Wow, the ridiculous EFF has done it again. Don't you people realize what we've been trying to drill into your head all along? Copying music is stealing. Stealing is wrong. Think about it: would you steal your mom's music just because she marked it (O)?
Next up, think of the artists! Yeah, sure, you may think this is a voluntary thing. They'll only make it (O) if they want to. Oh, yeah, sure. They already don't make any money because the RIAA takes it all. Now there's a competing music distributor called the EFF, who they can apparently go with and make no money because their music has to be (O). So, obviously, the only way to distribute your music is by not making money. This is a choice!?
Next, the money's in support. The only way they'll make money off this is the way we've been harping on all along-- providing preinstalled copies of the songs with handy utilities, or offering tech support when the song doesn't work. You know, like if it sucks. Then they'll just give you a version that doesn't suck.
Finally, unions are evil cartels. If artists everywhere start using this, it'll restrict use of this music to a select few: anyone who wants to use it and not pay any money. This is freedom? This isn't how America works, and it's not how the world works. If you're not a goddammed commie, you owe it to yourself and the world to prevent artists from using the (O).
I wasn't actually aiming the "naive idiots" bit at you-- your original statement was quite different: "approval of lawyers and much of the practice of the law today". My statement was misleading, but I intended to refer to the lawyer-bashing contingent, and not to people who are unhappy with the current state of the courts and/or law. Sorry for the confusion.
I believe you're under several misconceptions, which might be remedied by sitting in on a few trials, or reading up on a few cases.
First of all, only naive idiots are universally pro-lawyer or anti-lawyer. Lawyers, like any other large group of people, are diverse. Often, people who say they're anti-lawyer mean the asshole working for the insurance company who cheated them out of a claim; they don't mean the guy suing to protect national forests, or defending the latest Leonard Peltier.
Next, intent plays a much larger role than you'd believe. Law is typically not a game of "gotcha!" on contract wording. Intent determines whether you're charged with manslaughter or murder. Intent quite often is used to clarify, or even override, portions of contracts. If the challengee went to court, and attempted to base his entire case on the "sure" response to his "compressor" e-mail, he'd likely get tossed out-- the challenger could simply say, "oh, I thought he meant decompressor", or, "I was just attempting to clarify-- that wasn't intended to be a modification of the contract", or some other such thing. Again, the law is not a simple game of "gotcha".
Finally, juries are another reason specificity is often trumped. If they see a person getting cheated out of their money because they missed one line in a quite long, and very misleading, contract, they'll tend to side with that person.
You should sit in on a case or two some time; they can be quite enlightening. Court rooms are generally open to the public, and while some of the cases may be quite dry, you'll get a lot of insight in just a few hours.
Re:1.7 GHz is a lot like a 1.2GHz Athlon
on
What 1.7Ghz Is Like
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· Score: 2
As I, as well as the linked articles, pointed out, initial optimizations using SSE2 are not promising. In fact, even applications that have received a good deal of hand-tweaking to use all of the latest instructions run slower than the same app, sans SSE2 of course, on the Athlon 1.33GHz. And the gap would widen even more if, instead of wasting their time with SSE2, they just hand-optimized the program to run faster on the Athlon.
What's the upshot? That even with each processor's "ideal" system (DDR on the Athlon, RAMBUS on the P4)-- well, the P4 kicks ass at Quake 3: Team Arena. I mean, it's really really good at Quake 3. So good, in fact, that-- well, you won't be running anything else, I hope?
Because in almost every other app, the cheaper Athlon 1.2 equals or outperforms the P4. That even includes apps such as POVRay that did some early optimizations for the P4's extended instructions. I recommend reading the Tech Report's overview if you're interested in that; they have more details on exactly which instructions were used, and the current state of Intel's compilers for the chip.
Keep in mind, of course, that the compilers are still a bit beta-ish-- sometimes they actually make the programs run slower. But they never appeared to actually make it faster than an Athlon 1.2.
Debate what you will about future extensibility, and so on-- but unless you're going to be playing a whole lot of Quake, if you're looking for a new system you should grab one of those cheap Athlon CPU/Motherboard combos selling for $300 at Fry's.
Almost every post in this forum ought to be moderated -1, Offtopic. Except for a couple anon posts stuck at 0 and 1, there's almost nothing actually discussing the topic of the article. I've seen all the "Napster Bad/Good" bullshit before. If I wanted someone's decree about what I should use my computer for, I'd ask Microsoft.
What I was HOPING to find here was something about the reliability of this fingerprinting technology, possible ways to foil it, Napster's future plans for the service, etc.. I don't have those details. But I was hoping that with/.'s immense readership, someone would. Apparently not-- apparently there are simply a few hundred thousand people who want to discuss the morality and legality of Napster for the millionth fucking time.
I am! First distro, and only distro, I've ever installed (well, there was a brief run-in with Caldera, but that hardly counts-- ugh). After hearing all that shit about how hard it is to set up, it only took a couple hours for the core stuff. x took a little longer, and some IM'ing help from a friend, but once I got that going, it was simple to set up an FTP server, screw around with KDE and Gnome, upgrade some packages, etc. etc..
If I, a relative Linux newbie, could download software, compile it, manage and upgrade packages, etc. etc. etc., then Slack's reputation as hard to use must be way out of date. The recent releases are a walk in the park.
There is a point to all of this. The "culture jamming" movement is about getting the other side of the story to people. That is, rather than a person ("consumer") just getting the "Campbell's soup is good for you, American, homemade, grandma" message, you also get the "Campbell's beats monkeys to force them to craft Rat Organ Soup", or somesuch.
Yes, you can get a lot of this information other places, like searching the net, or hitting Consumer Reports. Some of it's actually fairly difficult to get (and this CueHack won't get it). The idea is most people only see the big billboards and TV ads, because that's what corporations pay for (of course). We, as non-corporations, don't have multimillion dollar marketing budgets-- how do we make our voices heard? This is one more creative way of getting the other side of the story heard.
Does it work? Sometimes. You're reading this, anyway. Maybe a few people will see the article on/., run the program, and find out a few new things about the products they own. Maybe a few people will go check out Consumer Reports. Is it as effective as $50million? Unfortunately not.
Agreed. A friend of mine worked at Spinway, a company that provided free dialup access. They not only had an ad bar at the bottom of your screen, they also had a 30 second MPEG (or somesuch) ad that played while you connected. Imagine-- an audience that has nothing better to do than watch the ad while they connect, and the ad can be the same one you play on TV if you like.
Now, you'd think these things would be fairly easy to sell, at SOME price. They can easily measure audience size, your ad is on all by itself (no competing ads before or after), and it's unlikely people are leaving to get a snack for the brief 30 seconds. But Internet advertising got such a bad name ("banners are ineffective!") that no one-- not the brick and mortars, not the dot coms-- would buy these things. They had to give a bunch away for free, as "trial offers".
It seems to me a lot of the brick and mortars are losing out on huge bargains right now, when a few years from now they'll be paying high rates when everyone catches on.
Ah, well, maybe it's for the best. The last thing we need right now is MORE corporatization of the net. Maybe these clueless corp's will help extend the incubation period of micropayments, tip jars, and such, so that when they finally come around, a lot of sites will be able to tell them to fuck off.
Disney and Microsoft can't force me to use their products.
There are plenty of examples of businesses either
using the "power of the gun", or getting in bed with government to essentially force people to work for them/buy their products. Slavery, and violent union-breaking are examples of the first; taxes on recordable media that go to various corporations are examples of the second.
I'd imagine Libertarians would be against this sort of thing, as it breaks down the barrier between corporations and government-- corporate government essentially destroys most of the Libertarian tenets. I'd also image they're against this government buying data thing, not because the corporations should be unable to sell the data, but because the government shouldn't even be able to afford it. (Correct me if I'm wrong on either point.)
The problem, though, is that by allowing corporations to play such a large role in the electoral process (money), there's little hope of getting the "pure" corporation espoused by Libertarians. They want to make money-- fine. But perhaps it's more efficient for them to lobby the government to force us to pay them money at gunpoint, rather than make a good product and sell it. A simple look at the huge budgets corporations allot for lobbying is enough to convince anyone. And what happened when Microsoft was slow to get in the money-to-Capital-Hill game? Witness the DOJ-- foolish MS, you didn't pay off the government!
Well, this is a rather off-topic ramble, but your above post got me to thinking.:) I think I made a reference to the government buying data up a bit, so I won't make a token effort to be on-topic.
You're right-- it isn't always bad. And most of it is insignificant. But if you think the government, insurance companies, and so on are paying lots of omney to see what kind of milk you buy, you're dead wrong.
What kind of data are they buying? How about medical records? Or complete, comprehensive financial data? Why would they want those?
You say, "Face it -- to the rest of the world, the big evil government, and the big evil corporations, YOU ARE BORING.". That's incorrect. To corporations, you are a consumer. You are a potential revenue stream. And I stress potential. If you're trying to buy health insurance, they'll want to scan your entire medical history, and possibly your genetic makeup. If you're signing up for a subscription service, they might check not just your credit history, but a history of every dispute you've ever had with a company-- to see how easily you're bullied into paying up any debt claimed by the corporation, legitimate or not. If you're applying for a job, they might want to dig around to see if they can find any information on whether you're planning on having kids in the next few years.
Is a lot of this illegal now? Sure it is. Do they still get lots of this information? Sure they do. With so many partnerships, mergers, and huge tangles of which corp owns who, it's easy to illegally share data without any real risk of prosecution.
Why would the feds want your information? Again, it's not what brand of milk you buy (although, if you buy non-growth-hormone milk, maybe you're a communist). You're not a potential revenue stream, but you are a potential threat to the people in power. Because of McCarthyism, and things like the Freedom of Information Act, we've found that the government can and does keep close tabs on any citizens who might be considered subversive. And because of things like genetic testing, we've found that a lot of people have been jailed for crimes they didn't commit. Put those two together-- don't you think there's a bit of risk there?
Oh, but wait, I should trust the government. I will, just as soon as top figures can look the cameras straight on and say, sincerely, "I am not a crook.". Yeah, that seems like a reliable test.
Erm, that was my point. When your apartment lease runs out, all of your stuff doesn't become useless. When your software lease runs out, all your stuff may become useless. So I guess we'll just have to disagree to agree.
This is almost as good as yesterday's "bomb china" bit. Lest there's any doubt that this is a troll, of course, there's Anne Marie's other recent post about how bonobos are chimps that are persecuted like homosexuals. But the debate over whether or not this post is "real" isn't the point-- we all know it's not. It's just funny, like it was when "bomb china" got modded up as Insightful.
It's a bunch CORBA component stuff. Bonobo itself is a component architecture, but the distribution appears to come with lots of handy tools. But I've never heard of it either, I'm just checking out the FAQ. But it's a good bet that if you love your interfaces, you might want to check this out. And if you think your code should communicate the old fashioned way-- by just calling a function, goddammit-- you'll want to take a miss. Personally, I'm sick enough of all these C/C++ attempts at component and interface design, I'll probably just ignore this too.
Maybe I'm just the eternal optimist, but I think that a lot of the "insightful" mods were done in the mood of the post-- i.e., in keeping with the satire. If you're about to read a bit of satire, and right at the top it says "THIS IS SATIRE", it's not very funny. However, if you go into it reading it as "+5, Insightful", it's really funny.
Am I giving the moderators too much credit? I'd prefer to isolate the stupid people to just the flamebait mods, it'd keep my world view a bit higher.
On a side note-- I see Overrated mods all over, but I've never once Metamodded one. What's the deal?
At absolute best(giving every benefit of every doubt) it was a poorly phrased attempt at satire or political commentary.
Ah, yes, the usual excuse. Huge numbers of people are taking the post seriously, not realizing it's a joke. Then at some point, everyone realizes it's a joke. Well, they can't admit they're stupid. So instead, they all say, "oh, well, it's a BAD joke.".
Now you're saying Jonathan Swift wouldn't deserve to be at +4, but rather, -1. Other people who are just starting to get the joke are saying "oh, well, Swift was funny, I KNEW that was satire" (because they were told it was satire in Lit class). And of course, there is the large contingent that will never realize it was a joke, because they fire off their stupid, knee-jerk, stereotypical anti-American responses (oh you Americans are all the same, at least all us non-Americans are all different-- "we're all different!" "I'm not"), and then move on to bitch about the next article that actually has the nerve to be about some neat bit of technology rather than an AIDS cure.
As for the original post being +4, and all of these staying in the 2 or lower dungeon-- it appears the mod system is the LEAST broken thing about/., as such a humorous (controversial?) post obviously deserves to be at +5 (just witness the 30+ replies).
This troll should never have been moderated so high, clearly slashdot is still highly american biased. None the less...
It's a joke, goddammit. It's Dr. Fucking Strangelove, ported to a new decade. The real problem isn't "American bias", it's ultrasensitive kneejerk-posters like you who are so concerned that someone might be serious about a point of view different from yours, that you don't even bother to read the entire post.
For all your "objectivity", you seem so hell-bent on fixing Americans' view of themselves that you're living in a completely distorted reality-- one in which the original post was alive during the war of 1812. Wow.
You've only proved you don't like me because I'm better looking than you.
Well, yeah, I thought that was obvious.
Re:The point is not to win the tech war
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CPRM Voted Down
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You're right that we can't win a technological arms race with big business. CPRM will probably get implemented....
What we can do is win the PR war.
Agreed, but I don't think we have to get the government involved. A few companies may manage to get some random standards body to pass CPRM, sure. And then MS and IBM will make content-controlled crap, but there will still be the companies that voted against it offering non-CPRM stuff for some time. Then there are two possible outcomes:
1) Joe Consumer doesn't understand this "geek issue", and buys the CPRM stuff, puzzled as to why his computer is more of a pain in the ass to use than ever, and nothing works. Solution? Spend more money. Western Digital, Maxtor, et. al. see that no one cares about CPRM, stop making non-CPRM drives.
2) Joe Consumer finds out that there's a select group of companies out to screw him out of his hard-earned money, but there are other companies that will sell him much better stuff that doesn't break all of his old software. Maxtor, Western Digital, other non-CPRM stuff becomes quite popular, and CPRM goes the way of DivX.
I was with you until you insulted vim. Emacs commie.
That aside, it's a good idea. As long as we have big, profitable companies on our side, making money selling us the products we want-- well, what do we have to fear if IBM and MS pass this content control BS, if we can still buy non-content controlled products from such a prestigious list?
Well, to sum up all this: yes, the 2 coder approach can work quite well. It seems like work, but try it on some real stuff-- it's generally more productive than 2 coders working separately, especially when you count bug fix and QA time.
Another Extreme Programming philosophy is test often, and one popular way to do that is using JUnit tests.
We've been using the JUnit tests with great success. We haven't been doing as much pair programming, though I'm not sure why-- whenever we do it it kicks a lot of ass.
I'm sure someone here can give a better summary-- one or two of the authors of some of the Extreme books post occasionally. I'd be rather surprised if any coders here hadn't heard what I just posted above-- if you haven't, what rock have you been hiding under?
*claps* Interesting post. I had just read through the TOS myself, and was trying to figure out why so many posts here were claiming "oh, it's not so bad", after reading what you just mentioned-- you're granting them to rights to anything and everything once you sign up. Boilerplate, my ass. I guess it's just popular to be devil's advocate these days.
The license agreement abuse for FS hasn't been done much. Has it been done at all? The most interesting license agreement I've read has been for LZip, which doesn't count.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, the ridiculous EFF has done it again. Don't you people realize what we've been trying to drill into your head all along? Copying music is stealing. Stealing is wrong. Think about it: would you steal your mom's music just because she marked it (O)?
Next up, think of the artists! Yeah, sure, you may think this is a voluntary thing. They'll only make it (O) if they want to. Oh, yeah, sure. They already don't make any money because the RIAA takes it all. Now there's a competing music distributor called the EFF, who they can apparently go with and make no money because their music has to be (O). So, obviously, the only way to distribute your music is by not making money. This is a choice!?
Next, the money's in support. The only way they'll make money off this is the way we've been harping on all along-- providing preinstalled copies of the songs with handy utilities, or offering tech support when the song doesn't work. You know, like if it sucks. Then they'll just give you a version that doesn't suck.
Finally, unions are evil cartels. If artists everywhere start using this, it'll restrict use of this music to a select few: anyone who wants to use it and not pay any money. This is freedom? This isn't how America works, and it's not how the world works. If you're not a goddammed commie, you owe it to yourself and the world to prevent artists from using the (O).
I wasn't actually aiming the "naive idiots" bit at you-- your original statement was quite different: "approval of lawyers and much of the practice of the law today". My statement was misleading, but I intended to refer to the lawyer-bashing contingent, and not to people who are unhappy with the current state of the courts and/or law. Sorry for the confusion.
I believe you're under several misconceptions, which might be remedied by sitting in on a few trials, or reading up on a few cases.
First of all, only naive idiots are universally pro-lawyer or anti-lawyer. Lawyers, like any other large group of people, are diverse. Often, people who say they're anti-lawyer mean the asshole working for the insurance company who cheated them out of a claim; they don't mean the guy suing to protect national forests, or defending the latest Leonard Peltier.
Next, intent plays a much larger role than you'd believe. Law is typically not a game of "gotcha!" on contract wording. Intent determines whether you're charged with manslaughter or murder. Intent quite often is used to clarify, or even override, portions of contracts. If the challengee went to court, and attempted to base his entire case on the "sure" response to his "compressor" e-mail, he'd likely get tossed out-- the challenger could simply say, "oh, I thought he meant decompressor", or, "I was just attempting to clarify-- that wasn't intended to be a modification of the contract", or some other such thing. Again, the law is not a simple game of "gotcha".
Finally, juries are another reason specificity is often trumped. If they see a person getting cheated out of their money because they missed one line in a quite long, and very misleading, contract, they'll tend to side with that person.
You should sit in on a case or two some time; they can be quite enlightening. Court rooms are generally open to the public, and while some of the cases may be quite dry, you'll get a lot of insight in just a few hours.
As I, as well as the linked articles, pointed out, initial optimizations using SSE2 are not promising. In fact, even applications that have received a good deal of hand-tweaking to use all of the latest instructions run slower than the same app, sans SSE2 of course, on the Athlon 1.33GHz. And the gap would widen even more if, instead of wasting their time with SSE2, they just hand-optimized the program to run faster on the Athlon.
First off, I read a good portion of the reviews that I found linked from Blue's News:
Source Magazine
Target PC
Hardware Unlimited
Tech Report
Gamer's Depot
What's the upshot? That even with each processor's "ideal" system (DDR on the Athlon, RAMBUS on the P4)-- well, the P4 kicks ass at Quake 3: Team Arena. I mean, it's really really good at Quake 3. So good, in fact, that-- well, you won't be running anything else, I hope?
Because in almost every other app, the cheaper Athlon 1.2 equals or outperforms the P4. That even includes apps such as POVRay that did some early optimizations for the P4's extended instructions. I recommend reading the Tech Report's overview if you're interested in that; they have more details on exactly which instructions were used, and the current state of Intel's compilers for the chip.
Keep in mind, of course, that the compilers are still a bit beta-ish-- sometimes they actually make the programs run slower. But they never appeared to actually make it faster than an Athlon 1.2.
Debate what you will about future extensibility, and so on-- but unless you're going to be playing a whole lot of Quake, if you're looking for a new system you should grab one of those cheap Athlon CPU/Motherboard combos selling for $300 at Fry's.
Almost every post in this forum ought to be moderated -1, Offtopic. Except for a couple anon posts stuck at 0 and 1, there's almost nothing actually discussing the topic of the article. I've seen all the "Napster Bad/Good" bullshit before. If I wanted someone's decree about what I should use my computer for, I'd ask Microsoft.
/.'s immense readership, someone would. Apparently not-- apparently there are simply a few hundred thousand people who want to discuss the morality and legality of Napster for the millionth fucking time.
What I was HOPING to find here was something about the reliability of this fingerprinting technology, possible ways to foil it, Napster's future plans for the service, etc.. I don't have those details. But I was hoping that with
Not long. How do you think they're going to dig up people for the class action lawsuits?
I am! First distro, and only distro, I've ever installed (well, there was a brief run-in with Caldera, but that hardly counts-- ugh). After hearing all that shit about how hard it is to set up, it only took a couple hours for the core stuff. x took a little longer, and some IM'ing help from a friend, but once I got that going, it was simple to set up an FTP server, screw around with KDE and Gnome, upgrade some packages, etc. etc..
If I, a relative Linux newbie, could download software, compile it, manage and upgrade packages, etc. etc. etc., then Slack's reputation as hard to use must be way out of date. The recent releases are a walk in the park.
I don't know, what is a bananagram? Is it like a cramagram?
There is a point to all of this. The "culture jamming" movement is about getting the other side of the story to people. That is, rather than a person ("consumer") just getting the "Campbell's soup is good for you, American, homemade, grandma" message, you also get the "Campbell's beats monkeys to force them to craft Rat Organ Soup", or somesuch.
/., run the program, and find out a few new things about the products they own. Maybe a few people will go check out Consumer Reports. Is it as effective as $50million? Unfortunately not.
Yes, you can get a lot of this information other places, like searching the net, or hitting Consumer Reports. Some of it's actually fairly difficult to get (and this CueHack won't get it). The idea is most people only see the big billboards and TV ads, because that's what corporations pay for (of course). We, as non-corporations, don't have multimillion dollar marketing budgets-- how do we make our voices heard? This is one more creative way of getting the other side of the story heard.
Does it work? Sometimes. You're reading this, anyway. Maybe a few people will see the article on
Agreed. A friend of mine worked at Spinway, a company that provided free dialup access. They not only had an ad bar at the bottom of your screen, they also had a 30 second MPEG (or somesuch) ad that played while you connected. Imagine-- an audience that has nothing better to do than watch the ad while they connect, and the ad can be the same one you play on TV if you like.
Now, you'd think these things would be fairly easy to sell, at SOME price. They can easily measure audience size, your ad is on all by itself (no competing ads before or after), and it's unlikely people are leaving to get a snack for the brief 30 seconds. But Internet advertising got such a bad name ("banners are ineffective!") that no one-- not the brick and mortars, not the dot coms-- would buy these things. They had to give a bunch away for free, as "trial offers".
It seems to me a lot of the brick and mortars are losing out on huge bargains right now, when a few years from now they'll be paying high rates when everyone catches on.
Ah, well, maybe it's for the best. The last thing we need right now is MORE corporatization of the net. Maybe these clueless corp's will help extend the incubation period of micropayments, tip jars, and such, so that when they finally come around, a lot of sites will be able to tell them to fuck off.
Disney and Microsoft can't force me to use their products.
:) I think I made a reference to the government buying data up a bit, so I won't make a token effort to be on-topic.
There are plenty of examples of businesses either using the "power of the gun", or getting in bed with government to essentially force people to work for them/buy their products. Slavery, and violent union-breaking are examples of the first; taxes on recordable media that go to various corporations are examples of the second.
I'd imagine Libertarians would be against this sort of thing, as it breaks down the barrier between corporations and government-- corporate government essentially destroys most of the Libertarian tenets. I'd also image they're against this government buying data thing, not because the corporations should be unable to sell the data, but because the government shouldn't even be able to afford it. (Correct me if I'm wrong on either point.)
The problem, though, is that by allowing corporations to play such a large role in the electoral process (money), there's little hope of getting the "pure" corporation espoused by Libertarians. They want to make money-- fine. But perhaps it's more efficient for them to lobby the government to force us to pay them money at gunpoint, rather than make a good product and sell it. A simple look at the huge budgets corporations allot for lobbying is enough to convince anyone. And what happened when Microsoft was slow to get in the money-to-Capital-Hill game? Witness the DOJ-- foolish MS, you didn't pay off the government!
Well, this is a rather off-topic ramble, but your above post got me to thinking.
You're right-- it isn't always bad. And most of it is insignificant. But if you think the government, insurance companies, and so on are paying lots of omney to see what kind of milk you buy, you're dead wrong.
What kind of data are they buying? How about medical records? Or complete, comprehensive financial data? Why would they want those?
You say, "Face it -- to the rest of the world, the big evil government, and the big evil corporations, YOU ARE BORING.". That's incorrect. To corporations, you are a consumer. You are a potential revenue stream. And I stress potential. If you're trying to buy health insurance, they'll want to scan your entire medical history, and possibly your genetic makeup. If you're signing up for a subscription service, they might check not just your credit history, but a history of every dispute you've ever had with a company-- to see how easily you're bullied into paying up any debt claimed by the corporation, legitimate or not. If you're applying for a job, they might want to dig around to see if they can find any information on whether you're planning on having kids in the next few years.
Is a lot of this illegal now? Sure it is. Do they still get lots of this information? Sure they do. With so many partnerships, mergers, and huge tangles of which corp owns who, it's easy to illegally share data without any real risk of prosecution.
Why would the feds want your information? Again, it's not what brand of milk you buy (although, if you buy non-growth-hormone milk, maybe you're a communist). You're not a potential revenue stream, but you are a potential threat to the people in power. Because of McCarthyism, and things like the Freedom of Information Act, we've found that the government can and does keep close tabs on any citizens who might be considered subversive. And because of things like genetic testing, we've found that a lot of people have been jailed for crimes they didn't commit. Put those two together-- don't you think there's a bit of risk there?
Oh, but wait, I should trust the government. I will, just as soon as top figures can look the cameras straight on and say, sincerely, "I am not a crook.". Yeah, that seems like a reliable test.
Erm, that was my point. When your apartment lease runs out, all of your stuff doesn't become useless. When your software lease runs out, all your stuff may become useless. So I guess we'll just have to disagree to agree.
... when your lease unexpectedly runs out, all of your data, er, stuff doesn't all of a sudden become useless.
This is almost as good as yesterday's "bomb china" bit. Lest there's any doubt that this is a troll, of course, there's Anne Marie's other recent post about how bonobos are chimps that are persecuted like homosexuals. But the debate over whether or not this post is "real" isn't the point-- we all know it's not. It's just funny, like it was when "bomb china" got modded up as Insightful.
You can try the slow-loading FAQ.
It's a bunch CORBA component stuff. Bonobo itself is a component architecture, but the distribution appears to come with lots of handy tools. But I've never heard of it either, I'm just checking out the FAQ. But it's a good bet that if you love your interfaces, you might want to check this out. And if you think your code should communicate the old fashioned way-- by just calling a function, goddammit-- you'll want to take a miss. Personally, I'm sick enough of all these C/C++ attempts at component and interface design, I'll probably just ignore this too.
Maybe I'm just the eternal optimist, but I think that a lot of the "insightful" mods were done in the mood of the post-- i.e., in keeping with the satire. If you're about to read a bit of satire, and right at the top it says "THIS IS SATIRE", it's not very funny. However, if you go into it reading it as "+5, Insightful", it's really funny.
Am I giving the moderators too much credit? I'd prefer to isolate the stupid people to just the flamebait mods, it'd keep my world view a bit higher.
On a side note-- I see Overrated mods all over, but I've never once Metamodded one. What's the deal?
At absolute best(giving every benefit of every doubt) it was a poorly phrased attempt at satire or political commentary.
/., as such a humorous (controversial?) post obviously deserves to be at +5 (just witness the 30+ replies).
Ah, yes, the usual excuse. Huge numbers of people are taking the post seriously, not realizing it's a joke. Then at some point, everyone realizes it's a joke. Well, they can't admit they're stupid. So instead, they all say, "oh, well, it's a BAD joke.".
Now you're saying Jonathan Swift wouldn't deserve to be at +4, but rather, -1. Other people who are just starting to get the joke are saying "oh, well, Swift was funny, I KNEW that was satire" (because they were told it was satire in Lit class). And of course, there is the large contingent that will never realize it was a joke, because they fire off their stupid, knee-jerk, stereotypical anti-American responses (oh you Americans are all the same, at least all us non-Americans are all different-- "we're all different!" "I'm not"), and then move on to bitch about the next article that actually has the nerve to be about some neat bit of technology rather than an AIDS cure.
As for the original post being +4, and all of these staying in the 2 or lower dungeon-- it appears the mod system is the LEAST broken thing about
This troll should never have been moderated so high, clearly slashdot is still highly american biased. None the less...
It's a joke, goddammit. It's Dr. Fucking Strangelove, ported to a new decade. The real problem isn't "American bias", it's ultrasensitive kneejerk-posters like you who are so concerned that someone might be serious about a point of view different from yours, that you don't even bother to read the entire post.
For all your "objectivity", you seem so hell-bent on fixing Americans' view of themselves that you're living in a completely distorted reality-- one in which the original post was alive during the war of 1812. Wow.
You've only proved you don't like me because I'm better looking than you.
Well, yeah, I thought that was obvious.
You're right that we can't win a technological arms race with big business. CPRM will probably get implemented.... What we can do is win the PR war.
Agreed, but I don't think we have to get the government involved. A few companies may manage to get some random standards body to pass CPRM, sure. And then MS and IBM will make content-controlled crap, but there will still be the companies that voted against it offering non-CPRM stuff for some time. Then there are two possible outcomes:
1) Joe Consumer doesn't understand this "geek issue", and buys the CPRM stuff, puzzled as to why his computer is more of a pain in the ass to use than ever, and nothing works. Solution? Spend more money. Western Digital, Maxtor, et. al. see that no one cares about CPRM, stop making non-CPRM drives.
2) Joe Consumer finds out that there's a select group of companies out to screw him out of his hard-earned money, but there are other companies that will sell him much better stuff that doesn't break all of his old software. Maxtor, Western Digital, other non-CPRM stuff becomes quite popular, and CPRM goes the way of DivX.
We need to make sure #2 happens.
I was with you until you insulted vim. Emacs commie.
That aside, it's a good idea. As long as we have big, profitable companies on our side, making money selling us the products we want-- well, what do we have to fear if IBM and MS pass this content control BS, if we can still buy non-content controlled products from such a prestigious list?
Never been posted about on /. before, that's for sure!
http://slashdot.org/books/00/12/29/1653211.shtml
http://slashdot.org/books/01/01/30/044210.shtml
There are actually 5 books so far; do a search for Extreme Programming on Amazon. I've only read 2, since 5 is an awful lot for any programming philosophy.
Well, to sum up all this: yes, the 2 coder approach can work quite well. It seems like work, but try it on some real stuff-- it's generally more productive than 2 coders working separately, especially when you count bug fix and QA time.
Another Extreme Programming philosophy is test often, and one popular way to do that is using JUnit tests.
We've been using the JUnit tests with great success. We haven't been doing as much pair programming, though I'm not sure why-- whenever we do it it kicks a lot of ass.
I'm sure someone here can give a better summary-- one or two of the authors of some of the Extreme books post occasionally. I'd be rather surprised if any coders here hadn't heard what I just posted above-- if you haven't, what rock have you been hiding under?
*claps* Interesting post. I had just read through the TOS myself, and was trying to figure out why so many posts here were claiming "oh, it's not so bad", after reading what you just mentioned-- you're granting them to rights to anything and everything once you sign up. Boilerplate, my ass. I guess it's just popular to be devil's advocate these days.
The license agreement abuse for FS hasn't been done much. Has it been done at all? The most interesting license agreement I've read has been for LZip, which doesn't count.