> The BBC certainly has the right idea with the sharing of information and history. > Here in the US we seem to be much more wrapped up in who owns the rights to something > and how to make money from it.
The end result of this is simple. 200 years from now, because of wide spread copying the BBC's version of history will still be around and because of licensing restrictions the US's version of history will not be.
As Orwell once said, "He who controls the past, controls the future.". In essense, by going for short term profit the US is letting the UK define it's future policy. Pretty short sighted if you ask me.
> Testing and clinical trials exist for a reason. Because in many cases, they save lives. It's an > imperfect system, to be sure, but it's better than the alternative.
Without such rigorous tests, you can make things *a lot* worse or steer people away from more proven but less of a "quick fix" treatment. Desperate people are willing to resort to desperate means in order to satisfy a need and drug companies are all too willing to encourage people into thinking that "they have the miracle tonic without side effects that will cure you of all ills. However, those dumb bearocrats won't let through. For god's sake, think of the children".
It's hard to look at someone who is in pain and looking for answers to say "there are no easy answers", but it's something responsible clinical physicians need to do every day. If you're desperate enough, you can often get yourself into a clinical trial and have the risks explained to you and be constantly monitored to be sure that it's helping and not hurting..
While I agree with your sentiments, there are a few points you should consider:
> Why should I as a content provider respect your Fair Use rights if you don't respect my copyrights?
You're forgetting that copyright is not a right, it's a compromise. It basically says that in order to encourage the artist to publish his/her work, the artist is given a limitted monopoly on his work. If other people don't respect your copyright, you have three options (1) prosecute them under copyright law, (2) not release your work, (3) adjust your business model so that it doesn't matter if it gets copied (e.g. street performer's protocol or create a community around your work or....). You could try to refuse to respect people's fair use rights, but in that case, you'd have the law working against you (at least in an ideal world). You can try to go the DRM route, but it's been tried many times before. It has always failed miserably and only serves to alienate the customers *who respect the copyright compromise* and force them to choose alternatives that respect the compromise.
You're also forgetting that for the bulk of human history, copyrights didn't exist but people still managed to create fantastic works of art. Indeed, to a large extent, the world of folklore and story telling still follows "the old ways". People freely borrow and adapt stories from each other and whenever a source is known give credit. People don't feel "ripped off" when someone uses their stories because they know that their stories are built off off the collective works of other works. Science follows a similar ethos. It's the old "standing on the shoulders of giants" idea. The need to create art in the artist is as great (if not greater) than the need to program for hard core hackers. Hackers work on programs even if there's no pay. If copyright didn't exist, I see three things happening for software. Firstly, the software support and customization market would boom. Secondly, companies that use software would collaborate to enhance and support software to their needs (e.g. Banks would hire inhouse developers to work on Linux and OpenOffice to ensure that it supports new features that they need). Thirdly, companies that didn't adapt to this new model would go bankrupt and developers would have to either become inhouse developers or consultant developers. Net result, the world goes on.
So while *rational* copyright law is a good compromise that most people (including me) feel comfortable supporting, it's not the only approach that works.
> If they really want to stop online piracy, they need to go after the makers of the software, > not the poor people they duped into believing that they had "purchased" music.
No. If they did that they'd have to go after the makers of just about every TCP/IP protocol and CD/DVD burner manufacturer because all of these can be used for piracy. They'd also need to go after the blank tape producers, because blank tapes were used for decades to share music. This doesn't hold much traction because TCP/IP protocols (Bittorent, FTP, SMB, NTFS, IMAP, etc) and blank tapes/CDs/DVDs have many legitimate uses.
The problem is this. People have been recording music from the radio and shopping takes for decades and it was considered okay. Many bands actually promoted sharing of their music because it was their way of getting free publicity. To a large extent this worked because you could rarely get all songs from an artist through sharing and the quality wasn't always perfect, so people would buy CDs. They'd also go to concerts because they liked the band and wanted to be around others who liked the band so they can get the full experience.
If the RIAA wants to stop online piracy, they need to:
* Realize that we have a few generations who don't see the difference between sharing tapes/recording radio music and sharing music, so changing something this ingrained is going to be hard and costly
* Realize that many people don't understand their computers fully an software makers regularly take liberties installing software and stuff on people's computers (read the MS EULA) and disclaim any liability. The bulk of the joe and jane users out there see computers as something useful that is surrounded by voodoo and strange rituals such as restarting your computer, changing magic values in the registry, or running scanners that are supposed to protect you from the demonic virus spirits that continually attack their computers for no reason at all. They've given up trying to understand computer things too deeply because it's just too complex. Trying to explain the nuances of P2P versus online purchases versus tapes is even harder because of this.
* Realize that P2P file transfers have their own issues (potential for viruses, incomplete songs, you have to waste time looking for songs, you don't get the full collections) and that it's possible to sell music more conveniently without those issues. People are generally lazy and/or too busy, so they'll chose quick and convenient over free but with time consuming hassles nine times out of ten.
* Realize that Sony CD-like tactics just make P2P sharing more appealing since it just makes purchased music more virus prone as P2P
* Realize that excessive restrictions that prevent you from using music on any device and price gauging only moves people to P2P services where those issues don't exist.
* Realize that some people go to P2P because they can't find music because it's no longer being sold
* Realize that promotion and distribution are now cheaper so they can increase their profits by distributing everything they have (including songs the no longer ship) and providing ways for people to discover undersold songs through association (e.g. Amazon-like "people who liked this song, also liked...." or "customer ratings")
* Realize that they have the opportunity to be a hub of the music world that's able to find out more about customer tastes and do tasteful cross promotions if they can attract people to their online stores by building a community.
The key thing to realize is that although they have to change their business model, they can get through this stronger than ever if they play their cards right. They fought tooth and nail against VCRs and Blockbuster-like rental stores, but they lost and that was the best thing that could have happened to them. They're now bigger than ever. However, if they don't play their cards right, they could risk a revolt that could destroy them. I personally think that that's what their most afraid of more than anything.
Basically, a task can either be important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, or unimportant and not urgent. Instead of dealing with all tasks as urgent whether they're time wasters or not and running around like a chicken without a head, you're taking the time to sort out what's important and what's not before doing anything. That's not procrastination. That's just good time management.
Ob procrastination quote: "One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say." -- Will Durant
From damsa's link, I count the libraries and digital divide stuff as mostly marketing (which I didn't criticize -- I made a point of saying that companies do it and it's *much* better to market through donation than market through spam or dirty market tricks).
But also from damsa's link, they do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with computers such as medical and social initiatives which they deserve praise for.
Moderators, please watch for nuances when you moderate.
Actually, that doesn't answer the question. There are several repeated references about the same four or so donations, some of which have computer related hooks (which I would count as marketing instead of charity). From the links, it seems like there are about 1-2 billion in donations. There must be more than that since if that's all there is then Ted Turner is a bigger philanthropist.
There must be a published list of donations out there.
Out of curiousity, what exactly do the Gates donate?
The only headlines I remember about Gates donations deal with MS software and computers that have MS software preloaded, particularly to charities and schools. These donations are simply good marketing. They get people to feel good about MS, they get schools on the MS upgrade threadmill (first one is free, next one costs you), and they get students hooked on MS products so when they go out into the work-force they are MS evangelists. Most big companies, properietary or open source, to varying degrees, use the same strategy. For instance, Jobs wanted to donate OSX for the $100 laptops. Generosity aside, it would have been a huge marketing opportunity for Apple. In the end Red Hat was chosen.
If you subtract all the marketing related "charity" work, what how much have the Gateses actually donated compared to other billionaires in their league?
You could quickly convert all PHP5 to PHP6 simply by adding the line: . . . import builtin\*; to the top of every file to make all builtin functions global (the way they are in PHP5).
Apps written in PHP5 would still work without the import, but they'd get a warning (which could be switches off in the php.ini).
> > The study claimed that Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to > > implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts. > > yeah, maybe true. But how about maintaining them later, for years, with zero > downtime?
Most sites don't fall apart if you have planned downtime during off-peak hours, so downtime might not be that much of an issue.
But you're right about better maintenance. On the whole, Linux apps are designed to be written around open standards and are often crossplatform, so they will take more time to write than apps that take proprietary shortcuts. Microsoft apps would likely take 68% longer too if they were written to strictly conform to standards and/or attempted to be crossplatform. But anyone whose been bitten by vendor lock-in knows that it's worth it in the end. No empire is forever. Things change when you least expected. Few people expected the PC revolution. Few people expected VMS to die. Few people expected the web to be as important as it is today. Using open standards gives you tremendous freedom, futureproofing, and flexibility and because they're openly implemented by anyone, you can often creatively leverage 3rd party tools to build something that those tools were never envisioned of doing.
> How can a "governing body" exist for something that it's currently not in charge of? > This is like someone moving into your house, and then starts explaining how you've > got everything set up incorrectly.
Actually, it's closer to this analogy. You create your own housing project and give them addresses 1 to N. A few other people decide to build a house on that street and they need to come up with a street address. They can either let you name the address since you were first, or name it themselves. If they let you name the street address, they'll be guaranteed that people will find your home in relation to other homes because your home will be given the N+1's sequence. The price of this choice is the freedom to choose your own street address.
Most houses are built, by you, it just makes no sense for anyone else to come up with their own addressing since anyone trying to find them will have no reference point to find them. If, however, most houses are not built by you, the other home builders can decide to come up with their own address system and not have to worry about negotiating the next street address with you.
That's pretty much what happened here. The internet has grown and is now bigger than the US. The control of the DNS has become a critical piece of infrastructure. Just imagine what would happen if the US decided to go to war with your country and decided to pull the plug on your DNS entries. Companies of that country would lose access to their web sites and the e-commerce/e-business economy of that country would halt in an instant. Such ICANN interference was thought to be unthinkable during the Clinton years, but current US unilateralism has got a lot of countries thinking that they need to reduce their reliance on the US.
> Let them suffer from their own patent laws. > It's the only way that things would get changed for the people.
Very true. In the computer world, that's called eating your own dog food.
There are definite exceptions but noncritical annoying bugs don't tend to get fixed until developers and managers are bitten by them. People don't tend to think any problem is very serious until they experience it. I explain to nontechies using this story:
There was once a small town that had a contageous itchy rash going around. The town doctor diagnozed that it wasn't serious and should go away within a month, so he told everyone to just put calamine lotion on it and wait 'til the rash disappeared. People grumbled, but since this was the only doctor in town, they could do little except complain. One week later, the doctor got the rash and the next morning, a cure was found.
> As an ex-CS college professor, let me suggest that it would be better to spend that $100 on the > developing world on more teachers, education for teachers, roof for schools, etc
You have a fairly limited idea of what the developing world is. Argentina is one of the countries that has committed to buying.5 million to 1 million of these $100 laptops: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27242
In many countries of the developing world, there are plenty of teachers, the teachers are well educated, schools have rooves, but computers are a luxury that few afford or even think they need (think back to 1980's in the US). Unless the population is made computer literate and understand the importance of computers, the digital divide will grow wider.
If you look at the article being linked to on LXer it says:
"The Linux desktop has gone way past the excellent product Sun released in December 2003. That desktop offered the Gnome 2.2 desktop and some very nice engineering. Most Linux desktops now offer Gnome 2.12 which has incorporated the nice engineering found in the original Sun project Madhatter. So, no one wants Sun's throwback desktop today.... Don't get your hopes up about the JDS desktop for Linux. They need to prove that they can follow through on something first. So far, the jury remains out. We don't know who would want their desktop anyway: It's old, they changed the look and feel and who will support it? "
Basically, they realized that their Java Desktop has been obsoleted by GNOME and they no longer want to maintain their fork which few people wanted.
Actually, you're missing the point. My introducing the bill they face three possibilities:
1) It will get passed. It's impossible to fully enforce, but it would give them a great deal of power to make deals with hardware manufacturers and give them the ability to sue virtually anyone (since virtually everyone will break it).
2) Alternately, there will be a large opposition to the bill and someone will propose a "compromise bill" that the no forces will have to support if they want to defeat the draconian bill. That "compromise bill" is the bill they wanted all a long. Think of it as a variation of the "Good Cop. Bad Cop" routine called "Bad Bill. Worse Bill."
3) Finally, the bill is laughed out of congress and ignored. In this case, they'll try again later when the climate it right.
It's a no lose situation for them to try, try, again.
* Information rot. If copyright is tied to a specific physical device and no circumvention is allowed, that information will disappear disappear when the physical device dies. Information needs to be copied by third parties in order to be preserved for the future.
* Eternal copyright. Related to the first point, if no circumvention is allowed, things are locked up forever
> You may find it instructive to consider the difference between "drinking" and "breathing":-)
Exactly what I was talking about. The missing constraint is that "drinking must not interfere with breathing or any other bodily function that is vital to life.".
For the patent system, the missing constraint is "it must help more than it hurts".
Without this contraint, the patent system would eventually fall apart, no matter what patent doctrine you follow. For instance, if you believe that the sole criteria for patenting is "if money can be made with it, then it should be patentable", you'll have to face the fact that when you patent an idea, you're creating a "middle man" on use of the idea, a "middle man" for negotiating the patent license red tape, and a "middle man" beaurocracy for keeping track of the number of times the patent is used. Each middle man adds a cost to the creation of a product and thus *reduces the money* that can be made. If I patented "the use of a white space in a patent application", I'd make loads of money (satisfying the "money talks" doctrine), but nearly all other patent holder would lose money (directly contradicting the "money talks" doctrine).
> This is a logical decision, the mistake was made years ago when courts > stopped asking the question of why patents should be permissible > in some fields but not in others.
Is is really the logical next step? If you take any doctrine to it's extreme, you'll nearly always end up with issues. For instance, nearly every health guide will tell you that drinking lots of water (with the appropriate electrolytes) is good for your health. If the "If some is good, more is better" doctrine holds, it must be true that drowning is good for your health.
If a mistake was made in the past, the logical decision is to fix the problem by *adding* missing contraints, not make it worse by *removing* existing constraints.
There are two ports, one from Apple and one based off the work from Apple by Nokia. Here's the link I think you're referring to: http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/
From the page: "Gtk+ WebCore is a Linux/Gtk+ port of Apple Computer Inc.'s WebCore KHTML html rendering engine including a web component. A reference browser implementation is included in the project. Gtk+ WebCore is a standards compliant (X)HTML rendering engine, javascript interpreter and an embeddable web component. The purpose of the web component is to be a light-weight, easy-to-compile and embed, open source rendering component.
The project work is done at Nokia Research Center (NRC) as part of ongoing internet browser-related research activities. By releasing the source we hope to support in open source communities interested in using KHTML rendering engine component."
After Katrina, the Tsunami, and the Indian-Pakistani earthquake this year, you'd think that people would realize that there are more important things to focus on in this world than terrorists.
When you compare the number of deaths from terrorists with the number of deaths lost each year to weather, war, crime, or poverty things come into perspective very quickly.
Obviously, the problem is that our IP laws aren't strong enough.
*snicker*
The problem isn't only fundies. The problem is also that scientists are often forced (either by an outside company or by their greed) to hide parts of their discoveries because they may have IP value. The discoveries that are released (in some industries at least) are sometimes used for their press release value rather than their scientific value. (e.g. Pons and Fleshman, Pharma industry, etc)
Science is a lot depends on a free exchange of honest ideas, so marketing and IP are no less responsible for the erosion of science than the fundies.
> Novell had their own distro before acquiring SuSE
Sort of. From what I remember, Caldera OpenLinux was originally a research project in Novell. In those days there was talk about porting WABI (a comercial product like WINE but for Win16) and the commericial equivalent of DOSEMU (I forget it's name) to Linux. This would allow Novell to use Linux as a high powered replacement for Win 3.1. Those plans appeared to be mostly hype or were abandoned when Win95 introduced Win32 and Win16 became irrelevant. Anyway, Novell Founder, Ray Noorda left Novell with several Novell employees to start Caldera. At least according to the press releases at the time, the excuse was that he was frustrated with Novell's lack of interest in Linux.
Unfortunately most press was not online during the 1994 era so I can't find many online references to back this up (anyone?). Here are a few I could google:
> For anything substantial, though, it always seem to wind up > being more work as I figure out how to configure & trick the > persistance layer into giving me my data in the most efficient > way. This can be frustrating when you know how to accomplish > the same thing in 5 seconds using plain SQL. Maybe it's just me?
That raises a question about these persistence layers. Most of the tables we create use an "always insert, never update or delete" model so we can keep track of who made the change, when the change was made, and by whom.
You have to code, normalize, index, and select from these tables in a particular way otherwise you'd end up with extremely inefficient code. I just don't see how a persistance layer can handle this.
Another thing, one thing I've learned is that for enterprise applications, data outlives the application and in many cases, it predates the application. In essense, the persistence layer will need to be retrofitted into the application. Top-down GUIs like the ones presented for Rails appear to be of no use. We already know the exact representation of the data so Rails will need to work from the bottom up by default.
As a side note, I don't see why people are so afraid of a little SQL. Sure it takes time to learn how to master efficient SQL coding, but it's well worth it. It's the most efficient way to deal with most data, and because it's a declarative language, it's often more intuitive than the imperative language you're working in. It's also supported by most languages, so it's universal. If you're using a strict model-view-controller paradigm, database access will be restricted to the model and recast into data objects that can be used by the view and controller. If done correctly, you can rewrite the data code of several applications every day of the week without affecting the view and the controller (i.e. the bulk of your code). From what I've seen, that clarity of what exactly is happening and how complex things are mapped really helps with maintenance and optimization. From trying to maintain persistense layers, I'm left trying to figure out "what on earth is the persistense layer trying to do that is causing so much trouble".
Slashdot Mirror
> The BBC certainly has the right idea with the sharing of information and history.
> Here in the US we seem to be much more wrapped up in who owns the rights to something
> and how to make money from it.
The end result of this is simple. 200 years from now, because of wide spread copying the BBC's version of history will still be around and because of licensing restrictions the US's version of history will not be.
As Orwell once said, "He who controls the past, controls the future.". In essense, by going for short term profit the US is letting the UK define it's future policy. Pretty short sighted if you ask me.
> Testing and clinical trials exist for a reason. Because in many cases, they save lives. It's an
t herapy ) show, thorough clinical studies *are* necessary before making the general population guinea pigs.
> imperfect system, to be sure, but it's better than the alternative.
As the Thalidomide Tragedy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide ) and Hormone replacement therapy revelation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormone_replacement_
Without such rigorous tests, you can make things *a lot* worse or steer people away from more proven but less of a "quick fix" treatment. Desperate people are willing to resort to desperate means in order to satisfy a need and drug companies are all too willing to encourage people into thinking that "they have the miracle tonic without side effects that will cure you of all ills. However, those dumb bearocrats won't let through. For god's sake, think of the children".
It's hard to look at someone who is in pain and looking for answers to say "there are no easy answers", but it's something responsible clinical physicians need to do every day. If you're desperate enough, you can often get yourself into a clinical trial and have the risks explained to you and be constantly monitored to be sure that it's helping and not hurting..
While I agree with your sentiments, there are a few points you should consider:
....). You could try to refuse to respect people's fair use rights, but in that case, you'd have the law working against you (at least in an ideal world). You can try to go the DRM route, but it's been tried many times before. It has always failed miserably and only serves to alienate the customers *who respect the copyright compromise* and force them to choose alternatives that respect the compromise.
> Why should I as a content provider respect your Fair Use rights if you don't respect my copyrights?
You're forgetting that copyright is not a right, it's a compromise. It basically says that in order to encourage the artist to publish his/her work, the artist is given a limitted monopoly on his work. If other people don't respect your copyright, you have three options (1) prosecute them under copyright law, (2) not release your work, (3) adjust your business model so that it doesn't matter if it gets copied (e.g. street performer's protocol or create a community around your work or
You're also forgetting that for the bulk of human history, copyrights didn't exist but people still managed to create fantastic works of art. Indeed, to a large extent, the world of folklore and story telling still follows "the old ways". People freely borrow and adapt stories from each other and whenever a source is known give credit. People don't feel "ripped off" when someone uses their stories because they know that their stories are built off off the collective works of other works. Science follows a similar ethos. It's the old "standing on the shoulders of giants" idea. The need to create art in the artist is as great (if not greater) than the need to program for hard core hackers. Hackers work on programs even if there's no pay. If copyright didn't exist, I see three things happening for software. Firstly, the software support and customization market would boom. Secondly, companies that use software would collaborate to enhance and support software to their needs (e.g. Banks would hire inhouse developers to work on Linux and OpenOffice to ensure that it supports new features that they need). Thirdly, companies that didn't adapt to this new model would go bankrupt and developers would have to either become inhouse developers or consultant developers. Net result, the world goes on.
So while *rational* copyright law is a good compromise that most people (including me) feel comfortable supporting, it's not the only approach that works.
> If they really want to stop online piracy, they need to go after the makers of the software,
> not the poor people they duped into believing that they had "purchased" music.
No. If they did that they'd have to go after the makers of just about every TCP/IP protocol and CD/DVD burner manufacturer because all of these can be used for piracy. They'd also need to go after the blank tape producers, because blank tapes were used for decades to share music. This doesn't hold much traction because TCP/IP protocols (Bittorent, FTP, SMB, NTFS, IMAP, etc) and blank tapes/CDs/DVDs have many legitimate uses.
The problem is this. People have been recording music from the radio and shopping takes for decades and it was considered okay. Many bands actually promoted sharing of their music because it was their way of getting free publicity. To a large extent this worked because you could rarely get all songs from an artist through sharing and the quality wasn't always perfect, so people would buy CDs. They'd also go to concerts because they liked the band and wanted to be around others who liked the band so they can get the full experience.
If the RIAA wants to stop online piracy, they need to:
* Realize that we have a few generations who don't see the difference between sharing tapes/recording radio music and sharing music, so changing something this ingrained is going to be hard and costly
* Realize that many people don't understand their computers fully an software makers regularly take liberties installing software and stuff on people's computers (read the MS EULA) and disclaim any liability. The bulk of the joe and jane users out there see computers as something useful that is surrounded by voodoo and strange rituals such as restarting your computer, changing magic values in the registry, or running scanners that are supposed to protect you from the demonic virus spirits that continually attack their computers for no reason at all. They've given up trying to understand computer things too deeply because it's just too complex. Trying to explain the nuances of P2P versus online purchases versus tapes is even harder because of this.
* Realize that P2P file transfers have their own issues (potential for viruses, incomplete songs, you have to waste time looking for songs, you don't get the full collections) and that it's possible to sell music more conveniently without those issues. People are generally lazy and/or too busy, so they'll chose quick and convenient over free but with time consuming hassles nine times out of ten.
* Realize that Sony CD-like tactics just make P2P sharing more appealing since it just makes purchased music more virus prone as P2P
* Realize that excessive restrictions that prevent you from using music on any device and price gauging only moves people to P2P services where those issues don't exist.
* Realize that some people go to P2P because they can't find music because it's no longer being sold
* Realize that promotion and distribution are now cheaper so they can increase their profits by distributing everything they have (including songs the no longer ship) and providing ways for people to discover undersold songs through association (e.g. Amazon-like "people who liked this song, also liked...." or "customer ratings")
* Realize that they have the opportunity to be a hub of the music world that's able to find out more about customer tastes and do tasteful cross promotions if they can attract people to their online stores by building a community.
The key thing to realize is that although they have to change their business model, they can get through this stronger than ever if they play their cards right. They fought tooth and nail against VCRs and Blockbuster-like rental stores, but they lost and that was the best thing that could have happened to them. They're now bigger than ever. However, if they don't play their cards right, they could risk a revolt that could destroy them. I personally think that that's what their most afraid of more than anything.
It's sounds like you're basically using a variation of the old Important/Urgent prioritization:c es/first.asp
https://studentloan.citibank.com/s/faaonln/resour
http://www.brefigroup.co.uk/acrobat/quadrnts.pdf
Basically, a task can either be important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, or unimportant and not urgent. Instead of dealing with all tasks as urgent whether they're time wasters or not and running around like a chicken without a head, you're taking the time to sort out what's important and what's not before doing anything. That's not procrastination. That's just good time management.
Ob procrastination quote:
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."
-- Will Durant
How is the above a troll? It's a legitimate question that was answered thanks to 'damsa' (see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171513&cid=142 86333 ).
From damsa's link, I count the libraries and digital divide stuff as mostly marketing (which I didn't criticize -- I made a point of saying that companies do it and it's *much* better to market through donation than market through spam or dirty market tricks).
But also from damsa's link, they do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with computers such as medical and social initiatives which they deserve praise for.
Moderators, please watch for nuances when you moderate.
Actually, that doesn't answer the question. There are several repeated references about the same four or so donations, some of which have computer related hooks (which I would count as marketing instead of charity). From the links, it seems like there are about 1-2 billion in donations. There must be more than that since if that's all there is then Ted Turner is a bigger philanthropist.
There must be a published list of donations out there.
Out of curiousity, what exactly do the Gates donate?
The only headlines I remember about Gates donations deal with MS software and computers that have MS software preloaded, particularly to charities and schools. These donations are simply good marketing. They get people to feel good about MS, they get schools on the MS upgrade threadmill (first one is free, next one costs you), and they get students hooked on MS products so when they go out into the work-force they are MS evangelists. Most big companies, properietary or open source, to varying degrees, use the same strategy. For instance, Jobs wanted to donate OSX for the $100 laptops. Generosity aside, it would have been a huge marketing opportunity for Apple. In the end Red Hat was chosen.
If you subtract all the marketing related "charity" work, what how much have the Gateses actually donated compared to other billionaires in their league?
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051125
I'll let you judge for yourself how good or bad it is:
MS XML />
</w:rPr>
<w:t>this is bold</w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r> <w:rPr> <w:b
OpenDocument
<text:span text:style-name="Strong_20_Emphasis"> this is bold </text:span>
XHTML
<b>this is bold</b>
Relating to this comment:9 325&cid=14113043
h pp
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=16
It's true that PHP suffers from various naming conventions, but namespaces might me the answer.
For PHP 6.0, does anyone know if the core developers are thinking of moving most builtin libraries into namespaces? For instance:
. . . http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.oci-commit.p
could be placed in the "builtin\oci" namespace and
. . . http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.ocicommit.ph
could be placed in the "builtin\legacy\oci" namespace.
You could quickly convert all PHP5 to PHP6 simply by adding the line:
. . . import builtin\*;
to the top of every file to make all builtin functions global (the way they are in PHP5).
Apps written in PHP5 would still work without the import, but they'd get a warning (which could be switches off in the php.ini).
> Paris went open source since her famous video went to the internet.
I think you're confusing the licensing. Paris may be exposed, but you can't modify her.
Basically, she's under a "shared" source license.
> > The study claimed that Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to
> > implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts.
>
> yeah, maybe true. But how about maintaining them later, for years, with zero
> downtime?
Most sites don't fall apart if you have planned downtime during off-peak hours, so downtime might not be that much of an issue.
But you're right about better maintenance. On the whole, Linux apps are designed to be written around open standards and are often crossplatform, so they will take more time to write than apps that take proprietary shortcuts. Microsoft apps would likely take 68% longer too if they were written to strictly conform to standards and/or attempted to be crossplatform. But anyone whose been bitten by vendor lock-in knows that it's worth it in the end. No empire is forever. Things change when you least expected. Few people expected the PC revolution. Few people expected VMS to die. Few people expected the web to be as important as it is today. Using open standards gives you tremendous freedom, futureproofing, and flexibility and because they're openly implemented by anyone, you can often creatively leverage 3rd party tools to build something that those tools were never envisioned of doing.
> How can a "governing body" exist for something that it's currently not in charge of?
> This is like someone moving into your house, and then starts explaining how you've
> got everything set up incorrectly.
Actually, it's closer to this analogy. You create your own housing project and give them addresses 1 to N. A few other people decide to build a house on that street and they need to come up with a street address. They can either let you name the address since you were first, or name it themselves. If they let you name the street address, they'll be guaranteed that people will find your home in relation to other homes because your home will be given the N+1's sequence. The price of this choice is the freedom to choose your own street address.
Most houses are built, by you, it just makes no sense for anyone else to come up with their own addressing since anyone trying to find them will have no reference point to find them. If, however, most houses are not built by you, the other home builders can decide to come up with their own address system and not have to worry about negotiating the next street address with you.
That's pretty much what happened here. The internet has grown and is now bigger than the US. The control of the DNS has become a critical piece of infrastructure. Just imagine what would happen if the US decided to go to war with your country and decided to pull the plug on your DNS entries. Companies of that country would lose access to their web sites and the e-commerce/e-business economy of that country would halt in an instant. Such ICANN interference was thought to be unthinkable during the Clinton years, but current US unilateralism has got a lot of countries thinking that they need to reduce their reliance on the US.
> Let them suffer from their own patent laws.
> It's the only way that things would get changed for the people.
Very true. In the computer world, that's called eating your own dog food.
There are definite exceptions but noncritical annoying bugs don't tend to get fixed until developers and managers are bitten by them. People don't tend to think any problem is very serious until they experience it. I explain to nontechies using this story:
There was once a small town that had a contageous itchy rash going around. The town doctor diagnozed that it wasn't serious and should go away within a month, so he told everyone to just put calamine lotion on it and wait 'til the rash disappeared. People grumbled, but since this was the only doctor in town, they could do little except complain. One week later, the doctor got the rash and the next morning, a cure was found.
> As an ex-CS college professor, let me suggest that it would be better to spend that $100 on the
.5 million to 1 million of these $100 laptops:
> developing world on more teachers, education for teachers, roof for schools, etc
You have a fairly limited idea of what the developing world is. Argentina is one of the countries that has committed to buying
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27242
In many countries of the developing world, there are plenty of teachers, the teachers are well educated, schools have rooves, but computers are a luxury that few afford or even think they need (think back to 1980's in the US). Unless the population is made computer literate and understand the importance of computers, the digital divide will grow wider.
If you look at the article being linked to on LXer it says:
...
"The Linux desktop has gone way past the excellent product Sun released in December 2003. That desktop offered the Gnome 2.2 desktop and some very nice engineering. Most Linux desktops now offer Gnome 2.12 which has incorporated the nice engineering found in the original Sun project Madhatter. So, no one wants Sun's throwback desktop today.
Don't get your hopes up about the JDS desktop for Linux. They need to prove that they can follow through on something first. So far, the jury remains out. We don't know who would want their desktop anyway: It's old, they changed the look and feel and who will support it?
"
Basically, they realized that their Java Desktop has been obsoleted by GNOME and they no longer want to maintain their fork which few people wanted.
Actually, you're missing the point. My introducing the bill they face three possibilities:
1) It will get passed. It's impossible to fully enforce, but it would give them a great deal of power to make deals with hardware manufacturers and give them the ability to sue virtually anyone (since virtually everyone will break it).
2) Alternately, there will be a large opposition to the bill and someone will propose a "compromise bill" that the no forces will have to support if they want to defeat the draconian bill. That "compromise bill" is the bill they wanted all a long. Think of it as a variation of the "Good Cop. Bad Cop" routine called "Bad Bill. Worse Bill."
3) Finally, the bill is laughed out of congress and ignored. In this case, they'll try again later when the climate it right.
It's a no lose situation for them to try, try, again.
You forgot two big ones:
* Information rot. If copyright is tied to a specific physical device and no circumvention is allowed, that information will disappear disappear when the physical device dies. Information needs to be copied by third parties in order to be preserved for the future.
* Eternal copyright. Related to the first point, if no circumvention is allowed, things are locked up forever
> You may find it instructive to consider the difference between "drinking" and "breathing" :-)
Exactly what I was talking about. The missing constraint is that "drinking must not interfere with breathing or any other bodily function that is vital to life.".
For the patent system, the missing constraint is "it must help more than it hurts".
Without this contraint, the patent system would eventually fall apart, no matter what patent doctrine you follow. For instance, if you believe that the sole criteria for patenting is "if money can be made with it, then it should be patentable", you'll have to face the fact that when you patent an idea, you're creating a "middle man" on use of the idea, a "middle man" for negotiating the patent license red tape, and a "middle man" beaurocracy for keeping track of the number of times the patent is used. Each middle man adds a cost to the creation of a product and thus *reduces the money* that can be made. If I patented "the use of a white space in a patent application", I'd make loads of money (satisfying the "money talks" doctrine), but nearly all other patent holder would lose money (directly contradicting the "money talks" doctrine).
> This is a logical decision, the mistake was made years ago when courts
> stopped asking the question of why patents should be permissible
> in some fields but not in others.
Is is really the logical next step? If you take any doctrine to it's extreme, you'll nearly always end up with issues. For instance, nearly every health guide will tell you that drinking lots of water (with the appropriate electrolytes) is good for your health. If the "If some is good, more is better" doctrine holds, it must be true that drowning is good for your health.
If a mistake was made in the past, the logical decision is to fix the problem by *adding* missing contraints, not make it worse by *removing* existing constraints.
There are two ports, one from Apple and one based off the work from Apple by Nokia. Here's the link I think you're referring to:
http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/
From the page: "Gtk+ WebCore is a Linux/Gtk+ port of Apple Computer Inc.'s WebCore KHTML html rendering engine including a web component. A reference browser implementation is included in the project. Gtk+ WebCore is a standards compliant (X)HTML rendering engine, javascript interpreter and an embeddable web component. The purpose of the web component is to be a light-weight, easy-to-compile and embed, open source rendering component.
The project work is done at Nokia Research Center (NRC) as part of ongoing internet browser-related research activities. By releasing the source we hope to support in open source communities interested in using KHTML rendering engine component."
After Katrina, the Tsunami, and the Indian-Pakistani earthquake this year, you'd think that people would realize that there are more important things to focus on in this world than terrorists.
When you compare the number of deaths from terrorists with the number of deaths lost each year to weather, war, crime, or poverty things come into perspective very quickly.
Obviously, the problem is that our IP laws aren't strong enough.
*snicker*
The problem isn't only fundies. The problem is also that scientists are often forced (either by an outside company or by their greed) to hide parts of their discoveries because they may have IP value. The discoveries that are released (in some industries at least) are sometimes used for their press release value rather than their scientific value. (e.g. Pons and Fleshman, Pharma industry, etc)
Science is a lot depends on a free exchange of honest ideas, so marketing and IP are no less responsible for the erosion of science than the fundies.
> Novell had their own distro before acquiring SuSE
t e-2004/FTLinuxCourse/en/net/chap5.html0 67.html
Sort of. From what I remember, Caldera OpenLinux was originally a research project in Novell. In those days there was talk about porting WABI (a comercial product like WINE but for Win16) and the commericial equivalent of DOSEMU (I forget it's name) to Linux. This would allow Novell to use Linux as a high powered replacement for Win 3.1. Those plans appeared to be mostly hype or were abandoned when Win95 introduced Win32 and Win16 became irrelevant. Anyway, Novell Founder, Ray Noorda left Novell with several Novell employees to start Caldera. At least according to the press releases at the time, the excuse was that he was frustrated with Novell's lack of interest in Linux.
Unfortunately most press was not online during the 1994 era so I can't find many online references to back this up (anyone?). Here are a few I could google:
http://www.ftlinuxcourse.com/FTLinuxCourse_Comple
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1996/11/msg01
> For anything substantial, though, it always seem to wind up
> being more work as I figure out how to configure & trick the
> persistance layer into giving me my data in the most efficient
> way. This can be frustrating when you know how to accomplish
> the same thing in 5 seconds using plain SQL. Maybe it's just me?
That raises a question about these persistence layers. Most of the tables we create use an "always insert, never update or delete" model so we can keep track of who made the change, when the change was made, and by whom.
You have to code, normalize, index, and select from these tables in a particular way otherwise you'd end up with extremely inefficient code. I just don't see how a persistance layer can handle this.
Another thing, one thing I've learned is that for enterprise applications, data outlives the application and in many cases, it predates the application. In essense, the persistence layer will need to be retrofitted into the application. Top-down GUIs like the ones presented for Rails appear to be of no use. We already know the exact representation of the data so Rails will need to work from the bottom up by default.
As a side note, I don't see why people are so afraid of a little SQL. Sure it takes time to learn how to master efficient SQL coding, but it's well worth it. It's the most efficient way to deal with most data, and because it's a declarative language, it's often more intuitive than the imperative language you're working in. It's also supported by most languages, so it's universal. If you're using a strict model-view-controller paradigm, database access will be restricted to the model and recast into data objects that can be used by the view and controller. If done correctly, you can rewrite the data code of several applications every day of the week without affecting the view and the controller (i.e. the bulk of your code). From what I've seen, that clarity of what exactly is happening and how complex things are mapped really helps with maintenance and optimization. From trying to maintain persistense layers, I'm left trying to figure out "what on earth is the persistense layer trying to do that is causing so much trouble".