Big companies like B&N and Borders are using their major websites to undercut the competition of smaller bookstores, who cannot afford large e-commerce websites and must sell their books primarily through B&M stores, therefore charging tax and not able to offer competetive prices to consumers. One of the sponsors of the bill is the Northern California Bookseller's Assocation.
Slashdot's typically pre-opinionated article posting might indicate that, well there shouldnt be any sales tax period! thats the real solution. But the problem is that the sales tax concept is not going anywhere soon (most likely), and charging it in an unequitable manner is harmful to various portions of a particular industry.
I suppose this question would seem very different if the students were required to use emacs/vi, gcc, make, etc. on a unix shell and one of the students insisted that he would learn the same material if he used Microsoft Visual Studio. Then the debate here wouldnt be how "unfair" the policy is, it would be about how people cannot learn true code development if they are dependent on a GUI.
The college's issue here is that its a burden to have one student using a completely different set of tools since it will be difficult for him to participate with everyone else in exercises and help sessions. If he is so ahead of the material that he definitely wont need any help then he maybe should try to test out of the course. It also would be better for him to use the GUI tools just for the learning experience, to get a compare/contrast of the two different design platforms, since there are advantages to each.
The opinion of the Progressive Policy Institute says nothing about outlawing any kind of technology at all:
http://www.dlcppi.org/press/release/napster1.htm
PPI proposes the following changes to the DMCA:
Require internet service providers that wish to qualify for safe harbor to collect personally identifiable and verifiable information from their users. Napster currently allows its users to sign on anonymously, making it impossible for rights holders to track down the infringers.
Establish a time frame for the "notice and take down" process for removal of infringing material. The law as currently written has no set time table, consequently service providers with a vested interest in the infringing activity of their subscribers, like Napster, have no incentive to act in a timely fashion.
Give judges the flexibility to grant injunctions against service providers whose services are substantially used for copyright infringement. It may be impossible to write a law that accounts for every conceivable technological innovations, however a judge will know an illegal act when she sees it.
This is all about accountability, not outlawing any technology at all. They want to hold users/ISP's accountable for illegal actions (we have heard this many times before). You could use Napster all you want, but they can bust you if you trade illegally, or if youre anonymous they bust the ISP. I guess its hopeless to ever ask/. to be the slightest bit non-inflammatory when discussing serious issues.
I would have hoped that the GPL could propigate on its own, not through utilizing the force of government in the form of a patent. If the patent is strictly to prevent closed-source vendors from closing it off, thats OK. But, if I were to write my own code that does the same thing as this (perhaps through reverse-engineering), and put it under BSD, would the FSF sue me for patent infringement? GPL by itself says that I cant use *the code* with any other license besides GPL or with any non-open-source software, whereas a patent seems more like I cant use *the idea*, such as Amazon one-click shopping....seems far more restrictive than the GPL by itself.
The hypocritical opinion that copyrights are immoral tools designed only to protect the profits of giant, evil corporations (ignoring the more desireable usages of copyright, such as the GPL and comment-posting rights) was posted to the front page of Slashdot by one of their own editors. Care should be taken by Slashdot to work towards achieving a higher editorial quality.
this happens to better programmers all the time....just pull a few 48 hour weekends and rewrite the thing, problem solved. Im half serious.....most insane code ive seen actually does very little and can be replaced with something of a fraction of the scale..but you have to throw *everything* away from the previous paradigm. Youll love the feeling but then youre going to own that project, so it better be good...
This would imply that all the benefits of having Mozilla's quality in the best interests of a huge software corporation (i.e. real monied interests involved in making it a better product) would be gone if the software were GPL...Real is not about to release the source code for RealPlayer, right?
If each page is a collection of bits and tags from three separate databases youd have to write tons of fancy administration code, and it sort of limits the ability to use other web technologies in tandem with your site, as well has have anyone who isnt an experienced programmer modify the content layout, since everything has to fit into a very restrictive and complicated architecture.
I havent used PHP before, but heres the basic idea not specific to any programming language..
build your site in English (or your default language), assuming we are talking about regular static HTML files or some kind of.shtml perhaps. Write a filter for your webserver (I use java servlets mapped to *.html myself) that parses the path info of the request for something like "/german/foo/bar.html", i.e. the language identified in the beginning of the URI. Then within your HTML files, anywhere you want translated text, do it like this:
<translation default="english" modulename="/foo/bar/mytext.html">
This is my english text. </translation>
Then within your filter servlet or apachemod or whatever, parse the file for these tags (caching schemes can be utilized for speed), and then based on the language encoded in the URL, dynamically replace the body text (if the URI-specified language is not the default) with the contents of a file <languagebase>/foo/bar/mytext.html. So you could have somehting like/web/translations/german/foo/bar/mytext.html,/web/translations/spanish/foo/bar/mytext.html, etc. If a translation file is not present then you just use the default text already in the document, so you can still launch new HTML pages even if a translation is not available yet.
If you want to raise the bar of speed, dont use a dynamic filter, just write a perl script to regenerate an entire static site underneath "/german" "/spanish", etc. using the same scheme. Or you could even mix up the two approaches.
If your site is not static HTML but some kind of database driven thing, you can still use a similar approach, it just means the filtering program has to be molded to fit your content-delivery environment.
Re:Who Cares About The Vocal Minority?
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The net is a big place blah blah blah...
Sure, we can all just leave Slashdot if we dont like it. If it continues to ignore important "geek" issues like the hypotetical loss of huge amounts of tech jobs because of a stock market crash in favor of trivial articles, making a clear impression of personally-motivated deflection of real issues, then pretty much everyone is going to leave Slashdot. The whole "just leave if you dont like it" argument is always there but dont you think for a prominent place like Slashdot there should be free and open discussions and an attempt to have all voices heard? Not this, "oh lets just ignore that vocal minority", or "i think this topic sucks [because i might lose more money] but oh ok ill post it but you people suck anyway", and "lets mark as 'troll' or 'offtopic' anything about a possible conflict of interest", thats completely against the ideals of a free-discussion community.
"insightful"??! Down with opinions, up with Taco?
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Why dont we just disable all story posting of any kind and just get a direct plug-in to CmdrTaco's brain? Is he your messiah or something? Slashdot is a terrific creation of his but its grown into something much more than his personal whining/deflecting-the-masses-from-real-issues-int o-mental-bubble-gum-topics platform, dont you think?
wrong - the stock market pays most of our salaries
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The biggest deal in the world these days has been the insane amounts of cash being generated by tech stocks, funding tens of thousands of startups, internet divisions of large corporations, everything to do with the internet, including the new success of our beloved Linux and BSD OSes and the long awaited stumbling of Microsoft. If the condition of the stock market changes then the nature of the entire technology profession as a whole will change as well. Its certainly a much more pertinent story to all our lives than things like this.
The obvious conflict of interest is the significant monetary connection that exists between the editors and writers of Slashdot.org and their corporate owners, VA Linux. And CmdrTaco's rant right on the front page is the greatest example I have ever seen of abusing a prominent and important public platform to whine about a personal situation that is his own fault anyway, and it can only further tarnish the image of Slashdot in the eyes of the greater technical and financial communities and hasten its journey towards complete irrelevance.
There is a tendancy to attribute everything that is unexplained as the work or existence of god.
Why can't we attribute what is explained to the work or existence of god? Where did the laws of math and physics come from? To say "how could they not exist" may just be revealing how limited our comprehension will always be, considering it is an inseparable part of this scientifically describeable framework.
Let them write the viruses now, so we can learn where the security hazards are and and patch/upgrade as necessary. Its not like Windows where the codebase of the OS is this unknown, immutable thing. The more viruses that are tacked down before the explosion of linux desktop usage, the better it will be when it gets there.
The problem with patents, particularly in use with software, is that people are claiming they own things that are in fact just permutations of mathematics and science, things that can be argued have already 'existed' for all of eternity, or are at least destined to be learned as scientific knowledge advances. Things like the Amazon patents amount to claiming ownership of millenia-old business concepts, like the two-for-one sale or something similarly trivial....its like charging the whole world everytime they tie their shoes or something.
Copyright is a whole different story, it is designed to protect creative ideas, things that arent inherent at all to any amount of understanding of math, science, and/or what exists already, they are something that has come "from nothing", i.e. the copyright owner's imagination, and are making a contribution towards the culture of society, rather than the scientific knowledge of society.
Im not sure what youre thinking here, the most lucrative outlets for a typical working musician are studio work, and touring with bands that are promoting a CD. Studio work is generally divided into advertising jingles and album work. The album work market disappears when you cant make money off the media anymore. Tours are paid for up front by record companies, so certainly putting them out of business is going to change the nature of tours, i.e. they will be much smaller scale and the hired musicians (and everyone else who is hired) will have to make far less money. I have known quite a few musicians who are able to pay their bills only because they are lucky enough to get a tour for 3 months out of the year that pays $3000 a week, then they live off of that money for the rest of the year, plus a few sessions and relatively low-paying club dates here and there.
Taking profits from CD sales out of the music industry altogether is shrinking the base of captial that all working musicians ultimately live off of...maybe thats how it has to be but lets not say it doesnt affect the artists.
Long after pirated music is on virtually every desktop and we have all spent months saying how any sort of restriction on copying artistic media sucks, suddenly Slashdot decides to post, "hey, you know what, I think musicians are losing money!"
Gee, ya think? I think if we were to come up with a model to spend months producing a record, paying engineers, musicians, producers, songwriters, equipment vendors, and then give the finished product away for free, and everyone gets to eat and pay their rent, Sony would pay us big bucks for that idea, man.
Much easier to send a copy of a movie to all your friends if its just a file to be put on an FTP site to be downloaded and viewed off a hard drive, rather than obtaining/burning/shipping the physical medium that the "approved" players require in order to view the content. So DeCSS isnt really foiling "copyright protection", its foiling "distribution protection" (albeit protection which is only a hindrance, not a prevention, to illegal distribution), which would supposedly lead to a much higher volume of copyright violations as well as greatly facilitate pirate operations. This is obviously the fear of the movie industry, copying/distribution that does not require a specialized physical medium to move the information.
/. should post articles of higher quality than this. This article is very clearly nothing more an ad for a company with a dumb product (I say dumb because there should be a better argument for its usage other than this):
Van Someren said nCipher decided to go after encryption keys because "we make products that redress these problems." The company offers a hardware solution to the problem of encryption-key security.
Everyone here should know that "security through obscurity" is a foolish and invalid method of security. This article is particularly annoying with its "submarine" and "cold war" analogies as well as its mention of "increasing hacker ingenuity", as though finding a big file of encryption keys open to all users on a server is some high tech stealth technique from a Harrison Ford movie or something.
Extremely easy to use by anyone and therefore extremely easy to generate the most awful code anyone has ever seen, yet it works, so when that guy quits some other poor sap has to maintain it. As you have said, you function for quite a while (5 or 6 years i think you said) without knowing the full syntax of the language...therefore YOU CANNOT READ OTHER PEOPLES PERL CODE until such 5 or 6 years learning and memorzing every possible dorky way (many of them sparsely documented, two lines in "Programming Perl" on page 238 perhaps and nowhere else) of doing something is complete. I have done perl for four years, including a huge amount of maintenance of code written by junior programmers (Tom's suggestion that you hire only experienced C++ programmers to write perl is unrealistic) as well as ultra-experienced Perl gurus...the junior programmers write garbage that takes hours to understand, the expert guys use syntaxes youve never even seen before, flip flip flip through "Programming Perl" all day (sorry, I just am too busy thinking of new ideas and concepts to be able to *memorize* hundreds of dorky symbols and syntaxes)..how often do you find yourself looking up a syntax for a Java application?...perhaps the learning curve of Perl is nice and low but its LOOONG!
my experience with minute-by-minute customer feedback is that the entire notion of a functional specification is lost immediately, as about one out of every five opinions they have on something will in fact be a new feature they just thought of now that they are seeing their product come to life. Having the customer sit with the programmer all the time means there is no project management layer in between, its just the client making demands directly to the programmer who has much more pressing (and non-programmer intangible) issues on his/her mind than all the random little frills that should have been spec'ed out and properly scheduled. All of the customer's thoughts and use case scenarios should be gathered into a proper and complete specification before any programming work is begun - if the programmer needs to ask questions to the customer during development, then the specification was not completed. Continuing down the road of developing a large project without a roadmap will guarantee project failure, major psychological/physical trauma to your programmers, or both.
Slashdot Mirror
Big companies like B&N and Borders are using their major websites to undercut the competition of smaller bookstores, who cannot afford large e-commerce websites and must sell their books primarily through B&M stores, therefore charging tax and not able to offer competetive prices to consumers. One of the sponsors of the bill is the Northern California Bookseller's Assocation.
Slashdot's typically pre-opinionated article posting might indicate that, well there shouldnt be any sales tax period! thats the real solution. But the problem is that the sales tax concept is not going anywhere soon (most likely), and charging it in an unequitable manner is harmful to various portions of a particular industry.
I suppose this question would seem very different if the students were required to use emacs/vi, gcc, make, etc. on a unix shell and one of the students insisted that he would learn the same material if he used Microsoft Visual Studio. Then the debate here wouldnt be how "unfair" the policy is, it would be about how people cannot learn true code development if they are dependent on a GUI.
The college's issue here is that its a burden to have one student using a completely different set of tools since it will be difficult for him to participate with everyone else in exercises and help sessions. If he is so ahead of the material that he definitely wont need any help then he maybe should try to test out of the course. It also would be better for him to use the GUI tools just for the learning experience, to get a compare/contrast of the two different design platforms, since there are advantages to each.
http://www.dlcppi.org/press/release/napster1.htm
This is all about accountability, not outlawing any technology at all. They want to hold users/ISP's accountable for illegal actions (we have heard this many times before). You could use Napster all you want, but they can bust you if you trade illegally, or if youre anonymous they bust the ISP. I guess its hopeless to ever ask /. to be the slightest bit non-inflammatory when discussing serious issues.
I would have hoped that the GPL could propigate on its own, not through utilizing the force of government in the form of a patent. If the patent is strictly to prevent closed-source vendors from closing it off, thats OK. But, if I were to write my own code that does the same thing as this (perhaps through reverse-engineering), and put it under BSD, would the FSF sue me for patent infringement? GPL by itself says that I cant use *the code* with any other license besides GPL or with any non-open-source software, whereas a patent seems more like I cant use *the idea*, such as Amazon one-click shopping....seems far more restrictive than the GPL by itself.
[bash]$ telnet www.cnn.com 80
Trying 207.25.71.82...
Connected to cnn.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/2.01
Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 17:45:11 GMT
Set-cookie: CNNid=cf19472d-20999-957980711-4; expires=Wednesday, 30-Dec-2037 16:00:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.cnn.com
Last-modified: Wed, 10 May 2000 17:45:11 GMT
Content-type: text/html
{HTML content of the homepage follows}
... since they are on their knees and there is talk of splitting them up. Things are getting better already.
The hypocritical opinion that copyrights are immoral tools designed only to protect the profits of giant, evil corporations (ignoring the more desireable usages of copyright, such as the GPL and comment-posting rights) was posted to the front page of Slashdot by one of their own editors. Care should be taken by Slashdot to work towards achieving a higher editorial quality.
this happens to better programmers all the time....just pull a few 48 hour weekends and rewrite the thing, problem solved. Im half serious.....most insane code ive seen actually does very little and can be replaced with something of a fraction of the scale..but you have to throw *everything* away from the previous paradigm. Youll love the feeling but then youre going to own that project, so it better be good...
This would imply that all the benefits of having Mozilla's quality in the best interests of a huge software corporation (i.e. real monied interests involved in making it a better product) would be gone if the software were GPL...Real is not about to release the source code for RealPlayer, right?
What a violent reaction....maybe you should cut down on the quake!
If each page is a collection of bits and tags from three separate databases youd have to write tons of fancy administration code, and it sort of limits the ability to use other web technologies in tandem with your site, as well has have anyone who isnt an experienced programmer modify the content layout, since everything has to fit into a very restrictive and complicated architecture.
I havent used PHP before, but heres the basic idea not specific to any programming language..
build your site in English (or your default language), assuming we are talking about regular static HTML files or some kind of .shtml perhaps. Write a filter for your webserver (I use java servlets mapped to *.html myself) that parses the path info of the request for something like "/german/foo/bar.html", i.e. the language identified in the beginning of the URI. Then within your HTML files, anywhere you want translated text, do it like this:
Then within your filter servlet or apachemod or whatever, parse the file for these tags (caching schemes can be utilized for speed), and then based on the language encoded in the URL, dynamically replace the body text (if the URI-specified language is not the default) with the contents of a file <languagebase>/foo/bar/mytext.html. So you could have somehting like /web/translations/german/foo/bar/mytext.html, /web/translations/spanish/foo/bar/mytext.html, etc. If a translation file is not present then you just use the default text already in the document, so you can still launch new HTML pages even if a translation is not available yet.
If you want to raise the bar of speed, dont use a dynamic filter, just write a perl script to regenerate an entire static site underneath "/german" "/spanish", etc. using the same scheme. Or you could even mix up the two approaches.
If your site is not static HTML but some kind of database driven thing, you can still use a similar approach, it just means the filtering program has to be molded to fit your content-delivery environment.
Sure, we can all just leave Slashdot if we dont like it. If it continues to ignore important "geek" issues like the hypotetical loss of huge amounts of tech jobs because of a stock market crash in favor of trivial articles, making a clear impression of personally-motivated deflection of real issues, then pretty much everyone is going to leave Slashdot. The whole "just leave if you dont like it" argument is always there but dont you think for a prominent place like Slashdot there should be free and open discussions and an attempt to have all voices heard? Not this, "oh lets just ignore that vocal minority", or "i think this topic sucks [because i might lose more money] but oh ok ill post it but you people suck anyway", and "lets mark as 'troll' or 'offtopic' anything about a possible conflict of interest", thats completely against the ideals of a free-discussion community.
Why dont we just disable all story posting of any kind and just get a direct plug-in to CmdrTaco's brain? Is he your messiah or something? Slashdot is a terrific creation of his but its grown into something much more than his personal whining/deflecting-the-masses-from-real-issues-int o-mental-bubble-gum-topics platform, dont you think?
The biggest deal in the world these days has been the insane amounts of cash being generated by tech stocks, funding tens of thousands of startups, internet divisions of large corporations, everything to do with the internet, including the new success of our beloved Linux and BSD OSes and the long awaited stumbling of Microsoft. If the condition of the stock market changes then the nature of the entire technology profession as a whole will change as well. Its certainly a much more pertinent story to all our lives than things like this.
The obvious conflict of interest is the significant monetary connection that exists between the editors and writers of Slashdot.org and their corporate owners, VA Linux. And CmdrTaco's rant right on the front page is the greatest example I have ever seen of abusing a prominent and important public platform to whine about a personal situation that is his own fault anyway, and it can only further tarnish the image of Slashdot in the eyes of the greater technical and financial communities and hasten its journey towards complete irrelevance.
Why can't we attribute what is explained to the work or existence of god? Where did the laws of math and physics come from? To say "how could they not exist" may just be revealing how limited our comprehension will always be, considering it is an inseparable part of this scientifically describeable framework.
Let them write the viruses now, so we can learn where the security hazards are and and patch/upgrade as necessary. Its not like Windows where the codebase of the OS is this unknown, immutable thing. The more viruses that are tacked down before the explosion of linux desktop usage, the better it will be when it gets there.
The problem with patents, particularly in use with software, is that people are claiming they own things that are in fact just permutations of mathematics and science, things that can be argued have already 'existed' for all of eternity, or are at least destined to be learned as scientific knowledge advances. Things like the Amazon patents amount to claiming ownership of millenia-old business concepts, like the two-for-one sale or something similarly trivial....its like charging the whole world everytime they tie their shoes or something.
Copyright is a whole different story, it is designed to protect creative ideas, things that arent inherent at all to any amount of understanding of math, science, and/or what exists already, they are something that has come "from nothing", i.e. the copyright owner's imagination, and are making a contribution towards the culture of society, rather than the scientific knowledge of society.
Im not sure what youre thinking here, the most lucrative outlets for a typical working musician are studio work, and touring with bands that are promoting a CD. Studio work is generally divided into advertising jingles and album work. The album work market disappears when you cant make money off the media anymore. Tours are paid for up front by record companies, so certainly putting them out of business is going to change the nature of tours, i.e. they will be much smaller scale and the hired musicians (and everyone else who is hired) will have to make far less money. I have known quite a few musicians who are able to pay their bills only because they are lucky enough to get a tour for 3 months out of the year that pays $3000 a week, then they live off of that money for the rest of the year, plus a few sessions and relatively low-paying club dates here and there.
Taking profits from CD sales out of the music industry altogether is shrinking the base of captial that all working musicians ultimately live off of...maybe thats how it has to be but lets not say it doesnt affect the artists.
Long after pirated music is on virtually every desktop and we have all spent months saying how any sort of restriction on copying artistic media sucks, suddenly Slashdot decides to post, "hey, you know what, I think musicians are losing money!"
Gee, ya think? I think if we were to come up with a model to spend months producing a record, paying engineers, musicians, producers, songwriters, equipment vendors, and then give the finished product away for free, and everyone gets to eat and pay their rent, Sony would pay us big bucks for that idea, man.
Heres two domain names that point to the same IP #, and based on the domain name it shows a different company logo and text:
http://www.adtechuniversity.com/
http://www.presentationstore.com/
and im going to be doing something for my current job in the same manner soon.
Much easier to send a copy of a movie to all your friends if its just a file to be put on an FTP site to be downloaded and viewed off a hard drive, rather than obtaining/burning/shipping the physical medium that the "approved" players require in order to view the content. So DeCSS isnt really foiling "copyright protection", its foiling "distribution protection" (albeit protection which is only a hindrance, not a prevention, to illegal distribution), which would supposedly lead to a much higher volume of copyright violations as well as greatly facilitate pirate operations. This is obviously the fear of the movie industry, copying/distribution that does not require a specialized physical medium to move the information.
/. should post articles of higher quality than this. This article is very clearly nothing more an ad for a company with a dumb product (I say dumb because there should be a better argument for its usage other than this):
Everyone here should know that "security through obscurity" is a foolish and invalid method of security. This article is particularly annoying with its "submarine" and "cold war" analogies as well as its mention of "increasing hacker ingenuity", as though finding a big file of encryption keys open to all users on a server is some high tech stealth technique from a Harrison Ford movie or something.
Extremely easy to use by anyone and therefore extremely easy to generate the most awful code anyone has ever seen, yet it works, so when that guy quits some other poor sap has to maintain it. As you have said, you function for quite a while (5 or 6 years i think you said) without knowing the full syntax of the language...therefore YOU CANNOT READ OTHER PEOPLES PERL CODE until such 5 or 6 years learning and memorzing every possible dorky way (many of them sparsely documented, two lines in "Programming Perl" on page 238 perhaps and nowhere else) of doing something is complete. I have done perl for four years, including a huge amount of maintenance of code written by junior programmers (Tom's suggestion that you hire only experienced C++ programmers to write perl is unrealistic) as well as ultra-experienced Perl gurus...the junior programmers write garbage that takes hours to understand, the expert guys use syntaxes youve never even seen before, flip flip flip through "Programming Perl" all day (sorry, I just am too busy thinking of new ideas and concepts to be able to *memorize* hundreds of dorky symbols and syntaxes)..how often do you find yourself looking up a syntax for a Java application? ...perhaps the learning curve of Perl is nice and low but its LOOONG!
my experience with minute-by-minute customer feedback is that the entire notion of a functional specification is lost immediately, as about one out of every five opinions they have on something will in fact be a new feature they just thought of now that they are seeing their product come to life. Having the customer sit with the programmer all the time means there is no project management layer in between, its just the client making demands directly to the programmer who has much more pressing (and non-programmer intangible) issues on his/her mind than all the random little frills that should have been spec'ed out and properly scheduled. All of the customer's thoughts and use case scenarios should be gathered into a proper and complete specification before any programming work is begun - if the programmer needs to ask questions to the customer during development, then the specification was not completed. Continuing down the road of developing a large project without a roadmap will guarantee project failure, major psychological/physical trauma to your programmers, or both.