If I take music to work that I own it's not stealing. If I happen to listen to my coworkers music at work, that's not stealing either. If, however, I then burn a CD of my co-workers music and take it home, that would be stealing.
So yes, it could fall under fair use to have an MP3 repository at work.
It depends on your definition of "kid." I certainly wouldn't let my eight-year-old see it.
I'm sorely disappointed that he can't enjoy it with me as it is the kind of film I would love to share with him (as my father and I shared it together), but we'll have to wait a few years and watch the whole trilogy over a long weekend together.
Until November 1st, I had been the guy in charge of the the contracts, When our attorneys came to me with the IP agreement they wanted my employees to sign I sent it back and said "try again. These are creative people, not indentured servants." They came up with a much more reasonable agreement, and included an addendum on which employees could retroactively list any projects they were working on that they didn't want covered by our employment contract. It worked very well and everyone was happy.
My company closed its doors Nov. 1, and I had to find work, and after six weeks, I did find work at a very cool company who also hired one of my former engineers at the same time. He and I went through the whole HR process at the same time and were both handed "employment contracts" at the same time. We read them in detail and both refused to sign the contract based on the same IP paragraph that said "We own you and everything you might possibly think of or create for up to one year after you leave our employ." The HR person was somewhat stunned and said she'd get the lawyer to change the wording so we could sign it. It's been three months and I've never seen the contract. I asked one of the executives about the contract and he told me not to worry about it, he wouldn't sign it either.
...but a tool called SCons has just been released. It is based on the ScCons tool that was in the Software Carpentry Contest, and is written by the same folk.
My first Ultima game was Ultima III on the Amiga. My wife and I beat it together. We worked very hard, and she figured out the final puzzle. Then we did Ultima IV together.
After that I departed from the Ultima series until Ultima Online came around. Ultima Online is amazing. The community within the game spills out into the real world. I played UO from 4/98 to 7/00, and then left until late last month. When I returned it truly was like a homecoming.
The best part is that my eight-year-old son is now able to play (he types a bit slowly, but other than that I don't know how many people would know he's eight).
So, if you play UO on the Pacific Shard and run into a Schizophrenic Ranger named Leo (GoL; Ranger Emeritus), or a slow-of-speech fighter named David. Stop and say "Hi" we'd love for you to be part of our community.
Noam's e-mail address is noam@midbartech.com. I encourage you to write him and let him know you are not a pirate. If you do write him, please be polite.
I sent him the following e-mail...
I read the following quotation and find it quite offensive:
"Midbar Tech's Noam Zur called copy-protection critics a fringe group
that probably are pirates themselves."
So I am writing to you to give you a chance to clarify it.
CD copy protection is an attempt to restrict fair-use by consumers. It
means that the buying public pays the same, but gets less (I lose my
right of fair-use). So, as you can see, I'm a copy-protection critic.
I've been in the IT industry for 15 years. I have functioned as the CTO
of two technology startups. I have a wife, three small children, two
hamsters, pay my taxes on time, go to church on Sunday, and try not to
do anything illegal (except ride my motorcycle a bit too fast). So, as
you can see I'm not in a fringe group.
I buy all my music. I have several hundred CDs. I am in the process of
ripping every CD I own, just so I can have the luxury of having them all
available at the click of a mouse. In my entire collection I have
exactly zero pirated MP3s. So, as you can see, I'm not a pirate.
Most of the people I know who believe the same things I do are very
similar. So what exactly did you mean in the quotation above?
While it may not be completely true. There is something to the statement. The last time the music industry really jumped the price on their music was when the CD format was introduced. The problem with the price jump was that the cost of material went down by 1/2 or 2/3, and did not justify the $4 to $5 price hike.
...Came for the gun owner's guns did you stand up for their rights, and write your government and post messages on Slashdot?
This legislation is absolutely stupid, but it is to be expected when no one will stand up for anyone elses rights.
I am a proud member of what most of you would probably call the religious right. But guess what: I vote libertarian because I know that standing up for the rights of pornographers and strippers and recreational drug users is equally as important as standing up for the rights of Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson and the NRA.
This is so reminicent of the quote from somebody shortly after the Second World War: "First they came for the _____ and I did nothing because I wasn't a ____. Then they came for the ____ and I did nothing because I wasn't a _____...Eventually they came for me and there was no one left..." Fill in the blanks people. You reap what you sow, and this is what happens.
Generally good points, however, doing cross platform development does not have to be difficult. A couple of years ago I wrote an app to manage a recycling brokerage using Python/Tkinter/ODBC/PostgreSQL. I wrote it entirely on my notebook running RH62. moved the apps to the Windows machines and they ran exactly as expected (actually, there were a couple of very minor gotchas that were easily handled in about fifteen minutes).
With that level of cross-platform support, writing apps to deploy on a couple of different architectures is not too bad.
Wow! You wrote my story. I graduated high school in 81, and started writing code on a Honeywell system in '77 that was replaced by an HP3000 in '78. We had a room with two 300 baud acoustic coupled modems connected to DecWriters, and two of the old fashioned teletype machines that had built-in phones.
I bet if I visited my folks I could still find printouts of my old spaghetti-code BASIC apps, and paper tapes with the code still on them.
I'm feeling quite melancholy about all this HP stuff. First the calculators, then the 3000s.
Maybe next they could kill some of their dreadful consumer level ink-jets.
So I clicked on the link looking for enlightenment, and all it was was some porn site. Then the boss walked in...
Then the popups started popping up.
"Yes, I was doing my job I was reading Slashdot and the article linked...
"...Oh, never mind"
I find this hard to believe. Just the other day I was talking with a guy about how much we love our HP calculators.
I still use a tricked out 41CV that I bought in 1981 as a high-school graduation present to myself. I tought it to play Battleship. It was pretty good at it too.
I have been increasing unimpressed with the state of current strategy games. (I've never been any good at them--other than Total Annihilation, but I love to play them). A couple of months ago I went in search of a really good strategy game and came across Combat Mission. It is a WWII turn based game played in 3D.
The cool thing about it is that the turns happen simultaneously. And after the turn has been resolved it is played out in a 60 second movie using the 3D engine. While the graphics are not the best I've ever seen, the game is completely compelling and is the most realistic war game I have ever seen.
The CM community is quite amazing (some of the WWII strategy zealots have similar counterparts in the Open Source community). The game is completely themeable, and the addition graphics that have been made available by the community are very impressive.
I just went through a situation where I was sole coder on a project (pre-funding) to where I was the architect on the project (post-funding). I had the privilege of hiring some extraordinarily competent engineers who all knew more technical details of the project than I did.
I tried to keep my hand in the coding, and managed to successfully pull off a couple of small pieces of the project, and to help some guys code out of jams, but I spent much more time dealing with the S & M folk and the higher level management.
One thing I discovered through this whole process is that I am a far better architect than coder. I love writing code, but I could keep the entire dev process, road map, etc. In my head, and help my team get focused on what needed to be accomplished and when, far better than I could actually code.
I moved to the States from England in April of 1969. We came on a Danish freighter (which we pretty much had the run of).
As one of only two families, and the only small children on board, the crew loved my brother and I. I can still vividly remember building Lego cars and trains with the crew members and using the really cool battery-packs and motors to run them all over the ship.
I still love lego. My oldest son (8) is starting to get into some of the Technic stuff. My middle son (4) is just starting to express his creativity with Legos.
When a four-year-old is silent for long periods of time you tend to worry. Last night I went and checked on him. I quietly peeked into his room and he was busy playing with his Legos. It didn't take long before he came out to show me the plane that he had built. Extremely rudimentary, but yes it was a plane and I was proud of him.
There are a lot of cool toys on the lists being made. I could probably still find my old Erector set at my parents house. But Lego allows younger children to participate than any of the others (except for maybe Lincoln Logs).
My kids are home schooled, so I have a small US Flag in the corner of my kitchen/classroom. I told my wife I was going to mount it on my motorcycle for my commute today. She told me she had some smaller flags--which was good, so my bike is currently flying two us flags attached to the saddle bags.
I must have done an OK job of mounting them with zip ties because they stayed on my bike after a freeway run. I will be keeping them on at least for the rest of the week.
I encourage all US people to fly the flag and where the colours if they can.
While I tend to agree on a visceral level, I think you forget just what kickass fighters the Afghans proved to be when they were fighting the Russians.
I don't know if I would want to get involved in a groundwar over there, and I doubt whether an air war would accomplish much. That leaves one other option that I don't even want to think about.
I was pretty fresh out of college with my CS degree in those days, and was fortunate enough to work at a company that was attempting to do some Amiga development. That game sucked huge quantities of time from our small three person development staff. That said, we were probably all better coders due to those experiences.
This sounds very similar to the math that says that a baseball team with an 80 and 30 record is 50 games over.500 when in fact they are only 25 games over.500.
It ticks me off every time. How are we supposed to teach our kids math with information like that in our papers.
Slashdot Mirror
I desperately wanted to share LoTR with my son, but couldn't do it as it was too violent for him.
My wife and I were both really upset when we saw that Spider-man was going to be PG-13, so I'm thinking that it is also probably out for my son.
That said, I'd love to hear from some parents on whether they think it would or wouldn't be appropriate for me to take my boy.
This has been going on since Borland developed Quattro and Lotus sued, in what I believe to be, the first "look-and-feel" lawsuit ever.
Quattro/Quattro Pro were far superior to 1-2-3. So instead of improving their product, Lotus sued and won and Borland had to change their interface.
The interesting thing is that this was a copyright case and not a patent case.
If I take music to work that I own it's not stealing. If I happen to listen to my coworkers music at work, that's not stealing either. If, however, I then burn a CD of my co-workers music and take it home, that would be stealing.
So yes, it could fall under fair use to have an MP3 repository at work.
It depends on your definition of "kid." I certainly wouldn't let my eight-year-old see it.
I'm sorely disappointed that he can't enjoy it with me as it is the kind of film I would love to share with him (as my father and I shared it together), but we'll have to wait a few years and watch the whole trilogy over a long weekend together.
Until November 1st, I had been the guy in charge of the the contracts, When our attorneys came to me with the IP agreement they wanted my employees to sign I sent it back and said "try again. These are creative people, not indentured servants." They came up with a much more reasonable agreement, and included an addendum on which employees could retroactively list any projects they were working on that they didn't want covered by our employment contract. It worked very well and everyone was happy.
My company closed its doors Nov. 1, and I had to find work, and after six weeks, I did find work at a very cool company who also hired one of my former engineers at the same time. He and I went through the whole HR process at the same time and were both handed "employment contracts" at the same time. We read them in detail and both refused to sign the contract based on the same IP paragraph that said "We own you and everything you might possibly think of or create for up to one year after you leave our employ." The HR person was somewhat stunned and said she'd get the lawyer to change the wording so we could sign it. It's been three months and I've never seen the contract. I asked one of the executives about the contract and he told me not to worry about it, he wouldn't sign it either.
...by David Beazley published by New Riders
Is my model for a great book. Short, concise, well written, and not 600 pages.
...but a tool called SCons has just been released. It is based on the ScCons tool that was in the Software Carpentry Contest, and is written by the same folk.
Wow! Great post!
My first Ultima game was Ultima III on the Amiga. My wife and I beat it together. We worked very hard, and she figured out the final puzzle. Then we did Ultima IV together.
After that I departed from the Ultima series until Ultima Online came around. Ultima Online is amazing. The community within the game spills out into the real world. I played UO from 4/98 to 7/00, and then left until late last month. When I returned it truly was like a homecoming.
The best part is that my eight-year-old son is now able to play (he types a bit slowly, but other than that I don't know how many people would know he's eight).
So, if you play UO on the Pacific Shard and run into a Schizophrenic Ranger named Leo (GoL; Ranger Emeritus), or a slow-of-speech fighter named David. Stop and say "Hi" we'd love for you to be part of our community.
Noam's e-mail address is noam@midbartech.com. I encourage you to write him and let him know you are not a pirate. If you do write him, please be polite.
I sent him the following e-mail...
While it may not be completely true. There is something to the statement. The last time the music industry really jumped the price on their music was when the CD format was introduced. The problem with the price jump was that the cost of material went down by 1/2 or 2/3, and did not justify the $4 to $5 price hike.
...Came for the gun owner's guns did you stand up for their rights, and write your government and post messages on Slashdot?
This legislation is absolutely stupid, but it is to be expected when no one will stand up for anyone elses rights.
I am a proud member of what most of you would probably call the religious right. But guess what: I vote libertarian because I know that standing up for the rights of pornographers and strippers and recreational drug users is equally as important as standing up for the rights of Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson and the NRA.
This is so reminicent of the quote from somebody shortly after the Second World War: "First they came for the _____ and I did nothing because I wasn't a ____. Then they came for the ____ and I did nothing because I wasn't a _____...Eventually they came for me and there was no one left..." Fill in the blanks people. You reap what you sow, and this is what happens.
Generally good points, however, doing cross platform development does not have to be difficult. A couple of years ago I wrote an app to manage a recycling brokerage using Python/Tkinter/ODBC/PostgreSQL. I wrote it entirely on my notebook running RH62. moved the apps to the Windows machines and they ran exactly as expected (actually, there were a couple of very minor gotchas that were easily handled in about fifteen minutes).
With that level of cross-platform support, writing apps to deploy on a couple of different architectures is not too bad.
Nope, Portland, OR. We also had a Commodore Pet and an Altair that I was not yet geeky enough to play with.
Wow! You wrote my story. I graduated high school in 81, and started writing code on a Honeywell system in '77 that was replaced by an HP3000 in '78. We had a room with two 300 baud acoustic coupled modems connected to DecWriters, and two of the old fashioned teletype machines that had built-in phones.
I bet if I visited my folks I could still find printouts of my old spaghetti-code BASIC apps, and paper tapes with the code still on them.
I'm feeling quite melancholy about all this HP stuff. First the calculators, then the 3000s.
Maybe next they could kill some of their dreadful consumer level ink-jets.
So I clicked on the link looking for enlightenment, and all it was was some porn site.
Then the boss walked in...
Then the popups started popping up.
"Yes, I was doing my job I was reading Slashdot and the article linked...
"...Oh, never mind"
I find this hard to believe. Just the other day I was talking with a guy about how much we love our HP calculators.
I still use a tricked out 41CV that I bought in 1981 as a high-school graduation present to myself. I tought it to play Battleship. It was pretty good at it too.
This is truly a sad day.
I have been increasing unimpressed with the state of current strategy games. (I've never been any good at them--other than Total Annihilation, but I love to play them). A couple of months ago I went in search of a really good strategy game and came across Combat Mission. It is a WWII turn based game played in 3D.
The cool thing about it is that the turns happen simultaneously. And after the turn has been resolved it is played out in a 60 second movie using the 3D engine. While the graphics are not the best I've ever seen, the game is completely compelling and is the most realistic war game I have ever seen.
The CM community is quite amazing (some of the WWII strategy zealots have similar counterparts in the Open Source community). The game is completely themeable, and the addition graphics that have been made available by the community are very impressive.
If you are into strategy you should check it out.
This is tremendously accurate advice.
I just went through a situation where I was sole coder on a project (pre-funding) to where I was the architect on the project (post-funding). I had the privilege of hiring some extraordinarily competent engineers who all knew more technical details of the project than I did.
I tried to keep my hand in the coding, and managed to successfully pull off a couple of small pieces of the project, and to help some guys code out of jams, but I spent much more time dealing with the S & M folk and the higher level management.
One thing I discovered through this whole process is that I am a far better architect than coder. I love writing code, but I could keep the entire dev process, road map, etc. In my head, and help my team get focused on what needed to be accomplished and when, far better than I could actually code.
It was a wonderfully enlightening experience.
I moved to the States from England in April of 1969. We came on a Danish freighter (which we pretty much had the run of).
As one of only two families, and the only small children on board, the crew loved my brother and I. I can still vividly remember building Lego cars and trains with the crew members and using the really cool battery-packs and motors to run them all over the ship.
I still love lego. My oldest son (8) is starting to get into some of the Technic stuff. My middle son (4) is just starting to express his creativity with Legos.
When a four-year-old is silent for long periods of time you tend to worry. Last night I went and checked on him. I quietly peeked into his room and he was busy playing with his Legos. It didn't take long before he came out to show me the plane that he had built. Extremely rudimentary, but yes it was a plane and I was proud of him.
There are a lot of cool toys on the lists being made. I could probably still find my old Erector set at my parents house. But Lego allows younger children to participate than any of the others (except for maybe Lincoln Logs).
My kids are home schooled, so I have a small US Flag in the corner of my kitchen/classroom. I told my wife I was going to mount it on my motorcycle for my commute today. She told me she had some smaller flags--which was good, so my bike is currently flying two us flags attached to the saddle bags.
I must have done an OK job of mounting them with zip ties because they stayed on my bike after a freeway run. I will be keeping them on at least for the rest of the week.
I encourage all US people to fly the flag and where the colours if they can.
While I tend to agree on a visceral level, I think you forget just what kickass fighters the Afghans proved to be when they were fighting the Russians.
I don't know if I would want to get involved in a groundwar over there, and I doubt whether an air war would accomplish much. That leaves one other option that I don't even want to think about.
Actually, we have pretty much shut down our company. It's not a matter of fear, but of respect for the dead.
This is not a normal day. Business should not continue as usual.
I don't know about your house, but I know that around our house slurping has been used as part of the replication process on three occassions ;^)
I was pretty fresh out of college with my CS degree in those days, and was fortunate enough to work at a company that was attempting to do some Amiga development. That game sucked huge quantities of time from our small three person development staff. That said, we were probably all better coders due to those experiences.
This sounds very similar to the math that says that a baseball team with an 80 and 30 record is 50 games over .500 when in fact they are only 25 games over .500.
It ticks me off every time. How are we supposed to teach our kids math with information like that in our papers.