Actually, there are a good number of non-free (beer) applications that are kind of open source to paying customers. For example, buy C++ Builder Pro or Enterprise, and you get the source code for the VCL. It just isn't licensed like the GPL where you can share it with all of your friends and neighbors. There are also some commercial OSs (many of them UNIX derivatives of some kind or another) that use the same philosophy. You pay enough money, you get the source code. I think that even VxWorks, which is almost like the M$ of the embedded UNIX market, sells licensed source code, but I'm not sure (somebody who knows please correct/validate me). It may not be unreasonable for Ximian to set up some kind of system where large enterprise customers pay up and get source code so that they can tweak the thing for their individual needs.
I have to agree with you. Let me just say for the record that I have been raised very much Christian and I am a conservative Republican. That being said, if this guy is not a hoax, he is definitely a misinformed zealot. The guy doesn't even have his Biblical facts right (at no time does the Bible refer to Adam and Eve eating an "apple" -- in fact, I'm not totally positive about this, but I don't think the Bible uses the word apple aywhere). Whether this guy is for real or not, his article is a great example of everthing bad about people who claim to be "Christians," while the only doctrine they seem to preach is intolerance and hatred. Take your "rock" music for example. My wife was teaching third grade and had a student in her class that was being raised by such religious zealots. She used to turn on a Yanni CD while the kids were working quietly to help keep a quiet mood. One of the kids went home and told Mommy that the teacher was making them listen to some Devil non-Christian music in class. Mommy came and explained with her very best poor grammar that their family only listens to "Chrisian" music (because obviously a song is more spiritual than Yanni's soft music if it says "Jesus" somewhere -- even if said music is loud and obnoxious). A couple of weeks later, this same kid became unusually upset when he lost one of his "good behavior" tokens for the day. My wife tried to console him and tell him that he had five of them every day (fifteen for the week) and that losing one every now and then was no big deal. All of the kids lost a token every once in a while. By this time the kid was crying, but he finally managed to explain to her that if he lost any of his behavior tokens on a given day, he was not given dinner that night. By this time, my wife was downright pissed with these people, so she proceed to call the good Christian parents, arrange a meeting, and chew them out. Of course, they had a hard time dealing with an educated person, so they just lied, contradicted themselves several times, and finally she let them go.
I would call this a matter of preference. I have enjoyed Shakespeare via both of these media. My bone to pick with the poster was not that he asserted an opinion that Shakespeare is more enjoyable when watched, but rather that he acted as though it were ridiculous that someone reads Shakespeare rather than watches it. It may be that Shakespeare is better seen than read, but I still maintain that most people have read more Shakespeare than seen, therefore the poster just sounded like he didn't know what he was talking about.
Not that this is on topic at all, but I have read lots more Shakespeare than I have seen acted out. I don't have any hard evidence, but I think this is the general case. Most people have read several Shakespearean plays in the course of their formal educations. Mocking somebody for having implied that reading is the normal means of exposure to Shakespeare makes you sound like one of a) an uneducated flunkie or b) a teenager who just doesn't know what he's talking about.
ICBMs use what is called "Circular Error Probability" (this is totally non-sensitive by the way, so don't think you're getting away with something). Basically, what that means is that our newest, baddest ICBMs can pretty much hit a football field at least half of the time. It's pretty hard to get a lot more accurate than that because they are "ballistic" devices (i.e., they have no guidance system once they are deployed from the rocket and make a couple of immediate corrections -- after that, it's just free fall). However, with a 300kt warhead, it doesn't make much difference which end zone you're over when you detonate.
Don't you know the publishers are making a concerted effort to get rid of libraries? That's right, libraries!!! Part of the very core of educated societies. So basically, unless you're into independently published books, it's not even safe to read any more. I personally try to stick to older stuff that's in the public domain that I can download from Project Gutenburg and read on my Visor.
@#&^@-it! My mod points expired yesterday. Rarely does a post actually make me chuckle. You, sir (or madame), have made my day. Now, I'm going to go get the IBM via-voice sdk, write a program, and put it in/root/.bashrc, so that on the rare occasion I login as root, I will hear "You've got root!"
While its true that the 1.44 MB floppy drive is woefully outdated and ridiculously small in storage capacity, you can't altogether remove it until something replaces it. Right now, there is no other removable re-writable medium that is found consistently on almost all computers. Until there is, the floppy still plays an important role.
Didn't you know? That's latin. "Deposi" is the latin for "deposits or excrements", ergo Microsoft is trying to bar the media from the crap they throw around at trials. What they are not counting on, is that eventually, some of it must eventually hit the fan.
I can't find the suspect article. They all seem to go to actual news stories. Somebody please show me the conspiracy. I can't believe they pulled it already, since I saw this posting early on.
I wasn't intending to imply that GUI's are the only useful application of OO design. I was saying that functions are more useful in solving engineering problems, so in this particular case, I would only use them for the interface. I personally hate doing GUI design (C++ Builder practically does it for me, which is fine with me), but I use objects to do all sorts of useful things in much of my daily work, which unfortunately is closer to Computer Science than Engineering (at least until I graduate).
While abstract classes will incur the hit of an extra level of indirection in a function call, and exception handling in C++ can be expensive (as can multiple inheritance), these features only cost you if you use them.
Actually, I was thinking more in terms of design overhead. I've done a fair amount of both kinds of programming, and I find OO very useful for many kinds of tasks, but if I'm writing an engineering application, I find the overhead of creating a class and all of its members tedious when all I need is a function that will accept inputs and return the output. To use your speech recognition example, if I had to, for example, perform a mathematical transform on an input waveform that represents a word, I would much prefer to implement that transform as a function than write a class that has to be instantiated, have data members assigned, have a member function called, and then read out a member variable to get the result (which would be the proper way to do it if we stick to true OO theory). I'm no anti-OO crusader by any means. Objects definately have their place. I just think that they are more appropriate to the realm of Computer Science problems than Engineering problems.
Functional programming is better suited to solving engineering problems. You don't need the overhead of OO design for your engineering programs. I would stick to C unless you are trying to do some kind of fancy GUI.
Point granted. In terms of number of musicians, "real" artists are probably the rule. I was thinking in terms of dollars. As for the rest (i.e. the "on-topic" part) it's unfortunate, but chances are that the law will end up representing the interests of the creators of the most seen content, because the creators of the most content generally don't have the "resources" (I had a professor who was fond of saying that in America, we have the best politicians money can buy). It's truly unfortunate, because music is a medium in which a quality product can be produced without a lot of money, and RIAA would just love to make it illegal for anyone to produce music without their blessing.
Fair enough - but it tends to be the exception rather than the rule in the recording industry.
That's crap. How many big music "artists" write their own music, or even their own arrangements? In some of the genres with a niche appeal, the performers are the artists (for example, most hard rock/alternative bands write their own stuff), but the big money makers are the mainstream pop titles that are cranked out like so many shoes, and have about as much artistic value. This is your pop and country (which no longer sounds like real country music -- it's just slightly more twangy pop). Almost none of them write their own material. The tunes are manufactured to be non-descript because it makes it more broadly palatable, and they hardly bother re-arranging the words anymore. The people performing it are images put together by their respective labels to give a familiar face to the latest garbage. I am not even a songwriter, and I find it ludicrous that people like Brittney Spears and Faith Hill are referred to as "artists." They're salesmen, and what they sell is mediocre at best. That's not to say that there are no artists in the music industry. I think that there are a lot of artists with record contracts that have something to say, and they do write and perform their own stuff. But to call them the rule is like claiming that trading Inde music on Napster was the rule.
The catch is, you can't return opened CD's. Ostensibly, this is because you may have burned an illegal copy and are returning it to get the music for free. The irony, of course, is that Universal claims you can't copy the CD, because they have the big, bad, unbreakable copy protection scheme. But they still won't let you return it because they hate you.
Since when do deaf people need accessibility features to use a computer? They may need some special help to get anything out of multimedia presentations, but they are certainly not inhibited from being productive. I operate my computer with the speakers muted about 99% of the time. The biggest thing this could even affect is some games (it would be hard to play Thief without the sound), which is hardly an important business function. Input devices that deal with mechanical inhibitions seem to be more hardware related (the only important software is the driver). So it would seem that the blind have a near monopoly on not being able to use standard software, which would defeat Cliff's implication that solutions for blind users aren't enough.
They're just words!
They're just combinations of sounds that, for some
odd historical reason, some religious freaks and
other prudes have somehow decided to focus on.
Words are, in your view, so insignificant, and yet if someone tried to abridge your right to say these meaningless, useless words, you would be all up in arms. Take a moment to think before you post. Words are very powerful. There may be nothing magical about the actual collection of sounds. You could pause in a sentence and say "Umm," and it would mean nothing to you, while a Korean could very well hear you saying "cancer." When words become part of a language, they inherit a context that has enough power that, for the entire written history of man, tyrants have tried to suppress their use while populations have fought and died to be able to use them. I believe the original poster's intent was to express that there are certain collections of sounds that he finds offensive because of the context they have acquired in a language. Why does that bother you so much? Why is that naive? Are you implying that it not possible to understand something that is bad without being a part of it? Why is this technology horrific? Nobody is forcing you to use it. It simply allows some people to watch movies that they would not otherwise watch because there are parts they find offensive. That hardly carries the weighty social implications you hinted at in your post.
Microsoft's contribution really HAS resulted in lower prices for the consumer because they were able to help more companies sell their products hence spreading more of the cost of development around rather than letting it land on a comparitively few customers.
Of course, they're working pretty hard to recoup those price losses now. The brilliantly evil part is, they know that Joe User can't generally afford lots of money at once, so they just figure they'll sap it out of him a few dollars at a time, until they are supping on his very life blood (the soul can wait until SR2 of.NET). Muhwaahaahaa.
>> and with the downturn in the high tech industry you can get them cheap.
You moron. EE's are not now and never have been cheap. The dot-com bust and downturn of computer sales have not left them wandering the streets with hopes of getting any job they can find. That's what happened to the hordes of IS geeks who thought they could make good money fast without actually learning a useful skill. EE's spend gruelling years in college earning their degrees because they know that once they get out, they are entering a market where they are constantly in demand. It's great that the USPTO is hiring some EE's, but that doesn't mean they're going to get them at minimum wage.
This just reminded me of something I saw flipping through cable channels once. There was a little spot about one of those has-been 80's hair bands (I think it was Poison). It was talking about how in their early days, when they were pretty much broke, they would let fans come visit their dive and tell them to bring a pizza or something. That's how they ate until they got some cash flow. I would have to say that for folks in that situation, the more exposure you get, the better. If MP3's had been around at the time, they probably would have been all for music sharing, because music sharing = more fans = more people at your concert = more people who want to come visit you = more pizza.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there are a good number of non-free (beer) applications that are kind of open source to paying customers. For example, buy C++ Builder Pro or Enterprise, and you get the source code for the VCL. It just isn't licensed like the GPL where you can share it with all of your friends and neighbors. There are also some commercial OSs (many of them UNIX derivatives of some kind or another) that use the same philosophy. You pay enough money, you get the source code. I think that even VxWorks, which is almost like the M$ of the embedded UNIX market, sells licensed source code, but I'm not sure (somebody who knows please correct/validate me). It may not be unreasonable for Ximian to set up some kind of system where large enterprise customers pay up and get source code so that they can tweak the thing for their individual needs.
I have to agree with you. Let me just say for the record that I have been raised very much Christian and I am a conservative Republican. That being said, if this guy is not a hoax, he is definitely a misinformed zealot. The guy doesn't even have his Biblical facts right (at no time does the Bible refer to Adam and Eve eating an "apple" -- in fact, I'm not totally positive about this, but I don't think the Bible uses the word apple aywhere). Whether this guy is for real or not, his article is a great example of everthing bad about people who claim to be "Christians," while the only doctrine they seem to preach is intolerance and hatred. Take your "rock" music for example. My wife was teaching third grade and had a student in her class that was being raised by such religious zealots. She used to turn on a Yanni CD while the kids were working quietly to help keep a quiet mood. One of the kids went home and told Mommy that the teacher was making them listen to some Devil non-Christian music in class. Mommy came and explained with her very best poor grammar that their family only listens to "Chrisian" music (because obviously a song is more spiritual than Yanni's soft music if it says "Jesus" somewhere -- even if said music is loud and obnoxious). A couple of weeks later, this same kid became unusually upset when he lost one of his "good behavior" tokens for the day. My wife tried to console him and tell him that he had five of them every day (fifteen for the week) and that losing one every now and then was no big deal. All of the kids lost a token every once in a while. By this time the kid was crying, but he finally managed to explain to her that if he lost any of his behavior tokens on a given day, he was not given dinner that night. By this time, my wife was downright pissed with these people, so she proceed to call the good Christian parents, arrange a meeting, and chew them out. Of course, they had a hard time dealing with an educated person, so they just lied, contradicted themselves several times, and finally she let them go.
But didn't you see? If you click the first one, they tell you right there, their bulk e-mial service is "completely spam-free!"
I would call this a matter of preference. I have enjoyed Shakespeare via both of these media. My bone to pick with the poster was not that he asserted an opinion that Shakespeare is more enjoyable when watched, but rather that he acted as though it were ridiculous that someone reads Shakespeare rather than watches it. It may be that Shakespeare is better seen than read, but I still maintain that most people have read more Shakespeare than seen, therefore the poster just sounded like he didn't know what he was talking about.
Not that this is on topic at all, but I have read lots more Shakespeare than I have seen acted out. I don't have any hard evidence, but I think this is the general case. Most people have read several Shakespearean plays in the course of their formal educations. Mocking somebody for having implied that reading is the normal means of exposure to Shakespeare makes you sound like one of a) an uneducated flunkie or b) a teenager who just doesn't know what he's talking about.
ICBMs use what is called "Circular Error Probability" (this is totally non-sensitive by the way, so don't think you're getting away with something). Basically, what that means is that our newest, baddest ICBMs can pretty much hit a football field at least half of the time. It's pretty hard to get a lot more accurate than that because they are "ballistic" devices (i.e., they have no guidance system once they are deployed from the rocket and make a couple of immediate corrections -- after that, it's just free fall). However, with a 300kt warhead, it doesn't make much difference which end zone you're over when you detonate.
Don't you know the publishers are making a concerted effort to get rid of libraries? That's right, libraries!!! Part of the very core of educated societies. So basically, unless you're into independently published books, it's not even safe to read any more. I personally try to stick to older stuff that's in the public domain that I can download from Project Gutenburg and read on my Visor.
@#&^@-it! My mod points expired yesterday. Rarely does a post actually make me chuckle. You, sir (or madame), have made my day. Now, I'm going to go get the IBM via-voice sdk, write a program, and put it in /root/.bashrc, so that on the rare occasion I login as root, I will hear "You've got root!"
While its true that the 1.44 MB floppy drive is woefully outdated and ridiculously small in storage capacity, you can't altogether remove it until something replaces it. Right now, there is no other removable re-writable medium that is found consistently on almost all computers. Until there is, the floppy still plays an important role.
Actually, the development of the Google search engine was funded and commissioned by the CIA too.
Didn't you know? That's latin. "Deposi" is the latin for "deposits or excrements", ergo Microsoft is trying to bar the media from the crap they throw around at trials. What they are not counting on, is that eventually, some of it must eventually hit the fan.
I can't find the suspect article. They all seem to go to actual news stories. Somebody please show me the conspiracy. I can't believe they pulled it already, since I saw this posting early on.
I wasn't intending to imply that GUI's are the only useful application of OO design. I was saying that functions are more useful in solving engineering problems, so in this particular case, I would only use them for the interface. I personally hate doing GUI design (C++ Builder practically does it for me, which is fine with me), but I use objects to do all sorts of useful things in much of my daily work, which unfortunately is closer to Computer Science than Engineering (at least until I graduate).
Actually, I was thinking more in terms of design overhead. I've done a fair amount of both kinds of programming, and I find OO very useful for many kinds of tasks, but if I'm writing an engineering application, I find the overhead of creating a class and all of its members tedious when all I need is a function that will accept inputs and return the output. To use your speech recognition example, if I had to, for example, perform a mathematical transform on an input waveform that represents a word, I would much prefer to implement that transform as a function than write a class that has to be instantiated, have data members assigned, have a member function called, and then read out a member variable to get the result (which would be the proper way to do it if we stick to true OO theory). I'm no anti-OO crusader by any means. Objects definately have their place. I just think that they are more appropriate to the realm of Computer Science problems than Engineering problems.
Functional programming is better suited to solving engineering problems. You don't need the overhead of OO design for your engineering programs. I would stick to C unless you are trying to do some kind of fancy GUI.
Point granted. In terms of number of musicians, "real" artists are probably the rule. I was thinking in terms of dollars. As for the rest (i.e. the "on-topic" part) it's unfortunate, but chances are that the law will end up representing the interests of the creators of the most seen content, because the creators of the most content generally don't have the "resources" (I had a professor who was fond of saying that in America, we have the best politicians money can buy). It's truly unfortunate, because music is a medium in which a quality product can be produced without a lot of money, and RIAA would just love to make it illegal for anyone to produce music without their blessing.
That's crap. How many big music "artists" write their own music, or even their own arrangements? In some of the genres with a niche appeal, the performers are the artists (for example, most hard rock/alternative bands write their own stuff), but the big money makers are the mainstream pop titles that are cranked out like so many shoes, and have about as much artistic value. This is your pop and country (which no longer sounds like real country music -- it's just slightly more twangy pop). Almost none of them write their own material. The tunes are manufactured to be non-descript because it makes it more broadly palatable, and they hardly bother re-arranging the words anymore. The people performing it are images put together by their respective labels to give a familiar face to the latest garbage. I am not even a songwriter, and I find it ludicrous that people like Brittney Spears and Faith Hill are referred to as "artists." They're salesmen, and what they sell is mediocre at best. That's not to say that there are no artists in the music industry. I think that there are a lot of artists with record contracts that have something to say, and they do write and perform their own stuff. But to call them the rule is like claiming that trading Inde music on Napster was the rule.
You're right. I was lazy this time. But I still think they hate you.
The catch is, you can't return opened CD's. Ostensibly, this is because you may have burned an illegal copy and are returning it to get the music for free. The irony, of course, is that Universal claims you can't copy the CD, because they have the big, bad, unbreakable copy protection scheme. But they still won't let you return it because they hate you.
Since when do deaf people need accessibility features to use a computer? They may need some special help to get anything out of multimedia presentations, but they are certainly not inhibited from being productive. I operate my computer with the speakers muted about 99% of the time. The biggest thing this could even affect is some games (it would be hard to play Thief without the sound), which is hardly an important business function. Input devices that deal with mechanical inhibitions seem to be more hardware related (the only important software is the driver). So it would seem that the blind have a near monopoly on not being able to use standard software, which would defeat Cliff's implication that solutions for blind users aren't enough.
Words are, in your view, so insignificant, and yet if someone tried to abridge your right to say these meaningless, useless words, you would be all up in arms. Take a moment to think before you post. Words are very powerful. There may be nothing magical about the actual collection of sounds. You could pause in a sentence and say "Umm," and it would mean nothing to you, while a Korean could very well hear you saying "cancer." When words become part of a language, they inherit a context that has enough power that, for the entire written history of man, tyrants have tried to suppress their use while populations have fought and died to be able to use them. I believe the original poster's intent was to express that there are certain collections of sounds that he finds offensive because of the context they have acquired in a language. Why does that bother you so much? Why is that naive? Are you implying that it not possible to understand something that is bad without being a part of it? Why is this technology horrific? Nobody is forcing you to use it. It simply allows some people to watch movies that they would not otherwise watch because there are parts they find offensive. That hardly carries the weighty social implications you hinted at in your post.
Of course, they're working pretty hard to recoup those price losses now. The brilliantly evil part is, they know that Joe User can't generally afford lots of money at once, so they just figure they'll sap it out of him a few dollars at a time, until they are supping on his very life blood (the soul can wait until SR2 of .NET). Muhwaahaahaa.
Simple does not mean blatantly obvious. Usually, finding the simple solution is a much more challenging task than coming up with a complicated one.
You moron. EE's are not now and never have been cheap. The dot-com bust and downturn of computer sales have not left them wandering the streets with hopes of getting any job they can find. That's what happened to the hordes of IS geeks who thought they could make good money fast without actually learning a useful skill. EE's spend gruelling years in college earning their degrees because they know that once they get out, they are entering a market where they are constantly in demand. It's great that the USPTO is hiring some EE's, but that doesn't mean they're going to get them at minimum wage.
This just reminded me of something I saw flipping through cable channels once. There was a little spot about one of those has-been 80's hair bands (I think it was Poison). It was talking about how in their early days, when they were pretty much broke, they would let fans come visit their dive and tell them to bring a pizza or something. That's how they ate until they got some cash flow. I would have to say that for folks in that situation, the more exposure you get, the better. If MP3's had been around at the time, they probably would have been all for music sharing, because music sharing = more fans = more people at your concert = more people who want to come visit you = more pizza.