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Is there some way anyone could see what patents they've allegedly got that are being infringed? I know Dan Ravicher supposedly compiled some list which includes 20+ patents owned by Microsoft, and that because of the "engineer no looky at law breaking listy" rule in US patent legislation it isn't widely available, but is it actually available at all or do we just have to take his word for it that it exists and is accurate? If it's the latter, that seems an awful lot like those ethereal Communist lists compiled by Joseph McCarthy. Can't I just click through some MS-style EULA and promise not to use any of the information myself? It can't be a coincidence that the guy who made this list nobody is allowed to see just happens to own a company that provides "insurance" to programmers against patent infringements, can it?
Ever hear of remote wake-up or ACPI? Even a Win98 box can be nudged out of Standby mode remotely. The network doesn't have to be fully operational 24 hours a day to receive updates and maintenance, and I doubt you're doing those updates and software installations every single night. If you are, you desperately need to rework your system because it's hanging on to life by a thread. I'm not talking about putting the computers involved in real-time processes, web servers, etc in sleep mode. That wouldn't make a lot of sense. But the dozens or hundreds of workstations the typical customer service department, the mail-room, and all the other clerical and administrative roles a large corporation has are completely unused after the employees leave and none of them except the management would ever have a need for logging in remotely. Not to mention in most of the offices I've worked in that had a Windows platform, usually NT 4 or 2000, all of the updates were run as a batch script when you first logged in. It required all of 5 minutes to complete and it gave you an excuse to go pour a cup of coffee on company time. And on a more cynical note, at least if the WSs were shutdown overnight that'd be 12+ virus- and crash-free hours not to have to worry about.
I don't grasp how this is "anti-Microsoft." That's a wee bit hyperdefensive to accuse the OP of. All the blog says is that if more people put their computer in standby or sleep mode at the end of the workday, the world would save a lot of money and electricity. That's not anti- anything except senseless waste. It's true however you want to defend it. I've never worked in a corporation that shut the computers off at the end of the day, despite the fact that it'd probably save them tens of thousands on electricity and having to buy new hardware periodically. As for how complex it is, considering there's already an option in every Windows system to put the computer in Standby after X Minutes, I doubt it would be very hard to change the setting in the Registry or wherever it's stored (I don't do Windows programming, but I use it enough to know the dialog box for Sleep Mode is there). That seems impractical and risky to me. It'd be better for MS just to start some sort of "corporate conservation" campaign telling them to shut the workstations down in the evening and flashing a bunch of slick graphs with captions like "Profit Losses Due to Idle Computers" on them till the executives' eyes glaze over and they submit.
My guess would be passion for what you are doing. For people who really love what they are doing, compensation for it is just the icing on the cake.
Why do I get the feeling the grandparent was one of those types I recall from uni who studied programming because they read in a magazine in secondary school that IT was the wave of the future and wanted a piece of the cake? I think what the GP is "missing" is a satisfaction for what they do. There have been times when I was hired to do a freelance project on the condition that I only get a paycheck if it can be accomplished, clocked 100 hours per week on it for a couple months, find that the task is too complicated or too grand for the platform, and felt that I didn't deserve to be paid merely because I had failed--in fact in those cases I was more upset by the fact that I couldn't succeed than by the lack of a wage. I doubt the people who program just because there's (sometimes) good money in it ever feel like this. When I'm working, the only motivation to get paid comes from my wife and the bills that come in the mail. If neither of those existed it would probably never occur to me that it's payday until those occasional weekends where I feel burnt out from 28 hours without sleep or food and feel like buying a DVD or run out of smokes.
Any profession where a person only puts in the bare minimum and has no emotional or intellectual connection to what they're doing is probably not their "calling." Unfortunately, I also think the majority of people have no real calling and therefore can only put in the bare minimum in whatever they do--in which case it's almost always irrelevant what job it is (the exception being scientists and civil/social services where an emotional and intellectual attachment to the job should be, in my opinion, an unconditional requirement).
I feel lucky that in all the workplaces I've been in, the software department has always been full of people wholly dedicated to solving problems and figuring out answers rather than "buying cars" and bottom-lines. These people are good programmers but terrible businessmen, which these days I tend to see as a plus when interviewing for a new job and visit the IT room(s) of the company. The programmers who are good businessmen but not passionate tend to be mentally lazy, stick to solutions that work, and are incapable of seeing the problem to be solved as anything more than a way to make money. In those environments I often find myself doing the brunt of the labour. I don't think such attitudes are inherent to open source or nonexistant in closed source, but people with this type of personality and attitude towards their work tend in my experience not to "get" open source software.
The minister of IT quoted in the article was formerly head of the University of Technology and is a millionaire. Go figure that he views open source software with mistrust. It probably goes against everything he's ever believed. It's funny, and I think I mentioned it once already in another discussion, but the professors I had at school were two kinds of people. There were the mainstream classes for introductory topics, which were always taught by die-hard Windows professors for whom nothing outside the realm of Visual Basic and MS-DOS programming even existed (these types remind me of the parent of the poster to whom I'm replying), and there were the more theoretical professors who always forced us to do every homework assignment on a Sparc station and seemed to brim with disgust at the "introductory" professors and the students who would take some Java and VB courses and spend the rest of their degree period falling asleep in class and dreaming about the day they have that sweet Microsoft job with the cabriolet and the trophy wife and Sunday schmooze trips to the golf course.
I see your point, but there's something to be said for being able to play something "out of the box," and since most games require a memory card and I've never known anyone who was so depressingly alone that they only ever played single-player games, it would make a lot more sense if the thing came with two controllers and a memory card. A poor but appropriate analogy would be if car manufacturers sold their automobiles for a very low price but only came with a driver's seat. If their justification was, "Well, our research shows that most automobile owners do not use all four or five of the traditional seats in a sedan, and this way you are offered more of a choice as a consumer to buy seats on the open market while lowering our costs," I doubt they'd be in business very long. It's just taken for granted that you're entitled to those seats, whether you use them or don't.
Can't really decide which poster to agree with...on one hand the PS3 was so costly to develop and manufacture that it isn't a surprise it's so expensive and running out and I don't think it was some sort of Big Sony Conspiracy...on the other hand I don't like replying to these types of posts and tacitly endorsing the offtopic, pro-capitalist rants that always get modded +3, 4, 5 Insightful just because the people with Modpoints happen to agree politically despite the fact that the post has nothing to do with the article. And on the other hand again, am I the only one who remembers when a console used to come with a game and two controllers? If it's really just a matter of quantity supplied being too low and has nothing whatsoever to do with gouging consumers, why the hell does it always feel like I'm paying 4 times more for the state of the art system than I was 20 years ago when I end up having to go back to the store and buy something else (another controller, a single game for the system, a memory card, cables for the television, etc.)?
Oh, and for the record communism with a lower-case 'c' does not imply state-controlled anything, and China hasn't been legitimately called Communist, Socialist, or whatever you want to pretend it was, since the late 70s before Deng Xiaopeng. It's little more than a slave state with forced labour for pennies, which for all the platitudes and lip services from Western capitalists about freedom and liberty, serves their need for cheap labour so well that I doubt they'd really want it to change.
I couldn't agree more. The most useful parts of my job that I never learned in school are: version control, working with groups and splitting up tasks, planning in advance a uniform coding (variable and function naming, etc.) and commenting style (documenting or self-documenting?) so that it's easier to understand each other's code, and properly using tools like diff/patch, autoconfigure, grep/find, etc. I realise in a Windows environment these tools wouldn't be as important, but I've never had a single programming job that didn't require at least some use of GNU development tools; even the managers usually had Cygwin installed on their laptops! Had I known how to use them when I was still a kid I wouldn't have had to spend all that money at the bookstore years later. I think one of the biggest problems, at least in my experience at two universities, was that the professors in the CS department weren't really involved in actual software development, or at least hadn't been for decades. They were either programmers who quit their jobs in the private sector and became instructors, or they were research scientists in theoretical fields like AI and had no "normal" application-dev experience. So I guess I can't blame them for being totally incapable of preparing me. But in hindsight, I certainly would have benefitted more from spending that freshman year learning about portability, scaling, security, thread-safety, etc., rather than completely useless things that no company you work for will ever use unless it's IBM or something. Let me think...When was the last time I was scheduled for a meeting to plan a new application and we all broke out our notepads and started jotting down UML schematics? Oh, right: never. Karnaugh, Quine-McCluskey, and GNU will pay off far more in programming than Z-Notation and UML ever will. Although I have to admit, Martin Fowler should also probably be taught, at least in the last year or two years of CS studies. Refactoring is hard to justify to your boss on already-existing software, but some of its concepts are quite useful in the initial coding and testing phase, and as the newest member of an already established team, you can only serve to endear yourself towards them by making your contributions easy to read and predict changes.
Oh, great. You just know some wingnut wackjob is going to latch onto this nugget of information and try and use it as "evidence" of racial superiority. Then you'll get the 24-hour news networks milking it for all the ratings as they can.
Then they'll have a hard time explaining why non-Europeans, like people from India and Asia, stereotypically perform better in maths and sciences than their Euro counterparts. This is just another example of how science nowadays is a matter of finding some weak correlation between Fact A and Fact B, and then reporting it to the news, who then report that correlation as a direct causal link.
By the way, for anyone who might enjoy the irony of eugenicists misusing this study for white superiority, if you weren't aware already: the scientist quoted in the CNN article is Bruce Lahn, who is Chinese, not European.
Re:Thanks, Sticking With PHP
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The Ruby Way
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· Score: 1
Like most arguments over "whose programming language is bigger," comparisons between Ruby and PHP don't take into account that PHP is meant for the web, whereas Ruby is not (although it can certainly be applied to that platform, but then any language with an output stream and the ability to read environment variables can be used for web development). I'm actually surprised to see how often people use the word "Ruby" when they really should say "Rails." I've never tried Rails, but I use Ruby maybe 2 or 3 hours a week because very often it's the fastest way to do proof-of-concepts and tests on alternative algorithms that I then rewrite in a lower-level language. It's much easier to come up with an idea for a work-related project and then quickly spit out a Ruby implementation of it, make sure it works, and then port it than to do it all in C/C++ first. I had never even heard of it until a year or so ago when one of FreeBSD's automated scripts crapped out due to me moving a directory and not realising it would have any effect, spewed some Ruby exceptions to my monitor, and forced me to take a long, hard look at myself and ask , "What in the hell is 'Ruby' and how long has it been on my machine?"
As for the book, I haven't read it and probably won't, although Ruby is the most productive language I've ever used for exploring and testing new ideas, second maybe only to Prolog. I actually opened this article because I was a bit misled by the post and thought it was saying that the book can be downloaded for free from those sites. But I guess I got all excited about the possibility of free information for nothing:(
I don't know if your post was sarcastic or not, so I thought I would clear up the numerous errors just in case it was serious:
The only requirements of being a US citizen are paying taxes if applicable, serving on a jury when called, not breaking federal, state or local laws, and having a passport when leaving the country. You could also include "registering with the US embassy in foreign countries" but that's more of a recommendation. Being well-informed and sceptical are not requirements of citizenship in any country in the world. In fact, they would probably be suicidal to the proper functioning of the state, or at the very least make it superfluous.
There are about 194 countries in the world, not 260.
Questioning the government is part of a healthy system, not unique to the United States. Democracy goes back millennia and was not invented by Americans out of thin air.
"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." is not Greek. It's from Proverbs in the Old Testament of the Bible.
Diebold isn't the only e-voting machine provider. There are about 3 of them in the United States. All of them use this black box model with no ability to prove who you voted for is who was recorded. Despite the fact that every aspect of a democratic process should be open and transparent, the government cannot force these companies to reveal everything without setting a dangerous precedent regarding their intellectual property vis-a-vis the public good. And it's clear from other aspects of technology that the rights of businesses are, at least in this case if not every, more important than the rights of citizens.
Tangible is the key difference between retail losses and software losses--in fact, tangible has a lot to do with both intellectual property and e-business in general (but I don't want to digress). If I go into your liquor store and nick a bottle of rum as in your example, I've stolen property. If I go into your software store and take a copy of Photoshop, I've again stolen property. If I download a torrent of Photoshop, I've committed an offence against the copyrights of the software publisher, but I've not stolen any property. In the first two scenarios, your loss is as tangible as the good, because you've paid money in advance for this product, I've taken it from you for nothing, and therefore you've lost what you would have made on that product if someone (not necessarily me) had purchased that bottle, box, or whatever. But in the third example, presumably the copy of the software that was uploaded came from someone who originally bought it, brought it home, and ripped it, or perhaps someone who swiped a copy off the computer at the manufacturer's and distributed it illegally. In the case where someone bought it and ripped it, the copy the retail store spent money on has already received their return on that investment from the original sale. In the case where someone stole it from the manufacturer's computer, there is a slight loss in the return on the company's investment in labour, research and development, etc., but no discernable (or at least provable) loss to retailers. As far as whether to count it as markup or wholesale, they usually use markup. I used to work in a department store, and in the back offices there was a sign over the photocopier discouraging employees from wasting paper by saying, "Every wasted stack of paper is worth 27 towels." Obviously they were referring to the profit from a retail sale, not the cost itself (unless the photocopier only uses solid gold paper). They (normally) do likewise with inventory shrinkage (which includes theft and other losses).
Copyright owners often use street-value estimates to calculate losses, but this assumes that every person who bought pirated goods would otherwise have paid for a legitimate item, the report notes.
This is merely because copyright holders like to pretend their business is the same as real ones and thus the same rules and physical laws, like matter, mass, occupying space in a warehouse, transportation costs etc., factor into their model and thus justify the hundreds or thousands their "commodity" is marked up to at a retail distributor. If Rolexes could be pirated over the internet in bytes instead of being produced in factories and transported on highways in cargo, Rolex would be reporting as many losses as the BSA. That doesn't mean the million people who suddenly start walking around with luxury watches could have dreamt of buying them before they were so widely available. It's no different for Photoshop, except that 10, 15 years ago it wasn't very common (note I am not saying it wasn't possible, just that the majority of people who used computers then were not savvy enough to find it and the selection wasn't as wide) for software to be available anywhere but in a retail store. It's actually very similar to when online casinos complain here in Europe about unfair monopolies and a lack of free market competition. A market implies some sort of commodity is being exchanged, whereas online gambling is producing nothing but an improbable hope and making a lot of money in return. Were this any other market but software-related, it'd be akin to walking into the supermarket to buy a bag of Doritos and having a 1:24 chance that the bag is not empty. The only improvement competition would offer is perhaps to increase the chance slightly, to say, 1 full bag for every 15 empty ones. Likewise, if 400.000 people buy "Application X" in Hong Kong, "Software Company Y" can claim 400.000 lost sales of a product even if they only really produced, say, a run a 5.000 units. Try getting away with that in any traditional industry, and you'll probably find yourself in trouble with the tax authorities for fraud.
Just a quick look at the summary of the 9/11 Commission (I really don't want to track this info down for all 19 hijackers, you can do that):
Mohamed Atta - flew to Newark Int'l Airport in New Jersey from Prague
Waleed al-Shehri - flew to US from UAE
Wail al Shehri - flew to US from UAE
Ahmed al-Nami - flew to US from UAE
Abdulaziz al-Omari - flew to US from either London or Dubai (not clear)
Anyway, it is pointless where they came from. They all had valid US visas and permission to be there. It's not an "immigrants sneaking into America causing terrorism" argument. It's more like "well-educated, affluent men go to Saudi Arabia, get a fresh passport, go through the process of visa acceptance by the US government, get their visa, then fly there and obtain valid driver's licenses and take classes in how to fly planes." Splitting hairs over what their country of origin was for a connecting flight is moot. In some cases the CIA was monitoring them anyway years before September 11th. Mohamed Atta, for example, was being followed by German and American surveillance as far back as 1999, but stopped when he entered the US borders because that would then become the jurisdiction of a domestic agency like the FBI.
Back on-topic to the film: it was good up until the crying scene towards the end. It seemed a little forced and unrealistic. While the whole procedure at the end was rather dramatic, that was what made it a bit trite. That and what seemed like a this-must-have-been-rehearsed-even-though-they're- pretending-it-isn't scenario. Maybe the Finnish CS who figured it out is more sure of himself than I am, but I would never do something programming-related and then do a blind test in front of a live camera. There had to be some sort of test before they filmed that. Maybe they gave him a dummy machine first so he didn't feel like an idiot afterwards in case it didn't work. I'm not saying the test was rigged, just that I would never go to the trouble of organising such a big to-do to see if the memory card could be altered without being damn sure it would work first. Otherwise you look like a totally incompetent boob on HBO. And unless you're Larry David, that isn't too good for your career.
I've had similar problems with Craigslist before. The one which sticks out as the worst has to be the time I sent an e-mail regarding a developer position, after which the manager who replied said he wanted to meet at a restaurant rather than an office, which in itself wasn't too weird for me to decline, so I went. He was late by twenty minutes, and after another forty minutes of discussing everything from his political views to describing himself as "a visionary" and a "modern-day Socrates" he confessed that he didn't actually have a need for any programmers, but was looking for contacts and "like-minded" people to work with in the future. In other words a complete waste of time. The number of fake or dead-end job posts on Craigslist is really annoying and probably far exceeds the number of real ones.
I moved to Austria.
I'll admit that the problems in the US weren't the only reason but they were a big motivating factor.
I received a residence visa to live in Vienna a little over a year ago, and other than occasionally wishing there was a Taco Bell, I have no intention of going back. Glad to see there are other expatriates here as well.
I thought I was the only one who moved to Austria.
A pain I know all too well.
So this is what it feels like...when doves cry.
$100M may spent in Washington on lawmakers may help change copyright laws altogether. Maybe a 100:1 return on investment compared to buying copyrighted work.
I think this would be a pretty pointless investment. So you spend 100 million USD to lobby to change the copyright laws. What happens if:
a) nobody pays attention because the industries who make their bread and butter from copyrighted material will throw everything they have at it (don't forget that film companies, record companies, publishers, and everyone else who derives income from copyrights stands to gain even more the longer those copyrights are valid; and those industries are certainly worth a hell of a lot more than a measly $100m -- what's the profit from a normal blockbuster action movie? A Matrix IV could singlehandedly quash your efforts and send all of that $100m you spent right down the toilet);
or
b) the effort succeeds, copyright laws are rolled back, and 10, 20, 30 years from now they get rolled right back to how they are at the moment or worse.
In either scenario, both of which I cynically believe to be more likely than the fantasy that the US government is going to return to the original copyright concept, that investment is no longer 100:1 but a complete and utter waste of money. Jimmy Wales would be better off putting it into a wine bottle addressed to Congress and tossing it into the ocean. At least if WikiFoundation bought out the rights to X number of books those X books would never succumb to any crazy bullshit laws that they come out with in the future. This is also failing to take into account that "fixing" it in one country is not going to fix it for anybody else. The rest of the world's copyright systems are getting stricter in order to provide a safer market for American exports (God forbid someone in Lithuania downloads a DVD rip of "Dude Where's My Car?"). It'd take a lot more than $100m to "solve" this problem through the legislative process. Then again "solving problems" and "legislative process" tend to be mutually exclusive concepts.
This all hinges on one question, however, that I haven't seen anybody (not that it hasn't been, I just didn't see it) yet ask: what exactly are the terms of this "free license" that they plan to put the books in. Is it the GNU FDL? Can I download it and print it out, or is it just viewable on the computer in ASCII format, or what? Is it a creative commons license? If so, what are the clauses? Jimmy Wales' email is rather vague and considering he's more a businessman than a philanthropist, I'm rather skeptical at the moment.
I think what I would do with the money is merely fly to some small, isolated country with broadband access, hire some natives to scan every copyrighted book, film, and recording I can find or someone is willing to lend me, put them online for free in a quality format, and use the rest of the money to bribe the local government officials to look the other way for as long as possible. Now that would go a long way towards destroying the parasitic copyright systems of the world.
I don't suppose this 'Anonymous Reader' who submitted this is an employee of the ChatterBlocker company looking or free ad space on Slashdot...?
Normally when one wants to promote their shite product by pretending to be someone interested in it, they don't end their fake query by asking readers whether or not it's a shite product. That tends to poison the marketing well.
By the way, this program isn't as much of a scam as some have said. It's 100% effective at blocking out unwanted conversations around your workplace, but in order to make it work you have to turn the speakers up all the way until the soothing nature sounds are so deafening that the people around you get pissed and talk somewhere else.
I hate to do a little own-horn-tooting, but why is this considered news? In 1998 I was renaming mp3s to those of famous, quality songs in order to promote the terrible, amateur songs of my friends' bands, or sometimes when I was bored 3 minutes of the Bell Labs text-to-speech synthesizer looping, "You are a loser. Give up. Why do you still try?"
As someone already mentioned, most people realise what they downloaded isn't what they wanted and delete it right away. Not to mention: 1) torrent sites aren't going to keep a seed that's been reported as fake up for very long, and most decent sites have places in the torrent page where users can post comments and reviews -- after about 50 "Hey, this isn't real, assclown!" messages I doubt anyone will be falling for it; and 2) P2P networks tend to give away the fake files when you look at the information of the 3 minute song or 2 hour movie you searched for and most of the very popular results that appear at the top say "156 kilobytes." Gee, I wonder if that's a 2 second advertisement masquerading as the file I'm looking for or has someone actually invented some sort of space-age lossless compression algorithm and is not telling anyone else about it.
Modern Europe is what would happen if the US embraced socialism. Thank god the Democrats are so disorganized now.
Oh, really? Is that why the EU Commission just decided to try and privatise the entire continents' small (50g) letter-carrying services by 2009 as of today's news on the BBC? One of the requirements for entering the EU is that a certain percentage of your social services have to be privately owned. That means no total state control of your oil industries, your post offices, your public transportation, etc. Many countries in the EU are a free market capitalist's wet dream. Here in Austria they're thinking about privatising the glaciers in the Alps because it's the world's largest supply of fresh water. They can seriously get away with things here that even your Republicans aren't able to do. I've never even seen a free public library in Europe, but they're all over the place in the United States.
BTW, the US at one point did embrace socialism. Until FDR swept the Depression-era elections by making a deal with the leftist parties not to run against him in exchange for implementing some of their ideas, it had an unprecedented popularity. Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party once received 20% of your popular vote for president. Crack open a history book sometime. And while you're at it, crack open a newspaper too so you can know what you're talking about when you say crazy things about Europe being too left-wing.
As for the grandparent post: my theory for the whole thing is that it's not about taxes. Most likely some business leader of the European Commission got forwarded an e-mail link to a video of something similar to goatse.cx, was furious because his grandmother was in the room at the time, and is now demanding that these sort of things be regulated to spare him the trouble of screening them himself or simply not clicking on every link he gets in an e-mail.
You have to admit though, the game does very little to promote peaceful solutions to its problems and obstacles, and very much to insinuate that you use violence. How about the assassination-missions in Vice City? How do you kill someone without violence?
If you read the previews of the game, it's almost completely opposite the GTA games--save the recognisable style. There are fights, but there's no gory effects, nobody dies or ends up missing a limb or in a coma. The worst thing is maybe that you can hit someone with a baseball bat, but even then the repercussions are less severe than they are in a Tom and Jerry cartoon from "the good old days."
Trust me, I think JT is a major dumbass just like everyone else, but to say that a game like GTA does NOT promote violence is actually stretching it a bit:)
Don't compare it to GTA. This isn't about any other game but Bully. I loved GTA 3 and Vice City, but I'll also admit they pretty much glorify violence if not make it completely acceptable and encouraged. But you can go most of Bully without ever encountering any violent situations from what I've read on game sites. The lion's share of questionable gameplay are harmless pranks that may result in some destroyed property but are probably more common in movies about children than actual life (I've honestly never heard of someone really lighting a bag of dog poo on someone's front porch despite the fact that I've seen it in film and television maybe 100 times). And the situations that are violent are things like, "Rescue the weak nerd from a savage beating." Since when is helping someone who can't defend themself a lesson we shouldn't teach children? I think Take-Two found a really clever way to both: a) satirise the shitty social structures and situations everyone is forced into when they go to school; and b) encourage cooperation and sympathy. True it's not encouraging it by saying your character should go around handing out flowers to everyone, but if they tried making a video game out of that nobody would buy it let alone play it for 60+ hours.
As for the case, I'm glad to see nothing's holding up the release now. I've already set aside 40,00eu for it when it comes out at the end of the month.
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Is there some way anyone could see what patents they've allegedly got that are being infringed? I know Dan Ravicher supposedly compiled some list which includes 20+ patents owned by Microsoft, and that because of the "engineer no looky at law breaking listy" rule in US patent legislation it isn't widely available, but is it actually available at all or do we just have to take his word for it that it exists and is accurate? If it's the latter, that seems an awful lot like those ethereal Communist lists compiled by Joseph McCarthy. Can't I just click through some MS-style EULA and promise not to use any of the information myself? It can't be a coincidence that the guy who made this list nobody is allowed to see just happens to own a company that provides "insurance" to programmers against patent infringements, can it?
Ever hear of remote wake-up or ACPI? Even a Win98 box can be nudged out of Standby mode remotely. The network doesn't have to be fully operational 24 hours a day to receive updates and maintenance, and I doubt you're doing those updates and software installations every single night. If you are, you desperately need to rework your system because it's hanging on to life by a thread. I'm not talking about putting the computers involved in real-time processes, web servers, etc in sleep mode. That wouldn't make a lot of sense. But the dozens or hundreds of workstations the typical customer service department, the mail-room, and all the other clerical and administrative roles a large corporation has are completely unused after the employees leave and none of them except the management would ever have a need for logging in remotely. Not to mention in most of the offices I've worked in that had a Windows platform, usually NT 4 or 2000, all of the updates were run as a batch script when you first logged in. It required all of 5 minutes to complete and it gave you an excuse to go pour a cup of coffee on company time. And on a more cynical note, at least if the WSs were shutdown overnight that'd be 12+ virus- and crash-free hours not to have to worry about.
I don't grasp how this is "anti-Microsoft." That's a wee bit hyperdefensive to accuse the OP of. All the blog says is that if more people put their computer in standby or sleep mode at the end of the workday, the world would save a lot of money and electricity. That's not anti- anything except senseless waste. It's true however you want to defend it. I've never worked in a corporation that shut the computers off at the end of the day, despite the fact that it'd probably save them tens of thousands on electricity and having to buy new hardware periodically. As for how complex it is, considering there's already an option in every Windows system to put the computer in Standby after X Minutes, I doubt it would be very hard to change the setting in the Registry or wherever it's stored (I don't do Windows programming, but I use it enough to know the dialog box for Sleep Mode is there). That seems impractical and risky to me. It'd be better for MS just to start some sort of "corporate conservation" campaign telling them to shut the workstations down in the evening and flashing a bunch of slick graphs with captions like "Profit Losses Due to Idle Computers" on them till the executives' eyes glaze over and they submit.
Any profession where a person only puts in the bare minimum and has no emotional or intellectual connection to what they're doing is probably not their "calling." Unfortunately, I also think the majority of people have no real calling and therefore can only put in the bare minimum in whatever they do--in which case it's almost always irrelevant what job it is (the exception being scientists and civil/social services where an emotional and intellectual attachment to the job should be, in my opinion, an unconditional requirement).
I feel lucky that in all the workplaces I've been in, the software department has always been full of people wholly dedicated to solving problems and figuring out answers rather than "buying cars" and bottom-lines. These people are good programmers but terrible businessmen, which these days I tend to see as a plus when interviewing for a new job and visit the IT room(s) of the company. The programmers who are good businessmen but not passionate tend to be mentally lazy, stick to solutions that work, and are incapable of seeing the problem to be solved as anything more than a way to make money. In those environments I often find myself doing the brunt of the labour. I don't think such attitudes are inherent to open source or nonexistant in closed source, but people with this type of personality and attitude towards their work tend in my experience not to "get" open source software.
The minister of IT quoted in the article was formerly head of the University of Technology and is a millionaire. Go figure that he views open source software with mistrust. It probably goes against everything he's ever believed. It's funny, and I think I mentioned it once already in another discussion, but the professors I had at school were two kinds of people. There were the mainstream classes for introductory topics, which were always taught by die-hard Windows professors for whom nothing outside the realm of Visual Basic and MS-DOS programming even existed (these types remind me of the parent of the poster to whom I'm replying), and there were the more theoretical professors who always forced us to do every homework assignment on a Sparc station and seemed to brim with disgust at the "introductory" professors and the students who would take some Java and VB courses and spend the rest of their degree period falling asleep in class and dreaming about the day they have that sweet Microsoft job with the cabriolet and the trophy wife and Sunday schmooze trips to the golf course.
ok...That was either the worst poem or the best rap song I've ever read.
I see your point, but there's something to be said for being able to play something "out of the box," and since most games require a memory card and I've never known anyone who was so depressingly alone that they only ever played single-player games, it would make a lot more sense if the thing came with two controllers and a memory card. A poor but appropriate analogy would be if car manufacturers sold their automobiles for a very low price but only came with a driver's seat. If their justification was, "Well, our research shows that most automobile owners do not use all four or five of the traditional seats in a sedan, and this way you are offered more of a choice as a consumer to buy seats on the open market while lowering our costs," I doubt they'd be in business very long. It's just taken for granted that you're entitled to those seats, whether you use them or don't.
Can't really decide which poster to agree with...on one hand the PS3 was so costly to develop and manufacture that it isn't a surprise it's so expensive and running out and I don't think it was some sort of Big Sony Conspiracy...on the other hand I don't like replying to these types of posts and tacitly endorsing the offtopic, pro-capitalist rants that always get modded +3, 4, 5 Insightful just because the people with Modpoints happen to agree politically despite the fact that the post has nothing to do with the article. And on the other hand again, am I the only one who remembers when a console used to come with a game and two controllers? If it's really just a matter of quantity supplied being too low and has nothing whatsoever to do with gouging consumers, why the hell does it always feel like I'm paying 4 times more for the state of the art system than I was 20 years ago when I end up having to go back to the store and buy something else (another controller, a single game for the system, a memory card, cables for the television, etc.)? Oh, and for the record communism with a lower-case 'c' does not imply state-controlled anything, and China hasn't been legitimately called Communist, Socialist, or whatever you want to pretend it was, since the late 70s before Deng Xiaopeng. It's little more than a slave state with forced labour for pennies, which for all the platitudes and lip services from Western capitalists about freedom and liberty, serves their need for cheap labour so well that I doubt they'd really want it to change.
I couldn't agree more. The most useful parts of my job that I never learned in school are: version control, working with groups and splitting up tasks, planning in advance a uniform coding (variable and function naming, etc.) and commenting style (documenting or self-documenting?) so that it's easier to understand each other's code, and properly using tools like diff/patch, autoconfigure, grep/find, etc. I realise in a Windows environment these tools wouldn't be as important, but I've never had a single programming job that didn't require at least some use of GNU development tools; even the managers usually had Cygwin installed on their laptops! Had I known how to use them when I was still a kid I wouldn't have had to spend all that money at the bookstore years later. I think one of the biggest problems, at least in my experience at two universities, was that the professors in the CS department weren't really involved in actual software development, or at least hadn't been for decades. They were either programmers who quit their jobs in the private sector and became instructors, or they were research scientists in theoretical fields like AI and had no "normal" application-dev experience. So I guess I can't blame them for being totally incapable of preparing me. But in hindsight, I certainly would have benefitted more from spending that freshman year learning about portability, scaling, security, thread-safety, etc., rather than completely useless things that no company you work for will ever use unless it's IBM or something. Let me think...When was the last time I was scheduled for a meeting to plan a new application and we all broke out our notepads and started jotting down UML schematics? Oh, right: never. Karnaugh, Quine-McCluskey, and GNU will pay off far more in programming than Z-Notation and UML ever will. Although I have to admit, Martin Fowler should also probably be taught, at least in the last year or two years of CS studies. Refactoring is hard to justify to your boss on already-existing software, but some of its concepts are quite useful in the initial coding and testing phase, and as the newest member of an already established team, you can only serve to endear yourself towards them by making your contributions easy to read and predict changes.
Like most arguments over "whose programming language is bigger," comparisons between Ruby and PHP don't take into account that PHP is meant for the web, whereas Ruby is not (although it can certainly be applied to that platform, but then any language with an output stream and the ability to read environment variables can be used for web development). I'm actually surprised to see how often people use the word "Ruby" when they really should say "Rails." I've never tried Rails, but I use Ruby maybe 2 or 3 hours a week because very often it's the fastest way to do proof-of-concepts and tests on alternative algorithms that I then rewrite in a lower-level language. It's much easier to come up with an idea for a work-related project and then quickly spit out a Ruby implementation of it, make sure it works, and then port it than to do it all in C/C++ first. I had never even heard of it until a year or so ago when one of FreeBSD's automated scripts crapped out due to me moving a directory and not realising it would have any effect, spewed some Ruby exceptions to my monitor, and forced me to take a long, hard look at myself and ask , "What in the hell is 'Ruby' and how long has it been on my machine?" As for the book, I haven't read it and probably won't, although Ruby is the most productive language I've ever used for exploring and testing new ideas, second maybe only to Prolog. I actually opened this article because I was a bit misled by the post and thought it was saying that the book can be downloaded for free from those sites. But I guess I got all excited about the possibility of free information for nothing :(
I don't know if your post was sarcastic or not, so I thought I would clear up the numerous errors just in case it was serious:
Just a quick look at the summary of the 9/11 Commission (I really don't want to track this info down for all 19 hijackers, you can do that):
- pretending-it-isn't scenario. Maybe the Finnish CS who figured it out is more sure of himself than I am, but I would never do something programming-related and then do a blind test in front of a live camera. There had to be some sort of test before they filmed that. Maybe they gave him a dummy machine first so he didn't feel like an idiot afterwards in case it didn't work. I'm not saying the test was rigged, just that I would never go to the trouble of organising such a big to-do to see if the memory card could be altered without being damn sure it would work first. Otherwise you look like a totally incompetent boob on HBO. And unless you're Larry David, that isn't too good for your career.
Mohamed Atta - flew to Newark Int'l Airport in New Jersey from Prague
Waleed al-Shehri - flew to US from UAE
Wail al Shehri - flew to US from UAE
Ahmed al-Nami - flew to US from UAE
Abdulaziz al-Omari - flew to US from either London or Dubai (not clear)
Anyway, it is pointless where they came from. They all had valid US visas and permission to be there. It's not an "immigrants sneaking into America causing terrorism" argument. It's more like "well-educated, affluent men go to Saudi Arabia, get a fresh passport, go through the process of visa acceptance by the US government, get their visa, then fly there and obtain valid driver's licenses and take classes in how to fly planes." Splitting hairs over what their country of origin was for a connecting flight is moot. In some cases the CIA was monitoring them anyway years before September 11th. Mohamed Atta, for example, was being followed by German and American surveillance as far back as 1999, but stopped when he entered the US borders because that would then become the jurisdiction of a domestic agency like the FBI.
Back on-topic to the film: it was good up until the crying scene towards the end. It seemed a little forced and unrealistic. While the whole procedure at the end was rather dramatic, that was what made it a bit trite. That and what seemed like a this-must-have-been-rehearsed-even-though-they're
I've had similar problems with Craigslist before. The one which sticks out as the worst has to be the time I sent an e-mail regarding a developer position, after which the manager who replied said he wanted to meet at a restaurant rather than an office, which in itself wasn't too weird for me to decline, so I went. He was late by twenty minutes, and after another forty minutes of discussing everything from his political views to describing himself as "a visionary" and a "modern-day Socrates" he confessed that he didn't actually have a need for any programmers, but was looking for contacts and "like-minded" people to work with in the future. In other words a complete waste of time. The number of fake or dead-end job posts on Craigslist is really annoying and probably far exceeds the number of real ones.
I received a residence visa to live in Vienna a little over a year ago, and other than occasionally wishing there was a Taco Bell, I have no intention of going back. Glad to see there are other expatriates here as well.
I thought I was the only one who moved to Austria.
A pain I know all too well.
So this is what it feels like...when doves cry.
It's kind of sad that I've been reading news stories here since 1999 and only just found this out :/
I think this would be a pretty pointless investment. So you spend 100 million USD to lobby to change the copyright laws. What happens if:
a) nobody pays attention because the industries who make their bread and butter from copyrighted material will throw everything they have at it (don't forget that film companies, record companies, publishers, and everyone else who derives income from copyrights stands to gain even more the longer those copyrights are valid; and those industries are certainly worth a hell of a lot more than a measly $100m -- what's the profit from a normal blockbuster action movie? A Matrix IV could singlehandedly quash your efforts and send all of that $100m you spent right down the toilet);or
b) the effort succeeds, copyright laws are rolled back, and 10, 20, 30 years from now they get rolled right back to how they are at the moment or worse.
In either scenario, both of which I cynically believe to be more likely than the fantasy that the US government is going to return to the original copyright concept, that investment is no longer 100:1 but a complete and utter waste of money. Jimmy Wales would be better off putting it into a wine bottle addressed to Congress and tossing it into the ocean. At least if WikiFoundation bought out the rights to X number of books those X books would never succumb to any crazy bullshit laws that they come out with in the future. This is also failing to take into account that "fixing" it in one country is not going to fix it for anybody else. The rest of the world's copyright systems are getting stricter in order to provide a safer market for American exports (God forbid someone in Lithuania downloads a DVD rip of "Dude Where's My Car?"). It'd take a lot more than $100m to "solve" this problem through the legislative process. Then again "solving problems" and "legislative process" tend to be mutually exclusive concepts.
This all hinges on one question, however, that I haven't seen anybody (not that it hasn't been, I just didn't see it) yet ask: what exactly are the terms of this "free license" that they plan to put the books in. Is it the GNU FDL? Can I download it and print it out, or is it just viewable on the computer in ASCII format, or what? Is it a creative commons license? If so, what are the clauses? Jimmy Wales' email is rather vague and considering he's more a businessman than a philanthropist, I'm rather skeptical at the moment.
I think what I would do with the money is merely fly to some small, isolated country with broadband access, hire some natives to scan every copyrighted book, film, and recording I can find or someone is willing to lend me, put them online for free in a quality format, and use the rest of the money to bribe the local government officials to look the other way for as long as possible. Now that would go a long way towards destroying the parasitic copyright systems of the world.
You have to admit that'd be a much more interesting fantasy film than the other Pearl Harbor from a few years back.
I hate to do a little own-horn-tooting, but why is this considered news? In 1998 I was renaming mp3s to those of famous, quality songs in order to promote the terrible, amateur songs of my friends' bands, or sometimes when I was bored 3 minutes of the Bell Labs text-to-speech synthesizer looping, "You are a loser. Give up. Why do you still try?" As someone already mentioned, most people realise what they downloaded isn't what they wanted and delete it right away. Not to mention: 1) torrent sites aren't going to keep a seed that's been reported as fake up for very long, and most decent sites have places in the torrent page where users can post comments and reviews -- after about 50 "Hey, this isn't real, assclown!" messages I doubt anyone will be falling for it; and 2) P2P networks tend to give away the fake files when you look at the information of the 3 minute song or 2 hour movie you searched for and most of the very popular results that appear at the top say "156 kilobytes." Gee, I wonder if that's a 2 second advertisement masquerading as the file I'm looking for or has someone actually invented some sort of space-age lossless compression algorithm and is not telling anyone else about it.
As for the case, I'm glad to see nothing's holding up the release now. I've already set aside 40,00eu for it when it comes out at the end of the month.