"The ends justifies the means" is not always in conflict with ethics. I would say it's ethical to steal food to feed your family, some would even say it's ethical to kill an intruder, to save your family. In both these cases, things end up better for you, but only by someone else suffering a loss. Ethics is only in contrary when your the bread maker or the intruder.
you can get a lot more money by suing people than by playing with a fair market
I wouldn't really say that for sure. The RIAA usually ends up settling out of court for a couple thousand dollars. I'm sure that this doesn't even come close to covering their lawyer fees. If the RIAA would just get off people's backs, and start charging a fair price for music, they'd be raking in tons of cash. And saving a ton on lawyer fees.
If we want real scientific information to be available to the masses, we should get the scientific journals to publish their material online for free. There's probably a lot of highschools, and maybe some colleges and universities who don't have proper research material, such as access to current scientific journals. I don't see why scientific journals have to only be for those who are paying. If you're only choice for free science news is Fox, then that's what you'll have to settle for.
Which makes me wonder. With so many smaller power generation units around, does it make it harder to stop people from stealing the electricity. Could you get together with the people you are sharing the generator with, and hack the system so that you all get 10% off your hydro bill. You couldn't get free hydro, because then they would catch on. But you could probably reduce your bill enough to make it worth it. Sorry for use of the word Hydro in place of Electricity. I'm from ontario.
Wake up. The entire internet, not just P2P has mostly illegal uses. I'm sure there's lots of criminals using email as a form of communication, possibly encrypted. There are many web sites on the internet that are illegal in most countries but can't be taken down because the country they are in are not interested in dealing with these problems, because they have bigger fish to fry. There's been software piracy going on way before the days of P2P technology. There was rampant software piracy even before the internet was developed. Before the internet, people copied music like crazy off their friends. Using blank tapes. That's the whole reason behind the high speed dubbing feature. So you could do it faster. The internet just gives them some bigger numbers to throw around. There are like 4 billion files on P2P system X, wow, look at all the money they are making us lose. The only thing that P2P has done is give them an easy way to quantify the amount of stuff being pirated. Before P2P, the only numbers they could come up with were just big guesses, and probably way off.
I live in Ottawa, and to tell you the truth, a good bus system can work almost as well as a rail system. In ottawa, there are special bus only roads. This greatly increases the speed at which buses travel. The only slow part seems to be going through the core part of down town. which is about 7 blocks. Mostly because they are too afraid to shut down the roads to cars. They don't want the car loving public to have to give up one of their roads. Anyway, rail is not always necessary to have a good transit system. A good bus system can work almost as well for inner city transit.
The whole appeal of that nano is that it is so thin. What's the point of having an iPod Nano, if you have to make it thicker with a case. Maybe they should have made teh screen recessed a bit, and have some sort of piece that can be used to cover the screen.
VNC has the disability that it has to work from just about any OS, to just about any other OS. It would be pretty hard to send anything but pictures across the wire and have the screen look anything like it did on the other end. RDP only has to work from windows to other windows machines. Windows already knows how to render it's own user interface, so there's much less information to send.
Having a car break down will only cost the whatever it costs to fix it. Having a computer filled with spyware may cost you more than the cost required to get rid of it. You may lose data, or you may have credit card numbers and other important information stolen from you. If your car breaks down, you may have to take the bus to work. If your identity is stolen because of spyware is on your computer, you might have a hard time getting your credit rating back.
Actually, I was being serious. I back up all my stuff to flac. Hard drives are cheap enough now, that the space difference between archival quality MP3 and flac isn't really that different. I completely understand people who download music, but if you're backing up albums you paid 20$ for, then lossless really is the only way to go.
I'm sure everyone's computers would work much better too if they took them in for a checkup every 3 months. Seriously, most computer problems results from piles and piles of problems. People hear their car making a little sputtering noise, and they take it into the shop. People will wait until their computer is on it's last legs before going to get it fixed. And at that point, they don't get it fixed, they usually just buy a new one. A computer is a much more complicated device than a car. I can't believe people maintain their car, but not their computer.
Yeah, but you cheated. You read the manual. I seriously wish computer programs still came with paper manuals. The ones on the computer are nice, but they don't work too well when the computer stops working.
The question is, why does their operating system have such high requirements. It doesn't really do that much more than windows 98. I mean really, is it that much more functional than windows 98, that I should need a computer 10 times stronger just to run the OS? Even the newest version of Linux will run on a pentium 1. Granted you won't be running KDE, but there are other desktops out there you could use. There's also up-to-date browsers, word processors, music players, and tons of other stuff that doesn't require brand new computers to run. It's nice to have the advantages of an updated kernel without having to have a high end computer. This is what bugs me about microsoft. In order to have a secure computer, you have to have a new computer.
The requirement for most computer users was filled about 10 years ago. Most people don't need office XP, or the new version of windows. I don't know how home users see any real difference between windows 98 and windows XP. As soon as people start realizing they can get products of sufficient quality from the open source community for cheap or free, they will start switching. I started trying to use Linux 6 years ago. I've only really started using it full time in the last 2 years. It's advanced a lot in the last 5 years. I think it's pretty much up to the point that people wouldn't have much more trouble using it than windows XP. Granted, you don't get as much choice in off the shelf software, but 90% of people wouldn't need something that isn't included in the distro anyway.
Of course, we all back up our CDs to flac. Why you would back up your CDs to a lossy format is beyond me. Once you do that, if The cd gets damage, you can never get the original back again.
I still buy CDs because i've never seen one of these copy protected CDs actually accomplish anything. When i'm booted up in Linux, nothing special happens. When I'm booted up in windows, where I have disabled the ability to automatically insert any disk I insert, nothing happens. Why would people leave this option on. I'm perfectly capable of executing the software on a disk myself. I don't need the computer starting programs just because I put a disk in. That's just asking for problems. And DVDs are just as bad. The encryption doesn't stop you from copying a disk, bit for bit, and playing it somewhere else. All it prevents if being able to copy the files onto your computer, and play them, without knowing how to crack the encryption. If they want something that will truly get less pirating problems, create a disk format that isn't readable on computers. Like the gamecube. Sure some stuff will get pirated, but the average Joe won't be able to read the disk on their computer, not without buying shady hardware, from a shady dealer. The mistake they have been making all along is using general data disks for storing media, when they should really be using media disks which can only be used legally on licensed players.
That really depends on the amount of power needed to handle a single request. There's some applications that require 2 machines to handle a million requests a day. There's other applications that require 10 machines to handle the same number of requests, because a request requires more processing. Maybe the amount of data sent out resulting from the request is low, but the amount of processing necessary to get that data is high.
There's lots of reasons you may want to move your application from.Net to something else. Maybe the cost of licensing windows is just getting too expensive. One or two small servers isn't too bad, but once you start building a web farm, using multiprocessor machines, that cost can skyrocket. Also, wanting to take advantage of 64 bit computing is easier with other platforms..Net handles some pretty big loads. But if you want to do some really big loads, it's going to cost you a lot in licensing costs.
Yes, I guess the problem is with the programmer. However, the technology involved breeds developers who don't know what they're doing. I'm a.Net developer myself. However, I don't really use that drag and drop method too often. Maybe i'm just old school, and don't really want to learn a new way of doing something that I've been doing for years. Microsoft didn't really invent anything new. All they did was make it more necessary to separate presentation from code. But, in doing so, they have made it so that once you program an app using their method, it's almost impossible to move it to another technology. With PHP, or Java, or Perl, you can already run it on almost any OS that you'd want a web server to run on, but you can also port code between the languages. If you program something in.Net, you may be able to port some of the backend code, but try porting the interface to some other technology. You'll be hard pressed to get that to work with any other language.
I'm not saying that there's anything that makes a.Net developer any less of a developer than someone who does Perl or Python or PHP or Java. I'm a.Net developer myself. What I'm saying is that by using the drag and drop features that MS provides you with, you are getting yourself stuck to using MS. If you ever wanted to port your application to run on PHP, or Java, then you would be very hard pressed to do that. Having all the UI programmed for you by dragging and dropping makes it harder to transfer the UI portion of that app to some other technology.
Good programmers have always separated presentation from code. This is nothing new. The problem is that some of your code stil ends up resulting in presentation. Microsoft has now separated the code that controls the presentation from the actual presentation. What a great idea.
I'm using a P2 266 at home. Really, all I do is browse the web, type some documents, a little bit of development for fun. It's pretty sufficient. For games I have a GameCube. Seriously, if you can't wait a couple seconds for your web browser to open up, you need some patience. I understand having a better computer at work, but for at home, I think most people should be fine with a computer like mine.
The problem with ASP.Net is that people believe they know what they are doing, even when they don't. It's good that you can go in and change the HTML so that everything looks good. But there are a lot of.Net developers who can't. Maybe I am getting mad at the developers who don't know what they're doing. Maybe it's nice that Microsoft makes everything really easy for us. But think about this. What would happen if you had to port one of your.Net apps to some other platform? What would you do? you'd have to completely redo the user interface. And all this stuff about seperating the code from the presentation? the code is the presentation. The code that runs results in the presentation. Layering code and seperating the data access from the business logic from the UI is important. But trying to completely separate all the code, from all the presentation is useless if what you want you're code to result in is the presentation.
I already get mad enough at developers that do everything in flash. God forbid I want to find out about the newest blockbuster movie without having my computer bogged down with tons of flash filled with impossible to find information. I don't see why everyone is out there to make the browser do more work then it really should. We have a hard enough time getting browsers to display HTML correctly. We don't even know what's going to happen with random browsers that are out there that may or may not interpret the JS correctly, or there may even be bugs in the code, causing something to not render correctly, giving users a really bad experience.
I really think that this sending XML back and forth would be a real pain too. I'm kind of against this whole Ajax thing to begin with. Basically, all I trust a browser to be able to do, is to render HTML correctly, submit forms correctly, and follow links correctly. I'ved worked enough with Netscape 4, and all the other browsers out there, to know that putting that amount of extensive javascript in your application is just asking for trouble. Even if it works most of the time, there will be bugs in your code. Will you even know when those bugs happen. Someone clicks on something, you send back a pile of XML, and it never gets displayed for some reason. Or it gets displayed incorrectly, or only half of it get's displayed. Then they decide to click on something else, but the page is in some messed up state. And it gets even more messed up. At least with normal HTML you know what the state of the browser is after each update. With this new stuff, little pieces getting updated, maybe working on that browser, maybe not... you never really know.
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"The ends justifies the means" is not always in conflict with ethics. I would say it's ethical to steal food to feed your family, some would even say it's ethical to kill an intruder, to save your family. In both these cases, things end up better for you, but only by someone else suffering a loss. Ethics is only in contrary when your the bread maker or the intruder.
you can get a lot more money by suing people than by playing with a fair market
I wouldn't really say that for sure. The RIAA usually ends up settling out of court for a couple thousand dollars. I'm sure that this doesn't even come close to covering their lawyer fees. If the RIAA would just get off people's backs, and start charging a fair price for music, they'd be raking in tons of cash. And saving a ton on lawyer fees.
If we want real scientific information to be available to the masses, we should get the scientific journals to publish their material online for free. There's probably a lot of highschools, and maybe some colleges and universities who don't have proper research material, such as access to current scientific journals. I don't see why scientific journals have to only be for those who are paying. If you're only choice for free science news is Fox, then that's what you'll have to settle for.
Which makes me wonder. With so many smaller power generation units around, does it make it harder to stop people from stealing the electricity. Could you get together with the people you are sharing the generator with, and hack the system so that you all get 10% off your hydro bill. You couldn't get free hydro, because then they would catch on. But you could probably reduce your bill enough to make it worth it. Sorry for use of the word Hydro in place of Electricity. I'm from ontario.
I'm in Canada, which usually, also uses British spellings, and it's also centripetal in my physics textbook.
Wake up. The entire internet, not just P2P has mostly illegal uses. I'm sure there's lots of criminals using email as a form of communication, possibly encrypted. There are many web sites on the internet that are illegal in most countries but can't be taken down because the country they are in are not interested in dealing with these problems, because they have bigger fish to fry. There's been software piracy going on way before the days of P2P technology. There was rampant software piracy even before the internet was developed. Before the internet, people copied music like crazy off their friends. Using blank tapes. That's the whole reason behind the high speed dubbing feature. So you could do it faster. The internet just gives them some bigger numbers to throw around. There are like 4 billion files on P2P system X, wow, look at all the money they are making us lose. The only thing that P2P has done is give them an easy way to quantify the amount of stuff being pirated. Before P2P, the only numbers they could come up with were just big guesses, and probably way off.
I live in Ottawa, and to tell you the truth, a good bus system can work almost as well as a rail system. In ottawa, there are special bus only roads. This greatly increases the speed at which buses travel. The only slow part seems to be going through the core part of down town. which is about 7 blocks. Mostly because they are too afraid to shut down the roads to cars. They don't want the car loving public to have to give up one of their roads. Anyway, rail is not always necessary to have a good transit system. A good bus system can work almost as well for inner city transit.
The whole appeal of that nano is that it is so thin. What's the point of having an iPod Nano, if you have to make it thicker with a case. Maybe they should have made teh screen recessed a bit, and have some sort of piece that can be used to cover the screen.
VNC has the disability that it has to work from just about any OS, to just about any other OS. It would be pretty hard to send anything but pictures across the wire and have the screen look anything like it did on the other end. RDP only has to work from windows to other windows machines. Windows already knows how to render it's own user interface, so there's much less information to send.
Having a car break down will only cost the whatever it costs to fix it. Having a computer filled with spyware may cost you more than the cost required to get rid of it. You may lose data, or you may have credit card numbers and other important information stolen from you. If your car breaks down, you may have to take the bus to work. If your identity is stolen because of spyware is on your computer, you might have a hard time getting your credit rating back.
Actually, I was being serious. I back up all my stuff to flac. Hard drives are cheap enough now, that the space difference between archival quality MP3 and flac isn't really that different. I completely understand people who download music, but if you're backing up albums you paid 20$ for, then lossless really is the only way to go.
I'm sure everyone's computers would work much better too if they took them in for a checkup every 3 months. Seriously, most computer problems results from piles and piles of problems. People hear their car making a little sputtering noise, and they take it into the shop. People will wait until their computer is on it's last legs before going to get it fixed. And at that point, they don't get it fixed, they usually just buy a new one. A computer is a much more complicated device than a car. I can't believe people maintain their car, but not their computer.
Yeah, but you cheated. You read the manual. I seriously wish computer programs still came with paper manuals. The ones on the computer are nice, but they don't work too well when the computer stops working.
The question is, why does their operating system have such high requirements. It doesn't really do that much more than windows 98. I mean really, is it that much more functional than windows 98, that I should need a computer 10 times stronger just to run the OS? Even the newest version of Linux will run on a pentium 1. Granted you won't be running KDE, but there are other desktops out there you could use. There's also up-to-date browsers, word processors, music players, and tons of other stuff that doesn't require brand new computers to run. It's nice to have the advantages of an updated kernel without having to have a high end computer. This is what bugs me about microsoft. In order to have a secure computer, you have to have a new computer.
The requirement for most computer users was filled about 10 years ago. Most people don't need office XP, or the new version of windows. I don't know how home users see any real difference between windows 98 and windows XP. As soon as people start realizing they can get products of sufficient quality from the open source community for cheap or free, they will start switching. I started trying to use Linux 6 years ago. I've only really started using it full time in the last 2 years. It's advanced a lot in the last 5 years. I think it's pretty much up to the point that people wouldn't have much more trouble using it than windows XP. Granted, you don't get as much choice in off the shelf software, but 90% of people wouldn't need something that isn't included in the distro anyway.
Of course, we all back up our CDs to flac. Why you would back up your CDs to a lossy format is beyond me. Once you do that, if The cd gets damage, you can never get the original back again.
I still buy CDs because i've never seen one of these copy protected CDs actually accomplish anything. When i'm booted up in Linux, nothing special happens. When I'm booted up in windows, where I have disabled the ability to automatically insert any disk I insert, nothing happens. Why would people leave this option on. I'm perfectly capable of executing the software on a disk myself. I don't need the computer starting programs just because I put a disk in. That's just asking for problems. And DVDs are just as bad. The encryption doesn't stop you from copying a disk, bit for bit, and playing it somewhere else. All it prevents if being able to copy the files onto your computer, and play them, without knowing how to crack the encryption. If they want something that will truly get less pirating problems, create a disk format that isn't readable on computers. Like the gamecube. Sure some stuff will get pirated, but the average Joe won't be able to read the disk on their computer, not without buying shady hardware, from a shady dealer. The mistake they have been making all along is using general data disks for storing media, when they should really be using media disks which can only be used legally on licensed players.
That really depends on the amount of power needed to handle a single request. There's some applications that require 2 machines to handle a million requests a day. There's other applications that require 10 machines to handle the same number of requests, because a request requires more processing. Maybe the amount of data sent out resulting from the request is low, but the amount of processing necessary to get that data is high.
There's lots of reasons you may want to move your application from .Net to something else. Maybe the cost of licensing windows is just getting too expensive. One or two small servers isn't too bad, but once you start building a web farm, using multiprocessor machines, that cost can skyrocket. Also, wanting to take advantage of 64 bit computing is easier with other platforms. .Net handles some pretty big loads. But if you want to do some really big loads, it's going to cost you a lot in licensing costs.
Yes, I guess the problem is with the programmer. However, the technology involved breeds developers who don't know what they're doing. I'm a .Net developer myself. However, I don't really use that drag and drop method too often. Maybe i'm just old school, and don't really want to learn a new way of doing something that I've been doing for years. Microsoft didn't really invent anything new. All they did was make it more necessary to separate presentation from code. But, in doing so, they have made it so that once you program an app using their method, it's almost impossible to move it to another technology. With PHP, or Java, or Perl, you can already run it on almost any OS that you'd want a web server to run on, but you can also port code between the languages. If you program something in .Net, you may be able to port some of the backend code, but try porting the interface to some other technology. You'll be hard pressed to get that to work with any other language.
I'm not saying that there's anything that makes a .Net developer any less of a developer than someone who does Perl or Python or PHP or Java. I'm a .Net developer myself. What I'm saying is that by using the drag and drop features that MS provides you with, you are getting yourself stuck to using MS. If you ever wanted to port your application to run on PHP, or Java, then you would be very hard pressed to do that. Having all the UI programmed for you by dragging and dropping makes it harder to transfer the UI portion of that app to some other technology.
Good programmers have always separated presentation from code. This is nothing new. The problem is that some of your code stil ends up resulting in presentation. Microsoft has now separated the code that controls the presentation from the actual presentation. What a great idea.
I'm using a P2 266 at home. Really, all I do is browse the web, type some documents, a little bit of development for fun. It's pretty sufficient. For games I have a GameCube. Seriously, if you can't wait a couple seconds for your web browser to open up, you need some patience. I understand having a better computer at work, but for at home, I think most people should be fine with a computer like mine.
The problem with ASP.Net is that people believe they know what they are doing, even when they don't. It's good that you can go in and change the HTML so that everything looks good. But there are a lot of .Net developers who can't. Maybe I am getting mad at the developers who don't know what they're doing. Maybe it's nice that Microsoft makes everything really easy for us. But think about this. What would happen if you had to port one of your .Net apps to some other platform? What would you do? you'd have to completely redo the user interface. And all this stuff about seperating the code from the presentation? the code is the presentation. The code that runs results in the presentation. Layering code and seperating the data access from the business logic from the UI is important. But trying to completely separate all the code, from all the presentation is useless if what you want you're code to result in is the presentation.
I already get mad enough at developers that do everything in flash. God forbid I want to find out about the newest blockbuster movie without having my computer bogged down with tons of flash filled with impossible to find information. I don't see why everyone is out there to make the browser do more work then it really should. We have a hard enough time getting browsers to display HTML correctly. We don't even know what's going to happen with random browsers that are out there that may or may not interpret the JS correctly, or there may even be bugs in the code, causing something to not render correctly, giving users a really bad experience.
I really think that this sending XML back and forth would be a real pain too. I'm kind of against this whole Ajax thing to begin with. Basically, all I trust a browser to be able to do, is to render HTML correctly, submit forms correctly, and follow links correctly. I'ved worked enough with Netscape 4, and all the other browsers out there, to know that putting that amount of extensive javascript in your application is just asking for trouble. Even if it works most of the time, there will be bugs in your code. Will you even know when those bugs happen. Someone clicks on something, you send back a pile of XML, and it never gets displayed for some reason. Or it gets displayed incorrectly, or only half of it get's displayed. Then they decide to click on something else, but the page is in some messed up state. And it gets even more messed up. At least with normal HTML you know what the state of the browser is after each update. With this new stuff, little pieces getting updated, maybe working on that browser, maybe not... you never really know.