The "license FairPlay" crowd often overlook this point. Right now it's Apple's DRM monopoly against the labels' music monopoly. They battle it out and prices remain reasonable. If Apple loses, it's just the labels against the consumers directly. No more 99c songs... now you'll pay &4.99 for any reasonably popular song (hey it'll still be cheaper than the CD that has the one song you like and 12 you don't).
In any case, be careful what you wish for. If Apple's forced to open FairPlay expect to pay a lot more for online music.
Yes - I've pointed out in another post. The same newspaper has an editorial only less than a week ago that says in 2004 the U.S. produced over 57,000 C.S. graduates. Coupled with his 65,000 H-1B visas, if his 100,000 new jobs a year is accurate, there's a 22k surplus.
You're assuming the two sets (U.S. produced X gradutes and there are Y H1-B visas) don't overlap. Anecdotally, I can say that the US probably produces a substantial number of C.S. graduates that are not Americans. We then have a choice. We can ship them back to their native country, where they'll probably open an out-sourcing company and work to get U.S. jobs moved overseas, or we can open an H1-B and hire them here in the U.S. My guess is that every time we deny an H1-B visa to someone already working here, we ship an average of 2 American jobs overseas when that person leaves and strengthens an out-sourcing company.
In any case, of the three software startups I've been closely involved in in the U.S., two were started by immigrants.
It's funny, I just read the "ultra-efficient incandescent bulb" story, and the note about how California wants to ban incandescent bulbs instead of simply setting an efficiency standard and letting innovation happen. It's the same sort of thing here. We have some blanket "H1-B policy", but make little affordance for how much immigrants help the economy and how harmful it can be to educate them, give them U.S. experience, then ship them overseas.
Your rant is hard to parse, but you seem to be equating software with fundamental laws of physics. It's not, any more than Fallingwater could theoretically be built by natural wind and erosion. Any innovative piece of software contains a substantial investment in brainpower, and it's more than "connect tab a to slot b". That investment is not only valuable, but far cheaper to copy than to create the first time.
I agree that the bar for "obvious" in patent law needs to be raised dramatically, and I will entertain arguments about whether patents generally reward or suppress innovation, but to claim that no piece of software is patentable because it would all write itself through some natural law of physics is specious at best.
As a desktop Java developer, I can say that the single biggest thing that makes me wish we were on a platform other than the JVM is lack of heavyweight/lightweight mixing and therefore lack of Swing/ActiveX embedding. Thus, any.NET application has huge instant advantages in the Windows/Office/IE world that is the reality of the corporate desktop. This is a feature Sun has repeatedly promised then pushed out to future releases. In addition, they have quite a few JVM crashing bugs in AWT, Swing, and Java2D that have been filed and voted on in their bug system for years that they haven't gotten around to addressing. Finally, JNI is a pretty awful way of having to link to existing native libraries, and all the earlier, better native implementations were deprecated when it came out in the late 90's.
Sun voluntarily ceeded the desktop market for dynamic development languages more than any other competitor, including Microsoft, won it.
And even if Sony throws its hands up and gives up on this generation, what makes you think they'll do better with the PS4?
Maybe by then Microsoft will force its XBox business unit to turn a profit. It's really hard to compete against a company that isn't interested in profitability and can pump as much as they need over from their OS monopoly.
The PS3 is not a bad console. It mostly suffered from bad timing, because Blu-Ray components are so expensive right now, because Nintento hit one out of the park with their cheap-but-fun Wii, and because they rushed what seems like a slightly unfinished software out the door because of marketing pressures. If it can come into price parity with an XBox360 this year it'll probably clean up the market this Christmas season with folks upgrading a PS2 and/or wanting a cheap Blu-Ray player.
>> The problem is, you really can't expect end users to use a CLI to install anything. > >Why? Why is it so unreasonable to expect people to know how to use their computer?
"Using a CLI" != "Using a computer". "Using" a computer should be about identifying what you want to create, edit, contribute, read, etc., then being able to do so in the easiest way possible. Maybe that's a CLI for you, but for most people double-clicking on an icon, or even having something already done so you don't have to worry about it at all, is a lot easier.
I thought you people lost these arguments in the late 80's. 20 years later and you STILL think CLI's should be necessary to perform basic functions on your computer?
Between putting dogma over usability and insisting everyone else should use a computer like a developer prefers to, combined with the big split in the licensing models coming up with GPLv3, I foresee some dark days ahead for open source on the desktop.
On MacOS X, you set the WINS server by running APplications/Utilities/Directory Access, clicking on SMB/CIFS, clicking "Configure..." and putting it in the "WINS Server" field.
I would argue that while Java continues to have a mindshare gap and hasn't improved it, that it's still an extremely viable language in both the full-blown application space and in the "small app" space (from web browsers to cell phones to Blu-Ray players) as well as its traditional stronghold of server software. The CJMTK (ESRI ArcGIS for US Government) group spend significant resources making their product viable in Java because so much US Government software runs on Java. I spend most of my day using IntelliJ or Eclipse along with a number of other small Java applications in my day-to-day work. I suspect a lot of the other applications, including OpenOffice, didn't go Java because they had a large installed base of C/C++ they didn't want to give up, and that will also be an Achilles heel for Java's competitors.
In short, the game isn't over yet, and Java is down but far from out.
is this the cause of the difference between heavy metal poisoning causing autism and genetics causing autism
It's not been shown that heavy metal poisoning causes autism. Poisoning with lead or mercury can have neurological symptoms that are similar to autism, but removing the heavy metal and flushing it from the body causes rapid improvement in the poisoning patients, while autism has no cure. The mistaken belief that they're the same thing led a lot of parents to stop immunizing, despite every single reproducible study showing no link between the mercury-based compound that used to be found in such immunizations and autism. To wit, autism continues to gradually become more common despite the fact that mercury has now been completely removed from childhood vaccines.
The only statistically significant environmental link found so far to the onset of true autism cases that I've seen was a study that showed that the rollout of cable television appeared to be correlated to a moderate rise in autism in the neighborhoods and time periods of the rollout during the 80's.
Just don't seriously suggest applets and Swing or something crap like that.
Why would you consider Python, Ruby, or.Net, but exclude Java and Swing? Java is faster than any of those three, and is very cross-platform, well-documented, open source, and easy code to develop and maintain. I understand it's uncool to like Java these days, but it's actually one of the best solutions for this sort of problem out there today.
Throw buckets of patent applications at the Patent Office, and see what sticks.
Even if BlueJ had 9 out of 10 claims of the patent covered with prior art, it's possible Microsoft could have gotten at least one original claim out of it. And considering they have lawyers on retainer for this stuff, it doesn't hurt them to try. The only thing that hurts them is if they think they'll lose sales over the hubbub.
As someone else mentioned, though, someone at Microsoft did commit perjury (even after it was retracted) by claiming to invent this feature since Microsoft engineers admitted in writing in a public forum that they were influenced by the success of BlueJ's features.
No Eclipse is written in SWT, which while it uses "native" widgets also imposes a Java-to-native translation. I haven't benchmarked SWT against Swing, so I'm not sure.
Of course, our client doesn't use either, but rather our own GUI we wrote in house. And it's extremely fluid. Java simply isn't a slow language anymore.
I fell for this one at the Huntsville, AL airport yesterday. The "scan" functionality on my wireless card (which doesn't use the standard XP wireless panel) doesn't differentiate ad-hoc and infrastructure networks, so I actually voluntarily joined myself to the network. Luckily I don't have any open shares and have good firewall software, but it's really easy to make this mistake when you're desperate for connectivity.
Incidentally, the "real" airport wireless signal was completely drowned out, so even if you connected to correct SSID on the infrastructure point you got no connectivity because the ad-hoc network was stomping on all the bandwidth.
As someone who writes client-side Java, I can say that Swing is actually fairly responsive these days. However, it often suffers from a "first click is slow" problem, where the very first time you do something it's slow, then it's fast after that. So a cursory glance at Java apps often show them in the worst possible light.
In any case, the meme that it's impossible to write a fluid, responsive UI in Java is just as wrong as it is on the server-side.
Maybe the problem is in the "metrics" themselves. Perhaps we should stop assigning a quality value to something because it has lots of links. It's no more valid than the notion that a piece of music is better than another because it has been played lots of times on the radio, or even because more people buy it.
Google isn't trying to judge what is better, though, it's trying to judge what people want to see when they type a search phrase. I'd argue that more people buying a piece of music DOES have some correlation to more people wanting to hear that music. Before Google came up with this metric, sites like AltaVista and the others had very comprehensive searches that usually turned up pages of things that were useless.
If history is any indication, they won't even get that... they'll just get ANOTHER judgement against them, and the DoJ will say, "This time, really, please don't do it again."
This article summary is incomplete, as the submitter forgot to take their obligatory pot-shot at Apple.
I think it's pretty disingenuous to say that DRM isn't about piracy. The fact that it has other advantages for the industry down the road isn't going to matter a lot to a business that survives on quarter to quarter revenues. Of course it's about piracy! And the original Napster's popularity proved it's necessary for the current music industry's distribution model to succeed electronically. You can argue that DRM is thus about maintaining the current music industry's business model, but vague conspiracy theories about wanting control is giving too much credit to corporate forethought.
Which is a pity, since several people a year die of it, especially in the distance running community. The "conventional wisdom" is to drink tons of water when you exercise. However, your kidneys basically shut down during intense exercise and you can easily die of water intoxication. To wit, there are no well-documented cases of distance runners dying due to dehydration, but many each year due to water intoxication.
It sounds like the radio station should hire some good lawyers. If they'd done this competition with alcohol everyone would be up in arms. Well, drinking too much water can cause exactly the same effects on the body.
I probably shouldn't take your bait, but since someone marked you "Insightful" I felt compelled.
First of all, the switch to Intel has been an incredible boon for Mac laptop owners. The new MacBook Pros are faster at running Photoshop in emulation than the old PowerBooks are running it native. Secondly, Apple's DRM position hasn't changed at all since the move to Intel. Finally, if moving to Intel is about DRM, why do you say your next laptop will be Intel?
Anyway, Apple has always been about having the most pleasing, efficient, and hassle-free experience, not about expandability or mod-ability, although some of Apple's products aren't bad in that respect.
Darwin, as an open source project, has code committed from outside Apple. The authors of this code still own it.
Perhaps, but I doubt it. The current Darwin kernel is something Apple almost certainly doesn't need to share at all. Most of the core of the OS comes from FreeBSD which Apple is also under no obligation to share code for under the BSD license. Apple can control this via their agreements signed before submissions to certain packages, similar to how all submissions to MySQL assign rights to them. If they were to include any GNU executable on the iPhone, and I don't see why they would, they'd have to share the code for only those packages. In fact, most of the BSD/UNIX layer is probably missing, only including those tools and libs directly necessary for the installed software.
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The "license FairPlay" crowd often overlook this point. Right now it's Apple's DRM monopoly against the labels' music monopoly. They battle it out and prices remain reasonable. If Apple loses, it's just the labels against the consumers directly. No more 99c songs... now you'll pay &4.99 for any reasonably popular song (hey it'll still be cheaper than the CD that has the one song you like and 12 you don't).
In any case, be careful what you wish for. If Apple's forced to open FairPlay expect to pay a lot more for online music.
Yes - I've pointed out in another post. The same newspaper has an editorial only less than a week ago that says in 2004 the U.S. produced over 57,000 C.S. graduates. Coupled with his 65,000 H-1B visas, if his 100,000 new jobs a year is accurate, there's a 22k surplus.
You're assuming the two sets (U.S. produced X gradutes and there are Y H1-B visas) don't overlap. Anecdotally, I can say that the US probably produces a substantial number of C.S. graduates that are not Americans. We then have a choice. We can ship them back to their native country, where they'll probably open an out-sourcing company and work to get U.S. jobs moved overseas, or we can open an H1-B and hire them here in the U.S. My guess is that every time we deny an H1-B visa to someone already working here, we ship an average of 2 American jobs overseas when that person leaves and strengthens an out-sourcing company.
In any case, of the three software startups I've been closely involved in in the U.S., two were started by immigrants.
It's funny, I just read the "ultra-efficient incandescent bulb" story, and the note about how California wants to ban incandescent bulbs instead of simply setting an efficiency standard and letting innovation happen. It's the same sort of thing here. We have some blanket "H1-B policy", but make little affordance for how much immigrants help the economy and how harmful it can be to educate them, give them U.S. experience, then ship them overseas.
Your rant is hard to parse, but you seem to be equating software with fundamental laws of physics. It's not, any more than Fallingwater could theoretically be built by natural wind and erosion. Any innovative piece of software contains a substantial investment in brainpower, and it's more than "connect tab a to slot b". That investment is not only valuable, but far cheaper to copy than to create the first time.
I agree that the bar for "obvious" in patent law needs to be raised dramatically, and I will entertain arguments about whether patents generally reward or suppress innovation, but to claim that no piece of software is patentable because it would all write itself through some natural law of physics is specious at best.
You'll get your $300 iPhone soon enough.
Farnsworth: "That's not soon enough!"
As a desktop Java developer, I can say that the single biggest thing that makes me wish we were on a platform other than the JVM is lack of heavyweight/lightweight mixing and therefore lack of Swing/ActiveX embedding. Thus, any .NET application has huge instant advantages in the Windows/Office/IE world that is the reality of the corporate desktop. This is a feature Sun has repeatedly promised then pushed out to future releases. In addition, they have quite a few JVM crashing bugs in AWT, Swing, and Java2D that have been filed and voted on in their bug system for years that they haven't gotten around to addressing. Finally, JNI is a pretty awful way of having to link to existing native libraries, and all the earlier, better native implementations were deprecated when it came out in the late 90's.
Sun voluntarily ceeded the desktop market for dynamic development languages more than any other competitor, including Microsoft, won it.
Is there any setting in Slashdot preferences to automatically hide the first 1-liner "funny" post and all the inane replies for each topic?
And even if Sony throws its hands up and gives up on this generation, what makes you think they'll do better with the PS4?
Maybe by then Microsoft will force its XBox business unit to turn a profit. It's really hard to compete against a company that isn't interested in profitability and can pump as much as they need over from their OS monopoly.
The PS3 is not a bad console. It mostly suffered from bad timing, because Blu-Ray components are so expensive right now, because Nintento hit one out of the park with their cheap-but-fun Wii, and because they rushed what seems like a slightly unfinished software out the door because of marketing pressures. If it can come into price parity with an XBox360 this year it'll probably clean up the market this Christmas season with folks upgrading a PS2 and/or wanting a cheap Blu-Ray player.
>> The problem is, you really can't expect end users to use a CLI to install anything.
>
>Why? Why is it so unreasonable to expect people to know how to use their computer?
"Using a CLI" != "Using a computer". "Using" a computer should be about identifying what you want to create, edit, contribute, read, etc., then being able to do so in the easiest way possible. Maybe that's a CLI for you, but for most people double-clicking on an icon, or even having something already done so you don't have to worry about it at all, is a lot easier.
I thought you people lost these arguments in the late 80's. 20 years later and you STILL think CLI's should be necessary to perform basic functions on your computer?
Between putting dogma over usability and insisting everyone else should use a computer like a developer prefers to, combined with the big split in the licensing models coming up with GPLv3, I foresee some dark days ahead for open source on the desktop.
On MacOS X, you set the WINS server by running APplications/Utilities/Directory Access, clicking on SMB/CIFS, clicking "Configure..." and putting it in the "WINS Server" field.
Not very Mac-like, but it works.
I would argue that while Java continues to have a mindshare gap and hasn't improved it, that it's still an extremely viable language in both the full-blown application space and in the "small app" space (from web browsers to cell phones to Blu-Ray players) as well as its traditional stronghold of server software. The CJMTK (ESRI ArcGIS for US Government) group spend significant resources making their product viable in Java because so much US Government software runs on Java. I spend most of my day using IntelliJ or Eclipse along with a number of other small Java applications in my day-to-day work. I suspect a lot of the other applications, including OpenOffice, didn't go Java because they had a large installed base of C/C++ they didn't want to give up, and that will also be an Achilles heel for Java's competitors.
In short, the game isn't over yet, and Java is down but far from out.
is this the cause of the difference between heavy metal poisoning causing autism and genetics causing autism
It's not been shown that heavy metal poisoning causes autism. Poisoning with lead or mercury can have neurological symptoms that are similar to autism, but removing the heavy metal and flushing it from the body causes rapid improvement in the poisoning patients, while autism has no cure. The mistaken belief that they're the same thing led a lot of parents to stop immunizing, despite every single reproducible study showing no link between the mercury-based compound that used to be found in such immunizations and autism. To wit, autism continues to gradually become more common despite the fact that mercury has now been completely removed from childhood vaccines.
The only statistically significant environmental link found so far to the onset of true autism cases that I've seen was a study that showed that the rollout of cable television appeared to be correlated to a moderate rise in autism in the neighborhoods and time periods of the rollout during the 80's.
Just don't seriously suggest applets and Swing or something crap like that.
.Net, but exclude Java and Swing? Java is faster than any of those three, and is very cross-platform, well-documented, open source, and easy code to develop and maintain. I understand it's uncool to like Java these days, but it's actually one of the best solutions for this sort of problem out there today.
Why would you consider Python, Ruby, or
Throw buckets of patent applications at the Patent Office, and see what sticks.
Even if BlueJ had 9 out of 10 claims of the patent covered with prior art, it's possible Microsoft could have gotten at least one original claim out of it. And considering they have lawyers on retainer for this stuff, it doesn't hurt them to try. The only thing that hurts them is if they think they'll lose sales over the hubbub.
As someone else mentioned, though, someone at Microsoft did commit perjury (even after it was retracted) by claiming to invent this feature since Microsoft engineers admitted in writing in a public forum that they were influenced by the success of BlueJ's features.
No Eclipse is written in SWT, which while it uses "native" widgets also imposes a Java-to-native translation. I haven't benchmarked SWT against Swing, so I'm not sure.
Of course, our client doesn't use either, but rather our own GUI we wrote in house. And it's extremely fluid. Java simply isn't a slow language anymore.
I fell for this one at the Huntsville, AL airport yesterday. The "scan" functionality on my wireless card (which doesn't use the standard XP wireless panel) doesn't differentiate ad-hoc and infrastructure networks, so I actually voluntarily joined myself to the network. Luckily I don't have any open shares and have good firewall software, but it's really easy to make this mistake when you're desperate for connectivity.
Incidentally, the "real" airport wireless signal was completely drowned out, so even if you connected to correct SSID on the infrastructure point you got no connectivity because the ad-hoc network was stomping on all the bandwidth.
As someone who writes client-side Java, I can say that Swing is actually fairly responsive these days. However, it often suffers from a "first click is slow" problem, where the very first time you do something it's slow, then it's fast after that. So a cursory glance at Java apps often show them in the worst possible light.
In any case, the meme that it's impossible to write a fluid, responsive UI in Java is just as wrong as it is on the server-side.
Maybe the problem is in the "metrics" themselves. Perhaps we should stop assigning a quality value to something because it has lots of links. It's no more valid than the notion that a piece of music is better than another because it has been played lots of times on the radio, or even because more people buy it.
Google isn't trying to judge what is better, though, it's trying to judge what people want to see when they type a search phrase. I'd argue that more people buying a piece of music DOES have some correlation to more people wanting to hear that music. Before Google came up with this metric, sites like AltaVista and the others had very comprehensive searches that usually turned up pages of things that were useless.
"Any Lawyers in the house have any idea when this case will wrap up?"
I suspect you'll get the obvious answer from the lawyers: when the money runs out.
Yes. See Apple's Dashboard widget collection.
If history is any indication, they won't even get that... they'll just get ANOTHER judgement against them, and the DoJ will say, "This time, really, please don't do it again."
This article summary is incomplete, as the submitter forgot to take their obligatory pot-shot at Apple.
I think it's pretty disingenuous to say that DRM isn't about piracy. The fact that it has other advantages for the industry down the road isn't going to matter a lot to a business that survives on quarter to quarter revenues. Of course it's about piracy! And the original Napster's popularity proved it's necessary for the current music industry's distribution model to succeed electronically. You can argue that DRM is thus about maintaining the current music industry's business model, but vague conspiracy theories about wanting control is giving too much credit to corporate forethought.
Which is a pity, since several people a year die of it, especially in the distance running community. The "conventional wisdom" is to drink tons of water when you exercise. However, your kidneys basically shut down during intense exercise and you can easily die of water intoxication. To wit, there are no well-documented cases of distance runners dying due to dehydration, but many each year due to water intoxication.
It sounds like the radio station should hire some good lawyers. If they'd done this competition with alcohol everyone would be up in arms. Well, drinking too much water can cause exactly the same effects on the body.
I probably shouldn't take your bait, but since someone marked you "Insightful" I felt compelled.
First of all, the switch to Intel has been an incredible boon for Mac laptop owners. The new MacBook Pros are faster at running Photoshop in emulation than the old PowerBooks are running it native. Secondly, Apple's DRM position hasn't changed at all since the move to Intel. Finally, if moving to Intel is about DRM, why do you say your next laptop will be Intel?
Anyway, Apple has always been about having the most pleasing, efficient, and hassle-free experience, not about expandability or mod-ability, although some of Apple's products aren't bad in that respect.
Darwin, as an open source project, has code committed from outside Apple. The authors of this code still own it.
Perhaps, but I doubt it. The current Darwin kernel is something Apple almost certainly doesn't need to share at all. Most of the core of the OS comes from FreeBSD which Apple is also under no obligation to share code for under the BSD license. Apple can control this via their agreements signed before submissions to certain packages, similar to how all submissions to MySQL assign rights to them. If they were to include any GNU executable on the iPhone, and I don't see why they would, they'd have to share the code for only those packages. In fact, most of the BSD/UNIX layer is probably missing, only including those tools and libs directly necessary for the installed software.
In short, I think you're wrong.
The week just wouldn't be complete if Slashdot didn't bash Apple for DRM again. Can we just tag all future similar articles as a "dup"?