30% and 6%? You don't know how lucky you are! What about 57% and 21% in this country (Belgium)? Complaining about taxes in the US? I wouldn't even consider dodging them, while in this place...
I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in Europe, every night club, bar, pub, radio station, television station, party organiser, even small pa and ma shop will pay copyright dues for using copyrighted music in a publicly accessible location.
The proceeds of these levies are more often than not a multiple of the proceeds from CD sales. Every copyright owner (not necessarily the artist) obtains a share from these levies in proportion to the number of times their music has been performed in a given period.
Therefore, copyright owners cannot claim that free downloads on the internet necessarily costs them money. Free downloads may, on the contrary, very well increase the popularity of their music and increase their share in the proceeds from the public performance music levies.
Hey, did anybody think of the fact that quite a number of these UFO projects may have been abandoned for a good reason?
If nobody picks up the project spontaneously, then it's not very likely to be worthy. Why not direct the people who want to contribute open source to the projects that will really make a difference?
The question is: What is a revenue stream of $20,000/year worth today (Net Present Value)?
Well, what is the expected profit on that revenue? Say that you can profit, after taxes, $5000/year.
Obviously, it's worth with less than the amount that you could deposit in a risk-free savings account and that yields the same profit, after taxes. I guess that $100,000 will easily yield $5,000/year in a savings account. So, at first glance, it puts a cap to the maximum value of your website.
If your website is more risky than the bakery next door, that sells for $60,000, nobody is going to give more than $60,000.
So the question becomes: What level of risk is there involved in running websites? What's the likelihood that the owner will not even net 5%, or even lose his money?
Note, that your after-tax profits could be growing substantially. If your after tax profit grows by 20% per year, your profits today could be small, but still represent a substantial future revenue stream. So, what's the expected growth in profits?
I'm quite conservative. A small web site yielding $5,000/year in after tax profits, with no interesting growth prospects seems to be worth a maximum of $25,000.
When you try something new, people in Europe have a good laugh at you, especially when you fail; and when you succeed they are so piss-jealous that they feel that they have the right to take it away from you, by any means, including sky-rocketing taxes.
There is something in European culture that wants to prevent you from succeeding in your plans; and it is all-pervasive across the people and the land. It sucks so hard: Can you heard the deep sucking sound of it?
MSCE may to more or lesser extent how to use MsProducts. True in-depth knowledge on a product is definitely not just knowing how to use a product, but when to use it, especially when not to use it.
MsProducts contain a minefield angles, buggyware, vapourlibs, and other crap you want to stay away of. To be a successful MsDeveloper you must know where the crap is. Only then, you can do successful projects. A big part of the solution is to use competing products for a particular job, even if Microsoft gives their alternative away for free: It doesn't matter.
The very last persons, who are gonna tell you where the crap is hidden, are the teachers on the certification programme. They'll, most likely, send you right into it! And then, armed with propaganda, instead of skills, you can go on to start wasting your customers' money, big time.
People who invest time in certification, obviously fail to understand this problem. That's why certification by Microsoft creates strong hints in the direction that you are not very intelligent, at best, and incompetent for sure.
Delphi looks very much like a tool to bind widgets against odbc data sources, God forbid it, even against parameters of a stored procedure; with so-called resync points.
That's about the best way to guarantee that your application will never run across the internet.
These are legacy concepts implementing outdated technology. Who needs stored procedures, bound data widgets and all that crap?
Furthermore, only in the simplest of applications one can map a form against a master-detail type of join of a few tables in the database. The real world is so much different.
Can't you see developers getting stuck? When they want to bind against something else than odbc/jdbc, they will have to wait for Borland to adapt the back engines to the new types of datasources that are bound to spring up in the future (xml-rpc, soap, xml-cgi, et cetera), or otherwise rewrite the whole application.
If Borland doesn't open-source, I won't use their shit, because they're bound to make me lose out on new markets and lose serious money, one day or the other.
That's why I'm sticking to what is available open source. At least, when the shit hits the fan, you can do something about it. See it as a life insurance.
We should not fail to grasp the international context in which DMCA has been instituted.
It won't be long before the US will threaten Europe to death to implement it too. All around the world, I see Mickey Cantor and his friends threatening third world countries, including China, to adopt DMCA or else be at war, (economically) with the US.
Will the war be economical alone? I doubt it. Copyright issues will increasingly be the true reason behind military interventions, coups d'état, dictatorial regimes installed to for the purpose of enforcing DCMA, and millions of people dying of starvation and disease in putrid poverty.
For any action to be effective, we need to get the support from the general public on this. If they knew and understood the issues at stake, they would support us wholeheartedly.
... still doesn't seem aware of the issues at stake. Apathetic as they usually are, they will only get it, when it will be too late.
But then again, let the software moguls à la M$ have their way, and let us go ahead with UCITA. It will only put off more people who will turn to open source instead.
Ok. I'm actually very much in favour of DMCA, for the very simple reason that it will self-destruct; and then I will have a good laugh at it. I really think that there is no need to prevent the bill from being passed; on the contrary, we should encourage it!
There is no preventing technological progress, and companies will still rush to market to supply us with bigger hard disk and larger media (fluo cds, nanotech,...) to copy data onto.
Of course, the big corporations will start with supplying content on DVD; but the rest of the market, like the upstarts in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, will not. They will supply on the other media. Obviously, the consumer too, will prefer these other, free media. The free media market will grow stronger and stronger; because more people will have the free players than the unfree ones, more content providers will be willing to supply, and therefore this is the place where there will be strong growth dynamics. As a result, the big corporations of the unfree media will be bound to lose market share and in the end, they will be dwarfed by the companies in the free media.
It's happened before. Where did the ancient forums of Compuserve go, once people started discovering the Internet? Did DIVX really stand a chance as long as movies were still available on VHS and DVD?
The only way the corporations of the unfree media can stop this, is to prevent new data storage technology from hitting the market. They should start with trying to outlaw the 20Gb harddrives; however, I'm afraid that this is beyond the capabilities of any corporation or cartel to push any legislator that far.
How to become rich easily? (1) Get yourself a monopoly on telephone calls; a monopoly on local call will do; (2) charge as much as you want for long-distance and international calls.
Why bring in broadband, if you can make truckloads of easy cash in this way? Further, the internet and large bandwidth will only compete with your cash cows. So, as a telco, prevent large bandwidth at every price!
I've got a credit card, and I avoid using it. I acutally only use it for paying hotels and at airports. I don't understand how people can use credit cards online: the vendor has all information to pay himself twice or as many times as he likes! Or someone who steals the information can do this too.
I'm actually more afraid of the vendors than the thieves.
One day I rented a car in Antwerp, Belgium. The contract said "unlimited kilometers". Well, when I brought the car back, the company charged me for excess kilometers, saying that I had gone over the limit specified in the "General Terms & Conditions" to which the contract refers, but which are not specified in the contract. He charged me without my consent: he actually paid himself from my funds. I complained about this to my bank,because it violates the general conditions for the use of the credit card. These general conditions say that I must sign the slip in order to pay. Nonetheless, the Bank Card Company refused to refund this payment. Even though I would probably win the case in court, because I may have agreed to the contract, I have never agreed to the payment, regardless of the contract, the Bank Card Company knows very well that it's not worth going to court for 200$.
If you generalize this case, it means that companies may very well state in their terms and conditions that, for example, a subscription to a magazine will silently be renewed, and that they are allowed to charge your credit card at the end of every term. They may add all kinds of costs in small print that you've never seen and charge you for that too.
I don't want a payment method in which a vendor could potentially serve himself a second time without my consent! It's too risky because it's simply inviting abuse! That's why credit cards are simply too dangerous to use frequently.
An online payment system should open 3 secure connections at the same time: customer clearinghouse vendor---token2,confirmation,amount->clearinghou se
The vendor should never,ever see the information that the customer transmits to the clearinghouse (token1) to validate the payment.
With such a large stake in Linux and products for the platform, they may wanna gain more control over it.
Have you ever read the an_a_l-retentive copyright notices in Corel and Borland's releases? It made me throw up and junk the crap.
They've played the proprietary, hooks in the flesh of the installed base, game even harder than Microsoft. That's undoubtedly one of the foremost reasons why they lost; because fewer people let themselves get trapped.
They are losers, and like all losers they haven't learned at all. I'm sure they are thinking out ways to go back to what they did before, using Linux to get there.
See where this kind of commercial strategies has lead to for software.
Quite a lot of people don't want a piece of software, unless it's licensed under the GPL. If there are strings attached, the software may be better, easier to use, even free, it doesn't matter, we don't want it anyway, we'll use the free-speech alternative instead. The number of people aware of the strings attached when the software is not GPL, is increasing dramatically; and with the increasing success of Linux, this number will further increase.
What's even more important, is the fact that the GPL is draining the public domain from contributions to be plundered and brought under proprietary control. The GPL is, in fact, the new public domain, but this time protected from plundering.
The more often the copyright lords make forays into the public domain to steal from the public, the more people will become aware of the theft, and will refuse to use their so-called IP.
I quite often have to fill in online forms when I want to download components, manuals, source code, and so on.
I always dutifully fill these forms out. To tell you the truth: I don't have a problem with this kind of forms, and I always try to comply with the rules:
I've been doing this for 2 years now, and it has always worked. The rules are:
* What you give up as "name" and "first name", that is, what you want to be called by this company, when they refer to you, should be alfanumeric.
* "Address1" and "Address2" should be alphanumeric ane should be the place where you want them to send ordinary mail for you.
* "Zip" usually zip is validated against the idea that it should be numeric.
* "Country" should be a country, and part of the list of countries as registered by the UN General Assembly. There are only around 200 valid countries. You must enter in this field what country you feel associated with, in a way that you feel you can truthfully disclose to third parties. For example, I am Belgian, but I quite often feel truthfully associated to Greece, the Bermudas, Ireland, Zimbabwe, Kazachstan, and a few other countries. Therefore, I reveal my association to one of these countries to the company requesting "Country". Note that there is usually no "Country Association Code or Category" to be filled out. Usually companies do not require you to qualify this association.
* "Fax" and "Phone" usually must be numeric, but of no particular length.
* "Email" must contain the character @ and . I can guarantee to you that c_u_nt@hotmail.com is usually considered valid, and I testify under oath that it is indeed the address to which I want the company to send messages to me.
I testify under oath that I have truthfully and faithfully filled out the online form above to the best of my understanding.
It's a one page fully-fledged 128-bit public cryptography script that basically enables you to have secure sessions. (I've seen a Perl implementation that only takes 3 lines). You can perfectly well use it over http. You only need to store the server's public key:
(1) you generate your own public key (and private one) (2) you encrypt your public key with the server's public key, along with your request (3) the server sends you the results encrypted with your public key (4) you decrypt your results with your private key.
Who the hell needs SSL or certificate authorities?
How can they make commercial products, export regulations, laws in congress, license schemes, per-user fees, other hassle, around something as trivial as that?
MySql and PostgreSQL have no open-source win32 implementations.
That means that you can only deploy to Linux, and that you cannot even realistically demo your application on an ordinary win32 laptop, and then scale from there, with linux workhorses serving the real-life request load coming from win32 desktops.
If there's anything that should be able to scale, it is databases, because cutting the load among different database servers can be very hard. (Don't tell me that a middle tier will mediate. Ha ha)
If Interbase is truly open-sourced (freedom to copy it by any means), it will make inroads into the MySql/PostgreSQL realms very fast.
The only thing I like about Java, is the incredibly nice Swing widgets. Every time I look at the SwingSet demo, I fall in love with them. Unfortunately, they are so slow.
Further, I resent the rest of the Java language. Slow like Basic and as complex as C++, it combines every reason not to use it.
Nonetheless, there should be a way to save the Swing set out of the Java cesspool. Does anybody know of a way to use the Swing widgets with python?
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30% and 6%? You don't know how lucky you are! What about 57% and 21% in this country (Belgium)? Complaining about taxes in the US? I wouldn't even consider dodging them, while in this place ...
I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in Europe, every night club, bar, pub, radio station, television station, party organiser, even small pa and ma shop will pay copyright dues for using copyrighted music in a publicly accessible location.
The proceeds of these levies are more often than not a multiple of the proceeds from CD sales. Every copyright owner (not necessarily the artist) obtains a share from these levies in proportion to the number of times their music has been performed in a given period.
Therefore, copyright owners cannot claim that free downloads on the internet necessarily costs them money. Free downloads may, on the contrary, very well increase the popularity of their music and increase their share in the proceeds from the public performance music levies.
"Patents cover machines and processes.
Copyrights cover particular expressions."
Obviously, we haven't solved the issue of particular expressions that implement a process (code).
The existing laws will not solve the issue. There is need for constitutional clarification as to the nature of code.
Hey, did anybody think of the fact that quite a number of these UFO projects may have been abandoned for a good reason?
If nobody picks up the project spontaneously, then it's not very likely to be worthy. Why not direct the people who want to contribute open source to the projects that will really make a difference?
The question is: What is a revenue stream of $20,000/year worth today (Net Present Value)?
Well, what is the expected profit on that revenue? Say that you can profit, after taxes, $5000/year.
Obviously, it's worth with less than the amount that you could deposit in a risk-free savings account and that yields the same profit, after taxes. I guess that $100,000 will easily yield $5,000/year in a savings account. So, at first glance, it puts a cap to the maximum value of your website.
If your website is more risky than the bakery next door, that sells for $60,000, nobody is going to give more than $60,000.
So the question becomes: What level of risk is there involved in running websites? What's the likelihood that the owner will not even net 5%, or even lose his money?
Note, that your after-tax profits could be growing substantially. If your after tax profit grows by 20% per year, your profits today could be small, but still represent a substantial future revenue stream. So, what's the expected growth in profits?
I'm quite conservative. A small web site yielding $5,000/year in after tax profits, with no interesting growth prospects seems to be worth a maximum of $25,000.
When you try something new, people in Europe have a good laugh at you, especially when you fail; and when you succeed they are so piss-jealous that they feel that they have the right to take it away from you, by any means, including sky-rocketing taxes.
There is something in European culture that wants to prevent you from succeeding in your plans; and it is all-pervasive across the people and the land. It sucks so hard: Can you heard the deep sucking sound of it?
MSCE may to more or lesser extent how to use MsProducts. True in-depth knowledge on a product is definitely not just knowing how to use a product, but when to use it, especially when not to use it.
MsProducts contain a minefield angles, buggyware, vapourlibs, and other crap you want to stay away of. To be a successful MsDeveloper you must know where the crap is. Only then, you can do successful projects. A big part of the solution is to use competing products for a particular job, even if Microsoft gives their alternative away for free: It doesn't matter.
The very last persons, who are gonna tell you where the crap is hidden, are the teachers on the certification programme. They'll, most likely, send you right into it! And then, armed with propaganda, instead of skills, you can go on to start wasting your customers' money, big time.
People who invest time in certification, obviously fail to understand this problem. That's why certification by Microsoft creates strong hints in the direction that you are not very intelligent, at best, and incompetent for sure.
Delphi looks very much like a tool to bind widgets against odbc data sources, God forbid it, even against parameters of a stored procedure; with so-called resync points.
That's about the best way to guarantee that your application will never run across the internet.
These are legacy concepts implementing outdated technology. Who needs stored procedures, bound data widgets and all that crap?
Furthermore, only in the simplest of applications one can map a form against a master-detail type of join of a few tables in the database. The real world is so much different.
Can't you see developers getting stuck? When they want to bind against something else than odbc/jdbc, they will have to wait for Borland to adapt the back engines to the new types of datasources that are bound to spring up in the future (xml-rpc, soap, xml-cgi, et cetera), or otherwise rewrite the whole application.
If Borland doesn't open-source, I won't use their shit, because they're bound to make me lose out on new markets and lose serious money, one day or the other.
That's why I'm sticking to what is available open source. At least, when the shit hits the fan, you can do something about it. See it as a life insurance.
We should not fail to grasp the international context in which DMCA has been instituted.
It won't be long before the US will threaten Europe to death to implement it too. All around the world, I see Mickey Cantor and his friends threatening third world countries, including China, to adopt DMCA or else be at war, (economically) with the US.
Will the war be economical alone? I doubt it. Copyright issues will increasingly be the true reason behind military interventions, coups d'état, dictatorial regimes installed to for the purpose of enforcing DCMA, and millions of people dying of starvation and disease in putrid poverty.
For any action to be effective, we need to get the support from the general public on this. If they knew and understood the issues at stake, they would support us wholeheartedly.
But believe me, they still haven't got a clue.
... still doesn't seem aware of the issues at stake. Apathetic as they usually are, they will only get it, when it will be too late.
But then again, let the software moguls à la M$ have their way, and let us go ahead with UCITA. It will only put off more people who will turn to open source instead.
Ok. I'm actually very much in favour of DMCA, for the very simple reason that it will self-destruct; and then I will have a good laugh at it. I really think that there is no need to prevent the bill from being passed; on the contrary, we should encourage it!
...) to copy data onto.
There is no preventing technological progress, and companies will still rush to market to supply us with bigger hard disk and larger media (fluo cds, nanotech,
Of course, the big corporations will start with supplying content on DVD; but the rest of the market, like the upstarts in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, will not. They will supply on the other media. Obviously, the consumer too, will prefer these other, free media. The free media market will grow stronger and stronger; because more people will have the free players than the unfree ones, more content providers will be willing to supply, and therefore this is the place where there will be strong growth dynamics. As a result, the big corporations of the unfree media will be bound to lose market share and in the end, they will be dwarfed by the companies in the free media.
It's happened before. Where did the ancient forums of Compuserve go, once people started discovering the Internet? Did DIVX really stand a chance as long as movies were still available on VHS and DVD?
The only way the corporations of the unfree media can stop this, is to prevent new data storage technology from hitting the market. They should start with trying to outlaw the 20Gb harddrives; however, I'm afraid that this is beyond the capabilities of any corporation or cartel to push any legislator that far.
How to become rich easily?
(1) Get yourself a monopoly on telephone calls; a monopoly on local call will do;
(2) charge as much as you want for long-distance and international calls.
Why bring in broadband, if you can make truckloads of easy cash in this way? Further, the internet and large bandwidth will only compete with your cash cows. So, as a telco, prevent large bandwidth at every price!
I've got a credit card, and I avoid using it. I acutally only use it for paying hotels and at airports. I don't understand how people can use credit cards online: the vendor has all information to pay himself twice or as many times as he likes! Or someone who steals the information can do this too.
u se
I'm actually more afraid of the vendors than the thieves.
One day I rented a car in Antwerp, Belgium. The contract said "unlimited kilometers". Well, when I brought the car back, the company charged me for excess kilometers, saying that I had gone over the limit specified in the "General Terms & Conditions" to which the contract refers, but which are not specified in the contract. He charged me without my consent: he actually paid himself from my funds. I complained about this to my bank,because it violates the general conditions for the use of the credit card. These general conditions say that I must sign the slip in order to pay. Nonetheless, the Bank Card Company refused to refund this payment. Even though I would probably win the case in court, because I may have agreed to the contract, I have never agreed to the payment, regardless of the contract, the Bank Card Company knows very well that it's not worth going to court for 200$.
If you generalize this case, it means that companies may very well state in their terms and conditions that, for example, a subscription to a magazine will silently be renewed, and that they are allowed to charge your credit card at the end of every term. They may add all kinds of costs in small print that you've never seen and charge you for that too.
I don't want a payment method in which a vendor could potentially serve himself a second time without my consent! It's too risky because it's simply inviting abuse! That's why credit cards are simply too dangerous to use frequently.
An online payment system should open 3 secure connections at the same time:
customer clearinghouse
vendor---token2,confirmation,amount->clearingho
The vendor should never,ever see the information that the customer transmits to the clearinghouse (token1) to validate the payment.
With such a large stake in Linux and products for the platform, they may wanna gain more control over it.
Have you ever read the an_a_l-retentive copyright notices in Corel and Borland's releases? It made me throw up and junk the crap.
They've played the proprietary, hooks in the flesh of the installed base, game even harder than Microsoft. That's undoubtedly one of the foremost reasons why they lost; because fewer people let themselves get trapped.
They are losers, and like all losers they haven't learned at all. I'm sure they are thinking out ways to go back to what they did before, using Linux to get there.
See where this kind of commercial strategies has lead to for software.
Quite a lot of people don't want a piece of software, unless it's licensed under the GPL. If there are strings attached, the software may be better, easier to use, even free, it doesn't matter, we don't want it anyway, we'll use the free-speech alternative instead. The number of people aware of the strings attached when the software is not GPL, is increasing dramatically; and with the increasing success of Linux, this number will further increase.
What's even more important, is the fact that the GPL is draining the public domain from contributions to be plundered and brought under proprietary control. The GPL is, in fact, the new public domain, but this time protected from plundering.
The more often the copyright lords make forays into the public domain to steal from the public, the more people will become aware of the theft, and will refuse to use their so-called IP.
I quite often have to fill in online forms when I want to download components, manuals, source code, and so on.
I always dutifully fill these forms out. To tell you the truth: I don't have a problem with this kind of forms, and I always try to comply with the rules:
Name: azuirozehjkl
First Name: aomjiazeruio
Address1: azozeruiozeuiro 32b
Address2: auirozeuirozeuioazer
City: ezuioreioapzeuir
Zip: 732837
Country: Greece
Phone: 7890798078978
Fax: 8977899078789
email: c_u_nt@hotmail.com
I've been doing this for 2 years now, and it has always worked. The rules are:
* What you give up as "name" and "first name", that is, what you want to be called by this company, when they refer to you, should be alfanumeric.
* "Address1" and "Address2" should be alphanumeric ane should be the place where you want them to send ordinary mail for you.
* "Zip" usually zip is validated against the idea that it should be numeric.
* "Country" should be a country, and part of the list of countries as registered by the UN General Assembly. There are only around 200 valid countries. You must enter in this field what country you feel associated with, in a way that you feel you can truthfully disclose to third parties. For example, I am Belgian, but I quite often feel truthfully associated to Greece, the Bermudas, Ireland, Zimbabwe, Kazachstan, and a few other countries. Therefore, I reveal my association to one of these countries to the company requesting "Country". Note that there is usually no "Country Association Code or Category" to be filled out. Usually companies do not require you to qualify this association.
* "Fax" and "Phone" usually must be numeric, but of no particular length.
* "Email" must contain the character @ and . I can guarantee to you that c_u_nt@hotmail.com is usually considered valid, and I testify under oath that it is indeed the address to which I want the company to send messages to me.
I testify under oath that I have truthfully and faithfully filled out the online form above to the best of my understanding.
The US gov. will have to relax these rules further.
I've been using RSA lately in Python, with the following script:
# Author: dj trombley
# Subject: RSA Cryptosystem
# Packages: crypto
It's a one page fully-fledged 128-bit public cryptography script that basically enables you to have secure sessions. (I've seen a Perl implementation that only takes 3 lines). You can perfectly well use it over http. You only need to store the server's public key:
(1) you generate your own public key (and private one)
(2) you encrypt your public key with the server's public key, along with your request
(3) the server sends you the results encrypted with your public key
(4) you decrypt your results with your private key.
Who the hell needs SSL or certificate authorities?
How can they make commercial products, export regulations, laws in congress, license schemes, per-user fees, other hassle, around something as trivial as that?
MySql and PostgreSQL have no open-source win32 implementations.
That means that you can only deploy to Linux, and that you cannot even realistically demo your application on an ordinary win32 laptop, and then scale from there, with linux workhorses serving the real-life request load coming from win32 desktops.
If there's anything that should be able to scale, it is databases, because cutting the load among different database servers can be very hard. (Don't tell me that a middle tier will mediate. Ha ha)
If Interbase is truly open-sourced (freedom to copy it by any means), it will make inroads into the MySql/PostgreSQL realms very fast.
Go back to school, you brainless cunt.
His story sounds good, while yours sounds like the deep s*cking sound of a swallowing bitch.
You must be truly anal-oriented to enforce objects into everybody ...
A tool doesn't need to be useful, to be helpful with the task at hand: no, no, it must shove all kinds of crap down people's throats.
This is exactly why java s*cks like a 5-dollar prostitute. We don't need anybody to "enforce" us.
Java unmasked ...
... was I the only one who thought the emperor was wearing no clothes?
Finally. At last.
I've been wondering for years now
The only thing I like about Java, is the incredibly nice Swing widgets. Every time I look at the SwingSet demo, I fall in love with them. Unfortunately, they are so slow.
Further, I resent the rest of the Java language. Slow like Basic and as complex as C++, it combines every reason not to use it.
Nonetheless, there should be a way to save the Swing set out of the Java cesspool. Does anybody know of a way to use the Swing widgets with python?
Many ecommerce sites seem to be one gigantic front end web application with no back office to actually fulfill them.