They have a distribution channel of 100M sites. They should beam down all sorts of stuff explaining why what the users are doing is right.
Possible arguments:
a) Making a copy of a song does not deprive the artist of anything. They have all of their assets and all of their goods and all of their money. You don't take anything from the music company. The music companies are just saying that they have a right to take your money whenever you talk about an artist.
b) Since music companies want you to pay whenever you talk about an artist, then perhaps artists should pay everyone that they talk about. If an artist can refer to Republicans, for example, should they not be required to pay every Republican a portion of the proceeds for the referral? Should not every gun owner be compensated when a song protests people with guns?
c) Kazaa is just a form of electronic discussion. It's no different than a song in and of itself. If artists do not damage people by discussing them, then how can Kazaa damage artists?
d) This is just about big companies being greedy. It's like the oil company saying they have the right to buy up fuel efficient engine designs so they can make more money.
Christ preached peace. He got crucified, and the Romans ruled for 500 years later, followed by 1500 years of European war mongers, followed by 100 years of American war mongers.
Ghandi preached peace. Then, he got shot, and India and Pakistan spent 50 years at war.
John Lennon said all he needed was love, then he married Yoko Ono, and got shot (don't know which is worse!)
Really, the thing to do is to quit complaining about the powers that be and just lop off their heads. The French did it in 1789, why can't we!
Re:Imitating MS, what fools
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
See, I think it's better to offer more innovative solutions, with lower TCO, that, make MS's technological position seem self contradictory.
Oh wait, that's what Netscape did. But at least Andreseen and Clark didn't have to write TPS reports.
Microsoft, for all their reputation as purveyor of buggy code, has done some doozies of redesigns that saw them win in some major areas.
Netscape got a two year head start on MS, but MS's rewrite of IE for version 4 - with its real programmable hierarchy, pretty much left any NS offering in the dust until gecko came out years later.
Windows NT had a much better guts than did OS/2, and took much longer to get to fruition. Even Windows 95, for all of its goofiness, was a carefully calculated and lengthy development. W95 offered a real transition from both DOS and 16 bit windows to at least some kind of 32 bit OS and without really too much aggravation.
The whole.NET technology platform was a long time in the making.
Access was a -long- development, but it proved much more successful in killing off competitive desktop database competitors then did the acquired FoxPro.
Bottom line is that hacks only take you so far, and eventually, you will lose by doing them.
Imitating MS, what fools
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
You know, I've always been mystified that people would pay money for Exchange. I could forgive MS for writing in a sense because at least the developers that did it got paid.
But now, you got guys taking a perfectly miserable product and then making their own free version of it, and not getting any dough for it, for no other purpose than to be like Microsoft but free.
I have to admit that Open Source has finally gone off the deep end of sanity.
You would think that all these open developers would have a BETTER vision of computing than merely cloning M$ stuff for no tax. What's that criticism of M$ not having vision? Whose imitating who now?
1000 years ago giving everyone the right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness would have been impossible in medevil Europe. The Roman Empire had been dead for not even 500 years, the continent was divided into militaristic factions, food was scarce, learning was stopped, and starvation was the norm. It was only during the prosperity and emergence of middle class during the renaissance that human rights discussions even really began. Today's "basic human rights" are rights that seemed luxurious to 16th century bourgouise, and most rights are really just the notion that promises made by leaders to the people are promises that should be kept.
Technological progress always yields greater human rights. It may seem foolish now, but why not have internet access as a fundamental right. 100 years ago, giving women the right to vote was silly too.
Well, you have my agreement that the Marxist crowd leading the anti-globalization charge tend to suck. I don't think socialism is the answer although I should point out that a large corporation, with its top down command and control system, centralized planning and production, is no different in operation than a small socialist country. As corporations merge and get ever larger, and centralize, they get less efficient and more stupid.
For me, the issues are not about hating private ownership. I have a shareware company myself. For me, the issues are nationalistic. I think it is strategically important that American citizens manufacture their own goods and services, as the long term social benefits of self reliance outweigh the short term gains of cheaper goods. As a people, we have to know how to do things, and we really don't.
Contrary to popular belief, I believe that there will NEVER be a day when free trade actually benefits the United States. I don't believe our trading partners genuinely believe in free trade as anything other than an economic weapon to use against us. They are never going to have this notion that they might consider American products as an alternative to their own, and, so, even countries that could afford to buy American products will not do so. This is especially true since the American commercial empire is becoming increasingly a military one.
Finally, as a country of some 300 million people, we cannot afford to elevate a world of 5 billion to our standard of living. If these countries wanted to elevate themselves for real, they should do what Henry Ford did and mass produce their own stuff and pay the workers enough to have a middle class!
Then... why are we using cheaping human labor to do something when we could instead be developing machines to do the same. Really, sending tasks offshore to be done by hordes of cheap people is a technological copout.
The aliens on this planet will receive the first television signals from Leave It To Beaver. They will immediately drive their FTL space battleships to earth and blow it up.
There is not a single head of an American corporation that is capable of telling the truth about anything. These people that you defend promise you a better day if we get through the "adjustment" of increased competition, yet, they themselves do not compete, they talk about accountability and they are not, and, finally, they keep adjusting manufacturing and now IT jobs overseas. F--- the leaders of American corporations. When will you realize that they do not care about American Citizens, that everything they say is a lie, that the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are a bigger threat to the American people than are the Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hamas and every dictator on the planet combined. All they care about is their own pocketbook, even when it means the ruin of their supposed nation. The next time an American CEO waves a flag at you, you should shove it up his a--- because he ain't no patriot.
Fine, you go ahead and defend your business leaders the same way Uncle Tom defended Nice Master. When they get the right to search your hard drive and your house (oh wait they already do), buy their way into starting wars overseas (oh wait they already do), and then send your job to some dude for 50 cents an hour, then, you can pat yourself on the back for being the dope that you are. CEO - American slang for traitor!
> In theory you should be able to take these >specific requirements and hand them to ANY >developer with proper coding skills and they >should turn it into exactly what is needed.
This practice sucks, because, it implies that the document takes way too long to create. If you have developers that actually understand the business and the tasks they are trying to assist or automate, then, requirements become business common sense, and, as a result, you wind up with a much better product with much less paper work.
User interface is more than specification of combo boxes versus check boxes.
The top down hand requirements to developers process is conceptually the same as the top down hand work orders to factory people process that GM used to produce many of its illconceived cars in the 1970s and 1980s.
Developers MUST know the marketplace because capturing all of the market knowledge into a requirements slows down business mobility too much to make it a worthwhile process.
Besides, if developers know the market they are in, then, they have an automatic value add over requirements only shops that work overseas!
Besides, under Open Source, you have the widest possible chance of peer review. Liability is not an issue because you have a chance to study it before you use it in ways that closed systems do not let you do. There is also a freedom of speech about it. A Chrysler Engineer might not be able to tell you that they screwed up something with an engine, but a Linux Engineer can tell you everything.
At the end of the day, Open Source is better than Closed Source + Liability because under Open Source you prevent Liability from ever happening.
a) The British were not inclined to use force to suppress Ghandi. Other occupying powers have been quite able to do use force. Certainly the Chinese have made short work of Tibet.
b) The British were completely spent from World War II. Remember that the British buy themselves built more ships and more aircraft than the Germans did. This made their empire broke.
c) By the time of Indian Independence, the Liberals were firmly ensconced into power, and so the British leadership was morally opposed to colonialism anyway.
Bottom Line: Ghandi was lucky, and, with World War II, India might still be a British colony.
It's a computer fan web site, and the Republican answer to internet issues is to have Orin Hatch come out and say that big business's have the right to blow up people's computers. How could any sane programmer go along with that?
Both political parties are completely worthless. The Democrats don't care about the people any more than the Republicans care about the free market and small businesses. Like, if Homeland Security didn't prove that for you, nothing will. Here, you had the "Anti-government Republicans" passing the biggest trampling of individual rights in American history, and the only thing the "we the people Democrats" did was to complain that the new Gestapo wasn't stuffed with enough Union jobs.
Both political parties are completely bipartisan and cooperative - they both make me sick equally as well. This is no longer a conflict of ideas between two political parties, it's a contest to see which set of crooks get to cash a 2.5 trillion dollar federal paycheck and anyone who is a partisan for either side is an idiot.
I agree. What I am saying is that instead of going back into the ugly past of every culture that we have, look at the problems for what they are. I'm not down for saying, this culture owes this culture that because of warlike ways, as those were the rules all cultures played by. Instead, say, the current situation of native americans sucks, because they are poor, have few educational opportunities, etc, and do SOMETHING ABOUT THAT.
A great euphemism for slavery
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ok, so now you basically Indians were forming rape gangs. Does the word, "savage" mean anything to you?
>but a large part of traditional warfare was >about nonlethal methods of capturing and >acquring new members for their tribe (a crucial >source of genetic diversity).
The fact that you are willing to overlook slavery in native americans while at the same time savaging europeans is ridiculous.
Besides, your whole basis of native americans being nice to each other is completely wrong. they hunted all the ice age big game to extinction. the aztecs and incas and mayans were all huge warmongers... every great native american civilization were butchers par excellent. but oh, they lost to the europeans, so, they must be saints.
by your logic, those poor germans were unjustly persecuted in world war II, and, all of that talk about the evils of national socialism is just a capitalist myth.
Detractors are quick to point out that it would be difficult to create a self sustaining colony on another planet because there is nothing that could be traded with it. Those arguments fail completely when one considers IP. Yes, IP, that evil Intellectual Property that we rail against, is also a product that a space based habitat could do to make it profitable.
IP advantages of a moon / mars base:
a) Completely safe against terrorism and domestic insurrection.
b) The ultimate DR site. If the Earth were to be hit by an Asteroid, rest assured, the IRS would still be able to collect taxes from cockroaches that lived through it.
c) Complete secrecy. These days, spies run everywhere and satellites get pictures of your stuff from LEO. If you are on Mars, a spy satellite is a taller order...
d) Powered by superior Windows software, the DR site will require humans to be present to reboot and monitor servers...
Oh knock it off will you!
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Native Americans were as much as warmongers as Europeans were, just less technologically advanced. Remember, they wanted to buy guns, they wanted the horses, and the whole tribal system was basically a male centered warrior cult mythology. If the Native Americans had invented calculus and sailing vessels first, they would have been spreading smallpox in Europe.
If you are 2000 feet under water, you hear the sounds of torpedos coming at you and you can count off the seconds until you get killed because the torpedo is faster than you are, smoking seems entirely reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
Please nobody let that thing get control of the military computers!
They have a distribution channel of 100M sites. They should beam down all sorts of stuff explaining why what the users are doing is right.
Possible arguments:
a) Making a copy of a song does not deprive the artist of anything. They have all of their assets and all of their goods and all of their money. You don't take anything from the music company. The music companies are just saying that they have a right to take your money whenever you talk about an artist.
b) Since music companies want you to pay whenever you talk about an artist, then perhaps artists should pay everyone that they talk about. If an artist can refer to Republicans, for example, should they not be required to pay every Republican a portion of the proceeds for the referral? Should not every gun owner be compensated when a song protests people with guns?
c) Kazaa is just a form of electronic discussion. It's no different than a song in and of itself. If artists do not damage people by discussing them, then how can Kazaa damage artists?
d) This is just about big companies being greedy. It's like the oil company saying they have the right to buy up fuel efficient engine designs so they can make more money.
Christ preached peace. He got crucified, and the Romans ruled for 500 years later, followed by 1500 years of European war mongers, followed by 100 years of American war mongers.
Ghandi preached peace. Then, he got shot, and India and Pakistan spent 50 years at war.
John Lennon said all he needed was love, then he married Yoko Ono, and got shot (don't know which is worse!)
Really, the thing to do is to quit complaining about the powers that be and just lop off their heads. The French did it in 1789, why can't we!
See, I think it's better to offer more innovative solutions, with lower TCO, that, make MS's technological position seem self contradictory.
Oh wait, that's what Netscape did. But at least Andreseen and Clark didn't have to write TPS reports.
Microsoft, for all their reputation as purveyor of buggy code, has done some doozies of redesigns that saw them win in some major areas.
Netscape got a two year head start on MS, but MS's rewrite of IE for version 4 - with its real programmable hierarchy, pretty much left any NS offering in the dust until gecko came out years later.
Windows NT had a much better guts than did OS/2, and took much longer to get to fruition. Even Windows 95, for all of its goofiness, was a carefully calculated and lengthy development. W95 offered a real transition from both DOS and 16 bit windows to at least some kind of 32 bit OS and without really too much aggravation.
The whole
Access was a -long- development, but it proved much more successful in killing off competitive desktop database competitors then did the acquired FoxPro.
Bottom line is that hacks only take you so far, and eventually, you will lose by doing them.
You know, I've always been mystified that people would pay money for Exchange. I could forgive MS for writing in a sense because at least the developers that did it got paid.
But now, you got guys taking a perfectly miserable product and then making their own free version of it, and not getting any dough for it, for no other purpose than to be like Microsoft but free.
I have to admit that Open Source has finally gone off the deep end of sanity.
You would think that all these open developers would have a BETTER vision of computing than merely cloning M$ stuff for no tax. What's that criticism of M$ not having vision? Whose imitating who now?
1000 years ago giving everyone the right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness would have been impossible in medevil Europe. The Roman Empire had been dead for not even 500 years, the continent was divided into militaristic factions, food was scarce, learning was stopped, and starvation was the norm. It was only during the prosperity and emergence of middle class during the renaissance that human rights discussions even really began. Today's "basic human rights" are rights that seemed luxurious to 16th century bourgouise, and most rights are really just the notion that promises made by leaders to the people are promises that should be kept.
Technological progress always yields greater human rights. It may seem foolish now, but why not have internet access as a fundamental right. 100 years ago, giving women the right to vote was silly too.
Well, you have my agreement that the Marxist crowd leading the anti-globalization charge tend to suck. I don't think socialism is the answer although I should point out that a large corporation, with its top down command and control system, centralized planning and production, is no different in operation than a small socialist country. As corporations merge and get ever larger, and centralize, they get less efficient and more stupid.
For me, the issues are not about hating private ownership. I have a shareware company myself. For me, the issues are nationalistic. I think it is strategically important that American citizens manufacture their own goods and services, as the long term social benefits of self reliance outweigh the short term gains of cheaper goods. As a people, we have to know how to do things, and we really don't.
Contrary to popular belief, I believe that there will NEVER be a day when free trade actually benefits the United States. I don't believe our trading partners genuinely believe in free trade as anything other than an economic weapon to use against us. They are never going to have this notion that they might consider American products as an alternative to their own, and, so, even countries that could afford to buy American products will not do so. This is especially true since the American commercial empire is becoming increasingly a military one.
Finally, as a country of some 300 million people, we cannot afford to elevate a world of 5 billion to our standard of living. If these countries wanted to elevate themselves for real, they should do what Henry Ford did and mass produce their own stuff and pay the workers enough to have a middle class!
Then... why are we using cheaping human labor to do something when we could instead be developing machines to do the same. Really, sending tasks offshore to be done by hordes of cheap people is a technological copout.
The aliens on this planet will receive the first television signals from Leave It To Beaver. They will immediately drive their FTL space battleships to earth and blow it up.
There is not a single head of an American corporation that is capable of telling the truth about anything. These people that you defend promise you a better day if we get through the "adjustment" of increased competition, yet, they themselves do not compete, they talk about accountability and they are not, and, finally, they keep adjusting manufacturing and now IT jobs overseas. F--- the leaders of American corporations. When will you realize that they do not care about American Citizens, that everything they say is a lie, that the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are a bigger threat to the American people than are the Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hamas and every dictator on the planet combined. All they care about is their own pocketbook, even when it means the ruin of their supposed nation. The next time an American CEO waves a flag at you, you should shove it up his a--- because he ain't no patriot.
Fine, you go ahead and defend your business leaders the same way Uncle Tom defended Nice Master. When they get the right to search your hard drive and your house (oh wait they already do), buy their way into starting wars overseas (oh wait they already do), and then send your job to some dude for 50 cents an hour, then, you can pat yourself on the back for being the dope that you are. CEO - American slang for traitor!
You should never challenge a powerful company like this...
What good do they do the public?
> In theory you should be able to take these >specific requirements and hand them to ANY >developer with proper coding skills and they >should turn it into exactly what is needed.
This practice sucks, because, it implies that the document takes way too long to create. If you have developers that actually understand the business and the tasks they are trying to assist or automate, then, requirements become business common sense, and, as a result, you wind up with a much better product with much less paper work.
User interface is more than specification of combo boxes versus check boxes.
The top down hand requirements to developers process is conceptually the same as the top down hand work orders to factory people process that GM used to produce many of its illconceived cars in the 1970s and 1980s.
Developers MUST know the marketplace because capturing all of the market knowledge into a requirements slows down business mobility too much to make it a worthwhile process.
Besides, if developers know the market they are in, then, they have an automatic value add over requirements only shops that work overseas!
and linux can do that
Let the buyer beware?
If it worked for Hammurabi, it worked for us.
Besides, under Open Source, you have the widest possible chance of peer review. Liability is not an issue because you have a chance to study it before you use it in ways that closed systems do not let you do. There is also a freedom of speech about it. A Chrysler Engineer might not be able to tell you that they screwed up something with an engine, but a Linux Engineer can tell you everything.
At the end of the day, Open Source is better than Closed Source + Liability because under Open Source you prevent Liability from ever happening.
a) The British were not inclined to use force to suppress Ghandi. Other occupying powers have been quite able to do use force. Certainly the Chinese have made short work of Tibet.
b) The British were completely spent from World War II. Remember that the British buy themselves built more ships and more aircraft than the Germans did. This made their empire broke.
c) By the time of Indian Independence, the Liberals were firmly ensconced into power, and so the British leadership was morally opposed to colonialism anyway.
Bottom Line: Ghandi was lucky, and, with World War II, India might still be a British colony.
It's a computer fan web site, and the Republican answer to internet issues is to have Orin Hatch come out and say that big business's have the right to blow up people's computers. How could any sane programmer go along with that?
Both political parties are completely worthless. The Democrats don't care about the people any more than the Republicans care about the free market and small businesses. Like, if Homeland Security didn't prove that for you, nothing will. Here, you had the "Anti-government Republicans" passing the biggest trampling of individual rights in American history, and the only thing the "we the people Democrats" did was to complain that the new Gestapo wasn't stuffed with enough Union jobs.
Both political parties are completely bipartisan and cooperative - they both make me sick equally as well. This is no longer a conflict of ideas between two political parties, it's a contest to see which set of crooks get to cash a 2.5 trillion dollar federal paycheck and anyone who is a partisan for either side is an idiot.
I agree. What I am saying is that instead of going back into the ugly past of every culture that we have, look at the problems for what they are. I'm not down for saying, this culture owes this culture that because of warlike ways, as those were the rules all cultures played by. Instead, say, the current situation of native americans sucks, because they are poor, have few educational opportunities, etc, and do SOMETHING ABOUT THAT.
Ok, so now you basically Indians were forming rape gangs. Does the word, "savage" mean anything to you?
>but a large part of traditional warfare was >about nonlethal methods of capturing and >acquring new members for their tribe (a crucial >source of genetic diversity).
The fact that you are willing to overlook slavery in native americans while at the same time savaging europeans is ridiculous.
Besides, your whole basis of native americans being nice to each other is completely wrong. they hunted all the ice age big game to extinction. the aztecs and incas and mayans were all huge warmongers... every great native american civilization were butchers par excellent. but oh, they lost to the europeans, so, they must be saints.
by your logic, those poor germans were unjustly persecuted in world war II, and, all of that talk about the evils of national socialism is just a capitalist myth.
Detractors are quick to point out that it would be difficult to create a self sustaining colony on another planet because there is nothing that could be traded with it. Those arguments fail completely when one considers IP. Yes, IP, that evil Intellectual Property that we rail against, is also a product that a space based habitat could do to make it profitable.
IP advantages of a moon / mars base:
a) Completely safe against terrorism and domestic insurrection.
b) The ultimate DR site. If the Earth were to be hit by an Asteroid, rest assured, the IRS would still be able to collect taxes from cockroaches that lived through it.
c) Complete secrecy. These days, spies run everywhere and satellites get pictures of your stuff from LEO. If you are on Mars, a spy satellite is a taller order...
d) Powered by superior Windows software, the DR site will require humans to be present to reboot and monitor servers...
Native Americans were as much as warmongers as Europeans were, just less technologically advanced. Remember, they wanted to buy guns, they wanted the horses, and the whole tribal system was basically a male centered warrior cult mythology. If the Native Americans had invented calculus and sailing vessels first, they would have been spreading smallpox in Europe.
Why is it that intellectual property rules are most jealously enforced by people that have no intellect?
Come on, don't they put your MAC address into your IPV6? WTF is up with that! Of course the military wants IPV6, so they can spy on everyone.
If you are 2000 feet under water, you hear the sounds of torpedos coming at you and you can count off the seconds until you get killed because the torpedo is faster than you are, smoking seems entirely reasonable.