"Honestly, how would a civil liberties advocate suggest we investigate terrorists? I would love to know."
Oh you know, warrants, due process, quaint little things like that.
Frankly I'd rather be a little bit more scared of bus bombs than a lot less sure of my personal liberty. Our founding fathers didn't fight and die for their goddamn safety.
Honestly, I've never liked IDEs, or any tool so specific to a given language / environment, that the experience won't generalize to my next project. I'd rather climb a steeper learning curve and learn a piece of software that I can be reasonably sure I will still be using for whatever language and system I'm working in in 2030.
The problem is it isn't the 1930s... or even the 1970s.
Government can't just arbitrarily regulate business any more. Nations have become a lot more like small towns in the global economy. If a small town triest to put too many regulations on its local business, the local business can and will just get up and leave.
modern commercial policy has to take that reality into account, and most leftist "solutions" i've heard don't.
Oh sure, I would too. But that's a problem. We don't want the driving forces of our economy only thinking about making money today and bailing. Who in modern mega-corporations is actually invested for the long haul? What decision maker actually has their personal money tied into the company's (and by extension our economy's) long term growth?
I've got a system with 160 Megs RAM and it runs just fine. On a system with 1 gig, firefox will keep rendered pages (much larger than html + images mind you) of most of your tabs in RAM. On a system with less to spare, it will re-render pages. It's smart. All that extra memory wouldn't be any good if your software didn't try to use it.
But yeah, Opera is more lightweight, and one does get the sense that Firefox could be trimmed. But just because it's using that much on your system, don't assume that it actually NEEDS half a gig.
Do you think the complaints about CSS fail to consider the scope of the problem?
Laying out text is not a simple problem. The file formats of programs like InDesign and Scribus are tremendously complicated, and they don't even have to deal with an arbitrarily sized page surface that may or may not implement ANY of the described features.
CSS isn't a lanugage for creating 3 column layouts or centered boxes or anything like that. It's primary purpose is to break elegantly. Someone out there is reading the page in text-only mode. Someone is on a cellphone with a 320 pixel wide screen. Someone else is viewing at 1600x1200. In the 90s you saw books that more or less said if your page looks right in 800x600 and it renders in the two leading browsers, your job was done. The web isn't that simple any more. And while some designers might not see it this way, the need to create pixel-perfect layouts or waste space by surrounding a little box in the middle of the screen with a bunch of white space do not trump greater usability issues.
Second question: If CSS alone isn't up to the task of meeting both cross-platform user needs AND satisfying designers' OCD, what form do you see the solution taking? Are there any satisfactory candidates out in the wild right now?
The only thing wrong with Microsoft's Embrace & Extend model is their failure to embrace.
The extend part gave us XMLHttpRequest.
MS are actually pretty good at innovation, they just don't do it very often.
Re:Why is CSS such a good idea but a pain to use?
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Ask Håkon About CSS or...?
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you don't think tables are bad, then you aren't designing for cellphones, text-only brpwsers, braile readers, etc. etc. etc.
If you're just making static pages for personal use, go ahead and do whatever. The primary goal of stylesheets isn't to make layout easy (obviously...) it's to break down elegantly on non-standard devices. A good CSSed document will be inteligeable if all formatting gets turned off and it just reads as a long page of text.
While the language has its problems, MOST of the complaints seem to come from people who want to put their heads in the sand and pretend like it's 1998 and all you need to do is make sure your page renders at 800x600 on two browsers and you're done. The web's a bigger place than that now, and the technology has by necessity gotten more complicated.
The headlines should read: MegaCorp loses notebook with customer data on it. Company issues this statement: "This is a non-issue, the notebook was encrypted with a system that meets XYZ standard, it will take no less than 200 years for the system to be cracked."
Oops, the laptop that was stolen had the PGP password written on a post-it-note. Or it was the guys' daughters' college fund account number. Or they were logged in while working at a coffee shop, got up to use the bathroom, and came back to an empty table. Or a corporate spy stole it once, put on a keylogger, and then steals it again. Ask the police how private your fingerprints are. Does your boss put retina scanners on all company laptops? Can you be sure that nobody with data access would be dumb enough to keep any of that info on their USB drive or a CDR? Are you using strong crypt on your swap space? What do your bosses do to make 100% sure that nobody is printing out information on their home deskjet and leaving the printouts in the recycle bin on thursday morning? Are you so sure that there aren't moles in your office that you'll let a billion dollars juts walk out the front door? If your data is really as valuable as you say it is, then you need to have the working assumption that someone out there is going to pull some James Bond style shit to get at it, they're not going to stop at "aw shucks, they *encrypted* it!" A password is relatively easy to bribe someone out of. If they never have to show up on site to access the data, then that's all they'll ever need.
When your data is valuable enough that people would REALLY want to steal it, people, not protocols and passwords, are the big problem. When you let people just walk out of your office with company secrets, you're not just increasing the size of the problem, you're adding entire DIMENSIONS to it. People get lazy about things that they have to do every day. Lab Chemists and Biologists have horrible cancer incidence rates because they eventually get lax with safety procedures, even though they know better than anyone on the planet how dangerous what they're doing is. The human brain is set up in such a way that something it encounters every day without visible harm stops registering as "threat" pretty fast. No matter how rigorously you try to follow standard XYZ at the office, people will get lazy when they're looking over some work in front of the TV.
It would take a good chunk of a decade for that to actually happen. We'd all be screwed for quite some time.
This is the problem with a lot of libertarian thought. Yes markets eventually optimise themselves, but depending on the situation this process can be slow. So slow that the unhappy situation in question might have changed shape completely by the time that market forces come in to save the day.
Also markets optimize along the parameters that are actually used by the players in markets. Modern corporate structure places little value on long-term investment. Large publicly held corporations give little incentive to avoid failure to top executives, and the stock holders themselves are frequently invested in competitors or are only invested short term (that is, they'd rather see a spike that gets them $10 million this year than steady growth that gets them $100 over ten years).
Lastly there is not nor has there ever been such thing as a free marktet in the United States. The founding fathers wrote the commerce clause into the constitution: the market has always been intended to be second to the General Will (as understood by enlightenment political thinkers).
What sucks is that there's basically no solution. Regulation begins a slippery slope of congressional involvement, and in the end that will mean special services going to the highest bidder (for every liberal "socialist" regulation enacted by congress there are 100 pieces of appropriations bill pork handed out to well connected and deep pocketed interests, and THESE do far more damage to the free market than even overly restrictive regulations that apply equally to all market players). But no regulation means that ATT is free to triple bill up until the point where real competition comes about, which is only comforting in the abstract. The reality of scale pricing is that any realistic competition is going to be unlikely to compete on billing at two points on the connection when ATT is billing on three, and they would sell more on outbidding ATT where their nonneutrality is particularly exploitative, but not on restoring neutrality.
All of this is why I have very mixed feelings on market capitalism. On the one hand, if you ignore it, or try to go against it too strongly, it eats you alive, or you become some kind of totalitarian state. But on the other hand, it seems that cases where competition creates symbiosis and beneficial growth don't really outnumber the cases that look like degenerate instances of the "prisoners dillema" problem.
I misspoke. Python, of course, HAS object orientation, but I don't really consider a language (ESPECIALLY) a scripting language to be object oriented unless it's structured in such a way to make object orientation the simplest and most direct approach to most problems.
There are a whole LOT of 2000 line procedural python programs out there. Nothing wrong with that, but it speaks to the nature of object orientation in python.
This criterion obviously doesn't apply to compiled languages, where languages are chosen more on the existance of features rather than their comparative ease. I'd hardly say that C++'s object model is elegant the way Ruby's or Smalltalk's is, but if you weren't doing objects, you'd be using C, so C++ code is overwhelmingly object oriented.
The culture behind a language is as important as its formal specification. You can do a lot of python hacking without ever encountering a user-defined object. It's similar to the way that Perl isn't obfuscated by design, but the community of Perl system hackers has a thing for terse little brainteasers, so hacking Perl means dealing with the occasional mindfuck. It's, in effect, part of the language.
Until I started programming Ruby, I'd only make my big important central data structures objects. My response to OO was generally "yeah, I could go through all that nonsense, or I could, you know, just write the damn program." Ruby makes OO so easy you almost can't avoid it. It's done a lot for my coding in other languages. Ruby is to OO as Lisp is to lambdas and recursion.
Microsoft in 2011: "The widely quoted 2010 release date for Vista SP1 was an internal development target and was never intended as a promise to the public."
So, this can effectively replace 35mm film in terms of resolution. It falls a bit short of replacing truly professional-quality film, however. But then, how often do you need to print out your personal pics at literally bilboard size?
Maybe my grinning face is the ONE YOU NEED TO CALL IF YOU'VE BEEN INJURED!
Oh and a contract to sign over your copyrights, agree on distribution rights across multiple media and the entire world, settle touring duties, rights, profit splitting on any number of different items of merchandise, licensing for TV commercials, movies, plus the massive uncertainty of emerging markets for entertainment (where Al seems to have gotten screwed)
I'm sorry but an employment contract looks like a software license agreement compared to what artists are asked to sign. Your experience and superior attitude aren't terriblyu relivant to the situation. These are legal agreements on an order of complexity approaching a corporate merger, asking some 18 year old kid with a good voice who dropped out of highschool to tour and write songs to understand the complexities of it is absurd. The musicians who have done well in the system frequently come from good families who can pay for the legal help (The Strokes, the Stones) or are those whose popularity outlasts an initial bad contract and lets them renegotiate (Paul McCartney, Madonna, etc.) But that's not most musicians, most musicians are poor kids whose one shot at success is more than they were really expected to get in the first place, record label contracts come down to "take it or flip burgers, guitar-boy: your voice and haircut are as replaceable as kleenex.
I'm friends with a lot of musicians, and I can say that the industry is just fucking rotten. The business is a bunch of crooks with zero love for the fans and zero love for the art and artists. When the internet and bittorrent finally lick those bastards' bones clean, every singer and musician I know will be dancing in the street, because they'll finally be able to just organize a tour themselves and play venues larger than basements. There were far more successful musicians in the 19th century than there were in the 20th century. Recording and radio have made life hell on performers, but most weren't aware of it. If anyone thinks they'll stop getting new music when they stop selling CDs, they really don't know too much about the way it all works.
PHP was a a great little language for little webapps. Web programming has become about a lot more than validating forms though, it's limitations have become a little too obvious.
Perl had a killer head-start because in 1996 nobody did CGI like Perl did CGI. But Perl is s system glue language. It's a mighty system glue language, and there will always be work for Perl gurus, since all those custom scripts holding the infrastructure of every Unix shop on earth together are always going to need maintanence and updating. But as a glue language, it's a little sticky for web development.
I was never taken with Python, it's got some great ideas, and a really well optimized interpereter, but there's just too much hand-holding, and it doesn't do OO. Python's brief success was a result of frustration with Perl.
Java is all about huge teams. Namespaces namespaces namespaces, and all that. I can't say much, I was never a CS student, and my idea of fun isn't being a cog in a 50 person, 18 month project. In my experience, development starts to factionalize once you've got more than 5 people working, and suddently you need an -ugh- project manager. I like a small team where everyone trusts everyone else, everyone is looking over everyone's shoulder fixing each others problems, and SVN is sufficient for keeping you off each others toes. In that kind of environment Java is just overkill.
Ruby is succeeding because it's learned the lessongs of Java: it's all about the frameworks. With absolutely *beautiful* syntax for everything from polymorphism to lambda functions, and an intelligently lax approach to syntax and typing (rather than statically type, treat absolutely everything as an object, and make it easy for objects to pretend to be one another) it's easy to write powerful frameworks that feel like extensions to the base of the language.
This could be dangerous of course, if they were to approach development like Sun's warring houses, but the Ruby community seems to be rabid about keeping things clean, simple, and consistant.
Hype is hype, and I'm always wary of it, but Ruby is just so niiiiice. I'm not sure if Rails will be around in 5 years, but I'm pretty sure that Ruby, and something related to Activerecord (the independant database abstraction class that Rails is built upon -- really check it out, it's simultaneously absolutely minimal and perfectly sufficient, you'd think it was running on Swiss cams and gears rather than code) will be.
In the 1960s as the Vietnam war escalated, and Civil Rights unrest stirred at home, those hardcore pinko liberals at the cold war era State Department realized that they had a massive problem on their hands, with a disproportionately black population of inlisted servicemen, and a disproportionately white population of field officers. In a combat situation, if you feel like your life is being put at undue risk because the Lieutenant is a racist, as is the army he works for, then you don't write a letter to the editor or take a sign to the streets, you let one of your bullets accidentally hit his head the next time the VC drop some chaos and confusion on your unit.
So what does the army do? The implement the largest and most extensive affirmative action program the country has ever seen. They rushed minorities through officer training school, ignored the complaints of whites who were being passed up for promotions and positions, and solved their demographics problem fast. By the 70s they dropped the double standard, and the military was the first major institution in the US where blacks were regularly advancing as far and as fast as whites.
Members of a minority tend to flock to where other members of their minority have been successful. This is how so many Jews wound up in entertainment, so many Blacks have wound up in sales positions, Indians in medicine, Koreans in investment banking, etc. etc. No business, academic institution, government organization, or anyone anywhere has ever been a completely blind employer. California tech companies these days like to hire the friends of qualified new hires. Maybe your buddy from university isn't as qualified, on a point-for-point resume basis as the guy they're passing over, and is that fair? Absolutely. The business hires for the work environment they're trying to create, and if they don't feel like just taking the top n "best" applications, is the right road to that, then that's their choice.
So do GNOME really care about lovey-dovey PC crap, or are they worried that fully 51% of the population seems to reject the idea of working on their project out of hand? I think GNOME knows that there are tons of left-brainy technical women out there, and so realizes that the fact that they didn't get a single female application from SOC says less about women, than it does about women's perception of Open Source Software. By going a little bit out of their way to recruit women, they hope that next summer, more women will apply without prompting, and maybe whatever cultural problems within OSS (and boy are there some...) might be fixed a bit by opening up the doors to the boys' club a bit.
Likewise Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. are private institutions. It isn't some group of overreaching democrats writing their Affirmative Action programs, they're doing it for the same reason they'll take a kid who traveled with the circus for a few years over one with 30 more points on the ol' SAT. Their applicant pool represents a potential campus culture, not just a potential GPA and set of lawschool admissions statistics, and these days it would be pretty difficult to attract top-tier teaching faculty (many of whom have a lot more in common with the Affirmative Action kids than they do to the prep-school brats with millionaire parents who hire out application essay writing, and send Jr. off to *3 week long college application SUMMER CAMPS* to an all-caucasian monoculture.
AA is a partial solution that's looking increasingly dated, but it's made for far more progress inside just a generation and a half's time than a more "fair" system would have.
Almost every business on the anti- side of the patent debate has a collection of patents. It's suicidal not to. Furthermore, not leveraging your patents for profit is a good way to get sued off the board by the shareholders, it has nothing to do with whether or not the personalitiless pile of financial paperwork called "Amazon" is being hypocritical or not.
The average PC user doesn't have a damn thing to do with the success of Windows. The home market is just Microsoft's way of further ensuring lock-in at the office, which is where their profits are. Your copy of Windows was an OEM bundle that MS made pennies off of, it's the 10,000 seat licenses down at the office that keep Bill partying with Bono. And does your director if IT purchases give a crap about how pretty the interface is? Nope. This is why Microsoft does eye candy (you have to to be a modern consumer OS) but half-asses it (they aren't really a consumer OS, but have to pretend to be for marketing reasons.)
"It's just us hardcore geeks who care more about utility than appearance."
Smiling as I type this reply on links while my new gentoo system compiles one virtual terminal over.
Musicians are not typically very business savvy people. There are exceptions of course, but it's a general rule. Even a successful musician is unlikely to be able to afford more than one lawyer and one accountant. The labels on the other hand have vast teams of people insuring that they squeeze every cent out of their talent and customers. The record industry has been pulling this kind of sneaky contract shit since the 20s to rip off talent.
Slashdot Mirror
"Honestly, how would a civil liberties advocate suggest we investigate terrorists? I would love to know."
Oh you know, warrants, due process, quaint little things like that.
Frankly I'd rather be a little bit more scared of bus bombs than a lot less sure of my personal liberty. Our founding fathers didn't fight and die for their goddamn safety.
IDE? You mean like vim and an xterm?
Honestly, I've never liked IDEs, or any tool so specific to a given language / environment, that the experience won't generalize to my next project. I'd rather climb a steeper learning curve and learn a piece of software that I can be reasonably sure I will still be using for whatever language and system I'm working in in 2030.
At 50 megs, even on 6 or 7 year old hardware, it fits on a RAMdisk.
The problem is it isn't the 1930s... or even the 1970s.
Government can't just arbitrarily regulate business any more. Nations have become a lot more like small towns in the global economy. If a small town triest to put too many regulations on its local business, the local business can and will just get up and leave.
modern commercial policy has to take that reality into account, and most leftist "solutions" i've heard don't.
hey pot, this is kettle, i think we've met somewhere before.
Oh sure, I would too. But that's a problem. We don't want the driving forces of our economy only thinking about making money today and bailing. Who in modern mega-corporations is actually invested for the long haul? What decision maker actually has their personal money tied into the company's (and by extension our economy's) long term growth?
Firefox is greedy with ram, but not leaky.
I've got a system with 160 Megs RAM and it runs just fine. On a system with 1 gig, firefox will keep rendered pages (much larger than html + images mind you) of most of your tabs in RAM. On a system with less to spare, it will re-render pages. It's smart. All that extra memory wouldn't be any good if your software didn't try to use it.
But yeah, Opera is more lightweight, and one does get the sense that Firefox could be trimmed. But just because it's using that much on your system, don't assume that it actually NEEDS half a gig.
Do you think the complaints about CSS fail to consider the scope of the problem?
Laying out text is not a simple problem. The file formats of programs like InDesign and Scribus are tremendously complicated, and they don't even have to deal with an arbitrarily sized page surface that may or may not implement ANY of the described features.
CSS isn't a lanugage for creating 3 column layouts or centered boxes or anything like that. It's primary purpose is to break elegantly. Someone out there is reading the page in text-only mode. Someone is on a cellphone with a 320 pixel wide screen. Someone else is viewing at 1600x1200. In the 90s you saw books that more or less said if your page looks right in 800x600 and it renders in the two leading browsers, your job was done. The web isn't that simple any more. And while some designers might not see it this way, the need to create pixel-perfect layouts or waste space by surrounding a little box in the middle of the screen with a bunch of white space do not trump greater usability issues.
Second question: If CSS alone isn't up to the task of meeting both cross-platform user needs AND satisfying designers' OCD, what form do you see the solution taking? Are there any satisfactory candidates out in the wild right now?
The only thing wrong with Microsoft's Embrace & Extend model is their failure to embrace.
The extend part gave us XMLHttpRequest.
MS are actually pretty good at innovation, they just don't do it very often.
If you don't think tables are bad, then you aren't designing for cellphones, text-only brpwsers, braile readers, etc. etc. etc.
If you're just making static pages for personal use, go ahead and do whatever. The primary goal of stylesheets isn't to make layout easy (obviously...) it's to break down elegantly on non-standard devices. A good CSSed document will be inteligeable if all formatting gets turned off and it just reads as a long page of text.
While the language has its problems, MOST of the complaints seem to come from people who want to put their heads in the sand and pretend like it's 1998 and all you need to do is make sure your page renders at 800x600 on two browsers and you're done. The web's a bigger place than that now, and the technology has by necessity gotten more complicated.
It's _Asimov_ and, well, duh.
Every single story he wrote that used the three laws was about how the three laws couldn't really work.
So quit being such a frikkin' know-it-all, you humorless chump.
The headlines should read: MegaCorp loses notebook with customer data on it. Company issues this statement: "This is a non-issue, the notebook was encrypted with a system that meets XYZ standard, it will take no less than 200 years for the system to be cracked."
Oops, the laptop that was stolen had the PGP password written on a post-it-note. Or it was the guys' daughters' college fund account number. Or they were logged in while working at a coffee shop, got up to use the bathroom, and came back to an empty table. Or a corporate spy stole it once, put on a keylogger, and then steals it again. Ask the police how private your fingerprints are. Does your boss put retina scanners on all company laptops? Can you be sure that nobody with data access would be dumb enough to keep any of that info on their USB drive or a CDR? Are you using strong crypt on your swap space? What do your bosses do to make 100% sure that nobody is printing out information on their home deskjet and leaving the printouts in the recycle bin on thursday morning? Are you so sure that there aren't moles in your office that you'll let a billion dollars juts walk out the front door? If your data is really as valuable as you say it is, then you need to have the working assumption that someone out there is going to pull some James Bond style shit to get at it, they're not going to stop at "aw shucks, they *encrypted* it!" A password is relatively easy to bribe someone out of. If they never have to show up on site to access the data, then that's all they'll ever need.
When your data is valuable enough that people would REALLY want to steal it, people, not protocols and passwords, are the big problem. When you let people just walk out of your office with company secrets, you're not just increasing the size of the problem, you're adding entire DIMENSIONS to it. People get lazy about things that they have to do every day. Lab Chemists and Biologists have horrible cancer incidence rates because they eventually get lax with safety procedures, even though they know better than anyone on the planet how dangerous what they're doing is. The human brain is set up in such a way that something it encounters every day without visible harm stops registering as "threat" pretty fast. No matter how rigorously you try to follow standard XYZ at the office, people will get lazy when they're looking over some work in front of the TV.
It would take a good chunk of a decade for that to actually happen. We'd all be screwed for quite some time.
This is the problem with a lot of libertarian thought. Yes markets eventually optimise themselves, but depending on the situation this process can be slow. So slow that the unhappy situation in question might have changed shape completely by the time that market forces come in to save the day.
Also markets optimize along the parameters that are actually used by the players in markets. Modern corporate structure places little value on long-term investment. Large publicly held corporations give little incentive to avoid failure to top executives, and the stock holders themselves are frequently invested in competitors or are only invested short term (that is, they'd rather see a spike that gets them $10 million this year than steady growth that gets them $100 over ten years).
Lastly there is not nor has there ever been such thing as a free marktet in the United States. The founding fathers wrote the commerce clause into the constitution: the market has always been intended to be second to the General Will (as understood by enlightenment political thinkers).
What sucks is that there's basically no solution. Regulation begins a slippery slope of congressional involvement, and in the end that will mean special services going to the highest bidder (for every liberal "socialist" regulation enacted by congress there are 100 pieces of appropriations bill pork handed out to well connected and deep pocketed interests, and THESE do far more damage to the free market than even overly restrictive regulations that apply equally to all market players). But no regulation means that ATT is free to triple bill up until the point where real competition comes about, which is only comforting in the abstract. The reality of scale pricing is that any realistic competition is going to be unlikely to compete on billing at two points on the connection when ATT is billing on three, and they would sell more on outbidding ATT where their nonneutrality is particularly exploitative, but not on restoring neutrality.
All of this is why I have very mixed feelings on market capitalism. On the one hand, if you ignore it, or try to go against it too strongly, it eats you alive, or you become some kind of totalitarian state. But on the other hand, it seems that cases where competition creates symbiosis and beneficial growth don't really outnumber the cases that look like degenerate instances of the "prisoners dillema" problem.
I misspoke. Python, of course, HAS object orientation, but I don't really consider a language (ESPECIALLY) a scripting language to be object oriented unless it's structured in such a way to make object orientation the simplest and most direct approach to most problems.
There are a whole LOT of 2000 line procedural python programs out there. Nothing wrong with that, but it speaks to the nature of object orientation in python.
This criterion obviously doesn't apply to compiled languages, where languages are chosen more on the existance of features rather than their comparative ease. I'd hardly say that C++'s object model is elegant the way Ruby's or Smalltalk's is, but if you weren't doing objects, you'd be using C, so C++ code is overwhelmingly object oriented.
The culture behind a language is as important as its formal specification. You can do a lot of python hacking without ever encountering a user-defined object. It's similar to the way that Perl isn't obfuscated by design, but the community of Perl system hackers has a thing for terse little brainteasers, so hacking Perl means dealing with the occasional mindfuck. It's, in effect, part of the language.
Until I started programming Ruby, I'd only make my big important central data structures objects. My response to OO was generally "yeah, I could go through all that nonsense, or I could, you know, just write the damn program." Ruby makes OO so easy you almost can't avoid it. It's done a lot for my coding in other languages. Ruby is to OO as Lisp is to lambdas and recursion.
Microsoft in 2011: "The widely quoted 2010 release date for Vista SP1 was an internal development target and was never intended as a promise to the public."
So, this can effectively replace 35mm film in terms of resolution. It falls a bit short of replacing truly professional-quality film, however. But then, how often do you need to print out your personal pics at literally bilboard size?
Maybe my grinning face is the ONE YOU NEED TO CALL IF YOU'VE BEEN INJURED!
Oh and a contract to sign over your copyrights, agree on distribution rights across multiple media and the entire world, settle touring duties, rights, profit splitting on any number of different items of merchandise, licensing for TV commercials, movies, plus the massive uncertainty of emerging markets for entertainment (where Al seems to have gotten screwed)
I'm sorry but an employment contract looks like a software license agreement compared to what artists are asked to sign. Your experience and superior attitude aren't terriblyu relivant to the situation. These are legal agreements on an order of complexity approaching a corporate merger, asking some 18 year old kid with a good voice who dropped out of highschool to tour and write songs to understand the complexities of it is absurd. The musicians who have done well in the system frequently come from good families who can pay for the legal help (The Strokes, the Stones) or are those whose popularity outlasts an initial bad contract and lets them renegotiate (Paul McCartney, Madonna, etc.) But that's not most musicians, most musicians are poor kids whose one shot at success is more than they were really expected to get in the first place, record label contracts come down to "take it or flip burgers, guitar-boy: your voice and haircut are as replaceable as kleenex.
I'm friends with a lot of musicians, and I can say that the industry is just fucking rotten. The business is a bunch of crooks with zero love for the fans and zero love for the art and artists. When the internet and bittorrent finally lick those bastards' bones clean, every singer and musician I know will be dancing in the street, because they'll finally be able to just organize a tour themselves and play venues larger than basements. There were far more successful musicians in the 19th century than there were in the 20th century. Recording and radio have made life hell on performers, but most weren't aware of it. If anyone thinks they'll stop getting new music when they stop selling CDs, they really don't know too much about the way it all works.
PHP was a a great little language for little webapps. Web programming has become about a lot more than validating forms though, it's limitations have become a little too obvious.
Perl had a killer head-start because in 1996 nobody did CGI like Perl did CGI. But Perl is s system glue language. It's a mighty system glue language, and there will always be work for Perl gurus, since all those custom scripts holding the infrastructure of every Unix shop on earth together are always going to need maintanence and updating. But as a glue language, it's a little sticky for web development.
I was never taken with Python, it's got some great ideas, and a really well optimized interpereter, but there's just too much hand-holding, and it doesn't do OO. Python's brief success was a result of frustration with Perl.
Java is all about huge teams. Namespaces namespaces namespaces, and all that. I can't say much, I was never a CS student, and my idea of fun isn't being a cog in a 50 person, 18 month project. In my experience, development starts to factionalize once you've got more than 5 people working, and suddently you need an -ugh- project manager. I like a small team where everyone trusts everyone else, everyone is looking over everyone's shoulder fixing each others problems, and SVN is sufficient for keeping you off each others toes. In that kind of environment Java is just overkill.
Ruby is succeeding because it's learned the lessongs of Java: it's all about the frameworks. With absolutely *beautiful* syntax for everything from polymorphism to lambda functions, and an intelligently lax approach to syntax and typing (rather than statically type, treat absolutely everything as an object, and make it easy for objects to pretend to be one another) it's easy to write powerful frameworks that feel like extensions to the base of the language.
This could be dangerous of course, if they were to approach development like Sun's warring houses, but the Ruby community seems to be rabid about keeping things clean, simple, and consistant.
Hype is hype, and I'm always wary of it, but Ruby is just so niiiiice. I'm not sure if Rails will be around in 5 years, but I'm pretty sure that Ruby, and something related to Activerecord (the independant database abstraction class that Rails is built upon -- really check it out, it's simultaneously absolutely minimal and perfectly sufficient, you'd think it was running on Swiss cams and gears rather than code) will be.
Oooooh Microsoft, you're so 1337.
Counter argument:
In the 1960s as the Vietnam war escalated, and Civil Rights unrest stirred at home, those hardcore pinko liberals at the cold war era State Department realized that they had a massive problem on their hands, with a disproportionately black population of inlisted servicemen, and a disproportionately white population of field officers. In a combat situation, if you feel like your life is being put at undue risk because the Lieutenant is a racist, as is the army he works for, then you don't write a letter to the editor or take a sign to the streets, you let one of your bullets accidentally hit his head the next time the VC drop some chaos and confusion on your unit.
So what does the army do? The implement the largest and most extensive affirmative action program the country has ever seen. They rushed minorities through officer training school, ignored the complaints of whites who were being passed up for promotions and positions, and solved their demographics problem fast. By the 70s they dropped the double standard, and the military was the first major institution in the US where blacks were regularly advancing as far and as fast as whites.
Members of a minority tend to flock to where other members of their minority have been successful. This is how so many Jews wound up in entertainment, so many Blacks have wound up in sales positions, Indians in medicine, Koreans in investment banking, etc. etc. No business, academic institution, government organization, or anyone anywhere has ever been a completely blind employer. California tech companies these days like to hire the friends of qualified new hires. Maybe your buddy from university isn't as qualified, on a point-for-point resume basis as the guy they're passing over, and is that fair? Absolutely. The business hires for the work environment they're trying to create, and if they don't feel like just taking the top n "best" applications, is the right road to that, then that's their choice.
So do GNOME really care about lovey-dovey PC crap, or are they worried that fully 51% of the population seems to reject the idea of working on their project out of hand? I think GNOME knows that there are tons of left-brainy technical women out there, and so realizes that the fact that they didn't get a single female application from SOC says less about women, than it does about women's perception of Open Source Software. By going a little bit out of their way to recruit women, they hope that next summer, more women will apply without prompting, and maybe whatever cultural problems within OSS (and boy are there some...) might be fixed a bit by opening up the doors to the boys' club a bit.
Likewise Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. are private institutions. It isn't some group of overreaching democrats writing their Affirmative Action programs, they're doing it for the same reason they'll take a kid who traveled with the circus for a few years over one with 30 more points on the ol' SAT. Their applicant pool represents a potential campus culture, not just a potential GPA and set of lawschool admissions statistics, and these days it would be pretty difficult to attract top-tier teaching faculty (many of whom have a lot more in common with the Affirmative Action kids than they do to the prep-school brats with millionaire parents who hire out application essay writing, and send Jr. off to *3 week long college application SUMMER CAMPS* to an all-caucasian monoculture.
AA is a partial solution that's looking increasingly dated, but it's made for far more progress inside just a generation and a half's time than a more "fair" system would have.
You know your signature is a paraphrase of Hitler's minister of propaganda? Right?
Oh and:
When I hear revolvers, I reach for my culture.
Almost every business on the anti- side of the patent debate has a collection of patents. It's suicidal not to. Furthermore, not leveraging your patents for profit is a good way to get sued off the board by the shareholders, it has nothing to do with whether or not the personalitiless pile of financial paperwork called "Amazon" is being hypocritical or not.
The average PC user doesn't have a damn thing to do with the success of Windows. The home market is just Microsoft's way of further ensuring lock-in at the office, which is where their profits are. Your copy of Windows was an OEM bundle that MS made pennies off of, it's the 10,000 seat licenses down at the office that keep Bill partying with Bono. And does your director if IT purchases give a crap about how pretty the interface is? Nope. This is why Microsoft does eye candy (you have to to be a modern consumer OS) but half-asses it (they aren't really a consumer OS, but have to pretend to be for marketing reasons.)
"It's just us hardcore geeks who care more about utility than appearance."
Smiling as I type this reply on links while my new gentoo system compiles one virtual terminal over.
Closed source software doesn't have security problems, they have marketing and public image problems. What do you expect?
Musicians are not typically very business savvy people. There are exceptions of course, but it's a general rule. Even a successful musician is unlikely to be able to afford more than one lawyer and one accountant. The labels on the other hand have vast teams of people insuring that they squeeze every cent out of their talent and customers. The record industry has been pulling this kind of sneaky contract shit since the 20s to rip off talent.