We used to call this neurosis. The actual neurotic behavior isn't really all that important. What is important is addressing the underlying causes, which often have little or nothing to do with the resulting behavior. This guy obviously has a problem, but obsessive gaming is just the symptom. He could equally well be compulsively plucking his eyebrows or watching TV.
Well, I never meant to imply that the major publishers weren't greedy, craven, corrupt, and utterly morally bankrupt, just that even imperfect DRM serves the purpose it is intended to serve.
The question of whether the piracy DRM prevents is worth more than the sales it discourages is another matter altogether. Right now, it's a matter of speculation, frankly. And given that most of the market is sewn up by a cartel of price-fixing corporate titans, the market is unlikely to sort things out, either.
For the record, the levy on blank media really pisses me off. I have, like, ten times as many DVD-Rs filled with database backups as I do with pirated MP3s and movies, so shouldn't I get a discount?;)
Actually, I thought the point on preventing casual piracy -- which I took to mean not legitimate backups but making copies for your buddies -- was really crucial. Professional pirates, the folks who are selling counterfeit DVDs out of Hong Kong and other points east, are not in any way going to be deterred by DRM. They have the resources to route around it at the hardware level and the incentives to do so. But stopping professional piracy is a job for bilateral trade agreements and customs inspections, not DRM.
In between are the people uploading movies and music to the alt.binaries.* hierarchy and p2p systems like BitTorrent. Frankly, as much as I'm sure the big publishing firms would like for this to stop, the (admittedly modest) technical knowledge needed to take advantage of this kind of mid-range amateur piracy are beyond the average user, and the effort involved is sufficiently great that most people would rather just buy the damn movie at the store. The publishers may or may not understand this, hence the occasional wave of egregious lawsuits, but I suspect they do, if only because crushing Usenet binaries and p2p networks would neither legally nor technically all that challenging.
The goal of big media is to make most people afraid to pirate their products. The huffing and puffing over the technical fringe is just a publicity stunt.
The only really disturbing aspect of DRM is the legislative component, which tramples all over fair use and other elements of free expression. That is something to worry about for sure.
As for BD+, I don't think it will stick around long after the first time some discs are distributed with buggy flash code that cripples the players they are inserted into.
I'm not that big a fan of OpenOffice, mostly because it's big and slow, but I keep it around because it can open MS Office files that have suffered some kind of corruption and generally save them again in an uncorrupted form without much if any loss of data. If nothing else, it's worth having around for that alone, especially if you're in an environment using Office 97, which is particularly prone to this kind of problem.
In the case of music, it's not the price for me, it's the physical artifact. I don't perceive a brand-new CD I purchased for $17.99 to be more valuable than the used CD I purchased for $5.99. I do perceive both as being more valuable than a bunch of MP3s encoded at a bitrate that I cannot distinguish from the original.
Of course, that may be because I grew up in the vinyl era, when record albums were often elaborately produced pieces of visual art themselves, and I've just retained that emotional response to the crappy little liner notes in CD cases.
For what it's worth, a quick search of Google Books shows the usage as far back as 1921. May I have my head back now?
It's also worth noting that the coupling of prepositions to verbs is fairly arbitrary and, for less common idioms, not very stable in most languages, as well as varying widely between languages.
I've been developing web apps since "web app" meant CGI scripts, and if there is one thing that smacks me in the face each and every day, it is what a tremendous pain in the ass it is to develop web applications compared to desktop apps, thanks in large part because of the hodge-podge of ad hoc technologies that have been thrown at the problem, generally because some narrow corporate interest (Sun, Microsoft, Adobe) wanted to make wheelbarrows of money, or because some bunch of technology evangelists wanted to reinvent the wheel yet again (insert alphabet soup of competing languages and standards and frameworks) without benefit, apparently, of ever having seen a real wheel in the first place.
More than ten years after the initial wave of enthusiasm about the web, it is still impossible to sit down and design a complex web application with the ease that has long been normal for desktop applications. And that is not because of an inherent complexity involved in client-server application development, especially in an age when most of that complexity can be handled by mature database software and other back end apps. Developing web applications is like punching yourself in the face, hard. You get used to it after a while, but in the long days between (admittedly generous) paychecks, you can't help wonder if it might not be better to go back to writing software in an area where the end product isn't mostly digital duct tape instead of waiting endlessly for vaporous standards to be finalized and implemented. One can only take so much pride in being highly skilled at compensating for broken (and generally undocumented) toolsets and ill-considered technologies.
I'm not sure Flash is the answer, but on the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time that a so-called "90% solution" ended up becoming the de facto standard because no one else could get their shit together. It's certainly preferable to spending hours looking for the magic combination of XHTML and CSS parameters needed to lay out a damn page the same way in five different browsers.
I can't speak to lithium batteries, but I can tell you that NiMH rechargeables are pretty sensitive to moderately high temperatures. I've never cooked one by putting it under excessive load, but I lit several before I learned the trick of how to solder the solder-tab variety. I had one blow once when I was applying heat-shrink tubing to a series of them and kept the heat gun still a little too long.
Now, as I said, I don't know much about lithium batteries, but batteries in general use chemical processes to store energy. Transfer that energy faster than the usual chemistry will allow (or physically stress them by knocking them around), and you shouldn't be too surprised if the energy is released through a more expedient means -- like combustion.
I'm a little surprised we haven't seen more of this. The more energy we insist on packing into smaller and smaller batteries, the more inherently dangerous they become. Combine that with a low-margin market like laptop PCs where there is tremendous pressure to cut corners at every possible point, and you end up with yet another reason not to keep that laptop on your lap.
The original poster raises two questions: If the source of obfuscated PHP scripts can be recovered, should PHP script vendors just open source their products now so that they have some control over them? And what about products that depend on security through obscurity?
In the first case, vendors already have control. It's called copyright. If you misappropriate copyrighted code, there are an amazing vast number of avenues for the aggrieved party to take through a very well-developed legal system. Frequent Slashdot readers are painfully well aware of this system, both through its abuses (SCO) and its creative uses (GPL). If you're trying to conceal trade secrets, that's another matter, but then, if you're trying to conceal trade secrets, you probably aren't implementing them in PHP.
The second question has the same answer it always has: security through obscurity is weak security. Making the source available makes it easier to crack, but that's all. Inherently weak systems that try to avoid attack by concealing their weakness always fail. PHP is neither here nor there as far as that issue is concerned.
I've travelled pretty extensively, too, and I would generally agree with your remarks except for a couple of things. I've seen a lot of bitter sentiments directed at the American government, but seldom ever caught any flak for being an American citizen. Most people around the world seem to be able to make the distinction between one's leaders being assholes and being an asshole oneself. The worst I've ever run into is a minor hassle at the Austrian border by guards who plainly didn't care for Americans, but they were able to make themselves pains in the ass entirely without the assistance of RFID.
That said, the concern isn't that angry RFID-scanner-carrying mobs will suddenly descend on American tourists and tear them to shreds. It's that terrorists (not very likely) or common criminals (much more likely) will exploit the system somehow. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that any RFID-enabled ID we might end up carrying domestically carries the same risks, and probably more so, since it's arguably easier to rip someone off when you don't have to deal with language and currency barriers.
The underlying problem with the obsession our government and others -- notably the UK -- have with abolishing anonymity is that anonymity is not just useful for criminals; it is also much more useful for people who would like to avoid becoming the victims of criminals.
The amount of venom expended on Wikipedia is quite bizarre. The complaint that it's not authoritative is utter bullshit. By nature, no encyclopedia is authoritative. An encyclopedia is meant to provide brief summaries of subjects that are covered elsewhere by entire volumes, preferably with citations so that the reader can get at those primary sources. It's a starting point for research or, if you're so inclined (I am), a good way to pass the time browsing idly. Outside of high school and remedial undergraduate courses, you'd better not try citing an encyclopedia as a source in a real paper, unless that paper happens to be about encyclopedias.
As for Jaron Lanier, I remember reading articles about him in the Whole Earth Review more than twenty years ago in which he showed off his prototype gloves and goggles and promised that the world would be utterly transformed by our choice of I/O devices. As near as I can tell, Wikipedia is of greater practical use to more people today than anything Lanier has said or done.
For me, the irony is that if I ever had the kind of mind-machine interface that folks like Lanier blather about, one of the first things I'd want is 24/7 access to Wikipedia.
...it sure would be great if someone would do this for the other wx language bindings. For something as complex as a widget library, lacking comprehensive documentation renders it all but useless to anyone but folks with lots of time on their hands.
The average college athletics department, if allowed to run free outside of games and carefully scripted public appearances, would bring endless disgrace on just about any school. Now mind you, if it was me, I wouldn't have bothered with any glad-handing bullshit about wanting to protect students; I'd have just come right out and said it was to protect the university's image. Of course, if it was me, I wouldn't have banned the athletes from being on Facebook; I'd have just required them not to state their affiliation to the university.
Well, actually, if it was me, I'd have encouraged athlete participation on Facebook and MySpace in hopes that it would create sufficiently large scandals that I could shut down most or all of the athletic department and repurpose their budgets and facilities for something actually educational. Not that underage drinking and date-rape isn't educational in a sense, but it hardly requires a university.
If the market was sorting things out alone, there would be one telecommunications monopoly, you'd be paying whatever the hell it felt like charging, and there wouldn't be any competition.
Laissez faire economic fantasies always depend on willful ignorance of the fact that wealth is a competitive advantage. Sooner or later, especially in fields like telecom where the barrier to entry is high by nature, one player gets far enough ahead to either buy out or squeeze out the competition. Excessive or ill-considered regulation is always a bad thing, of course, but some degree of regulation is necessary to ensure that competition exists in the first place. Mature markets do not have spontaneously occurring competition in most cases.
I've never been a big believer that bias can be cured by more bias.
Simple fact: there are vastly more women and minorities in the workplace now than there were before affirmative action and forced equal access to education. It works. It's not flawless, and it's not a cure-all, but it has produced results.
Affirmative action only leads to people thinking that a miss-represented group of people were only hired because of affirmative action.
Who gives a shit? Those are the same people who didn't think women and minorities belonged in their workplace in the first place.
Honestly, in a field so utterly dominated by men that a female software engineer is a bit of a rarity, you have to be pretty insecure to be bothered by the fact that one free software project wants to try to get a whopping three women involved. In any event, the odds are that your job and mine are both going to India long before they are threatened by any kind of domestic quota system.
Maybe I'm getting old and cranky, but I just can't take development language holy wars anymore. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, unless you are present at the start of a business, the language choice has already been made for you. No matter how appealing it may be to you as a programmer to start from scratch, it rarely makes sense from a business perspective. The lure of the complete rewrite has killed more otherwise successful software products than just about anything else, Netscape being one of the more recent and spectacular examples. And at the end of the day, as an employee you are paid to make money for the company, not to advance your biases about language aesthetics at the expense of the company.
As far as VB goes, it's not the best language around, IMHO, but it does make rapid development of user interfaces pretty quick and easy, and if performance becomes an issue, you can always call out to DLLs written in C or C++. It wouldn't be my first (or second or third) choice if I was starting from scratch, but if you already have an extensive existing codebase, you need to have some damn good reasons to abandon it, and language choice is seldom a good reason for much of anything.
The substance of his message wasn't really addressed in the original story. A great deal of noise was made about his former role in Greenpeace, implying inaccurately that he is an environmentalist. He is, in fact, not. The advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power are a separate issue and have been dealt with exhaustively elsewhere; Moore isn't making any novel arguments. The initial fallacy, which I was addressing, was dual: first, that a fallacious appeal to authority was being made, and second, that the appeal was based on equivocation in the first place.
The ability to service my own laptop was a major reason I exclusively dealt in Thinkpads until the Lenovo acquisition. (The other major reason was an irrational brand loyalty to IBM that goes back to the 1970's.) IBM made real, honest-to-god not-written-for-idiots service manuals available for free download.
Fortunately, I bought a new Thinkpad right before the acquisition, and it was one of the higher-end desktop replacements. I don't know what I'm going to for my next laptop. It's a lot trickier question than purchasing a desktop because laptop designs are, by nature, heavily proprietary. You can't just go down to Fry's and pick up a generic part for your laptop like you can with a desktop PC. Finding a brand you can trust and rely on is very important.
My problem is that I don't trust Lenovo, less because they are Chinese than because they have no track record, and I have had very bad experiences with the remaining US laptop manufacturers. The only major brand out there that has a reputation for quality in general is Sony, and truth to tell, I don't know much about their laptops.
I do know that aside from routine wear and tear, I've never had any major problems with IBM Thinkpads, and IBM customer service was pretty good. What now?
Moore is a paid lobbyist who specializes is garnering favorable press for environmentally destructive mining and energy industries. He's not just ex-Greenpeace, he's an ex-environmentalist who parlayed his prior experience working for Greenpeace into working against it. If you are a major polluter, Moore is the go-to guy for whitewashing your corporate image.
but by dropping the disputed technology, Microsoft is tacitly admitting that the patent is valid.
I don't see that. If Microsoft is admitting anything, it's that the courts decided against them and now they have to abide by the law. While that is unusual for Microsoft, it's not really something you can complain about. The patent is valid because the courts decided it is. You can argue that the patent laws are stupid, or that the presiding judge was a dunderhead, and though I will be the last to contradict you, that's just how the legal system works.
To be fair to the companies that are actually producing something, I don't think any of them are thrilled with the unintended consequences of the patent system as it is applied to software, and they are becoming less thrilled with each new suit from patent farms like Eolas. However, they have effectively painted themselves into a corner, so don't expect the system to change until it becomes so onerous for ordinary consumers that there's political consensus to change the law. I think that day will come, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
The only people who NEED terabytes or more can already afford that much in hard drives.
Well, I don't NEED terabytes of storage, but I can think of a lot of things I'd LIKE to do with it if I had it. And for most of the applications I have in mind, high throughput isn't a major issue, and if this turns out to be cheaper than hard drives and offers the advantage of removable media, I'm all over it.
I don't need a computer in the first place. But I have spent many thousands of dollars over the years because I wanted one, and then a better one, and then...
OTOH, I'd like to see an actual product, like in a box, in a store, for sale, before I get excited about this. After all, they've been promising us flying cars and sexy androids for decades now.
This helps me avoid dealing with all that stupid paperclip crap and whatnot that I had to put up with in Word.
While I am hardly an advocate for the bloated MS Office, statements like this make me wonder if half the people complaining about Office have made even a minimal effort to learn how to use it. The paperclip can be turned off. It doesn't even have to be installed. Just uncheck "Office Assistant" and you will never see Clippy again.
I remember seeing this kind of thing way back in the early 90's when I was learning TeX. There were often posts on TeX-related newsgroups and mailing lists about how Word didn't support some feature or other that TeX had. Almost without exception, they were talking about features that were, in fact, supported by Word.
But then, I get the impression that a lot of Word-bashers simply don't use many word processor features to begin with and probably would get along fine with Wordpad or one of the simpler open source RTF editors. I often hear people decry as unnecessary features that I use nearly every day, and I am often surprised to find that features *I* thought were unnecessary are vital to other people in my office. As more than one strategist at Microsoft has noted, most people use only a small subset of the features in Word (or any other Office app), but the subset varies from person to person. Until the folks writing open source office apps come to grips with that fact, they will continue to lag behind.
FWIW, I use Office 97, though I have more recent copies of Office available to me. What has kept me from switching to OpenOffice isn't a lack of features -- it certainly has feature-parity with Word 97 -- but it requires vastly more system resources than Word 97. I can run MS' old offering on a machine with 32 megs of RAM and a Pentium I, which can't be said for OOo. I do have it installed, though -- it does a great job of fixing corrupted Word files!
Abiword, however, is a joke. Try loading a 300 page document in it sometime. Even on a recent machine it bogs down badly during trivial operations on large documents. It works fine for writing letters, but that's about it.
So far, my favorite open source word processor, oddly enough, is KWord, whose frame-based layout makes it a good alternative to Framemaker, if not Word. Very nice for technical docs.
Slashdot Mirror
We used to call this neurosis. The actual neurotic behavior isn't really all that important. What is important is addressing the underlying causes, which often have little or nothing to do with the resulting behavior. This guy obviously has a problem, but obsessive gaming is just the symptom. He could equally well be compulsively plucking his eyebrows or watching TV.
Are you sure it's a good idea to let students execute arbitrary code on your unattended machine?
I mean, I know *I* would get ideas...
Well, I never meant to imply that the major publishers weren't greedy, craven, corrupt, and utterly morally bankrupt, just that even imperfect DRM serves the purpose it is intended to serve.
;)
The question of whether the piracy DRM prevents is worth more than the sales it discourages is another matter altogether. Right now, it's a matter of speculation, frankly. And given that most of the market is sewn up by a cartel of price-fixing corporate titans, the market is unlikely to sort things out, either.
For the record, the levy on blank media really pisses me off. I have, like, ten times as many DVD-Rs filled with database backups as I do with pirated MP3s and movies, so shouldn't I get a discount?
Actually, I thought the point on preventing casual piracy -- which I took to mean not legitimate backups but making copies for your buddies -- was really crucial. Professional pirates, the folks who are selling counterfeit DVDs out of Hong Kong and other points east, are not in any way going to be deterred by DRM. They have the resources to route around it at the hardware level and the incentives to do so. But stopping professional piracy is a job for bilateral trade agreements and customs inspections, not DRM.
In between are the people uploading movies and music to the alt.binaries.* hierarchy and p2p systems like BitTorrent. Frankly, as much as I'm sure the big publishing firms would like for this to stop, the (admittedly modest) technical knowledge needed to take advantage of this kind of mid-range amateur piracy are beyond the average user, and the effort involved is sufficiently great that most people would rather just buy the damn movie at the store. The publishers may or may not understand this, hence the occasional wave of egregious lawsuits, but I suspect they do, if only because crushing Usenet binaries and p2p networks would neither legally nor technically all that challenging.
The goal of big media is to make most people afraid to pirate their products. The huffing and puffing over the technical fringe is just a publicity stunt.
The only really disturbing aspect of DRM is the legislative component, which tramples all over fair use and other elements of free expression. That is something to worry about for sure.
As for BD+, I don't think it will stick around long after the first time some discs are distributed with buggy flash code that cripples the players they are inserted into.
I'm not that big a fan of OpenOffice, mostly because it's big and slow, but I keep it around because it can open MS Office files that have suffered some kind of corruption and generally save them again in an uncorrupted form without much if any loss of data. If nothing else, it's worth having around for that alone, especially if you're in an environment using Office 97, which is particularly prone to this kind of problem.
In the case of music, it's not the price for me, it's the physical artifact. I don't perceive a brand-new CD I purchased for $17.99 to be more valuable than the used CD I purchased for $5.99. I do perceive both as being more valuable than a bunch of MP3s encoded at a bitrate that I cannot distinguish from the original.
Of course, that may be because I grew up in the vinyl era, when record albums were often elaborately produced pieces of visual art themselves, and I've just retained that emotional response to the crappy little liner notes in CD cases.
For what it's worth, a quick search of Google Books shows the usage as far back as 1921. May I have my head back now?
It's also worth noting that the coupling of prepositions to verbs is fairly arbitrary and, for less common idioms, not very stable in most languages, as well as varying widely between languages.
I have to agree wholeheartedly.
I've been developing web apps since "web app" meant CGI scripts, and if there is one thing that smacks me in the face each and every day, it is what a tremendous pain in the ass it is to develop web applications compared to desktop apps, thanks in large part because of the hodge-podge of ad hoc technologies that have been thrown at the problem, generally because some narrow corporate interest (Sun, Microsoft, Adobe) wanted to make wheelbarrows of money, or because some bunch of technology evangelists wanted to reinvent the wheel yet again (insert alphabet soup of competing languages and standards and frameworks) without benefit, apparently, of ever having seen a real wheel in the first place.
More than ten years after the initial wave of enthusiasm about the web, it is still impossible to sit down and design a complex web application with the ease that has long been normal for desktop applications. And that is not because of an inherent complexity involved in client-server application development, especially in an age when most of that complexity can be handled by mature database software and other back end apps. Developing web applications is like punching yourself in the face, hard. You get used to it after a while, but in the long days between (admittedly generous) paychecks, you can't help wonder if it might not be better to go back to writing software in an area where the end product isn't mostly digital duct tape instead of waiting endlessly for vaporous standards to be finalized and implemented. One can only take so much pride in being highly skilled at compensating for broken (and generally undocumented) toolsets and ill-considered technologies.
I'm not sure Flash is the answer, but on the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time that a so-called "90% solution" ended up becoming the de facto standard because no one else could get their shit together. It's certainly preferable to spending hours looking for the magic combination of XHTML and CSS parameters needed to lay out a damn page the same way in five different browsers.
I can't speak to lithium batteries, but I can tell you that NiMH rechargeables are pretty sensitive to moderately high temperatures. I've never cooked one by putting it under excessive load, but I lit several before I learned the trick of how to solder the solder-tab variety. I had one blow once when I was applying heat-shrink tubing to a series of them and kept the heat gun still a little too long.
Now, as I said, I don't know much about lithium batteries, but batteries in general use chemical processes to store energy. Transfer that energy faster than the usual chemistry will allow (or physically stress them by knocking them around), and you shouldn't be too surprised if the energy is released through a more expedient means -- like combustion.
I'm a little surprised we haven't seen more of this. The more energy we insist on packing into smaller and smaller batteries, the more inherently dangerous they become. Combine that with a low-margin market like laptop PCs where there is tremendous pressure to cut corners at every possible point, and you end up with yet another reason not to keep that laptop on your lap.
The original poster raises two questions: If the source of obfuscated PHP scripts can be recovered, should PHP script vendors just open source their products now so that they have some control over them? And what about products that depend on security through obscurity?
In the first case, vendors already have control. It's called copyright. If you misappropriate copyrighted code, there are an amazing vast number of avenues for the aggrieved party to take through a very well-developed legal system. Frequent Slashdot readers are painfully well aware of this system, both through its abuses (SCO) and its creative uses (GPL). If you're trying to conceal trade secrets, that's another matter, but then, if you're trying to conceal trade secrets, you probably aren't implementing them in PHP.
The second question has the same answer it always has: security through obscurity is weak security. Making the source available makes it easier to crack, but that's all. Inherently weak systems that try to avoid attack by concealing their weakness always fail. PHP is neither here nor there as far as that issue is concerned.
I've travelled pretty extensively, too, and I would generally agree with your remarks except for a couple of things. I've seen a lot of bitter sentiments directed at the American government, but seldom ever caught any flak for being an American citizen. Most people around the world seem to be able to make the distinction between one's leaders being assholes and being an asshole oneself. The worst I've ever run into is a minor hassle at the Austrian border by guards who plainly didn't care for Americans, but they were able to make themselves pains in the ass entirely without the assistance of RFID.
That said, the concern isn't that angry RFID-scanner-carrying mobs will suddenly descend on American tourists and tear them to shreds. It's that terrorists (not very likely) or common criminals (much more likely) will exploit the system somehow. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that any RFID-enabled ID we might end up carrying domestically carries the same risks, and probably more so, since it's arguably easier to rip someone off when you don't have to deal with language and currency barriers.
The underlying problem with the obsession our government and others -- notably the UK -- have with abolishing anonymity is that anonymity is not just useful for criminals; it is also much more useful for people who would like to avoid becoming the victims of criminals.
The amount of venom expended on Wikipedia is quite bizarre. The complaint that it's not authoritative is utter bullshit. By nature, no encyclopedia is authoritative. An encyclopedia is meant to provide brief summaries of subjects that are covered elsewhere by entire volumes, preferably with citations so that the reader can get at those primary sources. It's a starting point for research or, if you're so inclined (I am), a good way to pass the time browsing idly. Outside of high school and remedial undergraduate courses, you'd better not try citing an encyclopedia as a source in a real paper, unless that paper happens to be about encyclopedias.
As for Jaron Lanier, I remember reading articles about him in the Whole Earth Review more than twenty years ago in which he showed off his prototype gloves and goggles and promised that the world would be utterly transformed by our choice of I/O devices. As near as I can tell, Wikipedia is of greater practical use to more people today than anything Lanier has said or done.
For me, the irony is that if I ever had the kind of mind-machine interface that folks like Lanier blather about, one of the first things I'd want is 24/7 access to Wikipedia.
...it sure would be great if someone would do this for the other wx language bindings. For something as complex as a widget library, lacking comprehensive documentation renders it all but useless to anyone but folks with lots of time on their hands.
The average college athletics department, if allowed to run free outside of games and carefully scripted public appearances, would bring endless disgrace on just about any school. Now mind you, if it was me, I wouldn't have bothered with any glad-handing bullshit about wanting to protect students; I'd have just come right out and said it was to protect the university's image. Of course, if it was me, I wouldn't have banned the athletes from being on Facebook; I'd have just required them not to state their affiliation to the university.
Well, actually, if it was me, I'd have encouraged athlete participation on Facebook and MySpace in hopes that it would create sufficiently large scandals that I could shut down most or all of the athletic department and repurpose their budgets and facilities for something actually educational. Not that underage drinking and date-rape isn't educational in a sense, but it hardly requires a university.
I'd rather let the market sort these things out.
If the market was sorting things out alone, there would be one telecommunications monopoly, you'd be paying whatever the hell it felt like charging, and there wouldn't be any competition.
Laissez faire economic fantasies always depend on willful ignorance of the fact that wealth is a competitive advantage. Sooner or later, especially in fields like telecom where the barrier to entry is high by nature, one player gets far enough ahead to either buy out or squeeze out the competition. Excessive or ill-considered regulation is always a bad thing, of course, but some degree of regulation is necessary to ensure that competition exists in the first place. Mature markets do not have spontaneously occurring competition in most cases.
I've never been a big believer that bias can be cured by more bias.
Simple fact: there are vastly more women and minorities in the workplace now than there were before affirmative action and forced equal access to education. It works. It's not flawless, and it's not a cure-all, but it has produced results.
Affirmative action only leads to people thinking that a miss-represented group of people were only hired because of affirmative action.
Who gives a shit? Those are the same people who didn't think women and minorities belonged in their workplace in the first place.
Honestly, in a field so utterly dominated by men that a female software engineer is a bit of a rarity, you have to be pretty insecure to be bothered by the fact that one free software project wants to try to get a whopping three women involved. In any event, the odds are that your job and mine are both going to India long before they are threatened by any kind of domestic quota system.
Maybe I'm getting old and cranky, but I just can't take development language holy wars anymore. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, unless you are present at the start of a business, the language choice has already been made for you. No matter how appealing it may be to you as a programmer to start from scratch, it rarely makes sense from a business perspective. The lure of the complete rewrite has killed more otherwise successful software products than just about anything else, Netscape being one of the more recent and spectacular examples. And at the end of the day, as an employee you are paid to make money for the company, not to advance your biases about language aesthetics at the expense of the company.
As far as VB goes, it's not the best language around, IMHO, but it does make rapid development of user interfaces pretty quick and easy, and if performance becomes an issue, you can always call out to DLLs written in C or C++. It wouldn't be my first (or second or third) choice if I was starting from scratch, but if you already have an extensive existing codebase, you need to have some damn good reasons to abandon it, and language choice is seldom a good reason for much of anything.
The substance of his message wasn't really addressed in the original story. A great deal of noise was made about his former role in Greenpeace, implying inaccurately that he is an environmentalist. He is, in fact, not. The advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power are a separate issue and have been dealt with exhaustively elsewhere; Moore isn't making any novel arguments. The initial fallacy, which I was addressing, was dual: first, that a fallacious appeal to authority was being made, and second, that the appeal was based on equivocation in the first place.
The ability to service my own laptop was a major reason I exclusively dealt in Thinkpads until the Lenovo acquisition. (The other major reason was an irrational brand loyalty to IBM that goes back to the 1970's.) IBM made real, honest-to-god not-written-for-idiots service manuals available for free download.
Fortunately, I bought a new Thinkpad right before the acquisition, and it was one of the higher-end desktop replacements. I don't know what I'm going to for my next laptop. It's a lot trickier question than purchasing a desktop because laptop designs are, by nature, heavily proprietary. You can't just go down to Fry's and pick up a generic part for your laptop like you can with a desktop PC. Finding a brand you can trust and rely on is very important.
My problem is that I don't trust Lenovo, less because they are Chinese than because they have no track record, and I have had very bad experiences with the remaining US laptop manufacturers. The only major brand out there that has a reputation for quality in general is Sony, and truth to tell, I don't know much about their laptops.
I do know that aside from routine wear and tear, I've never had any major problems with IBM Thinkpads, and IBM customer service was pretty good. What now?
Moore is a paid lobbyist who specializes is garnering favorable press for environmentally destructive mining and energy industries. He's not just ex-Greenpeace, he's an ex-environmentalist who parlayed his prior experience working for Greenpeace into working against it. If you are a major polluter, Moore is the go-to guy for whitewashing your corporate image.
Google is profiting from this. Systematically. It's called DomainPark.
...but somehow, they've managed to make it annoying already.
but by dropping the disputed technology, Microsoft is tacitly admitting that the patent is valid.
I don't see that. If Microsoft is admitting anything, it's that the courts decided against them and now they have to abide by the law. While that is unusual for Microsoft, it's not really something you can complain about. The patent is valid because the courts decided it is. You can argue that the patent laws are stupid, or that the presiding judge was a dunderhead, and though I will be the last to contradict you, that's just how the legal system works.
To be fair to the companies that are actually producing something, I don't think any of them are thrilled with the unintended consequences of the patent system as it is applied to software, and they are becoming less thrilled with each new suit from patent farms like Eolas. However, they have effectively painted themselves into a corner, so don't expect the system to change until it becomes so onerous for ordinary consumers that there's political consensus to change the law. I think that day will come, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
The only people who NEED terabytes or more can already afford that much in hard drives.
Well, I don't NEED terabytes of storage, but I can think of a lot of things I'd LIKE to do with it if I had it. And for most of the applications I have in mind, high throughput isn't a major issue, and if this turns out to be cheaper than hard drives and offers the advantage of removable media, I'm all over it.
I don't need a computer in the first place. But I have spent many thousands of dollars over the years because I wanted one, and then a better one, and then...
OTOH, I'd like to see an actual product, like in a box, in a store, for sale, before I get excited about this. After all, they've been promising us flying cars and sexy androids for decades now.
This helps me avoid dealing with all that stupid paperclip crap and whatnot that I had to put up with in Word.
While I am hardly an advocate for the bloated MS Office, statements like this make me wonder if half the people complaining about Office have made even a minimal effort to learn how to use it. The paperclip can be turned off. It doesn't even have to be installed. Just uncheck "Office Assistant" and you will never see Clippy again.
I remember seeing this kind of thing way back in the early 90's when I was learning TeX. There were often posts on TeX-related newsgroups and mailing lists about how Word didn't support some feature or other that TeX had. Almost without exception, they were talking about features that were, in fact, supported by Word.
But then, I get the impression that a lot of Word-bashers simply don't use many word processor features to begin with and probably would get along fine with Wordpad or one of the simpler open source RTF editors. I often hear people decry as unnecessary features that I use nearly every day, and I am often surprised to find that features *I* thought were unnecessary are vital to other people in my office. As more than one strategist at Microsoft has noted, most people use only a small subset of the features in Word (or any other Office app), but the subset varies from person to person. Until the folks writing open source office apps come to grips with that fact, they will continue to lag behind.
FWIW, I use Office 97, though I have more recent copies of Office available to me. What has kept me from switching to OpenOffice isn't a lack of features -- it certainly has feature-parity with Word 97 -- but it requires vastly more system resources than Word 97. I can run MS' old offering on a machine with 32 megs of RAM and a Pentium I, which can't be said for OOo. I do have it installed, though -- it does a great job of fixing corrupted Word files!
Abiword, however, is a joke. Try loading a 300 page document in it sometime. Even on a recent machine it bogs down badly during trivial operations on large documents. It works fine for writing letters, but that's about it.
So far, my favorite open source word processor, oddly enough, is KWord, whose frame-based layout makes it a good alternative to Framemaker, if not Word. Very nice for technical docs.