Most spammers are from overseas in non-cooperative countries (with the US). This is a US law. What do they care? This law has no effect on illegal spamming. Besides, a vast majority of it comes from compromised home Windows boxes...they should just sue microsoft for making shatty insecure O/S' which help increase your daily spam. All it's going to to is get a lot of innocent and naive computer users in trouble for not securing their boxes and allowing overseas spam to bounce through their home PC's.
Not sure what state you live in, but here I pay "Less for more choices" Observe:
Monopolistic Cox cable internet: $37/mo DOWN: 24Kbs - 1000Kbs; no guarenteed minimium (I had 24Kbs everynight at peak hours!) UP: 14KBs - 24KBs DOWNTIME: 12-24 hours per month BLOCKING: web, ssl, smtp, pop and other server ports including some P2P common ports
Competition at it's best (AKA choices): SWBell ADSL: $29/mo DOWN: 384Kbs - 1500Kbs; guarenteed minimium (I get solid conection at 1150Kbs) UP: 16KBs - 32KBs DOWNTIME: 4 times in 2 year...when MY electricity went out. BLOCKING: none
Direct TV offers ADSL at about the same price as SWBell, as does one other provider...hence the lower cost of DSL over Cable (in my area).
BTW, Cox cable sucks...petition your senators/congressmen for anti-monopolistic cable laws. Hey, I am originially from a state with cable/phone/electicity choices...I miss it dearly;)
Well, there is nothing wrong with non-obtrusive, non-distracting banner ads...but those are not the banners that have created the hatred and the anti-ad software. I, like many I know, have issues trying to actually read the article content on a page while a banner is constantly flashing, popping, moving, or whatever, while you are reading. If ads were not such a headache causer for a user, I am sure this would not even be an issue. I remember static ads for years on the internet, and no one ever really complained about them. But it hasn't been until the pop-ups and continuous bombardment of motion pictions has it been an issue, I mean some have so many pop-ups you can't even find the desktop >:( So, as long as these blockers are just blocking the anoying ones, I don't really care...but we know that won't be the case, so I am going to have to care...oh wait, I use Linux and mozilla so I don't have to worry about pop-ups OR anti-virus software:D
Because if I wanted big brother in my box, I would use SELinux. There is no need for anyone to mandate total logging of what I do. If SELinux merges with Linux, them I'm off to BSD, or somewhere where big brother is not.
"I intend to honor my family by maintaining the freedoms they died for!"
This quote really says it all. Kopete and Gaim are already working on a solution. You wont find either of those mentioned in the article, why? Because they don't CHARGE $$$ for people to use someone elses service, like Tillian does. Trillian is nothing but a leech that deserves to be shut down. That is why Microsoft only gave trillian access to its new MSN protocol after Trillian agreed to pay a fee.
I mean seriously, if you had a service you were providing for free/ad-ware, and some company added monthly costs to your bandwidth and cpu usage, and you received no money from them, yet they charged a fairly steep fee, wouldn't you be ticked off too?
BTW, Kopete has already released a fix for MSN, and both (Kopete and Gaim) are working on fixes for MSN and Yahoo! to be released soon.
Macs hold only 4% of desktop O/S' and Linux is at 1%. At only 1% of the market why waste their time? At home I run 100% linux, but at work I develope M$ only software...why? Because it is impossible to explain how all the extra effort (programming exceptions, beta testing, extra hardware/software) is worth going cross platform for only 5% of the market, Unfortunatly, it's simple economics at this point. Get more of your friends to move to Linux, do something to make the home market grow to even 20%, and you will have your Linux support for everything. In the mean time, I write programs in my spare time to make Linux more enjoyable for the masses, as do *many* others. We'll get there...just not quite yet.
Seriously, I am tired of people finding someone else to blame just to get money. Laws are not for parenting. If you don't know how to be a parent then that is your problem, do not make it mine by making the government's job to be your parent because you are a lazy sack of crap.
Maybe it's time we took a step back. I am pushing 30 years old and my generation has it's good people and it's bad. I went to school in New Jersey, but never had metal detectors nor serious any problems with with weapons or kids shooting each other. We duked it out after school one-on-one, and took care of it that way. We had not nearly as many laws as kids do today, to dictate what we could and could not do, that's what our parents did. Oh, and if you say that "well tv, video games, and music got more violent" I would say to you "well, you know what, I wouldn't know because my parents monitored that stuff, and I wasn't allowed to watch rated R movies, and my parents didn't let me watch late night tv, why? because it was for adults, which I clearly was not!" Now, in today's world, it is the movie industry, or game industry's fault, and the child has to go to some kind of counceling? No wonder kids are going around shooting everyone at their 8-3 prison (aka school) that has metal detectors, and riots, and no money for books or pencils, and a chain-linked fence around the playground...if the playground wasn't removed due to the trailers that house the over population of the school building. If there weren't so many worthless lawsuits in this country maybe we'd have better school systems.
The victims should sue the parents for not being proper parents, not the gaming industry whose outcome will effect all of our lives. I did not vote for these people to make up laws for me! They need to attack those who are at fault, the lazy crappy parents who shouldn't even have let a freakin' gun laying around for the kids to use in the first place!
"The shareholders need to know what their games are doing to kids and their families." No, the parents need to learn how to read the damned warning labels, and what they are doing to their kids and families!
...google won't be able to link to any patented, trade marked, or service marked material, either...without explicit written consent by the owners, or a fee to said owners. Gee, I guess all search engines should just take themselves off the web now, and save us all the headache.
While I can't vouch as to whether a slower cd burner produces better cd quality, I can say that I have an old HP 2xWR and 4xR burner for many years, and even at 4x, I have had lots of flaky discs. How did I fight against this? I bought better CD's! Each CD is made with different materials, the blue and green are the weakest cd's with the shortest life span (one of those is worse then the other...but I forget which). Silver is in the middle, and gold is at the high end (reportedly platinum is better then gold cd's, but obviously not something easily found). In any case, when archiving media that is critical, I always opt for my more expensive sony CD-R's that contain higher quantities of gold, and that have that lifetime warenty for your media. Fuji is another company I have used as well, and their gold CD's have like a 500 year warrenty or something. Anyway...most of all my generic, blue, and green CD's almost all loose at least 1% readability failure within 3-4 years, but I have yet to lose data on the gold CD's.
Also, when I refer to the type of cd, like gold, it does not necessarily mean the entire cd is gold, but has gold substances in it, which makes the bottom of the cd have a gold apprearance. In other words, it is not entirely gold.
I have used Linux since slackware 3.6a. I have tried slackware upto 7.0 then to redhat 5.2 at some point, then suse 7.0 and 8.1 and one of the more recent debian builds in between the suse versions.
Why SuSE? A few reasons: 1. it works out of the box on every box from my an old p75 to my newest 2.4GHz with and without scsi, and raid. 2. it has the shortest install time, esp. since everything is now on one DVD or 7 CD's...everything is right there for you. 3. yast2. the way suse can handle both tarballs and.rpm's with more ese then my redhat 5.2 could 4 it has a killer firewall script that is just extremely fast to edit, so i don't ahve to waste hours rewritng my firewall whenever i move a box from its role to a new one, or 10-15 minutes just to play a new online game or something.
Slackware is and was great, but i got tired of wasting all the time building from tarballs.
Redhat was just riddled with bugs and problems, even installing its own rpm's
However, I think SuSE has seen its day, too. They have gone too proprietary, and non-standard compliant, making it a pain in the rear to update these days. Needless to say 3 years of SuSE is now soon to be over on my boxes...back to slackware or maybe something new, for I shall not use RedHat due to past experience, and I will not use it simply because "its what everyone else uses"...which is why most people in the US use it, I think. Because I never found it that impressive compared to other distros.
I think the "raise the stock and sell it" theory is probably dead on. Consider that they filed suite around March 27, 2003, then go look at the stock: yahoo 6mo quote
It's a gambit to make as much money as possible before going backrupt.
I agree, Crucial is one of the best ones I have come across, not one dead stick since I started using them in 1997. Of the 12 kingston chips I have come across, 4 of them were dead...so much for their reputation IMO.
Of course no one calls in and reports bugs to microsoft, it costs >=$25 per phone call, and must give a CC# before even getting though. Oh, and forget about it if you have a server, >=$235. Who would report bugs, if it costs you money to do so?
While the knowledge base is useful, I have, on many occasions, recieved the fix as being "Microsoft has a fix for this problem, but you must call to get the information on how to resolve this issue"...then I have to pay $$ to get it. And since it *only* ran 2000 server, I will garentee that it was not a 3rd part software causing the problem!
So, I guess his statement is correct, but blatently biased...to the point of a lie.
Everything is illegal somewhere. If country X thinks Y is illegal, then it is up to country X to do sometihng about it within their own country.
This should not be allowed to stand, and any judge that doesn't take kickbacks should see this. Could you imagine if China started sueing US citizens because they posted something on the internet that they should not be allowed to see? China vs Google: "China requests the extradistion of all google authors to face persecution in Bejing. For posting democratic news which is inviolation of Chinese law" Yeah, right, like that would ever hold up!
The US is way out of line (isn't this exactly what my ancestors fought AGAINST in 1770's?).
Why not sue the people for violating their own laws of Ca.? Why not sue the Californian ISP's?
California has too many stupid laws to begin with, if I wanted their laws enforced upon me, I would move there...which is exactly why I don't live there! California needs to understand what the laws of this country are, and they need to read and understand the constitution that governs them.
Go Kazaa!:^)
BTW, I don't even use P2P...it's just the principle of the issue.
Also, Ada Lovelase (Byron) assited Charles Babbage.
How about:
John von Newmann ("von Newmann architecture"),
John Backus (FORTRAN),
Niklaus Writh (Pascal),
Dan Bricklin/Bob Frankston (first spreadsheet - VisiCalc),
IMO, Bill Gates is not an inovator, he is a buisiness man who invented nothing that wasn't already on the market in the 80's.
hmmm long term memory kicks in ...
on
Pinewood Derby Tips?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Let's see.
my body was no thicker then my pinky in the front of the car which came to a rounded point in the front. The back was no thicker then my thumb.
I put wood puddy (putty? hrm, it's late) in the middle where most of the fishing weights and lead were hidden. It looked like a cockpit/bubble like thing on the top middle. But I also had a door for access to a small amount of loose wieghts on the bottom for find tuning.
I even put a spoiler over the back wheels for kicks. With 2 wood dollies holding up a trianglar piece of wood on top. Hey, it looked cool;^)
But after all is said and done, it is all about the wheels. I have seen people take 3rd with an un carved square block with weights.
Sand the wheels with some of the finest sand paper you can get (220grit at least, but the last of the sand papers was almost like paper it was so smooth...dont remember the grit on that one, though). I remember sanding the wheels for more hours then builing the thing. Also, I used graphite powder on the wheel nails for lubrication.
I won two 1st places in cub scouts with this design and one 2rd place later racing against the adults as a cubmaster.
(afterthought):
It's alot like Linux, you can get it for free via download, but if you want to be able to get installation, or general setup support, you need to purchase it seperately from a 3rd party or the distribution company (e.g. purchasing it retail). True, you can look on the internet/usenet for support, but that is just a community of some really smart people willing to share their knowledge of something they might better understand, or have encounterd (and solved) themselves. So, if there is an error with this software, there are many people smart enough to figure out a fix on their own (I am usually not one of them;) who can assist with publicly posted problems.
So, really, you are just paying to use "their" forums, hosted on "their" servers, and maintenanced by "them" to obtain "their" technicians support time. So, I don't see much of a problem with it (eek, did I just say that?...I just stuck up for a corporation...what's wrong with me?! ahhh!).
I have always been taught, both via institutional learning and private corporation classes, that "mantanance is 80% of cost". All the planning, hardware, software development, etc. is part of the 20% of the money that is for this project. After the product (whether it is a web server, database server, software, or whatever) is completed to the point where it is ready for mainstream production, the other 80% of the funds allocated for said project is used to maintain, tweak, debug (bugs not caught in QA), optimize, etc. the product.
I briefly looked over the link, and it did seem that installation problems also required the fee (but I could have very easily overlooked something). If installation support can only be obtained with a fee, then this is just not good buisiness...for the company or customers. However, if it is *just* for support after installation, this is good business practice for the company. If the customers like program, they will pay to fix it if/when it has an issue, while simultaniously dramatically reducing that %80 cost percentage for the business.
IMHO, it should be free code, and pay for all support, other then installation support, if you need it. It's one of the few ways a company can make any money with open-source.
I think that the key word here is "DURING". If he posted the material/after/ the assignment was due, then there is no breach of policy. By posting it after the assignments are due, it is then considered a reference, and not assistance. Many students posted CS programming assignments on the web when I attended Rutgers, and the only time anyone got in trouble was if it was distributed before the assignment was due. (however, this was several years ago, and policies may have changed).
I believe he has a strong argument provided that he was using it to A) as a reference to/for himself and/or B) refers to this page to others when, for example, applying for a job or other similar situations.
Although, after everything is said, you should really put this on a free web site, and just put a link to the free site on your.edu homepage...this would solve and conflict of interests.
Last thought: Many University professors (the not so lazy ones, anyway) put old exams in the library for students to prepare with, because they *change the assignments* every year. If the professor was a little better, maybe this wouldn't be an issue, either. It can be argued that the classic programming techniques need to be taught, but there are a million and one program assignments that can be used to teach what an array, hash, function, subroutine, etc. are used for and how to incorporate them in any program. The entire purpose of *learning* programming (note: learning is not the same as memorizing) is to be able to write a program for ANY situation, not just some static textbook example. Maybe what you are doing will force the professor to change his ways in order to benefit the students in the real world, not just in theories!
There is no way they will give them the/entire/ source for/free/ without a catch. It goes against the very foundation of everything microshaft is. It is just a ploy because M$ is scared crapless of the open-source movement and the fact that India is seriously considering Linux (or have they already decided on it for gov't use?). I just hope India is smart enough to see through their deceptions.
Hey, maybe the US DOJ can purchase it from India, then?:p
Slashdot Mirror
Most spammers are from overseas in non-cooperative countries (with the US). This is a US law. What do they care? This law has no effect on illegal spamming. Besides, a vast majority of it comes from compromised home Windows boxes...they should just sue microsoft for making shatty insecure O/S' which help increase your daily spam. All it's going to to is get a lot of innocent and naive computer users in trouble for not securing their boxes and allowing overseas spam to bounce through their home PC's.
Not sure what state you live in, but here I pay "Less for more choices" Observe:
;)
Monopolistic Cox cable internet:
$37/mo
DOWN: 24Kbs - 1000Kbs; no guarenteed minimium (I had 24Kbs everynight at peak hours!)
UP: 14KBs - 24KBs
DOWNTIME: 12-24 hours per month
BLOCKING: web, ssl, smtp, pop and other server ports including some P2P common ports
Competition at it's best (AKA choices):
SWBell ADSL:
$29/mo
DOWN: 384Kbs - 1500Kbs; guarenteed minimium (I get solid conection at 1150Kbs)
UP: 16KBs - 32KBs
DOWNTIME: 4 times in 2 year...when MY electricity went out.
BLOCKING: none
Direct TV offers ADSL at about the same price as SWBell, as does one other provider...hence the lower cost of DSL over Cable (in my area).
BTW, Cox cable sucks...petition your senators/congressmen for anti-monopolistic cable laws. Hey, I am originially from a state with cable/phone/electicity choices...I miss it dearly
Well, there is nothing wrong with non-obtrusive, non-distracting banner ads...but those are not the banners that have created the hatred and the anti-ad software. I, like many I know, have issues trying to actually read the article content on a page while a banner is constantly flashing, popping, moving, or whatever, while you are reading. If ads were not such a headache causer for a user, I am sure this would not even be an issue. I remember static ads for years on the internet, and no one ever really complained about them. But it hasn't been until the pop-ups and continuous bombardment of motion pictions has it been an issue, I mean some have so many pop-ups you can't even find the desktop >:( :D
So, as long as these blockers are just blocking the anoying ones, I don't really care...but we know that won't be the case, so I am going to have to care...oh wait, I use Linux and mozilla so I don't have to worry about pop-ups OR anti-virus software
Why not just merge SELinux with Linux?
Because if I wanted big brother in my box, I would use SELinux. There is no need for anyone to mandate total logging of what I do. If SELinux merges with Linux, them I'm off to BSD, or somewhere where big brother is not.
"I intend to honor my family by maintaining the freedoms they died for!"
This quote really says it all. Kopete and Gaim are already working on a solution. You wont find either of those mentioned in the article, why? Because they don't CHARGE $$$ for people to use someone elses service, like Tillian does. Trillian is nothing but a leech that deserves to be shut down. That is why Microsoft only gave trillian access to its new MSN protocol after Trillian agreed to pay a fee.
I mean seriously, if you had a service you were providing for free/ad-ware, and some company added monthly costs to your bandwidth and cpu usage, and you received no money from them, yet they charged a fairly steep fee, wouldn't you be ticked off too?
BTW, Kopete has already released a fix for MSN, and both (Kopete and Gaim) are working on fixes for MSN and Yahoo! to be released soon.
Macs hold only 4% of desktop O/S' and Linux is at 1%. At only 1% of the market why waste their time? At home I run 100% linux, but at work I develope M$ only software...why? Because it is impossible to explain how all the extra effort (programming exceptions, beta testing, extra hardware/software) is worth going cross platform for only 5% of the market, Unfortunatly, it's simple economics at this point. Get more of your friends to move to Linux, do something to make the home market grow to even 20%, and you will have your Linux support for everything. In the mean time, I write programs in my spare time to make Linux more enjoyable for the masses, as do *many* others. We'll get there...just not quite yet.
Seriously, I am tired of people finding someone else to blame just to get money. Laws are not for parenting. If you don't know how to be a parent then that is your problem, do not make it mine by making the government's job to be your parent because you are a lazy sack of crap.
Maybe it's time we took a step back. I am pushing 30 years old and my generation has it's good people and it's bad. I went to school in New Jersey, but never had metal detectors nor serious any problems with with weapons or kids shooting each other. We duked it out after school one-on-one, and took care of it that way. We had not nearly as many laws as kids do today, to dictate what we could and could not do, that's what our parents did. Oh, and if you say that "well tv, video games, and music got more violent" I would say to you "well, you know what, I wouldn't know because my parents monitored that stuff, and I wasn't allowed to watch rated R movies, and my parents didn't let me watch late night tv, why? because it was for adults, which I clearly was not!" Now, in today's world, it is the movie industry, or game industry's fault, and the child has to go to some kind of counceling? No wonder kids are going around shooting everyone at their 8-3 prison (aka school) that has metal detectors, and riots, and no money for books or pencils, and a chain-linked fence around the playground...if the playground wasn't removed due to the trailers that house the over population of the school building. If there weren't so many worthless lawsuits in this country maybe we'd have better school systems.
The victims should sue the parents for not being proper parents, not the gaming industry whose outcome will effect all of our lives. I did not vote for these people to make up laws for me! They need to attack those who are at fault, the lazy crappy parents who shouldn't even have let a freakin' gun laying around for the kids to use in the first place!
"The shareholders need to know what their games are doing to kids and their families." No, the parents need to learn how to read the damned warning labels, and what they are doing to their kids and families!
...google won't be able to link to any patented, trade marked, or service marked material, either...without explicit written consent by the owners, or a fee to said owners. Gee, I guess all search engines should just take themselves off the web now, and save us all the headache.
While I can't vouch as to whether a slower cd burner produces better cd quality, I can say that I have an old HP 2xWR and 4xR burner for many years, and even at 4x, I have had lots of flaky discs. How did I fight against this? I bought better CD's! Each CD is made with different materials, the blue and green are the weakest cd's with the shortest life span (one of those is worse then the other...but I forget which). Silver is in the middle, and gold is at the high end (reportedly platinum is better then gold cd's, but obviously not something easily found). In any case, when archiving media that is critical, I always opt for my more expensive sony CD-R's that contain higher quantities of gold, and that have that lifetime warenty for your media. Fuji is another company I have used as well, and their gold CD's have like a 500 year warrenty or something. Anyway...most of all my generic, blue, and green CD's almost all loose at least 1% readability failure within 3-4 years, but I have yet to lose data on the gold CD's.
Also, when I refer to the type of cd, like gold, it does not necessarily mean the entire cd is gold, but has gold substances in it, which makes the bottom of the cd have a gold apprearance. In other words, it is not entirely gold.
I have used Linux since slackware 3.6a. I have tried slackware upto 7.0 then to redhat 5.2 at some point, then suse 7.0 and 8.1 and one of the more recent debian builds in between the suse versions.
...everything is right there for you. .rpm's with more ese then my redhat 5.2 could
Why SuSE? A few reasons:
1. it works out of the box on every box from my an old p75 to my newest 2.4GHz with and without scsi, and raid.
2. it has the shortest install time, esp. since everything is now on one DVD or 7 CD's
3. yast2. the way suse can handle both tarballs and
4 it has a killer firewall script that is just extremely fast to edit, so i don't ahve to waste hours rewritng my firewall whenever i move a box from its role to a new one, or 10-15 minutes just to play a new online game or something.
Slackware is and was great, but i got tired of wasting all the time building from tarballs.
Redhat was just riddled with bugs and problems, even installing its own rpm's
However, I think SuSE has seen its day, too. They have gone too proprietary, and non-standard compliant, making it a pain in the rear to update these days. Needless to say 3 years of SuSE is now soon to be over on my boxes...back to slackware or maybe something new, for I shall not use RedHat due to past experience, and I will not use it simply because "its what everyone else uses"...which is why most people in the US use it, I think. Because I never found it that impressive compared to other distros.
oh, and i live in the US, also.
I think the "raise the stock and sell it" theory is probably dead on. Consider that they filed suite around March 27, 2003, then go look at the stock:
yahoo 6mo quote
It's a gambit to make as much money as possible before going backrupt.
I agree, Crucial is one of the best ones I have come across, not one dead stick since I started using them in 1997. Of the 12 kingston chips I have come across, 4 of them were dead...so much for their reputation IMO.
Of course no one calls in and reports bugs to microsoft, it costs >=$25 per phone call, and must give a CC# before even getting though. Oh, and forget about it if you have a server, >=$235. Who would report bugs, if it costs you money to do so?
While the knowledge base is useful, I have, on many occasions, recieved the fix as being "Microsoft has a fix for this problem, but you must call to get the information on how to resolve this issue"...then I have to pay $$ to get it. And since it *only* ran 2000 server, I will garentee that it was not a 3rd part software causing the problem!
So, I guess his statement is correct, but blatently biased...to the point of a lie.
Everything is illegal somewhere. If country X thinks Y is illegal, then it is up to country X to do sometihng about it within their own country.
:^)
This should not be allowed to stand, and any judge that doesn't take kickbacks should see this. Could you imagine if China started sueing US citizens because they posted something on the internet that they should not be allowed to see? China vs Google: "China requests the extradistion of all google authors to face persecution in Bejing. For posting democratic news which is inviolation of Chinese law" Yeah, right, like that would ever hold up!
The US is way out of line (isn't this exactly what my ancestors fought AGAINST in 1770's?).
Why not sue the people for violating their own laws of Ca.? Why not sue the Californian ISP's? California has too many stupid laws to begin with, if I wanted their laws enforced upon me, I would move there...which is exactly why I don't live there! California needs to understand what the laws of this country are, and they need to read and understand the constitution that governs them.
Go Kazaa!
BTW, I don't even use P2P...it's just the principle of the issue.
The folowing has some people: softwarehistory important people
Also, Ada Lovelase (Byron) assited Charles Babbage. How about: John von Newmann ("von Newmann architecture"), John Backus (FORTRAN), Niklaus Writh (Pascal), Dan Bricklin/Bob Frankston (first spreadsheet - VisiCalc),
IMO, Bill Gates is not an inovator, he is a buisiness man who invented nothing that wasn't already on the market in the 80's.
Let's see. my body was no thicker then my pinky in the front of the car which came to a rounded point in the front. The back was no thicker then my thumb.
;^)
:^)
I put wood puddy (putty? hrm, it's late) in the middle where most of the fishing weights and lead were hidden. It looked like a cockpit/bubble like thing on the top middle. But I also had a door for access to a small amount of loose wieghts on the bottom for find tuning.
I even put a spoiler over the back wheels for kicks. With 2 wood dollies holding up a trianglar piece of wood on top. Hey, it looked cool
But after all is said and done, it is all about the wheels. I have seen people take 3rd with an un carved square block with weights.
Sand the wheels with some of the finest sand paper you can get (220grit at least, but the last of the sand papers was almost like paper it was so smooth...dont remember the grit on that one, though). I remember sanding the wheels for more hours then builing the thing. Also, I used graphite powder on the wheel nails for lubrication.
I won two 1st places in cub scouts with this design and one 2rd place later racing against the adults as a cubmaster.
Have fun
(afterthought): It's alot like Linux, you can get it for free via download, but if you want to be able to get installation, or general setup support, you need to purchase it seperately from a 3rd party or the distribution company (e.g. purchasing it retail). True, you can look on the internet/usenet for support, but that is just a community of some really smart people willing to share their knowledge of something they might better understand, or have encounterd (and solved) themselves. So, if there is an error with this software, there are many people smart enough to figure out a fix on their own (I am usually not one of them ;) who can assist with publicly posted problems.
...I just stuck up for a corporation ...what's wrong with me?! ahhh!).
So, really, you are just paying to use "their" forums, hosted on "their" servers, and maintenanced by "them" to obtain "their" technicians support time. So, I don't see much of a problem with it (eek, did I just say that?
I have always been taught, both via institutional learning and private corporation classes, that "mantanance is 80% of cost". All the planning, hardware, software development, etc. is part of the 20% of the money that is for this project. After the product (whether it is a web server, database server, software, or whatever) is completed to the point where it is ready for mainstream production, the other 80% of the funds allocated for said project is used to maintain, tweak, debug (bugs not caught in QA), optimize, etc. the product.
I briefly looked over the link, and it did seem that installation problems also required the fee (but I could have very easily overlooked something). If installation support can only be obtained with a fee, then this is just not good buisiness...for the company or customers. However, if it is *just* for support after installation, this is good business practice for the company. If the customers like program, they will pay to fix it if/when it has an issue, while simultaniously dramatically reducing that %80 cost percentage for the business.
IMHO, it should be free code, and pay for all support, other then installation support, if you need it. It's one of the few ways a company can make any money with open-source.
I think that the key word here is "DURING". If he posted the material /after/ the assignment was due, then there is no breach of policy. By posting it after the assignments are due, it is then considered a reference, and not assistance. Many students posted CS programming assignments on the web when I attended Rutgers, and the only time anyone got in trouble was if it was distributed before the assignment was due. (however, this was several years ago, and policies may have changed).
.edu homepage...this would solve and conflict of interests.
I believe he has a strong argument provided that he was using it to A) as a reference to/for himself and/or B) refers to this page to others when, for example, applying for a job or other similar situations.
Although, after everything is said, you should really put this on a free web site, and just put a link to the free site on your
Last thought: Many University professors (the not so lazy ones, anyway) put old exams in the library for students to prepare with, because they *change the assignments* every year. If the professor was a little better, maybe this wouldn't be an issue, either. It can be argued that the classic programming techniques need to be taught, but there are a million and one program assignments that can be used to teach what an array, hash, function, subroutine, etc. are used for and how to incorporate them in any program. The entire purpose of *learning* programming (note: learning is not the same as memorizing) is to be able to write a program for ANY situation, not just some static textbook example. Maybe what you are doing will force the professor to change his ways in order to benefit the students in the real world, not just in theories!
There is no way they will give them the /entire/ source for /free/ without a catch. It goes against the very foundation of everything microshaft is. It is just a ploy because M$ is scared crapless of the open-source movement and the fact that India is seriously considering Linux (or have they already decided on it for gov't use?). I just hope India is smart enough to see through their deceptions.
:p
Hey, maybe the US DOJ can purchase it from India, then?