Is the posted list of banned songs complete? One of the more obvious candidates, "First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin" by Manfred Mann is missing.
They probably didn't bother to "ban" any songs that their stations would never play, anyways.
Serious question here. I'm sorry, but what does this have anything to do with the Paris Expo? Security is their #1 concern? I'm not following the relevance.
Even if nobody was worried about attacks, there's a more basic practical matter: How will people get there? The airlines have a pretty big backlog of cancelled flights to deal with, and many people will probably be simply unable to make it.
You know, that's what _always_ gets me going about TV news outlets. They start out with really excellent coverage as the events unfold, but eventually the action dies down and they shift into "Emmy mode".
Somebody moderate this up. There was something vaguely sickening about the development of the "America Under Attack" logos. We don't need flashy graphics to bring home to us just what a major event this was.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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It's looking increasingly like a fundamentalist Muslim attack on the center of the Christian world.
New York is the center of the Christian world? Man, what have you been smoking?
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
I too have trouble with people looking at Middle Easterners in the US and blaming or feeling ill will toward them. I wish some high ranking government official would say, "if you blame them, then please blame all white people for Oklahoma City. Since that thought probably seems ridiculous to you, stop associating bad things with people just because they might look like people who are suspects".
This isn't just the right attitude to take on principle, it's also a supremely pragmatic attitude. A perception that Americans hate Arabs will only make it easier for the people who masterminded yesterday's events to find new fanatics to recruit. If we allow our anger to drive us to harm innocents, we'll only strengthen the sort of anti-American sentiment that killed thousands of people, yesterday.
Some people argue that proprietary software is appropriate, because "users aren't intelligent or driven enough" to make use of the freedoms to modify and study the software.
This is a strawman. Very few people make this argument. It looks to me like you're only bringing it up because it gives you an opportunity to cast supporters of copyright as elitist.
It's a very heartwarming idea - he's attempting to conjugate C's performance, speed, and low "levelness" with Java's "oh-my-god-did-I-just-finish-writing-that,-boy-it- only-took-me-3 minutes... but-it-runs-slow" beauty.
But if it can be done, why hasn't it been done already, hmm?
It has been done already. The language is called C++. It's a big language, but it's considerably more powerful than Java (multiple inheritance, templates), while also being faster.
Unfortunately, it doesn' t have Sun's marketing engine behind it.
As a Canadian who has been to the states often enough to understand mass transit in both countries, I quickly realised that mass transit ONLY works in huge cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Atlanta, Detriot, New York, for example.
I'm guessing you didn't spend much time in Atlanta. I can't comment on Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, or Detroit, having never visited those cities, but except for getting to/from the airport (the city's best feature: it's easy to get out of), Atlanta's mass transit sucks. Atlanta's subway lines barely cover any territory at all, and buses are slow. And trying to walk more than a quarter-mile from a subway/bus stop is generally unpleasant in a city where most of the the sidewalks are simply narrow strips of concrete situated between strip-mall parking lots and roads full of cars whizzing by at 45+ mph. Living in Atlanta without a car is painful, at best. I've done it, but I don't recommend it.
Those of us who have been on the Net for 5+ years have been used to not having to pay for content, whether it be streaming video clips or insightful Usenet discussions. It's hard psychologically for people to swallow costs for things that they used to get for free, even if paid content is better than free sometimes.
That's your right, I suppose. But if you take this attitude, you shouldn't be surprised when your culture comes to be effectively owned by the advertisers and manipulators who do pay money to the people who write essays, record music, film television shows, and host discussion forums.
The way I see it, the money I pay for content makes the content producers a little more responsive and responsible to me, and a little less so to, say, Lexus, or the Office of National Drug Control Policy. I like that. Those who create things with no immediate utilitarian value (artists, writers, and all sorts of "content producers") have always had patrons who paid them to create. Sometimes that has been the church, or a few wealthy individuals. The printing press and movie theater made it possible for the common man to act as a patron. And American television puts patronage in the hands of large corporate and governmental organizations who buy advertising time.
The internet offers the role of patron to the common man in a way that even the printing press could not. We should be eager to take up this role, rather than leaving it to fall into the hands of organizations whose values are ultimately quite different from our own.
The common interpretation at Slashdot is that Microsoft doesn't like the GPL because it doesn't allow them to 'steal' other people's code for use in their products, as the BSD license does.
Articles like this make it more likely that the common person will interpret things the same way. Microsoft might claim that their motivation is moral principles and concern for intellectual property and the software industry as a whole, but simple self-interest is going to look like the real motivation to a few more people, now.
I was pretty surprised, a few months ago, when MS seemed to start stepping up their rhetoric against open source. It was the first time I believed that open source was a serious long-term threat to them. And it seemed like a misstep from a marketing perspective, too. They give open source credibility when they publicly attack it. A lot of CTOs will look at this rhetoric and think "If MS is afraid of it (but using it), maybe there's something useful there, after all."
So, any proprietary software that can be extended by addition of GPLed modules is by definition a derived work? That's more than a little bit scary.
No. What you describe resembles the current case only in certain technical details. You can't call the GPL'd module here a mere "extension" to the closed source program: In addition to advertising itself as providing capabilities that actually come from GPL'd code, the program in question is designed and built around that code. Regardless of the technical details of how the program it uses the GPL'd code, this makes it a derived work. It's quite possible that in another situation, the same technical mechanism could be used without the calling code being a derived work of the called code.
The law doesn't merely care about technical distinctions, such as "static" vs. "dynamic" linking. The law is much more concerned about distinctions (such as intent) that usually have no simple and straightforward technical manifestation.
The "Macs use non-standard components" complaint has been obsolete for ages - everything since the Power Macs has shipped uses standard components just about everywhere -- with the exception of the monitor jack, which, as I said, requires only a cheap adaptor to work with VGA.
That's news to me. I was able to plug my VGA monitor into my G4 cube using the same cable I'd previously used to plug it into my PC. No adapter was required -- the video card has both ADC and VGA outputs. I'm sure that what you say may hold true for some Macs, though.
However, the idea of picking up one of those 17" LCDs is starting to look rather appealing.
My experience has been that: The accounting people who wanted to generate reports using the tools they were used to (Crystal Reports, Excel, etc.) needed instead to ask the IS department to write programs that would generate flat files (rows and columns) so that the complex, non-tabular OO data could be brought back to tabular data for reporting purposes. Hell it would have been simpler and cheaper to have had the data in an RDBMS in the first place!
An RDBMS wouldn't have necessarily made reporting any easier. The sort of highly-normalized RDBMS schema that is appropriate for an OLTP-type application is quite hard to report against - data in such a schema isn't usually very "tabular", either.
Many shops that use an RDBMS for their OLTP systems end up building a seperate data warehouse with a flatter, more tabular schema that can be more easily queried for report generation.
If that's what you wanted, that's great. I'm glad you use the BSD license for your code. However, I have had BSD license advocates suggest that the GPL is unnecessary, because people will always contribute back their improvements as free software anyway, without the compulsion provided by the GPL. That's BS, and this is an example.
What exactly is the goal? To maximize the contributions back to 'the community'?
If so, it's not at all clear that the GPL is superior to a BSDish license. Contributions back to the community are not just a function of the percentage of 'users' who become 'contributors' (which is lower for BSD than for the GPL), but also of the absolute number of users. I'd wager that many more companies pick up and use BSDish code than GPL'd code -- the GPL's viral clause scares most off, even if they want to release improvements back to the community. I'd wager that the larger number of companies using BSD-licensed code could well be enough to compensate for the fact that fewer of these companies are contributing back to the community.
BSD code is very attractive to businesses for precisely this reason. People want to leverage free software without giving anything back.
The only people who have the right to demand anything back are the people who write the code these businesses are using. Not you. Not some nebulous 'community'.
And if these people who actually wrote the code wanted anything back, they would have picked a license other than BSD. I doubt these people are bitching now, and I doubt that they want self-appointed representatives of 'the community' bitching on their behalf, either.
After a quick check of the site I've come to believe that the product that they're OSSing is the same thing that they use in their SAP R/3 product (thats right, the same product that costs thousands of dollars and is used all over the world).
Thousands of dollars? More like hundreds of thousands, I think.
SAP R/3 has an abstraction layer that allows it to run on top of many different databases, including Oracle and DB/2. It may also run on top of sapdb, but few if any R/3 installations actually do so. During the year I spent working for a consulting company specializing in SAP implementations, I never even heard of sapdb, much less of anyone actually using it on an installation - everyone was using Oracle or DB/2. No doubt this has played a role in their decision to open it up.
So I wouldn't expect sapdb to be a particularly high-quality database - SAP's strength is in business applications, not the databases they run on top of. If you're interested in an open-source database, you should probably stick with one of the ones that already has an established open-source following and developer community.
Okay, you take a successful company with 80 employees. You bring in VC money, you bring in a change in CEO, and with that, a change in direction. The first quarter, instead of the great growth you've been having, you start to slump. Then the next quarter after that you're even lower. I think at that point he should have stepped in a said "Hey listen, you guys might be great in your own respective fields, but you don't know what you're doing in this one. Step away from the console...."
Except that it's not at all clear that the new management team doesn't know what they're doing. It's absurd to talk about the declines in AD's profitability without considering it in the context of what the industry as a whole is seeing. Plenty of companies are seeing losses and having to lay people off. Plenty are just folding up and dying completely.
Look at what's been happening to software service companies recently and tell me honestly that the management team that replaced Philip is solely responsible for the decline in AD's fortunes. You can't. Despite the the big-name clients Philip likes to cite, a hell of a lot of AD's revenues were coming from little dot coms flush with VC cash of their own. Now that the gold rush has died down, it's no surprise they are suffering -- just like nearly every other software company that depends significantly on service revenue, and many that don't.
Giving Philip all the credit for past profits and the current management all the blame for present losses requires that you willfully blind yourself to changes in market conditions.
It is much easier to set up a web page than a magazine.
The print journals don't have more credibility than a website set up by a researcher because of the greater difficulty of paper printing. The print journals have more credibility because the put research through a peer review and editing process.
Frankly, I've never understood why you would want your client to do less.
You may not be able to trust the client. To go back to your Quake example: If the server did all the real work and the client's only job was to feed user input to the server and display a stream of images sent back by the server, a lot of the cheating that happens on Quake 1 multiplayer games would become impossible.
My experience is that others tend to focus on style instead of substance, criticising variable naming conventions and the like instead of focusing on finding the actual bugs in code. This is during peer reviews, mind you, I have no experience of pair programming.
This is actually one of the ways in which pair programming is better than code reviews: With pair programming, the guy 'watching' isn't passive - he's an active participant, and is just as much an "owner" of the code as the guy typing. He's as eager to get it done and see something working as the guy with the keyboard, and so he's probably going to set aside his personal idiosyncracies if they're impeding progress.
With code reviews, the reviewer doesn't have this kind of investement in the code, and this makes it much easier for him to get nitpicky about things like naming conventions.
One thing I'm noticing here is that a lot of the critics of pair programming think that it means "one person codes, the other watches". It doesn't: It means two people coding - the guy "watching" is going through a lot of the same mental processes as the guy with the keyboard. They're both programming. It's just that only one of them happens to be typing.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably didn't bother to "ban" any songs that their stations would never play, anyways.
Even if nobody was worried about attacks, there's a more basic practical matter: How will people get there? The airlines have a pretty big backlog of cancelled flights to deal with, and many people will probably be simply unable to make it.
Somebody moderate this up. There was something vaguely sickening about the development of the "America Under Attack" logos. We don't need flashy graphics to bring home to us just what a major event this was.
New York is the center of the Christian world? Man, what have you been smoking?
This isn't just the right attitude to take on principle, it's also a supremely pragmatic attitude. A perception that Americans hate Arabs will only make it easier for the people who masterminded yesterday's events to find new fanatics to recruit. If we allow our anger to drive us to harm innocents, we'll only strengthen the sort of anti-American sentiment that killed thousands of people, yesterday.
You're missing the point. Which is more powerful? A word processor that can handle a 1,000,000 novel, or one that craps out around 1,000?
This is a strawman. Very few people make this argument. It looks to me like you're only bringing it up because it gives you an opportunity to cast supporters of copyright as elitist.
It's a very heartwarming idea - he's attempting to conjugate C's performance, speed, and low "levelness" with Java's "oh-my-god-did-I-just-finish-writing-that,-boy-it- only-took-me-3 minutes... but-it-runs-slow" beauty.
But if it can be done, why hasn't it been done already, hmm?
It has been done already. The language is called C++. It's a big language, but it's considerably more powerful than Java (multiple inheritance, templates), while also being faster.
Unfortunately, it doesn' t have Sun's marketing engine behind it.
I'm guessing you didn't spend much time in Atlanta. I can't comment on Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, or Detroit, having never visited those cities, but except for getting to/from the airport (the city's best feature: it's easy to get out of), Atlanta's mass transit sucks. Atlanta's subway lines barely cover any territory at all, and buses are slow. And trying to walk more than a quarter-mile from a subway/bus stop is generally unpleasant in a city where most of the the sidewalks are simply narrow strips of concrete situated between strip-mall parking lots and roads full of cars whizzing by at 45+ mph. Living in Atlanta without a car is painful, at best. I've done it, but I don't recommend it.
That's your right, I suppose. But if you take this attitude, you shouldn't be surprised when your culture comes to be effectively owned by the advertisers and manipulators who do pay money to the people who write essays, record music, film television shows, and host discussion forums.
The way I see it, the money I pay for content makes the content producers a little more responsive and responsible to me, and a little less so to, say, Lexus, or the Office of National Drug Control Policy. I like that. Those who create things with no immediate utilitarian value (artists, writers, and all sorts of "content producers") have always had patrons who paid them to create. Sometimes that has been the church, or a few wealthy individuals. The printing press and movie theater made it possible for the common man to act as a patron. And American television puts patronage in the hands of large corporate and governmental organizations who buy advertising time.
The internet offers the role of patron to the common man in a way that even the printing press could not. We should be eager to take up this role, rather than leaving it to fall into the hands of organizations whose values are ultimately quite different from our own.
The common interpretation at Slashdot is that Microsoft doesn't like the GPL because it doesn't allow them to 'steal' other people's code for use in their products, as the BSD license does.
Articles like this make it more likely that the common person will interpret things the same way. Microsoft might claim that their motivation is moral principles and concern for intellectual property and the software industry as a whole, but simple self-interest is going to look like the real motivation to a few more people, now.
I was pretty surprised, a few months ago, when MS seemed to start stepping up their rhetoric against open source. It was the first time I believed that open source was a serious long-term threat to them. And it seemed like a misstep from a marketing perspective, too. They give open source credibility when they publicly attack it. A lot of CTOs will look at this rhetoric and think "If MS is afraid of it (but using it), maybe there's something useful there, after all."
No. What you describe resembles the current case only in certain technical details. You can't call the GPL'd module here a mere "extension" to the closed source program: In addition to advertising itself as providing capabilities that actually come from GPL'd code, the program in question is designed and built around that code. Regardless of the technical details of how the program it uses the GPL'd code, this makes it a derived work. It's quite possible that in another situation, the same technical mechanism could be used without the calling code being a derived work of the called code.
The law doesn't merely care about technical distinctions, such as "static" vs. "dynamic" linking. The law is much more concerned about distinctions (such as intent) that usually have no simple and straightforward technical manifestation.
Who cares what kind of citizens they'll be? They'll be really kickass consumers.
That's news to me. I was able to plug my VGA monitor into my G4 cube using the same cable I'd previously used to plug it into my PC. No adapter was required -- the video card has both ADC and VGA outputs. I'm sure that what you say may hold true for some Macs, though.
However, the idea of picking up one of those 17" LCDs is starting to look rather appealing.
The two of you reach a compromise: Instead of "read slashdot" or "read LinuxToday", you go with "work on the code".
An RDBMS wouldn't have necessarily made reporting any easier. The sort of highly-normalized RDBMS schema that is appropriate for an OLTP-type application is quite hard to report against - data in such a schema isn't usually very "tabular", either.
Many shops that use an RDBMS for their OLTP systems end up building a seperate data warehouse with a flatter, more tabular schema that can be more easily queried for report generation.
What exactly is the goal? To maximize the contributions back to 'the community'?
If so, it's not at all clear that the GPL is superior to a BSDish license. Contributions back to the community are not just a function of the percentage of 'users' who become 'contributors' (which is lower for BSD than for the GPL), but also of the absolute number of users. I'd wager that many more companies pick up and use BSDish code than GPL'd code -- the GPL's viral clause scares most off, even if they want to release improvements back to the community. I'd wager that the larger number of companies using BSD-licensed code could well be enough to compensate for the fact that fewer of these companies are contributing back to the community.
The only people who have the right to demand anything back are the people who write the code these businesses are using. Not you. Not some nebulous 'community'.
And if these people who actually wrote the code wanted anything back, they would have picked a license other than BSD. I doubt these people are bitching now, and I doubt that they want self-appointed representatives of 'the community' bitching on their behalf, either.
Thousands of dollars? More like hundreds of thousands, I think.
SAP R/3 has an abstraction layer that allows it to run on top of many different databases, including Oracle and DB/2. It may also run on top of sapdb, but few if any R/3 installations actually do so. During the year I spent working for a consulting company specializing in SAP implementations, I never even heard of sapdb, much less of anyone actually using it on an installation - everyone was using Oracle or DB/2. No doubt this has played a role in their decision to open it up.
So I wouldn't expect sapdb to be a particularly high-quality database - SAP's strength is in business applications, not the databases they run on top of. If you're interested in an open-source database, you should probably stick with one of the ones that already has an established open-source following and developer community.
Python's tuples let you do exactly this. Lisp has something along these lines, too, though it's a bit more cumbersome.
And in C/C++, it's not always completely unreasonable to define a struct type just for returning from a function.
Except that it's not at all clear that the new management team doesn't know what they're doing. It's absurd to talk about the declines in AD's profitability without considering it in the context of what the industry as a whole is seeing. Plenty of companies are seeing losses and having to lay people off. Plenty are just folding up and dying completely.
Look at what's been happening to software service companies recently and tell me honestly that the management team that replaced Philip is solely responsible for the decline in AD's fortunes. You can't. Despite the the big-name clients Philip likes to cite, a hell of a lot of AD's revenues were coming from little dot coms flush with VC cash of their own. Now that the gold rush has died down, it's no surprise they are suffering -- just like nearly every other software company that depends significantly on service revenue, and many that don't.
Giving Philip all the credit for past profits and the current management all the blame for present losses requires that you willfully blind yourself to changes in market conditions.
Because print journals have more credibility.
It is much easier to set up a web page than a magazine.
The print journals don't have more credibility than a website set up by a researcher because of the greater difficulty of paper printing. The print journals have more credibility because the put research through a peer review and editing process.
Frankly, I've never understood why you would want your client to do less.
You may not be able to trust the client. To go back to your Quake example: If the server did all the real work and the client's only job was to feed user input to the server and display a stream of images sent back by the server, a lot of the cheating that happens on Quake 1 multiplayer games would become impossible.
This is actually one of the ways in which pair programming is better than code reviews: With pair programming, the guy 'watching' isn't passive - he's an active participant, and is just as much an "owner" of the code as the guy typing. He's as eager to get it done and see something working as the guy with the keyboard, and so he's probably going to set aside his personal idiosyncracies if they're impeding progress.
With code reviews, the reviewer doesn't have this kind of investement in the code, and this makes it much easier for him to get nitpicky about things like naming conventions.
One thing I'm noticing here is that a lot of the critics of pair programming think that it means "one person codes, the other watches". It doesn't: It means two people coding - the guy "watching" is going through a lot of the same mental processes as the guy with the keyboard. They're both programming. It's just that only one of them happens to be typing.
So is it also voluntary for the citizens who use libraries to pay the taxes that fund this subsidy?