I don't really think there will be much of a change in the percentage of female involvement in open source coding no matter what we do (unless Mattel introduces Open Source Coding Barbie).
They merely have the distinction of requiring less mental effort to understand and talk about, which in most circles is a huge advantage. It is, after all, unpopular to display any sign of intelligence in polite company. We have our culture to thank for that, and for the subsequent decline in science education such an attitude brings. If this continues, we'll soon all live in the stone age, and rock climbing will be the only hobby you'll be able to have.
I'm not so sure that this is a cultural thing. You displaying superior intelligence means that the receiving party feels inferior. Nobody likes to feel that way, that's a basic biological trait everyone has.
Most women are looking for a mature adult, not an overgrown child. If you can demonstrate that you are definitively the former, despite still playing games, then she will likely overlook that trait.
FYI, your implication that only children play games is quite offensive for a lot of people and very untrue. I don't think I personally know more than a handful of (grown) people who don't like playing board or card games.
I'm a Wuala user myself, so perhaps I've overlooked something - but how does Dropbox hope to earn money? By selling additional disk space or turning the free accounts into paid ones once people begin to rely on them?
As far as I've heard, they're already in the black by selling additional disk space.
How many people have been killed in Guantanamo? How many US citizens are currently being held there? How do these number make the US the new Nazi's?
Nobody outside the military knows exactly, but three people are said to have been killed, with hints to more.
The "nobody knows exactly" part is the answer to your third question.
Software patents cover existing technologies, what stops you from creating something new?
No, software patents cover ideas, not technology. Besides that, how should I know what has been patented? There are thousands of patents I'd have to check for every line of my code, with many many more being approved constantly. Only a huge company with its own legal division can even come close to do something like that, even in theory. In practice, nobody does, they just cross-license or sue the hell out of each other. All three are not an option for small startups.
Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in the last decade -- why didn't software patents stop him?
He probably got lucky, and/or did some sweet deals... Being at Harvard probably did help a lot.
If SOPA is so egregious that it warrants a violent revolution then it seems like it would be easy to collect the signatures to start a referendum, right?
Nope, because people are lazy. However, this has been covered multiple times in this article's comments, so I won't get into details.
How many people does the "facist government" put to death in concentration camps each year?
Ever heard of Guantanamo? It's not just for foreigners any more.
In the last 30 years I remember a ton of new billionaires being created out of their own new talents. What stops you from doing the same and changing things?
Software patents. You can't afford to be noticed by anybody in the industry by being too successful. Just look at the patent wars going on in the mobile space at the moment.
Even if you don't have the intelligence or capabilities to succeed, why don't you simply start a referendum to have the bills you don't like repealed?
Because he's not rich enough to do that? You need a lot of money for the general public to even notice anything.
You know what's funny? In Germany, the president is currently under a lot of pressure, and may have to resign, because he got a private credit for his house at too favorable a rate of interest.
That's not the whole story. The bigger part of the outcry is because he wanted to silence the publication (no, I'm not calling "Bild" a newspaper. Compared to it, even Fox News is fair and accurate...) that wanted to publish this piece of information and threatened the "reporter" via phone (the exact wording is still unknown, as far as I know). Freedom of the press is still a big thing in Germany.
But generally, politicians get booted for receiving money from companies in any shape or form in Europe, exactly to avoid the disaster happening in the US right now.
The problem is based on the US legal system the way to challenge the Constitutionality of these laws is to break them, and then (after a likely horrible reaming by the justice system) appeal to the Supreme court to try to get it overturned.
Uh, if you do stand up against them, you get detained indefinitely without any rights, so how are you supposed to challenge anything from that position?
And you weren't around to realize Hotmail was a separate entity until Microsoft bought it. If anything it proves they eat their own dog food.
Uh, that's totally beside the point. Microsoft bought a well-working BSD-based webmail service, and moved it to the Windows platform for no technical reason. The result was a lot of issues and downtime.
Nope, they have several times clarified on the forum that blocks are encrypted with the Dropbox key before they are stored in S3 - it was the whole "so you aren't encrypting using individual keys" that was the highlighted issue.
The forums are read by very few Dropbox users. Essentially they are implying an untruth on their official page, while stating the real facts hidden away.
I am aware that people with security in mind should check the facts themselves instead of relying on marketing pages, but still that doesn't excuse the vague wording.
They have never made false claims about security - that's a trumped up argument. A logical block to employees accessing your files is what they claimed to have in place, and is perfectly valid - however, someone assumed something else and voila - we have a "security issue".
On their web site, they make the marketing-language claim that they are using AES encryption, without any modifiers to narrow down that statement. Many people obviously thought that they are using encryption on the server's storage, when actually they only encrypt the transmission. For technically-minded people this is obvious (due to the web interface and the cross-user deduplication), but for others it's not.
Do remember, Ive was at Apple long before Jobs came out and how well did that go?
Yes, Steve Jobs' biography implies that the most important change Steve Jobs implemented when he came back to Apple (except for getting himself to the top) was to move Ive up to the top of the corporate food chain (only Jobs himself was above him, and he didn't hinder Ive at all), so he had free reign to get his ideas implemented, no matter how nutty they were (like the handle on the original iMac, which didn't serve any physical purpose and was very expensive).
Steve Jobs was the facilitator, but the real mastermind behind all the hardware is Ive.
The infringement in this case was that real view had illegally downloaded a pirate copy of 20-20's flagship product, and then used that as part of their development process for their own product. In particular, they effectively cloned the GUI and a number of other features, so that users who had previously used 20-20's product could switch to the new real view product without retraining.
Unless they have a design patent on the UI (like Apple has for many things), they don't have any legal standing. Of course, that's totally irrelevant to a copyright case anyways, unless they actually took the icons from 20-20's product.
So apart from the fact they're walled gardens, each implement a different subset of the standard that corresponds to whatever actual underlying protocol they use, and (in the case of MSN and Facebook) have their own authentication system that no-one else uses, in theory with a good wind behind you they can actually be connected to with some of the same code.
Well, yes:) Still, it's much better than what has to be done for otherprotocols.
While you're generally correct, at least in IM a standardization process has been happening. Google, Facebook and MSN have adopted the XMPP protocol (RFC 6120) for chatting. Once you have a generic XMPP client, it's easy to connect to those networks (well, some coding is required for MSN and recommended for Facebook to use their oauth implementations, but that's trivial compared to implementing a whole new protocol).
All except Google's are still walled gardens, but I guess that's company policy.
Coming from embedded device development, I can tell you that adding an LCD display is waaaay too expensive for these kind of devices to be considered. It's not only the LCD display itself, you also need the controller and the software to control it.
As a contrast, in the company I worked there was a bounty on reducing the BOM price. One employee won it with a 10 cents/piece reduction by using cheaper rubber material for the printer unit's paper transport system. The result was that the device was completely unusable (I had one of them on my workplace there), you had to supply the sheets manually one by one so it didn't mess up. But hey, it was 10 cents cheaper, so they went right ahead.
It really depresses me that this random person that I don't even think I know posted some random invented crap about me on this site and now it shows up when I google myself (which I don't do, because it depresses me as a result of this). But there's absolutely no recourse. Unless I want to pay a bunch of money tot he guy who runs this rip off of a site.
This sounds to me like there's a real possibility that this guy himself invented some random bad stuff, attached real names from a phonebook or some other source to it and hopes that these people pay him money for removing it again. I guess that would be great business plan for someone lacking any hint of morals.
What are you talking about ? Experts agree that in the presidential election of 2012, internet will have more influence than TV.
Sure: cnn.com, foxnews.com, gop.com, democrats.org, whitehouse.gov, etc.
And OWS gets a lot of online coverage.
On the large news outlets, that's mostly smearing campaigns, like OWS not having a clear goal (they do) and attendees being rude to jewish passersby (that guy is a known offline troll and a jew himself).
Check the news, Twitter and facebook have literally caused revolutions in Arab states where traditional media are a tad more controlled than in US.
Those states did not employ the Roman strategy of bread and circuses for the middle class. In contrast, the ruling class in the US has perfected it, in the form of fast food and media. As long as the majority of the population has that, no revolution will take place, and few will actively look into politics (which is what happened in the arab spring, people started to be active in politics). The new media is an active form of information transfer, you have to look for stuff. In the old media, everything is brought to you (prefiltered), which is much more convenient.
If you believe that twitter only gets 1000 votes, please read the link. In a single district, an unknown candidate got 3000 donations through internet.
I'm pretty sure part of that was also the novelty factor. However, I'd love to be proven wrong on my convictions. It just hasn't happened yet.
Not to mention every single business that I've ever dealt with has some sort of proprietary in-house software for one need or another. If it's a networked application then it's running on IPv4 no doubt.
All Java apps magically support IPv6 without any changes to the code (unless the program does some IP trickery itself, like storing the IP address as text in a database field that only allows 15 characters max). HTTP clients and servers all support IPv6. That should take care of a lot of custom software.
And is that a good reason to not try ? It just means it won't be easy.
Or rather impossible. Zero exposure in traditional media and no funding at all...
That said, I'm not saying that they should stop trying. I just don't believe in them succeeding, at least with their current strategy (if you can call it a strategy).
Anyway, the thing to do is to gather votes.
How? Via facebook, twitter, reddit and slashdot? Maybe that could amount to about 1000 votes! A true revolution in democracy! It might be possible in 2 or 3 generations, when traditional mass media will be significantly replaced by user-produced content, but currently it looks like the establishment is trying to prevent just that. It's a race which appears that we're losing right now.
In a country where an obvious brain-killer like FOX News has more than 1% penetration, you can't honestly expect any significant number of people to not adhere to the herd mentality.
If you try to play by their rules, you have ~220 years of experience in working with those to catch up on. People complain that politicians are meddling in areas they don't understand when crafting SOPA, but it would be exactly the same for an OWS party. The only way to get around that would be to get single politicians from the two parties to join, but that's very unlikely to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really think there will be much of a change in the percentage of female involvement in open source coding no matter what we do (unless Mattel introduces Open Source Coding Barbie).
Like this one?
Not sure what her stance on GPL is though, doesn't say on the packaging.
They merely have the distinction of requiring less mental effort to understand and talk about, which in most circles is a huge advantage. It is, after all, unpopular to display any sign of intelligence in polite company. We have our culture to thank for that, and for the subsequent decline in science education such an attitude brings. If this continues, we'll soon all live in the stone age, and rock climbing will be the only hobby you'll be able to have.
I'm not so sure that this is a cultural thing. You displaying superior intelligence means that the receiving party feels inferior. Nobody likes to feel that way, that's a basic biological trait everyone has.
Most women are looking for a mature adult, not an overgrown child. If you can demonstrate that you are definitively the former, despite still playing games, then she will likely overlook that trait.
FYI, your implication that only children play games is quite offensive for a lot of people and very untrue. I don't think I personally know more than a handful of (grown) people who don't like playing board or card games.
As I recall, google actually had a hard time getting investors early on because no one thought there was any more money in search.
That was probably correct. After all, they're not selling search, they're selling advertisement spots.
I'm a Wuala user myself, so perhaps I've overlooked something - but how does Dropbox hope to earn money? By selling additional disk space or turning the free accounts into paid ones once people begin to rely on them?
As far as I've heard, they're already in the black by selling additional disk space.
Have you actually watched Fox News? Compared to their venom spouting gibberish fake news BILD would be a quality newspaper.
Heh, I won't get into that discussion. Have a picture I took in Cologne instead :)
How many people have been killed in Guantanamo? How many US citizens are currently being held there? How do these number make the US the new Nazi's?
Nobody outside the military knows exactly, but three people are said to have been killed, with hints to more.
The "nobody knows exactly" part is the answer to your third question.
Software patents cover existing technologies, what stops you from creating something new?
No, software patents cover ideas, not technology. Besides that, how should I know what has been patented? There are thousands of patents I'd have to check for every line of my code, with many many more being approved constantly. Only a huge company with its own legal division can even come close to do something like that, even in theory. In practice, nobody does, they just cross-license or sue the hell out of each other. All three are not an option for small startups.
Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in the last decade -- why didn't software patents stop him?
He probably got lucky, and/or did some sweet deals... Being at Harvard probably did help a lot.
If SOPA is so egregious that it warrants a violent revolution then it seems like it would be easy to collect the signatures to start a referendum, right?
Nope, because people are lazy. However, this has been covered multiple times in this article's comments, so I won't get into details.
How many people does the "facist government" put to death in concentration camps each year?
Ever heard of Guantanamo? It's not just for foreigners any more.
In the last 30 years I remember a ton of new billionaires being created out of their own new talents. What stops you from doing the same and changing things?
Software patents. You can't afford to be noticed by anybody in the industry by being too successful. Just look at the patent wars going on in the mobile space at the moment.
Even if you don't have the intelligence or capabilities to succeed, why don't you simply start a referendum to have the bills you don't like repealed?
Because he's not rich enough to do that? You need a lot of money for the general public to even notice anything.
You know what's funny? In Germany, the president is currently under a lot of pressure, and may have to resign, because he got a private credit for his house at too favorable a rate of interest.
That's not the whole story. The bigger part of the outcry is because he wanted to silence the publication (no, I'm not calling "Bild" a newspaper. Compared to it, even Fox News is fair and accurate...) that wanted to publish this piece of information and threatened the "reporter" via phone (the exact wording is still unknown, as far as I know). Freedom of the press is still a big thing in Germany.
But generally, politicians get booted for receiving money from companies in any shape or form in Europe, exactly to avoid the disaster happening in the US right now.
Can you name some of these Americans who are being detained indefinitely without any rights?
How is that question relevant to the point that they have the legal rights to do so?
Well, in all seriousness, you are not going to be sent to a maximum security military prison for telling a TSA employee at a bus station to piss off.
Are you really willing to risk your whole life on the goodwill of somebody who volunteered to join the TSA?
The problem is based on the US legal system the way to challenge the Constitutionality of these laws is to break them, and then (after a likely horrible reaming by the justice system) appeal to the Supreme court to try to get it overturned.
Uh, if you do stand up against them, you get detained indefinitely without any rights, so how are you supposed to challenge anything from that position?
And you weren't around to realize Hotmail was a separate entity until Microsoft bought it. If anything it proves they eat their own dog food.
Uh, that's totally beside the point. Microsoft bought a well-working BSD-based webmail service, and moved it to the Windows platform for no technical reason. The result was a lot of issues and downtime.
Nope, they have several times clarified on the forum that blocks are encrypted with the Dropbox key before they are stored in S3 - it was the whole "so you aren't encrypting using individual keys" that was the highlighted issue.
The forums are read by very few Dropbox users. Essentially they are implying an untruth on their official page, while stating the real facts hidden away.
I am aware that people with security in mind should check the facts themselves instead of relying on marketing pages, but still that doesn't excuse the vague wording.
They have never made false claims about security - that's a trumped up argument. A logical block to employees accessing your files is what they claimed to have in place, and is perfectly valid - however, someone assumed something else and voila - we have a "security issue".
On their web site, they make the marketing-language claim that they are using AES encryption, without any modifiers to narrow down that statement. Many people obviously thought that they are using encryption on the server's storage, when actually they only encrypt the transmission. For technically-minded people this is obvious (due to the web interface and the cross-user deduplication), but for others it's not.
Unlike smelly hippies, they're not going to trash a perfectly good service just because of rah rah candy ass confusion of software and ideology.
I guess you weren't around yet when they switched Hotmail from BSD to Windows?
Do remember, Ive was at Apple long before Jobs came out and how well did that go?
Yes, Steve Jobs' biography implies that the most important change Steve Jobs implemented when he came back to Apple (except for getting himself to the top) was to move Ive up to the top of the corporate food chain (only Jobs himself was above him, and he didn't hinder Ive at all), so he had free reign to get his ideas implemented, no matter how nutty they were (like the handle on the original iMac, which didn't serve any physical purpose and was very expensive).
Steve Jobs was the facilitator, but the real mastermind behind all the hardware is Ive.
The infringement in this case was that real view had illegally downloaded a pirate copy of 20-20's flagship product, and then used that as part of their development process for their own product. In particular, they effectively cloned the GUI and a number of other features, so that users who had previously used 20-20's product could switch to the new real view product without retraining.
Unless they have a design patent on the UI (like Apple has for many things), they don't have any legal standing. Of course, that's totally irrelevant to a copyright case anyways, unless they actually took the icons from 20-20's product.
So apart from the fact they're walled gardens, each implement a different subset of the standard that corresponds to whatever actual underlying protocol they use, and (in the case of MSN and Facebook) have their own authentication system that no-one else uses, in theory with a good wind behind you they can actually be connected to with some of the same code.
Well, yes :) Still, it's much better than what has to be done for other protocols.
While you're generally correct, at least in IM a standardization process has been happening. Google, Facebook and MSN have adopted the XMPP protocol (RFC 6120) for chatting. Once you have a generic XMPP client, it's easy to connect to those networks (well, some coding is required for MSN and recommended for Facebook to use their oauth implementations, but that's trivial compared to implementing a whole new protocol).
All except Google's are still walled gardens, but I guess that's company policy.
Coming from embedded device development, I can tell you that adding an LCD display is waaaay too expensive for these kind of devices to be considered. It's not only the LCD display itself, you also need the controller and the software to control it.
As a contrast, in the company I worked there was a bounty on reducing the BOM price. One employee won it with a 10 cents/piece reduction by using cheaper rubber material for the printer unit's paper transport system. The result was that the device was completely unusable (I had one of them on my workplace there), you had to supply the sheets manually one by one so it didn't mess up. But hey, it was 10 cents cheaper, so they went right ahead.
It really depresses me that this random person that I don't even think I know posted some random invented crap about me on this site and now it shows up when I google myself (which I don't do, because it depresses me as a result of this). But there's absolutely no recourse. Unless I want to pay a bunch of money tot he guy who runs this rip off of a site.
This sounds to me like there's a real possibility that this guy himself invented some random bad stuff, attached real names from a phonebook or some other source to it and hopes that these people pay him money for removing it again. I guess that would be great business plan for someone lacking any hint of morals.
What are you talking about ? Experts agree that in the presidential election of 2012, internet will have more influence than TV.
Sure: cnn.com, foxnews.com, gop.com, democrats.org, whitehouse.gov, etc.
And OWS gets a lot of online coverage.
On the large news outlets, that's mostly smearing campaigns, like OWS not having a clear goal (they do) and attendees being rude to jewish passersby (that guy is a known offline troll and a jew himself).
Check the news, Twitter and facebook have literally caused revolutions in Arab states where traditional media are a tad more controlled than in US.
Those states did not employ the Roman strategy of bread and circuses for the middle class. In contrast, the ruling class in the US has perfected it, in the form of fast food and media. As long as the majority of the population has that, no revolution will take place, and few will actively look into politics (which is what happened in the arab spring, people started to be active in politics). The new media is an active form of information transfer, you have to look for stuff. In the old media, everything is brought to you (prefiltered), which is much more convenient.
You live in a country where this happened.
Actually I don't, but that's beside the point :)
If you believe that twitter only gets 1000 votes, please read the link. In a single district, an unknown candidate got 3000 donations through internet.
I'm pretty sure part of that was also the novelty factor. However, I'd love to be proven wrong on my convictions. It just hasn't happened yet.
Not to mention every single business that I've ever dealt with has some sort of proprietary in-house software for one need or another. If it's a networked application then it's running on IPv4 no doubt.
All Java apps magically support IPv6 without any changes to the code (unless the program does some IP trickery itself, like storing the IP address as text in a database field that only allows 15 characters max). HTTP clients and servers all support IPv6. That should take care of a lot of custom software.
And is that a good reason to not try ? It just means it won't be easy.
Or rather impossible. Zero exposure in traditional media and no funding at all...
That said, I'm not saying that they should stop trying. I just don't believe in them succeeding, at least with their current strategy (if you can call it a strategy).
Anyway, the thing to do is to gather votes.
How? Via facebook, twitter, reddit and slashdot? Maybe that could amount to about 1000 votes! A true revolution in democracy! It might be possible in 2 or 3 generations, when traditional mass media will be significantly replaced by user-produced content, but currently it looks like the establishment is trying to prevent just that. It's a race which appears that we're losing right now.
In a country where an obvious brain-killer like FOX News has more than 1% penetration, you can't honestly expect any significant number of people to not adhere to the herd mentality.
If you try to play by their rules, you have ~220 years of experience in working with those to catch up on. People complain that politicians are meddling in areas they don't understand when crafting SOPA, but it would be exactly the same for an OWS party. The only way to get around that would be to get single politicians from the two parties to join, but that's very unlikely to happen.