In one of my senior CS courses, the professor asked what the department could do that would make things better for the educational experience. He was expecting things like more course offerings, more focus on newer languages and approaches, stuff like that. The response that resounded with too many of the students was that the professors should do a better job at helping the students learn how to translate a project specification into code.
Basically he wanted the professors to hold his hand through the process of learning how to code. Not just do a better job at explaining Java, C++, etc., but rather teach time and again the basics of actually reading instructions and writing a program that implements them.
About half of our classes that use Java have a week of remedial Java. There is no "you ought to know it by now" in them. Consequently, I just skip the first week of my CS classes that aren't purely theory classes like ones on operating systems and algorithm design. We're talking junior level classes and people still sometimes struggle with basic Java and C++. It was a mind fuck for many of them to reach the operating systems class and have to *drum roll* LEARN C ALL BY THEIRSELVES except with a basic overview of the differences between it and C++ - which most of them never really learned at all in their sophomore year.
Needless to say, my response was "we need a mandatory design patterns class for the sophomores" which caused several of the better coders in the class to agree with. People can make the excuse that CS is about a lot more than coding, but it really isn't. If you can't code worth a damn, you have no business being in Computer Science because you're either cut out for engineering, networking or nothing related to IT altogether.
Seriously, I'm not a prodigy or anything, but I can code pretty well. It's disturbing when I see people with 3.9 major GPAs in CS who can't find less than a dozen ANSI C file I/O functions within 5 minutes of a Google search. I had to listen to one of our "uber-elite" female coders complain about how hard C is to learn for the first time, even though she had a 3.9 GPA and had taken probably 15-21 credits of classes that revolved around derivatives of C. Then I get called an elitist because my attitude is that since C is a subset of C++, and you have to take a class that uses C++ exclusively, that you shouldn't be spending hours learning the basics of C. It shouldn't be hard for anyone who reachs their senior year in CS, it's not like the projects were kernel level stuff. The most complicated project we did was write a "shell" that did little more than fork a process.
The problem, I think, is that so many American kids want to have it all spoonfed to them. They don't want to learn stuff outside of class. Most of them don't even really like what they're doing for that matter! Let the numbers slow down, maybe it'll be good for those of us who, regardless of skill level, care about it and enjoy it. Mark my words, eventually India will have the same problem and the types of cheap Indian coders, who are not inherently any better than Americans, will resemble the US. There will be the legions of certificate holders who have no natural inclination or skill toward the field except their pay check and there will be those who do care. In the end, things will balance out... or American business will choose tons of cheap, shitty coders, get thrashed like they deserve and we'll get to say "I told you so."
If the content cartels would invest in a real micropayment system, Tivo would be awesome for them. In fact, I bet it'd be more profitable than anything they've had before. Instead of watching ads, I'd pay $2/episode for something like Battlestar Galactica or Stargate SG1. After the series is over, people who have paid for half ofthe series should get a 25-30% discount on the boxed set for the season and people who paid for the entire thing should get about 60-70% off. If I've paid $40-$60 for the entire season already, that's real, guaranteed money in their hands. Then, if they play their cards right, as a loyal fan I can buy the entire series on DVD for $25 including S&H since I already paid $40-$60 for the series.
The cost of making DVDs is really low now. If they pay only $1/DVD to make and it costs them $2 to make the box and shrink wrap it, a 5 DVD set like Stargate SG1 would cost $7 to make. They could realistically go to $15 before S&H if they were really gung ho about getting a paying fanbase going. Just think, right after you watch the last episode in the series, the TV channel popups up a message saying "Thanks for supporting this series with your micropayments, if you would like to own this series, because of your generous support we'll give you a 70% discount on the boxed set." They'd make a killing doing that for many series.
The problem though, is that regular TV sitcom bullshit would probably be hit hard initially by that. Imagine people having to pay for an episode of Friends or Seinfeld? At any rate, if the Cartoon Network, Comedy Central and Sci Fi Channel offered this, knowing their audiences, it'd work like a charm.
If I could buy them and burn them to DVD using iTunes, then hell yeah I'd pay $1.99 per video. However, if they expect me to have to watch them on a tiny iPod screen or on my laptop then forget it. I have about 6-7 DVDs of music videos that I've downloaded online. If I can't watch them on my TV using VCDs or DVDs, then this isn't a good reason for me to give up on downloading music videos.
I bet you that most of the ghettos in this country could get broadband. Yet something tells me that that doesn't imply for even a second that they are prosperous.
You're right, though, that the city government can do this. However, the private corporations involved can also shutdown their services and liquidate and/or sabotage all of their infrastructure.
There's nothing "free market" about what you support. The government getting involved to compete is socialism, not capitalism.
It's been my experience that people who do the non-specialized business work tend to think that their "leadership" is invaluable to the company, when in reality it is easily reproduced. An engineer can rise to the occassion and be a good leader, but a person whose formal training is just "business" or a MBA and a liberal arts background cannot just rise to the occassion and be a replacement engineer. Leadership is something that is half nature, half nurture. Most people I've ever known, myself included, who are good at leading have a very strong natural knack for leading and organizing.
Personally, I would want efficiency-minded former engineers to head an engineering company I was the CEO of. I'd want these former engineers because they'd know what's bullshit and what's not and that'd keep my company's ass farther away from the fire. We're sentient beings, not hive workers. To paraphrase Heinlein, specialization is for insects, there is no reason why someone who spent most of their career as an engineer cannot have a good sense for business and be a good business leader.
Since the buck clearly doesn't stop at the CEO's desk in most situations, I don't see why stockholders waste tens of millions of dollars of their company's money on them. At a company like HP, the CEO is naturally going to be detatched from most of the company's operations and excuse me, but I just don't see why any company would sacrifice anyone who could contribute to R&D of new products when cuts in middle and upper management employment and salaries would yield decent results.
Which is more likely to bring a higher ROI: firing many of the people capable of making new products and keeping many of the middle managers and their upper management ilk, or trimming top down? Maybe if HP put many of those people on some good projects, they'd do a lot of good for the company. It'd be ironic if several groups from the 15,000 who get laid off end up founding companies that make the next iPod, Tivo or something like that.
I'm not saying that many of them shouldn't have been laid off, just that it is incredibly stupid to fire people who can make products if assigned properly, but not cut back severely on upper management's pay and the ranks of the middle managers. When Sun laid off a number of its Solaris and Java developers, but didn't fire McNealey, that loud mouth imbecile, I just shook my head. In order to save money and face, our shiny suit wearing business elite would rather fire people with very hard to find engineering skills that could make or break the success of their products than cull the ranks of their own.
What many people also forget is that Netscape sucked after version 3. I was one of those rabidly anti-Microsoft people who defended Netscape (wrongly) because of Microsoft's monopoly. Firefox and Mozilla proved that Microsoft can be beaten in time without the government.
Let's also not forget that AJAX' XMLHttpRequest object, which powers many of Google's new services, was invented by Microsoft with IE 5. I remember Netscape 4 sucking so bad that when IE 4 was about to go gold that there were people lining up in the chat room that I was in on Westwood Studios' chat service for C&C players to get as they ranted about Communicator.
And my God was it a POS. The thing was horribly bloated, ugly, not standards compliant and a spectacular mess to maintain, hence the mozilla guys practically starting over from scratch. Let's not forget something here, which Google has not. Netscape lost not because IE went free, but because Netscape 4 was such a bloat POS that it was agonizing to use it compared to IE 4. Netscape lost because when Microsoft got their act together, Netscape went from the elite of browser design to rank amateurs at best.
Most regulations, such as this one, exist not to protect anyone, but just to make lawyers rich. It doesn't matter which side the lawyer takes, plaintiff or defendant, they both stand to make good money off of ambiguous and overly broad laws. Stuff like this just proves the old saying, "in a town with only 1 lawyer, the lawyer will starve but in a town with 2 lawyers they will never go hungry."
On both sides of the border we make no pretense of electing people who actually know what they're doing. Almost every politician is a hack these days whether in America or Canada, and that probably applies to most countries in general. Look at that POS proposed by Leahy and Specter in the US recently. These lawyers and buisnessmen don't know a damn thing about the ramifications of their legislation most of the time, and when they do, malice is frequently their motivation for the diabolical implications of its scope. Is it any wonder why liberty-minded people tend to just eschew regulation altogether these days since most of the time, we have to choose between scoundrels and blithering idiots for our lawmakers?
These home entertainment devices are evolving into computers. What will end up determining how well they succeed or fail is the software. If people can't do stuff more complicated than play games and surf the web, they won't find much use for these. People need to be able to:
-Play games -Do office functions -Do web stuff to communicate -Play music and movies
And most of that needs to be done all at once. A device that switches between modes won't cut it for regular use. It'll be great for families to have a console that can become a DVD player, a music player and that can do basic web stuff, but if it can't do several of those at once, it'll be no more than an entertainment machine.
The problem is that there are too many people who want to be able to do it all at once. I'd buy a console that could do several things in different modes, but it'd never be a replacement for my computers. It'd certainly never replace my mom's PC and she's got next to zero interest in ever seriously learning how to use one. I just don't see these things killing the PC.
But they aren't genuinely "innovative" most of the time. Anyone who wants to see real innovation should look at Sun, Apple and Be before Be went belly up. Look at how small Be's development team was, yet somehow they managed to create a 64bit file system with many of WinFS' features back in what? 1998-1999?
The one legitimate criticism of open source development though, is that you'd not have thinks like Apache Jakarta were it not for Sun creating Java. Open source and commercial closed source development should have the same relationship that name brand and generic drugs have. Software patents, IMO, would work if 2 things happened:
1) We had a patent office with people who knew what they were doing and could safely reject bad patents.
2) Software patents lasted for 2-3 years so that way the businesses could get a reward for doing stuff like creating.NET, Java, Windows Media, etc.
The problem is that just as Microsoft takes Apples ideas, so do some projects like Mono and OpenOffice take Microsoft's ideas.
Rumor had it that they had overstocked their inventory of iPods and needed to get rid of them. Is this just a quiet way of getting rid of them through promotions and suckering people into buying songs? Sounds like it to me.
All it'll take is for some nationalist in the PRC to get a bug up their ass and Microsoft won't be legally allowed to participate without at least a heavy barrier to entry into the market. I wouldn't mind seeing Microsoft succeed because I'm an American and I don't want the communists to get richer at our expense.
It'd be good for the US and China to get into a trade war NOW while China still doesn't have too much leverage against us. Yeah, they could do a good bit of damage, but nothing we couldn't recover from within five to ten years from. However, the fact remains that China has allowed us very little access to their markets while demanding access to our markets. It'd be nice to see Bush actually pull one of his "homeland security" initiatives by getting a law passed that mandates a major US divestment from China. Why we're investing in a country that is belligerant toward Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, three of our largest trade partners and three good allies is beyond me.
What China is proving today is that free market capitalism doesn't inherently lead toward freedom. The people have to really want it and use the free market as a means to get ahead toward that freedom. The Shanda Box succeeding may make life a little bit better for some people in China, but at the same time it'll also help fund the weapons that'll probably kill thousands in Taiwan if and when the PLA invades Taiwan before 2008.
Did it ever occur to you, and those like you, that blogs and livejournals have given several hundred thousand Americans (just Americans alone) a new stake in online freedom of speech? The EFF now has a potential base of support from hundreds of thousands of bloggers who don't want the FCC and FEC telling them what they can and cannot say online. That means that online speech is now rapidly becoming a popular issue rather than a "geek issue."
And you want to know what ruins the net even more? Trolls. It doesn't matter where they are rearing their ugly heads, trolls do real damage to any discourse online. If a troll were to talk the way that most of them do in a bar, they'd probably be murdered by having a glass bottle smashed over their head and then get stabbed with the jagged edges. Yet there are tons of trolls out there, and you worry about someone writing a narcistic blog or LJ about their life for their friends? I've only seen a few of that type care if anyone outside their circle of friends and family reads their posts.
And you know what? What makes you think that your comments on slashdot are any different, in principle, from a blog post? How are tons of comments in this forum about natalie portman petrified, and all of the other trollish bullshit not destroying the net just as much? No my friend, the net is just beginning to look more and more like the "offline world."
Many blogs require you to register in order to be able to comment so that the person who runs them can control trollish behavior. This sort of system is good for letting people avoid having to register to be able to post on dozens of blogs.
Registration is mostly good for keeping away trolls who can't even take the time to learn their native dialect of English well enough to write a coherent and grammatically correct post. Sometimes it's horrifying to read the structure of such posts because you realize how far our schools have fallen. I've gotten ones that if I didn't have a college-level grasp of English, I'd have no idea what was being said.
As long as security is the first priority, this is a good thing. What I wonder though, is how secure this could really be without centralization. The appeal of SixApart's service is that SixApart is guarding it aggressively from being cracked... so who runs this service? I'm not sure how well you could trust a P2P system like this since you have no definitive authority to say "this user is who he/she says they are."
Yeah, like China really cares about the rule of la
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China Signs Anti-Spam Pact
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· Score: 4, Insightful
And how many extrajudicial executions still happen in China? How about the laogai? Buy something at Wal-Mart lately? Well it could have been made with slave^H^H^H^H^Hprison labor. Tibet, the Uhigurs in Western China, the censorship of the internet, their bellicosity toward Taiwan, aborting babies because they're girls and more. Oh and they pretty much let their hackers take pot shots at the US' infrastructure with maybe a slap on the wrist.
The US, EU and Japan aren't perfect, but they are a lot better than China. For my money, I blame it on the "middle kingdom complex." Let's be realistic, China doesn't even really pretend to care about any law other than what it creates, and even that is flimsy as there are numerous loopholes for the state to get out of trouble with. China isn't going to really do anything to stop spammers unless it means they might not get the 2008 olympics or they might lose their MFN status in the US and neither of those will happen over spam.
Move on kids, this is just another feel good thing by the politicians. Nothing to see here that you couldn't see on C-Span.
The biggest problem I have always had with PHP is that it has never struck me like it was developed by a team and community that had any genuine sense of direction like the Perl and Python teams. IMO, what'd be a real coup for the Python community would be to really work on getting mod_python's PSP support distributed around to as many hosts as possible. It's a lot easier to write good code in Python than it is in PHP.
Someone who's this greedy, self-centered and determined to make a mess of everyone's life, liberty and property for his own advancement would discretely get his ass kicked one day on his way home from work. Seriously, the courts are too civilized of a way of dealing with things like this sometimes. Not that I'd recommend doing it to him, but there was a long period in our history where being this much of a troll got your ass tore up by a few "concerned citizens" for wasting tax payers' money with frivilous cases that were all about greed and nothing about justice.
But those cops aren't. Their sirens aren't on, they're just cruising down the road, patroling. You did know that cops aren't legally allowed to break the speed limit when they aren't responding to a call or enforcing the law, right? I've seen tons of cops breaking the speed limit when they had no good reason to. Their sirens were off, they just wanted to go say... 10-15 over the speed limit since it was faster and easier.
I can't even begin to count the number of times I've seen police in the US get away with speeding because they're the police. For some reason, I can't imagine it being much different elsewhere around the world since government corruption doesn't know geographic boundaries.
They'll come up with excuses like people trying to track law enforcement or something like that and that's why they won't be on the grid.
The origins of the ITU are meaningless to this discussion because the ITU is now a UN agency. Do you know what that means? It has become part of a world body that has done precious little to actually help the world rather than trying to become a one world government accountable to no one but the rich and powerful.
If I am so ignorant of the real, good accomplishments of the UN, the please post them here. Let's see them.
I am distrustful of the UN because most of its members are completely undemocratic tin horn dictatorships that wouldn't know good government if it bit them in the ass. Actually, they probably would since they have spent so much of their effort to ensure that their people don't have it!
People like you need to just accept the fact that there are a lot of well-informed people who disagree with you based on what they have learned about groups like the UN. The UN has never "kept the peace" anywhere it has ever been, nor has it ever done anything of substance elsewhere. It'll always been a pawn of the richest and most powerful nations because they are the ones with the largest individual populations and the most wealth. The US, EU, Japan, Russia and China account for half of the world's population. Even if we "democratize" the UN, it'll still be controlled by the G8 and China.
Besides, WTF does the ITU setting the standard for telephone systems have to do with anything? Is that supposed to be like some special dispensation from the pope that whitewashes all of the shit caused by the UN around the world? We already have a world standard for the internet in the form of TCP/IP and no one, last I checked, is debating whether DNS should stay as a standard. The only debate here is ownership, and that is a very relevant concern when it is a UN agency that wants to take over ownership.
Can anyone look at the history of the UN and honestly say that they would be any better, rather than a lot worse? Does anyone want the organization that puts the Sudan and other bloody, human rights violating states on its human rights commission to be the ones to regulate who gets a domain name? I sure don't.
That we'd be better off in the US if we made it a class six felony to lobby on behalf of a company or labor union. Maybe the only way to rein in these kinds of assholes is to do what none of the Europeans and many Americans couldn't stomach: make the penalty for trying to genuinely corrupt the system the death penalty.
I can't help but notice that both America and Europe have the same problems here. For America at least, I think we should eschew the flag burning amendment bullshit and try something new: amend the Constitution so that attempting to bribe members of the body politic or accepting said bribes on their part constitutes capital treason.
It's a ban on downloading unauthorized copyright materials. Based on the title, you'd think that in some late night drinking spree, the Swedish legislators just said "if it has (C) anywhere near it, ban it." If the title were true, it'd really suck because then Swedes wouldn't be able to even look at any webpage because the Berne Convention (I assume y'all are a signatory nation) gives every work a copyright even if it's not officially registered.
If it shamelessly borrowed from ASP.NET and JSP where appropriate. One of those things it should borrow from is consistent function names. The ad hoc naming convention has to go if PHP is going to really end up taking over in those markets. It is also a lot harder for people to remember how to use functions that aren't consistently named.
It should also be working toward full support for namespaces and something analogous to Web Controls. I should be able to declare a button like:
<php:Button>
and then be able to manipulate its properties using PHP code.
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In one of my senior CS courses, the professor asked what the department could do that would make things better for the educational experience. He was expecting things like more course offerings, more focus on newer languages and approaches, stuff like that. The response that resounded with too many of the students was that the professors should do a better job at helping the students learn how to translate a project specification into code.
Basically he wanted the professors to hold his hand through the process of learning how to code. Not just do a better job at explaining Java, C++, etc., but rather teach time and again the basics of actually reading instructions and writing a program that implements them.
About half of our classes that use Java have a week of remedial Java. There is no "you ought to know it by now" in them. Consequently, I just skip the first week of my CS classes that aren't purely theory classes like ones on operating systems and algorithm design. We're talking junior level classes and people still sometimes struggle with basic Java and C++. It was a mind fuck for many of them to reach the operating systems class and have to *drum roll* LEARN C ALL BY THEIRSELVES except with a basic overview of the differences between it and C++ - which most of them never really learned at all in their sophomore year.
Needless to say, my response was "we need a mandatory design patterns class for the sophomores" which caused several of the better coders in the class to agree with. People can make the excuse that CS is about a lot more than coding, but it really isn't. If you can't code worth a damn, you have no business being in Computer Science because you're either cut out for engineering, networking or nothing related to IT altogether.
Seriously, I'm not a prodigy or anything, but I can code pretty well. It's disturbing when I see people with 3.9 major GPAs in CS who can't find less than a dozen ANSI C file I/O functions within 5 minutes of a Google search. I had to listen to one of our "uber-elite" female coders complain about how hard C is to learn for the first time, even though she had a 3.9 GPA and had taken probably 15-21 credits of classes that revolved around derivatives of C. Then I get called an elitist because my attitude is that since C is a subset of C++, and you have to take a class that uses C++ exclusively, that you shouldn't be spending hours learning the basics of C. It shouldn't be hard for anyone who reachs their senior year in CS, it's not like the projects were kernel level stuff. The most complicated project we did was write a "shell" that did little more than fork a process.
The problem, I think, is that so many American kids want to have it all spoonfed to them. They don't want to learn stuff outside of class. Most of them don't even really like what they're doing for that matter! Let the numbers slow down, maybe it'll be good for those of us who, regardless of skill level, care about it and enjoy it. Mark my words, eventually India will have the same problem and the types of cheap Indian coders, who are not inherently any better than Americans, will resemble the US. There will be the legions of certificate holders who have no natural inclination or skill toward the field except their pay check and there will be those who do care. In the end, things will balance out... or American business will choose tons of cheap, shitty coders, get thrashed like they deserve and we'll get to say "I told you so."
If the content cartels would invest in a real micropayment system, Tivo would be awesome for them. In fact, I bet it'd be more profitable than anything they've had before. Instead of watching ads, I'd pay $2/episode for something like Battlestar Galactica or Stargate SG1. After the series is over, people who have paid for half ofthe series should get a 25-30% discount on the boxed set for the season and people who paid for the entire thing should get about 60-70% off. If I've paid $40-$60 for the entire season already, that's real, guaranteed money in their hands. Then, if they play their cards right, as a loyal fan I can buy the entire series on DVD for $25 including S&H since I already paid $40-$60 for the series.
The cost of making DVDs is really low now. If they pay only $1/DVD to make and it costs them $2 to make the box and shrink wrap it, a 5 DVD set like Stargate SG1 would cost $7 to make. They could realistically go to $15 before S&H if they were really gung ho about getting a paying fanbase going. Just think, right after you watch the last episode in the series, the TV channel popups up a message saying "Thanks for supporting this series with your micropayments, if you would like to own this series, because of your generous support we'll give you a 70% discount on the boxed set." They'd make a killing doing that for many series.
The problem though, is that regular TV sitcom bullshit would probably be hit hard initially by that. Imagine people having to pay for an episode of Friends or Seinfeld? At any rate, if the Cartoon Network, Comedy Central and Sci Fi Channel offered this, knowing their audiences, it'd work like a charm.
If I could buy them and burn them to DVD using iTunes, then hell yeah I'd pay $1.99 per video. However, if they expect me to have to watch them on a tiny iPod screen or on my laptop then forget it. I have about 6-7 DVDs of music videos that I've downloaded online. If I can't watch them on my TV using VCDs or DVDs, then this isn't a good reason for me to give up on downloading music videos.
I bet you that most of the ghettos in this country could get broadband. Yet something tells me that that doesn't imply for even a second that they are prosperous.
You're right, though, that the city government can do this. However, the private corporations involved can also shutdown their services and liquidate and/or sabotage all of their infrastructure.
There's nothing "free market" about what you support. The government getting involved to compete is socialism, not capitalism.
It's been my experience that people who do the non-specialized business work tend to think that their "leadership" is invaluable to the company, when in reality it is easily reproduced. An engineer can rise to the occassion and be a good leader, but a person whose formal training is just "business" or a MBA and a liberal arts background cannot just rise to the occassion and be a replacement engineer. Leadership is something that is half nature, half nurture. Most people I've ever known, myself included, who are good at leading have a very strong natural knack for leading and organizing.
Personally, I would want efficiency-minded former engineers to head an engineering company I was the CEO of. I'd want these former engineers because they'd know what's bullshit and what's not and that'd keep my company's ass farther away from the fire. We're sentient beings, not hive workers. To paraphrase Heinlein, specialization is for insects, there is no reason why someone who spent most of their career as an engineer cannot have a good sense for business and be a good business leader.
Since the buck clearly doesn't stop at the CEO's desk in most situations, I don't see why stockholders waste tens of millions of dollars of their company's money on them. At a company like HP, the CEO is naturally going to be detatched from most of the company's operations and excuse me, but I just don't see why any company would sacrifice anyone who could contribute to R&D of new products when cuts in middle and upper management employment and salaries would yield decent results.
Which is more likely to bring a higher ROI: firing many of the people capable of making new products and keeping many of the middle managers and their upper management ilk, or trimming top down? Maybe if HP put many of those people on some good projects, they'd do a lot of good for the company. It'd be ironic if several groups from the 15,000 who get laid off end up founding companies that make the next iPod, Tivo or something like that.
I'm not saying that many of them shouldn't have been laid off, just that it is incredibly stupid to fire people who can make products if assigned properly, but not cut back severely on upper management's pay and the ranks of the middle managers. When Sun laid off a number of its Solaris and Java developers, but didn't fire McNealey, that loud mouth imbecile, I just shook my head. In order to save money and face, our shiny suit wearing business elite would rather fire people with very hard to find engineering skills that could make or break the success of their products than cull the ranks of their own.
What many people also forget is that Netscape sucked after version 3. I was one of those rabidly anti-Microsoft people who defended Netscape (wrongly) because of Microsoft's monopoly. Firefox and Mozilla proved that Microsoft can be beaten in time without the government.
Let's also not forget that AJAX' XMLHttpRequest object, which powers many of Google's new services, was invented by Microsoft with IE 5. I remember Netscape 4 sucking so bad that when IE 4 was about to go gold that there were people lining up in the chat room that I was in on Westwood Studios' chat service for C&C players to get as they ranted about Communicator.
And my God was it a POS. The thing was horribly bloated, ugly, not standards compliant and a spectacular mess to maintain, hence the mozilla guys practically starting over from scratch. Let's not forget something here, which Google has not. Netscape lost not because IE went free, but because Netscape 4 was such a bloat POS that it was agonizing to use it compared to IE 4. Netscape lost because when Microsoft got their act together, Netscape went from the elite of browser design to rank amateurs at best.
Most regulations, such as this one, exist not to protect anyone, but just to make lawyers rich. It doesn't matter which side the lawyer takes, plaintiff or defendant, they both stand to make good money off of ambiguous and overly broad laws. Stuff like this just proves the old saying, "in a town with only 1 lawyer, the lawyer will starve but in a town with 2 lawyers they will never go hungry."
On both sides of the border we make no pretense of electing people who actually know what they're doing. Almost every politician is a hack these days whether in America or Canada, and that probably applies to most countries in general. Look at that POS proposed by Leahy and Specter in the US recently. These lawyers and buisnessmen don't know a damn thing about the ramifications of their legislation most of the time, and when they do, malice is frequently their motivation for the diabolical implications of its scope. Is it any wonder why liberty-minded people tend to just eschew regulation altogether these days since most of the time, we have to choose between scoundrels and blithering idiots for our lawmakers?
These home entertainment devices are evolving into computers. What will end up determining how well they succeed or fail is the software. If people can't do stuff more complicated than play games and surf the web, they won't find much use for these. People need to be able to:
-Play games
-Do office functions
-Do web stuff to communicate
-Play music and movies
And most of that needs to be done all at once. A device that switches between modes won't cut it for regular use. It'll be great for families to have a console that can become a DVD player, a music player and that can do basic web stuff, but if it can't do several of those at once, it'll be no more than an entertainment machine.
The problem is that there are too many people who want to be able to do it all at once. I'd buy a console that could do several things in different modes, but it'd never be a replacement for my computers. It'd certainly never replace my mom's PC and she's got next to zero interest in ever seriously learning how to use one. I just don't see these things killing the PC.
But they aren't genuinely "innovative" most of the time. Anyone who wants to see real innovation should look at Sun, Apple and Be before Be went belly up. Look at how small Be's development team was, yet somehow they managed to create a 64bit file system with many of WinFS' features back in what? 1998-1999?
.NET, Java, Windows Media, etc.
The one legitimate criticism of open source development though, is that you'd not have thinks like Apache Jakarta were it not for Sun creating Java. Open source and commercial closed source development should have the same relationship that name brand and generic drugs have. Software patents, IMO, would work if 2 things happened:
1) We had a patent office with people who knew what they were doing and could safely reject bad patents.
2) Software patents lasted for 2-3 years so that way the businesses could get a reward for doing stuff like creating
The problem is that just as Microsoft takes Apples ideas, so do some projects like Mono and OpenOffice take Microsoft's ideas.
Rumor had it that they had overstocked their inventory of iPods and needed to get rid of them. Is this just a quiet way of getting rid of them through promotions and suckering people into buying songs? Sounds like it to me.
All it'll take is for some nationalist in the PRC to get a bug up their ass and Microsoft won't be legally allowed to participate without at least a heavy barrier to entry into the market. I wouldn't mind seeing Microsoft succeed because I'm an American and I don't want the communists to get richer at our expense.
It'd be good for the US and China to get into a trade war NOW while China still doesn't have too much leverage against us. Yeah, they could do a good bit of damage, but nothing we couldn't recover from within five to ten years from. However, the fact remains that China has allowed us very little access to their markets while demanding access to our markets. It'd be nice to see Bush actually pull one of his "homeland security" initiatives by getting a law passed that mandates a major US divestment from China. Why we're investing in a country that is belligerant toward Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, three of our largest trade partners and three good allies is beyond me.
What China is proving today is that free market capitalism doesn't inherently lead toward freedom. The people have to really want it and use the free market as a means to get ahead toward that freedom. The Shanda Box succeeding may make life a little bit better for some people in China, but at the same time it'll also help fund the weapons that'll probably kill thousands in Taiwan if and when the PLA invades Taiwan before 2008.
Did it ever occur to you, and those like you, that blogs and livejournals have given several hundred thousand Americans (just Americans alone) a new stake in online freedom of speech? The EFF now has a potential base of support from hundreds of thousands of bloggers who don't want the FCC and FEC telling them what they can and cannot say online. That means that online speech is now rapidly becoming a popular issue rather than a "geek issue."
And you want to know what ruins the net even more? Trolls. It doesn't matter where they are rearing their ugly heads, trolls do real damage to any discourse online. If a troll were to talk the way that most of them do in a bar, they'd probably be murdered by having a glass bottle smashed over their head and then get stabbed with the jagged edges. Yet there are tons of trolls out there, and you worry about someone writing a narcistic blog or LJ about their life for their friends? I've only seen a few of that type care if anyone outside their circle of friends and family reads their posts.
And you know what? What makes you think that your comments on slashdot are any different, in principle, from a blog post? How are tons of comments in this forum about natalie portman petrified, and all of the other trollish bullshit not destroying the net just as much? No my friend, the net is just beginning to look more and more like the "offline world."
Many blogs require you to register in order to be able to comment so that the person who runs them can control trollish behavior. This sort of system is good for letting people avoid having to register to be able to post on dozens of blogs.
Registration is mostly good for keeping away trolls who can't even take the time to learn their native dialect of English well enough to write a coherent and grammatically correct post. Sometimes it's horrifying to read the structure of such posts because you realize how far our schools have fallen. I've gotten ones that if I didn't have a college-level grasp of English, I'd have no idea what was being said.
As long as security is the first priority, this is a good thing. What I wonder though, is how secure this could really be without centralization. The appeal of SixApart's service is that SixApart is guarding it aggressively from being cracked... so who runs this service? I'm not sure how well you could trust a P2P system like this since you have no definitive authority to say "this user is who he/she says they are."
And how many extrajudicial executions still happen in China? How about the laogai? Buy something at Wal-Mart lately? Well it could have been made with slave^H^H^H^H^Hprison labor. Tibet, the Uhigurs in Western China, the censorship of the internet, their bellicosity toward Taiwan, aborting babies because they're girls and more. Oh and they pretty much let their hackers take pot shots at the US' infrastructure with maybe a slap on the wrist.
The US, EU and Japan aren't perfect, but they are a lot better than China. For my money, I blame it on the "middle kingdom complex." Let's be realistic, China doesn't even really pretend to care about any law other than what it creates, and even that is flimsy as there are numerous loopholes for the state to get out of trouble with. China isn't going to really do anything to stop spammers unless it means they might not get the 2008 olympics or they might lose their MFN status in the US and neither of those will happen over spam.
Move on kids, this is just another feel good thing by the politicians. Nothing to see here that you couldn't see on C-Span.
The biggest problem I have always had with PHP is that it has never struck me like it was developed by a team and community that had any genuine sense of direction like the Perl and Python teams. IMO, what'd be a real coup for the Python community would be to really work on getting mod_python's PSP support distributed around to as many hosts as possible. It's a lot easier to write good code in Python than it is in PHP.
for stuff like this.
Someone who's this greedy, self-centered and determined to make a mess of everyone's life, liberty and property for his own advancement would discretely get his ass kicked one day on his way home from work. Seriously, the courts are too civilized of a way of dealing with things like this sometimes. Not that I'd recommend doing it to him, but there was a long period in our history where being this much of a troll got your ass tore up by a few "concerned citizens" for wasting tax payers' money with frivilous cases that were all about greed and nothing about justice.
But those cops aren't. Their sirens aren't on, they're just cruising down the road, patroling. You did know that cops aren't legally allowed to break the speed limit when they aren't responding to a call or enforcing the law, right? I've seen tons of cops breaking the speed limit when they had no good reason to. Their sirens were off, they just wanted to go say... 10-15 over the speed limit since it was faster and easier.
in police cars.
I can't even begin to count the number of times I've seen police in the US get away with speeding because they're the police. For some reason, I can't imagine it being much different elsewhere around the world since government corruption doesn't know geographic boundaries.
They'll come up with excuses like people trying to track law enforcement or something like that and that's why they won't be on the grid.
Next thing you know, we'll be giving squad cars to the spiders to keep those speed demon roaches in check...
The origins of the ITU are meaningless to this discussion because the ITU is now a UN agency. Do you know what that means? It has become part of a world body that has done precious little to actually help the world rather than trying to become a one world government accountable to no one but the rich and powerful.
If I am so ignorant of the real, good accomplishments of the UN, the please post them here. Let's see them.
I am distrustful of the UN because most of its members are completely undemocratic tin horn dictatorships that wouldn't know good government if it bit them in the ass. Actually, they probably would since they have spent so much of their effort to ensure that their people don't have it!
People like you need to just accept the fact that there are a lot of well-informed people who disagree with you based on what they have learned about groups like the UN. The UN has never "kept the peace" anywhere it has ever been, nor has it ever done anything of substance elsewhere. It'll always been a pawn of the richest and most powerful nations because they are the ones with the largest individual populations and the most wealth. The US, EU, Japan, Russia and China account for half of the world's population. Even if we "democratize" the UN, it'll still be controlled by the G8 and China.
Besides, WTF does the ITU setting the standard for telephone systems have to do with anything? Is that supposed to be like some special dispensation from the pope that whitewashes all of the shit caused by the UN around the world? We already have a world standard for the internet in the form of TCP/IP and no one, last I checked, is debating whether DNS should stay as a standard. The only debate here is ownership, and that is a very relevant concern when it is a UN agency that wants to take over ownership.
Can anyone look at the history of the UN and honestly say that they would be any better, rather than a lot worse? Does anyone want the organization that puts the Sudan and other bloody, human rights violating states on its human rights commission to be the ones to regulate who gets a domain name? I sure don't.
That we'd be better off in the US if we made it a class six felony to lobby on behalf of a company or labor union. Maybe the only way to rein in these kinds of assholes is to do what none of the Europeans and many Americans couldn't stomach: make the penalty for trying to genuinely corrupt the system the death penalty.
I can't help but notice that both America and Europe have the same problems here. For America at least, I think we should eschew the flag burning amendment bullshit and try something new: amend the Constitution so that attempting to bribe members of the body politic or accepting said bribes on their part constitutes capital treason.
It's a ban on downloading unauthorized copyright materials. Based on the title, you'd think that in some late night drinking spree, the Swedish legislators just said "if it has (C) anywhere near it, ban it." If the title were true, it'd really suck because then Swedes wouldn't be able to even look at any webpage because the Berne Convention (I assume y'all are a signatory nation) gives every work a copyright even if it's not officially registered.
What will the powers that be put in there to make it easy to track and control everything we do with it?
If it shamelessly borrowed from ASP.NET and JSP where appropriate. One of those things it should borrow from is consistent function names. The ad hoc naming convention has to go if PHP is going to really end up taking over in those markets. It is also a lot harder for people to remember how to use functions that aren't consistently named.
It should also be working toward full support for namespaces and something analogous to Web Controls. I should be able to declare a button like:
<php:Button>
and then be able to manipulate its properties using PHP code.