Is it enough? No. They should have forced MS to make a windows version allowing to optionally select components, like WMP, IE, etc.
Do you really think so that the only real bad effect of a monopoly is the price? What about decreased quality? What about vendor lock-in? What about bullying behaviour (danish government anyone?)? What about slowing or stopping innovation because all competitors are out of the business?
Last time i checked MS' WinXp is ridiculously overpriced for being a 5 year old software.
The right or ethical thing to do not always equals what the public deems necessary. For example, most people are not aware of the patent issue, just when they bump into it. I'd hazard the guess that one of the foundations of a government or union is ideology. To give a exaggareted example, if you could jail 10 man, 9 guilty and 1 innocent, would you do it? It would certainly seem economically good, could even meet public support, but is it the right thing to do?
Remember that everything can be generalized into broad, short terms, but if you do that nothing except universe in the broadest sense makes a topic worth talking about. So before deducting something's value please try to look at the details first, not the broad generalization (btw, that is why i hate short summaries of any movie/tv show: they make the topic look utterly boring even when it is not).
There could be no better incentive for software writers to support multicore than to start actually producing them for the masses! It should be normally like this, that someone comes up with hardware and people write software for it, not the other way around.
It doesn't prohibit using that kind of license, but the copyright owner needs to be payed a fee which he/she cannot not "collect". I remember, as this thing killed the amateur music scene in 1998...(the amateur sites would have needed to pay this fee to the amateur musicians)
If you talk about the music industry, they are most certainly not going to leave, at least en masse.
For a second, let's think about it a bit, what is leaving exactly? It is certainly not practical, because noone knows what product will be a success when it's conceived, or in a case of a well established brand, you can call a band that, noone knows what the effect would be to change the country. You can name a lot of tv shows in the UK being huge successes but failures in the USA, just because the differences between the two markets. So no, they are not going to leave.
Also, you've been talking about the economy only from the negative side. What is that we gain from reducing the limit of copyright on music?
According to a lecturer at my university, who worked for the local equivalent of RIAA for 7 years, the copyright system is not fulfilling it's intended goals. It has good aspects, but they are outnumbered by the negative effects for the following reasons:
The copyright on music has been created to protect the artist from corporations basically enslaving them, so (at least in my country) at the early half of the 20th century, they made it into law that an artist cannot make his/her work public domain or just get rid of the royalties.
The law described above worked in an age when there were industries basically making people work for barely a living, but as time progressed, the music industry lobbied to the government to extend copyright. They slowly increased it from 10 years up to the 50(?) years today.
Because of the situation described above, history and innovation suffers. We could not create an archive of music noone listens to any more, which would not have anything but historical value because the licensing costs would outweight the other involved costs of building a music archive by the factor of 10 at least. Innovation suffers, because we cannot use previously built things (tunes) to create new/better ones. Think of it, it's like Eucleides copyrighting mathematics, where would be humanity today then if noone would be allowed to build on someone else's work? As of today in this country (Hungary), the relatives of a deceased musician who worked in the 50ies cannot put his work into public domain because that would violate law. Absurd.
The lecturer added, that the recording industry considers around a 5-10 years of profit making from an average band at max. Therefore he said, that he would set copyright to expire in 15 years at max for any given musical composition, because if someone couldn't have made enough profit in that time, then he shouldn't have copyright in the first place. It is reasonable to assume that a musician wants to profit from his/her work, but what about a musician's children? What about the children's children? Are they really entitled to that money (which is non-existant in 99.5% of the cases, Elvis, etc are the rare exceptions)?
To sum it up, the longer you make the copyright, the more economy and history suffers. Things need to be changed and changed now.
Consider this flamebait if you wish, but that is how i see events from an european perspective.
Since 9/11, the goverment of USA has been granted extra money, extra legal rights, extra measures and lives to defend against the 'terrorist threat'. I find it extremely ironic, let me tell you why.
First, what did the government do in the last years to improve security? A lot of in-depth reports and analysis say that the results can be barely registered as an improvement, meanwhile being a major annoyance to the ordinary person. The terrorist threat will not be stopped by technology. Humans drive technological advancement and can defeat technology just the same way (if you consider humans to be an advanced piece of engineering, it can be seen clearly). The only way is to convince people, so basically through political and demographical measures, in which areas the USA managed to alienate a sizable chunk of the world after 9/11.
So what do you managed to do in 4 years? The threat level increased in your country by your own actions, working technological measures could have been taken to decrease that risk, but instead the government ended up scaring people to give them more rights and tools. My post is not only related to this particular article, since i try to paint the bigger picture. Placing this particular article in the context of the proposed extension of the Patriot act, the increase in government buerocracy, the laws which you cannot know about but are subject to, the discrimination of muslim people (at customs, and generally in the us administration), the questionable state of DMCA and associated measures, etc. indicates that people need to question the government's actions. To sum it up what i find extremely ironic is that the government promised security and an indefinite fight against a concept (terrorism) and in the process you ended up with less security and less rights.
Re:One of pillars of success: manual
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Um, what are you talking about? 'perldoc' seems pretty good for me.
As i recall, when i first started to get familiar with perl, i was using perl in 21 days, then switched to perldoc and cpan.org documentation.
Also, please note the difference between a manual, a book and a guide. Manuals don't necessarily need to be easy to understandable, just coherent and clear. They are intended for those already familiar with the language, or at least some degree familiar with it. Given that php has so many functions, i'd say it's pretty needed.
screen scraping: v.
The act of capturing data from a system or program by snooping the contents of some display that is not actually intended for data transport or inspection by programs. Around 1980 this term referred to tricks like reading the display memory of a smart terminal through its auxiliary port. Nowadays it often refers to parsing the HTML in generated web pages with programs designed to mine out particular patterns of content. In either guise screen-scraping is an ugly, ad-hoc, last-resort technique that is very likely to break on even minor changes to the format of the data being snooped.
On the other hand, Perl supports pipes and bidirectional pipes. See 'perldoc perlipc' for interprocess related communication, if you have it installed. I wouldn't call using pipes 'not intended' data transportation method, even though they don't support object transportation, which in my opinion could generate a lot of security problems. I hope MS designs the CLI in the mind with security, then usability.
Yes, itiz inded obvius that dis is al a leftie-comunist-terorist plot againstz our great nation and our great leder. The artikel was so biasd und comunist it is obviuse were the writter standz on the politikel fense the writter stand on. The Patiot Akt is teh shite and yu infidelz will burninate in hel!
This is what apache did with modules ages ago and webmin did years ago aswell. Although all of it seems to be good what MS is doing, it is late with a few years again.
"Elaine Liner, an adjunct professor who taught writing and ethics classes in SMU's public relations department since 2001, revealed in an online publication that the blog was hers."
(Emphasis is mine)
I think they couldn't have picked a worse person to teach that kind of class. This is just so surreal.
And Taco obviously attempted to do some perl scripting, with a revolutionary new way:
Like tracking your spouse is ok?. What a world!
I mean, most, less experienced or cunning perl coders would have done it this way:
"$comment = $track_spouse ? 'What a world!':'';"
If you look at the revolutionary concatisanation, the new way to use ? and . next to each other clearly indicate a brilliant new way to use the Conditional Operator and the "." Additive Operator.
Some less experienced people on slashdot might wonder, that it was just a typo(sic!). They must be new here and do not grasp the subtle indications of the existence of a brilliant mind CmdrTaco must be possessing.
Get their password via the "send password by email" option if there is any and either just change the email address on their site if possible or change the settings so that you don't get emails from them...although this could be quite problematic with 30 registrations / day.
As long as there are DRM free products, i will use them in all possible cases. I can't speak for the rest of the people, most of them probably just won't care...
After working with Linux for about 4 months, my most recent roommate caught me by surprise when she asked me to remove (..)
When i got to this part i thought that it's a myth that slashdot geeks don't get laid and Linux does have a sexual magnet effect after all, but then i continued to read on.
Slashdot Mirror
The planet is flat you stupid heathen!
Can't you see from your own eyes? Even that ungodly google shows it's flat!
Yes. Humour.
You've misunderstood what i've been saying.
Is it the right thing to do by the EU? Yes.
Is it enough? No. They should have forced MS to make a windows version allowing to optionally select components, like WMP, IE, etc.
Do you really think so that the only real bad effect of a monopoly is the price? What about decreased quality? What about vendor lock-in? What about bullying behaviour (danish government anyone?)? What about slowing or stopping innovation because all competitors are out of the business?
Last time i checked MS' WinXp is ridiculously overpriced for being a 5 year old software.
Your most obvious solution would probably break a lot of national laws or even violate the constitution of the involved countries.
Were/Are lynch mobs the obvious solution aswell to criminal problems?
The right or ethical thing to do not always equals what the public deems necessary. For example, most people are not aware of the patent issue, just when they bump into it. I'd hazard the guess that one of the foundations of a government or union is ideology. To give a exaggareted example, if you could jail 10 man, 9 guilty and 1 innocent, would you do it? It would certainly seem economically good, could even meet public support, but is it the right thing to do?
You're using pico? Bah, nano is much more superior!
1.) You born
2.) You live
3.) You die
Remember that everything can be generalized into broad, short terms, but if you do that nothing except universe in the broadest sense makes a topic worth talking about. So before deducting something's value please try to look at the details first, not the broad generalization (btw, that is why i hate short summaries of any movie/tv show: they make the topic look utterly boring even when it is not).
It's a bit like the chicken-egg problem.
There could be no better incentive for software writers to support multicore than to start actually producing them for the masses! It should be normally like this, that someone comes up with hardware and people write software for it, not the other way around.
It doesn't prohibit using that kind of license, but the copyright owner needs to be payed a fee which he/she cannot not "collect". I remember, as this thing killed the amateur music scene in 1998...(the amateur sites would have needed to pay this fee to the amateur musicians)
For a second, let's think about it a bit, what is leaving exactly? It is certainly not practical, because noone knows what product will be a success when it's conceived, or in a case of a well established brand, you can call a band that, noone knows what the effect would be to change the country. You can name a lot of tv shows in the UK being huge successes but failures in the USA, just because the differences between the two markets. So no, they are not going to leave.
Also, you've been talking about the economy only from the negative side. What is that we gain from reducing the limit of copyright on music?
According to a lecturer at my university, who worked for the local equivalent of RIAA for 7 years, the copyright system is not fulfilling it's intended goals. It has good aspects, but they are outnumbered by the negative effects for the following reasons:
- The copyright on music has been created to protect the artist from corporations basically enslaving them, so (at least in my country) at the early half of the 20th century, they made it into law that an artist cannot make his/her work public domain or just get rid of the royalties.
- The law described above worked in an age when there were industries basically making people work for barely a living, but as time progressed, the music industry lobbied to the government to extend copyright. They slowly increased it from 10 years up to the 50(?) years today.
- Because of the situation described above, history and innovation suffers. We could not create an archive of music noone listens to any more, which would not have anything but historical value because the licensing costs would outweight the other involved costs of building a music archive by the factor of 10 at least. Innovation suffers, because we cannot use previously built things (tunes) to create new/better ones. Think of it, it's like Eucleides copyrighting mathematics, where would be humanity today then if noone would be allowed to build on someone else's work? As of today in this country (Hungary), the relatives of a deceased musician who worked in the 50ies cannot put his work into public domain because that would violate law. Absurd.
The lecturer added, that the recording industry considers around a 5-10 years of profit making from an average band at max. Therefore he said, that he would set copyright to expire in 15 years at max for any given musical composition, because if someone couldn't have made enough profit in that time, then he shouldn't have copyright in the first place. It is reasonable to assume that a musician wants to profit from his/her work, but what about a musician's children? What about the children's children? Are they really entitled to that money (which is non-existant in 99.5% of the cases, Elvis, etc are the rare exceptions)?To sum it up, the longer you make the copyright, the more economy and history suffers. Things need to be changed and changed now.
Zeus, is that you? Oh wait...
Consider this flamebait if you wish, but that is how i see events from an european perspective.
Since 9/11, the goverment of USA has been granted extra money, extra legal rights, extra measures and lives to defend against the 'terrorist threat'. I find it extremely ironic, let me tell you why.
First, what did the government do in the last years to improve security? A lot of in-depth reports and analysis say that the results can be barely registered as an improvement, meanwhile being a major annoyance to the ordinary person. The terrorist threat will not be stopped by technology. Humans drive technological advancement and can defeat technology just the same way (if you consider humans to be an advanced piece of engineering, it can be seen clearly). The only way is to convince people, so basically through political and demographical measures, in which areas the USA managed to alienate a sizable chunk of the world after 9/11.
So what do you managed to do in 4 years? The threat level increased in your country by your own actions, working technological measures could have been taken to decrease that risk, but instead the government ended up scaring people to give them more rights and tools. My post is not only related to this particular article, since i try to paint the bigger picture. Placing this particular article in the context of the proposed extension of the Patriot act, the increase in government buerocracy, the laws which you cannot know about but are subject to, the discrimination of muslim people (at customs, and generally in the us administration), the questionable state of DMCA and associated measures, etc. indicates that people need to question the government's actions. To sum it up what i find extremely ironic is that the government promised security and an indefinite fight against a concept (terrorism) and in the process you ended up with less security and less rights.
Um, what are you talking about? 'perldoc' seems pretty good for me.
As i recall, when i first started to get familiar with perl, i was using perl in 21 days, then switched to perldoc and cpan.org documentation.
Also, please note the difference between a manual, a book and a guide. Manuals don't necessarily need to be easy to understandable, just coherent and clear. They are intended for those already familiar with the language, or at least some degree familiar with it. Given that php has so many functions, i'd say it's pretty needed.
On the other hand, Perl supports pipes and bidirectional pipes. See 'perldoc perlipc' for interprocess related communication, if you have it installed. I wouldn't call using pipes 'not intended' data transportation method, even though they don't support object transportation, which in my opinion could generate a lot of security problems. I hope MS designs the CLI in the mind with security, then usability.
Yes, itiz inded obvius that dis is al a leftie-comunist-terorist plot againstz our great nation and our great leder. The artikel was so biasd und comunist it is obviuse were the writter standz on the politikel fense the writter stand on. The Patiot Akt is teh shite and yu infidelz will burninate in hel!
</sarcasm>
This is what apache did with modules ages ago and webmin did years ago aswell. Although all of it seems to be good what MS is doing, it is late with a few years again.
i dunno, how could you say someone is an 'expert' on ethics if they haven't run the full spectrum on it?
I hope this was sarcasm.
In the case it wasn't, by the same logic a judge would need to commit all possible crimes to be able to judge them.
"Elaine Liner, an adjunct professor who taught writing and ethics classes in SMU's public relations department since 2001, revealed in an online publication that the blog was hers."
(Emphasis is mine)
I think they couldn't have picked a worse person to teach that kind of class. This is just so surreal.
And Taco obviously attempted to do some perl scripting, with a revolutionary new way:
Like tracking your spouse is ok?. What a world!
I mean, most, less experienced or cunning perl coders would have done it this way:
"$comment = $track_spouse ? 'What a world!':'';"
If you look at the revolutionary concatisanation, the new way to use ? and . next to each other clearly indicate a brilliant new way to use the Conditional Operator and the "." Additive Operator.
Some less experienced people on slashdot might wonder, that it was just a typo(sic!). They must be new here and do not grasp the subtle indications of the existence of a brilliant mind CmdrTaco must be possessing.
Get their password via the "send password by email" option if there is any and either just change the email address on their site if possible or change the settings so that you don't get emails from them...although this could be quite problematic with 30 registrations / day.
As long as there are DRM free products, i will use them in all possible cases. I can't speak for the rest of the people, most of them probably just won't care...
After working with Linux for about 4 months, my most recent roommate caught me by surprise when she asked me to remove (..)
When i got to this part i thought that it's a myth that slashdot geeks don't get laid and Linux does have a sexual magnet effect after all, but then i continued to read on.
I like the "Obviousmobile not starting" one more, but yeah, this one is good too...
You need to get a sense of humour, dude!
Don't you think the article would be even half this funny if Windows would be below 20% marketshare?
Things aren't looking food from this perspective.
Are you hungry or something? You know freudian slips do happen...
That is no longer a problem with the system, it is up to the particular user to keep their passwords secret.