It's unfortunate that the parent was modded a flamebait as he happens to make a very valid point. The current US administration has not been honoring the international treaties that it is a party to. Glossing over the whole "legality" of Bush's appointment to the office of President, there are the issues of the Geneva convention, the Kyoto Agreement and several others which, if I had the time and the caffeine, I would cite here.
The fact is, for the past several years, we haven't been playing by the rules. The dues that the US owes to the United Nations is a very good example of why we, as US citizens, would not want an international body controlling the Internet. We haven't been paying the bills and the Internet would be used as a measure of control and influence over our policies and practices. The US economy has come to rely on the Net too greatly to give up such a significant measure of control.
It is far better for our own concerns to keep that control for our own.
Actually, there is not. Retail is governed by the states unless inter-state mail-order is involved, in which case the federal (US) government gets involved. Regardless, there is no "federal law" requiring a refund policy. However, if you do not post your return policy in a publicly accessible place, you leave yourself open to a situation where you, as the retailer, would most likely lose a dispute over a return, should that dispute go to court.
If you know otherwise, by all means, please post the relevant links here.
Yes, true, however, the site mentioned here is one geared towards promoting independent artists who have more control over how their music is used. In this particular case, such a method of promotion could be possible.
An interesting site and one I'm sure that I will be visiting (and purchasing from) often.
As for the samples, 30 seconds are nice (60 are better) but one thing that has caused me to buy a TON of music is radio streams. Some sites have set up various genre-themed channels where they play the music that they sell. You get to hear the entire song, hear other music that you might not have thought of sampling, and all of the track info is carried with the stream.
I don't own a record store. It's a hobby shop - nothing to do with the RIAA. Lucky me, I can sleep at night.
My reaction was to the suggestion of buying, then returning, large quantities of product in order to hurt the music industry. It won't. It'll hurt the retailer.
Yes, by all means, let's hit the RIAA where they'll feel it the most: the RETAILERS. Let's really put the screws to the music labels by forcing the RETAILERS to lose millions of dollars on labor costs and credit card transaction fees. Let's force the RIAA to listen to our angered cries by clearing out the RETAILERS' inventories, making them re-order their stock, paying for rushed processing and delivery charges. Let us cheer in our new found victories while the RETAILERS have to sit on a pile of extra (NON-REFUNDABLE) inventory, costing them lost revenue and storage charges. Let's really fuck over the music industry by preventing RETAILERS from ordering new product, thereby causing their customers to stop coming into the store, since all that is on the shelves is old product. Hey, if we hit it on the right day of the month, we can even cause the RETAILER to pay thousands in extra sales/revenue tax thereby ensuring that they can't afford to do business anymore.
Here's an idea: how about growing the fuck up and paying for your music and movies? How about not stealing things that don't belong to you? How about abandoning your rediculously naive and misguided notion that you are somehow entitled to free merchandise.?
This is not a troll. I am a retailer. I own a brick-and-mortar retail store. *I* am the one who gets screwed when you do things like this. The products that I sell are part of my livelihood. All that you are going to accomplish from action like this is a reduction in the new products that I can afford to offer, a change in my return policy and you getting banned from my store. Returns are a courtesy extended to the public - they are not mandated by law. Abuse our goodwill and you will lose our goodwill.
Protect your independant retailers. Don't listen to drivel like the parent's post.
One of my businesses is a retail store and we use the CamCommerce RetailIce POS (that's "Point-of-Sale", wise guys). The cost is $30 for a stand-alone station and it runs on a Windows PC. While I'm not sure if they still do this, the publisher was selling it on EBay for $15 when I bought it.
RetailIce is a full-featured system that does what you are looking for. We have been using it for almost two years now and it has certainly been very much worth the cost.
The reason for the price (which basically just covers production and shipping) is that they realize that a small business (mom-and-pop typically) cannot afford a full-blown $5000 per station system. So they give it to you in hopes that you will be successful, grow, and then need more licenses. It's a nice business model that has been working out very well for them. It's important to understand, however, that the $30 version only supports a single station. If you need more, then you might want to look into the POS solutions from Wasp or (dare I say it?) Intuit. I haven't used either but the are less than $500.
You can find info on it at www.camcommerce.com and, no, I don't work for them.
You might want to throw the Asian Anti-Defamation League in to the mix as well. I seem to recall a flap over TPM's Trade Federation (Neimoidians) population being sterotypical Asians. Lucas had claimed that he had never noticed the similarity, despite their broken Engrish, flat faces and "slanted" eyes.
Lucas has been borrowing too liberaly from the serials of the 1930's, methinks.
From the article: "The project was started, in part, to prepare Google for competing with Windows Longhorn, which according to industry analysts will dispense with the need for a stand-alone browser."
Yeah, because IE is such a compelling product today that I have little need for an alternative.
>> that I am still thinking of buying it to reward the company
Do or do not. There is no "thinking of buying."
Seriously, folks. If you like Opera, just buy the damn thing. The price is extremely reasonable ($39 buy, $15 upgrade) for an app that you probably use constantly. I know that, on my machine, the only software that gets used more than Opera is the operating system itself!
And please don't use the excuse "well, they just got a 12.5 million dollar settlement" as a reason to not send in your pocket change. We all know that their lawyers will get the lion's share of it anyway.
My house is inundated with toys. Nothing that I do to get rid of those damn toys ever seems to work. Every time I put them away, the little bastards come right back out again. They're worse than cockroaches! Not even the lights deter them! I suspect my two-year old is somehow responsible.
And, yet, despite all this, I still manage to enjoy Toy Story.
I think you misunderstand me. I want them to thoroughly inspect the credentials of their applicants. I want them to weed out the liars, scam artists, fakes and phonies. I was there on Wall St when the World Trade Center towers fell. I walked through the south tower every single morning at 9:05am. It was by mere luck that I wasn't in those towers when they were hit.
If you don't want to play by the rules, if you are not confident enough in your abilities to subject them to scrutiny, if you are so sure that you cannot be trusted that you would reject any attempt to verify your credentials, then I say "Stay outta my face". This ESPECIALLY applies to YOU.
>Everyone would have much better access to the APIs
I've been hearing this complaint since the days of Windows 3.1 when I coded C and WinSDK at the API level. Since then, through present-day, I have yet to not be able to develop something due to not having access to some phantom APIs. With the rate that I hear the argument, however, this obviously must be a prevailant problem.
Could someone please cite some examples where the operating system's APIs were not accessible? Has this been an issue since Windows 95, which was developed nearly 10 years ago?
We're my clients little pissant companies, I might agree. However, I service the big financial companies on Wall St, as well as other Fortune 100 companies. Especially with regards to those businesses whose operations directly affect the US and Global economies, I'd much prefer that they ensure that the folks they employ are who they say they are.
I think the link that you meant to provide was this one. Regardless, the point that I was making wasn't that IIS is the leader right now. Ranked as the #2 webserver, it currently has a 21% marketshare compared to Apache's 67%. However, what do you suppose would happen if IIS was GPL'd? I'm willing to bet its share would catch up with Apache and very quickly at that.
I wouldn't be so gung-ho for Microsoft to jump into the OSS foray.
An alternate scenario:
1) Slowly, start testing the waters of the OSS community by offering up small, insignificant components. 2) Build support and confidence within the OSS community 3) Maintain your market share and increase your ability to push against your rivals (notably *nix/BSD)
They don't need to embrace and extend. They don't need to play games with licensing. They simply have to maintain market dominance on their three main products: Windows desktop, Windows server, and Office.
And please, let us not forget that there is a *huge* amount of OSS developers who are Windows-centric. They would absolutely love to be able to get their hands into MS's pie and contribute to the Windows component base.
The best thing that MS could do, from a competitive viewpoint, would be to GPL a bunch of their products. They would increase their workforce by such an order of magnitude (and for little to no cost) so as to make *nix's head spin.
One point of clarification: I don't think that M$ needs to worry about their position on the desktop. I know first-hand of many companies that won't touch their server components.
>1)The law. Its in the license agreement that they can't.
Two things here. First, EULAs have yet to be proven legally binding. If someone knows otherwise, I would be very interested in knowing the details of the case (name, date, etc). Second, Government use of software often occurs under a separate agreement of usuage terms.
>2)They don't have the build environment. Which is a significant technical hurdle. They don't need it. Access to the source code has little to do with building the system yourself. It's about auditing. The US government has access to the resources required to carry out such an audit. EDS, CSC and many other top-tier organizations have the talent. As the US government outsources a large portion of their IT work to US IT companies, the lack of any in-house expertise is of little concern.
There is no formalized process or independant entity in place to audit and ensure the security and "trustworthiness" of open-source software. I can understand why this would be of some concern. The nature of OSS is such that anyone can get involved with a project without ever meeting, in person, other members of that project. Let's be honest. I think Apache is, without question, the most superior web server out there. But how do you know that mod-SSL, to pick a purely random target, wasn't written by some terrorist or government blackhat or some other asshat?
Given the anonimity that the Internet provides, this creates a security risk that, at some level, can be mitigated, it is hoped, at a corporate, closed-source entity. Of course, this requires a bit of due dilligence on the part of the software company to thoroughly investigate the credentials and background of an applicant. But my professional experience has shown me that this occurs much more frequently in the corporate world than the OSS world. I've been fingerprinted, investigated and have pissed into more cups than I care to remember for corporate positions/contracts. I can't say the same for OSS projects.
Not that it is my intention to condemn OSS projects. Far from it. Im a huge fan (and supporter) or OSS but I don't feel that OSS provides a significant threat to commercial software. There will always be companies that are too OSS-adverse to turn away from commercial software (see: IIS). Microsoft, et al, have little to worry about there. As much as I love *nix, I don't think M$ need lose any sleep over their market position. As for companies that do embrace OSS, that just leaves them with more operating capital to put towards development. Which benefits me and other developers. And there will always be a need for custom developed software. Happy smiles all around.
>> the plastic urinal cheese holders in public restrooms.
You know, I always thought that they were supposed to be minty, but never worked up the courage (or alcohol tolerance) to actually go ahead and taste them. Now I know the truth. Thanks!!
Slashdot Mirror
It's unfortunate that the parent was modded a flamebait as he happens to make a very valid point. The current US administration has not been honoring the international treaties that it is a party to. Glossing over the whole "legality" of Bush's appointment to the office of President, there are the issues of the Geneva convention, the Kyoto Agreement and several others which, if I had the time and the caffeine, I would cite here.
The fact is, for the past several years, we haven't been playing by the rules. The dues that the US owes to the United Nations is a very good example of why we, as US citizens, would not want an international body controlling the Internet. We haven't been paying the bills and the Internet would be used as a measure of control and influence over our policies and practices. The US economy has come to rely on the Net too greatly to give up such a significant measure of control.
It is far better for our own concerns to keep that control for our own.
>> I think its the school system, it produces a nation of plodders and worker bees without creativiyt or imagination.
Or grammar and spelling skills, apparently.
Actually, there is not. Retail is governed by the states unless inter-state mail-order is involved, in which case the federal (US) government gets involved. Regardless, there is no "federal law" requiring a refund policy. However, if you do not post your return policy in a publicly accessible place, you leave yourself open to a situation where you, as the retailer, would most likely lose a dispute over a return, should that dispute go to court.
If you know otherwise, by all means, please post the relevant links here.
Yes, true, however, the site mentioned here is one geared towards promoting independent artists who have more control over how their music is used. In this particular case, such a method of promotion could be possible.
An interesting site and one I'm sure that I will be visiting (and purchasing from) often.
As for the samples, 30 seconds are nice (60 are better) but one thing that has caused me to buy a TON of music is radio streams. Some sites have set up various genre-themed channels where they play the music that they sell. You get to hear the entire song, hear other music that you might not have thought of sampling, and all of the track info is carried with the stream.
>>You think that wouldn't be punishment?
At the very least, it'll make it easier for the hookers to find their way.
I don't own a record store. It's a hobby shop - nothing to do with the RIAA. Lucky me, I can sleep at night.
My reaction was to the suggestion of buying, then returning, large quantities of product in order to hurt the music industry. It won't. It'll hurt the retailer.
Yes, by all means, let's hit the RIAA where they'll feel it the most: the RETAILERS. Let's really put the screws to the music labels by forcing the RETAILERS to lose millions of dollars on labor costs and credit card transaction fees. Let's force the RIAA to listen to our angered cries by clearing out the RETAILERS' inventories, making them re-order their stock, paying for rushed processing and delivery charges. Let us cheer in our new found victories while the RETAILERS have to sit on a pile of extra (NON-REFUNDABLE) inventory, costing them lost revenue and storage charges. Let's really fuck over the music industry by preventing RETAILERS from ordering new product, thereby causing their customers to stop coming into the store, since all that is on the shelves is old product. Hey, if we hit it on the right day of the month, we can even cause the RETAILER to pay thousands in extra sales/revenue tax thereby ensuring that they can't afford to do business anymore.
Here's an idea: how about growing the fuck up and paying for your music and movies? How about not stealing things that don't belong to you? How about abandoning your rediculously naive and misguided notion that you are somehow entitled to free merchandise.?
This is not a troll. I am a retailer. I own a brick-and-mortar retail store. *I* am the one who gets screwed when you do things like this. The products that I sell are part of my livelihood. All that you are going to accomplish from action like this is a reduction in the new products that I can afford to offer, a change in my return policy and you getting banned from my store. Returns are a courtesy extended to the public - they are not mandated by law. Abuse our goodwill and you will lose our goodwill.
Protect your independant retailers. Don't listen to drivel like the parent's post.
>>Copyright is censorship.
Chocolate cake is rape.
Oh, wait...that doesn't make sense either.
One of my businesses is a retail store and we use the CamCommerce RetailIce POS (that's "Point-of-Sale", wise guys). The cost is $30 for a stand-alone station and it runs on a Windows PC. While I'm not sure if they still do this, the publisher was selling it on EBay for $15 when I bought it.
RetailIce is a full-featured system that does what you are looking for. We have been using it for almost two years now and it has certainly been very much worth the cost.
The reason for the price (which basically just covers production and shipping) is that they realize that a small business (mom-and-pop typically) cannot afford a full-blown $5000 per station system. So they give it to you in hopes that you will be successful, grow, and then need more licenses. It's a nice business model that has been working out very well for them. It's important to understand, however, that the $30 version only supports a single station. If you need more, then you might want to look into the POS solutions from Wasp or (dare I say it?) Intuit. I haven't used either but the are less than $500.
You can find info on it at www.camcommerce.com and, no, I don't work for them.
You might want to throw the Asian Anti-Defamation League in to the mix as well. I seem to recall a flap over TPM's Trade Federation (Neimoidians) population being sterotypical Asians. Lucas had claimed that he had never noticed the similarity, despite their broken Engrish, flat faces and "slanted" eyes.
Lucas has been borrowing too liberaly from the serials of the 1930's, methinks.
From the article: "The project was started, in part, to prepare Google for competing with Windows Longhorn, which according to industry analysts will dispense with the need for a stand-alone browser."
Yeah, because IE is such a compelling product today that I have little need for an alternative.
>> that I am still thinking of buying it to reward the company
Do or do not. There is no "thinking of buying."
Seriously, folks. If you like Opera, just buy the damn thing. The price is extremely reasonable ($39 buy, $15 upgrade) for an app that you probably use constantly. I know that, on my machine, the only software that gets used more than Opera is the operating system itself!
And please don't use the excuse "well, they just got a 12.5 million dollar settlement" as a reason to not send in your pocket change. We all know that their lawyers will get the lion's share of it anyway.
Just my 2 cents. The rest of it went here.
and the "Star Wars" program was a good idea
...but not the "Christmas on Endor" version.
> quite frankly, my house gets ants every year.
My house is inundated with toys. Nothing that I do to get rid of those damn toys ever seems to work. Every time I put them away, the little bastards come right back out again. They're worse than cockroaches! Not even the lights deter them! I suspect my two-year old is somehow responsible.
And, yet, despite all this, I still manage to enjoy Toy Story.
I think you misunderstand me. I want them to thoroughly inspect the credentials of their applicants. I want them to weed out the liars, scam artists, fakes and phonies. I was there on Wall St when the World Trade Center towers fell. I walked through the south tower every single morning at 9:05am. It was by mere luck that I wasn't in those towers when they were hit.
If you don't want to play by the rules, if you are not confident enough in your abilities to subject them to scrutiny, if you are so sure that you cannot be trusted that you would reject any attempt to verify your credentials, then I say "Stay outta my face". This ESPECIALLY applies to YOU.
>Everyone would have much better access to the APIs
I've been hearing this complaint since the days of Windows 3.1 when I coded C and WinSDK at the API level. Since then, through present-day, I have yet to not be able to develop something due to not having access to some phantom APIs. With the rate that I hear the argument, however, this obviously must be a prevailant problem.
Could someone please cite some examples where the operating system's APIs were not accessible? Has this been an issue since Windows 95, which was developed nearly 10 years ago?
We're my clients little pissant companies, I might agree. However, I service the big financial companies on Wall St, as well as other Fortune 100 companies. Especially with regards to those businesses whose operations directly affect the US and Global economies, I'd much prefer that they ensure that the folks they employ are who they say they are.
I think the link that you meant to provide was this one. Regardless, the point that I was making wasn't that IIS is the leader right now. Ranked as the #2 webserver, it currently has a 21% marketshare compared to Apache's 67%. However, what do you suppose would happen if IIS was GPL'd? I'm willing to bet its share would catch up with Apache and very quickly at that.
It's a shame that there isn't an "Obvious" mod. Thank you for filling us in that there are other parts of the Internet that isn't Slashdot.
DUH! It's called "AOL".
I wouldn't be so gung-ho for Microsoft to jump into the OSS foray.
An alternate scenario:
1) Slowly, start testing the waters of the OSS community by offering up small, insignificant components.
2) Build support and confidence within the OSS community
3) Maintain your market share and increase your ability to push against your rivals (notably *nix/BSD)
They don't need to embrace and extend. They don't need to play games with licensing. They simply have to maintain market dominance on their three main products: Windows desktop, Windows server, and Office.
And please, let us not forget that there is a *huge* amount of OSS developers who are Windows-centric. They would absolutely love to be able to get their hands into MS's pie and contribute to the Windows component base.
The best thing that MS could do, from a competitive viewpoint, would be to GPL a bunch of their products. They would increase their workforce by such an order of magnitude (and for little to no cost) so as to make *nix's head spin.
One point of clarification: I don't think that M$ needs to worry about their position on the desktop. I know first-hand of many companies that won't touch their server components.
>1)The law. Its in the license agreement that they can't.
Two things here. First, EULAs have yet to be proven legally binding. If someone knows otherwise, I would be very interested in knowing the details of the case (name, date, etc). Second, Government use of software often occurs under a separate agreement of usuage terms.
>2)They don't have the build environment. Which is a significant technical hurdle.
They don't need it. Access to the source code has little to do with building the system yourself. It's about auditing. The US government has access to the resources required to carry out such an audit. EDS, CSC and many other top-tier organizations have the talent. As the US government outsources a large portion of their IT work to US IT companies, the lack of any in-house expertise is of little concern.
There is no formalized process or independant entity in place to audit and ensure the security and "trustworthiness" of open-source software. I can understand why this would be of some concern. The nature of OSS is such that anyone can get involved with a project without ever meeting, in person, other members of that project. Let's be honest. I think Apache is, without question, the most superior web server out there. But how do you know that mod-SSL, to pick a purely random target, wasn't written by some terrorist or government blackhat or some other asshat?
Given the anonimity that the Internet provides, this creates a security risk that, at some level, can be mitigated, it is hoped, at a corporate, closed-source entity. Of course, this requires a bit of due dilligence on the part of the software company to thoroughly investigate the credentials and background of an applicant. But my professional experience has shown me that this occurs much more frequently in the corporate world than the OSS world. I've been fingerprinted, investigated and have pissed into more cups than I care to remember for corporate positions/contracts. I can't say the same for OSS projects.
Not that it is my intention to condemn OSS projects. Far from it. Im a huge fan (and supporter) or OSS but I don't feel that OSS provides a significant threat to commercial software. There will always be companies that are too OSS-adverse to turn away from commercial software (see: IIS). Microsoft, et al, have little to worry about there. As much as I love *nix, I don't think M$ need lose any sleep over their market position. As for companies that do embrace OSS, that just leaves them with more operating capital to put towards development. Which benefits me and other developers. And there will always be a need for custom developed software. Happy smiles all around.
>> the plastic urinal cheese holders in public restrooms.
You know, I always thought that they were supposed to be minty, but never worked up the courage (or alcohol tolerance) to actually go ahead and taste them. Now I know the truth. Thanks!!
Depends on the chat room and how much lotion you have handy.