This really seems to apply to companies that incorporate Linux into a product. Well known examples include Tivo and the Linksys WRT54G (v4 and below). In such a case, Linux is an important part of those companies' product portfolio and thus and important factor in assessing the tangible and intangible worth of that company. For the companies that only use Linux in operational capacities, it wouldn't have any impact unless SCO wins. (yea, right)
Put another way: ownership of a patent on a hammer is important for a tool maker, but not for the construction company that uses it.
Bruce Schneier once said, "Making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet." DVD Jon pointed out the the purpose of DRM isn't to prevent copying. Its purpose is to place constraints on the decoder.
RMS started his crusade long before anyone heard of Microsoft when a printer manufacturer wouldn't give him the source code for a printer driver so he could fix the bugs that were preventing it from working on the computer he was using. RMS is about preventing artificial limits on a computers ability to meet the needs of its users.
Over the years the artificial limits have included the unavailability (hoarding in RMS-speak) of source code and patents. Adding DRM is the next logicial addition.
I remember when viewers basically "made an appointment" with a TV show. The VCR was a novelty that only the Rich could afford. You either watched it on its appointed time or you hoped to catch it on re-runs. Writers couldn't create series with long, intricate story arcs that spanned multiple episodes, because if a viewer missed an episode, they'd be confused. So every week, the problem that threatened the world was neatly tidied up in the last ten minutes.
Finally, Appointment Viewing is Dead! iTunes and Tivo and PVR's have killed it.
Part of the reason series like BSG are so good, is because the writers know that the don't have clean up the story in the last ten minutes. In fact the last ten minutes become a good time to "frack-up" everything we've come to know and trust.
They kept the look of the Dalek. But, they gave it some major attitude. When I watched the episode, it was a Dalek that was capable of kicking some serious ass!
A device like a USB key fob is blank storage. Like a really big floppy. It doesn't violate because it doesn't have an algorithm that implements FAT. Cameras, on the other hand, have to save their images in a structured way. They do implement a FAT algorithm.
I remember Peter Gabriel doing something with a dot matrix printer on his "Melt" album. Sure he followed an easier path: he modified a sample rather than modify the printer. Whilst making music from machines designed for another purpose isn't new, you have to salute the chap with the ambition to do so.
I agree. The closest I've seen so far is Tiki Bar TV. Even then, the storeys aren't that coherent. Not that these episodes really need to be coherent to be entertaining.
RoR has explicit and implicit code generation. Model classes which extend ActiveRecord::Base have amazing amounts of implicit, runtime-generated methods which can be replaced with custom logic if that's what you want.
The template generators are explicitly called development-generated blocks of code which are intended to be one-time only and edited by hand thereafter to meet business objectives.
Between the two, I love the former and dislike the later. I usually don't use scaffold built views except for Quick and Dirty lookup table administration. I think the difference between the final view and an empty file is smaller than the scaffold view and the final view.
... Without regulations, the ISPs must compete with one another. This means that the two-tier system could actually be of benefit to the end users. I have customers with offices all over the country who have to maintain expensive T1 lines. With a two-tier system that gives customers on the same network preferential treatment, I think we'll see lowered costs for corporate WANs, meaning lower prices for consumers of those corporations' products. Every dollar saved is some money passed on to the consumer.
This is what corporations always say to justify less regulation. Less regulation isn't a perfect solution for everything. Sometimes it works (Airlines). Sometimes it doesn't (Media). I'm not saying one way or another if this situation benefits or hurts from deregulation, but a very plausible scenario could also go like this...
... Without regulations, the ISPs can collude with one another. This means that the two-tier system could actually be of benefit to the shareholders. I have customers with offices all over the country who have to maintain profitable T1 lines. With a two-tier system that gives customers on the same network preferential treatment, I think we'll see lowered competition for corporate WANs, meaning lower benefits for employees of those corporations' products. Every dollar saved is some money passed on to the shareholder.
Amazon tried that once. Not based upon browser, but based upon previous purchases. It's been covered in Slashdot before, but I haven't found the original article. People discovered that different people were getting different prices. The emerging blogosphere, such that it was at the time, went balistic and Amazon backed down.
I agree with the elasticity problem. To tweak you remark a little, in a classic stock market, there are only so many shares of any one stock out there. The more people who want a certain issue will drive up the price of that issue. With downloadable music, there is no scarcity of the resource. The supply side of the law of Supply and Demand is, in effect, infinite. Thus the pricing of music has to be based upon some factor other than supply.
Revenue experts like Robert G. Cross espouse partitioning products and customers into different categories to ensure the each customer and product receives the greatest profit possible.
Regardless, I think it will be interesting to see how much higher premium priced songs will drive customers into alternative lower-priced ones.
Yes, because in the eyes of non-techies (more importantly the legislature and judiciary) it emphasises the legitimicy of the non-infringing uses BitTorrent and distances the technology away from the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding file-sharing.
No. Just that those with money are too busy profiting from a lack of peace.
Read George Bernard Shaw's 100 year old play, "Major Barbara". Especially the lines for Andrew Undershaft. Substitute Undershaft Industries with any other defence industry company and see how depressingly little changes in a century.
I think the real cause is a communication breakdown between users and programmers. The biggest problem with most software is that the users get an application that fits what they said, not what they wanted.
Many software engineering methodologists hold the Space Shuttle program as the example of how low a defect rate can be. I think what most neglect to consider is that their user community is 100% aerospace engineers. The specs that come out of that user group are as bug-free as anyone could hope for.
I was sitting down in the plaza outside Notre Dame Cathedral. There is a line where people can climb the 300+ stairs into the bellfry. Someone from the cathedral was canvasing the line with a stack informational leaflets. Different languages were printed in different color paper. The guy had an amazing ability to look at the next person in line and begin pulling the correct color before speaking with them. Once in a while he had to put one back and get another color, but that moment really sold me on how much we wear our cultural identities in public.
If the destruction can appear as innocent "wear and tear" one can always feign innocence. It wouldn't put a foil lined document in a microwave, however.
I'm not too worried about the data that's on there. The level of sophistication required to acquire and decrypt my details is pretty high. I'd be more worried about a lightning strike.
This is the scenario that give me the willies: The "ping" scenario. Most of us know about the internet tool called ping. A terrorist (or anyone else with strong motivations against the US) is walking down the streets of Paris or Frankfort or Cairo or wherever looking for Americans. He doesn't care who the American is, he just cares that someone is an American. He walks down the street getting within a foot or two of people until he gets an RFID ping.
RFID Ping == American. American == Target.
I've yet to hear anyone adequately appease this concern.
I used to work for Comair. I left over two years ago and was not entirely supprised what happened last Christmas. I'd like to think I have a few insights that are airline related and some that are universal. I'd love to have a chance to communicate with you in a better forum than Slashdot.
He clearly doesn't understand the stamina required to run up and down the pitch for 45+ minutes without stopping. And you don't get any pansy time-outs or commercial breaks either.
OPEC does the same thing. Current supply issues not withstanding, OPEC keeps the price of oil by regulating supply such that it isn't cost effective for US domestic producers to develop domestic alternatives.
Writing lots of code is a drasticly slower improvement process than reading code. Not books, but code. There's lots of code out there. Most of it is bad. Bad code is just as educational as good code. Sometimes with code, like with people, it isn't always obvious which is which.
Another thing to do is to get involved in a user's group. Here in Cincinnati there is an XP users group. In this case, XP is eXtreme Programing, not a version of Windows. It started out as a lab to try out XP in a "safe" environment. It's evolved into a group of people who really care about making progammers more effective.
What really amazed me about this group is in addition to talking about patterns, Dependency Injection, Transaction Script, MVC, and so on; they also talk about how important non-technical things can really impact your productivity. How a user phrases a requirement will affect the design and style of your program. You won't realize they're doing it. Users also have a tendency to create technical solutions for you. More often than not, the solutions and designs they stear you to are not as effective a design as they could be.
Slashdot Mirror
This really seems to apply to companies that incorporate Linux into a product. Well known examples include Tivo and the Linksys WRT54G (v4 and below). In such a case, Linux is an important part of those companies' product portfolio and thus and important factor in assessing the tangible and intangible worth of that company. For the companies that only use Linux in operational capacities, it wouldn't have any impact unless SCO wins. (yea, right)
Put another way: ownership of a patent on a hammer is important for a tool maker, but not for the construction company that uses it.
RMS started his crusade long before anyone heard of Microsoft when a printer manufacturer wouldn't give him the source code for a printer driver so he could fix the bugs that were preventing it from working on the computer he was using. RMS is about preventing artificial limits on a computers ability to meet the needs of its users.
Over the years the artificial limits have included the unavailability (hoarding in RMS-speak) of source code and patents. Adding DRM is the next logicial addition.
Finally, Appointment Viewing is Dead! iTunes and Tivo and PVR's have killed it.
Part of the reason series like BSG are so good, is because the writers know that the don't have clean up the story in the last ten minutes. In fact the last ten minutes become a good time to "frack-up" everything we've come to know and trust.
They kept the look of the Dalek. But, they gave it some major attitude. When I watched the episode, it was a Dalek that was capable of kicking some serious ass!
This could be a terrible precident. If I make a floppy disk, give it to a friend, do I have to pay the license?
A device like a USB key fob is blank storage. Like a really big floppy. It doesn't violate because it doesn't have an algorithm that implements FAT. Cameras, on the other hand, have to save their images in a structured way. They do implement a FAT algorithm.
I remember Peter Gabriel doing something with a dot matrix printer on his "Melt" album. Sure he followed an easier path: he modified a sample rather than modify the printer. Whilst making music from machines designed for another purpose isn't new, you have to salute the chap with the ambition to do so.
In addition to the zillions of synthesizers used in the sound, he used a Mac to mix it all together.
I agree. The closest I've seen so far is Tiki Bar TV. Even then, the storeys aren't that coherent. Not that these episodes really need to be coherent to be entertaining.
The template generators are explicitly called development-generated blocks of code which are intended to be one-time only and edited by hand thereafter to meet business objectives.
Between the two, I love the former and dislike the later. I usually don't use scaffold built views except for Quick and Dirty lookup table administration. I think the difference between the final view and an empty file is smaller than the scaffold view and the final view.
This is what corporations always say to justify less regulation. Less regulation isn't a perfect solution for everything. Sometimes it works (Airlines). Sometimes it doesn't (Media). I'm not saying one way or another if this situation benefits or hurts from deregulation, but a very plausible scenario could also go like this ...
The only thing worse than pure, unfettered bureaucracy is pure, unfettered capitalism.
Both are essential to keep each in check.
Amazon tried that once. Not based upon browser, but based upon previous purchases. It's been covered in Slashdot before, but I haven't found the original article. People discovered that different people were getting different prices. The emerging blogosphere, such that it was at the time, went balistic and Amazon backed down.
Revenue experts like Robert G. Cross espouse partitioning products and customers into different categories to ensure the each customer and product receives the greatest profit possible.
Regardless, I think it will be interesting to see how much higher premium priced songs will drive customers into alternative lower-priced ones.
Think of how a 50kg woman in stilletto heels leaves dents in wood floors where a 90kg man in sneakers doesn't.
Yes, because in the eyes of non-techies (more importantly the legislature and judiciary) it emphasises the legitimicy of the non-infringing uses BitTorrent and distances the technology away from the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding file-sharing.
Read George Bernard Shaw's 100 year old play, "Major Barbara". Especially the lines for Andrew Undershaft. Substitute Undershaft Industries with any other defence industry company and see how depressingly little changes in a century.
Many software engineering methodologists hold the Space Shuttle program as the example of how low a defect rate can be. I think what most neglect to consider is that their user community is 100% aerospace engineers. The specs that come out of that user group are as bug-free as anyone could hope for.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
I was sitting down in the plaza outside Notre Dame Cathedral. There is a line where people can climb the 300+ stairs into the bellfry. Someone from the cathedral was canvasing the line with a stack informational leaflets. Different languages were printed in different color paper. The guy had an amazing ability to look at the next person in line and begin pulling the correct color before speaking with them. Once in a while he had to put one back and get another color, but that moment really sold me on how much we wear our cultural identities in public.
I'm not too worried about the data that's on there. The level of sophistication required to acquire and decrypt my details is pretty high. I'd be more worried about a lightning strike.
This is the scenario that give me the willies: The "ping" scenario. Most of us know about the internet tool called ping. A terrorist (or anyone else with strong motivations against the US) is walking down the streets of Paris or Frankfort or Cairo or wherever looking for Americans. He doesn't care who the American is, he just cares that someone is an American. He walks down the street getting within a foot or two of people until he gets an RFID ping.
RFID Ping == American.
American == Target.
I've yet to hear anyone adequately appease this concern.
ericbardes@gmail.com
Thanks, Eric
He clearly doesn't understand the stamina required to run up and down the pitch for 45+ minutes without stopping. And you don't get any pansy time-outs or commercial breaks either.
OPEC does the same thing. Current supply issues not withstanding, OPEC keeps the price of oil by regulating supply such that it isn't cost effective for US domestic producers to develop domestic alternatives.
Another thing to do is to get involved in a user's group. Here in Cincinnati there is an XP users group. In this case, XP is eXtreme Programing, not a version of Windows. It started out as a lab to try out XP in a "safe" environment. It's evolved into a group of people who really care about making progammers more effective.
What really amazed me about this group is in addition to talking about patterns, Dependency Injection, Transaction Script, MVC, and so on; they also talk about how important non-technical things can really impact your productivity. How a user phrases a requirement will affect the design and style of your program. You won't realize they're doing it. Users also have a tendency to create technical solutions for you. More often than not, the solutions and designs they stear you to are not as effective a design as they could be.