This is a great move on the part of the corporations. N'Sync will sell very well, because they're a popular band. They can then use those sales numbers to point out that this "copy-protection technology" doesn't negatively affect sales, and thus implement the scheme across a wide variety of products.
This is of course a scientifically invalid study, but management types don't really care about science, or the scientific method, or any nasty side effects of this scheme. They just want to see they profit margin continue to climb upwards, and with this skewed "test of technology", that's exactly what they're going to see.
We can keep fighting the good fight, and that's honorable. But at best, we're only delaying the inevetable. The best decision is to play along, accumulate enough money and power until you can make the decisions, and then pray that you yourself haven't totally sold out your principles in the name of the golden cash cow. Then maybe you can call the shots, and Do The Right Thing...
Specific references to Kiddie Porn and Age Verification aside, I think someone needs to point out to America that while they're trying to "Protect Their Children From Sex", they should be reminded that in order to have their precious little darlings, parents had to Have Sex themselves...
It really is as natural as breathing and digestion, and many European countries have a much better attitude towards it, with fewer negative side effects than this Nation...
Funny that this should come up. Just the other week, I was working on a Saturday during my mandatory six day work week, and was pouring through someone else's code, trying to figure out what they were doing so I could get my job done correctly. Needless to say, I got very frustrated because I didn't find the other code to be very neat, well organized, well written, and there was no documentation. So I temporarily flipped out, and fired off an email to the head of my department complaining about standards, quality, and documentation.
That was a huge mistake. I was "talked to" by several people above me, and my superiors wondered if I was "on crack." When I tried to explain my standpoint, and how quality would improve and six-day workweeks would be unnecessary if we could produce more quality work on a consistant level across the development teams, here's what I was told:
Many people on this team are Senior Level programmers (even though they're not Senior in title) and Code Reviews would just insult them.
Things change too quickly to document, so there's really no reason to. We just like to shout down the hall how things work.
Our project is super accelerated because of a Holiday Deadline, so that's why we're working so hard.
All those studies that show quality improvement with standardized methodologies only improve productivity by 12%, but if you keep teams together from project to project, you get a 500% improvement in productivity
So what it comes down to is that the profit margin is the bottom line, always, and the beauty of the insides of the machine you're building take a backseat to doing things the way they've always been done, as long as everything gets done on time.
Is it crappy? You bet. Am I comfortable working this way? Not at all. But like everyone else, I have bills to pay, and I'm looking forward to a future where I can start my own small company, and run things in a manner that I'm comfortable with. It's a sucky situation, but the more I learn about anything, the more I learn that the bottom line is always the trump card in every situation.
It's also true that the market does suck, but smart people will always be needed, and if you're smart enough, you can find a way out that both benefits your career and improves your workstyle. It may not be this week or the next, but it will happen.
Re:Progress? Or reinventing the wheel?
on
The Future Of 3D
·
· Score: 2
Except, you know, actually finding the perfect layout of streams, trees, people, spaceships, alien beings, exploding stars, translucent men, dissolving animals, liquid metal Terminators, or Infernal Machines Powered By The Dead, and then setting up the camera and lighting so that you get the shot you're after, which can be tough if you're shooting inside a trash can, or doing a zoom out which starts inside an office and ends near the orbit of the moon... In any of these cases, your Drug Store Polaroid won't really do the trick.
Without strong copyright protections, the incentive to
innovate would be diminished. In fact, this issue was so important
to the Founding Fathers that the ability of Congress to protect
copyrights is actually written into our Constitution itself.
Except that the Founding Fathers were wise enough to know that by making the term limit on Copyright too high, they were depriving the People (and further artists, musicians, and authors) of work from which they could build upon and grow new works from. While the Constitution reads "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;", no mention of actual time limits exists within this document. The limits were proposed by Jefferson to be 14 years, which were then extended to 28 years, as is demonstrated by reading ancillary documents of the time.
While your Senator believes that protecting the intellectual property of the US is vital for the economy and provides incentive, it actually has a retrograde effect for content providers who do not hold the Copyright on current work, as they cannot build on existing works until those works leave copyright (A period currently longer than most human lifespans), or until they pay Copyright holders for the privledge of using their work. This effectively shrinks the pool of content creators to those already holding Copyright, or those financially entangled with Copyright holders.
And while those Copyright Holders may provide large donations to your Senator's campaign, they are not the majority of voters in the State of California. It is the will of the Voters that your Senator swore to represent in our Government, and if she is failing in this regard, then she is unfit to hold office.
Re:An article about the model, but no grapics?
on
New Moon Formation Model
·
· Score: 4, Informative
On detecting other planets that may sustain life, we could point a radio telescope their way and see if anything intelligent has been broadcasting something as of 45 years ago. Sure, it's highly unlikely, but if we could eliminate the background noise and pick up the extraordinarily faint signal, we'd know. If we hear nothing, it doesn't seem like we're any worse off than we were.
Of course if there is life there, and they're getting our signals, they'll at least know we're an inquisitive race, because the first episodes of Perry Mason should just be arriving...
Is hasn't happened yet because the RIAA owns the distribution and advertising channels. You can build a better mousetrap, but if you can't tell anyone about it, and you can't get it to the stores, no one will ever buy it.
And in further news, Episode III will be named, "I Wipe my Ass With Your Money", and will consist entirely of 15 minutes of Hayden Christensen putting on the Darth Vader outfit, saying "This is heavy," and "Okay, I'm ready to be Evil now."
Yeah, well, all artists hate the Music Industry. But as long as they control every major record store in the country, where 90% of Americans go to buy their music, artists have no choice but to sign a crappy deal with a crappy label in order to get distrobution and have a shot at some sort of monetary compensation for their work. If the populace could be convinced to buy their CDs from other outlets (direct, or online) and was not deluged with target marketed, formulated-to-sell crap (Brittney, Boy Bands, and Limp Bizket Sound-Alikes), there would be hope.
You never see a Behind the Music where artists say "Oh yeah, we love our label and management, and they've never screwed us over!"
We lobby Congress, but it has little effect, because money buys legal power, not shouting voices, no matter how Right those voices may be.
But why are we playing by their rules? If we really want to be heard, we should use our abilities to make ourselves heard. America needs the developers, techies, and computer savvy people who oppose the DMCA to function as a country, to remain economically viable, and to remain internationally competetive.
Personally, I think we should show the nation just how much power they've inadvertantly given us. We should strike, or perform some equivalant that cripples the software and internet infrastructure that runs this economy. We should make a statement that shows that unless America listens to the very people who have created this Digital World, we're not going to give it to them anymore.
Sure, we'll get initially labeled as "evil hackers" and social miscreants, but we're educated enough to know that that's the price of freedom. And we're also the only people who can bail the country out of a technical catastrophe. The fact is that America needs us much more than America needs bogus laws that protect the wealthiest of companies. And we're everywhere, in every industry, and influencing every aspect of life.
Like the Patriots who threw tea overboard in Boston Harbor to protest unjust laws, we shall show that without the foundation technology upon which the Nation depends, no law prohibiting it's advancement and the open table research thereof shall survive or be tolerated.
There's a plethora of independantly authored games, specifications for the Z-Machine, and a few programming languages and compilers (Inform and TADS being the most popular) for writing "interactive fiction" in a faily high level, object oriented manner. Plus, the Z-Machine has been expanded to have some pretty huge memory allowances, such that games the size of the entire Zork and Enchanter series combined can be written and played.
What the hell is wrong with our corporate structure? Marketing makes promises to customers without asking Engineering if it can be done. Scientists say a task is impossible, so Management just lobbies Congress to simply make it illegal. If we had this mindset in the 60's, would NASA simply have tried to sue it's way to the Moon?
This has to stop. Corporations are behaving like kindergardeners. As Americans, we pride ourselves saying that whoever is more creative, or is the hardest worker, gets ahead. But more and more it appears that whoever is the biggest bully in a meeting, or whoever pushes others around the most, gets what they want, even if it's not what the company or the customer needs. And now, at the very height of hubris, companies are having people arrested because we don't like them pointing out the flaws in our products...
Sure the job market sucks, but Engineers should simply walk out of these companies, en masse. I guess I'm just too proud to work for a company that follows these tactics. Maybe the company will say "sure, leave, we'll just hire new programmers," but we all know the learning curve cost of new employees - they'd be screwed. Clearly engineers are not the only important human assets that a company has, but it's just as clear that bull headed managers who lie, cheat, bully, and pad their golden parachutes so that they always get their way are indicative of the worst of short sighted American attitudes. If this country ever wants to truly be respected on a global scale, and once achieve feats of artistic and scientific greatness that are not simply fueled by the bottom line, someone needs to start setting an example.
To paraphrase Tyler Durden, "We enable your e-commerce, we set up your Stock Exchange Network, we build your military weapons. We are your engineers, your scientists, your software developers. Don't fuck with us."
Besides the SKB racks already mentioned by another poster, you can buy rack rails and screws very inexpensively online at music stores (http://www.sweetwater.com, and http://www.americanmusical.com come to mind) and build your own rack. I built a nice 14 space rack out of oak plywood (and oak tape becomes your new friend), which while not all-metal industrial-looking, is very sturdy, was a lot of fun to build, and looks great. If you're going to be mounting a lot of stuff, you may also want to put some vent panels in between pieces of equipment. They look slightly better than open rack spaces and provide good airflow room.
While large corporations may continually lobby Congress for extended copyright on properties that they lay claim to (i.e. Disney and The Rat), there is something that individual artists can do - release their copyright after a set period of time.
I'm a musician, and I plan on entering all my work into the public domain 14 years after it's initial release. Why? Because after 14 years, I'd like to see what other artists will do with it. After 14 years, I don't want to have to be bothered with licensing fees, legal issues, and repackaging old creations that I'm probably quite tired of. If I haven't made any money off an artistic release within 14 years, I don't want to keep trying to make money off it. I'd rather invest my time and energies in being creative in a new way.
And finally, my creations will be released after fourteen years because the pushing drive in my life is not to accumulate as much money as possible. It is not to maximize my profits or to increase my holdings. My life is not a game of numbers and margins. I can always pay my rent/mortgage and put food on the table. I live comfortably. I would much rather grow intellectually and creatively, and allow others to do the same, than to simply wallow in a pit of uneding profits and live a life of greed.
Corporations, driven by profits and quarterly reports, will almost never feel with way. Politicians, driven by a want to stay in office, may be persuaded to feel this way, although it is doubtful given the power of the Corporate Lobbies. I'd like to think that individual artists, musicians, and authors would feel this way, since it is in their best interests to grow as creators, and to have a wide body of work from which to build upon, explore, and reinterpret in the name of creation. It's too bad that we've become a country bent on profits rather than a nation striving for intellectual development and artistic expression.
I used to contract there. They make SOI (Silicon on Insulator) wafers which allow chips manufacured with them to be both low power and radiation hardened. They run (at the time I worked there) the worlds most powerful Ion Beam Implanter, which is about 10 meters long and sends ionized Oxygen into a chamber in which wafers are spinning through the ion beam at 200 RPM. The O2 embeds itself in the Silicon about 60nm beneath the surface, and sticks there. After eight hours of this process, the wafers are removed and annealed in a giant oven, at which point the Oxygen and Silicon chemically merge to form SiO2 (silicon dioxide, also known as sand), which is a mighty fine insulator.
This whole process causes chips printed on these wafers to have a lower energy drain through the substrate. It also has the advantage that when hit with an ionized particle, the oppositely charged electrons which would normally rush up from the substrate are blocked by the insulator, so you have a greatly reduced charge entering your gate, which has a greatly reduced chance of flipping your bit.
As of three years ago, Motorola was a big purchaser of these wafers, and IBM was just getting into buying their own implanter. So those PPC chips may just be special spacefaring jobbies...
I purchased this game, got it to run just fine on my year-and-a-half old PC, and really enjoyed it. It was in the spirit of Myst and Riven, well written and acted, involving and beautiful, and most of all fun.
Now as for the bitching about SafeDisc, yes, copy protection sucks. Not because it prevents every Tom, Dick, and Harry Pirate from copying the game, but because it prevents normal users from playing it all too often. And copy protection is really just copy delay - someone will hack the game eventually, release a patch, and then the game is everywhere.
As Bruce Schneier wrote in his latest Cryptogram, "Software can encapsulate Skill." The skilled cracker needs only crack the game once, and then the world has that game as soon as the crack is coded up into an executable.
A little over a year ago, I attended a Seattle area Sputnik meeting, which was (may still be, I haven't been in a while) a monthly meeting of Game Developers sharing techniques and information so that all games and developers could benefit. That day, the topic was Copy Protection, and the speakers were Bruce Dawson, Brian Brown (at the time, two of my coworkers at Cavedog Entertainment), and Scott Bilas (now at Gas Powered Games). They told interesting tales of how SafeDisc screwed up their games, made them run at 50% speed (or worse!), introduced compatibility issues, and delayed the development process while adding expense. Some developers switched to custom solutions, and some stuck it out and got Safedisc "working", more or less. The universal result: The games were still cracked. From several days to a month later, cracks appeared on the internet, with large audio files meant to drive the CD "out of range" compressed to MP3 format so the whole game could be neatly downloaded from a FTP site. In many cases, users were directed at game fan sites to grab the crack because it improved the performance of the game (by removing SafeDisc, of course).
The lesson was never spoken aloud, but it was pretty clear to me that day that the answer was to just forgo copy protection alltogether. Otherwise, you wind up pissing off your loyal, non-cracker customers, waste time and money, and you garner bad reviews. As has been said countless times before, digital data WILL be copied, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. So long as publishers release products of high enough quality at a reasonable enough price, the benefit to cracking the game will be outweighed to all but the crackers who take cracking as a personal challenge. Besides, there's nothing you can do about these guys anyway, except maybe get them a job putting their skills to the forces of Good instead of Evil.
Wasn't part of the impetus behind the creation of the Ada programming language that it had to be readable by non-programmers so that it's correctness could also be verified by government workers/military officials?
Most people are trichromats, with retinas having three kinds of color sensors, called cone photopigments -- those for red, green, and blue.
Isn't this incorrect? I thought that the retina contained two different types of Cones, one of which senses Red/Green and the other of which senses Blue/Yellow, in addition to Rods, which sense brightness. Our retinas are not configured like CRTs, with RGB elements. This is why people suffer from Red/Green color blindness (most common) or Blue/Yellow color blindness (less common) - a defect in that particular type of Cone...
So my question is, if you're sitting on a planet orbiting a star at the edge of one of these galaxies, and you look up in the sky, do you see a whole lot of nothing if you look away from the center of the universe, and a whole lot of everything if you look towards the center of the universe?
Except that racecars slide at extreme speeds, and there's several degrees of hysteresis that have to be accounted for, along with "feeling" when the back end is about to kick out, tires losing traction because of rain, debris on the track, lifting off the track on a hill, and so on. As a Skip Barber Racing School graduate, I can tell you, it's not a simple case of following the line and turning up the speed even on an open course.
For some people, sure, college is a financial burden, and it makes more sense for them to start making money right away.
Personally, I went to RPI (upstate NY) for a BS in Computer Science. Was it expensive? Yes. I accrued some debt, and was constatnly worried about money while there. Was it difficult? Hell yes, it was one of the most difficult experiences in my life, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and even physically draining. What did I get out of it besides a nice piece of paper signed by the Institute President? Here's my list:
A bunch of lifelong friends. Sure, they're spread all over the country, but I know I can call my friend in NJ or MA anytime for advice, or in an emergency, they'll fly out here to Seattle on the drop of a hat for me. We keep in touch very often, and we share a common set of experiences and knowledge. We also network for when one of us is out of work, looking for a career change, looking for an investor, or moving to a new area.
A wide range of education. Besides my programming knowledge, formal training, and exposure to many different facets of computing, I also am more well versed than average on the topics of psychology; pharmacuticals; biology; physics; film theory, cinematography, and practice; musical structure, theory, and composition, with an emphasis on electronic music and the related tools; sociological influences of technology; and a few other things I can't remember off the top of my head. As a result, I can have in depth discussions with my co-worker who was a documentary producer about film. I have a musical side project that is actually generating revenue. Friends, family and coworkers come to me with bizarre questions on a variety of topics, and I can almost always answer their question with a referencable fact, offer an educated opinion, or hold an intelligent and informed discussion. I am the definition of well rounded.
Leadership experience. Besides leading teams in projects, I joined a co-educational social fraternity. With men and women socially interacting, I got real world experience (since most of the school was decidely male, unlike the real world), and learned how to interact and motivate teams. As fraternity president, I successfully motivated our dwindling brotherhood of around 15 to increase our numbers to over 30, in just one school year. I learned tact and management skills, while building strong friendships at the same time.
A great career. After four years, I've worked as a consultant for a series of high energy physics industry clients. I've worked in finances, and I now work in the computer game industry. I've learned a lot about what all these industries have in common, how they differ, and how to enhance my future marketability if I decide to move on. I'm a valued employee who can be pulled onto almost any task at hand, and get the job done. My salary is in the $60k range, I have stock options, a 401(k), a Roth IRA, a car I bought new four years ago with all the deckings that still runs great, a large, modern apartment, and more importantly, I have happiness and piece of mind.
I guess the best thing I got out of college was the confidence that I could learn anything, and do anything. And this is not in the arrogant, early-in-the-movie Good Will Hunting sort of way (well, I can read a book and get the same education as you, Mr. How Do You Like Them Apples), but in the sincere, I can put my mind to something, understand it at a pace I set myself, articulate and apply my knowledge, and take it into the real world to increase my set of friends and enhance my future. College set me up for life, and I don't regret going for a single minute.
Slashdot Mirror
This is of course a scientifically invalid study, but management types don't really care about science, or the scientific method, or any nasty side effects of this scheme. They just want to see they profit margin continue to climb upwards, and with this skewed "test of technology", that's exactly what they're going to see.
We can keep fighting the good fight, and that's honorable. But at best, we're only delaying the inevetable. The best decision is to play along, accumulate enough money and power until you can make the decisions, and then pray that you yourself haven't totally sold out your principles in the name of the golden cash cow. Then maybe you can call the shots, and Do The Right Thing...
It really is as natural as breathing and digestion, and many European countries have a much better attitude towards it, with fewer negative side effects than this Nation...
Sounds like you need a new fiancee.
That was a huge mistake. I was "talked to" by several people above me, and my superiors wondered if I was "on crack." When I tried to explain my standpoint, and how quality would improve and six-day workweeks would be unnecessary if we could produce more quality work on a consistant level across the development teams, here's what I was told:
So what it comes down to is that the profit margin is the bottom line, always, and the beauty of the insides of the machine you're building take a backseat to doing things the way they've always been done, as long as everything gets done on time.
Is it crappy? You bet. Am I comfortable working this way? Not at all. But like everyone else, I have bills to pay, and I'm looking forward to a future where I can start my own small company, and run things in a manner that I'm comfortable with. It's a sucky situation, but the more I learn about anything, the more I learn that the bottom line is always the trump card in every situation.
It's also true that the market does suck, but smart people will always be needed, and if you're smart enough, you can find a way out that both benefits your career and improves your workstyle. It may not be this week or the next, but it will happen.
Except, you know, actually finding the perfect layout of streams, trees, people, spaceships, alien beings, exploding stars, translucent men, dissolving animals, liquid metal Terminators, or Infernal Machines Powered By The Dead, and then setting up the camera and lighting so that you get the shot you're after, which can be tough if you're shooting inside a trash can, or doing a zoom out which starts inside an office and ends near the orbit of the moon... In any of these cases, your Drug Store Polaroid won't really do the trick.
innovate would be diminished. In fact, this issue was so important
to the Founding Fathers that the ability of Congress to protect
copyrights is actually written into our Constitution itself.
Except that the Founding Fathers were wise enough to know that by making the term limit on Copyright too high, they were depriving the People (and further artists, musicians, and authors) of work from which they could build upon and grow new works from. While the Constitution reads "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;", no mention of actual time limits exists within this document. The limits were proposed by Jefferson to be 14 years, which were then extended to 28 years, as is demonstrated by reading ancillary documents of the time.
While your Senator believes that protecting the intellectual property of the US is vital for the economy and provides incentive, it actually has a retrograde effect for content providers who do not hold the Copyright on current work, as they cannot build on existing works until those works leave copyright (A period currently longer than most human lifespans), or until they pay Copyright holders for the privledge of using their work. This effectively shrinks the pool of content creators to those already holding Copyright, or those financially entangled with Copyright holders.
And while those Copyright Holders may provide large donations to your Senator's campaign, they are not the majority of voters in the State of California. It is the will of the Voters that your Senator swore to represent in our Government, and if she is failing in this regard, then she is unfit to hold office.
http://www.swri.org/press/impact.htm
Of course if there is life there, and they're getting our signals, they'll at least know we're an inquisitive race, because the first episodes of Perry Mason should just be arriving...
Is hasn't happened yet because the RIAA owns the distribution and advertising channels. You can build a better mousetrap, but if you can't tell anyone about it, and you can't get it to the stores, no one will ever buy it.
And in further news, Episode III will be named, "I Wipe my Ass With Your Money", and will consist entirely of 15 minutes of Hayden Christensen putting on the Darth Vader outfit, saying "This is heavy," and "Okay, I'm ready to be Evil now."
You never see a Behind the Music where artists say "Oh yeah, we love our label and management, and they've never screwed us over!"
But why are we playing by their rules? If we really want to be heard, we should use our abilities to make ourselves heard. America needs the developers, techies, and computer savvy people who oppose the DMCA to function as a country, to remain economically viable, and to remain internationally competetive.
Personally, I think we should show the nation just how much power they've inadvertantly given us. We should strike, or perform some equivalant that cripples the software and internet infrastructure that runs this economy. We should make a statement that shows that unless America listens to the very people who have created this Digital World, we're not going to give it to them anymore.
Sure, we'll get initially labeled as "evil hackers" and social miscreants, but we're educated enough to know that that's the price of freedom. And we're also the only people who can bail the country out of a technical catastrophe. The fact is that America needs us much more than America needs bogus laws that protect the wealthiest of companies. And we're everywhere, in every industry, and influencing every aspect of life.
Like the Patriots who threw tea overboard in Boston Harbor to protest unjust laws, we shall show that without the foundation technology upon which the Nation depends, no law prohibiting it's advancement and the open table research thereof shall survive or be tolerated.
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html
There's a plethora of independantly authored games, specifications for the Z-Machine, and a few programming languages and compilers (Inform and TADS being the most popular) for writing "interactive fiction" in a faily high level, object oriented manner. Plus, the Z-Machine has been expanded to have some pretty huge memory allowances, such that games the size of the entire Zork and Enchanter series combined can be written and played.
This has to stop. Corporations are behaving like kindergardeners. As Americans, we pride ourselves saying that whoever is more creative, or is the hardest worker, gets ahead. But more and more it appears that whoever is the biggest bully in a meeting, or whoever pushes others around the most, gets what they want, even if it's not what the company or the customer needs. And now, at the very height of hubris, companies are having people arrested because we don't like them pointing out the flaws in our products...
Sure the job market sucks, but Engineers should simply walk out of these companies, en masse. I guess I'm just too proud to work for a company that follows these tactics. Maybe the company will say "sure, leave, we'll just hire new programmers," but we all know the learning curve cost of new employees - they'd be screwed. Clearly engineers are not the only important human assets that a company has, but it's just as clear that bull headed managers who lie, cheat, bully, and pad their golden parachutes so that they always get their way are indicative of the worst of short sighted American attitudes. If this country ever wants to truly be respected on a global scale, and once achieve feats of artistic and scientific greatness that are not simply fueled by the bottom line, someone needs to start setting an example.
To paraphrase Tyler Durden, "We enable your e-commerce, we set up your Stock Exchange Network, we build your military weapons. We are your engineers, your scientists, your software developers. Don't fuck with us."
Besides the SKB racks already mentioned by another poster, you can buy rack rails and screws very inexpensively online at music stores (http://www.sweetwater.com, and http://www.americanmusical.com come to mind) and build your own rack. I built a nice 14 space rack out of oak plywood (and oak tape becomes your new friend), which while not all-metal industrial-looking, is very sturdy, was a lot of fun to build, and looks great. If you're going to be mounting a lot of stuff, you may also want to put some vent panels in between pieces of equipment. They look slightly better than open rack spaces and provide good airflow room.
I'm a musician, and I plan on entering all my work into the public domain 14 years after it's initial release. Why? Because after 14 years, I'd like to see what other artists will do with it. After 14 years, I don't want to have to be bothered with licensing fees, legal issues, and repackaging old creations that I'm probably quite tired of. If I haven't made any money off an artistic release within 14 years, I don't want to keep trying to make money off it. I'd rather invest my time and energies in being creative in a new way.
And finally, my creations will be released after fourteen years because the pushing drive in my life is not to accumulate as much money as possible. It is not to maximize my profits or to increase my holdings. My life is not a game of numbers and margins. I can always pay my rent/mortgage and put food on the table. I live comfortably. I would much rather grow intellectually and creatively, and allow others to do the same, than to simply wallow in a pit of uneding profits and live a life of greed.
Corporations, driven by profits and quarterly reports, will almost never feel with way. Politicians, driven by a want to stay in office, may be persuaded to feel this way, although it is doubtful given the power of the Corporate Lobbies. I'd like to think that individual artists, musicians, and authors would feel this way, since it is in their best interests to grow as creators, and to have a wide body of work from which to build upon, explore, and reinterpret in the name of creation. It's too bad that we've become a country bent on profits rather than a nation striving for intellectual development and artistic expression.
I used to contract there. They make SOI (Silicon on Insulator) wafers which allow chips manufacured with them to be both low power and radiation hardened. They run (at the time I worked there) the worlds most powerful Ion Beam Implanter, which is about 10 meters long and sends ionized Oxygen into a chamber in which wafers are spinning through the ion beam at 200 RPM. The O2 embeds itself in the Silicon about 60nm beneath the surface, and sticks there. After eight hours of this process, the wafers are removed and annealed in a giant oven, at which point the Oxygen and Silicon chemically merge to form SiO2 (silicon dioxide, also known as sand), which is a mighty fine insulator.
This whole process causes chips printed on these wafers to have a lower energy drain through the substrate. It also has the advantage that when hit with an ionized particle, the oppositely charged electrons which would normally rush up from the substrate are blocked by the insulator, so you have a greatly reduced charge entering your gate, which has a greatly reduced chance of flipping your bit.
As of three years ago, Motorola was a big purchaser of these wafers, and IBM was just getting into buying their own implanter. So those PPC chips may just be special spacefaring jobbies...
Now as for the bitching about SafeDisc, yes, copy protection sucks. Not because it prevents every Tom, Dick, and Harry Pirate from copying the game, but because it prevents normal users from playing it all too often. And copy protection is really just copy delay - someone will hack the game eventually, release a patch, and then the game is everywhere.
As Bruce Schneier wrote in his latest Cryptogram, "Software can encapsulate Skill." The skilled cracker needs only crack the game once, and then the world has that game as soon as the crack is coded up into an executable.
A little over a year ago, I attended a Seattle area Sputnik meeting, which was (may still be, I haven't been in a while) a monthly meeting of Game Developers sharing techniques and information so that all games and developers could benefit. That day, the topic was Copy Protection, and the speakers were Bruce Dawson, Brian Brown (at the time, two of my coworkers at Cavedog Entertainment), and Scott Bilas (now at Gas Powered Games). They told interesting tales of how SafeDisc screwed up their games, made them run at 50% speed (or worse!), introduced compatibility issues, and delayed the development process while adding expense. Some developers switched to custom solutions, and some stuck it out and got Safedisc "working", more or less. The universal result: The games were still cracked. From several days to a month later, cracks appeared on the internet, with large audio files meant to drive the CD "out of range" compressed to MP3 format so the whole game could be neatly downloaded from a FTP site. In many cases, users were directed at game fan sites to grab the crack because it improved the performance of the game (by removing SafeDisc, of course).
The lesson was never spoken aloud, but it was pretty clear to me that day that the answer was to just forgo copy protection alltogether. Otherwise, you wind up pissing off your loyal, non-cracker customers, waste time and money, and you garner bad reviews. As has been said countless times before, digital data WILL be copied, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. So long as publishers release products of high enough quality at a reasonable enough price, the benefit to cracking the game will be outweighed to all but the crackers who take cracking as a personal challenge. Besides, there's nothing you can do about these guys anyway, except maybe get them a job putting their skills to the forces of Good instead of Evil.
Wasn't part of the impetus behind the creation of the Ada programming language that it had to be readable by non-programmers so that it's correctness could also be verified by government workers/military officials?
Isn't this incorrect? I thought that the retina contained two different types of Cones, one of which senses Red/Green and the other of which senses Blue/Yellow, in addition to Rods, which sense brightness. Our retinas are not configured like CRTs, with RGB elements. This is why people suffer from Red/Green color blindness (most common) or Blue/Yellow color blindness (less common) - a defect in that particular type of Cone...
-pjf
So my question is, if you're sitting on a planet orbiting a star at the edge of one of these galaxies, and you look up in the sky, do you see a whole lot of nothing if you look away from the center of the universe, and a whole lot of everything if you look towards the center of the universe?
Except that racecars slide at extreme speeds, and there's several degrees of hysteresis that have to be accounted for, along with "feeling" when the back end is about to kick out, tires losing traction because of rain, debris on the track, lifting off the track on a hill, and so on. As a Skip Barber Racing School graduate, I can tell you, it's not a simple case of following the line and turning up the speed even on an open course.
The problem is, a lot of us work for Corporations...
Personally, I went to RPI (upstate NY) for a BS in Computer Science. Was it expensive? Yes. I accrued some debt, and was constatnly worried about money while there. Was it difficult? Hell yes, it was one of the most difficult experiences in my life, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and even physically draining. What did I get out of it besides a nice piece of paper signed by the Institute President? Here's my list:
- A bunch of lifelong friends. Sure, they're spread all over the country, but I know I can call my friend in NJ or MA anytime for advice, or in an emergency, they'll fly out here to Seattle on the drop of a hat for me. We keep in touch very often, and we share a common set of experiences and knowledge. We also network for when one of us is out of work, looking for a career change, looking for an investor, or moving to a new area.
- A wide range of education. Besides my programming knowledge, formal training, and exposure to many different facets of computing, I also am more well versed than average on the topics of psychology; pharmacuticals; biology; physics; film theory, cinematography, and practice; musical structure, theory, and composition, with an emphasis on electronic music and the related tools; sociological influences of technology; and a few other things I can't remember off the top of my head. As a result, I can have in depth discussions with my co-worker who was a documentary producer about film. I have a musical side project that is actually generating revenue. Friends, family and coworkers come to me with bizarre questions on a variety of topics, and I can almost always answer their question with a referencable fact, offer an educated opinion, or hold an intelligent and informed discussion. I am the definition of well rounded.
- Leadership experience. Besides leading teams in projects, I joined a co-educational social fraternity. With men and women socially interacting, I got real world experience (since most of the school was decidely male, unlike the real world), and learned how to interact and motivate teams. As fraternity president, I successfully motivated our dwindling brotherhood of around 15 to increase our numbers to over 30, in just one school year. I learned tact and management skills, while building strong friendships at the same time.
- A great career. After four years, I've worked as a consultant for a series of high energy physics industry clients. I've worked in finances, and I now work in the computer game industry. I've learned a lot about what all these industries have in common, how they differ, and how to enhance my future marketability if I decide to move on. I'm a valued employee who can be pulled onto almost any task at hand, and get the job done. My salary is in the $60k range, I have stock options, a 401(k), a Roth IRA, a car I bought new four years ago with all the deckings that still runs great, a large, modern apartment, and more importantly, I have happiness and piece of mind.
I guess the best thing I got out of college was the confidence that I could learn anything, and do anything. And this is not in the arrogant, early-in-the-movie Good Will Hunting sort of way (well, I can read a book and get the same education as you, Mr. How Do You Like Them Apples), but in the sincere, I can put my mind to something, understand it at a pace I set myself, articulate and apply my knowledge, and take it into the real world to increase my set of friends and enhance my future. College set me up for life, and I don't regret going for a single minute.-pjf
What company do YOU work for?