The law provides the Fair Use exception to allow citizens certain rights with respect to creative works. The law does not require that works must be distributed in a fashion that allows these exceptions to be exercised.
And if the software prevents things which are legal under fair use precedent, then I claim the software is failing to implement copyright law -- QED.
There's a white rhinoceros in this whole debate. Copyright law -- fair use in particular -- is too subtle and too contextual to implement in software. It is impossible to create rights management software which implements the law; such software will always err in favor of the consumer or the copyright holder (or both).
Let me repeat that: It is IMPOSSIBLE to implement copyright law in software.
Linux and Mac OS X have in common that they both caused a major shift in the widespread perception of UNIX.
Linux changed the way developers saw UNIX. Instead of being exclusively a thing of the massive, expensive, big-iron world, UNIX became accessible -- an essential rite of passage for programmers, a domain for tinkerers, and a tool of professionals and hobbyists at all scales. And, perhaps for the first time, "UNIX" came vaguely onto the radar of the general public.
OS X changed the way the general public saw UNIX. Instead of being exclusively a mysterious thing of the geek elite, it was suddenly the foundation of a major consumer OS. Check the records, and you can see the wave of consumer tech columnists praticing saying "UNIX" without flinching. And it changed public perception about Linux, too -- suddenly, UNIX (and thus Linux) on the desktop is not just a pipe dream in the public eye. While Microsoft is trying to discredit UNIX in general and Linux in particular, both have more credibility than ever before.
Who would have imagined the current state of UNIX 20 years ago?
As both a Linux proponent, a developer walking all these lines of professional/hobbyist small, shop/big iron, etc. -- and as somebody at the center of the biggest geek watering hole -- it seems like you (CmdrTaco that is) might have some special insight into the changing public perception of UNIX, and how Apple fits in to it all.
I severely doubt that only 2.7% of websites use either HTML, Javascript, or CSS
No, but only 2.7% of websites use Javascript, CSS, or HTML that doesn't work in Omniweb. Its support for these things is not complete, but quite good and constantly improving.
Omniweb also has a large number of quite substantive functional advantages over most browsers, e.g.:
It has the nicest cookie management functionality of any web browser anywhere (still).
It has a very slick mechanism for auto-checking for updates to selected bookmarks.
It has really good ad filtering and anti-popup capability. You can filter content by domain regexp and images by size. (Does Chimera do this as well? Can't remember.) And I saw the "Allow popups: Always / In response to a click / Never" option in Omniweb first.
It allows you to watch the progress of all the individual components of a downloading page, and even stop individual components so the overall page can proceed. For example, if a page is spinning forever because the stylesheet or an image is on some server that's down, you can skip that item and let the rest of the page load.
After a page has downloaded, you can selectively examine, reload, and even edit a page's components.
Unless you're looking for WYSIWIG, it's great for editing page sources.
And its UI isn't just pretty -- they're paid meticulous attention to details, making their UI clean, minimal, gentle on screen real estate, easy on the eye, and slick slick slick. It's all in the details: the nice, compact download history window with draggable icons; the history drawer which groups global history by site, and has a search box; the spell checking in text areas like the one I'm typing in now (which you can disable, of course).
Its support for CSS and DHTML isn't up to par. But they're improving that -- and for the 97.3% of the web for which those things don't matter, Omniweb is a really nice browser to work with. I recommend that OS X users give it a try.
I also recommend that browser developers on all platforms, especially Mozilla developers, give it a hard look and take a lesson from its elegance.
Also _Effective Java_
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Another really superb book is Effective Java, written by Josh Bloch, who is responsible for the Java Collections API.
It's definitely not a book for beginners; it's more of a style guide for API design in Java. It fills a gap between the very abstract world of patterns and the low-level syntax of the language. For example, it gives a several-page exposition of the contract of equals(), which was eye-opening even to this fairly experienced Java programmer.
And... it's superbly written. Bloch's prose is crisp, clear, and gets right to the point. It is, in fact, my favorite book devoted to a single language since K&R.
Oracle ran a Java Pet Store benchmark to compare the performance of Oracle9iAS and the.NET Pet Shop.... We found that
without caching, Oracle9iAS was up to 18 times faster than Microsoft.NET, while using just half the resources. In addition, Oracle was able to scale to a much higher user load on the same hardware. If we compare the same application using Microsoft's output caching and Oracle's Web Cache, the results are even more dramatic. Using Web Cache, Oracle proved to be more than 22 times faster under load, while the middle tier resource utilization was only a small fraction of that consumed by.NET.
In addition to disclosing the results of this benchmark effort in this paper, Oracle is also providing the source code, a description of the environment in which the tests were run, and the test scripts that were used to simulate this environment. The code and test scripts can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network.
Gee, how could two identical benchmarks produce such different numbers? Sounds like a marketing war to me. I wouldn't take any of those numbers, Microsoft's or Oracles, without a grain -- or a pillar! -- of salt.
I think that's a pretty strong reading of what I'm suggesting. Quit yer trolling.
I'm not advocating.NET, or any other particular framework. I'm just saying that auto-executed programs should be sandboxed. Let MS figure out the best way to make that happen.
Now it's true that, since Microsoft didn't architect for this from the start, it's going to be pretty hard for them to make the switch now. And it going to be very hard for them to figure out a migration path that doesn't make like difficult for those 80,000 apps. That's why their new commitment to security isn't going to change things overnight.
But these changes do happen. Though it was bumpy and painful road, they managed to get apps to switch from a DOS-based to a Win-based system, and then to the NT architecture. In another five or ten years, they may have actually managed a switch to a secure platform!
There's one huge thing that's at the root of all these viruses: the fact that MS provides all sorts of scripting hooks in their apps, eager to execute code, which have degenerate or nonexistent security models.
The solution is simple: anything which executes without the user explicitly installing and running it should run in a security sandbox.
This is a very difficult thing to pull off. It's not simply a matter of setting permissions correctly -- untrusted code must actually only be able to access a limited subset of the system APIs. Opening a socket, for example, could lead to a security breach. So could reading a globally readable file. (What are the permissions on your Outlook address book?) And a clever program must not be able to bypass these security checks by exploiting weird pointer arithmetic, runtime code generation, or buffer overruns. The security model has to extend to all aspects of the system APIs and the runtime environment of the language, so the scripting language's runtime environment has to be designed from the ground up for it.
Maintaining complete sandbox closure is not a simple fix; it is a deep architectural problem.
It's a tall order, but it's possible. Java does it, and that's why (as far as I know) there's never been a Java applet virus. Applets get downloaded and execute on the client machine, but have a very limited ability to open sockets, read files, and so forth. Java's virtual machine model even makes it impossible for malicious programs to crash their host, or sneak through some backdoor into a protected API -- buffer overruns are ruled out as a fundamental language feature. The worst a malicious program can do is allocate a lot of crap and stage a denial-of-resource attack.
There was one applet-based exploit I've heard of, but it exploited a weakness in ActiveX -- which demonstrates my point.
All this is why MS's big security push is a joke. Security isn't just about fixing bugs. A system has to be designed from the ground up for security -- and Microsoft's products, especially the Office line and Windows itself, have a long way to go on that front. I'll repeat:
Maintaining complete sandbox closure is not a simple fix; it is a deep architectural problem.
Not a specialized one, no
on
Music Filesystems?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't see why you'd want a specialized system is a good idea. Instead, we should ask what general principles might make filesystems work better with music. The obvious ones for music files include:
performance (obviously),
handling of massive storage (pushing the latest n-bit addressing limit,
customizable file metadata (for storing tag information, among other things), and
query facilities for the metadata.
That all sounds like BeFS to me. -- which, lo and behold, was discussed on Slashdot just the other day!
What other general features might be good for the specific application of music?
The recording industry is chanting, "The artists! The artists!" At the same time, tech seems to be saying, "The consumer! The consumer!"
Yeah, exactly.
The funny thing, I'm an artist (a pianist and composer), and my skin crawls when the RIAA claims to be looking out for me. Eeech.
One of the important points artists out there need to keep making loud and clear is that the RIAA is not representing our interests. Artists and consumers are on the same side of this issue -- limited access to creative work hurts those who create at least as much as those who receive.
Many artists are already speaking out. More need to. If I'm going to be some corporation's rhetorical pawn, I'd like to at least agree with what they're advocating!
It's true that Apple's end goal is selling more hardware. The particular way in which open source has done this, however, it to make their hardware more attractive by raising the quality of the software that it will run.
So, Microsoft could use open source in manner parallel to Darwin (and Apple's treatment of Apache, SSH, Perl, etc etc) to improve their software. Whether or not they're a hardware vendor, improving their software should make it more attractive to customers, and thus Increase Shareholder Value.
Actually, I suppose that competing on the cutting edge of quality is a novel strategy for MS. But heck, if they wanted to start doing that more more often....
There's a lot of promise in these online degree programs -- they may bring knowledge and opportunity to people who, due to a variety of circumstances, wouldn't otherwise have them. Ideally, they could be a great democratizing force in education.
That said, an online education is absolutely no substitute. In the very best online program, you'll still get to work with top-notch instructors in a well-designed curriculum.
However, the single most important thing -- by far -- about undergraduate education is your peers. Textbooks are OK, classes are good, professors are wonderful -- but nothing matters so much as directly sharing that environment with other students. Meeting other students, challenging each other, working side by side and together on problems, everybody chipping in for a pizza at 2 AM... this is where the learning really happens, and this is the real value of a degree.
A degree isn't really about knowledge; it's about cultivating an adaptable mind, and becoming a good problem solver and good communicator who can work with others. That's one of the reasons why there's often little correlation between peoples' majors and their ultimate professional fields. That's why so the majority of job descriptions don't say "college degree in X", but simply say "college degree".
Yes, online communities exist (e.g. this), and yes, one can form a peer group there. But for education, there is no substitute for face-to-face immersion.
They will only mod to -1. Here it is from the proverbial horse's mouth -- when I wrote in about a threatening post which included a guy's home address, this is all that Taco wrote back:
From: "Rob \"CmdrTaco\" Malda" Date: Mon Oct 08, 2001 08:18:20 US/Central To: Paul `Order in Chaos` Cantrell Subject: Re: Abusive and possibly dangerous post
We don't remove comments. It sucks, but people did this to my girlfriend for awhile too. She had to get an answering machine and screen her calls.
And it's a reasonable policy if they stick to it -- they won't touch comments, they're not responsible, and there's no liability. They just modded the abusive post down (I presume it was the editors) to -1 ("offtopic", interestingly, and not "troll").
Can you confirm that Slashdot really broke their own policy for the Scientologists? Or is this just hearsay?
Since all is silent here, I'll post a word of encouragement:
This is a fine idea. Separation of roles is good both for keeping code tidy and for security. Carry on!
It's not dumb. Testing common sense is science!
on
Rejection Makes You Dumb
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It never ceases to amaze what a tenuous grasp otherwise intelligent people... um, OK, this is Slashdot, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here... what a tenuous grasp otherwise intelligent people have on the nature of scientific research.
Yes, it is obvious common sense that rejection -- or psychological upset of any kind -- would make subjects perform poorly on a test. We'd all expect the study to come out this way, and probably wonder why it's necessary.
But common sense is often wrong. That's why we have science.
There is tremendous value in taking things that we all presume to be true, and seeing whether they actually hold up to scrutiny. Another interesting psychological tidbit: although it's "common knowledge" that children pick up new languages much faster and with much more facility than adults, no study has ever actually managed to show conclusively that children have an inherently better language-learning ability.
Suddenly, a piece of common sense is full of interesting questions: Is there a neurological change in the brain's language centers around puberty? Or is there a social change? Are adults simply less willing to jump in and make mistakes? Nobody knows for sure.
Remember -- common sense once held that the sun and the planets revolved in perfect circles around the earth. A few brave souls started questioning that, and everybody said, "dumb dumb dumb", with a dash of "die heretic" thrown in for good measure.
Granted, this study is not the most exciting one in the world. It's unsurprising, and other research suggests about the same thing. But it is never "dumb dumb dumb" to question common sense -- even when common sense turns out to be completely correct.
When I was a student, I paid (IIRC) $350 for the academic-priced Photoshop. Yes, I paid. And yes, that's a great deal -- Photoshop really is worth twice that.
But $350 was a fucking lot of money for me back in the days when a $3.50 sandwich seemed expensive.
Yes, a lot of student pirates out there have money to burn -- but a great many don't. Many students are working one or two jobs to pay their way through school, and struggling to make rent. Sure, games are cheap. But the software that students need for their education really is expensive.
I'm not necessarily defending rampant piracy, but don't get so cocky about students' spending habits. I think if you saw "an honest analysis of their lifestyle", you'd find out that a lot of them are genuinely broke.
Yes, please -- with the opportunity to moderate or rank them, so the most interesting rejected submissions float to the top.
If a story gets a very positive ranking, maybe the editorial staff can give it a second thought. And if it goes the way of the troll, nobody is the worse for it.
I'm sure we didn't see anything like Yahoo-scale traffic, but we still saw several tens of thousands of hits in the first few hours -- certainly more than your average home-hosted site is going to see on an average day. (His got more traffic in 24 hours than it had previously in its entire lifetime of several years.)
When Eidola was Slashdotted, it was hosted on an old PC running Apache and Linux, over DSL, and it did just fine. (It's now hosted on Sourceforge, but at the time, it was just DSL.) It's worth mentioning that it is a very low-bandwidth site, but still -- the DSL took it in stride. In fact, my friend who was hosting didn't even notice that he was being Slashdotted until he saw the link to his server on Slashdot!
It's also worth mentioning that reason I switched to Sourceforge was that his DSL provider went under. For a little project like Eidola, that was OK. But if you need uptime, pay somebody to host.
A lot of us are wondering about 1.4. Some time ago, Allen Denison of Apple posted this message on Apple's Java-dev list which answers a lot of your concerns.
The short: they are prioritizing getting it right over getting it fast, but closing the release gap between Sun's and Apple's Java updates is a major goal for Apple. They are actively working on 1.4, and general speculation is that it will be available Q2.
And yes, as numerous others have pointed out, 1.3.1 has been out for OS X for about five months. This is just a patch to 1.3.1.
This update apparently improves graphics hardware acceleration for Java (haven't tested it yet). It's still somewhat experimental, so you have to turn it on manually. With the new update, you specify the video cards for which you want it enabled. The release notes explain how to do this, but give the wrong path for the config file that has the names of the video cards your machine might support. The correct path seems to be:
Curious to see if there's an improvement. Though the low-level stuff is blazingly fast on OS X, the high-level, especially Swing, has been pretty sluggish.
Slashdot Mirror
The law provides the Fair Use exception to allow citizens certain rights with respect to creative works. The law does not require that works must be distributed in a fashion that allows these exceptions to be exercised.
And if the software prevents things which are legal under fair use precedent, then I claim the software is failing to implement copyright law -- QED.
There's a white rhinoceros in this whole debate. Copyright law -- fair use in particular -- is too subtle and too contextual to implement in software. It is impossible to create rights management software which implements the law; such software will always err in favor of the consumer or the copyright holder (or both).
Let me repeat that: It is IMPOSSIBLE to implement copyright law in software.
Period.
Linux and Mac OS X have in common that they both caused a major shift in the widespread perception of UNIX.
Linux changed the way developers saw UNIX. Instead of being exclusively a thing of the massive, expensive, big-iron world, UNIX became accessible -- an essential rite of passage for programmers, a domain for tinkerers, and a tool of professionals and hobbyists at all scales. And, perhaps for the first time, "UNIX" came vaguely onto the radar of the general public.
OS X changed the way the general public saw UNIX. Instead of being exclusively a mysterious thing of the geek elite, it was suddenly the foundation of a major consumer OS. Check the records, and you can see the wave of consumer tech columnists praticing saying "UNIX" without flinching. And it changed public perception about Linux, too -- suddenly, UNIX (and thus Linux) on the desktop is not just a pipe dream in the public eye. While Microsoft is trying to discredit UNIX in general and Linux in particular, both have more credibility than ever before.
Who would have imagined the current state of UNIX 20 years ago?
As both a Linux proponent, a developer walking all these lines of professional/hobbyist small, shop/big iron, etc. -- and as somebody at the center of the biggest geek watering hole -- it seems like you (CmdrTaco that is) might have some special insight into the changing public perception of UNIX, and how Apple fits in to it all.
I severely doubt that only 2.7% of websites use either HTML, Javascript, or CSS
No, but only 2.7% of websites use Javascript, CSS, or HTML that doesn't work in Omniweb. Its support for these things is not complete, but quite good and constantly improving.
And its UI isn't just pretty -- they're paid meticulous attention to details, making their UI clean, minimal, gentle on screen real estate, easy on the eye, and slick slick slick. It's all in the details: the nice, compact download history window with draggable icons; the history drawer which groups global history by site, and has a search box; the spell checking in text areas like the one I'm typing in now (which you can disable, of course).
Its support for CSS and DHTML isn't up to par. But they're improving that -- and for the 97.3% of the web for which those things don't matter, Omniweb is a really nice browser to work with. I recommend that OS X users give it a try.
I also recommend that browser developers on all platforms, especially Mozilla developers, give it a hard look and take a lesson from its elegance.
Another really superb book is Effective Java, written by Josh Bloch, who is responsible for the Java Collections API.
... it's superbly written. Bloch's prose is crisp, clear, and gets right to the point. It is, in fact, my favorite book devoted to a single language since K&R.
It's definitely not a book for beginners; it's more of a style guide for API design in Java. It fills a gap between the very abstract world of patterns and the low-level syntax of the language. For example, it gives a several-page exposition of the contract of equals(), which was eye-opening even to this fairly experienced Java programmer.
And
See:
O'Reilly article on the subject
Oracle's benchmarks (PDF)
In the second article, Oracle claims:
Gee, how could two identical benchmarks produce such different numbers? Sounds like a marketing war to me. I wouldn't take any of those numbers, Microsoft's or Oracles, without a grain -- or a pillar! -- of salt.
Clarification:
Simple to identify, but difficult to execute.
I think that's a pretty strong reading of what I'm suggesting. Quit yer trolling.
.NET, or any other particular framework. I'm just saying that auto-executed programs should be sandboxed. Let MS figure out the best way to make that happen.
I'm not advocating
Now it's true that, since Microsoft didn't architect for this from the start, it's going to be pretty hard for them to make the switch now. And it going to be very hard for them to figure out a migration path that doesn't make like difficult for those 80,000 apps. That's why their new commitment to security isn't going to change things overnight.
But these changes do happen. Though it was bumpy and painful road, they managed to get apps to switch from a DOS-based to a Win-based system, and then to the NT architecture. In another five or ten years, they may have actually managed a switch to a secure platform!
There's one huge thing that's at the root of all these viruses: the fact that MS provides all sorts of scripting hooks in their apps, eager to execute code, which have degenerate or nonexistent security models.
The solution is simple: anything which executes without the user explicitly installing and running it should run in a security sandbox.
This is a very difficult thing to pull off. It's not simply a matter of setting permissions correctly -- untrusted code must actually only be able to access a limited subset of the system APIs. Opening a socket, for example, could lead to a security breach. So could reading a globally readable file. (What are the permissions on your Outlook address book?) And a clever program must not be able to bypass these security checks by exploiting weird pointer arithmetic, runtime code generation, or buffer overruns. The security model has to extend to all aspects of the system APIs and the runtime environment of the language, so the scripting language's runtime environment has to be designed from the ground up for it.
Maintaining complete sandbox closure is not a simple fix; it is a deep architectural problem.
It's a tall order, but it's possible. Java does it, and that's why (as far as I know) there's never been a Java applet virus. Applets get downloaded and execute on the client machine, but have a very limited ability to open sockets, read files, and so forth. Java's virtual machine model even makes it impossible for malicious programs to crash their host, or sneak through some backdoor into a protected API -- buffer overruns are ruled out as a fundamental language feature. The worst a malicious program can do is allocate a lot of crap and stage a denial-of-resource attack.
There was one applet-based exploit I've heard of, but it exploited a weakness in ActiveX -- which demonstrates my point.
All this is why MS's big security push is a joke. Security isn't just about fixing bugs. A system has to be designed from the ground up for security -- and Microsoft's products, especially the Office line and Windows itself, have a long way to go on that front. I'll repeat:
Maintaining complete sandbox closure is not a simple fix; it is a deep architectural problem.
That all sounds like BeFS to me. -- which, lo and behold, was discussed on Slashdot just the other day!
What other general features might be good for the specific application of music?
The recording industry is chanting, "The artists! The artists!" At the same time, tech seems to be saying, "The consumer! The consumer!"
Yeah, exactly.
The funny thing, I'm an artist (a pianist and composer), and my skin crawls when the RIAA claims to be looking out for me. Eeech.
One of the important points artists out there need to keep making loud and clear is that the RIAA is not representing our interests. Artists and consumers are on the same side of this issue -- limited access to creative work hurts those who create at least as much as those who receive.
Many artists are already speaking out. More need to. If I'm going to be some corporation's rhetorical pawn, I'd like to at least agree with what they're advocating!
One question:
Can you imagine Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Amazon.com doing what the Tattered Cover has done?
It's true that Apple's end goal is selling more hardware. The particular way in which open source has done this, however, it to make their hardware more attractive by raising the quality of the software that it will run.
So, Microsoft could use open source in manner parallel to Darwin (and Apple's treatment of Apache, SSH, Perl, etc etc) to improve their software. Whether or not they're a hardware vendor, improving their software should make it more attractive to customers, and thus Increase Shareholder Value.
Actually, I suppose that competing on the cutting edge of quality is a novel strategy for MS. But heck, if they wanted to start doing that more more often....
There's a lot of promise in these online degree programs -- they may bring knowledge and opportunity to people who, due to a variety of circumstances, wouldn't otherwise have them. Ideally, they could be a great democratizing force in education.
... this is where the learning really happens, and this is the real value of a degree.
That said, an online education is absolutely no substitute. In the very best online program, you'll still get to work with top-notch instructors in a well-designed curriculum.
However, the single most important thing -- by far -- about undergraduate education is your peers. Textbooks are OK, classes are good, professors are wonderful -- but nothing matters so much as directly sharing that environment with other students. Meeting other students, challenging each other, working side by side and together on problems, everybody chipping in for a pizza at 2 AM
A degree isn't really about knowledge; it's about cultivating an adaptable mind, and becoming a good problem solver and good communicator who can work with others. That's one of the reasons why there's often little correlation between peoples' majors and their ultimate professional fields. That's why so the majority of job descriptions don't say "college degree in X", but simply say "college degree".
Yes, online communities exist (e.g. this), and yes, one can form a peer group there. But for education, there is no substitute for face-to-face immersion.
(My epsilon cents.)
They will only mod to -1. Here it is from the proverbial horse's mouth -- when I wrote in about a threatening post which included a guy's home address, this is all that Taco wrote back:
From: "Rob \"CmdrTaco\" Malda"
Date: Mon Oct 08, 2001 08:18:20 US/Central
To: Paul `Order in Chaos` Cantrell
Subject: Re: Abusive and possibly dangerous post
We don't remove comments. It sucks, but people did this to my girlfriend for
awhile too. She had to get an answering machine and screen her calls.
And it's a reasonable policy if they stick to it -- they won't touch comments, they're not responsible, and there's no liability. They just modded the abusive post down (I presume it was the editors) to -1 ("offtopic", interestingly, and not "troll").
Can you confirm that Slashdot really broke their own policy for the Scientologists? Or is this just hearsay?
it's as scientifically correct to use any point in the solar system as the "unmovable object" as any other.
That's why I was careful not to use any, but thanks for the clarification.
Nit-picking aside, I think my actual point holds: it's important to question common sense.
Since all is silent here, I'll post a word of encouragement:
This is a fine idea. Separation of roles is good both for keeping code tidy and for security. Carry on!
It never ceases to amaze what a tenuous grasp otherwise intelligent people ... um, OK, this is Slashdot, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here ... what a tenuous grasp otherwise intelligent people have on the nature of scientific research.
Yes, it is obvious common sense that rejection -- or psychological upset of any kind -- would make subjects perform poorly on a test. We'd all expect the study to come out this way, and probably wonder why it's necessary.
But common sense is often wrong. That's why we have science.
There is tremendous value in taking things that we all presume to be true, and seeing whether they actually hold up to scrutiny. Another interesting psychological tidbit: although it's "common knowledge" that children pick up new languages much faster and with much more facility than adults, no study has ever actually managed to show conclusively that children have an inherently better language-learning ability.
Suddenly, a piece of common sense is full of interesting questions: Is there a neurological change in the brain's language centers around puberty? Or is there a social change? Are adults simply less willing to jump in and make mistakes? Nobody knows for sure.
Remember -- common sense once held that the sun and the planets revolved in perfect circles around the earth. A few brave souls started questioning that, and everybody said, "dumb dumb dumb", with a dash of "die heretic" thrown in for good measure.
Granted, this study is not the most exciting one in the world. It's unsurprising, and other research suggests about the same thing. But it is never "dumb dumb dumb" to question common sense -- even when common sense turns out to be completely correct.
That's science. Don't knock it.
When I was a student, I paid (IIRC) $350 for the academic-priced Photoshop. Yes, I paid. And yes, that's a great deal -- Photoshop really is worth twice that.
But $350 was a fucking lot of money for me back in the days when a $3.50 sandwich seemed expensive.
Yes, a lot of student pirates out there have money to burn -- but a great many don't. Many students are working one or two jobs to pay their way through school, and struggling to make rent. Sure, games are cheap. But the software that students need for their education really is expensive.
I'm not necessarily defending rampant piracy, but don't get so cocky about students' spending habits. I think if you saw "an honest analysis of their lifestyle", you'd find out that a lot of them are genuinely broke.
Access to the rejected submissions bin?
Yes, please -- with the opportunity to moderate or rank them, so the most interesting rejected submissions float to the top.
If a story gets a very positive ranking, maybe the editorial staff can give it a second thought. And if it goes the way of the troll, nobody is the worse for it.
"Not be mean, but <mean remark>."
I'm sure we didn't see anything like Yahoo-scale traffic, but we still saw several tens of thousands of hits in the first few hours -- certainly more than your average home-hosted site is going to see on an average day. (His got more traffic in 24 hours than it had previously in its entire lifetime of several years.)
When Eidola was Slashdotted, it was hosted on an old PC running Apache and Linux, over DSL, and it did just fine. (It's now hosted on Sourceforge, but at the time, it was just DSL.) It's worth mentioning that it is a very low-bandwidth site, but still -- the DSL took it in stride. In fact, my friend who was hosting didn't even notice that he was being Slashdotted until he saw the link to his server on Slashdot!
It's also worth mentioning that reason I switched to Sourceforge was that his DSL provider went under. For a little project like Eidola, that was OK. But if you need uptime, pay somebody to host.
A lot of us are wondering about 1.4. Some time ago, Allen Denison of Apple posted this message on Apple's Java-dev list which answers a lot of your concerns.
The short: they are prioritizing getting it right over getting it fast, but closing the release gap between Sun's and Apple's Java updates is a major goal for Apple. They are actively working on 1.4, and general speculation is that it will be available Q2.
And yes, as numerous others have pointed out, 1.3.1 has been out for OS X for about five months. This is just a patch to 1.3.1.
This update apparently improves graphics hardware acceleration for Java (haven't tested it yet). It's still somewhat experimental, so you have to turn it on manually. With the new update, you specify the video cards for which you want it enabled. The release notes explain how to do this, but give the wrong path for the config file that has the names of the video cards your machine might support. The correct path seems to be:
/Library/Java/Home/lib/glconfigurationlist.propert ies
Curious to see if there's an improvement. Though the low-level stuff is blazingly fast on OS X, the high-level, especially Swing, has been pretty sluggish.