Then he sat me down and walked through the code, and explained what the code was doing, and the failure modes that made it necessary to use a goto.
Exactly. To every rule there is an exception, and if you would not ever want to use a GOTO, don't you think programming languages would have removed it by now?
For every hallowed "law" of programming, there is always a case where it doesn't hold true. I passed my assembler 101 with a self-modifying program, even though the prof told us pretty much every other lecture that self-modifying programs are a big no-no (and yes, thus the challenge was born in my mind). Because I could explain why in this particular case for this particular purpose, the specific self-modifications I made were the best solution.
It has its place, but it should definitely be used sparingly. Blindly saying never use a goto doesn't always give you the best solution.
iBooks 1 uses epub (I just published a book on it, so I know). I've not yet looked at what this new format is, but I've be surprised if it weren't epub as well.
They're a bit late to this game, Amazon is pretty entrenched with Kindles already in most people's hands,
Why does everyone with no clue whine on this article that it's about the iPad? Why do you think this is about the iPad? What makes you think that?
Apple has consistently won markets by thinking bigger than that. They always create nice integrated products, such as the iPod and iTunes - but they have always looked beyond the immediate. The iTunes music store is huge in itself, with or without iPod sales.
Sure, Apple will move more iPads if this gets big. But if the become a major publisher of textbooks, they gain something far beyond more iPad sales - they profit from the textbooks themselves, even if the students use a Kindle to read them.
I'm not really sold on the idea that we need interactive textbooks,
You didn't study anything complicated, then.
For all natural sciences, layered diagrams, 3D models that you can turn and watch from more than one perspective, etc. are godsent. Not because they are shiney and "multimedia", but because they convey more information better. Check out anatomy textbooks and tell me the diagrams wouldn't be 100% improved if they supported just layers.
What the hell does an iPad do that cheaper full fledged computers haven't been able to do for ages?
It can sit on your desk alongside your books, papers, pencils and not take up all the space. You can carry it around, and it has a great form-factor for using it as a tool.
Typical geek error: You think this is about technological capabilities, specs - it isn't. It is about design, about integration into the workflow, about everything around the device as much as the device itself.
if I had an iPad to play with in class in school, I don't think much learning would have happened.
That absolutely is the #1 argument against an iPad or any other multi-purpose electronic gadget. Then again, if pupils want to play, they will. Back in my days, we played on paper. Worked, too.
And come on, it's Apple and we all know Apple can do no wrong.
They've done plenty of wrong. The reason you don't hear much about it is that unlike MS they don't keep their mistakes around for ages, spending billions on them until either they are so dead that they have to bury them because they start to smell (Zune), or the sheer amount of money and exclusivity-deals and other niceties that money can buy make it into a viable thing (xbox).
Apple buries its mistakes and moves on. Doesn't mean they don't make plenty of mistakes.
Personally, I would prefer DRM-free PDFs or interactive and cross platform HTML 5 "books" that didn't mandate a platform.
The epub format (which iBooks uses, I'm not sure about iBooks2, we'll have to see) is HTML5.
And trust me, you don't want PDF for e-books. I have a couple PDF books alongside epub e-books on my iPad and gosh does PDF suck. It doesn't re-flow when I change from portrait to landscape, and it doesn't re-scale text, only zooms on a page level.
Ok, the longer, more formally correct and complete version would be a bit more complex, maybe slightly above the comprehension abilities of the average Fox News watcher, but this is/., so here's the complex, nuanced and correct long version:
Absolutely do this. This is way, way more important than anything else. Unless someone loses their comfy seat and effortless income over this, there will be no deterence whatsoever to not try again next year, next election or just when the shitstorm has calmed down.
The more of the jerks lose their jobs over this, the longer it will take before they try again.
And - make sure that everyone knows why he lost his seat.
I question your assumption on intention. Intention is such a misleading word - our mental concept of it involves one unified mind, but that's not how the real world works. Not only are our individual minds seldom unified, but in the development of anything even remotely complex, many people are involved.
There's developers, managers, outside contractors, distributors and then there are snakeoil salesmen telling them they need new/strong/bla DRM (which, incidentally, they are selling), and many more people involved.
Most evil does not spring from a single mind, but from a bad collection of good intentions mashed together in an stupid way.
I've just published an e-book, and epub is the vastly superior format. Since it is basically HTML, it will re-flow your text, you can change font sizes and fonts, it will work in both landscape and portrait and so on and so forth.
You don't want PDF for e-books. Download a few ebooks and a few PDF-books to an iPad or something and compare them.
Most women I know would disagree. And to be honest, I have slightly more female friends than male friends, mostly because I couldn't care less about soccer and formula one.
Some women either make gender issues their pet subject (and when you are on the lookout for something, you sure as hell see it everywhere), or they are in an environment where indeed it comes up constantly. Such environments exist. But, you know, the beauty of life in the western world is that you generally have a choice. You can dedicate your life to gender issues, or you can walk away and change the environment.
No, I'm not claiming we have 100% gender equality in all but a few bad environments. But there are certainly more than enough to choose from where it's not "the" big topic and you can get by perfectly without having to worry about it every day.
Solution: Get the pirated version. It comes with all the features of the paid version, but without the pesky DRM.
Ten years from now, they'll finally figure out that making your version not only more expensive but also less useful is not exactly what will drive customers towards it.
In order to get an interest in an issue, you have to identify what the problem is. And non-conformance to an arbitrary number, such as any specific gender ratio isn't a problem. It has to have some negative effect.
I don't care if you are male or female, I care about the job you do, the software you write, the art you create, whatever it is you do. And I refuse to get gender issues pushed on me with no explanation as to why they are problematic. Maybe women just don't care about this kind of stuff, just like girls care a lot more about riding and horses than boys do?
Of course not. The 4th was written when the government's military had cannons while the militia had only guns. When the militia has guns while the military has drones, tanks, air support, artillery, satellite surveillance and a dozen other things your average redneck doesn't even know how to spell, the idea of standing up against an oppressive government by nailing shut your windows and loading your trusted shotgun is kind of... antiquated.
The answer to corruption is not to pay more than the other guys. The answer is to run out the corrupt bastards in such a way that the next bunch gets the message. Shooting them generally works fairly well for a generation or two, then you have to repeat it to refresh everyone's memory.
If they have any guts and interest in a long-term solution to this, they will do it anyway and make a list of supporters headlined: "These are the people who want to destroy the Internet. Your choice if you want to vote for them again."
I haven't owned a TV for going on 15 years now. What I do own (in various setups over the years) is a video beamer, a dolby sound system and a living-room-computer (used to be a cheap notebook, nowadays it's a Mac Mini) hooked up to both. It's my stereo system and it allows me to watch movies. And the few TV series worth watching are all available online.
TV? Whenever I spend a night at a hotel on a business trip, I give it a try, and almost always turn it off again and pick up a book or my iPad instead.
I don't think it'll go away, but anyone interested in a "smarter" TV has already migrated to something else. Those left in the TV world are the people who just have it running in the background, and they don't give a shit about it being smart, they're not really watching it most of the time anyways.
In reality, 5 years is a very short time for games, given the emulator, abandonware and retro game activity online.
The relevant time period for a game is not how long it is in use - just like it isn't for books. The relevant period is how long it takes an author to make enough money off his work so that he can then go and create more good stuff for the benefit of society.
The commercial period of a good game is a few years at best, 5 is very optimistic. Whatever money you haven't made after 5 years you almost certainly won't make in year 6, 7, etc.
Copyright law is a compromise between getting the author his fair share and getting the work into the public domain. That means that with any sane copyright law, the author will not get the maximum-possible, best-deal-imaginable, but a compromise that allows him to make a good part of the money, but not the best-case-maximum-imaginable.
For books, a longer time is fine because it does happen regularily that a book is really "discovered" after a while, or that it sells slowly, but constantly over a long period of time.
Computer games and movies have a different curve, they usually sell most of their copies within the first few months. Allow for late-starters and give it a couple years, that should be a good compromise.
Music falls somewhere inbetween. While there's the charts phenomenon that works much like movies (top today, forgotten tomorrow), many smaller bands sell albums for years, and are constantly discovered by new fans when they play at festivals, etc.
So my suggestion would be 20 years for books, painting and other artwork, 10 years for music and 5 years for movies and computer games. But that's just a rough outline, a discussion-starter. I don't claim that's the final word.
The point is: Adapt the laws to the changing reality - and that includes much more than illegal online copying. It also includes the changes in the way that copyrighted material is consumed.
How exactly are they going to sell something which is, essentially, free?
The keyword is "essentially". There are transaction costs and there's doing the right thing. I buy music I could download for free if it's worth it.
But yes, maybe the times of the multi-million-dollar album sales and the rockstars who don't know how to snort away their fortune are over. That's fine with me, they were abnormalities anyways, most musicians and actors don't really make more than you or me and often less.
Neither is search - before Google made it. MP3 players were a niche market until Apple made it sexy.
Don't think "file storage" - think what you can do with it. I can, for example, envision a very nice web-app like business model where you store HTML5 apps in the Dropbox cloud and can, with the click of a button, make a personal copy and execute that, with storage and all in a nice bundle. Something like that would eat the cake of the flash games sites and many others.
Copyright laws originated when the only copyrighted material that mattered was books. The lifetime of a good book is easily 20 years, but the lifetime of even a good computer game is maybe 5 years. And most blockbuster movies are forgotten before their first anniversary.
Understanding your subject matter is the first step towards finding a good solution. I fear very few people really understand both copyright law and the subjects of it, i.e. copyrighted works in all their various forms and shapes.
What I know is that the solution won't be simple. We need differentiation.
Slashdot Mirror
Then he sat me down and walked through the code, and explained what the code was doing, and the failure modes that made it necessary to use a goto.
Exactly. To every rule there is an exception, and if you would not ever want to use a GOTO, don't you think programming languages would have removed it by now?
For every hallowed "law" of programming, there is always a case where it doesn't hold true. I passed my assembler 101 with a self-modifying program, even though the prof told us pretty much every other lecture that self-modifying programs are a big no-no (and yes, thus the challenge was born in my mind). Because I could explain why in this particular case for this particular purpose, the specific self-modifications I made were the best solution.
It has its place, but it should definitely be used sparingly. Blindly saying never use a goto doesn't always give you the best solution.
Amen
Achievements should be defined by management
Yeah! We wouldn't want anyone who actually has a clue about coding to define them, would we?
Good managers don't need this, and bad managers - will become worse.
iBooks 1 uses epub (I just published a book on it, so I know). I've not yet looked at what this new format is, but I've be surprised if it weren't epub as well.
They're a bit late to this game, Amazon is pretty entrenched with Kindles already in most people's hands,
Why does everyone with no clue whine on this article that it's about the iPad? Why do you think this is about the iPad? What makes you think that?
Apple has consistently won markets by thinking bigger than that. They always create nice integrated products, such as the iPod and iTunes - but they have always looked beyond the immediate. The iTunes music store is huge in itself, with or without iPod sales.
Sure, Apple will move more iPads if this gets big. But if the become a major publisher of textbooks, they gain something far beyond more iPad sales - they profit from the textbooks themselves, even if the students use a Kindle to read them.
I'm not really sold on the idea that we need interactive textbooks,
You didn't study anything complicated, then.
For all natural sciences, layered diagrams, 3D models that you can turn and watch from more than one perspective, etc. are godsent. Not because they are shiney and "multimedia", but because they convey more information better. Check out anatomy textbooks and tell me the diagrams wouldn't be 100% improved if they supported just layers.
What the hell does an iPad do that cheaper full fledged computers haven't been able to do for ages?
It can sit on your desk alongside your books, papers, pencils and not take up all the space. You can carry it around, and it has a great form-factor for using it as a tool.
Typical geek error: You think this is about technological capabilities, specs - it isn't. It is about design, about integration into the workflow, about everything around the device as much as the device itself.
if I had an iPad to play with in class in school, I don't think much learning would have happened.
That absolutely is the #1 argument against an iPad or any other multi-purpose electronic gadget. Then again, if pupils want to play, they will. Back in my days, we played on paper. Worked, too.
And come on, it's Apple and we all know Apple can do no wrong.
They've done plenty of wrong. The reason you don't hear much about it is that unlike MS they don't keep their mistakes around for ages, spending billions on them until either they are so dead that they have to bury them because they start to smell (Zune), or the sheer amount of money and exclusivity-deals and other niceties that money can buy make it into a viable thing (xbox).
Apple buries its mistakes and moves on. Doesn't mean they don't make plenty of mistakes.
Personally, I would prefer DRM-free PDFs or interactive and cross platform HTML 5 "books" that didn't mandate a platform.
The epub format (which iBooks uses, I'm not sure about iBooks2, we'll have to see) is HTML5.
And trust me, you don't want PDF for e-books. I have a couple PDF books alongside epub e-books on my iPad and gosh does PDF suck. It doesn't re-flow when I change from portrait to landscape, and it doesn't re-scale text, only zooms on a page level.
Because, you know, it is nothing like property at all. At least for tax purposes.
Who cares about words, truth and pesky details like that when your government is for sale?
I have no clue how SOPA got this far.
Money
Ok, the longer, more formally correct and complete version would be a bit more complex, maybe slightly above the comprehension abilities of the average Fox News watcher, but this is /., so here's the complex, nuanced and correct long version:
Money and corruption
Absolutely do this. This is way, way more important than anything else. Unless someone loses their comfy seat and effortless income over this, there will be no deterence whatsoever to not try again next year, next election or just when the shitstorm has calmed down.
The more of the jerks lose their jobs over this, the longer it will take before they try again.
And - make sure that everyone knows why he lost his seat.
This is the only way to guard against the future.
I question your assumption on intention. Intention is such a misleading word - our mental concept of it involves one unified mind, but that's not how the real world works. Not only are our individual minds seldom unified, but in the development of anything even remotely complex, many people are involved.
There's developers, managers, outside contractors, distributors and then there are snakeoil salesmen telling them they need new/strong/bla DRM (which, incidentally, they are selling), and many more people involved.
Most evil does not spring from a single mind, but from a bad collection of good intentions mashed together in an stupid way.
Local installation, local data and offline mode, cross-browser.
PDF is intended for printing, and it shows.
I've just published an e-book, and epub is the vastly superior format. Since it is basically HTML, it will re-flow your text, you can change font sizes and fonts, it will work in both landscape and portrait and so on and so forth.
You don't want PDF for e-books. Download a few ebooks and a few PDF-books to an iPad or something and compare them.
Most women I know would disagree. And to be honest, I have slightly more female friends than male friends, mostly because I couldn't care less about soccer and formula one.
Some women either make gender issues their pet subject (and when you are on the lookout for something, you sure as hell see it everywhere), or they are in an environment where indeed it comes up constantly. Such environments exist. But, you know, the beauty of life in the western world is that you generally have a choice. You can dedicate your life to gender issues, or you can walk away and change the environment.
No, I'm not claiming we have 100% gender equality in all but a few bad environments. But there are certainly more than enough to choose from where it's not "the" big topic and you can get by perfectly without having to worry about it every day.
it actually appears intended to stop piracy.
I'm sure Vietnam was intended to be won, but that doesn't make it so.
Solution: Get the pirated version. It comes with all the features of the paid version, but without the pesky DRM.
Ten years from now, they'll finally figure out that making your version not only more expensive but also less useful is not exactly what will drive customers towards it.
In order to get an interest in an issue, you have to identify what the problem is. And non-conformance to an arbitrary number, such as any specific gender ratio isn't a problem. It has to have some negative effect.
I don't care if you are male or female, I care about the job you do, the software you write, the art you create, whatever it is you do. And I refuse to get gender issues pushed on me with no explanation as to why they are problematic. Maybe women just don't care about this kind of stuff, just like girls care a lot more about riding and horses than boys do?
Of course not. The 4th was written when the government's military had cannons while the militia had only guns. When the militia has guns while the military has drones, tanks, air support, artillery, satellite surveillance and a dozen other things your average redneck doesn't even know how to spell, the idea of standing up against an oppressive government by nailing shut your windows and loading your trusted shotgun is kind of... antiquated.
The answer to corruption is not to pay more than the other guys. The answer is to run out the corrupt bastards in such a way that the next bunch gets the message. Shooting them generally works fairly well for a generation or two, then you have to repeat it to refresh everyone's memory.
Provided that they now don't.
If they have any guts and interest in a long-term solution to this, they will do it anyway and make a list of supporters headlined: "These are the people who want to destroy the Internet. Your choice if you want to vote for them again."
It's like paying software developers based on the number of bugs they fix... while allowing them to introduce as many bugs as they want.
Microsoft has built a huge empire on that business model.
Indeed.
I haven't owned a TV for going on 15 years now. What I do own (in various setups over the years) is a video beamer, a dolby sound system and a living-room-computer (used to be a cheap notebook, nowadays it's a Mac Mini) hooked up to both. It's my stereo system and it allows me to watch movies. And the few TV series worth watching are all available online.
TV? Whenever I spend a night at a hotel on a business trip, I give it a try, and almost always turn it off again and pick up a book or my iPad instead.
I don't think it'll go away, but anyone interested in a "smarter" TV has already migrated to something else. Those left in the TV world are the people who just have it running in the background, and they don't give a shit about it being smart, they're not really watching it most of the time anyways.
In reality, 5 years is a very short time for games, given the emulator, abandonware and retro game activity online.
The relevant time period for a game is not how long it is in use - just like it isn't for books. The relevant period is how long it takes an author to make enough money off his work so that he can then go and create more good stuff for the benefit of society.
The commercial period of a good game is a few years at best, 5 is very optimistic. Whatever money you haven't made after 5 years you almost certainly won't make in year 6, 7, etc.
Copyright law is a compromise between getting the author his fair share and getting the work into the public domain. That means that with any sane copyright law, the author will not get the maximum-possible, best-deal-imaginable, but a compromise that allows him to make a good part of the money, but not the best-case-maximum-imaginable.
For books, a longer time is fine because it does happen regularily that a book is really "discovered" after a while, or that it sells slowly, but constantly over a long period of time.
Computer games and movies have a different curve, they usually sell most of their copies within the first few months. Allow for late-starters and give it a couple years, that should be a good compromise.
Music falls somewhere inbetween. While there's the charts phenomenon that works much like movies (top today, forgotten tomorrow), many smaller bands sell albums for years, and are constantly discovered by new fans when they play at festivals, etc.
So my suggestion would be 20 years for books, painting and other artwork, 10 years for music and 5 years for movies and computer games. But that's just a rough outline, a discussion-starter. I don't claim that's the final word.
The point is: Adapt the laws to the changing reality - and that includes much more than illegal online copying. It also includes the changes in the way that copyrighted material is consumed.
How exactly are they going to sell something which is, essentially, free?
The keyword is "essentially". There are transaction costs and there's doing the right thing. I buy music I could download for free if it's worth it.
But yes, maybe the times of the multi-million-dollar album sales and the rockstars who don't know how to snort away their fortune are over. That's fine with me, they were abnormalities anyways, most musicians and actors don't really make more than you or me and often less.
file storage isn't that sexy.
Neither is search - before Google made it. MP3 players were a niche market until Apple made it sexy.
Don't think "file storage" - think what you can do with it. I can, for example, envision a very nice web-app like business model where you store HTML5 apps in the Dropbox cloud and can, with the click of a button, make a personal copy and execute that, with storage and all in a nice bundle. Something like that would eat the cake of the flash games sites and many others.
Correct.
Copyright laws originated when the only copyrighted material that mattered was books. The lifetime of a good book is easily 20 years, but the lifetime of even a good computer game is maybe 5 years. And most blockbuster movies are forgotten before their first anniversary.
Understanding your subject matter is the first step towards finding a good solution. I fear very few people really understand both copyright law and the subjects of it, i.e. copyrighted works in all their various forms and shapes.
What I know is that the solution won't be simple. We need differentiation.