Bram Cohen (the creator of Bittorrent) studiously avoids anything that could be considered positive statements about copyright infringement, or personally doing so himself, for this very reason. Of course, he's geek enough that he probably genuinely developed Bittorrent for its non-infringing uses. But he's bright enough to avoid anything that could be construed in a particular way by the unhappy content industries.
A lot of file sharing sites, however, aren't as savvy. Sure, The Pirate Bay doesn't specifically tell you to go download stuff. But it is a tool designed for downloading illegal stuff, used for downloading illegal stuff, and it's called The Pirate Bay. Sure KaZaa could have been used to share the music that your band created. But its design was better suited to sharing illegal music than your own band's creations, its primary use in the wild was sharing music illegally, and the owners both knew about this and promoted it. Would anyone reasonably believe that a site called IsoHunt wasn't being used to transfer CD's and DVD's?
Under most legal systems, there are codified common sense notions. A physicist could argue that when applying muscular force to a finger, they couldn't be sure that this would move a metal bar, which would release a spring, which would cause a spark, which would ignite a sulfurous potassium nitrate solution, which would increase the air pressure behind a metallic tube, which would accelerate the tube along the x-axis at a rapid rate, which would strike a subsequent object, which would cause soft tissue damage. But a court would say that they knew they were going to kill someone when they fired a gun. The apparent motivation doesn't need to be scientifically proven, it just needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt.
Similarly, if someone released a search engine that simply queried google with torrent, and advertised as the best place to find hollywood releases, they'd be guilty of inducing infringement. Beyond a reasonable doubt, that modified search engine is there to search for illegal content.
Just because they're offering a subset of a larger feature set doesn't mean that they're OK, or that the larger feature set would be illegal. To torture an analogy: If you offer a gun for sale, it can be used for a wide variety of illegal and legal actions. The courts have ruled in the US that there are enough legal uses for guns in general that selling them is not inducement to crime. However, if you offered a gun that could only shoot homeowners during robberies, your featureset and viable uses would be narrowed such that a reasonable person would think that gun was being sold in order to commit a crime. If you offered a gun that could only shoot Jewish homeowners during robberies, you might similarly be guilty of inducement to commit a hate crime.
Limewire had a product that they advertised to college students as where you go to get MP3's. They extensively supported MP3 tagging and naming in their interface. They had a system for filtering out illegal music, which was off by default, and a second system for filtering out music purchased from Limewire's partners, which was not disableable. In short, they knew of the infringement on their system, promoted themselves as a platform for that infringement, and took steps to prevent just the infringement on their own copyrights while allowing the rest. That's enough for a reasonable person to think that Limewire is specifically encouraging breaking the law on their platform.
Napster went dark. Grockster went down. KaZaa went down. Pirate Bay was dinged repeatedly. MetaMachine went out of business. Limewire is going down.
The message is that commercial entities should not setup businesses around piracy. If you value the fruits of your work (and freedom), do something else.
Sure that drives the illegal activity onto hobbyist networks. But if your goal is to make it progressively harder and less effective to infringe copyright, that is a step in the right direction.
For one, illegal or not the RIAA sues people using tracked downloads as evidence of filesharing. It will either cost you 10k to settle, or at least 10k in legal fees. In practical terms then, there definitely is something wrong in downloading a file to check it out, and it will be viable evidence against you in a court of law.
For another, you're not opening a magazine to see if you want to buy it or not. You're inducing copyright infringement to get an illegal copy. Even if it is to "decide if you want to buy," the fact remains that someone violated copyright at your request, and that you most definitely knew it was going to happen. At minimum, that makes you guilty of being an accessory to copyright infringement, inducing copyright infringement, and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, which have been ruled illegal in various locals at various times. Further, an overpaid lawyer could easily argue that the copy being made at your request makes you a joint principle in the act. Pressing "download" on bittorrent is like pressing the copy button on a xerox, irrespective of who owns the xerox and who loaded the book into the copier. A skilled lawyer would argue that the uploader isn't making any copies at all, they're just holding up a book saying "come make copies of this." The downloaders are the ones who bring their little xerox machines, and suddenly have identical bits on their computers.
Maybe a real lawyer could chime in on this subject (please?). But things definitely aren't as black-and-white as "uploading is illegal, downloading is legal."
I was going to say, why is everyone laughing this off? It's very unlikely to be true. But we seem to be laughing at it because "our scientists are obviously better than their scientists."
Yes, it's probably BS. But it isn't BS until it is disproven. And yes, there isn't anything there to disprove right now. And sure, we haven't been able to achieve net positive fusion yet. Net negative fusion is pretty easy. I wouldn't expect useful fusion to be achieved by the old methods. I would expect it to come from unexpected approaches. And honestly, I would expect unexpected approaches from China, Brazil, North Korea, Russia, or somewhere that has less to lose by the untraditional, and who has the need to improvise around a lack of equipment. That doesn't mean it's likely to succeed.
I don't know. Just because it's probably BS doesn't mean it deserves derision and dismissal. Is there a term for "nation-ism"? "part-of-the-world-ism"?
Because in hydroelectric power, something else does the work of lifting the water up the hill. In wind, you're not applying energy to cause the differing atmospheric pressures. In both cases, we're tapping into a larger system, and our involvement begins once a power differential exists.
For non-nuclear hydrogen, you have to have the power source to tap at the beginning. Usually that's something which generates electricity to break the hydrogen apart, but in this case it is solar. Either way, you actually have all of the energy before you even get to the converting hydrogen phase. The hydrogen part is actually a net energy-loss, but hydrogen is such a powerful and portable store of energy that it just might be worth it. Also, due in part to being an intermediary, the water is not consumed in the process.
For nuclear hydrogen, you're completely right in asserting that it is a fuel. The energy that you're extracting comes from the hydrogen itself, and the hydrogen is converted in the process. But for conventional hydrogen, you're putting the energy into the system from somewhere, and then it returns to its original state.
Considering that all life on this planet has a tendency to expand to consume all available resources, I wouldn't count on a cultural change to rectify the consumptionist problem.
But don't cry a tear for poor H20. The water is not consumed when you create Hydrogen; when recombined with Oxygen it forms water again. You're not getting energy "out" of water. You're getting energy out of solar radiation. The water is merely a temporary medium to be broken apart to store energy, and re-combined to release it.
I first noticed this earlier today: passages just started being underlined. Hovering over the text explains that it has been highlighted by other users, and how to turn off the feature. It's a bit bloatey for anything other than textbooks, but as a feature it is almost unmissable. You can't read on a Kindle anymore without knowing about this feature (and preferably disabling it).
Personally, I'm just annoyed that people highlight the most inane sappy lines as if they were genuinely insightful about life. Thank you, dozens of people who highlighted "The most important things in life are friends"; I'm glad that if you forget this pearl of wisdom in the future, you can return to the convenient highlight marker and be re-enlightened.
Anything you could launch up there to get at or repair the satellite would be inherently more expensive to launch than replacing the satellite. The main cost is the launch.
Now, something permanently up in space that could maneuver other satellites would be very helpful. But unless it's going to have enough maneuvering fuel to change orbits repeatedly, you'd have to have some way of moving other satellites by hitting them with something, such as lasers. Maybe a laser-reactive outer coating that could provide a short burst of thrust when exposed to the right frequency of light?
How is that "the" supremely selfish act compared to, say, dumping toxic waste on 3rd world water supplies in order to save a buck? Or buying up a business, raiding the pension fund, and selling off the parts for profit while thousands of people wonder where their job and retirement went? Or abusing your status as a police officer in order to get a sad power kick?
Having a kid basically means devoting very large chunks of your life to someone else. You're giving up 2 years of doing anything, 3 further years of any daytime activities, then 15 years of having control over your own life. And why? So you can create a life that will hopefully go off into the wild and make society a better place.
Some people want to help a million people a little bit. A lot of people want to help one or two people a whole lot. Is it "supremely selfish" because it is something they want to do? Does this now mean that the only selfless acts that matter are the acts of self-flagellation that nobody wants to do? In the kinds of developed countries that post on slashdot, the birthrate generally has fallen below 1 child per 1 person. Clearly the problem can't be overpopulation, at least not here.
Really, the only way raising children could be considered "the supremely selfish act" is if you start from the position that human beings are bad, and more human beings are more bad. We have enough food to feed everybody currently, we're just terrible at distributing it. We have enough water for now. And peak oil is happening one way or another. Arguably, we'll be off of the oil standard faster the more scientists we can raise. And again, if you don't count immigration the population of most developed countries is declining.
They went broke a couple of times. And as you mentioned, they fell a bit behind.
That seems to be the problem with linux distros... They start with some revolutionary idea or ideal. They get adopted, and their userbase grows and starts having expectations about how the distro functions. As more and more people users get added, the developers become locked into specific technologies and implementations. Instead of devoting resources to trying new things, they have to support their userbase's needs. Then a different upstart bunch gets another revolutionary idea, and try that out.
I loved Mandrake as well, and am sad to see how it has been languishing for years.
It seems like people have the underlying assumption that a longer feature list = a better product. For good design and usability, you want the absolute minimum number of features required to get the job done well. If you have 10 options, the user can see them all at once. If you have 1,000 options, you will have a heirarchical mess that drives users to repeatedly press the one button they are familiar with.
Exposing application installation and local storage means exposing all of the really ugly bits of Linux... the file structures that support the system, installation dependencies, patches, security and logins, etc. A browser, on the other hand, is just a browser. The end user never has to wonder if a file is in/bin,/usr, the desktop somewhere, etc. The system can't be hacked (much). There are no dependency trees to resolve when you want to see a PDF file. Since it is cloud-based, you don't have to back anything up. It just works. Oh, and youtube (of course) has a good corporate shill video of this, and an interesting video of the OS in action,
To force a car analogy, Sometimes you need a truck to haul all of your crap. Sometimes you just want a motorcycle to get from point A to point B quickly. You probably wouldn't get a motorcycle as your primary vehicle. But damn are they nice.
Are you an employee or a contractor? As an employee, the onus to fall on the right side of the GPL probably falls on your employer. But as a contractor, you yourself might be legally responsible for proper adherence to legal rules around the GPL. They are, after all, hiring you to know this stuff.
As for ownership of the code you created before you were hired: ask HR for a copy of your contract. There is probably a clause in there granting them specific rights, but they might not cover everything. They will definitely walk away with a license for everything and ownership of the code that you created for them, but they might not own the code that you created before you were hired.
And if they don't want you to, you can't published the extended version of the code. They definitely own that. And welcome to the new academia, where all knowledge is a secret to be jealously guarded.
HTML5 is still a draft specification, scheduled to be ratified in 2012.
Here is a chart, showing implementation support for HTML5 and CSS3. It's pretty poor. In an industry where dropping I.E. 6 support is considered controversial (despite being 9 years old), being able to safely assume your clients support HTML 5 is still a ways off.
I'm sure it will be a great industry standard someday, and I hope it gets ratified quickly. But it's not even a standard yet. It took years of concerted effort to move the industry over to PNG as a viable web graphics standard. Do you really think HTML 5 will be safe to use straight out of the box, before the standard is even finished?
If you have a large group of friends and associates, it's a nice way to let each other know of goings-on. Things like BBQ's, beach outings, cocktail nights, etc.
If people you know aren't using it, then it is exceedingly useless.
What if you don't need all of the capabilities of XCode? What if you just quickly need to create an informational app for a local college, which already has a lot of resources and animations in SWF format?
Hopefully a lot of people will continue to code in objective C. But that doesn't mean that everyone is pushing the metal. Sometimes you just need to get something boring and effective done.
I don't agree that it is a trivial conclusion in the consumer-grade tech industry. What you're describing is a situation where there are few enough competitors in a market that real competition is not the best way to maximize profits. But Netgear needs to spice up their wireless equipment with new proprietary speed-up extensions, or else a half-dozen other manufacturers will take their top speed crown. Intel needs to push the GHZ up, or they can't sell new computers to the same people.
Sure, sinking another 100 grand in plastic molds is a limiting factor in how fast certain technologies get turned around. But for a lot of consumer-grade tech, there really is a thriving ecosystem. Broadband? No. Title Insurance on your house? No. Power? No. Consumer-grade tech? Yes.
To add to the other poster's response, there really are just 3 wireless channels in the US: 1, 6, and 11. 1 actually ranges from 1 - 3, 6 ranges from 4 - 8, 11 ranges from 9 - 11.
There are about 28 wireless networks that my computer can see at the moment, all of which are consuming the airspace in one of those 3 channels. Because of this, networks will barely propogate through an entire apartment. If you need to hit two apartments, or a back porch, you need to put up more than one router, making the problem that much worse for the people around you.
Having worked in a company which used laser networking... that thing was darned touchy. My favorite was the 2 weeks of outages we tended to have during the spring for 2 hours every afternoon. Nobody knew why. Eventually it was discovered that at those moments, the sun happened to reflect off of the building JUST RIGHT to blind the laser. Other times it just went down for mysterious orientation reasons, dead boards, etc. Most weather wasn't bad, but fog was a bane of existence.
I love laser networking technology. But it's not exactly at fire-and-forget consumer grade level yet.
Is this the industry that launched 802.11N before the draft specification had even hit 2.0, and 6 years before the spec was finished? That were selling computers "With Vista" (upgrade coupons) almost two years before vista launched? That
I don't disagree that many industries milk adequate-but-not-best technologies because they're more profitable at the moment. But the consumer tech industry has a tendency to push things out the door before they're done.
In his defense, he knows this. Talking to him about it, he admits that being a video game pundit is just something he does on the side. And that he gets things wrong a lot. Partly it's prediction, but I suspect mostly it is bravado.
He gets paid for his business analytics: you can name an entertainment stock and a quarter in the past 20 years, and he will tell you what their earnings were from memory. He's actually not that bad at that part.
"Screwing over developers in a monopolistic fashion is unacceptable behavior. If we as developers don't fight against companies doing this, we will be screwed over again and again."
Apple already screwed over developers by forcing everyone into the iStore, by setting arbitrary standards for what is and isn't acceptable in the iStore, and for changing those standards randomly in ways that screw over legitimate developers left and right. They let apps languish in approval lingo, ban apps that duplicate unreleased / unannounced functionality, and allow big-name apps to flaunt the rules. They ban apps that follow the rules just because AT&T doesn't like them. They just removed all of the WiFi finding apps in the store, some of which have been approved since the beginning of the app store.
Flash really is just the latest drop in the bucket, but it is one that everyone can unite behind. Until now Apple has not attempted to take control of the development tools that were used to create apps in their store. Now they will ban your app if you're using middlewear. If you read 3.3.1, not only are they banning anything developed in Flash, they're banning anything developed with the help of most of the middlewear out there.
Is this developers being whiny? You bet your ass we're being whiny. Flash is a dirt easy enviornment to create tiny little special-purpose apps in. Things like magazine apps, rental fleet information, school maps, etc. "But" you say "You could create all of that in Apple's native rendering environment. And it would run faster!" Yes, a front end that displays and sorts data about a library in realtime could theoretically run in 60 frames per second instead of 20 frames per second. But so what? An Apple native tool might cost 40k to write, whereas a flash version might cost just 10k, and might have large chunks re-usable for their website. For a lot of applications, that might make the difference between going ahead and doing the project, and scrapping it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Bram Cohen (the creator of Bittorrent) studiously avoids anything that could be considered positive statements about copyright infringement, or personally doing so himself, for this very reason. Of course, he's geek enough that he probably genuinely developed Bittorrent for its non-infringing uses. But he's bright enough to avoid anything that could be construed in a particular way by the unhappy content industries.
A lot of file sharing sites, however, aren't as savvy. Sure, The Pirate Bay doesn't specifically tell you to go download stuff. But it is a tool designed for downloading illegal stuff, used for downloading illegal stuff, and it's called The Pirate Bay. Sure KaZaa could have been used to share the music that your band created. But its design was better suited to sharing illegal music than your own band's creations, its primary use in the wild was sharing music illegally, and the owners both knew about this and promoted it. Would anyone reasonably believe that a site called IsoHunt wasn't being used to transfer CD's and DVD's?
Under most legal systems, there are codified common sense notions. A physicist could argue that when applying muscular force to a finger, they couldn't be sure that this would move a metal bar, which would release a spring, which would cause a spark, which would ignite a sulfurous potassium nitrate solution, which would increase the air pressure behind a metallic tube, which would accelerate the tube along the x-axis at a rapid rate, which would strike a subsequent object, which would cause soft tissue damage. But a court would say that they knew they were going to kill someone when they fired a gun. The apparent motivation doesn't need to be scientifically proven, it just needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt.
Similarly, if someone released a search engine that simply queried google with torrent, and advertised as the best place to find hollywood releases, they'd be guilty of inducing infringement. Beyond a reasonable doubt, that modified search engine is there to search for illegal content.
Just because they're offering a subset of a larger feature set doesn't mean that they're OK, or that the larger feature set would be illegal. To torture an analogy: If you offer a gun for sale, it can be used for a wide variety of illegal and legal actions. The courts have ruled in the US that there are enough legal uses for guns in general that selling them is not inducement to crime. However, if you offered a gun that could only shoot homeowners during robberies, your featureset and viable uses would be narrowed such that a reasonable person would think that gun was being sold in order to commit a crime. If you offered a gun that could only shoot Jewish homeowners during robberies, you might similarly be guilty of inducement to commit a hate crime.
Limewire had a product that they advertised to college students as where you go to get MP3's. They extensively supported MP3 tagging and naming in their interface. They had a system for filtering out illegal music, which was off by default, and a second system for filtering out music purchased from Limewire's partners, which was not disableable. In short, they knew of the infringement on their system, promoted themselves as a platform for that infringement, and took steps to prevent just the infringement on their own copyrights while allowing the rest. That's enough for a reasonable person to think that Limewire is specifically encouraging breaking the law on their platform.
Napster went dark. Grockster went down. KaZaa went down. Pirate Bay was dinged repeatedly. MetaMachine went out of business. Limewire is going down.
The message is that commercial entities should not setup businesses around piracy. If you value the fruits of your work (and freedom), do something else.
Sure that drives the illegal activity onto hobbyist networks. But if your goal is to make it progressively harder and less effective to infringe copyright, that is a step in the right direction.
IANAL, but that position is pretty thin.
For one, illegal or not the RIAA sues people using tracked downloads as evidence of filesharing. It will either cost you 10k to settle, or at least 10k in legal fees. In practical terms then, there definitely is something wrong in downloading a file to check it out, and it will be viable evidence against you in a court of law.
For another, you're not opening a magazine to see if you want to buy it or not. You're inducing copyright infringement to get an illegal copy. Even if it is to "decide if you want to buy," the fact remains that someone violated copyright at your request, and that you most definitely knew it was going to happen. At minimum, that makes you guilty of being an accessory to copyright infringement, inducing copyright infringement, and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, which have been ruled illegal in various locals at various times. Further, an overpaid lawyer could easily argue that the copy being made at your request makes you a joint principle in the act. Pressing "download" on bittorrent is like pressing the copy button on a xerox, irrespective of who owns the xerox and who loaded the book into the copier. A skilled lawyer would argue that the uploader isn't making any copies at all, they're just holding up a book saying "come make copies of this." The downloaders are the ones who bring their little xerox machines, and suddenly have identical bits on their computers.
Maybe a real lawyer could chime in on this subject (please?). But things definitely aren't as black-and-white as "uploading is illegal, downloading is legal."
I was going to say, why is everyone laughing this off? It's very unlikely to be true. But we seem to be laughing at it because "our scientists are obviously better than their scientists."
Yes, it's probably BS. But it isn't BS until it is disproven. And yes, there isn't anything there to disprove right now. And sure, we haven't been able to achieve net positive fusion yet. Net negative fusion is pretty easy. I wouldn't expect useful fusion to be achieved by the old methods. I would expect it to come from unexpected approaches. And honestly, I would expect unexpected approaches from China, Brazil, North Korea, Russia, or somewhere that has less to lose by the untraditional, and who has the need to improvise around a lack of equipment. That doesn't mean it's likely to succeed.
I don't know. Just because it's probably BS doesn't mean it deserves derision and dismissal. Is there a term for "nation-ism"? "part-of-the-world-ism"?
Because in hydroelectric power, something else does the work of lifting the water up the hill. In wind, you're not applying energy to cause the differing atmospheric pressures. In both cases, we're tapping into a larger system, and our involvement begins once a power differential exists.
For non-nuclear hydrogen, you have to have the power source to tap at the beginning. Usually that's something which generates electricity to break the hydrogen apart, but in this case it is solar. Either way, you actually have all of the energy before you even get to the converting hydrogen phase. The hydrogen part is actually a net energy-loss, but hydrogen is such a powerful and portable store of energy that it just might be worth it. Also, due in part to being an intermediary, the water is not consumed in the process.
For nuclear hydrogen, you're completely right in asserting that it is a fuel. The energy that you're extracting comes from the hydrogen itself, and the hydrogen is converted in the process. But for conventional hydrogen, you're putting the energy into the system from somewhere, and then it returns to its original state.
Considering that all life on this planet has a tendency to expand to consume all available resources, I wouldn't count on a cultural change to rectify the consumptionist problem.
But don't cry a tear for poor H20. The water is not consumed when you create Hydrogen; when recombined with Oxygen it forms water again. You're not getting energy "out" of water. You're getting energy out of solar radiation. The water is merely a temporary medium to be broken apart to store energy, and re-combined to release it.
I first noticed this earlier today: passages just started being underlined. Hovering over the text explains that it has been highlighted by other users, and how to turn off the feature. It's a bit bloatey for anything other than textbooks, but as a feature it is almost unmissable. You can't read on a Kindle anymore without knowing about this feature (and preferably disabling it).
Personally, I'm just annoyed that people highlight the most inane sappy lines as if they were genuinely insightful about life. Thank you, dozens of people who highlighted "The most important things in life are friends"; I'm glad that if you forget this pearl of wisdom in the future, you can return to the convenient highlight marker and be re-enlightened.
Anything you could launch up there to get at or repair the satellite would be inherently more expensive to launch than replacing the satellite. The main cost is the launch.
Now, something permanently up in space that could maneuver other satellites would be very helpful. But unless it's going to have enough maneuvering fuel to change orbits repeatedly, you'd have to have some way of moving other satellites by hitting them with something, such as lasers. Maybe a laser-reactive outer coating that could provide a short burst of thrust when exposed to the right frequency of light?
That would fall under the purvey of the "safety research" that the Gates are funding. It's not like they're opening clinics in 7-11 just yet.
How is that "the" supremely selfish act compared to, say, dumping toxic waste on 3rd world water supplies in order to save a buck? Or buying up a business, raiding the pension fund, and selling off the parts for profit while thousands of people wonder where their job and retirement went? Or abusing your status as a police officer in order to get a sad power kick?
Having a kid basically means devoting very large chunks of your life to someone else. You're giving up 2 years of doing anything, 3 further years of any daytime activities, then 15 years of having control over your own life. And why? So you can create a life that will hopefully go off into the wild and make society a better place.
Some people want to help a million people a little bit. A lot of people want to help one or two people a whole lot. Is it "supremely selfish" because it is something they want to do? Does this now mean that the only selfless acts that matter are the acts of self-flagellation that nobody wants to do? In the kinds of developed countries that post on slashdot, the birthrate generally has fallen below 1 child per 1 person. Clearly the problem can't be overpopulation, at least not here.
Really, the only way raising children could be considered "the supremely selfish act" is if you start from the position that human beings are bad, and more human beings are more bad. We have enough food to feed everybody currently, we're just terrible at distributing it. We have enough water for now. And peak oil is happening one way or another. Arguably, we'll be off of the oil standard faster the more scientists we can raise. And again, if you don't count immigration the population of most developed countries is declining.
They went broke a couple of times. And as you mentioned, they fell a bit behind.
That seems to be the problem with linux distros... They start with some revolutionary idea or ideal. They get adopted, and their userbase grows and starts having expectations about how the distro functions. As more and more people users get added, the developers become locked into specific technologies and implementations. Instead of devoting resources to trying new things, they have to support their userbase's needs. Then a different upstart bunch gets another revolutionary idea, and try that out.
I loved Mandrake as well, and am sad to see how it has been languishing for years.
It seems like people have the underlying assumption that a longer feature list = a better product. For good design and usability, you want the absolute minimum number of features required to get the job done well. If you have 10 options, the user can see them all at once. If you have 1,000 options, you will have a heirarchical mess that drives users to repeatedly press the one button they are familiar with.
Exposing application installation and local storage means exposing all of the really ugly bits of Linux... the file structures that support the system, installation dependencies, patches, security and logins, etc. A browser, on the other hand, is just a browser. The end user never has to wonder if a file is in /bin, /usr, the desktop somewhere, etc. The system can't be hacked (much). There are no dependency trees to resolve when you want to see a PDF file. Since it is cloud-based, you don't have to back anything up. It just works. Oh, and youtube (of course) has a good corporate shill video of this, and an interesting video of the OS in action,
To force a car analogy, Sometimes you need a truck to haul all of your crap. Sometimes you just want a motorcycle to get from point A to point B quickly. You probably wouldn't get a motorcycle as your primary vehicle. But damn are they nice.
Are you an employee or a contractor? As an employee, the onus to fall on the right side of the GPL probably falls on your employer. But as a contractor, you yourself might be legally responsible for proper adherence to legal rules around the GPL. They are, after all, hiring you to know this stuff.
As for ownership of the code you created before you were hired: ask HR for a copy of your contract. There is probably a clause in there granting them specific rights, but they might not cover everything. They will definitely walk away with a license for everything and ownership of the code that you created for them, but they might not own the code that you created before you were hired.
And if they don't want you to, you can't published the extended version of the code. They definitely own that. And welcome to the new academia, where all knowledge is a secret to be jealously guarded.
HTML5 is still a draft specification, scheduled to be ratified in 2012.
Here is a chart, showing implementation support for HTML5 and CSS3. It's pretty poor. In an industry where dropping I.E. 6 support is considered controversial (despite being 9 years old), being able to safely assume your clients support HTML 5 is still a ways off.
I'm sure it will be a great industry standard someday, and I hope it gets ratified quickly. But it's not even a standard yet. It took years of concerted effort to move the industry over to PNG as a viable web graphics standard. Do you really think HTML 5 will be safe to use straight out of the box, before the standard is even finished?
If you have a large group of friends and associates, it's a nice way to let each other know of goings-on. Things like BBQ's, beach outings, cocktail nights, etc.
If people you know aren't using it, then it is exceedingly useless.
The main difference being that back in the blue boxing days, security was an afterthought and now it's a multi-billion dollar industry.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry... that gets called in after-the-fact once a tool gets really popular.
Whoops. Meant to post under this account name.
What if you don't need all of the capabilities of XCode? What if you just quickly need to create an informational app for a local college, which already has a lot of resources and animations in SWF format?
Hopefully a lot of people will continue to code in objective C. But that doesn't mean that everyone is pushing the metal. Sometimes you just need to get something boring and effective done.
I don't agree that it is a trivial conclusion in the consumer-grade tech industry. What you're describing is a situation where there are few enough competitors in a market that real competition is not the best way to maximize profits. But Netgear needs to spice up their wireless equipment with new proprietary speed-up extensions, or else a half-dozen other manufacturers will take their top speed crown. Intel needs to push the GHZ up, or they can't sell new computers to the same people.
Sure, sinking another 100 grand in plastic molds is a limiting factor in how fast certain technologies get turned around. But for a lot of consumer-grade tech, there really is a thriving ecosystem. Broadband? No. Title Insurance on your house? No. Power? No. Consumer-grade tech? Yes.
To add to the other poster's response, there really are just 3 wireless channels in the US: 1, 6, and 11. 1 actually ranges from 1 - 3, 6 ranges from 4 - 8, 11 ranges from 9 - 11.
There are about 28 wireless networks that my computer can see at the moment, all of which are consuming the airspace in one of those 3 channels. Because of this, networks will barely propogate through an entire apartment. If you need to hit two apartments, or a back porch, you need to put up more than one router, making the problem that much worse for the people around you.
Having worked in a company which used laser networking... that thing was darned touchy. My favorite was the 2 weeks of outages we tended to have during the spring for 2 hours every afternoon. Nobody knew why. Eventually it was discovered that at those moments, the sun happened to reflect off of the building JUST RIGHT to blind the laser. Other times it just went down for mysterious orientation reasons, dead boards, etc. Most weather wasn't bad, but fog was a bane of existence.
I love laser networking technology. But it's not exactly at fire-and-forget consumer grade level yet.
Is this the industry that launched 802.11N before the draft specification had even hit 2.0, and 6 years before the spec was finished? That were selling computers "With Vista" (upgrade coupons) almost two years before vista launched? That
I don't disagree that many industries milk adequate-but-not-best technologies because they're more profitable at the moment. But the consumer tech industry has a tendency to push things out the door before they're done.
In his defense, he knows this. Talking to him about it, he admits that being a video game pundit is just something he does on the side. And that he gets things wrong a lot. Partly it's prediction, but I suspect mostly it is bravado.
He gets paid for his business analytics: you can name an entertainment stock and a quarter in the past 20 years, and he will tell you what their earnings were from memory. He's actually not that bad at that part.
Great point. To summarize:
"Screwing over developers in a monopolistic fashion is unacceptable behavior. If we as developers don't fight against companies doing this, we will be screwed over again and again."
Apple already screwed over developers by forcing everyone into the iStore, by setting arbitrary standards for what is and isn't acceptable in the iStore, and for changing those standards randomly in ways that screw over legitimate developers left and right. They let apps languish in approval lingo, ban apps that duplicate unreleased / unannounced functionality, and allow big-name apps to flaunt the rules. They ban apps that follow the rules just because AT&T doesn't like them. They just removed all of the WiFi finding apps in the store, some of which have been approved since the beginning of the app store.
Flash really is just the latest drop in the bucket, but it is one that everyone can unite behind. Until now Apple has not attempted to take control of the development tools that were used to create apps in their store. Now they will ban your app if you're using middlewear. If you read 3.3.1, not only are they banning anything developed in Flash, they're banning anything developed with the help of most of the middlewear out there.
Is this developers being whiny? You bet your ass we're being whiny. Flash is a dirt easy enviornment to create tiny little special-purpose apps in. Things like magazine apps, rental fleet information, school maps, etc. "But" you say "You could create all of that in Apple's native rendering environment. And it would run faster!" Yes, a front end that displays and sorts data about a library in realtime could theoretically run in 60 frames per second instead of 20 frames per second. But so what? An Apple native tool might cost 40k to write, whereas a flash version might cost just 10k, and might have large chunks re-usable for their website. For a lot of applications, that might make the difference between going ahead and doing the project, and scrapping it all.