The one steady complaint I hear is "doesn't do a perfect job of opening Microsoft Office formats". THat complaint is, even if true, ridiculous.
Why is it ridiculous?
We work with lawyers all the time, and all the time they send their funky boilerplate with our names filled in, and about 40% of the time, we need to go to the token windows box in the office to open it up. (Nice note though, sending stuff to them from OO works great.)
Ergo, we need a token windows box. It's easier than convincing our law firm to switch.
As a general note, ignoring customer's demands and dismissing them as ridiculous is not the way to gain market share.
The mom and pop joint has far better burgers, and real milkshakes, but when the zombie masses see the golden arches they act as if their decision has been made for them and go for the Big Macs.
IMHO, while this is somewhat saddening, this is actually rational behavior on the part of the "zombies". The quality of McD's product is fairly constant, and although not superlative, has low associated risk. The mom and pop store involves risk, in this case it's better, but you don't know that in advance, and it can take alot of time trying out all the little places to find better stuff.
p.z. i hope m$ tries to take on google; as long as there is no unfair bundling with the OS, competition will only spur more innovation by both parties.
Worst Public Servant: London Mayor Ken Livingstone, whose traffic-reduction plan relies on a network of 700 surveillance cameras posted around the capital that photograph car license plates to enforce a new fee for driving during rush hour.
I'm going to argue in favor of this strategy of enforcing traffic laws (speeding, stop signs, etc.) by video.
First, I think it's a fairer approach. As we all know, being pulled over for traffic offenses is biased. Minorities and those driving tricked-out racer cars are more likely to get pulled over. The videocamera is totally unbiased. Of course, we must be careful to guard against bias in determining where these video units are deployed.
In addition, I can't count the number of times attractive female (just) friends of mine have cried/clevaged their way out of various traffic tickets. Doing that in front of the camera might make them popular on the internet, but won't get them out of the ticket.
It's also very easy to beat a traffic ticket by pleading not-guilty, moving the court date several times, and counting on the cop not to show, thus winning the case for lack of evidence. This latter strategy both shifts court costs to the public (no court fees collected when not guilty) and favors those who have enough time or a flexible enough job to handle the requisite scheduling. This strategy would be stopped dead by the permanent and available nature of video as evidence.
Cops *have* died during traffic stops, either by being shot (purposefully) or by being run over (accidentally). So, traffic stops are dangerous from the police perspective, and probably creates some citizen-police tensions as some police are on guard during them.
Video minimizes unnecessary, dangerous, and potentially explosive contact.
Finally, I feel personally that this will lead to *less* invasive search, not more, because I don't have to worry about a cop searching my car for drugs, guns, or whatever he thinks I might have now that he had a valid reason to pull me over.
In a corporate environment, isn't this what testers are for? You don't waste the programmers time on this...
In fact, they shouldn't be the same people.
I agree that ultimately, one needs a seperate QA department for the end game assessments, because after a long time of staring at the same code, a set of people will no longer be able to see any further defects.
However, I think it's important for programmers to take an adversarial approach to their own code.
I definitely don't feel that it "wastes programmer time" to write their own tests, and therefore think about how to test the code. In my experience this leads to constructing more easily testable components which in turn increases modularity and improves design.
Also, on a social note, I believe it in unnatural and counterproductive to consider one activity (initial generation of inevitably defective code) to be more important or worthy of developer time than another activity (identification and elimination of introduced code defects) when both activities are critical to final software quality. Basically, then nobody wants to write tests because it is considered an inferior task!
However, it does counter the numerous articles and studies written alleging that Open Source software is inherently inferior in quality because there is no formal development process, no comprehensive test plan or infrastructure and no dedicated resources to provide follow-on support and maintenance...
We chose to examine the TCP/IP stack because it's "atypical" in a way that makes it perfect for comparison: it has a very well-defined set of published requirements that have been stable for several years; adherence to published standards is an essential element of any implementation; there are hundreds of books and articles covering design alternatives, performance measurements, and sample implementations; and there are publicly available conformance tests.
Ok, I love open source as much as, no more than, the next guy. But being knee deep in LSAT preparation materials, I immediately spotted the weakness in the argument here.
1. Open source is believed to be inferior because of the lack of formal development process.
2. TCP/IP is an atypical situation where an external standards body has created requirements, test cases, and the other trappings of a formal development process.
3. TCP/IP open source implementations are greatly superior to non-open source implementations.
Scott goes on to talk about the virtues of increased code inspection in open source projects. I think this is a fair and interesting point, namely, when the "formal development process variables" are held constant (i.e. all other things being equal), the increased code inspection leads to greatly increased code quality.
However, it seems clear to me that the original contention that open source lacks formal development processes and therefore produces inferior code has not been directly addressed. We are left to wonder whether the virtues of increased code inspection can overcome the lack of formal development processes.
"Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.
LOL when I read this. I thought for sure the second sentence would read something like "it enables us to abstract over past experience, and is an integral part of categorizing and modeling our universe into a managable and queriable form." Probably that would be closer to what this Williams guy actually said.
Leave it to the press to find the emotional hook. Not that somebody who remember everything would be hopelessly impaired cognitively like the famous Russian "S" case, but rather, they would have to endure their last breakup without relief.
It seems as if Taiwan has succeeded in doing what John Ashcroft and Co. (and his predecessors, for that matter) could never do: control Microsoft.
Not so strange, when you consider that M$ employs alot more people in the US than in Taiwan.
Outside of America, M$ dominance of the software world is seen as part of American hegemony and hence to be resisted. Inside America, people only think this on slashdot:)
Play in person is usually impossible, because the referee can only show the adventurer the terrain he is crossing at that instant, plus whatever is in his sight... The optimum solution seems to be play by phone...
hehehe.
Computers handle the mechanical aspects of "being the referee" so well. but I never really got into these newfangled muds/mmorps the kids like nowadays, because the human referee was so much better at the storytelling component of it.
Maybe the computer allows things to scale a little bit... what about 40 people get a dedicated world and 24-7 human referees providing open ended storylines. They each pay $500/mo or so to support their referees. Professional DM-ing!
I guess the referee interface to the world would have to get much better so that they could keep up... I had a good DM in junior high and that guy spent every waking hour of the week (including school, natch) coming up with enough material for one session a week... and I was a junior high school kid so my standards of entertainment weren't so high.
Don't want to troll too badly:), so please take in good sprit... but everybody here seems to treat NP as a synonym for "difficult to solve."
Easy mnemonic: an NP problem has a solution that can be verified in polynomial time. Clearly, lots of problems that people casually say are NP are actually far far harder.
The open question P=NP question is essentially whether there's a way to quickly (polynomially) find the solution to verify.
Many of these goodies will be items that are presently given away, because there's no efficient way to charge for them...at the microprices made possible by his software, Rivest figures millions of us will be happy to let him throw our money away.
So... not sure if I should be happy that lots of cheap things will be available to buy, given that they were free before.
in the movie "the recruit", the cia supposedly develops a virus that travels along the power grid, which can infect and destroy every computing device in the world.
i thought, this movie is retarded. well what do you know? i guess i'm not so smart after all... now i am forced to rethink all my assumptions... hmmm... perhaps "nonlinear crytography" is a real undergraduate degree at MIT, and having such a degree would make one an attractive job candidate to the head of research at Dell computer...
And no one ever may get the chance. In November 2001, the man who confessed to British authorities that he'd created the Leaves worm received a "formal caution," a legal warning usually reserved for juvenile crimes and minor drug offenses.
The lead officer on the case insists the agency has information about the hacker's motives that the FBI hasn't heard. But Scotland Yard refuses to divulge what it knows. Citing British law, officials refuse even to reveal the hacker's name.
wtf?
so we went through all that effort just to have the british let him go... suspicious. especially when the rest of the article indicates they had problems understanding the author's motivation, because they never really used the worm. "Perplexed by the lack of attack" as the article put it.
"An experienced sysadmin can just do so much more to lock down a Unix-based operating system, especially Linux," says Beale. "Windows 2000 doesn't offer either the same kind of granularity of configuration or the equivalent ability to inspect pieces of the operating system."
now is this true?
i know zero about windows administration, but i always thought it was that unix admins were more security conscious, better trained, or better paid, but that windows itself inherited alot of really cool security features from VMS, which in theory could make the box even more lock downable.
-- p
btw, the most productive follow-ups would be objective assesments from those who have administered both unixen and windows.
OverPeer even managed to procure a USPTO patent on (a) producing an advertising digital music file by deteriorating or damaging a sound quality of an original music file of a record of a cooperating record corporation; and (b) distributing the advertising digital music file through the communication network."
hey... this is a good thing! now they can prevent other people from doing this, and the aggregate amount of this activity will be lower, which is just fine by me.
Despite their dominance, though, the majors are merely duchies in large media empires with other, often conflicting, priorities.
Last year, the Big Five together sold about $20 billion worth of music. Meanwhile, Sony alone saw about $42 billion in electronics and computer sales. If Sony wants to sell MP3-capable cell phones - a big thing in Japan and potentially worldwide - how much attention will it pay to Sony Music's protests?
For the first time, I truly think the music industry might not survive as is, because there's more money in hardware if the software is free.
(Note this is IBM's business plan in a different context).
I was never big on "information wants to be free" or "the artists will revolt" analyses, because frankly executives and shareholders want to get paid, so they'll pass whatever laws they need to bully their way to the money.
But, if there's more money to be made with a different model, well, they're ya go.
"We see Linux going over the moon," says Larry Ellison, chairman and chief executive officer of Oracle. "We have never seen anything with this much of an uptake in 25 years in the industry."
Well, laugh now Larry, because Oracle is next.
Hopefully the state of California will be one of the first converts to an open source database.
I wonder about all these companies that have to come up with their own licenses. I had some understanding when netscape did it (they being one of the first big companies doing major open source and perhaps finding the gpl/bsd "extremes" unappealing), but now that they, ibm, and others have released tweaked licenses that are (presumably) more friendly to business, is there really need for another one, or are the lawyers just extracting $$$?
Actually, i'm just being cynical, i guess that is a pretty good idea.. a kid-safe playground that you can let your children run free on without any worry they'll run across anything "bad".
Agreed... because it allows the bad stuff to stay around.
The reason there are 7 words on the radio you can't say is because radio is a broadcast medium, and the US Supreme Court ruled that since people can't stop the broadcast from reaching them, a weaker interpretation of the first amendment holds relative to non-broadcast medium. Not my favorite case law, but that's the way it happened.
Now the court has been really really good about saying that broadcast arguments don't apply to the internet. The rationale is, since you request stuff, you can easily avoid offensive material by not requesting it.
That's exactly what.kids.us facilitates. I love it, cuz it means more pr0n for me.
So any site under kids.us is safe for kids. Sites are only safe for kids if they're under kids.us. Why not just create a whitelist of kids-safe sites. In order to get on the list, you must not link to sites that aren't on the whitelist.
Works out the same, but eliminates the cost of the domain to the website owner.
Well, the computational complexity of your solution is O(n) in space, whereas Bush's solution is O(1) space.
Looks like George W. Bush is a better software engineer than you are!
The honorable Judge J. Baxter writes in dissent:
The record indicates that, by intentionally posting an unlicensed decryption code for the Content Scrambling System (CSS) on their Internet Web sites, defendant and his network of ``open source'' associates sought to undermine and defeat the very purposes of the licensed CSS encrytion technology...
Wow! Makes free software sound like the mafia. (Those are his quotes around open source, btw.)
I think we (open source) have a major PR problem with the judiciary to address.
i saw an interview with jason alexander (george from seinfeld) once, who claimed that he was inspired by shatner's overemoting style. makes sense, considering his rendition of george.
jason also made the point, which i agree with, that shatner's "over the top" style was a major factor in the success of the original series.
In the long run, the internet means that there IS NO "Information Economy". Economy as humanity knows it is effectively the redistribution of scarce resources, and the internet makes information non-scarce. Imagine your neighbour had a magic-car-cloning-ray. Would you begrudge him a clone of your car? You'd still have a car, he'd still have a car, everyone's better off.
While the marginal costs of information replication are effectively zero, the fixed costs are not. Following your car-cloning-ray example, somebody had to assemble the first car, and whoever did that is paying more for their car then the cloners. Therefore, free rider mentality indicates no one will be the first to assemble a car by hand.
In software, the fixed costs can be amortized across many users, since they all want to use the identical information product. In addition, the fixed costs can be decomposed among many contributors because of the modular nature of (good) software.
In music, however, the fixed costs are more important because the products are not perfect substitutes, and a large-scale collaborative effort is not feasible. To put in another way, unless we all want to listen to a single album (the way we all run one kernel), made by many people contributing a few notes each, we need to find a way to sustain the fixed costs of music production, which in this case means feeding and clothing the artists.
The old model is terminal, but scarcity has not been eliminated.
More importantly, Join the ACLU. The EFF has practices that unfortunetly go against practicality. The ACLU is an old and established group that fights for our rights. They do fight for our first amendment rights anywhere, including on the web. Lobbying againt the right wing republicans and ashcroft is a good thing
I belong to both. I first joined the ACLU, but then I noticed that while they do alot of excellent work, they get alot of their money and support from wealthy people in the media industries. It therefore seemed there were certain issues, relating to copyrights and intellectual property, for which the EFF seemed more aligned with my interests.
The other reason we use the database, that it's easier to deal with in our application, because writting a join against the filesystem is tricky.
I think this gets to the point.
Namely, the hierarchical tree model of filesystems pales in comparison to the relational model of modern databases (first generation databases, way back in the day, were hierarchical).
Slashdot Mirror
The one steady complaint I hear is "doesn't do a perfect job of opening Microsoft Office formats". THat complaint is, even if true, ridiculous.
Why is it ridiculous?
We work with lawyers all the time, and all the time they send their funky boilerplate with our names filled in, and about 40% of the time, we need to go to the token windows box in the office to open it up. (Nice note though, sending stuff to them from OO works great.)
Ergo, we need a token windows box. It's easier than convincing our law firm to switch.
As a general note, ignoring customer's demands and dismissing them as ridiculous is not the way to gain market share.
-- p
The mom and pop joint has far better burgers, and real milkshakes, but when the zombie masses see the golden arches they act as if their decision has been made for them and go for the Big Macs.
IMHO, while this is somewhat saddening, this is actually rational behavior on the part of the "zombies". The quality of McD's product is fairly constant, and although not superlative, has low associated risk. The mom and pop store involves risk, in this case it's better, but you don't know that in advance, and it can take alot of time trying out all the little places to find better stuff.
aka sharpe's ratio.
-- p
p.z. i hope m$ tries to take on google; as long as there is no unfair bundling with the OS, competition will only spur more innovation by both parties.
Worst Public Servant: London Mayor Ken Livingstone, whose traffic-reduction plan relies on a network of 700 surveillance cameras posted around the capital that photograph car license plates to enforce a new fee for driving during rush hour.
I'm going to argue in favor of this strategy of enforcing traffic laws (speeding, stop signs, etc.) by video.
First, I think it's a fairer approach. As we all know, being pulled over for traffic offenses is biased. Minorities and those driving tricked-out racer cars are more likely to get pulled over. The videocamera is totally unbiased. Of course, we must be careful to guard against bias in determining where these video units are deployed.
In addition, I can't count the number of times attractive female (just) friends of mine have cried/clevaged their way out of various traffic tickets. Doing that in front of the camera might make them popular on the internet, but won't get them out of the ticket.
It's also very easy to beat a traffic ticket by pleading not-guilty, moving the court date several times, and counting on the cop not to show, thus winning the case for lack of evidence. This latter strategy both shifts court costs to the public (no court fees collected when not guilty) and favors those who have enough time or a flexible enough job to handle the requisite scheduling. This strategy would be stopped dead by the permanent and available nature of video as evidence.
Cops *have* died during traffic stops, either by being shot (purposefully) or by being run over (accidentally). So, traffic stops are dangerous from the police perspective, and probably creates some citizen-police tensions as some police are on guard during them. Video minimizes unnecessary, dangerous, and potentially explosive contact.
Finally, I feel personally that this will lead to *less* invasive search, not more, because I don't have to worry about a cop searching my car for drugs, guns, or whatever he thinks I might have now that he had a valid reason to pull me over.
-- p
In a corporate environment, isn't this what testers are for? You don't waste the programmers time on this ...
In fact, they shouldn't be the same people.
I agree that ultimately, one needs a seperate QA department for the end game assessments, because after a long time of staring at the same code, a set of people will no longer be able to see any further defects.
However, I think it's important for programmers to take an adversarial approach to their own code. I definitely don't feel that it "wastes programmer time" to write their own tests, and therefore think about how to test the code. In my experience this leads to constructing more easily testable components which in turn increases modularity and improves design.
Also, on a social note, I believe it in unnatural and counterproductive to consider one activity (initial generation of inevitably defective code) to be more important or worthy of developer time than another activity (identification and elimination of introduced code defects) when both activities are critical to final software quality. Basically, then nobody wants to write tests because it is considered an inferior task!
-- p
However, it does counter the numerous articles and studies written alleging that Open Source software is inherently inferior in quality because there is no formal development process, no comprehensive test plan or infrastructure and no dedicated resources to provide follow-on support and maintenance ...
We chose to examine the TCP/IP stack because it's "atypical" in a way that makes it perfect for comparison: it has a very well-defined set of published requirements that have been stable for several years; adherence to published standards is an essential element of any implementation; there are hundreds of books and articles covering design alternatives, performance measurements, and sample implementations; and there are publicly available conformance tests.
Ok, I love open source as much as, no more than, the next guy. But being knee deep in LSAT preparation materials, I immediately spotted the weakness in the argument here.
1. Open source is believed to be inferior because of the lack of formal development process.
2. TCP/IP is an atypical situation where an external standards body has created requirements, test cases, and the other trappings of a formal development process.
3. TCP/IP open source implementations are greatly superior to non-open source implementations.
Scott goes on to talk about the virtues of increased code inspection in open source projects. I think this is a fair and interesting point, namely, when the "formal development process variables" are held constant (i.e. all other things being equal), the increased code inspection leads to greatly increased code quality.
However, it seems clear to me that the original contention that open source lacks formal development processes and therefore produces inferior code has not been directly addressed. We are left to wonder whether the virtues of increased code inspection can overcome the lack of formal development processes.
-- p
"Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.
LOL when I read this. I thought for sure the second sentence would read something like "it enables us to abstract over past experience, and is an integral part of categorizing and modeling our universe into a managable and queriable form." Probably that would be closer to what this Williams guy actually said.
Leave it to the press to find the emotional hook. Not that somebody who remember everything would be hopelessly impaired cognitively like the famous Russian "S" case, but rather, they would have to endure their last breakup without relief.
-- p
It seems as if Taiwan has succeeded in doing what John Ashcroft and Co. (and his predecessors, for that matter) could never do: control Microsoft.
:)
Not so strange, when you consider that M$ employs alot more people in the US than in Taiwan.
Outside of America, M$ dominance of the software world is seen as part of American hegemony and hence to be resisted. Inside America, people only think this on slashdot
-- p
Play in person is usually impossible, because the referee can only show the adventurer the terrain he is crossing at that instant, plus whatever is in his sight ... The optimum solution seems to be play by phone ...
... what about 40 people get a dedicated world and 24-7 human referees providing open ended storylines. They each pay $500/mo or so to support their referees. Professional DM-ing!
... I had a good DM in junior high and that guy spent every waking hour of the week (including school, natch) coming up with enough material for one session a week ... and I was a junior high school kid so my standards of entertainment weren't so high.
hehehe.
Computers handle the mechanical aspects of "being the referee" so well. but I never really got into these newfangled muds/mmorps the kids like nowadays, because the human referee was so much better at the storytelling component of it.
Maybe the computer allows things to scale a little bit
I guess the referee interface to the world would have to get much better so that they could keep up
-- p
In CS lingo, it would appear to be NP-Complete. ;)
:), so please take in good sprit ... but everybody here seems to treat NP as a synonym for "difficult to solve."
Don't want to troll too badly
Easy mnemonic: an NP problem has a solution that can be verified in polynomial time. Clearly, lots of problems that people casually say are NP are actually far far harder.
The open question P=NP question is essentially whether there's a way to quickly (polynomially) find the solution to verify.
'nuff said.
-- p
the article is a little contradictory.
...at the microprices made possible by his software, Rivest figures millions of us will be happy to let him throw our money away.
... not sure if I should be happy that lots of cheap things will be available to buy, given that they were free before.
Many of these goodies will be items that are presently given away, because there's no efficient way to charge for them
So
-- p
in the movie "the recruit", the cia supposedly develops a virus that travels along the power grid, which can infect and destroy every computing device in the world.
... now i am forced to rethink all my assumptions ... hmmm ... perhaps "nonlinear crytography" is a real undergraduate degree at MIT, and having such a degree would make one an attractive job candidate to the head of research at Dell computer ...
i thought, this movie is retarded. well what do you know? i guess i'm not so smart after all
-- p
And no one ever may get the chance. In November 2001, the man who confessed to British authorities that he'd created the Leaves worm received a "formal caution," a legal warning usually reserved for juvenile crimes and minor drug offenses.
The lead officer on the case insists the agency has information about the hacker's motives that the FBI hasn't heard. But Scotland Yard refuses to divulge what it knows. Citing British law, officials refuse even to reveal the hacker's name.
wtf?
so we went through all that effort just to have the british let him go
You be the judge.
-- p
"An experienced sysadmin can just do so much more to lock down a Unix-based operating system, especially Linux," says Beale. "Windows 2000 doesn't offer either the same kind of granularity of configuration or the equivalent ability to inspect pieces of the operating system."
now is this true?
i know zero about windows administration, but i always thought it was that unix admins were more security conscious, better trained, or better paid, but that windows itself inherited alot of really cool security features from VMS, which in theory could make the box even more lock downable.
-- p
btw, the most productive follow-ups would be objective assesments from those who have administered both unixen and windows.
OverPeer even managed to procure a USPTO patent on (a) producing an advertising digital music file by deteriorating or damaging a sound quality of an original music file of a record of a cooperating record corporation; and (b) distributing the advertising digital music file through the communication network."
... this is a good thing! now they can prevent other people from doing this, and the aggregate amount of this activity will be lower, which is just fine by me.
hey
-- p
Despite their dominance, though, the majors are merely duchies in large media empires with other, often conflicting, priorities.
Last year, the Big Five together sold about $20 billion worth of music. Meanwhile, Sony alone saw about $42 billion in electronics and computer sales. If Sony wants to sell MP3-capable cell phones - a big thing in Japan and potentially worldwide - how much attention will it pay to Sony Music's protests?
For the first time, I truly think the music industry might not survive as is, because there's more money in hardware if the software is free. (Note this is IBM's business plan in a different context).
I was never big on "information wants to be free" or "the artists will revolt" analyses, because frankly executives and shareholders want to get paid, so they'll pass whatever laws they need to bully their way to the money.
But, if there's more money to be made with a different model, well, they're ya go.
-- p
"We see Linux going over the moon," says Larry Ellison, chairman and chief executive officer of Oracle. "We have never seen anything with this much of an uptake in 25 years in the industry."
Well, laugh now Larry, because Oracle is next.
Hopefully the state of California will be one of the first converts to an open source database.
-- p
I wonder about all these companies that have to come up with their own licenses. I had some understanding when netscape did it (they being one of the first big companies doing major open source and perhaps finding the gpl/bsd "extremes" unappealing), but now that they, ibm, and others have released tweaked licenses that are (presumably) more friendly to business, is there really need for another one, or are the lawyers just extracting $$$?
-- p
mark my words ... some young perl hacker is going to whip something up.
-- p
Actually, i'm just being cynical, i guess that is a pretty good idea.. a kid-safe playground that you can let your children run free on without any worry they'll run across anything "bad".
... because it allows the bad stuff to stay around.
.kids.us facilitates. I love it, cuz it means more pr0n for me.
Agreed
The reason there are 7 words on the radio you can't say is because radio is a broadcast medium, and the US Supreme Court ruled that since people can't stop the broadcast from reaching them, a weaker interpretation of the first amendment holds relative to non-broadcast medium. Not my favorite case law, but that's the way it happened.
Now the court has been really really good about saying that broadcast arguments don't apply to the internet. The rationale is, since you request stuff, you can easily avoid offensive material by not requesting it.
That's exactly what
-- p
So any site under kids.us is safe for kids. Sites are only safe for kids if they're under kids.us. Why not just create a whitelist of kids-safe sites. In order to get on the list, you must not link to sites that aren't on the whitelist.
Works out the same, but eliminates the cost of the domain to the website owner.
Well, the computational complexity of your solution is O(n) in space, whereas Bush's solution is O(1) space.
Looks like George W. Bush is a better software engineer than you are!
-- p
The honorable Judge J. Baxter writes in dissent: ...
The record indicates that, by intentionally posting an unlicensed decryption code for the Content Scrambling System (CSS) on their Internet Web sites, defendant and his network of ``open source'' associates sought to undermine and defeat the very purposes of the licensed CSS encrytion technology
Wow! Makes free software sound like the mafia. (Those are his quotes around open source, btw.)
I think we (open source) have a major PR problem with the judiciary to address.
-- p
i saw an interview with jason alexander (george from seinfeld) once, who claimed that he was inspired by shatner's overemoting style. makes sense, considering his rendition of george.
jason also made the point, which i agree with, that shatner's "over the top" style was a major factor in the success of the original series.
-- p
In the long run, the internet means that there IS NO "Information Economy". Economy as humanity knows it is effectively the redistribution of scarce resources, and the internet makes information non-scarce. Imagine your neighbour had a magic-car-cloning-ray. Would you begrudge him a clone of your car? You'd still have a car, he'd still have a car, everyone's better off.
While the marginal costs of information replication are effectively zero, the fixed costs are not. Following your car-cloning-ray example, somebody had to assemble the first car, and whoever did that is paying more for their car then the cloners. Therefore, free rider mentality indicates no one will be the first to assemble a car by hand.
In software, the fixed costs can be amortized across many users, since they all want to use the identical information product. In addition, the fixed costs can be decomposed among many contributors because of the modular nature of (good) software.
In music, however, the fixed costs are more important because the products are not perfect substitutes, and a large-scale collaborative effort is not feasible. To put in another way, unless we all want to listen to a single album (the way we all run one kernel), made by many people contributing a few notes each, we need to find a way to sustain the fixed costs of music production, which in this case means feeding and clothing the artists.
The old model is terminal, but scarcity has not been eliminated.
-- p
More importantly, Join the ACLU. The EFF has practices that unfortunetly go against practicality. The ACLU is an old and established group that fights for our rights. They do fight for our first amendment rights anywhere, including on the web. Lobbying againt the right wing republicans and ashcroft is a good thing
I belong to both. I first joined the ACLU, but then I noticed that while they do alot of excellent work, they get alot of their money and support from wealthy people in the media industries. It therefore seemed there were certain issues, relating to copyrights and intellectual property, for which the EFF seemed more aligned with my interests.
I think both are excellent organizations.
-- p
The other reason we use the database, that it's easier to deal with in our application, because writting a join against the filesystem is tricky.
I think this gets to the point.
Namely, the hierarchical tree model of filesystems pales in comparison to the relational model of modern databases (first generation databases, way back in the day, were hierarchical).
-- p