There may be a glimmer of truth to that. When I was at uni I recall the teaching was all about object oriented design and how wonderful it was - to the extent that at least one lecturer I remember didn't actually understand anything that wasn't OO.
Well and good, but the whole point of object orientation is that you shouldn't have to think outside your own modules. I don't think I've ever seen a scenario IRL where any given developer could honestly say this was entirely practical.
The current UK government has been in power for too long and is doing what all governments do when that happens.
They become complacent. They adopt the attitude "We can do anything we please and if the general public doesn't like it, the general public can f*ck right off". Our government's been heading in that direction for some time but it's only relatively recently (the expenses scandal springs to mind) that it's started to look glaringly obvious.
Same thing happened with the Conservatives in 1997. They rendered themselves entirely unelectable for over 10 years, and it's only recently they're being taken seriously again.
I'm not sure what this is marketed as, for prototyping? Fast prototypes would be nice. But the vast majority of electronics are mass produced stuff, where the physical cost of the PCB is a small portion of the overall circuitry, with components, labour, and R&D being the real cost. I can't see printing traces of silver being cheaper than the existing methods. Maybe I'm missing something.
If it could be so much faster and cheaper to create a prototype, the barrier to entry for companies seeking to build a particular piece of electronic equipment would drop drastically. Right now you have to pay a hardware designer a lot of money, you have to minimise the number of prototypes you order because each one costs an arm and a leg and takes some time to produce. There's a reason why there are relatively few companies that do anything more sophisticated than silkscreen their name onto a reference design for a board these days.
And you know what happens next? Outlawing any software which attempts to hide the origin or ultimate destination of network traffic.
So next some basic stenography principles are applied and bingo! Can't tell the difference between that and HTTP.
And so begins the arms race that the spooks are so afraid of starting. What's particularly amusing/concerning (depending on how paranoid you are) is that technology moves so much faster than legislation that it's an arms race that legislation is doomed to lose unless such broadly written legislation is passed that they can get you for more-or-less anything.
I'm in the UK (my employer, until recently, had an office in the US) and there appears to be a huge cultural difference - our US office closed partly because we simply couldn't avoid hiring empire builders who wanted to spend all the company money hiring people and becoming middle managers of some sort rather than, I don't know, actually producing and selling a product. This was immensely frustrating for anyone in the UK trying to work with them.
I think at the height we had 80 staff over there and 5 layers of management from top to bottom. And then people wonder why the Indians and the Chinese are eating their breakfast.
Well, yes. Nobody who makes these laws really engages brain though - they discovered there wasn't any need once they'd got the nice cushy job in Westminster with the all-expenses-paid everything.
It's not that I think it's something to give up, it's that I think the ramifications of this are so great that you really need some way of resolving it that's a heck of a lot quicker than due process.
Sounds familiar. You really can't reason with people like that because they've already made up their mind what they're going to do - or more accurately, someone else has made it up for them - and the only thing that will change that is an instruction from the top.
Encryption itself won't help much here, but things like tor and freenet would. If someone were to apply the ideas behind tor to something like BitTorrent, it'd be impossible to tell whether any given node in a torrent were actually using the material it were distributing or simply sitting there passing it on.
So when your ISP cans you, with no trial, no conviction, simply waive the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 6.2 at them and demand your connection back, if/when they decline, start running it up the legal flagpole, the court system, and get the law stricken from the books.
Which is great and all that but these things take months, if not years to sort out. Meantime you've got no Internet access.
Lots of people work from home some or all of the time. Join the dots...
The protagonist responded it was to which the minster replied "well, that's not what it means".
Would be great if anyone could remember who was involved.
IIRC that was Jack Straw, then Home Secretary.
I also wrote to my MP at the time who basically said "well, yes it may say that but it'll never be enforced in that way, so what's the concern?". My argument to that has always been "if you don't want it enforced in that way, don't write it so it can be".
Lo and behold, we now have councils using this legislation to spy on people for all sorts of petty reasons. The original plan was it would be used to spy on potential benefit cheats (some benefits are administered by local government), but instead we have this:
Do you think they care at all what the people think? If anything proves that any form of democracy is not at work here, this does. Business interests are guiding, directing and even controlling government all over the world. The world may be pissed off at the U.S. government, but one only has to look to the "Military Industrial Complex" for why things are the way they are.
Oh the leading party cares very much what people think - though usually more if "what people think" is dramatically at odds with "what they want to do". In such cases, they'll spend inordinate amounts of money (oh, and where does that money come from...?) to tell people what to think. See also: ID cards.
Furthermore, individual MPs are frequently so loyal to their party that no matter how braindead the idea, most will still fall into line and vote for it. My own MP is part of the incumbent party and I don't think she has ever said so much as a single word against any of the government's policies. There's no earthly way she's going to rock the boat over an issue like this.
Who said anything about efficiency? He sounds like he doesn't care whether or not they change, he's just not going to support them. And "I'm not going to buy movies" isn't "big talk."
And it's a fantastically easy position to maintain, provided you don't have a SO or kids.
You do realize that they're not playing by the free market, but instead are putting limitations which would not exist if there was competition. If piracy could be eliminated (in their perfect world), would you expect prices to drop? I'm sure they'd skyrocket
That's partly because there isn't really a free market in the entertainment industry, for a number of reasons:
1. Little competition. There's, what, 4-5 major movie distributors? Similar number of major record labels. And they openly collude on all sorts of things. 2. A "free market" assumes that when John produces a perfectly good product but does a lousy job of selling it for whatever reason, Fred will come along with a similar product, do a better job of selling it and Fred does better overall. Copyrights (without which the entertainment industry would look nothing like it does today) make that impossible.
I'm not advocating the abolition of copyright - I actually think it's a perfectly reasonable idea - but limiting the terms to a lot less than what they are now (I have no sympathy at all for Cliff Richard and other industry veterans who propose longer copyright terms - everyone else in this world has to save up for the day that they can't/don't wish to work any longer, why should musicians be exempt from that?) and doing something about existing cartels would solve a lot of society's problems vis. entertainment.
Geocities really did make it easy to get a web page online, and is arguably, still one of the easiest ways for *anybody* to get information out there.
I would argue that seeing as the WHOLE FREAKING POINT OF THE ARTICLE THAT GEOCITIES IS CLOSING DOWN, the second part of that sentence is downright wrong.
There's an article based on this book in the current New Scientist magazine, and indeed one of the suggestions for lowering the impact of pet ownership was to feed them leftovers instead of canned pet food. It also suggests fish heads from the fishmonger, instead of premium cat food.
Because I'm quite sure the tuna catfood my cat got this morning contained no tuna heads, fins or arseholes.
It's far more efficient to put some sheep into a field and let them graze and then eat the sheep, than it is for me to try to work out some way to eat grass.
Excuse me, but Bull. Shit.
Let's say you have 10 acres of land. Your neighbour also has 10 acres of land.
You use your land to farm sheep.
Your neighbour uses his land to farm soy.
I bet you anything you like your neighbour can feed a hell of a lot more people than you can - and soy is high in protein.
(Of course, this argument is actually fairly silly because it has a huge flaw. It assumes that it's equally practical to farm sheep as it is to farm soy on a given area of land. This is of course rubbish - there are plenty of parts of the world where the land or the prevailing climate make for lousy animal farming but great arable - or vice versa - and generally speaking few farmers are silly enough to try and grow corn on steep rocky patches of land where it rains for 300 days of the year).
What you have described is a very shortsighted view of cost. Not that I think it's inaccurate - I'm sure a lot of companies work that way.
Let's say it costs $X to have your network run by a team of smart people who really understand what they're doing, who configure things so these errors don't happen. It costs $X * 0.666 to have your network run by a team of people who don't really understand what they're doing and so these errors to come up from time to time.
The argument in favour of taking the cheap route basically states "... but our customers are prepared to put up with the occasional inconvenience and it reduces our costs so it's all good". Great. But there's another side to that argument. Phone companies charge according to data and calls going across their network. When there's a fault which results in significantly less going across it, they can't charge as much. Yet their staff don't all go home and earn $0 the minute that happens. The electric company doesn't stop billing them the minute that happens. So as soon as there is a major issue it costs real money.
I would like to believe that someone's actually done the arithmetic to figure out precisely how much each minute of downtime costs and, more to the point, how much it costs to avoid each of those minutes. But considering how your average telco seems to operate these days, I doubt it.
I've only been a mac user for a few months, but I've never seen a PPC binary, with the exception of the one 'hello world' universal binary I made just to see what would happen.
That's largely because XCode was producing universal binaries several months before Apple actually announced what a universal binary was or why a developer might wish to produce one.
About the only PPC thing I have is the software for my Epson scanner - they haven't produced a Universal driver nor are they likely to seeing as it was discontinued a few years ago. The day I move to a version of OS X without Rosetta support I either need to use something other than Epson's software or buy a new scanner.
Wouldn't surprise me if this is to encourage users to demand a native x86 version of software - once every significant application exists as x86 binaries, Apple can drop support for Rosetta altogether and that's another developer or two freed up to work on furthering their products rather than backward compatibility.
I suppose that explains the death of LTO to hard drives. Wait...
Don't. You'll have a torrent of 14-18 year olds on here in a minute telling you that you're a dinosaur for even continuing to acknowledge the existence of tape.
By contrast, ARM was developed on a shoestring budget. The goal was modest: low power and average performance.
The goal was, simply, a half-decent processor architecture that could supplement and eventually replace the 6502 in Acorn's range of desktop computers. They didn't think anything on the market at the time was suitable.
They read about the Berkeley RISC project and figured if a bunch of students could put together a processor architecture, they should be able to do a good job fairly easily.
That the processor architecture wound up offering sufficiently good performance/watt as to become a roaring success in the embedded market was certainly not part of the original plan. Worked out pretty well for the people who went on to form ARM, though.
Slashdot Mirror
A little Google-Fu: search for "artist name" intitle:index.of mp3 -html -htm -php -asp -txt -pls
There may be a glimmer of truth to that. When I was at uni I recall the teaching was all about object oriented design and how wonderful it was - to the extent that at least one lecturer I remember didn't actually understand anything that wasn't OO.
Well and good, but the whole point of object orientation is that you shouldn't have to think outside your own modules. I don't think I've ever seen a scenario IRL where any given developer could honestly say this was entirely practical.
The current UK government has been in power for too long and is doing what all governments do when that happens.
They become complacent. They adopt the attitude "We can do anything we please and if the general public doesn't like it, the general public can f*ck right off". Our government's been heading in that direction for some time but it's only relatively recently (the expenses scandal springs to mind) that it's started to look glaringly obvious.
Same thing happened with the Conservatives in 1997. They rendered themselves entirely unelectable for over 10 years, and it's only recently they're being taken seriously again.
I'm not sure what this is marketed as, for prototyping? Fast prototypes would be nice. But the vast majority of electronics are mass produced stuff, where the physical cost of the PCB is a small portion of the overall circuitry, with components, labour, and R&D being the real cost. I can't see printing traces of silver being cheaper than the existing methods. Maybe I'm missing something.
If it could be so much faster and cheaper to create a prototype, the barrier to entry for companies seeking to build a particular piece of electronic equipment would drop drastically. Right now you have to pay a hardware designer a lot of money, you have to minimise the number of prototypes you order because each one costs an arm and a leg and takes some time to produce. There's a reason why there are relatively few companies that do anything more sophisticated than silkscreen their name onto a reference design for a board these days.
And you know what happens next? Outlawing any software which attempts to hide the origin or ultimate destination of network traffic.
So next some basic stenography principles are applied and bingo! Can't tell the difference between that and HTTP.
And so begins the arms race that the spooks are so afraid of starting. What's particularly amusing/concerning (depending on how paranoid you are) is that technology moves so much faster than legislation that it's an arms race that legislation is doomed to lose unless such broadly written legislation is passed that they can get you for more-or-less anything.
I'm in the UK (my employer, until recently, had an office in the US) and there appears to be a huge cultural difference - our US office closed partly because we simply couldn't avoid hiring empire builders who wanted to spend all the company money hiring people and becoming middle managers of some sort rather than, I don't know, actually producing and selling a product. This was immensely frustrating for anyone in the UK trying to work with them.
I think at the height we had 80 staff over there and 5 layers of management from top to bottom. And then people wonder why the Indians and the Chinese are eating their breakfast.
Well, yes. Nobody who makes these laws really engages brain though - they discovered there wasn't any need once they'd got the nice cushy job in Westminster with the all-expenses-paid everything.
It's not that I think it's something to give up, it's that I think the ramifications of this are so great that you really need some way of resolving it that's a heck of a lot quicker than due process.
Sounds familiar. You really can't reason with people like that because they've already made up their mind what they're going to do - or more accurately, someone else has made it up for them - and the only thing that will change that is an instruction from the top.
Encryption itself won't help much here, but things like tor and freenet would. If someone were to apply the ideas behind tor to something like BitTorrent, it'd be impossible to tell whether any given node in a torrent were actually using the material it were distributing or simply sitting there passing it on.
So when your ISP cans you, with no trial, no conviction, simply waive the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 6.2 at them and demand your connection back, if/when they decline, start running it up the legal flagpole, the court system, and get the law stricken from the books.
Which is great and all that but these things take months, if not years to sort out. Meantime you've got no Internet access.
Lots of people work from home some or all of the time. Join the dots...
The protagonist responded it was to which the minster replied "well, that's not what it means".
Would be great if anyone could remember who was involved.
IIRC that was Jack Straw, then Home Secretary.
I also wrote to my MP at the time who basically said "well, yes it may say that but it'll never be enforced in that way, so what's the concern?". My argument to that has always been "if you don't want it enforced in that way, don't write it so it can be".
Lo and behold, we now have councils using this legislation to spy on people for all sorts of petty reasons. The original plan was it would be used to spy on potential benefit cheats (some benefits are administered by local government), but instead we have this:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article4036231.ece
Do you think they care at all what the people think? If anything proves that any form of democracy is not at work here, this does. Business interests are guiding, directing and even controlling government all over the world. The world may be pissed off at the U.S. government, but one only has to look to the "Military Industrial Complex" for why things are the way they are.
Oh the leading party cares very much what people think - though usually more if "what people think" is dramatically at odds with "what they want to do". In such cases, they'll spend inordinate amounts of money (oh, and where does that money come from...?) to tell people what to think. See also: ID cards.
Furthermore, individual MPs are frequently so loyal to their party that no matter how braindead the idea, most will still fall into line and vote for it. My own MP is part of the incumbent party and I don't think she has ever said so much as a single word against any of the government's policies. There's no earthly way she's going to rock the boat over an issue like this.
Who said anything about efficiency? He sounds like he doesn't care whether or not they change, he's just not going to support them. And "I'm not going to buy movies" isn't "big talk."
And it's a fantastically easy position to maintain, provided you don't have a SO or kids.
You do realize that they're not playing by the free market, but instead are putting limitations which would not exist if there was competition. If piracy could be eliminated (in their perfect world), would you expect prices to drop? I'm sure they'd skyrocket
That's partly because there isn't really a free market in the entertainment industry, for a number of reasons:
1. Little competition. There's, what, 4-5 major movie distributors? Similar number of major record labels. And they openly collude on all sorts of things.
2. A "free market" assumes that when John produces a perfectly good product but does a lousy job of selling it for whatever reason, Fred will come along with a similar product, do a better job of selling it and Fred does better overall. Copyrights (without which the entertainment industry would look nothing like it does today) make that impossible.
I'm not advocating the abolition of copyright - I actually think it's a perfectly reasonable idea - but limiting the terms to a lot less than what they are now (I have no sympathy at all for Cliff Richard and other industry veterans who propose longer copyright terms - everyone else in this world has to save up for the day that they can't/don't wish to work any longer, why should musicians be exempt from that?) and doing something about existing cartels would solve a lot of society's problems vis. entertainment.
Not really necessary when you can lock someone up for two years for refusing to divulge keys.
And Windows locks you into x86 based computers.
Were it not for the ubiquitousness of Windows, I am quite sure that it too would lock you into more than just the hardware platform.
Geocities really did make it easy to get a web page online, and is arguably, still one of the easiest ways for *anybody* to get information out there.
I would argue that seeing as the WHOLE FREAKING POINT OF THE ARTICLE THAT GEOCITIES IS CLOSING DOWN, the second part of that sentence is downright wrong.
There's an article based on this book in the current New Scientist magazine, and indeed one of the suggestions for lowering the impact of pet ownership was to feed them leftovers instead of canned pet food. It also suggests fish heads from the fishmonger, instead of premium cat food.
Because I'm quite sure the tuna catfood my cat got this morning contained no tuna heads, fins or arseholes.
It's far more efficient to put some sheep into a field and let them graze and then eat the sheep, than it is for me to try to work out some way to eat grass.
Excuse me, but Bull. Shit.
Let's say you have 10 acres of land. Your neighbour also has 10 acres of land.
You use your land to farm sheep.
Your neighbour uses his land to farm soy.
I bet you anything you like your neighbour can feed a hell of a lot more people than you can - and soy is high in protein.
(Of course, this argument is actually fairly silly because it has a huge flaw. It assumes that it's equally practical to farm sheep as it is to farm soy on a given area of land. This is of course rubbish - there are plenty of parts of the world where the land or the prevailing climate make for lousy animal farming but great arable - or vice versa - and generally speaking few farmers are silly enough to try and grow corn on steep rocky patches of land where it rains for 300 days of the year).
What you have described is a very shortsighted view of cost. Not that I think it's inaccurate - I'm sure a lot of companies work that way.
Let's say it costs $X to have your network run by a team of smart people who really understand what they're doing, who configure things so these errors don't happen. It costs $X * 0.666 to have your network run by a team of people who don't really understand what they're doing and so these errors to come up from time to time.
The argument in favour of taking the cheap route basically states "... but our customers are prepared to put up with the occasional inconvenience and it reduces our costs so it's all good". Great. But there's another side to that argument. Phone companies charge according to data and calls going across their network. When there's a fault which results in significantly less going across it, they can't charge as much. Yet their staff don't all go home and earn $0 the minute that happens. The electric company doesn't stop billing them the minute that happens. So as soon as there is a major issue it costs real money.
I would like to believe that someone's actually done the arithmetic to figure out precisely how much each minute of downtime costs and, more to the point, how much it costs to avoid each of those minutes. But considering how your average telco seems to operate these days, I doubt it.
I've only been a mac user for a few months, but I've never seen a PPC binary, with the exception of the one 'hello world' universal binary I made just to see what would happen.
That's largely because XCode was producing universal binaries several months before Apple actually announced what a universal binary was or why a developer might wish to produce one.
About the only PPC thing I have is the software for my Epson scanner - they haven't produced a Universal driver nor are they likely to seeing as it was discontinued a few years ago. The day I move to a version of OS X without Rosetta support I either need to use something other than Epson's software or buy a new scanner.
Wouldn't surprise me if this is to encourage users to demand a native x86 version of software - once every significant application exists as x86 binaries, Apple can drop support for Rosetta altogether and that's another developer or two freed up to work on furthering their products rather than backward compatibility.
I suppose that explains the death of LTO to hard drives. Wait...
Don't. You'll have a torrent of 14-18 year olds on here in a minute telling you that you're a dinosaur for even continuing to acknowledge the existence of tape.
By contrast, ARM was developed on a shoestring budget. The goal was modest: low power and average performance.
The goal was, simply, a half-decent processor architecture that could supplement and eventually replace the 6502 in Acorn's range of desktop computers. They didn't think anything on the market at the time was suitable.
They read about the Berkeley RISC project and figured if a bunch of students could put together a processor architecture, they should be able to do a good job fairly easily.
That the processor architecture wound up offering sufficiently good performance/watt as to become a roaring success in the embedded market was certainly not part of the original plan. Worked out pretty well for the people who went on to form ARM, though.