going to argue that they have some sort of excuse for maintaining their effective monopoly? Where is there any balance in the current market? Are you going to argue that there can be balance in a monopoly market?
I don't care what business they give you in business school, a business that is not interested in the health of the industry and market in which it operates is not a business. A market out of balance is not healthy. That's the whole problem with every current implementation of communism and most implementations of socialism and nationalism -- there is an implicit monopoly, no reason or room to compete, no reason or room to improve.
About nine or ten years ago, Microsoft was defending their monopoly under some sort of PR campaign claiming they had some natural right to "innovate" or something, implicitly at the expense of everyone else. It's a sick idea, and if the market follows it, the market may seem to boom for a while, then it busts. Do you not understand that Microsoft is at the center of the current failure of the economy? Their business ideas poisoned the rest of the "business" market. Everybody wanting today's bottom line to rule the world.
I don't suppose you're still reading, but in case you are, the argument you give about most users not knowing how to use the internet is the very reason Microsoft should not have enabled naked network connectivity in MSWindows 95. That "engineering" attitude is the very center of the current trouble with malware that gets spread, automatically or by social engineering, mostly through MSOutlook or MSOutlook Express and through MSInternet Explorer.
Sure, the average user will be dazzled by the mail attachment that automatically starts running. That's the whole problem. Even Linux does not yet have the necessary protections to allow that kind of "interactive" application safely.
Likewise for web pages that have a lot of bells and whistles and stuff that
From my point of view, they are paying with money they should not have.
Their software, rushed to market before the underlying infrastructure was ready for it, not to mention rushed to market with half-baked and half-complete features that exacerbated the problems the software caused, is costing us all.
Sure, there would be malware and spam even if Microsoft had had the patience (and engineering fortitude) to wait to get the software mostly right, and to limit it to run sensibly within the scope of the RFCs, but the scale would be orders of magnitude less.
And the cost due to their bad engineering is closer in scope to their corporate worth than it is to the cost of this bridge.
No, they don't get brownie points for this bridge, even if they foot the whole cost.
If Microsoft were showing the slightest interest in restoring balance to the marketplace,
If Microsoft were showing the slightest real interest in undoing the damage their software has done to the internet,
If Microsoft were showing the slightest indication of getting away from the sieve security models they've been using to enable bad software to keep running in spite of the damage it has already done (and will continue do) to the internet,
If the money they have hadn't been taken by fraudulently selling feature lists instead of real features, ...
The problem is Microsoft. Where they are a burden to the infrastructure, they should foot the bill for fixing the problems they've caused.
The entire bill.
What are you planning to do, buy SCO and finally put them out of our misery?
Wow. Freedom fries.
Serious silliness I miss not living in the US.
Might explain some of the questions I have gotten from English students on the subject.
(Wonder what could be done so that trying to link to the Japanese article doesn't send wikipedia to ampersand.)
(See, honey, reading /. is educational.)
Hmm.
Trying to remember the contexts where I've read, heard, used the word elite.
My friend who joined some elite branch of the military is probably the most representative instance. (The branch where they pick up their agents with bungie cords dangling from reconnaissance jets or something like that.)
If your friends call you elitist for naming the failings of MySQL, maybe you need to spend time with different friends. :-/
I don't exactly disagree about MySQL not being good enough, but then most software really isn't good enough, either. PostGreSQL is a good direction to migrate if migration ends up being necessary, but I was mostly commenting on the word "elite".
Myself, I'm from the camp that believes that ++i is more often what people mean when they write i++, and that people would benefit at a fundamental level to understand what they are saying, especially when writing software. MySQL used to be much easier to get started with than PostGreSQL, and most people who thought they wanted a database, seemed they really mostly expected some cheap semi-persistent content-addressable store.
It's a different world now. MySQL has improved their underlying tech, PostGreSQL is easier to get started with and has improved the underlying tech. The money Sun spent for MySQL was a huge mistake. Unbelievable mistake, typical of what tends to be done just before the stock (etc.) market starts a major correction.
But, I'm not sure the investment should be just abandoned. There is market value in the brand, still, and the licensing compatibility issues (among other things) prevent Sun from just bolting a compatibility interface on top of PostGreSQL.
Anyway, I was just commenting on the word elite.
Well, there _are_ parts of the planet where bread is not the staple starch source.
The ability to understand the difference between ++i and i++ comes by experience to those for whom it makes a difference. The ability to recognize and appreciate a decent RDBMS comes by experience to those who use such. We can talk about such things, but, as is typical, the set of those who talk and the set of those who do tend to be somewhat disjoint sets.
Designation as elite comes from the person so designating himself, or, perhaps, some certifying organization which certifies primarily based on tests. Experience is a hard thing to measure, and an even harder thing to certify meaningfully. Tests can only certify a baseline competence.
Elitism tends to declare itself beyond competence. Thus, elite is mostly hubris.
Hubris (in the sense of self-confidence) is not entirely evil, and I may be conflating "l33t" with "elite" to an extent with which you would not agree, but elite is still mostly hubris.
I would rather talk about dedication to ideals such as constantly refining one's skill set, and service.
Some people call that professionalism, but that's yet another word that means different things to different people. (Some managers think it's unprofessional to perform uncharged service, for instance.)
I think you wanted to say,
var v = i++;
and
var v = ++i;
Otherwise, yeah.
You perhaps thought some denizen of /. could just rant that well and that prolifically?
Not exactly off-topic. This is one example of unrequested information (spam), and of the ultimate problem of controlling it --
We might succeed.
You might get more sleep there, anyway.
Getting up for the facilities is going to be a problem.
Different stations, with earplugs.
If only one person is listening to each radio, it's not a public performance any more.
And the stuff can listen to what they like, since they really don't like the classical. (Although, she would then have problems with some staff playing head-banger music loud enough to spook the horses through the plugs.)
I agree with the gp. I've fought the hazards of "interpreted" urls since way back before IE market penetration went over 50%.
Current browsers have way too much function, and this is yet another example of a security hole waiting to be entered. We have a separate search field, at least move the command interface over there.
Or maybe require something like
command://
to switch on the command interpretation, if you simply have to have it in the url field.