And market capitalization means two tenths of stuff all. No judgements on the relative companies here, but Apple is worth more because stock holders think it is, not because it actually is, we're not talking about cash reserves, or profits, or anything like that, just what people are willing to pay for the stock.
Apple has come in with some really strong products in recent years and has nowhere to go but up in most places, Microsoft is probably as large as it is ever likely to get, and will probably get at least slightly smaller as things level out.
It's been so riven with ideology that it's original purpose has become completely lost(even if you make the presumption the original purpose was viable in the first place).
The OP mentions "niche Microsoft operating systems", which places him/her firmly into the linux loony camp. There's nothing wrong with Linux, but believing that the company that still has 60% of the server market and has an even higher percentage of the desktop is "niche" either means the he/she has never left the server room of a bank, or is a loony.
I've coded in.NET and I've coded in JEE, there are pluses and minuses to both.
That said, the biggest benefit that Java has isn't so much the open source libraries(there's plenty of open source.NET stuff as well), but the lack of corporate conflict. For example, JPA is(while relatively new) vastly superior to the ORM models available in.NET(even if LINQ is just plain awesome). A lot of the reason for that superiority is that Oracle provides(and provided even before they owned Sun) JDBC drivers which don't require an Oracle client for free. They'll never do that for Microsoft because Microsoft is a competitor in a way that Sun never was.
The interesting question will be how long this sort of thing lasts now that it's Oracle who owns Java and not Sun. If conflict results in IBM or one of the other big players forking Java, then Java is done.
Yes, they have to prove that the thing which fell was in my yard and that that's what injured them, they don't have to prove that it's my fault that it fell(they might have to prove that it's not their fault that it fell).
The point is that the relationship between me and the contractor is my relationship, not the relationship of the person who is suing me. The fact that they didn't do their job is not their problem, it's mine since I'm the one who had an arrangement with them.
What due process? It's BP's well they are responsible for it and any damage that it does.
If they were let down by people doing work for them (Haliburton for instance) then that's an issue they need to sort out on their own. If their subcontractors screwed up then can and should sue them and/or insist they pay their share of the damage. It doesn't in any way reduce their culpability, those people were acting on behalf of BP, their actions are BP's responsibility.
If I employ a contractor to build something on my land and it falls down and hurts someone, I'm responsible for that injury. I may be able to recoup a large part of my losses by suing the contractor who built it, and if I can prove immediately that this is the case I may be able to transfer that blame, but it's my job to prove it was their fault, not the person who got hurt's fault to prove I was the one to blame.
It's not just about works in the public domain, it's about works period.
A beautiful piece of music enriches society, whether you can copy it or not, the eventual addition to the public domain is of course beneficial, but so is the creation, and nothing in the constitution specifies that they didn't consider both values.
Didn't say they were, copyright periods are out of touch with reality, especially in this day and age where there isn't a 20 year lead time to getting something published for the first time. I merely said that, broken as it may be, copyright is achieving its purpose. There may be a lot of unpleasant side effects, but that doesn't mean we do away with it. I've yet to hear of a viable alternative to copyright which wouldn't essentially eliminate the production of the vast majority of creative works.
The costs to distribute and record/design/print have certainly gone down, and again I am by no means advocating the behavior of the music industry(they'd have done far better using more carrot and less stick), but you still need someone to write the music, play the music, write the book, design the product, you still need someone creative, and that someone still needs to eat, even if their costs have gone down, they still need to eat.
In a place as large as Google with as many servers as they have, you should really have enough people on call that you don't end up getting called that many days in a row(for that matter, your systems shouldn't go down that many days in a row) except on rare occasions.
I do not work for nor have I ever worked for Google, but the impression I've always gotten is that their top tier engineering talent practically sleeps there, can you imagine what they make the grunts do?
Google provides a whole bunch of perks, but it also expects you to essentially never leave the office(which is part of why they provide all those perks in the first place. In addition, not everyone at Google is going to be a super genius designing new ideas, someone will be supporting their server farms, desktops, and all the usual crap. I would hazard a guess that the top tier Google employees are probably quite happy, but that their infrastructure IT staff are probably fairly miserable.
No one said DRM was the answer, but if you think that taking the fruits of someone else's hard work is righteous then you're fooling yourself. Copyright is based on the fundamental human truth that everyone has to eat. It's not perfect, but its purpose is to allow people to create ideas and still eat. If they can't eat they won't create, either because they're too busy to create or because they've starved to death. It doesn't really matter if the artists get paid directly from the proceeds of their creation, or if they create on behalf of someone else in exchange for less risky cash.
Lord knows the current copyright terms are ridiculous, and that the business model of the RIAA is fundamentally flawed(I said they'd be stupid not to fight to defend it, not that it was the right model), but if you think the world would be a better place if music was only created for people who have enough money to hire artists to create it, or where artists and inventors never created anything at all, you're batshit insane.
The price of copying data has dropped to almost nothing. So what? The price of creating the data in the first place hasn't.
They didn't take a gamble on the moral rightness of copyright. They won that bit, the court decided that this woman did in fact infringe on copyright(and let's be honest, she did).
The gamble they took was that the patently ludicrous multi-million dollar penalties they lobbied for would stand up in court when used against some dumb schmuck who wasn't sharing for profit. They lost that gamble, and they lost big time.
One of the consequences of this is that they've basically lost nearly all of their ability to actually frighten pirates. Given your the abysmally small chance you have of getting caught and how difficult it is to prove that you were sharing any substantial number of songs, 54 grand is, to most people, an acceptable risk. Most people could arrange a payment schedule for that and wouldn't even need to declare bankruptcy. It would suck, but it wouldn't be the end of the world, and you've got a slightly higher chance of getting struck by lightning than sued for copyright infringement, even if you're the biggest pirate in the world, and the lightning strike would probably cost you more.
The other consequence of this is that they're pretty much guaranteed to lose money on any future cases affected by this precedent. By the time you pay the investigators, file the paperwork, pay the lawyers, and all the other costs associated with something like this, you'd be lucky to break even at that kind of judgement. That's not even counting bad publicity.
So if you can't scare people, and the process loses you money, what do you do? They've gone too far down this path to turn back and try to fight this another way, and they can't really ignore the threat to their business model.
Law enforcement is always difficult for instances where the chance of getting caught is incredibly low. If you pile on the penalties you start looking like jack booted thugs, and if you give a fair penalty, there is no deterrent.
Which is how it always should have been. Privatizing the network meant that Telstra had to be saddled with all sorts of ridiculous legislation to stop it from becoming an abusive monopoly, and to ensure service to the bush. That's the primary reason why Telstra shares aren't worth spit, because Telstra can't be competitive, no matter how hard they try.
Universal service should always have been a government thing because it's a massive money sink which is supposed to be there for the good of society.
No copper network in any real world scenario is delivering >100 megabit connectivity, those new housing estates have fibre to the premises(which is exactly what the government is trying to give to everyone else.
I'm still not sure if the government is actually serious about the filter.
They've been in for the better part of three years now and it's never even come close to coming up for a vote. They've certainly talked about it enough, but they've never even tried to pass it, despite the fact that they could probably actually get it across the line, especially if they actually played the "think of the children" card. They've tried to pass a whole bunch of other things which they didn't have a hope in hell of passing and which have cost them a lot more votes than the filter would, but they've never even tried to pass the filter.
Don't use names as a unique identifier, they're not.
Cher has a last name, as most likely did Homer and Virgil and everyone else, they're last names might have been "from _____ or the ______", but they still had one.
It's illegal to use SSN as a unique identifier, so don't use it as one.
Who cares, don't muck around with case, and search case insensitive, more matches are better than not enough.
There are conventions to get around that in ASCII, but unicode solves most of it anyway.
Always properly encode and decode your data to meet the requirements of your medium.
You still have to have name limits, and someone's name will always break it, using some ridiculous number of characters in your database is just going to kill your database.
No ones name is a single letter in any language I've ever heard of(a single character, but that's not the same thing), and since names aren't unique or identifying this doesn't really matter.
Who cares?
Names are not meaningful except to the people who have them, and they're deluding themselves. You are not your name, and your name is not you.
They're not globally(or even locally) unique nor are they even identifying, so if you're writing a program there's really no point in trying to treat them as such.
Even in combination with other data you can't guarantee a unique or identifying result, so why bother. The only reason we bother with them in the first place is because people would get offended if you just treated them as a number, which is exactly what every single computer program on earth does and should do. I know that people get all precious about them, but all you can really do is specify a reasonable number of characters in a reasonable character set, in a format which makes sense for the people who will be using the application(the fact that your users will be looking for a last name is more important than whether a specific person has one from the point of view of application flow, and the vast majority of cultures have a naming structure which conforms at least loosely to a first, last, other configuration even if the display order and meaning of the configuration may differ.
There's a reason that every country in the world got off the gold standard. There just isn't enough gold available to sustain it.
As a side note, how one earth do you plan on managing that kind of rapid deflation in a way which doesn't cause riots and topple governments anyway? Gold is well over a thousand dollars an ounce as it is, and that's without every major government in the world needing it to back their currency. Everything you'll ever earn wouldn't add up to a single bar of gold.
Having a noble goal is not sufficient, your method of reaching that goal must be appropriate as well.
I believe in nearly everything the Green party is trying to achieve, but I am concerned that if they ever got power unto themselves, that they'd throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Maybe the seats have changed, but last I checked they needed all 8 greens plus two others to get something accomplished in the senate, which is why the whole ETS thing fell apart(there was no scheme which would pull the Greens onside and two others).
I too am hoping for a deadlock, but I'm hoping for a better deadlock than the current one.
The current situation has the government in a rather impossible position. Rudd has to keep Fielding and Xenophon happy as well as the Greens in order to actually get anything passed(unless the libs are willing to vote for it as well).
While there is some policy crossover with those groups, it's not entirely vast, and I'm still holding out hope that all this internet filter crap is just an attempt to keep Fielding and Xenophon on side. I'm hoping for a situation where the Greens can offer Rudd control he doesn't otherwise have(ideally of both houses) on their own. That might potentially give me the green tilting pragmatic government I actually want.
Generally the Greens tend to fall into the "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" type of implementation.
I believe in nearly everything they want to do, I just think they'd probably go about doing it in a manner which would be moderately insane.
Specifically environmental policy is my concern. I want an ETS(or a straight carbon tax), but I'm not entirely certain whether the economy could stand the kinds of cuts the Greens would probably call for over the time scale they would try for.
It's all a matter of balance with that sort of thing and I'm not entirely convinced that the Greens are all that balanced. Certainly Bob Brown is trying to show the moderate face of the Greens, but there's a certain element of lunacy in the party(a bit like the libs at the moment).
Slashdot Mirror
It's metaphorical blood. The press always says things that way.
They don't mean "no one was shot", they mean "they may have gotten the knives out, but it didn't get nasty"
The last two leaders of the coalition did not go in bloodless coups.
Well it was bloodless.
The fact that it was only bloodless because Rudd did some last minute polling and found out exactly how much of it he was about to lose is unrelated.
And market capitalization means two tenths of stuff all. No judgements on the relative companies here, but Apple is worth more because stock holders think it is, not because it actually is, we're not talking about cash reserves, or profits, or anything like that, just what people are willing to pay for the stock.
Apple has come in with some really strong products in recent years and has nowhere to go but up in most places, Microsoft is probably as large as it is ever likely to get, and will probably get at least slightly smaller as things level out.
OLPC was and is a joke.
It's been so riven with ideology that it's original purpose has become completely lost(even if you make the presumption the original purpose was viable in the first place).
The OP mentions "niche Microsoft operating systems", which places him/her firmly into the linux loony camp. There's nothing wrong with Linux, but believing that the company that still has 60% of the server market and has an even higher percentage of the desktop is "niche" either means the he/she has never left the server room of a bank, or is a loony.
I've coded in .NET and I've coded in JEE, there are pluses and minuses to both.
That said, the biggest benefit that Java has isn't so much the open source libraries(there's plenty of open source .NET stuff as well), but the lack of corporate conflict. For example, JPA is(while relatively new) vastly superior to the ORM models available in .NET(even if LINQ is just plain awesome). A lot of the reason for that superiority is that Oracle provides(and provided even before they owned Sun) JDBC drivers which don't require an Oracle client for free. They'll never do that for Microsoft because Microsoft is a competitor in a way that Sun never was.
The interesting question will be how long this sort of thing lasts now that it's Oracle who owns Java and not Sun. If conflict results in IBM or one of the other big players forking Java, then Java is done.
Yes, they have to prove that the thing which fell was in my yard and that that's what injured them, they don't have to prove that it's my fault that it fell(they might have to prove that it's not their fault that it fell).
The point is that the relationship between me and the contractor is my relationship, not the relationship of the person who is suing me. The fact that they didn't do their job is not their problem, it's mine since I'm the one who had an arrangement with them.
What due process? It's BP's well they are responsible for it and any damage that it does.
If they were let down by people doing work for them (Haliburton for instance) then that's an issue they need to sort out on their own. If their subcontractors screwed up then can and should sue them and/or insist they pay their share of the damage. It doesn't in any way reduce their culpability, those people were acting on behalf of BP, their actions are BP's responsibility.
If I employ a contractor to build something on my land and it falls down and hurts someone, I'm responsible for that injury. I may be able to recoup a large part of my losses by suing the contractor who built it, and if I can prove immediately that this is the case I may be able to transfer that blame, but it's my job to prove it was their fault, not the person who got hurt's fault to prove I was the one to blame.
It's not just about works in the public domain, it's about works period.
A beautiful piece of music enriches society, whether you can copy it or not, the eventual addition to the public domain is of course beneficial, but so is the creation, and nothing in the constitution specifies that they didn't consider both values.
That's all true, however if there were no copyright, how would you eat without taking a second job?
Didn't say they were, copyright periods are out of touch with reality, especially in this day and age where there isn't a 20 year lead time to getting something published for the first time. I merely said that, broken as it may be, copyright is achieving its purpose. There may be a lot of unpleasant side effects, but that doesn't mean we do away with it. I've yet to hear of a viable alternative to copyright which wouldn't essentially eliminate the production of the vast majority of creative works.
The costs to distribute and record/design/print have certainly gone down, and again I am by no means advocating the behavior of the music industry(they'd have done far better using more carrot and less stick), but you still need someone to write the music, play the music, write the book, design the product, you still need someone creative, and that someone still needs to eat, even if their costs have gone down, they still need to eat.
In a place as large as Google with as many servers as they have, you should really have enough people on call that you don't end up getting called that many days in a row(for that matter, your systems shouldn't go down that many days in a row) except on rare occasions.
I do not work for nor have I ever worked for Google, but the impression I've always gotten is that their top tier engineering talent practically sleeps there, can you imagine what they make the grunts do?
Google provides a whole bunch of perks, but it also expects you to essentially never leave the office(which is part of why they provide all those perks in the first place. In addition, not everyone at Google is going to be a super genius designing new ideas, someone will be supporting their server farms, desktops, and all the usual crap. I would hazard a guess that the top tier Google employees are probably quite happy, but that their infrastructure IT staff are probably fairly miserable.
No one said DRM was the answer, but if you think that taking the fruits of someone else's hard work is righteous then you're fooling yourself. Copyright is based on the fundamental human truth that everyone has to eat. It's not perfect, but its purpose is to allow people to create ideas and still eat. If they can't eat they won't create, either because they're too busy to create or because they've starved to death. It doesn't really matter if the artists get paid directly from the proceeds of their creation, or if they create on behalf of someone else in exchange for less risky cash.
Lord knows the current copyright terms are ridiculous, and that the business model of the RIAA is fundamentally flawed(I said they'd be stupid not to fight to defend it, not that it was the right model), but if you think the world would be a better place if music was only created for people who have enough money to hire artists to create it, or where artists and inventors never created anything at all, you're batshit insane.
The price of copying data has dropped to almost nothing. So what? The price of creating the data in the first place hasn't.
They didn't take a gamble on the moral rightness of copyright. They won that bit, the court decided that this woman did in fact infringe on copyright(and let's be honest, she did).
The gamble they took was that the patently ludicrous multi-million dollar penalties they lobbied for would stand up in court when used against some dumb schmuck who wasn't sharing for profit. They lost that gamble, and they lost big time.
One of the consequences of this is that they've basically lost nearly all of their ability to actually frighten pirates. Given your the abysmally small chance you have of getting caught and how difficult it is to prove that you were sharing any substantial number of songs, 54 grand is, to most people, an acceptable risk. Most people could arrange a payment schedule for that and wouldn't even need to declare bankruptcy. It would suck, but it wouldn't be the end of the world, and you've got a slightly higher chance of getting struck by lightning than sued for copyright infringement, even if you're the biggest pirate in the world, and the lightning strike would probably cost you more.
The other consequence of this is that they're pretty much guaranteed to lose money on any future cases affected by this precedent. By the time you pay the investigators, file the paperwork, pay the lawyers, and all the other costs associated with something like this, you'd be lucky to break even at that kind of judgement. That's not even counting bad publicity.
So if you can't scare people, and the process loses you money, what do you do? They've gone too far down this path to turn back and try to fight this another way, and they can't really ignore the threat to their business model.
Law enforcement is always difficult for instances where the chance of getting caught is incredibly low. If you pile on the penalties you start looking like jack booted thugs, and if you give a fair penalty, there is no deterrent.
Which is how it always should have been. Privatizing the network meant that Telstra had to be saddled with all sorts of ridiculous legislation to stop it from becoming an abusive monopoly, and to ensure service to the bush. That's the primary reason why Telstra shares aren't worth spit, because Telstra can't be competitive, no matter how hard they try.
Universal service should always have been a government thing because it's a massive money sink which is supposed to be there for the good of society.
No copper network in any real world scenario is delivering >100 megabit connectivity, those new housing estates have fibre to the premises(which is exactly what the government is trying to give to everyone else.
I'm still not sure if the government is actually serious about the filter.
They've been in for the better part of three years now and it's never even come close to coming up for a vote. They've certainly talked about it enough, but they've never even tried to pass it, despite the fact that they could probably actually get it across the line, especially if they actually played the "think of the children" card. They've tried to pass a whole bunch of other things which they didn't have a hope in hell of passing and which have cost them a lot more votes than the filter would, but they've never even tried to pass the filter.
Names are not meaningful except to the people who have them, and they're deluding themselves. You are not your name, and your name is not you.
They're not globally(or even locally) unique nor are they even identifying, so if you're writing a program there's really no point in trying to treat them as such.
Even in combination with other data you can't guarantee a unique or identifying result, so why bother. The only reason we bother with them in the first place is because people would get offended if you just treated them as a number, which is exactly what every single computer program on earth does and should do. I know that people get all precious about them, but all you can really do is specify a reasonable number of characters in a reasonable character set, in a format which makes sense for the people who will be using the application(the fact that your users will be looking for a last name is more important than whether a specific person has one from the point of view of application flow, and the vast majority of cultures have a naming structure which conforms at least loosely to a first, last, other configuration even if the display order and meaning of the configuration may differ.
There's a reason that every country in the world got off the gold standard. There just isn't enough gold available to sustain it.
As a side note, how one earth do you plan on managing that kind of rapid deflation in a way which doesn't cause riots and topple governments anyway? Gold is well over a thousand dollars an ounce as it is, and that's without every major government in the world needing it to back their currency. Everything you'll ever earn wouldn't add up to a single bar of gold.
Having a noble goal is not sufficient, your method of reaching that goal must be appropriate as well.
I believe in nearly everything the Green party is trying to achieve, but I am concerned that if they ever got power unto themselves, that they'd throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Maybe the seats have changed, but last I checked they needed all 8 greens plus two others to get something accomplished in the senate, which is why the whole ETS thing fell apart(there was no scheme which would pull the Greens onside and two others).
I too am hoping for a deadlock, but I'm hoping for a better deadlock than the current one.
The current situation has the government in a rather impossible position. Rudd has to keep Fielding and Xenophon happy as well as the Greens in order to actually get anything passed(unless the libs are willing to vote for it as well).
While there is some policy crossover with those groups, it's not entirely vast, and I'm still holding out hope that all this internet filter crap is just an attempt to keep Fielding and Xenophon on side. I'm hoping for a situation where the Greens can offer Rudd control he doesn't otherwise have(ideally of both houses) on their own. That might potentially give me the green tilting pragmatic government I actually want.
Generally the Greens tend to fall into the "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" type of implementation.
I believe in nearly everything they want to do, I just think they'd probably go about doing it in a manner which would be moderately insane.
Specifically environmental policy is my concern. I want an ETS(or a straight carbon tax), but I'm not entirely certain whether the economy could stand the kinds of cuts the Greens would probably call for over the time scale they would try for.
It's all a matter of balance with that sort of thing and I'm not entirely convinced that the Greens are all that balanced. Certainly Bob Brown is trying to show the moderate face of the Greens, but there's a certain element of lunacy in the party(a bit like the libs at the moment).