I rarely use a floppy drive, but for those odd occasions where I do need one, there's no better technology available (yet). And considering they're dirt-cheap anyways, why would I not want to have one around, just in case.
I just don't understand this mentality of "let's get rid of it because it's old". Come on people, the keyboard is much older technology than the floppy drive. I don't hear anyone bitching about how we need to scrap that "ancient" technology.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and sure as hell don't throw it away!
He didn't say want. He said what you must do to be happy.
So, doing what you don't want to do, but must do, will make you happy? So, slaves must be the happiest people in the world. I'm sorry, I don't quite follow.
A lot of people don't want a family. They will die a miserable death, alone.
Interesting. People who do what they want to do, which happens to not be the same as what you want, will be miserable doing what they want. Again, you're really caught in this rut of thinking that there's only one way to be happy, and it has nothing to do with what the individual actually wants. That's really bizarre.
Our roles have been ingrained into us after so much evolution. We multiply.
You really make life look bleak.
Gender IS relevant. It's naive to think otherwise.
I agree. I'm going to retract part of what I said before. Gender is not, as I stated, irrelevant. However, it is not the single factor that determines what will make people happy. And these pre-determined gender roles are definitely not how you determine what will make any individual happy. Doing what I want to do with my life, as a human being, will determine how happy I am, not how tightly I fit into some "male role" set out for me.
Biology, evolution, the innate desire to multiply, these things make us efficient creatures. They do not make us happy human beings. Sadly, we're too intelligent and advanced a species for that.
In the same way as it's pretty ridiculous to try to segment a population the way marketing people do... and yet it works amazingly well
And any marketer who segments a population into two simple camps, men and women, won't last long as a marketer. It's much more complex than that.
Treat an 18 year old student as you would a 40 year old and your business won't work.
Well, according to your previous assessment, there should be no problem treating an 18-year old student as you would a 40-year old, as long as you stay along gender lines. To an extent, you've just made my point.
How can gender be irrelevant when the economics of sexual reproduction are so different?
Because we're talking about what will make people happy. Many women would be miserable as the housewife you want them all to be happy being. Many men would be miserable being the provider you want them all to be happy being. Obviously, there are certain roles that we can't change. I can't decide to be the one to carry the baby. I can decide to be the one to stay home and raise it.
Of course many people don't want a family, but it's easy to guess you're a young man.
Yes, I guess I could be called a "young man", though at almost 31 I'm older than most of my friends, so it's not often I get called that. I thank you.:)
Ask every woman you know and you'll get a different range of answers.
So why do you want to tell them that their answers are wrong, and your gender-based answer is right? Again, you've made my point.
I may just be feeding a troll here, but there's also the possibility that you're actually serious, so I'll address a few of your points.
First, men and women are not the same (surprise!), so there are two different answers.
Actually, very few people, regardless of gender, are the same, so there are actually as many different answers as there are people. What you described as the "male" answer will work for some males but not others, and also for some females but not others. What you described as the "female" answer will work for some females but not others, and also for some males but not others. It's pretty ridiculous to try to package people's wants/desires into arbitrary groupings like that.
Use your work to invest in a family, look after that with your life, and you will die a happy man surrounded by your kids and grandkids.
Believe it or not, some of us (men and women) don't want a family.
You'll get old and wrinkled like everyone does, but you'll be happy.
Again, attempts to define what will make all women happy are ridiculous. I know countless women who would go completely insane living the life you've prescribed. I also know men who dream of living that very life. And even some who are living it.
healthy communities depend on each person, each gender, playing their role to the full.
No. Healthy communities depend on each person playing their role to the fullest. Gender is irrelevant. Each person's role is slightly different, and is defined by who they are (mentally, emotionally, intellectually), not what's between their legs.
Again, agreed to an extent. As long as there is interest in music, there is money to be made. As long as there is sufficient money to be made, corporations will want a hand in it.
But, whether or not there will always be a cartel of rich and powerful monopolists with a representative body like the RIAA is still open to debate.
...we will always have corporations. As long as we have corporate record companies...
Your logic doesn't quite flow. Just because we will always have corporations, does not necessarily mean we will always have corporate record companies. The need for record companies is rapidly disappearing. When the service provided by a service company becomes obsolete, that company becomes obsolete. It doesn't remain just because corporations still remain and it's a corporation.
I don't know if record companies, and subsequently the RIAA, will cease to exist. I do know that if they don't start to actually adapt to the changes that have occurred in the market right before their bewildered -- and apparently non-functional -- eyes, it's highly unlikely they will remain profitable.
and the RIAA levy.... will raise the price to $200?
That's probably not too far off, actually. The proposed increase in the recording media levy that's currently being debated in Canada will set the levy at $21/GB for hard drives in devices like MP3 players. If a similar rate gets applied to something like this, that would up the cost of a 5GB card by an extra $105.
Then the music industry will want to apply a levy to wallet sales, since wallets can be used to carry these illegal MP3-laden cards around.
Q: When you pay the levy what do you get in return?
A: A license to copy music!
Actually, yes. At least that's the way it was when the levies were first introduced. I haven't checked any of the more recent decisions of the Copyright Board, but in the original decisions they explicitly stated that along with the imposition of the levies came the right of consumers to make copies of music for personal use only. And, more importantly, they explicitly stated that you don't just get the right to copy your own music, but you get the right to copy anyone's music. As long as you make the copy for yourself (ie. you can't make a copy to give to someone else -- the person who will receive the copy has to be the one who makes the copy).
I was rather stunned when I read this. I will hopefully find some time in the near future to read some of the more recent decisions to see if they've changed this.
Re:No Offense meant, but..
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hmmm, I can't just let this post slide. You present a good argument, but you miss some crucial facts. I feel I must respond.
The trial kept getting delayed due to it's complexity - often at the request of HIS lawyers.
Primarily because his lawyers were denied access to the information they needed in order to prepare for any trial. Personally, I'd rather wait in prison a little longer for my lawyers to prepare than go to court with a lawyer who isn't even sure what the charge is (I'm exaggerating there, obviously, but I think you get the point).
As for being denied bail that whole time - well that is sort of a natural penalty for running & continuing to commit the same crimes while on the run - for some reason people just don't trust you not to it again.
It wasn't just that he was denied bail, he was denied a bail hearing. From what I understand, no other defendant in all of American legal history has been denied a bail hearing. This doesn't strike you as a bit odd?
I doubt HE knows it's value... On the other hand it is not difficult at ALL to assume that the value was quite significant. Big companies worth many billions of dollars keep stuff on their computers that really do have multi-million dollar values to those companies.
Actually, in some cases the values are quite clear. For example, one particular item of software he downloaded was available free to educational institutions, and $100 to anyone else. But that didn't stop the plaintiffs from claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Well, at least that was their claim in the courtroom. They made no such claim to the SEC or their shareholders. As far as I know, none of the "victim" companies reported a single lost penny as a result of Mr. Mitnick's actions. But the moment they stepped into the courtroom, suddenly it was all sob stories about the hundreds of millions in damages he had caused. I wonder if any of those guys went on to work for Enron....;)
That's a GREAT argument for harsher treatment of murderers IMO than for more lenient treatment of multiple offense fraud artist fugitives.
Agreed to an extent. Many violent criminals these days are treated far more leniently than they should. But, Mr. Mitnick got the shaft, big time. If he had received a 2-year sentence, you wouldn't hear a single voice speaking out on his behalf. In fact, based on things I've heard him say in the past, I don't think even he would speak out. He would say that he got what he deserved, and I think few would argue with that. He was a petty criminal, but was treated like he was the biggest threat to society at the time.
Did you sleep more easily while Mitnick was in jail, knowing that he was off the streets? Do you lose sleep now knowing that he's back out there? I doubt it. They went way overboard on his case.
Q: How did you get into those NORAD computers, and how accurate was War Games?
(NOTE: yes, the above was just a joke, please put down your flamethrowers)
But seriously, now that all this is more or less over, how do you feel about John Markoff? Do you hold a grudge, or have you moved on? How about Tsutomu Shimomura?
Once they got into power, they used their power to create a system where the party in power hand-picks their successors in their equivalent of congress.
Precisely. They removed democracy from the equation.
If a man wearing the colours of one football team walks into a pub full of supporters of a rival team after his team's just beaten them, then should he get into a fight? No, but in reality, if he did most people would say he should have been more careful.
It's not a double standard. It's one thing to say that he should have been more careful. It's another thing to blame him. In your analogy, he definitely should have been more careful, but the people who beat him up are the guilty ones, period. It's not right to beat people up. Same thing with the rape situation. Some women dress and act in ways that are not smart, and they really should be more careful. But it's still not right to rape them, and if someone does, they are guilty, period.
I remember reading that IBM reckon that, including design, coding, testing, debugging and documentation, a programmer's doing well to get 10 lines of code per day, averaged over the life of the project.
That may be somewhat accurate when looking at a properly managed product, where actual coding might take up 10-15% of the project's total time. But this is a teenager writing code in his parents' basement. Do you think he wrote use cases? Do he think he documented anything? Also, I don't think it states that all 780,000 lines were his own; code reuse is a wonderful thing, after all.
We'll all have to wait and see if this turns out to be real, but IBM's 10 lines/day figure really doesn't apply here.
Never underestimate the productivity of a teenager with no life.
Exactly what language would you like this magical debugger work for?
How about, for example, Java?
I can see where you're coming from. As other replies have pointed out, you're thinking primarily in terms of compiled code. I'm focused primarily on Java these days.
Also, I said this was my "Dream Debugger". I didn't say it was necessarily possible, just that these are the things that I would love to see in a debugger. However, as others have pointed out, these are not only possible, but do exist in some debuggers.
Asking a debugger to do more turns it into a crutch.
Bullshit. It turns it into a more useful tool. A tool only becomes a crutch if you let it.
2) Recognize and issue warnings about possible semantic problems. e.g. Using uninitialized variables, = instead of ==, etc.
I agree with that one. Of course, I'm used to that already, since my Java IDE does that for me right now.:)
Some of these features exist in current debuggers, and some do not. What I want is all of them.
1) The ability to set conditional breakpoints. 2) The ability to see not only a variable's current value, but a stack of all of its previous values. 3) The ability to select a variable's previous value and jump to the line of code that set it to that. 4) The ability to change the value of a variable at any point. 5) The ability to add/change code on the fly. 6) The ability to jump into the debugger at any point in the program, even when I hadn't planned to before running it. 7) Auto-logging of method calls and (optionally) variable values, to be started and stopped as I see fit either while stepping through code or running it.
That's all that comes to mind off the top of my head.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 1
IANAL and don't ever want to be one, so I really don't know how libel and defamation and all that work. But this situation seems kind of odd. You state that it's libel because they quote someone as saying something that they did not actually say, even though the words they are putting in his mouth are true. However, I go over to "The Onion" and take a look at the articles there, and right away I come across a story about Bill Clinton which quotes him saying a number of silly things that he clearly never said. I also remember a story I read there once about Dell closing down because they had achieved the success they wanted, so there was no point continuing, and it quoted the CEO talking about how happy he was to have succeeded so he can now close down the company. Clearly, these stories are parody. As far as I know, The Onion has never been sued for them.
So, why is it okay to write parodies in which people are quoted as saying things that are not true (like Dell closing), but it's not okay to write parodies in which people are quoted as saying things that are true?
You cannot have it both ways, as you pointed out, when talking about one product, but with Windows there are many products that have been released over the years. Would anyone argue that Windows 3.1 and Windows XP are essentially the same product? I think not.
Going back to the original quote from the article, the poster left out the first part of the paragraph, as well as the sentence that followed it. These are somewhat critical. The full quote is:
In written testimony last month, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, asserted that while Windows enabled the display of on-screen windows, its ambitions were much larger. Mr. Gates said that unlike most competing products in the early 1980's, which were simple window systems, Windows is a layer of software between an operating system and an application like a word processor. As such, he added, the Windows layer has allowed outside software developers to write all kinds of applications that run on Windows.
In the early 1980's, "Windows represented a new kind of product for personal computers," Mr. Gates wrote. "It was not part of any existing product category."
He's not talking about Windows today, he's talking about Windows as it was at the time that the trademark was established. Now, granted, the sentence does say "Windows is" rather than "Windows was", but that is the NY Times writer's choice of words, not necessarily Bill's choice of words. The rest of the paragraph is written in the past tense. The author is paraphrasing, not quoting. This is an important distinction. The one sentence he does quote directly is also entirely in the past tense, referring to Windows circa 1983, not Windows circa 2003.
Windows is not a generic term now. If someone says Linux, you know what they are talking about (the specific OS). By the same terms, if someone says that a program they wrote "runs on Windows" you know, with 100% certainty, that they are referring to the specificMS OS called Windows.
Well, yes and no. "Windows", in reference to an Operating System, means Microsoft Windows [insert version number here] to just about anyone. However, "window(s)" does still have a generic meaning to most people even now. "Linux", on the other hand, only and always means the Linux Operating System.
If someone is surfing the web with a browser, and they right-click on a link and select "Open in New Window", they will not assume that a new Operating System will launch. If I tell someone to "close those windows", they will not shutdown their OS, they will click the "X" buttons on the windows I referred to. If I'm describing to someone a new Gnome-based Linux application I'm writing, and I say "when you run the app it opens up a couple windows...", that person isn't going to interrupt and say "Windows(tm)?! I thought this was a Linux app?"
Anyways, you are correct, though, that what really matters here is not whether "Windows" is generic today, but whether or not it was generic when the trademark was mysteriously granted (with no explanation, and in stark contrast to the well-explained previous denial of trademark protection). And that is where I think Microsoft is in serious trouble.
Agreed, but with one exception. I'm currently moving into J2EE, with a focus on Websphere (it's what everyone's using in my part of the world, so the job opportunities are many -- and I'm a consultant). So far, it's been my experience that the Sun tutorials are pretty bad. At least, the one's I've seen were pretty shoddy, and a friend of mine who's also teaching himself J2EE is completely fed up with the tutorials he's done.
Maybe we just picked the bad ones, I don't know. But I recommend buying a book or two on the subject.
Think about it.. if you had to walk down the street and stand in line to read slashdot, would you?
Well, given that I read Slashdot daily, but only vote once every few years or so, that's a pretty crappy analogy you've got going on there.
People leave their houses to go shopping, visit the dentist, go to work, rent movies, walk their dog, blah blah blah. Most people leave their house at least once every day. Is it that difficult to go down the street to mark an X on a piece of paper every few years?
It's apathy, not laziness, that prevents people from voting. Convenience doesn't change apathy.
Slashdot Mirror
I just don't understand this mentality of "let's get rid of it because it's old". Come on people, the keyboard is much older technology than the floppy drive. I don't hear anyone bitching about how we need to scrap that "ancient" technology.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and sure as hell don't throw it away!
Biology, evolution, the innate desire to multiply, these things make us efficient creatures. They do not make us happy human beings. Sadly, we're too intelligent and advanced a species for that.
I can just picture a little sticker on the front door across the seam between the door and the frame that says:
Correction: Life would be much more pleasant if people didn't hire lawyers for stupid selfish greedy reasons.
The problem is not lawyers, the problem is the way that people use lawyers. Lawyers are but a tool. And a useful one, too, when you really need one.
"Every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right." -- Ani DiFranco
But, whether or not there will always be a cartel of rich and powerful monopolists with a representative body like the RIAA is still open to debate.
Your logic doesn't quite flow. Just because we will always have corporations, does not necessarily mean we will always have corporate record companies. The need for record companies is rapidly disappearing. When the service provided by a service company becomes obsolete, that company becomes obsolete. It doesn't remain just because corporations still remain and it's a corporation.
I don't know if record companies, and subsequently the RIAA, will cease to exist. I do know that if they don't start to actually adapt to the changes that have occurred in the market right before their bewildered -- and apparently non-functional -- eyes, it's highly unlikely they will remain profitable.
That's probably not too far off, actually. The proposed increase in the recording media levy that's currently being debated in Canada will set the levy at $21/GB for hard drives in devices like MP3 players. If a similar rate gets applied to something like this, that would up the cost of a 5GB card by an extra $105.
Then the music industry will want to apply a levy to wallet sales, since wallets can be used to carry these illegal MP3-laden cards around.
A: A license to copy music!
Actually, yes. At least that's the way it was when the levies were first introduced. I haven't checked any of the more recent decisions of the Copyright Board, but in the original decisions they explicitly stated that along with the imposition of the levies came the right of consumers to make copies of music for personal use only. And, more importantly, they explicitly stated that you don't just get the right to copy your own music, but you get the right to copy anyone's music. As long as you make the copy for yourself (ie. you can't make a copy to give to someone else -- the person who will receive the copy has to be the one who makes the copy).
I was rather stunned when I read this. I will hopefully find some time in the near future to read some of the more recent decisions to see if they've changed this.
The trial kept getting delayed due to it's complexity - often at the request of HIS lawyers.
Primarily because his lawyers were denied access to the information they needed in order to prepare for any trial. Personally, I'd rather wait in prison a little longer for my lawyers to prepare than go to court with a lawyer who isn't even sure what the charge is (I'm exaggerating there, obviously, but I think you get the point).
As for being denied bail that whole time - well that is sort of a natural penalty for running & continuing to commit the same crimes while on the run - for some reason people just don't trust you not to it again.
It wasn't just that he was denied bail, he was denied a bail hearing. From what I understand, no other defendant in all of American legal history has been denied a bail hearing. This doesn't strike you as a bit odd?
I doubt HE knows it's value ... On the other hand it is not difficult at ALL to assume that the value was quite significant. Big companies worth many billions of dollars keep stuff on their computers that really do have multi-million dollar values to those companies.
Actually, in some cases the values are quite clear. For example, one particular item of software he downloaded was available free to educational institutions, and $100 to anyone else. But that didn't stop the plaintiffs from claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Well, at least that was their claim in the courtroom. They made no such claim to the SEC or their shareholders. As far as I know, none of the "victim" companies reported a single lost penny as a result of Mr. Mitnick's actions. But the moment they stepped into the courtroom, suddenly it was all sob stories about the hundreds of millions in damages he had caused. I wonder if any of those guys went on to work for Enron.... ;)
That's a GREAT argument for harsher treatment of murderers IMO than for more lenient treatment of multiple offense fraud artist fugitives.
Agreed to an extent. Many violent criminals these days are treated far more leniently than they should. But, Mr. Mitnick got the shaft, big time. If he had received a 2-year sentence, you wouldn't hear a single voice speaking out on his behalf. In fact, based on things I've heard him say in the past, I don't think even he would speak out. He would say that he got what he deserved, and I think few would argue with that. He was a petty criminal, but was treated like he was the biggest threat to society at the time.
Did you sleep more easily while Mitnick was in jail, knowing that he was off the streets? Do you lose sleep now knowing that he's back out there? I doubt it. They went way overboard on his case.
Q: How did you get into those NORAD computers, and how accurate was War Games?
(NOTE: yes, the above was just a joke, please put down your flamethrowers)
But seriously, now that all this is more or less over, how do you feel about John Markoff? Do you hold a grudge, or have you moved on? How about Tsutomu Shimomura?
Precisely. They removed democracy from the equation.
Odd. You state that as if "Democracy" and "Republic" are somehow mutually exclusive concepts.
China is a republic. The former Soviet Union was a republic. Iraq is a republic.
The difference between the above republics and the republic of the United States: democracy.
It's not a double standard. It's one thing to say that he should have been more careful. It's another thing to blame him. In your analogy, he definitely should have been more careful, but the people who beat him up are the guilty ones, period. It's not right to beat people up. Same thing with the rape situation. Some women dress and act in ways that are not smart, and they really should be more careful. But it's still not right to rape them, and if someone does, they are guilty, period.
That may be somewhat accurate when looking at a properly managed product, where actual coding might take up 10-15% of the project's total time. But this is a teenager writing code in his parents' basement. Do you think he wrote use cases? Do he think he documented anything? Also, I don't think it states that all 780,000 lines were his own; code reuse is a wonderful thing, after all.
We'll all have to wait and see if this turns out to be real, but IBM's 10 lines/day figure really doesn't apply here.
Never underestimate the productivity of a teenager with no life.
How about, for example, Java?
I can see where you're coming from. As other replies have pointed out, you're thinking primarily in terms of compiled code. I'm focused primarily on Java these days.
Also, I said this was my "Dream Debugger". I didn't say it was necessarily possible, just that these are the things that I would love to see in a debugger. However, as others have pointed out, these are not only possible, but do exist in some debuggers.
Asking a debugger to do more turns it into a crutch.
Bullshit. It turns it into a more useful tool. A tool only becomes a crutch if you let it.
2) Recognize and issue warnings about possible semantic problems. e.g. Using uninitialized variables, = instead of ==, etc.
I agree with that one. Of course, I'm used to that already, since my Java IDE does that for me right now. :)
1) The ability to set conditional breakpoints.
2) The ability to see not only a variable's current value, but a stack of all of its previous values.
3) The ability to select a variable's previous value and jump to the line of code that set it to that.
4) The ability to change the value of a variable at any point.
5) The ability to add/change code on the fly.
6) The ability to jump into the debugger at any point in the program, even when I hadn't planned to before running it.
7) Auto-logging of method calls and (optionally) variable values, to be started and stopped as I see fit either while stepping through code or running it.
That's all that comes to mind off the top of my head.
So, why is it okay to write parodies in which people are quoted as saying things that are not true (like Dell closing), but it's not okay to write parodies in which people are quoted as saying things that are true?
Going back to the original quote from the article, the poster left out the first part of the paragraph, as well as the sentence that followed it. These are somewhat critical. The full quote is:
He's not talking about Windows today, he's talking about Windows as it was at the time that the trademark was established. Now, granted, the sentence does say "Windows is" rather than "Windows was", but that is the NY Times writer's choice of words, not necessarily Bill's choice of words. The rest of the paragraph is written in the past tense. The author is paraphrasing, not quoting. This is an important distinction. The one sentence he does quote directly is also entirely in the past tense, referring to Windows circa 1983, not Windows circa 2003.
Thankfully, I've never worked tech support.
Well, okay, that's not true. Anyone who's a geek, and knows at least one non-geek, has "worked" tech support.
Someday, I'm gonna buy that shirt from ThinkGeek that says "No I will not fix your computer". And then I'll never take it off. Not even to shower.
Heh. "Shower". I made a funny. :)
Well, yes and no. "Windows", in reference to an Operating System, means Microsoft Windows [insert version number here] to just about anyone. However, "window(s)" does still have a generic meaning to most people even now. "Linux", on the other hand, only and always means the Linux Operating System.
If someone is surfing the web with a browser, and they right-click on a link and select "Open in New Window", they will not assume that a new Operating System will launch. If I tell someone to "close those windows", they will not shutdown their OS, they will click the "X" buttons on the windows I referred to. If I'm describing to someone a new Gnome-based Linux application I'm writing, and I say "when you run the app it opens up a couple windows...", that person isn't going to interrupt and say "Windows(tm)?! I thought this was a Linux app?"
Anyways, you are correct, though, that what really matters here is not whether "Windows" is generic today, but whether or not it was generic when the trademark was mysteriously granted (with no explanation, and in stark contrast to the well-explained previous denial of trademark protection). And that is where I think Microsoft is in serious trouble.
Maybe we just picked the bad ones, I don't know. But I recommend buying a book or two on the subject.
And use Eclipse!!!
Well, given that I read Slashdot daily, but only vote once every few years or so, that's a pretty crappy analogy you've got going on there.
People leave their houses to go shopping, visit the dentist, go to work, rent movies, walk their dog, blah blah blah. Most people leave their house at least once every day. Is it that difficult to go down the street to mark an X on a piece of paper every few years?
It's apathy, not laziness, that prevents people from voting. Convenience doesn't change apathy.
...and start listening to the new "experts" that are convincing everyong to go on high-protein diets.
.....oh wait.........