Even if copyright were abandoned there would remain many people/corporations who would not change their way of thinking or their business model.
Confidentiality, non-disclosure, royalty and non-compete agreements can be expected to proliferate in copyright-free commerce.
not just that, but dumbass attempts like CCS, SDMI and that ATA copyprotection scheme etc will explode tenfold. You might think you can hack them like you hacked CSS, but the only reason CSS was thoroughly hacked was the (now nonexistant) US cryptography export laws. Until public key encyrption is hacked these schemes don't have to be breakable (so you pulled the key and algorithm out of the firmware's chipset, the next peice of software for it will just use a different key)
I think the world could run quite nicely without copyright, and artists would still get paid (possibly paid more). But it's a moot point because it ain't going to happen (at least, not until the invention of replicators).
I really don't see anything wrong with DirecTV trying to stop people from accessing channels which normally cost extra for free.
DirecTV isn't being slammed here for protecting their income, they're being admired for pulling off a cool stunt. 'Company outhacks hackers' isn't something you hear everyday.
But the question is whether or not any of these are "rights" at all, in light of the fact that we're buying the content from someone else. They set up the contract. We purchase the movie -- we in essence sign it.
No, that's not how it works at all.
There is no contract.
You can watch any movie you can see and listen to any song you can hear - there is no law saying you have to block your ears when you hear a song you haven't purchased, that would be silly. You don't have to buy the song or the movie to see/hear them, morally or legally.
To paraphraise someone else on slashdot, when you buy a CD you are not buying a song, you not buying a license to listen to a song, or a license to own a song, you are buying a piece of plastic - nothing more.
I'll say it again because it's important - there is no contract. If you didn't sign it (physically or verbally), it's not a contract. There is no license either - if you had a license then you would be able to walk into the CD store with your broken or scratched CD and ask for a replacement (at the cost of about $1).
Congratulations, you have now purchased a piece of plastic. How is the artificial scarcity maintained? Copyright law says you are not allowed to copy the contents of the CD without the authors permission.
Copyright law is the only thing restricting what we do with the contents of the CD, and copyright law specifically says we can do things such as sell the CD. Because of this you have to wonder how we can end up in a situation where we can't duplicate a work, and we can't sell it either. Sounds like the media corps are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
This license that you think you sign when you buy a movie... what exactly does it say? How do you know - have you read it? Where is it? You should be careful about buying into contracts you haven't read. What if clause #23 said that you consented to having your children killed - 'but that would be against the law' I hear you say, not at all like breaking the First Sale copyright law (and others that copy protection is walking all over).
yeah yeah, criminal vs civil law, but you get the point I hope. What these companies are doing is not on.
You know what others will say: if you don't like it, don't purchase it. Movies are entertainment. If the argument was for getting bread and water...
Movies are for making money, but that's not the issue here:)
Movies are culture. How would you feel if Titus was the only work of shakespear that existed today because 400 years ago he was signed onto a large media corporation and all of his other works are released on copyprotected mediums which can no longer be accessed or copied as the copyprotection scheme was hardware-timestamped so that when the works went out of copyright the media company could re-release the work and gain another 90 years of copyright over it safe in the knowledge that none of the versions that had entered the public domain could be acessed.
After 50 years said media company iether dissolved or changed direction and moved into the advertising market. The works were never re-released, and if any originals have survived the 4 centurys, nobody know's where they are.
Someone is floating around on/. with a sig that says no movie released on DVD will ever enter the public domain. Think about the implications of that.
What these companies are doing is not on.
(What's even more annoying is they are pretending that piracy is the reason they are doing it)
My perception (admittedly based on little information) is that game programmers tend to be arrogant pricks who tend to subscribe to two theories:
If I didn't write it, I won't link to it. This goes directly to your comment about other people's libraries.
They do not seem as willing to learn from lessons from other "programming industries".
Not at all the case in my experience.
Point 1 hasn't really been possible since the days of DOS, and even back then game programmers seemed more than willing to use someone elses library to figure out whatever weirdass soundcard the system had and play the sound, or play back full screen video etc.
Point 2 might be true in that some may feel their code doesn't need to be maintainable (keeping code maintainable has many lessons from other industries to learn) but not in my experience. You have to factor in that most game programmers are aware of many things that heralded breakthroughs such as BSP trees and know that they were not invented by game programmers. These things are floating around fully documented in academic tomes and other industry just waiting for a game programmer willing to learn a lesson or two. Quaternians, FFTs, Bezier/spline patches, natural language parsing, scripting languages... heck, just look at the list Abrash posted "graphics, physics, modeling, scripting, AI, networking, databases" and ask yourself 'how much of that was invented by game programmers'.
Improved post processing to plaster over compression artifacts I assume.
I can't download it, it keeps saying I havn't selected an OS (bloody well did so), I've tried NS and IE, the internet install and the standalone install. All the same.
Obviously you got it somehow. Anyone else have the same problem?
While that would be cool, something of a similar nature (but even cooler) has been kicking around for a while, and already has just about all of the US - see if you can find your house:
operating system (OS):... and presents a default interface to the
user when no application program is running.
Well, a kernal fails that definition
The OS may be
split into a kernel which is always present and various system programs...
and this one too
So where in the definition you provided does it say a kernal is an operating system? I can see it in the bit of text you provided at the bottom, but not in the Free Online Dictionary of Computing definition.
Lets drop the kernal is an OS thing, I stand by my original position that Athena is an operating system (which is still a pretty silly thing to argue over).
actually that's exactly what a kernel is - an operating system.
That's nice, but I expect operating systems to allow me to do things like launch programs and copy files. There's not a lot you can do with an 'operating system' that only does thread, memory and message managment. (Or did you mean monolithic kernals that have file systems and user interfaces etc compiled into them?).
None of what you just said contradicted anything I said.
You could well be right, but since an operating system is not an application, your view doesn't apply to Athena.
Reread the context, I wasn't talking about about operating systems or Athena, I was saying that my work is affected by the GUI of the operating system.
If the application's main purpose is to control, manage or process things by itself with only
occasional user control or none at all, then a pro-UI argument misses the point entirely.
OK, this might just be different culture, but I specifically used the word application because it implies a program the user interacts with directly. If it controls, manages, or processes things by itself then (where I come from) it's not called an application, it's a daemon, or service, command or driver etc.
As has been pointed out many times in the past,
graphical input specification typically lacks the power of linguistic specification by a huge margin
As has been pointed out many times by people unable to adapt maybe. The GUI vs CLI argument is completely irrelevant to Athena but I'm too stupid to let it rest. About 6 years ago I would have advocated CLI's (and GUI's did suck back then), since then I was forced to develop long term in a modern GUI with IDE etc. Once I got the hang of everything I found out that for the tasks that matter (ie the ones you do every day) it was normally faster and often more useful. You can go on about the power of command lines and how real programmers use gcc/make/emacs all you like, but that just puts you in the box of 'Will probably figure it out eventually'. If CLI's have been there for you for 30 years with GUI's only being around for 16, but only failing to suck in the last 4 then it's no wonder you think CLI's are the bee's knee's. (even more off topic, but soemthing you will probably agree with, a good UI is a combination of GUI and CLI)
I believe: a focus on GUI
issues at this level is a mistake.
Yeah, I think you are probably right there.
Personally I'm hoping it's because the GUI is the thing people identify with and they need it to look pretty for investors, user interest etc.
since this thing not only requires linux and X11, i don't see how this is more than a fancy xml-programmable window
manager. it may become more in the future. but calling a window manager an OS is a major exaggeration.
It requires neither linux nor X11, all it requires is a kernal, kernal's are a dime a dozen. The version you downloaded from the website was written for the linux kernal.
for it to be an OS it would need to allow me to log into it, and create an environment where i can run programs without
them being aware that they are actually on a different system (the linux host). i have seen nothing of that in the description.
I dunno what the unix obsession with having to log into your own computer is, but from the description:
In order to allow developers to easily port their programs to other Pandora environments, it has
been ensured that 100% Pandora based applications and components can be ported to new
systems with little effort. Writing such a program requires that it does not make direct calls to
the host environment. This decision is entirely up to the developer and is dependent on what his
or her program is trying to achieve.
Seems fairly implicit that you can create Athena apps that know nothing of the host environment.
Requires Linux, Mac OS, or Window means that your product is not an OS. It sounds like you product is more like WM/API than anything else.
It doesn't require Linux, Mac OS, or Windows, it requires a kernal, any kernal. A kernal is not an operating system.
While they mention it may soon come with it's own kernal (and hense be a standalone OS), kernal abstraction gives you the added advantage that it can run on top of Linux, Mac OS, or Windows, saving you all the dual boot crap that comes with more primitive operating system archetectures.
With widows domination, and the only commercially feasible way to develop a new OS for a machine being to start by porting a unix, operating systems are stuck in a deep rut. Instead of building a system that fails to suck, we're having religious wars about whether linux/unix or windows is the lesser of the two evils.
You're OS is a breath of fresh air.
I don't know if some of the philosophies you are using are the best, but that's because I haven't considered them before. This is good, it means the OS is outside the windows/unix square of thinking.
I've given up reading the slashdot comments, most of the negative ones are clueless (not a real OS, is just the same as <insert completely different technology> etc) except for open source - I respect your right not to make it open source, but read some of the posts - there are many options (for instance the way trolltech works) and open source is important for hobbyist appeal (which I imagine is very important if you're not a commercial development platform).
OK, so there are a few non-GUI aspects to the Athena product, but the overall focus is so strongly tied to their GUI in virtually all areas that it raises the question of whether they are addressing a real requirement
An excerpt from their page:
it has been ensured that 100% Pandora based applications and components can be ported to new systems with little effort. Writing such a program requires that it does not make direct calls to the host environment
Now, if Athena allows you to write your applications with no calls to the host kernal then I think there's a little more under the hood than just the GUI as you imply. I would also argue that their overall focus is not the GUI, but an OOP way of doing things from the ground up, a philosophy I agree with.
My work is never constrained by inadequacy of the GUI interfaces I use, even when there is a graphic element to it
Mine is all the time, but then I've finally come around to the conclusion (after argueing year ago that this wasn't the case) that the user interface is the most important aspect of an application and should be designed first.
Re:Programmer != CS major
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, there are things that one learns in school that a person is just not going to discover on the job.
Like what? Please explain. I've yet to encounter anything that cannot be taught or learned on the job, or picked up "on
the side" while working.
It's not a matter of "cannot be taught or learned on the job", it's a matter of not knowing that reading a book at this point would be a really good idea.
For instance, suppose some part of the project required a parser. Programmers I've encountered who come across this problem without the benifit of a CS degree go "a parser, that'll be easy, I can do that", and for the most part they're right. The thing is instead of a lex tokeniser you get a unmaintainable lump of string comparisons, and instead of a yakk (or handwritten LL) parser you get huge nest of swicth statements. Often the two are mixed together.
Hey, it works!
(Then some selfish bastard asks to add another statement to the syntax)
The things a CS degree taught me that I didn't know I didn't know are the important ones, while I might have to brush up a bit on compiler design to write a parser, I now know I have to brush up on compiler design.
Having said all that, CS Graduates can't code for squat, so work (or hobby) experience with programming is also needed.
Write a censorware program, keep the list open, but more importantly keep the list short.
4 or 5 sites that have been confirmed in person to be objectionable ought to do it. That way the public institutions have their legally required censorware and we have a reasonably free internet.
Create a censorware package that guarentees not to censor any protected speech - there will be no competition (it just doesn't guarentee it'll block all objectionable material, but then neither does any other package).
Because slashdotters are trying to learn what is copyright infringement and what isn't.
This example is interesting because normally copyright applies only to the actual implementation, not reimplementing it from scratch (that's what patent's cover). For instance, if you take a photo of St Pauls Cathedral from a specific angle I am not allowed to copy it without your permission, I am however allowed to to take a photo myself from the same angle.
But in this case, no original material (pictures, samples etc) needs be duplicated to infringe copyright, you can create your media from scratch but because it deliberatly resembles someone elses you are infringing copyright.
That's what the discussion is about, copyright is quite a complicated issue and many slashdotters are in positions where they'd like to know as much about it as they can. Not everything is in the copyright FAQ.
Yes. Despite all the windows bashing that linux users seem to enjoy, one of the few advantages linux has over windows for me is distros.
While I can (have, infact) create my own CD of utils to install on top of windows (proper task manager, editor, mp3 player, ICQ, FTP, terminal, thesaurus, calculator... the list goes on, and that's not even counting the programming stuff), I still have to install them one by one rather than stick in a disk and hit go (and then bind them to keys blah blah blah, life is so difficult:)).
Hmm, maybe there is a market for a one disc windows 'upgrade' (many of the apps on my disc are Free), it would have the advantage that you can upgrade without re-installing - ie you can upgrade your work PC to have all the apps etc that your home one does.
You've missed the point, why is it america's problem to enforce french laws in america?
Should all US mail order companies pay the expense of setting up special operating procedures for orders from france because of some law in france? What about the 200 odd other countries?
Isn't that absurd - what if you're running a home owned business, you can't afford to enforce every law in every country. It's not your problem, you just make sure you satisify the laws of the country you are operating in.
The french have the problem, it's up to them not order things that their goverment says they can't have. Ordering a image over the internet differs little from ordering a photo via mail order in this case, it was requested by someone in france and it was requested in a country where it's legal.
It's not yahoo's problem, it's france's problem.
Do you really expect every website in the world to make sure they confirm to every law of every country in the world? Because it's polite? Because it would be a nice thing to do?
While the Gartner study may have been talking about enterprise OS's. I believe the guy you replied to was talking about general Linux acceptance.
Linux could dominate the server market and it would still be a minority OS, to gain mainstream acceptance it has to appeal to the people who don't like computers, (and that's where the power of open source faulters a little since it tends to be geeks scratching geeky itches).
"but windows being more "assume the user is an idiot when programming" oriented, it will continue to have a good part of the market. IMHO, unix sould be used for servers"
He's not exactly promoting idiots being running your servers is he.
The New Zealand government is planning to introduce powerful legislation to enable the Police, GCSB and Security Intelligence Service to hack into computers without the knowledge of the owner
The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service can't even break into a house without screwing up, I don't think we have much to worry about from their 1337 h4X0rs.
The rest sounds pretty damn dodgy tho. Time to brush up on stenography I think.
They were right about Echelon. The Echelon as painted by conspiracy theorists and magazines (every phone call you make being scanned for keywords etc) could not be real, the suspected model of what echelon actually is is much more practical and nowhere near as far fetched.
Likewise, the number of bogus claims made by this company is immense, but lets just examine one:
There a 20000 new porn sites put up each day.
How do they know this - obviously they can't map the internet every day so it's extrapolated. But lets assume they can remap the entire internet on a regular basis (you'd have to to discover the new porn sites). How do they know they're porn sites? None of the censorware programs have solved this problem - do they have someone looking (20k pages a day?), do they search for naughty words or phrases (this has a collosal failure rate), do they have an AI that can spot naughty bits (remember the last attempt at this has a success rate of 50% - I can write one of those in 5 mins - sure this doesn't mean it can't be done, but I would be very skeptical of this scale of problem being solved as a side project to an internet mapping project). You have the same problem for racial hate speech etc etc. And that's just one of the dumbass claims they made.
Or maybe it's the exagerated claims of a company that wants free advertising/higher share prices/demand for their database by people who don't know how rediculous the concept is - you know, the managers with their inspirational calendar sitting on the desk telling them everything is possible.
I couldn't believe what I was reading, I've never seen so much bollox written in the same place with a straight typeface.
That article was an even worse work of fiction than the virus upload in independance day.
I was just thinking 'yeah, but suits would probably buy into stuff like that' (remembering one of my old bosses and his grasp of how it all worked) as I scrolled to the top of the page and saw it was posted by a source called the Financial Times. Suddenly the article made a bit more sense.
Hey, maybe someone wants a share price to go up : )
From a user interface angle, rather than trying to implment a columns version of every useful feature in the editor. Would the following two features solve all you columns problems:
Transpose rows with character columns
112 223 334
444 555 666
777 888 999
becomes
147
147
247
258
258
358
369
369
469
Transpose rows and columns with custom delimiter:
112 223 334
444 555 666
777 888 999
becomes
112, 444, 777
223, 555, 666
334, 666, 999
The idea behind those two functions is you could use them to allow all the editor's functions (eg reg exp searches) to operate on columns by converting them to rows and then back again (you probably picked that up:)).
Slashdot Mirror
It's already been done with a study of identical twins (also identical DNA) split at birth, apparently nurture doesn't contribute much.
Even if copyright were abandoned there would remain many people/corporations who would not change their way of thinking or their business model. not just that, but dumbass attempts like CCS, SDMI and that ATA copyprotection scheme etc will explode tenfold. You might think you can hack them like you hacked CSS, but the only reason CSS was thoroughly hacked was the (now nonexistant) US cryptography export laws. Until public key encyrption is hacked these schemes don't have to be breakable (so you pulled the key and algorithm out of the firmware's chipset, the next peice of software for it will just use a different key)
I think the world could run quite nicely without copyright, and artists would still get paid (possibly paid more). But it's a moot point because it ain't going to happen (at least, not until the invention of replicators).
You can watch any movie you can see and listen to any song you can hear - there is no law saying you have to block your ears when you hear a song you haven't purchased, that would be silly. You don't have to buy the song or the movie to see/hear them, morally or legally.
To paraphraise someone else on slashdot, when you buy a CD you are not buying a song, you not buying a license to listen to a song, or a license to own a song, you are buying a piece of plastic - nothing more.
I'll say it again because it's important - there is no contract. If you didn't sign it (physically or verbally), it's not a contract. There is no license either - if you had a license then you would be able to walk into the CD store with your broken or scratched CD and ask for a replacement (at the cost of about $1).
Congratulations, you have now purchased a piece of plastic. How is the artificial scarcity maintained? Copyright law says you are not allowed to copy the contents of the CD without the authors permission.
Copyright law is the only thing restricting what we do with the contents of the CD, and copyright law specifically says we can do things such as sell the CD. Because of this you have to wonder how we can end up in a situation where we can't duplicate a work, and we can't sell it either. Sounds like the media corps are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
This license that you think you sign when you buy a movie... what exactly does it say? How do you know - have you read it? Where is it? You should be careful about buying into contracts you haven't read. What if clause #23 said that you consented to having your children killed - 'but that would be against the law' I hear you say, not at all like breaking the First Sale copyright law (and others that copy protection is walking all over).
yeah yeah, criminal vs civil law, but you get the point I hope. What these companies are doing is not on. Movies are for making money, but that's not the issue here
Movies are culture. How would you feel if Titus was the only work of shakespear that existed today because 400 years ago he was signed onto a large media corporation and all of his other works are released on copyprotected mediums which can no longer be accessed or copied as the copyprotection scheme was hardware-timestamped so that when the works went out of copyright the media company could re-release the work and gain another 90 years of copyright over it safe in the knowledge that none of the versions that had entered the public domain could be acessed.
After 50 years said media company iether dissolved or changed direction and moved into the advertising market. The works were never re-released, and if any originals have survived the 4 centurys, nobody know's where they are.
Someone is floating around on
What these companies are doing is not on.
(What's even more annoying is they are pretending that piracy is the reason they are doing it)
Point 1 hasn't really been possible since the days of DOS, and even back then game programmers seemed more than willing to use someone elses library to figure out whatever weirdass soundcard the system had and play the sound, or play back full screen video etc.
Point 2 might be true in that some may feel their code doesn't need to be maintainable (keeping code maintainable has many lessons from other industries to learn) but not in my experience. You have to factor in that most game programmers are aware of many things that heralded breakthroughs such as BSP trees and know that they were not invented by game programmers. These things are floating around fully documented in academic tomes and other industry just waiting for a game programmer willing to learn a lesson or two. Quaternians, FFTs, Bezier/spline patches, natural language parsing, scripting languages... heck, just look at the list Abrash posted "graphics, physics, modeling, scripting, AI, networking, databases" and ask yourself 'how much of that was invented by game programmers'.
Improved post processing to plaster over compression artifacts I assume.
I can't download it, it keeps saying I havn't selected an OS (bloody well did so), I've tried NS and IE, the internet install and the standalone install. All the same.
Obviously you got it somehow. Anyone else have the same problem?
While that would be cool, something of a similar nature (but even cooler) has been kicking around for a while, and already has just about all of the US - see if you can find your house:
http://www.terraserver.com/findaplace.asp
So where in the definition you provided does it say a kernal is an operating system? I can see it in the bit of text you provided at the bottom, but not in the Free Online Dictionary of Computing definition.
Lets drop the kernal is an OS thing, I stand by my original position that Athena is an operating system (which is still a pretty silly thing to argue over).
Personally I'm hoping it's because the GUI is the thing people identify with and they need it to look pretty for investors, user interest etc.
PS Sorry about the state of this post, I'm drunk.
While they mention it may soon come with it's own kernal (and hense be a standalone OS), kernal abstraction gives you the added advantage that it can run on top of Linux, Mac OS, or Windows, saving you all the dual boot crap that comes with more primitive operating system archetectures.
With widows domination, and the only commercially feasible way to develop a new OS for a machine being to start by porting a unix, operating systems are stuck in a deep rut. Instead of building a system that fails to suck, we're having religious wars about whether linux/unix or windows is the lesser of the two evils.
You're OS is a breath of fresh air.
I don't know if some of the philosophies you are using are the best, but that's because I haven't considered them before. This is good, it means the OS is outside the windows/unix square of thinking.
I've given up reading the slashdot comments, most of the negative ones are clueless (not a real OS, is just the same as <insert completely different technology> etc) except for open source - I respect your right not to make it open source, but read some of the posts - there are many options (for instance the way trolltech works) and open source is important for hobbyist appeal (which I imagine is very important if you're not a commercial development platform).
Mine is all the time, but then I've finally come around to the conclusion (after argueing year ago that this wasn't the case) that the user interface is the most important aspect of an application and should be designed first.
For instance, suppose some part of the project required a parser. Programmers I've encountered who come across this problem without the benifit of a CS degree go "a parser, that'll be easy, I can do that", and for the most part they're right. The thing is instead of a lex tokeniser you get a unmaintainable lump of string comparisons, and instead of a yakk (or handwritten LL) parser you get huge nest of swicth statements. Often the two are mixed together.
Hey, it works!
(Then some selfish bastard asks to add another statement to the syntax)
The things a CS degree taught me that I didn't know I didn't know are the important ones, while I might have to brush up a bit on compiler design to write a parser, I now know I have to brush up on compiler design.
Having said all that, CS Graduates can't code for squat, so work (or hobby) experience with programming is also needed.
Write a censorware program, keep the list open, but more importantly keep the list short.
4 or 5 sites that have been confirmed in person to be objectionable ought to do it. That way the public institutions have their legally required censorware and we have a reasonably free internet.
Create a censorware package that guarentees not to censor any protected speech - there will be no competition (it just doesn't guarentee it'll block all objectionable material, but then neither does any other package).
Because slashdotters are trying to learn what is copyright infringement and what isn't.
This example is interesting because normally copyright applies only to the actual implementation, not reimplementing it from scratch (that's what patent's cover). For instance, if you take a photo of St Pauls Cathedral from a specific angle I am not allowed to copy it without your permission, I am however allowed to to take a photo myself from the same angle.
But in this case, no original material (pictures, samples etc) needs be duplicated to infringe copyright, you can create your media from scratch but because it deliberatly resembles someone elses you are infringing copyright.
That's what the discussion is about, copyright is quite a complicated issue and many slashdotters are in positions where they'd like to know as much about it as they can. Not everything is in the copyright FAQ.
Yes. Despite all the windows bashing that linux users seem to enjoy, one of the few advantages linux has over windows for me is distros.
:)).
While I can (have, infact) create my own CD of utils to install on top of windows (proper task manager, editor, mp3 player, ICQ, FTP, terminal, thesaurus, calculator... the list goes on, and that's not even counting the programming stuff), I still have to install them one by one rather than stick in a disk and hit go (and then bind them to keys blah blah blah, life is so difficult
Hmm, maybe there is a market for a one disc windows 'upgrade' (many of the apps on my disc are Free), it would have the advantage that you can upgrade without re-installing - ie you can upgrade your work PC to have all the apps etc that your home one does.
Off to www.shouldexist.org...
You've missed the point, why is it america's problem to enforce french laws in america?
Should all US mail order companies pay the expense of setting up special operating procedures for orders from france because of some law in france? What about the 200 odd other countries?
Isn't that absurd - what if you're running a home owned business, you can't afford to enforce every law in every country. It's not your problem, you just make sure you satisify the laws of the country you are operating in.
The french have the problem, it's up to them not order things that their goverment says they can't have. Ordering a image over the internet differs little from ordering a photo via mail order in this case, it was requested by someone in france and it was requested in a country where it's legal.
It's not yahoo's problem, it's france's problem.
Do you really expect every website in the world to make sure they confirm to every law of every country in the world? Because it's polite? Because it would be a nice thing to do?
Linux could dominate the server market and it would still be a minority OS, to gain mainstream acceptance it has to appeal to the people who don't like computers, (and that's where the power of open source faulters a little since it tends to be geeks scratching geeky itches).
He's not exactly promoting idiots being running your servers is he.
hehe, yes. Next time I'll use dictionary.com rather than count the number of hits on altavista.
:)
thousands of hits - it must be spelled correctly
The rest sounds pretty damn dodgy tho. Time to brush up on stenography I think.
They were right about Echelon. The Echelon as painted by conspiracy theorists and magazines (every phone call you make being scanned for keywords etc) could not be real, the suspected model of what echelon actually is is much more practical and nowhere near as far fetched.
Likewise, the number of bogus claims made by this company is immense, but lets just examine one:
There a 20000 new porn sites put up each day.
How do they know this - obviously they can't map the internet every day so it's extrapolated. But lets assume they can remap the entire internet on a regular basis (you'd have to to discover the new porn sites). How do they know they're porn sites? None of the censorware programs have solved this problem - do they have someone looking (20k pages a day?), do they search for naughty words or phrases (this has a collosal failure rate), do they have an AI that can spot naughty bits (remember the last attempt at this has a success rate of 50% - I can write one of those in 5 mins - sure this doesn't mean it can't be done, but I would be very skeptical of this scale of problem being solved as a side project to an internet mapping project). You have the same problem for racial hate speech etc etc. And that's just one of the dumbass claims they made.
Or maybe it's the exagerated claims of a company that wants free advertising/higher share prices/demand for their database by people who don't know how rediculous the concept is - you know, the managers with their inspirational calendar sitting on the desk telling them everything is possible.
I know which one I think is more likely.
I couldn't believe what I was reading, I've never seen so much bollox written in the same place with a straight typeface.
That article was an even worse work of fiction than the virus upload in independance day.
I was just thinking 'yeah, but suits would probably buy into stuff like that' (remembering one of my old bosses and his grasp of how it all worked) as I scrolled to the top of the page and saw it was posted by a source called the Financial Times. Suddenly the article made a bit more sense.
Hey, maybe someone wants a share price to go up : )
From a user interface angle, rather than trying to implment a columns version of every useful feature in the editor. Would the following two features solve all you columns problems:
- Transpose rows with character columns
- Transpose rows and columns with custom delimiter:
The idea behind those two functions is you could use them to allow all the editor's functions (eg reg exp searches) to operate on columns by converting them to rows and then back again (you probably picked that up112 223 334
444 555 666
777 888 999
becomes
147
147
247
258
258
358
369
369
469
112 223 334
444 555 666
777 888 999
becomes
112, 444, 777
223, 555, 666
334, 666, 999
Would this solve your problems? Do you see flaws?