Well, the problem is, I think, that the more people read your magazine, the harder it becomes to stay independent. Advertising deals might require favorable stories for the product or company, contributions from interest groups bind into supporting a certain political view.
The costs of publishing in large volume make it prohibitive to rely on small-scale advertising and subscription income. Just have a look at the major newspapers in the United States (e.g. New York Times, Washinton Post, USA Today). None of them is impartial or unbiased in their reporting.
StarOffice used to be a fully commercial and proprietary product before Sun bought it from Star**** (don't remember the full name here), a German company. They published the source code for it and maintain a closed-source version including support and documentation. It was actually a fairly advanced office suite when Sun bought it.
Yeah, but even if that right exists, as long as the law doesn't recognize it and protect its existence and enforcability, it might just as well not exist.
This is kind of like the human rights the Weimar constitution in 1920's Germany listed. They were there allright but not enforcable in a court of law.
When I said depending on your jurisdiction, I was talking about a global leve. Amendments to the Constitution of the United States mean squad outside of US jurisdiction.
In theory, doing business is about providing value to your customers and fostering sound relationships with your suppliers, including your employees who provide the labor you need. In theory, businesses don't have a need to extort their employees because they see them as an important part of the business' capital. In theory, there is also a meaningful relationship between the wage rate of the lowest paid employee and the salary of the CEO.
But, in reality, the latter isn't true anymore. What we have done in the 90's is vastly overpay managers at the highest levels at the expense of the rest of the employees. What we have done is apply the basic ideas of capitalism (demand/supply and competition) to a social structure within the company that has led to a hierarchy where everyone is just out to get to the better end of everything, where cheating, lying and corruption is rewarded, where honesty and cooperation is punished.
It hasn't always been like that. I work as the bookkeeper/accountant in a small business. It is frightening to see that in a venture like this where the personal assets of the owners are at risk, where the owners work their hardest and accept pay cuts to keep the company running in hope for future revenue, the employees are actually treated as valuable assets. It is frightening because in large businesses that have all the resources available to treat their employees with dignity and respect, those resources are rather used to give the CEO another raise on top of his multi-million dollar salary.
Adam Smith & Co never thought of capitalism as the foundation of social order. It was supposed to be the basis for how we conduct trade with other people (and later corporations).
Re:WHY so much of this lately?
on
The Apple Name Game
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There is a fairly easy explanation for this. In the soaring 90's, these companies made more revenue than they could ever imagine because people bought each and every product from them.
Now that the computer market has become highly saturated and the economy in a recession, companies will try to offset their losses by exploring new ways to make some money. When Apple or Microsoft go after these people, they hope they will fight against it and make way for a settlement. The company pays Microsoft (or Apple resp.) an undisclosed amount of money and in return Microsoft (or Apple) promises not to sue them.
The point of these cease-and-desist letters, trademark and patent lawsuits, etc. is not necessarily to stop other companies but to extort as much cash as possible. Makes perfect business sense to me.
Still PCS coverage is 10x the coverage of t-mobile(voicestream), which is why I think whoever your sales rep was might not know what he's talking about. They probably have the worst service of any national carrier, and the only reason they're even trying to get new subscribers is the fact they want to up the price when cingular (inevitably) buys them out.
Last thing I heard was that AT&T was interested in buying VoiceStream/T-Mobile USA. So far, Deutsche Telekom (DTAG) has only made losses with their American cell phone division. Considering the recent change of DTAG leadership in Germany, I presume it's only a matter of time before they sell T-Mobile USA. A pitty for GSM development in the US though:(
I don't know if it is just me or has the meaning of piracy been changed in the past decade? I always thought it was meant stealing in terms of robbery, i.e. taking *away* something that doesn't belong to you.
But it's that taking away part that I fail to see when it comes to movies or software. If I, purely for the sake of discussion, download a movie from the internet, how is that stealing if, at the end, the owner still has the original?
Or if I were to tape a movie off a screen, how can that constitute theft if (a) the movie is still in the possession of the owner, and (b) my copy is of a significantly less quality to the original.
So maybe instead of talking about piracy, we should rather start talking about unauthorized copying, which begs a totally different question: what right does the owner of software or a movie have to tell me what I can or can't copy. Last time I checked, the only one who can tell me anything are law enforcement officials acting out the law of the land. EULA's in and by themselves can't and shouldn't be able restrict my behavior after the act of purchase.
It is time that we start waking up and realizing that we as a civilization would not be where we are now had we not copied other people's invention. Imagine somebody had patented paper hundreds of years ago and charged horrendous license fees to produce paper. It is highly arguable that such a copyright could never have been in the public interest.
It's funny how so many people, especially in the US, are so adamant about freedom of choice and capitalism as an economic system. Where are those people when it comes to preserving our rights to choose what we want to do with a product after we bought it? Where have the ideals of fair competition gone if copyright terms get extended to a point where a perpetual copyright is becoming a reality?
Patents are by their very nature monopolistic. They go against everything that is considered "holy" in a capitalist economy. The original founders of copyright laws knew that very well. But they considered the increased incentive to invent an acceptable trade-off for monopolistic behavior, *as long* as the monopoly is limited in time. Without the latter part, we might just as well say capitalism in the movie and software industry good bye.
Delphi.NET will have the VCL and a lot of the other Borland libraries that have been introduced lately. You are not limited to using Window Forms and ADO.NET with Delphi.NET.
And now you get the same thing for $60 from Borland.
You can download Borland C++ Builder 6 Personal Edition which includes IDE, form designers, compiler, debugger, inline assembler, tons of demos, 1600+ pages of documentation, and an extensive help system.
Such a database could be exempt from US copyright laws if it was operated outside the US. Most European companies, for example, will not allow an EULA to dictate anything (much less anything about its own copyright status).
Kylix uses Wine exclusively for its own IDE. None of the binaries you produce will require any kind of emulation layer. They will need Qt running though.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this will have any repercussions on current space missions. Seems like a lot of missions lately have failed.
Yup. That and 617 additional ones as of 11:51pm CST totalling 2117. I wonder if that's a new record for a slashdot post.
Any veterans here remember anything with more comments than that?
Well, the problem is, I think, that the more people read your magazine, the harder it becomes to stay independent. Advertising deals might require favorable stories for the product or company, contributions from interest groups bind into supporting a certain political view.
The costs of publishing in large volume make it prohibitive to rely on small-scale advertising and subscription income. Just have a look at the major newspapers in the United States (e.g. New York Times, Washinton Post, USA Today). None of them is impartial or unbiased in their reporting.
Interesting contrast to the mainstream press which usually tries to appear impartial.
yeah, right. does anybody really believe that there's such a thing as impartial or opinion-free press? I have yet to see one
StarOffice used to be a fully commercial and proprietary product before Sun bought it from Star**** (don't remember the full name here), a German company. They published the source code for it and maintain a closed-source version including support and documentation. It was actually a fairly advanced office suite when Sun bought it.
Yeah, but even if that right exists, as long as the law doesn't recognize it and protect its existence and enforcability, it might just as well not exist.
This is kind of like the human rights the Weimar constitution in 1920's Germany listed. They were there allright but not enforcable in a court of law.
When I said depending on your jurisdiction, I was talking about a global leve. Amendments to the Constitution of the United States mean squad outside of US jurisdiction.
lol. I guess I had a language block. That's actually the German spelling. What I was referring to is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The United Nations listed them in the Charta of Human Rights.
Actually, not all human rights violations are illegal. Depending on the your jurisdiction, not all human rights are part of your local laws.
In theory, doing business is about providing value to your customers and fostering sound relationships with your suppliers, including your employees who provide the labor you need. In theory, businesses don't have a need to extort their employees because they see them as an important part of the business' capital. In theory, there is also a meaningful relationship between the wage rate of the lowest paid employee and the salary of the CEO.
But, in reality, the latter isn't true anymore. What we have done in the 90's is vastly overpay managers at the highest levels at the expense of the rest of the employees. What we have done is apply the basic ideas of capitalism (demand/supply and competition) to a social structure within the company that has led to a hierarchy where everyone is just out to get to the better end of everything, where cheating, lying and corruption is rewarded, where honesty and cooperation is punished.
It hasn't always been like that. I work as the bookkeeper/accountant in a small business. It is frightening to see that in a venture like this where the personal assets of the owners are at risk, where the owners work their hardest and accept pay cuts to keep the company running in hope for future revenue, the employees are actually treated as valuable assets. It is frightening because in large businesses that have all the resources available to treat their employees with dignity and respect, those resources are rather used to give the CEO another raise on top of his multi-million dollar salary.
Adam Smith & Co never thought of capitalism as the foundation of social order. It was supposed to be the basis for how we conduct trade with other people (and later corporations).
There is a fairly easy explanation for this. In the soaring 90's, these companies made more revenue than they could ever imagine because people bought each and every product from them.
Now that the computer market has become highly saturated and the economy in a recession, companies will try to offset their losses by exploring new ways to make some money. When Apple or Microsoft go after these people, they hope they will fight against it and make way for a settlement. The company pays Microsoft (or Apple resp.) an undisclosed amount of money and in return Microsoft (or Apple) promises not to sue them.
The point of these cease-and-desist letters, trademark and patent lawsuits, etc. is not necessarily to stop other companies but to extort as much cash as possible. Makes perfect business sense to me.
The "Ode to Joy" or the entire 9th symphony for that matter is a work in the public domain (and has been so for a very long time).
Still PCS coverage is 10x the coverage of t-mobile(voicestream), which is why I think whoever your sales rep was might not know what he's talking about. They probably have the worst service of any national carrier, and the only reason they're even trying to get new subscribers is the fact they want to up the price when cingular (inevitably) buys them out.
:(
Last thing I heard was that AT&T was interested in buying VoiceStream/T-Mobile USA. So far, Deutsche Telekom (DTAG) has only made losses with their American cell phone division. Considering the recent change of DTAG leadership in Germany, I presume it's only a matter of time before they sell T-Mobile USA. A pitty for GSM development in the US though
I don't know if it is just me or has the meaning of piracy been changed in the past decade? I always thought it was meant stealing in terms of robbery, i.e. taking *away* something that doesn't belong to you.
But it's that taking away part that I fail to see when it comes to movies or software. If I, purely for the sake of discussion, download a movie from the internet, how is that stealing if, at the end, the owner still has the original?
Or if I were to tape a movie off a screen, how can that constitute theft if (a) the movie is still in the possession of the owner, and (b) my copy is of a significantly less quality to the original.
So maybe instead of talking about piracy, we should rather start talking about unauthorized copying, which begs a totally different question: what right does the owner of software or a movie have to tell me what I can or can't copy. Last time I checked, the only one who can tell me anything are law enforcement officials acting out the law of the land. EULA's in and by themselves can't and shouldn't be able restrict my behavior after the act of purchase.
It is time that we start waking up and realizing that we as a civilization would not be where we are now had we not copied other people's invention. Imagine somebody had patented paper hundreds of years ago and charged horrendous license fees to produce paper. It is highly arguable that such a copyright could never have been in the public interest.
It's funny how so many people, especially in the US, are so adamant about freedom of choice and capitalism as an economic system. Where are those people when it comes to preserving our rights to choose what we want to do with a product after we bought it? Where have the ideals of fair competition gone if copyright terms get extended to a point where a perpetual copyright is becoming a reality?
Patents are by their very nature monopolistic. They go against everything that is considered "holy" in a capitalist economy. The original founders of copyright laws knew that very well. But they considered the increased incentive to invent an acceptable trade-off for monopolistic behavior, *as long* as the monopoly is limited in time. Without the latter part, we might just as well say capitalism in the movie and software industry good bye.
Delphi.NET will have the VCL and a lot of the other Borland libraries that have been introduced lately. You are not limited to using Window Forms and ADO.NET with Delphi.NET.
Oops, it's just $69.90. Still not bad.
--
P.S. Somebody's gotta turn off those stupid time limits. I had to wait several minutes to write this addendum. Not fun.
And now you get the same thing for $60 from Borland.
You can download Borland C++ Builder 6 Personal Edition which includes IDE, form designers, compiler, debugger, inline assembler, tons of demos, 1600+ pages of documentation, and an extensive help system.
Sounds like a pretty good bargain to me.
Such a database could be exempt from US copyright laws if it was operated outside the US. Most European companies, for example, will not allow an EULA to dictate anything (much less anything about its own copyright status).
sm
Kylix uses Wine exclusively for its own IDE. None of the binaries you produce will require any kind of emulation layer. They will need Qt running though.