The choices of prefix for this post... I'm curious, why is he anti-creationist rather than pro-evolutionist?
Because he's a professor of religion, not of science. Evolution has little place in theology; however it's perfectly reasonable for a theologian to question whether creationism represents fundamental religious belief or is simply an overly-literal interpetation of a nice and comforting myth.
If game makers want to draw in a female audience, they need to have characters that women want to play - and that means strong, complex, and capable... not falling out of her clothes.
Oh, I don't know. I've known some women gamers who are quite intelligent, and generally I think they probably wouldn't know what you're talking about when you say they want a "strong, complex, and capable" videogame character. Most of them would just say they want the option to play a girl in the game.
I mean, come on... would you describe that guy with the gun in Doom 3 as "complex"? "Capable"? I mean, who cares? You steer him around and have him shoot at stuff. If he has any personality traits at all, they're the ones the player brings to the table.
Girls are no different. They'd just like to not have to play the role of some beefy dude to solve all the puzzles in a game level. They probably don't want to look like a completely sleazy Maxim girl, either, but in my experience that concern is secondary.
Leviathan enthusiam and attention forces the swirling around powerful Web 2.0 enablers to happen, making your organization something important and exciting.
What's even goofier is that in OS X, as far as I can figure, "show file extension" is a file-specific flag, not a user-specific flag. Unless I'm missing something, it's impossible to get OS X to show file extensions on all files all the time.
It's been a while since I used a Mac much, but as of 10.3 at least you could go to the Finder's Preferences window, Advanced pane, and check "Show all file extensions."
OK fine, a journalist ripping off someone else's blog post is a bad thing and shouldn't be happening. But the kind of vitriol against the media exhibited by the parent is pretty disturbing. Yes, I know this is Slashdot... but do people really have this kind of attitude about journalism these days, that they would rather see some guy rattle off a rant in a blog post than read a story in the New York Times?
Yes, I know these are difficult times for journalism and there are a lot of challenges facing the so-called mainstream media industry, but I just don't see that as a valid reason to spit this kind of venom at the practice of journalism as a whole.
To the parent: It sounds like you equate journalism with TV. Maybe if you turned off the tube and picked up a (yes, I know) "dead tree" sometime, you might see that there's a shitload more to reporting about the world around us than being a talking head on Bill O'Reilly. Maybe the "mainstream media" would like to channel your attention that way because that kind of content is easier to produce, but I assure you, you have other options.
So one guy put his name on someone else's press release for one story and that means "the mainstream media" are involved in some sort of conspiracy to swipe material? Way to go, anecdotal evidence.
Also, it's not clear to me what they have actually opened up. They opened Solaris, JES, etc., fine. What else? Compilers? Drivers? SunRay? Is there a list somewhere?
Yes, if you read the official press release they give a list. Sun Ray, yes. Compilers are unclear -- but I suspect that by "tools" they mean IDEs and the like and not compilers.
As far as "opening up," though, as of today Sun has opened nothing new, as far as I can tell. It is just "reaffirming its commitment to open source this software," to quote the press release.
Was this a Vonage problem or a number porting problem? I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile a while back and they had my number ported in about 30 hours. Not all of the features worked right away -- that took maybe a few extra days -- but when you called my old number, the new phone rang. Is this something Vonage can't handle?
Also, the personalization algorithms don't even really represent your own tastes all that accurately, at least, not until they've built up a considerable database about you.
For example, at one point in time or another, I bought some Star Wars-related product from Amazon.com. This was years ago. But to this day, every time I go to Amazon.com, they are recommending me the latest Star Wars novel or toy or DVD bonus package or what-have-you. Just what is it about my buying habits that makes them think I like Star Wars that much?
Not to mention the fact that my Amazon.com purchasing habits don't necessarily represent my purchasing habits as a whole. It's funny; I probably buy a ton more books than I do Star Wars DVDs. The thing is, I don't really like to order my books through the Web. I prefer to wander down to my local independent bookstore on my lunch break, thumb through the pages a bit, smell the paper, and then proceed to buy the books at the checkout counter using my 10 percent discount card.
As a result, Amazon, which by all rights should know exactly what my purchasing habits are, doesn't actually have the slightest idea.
Likewise, my iTunes (or Windows Media Player or whatever) probably doesn't have the absolute best idea of what music I listen to. Yes, the music I play on iTunes is probably music that I legitimately like. But it's also music that I downloaded. I do legitimately rip my own CDs to MP3 format, but I do that for my portable player, not to listen to at home when I have the original disc sitting right there. So if you were using iTunes to judge my preferences, you'd only really know about the music that I think is kinda catchy, but either I don't feel like paying for or else is too obscure for me to be able to track down and buy. You wouldn't know about any of the stuff that I liked enough to drop $18 on.
And for the flamebait part, why is kde so unloved here in the USA?
I can't speak for all of the USA, but if anyone wants me to give KDE a decent chance, the first thing they'll have to do is a serious round of UI beautification in the default install, beginning with that nasty faux-digital clock in the lower righthand corner. It's like the KDE designers took everything users love(?) about Windows and spackeled it over with a veneer of Ugly. (Yes, I know you can replace the clock applet, but why should I have to spend so much as ten minutes of my life doing something so trivial?)
Linux happens to include several distributions, some more "monolithic" than "modular". Unsuprisingly, the "monolithic" versions are usually those used by "enterprises", such as RedHat and SuSE. The "modular" operating systems, such as Debian, are almost universally ignored by businesses, though you will find IT personnel swear by them.
This is not a prelude to a flame; I seriously would like to know how you define "modular" vs. "monolithic" in this context. What makes a Red Hat OS inherently less modular than Debian? And do you count Debian-derived distros like Ubuntu or Mepis in that category? I may or may not agree with you, I just want to know the terms you're dealing with here.
In the 1980s it was cassette tapes; now this! Can anyone think of a single kind of tape that isn't a potential threat to the intellectual property of America's great and prominent corporations? If so, raise a hand. No? OK... we have our solution, then.
Actually, these days Image Comics is perhaps the most famous. Founded by a group of artists who largely made their names on company-owned Marvel comics, including Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Marc Silvestri, Jim Valentino, Jim Lee, and Rob Liefeld, Image published a number of top-selling creator-owned properties, including WildCATS, Spawn, the Savage Dragon, Youngblood, etc.
These days Image publishes a number of less-mainstream titles, but the policy is still that the creators own the copyrights to their works. Three current favorites, off the top of my head, are Godland, Sea of Red and the Walking Dead.
Like the parent says, however, Image was hardly the first. Not including the undergrounds, Marvel was one of the first companies to experiment with giving creators ownership of their titles, with the Epic line in the 80s.
And, of course, while it's laudable for a publisher to give authors control over the works they create, tis is nothing new for the mainstream publishing industry. If you write a novel, you don't typically have to sign over the copyright to your publisher. The really amazing thing is not that this company wants to give comics artists control over their work, but that in 2005 the comics industry is still so backwards that this should even be news.
The MS Office compatibility in OpenOffice is not all it's cracked up to be - even things like bullets and headings change fonts and spacings during conversions.
This kind of thing doesn't sound all that severe. I would expect programs like Word and OpenOffice.org Writer to support things like default serif and sans-serif fonts. For example, at least in the old days, Mac users typically didn't have Times New Roman and Arial; those documents, when opened on the Mac, would render in Times and Helvetica.
The larger issue here is that a word processor really shouldn't be expected to be a page layout program. If you have a document that you want to "publish" with fancy layouts and everything, then yes, by all means render it out as PDF. If you have a living document that you want people to collaborate on, do it in Word, but you shouldn't expect the final product to be the equivalent of a Quark layout. And -- hey, marketing people, I'm talking to you -- if all you have is a press release with some text in it, don't bother to send it as an attachment; just cut and paste it into an e-mail as text, already!
Which brings me to my question: Does OpenOffice.org Writer support the equivalent of Word's "Normal" layout? Every time I open a document in Writer it shows it to me in a page view, with borders around the "paper" and everything. I don't want that. I want what word processors like WordPerfect used to do in the Good Ole Days, which was give me an area in which to edit a document. A few type styles and bullet points here and there are fine, but all that fancy formatting stuff should come later, using programs that were designed for it. (And the fact that all the screenshots I've seen of Office 12 are also using the Print view is starting to make me nervous...)
The distinction is not clear. Freelancers are also employed. They just are not employees. If you look at the court records for the original case in this topic, it looks like the guy was in fact a contractor.
Smaller ISPs seem to gain users by not making themselves visible as the middleman. The more you've noticed your ISP, the more I bet you've been frustrated.
I don't know where you live, but in my area (San Francisco) the local broadband providers are fiercely competing on the basis of add-on services. Comcast, for example, is selling streaming video of news clips, sports, music videos, etc. SBC DSL is trying more aggressively to sell on price, but they too bundle all kinds of anti-virus tools, etc.
The providers know that if all it comes down to is an invisible pipe to the Internet, all they can compete on is price and downtime (and in many areas, downtime is hard for them to control). That model makes broadband access a commodity. You may already believe that Internet access is a commodity, but propagating that view is not in the best interests of the broadband providers right now.
CmdrTaco edits an article, but people come here for the +5'd comments.
Sorry, but Taco doesn't edit anything that I've seen. He posts a link to an article to the homepage. The editors at those respective publications did the editing. Though I, too, visit Slashdot for the +5 comments, I would argue that none of those comments could exist without the far-smaller number of people who did the actual production of the original content (although, admittedly, I am biased.)
AOL is none of these things. They're an online newspaper and amusement park. *Yawn* I wouldn't pay $5 for them.
I tend to agree here, but all this says is that AOL has done a piss-poor job of its original mission, which was creating value for the end user by providing original content through its own tightly controlled channels. AOL's business model should be that of XM Satellite radio. XM is a delivery medium, insofar as it repackages existing content from people like Bill O'Reilly, but it also generates its own original content and it will go further in this direction as time goes on. At its heart, XM is a content company. AOL could have been the same; it could have been the online equivalent of HBO, but for whatever reason it's mostly blown it -- probably because it set its sights too low. It went for the mass market, every-household-is-an-online-consumer market, when it should have realized 1.) that it needed to get on the Web much sooner; and 2.) that the most valuable customers for Web-based services were technically-savvy people, and that they needed to capture that audience before they trying to woo grandma and her digital camera.
As for Time Warner stock, would you want a part of Time? Warner? Maybe in 1985.
I don't know. Without getting into specifics, because I don't have them on-hand, from what I've heard Time Warner is pretty much on track as far as where a big media company in America should be right now. There are definitely rough seas ahead for that business, but if anybody's on the ball it's Time Warner.
When someone hires you to create a work, they own the copyright under the doctrine of "work for hire". The contracts do a couple of things: they spell this out explicitly, and often extend the provision to works you were not directly asked to create.
IAANAL, but while that certainly may be true and such a doctrine does exist, it is more specific than you seem to believe it is.
In order for a work that is created by a freelance contractor to qualify as a "work made for hire" (specific wording of copyright law), both parties have to specifically agree, in writing, that the work is a work made for hire. If no such agreement exists, then the contractor owns the copyright of the work. That's one good reason to have a contract if you are the one doing the hiring.
In addition, the work must fall into one of nine specific categories delineated by copyright law -- for example, it might be a contribution to a collective work. Generally speaking, if a contractor wrote a software program from whole cloth and nobody else ever touched the code and there was no understanding that anybody ever would, then that program could probably not be considered a work made for hire under copyright law. If if the contractor's code is part of a collective work, however, it still is not a work for hire unless the abovementioned agreement is in place.
The rules for employees are different. The employer clearly has the upper hand there.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, come on... would you describe that guy with the gun in Doom 3 as "complex"? "Capable"? I mean, who cares? You steer him around and have him shoot at stuff. If he has any personality traits at all, they're the ones the player brings to the table.
Girls are no different. They'd just like to not have to play the role of some beefy dude to solve all the puzzles in a game level. They probably don't want to look like a completely sleazy Maxim girl, either, but in my experience that concern is secondary.
Leviathan enthusiam and attention forces the swirling around powerful Web 2.0 enablers to happen, making your organization something important and exciting.
I'm sold already.
Actually, it's Windows Presentation Foundation.
The so-called Media Center Macs won't have a TV tuner, for one thing.
...it appeared on Slashdot three days earlier.
HEYY-OHHHHHHH!
OK fine, a journalist ripping off someone else's blog post is a bad thing and shouldn't be happening. But the kind of vitriol against the media exhibited by the parent is pretty disturbing. Yes, I know this is Slashdot ... but do people really have this kind of attitude about journalism these days, that they would rather see some guy rattle off a rant in a blog post than read a story in the New York Times?
Yes, I know these are difficult times for journalism and there are a lot of challenges facing the so-called mainstream media industry, but I just don't see that as a valid reason to spit this kind of venom at the practice of journalism as a whole.
To the parent: It sounds like you equate journalism with TV. Maybe if you turned off the tube and picked up a (yes, I know) "dead tree" sometime, you might see that there's a shitload more to reporting about the world around us than being a talking head on Bill O'Reilly. Maybe the "mainstream media" would like to channel your attention that way because that kind of content is easier to produce, but I assure you, you have other options.
So one guy put his name on someone else's press release for one story and that means "the mainstream media" are involved in some sort of conspiracy to swipe material? Way to go, anecdotal evidence.
...French Parliament considers campaign against egalité, fraternité.
News at 11.
As far as "opening up," though, as of today Sun has opened nothing new, as far as I can tell. It is just "reaffirming its commitment to open source this software," to quote the press release.
Was this a Vonage problem or a number porting problem? I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile a while back and they had my number ported in about 30 hours. Not all of the features worked right away -- that took maybe a few extra days -- but when you called my old number, the new phone rang. Is this something Vonage can't handle?
Also, the personalization algorithms don't even really represent your own tastes all that accurately, at least, not until they've built up a considerable database about you.
For example, at one point in time or another, I bought some Star Wars-related product from Amazon.com. This was years ago. But to this day, every time I go to Amazon.com, they are recommending me the latest Star Wars novel or toy or DVD bonus package or what-have-you. Just what is it about my buying habits that makes them think I like Star Wars that much?
Not to mention the fact that my Amazon.com purchasing habits don't necessarily represent my purchasing habits as a whole. It's funny; I probably buy a ton more books than I do Star Wars DVDs. The thing is, I don't really like to order my books through the Web. I prefer to wander down to my local independent bookstore on my lunch break, thumb through the pages a bit, smell the paper, and then proceed to buy the books at the checkout counter using my 10 percent discount card.
As a result, Amazon, which by all rights should know exactly what my purchasing habits are, doesn't actually have the slightest idea.
Likewise, my iTunes (or Windows Media Player or whatever) probably doesn't have the absolute best idea of what music I listen to. Yes, the music I play on iTunes is probably music that I legitimately like. But it's also music that I downloaded. I do legitimately rip my own CDs to MP3 format, but I do that for my portable player, not to listen to at home when I have the original disc sitting right there. So if you were using iTunes to judge my preferences, you'd only really know about the music that I think is kinda catchy, but either I don't feel like paying for or else is too obscure for me to be able to track down and buy. You wouldn't know about any of the stuff that I liked enough to drop $18 on.
Good lord, I thought I'd never see the day.
In the 1980s it was cassette tapes; now this! Can anyone think of a single kind of tape that isn't a potential threat to the intellectual property of America's great and prominent corporations? If so, raise a hand. No? OK ... we have our solution, then.
Actually, these days Image Comics is perhaps the most famous. Founded by a group of artists who largely made their names on company-owned Marvel comics, including Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Marc Silvestri, Jim Valentino, Jim Lee, and Rob Liefeld, Image published a number of top-selling creator-owned properties, including WildCATS, Spawn, the Savage Dragon, Youngblood, etc.
These days Image publishes a number of less-mainstream titles, but the policy is still that the creators own the copyrights to their works. Three current favorites, off the top of my head, are Godland, Sea of Red and the Walking Dead.
Like the parent says, however, Image was hardly the first. Not including the undergrounds, Marvel was one of the first companies to experiment with giving creators ownership of their titles, with the Epic line in the 80s.
And, of course, while it's laudable for a publisher to give authors control over the works they create, tis is nothing new for the mainstream publishing industry. If you write a novel, you don't typically have to sign over the copyright to your publisher. The really amazing thing is not that this company wants to give comics artists control over their work, but that in 2005 the comics industry is still so backwards that this should even be news.
The larger issue here is that a word processor really shouldn't be expected to be a page layout program. If you have a document that you want to "publish" with fancy layouts and everything, then yes, by all means render it out as PDF. If you have a living document that you want people to collaborate on, do it in Word, but you shouldn't expect the final product to be the equivalent of a Quark layout. And -- hey, marketing people, I'm talking to you -- if all you have is a press release with some text in it, don't bother to send it as an attachment; just cut and paste it into an e-mail as text, already!
Which brings me to my question: Does OpenOffice.org Writer support the equivalent of Word's "Normal" layout? Every time I open a document in Writer it shows it to me in a page view, with borders around the "paper" and everything. I don't want that. I want what word processors like WordPerfect used to do in the Good Ole Days, which was give me an area in which to edit a document. A few type styles and bullet points here and there are fine, but all that fancy formatting stuff should come later, using programs that were designed for it. (And the fact that all the screenshots I've seen of Office 12 are also using the Print view is starting to make me nervous...)
You jest, but Microsoft actually does have a horse in this race.
The distinction is not clear. Freelancers are also employed. They just are not employees. If you look at the court records for the original case in this topic, it looks like the guy was in fact a contractor.
The providers know that if all it comes down to is an invisible pipe to the Internet, all they can compete on is price and downtime (and in many areas, downtime is hard for them to control). That model makes broadband access a commodity. You may already believe that Internet access is a commodity, but propagating that view is not in the best interests of the broadband providers right now.
Sorry, but Taco doesn't edit anything that I've seen. He posts a link to an article to the homepage. The editors at those respective publications did the editing. Though I, too, visit Slashdot for the +5 comments, I would argue that none of those comments could exist without the far-smaller number of people who did the actual production of the original content (although, admittedly, I am biased.) I tend to agree here, but all this says is that AOL has done a piss-poor job of its original mission, which was creating value for the end user by providing original content through its own tightly controlled channels. AOL's business model should be that of XM Satellite radio. XM is a delivery medium, insofar as it repackages existing content from people like Bill O'Reilly, but it also generates its own original content and it will go further in this direction as time goes on. At its heart, XM is a content company. AOL could have been the same; it could have been the online equivalent of HBO, but for whatever reason it's mostly blown it -- probably because it set its sights too low. It went for the mass market, every-household-is-an-online-consumer market, when it should have realized 1.) that it needed to get on the Web much sooner; and 2.) that the most valuable customers for Web-based services were technically-savvy people, and that they needed to capture that audience before they trying to woo grandma and her digital camera. I don't know. Without getting into specifics, because I don't have them on-hand, from what I've heard Time Warner is pretty much on track as far as where a big media company in America should be right now. There are definitely rough seas ahead for that business, but if anybody's on the ball it's Time Warner.See my comment "Work Made for Hire," above.
In order for a work that is created by a freelance contractor to qualify as a "work made for hire" (specific wording of copyright law), both parties have to specifically agree, in writing, that the work is a work made for hire. If no such agreement exists, then the contractor owns the copyright of the work. That's one good reason to have a contract if you are the one doing the hiring.
In addition, the work must fall into one of nine specific categories delineated by copyright law -- for example, it might be a contribution to a collective work. Generally speaking, if a contractor wrote a software program from whole cloth and nobody else ever touched the code and there was no understanding that anybody ever would, then that program could probably not be considered a work made for hire under copyright law. If if the contractor's code is part of a collective work, however, it still is not a work for hire unless the abovementioned agreement is in place.
The rules for employees are different. The employer clearly has the upper hand there.