> And in the land of the rolling blackout, one has to wonder if the potential power saved could help the situation,
I'm not sure personally.
More power means more jobs for men in power plants.
This reduces unemployment, improves the power infrastructure, and increases the power capacity.
Reducing power consumption OTOH, just buries the problem under the carpet - there's still the same power shortage issue, but it's just been postponed a little.
My solution:
everyone turn on all their high-drain electrical appliances: hairdriers, heaters, computers, etc., and leave them on 24 hours a day - for example, my PC has been on all of January and I haven't turned it off or rebooted it once. We also have the heating on max and all the windows open.
This is the most public-spirited thing I can think of in this situation.
The problem is that things are getting more and more complicated - very soon, things like SMTP will be obsolete, and only groupware like Exchange will be viable - simply because it's more productive for a company to have groupware.
There isn't the money in open source to be able to afford to produce things like this - because there's no revenue in giving things away, companies can't afford the programmers to produce the complicated products of the future.
Even Netscape, bankrolled by one of the world's largest companies, AOL, can't keep up, via open source, with expensive protocols like XSL and so on.
There's just not enough money.
However, that comes a stage down the line.
For the moment, companies are happy to except vanilla products like Apache and qmail, which do something simple, but do it efficiently.
For these products, open source is viable - there is none of the strategic problems involved with say co-ordinating an open-source GUI, which only a commercial company, with control over its staff can do.
This will take a while though - the first thing to happen will be the death of consumer open source. I posted an article on this to Kuro5hin, and although the poll died, the majority of people agreed with my conclusion that open source isn't viable for consumer software.
I invite you to read my arguments, which, briefly summarised are as follows:
no direction - there's no-one who can find what the focus groups want and then enforce it
no money - you can't afford to compete if you don't have enough money to do so]
a mistaken belief as to the ability of users. Open source relies on a hobbyist's views of computing, which states that everyone knows how to program - false; modern programs are exceptionally complicated and most users are not programmers.
no innovation. Because there's no money for r+d, there's little innovation and open source plays catchup all the time. Furthermore, there's no incentive for improvement - open source doesn't have to make improvements like MS does - they don't have to make qmail v6 much better than v5 ytto get people to upgrade as MS would with Outlook 2002 vs 2000.
> Sorry, I must have missed where this MASSIVE crime wave was coming from.
Have you looked at crime trends? They're going up you know.
And no-one, but no-one uses machinery unless it reduces staff numbers.
Factories are now robotic.
The ones that aren't don't survive - they have to employ people, and that costs more. The result of this is that people are *forced* to increase unemployment - if they don't go robotic, they go bust and everyone's out of a job, and if they do, then people lose their jobs too.
This myth about humans retaining their jobs is wrong - (a) they don't, and (b) the one's that keep the jobs, as managers, etc. are not the manual workers.
Why pay money for anonymous information?
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 5
I'm not sure if that is a serious question, but anonymous information is worth a great deal.
If I know that the magazine I'm thinking of advertising in has the anonymous profile of mainly 20-30 year-olds, that it makes my decision as to whether, and how to advertise with them more effective.
Similiarly, if I know that lots of children visit Slashdot (or MSN), then I'll advertise things here.
It's good news, because it means the government don't have to pay as much for the filtering because the people make more money other ways.
It also means that advertising is better focused, which is better for the recipient (good ads will be clicked on, and might be useful).
There is no issue about privacy, simply because there's no personal data.
There's no problem here. It's just that people worry because it's on the internet. This has been going on for years.
The fact that advertisers know that most Economist readers are male and middle-aged is not a privacy issue, and neither is this - exactly the same thing.
'Characters with religious views that are real to those who hold them?'
Isn't that a tautology?
'Like any work of fiction, there must be a suspension of disbelief'
This reads like someone reviewing a book for a grade school essay. Sorry. You don't need to say that.
This reminds of a restaurant review I read by someone (another lay person) recently who reviewed the McDonalds he went into as if it was a 5* restaurant, commenting on the quality of the fries.
You can't analyze trashy novels as if they were real literature. They're great for reading on the beach or whatever - but analysis? Never.
I'm not trying to be negative here, but if you're going to review something, you should be a little more critical of it. Try reading a book on literary criticism. There's quite an art to it, and I think you might find you have a genuine interest in it.
What use is this? Surely winning this competition is a sign you should never work again? Obfuscated code (aka elegant) is no faster, even if it is shorter, and may even compile into worse code.
For me this shows the problm with open source - people are more interested in playing silly games than actually getting something constructive done.
Microsoft didn't get to be as successful as it did by creating obfuscated code you know.
I don't normally respond to illiterate flamebait, but in this case I'll make an exception:
> Everybody and there brother
I'll just pick this up before someone else does.
'There'!= 'their', the possessive pronoun Taco is looking for.
> has submitted what has to be the least interesting story in months. Microsoft's DNS server is down.
Ok fine. End of story. No need for irrelevant flamebait designed to get thousands of posts about how Windows/Linux sucks.
Let's address the news: MS' dns is down.
Ok wow. Have you been to uptime.netcraft.com? I think you'll find *all* servers go down, especially ones under the consistently heavy load of ddos, millions of hits a day, etc like MS. Redhat goes down, MS goes down, big wow. Every big site goes down more often than a presedential intern on heat. Ok. [It's just that people don't gloat when Linux companies go down, probably because they aren't successful like MS so people aren't jealous of their success.]
> I haven't visited their web site in months and I don't care in the slightest, but if I don't post this, I'm going to spend the next 48 hours deleting 2,000 submissions about it as zillions of people somehow think that this matters.
It does to the millions of daily visitors, yes.
> Yup. Its down. Ye haw. Do you people actually visit microsoft.com?
It's actually in the top 10 of most visited websites in the world. It has free software, updates, one of the best developers' sites anywhere, etc..
> I can't remember the last time I intentionally went to that site. There's just no need.
You might as well say you have no need to upgrade Slashcode when that gets holes in it. If you use Windows there is a need, because all software is insecure and Windows is no exception. It's no different with Linux. It's not just that either. Microsoft's website has a whole bunch of other interesting and free stuff there too. In fact, Microsoft's site became, in about 1997 (I remember reading) the largest website in the world, with several terabytes of content. So yes, there is a need.
If you actually took your blinkers off you might realize that - I don't just crap about Linux like you seem to about Windows. I haven't got an irrational fear/jealousy about Linux.
Hell I use linux. I install and maintain it as a web server. And I don't say that no-one needs to visit redhat.com, even though it's clearly not as good a site.
> (Well, I guess if you run windows you gotta get your service packs every few minutes;)
Nice casual aside there, guaranteed to pick up a few hundred replies. Nice one. But it's not true.
There is *one* service pack for Windows 2000 since release.
This stuff about Windows needing service packs often is bull. Linux has far more service packs, because Microsft updates things all at once whereas with Linux you have to update individually.
Hell my grandmother could install a Windows service pack, but I can't see her upgrading bind when a security hole's found in that.
I don't mean to respond in such flameish terms, but I had no choice in this case. In one breath you say the story sucks, and then you throw in some highly childish and unprofessional insults against a site which represents a considerable portion of many people's lives.
We keep hearing from you how Slashdot is becoming the newspaper for the new millennium, how people are taking notice of it, and how it ranks alongside traditional media, but if you expect the kind of respect this implies, you are going to:
(a) learn how to spell. I'm not normally a spelling flamer (i.e. not for posters), but how can you expect people to take the site seriously when you can't even be bothered to read the post twice or put it through a spellchecker to find that 'its' is a possessive pronoun, whereas 'it's' is the contraction of 'it is' you where looking for.
(b) you're going to have to learn about journalistic standards. If you expect to be taken seriously, you can't write like that - you can't show such prejudice, and you can't show such a casual dismissal of America's biggest company.
You're not just a Perl hacker sitting around eating pizza and drinking Mountain Dew any more Rob - you're responsible for an important and valuable institution, and it's time you behaved like it.
I always hear things about how evil Doubleclick are. For example, I run a website with advertising from Doubleclick. I have received a lot of flames from readers of the site about how evil they are, but I just can't see it myself.
What are the allegations against them?
That they collect data on customers in order to target advertising at them.
Wow! I mean big whoop.
This is not evil. If I get an ad targeted to me I'm pleased - I'd far rather have an advert for a nice geek product than one of these untargeted plastic pearl ads.
So then what's the problem. The sum total of the evil is that you get good ads. This is not bad. I like buying things off the internet because it's cheap and convenient, and if I get a good offer I'm pleased.
Furthermore, this means things are cheaper for you, which is also good, because companies spend less on advertising and sell more because of the targeting.
Even if you do object to good offers then you should be used to companies monitoring you because *get this* it happens already! Everything you buy, those store cards, and even the man interviewing you in the street goes to data organizations. People make such a fuss just because the internet's involved. Do you notice polling organizations getting investigated?
Of course not. This information's not even personal. It's information about people, not you.
Still further, lest you forget, you're not just having these people coming into your house and spying on you. It's not like that. You give the information voluntarily - you don't have to go to these sites.
Finally, what do you think would happen without this? Do you think the journalists on these ad-funded sites live on air? Of course they don't. It's time people realize that things have to be paid for - and unless you want to pay for the sites you visit, you better realize how good you got it - getting an improved consumer experience, cheaper products and free journalism. Sometimes I think these people don't like the internet, because they're doing a lot to kill it by trying to stop these sites funding themselves.
> Jeriten writes "NewsScientist
Ah yes. I remember the News Scientist. Is that the dude who reads the news in a white coat?
> puplished this story
Puplished? Oh so it's one of those nasty scientists that does tests on dogs. Nasty man.
> about how your chips could be cooled down
Personally I find the best way to cool chips is to leave them out of the oven for a while after you've fried them.
> Answer is multiple fans
Is this a definite article? [poor grammatical joke]
> sized smaller than head of a pin and growed
Like Topsy? She just growed and growed and growed.
> directly to a surface of a chips.
A chips?
[In silly 60s detective film voice]: "Excuse me Mr. Chips we have a situation here."
I would recommend a journalling file system, because you don't want to lose your MP3 selection if you don't unmount your drive properly (which could happen otherwise). You are effectively restricted to an open source file system since it's not practical to run full Windows (implied by FAT) on such a device. You will be able to customize the kernel as well. Choose between ReiserFS and ext3fs.
Also, although you don't say it's portable, if it is, a normal hard drive won't be suitable since they won't stand the movement. If it is portable, use a solid-state device.
Finally, as to hard drive vs. cd, cd is much more flexible, since you imply that the device is a music player in function and hence there won't be any advantage from being able to download music onto the hard drive, and music players aren't much good unless you can change the album.
copyright exists in artistic works
patents exist in processes
Whenever you produce a work, it is protected by international treat and you own the copyright in it. You don't need to apply for copyright - you own it immediately.
However, the copyright might belong to someone else under copyright. For example, under your contract of emplyoment, your work will probably be owned by your employers, and some websites might have as a condition of your agreement with them that they own the copyright.
Fair use applies for criticism and study, broadly. Thus it is legitimate to post a few lines from a book in order to review it, since that would be fair use. Posting the entire book, OTOH would not be fair use.
Reverse engineering OTOH, is not illegal as such, since copyright does not exist in ideas (only in expression of those ideas). Thus when Rob Malda said that he wouldn't sue
Kuro5hin 'in the spirit of open source', he was wrong, since the idea cannot be copyrighted. Software code is treated as a literary work (although most code is not very poetic),
and so is protected by copyright.
There do exist design rights however, and the look and feel may be protected under copyright. So if you produced something that looked to similar to Slashdot, that would be breach of copyright.
Patents exist in respect of processes - in particular there is a requirement for a novel and innovative way of doing something (with a particular requirement for absence of prior art). These can affect software, if the software includes a novel process.
Finally, there is passing off - if a product is confusingly similar to another well-known product it will be passing off, provided they are in the same market sector.
Thus a McDonalds construction company has no chance of confusion with the burger chain, whereas the cafe owned by Ronald McDonald was, since they were in the same business.
In conclusion, the copyright holder owns the work, and can do what he likes with it. He can sue if you do anything, excluding fair use that breaks his owners rights.
I always hear this argument when it comes to copy protection. "It's not fair because people have legitimate uses."
This might be true, but the fact is that most of the uses are not legitimate. This stuff about being denied access to these things unfairly is wrong.
If you can show me one person who has not been able to pursue legitimate recording activites because of copy protection I will eat my words. Otherwise I stand by what I say.
'Oh yes', I hear you say, 'People haven't been able to use their DAT tapes'.
Big whoop. Just use some other way. It's not going to stop you getting your recording contract.
And people seem to think no-one gets hurt by these things.
They are wrong. The people working for record and computer companies have jobs and families too.
Even worse:
> Like Apple's recent happy-happy web pages on their new DVD-writing drive, announced this month (http://www.apple.com/idvd/). It's full of glowing info about how you can write DVDs based on your own DV movie recordings, etc. What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video copyrighted by major companies.
This is just my point. Why the hell shouldn't companies be allowed to protect their property? The big word there is copyrighted - like 'owned by'. The fact is that piracy makes companies go bust. Piracy increases the costs for people who aren't thieves. Piracy means that some great software just doesn't reach you. If we remove the tools, we remove the crime, and the world is better off in the end.
Next thing the free software guys will be trying to tell me that I can't put a chain on my bike! I mean this is getting Communist in proportions - surely we've got past the belief in common ownership of property.
>...if all sites could agree on a common (e.g. XML-based) content exchange format and conventions/protocols for agents to visit from remote sites and swap/glean content.
I think you need to learn about RDF, which is indeed XML based. Specifically the Netscape RDF format is already an established form of this.
So infrastructure isn't a problem, it's resources - to maintain, develop and host such a site - and this needs money. That will be your problem - you will have trouble finding money beause Open Source is based on giving things away. Perhaps you should start an Open Source charity. I'm sure if you went round the campus towns of America ratting a tin you'd get plenty of donations.
If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
Unfortunately the GPL is designed for traditional software - not Slashcode, and I think that it should be a breach - the copyright message (absent from plastic.com) is intended to demonstrate the copyright to others - so if I distribute a piece of software to my friends, I have to tell them it's GPL; this is similar to that - this is not within the spirit of the GPL, even if it's within the letter of it.
Slashdot members who receive high ratings also earn special privileges: their posts start out at a higher rating than usual, and they are more likely to be chosen as a moderator in the future.
"This last privilege is a brilliant example of metafeedback at work," said Steven Johnson, the author of the forthcoming book "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" (Scribner, 2001) and a vice president of Automatic Media, Plastic.com's parent company.
"It's the ratings snake devouring its own tail," Mr. Johnson said. "Moderators rate posts, and those ratings are used to select future moderators." The most impressive aspect of the Slashdot system, Mr. Johnson said, is that it not only encourages high quality in submissions to the site, but it also sets up an environment where community leaders can naturally rise to the top.
I quote a passage I think is interesting, highlighting the most dubious part.
I think what's happened here is that people have gone "Oh goodie, we've got to right about the 'Online Community', and try to fit their conclusions to what's out there".
What really happens is:
(a) Comedians become moderators (funny posts do well)
(b) Those who post crap stolen off the linked site become moderators (informative)
(c) Those who conform to the majority opinion do well (insightful)
(d) Trolls thrive
High quality is not encouraged - in fact those who become moderators are those:
(a) with nothing (like myself) better to do than to post their opinions (which won't change a jot) to a website
(b) do so so much that they become moderators
If you've got any sense, you'll find a way to market yourself without spam.
Viral marketing's probably the answer - you make people want to visit your site - and they are the ones forwarding it round the world, not you. Make people want to visit your website.
For example, you could investigate putting Flash or Java games on there, or giving free downloads of stuff like freeloader.com's free Grand Theft Auto 2. You could even write your own game, as the Dommelsch brewery did - a decent pinball game, available here.
The other way is to create an amusing email, animation or movie, implanted with your adverts, and then get people to forward it.
Finally, try publicity stunts, but be careful that they are things you want your company to be associated with.
> games cover a huge range of technologies-graphics, physics, modeling, scripting, AI, networking, databases-more than any other kind of software I can think of. What I finally realized was that, for me at least, game programming is the sweetest spot in all of software development.
They might be fulfilling to the programmer, but that does not necessarily mean that games programming is the highest form of programming. Don't get me wrong, I like a Quake deathmatch with the rest of the office as much as the next guy, but to say that games programming somehow transcends other software is wrong.
Surely it's much more fulfilling to say that you created the software that runs a hospital which saves people lives, or that we sent man to the moon on one of your programs. Compared with these games seem just a little trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
He\'s an idiot.
Do forgive him.
chilisoft ASP
I.e. so that they have to increase the power supply accordingly.
This means that power will be cheaper (as volume increases, cost reduces), and there will be capacity to spare.
> And in the land of the rolling blackout, one has to wonder if the potential power saved could help the situation,
I'm not sure personally.
More power means more jobs for men in power plants.
This reduces unemployment, improves the power infrastructure, and increases the power capacity.
Reducing power consumption OTOH, just buries the problem under the carpet - there's still the same power shortage issue, but it's just been postponed a little.
My solution:
everyone turn on all their high-drain electrical appliances: hairdriers, heaters, computers, etc., and leave them on 24 hours a day - for example, my PC has been on all of January and I haven't turned it off or rebooted it once. We also have the heating on max and all the windows open.
This is the most public-spirited thing I can think of in this situation.
I think in the long term open source will fail.
The problem is that things are getting more and more complicated - very soon, things like SMTP will be obsolete, and only groupware like Exchange will be viable - simply because it's more productive for a company to have groupware.
There isn't the money in open source to be able to afford to produce things like this - because there's no revenue in giving things away, companies can't afford the programmers to produce the complicated products of the future.
Even Netscape, bankrolled by one of the world's largest companies, AOL, can't keep up, via open source, with expensive protocols like XSL and so on.
There's just not enough money.
However, that comes a stage down the line.
For the moment, companies are happy to except vanilla products like Apache and qmail, which do something simple, but do it efficiently.
For these products, open source is viable - there is none of the strategic problems involved with say co-ordinating an open-source GUI, which only a commercial company, with control over its staff can do.
This will take a while though - the first thing to happen will be the death of consumer open source. I posted an article on this to Kuro5hin, and although the poll died, the majority of people agreed with my conclusion that open source isn't viable for consumer software.
I invite you to read my arguments, which, briefly summarised are as follows:
no direction - there's no-one who can find what the focus groups want and then enforce it
no money - you can't afford to compete if you don't have enough money to do so]
a mistaken belief as to the ability of users. Open source relies on a hobbyist's views of computing, which states that everyone knows how to program - false; modern programs are exceptionally complicated and most users are not programmers.
no innovation. Because there's no money for r+d, there's little innovation and open source plays catchup all the time. Furthermore, there's no incentive for improvement - open source doesn't have to make improvements like MS does - they don't have to make qmail v6 much better than v5 ytto get people to upgrade as MS would with Outlook 2002 vs 2000.
> Sorry, I must have missed where this MASSIVE crime wave was coming from.
Have you looked at crime trends? They're going up you know.
And no-one, but no-one uses machinery unless it reduces staff numbers.
Factories are now robotic.
The ones that aren't don't survive - they have to employ people, and that costs more. The result of this is that people are *forced* to increase unemployment - if they don't go robotic, they go bust and everyone's out of a job, and if they do, then people lose their jobs too.
This myth about humans retaining their jobs is wrong - (a) they don't, and (b) the one's that keep the jobs, as managers, etc. are not the manual workers.
I'm not sure if that is a serious question, but anonymous information is worth a great deal.
If I know that the magazine I'm thinking of advertising in has the anonymous profile of mainly 20-30 year-olds, that it makes my decision as to whether, and how to advertise with them more effective.
Similiarly, if I know that lots of children visit Slashdot (or MSN), then I'll advertise things here.
It's good news, because it means the government don't have to pay as much for the filtering because the people make more money other ways.
It also means that advertising is better focused, which is better for the recipient (good ads will be clicked on, and might be useful).
There is no issue about privacy, simply because there's no personal data.
There's no problem here. It's just that people worry because it's on the internet. This has been going on for years.
The fact that advertisers know that most Economist readers are male and middle-aged is not a privacy issue, and neither is this - exactly the same thing.
Sorry, but that is badly written.
'Characters with religious views that are real to those who hold them?'
Isn't that a tautology?
'Like any work of fiction, there must be a suspension of disbelief'
This reads like someone reviewing a book for a grade school essay. Sorry. You don't need to say that.
This reminds of a restaurant review I read by someone (another lay person) recently who reviewed the McDonalds he went into as if it was a 5* restaurant, commenting on the quality of the fries.
You can't analyze trashy novels as if they were real literature. They're great for reading on the beach or whatever - but analysis? Never.
I'm not trying to be negative here, but if you're going to review something, you should be a little more critical of it. Try reading a book on literary criticism. There's quite an art to it, and I think you might find you have a genuine interest in it.
Very cool but...
What use is this? Surely winning this competition is a sign you should never work again? Obfuscated code (aka elegant) is no faster, even if it is shorter, and may even compile into worse code.
For me this shows the problm with open source - people are more interested in playing silly games than actually getting something constructive done.
Microsoft didn't get to be as successful as it did by creating obfuscated code you know.
I don't normally respond to illiterate flamebait, but in this case I'll make an exception:
;)
> Everybody and there brother
I'll just pick this up before someone else does.
'There'!= 'their', the possessive pronoun Taco is looking for.
> has submitted what has to be the least interesting story in months. Microsoft's DNS server is down.
Ok fine. End of story. No need for irrelevant flamebait designed to get thousands of posts about how Windows/Linux sucks.
Let's address the news: MS' dns is down.
Ok wow. Have you been to uptime.netcraft.com? I think you'll find *all* servers go down, especially ones under the consistently heavy load of ddos, millions of hits a day, etc like MS. Redhat goes down, MS goes down, big wow. Every big site goes down more often than a presedential intern on heat. Ok. [It's just that people don't gloat when Linux companies go down, probably because they aren't successful like MS so people aren't jealous of their success.]
> I haven't visited their web site in months and I don't care in the slightest, but if I don't post this, I'm going to spend the next 48 hours deleting 2,000 submissions about it as zillions of people somehow think that this matters.
It does to the millions of daily visitors, yes.
> Yup. Its down. Ye haw. Do you people actually visit microsoft.com?
It's actually in the top 10 of most visited websites in the world. It has free software, updates, one of the best developers' sites anywhere, etc..
> I can't remember the last time I intentionally went to that site. There's just no need.
You might as well say you have no need to upgrade Slashcode when that gets holes in it. If you use Windows there is a need, because all software is insecure and Windows is no exception. It's no different with Linux. It's not just that either. Microsoft's website has a whole bunch of other interesting and free stuff there too. In fact, Microsoft's site became, in about 1997 (I remember reading) the largest website in the world, with several terabytes of content. So yes, there is a need.
If you actually took your blinkers off you might realize that - I don't just crap about Linux like you seem to about Windows. I haven't got an irrational fear/jealousy about Linux.
Hell I use linux. I install and maintain it as a web server. And I don't say that no-one needs to visit redhat.com, even though it's clearly not as good a site.
> (Well, I guess if you run windows you gotta get your service packs every few minutes
Nice casual aside there, guaranteed to pick up a few hundred replies. Nice one. But it's not true.
There is *one* service pack for Windows 2000 since release.
Let's look at the Linux equivalent shall we?
Have you ever tried installing Redhat?
I have, and I spent 3 hours downloading things from http://updates.redhat.com and upgrading them.
This stuff about Windows needing service packs often is bull. Linux has far more service packs, because Microsft updates things all at once whereas with Linux you have to update individually.
Hell my grandmother could install a Windows service pack, but I can't see her upgrading bind when a security hole's found in that.
I don't mean to respond in such flameish terms, but I had no choice in this case. In one breath you say the story sucks, and then you throw in some highly childish and unprofessional insults against a site which represents a considerable portion of many people's lives.
We keep hearing from you how Slashdot is becoming the newspaper for the new millennium, how people are taking notice of it, and how it ranks alongside traditional media, but if you expect the kind of respect this implies, you are going to:
(a) learn how to spell. I'm not normally a spelling flamer (i.e. not for posters), but how can you expect people to take the site seriously when you can't even be bothered to read the post twice or put it through a spellchecker to find that 'its' is a possessive pronoun, whereas 'it's' is the contraction of 'it is' you where looking for.
(b) you're going to have to learn about journalistic standards. If you expect to be taken seriously, you can't write like that - you can't show such prejudice, and you can't show such a casual dismissal of America's biggest company.
You're not just a Perl hacker sitting around eating pizza and drinking Mountain Dew any more Rob - you're responsible for an important and valuable institution, and it's time you behaved like it.
I always hear things about how evil Doubleclick are. For example, I run a website with advertising from Doubleclick. I have received a lot of flames from readers of the site about how evil they are, but I just can't see it myself.
What are the allegations against them?
That they collect data on customers in order to target advertising at them.
Wow! I mean big whoop.
This is not evil. If I get an ad targeted to me I'm pleased - I'd far rather have an advert for a nice geek product than one of these untargeted plastic pearl ads.
So then what's the problem. The sum total of the evil is that you get good ads. This is not bad. I like buying things off the internet because it's cheap and convenient, and if I get a good offer I'm pleased.
Furthermore, this means things are cheaper for you, which is also good, because companies spend less on advertising and sell more because of the targeting.
Even if you do object to good offers then you should be used to companies monitoring you because *get this* it happens already! Everything you buy, those store cards, and even the man interviewing you in the street goes to data organizations. People make such a fuss just because the internet's involved. Do you notice polling organizations getting investigated?
Of course not. This information's not even personal. It's information about people, not you.
Still further, lest you forget, you're not just having these people coming into your house and spying on you. It's not like that. You give the information voluntarily - you don't have to go to these sites.
Finally, what do you think would happen without this? Do you think the journalists on these ad-funded sites live on air? Of course they don't. It's time people realize that things have to be paid for - and unless you want to pay for the sites you visit, you better realize how good you got it - getting an improved consumer experience, cheaper products and free journalism. Sometimes I think these people don't like the internet, because they're doing a lot to kill it by trying to stop these sites funding themselves.
[Formatting fixed: sorry. (Why is HTML the default??]
> Jeriten writes "NewsScientist
Ah yes. I remember the News Scientist. Is that the dude who reads the news in a white coat?
> puplished this story
Puplished? Oh so it's one of those nasty scientists that does tests on dogs. Nasty man.
> about how your chips could be cooled down
Personally I find the best way to cool chips is to leave them out of the oven for a while after you've fried them.
> Answer is multiple fans
Is this a definite article? [poor grammatical joke]
> sized smaller than head of a pin and growed
Like Topsy? She just growed and growed and growed.
> directly to a surface of a chips.
A chips?
[In silly 60s detective film voice]: "Excuse me Mr. Chips we have a situation here."
> Jeriten writes "NewsScientist Ah yes. I remember the News Scientist. Is that the dude who reads the news in a white coat? > puplished this story Puplished? Oh so it's one of those nasty scientists that does tests on dogs. Nasty man. > about how your chips could be cooled down Personally I find the best way to cool chips is to leave them out of the oven for a while after you've fried them. > Answer is multiple fans Is this a definite article? [poor grammatical joke] > sized smaller than head of a pin and growed Like Topsy? She just growed and growed and growed. > directly to a surface of a chips. A chips? [In silly 60s detective film voice]: "Excuse me Mr. Chips we have a situation here."
True. But I can't see that an MP3 player could function with such a small drive.
I would recommend a journalling file system, because you don't want to lose your MP3 selection if you don't unmount your drive properly (which could happen otherwise). You are effectively restricted to an open source file system since it's not practical to run full Windows (implied by FAT) on such a device. You will be able to customize the kernel as well. Choose between ReiserFS and ext3fs.
Also, although you don't say it's portable, if it is, a normal hard drive won't be suitable since they won't stand the movement. If it is portable, use a solid-state device.
Finally, as to hard drive vs. cd, cd is much more flexible, since you imply that the device is a music player in function and hence there won't be any advantage from being able to download music onto the hard drive, and music players aren't much good unless you can change the album.
You've missed the point.
There isn't any book piracy. That's why we don't restrict copiers.
It's similar to the fact that I need to put a chain on my bike but not my house.
If people stole houses we'd protect them to.
Briefly:
copyright exists in artistic works
patents exist in processes
Whenever you produce a work, it is protected by international treat and you own the copyright in it. You don't need to apply for copyright - you own it immediately.
However, the copyright might belong to someone else under copyright. For example, under your contract of emplyoment, your work will probably be owned by your employers, and some websites might have as a condition of your agreement with them that they own the copyright.
Fair use applies for criticism and study, broadly. Thus it is legitimate to post a few lines from a book in order to review it, since that would be fair use. Posting the entire book, OTOH would not be fair use.
Reverse engineering OTOH, is not illegal as such, since copyright does not exist in ideas (only in expression of those ideas). Thus when Rob Malda said that he wouldn't sue
Kuro5hin 'in the spirit of open source', he was wrong, since the idea cannot be copyrighted. Software code is treated as a literary work (although most code is not very poetic),
and so is protected by copyright.
There do exist design rights however, and the look and feel may be protected under copyright. So if you produced something that looked to similar to Slashdot, that would be breach of copyright.
Patents exist in respect of processes - in particular there is a requirement for a novel and innovative way of doing something (with a particular requirement for absence of prior art). These can affect software, if the software includes a novel process.
Finally, there is passing off - if a product is confusingly similar to another well-known product it will be passing off, provided they are in the same market sector.
Thus a McDonalds construction company has no chance of confusion with the burger chain, whereas the cafe owned by Ronald McDonald was, since they were in the same business.
In conclusion, the copyright holder owns the work, and can do what he likes with it. He can sue if you do anything, excluding fair use that breaks his owners rights.
I always hear this argument when it comes to copy protection. "It's not fair because people have legitimate uses."
This might be true, but the fact is that most of the uses are not legitimate. This stuff about being denied access to these things unfairly is wrong.
If you can show me one person who has not been able to pursue legitimate recording activites because of copy protection I will eat my words. Otherwise I stand by what I say.
'Oh yes', I hear you say, 'People haven't been able to use their DAT tapes'.
Big whoop. Just use some other way. It's not going to stop you getting your recording contract.
And people seem to think no-one gets hurt by these things.
They are wrong. The people working for record and computer companies have jobs and families too.
Even worse:
> Like Apple's recent happy-happy web pages on their new DVD-writing drive, announced this month (http://www.apple.com/idvd/). It's full of glowing info about how you can write DVDs based on your own DV movie recordings, etc. What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video copyrighted by major companies.
This is just my point. Why the hell shouldn't companies be allowed to protect their property? The big word there is copyrighted - like 'owned by'. The fact is that piracy makes companies go bust. Piracy increases the costs for people who aren't thieves. Piracy means that some great software just doesn't reach you. If we remove the tools, we remove the crime, and the world is better off in the end.
Next thing the free software guys will be trying to tell me that I can't put a chain on my bike! I mean this is getting Communist in proportions - surely we've got past the belief in common ownership of property.
This is about theft. That's all.
> ...if all sites could agree on a common (e.g. XML-based) content exchange format and conventions/protocols for agents to visit from remote sites and swap/glean content.
I think you need to learn about RDF, which is indeed XML based. Specifically the Netscape RDF format is already an established form of this.
So infrastructure isn't a problem, it's resources - to maintain, develop and host such a site - and this needs money. That will be your problem - you will have trouble finding money beause Open Source is based on giving things away. Perhaps you should start an Open Source charity. I'm sure if you went round the campus towns of America ratting a tin you'd get plenty of donations.
If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
Unfortunately the GPL is designed for traditional software - not Slashcode, and I think that it should be a breach - the copyright message (absent from plastic.com) is intended to demonstrate the copyright to others - so if I distribute a piece of software to my friends, I have to tell them it's GPL; this is similar to that - this is not within the spirit of the GPL, even if it's within the letter of it.
Someone email Stallman
Slashdot members who receive high ratings also earn special privileges: their posts start out at a higher rating than usual, and they are more likely to be chosen as a moderator in the future.
"This last privilege is a brilliant example of metafeedback at work," said Steven Johnson, the author of the forthcoming book "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" (Scribner, 2001) and a vice president of Automatic Media, Plastic.com's parent company.
"It's the ratings snake devouring its own tail," Mr. Johnson said. "Moderators rate posts, and those ratings are used to select future moderators." The most impressive aspect of the Slashdot system, Mr. Johnson said, is that it not only encourages high quality in submissions to the site, but it also sets up an environment where community leaders can naturally rise to the top.
I quote a passage I think is interesting, highlighting the most dubious part.
I think what's happened here is that people have gone "Oh goodie, we've got to right about the 'Online Community', and try to fit their conclusions to what's out there".
What really happens is:
(a) Comedians become moderators (funny posts do well)
(b) Those who post crap stolen off the linked site become moderators (informative)
(c) Those who conform to the majority opinion do well (insightful)
(d) Trolls thrive
High quality is not encouraged - in fact those who become moderators are those:
(a) with nothing (like myself) better to do than to post their opinions (which won't change a jot) to a website
(b) do so so much that they become moderators
Although I'm not sure why they shouldn't provide the content *they* paid for on *their* terms, you can get in without registering here
If you've got any sense, you'll find a way to market yourself without spam.
Viral marketing's probably the answer - you make people want to visit your site - and they are the ones forwarding it round the world, not you. Make people want to visit your website.
For example, you could investigate putting Flash or Java games on there, or giving free downloads of stuff like freeloader.com's free Grand Theft Auto 2. You could even write your own game, as the Dommelsch brewery did - a decent pinball game, available here.
The other way is to create an amusing email, animation or movie, implanted with your adverts, and then get people to forward it.
Finally, try publicity stunts, but be careful that they are things you want your company to be associated with.
> games cover a huge range of technologies-graphics, physics, modeling, scripting, AI, networking, databases-more than any other kind of software I can think of. What I finally realized was that, for me at least, game programming is the sweetest spot in all of software development.
They might be fulfilling to the programmer, but that does not necessarily mean that games programming is the highest form of programming. Don't get me wrong, I like a Quake deathmatch with the rest of the office as much as the next guy, but to say that games programming somehow transcends other software is wrong.
Surely it's much more fulfilling to say that you created the software that runs a hospital which saves people lives, or that we sent man to the moon on one of your programs. Compared with these games seem just a little trivial.
I bet the developers are pretty pissed with that.