...are DVDs with built-in parental control via the disc's menus. In order to watch the unedited movie you have to enter a code from the DVD packaging, otherwise you get a sanitized version, free of any "offending content" via seamless branching.
This will nip the "What about the CHILDREN!?!?!" and religious fundamentalist justifications for editing/manipulating content, since parents can just toss/hide the adults-only code for the DVD so that junior is stuck with the G version.
It will also serve to get the right-wing Republicans backing their activist constitutents doing the editing to stop being interested in fair use issues and back with the rest of the Republicans in legislatively enshrining MPAA corporate objectives.
They'll still offer the non-code-based DVDs to the rest of us, so that filmies and others won't whine to loudly about this inconvenience.
"Everybody" wins -- Mormon kiddies don't see titties, filmies get "normal" DVDs, the MPAA gets Orrin Hatch off his back AND can get back to kicking home editors in the ass.
I wonder if MS is against spam, or just against independents making money off of Microsoft's "interactive properties" without Microsoft getting a percentage of the action?
I can only speculate that MS would be fully in favor of spamming as long as it was part of a "regulated media process" that enabled MS to collect money off of.
I have a much harder time believing that MS isn't interested in direct email marketing period, just not stuff that they don't make money off of.
I wish the industry could get that into their heads and stop throwing away money on DRM schemes and concentrate on making products actually worth buying.
This is the major problem with many American industries; a significant obsession with protecting existing markets with monopolies and vendor lock-in through incompatibilities and standards deviation, among other techniques.
There's too little effort paid to R&D and innovative product development as means to market expansion and customer loyalty, especially since those things don't have payoffs in less than 4 quarters.
Dippin Dots are OK, but my gripe is that they're almost TOO cold for consumption.
I'm kind of glad they're not more commonly available, as I only see them at the State Fair and the Amusement Park, and it's part of what makes that experience kind of unique. Like Cheese on a Stick and other delecasies...
I think we should find a NIMBY-like acronym for people who can easily afford to purchase environment friendly cars (and one that meet their requirements) but complain about pollution.
This book I think describes the class of people you're talking about. Many of their tastes and habits are drawn from an earlier class known as the Limousine Liberal.
I would describe them (from my own personal experiences) as the adult children of liberal professionals (lawyer, doctor, professor, etc) who are themselves liberal professionals who have spent life in a well-paid vacuum of liberal values.
They've pattenered their life on a life of high-end PC living:
Buying all their food at the coop at 2x the price of the Sav-A-Lot while voting and supporting all kinds of environmental regulations that only seem to jump the price of food for the Sav-A-Lot shoppers.
Spending 3x the cost of a normal house on remodeling a house in a trendy older neighborhood, using special "natural" materials and ultra-efficient appliances and designs, while complaining about the materials and land usage for houses that others can afford.
Supporting affirmative action, immigration and other diversity programs that have little or no economic impact on their professions which typically have steep barriers to entry based almost exclusively on economics and skill-based examinations (bar exam, medical boards, etc) or have steep cultural barriers to entry (writers of various stripes).
There are loads of examples, but many of them are theme-and-variations on the typical educated white collar, politically left vs. less educated blue collar, politically centerist or conservative theme.
Re:Who's got the time?
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Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
You'll never, ever be able to afford a house built of steel and concrete. The costs would be astronomical and it would require a union commercial crew to build and probably a real architect and engineer to design.
A standard 3k sq ft stick house with a block foundation is $150k to build. Your desire for a "permanent" house is probably on the order of $300-400k, and the zoning people may take issue with such a permanent design in a residentially zoned area.
Properly built and vented, the wood will last for centuries. Bugproofing can be accomplished by having an exterminator pre-pipe the crawlspace and outer wall voids for bug killer. They can then attach to a valve on the outside and spray the voids periodically to ensure a bug-free existence. This is now done commonly on houses in the South.
Re:Who's got the time?
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Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree completely and it kind of scares me. I make the time to tinker with some stuff and keep a couple of FreeBSD boxes going, but that's about the outer limit as to what I can do, and I'm "only" married and a homeowner, and those are huge consumers of time (which sounds negative -- its not, except when its BS yardwork).
How can I be expected to keep up with the changing technology landscape when my employer doesn't bother to make it part of our job situation and I don't have that much spare time. Kids? shit, I'd be fucked. There would be a window of about 30 minutes a day, and that's just not enough time.
Although a lot of people consider HST's journalistic ability to have fallen apart in the mid '70s largely due to massive cocaine use, nixing the "has good job" qualification (unless you equate "good job" with "good income"). He also is supposed to have physically abused his ex-wife Sandy, in addition to cheating on her, which eliminates the "stable family life" factor as well.
And then there's just all the absurdity and violence he was associated with since the mid 70s as well, which might also eliminate him from consideration from the "functional addict" definition.
Of course you could always just define functional addict as someone who does tons of drugs and isn't dead.
This is true, but what's to prevent Microsoft from including DVD ripping software in Longhorn? Even the threat of that might be enough to get the media people to the table.
It was an interesting article, but it repeats as facts the record industry's equation of downloads equalling lost revenue, which isn't true.
Headphones, and remote controls don't really need IP's as someone else pointed out.
Hi, we're from the Slashdot Geekness Enforcement Group. We've determined that your inability to see the rationale for IP connectivity to headphones and remote controls violates our standards. We've even recieved some complaints that this attitude "goes against the GPL" and helps to enforce "MPAA/RIAA restrictions on content use".
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There are also a class of people considered "functional addicts" -- I'm only familiar with the subject in the realm of substance (ab)use, but the idea is that these are people who consume large amounts of a substance but yet do not have disrupted social lives or immediate health problems -- they hold (often prestigious, well-paid) jobs, have families, friends and all the other trappings of a normal life.
I remember reading a NYT or other magazine article a few years ago on white collar heroin addicts who fit this definition well and, thanks to the relatively noncorrosive effect of heroin* relative to booze, had excellent long-term health prospects
People like them were an interesting contradiction of the addiction model: they're not specifically hurting themselves, they have good social lives and careers, about the only negative factual thing you can attribute to them is they're breaking the law.
Any other criticism is purely moral, and the morality of addiction studies is where I think there's real meat.
* Despite the awful connotations, opiate use is far less destructive than liquor or cigarettes. Most of the danger is attributable to IV users addicted to the "rush" from injected heroin, which is difficult to sustain long-term without increasingly high doses.
1) Applications like video and gaming will be ubiquitous on mobile phones and will be expected and used _by_the_generation_that_grows_up_with them. Sure, if I'm 18 and my first mobile is a 3G with color and gaming, I'll probably expect and use that functionality forever, expanding the user base for nG-based handsets.
But it's a drag to wait a generation to finally build the base up to make a profit off of a tecnology that's essentially out of date in 5-7 years.
2) The cost of handsets. Even if the lame applications on tiny screens were appealing to a majority of adults, they will quickly revert to reality when they realize it will be competitive with the price of a low-end laptop. And this will also be a hindrace for hooking new users; not many 17 year olds will be able to afford a $500 phone.
This is pretty reasonable, since a large entity like LA County is likely to interconnect with other networks in the future (if not right now), and a globally unique address space makes that much saner.
We have an ASP provided service via a frame circuit. In its first iteration the engineer I worked with assigned me an address of 10.2.3.4 on the WAN side of the router. When I asked him what the destination network was for the services we were communicating with, he just said "10.0.0.0/8". When I told him that space was in use here as well, he said "You'll have to renumber, those are our IPs" it took an hour argument with his boss and faxes of RFC1918 to convince them otherwise.
The next iteration of this service had a different connection to a different provider who connected to the provider above. Both of these providers were using overlapping 10.0.0.0/8 space and were NATing to each other, and when the service wasn't working right it was funny/sad listening to these clowns try to dignose these double NAT'd connections. None of that would have been necessary if they had used unique address space.
Heh, the reason I still call it a fantasy is that I presume the same would happen.
I *can* see getting a little out of them for obscure passwords or configuration assistance on something, though.
It's only a fantasy at a reasonably managed business that doesn't treat its employees like shit and actually has sensible policies and procedures that ensure the entire company's critical IT isn't in the head of one guy.
Sorry, having never actually executed this plan I didn't know what mistakes I was making.
You're right, though, that works better, and if its non-refundable, if the work is under 25 hours total, you just reap a higher average hourly rate.
3G/4G/NG Needs An Application
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Is 3G Irrelevant?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
...beyond wireless email/messaging and web browsing.
So far we don't really have any applications. The overwhelming majority of mobile users have decided that the primary purpose of their devices, telephony, is perfectly adequate.
A remaining minority is content to get email or other text messages, but they're early adopters, pioneers and gadget freaks who buy anything and their aren't enough of them to make change-the-world money off of.
An even smaller minority have developed proprietary applications, but they've been doing that over more expensive technologies forver, this just lets them do it with greater freedom. They're not a growth medium, though, since they're generally large businesses that negotiate deep discounts and optimize for minimum usage anyway.
Right now there's just not a compelling application for wireless data at the price at which it is available.
A wireless technology with sustainable node throughputs in excess of 10 megabits and ranges equivilent to cellular and all-you-can-eat pricing would be compelling, but the application wouldn't be mobile as much as last-mile fixed, mobile data would just be a side benefit.
This is very true, and particularly true if you live in a second or third tier city where the community of IT Directors/CIOs and higher-level IT opportunities is limited. If you should *succeed* at crippling a business for a period of time, you could get blacklisted as a troublemaker and have difficulty finding a job or getting promitions if you do find a job.
I also wonder if a particularly successful fscking of an IT infrastructure couldn't put you at some risk for a lawsuit claiming sabotage. Even if it didn't have a chance of success, you're unemployed and having to defend yourself in a civil suit. That $25k in savings will disappear in a blink just getting a bogus suit dismissed, one with a shade of merit? Hello, homelessness!
My personal "extreme quitting" plan would be to submit a letter to my boss outlining my reasons for leaving, as well as outlining my availability on a contract basis to provide continuity on these NON-NEGOTIABLE terms:
1) Work will be billed at a rate of $200 per hour with a four hour per day minimum, including telephone consultation, travel and offsite work.
2) All expenses, including meals, parking, travel, supplies and equipment required will be billed and provided by the vendors of my choosing. I will seek approval for all purchases over $500 and all materials will become the company's property when my consulting term is over.
3) The company will indemnify me against any damage or losses resulting during my contractual employment.
4) An up-front non-refundable retainer of $5000, payable in cashier's check or cash ONLY, is required before any work, including telephone consultation, will take place. The first 25 billable hours will be subtracted from this retainer.
5) Payment for all hours is due via cash or cashier's check on the Friday of each week before any further work will be performed.
This prevents them from saying you fucked them to harm them and won't help, you have a better basis for arguing you didn't like the job/pay/whatever. The frequent cash payment requirements keep them honest and from getting work and just not paying, important if there's financial problems with the company or if they just have no choice.
Of course in my personal fantasy I get a call from my ex-boss 72 hours later saying they agree to all these terms and that if I will come in today that they will have a cashier's check for $5k waiting for me. I work for about 40 hours and make two months salary.
Physical object analogies don't hold here, so I can't respond to this, plus we're not talking about anyone's personal posessions either.
And the "testing" copies aren't used for doing production work. The scenerio is usually like this:
User: When I'm using X, Y, and Z and I choose the "Make Widgets" command in X, I get an error that says "Can't Make Widgets, PixieWings are in use."
IT: We replicate their scenerio, opening X, Y, and Z applications and hope to get the same error. When we do, we figure out that Z has the PixieWings locked. Quit Z, they unlock, and you can Make Widgets again.
At no point does the IT use of the apps for testing actually do anything productive other than enable the *real* licensed user to actually make the applications work. No work for hire is performed on them whatsoever.
It's not a question of not liking farming or rural living. It's about not subsidizing all the technological benefits of high-density living for people living in low density areas.
By the way, farming is *heavily* subsidized by non-farmers. This is part of the overall package deal of subsidies for rural residents that were politically expedient and perhaps justified in the 1930s when a significant number of people were rural residents, and it was in the (government/society/rural/urban/politician)'s best interest to not have a society sharply split between urban and rural.
We don't live in the 1930s anymore, the rural subsidization has already done its job, and its not necessary to continue a subsidy that doesn't really help anyone but ILECs.
Even the most rigid places are willing to bend the rules for licensing when it comes to testing.
Sometimes its entirely legitimate -- building a new box for some CAD guy; he can't stop working on the application while the box is built and tested, and we can't get the box built and tested without the license. The same has to be true in a zillion different production hardware swapouts. The old box is wiped when the swap is completed, so there's no production use of two copies (although one place I worked had a circular buffer about 90 days long for old hardware, and the old box sat untouched during the days until it got reused, just in case something was missed).
Sometimes its somewhat less legitimate, like the support guy that has a whole suite of applications installed on his every day machine so that he can try to replicate problems from the people that make production use of it. They're not installed/uninstalled/reinstalled to test each problem, since that would take hours, but since they're not used to actually do production work, no one interprets the licensing rules to say that the copies are illegitimate.
I call that one somewhat less legitimate than the first, which is a legitimate chicken-and-egg problem, because the apps are staying resident on the machine, usable. I personally think it's a fair exception to make, since that test suite of applications aren't making anyone money from their use, and the total usage of a couple of hours per month in a 'test' mode would never pass the finance people's justification for the $10k it would take to buy them.
And then there's the "backup server" that doesn't even get turned on but to sync configs with the production box once in a while or as a total drop-in replacement when the production server stops being usable.
I'm sure there's 1001 variations on these kinds of rule-bending, but I've never worked someplace so inflexible that they required new licensing (or at least a 10+ copy slack) to cover legitimate IT maintenance issues. If the SPA nazis aren't going to give us some slack, how can we make their applications usable?
About 85 percent of the fund's revenues are split between two causes: the "e-rate" program (40 percent), which subsidizes school and library Internet connections, and rural telephone companies (45 percent), which might otherwise end up paying more for telephone service than city dwellers.
75-100 years ago, when most of America was rural, subsidizing services for rural people was politically expedient and helped bridge a pretty large technology gap between rural and urban.
I don't see the need for it anymore. Basic technology infrastructure (dialtone, power) has already been built for rural America and has been for some time. Why should we urban dwellers continue to subsidize a built infrastructure? And it's not like it's helping get DSL or any other expensive last-mile technologies to farmers, anyway.
At some point, it's necessary to just tell people that *yes*, if you live in extremely low-density areas it is VERY EXPENSIVE to provide you with technology that has a measurable cost per FOOT, let alone mile. It seems that we're actually subsidizing a rural lifestyle that some people choose to lead (or choose to continue leading). If you want the technology at an affordable cost, you need to go somewhere it's affordable to deliver.
Or maybe we should start taxing off-road vehicles owned by rural people so we can build an affordable infrastructure in urban areas for urban people to use off-road vehicles. Urban people paying for rural people to have urban lifestyles is just as ludicrous.
Would the world be better off or not if it was illegal to overpromote the functionality or features of software?
Too many of society's current problems have to do with the ever-widening gulf between "legally acceptable" and "morally unacceptable", particularly in the business world. WorldCon, Enron, the whole investment banking industry pump 'n' dump of the late 90s, the car dealer, and many commonly accepted marketing practices can ALL be blamed on people doing "what's legal" but which are by any common standard of ethics dishonest.
Even spam (especially spam?) can largley be blamed on people marketing "products" which really don't work or for promoting "deals" which really aren't.
It'd be great to see more significant penalties and more streamlined punishment procedures for what essentially amounts to dishonesty for dollars.
The case of vaporware is essentially just a subset of the larger problem, and can be a particularly malicious tool used by big companies against small companies when product choices and switching are high-cost endeavors.
I was looking for a word to indicate the kind of rank-and-file, part-time kernel hacker who isn't one of the well-known glitterati.
Since the probability of finding code that fixes a Linux problem, is acceptable to Linus and his lieutenants AND can be cut-and-pasted from SCO's base is substitutable for the value better known as "zero", it's likely SCO's claim is based upon similar comments and similar algorithms where its within the realm of possibile that the code could have been *adapted* from SCO code.
But this is like arguing that because I slept last night and Kirsten Dunst slept last night, it's within the realm of possible that we slept together. Probability subsitutable for the value better known as "zero".
Slashdot Mirror
...are DVDs with built-in parental control via the disc's menus. In order to watch the unedited movie you have to enter a code from the DVD packaging, otherwise you get a sanitized version, free of any "offending content" via seamless branching.
This will nip the "What about the CHILDREN!?!?!" and religious fundamentalist justifications for editing/manipulating content, since parents can just toss/hide the adults-only code for the DVD so that junior is stuck with the G version.
It will also serve to get the right-wing Republicans backing their activist constitutents doing the editing to stop being interested in fair use issues and back with the rest of the Republicans in legislatively enshrining MPAA corporate objectives.
They'll still offer the non-code-based DVDs to the rest of us, so that filmies and others won't whine to loudly about this inconvenience.
"Everybody" wins -- Mormon kiddies don't see titties, filmies get "normal" DVDs, the MPAA gets Orrin Hatch off his back AND can get back to kicking home editors in the ass.
I wonder if MS is against spam, or just against independents making money off of Microsoft's "interactive properties" without Microsoft getting a percentage of the action?
I can only speculate that MS would be fully in favor of spamming as long as it was part of a "regulated media process" that enabled MS to collect money off of.
I have a much harder time believing that MS isn't interested in direct email marketing period, just not stuff that they don't make money off of.
I wish the industry could get that into their heads and stop throwing away money on DRM schemes and concentrate on making products actually worth buying.
This is the major problem with many American industries; a significant obsession with protecting existing markets with monopolies and vendor lock-in through incompatibilities and standards deviation, among other techniques.
There's too little effort paid to R&D and innovative product development as means to market expansion and customer loyalty, especially since those things don't have payoffs in less than 4 quarters.
They're jamming them with all of the features of a laptop, except a good keyboard and a nice display.
Frankly I'd find something like the Sony Picturebook or slightly smaller much more useful and about as portable.
Dippin Dots are OK, but my gripe is that they're almost TOO cold for consumption.
I'm kind of glad they're not more commonly available, as I only see them at the State Fair and the Amusement Park, and it's part of what makes that experience kind of unique. Like Cheese on a Stick and other delecasies...
This book I think describes the class of people you're talking about. Many of their tastes and habits are drawn from an earlier class known as the Limousine Liberal.
I would describe them (from my own personal experiences) as the adult children of liberal professionals (lawyer, doctor, professor, etc) who are themselves liberal professionals who have spent life in a well-paid vacuum of liberal values.
They've pattenered their life on a life of high-end PC living:
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Buying all their food at the coop at 2x the price of the Sav-A-Lot while voting and supporting all kinds of environmental regulations that only seem to jump the price of food for the Sav-A-Lot shoppers.
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Spending 3x the cost of a normal house on remodeling a house in a trendy older neighborhood, using special "natural" materials and ultra-efficient appliances and designs, while complaining about the materials and land usage for houses that others can afford.
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Supporting affirmative action, immigration and other diversity programs that have little or no economic impact on their professions which typically have steep barriers to entry based almost exclusively on economics and skill-based examinations (bar exam, medical boards, etc) or have steep cultural barriers to entry (writers of various stripes).
There are loads of examples, but many of them are theme-and-variations on the typical educated white collar, politically left vs. less educated blue collar, politically centerist or conservative theme.You'll never, ever be able to afford a house built of steel and concrete. The costs would be astronomical and it would require a union commercial crew to build and probably a real architect and engineer to design.
A standard 3k sq ft stick house with a block foundation is $150k to build. Your desire for a "permanent" house is probably on the order of $300-400k, and the zoning people may take issue with such a permanent design in a residentially zoned area.
Properly built and vented, the wood will last for centuries. Bugproofing can be accomplished by having an exterminator pre-pipe the crawlspace and outer wall voids for bug killer. They can then attach to a valve on the outside and spray the voids periodically to ensure a bug-free existence. This is now done commonly on houses in the South.
I agree completely and it kind of scares me. I make the time to tinker with some stuff and keep a couple of FreeBSD boxes going, but that's about the outer limit as to what I can do, and I'm "only" married and a homeowner, and those are huge consumers of time (which sounds negative -- its not, except when its BS yardwork).
How can I be expected to keep up with the changing technology landscape when my employer doesn't bother to make it part of our job situation and I don't have that much spare time. Kids? shit, I'd be fucked. There would be a window of about 30 minutes a day, and that's just not enough time.
Although a lot of people consider HST's journalistic ability to have fallen apart in the mid '70s largely due to massive cocaine use, nixing the "has good job" qualification (unless you equate "good job" with "good income"). He also is supposed to have physically abused his ex-wife Sandy, in addition to cheating on her, which eliminates the "stable family life" factor as well.
And then there's just all the absurdity and violence he was associated with since the mid 70s as well, which might also eliminate him from consideration from the "functional addict" definition.
Of course you could always just define functional addict as someone who does tons of drugs and isn't dead.
And there never will be.
This is true, but what's to prevent Microsoft from including DVD ripping software in Longhorn? Even the threat of that might be enough to get the media people to the table.
It was an interesting article, but it repeats as facts the record industry's equation of downloads equalling lost revenue, which isn't true.
Headphones, and remote controls don't really need IP's as someone else pointed out.
Hi, we're from the Slashdot Geekness Enforcement Group. We've determined that your inability to see the rationale for IP connectivity to headphones and remote controls violates our standards. We've even recieved some complaints that this attitude "goes against the GPL" and helps to enforce "MPAA/RIAA restrictions on content use".
Please turn in your Slashdot ID by the end of the day, otherwise we'll be forced to blog you into oblivion. Thanks.
There are also a class of people considered "functional addicts" -- I'm only familiar with the subject in the realm of substance (ab)use, but the idea is that these are people who consume large amounts of a substance but yet do not have disrupted social lives or immediate health problems -- they hold (often prestigious, well-paid) jobs, have families, friends and all the other trappings of a normal life.
I remember reading a NYT or other magazine article a few years ago on white collar heroin addicts who fit this definition well and, thanks to the relatively noncorrosive effect of heroin* relative to booze, had excellent long-term health prospects
People like them were an interesting contradiction of the addiction model: they're not specifically hurting themselves, they have good social lives and careers, about the only negative factual thing you can attribute to them is they're breaking the law.
Any other criticism is purely moral, and the morality of addiction studies is where I think there's real meat.
* Despite the awful connotations, opiate use is far less destructive than liquor or cigarettes. Most of the danger is attributable to IV users addicted to the "rush" from injected heroin, which is difficult to sustain long-term without increasingly high doses.
The problem with these scenerios is twofold:
1) Applications like video and gaming will be ubiquitous on mobile phones and will be expected and used _by_the_generation_that_grows_up_with them. Sure, if I'm 18 and my first mobile is a 3G with color and gaming, I'll probably expect and use that functionality forever, expanding the user base for nG-based handsets.
But it's a drag to wait a generation to finally build the base up to make a profit off of a tecnology that's essentially out of date in 5-7 years.
2) The cost of handsets. Even if the lame applications on tiny screens were appealing to a majority of adults, they will quickly revert to reality when they realize it will be competitive with the price of a low-end laptop. And this will also be a hindrace for hooking new users; not many 17 year olds will be able to afford a $500 phone.
This is pretty reasonable, since a large entity like LA County is likely to interconnect with other networks in the future (if not right now), and a globally unique address space makes that much saner.
We have an ASP provided service via a frame circuit. In its first iteration the engineer I worked with assigned me an address of 10.2.3.4 on the WAN side of the router. When I asked him what the destination network was for the services we were communicating with, he just said "10.0.0.0/8". When I told him that space was in use here as well, he said "You'll have to renumber, those are our IPs" it took an hour argument with his boss and faxes of RFC1918 to convince them otherwise.
The next iteration of this service had a different connection to a different provider who connected to the provider above. Both of these providers were using overlapping 10.0.0.0/8 space and were NATing to each other, and when the service wasn't working right it was funny/sad listening to these clowns try to dignose these double NAT'd connections. None of that would have been necessary if they had used unique address space.
Heh, the reason I still call it a fantasy is that I presume the same would happen.
I *can* see getting a little out of them for obscure passwords or configuration assistance on something, though.
It's only a fantasy at a reasonably managed business that doesn't treat its employees like shit and actually has sensible policies and procedures that ensure the entire company's critical IT isn't in the head of one guy.
Sorry, having never actually executed this plan I didn't know what mistakes I was making.
You're right, though, that works better, and if its non-refundable, if the work is under 25 hours total, you just reap a higher average hourly rate.
...beyond wireless email/messaging and web browsing.
So far we don't really have any applications. The overwhelming majority of mobile users have decided that the primary purpose of their devices, telephony, is perfectly adequate.
A remaining minority is content to get email or other text messages, but they're early adopters, pioneers and gadget freaks who buy anything and their aren't enough of them to make change-the-world money off of.
An even smaller minority have developed proprietary applications, but they've been doing that over more expensive technologies forver, this just lets them do it with greater freedom. They're not a growth medium, though, since they're generally large businesses that negotiate deep discounts and optimize for minimum usage anyway.
Right now there's just not a compelling application for wireless data at the price at which it is available.
A wireless technology with sustainable node throughputs in excess of 10 megabits and ranges equivilent to cellular and all-you-can-eat pricing would be compelling, but the application wouldn't be mobile as much as last-mile fixed, mobile data would just be a side benefit.
This is very true, and particularly true if you live in a second or third tier city where the community of IT Directors/CIOs and higher-level IT opportunities is limited. If you should *succeed* at crippling a business for a period of time, you could get blacklisted as a troublemaker and have difficulty finding a job or getting promitions if you do find a job.
I also wonder if a particularly successful fscking of an IT infrastructure couldn't put you at some risk for a lawsuit claiming sabotage. Even if it didn't have a chance of success, you're unemployed and having to defend yourself in a civil suit. That $25k in savings will disappear in a blink just getting a bogus suit dismissed, one with a shade of merit? Hello, homelessness!
My personal "extreme quitting" plan would be to submit a letter to my boss outlining my reasons for leaving, as well as outlining my availability on a contract basis to provide continuity on these NON-NEGOTIABLE terms:
1) Work will be billed at a rate of $200 per hour with a four hour per day minimum, including telephone consultation, travel and offsite work.
2) All expenses, including meals, parking, travel, supplies and equipment required will be billed and provided by the vendors of my choosing. I will seek approval for all purchases over $500 and all materials will become the company's property when my consulting term is over.
3) The company will indemnify me against any damage or losses resulting during my contractual employment.
4) An up-front non-refundable retainer of $5000, payable in cashier's check or cash ONLY, is required before any work, including telephone consultation, will take place. The first 25 billable hours will be subtracted from this retainer.
5) Payment for all hours is due via cash or cashier's check on the Friday of each week before any further work will be performed.
This prevents them from saying you fucked them to harm them and won't help, you have a better basis for arguing you didn't like the job/pay/whatever. The frequent cash payment requirements keep them honest and from getting work and just not paying, important if there's financial problems with the company or if they just have no choice.
Of course in my personal fantasy I get a call from my ex-boss 72 hours later saying they agree to all these terms and that if I will come in today that they will have a cashier's check for $5k waiting for me. I work for about 40 hours and make two months salary.
Physical object analogies don't hold here, so I can't respond to this, plus we're not talking about anyone's personal posessions either.
And the "testing" copies aren't used for doing production work. The scenerio is usually like this:
User: When I'm using X, Y, and Z and I choose the "Make Widgets" command in X, I get an error that says "Can't Make Widgets, PixieWings are in use."
IT: We replicate their scenerio, opening X, Y, and Z applications and hope to get the same error. When we do, we figure out that Z has the PixieWings locked. Quit Z, they unlock, and you can Make Widgets again.
At no point does the IT use of the apps for testing actually do anything productive other than enable the *real* licensed user to actually make the applications work. No work for hire is performed on them whatsoever.
It's not a question of not liking farming or rural living. It's about not subsidizing all the technological benefits of high-density living for people living in low density areas.
By the way, farming is *heavily* subsidized by non-farmers. This is part of the overall package deal of subsidies for rural residents that were politically expedient and perhaps justified in the 1930s when a significant number of people were rural residents, and it was in the (government/society/rural/urban/politician)'s best interest to not have a society sharply split between urban and rural.
We don't live in the 1930s anymore, the rural subsidization has already done its job, and its not necessary to continue a subsidy that doesn't really help anyone but ILECs.
Even the most rigid places are willing to bend the rules for licensing when it comes to testing.
Sometimes its entirely legitimate -- building a new box for some CAD guy; he can't stop working on the application while the box is built and tested, and we can't get the box built and tested without the license. The same has to be true in a zillion different production hardware swapouts. The old box is wiped when the swap is completed, so there's no production use of two copies (although one place I worked had a circular buffer about 90 days long for old hardware, and the old box sat untouched during the days until it got reused, just in case something was missed).
Sometimes its somewhat less legitimate, like the support guy that has a whole suite of applications installed on his every day machine so that he can try to replicate problems from the people that make production use of it. They're not installed/uninstalled/reinstalled to test each problem, since that would take hours, but since they're not used to actually do production work, no one interprets the licensing rules to say that the copies are illegitimate.
I call that one somewhat less legitimate than the first, which is a legitimate chicken-and-egg problem, because the apps are staying resident on the machine, usable. I personally think it's a fair exception to make, since that test suite of applications aren't making anyone money from their use, and the total usage of a couple of hours per month in a 'test' mode would never pass the finance people's justification for the $10k it would take to buy them.
And then there's the "backup server" that doesn't even get turned on but to sync configs with the production box once in a while or as a total drop-in replacement when the production server stops being usable.
I'm sure there's 1001 variations on these kinds of rule-bending, but I've never worked someplace so inflexible that they required new licensing (or at least a 10+ copy slack) to cover legitimate IT maintenance issues. If the SPA nazis aren't going to give us some slack, how can we make their applications usable?
About 85 percent of the fund's revenues are split between two causes: the "e-rate" program (40 percent), which subsidizes school and library Internet connections, and rural telephone companies (45 percent), which might otherwise end up paying more for telephone service than city dwellers.
75-100 years ago, when most of America was rural, subsidizing services for rural people was politically expedient and helped bridge a pretty large technology gap between rural and urban.
I don't see the need for it anymore. Basic technology infrastructure (dialtone, power) has already been built for rural America and has been for some time. Why should we urban dwellers continue to subsidize a built infrastructure? And it's not like it's helping get DSL or any other expensive last-mile technologies to farmers, anyway.
At some point, it's necessary to just tell people that *yes*, if you live in extremely low-density areas it is VERY EXPENSIVE to provide you with technology that has a measurable cost per FOOT, let alone mile. It seems that we're actually subsidizing a rural lifestyle that some people choose to lead (or choose to continue leading). If you want the technology at an affordable cost, you need to go somewhere it's affordable to deliver.
Or maybe we should start taxing off-road vehicles owned by rural people so we can build an affordable infrastructure in urban areas for urban people to use off-road vehicles. Urban people paying for rural people to have urban lifestyles is just as ludicrous.
Would the world be better off or not if it was illegal to overpromote the functionality or features of software?
Too many of society's current problems have to do with the ever-widening gulf between "legally acceptable" and "morally unacceptable", particularly in the business world. WorldCon, Enron, the whole investment banking industry pump 'n' dump of the late 90s, the car dealer, and many commonly accepted marketing practices can ALL be blamed on people doing "what's legal" but which are by any common standard of ethics dishonest.
Even spam (especially spam?) can largley be blamed on people marketing "products" which really don't work or for promoting "deals" which really aren't.
It'd be great to see more significant penalties and more streamlined punishment procedures for what essentially amounts to dishonesty for dollars.
The case of vaporware is essentially just a subset of the larger problem, and can be a particularly malicious tool used by big companies against small companies when product choices and switching are high-cost endeavors.
I was looking for a word to indicate the kind of rank-and-file, part-time kernel hacker who isn't one of the well-known glitterati.
Since the probability of finding code that fixes a Linux problem, is acceptable to Linus and his lieutenants AND can be cut-and-pasted from SCO's base is substitutable for the value better known as "zero", it's likely SCO's claim is based upon similar comments and similar algorithms where its within the realm of possibile that the code could have been *adapted* from SCO code.
But this is like arguing that because I slept last night and Kirsten Dunst slept last night, it's within the realm of possible that we slept together. Probability subsitutable for the value better known as "zero".