Got to hand it to Bill, he had the interviewer backpedalling wit that one because he had a valid point -- there are too many extremists and extremist views in the Linux/OSS community. Take for instance RMS, who says not only should software be given away for $0, but if you charge money for software, you are committing an unethical act.
He doesn't just say that software should be given away for $0, he's written a prolific amount of software that is used right at this moment by many millions of people and he DID give it away for $0. He is the 'starving artist' of the software world, an artist that does it for the love of his art. I don't see why you have a problem with that.
Or, in his last interview publicized on/., RMS was quoted as saying people ought to quit their jobs if it requires them to use 'un-free' software.
I refuse to work on software for Microsoft platforms, and have always made it clear I would quit my job should my company try and make me. This is simply because I think they write badly designed software and the frustration of trying to write software on such shoddy foundations would take the fun out of my job. I'm priviledged enought to be able to make that choice and still put food on the table, and I take full advantage.
This extremism is what is being picked by the MSFT et al crowd. It's high time the OSS community seperates itself from such lunacy.
Since when does having your own point of view and set of ethics become 'lunacy'? You are becoming hysterical for no reason.
Why is the word communist a deragatory term now a days.
Because it's a rubbish system that has shown since its inception to lead to totalitarian regimes which execute brutal mass repression of its people?
People have no clue what it means and use it as a slam. Guess 50 years of govt brainwashing work.
Of course you are far better educated than the rest of the civilised world. Cue the trite, "You can't take Stalinist Russia or Mao's China as examples of TRUE communism as Marx said blah blah blah".
IF someone would have linked to the full discussion, it would have turned out that he suggested a 5 working day embargo on the disclosure MAX.
I would have thought the embargo should be n-1 days, where n is the number of days it would take a company to serve the individual courteous enough to notify the vendor before the public with a gagging order on some frivoulous pretext (DMCA etc):-/
I thought they had found a method to further compress a JPEG, while still maintaining the original format. i.e. it could still be viewed with a regular JPG viewer. That kind of optimization would've been great, especially if it could be used on webpages, forums etc.
If you have a large archive of images you need to access online, you can always put them all on a partition and mount a Virtual File System that decodes SIF->JPEG on the fly. This would solve the backwards compatibility.
But this is somewhat disappointing. The compression changes the format, and it must be decompressed to view it. Plus they don't intend on releasing the format, and their proposal for a new filetype which can be read by a "plugin" reeks of incompatibility issues.
If they don't make it a free format then it's pretty much dead in the water, forcing them to hard-sell to niche markets that require substantial image archival. A compromise could be to make it free for software implementation but charge for hardware implementation (ie in digital cameras).
Maybe it's the paranoid dad in me, but while it may be nice to see what my kids and teachers are doing, it scares me that some pediphile may be watching what kids are doing, learning their favorite activites, and their overall daily schedule. The ped could even be a parent that has a kid registered at the school making access even easier. So in the end, I axed schools that has cams (especially wireless ones) and convinced my wife based on the reasons above.
You sound totally paranoid. The driver of your school bus could be a pedo. In fact don't take your kid to the beach, a pedo-infested hunting ground. Statistically walking down the street your kid may pass a few.
Despite what the media may say, the world is populated by mostly normal people. Teaching your kid the dangers and a bit of common sense, and a CCTV camera by the school gates where the kids are picked up, should ensure nothing happens. Please don't inflict your irrational fears on your kids, the media and certain Prominent Politicians will be doing far too much of that already.
Of course if you put in place the elements of a Big Brother state then they will be abused. Three working for the UK authorities have been suspended for perving through a young ladies window, goodness knows how they got found out. I'm sure 99.99% of these cases are never detected.
Of course we now know that the prevalence of computers that would fail because of this error was greatly exaggerated by the media. Computer scientists were generally aware that most machines would continue operating as usual through the century turnover, with the worst result being an incorrect date. This prediction withstood through to the new millennium.
Untrue. Computer Scientists were aware that an awful lot of work was needed to prevent widescale computer crashes and were evangelising as such since the early 90s. An incorrect date can wreak havoc in banking, accounts, system backups, etc. As for saying this prediction withstood... what a load of crock. Business sank hundreds of millions into ensuring the millenium ticked in smoothly.
There are however several other problems with date handling on machines in the world today. Some are less prevalent than others, but it is true that almost all computers suffer from one critical limitation. Most programs use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to work out their dates. Simply, UTC is the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1 1970. A recent milestone was Sep 9 2001, where this value wrapped from 999'999'999 seconds to 1'000'000'000 seconds. Very few programs anywhere store time as a 9 digit number, and therefore this was not a problem.
Someone has already pointed out that UTC is not the number of seconds elapsed since 1970. As far as I know that format was picked arbitarily by Kernigan and Ritchie when they wrote the C language and Unix operating system.
"There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises."
Yep, he pretty much just said that if you don't support IP then your a Communist. What a douchebag.
I like this new generic group: musicians, moviemakers and software makers. Thanks Bill, you make me feel like a rock and roll star!
It's typical PR spin. If you repeat something untrue often enough people may believe it. Rather than remove incentive for software makers, OSS makes the bar higher and requires software to be of a much higher caliber to provide value and make it worth paying for instead of using free software. Of course the maker of shoddy bug-ridden software is going to be frightened by this. Bill is still living in the 80s where software was so rare you paid through the nose for applications you needed no matter how poorly written. The world has moved on since then and he has been left behind.
I went over to a friend's house to 'fix' a problem. He was having trouble cutting and pasting a diagram from StarOffice to Word2003. I discovered that all this time he had been using Wordpad and never known he wasn't using Word. I would also use Word97 under Windows if Abiword didn't suffice for most of my needs. I do miss my RiscOS4 with Impressions and Techwriter though. They beat the pants off any of them.
Some products were not made to be combined. A cell phone iPod combination makes sense, a cell phone TV doesn't. HDTV on your cellphone screen is even sillier. You want a screen at least 5cm square, 10cm for HD.
I was playing with a phone this afternoon with a screen 5cm square, and only a few mm thick. Talking about TV and HDTV doesn't make any sense. Surely it will be a digitally encoded low-res signal tailored to small screens. I know a number of people that pay good money just to get the football (soccer) scores as they happen via SMS. If they can get the rights to show the goals too then someone is going to make a killing.
Phillip.
Re:Local bike cops got segways...
on
Segway Polo
·
· Score: 1
A bunch of local businessmen donated segways to the local police department earlier this year. I was talking to one of the officers who is using them now, and he says it is the worst waste of money he's ever seen. The segways are not as manuverable/fast as a bike, need batteries, and are just wierd around town. Sounds about right to me.
You don't think it was merely a hint by the local businessmen as to the girth of the police officers in their area?
I think a number are great ideas for automation. I much prefer booking my flight online as opposed to trekking down my high-street comparing prices of travel agent after travel agent. I use Amazon as much for its convenience as for its prices. Online banking is also great. I'd order groceries online if I could here too, for basic things such as rice and mineral water, leaving my grocery shopping free to pick out fine wines or specialty ingredients. To be honest I'm not too fussed about buying from other people for 99% of purchases, only when buying specialist things such as a guitar or rare book.
I agree with everything you have to say. I'm holding off buying in the hope they'll change. Any ideas on how the system could be improved? Personally I would be prepared to buy if the Valve authentication servers could not be contacted it gave you the benefit of the doubt and let you play. If Valve went belly-up and the servers went down then I would still be able to play the game I bought. The problem with that system is it would encourage DDoS attacks on the Valve authentication servers. OTOH it would mean DDoS attacks wouldn't inconvenience customers.
The scroll bar snapping back if you move the pointer too far away is probably THE most annoying Windows bug.
Then I agree with others about pop-up windows stealing focus, and applications opening windows which then block the rest of the application until it's closed.
There's at least one of these cars being used by the New South Wales police here in Sydney and it's painted just like a regular cop car.
It drove past me once as I was walking to lunch in the city, the sight of two cops in this thing made me and a lot of other people piss ourselves laughing:-)
You could tell the cops felt like dicks in it, they just had these sheepish grins on their faces...
Being a police officer is about ensuring the safety of the citizens, not looking macho. In a city it makes a lot of sense. You can do an instant u-turn in a street instead of a 3-point turn. Easier to weave around people/obstructions. Acceleration is more important than top-end speed. And for a car that is supposed to be permanently moving, usually at low speed, the high mpg is a plus for the taxpayer. So cut the poor guys some slack!:-)
Forcing customers to do business on your terms (buy the CD @ the producer-price-fixed $18 or break the law)[snip]
You mean forcing customers to buy the $18 CD, which then is copy protected so it won't work when they try and listen to it at work on their computer? Which is the reason they bought it in the first place?
Note to the entertainment industry: we computer scientists have jumped into the 21st century by getting through the Y2K bug, I suggest you push your business model to the 21st century as well and reap the benefits be earning my money instead of coercing me. iTunes started it, now embrace it.
iTunes started it??? If they arrived at a party, the last guests would be stumbing drunkenly out. People were begging for a way of buying music online for years. The music industry REFUSED. Hence Napster... and the rest is history. Now, many YEARS later there are belated efforts such as iTunes which offer a restricted catalogue.
Music sales continue because despite the RIAA claims that all citizens are criminals, in real life most people are honest and happy to reward those the deserve it. The people that work hard and want to spend their well earned money are NOT happy when they are played for fools by people that want to rip them off. The crux of the problem is how to reward the artists without giving most of the cash to the fat cats leeching off them.
... in Edinburgh, local cinema managers are blaming declining attendances on pirate DVD's being sold at local flea markets.
So much easier than blaming the decline in the quality in movies. I've noticed that I'm downloading more and more, despite the fact that it's far easier to go down to my cheap local video rental place than spend over a day downloading over the Internet. Why? Two reasons. First, the quality of films normally 'safe' (big names, major brand) have fallen to an APPALLING low. Eg I downloaded and watched Solaris with George Clooney. I would have felt sick if I'd paid 1c to watch that. Second, I cannot find the great films I want to watch for hire (examples: Project A with Jackie Chan, or Hard Boiled with Chow Yun Fat).
I wait and read Rotten Tomato, and if it's got a good review then I'll watch it in the cinema (and if I miss it then DVD). Some I'll wait the fscking x months between it coming out in US and poor cousin 'Europe'. Otherwise I'll just download it and watch the first 15 mins. If it's good then I'll stop and hire the DVD (eg The Circle). If not I'll probably watch to the end, in the same way you can't help but watch a car crash, and then later wonder why I just lost a couple of hours of my life.
It's well known that EDS are incompetant and unprofessional, costing UK taxpayers hundreds millions of pounds. Examples include tax, welfareand air safety. In fact they seem to be awarded contracts by default despite not a single success with projects running hundreds of millions over budget and those that aren't a couple of years late are junked as a massive write-off.
It's well known that the UK government are in the pocket of EDS and Microsoft. The worst thing is that it's not intentional. The people in charge of making these decisions are complete non-techies and haven't heard of any IT company that aren't a regular in the new headlines of the FT. It's not corruption, it's basically a lack of education.
Something to think about when libertarians/conservatives claim Europe is hopelessly behind in competitiveness. We get the same amount done AND we have much more pleasant lives.
Get the same amount done? In France you can be a maximum of 35hrs/week at work, this is not the same as 35hrs/week doing work. Factor in emailing each other jokes, chatting, cigarette breaks, extended 2hr lunches, etc, and you aren't talking about 35hrs of productivity.
Also can't generalise about 'Europe'. Different countries take their jobs with different levels of seriousness (affecting productivity).
Indeed MS was happy to encourage piracy to enable them to become a complete monopoly. Now they have achieved saturation their shareholders are squeezing them for continued growth and so MS in turn are turning on the squeeze on their customers.
All my friends here are begging me to install Linux so they can go on the Internet safely. The first person I made the mistake of installing Gentoo. What a mistake. I can't even get my own machine into a usable state let alone find time to do someone else's. I'm going to persevere with it myself but everyone else gets Mandrake or Knoppix.
So you believe you'd have no problems buying a game and then using someone else's CD key? Hah!
Uh? I do this with friends all the time with Half Life 1. We've bought more copies than we have people that play it. What's the problem?
Fact of the matter is, there's no excuse to pirate this game, and Valve took the logical step that they can to protect their property. Don't even try to front like you've got any ethical ground to stand on.
How is using someone else's CD key pirating the game if you've bought an original copy?
The fact is that Valve have messed up big time. I don't know how they could throw away so much goodwill that they bought with HL1. Everyone who has bought HL2 will want to go online at some point, at which point they will need a valid key. What morons are still left in the software industry that haven't learned: * don't require the CD in the drive - much as your precious software is *your* baby, we have several hundred other bits of software just as important to us stacked all over the house * no hardware dongles - again, your software isn't the only one we use. Can you imagine trying to plug a dozen dongles into one parallel port, ignoring the usual screwing up of the printer * no online activation - we don't all have Internet, and those of us that do don't trust being able to connect to servers. Steam sucks, I've lost count of the number of times I couldn't access CS for days at a time.
I'm going to hold off buying HL2 for a few months, and if they don't change their tune then I'm sure a new title will come out I can purchase instead.
Be reducing all the benefits of OOP (huge and varied, numerous and wonderful)
After being over-exposed to OOP (clunky, temptation to make everything an object, multiple inheritence obscuring what the code is supposed to do), people are trying to find a balance between when OOP should and shouldn't be used.
we seek to define our crowining enterprise applications with an approach from the 70's that would pioneer the use of string processing programming constructs over highly developed and structured powerful programming tools.
A lot of people reading Slashdot are in the web industry, which is primarily text processing (though we can think up fancy names such as data mining, content management systems, etc).Don't think you've discovered anything no-one else has, the chances are they've all tried these "powerful programming tools" and discarded them as unproductive for them.
The program isn't the code, it isn't the data, it is the design, the behaviour, the organisation, the people understanding it. All of this becomes very alien to us when we go this route.
Complete BS. You do a func spec then a tech spec. After this the implementation is down to the project manager and the developer. With the right specs the system will behave identically, no matter what language it is written in. Whether C, Java, C#, Lisp or Whitespace. The main difference is in the time-to-market and the maintenance costs (usually inversely proportional to each other).
In my experience Java takes a long time to develop, but when done you can just throw more and more hardware at it. LAMP is an order of magnitude quicker to develop but when hitting hardware limitations you need more lateral thinking to overcome these.
I think hydrogen counts as a natural fuel, and BMW have non-commercial versions going 300 km/h. The fact is that when you say electric vehicles crawl slower than snails you only mean top-end speed. An electric vehicle will leave its petrol equivalent dead at the lights. I think the massive increase in acceleration will be a big seller.
Slashdot Mirror
Got to hand it to Bill, he had the interviewer backpedalling wit that one because he had a valid point -- there are too many extremists and extremist views in the Linux/OSS community. Take for instance RMS, who says not only should software be given away for $0, but if you charge money for software, you are committing an unethical act.
/., RMS was quoted as saying people ought to quit their jobs if it requires them to use 'un-free' software.
He doesn't just say that software should be given away for $0, he's written a prolific amount of software that is used right at this moment by many millions of people and he DID give it away for $0. He is the 'starving artist' of the software world, an artist that does it for the love of his art. I don't see why you have a problem with that.
Or, in his last interview publicized on
I refuse to work on software for Microsoft platforms, and have always made it clear I would quit my job should my company try and make me. This is simply because I think they write badly designed software and the frustration of trying to write software on such shoddy foundations would take the fun out of my job. I'm priviledged enought to be able to make that choice and still put food on the table, and I take full advantage.
This extremism is what is being picked by the MSFT et al crowd. It's high time the OSS community seperates itself from such lunacy.
Since when does having your own point of view and set of ethics become 'lunacy'? You are becoming hysterical for no reason.
Phillip.
Why is the word communist a deragatory term now a days.
Because it's a rubbish system that has shown since its inception to lead to totalitarian regimes which execute brutal mass repression of its people?
People have no clue what it means and use it as a slam. Guess 50 years of govt brainwashing work.
Of course you are far better educated than the rest of the civilised world. Cue the trite, "You can't take Stalinist Russia or Mao's China as examples of TRUE communism as Marx said blah blah blah".
Phillip.
He's actually kind of right. IN a comunist/socialist systme, the people own the code. (Since the people own everything.)
This is a refreshing contrast to the fascist model, where the state owns the code. In this case, the writers own the code.
If he says Linus is Stallin/lennin/marx, then he's Hitler by the same set of parameters.
Under Milo Mindbender, everyone owns a part of M&M Enterprises.
Actually under both a communist and fascist model the state owns the code. Under a capitalist model the writer owns the code.
Phillip.
IF someone would have linked to the full discussion, it would have turned out that he suggested a 5 working day embargo on the disclosure MAX.
:-/
I would have thought the embargo should be n-1 days, where n is the number of days it would take a company to serve the individual courteous enough to notify the vendor before the public with a gagging order on some frivoulous pretext (DMCA etc)
Phillip.
support Active X controls under Windows
ROTFL. I like the joke option to keep us on our toes. Nice one.
Phillip.
I thought they had found a method to further compress a JPEG, while still maintaining the original format. i.e. it could still be viewed with a regular JPG viewer. That kind of optimization would've been great, especially if it could be used on webpages, forums etc.
If you have a large archive of images you need to access online, you can always put them all on a partition and mount a Virtual File System that decodes SIF->JPEG on the fly. This would solve the backwards compatibility.
But this is somewhat disappointing. The compression changes the format, and it must be decompressed to view it. Plus they don't intend on releasing the format, and their proposal for a new filetype which can be read by a "plugin" reeks of incompatibility issues.
If they don't make it a free format then it's pretty much dead in the water, forcing them to hard-sell to niche markets that require substantial image archival. A compromise could be to make it free for software implementation but charge for hardware implementation (ie in digital cameras).
Phillip.
Maybe it's the paranoid dad in me, but while it may be nice to see what my kids and teachers are doing, it scares me that some pediphile may be watching what kids are doing, learning their favorite activites, and their overall daily schedule. The ped could even be a parent that has a kid registered at the school making access even easier. So in the end, I axed schools that has cams (especially wireless ones) and convinced my wife based on the reasons above.
You sound totally paranoid. The driver of your school bus could be a pedo. In fact don't take your kid to the beach, a pedo-infested hunting ground. Statistically walking down the street your kid may pass a few.
Despite what the media may say, the world is populated by mostly normal people. Teaching your kid the dangers and a bit of common sense, and a CCTV camera by the school gates where the kids are picked up, should ensure nothing happens. Please don't inflict your irrational fears on your kids, the media and certain Prominent Politicians will be doing far too much of that already.
Phillip.
Of course if you put in place the elements of a Big Brother state then they will be abused. Three working for the UK authorities have been suspended for perving through a young ladies window, goodness knows how they got found out. I'm sure 99.99% of these cases are never detected.
Phillip.
Of course we now know that the prevalence of computers that would fail because of this error was greatly exaggerated by the media. Computer scientists were generally aware that most machines would continue operating as usual through the century turnover, with the worst result being an incorrect date. This prediction withstood through to the new millennium.
Untrue. Computer Scientists were aware that an awful lot of work was needed to prevent widescale computer crashes and were evangelising as such since the early 90s. An incorrect date can wreak havoc in banking, accounts, system backups, etc. As for saying this prediction withstood... what a load of crock. Business sank hundreds of millions into ensuring the millenium ticked in smoothly.
There are however several other problems with date handling on machines in the world today. Some are less prevalent than others, but it is true that almost all computers suffer from one critical limitation. Most programs use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to work out their dates. Simply, UTC is the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1 1970. A recent milestone was Sep 9 2001, where this value wrapped from 999'999'999 seconds to 1'000'000'000 seconds. Very few programs anywhere store time as a 9 digit number, and therefore this was not a problem.
Someone has already pointed out that UTC is not the number of seconds elapsed since 1970. As far as I know that format was picked arbitarily by Kernigan and Ritchie when they wrote the C language and Unix operating system.
Phillip.
"There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises."
Yep, he pretty much just said that if you don't support IP then your a Communist. What a douchebag.
I like this new generic group: musicians, moviemakers and software makers. Thanks Bill, you make me feel like a rock and roll star!
It's typical PR spin. If you repeat something untrue often enough people may believe it. Rather than remove incentive for software makers, OSS makes the bar higher and requires software to be of a much higher caliber to provide value and make it worth paying for instead of using free software. Of course the maker of shoddy bug-ridden software is going to be frightened by this. Bill is still living in the 80s where software was so rare you paid through the nose for applications you needed no matter how poorly written. The world has moved on since then and he has been left behind.
Phillip.
I went over to a friend's house to 'fix' a problem. He was having trouble cutting and pasting a diagram from StarOffice to Word2003. I discovered that all this time he had been using Wordpad and never known he wasn't using Word. I would also use Word97 under Windows if Abiword didn't suffice for most of my needs. I do miss my RiscOS4 with Impressions and Techwriter though. They beat the pants off any of them.
Phillip.
Some products were not made to be combined. A cell phone iPod combination makes sense, a cell phone TV doesn't. HDTV on your cellphone screen is even sillier. You want a screen at least 5cm square, 10cm for HD.
I was playing with a phone this afternoon with a screen 5cm square, and only a few mm thick. Talking about TV and HDTV doesn't make any sense. Surely it will be a digitally encoded low-res signal tailored to small screens. I know a number of people that pay good money just to get the football (soccer) scores as they happen via SMS. If they can get the rights to show the goals too then someone is going to make a killing.
Phillip.
A bunch of local businessmen donated segways to the local police department earlier this year. I was talking to one of the officers who is using them now, and he says it is the worst waste of money he's ever seen. The segways are not as manuverable/fast as a bike, need batteries, and are just wierd around town. Sounds about right to me.
You don't think it was merely a hint by the local businessmen as to the girth of the police officers in their area?
Phillip.
Service jobs are a bad idea for automation.
I think a number are great ideas for automation. I much prefer booking my flight online as opposed to trekking down my high-street comparing prices of travel agent after travel agent. I use Amazon as much for its convenience as for its prices. Online banking is also great. I'd order groceries online if I could here too, for basic things such as rice and mineral water, leaving my grocery shopping free to pick out fine wines or specialty ingredients. To be honest I'm not too fussed about buying from other people for 99% of purchases, only when buying specialist things such as a guitar or rare book.
Phillip.
I agree with everything you have to say. I'm holding off buying in the hope they'll change. Any ideas on how the system could be improved? Personally I would be prepared to buy if the Valve authentication servers could not be contacted it gave you the benefit of the doubt and let you play. If Valve went belly-up and the servers went down then I would still be able to play the game I bought. The problem with that system is it would encourage DDoS attacks on the Valve authentication servers. OTOH it would mean DDoS attacks wouldn't inconvenience customers.
Phillip.
The scroll bar snapping back if you move the pointer too far away is probably THE most annoying Windows bug.
Then I agree with others about pop-up windows stealing focus, and applications opening windows which then block the rest of the application until it's closed.
Phillip.
There's at least one of these cars being used by the New South Wales police here in Sydney and it's painted just like a regular cop car.
:-)
:-)
It drove past me once as I was walking to lunch in the city, the sight of two cops in this thing made me and a lot of other people piss ourselves laughing
You could tell the cops felt like dicks in it, they just had these sheepish grins on their faces...
Being a police officer is about ensuring the safety of the citizens, not looking macho. In a city it makes a lot of sense. You can do an instant u-turn in a street instead of a 3-point turn. Easier to weave around people/obstructions. Acceleration is more important than top-end speed. And for a car that is supposed to be permanently moving, usually at low speed, the high mpg is a plus for the taxpayer. So cut the poor guys some slack!
Phillip.
Forcing customers to do business on your terms (buy the CD @ the producer-price-fixed $18 or break the law)[snip]
You mean forcing customers to buy the $18 CD, which then is copy protected so it won't work when they try and listen to it at work on their computer? Which is the reason they bought it in the first place?
Note to the entertainment industry: we computer scientists have jumped into the 21st century by getting through the Y2K bug, I suggest you push your business model to the 21st century as well and reap the benefits be earning my money instead of coercing me. iTunes started it, now embrace it.
iTunes started it??? If they arrived at a party, the last guests would be stumbing drunkenly out. People were begging for a way of buying music online for years. The music industry REFUSED. Hence Napster... and the rest is history. Now, many YEARS later there are belated efforts such as iTunes which offer a restricted catalogue.
Music sales continue because despite the RIAA claims that all citizens are criminals, in real life most people are honest and happy to reward those the deserve it. The people that work hard and want to spend their well earned money are NOT happy when they are played for fools by people that want to rip them off. The crux of the problem is how to reward the artists without giving most of the cash to the fat cats leeching off them.
Phillip.
So much easier than blaming the decline in the quality in movies. I've noticed that I'm downloading more and more, despite the fact that it's far easier to go down to my cheap local video rental place than spend over a day downloading over the Internet. Why? Two reasons. First, the quality of films normally 'safe' (big names, major brand) have fallen to an APPALLING low. Eg I downloaded and watched Solaris with George Clooney. I would have felt sick if I'd paid 1c to watch that. Second, I cannot find the great films I want to watch for hire (examples: Project A with Jackie Chan, or Hard Boiled with Chow Yun Fat).
I wait and read Rotten Tomato, and if it's got a good review then I'll watch it in the cinema (and if I miss it then DVD). Some I'll wait the fscking x months between it coming out in US and poor cousin 'Europe'. Otherwise I'll just download it and watch the first 15 mins. If it's good then I'll stop and hire the DVD (eg The Circle). If not I'll probably watch to the end, in the same way you can't help but watch a car crash, and then later wonder why I just lost a couple of hours of my life.
Phillip.
It's well known that EDS are incompetant and unprofessional, costing UK taxpayers hundreds millions of pounds. Examples include tax, welfareand air safety. In fact they seem to be awarded contracts by default despite not a single success with projects running hundreds of millions over budget and those that aren't a couple of years late are junked as a massive write-off.
It's well known that the UK government are in the pocket of EDS and Microsoft. The worst thing is that it's not intentional. The people in charge of making these decisions are complete non-techies and haven't heard of any IT company that aren't a regular in the new headlines of the FT. It's not corruption, it's basically a lack of education.
Phillip.
Something to think about when libertarians/conservatives claim Europe is hopelessly behind in competitiveness. We get the same amount done AND we have much more pleasant lives.
Get the same amount done? In France you can be a maximum of 35hrs/week at work, this is not the same as 35hrs/week doing work. Factor in emailing each other jokes, chatting, cigarette breaks, extended 2hr lunches, etc, and you aren't talking about 35hrs of productivity.
Also can't generalise about 'Europe'. Different countries take their jobs with different levels of seriousness (affecting productivity).
Phillip.
Indeed MS was happy to encourage piracy to enable them to become a complete monopoly. Now they have achieved saturation their shareholders are squeezing them for continued growth and so MS in turn are turning on the squeeze on their customers.
All my friends here are begging me to install Linux so they can go on the Internet safely. The first person I made the mistake of installing Gentoo. What a mistake. I can't even get my own machine into a usable state let alone find time to do someone else's. I'm going to persevere with it myself but everyone else gets Mandrake or Knoppix.
Phillip.
So you believe you'd have no problems buying a game and then using someone else's CD key? Hah!
Uh? I do this with friends all the time with Half Life 1. We've bought more copies than we have people that play it. What's the problem?
Fact of the matter is, there's no excuse to pirate this game, and Valve took the logical step that they can to protect their property. Don't even try to front like you've got any ethical ground to stand on.
How is using someone else's CD key pirating the game if you've bought an original copy?
The fact is that Valve have messed up big time. I don't know how they could throw away so much goodwill that they bought with HL1. Everyone who has bought HL2 will want to go online at some point, at which point they will need a valid key. What morons are still left in the software industry that haven't learned:
* don't require the CD in the drive - much as your precious software is *your* baby, we have several hundred other bits of software just as important to us stacked all over the house
* no hardware dongles - again, your software isn't the only one we use. Can you imagine trying to plug a dozen dongles into one parallel port, ignoring the usual screwing up of the printer
* no online activation - we don't all have Internet, and those of us that do don't trust being able to connect to servers. Steam sucks, I've lost count of the number of times I couldn't access CS for days at a time.
I'm going to hold off buying HL2 for a few months, and if they don't change their tune then I'm sure a new title will come out I can purchase instead.
Phillip.
Be reducing all the benefits of OOP (huge and varied, numerous and wonderful)
After being over-exposed to OOP (clunky, temptation to make everything an object, multiple inheritence obscuring what the code is supposed to do), people are trying to find a balance between when OOP should and shouldn't be used.
we seek to define our crowining enterprise applications with an approach from the 70's that would pioneer the use of string processing programming constructs over highly developed and structured powerful programming tools.
A lot of people reading Slashdot are in the web industry, which is primarily text processing (though we can think up fancy names such as data mining, content management systems, etc).Don't think you've discovered anything no-one else has, the chances are they've all tried these "powerful programming tools" and discarded them as unproductive for them.
The program isn't the code, it isn't the data, it is the design, the behaviour, the organisation, the people understanding it. All of this becomes very alien to us when we go this route.
Complete BS. You do a func spec then a tech spec. After this the implementation is down to the project manager and the developer. With the right specs the system will behave identically, no matter what language it is written in. Whether C, Java, C#, Lisp or Whitespace. The main difference is in the time-to-market and the maintenance costs (usually inversely proportional to each other).
In my experience Java takes a long time to develop, but when done you can just throw more and more hardware at it. LAMP is an order of magnitude quicker to develop but when hitting hardware limitations you need more lateral thinking to overcome these.
Phillip.
I think hydrogen counts as a natural fuel, and BMW have non-commercial versions going 300 km/h. The fact is that when you say electric vehicles crawl slower than snails you only mean top-end speed. An electric vehicle will leave its petrol equivalent dead at the lights. I think the massive increase in acceleration will be a big seller.
Phillip.