... is the Internet equivalent of self-important navel-gazing.
When writers write about writing, or cartoonists draw comics about cartooning, why does nobody self-righteously and smugly bash it as "self-important navel-gazing"? What gives with blogs, or is it just "trendy" to bash blogging?
Here's more info on the problems with publishing contracts. Don't know if this is accurate but here's a statistic stating "99 percent of all the books ever printed are out-of-print".
I've dealt with and signed publishing contracts too and the contracts I've seen are incredibly one-sided towards the publisher, where publishers sign over not only rights to the work but to future related works too. Note that it was a very large publisher with a very strong brand and that hence carries a lot of sway. We had to specifically bargain to retain copyright.
The publication rights of OOP books revert to the author. The OOP books aren't sitting in publishers' vaults; they are sitting in the hands of the authors, unexploited.
Hvae you actually seen the contracts that authors typically have to sign with publishers?
Because, 'olddotter', most of the people here are 'youngdotters' and weren't around then so don't know about it. "Everything that's new, is old". FWIW, I also remember stories from many years back about large-scale POS till system Linux installations.
*none* of the software industry is exactly a powerhouse of innovation
So your logic is that, since none of the industry is a "powerhouse" of innovation, that all of the companies must be equally innovative? That makes no sense - it's pretty clear that there are vastly different degrees of innovativeness.
Further, some companies appear to have an internal culture of innovation, while others appear to have an internal culture that deliberately avoids innovation in favour of purchasing and copying existing technologies from innovative companies.
And choosing innovative companies really DOES matter, "ranting" about innovation is not just ranting about some abstract 'religious' ideal --- innovation and competitiveness genuinely affect the economic productivity and the quality of lives of the millions of people that use the products. INNOVATION MATTERS.
Believe it or not, it DOES actually matter when the most widespread operating system is perpetually five to ten years behind everyone else... apart from the obvious economic implications in terms of business efficiency and productivity, there is also the issue of industry and technology stagnation and lack of innovation. These are not abstract religious ideals, they actually affect the country's wealth, GDP, productivity, and quality of lives of the people -- that is why people care. In fact the idea of saying "who cares" to such an obvious and real problem is simply, well, stupid.
please note it's viewing that's built in, MS is talking about PDF creation as well
This is 100% wrong. Either you are deliberately lying and spreading FUD, or you are a moron who does not do even the most basic research before posting.
As it happens Microsoft had a production 32-bit OS with full memory protection and preemption (NT 3.1) almost a decade before Apple did
When did Microsoft's first CONSUMER operating system with full 32-bit memory protection come out?2001 (and it was a god-awful security mess until SP2 came out in 2003). Mac OS X is a consumer OS, and NT was never, ever marketed to home users. The "best" thing Microsoft was pitching to home users at the time OS 10.0 came out was Windows Me!
The difference with the Net connection is that it's entirely unnecessary and doesn't offer any notable compelling advantages over and above what you can already do without the Net connection - it only adds vendor dependencies and lock-in that can only lead to no good (e.g. higher prices).
Oh please drop this tired "slashdot is biased" meme already. Let me rephrase your comment as an analogy to show how ridiculous your implication is: "... double standards... when Kim Jong-Il creates WMDs its bad, when USA creates WMDs its good". Hello, THEY ARE DIFFERENT. There is nothing wrong with applying different standards to two organisations that ARE, in fact, entirely different, with different intentions, different strategies, different histories, different track records, different characters, different ideals.
The flaw in your reasoning is to presume that companies, like "races", are supposed to be presumed to be all equal, and that it would be biased to apply different standards to different races... . But companies are not like races at all. They really are different, and what may appear to be an equivalent action when taken entirely out of context, really isn't when a little sensible context is applied.
By your reasoning, it's also "double standards" if we treat a locksmith purchasing lock-picking tools and a thief purchasing lock-picking tools differently.
Re:Talking out both sides of out mouths.
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 1
Ummm.. I'm a bit confused here?
Read the 'findings of fact' of the case, should clear up any confusion.
The US funded the construction of the Internet and has invited other nations to use it
"Invited"? Wow, you make it sound like some huge altruistic project where the rest of the world is just freely "using" something built by the US. You do realise that all those other countries PAY for every byte of their traffic that comes into or passes through the US? The US makes a profit from other countries for being a major international traffic and content hub - it's an export, a for-profit enterprise like anything else. And the infrastructure within foreign countries is paid for and built entirely by the people in those countries. In fact, interconnect agreements between the US and other countries are already financially skewed disproportionately in favour of the US.
The US invented most of the technologies that the Internet is built on, but they didn't "give" anything to anyone else, except perhaps RFC specs. But if you start going down that silly "we invented this it's ours" route, then you also have to be willing to relinquish control of every technology not invented in the US (e.g. fiber optics, CD-ROMs, Linux, C++, etc.). Guess what, everyone benefits when everyone shares, and the US has benefitted much from other countries, not just the other way round, contrary to popular belief.
Let's be honest though, the main reason the US government doesn't bother to censor Korean/Iranian etc. websites is that realistically speaking those countries/ideologies don't really pose any realistic threat at all. If any power ever rose to truly challenge the US, or any foreign ideology ever appeared to be taking widespread hold in the US and threatening the power base of the leaders, I don't doubt for a minute that we would start seeing government-mandated censorship of foreign sites (under the guise of "protecting US national security", or "blocking hate-speech", or "protecting children from terrorist propaganda" and whatever other excuse is cooked up).
How do you propose these people are going to tend their cattle, crops, fetch water, go to school etc. without getting up out of their homes and going out?
OK, that is not a growth measurement, but a kind of relative economic competitiveness measurement, but your point is taken: GDP is not the ultimate economic statistic. In absolute terms though, stability and average GDP/wealth per capita is rising in Southern Africa, and it's not the "pit of despair" that most of the slashdot posters seem to make it out to be. Of course, GDP also however belies another important statistic: income inequality, e.g. the Gini Coefficient and trends thereof. Income inequality is high in most parts of Southern Africa, and in some cases, getting worse.
What really irks me is what organisations like the WFP come and do here in the guise of "helping" Africa. E.g. US WFP reps will come set up here, saying "we'll help feed these countries", then proceed to take donations from other countries like Germany, and use that money to purchase (already heavily subsidised) grain from American farmers in Utah/Texas etc., dumping the grain on a country that would otherwise have bought grain from a neighbouring African country - oops, now the neighbouring country's agriculural industry deflates and collapses. This type of thing is killing agriculture in Africa and all over the world, keeping millions more poor but protecting rich countries, and then still we have so many e.g. Americans posting on slashdot, with no idea, about how it's purely Africa's fault that Africa stays poor. Every year the rich countries at G8 world summit etc. pay lip service to ending subsidies but nobody ever does anything.
Well done for copying and pasting some facts on extreme poverty, but what on earth does that have to do with the relative silliness of suggesting that what Africa needs is air conditioners?
My point is that Africa CAN get better. But they are doing their best to stay poor. Of course they do not choose to stay poor, but they just make bad decision after bad decision. And they pour their resources at completely wrong places (instead of figuring out ways to feed and educate their people, they are busy figuring out ways to kill their own people or invade neighbourghing countries).
Is that why the current average GDP growth for the entire Southern African region (12 countries) (including Zimbabwe and in spite of the latter's -4.5% decline) is 4.5% and growing? With some countries, like Mozambique, experiencing nearly 10% GDP growth sustained for several years already? (And this in spite of unfair trade rules and subsidies.)
A bit more reading up on current events, a bit less sensationalist shock-value television and uninformed slashdot rants repeating the tired old cliches, and you might actually keep up with the facts: These days, countries like Zimbabwe are the exception, not the rule. The majority of African countries are experiencing economic growth, many in excess of the growth rates found in Europe and the US.
Agreed, there's a problem, and metamoderation doesn't help. I think part of the solution is to get rid of anonymous moderation - show the usernames of every mod when you click on a post and see the 'detailed' moderation breakdown, so moderators will think twice before hitting '-1', and those moderators pushing obvious agendas (e.g. the astroturfers, sock puppets and so on) could soon be exposed. Either that, or fix metamoderation, or build an interface for some kind of meta-moderation 'voting' into the general thread interface so anyone could immediately click it if they saw an unfair moderation.
Oh, so you actually used NeXT back in the early 90's? You used an early Apple from the mid-80's? OK, so you must have at least a little perspective then.
And honestly, skip the blatant and ridiculous lies about OS X.
Bottom line, the free market only works properly when the market is informed and educated. 99% of people have virtually no knowledge or understanding whatsoever of how computers work, and thus have little way of properly evaluating the products they use. Worse, consumers today literally don't WANT to be informed, the emerging cultural trends compel one to not think but rather to just buy whatever is splashed in front of you --- thinking and being informed are nerdy and outdated concepts.
In the old days there were things like 'independent consumer review publications', but nowadays anything mascarading as such is just a marketing rag for the advertisers with the most money.
... to this and other human rights abuses in China by, uh, giving $162 billion per year (and increasing) business to China, $55 billion dollars Foreign Direct Investment, and ship hundreds of thousands of US jobs to China.
</sarcasm>
Is China already too powerful/influental that nobody could influence them even if they wanted to? Or is it simply that nobody in the ruling class cares about human rights abuses as long as there is more money to be made?
Just to be clear, the FAQ seems to gloss over this issue almost over-simplistically: "it can then be simply flown back down to the anchor by moving some of the counterweight mass a bit further out and will be back in operation in a couple of days."
Just "simply" flown back down in case it was attacked? Sounds a bit too easy to me. They also state that terrorists would be unlikely to attack it, but I wouldn't be worried about terrorists, with the US pushing to dominate space, other countries might want to attack it, as it would be a strategic asset in maintaining military space dominance.
I have an ill-informed question of my own: what would happen if such a long cable hypothetically broke (or was e.g. deliberately attacked)? Would it fly out to space, or fall down to Earth?
Slashdot Mirror
A minor (but important) technicality: We didn't "evolve from" apes --- we are apes. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] etc.
When writers write about writing, or cartoonists draw comics about cartooning, why does nobody self-righteously and smugly bash it as "self-important navel-gazing"? What gives with blogs, or is it just "trendy" to bash blogging?
Here's more info on the problems with publishing contracts. Don't know if this is accurate but here's a statistic stating "99 percent of all the books ever printed are out-of-print".
I've dealt with and signed publishing contracts too and the contracts I've seen are incredibly one-sided towards the publisher, where publishers sign over not only rights to the work but to future related works too. Note that it was a very large publisher with a very strong brand and that hence carries a lot of sway. We had to specifically bargain to retain copyright.
Google can't "publish" anything that isn't already freely and openly available on the web.
The publication rights of OOP books revert to the author. The OOP books aren't sitting in publishers' vaults; they are sitting in the hands of the authors, unexploited.
Hvae you actually seen the contracts that authors typically have to sign with publishers?
Because, 'olddotter', most of the people here are 'youngdotters' and weren't around then so don't know about it. "Everything that's new, is old". FWIW, I also remember stories from many years back about large-scale POS till system Linux installations.
*none* of the software industry is exactly a powerhouse of innovation
So your logic is that, since none of the industry is a "powerhouse" of innovation, that all of the companies must be equally innovative? That makes no sense - it's pretty clear that there are vastly different degrees of innovativeness.
Further, some companies appear to have an internal culture of innovation, while others appear to have an internal culture that deliberately avoids innovation in favour of purchasing and copying existing technologies from innovative companies.
And choosing innovative companies really DOES matter, "ranting" about innovation is not just ranting about some abstract 'religious' ideal --- innovation and competitiveness genuinely affect the economic productivity and the quality of lives of the millions of people that use the products. INNOVATION MATTERS.
NineNine is a Microsoft shill, that's why. The "other format" he is referring to, that he expects, is no doubt Microsoft Word.
Who. Cares.
Believe it or not, it DOES actually matter when the most widespread operating system is perpetually five to ten years behind everyone else ... apart from the obvious economic implications in terms of business efficiency and productivity, there is also the issue of industry and technology stagnation and lack of innovation. These are not abstract religious ideals, they actually affect the country's wealth, GDP, productivity, and quality of lives of the people -- that is why people care. In fact the idea of saying "who cares" to such an obvious and real problem is simply, well, stupid.
please note it's viewing that's built in, MS is talking about PDF creation as well
This is 100% wrong. Either you are deliberately lying and spreading FUD, or you are a moron who does not do even the most basic research before posting.
As it happens Microsoft had a production 32-bit OS with full memory protection and preemption (NT 3.1) almost a decade before Apple did
When did Microsoft's first CONSUMER operating system with full 32-bit memory protection come out?2001 (and it was a god-awful security mess until SP2 came out in 2003). Mac OS X is a consumer OS, and NT was never, ever marketed to home users. The "best" thing Microsoft was pitching to home users at the time OS 10.0 came out was Windows Me!
The difference with the Net connection is that it's entirely unnecessary and doesn't offer any notable compelling advantages over and above what you can already do without the Net connection - it only adds vendor dependencies and lock-in that can only lead to no good (e.g. higher prices).
Oh please drop this tired "slashdot is biased" meme already. Let me rephrase your comment as an analogy to show how ridiculous your implication is: "... double standards ... when Kim Jong-Il creates WMDs its bad, when USA creates WMDs its good". Hello, THEY ARE DIFFERENT. There is nothing wrong with applying different standards to two organisations that ARE, in fact, entirely different, with different intentions, different strategies, different histories, different track records, different characters, different ideals.
The flaw in your reasoning is to presume that companies, like "races", are supposed to be presumed to be all equal, and that it would be biased to apply different standards to different races ... . But companies are not like races at all. They really are different, and what may appear to be an equivalent action when taken entirely out of context, really isn't when a little sensible context is applied.
By your reasoning, it's also "double standards" if we treat a locksmith purchasing lock-picking tools and a thief purchasing lock-picking tools differently.
Ummm.. I'm a bit confused here?
Read the 'findings of fact' of the case, should clear up any confusion.
The US funded the construction of the Internet and has invited other nations to use it
"Invited"? Wow, you make it sound like some huge altruistic project where the rest of the world is just freely "using" something built by the US. You do realise that all those other countries PAY for every byte of their traffic that comes into or passes through the US? The US makes a profit from other countries for being a major international traffic and content hub - it's an export, a for-profit enterprise like anything else. And the infrastructure within foreign countries is paid for and built entirely by the people in those countries. In fact, interconnect agreements between the US and other countries are already financially skewed disproportionately in favour of the US.
The US invented most of the technologies that the Internet is built on, but they didn't "give" anything to anyone else, except perhaps RFC specs. But if you start going down that silly "we invented this it's ours" route, then you also have to be willing to relinquish control of every technology not invented in the US (e.g. fiber optics, CD-ROMs, Linux, C++, etc.). Guess what, everyone benefits when everyone shares, and the US has benefitted much from other countries, not just the other way round, contrary to popular belief.
Let's be honest though, the main reason the US government doesn't bother to censor Korean/Iranian etc. websites is that realistically speaking those countries/ideologies don't really pose any realistic threat at all. If any power ever rose to truly challenge the US, or any foreign ideology ever appeared to be taking widespread hold in the US and threatening the power base of the leaders, I don't doubt for a minute that we would start seeing government-mandated censorship of foreign sites (under the guise of "protecting US national security", or "blocking hate-speech", or "protecting children from terrorist propaganda" and whatever other excuse is cooked up).
How do you propose these people are going to tend their cattle, crops, fetch water, go to school etc. without getting up out of their homes and going out?
OK, that is not a growth measurement, but a kind of relative economic competitiveness measurement, but your point is taken: GDP is not the ultimate economic statistic. In absolute terms though, stability and average GDP/wealth per capita is rising in Southern Africa, and it's not the "pit of despair" that most of the slashdot posters seem to make it out to be. Of course, GDP also however belies another important statistic: income inequality, e.g. the Gini Coefficient and trends thereof. Income inequality is high in most parts of Southern Africa, and in some cases, getting worse.
What really irks me is what organisations like the WFP come and do here in the guise of "helping" Africa. E.g. US WFP reps will come set up here, saying "we'll help feed these countries", then proceed to take donations from other countries like Germany, and use that money to purchase (already heavily subsidised) grain from American farmers in Utah/Texas etc., dumping the grain on a country that would otherwise have bought grain from a neighbouring African country - oops, now the neighbouring country's agriculural industry deflates and collapses. This type of thing is killing agriculture in Africa and all over the world, keeping millions more poor but protecting rich countries, and then still we have so many e.g. Americans posting on slashdot, with no idea, about how it's purely Africa's fault that Africa stays poor. Every year the rich countries at G8 world summit etc. pay lip service to ending subsidies but nobody ever does anything.
Ah, the views of the ignorant.
Well done for copying and pasting some facts on extreme poverty, but what on earth does that have to do with the relative silliness of suggesting that what Africa needs is air conditioners?
My point is that Africa CAN get better. But they are doing their best to stay poor. Of course they do not choose to stay poor, but they just make bad decision after bad decision. And they pour their resources at completely wrong places (instead of figuring out ways to feed and educate their people, they are busy figuring out ways to kill their own people or invade neighbourghing countries).
Is that why the current average GDP growth for the entire Southern African region (12 countries) (including Zimbabwe and in spite of the latter's -4.5% decline) is 4.5% and growing? With some countries, like Mozambique, experiencing nearly 10% GDP growth sustained for several years already? (And this in spite of unfair trade rules and subsidies.)
A bit more reading up on current events, a bit less sensationalist shock-value television and uninformed slashdot rants repeating the tired old cliches, and you might actually keep up with the facts: These days, countries like Zimbabwe are the exception, not the rule. The majority of African countries are experiencing economic growth, many in excess of the growth rates found in Europe and the US.
Agreed, there's a problem, and metamoderation doesn't help. I think part of the solution is to get rid of anonymous moderation - show the usernames of every mod when you click on a post and see the 'detailed' moderation breakdown, so moderators will think twice before hitting '-1', and those moderators pushing obvious agendas (e.g. the astroturfers, sock puppets and so on) could soon be exposed. Either that, or fix metamoderation, or build an interface for some kind of meta-moderation 'voting' into the general thread interface so anyone could immediately click it if they saw an unfair moderation.
Oh, so you actually used NeXT back in the early 90's? You used an early Apple from the mid-80's? OK, so you must have at least a little perspective then.
And honestly, skip the blatant and ridiculous lies about OS X.
Bottom line, the free market only works properly when the market is informed and educated. 99% of people have virtually no knowledge or understanding whatsoever of how computers work, and thus have little way of properly evaluating the products they use. Worse, consumers today literally don't WANT to be informed, the emerging cultural trends compel one to not think but rather to just buy whatever is splashed in front of you --- thinking and being informed are nerdy and outdated concepts.
In the old days there were things like 'independent consumer review publications', but nowadays anything mascarading as such is just a marketing rag for the advertisers with the most money.
... to this and other human rights abuses in China by, uh, giving $162 billion per year (and increasing) business to China, $55 billion dollars Foreign Direct Investment, and ship hundreds of thousands of US jobs to China.
</sarcasm>
Is China already too powerful/influental that nobody could influence them even if they wanted to? Or is it simply that nobody in the ruling class cares about human rights abuses as long as there is more money to be made?
Just to be clear, the FAQ seems to gloss over this issue almost over-simplistically: "it can then be simply flown back down to the anchor by moving some of the counterweight mass a bit further out and will be back in operation in a couple of days."
Just "simply" flown back down in case it was attacked? Sounds a bit too easy to me. They also state that terrorists would be unlikely to attack it, but I wouldn't be worried about terrorists, with the US pushing to dominate space, other countries might want to attack it, as it would be a strategic asset in maintaining military space dominance.
I have an ill-informed question of my own: what would happen if such a long cable hypothetically broke (or was e.g. deliberately attacked)? Would it fly out to space, or fall down to Earth?