Brilliant, you really addressed the point of my post.
PDF allows your bank to send you a file which requires your browser to clunk about on the hard drive locating and executing proprietary code which wouldn't be required if the information was stored in something sensible like HTML in the first place.
See my response to another post who raised a similar point. PDF allows me to print out a document that is actually usable in legal situations for which HTML is often not good enough.
When I bought and refinanced my house, I showed up with HTML version of my bank statement straight from the bank's web site and they were disallowed. I went back and got the PDF versions, the same file that was used to print my monthly statement, and they were accepted. This may be a short-sighted failing of the real estate business, but I for one was grateful that my bank offered a PDF version. Maybe other technologies can do this too, and maybe cheaper/easier/better, in which case these banks and other industries need to get with the times.
Various municipal agencies allow you to download, print, and fill out forms without standing in lines at the DMV. They use PDF because if everybody who walked in had a differently formatted/looking HTML printout, the monkeys behind the counter would blow a fuse.
I specifically picked out those examples because I think they're good examples of when a fixed-presentation format like PDF has a purpose.
There are other situations where that's not necessary. When I print out my plane tickets, it doesn't load a PDF, for example. As long as the bar code is valid and my name is spelled right, that's all that's really necessary.
Yah, it isn't like you can do that with open standards like PNG, JPEG, HTML, or even plain text.
The problem with HTML is that it's difficult to predict what the layout is going to look like. What browser is the end-user on? What resolution? What will it look like when (s)he prints it?
I don't know enough about PNG or JPEG to say if they'd suffer from similar problems, nor how easy or fast it is to dynamically generate them on-demand for things like bank statements.
It really irritates me when I go to obtain some basic information (like my bank account details or some product info) and the web server insists on shoving a PDF down my throat. HTML would be so much better: Smaller, quicker, open, no special software, device and software independent. Why PDF?
I also dislike PDFs when used that way. I do like them, however, when I download a W2 and print it, and it looks exactly like a real W2, so that when I turn it in to the IRS, they don't audit me on the grounds that the forms I submitted look "funny".
PDF (and things like it) are great when you actually need the rendered output to be the same everywhere.
That's kinda what I was getting at with examples like bank statements and tax forms. When I was refinancing my house, they disallowed me from just printing an HTML version of my bank statement. I had to get the real statement, and my distributed it as a PDF. If PNG or JPG can do the same thing with equal or lesser effort, then I agree with you that the proper technologies are not being leveraged.
Why not offer customers an alternative that has better performance instead of risking the lose of those customers to another vendor that does?
Any number of reasons come to mind, all pulled from my posterier based on what little I know about Dell's business model and relationship with Intel, but try any of these on:
Dell has a current contract with Intel dictating that only Intel chips can be shipped in their machines
Intel offers a significant price cut on their chips so long as Dell doesn't offer any competing chips
Various aspects of the other chips (heat generation, physical dimensions, whatever) make it impractical for use on Dell's boards
Setting up production lines, testing procedures, quality control, etc, for a new brand of chip is prohibitively expensive
Custom choice is irrelevent when you're still making profits; clearly, Dell's customer base largely doesn't care, and the risk of losing them is minimal. Most likely, the kind of user that really cares about performance isn't buying a stock Dell.
It could be any combination of the above or something else entirely. Maybe Dell is just making a horrible business decision, but I'm guessing that they've run the numbers and decided that its in their best interests to stay the course. Decisions that seem to be perplexing to us almost boil down to money. Their financial analysts have convinced management that the company is best served this way.
I'm kind of lukewarm on this. I like PDFs, it allows me to download my tax statement, bank statements, government forms, and all kinds of other stuff that I used to have to fork over $3 to some government agency to get ahold of.
The impact of Flash on the web, however, has been unforgivably negative, in my opinion. I boycott companies who require flash to view their web sites, there's no reason to ever need it for most web sites out there. I'm kind old school I guess, I think of the web as being primarily a form of information and knowledge distribution, and flash isn't necessary to present most types of information or knowledge.
Your sympathy is misplaced. Making work more difficult for employees (and managers) is exactly what you do to get something changed. What good would it do if you didn't cause a scene and problems?
I must have poorly represented what I was trying to express, because you're the second person to think that I'm trying to generate sympathy for people who jockey a cash register, or manage such jockeys. I'm not. My point was that the primary effect of this stunt isn't really to point out the lack of privacy or some hypocrasy ("I can't monitor my own actions but you can!"), but just to disrupt life for a bunch of people who have nothing to do with the surviellance state and who don't really care, they just want to go home and not be hassled. I'm not trying to make you sympathize with those people, I'm trying to illustrate that this stunt isn't accomplishing its implied goal.
If you want to get a store to do something... anything... just make a big scene about it, disturbing customers, making the employees and manager's job difficult.
Of course. Like I said, the manager's job is to make problems (i.e., you) go away as quickly and painlessly as possible. But if you think the managers of these places are going to march, en masse, to the makers of corporate policy and demand the removal of cameras to put a stop to stunts like this... well I just don't think it's going to happen, and if it did, I don't see HQ paying much attention. They'll put a cop outside first, it's cheaper.
In this case, it'll take a lot more than one person causing a scene before they'll do something as serious as remove cameras, but that's exactly what you need to do to get results at all.
I agree in principle - action motivates change, but I don't think a stunt like this is going to make a difference, nor would 1,000 stunts like this. If Joe Q. Manager tells HQ in his monthly coference call that people keep coming in and protesting the video cameras (if he even figures out that the cameras are the focus of our ire), HQ is going to say, "Call mall security and tell them to kick those people out. And if that doesn't work, call the cops."
Walking in and politely stating your complaints to the manager will just result in your complain being completely ignored, as they inundate you with market-speak about how important their customers are to them, and how they will carefully consider what you've said...
Yes, yes, I know, and I agree. I've been through this first-hand with my former bank. Quietly and politely discuss, in a rational manner, the bank's utter failure to accomplish the most basic and simple of tasks in a reasonable time frame: nothing. Throw a temper tantrum: service!
I still think this stunt won't work. People are still shopping there. You want the cameras gone, don't shop there, encourage other people not to shop there, and patronize places that have more respect for your privacy, and make it clear.
When the amount of lost revenue from privacy-conscious boycotters excedes the potential lost revenue from theft that is no longer deterred by the absence of cameras, they might change their minds.
Also, bear in mind that employees account for more theft than any other group of people; those cameras are mostly there to monitor them.
but rather to get rid of this idiotic complacency workers have with their situations in life.
That sounds nice, but somebody has to be paid to pick up my garbage, man the Drive-Thru, and check me out at the grocery store. And when those jobs can be automated by technology, it just raises the lowest tier of work that people are needed to do. Those people are probably going to hate their jobs and be unqualified for much else due to age, lack of training, lack of experience, or lack of a tolerably clean criminal record. There is always going to have to be people who can deal with doing crap work. Every American does not need job training and a college education, or we'll find ourselves paying MBA's $75,000/year to ride around on a stinkheap throwing garbage into it, and everybody who wants a career will be in school until they're 40 years old trying to distiguish themselves from the herd.
What the hell right does a manager have NOT KNOWING why his store has the policies it does?
None. I didn't imply their ignorance was excusable. I'm trying to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the stunt in getting their point across. It doesn't stand up to the least bit of scrutiny or critical thinking.
Mann asked the guard why, if the Mont Blanc cameras were recording him, he couldn't, in turn, record the cameras. But the philosophical question, asked again at Nordstrom and the Gap, was beyond the comprehension of store managers who were more concerned with the practical issues of prohibiting store photography.
It sounds like a bunch of people who are trying to make a good point are basically just making life more difficult for the new generation of blue collar workers who staff service industries and who consider their days blessed if they can get through them uneventfully. Especially middle-layer managers of mall chains, whose job description is basically to make problems go away as quickly as possible before somebody notices.
Then again, when I was slinging burgers as a youth, somebody creating a scene would have been a welcome distraction. Still, I think their point is well-meant but poorly-executed. Most retail chains are going to disallow photography inside the retail space for a number of reasons, most of which your typical manager is utterly ignorant. So the fact that stores were ushering them out is irrelevent. If they were taking pictures of the color of the walls or the brand name of the urinal cakes, they should have expected a similar response.
A cute idea that, like most of these kinds of demonstrations, ultimately makes transparent that the people engaging in these kinds of stunts aren't that bright. I'm all in favor of privacy advocacy but this kind of stuff... well, at best it raises awareness, at worse it paints privacy advocates as misguided loonies. I question whether or not the stunt is worth the tradeoff, especially since it doesn't really prove or demonstrate anything other than the obvious fact that private retail spaces typically disallow photography of any kind on their grounds.
I'm sure you've all heard of it by now, but if not, the Artemis Project has been planning moon colonization by private citizens for years, using a business model to pay for and sustain operations, rather than just sucking tax money out of the system.
Those who use the KnR style look at the indentation rather than the braces. Because you need to indent the block anyway, having the brace denote the separation is redundant and looks superfluous.
If this is true, and "compact code" is the point, then why isn't KnR style:
if ( <i>condition</i> ) { <i>statement</i> }
If it was, I could see the point, that's consistant with viewing indentation and not braces, and positioning braces for compact code. But I haven't bumped into a lot of coders who do that.
Placing the function opening brace on its own line is the KnR standard. I would guess it is because the function line is a declaration and produces no code, while the control statements like if, for, while, do.
First, that's the function definition, not a declaration. Second, what difference does it make? The point is compact code, right? On everybody's decrepit 80x25 terminals? So who cares whether the statement produces code or not, that has nothing to do with the two arguments you've presented: compactness and using indentation to identify blocks of code. It's still inconsistant, no matter how you slice it. Also, I haven't touched an assembler in awhile, but I seem to recall that starting a new function did indeed require a bit of assembler to be generated. On a PC anyway. Maybe it's different now.
This visually separates the declaration from the definition, which IMO is the right thing to do.
Oh, you're calling the function sig the declaration, I understand now. So why is it a good thing to make a function signiture visually distint from its associated code, but not a good thing to make a conditional statement visually distinct from its associated code?
This is not exactly a common scenario.
No, not very common, but neither is the bug with a semicolon after the end of a conditional, especially for ubercoders like us. I don't see you refuting that one as being too infrequent to be relevent.
If you are testing your code, you should be testing the code as written,
I agree, but I'm talking about testing in the sense of debugging, not formal testing. I'll take the blame for being imprecise on that one.
As someone who codes exclusively on the 100x30 console, I can tell you that vertical space is pretty important. Not everyone can stare at tiny fonts all day; I dislike coding with a headache.
I think you are the exception more than the norm, and that sucks, you should find another job! Or make them give you a bigger monitor.
Nope. Highlighting is exactly the same whether you have the semicolon at the end or not.
Maybe in your editor. In mind, the semi-colon is shaded differently from the rest of the conditional, and it sticks out. Sounds like you need a better editor! And a better terminal and a bigger monitor and maybe glasses.
In fact, I have a version of this problem all the time when I cut-n-paste function declarations from the header file to write the bodies. I forget the delete the semicolon occasionally, creating a few screens of strange errors:)
Which is readily apparant to a real programming like you, and thus shouldn't be a consideration for determing something like your brace style.
the 2-space indentation is. Nowadays every book has it and it just looks hideous to me after my perfect 4-space indents which make "golden rectangles" with my font.
Yeah I dislike 2-space indentation. I prefer that people indent lines with tabs so I can just set my editor to use whatever identation I like. The problem is that most people don't consistantly use tabs, they'll tab over and then throw in 3 spaces here and there and it all looks like a mess. Any more I replace tabs in spaces in code I'm working on and then re-align all the identitation and then sometimes convert back to ta
I was kidding, mostly, just needling people who use that brace style.
To answer your question, nothing is strictly wrong with it, it's a matter of preference. I can give you my reasons for disliking it but it's just garbage to justify an opinion I can't otherwise explain.
The bracers are not vertically aligned in the same column, thus breaking my the ability to quickly, visually align blocks of related code on-screen. Note that plenty of people find your method more readable. I don't.
Few people who code that way will put the start brace to a function in the same place; they tend to start a newline and put the brace on it. Usage tends to be inconsistant, making other people's code more difficult to read.
When you start a new block of code without a conditional, where do you put the brace?
If you want to test a block of code, you can easily comment-out the conditional if the brace has its own line. If you put it after the conditional, you have to comment that line out and add another brace, then delete it when you're done.
But mostly I like it because that's how I learned to program and I find the shortcomings of the same-column brace style more tolerable than the shortcomings of the old style. I find on-screen space to be a negligable concern, I haven't coded on an 80x25 terminal since 1993, I personally find it less readable, and I've not committed or experienced that particular bug since my first semester of C. Moreover, that bug becomes easily self-apparant with any modern editor that supports good syntax highlighting.
Those are my reasons, but I suspect that, as with most programmers, the real reason I dislike that style is that I didn't learn to code using it, and so it looks "funny" to me. Being a rational person, I've tried to justify my preference with logic, and I think I do a good job of it, but I'm willing to accept that it's just stubborn adherence to how I learned it.
I also find the BSD style ("my way") to be far more common than the K&R-style, which means I more easily read more code that I run into "in the wild". K&R didn't even use their own style consistantly. As I mentioned, they failed to use that style on function definitions.
I like the orthogonality of the braces lining up, it just looks clean and organized to me. However, in Perl, where I cannot omit braces for single-line code blocks after a conditional, I use K&R style for brevity, so I'm guilty of the very inconsistance that I claim to dislike!
I mean, when people violate conventions, I sometimes get annoyed. For example, creating stack variables in C whose names are in all-capital letters, when convention holds that macros look like that.
Perhaps it's useful to discuss what the difference is between a de facto standard and a convention. If there is none, then I'd say conventions evolve through traditions established by whomever pioneered a given technology/idea, and those conventions can and do change over time (Liebniz notation in calculus comes to mind as a mediocre example) as better ideas come up. But usually over a long period of time.
I mean, we had damn near purged the world of programmers who put their opening brace for a new code block on the same line as the conditional statement, and then that Gosling dude from Java went and set us back 20 years.
Speaking only for myself, you can substitute 'RIAA' with 'major member orgnaizations with enough financial resources to influence law and society' safely in most of what I post. Most, not all.
Still, your point is well-taken.
To quibble (this wouldn't be Slashdot if I didn't!):
Then, I guess the RIAA hired an unknown buy very overzealous lawyer that is very persistent in maintaining their job security by perpetuating lawsuits that regardless of the outcome of the suit, the lawyer will win.
Based on a sample of 1 attorney I know, if he got paid, he won. I'm not sure which "case" you're referring to, actually. I was talking more about drafting legalspeak to push into the hands of lobbyists who then pressure their honorably elected representatives in Washington to pass legislation that would require all newly manufactured playback devices as of a specific date to respect DRM. Given the death of region coding in DVDs, though, I have some confidence that this kind of legislation would be dead-on-arrival and would pass quietly into history.
Oh I get it, your upset you cannot engage in illegal activity, right?
I don't think so. Although I do believe piracy is a rampant problem, your typical Slashdot poster doesn't fit the profile. I think most of the piracy is being done by the people a generation behind this crowd. A number of people here are employed and have enough discretionary income to legally purchase most of what they want. I think Slashdot users are probably far more guilty of downloading TV shows and movies than music.
But the major culprit in the music business is probably kids. By "kids" I mean high school and college students, who have no income but self-associate tightly with MTV culture (high schoolers, mostly) and self-define by their musical tastes.
They do not, en masse, sample-and-by. I think the Slashdot crowd is probably a wash on the sample/steal ratio in terms of their impact on the sales of RIAA companies. But the downloading community as a whole is most likely a significant drain (ample studies exist to support this claim, go google for them if you want proof).
I think your typical Slashdot poster is upset that they are not engaging in illegal activity, at least, not on any large scale, and yet when they try to do right by purchasing their music, they are handcuffed in terms of what they can easily/legally do with it.
Don't misunderstood; I do believe there is a legitimate piracy problem, and I do believe the copyright holders have every right to protect themselves. But one man's right to protect himself ends where my rights begin, and under the "Home Use" interpretation of the Fair Use doctrine (US Code; Title XVII; Section 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair Use), I have the right to make limited copies of media I purchase for private home use. Section 117 extends this right explicitely to computer software, too.
I actually can accept DRM if it was done right, because DRM is "Digital Rights Management," right? And I have some rights under current interpretations of US legal code to make backup copies. DRM should be enforcing and supporting that right, but it doesn't; it limits and restricts it, usually.
I hate the use the "Fair Use" argument because every legal expert has concluded that a specific definition of what is and is not "fair use" is impossible, and all cases must be evaluated independently, but this is old news, and it's been SOP in our legal system since the Copyright Act (1972).
In corporate form of poetic justice, the Korean electronics companies are poised to start picking away at Sony in the next decade unless something seriously changes at the big guy. Don't get me wrong, I actually still mostly like Sony products, but they've fallen from their lofty perch in the last few years as the top producer of quality goods. I've noticed sparser and sparser distribution of Sony products as the "Recommende Buy" in Consumer Reports over the last two years. They've still always got a ringer in there but those top 5 spots aren't dominated by them anymore.
Luckily for Dai Nippon, there's still Toyota and Honda, so the Koreans are gaining ground only on the technological front, but watch out! Hyundai is on the prowl!
Troublesome, isn't it? I want so much to embrace Sony, a big warm fuzzy company that makes neat stuff that works. Happy Fun Sony! Good Sony!
I bet their internal board meetings are a riot. On one side you've got their hardware guys who don't want to spend their R&D money and waste time/resources on redesigning and rebuilding playback devices that have worked just fine for years to respect the mandated DRM that the RIAA is trying to get into the law books.
Then you've got the label people pushing Sony's attorneys and reps at the RIAA to get this legislation done!
You've got Sony's legal department sending letters to people using Sony's laptops to rip MP3s of songs owned by a Sony label from their Sony DiscMan. And people becoming felons by violating the DMCA when they bypass the copy protection included on Sony CDs. They're violating the copy protection by using hardware produced by... Sony. It's like a weird hybrid of a Kevin Smith movie and the Twilight Zone.
I appreciate the impact of the piracy issue on them, but they haven't figured out how to beat it.
Create digital music store (should have done this before Napster taught us all that we could easily get music for free with little risk)
Establish digital management rules within range of the "Home Use" interpretation of Fair Use (for the curious, your Fair Use rights are established in US Code under Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 106 or 107, I forget which. I think it's 107, 106 is Copyright holder rights; it's worth noting here that "home use" was not originally part of the Fair Use clause, but it has since been interpretted to fall under its umbrella)
Make use of store convenient and reliable enough to be measurably superior than scrounging p2p networks for uncorrupted files.
Establish a cost such that the added convenience, legality, and reliability of your digital music store is worth paying for in lieu of the sort of dumpster-diving you sometimes have to do on p2p
Include some additional benefit for buying instead of stealing, such as a "frequent flyer" type program that rewards you with the option to get ahold of preview tracks earlier than other people (granted, these all just end up on p2p so it becomes moot), discounts on concert tickets and fan merchandise, access to reserved ticketing for popular concerts, and less restrictive DRM for loyal customers
This part is critical: respect the customer, respect his rights. Do not assume everybody who buys your music is doing so to put in on eMule. Establish that you trust your customer to be a good consumer.
The profit here may or may not be significant, but a combinaton of a revenue stream plus reduced losses from piracy might make it worth the effort.
Don't bother telling me that piracy doesn't actually cost them anything, it doesn't matter whether it does or not as long as they think it does. If they think it does, and they want to reduce/eliminate it, far better than they do so by leveraging technology to our benefit than try to get their business model legislated.
I think it would be possible to create every possible permutation of a 4 bar, or heck up to 16 bar melody, rhythm and harmony.
Given all quarter notes or what? Because for every melody, you can create a new one by splitting any given note into two different notes, the sum of whose durations is equal to the original. And you could split it into 3 notes, or 4 notes... and each of those into briefer notes, etc.
It's like the people who want to map every possible permutation of a chess game. I think it's impossible, because there's infinite possibilities. I'm sure somebody will quibble with this. I liken it to a problem I once thought up when I was a kid while biking to my friend's house. I used to debate with myself which way was fastest, and then invent new ways to get there, and try them, and then once I wondered how many total possible ways there were to get there from my house. I concluded that there had to be infinite (I was a nerdy kid). Even if I took the most direct route, I could simple circle any given block once to create a new route; circle it twice to create another new route; circle it twice but backwards the second time to create another new route, etc.
You'd have to impose some kind of limit on what constitutes a "unique" melody (perhaps the copyright office can help you out on this) to make a plan like this a reality.
Assume your song is has a duration of one note, may consist of notes no briefer than 16th notes, and must be within 1 octave of concert middle C. That means you've got a 2-octave range in which there are, in Western music, 23 notes (I think). So there's 23 possible tubes. Each could be a whole note, a half-note, a dotted half-note, a quarter-note, a dotted quarter-note, an eigth-note, a dotted eight-note, a sixteenth-note, a dotted sixteenth note. So there's 23 x 9 = 207 possible songs just using 1 note in a two octave range with pretty strict limits. To say nothing of stuff like fermatas, key signitures, etc.
It's understandable that quality will suffer as popularity/population increases, but journalistic errors like this are exactly why I feel it's safe to laugh at loud when people quote web sites, even reputable news sites, as evidence for some of the nutty things they believe.
When I was in high school I did a research paper on the evolution of computing. It was widely theorized at the time that computers would reach a stopping point as the size of transistors approached that of the atom and further miniaturization wasn't possible as the distance between circuits was so small that electron interference was a problem.
This was pooh-pooh'd, however, by the optimists, who said that by the time this is a problem, new forms of miniaturization will have been developed to overcome these problems, such as using biological material in computer circuitry whose electronic properties are different from metals in some fundamental way that I don't understand which solves this problem.
The date for all this sophistry? They said it in 1993 (I believe the article was in PC Magazine). I'm not really supporting either side here, just repeating something I learned almost 15 years ago and never forgot, because I'm still curious about who will end up being right. They predicted that computer development would hit a wall between 2015 and 2020.
Not that I disagree with your points, but you were the one making the initial claim of the majority of traffic on the internet being illegal content, so really the onus falls on you to back up your claims first.:)
Very well. A modest google search will bring up any of this, but plenty of independent and peer-reviewed surveys have been conducted to prove that:
(1) Most downloading is of copyrighted material that the downloader has no legal right to
(2) The number of people who buy less music because it's available for free on-line is far greater than the number who buy more
Some sample studies that have been done include:
(8/04) Forrester Research
Highlights include that while 10% of Europeans buy more music because they can sample it on-line, over 35% buy less because it's free. The rest claim that it has no impact.
(3/04) TNS Research
Self-described "downloaders" saw an average decline of 32% in spending on music. This was also one of many studies that showed that piracy is the worst among young people. This is also why I always tell you guys not to extrapolate
your experience to the rest of the world. It's likely that most people our age (25-45 for a lot of) pay for music. We have jobs and discretionary income to blow on binary clocks and math T-shirts from ThinkGeek. Teenagers and college students usually don't.
(9/03) Informa
Estimates that approximately 75% of lost music sales can be accounted for by on-line piracy. If there REALLY was more legal than illegal sharing/trading, this wouldn't be the case.
(8/03) Forrester
Estimates $700 million in lost sales due directly to on-line piracy. If more people sample than steal, this wouldn't be the case.
(8/03) Jupiter Research
Over 30% of on-line pirates bought less music because they can steal it. Less than 20% bought more because they can sample it.
(3/03) Enders
35-40% of the deflated music market worldwide can be attributed to internet piracy.
(1/03) Forrester Europe
40% of downloaders buy less music because they can steal it easily. Less than 5% buy more because they can sample it easily.
Pew Research
The peer-to-peer networks aren't even the entirety of the problem. Half of music traded illegally on-line is done outside of the p2p networks. The percentage of Internet uses who knowingly download illegally has risen from 18% in 2/04 to 22% prior to the Grokster case.
Your post is excellent, with one major mistake. Downloading copyrighted material is not illegal.
Actually, it is illegal. See US Code: Title 17: Chapter 1: Section 102. I'll quote it for your convenience.
...the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work....
When you download, you reproduce the work, and thus you violate this law.
It also appears, in an examination of the Fair Use Doctrine (US Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107) that Fair Use does not give you the right to make copies of your music. That right applies only to computer programs (US Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117). Whether or not an MP3 could be classified as a computer program is another question. I'm sure there's been a legal case that already has examined and made a determination on this.
You misunderstood. The "brand = generic product" perception used to be true for Frisbees, but has been changing for many years. I have attacked the ancillary data in this instance because it no longer supports your argument.
Ahhhh, gotcha. My bad. Your debunking of my supporting argument, however, falls flat, since you mentioned sales figures to support a shift in public association, when sales figures are irrelevent. My point stands if public perception is such that, whether I buy a Frisbee-brand product or not, I use the word "Frisbee" to describe the thing I have purchased, referring not to the brand (as in, "I bought a Honda") but the product (as in, "I bought a car.").
If people were starting to use "Frisbee" the way I used "Honda" above, and "flying disc" or whatever the way I used "car", I think you've got something there. Speaking from, admittedly, only my own experience, I haven't seen any evidence of this change. Perhaps you have, and that's the source of our disagreement, but your retort to my original point didn't demonstrate this in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant, you really addressed the point of my post.
PDF allows your bank to send you a file which requires your browser to clunk about on the hard drive locating and executing proprietary code which wouldn't be required if the information was stored in something sensible like HTML in the first place.
See my response to another post who raised a similar point. PDF allows me to print out a document that is actually usable in legal situations for which HTML is often not good enough.
When I bought and refinanced my house, I showed up with HTML version of my bank statement straight from the bank's web site and they were disallowed. I went back and got the PDF versions, the same file that was used to print my monthly statement, and they were accepted. This may be a short-sighted failing of the real estate business, but I for one was grateful that my bank offered a PDF version. Maybe other technologies can do this too, and maybe cheaper/easier/better, in which case these banks and other industries need to get with the times.
Various municipal agencies allow you to download, print, and fill out forms without standing in lines at the DMV. They use PDF because if everybody who walked in had a differently formatted/looking HTML printout, the monkeys behind the counter would blow a fuse.
I specifically picked out those examples because I think they're good examples of when a fixed-presentation format like PDF has a purpose.
There are other situations where that's not necessary. When I print out my plane tickets, it doesn't load a PDF, for example. As long as the bar code is valid and my name is spelled right, that's all that's really necessary.
The problem with HTML is that it's difficult to predict what the layout is going to look like. What browser is the end-user on? What resolution? What will it look like when (s)he prints it?
I don't know enough about PNG or JPEG to say if they'd suffer from similar problems, nor how easy or fast it is to dynamically generate them on-demand for things like bank statements.
It really irritates me when I go to obtain some basic information (like my bank account details or some product info) and the web server insists on shoving a PDF down my throat. HTML would be so much better: Smaller, quicker, open, no special software, device and software independent. Why PDF?
I also dislike PDFs when used that way. I do like them, however, when I download a W2 and print it, and it looks exactly like a real W2, so that when I turn it in to the IRS, they don't audit me on the grounds that the forms I submitted look "funny".
PDF (and things like it) are great when you actually need the rendered output to be the same everywhere.
That's kinda what I was getting at with examples like bank statements and tax forms. When I was refinancing my house, they disallowed me from just printing an HTML version of my bank statement. I had to get the real statement, and my distributed it as a PDF. If PNG or JPG can do the same thing with equal or lesser effort, then I agree with you that the proper technologies are not being leveraged.
Any number of reasons come to mind, all pulled from my posterier based on what little I know about Dell's business model and relationship with Intel, but try any of these on:
It could be any combination of the above or something else entirely. Maybe Dell is just making a horrible business decision, but I'm guessing that they've run the numbers and decided that its in their best interests to stay the course. Decisions that seem to be perplexing to us almost boil down to money. Their financial analysts have convinced management that the company is best served this way.
The impact of Flash on the web, however, has been unforgivably negative, in my opinion. I boycott companies who require flash to view their web sites, there's no reason to ever need it for most web sites out there. I'm kind old school I guess, I think of the web as being primarily a form of information and knowledge distribution, and flash isn't necessary to present most types of information or knowledge.
I must have poorly represented what I was trying to express, because you're the second person to think that I'm trying to generate sympathy for people who jockey a cash register, or manage such jockeys. I'm not. My point was that the primary effect of this stunt isn't really to point out the lack of privacy or some hypocrasy ("I can't monitor my own actions but you can!"), but just to disrupt life for a bunch of people who have nothing to do with the surviellance state and who don't really care, they just want to go home and not be hassled. I'm not trying to make you sympathize with those people, I'm trying to illustrate that this stunt isn't accomplishing its implied goal.
If you want to get a store to do something... anything... just make a big scene about it, disturbing customers, making the employees and manager's job difficult.
Of course. Like I said, the manager's job is to make problems (i.e., you) go away as quickly and painlessly as possible. But if you think the managers of these places are going to march, en masse, to the makers of corporate policy and demand the removal of cameras to put a stop to stunts like this ... well I just don't think it's going to happen, and if it did, I don't see HQ paying much attention. They'll put a cop outside first, it's cheaper.
In this case, it'll take a lot more than one person causing a scene before they'll do something as serious as remove cameras, but that's exactly what you need to do to get results at all.I agree in principle - action motivates change, but I don't think a stunt like this is going to make a difference, nor would 1,000 stunts like this. If Joe Q. Manager tells HQ in his monthly coference call that people keep coming in and protesting the video cameras (if he even figures out that the cameras are the focus of our ire), HQ is going to say, "Call mall security and tell them to kick those people out. And if that doesn't work, call the cops."
Walking in and politely stating your complaints to the manager will just result in your complain being completely ignored, as they inundate you with market-speak about how important their customers are to them, and how they will carefully consider what you've said...
Yes, yes, I know, and I agree. I've been through this first-hand with my former bank. Quietly and politely discuss, in a rational manner, the bank's utter failure to accomplish the most basic and simple of tasks in a reasonable time frame: nothing. Throw a temper tantrum: service!
I still think this stunt won't work. People are still shopping there. You want the cameras gone, don't shop there, encourage other people not to shop there, and patronize places that have more respect for your privacy, and make it clear.
When the amount of lost revenue from privacy-conscious boycotters excedes the potential lost revenue from theft that is no longer deterred by the absence of cameras, they might change their minds.
Also, bear in mind that employees account for more theft than any other group of people; those cameras are mostly there to monitor them.
That sounds nice, but somebody has to be paid to pick up my garbage, man the Drive-Thru, and check me out at the grocery store. And when those jobs can be automated by technology, it just raises the lowest tier of work that people are needed to do. Those people are probably going to hate their jobs and be unqualified for much else due to age, lack of training, lack of experience, or lack of a tolerably clean criminal record. There is always going to have to be people who can deal with doing crap work. Every American does not need job training and a college education, or we'll find ourselves paying MBA's $75,000/year to ride around on a stinkheap throwing garbage into it, and everybody who wants a career will be in school until they're 40 years old trying to distiguish themselves from the herd.
What the hell right does a manager have NOT KNOWING why his store has the policies it does?
None. I didn't imply their ignorance was excusable. I'm trying to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the stunt in getting their point across. It doesn't stand up to the least bit of scrutiny or critical thinking.
It sounds like a bunch of people who are trying to make a good point are basically just making life more difficult for the new generation of blue collar workers who staff service industries and who consider their days blessed if they can get through them uneventfully. Especially middle-layer managers of mall chains, whose job description is basically to make problems go away as quickly as possible before somebody notices.
Then again, when I was slinging burgers as a youth, somebody creating a scene would have been a welcome distraction. Still, I think their point is well-meant but poorly-executed. Most retail chains are going to disallow photography inside the retail space for a number of reasons, most of which your typical manager is utterly ignorant. So the fact that stores were ushering them out is irrelevent. If they were taking pictures of the color of the walls or the brand name of the urinal cakes, they should have expected a similar response.
A cute idea that, like most of these kinds of demonstrations, ultimately makes transparent that the people engaging in these kinds of stunts aren't that bright. I'm all in favor of privacy advocacy but this kind of stuff ... well, at best it raises awareness, at worse it paints privacy advocates as misguided loonies. I question whether or not the stunt is worth the tradeoff, especially since it doesn't really prove or demonstrate anything other than the obvious fact that private retail spaces typically disallow photography of any kind on their grounds.
I'm sure you've all heard of it by now, but if not, the Artemis Project has been planning moon colonization by private citizens for years, using a business model to pay for and sustain operations, rather than just sucking tax money out of the system.
If this is true, and "compact code" is the point, then why isn't KnR style:
If it was, I could see the point, that's consistant with viewing indentation and not braces, and positioning braces for compact code. But I haven't bumped into a lot of coders who do that.
Placing the function opening brace on its own line is the KnR standard. I would guess it is because the function line is a declaration and produces no code, while the control statements like if, for, while, do.
First, that's the function definition, not a declaration. Second, what difference does it make? The point is compact code, right? On everybody's decrepit 80x25 terminals? So who cares whether the statement produces code or not, that has nothing to do with the two arguments you've presented: compactness and using indentation to identify blocks of code. It's still inconsistant, no matter how you slice it. Also, I haven't touched an assembler in awhile, but I seem to recall that starting a new function did indeed require a bit of assembler to be generated. On a PC anyway. Maybe it's different now.
This visually separates the declaration from the definition, which IMO is the right thing to do.
Oh, you're calling the function sig the declaration, I understand now. So why is it a good thing to make a function signiture visually distint from its associated code, but not a good thing to make a conditional statement visually distinct from its associated code?
This is not exactly a common scenario.
No, not very common, but neither is the bug with a semicolon after the end of a conditional, especially for ubercoders like us. I don't see you refuting that one as being too infrequent to be relevent.
If you are testing your code, you should be testing the code as written,
I agree, but I'm talking about testing in the sense of debugging, not formal testing. I'll take the blame for being imprecise on that one.
As someone who codes exclusively on the 100x30 console, I can tell you that vertical space is pretty important. Not everyone can stare at tiny fonts all day; I dislike coding with a headache.
I think you are the exception more than the norm, and that sucks, you should find another job! Or make them give you a bigger monitor.
Nope. Highlighting is exactly the same whether you have the semicolon at the end or not.
Maybe in your editor. In mind, the semi-colon is shaded differently from the rest of the conditional, and it sticks out. Sounds like you need a better editor! And a better terminal and a bigger monitor and maybe glasses.
In fact, I have a version of this problem all the time when I cut-n-paste function declarations from the header file to write the bodies. I forget the delete the semicolon occasionally, creating a few screens of strange errors :)
Which is readily apparant to a real programming like you, and thus shouldn't be a consideration for determing something like your brace style.
the 2-space indentation is. Nowadays every book has it and it just looks hideous to me after my perfect 4-space indents which make "golden rectangles" with my font.
Yeah I dislike 2-space indentation. I prefer that people indent lines with tabs so I can just set my editor to use whatever identation I like. The problem is that most people don't consistantly use tabs, they'll tab over and then throw in 3 spaces here and there and it all looks like a mess. Any more I replace tabs in spaces in code I'm working on and then re-align all the identitation and then sometimes convert back to ta
To answer your question, nothing is strictly wrong with it, it's a matter of preference. I can give you my reasons for disliking it but it's just garbage to justify an opinion I can't otherwise explain.
- The bracers are not vertically aligned in the same column, thus breaking my the ability to quickly, visually align blocks of related code on-screen. Note that plenty of people find your method more readable. I don't.
- Few people who code that way will put the start brace to a function in the same place; they tend to start a newline and put the brace on it. Usage tends to be inconsistant, making other people's code more difficult to read.
- When you start a new block of code without a conditional, where do you put the brace?
- If you want to test a block of code, you can easily comment-out the conditional if the brace has its own line. If you put it after the conditional, you have to comment that line out and add another brace, then delete it when you're done.
But mostly I like it because that's how I learned to program and I find the shortcomings of the same-column brace style more tolerable than the shortcomings of the old style. I find on-screen space to be a negligable concern, I haven't coded on an 80x25 terminal since 1993, I personally find it less readable, and I've not committed or experienced that particular bug since my first semester of C. Moreover, that bug becomes easily self-apparant with any modern editor that supports good syntax highlighting.Those are my reasons, but I suspect that, as with most programmers, the real reason I dislike that style is that I didn't learn to code using it, and so it looks "funny" to me. Being a rational person, I've tried to justify my preference with logic, and I think I do a good job of it, but I'm willing to accept that it's just stubborn adherence to how I learned it.
I also find the BSD style ("my way") to be far more common than the K&R-style, which means I more easily read more code that I run into "in the wild". K&R didn't even use their own style consistantly. As I mentioned, they failed to use that style on function definitions.
I like the orthogonality of the braces lining up, it just looks clean and organized to me. However, in Perl, where I cannot omit braces for single-line code blocks after a conditional, I use K&R style for brevity, so I'm guilty of the very inconsistance that I claim to dislike!
Perhaps it's useful to discuss what the difference is between a de facto standard and a convention. If there is none, then I'd say conventions evolve through traditions established by whomever pioneered a given technology/idea, and those conventions can and do change over time (Liebniz notation in calculus comes to mind as a mediocre example) as better ideas come up. But usually over a long period of time.
I mean, we had damn near purged the world of programmers who put their opening brace for a new code block on the same line as the conditional statement, and then that Gosling dude from Java went and set us back 20 years.
Still, your point is well-taken.
To quibble (this wouldn't be Slashdot if I didn't!):
Then, I guess the RIAA hired an unknown buy very overzealous lawyer that is very persistent in maintaining their job security by perpetuating lawsuits that regardless of the outcome of the suit, the lawyer will win.
Based on a sample of 1 attorney I know, if he got paid, he won. I'm not sure which "case" you're referring to, actually. I was talking more about drafting legalspeak to push into the hands of lobbyists who then pressure their honorably elected representatives in Washington to pass legislation that would require all newly manufactured playback devices as of a specific date to respect DRM. Given the death of region coding in DVDs, though, I have some confidence that this kind of legislation would be dead-on-arrival and would pass quietly into history.
Having two Korean roomates, I am forced to agree or they'll tae kwon do my head.
I don't think so. Although I do believe piracy is a rampant problem, your typical Slashdot poster doesn't fit the profile. I think most of the piracy is being done by the people a generation behind this crowd. A number of people here are employed and have enough discretionary income to legally purchase most of what they want. I think Slashdot users are probably far more guilty of downloading TV shows and movies than music.
But the major culprit in the music business is probably kids. By "kids" I mean high school and college students, who have no income but self-associate tightly with MTV culture (high schoolers, mostly) and self-define by their musical tastes.
They do not, en masse, sample-and-by. I think the Slashdot crowd is probably a wash on the sample/steal ratio in terms of their impact on the sales of RIAA companies. But the downloading community as a whole is most likely a significant drain (ample studies exist to support this claim, go google for them if you want proof).
I think your typical Slashdot poster is upset that they are not engaging in illegal activity, at least, not on any large scale, and yet when they try to do right by purchasing their music, they are handcuffed in terms of what they can easily/legally do with it.
Don't misunderstood; I do believe there is a legitimate piracy problem, and I do believe the copyright holders have every right to protect themselves. But one man's right to protect himself ends where my rights begin, and under the "Home Use" interpretation of the Fair Use doctrine (US Code; Title XVII; Section 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair Use), I have the right to make limited copies of media I purchase for private home use. Section 117 extends this right explicitely to computer software, too.
I actually can accept DRM if it was done right, because DRM is "Digital Rights Management," right? And I have some rights under current interpretations of US legal code to make backup copies. DRM should be enforcing and supporting that right, but it doesn't; it limits and restricts it, usually.
I hate the use the "Fair Use" argument because every legal expert has concluded that a specific definition of what is and is not "fair use" is impossible, and all cases must be evaluated independently, but this is old news, and it's been SOP in our legal system since the Copyright Act (1972).
Luckily for Dai Nippon, there's still Toyota and Honda, so the Koreans are gaining ground only on the technological front, but watch out! Hyundai is on the prowl!
I bet their internal board meetings are a riot. On one side you've got their hardware guys who don't want to spend their R&D money and waste time/resources on redesigning and rebuilding playback devices that have worked just fine for years to respect the mandated DRM that the RIAA is trying to get into the law books.
Then you've got the label people pushing Sony's attorneys and reps at the RIAA to get this legislation done!
You've got Sony's legal department sending letters to people using Sony's laptops to rip MP3s of songs owned by a Sony label from their Sony DiscMan. And people becoming felons by violating the DMCA when they bypass the copy protection included on Sony CDs. They're violating the copy protection by using hardware produced by ... Sony. It's like a weird hybrid of a Kevin Smith movie and the Twilight Zone.
- Create digital music store (should have done this before Napster taught us all that we could easily get music for free with little risk)
- Establish digital management rules within range of the "Home Use" interpretation of Fair Use (for the curious, your Fair Use rights are established in US Code under Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 106 or 107, I forget which. I think it's 107, 106 is Copyright holder rights; it's worth noting here that "home use" was not originally part of the Fair Use clause, but it has since been interpretted to fall under its umbrella)
- Make use of store convenient and reliable enough to be measurably superior than scrounging p2p networks for uncorrupted files.
- Establish a cost such that the added convenience, legality, and reliability of your digital music store is worth paying for in lieu of the sort of dumpster-diving you sometimes have to do on p2p
- Include some additional benefit for buying instead of stealing, such as a "frequent flyer" type program that rewards you with the option to get ahold of preview tracks earlier than other people (granted, these all just end up on p2p so it becomes moot), discounts on concert tickets and fan merchandise, access to reserved ticketing for popular concerts, and less restrictive DRM for loyal customers
- This part is critical: respect the customer, respect his rights. Do not assume everybody who buys your music is doing so to put in on eMule. Establish that you trust your customer to be a good consumer.
The profit here may or may not be significant, but a combinaton of a revenue stream plus reduced losses from piracy might make it worth the effort.Don't bother telling me that piracy doesn't actually cost them anything, it doesn't matter whether it does or not as long as they think it does. If they think it does, and they want to reduce/eliminate it, far better than they do so by leveraging technology to our benefit than try to get their business model legislated.
Distributed Labels of Reporting Companies Sony Classical Sony Discos Sony Japan Sony Labels Sony Music Sony Music US (Latin) Sony Wonder
Given all quarter notes or what? Because for every melody, you can create a new one by splitting any given note into two different notes, the sum of whose durations is equal to the original. And you could split it into 3 notes, or 4 notes ... and each of those into briefer notes, etc.
It's like the people who want to map every possible permutation of a chess game. I think it's impossible, because there's infinite possibilities. I'm sure somebody will quibble with this. I liken it to a problem I once thought up when I was a kid while biking to my friend's house. I used to debate with myself which way was fastest, and then invent new ways to get there, and try them, and then once I wondered how many total possible ways there were to get there from my house. I concluded that there had to be infinite (I was a nerdy kid). Even if I took the most direct route, I could simple circle any given block once to create a new route; circle it twice to create another new route; circle it twice but backwards the second time to create another new route, etc.
You'd have to impose some kind of limit on what constitutes a "unique" melody (perhaps the copyright office can help you out on this) to make a plan like this a reality.
Assume your song is has a duration of one note, may consist of notes no briefer than 16th notes, and must be within 1 octave of concert middle C. That means you've got a 2-octave range in which there are, in Western music, 23 notes (I think). So there's 23 possible tubes. Each could be a whole note, a half-note, a dotted half-note, a quarter-note, a dotted quarter-note, an eigth-note, a dotted eight-note, a sixteenth-note, a dotted sixteenth note. So there's 23 x 9 = 207 possible songs just using 1 note in a two octave range with pretty strict limits. To say nothing of stuff like fermatas, key signitures, etc.
Your task is monumental, sir!
It's understandable that quality will suffer as popularity/population increases, but journalistic errors like this are exactly why I feel it's safe to laugh at loud when people quote web sites, even reputable news sites, as evidence for some of the nutty things they believe.
This was pooh-pooh'd, however, by the optimists, who said that by the time this is a problem, new forms of miniaturization will have been developed to overcome these problems, such as using biological material in computer circuitry whose electronic properties are different from metals in some fundamental way that I don't understand which solves this problem.
The date for all this sophistry? They said it in 1993 (I believe the article was in PC Magazine). I'm not really supporting either side here, just repeating something I learned almost 15 years ago and never forgot, because I'm still curious about who will end up being right. They predicted that computer development would hit a wall between 2015 and 2020.
Very well. A modest google search will bring up any of this, but plenty of independent and peer-reviewed surveys have been conducted to prove that:
(1) Most downloading is of copyrighted material that the downloader has no legal right to
(2) The number of people who buy less music because it's available for free on-line is far greater than the number who buy more
Some sample studies that have been done include:
Actually, it is illegal. See US Code: Title 17: Chapter 1: Section 102. I'll quote it for your convenience.
When you download, you reproduce the work, and thus you violate this law.
It also appears, in an examination of the Fair Use Doctrine (US Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107) that Fair Use does not give you the right to make copies of your music. That right applies only to computer programs (US Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117). Whether or not an MP3 could be classified as a computer program is another question. I'm sure there's been a legal case that already has examined and made a determination on this.
Ahhhh, gotcha. My bad. Your debunking of my supporting argument, however, falls flat, since you mentioned sales figures to support a shift in public association, when sales figures are irrelevent. My point stands if public perception is such that, whether I buy a Frisbee-brand product or not, I use the word "Frisbee" to describe the thing I have purchased, referring not to the brand (as in, "I bought a Honda") but the product (as in, "I bought a car.").
If people were starting to use "Frisbee" the way I used "Honda" above, and "flying disc" or whatever the way I used "car", I think you've got something there. Speaking from, admittedly, only my own experience, I haven't seen any evidence of this change. Perhaps you have, and that's the source of our disagreement, but your retort to my original point didn't demonstrate this in any way.