What makes you think that the US is the only country that could produce one of these types of reactors? Strikes me as a lot of arrogance that only the US could do it. As for your idea for a "cryptographic leash", other countries would be happy to provide the technology without any licensing restrictions.
Honestly, if the US is worried about the plutonium being extracted out of this reactor by the local government, DON'T SELL ONE OF THESE TO THAT GOVERNMENT. Chances are that countries like the ones who would want to steal plutonium will find other ways to do it and will simply buy their reactor technologies from somewhere else. Sure didn't stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. Besides, I don't see where it says only the United States is allowed to have nuclear weapons.
Being Canadian, I know that the Canadian government had sold a bunch of CANDU reactors to other countries, and I'd be willing to bet that we didn't try to squeeze licensing fees out of them for it. Of course, it may just be that Canada is too polite to ask.:)
Where I work we're coding a dating site. Currently, it's up to about 180K lines of scripts written in PHP. However, not a lot of it was written with unit testing (and test-driven development) in mind. I'm a big believer in unit testing but it's been hard to get the other members on board as they complain how hard it is to write unit tests for web pages. Bah.
So, most of the library functions that I wrote (stuff like except an integer, return a text string from a list) have been unit tested by myself, and every time I change a function or a class, I try and write a unit test for it.
Seriously, you just need to dive right in and think about how you make your code easy to test. I use the SimpleTest testing framework (it's PHP), and I always feel good when my array of tests all run correctly when I make a major change to the code that impacts a huge portion of the site.
If test-driven development has done one thing, it's forced me to carefully examine my code to create a way to make sure it is actually working according to the business logic we've been asked to implement.
"WITHOUT GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION" is the part you left off. Pure capitalism is a series of checks and balances, supply and demand. It does not survive in the face of ludicrous laws like the DMCA, and government sanctioned monopolies like RIAA.
The fact is, the RIAA could put an end to piracy once and for all by giving us what we want, not telling us what we want. Do you need DRM? Not if you give them an economic reason to stay legitimate.
Very true, but those ludicrous laws you described were bought and paid for by (wait for it) corporations! As for the RIAA "giving us what we want", does this mean that you want to download music that you can then use in any way you want? Me too, but I don't forsee it happening any time soon. The RIAA will drag down everyone it can with their clients on the slide down, and it will take a strong co-ordinated effort for people who want to listen to music on something other than a CD player to not go down in the wreckage. But given human nature, you can expect 99% of the public to basically not give a shit.
It is exactly like the movie industry when the VCR came out. Video's cost $100 a piece. Everyone pirated them because they were too damned expensive. The same is currently true of music. Would you waste your time searching on kazaa or emule if you could get a perfect digital copy for 25 cents? Would you risk downloading a virus or otherwise waste your time trying to find the exact version of a song you want? Absolutely not.
Hey, I'm with on this one too.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. But if you think for one damned second I am going to accept those terms, you are out of your mind. And eventually, I really believe the rest of the world is going to feel that way.
Look what happened with TurboTax. Intuit added product activation. It wasn't draconian, it really wasn't nearly as evil as everyone made it out to be, and yet, it caused an uproar. Intuit lost thousands of sales and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were forced to not only remove the product activation, but even the license key as well.
Again, can't argue too much there. But I think you severely overestimate that "the rest of the world", which includes half the population that doesn't even know how to use a phone, will stand up to this. Again, I lack faith that the very people you need to support this cause even care about it at all. This isn't like the civil rights movement in the U.S. in the 1950's and 1960's. This is about a bunch of technoelitists (which is what we are) wanting to have things our way. Which, of course, never happens unless (wait for it) CORPORATIONS agree to go along with it.
When, exactly, did the buying public become 10 times smaller than the entertainment industry? The tech sector alone is many times larger than the entertainment industry. The buying power of US citizens is many times larger than that.
The real problem here, is that you believe you have no power. What you should be doing, just as I and my friends have done, is to convince people not to buy CD's. People have attributed the decline in CD sales to the economy and to piracy, but less frequently to what is likely the real culprit, a disgruntled buying public.
Well, this isn't the buying public vs. the entertainment industry. It's the public vs. the entertainment industry PLUS your elected government officials who accept the monetary donations of the entertainment industry.
The sad truth is that you and I don't have any power against this combination. I don't buy CD's very often (I think I've bought 3 in the last 3 years) because I don't like the tactics of the music industry (although living in Canada gives me the right to share my MP3 and OGG collection online).
As long as they have the government on their side, the entertainment industry is free to treat us like the thieving pieces of shit they
First of all, let me preface the rest of my comment by stating that I am Canadian, and don't live in the US and Canada does not have a law like the DMCA. Therefore, my views and opinions may be different based on cultural and societal influences.
I remember going to Chicago a few years ago and there was a convention of Marxists going on there. One thing that struck me about their talk of changing the system and things like that is one simple fact: to change the system, you have to become part of the system. In order to become part of the system you often have to compromise your position so other people will come around to your point of view. So, if you want to change things you really do have to sell out to a specific point.
Now, I don't think of my view as "defeatist." I think of it as being a "realist". Your government doesn't seem to listen to the people who actually vote them into office, they listen to the people who give them money. Which are corporations. Which is why the United States has become a society where large corporations basically dictate economic policy and what you get to do with the products and services they are giving you in exchange for money. The DMCA is a terrible law, but it won't be repealed unless corporations want it to be gone. Your "corporate overlords" have ALREADY WON because they can contribute money to people trying to get elected to public office, who in turn pass laws that make it easier for those corporations to make money. Yes, it's terrible. Yes, it's pushing things towards a "Corporate Fiefdom", which is a phrase that perfectly describes the current situation.
As far as I can tell, a capitalistic system is really about MAKING AS MUCH FREAKIN' MONEY AS YOU CAN. Everything else doesn't matter. I see nothing wrong with saying "Here, you can buy this thing from me but you can only use it in the following ways I think are acceptable." That's essentially what a license is, isn't it? If you don't like it, THEN DON'T BUY SOMETHING FROM THEM. Your use of an X-Box being modded is a prime example of this. Nobody is forcing you to buy an X-Box and mod it. You don't like that if you buy an X-Box, you can't modify it? Gee, that's too freakin' bad because when you bought it you agreed to a bunch of rules regarding how you can use it. Again, I don't agree with the idea of a license that restricts how you can use something like an X-Box, but then again, I never voted for the people who helped pass the laws that let Microsoft do that.
If you sell something and attach no rules to it, then you are absolutely correct that you should have no control over what happens to it. Again, just don't buy stuff from people who want to apply rules to it's use that you disagree with it.
Go ahead and call me defeatist and claim that I've decided to bend over and smile. When the person who is bending you over is 10 times your size and 10 times your weight, there isn't anything you can do about it. A poster in a comment below talks about how "people will take the power back." People are too apathetic to care about the issues that readers of Slashdot are so passionate about. The few who care will be abandoned by the majority who don't.
So, prepare to be violated by the rulers of the corporate fiefdom.
Very noble, but ignores the reality of the situation. If you want access to the widest possible source of music, those people who will give you access to that source will be putting restrictions on what you can do with that stuff.
Hey, I like Magnatune too but they are basically a fringe record label. No huge record label is EVER going to say "here, download this stuff of our pay-per-download site and do with it whatever you want." Because then there is nothing to stop you from setting up a site that competes with them.
It's not about being "willing to accept the situation" as you said, it's about getting what you want. People want to download the latest popular music and the vast majority of them don't want to give 100 copies to all their friends. They just want to listen to it on their computer at home and on their portable player.
Apple has figured this out, and it's driving iPod sales right now. The sad truth is that "principles" don't count for anything in a society that has put corporations that make money at the top of the food chain.
This article is one big "Java can solve all the internet's problems" troll. As if Microsoft's problem is because their code is written in C instead of Java. That's ludicrous.
A programming language can't change people's behaviour. Only PEOPLE can change people's behaviour. Bill Joy's obviously a smart guy, but his railing against what he calls "antiquated" languages and his lack of understanding on why programming languages have nothing to do with e-mail viruses being able to spread so easily shows why Sun is no longer in such a position of prominence.
His statement about how he "designed solutions for problems that people didn't yet know they had" either shows a complete lack of understanding of the way NORMAL people use technology or he's started believing his own marketing spin about Java and Sun's other technologies.
It makes me wonder if Joy is leaving Sun because he's bitter that Sun couldn't take down Microsoft and that Java, while a very powerfull programming language that definitely has it's place in certain types of projects, isn't the language of choice for programmers everywhere.
No, I just think shows how DUMB this girl and her family is. That $29.95 is a ONE-time fee for an ad-free version of Kazaa, not a monthly fee. Did they actually believe that paying $29.95 for a copy of a program meant that they can download all the copyrighted music they want? I bet the girl still thinks there is a Santa Claus.
The mother's quote at the end of the article is priceless. Of COURSE what they were doing is illegal. It's called copyright infringement. Is it theft? Hell no. But it's still illegal. I suspect the RIAA will quietly drop this case and move on to someone else who won't make them look so bad.
I remember reading about this system. What they do is actually pool your mico transations and charge at the end of the billing period instead of instantly charging you when you make the purchase. Apple is gambling that you'll buy enough stuff during the billing period to make the transaction fee charged to Apple palatable.
The only thing I see different from that site and the opensnippets one is (a) the interface is a lot better at "The Code Project" and (b) they push the development tools of their sponsors. Hey, we've all been whores at some point in our lives, so I don't completely blame them. Running websites isn't free.
I'm sure those 1/2 million members (that seems like an awfully large number to me, but I have no reason to believe it's not true) are finding something of value from the site. I guess I just let my own morals get in the way of using a site like that.
Took a look at www.codeproject.com. It's all Windows-specific stuff except for a link to Perl. And no link to PHP in the scripting section? What a shock. Definitely a Windows-centric site.
Gee, what's this? I dig a little deeper and find out that the site is nothing more than a shill for the products of it's sponsors.
I'll take a sponsor-free site over one whoring itself out any day.
I would prefer no cables either, as wireless is the best way to go (there is wireless access where I work). Having a direct USB connection could mean you could still do the whole ethernet-over-USB thing that you do with the cradle.
My next purchase for my Zaurus will be a WiFi CF card so I can surf during meetings...
I have a Sharp Zaurus 5500 that has both a CF and a SD port. Um, I don't see how the "CompactFlash port, in particular is very bulky". I'm looking at the port right now, and it's probably less than half the height of the device. To me, that does not say bulky.
Now, a direct USB connection would be way cool for the Zaurus. I know that you can buy a cable for about US$30 that plugs into the bottom of the Zaurus and into a USB port, which means you no longer have to use the cradle to connect it to your PC.
That sounds interesting, but the reason for $9.95 is also *marketing* related. My wife and I have been shopping for a new TV and I've lost track of the number of times my wife has said to me "Hey, that thing is only $X00!" when in fact it is $X99.95. (X being a number usually between 6 and 9).
Marketing is all about deceiving people into believing your product is better than it really is, so if you can make people think an item that cost a nickel less than $800 really costs $700, then you're doing a good job.
Besides, if cashiers really want to steal money, they'll figure out a way. I worked at a grocery store while in high-school and saw all sorts of scams pulled by dishonest cashiers.
Well, I have to disagree with your reasoning about SCO's lawyers knowing what they are doing. All I see is a bunch of wild claims with no concrete proof to back them up.
Lawsuits backed by ridiculous claims get filed all the time. All you need is an idiot judge and the right group of jurors and you've got yourself a multi-billion dollar judgement.
I don't think SCO has any chance of prevailing for a few reasons, all of which I think aren't founded on rumours from various Internet gossip-mongering sites:
They refuse to show anyone who doesn't sign an NDA the allegedly offending code. Why don't they want to show anyone where the problem is. That would be the first thing I'd show if it were me.
Their own company officers keep changing their story about what the problem really is. One day it's 60 lines of code. Next it's thousands of lines of code. Now it's every OS that has a smidgen of UNIX-like code it is infringing. SCO is aiming for the "ask for the moon, settle for a hamster" method that seems to work in the current US judicial system.
IBM has about a billion dollars to spend on lawyers, and we all know that those who can spend the most on legal fees win.
I'm firmly in the camp that SCO is hoping for a fuck-off-we-will-buy-you-to-shut-you-up settlement with IBM. It won't happen. I'm no scholarly 15 year-old, but assuming that SCO knows what they are doing is a foolish thing to assume. They don't care if they win or lose in court because they are hoping someone buys them out, and the target they've chosen has the money to do so.
Re:The Zaurus software is so-so? No, it's rubbish.
on
YOPY Arrives
·
· Score: 1
I just bought a Zaurus 5500 on eBay and are waiting for it to be shipped up to me, but I have been scouting around on the net about it.
The first task for me will to be to get a CF memory card and install Open Zaurus and Opie on my Zaurus and get rid of QTopia, which is good but the Opie/OpenZaurus combo turns the Zaurus into something that I think fits my needs.
I realize that I am not a normal user, so the QTopia environment and standard applications need to be improved so they can compete with everything else.
All very good ideas, impossible to implement. Spammers will just get more creative in their methods to avoid getting caught.
I used to be firmly in the "kill the spammers" camp, but I've come to the realization (like many others) that the real culprits are people who actually BUY stuff in the spam they get sent. If nobody buys the stuff, spam WILL disappear.
For now I will just keep using Mozilla's junk mail stuff and not stress myself over it. I have yet to purchase ANYTHING over the Internet that was brought to my attention by a piece of spam.
It's only 4% because people are acting quickly to try and stop it from spreading. I live and work around Toronto (which is one of the places where SARS has shown up with a vengence in Canada), and believe me, it's a big freakin' deal. I had to go the doctor for treatment of strep throat and there was a form I had to fill out about SARS and every medical person there had a filter mask on and wouldn't go NEAR you until they determined you weren't a SARS risk.
Like some others have said, how would YOU feel if someone you knew was one of those 4%. I think your knee would jerk pretty high.
Well, I can understand your paranoia but I think the risks of you getting in trouble for having child porn stashed on your computer is very remote. From what I understand about Freenet, the anonymous nature of it makes it incredibly unlikely they could actually track individual files and find out who is hosting what.
IANAL, but a good lawyer could probably successfully argue you have no way of knowing what's being stored on your computer as it is part of an anonymous network. It would be like a bank being held liable for criminals stashing money from the drug trade in it. The bank doesn't know where the money comes from, do they? But I guess you can only afford a good lawyer if you've got lots of money. I'm pretty sure Pete Townsend won't do any jail time for his having viewed and/or possessed child pornography.
I am Canadian, not American, so this decision will not affect me until Canada passes similar laws with respect to copyright. I don't want everything to be free (I'm a programmer who gets paid for his work), but what bugs me is the double standard the corporations have held up here.
They want the ability to take things OTHER PEOPLE HAVE CREATED IN THE PAST and turn them into products they can make money off. Now they don't want to give anyone else the same opportunity, hence their non-stop lobbying for extensions of terms of copyright.
You make the good point that people shouldn;t "depend on the work somebody else did decades ago to be your only creative outlet." Unfortunately, that's EXACTLY what Disney and the other huge media outlets want to do. By extending copyrights, they never lose their ability to keep making money off the past.
If anything, it makes it less and less likely that new material is as good as the old material because their is no incentive to make new exciting stuff to keep the cash flow up.
I use PHP for serious stuff at work where Perl and Java aren't worth the trouble because we prefer to make MONEY as opposed to wasting time with Perl and Java on the front end. We use PHP for front end stuff and Perl for data mining and munging.
PHP is just as useful a tool as Perl when used properly, JUST LIKE ANY OTHER PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE.
Well, it may be over the top but it does point out the party line being espoused by all the record companies:
1) they want to copy-protect all CD's 2) they insist that their copy-protected media is still compliant with Phillip's CD standard 3) your complaints will be ignored and you will be labeled a pirate for your troubles
Posting anonymously doesn't make your opinion carry any more weight, you know. If Win2K is working well, great for him but he is slamming Linux based on his OWN experiences, which are probably not the experiences of the majority of Linux users. I remember when Win95 required you to jump through hoops to do certain things that are now much easier under WinXP. As more hardware vendors support Linux, first-time installs will become easier and hopefully we get to a point where driver support is no longer an issue.
Besides, if you want everything to work perfectly out of the box you should try a Mac (not a troll, just personal experience) because any time I've seen a peripheral added to a Mac box it works perfectly. I suspect that the standard for device drivers for Apple is higher than for Windows, hence the ease of use for installing new hardware for a Mac.
Um, I don't know about you, but putting up a picture of somebody and claiming that it's someone else (which is what obviously happened in the Microsoft ad) is a TOTAL sham. It's borderline fraud and dishonest to boot
An ISP I worked for many years ago used to do this same sort of thing: stock photos for members of the company. Customers laughed at them because they got to meet the real people at a few trade shows. It sure didn't reflect well on the ISP and Microsoft will have to spin this at 7500RPM to try and fix it.
I work for a company that handles a LOT of database traffic (high volume web hosting and e-mail management) and we use MySQL for everything. We're talking terrabits of data here. MySQL is good enough for us because we don't need transactions and other high-end things.
That said, we are contemplating switching to Oracle because we are introducing credit card processing and we need the pure horsepower and transactional capabilities that it can do for us.
It's all about the right tool for the right job. If you don't need transactions or sub-selects then MySQL will do you just fine.
I agree that the problems aren't being 100% fixed, but I think that it's a step in the right direction. We deserve to know who is being awarded contracts and who got money from somebody and how much were they given.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think that the US is the only country that could produce one of these types of reactors? Strikes me as a lot of arrogance that only the US could do it. As for your idea for a "cryptographic leash", other countries would be happy to provide the technology without any licensing restrictions.
:)
Honestly, if the US is worried about the plutonium being extracted out of this reactor by the local government, DON'T SELL ONE OF THESE TO THAT GOVERNMENT. Chances are that countries like the ones who would want to steal plutonium will find other ways to do it and will simply buy their reactor technologies from somewhere else. Sure didn't stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. Besides, I don't see where it says only the United States is allowed to have nuclear weapons.
Being Canadian, I know that the Canadian government had sold a bunch of CANDU reactors to other countries, and I'd be willing to bet that we didn't try to squeeze licensing fees out of them for it. Of course, it may just be that Canada is too polite to ask.
Where I work we're coding a dating site. Currently, it's up to about 180K lines of scripts written in PHP. However, not a lot of it was written with unit testing (and test-driven development) in mind. I'm a big believer in unit testing but it's been hard to get the other members on board as they complain how hard it is to write unit tests for web pages. Bah.
So, most of the library functions that I wrote (stuff like except an integer, return a text string from a list) have been unit tested by myself, and every time I change a function or a class, I try and write a unit test for it.
Seriously, you just need to dive right in and think about how you make your code easy to test. I use the SimpleTest testing framework (it's PHP), and I always feel good when my array of tests all run correctly when I make a major change to the code that impacts a huge portion of the site.
If test-driven development has done one thing, it's forced me to carefully examine my code to create a way to make sure it is actually working according to the business logic we've been asked to implement.
Hey, lots of good points. Let me respond to them:
"WITHOUT GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION" is the part you left off. Pure capitalism is a series of checks and balances, supply and demand. It does not survive in the face of ludicrous laws like the DMCA, and government sanctioned monopolies like RIAA.
The fact is, the RIAA could put an end to piracy once and for all by giving us what we want, not telling us what we want. Do you need DRM? Not if you give them an economic reason to stay legitimate.
Very true, but those ludicrous laws you described were bought and paid for by (wait for it) corporations! As for the RIAA "giving us what we want", does this mean that you want to download music that you can then use in any way you want? Me too, but I don't forsee it happening any time soon. The RIAA will drag down everyone it can with their clients on the slide down, and it will take a strong co-ordinated effort for people who want to listen to music on something other than a CD player to not go down in the wreckage. But given human nature, you can expect 99% of the public to basically not give a shit.
It is exactly like the movie industry when the VCR came out. Video's cost $100 a piece. Everyone pirated them because they were too damned expensive. The same is currently true of music. Would you waste your time searching on kazaa or emule if you could get a perfect digital copy for 25 cents? Would you risk downloading a virus or otherwise waste your time trying to find the exact version of a song you want? Absolutely not.
Hey, I'm with on this one too.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. But if you think for one damned second I am going to accept those terms, you are out of your mind. And eventually, I really believe the rest of the world is going to feel that way.
Look what happened with TurboTax. Intuit added product activation. It wasn't draconian, it really wasn't nearly as evil as everyone made it out to be, and yet, it caused an uproar. Intuit lost thousands of sales and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were forced to not only remove the product activation, but even the license key as well.
Again, can't argue too much there. But I think you severely overestimate that "the rest of the world", which includes half the population that doesn't even know how to use a phone, will stand up to this. Again, I lack faith that the very people you need to support this cause even care about it at all. This isn't like the civil rights movement in the U.S. in the 1950's and 1960's. This is about a bunch of technoelitists (which is what we are) wanting to have things our way. Which, of course, never happens unless (wait for it) CORPORATIONS agree to go along with it.
When, exactly, did the buying public become 10 times smaller than the entertainment industry? The tech sector alone is many times larger than the entertainment industry. The buying power of US citizens is many times larger than that.
The real problem here, is that you believe you have no power. What you should be doing, just as I and my friends have done, is to convince people not to buy CD's. People have attributed the decline in CD sales to the economy and to piracy, but less frequently to what is likely the real culprit, a disgruntled buying public.
Well, this isn't the buying public vs. the entertainment industry. It's the public vs. the entertainment industry PLUS your elected government officials who accept the monetary donations of the entertainment industry.
The sad truth is that you and I don't have any power against this combination. I don't buy CD's very often (I think I've bought 3 in the last 3 years) because I don't like the tactics of the music industry (although living in Canada gives me the right to share my MP3 and OGG collection online).
As long as they have the government on their side, the entertainment industry is free to treat us like the thieving pieces of shit they
First of all, let me preface the rest of my comment by stating that I am Canadian, and don't live in the US and Canada does not have a law like the DMCA. Therefore, my views and opinions may be different based on cultural and societal influences.
I remember going to Chicago a few years ago and there was a convention of Marxists going on there. One thing that struck me about their talk of changing the system and things like that is one simple fact: to change the system, you have to become part of the system. In order to become part of the system you often have to compromise your position so other people will come around to your point of view. So, if you want to change things you really do have to sell out to a specific point.
Now, I don't think of my view as "defeatist." I think of it as being a "realist". Your government doesn't seem to listen to the people who actually vote them into office, they listen to the people who give them money. Which are corporations. Which is why the United States has become a society where large corporations basically dictate economic policy and what you get to do with the products and services they are giving you in exchange for money. The DMCA is a terrible law, but it won't be repealed unless corporations want it to be gone. Your "corporate overlords" have ALREADY WON because they can contribute money to people trying to get elected to public office, who in turn pass laws that make it easier for those corporations to make money. Yes, it's terrible. Yes, it's pushing things towards a "Corporate Fiefdom", which is a phrase that perfectly describes the current situation.
As far as I can tell, a capitalistic system is really about MAKING AS MUCH FREAKIN' MONEY AS YOU CAN. Everything else doesn't matter. I see nothing wrong with saying "Here, you can buy this thing from me but you can only use it in the following ways I think are acceptable." That's essentially what a license is, isn't it? If you don't like it, THEN DON'T BUY SOMETHING FROM THEM.
Your use of an X-Box being modded is a prime example of this. Nobody is forcing you to buy an X-Box and mod it. You don't like that if you buy an X-Box, you can't modify it? Gee, that's too freakin' bad because when you bought it you agreed to a bunch of rules regarding how you can use it. Again, I don't agree with the idea of a license that restricts how you can use something like an X-Box, but then again, I never voted for the people who helped pass the laws that let Microsoft do that.
If you sell something and attach no rules to it, then you are absolutely correct that you should have no control over what happens to it. Again, just don't buy stuff from people who want to apply rules to it's use that you disagree with it.
Go ahead and call me defeatist and claim that I've decided to bend over and smile. When the person who is bending you over is 10 times your size and 10 times your weight, there isn't anything you can do about it. A poster in a comment below talks about how "people will take the power back." People are too apathetic to care about the issues that readers of Slashdot are so passionate about. The few who care will be abandoned by the majority who don't.
So, prepare to be violated by the rulers of the corporate fiefdom.
Very noble, but ignores the reality of the situation. If you want access to the widest possible source of music, those people who will give you access to that source will be putting restrictions on what you can do with that stuff.
Hey, I like Magnatune too but they are basically a fringe record label. No huge record label is EVER going to say "here, download this stuff of our pay-per-download site and do with it whatever you want." Because then there is nothing to stop you from setting up a site that competes with them.
It's not about being "willing to accept the situation" as you said, it's about getting what you want. People want to download the latest popular music and the vast majority of them don't want to give 100 copies to all their friends. They just want to listen to it on their computer at home and on their portable player.
Apple has figured this out, and it's driving iPod sales right now. The sad truth is that "principles" don't count for anything in a society that has put corporations that make money at the top of the food chain.
...but he's acting like he still is.
This article is one big "Java can solve all the internet's problems" troll. As if Microsoft's problem is because their code is written in C instead of Java. That's ludicrous.
A programming language can't change people's behaviour. Only PEOPLE can change people's behaviour. Bill Joy's obviously a smart guy, but his railing against what he calls "antiquated" languages and his lack of understanding on why programming languages have nothing to do with e-mail viruses being able to spread so easily shows why Sun is no longer in such a position of prominence.
His statement about how he "designed solutions for problems that people didn't yet know they had" either shows a complete lack of understanding of the way NORMAL people use technology or he's started believing his own marketing spin about Java and Sun's other technologies.
It makes me wonder if Joy is leaving Sun because he's bitter that Sun couldn't take down Microsoft and that Java, while a very powerfull programming language that definitely has it's place in certain types of projects, isn't the language of choice for programmers everywhere.
No, I just think shows how DUMB this girl and her family is. That $29.95 is a ONE-time fee for an ad-free version of Kazaa, not a monthly fee. Did they actually believe that paying $29.95 for a copy of a program meant that they can download all the copyrighted music they want? I bet the girl still thinks there is a Santa Claus.
The mother's quote at the end of the article is priceless. Of COURSE what they were doing is illegal. It's called copyright infringement. Is it theft? Hell no. But it's still illegal. I suspect the RIAA will quietly drop this case and move on to someone else who won't make them look so bad.
I remember reading about this system. What they do is actually pool your mico transations and charge at the end of the billing period instead of instantly charging you when you make the purchase. Apple is gambling that you'll buy enough stuff during the billing period to make the transaction fee charged to Apple palatable.
The only thing I see different from that site and the opensnippets one is (a) the interface is a lot better at "The Code Project" and (b) they push the development tools of their sponsors. Hey, we've all been whores at some point in our lives, so I don't completely blame them. Running websites isn't free.
I'm sure those 1/2 million members (that seems like an awfully large number to me, but I have no reason to believe it's not true) are finding something of value from the site. I guess I just let my own morals get in the way of using a site like that.
Took a look at www.codeproject.com. It's all Windows-specific stuff except for a link to Perl. And no link to PHP in the scripting section? What a shock. Definitely a Windows-centric site.
Gee, what's this? I dig a little deeper and find out that the site is nothing more than a shill for the products of it's sponsors.
I'll take a sponsor-free site over one whoring itself out any day.
I would prefer no cables either, as wireless is the best way to go (there is wireless access where I work). Having a direct USB connection could mean you could still do the whole ethernet-over-USB thing that you do with the cradle.
My next purchase for my Zaurus will be a WiFi CF card so I can surf during meetings...
I have a Sharp Zaurus 5500 that has both a CF and a SD port. Um, I don't see how the "CompactFlash port, in particular is very bulky". I'm looking at the port right now, and it's probably less than half the height of the device. To me, that does not say bulky.
Now, a direct USB connection would be way cool for the Zaurus. I know that you can buy a cable for about US$30 that plugs into the bottom of the Zaurus and into a USB port, which means you no longer have to use the cradle to connect it to your PC.
That sounds interesting, but the reason for $9.95 is also *marketing* related. My wife and I have been shopping for a new TV and I've lost track of the number of times my wife has said to me "Hey, that thing is only $X00!" when in fact it is $X99.95. (X being a number usually between 6 and 9).
Marketing is all about deceiving people into believing your product is better than it really is, so if you can make people think an item that cost a nickel less than $800 really costs $700, then you're doing a good job.
Besides, if cashiers really want to steal money, they'll figure out a way. I worked at a grocery store while in high-school and saw all sorts of scams pulled by dishonest cashiers.
Well, I have to disagree with your reasoning about SCO's lawyers knowing what they are doing. All I see is a bunch of wild claims with no concrete proof to back them up.
Lawsuits backed by ridiculous claims get filed all the time. All you need is an idiot judge and the right group of jurors and you've got yourself a multi-billion dollar judgement.
I don't think SCO has any chance of prevailing for a few reasons, all of which I think aren't founded on rumours from various Internet gossip-mongering sites:
They refuse to show anyone who doesn't sign an NDA the allegedly offending code. Why don't they want to show anyone where the problem is. That would be the first thing I'd show if it were me.
Their own company officers keep changing their story about what the problem really is. One day it's 60 lines of code. Next it's thousands of lines of code. Now it's every OS that has a smidgen of UNIX-like code it is infringing. SCO is aiming for the "ask for the moon, settle for a hamster" method that seems to work in the current US judicial system.
IBM has about a billion dollars to spend on lawyers, and we all know that those who can spend the most on legal fees win.
I'm firmly in the camp that SCO is hoping for a fuck-off-we-will-buy-you-to-shut-you-up settlement with IBM. It won't happen. I'm no scholarly 15 year-old, but assuming that SCO knows what they are doing is a foolish thing to assume. They don't care if they win or lose in court because they are hoping someone buys them out, and the target they've chosen has the money to do so.
I just bought a Zaurus 5500 on eBay and are waiting for it to be shipped up to me, but I have been scouting around on the net about it.
The first task for me will to be to get a CF memory card and install Open Zaurus and Opie on my Zaurus and get rid of QTopia, which is good but the Opie/OpenZaurus combo turns the Zaurus into something that I think fits my needs.
I realize that I am not a normal user, so the QTopia environment and standard applications need to be improved so they can compete with everything else.
All very good ideas, impossible to implement. Spammers will just get more creative in their methods to avoid getting caught.
I used to be firmly in the "kill the spammers" camp, but I've come to the realization (like many others) that the real culprits are people who actually BUY stuff in the spam they get sent. If nobody buys the stuff, spam WILL disappear.
For now I will just keep using Mozilla's junk mail stuff and not stress myself over it. I have yet to purchase ANYTHING over the Internet that was brought to my attention by a piece of spam.
It's only 4% because people are acting quickly to try and stop it from spreading. I live and work around Toronto (which is one of the places where SARS has shown up with a vengence in Canada), and believe me, it's a big freakin' deal. I had to go the doctor for treatment of strep throat and there was a form I had to fill out about SARS and every medical person there had a filter mask on and wouldn't go NEAR you until they determined you weren't a SARS risk.
Like some others have said, how would YOU feel if someone you knew was one of those 4%. I think your knee would jerk pretty high.
Well, I can understand your paranoia but I think the risks of you getting in trouble for having child porn stashed on your computer is very remote. From what I understand about Freenet, the anonymous nature of it makes it incredibly unlikely they could actually track individual files and find out who is hosting what.
IANAL, but a good lawyer could probably successfully argue you have no way of knowing what's being stored on your computer as it is part of an anonymous network. It would be like a bank being held liable for criminals stashing money from the drug trade in it. The bank doesn't know where the money comes from, do they? But I guess you can only afford a good lawyer if you've got lots of money. I'm pretty sure Pete Townsend won't do any jail time for his having viewed and/or possessed child pornography.
I am Canadian, not American, so this decision will not affect me until Canada passes similar laws with respect to copyright. I don't want everything to be free (I'm a programmer who gets paid for his work), but what bugs me is the double standard the corporations have held up here.
They want the ability to take things OTHER PEOPLE HAVE CREATED IN THE PAST and turn them into products they can make money off. Now they don't want to give anyone else the same opportunity, hence their non-stop lobbying for extensions of terms of copyright.
You make the good point that people shouldn;t "depend on the work somebody else did decades ago to be your only creative outlet." Unfortunately, that's EXACTLY what Disney and the other huge media outlets want to do. By extending copyrights, they never lose their ability to keep making money off the past.
If anything, it makes it less and less likely that new material is as good as the old material because their is no incentive to make new exciting stuff to keep the cash flow up.
I use PHP for serious stuff at work where Perl and Java aren't worth the trouble because we prefer to make MONEY as opposed to wasting time with Perl and Java on the front end. We use PHP for front end stuff and Perl for data mining and munging.
PHP is just as useful a tool as Perl when used properly, JUST LIKE ANY OTHER PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE.
Well, it may be over the top but it does point out the party line being espoused by all the record companies:
1) they want to copy-protect all CD's
2) they insist that their copy-protected media is still compliant with Phillip's CD standard
3) your complaints will be ignored and you will be labeled a pirate for your troubles
Posting anonymously doesn't make your opinion carry any more weight, you know. If Win2K is working well, great for him but he is slamming Linux based on his OWN experiences, which are probably not the experiences of the majority of Linux users. I remember when Win95 required you to jump through hoops to do certain things that are now much easier under WinXP. As more hardware vendors support Linux, first-time installs will become easier and hopefully we get to a point where driver support is no longer an issue.
Besides, if you want everything to work perfectly out of the box you should try a Mac (not a troll, just personal experience) because any time I've seen a peripheral added to a Mac box it works perfectly. I suspect that the standard for device drivers for Apple is higher than for Windows, hence the ease of use for installing new hardware for a Mac.
Um, I don't know about you, but putting up a picture of somebody and claiming that it's someone else (which is what obviously happened in the Microsoft ad) is a TOTAL sham. It's borderline fraud and dishonest to boot
An ISP I worked for many years ago used to do this same sort of thing: stock photos for members of the company. Customers laughed at them because they got to meet the real people at a few trade shows. It sure didn't reflect well on the ISP and Microsoft will have to spin this at 7500RPM to try and fix it.
I work for a company that handles a LOT of database traffic (high volume web hosting and e-mail management) and we use MySQL for everything. We're talking terrabits of data here. MySQL is good enough for us because we don't need transactions and other high-end things.
That said, we are contemplating switching to Oracle because we are introducing credit card processing and we need the pure horsepower and transactional capabilities that it can do for us.
It's all about the right tool for the right job. If you don't need transactions or sub-selects then MySQL will do you just fine.
I agree that the problems aren't being 100% fixed, but I think that it's a step in the right direction. We deserve to know who is being awarded contracts and who got money from somebody and how much were they given.
It's just not as bad as in the U.S..