Been there, done that, at least in the small scale. On my last project I got sick and tired of telling the project manager that we needed designer time for stuff only to be told that there was "no budget left for it". So it added to my work load, took me longer, didn't get done properly, got raised as a bug by the customer, and we had to fix it anyway.
I guess that comes out of a different column on the spreadsheet though, so that's all right.
IANAL and all that, but I'm pretty damn sure that fair use doesn't cover providing even the smallest part of a copyrighted work for the specific purpose of distributing the work without permission. You're not using the snippet for the purposes of criticism or satire, etc, you're using it specifically so that someone else can get a copy of the entire work.
The judiciary may not understand all the deep technological points involved, but you can bet that they have a huge experience of people trying to worm their way out of things using bogus armchair lawyer arguments.
So, to turn your question back on yourself, "Where did the Big Bang come from? What were its origins?"
We don't know, but I guarantee you that right now, as I type this, people are trying to work it out. Can you say the same for the intelligent design crowd? Are they trying to work out where their designer comes from?
Unfortunately I'm using Windows and IMAP - the real reason for using Outlook is because it's company policy to use the calendar. Not that anyone seems to check my calendar before booking me into a meeting, of course...
Oh, and having switched on the option to compact folders when it would save more than 100KB, I just got another point of suckage for Thunderbird - I marked a mail as junk and now have a modal dialogue with the following message:
"The folder 'Junk' cannot be compacted because another operation is in progress. Please try again later."
No! I am not compacting Junk, you are! Wtf are you telling me for?
Well I'm with Eclipse and I'm not aware of any major changes to my ADSL service, but perhaps that's the point as there have definitely been changes - eg it went from 512Kbps fixed to user-variable up to 2Mbps to 8Mbps, all without any issues that affected me.
Near the start of the year my ex moved out, and so one of the many things that had to be changed was the BT phone line - it was in her name, so I needed to change it to mine. BT couldn't just change the name on the account; oh no, they had to close the old account and open a new one for me. Ok, fine - what they didn't tell me was that that would involve cancelling my ADSL provision. Luckily Eclipse were notified by BT and emailed me to check. One quick reply to say no I most certainly did not want to cancel and everything was sorted.
So while I can't say categorically that Eclipse follow standard procedures for technical roll-outs, I haven't been affected by anything that has happened and their customer service is excellent. I just wish my BT phone line could actually handle anything like the 8Mbps it's supposed to be able to take - I'm lucky to get more than about 2.5Mbps and rarely get download speeds to match even that. I'm seriously considering cable broadband from Virgin, but I'm otherwise perfectly happy with Eclipse.
The first whiff of displeasure I got when using Facebook was when people could tag me in photos without my permission and have them display on my profile.
I believe you now have to accept the tagging, although it's been a while - perhaps that's only for people tagging your photos, rather than tagging you in theirs.
Similarly, I expect there's a way to disable this privacy-infringing commercial thing
It looks like you have to do it on a site-by-site basis; the only thing I can see in the privacy settings page that looks like it might be it isn't presenting me with any options as "No sites have tried sending stories to your profile". Guess I'll just have to wait then.
Understandably, there's lots of pictures one would probably not want the world to see, especially during a job search.
While I do appreciate your concern, I would see not getting a job offer because of a photo of me they found on the Internet as a *good* thing - because frankly I wouldn't want to work for that sort of company.
That's not how this kind of stuff should work. It should be opt-in, not opt-out.
Yes, it should, but you're thinking like a user. Facebook doesn't exist to serve its users, it exists to make money. The fact that you can do useful things with it is just the bait they use to lure you in and keep you there to be advertised at. Most large-scale free sites are like that - if they're not actively selling stuff to you, then they're actively selling you to advertisers. That's not to say that Facebook doesn't take it one or two steps further than a lot of sites; just pointing out why it's opt-out, rather than opt-in.
Overall though I don't disagree with you - they're going about things the wrong way.
I can only assume you've not used that many email clients. Yes Outlook sucks, but so does Thunderbird - it just sucks less.
Examples of Thunderbird's suckage:
* if you click "check mail" while it's already checking your mail, a dialogue pops up saying something like "The action cannot be performed because the folder is already being processed". What's wrong with simply ignoring the click? (Or at least displaying a less generic message)
* I get a hell of a lot of junk, and can easily have 5k - 10k messages in my junk folder. Deleting them all takes *ages*. Yet deleting all the mail in the trash is instantaneous; why is there no "Empty folder" option for the junk folder? (After all, it's pretty likely people are going to want to empty it regularly)
* Sometimes Thunderbird gets confused part-way through processing junk mails, and leaves a number (anything from half a dozen to several hundred) sat in my inbox, marked as junk. Sometimes checking for new mail clears them, sometimes telling Thunderbird to delete mail marked as junk clears them, sometimes I have to delete them manually.
* Sometimes if you hit ctrl-A to select all mails in a folder (eg to delete all the mail in the junk folder), you then discover that even though the selection is performed the message list isn't focussed, so you can't delete them - you have to click in the message list and then reselect them all
* If manually marking a number of messages as junk by clicking the little "junk" icon in the message list pane, if you click too quickly subsequent clicks are ignored. You can actually keep clicking apparently forever with nothing happening; you *must* leave a gap of a second or two between clicks
* "Get all new messages" gets messages in the currently-focussed folder - eg I use Thunderbird for mail and RSS feeds. If I have the mail list focussed, "Get all new messages" gets email; if I have one of the feeds selected then it checks for new RSS items. This is despite it being above individual options for checking each message source, thus implying that it checks *all* configured accounts
* Deleting mail doesn't seem to really delete it, you have to compact folders from time to time too
* Sometimes Thunderbird gets confused and notifies me of new mail when there is none, or doesn't when there is, or shows a folder as having a number of unread messages but the folder itself as empty or vice versa. These last two are generally fixed by using "compact folder" on the affected folder. Other times it shows phantom blank messages, with a delivery date of the Unix epoch; these seem to correspond to blank lines in the mail file itself. Again, "compact folder" sorts that out.
* Sometimes when checking for mail automatically it will display a count of how many there are to download; other times it doesn't, apparently at random.
Anyway like I said, Outlook sucks; I have to use Outlook 2000 at work and I would gladly use Thunderbird instead if I could. However personally I think Thunderbird sucks too, and from time to time look around for an alternative. So far I've not found any free mail clients that are better enough to warrant shifting all my mail and settings over, but I live in hope.
Vader killed the Emperor, but that whole scene was irrelevant on the larger scale. It took place on the Death Star, and the Death Star was blown up two minutes later.
I was going to say that - the reason why the Empire survived the first Death Star's destruction is the Emperor wasn't on it at the time. As you point out, Luke might as well have not been on the second one - at the very most he kept Vader and the Emperor distracted, but then the Rebel fleet would've done a pretty good job of that too.
Seems to me that many inanimate systems self-propagate themselves through time, relying on the continuous collapse of wave functions -- without people looking at them.
If you're not looking, how do you know they're doing it?
The RIAA made it socially acceptable to commit file sharing. People don't see the behavior as criminal, they don't see it as wrong.
I disagree. I think most people found it socially acceptable to copy stuff long before this whole debate got started. Ever since it was easy to copy stuff at home people have been doing it. Why do you think so many games back in the 80s used copy prevention measures? Back then there were no anti-file sharing crusades, no headline-making law suits, no fat-cat executives making easy targets of themselves.
I'm not saying that the RIAA aren't their own worst enemy, or immoral, etc; I'm just saying that copying has been socially acceptable for much longer than the RIAA could be used as a convenient excuse. If nothing else, people have been copying stuff here in the UK for decades, and I'd never heard of the RIAA before I started reading slashdot.
So, just like the US citizen was wrong in thinking the rest of the world starts the holiday season with thanksgiving, you are wrong in thinking that everyone else starts it with Christmas.
Even the title of the article refers to the UK - this story is about a UK industry body calling on the UK recording industry to drop DRM.
I think I can be forgiven for pointing out that the holiday season referred to in TFA is Christmas, as over here in the country the story is about that's the next holiday in the calendar... Yeah ok, so I shouldn't have said "everywhere else", I should really have said "in the UK".
I think the argument is that it's less likely that an established, profitable company will go splat than some hobbiest group will simply tire of the work and go and do something else instead.
Half-Life 1 and 2 for the PC have very similar loading screens
Both Half-Life 1 and 2 on the PC work in exactly the same way - you walk down a certain bit of corridor, the game pauses, the word "LOADING" appears on the screen and it loads the next section. There is no "loading screen" in the sense of the ones in Doom 3, where you are thrown out of the experience to a 2D graphic-and-text screen.
That said, TFA is wrong - HL1 most definitely had levels, in exactly the same way as HL2. Play it today on a modern PC and the pause would be a blip, but it's still there and was most definitely noticeable on PCs of the day.
While we're at it, it was rare for a C64 game to have in-game loading.
I was going to make a similar comment. I had a ZX Spectrum and it too loaded games from tape. I don't remember a single one that loaded anything once the initial load had finished. And how annoying would that be anyway?
When you get scammed with a debit card, you call your bank, explain the situation, they say "Thank you Mr. X, we'll investigate it", and then a month or two later you'll get a refund. In the intervening period you have no money.
A work mate of mine had his bank account emptied a few years ago. He spoke to the bank, contested the purchases/withdrawals, and he had his money back within a day or two.
True, he then had to contest the charges for going over his overdraft limit, but they were dropped too. The point is, if it takes "a couple of months" to get your money back, you're banking with the wrong people.
Billing by the hour engenders more professionalism on both sides of the equation.
You'd think that wouldn't you? However I've worked with a lot of permanent and a lot of contract employees over the years, and on the whole I've seen more professionalism from the permanent staff. That's not to say that I've not worked with some truly excellent contractors, as I have; however I've also worked with some that were truly, truly awful - such as the one who texted the project manager to say he was in hospital with kidney problems, only to be spotted working elsewhere the next day. Turned out he'd written a small fraction of what he'd claimed to have done in the time he was actually on the project too.
That's just one example, but I have plenty of others. I've worked with some pretty dire permanent employees too mind, but on the whole the worst of the bad ones have been contractors.
Well, I actually thought (and in fact said out loud) "That's an absolutely fucking ridiculous idea!", but close enough I feel.
So, I access a site I presumably already trust which would presumably be worthy of that trust, as they're trying to protect themselves and their users (albeit in an utterly retarded way). It pops up a dialogue asking me if I want to use a new, even more secure connection, and if I say yes then they root my PC because they think I'm an idiot and therefore my PC is almost certainly infected? I want more security from a site I trust so I'm better protected and that makes me untrustworthy.
Pure fucking genius. About the only redeeming feature is that any site that implements the scheme as described isn't trustworthy and so I shouldn't have hit yes and so I shouldn't be surprised when I get rooted. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what they're aiming for, however.
There called mercenaries or terrorists and they probably cost a lot less than most people pay in taxes.
I would have thought that the average mercenary would be paid on a par with the average soldier, which again is probably on a par with the average for any given profession. Therefore hiring a group of mercenaries, all of whom expect to be paid, supplied, equipped, etc is going to cost far more than the average person earns, let alone pays in tax.
Privacy from private companies, not from the government or law enforcement.
Unfortunately my country has become mired in the fear of terrorism. Decades of threat from the IRA and we never thought anything like that was necessary. Suddenly the people committing the crimes have funny names, languages and religions as well as funny accents and we're over-reacting left right and centre...
This is a programming error, plain and simple. From TFA:
Though we thought we had cleared all references to old entries in the list, because the objects were still registered as subscribers to an event, they were never getting deleted.
So references were held to the objects in two places - the list of encountered obstacles, and the list of event subscribers. They were being removed from the list of encountered obstacles, but not being unsubscribed from the event.
How do you think event subscription works? Something has to hold a reference to the objects that are subscribed to the event! That thing is going to hold a reference until you unsubscribe the object - it neither knows nor cares about any other list of references you may be maintaining separately, how could it?
This is a coding error. A subtle, non-obvious one perhaps, but a bug nevertheless. It is not an error in the CLR, and in fact the article never paints it as such. That particular bit of spin is wholly down to the submitter.
Because 9-inch Nails has an annoying, droning, sameness to every song ever recorded by him(them?)
Actually I challenge you to listen to any two albums and genuinely find that they sound the same. There's a world of difference between Pretty Hate Machine and Downward Spiral (the first two albums), let alone between With Teeth and Year Zero (the most recent two; for what it's worth I just don't like Year Zero so far). If anything NIN has changed their musical style more than most bands I know.
As for fame, I couldn't name a single song by KISS, and know nothing about them other than that they're some kind of glam rock/metal band with painted faces and leather costumes. It all depends on what sort of scene you're into, and what generation you're from. Meanwhile NIN/Trent has written music for everything from films (Se7en's opening credits (a remix of Closer, the "fuck you like an animal" song) and Doom for example) and computer games (Quake being the most obvious - hence the Doom film work I guess). To be fair I do seem to remember a KISS computer game back in the 80s; the closest NIN have come to that is the "NIN" on the nail gun ammo boxes in Quake.
Oh and I do like Cash's version of Hurt, although "a million times better" is an exaggeration. I like his version of Personal Jesus too, but wouldn't try to make that a comment on Depeche Mode.
Besides which, I really don't think popularity or lack thereof has any bearing on their arguments for or against the current music industry. They're both very successful musicians by any measure, perfectly capable of making a good living from their work and thus entitled to their opinions.
And why do you think there's been so many superhero movies over the last few years all based on storylines from the 80's?
Because a lot of the people making those movies were kids in the 80s, just like us. It's no coincidence, and it's not just cynical targeting of a given demographic. The people making them are making them because *they* think they're cool too.
Slashdot Mirror
No; journal entries that make it are marked as such. This looks to have been a normal submission.
Been there, done that, at least in the small scale. On my last project I got sick and tired of telling the project manager that we needed designer time for stuff only to be told that there was "no budget left for it". So it added to my work load, took me longer, didn't get done properly, got raised as a bug by the customer, and we had to fix it anyway.
I guess that comes out of a different column on the spreadsheet though, so that's all right.
IANAL and all that, but I'm pretty damn sure that fair use doesn't cover providing even the smallest part of a copyrighted work for the specific purpose of distributing the work without permission. You're not using the snippet for the purposes of criticism or satire, etc, you're using it specifically so that someone else can get a copy of the entire work.
The judiciary may not understand all the deep technological points involved, but you can bet that they have a huge experience of people trying to worm their way out of things using bogus armchair lawyer arguments.
Unfortunately I'm using Windows and IMAP - the real reason for using Outlook is because it's company policy to use the calendar. Not that anyone seems to check my calendar before booking me into a meeting, of course...
Oh, and having switched on the option to compact folders when it would save more than 100KB, I just got another point of suckage for Thunderbird - I marked a mail as junk and now have a modal dialogue with the following message:
"The folder 'Junk' cannot be compacted because another operation is in progress. Please try again later."
No! I am not compacting Junk, you are! Wtf are you telling me for?
Well I'm with Eclipse and I'm not aware of any major changes to my ADSL service, but perhaps that's the point as there have definitely been changes - eg it went from 512Kbps fixed to user-variable up to 2Mbps to 8Mbps, all without any issues that affected me.
Near the start of the year my ex moved out, and so one of the many things that had to be changed was the BT phone line - it was in her name, so I needed to change it to mine. BT couldn't just change the name on the account; oh no, they had to close the old account and open a new one for me. Ok, fine - what they didn't tell me was that that would involve cancelling my ADSL provision. Luckily Eclipse were notified by BT and emailed me to check. One quick reply to say no I most certainly did not want to cancel and everything was sorted.
So while I can't say categorically that Eclipse follow standard procedures for technical roll-outs, I haven't been affected by anything that has happened and their customer service is excellent. I just wish my BT phone line could actually handle anything like the 8Mbps it's supposed to be able to take - I'm lucky to get more than about 2.5Mbps and rarely get download speeds to match even that. I'm seriously considering cable broadband from Virgin, but I'm otherwise perfectly happy with Eclipse.
Overall though I don't disagree with you - they're going about things the wrong way.
Examples of Thunderbird's suckage:
* if you click "check mail" while it's already checking your mail, a dialogue pops up saying something like "The action cannot be performed because the folder is already being processed". What's wrong with simply ignoring the click? (Or at least displaying a less generic message)
* I get a hell of a lot of junk, and can easily have 5k - 10k messages in my junk folder. Deleting them all takes *ages*. Yet deleting all the mail in the trash is instantaneous; why is there no "Empty folder" option for the junk folder? (After all, it's pretty likely people are going to want to empty it regularly)
* Sometimes Thunderbird gets confused part-way through processing junk mails, and leaves a number (anything from half a dozen to several hundred) sat in my inbox, marked as junk. Sometimes checking for new mail clears them, sometimes telling Thunderbird to delete mail marked as junk clears them, sometimes I have to delete them manually.
* Sometimes if you hit ctrl-A to select all mails in a folder (eg to delete all the mail in the junk folder), you then discover that even though the selection is performed the message list isn't focussed, so you can't delete them - you have to click in the message list and then reselect them all
* If manually marking a number of messages as junk by clicking the little "junk" icon in the message list pane, if you click too quickly subsequent clicks are ignored. You can actually keep clicking apparently forever with nothing happening; you *must* leave a gap of a second or two between clicks
* "Get all new messages" gets messages in the currently-focussed folder - eg I use Thunderbird for mail and RSS feeds. If I have the mail list focussed, "Get all new messages" gets email; if I have one of the feeds selected then it checks for new RSS items. This is despite it being above individual options for checking each message source, thus implying that it checks *all* configured accounts
* Deleting mail doesn't seem to really delete it, you have to compact folders from time to time too
* Sometimes Thunderbird gets confused and notifies me of new mail when there is none, or doesn't when there is, or shows a folder as having a number of unread messages but the folder itself as empty or vice versa. These last two are generally fixed by using "compact folder" on the affected folder. Other times it shows phantom blank messages, with a delivery date of the Unix epoch; these seem to correspond to blank lines in the mail file itself. Again, "compact folder" sorts that out.
* Sometimes when checking for mail automatically it will display a count of how many there are to download; other times it doesn't, apparently at random.
Anyway like I said, Outlook sucks; I have to use Outlook 2000 at work and I would gladly use Thunderbird instead if I could. However personally I think Thunderbird sucks too, and from time to time look around for an alternative. So far I've not found any free mail clients that are better enough to warrant shifting all my mail and settings over, but I live in hope.
The RIAA made it socially acceptable to commit file sharing. People don't see the behavior as criminal, they don't see it as wrong.
I disagree. I think most people found it socially acceptable to copy stuff long before this whole debate got started. Ever since it was easy to copy stuff at home people have been doing it. Why do you think so many games back in the 80s used copy prevention measures? Back then there were no anti-file sharing crusades, no headline-making law suits, no fat-cat executives making easy targets of themselves.
I'm not saying that the RIAA aren't their own worst enemy, or immoral, etc; I'm just saying that copying has been socially acceptable for much longer than the RIAA could be used as a convenient excuse. If nothing else, people have been copying stuff here in the UK for decades, and I'd never heard of the RIAA before I started reading slashdot.
So, just like the US citizen was wrong in thinking the rest of the world starts the holiday season with thanksgiving, you are wrong in thinking that everyone else starts it with Christmas.
Even the title of the article refers to the UK - this story is about a UK industry body calling on the UK recording industry to drop DRM.
I think I can be forgiven for pointing out that the holiday season referred to in TFA is Christmas, as over here in the country the story is about that's the next holiday in the calendar... Yeah ok, so I shouldn't have said "everywhere else", I should really have said "in the UK".
What do you do if Red Hat goes splat?
I think the argument is that it's less likely that an established, profitable company will go splat than some hobbiest group will simply tire of the work and go and do something else instead.
Only in the US, my friend; everywhere else we're looking forward to Christmas. So yes, you're wrong.
The clue was in the repeated use of the letters "UK" in the summary.
Half-Life 1 and 2 for the PC have very similar loading screens
Both Half-Life 1 and 2 on the PC work in exactly the same way - you walk down a certain bit of corridor, the game pauses, the word "LOADING" appears on the screen and it loads the next section. There is no "loading screen" in the sense of the ones in Doom 3, where you are thrown out of the experience to a 2D graphic-and-text screen.
That said, TFA is wrong - HL1 most definitely had levels, in exactly the same way as HL2. Play it today on a modern PC and the pause would be a blip, but it's still there and was most definitely noticeable on PCs of the day.
True, he then had to contest the charges for going over his overdraft limit, but they were dropped too. The point is, if it takes "a couple of months" to get your money back, you're banking with the wrong people.
That's just one example, but I have plenty of others. I've worked with some pretty dire permanent employees too mind, but on the whole the worst of the bad ones have been contractors.
Well, I actually thought (and in fact said out loud) "That's an absolutely fucking ridiculous idea!", but close enough I feel.
So, I access a site I presumably already trust which would presumably be worthy of that trust, as they're trying to protect themselves and their users (albeit in an utterly retarded way). It pops up a dialogue asking me if I want to use a new, even more secure connection, and if I say yes then they root my PC because they think I'm an idiot and therefore my PC is almost certainly infected? I want more security from a site I trust so I'm better protected and that makes me untrustworthy.
Pure fucking genius. About the only redeeming feature is that any site that implements the scheme as described isn't trustworthy and so I shouldn't have hit yes and so I shouldn't be surprised when I get rooted. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what they're aiming for, however.
Privacy from private companies, not from the government or law enforcement.
Unfortunately my country has become mired in the fear of terrorism. Decades of threat from the IRA and we never thought anything like that was necessary. Suddenly the people committing the crimes have funny names, languages and religions as well as funny accents and we're over-reacting left right and centre...
This is a programming error, plain and simple. From TFA:
Though we thought we had cleared all references to old entries in the list, because the objects were still registered as subscribers to an event, they were never getting deleted.
So references were held to the objects in two places - the list of encountered obstacles, and the list of event subscribers. They were being removed from the list of encountered obstacles, but not being unsubscribed from the event.
How do you think event subscription works? Something has to hold a reference to the objects that are subscribed to the event! That thing is going to hold a reference until you unsubscribe the object - it neither knows nor cares about any other list of references you may be maintaining separately, how could it?
This is a coding error. A subtle, non-obvious one perhaps, but a bug nevertheless. It is not an error in the CLR, and in fact the article never paints it as such. That particular bit of spin is wholly down to the submitter.
As for fame, I couldn't name a single song by KISS, and know nothing about them other than that they're some kind of glam rock/metal band with painted faces and leather costumes. It all depends on what sort of scene you're into, and what generation you're from. Meanwhile NIN/Trent has written music for everything from films (Se7en's opening credits (a remix of Closer, the "fuck you like an animal" song) and Doom for example) and computer games (Quake being the most obvious - hence the Doom film work I guess). To be fair I do seem to remember a KISS computer game back in the 80s; the closest NIN have come to that is the "NIN" on the nail gun ammo boxes in Quake.
Oh and I do like Cash's version of Hurt, although "a million times better" is an exaggeration. I like his version of Personal Jesus too, but wouldn't try to make that a comment on Depeche Mode.
Besides which, I really don't think popularity or lack thereof has any bearing on their arguments for or against the current music industry. They're both very successful musicians by any measure, perfectly capable of making a good living from their work and thus entitled to their opinions.
And why do you think there's been so many superhero movies over the last few years all based on storylines from the 80's?
Because a lot of the people making those movies were kids in the 80s, just like us. It's no coincidence, and it's not just cynical targeting of a given demographic. The people making them are making them because *they* think they're cool too.