Seriously - if you've studied C/C++/Java to a reasonable level, picking up other procedural/OOP languages like Pascal, C# should be a no-brainer.
These days, though, you rarely get paid to write stand-alone code from the ground up - you'll have to deal with complex APIs, application frameworks, communication protocols, database servers etc. If all your Java work was done using AWT or Swing and you get a job using SWT then you'll be on a learning curve (and that's just the GUI/forms end - let alone the rest of the Java acronym thicket). If someone still wants FORTRAN then what it probably means is they rely on something like the NAG library for numerical analysis.
Learning (say) Javascript is trivial compared to getting up to speed on the object model used to interact with HTML/XML models, and if you use AJAX you'll probably start with an existing framework.
In some fields, the Big Thing will be databases - SQL and all that (plus the APIs for accessing them).
So when you're looking at job ads, pay less attention to the languages and more to the other technologies they ask. You ain't gonna learn them all, but it will pay to have some knowledge of what does what.
That's nice. They get what they want. What about those that do care about the headphones?
Er, they won't buy 3rd Gen iPod Shuffles and Apple won't make any money out of them? I don't see the problem.
The only problem is if you have built up a huge library of iTunes music: So don't do that, then! If you like the design of the iPod, then iPod/iTunes will work quite happily with a music library of un-DRM'd MP3 files.
It's a bit late here and I am sleepy, but parent's post just gave me an idea. Would it be possible to patent something not to a particular person or company but to 'the public'?
My suspicion is that that would work... if the patent system wasn't broken and the mere existence of the first patent was a cast-iron guarantee against someone else patenting the same thing.
However, couldn't someone "embrace and extend" that by getting a new patent on some trivial but non-obvious (to plankton and software patent examiners) refinement? To prevent that, the license would need some GPL-esque viral clause.
That gets interesting, because whereas the legal basis of the GPL is "don't agree with GPL? don't copy this work! End of argument!" patents don't rely on you knowingly copying anything.
Then the company gets sold or new management comes on board, money gets tight and it's not long before they're taking another look at monetizing their patent portfolio.
Aye, there's the rub! Particularly when the sorts of companies the patents might be used defensively against could probably afford to bankroll a hostile takeover if Red Hat got too anoying.
Obtaining patents and then releasing them under an irrevocable public license seems like the only way to avoid this - but then you'd still need a clever, bulletproof "GPL-for-patents" public license to ensure that they could still be used defensively. The first test case of such a license would be, er, fun... (Unlike GPL, it could end up being infectiously viral, because you don't have to consciously copy anything to violate a patent).
My suspicion is that the the mutually assured patent portfolio destruction concept only really works for superpowers with very deep litigation pockets. Part of the problem is, the patent system is so broken and full of invalid patents or patents on minor variations of other patents, nobody really knows whether they are holding a doomsday device or a shiny casing full of pinball machine parts...
Physics has gone off the rails
since Einstein, postulating all kinds of absurd entities with no evidence whatsoever except "the math doesn't work."
Ever since Newton, math has been fairly crucial to making and testing theories in Physics. However, as long as Physics was dealing with subjects which could be usefully envisioned in terms of nice, human scale machines with rolling balls and pendulums and stuff, anybody could take an interest in the "qualitative" side and build a nice little brass model with balls and springs that showed the principle.
Trouble is, when you start dealing with the very tiny, or the very large, or something that happened 0.001s after the Big Bang, things just don't work they way they do in the human scale world: modern physics really started (or "went of the rails" in your opinion) when "human scale" theories about atomic structure, light and gravity started to be debunked by observation and experiment (spectroscopy, the constant speed of light, electron diffraction, the orbit of Mercury...) With hindsight, why would you expect otherwise? Why would an electron behave like a little ball of "stuff" when its a few orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest bit of "stuff"? These phenomena aren't examples of the way the human scale world behaves, they're the reason why the human scale world behaves the way it does.
Currently, math is the only language which can cope with these concepts.
Personally, I think attempts to describe things like quantum mechanics in "real world" terms actually make them sound whackier than they really are (while also encouraging cruelty to cats).
I loved Pushing Daises but it failed fair and square.
I think some of these "high concept" shows are only really good for a dozen or so episodes. Unfortunately, the US system expects everything to run for 7-8 years or be deemed a failure. If PD had been made in the UK they'd have done two runs of 6-12 episodes, finished the story and gone out while they were ahead (c.f. Life on Mars UK vs. Life on Mars USA).
Heroes is another case in point: Season 1 found a fresh new way to do a superhero origin story. Shiny*. Unfortunately, once that was finished, well, either take up the spandex or go back to your families and quit whining, guys.
(also c.f. the 6 episodes in each season of BSG which are really, really good or how much better B5 got when they crammed two seasons of plot arc into one...)
Now Trek doesn't have to be high concept if they go back to the basic TOS/TNG formula: not stuck in the delta quadrant; not stuck on a space station in the vanguard of a galactic war; not a pawn in the great time ware. Nope, just a starship crew on a continuing mission to explore strange new worlds and go where no man/person/reptile/walking tree-oid has gone before. Think of a story, any story, they can stumble into it.
If they want high concept, do a movie or mini series.
* Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, everybody on the CColonBackSlash blog is probably whining about how rubbish Season 8 of Firefly is turning out to be, and asking why the hell they cancelled the Simpsons in 1995.
How "chuffed" do you suppose the shareholders will be that archaic budget practices developed in the 19th century are preventing income growth?
I suspect you'd fine that the majority shareholders - big pension funds etc. - are right behind those 19th century budget practices. Slashdotters with a few hundred bucks worth of stock don't count for much.
Perhaps large organizations are ill-suited to doing new things? And yet Apple somehow manages, most of the time.
Pure speculation, but a certain turtle-necked evangelist running around kicking butt might have helped. Get well soon!
It's not like Apple could use its 20 Billion dollars in the bank to, you know, hire more people to handle the developer requests.
Apple may have 20bn in the bank but I bet that the iPhone developer support group doesn't have the keys to the vault, and the sharehoders and SEC wouldn't be too chuffed if it did.
Thing is, in any large organization, you have to prepare budgets and plans months in advance and get them approved by accountants - who rarely understand concepts such as "no one has done this before so we don't have a fscking clue how many developers per month will sign up over the first 3 years"...
Second, assuming that 100 downloads translates into 0 lost sales is just as silly as the when the RIAA assumes 100 downloads translates into 100 lost sales.
The tricky question is, which is it closest to?
Obviously, a fair proportion of downloaders will just be "leeching" - but equally, some of them will be serious fans who are going to go to the theater when it comes out anyway, and buy the DVD, buy the special edition DVD, the director's cut CD, the collectable action figures and would buy the Blu-ray if they didn't believe the system was hobbled with DRM.
Then you have to think about downloaders who might not buy that particular movie/album but will still spend the money they save on movies games or music, and the people who don't download, but won't go to the theater if they're treated like potential thieves and won't buy the DVD if they can't rip it to watch on their iPod.
Now, I don't happen to have the data to back up those theories - trouble is, data costs money and most of the "research" money is coming from the movie/recording industry and DRM snakeoil merchants. These are the people who insist on a "no skip" facilities on DVD players so that they can ensure that we read the important legal messages and then use it to force us to watch trailers for movies that were "coming soon" when we bought the DVD 3 years ago...
Here's an exercise: look at your "legal" music collection (be it CDs, Vinyl, Cassette*, iTunes etc.) and ask yourself - how many of those would you never have bought if your friend hadn't given you that first C90* or MP3?
(* I did acquire a few pre-recorded cassettes before I learned that they were apparently recorded on Scotch adhesive tape sprinkled with rust using a Fisher Price 'my first cassette player': mostly, the boxes now contain home-taped copies of the CD, the original having jammed solid).
I don't disagree with anything you say - but most of it boils down to you taking your responsibilities seriously and acting sensibly. That is not a state of affairs that follows magically from centralised record-keeping (especially of the high tech variety).
Its also important to remember the statistics and not fall for the old fallacy that if you have 1000 staff & students and your record keeping system is 99% accurate then only 1% of people unaccounted for will be false alarms. In reality, most people unaccounted for will be false alarms.
If there *was* a fire and someone who I *know* was sitting near me ended up dying in the fire, I don't want to have that on my mind, especially not children.
...and if the firefighter who could have saved that person if they'd talked to you was on a wild goose chase after a visitor who had forgotten to sign out? That will inevitably happen in a system that prioritises record keeping over individual responsibility. The trouble is, record keeping is much easier to police.
The official position is that they don't want to confuse customers when timetables are out of date.
Sorry - lets put that right for you:
The official position is that they don't want third parties to confuse customers - that's their job!
Seriously, and lets play devil's advocate here, they do actually have a point. If third parties publish outdated information then its still their employees who get to deal with the irate customers. I've got a little picture of Very (self)Important Businessman waving his Blackberry and spitting foam at the poor underpaind customer service bod - he's not going to be appeased by the little "valid until 1st January 2006" disclaimer on the "About" screen.
A more constructive continuation to your conversation would be to suggest that they look to incorporating a RSS feed or similar open protocol in future website developments, to allow developers of mapping and mobile phone apps to incorporate live, accurate data; effectively giving them free advertising. Of course, if their real motive is to raise revenue, we know what their answer will be.
Despite the Australian rail network sounding very much like the UK, There's a nice UK iPhone app called MyRail which gives train times, including "live" ETAs and changes, for any station.
Of course, if it snows, rains, the wind blows, the sun shines or (worst of all) autumn arrives and leaves start falling off the trees, the second thing that happens (after the trains grinding to a halt) is the National Rail webservers start melting...
How the hell do you copyright tide tables? All I need to do is turn up one day, wait till high tide, note the time and date. After that it is a simple matter to calculated the tide times in advance. Heck you can by clocks for it
Clue: if you get on a boat and see the captain consulting one of those clocks, get off again very rapidly.
Your method might give you a rough guide as to whether you'll be surfing or gathering bait. However, even assuming you remember to factor in all that ephemeris data about the relative positions of the sun and moon (which are kinda important, especially if you want to know how deep the water will be) you'll find that the exact times and heights of tides as the water flows around a nice crinkly coastline are a bit more complicated than looking up the latitude and longditude. Random example: some parts of the UK coastline get "double" high tides because there are two routes the water can take.
So, a lot of work will go into producing accurate tide tables that aren't going to leave supertankers either (a) stuck in the mud or (b) fannying around waiting when there's plenty of water. The people doing this will want to eat hot meals and sleep indoors.
Of course, that doesn't undermine the argument when the data has been gathered at taxpayers expense. In theory money raised from selling it should help offset the cost to the taxpayer, but in reality the usual result is an enterprise which combines the humanitarian values and public spirit of capitalism with the efficiency and economic prudence of socialism.
You are now RELIANT on that system being accurate to safely evacuate the building in an emergency.
Using any sort of register for this purpose, is a great idea for an office with 20 people and one front door. Anybody with an ounce of practicality should be able to see that applying this to a situation with thousands of students and hundreds of staff moving around multiple buildings is going to result in firefighters chasing false positives in building "A" while false negatives are trapped in building "B".
If a school building is on fire during the working day, you have to assume that someone might be in there - end of story.
However, this probably ticks a box on somebody's regulations - which are usually designed to produce a nice paper trail for inspectors rather than to actually help in an emergency.
Where I work, we don't have a register (it would be impossible), although we do have some high-tech automatic fire doors with tiny windows triggered by the alarm. These completely transform the look of the corridors and hide the stair wells. When the alarm sounds and you step into the corridor your first reaction is "Where the fsck am I and who moved the stairs?" Brilliant.)
I've been happily using Parallels to run Windows, but found it a bit deficient for Linux clients (the linux "guest tools" were slow to appear, and you often need to wait for an update before the latest distros will work). VirtualBox now seems great for this, and I'm tempted to give it a spin with windows.
Parallels offers "boot camp" support, drag & drop between Mac and Windows and cross-platform file associations. On the negative side, Parallels offers boot camp support, drag & drop between Mac and Windows and cross-platform file associations (each of which opens a catering-size can of worms!)
Main current gripe with VirtualBox is a minor one: the files that make up a virtual machine get scattered around various directories under "~/Library" and are tied together by a central config file. If you're managing a virtual server that's probably sensible, but for dev/testing work on a desktop its nicer to have a self-contained folder (or even an app bundle) for each VM that can be moved between machines. It would be neater for "virtual appliance" downloads, too: currently then need to be "installed" before use.
You forgot to mention excessive copyright terms (Mickey Mouse)
Think of all that 80-year old software that should be in the public domain by now:-) Sure, its an issue, but not really a GPL issue. If anything, we should thank Mickey for delaying that terrible day when people will be able to distribute modified EMACS binaries without the source...
and the copyright of binary software without the source code (combination of copyright/trade secret combination).
Now that's where you start a phoney war between GPL and copyright. The GPL philosophy has some compelling arguments as to why society should demand access to source code - all society needs to do is demand it, which is starting to happen. A full-out war on fundamental copyright, which is so mired in international treaties that it would be hard to change anyway, isn't needed.
The "victory condition" for "copyleft" isn't the abolition of copyright: "copyleft" wins when the primary use of copyright is to protect "copyleft".
The big conflicts between "Intellectual Property" (sorry, 25c in the swear box) and the free software movements don't seem to be about the basic principle of copyright, but rather:
Restrictive "end user" licenses which purport to extend protection far beyond that which is provided by copyright law
DRM and TiVOization
Patents
Proprietary standards for interoperability
Disproportionate penalties for copyright infringement and the escalation of copyright infringement to a criminal offense tantamount to theft.
People who forget to say GNU/Linux
The Foundation for Free Software and the Software Freedom Foundation (bastards!)
The GPL would be on a bit of a sticky wicket without copyright - there would be nothing to stop people keeping the source code secret - although I guess if RMS was made official supreme ruler of the universe he could not only abolish copyright but mandate that all source code had to be made public. We'd probably see disabled single grandmothers being dragged off to jail plaintively crying "but I included the URL for the SourceForge page...":-)
But seriously folks - you can object to the current "IP madness" without rejecting the basic premise of copyright...
... and this is why you have draconian policies in many companies about installing ANY unapproved software.
Which is quite a reasonable policy provided it is coupled with a mechanism for rapidly turning around sensible requests for new software, and truly is driven by security considerations rather than control-freakery and the need to secure middle management jobs in the procurement department.
Oh, and also provided it is applied to the Pointy Haired Boss as well as the proles - because (a) they may be the ones doing the dumb-ass things, and (b) if they have to wait 6 months for the software update they need then the system might get improved.
... it only takes one dumb-ass like this to wreak major havoc.
So an even better solution is not to let dumb-asses keep highly confidential files on their personal computers.
Of course, in the case of any slashdotter worth their salt, allowing them to manage their own PC will likely increase security by an order of magnitude c.f. the typical large organisational network.
You have a point about ".doc" being the de-facto standard. However, it is proprietary, not publicly documented and subject to change at Microsoft's whim.
Then you go and spoil it by mentioning ".docx" - a completely new format, incompatible with.doc, which causes all manner of headaches even for exchanging documents between Word users. Since MS were clearly prepared to undertake the expense and risk of a major format change, why not choose the (by then) already specified and ISO-certified ODF? The only "customer demand" for change was from those people who wanted a non-proprietary format - and ODF would have been a much better solution from that point of view.
I don't get it. Microsoft makes a web browser and bundles it with their operating system. Big deal! Apple does the same thing with Safari.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly on desktop operating systems - and you can't abuse a monopoly if you don't have one to abuse.
Microsoft in no way prevented me from downloading these or installing them.
The problem is not that you can't install an alternative, but that if you do, you will find your choice of content seriously curtailed, because providers will target the quirks and proprietary features of the browser that 90% of customers use by default.
Now, back in 1994, an operating system let your computer start up and load programs, provided the GUI and API, and maybe some trivial "starter" applications like Notepad and Paint. Applications like web browsers, email clients etc. were a new-ish emerging market (certainly outside of universities and the military). Microsoft, coming late to the game, decimated that market by bundling IE with Windows. However, if the powers that be were going to stop that, they should have nipped it in the bid then.
Fast forward to 2009 what we understand by "operating system" has changed and we expect any OS to do many things that, previously, would have been third party apps, including a web browser, email client, CD burning, media player, basic video capture/editing... and, in some cases, for these to be integrated into the API. Now, partly, that is due to Microsoft's influence, but OS X and Linux have followed suit or gone even further (e.g. OS X and Linux have PDF creation and manipulation, most Linux distros now include Open Office).
The EU need to concentrate on the standards issue - its hard to "fix" the MS monopoly without access to a gun and a time machine, but promoting/mandating open standards and preventing standards lock-ins of the past will do a lot to level the playing field. Quixotic attempts to micromanage what Microsoft bundles with Windows are just going to waste time and money.
Amazon is Paying e-book prices and selling them as audiobooks.
...and a Kindle is going to read out Harry Potter in the voice of Stephen Fry, with all the correct emphasis and intonation? If I plug in a Terry Prachett eBook will Tony "Baldrick" Robinson do all the voices? If I download The Hitchhiker's Guide will it sound like it is being read by two of the original cast members? Because, looking at Amazon (UK) that's what you currently get if you pay a premium for an eBook.
Text to speech sounds like it is getting usable. Text to talented dramatic performance is still a few years off.
I'm sure Amazon would be quite happy to use Kindle to punt professionally performed versions as an "upgrade" to the free robotic overlord option.
I can run basically every Linux/Unix application on my Mac, both command-line and GUI, while not having to worry about wireless networking drivers, printer support, power management / sleep support on my laptop, getting accelerated 3D drivers working, or any of the other minor hassles that are involved with setting up and maintaining a Linux install.
I partly agree, but in defense of Linux, you seem to be comparing a shrink-wrapped Mac (hand built by dusky maidens from only the finest OS X-compatible components) with slapping a standard Ubuntu CD on your old Dell. If you bought a purpose-built Linux workstation you'd expect it to, likewise, have been made out of Linux-supported components and be properly configured out of the box.
You'd probably have similar driver nightmares with OS X if, rather than buy a nice shrink-wrapped system from Apple, you tried to turn an existing PC into a Hackintosh.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously - if you've studied C/C++/Java to a reasonable level, picking up other procedural/OOP languages like Pascal, C# should be a no-brainer.
These days, though, you rarely get paid to write stand-alone code from the ground up - you'll have to deal with complex APIs, application frameworks, communication protocols, database servers etc. If all your Java work was done using AWT or Swing and you get a job using SWT then you'll be on a learning curve (and that's just the GUI/forms end - let alone the rest of the Java acronym thicket). If someone still wants FORTRAN then what it probably means is they rely on something like the NAG library for numerical analysis.
Learning (say) Javascript is trivial compared to getting up to speed on the object model used to interact with HTML/XML models, and if you use AJAX you'll probably start with an existing framework.
In some fields, the Big Thing will be databases - SQL and all that (plus the APIs for accessing them).
So when you're looking at job ads, pay less attention to the languages and more to the other technologies they ask. You ain't gonna learn them all, but it will pay to have some knowledge of what does what.
That's nice. They get what they want. What about those that do care about the headphones?
Er, they won't buy 3rd Gen iPod Shuffles and Apple won't make any money out of them? I don't see the problem.
The only problem is if you have built up a huge library of iTunes music: So don't do that, then! If you like the design of the iPod, then iPod/iTunes will work quite happily with a music library of un-DRM'd MP3 files.
It's a bit late here and I am sleepy, but parent's post just gave me an idea. Would it be possible to patent something not to a particular person or company but to 'the public'?
My suspicion is that that would work... if the patent system wasn't broken and the mere existence of the first patent was a cast-iron guarantee against someone else patenting the same thing.
However, couldn't someone "embrace and extend" that by getting a new patent on some trivial but non-obvious (to plankton and software patent examiners) refinement? To prevent that, the license would need some GPL-esque viral clause.
That gets interesting, because whereas the legal basis of the GPL is "don't agree with GPL? don't copy this work! End of argument!" patents don't rely on you knowingly copying anything.
Then the company gets sold or new management comes on board, money gets tight and it's not long before they're taking another look at monetizing their patent portfolio.
Aye, there's the rub! Particularly when the sorts of companies the patents might be used defensively against could probably afford to bankroll a hostile takeover if Red Hat got too anoying.
Obtaining patents and then releasing them under an irrevocable public license seems like the only way to avoid this - but then you'd still need a clever, bulletproof "GPL-for-patents" public license to ensure that they could still be used defensively. The first test case of such a license would be, er, fun... (Unlike GPL, it could end up being infectiously viral, because you don't have to consciously copy anything to violate a patent).
My suspicion is that the the mutually assured patent portfolio destruction concept only really works for superpowers with very deep litigation pockets. Part of the problem is, the patent system is so broken and full of invalid patents or patents on minor variations of other patents, nobody really knows whether they are holding a doomsday device or a shiny casing full of pinball machine parts...
Physics has gone off the rails since Einstein, postulating all kinds of absurd entities with no evidence whatsoever except "the math doesn't work."
Ever since Newton, math has been fairly crucial to making and testing theories in Physics. However, as long as Physics was dealing with subjects which could be usefully envisioned in terms of nice, human scale machines with rolling balls and pendulums and stuff, anybody could take an interest in the "qualitative" side and build a nice little brass model with balls and springs that showed the principle.
Trouble is, when you start dealing with the very tiny, or the very large, or something that happened 0.001s after the Big Bang, things just don't work they way they do in the human scale world: modern physics really started (or "went of the rails" in your opinion) when "human scale" theories about atomic structure, light and gravity started to be debunked by observation and experiment (spectroscopy, the constant speed of light, electron diffraction, the orbit of Mercury...) With hindsight, why would you expect otherwise? Why would an electron behave like a little ball of "stuff" when its a few orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest bit of "stuff"? These phenomena aren't examples of the way the human scale world behaves, they're the reason why the human scale world behaves the way it does.
Currently, math is the only language which can cope with these concepts.
Personally, I think attempts to describe things like quantum mechanics in "real world" terms actually make them sound whackier than they really are (while also encouraging cruelty to cats).
Taylor's son, Damilola Taylor, was killed in November 2000 at the age of 10 by knife stabbing."
Actually, although it doesn't make it any less tragic, I'm pretty sure he was stabbed with a broken bottle...
Before you ask, in the UK bottles are only taxed heavily if they contain alcohol.
I loved Pushing Daises but it failed fair and square.
I think some of these "high concept" shows are only really good for a dozen or so episodes. Unfortunately, the US system expects everything to run for 7-8 years or be deemed a failure. If PD had been made in the UK they'd have done two runs of 6-12 episodes, finished the story and gone out while they were ahead (c.f. Life on Mars UK vs. Life on Mars USA).
Heroes is another case in point: Season 1 found a fresh new way to do a superhero origin story. Shiny*. Unfortunately, once that was finished, well, either take up the spandex or go back to your families and quit whining, guys.
(also c.f. the 6 episodes in each season of BSG which are really, really good or how much better B5 got when they crammed two seasons of plot arc into one...)
Now Trek doesn't have to be high concept if they go back to the basic TOS/TNG formula: not stuck in the delta quadrant; not stuck on a space station in the vanguard of a galactic war; not a pawn in the great time ware. Nope, just a starship crew on a continuing mission to explore strange new worlds and go where no man/person/reptile/walking tree-oid has gone before. Think of a story, any story, they can stumble into it.
If they want high concept, do a movie or mini series.
* Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, everybody on the CColonBackSlash blog is probably whining about how rubbish Season 8 of Firefly is turning out to be, and asking why the hell they cancelled the Simpsons in 1995.
How "chuffed" do you suppose the shareholders will be that archaic budget practices developed in the 19th century are preventing income growth?
I suspect you'd fine that the majority shareholders - big pension funds etc. - are right behind those 19th century budget practices. Slashdotters with a few hundred bucks worth of stock don't count for much.
Perhaps large organizations are ill-suited to doing new things? And yet Apple somehow manages, most of the time.
Pure speculation, but a certain turtle-necked evangelist running around kicking butt might have helped. Get well soon!
It's not like Apple could use its 20 Billion dollars in the bank to, you know, hire more people to handle the developer requests.
Apple may have 20bn in the bank but I bet that the iPhone developer support group doesn't have the keys to the vault, and the sharehoders and SEC wouldn't be too chuffed if it did.
Thing is, in any large organization, you have to prepare budgets and plans months in advance and get them approved by accountants - who rarely understand concepts such as "no one has done this before so we don't have a fscking clue how many developers per month will sign up over the first 3 years"...
Second, assuming that 100 downloads translates into 0 lost sales is just as silly as the when the RIAA assumes 100 downloads translates into 100 lost sales.
The tricky question is, which is it closest to?
Obviously, a fair proportion of downloaders will just be "leeching" - but equally, some of them will be serious fans who are going to go to the theater when it comes out anyway, and buy the DVD, buy the special edition DVD, the director's cut CD, the collectable action figures and would buy the Blu-ray if they didn't believe the system was hobbled with DRM.
Then you have to think about downloaders who might not buy that particular movie/album but will still spend the money they save on movies games or music, and the people who don't download, but won't go to the theater if they're treated like potential thieves and won't buy the DVD if they can't rip it to watch on their iPod.
Now, I don't happen to have the data to back up those theories - trouble is, data costs money and most of the "research" money is coming from the movie/recording industry and DRM snakeoil merchants. These are the people who insist on a "no skip" facilities on DVD players so that they can ensure that we read the important legal messages and then use it to force us to watch trailers for movies that were "coming soon" when we bought the DVD 3 years ago...
Here's an exercise: look at your "legal" music collection (be it CDs, Vinyl, Cassette*, iTunes etc.) and ask yourself - how many of those would you never have bought if your friend hadn't given you that first C90* or MP3?
(* I did acquire a few pre-recorded cassettes before I learned that they were apparently recorded on Scotch adhesive tape sprinkled with rust using a Fisher Price 'my first cassette player': mostly, the boxes now contain home-taped copies of the CD, the original having jammed solid).
I don't disagree with anything you say - but most of it boils down to you taking your responsibilities seriously and acting sensibly. That is not a state of affairs that follows magically from centralised record-keeping (especially of the high tech variety).
Its also important to remember the statistics and not fall for the old fallacy that if you have 1000 staff & students and your record keeping system is 99% accurate then only 1% of people unaccounted for will be false alarms. In reality, most people unaccounted for will be false alarms.
If there *was* a fire and someone who I *know* was sitting near me ended up dying in the fire, I don't want to have that on my mind, especially not children.
...and if the firefighter who could have saved that person if they'd talked to you was on a wild goose chase after a visitor who had forgotten to sign out? That will inevitably happen in a system that prioritises record keeping over individual responsibility. The trouble is, record keeping is much easier to police.
The official position is that they don't want to confuse customers when timetables are out of date.
Sorry - lets put that right for you:
The official position is that they don't want third parties to confuse customers - that's their job!
Seriously, and lets play devil's advocate here, they do actually have a point. If third parties publish outdated information then its still their employees who get to deal with the irate customers. I've got a little picture of Very (self)Important Businessman waving his Blackberry and spitting foam at the poor underpaind customer service bod - he's not going to be appeased by the little "valid until 1st January 2006" disclaimer on the "About" screen.
A more constructive continuation to your conversation would be to suggest that they look to incorporating a RSS feed or similar open protocol in future website developments, to allow developers of mapping and mobile phone apps to incorporate live, accurate data; effectively giving them free advertising. Of course, if their real motive is to raise revenue, we know what their answer will be.
Despite the Australian rail network sounding very much like the UK, There's a nice UK iPhone app called MyRail which gives train times, including "live" ETAs and changes, for any station.
Of course, if it snows, rains, the wind blows, the sun shines or (worst of all) autumn arrives and leaves start falling off the trees, the second thing that happens (after the trains grinding to a halt) is the National Rail webservers start melting...
How the hell do you copyright tide tables? All I need to do is turn up one day, wait till high tide, note the time and date. After that it is a simple matter to calculated the tide times in advance. Heck you can by clocks for it
Clue: if you get on a boat and see the captain consulting one of those clocks, get off again very rapidly.
Your method might give you a rough guide as to whether you'll be surfing or gathering bait. However, even assuming you remember to factor in all that ephemeris data about the relative positions of the sun and moon (which are kinda important, especially if you want to know how deep the water will be) you'll find that the exact times and heights of tides as the water flows around a nice crinkly coastline are a bit more complicated than looking up the latitude and longditude. Random example: some parts of the UK coastline get "double" high tides because there are two routes the water can take.
So, a lot of work will go into producing accurate tide tables that aren't going to leave supertankers either (a) stuck in the mud or (b) fannying around waiting when there's plenty of water. The people doing this will want to eat hot meals and sleep indoors.
Of course, that doesn't undermine the argument when the data has been gathered at taxpayers expense. In theory money raised from selling it should help offset the cost to the taxpayer, but in reality the usual result is an enterprise which combines the humanitarian values and public spirit of capitalism with the efficiency and economic prudence of socialism.
You are now RELIANT on that system being accurate to safely evacuate the building in an emergency.
Using any sort of register for this purpose, is a great idea for an office with 20 people and one front door. Anybody with an ounce of practicality should be able to see that applying this to a situation with thousands of students and hundreds of staff moving around multiple buildings is going to result in firefighters chasing false positives in building "A" while false negatives are trapped in building "B".
If a school building is on fire during the working day, you have to assume that someone might be in there - end of story.
However, this probably ticks a box on somebody's regulations - which are usually designed to produce a nice paper trail for inspectors rather than to actually help in an emergency.
Where I work, we don't have a register (it would be impossible), although we do have some high-tech automatic fire doors with tiny windows triggered by the alarm. These completely transform the look of the corridors and hide the stair wells. When the alarm sounds and you step into the corridor your first reaction is "Where the fsck am I and who moved the stairs?" Brilliant.)
I've been happily using Parallels to run Windows, but found it a bit deficient for Linux clients (the linux "guest tools" were slow to appear, and you often need to wait for an update before the latest distros will work). VirtualBox now seems great for this, and I'm tempted to give it a spin with windows.
Parallels offers "boot camp" support, drag & drop between Mac and Windows and cross-platform file associations. On the negative side, Parallels offers boot camp support, drag & drop between Mac and Windows and cross-platform file associations (each of which opens a catering-size can of worms!)
Main current gripe with VirtualBox is a minor one: the files that make up a virtual machine get scattered around various directories under "~/Library" and are tied together by a central config file. If you're managing a virtual server that's probably sensible, but for dev/testing work on a desktop its nicer to have a self-contained folder (or even an app bundle) for each VM that can be moved between machines. It would be neater for "virtual appliance" downloads, too: currently then need to be "installed" before use.
You forgot to mention excessive copyright terms (Mickey Mouse)
Think of all that 80-year old software that should be in the public domain by now :-) Sure, its an issue, but not really a GPL issue. If anything, we should thank Mickey for delaying that terrible day when people will be able to distribute modified EMACS binaries without the source...
and the copyright of binary software without the source code (combination of copyright/trade secret combination).
Now that's where you start a phoney war between GPL and copyright. The GPL philosophy has some compelling arguments as to why society should demand access to source code - all society needs to do is demand it, which is starting to happen. A full-out war on fundamental copyright, which is so mired in international treaties that it would be hard to change anyway, isn't needed.
The "victory condition" for "copyleft" isn't the abolition of copyright: "copyleft" wins when the primary use of copyright is to protect "copyleft".
every once in a while the whole system would seize up when you hit return
...and when you tell that to young people today, they don't believe... Oh, wait..
The big conflicts between "Intellectual Property" (sorry, 25c in the swear box) and the free software movements don't seem to be about the basic principle of copyright, but rather:
The GPL would be on a bit of a sticky wicket without copyright - there would be nothing to stop people keeping the source code secret - although I guess if RMS was made official supreme ruler of the universe he could not only abolish copyright but mandate that all source code had to be made public. We'd probably see disabled single grandmothers being dragged off to jail plaintively crying "but I included the URL for the SourceForge page..." :-)
But seriously folks - you can object to the current "IP madness" without rejecting the basic premise of copyright...
You'd have to be careful with at least PET,
Well it looks like the Commodore 64 survived, and the PET was a lot more solidly built :-)
(Sorry. I'll get my coat)
(Anyway, ISTR the PET was made out of metal...)
... and this is why you have draconian policies in many companies about installing ANY unapproved software.
Which is quite a reasonable policy provided it is coupled with a mechanism for rapidly turning around sensible requests for new software, and truly is driven by security considerations rather than control-freakery and the need to secure middle management jobs in the procurement department.
Oh, and also provided it is applied to the Pointy Haired Boss as well as the proles - because (a) they may be the ones doing the dumb-ass things, and (b) if they have to wait 6 months for the software update they need then the system might get improved.
... it only takes one dumb-ass like this to wreak major havoc.
So an even better solution is not to let dumb-asses keep highly confidential files on their personal computers.
Of course, in the case of any slashdotter worth their salt, allowing them to manage their own PC will likely increase security by an order of magnitude c.f. the typical large organisational network.
Hint: The standard is .doc and/or .docx. Period.
You have a point about ".doc" being the de-facto standard. However, it is proprietary, not publicly documented and subject to change at Microsoft's whim.
Then you go and spoil it by mentioning ".docx" - a completely new format, incompatible with .doc, which causes all manner of headaches even for exchanging documents between Word users. Since MS were clearly prepared to undertake the expense and risk of a major format change, why not choose the (by then) already specified and ISO-certified ODF? The only "customer demand" for change was from those people who wanted a non-proprietary format - and ODF would have been a much better solution from that point of view.
I don't get it. Microsoft makes a web browser and bundles it with their operating system. Big deal! Apple does the same thing with Safari.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly on desktop operating systems - and you can't abuse a monopoly if you don't have one to abuse.
Microsoft in no way prevented me from downloading these or installing them.
The problem is not that you can't install an alternative, but that if you do, you will find your choice of content seriously curtailed, because providers will target the quirks and proprietary features of the browser that 90% of customers use by default.
Now, back in 1994, an operating system let your computer start up and load programs, provided the GUI and API, and maybe some trivial "starter" applications like Notepad and Paint. Applications like web browsers, email clients etc. were a new-ish emerging market (certainly outside of universities and the military). Microsoft, coming late to the game, decimated that market by bundling IE with Windows. However, if the powers that be were going to stop that, they should have nipped it in the bid then.
Fast forward to 2009 what we understand by "operating system" has changed and we expect any OS to do many things that, previously, would have been third party apps, including a web browser, email client, CD burning, media player, basic video capture/editing... and, in some cases, for these to be integrated into the API. Now, partly, that is due to Microsoft's influence, but OS X and Linux have followed suit or gone even further (e.g. OS X and Linux have PDF creation and manipulation, most Linux distros now include Open Office).
The EU need to concentrate on the standards issue - its hard to "fix" the MS monopoly without access to a gun and a time machine, but promoting/mandating open standards and preventing standards lock-ins of the past will do a lot to level the playing field. Quixotic attempts to micromanage what Microsoft bundles with Windows are just going to waste time and money.
Amazon is Paying e-book prices and selling them as audiobooks.
...and a Kindle is going to read out Harry Potter in the voice of Stephen Fry, with all the correct emphasis and intonation? If I plug in a Terry Prachett eBook will Tony "Baldrick" Robinson do all the voices? If I download The Hitchhiker's Guide will it sound like it is being read by two of the original cast members? Because, looking at Amazon (UK) that's what you currently get if you pay a premium for an eBook.
Text to speech sounds like it is getting usable. Text to talented dramatic performance is still a few years off.
I'm sure Amazon would be quite happy to use Kindle to punt professionally performed versions as an "upgrade" to the free robotic overlord option.
...or there's always Greek, Hebrew, Klingon* and, hey, Chinese (that should keep us going for a while)!
Why do you think they invented Unicode?
(*Fatal Error at line 16349: statement has no honour)
I can run basically every Linux/Unix application on my Mac, both command-line and GUI, while not having to worry about wireless networking drivers, printer support, power management / sleep support on my laptop, getting accelerated 3D drivers working, or any of the other minor hassles that are involved with setting up and maintaining a Linux install.
I partly agree, but in defense of Linux, you seem to be comparing a shrink-wrapped Mac (hand built by dusky maidens from only the finest OS X-compatible components) with slapping a standard Ubuntu CD on your old Dell. If you bought a purpose-built Linux workstation you'd expect it to, likewise, have been made out of Linux-supported components and be properly configured out of the box.
You'd probably have similar driver nightmares with OS X if, rather than buy a nice shrink-wrapped system from Apple, you tried to turn an existing PC into a Hackintosh.