Whoever keeps making these rules really doesn't get it I guess. Making rules, valid legally or not, that fly in the face of what people almost unconsciously expect just erodes the respect of legitimate law. So thanks a lot for further degrading respect for rules of any kind.
This reminds me of the problem of attempting interstellar travel too early. Chances are that the ship you launch will be passed up in a few years by superior technology. At least in this case, the state has a clear shot at saving some money by going with the latest and greatest, in this case, cloud computing. And being able to support local businesses (ie in-state jobs) is a double bonus as $300M is nothing to sneeze at as I'm sure the state a few hundreds miles south would attest to.
As tempting, as a longtime Camaro owner, as this is, I'm more concerned about whether the new Camaro is a durable, high quality product. I generally try to stay away from version 1.0 of anything, especially GM these days. Now don't get me wrong, my 98 Camaro has on the whole been a surprisingly good car, but it does have it's quirks as it approaches 100K miles. My much younger 03 Venture though is almost a total lemon...so I'm going slow on any more GM for now...
No real surprise here. Microsoft is in the business of making money, so if everyone remembers this in dealing with them or any other profit driven company, then we'll be well prepared for this behavior. Open Source is seen by MS and others as a threat to their profits, so many avoid it. But in the tech world, that is getting increasingly harder, and more foolish to do. So avoiding a profit sapping lawsuit is probably a good move. Yeah they could recode, but in this case it was probably easier (and cheaper) to just comply with the GPL.
This is just more proof that the people who run the big media companies not only do not understand technology, but cannot be bothered to learn it either. If they did, they would realize that DRM is ultimately a futile effort because the end user has to have everything they need in order to decode the content. That means that someone who wants to decode the content to display it in some other unapproved manner, also has everything they need to do it.
I'll assume that the technical people/aliens at Hulu know this too and are only doing what the content providers are demanding.
I hope that stupid and dangerous court decisions like this will prod Canadians to spring into action and change the laws that lead to this. In any society "free" or not, it is ultimately the will of the people that shapes the society, whether through peaceful political means, or otherwise.
Interesting study. I wonder if the same pattern would emerge if the study were done in a non-western culture. Attitudes about death are quite different in East Asian, for example, even among the religious in there.
I've been watching these developments in UK for the last few years, and I still wonder how long British citizens are going to stand for such brazenly proposed invasions of their privacy. What kind of loons come up with this stuff? What terrorists are using Facebook to openly plan their attacks?
You're probably on to something here. Perhaps getting control of things like Java, and MySQL is behind the IBM move. Even more so if Oracle, or even Microsoft, had any interest in buying out Sun.
Hmmm, stories like this are making me consider abandoning retail for tech purchases altogether in favor of online. Are these places trying to put themselves out of business? You just can't screw your customers like this anymore and expect that the whole world is not going to hear about it.
In light of Karzai's statements, it is rather ironic that the original Playstation was a popular platform because it was relatively easy to develop for! Much easier than the dual processor horror that was Saturn, and not constrained by the outdated cartridge system of the N64. Oh well, maybe it was just a fluke.
With virtualization becoming commonplace, Haiku may be worth a look in a VM at least. A fast, efficient little OS in a VM may have some good uses for specialized tasks.
Given the mess that Vista has been, deserved or not, free upgrades to Windows 7 is a good move and could repair some broken fences. Must say though, I'm surprised to hear this news.
Agreed. These days it seems that the major IDEs are Eclipse, Visual Studio, and maybe NetBeans. If you really want to be in the tools business, your best bet is to make plugins that do something that is not easily done by any programmer/hack and that they are willing to pay for. This assumes that there really is a sustainable market for it. Case in point, Adobe turned Flex Builder into an Eclipse plugin. It's still expensive, but is not something easily duplicated...yet...
Just stop publishing in those journals and create your own. The barriers to entry are pretty low to set up an on-line publication, and even dead tree publishing of scientific papers isn't that expensive.
This is probably just what the journal is afraid of. While getting published in the major, established, peer reviewed journals, is the current road to tenure, fame, and fortune (except maybe for the fame and fortune), that may not always be the case. One of the most important pieces of the puzzle for the advancement of science itself is the peer review process. If the community respects the peers doing the review, then no one will care whether the paper is published in Phys Rev or on the research group's blog. It's the science that matters.
Physicists can be real rebels at times, so I can imagine a group of respected and talented ones getting fed up with the old system and forming a new review and publication platform. With sufficient star power and good science, there's little that anyone could do to stop them. There are probably already private groups doing just that in addition to seeking publication in the more established journals.
Well, actually you can upload high quality video now, but it gets converted to the low quality flash video that you'll play back later. As near as I can tell, they do keep the original upload. So they still have the original to convert to whatever their higher quality format is.
Technically feasible or not, filtering would be the kiss of death for any ISP. I mean really, who is the average consumer going to buy from, ISP A who gives them the whole internet, or ISP B who blocks out those naughty sites to protect the children. Even protective parents would probably pass on the ISP that gives them less of the internet. And those who did go with the filtering ISP would jump ship as soon as some site they wanted or needed to access came up on the blocked list. Not to mention the performance hit that filtering would bring, which is already noticeable to internet users in China. I don't think a crawling filtered ISP would get a lot of customers in the US, as long as the consumer has a choice, that is...
Actually I see Gimp and OpenOffice as evidence that their proprietary cousins, Photoshop and Microsoft Office are just too darn expensive. If these were cheaper and available on more platforms, there wouldn't have been as much incentive to create free clones. Innovation sometimes comes along for the ride, but I think the biggest driving force for the creation of any F/OSS software is the need to solve a problem that can't be solved by existing software for the aforementioned reasons of excessive cost or not being available on your platform of choice.
Stuff like this makes me wonder just how much invasion/erosion of privacy will be tolerated in the UK before people rise up and flood into the streets in protest. Of course, I wonder how far the same thing will go in the US before a similar reaction too! But it seems that our friends in the UK are farther along this particular curve than the US.
Yeah, limited mode drives me crazy when it comes to games. But that problem fixes itself in my house since most of the games they play now are on consoles. I'm the only one who does any serious gaming on the PC. Even on the PC, the games that the youngest play are mostly Flash based.
LOL, my 7 year old always ends up being the computer expert in his classes, since preschool. But I still think 7 may be a little young to have a personal account and memorizing passwords. In my household, the younger kids share an account with a simple and long password written on a card stuck on the kids' computer. The shared account is just a limited Windows XP account and the PC itself is out in the open in a dining room corner. The older kids have their own accounts at the power user level and I'm the admin. It's not perfect, but since I my own work is done on a separate computer, any disasters are well contained.
There's been a lot of comment about how ultimately downloads will make the physical format irrelevant. I still agree with that for the most part, but now that the HD format war appears to be over the next thing that comes to mind are the TVs. Even if I wanted to run out right now and buy a Blu-ray player, it'd be a waste of money without an HDTV to go with it. HDTVs are still too expensive in my book, so I'll be waiting a bit longer. Hopefully we'll see some nicely priced bundles in the near future designed to get people off the fence.
This should make for some interesting drama over the next year. I wonder what Harvard, which RIAA appears to be avoiding wrt lawsuits, will do about this bit of legislation if it becomes law?
I've been using Yahoo webhosting for years and the service is just okay, but I don't ask for very much anyway. So the new plan is actually a significant savings for me and now if I want to place some big multimedia files on my site, I don't have to watch out for bandwidth usage if it gets linked to someone's MySpace account.
As for a Microsoft buyout, I'll just wait and see. I've stuck with Yahoo mainly because they make a lot of routine things simple and relatively easy. And when I first signed up, I felt like Yahoo was likely to be around a lot longer than Joe's Fast Web Hosting Service.
All I can say is, waaaaaaa! Honestly, Microsoft dropped the ball on themselves on OOXML. There's no technical reason they could not have created a truly open standard that anyone could use to read and write Office compatible documents. So I can only wonder what really went on behind the scenes. Surely they have plenty of developers on staff who knew OOXML was not going to fly and that IBM and others would call them on it. I learned the hard way in grad school to never give a presentation or submit anything that's not ready. Either OOXML wasn't really ready, or some business-bots decided to try and pull a fast one.
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Whoever keeps making these rules really doesn't get it I guess. Making rules, valid legally or not, that fly in the face of what people almost unconsciously expect just erodes the respect of legitimate law. So thanks a lot for further degrading respect for rules of any kind.
This reminds me of the problem of attempting interstellar travel too early. Chances are that the ship you launch will be passed up in a few years by superior technology. At least in this case, the state has a clear shot at saving some money by going with the latest and greatest, in this case, cloud computing. And being able to support local businesses (ie in-state jobs) is a double bonus as $300M is nothing to sneeze at as I'm sure the state a few hundreds miles south would attest to.
As tempting, as a longtime Camaro owner, as this is, I'm more concerned about whether the new Camaro is a durable, high quality product. I generally try to stay away from version 1.0 of anything, especially GM these days. Now don't get me wrong, my 98 Camaro has on the whole been a surprisingly good car, but it does have it's quirks as it approaches 100K miles. My much younger 03 Venture though is almost a total lemon...so I'm going slow on any more GM for now...
No real surprise here. Microsoft is in the business of making money, so if everyone remembers this in dealing with them or any other profit driven company, then we'll be well prepared for this behavior. Open Source is seen by MS and others as a threat to their profits, so many avoid it. But in the tech world, that is getting increasingly harder, and more foolish to do. So avoiding a profit sapping lawsuit is probably a good move. Yeah they could recode, but in this case it was probably easier (and cheaper) to just comply with the GPL.
This is just more proof that the people who run the big media companies not only do not understand technology, but cannot be bothered to learn it either. If they did, they would realize that DRM is ultimately a futile effort because the end user has to have everything they need in order to decode the content. That means that someone who wants to decode the content to display it in some other unapproved manner, also has everything they need to do it. I'll assume that the technical people/aliens at Hulu know this too and are only doing what the content providers are demanding.
I hope that stupid and dangerous court decisions like this will prod Canadians to spring into action and change the laws that lead to this. In any society "free" or not, it is ultimately the will of the people that shapes the society, whether through peaceful political means, or otherwise.
Interesting study. I wonder if the same pattern would emerge if the study were done in a non-western culture. Attitudes about death are quite different in East Asian, for example, even among the religious in there.
I've been watching these developments in UK for the last few years, and I still wonder how long British citizens are going to stand for such brazenly proposed invasions of their privacy. What kind of loons come up with this stuff? What terrorists are using Facebook to openly plan their attacks?
You're probably on to something here. Perhaps getting control of things like Java, and MySQL is behind the IBM move. Even more so if Oracle, or even Microsoft, had any interest in buying out Sun.
Hmmm, stories like this are making me consider abandoning retail for tech purchases altogether in favor of online. Are these places trying to put themselves out of business? You just can't screw your customers like this anymore and expect that the whole world is not going to hear about it.
In light of Karzai's statements, it is rather ironic that the original Playstation was a popular platform because it was relatively easy to develop for! Much easier than the dual processor horror that was Saturn, and not constrained by the outdated cartridge system of the N64. Oh well, maybe it was just a fluke.
With virtualization becoming commonplace, Haiku may be worth a look in a VM at least. A fast, efficient little OS in a VM may have some good uses for specialized tasks.
Given the mess that Vista has been, deserved or not, free upgrades to Windows 7 is a good move and could repair some broken fences. Must say though, I'm surprised to hear this news.
Agreed. These days it seems that the major IDEs are Eclipse, Visual Studio, and maybe NetBeans. If you really want to be in the tools business, your best bet is to make plugins that do something that is not easily done by any programmer/hack and that they are willing to pay for. This assumes that there really is a sustainable market for it. Case in point, Adobe turned Flex Builder into an Eclipse plugin. It's still expensive, but is not something easily duplicated...yet...
Just stop publishing in those journals and create your own. The barriers to entry are pretty low to set up an on-line publication, and even dead tree publishing of scientific papers isn't that expensive.
This is probably just what the journal is afraid of. While getting published in the major, established, peer reviewed journals, is the current road to tenure, fame, and fortune (except maybe for the fame and fortune), that may not always be the case. One of the most important pieces of the puzzle for the advancement of science itself is the peer review process. If the community respects the peers doing the review, then no one will care whether the paper is published in Phys Rev or on the research group's blog. It's the science that matters.
Physicists can be real rebels at times, so I can imagine a group of respected and talented ones getting fed up with the old system and forming a new review and publication platform. With sufficient star power and good science, there's little that anyone could do to stop them. There are probably already private groups doing just that in addition to seeking publication in the more established journals.
Well, actually you can upload high quality video now, but it gets converted to the low quality flash video that you'll play back later. As near as I can tell, they do keep the original upload. So they still have the original to convert to whatever their higher quality format is.
Technically feasible or not, filtering would be the kiss of death for any ISP. I mean really, who is the average consumer going to buy from, ISP A who gives them the whole internet, or ISP B who blocks out those naughty sites to protect the children. Even protective parents would probably pass on the ISP that gives them less of the internet. And those who did go with the filtering ISP would jump ship as soon as some site they wanted or needed to access came up on the blocked list. Not to mention the performance hit that filtering would bring, which is already noticeable to internet users in China. I don't think a crawling filtered ISP would get a lot of customers in the US, as long as the consumer has a choice, that is...
Actually I see Gimp and OpenOffice as evidence that their proprietary cousins, Photoshop and Microsoft Office are just too darn expensive. If these were cheaper and available on more platforms, there wouldn't have been as much incentive to create free clones. Innovation sometimes comes along for the ride, but I think the biggest driving force for the creation of any F/OSS software is the need to solve a problem that can't be solved by existing software for the aforementioned reasons of excessive cost or not being available on your platform of choice.
Stuff like this makes me wonder just how much invasion/erosion of privacy will be tolerated in the UK before people rise up and flood into the streets in protest. Of course, I wonder how far the same thing will go in the US before a similar reaction too! But it seems that our friends in the UK are farther along this particular curve than the US.
Yeah, limited mode drives me crazy when it comes to games. But that problem fixes itself in my house since most of the games they play now are on consoles. I'm the only one who does any serious gaming on the PC. Even on the PC, the games that the youngest play are mostly Flash based.
LOL, my 7 year old always ends up being the computer expert in his classes, since preschool. But I still think 7 may be a little young to have a personal account and memorizing passwords. In my household, the younger kids share an account with a simple and long password written on a card stuck on the kids' computer. The shared account is just a limited Windows XP account and the PC itself is out in the open in a dining room corner. The older kids have their own accounts at the power user level and I'm the admin. It's not perfect, but since I my own work is done on a separate computer, any disasters are well contained.
There's been a lot of comment about how ultimately downloads will make the physical format irrelevant. I still agree with that for the most part, but now that the HD format war appears to be over the next thing that comes to mind are the TVs. Even if I wanted to run out right now and buy a Blu-ray player, it'd be a waste of money without an HDTV to go with it. HDTVs are still too expensive in my book, so I'll be waiting a bit longer. Hopefully we'll see some nicely priced bundles in the near future designed to get people off the fence.
This should make for some interesting drama over the next year. I wonder what Harvard, which RIAA appears to be avoiding wrt lawsuits, will do about this bit of legislation if it becomes law?
I've been using Yahoo webhosting for years and the service is just okay, but I don't ask for very much anyway. So the new plan is actually a significant savings for me and now if I want to place some big multimedia files on my site, I don't have to watch out for bandwidth usage if it gets linked to someone's MySpace account.
As for a Microsoft buyout, I'll just wait and see. I've stuck with Yahoo mainly because they make a lot of routine things simple and relatively easy. And when I first signed up, I felt like Yahoo was likely to be around a lot longer than Joe's Fast Web Hosting Service.
All I can say is, waaaaaaa! Honestly, Microsoft dropped the ball on themselves on OOXML. There's no technical reason they could not have created a truly open standard that anyone could use to read and write Office compatible documents. So I can only wonder what really went on behind the scenes. Surely they have plenty of developers on staff who knew OOXML was not going to fly and that IBM and others would call them on it. I learned the hard way in grad school to never give a presentation or submit anything that's not ready. Either OOXML wasn't really ready, or some business-bots decided to try and pull a fast one.