Where's the lawsuit? If not, the GPL might as well not exist.
That's the big problem Free Software advocates can't seem to face. They draw up a license that technically guarantees that Free Software remains Free. But suppose somebody ignores that license? The only way to make them stop is to sue them, and that's expensive. I very much doubt that Sebastian Balias has that kind of money.
Nobody in the tech world seems to grasp that defending your legal rights costs money. Every time Slashdot does a story about another round of Cease and Desist letters, we get a ton of posts saying, in effect, "That's obviously lame, people should just ignore them." But the sad fact is, you don't know how lame any legal action is until you've gotten legal advice. Nor can you take legal action without that overpaid guy in the suit.
Well, if you're very smart and very patient, you can represent yourself in Small Claims Court. But that's not applicable to this kind of issue.
I forgot to say: the weirdest thing about Anime is its fondness for stories set in this weird semi-Vernian alternate reality. Examples include Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, and of course Steam Boy.
The movie features the notable return of Katsuhiro Otomo, who hasn't directed an animated film since Akira, so big things can be expected.
I'm glad to see some high-quality anime that isn't by Miyasaki. Nothing against old Hayao (there isn't a single scene in Spirited Away I can think of without smiling), but his colleagues are too neglected in the west.
The english cast features Anna Paquin, Alfred Molina, and Patrick Stewart. That's interesting casting since...
Who cares? These are all fine actors, but they're obviously chosen for their star power, not their voice acting skills. Besides, Hollywood will "improve" the sound track the same way they do for Miyasaki's films. I'd much rather watch the film in Japanese, with those flaky subtitles that often get English idioms wrong, but are true to the spirit of the film.
Anime films without Pokémon in their titles haven't fared well at the US Box office...
Spirited Away did OK. But basically you're right -- and that's not going to change. American's aren't big on foreign films.
Studio Ghibli movies cost a lot to make. If a lot of people don't go to see them, distributors and investors will lose interest, and there won't be any more.
Entertaining a mass market is always a tradeoff. On the one extreme you have whorish content-free Hollywood crap that aims to please hundreds of millions of mindless drones. At the other extreme you have navel-gazing art films that aim to please only themselves. There's nothing wrong with trying to find a place in the middle.
Please. Show me a single feature in WordPerfect that's law-oriented and that isn't in Word. Actually, there couldn't be since both products are highly customizable and there are tons of third-party vendors selling customizations. But of course lawyers, having spent a fortune buying WordPerfect customizations, and training their staff to use them, are reluctant to retool for Word. Sounds like lockin to me.
Word did not spread from proprietary lock-in, that merely entrenched it. Word spread because businesses were foolishly using its proprietary documents for document exchange.
They don't have proprietary lockin, they just depend on a proprietary format? I don't get the distinction.
If Word were a superior product, then yes, lock-in through proprietary programs and macros would create a lock-in effect...
Even if we could agree which product is "superior" (people tend to like what they're used to, not what's more carefully designed), that has nothing to do with lockin. Lockin has to do the difficult of changing products. Once people are used to doing things a certain way, it's very hard to get them to retool. That's why almost nobody uses the Dvorak keyboard. Indeed, I'm convinced that once a product dominates a market, it actually helps if the product has bugs. That means that users have invested a lot of effort coping with those bugs -- an effort they're not about to write off.
Indeed. I know several lawyers, and the only ones that don't use WordPerfect work for a firm that has Microsoft as a client!
This is just a case of product lockin, the same effect that keeps Microsoft dominant in most offices. Notice that the two big exceptions (FBI and DEA) are primarily police agencies, and thus don't nearly as much legal document preparation as does the main Justice Department.
It's unclear if Microsoft also is porting WinFS to Windows Server 2003, but such a move would be likely, given that the Redmond software vendor is doing so with Avalon and Indigo.
More to the point, it would be very silly to provide an advanced database-style filesystem on workstations but not servers!
I'm intrigued by the idea, but I'm very sceptical that Microsoft can ever deliver this product in a form people will want to use. Consider their previous attempt to deliver hierarchical data management: the Windows Registry. In order to get it to do what you want, you have to deal with all kinds of obscure APIs and specifications. And even you can figure out how it's supposed to work, you run into problems because somebody in Redmond has kludged in some undocumented functionality that conflicts with what you're trying to do. If WinFS is at all similar, developers will spend a few months banging their heads against it, then decide it's not worth the trouble.
That's perfectly consistent. Missing features are bitchable as bugs if they're features you want. Actual features are bitchable as bloat if they're features you see no need for.
Which sounds funny, but isn't. The only objective definition of bloat is trivial features whose maintenance cost far outweighs their benefit to the user community. I've worked on projects that had really nasty feature bloat, because individual developers were given too much independence, and wasted time working on features that appealed to them. Meanwhile, less sexy but more important features (and worse, fixes for showstopping bugs), went neglected. So yeah, you can have bloat and missing features at the same time.
They can fire you for whatever reason they like.... Stop this bellyaching about your freedom. You don't have the "right" to keep your job.
Ah, another self-taught Slashdot social philosopher and legal expert. I'm afraid your idea of an employer's obligations are simplistic and ignorant. At the very least, a salaried employee almost always has an employment contract that specifies when he can and can't be fired. (Lots of hourly employees have them too.) And there are a lot of customs and laws that say that you can't fire somebody at a whim. In legal terms there are all kinds of fair employment laws that an employer ignores at his peril.
Unfortunately, these laws are pretty easy to get around. Legally, you can't fire somebody for exercising their first amendment rights in ways that don't affect the company. But I have a friend who was targetted for termination the moment her personal web site was deemed "un-Christian". Of course, they had to find another official reason to fire her -- but HR departments are good at that.
Even if there's no legal reason for an employer not to show an employee the door, it's stupid to call the relationship a "two way street". That guy who lost his job at Google after working less than a week had just left a secure job at MS and relocated to a new state. He's probably not gonna be homeless, but he underwent real hardship. By contrast Google is a huge entity that doesn't suffer much when an "individual contributer" bugs out. When they lose top management, it's a different story of course -- but those folks tend to have a much nicer severence package!
Before you dismiss me as another bleeding heart liberal, stop and think what America would be like if employers had the power you think they do. They could dictate every aspect of their employees lives, from what church they belong to to who they associate with, to what books and magazines they read. (How would they know all this stuff? By sending inspectors out to employees homes. Ford Motors actually used to do that.) When one side has all the power and the money, there's no fucking two-way street.
I haven't used Open Office enough to have an opinion, but Elliotte Rusty Harold used it to write a book, and came away with the opinion that the program is full of "GUI Bloopers". More here.
The problem with Enterprise is, the studio knew that there was this already existing rabid fanbase for all things Trek, so they figured that they could put any old crap on...
You're basically right, but I think it's a little more complicated than that. The sad fact is that the Trek franchise has always treated writers badly, even back when Gene Roddenberry was in charge. Experienced writers often warn newbies not to let the producers have detailed stories until a written agreement is in place; if they get the material, they're likely to produce it as their own without any credit to the writer. Or if the writer does get a contract, the producers will do their best to horn in on the writing credit, which reduces the amount the writer is paid. Not that they're paid a lot to begin with.
That's actually standard Hollywood ethics, but Star Trek has always been worse than most shows. And particularly stupid for a franchise where the stories are extremely important. And an uncritical fan base reinforces this attitude.
I often think that the people who run the SciFi Channel are more creative and imaginative than most of the programs they air. The cute little CGI-intense promos are a lot of fun. (Though they tend to get worn out by overuse.) And their web site never fails to impress.
I was never a fan of Sliders (corny and illogical), but the SciFi web site tie in was a true gem, with its clever contests and imaginative episode tie-ins. My favorite was the tie-in for the ep where the good guys are captured by the evil Cromags and thrown in a prison camp. The tie-in for that ep was the camp newsletter. Great stuff!
Actually, US customary measures are all English units that were in use before the UK went to the Imperial system. For example, our "fluid gallon" is the same as the Winchester wine gallon.
Not "completely different" though certainly more secure. It's my understanding that Embedded is just Windows without extra software like IE and Media Player and other "user experience" crap.
Anyway, that still leaves us something to feel outraged about. If computer makers were allowed to use Embedded instead of XP on machines they sell, they could provide a high level of compatibility without shoving a lot of anti-competitive, low-security crap down users throats. But they can't. Forcing MS to remove this restriction ought to be a prime goal of any anti-trust zealots.
This is just one of Googles famous "20% projects". Google develepors can spend 20% of their time on self-assigned special projects (I think it might even be a requirement) and this would appear to be Ben Sigelman's. If you can find his email, send him a feature request.
Sure, Safari and Konqueror both use the KHTML engine. But "a little validation" isn't practical for serious QA work. Somebody has to sit down and design an automated test harness for each configuration you support. That's most of the work, no matter how many tests you actually do.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody in the tech world seems to grasp that defending your legal rights costs money. Every time Slashdot does a story about another round of Cease and Desist letters, we get a ton of posts saying, in effect, "That's obviously lame, people should just ignore them." But the sad fact is, you don't know how lame any legal action is until you've gotten legal advice. Nor can you take legal action without that overpaid guy in the suit.
Well, if you're very smart and very patient, you can represent yourself in Small Claims Court. But that's not applicable to this kind of issue.
Zip does all these things as well. I couldn't say whether RAR or Zip does them better.
I forgot to say: the weirdest thing about Anime is its fondness for stories set in this weird semi-Vernian alternate reality. Examples include Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, and of course Steam Boy.
Step 3: ????
Step 4: Profit!!!!
Entertaining a mass market is always a tradeoff. On the one extreme you have whorish content-free Hollywood crap that aims to please hundreds of millions of mindless drones. At the other extreme you have navel-gazing art films that aim to please only themselves. There's nothing wrong with trying to find a place in the middle.
This is just a case of product lockin, the same effect that keeps Microsoft dominant in most offices. Notice that the two big exceptions (FBI and DEA) are primarily police agencies, and thus don't nearly as much legal document preparation as does the main Justice Department.
If the LAND Attack is that notorious, you should be able to find a better description of it than a bit of badly-documented C code.
I'm intrigued by the idea, but I'm very sceptical that Microsoft can ever deliver this product in a form people will want to use. Consider their previous attempt to deliver hierarchical data management: the Windows Registry. In order to get it to do what you want, you have to deal with all kinds of obscure APIs and specifications. And even you can figure out how it's supposed to work, you run into problems because somebody in Redmond has kludged in some undocumented functionality that conflicts with what you're trying to do. If WinFS is at all similar, developers will spend a few months banging their heads against it, then decide it's not worth the trouble.
Which sounds funny, but isn't. The only objective definition of bloat is trivial features whose maintenance cost far outweighs their benefit to the user community. I've worked on projects that had really nasty feature bloat, because individual developers were given too much independence, and wasted time working on features that appealed to them. Meanwhile, less sexy but more important features (and worse, fixes for showstopping bugs), went neglected. So yeah, you can have bloat and missing features at the same time.
Unfortunately, these laws are pretty easy to get around. Legally, you can't fire somebody for exercising their first amendment rights in ways that don't affect the company. But I have a friend who was targetted for termination the moment her personal web site was deemed "un-Christian". Of course, they had to find another official reason to fire her -- but HR departments are good at that.
Even if there's no legal reason for an employer not to show an employee the door, it's stupid to call the relationship a "two way street". That guy who lost his job at Google after working less than a week had just left a secure job at MS and relocated to a new state. He's probably not gonna be homeless, but he underwent real hardship. By contrast Google is a huge entity that doesn't suffer much when an "individual contributer" bugs out. When they lose top management, it's a different story of course -- but those folks tend to have a much nicer severence package!
Before you dismiss me as another bleeding heart liberal, stop and think what America would be like if employers had the power you think they do. They could dictate every aspect of their employees lives, from what church they belong to to who they associate with, to what books and magazines they read. (How would they know all this stuff? By sending inspectors out to employees homes. Ford Motors actually used to do that.) When one side has all the power and the money, there's no fucking two-way street.
I haven't used Open Office enough to have an opinion, but Elliotte Rusty Harold used it to write a book, and came away with the opinion that the program is full of "GUI Bloopers". More here.
That's actually standard Hollywood ethics, but Star Trek has always been worse than most shows. And particularly stupid for a franchise where the stories are extremely important. And an uncritical fan base reinforces this attitude.
I was never a fan of Sliders (corny and illogical), but the SciFi web site tie in was a true gem, with its clever contests and imaginative episode tie-ins. My favorite was the tie-in for the ep where the good guys are captured by the evil Cromags and thrown in a prison camp. The tie-in for that ep was the camp newsletter. Great stuff!
The apostrophe is really there, here's a 500-page legal brief that says so. See you in court!
Actually, US customary measures are all English units that were in use before the UK went to the Imperial system. For example, our "fluid gallon" is the same as the Winchester wine gallon.
Anyway, that still leaves us something to feel outraged about. If computer makers were allowed to use Embedded instead of XP on machines they sell, they could provide a high level of compatibility without shoving a lot of anti-competitive, low-security crap down users throats. But they can't. Forcing MS to remove this restriction ought to be a prime goal of any anti-trust zealots.
This dude. (One cliche deserves another!)
Thanks for the correction. Which allows me to provide a Google Link that's more interesting than any single RCrumb web site.
This is just one of Googles famous "20% projects". Google develepors can spend 20% of their time on self-assigned special projects (I think it might even be a requirement) and this would appear to be Ben Sigelman's. If you can find his email, send him a feature request.
Sure, Safari and Konqueror both use the KHTML engine. But "a little validation" isn't practical for serious QA work. Somebody has to sit down and design an automated test harness for each configuration you support. That's most of the work, no matter how many tests you actually do.
So litigation isn't a reliable business model either. We're doomed!
I see they finally added a simple "delete" button. About time. Even with a 1 GB mailbox, there's always gonna be email you want to discard.