I've got to say I agree... They also have www.yohoo.com (same Euro Sluts image, description and links) and this lady at work (mid 50's) typed it accidentally (like yahoo, but worse)...She got all flustered...
So I'm thinking someone's trying to generate traffic...
Actually, in Texas, it's a felony to carry a firearm into an establishment that sells alcoholic beverages. Only law enforcment officers are allowed. Rent-a-cop are not.
In 1993, there were 15 million people in texas (not counting illegals), and 68 millions registered firearms (not counting illegals).
And file sharing services are exactly the kinds of "other means of getting their music out" that the RIAA does not want to become popular.
You see, the RIAA members are *solely* distribution companies. They advance the artists money so that the artist can produce a marketable product (didn't say good, said marketable) and turn around and distribute it.
If artists can get their music out a different way (Kazaa et al) then there is no need to make "marketable products" such as CDs with 2 good songs and 9 fillers, and there is no need to spend $600,000 making the CD, printing half a million copies, shipping it all over the country, making "deals" with radio stations for airtime, and all that Jazz.
I live in Los Angeles. There is PLENTY of great music and great musicians here who do it for the love of music who are not signed with big labels. Are they famous, no. Do they enjoy what they do? You betcha. Do they have problems paying the bills? Don't we all?
There was a high cost of entry in the recording industry until mp3s and file sharing programs came along. The RIAA members profited from the high cost of entry. The market dynamics have changed. There is still money to be made, but it will have to be made differently. This is called capitalism. Anything short of that is called socialism: the promotion and legalization of state-protected industries.
People who download music and various other "infotainment" should actively seek to compensate the artists and authors for their work, but it does not have to be by purchasing useless CDs to prop up an obsolete and dying industry.
Horse-drawn-carts manufacturers collapsed after cars were invented. Should the government have protected them at the expense of an innovative technology?
That's why a CD burner and a T-1 at work is good. At home, I use a 56k modem on my laptop (I use it a lot of places), and a 28.8 external on my linux box.
The other $20/month, I use for a good website.
Also, it's amazing how much "infotainment" I've downloaded at night (midnight-7am) with my sustainable 44000. (thank you Kazaa!). There's about a gig's worth.
Also, I consider it bad manners for a web site not to offer low-speed html (as in xhtml/CSS) options. I've tweaked Moz to disable popups and non-server images, and dang, it's amazing how fast the net goes without all those ads... Also, I disable cookies from just anywhere (except slashydotty of course) and it seems to increase perf. What's the relation there?
Let's say you decide to add a USPS address parser to your favorite open source program that validates the Zip and the city via an xml-rpc interface to a server on your company with Linux&&apache&&(Perl||Python)... You can! And if it's great and you send it to the maintainers of that piece of software, they might put it in the official release, and then, everyone will have it...
Can you ask Microsoft to do that in WordXP? Would they do it? Might they sell that back to you as a "feature" in WordXP2004? You betcha...
Company IT departments don't have to buy linux. Thus, it never gets sent to HQ for funding request, thus, executives don't know about it.
As far as business-critical apps: my company found out quickly how business-critical email was. Our internet was down in September (thanks Qwest) and our clients would call and say: I just got your email sent back with Host not found. Are you still in business?
Every application in an enterprise is business-critical. It's just some are bigger than others.
One of the most important things about Code Red and Nimda is that news agencies told the genreal public that these viruses/worms would not affect the general public, only those who run web server. Well, the AOL Grandma does not run a web server.
Either BlueCross or BlueShield of CA (I forget which) is ditching their IIS5/ASP architecture in favor of Sun's Java Enterprise server over security concerns. They're probably not the only ones.
The thing is that to most americans, $19B looks like a lot of money, and if you fine MS $19B, that will mean that they had done something bad, bad enough to warrant $19B in punitive damages.
Ultimately, the "hurt" would come from the damage to the company's image.
Granted the $19B would not put MS out of business, and that's not what we want.
You, sir, are a danger to society. Not because of your ideas, but because you would actually put them to use and quite possibly irreparably damage the lives of thousands just because you are disgruntled.
It is not only legal but encouraged to have ideas in this country.
Putting people out of work? It's called capitalism.
Oh, and God just fell off his throne... Oh, wait, my bad, he didn't.
Being disgruntled? that's okay too. I do something constructive about it, instead of sulking.
Answering trolls? Exercising my constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech.
All I'm saying is that the old expression "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" should be relegated to the antics of a past age.
In today's complex world, all entities must walk circumspectly, carefully gauging the pros and cons of any endeavor, and not follow anyone blindly, no matter how lofty their motives might be.
Perhaps the ref to WWII was a bit over the top, though.
You need to look a gift horse in the mouth. Look at Germany in the 30's. They were hit hard by the US/Global depression on top of an enormous debt burden from WWI. Then, these idealists came in and rebuilt the country. They built world-class freeways, rebuilt the industry, lowered unemployment, lowered inflation, in 6 short years Germany arguably became the most powerful nation in the world economically, and soon, militarily as well. (1933-1939) then, another 6 years later (1939-1945) Germany had suffered 11 million+ dead, had been bombed back to the stone age by the UK, the US and the USSR. They also suffered being split in half, being occupied by foreign forces for 45+ years, and being branded by the world as barbarians.
It all looked good, but in reality, they were going down the path to perdition. They should have really looked that gift horse in the mouth.
There's something Microsoft learned a long time ago: cozy up to the developers, then charge everybody else money.
I got all happy learning VB and Asp (free PWS)...
Of course, they screwed up when they began charging for the MSDN library.
So I have since realized the error of my ways.
Long live Perl! (waiting for Perl 6... please by Xmas please...)
I follow the W3C recommendations (and they are just recommendations mind you) on XHTML because I like to write tight (english, code, and html). But there's nothing forcing me to do it.
Likewise, there will be nothing forcing me to use their newfangled patented standard.
<ramble>true</ramble>
Oh, but wait, what if they patent a hyperlinking system, or an xml schema... and I need to use it? Can they shut down my site for patent violation? What? Whatever happened to the First Amendment to The United States Constitution in The Bill of RIGHTS. By the way, people should not forget that the Bill of Rights was not amended later on, like the prohibition, it was in there from the get-go. It was a deal-breaker. There's a reason for that. It's a fundamental necessity for freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and those were the reasons we had a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution, and a War in the first place.
Now, whatever happened to the $20/per month the Average Person pays for internet access (more or less, mind you)
If 50,000,000 people in the US (low figure) pay that each month, that's, oh, $1 Billion per month, and $12 Billion per year. Now, isn't that enough for some decent content?
I have an interesting solution.
Make the ISP pay. They're collecting the money (the aforementioned 12 billion). They need to distribute it.
Heck, just like a cable company.
Let's say I set up a site, and I say: All AOL IP blocks will be blocked unless AOL pays me $10,000 per month. AOL users coming to my site will get a: "Sorry, AOL has chosen not to provide this service to you. Please select an alternative ISP in the list below, or email customerservice@aol.com and request that they provide access to this web site."
Hummm... I wonder. Then: no ads, no popups, and the customer does not have to pay anything. Forget Micropayments. One check from each of the major ISPs each month. I should be able to manage that just fine.
Oh, and access would be provided to all MIL, GOV, and EDU for free, for good measure...
Our developers spend significant amounts of time doing actual work (it's part of the corporate culture) and very little time playing your alleged "troll busting" game on Slashdot
People that spend significant amount of time doing actual work appreciate Slashdot.
Re:Not this stupid 'programming is art' BS again!
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 1
mmm, what would you say to an artificial intelligence system designed and written solely for the purpose of making the user think, ponder life, and appreciate one's place in the universe?
Is that not what most music, paitings, and sculptures attempt to do?
How about programming for purely visual gratification, like a movie, or something?
The paint on the canvas itself is gooey oils mixed, the notes on the music sheet are highly symolic notation that must follow hundreds of years of convention, yet the end-result of 5 pages of music code can be "Fur Elise" by Mozart. My wife is a pianist, a very good one, and can just, by reading sheet music, "see" the performance in her head. She can look at sheet music and say: "Wow, I love it, it's just so deep." And then she'll play it.
Computer code is like sheet music. You can have a ten line canon or a 40 pages symphony, either of which looks like complete gibberish to those who can't read sheet music, but which truly represents the art of the artist who wrote it.
Ok. Work for commercial purpose:
How much do you want to bet that most, if not all, of Mozart's pieces were work-for-hire? hehe.
How about the score for Dances with Wolves, the Titanic Theme, the latest and greatest by Schpiel-berg? Are these not art? Of course they are. Do they serve a commercial purpose? You bet! If there wasn't the lure of generating hundreds of millions of dollars, I don't think any of these pieces would have ever been written.
Now, I write code. I want to make the user feel a bond with a freaking motherboard. If I succeed in making a grown man or woman "enjoy the interaction" with a piece of plastic/metal/goo, and I have done that on purpose, is that not art?
I contend that in the same way the common man does not recognize Beethoven's 5th symphony by looking at the sheet music, likewise the common man does not recognize great, beautiful, engaging, pleasing software by looking at source code.
There are millions of programmers in the world who consider source code to be art, to be speech. Who are non-programmers to say that it isn't?
So it's okay for people who are alive right now to die so that people who are not yet born will have a chance to live longer?
With that reasoning, let's have a war, and kill all the people alive today who are lazy, poor, and ignorant (5B or so). So that in 50 years, the gene pool will be better, and people will work harder, be better educated, and be nicer to each other and live longer.
Yeah right.
Pollution kills people. Overpopulation produces pollution, therefore: reduce population. Methods? War, Aids. Let people die of aids. (What kind of people? See above paragraph).
Is that what you propose?
That is INSANE!
Heck: Even better, why don't we make air quality so bad that all people in cities will die around 62 1/2 of lung-related diseases, and only super rich people with houses in Aspen or the like will live to a ripe old age of 85. Heck, that will Save Social Security, no?
A truck engine can go 1,000,000 + miles, but my car's can only go about 150,000 before dying? I'm not pulling a 40 ton tractor either. It's just that they want to create an ongoing dependency on their product, that's all.
Just don't use the <br> tag. Let the browser size the right size of the screen. Modify the <p> tag instead with a css if you don't want a large line break.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got to say I agree... They also have www.yohoo.com (same Euro Sluts image, description and links) and this lady at work (mid 50's) typed it accidentally (like yahoo, but worse)...She got all flustered...
So I'm thinking someone's trying to generate traffic...
Actually, in Texas, it's a felony to carry a firearm into an establishment that sells alcoholic beverages. Only law enforcment officers are allowed. Rent-a-cop are not.
In 1993, there were 15 million people in texas (not counting illegals), and 68 millions registered firearms (not counting illegals).
I lived in France, unfortunately, so I know quite well what socialism is.
...cake back in the oven, it is still half-baked at present.
Oh, and yes, true, we have lots of it here too, but that's no reason to get more.
It's hard to tell when the cake is ready if you don't take it out and look at it once in a while...
'bin Laden'+Afghanistan-Germany+'Al Qaeda'-Wehrmart+Beard-'little-mustache'==Hitler
Really now...
As far as MS: When a convict proclaims his "great contribution to society" sensible people should take that with a grain of salt.
And file sharing services are exactly the kinds of "other means of getting their music out" that the RIAA does not want to become popular.
You see, the RIAA members are *solely* distribution companies. They advance the artists money so that the artist can produce a marketable product (didn't say good, said marketable) and turn around and distribute it.
If artists can get their music out a different way (Kazaa et al) then there is no need to make "marketable products" such as CDs with 2 good songs and 9 fillers, and there is no need to spend $600,000 making the CD, printing half a million copies, shipping it all over the country, making "deals" with radio stations for airtime, and all that Jazz.
I live in Los Angeles. There is PLENTY of great music and great musicians here who do it for the love of music who are not signed with big labels. Are they famous, no. Do they enjoy what they do? You betcha. Do they have problems paying the bills? Don't we all?
There was a high cost of entry in the recording industry until mp3s and file sharing programs came along. The RIAA members profited from the high cost of entry. The market dynamics have changed. There is still money to be made, but it will have to be made differently. This is called capitalism. Anything short of that is called socialism: the promotion and legalization of state-protected industries.
People who download music and various other "infotainment" should actively seek to compensate the artists and authors for their work, but it does not have to be by purchasing useless CDs to prop up an obsolete and dying industry.
Horse-drawn-carts manufacturers collapsed after cars were invented. Should the government have protected them at the expense of an innovative technology?
That's why a CD burner and a T-1 at work is good. At home, I use a 56k modem on my laptop (I use it a lot of places), and a 28.8 external on my linux box.
The other $20/month, I use for a good website.
Also, it's amazing how much "infotainment" I've downloaded at night (midnight-7am) with my sustainable 44000. (thank you Kazaa!). There's about a gig's worth.
Also, I consider it bad manners for a web site not to offer low-speed html (as in xhtml/CSS) options. I've tweaked Moz to disable popups and non-server images, and dang, it's amazing how fast the net goes without all those ads... Also, I disable cookies from just anywhere (except slashydotty of course) and it seems to increase perf. What's the relation there?
actually it's $23.95 for AOL now...
Except that there's no continental shelf in california. There's a drop to 1000 meters pretty quick...
Yeah, I could, but then it would definitely not be included in any release down the road...
The beauty of it all.
Let's say you decide to add a USPS address parser to your favorite open source program that validates the Zip and the city via an xml-rpc interface to a server on your company with Linux&&apache&&(Perl||Python)... You can! And if it's great and you send it to the maintainers of that piece of software, they might put it in the official release, and then, everyone will have it...
Can you ask Microsoft to do that in WordXP? Would they do it? Might they sell that back to you as a "feature" in WordXP2004? You betcha...
Company IT departments don't have to buy linux. Thus, it never gets sent to HQ for funding request, thus, executives don't know about it.
As far as business-critical apps: my company found out quickly how business-critical email was. Our internet was down in September (thanks Qwest) and our clients would call and say: I just got your email sent back with Host not found. Are you still in business?
Every application in an enterprise is business-critical. It's just some are bigger than others.
It has in the web server business.
One of the most important things about Code Red and Nimda is that news agencies told the genreal public that these viruses/worms would not affect the general public, only those who run web server. Well, the AOL Grandma does not run a web server.
Either BlueCross or BlueShield of CA (I forget which) is ditching their IIS5/ASP architecture in favor of Sun's Java Enterprise server over security concerns. They're probably not the only ones.
The thing is that to most americans, $19B looks like a lot of money, and if you fine MS $19B, that will mean that they had done something bad, bad enough to warrant $19B in punitive damages.
Ultimately, the "hurt" would come from the damage to the company's image.
Granted the $19B would not put MS out of business, and that's not what we want.
It is not only legal but encouraged to have ideas in this country.
Putting people out of work? It's called capitalism.
Oh, and God just fell off his throne... Oh, wait, my bad, he didn't.
Being disgruntled? that's okay too. I do something constructive about it, instead of sulking.
Answering trolls? Exercising my constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech.
I hope the nineteen states can hold out to a billion dollar payoff each.
That way, MS will see its cash reserves depleted, and will perhaps stop plastering so many XP ads all over magazines and billboards.
Also, that might derail the XBox marketing campain.
Also, that would put MS in a bind over EU fines.
That would really hurt if you ask me.
Oh, and their stock would do a spectacular dive, methinks. (all reservations avout forward-looking statements apply)
Not saying that.
All I'm saying is that the old expression "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" should be relegated to the antics of a past age.
In today's complex world, all entities must walk circumspectly, carefully gauging the pros and cons of any endeavor, and not follow anyone blindly, no matter how lofty their motives might be.
Perhaps the ref to WWII was a bit over the top, though.
You need to look a gift horse in the mouth. Look at Germany in the 30's. They were hit hard by the US/Global depression on top of an enormous debt burden from WWI. Then, these idealists came in and rebuilt the country. They built world-class freeways, rebuilt the industry, lowered unemployment, lowered inflation, in 6 short years Germany arguably became the most powerful nation in the world economically, and soon, militarily as well. (1933-1939) then, another 6 years later (1939-1945) Germany had suffered 11 million+ dead, had been bombed back to the stone age by the UK, the US and the USSR. They also suffered being split in half, being occupied by foreign forces for 45+ years, and being branded by the world as barbarians.
It all looked good, but in reality, they were going down the path to perdition. They should have really looked that gift horse in the mouth.
Outstanding!
There's something Microsoft learned a long time ago: cozy up to the developers, then charge everybody else money.
I got all happy learning VB and Asp (free PWS)...
Of course, they screwed up when they began charging for the MSDN library.
So I have since realized the error of my ways.
Long live Perl! (waiting for Perl 6... please by Xmas please...)
I follow the W3C recommendations (and they are just recommendations mind you) on XHTML because I like to write tight (english, code, and html). But there's nothing forcing me to do it.
Likewise, there will be nothing forcing me to use their newfangled patented standard.
<ramble>true</ramble>
Oh, but wait, what if they patent a hyperlinking system, or an xml schema... and I need to use it? Can they shut down my site for patent violation? What? Whatever happened to the First Amendment to The United States Constitution in The Bill of RIGHTS. By the way, people should not forget that the Bill of Rights was not amended later on, like the prohibition, it was in there from the get-go. It was a deal-breaker. There's a reason for that. It's a fundamental necessity for freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and those were the reasons we had a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution, and a War in the first place.
Now, whatever happened to the $20/per month the Average Person pays for internet access (more or less, mind you)
If 50,000,000 people in the US (low figure) pay that each month, that's, oh, $1 Billion per month, and $12 Billion per year. Now, isn't that enough for some decent content?
I have an interesting solution.
Make the ISP pay. They're collecting the money (the aforementioned 12 billion). They need to distribute it.
Heck, just like a cable company.
Let's say I set up a site, and I say: All AOL IP blocks will be blocked unless AOL pays me $10,000 per month. AOL users coming to my site will get a: "Sorry, AOL has chosen not to provide this service to you. Please select an alternative ISP in the list below, or email customerservice@aol.com and request that they provide access to this web site."
Hummm... I wonder. Then: no ads, no popups, and the customer does not have to pay anything. Forget Micropayments. One check from each of the major ISPs each month. I should be able to manage that just fine.
Oh, and access would be provided to all MIL, GOV, and EDU for free, for good measure...
<ramble>false</ramble>
I'll be right there with ya.
;)
The W3C stands for World Wide Web Commerce, right?
People that spend significant amount of time doing actual work appreciate Slashdot.
mmm, satellites don't fly...
mmm, what would you say to an artificial intelligence system designed and written solely for the purpose of making the user think, ponder life, and appreciate one's place in the universe?
Is that not what most music, paitings, and sculptures attempt to do?
How about programming for purely visual gratification, like a movie, or something?
The paint on the canvas itself is gooey oils mixed, the notes on the music sheet are highly symolic notation that must follow hundreds of years of convention, yet the end-result of 5 pages of music code can be "Fur Elise" by Mozart. My wife is a pianist, a very good one, and can just, by reading sheet music, "see" the performance in her head. She can look at sheet music and say: "Wow, I love it, it's just so deep." And then she'll play it.
Computer code is like sheet music. You can have a ten line canon or a 40 pages symphony, either of which looks like complete gibberish to those who can't read sheet music, but which truly represents the art of the artist who wrote it.
Ok. Work for commercial purpose:
How much do you want to bet that most, if not all, of Mozart's pieces were work-for-hire? hehe.
How about the score for Dances with Wolves, the Titanic Theme, the latest and greatest by Schpiel-berg? Are these not art? Of course they are. Do they serve a commercial purpose? You bet! If there wasn't the lure of generating hundreds of millions of dollars, I don't think any of these pieces would have ever been written.
Now, I write code. I want to make the user feel a bond with a freaking motherboard. If I succeed in making a grown man or woman "enjoy the interaction" with a piece of plastic/metal/goo, and I have done that on purpose, is that not art?
I contend that in the same way the common man does not recognize Beethoven's 5th symphony by looking at the sheet music, likewise the common man does not recognize great, beautiful, engaging, pleasing software by looking at source code.
There are millions of programmers in the world who consider source code to be art, to be speech. Who are non-programmers to say that it isn't?
So it's okay for people who are alive right now to die so that people who are not yet born will have a chance to live longer?
With that reasoning, let's have a war, and kill all the people alive today who are lazy, poor, and ignorant (5B or so). So that in 50 years, the gene pool will be better, and people will work harder, be better educated, and be nicer to each other and live longer.
Yeah right.
Pollution kills people. Overpopulation produces pollution, therefore: reduce population. Methods? War, Aids. Let people die of aids. (What kind of people? See above paragraph).
Is that what you propose?
That is INSANE!
Heck: Even better, why don't we make air quality so bad that all people in cities will die around 62 1/2 of lung-related diseases, and only super rich people with houses in Aspen or the like will live to a ripe old age of 85. Heck, that will Save Social Security, no?
Ok. I feel better now...
I've got to agree with you on this one...
A truck engine can go 1,000,000 + miles, but my car's can only go about 150,000 before dying? I'm not pulling a 40 ton tractor either. It's just that they want to create an ongoing dependency on their product, that's all.
dang, what I meant was
Just don't use the <br> tag. Let the browser size the right size of the screen. Modify the <p> tag instead with a css if you don't want a large line break.