If you have such a small number of people posting content, and they are making money (meaning they have accounts which identify them), then they would be easily tracked and prosecuted. How can this really be true?
That said, most people "pass along" content rather than rip it themselves. Is it really possible to tell the difference between a user that passes along content they acquire from some other source using bittorrent vs a user that actually rips content and passes that content along?
If the contributors are also the heaviest users (downloading 75 percent of the content) then it is really unlikely that they are ripping that content in the first place. How would they have the time, and why would they download what they ripped themselves? So if we assume that these "100 users" on these two sites actually contribute 66 percent of the content, and that most of that content isn't actually ripped by them, but acquired via other sources outside these sites, then does that that only 4 or 5 people are really ripping content?
Seriously, none of this makes a great deal of sense. It seems to me that the content flow comes from a much broader bases, and that the active users on these sites are not the same as the active users on other sites.
I see no "take these 100 out and problem solved" magic bullet here. But I'd have to see more details than this article gives to know for sure.
I changed my 24/7 channel to TLC when SiFi became SyFy and turned its back on Science Fiction. I was devastated by the loss of hard hitting Science Fiction, and I just needed Love to see me through...... Then TLC was there for me, and they implied that they me!!! But now with your blunt revelation, I now see they just wanted me for a host in which to heartlessly implant their ideas! It wasn't my fault! I just didn't know! Now my thoughts and dreams are dominated by their sinister concepts! I can't rid my mind of them!
My life is over.
I am going back to Fox. I know I can trust them; They are Fair and Balanced.
The Leak is Leaked and every corporations are pressured by the government to take silly actions against Wikileaks. All before we get any analysis of the content. Now it seems that everyone blasting Wikileaks must be for selling boys for sex parties (one of the cover ups documented in the leaks).
Yeah, they called Putin "Batman", and yeah the US has been twisting arms all over the world to get governments to lie to their people. But selling pretty little boys out for sex and covering it up because an American company was involved?
The "Danger" to American Diplomacy is accrued when our diplomats are involved in totally unethical and immoral behaviors. The "Danger" gets paid out when the documentation of such things gets out to the public. If our government wants to protect its diplomatic efforts, then DON'T ACCRUE the risk in the first place. Then you don't have to fear the leaks.
And if Mastercard and Visa (who now look like they want a world safe for the KKK and those that sell "Boys for Sex") would just wait for the Analysis before bowing to pressure, then they might get out of this without looking like fools.
What you are saying is that what we have today is good enough for the future, as far as the eye can see. You do not want to watch videos on Youtube, you do not want programming delivered over the Internet, you do not want news delivery via podcasts over the Internet, or real time maps, or traffic/weather reports.
I do not "fund your hobby" when you watch all the sports channels 24/7, and you do not "fund my hobby" when I watch YouTube videos all day. But when TelcomX charges you a flat rate to deliver "Sports Bits" to support your "hobby" while I pay out the WaZoo to seek programming outside the control of TelcomX....
THEN the problem still isn't that I am paying for your hobby!!! Like you imply, nothing has changed except....
I am getting shafted in an attempt to force me back onto their broadcast schedule!!! My "hobby" and your "hobby" are no different. We are both sucking down bandwidth. But the media companies can control the broadcast schedule of your "Sport Bits" hobby, while my DIY entertainment schedule eludes their control, and denies media companies their Advertisement Eyeballs.
Seriously, why do we have to pay more as improvements in technology drive the costs towards zero?
I don't much care if we go to a "Pay as you go" as long as the cost of such access continues to drive towards zero the same way everything else with computer systems has done historically. However, if we do not have competition, and we allow the big companies to erect huge barriers to entry against competition, then not only will this cost us as consumers, but will bash our ability to compete in the world, and bash our economy into the ground.
The FCC has no responsibility to safeguard the income for Internet providers, Cable providers, or Media companies. Their responsibility is to the citizens and to establish fair rules for competition. However, competition doesn't have the political clout that corporate America has.
We are being told that this release of information has harmed the ability of the U.S. to carry out diplomacy. In what way? That we tell lies and other governments tell lies, and now some of these lies have been exposed? What was the "Danger"? Wasn't the danger in the telling of the lies in the first place? Better sharing of Intel didn't bring about this danger.
Besides, if this data dump was so easily acquired (I am assuming the obvious here, that Wikileaks never had to go all "Tom Cruise/Mission Impossible" to get it), surely the data dump was no surprise to various other governments. I'd even guess that this is a fraction of what our enemies know about what we have been saying to ourselves for decades. How could it be otherwise?
So the "Danger" is that increase sharing might also include the public? If there is a change here, it is that the public got into the loop. Is it possible that they might have to abide by a higher level of ethics to avoid embarrassing lies coming out in future leaks? Is it possible that this is the "Danger"?
I am struggling here. So far I haven't heard about anything leaked which can be properly described as a "Danger" appeared with the leak itself. All of the best tidbits I have heard so far that might cause some diplomatic ruffle are due to actions that either 1) Should not have occurred (agreements to lie to the public), or 2) Need not have occurred (Let's call Putin "Batman").
I don't like to negotiate in business with people that live in secret worlds. I don't like the fact that our government loves secrets. The default for government should be to play their cards on TOP of the table, face up. When secrets are really necessary, they become easier to keep if their numbers are few, and the period of secrecy is of very short duration.
Just because something is "hard to do" doesn't mean you can copyright it. And it doesn't mean that something is primarily an artistic expression.
It is instructive to consider why you cannot copyright fashion in current law (something that the Fashion copyright bill intends to change). Fashion is considered primarily utilitarian, i.e. you wear a shirt to cover your top, and wear pants to cover your bottom. To allow copyright to control basic utilitarian functions would be hugely damaging to the fashion industry. Even the Fashion Copyright bill acknowledges this fact, restricting fashion copyright to 3 years, and only to identical copies.
Nobody says making attractive cloths isn't hard to do. Nobody is saying that poorly designed cloths make some people cringe. In fact, there can be huge artistic components to the design of both cloths and APIs.
But at the end of the day, you wear boots to cover your feet, gloves to cover your hands, and hats to cover your head, and belts to hold up your pants, etc. etc. You use APIs to paint buttons and fields on windows, write to files, access the internet, etc. etc.
These functions are primarily utilitarian in nature...
APIs are designed to allow certain functionalities in computer systems, and the market is ill served by restricting the control of their use perpetually to one company.
If copyrights are allowed for APIs, then we are all screwed. Let's count the ways:
Copyright on APIs would amount to a nearly 100 year lock on building systems that conform to various interfaces. APIs are all derivative, and companies like IBM could assert control over vast ranges of APIs that are clearly derived from their earlier systems. At the same time, changes to APIs produce opportunities to produce new copyrights (even as their use might be prohibited due to infringement on other APIs). Copyrights on APIs would effectively drive all small businesses out of programming, as nothing can be done without the use of an API, and all the control of APIs would reside with the historical companies who first designed the APIs we all use. Even the big companies today might not be able to assert control over APIs whose original authorship might be hard to nail down today.
As I have pointed out in the past, not one single company has secured all the IP required to produce a smart phone. If the courts side with Oracle on their claim that they have a copyright on an API, then no company will be able to secure the IP required to write a single program. Only by having vast army of lawyers can any company produce a smart phone today. Allow copyrighted APIs, and only by having a vast army of of lawyers can anyone write a program.
I can only hope our courts can see the problem with this idea.
.... One company for $250,000 can prohibit the application of this idea to systems that do not pay up.
This is what is wrong with this deal, off the top of my head:
1) NASA would have developed this technology anyway, one must assume, as they haven't auctioned patents in the past (at least, not that I know of). In any case, how could the patent have been a motivator to do the work? Wouldn't it have been the problem they needed to solve? And who believes 250K is enough of a motivator for NASA anyway? 2) Now that we have the innovation done, all the patent is going to do is prevent its application for 20 years 3) Many companies have been generating test cases from Rules for years. Isn't there a prior art issue here? 4) Why should we fund government research only to tie it up with IP on a restrictive basis for only 250K? How is this a good deal for the Tax Payer? (It would be different if the income to government was big enough to offset the Taxes we pay, but this doesn't do that) 5) Software Patents! Evil! They are most certainly a mechanism to patent ideas rather than implementations, as there are far too many ways to implement an algorithm in software to restrict the patent to an actual invention.
When I was there, Microsoft graded every project on a curve, with compensation in the balance. The "lowest" performers got slammed, the peak performs got rich. I imagine nothing has changed, except fewer people get rich.
Their system of evaluating and compensating developers rewards "hot dogs", who by any standard are good developers, but penalizes cooperation and useful developer documentation. Anything you might do to help someone on your team be successful automatically and in a very measured way hurts your own compensation. Few developers can rise above this and work with others outside of what is necessary to get the appropriate check marks on the review. And when individuals do work closely with each other, they are very selective as to who they work with. You can't afford to make *everyone* on your team successful. Remember, the bell curve WILL be applied.
Other mechanisms are used at Microsoft are very good. They have a huge commitment to testing, and a huge commitment to process. They know within a few months into a project when they are going to deliver. They know well in advance when projects are going to be late. They research and know the competition.
However, at the end of the day, their culture does not allow for clean design. Clean design means working together and making it a priority to make all developers on a team as productive as possible. But even if the differences between developers are tiny, the bell curve will be applied. People will win, and people will lose. And don't think for a moment that subjective decisions do not come into play based on a developer's reputation and ties with other developers.
In the end, if you don't know how something works, don't expect the comments to be useful. Don't be surprised if two interfaces sit next to each other and both do nearly the same thing. Obviously one developer implemented something, and the next couldn't figure out how to use it.
Microsoft's bloat is mostly a result of their development culture. Sure, supporting ten years of file formats is a factor, but not as important as their development culture, IMHO.
Microsoft was once a hugely internally competitive company, one that favored the absolute hot dog. The person that could write code and deliver code faster than anyone else (who cares if it can be understood as long as it was written with Hungarian Notation). Obviously some things have changed in the 15 or so years since I was there. Still, this environment is increasingly ineffective as software complexity goes up by leaps and bounds, and their ability to reward working in such a crappy, loner, dog eat dog fashion has passed away long ago.
So Microsoft (like IBM, Oracle, and many others) buy innovation rather than do innovation.
It doesn't really matter that Second Life doesn't blend with anything Microsoft has. It does matter that they do *something* innovative. They have been in a hugely dry spell for a long long time (technically speaking). Maybe it has been so dry that virtual worlds look promising to Microsoft management? Maybe they see injecting more power into virtual worlds with the increasing processing power of portable devices (smart phones, net books, etc. fused with LED projectors and virtual input technologies)?
My complaint ISN'T that the solution is old, but that very little has changed in the SQL/RDBMS approach through the years, despite the vast changes in hardware, the vast experience we have gathered in the awkwardness of using SQL to persist data, and the known performance costs to the SQL/RDBMS approach to persistence.
Maybe my summary statement stinks; it certainly has turned into a useless analysis of what the statement was taken to say vs. what I as an author think it says and meant for it to say.
So let's call you right about how poor the statement was as a summary, and me not so wrong in what I intended it to mean.
Maybe it is the fact that RDBS based solutions are too fragile and are too often crap. We need to develop in representations that make sense to developers, and have the right sorts of compiler technologies and tools that build the proper run time representations for performance.
That you CAN build manageable/fast/testable/efficient applications is only the first step.
The second is wringing manageable/fast/testable/efficient applications out of mere mediocre developers.
Uh.... If I never said that "being old" is a reason to replace something.... As you would have known if you actually read the sentence you quoted. Given this observation, what am I to say about the fact that the Core i7 is based on a 1960's view of a problem? Besides, the Core i7 ISN'T a 1960's based solution, but is based on a 1960's solution. There is an important difference between the two statements.
Everything we do in CS is based on work that goes back to 1939 and even earlier. However, in the case of the Core i7 (as an example) we CHANGE the approach to try and fix various problems we have with our performance.
Personally, I think going back to old ideas and realizing that we can now implement them better/faster/cleaner is a great way to approach many problems. That a solution is "old" isn't a problem, but it is a problem if a solution has known issues, and we just live with them.
I will absolutely agree that a well designed database does not have performance issues. However, I work in a segment of the industry that works with Health and Human services, and the databases have issues that make any reasonable DBA sick.
None the less, database throughput is always an issue. Our applications scale just fine for our needs (as you imply) but it remains that even if only one person is running one application against the database, the through put is just "meh" at best. This is because every operation requires queries against the database to move significant amounts of data from many different tables. Could we build applications with better performance? Absolutely, and using traditional Relational Databases too, if the Schema was properly designed.
All of this begs the question. The real question is why we use a technology that is so sensitive to bad schema design? Why use a technology that has such a high baseline overhead? Why use a technology that is so tedious? Why use a technology that is so hard to test?
Absolutely the developer doesn't have to build applications that inherit all these problems from the database. I have designed applications that sit on databases, and have none of these faults. But unfortunately not all the applications I work on were designed to avoid these issues.
Now you ARE right that I am not a DBA. But if I have a fault, it isn't because I don't understand the DBA, but that I don't understand the database....
And yeah, in my rant I criticized SQL and ACID and relational databases in general as if they were all the same. They are not, and in fact need not have any overlap at all. Still, I'll stand by my rant as an expression of my annoyance with various aspects (these and others) of this particular approach to the persistence problem.
The "old" part isn't the problem, but that there ARE other solutions and better solutions (that might address all previous issues) that are being actively ignored.
You are not going to win points for reading comprehension if you don't read the whole sentence.
Consider the problem HIPAA's security requirements might be for call centers run out of India. Any evidence or even suspicion that personal/medical information is leaked due to such "open access" requirements by the government of India, and all those call centers will move over night to China and elsewhere.
... because on every application I have ever worked on, the Database has always been the performance bottleneck. Testing of DB applications is always a problem, because the running of tests generally changes the database, rendering tests unrepeatable without reseting the database. Configuring applications to use this database or that database also ends up being a problem for most applications.
Furthermore, while programming in general has continued to progress through many languages, exploring many different ways to describe problems, SQL is still SQL. SQL is fixed in a syntax and written with naming conventions and styles that can best be described as neo-Cobal.
Bottom line: SQL is tedious, ugly, slow, and difficult to test. And don't get me started on stored procedures and the difficulty of using source code management with stored procedures.
Last gripe: A traditional Relational database imposes ACID overhead on every application, even if you don't really need it or use it. This is like a programming language that imposes a SORT overhead on all your data structures even if you rarely or never need to sort them.
Why is it that we continue to use a technology based on a 1960's view of a problem when clearly there ARE other solutions and ways to approach said problem?
To be prepared, the military plays war games, and one must assume that some play the part of our foes (in this case the Taliban, but perhaps generic terrorists, or Germans, or Russians, etc.). The idea of getting kids into playing games as a RECRUITMENT tool isn't lost on the U.S. Army! Such games require people to either play the part of the foes, or programmers to program the part of the foes. Studies have shown that games decrease reaction time, and provide a way to teach combat techniques that are used in real battlefields.
So just from the Military's point of view, military games are a positive influence as they prepare kids to be soldiers (I'd rather have games that prepared kids to do something else myself, BTW, but most of those just are not as fun to play with my boys... It is always more fun to shoot the Dad).
Now I doubt the Military is going to come out and defend EA here. But in their heart of hearts they are on EA's side.
It is tough to fight what I call the "Escalation of Righteousness" where somebody stands up and says, "This is in bad taste." Often, it is because "This" is in bad taste, or isn't polite, or maybe just isn't something the average Adult cares about enough to defend it. So a few people stand up and say, "We should stop this!" Most people don't agree, but don't disagree enough to fight it, and "This" gets banned even though there is no point in doing so.
I have seen this over Halloween, over playing cops and robbers in a school playground, in playing doge ball at recess, and now over a video game.
We just have to stop this. The idea that this game is "un-American" is bogus every which way you look at it. Speak up people, and shine the light on such ideas and show them to be the idiotic ideas that they are.
5 billion is a small number in the context of the national economy. In fact, it is so small as to be dwarfed by the margin of error when Considering economic trends.
A 1 TB drive is 60-100 dollars. The KW/h required to run a 60 watt drive 24/7 = 60/1000 KW x 24 hours x 365.25 days = 526 KW/h. At.12 cents per KW/h, that's 63.12 per year.
Even if we double or triple the hardware costs, they will only make up a few percentages of the 10 grand per TB cited here.
The labor to maintain 100 or 200 or 400 drives is going to be relatively constant. In fact, with a little more reasonable monitoring software (just reporting drive failures in a raid system, so the labor just has to pull bad drives and replace with good drives), I don't think the capacity of a data center is all that related to the labor costs.
End result, it is just cheaper and easier to throw hardware at problems to reduce labor costs than to pay for expensive software to monitor capacity and be more efficient in the use of capacity.
AT&T definitely drops tons of calls in Austin Texas. But I don't have much trouble in other places in Texas outside of the spotty coverage on 79 between East Texas and Austin. Even their coverage in Oklahoma and Kansas has improved over the last couple of years.
I got grandfathered in on AT&T for unlimited 3G networking, and my phone will set up a wireless hotspot to allow tethering devices over wireless. My phone supports SD cards, lets me install my own applications, and lets me copy files via a file system to its SD card (over a standard USB cable which also allows me to charge my phone).
But of course, I have an Android, which isn't setting the bar higher than Apple. Right.
When the iPhone 4 came out, it did not have a single feature not already present in the Nexus One that shipped first in January, and was available for AT&T in March. Its only edge on the Nexus One was a forward facing camera for video conferencing and a higher resolution screen. It has a slower processor (we can only guess, as Apple won't admit to its processor speed), crippled multitasking, slower browser (than Android 2.2), no desktop, no widget support, etc.
And I'd buy another Android (mine's a Nexus One) in a heart beat. I don't understand the idea that only 20 percent of Android owners would buy another Android phone.
The *constitution* does not discuss all the points you are making, but simply lays out the plan *for that time*. The warning label suggests you should consider the historical perspective into account when reading the constitution.
Nothing in the constitution goes any further than to count a slave as 3/5's a person without giving them rights. Not until the 13th amendment is slavery abolished, and not until the 15th amendment is citizenship and the vote guaranteed without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
No commentary is provided in the constitution on these matters. Nothing to say the previous rules were morally suspect. It just says what they were.
Which underlines the need to understand the constitution in a historical context. We SHOULD understand the constitution within the context you yourself described. It isn't too unreasonable to suggest the reader understand the historical context. But as I said, I don't think it is necessary; the reader ought to be able to understand the need to know the historical context of the constitution via common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have such a small number of people posting content, and they are making money (meaning they have accounts which identify them), then they would be easily tracked and prosecuted. How can this really be true?
That said, most people "pass along" content rather than rip it themselves. Is it really possible to tell the difference between a user that passes along content they acquire from some other source using bittorrent vs a user that actually rips content and passes that content along?
If the contributors are also the heaviest users (downloading 75 percent of the content) then it is really unlikely that they are ripping that content in the first place. How would they have the time, and why would they download what they ripped themselves? So if we assume that these "100 users" on these two sites actually contribute 66 percent of the content, and that most of that content isn't actually ripped by them, but acquired via other sources outside these sites, then does that that only 4 or 5 people are really ripping content?
Seriously, none of this makes a great deal of sense. It seems to me that the content flow comes from a much broader bases, and that the active users on these sites are not the same as the active users on other sites.
I see no "take these 100 out and problem solved" magic bullet here. But I'd have to see more details than this article gives to know for sure.
... I thought it was "Tender, Loving Care"!!!!
I changed my 24/7 channel to TLC when SiFi became SyFy and turned its back on Science Fiction. I was devastated by the loss of hard hitting Science Fiction, and I just needed Love to see me through... ... Then TLC was there for me, and they implied that they me!!! But now with your blunt revelation, I now see they just wanted me for a host in which to heartlessly implant their ideas! It wasn't my fault! I just didn't know! Now my thoughts and dreams are dominated by their sinister concepts! I can't rid my mind of them!
My life is over.
I am going back to Fox. I know I can trust them; They are Fair and Balanced.
. . L i k e d t h e s h o w...
. . . . l . i . k . e . d . . . t . h . e . . . s . h . o . w .....
. . . . . . . l . . i . . k . . e . . d . . . . . t . . h . . e . . . . . s . . h . . o . . w .....
eh? What's with the echo?
The Leak is Leaked and every corporations are pressured by the government to take silly actions against Wikileaks. All before we get any analysis of the content. Now it seems that everyone blasting Wikileaks must be for selling boys for sex parties (one of the cover ups documented in the leaks).
Yeah, they called Putin "Batman", and yeah the US has been twisting arms all over the world to get governments to lie to their people. But selling pretty little boys out for sex and covering it up because an American company was involved?
The "Danger" to American Diplomacy is accrued when our diplomats are involved in totally unethical and immoral behaviors. The "Danger" gets paid out when the documentation of such things gets out to the public. If our government wants to protect its diplomatic efforts, then DON'T ACCRUE the risk in the first place. Then you don't have to fear the leaks.
And if Mastercard and Visa (who now look like they want a world safe for the KKK and those that sell "Boys for Sex") would just wait for the Analysis before bowing to pressure, then they might get out of this without looking like fools.
What you are saying is that what we have today is good enough for the future, as far as the eye can see. You do not want to watch videos on Youtube, you do not want programming delivered over the Internet, you do not want news delivery via podcasts over the Internet, or real time maps, or traffic/weather reports.
I do not "fund your hobby" when you watch all the sports channels 24/7, and you do not "fund my hobby" when I watch YouTube videos all day. But when TelcomX charges you a flat rate to deliver "Sports Bits" to support your "hobby" while I pay out the WaZoo to seek programming outside the control of TelcomX....
THEN the problem still isn't that I am paying for your hobby!!! Like you imply, nothing has changed except....
I am getting shafted in an attempt to force me back onto their broadcast schedule!!! My "hobby" and your "hobby" are no different. We are both sucking down bandwidth. But the media companies can control the broadcast schedule of your "Sport Bits" hobby, while my DIY entertainment schedule eludes their control, and denies media companies their Advertisement Eyeballs.
Seriously, why do we have to pay more as improvements in technology drive the costs towards zero?
I don't much care if we go to a "Pay as you go" as long as the cost of such access continues to drive towards zero the same way everything else with computer systems has done historically. However, if we do not have competition, and we allow the big companies to erect huge barriers to entry against competition, then not only will this cost us as consumers, but will bash our ability to compete in the world, and bash our economy into the ground.
The FCC has no responsibility to safeguard the income for Internet providers, Cable providers, or Media companies. Their responsibility is to the citizens and to establish fair rules for competition. However, competition doesn't have the political clout that corporate America has.
"With better sharing of Intel Comes Danger"
I love this stuff. What Danger?
We are being told that this release of information has harmed the ability of the U.S. to carry out diplomacy. In what way? That we tell lies and other governments tell lies, and now some of these lies have been exposed? What was the "Danger"? Wasn't the danger in the telling of the lies in the first place? Better sharing of Intel didn't bring about this danger.
Besides, if this data dump was so easily acquired (I am assuming the obvious here, that Wikileaks never had to go all "Tom Cruise/Mission Impossible" to get it), surely the data dump was no surprise to various other governments. I'd even guess that this is a fraction of what our enemies know about what we have been saying to ourselves for decades. How could it be otherwise?
So the "Danger" is that increase sharing might also include the public? If there is a change here, it is that the public got into the loop. Is it possible that they might have to abide by a higher level of ethics to avoid embarrassing lies coming out in future leaks? Is it possible that this is the "Danger"?
I am struggling here. So far I haven't heard about anything leaked which can be properly described as a "Danger" appeared with the leak itself. All of the best tidbits I have heard so far that might cause some diplomatic ruffle are due to actions that either 1) Should not have occurred (agreements to lie to the public), or 2) Need not have occurred (Let's call Putin "Batman").
I don't like to negotiate in business with people that live in secret worlds. I don't like the fact that our government loves secrets. The default for government should be to play their cards on TOP of the table, face up. When secrets are really necessary, they become easier to keep if their numbers are few, and the period of secrecy is of very short duration.
Just because something is "hard to do" doesn't mean you can copyright it. And it doesn't mean that something is primarily an artistic expression.
It is instructive to consider why you cannot copyright fashion in current law (something that the Fashion copyright bill intends to change). Fashion is considered primarily utilitarian, i.e. you wear a shirt to cover your top, and wear pants to cover your bottom. To allow copyright to control basic utilitarian functions would be hugely damaging to the fashion industry. Even the Fashion Copyright bill acknowledges this fact, restricting fashion copyright to 3 years, and only to identical copies.
Nobody says making attractive cloths isn't hard to do. Nobody is saying that poorly designed cloths make some people cringe. In fact, there can be huge artistic components to the design of both cloths and APIs.
But at the end of the day, you wear boots to cover your feet, gloves to cover your hands, and hats to cover your head, and belts to hold up your pants, etc. etc. You use APIs to paint buttons and fields on windows, write to files, access the internet, etc. etc.
These functions are primarily utilitarian in nature...
APIs are designed to allow certain functionalities in computer systems, and the market is ill served by restricting the control of their use perpetually to one company.
If copyrights are allowed for APIs, then we are all screwed. Let's count the ways:
Copyright on APIs would amount to a nearly 100 year lock on building systems that conform to various interfaces. APIs are all derivative, and companies like IBM could assert control over vast ranges of APIs that are clearly derived from their earlier systems. At the same time, changes to APIs produce opportunities to produce new copyrights (even as their use might be prohibited due to infringement on other APIs). Copyrights on APIs would effectively drive all small businesses out of programming, as nothing can be done without the use of an API, and all the control of APIs would reside with the historical companies who first designed the APIs we all use. Even the big companies today might not be able to assert control over APIs whose original authorship might be hard to nail down today.
As I have pointed out in the past, not one single company has secured all the IP required to produce a smart phone. If the courts side with Oracle on their claim that they have a copyright on an API, then no company will be able to secure the IP required to write a single program. Only by having vast army of lawyers can any company produce a smart phone today. Allow copyrighted APIs, and only by having a vast army of of lawyers can anyone write a program.
I can only hope our courts can see the problem with this idea.
.... One company for $250,000 can prohibit the application of this idea to systems that do not pay up.
This is what is wrong with this deal, off the top of my head:
1) NASA would have developed this technology anyway, one must assume, as they haven't auctioned patents in the past (at least, not that I know of). In any case, how could the patent have been a motivator to do the work? Wouldn't it have been the problem they needed to solve? And who believes 250K is enough of a motivator for NASA anyway?
2) Now that we have the innovation done, all the patent is going to do is prevent its application for 20 years
3) Many companies have been generating test cases from Rules for years. Isn't there a prior art issue here?
4) Why should we fund government research only to tie it up with IP on a restrictive basis for only 250K? How is this a good deal for the Tax Payer? (It would be different if the income to government was big enough to offset the Taxes we pay, but this doesn't do that)
5) Software Patents! Evil! They are most certainly a mechanism to patent ideas rather than implementations, as there are far too many ways to implement an algorithm in software to restrict the patent to an actual invention.
When I was there, Microsoft graded every project on a curve, with compensation in the balance. The "lowest" performers got slammed, the peak performs got rich. I imagine nothing has changed, except fewer people get rich.
Their system of evaluating and compensating developers rewards "hot dogs", who by any standard are good developers, but penalizes cooperation and useful developer documentation. Anything you might do to help someone on your team be successful automatically and in a very measured way hurts your own compensation. Few developers can rise above this and work with others outside of what is necessary to get the appropriate check marks on the review. And when individuals do work closely with each other, they are very selective as to who they work with. You can't afford to make *everyone* on your team successful. Remember, the bell curve WILL be applied.
Other mechanisms are used at Microsoft are very good. They have a huge commitment to testing, and a huge commitment to process. They know within a few months into a project when they are going to deliver. They know well in advance when projects are going to be late. They research and know the competition.
However, at the end of the day, their culture does not allow for clean design. Clean design means working together and making it a priority to make all developers on a team as productive as possible. But even if the differences between developers are tiny, the bell curve will be applied. People will win, and people will lose. And don't think for a moment that subjective decisions do not come into play based on a developer's reputation and ties with other developers.
In the end, if you don't know how something works, don't expect the comments to be useful. Don't be surprised if two interfaces sit next to each other and both do nearly the same thing. Obviously one developer implemented something, and the next couldn't figure out how to use it.
Microsoft's bloat is mostly a result of their development culture. Sure, supporting ten years of file formats is a factor, but not as important as their development culture, IMHO.
Microsoft was once a hugely internally competitive company, one that favored the absolute hot dog. The person that could write code and deliver code faster than anyone else (who cares if it can be understood as long as it was written with Hungarian Notation). Obviously some things have changed in the 15 or so years since I was there. Still, this environment is increasingly ineffective as software complexity goes up by leaps and bounds, and their ability to reward working in such a crappy, loner, dog eat dog fashion has passed away long ago.
So Microsoft (like IBM, Oracle, and many others) buy innovation rather than do innovation.
It doesn't really matter that Second Life doesn't blend with anything Microsoft has. It does matter that they do *something* innovative. They have been in a hugely dry spell for a long long time (technically speaking). Maybe it has been so dry that virtual worlds look promising to Microsoft management? Maybe they see injecting more power into virtual worlds with the increasing processing power of portable devices (smart phones, net books, etc. fused with LED projectors and virtual input technologies)?
My complaint ISN'T that the solution is old, but that very little has changed in the SQL/RDBMS approach through the years, despite the vast changes in hardware, the vast experience we have gathered in the awkwardness of using SQL to persist data, and the known performance costs to the SQL/RDBMS approach to persistence.
Maybe my summary statement stinks; it certainly has turned into a useless analysis of what the statement was taken to say vs. what I as an author think it says and meant for it to say.
So let's call you right about how poor the statement was as a summary, and me not so wrong in what I intended it to mean.
Maybe it is the fact that RDBS based solutions are too fragile and are too often crap. We need to develop in representations that make sense to developers, and have the right sorts of compiler technologies and tools that build the proper run time representations for performance.
That you CAN build manageable/fast/testable/efficient applications is only the first step.
The second is wringing manageable/fast/testable/efficient applications out of mere mediocre developers.
Uh.... If I never said that "being old" is a reason to replace something.... As you would have known if you actually read the sentence you quoted. Given this observation, what am I to say about the fact that the Core i7 is based on a 1960's view of a problem? Besides, the Core i7 ISN'T a 1960's based solution, but is based on a 1960's solution. There is an important difference between the two statements.
Everything we do in CS is based on work that goes back to 1939 and even earlier. However, in the case of the Core i7 (as an example) we CHANGE the approach to try and fix various problems we have with our performance.
Personally, I think going back to old ideas and realizing that we can now implement them better/faster/cleaner is a great way to approach many problems. That a solution is "old" isn't a problem, but it is a problem if a solution has known issues, and we just live with them.
I will absolutely agree that a well designed database does not have performance issues. However, I work in a segment of the industry that works with Health and Human services, and the databases have issues that make any reasonable DBA sick.
None the less, database throughput is always an issue. Our applications scale just fine for our needs (as you imply) but it remains that even if only one person is running one application against the database, the through put is just "meh" at best. This is because every operation requires queries against the database to move significant amounts of data from many different tables. Could we build applications with better performance? Absolutely, and using traditional Relational Databases too, if the Schema was properly designed.
All of this begs the question. The real question is why we use a technology that is so sensitive to bad schema design? Why use a technology that has such a high baseline overhead? Why use a technology that is so tedious? Why use a technology that is so hard to test?
Absolutely the developer doesn't have to build applications that inherit all these problems from the database. I have designed applications that sit on databases, and have none of these faults. But unfortunately not all the applications I work on were designed to avoid these issues.
Now you ARE right that I am not a DBA. But if I have a fault, it isn't because I don't understand the DBA, but that I don't understand the database....
And yeah, in my rant I criticized SQL and ACID and relational databases in general as if they were all the same. They are not, and in fact need not have any overlap at all. Still, I'll stand by my rant as an expression of my annoyance with various aspects (these and others) of this particular approach to the persistence problem.
The "old" part isn't the problem, but that there ARE other solutions and better solutions (that might address all previous issues) that are being actively ignored.
You are not going to win points for reading comprehension if you don't read the whole sentence.
Consider the problem HIPAA's security requirements might be for call centers run out of India. Any evidence or even suspicion that personal/medical information is leaked due to such "open access" requirements by the government of India, and all those call centers will move over night to China and elsewhere.
... because on every application I have ever worked on, the Database has always been the performance bottleneck. Testing of DB applications is always a problem, because the running of tests generally changes the database, rendering tests unrepeatable without reseting the database. Configuring applications to use this database or that database also ends up being a problem for most applications.
Furthermore, while programming in general has continued to progress through many languages, exploring many different ways to describe problems, SQL is still SQL. SQL is fixed in a syntax and written with naming conventions and styles that can best be described as neo-Cobal.
Bottom line: SQL is tedious, ugly, slow, and difficult to test. And don't get me started on stored procedures and the difficulty of using source code management with stored procedures.
Last gripe: A traditional Relational database imposes ACID overhead on every application, even if you don't really need it or use it. This is like a programming language that imposes a SORT overhead on all your data structures even if you rarely or never need to sort them.
Why is it that we continue to use a technology based on a 1960's view of a problem when clearly there ARE other solutions and ways to approach said problem?
To be prepared, the military plays war games, and one must assume that some play the part of our foes (in this case the Taliban, but perhaps generic terrorists, or Germans, or Russians, etc.). The idea of getting kids into playing games as a RECRUITMENT tool isn't lost on the U.S. Army! Such games require people to either play the part of the foes, or programmers to program the part of the foes. Studies have shown that games decrease reaction time, and provide a way to teach combat techniques that are used in real battlefields.
So just from the Military's point of view, military games are a positive influence as they prepare kids to be soldiers (I'd rather have games that prepared kids to do something else myself, BTW, but most of those just are not as fun to play with my boys... It is always more fun to shoot the Dad).
Now I doubt the Military is going to come out and defend EA here. But in their heart of hearts they are on EA's side.
It is tough to fight what I call the "Escalation of Righteousness" where somebody stands up and says, "This is in bad taste." Often, it is because "This" is in bad taste, or isn't polite, or maybe just isn't something the average Adult cares about enough to defend it. So a few people stand up and say, "We should stop this!" Most people don't agree, but don't disagree enough to fight it, and "This" gets banned even though there is no point in doing so.
I have seen this over Halloween, over playing cops and robbers in a school playground, in playing doge ball at recess, and now over a video game.
We just have to stop this. The idea that this game is "un-American" is bogus every which way you look at it. Speak up people, and shine the light on such ideas and show them to be the idiotic ideas that they are.
5 billion is a small number in the context of the national economy. In fact, it is so small as to be dwarfed by the margin of error when Considering economic trends.
And in only 150 years, the gas you save pays for the car!
--Assuming you drive an earth mover to work today.
So ... 100 TB / 1 Million ==> 1 TB / $10,000.
A 1 TB drive is 60-100 dollars. .12 cents per KW/h, that's 63.12 per year.
The KW/h required to run a 60 watt drive 24/7 = 60/1000 KW x 24 hours x 365.25 days = 526 KW/h.
At
Even if we double or triple the hardware costs, they will only make up a few percentages of the 10 grand per TB cited here.
The labor to maintain 100 or 200 or 400 drives is going to be relatively constant. In fact, with a little more reasonable monitoring software (just reporting drive failures in a raid system, so the labor just has to pull bad drives and replace with good drives), I don't think the capacity of a data center is all that related to the labor costs.
End result, it is just cheaper and easier to throw hardware at problems to reduce labor costs than to pay for expensive software to monitor capacity and be more efficient in the use of capacity.
AT&T definitely drops tons of calls in Austin Texas. But I don't have much trouble in other places in Texas outside of the spotty coverage on 79 between East Texas and Austin. Even their coverage in Oklahoma and Kansas has improved over the last couple of years.
I got grandfathered in on AT&T for unlimited 3G networking, and my phone will set up a wireless hotspot to allow tethering devices over wireless. My phone supports SD cards, lets me install my own applications, and lets me copy files via a file system to its SD card (over a standard USB cable which also allows me to charge my phone).
But of course, I have an Android, which isn't setting the bar higher than Apple. Right.
When the iPhone 4 came out, it did not have a single feature not already present in the Nexus One that shipped first in January, and was available for AT&T in March. Its only edge on the Nexus One was a forward facing camera for video conferencing and a higher resolution screen. It has a slower processor (we can only guess, as Apple won't admit to its processor speed), crippled multitasking, slower browser (than Android 2.2), no desktop, no widget support, etc.
And I'd buy another Android (mine's a Nexus One) in a heart beat. I don't understand the idea that only 20 percent of Android owners would buy another Android phone.
The *constitution* does not discuss all the points you are making, but simply lays out the plan *for that time*. The warning label suggests you should consider the historical perspective into account when reading the constitution.
Nothing in the constitution goes any further than to count a slave as 3/5's a person without giving them rights. Not until the 13th amendment is slavery abolished, and not until the 15th amendment is citizenship and the vote guaranteed without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
No commentary is provided in the constitution on these matters. Nothing to say the previous rules were morally suspect. It just says what they were.
Which underlines the need to understand the constitution in a historical context. We SHOULD understand the constitution within the context you yourself described. It isn't too unreasonable to suggest the reader understand the historical context. But as I said, I don't think it is necessary; the reader ought to be able to understand the need to know the historical context of the constitution via common sense.