That's not correct.
Radio stations will pay labels a yearly fee to broadcast music (like in most of the world), but labels will pay radio stations to broadcast exactly the albums the labels want to sell.
Are they already doing that? Right, but they'll discover that they have to pay more. It's a zero sum game.
Another crossover is the right hand of the ninth Doctor. It was chopped off him with a sword in the second episode of the 2006 season, then regenerated. It's kept in a jar full of an unspecified liquid and it has been shown in many episodes of Torchwood, including the last one, when it glows moments before the Tardis' sound made its guest appearance.
So, if a web service (let's say Flickr) adds a new feature to its paying customers (let's say convert pics to grayscale), they have to charge extra money for it? I'm not saying that this is the end of the Web as we know it, but it would be quite a revolution and quite an advantage for non-US services.
Don't know with IE, but I can drag images to the Windows desktop with Firefox. I just saved one of the images at the top of this page by dragging it to the desktop. Despite the choice of the example I generally agree with you. Windows isn't the simplest system on Earth, it's just what most of us got used to.
Well, some memory leaks can't be helped: maybe it some extension or Javascript that makes my Firefox memory usage skyrocket (153 MB now) unless I restart it regularly. I'm sure that there is a way to associate each memory allocation with a script, and extension or internal Firefox code so I'll really welcome something that tells me who's the culprit of all those memory leaks.
IMHO the answer is interoperability. You can use any mail client to send an email and the recipient will be able to read it regardless of the client s/he uses (and in fact you normally don't know what it is).
On the other side collaboration suites usually require that everybody uses exactly the same tool. That's maybe acceptable in an small scale environment or in a company but there are no chances that everybody will ever use exactly the same tool in the world at large.
Furthermore, email clients are free or bundled with the OS, collaboration tools are not.
In fact, I encourage nerds of all colors to switch, even _away from_ Linux. Massing around Apple is, in my opinion, the best way to continue to chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly over the next few years. Linux can't do it on its own... KDE, GNOME, and 3rd party apps are still (perpetually, seemingly) not ready yet for the masses. OS X is.
A Mac + OSX cost money, but Linux is free and I already got the PC to run it. If you want to fund your world liberation campaign and are giving me the money to buy a Mac, I'll consider "massing around Apple", otherwise I'll stick with my OS. Nothing personal, I just don't see that much value in a Mac.
E-books would be great for technical books, which obsolete in a few months or a few years at most. However I won't buy anything really important on a medium as volatile as an e-book. Most of my paper books will survive me, but I still don't have evidence that any of my electronic data will last so much. Instead, I'm pretty sure that I'll lose more e-data due to media and hardware failures than paper due to water or fire.
As a minor concern, I want also a crisp display and light reader. e-ink is a good candidate.
I recently wrote two applications that included a registration form, validation checks, sending email with a URL to click to confirm the registration and finalizing the registration. I wrote the first one in Java and the second one with Ruby On Rails, to learn the language and experiment with the framework. The Rails application needed half as much time to be coded than the Java one, despite being totally new to Ruby and to Rails. The merit goes almost entirely to ActiveRecord and expecially to the validation feature. Another time saver is Ruby's being interpreted instead of compiled. That saves a few time at every change to the code, even if strong type checking at compile time would have occasionally saved me a lot of time. It's difficult to assess if I gained or lost time. What I'm looking forward to now is a good ActiveRecord implementation for Java because Rails is great but Ruby's syntax is really appalling. Even Perl (admittedly one of my languages of choice) looks more consistent. On the other side, halving development time is something that tempts me a lot. Java on Rails would be great.
Maybe, but this doesn't solve the real problem. The problem is that western governments are starting to work for corporations instead of for people and democracy is becoming a hollow shell. More and more laws are favoring corporations over people and this is quite evident to anybody reading Slashdot in the last few months. The US seem to be a long way down the road to this change and the smaller western countries (The Netherlans, Ireland, Danmark, Australia are a few examples) are being pushed by them. The larger countries (France, Germany are other examples) provide more resistance but there is nothing that money can't buy.
It's simpler than that: if Google isn't digitizing European books somebody else has to do it and eventually somebody will create a unified search interface.
GOTO was declared harmful but it's functionality was needed so it has beed replaced by other kind of control flow statements, mainly procedure and function calls (that is methods in OOP). That's more a matter of syntax than of semantic. If a consensus emerges that the current syntax of AOP is harmful we'll probably get new languages with a way to either prevent or explicitly declare those side effects. Does anybody know if there is any ongoing work in this area?
So, patent legislation is so weird that I can patent faster than light travel and my heirs will get rich when somebody finally discover how to make it work?
It looks like a way of benefitting customers with some of the money they gain thanks to their unlegal OS monopoly.
It's probably the first good thing they did since they started the company and sincerely wish them to succeed. However I bet that it will require a years-long legal campaign.
Some kind of programs must not crash. As an example think about something interactive, such as a web application (maybe Slashdot itself). It must not crash on a failed assertion, it must handle the error and keep going on, maybe reverting to a known state and notifying the admins of the error. This kind of coding is not naive, it's smart.
I can VCR TV and give the tapes to friends and/or view them for the time being. If I can't do that with DRM media they must cost significantly less.
I live in Italy and I have to pay a tax of about 100 Euro on TV sets. It covers all TV sets in a household and it is supposed to fund state-owned public-service channels. To be fair, add to that figure another 500 Euro per year that many people pay for satellite channels and that's a total of 600 Euro per year.
Given the radical functional loss of DRM media I expect an order of magnitude reduction in price, so I won't be willing to pay more than 60 Euro per year. Divide that by the number of movies, episodes, songs I'm expected to buy and you get a very small amount of money per item.
Because I'm going to pay more to download episodes than I do to buy DVDs. I will never pay 30 euro to buy a DVD for something I usually watch only once, expecially if I never saw the show in advance and I'm risking to buy something I don't like. Instead I'll happily pay 1 euro per episode to download it quickly and reliably, because if I don't like the show I'll stop watching it long before I spend 5 euro. So I'm not paying to buy DVDs but I can pay to download episodes. I think that if there are enough people like me they'll start selling episodes on the Internet as soon as they find out a DRM system that they can trust.
I've been paying 60 Euro per month since year 2000 for a 10 Mbits connection with unlimited traffic. It's behind a NAT server, so I don't have a public address, but that not a very big limitation for residential Internet use.
It's time to start thinking to move the Statue of Liberty to another country. As time passes her actual location seems more and more unappropriate, unless we want to find her a new name. Unluckily wherever we move her Profit will ultimately find her and make a mock of her name.
I don't understand how it is possible to be 100% sure that people will keep that black box into a piece of software distributed as source code. The black box is likely to be a binary-only library, but people can modify the surrounding code not to call the library. Will it be a criminal offence to compile out the black box in graphics programs used within the EU? I bet it will, as soon as legislators realize that open source SW exists. Will open source developers living outside the EU add the black box to their SW? I bet that not everybody will, unless the US adopt a similar law.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not correct. Radio stations will pay labels a yearly fee to broadcast music (like in most of the world), but labels will pay radio stations to broadcast exactly the albums the labels want to sell. Are they already doing that? Right, but they'll discover that they have to pay more. It's a zero sum game.
The correct link is www.virtualbox.org
Another crossover is the right hand of the ninth Doctor. It was chopped off him with a sword in the second episode of the 2006 season, then regenerated. It's kept in a jar full of an unspecified liquid and it has been shown in many episodes of Torchwood, including the last one, when it glows moments before the Tardis' sound made its guest appearance.
So, if a web service (let's say Flickr) adds a new feature to its paying customers (let's say convert pics to grayscale), they have to charge extra money for it? I'm not saying that this is the end of the Web as we know it, but it would be quite a revolution and quite an advantage for non-US services.
Don't know with IE, but I can drag images to the Windows desktop with Firefox. I just saved one of the images at the top of this page by dragging it to the desktop.
Despite the choice of the example I generally agree with you. Windows isn't the simplest system on Earth, it's just what most of us got used to.
Well, some memory leaks can't be helped: maybe it some extension or Javascript that makes my Firefox memory usage skyrocket (153 MB now) unless I restart it regularly. I'm sure that there is a way to associate each memory allocation with a script, and extension or internal Firefox code so I'll really welcome something that tells me who's the culprit of all those memory leaks.
IMHO the answer is interoperability. You can use any mail client to send an email and the recipient will be able to read it regardless of the client s/he uses (and in fact you normally don't know what it is).
On the other side collaboration suites usually require that everybody uses exactly the same tool. That's maybe acceptable in an small scale environment or in a company but there are no chances that everybody will ever use exactly the same tool in the world at large.
Furthermore, email clients are free or bundled with the OS, collaboration tools are not.
In fact, I encourage nerds of all colors to switch, even _away from_ Linux. Massing around Apple is, in my opinion, the best way to continue to chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly over the next few years. Linux can't do it on its own... KDE, GNOME, and 3rd party apps are still (perpetually, seemingly) not ready yet for the masses. OS X is.
A Mac + OSX cost money, but Linux is free and I already got the PC to run it. If you want to fund your world liberation campaign and are giving me the money to buy a Mac, I'll consider "massing around Apple", otherwise I'll stick with my OS. Nothing personal, I just don't see that much value in a Mac.
E-books would be great for technical books, which obsolete in a few months or a few years at most. However I won't buy anything really important on a medium as volatile as an e-book. Most of my paper books will survive me, but I still don't have evidence that any of my electronic data will last so much. Instead, I'm pretty sure that I'll lose more e-data due to media and hardware failures than paper due to water or fire.
As a minor concern, I want also a crisp display and light reader. e-ink is a good candidate.
I recently wrote two applications that included a registration form, validation checks, sending email with a URL to click to confirm the registration and finalizing the registration.
I wrote the first one in Java and the second one with Ruby On Rails, to learn the language and experiment with the framework. The Rails application needed half as much time to be coded than the Java one, despite being totally new to Ruby and to Rails.
The merit goes almost entirely to ActiveRecord and expecially to the validation feature.
Another time saver is Ruby's being interpreted instead of compiled. That saves a few time at every change to the code, even if strong type checking at compile time would have occasionally saved me a lot of time. It's difficult to assess if I gained or lost time.
What I'm looking forward to now is a good ActiveRecord implementation for Java because Rails is great but Ruby's syntax is really appalling. Even Perl (admittedly one of my languages of choice) looks more consistent. On the other side, halving development time is something that tempts me a lot. Java on Rails would be great.
Looks like Babylon 5's Nightwatch, some 250 years in advance. That's progress, enjoy!
Maybe, but this doesn't solve the real problem.
The problem is that western governments are starting to work for corporations instead of for people and democracy is becoming a hollow shell. More and more laws are favoring corporations over people and this is quite evident to anybody reading Slashdot in the last few months.
The US seem to be a long way down the road to this change and the smaller western countries (The Netherlans, Ireland, Danmark, Australia are a few examples) are being pushed by them. The larger countries (France, Germany are other examples) provide more resistance but there is nothing that money can't buy.
It's simpler than that: if Google isn't digitizing European books somebody else has to do it and eventually somebody will create a unified search interface.
GOTO was declared harmful but it's functionality was needed so it has beed replaced by other kind of control flow statements, mainly procedure and function calls (that is methods in OOP).
That's more a matter of syntax than of semantic.
If a consensus emerges that the current syntax of AOP is harmful we'll probably get new languages with a way to either prevent or explicitly declare those side effects.
Does anybody know if there is any ongoing work in this area?
So, patent legislation is so weird that I can patent faster than light travel and my heirs will get rich when somebody finally discover how to make it work?
It looks like a way of benefitting customers with some of the money they gain thanks to their unlegal OS monopoly.
It's probably the first good thing they did since they started the company and sincerely wish them to succeed. However I bet that it will require a years-long legal campaign.
Some kind of programs must not crash. As an example think about something interactive, such as a web application (maybe Slashdot itself). It must not crash on a failed assertion, it must handle the error and keep going on, maybe reverting to a known state and notifying the admins of the error.
This kind of coding is not naive, it's smart.
I can VCR TV and give the tapes to friends and/or view them for the time being. If I can't do that with DRM media they must cost significantly less. I live in Italy and I have to pay a tax of about 100 Euro on TV sets. It covers all TV sets in a household and it is supposed to fund state-owned public-service channels. To be fair, add to that figure another 500 Euro per year that many people pay for satellite channels and that's a total of 600 Euro per year. Given the radical functional loss of DRM media I expect an order of magnitude reduction in price, so I won't be willing to pay more than 60 Euro per year. Divide that by the number of movies, episodes, songs I'm expected to buy and you get a very small amount of money per item.
Because I'm going to pay more to download episodes than I do to buy DVDs.
I will never pay 30 euro to buy a DVD for something I usually watch only once, expecially if I never saw the show in advance and I'm risking to buy something I don't like.
Instead I'll happily pay 1 euro per episode to download it quickly and reliably, because if I don't like the show I'll stop watching it long before I spend 5 euro.
So I'm not paying to buy DVDs but I can pay to download episodes. I think that if there are enough people like me they'll start selling episodes on the Internet as soon as they find out a DRM system that they can trust.
I've been paying 60 Euro per month since year 2000 for a 10 Mbits connection with unlimited traffic. It's behind a NAT server, so I don't have a public address, but that not a very big limitation for residential Internet use.
The contribution of the Italian Space Agency is detailed here (don't worry, it's in English).
It's time to start thinking to move the Statue of Liberty to another country. As time passes her actual location seems more and more unappropriate, unless we want to find her a new name. Unluckily wherever we move her Profit will ultimately find her and make a mock of her name.
I don't understand how it is possible to be 100% sure that people will keep that black box into a piece of software distributed as source code. The black box is likely to be a binary-only library, but people can modify the surrounding code not to call the library.
Will it be a criminal offence to compile out the black box in graphics programs used within the EU? I bet it will, as soon as legislators realize that open source SW exists.
Will open source developers living outside the EU add the black box to their SW? I bet that not everybody will, unless the US adopt a similar law.