Teachers breed knowledge. Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Corruption is evil. Is this *really* that off base? I see it as a sad and *true* statement on human nature.
If I get any mail from you, I don't think I'll open it.
Oracle is where it is today because it did common business practices: Crushing the competition and swallowing them whole and shitting them out, and doing it in any means possible.
I must have missed the press release that said Informix was bought out by Oracle... or the one that said MS-SQL is being scrapped because Oracle has unfairly pushed them out of business.
Oracle is big because every 20-something with a dot-com and a fist full of VC money is running his business on Oracle. You can't swing a dead cat in a Starbucks without hitting a geek who thinks Oracle databases are the best available. They have mindshare, marketshare, and lots & lots of money.
Was this mostly because of marketing? Of course it is. Is that the same as "crushing and swallowing" the competition "by any means neccesary"? Certainly not.
Microsoft has not cornered the market on shady business practice, but they did establish the standards for it.
The reaction shouldn't be different, but it would have been.
Probably because nobody realy fears Oracle the way Apple fans (to use your example) fear Microsoft.
Oracle sells databases. I've never seen anybody become emotionally attatched to a database platform the way one would a great car or a computer. Nobody says "omygod, if Oracle wins, MySQL might be gone forever! They must be stopped!"
Microsoft, on the other hand, has driven a lot of interesting personal computing companies into the ground. My impression of Larry Ellison is that he would do the same if he were to his advantage, but its not (at the moment).
Bottom line is when a monkey misbehaves, it's a problem, but when The 800 Pound Gorilla misbehaves, it's a much bigger problem.
Let us not forget that it was not that long ago when Big Blue was the hated Evil Empire. IBM was on the verge of facing anti-trust regulation themselved, when Gates and Balmer managed to usurp the throne from them. Five or ten years from now it will be some other company (maybe Oracle) that terrorizes the entire industry and Must Be Stopped.
None of this changes the fact that Microsoft richly deserves every last wad of spit that has been lobbed towards Redmond lately.
Teachers breed knowledge Knowledge is power Power corrupts Corruption is evil
Therefore teachers breed evil. QED.
Oversimplification can lead to a lot of wrong conclusions.
Larry was an egomaniac long before he was a billionaire. Ditto for Bill, Steve, and all the other tech CEO's that we know by first name. Their "alpha dog" personalities is a big part of why they are where they are today.
In both cases, the crime is the same (copyright infringement) and the punishment is the same (suit for damages).
Except the ammount of damages claimed is vastly different.
If you run a web sight that makes money off somebody else's copyright material, they can make the case that they are entitled to royalties based on the money you made, plus punative damages for trying to cut them out.
If you copy a buddy's CD, the most they could claim is that you are less likely to buy an album that you might have purchaced otherwise.
Hardly the same "punishment" at all. (I put punishment in quotes because we are talking about civil lawsuits here, not criminal court. You have to commit copyright infringement on a pretty grand scale, like a large CD mastering lab, before criminal justice gets involved.)
It is starting to bug me that none of the Transmeta-related press releases I have seen so far seem to give many clues about the price of these chips. Sure they are low-power, low-heat chips filled with all kinds of crunchy goodness, but how do they stack up against, for example, the fondly remembered Strong-ARM in terms of "!" for "$"?
For that matter, how to they compete in price against the AIM-cabal's G3, which runs for hours off the static electricity of your body and actually cools the air around its own heatsinks, but costs more than a new family car... or the good old "de"Celeron, which doubles your power bill and is so hot that you can cook an egg on the next desk over, but can be bought in the Wal-mart bargain bin for $3 a pop and overclocked to 2500 MHz?
(Disclaimer: The above might contain a few slight exaggerations of the strengths and weaknesses of various CPU's.)
being "neutral" consitutes a knowing decision to include possibly illegal materials.
...which is completely different from a knowing decision to purposely include definitely illegal materials, and promote that as part of your service.
It's all or nothing. Accept linking or don't.
People like you also make civil debate about guns and abortion impossible.
Gawd, it's like walking on eggshells around here sometimes. All I did was try to point out that this might not be the cut-and-dried litmus test for hyperlinks that the posers at Wired want to hype it as being; and suddenly I'm surrounded by more flaming than at a San Francisco parade.
Settle down. The RIAA is not going to take the Internet away. The sky is not falling. Save the paranoia for John Katz articles.
There is a difference between speech and exploitation. If I videotape a movie with a handheld camera and sell the tapes, that's not free speech, it's a sale of art that I do not have the legal right to sell.
MP3.com and Napster are "selling" a service (actually, supporting it with ad sales, which ammounts to the same thing), and that service is to help you obtain unauthorized copies of music. Personally I'm all for it, but I'm not going to poke my head in the sand and pretend that they won't get bitchslapped for it in court.
Like it or not, the law takes a very different view between violating copyright for fun (such as taping a CD and giving the tape to a friend), and violating copyright for profit. One crime is far less severe than the other.
As for drug-making instructions, I agree that it is a restriction to free speech to try to stop it, and I am confident that the courts strike down such a law the first time it is challenged... but giving out instructions to cook E and selling "home meth lab" kits are two different things. To restrict one is a violation of the First Amendment, to restrict the other is not unconstitutional, just unreasonable.
Why do newspapers continue, why do classrooms remain.
Newspapers win because I can read one at lunch without carrying around an expensive appliance. For $.50, I can read Dilbert and Peanuts, check out the headlines, see how the Timberwolves are doing, and just leave the paper on the lunch-counter for the next guy to read. Getting all that out of a palm-pilot with wireless Internet is expensive, inconvenient and unpleasent... and will remain so for the immediate future.
Classrooms win because teaching is a much more subjective craft than we like to admit. For the last Century, we have been trying to regement our schools with standardized testing and procedures, which would seem to lend itself to having computers take over, but it still takes a human being to spot (as and example) the difference between dyslexia, slow learning, late development, or simple laziness when a kid does not learn to write as quickly as other students.
IANAJ, IWAT (I Am Not A Journalist, I Was A Teacher)
There's more to it than that. MP3.com is a comercial site.
To stretch an analogy that has been used on/. before, it is not illegal to tell somebody "there is a drug dealer selling E on the corner of 6th and Main", police informers do it all the time... but if you are in the business of directing people to where they can find drug dealers, and make a profit by giving out that information, you are crossing the line.
For somebody's personal web page (or a search engine) to say "here they be pirates" is not the same thing as hosting an ad-driven sight that offers links to copyright infringement sights as one of its services. They are in trouble for the same reason napster is: commercial exploitation without establishing a contract with the owner of the IP.
If MP3.com loses (or, more likely, settles), it is not neccesarilly the end of the linking fight.
My first big web job was building a site for a pyramid scheme company......I felt slimy writing code for that man. (Shudder)
You should feel slimy if you chose not to walk away from a job like that.
All of us should make life difficult for pyramid schemers at every opportunity. I've seen lives ruined because of bastards like this. Sure, they were more naive than you or I like to think we are, but that doesn't make it okay for somebody to bankrupt them.
The case has even been made (in P.J. O'Rourke's book "Eat the Rich") that the entire economy of Albania collapsed mainly because of pyramid schemes. Remember the war in Kosovo? Might not have happened if it wasn't for those punk-ass ex-KGB mofia mother f*$%@!#% ripping off everybody's last dime.
I strongly urge everybody to be an obstacle to every con like this that has the misfortune of stubling by you. Rip-off schemes make it harder to do legitimate business, which hurts all of us.
I may hate AOL with the fire of a thousand suns, but I completely agree with you.
Nobody wins in class action lawsuits, except for a bunch of crooked lawyers. Here in Minnesota, some people are actually shocked that Mike Cerreci and his golf buddies made off with most of the loot from the anti-tobacco lawsuit, then used most of that money to run "Humphrey for Governor" and "Cerreci for Senator" campaigns. It's all a big con-job.
Sure as you can't steer a train, AOL is going to settle this case, lots of people who didn't even know they were plaintifs will get checks for $.50 in the mail, and the lawyers will move on to the next zebra to twist its ankle. (My guess... beer and liquer companies.)
Okay, so M$ has a new language, called C-hash, pronounced See-Sharp. I know the instict is to wonder how this contributes to their plans to take over the world, or put a "laser beam" on the moon, or whatever. I don't think there is a lot of reason to worry.
Like Sun's Java and NeXT's (now Apple's) Objective C, this is just Yet Another Object Language, offered to programming shops who are dealing with the fact that nobody seems to know how to program in "Good Old C" anymore.
Choice of object languages is a religious issue, and the best language for you to be productive is usually the one you know best.
I suppose this is good news for people working under PHB's that like to proclaim "this is a Microsoft shop!" because now they have an alternative to VB for writing their apps.
Now for a decent rant and rave......And most of the reasons for Napster being evil is because it is depriving the bands out of money from lost record sales...
Any good rant deserves a good nit-pick.
The reason Napster is being "evil" is because they are (imagined to be) making money, by exploiting IP without sharing a slice with the creators of the product. If Napster had started out by drawing up contracts with the big media whores^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompanies, they would have been in good shape.
Napster lawyers had to know (unless they're idiots) that these lawsuits would be coming, but they decided that the company would be easier to start if they got it off the ground first, and settled the license issues later. Napster might shut down if the get bitchslapped too hard, but I'm willing to bet that they will eventually pony up, just like MyMP3 did.
All this means almost nothing to MP3 warez kiddies, who will probably all be using Gnutella to collect their Kid Rock "songs" by then anyway.
No, it means I sometimes choose to post without the bonus. (For example, sometimes I make a comment that is responding to a whining bitch, and I don't want to trouble those that are reading at +2 or higher with it.)
Hmmm... let's see... OS on the box, apps and storage on the network. Sounds like the same old client-server model to me. Off-load a few of the OS preferences and you move a little closer to the "thin" client concept, but it's still SSDD.
No, you idiot. Microsoft makes backup copies and stuff. Read the MSDN entries on the.NET data structures.
Oh, they run backups of the server data... kind of like in the client-server model. Wow, what a revolutionary concept. Next you are going to tell me that they are about to invent hard drive mirroring systems and RAID arrays.
More of the same M$ spin: "We just started doing it, so that makes it new."
Oh man, I am really not looking forward to the Wasszup/Wassabi! posts.
Oh, perfect. Instead of trolling by saying "Wasaaabi", you troll by saying "I bet somebody will troll by saying Wasaaaabi", and get modded up as funny, instead of down as the troll it is.
Meanwhile, massive thread of related comments (mostly about how somebody is bound to start a massive thread of related comments) is kicked off...
And I write this post complaining that you started all of these posts and got away with it, which only makes things worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this *really* that off base? I see it as a sad and *true* statement on human nature.
If I get any mail from you, I don't think I'll open it.
I must have missed the press release that said Informix was bought out by Oracle... or the one that said MS-SQL is being scrapped because Oracle has unfairly pushed them out of business.
Oracle is big because every 20-something with a dot-com and a fist full of VC money is running his business on Oracle. You can't swing a dead cat in a Starbucks without hitting a geek who thinks Oracle databases are the best available. They have mindshare, marketshare, and lots & lots of money.
Was this mostly because of marketing? Of course it is.
Is that the same as "crushing and swallowing" the competition "by any means neccesary"? Certainly not.
Microsoft has not cornered the market on shady business practice, but they did establish the standards for it.
Probably because nobody realy fears Oracle the way Apple fans (to use your example) fear Microsoft.
Oracle sells databases. I've never seen anybody become emotionally attatched to a database platform the way one would a great car or a computer. Nobody says "omygod, if Oracle wins, MySQL might be gone forever! They must be stopped!"
Microsoft, on the other hand, has driven a lot of interesting personal computing companies into the ground. My impression of Larry Ellison is that he would do the same if he were to his advantage, but its not (at the moment).
Bottom line is when a monkey misbehaves, it's a problem, but when The 800 Pound Gorilla misbehaves, it's a much bigger problem.
Let us not forget that it was not that long ago when Big Blue was the hated Evil Empire. IBM was on the verge of facing anti-trust regulation themselved, when Gates and Balmer managed to usurp the throne from them. Five or ten years from now it will be some other company (maybe Oracle) that terrorizes the entire industry and Must Be Stopped.
None of this changes the fact that Microsoft richly deserves every last wad of spit that has been lobbed towards Redmond lately.
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Corruption is evil
Therefore teachers breed evil. QED.
Oversimplification can lead to a lot of wrong conclusions.
Larry was an egomaniac long before he was a billionaire. Ditto for Bill, Steve, and all the other tech CEO's that we know by first name. Their "alpha dog" personalities is a big part of why they are where they are today.
Except the ammount of damages claimed is vastly different.
If you run a web sight that makes money off somebody else's copyright material, they can make the case that they are entitled to royalties based on the money you made, plus punative damages for trying to cut them out.
If you copy a buddy's CD, the most they could claim is that you are less likely to buy an album that you might have purchaced otherwise.
Hardly the same "punishment" at all. (I put punishment in quotes because we are talking about civil lawsuits here, not criminal court. You have to commit copyright infringement on a pretty grand scale, like a large CD mastering lab, before criminal justice gets involved.)
Where as people who don't read an entire post before making a knee-jerk reaction are towers of intellect.
Perhaps you should go here and look up "sarcasm", if you can manage to read the whole entry before wondering why I sent you to a pronounciation guide.
For that matter, how to they compete in price against the AIM-cabal's G3, which runs for hours off the static electricity of your body and actually cools the air around its own heatsinks, but costs more than a new family car... or the good old "de"Celeron, which doubles your power bill and is so hot that you can cook an egg on the next desk over, but can be bought in the Wal-mart bargain bin for $3 a pop and overclocked to 2500 MHz?
(Disclaimer: The above might contain a few slight exaggerations of the strengths and weaknesses of various CPU's.)
It's all or nothing. Accept linking or don't.
People like you also make civil debate about guns and abortion impossible.
Gawd, it's like walking on eggshells around here sometimes. All I did was try to point out that this might not be the cut-and-dried litmus test for hyperlinks that the posers at Wired want to hype it as being; and suddenly I'm surrounded by more flaming than at a San Francisco parade.
Settle down. The RIAA is not going to take the Internet away. The sky is not falling. Save the paranoia for John Katz articles.
Thanks for the correction. The point remains the same.
MP3.com and Napster are "selling" a service (actually, supporting it with ad sales, which ammounts to the same thing), and that service is to help you obtain unauthorized copies of music. Personally I'm all for it, but I'm not going to poke my head in the sand and pretend that they won't get bitchslapped for it in court.
Like it or not, the law takes a very different view between violating copyright for fun (such as taping a CD and giving the tape to a friend), and violating copyright for profit. One crime is far less severe than the other.
As for drug-making instructions, I agree that it is a restriction to free speech to try to stop it, and I am confident that the courts strike down such a law the first time it is challenged... but giving out instructions to cook E and selling "home meth lab" kits are two different things. To restrict one is a violation of the First Amendment, to restrict the other is not unconstitutional, just unreasonable.
(Yea, yea, IANAL.)
Newspapers win because I can read one at lunch without carrying around an expensive appliance. For $.50, I can read Dilbert and Peanuts, check out the headlines, see how the Timberwolves are doing, and just leave the paper on the lunch-counter for the next guy to read. Getting all that out of a palm-pilot with wireless Internet is expensive, inconvenient and unpleasent... and will remain so for the immediate future.
Classrooms win because teaching is a much more subjective craft than we like to admit. For the last Century, we have been trying to regement our schools with standardized testing and procedures, which would seem to lend itself to having computers take over, but it still takes a human being to spot (as and example) the difference between dyslexia, slow learning, late development, or simple laziness when a kid does not learn to write as quickly as other students.
IANAJ, IWAT (I Am Not A Journalist, I Was A Teacher)
To stretch an analogy that has been used on /. before, it is not illegal to tell somebody "there is a drug dealer selling E on the corner of 6th and Main", police informers do it all the time... but if you are in the business of directing people to where they can find drug dealers, and make a profit by giving out that information, you are crossing the line.
For somebody's personal web page (or a search engine) to say "here they be pirates" is not the same thing as hosting an ad-driven sight that offers links to copyright infringement sights as one of its services. They are in trouble for the same reason napster is: commercial exploitation without establishing a contract with the owner of the IP.
If MP3.com loses (or, more likely, settles), it is not neccesarilly the end of the linking fight.
(IANAL.. blah blah blah)
You should feel slimy if you chose not to walk away from a job like that.
All of us should make life difficult for pyramid schemers at every opportunity. I've seen lives ruined because of bastards like this. Sure, they were more naive than you or I like to think we are, but that doesn't make it okay for somebody to bankrupt them.
The case has even been made (in P.J. O'Rourke's book "Eat the Rich") that the entire economy of Albania collapsed mainly because of pyramid schemes. Remember the war in Kosovo? Might not have happened if it wasn't for those punk-ass ex-KGB mofia mother f*$%@!#% ripping off everybody's last dime.
I strongly urge everybody to be an obstacle to every con like this that has the misfortune of stubling by you. Rip-off schemes make it harder to do legitimate business, which hurts all of us.
Nobody wins in class action lawsuits, except for a bunch of crooked lawyers. Here in Minnesota, some people are actually shocked that Mike Cerreci and his golf buddies made off with most of the loot from the anti-tobacco lawsuit, then used most of that money to run "Humphrey for Governor" and "Cerreci for Senator" campaigns. It's all a big con-job.
Sure as you can't steer a train, AOL is going to settle this case, lots of people who didn't even know they were plaintifs will get checks for $.50 in the mail, and the lawyers will move on to the next zebra to twist its ankle. (My guess... beer and liquer companies.)
Like Sun's Java and NeXT's (now Apple's) Objective C, this is just Yet Another Object Language, offered to programming shops who are dealing with the fact that nobody seems to know how to program in "Good Old C" anymore.
Choice of object languages is a religious issue, and the best language for you to be productive is usually the one you know best.
I suppose this is good news for people working under PHB's that like to proclaim "this is a Microsoft shop!" because now they have an alternative to VB for writing their apps.
The rest of us can safely ignore C# forever.
Heh heh.
Your lazy spelling resulted in a great malipropism to coin as a jargon term!
From now on, I'm going to refer to any tired, over-reported and meaningless article as a "typicle".
Any good rant deserves a good nit-pick.
The reason Napster is being "evil" is because they are (imagined to be) making money, by exploiting IP without sharing a slice with the creators of the product. If Napster had started out by drawing up contracts with the big media whores^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompanies, they would have been in good shape.
Napster lawyers had to know (unless they're idiots) that these lawsuits would be coming, but they decided that the company would be easier to start if they got it off the ground first, and settled the license issues later. Napster might shut down if the get bitchslapped too hard, but I'm willing to bet that they will eventually pony up, just like MyMP3 did.
All this means almost nothing to MP3 warez kiddies, who will probably all be using Gnutella to collect their Kid Rock "songs" by then anyway.
No, it means I sometimes choose to post without the bonus. (For example, sometimes I make a comment that is responding to a whining bitch, and I don't want to trouble those that are reading at +2 or higher with it.)
Good point. Subnet transfers would be a problem.
OTOH BoLean's idea of meaningless random number strings as domain names seems to have no downside, other than the loss of vanity names.
Do we really still need to keep the Internet robust vs. large-scale nuclear war?
No, you idiot. Microsoft makes backup copies and stuff. Read the MSDN entries on the .NET data structures.
Oh, they run backups of the server data... kind of like in the client-server model. Wow, what a revolutionary concept. Next you are going to tell me that they are about to invent hard drive mirroring systems and RAID arrays.
More of the same M$ spin: "We just started doing it, so that makes it new."
Nice try, astroturf boy.
People have been using numbers for their telephones for decades, so it's not like the web would become impossible to use.
Oh, perfect. Instead of trolling by saying "Wasaaabi", you troll by saying "I bet somebody will troll by saying Wasaaaabi", and get modded up as funny, instead of down as the troll it is.
Meanwhile, massive thread of related comments (mostly about how somebody is bound to start a massive thread of related comments) is kicked off...
And I write this post complaining that you started all of these posts and got away with it, which only makes things worse.
Dude, you own this site. We are all your bitches.
I believe you are correct.
No correction of mine would be complete without another error.
We're going to Disneyland!
Heh heh. Sorry... had to be done.