Why does this nit always come up? Sincere question, I assure you: pretty much *every book or tutorial on PHP has "Turn Off register_globals" in the first chapter." And it's off-by-default in the last few major versions. I remember some popular (but crummy) big apps like osCommerce required(d?) it and when I discovered that (in 2003!) I about fell out of my chair.
And in agreement with another poster, SQL injection is basically-impossible in any language when you set up your privs intelligently.
"Software is a product. It is not sentient. It has no wants or desires. Thus it cannot ever be free."
Brilliant. But you forget that "free software" is not and has never been understood to mean "software that can do what it wants". It is and has always referred to "software that lets the users do what they wants".
Since no sane human could hold the position you're attacking here, I have to assume you're just being argumentative for no reason, and I'll just let you roll now.
I agree with you; you know what, though: I think the self-proclaimed "pragmatists" are as bad, rhetorically, as the people who spell Microsoft with dollar signs. In Linus's thread in Groklaw there are around 20 instances of outright name-calling ("zealot","extremist","crusader" etc.)
I think there's a double standard where the "free software" folk are required not to impose their beliefs on others but the "open source" guys get to use all this emotionally-charged language.
Your post makes basically zero sense. Do you mean that "freedom" is somehow too good a word for software? Freedom of speech, of the press, etc. are appropriate things to talk about but not free software?
"But again no normal person really cares about this so to explain the Free Software "ethos" to normal folk using the term "religious" is pretty apt"
That's your opinion of course. It depends on a certain definition of normal; my own definition includes a great many people who do in fact value freedom and care about that stuff.
So: just define "normal" and we can move on to talking about ideas instead of marginalizing them
I agree this is nice, I guess. I don't like that they use the term "religious" to (apparently) describe someone who chooses free software because they value freedom. That doesn't sound like they've toned down their rhetoric...
Don't you listen to the press releases and product pitches for all the RIAA's music? DRM manages your access to music and stuff.
I remember, back in the dark times before DRM, how I would frequently find my access running amok through the house, soiling my curtains etc.. On one unforgettable day, my access to John Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard started poking my 4-year-old son with a pointy stick for no reason at all!.
I was in dire straits, I assure you. Thankfully, George MacDonald (no relation to George MacDonald) came by with some XCP software for me. I only wish I could repay him for this fantastic gift.
Painful, but I watched all four little videos. Did anyone notice that not one of them (remember slogan is "School My Way") mentioned, um... school? Except that singer said something along the lines of "I sing instead of doing my homework". Does the word 'school' have some strange usage that I wasn't previously aware of?
"Could you go without purchasing or even downloading music for 3 months? 6 months? a year? to prove a point?"
Geez, I hope so.
If you can't find enough music to listen to here or here or here or here or here or here then I pity you. But try here or here before giving up entirely.
How come no ISP rep can discuss (i.e. oppose) net neutrality without talking about "incentivizing" the creation of higher-capacity networks. 1) Damn, "incentivize" is an annoying word. 2) The incentive to build high-capacity networks is the profit you will get when customers subscribe to your service.
Car analogy time! Does GM require that the automobile-production needs to be "incentivized"?
What that video reminds me of is e.g. a demoing a word processor or other document generator. Look, you open this template, fill out the fields in this wizard, and you've got a pretty, laid-out invoce you can print and send!
Great unless your business is unusual in some way they hadn't predicted -- that is to say if your business has a significant, novel differentiation that sets you apart from all other business. That is to say: if your business is sound.
I have no problem learning a programming language, but "frameworks" just send up a red flag for me. I'm sure there are great ones...
I've been dodging the whole Rails gestalt, and I can't say exactly why. I watched that cute video where the guy puts together the blog in about 10 minutes, and I'm all "cool, okay". And I did that and woot!
Then I decided to put together a blog that worked a little differently... and realized that to do so, I needed to spend a few months learning Ruby. not woot.
Maybe I didn't stick with it long enough, but it just seems like another micromanaging "framework" to me.
You're talking about something else. I'm talking about "that's the thing the RIAA has failed to grasp. Even at 10 cents a track and without any DRM, they could be making a fortune."
The RIAA has an enormous catalog. Those costs of producing it are "sunk". The price point at allofmp3.com is about right for music. Priced there, the RIAA and all the artists involved would make a killing. Priced there, I suspect that 3 or 4 times as many artists would be able to earn a living from their music. (Would you pay $18 for a CD by a fairly unknown band that you kinda liked? How about $2.50?)
The RIAA will not price there. Not -- as the original post and I keep arguing -- because it would hurt their profits. It might increase them. Rather, it's because it would explode their myth -- which keeps them in business -- that music is really expensive and thus requires big well-funded companies to "invest" in it otherwise we wouldn't have any
Here's the cost breakdown of a CD. Graphed. As you can see, the fixed costs you're talking about occupy a tiny slice of the pie.
Marginal cost analysis has a purpose. Analyzing the fixed costs is not it. This marginal cost analysis tells me that selling tracks at ten cents a tune gives you a gross margin of 95% -- to a potential market of 6 billion people. If you can't figure out how to cover the fixed costs in that situation, you have no business going into business. Any business.
It's like if I said I invented a jetpack that could get fly 300 miles powered by a teaspoon of orange juice, and you said "well, someone has to pay for the orange juice...
I think the answer's pretty simple: disallow Shift keys and PrintScreen keys on devices that can play DVDs. This could be enforced by a simple "flag" embedded in the content.
I feel this idea is worth studying and would like Jack Valenti to give me a grant of $10,000 for this purpose. I am completely convinced that this measure will stop unauthorized copying for at least a day and a half.
"What incentive would Microsoft have to release their source code if the EU stopped respecting their IP?"
Releasing source code causes more efficient product improvement & feature development, when the user base is above a certain threshold. I'd say the Windows user base is pretty well above that.
"Even at 10 cents a track and without any DRM, they could be making a fortune."
I once did a rough calculation on the true marginal cost of distributing music online. It was something like 0.3 cents a tune -- and this was with a woefully inefficient, viz. my laptop. About a third of the cost was power, and half the power cost is my laptop display, which would be unnecessary with a similar but headless setup.
So at 10 cents a track, the gross profit margin would be 'round 95 percent.
In accordance to the licenses' terms MediaServices pays license fees for all materials downloaded from the site subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights"
It always makes me think "cure-all". Which generally connotes that the person applying the cure-all is just trying to sweep the problem under the rug and not really solve it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does this nit always come up? Sincere question, I assure you: pretty much *every book or tutorial on PHP has "Turn Off register_globals" in the first chapter." And it's off-by-default in the last few major versions. I remember some popular (but crummy) big apps like osCommerce required(d?) it and when I discovered that (in 2003!) I about fell out of my chair. And in agreement with another poster, SQL injection is basically-impossible in any language when you set up your privs intelligently.
"Software is a product. It is not sentient. It has no wants or desires. Thus it cannot ever be free." Brilliant. But you forget that "free software" is not and has never been understood to mean "software that can do what it wants". It is and has always referred to "software that lets the users do what they wants". Since no sane human could hold the position you're attacking here, I have to assume you're just being argumentative for no reason, and I'll just let you roll now.
I agree with you; you know what, though: I think the self-proclaimed "pragmatists" are as bad, rhetorically, as the people who spell Microsoft with dollar signs. In Linus's thread in Groklaw there are around 20 instances of outright name-calling ("zealot","extremist","crusader" etc.) I think there's a double standard where the "free software" folk are required not to impose their beliefs on others but the "open source" guys get to use all this emotionally-charged language.
Your post makes basically zero sense. Do you mean that "freedom" is somehow too good a word for software? Freedom of speech, of the press, etc. are appropriate things to talk about but not free software?
Google search for "Let's set so double the killer" I want to see 95 youtube remixes by monday.
"But again no normal person really cares about this so to explain the Free Software "ethos" to normal folk using the term "religious" is pretty apt"
That's your opinion of course. It depends on a certain definition of normal; my own definition includes a great many people who do in fact value freedom and care about that stuff.
So: just define "normal" and we can move on to talking about ideas instead of marginalizing them
I agree this is nice, I guess. I don't like that they use the term "religious" to (apparently) describe someone who chooses free software because they value freedom. That doesn't sound like they've toned down their rhetoric...
Don't you listen to the press releases and product pitches for all the RIAA's music? DRM manages your access to music and stuff.
I remember, back in the dark times before DRM, how I would frequently find my access running amok through the house, soiling my curtains etc.. On one unforgettable day, my access to John Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard started poking my 4-year-old son with a pointy stick for no reason at all!.
I was in dire straits, I assure you. Thankfully, George MacDonald (no relation to George MacDonald) came by with some XCP software for me. I only wish I could repay him for this fantastic gift.Why his articles so frequently show up on /.
Seriously. There are thousands of way-more-competent writers out there who would kill for (and who deserve) this kind of attention.
Painful, but I watched all four little videos. Did anyone notice that not one of them (remember slogan is "School My Way") mentioned, um ... school? Except that singer said something along the lines of "I sing instead of doing my homework". Does the word 'school' have some strange usage that I wasn't previously aware of?
"Could you go without purchasing or even downloading music for 3 months? 6 months? a year? to prove a point?"
Geez, I hope so.
If you can't find enough music to listen to here or here or here or here or here or here then I pity you. But try here or here before giving up entirely.How come no ISP rep can discuss (i.e. oppose) net neutrality without talking about "incentivizing" the creation of higher-capacity networks. 1) Damn, "incentivize" is an annoying word. 2) The incentive to build high-capacity networks is the profit you will get when customers subscribe to your service.
Car analogy time! Does GM require that the automobile-production needs to be "incentivized"?
What that video reminds me of is e.g. a demoing a word processor or other document generator. Look, you open this template, fill out the fields in this wizard, and you've got a pretty, laid-out invoce you can print and send!
Great unless your business is unusual in some way they hadn't predicted -- that is to say if your business has a significant, novel differentiation that sets you apart from all other business. That is to say: if your business is sound.
I have no problem learning a programming language, but "frameworks" just send up a red flag for me. I'm sure there are great ones...
Then I decided to put together a blog that worked a little differently... and realized that to do so, I needed to spend a few months learning Ruby. not woot.
Maybe I didn't stick with it long enough, but it just seems like another micromanaging "framework" to me.
Gerard 't Hooft.
Okay, so there was a little bit of text
You're talking about something else. I'm talking about "that's the thing the RIAA has failed to grasp. Even at 10 cents a track and without any DRM, they could be making a fortune."
The RIAA has an enormous catalog. Those costs of producing it are "sunk". The price point at allofmp3.com is about right for music. Priced there, the RIAA and all the artists involved would make a killing. Priced there, I suspect that 3 or 4 times as many artists would be able to earn a living from their music. (Would you pay $18 for a CD by a fairly unknown band that you kinda liked? How about $2.50?)
The RIAA will not price there. Not -- as the original post and I keep arguing -- because it would hurt their profits. It might increase them. Rather, it's because it would explode their myth -- which keeps them in business -- that music is really expensive and thus requires big well-funded companies to "invest" in it otherwise we wouldn't have any
Here's the cost breakdown of a CD. Graphed. As you can see, the fixed costs you're talking about occupy a tiny slice of the pie.
how 'bout "Content Restriction/Access Prevention"
Is that you, Luke?
Marginal cost analysis has a purpose. Analyzing the fixed costs is not it. This marginal cost analysis tells me that selling tracks at ten cents a tune gives you a gross margin of 95% -- to a potential market of 6 billion people. If you can't figure out how to cover the fixed costs in that situation, you have no business going into business. Any business.
It's like if I said I invented a jetpack that could get fly 300 miles powered by a teaspoon of orange juice, and you said "well, someone has to pay for the orange juice...
I think the answer's pretty simple: disallow Shift keys and PrintScreen keys on devices that can play DVDs. This could be enforced by a simple "flag" embedded in the content.
I feel this idea is worth studying and would like Jack Valenti to give me a grant of $10,000 for this purpose. I am completely convinced that this measure will stop unauthorized copying for at least a day and a half.
"What incentive would Microsoft have to release their source code if the EU stopped respecting their IP?"
Releasing source code causes more efficient product improvement & feature development, when the user base is above a certain threshold. I'd say the Windows user base is pretty well above that.
no text
Someone with time on hisher hands build something funny there...
I once did a rough calculation on the true marginal cost of distributing music online. It was something like 0.3 cents a tune -- and this was with a woefully inefficient, viz. my laptop. About a third of the cost was power, and half the power cost is my laptop display, which would be unnecessary with a similar but headless setup.
So at 10 cents a track, the gross profit margin would be 'round 95 percent.
It always makes me think "cure-all". Which generally connotes that the person applying the cure-all is just trying to sweep the problem under the rug and not really solve it.