Actually, Windows for Workgroups was Windows 3.11 (clever aside about the intentional "bug" in calc.exe where entering "3.11 - 3.1" gave the answer "0"). Windows 3.1 was just non-network-ready "Windows". Brilliant marketing idea, actually.
Pretty much *everybody* installed win32s, because freecell came with it...always winnable my ass.
...which would be a fair comparison if Ghost (assuming corporate edition, which is 39.20 per seat for 10-1000 licenses on Symantec's site, btw) could only do bare-metal imaging.
The DeployCenter lets you get pretty sophisticated with picking and choosing application sets to install, etc.
That said, I'd do a search on sourceforge.net for "disk imaging" if cheap is the ultimate watchword, vs. capable.
Agreed. One of the nice things about AJAX app development is that all you have to do to make it work where you need it is to make sure it works on the installed browser.
For me, this means that now the few folks using linux on their desktops can run the same (previously VB) apps as the rest of the people who are using it.
I don't have to worry about tomcat, etc...the web pages are all plain old HTML, and the back-end processing pages are language-agnostic. If I write an app, I can port it to wherever I want by recoding just the logic half VB/ASP becomes PHP very easily, and all I have to do is make sure the same XML gets spit out in the response.
Java held the promise of "run anywhere" code, and javascript and HTML (plus browsers that support the XMLHTTP object) have made it reality.
All that aside, the morfik demo was way too reminiscent of using MS Access for me to take seriously...been there, done that. I watched it and thought "Is it April 1st?".
This is exactly what I mean. So caught up in the propaganda of the "ism" that it's inconceivable that people might actually choose to do something useful with their lives without the carrot of shiny stuff and the stick of deprivation.
No, this is not exactly what you mean. This is a comment meant to illustrate that your complaint has things within it that are also deserving of complaints (and some matrix-related karma-whoring).
You said "The point of driving efficiency and productivity up ought to be plenty for everyone, should it not?"...and I thought "hey now, that sounds an awful lot like idealism".
Yes, many people will do something with their lives without the carrot and stick, but I'd bet a few months salary that it's not a number greater than 50 percent of humanity.
You wax philosophical about people being controlled by deprivation at the whim of some nebulous ultra-wealth-mongers, and then bitch that *other* people are getting caught up in "isms"? Have a beer and calm down...all I wanted to do was get some points for the obvious animatrix tie-in.
If there is plenty, there is no reason it shouldn't all be free.
Until, of course, all of the lazy freeloaders that we just became at that point want there to *keep* being plenty.
I guess once the robots arrive and start taking care of us, we could manage it...until they revolt and turn us in to farms of human batteries hooked into some "matrix"...
In this case, we're talking about SBC wanting to have it's cake, eat it, and make somebody else pay them to do it. Yes, they paid for the lines. Yes, they charge customers (already) for the privilege of using them. Yes, Google already pays to be connected to the internet, which is also connected to those lines, in a fashion.
The dimness of SBC's statement is astounding. They want to charge companies who do not use the service they provide for the habits of the people that *do* use their service. Google doesn't get a free ride, they pay to be connected to the internet. I don't get a free ride either, I pay them 30-something dollars a month for my DSL.
I imagine that SBC's partnership with Yahoo has something to do with it all...
Building on that thought, I'd say you might want to get your feet wet with Perl. There are many ways to structure Perl code, and it'll make it reasonably easy to move to C or C++ later on. Dink around with it until you find something you want to do, but can't, and then delve into C to find out if you *really* want to know how to do it.
You can make useful programs, get help from plenty of people, and learn a bit at the same time. Just remember "#!perl -w" and "use strict;"
They used to make a single-DIN in-dash unit, but it's discontinued...
Anyway, the fanless model in the first link has SPDIF outputs, and (of course) normal 1/8" phono, which you can slap an RCA adapter on. If you can't use that to play OGG through your stereo, you ain't tryin'.
I dunno..."Standard Generalized Markup Language" vs. "eXtensible Markup Language". There are hints in the names as to what they're for.
In point of fact, XML is not just intended for rendering non-document structured data (XHTML being one example of this, just as HTML is an example of this relating to SGML).
XML and SGML both had the intent of allowing open definitions of document content within a specific framework (delimiters, keywords, general syntax rules), and XML is a restricted subset of SGML. The fact that the most common use of XML to date has been for data and data transformation does not make it a data-container-only language any more than the same fact makes SGML a data-container-only language. The difference comes in the specific restrictions used in XML that make it more practical to implement.
All that aside, if we go back to heredity, if SGML is not covered by the patent, and XML is substantially a subset of SGML, then does it make sense that XML should be covered by the patent? In Dec, 1997 you find an example of a way to create an XML declaration in SGML. The RFC says in section 4:
XML, as a subset of SGML, has the same security considerations as specified in [RFC-1874].
XML is defined here as 'An initiative from the W3C defining an "extremely simple" dialect of SGML suitable for use on the World-Wide Web.', which says to me that the patent holder and the USPTO ought to examine the relationship between SGML and XML more closely, as well as examining the SGML-based applications that still exist.
Seeing as how SGML is not designed specifically for web-based transactions, it is probably broad enough to cover any situation that the patent applies to, unless they have somehow designed a process that implements SGML/XML-like behavior outside of computing devices.
By grouping together people it becomes easier (or even possible) to make the situation better for all programmers.
Ideally, yes. In theory, there's no difference between theory and reality. In reality, there is...
Now I realise that the idea of thinking of a group of poeple goes against the American "ME ME ME!" thinking; but by being to egoistic you are making things worse for yourself in the long run. Becuase when it comes down to it you can always find someone that is willing to work for less than you are. And guess what, that means you lose.
Right. So, all we have to do is get all of those programmers to suspend their ego and submit to the decisions of an overriding authority.
Voluntarily.
I sense a divergence between theory and reality...
Besides, if a company uses the "It's too expensive here, feel sorry for us!" excuse to outsource they are going to outsource anyways.
True, but those aren't the ones that matter. They'll outsource, miss deadlines, make shoddy products, have lag in fixin bugs, trouble with QA, and either die a slow death, or reverse their stance on outsourcing. Over time, those offshore wages are rising, too. If they're saying "feel sorry for us", they're not going to be around long.
The company will pay what the market dictates. When programmers are in demand (or ditch-diggers, or pilots, or tire assembly-line workers), they get more money...this is pushing wages up overseas, and reducing the comparative attractiveness of price there. That *plus* the benefits of language, location, and oversight end up killing the practice of outsourcing programming jobs.
Unions force software companies with global competitors into charging higher prices for the same goods (assuming the union works for more compensation or benefits for the programmers). That either causes some programmers to get fired, or forces the company out of business. You can't make a copy of a car and sell it easily. With software, you can. There's much less room for overhead.
For some reason outsourcing seems most popular in the US which is not the most expensive place to employ people in. Companies in Europe seem to understand that the bottom line on the paper is not necessarily the best way to measure productivity.
Well, we're talking specifically about software, and beyond that, we're talking about being able to keep paying employees who write software, not just making massive profit (Microsoft aside...but then, they pay programmers fairly well).
If you want massive consolidation and mergers, higher priced software, and less choice, then yes, unions make sense. I'd rather be free to choose my employer, and have them pay me what I think I'm worth than get to pick between "the big three" and make whatever the union says I should be making.
Quite simply, programmers are treated poorly in many situations because they're viewed as expendable.
So, unionizing changes that how, exactly?
The reality is that they *are* expendable, to a point. Many outsourced programming jobs have come right back to the states after the companies that thought they were going to be saving tons of money realized the overhead associated with having a remote development team that was not easily supervisable, and might not have been able to communicate effectively with the PHBs in the US that hired them.
There are several factors conspiring to decrease the attractiveness of overseas programmers getting jobs from US companies: rising wages in said countries (especially India), communications problems, logistics issues, quality assurance, project management...
You are attempting to make the argument that when directed by an organization that they must belong to, the programmers (who tend to be wired into the decision-making process already) will be demanding more from their prospective employers. How would you convince these prospective members that they would have better employment opportunities by creating a situation that actually tips the balance of attractiveness *back* towards outsourcing?
Unions are useful to workers in situations where the workers involved cannot speak effectively for themselves, but programmers are not one of those groups.
"You're free to say whatever you want so long as it doesn't infringe on other's rights" is meaningless because there is no real distinction between speech that does and doesn't infringe on others rights. The law is an attempt to draw this distinction, yet in practice whether you get in trouble has little to do with what you say, and more to do with who hears it and what mood they're in and who else is watching and who stands in judgement.
The "who hears it" part is important, you're right. The reason it's important is because that right to free speech is about public speech (what you say or show in front of random people). That distinction is important, too.
I'm not sure if I agree with your take on who you say something in front of having more to do with you getting in trouble than what you say. Public speech that isn't threatening or overtly lewd is seldom a topic of first amendment-type debate. Granted, there are some people who get touchy about certain topics, usually racial ones, but that's a comparatively small percentage of the public comments that are made every day.
You're not sure what you're free to say? Are you concerned that the post I'm replying to will wind you up in court? Are you afraid that you are unduly offending someone, and that a jury would convict you of something?
Sure there are some clear cut cases like threatening to kill the President (of course the President's rights are different than anyone else's in this case - you can actually get in trouble for threatening him. Say the same thing about anybody else and you're unlikely to have trouble, unless they're a lawyer).
Actually, you could get into trouble for threatening to kill anyone, if they believed that the threat was genuine (and provided they told this to a lawyer), but that's a pretty weak example anyway, since death threats are unlikely to be considered protected speech. The difference between the public statements "I hate that son of a bitch" and "I'm going to kill that son of a bitch" are an indication of where one boundary of protected vs. unprotected speech lie.
"Speech" implies communication, which means that there must be a way for someone to hear the message. You can say those same things in private all day long and neither will get you in any more trouble than the other (unless somebody has your room bugged, I suppose).
The phrase "You're free to say whatever you want so long as it doesn't infringe on other's rights" is not meaningless, it just assumes that the reader knows what rights others have, and what your free speech rights allow you to do or say (which is pretty clear, most of the time).
I hear you, I'm just saying that it's not necessarily a matter of big labels creating big artists...it used to be the opposite, and labels fought over artists.
Currently, yes, for a musician to be mega-rich, they have to be fed through the RIAA production mill and be commercialized in order to extract as much money as possible in as short a time as possible. In the past, it was a matter of finding a solid group or artist and making sure they stayed with your label.
There's been a bit of a power shift, but it's not always necessarily labels creating rich artists. That's what I was getting at with the chicken and egg comment. I think we probably understand each other.
There's a certain question of chicken and egg in your example acts, though.
If you're going to tell me that there are no musicians, rappers, singers, bands, etc. as good as the ones you mentioned, then I see your point, but then I wouldn't say they have no equal.
If the labels think you could be the next big thing, they'll do a lot to try and make sure that you are. They'll promote you, over-play your latest song, and put your face as many places as they can manage.
Just because the labels were right a few times, and managed to promote some acts with talent doesn't mean that the ones with talent that they overlook can't be successful. It'll be a lot harder, since they don't have an equal chance at airtime, but radio is slowly losing ground to the 'net, anyway.
Actually, I think that's one of the big reasons the RIAA is so rabid about not just illegal downloads, but the software that people use to share *any* music. If they can't cram top-40 down your throat and pick what they need you to hear to justify the advertising, they're screwed, and they know it.
Contributory infringement is a clever tactic, but it's also a pointer to what it is that they feel threatened by. It's not the downloading itself...hell, they track that to find out who to spend money on (BigChampagne, anyone?). It's a simple matter of money and math. If not enough people are seeing the marketing (listening to radio, MTV, msn music, "legal" download services", etc.), then they're just pissing that money away.
You can't buy mansions and stuff without the labels, eh? Maybe not. And maybe that's not a bad thing...at least if it means that we get to hear more than 8 songs on a radio station in a given day.
I mostly agree. I'd say it's a business problem *causing* a technical one. Is there no way for Cogent and L3 to get the traffic that's no longer moving across the peering points directed to a router that will allow it to reach its destination?
In your example, you are correct, Qwest is under no obligation to do anything, but L3 and Cogent probably are. I doubt they sold their customers internet access to every internet destination except the ones that are owned by an ISP that they're in a dispute with. It a situation that is incredibly disruptive for certain organizations that use one of those two companies as an ISP, and the reason for the problem is a deliberate choice on the part of the ISP that the ISP *knew* would break some things.
In the company I work for, we have multiple sites connected via VPN. If one of the other sites hosted an application that users here needed to access, and I purposely broke the VPN connection to that site because of a political dispute with another IT admin, you better believe that it'd be my fault, and that I'd be in deep doo-doo. Why is this situation looked at differently?
That doesn't make any sense. It's not as if there's no other route at all between the two networks. Routing protocols and ICMP unreachables exist to allow traffic to route around trouble like this. Unless the link was deliberately broken and packets unceremoniously dropped, the source for a given connection attempt would see it's packet routed in what appeared to be an excessive manner, but it'd still get from point A to point B.
If Cogent users can get to Qwest and L3 users can get to Qwest, but cogent users can't talk to L3 users, then cogent and L3 are doing something intentionally bad and screwing everyone on the internet.
Re:Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft
on
Dell Offering "Open" PC
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Two things:
One, why do I get no results searching "All of Dell.com" for "e510n", but plenty when I search for "e510"
Two, why is the e510n selling for $849, when a 3.0GHz e510 with the same hardware sells for $779?
No, he didn't mention anything about VB6, true. The problem with that being that the article was about migrating from VS6 to VS2005.
Actually, anyone writing VB6 code probably *doesn't* have to port their code to VB.Net, since that code runs just fine on NT, Win2K, WinXP/XP Pro, and Server 2003. We know that the article author needs to, which is the reason for his/her question.
For trivial apps (where you don't do MFC or windows API-level stuff), it's not a tough transition, but from the sounds of the size of the codebase, I'm guessing the author of the article is going to run into a few headaches.
If I ask you "Hey, will it be tough to go from VS6 to VS2005?" and you reply "No, it's easy to go from VS2003 to VS2005", I certainly hope I get additional input (since my question wasn't answered in a useful way).
Gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on that one. The VS.Net IDE worked so much differently from previous versions that it slowed me down a fair bit (habits and all, I guess).
Then, of course, there's the fact that a fair number of methods and common constructors from VB6 don't get translated automatically (you'll find out all about this if you have any code that touches any system logs).
I'd say that much code going from VS6 to VS2005 is going to be a rather large pain in the ass, unless Microsoft has made some serious improvements to their project upgrade wizards.
I'm sorry, but I'm not even going to think about installing a piece of software where the people writing the license agreement can't even spell license right half the time.
And then there's the fact that all it does is look for some known binaries, and A/V files in pupular formats. It removes "illegal" content from your computer the same way that a garbage disposal removes "unwanted" fingers from your hand.
I guess it makes people feel better than telling them "Hey, delete all of your MP3's in the "Bearshare Downloads" directory, or else!"
Hey mods, parent deserves a look...already commented in this thread, or I'd have done it myself...
Are there consistent rules for the way that voting works? I admit that I'm not at all knowledgeable about caucuses in the sense that they're mentioned here...time to go google some stuff.
People don't just come together and do things without incentive. and without the "American Dream" that with smart investments and hard work you can go from a peasant to a monarch people will refute back to hunter gatherers and fend only for themselves and direct family.
Ahh, but there's the point at which the metaphor diverges from the subject at hand. Musicians *do* come together and do things (like making music) without [monetary] incentive on a regular basis. The death of every record label would most assuredly not be the death of music or musicians.
...well, maybe it would be the death of *some* musicians (not that I'd mind)
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The only Windows 3.11 I ever encountered was Windows for Workgroups.
Windows 3.1 was WfW without the networking, from everything I remember (cue config.sys/autoexec.bat/himem/loadhigh/emm386 flashbacks)
Actually, Windows for Workgroups was Windows 3.11 (clever aside about the intentional "bug" in calc.exe where entering "3.11 - 3.1" gave the answer "0"). Windows 3.1 was just non-network-ready "Windows". Brilliant marketing idea, actually.
Pretty much *everybody* installed win32s, because freecell came with it...always winnable my ass.
The DeployCenter lets you get pretty sophisticated with picking and choosing application sets to install, etc.
That said, I'd do a search on sourceforge.net for "disk imaging" if cheap is the ultimate watchword, vs. capable.
For me, this means that now the few folks using linux on their desktops can run the same (previously VB) apps as the rest of the people who are using it.
I don't have to worry about tomcat, etc...the web pages are all plain old HTML, and the back-end processing pages are language-agnostic. If I write an app, I can port it to wherever I want by recoding just the logic half VB/ASP becomes PHP very easily, and all I have to do is make sure the same XML gets spit out in the response.
Java held the promise of "run anywhere" code, and javascript and HTML (plus browsers that support the XMLHTTP object) have made it reality.
All that aside, the morfik demo was way too reminiscent of using MS Access for me to take seriously...been there, done that. I watched it and thought "Is it April 1st?".
No, this is not exactly what you mean. This is a comment meant to illustrate that your complaint has things within it that are also deserving of complaints (and some matrix-related karma-whoring).
You said "The point of driving efficiency and productivity up ought to be plenty for everyone, should it not?"...and I thought "hey now, that sounds an awful lot like idealism".
Yes, many people will do something with their lives without the carrot and stick, but I'd bet a few months salary that it's not a number greater than 50 percent of humanity.
You wax philosophical about people being controlled by deprivation at the whim of some nebulous ultra-wealth-mongers, and then bitch that *other* people are getting caught up in "isms"? Have a beer and calm down...all I wanted to do was get some points for the obvious animatrix tie-in.
Until, of course, all of the lazy freeloaders that we just became at that point want there to *keep* being plenty.
I guess once the robots arrive and start taking care of us, we could manage it...until they revolt and turn us in to farms of human batteries hooked into some "matrix"...
In this case, we're talking about SBC wanting to have it's cake, eat it, and make somebody else pay them to do it. Yes, they paid for the lines. Yes, they charge customers (already) for the privilege of using them. Yes, Google already pays to be connected to the internet, which is also connected to those lines, in a fashion.
The dimness of SBC's statement is astounding. They want to charge companies who do not use the service they provide for the habits of the people that *do* use their service. Google doesn't get a free ride, they pay to be connected to the internet. I don't get a free ride either, I pay them 30-something dollars a month for my DSL.
I imagine that SBC's partnership with Yahoo has something to do with it all...
Building on that thought, I'd say you might want to get your feet wet with Perl. There are many ways to structure Perl code, and it'll make it reasonably easy to move to C or C++ later on. Dink around with it until you find something you want to do, but can't, and then delve into C to find out if you *really* want to know how to do it. You can make useful programs, get help from plenty of people, and learn a bit at the same time. Just remember "#!perl -w" and "use strict;"
They used to make a single-DIN in-dash unit, but it's discontinued...
Anyway, the fanless model in the first link has SPDIF outputs, and (of course) normal 1/8" phono, which you can slap an RCA adapter on. If you can't use that to play OGG through your stereo, you ain't tryin'.
In point of fact, XML is not just intended for rendering non-document structured data (XHTML being one example of this, just as HTML is an example of this relating to SGML).
XML and SGML both had the intent of allowing open definitions of document content within a specific framework (delimiters, keywords, general syntax rules), and XML is a restricted subset of SGML. The fact that the most common use of XML to date has been for data and data transformation does not make it a data-container-only language any more than the same fact makes SGML a data-container-only language. The difference comes in the specific restrictions used in XML that make it more practical to implement.
All that aside, if we go back to heredity, if SGML is not covered by the patent, and XML is substantially a subset of SGML, then does it make sense that XML should be covered by the patent? In Dec, 1997 you find an example of a way to create an XML declaration in SGML. The RFC says in section 4:
XML, as a subset of SGML, has the same security considerations as specified in [RFC-1874].
XML is defined here as 'An initiative from the W3C defining an "extremely simple" dialect of SGML suitable for use on the World-Wide Web.', which says to me that the patent holder and the USPTO ought to examine the relationship between SGML and XML more closely, as well as examining the SGML-based applications that still exist.
Seeing as how SGML is not designed specifically for web-based transactions, it is probably broad enough to cover any situation that the patent applies to, unless they have somehow designed a process that implements SGML/XML-like behavior outside of computing devices.
By grouping together people it becomes easier (or even possible) to make the situation better for all programmers.
Ideally, yes. In theory, there's no difference between theory and reality. In reality, there is...
Now I realise that the idea of thinking of a group of poeple goes against the American "ME ME ME!" thinking; but by being to egoistic you are making things worse for yourself in the long run. Becuase when it comes down to it you can always find someone that is willing to work for less than you are. And guess what, that means you lose.
Right. So, all we have to do is get all of those programmers to suspend their ego and submit to the decisions of an overriding authority.
Voluntarily.
I sense a divergence between theory and reality...
Besides, if a company uses the "It's too expensive here, feel sorry for us!" excuse to outsource they are going to outsource anyways.
True, but those aren't the ones that matter. They'll outsource, miss deadlines, make shoddy products, have lag in fixin bugs, trouble with QA, and either die a slow death, or reverse their stance on outsourcing. Over time, those offshore wages are rising, too. If they're saying "feel sorry for us", they're not going to be around long.
The company will pay what the market dictates. When programmers are in demand (or ditch-diggers, or pilots, or tire assembly-line workers), they get more money...this is pushing wages up overseas, and reducing the comparative attractiveness of price there. That *plus* the benefits of language, location, and oversight end up killing the practice of outsourcing programming jobs.
Unions force software companies with global competitors into charging higher prices for the same goods (assuming the union works for more compensation or benefits for the programmers). That either causes some programmers to get fired, or forces the company out of business. You can't make a copy of a car and sell it easily. With software, you can. There's much less room for overhead.
For some reason outsourcing seems most popular in the US which is not the most expensive place to employ people in. Companies in Europe seem to understand that the bottom line on the paper is not necessarily the best way to measure productivity.
Well, we're talking specifically about software, and beyond that, we're talking about being able to keep paying employees who write software, not just making massive profit (Microsoft aside...but then, they pay programmers fairly well).
If you want massive consolidation and mergers, higher priced software, and less choice, then yes, unions make sense. I'd rather be free to choose my employer, and have them pay me what I think I'm worth than get to pick between "the big three" and make whatever the union says I should be making.
So, unionizing changes that how, exactly?
The reality is that they *are* expendable, to a point. Many outsourced programming jobs have come right back to the states after the companies that thought they were going to be saving tons of money realized the overhead associated with having a remote development team that was not easily supervisable, and might not have been able to communicate effectively with the PHBs in the US that hired them.
There are several factors conspiring to decrease the attractiveness of overseas programmers getting jobs from US companies: rising wages in said countries (especially India), communications problems, logistics issues, quality assurance, project management...
You are attempting to make the argument that when directed by an organization that they must belong to, the programmers (who tend to be wired into the decision-making process already) will be demanding more from their prospective employers. How would you convince these prospective members that they would have better employment opportunities by creating a situation that actually tips the balance of attractiveness *back* towards outsourcing?
Unions are useful to workers in situations where the workers involved cannot speak effectively for themselves, but programmers are not one of those groups.
The "who hears it" part is important, you're right. The reason it's important is because that right to free speech is about public speech (what you say or show in front of random people). That distinction is important, too.
I'm not sure if I agree with your take on who you say something in front of having more to do with you getting in trouble than what you say. Public speech that isn't threatening or overtly lewd is seldom a topic of first amendment-type debate. Granted, there are some people who get touchy about certain topics, usually racial ones, but that's a comparatively small percentage of the public comments that are made every day.
You're not sure what you're free to say? Are you concerned that the post I'm replying to will wind you up in court? Are you afraid that you are unduly offending someone, and that a jury would convict you of something?
Sure there are some clear cut cases like threatening to kill the President (of course the President's rights are different than anyone else's in this case - you can actually get in trouble for threatening him. Say the same thing about anybody else and you're unlikely to have trouble, unless they're a lawyer).
Actually, you could get into trouble for threatening to kill anyone, if they believed that the threat was genuine (and provided they told this to a lawyer), but that's a pretty weak example anyway, since death threats are unlikely to be considered protected speech. The difference between the public statements "I hate that son of a bitch" and "I'm going to kill that son of a bitch" are an indication of where one boundary of protected vs. unprotected speech lie.
"Speech" implies communication, which means that there must be a way for someone to hear the message. You can say those same things in private all day long and neither will get you in any more trouble than the other (unless somebody has your room bugged, I suppose).
The phrase "You're free to say whatever you want so long as it doesn't infringe on other's rights" is not meaningless, it just assumes that the reader knows what rights others have, and what your free speech rights allow you to do or say (which is pretty clear, most of the time).
It's far from meaningless, unless you consider glancing at a woman and raping her to be roughly equivalent.
Right, but the individual person who designed the handle isn't.
Currently, yes, for a musician to be mega-rich, they have to be fed through the RIAA production mill and be commercialized in order to extract as much money as possible in as short a time as possible. In the past, it was a matter of finding a solid group or artist and making sure they stayed with your label.
There's been a bit of a power shift, but it's not always necessarily labels creating rich artists. That's what I was getting at with the chicken and egg comment. I think we probably understand each other.
If you're going to tell me that there are no musicians, rappers, singers, bands, etc. as good as the ones you mentioned, then I see your point, but then I wouldn't say they have no equal.
If the labels think you could be the next big thing, they'll do a lot to try and make sure that you are. They'll promote you, over-play your latest song, and put your face as many places as they can manage.
Just because the labels were right a few times, and managed to promote some acts with talent doesn't mean that the ones with talent that they overlook can't be successful. It'll be a lot harder, since they don't have an equal chance at airtime, but radio is slowly losing ground to the 'net, anyway.
Actually, I think that's one of the big reasons the RIAA is so rabid about not just illegal downloads, but the software that people use to share *any* music. If they can't cram top-40 down your throat and pick what they need you to hear to justify the advertising, they're screwed, and they know it.
Contributory infringement is a clever tactic, but it's also a pointer to what it is that they feel threatened by. It's not the downloading itself...hell, they track that to find out who to spend money on (BigChampagne, anyone?). It's a simple matter of money and math. If not enough people are seeing the marketing (listening to radio, MTV, msn music, "legal" download services", etc.), then they're just pissing that money away.
You can't buy mansions and stuff without the labels, eh? Maybe not. And maybe that's not a bad thing...at least if it means that we get to hear more than 8 songs on a radio station in a given day.
In your example, you are correct, Qwest is under no obligation to do anything, but L3 and Cogent probably are. I doubt they sold their customers internet access to every internet destination except the ones that are owned by an ISP that they're in a dispute with. It a situation that is incredibly disruptive for certain organizations that use one of those two companies as an ISP, and the reason for the problem is a deliberate choice on the part of the ISP that the ISP *knew* would break some things.
In the company I work for, we have multiple sites connected via VPN. If one of the other sites hosted an application that users here needed to access, and I purposely broke the VPN connection to that site because of a political dispute with another IT admin, you better believe that it'd be my fault, and that I'd be in deep doo-doo. Why is this situation looked at differently?
Whatever you do, DO NOT let Mr. tally man tally your bananas, people. You only have to make it 'till daylight.
If Cogent users can get to Qwest and L3 users can get to Qwest, but cogent users can't talk to L3 users, then cogent and L3 are doing something intentionally bad and screwing everyone on the internet.
One, why do I get no results searching "All of Dell.com" for "e510n", but plenty when I search for "e510"
Two, why is the e510n selling for $849, when a 3.0GHz e510 with the same hardware sells for $779?
Truly puzzling...
Actually, anyone writing VB6 code probably *doesn't* have to port their code to VB.Net, since that code runs just fine on NT, Win2K, WinXP/XP Pro, and Server 2003. We know that the article author needs to, which is the reason for his/her question.
For trivial apps (where you don't do MFC or windows API-level stuff), it's not a tough transition, but from the sounds of the size of the codebase, I'm guessing the author of the article is going to run into a few headaches.
If I ask you "Hey, will it be tough to go from VS6 to VS2005?" and you reply "No, it's easy to go from VS2003 to VS2005", I certainly hope I get additional input (since my question wasn't answered in a useful way).
I call your criticism and raise you one ;)
Then, of course, there's the fact that a fair number of methods and common constructors from VB6 don't get translated automatically (you'll find out all about this if you have any code that touches any system logs).
I'd say that much code going from VS6 to VS2005 is going to be a rather large pain in the ass, unless Microsoft has made some serious improvements to their project upgrade wizards.
And then there's the fact that all it does is look for some known binaries, and A/V files in pupular formats. It removes "illegal" content from your computer the same way that a garbage disposal removes "unwanted" fingers from your hand.
I guess it makes people feel better than telling them "Hey, delete all of your MP3's in the "Bearshare Downloads" directory, or else!"
Are there consistent rules for the way that voting works? I admit that I'm not at all knowledgeable about caucuses in the sense that they're mentioned here...time to go google some stuff.
Ahh, but there's the point at which the metaphor diverges from the subject at hand. Musicians *do* come together and do things (like making music) without [monetary] incentive on a regular basis. The death of every record label would most assuredly not be the death of music or musicians.
...well, maybe it would be the death of *some* musicians (not that I'd mind)