I recently came out of a bankrupt company, e-mail was critical in a variety of cases including disputes with the liquidators, the records saved us many, many dollars.
2) Accepting the commandment of "thou shalt manually wade through gobs of data in a text file means he's no programmer. This is also perfectly fine, but means he's not the right person to be changing this file anyway.
He's not changing the file. Here's a quote from the first sentence of the summary, it's possible you missed it:
My business users regularly have to tweak large (>32MB text) data files manually
See the part where it's the end users that are editing?
3) Is under the impression that revision history could conceivably be hidden within said plain text file, implying the OP doesn't understand basic file formats, which confirms that he is not merely the wrong person but absolutely the last person you want manually mucking with your data files
So it's impossible to embed revision history in a plain text file? What about in a complementary file? What about all of the numerous methods that have been used in the past to solve this exact problem? Do you even know the nature of the requirements? Maybe it's ok to see revision history in the file, maybe it's ok to see it in a separate character for character change log file?
Before you start trashing the OP without even understanding the situation, you might want to ask some questions.
Did anyone really expect there to be a gap in ability? I hope not...
Absolutely. Male and female clearly are not identical (physically, hormones, chromosomes, etc.), to think this would have zero affect on brain function is not a very good assumption. It is logical to assume there are things each gender does better than the other.
While the ionizing radiation doesn't appear to be able to make changes to cell structure (as far as we can tell), magnetic fields have been shown to alter DNA, etc. in numerous studies and magnetic fields are routinely used in research to temporarily alter the brains function during testing (it's a pretty common technique).
It's enough of a potential factor that they needed to run tests to make sure the magnetic field from cell phones did not interfere with the operation of shunts placed in people.
From an abstract: The rapid increase in the number of cell phone users has led to the suggestion that electromagnetic waves might affect medical devices. Cerebrospinal fluid shunt valves contain a magnetic device to allow the intracranial pressure setting to be adjusted transcutaneously. Among the valves tested, the settings of the Strata valve, the Hakim valve, and the Sophy valve were affected by magnetic flux densities of 6.0, 17.5, and, 40.0 mT, respectively. Cell phones produce a magnetic flux density of 3.0 to 40.0 mT. Although cell phones could theoretically influence shunt valves, this seems unlikely because the flux density decreases with the square of the distance.
There is enough conflicting research on cell phone relationship to cancer/tumors that it's probably unwise to ignore the issue. Not saying it's one way or another, but it's too early to discount it.
You can try and defend him and glorify him all you want... but as a professional system administrator he should have known that his singular access and pathological behavior was more dangerous than helpful.
Agreed, this is 101. One of the most valuable assets a tech person can have is the ability to step back and see the big picture, along with good tech skills. Terry may be good technically but he is missing a key ingredient required in business.
And just to be fair, his managers are clearly not competent for allowing the situation to exist.
Please change the moderation of my parent post from "Just barely worth reading" to "Dang it, I'm so stupid, I'll probably end up living in a van, down by the river"
Intel chips outperform the PowerPC cpus without a doubt. PowerPC cpus were horrible
The PowerPC cpu's were not horrible. I've seen benchmarks over the years showing them outperforming intel cpu's (of the same generation) for some tasks (not all, some). The new architecture for Intel is definately impressive and Apple absolutely made the correct choice.
IBM continues to be the king of the hill at server processors like POWER5,6 and probably 7, but these are targeted at a different market than Apple's customers, and are not the same as the PowerPC cpu's.
Radiation is extremly safe and it does cure many disease that have no alternative treatment. We are bathed in radiation at every second of every day with no ill effects but just like oxygen and water, in excess it will kill you very quickly
So to recap your argument:
Radiation is extremely safe, except when it's deadly. When it's deadly, then it's not extremely safe.
No, my point is that all of the rules we make are just that, rules we made up. Notions of intrinsic morality might enter into the discussion when creating laws, but the bottom line is that we make rules we think make sense for specific reasons. Which means that people who think "stealing" real property is bad but "stealing" copyrighted material is ok are really using faulty logic if they think one is more "real" and "natural" than the other, both are really based on rules we made up.
Do you think that buying stolen property is theft, plain and simple? Is fraud also theft, plain and simple? Then if you own any land, you are a thief, plain and simple, as all property was either stolen from its original owners, or they were defrauded of it.
Fraud is covered by the term theft from a legal perspective, so yes, fraud is theft.
Definition of theft: In the criminal law, theft (also known as stealing or filching) is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent. As a term, it is used as shorthand for all major crimes against property, encompassing offences such as burglary, embezzlement, larceny, looting, robbery, mugging, trespassing, shoplifting, intrusion, fraud (theft by deception) and sometimes criminal conversion
That's pretty broad and includes many activities that don't involve "real" property. For example, embezzlement that merely transfers money from one account to another is just as theoretical as copyright infringement in the sense that it is just a manipulation of bits.
But in this case, the root of the activity is very different. Stealing a physical item is inherently amoral. Even in the total absence of government, stealing is wrong
No, it's not. There are no absolute rules. Prior to all of the rules we made up for society (including rules related to physical items and rules related to information), all that existed was survival.
Then you didn't read my post. I was pointing out the flaw in your argument, where you said that Imaginary Property was something that we made up, and so it did not need to be "believed in" in order to be considered real. In case I didn't make myself clear:
I disagree.
My point was not that it should be considered real. My point was that real/imaginary is not even part of the discussion. This is all about made up rules relating to economic transactions. Things you may consider real property also have rules we made up.
Alternate Model - Donations
Could work, but I strongly suspect people will take advantage of this type of model and merely copy some artists work, pass it off as their own and divert funds. People engaged in this behavior would probably be faster/stronger than the artists, using money to advertise their "new" works, constantly scanning the internet, etc. Without any IP laws to prevent this, how would you prevent it?
Examples of Current No-Direct-Compensation
Something to keep in mind regarding OSS is that much development is paid for by comapnies like IBM, etc., and their reasons are typically to help them make money in areas protected by IP. If the laws on IP were eliminated today, do you think we would see this same level of investment in OSS by these companies? I don't think we would. While I see the examples you have given of individuals and companies creating products for no-direct-compensation, I have a hard time picturing a large scale economy where so much is donation based. I think people in general will try to get away with what they can, meaning no or small donations, which I believe will leave the artists, etc. without enough income to exist.
why you are so fixated on the dollar, instead of the community
Because the dollar buys the artist (or other IP related fields) food, house and allows him/her to raise a family. It's not a fixation, it's merely a mechanism. While it would be nice to have a society where information is freely shared and each persons work can quickly build on anothers, I believe that competition is also a critical factor in advancement. People are motivated by the dollar which drives activity (to a degree). I don't think you can stray too far from competition and keep people motivated, and capitalism appears to be the best vehicle for economic competition. If there was another vehicle to drive competition then maybe community could be the primary focus, but I'm not sure what that would look like.
Except that this "mechanism" contradicts in a wholesale manner the scientifically testable properties of information, which it is supposed to somehow govern. As such it is an exact equivalent of a fundamentalist religion in which a "holy book" takes precedence over all scientific discovery.
Your arguments are more effective if they stay on-topic. We are talking about economics, not science and not religion. We are talking about made up societal "contracts", thats all.
If your business depends on people pretending that gravity does not exist, my demonstrating that it does (and by doing so depriving you of income) is not dependent on me finding you some other way to make money! It is your problem! After all it was you who were operating a scam based on falsehoods.
It wasn't a person operating a scam, it was a society that agreed the pros and cons of one economic model relating to specific transactions were more favorable to society as a whole than the other alternatives. Something you may not realize is that there really are no absolute rights, we created all of them. The only things preventing me from taking your computer are our laws/enforcement, and the possibility that you might be bigger than me. Whether it's physical property or any other manner of economic interaction, the only reason we have any rules is because we made them up.
I can however point out an alternative: an updated for the Information Age patronage system. This is in fact what many independent artists do already: they depend on direct electronic donations from their fans from all over the globe. If promotion of arts and sciences was indeed the goal, one could set up a myriad of private, non-profit and governmental foundations, direct donation systems and so on, complete with methods of electronic public participation in allocation of these funds to specific artists. This not only solves the problem of paying the artists (and scientists) it does so without attempting to contradict the scientific properties of information. Of course under such system a mega-corporation would not be able to manufacture a random blond ditz into a "pop star" in order to profit from such a "product". And that is the main reason why this fight against science is on.
Excellent, now we are on-topic with an alternate model. It seems like a very real problem with this model would be people copying others work and claiming they created it and then diverting donations to the person that copied the work. I can easily imagine a person/groups/companies being very effective at copying and advertising their "new" works and thus starving the actual artists of funds. Do you agree that this would be a natural outcome of that system or do you see inherent protections that would prevent it?
There, fixed it for you. Since the evidence for existence of Allah is pretty much on the same level as that for the so-called "Intellectual Property" (i.e. the concept of 'ownership' of large integer numbers and the like) and the relationship between such belief and laws passed based on it is strikingly similar
Not really. IP is a mechanism created by society for a specific economic reason: to encourage the investment of time and money in production of non-physical products because it is assumed, as a society, we would prefer to have those products than not have those products.
A question I keep asking, but no answer yet: Do you have an alternate economic model that will still result in the creation of products most affected by IP (software, movies, songs, books, etc.)?
Would an author still spend a year or two creating a book if there there were no copyright laws allowing him/her to make money? Maybe it's possible, but I haven't heard any kind of explanation yet as to how it might work.
Not sure what religion has to do with this economics question.
So I repeat my question: Do you have an alternate proposal for incentivizing content creators?
If not, do you believe that software/books/movies/songs/etc. will be created by individuals for no compensation? Or by companies for no compensation? I am really curious what economic model proponents of no-IP have in mind.
For some of us that isn't a problem, since we don't believe in IP anyway.
"IP" isn't something to believe in as if it exists on it's own. We made it up. But we made it up for a reason.
As a society we value the creation of content and came up with IP as a mechanism to help content authors make a profit from their work so they would be motivated to create more works.
I have yet to hear an alternate system in which content creators can make a living. Do you have a proposal?
I know this is offtopic and you didn't ask this question, but instead of using CPU (or ultimately FPGA like it sounds you might), have you looked into running calcs on a graphics card?
I also have a genetic algorithm, neural net, artificial life project that needs lots of processing power, after looking at my options (cluster of pc's, cluster of PS3's, FPGA's, GPU's), I found that GPU's look like the best bang for the buck by far.
I've just started the process of converting my critical code to nvidia's CUDA technology.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently came out of a bankrupt company, e-mail was critical in a variety of cases including disputes with the liquidators, the records saved us many, many dollars.
He's not changing the file. Here's a quote from the first sentence of the summary, it's possible you missed it:
My business users regularly have to tweak large (>32MB text) data files manually
See the part where it's the end users that are editing?
So it's impossible to embed revision history in a plain text file? What about in a complementary file? What about all of the numerous methods that have been used in the past to solve this exact problem? Do you even know the nature of the requirements? Maybe it's ok to see revision history in the file, maybe it's ok to see it in a separate character for character change log file?
Before you start trashing the OP without even understanding the situation, you might want to ask some questions.
Absolutely. Male and female clearly are not identical (physically, hormones, chromosomes, etc.), to think this would have zero affect on brain function is not a very good assumption. It is logical to assume there are things each gender does better than the other.
While the ionizing radiation doesn't appear to be able to make changes to cell structure (as far as we can tell), magnetic fields have been shown to alter DNA, etc. in numerous studies and magnetic fields are routinely used in research to temporarily alter the brains function during testing (it's a pretty common technique).
It's enough of a potential factor that they needed to run tests to make sure the magnetic field from cell phones did not interfere with the operation of shunts placed in people.
From an abstract:
The rapid increase in the number of cell phone users has led to the suggestion that electromagnetic waves might affect medical devices. Cerebrospinal fluid shunt valves contain a magnetic device to allow the intracranial pressure setting to be adjusted transcutaneously. Among the valves tested, the settings of the Strata valve, the Hakim valve, and the Sophy valve were affected by magnetic flux densities of 6.0, 17.5, and, 40.0 mT, respectively. Cell phones produce a magnetic flux density of 3.0 to 40.0 mT. Although cell phones could theoretically influence shunt valves, this seems unlikely because the flux density decreases with the square of the distance.
There is enough conflicting research on cell phone relationship to cancer/tumors that it's probably unwise to ignore the issue. Not saying it's one way or another, but it's too early to discount it.
That applies to every moment in time, whether there is a power outage or not
Anchorman
I doubt it.
Agreed, this is 101. One of the most valuable assets a tech person can have is the ability to step back and see the big picture, along with good tech skills. Terry may be good technically but he is missing a key ingredient required in business.
And just to be fair, his managers are clearly not competent for allowing the situation to exist.
Please change the moderation of my parent post from "Just barely worth reading" to "Dang it, I'm so stupid, I'll probably end up living in a van, down by the river"
Do they read /.?
The PowerPC cpu's were not horrible. I've seen benchmarks over the years showing them outperforming intel cpu's (of the same generation) for some tasks (not all, some). The new architecture for Intel is definately impressive and Apple absolutely made the correct choice.
IBM continues to be the king of the hill at server processors like POWER5,6 and probably 7, but these are targeted at a different market than Apple's customers, and are not the same as the PowerPC cpu's.
So to recap your argument:
Radiation is extremely safe, except when it's deadly. When it's deadly, then it's not extremely safe.
No, my point is that all of the rules we make are just that, rules we made up. Notions of intrinsic morality might enter into the discussion when creating laws, but the bottom line is that we make rules we think make sense for specific reasons. Which means that people who think "stealing" real property is bad but "stealing" copyrighted material is ok are really using faulty logic if they think one is more "real" and "natural" than the other, both are really based on rules we made up.
Fraud is covered by the term theft from a legal perspective, so yes, fraud is theft.
Definition of theft:
In the criminal law, theft (also known as stealing or filching) is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent. As a term, it is used as shorthand for all major crimes against property, encompassing offences such as burglary, embezzlement, larceny, looting, robbery, mugging, trespassing, shoplifting, intrusion, fraud (theft by deception) and sometimes criminal conversion
That's pretty broad and includes many activities that don't involve "real" property. For example, embezzlement that merely transfers money from one account to another is just as theoretical as copyright infringement in the sense that it is just a manipulation of bits.
Are you saying that "stealing" is a legal term with an agreed upon legal definition? If it is not, then your statement is debatable.
No, it's not. There are no absolute rules. Prior to all of the rules we made up for society (including rules related to physical items and rules related to information), all that existed was survival.
GPL is like ketchup
BSD is like mustard
They both taste good on hotdogs, but you wouldn't put mustard on your fries and you wouldn't put ketchup on your turkey sandwich.
Yep, both of 'em.
My point was not that it should be considered real. My point was that real/imaginary is not even part of the discussion. This is all about made up rules relating to economic transactions. Things you may consider real property also have rules we made up.
Alternate Model - Donations
Could work, but I strongly suspect people will take advantage of this type of model and merely copy some artists work, pass it off as their own and divert funds. People engaged in this behavior would probably be faster/stronger than the artists, using money to advertise their "new" works, constantly scanning the internet, etc. Without any IP laws to prevent this, how would you prevent it?
Examples of Current No-Direct-Compensation
Something to keep in mind regarding OSS is that much development is paid for by comapnies like IBM, etc., and their reasons are typically to help them make money in areas protected by IP. If the laws on IP were eliminated today, do you think we would see this same level of investment in OSS by these companies? I don't think we would. While I see the examples you have given of individuals and companies creating products for no-direct-compensation, I have a hard time picturing a large scale economy where so much is donation based. I think people in general will try to get away with what they can, meaning no or small donations, which I believe will leave the artists, etc. without enough income to exist.
why you are so fixated on the dollar, instead of the community
Because the dollar buys the artist (or other IP related fields) food, house and allows him/her to raise a family. It's not a fixation, it's merely a mechanism. While it would be nice to have a society where information is freely shared and each persons work can quickly build on anothers, I believe that competition is also a critical factor in advancement. People are motivated by the dollar which drives activity (to a degree). I don't think you can stray too far from competition and keep people motivated, and capitalism appears to be the best vehicle for economic competition. If there was another vehicle to drive competition then maybe community could be the primary focus, but I'm not sure what that would look like.
Your arguments are more effective if they stay on-topic. We are talking about economics, not science and not religion. We are talking about made up societal "contracts", thats all.
It wasn't a person operating a scam, it was a society that agreed the pros and cons of one economic model relating to specific transactions were more favorable to society as a whole than the other alternatives. Something you may not realize is that there really are no absolute rights, we created all of them. The only things preventing me from taking your computer are our laws/enforcement, and the possibility that you might be bigger than me. Whether it's physical property or any other manner of economic interaction, the only reason we have any rules is because we made them up.
Excellent, now we are on-topic with an alternate model. It seems like a very real problem with this model would be people copying others work and claiming they created it and then diverting donations to the person that copied the work. I can easily imagine a person/groups/companies being very effective at copying and advertising their "new" works and thus starving the actual artists of funds. Do you agree that this would be a natural outcome of that system or do you see inherent protections that would prevent it?
Not really. IP is a mechanism created by society for a specific economic reason: to encourage the investment of time and money in production of non-physical products because it is assumed, as a society, we would prefer to have those products than not have those products.
A question I keep asking, but no answer yet: Do you have an alternate economic model that will still result in the creation of products most affected by IP (software, movies, songs, books, etc.)?
Would an author still spend a year or two creating a book if there there were no copyright laws allowing him/her to make money? Maybe it's possible, but I haven't heard any kind of explanation yet as to how it might work.
Not sure what religion has to do with this economics question.
So I repeat my question: Do you have an alternate proposal for incentivizing content creators?
If not, do you believe that software/books/movies/songs/etc. will be created by individuals for no compensation? Or by companies for no compensation? I am really curious what economic model proponents of no-IP have in mind.
"IP" isn't something to believe in as if it exists on it's own. We made it up. But we made it up for a reason.
As a society we value the creation of content and came up with IP as a mechanism to help content authors make a profit from their work so they would be motivated to create more works.
I have yet to hear an alternate system in which content creators can make a living. Do you have a proposal?
I know this is offtopic and you didn't ask this question, but instead of using CPU (or ultimately FPGA like it sounds you might), have you looked into running calcs on a graphics card?
I also have a genetic algorithm, neural net, artificial life project that needs lots of processing power, after looking at my options (cluster of pc's, cluster of PS3's, FPGA's, GPU's), I found that GPU's look like the best bang for the buck by far.
I've just started the process of converting my critical code to nvidia's CUDA technology.