I guess that means my GPA is just going to make me look like an idiot now. School sucks.
I'm going to let you in on a secret from the Real World.
Once you graduate, nobody gives a shit what your GPA was.
Unless you're applying for graduate school, or some horrid cookie-cutter cubicle farm job (i.e., Accenture) where the HR dept processes so many people that they have no human methods of screening out the duds, nobody will even so much as look at your GPA ever again until you die.
I'm not sure why this continues to be such a revelation for people. You'd think they would have learned it after junior high. Remember how the guidance counselor told you that class you were messing up in 7th grade was going to dog you for the rest of your life, and that you were going to have to be a ditch digger if you didn't straighten up, and fast? Notice how once you hit 9th grade it was never spoken of again? That you were never required to provide your junior high transcript to anyone, anywhere, ever? There's a trend there.
You just have to do as well as necessary to make it to the next step. Just make sure the steps you're taking are leading you somewhere you want to be, because one day you're going to have to park it there. All the rest is for your benefit: learn what you can, try things, explore, meet people, make friends. It's how you did on those fronts that's going to determine how successful you are.
What I'm describing here is financial reality. Nothing is truly free. Costs are paid for by someone, always, and what I'm hearing here is that most people don't give a crap so long as it's not them shelling out the dough.
I don't see that at all. What people are complaining about is when the rules of the game are changed midstream. If they want to charge money for the database, that's certainly their right, and I say more power to them.
However, when I spent my precious time typing in song names and sending them up to their database, there was no indication that one day I would no longer be able to freely use it. The only right thing for them to do is to look at the timestamps on each record when deciding whether or not a client needs a license code to retrieve it. If something was entered before the change in terms, then it should be available to everyone. If, on the other hand, someone entered song titles under the new terms, those records could fairly be covered by them.
Anything less is outright deception, it's shoddy business, it's biting the hand that fed them. I can only hope the hand doesn't stick around for more.
I think that you are on the right track with the video games. That appeals to the population you want and enables you to have more than just a terminal room.
LAN gaming is incredibly popular in Asia... Everywhere you turn in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, even Thailand and Indonesia (just the biggest cities), you'll find places with rooms full of top-end computers, and many of them sell drinks.
They offer internet connectivity and other things as well, but it generally happens that the places get completely taken over by gaming. The noises (speakers, yelling, etc.) are too loud for anything else, really.
On the one hand, it's good, because the atmosphere is more fun (I assume; I don't play video games) than you'd get in your house. Lots of people all playing at the same time and clearly having a lot of fun.
On the other hand, though, it seems hard to mix with anything else. Sort of like trying to have a dance club with a Ye Olde English Pubbe section as well; it just doesn't work unless you've got a huge building and some very impressive soundproofing.
Perhaps the big names like Dell and Gateway might be diminishing in importance, but the PC itself is probably not in any danger.
If worst comes to worst, there's always used server parts. Nobody's going to put up with all this CPRM nonsense on a server, and yesterday's high-end servers architecture is today's average PC.
Some people have mentioned the car as an example of something that began hobbyist-accessible and turned into a shrink-wrap one-size-fits-all world.
There's a difference, I think: It gets harder and harder to roll your own car from parts because of all the safety requirements. To have a practical car, you are limited by the market because only car companies can afford to get their designs past the NTSB. This is different in the computer world. Despite some alarmist contentions to the contrary, the government does not and will not have a sufficiently strong position to argue that my safety or that of others is aided by preventing me from having a homemade - or otherwise nonstandard - computer. People already know that's not the case. The powers that be can point to legends of "hackers" and all the trouble they purportedly caused, but at the end of the day it's not the same kind of bone-crunching trouble that was prerequisite to justifying the sweeping restrictions on vehicle designs.
Furthermore, the economy depends on computer innovation in a very different way from how it depends on automobile innovation. Any country that made it impossible for people to learn and explore technology would be at a severe disadvantage to those that were more open. Some bright kid in Paraguay is very little threat to the American auto industry. But he might well be able to compete with the software industry.
Oh come on. Did she make a 5-second call and you extrapolated from that? There are some shysters out there but I highly doubt any of them are charging two thousand dollars an hour for $5 phone calls.
I don't understand why they specifically mentioned TV and radio. If the audio is digitised before being pass to the software, it doesn't really matter where it comes from. Maybe they are trying to draw attention from the fact that it can be used on things like making transcripts of phone calls, normal conversations recorded with various listen devices?
I don't think you realize how boring and mundane most intelligence work is. Thousands of extremely junior people sit all day long translating newspapers and transcribing radio/TV broadcasts. Much of this stuff is made available through FBIS (pronounced "fibis") to further bore people slightly higher up the ladder throughout the government and contracting agencies.
However, it is useful once in a while. Especially when looking back and saying "Now how didn't we catch that?" If it could be brought online cheaper and more quickly, I can see how this would be well worth the money - without being particularly draconian (except insofar as the concentration of enough otherwise innocuous information can be quite powerful).
Sometimes, just sometimes, they mean what they say.
What I demand to know, "Who the hell is watching the watchers, eh?" What are their limitations(as per constitution, illegal search and seizure, confiscation of intellectual property, etc.)...
It's the CIA. In theory they are not allowed to surveil US citizens on US soil. So most of that stuff doesn't apply.
here in the US you are (normally) allowed to say what you want. where you want, to whoever you want
You most certainly are not. As I described in more detail higher in the thread, you are only allowed to say what you want. You do not have freedom to say it where you want, and you do not have the freedom to force others to listen.
Because emergency services use some of the same frequency band that cell phones use, devices that block one would hinder the other.
It is for precisely reasons like these that they are talking about licensing the devices. This means that they are studied to ensure non-interference before they may be sold or used.
If someone had a heart attack or something, and a cell phone jammer prevented someone else from dialing 911 (or its equivalent), could the owner of the cell phone jammer face legal liability?
Yes, they almost certainly would.
In 1973, my uncle died in a Tulsa movie theatre after getting stuck to the floor in an awkward position that caused a bloot clot in his leg. It took several hours for help to arrive, because nobody could find a nickel for the payphone in the lobby. My aunt successfully sued the owner of the theatre for Operating a Public Venue Prior to the Widespread Availability of Lifesaving Cellphones.
A few months ago a woman here in town slipped and fell in the French Cultural Center gift shop and punctured her spleen on a miniature Eiffel Tower. Nobody in the store happened to have a cell phone to call 911 with, and she sued every last one of them. A jury awarded her over $24m in combined damages.
Just this morning I was walking down the street and a police officer ran up to me and demanded to use my cell phone to call his dispatcher because his car had been stolen. My batteries were worn down and he was unable to make the call. I was then arrested, and only got bailed out a few minutes ago.
Unfortunately so, the first amendment has been virtually twisted into a pretzel to protect the damndest things. Foolish me, I thought it was there to protect the right of citizens to criticize their government, but it seems to protect the right of a person to yak away on a cell phone, while placing others in harm's way or, at the least, distraction.
The First Amendment has been held by courts to protect content, not the time, place, or manner of what you say. So you can say whatever you like, but you can - if a "compelling" reason is provided - be stopped from, for instance, screaming at people trying to get into the hospital.
This is why public airports are able to have those "designated free speech areas". If they were required to give people blanket freedom to speak anywhere they wanted, why bother creating a designated area? Nobody would use it.
Likewise, freedom of speech has nothing to do with being allowed to use a cellphone in a restaurant. Nobody is complaining about the content, just about the place and manner.
So, back to your DeCSS point. DeCSS is a content issue, not a time/place/manner. People have tried to be flexible about it, printing it on T-shirts and singing it in songs. But The Man just isn't happy, because he doesn't like the content. And that's where the First Amendment comes into play. At least you'd hope it would.
That what I thought when I first read the article, but apparently it is fairly common for some mom and pop e-commerce sites to simple have a form that posts to someone else's SSL site.
You have probably seen sites like this. When the time comes to actually pay for the stuff the URLs are all at some other site. The information has got to get to the SSL site somehow, and apparently someone thought that "hidden" fields in a form would be a good idea, Yow!
This is the most informative thing I've read on this thread all day. I think you're exactly right. I was really struggling to imagine how else someone would even have come up with the idea to post prices back and forth between the client and server.
Not in the least. When you go to the store and get an item, it has a UPC on it. That UPC has a number that corresponds to a record in a pricing database. That record has name and price (among other things). When the cashier scans it, he/she views (or is supposed to view) the display to make sure the name matches what they just scanned. If it doesn't, they should cry foul (though for the machine by default, I would think). What you seem to imply is that the UPC is a number directly representing the price. This is totally incorrect, and would lead to a lot of UPC switching in stores.
As you say, UPCs correspond to specific products, and the register looks up the price.
However, the analogy in the parent posting seems sound. You can go to a grocery store and switch the wrapper on a pound of CrapCo Farms chicken with a pound of Organic Hippie Chicken that costs three times as much, and the person at the register has no reasonable way of telling the difference. Is that legal? Of course not, it's theft, and infantile to think otherwise.
Likewise, the web site operator is engaging in the transaction on the good faith that you have accepted the terms as presented. Just because it's possible to present them other terms when they're not looking doesn't mean they have accepted them. It's not like playing tag, or serving someone with divorce papers.
I'm glad to see that their prices have come down so much, now I could consider oracle an option. 6 months ago they were astronomical, and to my amazement, I verified the prices by asking another certified reseller (another branch of our company).
These prices are at least a year old. I think your certified reseller was shonking you.
Still, you were off 5x, you said a few thousand, but its actually $10,800
I said (and I quote) "Oracle Standard Edition on that hardware is a few thousand dollars a year". If anything, I overstated it, as a 2-year license is $3k.
I hate big Pharma about as much as anyone, but to suggest that they're behind the war on drugs is stupid and dishonest. Recreational drugs have nothing to do with medical products like Pepcid, Claritin, or whatever else they're trying to sell so much of today.
Pepcid and Claritin are not where the money is. The relatively mundane products have plenty of competition and many have been around long enough to be facing the Dread Generics in the market.
The big dollars come from the descendents of Prozac, Zoloft, etc., the parade of "lifestyle" pharmaceuticals of the last few years, which are expensive, unique, and in hot demand. Americans spend almost $10 billion a year on antidepressants alone. It is very difficult to come up with more and more people who have upset stomachs or allergies; these things are more or less tied to nature. However, you can always convince a good number of people that they have psychological problems requiring medication. Have you seen the commercials on TV recently? "Are you too shy to make friends? You may have a serious medical condition doctors call wallfloria gullibilia. Take our drug!"
And, the very rare legitimate case aside, the people using this stuff are the same people who'd be using pot or coke if their socioeconomic status were different, or they had different friends, or the drug pushers south of the train tracks had the ears of thousands of doctors and billions of dollars to spend on advertising.
If you have the chance, read this page. It's footnoted, and I even checked out some of the references and they were on the level.
I'll give you the prison industry though; they've been lobbying like mad against decriminalization.
Not only DID we pay this ammount for the pentiumII install, but I used their web site to generate the other figure of the ppro180. Keep in mind this is for a web site and not a developers license. Thats how they getcha.
Apparently they getcha by confusing some people into paying more than they need to.
Go to store.oracle.com. Look at the bottom-left of the main content area (Oracle 8i Standard Edition). Select Universal Power Unit Perpetual from the popup. Enter 800 (that's your dual-processor 400MHz) into the little "Units" box. Click "buy."
The total comes to $10,800. That's the Oracle database server, with a permanent license for that machine. If you only need a 2-year license, it's about 1/3 of that amount.
If this is all too complicated, just click the "Questions about how to license your product?" link off to the left, where it is explained in depth.
I'd be interested to hear how you managed to price it to $250k.
It's the music industry's right to say what can and can't be done with the object that they've sold to you if you consider a sale of this type to be contractual...
It most certainly is not. That's not a sale. Only in the case of external legal baggage (for instance, coventants on real estate) can such a thing happen. Generally, in other cases, they must provide you with something on an ongoing basis, in exchange for which you must adhere to a commitment you have made (such as not to duplicate the CD). Beyond that, they can refuse to do business with you in the future (this is how vendor/distributor/retailer policy relationships are enforced), but they cannot arbitrarily constrain what you do with something you own. This is why software companies try to pretend that the software is licensed and not sold.
How about if you sell me an apple on the condition that I not eat it. I will eat it in front of you while you search for redress. Good luck.
If they want to control what people do with them, then they are free to lease CDs.
So my suggestion is take some time and care about what you are buying! Don't demand everything all of the time... then the need to make copies of your entire collection won't seem like such a big deal.
Are you honestly saying that what's happening here is that the RIAA is trying to address the crisis of a mad consumer culture gone out of control - to help us reclaim our moorings and return to the austere sensibility of yore?
Because your argument smells like the silliest kind of apologism.
Have a look at media ownership some time. The fact of the matter is that NBC are hardly going to cover copyright term extension concerns when they're owned by Disney, are they?
So what do you suppose would happen if ABC were owned by Disney instead?
This is intended to stop mass piracy. E.g. people making black-market copies of CDs and selling them en masse (like software pirates).
No it's not. The record companies know it and I know it; surely you can figure it out too. This works on the kind of equipment that you buy at Circuit City, which - surprise, surprise - is not what large-scale pirates use. What, they have rooms full of monkeys changing tapes one-at-a-time and hitting "record"?
You think an outfit in China that has access to genius engineers with otherwise-zero earning potential is going to be held back for even a day by this? Industrial-strength piracy is just too lucrative.
Best I can figure, the recording industry mafia is upset about all the piracy but feels impotent to stop it, so they slake their thirst for revenge by fucking consumers up the ass.
And it probably works in the mafia's favor in the long run: Consumers get mad, the mafia says "we had to do it because of piracy," and then consumers say "Oh my goodness, piracy is awful," and vote for the candidate who's willing to put the most hurt on Vietnam for failure to clamp down on piracy.
An approximately similar strategy would be for the pharmaceutical companies (who are to illegal drugs what the RIAA is to pirated music: the legally-sanctioned provider of a more expensive alternative) to drive through the suburbs spraying Agent Orange in people's backyard gardens, claiming it's because of the drugs the residents "might" be growing, and then paying someone like you to post on Slashdot that it's a powerful strike against the Columbian drug cartels.
Oh, PS Anyone know how to get Oracle to export a SQL script that to create the current database (like you can when you generate a script in MQSQL)
All the DDL is in the files created by 'exp'. The files are binary but the DDL is there in plaintext. You can run the output through 'strings' to get a quick look, or use some Perl to do it properly.
Unfortunately the DML is not generated by exp. You'd probably have to whip something up yourself. Actually that seems like a nice addition to the Oracle tools I've been working on (obGPL: yes).
MS-SQL is kind of expensive for web applications, unless you're comparing it to Oracle. And I think the development tools are weak when compared to Oracle. But it's easy to admin
You think so? One of the reasons I will not touch MSSQL again for a long, long time is how hard it is to admin (at least version 7 was; not sure if they've gotten better but it would take a lot).
The documentation was scanty and of abysmal quality.
Too many admin functions were only documented as GUI tasks, which was a nuisance because the GUI admin tool seems to make a habit of losing touch with the database engine - reporting that the database is stopped and/or unavailable when actually it's started, on the same machine.
Likewise the GUI tools were counterintuitive to an extreme. And documenting a process was far more difficult than with a command-line interface; if you want to tell someone how to do something, you need pages of ambiguous screen shots rather than a few lines of precise commands.
Oracle is no picnic to admin, and the learning curve is surely steeper than that of MSSQL. On the other hand, once you get going, you can really start getting work done. No such luck with MSSQL, where you're always clicking around desperately trying to find where they decided to hide an option that could reasonably be assumed to be in any of 20 different places.
I've priced a 2x ppro180 and my company bought oracle for a client for a dual 400 pentium II, both for a public web server, and both prices were about $200,000-250,000 dollars.
Was this amortized out to the Second Coming? Oracle Standard Edition on that hardware is a few thousand dollars a year - less than many people spend on lunch. To spend $250,000 you'd need to purchase the perpetual license (no recurring fees other than optional support) and install it on over 20 dual-400 servers.
Why not check their web site before making wildly incorrect pronouncements?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to let you in on a secret from the Real World.
Once you graduate, nobody gives a shit what your GPA was.
Unless you're applying for graduate school, or some horrid cookie-cutter cubicle farm job (i.e., Accenture) where the HR dept processes so many people that they have no human methods of screening out the duds, nobody will even so much as look at your GPA ever again until you die.
I'm not sure why this continues to be such a revelation for people. You'd think they would have learned it after junior high. Remember how the guidance counselor told you that class you were messing up in 7th grade was going to dog you for the rest of your life, and that you were going to have to be a ditch digger if you didn't straighten up, and fast? Notice how once you hit 9th grade it was never spoken of again? That you were never required to provide your junior high transcript to anyone, anywhere, ever? There's a trend there.
You just have to do as well as necessary to make it to the next step. Just make sure the steps you're taking are leading you somewhere you want to be, because one day you're going to have to park it there. All the rest is for your benefit: learn what you can, try things, explore, meet people, make friends. It's how you did on those fronts that's going to determine how successful you are.
I don't see that at all. What people are complaining about is when the rules of the game are changed midstream. If they want to charge money for the database, that's certainly their right, and I say more power to them.
However, when I spent my precious time typing in song names and sending them up to their database, there was no indication that one day I would no longer be able to freely use it. The only right thing for them to do is to look at the timestamps on each record when deciding whether or not a client needs a license code to retrieve it. If something was entered before the change in terms, then it should be available to everyone. If, on the other hand, someone entered song titles under the new terms, those records could fairly be covered by them.
Anything less is outright deception, it's shoddy business, it's biting the hand that fed them. I can only hope the hand doesn't stick around for more.
LAN gaming is incredibly popular in Asia... Everywhere you turn in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, even Thailand and Indonesia (just the biggest cities), you'll find places with rooms full of top-end computers, and many of them sell drinks.
They offer internet connectivity and other things as well, but it generally happens that the places get completely taken over by gaming. The noises (speakers, yelling, etc.) are too loud for anything else, really.
On the one hand, it's good, because the atmosphere is more fun (I assume; I don't play video games) than you'd get in your house. Lots of people all playing at the same time and clearly having a lot of fun.
On the other hand, though, it seems hard to mix with anything else. Sort of like trying to have a dance club with a Ye Olde English Pubbe section as well; it just doesn't work unless you've got a huge building and some very impressive soundproofing.
The list goes on and on. You're just out of the loop.
If worst comes to worst, there's always used server parts. Nobody's going to put up with all this CPRM nonsense on a server, and yesterday's high-end servers architecture is today's average PC.
Some people have mentioned the car as an example of something that began hobbyist-accessible and turned into a shrink-wrap one-size-fits-all world.
There's a difference, I think: It gets harder and harder to roll your own car from parts because of all the safety requirements. To have a practical car, you are limited by the market because only car companies can afford to get their designs past the NTSB. This is different in the computer world. Despite some alarmist contentions to the contrary, the government does not and will not have a sufficiently strong position to argue that my safety or that of others is aided by preventing me from having a homemade - or otherwise nonstandard - computer. People already know that's not the case. The powers that be can point to legends of "hackers" and all the trouble they purportedly caused, but at the end of the day it's not the same kind of bone-crunching trouble that was prerequisite to justifying the sweeping restrictions on vehicle designs.
Furthermore, the economy depends on computer innovation in a very different way from how it depends on automobile innovation. Any country that made it impossible for people to learn and explore technology would be at a severe disadvantage to those that were more open. Some bright kid in Paraguay is very little threat to the American auto industry. But he might well be able to compete with the software industry.
Oh come on. Did she make a 5-second call and you extrapolated from that? There are some shysters out there but I highly doubt any of them are charging two thousand dollars an hour for $5 phone calls.
What's the name of the hotel?
I don't think you realize how boring and mundane most intelligence work is. Thousands of extremely junior people sit all day long translating newspapers and transcribing radio/TV broadcasts. Much of this stuff is made available through FBIS (pronounced "fibis") to further bore people slightly higher up the ladder throughout the government and contracting agencies.
However, it is useful once in a while. Especially when looking back and saying "Now how didn't we catch that?" If it could be brought online cheaper and more quickly, I can see how this would be well worth the money - without being particularly draconian (except insofar as the concentration of enough otherwise innocuous information can be quite powerful).
Sometimes, just sometimes, they mean what they say.
It's the CIA. In theory they are not allowed to surveil US citizens on US soil. So most of that stuff doesn't apply.
You most certainly are not. As I described in more detail higher in the thread, you are only allowed to say what you want. You do not have freedom to say it where you want, and you do not have the freedom to force others to listen.
It is for precisely reasons like these that they are talking about licensing the devices. This means that they are studied to ensure non-interference before they may be sold or used.
Yes, they almost certainly would.
In 1973, my uncle died in a Tulsa movie theatre after getting stuck to the floor in an awkward position that caused a bloot clot in his leg. It took several hours for help to arrive, because nobody could find a nickel for the payphone in the lobby. My aunt successfully sued the owner of the theatre for Operating a Public Venue Prior to the Widespread Availability of Lifesaving Cellphones.
A few months ago a woman here in town slipped and fell in the French Cultural Center gift shop and punctured her spleen on a miniature Eiffel Tower. Nobody in the store happened to have a cell phone to call 911 with, and she sued every last one of them. A jury awarded her over $24m in combined damages.
Just this morning I was walking down the street and a police officer ran up to me and demanded to use my cell phone to call his dispatcher because his car had been stolen. My batteries were worn down and he was unable to make the call. I was then arrested, and only got bailed out a few minutes ago.
I believe jammers have been used in some Japanese restaurants for a while now.
The First Amendment has been held by courts to protect content, not the time, place, or manner of what you say. So you can say whatever you like, but you can - if a "compelling" reason is provided - be stopped from, for instance, screaming at people trying to get into the hospital.
This is why public airports are able to have those "designated free speech areas". If they were required to give people blanket freedom to speak anywhere they wanted, why bother creating a designated area? Nobody would use it.
Likewise, freedom of speech has nothing to do with being allowed to use a cellphone in a restaurant. Nobody is complaining about the content, just about the place and manner.
So, back to your DeCSS point. DeCSS is a content issue, not a time/place/manner. People have tried to be flexible about it, printing it on T-shirts and singing it in songs. But The Man just isn't happy, because he doesn't like the content. And that's where the First Amendment comes into play. At least you'd hope it would.
This is the most informative thing I've read on this thread all day. I think you're exactly right. I was really struggling to imagine how else someone would even have come up with the idea to post prices back and forth between the client and server.
As you say, UPCs correspond to specific products, and the register looks up the price.
However, the analogy in the parent posting seems sound. You can go to a grocery store and switch the wrapper on a pound of CrapCo Farms chicken with a pound of Organic Hippie Chicken that costs three times as much, and the person at the register has no reasonable way of telling the difference. Is that legal? Of course not, it's theft, and infantile to think otherwise.
Likewise, the web site operator is engaging in the transaction on the good faith that you have accepted the terms as presented. Just because it's possible to present them other terms when they're not looking doesn't mean they have accepted them. It's not like playing tag, or serving someone with divorce papers.
These prices are at least a year old. I think your certified reseller was shonking you.
I said (and I quote) "Oracle Standard Edition on that hardware is a few thousand dollars a year". If anything, I overstated it, as a 2-year license is $3k.
Pepcid and Claritin are not where the money is. The relatively mundane products have plenty of competition and many have been around long enough to be facing the Dread Generics in the market.
The big dollars come from the descendents of Prozac, Zoloft, etc., the parade of "lifestyle" pharmaceuticals of the last few years, which are expensive, unique, and in hot demand. Americans spend almost $10 billion a year on antidepressants alone. It is very difficult to come up with more and more people who have upset stomachs or allergies; these things are more or less tied to nature. However, you can always convince a good number of people that they have psychological problems requiring medication. Have you seen the commercials on TV recently? "Are you too shy to make friends? You may have a serious medical condition doctors call wallfloria gullibilia. Take our drug!"
And, the very rare legitimate case aside, the people using this stuff are the same people who'd be using pot or coke if their socioeconomic status were different, or they had different friends, or the drug pushers south of the train tracks had the ears of thousands of doctors and billions of dollars to spend on advertising.
If you have the chance, read this page. It's footnoted, and I even checked out some of the references and they were on the level.I'll give you the prison industry though; they've been lobbying like mad against decriminalization.
Apparently they getcha by confusing some people into paying more than they need to.
Go to store.oracle.com. Look at the bottom-left of the main content area (Oracle 8i Standard Edition). Select Universal Power Unit Perpetual from the popup. Enter 800 (that's your dual-processor 400MHz) into the little "Units" box. Click "buy."
The total comes to $10,800. That's the Oracle database server, with a permanent license for that machine. If you only need a 2-year license, it's about 1/3 of that amount.
If this is all too complicated, just click the "Questions about how to license your product?" link off to the left, where it is explained in depth.
I'd be interested to hear how you managed to price it to $250k.
It most certainly is not. That's not a sale. Only in the case of external legal baggage (for instance, coventants on real estate) can such a thing happen. Generally, in other cases, they must provide you with something on an ongoing basis, in exchange for which you must adhere to a commitment you have made (such as not to duplicate the CD). Beyond that, they can refuse to do business with you in the future (this is how vendor/distributor/retailer policy relationships are enforced), but they cannot arbitrarily constrain what you do with something you own. This is why software companies try to pretend that the software is licensed and not sold.
How about if you sell me an apple on the condition that I not eat it. I will eat it in front of you while you search for redress. Good luck.
If they want to control what people do with them, then they are free to lease CDs.
Are you honestly saying that what's happening here is that the RIAA is trying to address the crisis of a mad consumer culture gone out of control - to help us reclaim our moorings and return to the austere sensibility of yore?
Because your argument smells like the silliest kind of apologism.
Produce a CD with one or more Green Day songs on it and nobody will want to copy it. Almost 100% effective.
So what do you suppose would happen if ABC were owned by Disney instead?
No it's not. The record companies know it and I know it; surely you can figure it out too. This works on the kind of equipment that you buy at Circuit City, which - surprise, surprise - is not what large-scale pirates use. What, they have rooms full of monkeys changing tapes one-at-a-time and hitting "record"?
You think an outfit in China that has access to genius engineers with otherwise-zero earning potential is going to be held back for even a day by this? Industrial-strength piracy is just too lucrative.
Best I can figure, the recording industry mafia is upset about all the piracy but feels impotent to stop it, so they slake their thirst for revenge by fucking consumers up the ass.
And it probably works in the mafia's favor in the long run: Consumers get mad, the mafia says "we had to do it because of piracy," and then consumers say "Oh my goodness, piracy is awful," and vote for the candidate who's willing to put the most hurt on Vietnam for failure to clamp down on piracy.
An approximately similar strategy would be for the pharmaceutical companies (who are to illegal drugs what the RIAA is to pirated music: the legally-sanctioned provider of a more expensive alternative) to drive through the suburbs spraying Agent Orange in people's backyard gardens, claiming it's because of the drugs the residents "might" be growing, and then paying someone like you to post on Slashdot that it's a powerful strike against the Columbian drug cartels.
All the DDL is in the files created by 'exp'. The files are binary but the DDL is there in plaintext. You can run the output through 'strings' to get a quick look, or use some Perl to do it properly.
Unfortunately the DML is not generated by exp. You'd probably have to whip something up yourself. Actually that seems like a nice addition to the Oracle tools I've been working on (obGPL: yes).
You think so? One of the reasons I will not touch MSSQL again for a long, long time is how hard it is to admin (at least version 7 was; not sure if they've gotten better but it would take a lot).
The documentation was scanty and of abysmal quality.
Too many admin functions were only documented as GUI tasks, which was a nuisance because the GUI admin tool seems to make a habit of losing touch with the database engine - reporting that the database is stopped and/or unavailable when actually it's started, on the same machine.
Likewise the GUI tools were counterintuitive to an extreme. And documenting a process was far more difficult than with a command-line interface; if you want to tell someone how to do something, you need pages of ambiguous screen shots rather than a few lines of precise commands.
Oracle is no picnic to admin, and the learning curve is surely steeper than that of MSSQL. On the other hand, once you get going, you can really start getting work done. No such luck with MSSQL, where you're always clicking around desperately trying to find where they decided to hide an option that could reasonably be assumed to be in any of 20 different places.
Was this amortized out to the Second Coming? Oracle Standard Edition on that hardware is a few thousand dollars a year - less than many people spend on lunch. To spend $250,000 you'd need to purchase the perpetual license (no recurring fees other than optional support) and install it on over 20 dual-400 servers.
Why not check their web site before making wildly incorrect pronouncements?