What it's supposed to do is limit casual piracy. Make it tougher for the average slob to make a copy with the EZ-CD Copier that shipped with his Dell and give it to his buddies. [...] It sure as hell has nothing to do with preventing some geek from leaking it on the 'net.
Right. DRM reduces casual piracy. Attacking P2P networks reduces large-scale online trading. Now, all that's left is to stop those street traders from selling cheap copies.
I cannot emphasize enough how much stuff traders sell on the street. The latest hit album is usually available for as little as 2 EUR. I can see how that can hurt the RIAA: copying burning CDs on your own is not really something that you can do on a massive scale for your friends. There is not really that much for the RIAA to lose from casual burning. Downloading is often a hassle. But the street traders.. they also seem to be making money out of it.
Really? If you have watched television for any length of time, you will be able to realise that all commercial TV stations are over time increasing the amount of commercials aired and decreasing the value of the programs shown.
I have not had a television of my own for quite a large period of time - I only get to watch it once every few months, so the changes in the structure and types of programs as the years pass are easier to perceive:
So, the number of films and other expensive programs will be low. Most programs will be cheap to produce: talk shows, reality TV shows, soap operas - even in soap operas, it has become noticeable that channels no longer shell out to buy rights for a soap that is an international hit. They make their own, equally bad, but much less expensive, soap operas.
The cost of newscasting has also been pushed down significantly. BBC and other state channels actually have reporters around the world, doing, erm, actual reporting. Private channels tend go around with a *spokesperson*. Also, no real news is being reported. Most of the air time during the news is wasted on stupid animations that last a huge amount of time (and which can be reused of course), on idiotic footage about lost cats and wandering cows or whatever, and on opinion calls (where the reporters ask the opinion of an 'expert' while on the main news - this is easy to do, costs nothing and eats up time quickly while entertaining the audience - rather than informing the audience.)
So we get lower and lower quality programs with higher and higher amounts of advertising. All the time. Of course I guess that *this* is what people want, otherwise they would not be watching those channels and would have preferred to watch the more serious state channels instead.
I am not currently living in Greece, but none of my friends there seem to be aware that the law has passed. I think it has received no coverage whatsoever. I also think that, whatever coverage it does receive would be positive in the sense of 'finally the rights of artists are protected against evil pirates' positive.
It seems like the ex cyber-terrorism chief doesn't understand the internet either:
"He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade -- and then they both should burn it," said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief. "The fiber-optic network is our country's nervous system."
"You don't want to give terrorists a road map to blow that up," he said.
CEOs of major companies also seem to be stupid
(John M. Derrick Jr., chairman of the board of Pepco Holdings Inc)
"This is why CEOs of major power companies don't sleep well these days," Derrick said, flattening the pages with his fist. "Why in the world have we been so stupid as a country to have all this information in the public domain? Does that openness still make sense? It sure as hell doesn't to me."
Companies are worried about losing money. All their executives are idiots and understand nothing. How else could they be amazed and concerned at how much their systems are interdependent? (Catherine Allen, chief executive of BITS, the technology group for the financial services roundtable, talking of their reaction) I'd expect people that are in financial service technologies to know a bit more, even if they are Just Managers
As for the rest of your post, well, there is nothing new under the sun. When I first learned about OOP, I was pissed. They weren't "methods", they were "functions". Or "procedures". Same argument.
Actually, in OOP, methods can be described as message passing. Methods are just functions only in a few OOP implementations, such as C++. Contrast C++ with ObjC, where you have both function calls and pure message-passing between objects. While a runtime environment must be provided for message passing, it is possible to achieve the same effect with C++, or even C, through the use of threads and message passing mechanisms provided by the OS.
While this is true for relatively small programs, when you move to very complicated tasks, the idiosyncracies of a particular language disappear, as you can take extra time to add features that will implementation of your project easier. There is no feature that programming language X has, that cannot be implemented in language Y. A redesign of the language itself is never necessary.
In the opposite direction, you may try and compare C to python if they only came with stdlib and the sys modules respectively.
The point is that the more complex the project, the more specialized features you will be needing anyway - and the less suitable any particular language will be for the implementation. People have been known to write their own meta-languages for exceedingly complex projects.
> In this one specific instance, SCO is correct. It > doesn't really affect their case at all, but they > are still correct about this.
I do think that it does affect their case, since they argue that the code was stolen. If Linus and the kernel team cannot identify close source code it means that they know nothing of it and thus cannot misappropriate it.
In fact this might be contradicting SCO's statement that Linux could not have matured so fast without stealing code.
In order for both SCO's statements to be true, the code must have been inserted by someone else other than Linus himself. Of course, the allegation that IBM has done it is still compatible with both statements. However, regardless of whether these allegations are correct or not, I cannot see how making statements about Linus can help their case. Maybe what they want to say is this:
"Look, IBM has stolen our code and put it into Linux. Linus does not concern himself with IP theft and even if he did he probably has no means to check. How many other people might be placing proprietary code into Linux? How would anyone know?"
My answer to them, of course, is this: if you have valuable IP that could manifest in a competitive product, screen it for comparisons.
In any case, IBM have very little to gain from putting proprietary code into Linux. Even if SCO-derived code was state-of-the-art, they'd be able to make a much more handsome profit by putting it in a non-Linux closed source solution and selling it on. Who would know or be able to screen that?
This command line sequence is incorrect as it will only count the countries on the right side of the list.
Actually, the number of US companies is 83, out of the 246 total. The number of european companies is 62. Keep in mind that Far East companies produce mostly hardware. The rest are from Latin America and the richer east countries, such as UAE and Saudi Arabia..
But this is beside the point:
How do you know that 95% of members of technical organisations are from US, EU and Far east? You don't, you are just guessing, aren't you? What are you trying to say anyway?
But it is just for AIX, right?
on
Latest SCO News
·
· Score: 1
Even if SCO have a case, it only affects the AIX branch that IBM developed.
Re:Near zero information in there.
on
Ximian's Back
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· Score: 1
I wonder why the author devotes a section to galeon and nautilus. They are separate from ximian, aren't they?
The Blogs are sites which are Hubs, i.e. they contain a lot of outgoing links to diverse sites. The source sites are usually Authorities, a lot other sites link to them. IBM had developed an engine called Clever, at around the same time as google, that gives separate ranks for Hubs and Authorities.
insist on being able to understand everything after the event? They always are able to find patterns _post facto_. Hey, I can do that too... the fact is that economists have never ever managed to predict anything - their predictions have been worse that those of seismologists.. they rely on naive prediction methods, simplistic 1 or 2-variable theories and childish 'cycles' to explain things. Cycles must exist, since growth is not constant, but they can neither explain them nor predict their duration. Just making fancy curves and putting cool names on the graph proves nothing.
And for those of you that would like to say that The Economist had a similar article during the boom, I have to counter that they have published conflicting articles during the same period. Economists have varying opinions, which are anyway never based on any solid evidence. They are just hunches. I trust my bookmaker more.
From my understanding the industry at some point needed a lot of low-skilled IT people. Hell, they even hired people that majored in Latin Literature if they knew a bit of HTML. Another point to be made is what they consider IT. There are the following segments nowadays:
Web Design and Internet application software that is used in a specific market niche, such as for example online bookstores. In this market there is usually a strong emphasis on Databases and general Software Engineering skills. Relationships with clients are close.
System Design, which can be a system-on-a-chip + firmware to become a complete integrated product that is ready to be sold to the consumer, or, alternatively an embedded device to be used in some other consumer gadget There are plenty of technological areas here, and the devices themselves are diverse. Sometimes expertese in the particular tech area is required (IC design, good knowledge of hardware, Telecoms, Control Systems,...)
Pure IC design, which requires less, but more highly skilled people. Analog design requires even less and even more highly skilled people.
There are also research institutes/departments related to all aspects of IT, but a lot of them have shrunk significantly after the bubble burst... a major loss.. however Microsoft seems to be keeping their research dpt healthy.
As far as I can understand the major problem was that everyone was following the money during this time - something that made them change their project goals/ideas. A lot of projects died because of frequent direction changes. A lot of people were working for nothing. Those that work in the more hardcore parts of the industry, that require either a lot of diverse skills, or extreme specialisation have not lost their jobs. Also, companies that had a sucessful IP and were selling that isntead of a tangible product (can you say ARM?) are still quite strong..
> Why, when there's a need to interoperate, does OSS > invariably fall back on the 'chain of programs > communicating via a pipe of characters' model from > the 1970s, even though mechanisms for defining > rich, concurrent interfaces have been in common > use for ages everywhere else?
There is another thing, called 'messaging'. It is part of the OS, at least. I guess messaging is used on many levels... I think there are some standard high-level messaging APIs as well, apart from the low-level OS stuff.. but the problem with those is that they are somehow associated with a particular desktop. I find that strange.
I think they have broken down that sentence inappropriately - the summary should be:
Unsolicited e-mails that are sent for direct marketing purposes may only be sent to individuals with their prior consent or when there is an existing customer relationship.
That means that 'for direct marketing purposes' is not a condition. It is a descriptive sentence, it describes what will be sent. Your interpretation is correct, but the BBC writer messed up when he summarised the directive.
It does. It says 'for the purposes of direct marketing' and 'with no human intervention'. This addresses both Commercial and Mass mailing. It covers not only email, but also fax and telephone..
Some people seem to fret that this legislation is only local.. the only way to make it global is to appeal to the World Trade Organisation. The WTO is responsible for the global application of Copyright Laws and also the DMCA and its European equivalent. Any country that wants to be a member of the WTO must produce legislation that conforms to the WTO's standards... so go lobby the WTO.
While I can agree in general about Scientific American and to similar extent, New Scientist, becoming a bit less 'scientific' and a bit more 'sensationalist', I have to say that having read this particular article I have found it to be interesting and informative. It explains clearly what many physicist consider a parallel universe: Something that may or may not exist but may not be directly observable. It does not give a lot of credit to the level III many-worlds quantum hypothesis.
The level I/II theories are simple mechanisms through which some parts of the universe are inacessible to other parts of the universe. One may consider these as discrete universes since they can no longer interact with each other in any way. I particularly liked the fact that they promote the chaotic eternal inflation model as a plausible Level II theory. Especially since it gets rid of the homogeneous universe assumption.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? If you have watched television for any length of time, you will be able to realise that all commercial TV stations are over time increasing the amount of commercials aired and decreasing the value of the programs shown.
I have not had a television of my own for quite a large period of time - I only get to watch it once every few months, so the changes in the structure and types of programs as the years pass are easier to perceive:
So, the number of films and other expensive programs will be low. Most programs will be cheap to produce: talk shows, reality TV shows, soap operas - even in soap operas, it has become noticeable that channels no longer shell out to buy rights for a soap that is an international hit. They make their own, equally bad, but much less expensive, soap operas.
The cost of newscasting has also been pushed down significantly. BBC and other state channels actually have reporters around the world, doing, erm, actual reporting. Private channels tend go around with a *spokesperson*. Also, no real news is being reported. Most of the air time during the news is wasted on stupid animations that last a huge amount of time (and which can be reused of course), on idiotic footage about lost cats and wandering cows or whatever, and on opinion calls (where the reporters ask the opinion of an 'expert' while on the main news - this is easy to do, costs nothing and eats up time quickly while entertaining the audience - rather than informing the audience.)
So we get lower and lower quality programs with higher and higher amounts of advertising. All the time. Of course I guess that *this* is what people want, otherwise they would not be watching those channels and would have preferred to watch the more serious state channels instead.
Yes, they voted, but afaicu, with all the suggested amendments by FFII. So this is a victory, not a loss.
I am sorry, but I fail to understand in what way copyright in Cuba differs from standard copyright law.
I am not currently living in Greece, but none of my friends there seem to be aware that the law has passed. I think it has received no coverage whatsoever. I also think that, whatever coverage it does receive would be positive in the sense of 'finally the rights of artists are protected against evil pirates' positive.
Copyright protection == state control == communism.
Don't you think they have copyrights in, say, Cuba?
It seems like the ex cyber-terrorism chief doesn't understand the internet either:
CEOs of major companies also seem to be stupid
Companies are worried about losing money. All their executives are idiots and understand nothing. How else could they be amazed and concerned at how much their systems are interdependent? (Catherine Allen, chief executive of BITS, the technology group for the financial services roundtable, talking of their reaction) I'd expect people that are in financial service technologies to know a bit more, even if they are Just Managers
Have you ever heard of self-extracting scripts? I.e. the NVIDIA driver installer? Most linux systems are x86-compatible anyway.
While this is true for relatively small programs, when you move to very complicated tasks, the idiosyncracies of a particular language disappear, as you can take extra time to add features that will implementation of your project easier.
There is no feature that programming language X has, that cannot be implemented in language Y. A redesign of the language itself is never necessary.
In the opposite direction, you may try and compare C to python if they only came with stdlib and the sys modules respectively.
The point is that the more complex the project, the more specialized features you will be needing anyway - and the less suitable any particular language will be for the implementation. People have been known to write their own meta-languages for exceedingly complex projects.
> In this one specific instance, SCO is correct. It > doesn't really affect their case at all, but they > are still correct about this.
I do think that it does affect their case, since they argue that the code was stolen. If Linus and the kernel team cannot identify close source code it means that they know nothing of it and thus cannot misappropriate it.
In fact this might be contradicting SCO's statement that Linux could not have matured so fast without stealing code.
In order for both SCO's statements to be true, the code must have been inserted by someone else other than Linus himself. Of course, the allegation that IBM has done it is still compatible with both statements. However, regardless of whether these allegations are correct or not, I cannot see how making statements about Linus can help their case. Maybe what they want to say is this:
"Look, IBM has stolen our code and put it into Linux. Linus does not concern himself with IP theft and even if he did he probably has no means to check. How many other people might be placing proprietary code into Linux? How would anyone know?"
My answer to them, of course, is this: if you have valuable IP that could manifest in a competitive product, screen it for comparisons.
In any case, IBM have very little to gain from putting proprietary code into Linux. Even if SCO-derived code was state-of-the-art, they'd be able to make a much more handsome profit by putting it in a non-Linux closed source solution and selling it on. Who would know or be able to screen that?
This command line sequence is incorrect as it will only count the countries on the right side of the list.
Actually, the number of US companies is 83, out of the 246 total. The number of european companies is 62. Keep in mind that Far East companies produce mostly hardware. The rest are from Latin America and the richer east countries, such as UAE and Saudi Arabia..
But this is beside the point:
How do you know that 95% of members of technical organisations are from US, EU and Far east? You don't, you are just guessing, aren't you? What are you trying to say anyway?
Even if SCO have a case, it only affects the AIX branch that IBM developed.
I wonder why the author devotes a section to galeon and nautilus. They are separate from ximian, aren't they?
This is not funny. Soon, compilers for low-level languages may be illegal.
I agree, and the previous poster is giving a selective range of modern professions. Most people work in the service industry:
.... a quite large number compared to the people that work in engineering/arts...
Bartenders, waiters, cab-drivers, shop assistants,
The Blogs are sites which are Hubs, i.e. they contain a lot of outgoing links to diverse sites. The source sites are usually Authorities, a lot other sites link to them. IBM had developed an engine called Clever, at around the same time as google, that gives separate ranks for Hubs and Authorities.
insist on being able to understand everything after the event? They always are able to find patterns _post facto_. Hey, I can do that too... the fact is that economists have never ever managed to predict anything - their predictions have been worse that those of seismologists.. they rely on naive prediction methods, simplistic 1 or 2-variable theories and childish 'cycles' to explain things. Cycles must exist, since growth is not constant, but they can neither explain them nor predict their duration. Just making fancy curves and putting cool names on the graph proves nothing.
And for those of you that would like to say that The Economist had a similar article during the boom, I have to counter that they have published conflicting articles during the same period. Economists have varying opinions, which are anyway never based on any solid evidence. They are just hunches. I trust my bookmaker more.
From my understanding the industry at some point needed a lot of low-skilled IT people. Hell, they even hired people that majored in Latin Literature if they knew a bit of HTML. Another point to be made is what they consider IT. There are the following segments nowadays:
Web Design and Internet application software that is used in a specific market niche, such as for example online bookstores. In this market there is usually a strong emphasis on Databases and general Software Engineering skills. Relationships with clients are close.
System Design, which can be a system-on-a-chip + firmware to become a complete integrated product that is ready to be sold to the consumer, or, alternatively an embedded device to be used in some other consumer gadget There are plenty of technological areas here, and the devices themselves are diverse. Sometimes expertese in the particular tech area is required (IC design, good knowledge of hardware, Telecoms, Control Systems,...)
Pure IC design, which requires less, but more highly skilled people. Analog design requires even less and even more highly skilled people.
There are also research institutes/departments related to all aspects of IT, but a lot of them have shrunk significantly after the bubble burst... a major loss.. however Microsoft seems to be keeping their research dpt healthy.
As far as I can understand the major problem was that everyone was following the money during this time - something that made them change their project goals/ideas. A lot of projects died because of frequent direction changes. A lot of people were working for nothing. Those that work in the more hardcore parts of the industry, that require either a lot of diverse skills, or extreme specialisation have not lost their jobs. Also, companies that had a sucessful IP and were selling that isntead of a tangible product (can you say ARM?) are still quite strong..
> Why, when there's a need to interoperate, does OSS
> invariably fall back on the 'chain of programs
> communicating via a pipe of characters' model from
> the 1970s, even though mechanisms for defining
> rich, concurrent interfaces have been in common
> use for ages everywhere else?
There is another thing, called 'messaging'. It is part of the OS, at least. I guess messaging is used on many levels... I think there are some standard high-level messaging APIs as well, apart from the low-level OS stuff.. but the problem with those is that they are somehow associated with a particular desktop. I find that strange.
I think they have broken down that sentence inappropriately - the summary should be:
Unsolicited e-mails that are sent for direct marketing purposes may only be sent to individuals with their prior consent or when there is an existing customer relationship.
That means that 'for direct marketing purposes' is not a condition. It is a descriptive sentence, it describes what will be sent. Your interpretation is correct, but the BBC writer messed up when he summarised the directive.
It does. It says 'for the purposes of direct marketing' and 'with no human intervention'.
This addresses both Commercial and Mass mailing. It covers not only email, but also fax and telephone..
Some people seem to fret that this legislation is only local.. the only way to make it global is to appeal to the World Trade Organisation. The WTO is responsible for the global application of Copyright Laws and also the DMCA and its European equivalent. Any country that wants to be a member of the WTO must produce legislation that conforms to the WTO's standards... so go lobby the WTO.
While I can agree in general about Scientific American and to similar extent, New Scientist, becoming a bit less 'scientific' and a bit more 'sensationalist', I have to say that having read this particular article I have found it to be interesting and informative. It explains clearly what many physicist consider a parallel universe: Something that may or may not exist but may not be directly observable. It does not give a lot of credit to the level III many-worlds quantum hypothesis.
The level I/II theories are simple mechanisms through which some parts of the universe are inacessible to other parts of the universe. One may consider these as discrete universes since they can no longer interact with each other in any way. I particularly liked the fact that they promote the chaotic eternal inflation model as a plausible Level II theory. Especially since it gets rid of the homogeneous universe assumption.
Read the article. It also has nice links.
It is easy enough to use a standard library that helps you maintain such buffers/stacks/queues. No need to mess around with standard c arrays.