It's just easier to keep the document and the history together if they're in the same file. Otherwise the linkage is easily lost if (say) you rename the main document file and forget to rename the history file.
Not to accuse programmers of being lazy, but it's easier to implement "save" functionality than it is to implement "complete undo/redo" functionality. You need the latter if you don't have the former.
Note that saving a change history along with the document itself can be problematic for various reasons, from the simple fact that you're bloating the file to the fact that you may expose information inadvertently if anyone care to look at the change history. As many Microsoft Word users have discovered to their chagrin.
But that's changing as the devices get more sophisticated. Mobile Flash and similar technologies mean it's getting harder for smaller shops to write games for these platforms. Progress, you know....
Publishing a game for these platforms requires a large investment in time and energy because of all the differences in the various platforms (not just J2ME, sorry "Java ME", either). That's really the biggest stumbling block for game developers, testing out and tweaking the game for the different devices. It can really suck up your time.
It's not an official site, though, just a compilation of DNSSEC information. It actually seems to be very comprehensive, obviously the compiler put a lot of effort into it. Maybe a bit crowded layout on the home page, yes, but lots of info. But here's the direct link to RFC 4033 if that helps.
All application servers are transactional in the simple case, where all the operations actually affect a single database. In that case the application server's transaction maps to the database server's concept of a transaction and things are very simple.
The difficulties arise when you're doing operations that involve more than one database or a database and some other type of software. For example, say the business logic does two things: it updates a database record and it sends an SMS message to a mobile device informing it of the update. Ideally, you want to wrap those two operations in a single transaction, so that if the udpate fails no message gets sent and vice-versa. Of if the update succeeds but the system goes down then on wakeup the system continues and sends out the message, or else rolls back the whole thing.
There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying it all from Amazon.
When she gets there she knows, that the store's never closed
With a click she can get what she came for.
Re:Extension of the Blogging Culture
on
Podcasting Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes and no. Unlike blogs, podcasts are mostly one-way, none of the commenting, tagging and cross-linking that characterizes blogging. Podcasting is another form of content syndication. And yes, the technology is so simple now (I use a Yamaha UW500, a USB audio/midi recorder) that anyone with a computer can record themselves doing all kinds of things and slap it out on the Internet for anyone to see. (A hint to save you some bandwidth: if what you're doing is distributable via a Creative Commons license, you can have the Internet Archive host it for you.)
Recording is easy. The tricky part is figuring out how to best build your feed. Besides the standard RSS tags, look at the iTunes extensions.
That's a good analogy, actually, a blog that is ordered by popularity instead of chronologically. Although you could argue that popularity of a blog posting can already be measured by the number of comments it generates, and some blog software lets you order entries that way.
What Amazon is doing, of course, is protecting a vast amount of intellectual property that it has amassed over the years in the form of consumer reviews. While Amazon does not own the copyright to those reviews, they do have extensive rights to them as set out in the Amazon Conditions of Use:
If you do post content or submit material, and unless we indicate otherwise, you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media. You grant Amazon.com and its affiliates and sublicensees the right to use the name that you submit in connection with such content, if they choose. You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content that you post; that the content is accurate; that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity; and that you will indemnify Amazon.com or its affiliates for all claims resulting from content you supply. Amazon.com has the right but not the obligation to monitor and edit or remove any activity or content. Amazon.com takes no responsibility and assumes no liability for any content posted by you or any third party.
This data that it has managed to collect is an important selling tool, especially for book authors. Why? Because potential book buyers often look at the Amazon reviews to get more details about what a book is really about, even if they don't end up buying it on Amazon (but it gives Amazon more opportunities to push products on those eyeballs). Sure, us authors will fuss over the star ratings (of course you want a 5-star rating, who wouldn't!) but the reality is that the negative ratings can also sell books -- if they're constructive. Those reviews get shared with Amazon partners through the Amazon Web Services, so they just don't end up on the Amazon.com site (though I do find it odd that the reviews aren't shared between the different English-locale Amazon sites). All this data just helps them become the e-commerce portal of choice.
So trying to protect the gathering and processing of this information -- visitor-supplied metadata -- is completely understandable from their point of view. They'd be fools not to do so, especially with the ease with which these kinds of patents seem to be granted.
AdWords = Google's advertising program (started as text-only pay-per-click ads on Google' search results pages)
AdSense = program that lets webmasters/bloggers rent space on their pages to Google to display ads drawn from the AdWords program, in return they get a percentage of the ad revenue made by Google from the ads shown on their pages
Promoting Firefox with the Google Toolbar promotes the use of Google, which (over the long run) leads to higher revenues as more people see the ads (both on the search results pages and on other sites via AdSense).
In some ways this is a reaction to competing programs like Yahoo!'s new ad program and also to Chitika's eMiniMalls program. There's no doubt that these programs will benefit some AdSense publishers, but they'll certainly benefit Google itself the most. Even if they have to pay.
That makes sense if the CS program is offered by the science faculty, but some schools (like Waterloo) offer it through a different faculty, so core science courses aren't necessarily a requirement. It's debatable whether computer "science" is really science, after all, just like the way some people don't consider mathematics to be science.
I think they need to think carefully about the ratio between free and paid content. Not knowing what publication this is, it's hard to be specific, but I believe that only the truly authoritative sites can get away with putting most of their content behind a subscription wall. Let's face it, with so much stuff available for free today on the Internet from reputable sources, you have to provide something unique, some extra value-add that makes it worthwhile to subscribe to your content.
The local newspaper in our area, The Record, went to a pure-subscriber model a couple of years ago. You can't get anything for free on their website except for some very basic stuff (weather, community events) and classified ads. Contrast that to The Globe and Mail, which offers much of its daily content for free. Guess which one I look to for online information?
What's worrisome for the subscription-only plays is that it's a serious barrier to entry to attracting a younger readership. Young people don't seem to read offline newspapers much any more. Placing your content behind a firewall means that can't read you online. Which will probably bite you in the long term.
Pretty much everyone is a Berne Coonvention signatory these days.
That's irrelevant. We're not talking about copyrights themselves, we're talking about licensing of copyrighted material.
The problem is, in order to be heard by a significant number of people (i.e. get that music on the radio, MTV, in stores, etc.) a musician has to sign a contract with one or more distribution houses.
That used to be the case, yes, but the Internet is changing that. Again, it's no different than with books. It used to be you had to sign with a big publisher to get wide distribution. You don't have to do that anymore. But you still have to do marketing, and that's where many people fall flat, whether they're musicians or authors or whatever.
Yes, there are organizations that collect copyright fees on behalf of owners, but these arose because creators were being deprived of compensation for public use of their works. For example, performing rights organizations like ASCAP and SOCAN directly represent music creators. These organizations actually serve the musicians, not the distribution networks.
Your proposed solution won't fix the problem. Say the musician keeps the copyright. They want to sell their material in different countries. What are they going to do? They're going to probably give different organizations the right to sell the music for them. Only to make it fair for those organizations, those rights need to be exclusive to some geography/whatever. Note that this has nothing to do with the transfer of copyright, it's simply the licensing of the rights that derive from copyright protection. Which is what an intellectual property holder wants to do. How else are they supposed to make money?
But this is the problem that people like Apple face in offering music across borders. They have to track down and deal with different parties in different geographies. That takes time. It takes money. But it's not any kind of conspiracy. It's just business.
I don't think your analogy is correct. You may or may not be able to buy a toaster from another country and import it to yours, for a variety of reasons. Differing safety standards. Patent conflicts.
What you're seeing with music is the same thing that's been seen with books and other intellectual property. It's going to take some time to sort out things so that you can license something worldwide. Partly it's because many of these issues postdate many of the music contracts. Yes, it's a pain. For now.
But your main argument about music creators having to sign away their rights to the record labels has nothing to do with whether or not music is available for download across international borders. Different topic. The success of digital audio devices like the iPod is in fact opening the eyes of musicians to new options that they didn't have before. Record labels are scared of this, which is why they're fighting so hard for DRM and other measures -- so they can keep controlling the music.
various organizations and cartels have monopolized all the popular distribution and advertising venues in a given territory
That makes it sound like a big conspiracy theory, but I don't think it's that. Yes, there are different rights (publisher, performance, etc.) with different organizations collecting them, but I'm not sure it's any more complex than selling anything in a different country.
Symbian is not the easiest OS to write for. Also, Symbian is dominated by Nokia, who bought out Motorola's share a couple of years back (which allowed Motorola to work on developing Microsoft Smartphone devices). See the Wikipedia entry for Symbian OS for more. Over time, I'm sure the power management features of Linux phones will be just as sophisticated.
Really, the problem many people have had with XML is that the tools aren't always up to par. But new ways of doing things come around to fix things, such as pull parsers, which simplifies XML parsing without having to resort to regular expression tricks like Tim Bray was talking about in XML Is Too Hard For Programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just easier to keep the document and the history together if they're in the same file. Otherwise the linkage is easily lost if (say) you rename the main document file and forget to rename the history file.
Eric
The Invisible Fence Guide (features my dogs!)
to take the word processor analogy: paragraphs, not characters.
I'm sure that e. e. cummings ("paragraph? what's a paragraph?") wouldn't have liked that "feature"...
Eric
View your HTTP headers here
Not to accuse programmers of being lazy, but it's easier to implement "save" functionality than it is to implement "complete undo/redo" functionality. You need the latter if you don't have the former.
Note that saving a change history along with the document itself can be problematic for various reasons, from the simple fact that you're bloating the file to the fact that you may expose information inadvertently if anyone care to look at the change history. As many Microsoft Word users have discovered to their chagrin.
Eric
My Squidoo page
But that's changing as the devices get more sophisticated. Mobile Flash and similar technologies mean it's getting harder for smaller shops to write games for these platforms. Progress, you know....
Eric
BlackBerry programming stuff
Publishing a game for these platforms requires a large investment in time and energy because of all the differences in the various platforms (not just J2ME, sorry "Java ME", either). That's really the biggest stumbling block for game developers, testing out and tweaking the game for the different devices. It can really suck up your time.
EricJ2ME overviews
It's not an official site, though, just a compilation of DNSSEC information. It actually seems to be very comprehensive, obviously the compiler put a lot of effort into it. Maybe a bit crowded layout on the home page, yes, but lots of info. But here's the direct link to RFC 4033 if that helps.
Eric
Read my Invisible Fence Guide
All application servers are transactional in the simple case, where all the operations actually affect a single database. In that case the application server's transaction maps to the database server's concept of a transaction and things are very simple.
The difficulties arise when you're doing operations that involve more than one database or a database and some other type of software. For example, say the business logic does two things: it updates a database record and it sends an SMS message to a mobile device informing it of the update. Ideally, you want to wrap those two operations in a single transaction, so that if the udpate fails no message gets sent and vice-versa. Of if the update succeeds but the system goes down then on wakeup the system continues and sends out the message, or else rolls back the whole thing.
That's what this stuff is about.
Eric
See your HTTP headers
There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying it all from Amazon.
When she gets there she knows, that the store's never closed
With a click she can get what she came for.
(with apologies to Page and Plant)
Eric
Speaking of product promotion (features my dogs)
Yes and no. Unlike blogs, podcasts are mostly one-way, none of the commenting, tagging and cross-linking that characterizes blogging. Podcasting is another form of content syndication. And yes, the technology is so simple now (I use a Yamaha UW500, a USB audio/midi recorder) that anyone with a computer can record themselves doing all kinds of things and slap it out on the Internet for anyone to see. (A hint to save you some bandwidth: if what you're doing is distributable via a Creative Commons license, you can have the Internet Archive host it for you.)
Recording is easy. The tricky part is figuring out how to best build your feed. Besides the standard RSS tags, look at the iTunes extensions.
Eric
Just put out my first (long!) podcast
That's a good analogy, actually, a blog that is ordered by popularity instead of chronologically. Although you could argue that popularity of a blog posting can already be measured by the number of comments it generates, and some blog software lets you order entries that way.
Eric
Read my Invisible Fence Guide
Yeah, but, like, it's so 80's...
Eric
See your HTTP headers
So if you think splogs are a problem now, wait until the music companies start actively getting into the fray. Mind you, it's not like they haven't already done that kind of thing before.
Eric
Follow my AdSense case study
What Amazon is doing, of course, is protecting a vast amount of intellectual property that it has amassed over the years in the form of consumer reviews. While Amazon does not own the copyright to those reviews, they do have extensive rights to them as set out in the Amazon Conditions of Use:
If you do post content or submit material, and unless we indicate otherwise, you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media. You grant Amazon.com and its affiliates and sublicensees the right to use the name that you submit in connection with such content, if they choose. You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content that you post; that the content is accurate; that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity; and that you will indemnify Amazon.com or its affiliates for all claims resulting from content you supply. Amazon.com has the right but not the obligation to monitor and edit or remove any activity or content. Amazon.com takes no responsibility and assumes no liability for any content posted by you or any third party.
This data that it has managed to collect is an important selling tool, especially for book authors. Why? Because potential book buyers often look at the Amazon reviews to get more details about what a book is really about, even if they don't end up buying it on Amazon (but it gives Amazon more opportunities to push products on those eyeballs). Sure, us authors will fuss over the star ratings (of course you want a 5-star rating, who wouldn't!) but the reality is that the negative ratings can also sell books -- if they're constructive. Those reviews get shared with Amazon partners through the Amazon Web Services, so they just don't end up on the Amazon.com site (though I do find it odd that the reviews aren't shared between the different English-locale Amazon sites). All this data just helps them become the e-commerce portal of choice.
So trying to protect the gathering and processing of this information -- visitor-supplied metadata -- is completely understandable from their point of view. They'd be fools not to do so, especially with the ease with which these kinds of patents seem to be granted.
Eric
Read my Invisible Fence story
AdWords = Google's advertising program (started as text-only pay-per-click ads on Google' search results pages)
AdSense = program that lets webmasters/bloggers rent space on their pages to Google to display ads drawn from the AdWords program, in return they get a percentage of the ad revenue made by Google from the ads shown on their pages
Promoting Firefox with the Google Toolbar promotes the use of Google, which (over the long run) leads to higher revenues as more people see the ads (both on the search results pages and on other sites via AdSense).
In some ways this is a reaction to competing programs like Yahoo!'s new ad program and also to Chitika's eMiniMalls program. There's no doubt that these programs will benefit some AdSense publishers, but they'll certainly benefit Google itself the most. Even if they have to pay.
Eric
Read my AdSense blog
I have a B.Math in CS from Waterloo.
Um, so do I. Hence the knowledge about what CS at Waterloo involves. But it's still debatable, as you can see from all the comments here.
That makes sense if the CS program is offered by the science faculty, but some schools (like Waterloo) offer it through a different faculty, so core science courses aren't necessarily a requirement. It's debatable whether computer "science" is really science, after all, just like the way some people don't consider mathematics to be science.
Eric
Read my Invisible Fence Guide
I think they need to think carefully about the ratio between free and paid content. Not knowing what publication this is, it's hard to be specific, but I believe that only the truly authoritative sites can get away with putting most of their content behind a subscription wall. Let's face it, with so much stuff available for free today on the Internet from reputable sources, you have to provide something unique, some extra value-add that makes it worthwhile to subscribe to your content.
The local newspaper in our area, The Record, went to a pure-subscriber model a couple of years ago. You can't get anything for free on their website except for some very basic stuff (weather, community events) and classified ads. Contrast that to The Globe and Mail, which offers much of its daily content for free. Guess which one I look to for online information?
What's worrisome for the subscription-only plays is that it's a serious barrier to entry to attracting a younger readership. Young people don't seem to read offline newspapers much any more. Placing your content behind a firewall means that can't read you online. Which will probably bite you in the long term.
EricThe power of authentic stories
Pretty much everyone is a Berne Coonvention signatory these days.
That's irrelevant. We're not talking about copyrights themselves, we're talking about licensing of copyrighted material.
The problem is, in order to be heard by a significant number of people (i.e. get that music on the radio, MTV, in stores, etc.) a musician has to sign a contract with one or more distribution houses.
That used to be the case, yes, but the Internet is changing that. Again, it's no different than with books. It used to be you had to sign with a big publisher to get wide distribution. You don't have to do that anymore. But you still have to do marketing, and that's where many people fall flat, whether they're musicians or authors or whatever.
Yes, there are organizations that collect copyright fees on behalf of owners, but these arose because creators were being deprived of compensation for public use of their works. For example, performing rights organizations like ASCAP and SOCAN directly represent music creators. These organizations actually serve the musicians, not the distribution networks.
Your proposed solution won't fix the problem. Say the musician keeps the copyright. They want to sell their material in different countries. What are they going to do? They're going to probably give different organizations the right to sell the music for them. Only to make it fair for those organizations, those rights need to be exclusive to some geography/whatever. Note that this has nothing to do with the transfer of copyright, it's simply the licensing of the rights that derive from copyright protection. Which is what an intellectual property holder wants to do. How else are they supposed to make money?
But this is the problem that people like Apple face in offering music across borders. They have to track down and deal with different parties in different geographies. That takes time. It takes money. But it's not any kind of conspiracy. It's just business.
EricI don't think your analogy is correct. You may or may not be able to buy a toaster from another country and import it to yours, for a variety of reasons. Differing safety standards. Patent conflicts.
What you're seeing with music is the same thing that's been seen with books and other intellectual property. It's going to take some time to sort out things so that you can license something worldwide. Partly it's because many of these issues postdate many of the music contracts. Yes, it's a pain. For now.
But your main argument about music creators having to sign away their rights to the record labels has nothing to do with whether or not music is available for download across international borders. Different topic. The success of digital audio devices like the iPod is in fact opening the eyes of musicians to new options that they didn't have before. Record labels are scared of this, which is why they're fighting so hard for DRM and other measures -- so they can keep controlling the music.
various organizations and cartels have monopolized all the popular distribution and advertising venues in a given territory
That makes it sound like a big conspiracy theory, but I don't think it's that. Yes, there are different rights (publisher, performance, etc.) with different organizations collecting them, but I'm not sure it's any more complex than selling anything in a different country.
EricThe flaw in Technorati's popularity calculations
About one-third reported purchasing a product or service online, compared with only 2 percent who did so in 1997
More telling would be knowing how many people are getting things for free (to put it gently) online.
Eric
Symbian is not the easiest OS to write for. Also, Symbian is dominated by Nokia, who bought out Motorola's share a couple of years back (which allowed Motorola to work on developing Microsoft Smartphone devices). See the Wikipedia entry for Symbian OS for more. Over time, I'm sure the power management features of Linux phones will be just as sophisticated.
Eric
BlackBerry programming information (speaking of non-Symbian)
Unfortunately, scientists say there's no evidence of "feathered dinosaurs".
Eric
Indeed, see Tim Bray's comments on Why XML Doesn't Suck for some great insight.
Really, the problem many people have had with XML is that the tools aren't always up to par. But new ways of doing things come around to fix things, such as pull parsers, which simplifies XML parsing without having to resort to regular expression tricks like Tim Bray was talking about in XML Is Too Hard For Programmers.
Eric
HTTP header viewer
But how would he explain the existence of Thunderbird?
Eric
Read one of the best AdSense blogs around (runs on blojsom)