I don't think it is a problem of people that hold copyrights in general.
But the description does ring true of any corporation. As made clear in the film "The Corporation", they act like psychopaths unable to either tell the difference between right and wrong, or give a damn about it when they do.
The days of fighters swooping around locked in a dog-fight-to-the-death are long gone
That's what they said in Vietname too and lowly old Mig 15s were blasting Phantoms out of the sky 1:1 until the navy started the Top Gun program, which changed the rate to something like 10:1 in favor of the US. The airforce didn't have a program like it and had to make do with a measly 2:1 ratio in air-to-air engagements until the end of the war.
The truth is that even in this day of "beyond visual range", in anything but an all-out war ("anything that crosses the line is a target"), visual ID still has to be made most of the time. In Gulf War one, most kills were done using Sidewinder misiles and guns at close range. Not that that gave the poorly trained and controled Iraqi pilots any chance, of course.
Anyone who attempts to engage the US ariforce in that type of combat will survive just long enough to realize just how stupid they really are
That is not entirely correct. You are right when comparing to the poorly trained Mig-toting airforces without proper command and control structures. (IE: AWACS and advanced data links)
But western european manufacturers (Eurofighter, Saab) are designing their own ("NATO compatible") systems and most western European airforces have excelent training and command and would do just fine. In fact, they do just fine during joint training excercises with all the gimmicks turned on on both sides. I don't think any US pilot would assume a war with, say, Britain to be a turkey shoot.
The Raptor is a different story altogether, though. Stealth works and one can race up to you and blast you out of the sky without you ever knowing it was there. As one F-15 pilot on the receiving end described it: "it's rather scary".
PostgreSQL is the Beta of databases. The superior system but the loser in the race because of reasons beyond it's control.
That is not true at all. Betamax lost because it was too expensive, made even worse by the shorter amount that could be recorded on one tape.
Not only is Postgres the better product, it is also free, so price is not an issue. In fact, I am really puzzled by the Slashdot mob being such admirerers of MySQL as Postgres is actually more free than MySQL is.
In the beer sense of "free" there isn't a single situation where you would ever have to pay "Postgres Inc" to do anything you like with it and you get a few free trivial extras thrown in that you'd have to pay a 3rd party for in the MySQL world. Like, ehrm, online backups. (who would want those anyway?)
And in the speech sense of the word, you can use the code in any damn way you please without having to use the same license; heck, you could turn it into your own commercial product and sell it for thousands if you want to. You can't get any more freedom than that!
Well, until just a few weeks ago, there was nothing to scan for, except Windows virusses! So what would the point have been?
The major vendors have engines ready to scan, but things will have to get a whole lot worse and more regular before I will pay up and slow down my system with one of those bastards....
Troll is a bit harsh, I agree. But you do make it sound like my brother is one of those no-time-for-the-kids-make-them-watch-movies-instea d parents. Which, of course, could not be further from the truth.
He's a geek, remember; turing a screaming couple of pounds of flesh into an intelligent well behaved human being is the ultimate hack that must be persued at all cost.
I haven't seen the DVD in question, but knowing my brother, I seriously doubt they are episodes Terminate Death Kill Autobots cartoons!;-)
My brother was recently forced to copy a DVD. It was a very cheap children's DVD his son loves. The problem? There was a 2 and a half minute non-skipable copyright notice before the main feature.
There is a difference between a glitch and an all out crash! Though I
This also wasn't meant as a competition between Windows and Linux; I prefer OS X on the desktop. All the power of a unix (great for development) with a good looking gui that is more stable than Windows and more managable than all the Linux desktops I tried. ("things just work" isn't just a marketing slogan, I can testify) The only thing affecting my uptime there are updates that require a restart. (one every month, maybe)
But it is a premium over a dirt cheap Dell or home built box running Linux, for sure.
That is a little short sighted. First of all, it's speculation, you don't know what will happen when you go to bolivia with the music on your laptop or how many computers you may use. My suspicion is that it will keep playing what you have until instructed otherwise, it is not going to check every single time you press play, so let's wait and see.
Secondly, you can be sure that any music on your "aPod" will keep working wherever you are for as long as you want.
Thirdly, you don't own anything with buying from iTunes, you just license. If you want to move you music to a new computer, it needs to phone home to re-authorize and apple can dissable this at any time too if they stop liking you. (or the content supplier stops liking Apple and tells them to shut down)
And last but not least, they are files on your computer and like Apple's DRM, it will be cracked and you can simply strip the files of their protection.
The government is going to win this case. It's a business, not a real person
That is not correct. A corporation, according to law, is a person, with the same rights. They have freedom of speech, can't have their property seized with due process, etc, just like and American citizen. I guess they would even have the right to bear arms!
Corporations have been using that "loophole" to quote the constitution in their defence for as long as it exists.
In one way I agree with you. But information - even if some of it is filtered - is power. Selling arms to the chinese goverment is obviously bad. Giving it's citizens at least some access is better than depriving them completely because you don't like the goverment. If the people can't see beyond the curtain at least a little bit, they don't know what they are missing and what they should be protesting about. (see North Korea)
Besides, Google being Google, it would not surprise me at all that now that they are in and paying lucrative taxes to the Chinese goverment they will try to keep pushing the boundries. If the stayed outside and managed to avoid the filtering, the Chinese goverment could easily block them completely. Now they are on the inside, the goverment has something to lose.
AFAIK, in most european countries, telcos are just DSL providers, that is they provide an ADSL line to your ISP through their DSLAM, just like in the old dial-up days.
On top of that, many now have competition, being required to give access to the subscriber lines. This gives you the situation where, in the UK, you can just have your "ma bell" British Telecom POTS line, running through an Easynet DSLAM to mix in your ADSL signal.
In the Netherlands it goes so far that ISP XS4All gives you different packages, with a choice of who actually provides the DSLAM and peering to XS4All.
And this stuff is all regulated that way to make sure there is fair competition and consumers get the best while still allowing BT - who owns the lines - to make more than a healthy profit.
1. Microsoft spearheads USB standard 2. "Mass Storage Class" added to USB that is so low level, the OS uses it as any disk, needing to support it's file systems 3. 95% of computers run windows and the ones that support USB only support FAT, forcing device manufacturers to use that as filesystem. 4. Patent filesystem and demand royalties after the fact 5. No need for "???" 6. Profit!
Yup, they planned this all along, the sneaky bastards.
Don't forget that many Australian go straight from university to see the world. Well, when I say "world", I mean "London", with some weekend trips into Europe. Well, when I say "Europe", I really mean the Shepherds Bush Walkabout and Fulham Slug.
Just kidding, back to the subject. Many of those are trained IT people, who tend to stick around here for quite some time before, not in the least because of the high wages you can make here, especially if you do contracting work. And that is why they stick around for quite a while too. I know; I work with many of them.
This, of course, upsets some of the locals here and also is one of the reasons Australia needs to import IT talent back into the country. But it is not just foreign specialists that make more than locals, the same it true for people returning with "London experience"; something not limtted to IT, but other fields too.
I am planning to reap the benefits of that later this year as my Australian wife and I plan to move from London to the land down under.
Go to dell and price a top of the range machine with nice monitor. Then go to Apple and price a top of the range PowerMac.
Do the same for a mid-range machine and compare it to an iMac G5.
Repeat for comparable notebooks.
Are Apple really THAT expensive? There are many cases where Apple is the cheaper option, especially when it comes to top of the range workstations.
Just because they don't sell bottom of the range hardware so bad they'll only dare give you 3 months warranty, like Dell does, doesn't make them expensive.
Michael Dell has already publicly said he'd love to license OS X.
It could be that is the reason for the drift away from MS, either because he wants to make friends with Steve Jobs or a backroom deal has actually already been done.
Ah, that would be the difference then, I have not ported anything, just straight Cocoa from scratch.
I guess Metrowerks felt quite stupid when Apple anounced the intel switch. Oh well, at the same time they were probably rejoicing about XBox 360 going to a POWER architecture, meaning they could sell their dev tools to PS2 and XBox 360 developers alike.
Nah, I'll stick with Obj-C. I have nothing against it (well not enough, anyway) and apart from pure Cocoa, like I said, all the cool things like CoreImage and WebKit are Obj-C.
I work with VS at work, XCode at home. I much prefer XCode, probably because it has less functionality. Just because one product has more functionality, doesn't make it a better way to develop.
The XCode/NIB/Cocoa/Obj-C combo isn't very beginner friendly, but it does force you into a proper MVC framework from day one. There is no simply double clicking a widget and writing your logic in all the wrong places; it forces you to think about these things.
Plus you don't find Cocoa code filled with TextField324, Class189 and Button17897632!:)
Now if only it gave me a tabbed editor!
XCode has yet to crash one me once, so I am not sure where you "stabilty" comment comes from. My experience is the opposite, actually. Plus the number of times I had to shut down VS because it locked some DLL I had to replace with a new version, those might as well be counted as a crash.
If you call a crippled version that is only free for one year the same as giving away your flagship product, then yes, you are right, Visual Studio is free too.
ADC ain't free, you are right. But the point is, you CAN develop on a Mac (like I do) with the same tools - not some crippled version - as the rich folks without paying a dime over the price of your hardware + OS.
And the cool thing is, with so much GPL software integrated into XCode (GCC, gdb, etc) there is no way they'll ever be able to charge for XCode.
But if you do pay, you get OS X 10.4 included, no paying for an upgrade required, just like MSDN.
as long as Apple is willing to spend as much as Microsoft spends on Visual Studio for a user base that's a tiny fraction of the size
And don't forget Apple gives theirs away for free, while MS charges an arm, 2 legs and several vital organs for Visual Studio, let alone an MSDN membership.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it is a problem of people that hold copyrights in general.
But the description does ring true of any corporation. As made clear in the film "The Corporation", they act like psychopaths unable to either tell the difference between right and wrong, or give a damn about it when they do.
That's what they said in Vietname too and lowly old Mig 15s were blasting Phantoms out of the sky 1:1 until the navy started the Top Gun program, which changed the rate to something like 10:1 in favor of the US. The airforce didn't have a program like it and had to make do with a measly 2:1 ratio in air-to-air engagements until the end of the war.
The truth is that even in this day of "beyond visual range", in anything but an all-out war ("anything that crosses the line is a target"), visual ID still has to be made most of the time. In Gulf War one, most kills were done using Sidewinder misiles and guns at close range. Not that that gave the poorly trained and controled Iraqi pilots any chance, of course.
Anyone who attempts to engage the US ariforce in that type of combat will survive just long enough to realize just how stupid they really are
That is not entirely correct. You are right when comparing to the poorly trained Mig-toting airforces without proper command and control structures. (IE: AWACS and advanced data links)
But western european manufacturers (Eurofighter, Saab) are designing their own ("NATO compatible") systems and most western European airforces have excelent training and command and would do just fine. In fact, they do just fine during joint training excercises with all the gimmicks turned on on both sides. I don't think any US pilot would assume a war with, say, Britain to be a turkey shoot.
The Raptor is a different story altogether, though. Stealth works and one can race up to you and blast you out of the sky without you ever knowing it was there. As one F-15 pilot on the receiving end described it: "it's rather scary".
That is not true at all. Betamax lost because it was too expensive, made even worse by the shorter amount that could be recorded on one tape.
Not only is Postgres the better product, it is also free, so price is not an issue. In fact, I am really puzzled by the Slashdot mob being such admirerers of MySQL as Postgres is actually more free than MySQL is.
In the beer sense of "free" there isn't a single situation where you would ever have to pay "Postgres Inc" to do anything you like with it and you get a few free trivial extras thrown in that you'd have to pay a 3rd party for in the MySQL world. Like, ehrm, online backups. (who would want those anyway?)
And in the speech sense of the word, you can use the code in any damn way you please without having to use the same license; heck, you could turn it into your own commercial product and sell it for thousands if you want to. You can't get any more freedom than that!
Well, until just a few weeks ago, there was nothing to scan for, except Windows virusses! So what would the point have been?
The major vendors have engines ready to scan, but things will have to get a whole lot worse and more regular before I will pay up and slow down my system with one of those bastards....
Troll is a bit harsh, I agree. But you do make it sound like my brother is one of those no-time-for-the-kids-make-them-watch-movies-instea d parents. Which, of course, could not be further from the truth.
;-)
He's a geek, remember; turing a screaming couple of pounds of flesh into an intelligent well behaved human being is the ultimate hack that must be persued at all cost.
I haven't seen the DVD in question, but knowing my brother, I seriously doubt they are episodes Terminate Death Kill Autobots cartoons!
That is a very good point. Besides, the guy blindly criticising my brother's parenting skill obvioulsy has no idea what kind of parent my brother is.
He's spends a *lot* of time playing (and educating) his son, but he is also a geek, and if it can be hacked to make it better, it must be done! :)
My brother was recently forced to copy a DVD. It was a very cheap children's DVD his son loves. The problem? There was a 2 and a half minute non-skipable copyright notice before the main feature.
You try explaining that one to a 2 year old...
There is a difference between a glitch and an all out crash! Though I
This also wasn't meant as a competition between Windows and Linux; I prefer OS X on the desktop. All the power of a unix (great for development) with a good looking gui that is more stable than Windows and more managable than all the Linux desktops I tried. ("things just work" isn't just a marketing slogan, I can testify) The only thing affecting my uptime there are updates that require a restart. (one every month, maybe)
But it is a premium over a dirt cheap Dell or home built box running Linux, for sure.
showcasing of Linux as the major operating system without any technical glitches
Linux? No technical glitches? And he already proclaims this before the trial?
Boy, is he in for a shock...
Disclosure: I love Linux (for servers) and wouldn't choose anything else. But I sure have seen my share of "glitches"!
That is a little short sighted. First of all, it's speculation, you don't know what will happen when you go to bolivia with the music on your laptop or how many computers you may use. My suspicion is that it will keep playing what you have until instructed otherwise, it is not going to check every single time you press play, so let's wait and see.
Secondly, you can be sure that any music on your "aPod" will keep working wherever you are for as long as you want.
Thirdly, you don't own anything with buying from iTunes, you just license. If you want to move you music to a new computer, it needs to phone home to re-authorize and apple can dissable this at any time too if they stop liking you. (or the content supplier stops liking Apple and tells them to shut down)
And last but not least, they are files on your computer and like Apple's DRM, it will be cracked and you can simply strip the files of their protection.
And this is different to iPod/iTunes, how?
I would be surprised if you would not be able to rip your own CDs or add existing MP3s you already have.
That is not correct. A corporation, according to law, is a person, with the same rights. They have freedom of speech, can't have their property seized with due process, etc, just like and American citizen. I guess they would even have the right to bear arms!
Corporations have been using that "loophole" to quote the constitution in their defence for as long as it exists.
In one way I agree with you. But information - even if some of it is filtered - is power. Selling arms to the chinese goverment is obviously bad. Giving it's citizens at least some access is better than depriving them completely because you don't like the goverment. If the people can't see beyond the curtain at least a little bit, they don't know what they are missing and what they should be protesting about. (see North Korea)
Besides, Google being Google, it would not surprise me at all that now that they are in and paying lucrative taxes to the Chinese goverment they will try to keep pushing the boundries. If the stayed outside and managed to avoid the filtering, the Chinese goverment could easily block them completely. Now they are on the inside, the goverment has something to lose.
AFAIK, in most european countries, telcos are just DSL providers, that is they provide an ADSL line to your ISP through their DSLAM, just like in the old dial-up days.
On top of that, many now have competition, being required to give access to the subscriber lines. This gives you the situation where, in the UK, you can just have your "ma bell" British Telecom POTS line, running through an Easynet DSLAM to mix in your ADSL signal.
In the Netherlands it goes so far that ISP XS4All gives you different packages, with a choice of who actually provides the DSLAM and peering to XS4All.
And this stuff is all regulated that way to make sure there is fair competition and consumers get the best while still allowing BT - who owns the lines - to make more than a healthy profit.
1. Microsoft spearheads USB standard
2. "Mass Storage Class" added to USB that is so low level, the OS uses it as any disk, needing to support it's file systems
3. 95% of computers run windows and the ones that support USB only support FAT, forcing device manufacturers to use that as filesystem.
4. Patent filesystem and demand royalties after the fact
5. No need for "???"
6. Profit!
Yup, they planned this all along, the sneaky bastards.
Don't forget that many Australian go straight from university to see the world. Well, when I say "world", I mean "London", with some weekend trips into Europe. Well, when I say "Europe", I really mean the Shepherds Bush Walkabout and Fulham Slug.
Just kidding, back to the subject. Many of those are trained IT people, who tend to stick around here for quite some time before, not in the least because of the high wages you can make here, especially if you do contracting work. And that is why they stick around for quite a while too. I know; I work with many of them.
This, of course, upsets some of the locals here and also is one of the reasons Australia needs to import IT talent back into the country. But it is not just foreign specialists that make more than locals, the same it true for people returning with "London experience"; something not limtted to IT, but other fields too.
I am planning to reap the benefits of that later this year as my Australian wife and I plan to move from London to the land down under.
Go to dell and price a top of the range machine with nice monitor. Then go to Apple and price a top of the range PowerMac.
Do the same for a mid-range machine and compare it to an iMac G5.
Repeat for comparable notebooks.
Are Apple really THAT expensive? There are many cases where Apple is the cheaper option, especially when it comes to top of the range workstations.
Just because they don't sell bottom of the range hardware so bad they'll only dare give you 3 months warranty, like Dell does, doesn't make them expensive.
It could be that is the reason for the drift away from MS, either because he wants to make friends with Steve Jobs or a backroom deal has actually already been done.
Ah, that would be the difference then, I have not ported anything, just straight Cocoa from scratch.
I guess Metrowerks felt quite stupid when Apple anounced the intel switch. Oh well, at the same time they were probably rejoicing about XBox 360 going to a POWER architecture, meaning they could sell their dev tools to PS2 and XBox 360 developers alike.
Nah, I'll stick with Obj-C. I have nothing against it (well not enough, anyway) and apart from pure Cocoa, like I said, all the cool things like CoreImage and WebKit are Obj-C.
I think the key difference is that with all the MSDN subscriptions out there, Visual Studio is probably a profit maker for Microsoft.
Apple only makes their money back only by people buying their boxes to run software on developed by XCode users.
I work with VS at work, XCode at home. I much prefer XCode, probably because it has less functionality. Just because one product has more functionality, doesn't make it a better way to develop.
:)
The XCode/NIB/Cocoa/Obj-C combo isn't very beginner friendly, but it does force you into a proper MVC framework from day one. There is no simply double clicking a widget and writing your logic in all the wrong places; it forces you to think about these things.
Plus you don't find Cocoa code filled with TextField324, Class189 and Button17897632!
Now if only it gave me a tabbed editor!
XCode has yet to crash one me once, so I am not sure where you "stabilty" comment comes from. My experience is the opposite, actually. Plus the number of times I had to shut down VS because it locked some DLL I had to replace with a new version, those might as well be counted as a crash.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
If you call a crippled version that is only free for one year the same as giving away your flagship product, then yes, you are right, Visual Studio is free too.
ADC ain't free, you are right. But the point is, you CAN develop on a Mac (like I do) with the same tools - not some crippled version - as the rich folks without paying a dime over the price of your hardware + OS.
And the cool thing is, with so much GPL software integrated into XCode (GCC, gdb, etc) there is no way they'll ever be able to charge for XCode.
But if you do pay, you get OS X 10.4 included, no paying for an upgrade required, just like MSDN.
And don't forget Apple gives theirs away for free, while MS charges an arm, 2 legs and several vital organs for Visual Studio, let alone an MSDN membership.
Unfortunately, Apple is no longer developing Java/Cocoa. And all the cool Mac stuff these days (CoreImage/Data/Audio) are Obj-C only.