As someone who spent around 8 years in school, let me tell you: The more and longer you spend in school the better. You will never get such a great chance to explorer yourself, learn things you didn't know you cared about, and encounter strange, amazing people. Don't worry too much about the classes, you learn the most outside of them anyway!
Yes, you could say I could be further along in my 'real life' career if I had finished school earlier. I doubt I'd be as full a person.
I started school as an engineer, at Rochester Institute of Technology. After two years I accepted that was not the best path for me. It was too planned out, too narrow. I moved back home and took classes at the local state university. Since I was an in-state student, classes were very cheap. I took whatever I wanted, and worked at night to pay for it all myself. I learned how much I loved the arts and philosophy. I learned I loved to work on old cars. I transfered a second time to New York University when I felt I needed a bigger challenge and new experiences. I got a dual degree in Comparitive Literature and Philosophy, and stayed to complete my MA in Performance Studies. Yes, that's right Performance Studies.
All along I played with computers as a hobby. I never took a programming class, although I took a lot of math and logic. I think that prepared me to learn any computer language, not just whatever is popular at the time. Yes, Java is it right now, but 4 years from now? Who knows? I also took the opportunity to teach some adult education classes. That was a great experience; if you ever get the chance to teach, take it!
Now I am a senior programming at a solid company. I have no fear of losing my job, even in these questionable economic times. Often I miss the freedom I had, and the time I had for myself while I was in school. So, don't rush things along, and don't start school at the age of 18 thinking you know exactly who you are and what you want from life.
Yes, I know you're thinking if you get really rich you can retire and spent all your time on things you care about. I know two people that dropped out of college and eventually became millionaires. They're both jerks who cheat on their wives, and surround themselves with lackies and leaches, not true friends. Don't kid yourself, getting rich doesn't make you emotionally or intelectually mature. That's something that can only happen with time and experience.
I was able to sell the CD, but the auction winner could not use it because the CD key was tied to my credit card number and sony online account. Sony refused to transfer the account or reset it. They claim it's to stop people from auctioning ebay characters or items, but since I only played the game for a few hours and then deleted the characters this was not an issue. They really want to force people to buy the new Everquest CD. I suspect to be seeing a lot more of this in the future.
I don't think it wise to rely on the hardware manufacturers to stop this type of law. We have to remember, they are also big companies which have only one overiding goal: profit. All that it would take to win their undying support is for some way of offsetting the costs to them be created. Maybe the music/video industry would arrange some sort of profit sharing mechanism for computer vendors that sell cd or dvd players?
We also have to remember that most of the costs for developing the software and changing the production lines to incorporate them are upfront. The costs would certainly decrease over time. Look at the V-chip for an example.
Now let's all concentrate on getting the guy home to his wife and kids, and not use him to further our political ends. If someone volunteers to be a test case for the FSF or others, that's fine; he did not, and is a unwitting victim of our police state.
...if you enable an option called "Dynamic Disks". This option must be enabled if you want to use software RAID. Of course NT4 supported software RAID and the boot sector, but for 'some reason' this was removed in w2k.
Here's what the MS Help says about Dynamic Disks:
A physical disk that is managed by Disk Management. Dynamic disks can contain only dynamic volumes (that is, volumes created with Disk Management). Dynamic disks cannot contain partitions or logical drives, nor can they be accessed by MS-DOS.
See also dynamic volume; partition.
I don't think this option is enabled by default for w2k, but I'm sure MS will find a way to make it required for their next OS.
I tried using this will a FreeBSD partition, and afterward I couldn't get back to FreeBSD, If anyone knows a way around this, or if I am incorrect, please speak up!
Please keep in mind that the mozilla browser is all new source code, build from scratch. Yes, the Netscape 4.x source code is there, in CVS somewhere, but when they realized the codebase was too inflexible to fix, they decided to forget it and build it right. I remember they had a vote or something, about a year into the project. So they put the 4.x code into maintainance mode, adding bug fixes etc to try and keep their corporate clients, while working on a new, more stable and flexible system in parallel. That's one of the main reasons this project is taking so long.
I don't think anyone at netscape thought the code was too f*cked up. Remember, when the decision was made to make this an open source project, Netscape was still ahead in the browser war. Nobody was taking free software very seriously. At the time, everyone was saying they needed to make the browser free (as in beer) in order to compete with IE. Their decision to make it free as in speech has really helped the movement, despite the marketshare. If you judged linux or freebsd by marketshare, you'd be making a mistake. I think Apache and sendmail are the only free software to have dominate marketshares in their product group. Anyone know of others?
I guess some of Slashdot's users are too young to remember...
Oh, and I figured I'd just mention that I'll never use that F word since I think its stupid
More great editorial analysis and insightful commentary from the Slashdot crew. I'm not sure why I bother to think anymore, when I can always just say, 'I think its (sic) stupid.'
No suprise most of the comments here are on the third grade level.
I was there and there are more than 8 protestors. The person taking the photos was probably not thinking she was documenting the entire event, just getting a few photos of her friends. Given the short time frame, it was great that the number we had actually showed up.
I was there, but not an organizer. Two reasons for choosing the library: 1) It was across the street from the Adobe offices. 2) It was symbolic of the fight against the DMCA, since libraries are potential targets of it's scope.
Also, there are a lot of people hanging out there!
I know, I was there between 1:45 and 1:30, when I had to return to work. There were several others who came on their lunch break, as well as some who planned to be there all day. We handed out quite a few flyers and talked to a lot of people. The pictures have a lot of the same people, so don't use those as a way of counting. I assume the person taking pictures was mostly taking pictures of people she knew, not intending them to be a documentary of the event.
In my experience, both can be as portable as Java. If they install the activestate versions, it makes both languages available for web programming, so you could use Javascript, VBScript, Python or Perl for writing web based applications.
That way we get real competition, not just a p1ss1ng match between two monopolists (or one monopolist and one that is willing to do anything to be the next one.)
Write your congressional representative and tell them to change it back to pre dot.com levels.
Here's what I wrote, if you're looking for ideas:
I'm writing to express my concerns on the current
economic situtation, and how some of my peers have
been affected by it.
I am a technology worker with a good job and benefits. However, I have many friends who are skilled programmers and system administrators, who have been laid off, and are having trouble finding a new job in the field they love. These people are ethical, hard working individuals who are not interested in handouts. Instead, there are concerned that the playing field for jobs in this industry has been skewed in the direction of the employers, due to recent large increases in the number of H1b visa the previous congress enacted.
At the time of the legislation, there was concern that the US economy would be harmed if there was not enough skilled technical worker available. Unfortunately, the previous congress choose a stopgag solution, instead of trying to address the real long term issues through education funding increases and job training programs.
Clearly, there is no shortage of technical workers in the US any longer. The recent loss of so many dot.com companies has flooded the market with skilled technical workers. Even well established companies are laying off workers in this field. Keeping the H1b visas at their current level is merely a tactic by large companies to drive down the salaries of american
workers and to create a new class of indentured
servants in the US.
I am not personally against immigration. I am against the unfair misuse of immigration laws by employers, who are only concerned with maximizing their profit at the expense of people.
---------
Yes, I know a lot of us have little pity for semiskilled dot.commers, but next year it will be people with 10 years of experience being layed off. Or not laid off, just no reasonable salary increase for the rest of your life.
...as in speech? Do we really want the next generation of programmers growing up with their primary language owned and controlled by one company? Sun has by no means been a benevolent dictator in their control of the Java(TM) language. It's pretty clear Sun wants to use Java(TM) as a tool to increase it's power. Sun talks about fighting the Windows Evil Empire, when all they really want is to take over Microsoft's position, and become the next Evil Empire.
Just look at all the close minded decisions they've made over the years:
-- JDBC(TM): Only works with Java(TM). Why not use ODBC?
-- Servlets(TM): Take FastCGI and remove cross language support.
-- RMI: Java(TM) only RPC.
-- SOAP: Thankfully IBM gave us this, but Sun would still like to find a way to make this Java(TM) only.
It's like someone copyrights a subset of the English language, and convinces schools to teach all their writing classes in that language. English, liked C++ is pretty messy with a difficult grammer and lots of exceptions. At least no one owns C++.Personally, I only took a single programming class in college (FORTRAN), which I failed due to conflicts with the teacher. I studied philosophy and math, and had little trouble converting my knowlege of algorithms and logic into Javascript, Perl, whatever language I needed to learn to get the job done. But I realize other people might not learn best that way.
I guess I shouldn't worry too much. Who learns anything useful in High School anyway...
In the abstract, I would agree with his statement that if an author choses to charge for her work, she deserves a way to agressively protect her interests. As much is laid out in the US Constitution. Unfortunately we are not talking about a single developer, or a small group of developers. Microsoft is a large company with tremendous economic and political clout; clearly they have abused this power, which reduces their moral authority to speak on these issues. Their monopoly control of the desktop OS, the office productivity suite and looming internet monopolies with IE and Outlook, threatens the rights of those who are required to use those applications. Intelectual property law has to strike a balance between the rights of the producers and those of the users. I believe the current situation gives too much power to Microsoft and their new anti piracy schemes only bias the situation further to their side.
It also avoids the greater philosophical question as to what should be consider public intrastructure, shared by all and maintained for the public good, and not for the profit of a few. I believe an OS has become a vital part of our public intrastructure, much like roadways became inportant in the past. This level of importance overides the rights of a few to make a profit.
Arg, that poke statement gave me a bad flashback to the days when I wrote assembly instructions on a piece of paper, converted them into base 10 and them wrote a small basic program to poke the values into memory. I couldn't afford a visual assembly editor back then.
I'm pretty sure the statement in question changes the background color on a commodore64 to black. But since my systems guide is sitting in a box in the basement of my parents house in texas I'm not really sure...
What are your statistics to back that up? Anyway, the point of this is not necessarily to have a local development environment, but as another way of blurring the boundries between serverside and clientside programming.
Personally, I use a lot of modules with my cgi development, and it wouldn't be worth the trouble to get them all working (and the database hookup) on my local pc when we have everything we need on the development box. But this could be a reasonable learning tool for some people.
I'm sure with a little work you could add in a free java servlet environment. The code is open, after all.
don't worry about it; take what you like.
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 1
I studied comparative literature and philosophy in undergrad, and performance studies in grad school. The only programming class I ever took I failed because I argued with the teacher too much!
Choose something you like, and take the opportunity to take classes in varied subjects. You'll never get as good a chance to explore as you have in undergrad! Even grad school is pretty focused.
Come on, from the network that brought us, "When good pets go bad?" How can you report this crap?
I can't believe of all the submissions in the bin this was the one that got posted.
I'd be the last one to take the side of a big corporation on an issue like this, I don't even drink beer, but if you read the text of the decision, in the link above you will note the following:
The 'respondant' (legalese for the person who registered the sites in question) do not bother to respond to the complaint. Here's the quote:
No Response was received by the Center from the Respondent and on September 25, 2000, the Center sent a Notification of Respondent Default to the Respondent by post/courier and by e-mail. A copy of said Notification of Respondent Default was on the same date sent to the authorised representative of the Complainant by e-mail. Said Notification inter alia advised the Respondent that the Respondent was in default and that in accordance with the Rules, and the Supplemental Rules, the Center would proceed to appoint a single member Administrative Panel as designated by the Complainant, that the said Administrative Panel would be informed of the said default, and that the Center would continue to send all case-related communications to the Respondent.
It seems to me like they went to a reasonable effect to contact this guy and get his side of the story. When he didn't bother, they even appointed someone to act for him. Later in the text, after the beer company finished their arguments, they tried to get his response:
The Respondent did not file any Response.
Another thing that comes out in the text is that this guy seems to own a lot of domain names.
The Complainant submits that the Respondent is a wholesaler of Internet domain names (defined as someone who acquires multiple domain names with the intent to profit from them). The Respondent has registered approximately 3000 domain names, approximately 1400 of which are registered with the Registrar. In support of this statement, the Complainant has submitted a print-out, running to thirty one pages, of the results of a search which the Complainant caused to be carried out on the Registrar's WHOIS database for domain names with NIC handles allegedly associated with the Respondent.
I realize we don't want to jump to conclusions, but it seems to me this guy justs registers a lot of domains trying to make a quick buck. I guess he has the right, but I think this fact diminishes the argument that this person is some small guy who's free speech rights are being trampled on. I mean, to register 3000 domain names costs how much? This is not some boy scout, this guy must be trying to make a living off of domain names.
In addition, I think there is some merit to the idea that the domain name may be confusing to people who don't speak english natively. I've been around the world, and met a lot of english as a second language people, and I can tell you, slang is the hardest thing to learn. It comes last, if at all. This problem could be addressed with a domain name that is more clear, and does not use slang. Here's the actual text:
As the Internet extends far beyond the Anglophone world, a more difficult question arises as to whether non-English speaking users of the Internet would be confused into believing that such a site is owned and/or controlled by the Complainant. Because the word "-sucks" is a slang word with which all English speakers may not be familiar, this Administrative Panel concludes that there may well be circumstances where Internet users are not aware of the abusive connotations of the word and consequently associate the domain name with the owner of the trademark.
You can disagree, but you can't say it's an unreasonable argument. It is also one that can be addressed, by registering a domain name that uses simpler language.
Personally, I think it would help if we all took a look at a cached version of the sites in question, and decided if the site was truly a complaint site that is being crushed.
In the end, I think they made the wrong decision, but I don't think it deserved the diatribe of corporate conspiracy theory we all read above. Even they think they may be wrong. Read the following, from the end of the text:
Since these are undefended proceedings and in the absence of any Response from the Respondent this Administrative Panel is satisfied that the Complainant has made out a prima facie case that on balance, there is a likelihood of confusion between each of the said domain names and the trademarks in which the Complainant has rights.
Although this Administrative Panel is conscious that there are strong arguments to the contrary, in the circumstances of this particular case, the Complainant is therefore entitled to the benefit of the decision on this issue. This Administrative Panel therefore decides that the Complainant has established a prima facie case that each said domain name in dispute is confusingly similar to a trademark in which the Complainant has rights.
Well, I'm sure to get flamed to pieces, but this is what I think. I know fighting these big corporations is an everyday battle, but I think we should be careful in picking those battles, and being sure of the honesty and authenticity of the person being challenged. Else we risk being judged by the poor friends we choose.
I don't know anything about Brown, but I want to reply to something you said:
-----
While not a geek, he does understand the economy, and the high-tech sector has been one of the less-regulated (which is why it's so hot), and I'd much like to keep it that way.
-----
I'm not so sure this is true. Remember, if it was not for a huge goverment program related to cold war defense spending, we wouldn't have the internet at all. I'm not just talking about Arpanet either; I'm talking about all the money the goverment spent developing the entire high tech sector. We needed high power computers and networking to develop weapons, crack Soviet codes, and for a million other reasons related to the cold war effort. Only the goverment has the resources to take on projects that are really expensive, or may not bear immediate profit. That's why the space station is a goverment sponsered project. In 20 or 40 years, maybe space flight will get cheap enough, and the private sector can take over.
Some types of regulation is good, particularly when it's about standards, fair pricing, and worker rights. Lack of regulation is why the US is much further behind other countries when is comes to wireless. Don't even get me started about salaries. I know right now those of us in the tech sector are enjoying ourselves; lots of work and competitive wages. I wonder what we will all be saying in a few years. Maybe when all our software jobs are farmed out overseas, or given to H1B1 visa holders, we'll be screaming for Nader's (or someone like him, I'm not recommending him for president) help. Maybe then we'll want to unionize. You never know.
Just don't try to pretend the tech sector is somehow magical and immune to the same problems other areas of the economy are. It always happen like this; some new great thing comes out, workers enjoy a period of power during the disruption, and then the old institions realign themselves to absorb the new idea and everything returns to the way it was. Read your history if you don't think I'm right.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who spent around 8 years in school, let me tell you: The more and longer you spend in school the better. You will never get such a great chance to explorer yourself, learn things you didn't know you cared about, and encounter strange, amazing people. Don't worry too much about the classes, you learn the most outside of them anyway!
Yes, you could say I could be further along in my 'real life' career if I had finished school earlier. I doubt I'd be as full a person.
I started school as an engineer, at Rochester Institute of Technology. After two years I accepted that was not the best path for me. It was too planned out, too narrow. I moved back home and took classes at the local state university. Since I was an in-state student, classes were very cheap. I took whatever I wanted, and worked at night to pay for it all myself. I learned how much I loved the arts and philosophy. I learned I loved to work on old cars. I transfered a second time to New York University when I felt I needed a bigger challenge and new experiences. I got a dual degree in Comparitive Literature and Philosophy, and stayed to complete my MA in Performance Studies. Yes, that's right Performance Studies.
All along I played with computers as a hobby. I never took a programming class, although I took a lot of math and logic. I think that prepared me to learn any computer language, not just whatever is popular at the time. Yes, Java is it right now, but 4 years from now? Who knows? I also took the opportunity to teach some adult education classes. That was a great experience; if you ever get the chance to teach, take it!
Now I am a senior programming at a solid company. I have no fear of losing my job, even in these questionable economic times. Often I miss the freedom I had, and the time I had for myself while I was in school. So, don't rush things along, and don't start school at the age of 18 thinking you know exactly who you are and what you want from life.
Yes, I know you're thinking if you get really rich you can retire and spent all your time on things you care about. I know two people that dropped out of college and eventually became millionaires. They're both jerks who cheat on their wives, and surround themselves with lackies and leaches, not true friends. Don't kid yourself, getting rich doesn't make you emotionally or intelectually mature. That's something that can only happen with time and experience.
Peace, or Not? Remember 9/11.
I was able to sell the CD, but the auction winner could not use it because the CD key was tied to my credit card number and sony online account. Sony refused to transfer the account or reset it. They claim it's to stop people from auctioning ebay characters or items, but since I only played the game for a few hours and then deleted the characters this was not an issue. They really want to force people to buy the new Everquest CD. I suspect to be seeing a lot more of this in the future.
He got out. Maybe many other have. there are almost 40-500 thousand people in those buildings.
If you are in NYC, get off the phone lines NOW, and give blood.
I don't think it wise to rely on the hardware manufacturers to stop this type of law. We have to remember, they are also big companies which have only one overiding goal: profit. All that it would take to win their undying support is for some way of offsetting the costs to them be created. Maybe the music/video industry would arrange some sort of profit sharing mechanism for computer vendors that sell cd or dvd players?
We also have to remember that most of the costs for developing the software and changing the production lines to incorporate them are upfront. The costs would certainly decrease over time. Look at the V-chip for an example.
Check out:
http://www.boycottadobe.org
for a picture of his wife and kids.
Now let's all concentrate on getting the guy home to his wife and kids, and not use him to further our political ends. If someone volunteers to be a test case for the FSF or others, that's fine; he did not, and is a unwitting victim of our police state.
...if you enable an option called "Dynamic Disks". This option must be enabled if you want to use software RAID. Of course NT4 supported software RAID and the boot sector, but for 'some reason' this was removed in w2k.
Here's what the MS Help says about Dynamic Disks:
A physical disk that is managed by Disk Management. Dynamic disks can contain only dynamic volumes (that is, volumes created with Disk Management). Dynamic disks cannot contain partitions or logical drives, nor can they be accessed by MS-DOS.
See also dynamic volume; partition.
I don't think this option is enabled by default for w2k, but I'm sure MS will find a way to make it required for their next OS.
I tried using this will a FreeBSD partition, and afterward I couldn't get back to FreeBSD, If anyone knows a way around this, or if I am incorrect, please speak up!
Please keep in mind that the mozilla browser is all new source code, build from scratch. Yes, the Netscape 4.x source code is there, in CVS somewhere, but when they realized the codebase was too inflexible to fix, they decided to forget it and build it right. I remember they had a vote or something, about a year into the project. So they put the 4.x code into maintainance mode, adding bug fixes etc to try and keep their corporate clients, while working on a new, more stable and flexible system in parallel. That's one of the main reasons this project is taking so long.
I don't think anyone at netscape thought the code was too f*cked up. Remember, when the decision was made to make this an open source project, Netscape was still ahead in the browser war. Nobody was taking free software very seriously. At the time, everyone was saying they needed to make the browser free (as in beer) in order to compete with IE. Their decision to make it free as in speech has really helped the movement, despite the marketshare. If you judged linux or freebsd by marketshare, you'd be making a mistake. I think Apache and sendmail are the only free software to have dominate marketshares in their product group. Anyone know of others?
I guess some of Slashdot's users are too young to remember...
Oh, and I figured I'd just mention that I'll never use that F word since I think its stupid
More great editorial analysis and insightful commentary from the Slashdot crew. I'm not sure why I bother to think anymore, when I can always just say, 'I think its (sic) stupid.'
No suprise most of the comments here are on the third grade level.
As above.
I was there and there are more than 8 protestors. The person taking the photos was probably not thinking she was documenting the entire event, just getting a few photos of her friends. Given the short time frame, it was great that the number we had actually showed up.
I was there, but not an organizer. Two reasons for choosing the library: 1) It was across the street from the Adobe offices. 2) It was symbolic of the fight against the DMCA, since libraries are potential targets of it's scope.
Also, there are a lot of people hanging out there!
I know, I was there between 1:45 and 1:30, when I had to return to work. There were several others who came on their lunch break, as well as some who planned to be there all day. We handed out quite a few flyers and talked to a lot of people. The pictures have a lot of the same people, so don't use those as a way of counting. I assume the person taking pictures was mostly taking pictures of people she knew, not intending them to be a documentary of the event.
In my experience, both can be as portable as Java. If they install the activestate versions, it makes both languages available for web programming, so you could use Javascript, VBScript, Python or Perl for writing web based applications.
That way we get real competition, not just a p1ss1ng match between two monopolists (or one monopolist and one that is willing to do anything to be the next one.)
Write your congressional representative and tell them to change it back to pre dot.com levels.
Here's what I wrote, if you're looking for ideas:
I'm writing to express my concerns on the current economic situtation, and how some of my peers have been affected by it.
I am a technology worker with a good job and benefits. However, I have many friends who are skilled programmers and system administrators, who have been laid off, and are having trouble finding a new job in the field they love. These people are ethical, hard working individuals who are not interested in handouts. Instead, there are concerned that the playing field for jobs in this industry has been skewed in the direction of the employers, due to recent large increases in the number of H1b visa the previous congress enacted.
At the time of the legislation, there was concern that the US economy would be harmed if there was not enough skilled technical worker available. Unfortunately, the previous congress choose a stopgag solution, instead of trying to address the real long term issues through education funding increases and job training programs.
Clearly, there is no shortage of technical workers in the US any longer. The recent loss of so many dot.com companies has flooded the market with skilled technical workers. Even well established companies are laying off workers in this field. Keeping the H1b visas at their current level is merely a tactic by large companies to drive down the salaries of american workers and to create a new class of indentured servants in the US.
I am not personally against immigration. I am against the unfair misuse of immigration laws by employers, who are only concerned with maximizing their profit at the expense of people.
---------
Yes, I know a lot of us have little pity for semiskilled dot.commers, but next year it will be people with 10 years of experience being layed off. Or not laid off, just no reasonable salary increase for the rest of your life.
...as in speech? Do we really want the next generation of programmers growing up with their primary language owned and controlled by one company? Sun has by no means been a benevolent dictator in their control of the Java(TM) language. It's pretty clear Sun wants to use Java(TM) as a tool to increase it's power. Sun talks about fighting the Windows Evil Empire, when all they really want is to take over Microsoft's position, and become the next Evil Empire.
Just look at all the close minded decisions they've made over the years:
-- JDBC(TM): Only works with Java(TM). Why not use ODBC?-- Servlets(TM): Take FastCGI and remove cross language support.
-- RMI: Java(TM) only RPC.
-- SOAP: Thankfully IBM gave us this, but Sun would still like to find a way to make this Java(TM) only.
It's like someone copyrights a subset of the English language, and convinces schools to teach all their writing classes in that language. English, liked C++ is pretty messy with a difficult grammer and lots of exceptions. At least no one owns C++.Personally, I only took a single programming class in college (FORTRAN), which I failed due to conflicts with the teacher. I studied philosophy and math, and had little trouble converting my knowlege of algorithms and logic into Javascript, Perl, whatever language I needed to learn to get the job done. But I realize other people might not learn best that way.
I guess I shouldn't worry too much. Who learns anything useful in High School anyway...
You can set the line terminator to whatever you want. I do a lot of html and often use the following:
/>\n"; #Change the terminator from \n
/>\n
$\="<br
print "Hello World";
Result is:
Hello World<br
You can also define the defaults for input records, for outputting arrays or hashes, etc.
In the abstract, I would agree with his statement that if an author choses to charge for her work, she deserves a way to agressively protect her interests. As much is laid out in the US Constitution. Unfortunately we are not talking about a single developer, or a small group of developers. Microsoft is a large company with tremendous economic and political clout; clearly they have abused this power, which reduces their moral authority to speak on these issues. Their monopoly control of the desktop OS, the office productivity suite and looming internet monopolies with IE and Outlook, threatens the rights of those who are required to use those applications. Intelectual property law has to strike a balance between the rights of the producers and those of the users. I believe the current situation gives too much power to Microsoft and their new anti piracy schemes only bias the situation further to their side.
It also avoids the greater philosophical question as to what should be consider public intrastructure, shared by all and maintained for the public good, and not for the profit of a few. I believe an OS has become a vital part of our public intrastructure, much like roadways became inportant in the past. This level of importance overides the rights of a few to make a profit.
Arg, that poke statement gave me a bad flashback to the days when I wrote assembly instructions on a piece of paper, converted them into base 10 and them wrote a small basic program to poke the values into memory. I couldn't afford a visual assembly editor back then.
I'm pretty sure the statement in question changes the background color on a commodore64 to black. But since my systems guide is sitting in a box in the basement of my parents house in texas I'm not really sure...
...and just call their help desk and mention 'Perl' and see how far you get.
What are your statistics to back that up? Anyway, the point of this is not necessarily to have a local development environment, but as another way of blurring the boundries between serverside and clientside programming.
Personally, I use a lot of modules with my cgi development, and it wouldn't be worth the trouble to get them all working (and the database hookup) on my local pc when we have everything we need on the development box. But this could be a reasonable learning tool for some people.
I'm sure with a little work you could add in a free java servlet environment. The code is open, after all.
I studied comparative literature and philosophy in undergrad, and performance studies in grad school. The only programming class I ever took I failed because I argued with the teacher too much! Choose something you like, and take the opportunity to take classes in varied subjects. You'll never get as good a chance to explore as you have in undergrad! Even grad school is pretty focused.
Come on, from the network that brought us, "When good pets go bad?" How can you report this crap? I can't believe of all the submissions in the bin this was the one that got posted.
I'd be the last one to take the side of a big corporation on an issue like this, I don't even drink beer, but if you read the text of the decision, in the link above you will note the following:
The 'respondant' (legalese for the person who registered the sites in question) do not bother to respond to the complaint. Here's the quote:
It seems to me like they went to a reasonable effect to contact this guy and get his side of the story. When he didn't bother, they even appointed someone to act for him. Later in the text, after the beer company finished their arguments, they tried to get his response:
Another thing that comes out in the text is that this guy seems to own a lot of domain names.
I realize we don't want to jump to conclusions, but it seems to me this guy justs registers a lot of domains trying to make a quick buck. I guess he has the right, but I think this fact diminishes the argument that this person is some small guy who's free speech rights are being trampled on. I mean, to register 3000 domain names costs how much? This is not some boy scout, this guy must be trying to make a living off of domain names.
In addition, I think there is some merit to the idea that the domain name may be confusing to people who don't speak english natively. I've been around the world, and met a lot of english as a second language people, and I can tell you, slang is the hardest thing to learn. It comes last, if at all. This problem could be addressed with a domain name that is more clear, and does not use slang. Here's the actual text:
You can disagree, but you can't say it's an unreasonable argument. It is also one that can be addressed, by registering a domain name that uses simpler language.
Personally, I think it would help if we all took a look at a cached version of the sites in question, and decided if the site was truly a complaint site that is being crushed.
In the end, I think they made the wrong decision, but I don't think it deserved the diatribe of corporate conspiracy theory we all read above. Even they think they may be wrong. Read the following, from the end of the text:
Well, I'm sure to get flamed to pieces, but this is what I think. I know fighting these big corporations is an everyday battle, but I think we should be careful in picking those battles, and being sure of the honesty and authenticity of the person being challenged. Else we risk being judged by the poor friends we choose.
I don't know anything about Brown, but I want to reply to something you said:
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While not a geek, he does understand the economy, and the high-tech sector has been one of the less-regulated (which is why it's so hot), and I'd much like to keep it that way.
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I'm not so sure this is true. Remember, if it was not for a huge goverment program related to cold war defense spending, we wouldn't have the internet at all. I'm not just talking about Arpanet either; I'm talking about all the money the goverment spent developing the entire high tech sector. We needed high power computers and networking to develop weapons, crack Soviet codes, and for a million other reasons related to the cold war effort. Only the goverment has the resources to take on projects that are really expensive, or may not bear immediate profit. That's why the space station is a goverment sponsered project. In 20 or 40 years, maybe space flight will get cheap enough, and the private sector can take over.
Some types of regulation is good, particularly when it's about standards, fair pricing, and worker rights. Lack of regulation is why the US is much further behind other countries when is comes to wireless. Don't even get me started about salaries. I know right now those of us in the tech sector are enjoying ourselves; lots of work and competitive wages. I wonder what we will all be saying in a few years. Maybe when all our software jobs are farmed out overseas, or given to H1B1 visa holders, we'll be screaming for Nader's (or someone like him, I'm not recommending him for president) help. Maybe then we'll want to unionize. You never know.
Just don't try to pretend the tech sector is somehow magical and immune to the same problems other areas of the economy are. It always happen like this; some new great thing comes out, workers enjoy a period of power during the disruption, and then the old institions realign themselves to absorb the new idea and everything returns to the way it was. Read your history if you don't think I'm right.