Eventually a court case will come up in some major venue (the US, or a major eurpoean country I'd guess)
Since when is Germany *not* a "major venue" or a "major European country"? This could feasibly be used as precedent for similar cases in other EU countries, and that makes it a court case in a very major venue with a very major country.
...and has hired International Business Machines Corp.'s services division to do the job
That's IBM to those of you still in your teens. God, it makes me feel old that I know all of the REAL names of companies that have been known by acronyms or abbreviated names for the last several years.
I'll tell you who and what piracy hurts : the developer and the developer's spirit. There's nothing shitier in this world that to see copies of your software floating around IRC the day after you sent it off to manufacturing for duplication. You start to wonder if all those nights your wife went to bed alone, if the fact that you watched your kid grow up on a video tape or the fact that your friends stopped calling you to go out and party were all worth it.
I'll agree that piracy is something hard to quantify; how much money is truly lost from people who have no money to buy the software anyhow? But the wallets of the high-salaried execs aren't the only things affected by piracy -- remember that next time you download and install something you shouldn't be owning.
"They" would probably ignore Fontographer, since changing the bits of a font constitutes a tiny part of the program's functionality. Not to mention that Fontographer has been around a very long time...way before the DMCA was ever conceived...
...which brings up an interesting question that may have been answered before : what about apps that are prey to the DMCA but were written and conceived before its time? Are these applications/devices/etc immune from persecution by some "grandfather" clause?
I've worked on plenty of commercial apps that use STL, all without problems. You are just like the die-hard ANSI C people that still think C++ is inherently slower than C. It's not the STL itself that is (always) the speed reducer, but the programmer that doesn't understand the proper tools to use to avoid slowing code down.
There was an article in the C/C++ Users Journal a year ago testing for compiler conformance. No compiler made 100%. The areas that some of the more advanced compilers lack are probably deep, dark recesses of the STL you'll never use, but there are still gaps in the implementations.
MS using a subset of C++ has nothing to do with the language-independent nature of the CLR. It still maintains that feature, it's just the.NET version of C++ that gets watered down.
Well, I think meta-programming came around by accident. Yes, you can do some cool things with templates, but were C++ templates really designed with meta-programming in mind? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Bjarne was sitting in his office thinking that he could facilitate generic programming while allowing programmers to compute cosine angles at compile time with the same type of code. Meta-programming happens (there's a new.sig for someone), but only because the language has a "loophole" (for lack of a better term) that allows you to write that type of obnoxious code.
Sorta like how you can put a screw in a wall with a hammer -- you get the job done, but it's not exactly the way you want to do it and it could be a messy process.
Watch the new Nike (well, new as far as us football-loving fans in the States are concerned) Secret Tournament (warning, Flash-only site) commercial(s). If a robot can pull moves like that off in the next 48 years, I'll be damn impressed. I know technology is advancing rapidly, but a machine that weighs the same as a player, has the mobility of a footballer and possesses an AI that matches the best players in the world is a long way off.
Just watch guys like Thierry Henry, Luis Figo, David Beckham, Zinedane Zindane, etc...you just can't program talent like that. Not even by 2050, I would wager.
And then I found the games. The games they made back then were perfect. Simple, fun, and addicting. If you have never played the game Crystal Quest, you have not lived.
Or "The Fool's Errand". I played the hell out of this thing one summer when visiting the college I was going to attend. Searches high and low have yielded no results for a copy of this amazing creation. At one point I heard the original programmer/designer (remember the days when a game was made by ONE person?) went to work for Disney as an Imagineer.
I searched on e-bay for a network card that would work with the thing
Baylor U cleaned out it's old inventory one time and I snagged and Mac Plus with all the periphs. In the back is what looks like a BNC connector that someone drilled into the case to install. I never cracked it open to see how they did it, but I'm sure it was done at an ACM programming competition to facilitate the play of some early networked games.
Re:Now is a good time to boycott Best Buy...
on
Worst Buy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If anything, I would say the author's reference that the man was an Indian American is racist. Why does it matter? We don't know how this guy was carrying on -- he could have threatened to destroy stuff in the store, threatened the manager and/or store associates. Hell, he could have even been approaching customers in an attempt to turn them away. All of these things could get you arrested at a store in America regardless of the country you were born in.
If you're gonna boycott Best Buy, do it because of something more legitimate than an article claiming the arrest of this guy is racist.
Re:Disclaimer?
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sure they have a disclaimer, but is the disclaimer legal? They're basically telling you that they can change the price of a product at any time, regardless of when the purchase was made. That sounds rather fishy to me. One would think that Best Buy has a decent legal team, but if it's anything like the team of people in their stores...well, most people here know what I mean.
So the question now (probably) becomes : Does Best Buy really have the right to arbitrarily change the price on any item you purchase, just because the disclaimer says so?
I asked for a wireless network in my home. Out of all the reasons I wanted it, the reality was 'So I can sit at the bar down the street and work while having a beer'.
What the hell kind of wireless network do you have? I can't even get mine to reach to the other end of my house, let alone down the street. Hopefully your family and those in your neighborhood don't start growing extra limbs from all of that high powered radiation you're pumping out!:-)
Ignore all that above if you're referring to something like Bluetooth...
your client will hire a smaller group of people to handle the business themselves, and bring it inhouse
I highly doubt it. Phone switches are not cheap. Software to run and manage a call center is not cheap (I know, I write this stuff for living). The turn-over rate in the call center business is outrageous. It makes little sense for small to medium sized businesses to have their own centers unless they have serious time and money to invest. In the long run, it's better to outsource and let someone else manage the day-to-day headache of a call center.
the more data you download the slower your connection becomes. I'm sure this has been thought of/implemented already - so why aren't ISPs using something like this?
Because usage isn't always usage. What if User B has already downloaded 200MB, but it's actually the first day of the month? Let's also say that user pulled down MP3s, some pr0n, a copy of Adobe Photoshop from Kazaa, and some e-mail. Should that user be throttled? Some say yes...
Now, what if User B has already downloaded 200MB and it's the 20th of the month? She's exceeded 200MB because she keeps e-mailing large documents to her colleagues working on cancer research. She's also connected to her e-mail server all day long, so those small packets for checking add up over time. Should this user be throttled? One could make a case that her usage is more "legitimate" than the usage of the "pirate".
The problem is this : determining "legitimate" use versus "less proper" use is so vague. Blanket limits on bandwidth could hurt people that use large amounts of bandwidth over time, just in smaller chucks on a continuing basis. For ISPs to determine who's using what bandwidth when and how could present an administration nightmare. Blocking P2P applications which tend to suck bandwidth for (arguably) less "appropriate" applications is just plain easier (evidently).
Add in that P2P content is presenting legal issues around the globe (or is it only here in the US?), this NZ company may be blocking use to cover its own ass.
Wrong. TRUE geeks buy hardware 'cause it's new and 'cause it lets you do more things faster. Maybe you wanna play Everquest on a machine with an ISA video card, but I'll keep my GeForce for fun gaming, thank you. And I don't feel like compiling my code and a 286, so my shiny new Pentium 4 will do nicely.
People who hang onto stuff that's old and crusty and then sneer at people who want something modern are called packrats and old codgers.
lowered price points mean poorer readers (like me, for years) can afford to assemble a decent library without paying $30/hardback
Here's proof of this...when in college I found the first 5 David Eddings books in hardback at a local Half Price Books. $5/each, which means I got the entire series for less than the price of a new hardback at my local retail store. Once I started getting in money (and spending it less on beer), I bought the next David Eddings series at the local book store as they came out -- all in hardback. This author made money off of me because I bought a set of books at a used store. Had I not seen the great deal and purchased the books on a whim, David would have one less reader to earn new sales from.
Or a PIII laptop owner. My Compaq Evo will sear skin if you don't get some good ventilation on it. I guess a burned thigh is one way to get me to stop playing EverQuest.
What's the point of even clicking the "remove" link? If you're using a mail reader that supports HTML, it's probably sending something back to the server (along with all of the http requests for graphics and text) that lets the sender know that your e-mail address is valid. The link is just (as you say) a ruse to make you think you're opting out of the list.
MSDN has tons of documentation freely available. It's not 100% complete, but a good majority of developers can find what they need there.
They should work to ensure that Visual C can use GCC as its compiler, and that anything that the Visual C compiler can build can also be built by gcc.
Well, they're not switching to GCC, but I know they've hired Herb Sutter to serve as a liason to the C++ community. It looks like they're wanting better C++ standard support, which can only be a good thing.
They should include a rootless X Window server in future versions of Windows so that Unix (open and closed source) software can be ported to Windows more easily.
Why? What's the business reason that would help MS advance in the corporate world? "Because it's cool" is not the right answer here. Besides, we're talking about how MS can help the OSS community not those trying to port X Window apps to MS Windows.
Microsoft doesn't release its source code for the same reason that millions of other software companies in the world don't hand out their source code. Not the best way to stay in business...
Once you realize why Microsoft doesn't do that, you'll realize how a handful of geeks in a garage can build a worldwide software empire.
Since when is OSS "playing by the rules". If anything, I would think OSS goes against the rules by giving the V-sign to the business world, showing that big corporations that want to make a ton of money aren't the only ones that can produce production-quality software.
It means that when a person is around other Real Life people, they freeze up, seem withdrawn, have problems communicating and fitting in, etc. It also means that when they are in a fantasy world like EQ, they become something they're not, usually someone or something of importance. One can only assume it was an event that diminished this person's importance in a virtual world that drove him to suicide. After all, if you're unable to fit in In Real Life and unable to compensate for that in a fantasy world, what's there to live for...at least that's what a person in his position may have thought.
When both sides of your personality are gone, that's gotta play havoc with your mental state.
Who hasnt seen slump. Slump is everywhere, and what do they really expect, to be immune.
They are immune. A quick look at the Billboard 200 shows a count of 111 million albums at least sold (within the last year, give or take). I did this by simply counting the albums that had reached [multi]platinum status. This doesn't count gold records, or the number of albums sold since hitting a platinum milestone, or the sales of albums that didn't hit gold or platinum yet. So let's add a couple more million sales just for fun. That takes us to 113 million sales at around USD$10 apiece...over 1 billion USD. Yeah, those poor guys are in SUCH a slump. I guess they won't be able to buy any more Bentleys or Ferraris for their videos this year...
In that same vein, those in the US (or even outside) that have access to MTV -- watch and episode of the show "Cribs" and tell me if these people are hurting for money or in a slump.
The record industry wants you to think there's a slump, that there are lost sales to digital pirates and amoral teenagers. Without such FUD, they wouldn't be able to force services such as this on the unsuspecting public.
Slashdot Mirror
Eventually a court case will come up in some major venue (the US, or a major eurpoean country I'd guess)
Since when is Germany *not* a "major venue" or a "major European country"? This could feasibly be used as precedent for similar cases in other EU countries, and that makes it a court case in a very major venue with a very major country.
...and has hired International Business Machines Corp.'s services division to do the job
That's IBM to those of you still in your teens. God, it makes me feel old that I know all of the REAL names of companies that have been known by acronyms or abbreviated names for the last several years.
I'll tell you who and what piracy hurts : the developer and the developer's spirit. There's nothing shitier in this world that to see copies of your software floating around IRC the day after you sent it off to manufacturing for duplication. You start to wonder if all those nights your wife went to bed alone, if the fact that you watched your kid grow up on a video tape or the fact that your friends stopped calling you to go out and party were all worth it.
I'll agree that piracy is something hard to quantify; how much money is truly lost from people who have no money to buy the software anyhow? But the wallets of the high-salaried execs aren't the only things affected by piracy -- remember that next time you download and install something you shouldn't be owning.
"They" would probably ignore Fontographer, since changing the bits of a font constitutes a tiny part of the program's functionality. Not to mention that Fontographer has been around a very long time...way before the DMCA was ever conceived...
...which brings up an interesting question that may have been answered before : what about apps that are prey to the DMCA but were written and conceived before its time? Are these applications/devices/etc immune from persecution by some "grandfather" clause?
This is a myth that I wish would just die...
I've worked on plenty of commercial apps that use STL, all without problems. You are just like the die-hard ANSI C people that still think C++ is inherently slower than C. It's not the STL itself that is (always) the speed reducer, but the programmer that doesn't understand the proper tools to use to avoid slowing code down.
There was an article in the C/C++ Users Journal a year ago testing for compiler conformance. No compiler made 100%. The areas that some of the more advanced compilers lack are probably deep, dark recesses of the STL you'll never use, but there are still gaps in the implementations.
MS using a subset of C++ has nothing to do with the language-independent nature of the CLR. It still maintains that feature, it's just the .NET version of C++ that gets watered down.
Well, I think meta-programming came around by accident. Yes, you can do some cool things with templates, but were C++ templates really designed with meta-programming in mind? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Bjarne was sitting in his office thinking that he could facilitate generic programming while allowing programmers to compute cosine angles at compile time with the same type of code. Meta-programming happens (there's a new .sig for someone), but only because the language has a "loophole" (for lack of a better term) that allows you to write that type of obnoxious code.
Sorta like how you can put a screw in a wall with a hammer -- you get the job done, but it's not exactly the way you want to do it and it could be a messy process.
Watch the new Nike (well, new as far as us football-loving fans in the States are concerned) Secret Tournament (warning, Flash-only site) commercial(s). If a robot can pull moves like that off in the next 48 years, I'll be damn impressed. I know technology is advancing rapidly, but a machine that weighs the same as a player, has the mobility of a footballer and possesses an AI that matches the best players in the world is a long way off.
Just watch guys like Thierry Henry, Luis Figo, David Beckham, Zinedane Zindane, etc...you just can't program talent like that. Not even by 2050, I would wager.
And then I found the games. The games they made back then were perfect. Simple, fun, and addicting. If you have never played the game Crystal Quest, you have not lived.
Or "The Fool's Errand". I played the hell out of this thing one summer when visiting the college I was going to attend. Searches high and low have yielded no results for a copy of this amazing creation. At one point I heard the original programmer/designer (remember the days when a game was made by ONE person?) went to work for Disney as an Imagineer.
I searched on e-bay for a network card that would work with the thing
Baylor U cleaned out it's old inventory one time and I snagged and Mac Plus with all the periphs. In the back is what looks like a BNC connector that someone drilled into the case to install. I never cracked it open to see how they did it, but I'm sure it was done at an ACM programming competition to facilitate the play of some early networked games.
If anything, I would say the author's reference that the man was an Indian American is racist. Why does it matter? We don't know how this guy was carrying on -- he could have threatened to destroy stuff in the store, threatened the manager and/or store associates. Hell, he could have even been approaching customers in an attempt to turn them away. All of these things could get you arrested at a store in America regardless of the country you were born in.
If you're gonna boycott Best Buy, do it because of something more legitimate than an article claiming the arrest of this guy is racist.
Sure they have a disclaimer, but is the disclaimer legal? They're basically telling you that they can change the price of a product at any time, regardless of when the purchase was made. That sounds rather fishy to me. One would think that Best Buy has a decent legal team, but if it's anything like the team of people in their stores...well, most people here know what I mean.
So the question now (probably) becomes : Does Best Buy really have the right to arbitrarily change the price on any item you purchase, just because the disclaimer says so?
I asked for a wireless network in my home. Out of all the reasons I wanted it, the reality was 'So I can sit at the bar down the street and work while having a beer'.
:-)
What the hell kind of wireless network do you have? I can't even get mine to reach to the other end of my house, let alone down the street. Hopefully your family and those in your neighborhood don't start growing extra limbs from all of that high powered radiation you're pumping out!
Ignore all that above if you're referring to something like Bluetooth...
your client will hire a smaller group of people to handle the business themselves, and bring it inhouse
I highly doubt it. Phone switches are not cheap. Software to run and manage a call center is not cheap (I know, I write this stuff for living). The turn-over rate in the call center business is outrageous. It makes little sense for small to medium sized businesses to have their own centers unless they have serious time and money to invest. In the long run, it's better to outsource and let someone else manage the day-to-day headache of a call center.
the more data you download the slower your connection becomes. I'm sure this has been thought of/implemented already - so why aren't ISPs using something like this?
Because usage isn't always usage. What if User B has already downloaded 200MB, but it's actually the first day of the month? Let's also say that user pulled down MP3s, some pr0n, a copy of Adobe Photoshop from Kazaa, and some e-mail. Should that user be throttled? Some say yes...
Now, what if User B has already downloaded 200MB and it's the 20th of the month? She's exceeded 200MB because she keeps e-mailing large documents to her colleagues working on cancer research. She's also connected to her e-mail server all day long, so those small packets for checking add up over time. Should this user be throttled? One could make a case that her usage is more "legitimate" than the usage of the "pirate".
The problem is this : determining "legitimate" use versus "less proper" use is so vague. Blanket limits on bandwidth could hurt people that use large amounts of bandwidth over time, just in smaller chucks on a continuing basis. For ISPs to determine who's using what bandwidth when and how could present an administration nightmare. Blocking P2P applications which tend to suck bandwidth for (arguably) less "appropriate" applications is just plain easier (evidently).
Add in that P2P content is presenting legal issues around the globe (or is it only here in the US?), this NZ company may be blocking use to cover its own ass.
Too bad the Cue::Cat makers are no longer in business. Good idea, bad timing I suppose.
Wrong. TRUE geeks buy hardware 'cause it's new and 'cause it lets you do more things faster. Maybe you wanna play Everquest on a machine with an ISA video card, but I'll keep my GeForce for fun gaming, thank you. And I don't feel like compiling my code and a 286, so my shiny new Pentium 4 will do nicely.
People who hang onto stuff that's old and crusty and then sneer at people who want something modern are called packrats and old codgers.
lowered price points mean poorer readers (like me, for years) can afford to assemble a decent library without paying $30/hardback
Here's proof of this...when in college I found the first 5 David Eddings books in hardback at a local Half Price Books. $5/each, which means I got the entire series for less than the price of a new hardback at my local retail store. Once I started getting in money (and spending it less on beer), I bought the next David Eddings series at the local book store as they came out -- all in hardback. This author made money off of me because I bought a set of books at a used store. Had I not seen the great deal and purchased the books on a whim, David would have one less reader to earn new sales from.
Something to think about...
Or a PIII laptop owner. My Compaq Evo will sear skin if you don't get some good ventilation on it. I guess a burned thigh is one way to get me to stop playing EverQuest.
greg
What's the point of even clicking the "remove" link? If you're using a mail reader that supports HTML, it's probably sending something back to the server (along with all of the http requests for graphics and text) that lets the sender know that your e-mail address is valid. The link is just (as you say) a ruse to make you think you're opting out of the list.
MS should document every API and protocol.
MSDN has tons of documentation freely available. It's not 100% complete, but a good majority of developers can find what they need there.
They should work to ensure that Visual C can use GCC as its compiler, and that anything that the Visual C compiler can build can also be built by gcc.
Well, they're not switching to GCC, but I know they've hired Herb Sutter to serve as a liason to the C++ community. It looks like they're wanting better C++ standard support, which can only be a good thing.
They should include a rootless X Window server in future versions of Windows so that Unix (open and closed source) software can be ported to Windows more easily.
Why? What's the business reason that would help MS advance in the corporate world? "Because it's cool" is not the right answer here. Besides, we're talking about how MS can help the OSS community not those trying to port X Window apps to MS Windows.
Microsoft doesn't release its source code for the same reason that millions of other software companies in the world don't hand out their source code. Not the best way to stay in business...
Once you realize why Microsoft doesn't do that, you'll realize how a handful of geeks in a garage can build a worldwide software empire.
Since when is OSS "playing by the rules". If anything, I would think OSS goes against the rules by giving the V-sign to the business world, showing that big corporations that want to make a ton of money aren't the only ones that can produce production-quality software.
It means that when a person is around other Real Life people, they freeze up, seem withdrawn, have problems communicating and fitting in, etc. It also means that when they are in a fantasy world like EQ, they become something they're not, usually someone or something of importance. One can only assume it was an event that diminished this person's importance in a virtual world that drove him to suicide. After all, if you're unable to fit in In Real Life and unable to compensate for that in a fantasy world, what's there to live for...at least that's what a person in his position may have thought.
When both sides of your personality are gone, that's gotta play havoc with your mental state.
greg
Who hasnt seen slump. Slump is everywhere, and what do they really expect, to be immune.
They are immune. A quick look at the Billboard 200 shows a count of 111 million albums at least sold (within the last year, give or take). I did this by simply counting the albums that had reached [multi]platinum status. This doesn't count gold records, or the number of albums sold since hitting a platinum milestone, or the sales of albums that didn't hit gold or platinum yet. So let's add a couple more million sales just for fun. That takes us to 113 million sales at around USD$10 apiece...over 1 billion USD. Yeah, those poor guys are in SUCH a slump. I guess they won't be able to buy any more Bentleys or Ferraris for their videos this year...
In that same vein, those in the US (or even outside) that have access to MTV -- watch and episode of the show "Cribs" and tell me if these people are hurting for money or in a slump.
The record industry wants you to think there's a slump, that there are lost sales to digital pirates and amoral teenagers. Without such FUD, they wouldn't be able to force services such as this on the unsuspecting public.
greg