Wow. I take it you're in research and it just burns you when research isn't taken as a religion that the unwashed masses simply absorb and believe: There are those of us who simply don't believe (believe in the religious sense of "just because that's what you say") when Scientist XYZ, with loads of documentation to back up their claims, proclaims the truth about something (usually proving exactly what they set out to prove), and months or years later scientist B, with loads of documentation to back up their claim, absolutely overrides the original suppositions and conclusions. This has happened in science countless times, but each time it is presented as this is absolutely, positively true : Look at our methodologies!
A perfect example of this is the number of "images" that the human eye can process per second, with various researchers attempting to come to a static number that quantifies and definitely states what the maximum FPS perceivable is. Of course they almost invariably fail to take into account persistence of vision, which is the concept that even if an entire scene isn't perceived the effects of the "sub-frames" merge together to form a common frame (natural motion blurring). That is what I mentioned about Quake (and it's funny how quickly you'll discount an oberservation: Don't you simply believe? Should I make some tables and package it in a whitepaper? Does that make it more credible?): Any Quake 3 player with a good system would have ZERO difficulty discerning between 60fps, 100fps, and possibly 200fps (or more), yet still there are those who will conclusively state that the human eye cannot see more than 46 FPS, etc. It is quite laughable though. In the case of pixel accuracy simply measuring the number of rods and cones in the eye would be insufficient and a half-measure: The "picture" that we see is the end result of a very intelligent system which may, for instance, do sub-pixel integration via "jitter" (i.e. you may have 20,000,000 "pixels" in your eye, but your eye is never absolutely still, which means that the light hitting your retina is contantly from a slightly different source: When looking at a leaf you are getting information from trillions of rays of light).
P.S. The post is interesting because most people in computers have seen this shit a million times before: Someone stating unequivically that the human ear/eye/nose/etc. can only see/hear/feel/taste/smell XYZ measures. CD is apparently beyond the absolute limit of human hearing (I won't get into the fools who believe that MP3 is beyond the limits of human hearing...), yet strangely they're coming out with DVD audio at 24-bits per sample/96Khz (versus 16-bits per sample/44.1Khz).
From the article: The eyeball is the limiting factor, not the screen
Yeah, sure it is. Throughout the history of time someone with a hard-on for a technology has slobbered away about how it's the last upgrade they'll ever have to do because damnit, it's more than the human eye/ear/senses can detect anyways. How many times have we had the moronic "The human eye can only detect below 60FPS!" arguments on Slashdot (yet I can refute that instantly as there is no doubt that Quake 3 feels smoother at 100+FPS than it does 60FPS, and the sense of natural motion blur is dramatically improved). How many times have people ranted that humans can only see X colors or hear X clarity of sound (both continually being defied).
The next time someone wants to sell their bosses on the idea that this is the last upgrade they'll ever need because it don't get any better practically, they need to stop and pick a different excuse. That particular one has just been proven wrong so many times it is now completely laughable.
In a humorous coincidence I was actually just coming on here to post a follow-up correction: My memory was spurred when I pulled up IMDB to check if the consensus opinion on 13 Days was as bad as I found it to be.
Completely true, however in concert with making ripping harder, as you know from the Napster situation they've been coming down hard on distribution mediums: While those alternate systems might be every bit as feature rich as Napster (or more), they are fringe products and nothing has remotely the mainstream penetration that Napster had.
It also should be said is that if they make ripping harder, less people will rip. Those who will will have a higher probability of subpar rips, poor spelling titling the product, etc. It's that sort of stuff that makes it inconvenient for the average Joe.
I have to admit that I have never dropped a CD in the car, and I haven't had a CD that was so scratched that it was unplayable since the sunrise of the CD revolution (when I was a little less careful).
Cost-wise I don't know if I agree with your assertion: You're talking about a dupe, so given that we should compare a CD-R to a good blank cassette - Here in Canada I'd say that a 100% quality CD-R is about $0.70 CDN each, whereas a good quality cassette (it's been a long time since I bought one) is about $2.50.
They state that it doesn't prevent analog copying, so yes you could copy the analog signal.
Copy protection is not what most "everything for free" Slashdotters think it is: It is not black and white, and just because a techie with a lot of free time can "break" it doesn't mean that the protection is a failure. It doesn't have to be 100% effective to be effective.
All copy protection has to achieve to commercially protect a product is that it makes the process more inconvenient for the average Joe/Jane than simply going to the store and picking up the CD: Whether it degrades the quality enough that they are willing to just buy a copy, or it makes the process inconvenient enough (i.e. The deCSS process in the early days was ridiculously inconvenient for the average Joe, which is why they sought to squash it in the early days before it becomes a Windows "wizard" to rip a DVD to a MPG), or it takes too much of their time: For the $15 level that we're talking about it's a very small "nuisance factor" that will lead most average citizens to just go buy the product rather than waste their time. I've ripped MP3s just because I can go in and select a track (and through IMDB instantly it's even titled correctly and everything), and it automatically pulls an MP3 copy. If, on the other hand, I had to sit here pressing record and stop at the right moment, and prune off the ends, and live with a degraded copy (all audio-in channels on the major soundcards are garbage), and manually identify each track: There's no way I'd do that, and while there's lots of little kids with nothing better to do who are willing to, a large majority of the consumers would rather part with $15 than deal with the hassle.
It's similar to the software market: There are warez channels on IRC, and to most people that is the downfall of the software industry...then after a couple of 1GB+ downloads which were corrupt you give up and never touch warez again. Even if you duped the CD off a friend, often you need a crack and most people are extremely wary of cracks (trojans, viruses, etc.), so they'd rather just buy the product that endure the risk.
Apparently you have forgotten the golden rule of car audio: All cassette car stereos shall eat 50% of all cassettes placed into them, without fail. It's funny we talk about this because one of the benefits of the CD revolution is pollution wise (well...apart from the fact that billions of cassettes were dumped in the garbage, cast off as obsolete): I remember being younger and quite frequently you would see several hundreds yards of tape floating down the street, or a case smashed into a million pieces, etc. Because of the "stereo must eat cassette" cardinal rule people were often quite frustrated and hurled the result out the window.
Don't know if I agree with that. In the case of rare or hostile-environment items, the intrinsic value is increased dramatically because of the shipment costs. For instance a moon rock is only a piece of dirt theoretically worth next to nothing, but because it came from the moon the "shipping" (hence the natural rarity of it) makes it worth significantly more. You might build a basic data relay satellite for $100,000, but because launching it costs $90,000,000 there is no way that you would sell it for less than $90,000,000 : The fact that it is sitting in space makes it worth that much more, because anyone else who wants to be there has to pay the same shipping costs.
The impact of the additional tax on these satellites will be miniscule compared to the property taxes that Hughes already pays on its facilities in the area.
They must have some incredible facilities, because at $100 million a pop, that's more than all but the most massive and most extravagent of giant office building complexes.
Living in Canada I find it very hard to believe that the people of CA tolerate this. While Canada is often cast as the overtaxed empire, the reality is that taxes are generally quite simple here : You get taxed on your income, and likewise companies get taxed on their profits. You get taxed when you "consume", which is when you purchase items like cars, gasoline, etc. You get taxed if you make income by selling items at more than you bought them (which is capital gains income and applies to stocks, property, etc. There are lots of loopholes though). All in all it is a very simple system, and if you removed yourself from society the tax system wouldn't be pecking you to death for everything you own, etc.
I could see that California probably justifies the car tax as a "roadway tax" or the like, however up here that is achieved by taxes on gasoline. Indeed that makes more sense because gas taxes directly correlate with your vehicles use of the roads (or in the cast of larger vehicles, the lower MPG means more taxes paid means compensation for the additional damage of the heavier vehicle).
Which juristictions do this? The idea of property taxes, as mentioned in another post, is that they get services for their taxes : Firemen, policemen, garbage pickup, etc. Obvious these services don't apply whatsoever to a satellite, nor would LA taxes apply if I had a company based in LA but we owned property in Vancouver. Property taxes don't apply to things like vehicles (though there are other types of taxes for them) or other assets. Generally the idea is that you pay a consumption tax when you buy it, you can get a tax break as it depreciates, and you pay a tax if you sell it at a gain (capital gain). I've never heard of taxing an asset just because you have it (apart from bogus licensing and other such fees).
Taxes don't make money out of nowhere, and imposing them at 5000 different layers doesn't help feed the poor or shelter the homeless: Instead it helps to pay the overwhelming mass of unnecessary government bureaucrats helping to ensure that a consumer product that costs $500 has $400 of various taxes added at 50 points along the way.
Company A makes widgets and they cost $200/unit to produce, and company A is a corporate "welfare" recipient so they pay no taxes. They sell the product at $220/unit.
Company B makes widgets and they cost $200/unit to produce, but because of wankers like LA County's tax officer, they pay approximately $50/unit in taxes per year. They sell the product at $270/unit.
That's just bizarre and incredibly damaging to capitalism. Indeed usually the opposite is true and the more assets a company has, the more depreciation it can assess each year, the less taxes it pays. The idea that the more a company owns physically the more taxes it pays is a sure way to send companies packing to a nicer municipality.
I understand and appreciate taxes on profits, and can see how taxes on properties in a municipality makes sense (different levels of government getting their cut), but taxes on assets? Do they tax each companies vehicles & computers?
This just sounds bizarre if they're trying to say that satellites are property in the same sense as a plot of land on Main Street.
BTW: On a similar parallel watch how many headlines talk about the tech crash, usually coupled with the collapse of the tech job market. Yet the reality is that overwhelmingly the crash has laid off low to mid level managers, HR, accountants, paper pushers, etc. IT workers are by far the least affected, yet they get the hugest majority of the attention. As another post mentioned: It's a desperate attempt to make programmers feel vulnerable.
Because most organizations have come to depend on their programmers to such a degree that they despise them. I had been cast as a prima donna at a previous place of work, and it was hilarious seeing the lengths that people would go to to try to prove this point: They would claim that I was hoarding code until I pointed out that they had full access to the source control and were welcome to look at it. Then they'd claim that I wouldn't explain it to them at which point I'd offer a meeting to go over the code. Then they'd claim that I was hiding some piece of information or other, at which point I'd direct them to deja, show them my sources, etc. All of it was absolutely useless because they were desperate to prove that I was a "prima donna" because how else could they explain my abilities? I had managers seriously believing that I was hoarding some secret stash of information because I could easily solve problems that others pondered over for weeks. There is a great irony in being despised for being a great asset to a company. I had managers constantly pathetically trying to drop hints that there are loads of great programmers out there, etc. (like this article says regarding trying to make your programmers feel replacable), which was laughable because I really wasn't demanding a lot of pay and was actually a very dependable employee, however their dependance on me led them to shine the spotlight on me ultra-bright, and they tried everything to psychologically control me.
There is another sort of prima donna that I would never stand up for, and that is the reverse prima donna that uses arrogance and elitism to pretend to have knowledge that they don't. At the same place I worked with a VB wanker who didn't have the slightest ounce of understanding of good code design, and any new technology would take him weeks to grasp remotely. He would attempt to look down his nose from high to his coworkers, hoping and praying that they would buy that he was 31337, when instead he was below average.
What a pile of shit. Software development is one of the (if not _the_) most complex fields in the world, and most prima donna programmers have spent most of their waking hours absorbing and learning, and they will continue to do so forever. While you attempt to disparage them by mentioning community college, the reality is (thankfully) that in the software development field you can't "earn" your way into eliteness by having Daddy pay for you to go to a prestigious college. Instead your abilities talk for you.
Absolutely true! I completely and absolutely agree with your assessment, and the fact that so-called "prima donnas" often technically question decisions or directions leads them to being tagged as outsiders who cause conflict, rather than people who actually care that things are done right.
I've been in situations where I have technically excelled over my coworkers, and invariably many (though not all) attempt to compensate for their weaknesses by projecting perceived weaknesses on me to disparage me and equalize in front of management, and I have a feeling this is where the whole term "prima donna" comes from when applied in the tech workspace (though, like in all fields, of course there are assholes out there). If they can't find faults in real life, they just make them up. This goes from presuming that any time I disagree I am "taking it personally", to commenting that I don't comment my code enough (though reverse analysis proved that I comment more than them), to commenting that I don't document enough (again analyzing my co-workers code showed that I documented as much or more than them). The point is that a lot of these supposed claimed faults of "prima donnas" are bullshit: When I read on here someone yapping that PDs don't document/comment I immediately imagine some subpar VB programmer, between extolling the reason why GOTOs are evil, imagining their superiority in non-technical realms because they are so thoroughly outclassed.
Few fields are as unbalanced as the software development field (i.e. the classic 10:1 development ratio), and because of this egos can be incredibly fragile in the software development industry. I have found that when I'm put in a position of technical authority this situation is amplified and every analysis I make is turned into a personal assault on the person who's decision I had to modify. Personally I think the whole prima donna thing is the propaganda of the mediocre, and I don't buy it for a minute.
Either you're doctv@peachlink.com, or you simply forgot to give proper attribution. Nice job getting the mod points though. The strange formatting was an obvious give away.
This presumes that the bandwidth throughout the world is the same as when we were all using 14.4 modems (and apparently those of us with high speed connections are doing so at the expense of those with low speed connections?): Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that the backbone speeds of the net have gone up astoundingly (indeed there is lots of dark fiber out there waiting for the need). I get 200KB/second pretty much all day downloading from a good number of sites, and that number is purely an artificial limit in my cable modem.
You list two points and pretend they are attributed to Microsoft, when in reality Microsoft has said or implied no such thing. The reality is that Microsoft extended Java in a way that gave them an advantage (most would call that the benefits of competition), and Sun didn't like that and sued them. Part of the agreement was that Microsoft stops all Java work (despite having the best JVM out there) and Microsoft dutifully complied. So now you have C# (which is largely like Java) & the CLR. Seems pretty logical to me.
Oh please. The only fanatic I'm seeing is you. I made a damn good point. If you put the product under a proprietary license and then offer the same package under BSD what's the point? The only thing you can offer is support. Just like GPL'd software.
I totally agree with this: There is very dubious economic value to releasing something under the BSD and simultaneously trying to sell it (just as it's absurd to try to sell something that's under the GPL, and this notion that keeps being proposed that the GPL & software sales go together is proposterous). You don't give away your greatest asset if you ever plan on profiting from it, and I don't agree with any such plan. However there are lots of companies whose asset isn't the software (for example hardware companies whose drivers are intrinsically tied to the sale of their hardware), and for them open source makes total sense. Additionally to push communications/packaging protocols and standards releasing open source makes sense. It also makes sense to release some open source for goodwill (IBM is playing this card). It doesn't make sense to make a "software company" and think that you're going to profit creating software and releasing it under the GPL. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of GPL fans are the leachers of society who between Napster sessions are busy ripping off cable TV and stealing the neighbours newspaper (or living in university labs).
Your analogies are skewed. No I don't expect to fly for free. Being able to use free software does not mitigate the cost of fuel, the cost of staff to fly and maintain the plane, etc. etc. Your reasoning is completely flawed. But if a cost savings gets them to add more staff, improve service, and get Fluffy from point A to point B in one piece then I don't see why that isn't a good thing.
My analogies are totally logical (although, like all analogies, they're of marginal value). The point is that GPL fanatics hold as their religion that it is evil for someone to profit off of "their" creations (although of course the person profiting must have added something to the GPLd code if they were to hypothetically profit from it, but this fact escapes GPLers. Another post brought up "Well what if someone sold something containing my open source code and profited from it without giving to me???!?!?!?!?!" : Obviously they're profiting on their EXTENSION of what you've done, as their creation does not make your open source disappear), but they extend this philosophy apparently only so far as other software, but if IBM is selling more servers because they install Linux on it: Good for them! If US Air can pay the CEO more because they switched to Linux (bogus scenario as TCO renders the base charge irrelevant), hurrah! It's a bizarre cannibalism of programmers where GPLers care the most that other programmers don't profit of their work, but if big business is laying off programmers and siphoning the IP for free: Hey isn't that just grand?
Now let's watch the rantings and ravings about the benefits and innovation of open source, followed by the stagnation of the project, and finally the forced forgetting of the dirty remnants. Ah this is better than fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. I take it you're in research and it just burns you when research isn't taken as a religion that the unwashed masses simply absorb and believe: There are those of us who simply don't believe (believe in the religious sense of "just because that's what you say") when Scientist XYZ, with loads of documentation to back up their claims, proclaims the truth about something (usually proving exactly what they set out to prove), and months or years later scientist B, with loads of documentation to back up their claim, absolutely overrides the original suppositions and conclusions. This has happened in science countless times, but each time it is presented as this is absolutely, positively true : Look at our methodologies!
A perfect example of this is the number of "images" that the human eye can process per second, with various researchers attempting to come to a static number that quantifies and definitely states what the maximum FPS perceivable is. Of course they almost invariably fail to take into account persistence of vision, which is the concept that even if an entire scene isn't perceived the effects of the "sub-frames" merge together to form a common frame (natural motion blurring). That is what I mentioned about Quake (and it's funny how quickly you'll discount an oberservation: Don't you simply believe? Should I make some tables and package it in a whitepaper? Does that make it more credible?): Any Quake 3 player with a good system would have ZERO difficulty discerning between 60fps, 100fps, and possibly 200fps (or more), yet still there are those who will conclusively state that the human eye cannot see more than 46 FPS, etc. It is quite laughable though. In the case of pixel accuracy simply measuring the number of rods and cones in the eye would be insufficient and a half-measure: The "picture" that we see is the end result of a very intelligent system which may, for instance, do sub-pixel integration via "jitter" (i.e. you may have 20,000,000 "pixels" in your eye, but your eye is never absolutely still, which means that the light hitting your retina is contantly from a slightly different source: When looking at a leaf you are getting information from trillions of rays of light).
P.S. The post is interesting because most people in computers have seen this shit a million times before: Someone stating unequivically that the human ear/eye/nose/etc. can only see/hear/feel/taste/smell XYZ measures. CD is apparently beyond the absolute limit of human hearing (I won't get into the fools who believe that MP3 is beyond the limits of human hearing...), yet strangely they're coming out with DVD audio at 24-bits per sample/96Khz (versus 16-bits per sample/44.1Khz).
From the article: The eyeball is the limiting factor, not the screen
Yeah, sure it is. Throughout the history of time someone with a hard-on for a technology has slobbered away about how it's the last upgrade they'll ever have to do because damnit, it's more than the human eye/ear/senses can detect anyways. How many times have we had the moronic "The human eye can only detect below 60FPS!" arguments on Slashdot (yet I can refute that instantly as there is no doubt that Quake 3 feels smoother at 100+FPS than it does 60FPS, and the sense of natural motion blur is dramatically improved). How many times have people ranted that humans can only see X colors or hear X clarity of sound (both continually being defied).
The next time someone wants to sell their bosses on the idea that this is the last upgrade they'll ever need because it don't get any better practically, they need to stop and pick a different excuse. That particular one has just been proven wrong so many times it is now completely laughable.
Yup, you're right. :-)
In a humorous coincidence I was actually just coming on here to post a follow-up correction: My memory was spurred when I pulled up IMDB to check if the consensus opinion on 13 Days was as bad as I found it to be.
Completely true, however in concert with making ripping harder, as you know from the Napster situation they've been coming down hard on distribution mediums: While those alternate systems might be every bit as feature rich as Napster (or more), they are fringe products and nothing has remotely the mainstream penetration that Napster had.
It also should be said is that if they make ripping harder, less people will rip. Those who will will have a higher probability of subpar rips, poor spelling titling the product, etc. It's that sort of stuff that makes it inconvenient for the average Joe.
I have to admit that I have never dropped a CD in the car, and I haven't had a CD that was so scratched that it was unplayable since the sunrise of the CD revolution (when I was a little less careful).
Cost-wise I don't know if I agree with your assertion: You're talking about a dupe, so given that we should compare a CD-R to a good blank cassette - Here in Canada I'd say that a 100% quality CD-R is about $0.70 CDN each, whereas a good quality cassette (it's been a long time since I bought one) is about $2.50.
They state that it doesn't prevent analog copying, so yes you could copy the analog signal.
Copy protection is not what most "everything for free" Slashdotters think it is: It is not black and white, and just because a techie with a lot of free time can "break" it doesn't mean that the protection is a failure. It doesn't have to be 100% effective to be effective.
All copy protection has to achieve to commercially protect a product is that it makes the process more inconvenient for the average Joe/Jane than simply going to the store and picking up the CD: Whether it degrades the quality enough that they are willing to just buy a copy, or it makes the process inconvenient enough (i.e. The deCSS process in the early days was ridiculously inconvenient for the average Joe, which is why they sought to squash it in the early days before it becomes a Windows "wizard" to rip a DVD to a MPG), or it takes too much of their time: For the $15 level that we're talking about it's a very small "nuisance factor" that will lead most average citizens to just go buy the product rather than waste their time. I've ripped MP3s just because I can go in and select a track (and through IMDB instantly it's even titled correctly and everything), and it automatically pulls an MP3 copy. If, on the other hand, I had to sit here pressing record and stop at the right moment, and prune off the ends, and live with a degraded copy (all audio-in channels on the major soundcards are garbage), and manually identify each track: There's no way I'd do that, and while there's lots of little kids with nothing better to do who are willing to, a large majority of the consumers would rather part with $15 than deal with the hassle.
It's similar to the software market: There are warez channels on IRC, and to most people that is the downfall of the software industry...then after a couple of 1GB+ downloads which were corrupt you give up and never touch warez again. Even if you duped the CD off a friend, often you need a crack and most people are extremely wary of cracks (trojans, viruses, etc.), so they'd rather just buy the product that endure the risk.
Apparently you have forgotten the golden rule of car audio: All cassette car stereos shall eat 50% of all cassettes placed into them, without fail. It's funny we talk about this because one of the benefits of the CD revolution is pollution wise (well...apart from the fact that billions of cassettes were dumped in the garbage, cast off as obsolete): I remember being younger and quite frequently you would see several hundreds yards of tape floating down the street, or a case smashed into a million pieces, etc. Because of the "stereo must eat cassette" cardinal rule people were often quite frustrated and hurled the result out the window.
Don't know if I agree with that. In the case of rare or hostile-environment items, the intrinsic value is increased dramatically because of the shipment costs. For instance a moon rock is only a piece of dirt theoretically worth next to nothing, but because it came from the moon the "shipping" (hence the natural rarity of it) makes it worth significantly more. You might build a basic data relay satellite for $100,000, but because launching it costs $90,000,000 there is no way that you would sell it for less than $90,000,000 : The fact that it is sitting in space makes it worth that much more, because anyone else who wants to be there has to pay the same shipping costs.
The impact of the additional tax on these satellites will be miniscule compared to the property taxes that Hughes already pays on its facilities in the area.
They must have some incredible facilities, because at $100 million a pop, that's more than all but the most massive and most extravagent of giant office building complexes.
Living in Canada I find it very hard to believe that the people of CA tolerate this. While Canada is often cast as the overtaxed empire, the reality is that taxes are generally quite simple here : You get taxed on your income, and likewise companies get taxed on their profits. You get taxed when you "consume", which is when you purchase items like cars, gasoline, etc. You get taxed if you make income by selling items at more than you bought them (which is capital gains income and applies to stocks, property, etc. There are lots of loopholes though). All in all it is a very simple system, and if you removed yourself from society the tax system wouldn't be pecking you to death for everything you own, etc.
I could see that California probably justifies the car tax as a "roadway tax" or the like, however up here that is achieved by taxes on gasoline. Indeed that makes more sense because gas taxes directly correlate with your vehicles use of the roads (or in the cast of larger vehicles, the lower MPG means more taxes paid means compensation for the additional damage of the heavier vehicle).
Which juristictions do this? The idea of property taxes, as mentioned in another post, is that they get services for their taxes : Firemen, policemen, garbage pickup, etc. Obvious these services don't apply whatsoever to a satellite, nor would LA taxes apply if I had a company based in LA but we owned property in Vancouver. Property taxes don't apply to things like vehicles (though there are other types of taxes for them) or other assets. Generally the idea is that you pay a consumption tax when you buy it, you can get a tax break as it depreciates, and you pay a tax if you sell it at a gain (capital gain). I've never heard of taxing an asset just because you have it (apart from bogus licensing and other such fees).
Taxes don't make money out of nowhere, and imposing them at 5000 different layers doesn't help feed the poor or shelter the homeless: Instead it helps to pay the overwhelming mass of unnecessary government bureaucrats helping to ensure that a consumer product that costs $500 has $400 of various taxes added at 50 points along the way.
Company A makes widgets and they cost $200/unit to produce, and company A is a corporate "welfare" recipient so they pay no taxes. They sell the product at $220/unit.
Company B makes widgets and they cost $200/unit to produce, but because of wankers like LA County's tax officer, they pay approximately $50/unit in taxes per year. They sell the product at $270/unit.
That's just bizarre and incredibly damaging to capitalism. Indeed usually the opposite is true and the more assets a company has, the more depreciation it can assess each year, the less taxes it pays. The idea that the more a company owns physically the more taxes it pays is a sure way to send companies packing to a nicer municipality.
I understand and appreciate taxes on profits, and can see how taxes on properties in a municipality makes sense (different levels of government getting their cut), but taxes on assets? Do they tax each companies vehicles & computers?
This just sounds bizarre if they're trying to say that satellites are property in the same sense as a plot of land on Main Street.
BTW: On a similar parallel watch how many headlines talk about the tech crash, usually coupled with the collapse of the tech job market. Yet the reality is that overwhelmingly the crash has laid off low to mid level managers, HR, accountants, paper pushers, etc. IT workers are by far the least affected, yet they get the hugest majority of the attention. As another post mentioned: It's a desperate attempt to make programmers feel vulnerable.
Because most organizations have come to depend on their programmers to such a degree that they despise them. I had been cast as a prima donna at a previous place of work, and it was hilarious seeing the lengths that people would go to to try to prove this point: They would claim that I was hoarding code until I pointed out that they had full access to the source control and were welcome to look at it. Then they'd claim that I wouldn't explain it to them at which point I'd offer a meeting to go over the code. Then they'd claim that I was hiding some piece of information or other, at which point I'd direct them to deja, show them my sources, etc. All of it was absolutely useless because they were desperate to prove that I was a "prima donna" because how else could they explain my abilities? I had managers seriously believing that I was hoarding some secret stash of information because I could easily solve problems that others pondered over for weeks. There is a great irony in being despised for being a great asset to a company. I had managers constantly pathetically trying to drop hints that there are loads of great programmers out there, etc. (like this article says regarding trying to make your programmers feel replacable), which was laughable because I really wasn't demanding a lot of pay and was actually a very dependable employee, however their dependance on me led them to shine the spotlight on me ultra-bright, and they tried everything to psychologically control me.
There is another sort of prima donna that I would never stand up for, and that is the reverse prima donna that uses arrogance and elitism to pretend to have knowledge that they don't. At the same place I worked with a VB wanker who didn't have the slightest ounce of understanding of good code design, and any new technology would take him weeks to grasp remotely. He would attempt to look down his nose from high to his coworkers, hoping and praying that they would buy that he was 31337, when instead he was below average.
What a pile of shit. Software development is one of the (if not _the_) most complex fields in the world, and most prima donna programmers have spent most of their waking hours absorbing and learning, and they will continue to do so forever. While you attempt to disparage them by mentioning community college, the reality is (thankfully) that in the software development field you can't "earn" your way into eliteness by having Daddy pay for you to go to a prestigious college. Instead your abilities talk for you.
Absolutely true! I completely and absolutely agree with your assessment, and the fact that so-called "prima donnas" often technically question decisions or directions leads them to being tagged as outsiders who cause conflict, rather than people who actually care that things are done right.
I've been in situations where I have technically excelled over my coworkers, and invariably many (though not all) attempt to compensate for their weaknesses by projecting perceived weaknesses on me to disparage me and equalize in front of management, and I have a feeling this is where the whole term "prima donna" comes from when applied in the tech workspace (though, like in all fields, of course there are assholes out there). If they can't find faults in real life, they just make them up. This goes from presuming that any time I disagree I am "taking it personally", to commenting that I don't comment my code enough (though reverse analysis proved that I comment more than them), to commenting that I don't document enough (again analyzing my co-workers code showed that I documented as much or more than them). The point is that a lot of these supposed claimed faults of "prima donnas" are bullshit: When I read on here someone yapping that PDs don't document/comment I immediately imagine some subpar VB programmer, between extolling the reason why GOTOs are evil, imagining their superiority in non-technical realms because they are so thoroughly outclassed.
Few fields are as unbalanced as the software development field (i.e. the classic 10:1 development ratio), and because of this egos can be incredibly fragile in the software development industry. I have found that when I'm put in a position of technical authority this situation is amplified and every analysis I make is turned into a personal assault on the person who's decision I had to modify. Personally I think the whole prima donna thing is the propaganda of the mediocre, and I don't buy it for a minute.
The guy/gal plagiarized from something apparently written in 1997 (copying up until the guys name), so don't expect anything modern in there.
Either you're doctv@peachlink.com, or you simply forgot to give proper attribution. Nice job getting the mod points though. The strange formatting was an obvious give away.
This presumes that the bandwidth throughout the world is the same as when we were all using 14.4 modems (and apparently those of us with high speed connections are doing so at the expense of those with low speed connections?): Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that the backbone speeds of the net have gone up astoundingly (indeed there is lots of dark fiber out there waiting for the need). I get 200KB/second pretty much all day downloading from a good number of sites, and that number is purely an artificial limit in my cable modem.
You list two points and pretend they are attributed to Microsoft, when in reality Microsoft has said or implied no such thing. The reality is that Microsoft extended Java in a way that gave them an advantage (most would call that the benefits of competition), and Sun didn't like that and sued them. Part of the agreement was that Microsoft stops all Java work (despite having the best JVM out there) and Microsoft dutifully complied. So now you have C# (which is largely like Java) & the CLR. Seems pretty logical to me.
Oh please. The only fanatic I'm seeing is you. I made a damn good point. If you put the product under a proprietary license and then offer the same package under BSD what's the point? The only thing you can offer is support. Just like GPL'd software.
I totally agree with this: There is very dubious economic value to releasing something under the BSD and simultaneously trying to sell it (just as it's absurd to try to sell something that's under the GPL, and this notion that keeps being proposed that the GPL & software sales go together is proposterous). You don't give away your greatest asset if you ever plan on profiting from it, and I don't agree with any such plan. However there are lots of companies whose asset isn't the software (for example hardware companies whose drivers are intrinsically tied to the sale of their hardware), and for them open source makes total sense. Additionally to push communications/packaging protocols and standards releasing open source makes sense. It also makes sense to release some open source for goodwill (IBM is playing this card). It doesn't make sense to make a "software company" and think that you're going to profit creating software and releasing it under the GPL. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of GPL fans are the leachers of society who between Napster sessions are busy ripping off cable TV and stealing the neighbours newspaper (or living in university labs).
Your analogies are skewed. No I don't expect to fly for free. Being able to use free software does not mitigate the cost of fuel, the cost of staff to fly and maintain the plane, etc. etc. Your reasoning is completely flawed. But if a cost savings gets them to add more staff, improve service, and get Fluffy from point A to point B in one piece then I don't see why that isn't a good thing.
My analogies are totally logical (although, like all analogies, they're of marginal value). The point is that GPL fanatics hold as their religion that it is evil for someone to profit off of "their" creations (although of course the person profiting must have added something to the GPLd code if they were to hypothetically profit from it, but this fact escapes GPLers. Another post brought up "Well what if someone sold something containing my open source code and profited from it without giving to me???!?!?!?!?!" : Obviously they're profiting on their EXTENSION of what you've done, as their creation does not make your open source disappear), but they extend this philosophy apparently only so far as other software, but if IBM is selling more servers because they install Linux on it: Good for them! If US Air can pay the CEO more because they switched to Linux (bogus scenario as TCO renders the base charge irrelevant), hurrah! It's a bizarre cannibalism of programmers where GPLers care the most that other programmers don't profit of their work, but if big business is laying off programmers and siphoning the IP for free: Hey isn't that just grand?
Now let's watch the rantings and ravings about the benefits and innovation of open source, followed by the stagnation of the project, and finally the forced forgetting of the dirty remnants. Ah this is better than fiction.