What I want to know - aside from getting a higher quality file (duboius at best) what's the point? It's not like this is legal, you might as well just download the songs anyway. (Unless you have a particularly large legal library or dialup, I suppose)
I have two computers at the office, five at home, and three in colocation. All of them run Linux (I also have one Windows machine at the office, but it has no sound card). If I want to become a customer of iTunes, I would require a crack program like this. I would have the legal right to listen to the music, and fair use specifically gives me the right to listen to the music in any way I see fit, including on Linux. The whole point of fair use is that anyone who purchases a copyrighted work should be able to use it as they see fit.
Why is fair use a good thing? Because copyright is a balance between the good of society and the good of the creator of a work. Long run cultural development of a society requires that people be free to draw inspiration from and transfor works. At the same time, creativity is valuable to society and should be rewarded. Thus the balance of an artificial monopoly with very specific terms and limitations was established. As we increasingly tip that balance, our culture is being damaged - for example, major labels and ClearChannel have audio entertainment completely locked up in the US, and all they produce is the stuff that hits the center of the popular markets. There's nothing wrong with pop music (I even like some of it), but a healthy culture requires that broad market exist.
I'm rambling a bit, and I've mixed the problems of trusts, monopoly, price fixing, and copyright extension together, but they all play off each other. The short of it is copyright is good and healthy, and so is the public domain. The most efficient solution for increasing the wealth of our society (wealth being the ability to satisfy wants, not just dollars) is a harmonious blend of copyright, public domain, and fair use.
OK, that was really rambly, but hopefully it at least provides some food for thought.
Not that you are wrong, but IMHO a survey should not require 'out of the box' thinking to be able to give a correct answer. It should ask questions in a straight forward way and should also not (as other posters pointed out) be used to carry opinions in the questions.
I take your point, and the skeptical side of me wants to agree. But consider another alternative: The question could be a weed-out question. EG: on psych tests they will often have the same question worded four different ways through the course of the survey - it's an attempt to trip up the testee.
Totally agreed that this is not the simple answer, and the simple answer is usually true. You may be right that the test author is simply biased. But if that's the case, it doesn't matter what answers are filled in, so you may as well pick 'b'.
6. Would you re-use blocks of code written elsewhere
a) ( ) Only if you were confident that nobody would find out
b) ( ) Whether it would be found out or not
This one stymied me for a moment too, but the correct answer is 'b'. Basically it's saying, "if you do re-use code, would you attempt to hide it?" I reuse code frequently, and always with the explicit permission of the copyright holder, and according to the conditions they have set forth. Therefore, whenever I do re-use blocks of code, it is completely irrelevant whether anyone knows.
I just haven't heard anything new I'd like to buy... how about you?
If you like old school Black Sabbath sounding heavy metal, you should go buy this album by Fireball Ministry. It's dirty, angry, and mean - just like metal should be. Modern death metal is all good, but Fireball Ministry does an outstanding job of going back to the basics. There are some MP3s on their site, give them a listen.
Do you believe this is a step in the right direction? Why?
Just firing from the hip here, but corporations and real estate have to have accurate contact information too. I'm guessing this has to do with preventing squatting, and with resolving legal issues which involve the owner of the property in question. Both of these issues have correlaries in domain name space.
"I commend Senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch for their vision and leadership in combating the theft of America's creative works," said Jack Valenti, MPAA's chief executive.
Wasn't it Valenti who, maybe 6 months ago, said the backlash against the RIAA was clearly more damaging to the music industry than could be justified, and that the MPAA wouldn't pursue a similar course of action?
Yeah, here it is: "I'm not ruling out anything, but at this moment we don't have any specific plans to sue anyone," Mr. Valenti said. "I think we have learned from the music industry.'' - published Dec 2003
OK, not really a quick change, I don't think any of us ever took him at face value, but it's still pretty annoying.
First, it will force Microsoft to raise prices in other ways, so the fine is a hidden tax on consumers.
You're assuming supply-side economics. The price of Microsoft's products is not governed by the supply side, it's governed by the demand side. Heck, that's pretty much the definition of monopoly pricing.
Second, it does not change the underlying problem, which is that Microsoft have been allowed over the last decade to establish a position from which they can control prices in a market almost devoid of real competition.
Neither does charging a fine for double parking solve the underlying problem of a willingness to occupy two parking spaces. Penalties are meant to be punitive, to make the violator think twice next time, and (in the case of MS's penalty) to provide recompense to the injured party.
Re:isn't this what bittorrent was created for?
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: 1
OK, I admit it, I was stoned. engart.us is working fine (I couldn't connect at first and thought it was dead). I've attached two fairly large pipe clients to his torrent.
Re:isn't this what bittorrent was created for?
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
now let's watch my tracker/web server die http://engert.us/gimp-2.0.0.tar.bz2.torrent
Sales Guy: Hi, it looks like you're considering Rackspace for your hosting needs. Can I help you? Chatterbot: Would you like to help me with considering Rackspace for your hosting needs? Sales Guy: Yes, that's why I'm here, to help you. Chatterbot: Why are you here, to help you? Sales Guy: No, to help you. To make your shopping experience with Rackspace more enjoyable. Chatterbot: How do you feel about shopping experience with Rackspace more enjoyable? ...
I rent one of your servers (the machine from which I'm sending this). I have been extremely pleased with your uptime, bandwidth, and pricing. I would like to remain a customer.
I have read your open letter regarding the SCO license in the forums, and understand your position. I also think some of the counterpoints that have been made are quite valid. I think there is an easy way to recover the support of those who see Linux as an important part of the national and global economy.
Please consider contributing to the OSDL's legal defense fund. http://www.osdl.org/about_osdl/legal/lldf/l ldf_des cription.html
I will be on vacation until early next week. Upon my return, I will check the front page of your website. If there is a large public notice that you have given the OSDL's Linux Legal Defense Fund a contribution equal to or greater than the amount you paid SCO, I will be very happy to continue using your service.
You have chosen to give money to highwaymen who have made baseless allegations about their ownership of some small portion of Linux. If you genuinely feel that SCO has earned your money, it seems abundantly clear that you owe far more to the people who actually wrote Linux. What better way to invest that money than in defending Linux from the same highwaymen that have just held you up at lawyerpoint?
You currently pay Red Hat for their support services. According to the license under which Linux is distributed (including the license under which SCO distributes Linux), you do not have to pay for the intellectual property. If you choose to pay for the intellectual property rights to Linux, you should be paying the people who own those rights. In this case, that money can be best spent by defending those authors' right to their intellectual property.
In theory one could wait until after work to read the day's articles on Slashdot. Instead of having three minute interruptions spread throughout your workday, you can compress that into one geek-binge at the end of the day.
Of course, given the time I'm posting and that I'm in a US timezone, you can see that this is not based on practical experience - only a working theory.
Re:Hardware *Debugging*?
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 1
You don't "troubleshoot" a circuit design. You debug it.
Actually, I just started designing analog circuits about a month ago. I can tell you with total confidence that my technique is still distinctly troubleshooting: hmm... I wonder if changing these two capacitors from tantalum to polyester film will eliminate the buzz... hack hack hack.
Re:The final conclusion:dont let it matter too muc
on
Lawmakers Game The System
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Slashdot has editors who not only ban crapflooders, but decide what things people get to even think abouto on the site. Apparently more egalitarian systems such as Kuro5hin start slipping into failure modes and the editors have to uncloak to fix them....
So if it becomes clear that any sort of government on the masses is going to susceptable to cheats, hacks and manipulators, the conclusion must be that the thing must not be allowed to become too important.
Your post operates on two assumptions: 1. There is no such thing as fair administration. 2. Slash, K5, etc. represent the pinnacle in public commentary systems, and cannot function without admins.
Item 1, while probably true in an absolute sense, is not true in a general sense. Reasonable administration is entirely possible, and I would argue works pretty well here. We already assume that it works in our gov'ts - for example, in the US, we assume that Congress is capable of administering law creation.
Item 2 may or may not be true, but it's certainly too soon to tell. Massively multiposter forums have only existed for a couple decades, and have only acheived true mass within the past 10 years. It is still a science in it's infancy, there's a lot of room for advancement.
The "don't let it matter too much" theme I agree with, sort of. Slashdot works because the amount of investment in impartiality of the system is in proper proportion to the weight of the subjects at hand. K5 works, even thought the subjects tend to be weightier, because there is a larger investment in the impartiality of the system. One might argue that the US gov'ts current failings are, likewise, a direct result of the lack of investment in impartiality of the system - EG: rather than pay the price of campaign finance reform, we have chosen to take the less expensive route of letting our politicians sell their votes.
To clarify the last rambling paragraph: Absolute impartiality is not possible, and so critical decisions should not be left to the system. But there are very few truly critical decisions in gov't.
Things like whether to nuke Cuba during the missile crisis should probably not be decided in an online forum (at least not yet). However, for a huge percentage of more mundane decisions, it is entirely reasonable to assume that with a sufficient investment of effort, a sufficiently impartial system could be designed. It could be made sufficiently impartial that the benefit of the public participation would outweigh the cost of the remaining partiality.
Let me second the parent and put it a little differently.
Koster explains: "We get to know the people who are good testers, who are good at catching bugs. The federal government is legally not allowed to do that."
Anonymity and authentication are not mutually exclusive. My userId doesn't have to be "Robert Bushman".
Heck, look at the various karma systems at sites like this - they don't rely on knowing the true identity of the poster. They don't even care (and shouldn't care) if it's one person, a company, a collective, or a computer program - only that it's the same entity as last time.
It's almost letting your subconscious thought processes work on the problem instead of trying to tackle it directly.
For me at least, I think this is a big part of the key. You load up your neural network with all the elements in the problem, and all the pieces of the solution that you know so far. Think about it a lot during the day to get the network good and excited, then take your constrained rational thought process off line.
The problem with many complex problems is that you can spin down the same logic paths over and over, and it feels like you're working the problem. The problem is that if the solution isn't down one of the paths you keep thinking along, you're not going to find it that way. Pulling the logic controller off the job (whether by sleep, running, music, whatever) while the neurons related to the problem are still in a heavily excited state (from all the active processing you've been doing) gives the neural net a chance to try some less obvious pathways.
whether it would not be easier to simply install a debian system from scratch and change the settings myself.
For a local system doing the clean install is fairly straightforward. The place I see this having the most value (for me at least) is converting the ubiquitous RedHat virtual host to Debian. It can be done without a tool like this (see here), but it's a PITA (particularly if there's only two partitions - setting up the Debian migration install in the swap partition is a hassle).
The first rule for growing a business is to preserve the existing business above all else. Then you can figure out a way to obtain new business opprtunistically with an alternative offering.
I take it you work for the RIAA?
The first, last, and only rule for growing a (large, established, long-term oriented) business is to do that which is most economically efficient in the long run, which occasionally (though most probably not in this case) means knowing when to abandon your current business model.
I conducted my own tests pitting Java 1.4 against gcc 3.3 and icc 8.0 using his benchmark code, and found Java to perform significantly worse than C on Linux/Athlon.
executed with java -server
I would assume that the HotSpot compiler produces much better SSE2 optimized code than gcc. Without SSE2, Java's performance is worse in all respects tested here than native code compiled with gcc 3.3.
Running short life tests with -server is not a good way to test Java's performance. Adding the -server switch increases the load time of the VM (while offering some long-term memory access speed advantages I think). This is fine on servers, which have a long life, so you don't care about startup time. Using it in a benchmark where the typical runtime is a few seconds is not a valid test.
I'd think that the cynical Slashdot crowd will not learn a great deal from this book... except perhaps gain some ammunition to educate others.
Even supposing that there is nothing new to be gleaned by the average Slashdotter, never underestimate the value of "some ammunition to educate others." Being able to clearly and concisely explain your position to a manager is invaluable. This is particularly true when the manager is on the cusp of deciding between the systems guy's proposal and yours.
For a quick head check on this, consider whether you've ever been in a meeting where such a decision was on the table, and found yourself sighing and saying, "but this is the better way to do it." If you're right, but they're not agreeing, this is precisely the sort of material you should be looking for.
You can continue to be frustrated by their blind inability to see that you are right, or you can realize that blindness is curable, and learn how to be a better communicator.
Remember TLC? Didn't that used to stand for The Learning Channel?
Why pick on TLC? You're neglecting TechTV, Discovery, and Discovery's Children (Discovery Science, Discovery Wings, etc). They all started off good and gradually drifted to 100 IQ pap (which is still 20 points above broadcast).
I don't understand why in television, as in music, they don't seem to recognize that catering to non-imbeciles is a workable business model. Magazines haven't all drifed to lowbrow populism, what makes them different - production cost?
Entrepreneurship is the act of finding a problem that has no solution in the current market, developing a solution for that problem, and making that solution available (hopefully at a profit).
Marketing is the act of taking a product and attempting to increase existing consumer demand for that product.
Marketing without entrepreneurship doesn't work (despte all the marketroids wishing really hard that it would). This strikes me as one of those cases. Entrepreneurship requires the existence of a problem, and the lack of a solution. Here we have the reverse case - people aren't asking for an entertainment convergence device, as evidenced by the fact that there are already solutions on the market that aren't selling.
A quick editorial comment on why: The components advance at a different rate. Integrating those components means that when you want to get the latest Playstation, you have to upgrade your television (or whatever the converged device is). All upside for Sony, all downside for the consumer. As long as Sony (or whoever) is letting the marketing people make decisions that should be left to the entrepreneurs, these things are going to keep popping up.
Slashdot Mirror
What I want to know - aside from getting a higher quality file (duboius at best) what's the point? It's not like this is legal, you might as well just download the songs anyway. (Unless you have a particularly large legal library or dialup, I suppose)
I have two computers at the office, five at home, and three in colocation. All of them run Linux (I also have one Windows machine at the office, but it has no sound card). If I want to become a customer of iTunes, I would require a crack program like this. I would have the legal right to listen to the music, and fair use specifically gives me the right to listen to the music in any way I see fit, including on Linux. The whole point of fair use is that anyone who purchases a copyrighted work should be able to use it as they see fit.
Why is fair use a good thing? Because copyright is a balance between the good of society and the good of the creator of a work. Long run cultural development of a society requires that people be free to draw inspiration from and transfor works. At the same time, creativity is valuable to society and should be rewarded. Thus the balance of an artificial monopoly with very specific terms and limitations was established. As we increasingly tip that balance, our culture is being damaged - for example, major labels and ClearChannel have audio entertainment completely locked up in the US, and all they produce is the stuff that hits the center of the popular markets. There's nothing wrong with pop music (I even like some of it), but a healthy culture requires that broad market exist.
I'm rambling a bit, and I've mixed the problems of trusts, monopoly, price fixing, and copyright extension together, but they all play off each other. The short of it is copyright is good and healthy, and so is the public domain. The most efficient solution for increasing the wealth of our society (wealth being the ability to satisfy wants, not just dollars) is a harmonious blend of copyright, public domain, and fair use.
OK, that was really rambly, but hopefully it at least provides some food for thought.
Ok, but this is hair splitting, isn't it?
Not that you are wrong, but IMHO a survey should not require 'out of the box' thinking to be able to give a correct answer. It should ask questions in a straight forward way and should also not (as other posters pointed out) be used to carry opinions in the questions.
I take your point, and the skeptical side of me wants to agree. But consider another alternative: The question could be a weed-out question. EG: on psych tests they will often have the same question worded four different ways through the course of the survey - it's an attempt to trip up the testee.
Totally agreed that this is not the simple answer, and the simple answer is usually true. You may be right that the test author is simply biased. But if that's the case, it doesn't matter what answers are filled in, so you may as well pick 'b'.
6. Would you re-use blocks of code written elsewhere
a) ( ) Only if you were confident that nobody would find out
b) ( ) Whether it would be found out or not
This one stymied me for a moment too, but the correct answer is 'b'. Basically it's saying, "if you do re-use code, would you attempt to hide it?" I reuse code frequently, and always with the explicit permission of the copyright holder, and according to the conditions they have set forth. Therefore, whenever I do re-use blocks of code, it is completely irrelevant whether anyone knows.
I just haven't heard anything new I'd like to buy... how about you?
If you like old school Black Sabbath sounding heavy metal, you should go buy this album by Fireball Ministry. It's dirty, angry, and mean - just like metal should be. Modern death metal is all good, but Fireball Ministry does an outstanding job of going back to the basics. There are some MP3s on their site, give them a listen.
Do you believe this is a step in the right direction? Why?
Just firing from the hip here, but corporations and real estate have to have accurate contact information too. I'm guessing this has to do with preventing squatting, and with resolving legal issues which involve the owner of the property in question. Both of these issues have correlaries in domain name space.
"I commend Senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch for their vision and leadership in combating the theft of America's creative works," said Jack Valenti, MPAA's chief executive.
Wasn't it Valenti who, maybe 6 months ago, said the backlash against the RIAA was clearly more damaging to the music industry than could be justified, and that the MPAA wouldn't pursue a similar course of action?
Yeah, here it is:
"I'm not ruling out anything, but at this moment we don't have any specific
plans to sue anyone," Mr. Valenti said. "I think we have learned from the music
industry.'' - published Dec 2003
OK, not really a quick change, I don't think any of us ever took him at face value, but it's still pretty annoying.
First, it will force Microsoft to raise prices in other ways, so the fine is a hidden tax on consumers.
You're assuming supply-side economics. The price of Microsoft's products is not governed by the supply side, it's governed by the demand side. Heck, that's pretty much the definition of monopoly pricing.
Second, it does not change the underlying problem, which is that Microsoft have been allowed over the last decade to establish a position from which they can control prices in a market almost devoid of real competition.
Neither does charging a fine for double parking solve the underlying problem of a willingness to occupy two parking spaces. Penalties are meant to be punitive, to make the violator think twice next time, and (in the case of MS's penalty) to provide recompense to the injured party.
OK, I admit it, I was stoned. engart.us is working fine (I couldn't connect at first and thought it was dead). I've attached two fairly large pipe clients to his torrent.
now let's watch my tracker/web server die http://engert.us/gimp-2.0.0.tar.bz2.torrent
:) That was fun. Here's another one we can try to kill: http://www.pfloss.com/tmp/gimp-2.0.0.tar.bz2.torre nt
... the potential customer chatterbot:
Sales Guy: Hi, it looks like you're considering Rackspace for your hosting needs. Can I help you?
Chatterbot: Would you like to help me with considering Rackspace for your hosting needs?
Sales Guy: Yes, that's why I'm here, to help you.
Chatterbot: Why are you here, to help you?
Sales Guy: No, to help you. To make your shopping experience with Rackspace more enjoyable.
Chatterbot: How do you feel about shopping experience with Rackspace more enjoyable?
...
Just sent the following to EV1:
l ldf_des cription.html
Hi,
I rent one of your servers (the machine from which I'm sending this). I have been extremely pleased with your uptime, bandwidth, and pricing. I would like to remain a customer.
I have read your open letter regarding the SCO license in the forums, and understand your position. I also think some of the counterpoints that have been made are quite valid. I think there is an easy way to recover the support of those who see Linux as an important part of the national and global economy.
Please consider contributing to the OSDL's legal defense fund.
http://www.osdl.org/about_osdl/legal/lldf/
I will be on vacation until early next week. Upon my return, I will check the front page of your website. If there is a large public notice that you have given the OSDL's Linux Legal Defense Fund a contribution equal to or greater than the amount you paid SCO, I will be very happy to continue using your service.
You have chosen to give money to highwaymen who have made baseless allegations about their ownership of some small portion of Linux. If you genuinely feel that SCO has earned your money, it seems abundantly clear that you owe far more to the people who actually wrote Linux. What better way to invest that money than in defending Linux from the same highwaymen that have just held you up at lawyerpoint?
You currently pay Red Hat for their support services. According to the license under which Linux is distributed (including the license under which SCO distributes Linux), you do not have to pay for the intellectual property. If you choose to pay for the intellectual property rights to Linux, you should be paying the people who own those rights. In this case, that money can be best spent by defending those authors' right to their intellectual property.
Thank you for your time,
Robert Bushman
In theory one could wait until after work to read the day's articles on Slashdot. Instead of having three minute interruptions spread throughout your workday, you can compress that into one geek-binge at the end of the day.
Of course, given the time I'm posting and that I'm in a US timezone, you can see that this is not based on practical experience - only a working theory.
You don't "troubleshoot" a circuit design. You debug it.
Actually, I just started designing analog circuits about a month ago. I can tell you with total confidence that my technique is still distinctly troubleshooting: hmm... I wonder if changing these two capacitors from tantalum to polyester film will eliminate the buzz... hack hack hack.
Slashdot has editors who not only ban crapflooders, but decide what things people get to even think abouto on the site. Apparently more egalitarian systems such as Kuro5hin start slipping into failure modes and the editors have to uncloak to fix them....
So if it becomes clear that any sort of government on the masses is going to susceptable to cheats, hacks and manipulators, the conclusion must be that the thing must not be allowed to become too important.
Your post operates on two assumptions:
1. There is no such thing as fair administration.
2. Slash, K5, etc. represent the pinnacle in public commentary systems, and cannot function without admins.
Item 1, while probably true in an absolute sense, is not true in a general sense. Reasonable administration is entirely possible, and I would argue works pretty well here. We already assume that it works in our gov'ts - for example, in the US, we assume that Congress is capable of administering law creation.
Item 2 may or may not be true, but it's certainly too soon to tell. Massively multiposter forums have only existed for a couple decades, and have only acheived true mass within the past 10 years. It is still a science in it's infancy, there's a lot of room for advancement.
The "don't let it matter too much" theme I agree with, sort of. Slashdot works because the amount of investment in impartiality of the system is in proper proportion to the weight of the subjects at hand. K5 works, even thought the subjects tend to be weightier, because there is a larger investment in the impartiality of the system. One might argue that the US gov'ts current failings are, likewise, a direct result of the lack of investment in impartiality of the system - EG: rather than pay the price of campaign finance reform, we have chosen to take the less expensive route of letting our politicians sell their votes.
To clarify the last rambling paragraph: Absolute impartiality is not possible, and so critical decisions should not be left to the system. But there are very few truly critical decisions in gov't.
Things like whether to nuke Cuba during the missile crisis should probably not be decided in an online forum (at least not yet). However, for a huge percentage of more mundane decisions, it is entirely reasonable to assume that with a sufficient investment of effort, a sufficiently impartial system could be designed. It could be made sufficiently impartial that the benefit of the public participation would outweigh the cost of the remaining partiality.
Mod parent up (damn - already at 5).
Let me second the parent and put it a little differently.
Koster explains: "We get to know the people who are good testers, who are good at catching bugs. The federal government is legally not allowed to do that."
Anonymity and authentication are not mutually exclusive. My userId doesn't have to be "Robert Bushman".
Heck, look at the various karma systems at sites like this - they don't rely on knowing the true identity of the poster. They don't even care (and shouldn't care) if it's one person, a company, a collective, or a computer program - only that it's the same entity as last time.
It's almost letting your subconscious thought processes work on the problem instead of trying to tackle it directly.
For me at least, I think this is a big part of the key. You load up your neural network with all the elements in the problem, and all the pieces of the solution that you know so far. Think about it a lot during the day to get the network good and excited, then take your constrained rational thought process off line.
The problem with many complex problems is that you can spin down the same logic paths over and over, and it feels like you're working the problem. The problem is that if the solution isn't down one of the paths you keep thinking along, you're not going to find it that way. Pulling the logic controller off the job (whether by sleep, running, music, whatever) while the neurons related to the problem are still in a heavily excited state (from all the active processing you've been doing) gives the neural net a chance to try some less obvious pathways.
whether it would not be easier to simply install a debian system from scratch and change the settings myself.
For a local system doing the clean install is fairly straightforward. The place I see this having the most value (for me at least) is converting the ubiquitous RedHat virtual host to Debian. It can be done without a tool like this (see here), but it's a PITA (particularly if there's only two partitions - setting up the Debian migration install in the swap partition is a hassle).
The first rule for growing a business is to preserve the existing business above all else. Then you can figure out a way to obtain new business opprtunistically with an alternative offering.
I take it you work for the RIAA?
The first, last, and only rule for growing a (large, established, long-term oriented) business is to do that which is most economically efficient in the long run, which occasionally (though most probably not in this case) means knowing when to abandon your current business model.
He did not count the startup time of the JVM (or IL, etc)
That's what I get for not reading the source code. I suck. Thanks.
I conducted my own tests pitting Java 1.4 against gcc 3.3 and icc 8.0 using his benchmark code, and found Java to perform significantly worse than C on Linux/Athlon.
executed with java -server
I would assume that the HotSpot compiler produces much better SSE2 optimized code than gcc. Without SSE2, Java's performance is worse in all respects tested here than native code compiled with gcc 3.3.
Running short life tests with -server is not a good way to test Java's performance. Adding the -server switch increases the load time of the VM (while offering some long-term memory access speed advantages I think). This is fine on servers, which have a long life, so you don't care about startup time. Using it in a benchmark where the typical runtime is a few seconds is not a valid test.
So this just occured to me - why is this called "extortion", and what SCO is doing is called, "protecting it's intellectual property rights"?
I'd think that the cynical Slashdot crowd will not learn a great deal from this book... except perhaps gain some ammunition to educate others.
Even supposing that there is nothing new to be gleaned by the average Slashdotter, never underestimate the value of "some ammunition to educate others." Being able to clearly and concisely explain your position to a manager is invaluable. This is particularly true when the manager is on the cusp of deciding between the systems guy's proposal and yours.
For a quick head check on this, consider whether you've ever been in a meeting where such a decision was on the table, and found yourself sighing and saying, "but this is the better way to do it." If you're right, but they're not agreeing, this is precisely the sort of material you should be looking for.
You can continue to be frustrated by their blind inability to see that you are right, or you can realize that blindness is curable, and learn how to be a better communicator.
Remember TLC? Didn't that used to stand for The Learning Channel?
Why pick on TLC? You're neglecting TechTV, Discovery, and Discovery's Children (Discovery Science, Discovery Wings, etc). They all started off good and gradually drifted to 100 IQ pap (which is still 20 points above broadcast).
I don't understand why in television, as in music, they don't seem to recognize that catering to non-imbeciles is a workable business model. Magazines haven't all drifed to lowbrow populism, what makes them different - production cost?
Entrepreneurship is the act of finding a problem that has no solution in the current market, developing a solution for that problem, and making that solution available (hopefully at a profit).
Marketing is the act of taking a product and attempting to increase existing consumer demand for that product.
Marketing without entrepreneurship doesn't work (despte all the marketroids wishing really hard that it would). This strikes me as one of those cases. Entrepreneurship requires the existence of a problem, and the lack of a solution. Here we have the reverse case - people aren't asking for an entertainment convergence device, as evidenced by the fact that there are already solutions on the market that aren't selling.
A quick editorial comment on why: The components advance at a different rate. Integrating those components means that when you want to get the latest Playstation, you have to upgrade your television (or whatever the converged device is). All upside for Sony, all downside for the consumer. As long as Sony (or whoever) is letting the marketing people make decisions that should be left to the entrepreneurs, these things are going to keep popping up.
If you're just looking for screw specs, this ought to do it.
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