6. The method of claim 1 further including the step of mapping class inheritance to rows within a table.
Clearly the person writing the patent doesn't understand object oriented programming or databases. Row 2 extends row 1? I think not (except maybe as a lab experiment proving it's possible).
And as an aside, I have violated this patent. Twice. A friend of mine working on the same project was violating it at the same time. Then we hired a third guy who violated it again. Yes, we have a project which contains four, count 'em, four, independently developed O-R mapping tools. Three of them (one of mine and the two others) were developed not knowing the others existed. Then someone recommended TopLink, which we chose not to use. Then a friend of mine showed me WebObjects, which we chose not to use. Then we hired a guy who told us about Hibernate, which we now use. WebObjects started as a NeXT project in the mid 90's. TopLink is older than the patent (I think). Our independent implementations were done without knowing about any of the existing tools or the patent, and before (I admit with some shame) we were aware of Scott Ambler's outstanding research on the subject (which dates back to 1998).
Summary judgement to the defendant, obvious and not novel.
Completely agreed. MS long ago lost sight of the fact that the OS is an Operating System, not an application. The OS should be the most minimal layer necessary to provide abstract access to the hardware. If it's a desktop system, that may reasonably include a nice light windowing system, gui toolkit, and window manager. All the rest of the cycles should go to the applications. Linux + X + Xfce4 + Xfwm is a very nice example of that idea. Toss in Alsa for sound and a printing system and you're good to go. Until we have practical, real 3D, monitors, there's no need for anything more from the OS.
But that does present a serious problem for MS: It costs arbitrarily close to nothing to build all that when you spread the cost over a few hundred million people. From an economic standpoint, there is no reason to have commercial operating systems any more. The only thing that has them on life support is artificial barriers to entry, and the market hates those, so they're not going to last.
The same is true of any common software. It has already happened to web browsers, email clients, IM, and many others. It is happening to office software now. The money is in small-market, big value applications like AutoCAD, custom enterprise software, and software that enables particular business models (eBay, PayPal, Facebook). Proprietary commodity software is the walking dead.
Boy: I never said I knew where the WMDs were. Father: We saw you do it, son. Boy: No, no, no, no, no.
Boy 1: That idea is mine! Boy 2: No, you gotta share! Boy 1: It's mine! (punches boy 2)
Boy 1: Wanna play Kerberos? Boy 2: Yeah! Only you gotta show me how. [They play] Boy 2: No, you can't use MD5. Boy 1: Yes I can, we always used MD5. Boy 2: It's my house, we play by my rules.
I hope you're saying that from the place of someone who turned down an office job with a desk to do janitorial work.
If not, you're being pretty preachy there.
Yup - speaking as someone who has given up decent paying immoral jobs for minimum wage (lived on less than $6.00 per hour for more than 5 years after dropping out of college), and as someone who presently has a long list of things I won't do for money, which have had a very clear and direct impact on my ability to climb the corporate ladder.
But that's not really the point, is it?
I'm also speaking as someone who is 100% willing to take responsibility for my choices. Anyone who wants to judge me for my decisions, should.
Net neutrality is right, because they already charge for a given bitrate.
Net neutrality is wrong, because the government shouldn't interfere with the free market.
But you know what? Neither of those answers have a goddamned thing to do with what the answer is going to be.
What's the answer going to be?
Net neutrality is wrong because it interferes with the ability to create artificial barriers to entry through contracts. You want to know what the end result will be? Follow the money. How can big content and big transport both make money off of net bias or net neutrality? The can both make money if they create bidirectional contracts that leave the little guys out.
Whazzat?
Suppose big transport says to Google, "We're not going to carry your video if you only pay for the pipes once." Maybe Google goes along at first. If they do, big transport will raise the price. They will keep raising the price until they find the point where Google is no longer willing to pay more. The find that by charging too much. At which point Google says no, and big transport turns off the switch.
Then what happens? Fourteen million screaming customers blow their stack. Big transport goes to Google and says, "OK, we'd like to renegotiate the price." To which Google responds, "Forget it - we see the light now. You are going to pay us for the right to carry our content, just like television." The box for a while, and eventually they wind up with a contract that says something along the lines of Google will pay PacBell $0.10 per megabyte for transport, and PacBell will pay Google $0.10 per megabyte for content.
Why do they come to this arrangement? Simple - anyone who's not big enough to play in PacBell and Google's league will either pay PacBell, or not be able to compete with Google. Everybody wins. Well, at least everyone who is in big content or big transport, and fuck everybody else, right? I mean, nobody else stepping up to the lobbying plate to pay for this legislation, so nobody else cares, right?
Right? Wrong? Big transport and big content are the guys with the guns.
Regardless of what you think of the policy, the guy on the other end is just a peon, not a "goon." He's doing this so he can pay rent, not because he enjoys harassing you -- got it? He has no control over the script.
No, I don't got it. He has 100% control over whether what is printed in the script comes out of his mouth.
Are you saying that for enough money anything is OK? Are you insane? (I guess the technical term is "sociopathic") Does what Enron did suddenly become OK because they made a lot of money at it?
Money has zero to do with morality. When you choose to enforce a policy, you are making a choice. The fact that you get a paycheck for it has zero to do with the moral decision. You may be willing to sell your morals for a given price, but that doesn't absolve you of the guilt.
If you steal bread to feed your family because the system is corrupt, that doesn't make the stealing OK. It makes it justifiable.
Your mother probably tried (but apparently failed) to teach you this as the doctrine of "Two wrongs don't make a right."
Now let's toss in that, unless this is a call center in a third world country, the hypothetical person reading an immoral script was not doing it because it was the only possible way to avoid starvation. He was doing it because he decided he would rather do that than sweep floors or clean toilets or any of a thousand other shitty, but morally straight, jobs that are available in this country. So he doesn't have impending doom to justify, let alone sanctify, his choice.
That doesn't mean a person can't, or even shouldn't, choose to sell their morals in this incredibly immoral society (by which I'm referring to the robber barons, not people who enjoy recreational sex - but that's my moral set), but it does mean that they are 100% judgeable for their actions. It's called "personal responsibility" and it is the exact same thing which we all find so lacking in congress. It's no better in an individual than in a public official.
Now you're talking about a different topic. The grandparent was saying that computer journals write what they write because they need to woo advertisers. I'm saying that's false; that's not the way it works. You, however, are saying that tech journalists write what they write because they are ignorant. That might be true, but it's a different argument.
I don't agree. I think the GP was saying that tech journals are unreliable because of 'X'. You responded that we on the outside cannot know if 'X' is true. I responded that tech journals may not be unreliable because of 'X', but regardless are unreliable because of 'Y'. IMO, the core matter of inquery is, "Are tech journals unreliable?"
Are you really asking a question?
Yes, though I admit I am starting from skeptical.
If so, are you willing to listen to me if I answer it?
Always - what other rational reason would I have for posting here? (though I know there are a great many people here who are not rational)
I need somebody who knows how to reach somebody on the phone, ask some questions, and transcribe the results. A lot of people with deeper technical background won't do that.
Very agreed that reporters have a tough job - one that most techs cannot do. It is unfortunate. I'm not saying you're bad, you may very well be doing the best job possible.
I personally have a technology background. I'm not a hotshot systems guy by any means, but I have administered Unix and Linux systems, have managed development teams, and have programmed in at least a half-dozen languages -- including Forth and assembly language,
Sounds like you are pretty well qualified for your position. I think that most of your reporters are not so qualified, and I'm betting it has been years since you were in the field. By necessity - your current job is a full time thing, and your reporters are literary professionals. Not a bad thing. Just a fact.
How could it be solved? I don't know. Maybe the answer is to cultivate more relationships with practitioners than with corporations, like ACM does. Maybe the answer is to have pseudo-practitioners on your staff, like Consumer Reports does. But what would that acheive? There is a bigger market for popular tech journals than for Communications of The ACM and for Popular Science than Consumer Reports. Advertisers are more attracted to that bigger market.
Which is an interesting way to tie it back to commercial journalism. Which was the GP's position.
However, that's not to say that there aren't sharp people out there. You may be familiar with Jon Udell, who is a tremendous resource for InfoWorld. I work with a guy named Mario Apicella, who knows more about storage than anyone I've met. Oliver Rist writes regularly for InfoWorld about Windows, yet his writing is witty and engaging and he cuts Microsoft no slack -- and he's a practitioner in the field.
Perhaps InfoWorld is the most credible in an incredible field. Perhaps InfoWorld is even credible. Perhaps it is unfortunate for InfoWorld to be tarred with the same brush as PC Magazine. But then again, maybe not. Even amongst full time technologists there are a great many people who believe white papers. People who do the work full time, and only stand to influence the decisions of a single company. How much more malleable is a person who was once a practitioner but is no more? How much more propaganda is targetted at a person with the ability to affect the decisions of hundreds or thousands of companies?
Again, this is not to say that it is bad. It is by necessity. It is.
Moreover it is not to say that you are not writing truth. You may be. But how can we know when you are? It is a tough question, one which you are vastly more qualified to deal with than I. For now, the answer seems to be, we cannot.
That may be true, but nobody ever said InfoWorld was an information science magazine, nor eWeek, and if that's the misconception you were laboring under then let me
What we're talking about here is major Free software products - you know, the ones that Microsoft might actually give a crap about interoperating with, like Linux, Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. I think you'll find those projects are actually relatively easy to read, quite well documented, and well maintained.
Let's go a step further. Suppose an MS team emailed the OOo people and said, "I know you're not going to believe this, but he wasn't kidding - we are actually building an ODS import/export module for MS Office. Your format documentation is not sufficient for us. We would like your help to ensure perfect document compatibility with OpenOffice. We'll give you the development release plugins as we go. They'll be in binary format, licensed just like MS Office, no redistribution allowed, of course. That way you can check them out for yourself. And we won't restrict disclosure except that you can only refer to our module as 'experimental' - but as long as we continue to act in good faith we'd like to make a gentleman's agreement that neither of us will go public before we're both ready. Would anyone be willing to help?"
I think the response would be something along the lines of, "How many people would you like? Don't worry about the cost on our side, we will find sponsors."
Any reputable publication has a "church and state" policy with regard to sales and editorial.
Hmm - let's see. So you're saying that Microsoft, IBM, Forrester, Gartner, and BEA repeat things to you over and over again until you believe them (white papers and PR / church services), then you attempt to convert others to your beliefs (editorial articles / laws, evangelism, and public proclamations)?
haha only serious.
Editorial staff at computer journals do nurture relationships with major technology vendors but that's because it's necessary to what we do -- which is report on IT.
Treat with extreme skepticism any politician who hasn't been in the situation in question, or any editorialist who doesn't build what he writes about. Common sense has only a moderate track record in general, and is miserable in relatively new scientific fields like information science. While it is true that tech magazines attempt - perhaps even go to great lengths - to know and profess truth, how well can one understand a fish while standing on dry land? How well when most of the information one receives comes from commercial fishermen?
It makes me think of Dick Cheney's views on homosexuality. It is incredible how far personal experience can go.
Do I trust you to report what you hear with relative accuracy? Sure. Do I trust that what you hear will be from unbiased sources? It is to laugh. Do you have your own experience against which to measure what you hear? Not for the most part (Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham notwithstanding). Then do I trust that what you report will reflect the truth? Should I?
Information science is science. Not fashion. It is not about what Coco Chanelle or Bill Gates proclaims to be true. It is about what scientists discover to be true. Give me Communications of The ACM and Consumer Reports, not PC Magazine and Popular Science (except when I'm trying to impress the boss - then give me CIO magazine, haha).
"MacWorld summarizes an article published in the U.K., stating that Apple's iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day, make $50/month, and have to pay half of that right back to the company for housing and food. The article also claims the workers live in dormitories where they are housed 100 per room, and are not allowed visitors."
Without passing judgement on whether it's good or bad, I have been to Beijing, and seen the living conditions of the lower classes up close. What is described above would be an upgrade for some. So while it may be a bad thing, don't get the impression that it is slave labor or indentured servitude - the people who work there are problably happy to have the job.
Finding a way to improve labor practices in China would be good. But if it leads to those people losing their jobs, it would (at least in the short run) be a bad thing.
Again, not saying the present state is defensible or good, nor that there are not good paths to improvement, just adding some information for thought.
If SPI is Debian's legal representative, it is perfectly reasonable for them to expect to be consulted about potentially problematic legal actions taken by Debian, let alone to simply be informed when such actions take place.
SPI wasn't trying to take the place of Debian's "governing body", it was simply trying to act as their legal representative.
I concur - and I think the right thing to do now is to relax. Take a step back and take a deep breath. Then ask, "Does the SPI help Debian? Is SPI benefitted by it's association with Debian?" I think the answer to both questions is yes.
So the next step is to recognize that this is something that happened in the past. It's over now. Learn from it. Come up with some guidelines for how to act in the future. Talk about the roles that each partner ought to play and the authority that each partner should have.
Don't get distracted with "You should not have done this." That is accusatory. The DPL didn't do it to piss off SPI, nor because he doesn't have respect for SPI. He did it because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. And that was a reasonable judgement call for him to make at the time and in context. How do I know that? Because he's not stupid and I sincerely doubt he's a dick.
So SPI would like to provide further explanation of, or expand, its role for Debian. OK, cool. So do that now. Figure out what the guidelines will be going forward. Learn from it and move on.
Saw the following comment on blogger shortly before it cratered, and wanted to clarify.
If I write a song, and I want to charge someone every time they hear my song, why should the law prevent me from doing that?
The law is the only thing that gives copies of intellectual property any market value. It is called a fiat monopoly. Most monopolies, and all fiat monopolies, are anathema to the pure free market. But, the pure free market is not what we are trying to acheive when enacting copyright - we are trying to incentivize science and the useful arts. So, creating law to establish market value for copies of intellectual property may be justified.
However, by creating a law to establish market value by fiat monopoly, you have crossed the line from free market to government license. Once you cross that line, you must also accept that government licenses are limited in their authority. This is not a question of a law restricting the artist's behavior - no such law is being or has been proposed. It is a question of how far the law that the artist is wielding is allowed it infringe on my free will. Under what conditions do a private act by me grant an artist the power to have me arrested or otherwise compelled?
Why do people keep submitting this moron? OK, maybe it's not too surprising that a community this large has a few idiots. But who keeps approving the posts? And why haven't they been fired?
Take digital cameras for instance. Nobody would have predicted that most people would now take pictures by holding the camera out in front of them and look at the preview screen to frame a shot. Then there's the iPod phenomenon. Is anyone's music collection that interesting? How many people are being deafened by these things, and what kind of a public health disaster is this?
When I was young trolley fare was a nickel and everyone payed with green stamps. Hey you kids, get offa my lawn. Why I remember when zzzzzz....
Piss off grampa, you weren't very interesting 20 years ago when you were vaguely relevant and at least attempted to communicate accurate information.
How are Slashdotters coping with the proliferation of spreadsheets in the face of greater legal accountability and auditing?
By giggling and thinking to myself, "see, that's what happens when you spend more on management than you do on mathematicians and logicians." The giggling helps.
As for non-Slashdotters, the will deal with this by hiring high priced lawyers for the high priced execs. The lawyers will argue that 1% is far better than could possibly be expected, therefore the VP who did it should not be held accountable - surely SOX is meant to cover willful acts, not innocent mistakes. The VP who did it will then get a bonus for publishing the faulty quarterly report which resulted in the stock going up 2.5 points.
Note that of those innocent mistakes that make it into published results, over 75% will result in lower P/E ratios, higher EBITDA, or something similar, with less than 25% resulting in no significant change or an inverse change. If anyone other than a few university economists notices this, they will simply think, "gee that's funny", not "gee, that's statistically significant."
I know it's sad that CD prices don't fall, but that's because every artist has a *monopoly* - like it or not - on his works. If you don't think their music is worth $15, just don't buy it. But again: there's not moral reason for any legal intervention.
Hang on, let me pare that down a little:
that's because every artist has a *monopoly*... on his works.... there's not moral reason for any legal intervention.
Just to clarify a little; a fiat monopoly *is* legal intervention. The free market does not have copyright. Read the Objectivist (Ayn Rand's extreme free-market philosophy) forums; they are deeply conflicted about patents and copyright, just as Ayn was. They see how they may - if properly applied - lead to innovation, but they don't accept the application of force to the marketplace (which is inherent in copyright enforcement).
As an aside, before you respond; Rearden was defending his right to not disclose the secret of Rearden Metal - not asking the government to intervene with force in defense of his ownership of the idea.
Which all is to say copyright may be good or bad, but if you are ideologically opposed to legal intervention in the free market, then you would fall on the side of copyright abolition.
The countries with the highest piracy rates were Vietnam (90%), Zimbabwe (90%), Indonesia (87%), China (86%), and Pakistan (86%).
Yeah. Clearly the general populace in those countries would be willing and able to pay full retail if it weren't for those damned pirates./scarcasm
The countries with the lowest piracy rates were the United States (21%),
Good. Does that mean you're going to get off our (USians) backs now? How about just cutting back a little on buying congress people and laws? You know, ease up on the Federal corruption - just for a little while - till the populace regains some semblance of trust in the democratic process that made this country great.
Although it is complete true that the distinction between application and document format is key, it is quite possible to design a document format with performance in mind versus merely counting on Moore's law to handle performance issues. My observation is that Microsoft has thought through some performance and reliability details to an impressive degree in OpenXML.
Performance optimization should be extremely limited before the product is feature complete and in the hands of at least expert customers, and preferably the real customers. Performance optimization is in tension with programmer friendliness. ODF is zipped ASCII XML with binary embeds (eg: raster graphics) stored in a separate part of the zip - it is really easy to generate documents (I have written a few apps that do it). MS XML is not going to be so easy - inline binary and lookup tables for content. Do you want nicely encapsulated code that can meet the customer's evolving needs without developing bugs (eg: Office's security holes), or do you want a document format that can run on a Pentium 60?
I work for a very large company that has had a number of teams developing code on several different ideologies for the five years that I have been here. I have been able to see up close the long term cost/benefit of teams that write heavily optimized code versus those that write code that is heavy on OO theory at the expense of performance (and versus those that write code that is neither clean nor fast, which is kind of funny/painful to watch). In the long run, there is no competition - the maintainable code wins hands down for anything that has evolving customer needs (which, except for those that have been cancelled, is every project I have seen).
The zip file is stream decompressed so that a lost bit halfway through the file does not prevent decompression of the beginning. Textual data is earlier in the file than bitmap data both because it is needed sooner and also because a truncated file will still have its text and basic formatting intact.
That is the very epitome of inappropriate technical magic put in place by the, "Shouldn't our code handle hypothetical situation X?" people. It makes the code harder to write, understand, and maintain, and it solves a problem that doesn't happen in normal operating conditions. If there's a problem with software or hardware failures during write, do what OOo and MSO already do - keep a backup while the file is open. Once the file is on disk, it is very unlikely to be truncated or bit-flipped unless the drive goes bad (in which case you are going to have a hard time recovering it anyway). If you need your data to withstand drive failures, use an off-disk, off-site, or off-line repository as appropriate.
Thing is XML was desgiend to be readable and easy to parse. If you start doing hacks like embedding tons of binary data (OpenXML has images embeded in the XML), using one letter tags and look-up tables, you've essentially a bloated binary format.
Harumph Harumph!
I've written some apps that generate ODF files. It is really easy. I've also written a few that generate RTF, which is harder, and many that use various other formats, most of which are similar to or harder than ODF. I haven't tried MS XML yet, but if MS is extracting the content to a lookup table, it has to be at least one class harder.
I'm not sure about the rest, but I can address this one.
StarOffice 5.x was the series where the people at Sun started to think, "hmmm, this could actually be something someday" - and they started showing it to a very small group of people. Those people said, "Well, that's not bad, but it crashes all the time."
StarOffice 6.x was more stable, and is when Sun spawned OpenOffice.org. It reached a slightly larger audience who said, "Well, it's stable now, but it's missing a whole bunch of important features."
OpenOffice 1.0 and 1.1 started to address the feature issues, and reached a larger audience. Those people said, "Well, it's getting there, but it doesn't handle Microsoft formats perfectly, and the user interface doesn't feel like MS Office."
OpenOffice 2.0 fixed that, and is reaching a much larger audience. Now people are saying, "This is getting pretty good, but it's not fast enough - for example, it chews a lot of CPU doing large spreadsheets."
Care to guess what version 3.0 will be improving upon? I don't actually know - haven't followed their developer notes or anything, but I'd place a big fat wager on performance.
It's the natural evolution of software. Sometimes the evolution happens behind closed doors, as is most common with proprietary software, but it almost always follows that evolutionary process. Core Stability, Major Features, Minor Features and User Friendliness, Performance. You can almost set your watch by it.
I agree on the "censoring" part - Google is not trying to take the sites off the web.
They've claimed something is "hate speech" to make a point that it is not the content they want on their web site.... Nevermind the fact that no actual hate speech has occured.
I'm not sure I agree here though. Does the following not rise to the level of hate speech?
Muslims are true victims of Islam. However, they fail to realize that Islam is a cult, and the prophet was a demon, possessed by a huge sexual appetite. Yes, true Muslims firmly believe, that those who die in the act of killing the infidels (Christians, Jews and other non-believers) will not only gain entrance into heaven, but will be greeted by 72 virgin women--most likely, Seventy-Two 9 year old girls.
I must confess I do not know the measuring stick that is used for assessing hate speech, but calling a religious icon a demon, and accusing an entire class of people of paedophilia, seems like it might fit the bill.
Persuasion tip #2: If you hope to be productive, under no circumstances use the words, "But when you are opposing a corrupt system of backscratchers that has more systemic power than you do, a dramatically tilted market, a gov't that gets paid to not care about the free market, and an apathetic/sheeplike populace." Or anything remotely resembling that.
If I were trying to pursuade a person who was emotionally opposed, obviously. I'm just figuring you're here (like me) to learn more about the varying views on the subject.
We hate that "Big Media" is using ever "improving"/"tightening" DRM restrictions, but we have to accept them if we want the latest music, video, and computer content.... If you don't like what they're doing, do without their content.
I couldn't agree more. May I recommend the fine selection of Lewis Black performances, and the excellent techno and metal sections?
Slashdot Mirror
you should have noticed that you need the ingenious solution that was published through the patent office
I don't think that holds water. The purpose of patents is to advance science and the useful arts. If it is obvious, it is not an advance.
6. The method of claim 1 further including the step of mapping class inheritance to rows within a table.
Clearly the person writing the patent doesn't understand object oriented programming or databases. Row 2 extends row 1? I think not (except maybe as a lab experiment proving it's possible).
And as an aside, I have violated this patent. Twice. A friend of mine working on the same project was violating it at the same time. Then we hired a third guy who violated it again. Yes, we have a project which contains four, count 'em, four, independently developed O-R mapping tools. Three of them (one of mine and the two others) were developed not knowing the others existed. Then someone recommended TopLink, which we chose not to use. Then a friend of mine showed me WebObjects, which we chose not to use. Then we hired a guy who told us about Hibernate, which we now use. WebObjects started as a NeXT project in the mid 90's. TopLink is older than the patent (I think). Our independent implementations were done without knowing about any of the existing tools or the patent, and before (I admit with some shame) we were aware of Scott Ambler's outstanding research on the subject (which dates back to 1998).
Summary judgement to the defendant, obvious and not novel.
Completely agreed. MS long ago lost sight of the fact that the OS is an Operating System, not an application. The OS should be the most minimal layer necessary to provide abstract access to the hardware. If it's a desktop system, that may reasonably include a nice light windowing system, gui toolkit, and window manager. All the rest of the cycles should go to the applications. Linux + X + Xfce4 + Xfwm is a very nice example of that idea. Toss in Alsa for sound and a printing system and you're good to go. Until we have practical, real 3D, monitors, there's no need for anything more from the OS.
But that does present a serious problem for MS: It costs arbitrarily close to nothing to build all that when you spread the cost over a few hundred million people. From an economic standpoint, there is no reason to have commercial operating systems any more. The only thing that has them on life support is artificial barriers to entry, and the market hates those, so they're not going to last.
The same is true of any common software. It has already happened to web browsers, email clients, IM, and many others. It is happening to office software now. The money is in small-market, big value applications like AutoCAD, custom enterprise software, and software that enables particular business models (eBay, PayPal, Facebook). Proprietary commodity software is the walking dead.
So, what is the scope of technical repair that Geek Squad techs do?
:)
Here's my guess:
- Look good.
- Dress nice.
- Talk nice.
- Send computer to someone who won't break it.
I'm telling Congress on you.
My lawyer could beat up your lawyer.
Boy: I never said I knew where the WMDs were.
Father: We saw you do it, son.
Boy: No, no, no, no, no.
Boy 1: That idea is mine!
Boy 2: No, you gotta share!
Boy 1: It's mine! (punches boy 2)
Boy 1: Wanna play Kerberos?
Boy 2: Yeah! Only you gotta show me how.
[They play]
Boy 2: No, you can't use MD5.
Boy 1: Yes I can, we always used MD5.
Boy 2: It's my house, we play by my rules.
Yup, sounds about right.
I hope you're saying that from the place of someone who turned down an office job with a desk to do janitorial work.
If not, you're being pretty preachy there.
Yup - speaking as someone who has given up decent paying immoral jobs for minimum wage (lived on less than $6.00 per hour for more than 5 years after dropping out of college), and as someone who presently has a long list of things I won't do for money, which have had a very clear and direct impact on my ability to climb the corporate ladder.
But that's not really the point, is it?
I'm also speaking as someone who is 100% willing to take responsibility for my choices. Anyone who wants to judge me for my decisions, should.
Net neutrality is right, because they already charge for a given bitrate.
Net neutrality is wrong, because the government shouldn't interfere with the free market.
But you know what? Neither of those answers have a goddamned thing to do with what the answer is going to be.
What's the answer going to be?
Net neutrality is wrong because it interferes with the ability to create artificial barriers to entry through contracts. You want to know what the end result will be? Follow the money. How can big content and big transport both make money off of net bias or net neutrality? The can both make money if they create bidirectional contracts that leave the little guys out.
Whazzat?
Suppose big transport says to Google, "We're not going to carry your video if you only pay for the pipes once." Maybe Google goes along at first. If they do, big transport will raise the price. They will keep raising the price until they find the point where Google is no longer willing to pay more. The find that by charging too much. At which point Google says no, and big transport turns off the switch.
Then what happens? Fourteen million screaming customers blow their stack. Big transport goes to Google and says, "OK, we'd like to renegotiate the price." To which Google responds, "Forget it - we see the light now. You are going to pay us for the right to carry our content, just like television." The box for a while, and eventually they wind up with a contract that says something along the lines of Google will pay PacBell $0.10 per megabyte for transport, and PacBell will pay Google $0.10 per megabyte for content.
Why do they come to this arrangement? Simple - anyone who's not big enough to play in PacBell and Google's league will either pay PacBell, or not be able to compete with Google. Everybody wins. Well, at least everyone who is in big content or big transport, and fuck everybody else, right? I mean, nobody else stepping up to the lobbying plate to pay for this legislation, so nobody else cares, right?
Right? Wrong? Big transport and big content are the guys with the guns.
Regardless of what you think of the policy, the guy on the other end is just a peon, not a "goon." He's doing this so he can pay rent, not because he enjoys harassing you -- got it? He has no control over the script.
No, I don't got it. He has 100% control over whether what is printed in the script comes out of his mouth.
Are you saying that for enough money anything is OK? Are you insane? (I guess the technical term is "sociopathic") Does what Enron did suddenly become OK because they made a lot of money at it?
Money has zero to do with morality. When you choose to enforce a policy, you are making a choice. The fact that you get a paycheck for it has zero to do with the moral decision. You may be willing to sell your morals for a given price, but that doesn't absolve you of the guilt.
If you steal bread to feed your family because the system is corrupt, that doesn't make the stealing OK. It makes it justifiable.
Your mother probably tried (but apparently failed) to teach you this as the doctrine of "Two wrongs don't make a right."
Now let's toss in that, unless this is a call center in a third world country, the hypothetical person reading an immoral script was not doing it because it was the only possible way to avoid starvation. He was doing it because he decided he would rather do that than sweep floors or clean toilets or any of a thousand other shitty, but morally straight, jobs that are available in this country. So he doesn't have impending doom to justify, let alone sanctify, his choice.
That doesn't mean a person can't, or even shouldn't, choose to sell their morals in this incredibly immoral society (by which I'm referring to the robber barons, not people who enjoy recreational sex - but that's my moral set), but it does mean that they are 100% judgeable for their actions. It's called "personal responsibility" and it is the exact same thing which we all find so lacking in congress. It's no better in an individual than in a public official.
Now you're talking about a different topic. The grandparent was saying that computer journals write what they write because they need to woo advertisers. I'm saying that's false; that's not the way it works. You, however, are saying that tech journalists write what they write because they are ignorant. That might be true, but it's a different argument.
I don't agree. I think the GP was saying that tech journals are unreliable because of 'X'. You responded that we on the outside cannot know if 'X' is true. I responded that tech journals may not be unreliable because of 'X', but regardless are unreliable because of 'Y'. IMO, the core matter of inquery is, "Are tech journals unreliable?"
Are you really asking a question?
Yes, though I admit I am starting from skeptical.
If so, are you willing to listen to me if I answer it?
Always - what other rational reason would I have for posting here? (though I know there are a great many people here who are not rational)
I need somebody who knows how to reach somebody on the phone, ask some questions, and transcribe the results. A lot of people with deeper technical background won't do that.
Very agreed that reporters have a tough job - one that most techs cannot do. It is unfortunate. I'm not saying you're bad, you may very well be doing the best job possible.
I personally have a technology background. I'm not a hotshot systems guy by any means, but I have administered Unix and Linux systems, have managed development teams, and have programmed in at least a half-dozen languages -- including Forth and assembly language,
Sounds like you are pretty well qualified for your position. I think that most of your reporters are not so qualified, and I'm betting it has been years since you were in the field. By necessity - your current job is a full time thing, and your reporters are literary professionals. Not a bad thing. Just a fact.
How could it be solved? I don't know. Maybe the answer is to cultivate more relationships with practitioners than with corporations, like ACM does. Maybe the answer is to have pseudo-practitioners on your staff, like Consumer Reports does. But what would that acheive? There is a bigger market for popular tech journals than for Communications of The ACM and for Popular Science than Consumer Reports. Advertisers are more attracted to that bigger market.
Which is an interesting way to tie it back to commercial journalism. Which was the GP's position.
However, that's not to say that there aren't sharp people out there. You may be familiar with Jon Udell, who is a tremendous resource for InfoWorld. I work with a guy named Mario Apicella, who knows more about storage than anyone I've met. Oliver Rist writes regularly for InfoWorld about Windows, yet his writing is witty and engaging and he cuts Microsoft no slack -- and he's a practitioner in the field.
Perhaps InfoWorld is the most credible in an incredible field. Perhaps InfoWorld is even credible. Perhaps it is unfortunate for InfoWorld to be tarred with the same brush as PC Magazine. But then again, maybe not. Even amongst full time technologists there are a great many people who believe white papers. People who do the work full time, and only stand to influence the decisions of a single company. How much more malleable is a person who was once a practitioner but is no more? How much more propaganda is targetted at a person with the ability to affect the decisions of hundreds or thousands of companies?
Again, this is not to say that it is bad. It is by necessity. It is.
Moreover it is not to say that you are not writing truth. You may be. But how can we know when you are? It is a tough question, one which you are vastly more qualified to deal with than I. For now, the answer seems to be, we cannot.
That may be true, but nobody ever said InfoWorld was an information science magazine, nor eWeek, and if that's the misconception you were laboring under then let me
What we're talking about here is major Free software products - you know, the ones that Microsoft might actually give a crap about interoperating with, like Linux, Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. I think you'll find those projects are actually relatively easy to read, quite well documented, and well maintained.
Let's go a step further. Suppose an MS team emailed the OOo people and said, "I know you're not going to believe this, but he wasn't kidding - we are actually building an ODS import/export module for MS Office. Your format documentation is not sufficient for us. We would like your help to ensure perfect document compatibility with OpenOffice. We'll give you the development release plugins as we go. They'll be in binary format, licensed just like MS Office, no redistribution allowed, of course. That way you can check them out for yourself. And we won't restrict disclosure except that you can only refer to our module as 'experimental' - but as long as we continue to act in good faith we'd like to make a gentleman's agreement that neither of us will go public before we're both ready. Would anyone be willing to help?"
I think the response would be something along the lines of, "How many people would you like? Don't worry about the cost on our side, we will find sponsors."
Any reputable publication has a "church and state" policy with regard to sales and editorial.
Hmm - let's see. So you're saying that Microsoft, IBM, Forrester, Gartner, and BEA repeat things to you over and over again until you believe them (white papers and PR / church services), then you attempt to convert others to your beliefs (editorial articles / laws, evangelism, and public proclamations)?
haha only serious.
Editorial staff at computer journals do nurture relationships with major technology vendors but that's because it's necessary to what we do -- which is report on IT.
Treat with extreme skepticism any politician who hasn't been in the situation in question, or any editorialist who doesn't build what he writes about. Common sense has only a moderate track record in general, and is miserable in relatively new scientific fields like information science. While it is true that tech magazines attempt - perhaps even go to great lengths - to know and profess truth, how well can one understand a fish while standing on dry land? How well when most of the information one receives comes from commercial fishermen?
It makes me think of Dick Cheney's views on homosexuality. It is incredible how far personal experience can go.
Do I trust you to report what you hear with relative accuracy? Sure. Do I trust that what you hear will be from unbiased sources? It is to laugh. Do you have your own experience against which to measure what you hear? Not for the most part (Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham notwithstanding). Then do I trust that what you report will reflect the truth? Should I?
Information science is science. Not fashion. It is not about what Coco Chanelle or Bill Gates proclaims to be true. It is about what scientists discover to be true. Give me Communications of The ACM and Consumer Reports, not PC Magazine and Popular Science (except when I'm trying to impress the boss - then give me CIO magazine, haha).
"MacWorld summarizes an article published in the U.K., stating that Apple's iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day, make $50/month, and have to pay half of that right back to the company for housing and food. The article also claims the workers live in dormitories where they are housed 100 per room, and are not allowed visitors."
Without passing judgement on whether it's good or bad, I have been to Beijing, and seen the living conditions of the lower classes up close. What is described above would be an upgrade for some. So while it may be a bad thing, don't get the impression that it is slave labor or indentured servitude - the people who work there are problably happy to have the job.
Finding a way to improve labor practices in China would be good. But if it leads to those people losing their jobs, it would (at least in the short run) be a bad thing.
Again, not saying the present state is defensible or good, nor that there are not good paths to improvement, just adding some information for thought.
If SPI is Debian's legal representative, it is perfectly reasonable for them to expect to be consulted about potentially problematic legal actions taken by Debian, let alone to simply be informed when such actions take place.
SPI wasn't trying to take the place of Debian's "governing body", it was simply trying to act as their legal representative.
I concur - and I think the right thing to do now is to relax. Take a step back and take a deep breath. Then ask, "Does the SPI help Debian? Is SPI benefitted by it's association with Debian?" I think the answer to both questions is yes.
So the next step is to recognize that this is something that happened in the past. It's over now. Learn from it. Come up with some guidelines for how to act in the future. Talk about the roles that each partner ought to play and the authority that each partner should have.
Don't get distracted with "You should not have done this." That is accusatory. The DPL didn't do it to piss off SPI, nor because he doesn't have respect for SPI. He did it because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. And that was a reasonable judgement call for him to make at the time and in context. How do I know that? Because he's not stupid and I sincerely doubt he's a dick.
So SPI would like to provide further explanation of, or expand, its role for Debian. OK, cool. So do that now. Figure out what the guidelines will be going forward. Learn from it and move on.
Saw the following comment on blogger shortly before it cratered, and wanted to clarify.
If I write a song, and I want to charge someone every time they hear my song, why should the law prevent me from doing that?
The law is the only thing that gives copies of intellectual property any market value. It is called a fiat monopoly. Most monopolies, and all fiat monopolies, are anathema to the pure free market. But, the pure free market is not what we are trying to acheive when enacting copyright - we are trying to incentivize science and the useful arts. So, creating law to establish market value for copies of intellectual property may be justified.
However, by creating a law to establish market value by fiat monopoly, you have crossed the line from free market to government license. Once you cross that line, you must also accept that government licenses are limited in their authority. This is not a question of a law restricting the artist's behavior - no such law is being or has been proposed. It is a question of how far the law that the artist is wielding is allowed it infringe on my free will. Under what conditions do a private act by me grant an artist the power to have me arrested or otherwise compelled?
Why do people keep submitting this moron? OK, maybe it's not too surprising that a community this large has a few idiots. But who keeps approving the posts? And why haven't they been fired?
Take digital cameras for instance. Nobody would have predicted that most people would now take pictures by holding the camera out in front of them and look at the preview screen to frame a shot. Then there's the iPod phenomenon. Is anyone's music collection that interesting? How many people are being deafened by these things, and what kind of a public health disaster is this?
When I was young trolley fare was a nickel and everyone payed with green stamps. Hey you kids, get offa my lawn. Why I remember when zzzzzz....
Piss off grampa, you weren't very interesting 20 years ago when you were vaguely relevant and at least attempted to communicate accurate information.
How are Slashdotters coping with the proliferation of spreadsheets in the face of greater legal accountability and auditing?
By giggling and thinking to myself, "see, that's what happens when you spend more on management than you do on mathematicians and logicians." The giggling helps.
As for non-Slashdotters, the will deal with this by hiring high priced lawyers for the high priced execs. The lawyers will argue that 1% is far better than could possibly be expected, therefore the VP who did it should not be held accountable - surely SOX is meant to cover willful acts, not innocent mistakes. The VP who did it will then get a bonus for publishing the faulty quarterly report which resulted in the stock going up 2.5 points.
Note that of those innocent mistakes that make it into published results, over 75% will result in lower P/E ratios, higher EBITDA, or something similar, with less than 25% resulting in no significant change or an inverse change. If anyone other than a few university economists notices this, they will simply think, "gee that's funny", not "gee, that's statistically significant."
What was the question again?
I know it's sad that CD prices don't fall, but that's because every artist has a *monopoly* - like it or not - on his works. If you don't think their music is worth $15, just don't buy it. But again: there's not moral reason for any legal intervention.
... on his works. ... there's not moral reason for any legal intervention.
Hang on, let me pare that down a little:
that's because every artist has a *monopoly*
Just to clarify a little; a fiat monopoly *is* legal intervention. The free market does not have copyright. Read the Objectivist (Ayn Rand's extreme free-market philosophy) forums; they are deeply conflicted about patents and copyright, just as Ayn was. They see how they may - if properly applied - lead to innovation, but they don't accept the application of force to the marketplace (which is inherent in copyright enforcement).
As an aside, before you respond; Rearden was defending his right to not disclose the secret of Rearden Metal - not asking the government to intervene with force in defense of his ownership of the idea.
Which all is to say copyright may be good or bad, but if you are ideologically opposed to legal intervention in the free market, then you would fall on the side of copyright abolition.
Very well said. I only have two people marked as friends (no offense to the great many sharp people here - I'm anti-social). You are the second.
The countries with the highest piracy rates were Vietnam (90%), Zimbabwe (90%), Indonesia (87%), China (86%), and Pakistan (86%).
/scarcasm
Yeah. Clearly the general populace in those countries would be willing and able to pay full retail if it weren't for those damned pirates.
The countries with the lowest piracy rates were the United States (21%),
Good. Does that mean you're going to get off our (USians) backs now? How about just cutting back a little on buying congress people and laws? You know, ease up on the Federal corruption - just for a little while - till the populace regains some semblance of trust in the democratic process that made this country great.
Come on, just for giggles - eh?
Just a thought.
Although it is complete true that the distinction between application and document format is key, it is quite possible to design a document format with performance in mind versus merely counting on Moore's law to handle performance issues. My observation is that Microsoft has thought through some performance and reliability details to an impressive degree in OpenXML.
Performance optimization should be extremely limited before the product is feature complete and in the hands of at least expert customers, and preferably the real customers. Performance optimization is in tension with programmer friendliness. ODF is zipped ASCII XML with binary embeds (eg: raster graphics) stored in a separate part of the zip - it is really easy to generate documents (I have written a few apps that do it). MS XML is not going to be so easy - inline binary and lookup tables for content. Do you want nicely encapsulated code that can meet the customer's evolving needs without developing bugs (eg: Office's security holes), or do you want a document format that can run on a Pentium 60?
I work for a very large company that has had a number of teams developing code on several different ideologies for the five years that I have been here. I have been able to see up close the long term cost/benefit of teams that write heavily optimized code versus those that write code that is heavy on OO theory at the expense of performance (and versus those that write code that is neither clean nor fast, which is kind of funny/painful to watch). In the long run, there is no competition - the maintainable code wins hands down for anything that has evolving customer needs (which, except for those that have been cancelled, is every project I have seen).
The zip file is stream decompressed so that a lost bit halfway through the file does not prevent decompression of the beginning. Textual data is earlier in the file than bitmap data both because it is needed sooner and also because a truncated file will still have its text and basic formatting intact.
That is the very epitome of inappropriate technical magic put in place by the, "Shouldn't our code handle hypothetical situation X?" people. It makes the code harder to write, understand, and maintain, and it solves a problem that doesn't happen in normal operating conditions. If there's a problem with software or hardware failures during write, do what OOo and MSO already do - keep a backup while the file is open. Once the file is on disk, it is very unlikely to be truncated or bit-flipped unless the drive goes bad (in which case you are going to have a hard time recovering it anyway). If you need your data to withstand drive failures, use an off-disk, off-site, or off-line repository as appropriate.
Thing is XML was desgiend to be readable and easy to parse. If you start doing hacks like embedding tons of binary data (OpenXML has images embeded in the XML), using one letter tags and look-up tables, you've essentially a bloated binary format.
Harumph Harumph!
I've written some apps that generate ODF files. It is really easy. I've also written a few that generate RTF, which is harder, and many that use various other formats, most of which are similar to or harder than ODF. I haven't tried MS XML yet, but if MS is extracting the content to a lookup table, it has to be at least one class harder.
But why is OpenOffice dog-ass slow?
I'm not sure about the rest, but I can address this one.
StarOffice 5.x was the series where the people at Sun started to think, "hmmm, this could actually be something someday" - and they started showing it to a very small group of people. Those people said, "Well, that's not bad, but it crashes all the time."
StarOffice 6.x was more stable, and is when Sun spawned OpenOffice.org. It reached a slightly larger audience who said, "Well, it's stable now, but it's missing a whole bunch of important features."
OpenOffice 1.0 and 1.1 started to address the feature issues, and reached a larger audience. Those people said, "Well, it's getting there, but it doesn't handle Microsoft formats perfectly, and the user interface doesn't feel like MS Office."
OpenOffice 2.0 fixed that, and is reaching a much larger audience. Now people are saying, "This is getting pretty good, but it's not fast enough - for example, it chews a lot of CPU doing large spreadsheets."
Care to guess what version 3.0 will be improving upon? I don't actually know - haven't followed their developer notes or anything, but I'd place a big fat wager on performance.
It's the natural evolution of software. Sometimes the evolution happens behind closed doors, as is most common with proprietary software, but it almost always follows that evolutionary process. Core Stability, Major Features, Minor Features and User Friendliness, Performance. You can almost set your watch by it.
I agree on the "censoring" part - Google is not trying to take the sites off the web.
... Nevermind the fact that no actual hate speech has occured.
They've claimed something is "hate speech" to make a point that it is not the content they want on their web site.
I'm not sure I agree here though. Does the following not rise to the level of hate speech?
Muslims are true victims of Islam. However, they fail to realize that Islam is a cult, and the prophet was a demon, possessed by a huge sexual appetite. Yes, true Muslims firmly believe, that those who die in the act of killing the infidels (Christians, Jews and other non-believers) will not only gain entrance into heaven, but will be greeted by 72 virgin women--most likely, Seventy-Two 9 year old girls.
I must confess I do not know the measuring stick that is used for assessing hate speech, but calling a religious icon a demon, and accusing an entire class of people of paedophilia, seems like it might fit the bill.
Persuasion tip #2: If you hope to be productive, under no circumstances use the words, "But when you are opposing a corrupt system of backscratchers that has more systemic power than you do, a dramatically tilted market, a gov't that gets paid to not care about the free market, and an apathetic/sheeplike populace." Or anything remotely resembling that.
If I were trying to pursuade a person who was emotionally opposed, obviously. I'm just figuring you're here (like me) to learn more about the varying views on the subject.
We hate that "Big Media" is using ever "improving"/"tightening" DRM restrictions, but we have to accept them if we want the latest music, video, and computer content. ... If you don't like what they're doing, do without their content.
I couldn't agree more. May I recommend the fine selection of Lewis Black performances, and the excellent techno and metal sections?