What's a DVD-capable set? Are you referring to a TV set? I curious about the number of installed TVs in 1998 that didn't have a composite video input. Anyway, the Atari 2600 came with an adapter for that years ago, so I doubt that was a real problem.
The thing is, there is already segregation on the Internet. It's what domain names do: they segregate. You can send your kid to a website that caters to children, and be reasonably assured that he won't find porn there. But letting your kid roam the whole internet is like letting him wander around the city.
As another example, consider a bookstore. Many bookstores (most, I'd say) cater to adults as well as children. There are many books sold in normal bookstores that contain "adult" material that would be arguably just as harmful as porn. Heck, many bookstores have a whole section of books on sex and sexuality, etc. These books often contain photographs as well as explicit text. Shocking! But to enter these bookstores you don't need to show ID proving your age, and I wouldn't be surprised if a clerk sold a child pretty much any book found in the store.
The internet is a huge place. It can't be controlled (fully) because every country has different laws and what qualifies as "porn" in one locale may not in another. In the UK some daily newspapers feature a page 3 photo of a topless woman. In Canada the equivalent newspapers would never show exposed breasts. Is this newspaper "porn"? What about the website for this newspaper? It depends on the society. Can the US make a law that says that this newspaper must host its website on a different port? I doubt this law would be effective, considering that the site in question is hosted in the UK.
Just as you wouldn't let your child wander around town, or walk into just any store, you should be wary of your child randomly surfing the internet, and visiting just any site. If you're worried, maybe what you need is a whitelist of domains. If your child needs that level of supervision, it's your responsibility to enforce it. We already have "channels" on the internet: these are website addresses. Just like your TV can be configured to block certain channels, so too can your computer be configured to block certain websites. And if the list of sites to block is too large, maybe you should consider blocking all sites, except whitelisted sites, when you're not available to personally supervise.
Ironic that you consider Java to be "Write once, debug everywhere" and yet seem to imply that C# doesn't have this problem going from MS.Net to Mono. I'd be willing to bet money that Java is better at "Write once, run anywhere" than.Net/Mono; I mean, it's not even the same VMs, and in some cases there are whole libraries that are different or unavailable.
Your use of the phrase "Tilting at Windmills" is registered trademark The Estate of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and you are hereby required to cease using this phrase forthwith. Failure to comply will result in legal action pursuant to 15 U.S.C. 1123, 35 U.S.C. 2.
Well, I'll agree that if the question is "Can it be worthwhile to support other browsers in some circumstances", then the answer is simply "yes", however I think it's pretty clear that we're talking about a business running a website, and it's a pretty safe assumption that a business has limited developer resources available for adding new features, and these features (one of which is additional browser support) need to be prioritized. Maybe you work in a company where there are tons of spare dev and test cycles to go around, and you have time to support every browser you want to support, but I work for a major website and I can tell you it's hard enough supporting the main browsers 100% all the time, let alone minor browsers.
Believe me, I'm all for nice, cross-platform designs that work well in lots of browsers, and I wish every website looked awesome in lynx AND every version of IE and firefox, but the reality is pretty basic: there just isn't time. And the reason I brought this up in the first place is that Slashdot discussions about this topic often forget that simple economics drive many of these seemingly strange choices when it comes to browser support. Mac support? Why wouldn't you want to support Mac users? Because it's not a profitable decision at this time? Exactly. Maybe the economic analysis is wrong, but maybe a site that looks like crap in Safari is the right thing to do for your shareholders, as unpopular as that makes you in the Mac world.
Even if you're not "strapped for cash", the only time you do "both" projects is if you only have two projects. In practice there are ALWAYS multiple ways money can be invested to get a return, including investing that money in bonds or putting it in a bank account, and a company has to look at all ways it can benefit from that money. If adding support for a marginal browser would give a 1% ROI, but investing that SAME MONEY in a bank account gives 2% ROI, the business would be foolish to add the support for that browser. It's not a strawman, it's reality.
Is 1% of your expected revenue greater than the implementation costs of supporting multiple browser platforms?
The answer is more complicated than the question makes it seem; remember that the implementation costs to support a new browser could be spent on adding new features that will grow your market for existing users. Thus you have to say, "What does it cost to support another browser? What else could I spend that money on? Which gives a better return on investment?" If I can spend $1000 to add support for one more browser on my website, and that will net me $10,000 in sales, vs. spending $1000 on adding new features to the site which will net me $20,000 in sales, I think the answer is clear that the other browser isn't going to be supported this iteration.
Actually, I hadn't forgotten about the network effect; it's well known that pirate software can actually help the dominant market player because their software is the best-known and most-used. For example, some kid at home wants to learn how to edit photos, he likely downloads photoshop instead of the Gimp, and thus pushes himself down the path of "addiction" to the proprietary software. When he's in the workplace, where there is a budget to buy a graphics tool, he already knows Photoshop and thus buys that, even if there are lots of tools that could do the job.
Similarly, as you mentioned, documents in a proprietary format also help entrench the de facto standards.
However, these are all BENEFITS to the company whose product is being pirated, and my perspective was from the COST side. When someone who wouldn't otherwise purchase a program pirates that program, the copyright holder doesn't lose anything, and the "pirate" still counts as zero on the balance sheet. (There COULD be a cost associated with some auxilliary services; for example, providing patches; if you have to support a large numnber of pirate users downloading patches from you, that can increase your bandwidth costs, etc. But it's also possible that pirate users won't patch as often, or can be denied patches through your system, at which point they must download "pirate" patches.)
The thing about Microsoft clamping down on a foreign country with a high rate of piracy is that it's usually the US Government doing the clamping, through treaties. At some point the foreign government decides that they will agree with the US's demands for stricter copyright enforcement, usually in return for the US buying some product or lowering some tariff or something. These governments often don't care about "intellectual property" laws (hence the lax enforcement) but at some point the "copyright card" becomes worth playing. At that point the citizens of that country who had previously violated the foreign copyrights now find themselves at odds with their local laws and are forced to "go legit". By the time this happens the users of the software are in no position to reverse engineer (if that is even still legal!) and must either pay MS's (and any other proprietary software) prices or switch to Free software.
If a foreign government wanted to, say, eliminate their dependancy on foreign software, they could nullify MS's copyright and patents, etc, but MS would lobby the US government and the US government would threaten sanctions, and unfavourable tariffs and treaties, etc, to keep this "rogue state" in line.
I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense; There is no material difference to Microsoft between one pirate user and one non-user. This isn't like a retail store that sells goods, where stores raise prices to cover a certain percentage of shoplifting. If someone pirates a Microsoft product, Microsoft is harmed in the "lost sale" but they still make money on their other sales. And in a region where basically ALL software is "pirate", Microsoft can essentially forecast zero sales and be done with it.
Anyway, the so-called "economics of open source" obviously won't apply in a region where none of the "economics" of software apply; as someone else mentioned it's really Microsoft's business model that falls apart here. Microsoft's supposed high prices aside, Microsoft isn't making any sales in regions with very high piracy; but one day they will convince the powers that be to crack down on it, and the users will suddenly realize the trap of Microsoft software; just look at what happened recently in Russia: Schools are switching away from all non-Free software because they can't afford the costs, and their governments are making them stop pirating software. Then it will be abundantly clear what the difference is between the two "economies" of software.
The reason the author brings up GSM is because it has some similarities with iPod DRM: Devices have a key, the key authenticates the device to the network, and there is encryption support for content. However, there are lots of major differences:
1. with GSM, your "key" is in your SIM, which means you can take it with you from device to device. 2. Wtih GSM, you only need the key to access a particular network. To switch networks, you throw away the old key and buy a new key. Now that the US (and soon Canada, yay!) have number portability, you don't even lose your phone number when you switch. Unlike DRM on music, where switching brands means losing all music. 3. With GSM, encryption is used to PROTECT your conversation and service; the idea is to prevent thieves from cloning your phone or eavesdroppers from listening in on your converstaions.
Interestingly, according to the gsm-security website faq, both the authentication and encryption protocols have been shown to be trivially broken, either due to poor implementation (using only part of the keyspace) or because the encryption algorithm wasn't that robust. So much for "GSM is a successful DRM".
Don't put words into my mouth; I was only paraphrasing the article. I don't know if the BSD license requires these terms, but it's not totally impossible that it does. But I suspect that the BSD code would still be GPL compliant since the major difference would (in that case) appear to be that GPL requires that you distribute source while BSD does not. But who knows? Maybe the two licenses ARE incompatible.
The viral aspect comes from the fact that the BSD license says that you have to include the license with the redistribution of modified code. This implies that the modified code must be BSD licensed, hence, it is "infected" by the "BSD Virus". The license applies to source and binary distribution, ergo any binary that includes BSD code should be licensed according to the BSD license, especially under Australian copyright law which treats compiling source as equivalent to modifying soure and distributing.
I know that 2x4s are planed to make them "finished" or something, and that the "rough" size is actually 2 x 4. But I was hoping that a switch to metric could be accompanied by renaming the building materials; since many buildings are made with steel studs these days, and these studs are the same size as the wooden ones, the pedant in me has a hard time calling a steel stud 2 x 4 when it is not 2x4 and never was.
As for a reason to not switch, the main impediment is inertia, I think. There's always a cost to switching and it's arguable what the benefits are, and whether they are worth the cost. Ironically though, some building materials ARE switching, such as nuts, bolts, and hexagonal (Allen) screws/keys. Which makes it even MORE annoying; I have to keep two sets of allen keys in my toolbox because the doorknob on my front door is held on with a metric screw while the deadbolt's knob is held on with an imperial screw. sigh.
You should see what it's like in Canada. Due to certain laws, most products are sold in metric, like cans of coke. But because Coke uses the same cans for the US market, we get nice metric sizes like 355mL. And then when you start talking about mass, every grocery store I go to advertizes and posts (in large font) prices for produce, meat, etc, in dollars/pound, but then at the cash register it rings up in dollars/kilo. It makes it annoying to verify if you were charged the right price at the checkout, since you need to do the conversion. Also the scales my supermarket provides only measure in kilos.
Then there's lumber and other construction materials. Again, to allow import/export from/to the US, all our building materials are specified in imperial units. We use 2x4s to build our houses (though they stopped being 2"x4" a while ago). Room measurements and area are usually discussed in feet and square feet.
Finally nobody I know can tell you their height or weight in metric. I suspect this is because of the construction thing; most people have at least some reference of how tall, say, a door is and thus can correlate that to the height of a person, which are both expressed in feet/inches.
Despite all of this stuff still gets done, but I look forward to the day when the US is finally free of the metric system and we can finally call 2x4s 4.5x9.5s
Actually, when I buy a device, I just expect it to work with Windows. I don't think I'm alone in this; any device I buy off-the-shelf for home use I just expect 100% compatibility with whatever the latest version of Windows is. The only time it would even cross my mind that a device might not work with the drivers in the box is if the device is quite old and a new version of Windows was released, or if the device is specifically marketed as a Mac device, with Mac colours and the Apple logo on it. But otherwise, it had better damn well work on Windows or I'm likely to ask for a refund.
All this assumption, and I KNOW of different OSes and hardware compatibility, etc. But, like it or not, Windows is a de facto standard, so a device can be honestly claimed to not work if it doesn't work with Windows.
All this aside, when I buy a device I also do my homework to see if it will work in Linux, and that can be a difficult and annoying process. Try buying a scanner sometime when you are looking for specific features that are only found on certain models of scanners. You have to browse the web looking up names of scanners, and their feature sets, until you find the scanners that will meet the functionality requirements. Then you have to cross-ref this with the Sane list of supported devices, which uses European model names for scanners and has some scanners listed as supported with reduced functionality. Then you gamble on a scanner's supported functionality matching your needs, and you also gamble on the scanner's functionality actually working as advertised by Sane. (Not to bash the Sane guys, they do good work but scanning is may latest hardware issue). Repeat this process for all hardware you wish to use, and consider that you can't upgrade some drivers in your Linux system without upgrading the kernel, which can be a problem.... ugh. Frankly the whole situation is annoying.
The problem is, IE is KNOWN to not support standards, or to support them differently from Firefox, Opera, etc. Especially IE 6 and IE 5/5.5. If IE6 is important (and it's something like 80-90% of web traffic, so it IS important) then you have to test with it, even if IE7 is out there. And anyway, when Microsoft or anyone releases a new browser, that interprets your HTML correctly, you have to fix the site. That's all there is to it.
I agree in principle but prefer YGHJ. That way my hand is in the middle of the keyboard, lots of keys for my little finger to whack for rarely used items, and my thumb has far more keys to hit; instead of spacebar there's space, alt, win, menu, ctrl.
You claim that we lose some of our money and time (let's say those are the same thing) by using x86. However you probably realize, but have ignored in your post, the large cost of migrating to a new processor.
Apple can get away with it because their market share is small and their users are used to these shenanigans. However the Windows world is founded on a basis of backwards compatibility. For good or evil, users demand this and Intel and Microsoft have given it to them. The Linux world eschews compatibility for cleaner systems, which is possible with open-source, but in the proprietary closed-source Windows world, backwards compat is a must. Businesses rely on old programs that can not be maintained because the coders are gone and sometimes the code is too; they rely on applications that are so important to their business that any change could be catastrophic, hence upgrades happen almost never; they rely on old, out-dated applications that are coded against old libraries and OS API calls, yet all of this stuff (usually) works on new hardware and a new OS because of backwards compatibility. And by switching to a new processor we have to throw all of this away.
Now, granted, there are some mitigating factors. For example, there is emulation. But lots of old software doesn't work in emulation because it requires direct hardware access. Also there are bound to be cases where the emulation isn't perfect. All of this creates risk and takes time and effort to solve. Old software can be replaced by new versions, if the old software HAS a new version, and the new version can read the old data, and it has all the important features of the old software. If any of these steps are missing, time and money can solve the problem. But the cost rises again.
The net result is that switching to a "cleaner" architecture is really expensive. Microsoft isn't even TRYING to support all the old xbox games on the '360; only some of them. And this is a specialized platform with well-defined features and requirements: Play games. The problem is orders of magnitude worse for general-purpose computing.
In the meantime x86 users demand increased performance and those wacky guys at Intel and AMD have delivered. They have managed to make really good processors with lots of performance and speed; they have improved the system architecture incredibly; they have extended the system from 32 to 64 bits (for whoever needs it); they have incorporated all of the important RISC features into the micro-ops pipelines of the x86 processors. It's almost as if the x86 is, itself, a RISC processor with an x86 backwards compat layer; those x86 instructions get broken down into RISC instructions internally, letting the CPU do all that clean RISC stuff.
Finally, in the end, the only people harmed by this are the compiler writers and those poor devils who have to write x86 assembly. We all feel bad for you guys. But in the end the cost to society is probably lower if we stay with x86 than if we switch.
As cohesive as Tolkein? Did you read the same Tolkein I did?
I'll admit, I read the HP books and find them entertaining. But so many things don't make sense; starting with why certain things can be conjured or transformed in ways that violate the laws of physics (i.e. turning one object into another, like transforming a pig into an ink jar) and yet all wizards aren't "rich" with material goods. You'd think they could transform some dirt or dust into a house.
Then there are things that change in the story, so that stuff that used to make sense no longer does. Like, why do wizards need to speak for spells? This is pretty clearly demonstrated in books 1-5; the battles at the end of 4 and 5 show experienced adult wizards speaking their spells or being rendered helpless when they can no longer speak. Yet in book 6 it is revealed that all experienced wizards can think their spells. Surprise!
Finally it seems that certain kinds of magic are trivial and others are hard, even though they are related. Making a spell that grows you a beard or grows or shrinks some physical feature (or transforms a living animal into a different kind of living animal) is done routinely, yet only the "nurse" in the school hospital can cure "injured" students. Also it seems no wizards use magic to alter their appearance; some wear shabby clothes, or have unmanageble hair, or wear broken glasses, or whatever, even though these things should be fixable (and why does Harry wear glasses? Seems they should have been able to correct that easily enough).
Then there seems to be this strange disconnect between the wizard world and the muggle world. The worlds are connected, and related, but even though many muggles know about the magic they NEVER TELL ANYONE. Or if they do it never becomes an issue. And virtually no wizards offer their services to muggles or attempt to rule over them or anything.
Frankly, I hope Rowling DOESN'T use the HP universe; it's so incohesive it needs a complete reboot.
The problem I personally have with the Harry Potter books, in regards to the Magic, is the seeming haphazard application of it. Certain things are impossible, while other things that seem related are trivial. As you pointed out, wizards should be able to conjure goods or magically repair clothes, yet seem unable to. A wizard economy exists, the wizards have money and a bank, and, presumably (maybe this was explained? I forget) magic to prevent counterfeiting. And yet wizards have slaves, even though magic can be (and is) used to automate tasks such as preparing food. It seems that these details, with all their flaws, were just slapped together for the first book, and expanded upon when needed for the other books, with no real thought to their consistency and whether the concepts make sense.
As you mention, this may be beside the point of the stories, but it still stands out as a flaw; much like a movie (cough Return of the King) where an army of soldiers is seen on horseback, then, in the next shot, they are all on foot; It's not really important whether they're attacking on horse or not, but the sudden disappearance of the horses breaks the narrative for me. Similarly the inconsistencies in the Wizard world annoy me.
However my most hated inconsistency is the one regarding how magic is actually performed. In the first five books it was made pretty clear that, in order to cast a spell, you needed to vocalize its incantation. Speak the magic word, so to say. This is clear because even powerful adult wizards like Voldemort speak their spells, and other powerful wizards are rendered helpless when they were made speechless. But all of this is discarded in book 6 when the concept of thinking a spell is introduced. In this mode of magic, you merely have to think the spell, or subvocalize, or something, and you can cast the spell. It's harder than speaking, yet deemed essential in, say, duelling situations. And yet, this late in the series, nobody had used this technique. Suddenly this becomes an important key to performing magic. This new development makes it seem as if all the previous wizard duels were mere charades or games. Several times a wizard spoke when they shouldn't have, or was stopped by silencing them; at no point in the past did a "bad guy" ever try to kill Harry with a silent curse. And there's nothing in the story to explain this glaring lack.
Now, I will overlook this, and read book 7 anyway. But in my mind all this plot device does is help reduce Harry's talent; when he was finally becoming a powerful force, it turns out everybody with more training than him was just screwing around with him; he's been rendered incompetent again. This was clearly demonstrated at the end of book 6 when Harry gets into a duel. Thus it seems that Harry's magic won't be able to save him after all; he's a slow learner and one school year won't be enough to turn it around. But this sort of retroactive continuity, or rule-changing, partway through the story, is very annoying to readers who are paying attention.
I think the difficulty of programming in Java without an IDE is overstated. Sure, an IDE helps tremendously and I wouldn't work without one, but for learning purposes students will most likely focus on the basics. There are tons of interesting learning problems they can solve with the Java class libraries that are part of the JDK, from basic algorithms and data-structures to GUI programming. I would recommend that students use a text editor that does syntax highlighting (my favourite is jEdit), but using something like Eclipse may be overkill. However, given that Eclipse is a high-quality, and free, IDE, it might be good to use it as well. But I'm part of the camp that thinks students should start without an IDE, and graduate to using an IDE once they understand what they are doing.
In any case, I think programming in C and assembly is a bad choice for beginners, unless they are seriously determined, focussed, and intelligent. There are too many details re: memory organization, string manipulation, etc, and these details will distract students from more fundamental issues such as program structure and control flow. The only advantage C has over Java is that you don't need OO to program in C, and OO complicates things further. You have to walk before you can run; OO is usually superior to procedural code but Java's "pure-OO" mindset makes it annoying for procedural tasks at times, and this is something that will also distract and confuse beginners. But I think this is a much smaller problem than malloc/free, pointers, pointer math, and the lack of Strings in C.
That proverb is completely bullshit. I'm sorry, but there is such a thing as "the right tool for the job", and using the wrong tool makes the job harder or the result worse. I know you had a smiley after your statement, so were probably not totally serious, but I agree with the GP that some tools are just wrong for the job, and specifically PHP is wrong for the job. Having coded in PHP and Java, I would never recommend PHP. I'd basically recommend almost anything else. PHP is designed for quick and dirty jobs and it SHOWS. Its libraries are a mess. It's syntax is ugly, and the new features seem hacked on. It has many features that have to be disabled because they compromise security. Its legacy of bad design decisions is summed up by the function for escaping SQL in strings, for MySQL: it used to be mysql_escape but turns out that one is broken, so now you hae to use mysql_real_escape. Madness! For this reason I would never write an app in PHP, it's just too much work to get things right.
I had a similar problem but my situation was audio/video devices, not game consoles. DVD player, Digital cable box, VCR, 200-CD changer, HTPC, and maybe a console or two in the future; all of these devices wanted to be plugged directly into my TV. Since these all varied in terms of their video connections (i.e. some are RCA-composite, some are SVideo, and some are Component), and, actually, they varied in terms of their audio connections as well (stereo RCA, 5-channel RCA, digital coax, digital optical) I skipped a basic RCA A/V switchbox and went with a full stereo receiver. It has several inputs on the back, so I can connect 3 component video sources, and something like 10 SVideo or RCA sources, along with the corresponding digital and analog audio inputs.
My system isn't real high-end; it was about $500 CDN for the receiver. If you have different devices you may need a better receiver, but the beauty of a nice setup like this one is that you get one remote control (programmable) that controls all your devices, and you hit a selector button on the remote and it switches audio and video all at once. Your TV becomes a simple monitor; everything else goes through the receiver.
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What's a DVD-capable set? Are you referring to a TV set? I curious about the number of installed TVs in 1998 that didn't have a composite video input. Anyway, the Atari 2600 came with an adapter for that years ago, so I doubt that was a real problem.
The thing is, there is already segregation on the Internet. It's what domain names do: they segregate. You can send your kid to a website that caters to children, and be reasonably assured that he won't find porn there. But letting your kid roam the whole internet is like letting him wander around the city.
As another example, consider a bookstore. Many bookstores (most, I'd say) cater to adults as well as children. There are many books sold in normal bookstores that contain "adult" material that would be arguably just as harmful as porn. Heck, many bookstores have a whole section of books on sex and sexuality, etc. These books often contain photographs as well as explicit text. Shocking! But to enter these bookstores you don't need to show ID proving your age, and I wouldn't be surprised if a clerk sold a child pretty much any book found in the store.
The internet is a huge place. It can't be controlled (fully) because every country has different laws and what qualifies as "porn" in one locale may not in another. In the UK some daily newspapers feature a page 3 photo of a topless woman. In Canada the equivalent newspapers would never show exposed breasts. Is this newspaper "porn"? What about the website for this newspaper? It depends on the society. Can the US make a law that says that this newspaper must host its website on a different port? I doubt this law would be effective, considering that the site in question is hosted in the UK.
Just as you wouldn't let your child wander around town, or walk into just any store, you should be wary of your child randomly surfing the internet, and visiting just any site. If you're worried, maybe what you need is a whitelist of domains. If your child needs that level of supervision, it's your responsibility to enforce it. We already have "channels" on the internet: these are website addresses. Just like your TV can be configured to block certain channels, so too can your computer be configured to block certain websites. And if the list of sites to block is too large, maybe you should consider blocking all sites, except whitelisted sites, when you're not available to personally supervise.
Ironic that you consider Java to be "Write once, debug everywhere" and yet seem to imply that C# doesn't have this problem going from MS .Net to Mono. I'd be willing to bet money that Java is better at "Write once, run anywhere" than .Net/Mono; I mean, it's not even the same VMs, and in some cases there are whole libraries that are different or unavailable.
Your use of the phrase "Tilting at Windmills" is registered trademark The Estate of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and you are hereby required to cease using this phrase forthwith. Failure to comply will result in legal action pursuant to 15 U.S.C. 1123, 35 U.S.C. 2.
Well, I'll agree that if the question is "Can it be worthwhile to support other browsers in some circumstances", then the answer is simply "yes", however I think it's pretty clear that we're talking about a business running a website, and it's a pretty safe assumption that a business has limited developer resources available for adding new features, and these features (one of which is additional browser support) need to be prioritized. Maybe you work in a company where there are tons of spare dev and test cycles to go around, and you have time to support every browser you want to support, but I work for a major website and I can tell you it's hard enough supporting the main browsers 100% all the time, let alone minor browsers.
Believe me, I'm all for nice, cross-platform designs that work well in lots of browsers, and I wish every website looked awesome in lynx AND every version of IE and firefox, but the reality is pretty basic: there just isn't time. And the reason I brought this up in the first place is that Slashdot discussions about this topic often forget that simple economics drive many of these seemingly strange choices when it comes to browser support. Mac support? Why wouldn't you want to support Mac users? Because it's not a profitable decision at this time? Exactly. Maybe the economic analysis is wrong, but maybe a site that looks like crap in Safari is the right thing to do for your shareholders, as unpopular as that makes you in the Mac world.
Even if you're not "strapped for cash", the only time you do "both" projects is if you only have two projects. In practice there are ALWAYS multiple ways money can be invested to get a return, including investing that money in bonds or putting it in a bank account, and a company has to look at all ways it can benefit from that money. If adding support for a marginal browser would give a 1% ROI, but investing that SAME MONEY in a bank account gives 2% ROI, the business would be foolish to add the support for that browser. It's not a strawman, it's reality.
The answer is more complicated than the question makes it seem; remember that the implementation costs to support a new browser could be spent on adding new features that will grow your market for existing users. Thus you have to say, "What does it cost to support another browser? What else could I spend that money on? Which gives a better return on investment?" If I can spend $1000 to add support for one more browser on my website, and that will net me $10,000 in sales, vs. spending $1000 on adding new features to the site which will net me $20,000 in sales, I think the answer is clear that the other browser isn't going to be supported this iteration.
Actually, I hadn't forgotten about the network effect; it's well known that pirate software can actually help the dominant market player because their software is the best-known and most-used. For example, some kid at home wants to learn how to edit photos, he likely downloads photoshop instead of the Gimp, and thus pushes himself down the path of "addiction" to the proprietary software. When he's in the workplace, where there is a budget to buy a graphics tool, he already knows Photoshop and thus buys that, even if there are lots of tools that could do the job.
Similarly, as you mentioned, documents in a proprietary format also help entrench the de facto standards.
However, these are all BENEFITS to the company whose product is being pirated, and my perspective was from the COST side. When someone who wouldn't otherwise purchase a program pirates that program, the copyright holder doesn't lose anything, and the "pirate" still counts as zero on the balance sheet. (There COULD be a cost associated with some auxilliary services; for example, providing patches; if you have to support a large numnber of pirate users downloading patches from you, that can increase your bandwidth costs, etc. But it's also possible that pirate users won't patch as often, or can be denied patches through your system, at which point they must download "pirate" patches.)
The thing about Microsoft clamping down on a foreign country with a high rate of piracy is that it's usually the US Government doing the clamping, through treaties. At some point the foreign government decides that they will agree with the US's demands for stricter copyright enforcement, usually in return for the US buying some product or lowering some tariff or something. These governments often don't care about "intellectual property" laws (hence the lax enforcement) but at some point the "copyright card" becomes worth playing. At that point the citizens of that country who had previously violated the foreign copyrights now find themselves at odds with their local laws and are forced to "go legit". By the time this happens the users of the software are in no position to reverse engineer (if that is even still legal!) and must either pay MS's (and any other proprietary software) prices or switch to Free software.
If a foreign government wanted to, say, eliminate their dependancy on foreign software, they could nullify MS's copyright and patents, etc, but MS would lobby the US government and the US government would threaten sanctions, and unfavourable tariffs and treaties, etc, to keep this "rogue state" in line.
I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense; There is no material difference to Microsoft between one pirate user and one non-user. This isn't like a retail store that sells goods, where stores raise prices to cover a certain percentage of shoplifting. If someone pirates a Microsoft product, Microsoft is harmed in the "lost sale" but they still make money on their other sales. And in a region where basically ALL software is "pirate", Microsoft can essentially forecast zero sales and be done with it.
Anyway, the so-called "economics of open source" obviously won't apply in a region where none of the "economics" of software apply; as someone else mentioned it's really Microsoft's business model that falls apart here. Microsoft's supposed high prices aside, Microsoft isn't making any sales in regions with very high piracy; but one day they will convince the powers that be to crack down on it, and the users will suddenly realize the trap of Microsoft software; just look at what happened recently in Russia: Schools are switching away from all non-Free software because they can't afford the costs, and their governments are making them stop pirating software. Then it will be abundantly clear what the difference is between the two "economies" of software.
The reason the author brings up GSM is because it has some similarities with iPod DRM: Devices have a key, the key authenticates the device to the network, and there is encryption support for content. However, there are lots of major differences:
1. with GSM, your "key" is in your SIM, which means you can take it with you from device to device.
2. Wtih GSM, you only need the key to access a particular network. To switch networks, you throw away the old key and buy a new key. Now that the US (and soon Canada, yay!) have number portability, you don't even lose your phone number when you switch. Unlike DRM on music, where switching brands means losing all music.
3. With GSM, encryption is used to PROTECT your conversation and service; the idea is to prevent thieves from cloning your phone or eavesdroppers from listening in on your converstaions.
Interestingly, according to the gsm-security website faq, both the authentication and encryption protocols have been shown to be trivially broken, either due to poor implementation (using only part of the keyspace) or because the encryption algorithm wasn't that robust. So much for "GSM is a successful DRM".
Looks like the implementations of GSM encryption are known to be weak:
- broken-security.shtml
http://www.gsm-security.net/faq/gsm-a3-a8-comp128
Don't put words into my mouth; I was only paraphrasing the article. I don't know if the BSD license requires these terms, but it's not totally impossible that it does. But I suspect that the BSD code would still be GPL compliant since the major difference would (in that case) appear to be that GPL requires that you distribute source while BSD does not. But who knows? Maybe the two licenses ARE incompatible.
The viral aspect comes from the fact that the BSD license says that you have to include the license with the redistribution of modified code. This implies that the modified code must be BSD licensed, hence, it is "infected" by the "BSD Virus". The license applies to source and binary distribution, ergo any binary that includes BSD code should be licensed according to the BSD license, especially under Australian copyright law which treats compiling source as equivalent to modifying soure and distributing.
I know that 2x4s are planed to make them "finished" or something, and that the "rough" size is actually 2 x 4. But I was hoping that a switch to metric could be accompanied by renaming the building materials; since many buildings are made with steel studs these days, and these studs are the same size as the wooden ones, the pedant in me has a hard time calling a steel stud 2 x 4 when it is not 2x4 and never was.
As for a reason to not switch, the main impediment is inertia, I think. There's always a cost to switching and it's arguable what the benefits are, and whether they are worth the cost. Ironically though, some building materials ARE switching, such as nuts, bolts, and hexagonal (Allen) screws/keys. Which makes it even MORE annoying; I have to keep two sets of allen keys in my toolbox because the doorknob on my front door is held on with a metric screw while the deadbolt's knob is held on with an imperial screw. sigh.
You should see what it's like in Canada. Due to certain laws, most products are sold in metric, like cans of coke. But because Coke uses the same cans for the US market, we get nice metric sizes like 355mL. And then when you start talking about mass, every grocery store I go to advertizes and posts (in large font) prices for produce, meat, etc, in dollars/pound, but then at the cash register it rings up in dollars/kilo. It makes it annoying to verify if you were charged the right price at the checkout, since you need to do the conversion. Also the scales my supermarket provides only measure in kilos.
Then there's lumber and other construction materials. Again, to allow import/export from/to the US, all our building materials are specified in imperial units. We use 2x4s to build our houses (though they stopped being 2"x4" a while ago). Room measurements and area are usually discussed in feet and square feet.
Finally nobody I know can tell you their height or weight in metric. I suspect this is because of the construction thing; most people have at least some reference of how tall, say, a door is and thus can correlate that to the height of a person, which are both expressed in feet/inches.
Despite all of this stuff still gets done, but I look forward to the day when the US is finally free of the metric system and we can finally call 2x4s 4.5x9.5s
Actually, when I buy a device, I just expect it to work with Windows. I don't think I'm alone in this; any device I buy off-the-shelf for home use I just expect 100% compatibility with whatever the latest version of Windows is. The only time it would even cross my mind that a device might not work with the drivers in the box is if the device is quite old and a new version of Windows was released, or if the device is specifically marketed as a Mac device, with Mac colours and the Apple logo on it. But otherwise, it had better damn well work on Windows or I'm likely to ask for a refund.
All this assumption, and I KNOW of different OSes and hardware compatibility, etc. But, like it or not, Windows is a de facto standard, so a device can be honestly claimed to not work if it doesn't work with Windows.
All this aside, when I buy a device I also do my homework to see if it will work in Linux, and that can be a difficult and annoying process. Try buying a scanner sometime when you are looking for specific features that are only found on certain models of scanners. You have to browse the web looking up names of scanners, and their feature sets, until you find the scanners that will meet the functionality requirements. Then you have to cross-ref this with the Sane list of supported devices, which uses European model names for scanners and has some scanners listed as supported with reduced functionality. Then you gamble on a scanner's supported functionality matching your needs, and you also gamble on the scanner's functionality actually working as advertised by Sane. (Not to bash the Sane guys, they do good work but scanning is may latest hardware issue). Repeat this process for all hardware you wish to use, and consider that you can't upgrade some drivers in your Linux system without upgrading the kernel, which can be a problem.... ugh. Frankly the whole situation is annoying.
The problem is, IE is KNOWN to not support standards, or to support them differently from Firefox, Opera, etc. Especially IE 6 and IE 5/5.5. If IE6 is important (and it's something like 80-90% of web traffic, so it IS important) then you have to test with it, even if IE7 is out there. And anyway, when Microsoft or anyone releases a new browser, that interprets your HTML correctly, you have to fix the site. That's all there is to it.
I agree in principle but prefer YGHJ. That way my hand is in the middle of the keyboard, lots of keys for my little finger to whack for rarely used items, and my thumb has far more keys to hit; instead of spacebar there's space, alt, win, menu, ctrl.
You claim that we lose some of our money and time (let's say those are the same thing) by using x86. However you probably realize, but have ignored in your post, the large cost of migrating to a new processor.
Apple can get away with it because their market share is small and their users are used to these shenanigans. However the Windows world is founded on a basis of backwards compatibility. For good or evil, users demand this and Intel and Microsoft have given it to them. The Linux world eschews compatibility for cleaner systems, which is possible with open-source, but in the proprietary closed-source Windows world, backwards compat is a must. Businesses rely on old programs that can not be maintained because the coders are gone and sometimes the code is too; they rely on applications that are so important to their business that any change could be catastrophic, hence upgrades happen almost never; they rely on old, out-dated applications that are coded against old libraries and OS API calls, yet all of this stuff (usually) works on new hardware and a new OS because of backwards compatibility. And by switching to a new processor we have to throw all of this away.
Now, granted, there are some mitigating factors. For example, there is emulation. But lots of old software doesn't work in emulation because it requires direct hardware access. Also there are bound to be cases where the emulation isn't perfect. All of this creates risk and takes time and effort to solve. Old software can be replaced by new versions, if the old software HAS a new version, and the new version can read the old data, and it has all the important features of the old software. If any of these steps are missing, time and money can solve the problem. But the cost rises again.
The net result is that switching to a "cleaner" architecture is really expensive. Microsoft isn't even TRYING to support all the old xbox games on the '360; only some of them. And this is a specialized platform with well-defined features and requirements: Play games. The problem is orders of magnitude worse for general-purpose computing.
In the meantime x86 users demand increased performance and those wacky guys at Intel and AMD have delivered. They have managed to make really good processors with lots of performance and speed; they have improved the system architecture incredibly; they have extended the system from 32 to 64 bits (for whoever needs it); they have incorporated all of the important RISC features into the micro-ops pipelines of the x86 processors. It's almost as if the x86 is, itself, a RISC processor with an x86 backwards compat layer; those x86 instructions get broken down into RISC instructions internally, letting the CPU do all that clean RISC stuff.
Finally, in the end, the only people harmed by this are the compiler writers and those poor devils who have to write x86 assembly. We all feel bad for you guys. But in the end the cost to society is probably lower if we stay with x86 than if we switch.
As cohesive as Tolkein? Did you read the same Tolkein I did?
I'll admit, I read the HP books and find them entertaining. But so many things don't make sense; starting with why certain things can be conjured or transformed in ways that violate the laws of physics (i.e. turning one object into another, like transforming a pig into an ink jar) and yet all wizards aren't "rich" with material goods. You'd think they could transform some dirt or dust into a house.
Then there are things that change in the story, so that stuff that used to make sense no longer does. Like, why do wizards need to speak for spells? This is pretty clearly demonstrated in books 1-5; the battles at the end of 4 and 5 show experienced adult wizards speaking their spells or being rendered helpless when they can no longer speak. Yet in book 6 it is revealed that all experienced wizards can think their spells. Surprise!
Finally it seems that certain kinds of magic are trivial and others are hard, even though they are related. Making a spell that grows you a beard or grows or shrinks some physical feature (or transforms a living animal into a different kind of living animal) is done routinely, yet only the "nurse" in the school hospital can cure "injured" students. Also it seems no wizards use magic to alter their appearance; some wear shabby clothes, or have unmanageble hair, or wear broken glasses, or whatever, even though these things should be fixable (and why does Harry wear glasses? Seems they should have been able to correct that easily enough).
Then there seems to be this strange disconnect between the wizard world and the muggle world. The worlds are connected, and related, but even though many muggles know about the magic they NEVER TELL ANYONE. Or if they do it never becomes an issue. And virtually no wizards offer their services to muggles or attempt to rule over them or anything.
Frankly, I hope Rowling DOESN'T use the HP universe; it's so incohesive it needs a complete reboot.
The problem I personally have with the Harry Potter books, in regards to the Magic, is the seeming haphazard application of it. Certain things are impossible, while other things that seem related are trivial. As you pointed out, wizards should be able to conjure goods or magically repair clothes, yet seem unable to. A wizard economy exists, the wizards have money and a bank, and, presumably (maybe this was explained? I forget) magic to prevent counterfeiting. And yet wizards have slaves, even though magic can be (and is) used to automate tasks such as preparing food. It seems that these details, with all their flaws, were just slapped together for the first book, and expanded upon when needed for the other books, with no real thought to their consistency and whether the concepts make sense.
As you mention, this may be beside the point of the stories, but it still stands out as a flaw; much like a movie (cough Return of the King) where an army of soldiers is seen on horseback, then, in the next shot, they are all on foot; It's not really important whether they're attacking on horse or not, but the sudden disappearance of the horses breaks the narrative for me. Similarly the inconsistencies in the Wizard world annoy me.
However my most hated inconsistency is the one regarding how magic is actually performed. In the first five books it was made pretty clear that, in order to cast a spell, you needed to vocalize its incantation. Speak the magic word, so to say. This is clear because even powerful adult wizards like Voldemort speak their spells, and other powerful wizards are rendered helpless when they were made speechless. But all of this is discarded in book 6 when the concept of thinking a spell is introduced. In this mode of magic, you merely have to think the spell, or subvocalize, or something, and you can cast the spell. It's harder than speaking, yet deemed essential in, say, duelling situations. And yet, this late in the series, nobody had used this technique. Suddenly this becomes an important key to performing magic. This new development makes it seem as if all the previous wizard duels were mere charades or games. Several times a wizard spoke when they shouldn't have, or was stopped by silencing them; at no point in the past did a "bad guy" ever try to kill Harry with a silent curse. And there's nothing in the story to explain this glaring lack.
Now, I will overlook this, and read book 7 anyway. But in my mind all this plot device does is help reduce Harry's talent; when he was finally becoming a powerful force, it turns out everybody with more training than him was just screwing around with him; he's been rendered incompetent again. This was clearly demonstrated at the end of book 6 when Harry gets into a duel. Thus it seems that Harry's magic won't be able to save him after all; he's a slow learner and one school year won't be enough to turn it around. But this sort of retroactive continuity, or rule-changing, partway through the story, is very annoying to readers who are paying attention.
I think the difficulty of programming in Java without an IDE is overstated. Sure, an IDE helps tremendously and I wouldn't work without one, but for learning purposes students will most likely focus on the basics. There are tons of interesting learning problems they can solve with the Java class libraries that are part of the JDK, from basic algorithms and data-structures to GUI programming. I would recommend that students use a text editor that does syntax highlighting (my favourite is jEdit), but using something like Eclipse may be overkill. However, given that Eclipse is a high-quality, and free, IDE, it might be good to use it as well. But I'm part of the camp that thinks students should start without an IDE, and graduate to using an IDE once they understand what they are doing.
In any case, I think programming in C and assembly is a bad choice for beginners, unless they are seriously determined, focussed, and intelligent. There are too many details re: memory organization, string manipulation, etc, and these details will distract students from more fundamental issues such as program structure and control flow. The only advantage C has over Java is that you don't need OO to program in C, and OO complicates things further. You have to walk before you can run; OO is usually superior to procedural code but Java's "pure-OO" mindset makes it annoying for procedural tasks at times, and this is something that will also distract and confuse beginners. But I think this is a much smaller problem than malloc/free, pointers, pointer math, and the lack of Strings in C.
That proverb is completely bullshit. I'm sorry, but there is such a thing as "the right tool for the job", and using the wrong tool makes the job harder or the result worse. I know you had a smiley after your statement, so were probably not totally serious, but I agree with the GP that some tools are just wrong for the job, and specifically PHP is wrong for the job. Having coded in PHP and Java, I would never recommend PHP. I'd basically recommend almost anything else. PHP is designed for quick and dirty jobs and it SHOWS. Its libraries are a mess. It's syntax is ugly, and the new features seem hacked on. It has many features that have to be disabled because they compromise security. Its legacy of bad design decisions is summed up by the function for escaping SQL in strings, for MySQL: it used to be mysql_escape but turns out that one is broken, so now you hae to use mysql_real_escape. Madness! For this reason I would never write an app in PHP, it's just too much work to get things right.
I had a similar problem but my situation was audio/video devices, not game consoles. DVD player, Digital cable box, VCR, 200-CD changer, HTPC, and maybe a console or two in the future; all of these devices wanted to be plugged directly into my TV. Since these all varied in terms of their video connections (i.e. some are RCA-composite, some are SVideo, and some are Component), and, actually, they varied in terms of their audio connections as well (stereo RCA, 5-channel RCA, digital coax, digital optical) I skipped a basic RCA A/V switchbox and went with a full stereo receiver. It has several inputs on the back, so I can connect 3 component video sources, and something like 10 SVideo or RCA sources, along with the corresponding digital and analog audio inputs.
My system isn't real high-end; it was about $500 CDN for the receiver. If you have different devices you may need a better receiver, but the beauty of a nice setup like this one is that you get one remote control (programmable) that controls all your devices, and you hit a selector button on the remote and it switches audio and video all at once. Your TV becomes a simple monitor; everything else goes through the receiver.