I would say that there is insufficient demand if you can't make money at it...That or the supplier wasn't connecting effectively with the demand.
If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door...If they find out you created a better mousetrap, and figured out where your door was.
Seems like he could have used the same bug to make "Javascript" into: j-a-v-a-s-c-r-i-p-t, with each character on a new line. It'd be pretty hard for a filter to catch something like that, though I suppose they could strip out newlines and whitespace as well and just look for character sequences.
What a pain in the butt though. Seems like M$ could just produce a browser that doesn't go out of its way to screw itself.
It's going to change/steal all of our future programming!
WTF?
The reason the programming exists in the first place is because there is demand for it. The fact that it's now being shown through a different medium is irrelevant to that demand.
And where there is demand, someone will find a way to make money off supplying that demand. Just simple economics.
It doesn't work that way...Look at CGI films. As the technology becomes more widely adopted, the tools become cheaper and more accessable, and everybody starts using them, while the super high-end blockbuster effects types start working on the next generation, which costs a mint today but will be the cheapo standard tomorrow.
So when super real graphics become the standard, the focus will shift away from them. It's simply inevitable.
Yer math is a bit off. 90/200 is right...for a 200 meg drive. But for a 200 gig drive, it's 90/200,000 (counting 1000 megs to the gig, which is wrong), which equals.00045 cents per meg, which means one meg in floppy cash is equal to 466 megs in harddrive cash.
So a 200 gig drive made of floppies would cost about $42,000 (1 meg =.21,.21 * 200,000)...A bit more than twice the price of a 200 gig hard drive.
Heh. From what I know of the Dutch, I'd be more likely to believe the submitter was Dutch if there wasn't a grammatical error. I hear they make fun of school kids over there who only speak three languages.
That being said, you're probably right. The most common mistake people make in foreign languages is subject/verb agreement.
Eh. Don't knock the subscriber fee; that pays for a lot of things. Pays for the guy who carries it to your door, pays for the guy who carries it to the guy who carries it to your door. These days, with gas prices up, that doesn't cover all that much.
It's not unusual for a newspaper to make 25-30% of it's revenue from a subscriber base...and considering how weak TV news is on anything that isn't on fire or under water, I don't mind paying a quarter a day, or whatever the going rate is.
Sad but true...DDoS extortion is actually pretty common. Not really much other use for a botnet that big...'cept maybe to crunch an unholy large number of SETI packets.
Maybe if they put all those computers together to type up story submissions, occasionally I wouldn't have to see one with a glaring gramatical error in the first three words.
Actually, you're completely wrong. I spoke very carefully...Ethically speaking, there is no moral component to following the law. The moral component comes in how you apply the law; in this case they're using it to try and deprive rights from a large company with tons of government contracts...Not exactly an easy target.
As it stands, its just two companies fighting it out over some chunk of cash, the same thing that happens all the time, everywhere. Therefore, no ethical component.
Though, in my personal opinion, you're right, they're scum.
Perhaps you would like to point out how the current system is better?
Right now we have a system that is set up so that the little man can go in and effectively block production of a product forever. This is idiotic. Period.
Patents that are never implemented should either be invalid or they should lapse as soon as someone else implements it. I frankly have no sympathy; if you can't get it done, then get out of the way and let someone else do it. End of story. This "IP Hostage" crap has got to go.
Nothing to do with ethics, it's to do with our crappy IP laws. Ethically, the only thing that can be said about them is that they're following the law.
I do think, however, that all such IP claims, based on nothing, should be thrown out when someone else produces a viable product first. The idea is to protect innovation, not to protect a group of idiots sitting around in a room, patenting anything that flies out of their mouths. The idea of a thing isn't worth crap compared to the massive NRE that goes into making it work in the real world.
I wish more of these pie-in-the-sky morons understood that. Patented the idea of wireless email? You've got to be kidding. It's like they looked at all technology that was blowing up 10 years ago, and said, "Let's put 'wireless' in front of that and patent it."
I used to work as a DJ...They call that a "post" and it's the mark of a "good" DJ that they talk until a fraction of a second before the first words (they call that "hitting the post"). I was never a "good" DJ in that sense, exactly because I had spent my childhood cursing those jackasses.
I still have tapes lying around with inane DJ crap from the 80's immortalized on them...And my own inane crap from 1997-2000 as well.
Heh. Well, I generally leave my "MyFi" (Gag. Stupid name.) sitting in the passenger seat, so it's more like leaning over, picking it up, fiddling with buttons...It's just too much bother when driving. I never use it when I'm not in the car (rather listen to MP3s), so if it ain't easy to do in the car, I don't do it.
I should have just bought an iPod, but I had a perception of satelite radio that turned out to be a misapprehension. Ah well.
And the "recording" feature they're talking about is a joke as well. I remember when I was 8 or 9 copying crap off the radio, because I didn't have enough cash to buy the album...Lunging across the room to hammer record and miss as little of the song as possible. Just what I want to regress to, 22 years later, WHILE DRIVING. I think not.
I've got a player with this "feature" and I've never once used it. Just when you think the RIAA can't possibly piss you off any more...
I used to work for this guy, and he was enamored of this software application called "SCObiz" (Yea, that SCO). Had to go to training for it, where it took me about 10 seconds to realize that the point of this software was to make money to fund McBrides legal scam, and deliver an overpriced mediocre product that was guaranteed to alienate customers. The sales end of it was a three tier pyramid scheme. Ugh. It was ugly.
So I ask the guy I was working for, "Why are we doing this?"
He replies, "There's a guy in california who's doing it and making 100,000 a month!"
I just looked at him, and said, "There is always one guy."
I think we ended up making less than 10k total off it, not counting the 6k we had to pay for the privledge of selling it.
Heh. That joker was actually a techie himself...A high level Unix admin. I turned the tables on him about 2 months later, when he was sitting where I was sitting, doing some weird network thing with his headphones on. Snuck up on his ass, and flicked the crap out of his ear.
He was quite peeved. Seemed to think my attempt to kill him earlier was payback enough. Ahhhh, it was sweet.
Actually, you pretty much hit the nail on the head, though it might be more accurate to call a GAL a "legal representative" rather than a guardian. A GAL is supposed to represent the interests of someone who is incompetent to stand trial...
If you're in a coma, and someone breaks into your house, falls down the stairs, and sues you, they'll appoint a GAL to represent your interests in court. It's more interesting in this sort of case because it becomes challenging to suggest that a person who has committed a civil offense, but is incompetent due to age, should be tried to the same standard as an incapacitated adult.
Were I the judge, I wouldn't touch this case with a 10 foot pole. It's a lose lose situation; either you're going to piss off congress and big business (at this point that grouping is almost redundant), or you're going to piss off everyone else.
I think the word he was looking for was "Hypocrisy" actually...Which is to say, someone who himself has spelling and grammar errors criticising someone else's spelling and grammar errors.
It's ironic (heh), that he confused hypocrisy with irony while criticising the use of the word "hypocrisy".
I spent a lot of time in college working in the computer labs with all manner of annoying idiocy going on around me all the time ("Ohmygoh, I like, slept with Bobby last night, and he like, called me Robert when he, you know, and I said, 'Robert? Do I LOOK like a guy to you?' Ohmygoh.") I learned to just crank whatever I was listening to, and ignore it. I got to the point where I didn't hear the music anymore, no matter how loud it was turned up.
I find a CD I've listened to 1000 times works best, because it's so familiar you can't really pay attention to it.
Actually it counts as an office because it has four walls, a ceiling, and a door. That's what "office" means.
An environment of quiet, distraction-free productivity is not a reality in the modern business world. I don't even have that when working from home. Being able to work effectively when things are loudly and freneticly going south is an excellent business skill to aquire.
Had a boss once who liked flicking me on the ear when I was coding, and when I'm coding, I put on the headphones, get into tunnel vision mode, and tune out the whole world. Having someone sneak up on me and flick me on the ear when I'm like that is the psychic equvalent of getting smacked with a 2x4. I was pretty rational about it at first, but we were pretty good friends, and he thought it was funny...
He did it about 3 times, and on the fourth time I snapped. I can't remember ever being so mad...I was so mad it wasn't even like being mad. I had a real moment where I really thought I might attack him, not a little scuffle or anything, but seriously out for blood...really wavered on it for a moment...then I turned and put my fist through two layers of a prefab wall.
Not my finest hour. Though it does mark the only point in my programming career where I found a use for the ability to repair drywall.
That kind of crap is hardwired with me. Normally it's not much of an issue, because how often do you end up with people literally sneaking up on you in a business environment? Used to be really useful in college...I could crash on a couch after a party and no one would even think about pulling post-party pranks on me.
But the first thing I do when I get a new job, is find a place to put my desk where no one can walk up without me seeing them. Better safe than sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say that there is insufficient demand if you can't make money at it...That or the supplier wasn't connecting effectively with the demand.
If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door...If they find out you created a better mousetrap, and figured out where your door was.
Seems like he could have used the same bug to make "Javascript" into:
j-a-v-a-s-c-r-i-p-t, with each character on a new line. It'd be pretty hard for a filter to catch something like that, though I suppose they could strip out newlines and whitespace as well and just look for character sequences.
What a pain in the butt though. Seems like M$ could just produce a browser that doesn't go out of its way to screw itself.
I think Heisenberg would have said that you can know where the key is, or you can press it, you just can't do both.
It's going to change/steal all of our future programming!
WTF?
The reason the programming exists in the first place is because there is demand for it. The fact that it's now being shown through a different medium is irrelevant to that demand.
And where there is demand, someone will find a way to make money off supplying that demand. Just simple economics.
It doesn't work that way...Look at CGI films. As the technology becomes more widely adopted, the tools become cheaper and more accessable, and everybody starts using them, while the super high-end blockbuster effects types start working on the next generation, which costs a mint today but will be the cheapo standard tomorrow.
So when super real graphics become the standard, the focus will shift away from them. It's simply inevitable.
They'd probably still throw you in jail, even if you worked for K/R...Not that K/R would have ever let you print the pic in the first place.
Yer math is a bit off. 90/200 is right...for a 200 meg drive. But for a 200 gig drive, it's 90/200,000 (counting 1000 megs to the gig, which is wrong), which equals .00045 cents per meg, which means one meg in floppy cash is equal to 466 megs in harddrive cash.
.21, .21 * 200,000)...A bit more than twice the price of a 200 gig hard drive.
So a 200 gig drive made of floppies would cost about $42,000 (1 meg =
Heh. From what I know of the Dutch, I'd be more likely to believe the submitter was Dutch if there wasn't a grammatical error. I hear they make fun of school kids over there who only speak three languages.
That being said, you're probably right. The most common mistake people make in foreign languages is subject/verb agreement.
Eh. Don't knock the subscriber fee; that pays for a lot of things. Pays for the guy who carries it to your door, pays for the guy who carries it to the guy who carries it to your door. These days, with gas prices up, that doesn't cover all that much.
It's not unusual for a newspaper to make 25-30% of it's revenue from a subscriber base...and considering how weak TV news is on anything that isn't on fire or under water, I don't mind paying a quarter a day, or whatever the going rate is.
Sad but true...DDoS extortion is actually pretty common. Not really much other use for a botnet that big...'cept maybe to crunch an unholy large number of SETI packets.
Maybe if they put all those computers together to type up story submissions, occasionally I wouldn't have to see one with a glaring gramatical error in the first three words.
Actually, you're completely wrong. I spoke very carefully...Ethically speaking, there is no moral component to following the law. The moral component comes in how you apply the law; in this case they're using it to try and deprive rights from a large company with tons of government contracts...Not exactly an easy target.
As it stands, its just two companies fighting it out over some chunk of cash, the same thing that happens all the time, everywhere. Therefore, no ethical component.
Though, in my personal opinion, you're right, they're scum.
Perhaps you would like to point out how the current system is better?
Right now we have a system that is set up so that the little man can go in and effectively block production of a product forever. This is idiotic. Period.
Patents that are never implemented should either be invalid or they should lapse as soon as someone else implements it. I frankly have no sympathy; if you can't get it done, then get out of the way and let someone else do it. End of story. This "IP Hostage" crap has got to go.
Nothing to do with ethics, it's to do with our crappy IP laws. Ethically, the only thing that can be said about them is that they're following the law.
I do think, however, that all such IP claims, based on nothing, should be thrown out when someone else produces a viable product first. The idea is to protect innovation, not to protect a group of idiots sitting around in a room, patenting anything that flies out of their mouths. The idea of a thing isn't worth crap compared to the massive NRE that goes into making it work in the real world.
I wish more of these pie-in-the-sky morons understood that. Patented the idea of wireless email? You've got to be kidding. It's like they looked at all technology that was blowing up 10 years ago, and said, "Let's put 'wireless' in front of that and patent it."
I used to work as a DJ...They call that a "post" and it's the mark of a "good" DJ that they talk until a fraction of a second before the first words (they call that "hitting the post"). I was never a "good" DJ in that sense, exactly because I had spent my childhood cursing those jackasses.
I still have tapes lying around with inane DJ crap from the 80's immortalized on them...And my own inane crap from 1997-2000 as well.
Heh. Well, I generally leave my "MyFi" (Gag. Stupid name.) sitting in the passenger seat, so it's more like leaning over, picking it up, fiddling with buttons...It's just too much bother when driving. I never use it when I'm not in the car (rather listen to MP3s), so if it ain't easy to do in the car, I don't do it.
I should have just bought an iPod, but I had a perception of satelite radio that turned out to be a misapprehension. Ah well.
It's not even close, trust me.
And the "recording" feature they're talking about is a joke as well. I remember when I was 8 or 9 copying crap off the radio, because I didn't have enough cash to buy the album...Lunging across the room to hammer record and miss as little of the song as possible. Just what I want to regress to, 22 years later, WHILE DRIVING. I think not.
I've got a player with this "feature" and I've never once used it. Just when you think the RIAA can't possibly piss you off any more...
I used to work for this guy, and he was enamored of this software application called "SCObiz" (Yea, that SCO). Had to go to training for it, where it took me about 10 seconds to realize that the point of this software was to make money to fund McBrides legal scam, and deliver an overpriced mediocre product that was guaranteed to alienate customers. The sales end of it was a three tier pyramid scheme. Ugh. It was ugly.
So I ask the guy I was working for, "Why are we doing this?"
He replies, "There's a guy in california who's doing it and making 100,000 a month!"
I just looked at him, and said, "There is always one guy."
I think we ended up making less than 10k total off it, not counting the 6k we had to pay for the privledge of selling it.
Heh. That joker was actually a techie himself...A high level Unix admin. I turned the tables on him about 2 months later, when he was sitting where I was sitting, doing some weird network thing with his headphones on. Snuck up on his ass, and flicked the crap out of his ear.
He was quite peeved. Seemed to think my attempt to kill him earlier was payback enough. Ahhhh, it was sweet.
Actually, you pretty much hit the nail on the head, though it might be more accurate to call a GAL a "legal representative" rather than a guardian. A GAL is supposed to represent the interests of someone who is incompetent to stand trial...
If you're in a coma, and someone breaks into your house, falls down the stairs, and sues you, they'll appoint a GAL to represent your interests in court. It's more interesting in this sort of case because it becomes challenging to suggest that a person who has committed a civil offense, but is incompetent due to age, should be tried to the same standard as an incapacitated adult.
Were I the judge, I wouldn't touch this case with a 10 foot pole. It's a lose lose situation; either you're going to piss off congress and big business (at this point that grouping is almost redundant), or you're going to piss off everyone else.
Philosophy type persons think murder==copyright infringement? I think you've got us confused with Republicans.
I think the word he was looking for was "Hypocrisy" actually...Which is to say, someone who himself has spelling and grammar errors criticising someone else's spelling and grammar errors.
It's ironic (heh), that he confused hypocrisy with irony while criticising the use of the word "hypocrisy".
Yea, the price is pretty similar too.
Oh...Wait...
I spent a lot of time in college working in the computer labs with all manner of annoying idiocy going on around me all the time ("Ohmygoh, I like, slept with Bobby last night, and he like, called me Robert when he, you know, and I said, 'Robert? Do I LOOK like a guy to you?' Ohmygoh.") I learned to just crank whatever I was listening to, and ignore it. I got to the point where I didn't hear the music anymore, no matter how loud it was turned up.
I find a CD I've listened to 1000 times works best, because it's so familiar you can't really pay attention to it.
Actually it counts as an office because it has four walls, a ceiling, and a door. That's what "office" means.
An environment of quiet, distraction-free productivity is not a reality in the modern business world. I don't even have that when working from home. Being able to work effectively when things are loudly and freneticly going south is an excellent business skill to aquire.
Yea, well I came real close once.
Had a boss once who liked flicking me on the ear when I was coding, and when I'm coding, I put on the headphones, get into tunnel vision mode, and tune out the whole world. Having someone sneak up on me and flick me on the ear when I'm like that is the psychic equvalent of getting smacked with a 2x4. I was pretty rational about it at first, but we were pretty good friends, and he thought it was funny...
He did it about 3 times, and on the fourth time I snapped. I can't remember ever being so mad...I was so mad it wasn't even like being mad. I had a real moment where I really thought I might attack him, not a little scuffle or anything, but seriously out for blood...really wavered on it for a moment...then I turned and put my fist through two layers of a prefab wall.
Not my finest hour. Though it does mark the only point in my programming career where I found a use for the ability to repair drywall.
That kind of crap is hardwired with me. Normally it's not much of an issue, because how often do you end up with people literally sneaking up on you in a business environment? Used to be really useful in college...I could crash on a couch after a party and no one would even think about pulling post-party pranks on me.
But the first thing I do when I get a new job, is find a place to put my desk where no one can walk up without me seeing them. Better safe than sorry.