That is something I do not have any control over and (as has been demonstrated) even supposedly very security conscious companies regularily goof.
The question is: Do they goof more or less than you? I can relate to the idea that oneself is more concerned with the security of ones data, the question is if you really are better at securing data than a company or not. It might be true for a small minority but the population at large might very well have a lot better security by using these online services.
I'm not french, so take this with a grain of salt but: The Gendarmerie in France is used for a whole lot more than policing the military. When you go skiing in France and end up being a bit too noisy in your hotel it's the gendarmerie that shows up, politely asking you to tone it down - being 6 feet tall and 6 feet wide and wearing skimasks in the hotel of course - at least, that's how I remember them;-)
the specific laws will be drawn up with consultation of larger ISPs
Funny you should mention that. Here in Denmark several of the major ISP's have comlained about this legislation, stating it would lead to massive expences for no apparent gain. And yet the governtment doesn't seem to take any notice whatsoever.
ISPs make money now
Some ISPs make money now. But there's a lot of smaller ISPs say f.ex. residential networks setup by local communities which does not make very much if any money. These networks will have a hard time surviving if this legislation is implemented to it's fullest extent.
Really? Do you keep logs of internet activity? As far as I can tell this means the ISP's have to keep logs of all connections to the Internet. Now what is meant by a connection to the Internet is of course not very well defined. In my mind it translates to all IP connections made, which in turn means a record of every IP packet sent. Do you still think this data is already collected?
Work as advertised? How much software do you know that comes with a full specification of how it is supposed to work? The only thing I can think of is OSS because you have the software and even then you're not getting a specification of how it is supposed to work, but only how it actually works. Software is just too complex to give a full specification of how it'll work to a consumer -- and most of the time for the developers too.
The point being that software may very well do what's promised on the box and still require a whole lot of bugfixing.
I got the announcement earlier today and wondered why it was dated 28 Sep 2004, a little header parsing revealed the following (email addresses altered to protect the innocent):
Received: from warr.ath.cx (70-32-9-83.frdrmd.adelphia.net [70.32.9.83])
by shitei.mindrot.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 14EC827C188
for <openssh-unix-announce...>;
Sun, 5 Jun 2005 15:00:29 +1000 (EST) Received: (qmail 30775 invoked by uid 1000); 5 Jun 2005 05:00:27 -0000 Delivered-To: unknown Received: from suen.ed.psu.edu (146.186.175.19) by myria.szcat.lan with POP3;
05 Jun 2005 05:00:27 -0000 Delivered-To:... Received: (qmail 6581 invoked from network); 28 Sep 2004 14:46:23 -0000 Received: from tr12g04.aset.psu.edu (HELO tr12n04.aset.psu.edu)
(128.118.146.130)
by cdr19.ed.psu.edu with SMTP; 28 Sep 2004 14:46:23 -0000
And yes, I know it's not really a laggy mailserver;-)
All the while Linux and Mac users enjoy all the bundled software that comes for free with their OSs.
This is blatently unfair to Microsoft
Your analogy fails on the count (at least as far as Linux is concerned, don't know about Apple) that the software bundled with a Linux distribution primarily is products not of the company producing the distribution. Actually most Linux distributions include all sorts of competing products or at least makes it very easy to get your hands on those products.
That was in many ways Firefox's advantage over Opera and Mozilla, it looked a lot better and cleaner. And don't lecture me on how software should be judged by quality instead of prettiness, I know that.
I believe that Firefox looking cleaner and prettier is actually a quality marker. The userinterface of Firefox is clean, it's simple, it lets you do what you need to do without a ton of bells and whistles. You seem to consider that superficial glamour, but IMHO it is actually a quality in it self.
Right... until one day your favourite proprietor goes out of business or simply decides there's not enough money to be made on your piece of software. Soon after you're going to need to move your data to some other piece of software because it has this new killer feature. That day you will start wishing you opted for something just a little more interoperable.
...generating additional revenue for film studios and producers.
I never did get the term "generating" revenue. Specially in the context of trying to get money from people who would never buy the product anyway. I guess it's just biz lingo for "all your money are belong to us!" or "we want a bigger piece of your pie" or something:-/
...so that every other office suite out there can read and write them with 100% compatibility...
Which of course would require every other office suite out there to have 100% of the functions available in MS Office. Somehow I doubt that's ever going to happen. So maybe OSS should aim for "enough" compability.
I remember lying in bed trying to fall asleep with my head full of strategies for civilization. What units to build, what technologies to pursue.
More recently I've been having trouble letting Counter-strike go. Trying to work out attack and defence patterns.
Luckily, I haven't had problems keeping the real world and the game separated. Like having thoughts about sneaking up on people with a military grade blade trying to score another head shot... uhm, except maybe for... nevermind;-)
I also feel the typical (in PHP) mixing of PHP and HTML is bad (what if you want to generate a different output format?).
It is bad! You do not have to mix in emotion. It is a plain fact as soon as you move beyond the simplest applications.
But that is not the fault of the language, even though PHP more than other languages may encourage this behaviour. You can mix things that should not be mixed in any language.
You can make your application just as loosely coupled in PHP as you can in most other programming languages.
Not to say that PHP does not have shortcomings compared to others. Yes, Python and Ruby does have capabilites far surpassing those of PHP. But PHP also have strengths compared to Python and Ruby I believe. So use whatever lets you express your ideas easily (both for you and your readers) and concisely.
My primary reason for using Gentoo is Portage. I couldn't care less about "speed optimizations" or whatnot. But being able to install software with one command is wonderful.
My secondary reason is that it is continuously updated. I have yet to reinstall my system for anything else than major hardware upgrades. This is why I never liked Debian much, which in retrospect might have been wrong.
My tertiary reason is the documentation and community. http://forums.gentoo.org and #gentoo on freenode will get you lots of help.
But beware, there's a downside too. You can more easily end up with a broken system (compared to other "easier" distros) because you accidentaly wrote over some important configuration files. So you need to know what stuff like fstab is. And you need to know how to recover from disasters should something go haywire.
Please be advised that Project Gutenberg and PGA are subject to U.S. copyright law and to jurisdiction in the U.S.
So PGA, an australian entity(!), is subject to U.S. copyright law and jurisdiction? Wouldn't that also mean, that australian copyright law is applicable to U.S. entities, or is the U.S. the only country in the world who can dictate their laws unto others?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually .NET is not a programming language, it's a platform. Many languages run on the .NET platform, PHP amongst others.
The question is: Do they goof more or less than you? I can relate to the idea that oneself is more concerned with the security of ones data, the question is if you really are better at securing data than a company or not. It might be true for a small minority but the population at large might very well have a lot better security by using these online services.
I'm not french, so take this with a grain of salt but: The Gendarmerie in France is used for a whole lot more than policing the military. When you go skiing in France and end up being a bit too noisy in your hotel it's the gendarmerie that shows up, politely asking you to tone it down - being 6 feet tall and 6 feet wide and wearing skimasks in the hotel of course - at least, that's how I remember them ;-)
Funny you should mention that. Here in Denmark several of the major ISP's have comlained about this legislation, stating it would lead to massive expences for no apparent gain. And yet the governtment doesn't seem to take any notice whatsoever.
Some ISPs make money now. But there's a lot of smaller ISPs say f.ex. residential networks setup by local communities which does not make very much if any money. These networks will have a hard time surviving if this legislation is implemented to it's fullest extent.
Really? Do you keep logs of internet activity? As far as I can tell this means the ISP's have to keep logs of all connections to the Internet. Now what is meant by a connection to the Internet is of course not very well defined. In my mind it translates to all IP connections made, which in turn means a record of every IP packet sent. Do you still think this data is already collected?
As opposed to...
Work as advertised? How much software do you know that comes with a full specification of how it is supposed to work? The only thing I can think of is OSS because you have the software and even then you're not getting a specification of how it is supposed to work, but only how it actually works. Software is just too complex to give a full specification of how it'll work to a consumer -- and most of the time for the developers too.
The point being that software may very well do what's promised on the box and still require a whole lot of bugfixing.
... a trick question? ;-)
I'm not saying piracy isn't taking a lump out of the **AA's pocket but it sure isn't anywhere near the numbers they like to claim every so often.
... land of the free?
Your analogy fails on the count (at least as far as Linux is concerned, don't know about Apple) that the software bundled with a Linux distribution primarily is products not of the company producing the distribution. Actually most Linux distributions include all sorts of competing products or at least makes it very easy to get your hands on those products.
I believe that Firefox looking cleaner and prettier is actually a quality marker. The userinterface of Firefox is clean, it's simple, it lets you do what you need to do without a ton of bells and whistles. You seem to consider that superficial glamour, but IMHO it is actually a quality in it self.
Right... until one day your favourite proprietor goes out of business or simply decides there's not enough money to be made on your piece of software. Soon after you're going to need to move your data to some other piece of software because it has this new killer feature. That day you will start wishing you opted for something just a little more interoperable.
...generating additional revenue for film studios and producers.
:-/
I never did get the term "generating" revenue. Specially in the context of trying to get money from people who would never buy the product anyway. I guess it's just biz lingo for "all your money are belong to us!" or "we want a bigger piece of your pie" or something
Which of course would require every other office suite out there to have 100% of the functions available in MS Office. Somehow I doubt that's ever going to happen. So maybe OSS should aim for "enough" compability.
I remember lying in bed trying to fall asleep with my head full of strategies for civilization. What units to build, what technologies to pursue.
;-)
More recently I've been having trouble letting Counter-strike go. Trying to work out attack and defence patterns.
Luckily, I haven't had problems keeping the real world and the game separated. Like having thoughts about sneaking up on people with a military grade blade trying to score another head shot... uhm, except maybe for... nevermind
It is bad! You do not have to mix in emotion. It is a plain fact as soon as you move beyond the simplest applications.
But that is not the fault of the language, even though PHP more than other languages may encourage this behaviour. You can mix things that should not be mixed in any language.
You can make your application just as loosely coupled in PHP as you can in most other programming languages.
Not to say that PHP does not have shortcomings compared to others. Yes, Python and Ruby does have capabilites far surpassing those of PHP. But PHP also have strengths compared to Python and Ruby I believe. So use whatever lets you express your ideas easily (both for you and your readers) and concisely.
In the end what matters is the final result.
My primary reason for using Gentoo is Portage. I couldn't care less about "speed optimizations" or whatnot. But being able to install software with one command is wonderful.
My secondary reason is that it is continuously updated. I have yet to reinstall my system for anything else than major hardware upgrades. This is why I never liked Debian much, which in retrospect might have been wrong.
My tertiary reason is the documentation and community. http://forums.gentoo.org and #gentoo on freenode will get you lots of help.
But beware, there's a downside too. You can more easily end up with a broken system (compared to other "easier" distros) because you accidentaly wrote over some important configuration files. So you need to know what stuff like fstab is. And you need to know how to recover from disasters should something go haywire.
...what you call old news?
So PGA, an australian entity(!), is subject to U.S. copyright law and jurisdiction? Wouldn't that also mean, that australian copyright law is applicable to U.S. entities, or is the U.S. the only country in the world who can dictate their laws unto others?
Looks like it too
Dont bitch, change it your self.
;-)
Guess you didn't read Examining Some Open Source Myths
Think about it in this theoretical situation, why should I buy the $1000 3.4Ghz chip when I can buy the $500 3.2Ghz chip and overclock it 200Mhz
;-)
Why is this a theoretical situation? 3.2GHz * 1.1 > 3.4GHz