I can't even imagine where the web would be today without Perl, PHP and Python. Perl and Python are excellent CGI languages and PHP 5.0/5.1 is a great substitute for commercial products like ASP.NET in many cases. Small businesses and home users simply don't need all of the wiz bang features of something like ASP/JSP. OSS has definitely stepped in to provide a lot of power to the little guys who want it. Now Mono is rapidly becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft's.NET and Tomcat has been for a long time a very solid basis for J2EE web projects.
But perhaps the best thing about OSS is that it has helped to return a bit of an "ownership society" to software development. The GPL despite its problems says that it doesn't apply to you if you are just a regular user who isn't going to modify the code and redistribute the changed binaries. For all intents and purposes, you "own" that code until you do something public with it that takes commercial advantage of it without meeting the GPL's requirements. That's a hell of a lot more property rights-centered than a typical industry EULA.
If file system compatibility really helped THAT much, then BeOS would have owned Linux and Be would be a viable contender today. BeOS' support for Fat32 and NTFS, especially in how easy it was for users to mount them from the desktop, was well above that of the Linux desktops of BeOS' day. When you wanted to mount a drive, a right click on the desktop showed the Fat32 and NTFS partitions as plainly as a BFS partition so the whole process was the same to John Q. Not only that, but BeOS back then also automatically recognized new partitions, something Linux did not and still doesn't seem to do well.
What keeps people loyal to Microsoft in the U.S. is the popularity of its products combined with the variety of games and home software for Windows. Office and Windows have a symbiotic relationship, you take down one, the other goes down eventually, but Windows is more important to Microsoft because the home market provides a solid foundation for Office. Installing a game on Windows is easy for the average home user, but not on Linux.
Game developers don't want to waste their time getting around that. Until a very comprehensive, attractive way to install home software is availible, Linux and other OSS projects will be left behind. The best way for Linux developers to get around this is probably to make a concerted effort to emulate Apple's framework system so that all of the dependencies one needs to have in place are part of the Linux game's ".app directory." Either that or program the games in a combination of C# and C and pray that Mono doesn't die on users.
Maybe it's just my perspective, but interoperability with things like FAT only do so much for the average user. In the long run, it's a lot more complicated than that. If interoperability were the key, then BeOS and MacOS X would have eaten Windows alive a long time ago.
The new For loop may seem to be just syntactic sugar, but it isn't. It really does make the code look a lot cleaner when you are iterating over a collection or an array. The type safe collections are also very handy--no more class cast exceptions and stuff like that.
It would be nice though if Sun would make Groovy or Jython a standard part of their java distribution. That would definitely make it competitive with.NET
I can't even imagine how much time you'd have to spend finding unique porn mailing lists to get enough spam to fill one of these babies up. You'd see so much T&A that sex would be just... boring....
I'm a legal layman but it sounds like they're taking the mens rea (guilty mind) out of it entirely. How do you determine if someone is "willing to do it?" At the rate they are going, why not just eschew all notions of this being about justice, since justice has to be both acquired for the victim and **delivered to** the perp.
If there was any copyright law for all sides to agree on opposing this is it. This is more of a thought police law than a copyright law.
I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see us
on
What The Bubble Got Right
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
His point about the rising power of nerds highlights something of great importance: the "old class relations" that sparked Marxism are essentially dead. In many respects now there is a symbiotic relationship between the large number of white collar workers and the "capitalist class" which allows for an almost give-take relationship.
Now I know that some will look to outsourcing and say, see class exploitation still exists! Yes, but it is the fault of the people of many of those countries. If your government is corrupt and you have a democratic system of government, why are your people systematically voting for political parties that keep your country from growing. America's corruption is bad, but it doesn't hinder growth anywhere near that of many developing or stagnate countries.
People often want it both ways. They don't want to adapt to a new economy, but they want all of the benefits. You have three choices, and these have existed for most of human history. You can lead, you can follow or you can be dominated. America leads, India follows, others are simply dominated because they refuse to follow the leaders' example and try to grow, and cannot lead on their own, thus another country steps in and economically dominates them. It doesn't mean it's right, but it's a fact of life.
The law of unintended consequences will one day come back to haunt corporate America if it doesn't realize en masse that domestic research and development and manufacturing are the safest route. The rule of law in America can be safeguarded, but Americans cannot do so around the world. The lesson of the "rise of the nerd" is that yes, you can start outsourcing jobs eventually to "regain power over the nerds" but what happens when those you outsource to abscond with your R&D results and your domestic nerd base is so atrophied that they can't compete?
The lesson of the modern economy is that businesses need to realize that no part of the company is less valuable than another. Whereas in the past, the rich could safely exploit their employees, they now do it at the risk of their own base of wealth and power.
In the real world, you get to look stuff up most of the time. Maybe it's just my experience, but most of the exams I've had in college have tested my memory more than my understanding. A friend of mine used to get pissed because there was a guy in his biology classes who would memorize everything before an exam and then ace it, but outside of the exams he didn't know much at all about biology. He just crammed, got the B/A and got mostly Bs in his bio classes it seems.
Major open source groups should patent everything they can get their hands on and then when Microsoft goes postal, lock down all of those patents. Basically it should be a simple game of "if we can't do what we want, then no American company will be allowed to make software products without our permission."
With the kind of random chaos that they could bring, it would be very, very easy for someone with violent or other criminal intentions to get away with something. Imagine flash mobbing the President, it would be very easy for someone to get around the SS agents and shoot the President because there would be so many people "spontaneously" crowding around Bush.
Now I know that many of you who can't stand Bush think this is the perfect means to "retake America" but let's be honest. Flash mobbing presents a danger to what little is left of freedom of association.
And as a complementary gift for our "large customers" we provide coupons for 20 big macs per buyer. *Lawyer whispers in Intel CEO's ear* And by large buyer we mean someone who buys a lot of our products, we would never, ever think to provide so much almost 700g of pure fat to those struggling with weight at McDonalds...
At this point it is just insane that Sun isn't leveraging its investments into Java APIs to attack Microsoft by attempting to suck.NET developers into using Java APIs like Swing for their apps. There are already compilers that will let Sun rebuild Swing for the.NET platform and at this point Sun needs to consider co-opting the.NET platform to be a major goal.
Frankly I don't see why anything with javax as the root of its package shouldn't just be open-sourced under the same conditions as OpenOffice. Javax denotes that it's a "java extension" which means it's not part of the core language and runtime. Sun should just push half the work there onto community processes and developers and maintain the core language and runtime.
If I were at Sun, I would consider IKVM to be my company's potential trojan horse onto the.NET platform, not my enemy. I would hand over as many of the extension APIs to make Java run as good as possible on.NET. Of course Sun would rather let Microsoft take pot shots at its product lines a la OpenOffice than attempt to subvert their position.
I have a Samsung SyncMaster 213T and it works just fine with my PowerBook G4. I move the cursor around and it responds just fine. Me thinks it's YOUR LCD that has the problem...
The last thing we need is to give the average driver the ability to pull stupid moves in the air. If the idea of flying cars doesn't make you cringe, just imagine the average SUV drive cutting you off 50-100 ft off the ground. Yeah, that's all we need. Car accidents that happen several hundred feet in the air and cause cars to come crashing down on top of people's houses and businesses....
Have the city actively assist the deployment of private wifi networks by giving tax cuts to individuals and companies that participate and rework the zoning laws to make filling in the gaps easier. In this surveillance state age, do you really want to be getting internet access from the government if you can avoid it? They'll take your privacy and say that since you got it for free, you are bound to their arbitrary rules.
The best way to approach this is for the city government to actively help private citizens implement this in the same spirit that the internet first got big. Tax cuts, profits, the like. Personally, though, I would rather pay for a private service than get a free public service. When I grow tired of the private service, at least I can immediately disconnect it from my wallet by canceling it, you usually can't do that with a public service.
Right now I think the best thing that the governments in this country could do would be to destroy the licensing of the airwaves and move all of the frequencies over to public use. That way we could have wifi be the norm and get digital radio broadcasts from webcasters in our cars since we'd have all of that bandwidth to use. Just imagine how cool it would be if your radio had a foldable keyboard that you could type the URL of a RSS/RDF file into that would get you radio feeds from local and nonlocal web broadcasters. Now THAT would keep the RIAA and ClearChannel awake at night.
And it would give Orrin Hatch another reason to continue on with his miserable, worthless career as a fraud of a right winger.
Athlon64/Opteron may well be diasterous for Intel
on
Dual Opteron SFF PC Tested
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Intel plans to sell 100,000 Itanium processors, and in the same time frame AMD plans to sell between 1.5 and 2.0 million Athlon64 and Opteron processors. Intel has been left with a 64bit processor that nobody really wants, I have the sneaky suspicion that soon there will be more PowerMacs running 64bit PPCs than Itanium workstations and servers. That alone should tell Intel that the writing is on the wall: adapt or die.
A friend of mine just put together a dual Opteron workstation for a client, and the price was dirt cheap compared to the Itanium workstations. It was only a few hundred dollars more expensive than a PowerMac G5. Itanium workstations are incredibly expensive and what do you get? A processor that nobody really wants to support in the end.
Truthfully, I think the biggest winners coming out of this will be Java and.NET as the splintering of the processor market will make the case for virtual machines greater. Why ship 3-5 native binaries when you can ship just 1 binary for a VM instead?
The Constitution mandates that specific time frames for copyrights be established, and the judge has said that this is ambiguous about how long the copyright for this particular type of recording lasts. Unless the appelate court clarifies it by issuing a ruling saying that its length is already covered under copyright law, it will most likely stand. The courts don't like ambiguous laws, especially laws that are ambiguous where the U.S. Constitution is quite clear.
The only thing you have to worry about are those wackos on the Supreme Court. With McCain-Feingold they acted like they had never read the first amendment, but most courts aren't nearly that bad.
Who says the person has to be dead? Think of all of the savings on all of the old people and babies that can be safely ignored now that rats are being employed for this harrowing job!
And the next thing you know, someone will be trying to train Pirhanas for underwater rescue missions...
Slashdot Mirror
I can't even imagine where the web would be today without Perl, PHP and Python. Perl and Python are excellent CGI languages and PHP 5.0/5.1 is a great substitute for commercial products like ASP.NET in many cases. Small businesses and home users simply don't need all of the wiz bang features of something like ASP/JSP. OSS has definitely stepped in to provide a lot of power to the little guys who want it. Now Mono is rapidly becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft's .NET and Tomcat has been for a long time a very solid basis for J2EE web projects.
But perhaps the best thing about OSS is that it has helped to return a bit of an "ownership society" to software development. The GPL despite its problems says that it doesn't apply to you if you are just a regular user who isn't going to modify the code and redistribute the changed binaries. For all intents and purposes, you "own" that code until you do something public with it that takes commercial advantage of it without meeting the GPL's requirements. That's a hell of a lot more property rights-centered than a typical industry EULA.
I'd need a room with padded walls to come home to after a grueling day of putting up with the pointy-haired boss.
If file system compatibility really helped THAT much, then BeOS would have owned Linux and Be would be a viable contender today. BeOS' support for Fat32 and NTFS, especially in how easy it was for users to mount them from the desktop, was well above that of the Linux desktops of BeOS' day. When you wanted to mount a drive, a right click on the desktop showed the Fat32 and NTFS partitions as plainly as a BFS partition so the whole process was the same to John Q. Not only that, but BeOS back then also automatically recognized new partitions, something Linux did not and still doesn't seem to do well.
What keeps people loyal to Microsoft in the U.S. is the popularity of its products combined with the variety of games and home software for Windows. Office and Windows have a symbiotic relationship, you take down one, the other goes down eventually, but Windows is more important to Microsoft because the home market provides a solid foundation for Office. Installing a game on Windows is easy for the average home user, but not on Linux.
Game developers don't want to waste their time getting around that. Until a very comprehensive, attractive way to install home software is availible, Linux and other OSS projects will be left behind. The best way for Linux developers to get around this is probably to make a concerted effort to emulate Apple's framework system so that all of the dependencies one needs to have in place are part of the Linux game's ".app directory." Either that or program the games in a combination of C# and C and pray that Mono doesn't die on users.
Maybe it's just my perspective, but interoperability with things like FAT only do so much for the average user. In the long run, it's a lot more complicated than that. If interoperability were the key, then BeOS and MacOS X would have eaten Windows alive a long time ago.
To not call it GNU/Linux....
The new For loop may seem to be just syntactic sugar, but it isn't. It really does make the code look a lot cleaner when you are iterating over a collection or an array. The type safe collections are also very handy--no more class cast exceptions and stuff like that.
.NET
It would be nice though if Sun would make Groovy or Jython a standard part of their java distribution. That would definitely make it competitive with
I can't even imagine how much time you'd have to spend finding unique porn mailing lists to get enough spam to fill one of these babies up. You'd see so much T&A that sex would be just... boring....
Compare the tone of my post with the moderation. I was joking, not trying to be insightful....
Just give them a EULA to sign saying you aren't responsible for anything that you do to them, works great for Microsoft.
If you are a lawyer, then you should know that if this gets upheld on appeals and the SCOTUS refuses to hear the case, then it stands...
I'm a legal layman but it sounds like they're taking the mens rea (guilty mind) out of it entirely. How do you determine if someone is "willing to do it?" At the rate they are going, why not just eschew all notions of this being about justice, since justice has to be both acquired for the victim and **delivered to** the perp.
If there was any copyright law for all sides to agree on opposing this is it. This is more of a thought police law than a copyright law.
His point about the rising power of nerds highlights something of great importance: the "old class relations" that sparked Marxism are essentially dead. In many respects now there is a symbiotic relationship between the large number of white collar workers and the "capitalist class" which allows for an almost give-take relationship.
Now I know that some will look to outsourcing and say, see class exploitation still exists! Yes, but it is the fault of the people of many of those countries. If your government is corrupt and you have a democratic system of government, why are your people systematically voting for political parties that keep your country from growing. America's corruption is bad, but it doesn't hinder growth anywhere near that of many developing or stagnate countries.
People often want it both ways. They don't want to adapt to a new economy, but they want all of the benefits. You have three choices, and these have existed for most of human history. You can lead, you can follow or you can be dominated. America leads, India follows, others are simply dominated because they refuse to follow the leaders' example and try to grow, and cannot lead on their own, thus another country steps in and economically dominates them. It doesn't mean it's right, but it's a fact of life.
The law of unintended consequences will one day come back to haunt corporate America if it doesn't realize en masse that domestic research and development and manufacturing are the safest route. The rule of law in America can be safeguarded, but Americans cannot do so around the world. The lesson of the "rise of the nerd" is that yes, you can start outsourcing jobs eventually to "regain power over the nerds" but what happens when those you outsource to abscond with your R&D results and your domestic nerd base is so atrophied that they can't compete?
The lesson of the modern economy is that businesses need to realize that no part of the company is less valuable than another. Whereas in the past, the rich could safely exploit their employees, they now do it at the risk of their own base of wealth and power.
In the real world, you get to look stuff up most of the time. Maybe it's just my experience, but most of the exams I've had in college have tested my memory more than my understanding. A friend of mine used to get pissed because there was a guy in his biology classes who would memorize everything before an exam and then ace it, but outside of the exams he didn't know much at all about biology. He just crammed, got the B/A and got mostly Bs in his bio classes it seems.
Major open source groups should patent everything they can get their hands on and then when Microsoft goes postal, lock down all of those patents. Basically it should be a simple game of "if we can't do what we want, then no American company will be allowed to make software products without our permission."
With the kind of random chaos that they could bring, it would be very, very easy for someone with violent or other criminal intentions to get away with something. Imagine flash mobbing the President, it would be very easy for someone to get around the SS agents and shoot the President because there would be so many people "spontaneously" crowding around Bush.
Now I know that many of you who can't stand Bush think this is the perfect means to "retake America" but let's be honest. Flash mobbing presents a danger to what little is left of freedom of association.
They haven't sued GIMP
They still support Apple
They don't suck up to Microsoft
When one of those changes, by all means let slip the dogs of war. Or is that the Gnus of war? I can't remember THAT? Dogs or Gnus, people?
And as a complementary gift for our "large customers" we provide coupons for 20 big macs per buyer. *Lawyer whispers in Intel CEO's ear* And by large buyer we mean someone who buys a lot of our products, we would never, ever think to provide so much almost 700g of pure fat to those struggling with weight at McDonalds...
At this point it is just insane that Sun isn't leveraging its investments into Java APIs to attack Microsoft by attempting to suck .NET developers into using Java APIs like Swing for their apps. There are already compilers that will let Sun rebuild Swing for the .NET platform and at this point Sun needs to consider co-opting the .NET platform to be a major goal.
.NET platform, not my enemy. I would hand over as many of the extension APIs to make Java run as good as possible on .NET. Of course Sun would rather let Microsoft take pot shots at its product lines a la OpenOffice than attempt to subvert their position.
Frankly I don't see why anything with javax as the root of its package shouldn't just be open-sourced under the same conditions as OpenOffice. Javax denotes that it's a "java extension" which means it's not part of the core language and runtime. Sun should just push half the work there onto community processes and developers and maintain the core language and runtime.
If I were at Sun, I would consider IKVM to be my company's potential trojan horse onto the
I have a Samsung SyncMaster 213T and it works just fine with my PowerBook G4. I move the cursor around and it responds just fine. Me thinks it's YOUR LCD that has the problem...
The last thing we need is to give the average driver the ability to pull stupid moves in the air. If the idea of flying cars doesn't make you cringe, just imagine the average SUV drive cutting you off 50-100 ft off the ground. Yeah, that's all we need. Car accidents that happen several hundred feet in the air and cause cars to come crashing down on top of people's houses and businesses....
Have the city actively assist the deployment of private wifi networks by giving tax cuts to individuals and companies that participate and rework the zoning laws to make filling in the gaps easier. In this surveillance state age, do you really want to be getting internet access from the government if you can avoid it? They'll take your privacy and say that since you got it for free, you are bound to their arbitrary rules.
The best way to approach this is for the city government to actively help private citizens implement this in the same spirit that the internet first got big. Tax cuts, profits, the like. Personally, though, I would rather pay for a private service than get a free public service. When I grow tired of the private service, at least I can immediately disconnect it from my wallet by canceling it, you usually can't do that with a public service.
Right now I think the best thing that the governments in this country could do would be to destroy the licensing of the airwaves and move all of the frequencies over to public use. That way we could have wifi be the norm and get digital radio broadcasts from webcasters in our cars since we'd have all of that bandwidth to use. Just imagine how cool it would be if your radio had a foldable keyboard that you could type the URL of a RSS/RDF file into that would get you radio feeds from local and nonlocal web broadcasters. Now THAT would keep the RIAA and ClearChannel awake at night.
And it would give Orrin Hatch another reason to continue on with his miserable, worthless career as a fraud of a right winger.
Intel plans to sell 100,000 Itanium processors, and in the same time frame AMD plans to sell between 1.5 and 2.0 million Athlon64 and Opteron processors. Intel has been left with a 64bit processor that nobody really wants, I have the sneaky suspicion that soon there will be more PowerMacs running 64bit PPCs than Itanium workstations and servers. That alone should tell Intel that the writing is on the wall: adapt or die.
.NET as the splintering of the processor market will make the case for virtual machines greater. Why ship 3-5 native binaries when you can ship just 1 binary for a VM instead?
A friend of mine just put together a dual Opteron workstation for a client, and the price was dirt cheap compared to the Itanium workstations. It was only a few hundred dollars more expensive than a PowerMac G5. Itanium workstations are incredibly expensive and what do you get? A processor that nobody really wants to support in the end.
Truthfully, I think the biggest winners coming out of this will be Java and
The Constitution mandates that specific time frames for copyrights be established, and the judge has said that this is ambiguous about how long the copyright for this particular type of recording lasts. Unless the appelate court clarifies it by issuing a ruling saying that its length is already covered under copyright law, it will most likely stand. The courts don't like ambiguous laws, especially laws that are ambiguous where the U.S. Constitution is quite clear.
The only thing you have to worry about are those wackos on the Supreme Court. With McCain-Feingold they acted like they had never read the first amendment, but most courts aren't nearly that bad.
How the hell does a cell phone get a virus, is it through internet connectivity or something?
Who says the person has to be dead? Think of all of the savings on all of the old people and babies that can be safely ignored now that rats are being employed for this harrowing job!
And the next thing you know, someone will be trying to train Pirhanas for underwater rescue missions...
I think we've found the culprit