Oh come on. Say I bought a really good business skills book, just followed its instructions to the letter and somehow lucked out and made billions. Then later the author shows up, tells me he is barely making ends meet and asks for more money. I sure as hell hope I don't legally owe him money. Otherwise I have to keep paying perpetual royalties on all books, software, music, movies that I bought and put to good use. That's what the bad guys want, right?
It's a different story if the inventor of the blue ray was enticed to work hard on a modest salary by promises of a sizable reward if he created something of value. Then it's up to jury to decide how much reward was implied. $8M sounds about right.
Re:Sick of Microsoft's Lack of Dedication to Mac
on
Microsoft At Macworld
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't know about Word - I am not too impressed with it's performance, stability and especially ability to read documents created with different version/OS/installed fonts on Windows.
But Windows Media Player is definitely more pleasant to use on Mac than on its native platform. It just launches and does its job. No loading unwanted ads, no washing top of the window with a mouse to get the menu to pop up, no confusing tabs.
I suspect Microsoft has a secret fascination with Mac. They made their own OS messy, unstable and unpleasent to people with taste. But they can not make a radical change without breaking backward compatibility or alienating people who are used to stuff as it is. Mac applications offer them a chance to do things right. They would be much relieved if Apple gained a moderate (say 20%) market share and they could start offering the rest of their products - Office, SQL Server, Business apps - to customers who demand more stability and less administration than is possible with Windows.
Bullshit. Just because company's CEO, employees and shareholders want to make money doesn't mean they don't care about what they are doing or shouldn't be held up to other responsibilities by the society. Sure, it's a free country. But if you are a jerk, who will invite you to their home?
When companies that act like pests find they can not build stores or office building in any community, route their packets over Internet ?r use publically funded roads and their shareholders can't get laid, they will clean up their act in a hurry. I wait for the reports of McBride run out of town,
The purpose of a graduate degree is to get a student visa and have about 3 years (you get a 1 year work permit after graduating) to hang around in US and look for a job that can get you a green card. Other than that, there are much cheaper places to teach you programming/CS at graduate level. Of course I can not speak for serious scientists.
I think you could raise the same 3 points when Netscape gave up on a commercial browser. Howerver:
1. Smart people know when they can't get much value out of something but other people might. Think of all the people with organ donor stickers on their driver license. 2. Code with serious initial investment make take a while to take off initially but doesn't go to stale. Think of OpenOffice, Netbeans, Mozilla, BSD. 3. If an effort to create an MMORPG from scratch is X, it can be easily X/10 if you have a free engine and a starter world design. This means people start creating specialty games for smaller markets than Everquest. Say a geeky game ala TRON 2.0 for slashdot users, a game for hardcore players/fighters that would intimidate a novice, a game for Harry Potter fans...
The author assumes that people need freedom to redistribute/modify programs, but not music or graphics. But it's a rare case I have time to modify other people's programs. On the other hand, if a song becomes popular, I may very well want to make a video of myself singing it or dancing to it and post it on my website without restricting who downloads it. Likewise, how do you run a fan site without copying some graphics and video clips?
For some software like games, it's really not that important for people to have free access to source code - or graphics, music... Games are not essential by definition and in the worst case you lose part of the value of your $20 investment. There is nothing wrong with closed source model here. RMS should just leave game developers alone:-)
For other software, like word processors and financial programs, open source is highly desirable. Imagine hundreds of businesses losing their customer records because one company flopped and their program has a Y2K bug. I don't know how any company can justify using MSWord.
It's likewise with music, graphics and other data. Sometimes it's essential for users to have free access, sometimes it's not. That depends more on use scenario than the media.
And yet, software design principals frown on frequent changes to base classes, encouraging encapsulation, delegates and subclassing instead. Perhaps you are only complaining about poorly written, monolythic proprietory software? Certainly most changes you would want to make to Windows do not involve rewritting the kernel?
Germany and Japan didn't make the changes themselves and one generation in each country suffered enourmous and probably not entirely necessary losses. And yet, many future generations have been spared the horrors of living under followers of Hitler or Hirohito.
Historically, oppressive societies endured for hundreds of years. Remember the dark ages, slavery and gladiator fights of Roman empire, or many dynasties and continued lack of human rights in China? When a change finally came, it was often after a bloody military conquest, civil war, revolution, or complete colapse of the civilization and a period of violent chaos. What is happening in Iraq is trivial by comparison. If any country or region reverts to dark ages today, than by all means the neighbors should step in, clean things up, and persist despite critisism for the sake of the majority of current generation and all of their children.
The only thing is, I am affraid US has reached such a degree of oppression that we are no longer qualified to save the world. It used to be that soldiers rapped and pilaged only because they were male, horny and greedy. Current Iraq prison abuse cases suggest something else. Apparently, both male and female US soldiers get the most kick of sexually controlling somebody else, even if they are unlikely to be attracted to them. At home, it takes many other forms - bullying gay couples, stigmatising single mothers, portraying teenager's sexuality as an entirely bad thing. In a free society, people would just live as they want and let everyone else do the same.
Another dysfunctional sign is that capitalism in general and big companies in particular are considered to be sacred and untouchable, rather than only encouraged to the extent they benefit the people. Democracy and stuff, you know? If a company started behaving like a pest, hiring 90% of stuff overseas and killing the competition by selling stuff at a loss rather than making the best product, we absolutely have a right to split them into 10 independent companies.
If you think about it, the only satisfactor solution are custom made devices. People who don't spend much time at home really need a phone with a camera, HD mp3 player, big color screen, keyboard and WiFi. Beats having to go home to e-mail a picture you just took, spilling devices out of full pockets or always carrying a backpack.
On the other hand, if you only want the phone, you would rather have a little thing that fits on top of one ear when in use. And if you only want some of the function, you expect your phone to be proportionally smaller and cheaper.
They should make a modular device with a main board that supports, say 4 plugins such as a hard drive, an 802.11 radio or a keyboard. But instead of attachable dongles that fall off and break, you can just get a smaller case that excludes the sides you don't use.
If you came in my house and sent e-mail on my computer, I'm entitled to read it.
Darn, I must remember to avoid using YOUR restroom if I ever visit your place.
Also, surely companies that monitor employee's email will never take advantage of DMCA, copyrights, patents or prosecute people who descramble sattelite signals. They don't own my computer, products they sold to me, or elecromagnetic waves that pass through my house. They are MINE!
Or do you think rich people (company owners) somehow deserve more protection than poor and middle class? I sure can't find anything in US constitution to support this notion. Maybe strict constructionist supreme court justices Bush wants to appoint have their work cut out for them.
Actually, I don't see how price of buying a DVD matters. Either it's one of the few movies that you plan to watch many times or you have ample money to burn. In either case, they could double the price without much impact on sales or people's pockets.
A realistic price of watching a movie at home is $4.50 you pay to rent a DVD in blockbuster. I agree that it doesn't make much sense to download - provided they actually carry that movie within a few months of release. Anyway, they shouldn't complain about sales lost to piracy if they are not selling!
Theater prices are insane however. It takes $20 to watch a movie with a significant other, and many people bring children. For the same price you can rent a DVD AND buy a PS2 game that provides at least 8 hours of entertainment instead of a 2 hour movie. Or 16 songs on iTunes music store that you will listen to for long time.
I end up waiting until there are at least two movies I want to see and hopping rooms. If it was too difficult to do that, I just wouldn't go to theaters unless the movie is exceptional. I suspect that their intention is for people to see most movies in a theater and only rent a DVD if they didn't have time to watch it before. In this case $4.50 for a ticket would be a reasonable price, because at least two people usually watch a movie at home and it's reasonable to say that a big screen is twice as enjoyable.
Original BASIC with line numbers and graphics drawing primitives is an excellent first language to learn. Beginners can immediatelly understand a 3 line program to solve quadratic equations and can be drawing geometric shapes and function graphs after an hour of reading. At the same time it captures the essential idea of how computers work - executing numbered instuctions step by step or jumping to a different numbered step if some condition is true.
Someone who wrote a page-long BASIC program can look at assembler and immediately recognize it as a more primitive version of what they already know. More importantly, they can understand how higher-level languages implement their abstractions and why they sometimes break down or perform poorly.
So just find gwbasic.exe (and DOSBox if you don't use Windows) on google and off you go.
I don't see a problem with Java device drivers. But if performance/realtime/dependency considerations require a native one, it can still access data in the original user's object directly without worrying that it will be overwritten in the middle.
Microsoft might cancel or deempasize Office for Mac if the new product is too close to its turf. That was Ok for the browser, because IE is not known for quality. But MSWord is actually good if you need very precise control over a printed document or heavily use their templates for different tasks. I would even bundle Office with high-end desktops and add integration in iLife apps to encourage more development effort from MS. There are pleanty of other areas to compete.
Current JavaVM implementations are all designed to run as one or multiple user processes on top of the OS. Not surprisingly, such implementations don't duplicate abstractions already provided by underlying platform - like virtual memory or persistent filesystem permissions.
However, if a VM was running directly on top of the kernel, it could implement these features more efficiently than what must be done for native code and would need little hardware support from the CPU. For example, kernel and user code can pass objects to each other without making a copy or any security concerns.
Re:Obligatory product bashing
on
TiVo to Go Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, but how do you justify paying $13/month for just a program guide which is free on tv.yahoo.com or your cable provider's site? Or keeping a landline for TiVo to use when you probably already have broadband and a cell phone? Also don't you sometimes want to send a VCD of your favourite episode to a friend?
If MythTV is too complicated to setup, just get the cheapest Windows PC and use whatever PVR program comes with the TV tuner. Might want to throw in a wireless keyboard+trackpad.
Well, China requires website/IM operators and owners of Internet Cafes to self-censor their contents, monitor discussions and report people who mention certain topics to the authorities. This will not be feasable if a million of individuals run their own little servers. People will be able to have forbidden discussions using someone's obscure personal blog script with no relalistic chance of being caught.
Now, I don't know if currently there is a regulation that bans an individual from having a routable address. But if enough people do, one of them will cause a problem sooner or later and then there will be a crackdown.
And increasingly people are not playing. The army has a huge problem recruiting, largely because people heard of conditions outlined by your parent. I thought about national guard when I was a bit younger. You know, being a hero you always see in the movie during a natural disaster without having to kill people or live in barraks for extended time. Fucking liers!
Do you really want other federal jobs to lose appeal as well because they do so many invasive background checks in return for meager pay? That said, I don't see a problem with carrying a badge of my employer's choice as long as I am not required to show it off work.
Seriously, what use is a high performance router if you are going to have a firewall that does extensive filtering, blocking and logging? Or a large number of IP addresses if private citizens are not allowed to run servers?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how it makes a difference. You can sell your knowledge to other people and after that you can't complain just because they are using it.
Oh come on. Say I bought a really good business skills book, just followed its instructions to the letter and somehow lucked out and made billions. Then later the author shows up, tells me he is barely making ends meet and asks for more money. I sure as hell hope I don't legally owe him money. Otherwise I have to keep paying perpetual royalties on all books, software, music, movies that I bought and put to good use. That's what the bad guys want, right?
It's a different story if the inventor of the blue ray was enticed to work hard on a modest salary by promises of a sizable reward if he created something of value. Then it's up to jury to decide how much reward was implied. $8M sounds about right.
I don't know about Word - I am not too impressed with it's performance, stability and especially ability to read documents created with different version/OS/installed fonts on Windows.
But Windows Media Player is definitely more pleasant to use on Mac than on its native platform. It just launches and does its job. No loading unwanted ads, no washing top of the window with a mouse to get the menu to pop up, no confusing tabs.
I suspect Microsoft has a secret fascination with Mac. They made their own OS messy, unstable and unpleasent to people with taste. But they can not make a radical change without breaking backward compatibility or alienating people who are used to stuff as it is. Mac applications offer them a chance to do things right. They would be much relieved if Apple gained a moderate (say 20%) market share and they could start offering the rest of their products - Office, SQL Server, Business apps - to customers who demand more stability and less administration than is possible with Windows.
Shouldn't you be telling them you installed iWork (or NeoOffice/J) instead because Apple will sell you a good computer for the price of MSOffice?
Bullshit. Just because company's CEO, employees and shareholders want to make money doesn't mean they don't care about what they are doing or shouldn't be held up to other responsibilities by the society. Sure, it's a free country. But if you are a jerk, who will invite you to their home?
When companies that act like pests find they can not build stores or office building in any community, route their packets over Internet ?r use publically funded roads and their shareholders can't get laid, they will clean up their act in a hurry. I wait for the reports of McBride run out of town,
Will cause you to take gaming too far by imagining you are the guy who took gaming way too far.
...seeds that sprout into treehouses
Was any part of design done by students living in hollow tubes under the ocean, having sex to let nanoprobes in their blood exchange information.
The purpose of a graduate degree is to get a student visa and have about 3 years (you get a 1 year work permit after graduating) to hang around in US and look for a job that can get you a green card. Other than that, there are much cheaper places to teach you programming/CS at graduate level. Of course I can not speak for serious scientists.
I think you could raise the same 3 points when Netscape gave up on a commercial browser. Howerver:
1. Smart people know when they can't get much value out of something but other people might. Think of all the people with organ donor stickers on their driver license.
2. Code with serious initial investment make take a while to take off initially but doesn't go to stale. Think of OpenOffice, Netbeans, Mozilla, BSD.
3. If an effort to create an MMORPG from scratch is X, it can be easily X/10 if you have a free engine and a starter world design. This means people start creating specialty games for smaller markets than Everquest. Say a geeky game ala TRON 2.0 for slashdot users, a game for hardcore players/fighters that would intimidate a novice, a game for Harry Potter fans...
The author assumes that people need freedom to redistribute/modify programs, but not music or graphics. But it's a rare case I have time to modify other people's programs. On the other hand, if a song becomes popular, I may very well want to make a video of myself singing it or dancing to it and post it on my website without restricting who downloads it. Likewise, how do you run a fan site without copying some graphics and video clips?
:-)
For some software like games, it's really not that important for people to have free access to source code - or graphics, music...
Games are not essential by definition and in the worst case you lose part of the value of your $20 investment. There is nothing wrong with closed source model here. RMS should just leave game developers alone
For other software, like word processors and financial programs, open source is highly desirable. Imagine hundreds of businesses losing their customer records because one company flopped and their program has a Y2K bug. I don't know how any company can justify using MSWord.
It's likewise with music, graphics and other data. Sometimes it's essential for users to have free access, sometimes it's not. That depends more on use scenario than the media.
And yet, software design principals frown on frequent changes to base classes, encouraging encapsulation, delegates and subclassing instead. Perhaps you are only complaining about poorly written, monolythic proprietory software? Certainly most changes you would want to make to Windows do not involve rewritting the kernel?
Germany and Japan didn't make the changes themselves and one generation in each country suffered enourmous and probably not entirely necessary losses. And yet, many future generations have been spared the horrors of living under followers of Hitler or Hirohito.
Historically, oppressive societies endured for hundreds of years. Remember the dark ages, slavery and gladiator fights of Roman empire, or many dynasties and continued lack of human rights in China? When a change finally came, it was often after a bloody military conquest, civil war, revolution, or complete colapse of the civilization and a period of violent chaos. What is happening in Iraq is trivial by comparison. If any country or region reverts to dark ages today, than by all means the neighbors should step in, clean things up, and persist despite critisism for the sake of the majority of current generation and all of their children.
The only thing is, I am affraid US has reached such a degree of oppression that we are no longer qualified to save the world. It used to be that soldiers rapped and pilaged only because they were male, horny and greedy. Current Iraq prison abuse cases suggest something else. Apparently, both male and female US soldiers get the most kick of sexually controlling somebody else, even if they are unlikely to be attracted to them. At home, it takes many other forms - bullying gay couples, stigmatising single mothers, portraying teenager's sexuality as an entirely bad thing. In a free society, people would just live as they want and let everyone else do the same.
Another dysfunctional sign is that capitalism in general and big companies in particular are considered to be sacred and untouchable, rather than only encouraged to the extent they benefit the people. Democracy and stuff, you know? If a company started behaving like a pest, hiring 90% of stuff overseas and killing the competition by selling stuff at a loss rather than making the best product, we absolutely have a right to split them into 10 independent companies.
If you think about it, the only satisfactor solution are custom made devices. People who don't spend much time at home really need a phone with a camera, HD mp3 player, big color screen, keyboard and WiFi. Beats having to go home to e-mail a picture you just took, spilling devices out of full pockets or always carrying a backpack.
On the other hand, if you only want the phone, you would rather have a little thing that fits on top of one ear when in use. And if you only want some of the function, you expect your phone to be proportionally smaller and cheaper.
They should make a modular device with a main board that supports, say 4 plugins such as a hard drive, an 802.11 radio or a keyboard. But instead of attachable dongles that fall off and break, you can just get a smaller case that excludes the sides you don't use.
So you don't have to fly to SF, just wait an hour or two. No big difference from life broadcast, unless people get to ask questions over IM.
It's more puzzling why they will not broadcast the keynote in Apple stores. Don't they want fans to come and buy some more stuff?
If you came in my house and sent e-mail on my computer, I'm entitled to read it.
Darn, I must remember to avoid using YOUR restroom if I ever visit your place.
Also, surely companies that monitor employee's email will never take advantage of DMCA, copyrights, patents or prosecute people who descramble sattelite signals. They don't own my computer, products they sold to me, or elecromagnetic waves that pass through my house. They are MINE!
Or do you think rich people (company owners) somehow deserve more protection than poor and middle class? I sure can't find anything in US constitution to support this notion. Maybe strict constructionist supreme court justices Bush wants to appoint have their work cut out for them.
Actually, I don't see how price of buying a DVD matters. Either it's one of the few movies that you plan to watch many times or you have ample money to burn. In either case, they could double the price without much impact on sales or people's pockets.
A realistic price of watching a movie at home is $4.50 you pay to rent a DVD in blockbuster. I agree that it doesn't make much sense to download - provided they actually carry that movie within a few months of release. Anyway, they shouldn't complain about sales lost to piracy if they are not selling!
Theater prices are insane however. It takes $20 to watch a movie with a significant other, and many people bring children. For the same price you can rent a DVD AND buy a PS2 game that provides at least 8 hours of entertainment instead of a 2 hour movie. Or 16 songs on iTunes music store that you will listen to for long time.
I end up waiting until there are at least two movies I want to see and hopping rooms. If it was too difficult to do that, I just wouldn't go to theaters unless the movie is exceptional. I suspect that their intention is for people to see most movies in a theater and only rent a DVD if they didn't have time to watch it before. In this case $4.50 for a ticket would be a reasonable price, because at least two people usually watch a movie at home and it's reasonable to say that a big screen is twice as enjoyable.
Original BASIC with line numbers and graphics drawing primitives is an excellent first language to learn. Beginners can immediatelly understand a 3 line program to solve quadratic equations and can be drawing geometric shapes and function graphs after an hour of reading. At the same time it captures the essential idea of how computers work - executing numbered instuctions step by step or jumping to a different numbered step if some condition is true.
Someone who wrote a page-long BASIC program can look at assembler and immediately recognize it as a more primitive version of what they already know. More importantly, they can understand how higher-level languages implement their abstractions and why they sometimes break down or perform poorly.
So just find gwbasic.exe (and DOSBox if you don't use Windows) on google and off you go.
I don't see a problem with Java device drivers. But if performance/realtime/dependency considerations require a native one, it can still access data in the original user's object directly without worrying that it will be overwritten in the middle.
Microsoft might cancel or deempasize Office for Mac if the new product is too close to its turf. That was Ok for the browser, because IE is not known for quality. But MSWord is actually good if you need very precise control over a printed document or heavily use their templates for different tasks. I would even bundle Office with high-end desktops and add integration in iLife apps to encourage more development effort from MS. There are pleanty of other areas to compete.
Current JavaVM implementations are all designed to run as one or multiple user processes on top of the OS. Not surprisingly, such implementations don't duplicate abstractions already provided by underlying platform - like virtual memory or persistent filesystem permissions.
However, if a VM was running directly on top of the kernel, it could implement these features more efficiently than what must be done for native code and would need little hardware support from the CPU. For example, kernel and user code can pass objects to each other without making a copy or any security concerns.
Yes, but how do you justify paying $13/month for just a program guide which is free on tv.yahoo.com or your cable provider's site? Or keeping a landline for TiVo to use when you probably already have broadband and a cell phone? Also don't you sometimes want to send a VCD of your favourite episode to a friend?
If MythTV is too complicated to setup, just get the cheapest Windows PC and use whatever PVR program comes with the TV tuner. Might want to throw in a wireless keyboard+trackpad.
Well, China requires website/IM operators and owners of Internet Cafes to self-censor their contents, monitor discussions and report people who mention certain topics to the authorities. This will not be feasable if a million of individuals run their own little servers. People will be able to have forbidden discussions using someone's obscure personal blog script with no relalistic chance of being caught.
Now, I don't know if currently there is a regulation that bans an individual from having a routable address. But if enough people do, one of them will cause a problem sooner or later and then there will be a crackdown.
You don't like the rules, don't play the game.
And increasingly people are not playing. The army has a huge problem recruiting, largely because people heard of conditions outlined by your parent. I thought about national guard when I was a bit younger. You know, being a hero you always see in the movie during a natural disaster without having to kill people or live in barraks for extended time. Fucking liers!
Do you really want other federal jobs to lose appeal as well because they do so many invasive background checks in return for meager pay? That said, I don't see a problem with carrying a badge of my employer's choice as long as I am not required to show it off work.
Seriously, what use is a high performance router if you are going to have a firewall that does extensive filtering, blocking and logging? Or a large number of IP addresses if private citizens are not allowed to run servers?
So basically, this project will tell you how to design an extra virulent, biological weapon version of mad cow disease?