That's the way every other business in the USA operates these days. Regular incomes don't impress the shareholders anymore.
You're correct. But for most businesses, this is a recent thing. I can't remember a time when broadcast TV didn't operate this way. No metter how well they're doing, TV networks seem to think that they have to fiddle. So if a show isn't doing too well, they'll pull it because they think another show can make better use of the time slot. Or they'll move the show to another night. Or they'll retool the premise, or replace part of the cast.
All of which usually guarantees that most shows never get a chance to develop a following. Which doesn't usually if it's the usual "Hey, let's make a sitcom starring Paris Hilton! Or maybe Betty Ford!" crap. But really creative shows have almost no hope of lasting.
Buffy sort of crept in under the radar. Joss Whedon had more or less abandoned the concept (which was pretty much trashed in the Kristy Swanson movie) because he couldn't make anybody understand that he wasn't aiming for High Camp. But then a new network struggling to find material that people would actually watch bought a dozen episodes. Whedon was so sure that they'd never order any more that he did a show mainly to please himself. Which is actually the only way to make a decent tV show.
I enjoyed the show immensely, but I'm basically glad the Bufferverse has retreated from view. (Yeah, there will be comic books and novelizations, but who pays attention to those? And I can't see anybody putting up the money for a Buffyverse movie.) It was fun at first, but as time went on, the whole Buffy-Angel thing started taking itself way too seriously. Angel was always that way, and Buffy was that way most of the time in the two last seasons. Maybe serious is the wrong word -- it was always about life or death issues. Perhaps I mean solemn. And cluttered. And disorganized. I still haven't figured out what that axe was supposed to be!
Why do people insist on asking for legal advice on Slashdot?
More to the point, why does Cliff keep accepting such lame "tell me how to" stories?
It isn't just that Slashdot is the wrong place to go for legal advice. Agram's whole attitude is just plain childish. Here's the scenario: somebody makes a cool game. People love it and play it to death. Motivated by their previous success, the developers plan a followup. But they overreach themselves, fall behind schedule, and end up releasing an incomplete product.
This is not anything new. It certainly isn't a "Rapid Erosion of End-User Rights". Game buyers have been getting stung since forever, especially those that rush out and buy without reading the reviews. It sucks, but it's not a major moral crisis.
But since legal advice is solicited, here's mine: forget it. You're not going to recover anything, even if the law is on your side. You can prove a claim, but the claimee isn't obligated to sell his family into slavery to satisfy you. Or do you think that a software company that can't get a product out the door has infinitely deep pockets?
Quite right. There's also the detail that Cobalt is in some respects a continuation of BeOS. Unlikely that the developers who experienced the long (and ultimately unsuccessful) struggle for BeOS's commercial survival would overlook cross-platform compatibility.
I keep having to point this out: it costs a lot of extra money to support an application on an extra platform. Yeah, Macs are easy to use and administer. It takes less training to create a Mac support person. But it doesn't take no training. There just aren't enough Mac users to make that pay for every commercial application.
I don't know whether to say "Kneejerk response" or "RTFA."
Let's do the second thing first. The point of the article is not that people build on fertile land. The point is that in doing so, they affect the environment and the food supply.
Second, it's not as simple as saying, "that's where people want to live, too bad." Silicon Valley is built on the best farmland in California, possibly in North America. The early electronic factories didn't come here for easy access to food -- they came here to be near Stanford and the Moffett Naval Air Station. Later high-tech companies came here to be near existing high-tech companies, and to tap the labor pool. There were urban centers they could have built in, but farmland was cheaper.
The huge growth that followed was inevitable, and even desireable. But it could have been a lot better managed. Swathes of orchards could have been set aside, which would have made the Valley a nicer place to live, helped recharge the water table (lots of droughts here) and fought smog (trees suck up a lot of air polution). Instead of building willy-nilly, housing could have been concentrated in logical locations connected by heavy-duty transit corridors, including mass transit (the traffic jams are horrendous, and even if there were money for more freeways, there's no place to put them).
Back in the 60s and 70s, when things started to ramp up, the County government tried to do something like the above. But county-wide planning would have eliminated the huge profits of real-estate developers. So they persuaded various little towns, some of them little more than railroad stops, to annex huge patches of land, exempting them from county planning.
There's a street that runs on a rise at the side end of the valley, called Blossom Hill Road. The name comes from the fact that driving their in the spring brought you face to face with a shocking amount of floral color. Now all you see is urban sprawl. I never go there.
I have a lot of respect for ERH. As you say,he's written some really good books, including the absolute best XML-for-beginners book. And I sort of agree with him that a 1.1 spec is premature. But I think he's kind of gone overboard on this issue. Some points:
Although this revision was partially driven by IBM (they needed some changes to do XML in EBCDIC, there are other problems that people wanted to address. ERH seems to think this is all a case of IBM throwing its weight around -- which is just not true.
ERH blames this hassle over an "obsolete" coding on IBM's corporate arrogance. In this, he follows the common wisdom that IBM just ignored the whole EBCDIC/ASCII issue until the PC revolution made a switch to standard character sets unavoidable. I actually believed this stuff myself, until I stumbled onto the real story. Which is that ASCII (which was invented at IBM!) was supposed to be the standard for IBM mainframes, but a series of bureaucratic screwups and bad decisions prevented this from happening.
Yeah, IBM, should have made the change anyway. But we all how hard it is to change a technical direction once a lot of effort has been put into it. Look at the groddy UI at Slashdot. Look at all the web presence providers (including mine!) who won't upgrade to a taint-safe version of Perl because it would break too much of their code. The examples are endless. You may not sympathize, but you damn well should understand.
If you read the 1.1 spec carefully (I recommend the version with highlighted revisions) you'll realize that 1.1 is in no way a replacement for 1.0. People with a lot of 1.0-compliant XML and who don't need to read any 1.1-compliant XML can simply ignore the new spec, if they choose. The 1.1 spec very clearly states that nothing has changed in terms of what parsers should and should not do with XML 1.0. Provided, of course, people remembered to head all their XML files with the mandatory processing instruction:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
And if you've read ERH's books, you know to do that!
Re:It was never then, it is always now
on
How C# Was Made
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· Score: 1
Personally, I'd use care before citing Mr. Spolsky on any issue more complex than "What time is it?" But that's just me!
If you live in a popular place for any length of time, you're subject to Icudavitis. This is a disease where people go around saying things like, "That house is selling for $300,000, I could have bought it for 30,000." (Oh God, I've actually said that myself.) Now, it's too late to make a killing in the meatspace real-estate market -- but where is it written that the land you sell has to have physical existence?
It was never then, it is always now
on
How C# Was Made
·
· Score: 1
Spolsky is a man of idiot enthusiasms. He sees some C# features he likes and decides that.NET is glorious. Then he discovers his old deployment techniques don't work any more and decides that.NET is evil. As we speak, somebody is explaining to him that.NET deployment involves a kind of dynamic linking that's a nice inprovement from the old way, and he'll think.NET is glorious again.
It's not external threats the Yanks should be worrying about. Their homegrown parasitic lawyers are doing far more damage to their economy.
Lawyers didn't invent this stuff. They're just following their mandate to boost the bottom line by any means. Blaming lawyers for abusive litigation is like blaming plumbers for water pollution.
The ultimate culprit is a pervasive enterprise business model that's obsessed with numbers, and fuck all the subtle hard-to-measure factors that go with growing a sustainable business. Which is not, as it happens, totally unconnected with the whole terrorist thing. The most deadly terrorist groups, such as Al Qaida, seem to be obsessed with bringing down this very same economic establishment.
"Pentium" is just a brand name. Intel used to give its CPU numbers, but but you can't trademark those. So when it came time to name the sequel to the 80486, they ditched "80586" and went with "Pentium" (as in "penta-") instead. There have been at least three major upgrades since then, but a brand like "Pentium" is too valuable to sacrifice to linguistic correctness, so each upgrade has had a variation of the original name. The current one is "Pentium III".
I don't know when the first Pentium came out with an on-chip clock, but that's probably not important anyway. I doubt if the patent is on the idea of an on-chip clock -- they can hardly claim to be the first people to have invented the concept of component integration! More likely they're claiming to have invented a design or manufacturing technique... oh well, might as well go look it up.
Yup, here's the 1995 patent application. It's too complicated for me, but they seem be claiming that their design manages to produce a steady clock signal even as temperature fluctuations play holy hell with the oscillations that produce the clock signal. Assuming I haven't totally mangled the concept, and that they really did think of this first, that's a pretty significant invention. It's certainly not on the same level as these business-process and software patents that we all love to hate.
If Anders would just return the favor...
on
How C# Was Made
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· Score: 2, Funny
Now we only need for Anders to write an article explaining why Spolsky is such a jackass...
Not to defend the whole HOA thing (I find this kind of private zoning enforcement obnoxious and evil), but I'd think twice before betting my bank account on the whole FCC-trumps-everything principle. First off, you never know when some judge is going to find some obscure legal theory that says that FCC is full of shit. It might be bad law, but you could face a big hassle to get it overruled.
Second, there's the "loser has to pay costs" thing. Slashdotters keep bringing this up like it's some kind of holy writ. The reality is that it's not even applicable most of the time, and even when it is, it's damned hard to prove that you deserve that kind of compensation.
And here's the biggest issue of all: right or wrong, win or lose, you gotta live with these people. Do you really want to teach them to hate you so badly, they'll be looking for every little chance to get even? You might be able to force them to let you have a sat dish, but then they'll be watching you like the proverbial hawk. Every little violation will earn you the worst punishment they can manage.
Which can extend to seizing your home and turning you out on the street. Which is not as unlikely as it sounds. There was a case recently where this happened because a couple forgot to pay a $200 dollar fee.
We're talking a whole planet, not a tennis ball..3% is a lot. Look at it this way. The planetary diameter is about 7K miles. 0.3% of that is more than 20 miles! No wait, that can't be right. If the sea level had risen by that much somebody probably would have noticed. Time to RTFA...
Ah, I got it. The articles doesn't say that the bulge has risen by.3%. The equatorial bulge has always been about 0.3% How much has the bulge increased recently? They don't give figures. But they do say that gravitational field changes usually attributed to the "post-glacial rebound" (the geological adjustment to their being less weight at the poles since the end of the last ice age) is twice what it was in 1998.
That's scary. Why? Well, sea level has been rising for the last 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. That rise isn't notice during a human lifetime, of course. But now it appears that the rate of melting has doubled in just the last five years. Still not a lot, but we're pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere faster than ever. Even if we could slow our rate of increase (and Dubya doesn't even want to do that), we'd still be looking at a big change in the ocean configuration.
Which could lead, ironically enough, to another ice age. If that happens the "junk science" pundits will doubtless insist that the whole greenhouse effect was just a myth. Oh well, I think I'll go fix a cold drink.
Slashdot Mirror
All of which usually guarantees that most shows never get a chance to develop a following. Which doesn't usually if it's the usual "Hey, let's make a sitcom starring Paris Hilton! Or maybe Betty Ford!" crap. But really creative shows have almost no hope of lasting.
Buffy sort of crept in under the radar. Joss Whedon had more or less abandoned the concept (which was pretty much trashed in the Kristy Swanson movie) because he couldn't make anybody understand that he wasn't aiming for High Camp. But then a new network struggling to find material that people would actually watch bought a dozen episodes. Whedon was so sure that they'd never order any more that he did a show mainly to please himself. Which is actually the only way to make a decent tV show.
I enjoyed the show immensely, but I'm basically glad the Bufferverse has retreated from view. (Yeah, there will be comic books and novelizations, but who pays attention to those? And I can't see anybody putting up the money for a Buffyverse movie.) It was fun at first, but as time went on, the whole Buffy-Angel thing started taking itself way too seriously. Angel was always that way, and Buffy was that way most of the time in the two last seasons. Maybe serious is the wrong word -- it was always about life or death issues. Perhaps I mean solemn. And cluttered. And disorganized. I still haven't figured out what that axe was supposed to be!
... but surely not flamebait. I really do need to know!
...here's mine. I have a system with USB 1.1 on the motherboard. Can I upgrade to 2.0 just by buying a PCI card?
Wishful thinking.
It isn't just that Slashdot is the wrong place to go for legal advice. Agram's whole attitude is just plain childish. Here's the scenario: somebody makes a cool game. People love it and play it to death. Motivated by their previous success, the developers plan a followup. But they overreach themselves, fall behind schedule, and end up releasing an incomplete product.
This is not anything new. It certainly isn't a "Rapid Erosion of End-User Rights". Game buyers have been getting stung since forever, especially those that rush out and buy without reading the reviews. It sucks, but it's not a major moral crisis.
But since legal advice is solicited, here's mine: forget it. You're not going to recover anything, even if the law is on your side. You can prove a claim, but the claimee isn't obligated to sell his family into slavery to satisfy you. Or do you think that a software company that can't get a product out the door has infinitely deep pockets?
Dunno about you, but I am not a C program. Thus I grasp the concept of semantic ambiguity, which in turn leads to an appreciation of irony.
I keep having to point this out: it costs a lot of extra money to support an application on an extra platform. Yeah, Macs are easy to use and administer. It takes less training to create a Mac support person. But it doesn't take no training. There just aren't enough Mac users to make that pay for every commercial application.
What is it about the bathroom that people find so sexy? Is everybody but me a closet commodophiliac?
Let's do the second thing first. The point of the article is not that people build on fertile land. The point is that in doing so, they affect the environment and the food supply.
Second, it's not as simple as saying, "that's where people want to live, too bad." Silicon Valley is built on the best farmland in California, possibly in North America. The early electronic factories didn't come here for easy access to food -- they came here to be near Stanford and the Moffett Naval Air Station. Later high-tech companies came here to be near existing high-tech companies, and to tap the labor pool. There were urban centers they could have built in, but farmland was cheaper.
The huge growth that followed was inevitable, and even desireable. But it could have been a lot better managed. Swathes of orchards could have been set aside, which would have made the Valley a nicer place to live, helped recharge the water table (lots of droughts here) and fought smog (trees suck up a lot of air polution). Instead of building willy-nilly, housing could have been concentrated in logical locations connected by heavy-duty transit corridors, including mass transit (the traffic jams are horrendous, and even if there were money for more freeways, there's no place to put them).
Back in the 60s and 70s, when things started to ramp up, the County government tried to do something like the above. But county-wide planning would have eliminated the huge profits of real-estate developers. So they persuaded various little towns, some of them little more than railroad stops, to annex huge patches of land, exempting them from county planning.
There's a street that runs on a rise at the side end of the valley, called Blossom Hill Road. The name comes from the fact that driving their in the spring brought you face to face with a shocking amount of floral color. Now all you see is urban sprawl. I never go there.
Not "interesting", "funny"! Jeez.
Yeah, IBM, should have made the change anyway. But we all how hard it is to change a technical direction once a lot of effort has been put into it. Look at the groddy UI at Slashdot. Look at all the web presence providers (including mine!) who won't upgrade to a taint-safe version of Perl because it would break too much of their code. The examples are endless. You may not sympathize, but you damn well should understand.
Personally, I'd use care before citing Mr. Spolsky on any issue more complex than "What time is it?" But that's just me!
If you live in a popular place for any length of time, you're subject to Icudavitis. This is a disease where people go around saying things like, "That house is selling for $300,000, I could have bought it for 30,000." (Oh God, I've actually said that myself.) Now, it's too late to make a killing in the meatspace real-estate market -- but where is it written that the land you sell has to have physical existence?
I wonder if he knows Jerry Pournelle?
The ultimate culprit is a pervasive enterprise business model that's obsessed with numbers, and fuck all the subtle hard-to-measure factors that go with growing a sustainable business. Which is not, as it happens, totally unconnected with the whole terrorist thing. The most deadly terrorist groups, such as Al Qaida, seem to be obsessed with bringing down this very same economic establishment.
By making that post, you incurred a listening fee. My lawyers will contact you.
Yeah, well, I'm not sure who won the superbowl, either.
I don't know when the first Pentium came out with an on-chip clock, but that's probably not important anyway. I doubt if the patent is on the idea of an on-chip clock -- they can hardly claim to be the first people to have invented the concept of component integration! More likely they're claiming to have invented a design or manufacturing technique... oh well, might as well go look it up.
Yup, here's the 1995 patent application. It's too complicated for me, but they seem be claiming that their design manages to produce a steady clock signal even as temperature fluctuations play holy hell with the oscillations that produce the clock signal. Assuming I haven't totally mangled the concept, and that they really did think of this first, that's a pretty significant invention. It's certainly not on the same level as these business-process and software patents that we all love to hate.
Now we only need for Anders to write an article explaining why Spolsky is such a jackass...
Second, there's the "loser has to pay costs" thing. Slashdotters keep bringing this up like it's some kind of holy writ. The reality is that it's not even applicable most of the time, and even when it is, it's damned hard to prove that you deserve that kind of compensation.
And here's the biggest issue of all: right or wrong, win or lose, you gotta live with these people. Do you really want to teach them to hate you so badly, they'll be looking for every little chance to get even? You might be able to force them to let you have a sat dish, but then they'll be watching you like the proverbial hawk. Every little violation will earn you the worst punishment they can manage.
Which can extend to seizing your home and turning you out on the street. Which is not as unlikely as it sounds. There was a case recently where this happened because a couple forgot to pay a $200 dollar fee.
Besides, they cancelled Firefly!! No geek can watch Fox with a clear conscience!
I'll make a deal with you. If you'll assume that my opinions are honestly held, and not "political thinking", I'll do the same for you.
Oh of course, all my logic is an illusion! I've been seduced by those evil Liberals! Thanks for straightening that out.
Ah, I got it. The articles doesn't say that the bulge has risen by .3%. The equatorial bulge has always been about 0.3% How much has the bulge increased recently? They don't give figures. But they do say that gravitational field changes usually attributed to the "post-glacial rebound" (the geological adjustment to their being less weight at the poles since the end of the last ice age) is twice what it was in 1998.
That's scary. Why? Well, sea level has been rising for the last 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. That rise isn't notice during a human lifetime, of course. But now it appears that the rate of melting has doubled in just the last five years. Still not a lot, but we're pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere faster than ever. Even if we could slow our rate of increase (and Dubya doesn't even want to do that), we'd still be looking at a big change in the ocean configuration.
Which could lead, ironically enough, to another ice age. If that happens the "junk science" pundits will doubtless insist that the whole greenhouse effect was just a myth. Oh well, I think I'll go fix a cold drink.