There's no class action lawsuit because the judge would laugh at it and throw the case out. Nobody is forcing you to send text messages. You're not going to die if you don't send your BFF a text message. You can always just call instead. Or send them a message on AIM/ICQ/MSN. Instead you decided to send a text message, knowing full well how much it would cost compared to the alternatives. How can you file a lawsuit against somebody when you consciously decided to use their product? What are you going to say, "I can't read, so the phone company should give my money back"?
If you're pissed off by the price of text messages, blame the people who keep buying them. The free market works when people stop buying things they think are priced too high. Right now consumers are telling the phone companies "15 cents per text message is a reasonable price." What motivation is there for the phone company to lower prices when people are more than happy to buy text messages at the current price?
Re:Didn't even know it was "done"...
on
A Year of GPLv3
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· Score: 4, Informative
Uh, how about GCC and just about everything else maintained by GNU? If you're using Linux, chances are you're using a lot of GPL 3 stuff without even knowing it. Stallman isn't entirely crazy for wanting it called GNU/Linux
The government acting as a neutral party to collect useful data is hardly meddling.
Why is the government wasting our money collecting data? If somebody finds it useful, let them collect the data themselves. Having a Rolls Royce would be useful, but that doesn't mean the government should buy me one.
The facts of the matter are that datacenter energy use is very poorly understood by owners and considered a negligible cost of the business.
The only thing the "owners" need to know is that using less energy costs them less money. If they're smart enough to build and run a data center, I guarantee you they're smart enough to figure that out by themselves.
Repairing a computer is much more likely to produce evidence against someone.
What? That's most ridiculous thing I've heard all day.
Not that I'm particularly worried about this law. The black market for computer repair people without PI licenses will be HUGE. Computer savvy neighbor kids who know how to reinstall Windows and upgrade RAM are going to love this law.
What browser I'm using shouldn't be relevant. That's the whole fucking point of the internet and "web applications". If I have to download a specific browser or use a specific operating system, I might as well just download a native excutable and be done with it. Suffice it to say that I'm using the latest version of a modern browser that isn't Firefox.
Did you even try the demo? On my dual-core Opteron with 4 gigs of RAM it was *painfully* slow. I can run Windows in Qemu, then run Office inside of that, and it would seem really fast compared to their demo. A little bloat here and there isn't an issue. When an app is so bloated and slow that it's unusable for anything practical, it's a real problem.
If I wanted to feel like I was building a presentation on an ancient 286, I would just dig one out of my closet
Also, until you're volunteering to buy the RAM for me, you can kindly shut the fuck up about how cheap it is. Thanks.
Not if the developers have been working with the aim of not breaking under Wine. I think the OP was saying to distribute a known good version of Wine with the game, and run it that way, which would mean that there aren't any issue.
I didn't know WoW did that, but I admit it's better than hoping it works with whatever version of Wine happens to be installed.
In any case, if Blizzard wants my money this time around they can release a native Linux port.
Well shit, in that case I can just run Windows inside Qemu or VMWare and run all my apps that way. Why bother making any Linux software at all?
Using wine is a hack. It only works sometimes, in some cases, and chances are good that upgrading it will break things. It's not an excuse for not releasing a Linux version. If I wanted Windows, I would just go buy it.
That's more or less been my point all along. Nowhere have I said "The java language == bad". The problem is, I've found that most Java programmers like to greatly over complicate things.
Unfortunately, writing code in isolation just isn't practical. I can't go in to work on Monday and say "Fuck all you guys, I'm writing this app by myself." So when the majority of Java programmers like to write bad, over complicated code it makes writing Java apps in general less desirable.
So I don't understand the ribbing. It's arguing that it isn't profitable when that's not what the long tail is about. It's about demand continuing BEYOND the profitable age of entertainment goods.
I'm not familiar with how "the long tail" is normally used, but TFA definitely isn't about copyright lengths. The article's "long tail" refers to obscure products with less sales potential.
For example: very few people like accordian music. So few people that if you built a "brick and mortar" shop dedicated to accordian music, you'd likely go out of business. It's probably not even worth stocking accordian music in a regular record store. The internet, however, gives you a broader reach so you can profitably sell accordian music because you're not limited to your tiny local area. That's the "long tail" as described in the HBR article.
I'm well aware that it's not Java's fault. As somebody else pointed out, it's the "culture" around Java that promotes over-engineering, not Java itself. Unfrotunately, in real life it's hard to do anything without running into that culture. What that means is that Java projects are more likely to suffer from the problem than other projects.
There are over-engineered, bad projects in every language, but in my experience projects written in Java are almost always more complicated than they need to be. Much, much more often than projects written in other languages. As far as I'm concerned that makes it a Java problem for all practical purposes.
Sorry but that's just a bit daft - and suggests that you need to go back to school on this.
Maybe you should spend a little less time in school and little more time in real life. Very few people use plain old servlets running in a plain old J2EE container. They use JBoss and Struts and Hibernate and jBPM and Seam and Rules and Spring and on and on and on, all tied together with an endless maze of XML configuration files. It's not uncommon for Java web apps to require 20+ MB of addtional libraries and jar files on top of the regular old J2EE container.
I've seen sites that get fewer than 500 hits a day using all of that crap. Internal sites where, if the company grew at 100x its current rate, it might get 10000 hits a day sometime ten years from now. Sites that could have been replaced by a couple hundred lines of Perl using nothing but the DBI and CGI modules along with mod_perl.
Like I said, it's great if you're developing for Google or Amazon or some other incredibly popular site that needs the flexibility and scalability, but it's overkill in 99.9% of the places where it gets used.
I think you need to take you tinfoil hat off. Yes, some companies are just out for a dollar - not all are. I run a company that isn't and I have sizeable share holdings in other companies that aren't. I'd say there is a 60/30/10 split out there of good/poor/evil.
So are you saying trying to make money is "evil"? Or something Charter was doing is "evil"?
Not really. Most companies listen to their customers some even go so far as to encourage feedback.
But the point is that the customers aren't controlling the company. Somebody inside the company is reading the feedback and making decisions. That may be investors, marketting people, the CEO, or somebody else, but the customers are not making the decisions, they're just giving feedback. The company isn't obligated to take action on customer feedback.
I merely said that in the current age it seems corporations have more rights than people, as in the power of a corporation to inflict a patently bad idea onto the general populus is a sorry one; That seems to be your principle gripe too.
My gripe is that I paid a shitload of taxes last year and its being spent babysitting irresponsible morons who couldn't be bothered to read the agreements they got into. Do you honestly believe this wasn't covered in the terms of service that every single Charter subscriber had to agree to? Maybe if congress wasn't wasting their time and our money on bullshit like this they could cut taxes a tiny fraction of a percent.
As for corporations having "more rights" than people, I don't know what you mean. It's completely legal for me to redirect or inject content into the HTTP connections of people who use my wireless access point without my permission. I don't even have to let the people know or ask if they find it acceptable. It's also legal for me to tell people "You can use my wireless access all you want, but I may modify the content of sites you view." Are you saying I need to start a corporation to do that because it requires some special rights? When did that happen?
Actually, I wouldn't say that's the case at all. I know of plenty of companies who are equally interested in social responsibility, their customers and making an ethical profit.
No you don't. You know plenty of companies that think they'll make more money if their customers believe they're socially responsible and ethical. You are proof that their plan is working.
So I guess the big deal is that concerns raised by investors was the thing that had the impact, not concern raised by customers.
But the investors were only concerned because they thought customers would be worried about it and leave. That's how the system works. If it weren't investors being concerned the program would have been stopped because concern was raised by the CEO, or upper management, or some marketting dweebs or somebody else inside the company. Under no circumstances would the program have been stopped simply because the customers didn't like it. The only say customers have in the running of a company is whether they buy a product from the company or not. If you want to voice your opinion on how the company should be run, buy stock in it.
In the current age it seems corporations have more rights than people, whereas previously they didn't. If you poison your neighbour you're going to gaol, if a corporation does, there'll be hearings, enquiries, media coverage, fines - but at the end of the day, rarely any cases result in asses in cells.
What has Charter done that's illegal? Injecting advertising after all of their customers agreed to let advertising injected? Using NebuAd is stupid, and I would never buy internet access from any company that used it, but it's not illegal, and I don't understand why you think it should be. If people decide with their own free will to pay Charter every month, it's their own responsibility to know what they're paying for. The government isn't your babysitter.
I'm writing this at 1920x14 40. The problem is, I use this resolution, in part, bec ause I want to see more o n the screen. I'd say the t ext box is taking up mayb e 1/8 th of the window, foll owed by nothing for 7/8th of the screen. What a was te of space.
In most areas the local government grants a single telco and/or single cable company sole access to the city. Your best bet is to complain to your city council and tell them to open your market to competition.
Well duh. That's what every company cares about, from the tiniest single person company to the massive corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees. At companies with investors, the investors help decide if something will piss off too many customers. What's the big deal?
where do you get your information? no really where?
Several real, actual projects I've personally worked on. I know anecdotal evidence doesn't prove everybody over-engineers their Java apps, but in my experience most people do.
My biggest complaint with Java web development is that most of the libraries, toolkits and frameworks are massively over-engineered, and that causes many Java projects to be massively over-engineered. Google probably needs the flexibility, extensibility and scalability the libraries provide. Not so much for the internal web apps that Java gets used on so often.
I can't count the number of times I've seen Java web apps running on massive servers providing functionality that could easily be provided by some Perl scripts running on a machine a fraction of the size.
Or, y'know, some of us aren't interested in drawing false dichotomies between privacy and Internet access.
It's not a false dichotomy. If Charter only sells internet access that violates the user's privacy, your only options for buying internet access from them are "Buy it" or "Don't buy it". Internet access without privacy violation isn't a product Charter sells. You shouldn't be able to take them to court and force them to sell something any more than I should be able to take you to court and force you to sell your house.
Except for precedence. If Charter gets away with this kind of shit, then there's nothing stopping Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, et. al. from implementing the same system. We need a national precedent (in the form of a court ruling or legislation) set early on in this, and Congress is a perfectly valid place to pursue that.
Set a precedent that companies will actually pay attention to by not paying them for products and services you don't want.
Look at the post about the price of oil and how it fell from $34 to $10 and STAYED there for most of a decade.
Oh, I know. What I don't know is why you think that will happen again.
So right now, Jlarroco, are you willing to invest your retirement savings in alternative energy which requires $101 oil to be profitable?
Absolutely. Right now a large fraction of my 401K is invested in companies developing solar and wind power technologies. I'm not the only person.
However, providing a *stable* price environment that investors can count on for the next 10 years is much better once you get past the development stage.
Can you point to a single example where government price fixing has been a viable long term solution?
The vast majority of ares with cable TV in the US are served by a single company.
I'm well aware. Here are two solutions to the problem that are better than involving Congress:
Contact your local government and complain loudly that they should grant the monopoly to a different company
Contact your local government and complain loudly that they shouldn't be granting monopolies at all
Personally, I like the second option.
Unless you live in a very large city, the chances are good that a couple dozen people complaining to the city council and some local politicians can make a big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no class action lawsuit because the judge would laugh at it and throw the case out. Nobody is forcing you to send text messages. You're not going to die if you don't send your BFF a text message. You can always just call instead. Or send them a message on AIM/ICQ/MSN. Instead you decided to send a text message, knowing full well how much it would cost compared to the alternatives. How can you file a lawsuit against somebody when you consciously decided to use their product? What are you going to say, "I can't read, so the phone company should give my money back"?
If you're pissed off by the price of text messages, blame the people who keep buying them. The free market works when people stop buying things they think are priced too high. Right now consumers are telling the phone companies "15 cents per text message is a reasonable price." What motivation is there for the phone company to lower prices when people are more than happy to buy text messages at the current price?
Uh, how about GCC and just about everything else maintained by GNU? If you're using Linux, chances are you're using a lot of GPL 3 stuff without even knowing it. Stallman isn't entirely crazy for wanting it called GNU/Linux
Why is the government wasting our money collecting data? If somebody finds it useful, let them collect the data themselves. Having a Rolls Royce would be useful, but that doesn't mean the government should buy me one.
The only thing the "owners" need to know is that using less energy costs them less money. If they're smart enough to build and run a data center, I guarantee you they're smart enough to figure that out by themselves.
What? That's most ridiculous thing I've heard all day.
Not that I'm particularly worried about this law. The black market for computer repair people without PI licenses will be HUGE. Computer savvy neighbor kids who know how to reinstall Windows and upgrade RAM are going to love this law.
Who cares? I sure as hell don't. Your kid, *your* responsibility.
What browser I'm using shouldn't be relevant. That's the whole fucking point of the internet and "web applications". If I have to download a specific browser or use a specific operating system, I might as well just download a native excutable and be done with it. Suffice it to say that I'm using the latest version of a modern browser that isn't Firefox.
That's not saying much.
Did you even try the demo? On my dual-core Opteron with 4 gigs of RAM it was *painfully* slow. I can run Windows in Qemu, then run Office inside of that, and it would seem really fast compared to their demo. A little bloat here and there isn't an issue. When an app is so bloated and slow that it's unusable for anything practical, it's a real problem.
If I wanted to feel like I was building a presentation on an ancient 286, I would just dig one out of my closet
Also, until you're volunteering to buy the RAM for me, you can kindly shut the fuck up about how cheap it is. Thanks.
I didn't know WoW did that, but I admit it's better than hoping it works with whatever version of Wine happens to be installed.
In any case, if Blizzard wants my money this time around they can release a native Linux port.
Well shit, in that case I can just run Windows inside Qemu or VMWare and run all my apps that way. Why bother making any Linux software at all?
Using wine is a hack. It only works sometimes, in some cases, and chances are good that upgrading it will break things. It's not an excuse for not releasing a Linux version. If I wanted Windows, I would just go buy it.
That's more or less been my point all along. Nowhere have I said "The java language == bad". The problem is, I've found that most Java programmers like to greatly over complicate things.
Unfortunately, writing code in isolation just isn't practical. I can't go in to work on Monday and say "Fuck all you guys, I'm writing this app by myself." So when the majority of Java programmers like to write bad, over complicated code it makes writing Java apps in general less desirable.
I'm not familiar with how "the long tail" is normally used, but TFA definitely isn't about copyright lengths. The article's "long tail" refers to obscure products with less sales potential.
For example: very few people like accordian music. So few people that if you built a "brick and mortar" shop dedicated to accordian music, you'd likely go out of business. It's probably not even worth stocking accordian music in a regular record store. The internet, however, gives you a broader reach so you can profitably sell accordian music because you're not limited to your tiny local area. That's the "long tail" as described in the HBR article.
I'm well aware that it's not Java's fault. As somebody else pointed out, it's the "culture" around Java that promotes over-engineering, not Java itself. Unfrotunately, in real life it's hard to do anything without running into that culture. What that means is that Java projects are more likely to suffer from the problem than other projects.
There are over-engineered, bad projects in every language, but in my experience projects written in Java are almost always more complicated than they need to be. Much, much more often than projects written in other languages. As far as I'm concerned that makes it a Java problem for all practical purposes.
Here. There's more if you google for it, but I happened to read that just a moment ago when somebody else linked to it.
Maybe you should spend a little less time in school and little more time in real life. Very few people use plain old servlets running in a plain old J2EE container. They use JBoss and Struts and Hibernate and jBPM and Seam and Rules and Spring and on and on and on, all tied together with an endless maze of XML configuration files. It's not uncommon for Java web apps to require 20+ MB of addtional libraries and jar files on top of the regular old J2EE container.
I've seen sites that get fewer than 500 hits a day using all of that crap. Internal sites where, if the company grew at 100x its current rate, it might get 10000 hits a day sometime ten years from now. Sites that could have been replaced by a couple hundred lines of Perl using nothing but the DBI and CGI modules along with mod_perl.
Like I said, it's great if you're developing for Google or Amazon or some other incredibly popular site that needs the flexibility and scalability, but it's overkill in 99.9% of the places where it gets used.
Point me to the source code and/or the 64-bit Linux version, and I'll give it a try.
So are you saying trying to make money is "evil"? Or something Charter was doing is "evil"?
But the point is that the customers aren't controlling the company. Somebody inside the company is reading the feedback and making decisions. That may be investors, marketting people, the CEO, or somebody else, but the customers are not making the decisions, they're just giving feedback. The company isn't obligated to take action on customer feedback.
My gripe is that I paid a shitload of taxes last year and its being spent babysitting irresponsible morons who couldn't be bothered to read the agreements they got into. Do you honestly believe this wasn't covered in the terms of service that every single Charter subscriber had to agree to? Maybe if congress wasn't wasting their time and our money on bullshit like this they could cut taxes a tiny fraction of a percent.
As for corporations having "more rights" than people, I don't know what you mean. It's completely legal for me to redirect or inject content into the HTTP connections of people who use my wireless access point without my permission. I don't even have to let the people know or ask if they find it acceptable. It's also legal for me to tell people "You can use my wireless access all you want, but I may modify the content of sites you view." Are you saying I need to start a corporation to do that because it requires some special rights? When did that happen?
No you don't. You know plenty of companies that think they'll make more money if their customers believe they're socially responsible and ethical. You are proof that their plan is working.
But the investors were only concerned because they thought customers would be worried about it and leave. That's how the system works. If it weren't investors being concerned the program would have been stopped because concern was raised by the CEO, or upper management, or some marketting dweebs or somebody else inside the company. Under no circumstances would the program have been stopped simply because the customers didn't like it. The only say customers have in the running of a company is whether they buy a product from the company or not. If you want to voice your opinion on how the company should be run, buy stock in it.
What has Charter done that's illegal? Injecting advertising after all of their customers agreed to let advertising injected? Using NebuAd is stupid, and I would never buy internet access from any company that used it, but it's not illegal, and I don't understand why you think it should be. If people decide with their own free will to pay Charter every month, it's their own responsibility to know what they're paying for. The government isn't your babysitter.
I'm writing this at 1920x14
40. The problem is, I use
this resolution, in part, bec
ause I want to see more o
n the screen. I'd say the t
ext box is taking up mayb
e 1/8 th of the window, foll
owed by nothing for 7/8th
of the screen. What a was
te of space.
In most areas the local government grants a single telco and/or single cable company sole access to the city. Your best bet is to complain to your city council and tell them to open your market to competition.
Well duh. That's what every company cares about, from the tiniest single person company to the massive corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees. At companies with investors, the investors help decide if something will piss off too many customers. What's the big deal?
Several real, actual projects I've personally worked on. I know anecdotal evidence doesn't prove everybody over-engineers their Java apps, but in my experience most people do.
My biggest complaint with Java web development is that most of the libraries, toolkits and frameworks are massively over-engineered, and that causes many Java projects to be massively over-engineered. Google probably needs the flexibility, extensibility and scalability the libraries provide. Not so much for the internal web apps that Java gets used on so often.
I can't count the number of times I've seen Java web apps running on massive servers providing functionality that could easily be provided by some Perl scripts running on a machine a fraction of the size.
It's not a false dichotomy. If Charter only sells internet access that violates the user's privacy, your only options for buying internet access from them are "Buy it" or "Don't buy it". Internet access without privacy violation isn't a product Charter sells. You shouldn't be able to take them to court and force them to sell something any more than I should be able to take you to court and force you to sell your house.
Set a precedent that companies will actually pay attention to by not paying them for products and services you don't want.
Oh, I know. What I don't know is why you think that will happen again.
Absolutely. Right now a large fraction of my 401K is invested in companies developing solar and wind power technologies. I'm not the only person.
Can you point to a single example where government price fixing has been a viable long term solution?
I'm well aware. Here are two solutions to the problem that are better than involving Congress:
Personally, I like the second option.
Unless you live in a very large city, the chances are good that a couple dozen people complaining to the city council and some local politicians can make a big difference.