The "rest of us" will have more personal liberties due to the techniques developed by people needing to keep their identities secret. For example, Freenet can handle large files nowadays, even if it's still not as fast as BitTorrent.
One more thing...I checked FreeNet's "About Us" page, and nowhere does it say that FreeNet was created for the purpose of enabling piracy.
The "rest of us" will have more personal liberties due to the techniques developed by people needing to keep their identities secret. For example, Freenet can handle large files nowadays, even if it's still not as fast as BitTorrent.
One more thing...I checked FreeNet's "About Us" page, and nowhere does it say that FreeNet was created for the purpose of enabling piracy.
Piracy predates PC, as do measures used to fight it. It doesn't show any signs of lessening in the slightest. There comes a time when persistence becomes a synonym for stupidity.
So, what's more stupid for a game developer...using the best available (albeit flawed) methods to prevent illicit copying, or abandoning all efforts to earn a profit because they are unable to prevent a small fraction of their user base from playing the game for free? I couldn't find any statistics specifically on game piracy, but I did find this article that confirms a recent decrease of business software piracy in 54 countries. Note that unlike games, business software does not normally include heavy-handed DRM, so it stands to reason that games (especially the console variety) would have an even lower piracy rate. Also note that the BSA has a more to gain by claiming that piracy is increasing than the alternative, which lends additional credibility to the statistics.
Most people (particularly on/.) tend to think that when an organization goes after pirates, it's a case of them taking on the world.
Yes, it pretty much is. The number of people actively fighting DRM outnumber the people fighting piracy a thousandfold, if not millionfold.
You seem to think that there exists a massive guerilla army of crackers with ninja-like acumen working tirelessly to...I don't know...get people free stuff? What are you basing this on? The miracle of the Internet is such that the work of a single cracker can be easily distributed to the millions of script kiddies and end-lusers who do the actual pirating. There's a big difference between those who pirate software and those who enable the pirates. The former outnumber the latter a millionfold to be sure.
The reality, however, is that there are a relatively small number of crackers, rippers, uploaders, webmasters, etc. that make piracy possible for the masses.
"Relatively small" number here means mere millions, rather than billions.
I would guess hundreds but with the absence of a pirate census, the exact number can't be known. I do know, however, that whenever I visit a torrent site, I see the same uploader nicknames popping up on every torrent. "millions" is nowhere close to realistic.
No, pursuit of these individuals is hampered by the simple fact that it's impossible to track a small file back to its origin, and cracks are small files.
There is little need to track game cracks all the way back to their origin. All that is needed to stop piracy is to cut off the means of distribution. But if you did want to trace these back to their authors, it could be done with proper intervention by law enforcement, such as when hunting virus authors and other cyber-criminals. But in the case of piracy these efforts are hampered by politics and matters of international law.
The Pirate Bay is still up and serving pirated content, you know.
Oh well...*shrugs* I must have been foolish to assume that the imprisonment of the founders and a $3.6 million fine would prevent their freinds from continuing the site. Regardless, there's a graveyard of other sites that weren't so lucky. TPB can't last forever.
I trust that any DRM scheme will always be cracked because the opposite would require the DRM maker to have absolute omnipotence [wikipedia.org], that is, to be able to break the laws of logic.
That's like saying cryptography is useless because, given enough time and hardware, any code can be broken. The goal of any security scheme is to make it so that the labor and resources required to crack the system drastically outweigh the potential reward to the attacker. There is no divine intervention criteria for security.
Yeah, he could probably manifest without anyone checking his license status. He might even find a DZO willing to look the other way. But I seriously doubt you could find any DZO willing to go on public record in defiance of the USPA as they have close ties with the FAA and provide essential third-party liability insurance. If you know of any USPA DZ's that allow unlicensed jumpers please post the list here. I'd love to hear what their owners have to say.
There really isn't any solid, fool-proof way to fight piracy.
Yes there is...one word: Persistence
Most people (particularly on/.) tend to think that when an organization goes after pirates, it's a case of them taking on the world. The reality, however, is that there are a relatively small number of crackers, rippers, uploaders, webmasters, etc. that make piracy possible for the masses. Pursuit of these individuals is hampered by international boundaries and various legal technicalities, but for years we have seen the slow but steady dissolution of those obstacles. The process is slow, but make no mistake...progress is being made.
The list of pirate sites that have been taken down only to be replaced by others is a mile long, but for each site that gets axed, the challenges facing its potential successors become even greater. Its naive to think that this could go on to infinity. The Pirate Bay, for example, found a loophole that it was able to exploit for many years, but eventually that loophole was closed. NinjaVideo and its ilk had their domain names seized by the federal government, coincidentally dispelling the illusion that the USA does not control the Internet. For every clever trick and technicality exploited by the piracy-enablers, there is a rebuttal. Don't be fooled just because the process is slow.
And then there's DRM. Because there have been so few forms of DRM that have not been cracked, people assume that there will always be a way to crack the next one that comes out. Again, this is very naive. Your average Joe may have the willingness, but not the ability to reverse engineer software while top engineers have the ability but not the motivation. Both traits are needed, however, and the combination of stronger DRM and social engineering (including law enforcement action) makes it increasingly difficult to produce persons willing and able to crack.
It's entirely possible that copyright-holders will stop pursuing pirates and piracy-enablers once piracy falls down to acceptable levels. Still, this would be no less of a victory for the industry. Their victory is inevitable, and sadly, the arms-race that precipitated it will leave the rest of us with far fewer personal liberties than when it all started.
Also, the USPA can't ban anyone from doing anything
They can ban you from jumping at USPA-licensed drop zones, which includes pretty much all of the DZ's in the US. He may be able to get a ride to altitude with club jumpers or at DZ's in another country though.
the FAA however can pull a pilots license for allowing divers to pull bandit jumps like this.
The FAA also added Pastrana to their blacklist...I'm not exactly sure what being blacklisted by the FAA entails for a non-pilot, but probably nothing good.
That jump has been done many many times since the 80's but most people only know about Pastrana's.
I thought of it because of the Red Bull reference when he "wakes up" in the plane and says, "I hope this stuff works" before jumping out. Not exactly an Oscar-caliber performance, but still better showmanship than the rest.
For another great moment in skydiving/Red Bull history check out this video of Travis Pastrana. I heard he got banned for life by the USPA for this stunt. Apparently its illegal in the US to exit an airplane without a parachute.
I find it odd that the summary neither links to nor mentions the official project page. Perhaps the author has something against Red Bull (or that it uses MS Silverlight). In any case, this is the Red Bull Stratos project, not the Baumgartner Stratos Project. This is some pretty exciting stuff...Besides being totally bad-ass, Kittinger's original jump paved the way for manned space exploration. It may seem tacky to some, but credit should be given where credit is due, and as Red Bull is the primary sponsor of the project, they deserve to be mentioned.
Uhm, this is rather well known and well established.
I thought it was well known and established that viruses are exclusively parasitic. Now it turns out that some bacteriophages are not only harmless to their hosts, but can actually assist bacteria by exchanging their genetic material, creating an accelerated evolutionary process which results in advantageous mutations to the ultimate benefit of the human host. I'm not sure if this is a new discovery, but it definitely goes against the conventional wisdom.
I'll admit that the title could have been worded better, but still, you should RTFA before criticizing.
More and more, the big labels are nothing but factories for wholly-fabricated "artists" like Lady Gaga or the finalists of American Idol.
How exactly was Lady Gaga "wholly-fabricated" by big labels? Unlike many other pop stars, she writes all of her own songs and, by most accounts, earned her success through the merit of own performance. She admits that her music is pop but challenges the idea that there's anything wrong with that. Before signing with the behemoth Interscope, she signed with the small, no-name label created by Akon. Sure, her music sounds like it was made in an electronic pop-factory but that doesn't necessarily reflect on her personally.
And as for American Idol, that's the whole point. It's a show about taking someone out of complete obscurity and making them a star, and people love it. There's no skulduggery going on here...it's a case of people asking the industry to fabricate a star for them and then getting exactly what they asked for.
This is great for countries that lack opticians with basic equiptment yet somehow have lots of people with large screened smartphones?
The point is that they developed a new method of measuring visual impairment. The fact that they used a cell phone LCD screen is irrelevant. They would have used the cheapest possible method for attaching a programmable LCD display to their apparatus. This time it just happened to be a Nexus One (According to TFA, they never actually tried the iPhone).
I can relate to what you are saying...When you see a case like this, you can (as I said) make a suggestion for a more elegant design. If they ignore you, then start looking for another job/contract. Let them shoot themselves in the foot if necessary...they've earned that right.
A detailed specification is normally a good thing since it takes the guesswork out of building software. As a side-effect, it also limits the creativity of programmers, which they don't like. But business decisions can't be made for reasons such as this. If there is a problem with the spec then the programmer should suggest a fix. Otherwise he should just do his job and code it.
But regardless, my main point was that programmers (such as the OP) tend to belittle the risks that clients/executives take in hiring them. It's a fair trade-off when you think about it...most of the reward for a business' success goes to the investor, but so do it's losses. Programmers are exchanging their labor for a fixed amount of money that doesn't depend on business profit or loss.
Or, to put another way, its fair because the person who takes the risk does not have to do the work and the person who does the work does not have to take the risk.
How is a business person more qualified to understand business than a programmer
First of all, it doesn't matter. The client is the one taking the risk while the programmer (at least in theory) gets paid regardless of whether the business succeeds or fails. Too many programmers take this for granted, and fail to appreciate the risks that are being taken to pay their contracts/salaries.
Secondly, the presence of capital in the hands of a client or executive is at least some (albeit a weak) indicator of market confidence in that person's decisions. At some point, they were able to attract investors who believed their sales pitch, or were somehow able to earn it on their own through other successful ventures.
who we can assume has at least some idea of the business domain he is modeling?
Huh? How can we assume that? Programmers are hired for technical ability, not business domain knowledge.
Sounds pretty stupid when you put it that way, doesn't it?
Indeed it does, but I didn't say it...You did.
So why do you assume that user interface design isn't part of the repertoire of any programmer who writes customer-facing applications?
Certainly, any programmer worth 2 cents knows the mechanics of how to build a UI. But programmers (especially those who work solo), tend to be bad at designing UI's because they lack the perspective of someone trying to use their system for the very first time. The countless hours they spend pouring over every detail makes them experts on what is going on in front of and behind the scene, so they often don't take the time to make things user-friendly or write help docs. Any system *you* design will seem useable to you, but you need an outside perspective to test that hypothesis. I have yet to meet a programmer that went out and actively recruited end-user testers as part of their UI design process. It is usually just the digital equivalent of licking their thumb and sticking it in the air.
A good programmer has the freedom to find clients or an employer at a competence level appropriate to his own.
Right on point with this one. If you suggest design improvements and they ignore the valid issues you present, then you should indeed look for another client/job.
It is remarkable, though, that people will blindly trust a programmer to make decisions on the safe handling of billions of dollars worth of data, and yet second-guess everything that programmer does that they can actually see.
You are obviously angry/disgruntled over an employment situation. Don't let that anger cloud your ability to reason and keep things in perspective.
The difference is that the programmer (usually) gets paid whether the business succeeds or fails. The investors don't. Exchanging time spent working for cash does not involve substantial risk. Investments are measured in capital (cold, hard cash), not life experience, fuzzy feelings or anything else along those lines.
I think in these situations there should be a court which determines whether he was being ethical in his actions. Not simply whether or not he was breaking military rules.
I think I threw up a little in my mouth as I read this. I'm supremely thankful that, in our society, judges are expected to interpret and apply the law, not write it from the bench. Allowing a person to unilaterally decide what is or isn't ethical without going through a democratic process or any other type of review opens the door to a world of totalitarian nightmare scenarios. I would personally like judges to behave like computers, with the text of the law as their program code. Allowing special exeptions to the law for any one person or organization at someone's whim is corruption, plain and simple.
Otherwise it simply discourages leaks and whistle blowers.
Leakers such as Manning rightfully ought to be discouraged, because their actions help no one but can potentially cause tremendous harm. Along with the video, he claims to have indiscriminately leaked hundreds of thousands of other classified documents to Assange. Did he even bother to read any of them? Probably not. He just thought "Army bad! Army bad! I'm a l33t haxor and I'll prove it by betraying the trust that was placed in me!"
Whistle blowers that benefit society are often the ones you never hear about, because they don't go straight to the newspapers with their findings. They instead seek out the appropriate investigative or regulatory authority to hear their case. And, believe it or not, there are laws in place to protect those that do it the right way. What if some judge decided to ignore those laws on a whim? I'll bet you wouldn't feel so great about that.
This is certainly a typical programmer's perspective on management's attitude. But, what you don't often see represented on/. is the reality that many programmers are prima donnas who vastly overestimate their own genius to the detriment of the projects they work on.
These sorts of programmers refuse to write comments (let alone end-user docs) because they say, "my code is self-documenting", while you're looking right at it and can see nothing but spaghetti. They come up with bizarre database schemas and naming conventions, throwing out all rules of normalization, etc., because they think they're smarter than anyone who's methods they could have found with a 10-second Google search. They refuse to write test code because they conveniently recall something someone said one time in a class they took that regression testing alone was not good enough. They proudly declare themselves experts in a technology they spent 3 months dicking around with in their parents basement, while failing to see any difference between themselves and someone who may have had years of on-the-job experience and real training.
The list goes on and on. I'm not saying there aren't programmers out there that don't suffer from ego-overload...I'm just saying that they are a rare and valuable commodity. Self-awareness, maturity and a sense of perspective are things that are more valuable to IT managers than simply posessing the ability to write code.
How is a programmer any more qualified to do UI design than a business person, who we can assume has at least some idea about how he wants people to use the software? Who's capital is being risked in this scenario (excluding of course lame offers of equity in exchange for labor)? The person taking the risk should have the final say on the design even if you don't agree with it. A good programmer would make suggestions for UI design, but not become offended if those suggestions get rejected.
when large investors make a series of transactions (they make big trades in several parts, not all at once), the traders see this and make trades between the investors' trades, driving prices further in the unfavourable direction
Buying gigantic quantities of stock makes prices rise! News at 11!
I assume you've never heard of "dividends." They're what used to drive investments prior to computers.
...and they still do. Institutional traders who use technical analysis palmistry and black boxes for algorithmic trading aren't taking away anyone else's right to enter trades based on fundamentals. On opposite sides of every transaction, there is a willing buyer and a willing seller. The duration that a position was held by either side does not change that. Furthermore, the markets offer many investment vehicles (short selling, options, etc.) that traders following sound fundamentals can fall back on when market prices get blown out of proportion by masses of speculators.
I am convinced that much of the outrage against day/speculative trading and the calls for heavy-handed regulation are driven by class-envy. People who don't have a team of 90+ Ph.D-holding quants to build their black boxes for them get jealous of those that do.
Oh, yeah! Fueleconomy.gov...that site is da shit. I hang out and post there all the time. It's like...slashdot, 4chan, digg and feuleconomy.gov are where I spend 99% of my time when I'm screwing around on the net.
If all of us get 5 Mbit plans, does that mean that our ISP needs 5n (where n is the number of customers) available bandwidth? What about upstream of them? What about upstream of that? Such a provisioning scheme is a fantasy.
Not quite...That's where content delivery networks such as Akamai come into play. By hosting nodes at your ISP's NOC, you can get high-bandwidth delivery of most commonly accessed content without your ISP needing to maintain huge pipes to its peers.
"Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life.
Last I checked, it doesn't work. You either end up with an utterly failed system of production as in the USSR, or a totalitarian regime that oppresses its people, most of whom end up living in abject poverty.
The only telecom "subsidy" I am aware of is the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for not by tax dollars, but by mandatory contributions from telecom carriers. The stated purpose of the USF was simply to provide access, not to make sure that prices stay low. That being said, I do think that the USF has run its course and ought to be ended, but I digress.
It is only natural that AT&T and all other wireless carriers would put strict caps on the usage of their wireless service, and increase prices per Mb as demand goes up, because the 3G wireless band has a finite limit to the data it can carry, and there's no indication it will expand any time soon. When resources are scarce, one should expect prices to increase. On the other hand, its always possible to lay new fiber and copper so we can expect cable and DSL plans to stay unlimited and be competitively priced for the forseeable future.
Of course, one thing that TFA points out that really is quite frustrating is the fact that companies always charge extra for SMS messaging. SMS messages (at least in GSM implementations) use a rather ingenious method of piggybacking ontop of the SS7 protocol that requires no additional bandwidth from the GSM carrier! Yet we still get charged outrageous fees for them because of high demand...I predict that this will change as more people switch to data-based texting services such as GChat, but I'm not holding my breath.
To say that it needs a lot of RAM and a multi-core processor is an understatement. I ran it on a somewhat high-end quad-core PC with 8Gb of RAM and it brought my system to a grinding halt whenever I tried to add more than five devices. I assume that's because it uses qemu to to emulate the routers' non-x86 processors and, as most are probably aware, emulation is a grossly inefficient way to do virtualization.
I'm sure there are better commercial options out there, but I agree that for a FOSS option, GNS3 is the best bet.
I worked as a computer camp counselor for several years and had gone as a camper in years prior. When I started at the camp (in the 90's), it was basically a small group of nerds getting together to have fun coding, playing games and learning about cool new technologies. Everyone who was there enjoyed it and wanted to come back for more the next summer.
Then the dotcom bubble hit. Attendance at the camp nearly tripled and, for the first time, you started seeing kids come in who didn't really want to be there. They wanted to engage in traditional summer camp activities and did not do very well on their programming assignments (either due to lack of aptitude or lack of desire). This made it tougher for some of the counselors too. I was fortunate enough to be teaching the advanced kids who really wanted to learn, as I did when I was one of them (they had to regularly kick us out of the computer lab so we could get at least *some* exercise and sunshine).
Anyway, long story short...If you're kid is not into programming or any other area of IT, don't push him -- It won't work out well for either of you. Let him play all the games he wants as long as; he is getting good grades in school, and it is not interfering with his social life. If he has a "B" average or better, and regularly spends time with friends rather than being completely isolated, then he should be able to play all the games he wants.
Slashdot Mirror
The "rest of us" will have more personal liberties due to the techniques developed by people needing to keep their identities secret. For example, Freenet can handle large files nowadays, even if it's still not as fast as BitTorrent.
One more thing...I checked FreeNet's "About Us" page, and nowhere does it say that FreeNet was created for the purpose of enabling piracy.
Oh, nevermind...I didn't scroll down far enough :-}
The "rest of us" will have more personal liberties due to the techniques developed by people needing to keep their identities secret. For example, Freenet can handle large files nowadays, even if it's still not as fast as BitTorrent.
One more thing...I checked FreeNet's "About Us" page, and nowhere does it say that FreeNet was created for the purpose of enabling piracy.
Piracy predates PC, as do measures used to fight it. It doesn't show any signs of lessening in the slightest. There comes a time when persistence becomes a synonym for stupidity.
So, what's more stupid for a game developer...using the best available (albeit flawed) methods to prevent illicit copying, or abandoning all efforts to earn a profit because they are unable to prevent a small fraction of their user base from playing the game for free? I couldn't find any statistics specifically on game piracy, but I did find this article that confirms a recent decrease of business software piracy in 54 countries. Note that unlike games, business software does not normally include heavy-handed DRM, so it stands to reason that games (especially the console variety) would have an even lower piracy rate. Also note that the BSA has a more to gain by claiming that piracy is increasing than the alternative, which lends additional credibility to the statistics.
Most people (particularly on /.) tend to think that when an organization goes after pirates, it's a case of them taking on the world.
Yes, it pretty much is. The number of people actively fighting DRM outnumber the people fighting piracy a thousandfold, if not millionfold.
You seem to think that there exists a massive guerilla army of crackers with ninja-like acumen working tirelessly to...I don't know...get people free stuff? What are you basing this on? The miracle of the Internet is such that the work of a single cracker can be easily distributed to the millions of script kiddies and end-lusers who do the actual pirating. There's a big difference between those who pirate software and those who enable the pirates. The former outnumber the latter a millionfold to be sure.
The reality, however, is that there are a relatively small number of crackers, rippers, uploaders, webmasters, etc. that make piracy possible for the masses.
"Relatively small" number here means mere millions, rather than billions.
I would guess hundreds but with the absence of a pirate census, the exact number can't be known. I do know, however, that whenever I visit a torrent site, I see the same uploader nicknames popping up on every torrent. "millions" is nowhere close to realistic.
No, pursuit of these individuals is hampered by the simple fact that it's impossible to track a small file back to its origin, and cracks are small files.
There is little need to track game cracks all the way back to their origin. All that is needed to stop piracy is to cut off the means of distribution. But if you did want to trace these back to their authors, it could be done with proper intervention by law enforcement, such as when hunting virus authors and other cyber-criminals. But in the case of piracy these efforts are hampered by politics and matters of international law.
The Pirate Bay is still up and serving pirated content, you know.
Oh well...*shrugs* I must have been foolish to assume that the imprisonment of the founders and a $3.6 million fine would prevent their freinds from continuing the site. Regardless, there's a graveyard of other sites that weren't so lucky. TPB can't last forever.
I trust that any DRM scheme will always be cracked because the opposite would require the DRM maker to have absolute omnipotence [wikipedia.org], that is, to be able to break the laws of logic.
That's like saying cryptography is useless because, given enough time and hardware, any code can be broken. The goal of any security scheme is to make it so that the labor and resources required to crack the system drastically outweigh the potential reward to the attacker. There is no divine intervention criteria for security.
Yeah, he could probably manifest without anyone checking his license status. He might even find a DZO willing to look the other way. But I seriously doubt you could find any DZO willing to go on public record in defiance of the USPA as they have close ties with the FAA and provide essential third-party liability insurance. If you know of any USPA DZ's that allow unlicensed jumpers please post the list here. I'd love to hear what their owners have to say.
There really isn't any solid, fool-proof way to fight piracy.
Yes there is...one word: Persistence
Most people (particularly on /.) tend to think that when an organization goes after pirates, it's a case of them taking on the world. The reality, however, is that there are a relatively small number of crackers, rippers, uploaders, webmasters, etc. that make piracy possible for the masses. Pursuit of these individuals is hampered by international boundaries and various legal technicalities, but for years we have seen the slow but steady dissolution of those obstacles. The process is slow, but make no mistake...progress is being made.
The list of pirate sites that have been taken down only to be replaced by others is a mile long, but for each site that gets axed, the challenges facing its potential successors become even greater. Its naive to think that this could go on to infinity. The Pirate Bay, for example, found a loophole that it was able to exploit for many years, but eventually that loophole was closed. NinjaVideo and its ilk had their domain names seized by the federal government, coincidentally dispelling the illusion that the USA does not control the Internet. For every clever trick and technicality exploited by the piracy-enablers, there is a rebuttal. Don't be fooled just because the process is slow.
And then there's DRM. Because there have been so few forms of DRM that have not been cracked, people assume that there will always be a way to crack the next one that comes out. Again, this is very naive. Your average Joe may have the willingness, but not the ability to reverse engineer software while top engineers have the ability but not the motivation. Both traits are needed, however, and the combination of stronger DRM and social engineering (including law enforcement action) makes it increasingly difficult to produce persons willing and able to crack.
It's entirely possible that copyright-holders will stop pursuing pirates and piracy-enablers once piracy falls down to acceptable levels. Still, this would be no less of a victory for the industry. Their victory is inevitable, and sadly, the arms-race that precipitated it will leave the rest of us with far fewer personal liberties than when it all started.
That jump wasn't done in the U.S.
Nevertheless, they revoked his skydiving license.
Also, the USPA can't ban anyone from doing anything
They can ban you from jumping at USPA-licensed drop zones, which includes pretty much all of the DZ's in the US. He may be able to get a ride to altitude with club jumpers or at DZ's in another country though.
the FAA however can pull a pilots license for allowing divers to pull bandit jumps like this.
The FAA also added Pastrana to their blacklist...I'm not exactly sure what being blacklisted by the FAA entails for a non-pilot, but probably nothing good.
That jump has been done many many times since the 80's but most people only know about Pastrana's.
I thought of it because of the Red Bull reference when he "wakes up" in the plane and says, "I hope this stuff works" before jumping out. Not exactly an Oscar-caliber performance, but still better showmanship than the rest.
For another great moment in skydiving/Red Bull history check out this video of Travis Pastrana. I heard he got banned for life by the USPA for this stunt. Apparently its illegal in the US to exit an airplane without a parachute.
I find it odd that the summary neither links to nor mentions the official project page. Perhaps the author has something against Red Bull (or that it uses MS Silverlight). In any case, this is the Red Bull Stratos project, not the Baumgartner Stratos Project. This is some pretty exciting stuff...Besides being totally bad-ass, Kittinger's original jump paved the way for manned space exploration. It may seem tacky to some, but credit should be given where credit is due, and as Red Bull is the primary sponsor of the project, they deserve to be mentioned.
Uhm, this is rather well known and well established.
I thought it was well known and established that viruses are exclusively parasitic. Now it turns out that some bacteriophages are not only harmless to their hosts, but can actually assist bacteria by exchanging their genetic material, creating an accelerated evolutionary process which results in advantageous mutations to the ultimate benefit of the human host. I'm not sure if this is a new discovery, but it definitely goes against the conventional wisdom.
I'll admit that the title could have been worded better, but still, you should RTFA before criticizing.
More and more, the big labels are nothing but factories for wholly-fabricated "artists" like Lady Gaga or the finalists of American Idol.
How exactly was Lady Gaga "wholly-fabricated" by big labels? Unlike many other pop stars, she writes all of her own songs and, by most accounts, earned her success through the merit of own performance. She admits that her music is pop but challenges the idea that there's anything wrong with that. Before signing with the behemoth Interscope, she signed with the small, no-name label created by Akon. Sure, her music sounds like it was made in an electronic pop-factory but that doesn't necessarily reflect on her personally.
And as for American Idol, that's the whole point. It's a show about taking someone out of complete obscurity and making them a star, and people love it. There's no skulduggery going on here...it's a case of people asking the industry to fabricate a star for them and then getting exactly what they asked for.
This is great for countries that lack opticians with basic equiptment yet somehow have lots of people with large screened smartphones?
The point is that they developed a new method of measuring visual impairment. The fact that they used a cell phone LCD screen is irrelevant. They would have used the cheapest possible method for attaching a programmable LCD display to their apparatus. This time it just happened to be a Nexus One (According to TFA, they never actually tried the iPhone).
I can relate to what you are saying...When you see a case like this, you can (as I said) make a suggestion for a more elegant design. If they ignore you, then start looking for another job/contract. Let them shoot themselves in the foot if necessary...they've earned that right.
A detailed specification is normally a good thing since it takes the guesswork out of building software. As a side-effect, it also limits the creativity of programmers, which they don't like. But business decisions can't be made for reasons such as this. If there is a problem with the spec then the programmer should suggest a fix. Otherwise he should just do his job and code it.
But regardless, my main point was that programmers (such as the OP) tend to belittle the risks that clients/executives take in hiring them. It's a fair trade-off when you think about it...most of the reward for a business' success goes to the investor, but so do it's losses. Programmers are exchanging their labor for a fixed amount of money that doesn't depend on business profit or loss.
Or, to put another way, its fair because the person who takes the risk does not have to do the work and the person who does the work does not have to take the risk.
How is a business person more qualified to understand business than a programmer
First of all, it doesn't matter. The client is the one taking the risk while the programmer (at least in theory) gets paid regardless of whether the business succeeds or fails. Too many programmers take this for granted, and fail to appreciate the risks that are being taken to pay their contracts/salaries.
Secondly, the presence of capital in the hands of a client or executive is at least some (albeit a weak) indicator of market confidence in that person's decisions. At some point, they were able to attract investors who believed their sales pitch, or were somehow able to earn it on their own through other successful ventures.
who we can assume has at least some idea of the business domain he is modeling?
Huh? How can we assume that? Programmers are hired for technical ability, not business domain knowledge.
Sounds pretty stupid when you put it that way, doesn't it?
Indeed it does, but I didn't say it...You did.
So why do you assume that user interface design isn't part of the repertoire of any programmer who writes customer-facing applications?
Certainly, any programmer worth 2 cents knows the mechanics of how to build a UI. But programmers (especially those who work solo), tend to be bad at designing UI's because they lack the perspective of someone trying to use their system for the very first time. The countless hours they spend pouring over every detail makes them experts on what is going on in front of and behind the scene, so they often don't take the time to make things user-friendly or write help docs. Any system *you* design will seem useable to you, but you need an outside perspective to test that hypothesis. I have yet to meet a programmer that went out and actively recruited end-user testers as part of their UI design process. It is usually just the digital equivalent of licking their thumb and sticking it in the air.
A good programmer has the freedom to find clients or an employer at a competence level appropriate to his own.
Right on point with this one. If you suggest design improvements and they ignore the valid issues you present, then you should indeed look for another client/job.
It is remarkable, though, that people will blindly trust a programmer to make decisions on the safe handling of billions of dollars worth of data, and yet second-guess everything that programmer does that they can actually see.
You are obviously angry/disgruntled over an employment situation. Don't let that anger cloud your ability to reason and keep things in perspective.
The difference is that the programmer (usually) gets paid whether the business succeeds or fails. The investors don't. Exchanging time spent working for cash does not involve substantial risk. Investments are measured in capital (cold, hard cash), not life experience, fuzzy feelings or anything else along those lines.
I think in these situations there should be a court which determines whether he was being ethical in his actions. Not simply whether or not he was breaking military rules.
I think I threw up a little in my mouth as I read this. I'm supremely thankful that, in our society, judges are expected to interpret and apply the law, not write it from the bench. Allowing a person to unilaterally decide what is or isn't ethical without going through a democratic process or any other type of review opens the door to a world of totalitarian nightmare scenarios. I would personally like judges to behave like computers, with the text of the law as their program code. Allowing special exeptions to the law for any one person or organization at someone's whim is corruption, plain and simple.
Otherwise it simply discourages leaks and whistle blowers.
Leakers such as Manning rightfully ought to be discouraged, because their actions help no one but can potentially cause tremendous harm. Along with the video, he claims to have indiscriminately leaked hundreds of thousands of other classified documents to Assange. Did he even bother to read any of them? Probably not. He just thought "Army bad! Army bad! I'm a l33t haxor and I'll prove it by betraying the trust that was placed in me!"
Whistle blowers that benefit society are often the ones you never hear about, because they don't go straight to the newspapers with their findings. They instead seek out the appropriate investigative or regulatory authority to hear their case. And, believe it or not, there are laws in place to protect those that do it the right way. What if some judge decided to ignore those laws on a whim? I'll bet you wouldn't feel so great about that.
You can swap 'em around and get the same result.
This is certainly a typical programmer's perspective on management's attitude. But, what you don't often see represented on /. is the reality that many programmers are prima donnas who vastly overestimate their own genius to the detriment of the projects they work on.
These sorts of programmers refuse to write comments (let alone end-user docs) because they say, "my code is self-documenting", while you're looking right at it and can see nothing but spaghetti. They come up with bizarre database schemas and naming conventions, throwing out all rules of normalization, etc., because they think they're smarter than anyone who's methods they could have found with a 10-second Google search. They refuse to write test code because they conveniently recall something someone said one time in a class they took that regression testing alone was not good enough. They proudly declare themselves experts in a technology they spent 3 months dicking around with in their parents basement, while failing to see any difference between themselves and someone who may have had years of on-the-job experience and real training.
The list goes on and on. I'm not saying there aren't programmers out there that don't suffer from ego-overload...I'm just saying that they are a rare and valuable commodity. Self-awareness, maturity and a sense of perspective are things that are more valuable to IT managers than simply posessing the ability to write code.
How is a programmer any more qualified to do UI design than a business person, who we can assume has at least some idea about how he wants people to use the software? Who's capital is being risked in this scenario (excluding of course lame offers of equity in exchange for labor)? The person taking the risk should have the final say on the design even if you don't agree with it. A good programmer would make suggestions for UI design, but not become offended if those suggestions get rejected.
when large investors make a series of transactions (they make big trades in several parts, not all at once), the traders see this and make trades between the investors' trades, driving prices further in the unfavourable direction
Buying gigantic quantities of stock makes prices rise! News at 11!
I assume you've never heard of "dividends." They're what used to drive investments prior to computers.
...and they still do. Institutional traders who use technical analysis palmistry and black boxes for algorithmic trading aren't taking away anyone else's right to enter trades based on fundamentals. On opposite sides of every transaction, there is a willing buyer and a willing seller. The duration that a position was held by either side does not change that. Furthermore, the markets offer many investment vehicles (short selling, options, etc.) that traders following sound fundamentals can fall back on when market prices get blown out of proportion by masses of speculators.
I am convinced that much of the outrage against day/speculative trading and the calls for heavy-handed regulation are driven by class-envy. People who don't have a team of 90+ Ph.D-holding quants to build their black boxes for them get jealous of those that do.
Oh, yeah! Fueleconomy.gov...that site is da shit. I hang out and post there all the time. It's like...slashdot, 4chan, digg and feuleconomy.gov are where I spend 99% of my time when I'm screwing around on the net.
If all of us get 5 Mbit plans, does that mean that our ISP needs 5n (where n is the number of customers) available bandwidth? What about upstream of them? What about upstream of that? Such a provisioning scheme is a fantasy.
Not quite...That's where content delivery networks such as Akamai come into play. By hosting nodes at your ISP's NOC, you can get high-bandwidth delivery of most commonly accessed content without your ISP needing to maintain huge pipes to its peers.
There's a word for that: Communism
From Wikipedia:
"Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life.
Last I checked, it doesn't work. You either end up with an utterly failed system of production as in the USSR, or a totalitarian regime that oppresses its people, most of whom end up living in abject poverty.
The only telecom "subsidy" I am aware of is the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for not by tax dollars, but by mandatory contributions from telecom carriers. The stated purpose of the USF was simply to provide access, not to make sure that prices stay low. That being said, I do think that the USF has run its course and ought to be ended, but I digress.
It is only natural that AT&T and all other wireless carriers would put strict caps on the usage of their wireless service, and increase prices per Mb as demand goes up, because the 3G wireless band has a finite limit to the data it can carry, and there's no indication it will expand any time soon. When resources are scarce, one should expect prices to increase. On the other hand, its always possible to lay new fiber and copper so we can expect cable and DSL plans to stay unlimited and be competitively priced for the forseeable future.
Of course, one thing that TFA points out that really is quite frustrating is the fact that companies always charge extra for SMS messaging. SMS messages (at least in GSM implementations) use a rather ingenious method of piggybacking ontop of the SS7 protocol that requires no additional bandwidth from the GSM carrier! Yet we still get charged outrageous fees for them because of high demand...I predict that this will change as more people switch to data-based texting services such as GChat, but I'm not holding my breath.
To say that it needs a lot of RAM and a multi-core processor is an understatement. I ran it on a somewhat high-end quad-core PC with 8Gb of RAM and it brought my system to a grinding halt whenever I tried to add more than five devices. I assume that's because it uses qemu to to emulate the routers' non-x86 processors and, as most are probably aware, emulation is a grossly inefficient way to do virtualization.
I'm sure there are better commercial options out there, but I agree that for a FOSS option, GNS3 is the best bet.
I worked as a computer camp counselor for several years and had gone as a camper in years prior. When I started at the camp (in the 90's), it was basically a small group of nerds getting together to have fun coding, playing games and learning about cool new technologies. Everyone who was there enjoyed it and wanted to come back for more the next summer.
Then the dotcom bubble hit. Attendance at the camp nearly tripled and, for the first time, you started seeing kids come in who didn't really want to be there. They wanted to engage in traditional summer camp activities and did not do very well on their programming assignments (either due to lack of aptitude or lack of desire). This made it tougher for some of the counselors too. I was fortunate enough to be teaching the advanced kids who really wanted to learn, as I did when I was one of them (they had to regularly kick us out of the computer lab so we could get at least *some* exercise and sunshine).
Anyway, long story short...If you're kid is not into programming or any other area of IT, don't push him -- It won't work out well for either of you. Let him play all the games he wants as long as; he is getting good grades in school, and it is not interfering with his social life. If he has a "B" average or better, and regularly spends time with friends rather than being completely isolated, then he should be able to play all the games he wants.