Wow, I bet it feels nice to have so much money that you can subsidize the media industry's foray into HDTV. On the other hand, I don't really give a damn about HDTV, and don't feel it is my responsibility to subsidize opening their new market. I don't give a damn that the same old retreaded stale homogenized crap that Hollywood and the RIAA pump out now comes to me in 3200x2400 resolution at 32bit color depth. Your telivision will not be revolutionized.
Some people don't only want to be mindless consumers. Fair use is necessary to participate in the generation of culture, for art, for literature, for many common goods of society. Currently the "media industry" has a pretty tight lock on culture - it's a one way street: they generate it and we slurp it up. When they need to turn another buck they deprecate what's currently "cool" and sell us a new retread.
"But I guess it's OK for poor people to not be able to afford entertainment, right?"
If I recall correctly it is the poor that are the largest consumers of popular entertainment. Which makes this even more a crime. Because us (relatively) rich geeks can just go out and upgrade or hack around with our thousands of dollars of PC equipment while the poor are hoodwinked into a higher and higher barrier to participation in culture. And that is an utter shame.
"You already stated that you would just make backups anyway. Who's going to push that big red button rendering the earths supply of vcr's inoperable?"
* one day the VHS tapes will inevitably degrade to being unusable * same thing goes for VCRs * I can back up my content digitally, but there is no guarantee that the MPAA/DVD industry won't simply refuse to play any DVDs that haven't been stamped with their particular copy-restriction technology, rendering my backups unusable * So basically I have to wait it out until some technology comes along that will allow me to restore and use my backups * Until that day, *which may never come*, the media industry has rendered my content worthless
Now ask yourself the same then about data on your hard drive. How comfortable would you be if the hard drive industry could just forcefully deprecate all current hard drives and force all new hard drives to carry "officially stamped" data, rendering your data useless?
"Don't you agree that it is hypocritical to cry foul regarding CD copy-protection, but not the guards built into VHS and DVD works?"
Where have you been? We've been crying foul the whole damn time. Or at least I have. If media companies really think that their content is so precious and valuable, why don't they just raise the price, instead of colluding with distributors and presenters to retroactively destroy the worth of a product you have purchased? The answer is it is NOT worth as much as they are making it out to be and they are introducing artificial barriers to keep profit margins high. There is no technical reason why the data on a VHS should become worthless just because there is a new storage medium, or presentation technology. But because of copy-restrictions, and presentation-restrictions these companies get to retroactively decide how and when and where you can use content you previously purchased.
Likewise, EULAs are now becoming really despicable. They are telling you that not only don't you own what you purchased, but that you can only use it in certain circumstances circumscribed by the EULA which comes with an implicit time limit (until the next version of software or operating system or machine you have to purchase, etc. etc.), and in some cases, your actions with the product you purchased can be tracked, and your rights to your own creations appropriated!
Yet exercising rights you'd otherwise have with physical items does not "steal" anything material from them in any way. The whole effort is an effort to cement in the minds of people (the government particular) that speculative potential profits are an asset OWNED a priori by these companies and that anything anybody does to perturb the predictions of their staff of actuarians should be illegal, because God knows they are OWED these profits.
Mod parent up. Oh hell, I'll just quote it http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=34332&cid=3716 604 here:
You forgot to mention that most of us aren't allowed to "protect" our property in a manner that can cause damage to thief and non-thief alike. For example, the city won't allow me to run a high-power electrical fence around my yard, even if I do have a warning sign. Of course any real thief would have some insulated wire cutters. Its only the neighbors' kids that have to worry.
We also don't get the choice to sabotage our personal information with copy-protection which will destroy the computers of companies that take our personal information, and sell it to partners, and spammers, and god knows who.
Well, nobody is *forcing* people to put non-CDs in their CDROMS and expecting them to play. I mean, I don't stick bagels into my CDROM and expect something to happen, and then sue bagel manufacturers. That said, of course this is deceitful, because the RIAA wants to slip this by the public and not tell them that "these shiny discs that look identical to CDs are actually not CDs, but instead Cdrom Destroyers". In cases like these I'm sure there is grounds for a case. Just like if gas stations just suddenly started putting maple syrup in their pumps without any warning.
I won't convert to DVD until it is completely safe of DMCA/UBDTCADFDSASBXCASFAF/copyright-gestapo restrictions. We fall so easily for the same old trick. Now we have to repurchase all our old content because VHS is being phased out (just like we had to pay x2 to upgrade to CD)? No thanks, I'd rather *legally* digitize my copy-unrestricted VHS tapes and burn them onto (if it is DVDR I'll already be unduly taxed for "piracy"). In fact, the first thing I'm going to do after I purchase the new VHS movie I want today, is to download *legally* a DivXed copy (save myself the trouble of digitization). Just watch 10 years from now it will be flourescent video disc technology and we will be on the same upgrade treadmill throwing away mountains of DVDs and repurchasing our property all over again.
"2) This is a pointless exercise and serves no useful purpose."
Well I don't know what a "handwriting test" is, but writing code on paper sure does serve a purpose. It illustrates that you can think through a problem and put it on paper (hopefully with a minimum of mistakes) without being at a computer. It is useful. If anything, if you are bored, you can just code with a pencil and paper for "fun".
It's shouldn't be a function of "development costs" either. I can claim to "invent" one click shopping with $1000000 of research spent on twinkies. Who cares. Effort in itself is not an indication of value. Patent durations need to be tied to the rate of development of the industry/field they are in. Software patent? Fine. 1 or 2 years. Business patent? Ok, maybe 1 year for you.
On the other hand, interference isn't going to be as likely at a global level than with DNS, so regional instead of global control makes sense. Who cares what somebody on the other side of the globe uses as long as it does not interfere with you.
You're pissed because a project which gave cancer to many workers (and unsuspecting civilians who were too close to test sites and unwarned), killed hundreds of thousands of people (some of whose decendants might actually be living in Nevada), and a technology whose refuse is now being dumped in your state, is not being commemorated by a license plate? If anything, I'd want the plates to be a mushroom with a big circle and cross over it.
Yeah, I don't get this either. People are saying basically that the South African government shouldn't get control because they "don't understand the internet" or are doing "stupid things". So what? It's THEIR domain! If they want to fuck it up, so be it. Let their government and their citizens deal with it. Why does the rest of the world, let alone a bunch of irrelevant geeks, have to be involved in this issue? That the South African government "does a good job" with its domain in the eyes of us geeks is NOT a prerequisite for sovereignty.
"Money can mean the difference between living in an apartment or buying a decent house."
These are both shelter. Anything extra is a luxury (relative to the vast majority of people in the world).
"It can mean the ability to support new additions to the family."
Reproduction is not essential to survival. Again, it is a luxury.
"It can be the freedom to fly home to visit your family without having to worry about the price of the plane ticket."
Utter luxury. I wonder how long you would last if dropped randomly in the middle of Africa.
Wake up geeks: statistics show we live in the richest of the rich countries and get paid relatively exorbitant wads of cash to sit on our asses and press buttons, and waste our time reading Slashdot. We are rank bourgeoisie.
"You're also forgetting that Java has limited control over the operating system it's running on. For security, this is great, but when it comes to making proper software, it's not so good."
Granted. But even.NET and now OpenBSD are copying the security features of Java.
"Java apps just don't look as good and don't work as well as regular apps." "many Java apps have weird customized UIs, or use awful Motif style interfaces. Thta's not what we want, we want people using native interface libraries, and.NET encourages this."
Again, true. Then again, let's just see how "nice".NET apps look on anything but Windows operating systems. Also, for reference, check out IBM's Simple Widget Toolkit (tutorial)which is a very thin layer on top of native widgets...applications using SWT are very fast and nice looking. I think you'll be surprised.
That said, it is true that Java isn't as good on the client as it is on the server. Take a wild guess as to why that is...
"If you are wondering what I'm talking about, the easiest example is to try and compile jdk13 from the ports in FreeBSD, you can't w/o agreeing to about 500 agreements and giving them plenty of marketoid info."
And you think you will have better success with.NET??
"That along was enough to make me recomend against using java in favor of a VC app on a NT server for our most recent project (And I'm an 'Open Source Weenie')."
I thought we were talking FreeBSD. So not being able to build a proprietary VM on FreeBSD makes you choose an even more proprietary solution on an even more proprietary OS...?
"and the source was Free (Free as in speach, not free as in downloadable)"
Again, how is.NET any better in this regard? Is the code for the.NET libraries even viewable (if not "open source")?? (Sun packages most of the source to their libraries with their SDKs for free for "reference" purposes)
"by shutting out MS they screwed themselfs"
Dude, MS shut *THEM* out, once they saw Java as a threat.
To their credit Sun has done a great job with Java...they still maintain control (and with a competitor like MS and.NET, why wouldn't they want to?), but they have been increasingly open...they even recently came to an agreement with the Apache group on open source java J2EE certification. I'm really not holding my breath to see if MS is going to be more open-source friendly than Java.
"OK, is anyone else sick of the inane way in which we compliment ourselves continuously?"
Yes. Everybody is so enraptured with their cause that they can't even see the deficits in front of their face. Unix (including Linux) needs an overhaul. It's the least worst popular operating system around but that's not saying much. It *is* based on old ideas (no matter how well it *implements* them) for an old era. The Unix culture has the tired old mentality of "it was always this way so it should always be this way". I could list a litany of criticisms, but instead, we should just realize that chest thumping will get us nowhere. We have to soberly compare Unix (and Linux, *BSD, etc.) with other operating systems and the state of the art.
".NET's virtual machine and class libraries can do WAY more than what Java can."
Like? From what I can tell,.NET (or rather CLR) adds some small syntactic features (simpler inlining of native code, automatic boxing), and some "web services integration". If you look at the.NET class library, it is almost literally a 1-to-1 mapping to the Java class libraries. And automatic boxing and parameterized types are coming to Java in 1.5. As far as web services and middleware, Java is FAR ahead of the pack with J2EE which is absolutely dominating enterprise middleware and what is now being hyped as "web services". Servlet engines and JSP were in production for quite a while before.NET thank-you-very-much. Unfortunately MS did everything it could to kill the prospects of Java on the client, so we never really saw that come to fruition, while of course.NET will be getting automatic first class treatment on the client side which it will undoubtedly be able to leverage to accelerate acceptence in areas which J2EE is currently dominating.
".NET is just a VM/platform, whereas 'Java' was both the JVM *and* a language."
Well,.NET is a VM/platform geared towards a particular type of language (e.g., C#). From what I've read everything else is pretty much C# with different keyword/token names. That's not to say it is a *bad* thing, since MS's goal is mostly migrating its *current* base of developers. But it's far from magically-better-than-Java.
"You couldn't load up your old C software, and get it working in Java."
Woah! Could that have been a feature!;)
"with VB.NET, VC.NET etc.. this is a possibility."
Yes, because the goal of.NET is to migrate current MS developers to a new architecture with many of the benefits of the Java platform.
"People have already created FORTH and COBOL compilers for.NET!"
Will wonders never cease! Perhaps you want to take a look at a list of the many languages that run on the Java VM (the page says "160 systems"...I'm not sure what that means, but there are a whole bunch). All this, long before.NET was anything but vapor.
"but it has several very important things going for it, and Java had none of them."
Come on, be fair, you are really pulling this out of your ass.
Actually I'd have to say I like, and am impressed by the.NET architecture, and regularly step in to defend the architecture (if not MS) in front of FUDders and bashers. It is a great step up from the mess of native languages Microsoft was supporting. It has many of the nice features of the Java platform, and some new ones. But it would be really naive and unfair to not recognize the tremendous success Java has had and is having today in the same realms.NET is just now attempting to address. Maybe being one of those who are just now boarding the ship makes things look so much more rosier, than to myself, who has been on the ship already for 3 years;)
The thing that is useful about blogs is that you can draw a community that generates content for *itself*. Now, having a blog so that 3 or 4 employees alone could post "updated news" would probably be rather pointless. However, if the blog was local community-centered and *integrated* with the newspaper, you could do things like publish the most popular posts/threads in a real physical newspaper product. *That* would be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I bet it feels nice to have so much money that you can subsidize the media industry's foray into HDTV. On the other hand, I don't really give a damn about HDTV, and don't feel it is my responsibility to subsidize opening their new market. I don't give a damn that the same old retreaded stale homogenized crap that Hollywood and the RIAA pump out now comes to me in 3200x2400 resolution at 32bit color depth. Your telivision will not be revolutionized.
Some people don't only want to be mindless consumers. Fair use is necessary to participate in the generation of culture, for art, for literature, for many common goods of society. Currently the "media industry" has a pretty tight lock on culture - it's a one way street: they generate it and we slurp it up. When they need to turn another buck they deprecate what's currently "cool" and sell us a new retread.
"But I guess it's OK for poor people to not be able to afford entertainment, right?"
If I recall correctly it is the poor that are the largest consumers of popular entertainment. Which makes this even more a crime. Because us (relatively) rich geeks can just go out and upgrade or hack around with our thousands of dollars of PC equipment while the poor are hoodwinked into a higher and higher barrier to participation in culture. And that is an utter shame.
"You already stated that you would just make backups anyway. Who's going to push that big red button rendering the earths supply of vcr's inoperable?"
* one day the VHS tapes will inevitably degrade to being unusable
* same thing goes for VCRs
* I can back up my content digitally, but there is no guarantee that the MPAA/DVD industry won't simply refuse to play any DVDs that haven't been stamped with their particular copy-restriction technology, rendering my backups unusable
* So basically I have to wait it out until some technology comes along that will allow me to restore and use my backups
* Until that day, *which may never come*, the media industry has rendered my content worthless
Now ask yourself the same then about data on your hard drive. How comfortable would you be if the hard drive industry could just forcefully deprecate all current hard drives and force all new hard drives to carry "officially stamped" data, rendering your data useless?
"Don't you agree that it is hypocritical to cry foul regarding CD copy-protection, but not the guards built into VHS and DVD works?"
Where have you been? We've been crying foul the whole damn time. Or at least I have. If media companies really think that their content is so precious and valuable, why don't they just raise the price, instead of colluding with distributors and presenters to retroactively destroy the worth of a product you have purchased? The answer is it is NOT worth as much as they are making it out to be and they are introducing artificial barriers to keep profit margins high. There is no technical reason why the data on a VHS should become worthless just because there is a new storage medium, or presentation technology. But because of copy-restrictions, and presentation-restrictions these companies get to retroactively decide how and when and where you can use content you previously purchased.
Likewise, EULAs are now becoming really despicable. They are telling you that not only don't you own what you purchased, but that you can only use it in certain circumstances circumscribed by the EULA which comes with an implicit time limit (until the next version of software or operating system or machine you have to purchase, etc. etc.), and in some cases, your actions with the product you purchased can be tracked, and your rights to your own creations appropriated!
Yet exercising rights you'd otherwise have with physical items does not "steal" anything material from them in any way. The whole effort is an effort to cement in the minds of people (the government particular) that speculative potential profits are an asset OWNED a priori by these companies and that anything anybody does to perturb the predictions of their staff of actuarians should be illegal, because God knows they are OWED these profits.
We also don't get the choice to sabotage our personal information with copy-protection which will destroy the computers of companies that take our personal information, and sell it to partners, and spammers, and god knows who.
Well, nobody is *forcing* people to put non-CDs in their CDROMS and expecting them to play. I mean, I don't stick bagels into my CDROM and expect something to happen, and then sue bagel manufacturers. That said, of course this is deceitful, because the RIAA wants to slip this by the public and not tell them that "these shiny discs that look identical to CDs are actually not CDs, but instead Cdrom Destroyers". In cases like these I'm sure there is grounds for a case. Just like if gas stations just suddenly started putting maple syrup in their pumps without any warning.
I won't convert to DVD until it is completely safe of DMCA/UBDTCADFDSASBXCASFAF/copyright-gestapo restrictions. We fall so easily for the same old trick. Now we have to repurchase all our old content because VHS is being phased out (just like we had to pay x2 to upgrade to CD)? No thanks, I'd rather *legally* digitize my copy-unrestricted VHS tapes and burn them onto (if it is DVDR I'll already be unduly taxed for "piracy"). In fact, the first thing I'm going to do after I purchase the new VHS movie I want today, is to download *legally* a DivXed copy (save myself the trouble of digitization). Just watch 10 years from now it will be flourescent video disc technology and we will be on the same upgrade treadmill throwing away mountains of DVDs and repurchasing our property all over again.
"Silicon Valley: the only place where men meet to boast about who has the smallest."
Not to mention, fastest...
"Write code away from a computer."
"2) This is a pointless exercise and serves no useful purpose."
Well I don't know what a "handwriting test" is, but writing code on paper sure does serve a purpose. It illustrates that you can think through a problem and put it on paper (hopefully with a minimum of mistakes) without being at a computer. It is useful. If anything, if you are bored, you can just code with a pencil and paper for "fun".
It's shouldn't be a function of "development costs" either. I can claim to "invent" one click shopping with $1000000 of research spent on twinkies. Who cares. Effort in itself is not an indication of value. Patent durations need to be tied to the rate of development of the industry/field they are in. Software patent? Fine. 1 or 2 years. Business patent? Ok, maybe 1 year for you.
On the other hand, interference isn't going to be as likely at a global level than with DNS, so regional instead of global control makes sense. Who cares what somebody on the other side of the globe uses as long as it does not interfere with you.
You're pissed because a project which gave cancer to many workers (and unsuspecting civilians who were too close to test sites and unwarned), killed hundreds of thousands of people (some of whose decendants might actually be living in Nevada), and a technology whose refuse is now being dumped in your state, is not being commemorated by a license plate? If anything, I'd want the plates to be a mushroom with a big circle and cross over it.
How about Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
Yeah, I don't get this either. People are saying basically that the South African government shouldn't get control because they "don't understand the internet" or are doing "stupid things". So what? It's THEIR domain! If they want to fuck it up, so be it. Let their government and their citizens deal with it. Why does the rest of the world, let alone a bunch of irrelevant geeks, have to be involved in this issue? That the South African government "does a good job" with its domain in the eyes of us geeks is NOT a prerequisite for sovereignty.
"Money can mean the difference between living in an apartment or buying a decent house."
These are both shelter. Anything extra is a luxury (relative to the vast majority of people in the world).
"It can mean the ability to support new additions to the family."
Reproduction is not essential to survival. Again, it is a luxury.
"It can be the freedom to fly home to visit your family without having to worry about the price of the plane ticket."
Utter luxury. I wonder how long you would last if dropped randomly in the middle of Africa.
Wake up geeks: statistics show we live in the richest of the rich countries and get paid relatively exorbitant wads of cash to sit on our asses and press buttons, and waste our time reading Slashdot. We are rank bourgeoisie.
"You're also forgetting that Java has limited control over the operating system it's running on. For security, this is great, but when it comes to making proper software, it's not so good."
.NET and now OpenBSD are copying the security features of Java.
.NET encourages this."
.NET apps look on anything but Windows operating systems. Also, for reference, check out IBM's Simple Widget Toolkit (tutorial)which is a very thin layer on top of native widgets...applications using SWT are very fast and nice looking. I think you'll be surprised.
Granted. But even
"Java apps just don't look as good and don't work as well as regular apps."
"many Java apps have weird customized UIs, or use awful Motif style interfaces. Thta's not what we want, we want people using native interface libraries, and
Again, true. Then again, let's just see how "nice"
That said, it is true that Java isn't as good on the client as it is on the server. Take a wild guess as to why that is...
"If you are wondering what I'm talking about, the easiest example is to try and compile jdk13 from the ports in FreeBSD, you can't w/o agreeing to about 500 agreements and giving them plenty of marketoid info."
.NET??
.NET any better in this regard? Is the code for the .NET libraries even viewable (if not "open source")?? (Sun packages most of the source to their libraries with their SDKs for free for "reference" purposes)
.NET, why wouldn't they want to?), but they have been increasingly open...they even recently came to an agreement with the Apache group on open source java J2EE certification. I'm really not holding my breath to see if MS is going to be more open-source friendly than Java.
And you think you will have better success with
"That along was enough to make me recomend against using java in favor of a VC app on a NT server for our most recent project (And I'm an 'Open Source Weenie')."
I thought we were talking FreeBSD. So not being able to build a proprietary VM on FreeBSD makes you choose an even more proprietary solution on an even more proprietary OS...?
"If the java specs were published"
They ARE published: Language Spec VM Spec
"and the source was Free (Free as in speach, not free as in downloadable)"
Again, how is
"by shutting out MS they screwed themselfs"
Dude, MS shut *THEM* out, once they saw Java as a threat.
To their credit Sun has done a great job with Java...they still maintain control (and with a competitor like MS and
You know you're right! Anybody interested in a used set of principles!? Going fast!
"OK, is anyone else sick of the inane way in which we compliment ourselves continuously?"
Yes. Everybody is so enraptured with their cause that they can't even see the deficits in front of their face. Unix (including Linux) needs an overhaul. It's the least worst popular operating system around but that's not saying much. It *is* based on old ideas (no matter how well it *implements* them) for an old era. The Unix culture has the tired old mentality of "it was always this way so it should always be this way". I could list a litany of criticisms, but instead, we should just realize that chest thumping will get us nowhere. We have to soberly compare Unix (and Linux, *BSD, etc.) with other operating systems and the state of the art.
Why don't you ask Bill Joy what he thinks.
".NET's virtual machine and class libraries can do WAY more than what Java can."
.NET (or rather CLR) adds some small syntactic features (simpler inlining of native code, automatic boxing), and some "web services integration". If you look at the .NET class library, it is almost literally a 1-to-1 mapping to the Java class libraries. And automatic boxing and parameterized types are coming to Java in 1.5. As far as web services and middleware, Java is FAR ahead of the pack with J2EE which is absolutely dominating enterprise middleware and what is now being hyped as "web services". Servlet engines and JSP were in production for quite a while before .NET thank-you-very-much. Unfortunately MS did everything it could to kill the prospects of Java on the client, so we never really saw that come to fruition, while of course .NET will be getting automatic first class treatment on the client side which it will undoubtedly be able to leverage to accelerate acceptence in areas which J2EE is currently dominating.
.NET is a VM/platform geared towards a particular type of language (e.g., C#). From what I've read everything else is pretty much C# with different keyword/token names. That's not to say it is a *bad* thing, since MS's goal is mostly migrating its *current* base of developers. But it's far from magically-better-than-Java.
;)
.NET is to migrate current MS developers to a new architecture with many of the benefits of the Java platform.
.NET!"
.NET was anything but vapor.
.NET architecture, and regularly step in to defend the architecture (if not MS) in front of FUDders and bashers. It is a great step up from the mess of native languages Microsoft was supporting. It has many of the nice features of the Java platform, and some new ones. But it would be really naive and unfair to not recognize the tremendous success Java has had and is having today in the same realms .NET is just now attempting to address. Maybe being one of those who are just now boarding the ship makes things look so much more rosier, than to myself, who has been on the ship already for 3 years ;)
Like? From what I can tell,
".NET is just a VM/platform, whereas 'Java' was both the JVM *and* a language."
Well,
"You couldn't load up your old C software, and get it working in Java."
Woah! Could that have been a feature!
"with VB.NET, VC.NET etc.. this is a possibility."
Yes, because the goal of
"People have already created FORTH and COBOL compilers for
Will wonders never cease! Perhaps you want to take a look at a list of the many languages that run on the Java VM (the page says "160 systems"...I'm not sure what that means, but there are a whole bunch). All this, long before
"but it has several very important things going for it, and Java had none of them."
Come on, be fair, you are really pulling this out of your ass.
Actually I'd have to say I like, and am impressed by the
..."and you can then use conventional debugging tools to track down the"
;)
Looks like you should have used it on that sentence
So I guess you don't consider mash ups valid art/mustic.
"Huh, in what way is an aeroplane not mass transit?"
Yeah, sure, I take an aeroplane everyday to work instead of my hour commute...
The US has pretty shitty mass transit (for intra and intercity) compared to Europe (or the rest of the world even).
The thing that is useful about blogs is that you can draw a community that generates content for *itself*. Now, having a blog so that 3 or 4 employees alone could post "updated news" would probably be rather pointless. However, if the blog was local community-centered and *integrated* with the newspaper, you could do things like publish the most popular posts/threads in a real physical newspaper product. *That* would be useful.