If it makes you feel any better, KRS One, a mainstay of the industry points out that black execs are generally more resistant to letting black rappers promote concious non-gansta images than their white exec counterparts.
I'm not pinning it on race, I'm pinning it on the buying public, which, according to the numbers for mainstream rap, is more white than black. That part might be wrong. I didn't mean to really single out a colour - more the fact that the buying public is more suburban than urban as far as I can guess.
Jazz Combos Stage Bands Rock Bands Concert Orchestras.. and produces music at home, I can tell you straight up that *all* music, whether its terribly immoral gangsta rap takes talent. Some takes more than others (you seem to pick up on the fact that jazz is quite difficult, which is true).. but rap easily takes more talent than most rock heard on the radio these days. Its an extremely unappreciated art, but as a classically trained musician who listens mostly to jazz and rap, rap is *not* easy. For proof, refer to every rap you've ever heard in a commercial or promotional campaign. It's a wholesomely misunderstood style, and most media houses producing music for campaigns have *very* difficult times reproducing the sound of authentic, good rap. Its like saying that playing the drums is easy; sure, hitting a drum is easy, but producing a sound with drums that people want to listen to for 5 minutes in a row is not easy, and takes time, talent, dedication, and hard work. Factor in the fact that all music must relate to a social sound and make reference to its place in the musical tapestry of a culture (ie, rock is awesome in Flynt, Michigain, but not awesome in India.. its all about referencing what people already listen to and want to hear), and you end up with the fact that nearly any musician who wants to make it must have a very deep and ingrained knowledge of what people want to hear and how to make that sound.
Thats all terribly OT, but this thread has made me some karma, so why not burn a little.:)
Major Label rappers who promote positve messages (and can be found in the stores you list):
De La Soul Tribe Called Quest Black Eyed Peas Common Mos Def Talib Kwali The Roots
The list goes on. That was my point. There are lots of positive rappers, but blame the marketers for not trying to sell it to you and the kids for not being interested in searching for a truth outside of the allure of gansta rap.
As a slight aside, something that irks me about the dismissal of Gangsta Rap as having no redeeming value.. anyone who watches The Sopranos has no right to diss Gangsta Rap. Thats not to say that you value the Sopranos, but I want to make it perfectly clear that ALL cultures glamoize the criminal underworld. Both portray a glamorized, clean-cut interpretation of seedy underworlds; the only difference is that The Mafia seems to have some sort of romance that people identify with, where as most folks cant identify with the romance in the gangsta life. Thats not to say that there is any, since I cant find the romance in The Mafia culture, but hey, thats just my take. Selling and glamorizing the criminal element is not something the rap culture came up with - hell, the roots of rap are in positive social change (read up on HipHop Culture if you have time on your hands), but as usual, the commercialization of something tends to support the perversion of any positive message.
There's plenty of good rap out there like there is plenty of good Nu Metal bands out there. But like food, the better it is, the less people will like it, and thus the less it will be promoted into the public conciousness.
> It should be interesting as these multi-year contracts start to run out
I believe one of the problems in the industry is that multi-year deals are actually kind of out of flavour. Labels used to look for career musicians. Now they rent you for an album; if you sell, you might get one more album. Rince, lather, repeat.
That is to say that we might not have to wait that long..
Yeah but you can thank suburban white CD buying 18 year olds for demanding the image and lifestyle you describe.
They don't do this stuff in a vacuum - the image sells, so blame your kids for wanting a Puff Daddy instead of a De La Soul, or wanting a Wu Tang instead of a Del tha Funky Homosapien.
There are plenty of positive, concious rappers out there who do not condone the "thug life". But the CD buying public drives the demand for the thug life.. thank the protected coddled white masses in the 'burbs and the execs who market the image.
You don't actually believe music reviewers are going to appreciate the difference between a high end audio setup and a discman do you?
You must be confusing music reviewers with audio equipment reviewers.
Movie reviewers watch movies in theatres, not in private viewing rooms with top of the line home-theatre-nerd equipment. They're there to review the _content_, not the platform.
I don't think a review on a Pearl Jam CD is going to hinge on whether or not you can hear the idividual pieces of phlem in Eddie's throat when he's singing.. and for the most part, since people buying these CDs will be listening on discmen instead of a Dolby Pro Logic 5.1 whatever channel setup, shouldn't the reviewer base his review on how most consumers will listen to the music anyway?
a) The P2P networks wouldn't require you to swipe a card, if they could only gain access to the copyrights people were actually interested in.
b) The RIAA's members would pay artists if we didn't make sure they did?
My point was that the RIAA is trying to make it look like P2P networks would never pay artists, even if forced. But really, the RIAA owns all the content the P2P networks want access to, but wont let them have it, because they want to own that market.
The RIAA's fate will ultimately reflect their stubborness. Since they won't play nice with others, at some point they won't be allowed to play at all.
In the meantime, we live in a world where P2P networks could pay artsits, if the copyright owners (the labels) would just freaking co-operate.. but seeing as that would kill a huge part of the Big Label market, they won't do that.
So we, as people, should support P2P in the short term, until the RIAA becomes weak enough to have to conceed to plugging in their copyrights to the P2P networks so the artsits could get paid.
And as you said, artists dont make that much from the CD sales anyhow, so the pain incurred on artists during the transition from RIAA-model to P2P model is very much a fabrication of the RIAA. If anything, increased distribution of artsits that would result from P2P would probably lead to higher concert sales, which is where most mainstream musicians make their money.
Add on top of this that clearly P2P networks havn't killed off CD sales, only affected them by around 5%, and I have a hard time figuring out what everybody is so scared about.
It simply seems awfully clear to me that the RIAA's model is to use the real estate it owns to force people into feeding other arms of their business (distribution, promotion, marketing, etc). Anybody who isn't allowed by the RIAA to enter a market they should be allowed to enter into climbs the fence to do so. Then the RIAA cries "Foul.. kick them out!"
Unfortunately, since people are bred to give credit to those who have lots of money and are very big and successful (nevermind how they became successful, people usually dont take this into account), they have a very hard time understanding how something so wildly rich and big could be doing thing in the wrong manner. Time will vett all our opinions, but its frusterating, because by the time public opinion shifts, nobody is willing to admit or can't remember how they felt before.:)
Great post. Clearly you are in tune with the mechanics of this situation.
I always found it funny that, armed with the DMCA, you can pretty much 'invent' your own copyright terms, since circumventing protections that violate the law of copyright (notably that the work must return into the public domain after some-odd yeats) is itself against the law.
Basically, we've arrived in a situation where the copyright holders can write their own blank cheques of ownership, which was one of the reasons copyright law was enacted in the first place (yes, to mandate ownership and royalties to the author, but also to break the monopoly that the Royal Family-approved publishing houses had on the social culture at the time.)
> Would the record companies be able to sell into a meat-space distribution network?
No, but correct me if I'm wrong in stating thats the whole point of the market. There would not have been a need for them. Mind you, there may have been a need to regulate or mandate these distribution networks such that artists had to get paid, but the way the RIAA conducts business (shelfspace, adspace, and no space left over for anybody else).. there would not be a need for their business model.
But thats okay, see? I can't link the intrinsic need for the Big Label business model to the existance and development of music... maybe the artists would have fought the Napsters such that they could pay proper royalties and such, but the whole point is there is no intrinsic need for the RIAA/Big label style business model for artists to earn a profit. Thats all. There isn't. Its no use wondering if the RIAA wouldn't have existed had they come in at the same time as Napster, because in that case, we'd give RIAA none of our business (I have to go to the store to buy the CD? But these other guys, I can do it from home! And make my own mix CDs! And they take less of a cut off the profits! And I dont have to buy 15 songs all at once!) and Napster all of our business. And then youd simply have the artists ensure that they were getting paid for making music. They wouldn't kill off the most innovative, competative, exciting and practically unlimited shelf-space model of p2p networks, they'd just make sure that they were in the loop.
We're so used to the RIAA approach that we think its required for artists to earn a living. So who cares if the RIAA's members could have survived with their approach had Napster been around at their birth? Its not like the RIAA are royalty-giving saints and p2p networks are all socialist devils. P2P networks can't pay the artists for copyrights mostly because the labels own the copyrights and dont want the p2p networks to be able to pay so that they can own all the parts of the music industry. (IE, they want to own the entire vertical market, and use the limited shelf and ad space available to artificially control who gets to profit off the music industry.)
Sorry for all the italics and bold. The only way to progress is to rip down what already exists, if you get my drift. Humans find a system that works, in the end. Any one group that becomes very powerful, such as the RIAA, simply injects unnatural market forces and distorts the perception of 'need' in a market. Its not that p2p networks dont want to be able to support royalty payments, its that the RIAA doesn't want anybody else to participate in the very market it was created to own.
The worst part is, the RIAA represents a group of labels that supposedly reps the entire music industry and yet represents itself like one company that needs to maximize all potential sources of profit. If that isn't cartel, I'm not sure what is.
Well, *obviously not*. I mean, major record labels didn't turn a profit while Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, Aimster, FTP, HTTP, TCP/IP, The Internet exi - oh wait, yes they did.
My interpretation is that the file is attached 'silently' - the user is unaware that the attachment was made.
I say this only because its so obviously not an exploit if the user must willingly select a file, even if s/he is not aware of what action spawned the file dialog window.
I think its a pretty serious exploit if that is indeed the case.
Re:There is no programming in PHP
on
Programming PHP
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· Score: 1, Troll
If you can't figure out how to sperate your data-access, display, and logic layers in PHP, you are as much a "programmer" as you credit PHP with being a "lanuage". Meaning, not much of one at all.
There are tons of huge sites out there that use php. You can apply standard software engineering design and analysis skills to PHP, including but not limited to UI/Logic separation, profiling, OO, etc.
Web applications are and will never be the ASMs you cookie-cutter CS grads want it to be, so get over yourself and accept that procedural scripting languages can be suitable approaches for even large websites.
And Lisp? Even lisp.org seems to indicate that Lisp can be interpretive in the same manner PHP is, and states that the interpretive nature of Lisp is actually a strength, not a weakness as you contend it is with PHP. I guess you'll have to de-learn Lisp and stop "hacking" in it, huh?
First off, we're not talking about PHP the language; the complaint was specifically against the API provided with the language.
That said, I really hope you're not comparing language weaknesses like making buffer over flow errors easy to commit and 'weaknesses' like letting the developer choose speed-vs-portability.
Good programmers still make little mistakes like off-by-one and buffer-overflow errors, and sure, you can say the language is asking for it in the case of C. But portability, when the api function names specifically refer to the database you are programming non-portably against is something the developer should be intrinsically aware about.. this is not a problem subject to little one line programming slips.. youd have to be a pretty lousy programmer to use mysql_dothis, mysql_dothat and then get pissed off after 5 weeks of development that your code isn't portable to prosgres or whatnot.
You're almost saying that all hooks of an API should be horizontal, and never heirarchiel; and that it is the weakness of an API when the programmer uses non-portal code that is clearly named and documented as such (?!). Its a completely unreasonable and very inefficient approach; at the end of the day, the developer needs to have some accountability and responsibility for his use of the tools presented with him. Seeing as the PHP API makes it very obvious (as in right in the function names) which level of portibility you are programming to, I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to fire a programmer who accidentally wrote a PHP application using the mysql-specific calls when the requirements of the project included database portability. Wouldn't you?!
> Pear is cool and all, but by making the old calls avail, you allow users to still shoot themselves in the foot.
Uh yeah, mostly because, as programmers, its our job to hold the gun. Not knowing which body parts to shoot, ours or otherwise is the sign of a bad programmer, not a bad API.
I like having the options. On portable projects, I can use one of the many abstracted db layers. On non portable, I can just rip through development with the mysql-specific apis.
If they didn't make the naked db-specific APIs available, nobody else could developer their own home-cooked abstraction layer. If you dont like Pear:DB, at least there are alternatives.
Hehe, and here I thought I was being rude. I'm going to have to work on that.;)
Seriously tho, I understand that peoples views stem mostly from their experience, but thats pretty much the golden rule of software: Even enterprise businesses have suitable uses for non-enterprise software. There is always a time and place for high load distributed multi-tier web applications, and PHP can be a little out of its element in really large deployment environments if developers treat PHP like its a stand-in for other enterprise web app platforms... but any good solution suite should be componant based.. sometimes the cost of supporting another platform is outwieghed by the cost of solving a small problem with enterprise technology (ie, solution overkill).
The Right Tool for the Right Job; just dont assume the kinds of jobs you have to do have any intrinsic relationship with the size or worth of the company. Case in point: A small internet advertising delivery company will have a much greater need for performance and speed than a large company with thousands of clients on a web application. In this example, its the small company that needs the robust, extensible framework, while the larger company can probably get away with building their front end in PHP. And of course, many companies will need both (high performance servers with lightweight web front-end) so using both enterprise-style platforms and lightweight style platforms (PHP and Perl) is not uncommon in the same organization.
The only thing they got wrong is that its GUI should be thin.. the GUI should be on the computer. I always thought it was funny that these devices are called 'hubs', when really the hub is the computer. These things are just thin clients to access the content on the computer.
In that respect, centralize, centralize, centralize! These things should just host GUI-output from your computer, and accept commands from the remote and hand them back to your machine. I'm not sure why they'd put a device-specific gui on it when the computer might as well provide that in the case where you have 2 or 3 of these things around the house and you'd rather have a consitant interface and consistant playlists/settings/etc.
The computer is (and will always be IMHO) the center. It plays the stuff. It stores it. It sends it out to the 'terminals' (the TV/Receiver in this case) which can display it.
My question is, why doesn't the computer provide the GUI and hand off the screen caps to this Intel Device? Seems to me that way, if you have multiple hubs like this in your house, say one for the living room, one for the rec room, you dont have to replicate or use another GUI to access the content?
It seems to me that the dumber and thinner you make these supposed 'hubs', the more centralized your functionality is on your computer, and the better off the technology is. Plus, things like playlists, etc dont become specific to a particular wireless hub, as I'm prone to think it would be in the case of the device in the article. I'm also working on the assumption that adoption goes up when people dont have to learn how to use that new technology.
The computer should do everything - thats what it was built to do! These room-specific hubs should basically be wireless dump terminals that just show X-like or Remote Terminal Services-type sessions from your 'digital media' software running on your computer.
We are a business. We serve Fortune 500 clients. We don't need no stinkin RCs, and thank the fucking lord we dont have to write the front-end of our app in JSP, Perl or C... yay for PHP. Talk about a time/money saver.
Your attitude is that of the 'cookie-cutter' CS grad. What you might learn in the future is that you shouldn't throw out the entire code base with the missing feature.
I do recall us having some difficulties with ORBit a year or so ago (bug related issues, they might even be fixed today for all I know) so a module that could be compiled against different ORBs would be ultra cool.
I believe there is a CORBA module, but I have no idea how far along it is. It was non-functional when 4.0 came out. No idea where it is now.
Developing custom modules for PHP in C is pretty easy - I dont imagine it would be too tough to write a custom module that could provide PHP-level function calls that resulted in CORBA calls being made across the wire (I suppose you'd have to use a C Orb.. ORBit would be a natural choice, although my only CORBA experience is C++ with omniORB, so YMMV.. then again, maybe you can write PHP modules in C++, I'm too lazy to think about this.:)
> The author also seems to imply that shutting down Napster reduced the degree of copyright infringement but this seems unlikely given the number of P2P services that sprang up in its stead from Kazaa to Audiogalaxy to Gnutella.
Seems? You go on to chastize the author for concluding something from a gut feeling, yet you did the exact same thing in the above quote. Many other services may have sprung up, but unless you have usage statistics, you're assuming that the total amount of burning and sharing has risen. Unless you can prove that, you're coming to conclusions in the same presumptuous manner the author has.
Asides, probably redering even my assertion moot, the part you quote from the article has the world Perhaps in it. Its no use attacking conclusions to which the author has already correctly prefixed with a qualifier.. the author has already admitted it is just that.. a gut feeling.:)
> If the US is not the best country (remember, most folks speak of the best country as far as opportunity for the common man, not global politics), then exactly which country do you think holds that claim?
Fortunately for you, the UN does a report to answer your very question. The US has never topped it, but its usually in the top 10. It was 6th in the 2002 report.
I think what irks many people is that because the average patriotic american would rather have his guts torn out by a plastic spork than be, say, 6th in any given ranking, it is nearly impossible to get some americans to conceed that they are not the best. Nobody is saying the USA blows, and those that do are simply applying the same blind hyperbole that is found in blind no-questions-asked american patriotism.
If I ran the world, my first priority would be to attempt to purge the #1 or Bust value so deeply ingrained in american culture. Out of 200-odd countries on this planet, 6th is still damned good. Plus, it leaves you with the ability and room to improve and become the best. Isn't it kinda boring just assuming the USA is #1? Why not enjoy being 6th of hundreds, and focus on the challenge and fun of improving certain aspects of the country (most notably wage distribution is much worse in the US than other countries).
That is one freakingly hilarious.sig... I'd be lying if I had said I hadn't had fantasies along those lines from time to time. Shh, dont tell anybody.;)
"Lusers" angle notwithstanding, it was a *terrible* layout for the ballot. There are zillions of ways that the design of the ballot could have alleviated the concerns expressed by some voters.
Just because *you* can do something doesn't mean everybody else should be able to. There is tons of literature in usability, design, etc that show that there are tons of ways of influencing a reader or user into acting a certain way, one way or the other. I'm not saying anything was done intentionally in the case of Florida's ballots. What I will say is that I have a lower opinion of your type of self-affirming drivel than somebody who mistakeningly voted for the wrong candidate. Your view is just as closed minded as somebody asserting that the design of the ballot was *solely* responsible for miscast votes.
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If it makes you feel any better, KRS One, a mainstay of the industry points out that black execs are generally more resistant to letting black rappers promote concious non-gansta images than their white exec counterparts.
I'm not pinning it on race, I'm pinning it on the buying public, which, according to the numbers for mainstream rap, is more white than black. That part might be wrong. I didn't mean to really single out a colour - more the fact that the buying public is more suburban than urban as far as I can guess.
By the way, as a musician who has played in:
.. and produces music at home, I can tell you straight up that *all* music, whether its terribly immoral gangsta rap takes talent. Some takes more than others (you seem to pick up on the fact that jazz is quite difficult, which is true) .. but rap easily takes more talent than most rock heard on the radio these days. Its an extremely unappreciated art, but as a classically trained musician who listens mostly to jazz and rap, rap is *not* easy. For proof, refer to every rap you've ever heard in a commercial or promotional campaign. It's a wholesomely misunderstood style, and most media houses producing music for campaigns have *very* difficult times reproducing the sound of authentic, good rap. Its like saying that playing the drums is easy; sure, hitting a drum is easy, but producing a sound with drums that people want to listen to for 5 minutes in a row is not easy, and takes time, talent, dedication, and hard work. Factor in the fact that all music must relate to a social sound and make reference to its place in the musical tapestry of a culture (ie, rock is awesome in Flynt, Michigain, but not awesome in India .. its all about referencing what people already listen to and want to hear), and you end up with the fact that nearly any musician who wants to make it must have a very deep and ingrained knowledge of what people want to hear and how to make that sound.
:)
Jazz Combos
Stage Bands
Rock Bands
Concert Orchestras
Thats all terribly OT, but this thread has made me some karma, so why not burn a little.
Yes, good point. Thanks. :)
Major Label rappers who promote positve messages (and can be found in the stores you list):
.. anyone who watches The Sopranos has no right to diss Gangsta Rap. Thats not to say that you value the Sopranos, but I want to make it perfectly clear that ALL cultures glamoize the criminal underworld. Both portray a glamorized, clean-cut interpretation of seedy underworlds; the only difference is that The Mafia seems to have some sort of romance that people identify with, where as most folks cant identify with the romance in the gangsta life. Thats not to say that there is any, since I cant find the romance in The Mafia culture, but hey, thats just my take. Selling and glamorizing the criminal element is not something the rap culture came up with - hell, the roots of rap are in positive social change (read up on HipHop Culture if you have time on your hands), but as usual, the commercialization of something tends to support the perversion of any positive message.
De La Soul
Tribe Called Quest
Black Eyed Peas
Common
Mos Def
Talib Kwali
The Roots
The list goes on. That was my point. There are lots of positive rappers, but blame the marketers for not trying to sell it to you and the kids for not being interested in searching for a truth outside of the allure of gansta rap.
As a slight aside, something that irks me about the dismissal of Gangsta Rap as having no redeeming value
There's plenty of good rap out there like there is plenty of good Nu Metal bands out there. But like food, the better it is, the less people will like it, and thus the less it will be promoted into the public conciousness.
> It should be interesting as these multi-year contracts start to run out
..
I believe one of the problems in the industry is that multi-year deals are actually kind of out of flavour. Labels used to look for career musicians. Now they rent you for an album; if you sell, you might get one more album. Rince, lather, repeat.
That is to say that we might not have to wait that long
Yeah but you can thank suburban white CD buying 18 year olds for demanding the image and lifestyle you describe.
.. thank the protected coddled white masses in the 'burbs and the execs who market the image.
They don't do this stuff in a vacuum - the image sells, so blame your kids for wanting a Puff Daddy instead of a De La Soul, or wanting a Wu Tang instead of a Del tha Funky Homosapien.
There are plenty of positive, concious rappers out there who do not condone the "thug life". But the CD buying public drives the demand for the thug life
You don't actually believe music reviewers are going to appreciate the difference between a high end audio setup and a discman do you?
.. and for the most part, since people buying these CDs will be listening on discmen instead of a Dolby Pro Logic 5.1 whatever channel setup, shouldn't the reviewer base his review on how most consumers will listen to the music anyway?
You must be confusing music reviewers with audio equipment reviewers.
Movie reviewers watch movies in theatres, not in private viewing rooms with top of the line home-theatre-nerd equipment. They're there to review the _content_, not the platform.
I don't think a review on a Pearl Jam CD is going to hinge on whether or not you can hear the idividual pieces of phlem in Eddie's throat when he's singing
Yeah, but who says:
.. but seeing as that would kill a huge part of the Big Label market, they won't do that.
.. kick them out!"
:)
a) The P2P networks wouldn't require you to swipe a card, if they could only gain access to the copyrights people were actually interested in.
b) The RIAA's members would pay artists if we didn't make sure they did?
My point was that the RIAA is trying to make it look like P2P networks would never pay artists, even if forced. But really, the RIAA owns all the content the P2P networks want access to, but wont let them have it, because they want to own that market.
The RIAA's fate will ultimately reflect their stubborness. Since they won't play nice with others, at some point they won't be allowed to play at all.
In the meantime, we live in a world where P2P networks could pay artsits, if the copyright owners (the labels) would just freaking co-operate
So we, as people, should support P2P in the short term, until the RIAA becomes weak enough to have to conceed to plugging in their copyrights to the P2P networks so the artsits could get paid.
And as you said, artists dont make that much from the CD sales anyhow, so the pain incurred on artists during the transition from RIAA-model to P2P model is very much a fabrication of the RIAA. If anything, increased distribution of artsits that would result from P2P would probably lead to higher concert sales, which is where most mainstream musicians make their money.
Add on top of this that clearly P2P networks havn't killed off CD sales, only affected them by around 5%, and I have a hard time figuring out what everybody is so scared about.
It simply seems awfully clear to me that the RIAA's model is to use the real estate it owns to force people into feeding other arms of their business (distribution, promotion, marketing, etc). Anybody who isn't allowed by the RIAA to enter a market they should be allowed to enter into climbs the fence to do so. Then the RIAA cries "Foul
Unfortunately, since people are bred to give credit to those who have lots of money and are very big and successful (nevermind how they became successful, people usually dont take this into account), they have a very hard time understanding how something so wildly rich and big could be doing thing in the wrong manner. Time will vett all our opinions, but its frusterating, because by the time public opinion shifts, nobody is willing to admit or can't remember how they felt before.
Great post. Clearly you are in tune with the mechanics of this situation.
I always found it funny that, armed with the DMCA, you can pretty much 'invent' your own copyright terms, since circumventing protections that violate the law of copyright (notably that the work must return into the public domain after some-odd yeats) is itself against the law.
Basically, we've arrived in a situation where the copyright holders can write their own blank cheques of ownership, which was one of the reasons copyright law was enacted in the first place (yes, to mandate ownership and royalties to the author, but also to break the monopoly that the Royal Family-approved publishing houses had on the social culture at the time.)
> Would the record companies be able to sell into a meat-space distribution network?
.. there would not be a need for their business model.
... maybe the artists would have fought the Napsters such that they could pay proper royalties and such, but the whole point is there is no intrinsic need for the RIAA/Big label style business model for artists to earn a profit. Thats all. There isn't. Its no use wondering if the RIAA wouldn't have existed had they come in at the same time as Napster, because in that case, we'd give RIAA none of our business (I have to go to the store to buy the CD? But these other guys, I can do it from home! And make my own mix CDs! And they take less of a cut off the profits! And I dont have to buy 15 songs all at once!) and Napster all of our business. And then youd simply have the artists ensure that they were getting paid for making music. They wouldn't kill off the most innovative, competative, exciting and practically unlimited shelf-space model of p2p networks, they'd just make sure that they were in the loop.
No, but correct me if I'm wrong in stating thats the whole point of the market. There would not have been a need for them. Mind you, there may have been a need to regulate or mandate these distribution networks such that artists had to get paid, but the way the RIAA conducts business (shelfspace, adspace, and no space left over for anybody else)
But thats okay, see? I can't link the intrinsic need for the Big Label business model to the existance and development of music
We're so used to the RIAA approach that we think its required for artists to earn a living. So who cares if the RIAA's members could have survived with their approach had Napster been around at their birth? Its not like the RIAA are royalty-giving saints and p2p networks are all socialist devils. P2P networks can't pay the artists for copyrights mostly because the labels own the copyrights and dont want the p2p networks to be able to pay so that they can own all the parts of the music industry. (IE, they want to own the entire vertical market, and use the limited shelf and ad space available to artificially control who gets to profit off the music industry.)
Sorry for all the italics and bold. The only way to progress is to rip down what already exists, if you get my drift. Humans find a system that works, in the end. Any one group that becomes very powerful, such as the RIAA, simply injects unnatural market forces and distorts the perception of 'need' in a market. Its not that p2p networks dont want to be able to support royalty payments, its that the RIAA doesn't want anybody else to participate in the very market it was created to own.
The worst part is, the RIAA represents a group of labels that supposedly reps the entire music industry and yet represents itself like one company that needs to maximize all potential sources of profit. If that isn't cartel, I'm not sure what is.
Well, *obviously not*. I mean, major record labels didn't turn a profit while Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, Aimster, FTP, HTTP, TCP/IP, The Internet exi - oh wait, yes they did.
Does that answer your question?
My interpretation is that the file is attached 'silently' - the user is unaware that the attachment was made.
I say this only because its so obviously not an exploit if the user must willingly select a file, even if s/he is not aware of what action spawned the file dialog window.
I think its a pretty serious exploit if that is indeed the case.
If you can't figure out how to sperate your data-access, display, and logic layers in PHP, you are as much a "programmer" as you credit PHP with being a "lanuage". Meaning, not much of one at all.
There are tons of huge sites out there that use php. You can apply standard software engineering design and analysis skills to PHP, including but not limited to UI/Logic separation, profiling, OO, etc.
Web applications are and will never be the ASMs you cookie-cutter CS grads want it to be, so get over yourself and accept that procedural scripting languages can be suitable approaches for even large websites.
And Lisp? Even lisp.org seems to indicate that Lisp can be interpretive in the same manner PHP is, and states that the interpretive nature of Lisp is actually a strength, not a weakness as you contend it is with PHP. I guess you'll have to de-learn Lisp and stop "hacking" in it, huh?
Get your head out of your bum.
First off, we're not talking about PHP the language; the complaint was specifically against the API provided with the language.
.. this is not a problem subject to little one line programming slips .. youd have to be a pretty lousy programmer to use mysql_dothis, mysql_dothat and then get pissed off after 5 weeks of development that your code isn't portable to prosgres or whatnot.
That said, I really hope you're not comparing language weaknesses like making buffer over flow errors easy to commit and 'weaknesses' like letting the developer choose speed-vs-portability.
Good programmers still make little mistakes like off-by-one and buffer-overflow errors, and sure, you can say the language is asking for it in the case of C. But portability, when the api function names specifically refer to the database you are programming non-portably against is something the developer should be intrinsically aware about
You're almost saying that all hooks of an API should be horizontal, and never heirarchiel; and that it is the weakness of an API when the programmer uses non-portal code that is clearly named and documented as such (?!). Its a completely unreasonable and very inefficient approach; at the end of the day, the developer needs to have some accountability and responsibility for his use of the tools presented with him. Seeing as the PHP API makes it very obvious (as in right in the function names) which level of portibility you are programming to, I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to fire a programmer who accidentally wrote a PHP application using the mysql-specific calls when the requirements of the project included database portability. Wouldn't you?!
> Pear is cool and all, but by making the old calls avail, you allow users to still shoot themselves in the foot.
Uh yeah, mostly because, as programmers, its our job to hold the gun. Not knowing which body parts to shoot, ours or otherwise is the sign of a bad programmer, not a bad API.
I like having the options. On portable projects, I can use one of the many abstracted db layers. On non portable, I can just rip through development with the mysql-specific apis.
If they didn't make the naked db-specific APIs available, nobody else could developer their own home-cooked abstraction layer. If you dont like Pear:DB, at least there are alternatives.
Hehe, and here I thought I was being rude. I'm going to have to work on that. ;)
... but any good solution suite should be componant based .. sometimes the cost of supporting another platform is outwieghed by the cost of solving a small problem with enterprise technology (ie, solution overkill).
Seriously tho, I understand that peoples views stem mostly from their experience, but thats pretty much the golden rule of software: Even enterprise businesses have suitable uses for non-enterprise software. There is always a time and place for high load distributed multi-tier web applications, and PHP can be a little out of its element in really large deployment environments if developers treat PHP like its a stand-in for other enterprise web app platforms
The Right Tool for the Right Job; just dont assume the kinds of jobs you have to do have any intrinsic relationship with the size or worth of the company. Case in point: A small internet advertising delivery company will have a much greater need for performance and speed than a large company with thousands of clients on a web application. In this example, its the small company that needs the robust, extensible framework, while the larger company can probably get away with building their front end in PHP. And of course, many companies will need both (high performance servers with lightweight web front-end) so using both enterprise-style platforms and lightweight style platforms (PHP and Perl) is not uncommon in the same organization.
Anyhow, toodles!
The only thing they got wrong is that its GUI should be thin .. the GUI should be on the computer. I always thought it was funny that these devices are called 'hubs', when really the hub is the computer. These things are just thin clients to access the content on the computer.
In that respect, centralize, centralize, centralize! These things should just host GUI-output from your computer, and accept commands from the remote and hand them back to your machine. I'm not sure why they'd put a device-specific gui on it when the computer might as well provide that in the case where you have 2 or 3 of these things around the house and you'd rather have a consitant interface and consistant playlists/settings/etc.
The computer is (and will always be IMHO) the center. It plays the stuff. It stores it. It sends it out to the 'terminals' (the TV/Receiver in this case) which can display it.
My question is, why doesn't the computer provide the GUI and hand off the screen caps to this Intel Device? Seems to me that way, if you have multiple hubs like this in your house, say one for the living room, one for the rec room, you dont have to replicate or use another GUI to access the content?
It seems to me that the dumber and thinner you make these supposed 'hubs', the more centralized your functionality is on your computer, and the better off the technology is. Plus, things like playlists, etc dont become specific to a particular wireless hub, as I'm prone to think it would be in the case of the device in the article. I'm also working on the assumption that adoption goes up when people dont have to learn how to use that new technology.
The computer should do everything - thats what it was built to do! These room-specific hubs should basically be wireless dump terminals that just show X-like or Remote Terminal Services-type sessions from your 'digital media' software running on your computer.
We are a business. We serve Fortune 500 clients. We don't need no stinkin RCs, and thank the fucking lord we dont have to write the front-end of our app in JSP, Perl or C ... yay for PHP. Talk about a time/money saver.
Your attitude is that of the 'cookie-cutter' CS grad. What you might learn in the future is that you shouldn't throw out the entire code base with the missing feature.
Aha! Thanks for making my post redunant!
;)
Yes, google is great, but laziness is better.
I do recall us having some difficulties with ORBit a year or so ago (bug related issues, they might even be fixed today for all I know) so a module that could be compiled against different ORBs would be ultra cool.
I believe there is a CORBA module, but I have no idea how far along it is. It was non-functional when 4.0 came out. No idea where it is now.
.. ORBit would be a natural choice, although my only CORBA experience is C++ with omniORB, so YMMV .. then again, maybe you can write PHP modules in C++, I'm too lazy to think about this. :)
Developing custom modules for PHP in C is pretty easy - I dont imagine it would be too tough to write a custom module that could provide PHP-level function calls that resulted in CORBA calls being made across the wire (I suppose you'd have to use a C Orb
> The author also seems to imply that shutting down Napster reduced the degree of copyright infringement but this seems unlikely given the number of P2P services that sprang up in its stead from Kazaa to Audiogalaxy to Gnutella.
.. the author has already admitted it is just that .. a gut feeling. :)
Seems? You go on to chastize the author for concluding something from a gut feeling, yet you did the exact same thing in the above quote. Many other services may have sprung up, but unless you have usage statistics, you're assuming that the total amount of burning and sharing has risen. Unless you can prove that, you're coming to conclusions in the same presumptuous manner the author has.
Asides, probably redering even my assertion moot, the part you quote from the article has the world Perhaps in it. Its no use attacking conclusions to which the author has already correctly prefixed with a qualifier
> If the US is not the best country (remember, most folks speak of the best country as far as opportunity for the common man, not global politics), then exactly which country do you think holds that claim?
Fortunately for you, the UN does a report to answer your very question. The US has never topped it, but its usually in the top 10. It was 6th in the 2002 report.
I think what irks many people is that because the average patriotic american would rather have his guts torn out by a plastic spork than be, say, 6th in any given ranking, it is nearly impossible to get some americans to conceed that they are not the best. Nobody is saying the USA blows, and those that do are simply applying the same blind hyperbole that is found in blind no-questions-asked american patriotism.
If I ran the world, my first priority would be to attempt to purge the #1 or Bust value so deeply ingrained in american culture. Out of 200-odd countries on this planet, 6th is still damned good. Plus, it leaves you with the ability and room to improve and become the best. Isn't it kinda boring just assuming the USA is #1? Why not enjoy being 6th of hundreds, and focus on the challenge and fun of improving certain aspects of the country (most notably wage distribution is much worse in the US than other countries).
Good point.
.sig ... I'd be lying if I had said I hadn't had fantasies along those lines from time to time. Shh, dont tell anybody. ;)
That is one freakingly hilarious
"Lusers" angle notwithstanding, it was a *terrible* layout for the ballot. There are zillions of ways that the design of the ballot could have alleviated the concerns expressed by some voters.
Just because *you* can do something doesn't mean everybody else should be able to. There is tons of literature in usability, design, etc that show that there are tons of ways of influencing a reader or user into acting a certain way, one way or the other. I'm not saying anything was done intentionally in the case of Florida's ballots. What I will say is that I have a lower opinion of your type of self-affirming drivel than somebody who mistakeningly voted for the wrong candidate. Your view is just as closed minded as somebody asserting that the design of the ballot was *solely* responsible for miscast votes.