I pretty sure they complied to the court orders here in Brazil because, otherwise, the Brazilian directors/managers would actually go on trial for "obstruction of justice" or maybe even something like "facilitating child pornography". Those are *criminal* charges, not civil ones.
This is actually worse than the original announcement because not only they're restricting international users, they're also crippling the service for everyone else.
Using Mobbler is awesome. Being an international user and not being able to use it anymore will *definitely* kill last.fm for me.
Here in Brazil, sugar-cane ethanol usage has recently surpassed gasoline usage. This happened exclusively because it's cheaper than gas. Not because of any government subsidies or less taxes. It's just cheaper than oil. Brazil has been growing sugar cane for a ridiculous amount of time and the process is very efficient.
Most new cars here are bi-fuel (ethanol and gas) because people will actually pay more for a bi-fuel car (the savings are worth it). If the US didn't have ridiculous taxes on foreign ethanol (so that its own, inefficient, corn ethanol industry won't go bankrupt) you would also have cheaper-than-gas ethanol over there.
About 6 months ago, during this interview, Mythic VP and lead Warhammer Online designer Mark Jacobs said some interesting things regarding MMO development, including their own game. In particular:
According to Jacobs, another way to measure success is to look at the number of servers a game has added in a six-month period. "The corollary to that is if you've seen a game consolidate servers, you know it's in deep, deep trouble -- that's not a healthy sign for an MMO," he said, citing Sony's January-released "Pirates of the Burning Sea" as a recent example. "It will be the same for 'Warhammer.' Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we're not adding servers, we're not doing well."
Looks like they're not doing that well - according to their own standards.
I'm not sure if by "termination" you really meant "providing termination services for third-parties without a license". But in Brazil it's perfectly legal to have a VoIP gateway which will route your company internal VoIP systems to the PSTN.
Providing this service for third-parties would require a telecom license, though.
It's completely legal with some cable companies offering cable + VoIP and several VoIP-only telecoms here. But most of the national VoIP providers are expensive when compared to Skype (about 2-3x more expensive). One of the reasons for that is taxes: telephony (and telecom in general) is taxed at 33%. Their only advantage is reliability for incoming calls when compared to SkypeIn.
In the early days of Skype, some ADSL providers tried to block Skype traffic in some places, it's actually not illegal for them to do that. But this only lasted for a few months as, presumably, people started switching over to cable companies (which were more than happy to grab yet another revenue stream from the telcos).
I believe my experience might be more relevant to you as Brazil and Paraguay are neighbor countries, so the context should be somewhat similar.
Here in Brazil ethanol is used by cars more than gasoline. We don't use it because there's a government subsidy or because we love the environment or any such nonsense.
Sugar cane ethanol is *cheaper* than gasoline.
Biofuels are seen as expensive in the US because you're using the wrong sources. Of course it won't be cost-effective to extract ethanol from corn.
Seriously. This should be the first time I'm actually able to conclude that Brazil is better than the US at something. It's impossible for me to understand how can you *seriously* think that paper ballots are better than electronic voting.
Here in Brazil the whole voting process only happens on a single day and everyone must vote, since voting is mandatory. This should mean about 120 million voters. The whole vote counting process takes only a few hours and that's it. And it only takes that long because there's no networked transmission of the results for security concerns, so the voting machine actually needs to be physically taken somewhere.
Each person votes on a specific, preassigned, voting place and each citizen has a voting card issued by the federal government. Since voting is mandatory, everyone has that card. So voter identification is trivial.
This was done to *avoid* fraud. I mean, it's pretty obvious to me that a bag full of paper is much more easy to tamper with than anything electronic, specially since the voting machines run on open-source software.
Our laws actually *forbid* any kind of paper trail or any other sort of "proof of vote". Voting should be anonymous at all costs. This way, if someone tries to buy votes, they can never know if the person actually voted on them or not.
Well, I was surprised the first reply wasn't about this. That was supposed to read "places like Africa".
Unfortunately, I didn't notice it during preview and Slashdot doesn't allow me to edit my posts. Oh, well. I could always say I was referring to South Africa.;)
Google isn't asking for profitable ideas or anything like that.
Sure, some of them could end up being profitable, but that's not the point. They want to invest in nice ideas which could improve the life quality of people. From the video, you can clearly see they're interested in ideas that could, for instance, ease the burden put on poor people in countries like Africa. You can hardly profit from that.
This is called philanthropy. And it's amazing how people from the US find this so absurd. Sometimes, there really isn't a catch.
It makes sense when talking about Perl because there is only one Perl language, which is defined as whatever is implemented by perl. There isn't a language specification document and this is by design.
Perl isn't interpreted on any system. Perl is compiled by perl and then its optree is interpreted by perl. The optree is interpreted, not the language itself. I think you've still failed to understand the difference here. There is a formal compiler in there. There is a compilation stage, then you've got 3 optimization stages and then, finally, execution. It just happens to be all inside the same program.
Empirically speaking, line by line interpreters are slower than bytecode interpreters. Look at the history of Tcl or Ruby (I'm not aware if Ruby is already bytecode interpreted or if it's something scheduled for 1.9 or 2.0).
I am fully aware that Perl is bytecode-interpreted (actually, to be more precise, optree-interpreted). But there's a difference between that and line-interpreted languages such as Tcl. My main issue is that people perceive Perl as an interpreted language while also perceiving Java as compiled language.
You can't use double standards. You either use "interpreted" for both bytecode-interpreted and line-interpreted languages (in which case both Perl and Java are interpreted languages) or you use it for line-interpreted languages (in which case neither Perl nor Java are).
It's important to note that bytecode interpreted can possibly mean no relevant impact in performance whatsoever because it's possible to write JIT compilers, it's much easier to achieve decent performance and you could even develop hardware for that VM while this would never be possible for line-interpreted language.
I wouldn't post here if I didn't know what I was talking about and suggest you to follow this same advice.
Paulo Coelho isn't an underdog author at all. He's actually the best selling Brazilian author of all time. He's sold more than 100 million copies of his books in multiple different countries.
This isn't a guerrilla marketing thing or anything like that. He doesn't need more marketing at all.
I hope people see this as a proof of concept showing that online sharing doesn't actually hurt sales - even for the big ones - it actually improves sales. Most people who wouldn't buy his book still won't buy it but hey, they can talk to friends who might buy it. At worse, he was able to spread his ideas and his art which might pay off as a personal achievement.
To be honest, I think his books suck. But, if this is really true, kudos to him.
This article contains huge bits misinformation spread all over.
The author fails to notice completely the recent advances of Perl such as Catalyst which is a Rails-like (but better) framework for web application development.
Also, Perl isn't interpreted. It's compiled to bytecode on the fly and run by its internal virtual machine, much like Java (except Java has an explicit compilation stage, while it's implicit in Perl).
Perl performance is more than adequate and surpasses most other languages except. A proof of that is SixApart's perlbal - a load balancer completely written in Perl which is as fast as most of other solutions currently available (some of them in hardware) while providing much greater flexibility.
I'm honestly disappointed by this article (even the title is full of prejudice), especially because I don't have many hopes for the author to correct his mistakes and this is a somewhat influential site.
The bottom line is: Perl is an evolving language and we're not in 2000 anymore. Recent Perl developments have made the language a full fledged platform for web development. But developers need to code in "2008 Perl" not "last millenium Perl".
PS: I wrote this comment for this original article on cio.com and I thought this wouldn't get past the Firehose here... either way, I only pasted it here because I think my comment can be informative or insightful to some of you. Since I'm a bit late, I'm pretty sure it will probably end up buried unless someone mods it up, oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
I pretty sure they complied to the court orders here in Brazil because, otherwise, the Brazilian directors/managers would actually go on trial for "obstruction of justice" or maybe even something like "facilitating child pornography". Those are *criminal* charges, not civil ones.
I pretty sure you would comply too.
This is actually worse than the original announcement because not only they're restricting international users, they're also crippling the service for everyone else.
Using Mobbler is awesome. Being an international user and not being able to use it anymore will *definitely* kill last.fm for me.
You're completely right.
Here in Brazil, sugar-cane ethanol usage has recently surpassed gasoline usage. This happened exclusively because it's cheaper than gas. Not because of any government subsidies or less taxes. It's just cheaper than oil. Brazil has been growing sugar cane for a ridiculous amount of time and the process is very efficient.
Most new cars here are bi-fuel (ethanol and gas) because people will actually pay more for a bi-fuel car (the savings are worth it). If the US didn't have ridiculous taxes on foreign ethanol (so that its own, inefficient, corn ethanol industry won't go bankrupt) you would also have cheaper-than-gas ethanol over there.
About 6 months ago, during this interview, Mythic VP and lead Warhammer Online designer Mark Jacobs said some interesting things regarding MMO development, including their own game. In particular:
According to Jacobs, another way to measure success is to look at the number of servers a game has added in a six-month period. "The corollary to that is if you've seen a game consolidate servers, you know it's in deep, deep trouble -- that's not a healthy sign for an MMO," he said, citing Sony's January-released "Pirates of the Burning Sea" as a recent example. "It will be the same for 'Warhammer.' Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we're not adding servers, we're not doing well."
Looks like they're not doing that well - according to their own standards.
I'm not sure if by "termination" you really meant "providing termination services for third-parties without a license".
But in Brazil it's perfectly legal to have a VoIP gateway which will route your company internal VoIP systems to the PSTN.
Providing this service for third-parties would require a telecom license, though.
It's completely legal with some cable companies offering cable + VoIP and several VoIP-only telecoms here. But most of the national VoIP providers are expensive when compared to Skype (about 2-3x more expensive). One of the reasons for that is taxes: telephony (and telecom in general) is taxed at 33%. Their only advantage is reliability for incoming calls when compared to SkypeIn.
In the early days of Skype, some ADSL providers tried to block Skype traffic in some places, it's actually not illegal for them to do that. But this only lasted for a few months as, presumably, people started switching over to cable companies (which were more than happy to grab yet another revenue stream from the telcos).
I believe my experience might be more relevant to you as Brazil and Paraguay are neighbor countries, so the context should be somewhat similar.
Here, let me give you some education:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation
Here in Brazil ethanol is used by cars more than gasoline.
We don't use it because there's a government subsidy or because we love the environment or any such nonsense.
Sugar cane ethanol is *cheaper* than gasoline.
Biofuels are seen as expensive in the US because you're using the wrong sources. Of course it won't be cost-effective to extract ethanol from corn.
Enough with the pointless Google-hating attitude.
Well, if you read the summary, you'll clearly read: "One feature present in Beta 1 is gone in the new beta: Ctrl-Tab switching."
So maybe you might want to rephrase that as: "Mod clueless kdawson down, plz."
Well, right now I have 23 opened tabs (including this one). :(
Unfortunately, I don't see any key labeled "23" on my keyboard.
Honestly, I have no idea why it was moderated funny either.
If I had mod points and could mod myself, I would myself insightful.
But, uhm, I guess you just can't predict Slashdot behavior.
Come on... no Ctrl+Tab switching?
How could anyone possibly use it without that feature?
Seems like a deal-breaker for me...
You clearly never worked with any *decent* Perl programmers.
You can write bad code in any language. In Perl, bad code looks bad. That's a *feature*.
Seriously.
This should be the first time I'm actually able to conclude that Brazil is better than the US at something.
It's impossible for me to understand how can you *seriously* think that paper ballots are better than electronic voting.
Here in Brazil the whole voting process only happens on a single day and everyone must vote, since voting is mandatory. This should mean about 120 million voters. The whole vote counting process takes only a few hours and that's it. And it only takes that long because there's no networked transmission of the results for security concerns, so the voting machine actually needs to be physically taken somewhere.
Each person votes on a specific, preassigned, voting place and each citizen has a voting card issued by the federal government. Since voting is mandatory, everyone has that card. So voter identification is trivial.
This was done to *avoid* fraud. I mean, it's pretty obvious to me that a bag full of paper is much more easy to tamper with than anything electronic, specially since the voting machines run on open-source software.
Our laws actually *forbid* any kind of paper trail or any other sort of "proof of vote". Voting should be anonymous at all costs. This way, if someone tries to buy votes, they can never know if the person actually voted on them or not.
This is interesting.
Could you give more details about it?
3) You didn't bother reading the other comments
Well, I was surprised the first reply wasn't about this. That was supposed to read "places like Africa".
Unfortunately, I didn't notice it during preview and Slashdot doesn't allow me to edit my posts. ;)
Oh, well. I could always say I was referring to South Africa.
Also note that English isn't my primary language.
Google isn't asking for profitable ideas or anything like that.
Sure, some of them could end up being profitable, but that's not the point. They want to invest in nice ideas which could improve the life quality of people. From the video, you can clearly see they're interested in ideas that could, for instance, ease the burden put on poor people in countries like Africa. You can hardly profit from that.
This is called philanthropy. And it's amazing how people from the US find this so absurd.
Sometimes, there really isn't a catch.
You do know that Toyota is a Japanese company, right?
The electron volt (eV) is a unit of energy (like joule) while the volt (V) measures the electric potential difference.
It makes sense when talking about Perl because there is only one Perl language, which is defined as whatever is implemented by perl. There isn't a language specification document and this is by design.
Perl isn't interpreted on any system. Perl is compiled by perl and then its optree is interpreted by perl. The optree is interpreted, not the language itself. I think you've still failed to understand the difference here. There is a formal compiler in there. There is a compilation stage, then you've got 3 optimization stages and then, finally, execution. It just happens to be all inside the same program.
Empirically speaking, line by line interpreters are slower than bytecode interpreters. Look at the history of Tcl or Ruby (I'm not aware if Ruby is already bytecode interpreted or if it's something scheduled for 1.9 or 2.0).
I am fully aware that Perl is bytecode-interpreted (actually, to be more precise, optree-interpreted). But there's a difference between that and line-interpreted languages such as Tcl. My main issue is that people perceive Perl as an interpreted language while also perceiving Java as compiled language.
You can't use double standards. You either use "interpreted" for both bytecode-interpreted and line-interpreted languages (in which case both Perl and Java are interpreted languages) or you use it for line-interpreted languages (in which case neither Perl nor Java are).
It's important to note that bytecode interpreted can possibly mean no relevant impact in performance whatsoever because it's possible to write JIT compilers, it's much easier to achieve decent performance and you could even develop hardware for that VM while this would never be possible for line-interpreted language.
I wouldn't post here if I didn't know what I was talking about and suggest you to follow this same advice.
Paulo Coelho isn't an underdog author at all. He's actually the best selling Brazilian author of all time. He's sold more than 100 million copies of his books in multiple different countries.
This isn't a guerrilla marketing thing or anything like that. He doesn't need more marketing at all.
I hope people see this as a proof of concept showing that online sharing doesn't actually hurt sales - even for the big ones - it actually improves sales. Most people who wouldn't buy his book still won't buy it but hey, they can talk to friends who might buy it. At worse, he was able to spread his ideas and his art which might pay off as a personal achievement.
To be honest, I think his books suck. But, if this is really true, kudos to him.
This article contains huge bits misinformation spread all over.
The author fails to notice completely the recent advances of Perl such as Catalyst which is a Rails-like (but better) framework for web application development.
Also, Perl isn't interpreted. It's compiled to bytecode on the fly and run by its internal virtual machine, much like Java (except Java has an explicit compilation stage, while it's implicit in Perl).
Perl performance is more than adequate and surpasses most other languages except. A proof of that is SixApart's perlbal - a load balancer completely written in Perl which is as fast as most of other solutions currently available (some of them in hardware) while providing much greater flexibility.
I'm honestly disappointed by this article (even the title is full of prejudice), especially because I don't have many hopes for the author to correct his mistakes and this is a somewhat influential site.
The bottom line is: Perl is an evolving language and we're not in 2000 anymore. Recent Perl developments have made the language a full fledged platform for web development. But developers need to code in "2008 Perl" not "last millenium Perl".
PS: I wrote this comment for this original article on cio.com and I thought this wouldn't get past the Firehose here... either way, I only pasted it here because I think my comment can be informative or insightful to some of you. Since I'm a bit late, I'm pretty sure it will probably end up buried unless someone mods it up, oh well.