I'm not going to bother discussing this with somebody who didn't read my post and is responding to one sentence in isolation. Go read it again and respond (not as AC) if you want to actually discuss what I proposed which has NOTHING to do with oil. And yes, oil (and more relevantly ethanol, since that's what my post was about) are far, far cheaper and easier to transport forms of... you guessed it, HYDROGEN.
The efficiency of the whole fuel cell production, hydrogen production, and use cycle is what we were discussing (and I was comparing it to lignocellulosic bioethanol, not a fossil fuel economy), not the obvious fact the efficiency of the under-the-hood portion of the process is quite different. Talk about missing the entire point...
No, I appreciate the value, but I also appreciate the cost. Haven't you worked on a project that had so many architects and levels of abstraction that it became massively inefficient and had to be ripped apart and rewritten to keep things "closer to the metal"? I know I have. I appreciate the potential value of hydrogen as an abstraction mechanism, but I think the costs are way too high, when a fraction of the same money could be used to much better effect _right now_. Also, hydrogen is just one possible energy storage mechanism - ethanol is another one that has many of the excellent properties of gasoline for storage and use at normal room temperatures on our planet - it doesn't require highly pressurized storage tanks and specialized transportation infrastructure, can be pumped from current pumps, can be used with current engines, and is generally very stable and not prone to explosive combustion. You can even build ethanol or methanol based fuel cells if you really think combustion is a bad way to extract energy. In fact, most of the fuel cells for laptops and cell phones that are being commercialized now are methanol or ethanol based, rather than hydrogen based due to exactly these factors that I mention.
I stand corrected on the current wisdom on corn ethanol - I have heard the same before, it's just that I prefer not to deal with debating about corn ethanol since it gets so damned contentious and everybody has an opinion about it. Better to keep the conversation focused on the less politically baggage laden, more economically promising production methodologies.
As for your claims about biodiesel, based on my research about a year and a half ago, the production cost gap between B100 and fossil fuel diesel was still much greater than the gap between estimated cost of large scale fuel ethanol production and gasoline fuel, which likely reflects the underlying energy economics. I'm not saying biodiesel isn't great stuff, but I'd like to see some evidence to support this claim... I'm well aware of the biodiesel algae research, and I was involved in doing a study on that as well. Again, it's entirely possible, but still didn't look like it was as economically promising to harvest biodiesel from algae without substantial genetic engineering work to improve lipid yields and growth rates simultaneously (as I recall, these two factors tended to work at odds with each other). It's entirely possible that more progress has been made on the genetic engineering front though by now, and I definitely agree with you that biodiesel-from-algae has lots of long term promise.
The sad thing is that it looks like a lot of the NREL's work on bioethanol has been reorganized or deprioritized from their website, which doesn't really make any extensive mention of it anymore. Hopefully work is still ongoing behind the scenes.
I thought everybody but George Bush knew that the supposed economics of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles were a crock. This has been widely reported in mass media, discussed and rehashed many times on Slashdot. Hydrogen isn't clean unless it's being produced by clean means. If we are just going to burn more coal and oil to make hydrogen, we gain some efficiency by producing the energy centrally, but lose that energy savings and then some in the transportation and distribution of the hydrogen (or by the lesser economies of small-scale distributed hydrogen production). Every time you convert the form of energy, you lose energy - at best you get 75-80% efficiency in a conversion (as in large scale cracking of water to hydrogen), at worst, much less.
Instead of investing billions in pipe dreams, we should focus on excellent technology that can be implemented in the next few years for a reasonable cost. Renewable cellulose-derived ethanol could reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels and is neutral in net carbon impact (the carbon emissions from burning the fuel are offset by growing more low cost fuel crops that take CO2 out of the environment). And current gasoline engines run with minimal modifications on E85, an 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline mix. Making FFV engines (flexible fuel vehicles - compatible with ethanol and gasoline in various mixtures) can be done for at most 100-200 dollars of extra cost at vehicle build time, and many FFVs are already on the road in the US (in many cases, people don't even know they have them, the manufacturers build them for tax breaks then don't market the features outside of certain areas of the midwest where corn-derived ethanol is available at the gas station).
At current gas prices, cellulose-derived ethanol is actually more than competitive, it is cheaper than gas - the problem is the long term instability of gas prices makes investing in infrastructure to produce cellulosic ethanol as a fuel substitute too risky - it's hard to compete with something pumped out of the ground, where most of the costs are transportation, and political/defense issues. Please note that we're NOT talking about corn ethanol, which a highly subsidized and environmentally contentious product due to high energy costs of growing and harvesting corn.
Actually, if you read it, the developer claims there was no copyright assignment or explicit contract in place. Without that, the contractee really only has the right to use the code developed - the money changing hands is generally considered acceptance of a contract for the time involved and services rendered, but that doesn't involve a transfer of copyright unless there is a document signed by both parties or comparable evidence of contractual agreement to such a term.
I don't think this looks bad for OSS. Don't try to operate a technology-based business on top of other people's work without a basic understanding of the laws involved, just like any other business. This dude has no fundamental right to his business, he needs to take responsibility for putting proper contracts and documentation in place when he hires developers, and be very clear and explicit about handling copyright issues with his code, just like any other techology business. If he can't handle that, and he can't keep a competitive edge for his business, well, cry me a river for this moron.
This stuff normally doesn't happen because companies "paper trail the fuck out of it" (to use the software industry term of art) when it comes to employment agreements, independent contractor agreements, and copyright assignment agreements, and for good reason.
While you are correct on all these things, the real question is what happens to that code if said party leaks it? As far as my understanding of the GPL goes, in order for him to have commissioned the modification of it, he must accept the GPL (in other words, you don't really need to accept the license to just use, but to modify, you absolutely do). Thus, he has accepted the terms of the GPL, which include the fact that anybody to whom you distribute a binary has the right to a copy of the source which must be under a license that doesn't further restrict their ability to redistribute said code.
Now obviously, this developer sounds like they violated their contract, either explicit or implicit with their client or employer. But the question is did any "distribution" of the code go on? It did, but apparently it was unauthorized by the copyright holder (assuming that a proper assignment document was in place, which needs to be proved first). If the code itself was never distributed, then it is leaked internal code - not really that different from the Gnutella code, which was released without proper authorization by AOL, the copyright holder (a more debatable case, because clearly they had authorization at the AOL subsidiary, but not from corporate). Leaked internal code is definitely bad - but again, this guy has the burden of proof on him that he owns copyright to the code, he needs to document the contract and assignment of copyright thoroughly. And should probably accept that even if they take the patch out, they are just going to rewrite the same feature now with untainted code.
Again, we have a fringe case test of the GPL where the question is, what constitutes authorization for distribution and who owns the code in question? The trade secret claim is laughable - no CMS system contains anything remotely resembling a trade secret. There are dozens of these things, and pretty much any feature or two in isolation can't be considered a trade secret.
I just got a lump in my throat (of fear) when I saw that. My lord, why would anybody ever do such a thing? I hate TCL with an unbridled passion after trying to work with another person on developing an AOLserver/TCL app many years back. upvar this, upvar that. I have never seen a language that seems to more strongly desire making code unreadable, even for small team development efforts. Well except maybe Perl, but at least we all know Perl sucks.
See here for some rough (and somewhat outdated) assessments of CPython vs. Jython performance. It is somewhat slower, but depends on the nature of the task. And is it slower than the equivalent compiled Java bytecode? Again, probably yes, but for some tasks it doesn't matter. And the nice thing is you can write a whole app in Jython and easily rewrite performance critical components in Java and just call them from Jython, which is much easier given that everything happens in the bytecode realm than writing and exporting C/C++ modules to Python.
Okay, this isn't quite fair. I know you are joking around, so don't accuse me of having no sense of humor.:) There are a lot of things I like about Java, and J2EE is absolutely, positively NOT one of them (and yes, I've done fairly large rollouts with it and know how to optimize it, but I still think it's atrocious stuff and very ineffecient in terms of developer time and runtime performance, and no, 'scalability' is not a viable excuse since it's rarely as scalable as it ought to be). There are other nice frameworks for developing Java-based webapps that don't involve using EJBs and which involve just writing files.
Well let's see, probably because the support costs of dealing with confused or angry users who don't get email with their receipt or delivery of some electronic purchase confirmation, or any other of the zillions of important (account confirmation?) automated emails used every day? Then there's the problem of joe jobs - this floods replies back to spoofed From addresses, creating a real potential annoyance _IF_ it's implented on a large scale. In fact, doing this really relies on SPF to validate that the email comes from who it says it comes from. If it doesn't come from who it says it comes from, just throw it away in the first place (no bouncing, god, that just increases the mess). If it DOES, and you still feel you need an automatically managed whitelist solution like ASK, then by all means, go ahead, but at that point it's likely to cause more problems than it solves for ISPs with dumb users.
I agree with you that the article is rather unfair and can be accurately described as a hatchet piece (who among us _didn't_ work for some moderately or severely failed company in the late '90s, early 2000s? And especially the companies that ended up losing money well after he left them? Definitely not fair.). I will agree that this guy, as with many others I categorize as "marginal entrepreneurs", straddles the line between legitimate entrepreneur and shyster at times, but that's not terribly unusual. And clearly there was quite a bit of sketchiness and vapor factor associated with the Phantom console.
Anyway, I still don't think that piece justifies any legal action, since despite being quite negative and filling with several unjustified suggestions, it doesn't say or do anything clearly illegal. I don't know if HardOCP sued Infinium preemptively? That also sounds over the top. But hey, more power to 'em, threatening legal action against journalists, even ones who have nasty things to say about you, is almost always a bad idea.
Hmm, well, I can agree with you on environmental regulations since they are absolutely necessary to make up for negative externalities that corporations otherwise tend to inflict on the commons.
The labor union bit I'm a bit more iffy on. I'm theoretically supportive of the right of a group to collectively bargain, but in many cases (not all) strong labor unions tend to decrease personal iniative and motivators for efficiency and producitivity. And in others they just seem to drive sectors of the economy into the ground (airline industry anyone?). Obviously labor unions did a lot of good in the early part of this century to prevent flagrant abuses of workers, but I feel like a lot of that function is supplanted and much of the remainder could be by better legislation and enforcement of employment laws.
Let's see, you're liberal, but believe fundamentally in individual freedoms (including the second amendment), but scorn libertarians? So you're like a libertarian, only not a heartless Randian bastard?
Agreed, there is something nice sometimes about having somebody else pick the content for you, within certain bounds. The nice thing about XM radio is that it has exposed me to a lot of music I would never think of to download myself. XM is not perfect, but I do on the whole like the kind of programming breadth and depth they offer - I can listen to XM Pops or Classical and say "ah ha! I've heard this before!" and discover that a song I always liked was a fugue by Debussy. Or listen to some old school rap on 66/67 and rediscover a song I had loved as a kid. Or see what the latest tripe getting spewed on the Top 20 station is.
And then sometimes I just want to listen to specific songs from my mp3 collection. In any case, I'm all for some content programming, but I don't think I'm likely to give up my Tivo and start watching network TV ever again (Discovery HD though maybe, if they could just get a slightly broader array of programming on the channel).
He's given comparable amounts of money to Harvard (the infamous Max Dork, err... Maxwell Dworkin CS building) and now to MIT as well I believe (the new LCS building I think, haven't actually been in it yet). There was a bit of a fracas at Harvard over whether the dumb terminals that had been donated by Gates and Ballmer and then prompty wiped of the weird Windows terminal software and replaced with Linux should be taken down when Ballmer was there for the official ceremony honoring him and the building (they were, I believe, but promptly reappeared within a few days afterwards).
As far as I know, none of this has meaningfully affected the curriculum at either school, and I'm assuming UNIX is still as integral a part of the CS department at Harvard and MIT as it always was (there was no evidence when I was still in school that things were changing at all). I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft tried to get mileage out of it, but my guess is the best it does is give Gates good PR with the current crop of CS students and thus serves as a very effective recruiting exercise.
Jesus, shut your fucking trap. Many people in the top schools in this nation didn't come from privileged white suburbs. Plenty of people who grew up in lower and lower middle class surroundings and worked their asses off. Some of us value education and success because our families raise us that way regardless of our financial background. Yes I did go to a school not that far off from what you describe for several years (junior high school and first year of high school) before finally going to a private school when my family could afford it. I knew kids in college whose family circumstances were so messed up or were so poor they had been living on the streets in high school at times.
Just look at the kids of many immigrant families who grow up quite poor yet still end up highly motivated and successful. Just because the kids in the ghetto don't seem to understand the obvious (that academic success and achievement is a guaranteed way to a better life), don't go raging around at everybody else acting like we're all so damned spoiled or our lives have been perfect and wonderful.
I think it's pretty clear, legal gobbledygook style in number 2 aside - the cross-licensing agreement does not pass along to users or developers who work with Open Office, period. Without such a clause, a lawyer could argue, not necessarily successfully, that the cross-licensing agreement and normal indemnification associated with a product developed by a company could pass onto the users (because if Sun was a licensee of the patents, developed and released Open Source software using those patents, then their licensing partner sued the users, a judge might not hesitate to throw the claim out).
This way Microsoft can sue the users, sue Sun or sue anybody, but as long as Sun plays along well, any portion of liabilities that accrue to them will be reimbursed by Microsoft. So Sun is pretty much protected from any liability regarding Open Office as long as they play nicely with MS.
Is Microsoft planning such lawsuits? They have been keeping the option open for some time with their XML file format patents. If they actually try to do this, however, they would face some fearsome opposition. I suspect they intend primarily to use the threat that they MIGHT do it to prevent large scale adoption of Open Office where strategically necessary (US Government perhaps?).
No, I get the messed up margins too. Everybody gets that. I don't generally get black on black text or blank screens though (other than the occasional batch of 503 errors that Slashdot spews out). This has been a known issue for some time in Firefox, and was fixed ages ago in Gecko - they kept the patch out of the Firefox branch because it caused other bad layout regressions, in a rather complicated set of interdependent issues (copy and paste the following link as you an't link to Bugzilla from Slashdot directly: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217527 ). Not defending it, but just explaining that the reason they haven't brought this fix into the Firefox branch is because they still haven't fixed all the other layout bugs the fix introduced in the trunk, and thus fixing a minor layout annoyance on Slashdot might cause some other sites to stop layout out in a usable manner at all.
Of course, Slashdot could obviate this issue entirely by cleaning up their HTML and using reasonable CSS for layout.
Well, I agree, most Slashdotters still use Windows as their primary desktop OS and that wouldn't look good. But it's hard for me to believe that the IE browser share here could be over 50%. How could somebody even regularly read the homepage here without discovering other, better browsers? Using IE for even a modestly geeky person is like scraping your nails against a chalkboard.
It's the surcharge students are paying in the article, they just mangled the text a bit. Looks like they are paying 1 cent per kWh MORE for wind power than for regular power, which is much more believable, since generally power costs about 5-6 cents per kWh (more in some areas), excluding transmission costs (which are usually shown separately on your bill, another 5-6 cents per kWh).
It's about 75% efficient in most commercial processes, but I think building fuel cells on the scale needed to store primary generated power from a power plant would be extremely expensive. It seems that something like water-gravitational storage systems described elsewhere, while perhaps not quite as efficient, would be much cheaper to implement on this large scale.
No offense, but you're crazy. You think 15 old shells with cyclosporin that were almost surely around since pre-Gulf War justify the expense and cost of lives in fighting a whole war with Iraq? There was supposedly a stockpile, and there is no evidence whatsoever of a stockpile there at all. If I wanted to make an equivalent amount of chem/bio agents I could brew up a comparable amount in a garage lab. This would have been enough for a jury rigged terror attack that might have caused the loss of a few lives, maybe even a few dozen, but thousands? Very unlikely. And it is unlikely that the Iraqi government even knew they still had those 15 shells.
I don't claim to understand why the hell Saddam Hussein refused to allow inspections - that one is still a mystery to me. He was basically asking to get invaded, and he clearly got what he deserved. But I don't think the 1000 American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi grunts who died in the invasion, and several thousand civilian casualities that have resulted from our invasion were justified by this level of threat at all. Whether the result is good in the long run (more freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people and everyone in the Arab countries) is another question, but that argument sort of comes off sounding like "the ends justify the means".
The true neo-con justification for the war never had much to do with WMDs or supposed Al Qaeda-Iraqi interactions. That was just what was used to put the politically palatable face on this war and provide the justification to actually enable Bush to take an action he had clearly wanted to take from the minute he got to the Oval Office.
That's an amazing story - I'm shocked to hear that you made no sales at all on several million downloads. The first lesson I learned about shareware is that the download version of your product is not a piece of software at all, it's a sales pitch. It has to provide enough functionality to entice and convince the user of its value, provide sufficient incentive to register without annoying the user away instantly, and make the cost in terms of effort of piracy and cracking high enough that the casual user won't do it.
The reason I'm so shocked about your numbers is that I've found that some people will always buy software they like and use, with almost no incentive at all (actual functionality withheld) and some users will never buy your software no matter how cheap it is or how much you are giving them for their money. So zero sales is tough to imagine - probably has something to do with the type of market for a light HTML editor app. Some apps work better in the shareware model than others - I think apps that have fewer direct substitutions (competitors) available are more likely to entice buyers.
As for preventing cracking - my preferred personal approach has been a middle ground. Roll your own to avoid being part of somebody else's big target (especially if your app is a niche app - it's less likely to attract serious attention from the good crackers by itself, some script kiddie types will likely fool around with it and then give up when it turns out to be too hard to crack). Do hardware locking of your registration codes by using a modified (and well obfuscated) digital signature algorithm on a hardware-derived system ID. This is fairly tough to decipher with something like SoftICE or similar tools. Take some countermeasures in your release executables against the running of such debugger tools if you are really worried. Then allow users to obtain additional registration codes if they want to use the app on multiple computers, or they buy a new computer, etc., and have this all available automatically on your website, requiring essentially just their email address. Anyway, this pretty much destroys all the casual piracy associated with sharing reg codes on forums and bulletin boards. Your app will still be cracked eventually if enough people are interested, but like I said, most of the people who obtain and use that crack probably weren't going to buy it in the first place, so just forget about them and focus on providing some value for the people who are buying.
Agreed. Said loophole is not just weak, it is ridiculous. If I walked into a store and bought a piece of software or provided my credit card online to buy it, then I am the owner of a copy of it, unless I explicitly knew I was renting it and signed a rental contract of some sort up front. Have you ever "rented" anything without a rental contract (even when you rent videos at Blockbuster, you need an account and signed contract first)? You can't buy something then discover after the fact that the buyer wasn't ever really selling it, they were just selling you a box and "perpetually renting" you the contents, which they reserve the right to deny you your property rights (resale, etc.) on in the future.
As always EULAs have always been pretty much bogus - you can refuse to accept them, or click on "Accept" while your fingers are crossed, but you can still feel free to use the software as you will within the constraints of copyright law.
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The efficiency of the whole fuel cell production, hydrogen production, and use cycle is what we were discussing (and I was comparing it to lignocellulosic bioethanol, not a fossil fuel economy), not the obvious fact the efficiency of the under-the-hood portion of the process is quite different. Talk about missing the entire point...
No, I appreciate the value, but I also appreciate the cost. Haven't you worked on a project that had so many architects and levels of abstraction that it became massively inefficient and had to be ripped apart and rewritten to keep things "closer to the metal"? I know I have. I appreciate the potential value of hydrogen as an abstraction mechanism, but I think the costs are way too high, when a fraction of the same money could be used to much better effect _right now_. Also, hydrogen is just one possible energy storage mechanism - ethanol is another one that has many of the excellent properties of gasoline for storage and use at normal room temperatures on our planet - it doesn't require highly pressurized storage tanks and specialized transportation infrastructure, can be pumped from current pumps, can be used with current engines, and is generally very stable and not prone to explosive combustion. You can even build ethanol or methanol based fuel cells if you really think combustion is a bad way to extract energy. In fact, most of the fuel cells for laptops and cell phones that are being commercialized now are methanol or ethanol based, rather than hydrogen based due to exactly these factors that I mention.
As for your claims about biodiesel, based on my research about a year and a half ago, the production cost gap between B100 and fossil fuel diesel was still much greater than the gap between estimated cost of large scale fuel ethanol production and gasoline fuel, which likely reflects the underlying energy economics. I'm not saying biodiesel isn't great stuff, but I'd like to see some evidence to support this claim... I'm well aware of the biodiesel algae research, and I was involved in doing a study on that as well. Again, it's entirely possible, but still didn't look like it was as economically promising to harvest biodiesel from algae without substantial genetic engineering work to improve lipid yields and growth rates simultaneously (as I recall, these two factors tended to work at odds with each other). It's entirely possible that more progress has been made on the genetic engineering front though by now, and I definitely agree with you that biodiesel-from-algae has lots of long term promise.
The sad thing is that it looks like a lot of the NREL's work on bioethanol has been reorganized or deprioritized from their website, which doesn't really make any extensive mention of it anymore. Hopefully work is still ongoing behind the scenes.
Instead of investing billions in pipe dreams, we should focus on excellent technology that can be implemented in the next few years for a reasonable cost. Renewable cellulose-derived ethanol could reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels and is neutral in net carbon impact (the carbon emissions from burning the fuel are offset by growing more low cost fuel crops that take CO2 out of the environment). And current gasoline engines run with minimal modifications on E85, an 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline mix. Making FFV engines (flexible fuel vehicles - compatible with ethanol and gasoline in various mixtures) can be done for at most 100-200 dollars of extra cost at vehicle build time, and many FFVs are already on the road in the US (in many cases, people don't even know they have them, the manufacturers build them for tax breaks then don't market the features outside of certain areas of the midwest where corn-derived ethanol is available at the gas station).
At current gas prices, cellulose-derived ethanol is actually more than competitive, it is cheaper than gas - the problem is the long term instability of gas prices makes investing in infrastructure to produce cellulosic ethanol as a fuel substitute too risky - it's hard to compete with something pumped out of the ground, where most of the costs are transportation, and political/defense issues. Please note that we're NOT talking about corn ethanol, which a highly subsidized and environmentally contentious product due to high energy costs of growing and harvesting corn.
I don't think this looks bad for OSS. Don't try to operate a technology-based business on top of other people's work without a basic understanding of the laws involved, just like any other business. This dude has no fundamental right to his business, he needs to take responsibility for putting proper contracts and documentation in place when he hires developers, and be very clear and explicit about handling copyright issues with his code, just like any other techology business. If he can't handle that, and he can't keep a competitive edge for his business, well, cry me a river for this moron.
This stuff normally doesn't happen because companies "paper trail the fuck out of it" (to use the software industry term of art) when it comes to employment agreements, independent contractor agreements, and copyright assignment agreements, and for good reason.
Now obviously, this developer sounds like they violated their contract, either explicit or implicit with their client or employer. But the question is did any "distribution" of the code go on? It did, but apparently it was unauthorized by the copyright holder (assuming that a proper assignment document was in place, which needs to be proved first). If the code itself was never distributed, then it is leaked internal code - not really that different from the Gnutella code, which was released without proper authorization by AOL, the copyright holder (a more debatable case, because clearly they had authorization at the AOL subsidiary, but not from corporate). Leaked internal code is definitely bad - but again, this guy has the burden of proof on him that he owns copyright to the code, he needs to document the contract and assignment of copyright thoroughly. And should probably accept that even if they take the patch out, they are just going to rewrite the same feature now with untainted code.
Again, we have a fringe case test of the GPL where the question is, what constitutes authorization for distribution and who owns the code in question? The trade secret claim is laughable - no CMS system contains anything remotely resembling a trade secret. There are dozens of these things, and pretty much any feature or two in isolation can't be considered a trade secret.
I just got a lump in my throat (of fear) when I saw that. My lord, why would anybody ever do such a thing? I hate TCL with an unbridled passion after trying to work with another person on developing an AOLserver/TCL app many years back. upvar this, upvar that. I have never seen a language that seems to more strongly desire making code unreadable, even for small team development efforts. Well except maybe Perl, but at least we all know Perl sucks.
See here for some rough (and somewhat outdated) assessments of CPython vs. Jython performance. It is somewhat slower, but depends on the nature of the task. And is it slower than the equivalent compiled Java bytecode? Again, probably yes, but for some tasks it doesn't matter. And the nice thing is you can write a whole app in Jython and easily rewrite performance critical components in Java and just call them from Jython, which is much easier given that everything happens in the bytecode realm than writing and exporting C/C++ modules to Python.
Okay, this isn't quite fair. I know you are joking around, so don't accuse me of having no sense of humor. :) There are a lot of things I like about Java, and J2EE is absolutely, positively NOT one of them (and yes, I've done fairly large rollouts with it and know how to optimize it, but I still think it's atrocious stuff and very ineffecient in terms of developer time and runtime performance, and no, 'scalability' is not a viable excuse since it's rarely as scalable as it ought to be). There are other nice frameworks for developing Java-based webapps that don't involve using EJBs and which involve just writing files.
Well let's see, probably because the support costs of dealing with confused or angry users who don't get email with their receipt or delivery of some electronic purchase confirmation, or any other of the zillions of important (account confirmation?) automated emails used every day? Then there's the problem of joe jobs - this floods replies back to spoofed From addresses, creating a real potential annoyance _IF_ it's implented on a large scale. In fact, doing this really relies on SPF to validate that the email comes from who it says it comes from. If it doesn't come from who it says it comes from, just throw it away in the first place (no bouncing, god, that just increases the mess). If it DOES, and you still feel you need an automatically managed whitelist solution like ASK, then by all means, go ahead, but at that point it's likely to cause more problems than it solves for ISPs with dumb users.
Anyway, I still don't think that piece justifies any legal action, since despite being quite negative and filling with several unjustified suggestions, it doesn't say or do anything clearly illegal. I don't know if HardOCP sued Infinium preemptively? That also sounds over the top. But hey, more power to 'em, threatening legal action against journalists, even ones who have nasty things to say about you, is almost always a bad idea.
The labor union bit I'm a bit more iffy on. I'm theoretically supportive of the right of a group to collectively bargain, but in many cases (not all) strong labor unions tend to decrease personal iniative and motivators for efficiency and producitivity. And in others they just seem to drive sectors of the economy into the ground (airline industry anyone?). Obviously labor unions did a lot of good in the early part of this century to prevent flagrant abuses of workers, but I feel like a lot of that function is supplanted and much of the remainder could be by better legislation and enforcement of employment laws.
Let's see, you're liberal, but believe fundamentally in individual freedoms (including the second amendment), but scorn libertarians? So you're like a libertarian, only not a heartless Randian bastard?
And then sometimes I just want to listen to specific songs from my mp3 collection. In any case, I'm all for some content programming, but I don't think I'm likely to give up my Tivo and start watching network TV ever again (Discovery HD though maybe, if they could just get a slightly broader array of programming on the channel).
As far as I know, none of this has meaningfully affected the curriculum at either school, and I'm assuming UNIX is still as integral a part of the CS department at Harvard and MIT as it always was (there was no evidence when I was still in school that things were changing at all). I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft tried to get mileage out of it, but my guess is the best it does is give Gates good PR with the current crop of CS students and thus serves as a very effective recruiting exercise.
Just look at the kids of many immigrant families who grow up quite poor yet still end up highly motivated and successful. Just because the kids in the ghetto don't seem to understand the obvious (that academic success and achievement is a guaranteed way to a better life), don't go raging around at everybody else acting like we're all so damned spoiled or our lives have been perfect and wonderful.
This way Microsoft can sue the users, sue Sun or sue anybody, but as long as Sun plays along well, any portion of liabilities that accrue to them will be reimbursed by Microsoft. So Sun is pretty much protected from any liability regarding Open Office as long as they play nicely with MS.
Is Microsoft planning such lawsuits? They have been keeping the option open for some time with their XML file format patents. If they actually try to do this, however, they would face some fearsome opposition. I suspect they intend primarily to use the threat that they MIGHT do it to prevent large scale adoption of Open Office where strategically necessary (US Government perhaps?).
Of course, Slashdot could obviate this issue entirely by cleaning up their HTML and using reasonable CSS for layout.
Well, I agree, most Slashdotters still use Windows as their primary desktop OS and that wouldn't look good. But it's hard for me to believe that the IE browser share here could be over 50%. How could somebody even regularly read the homepage here without discovering other, better browsers? Using IE for even a modestly geeky person is like scraping your nails against a chalkboard.
It's the surcharge students are paying in the article, they just mangled the text a bit. Looks like they are paying 1 cent per kWh MORE for wind power than for regular power, which is much more believable, since generally power costs about 5-6 cents per kWh (more in some areas), excluding transmission costs (which are usually shown separately on your bill, another 5-6 cents per kWh).
It's about 75% efficient in most commercial processes, but I think building fuel cells on the scale needed to store primary generated power from a power plant would be extremely expensive. It seems that something like water-gravitational storage systems described elsewhere, while perhaps not quite as efficient, would be much cheaper to implement on this large scale.
I don't claim to understand why the hell Saddam Hussein refused to allow inspections - that one is still a mystery to me. He was basically asking to get invaded, and he clearly got what he deserved. But I don't think the 1000 American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi grunts who died in the invasion, and several thousand civilian casualities that have resulted from our invasion were justified by this level of threat at all. Whether the result is good in the long run (more freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people and everyone in the Arab countries) is another question, but that argument sort of comes off sounding like "the ends justify the means".
The true neo-con justification for the war never had much to do with WMDs or supposed Al Qaeda-Iraqi interactions. That was just what was used to put the politically palatable face on this war and provide the justification to actually enable Bush to take an action he had clearly wanted to take from the minute he got to the Oval Office.
The reason I'm so shocked about your numbers is that I've found that some people will always buy software they like and use, with almost no incentive at all (actual functionality withheld) and some users will never buy your software no matter how cheap it is or how much you are giving them for their money. So zero sales is tough to imagine - probably has something to do with the type of market for a light HTML editor app. Some apps work better in the shareware model than others - I think apps that have fewer direct substitutions (competitors) available are more likely to entice buyers.
As for preventing cracking - my preferred personal approach has been a middle ground. Roll your own to avoid being part of somebody else's big target (especially if your app is a niche app - it's less likely to attract serious attention from the good crackers by itself, some script kiddie types will likely fool around with it and then give up when it turns out to be too hard to crack). Do hardware locking of your registration codes by using a modified (and well obfuscated) digital signature algorithm on a hardware-derived system ID. This is fairly tough to decipher with something like SoftICE or similar tools. Take some countermeasures in your release executables against the running of such debugger tools if you are really worried. Then allow users to obtain additional registration codes if they want to use the app on multiple computers, or they buy a new computer, etc., and have this all available automatically on your website, requiring essentially just their email address. Anyway, this pretty much destroys all the casual piracy associated with sharing reg codes on forums and bulletin boards. Your app will still be cracked eventually if enough people are interested, but like I said, most of the people who obtain and use that crack probably weren't going to buy it in the first place, so just forget about them and focus on providing some value for the people who are buying.
As always EULAs have always been pretty much bogus - you can refuse to accept them, or click on "Accept" while your fingers are crossed, but you can still feel free to use the software as you will within the constraints of copyright law.
You can now watch your childhood dreams get stomped on ... in HIGH DEFINITION!