I attended a lecutre where the CEO of Hollywood video stated that over half the revenue on the average movie was generated by rentals, and that blockbuster and Hollywood account for somethig like 90% of rentals. So, there's really no chance the MPAA will say "no DVD for you".
This is a good thing. The MPAA will hear this comment. Whether they listen...who knows.
He says, "Obviously the goal of this website is not to provide terrorists or other nefarious types with the plans for a working cruise missile", but then he gets permission to export his technology to Iran? I suppose it's debatable if Iran=Terrorism, but what he says and what he does doesn't match apparently.
No, it doesn't look much like a Tardis (unless the Tardis' chameleon circuit is working). It looks like all the other ships that come in contact with the Tardis, particularly if that spaceship is on it's way to conquest.
Why do we need this? What's wrong with our current namespace that this will fix?
Sometimes it seems like many new ideas generate excitement just because they are new. This is one of them. Want to look up a patent, go to http://www.uspto.gov/ and look it up! There's no need for a URI of <info:USPTO/patents/12345666789>. Strings like that only get geeks excited...
In a way, I can see a type of Spanish of inquisition forming. I doubt public tourture will be back in vogue, but jailing without reasonable cause, threats based on your beliefs, thoughts, and writings (think DeCSS) are already back, not to mention the threats to remove your ability to make a living, which in some ways might be more insidious than some of the things the inquisition did (I can't recall an historical example where a farmer was released on the condition that they can't go back to farming). Sure, if you go kill someone, the constitution protects you and your rights and everyone is meticulous (sp?) in making sure you receive due process. But...break a patent or violate the DMCA and forget your rights. Your property might be taken, you may go to jail for a long time, and if you don't have enough money to fight the corporate lawyers, you're stuck.
I'm not taking a totally gloomy outlook. I think we're at the point that this trend can be changed, with education of the public. But, in ten or twenty years, if we don't educate our fellows, we'll look back on the freedoms we've had for the past years from today with longing and regret for what has been lost.
You are exactly right in the idea that this is a turning point of civilization. In history, the "dark ages" (in Europe) were brought about by the repression of a religion. Now, we're entering another "dark age" that will be global. This new dark age will not be brought about by religion, but by stupid laws such as these, large corporations, and governments who could care less as long as the bribes keep coming.
Prepare for a stunning lack of new breakthrough technical developments in the future.
When they shut down Napster, the complaints were something along the lines of, "they can't shut down a service that could offer legitimate content just because it happens to offer copyrighted content." Which seems quite correct.
Now they are going after those who are actually abusing the services rather than the services themselves, which I think is much better. This way, those of us who think much of the available content that's not spewed out by RIAA is better than the drivel that is, can still use various online services to get to the legitimate content without fear of RIAA shutting those services down because some moron put his Brittney Spears collection on the service. Instead of the service getting sued, said moron gets sued and the rest of us can continue on.
I'm surprised at the number of people who think the government of Brazil is going too far to mandate that government computers use open source. Brazil making this mandate is just like the CIO of some company making the mandate to use open source, or MS Windows. If Brazil was passing a law that forced all it's citizens to use open source, that would definately be going to far. Right now, it sounds like they've made the choice internally to use certain software systems, and htose software systems are open source, yay!
The open source community shouldn't second guess themselves when they score a win.
Problem: spammer uses the email address you just unsubscribed from to populate another spam email, with a different name and a different product. Noticing that happened, not to mention proving it in court, would be difficult.
The easiest way: if you receive an email that advertises a commercial product, and you're email is on a do-not-spam list, you get to sue for $1,000. People would sue all the time and the spammers would be forced out of business. Horaay!
But what about all those people who want to receive their Amazon newsletters, you ask? The do-not-spam list should have "allowed spammers". If you want to receive Amazon's email, you put their domain in the allow list. Amazon doesn't send you their "newsletter" even if you subscribe unless you put them on this allow list. They can even have a link to the do-not-spam registry home page so you can go easily and directly to the page and add their domain.
This may seem somewhat draconian and drastic, but Spam is such a huge problem, we need to get this type of system in place. We can't let people use the bandwidth, storage, and personal time that we pay for or provide to sell their ignoramous products.
"However, I don't think this is actually negatively affecting anything of importance. The major use for home broadband throughout the US is "piracy" -- and while I have no firm moral position on this, I don't think it's a good reason to demand cheap broadband."
Now there's a well researched and thought out statement if I ever heard one. What are you, a mindless believer in whatever the RIAA says (even though I assume you're in Australia)?
Really, it's stupid generic blanket frames of mind like this that are giving the goons trying to tie down all digital media an audience in the circles that matter. I have DSL (in the U.S.) and wouldn't trade it for dial up for anything. This is because of the speed of web surfing and being able to watch online streaming videos and other multimedia content, not to mention downloading the latest ISO's and other software. Downloading pirated media is not a concern of mine, or of most of my aquaintences who have some kind of high speed internet link.
I believe that if realistic statistics on pirating using the Internet were generated, instead of statistics that were dreamed up by a bunch of RIAA flunkies sitting isolated in a conference room, you would find piracy rates to be related by specific age groups and demographics rather than be related to type of Internet connection. Also, I think it's almost a certainty that the piracy rates would be lower than the RIAA wants the masses to believe.
I also find it amusing that, right after admitting that you don't do many of the things you would like to do online because of the bandwidth caps, you make the statement that this hasn't negatively affected anything of importance. It's the grass roots, "let's try this out", projects that produce some of the most interesting ideas and software. By your own admission, excessive bandwidth caps stifle this.
Additionally, what about all those kids that would like to do those things, gain the experience and learn, but who can't? Where's the next generation of geeks coming from? Perhaps not from the realm of personal experience and wonder, but from the MSCE classrooms of the world, which is unfortunate. In my experience, those with computer "book learning" are much less capable than those who also learned their skills by trian an error.
I will switch to Walmart if the service is comparible for one reason: I hate pop-ups, pop-unders and spam and Netflix engages in all three. I will be glad to switch from a company that engages in such low life advertising, even if they do provide good service.
I doubt Games Workshop would do this if a significant portion of their income came from online realtors. As a result, they probably think their bottom line won't change very much as a result of this policy. What they don't realize is that many people, especially including geeks, research products online before purchasing them anywhere. They want to see pictures, read comments, and look at prices, even if they don't purchase online.
Thus, this policy will cost Games Workshop more than they think it will.
I think you're over symplifying. Managers realize that the more different languages are used means that, most likely, the harder future support becomes. Instead of just giving the programmers free range in what language they should use, two or three languages should be selected that provide good coverage of various functionality, and development should be limited to those languages.
I've worked places where the developers use whatever language they want. Guess what? Every time one of the developers leaves, their stuff gets rewritten since no one else likes their choice of language. That's not good business.
The title of idiot manager should not be placed on anyone that wants to reduce the choices of the developers. Instead, it should be placed on managers that don't recognize that at least more than one language will be needed and force everyone into C++. Unfortunatly, it seems that if management makes a decision that limits the "freedom" of the developers, they are labeled idiots irregardless if their decision makes sense business-wise.
This is a great example of a win-win scenario. Seems perfectly reasonable to me and the results can benefit everyone. More frequencies, more channels, easier to cover a building, etc...
Would a lawsuit like you describe be valid when the law requires the manufacturer to include such a device? I suppose I could see it happening if the gun is proved defective and it is shown that the gun manufacturer knew that it could become defective.
Interesting to think about in a headache kind of legal way...
I think you might have missed the mark a bit. Not everyone, in fact I believe the majority of web surfers, mind the ads on web pages. (As long as they aren't pop-up or pop-under ads, of course.)
What made Google is the accuracy of the results. They could put banner ads in and people would still use Google, except for the odd geek here and there that has a problem with web sites paying the bills. However, if their results started getting worse, or they allowed companies to affect the order of search returns with their pocket books, then you would see a large migration away from Google.
One thing you'll want to avoid for servers is location based names. You already can use DNS standards to specify locations, I.E., smtp.us.companyname.com will tell you the server is in the U.S. Do your users really care what closet or state the server is in? Probably not. A naming scheme based on location might work for workstations, but doesn't make sense for anything else.
We use the scheme of [service provided][two digit counter].country.companyname.com. The primary server of this service has an alias without a two digit code.
For example. A group of mail servers would be named:
We've found this to be very effective as the name tells us 90% of what we want to know about the server, but doesn't overburden our administrators with having to remember hard to remember names. Plus, if you don't remember which server is the primary dns, ntp, or smtp server, you just type something like "dns.companyname.com" to get to the primary server. Development servers are also easily recognized.
I'm really not surprised that Caldera went out of business. I remember that I first learned linux using a Caldera distribution. I liked the distro, but installing new software was a pain because the libraries weren't in the standard places. Once I toured Caldera's office and I remember the tour guide saying something to the effect of "I know we have a lot of library problems, hehehehe" like it was no big deal. Any company with that attitude was doomed to go under. After I heard that, I switched to another distro.
Perhaps I spend more money on Linux, per se, than Windows, because I'll never purchase Windows. But, how much money do others not spend because they burn the CD's from me? Also, at work we buy every new distribution version (for the distributions we use) when it comes out, but not for every server, like we would have to for Windows. So, in the end, our cost is much lower than if our servers were Microsoft based.
Plus, I would wager that a lot of./'s download ISO images instead of purchasing the CD's.
I agree with what your saying whole-heartedly on a personal basis. However, I interpreted RMS's speach as a sort of rebuttal of the idiocy that Microsoft was spreading. Thus, it seems that if Microsoft focused their statements at the corporation and at the CIO, etc, then RMS might have given a better rebuttal to Microsoft by including the economic reasons for using and contributing to open source.
Perhaps my "Missed the boat" title was too harsh. It just seems that what RMS said will have little effect on those who may make the financial commitment to Microsoft.
RMS replied using philosphical arguments. The origional arguments offered by Microsoft were based on economic arguments...the bottom line. Instead of focusing on the philsophy of open source, hit Microsoft where it hurts. Point out that the economy will benefit from not having half of their IT costs be gobbled up by licensing. So we lose a monopolistic company in the process. Who cares? The bottom line is that the money that's saved from licensing can go into expansion, lower prices, or whatever.
That will give the economy a better boost that keeping Microsoft around for philanthropic reasons.
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I attended a lecutre where the CEO of Hollywood video stated that over half the revenue on the average movie was generated by rentals, and that blockbuster and Hollywood account for somethig like 90% of rentals. So, there's really no chance the MPAA will say "no DVD for you".
This is a good thing. The MPAA will hear this comment. Whether they listen...who knows.
He says, "Obviously the goal of this website is not to provide terrorists or other nefarious types with the plans for a working cruise missile", but then he gets permission to export his technology to Iran? I suppose it's debatable if Iran=Terrorism, but what he says and what he does doesn't match apparently.
No, it doesn't look much like a Tardis (unless the Tardis' chameleon circuit is working). It looks like all the other ships that come in contact with the Tardis, particularly if that spaceship is on it's way to conquest.
Ok, now we're off topic. Sorry.
Obviously the submitter is a Dr. Who fan.
Why do we need this? What's wrong with our current namespace that this will fix?
Sometimes it seems like many new ideas generate excitement just because they are new. This is one of them. Want to look up a patent, go to http://www.uspto.gov/ and look it up! There's no need for a URI of <info:USPTO/patents/12345666789>. Strings like that only get geeks excited...
In a way, I can see a type of Spanish of inquisition forming. I doubt public tourture will be back in vogue, but jailing without reasonable cause, threats based on your beliefs, thoughts, and writings (think DeCSS) are already back, not to mention the threats to remove your ability to make a living, which in some ways might be more insidious than some of the things the inquisition did (I can't recall an historical example where a farmer was released on the condition that they can't go back to farming). Sure, if you go kill someone, the constitution protects you and your rights and everyone is meticulous (sp?) in making sure you receive due process. But...break a patent or violate the DMCA and forget your rights. Your property might be taken, you may go to jail for a long time, and if you don't have enough money to fight the corporate lawyers, you're stuck.
I'm not taking a totally gloomy outlook. I think we're at the point that this trend can be changed, with education of the public. But, in ten or twenty years, if we don't educate our fellows, we'll look back on the freedoms we've had for the past years from today with longing and regret for what has been lost.
You are exactly right in the idea that this is a turning point of civilization. In history, the "dark ages" (in Europe) were brought about by the repression of a religion. Now, we're entering another "dark age" that will be global. This new dark age will not be brought about by religion, but by stupid laws such as these, large corporations, and governments who could care less as long as the bribes keep coming.
Prepare for a stunning lack of new breakthrough technical developments in the future.
When they shut down Napster, the complaints were something along the lines of, "they can't shut down a service that could offer legitimate content just because it happens to offer copyrighted content." Which seems quite correct.
Now they are going after those who are actually abusing the services rather than the services themselves, which I think is much better. This way, those of us who think much of the available content that's not spewed out by RIAA is better than the drivel that is, can still use various online services to get to the legitimate content without fear of RIAA shutting those services down because some moron put his Brittney Spears collection on the service. Instead of the service getting sued, said moron gets sued and the rest of us can continue on.
I'm surprised at the number of people who think the government of Brazil is going too far to mandate that government computers use open source. Brazil making this mandate is just like the CIO of some company making the mandate to use open source, or MS Windows. If Brazil was passing a law that forced all it's citizens to use open source, that would definately be going to far. Right now, it sounds like they've made the choice internally to use certain software systems, and htose software systems are open source, yay!
The open source community shouldn't second guess themselves when they score a win.
Problem: spammer uses the email address you just unsubscribed from to populate another spam email, with a different name and a different product. Noticing that happened, not to mention proving it in court, would be difficult.
The easiest way: if you receive an email that advertises a commercial product, and you're email is on a do-not-spam list, you get to sue for $1,000. People would sue all the time and the spammers would be forced out of business. Horaay!
But what about all those people who want to receive their Amazon newsletters, you ask? The do-not-spam list should have "allowed spammers". If you want to receive Amazon's email, you put their domain in the allow list. Amazon doesn't send you their "newsletter" even if you subscribe unless you put them on this allow list. They can even have a link to the do-not-spam registry home page so you can go easily and directly to the page and add their domain.
This may seem somewhat draconian and drastic, but Spam is such a huge problem, we need to get this type of system in place. We can't let people use the bandwidth, storage, and personal time that we pay for or provide to sell their ignoramous products.
"However, I don't think this is actually negatively affecting anything of importance. The major use for home broadband throughout the US is "piracy" -- and while I have no firm moral position on this, I don't think it's a good reason to demand cheap broadband."
Now there's a well researched and thought out statement if I ever heard one. What are you, a mindless believer in whatever the RIAA says (even though I assume you're in Australia)?
Really, it's stupid generic blanket frames of mind like this that are giving the goons trying to tie down all digital media an audience in the circles that matter. I have DSL (in the U.S.) and wouldn't trade it for dial up for anything. This is because of the speed of web surfing and being able to watch online streaming videos and other multimedia content, not to mention downloading the latest ISO's and other software. Downloading pirated media is not a concern of mine, or of most of my aquaintences who have some kind of high speed internet link.
I believe that if realistic statistics on pirating using the Internet were generated, instead of statistics that were dreamed up by a bunch of RIAA flunkies sitting isolated in a conference room, you would find piracy rates to be related by specific age groups and demographics rather than be related to type of Internet connection. Also, I think it's almost a certainty that the piracy rates would be lower than the RIAA wants the masses to believe.
I also find it amusing that, right after admitting that you don't do many of the things you would like to do online because of the bandwidth caps, you make the statement that this hasn't negatively affected anything of importance. It's the grass roots, "let's try this out", projects that produce some of the most interesting ideas and software. By your own admission, excessive bandwidth caps stifle this.
Additionally, what about all those kids that would like to do those things, gain the experience and learn, but who can't? Where's the next generation of geeks coming from? Perhaps not from the realm of personal experience and wonder, but from the MSCE classrooms of the world, which is unfortunate. In my experience, those with computer "book learning" are much less capable than those who also learned their skills by trian an error.
I will switch to Walmart if the service is comparible for one reason: I hate pop-ups, pop-unders and spam and Netflix engages in all three. I will be glad to switch from a company that engages in such low life advertising, even if they do provide good service.
I doubt Games Workshop would do this if a significant portion of their income came from online realtors. As a result, they probably think their bottom line won't change very much as a result of this policy. What they don't realize is that many people, especially including geeks, research products online before purchasing them anywhere. They want to see pictures, read comments, and look at prices, even if they don't purchase online.
Thus, this policy will cost Games Workshop more than they think it will.
How long have you been waiting to use that one? :)
I think you're over symplifying. Managers realize that the more different languages are used means that, most likely, the harder future support becomes. Instead of just giving the programmers free range in what language they should use, two or three languages should be selected that provide good coverage of various functionality, and development should be limited to those languages.
I've worked places where the developers use whatever language they want. Guess what? Every time one of the developers leaves, their stuff gets rewritten since no one else likes their choice of language. That's not good business.
The title of idiot manager should not be placed on anyone that wants to reduce the choices of the developers. Instead, it should be placed on managers that don't recognize that at least more than one language will be needed and force everyone into C++. Unfortunatly, it seems that if management makes a decision that limits the "freedom" of the developers, they are labeled idiots irregardless if their decision makes sense business-wise.
This is a great example of a win-win scenario. Seems perfectly reasonable to me and the results can benefit everyone. More frequencies, more channels, easier to cover a building, etc...
Would a lawsuit like you describe be valid when the law requires the manufacturer to include such a device? I suppose I could see it happening if the gun is proved defective and it is shown that the gun manufacturer knew that it could become defective.
Interesting to think about in a headache kind of legal way...
I think you might have missed the mark a bit. Not everyone, in fact I believe the majority of web surfers, mind the ads on web pages. (As long as they aren't pop-up or pop-under ads, of course.)
What made Google is the accuracy of the results. They could put banner ads in and people would still use Google, except for the odd geek here and there that has a problem with web sites paying the bills. However, if their results started getting worse, or they allowed companies to affect the order of search returns with their pocket books, then you would see a large migration away from Google.
If Kirk and Gandalf got into a fight, who would win?
Does anyone know how Sharp is doing selling the Zaurus? Are they selling many? (I.e. enough to keep on making it.)
One thing you'll want to avoid for servers is location based names. You already can use DNS standards to specify locations, I.E., smtp.us.companyname.com will tell you the server is in the U.S. Do your users really care what closet or state the server is in? Probably not. A naming scheme based on location might work for workstations, but doesn't make sense for anything else.
e .com
e .com
We use the scheme of [service provided][two digit counter].country.companyname.com. The primary server of this service has an alias without a two digit code.
For example. A group of mail servers would be named:
mail01.us.companyname.com
mail02.us.companynam
mail03.us.companyname.com
With an alias for the primary server being:
mail.us.companyname.com
All development or testing servers don't use numbers but use letter as their counter. For example, mail development servers would be:
mail0a.us.companyname.com
mail0b.us.companynam
We've found this to be very effective as the name tells us 90% of what we want to know about the server, but doesn't overburden our administrators with having to remember hard to remember names. Plus, if you don't remember which server is the primary dns, ntp, or smtp server, you just type something like "dns.companyname.com" to get to the primary server. Development servers are also easily recognized.
I'm really not surprised that Caldera went out of business. I remember that I first learned linux using a Caldera distribution. I liked the distro, but installing new software was a pain because the libraries weren't in the standard places. Once I toured Caldera's office and I remember the tour guide saying something to the effect of "I know we have a lot of library problems, hehehehe" like it was no big deal. Any company with that attitude was doomed to go under. After I heard that, I switched to another distro.
Perhaps I spend more money on Linux, per se, than Windows, because I'll never purchase Windows. But, how much money do others not spend because they burn the CD's from me? Also, at work we buy every new distribution version (for the distributions we use) when it comes out, but not for every server, like we would have to for Windows. So, in the end, our cost is much lower than if our servers were Microsoft based. Plus, I would wager that a lot of ./'s download ISO images instead of purchasing the CD's.
I agree with what your saying whole-heartedly on a personal basis. However, I interpreted RMS's speach as a sort of rebuttal of the idiocy that Microsoft was spreading. Thus, it seems that if Microsoft focused their statements at the corporation and at the CIO, etc, then RMS might have given a better rebuttal to Microsoft by including the economic reasons for using and contributing to open source.
Perhaps my "Missed the boat" title was too harsh. It just seems that what RMS said will have little effect on those who may make the financial commitment to Microsoft.
RMS replied using philosphical arguments. The origional arguments offered by Microsoft were based on economic arguments...the bottom line. Instead of focusing on the philsophy of open source, hit Microsoft where it hurts. Point out that the economy will benefit from not having half of their IT costs be gobbled up by licensing. So we lose a monopolistic company in the process. Who cares? The bottom line is that the money that's saved from licensing can go into expansion, lower prices, or whatever.
That will give the economy a better boost that keeping Microsoft around for philanthropic reasons.