Heh. I recently left the academic world too. (Although, my boss was much closer to the "productive narcissist" mentioned in the article than a psychopath.)
We had a saying about life at the university: "The smaller the fiefdom, the more vicious the infighting is."
The issue isn't what gave you the ability to do something. The issue is jurisdictional.
If there's a rule in the game that says "you can't do this," then it should be coded in. Circumventing that code should be a violation of the license agreement, and your account should be terminated.
In real life, we have rules which are called "laws." Account suspension happens by moving your avatar to a special facility called a "jail." Occasionally (depending on the situation), your account may be terminated entirely, often by means of "lethal injection" or "the chair."
What the parent posts are addressing is that regardless of how you feel about the use of the bot, or selling the virtual goods for real money, it's not immediately obvious that any laws were broken here, which is why the police involvement seems sketchy.
Lowering the price does not create any gas, all it does it change the mechanism of rationing from selling gas to those willing to pay the most for it, to giving gas to those who arrive first. The ones who are willing to pay the most for gas are mostly likely the ones who need it the most, so why the hell would you just give gas to those who arrive first?
Please demonstrate the comparatively larger need of, say, Thurston Howell the Third, for gas, and I'll concede your point. Until then, suffice it to say that I find the assertion that "I have more money to pay, therefore my need is greater" to be suspect at best and perverse at worst.
Sure. Just sell the gas at market value. As a result, only a very select minority of people would be able to drive their cars, and everyone else would be essentially out of luck.
Actually, that is a fairly radical solution, considering that it would be likely to cause the collapse of the entire economy.
Screw that - head to the local package store or beverage place. They have tons of boxes used to ship beer, wine, and spirits, and they often wind up just dumping them. They're happy to give them away.
Flow control in a template to, say, repeat over a dataset is NOT business logic and doesn't need to be seperated.
I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to.
On the one hand, you might be referring to the controller, in which case I'd respond that fetching a list of users from a database is most certainly not presentation, especially if you're doing anything more complex than "get me all of them."
On the other, you might be referring to the call to "render_colleciton_of_partials", in which case I went to lengths to point out that it's optional, that you can "repeat over a dataset" right in the page content if you like, and that the render_collection... function is usually only used in situations where the presentation of each member of the dataset is hairy and obnoxious. In which case, it's probably much easier dealt with in its own file.
So, in that model, you have an abstracted version of your database logic mixed in with the presentation stuff. Meh, pass.
RoR defers the "which database objects will I need on this page?" question to the controller. This allows you to put only the barest minimum of stuff in the actual template for the web page: just exactly enough to get the presentation right:
Of course, if you prefer, you can iterate over the list right in the page, but if you're doing more than a single line or have some hairy presentation html in there, you have the option of just dumping it in another file, as demonstrated.
On the contrary, porn needs quite a lot of marketing, precisely because the market is so flooded. It's like the video revolution in porn, only orders of magnitude bigger: suddenly, everyone can be "in the business."
Incidentally, try doing a google search for "thumbnail gallery porn" sometime. There are scores of sites out there that exist only for the purpose of pointing to web pages with free porn on them. If that's not aggressive marketing, I'm not sure what is.
I attended an IT conference a couple of years ago which was organized by my old boss, which meant I was able to get into the CEO roundtable dinner. The speaker at the dinner was an FBI agent who specialized in issues of computer crime. He was mostly there flogging Infragard, and trying to persuade the attendees that should they be the victim of a hack, they should call their local FBI field office.
During his presentation, he repeatedly pronounced the word "warez" as "Juarez."
The FBI has some really talented folks working for them, and for all I know, this guy could have been very bright. But the thing I remember most from that evening was me and my friend snickering at each other and trying to figure out why hackers were apparently trading Latinos.
I'm not trying to rain on your parade, I swear. However, there's a joke I've heard that applies equally well to any white collar job as it does to IT work:
Q: What's the technical term for an employee whose skills and responsibilites increase significantly, but without a proportionate increase in salary? A: Schmuck.
Without going too much into detail, the same thing is happening right now to my wife. She was brought in at a very late stage (just before user acceptance testing) on a software project that has been turning out to be a huge boondoggle. None of the project managers prior to her were able to either make the client happy, or keep the development on schedule. But she's seen in the company as the "rain maker," and pretty much the only one capable of getting things back under control. Guess what the conclusion management drew from this is?
If you guessed, "Sammy's wife should be a project manager, with the corresponding major increase in salary," nice try. The correct answer was, "this project doesn't really need a project manager to be there, as long as she's on the job." Of course, projects still need to be managed. The only difference here is that rather than being managed by a stuffed shirt with PM credentials who will proceed to f*** things all up, it's being managed by someone who actually knows what she's doing, but can be paid at about half to two-thirds the rate.
(Sorry. Can you tell this is something of a sore point for me?;) )
It's been a while since I've booted a Debian box, so I can't double check, but I'm quite certain that if my RHEL machines didn't run/etc/init.d/network on boot, they wouldn't be particularly useful to me.
Me sucker punching you and taking your milk money is also allocation of resources: specifically, I have reallocated your resources to me.
Just because you can put a nice name on something doesn't justify it.
Also: check out what information you can on Microsoft's revenue stream sometime. In order to be called a "loss leader," Microsoft would have to be taking a loss on OS sales through their OEM channels. That just ain't happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. I recently left the academic world too. (Although, my boss was much closer to the "productive narcissist" mentioned in the article than a psychopath.)
We had a saying about life at the university: "The smaller the fiefdom, the more vicious the infighting is."
Good point. Certainly if someone bilks me out of a bunch of money through wire fraud, I would consider it actual theft.
The issue isn't what gave you the ability to do something. The issue is jurisdictional.
If there's a rule in the game that says "you can't do this," then it should be coded in. Circumventing that code should be a violation of the license agreement, and your account should be terminated.
In real life, we have rules which are called "laws." Account suspension happens by moving your avatar to a special facility called a "jail." Occasionally (depending on the situation), your account may be terminated entirely, often by means of "lethal injection" or "the chair."
What the parent posts are addressing is that regardless of how you feel about the use of the bot, or selling the virtual goods for real money, it's not immediately obvious that any laws were broken here, which is why the police involvement seems sketchy.
Please demonstrate the comparatively larger need of, say, Thurston Howell the Third, for gas, and I'll concede your point. Until then, suffice it to say that I find the assertion that "I have more money to pay, therefore my need is greater" to be suspect at best and perverse at worst.
Sure. Just sell the gas at market value. As a result, only a very select minority of people would be able to drive their cars, and everyone else would be essentially out of luck.
Actually, that is a fairly radical solution, considering that it would be likely to cause the collapse of the entire economy.
Throw an elbow at CmdrTaco then watch him pee himself on the pavement?
Apologies, I just need to get this out of my system.
MS "Honeymonkey" project starts netting su 9:31 10th August, 2005 Rejected
Screw that - head to the local package store or beverage place. They have tons of boxes used to ship beer, wine, and spirits, and they often wind up just dumping them. They're happy to give them away.
The even better part: with luck, all you assholes blowing by at 100 on the turnpike will manage to eliminate yourselves from the gene pool.
Morons.
I think this is the first time I've wanted to mod a story up for sarcasm.
Incidentally, "Oh, snap. No they dih-ent."
I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to.
On the one hand, you might be referring to the controller, in which case I'd respond that fetching a list of users from a database is most certainly not presentation, especially if you're doing anything more complex than "get me all of them."
On the other, you might be referring to the call to "render_colleciton_of_partials", in which case I went to lengths to point out that it's optional, that you can "repeat over a dataset" right in the page content if you like, and that the render_collection... function is usually only used in situations where the presentation of each member of the dataset is hairy and obnoxious. In which case, it's probably much easier dealt with in its own file.
So, um... what's your point?
Au contraire. Sysadmins go crazy approximately all the friggin' time.
Except the ones that start out crazy. But who can tell which is which?
Thank you for reiterating reason number #432 that sysadmins go crazy trying to secure windows.
...except that you bought a powerbook.
An iBook, I might have believed.
Amen, brother.
The difference is that this was an article in the WSJ, not a press release.
Unless you're of the opinion that they're the same thing too, in which case, you're right. No difference at all.
You sure? Even the ones having homosexual sex?
On the contrary, porn needs quite a lot of marketing, precisely because the market is so flooded. It's like the video revolution in porn, only orders of magnitude bigger: suddenly, everyone can be "in the business."
Incidentally, try doing a google search for "thumbnail gallery porn" sometime. There are scores of sites out there that exist only for the purpose of pointing to web pages with free porn on them. If that's not aggressive marketing, I'm not sure what is.
I attended an IT conference a couple of years ago which was organized by my old boss, which meant I was able to get into the CEO roundtable dinner. The speaker at the dinner was an FBI agent who specialized in issues of computer crime. He was mostly there flogging Infragard, and trying to persuade the attendees that should they be the victim of a hack, they should call their local FBI field office.
During his presentation, he repeatedly pronounced the word "warez" as "Juarez."
The FBI has some really talented folks working for them, and for all I know, this guy could have been very bright. But the thing I remember most from that evening was me and my friend snickering at each other and trying to figure out why hackers were apparently trading Latinos.
Okay - I have seen this argument, specificially in the context of training. On Slashdot. Here's the URL: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157816&cid=132 24464
I have, specifically in the context of training inexperienced users. And I've seen it on Slashdot, to boot.
Sorry I can't provide a URL - this was some time ago.
I'm not trying to rain on your parade, I swear. However, there's a joke I've heard that applies equally well to any white collar job as it does to IT work:
;) )
Q: What's the technical term for an employee whose skills and responsibilites increase significantly, but without a proportionate increase in salary?
A: Schmuck.
Without going too much into detail, the same thing is happening right now to my wife. She was brought in at a very late stage (just before user acceptance testing) on a software project that has been turning out to be a huge boondoggle. None of the project managers prior to her were able to either make the client happy, or keep the development on schedule. But she's seen in the company as the "rain maker," and pretty much the only one capable of getting things back under control. Guess what the conclusion management drew from this is?
If you guessed, "Sammy's wife should be a project manager, with the corresponding major increase in salary," nice try. The correct answer was, "this project doesn't really need a project manager to be there, as long as she's on the job." Of course, projects still need to be managed. The only difference here is that rather than being managed by a stuffed shirt with PM credentials who will proceed to f*** things all up, it's being managed by someone who actually knows what she's doing, but can be paid at about half to two-thirds the rate.
(Sorry. Can you tell this is something of a sore point for me?
It's been a while since I've booted a Debian box, so I can't double check, but I'm quite certain that if my RHEL machines didn't run /etc/init.d/network on boot, they wouldn't be particularly useful to me.
Me sucker punching you and taking your milk money is also allocation of resources: specifically, I have reallocated your resources to me.
Just because you can put a nice name on something doesn't justify it.
Also: check out what information you can on Microsoft's revenue stream sometime. In order to be called a "loss leader," Microsoft would have to be taking a loss on OS sales through their OEM channels. That just ain't happening.