Fod sells car repair services, doesn't it? Maytag washers and dryers? Air conditioners?
I know it seems like nitpicking, but this is a real point. Plenty of people complain about computer software companies, especially Microsoft, selling "maintenance" products -- they act like they're snake oil.
The real thing is: why wouldn't you expect this industry to have maintenance? Pretty much every other industry does, and many product companies also sell a 'verified' maintenance service.
Some well-put points. I think the problem is that instead of listening to consumers, they're trying to tell us what we need. Or perhaps they're just listening primarily to the MySpace crowd -- I don't know.
FTA: One would think that as cell phones evolve into cameras, e-mail readers, Web browser and music players, mobile users would be happy with the device that fulfills their digital needs
See, that's the thing. I don't have any digital needs that I want satisfied by a mobile device besides text messaging. And the phone companies seem to think that charging $0.10 per message is still reasonable somehow.
I think the first phone company to start worrying about its customer's needs will be the Google of the phone companies. I mean, seriously, you hear stories about phone companies disabling features on phones they give to customers, such as uploading pictures to one's computer, so as to require them to purchase proprietary services that send the pictures to one's email through the phone network. Sigh. They just don't get it.
Most scientific theories are like economics: they can 'explain' plenty, but they can't really predict anything.
Sorry, I meant to say scientific theories about the weather, not all theories. There's a reason weathermen have such a bad track record =) Quantum mechanics is quite good, however, in predicting things successfully;]
ok - so if I read this right it's saying that things aren't going as predicted. the implied message seems to be something like "science got it wrong" - but the whole point of science is to improve knowledge
Part of the problem with this system is that things like the Montreal Protocol are not science. It aims to solve a problem that might exist with remedies that might fix it. Note the usage of the world "explains" instead of "predicts". Most scientific theories are like economics: they can 'explain' plenty, but they can't really predict anything. Ultimately, all this talk about the weather is not science because we can't do experiments. There is simply no way to do scientific experiments with the global climate, and so theories about it don't quite make it all the way.
Using such theories to make worldwide policy is not exactly scientific when there is no actual evidence they have the verified power of prediction.
Yes, and me waving my hand back and forth has a gravitational effect on your face, no matter where it is. However, that effect is not detectable by any instruments we have -- error from other things far, far, far outweigh any actual change due to my hand's gravity. The same is true for these planets. But don't take my word for it! Let's do the math.
F = G*m1*m2/r^2 is a pretty basic math formula from physics describing the force from gravity [source] between two bodies.
The nearest known star (besides our sun, of course) is Proxima Centauri at about 4.2 light years = 3.97342193 × 10^13 km = 39,700,000,000,000 km.
I don't even need to tell you the mass of the stars for you to figure out where the calculations are going with a number that big for R. And remember it's squared. So whatever mass multiplication we get, it's divided by a number on the order of (10^13)^2 = 10000000000000000000000000000.
Although other nearby stars, and indeed, the whole rest of the universe certainly do influence us, the effects are negligable because of the exponential decrease in force proportional to distance. The effect of my hand on your face is probably more likely to be measured.
Q: How do I copyright a name, title, slogan or logo?
Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases. In some cases, these things may be protected as trademarks.... In some circumstances, an artistic logo may also be protected as a trademark.
I guess it depends whether you want to consider a trademark a type of copyright. I wasn't meaning to pick nits, but I was referring to them as separate things in my previous post.
My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow.
That sounds good when you first hear it, until you realize that this is actually going to give the MPAA and their like even more power.
The industry globally adopts such a model, there is even less chance of independent films making decent money. Everyone has to sign with the "big labels" and take a cut of the mass-produced cookie cutter movie model.
Once you adopt the position that no one but large companies (selling hundreds of different movies for $1.50 each) can recover their costs, you destroy the independent market entirely.
A mobile phone needs no centralized network to process transactions and most certainly is more efficient and trackable than paper currency and Visa/MC association payments.
Of course it needs a centralized network. Otherwise, what's to prevent me from hacking my phone and changing the amount of money that I have?
I understand what you're saying, in a sense: the transaction processing does not have to be centralized but it definitely must be authoritative. Without an authority, you must trust the phone to accurately report the amount of money it has -- clearly not workable. Thus, centralization is certainly needed.
Already done for us. Thankfully it's no longer under copyright, so I can post it.
The Hollow Men - T. S. Eliot (1925)
I
We are the hollow men/
We are the stuffed men/
Leaning together/
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!/
Our dried voices, when/
We whisper together/
Are quiet and meaningless/
As wind in dry grass/
Or rats' feet over broken glass/
In our dry cellar/
[Slashdot complained about too few characters to per line so some is reformatted]
Shape without form, shade without colour,/
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;/
Those who have crossed/
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom/
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost/
Violent souls, but only/
As the hollow men/
The stuffed men./
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams/
In death's dream kingdom/
These do not appear:/
There, the eyes are/>
Sunlight on a broken column/
There, is a tree swinging/
And voices are/
In the wind's singing/
More distant and more solemn/
Than a fading star./
Let me be no nearer/
In death's dream kingdom/
Let me also wear/
Such deliberate disguises/
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves/
In a field/
Behaving as the wind behaves/
No nearer --/
Not that final meeting/
In the twilight kingdom/
III
This is the dead land/
This is cactus land/
Here the stone images/
Are raised, here they receive/
The supplication of a dead man's hand/
Under the twinkle of a fading star./
Is it like this/
In death's other kingdom/
Waking alone/
At the hour when we are/
Trembling with tenderness/
Lips that would kiss/
Form prayers to broken stone./
IV
The eyes are not here/
There are no eyes here/
In this valley of dying stars/
In this hollow valley/
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms/
In this last of meeting places/
We grope together/
And avoid speech/
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river/
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear/
Prickly pear prickly pear/
Here we go round the prickly pear/
At five o'clock in the morning./
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
And, unless I'm missing something again, I think Microsoft still qualifies as a legally defined "monopoly", and this looks like leveraging their monopoly to unfairly skew market forces and competition.
I know, I know, we've all heard it before, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist... but for what? Bundling a free (as in beer) web browser with their OS qualifies as taking advantage of their monopoly?
People get upset every time Microsoft gives something away for free, always claiming it pushes other companies out of the market. Newsflash: Netscape gave away its browser; so did Microsoft. Where is the "market"?
Mindshare != market.
Or are you effectively saying a company can NEVER compete with an OSS project, because the OSS project will always be free while it's "unfair" for the company to give something away from free? I am unclear what standard you wish to impose. Answer me this: if a company (Microsoft) wants to make a product, which has free open-source or otherwise equivalents in the market, is it anticompetitive practice to also release a free one?
Consider this: how hot does something have to be to melt an ice sculpture? Well, a match would do it, except a match can't provide the power necessary to melt a significant amount of ice.
You need the temperature necessary to turn steel into a vapor (look that up on a periodic table of elements); you also need the power necessary to turn some mass (per second) of steel into vapor. Anyone with a background in chemistry should be able to look up the required information on a standard periodic table.
The equation will look like this:
(Steel's specific heat) * (volume of steel to vaporize per second) * (temperature difference) = power necessary.
In the real world would you trust a porn purveyor with your credit card?
Now, I'm not some kind of porn fiend, but I dislike your implication that people who sell porn are more likely to do something unethical to your credit card. I don't see any reason to be prejudiced against "porn purveyors". Because you might personally find their business in bad taste does not make the people in the business immoral or unethical.
Besides, there are plenty of brick-and-mortar stores that sell porn. That's where the majority of the business was, until the Internet came along (or did you think that porn started with the Internet?).
I know this is Slashdot, and people like to blame accountants (the people who *count* the money, not choose how to make it) for the business decisions of the CEOs, porn makers for the moral corruption of humanity... but let's please be realistic.
I generally find usenet newsgroups are about the best source for programming questions.
I've often found that IRC is also very helpful. There are a number of good channels such as #C# and #C++ on DALnet and Freenode.
IRC can sometimes be hostile and is usually less professional than newsgroups. It also pays to know how to ask smart questions. A well-phrased and well-thought-out question that demonstrates you've already attempted to research the topic will get you much more helpful replies; otherwise you'll be in for a flamestorm of "RTFM!" and "STFW!".
Hmmm, Slash isn't linking my IRC URLs properly, but I'm sure you can find out how to log on through their websites: www.dal.net, www.freenode.org.
Senators are once again pushing for a.XXX top-level domain to 'corral pornography'.
Pornography has become such a part of the Internet that I think having a domain explicitly for it a great idea. Then I read the rest of the article summary:
Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain. Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties as determined by the Commerce Department.
Whoah. Hold on. Who gets to decide whether something is "harmful to minors"? There are too many legitimate businesses that sell adult-related things for this even to make sense. Congress, do you think an online store that sells vibrators and sex toys should move to.xx?
Oh, ok then.
In related news, the business formerly known as Amazon.com recently changed its logo to Amazon.xxx. A spokesperson could not be reached for comment.
The fact that legislation like this goes far enough to make the news digusts me. The government is NOT a nanny!
/Votes in a bill to bring personal responsibility back to America
I read Slashdot to correct the FUD where I can. Or minor things like this:/ I read with a hearty dose of skepticism, as one should read all publications, and I energetically respond if I see something's amiss.
It's not too broken, I don't think. Just biased. But then, all people are biased. I'd rather hear anti-Microsoft sentiments than anti-Black.
It's not meant to be a virtual machine, although that's what its bytecode instruction set represents. A fundamental difference between.NET and Java is that.NET was designed from the beginning to be fully compiled natively before any execution. There is no.NET VM that interprets applications; they're always compiled natively.
Java is doing this now, too, but that was not the Java design from the beginning. Java actually was interpreted in a VM;.NET never has been.
Yes, yes, the.NET bytecode represents a VM. It has a stack and instruction and such things. But nothing actually ever executes that. It's only ever translated to native.
Why not a C# notepad, mspaint, explorer.exe, taskmgr, regedit etc?
Why waste time re-implementing something that already works fine? Also, explorer.exe doesn't really qualify as userland. Sure, it's not the kernel, but it's as close as you get in userland.
As it looks to me,.Net is the "soup of the day" at MS..Net will be replaced in 3-5 years with something else that will require MS customers to re-purchase their development tool chain.
Again, it seems you're expecting Microsoft to instantly rewrite all their software from scratch. A lot of software that's going into Vista, and indeed Vista itself, have been in the work as long as.NET or longer. Consider Office. That's been around forever.
You're saying they should just throw away everything and do it all over again in.NET? Personally, I think notepad and regedit are fine the way they are. If.NET needs to prove itself, it will not be through clones of tools as simple as those.
Slashdot Mirror
Fod sells car repair services, doesn't it? Maytag washers and dryers? Air conditioners?
I know it seems like nitpicking, but this is a real point. Plenty of people complain about computer software companies, especially Microsoft, selling "maintenance" products -- they act like they're snake oil.
The real thing is: why wouldn't you expect this industry to have maintenance? Pretty much every other industry does, and many product companies also sell a 'verified' maintenance service.
Some well-put points. I think the problem is that instead of listening to consumers, they're trying to tell us what we need. Or perhaps they're just listening primarily to the MySpace crowd -- I don't know.
FTA: One would think that as cell phones evolve into cameras, e-mail readers, Web browser and music players, mobile users would be happy with the device that fulfills their digital needs
See, that's the thing. I don't have any digital needs that I want satisfied by a mobile device besides text messaging. And the phone companies seem to think that charging $0.10 per message is still reasonable somehow.
I think the first phone company to start worrying about its customer's needs will be the Google of the phone companies. I mean, seriously, you hear stories about phone companies disabling features on phones they give to customers, such as uploading pictures to one's computer, so as to require them to purchase proprietary services that send the pictures to one's email through the phone network. Sigh. They just don't get it.
Most scientific theories are like economics: they can 'explain' plenty, but they can't really predict anything.
;]
Sorry, I meant to say scientific theories about the weather, not all theories. There's a reason weathermen have such a bad track record =) Quantum mechanics is quite good, however, in predicting things successfully
ok - so if I read this right it's saying that things aren't going as predicted. the implied message seems to be something like "science got it wrong" - but the whole point of science is to improve knowledge
Part of the problem with this system is that things like the Montreal Protocol are not science. It aims to solve a problem that might exist with remedies that might fix it. Note the usage of the world "explains" instead of "predicts". Most scientific theories are like economics: they can 'explain' plenty, but they can't really predict anything. Ultimately, all this talk about the weather is not science because we can't do experiments. There is simply no way to do scientific experiments with the global climate, and so theories about it don't quite make it all the way.
Using such theories to make worldwide policy is not exactly scientific when there is no actual evidence they have the verified power of prediction.
I was checking out the new beta and must've had the URL in the clipboard. I meant it to be a citation of your post. It's not a plug.
My apologies.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topi cs/msh/download.mspx
Yes, and me waving my hand back and forth has a gravitational effect on your face, no matter where it is. However, that effect is not detectable by any instruments we have -- error from other things far, far, far outweigh any actual change due to my hand's gravity. The same is true for these planets. But don't take my word for it! Let's do the math.
F = G*m1*m2/r^2 is a pretty basic math formula from physics describing the force from gravity [source] between two bodies.
The nearest known star (besides our sun, of course) is Proxima Centauri at about 4.2 light years = 3.97342193 × 10^13 km = 39,700,000,000,000 km.
I don't even need to tell you the mass of the stars for you to figure out where the calculations are going with a number that big for R. And remember it's squared. So whatever mass multiplication we get, it's divided by a number on the order of (10^13)^2 = 10000000000000000000000000000.
Although other nearby stars, and indeed, the whole rest of the universe certainly do influence us, the effects are negligable because of the exponential decrease in force proportional to distance. The effect of my hand on your face is probably more likely to be measured.
You can copyright a logo that has sufficient authorship.
I don't think a yellow-and-black smilie face counts.
You can't copyright a logo. That's what trademarks are for.
Pithily stated.
My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow.
That sounds good when you first hear it, until you realize that this is actually going to give the MPAA and their like even more power.
The industry globally adopts such a model, there is even less chance of independent films making decent money. Everyone has to sign with the "big labels" and take a cut of the mass-produced cookie cutter movie model.
Once you adopt the position that no one but large companies (selling hundreds of different movies for $1.50 each) can recover their costs, you destroy the independent market entirely.
A mobile phone needs no centralized network to process transactions and most certainly is more efficient and trackable than paper currency and Visa/MC association payments.
Of course it needs a centralized network. Otherwise, what's to prevent me from hacking my phone and changing the amount of money that I have?
I understand what you're saying, in a sense: the transaction processing does not have to be centralized but it definitely must be authoritative. Without an authority, you must trust the phone to accurately report the amount of money it has -- clearly not workable. Thus, centralization is certainly needed.
Already done for us. Thankfully it's no longer under copyright, so I can post it. The Hollow Men - T. S. Eliot (1925)
I
We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!/ Our dried voices, when/ We whisper together/ Are quiet and meaningless/ As wind in dry grass/ Or rats' feet over broken glass/ In our dry cellar/
[Slashdot complained about too few characters to per line so some is reformatted]
Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion;/
Those who have crossed/ With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom/ Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost/ Violent souls, but only/ As the hollow men/ The stuffed men./
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams/ In death's dream kingdom/ These do not appear:/ There, the eyes are/> Sunlight on a broken column/ There, is a tree swinging/ And voices are/ In the wind's singing/ More distant and more solemn/ Than a fading star./
Let me be no nearer/ In death's dream kingdom/ Let me also wear/ Such deliberate disguises/ Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves/ In a field/ Behaving as the wind behaves/ No nearer --/
Not that final meeting/ In the twilight kingdom/
III
This is the dead land/ This is cactus land/ Here the stone images/ Are raised, here they receive/ The supplication of a dead man's hand/ Under the twinkle of a fading star./
Is it like this/ In death's other kingdom/ Waking alone/ At the hour when we are/ Trembling with tenderness/ Lips that would kiss/ Form prayers to broken stone./
IV
The eyes are not here/ There are no eyes here/ In this valley of dying stars/ In this hollow valley/ This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms/
In this last of meeting places/ We grope together/ And avoid speech/ Gathered on this beach of the tumid river/
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear/ Prickly pear prickly pear/ Here we go round the prickly pear/ At five o'clock in the morning./
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Science: Big-O analysis, graph theory, computability evaluation
Not Science: Distributed systems design, system architecture
Tell that to this guy getting his PhD in it; his distributed project FeedTree has been previously featured on Slashdot.
Something doesn't stop being science just because you say so. Have you forgotten Google's roots?
And, unless I'm missing something again, I think Microsoft still qualifies as a legally defined "monopoly", and this looks like leveraging their monopoly to unfairly skew market forces and competition.
I know, I know, we've all heard it before, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist... but for what? Bundling a free (as in beer) web browser with their OS qualifies as taking advantage of their monopoly?
People get upset every time Microsoft gives something away for free, always claiming it pushes other companies out of the market. Newsflash: Netscape gave away its browser; so did Microsoft. Where is the "market"?
Mindshare != market.
Or are you effectively saying a company can NEVER compete with an OSS project, because the OSS project will always be free while it's "unfair" for the company to give something away from free? I am unclear what standard you wish to impose. Answer me this: if a company (Microsoft) wants to make a product, which has free open-source or otherwise equivalents in the market, is it anticompetitive practice to also release a free one?
It's an issue of temperature AND power.
Consider this: how hot does something have to be to melt an ice sculpture? Well, a match would do it, except a match can't provide the power necessary to melt a significant amount of ice.
You need the temperature necessary to turn steel into a vapor (look that up on a periodic table of elements); you also need the power necessary to turn some mass (per second) of steel into vapor. Anyone with a background in chemistry should be able to look up the required information on a standard periodic table.
The equation will look like this:
(Steel's specific heat) * (volume of steel to vaporize per second) * (temperature difference) = power necessary.
In the real world would you trust a porn purveyor with your credit card?
Now, I'm not some kind of porn fiend, but I dislike your implication that people who sell porn are more likely to do something unethical to your credit card. I don't see any reason to be prejudiced against "porn purveyors". Because you might personally find their business in bad taste does not make the people in the business immoral or unethical.
Besides, there are plenty of brick-and-mortar stores that sell porn. That's where the majority of the business was, until the Internet came along (or did you think that porn started with the Internet?).
I know this is Slashdot, and people like to blame accountants (the people who *count* the money, not choose how to make it) for the business decisions of the CEOs, porn makers for the moral corruption of humanity... but let's please be realistic.
I generally find usenet newsgroups are about the best source for programming questions.
I've often found that IRC is also very helpful. There are a number of good channels such as #C# and #C++ on DALnet and Freenode.
IRC can sometimes be hostile and is usually less professional than newsgroups. It also pays to know how to ask smart questions. A well-phrased and well-thought-out question that demonstrates you've already attempted to research the topic will get you much more helpful replies; otherwise you'll be in for a flamestorm of "RTFM!" and "STFW!".
Hmmm, Slash isn't linking my IRC URLs properly, but I'm sure you can find out how to log on through their websites: www.dal.net, www.freenode.org.
Just make sure to give them your weight in kilograms, not pounds!
Senators are once again pushing for a .XXX top-level domain to 'corral pornography'.
.xx?
/Votes in a bill to bring personal responsibility back to America
Pornography has become such a part of the Internet that I think having a domain explicitly for it a great idea. Then I read the rest of the article summary:
Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain. Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties as determined by the Commerce Department.
Whoah. Hold on. Who gets to decide whether something is "harmful to minors"? There are too many legitimate businesses that sell adult-related things for this even to make sense. Congress, do you think an online store that sells vibrators and sex toys should move to
Oh, ok then.
In related news, the business formerly known as Amazon.com recently changed its logo to Amazon.xxx. A spokesperson could not be reached for comment.
The fact that legislation like this goes far enough to make the news digusts me. The government is NOT a nanny!
I read Slashdot to correct the FUD where I can. Or minor things like this :/ I read with a hearty dose of skepticism, as one should read all publications, and I energetically respond if I see something's amiss.
It's not too broken, I don't think. Just biased. But then, all people are biased. I'd rather hear anti-Microsoft sentiments than anti-Black.
Grammar tip: "Effect" is a verb. "Affect" is a noun.
I know this is entirely off-topic, but I feel I must comment. Frankly, you're wrong. "Affect" and "effect" are both nouns and both verbs.
You can read the verb and noun definitions of affect here. You can read about those of effect here, if you want to learn more.
Anyway, please change your sig. It's bad to spread misinformation.
It's not meant to be a virtual machine, although that's what its bytecode instruction set represents. A fundamental difference between .NET and Java is that .NET was designed from the beginning to be fully compiled natively before any execution. There is no .NET VM that interprets applications; they're always compiled natively.
.NET never has been.
.NET bytecode represents a VM. It has a stack and instruction and such things. But nothing actually ever executes that. It's only ever translated to native.
Java is doing this now, too, but that was not the Java design from the beginning. Java actually was interpreted in a VM;
Yes, yes, the
Why not a C# notepad, mspaint, explorer.exe, taskmgr, regedit etc?
.Net is the "soup of the day" at MS. .Net will be replaced in 3-5 years with something else that will require MS customers to re-purchase their development tool chain.
.NET or longer. Consider Office. That's been around forever.
.NET? Personally, I think notepad and regedit are fine the way they are. If .NET needs to prove itself, it will not be through clones of tools as simple as those.
Why waste time re-implementing something that already works fine? Also, explorer.exe doesn't really qualify as userland. Sure, it's not the kernel, but it's as close as you get in userland.
As it looks to me,
Again, it seems you're expecting Microsoft to instantly rewrite all their software from scratch. A lot of software that's going into Vista, and indeed Vista itself, have been in the work as long as
You're saying they should just throw away everything and do it all over again in
May I be the first to ask: but do they have frickin' laser beams?!