If he uses a closed-source product to do this, there is every chance that his data will be locked in a format he won't be able to use if the company that owns that software goes out of business.
Plus, he very well may still have to hire a competent consultant to help him with the software.
If you don't like the laws of this country, nobody is stopping you from picking up and moving your college/business/home someplace else.
Ahhh... that's the great thing about the good ol' USA. We don't have to just leave if we don't like the laws. We can write our representatives, vote, support candidates we like, camp out in front of the president's house, yell, complain, march and protest. Hell, you don't even have to be a citizen of this country or here legally to protest - as we've seen today.
Maybe the people with the different opinions aren't the ones that should leave, maybe it's the people who want to opress free discussions of ideas, like YOU.
IIRC, he actually said he had to avoid mucking with the precompiled headers, though I could be wrong.
I remember him talking about precompiled headers several time, it stuck in my head. He may have said any number of things.
To be honest, that was one of the less implausable parts of the whole plot strand, though the idea that someone would be able to get enough access to hot-patch nuclear power plant control code while it was running seems a bit off...
Oh, absolutely, from a technical aspect that whole plot line was a little over the top. Not worth discussing here and don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't watched yet, but I'm sure anyone associated with the NRC was laughing their ass off. Point is 24s useage of technology, while not realistic, is convincing. There are inconsistencies, but many are minor and easy to overlook.
The thing I like about 24 is they do a good job of getting it right. They use real tech terms in (more or less) real contexts. It's possible write a machine-code matrix to track the remote connection of the rogue agent, it's just not likely that it could be done in 30 seconds. I'm continually amazed at the kind of terms they throw around. Last season Edgar had to use the kernel code to hack the precompiled headers to get around security protocols. Sure, not a technically viable or even accurate phrase, but they did use real terms and it sounds impressive. There is a very small percentage of us that know what he was really saying and that it's complete BS.
What's the difference? Who decides how close is a valid infringement on a copyright? The courts?
Issues like this are going to be the downfall of our current trademark/patent/copyright/Intellectual Property system. Courts bogged down deciding if bistbuy, bastbuy brstbuy or whatever is a trademark infringement. I'm guessing about every word you can imagine has been part of some trademark and many many domain names could be considered a trademark violation. How can we possibly maintain a system that has to figure out how misspelled a name can be be before it's a trademark infringement?
picking undervalued companies that pay a good dividend payout and holding them for a long time for the dividend yield
I didn't think Microsoft's dividend payout was that great to start with and with them pouring money into R&D it's unlikely it will get better. They have lost the tech community and they are starting to lose traction in the business arena that is waking up to the folly of spending money on useless upgrades. It's hard for me to see them as undervalued with the amount of competition in the tech sector and their lack of innovation, but I'm not an investing analyst...
It's only when you take away all their powers to create something unique and individual, and instead give them all the same boring template systems of MySpace and blogs in general, that they actually use it.
You bring up a very interesting point. This is something I've seen a lot lately and I wonder if it's an actual sales/marketing phenomenon. It seems like the more restrictive an application is in it's feature set the better it sells, at least initially. If a software (or any other product) is too broad in it's application and capabilities nobody wants it. Take one particular aspect of of the broad application, strip it down and repackage it and you have a best seller. It seems very strange to me, but I know it's true.
Lots of bands don't have the rights to redistribute their music. The two bands mentioned in the article, Cheap Trick and Allman Brothers probably can't legally resell their music through another site without the label getting their cut. They would have to record new songs, which isn't what's selling.
I can tell you than in 97 when I first started using Linux I was far more efficent with Windows at the time. I had to spend a great deal of my time learning linux to bring my skills to a point where it became a more effective soluiton for me than Microsoft products.
My experience would follow that statement, but I can also tell YOU that when I started using Windows in 91/92 I wasn't very efficient and I had to spend quite a bit of time gaining proficiency. I still remember my first experiences with Win 95 and Win 98. Quite the challeng.
I just told him to go out and buy a Linksys router. Problem solved.
That's a great example. And there is no doubt sometimes it's easier to buy a specific product. Just one caveat there, I've used a couple Linksys routers and the ones I've used haven't been the easiest things to configure. I've also used smoothwall and found it very easy to configure and use.
Nothing's free. Every aspect of technology takes a certain level of training to use. This training takes time and energy, but this training isn't limited to Linux users. The real question here is which technology gives the best payout when the training is complete.
All my Linux opinions aside, what is there about Microsoft that would project any growth? Vista is late and has had most of the mildly interesting features stripped out. The Office suite is about as bloated and ridiculous as you could possibly make word processing and spreadsheets. I don't see much for revenue there. I don't know if the Xbox has actually made any money yet. There was a bunch of noise about Groove and Ray Ozzie a while back, but we haven't seen anything come from that yet. AdCenter is just getting started, a little late. The only thing anybody seems moderately excited about it is IE7 (oh, and the fact the godaddy converted to Windows Servers).
While Microsoft may be a value stock based on previous performance, the competency of their leadership as businessment and the tremendous resources available, I wouldn't make any such judgements on their technical merits.
Sometimes they solve problems. World War II, The Revolutionary War, the (US)Civil War. OTOH, it is possible we are too liberal with our usage of the term 'War' especially when applying it to business.
Even if you build the DRM into the speaker, I can take the speaker apart and find those contacts and do it.
Or just put a microphone up to the speaker - wouldn't have to take anything apart. If I can hear it I can record it. Quality might be low, but I didn't see any mention of free passes for low quality recording.
Basically, it says you have to use this fantasy technology if it is "reasonably available, technologically feasible" and I say that any competent technician will tell you it's neither. This is like passing a law requiring that it may not rain on wednesdays: it's meaningless.
Plus, who determines what's 'reasonable'? The senate? I want to put those clowns in charge of deciding what's 'technologically feasible'.
What I mean is, how do you stop people from making cheap hacks to fix their immediate issue in favour of solving the real bug?
You don't, just like you don't in commercial software. Microsoft is FAMOUS for doing just what you describe, but it happens to most software projects. Eventually all of these hacks add up and a complete module or application has to have a major rewrite. The best way around this is for a developer to not incorporate hacks into the project, but rejecting the submissions is not the only way to accomplish this. One method is for the maintainer to use the hacks to identify the core problems and correct them. Another is to modularize your project to the extent that hacks can be made without impacting the core architecture.
Code maintenance is a challenge for any software project. OSS is not more or less prone to architecture degredation than any other project.
So WHY did Bill want to crush Netscape? Was it just a personal pride issue? I havent read TFA yet, but it seems rather obvious that Microsoft won the browser war, crushed Netscape and then just dropped the ball. They fought really hard to achieve dominance and then did nothing with it.
Bill may have got what he wanted, but it still seems like a blunder.
It's like the US conolists compromising with the Brits, it's like the slave states compromising with the free states. People who thought it was workable simply were in denial of the real world and real world forces that were in play.
Absolutely, compromise sucks. We should just nuke everybody!!! Koreans, Chinese, Mexico, Iran, liberals, conservatives, Environmentalists, Christians, etc... Compromise is vital. I'm not one to shy away from a fight and I do believe there are times when force is needed to settle some issues, but only after a compromise has been attempted and rejected by one or both parties.
There is no reason copyrights have to be an all or nothing game. There are many circumstances that copyrights have a legitimate place. I don't think a major men's magazine should be able to run a copyrighted image on their cover. I believe a major product manufacturer should have to pay to use a pop tune in their commercial. Copyrights should protect, for a limited time, the original author against other using material to directly generate revenue. That only seems reasonable to me. OTOH, there should be a reasonable limit on these rights and items should become public domain once the authors have had a chance to monetize their creativity.
What will happen is that there will still be people buying the 1USD illegal ones instead of the 1.50USD official ones.
Maybe, but I think the average person would buy the legal one for.5 USD. That's an insignificant amount, and most of us don't really want to break the law. Seems like crime only really flourishes where it's really easy, or it really pays off. Legal DVDs would be both easier to acquire and there would be little payoff by saving 50 cents.
Now add price point of $0.99 with only 20 minutes or total of two episodes or better yet, single episode with multiple language versions. Parents now purchase 2 discs per week for total of 102 per year instead of 12-24 per year.
Great. And since nobody has a place to store 102 DVDs we will start throwing them out to make room for new ones. Since there will be no secondary market they will just go in the trash and the landfill. Then the environmentalists will start bitching about it, the EPA will pass laws restricting the number of DVDs that can be manufactured and the prices will go back up. People will be digging through landfills for old Blues Clues DVDs. Anarchy will ensue and modern civilization will come to a halt.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was pronouced "Why".
No, then it would be spelled "Y"
If he uses a closed-source product to do this, there is every chance that his data will be locked in a format he won't be able to use if the company that owns that software goes out of business.
Plus, he very well may still have to hire a competent consultant to help him with the software.
Didn't say I didn't like them. Just said maybe they should move someplace where they will be more happy.
Besides, where would I go?
If you don't like the laws of this country, nobody is stopping you from picking up and moving your college/business/home someplace else.
Ahhh... that's the great thing about the good ol' USA. We don't have to just leave if we don't like the laws. We can write our representatives, vote, support candidates we like, camp out in front of the president's house, yell, complain, march and protest. Hell, you don't even have to be a citizen of this country or here legally to protest - as we've seen today.
Maybe the people with the different opinions aren't the ones that should leave, maybe it's the people who want to opress free discussions of ideas, like YOU.
IIRC, he actually said he had to avoid mucking with the precompiled headers, though I could be wrong.
I remember him talking about precompiled headers several time, it stuck in my head. He may have said any number of things.
To be honest, that was one of the less implausable parts of the whole plot strand, though the idea that someone would be able to get enough access to hot-patch nuclear power plant control code while it was running seems a bit off...
Oh, absolutely, from a technical aspect that whole plot line was a little over the top. Not worth discussing here and don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't watched yet, but I'm sure anyone associated with the NRC was laughing their ass off. Point is 24s useage of technology, while not realistic, is convincing. There are inconsistencies, but many are minor and easy to overlook.
The thing I like about 24 is they do a good job of getting it right. They use real tech terms in (more or less) real contexts. It's possible write a machine-code matrix to track the remote connection of the rogue agent, it's just not likely that it could be done in 30 seconds. I'm continually amazed at the kind of terms they throw around. Last season Edgar had to use the kernel code to hack the precompiled headers to get around security protocols. Sure, not a technically viable or even accurate phrase, but they did use real terms and it sounds impressive. There is a very small percentage of us that know what he was really saying and that it's complete BS.
Wii require a shrubbery!
What's the difference? Who decides how close is a valid infringement on a copyright? The courts?
Issues like this are going to be the downfall of our current trademark/patent/copyright/Intellectual Property system. Courts bogged down deciding if bistbuy, bastbuy brstbuy or whatever is a trademark infringement. I'm guessing about every word you can imagine has been part of some trademark and many many domain names could be considered a trademark violation. How can we possibly maintain a system that has to figure out how misspelled a name can be be before it's a trademark infringement?
picking undervalued companies that pay a good dividend payout and holding them for a long time for the dividend yield
I didn't think Microsoft's dividend payout was that great to start with and with them pouring money into R&D it's unlikely it will get better. They have lost the tech community and they are starting to lose traction in the business arena that is waking up to the folly of spending money on useless upgrades. It's hard for me to see them as undervalued with the amount of competition in the tech sector and their lack of innovation, but I'm not an investing analyst...
Sorry for the ot reply, but how exactly does one "turn down" a webserver?!
With the big knob on the front, of course.
It's only when you take away all their powers to create something unique and individual, and instead give them all the same boring template systems of MySpace and blogs in general, that they actually use it.
You bring up a very interesting point. This is something I've seen a lot lately and I wonder if it's an actual sales/marketing phenomenon. It seems like the more restrictive an application is in it's feature set the better it sells, at least initially. If a software (or any other product) is too broad in it's application and capabilities nobody wants it. Take one particular aspect of of the broad application, strip it down and repackage it and you have a best seller. It seems very strange to me, but I know it's true.
Did you get that out of the textbook?
I must have been asleep in the class where we went over the 'textbook definition of Web 2.0'.
Lots of bands don't have the rights to redistribute their music. The two bands mentioned in the article, Cheap Trick and Allman Brothers probably can't legally resell their music through another site without the label getting their cut. They would have to record new songs, which isn't what's selling.
I can tell you than in 97 when I first started using Linux I was far more efficent with Windows at the time. I had to spend a great deal of my time learning linux to bring my skills to a point where it became a more effective soluiton for me than Microsoft products.
My experience would follow that statement, but I can also tell YOU that when I started using Windows in 91/92 I wasn't very efficient and I had to spend quite a bit of time gaining proficiency. I still remember my first experiences with Win 95 and Win 98. Quite the challeng.
I just told him to go out and buy a Linksys router. Problem solved.
That's a great example. And there is no doubt sometimes it's easier to buy a specific product. Just one caveat there, I've used a couple Linksys routers and the ones I've used haven't been the easiest things to configure. I've also used smoothwall and found it very easy to configure and use.
Nothing's free. Every aspect of technology takes a certain level of training to use. This training takes time and energy, but this training isn't limited to Linux users. The real question here is which technology gives the best payout when the training is complete.
Almost makes MSFT look like a value stock...
All my Linux opinions aside, what is there about Microsoft that would project any growth? Vista is late and has had most of the mildly interesting features stripped out. The Office suite is about as bloated and ridiculous as you could possibly make word processing and spreadsheets. I don't see much for revenue there. I don't know if the Xbox has actually made any money yet. There was a bunch of noise about Groove and Ray Ozzie a while back, but we haven't seen anything come from that yet. AdCenter is just getting started, a little late. The only thing anybody seems moderately excited about it is IE7 (oh, and the fact the godaddy converted to Windows Servers).
While Microsoft may be a value stock based on previous performance, the competency of their leadership as businessment and the tremendous resources available, I wouldn't make any such judgements on their technical merits.
Sometimes they solve problems. World War II, The Revolutionary War, the (US)Civil War. OTOH, it is possible we are too liberal with our usage of the term 'War' especially when applying it to business.
Even if you build the DRM into the speaker, I can take the speaker apart and find those contacts and do it.
Or just put a microphone up to the speaker - wouldn't have to take anything apart. If I can hear it I can record it. Quality might be low, but I didn't see any mention of free passes for low quality recording.
Basically, it says you have to use this fantasy technology if it is "reasonably available, technologically feasible" and I say that any competent technician will tell you it's neither. This is like passing a law requiring that it may not rain on wednesdays: it's meaningless.
Plus, who determines what's 'reasonable'? The senate? I want to put those clowns in charge of deciding what's 'technologically feasible'.
So if you connect two together are you going to have a Wii Wii?
What I mean is, how do you stop people from making cheap hacks to fix their immediate issue in favour of solving the real bug?
You don't, just like you don't in commercial software. Microsoft is FAMOUS for doing just what you describe, but it happens to most software projects. Eventually all of these hacks add up and a complete module or application has to have a major rewrite. The best way around this is for a developer to not incorporate hacks into the project, but rejecting the submissions is not the only way to accomplish this. One method is for the maintainer to use the hacks to identify the core problems and correct them. Another is to modularize your project to the extent that hacks can be made without impacting the core architecture.
Code maintenance is a challenge for any software project. OSS is not more or less prone to architecture degredation than any other project.
You're giving your money away to the automotive industry anyway, why not give it where it will dow the most good.
So WHY did Bill want to crush Netscape? Was it just a personal pride issue? I havent read TFA yet, but it seems rather obvious that Microsoft won the browser war, crushed Netscape and then just dropped the ball. They fought really hard to achieve dominance and then did nothing with it.
Bill may have got what he wanted, but it still seems like a blunder.
It's like the US conolists compromising with the Brits, it's like the slave states compromising with the free states. People who thought it was workable simply were in denial of the real world and real world forces that were in play.
Absolutely, compromise sucks. We should just nuke everybody!!! Koreans, Chinese, Mexico, Iran, liberals, conservatives, Environmentalists, Christians, etc... Compromise is vital. I'm not one to shy away from a fight and I do believe there are times when force is needed to settle some issues, but only after a compromise has been attempted and rejected by one or both parties.
There is no reason copyrights have to be an all or nothing game. There are many circumstances that copyrights have a legitimate place. I don't think a major men's magazine should be able to run a copyrighted image on their cover. I believe a major product manufacturer should have to pay to use a pop tune in their commercial. Copyrights should protect, for a limited time, the original author against other using material to directly generate revenue. That only seems reasonable to me. OTOH, there should be a reasonable limit on these rights and items should become public domain once the authors have had a chance to monetize their creativity.
What will happen is that there will still be people buying the 1USD illegal ones instead of the 1.50USD official ones.
.5 USD. That's an insignificant amount, and most of us don't really want to break the law. Seems like crime only really flourishes where it's really easy, or it really pays off. Legal DVDs would be both easier to acquire and there would be little payoff by saving 50 cents.
Maybe, but I think the average person would buy the legal one for
Now add price point of $0.99 with only 20 minutes or total of two episodes or better yet, single episode with multiple language versions. Parents now purchase 2 discs per week for total of 102 per year instead of 12-24 per year.
Great. And since nobody has a place to store 102 DVDs we will start throwing them out to make room for new ones. Since there will be no secondary market they will just go in the trash and the landfill. Then the environmentalists will start bitching about it, the EPA will pass laws restricting the number of DVDs that can be manufactured and the prices will go back up. People will be digging through landfills for old Blues Clues DVDs. Anarchy will ensue and modern civilization will come to a halt.
Nice plan for causing the end of the world.