I'd watch a lot more movies if they were only a buck.
You can already watch a movie for a buck at a dollar theater, and on a big screen too. The only problem is that a bag of popcorn and a coke still cost $9.
However, you can circumvent that problem with a low-tech method: have your girlfriend bring a big purse stuffed with goodies.
And don't forget that the Lotus 123 floppy-based scheme used an incredibly supid
CPU spin loop to time the floppy shennanigans. This was calibrated for the orignial 4.77MHz PC, so of course faster CPUs didn't work with Lotus.
Thus, we were cursed with "Turbo" buttons for over a decade to slow the PC down while loading Lotus. I'll bet that the consumers wasted orders of magnitude more money paying for these useless hardware switches on their PCs than Lotus ever recovered with their copy prevention scheme.
So maybe the letter of a law makes a distinction, but that doesn't effect the ethics or morality of it.
Ethics and morality are supposed to be more fundamental than laws. However, copyright infringement was neither immoral, unethical or illegal until a few hundred years ago when the concept was invented and codified into law. I'd say that in this case, respect for the law is the only principle behind respecting copyrights. There is no deeper moral or ethical basis. Many ancient civilizations and many modern societies function(ed) just fine without the concept at all.
Our society chooses to allow copyrights as a practical tradeoff. There is no "natural" right to retain control over information you have disseminated. Your only natural right to control your information is to keep it secret.
"Warning! As this design uses a transformerless power supply, the whole circuit is at mains potential. Disconnect before making any adjustments etc.
If you need to use an oscilloscope for debugging, the circuit MUST be operated through an isolating transformer."
This reminds me of a Heathkit oscilliscope kit I put together 20 years ago. The beam intensity control circuit used a normal TTL gate chip that was attached to the back of the tube. The chip's power and ground were connected between -2000 and -2005 volts(!).
It the input signal to the chip (which was always pulsing to cancel DC potential) was controlled by the rest of the circuitry at between 0 and 5 volts, and this was transferred to the control chip via a huge high-voltage rated capacitor with 2000 volts accross it, which would wiggle the other end between -2000 and -2005 volts. An impressive hardware hack.
As it happened, when I finished the scope and fired it up, it didn't work. It was pretty hard to debug without an oscilliscope:-/, and I was afraid of shocking the crap out of myself poking around 2000V circuits. I eventually got it working. It still works to this day, but the lame 5MHz bandwidth isn't too impressive.
I've never found a language that allowed me to be as productive as Java for the type of applications that I build. The language supports all the things I need such as threads, network communication (RMI) and web development (JSP) and the API allows me to develop apps quickly and with the freedom of interchanging parts (Web servers, databases, etc.) from different vendors whenever I want.
I agree with you relative to C/C++, and I was using Java heavily a couple of years ago. But now I've moved on to higher-level languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby. They each have APIs that provide functionality similar to Java, but usually simpler and more intuitive. They also don't have licensing policies or agendas driven by one particular corporation..
I usually get the same job done with 1/2 or 1/3 the lines of code as with Java.
I've also found that once you free your mind from the strong-typing yoke, you can transform your concepts into reality much more efficiently.
It's funny that a few years ago I had to argue to the PHBs that Java was a valid solution. Now, they are set on Java, and I have to argue that a better solution has emerged as support for other languages has matured.
Does anyone know of any other projects out there to reclaim and use some of this lost energy?
Well, the university I went to had its own electrical power station. They used the waste heat to generate steam that was sent all over campus for heating. Even the dorms' clothes dryers used steam heat exchangers.
They seemed to have so much heat capacity available that they didn't think that proper thermostats were a priority. A lot of people had to regulate the heat on subzero days by opening the windows.
An excellent paper. I noticed one section that
should be read and understood by anyone contemplating
the trend towards "digital rights management" schemes:
A common mistake by authors of information is to not realize that most of the total utility of their piece of information will be felt by those to whom its utility is either rather small, or for which its value is speculative to the person considering accessing it. The other common mistake is to not realize or care how much harm will be caused by others expending the time cost of accessing their information only to find it irrelevant. Since we all have limited lifespans in which to do our research, time spent accessing rather than reading information detracts from our ability to wander speculatively after information that might be useful.
He is making the point in terms of namespace balkanization, but
I think that is argument is also valid in a more general sense.
This is actually exactly what I've done the last five years or so.
I'm serious; I like a really good ad. (I've even bought a couple of tapes of classic TV ads)
The problem is, the quality of Superbowl ads really seems to be diminishing the last few years. I don't know if I'm even going to bother scanning them any more.
Rush Limbaugh among others have blasted it for ruining the listener's experience.
<audio style="rush-limbaugh-voice">
Rush Limbaugh doesn't like it. Folks, I can't believe the... the... the.. gall this guy has. People, I can't emphasize this enough: The radio stations are there to make money for Clear Channel stockholders, not as some charity to provide the best possible experience for Rush's listeners.
Look, folks, if Rush doesn't want this technology applied to his show, he's free to negotiate a contract with the radio stations that enforces his wishes. Anybody in this great country of ours can negotiate any contract they want. I hope that he's not going to try to get the government weenies at the FCC to meddle with the radio stations' livelyhoods.
Sheesh. Sometimes, I just don't know. We'll be back after this...
It's pretty strange how a physical process can work at different scales: turbulent mixing, in this case.
This cloud that is light-years across could be mistaken for a tiny puff of muddy water a couple of millimeters in diameter. The ratio in volume between the two systems would be something like 10^57, but they look almost identical.
The only difference between Red Hat and Microsoft is 40 billion dollars and a 95% market share.
That might not be totally bad. Microsoft's installation process is a breeze and it usually works. So is Red Hat's. Can't say the same thing about certain "pure" distros.
It's rather depressing that you can only think of this problem in terms of the file-formats. Maybe that's your personal problem, but could it possibly be that MS's software is where the real value is?
No.
Without the proprietary formats, all of Microsoft's office software features could be cloned by any midsize software company within 24 months.
People talk about "Microsoft using its monopoly power to..." without recognizing that the only power Microsoft has is the price at which they sell their product.
That's a gross oversimplification. Microsoft wouldn't be worth jack squat if there weren't billions of.doc and.xls files out there that their products process better than anybody else's.
Why can't others duplicate Microsoft's products? Because Microsoft enjoys the dual protections of copyright and trade secrets. Without either one, competitors would swarm out of the woodwork and eat Microsoft's lunch because office software is a mature product that should be a commmodity by now.
How are the copyright and trade secret protections facilitated? By the heavy hand of government, of course. It is interesting that when the U.S. Constitution was written, there was no single technology such as software that could combine the two protections in such a powerful way. The powerful combination allows the barrier of entry into a monopolized software market to be almost infinite.
Take the example of Sun, who is giving away a capable office suite for free. Most people doubt that even at this price that they can significantly impact Microsoft's market share. This is largely because their handling of proprietary.doc and.xls files is less than perfect. This proves that microsoft's chosen pricing has little to do with the dynamics of this market.
In fact, I'd argue that if you can't even give a product away, it's not a market. There is no market for office software today. Just a government-facilitated fiefdom.
At a past client, e-mail servers were torn down monthly, had replacement hard drives installed, and had the server software reinstalled from scratch - importing in e-mail that is less than 30 days old. The old hard drives were shipped off to a destruction facility (managed by the client). All old servers had all media removed and shipped to the same facility. Any server or PC that was repurposed also had media replaced - again, the old media shipped off for destruction.
I'll bet that the dress code at that company also requires
all of the sysadmins to wear tin foil hats.
Pardon me, but as an old PDP-11 hacker (one who played with Unix in 1974) that dear old machine was perfectly capable of supporting virtual memory.
As was the PDP-8 (with custom hardware, as built by a local company based on a design suggested by Richie Lary and fleshed-out by me).
It seems you were pioneering the "embrace and extend" strategy.:-)
Anyway, I was just looking at some history websites on the PDP-8 last week My high school had one, and it was the first computer I got my hands on. I only used high-level languages back in the day, but I finally looked at the machine architecture on the websites. The instruction set is very cool; basically just 8 opcodes that can be put into various interesting permutations.
I'm guessing that since memory addressing was largely paged, you hacked in extra registers somewhere to add more pages and mix them up. A bit more interesting than today's overclocking.
Well, it looks like we here in the USA are asleep at the switch. We've actually let another country beat us in finding new venue that can be sold out. This is supposed to be our core competency.
The remedy that I'd be most happy with is if
Microsoft were forced to send out programmers to
fix every website on the Internet that uses
JavaScript in a way that only works on IE.
Of course, they'd be exempt from fixing website code that
actually conforms to a published standard. Maybe
the punitive damages would be to make them fix
Mozilla and Konqueror so that they correctly
implement the standards as well.
I'm getting really tired of having to try
3 different browsers before I can get through
an online purchase.
I've decided that it would be good if AOL bought
RedHat. This is because AOL could actually put
something useful on all of those stupid
CDs that they mail out: a fully functional Linux
distro! Each mass mailing could include the latest updates and patches.
It still wouldn't be as good as the old days when
I got dozens of free floppy disks (some of which
I use to this day), but it'd be better than nothing.
Netscape screwed itself out of the browser market. It did something really stupid, it decided that it should rewrite its browser.
I'm curious. A couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Netscape screwed up by sticking to its crusty code base while MS rewrote their browser 3 times between IE1 and IE5. Now, most posts seem to reverse this, saying that Netscape screwed up by rewriting while MS didn't. What's the real story?
Slashdot Mirror
You can already watch a movie for a buck at a dollar theater, and on a big screen too. The only problem is that a bag of popcorn and a coke still cost $9.
However, you can circumvent that problem with a low-tech method: have your girlfriend bring a big purse stuffed with goodies.
Thus, we were cursed with "Turbo" buttons for over a decade to slow the PC down while loading Lotus. I'll bet that the consumers wasted orders of magnitude more money paying for these useless hardware switches on their PCs than Lotus ever recovered with their copy prevention scheme.
Ethics and morality are supposed to be more fundamental than laws. However, copyright infringement was neither immoral, unethical or illegal until a few hundred years ago when the concept was invented and codified into law. I'd say that in this case, respect for the law is the only principle behind respecting copyrights. There is no deeper moral or ethical basis. Many ancient civilizations and many modern societies function(ed) just fine without the concept at all.
Our society chooses to allow copyrights as a practical tradeoff. There is no "natural" right to retain control over information you have disseminated. Your only natural right to control your information is to keep it secret.
No, they have copied something without the right to do so.
That is theft.
It is not theft. It is coppyright infringement. The law makes a very clear distinction.
I'm not saying its legal, but I wish people would quit confusing the issues by miscategorizing copyright infringement.
This reminds me of a Heathkit oscilliscope kit I put together 20 years ago. The beam intensity control circuit used a normal TTL gate chip that was attached to the back of the tube. The chip's power and ground were connected between -2000 and -2005 volts(!).
It the input signal to the chip (which was always pulsing to cancel DC potential) was controlled by the rest of the circuitry at between 0 and 5 volts, and this was transferred to the control chip via a huge high-voltage rated capacitor with 2000 volts accross it, which would wiggle the other end between -2000 and -2005 volts. An impressive hardware hack.
As it happened, when I finished the scope and fired it up, it didn't work. It was pretty hard to debug without an oscilliscope :-/, and I was afraid of shocking the crap out of myself poking around 2000V circuits. I eventually got it working. It still works to this day, but the lame 5MHz bandwidth isn't too impressive.
1. Food quality has never been a factor in free happy hour food
2. You propose letting drunken patrons operate a microwave? Can you imagine an cluster of exploding wieners?
Free (as in Happy hour) hot dogs
- 200 cheap wieners
- 200 cheap buns
- 2 gallons hot water
- 1 bottle ketchup
- 1 bottle mustard
Place hot water in a large tub, add wieners. Arrange all items on a folding table. Garnish with stale keg beer. Serve.Not true. There's also Unreal Tournament.
I agree with you relative to C/C++, and I was using Java heavily a couple of years ago. But now I've moved on to higher-level languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby. They each have APIs that provide functionality similar to Java, but usually simpler and more intuitive. They also don't have licensing policies or agendas driven by one particular corporation..
I usually get the same job done with 1/2 or 1/3 the lines of code as with Java. I've also found that once you free your mind from the strong-typing yoke, you can transform your concepts into reality much more efficiently.
It's funny that a few years ago I had to argue to the PHBs that Java was a valid solution. Now, they are set on Java, and I have to argue that a better solution has emerged as support for other languages has matured.
Well, the university I went to had its own electrical power station. They used the waste heat to generate steam that was sent all over campus for heating. Even the dorms' clothes dryers used steam heat exchangers.
They seemed to have so much heat capacity available that they didn't think that proper thermostats were a priority. A lot of people had to regulate the heat on subzero days by opening the windows.
Oh crap! I think I might have voted to send Pat Buchanan to Uranus!
I'm serious; I like a really good ad. (I've even bought a couple of tapes of classic TV ads)
The problem is, the quality of Superbowl ads really seems to be diminishing the last few years. I don't know if I'm even going to bother scanning them any more.
<audio style="rush-limbaugh-voice">
Rush Limbaugh doesn't like it. Folks, I can't believe the... the... the.. gall this guy has. People, I can't emphasize this enough: The radio stations are there to make money for Clear Channel stockholders, not as some charity to provide the best possible experience for Rush's listeners.
Look, folks, if Rush doesn't want this technology applied to his show, he's free to negotiate a contract with the radio stations that enforces his wishes. Anybody in this great country of ours can negotiate any contract they want. I hope that he's not going to try to get the government weenies at the FCC to meddle with the radio stations' livelyhoods.
Sheesh. Sometimes, I just don't know. We'll be back after this...
<riff genre="80's rock">
</audio>
This cloud that is light-years across could be mistaken for a tiny puff of muddy water a couple of millimeters in diameter. The ratio in volume between the two systems would be something like 10^57, but they look almost identical.
That might not be totally bad. Microsoft's installation process is a breeze and it usually works. So is Red Hat's. Can't say the same thing about certain "pure" distros.
No.
Without the proprietary formats, all of Microsoft's office software features could be cloned by any midsize software company within 24 months.
That's a gross oversimplification. Microsoft wouldn't be worth jack squat if there weren't billions of .doc and .xls files out there that their products process better than anybody else's.
Why can't others duplicate Microsoft's products? Because Microsoft enjoys the dual protections of copyright and trade secrets. Without either one, competitors would swarm out of the woodwork and eat Microsoft's lunch because office software is a mature product that should be a commmodity by now.
How are the copyright and trade secret protections facilitated? By the heavy hand of government, of course. It is interesting that when the U.S. Constitution was written, there was no single technology such as software that could combine the two protections in such a powerful way. The powerful combination allows the barrier of entry into a monopolized software market to be almost infinite.
Take the example of Sun, who is giving away a capable office suite for free. Most people doubt that even at this price that they can significantly impact Microsoft's market share. This is largely because their handling of proprietary .doc and .xls files is less than perfect. This proves that microsoft's chosen pricing has little to do with the dynamics of this market.
In fact, I'd argue that if you can't even give a product away, it's not a market. There is no market for office software today. Just a government-facilitated fiefdom.
I'll bet that the dress code at that company also requires all of the sysadmins to wear tin foil hats.
As was the PDP-8 (with custom hardware, as built by a local company based on a design suggested by Richie Lary and fleshed-out by me).
It seems you were pioneering the "embrace and extend" strategy. :-)
Anyway, I was just looking at some history websites on the PDP-8 last week My high school had one, and it was the first computer I got my hands on. I only used high-level languages back in the day, but I finally looked at the machine architecture on the websites. The instruction set is very cool; basically just 8 opcodes that can be put into various interesting permutations.
I'm guessing that since memory addressing was largely paged, you hacked in extra registers somewhere to add more pages and mix them up. A bit more interesting than today's overclocking.
The bad news is: 'TECO' r00ls; 'ed' suX0rs.
Well, it looks like we here in the USA are asleep at the switch. We've actually let another country beat us in finding new venue that can be sold out. This is supposed to be our core competency.
Of course, they'd be exempt from fixing website code that actually conforms to a published standard. Maybe the punitive damages would be to make them fix Mozilla and Konqueror so that they correctly implement the standards as well.
I'm getting really tired of having to try 3 different browsers before I can get through an online purchase.
It still wouldn't be as good as the old days when I got dozens of free floppy disks (some of which I use to this day), but it'd be better than nothing.
I'm curious. A couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Netscape screwed up by sticking to its crusty code base while MS rewrote their browser 3 times between IE1 and IE5. Now, most posts seem to reverse this, saying that Netscape screwed up by rewriting while MS didn't. What's the real story?