You typically aquire books by doing something like the following:
Enter a shop. Pick a product from the shelves.
Walk to the counter. Say something like: "I'd like to buy this, please."
"That'll be $39.95, then, is that all ?"
Yes, thank you. Here you are. (cash changes hands)
And from that point it is your book. You can tear it apart, burn it to stay warm, resell it to someone else. You might even read it should you want to.
However, you cannot just start making (partial) copies of this book, the law puts limitations on copying the contents of a book. That's what they call that 'Copyright'. You get some right by law, you may get other right from the copyright holder through some licence. That license might impose all kinds of contractual terms.
Now you by this CD-ROM with software. You can use it as a frisbee, put it in your microwave or even in your computer. But as soon as you start copying the contents of this disk onto your computers harddrive or memory copyright starts to kick in. That's why software is protected by copyright, even though the CD-ROM actually is your property.
Indeed, and while you're at it, only use this email address outside of your house. Like in internet cafe's and such. You girlfriend might just poke around on your computer. Als make sure she does not follow you when you are going out. Tell you're colleages not to let here in, since she might sneak up on you at work. Or perhaps it's best to just tie her up in the basement, that will solve the issue.
Or maybe, just maybe, we are solving the wrong problem here. Do i really need to explain something is wrong when you have to hide stuff for your SO?
Offcourse there is another problem, your SO is not the only one who has your email address. But do you really think that someone who is checking your email address against various websites to see if you have an account there should be having your email address? Nope, so solve that problem, make sure that people/organisations that cannot be trusted with you email address will not get it.
Big deal, an attacker can find out whether you're a Netflix user -- but that's not a huge privacy violation, it's not like I shamefully hide those red envelopes under my shirt while I'm scurrying back from the mailbox.
So here you are, making a big fuss about some perceived privacy problem. Yet appearantly privacy mainly means being able to hide the thing you are ashamed of. If that is all you are concerned with your privacy is not the problem.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." .
That statement was made by Edsger Wybe Dijkstra in 1975. Nothing changed in more then 30 years, a short article on some IBM website will not change things either.
True, but than add the cost off the admin setting the whole thing up. Add to cost of the needed spare parts and add the cost of replacement (both in labor and parts) of failing components. In an some companies it may even mean the difference between having to hire a sysadmin and being able to do without. At home it's absolutely the way to go, in a bussiness enviroment i'd think twice.
I do think China should be held to the same standards. But I also think that whatever China does is never an excuse for the US to do the same. Didn't you learn as a kid that 'But he did it as well!' is not an excuse?
Apart from that, how much chinese people are driving needlessly big and inefficient cars?
I whole agree with you on the command-line part, but I must add that using ssh over tcp/ip is far easier than using girlfriend of voice connection. The girlfriend over voice thingy has it's uses, but installing applications is not one of them.
Source-code compatibility often is indeed enough, but saying there are no advantages simply isn't true. I will grant you in advance that most of the advantages don't really apply to most desktop applications, which seems to be the target market of Lina.
The first and foremost advantage of a VM is the ease of deployment.
You can write a PHP script and run it on the server of almost any hosting provider without caring about the OS this provider happens to use. You can create apps for mobile phones without having to keep up with the huge variety of processors and operating systems found in cellphones. And incidentally it's in these fields where you see a lot of VM'd languages.
But there are advantages for desktops applications as well, there are good reasons for not supporting all possible operating systems, testing and support being one of them. Having to compile an application multiple times and having to create (and support) separate releases for different operating systems is another. It's generally just a bad investment to go through all that hassle to get access to just a few extra customers. Using a VM generally eases multi platform support enough to tip the balance to the other side. And can you imagine something like Java Webstart, without some kind of virtual machine to enable it?
Other advantages include smaller size of the application because there is a fixed set of library functions just there, reducing the need to include libraries with your application.
It can prevent issues with users that cannot seem to pick the right version (= support costs), it can ease loadbalancing as well as distributed execution. It also can make applications more future proof (I don't know what the next Apple platform will be, but i'm pretty sure it will contain a Java VM).
America will rightly take it to world court and EU will lose that.
Daily quiz questions:
1. What 'world court'?
2. When was it that America started careing about ruling of international courts?
3. Why do they think europe will care about such an international ruling?
Geez, reading is hard I guess?
Show me, were did I state that C(++) programs can't contain bugs? Believe me, I know they can. I know it is possible to produce crappy software in any language.
Yet you claim that since there are bugs in C(++) programs as well there is no correlation between the programming language and the propensity of bugs. Sounds like a heavy smoker stating that non smokers get cancer too. Smokers get more cancer, in some languages it's easier to write sloppy code, some programming languages are more prone to bugs. But than again, if you've never looked beyond C(++) I perfectly understand this might be a suprise to you.
And yes, I do have some understanding of the software development industry, I also had a proper IT education, unlike most people in this bussiness. I'm also clever enough to see that the average quality of software is really really low.
And yes, I do understand it is important to use the right tool for the job, that's exactly the point. A scripting language originally developed to be able to add some dynamic content to a webpage is *not* the right tool when you are developing a full e-commerce application. Not even when it's userinterface happens to be a web page. Period.
And it's stunning that so many people who claim to have some understanding about building software can't see these basic things. But if your view represents that of the average IT guy (judging by the moderation here it does) it sure explains something about the quality of most software.
Finding card numbers has always been easy. Just get a yourself a job at a shop, you'll get paid to collect creditcard numbers. People are strange, half the day they are running around showing their creditcard number (including all data needed for a transaction!) to a whole bunch of people, the other half of the day they worry about people discovering their creditcard number.
Please, get a grip an choose between 'I will not use a creditcard' or 'Creditcards are insecure but I'll use 'm anyway'. This has always been the situation and neither the big bad internet nor evil google changed that. Thats why no single creditcard company is suprised, they have know and handled this for years.
I've seen my share of asp code. Believe me, they generally sucks just as hard as these shitty PHP apps. It's just that must cheapo apps are written for the cheapest platform, which happens to be LAMP, not IIS. The problem lies in those 'easy' scripting language and the idea that everybody and their dog can write a web application.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of banning PHP. But we should ban ASP as well because it's just as bad. It's not about MS, it's not about opensource. It's about shitty developers writing shitty software in shitty scripting languages that make it for them to do so.
Ow, and yes, I know it's possible to write proper clean PHP code. Or even clean ASP code. It's just that hardly anyone seems to do so. (And the ones smart enough to write proper code are generally smart enough to avoid scripting language whenever they can.)
The problem is, a computer is a lot more complex from the user's perspective, than a car.
It's not just the users perspective. Computers are more complex then cars. Cars perform just one fairly simple task, move people and stuff from A to B. Now can you describe what your computer does for you in just 1 sentence?
Having said that I generally notice there is a relation between how people use their computer and how they perceive it's complexity. My aunt does 4 things with her computer: Turn it on, read email, send email, turn it of. That's all she ever does and she doesn't consider the computer to be a very complex thing. It didn't change when I switched her to a Linux machine.
My sister however is totally ignorant about what a computer is but allway expects it to automagically do whatever she wants it to do. Like burning DVD's without a DVD burner. She considers a computer to be extremly complex. That also did not change when she switched to Linux.
They are trying to move OS companies into a direction where they have to play the whole IP game. They won't kill open-source, but they can try to make money out of it. And that just what they are doing right now.
What they are saying is that they really honestly don't mind when we are using Linux. And it's true, it even is smart.
Just look at it, Dell customers get to use Linux but still pay their share of MS tax, but now for an OS Microsoft doesn't need to develop or support.
You thought having 99.9% marketshare is the ultimate way to make money? Think again.
"You mean BASIC isn't fun? It was fun for me... but maybe that's why I'm reading Slashdot now."
Indeed!
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
-- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
Now that quote is from 1975, and here we are, trying to create a new and better beginners allpurpose symbolic instruction code.
And business methods should not be patentable either, and AFAIK they aren't patentable in europe either. You guys in the US should target the patenting of business methods and kill software patents in the process.
That, and you should find a way to stop the patenting of stupid, useless, obvious and unoriginal things. Because thats the biggest problem with patents, patenting software would be far far far less devastating if it wasn't possible to patent obvious things and if it wasn't possible to patent other peoples solutions.
If these problems are fixed I think I might not even have a problem with someone getting a software patent for a really clever solution to a really hard problem.
"People may not want to think IBM is some great savior of FOSS, but they are the closest thing to a large money source the movement is going to have."
It's sad when you need 'a large money source' to get justice done. But it becomes a really sad thing when people start accepting it as a normal thing.
Just think about it for a while and wonder in what kind of country you are living.
Land of the free^H^H^H^Hbig money. Makes me sick.
Well, nothing was stolen from anyone. The guy gets to keep his profile and 160K friends if he sets up a new MySpace page, the Obama campain guys don't get that, and will need to build up their own MySpace page, just like you say they should.
The only thing which changes is who gets to use the myspace.com/barackobama profile. It's not suprising it's handed over to a person that's actually named Barack Obama, MySpace does that all the time.
What is sad is that a campain team feel the need to drop someone who is clearly committed to there case, you because that someone is not them. Stupid control freaks if you ask me. They could easily have kept the current situation, they allready had access to the profile. If they had put in same effort to offload this guy they whould have had a huge succesfull MySpace profile, now they getting bad press over this and need to start all over again.
I'm not entirely into the details, but according to this article the patents include the briliant idea to connect a voip network with the pots network. Anyone trying to patent something that obvious is a patent troll to me.
And to be honest, the rest of these patents really look like solutions anyone could come up with given the same problem. And perhaps that is the biggest problem with patents these days, most of them are just describing logical obvious solutions. Generally it's just an old solution applied to a somewhat new problem.
A Gecko ActiveX control is a great idea. The several MB's of download are a bit of a problem, so what we do need is an Opera ActiveX control. They still manage to squeez a proper browser into a few MB. I'm sure they can come up with an AciveX control of bearable size.
Hi, i'd like to welcome you all to our monthly bussiness strategy meeting. The agenda of this months meeting is basically the same as last month:
1. What has Apple been doing this month?
2. What has Google been doing this month?
3. Are there other interesting things to copy?
Slashdot Mirror
Enter a shop. Pick a product from the shelves.
Walk to the counter. Say something like: "I'd like to buy this, please."
"That'll be $39.95, then, is that all ?"
Yes, thank you. Here you are. (cash changes hands)
And from that point it is your book. You can tear it apart, burn it to stay warm, resell it to someone else. You might even read it should you want to.
However, you cannot just start making (partial) copies of this book, the law puts limitations on copying the contents of a book. That's what they call that 'Copyright'. You get some right by law, you may get other right from the copyright holder through some licence. That license might impose all kinds of contractual terms.
Now you by this CD-ROM with software. You can use it as a frisbee, put it in your microwave or even in your computer. But as soon as you start copying the contents of this disk onto your computers harddrive or memory copyright starts to kick in. That's why software is protected by copyright, even though the CD-ROM actually is your property.
Indeed, and while you're at it, only use this email address outside of your house. Like in internet cafe's and such. You girlfriend might just poke around on your computer. Als make sure she does not follow you when you are going out. Tell you're colleages not to let here in, since she might sneak up on you at work. Or perhaps it's best to just tie her up in the basement, that will solve the issue.
Or maybe, just maybe, we are solving the wrong problem here. Do i really need to explain something is wrong when you have to hide stuff for your SO?
Offcourse there is another problem, your SO is not the only one who has your email address. But do you really think that someone who is checking your email address against various websites to see if you have an account there should be having your email address? Nope, so solve that problem, make sure that people/organisations that cannot be trusted with you email address will not get it.
Big deal, an attacker can find out whether you're a Netflix user -- but that's not a huge privacy violation, it's not like I shamefully hide those red envelopes under my shirt while I'm scurrying back from the mailbox.
So here you are, making a big fuss about some perceived privacy problem. Yet appearantly privacy mainly means being able to hide the thing you are ashamed of. If that is all you are concerned with your privacy is not the problem.
Forget it, it won't help, it's hopeless.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
.
That statement was made by Edsger Wybe Dijkstra in 1975. Nothing changed in more then 30 years, a short article on some IBM website will not change things either.
I often prefer #define's for constants because they stand out more from the surrounding code.
When was it they made it illegal to CAPITALIZE constants?
True, but than add the cost off the admin setting the whole thing up. Add to cost of the needed spare parts and add the cost of replacement (both in labor and parts) of failing components. In an some companies it may even mean the difference between having to hire a sysadmin and being able to do without. At home it's absolutely the way to go, in a bussiness enviroment i'd think twice.
I do think China should be held to the same standards. But I also think that whatever China does is never an excuse for the US to do the same. Didn't you learn as a kid that 'But he did it as well!' is not an excuse? Apart from that, how much chinese people are driving needlessly big and inefficient cars?
I whole agree with you on the command-line part, but I must add that using ssh over tcp/ip is far easier than using girlfriend of voice connection. The girlfriend over voice thingy has it's uses, but installing applications is not one of them.
Source-code compatibility often is indeed enough, but saying there are no advantages simply isn't true. I will grant you in advance that most of the advantages don't really apply to most desktop applications, which seems to be the target market of Lina.
The first and foremost advantage of a VM is the ease of deployment.
You can write a PHP script and run it on the server of almost any hosting provider without caring about the OS this provider happens to use. You can create apps for mobile phones without having to keep up with the huge variety of processors and operating systems found in cellphones. And incidentally it's in these fields where you see a lot of VM'd languages.
But there are advantages for desktops applications as well, there are good reasons for not supporting all possible operating systems, testing and support being one of them. Having to compile an application multiple times and having to create (and support) separate releases for different operating systems is another. It's generally just a bad investment to go through all that hassle to get access to just a few extra customers. Using a VM generally eases multi platform support enough to tip the balance to the other side. And can you imagine something like Java Webstart, without some kind of virtual machine to enable it?
Other advantages include smaller size of the application because there is a fixed set of library functions just there, reducing the need to include libraries with your application.
It can prevent issues with users that cannot seem to pick the right version (= support costs), it can ease loadbalancing as well as distributed execution. It also can make applications more future proof (I don't know what the next Apple platform will be, but i'm pretty sure it will contain a Java VM).
How about:
The only fair thing is for every human being should have a "carbon budget" and they should either live within their budget. Period.
Why should the ones with to budget to invest in clean solutions be the ones allowed to polute more?
America will rightly take it to world court and EU will lose that.
Daily quiz questions:
1. What 'world court'?
2. When was it that America started careing about ruling of international courts?
3. Why do they think europe will care about such an international ruling?
Essentially what you want is for us to wreck our economy around the same time China finishes building theirs.
Nope, essentially I want you to stop wrecking the world my (grand)children will have to live in. But of course your wealth is far more important.
Geez, reading is hard I guess?
Show me, were did I state that C(++) programs can't contain bugs? Believe me, I know they can. I know it is possible to produce crappy software in any language.
Yet you claim that since there are bugs in C(++) programs as well there is no correlation between the programming language and the propensity of bugs. Sounds like a heavy smoker stating that non smokers get cancer too. Smokers get more cancer, in some languages it's easier to write sloppy code, some programming languages are more prone to bugs. But than again, if you've never looked beyond C(++) I perfectly understand this might be a suprise to you.
And yes, I do have some understanding of the software development industry, I also had a proper IT education, unlike most people in this bussiness. I'm also clever enough to see that the average quality of software is really really low.
And yes, I do understand it is important to use the right tool for the job, that's exactly the point. A scripting language originally developed to be able to add some dynamic content to a webpage is *not* the right tool when you are developing a full e-commerce application. Not even when it's userinterface happens to be a web page. Period.
And it's stunning that so many people who claim to have some understanding about building software can't see these basic things. But if your view represents that of the average IT guy (judging by the moderation here it does) it sure explains something about the quality of most software.
Finding card numbers has always been easy. Just get a yourself a job at a shop, you'll get paid to collect creditcard numbers. People are strange, half the day they are running around showing their creditcard number (including all data needed for a transaction!) to a whole bunch of people, the other half of the day they worry about people discovering their creditcard number.
Please, get a grip an choose between 'I will not use a creditcard' or 'Creditcards are insecure but I'll use 'm anyway'. This has always been the situation and neither the big bad internet nor evil google changed that. Thats why no single creditcard company is suprised, they have know and handled this for years.
I've seen my share of asp code. Believe me, they generally sucks just as hard as these shitty PHP apps. It's just that must cheapo apps are written for the cheapest platform, which happens to be LAMP, not IIS. The problem lies in those 'easy' scripting language and the idea that everybody and their dog can write a web application.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of banning PHP. But we should ban ASP as well because it's just as bad. It's not about MS, it's not about opensource. It's about shitty developers writing shitty software in shitty scripting languages that make it for them to do so.
Ow, and yes, I know it's possible to write proper clean PHP code. Or even clean ASP code. It's just that hardly anyone seems to do so. (And the ones smart enough to write proper code are generally smart enough to avoid scripting language whenever they can.)
The problem is, a computer is a lot more complex from the user's perspective, than a car.
It's not just the users perspective. Computers are more complex then cars. Cars perform just one fairly simple task, move people and stuff from A to B. Now can you describe what your computer does for you in just 1 sentence?
Having said that I generally notice there is a relation between how people use their computer and how they perceive it's complexity. My aunt does 4 things with her computer: Turn it on, read email, send email, turn it of. That's all she ever does and she doesn't consider the computer to be a very complex thing. It didn't change when I switched her to a Linux machine.
My sister however is totally ignorant about what a computer is but allway expects it to automagically do whatever she wants it to do. Like burning DVD's without a DVD burner. She considers a computer to be extremly complex. That also did not change when she switched to Linux.
They are trying to move OS companies into a direction where they have to play the whole IP game. They won't kill open-source, but they can try to make money out of it. And that just what they are doing right now.
What they are saying is that they really honestly don't mind when we are using Linux. And it's true, it even is smart.
Just look at it, Dell customers get to use Linux but still pay their share of MS tax, but now for an OS Microsoft doesn't need to develop or support.
You thought having 99.9% marketshare is the ultimate way to make money? Think again.
"You mean BASIC isn't fun? It was fun for me... but maybe that's why I'm reading Slashdot now."
Indeed!
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
-- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
Now that quote is from 1975, and here we are, trying to create a new and better beginners allpurpose symbolic instruction code.
Like Hegel told...
Oh well, nevermind.
And business methods should not be patentable either, and AFAIK they aren't patentable in europe either. You guys in the US should target the patenting of business methods and kill software patents in the process.
That, and you should find a way to stop the patenting of stupid, useless, obvious and unoriginal things. Because thats the biggest problem with patents, patenting software would be far far far less devastating if it wasn't possible to patent obvious things and if it wasn't possible to patent other peoples solutions.
If these problems are fixed I think I might not even have a problem with someone getting a software patent for a really clever solution to a really hard problem.
[Insert mod-me-down disclaimer here]
"People may not want to think IBM is some great savior of FOSS, but they are the closest thing to a large money source the movement is going to have."
It's sad when you need 'a large money source' to get justice done. But it becomes a really sad thing when people start accepting it as a normal thing.
Just think about it for a while and wonder in what kind of country you are living.
Land of the free^H^H^H^Hbig money. Makes me sick.
In DRM, B and C are the same person.
Now what's that supposed to mean? Did Bob give up on Alice to run off with Charlie, or did she dump them?
Can't they just stop this childish messages thing and watch a movie together or something?
Well, nothing was stolen from anyone. The guy gets to keep his profile and 160K friends if he sets up a new MySpace page, the Obama campain guys don't get that, and will need to build up their own MySpace page, just like you say they should. The only thing which changes is who gets to use the myspace.com/barackobama profile. It's not suprising it's handed over to a person that's actually named Barack Obama, MySpace does that all the time. What is sad is that a campain team feel the need to drop someone who is clearly committed to there case, you because that someone is not them. Stupid control freaks if you ask me. They could easily have kept the current situation, they allready had access to the profile. If they had put in same effort to offload this guy they whould have had a huge succesfull MySpace profile, now they getting bad press over this and need to start all over again.
I'm not entirely into the details, but according to this article the patents include the briliant idea to connect a voip network with the pots network. Anyone trying to patent something that obvious is a patent troll to me.
And to be honest, the rest of these patents really look like solutions anyone could come up with given the same problem. And perhaps that is the biggest problem with patents these days, most of them are just describing logical obvious solutions. Generally it's just an old solution applied to a somewhat new problem.
A Gecko ActiveX control is a great idea. The several MB's of download are a bit of a problem, so what we do need is an Opera ActiveX control. They still manage to squeez a proper browser into a few MB. I'm sure they can come up with an AciveX control of bearable size.
Hi, i'd like to welcome you all to our monthly bussiness strategy meeting. The agenda of this months meeting is basically the same as last month:
1. What has Apple been doing this month?
2. What has Google been doing this month?
3. Are there other interesting things to copy?