How many programmers!?!?!?
on
Mob Software
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I skimmed through the article, but this didn't make sense: if there are projects that are an order of magnitude or two larger than the space shuttle, and he argues that the space shuttle should have had 26,000 programmers instead of 260, does that mean that these larger projects should have 260,000 to 2.6 million programmers? Where are you going to get that many programmers?
The best article I've read in a while I read just today. This can be found on the Sierra Times website and reports on aspects of this crisis that major media have ignored.
Like how environmentalists are set to destroy wetlands habitats for 400+ species of waterfowl.
Sierra Times is as far as I can tell an independent website.
...depending on your system requirements, you might take a look at the Data Access product line, which includes character mode development environments for DOS and Linux/Unix (DataFlex), a GUI development environment for Windows (Visual Dataflex), and their WebApp Server for web based applications.
This is a high level "4GL" OOP development system, which we've been pretty happy with. Over the years we have moved from CPM (Data Access goes back a ways) and DOS character based "procedural" style programming to (briefly) the OOP character based system, and then to the OOP Windows development system we are using now.
If you must develop database type applications for multiple environments, a strength of DataFlex is the fact you can put business rules in the DataDictionary class definitions, and these will be enforced regardless of the underlying database (their proprietary DB, DB2, MS SQL, or any ODBC accessible database) and the overlying (if that's a word) GUI (character, Windows, Web).
I can't comment on creating a single user interface description and having it applied to different interfaces, as you point out some things do not translate well from one interface to another. Especially when things get more complicated... at least in the DOS/Linux and Windows environments you do work with a similar set of classes (I was actually quite happy when I started using Visual Dataflex because so much of my knowledge of the classes and framework translated straight over).
The WebApp server, btw, is designed to run on NT/IIS. However I think the newest version which is now in open beta has been redesigned to run on Linux/Apache/Java)
I think everyone is different, so you have to find out what works best for you. In my experience, the body adapts to a regular schedule, whether you are getting as much sleep as the experts say you need or not.
I recall my 5th grade teacher was going to law school at night and was fine with 3-4 hours of sleep. In college I was fine with 5-6 hours, but I usually also took a 20 minute nap during the lunch hour which helped keep me from dropping off in the afternoon.
I never have trouble getting to sleep now, but I'll echo other's posters comments: sex works if you need help falling asleep.
Dimethylaminoethanol (DMAE) also works for me. I need less sleep when I'm taking it, and I tend to be much more alert when I wake up.
For me I have to make sure I wake up only once. If I wake up at 6 am but try to snooze for just a few more minutes, it's going to be 7am before I wake up again.
Since Microsoft has a monopoly on the consumer OS market, what incentive do they have to improve any of the feature already included with the opperating system.
You can also see this effect not just in what they don't improve, but what they remove from the operating system. Some things I know of: Windows 98, fax modem driver was removed; Windows ME, backup software removed, and apparently some networking functionality is removed--a friend told me ME cannot do peer to peer networking ala 95/98.
While cassingles had the biggest drop percentage wise, look at the drop in full length cassettes: 47 million units down (from 123.6 to 76.0) and $435 million drop in dollar value.
Now I hate to be the devils advocate here (or worse, the RIAA's), but you would think that if people are not buying cassettes they would be shifting their purchases to CD's. And there is nowhere near that increase in CD unit sales to compenstate for this drop. Of course there are plenty of factors that could be contributing to this, for instance the rise of portable mp3 players which obsolete walkman-cassette players, or more cars coming with CD players.
Maybe a big percentage of cassette sales are now going to CD's. And maybe Napster is cutting into full length CD sales. But the two are offsetting each other pretty much, which makes for the small amount of growth in sales reported.
Another significant fact is what is not on the list. There is no subscription based revenue, or sales numbers for digital downloads. Now of course we know the industry has been slow to roll out new Internet-based offerings. The fact that it's now 2001 and there is still nothing significant (aside from Napster-Bertlesman deal) in this area while all analog based formats are suffering substantial declines means the record companies are not doing what they need to to continue to enjoy increasing revenues.
Still, it's ludicrous to focus on a drop in 1% of the industry's business as these articles do.
...then Bill Gates would be able to fullfill his dream of Windows Everywhere(tm)--imagine the horror of replacing GOS (God's OS) with Windows For Your Brain.
"Excuse me, my brain just ran out of system resources. Please wait a minute while I reboot..."
...convince everyone to get a napster user name with the same prefix or suffix, and prefer those names when selecting who to download from.
This is a good idea, but as I understand how Napster works, it has many different servers, any one of which you may connect to, and you can only see files from users logged into the same server as you. If there is a likelyhood that everyone from the school is going to go to the same server, there may be no problem, but otherwise the users will be fragmented among different server unable to see each other's files.
Scour Exchange on the other hand is supposed to enable you to see files from all users logged into their system.
I don't remember all of the details, but I have read that artists get little or no income from the promo CD's that these types of clubs offer on signing up (12 CD's for 1 cent, etc.) This is a key component to these clubs being able to make these offers, ie being able to shaft the artists.
It's depressing, but based on the way things have been going...
Someday, you will need a license for a high speed broadband connection. A maximum connection speed for home use will be established, and if you need more then you will need to show just cause and comply with license terms handed down to you from the government or else face heavy fines.
There are two competing interests here, audio and video delivery. One problem is that audio requires so much less bandwidth than video but maybe that will be circumvented by required all music to be transmitted with it's music video. Your home will only need so much bandwidth to deliver video. Maybe this will be based on the number of receivers--TVs, digital recorders--you have, with your connection actually being able to achieve 1GB/s but it's throttled back to only give you what you need.
The problem is, if you have too much bandwidth, then it's easy for you to act as a broadcaster, sending illegally copied material from your home computer network to anyone on the Internet 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Now, if you only have enough bandwidth to watch a TV stream (TV over Internet will supplant cable just as voice of IP will supplant the telephone) then you'll have to decide whether you want to watch TV or share a TV stream with someone else over that same bandwidth.
Or course the upstream/downstream speeds could be varied to contol this as well. Or your available bandwidth could be based on what you are doing, ie if you are just surfing, you only have 1Mbs of bandwidth. But if you go to a site that has a video stream, suddenly your available bandwidth jumps up to accomodate the stream.
Now if you want a really fat pipe you have got to have a reason for it right? It had better not be to deliver audio/video streams the best way of doing that is to require a government license, strict laws, periodic unscheduled inspections of your streams (hey, were back in high school having our lockers checked) and stiff penalties for violations.
Lest anyone thing I am joking, think about this: part of the underlying economic shift that is happening is a dramatic reduction in scarcity. Isn't the next step introducting scarcity to broadcast licenses, which have previously been limited by broadcast airwaves for radio and television (and to those who could afford the capital investment).
Why should all the little people suddenly have unlimited, unrestricted access to their own "press"? The founding fathers surely never intended for that to happen!
Freedom of speech? Whatzat? Freedom of the press? Whatzat?
The Internet is going to be taken over by old-line corporate interests bent on using it to deliver their mind numbing content to the masses.
I've read several posts about how people find it hard to explain the current crop of RIAA/MPAA lawsuits to people (non-geeks). Maybe it's easiest if you just tell people:
"The record and movie companies want to take away our tape recorders and VCRs."
Ultimately, that's what it comes down to. The digital equivalents of tape recorders and VCRs are the "Boston strangler" to the RIAA/MPAA in their view of the world.
Last month Wired ran an article about watermarks in DVD video, which focused basically on DVD-writable based recorders. Entirely missing the point of once watermark rules can be placed in DVD content to prevent perfect digital copies, they can also be placed in broadcast content to do whatever the broadcasters want!
This could include making broadcast content non-recordable (ie, a network decides you can't make your own copy of it's latest miniseries; if you want a copy you have to pay for it on DVD) or forcing you to record commercials (and not fast-forward through them on playback) or imposing a window (recorded program must be viewed within a week of recording) or imposing a limit on the number of playbacks.
My jaw dropped to the floor when I read the link to the article in the Motley Fool about the FCC To Rule On Copy Protection
Technology Dispute.
How much more popular are VCR's than Napster? What's going to happen if the old line media companies are stupid enough to use technological means to circumvent legal rulings that didn't exactly go their way, even if they've been enriched by the results? Is war coming, are are the sheep lining up to be sheared even as I write?
There is one thing I am fairly sure of though: DeCSS is the tip of the iceberg. Those hackers who have the knowledge, skill and motivation will create software that will ignore watermarks and cut through "copy protection devices". Maybe this time it will be anonymously as well as open source. What the industry execs fear will come to pass despite anything they can do.
It is still depressing to read about how the powerful are steamrolling the rights of everyone else.
"You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."
When I read the Napster brief in the section where they are that the AHRA exempts them, because it says to the effect that no action may be taken against someone for use of a digital recording device, and a page or two later they quote the Rio decision where a computer did not fit the legal definition of a digital recording device... Open mouth, insert foot.
So if computers aren't included in the defintion, it follows that the clause in the AHRA can't be used to exempt Napster users from copyright infringement (not Napster, remember this is the part where they are arguing that their users are not doing infringing copyrights, and if they aren't, Napster can't be held responsible for contributory infringement since there is no infringement going on in the first place.)
The next step I'd say is to question whether the activity of Napster users fits any strict legal definition on the books at all. If it doesn't (and the laws are littered with terms like phonorecords that bear no relevance to ephemeral mp3 files) then it Napster still might be able to argue that no law makes it illegal to share mp3 files....
I couldn't figure this one out either. I don't drink coffee but I've read that caffiene has a bitter taste, and figured that must factor in to the overall taste. And Barq's root beer advertises that it "has bite" which I figured might be due to the caffiene (not all root beers add caffiene).
As I remember the bitter taste was a factor that made caffienated H2O tricky. I don't know how they got around it.
I had thought about adding caffiene to other fruits and vegetables as another poster suggested but again you might have the same problem with taste.
I remember reports that mp3.com had >$400 in the bank from their IPO.
Even after the settlements, this still leaves them with a nice chunk of change.
By setting aside $150M, they've kind of sent a signal to Harry Fox and whatever other publishers/small labels that may want to continue to pursue them in court. If you figure each of the major labels will cost about $20, that leaves about $50M for the rest.
The original plan was to be up last November, then last February, but better late than mis-delivered, I guess.
Good thing Pizza Hut still doesn't have a "pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it's free" policy. Those cosmonauts on Mir must have been pretty ticked off when they finally got their cold pizza.
The Trashcan/Recycle Bin metaphor should be extended. When you empty your trash can, the contents should be placed in Dumpster on your LAN. If you realize that you've deleted a file that you needed, you can go dumpster diving. Of course the LAN will have a twice weekly pickup, so if the garbage truck has already come, you'll have to travel to the Landfill (a tape/CD-RW archive of deleted files) to retreive your file.
Somehow, it seems kind of fitting to have a Dumpster icon appear in a Windows NT/2000 server window under Network Neighborhood, and a Landfill icon when you click on Entire Network.
Napster has built an important music distribution infrastructure. Is it wise to try and put them out of business and throw that all away, or would it be better to build on it? Specifically, would you find Napster acceptable if it redefined it's role to act as a broker?
In other words, bands/labels set the price for each song. Napster gets a brokerage fee (flat or percentage). Users providing the labor (conversion from CD to mp3), storage space, and bandwidth to host music also get a percentage cut (probably based on the size of the file). Essentially a credit on their Napster account. The rest goes directly to the label/band. Fans become your distribution network, and in fact there is nothing stopping you, or your label, from signing up with Napster and providing a high bandwidth, always-on library that could be given preference in Napster's search results, so you could in fact get a bigger piece of the pie.
I think most people know that the "free music" party is going to have to end sooner or later. It is not too far of a stretch to see Napster's role evolving this way, if the music industry will work with them.
I think market pressures have relegated most 4GLs to taking a back seat to Visual Basic. My impression is that Microsoft's marketing machine has convinced everyone who doesn't know better that everything can and should be done in VB, whether VB is the right tool for the job or not.
I can give you one perspective from using a little known 4GL for the last ten years, DataFlex from Data Access. We started out using it the 80's for accounting software packages under MS-DOS and it was a vast improvement over Microsoft QuickBASIC when it came to database handling. We actually used little of the "4GL" part of it since we hand coded most of our apps to fit our application "framework"/look & feel and used third party add-ons to accomplish that. While we developed apps for DOS, they did have a high degree of cross platform compatibility, supporting Unix and OS/2 development and deployment environments. I don't think the OS/2 version is supported anymore, but they do provide current versions for Unix and Linux, still in character mode.
Dataflex developed an OOP model in the early 90's (still operating in "character mode"). It was (and still is) a decent OOP implementation.
This was followed by an effort to go to Windows, which was eventually abandoned because they were trying to develop their own GUI which would have given DataFlex apps a different "look and feel" than other Windows apps.
As Christopher Brown pointed out above, 4GLs tend to be proprietary, and they were going in this direction on the front end GUI initially, but came to their senses and started over from scratch. The current product is called Visual DataFlex, and is in its third major version (started at VDF 4, now at VDF 6). The GUI doesn't look proprietary, and in fact you have complete access to Windows API calls if you want to extend or add to the capabilities provided.
On the back end, their proprietary DataFlex database is of course supported, and for a long time they've supported access to Pervasive(Btreive), and within the last few years DB2 and SQL and well anything that can be done under ODBC.
One really nice aspect of VDF are the data dictionary (DD) classes, which allow you to specify your business/update/database integrity/etc rules for your database files, and these rules are applied no matter what back end database is used. In addition, the DD classes may be used for character mode applications as well, so if you need to support applications on both Linux and/or MS-DOS and/or Windows accessing the same back-end database then this code can be shared between your windows-based and character-mode based applications. And actually now they have a web server product that also uses the data dictionary rules, so you can actually now create web-based applications.
I think Data Access has "gotten religon" when it comes to making their product as interoperable as possible with other database system, work with Windows standards, and work with other popular programs (like Crystal Reports which comes with VDF 6) and operating systems (ie Linux).
My impression is that 4GL's in general seemed to be geared toward database applications, and if what you're building fits within that framework, then I belive you'll get a productivity boost after getting past the OOP learning curve (if necessary, if you already have OOP experience it's just a matter of learning VDF's syntax).
There are downsides of course, and the primary one in my view is that with such a small market share, VDF has a hard time competing against the limitless resources of Microsoft and the third party market that has sprung up around their development products. With fewer resources, Data Access' development may be a little behind the curve and some bugs have lingered in the product much longer than any developers desire. But I still wouldn't want to develop the type of applications we are developing in Visual Basic!
It would be nice to see Data Access develop a GUI version for Linux as well, but again they have limited resources...it would be interesting if they were to open source that part of the project but I don't think they've gotten "open source religon" quite yet...
...against a movie company based on restraint of fair use copying? Forget CSS for a minute. From what I understand reading messages on Slashdot and opendvd.org, if making fair use copies is a legally established right, and a movie company uses Macrovision to prevent imperfect analog copies that should be possible under fair use, then they have infringed on consumers rights.
So if I go buy a DVD player and a DVD of Mulan, then try to make a copy onto VHS for my 4 year old daughter to use so the DVD won't get messed up, and I can't do it, they have infringed on my rights, no? (IANAL of course!) And everyone else who has bought Mulan.
I don't know how this would work legally, but it would be an awesome legal DoS attack on the movie companies if separate class action lawsuits were brought for individual movies. It's probable that the courts would consolidate separate suits though.
This whole thing has soured me on DVD. Actually I'm pissed off, and I feel like retailiating against the movies companies. I'm not planning on buying a DVD player for home use now until this has shaken out, and then if the results are not good, I may never buy one.
The ironic thing is, the movie companies may be ahead of their time on this one. Either by luck or foresight, through draconian measures they seek to control so-called "casual" copies. Yes, today mass production operations account for the largest losses when it comes to piracy. But in the not to distant future, when we all have fiber to our desktops and 100Mbps wireless links, it will be trivial to ship gigabytes around. "Casual" copying _could_ eclipse organized mass production of DVD movies in terms of losses in the future.
What amazed me though was a recent story on Wired about a new technique a company is developing for "expiring" DVD disks. A film that is activated by the laser that will make the disk unreadable after a specified period of time--say 2 days, but it can vary. They are hoping to use this as a DIVX-type of rental, where people don't have to bring it back. The disturbing thing is, if the movie & rental companies can profit from a DVD rental disk that is rented for $2.50 to $3.00 and is in no way different (in terms of costs to manufacture and distribute) from a DVD you purchase at retail for $25.00, what does that say about their pricing? (Not to mention their concern for the environment with all these disks that just get thrown away!) The only difference is the licensing terms!
DVD is the first battle in the coming digital revolution. Can you imagine what is going to happen when digital broadcasts become widespread, and digital VCR's or computers are recording these broadcasts in perfect, exactly reproducable form? My wife has already built a substantial personal library of movies she's recorded legally from HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc. If they start broadcasting digitally, and we are recording digitally, that's better than DVD! No CSS right?
Heck, how is a TV network going to survive when people can digitally record a show, remove commercials, then view, webcast, or email copies to everyone on the planet?!
One thing that I rarely see is an emphasis on personal responsibility, that just because a person can do a thing, it doesn't mean they must do it, that copyrights must be respected, or yes, they do lose their value, and once content producers' content has no value, and thus no profit, there is no incentive (or means) to continue producing more content. It may be obvious to us, but I sometimes wonder about the general population.
Of course Amigas have lasted until today. But no single company has marketed, promoted, and developed the platform for how long?
I must admit I've been out of touch with the Amiga 3rd party market for a while...
Can you provide a URL to a company that is producing MPEG-2/mp3 hardware based codecs for the Amiga? Certainly if a hardware based MPEG-2 decompression were available, DVDs should be playable.
3rd party graphics cards and sound cards are all well and good, but the problem is the lack of support by and/or tight integration with the OS. I seem to remember that some of that improved with the later graphics cards....
If the Amiga platform had continued to progress, I would have expected to see advances in the multimedia coprocessors like I described...
I imagine a machine that you would be able to call on your telephone and say "Record the X-Files tonight. And see if there are any new songs from my favorite artists on mp3.com." This is possible right now, theoretically. There are are all these pieces floating around out there, but no one platform has everything...if the Amiga had stayed ahead of its time, I think it would have everything.
I want a true multimedia computer--cable ready, CD & DVD, with a reliable OS, good support in terms of 3rd party applications, real time MPEG2 encode/decode in hardware (video in & out of course), voice recognition through mic or telephone input, AutoConfig, multiple monitors--2 by default so it can support display on both a TV and a monitor simultaneously, multiple processors, compatibility with a wide range of add-ons (PCI, USB, FireWire support?)
Did I leave anything out? I don't ask for much do I?
I think the Y2K scare was a "self-preventing prophecy"
We have a few hundred people running our accounting software in the ag industry. If our softare had not been fixed for Y2K, it would have had at least the following impact:
* All G/L account balances would have started over at zero on 1/1/00. * Even if G/L account balances were correct, several financial reports would produce errorneous results. * Users would have been unable to print reports with a starting date in 99 and and ending date in 00. * Payables invoices would not be aged and paid correctly if the due date falls in 2000. * Receivable invoices would not be aged correctly.
It would have been hard on us to take all the support calls, and get everyone updated, all within a short time frame.
But remarkably, the crops still would have kept growing, and would get harvested.
Something in my gut tells me that these small and medium size businesses that are employing a "fix on failure" strategy still have a decent capacity to muddle though things like Y2K. It's amazing how many of our customers don't even operate with an accurate bank balance in their software anyway!
I'm still hoping to pick up some business from people whose software went kaput...
Slashdot Mirror
I skimmed through the article, but this didn't make sense: if there are projects that are an order of magnitude or two larger than the space shuttle, and he argues that the space shuttle should have had 26,000 programmers instead of 260, does that mean that these larger projects should have 260,000 to 2.6 million programmers? Where are you going to get that many programmers?
... put these parts in a shoddy bomb casing, and trade it to some Lybian nationalists for some plutonium.
The best article I've read in a while I read just today. This can be found on the Sierra Times website and reports on aspects of this crisis that major media have ignored.
Like how environmentalists are set to destroy wetlands habitats for 400+ species of waterfowl.
Sierra Times is as far as I can tell an independent website.
...depending on your system requirements, you might take a look at the Data Access product line, which includes character mode development environments for DOS and Linux/Unix (DataFlex), a GUI development environment for Windows (Visual Dataflex), and their WebApp Server for web based applications.
This is a high level "4GL" OOP development system, which we've been pretty happy with. Over the years we have moved from CPM (Data Access goes back a ways) and DOS character based "procedural" style programming to (briefly) the OOP character based system, and then to the OOP Windows development system we are using now.
If you must develop database type applications for multiple environments, a strength of DataFlex is the fact you can put business rules in the DataDictionary class definitions, and these will be enforced regardless of the underlying database (their proprietary DB, DB2, MS SQL, or any ODBC accessible database) and the overlying (if that's a word) GUI (character, Windows, Web).
I can't comment on creating a single user interface description and having it applied to different interfaces, as you point out some things do not translate well from one interface to another. Especially when things get more complicated... at least in the DOS/Linux and Windows environments you do work with a similar set of classes (I was actually quite happy when I started using Visual Dataflex because so much of my knowledge of the classes and framework translated straight over).
The WebApp server, btw, is designed to run on NT/IIS. However I think the newest version which is now in open beta has been redesigned to run on Linux/Apache/Java)
I think everyone is different, so you have to find out what works best for you. In my experience, the body adapts to a regular schedule, whether you are getting as much sleep as the experts say you need or not.
I recall my 5th grade teacher was going to law school at night and was fine with 3-4 hours of sleep. In college I was fine with 5-6 hours, but I usually also took a 20 minute nap during the lunch hour which helped keep me from dropping off in the afternoon.
I never have trouble getting to sleep now, but I'll echo other's posters comments: sex works if you need help falling asleep.
Dimethylaminoethanol (DMAE) also works for me. I need less sleep when I'm taking it, and I tend to be much more alert when I wake up.
For me I have to make sure I wake up only once. If I wake up at 6 am but try to snooze for just a few more minutes, it's going to be 7am before I wake up again.
You can also see this effect not just in what they don't improve, but what they remove from the operating system. Some things I know of: Windows 98, fax modem driver was removed; Windows ME, backup software removed, and apparently some networking functionality is removed--a friend told me ME cannot do peer to peer networking ala 95/98.
While cassingles had the biggest drop percentage wise, look at the drop in full length cassettes: 47 million units down (from 123.6 to 76.0) and $435 million drop in dollar value.
Now I hate to be the devils advocate here (or worse, the RIAA's), but you would think that if people are not buying cassettes they would be shifting their purchases to CD's. And there is nowhere near that increase in CD unit sales to compenstate for this drop. Of course there are plenty of factors that could be contributing to this, for instance the rise of portable mp3 players which obsolete walkman-cassette players, or more cars coming with CD players.
Maybe a big percentage of cassette sales are now going to CD's. And maybe Napster is cutting into full length CD sales. But the two are offsetting each other pretty much, which makes for the small amount of growth in sales reported.
Another significant fact is what is not on the list. There is no subscription based revenue, or sales numbers for digital downloads. Now of course we know the industry has been slow to roll out new Internet-based offerings. The fact that it's now 2001 and there is still nothing significant (aside from Napster-Bertlesman deal) in this area while all analog based formats are suffering substantial declines means the record companies are not doing what they need to to continue to enjoy increasing revenues.
Still, it's ludicrous to focus on a drop in 1% of the industry's business as these articles do.
...then Bill Gates would be able to fullfill his dream of Windows Everywhere(tm)--imagine the horror of replacing GOS (God's OS) with Windows For Your Brain.
"Excuse me, my brain just ran out of system resources. Please wait a minute while I reboot..."
This is a good idea, but as I understand how Napster works, it has many different servers, any one of which you may connect to, and you can only see files from users logged into the same server as you. If there is a likelyhood that everyone from the school is going to go to the same server, there may be no problem, but otherwise the users will be fragmented among different server unable to see each other's files.
Scour Exchange on the other hand is supposed to enable you to see files from all users logged into their system.
Before it can be a World Heritage site, it must be designated as a national landmark first.
I don't remember all of the details, but I have read that artists get little or no income from the promo CD's that these types of clubs offer on signing up (12 CD's for 1 cent, etc.) This is a key component to these clubs being able to make these offers, ie being able to shaft the artists.
...if the statistics had been more recent. Usage quadrupled between February and July. Ho hum. And duh!
I think Media Matrix just released this to get some media attention.
I think it would be more interesting to know what's happened since the injunction was issued and stayed.
It's depressing, but based on the way things have been going...
Someday, you will need a license for a high speed broadband connection. A maximum connection speed for home use will be established, and if you need more then you will need to show just cause and comply with license terms handed down to you from the government or else face heavy fines.
There are two competing interests here, audio and video delivery. One problem is that audio requires so much less bandwidth than video but maybe that will be circumvented by required all music to be transmitted with it's music video. Your home will only need so much bandwidth to deliver video. Maybe this will be based on the number of receivers--TVs, digital recorders--you have, with your connection actually being able to achieve 1GB/s but it's throttled back to only give you what you need.
The problem is, if you have too much bandwidth, then it's easy for you to act as a broadcaster, sending illegally copied material from your home computer network to anyone on the Internet 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Now, if you only have enough bandwidth to watch a TV stream (TV over Internet will supplant cable just as voice of IP will supplant the telephone) then you'll have to decide whether you want to watch TV or share a TV stream with someone else over that same bandwidth.
Or course the upstream/downstream speeds could be varied to contol this as well. Or your available bandwidth could be based on what you are doing, ie if you are just surfing, you only have 1Mbs of bandwidth. But if you go to a site that has a video stream, suddenly your available bandwidth jumps up to accomodate the stream.
Now if you want a really fat pipe you have got to have a reason for it right? It had better not be to deliver audio/video streams the best way of doing that is to require a government license, strict laws, periodic unscheduled inspections of your streams (hey, were back in high school having our lockers checked) and stiff penalties for violations.
Lest anyone thing I am joking, think about this: part of the underlying economic shift that is happening is a dramatic reduction in scarcity. Isn't the next step introducting scarcity to broadcast licenses, which have previously been limited by broadcast airwaves for radio and television (and to those who could afford the capital investment).
Why should all the little people suddenly have unlimited, unrestricted access to their own "press"? The founding fathers surely never intended for that to happen!
Freedom of speech? Whatzat? Freedom of the press? Whatzat?
The Internet is going to be taken over by old-line corporate interests bent on using it to deliver their mind numbing content to the masses.
Get ready for this!
I've read several posts about how people find it hard to explain the current crop of RIAA/MPAA lawsuits to people (non-geeks). Maybe it's easiest if you just tell people:
"The record and movie companies want to take away our tape recorders and VCRs."
Ultimately, that's what it comes down to. The digital equivalents of tape recorders and VCRs are the "Boston strangler" to the RIAA/MPAA in their view of the world.
Last month Wired ran an article about watermarks in DVD video, which focused basically on DVD-writable based recorders. Entirely missing the point of once watermark rules can be placed in DVD content to prevent perfect digital copies, they can also be placed in broadcast content to do whatever the broadcasters want!
This could include making broadcast content non-recordable (ie, a network decides you can't make your own copy of it's latest miniseries; if you want a copy you have to pay for it on DVD) or forcing you to record commercials (and not fast-forward through them on playback) or imposing a window (recorded program must be viewed within a week of recording) or imposing a limit on the number of playbacks.
My jaw dropped to the floor when I read the link to the article in the Motley Fool about the FCC To Rule On Copy Protection
Technology Dispute.
Wired has a link to a current article in USA Today, it seems it is a done deal now.
How much more popular are VCR's than Napster? What's going to happen if the old line media companies are stupid enough to use technological means to circumvent legal rulings that didn't exactly go their way, even if they've been enriched by the results? Is war coming, are are the sheep lining up to be sheared even as I write?
There is one thing I am fairly sure of though: DeCSS is the tip of the iceberg. Those hackers who have the knowledge, skill and motivation will create software that will ignore watermarks and cut through "copy protection devices". Maybe this time it will be anonymously as well as open source. What the industry execs fear will come to pass despite anything they can do.
It is still depressing to read about how the powerful are steamrolling the rights of everyone else.
"You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."
I really hope so.
When I read the Napster brief in the section where they are that the AHRA exempts them, because it says to the effect that no action may be taken against someone for use of a digital recording device, and a page or two later they quote the Rio decision where a computer did not fit the legal definition of a digital recording device... Open mouth, insert foot.
So if computers aren't included in the defintion, it follows that the clause in the AHRA can't be used to exempt Napster users from copyright infringement (not Napster, remember this is the part where they are arguing that their users are not doing infringing copyrights, and if they aren't, Napster can't be held responsible for contributory infringement since there is no infringement going on in the first place.)
The next step I'd say is to question whether the activity of Napster users fits any strict legal definition on the books at all. If it doesn't (and the laws are littered with terms like phonorecords that bear no relevance to ephemeral mp3 files) then it Napster still might be able to argue that no law makes it illegal to share mp3 files....
I couldn't figure this one out either. I don't drink coffee but I've read that caffiene has a bitter taste, and figured that must factor in to the overall taste. And Barq's root beer advertises that it "has bite" which I figured might be due to the caffiene (not all root beers add caffiene).
As I remember the bitter taste was a factor that made caffienated H2O tricky. I don't know how they got around it.
I had thought about adding caffiene to other fruits and vegetables as another poster suggested but again you might have the same problem with taste.
I remember reports that mp3.com had >$400 in the bank from their IPO.
Even after the settlements, this still leaves them with a nice chunk of change.
By setting aside $150M, they've kind of sent a signal to Harry Fox and whatever other publishers/small labels that may want to continue to pursue them in court. If you figure each of the major labels will cost about $20, that leaves about $50M for the rest.
The original plan was to be up last November, then last February, but better late than mis-delivered, I guess.
Good thing Pizza Hut still doesn't have a "pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it's free" policy. Those cosmonauts on Mir must have been pretty ticked off when they finally got their cold pizza.
Something clicked while reading the AntiMac page.
The Trashcan/Recycle Bin metaphor should be extended. When you empty your trash can, the contents should be placed in Dumpster on your LAN. If you realize that you've deleted a file that you needed, you can go dumpster diving. Of course the LAN will have a twice weekly pickup, so if the garbage truck has already come, you'll have to travel to the Landfill (a tape/CD-RW archive of deleted files) to retreive your file.
Somehow, it seems kind of fitting to have a Dumpster icon appear in a Windows NT/2000 server window under Network Neighborhood, and a Landfill icon when you click on Entire Network.
Napster has built an important music distribution infrastructure. Is it wise to try and put them out of business and throw that all away, or would it be better to build on it? Specifically, would you find Napster acceptable if it redefined it's role to act as a broker?
In other words, bands/labels set the price for each song. Napster gets a brokerage fee (flat or percentage). Users providing the labor (conversion from CD to mp3), storage space, and bandwidth to host music also get a percentage cut (probably based on the size of the file). Essentially a credit on their Napster account. The rest goes directly to the label/band. Fans become your distribution network, and in fact there is nothing stopping you, or your label, from signing up with Napster and providing a high bandwidth, always-on library that could be given preference in Napster's search results, so you could in fact get a bigger piece of the pie.
I think most people know that the "free music" party is going to have to end sooner or later. It is not too far of a stretch to see Napster's role evolving this way, if the music industry will work with them.
I think market pressures have relegated most 4GLs to taking a back seat to Visual Basic. My impression is that Microsoft's marketing machine has convinced everyone who doesn't know better that everything can and should be done in VB, whether VB is the right tool for the job or not.
I can give you one perspective from using a little known 4GL for the last ten years, DataFlex from Data Access. We started out using it the 80's for accounting software packages under MS-DOS and it was a vast improvement over Microsoft QuickBASIC when it came to database handling. We actually used little of the "4GL" part of it since we hand coded most of our apps to fit our application "framework"/look & feel and used third party add-ons to accomplish that. While we developed apps for DOS, they did have a high degree of cross platform compatibility, supporting Unix and OS/2 development and deployment environments. I don't think the OS/2 version is supported anymore, but they do provide current versions for Unix and Linux, still in character mode.
Dataflex developed an OOP model in the early 90's (still operating in "character mode"). It was (and still is) a decent OOP implementation.
This was followed by an effort to go to Windows, which was eventually abandoned because they were trying to develop their own GUI which would have given DataFlex apps a different "look and feel" than other Windows apps.
As Christopher Brown pointed out above, 4GLs tend to be proprietary, and they were going in this direction on the front end GUI initially, but came to their senses and started over from scratch. The current product is called Visual DataFlex, and is in its third major version (started at VDF 4, now at VDF 6). The GUI doesn't look proprietary, and in fact you have complete access to Windows API calls if you want to extend or add to the capabilities provided.
On the back end, their proprietary DataFlex database is of course supported, and for a long time they've supported access to Pervasive(Btreive), and within the last few years DB2 and SQL and well anything that can be done under ODBC.
One really nice aspect of VDF are the data dictionary (DD) classes, which allow you to specify your business/update/database integrity/etc rules for your database files, and these rules are applied no matter what back end database is used. In addition, the DD classes may be used for character mode applications as well, so if you need to support applications on both Linux and/or MS-DOS and/or Windows accessing the same back-end database then this code can be shared between your windows-based and character-mode based applications. And actually now they have a web server product that also uses the data dictionary rules, so you can actually now create web-based applications.
I think Data Access has "gotten religon" when it comes to making their product as interoperable as possible with other database system, work with Windows standards, and work with other popular programs (like Crystal Reports which comes with VDF 6) and operating systems (ie Linux).
My impression is that 4GL's in general seemed to be geared toward database applications, and if what you're building fits within that framework, then I belive you'll get a productivity boost after getting past the OOP learning curve (if necessary, if you already have OOP experience it's just a matter of learning VDF's syntax).
There are downsides of course, and the primary one in my view is that with such a small market share, VDF has a hard time competing against the limitless resources of Microsoft and the third party market that has sprung up around their development products. With fewer resources, Data Access' development may be a little behind the curve and some bugs have lingered in the product much longer than any developers desire. But I still wouldn't want to develop the type of applications we are developing in Visual Basic!
It would be nice to see Data Access develop a GUI version for Linux as well, but again they have limited resources...it would be interesting if they were to open source that part of the project but I don't think they've gotten "open source religon" quite yet...
There is this page which maps out the labels: Who Owns Who
...against a movie company based on restraint of fair use copying? Forget CSS for a minute. From what I understand reading messages on Slashdot and opendvd.org, if making fair use copies is a legally established right, and a movie company uses Macrovision to prevent imperfect analog copies that should be possible under fair use, then they have infringed on consumers rights.
So if I go buy a DVD player and a DVD of Mulan, then try to make a copy onto VHS for my 4 year old daughter to use so the DVD won't get messed up, and I can't do it, they have infringed on my rights, no? (IANAL of course!) And everyone else who has bought Mulan.
I don't know how this would work legally, but it would be an awesome legal DoS attack on the movie companies if separate class action lawsuits were brought for individual movies. It's probable that the courts would consolidate separate suits though.
This whole thing has soured me on DVD. Actually I'm pissed off, and I feel like retailiating against the movies companies. I'm not planning on buying a DVD player for home use now until this has shaken out, and then if the results are not good, I may never buy one.
The ironic thing is, the movie companies may be ahead of their time on this one. Either by luck or foresight, through draconian measures they seek to control so-called "casual" copies. Yes, today mass production operations account for the largest losses when it comes to piracy. But in the not to distant future, when we all have fiber to our desktops and 100Mbps wireless links, it will be trivial to ship gigabytes around. "Casual" copying _could_ eclipse organized mass production of DVD movies in terms of losses in the future.
What amazed me though was a recent story on Wired about a new technique a company is developing for "expiring" DVD disks. A film that is activated by the laser that will make the disk unreadable after a specified period of time--say 2 days, but it can vary. They are hoping to use this as a DIVX-type of rental, where people don't have to bring it back. The disturbing thing is, if the movie & rental companies can profit from a DVD rental disk that is rented for $2.50 to $3.00 and is in no way different (in terms of costs to manufacture and distribute) from a DVD you purchase at retail for $25.00, what does that say about their pricing? (Not to mention their concern for the environment with all these disks that just get thrown away!) The only difference is the licensing terms!
DVD is the first battle in the coming digital revolution. Can you imagine what is going to happen when digital broadcasts become widespread, and digital VCR's or computers are recording these broadcasts in perfect, exactly reproducable form?
My wife has already built a substantial personal library of movies she's recorded legally from HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc. If they start broadcasting digitally, and we are recording digitally, that's better than DVD! No CSS right?
Heck, how is a TV network going to survive when people can digitally record a show, remove commercials, then view, webcast, or email copies to everyone on the planet?!
One thing that I rarely see is an emphasis on personal responsibility, that just because a person can do a thing, it doesn't mean they must do it, that copyrights must be respected, or yes, they do lose their value, and once content producers' content has no value, and thus no profit, there is no incentive (or means) to continue producing more content. It may be obvious to us, but I sometimes wonder about the general population.
Of course Amigas have lasted until today. But no single company has marketed, promoted, and developed the platform for how long?
I must admit I've been out of touch with the Amiga 3rd party market for a while...
Can you provide a URL to a company that is producing MPEG-2/mp3 hardware based codecs for the Amiga? Certainly if a hardware based MPEG-2 decompression were available, DVDs should be playable.
3rd party graphics cards and sound cards are all well and good, but the problem is the lack of support by and/or tight integration with the OS. I seem to remember that some of that improved with the later graphics cards....
If the Amiga platform had continued to progress, I would have expected to see advances in the multimedia coprocessors like I described...
I imagine a machine that you would be able to call on your telephone and say "Record the X-Files tonight. And see if there are any new songs from my favorite artists on mp3.com." This is possible right now, theoretically. There are are all these pieces floating around out there, but no one platform has everything...if the Amiga had stayed ahead of its time, I think it would have everything.
I want a true multimedia computer--cable ready, CD & DVD, with a reliable OS, good support in terms of 3rd party applications, real time MPEG2 encode/decode in hardware (video in & out of course), voice recognition through mic or telephone input, AutoConfig, multiple monitors--2 by default so it can support display on both a TV and a monitor simultaneously, multiple processors, compatibility with a wide range of add-ons (PCI, USB, FireWire support?)
Did I leave anything out? I don't ask for much do I?
I think the Y2K scare was a "self-preventing prophecy"
We have a few hundred people running our accounting software in the ag industry. If our softare had not been fixed for Y2K, it would have had at least the following impact:
* All G/L account balances would have started over at zero on 1/1/00.
* Even if G/L account balances were correct, several financial reports would produce errorneous results.
* Users would have been unable to print reports with a starting date in 99 and and ending date in 00.
* Payables invoices would not be aged and paid correctly if the due date falls in 2000.
* Receivable invoices would not be aged correctly.
It would have been hard on us to take all the support calls, and get everyone updated, all within a short time frame.
But remarkably, the crops still would have kept growing, and would get harvested.
Something in my gut tells me that these small and medium size businesses that are employing a "fix on failure" strategy still have a decent capacity to muddle though things like Y2K. It's amazing how many of our customers don't even operate with an accurate bank balance in their software anyway!
I'm still hoping to pick up some business from people whose software went kaput...