I do my own live concert recordings at a local jazz club.
I also listen to music I like when it is distributed on CC-like terms. This is because I enjoy live music and attend concerts when I have an opportunity to.
I usually have no permission to distribute and/or broadcast what I record, but I have all the rights to do whatever constitutes personal use, including listening to them, backing them up in clouds of my choosing. I would slap on the face any label representative who would claim I have ripped off their CD, or if they would ask for my money just in case a mere thought of such possibility has the faintest opportunity to cross my mind.
First, it's because I haven't, second, because their records' quality stinks due to amount of dynamic range compression and limiters applied. I would be offended upon hearing that my music sounds like their shit. Third, to make such claims, it takes more unwarranted self-importance than our universe can possibly handle, to make such claims — and Sony is guilty doing it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRkUV73LPNM). Makes me regret that the earthquake hasn't destroyed their headquarters. In that case, the march in question would be so appropriate...
> The delays are largely due to the fact that Google is negotiating for cloud music rights and not just the authorization to distribute the songs themselves. > The search giant wants to be able to store users' existing music libraries on the company's servers.
Would you mind, Mr. Big Label Representative, if I ask, pardon for jumping in, what the bloody hell does your label have to do with _my_ music collection? May I suggest you shove your bloody greed up your stinking bottom, sir?
Well, if I wash my hair daily, keep it trimmed, shave and so on, what on earth am I doing wrong?
Jokes aside, physical attractiveness is a lame excuse for not getting job done which was the point of gp's post. And which you seem to have completely missed. So much for social injustice: problems with comprehension lead to problems with pay.
> Well, that and the fact that not many girls think dinner in a basement is romantic.
Nice guess, but I have a fifth floor apartment and no basement at all. As well as possessing some skills in “romantic talk” girls tend to like, but which I'm constantly aware to be total and absolute bullshit.
I think it takes quite a time to find a girl these days who would have honesty, trustworthiness, self-sacrifice, you name it, at a higher priority than making nonsensical poems about her (which are lousy quality ripoffs anyway), flowers (never found a delight in giving dead plants which last for several days tops), and dancing abilities (something which I was never interested in having).
And if you ever find a girl not full of the sickeningly romantic bullshit, she will inevitably accuse you of not yet having a luxurious car or a similarly luxurious house (or better yet, both).
If my date ever wanted to know a thing about my past relationship, she would just *ask*. No need to say that if I ever found her grepping my phone for things, she wouldn't be my date anymore. That's awful to date anyone distrustful to that extent.
But again, maybe that's precisely the reason why I don't have any dates. The 21st century is sick.
Their version is more akin to BSDs, which is more akin to naked POSIX, which is kinda frustrating after all GNU goodness you've had. The only thing more feature-crippled is Busybox, but it has a very good reason to be like that —being tremendously small, which unfortunately Mac OS X does not.
It also seemed as though the Archtect used Neo to learn how to better create that next layer, and probably even had a hand in creating Neo for that purpose.
I doubt it was a hand though, hands are not what you create humans with.
“Neo, presented as a biological human, can disable machines via stressing muscles in his hand and face. Numerous times.
“If that's not enough - he can be in the Matrix (or close - the "subway station") while apparently not connected.”
It was just an upgrade to a wireless broadband connection. With all unpatched security vulnerabilities it had at the time, like trainman-in-the-middle attacks or buffer overflows with arbitrary code execution (Smith/Bane) we all know and love so much here in the real world.
The fewer people that know about a security vulnerability means that fewer people will try to exploit it. That's a fact.
That's security through ignorance, not security through obscurity. Your reasoning is quite reminiscent to that of the monarchs of the old days: The education should be as limited as possible, or else too much people will discover we're screwing them and will overturn us.
Of course we now know that the truly secured dictatorship is the one in which all people know they're being bent over and how exactly they're screwed, but still are unable to do a single thing against that.
Information security in this respect does not differ very much.
It's seldom malice which leads to a directive that "we must use X to make this". Good companies expose those reasons internally, of course, but exposed or not, the reasons are always there.
I heard once a reason: We have invested $ridiculously_high_number in that tool and you're gonna use no matter what. That is a non-reason, especially if my training in that tool usage is going to last months.
If I were pure-dollar, I'd be stating "we're not here to hold hands and sing Kum By Ya, and NeckBeard here writes the best code, so suck up his tirades, you average workers". Exactly the opposite.
Oh, so you want to say that holding hands and singing whateveryounameit (are you referring to the silly teambuilding practices HR folks enjoy so much?)is the priority? How do you find time to produce anything, then?
Well there is one exception when a customer is deserving to be called a cretin he/she is.
It's when a customer makes a tragedy over a simple bug, or changes requirements at the slightest whim, or has requirements so custom that no part of his/her product cannot be reused for anyone else, without having properly understood that those things are going to cost extra.
In my experience, the worst nitpickers are notorious cheapskates, and as such don't deserve to have deals with —you're gonna end up with negative balance and headaches. And the business is about turning some profits, innit?
If I find an Apple hater, or a Windows hater, or a Ubuntu-hater, or a RedHat-hater... they ain't gonna work in my company.
If I find someone to whom GPL is a "religion"... they don't work at my company either.
If someone exhibits contempt for potential customers (including customers of the competition), they're out.
Haters, purists, jackasses... they all have one thing in common. They're "right" because they're "smarter than everyone else, especially YOU", and that's the end of it.
Would you mind sir, if I make a point by saying that, in your post above, you sound like a typical self-righteous purist company owner?
Maybe it helped you to earn a buck or two, but this approach of yours has got a strong smell of hypocrisy.
You need a worker because there's a problem to solve. If I prefer a tool over another tool to solve precisely that problem, it's because I have the damn experience with it, and I just happen to know my own set of skills better than you. There is no hatred for tools, but there's hatred for people who force broken tools on their workers ("because we have invested large sums of money in them anyway") and still expect them to deliver ahead of an unbelievably ridiculous schedule conceived by a bunch of childish folks all shouting to have their ponies right now no matter what.
P. S. As for customers, they may be idiots (and that's their right which I deeply respect as long as they are paying customers), but I would cuddle them all night long if it brought us some extra thousands of cash. Not sure however, what the proper wording on the invoice should be.
Linking is the equivalent to pointing and shouting "Oh look, a deer!" in the real world.
Go learn HTML 101. There are forms of linking which look exactly like copying.
Why don't you put some pictures on your web server?
I will put up some IMG objects on my site, and point the SRC= attribute to your server, then add text saying that these are my images.
Or how about I target an anchor, using your web page, to a frame inside my page? Look ma, no scroll bars or any kind of border or indication that this area of the screen is not my website but someone else's!
"Oh look, a moron".
I remember some bloke having the exact same way of thinking.
Back a few years ago, my colleague was tasked with making a few pages of HTML —you know, a kind of website just to explain that there is such and such company making such and such things, here's the telephone, here's the email address and here are some examples of what we do. A "business card" sort of stuff.
So when he made it and shown the demo running off his own server, the customer told him he didn't like it and wouldn't pay a single buck for it. So far, so good. But in a few days time, my colleague hit the friggin' web site after noticing some unusual activities in his demo server's access logs, and saw that the customer had actually used his design. The pages were ripped straight off the demo server. The catch was that those pages had absolute links in them, for both CSS and images, still pointing to the demo server.
Then my colleague did the obvious: he just replaced CSSs on his own server so that the pages now resembled an angry fruit salad mixed with psychodelic motifs garish enough to make a Pink Floyd fan cry, all fonts changed to Comic Sans, and every image replaced with something utterly silly, I cannot tell if he used goatse or not. Now that site was hanging on the interwebs for quite a while. Shortly after that, the unfortunate ex-customer went out of business, but I think the culprit was not the website but the business practices he used to employ.
It must be understood, that all "agility" is about is not producing the best, the fastest and the cheapest. It is about having an average-quality (a firm and predictable average, I would say) product in an acceptable timeframe. Then you add up polishing iterations until it goes from average to good enough if you need it.
See, nothing about miracles, but lots about actual manageability.
Agile works best when you're a small team, the customers aren't really sure what they want, and you still want to earn some revenue. You see, big folks such as IBM can allow retarted processes and practices because they mostly have enough money to cover it up.
However, I mean agile not Agile. This means: no cargo cult rituals, just enough communication to get work done in an acceptable way: tasks broken up into chunks easy to chew through in a foreseeable time, code well tested and workable at the end of each day, code written in a fashion that anyone on the team can pick it up and improve it without lots of "what the fuck is THAT?" questions, the code is reusable so that it can be easily sold multiple times.
But you can easily see that this is plain common sense and survival techniques, and not any kind of a new religion (that is why I'm mostly pro-extreme and anti-Agile; extreme folks are more mature in their judgments by now).
On a big team, cargo-cult Agile can easily lead to a disaster. Say you have a big, really big projects. You split your 100 programmers into 10 teams, the project is split into 10 subprojects, and then you want to sync the efforts after some iterations. Only then you see that 1) the integration is unthought of and thus a mess, 2) the splitting into smaller subprojects was wrong from the day one but no one knew, 3) Upper Management blames agile methodology and not the implementation, 4) an angry programmer writes a comment on/. about how Agile fails.;-)
I was on stand-up meetings of 30 or so people. By the time the meeting ended (it was unmoderated, and there were lots of irrelevant discussions), I was tired and unfit for any useful kind of work through the rest of the day.
I think that you spent your time in a wrong kind of stand-ups.
You see, if you have up to 10 people on your team, and each one gives precise answers to those three scrum questions, you are gonna spend no more than 15 minutes in that meeting. After that, you know what all other people are busy with, so should any issue pop up, you know who to ask. This is less time to spend than if each one were asking another one by one.
Scrum done wrong: 1) a half an hour stand up; 2) scrum done in teams with more than 10 people; 3) off-topic discussions during the stand ups.
If you are saying you can fix half a dozen bugs in 15 minutes, then what the heck were you doing yesterday? Pushing trivial to fix bugs so that you can overclock your bugfixing karma the next day? Doesn't look like competent, anyway.
I'm wondering if it will be possible to at least half automate that shit. If what is needed for an average IT shop can be at least 90% algorithmized, I'll happily spend a month or two to do an open source thing to have it done and leave 10% of really complicated cases to handle for myself.
From what I hear from my accountant friends, "it's all so complicated," but I really suspect they are just saying that to keep themselves pricey and necessary.
When Mike was in the Marines he knew nothing about his gun he just wanted it to shoot.
In Soviet Russian Army, every soldier which is ever expected to shoot with a gun, is required to be able to take it apart and reassemble it in under 30 seconds. And he wouldn't ever dare say things like "I don't care how it works I just want it to shoot", or some sort of disciplinary measures would follow very shortly.
Run a program that only allows whitelisted applications, and block all removable media.
Now how do you handle that: the Boss sends a PDF memo. PDF is not an executable, alright, the user opens it with the whitelisted Adobe® Reader(TM), and some bad code gets executed via some kind of a buffer overflow Adobe was so generous to include as its bonus package. The problem being, of course, "how dare you restrict the Boss' access to the 'Net? I'm gonna fire you! (The 'Net here means, of course, some clown fetish porn sites and the like, but that's none of your business)"
Okay, ditch that PDF, send a JPEG. A convenient hole in Microsoft® Outlook(TM), and here go zombies, ready for master's commands, not even having to click anything, just skim through the message.
You probably a Hindu on a H1B visa. So if you are some Abu working for lunch money you will always be employed, no matter which kind of depression we get into.
That's why people like us have advantage over you. We can see the wonders of the Universe and have fun for less than 30 altarian dollars a day, and be quite happy with our lives, no matter which kind of depression you get into.
Slashdot Mirror
The Monty Python's Flying Circusss
I do my own live concert recordings at a local jazz club.
I also listen to music I like when it is distributed on CC-like terms. This is because I enjoy live music and attend concerts when I have an opportunity to.
I usually have no permission to distribute and/or broadcast what I record, but I have all the rights to do whatever constitutes personal use, including listening to them, backing them up in clouds of my choosing. I would slap on the face any label representative who would claim I have ripped off their CD, or if they would ask for my money just in case a mere thought of such possibility has the faintest opportunity to cross my mind.
First, it's because I haven't, second, because their records' quality stinks due to amount of dynamic range compression and limiters applied. I would be offended upon hearing that my music sounds like their shit. Third, to make such claims, it takes more unwarranted self-importance than our universe can possibly handle, to make such claims — and Sony is guilty doing it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRkUV73LPNM). Makes me regret that the earthquake hasn't destroyed their headquarters. In that case, the march in question would be so appropriate...
> The delays are largely due to the fact that Google is negotiating for cloud music rights and not just the authorization to distribute the songs themselves.
> The search giant wants to be able to store users' existing music libraries on the company's servers.
Would you mind, Mr. Big Label Representative, if I ask, pardon for jumping in, what the bloody hell does your label have to do with _my_ music collection? May I suggest you shove your bloody greed up your stinking bottom, sir?
Well, if I wash my hair daily, keep it trimmed, shave and so on, what on earth am I doing wrong?
Jokes aside, physical attractiveness is a lame excuse for not getting job done which was the point of gp's post. And which you seem to have completely missed. So much for social injustice: problems with comprehension lead to problems with pay.
Oh, it's not dead. It's resting!
> Well, that and the fact that not many girls think dinner in a basement is romantic.
Nice guess, but I have a fifth floor apartment and no basement at all. As well as possessing some skills in “romantic talk” girls tend to like, but which I'm constantly aware to be total and absolute bullshit.
I think it takes quite a time to find a girl these days who would have honesty, trustworthiness, self-sacrifice, you name it, at a higher priority than making nonsensical poems about her (which are lousy quality ripoffs anyway), flowers (never found a delight in giving dead plants which last for several days tops), and dancing abilities (something which I was never interested in having).
And if you ever find a girl not full of the sickeningly romantic bullshit, she will inevitably accuse you of not yet having a luxurious car or a similarly luxurious house (or better yet, both).
Life sucks, and then you die.
If my date ever wanted to know a thing about my past relationship, she would just *ask*. No need to say that if I ever found her grepping my phone for things, she wouldn't be my date anymore. That's awful to date anyone distrustful to that extent.
But again, maybe that's precisely the reason why I don't have any dates. The 21st century is sick.
Their version is more akin to BSDs, which is more akin to naked POSIX, which is kinda frustrating after all GNU goodness you've had. The only thing more feature-crippled is Busybox, but it has a very good reason to be like that —being tremendously small, which unfortunately Mac OS X does not.
It also seemed as though the Archtect used Neo to learn how to better create that next layer, and probably even had a hand in creating Neo for that purpose.
I doubt it was a hand though, hands are not what you create humans with.
“Neo, presented as a biological human, can disable machines via stressing muscles in his hand and face. Numerous times.
“If that's not enough - he can be in the Matrix (or close - the "subway station") while apparently not connected.”
It was just an upgrade to a wireless broadband connection. With all unpatched security vulnerabilities it had at the time, like trainman-in-the-middle attacks or buffer overflows with arbitrary code execution (Smith/Bane) we all know and love so much here in the real world.
You must have done something wrong/weird then:
--no-preserve-root do not treat ‘/’ specially
--preserve-root do not remove ‘/’ (default)
He's on OS X (judging from /Library, /Users etc). Its default rm is not that smart.
The fewer people that know about a security vulnerability means that fewer people will try to exploit it. That's a fact.
That's security through ignorance, not security through obscurity. Your reasoning is quite reminiscent to that of the monarchs of the old days: The education should be as limited as possible, or else too much people will discover we're screwing them and will overturn us.
Of course we now know that the truly secured dictatorship is the one in which all people know they're being bent over and how exactly they're screwed, but still are unable to do a single thing against that.
Information security in this respect does not differ very much.
It's seldom malice which leads to a directive that "we must use X to make this". Good companies expose those reasons internally, of course, but exposed or not, the reasons are always there.
I heard once a reason: We have invested $ridiculously_high_number in that tool and you're gonna use no matter what. That is a non-reason, especially if my training in that tool usage is going to last months.
If I were pure-dollar, I'd be stating "we're not here to hold hands and sing Kum By Ya, and NeckBeard here writes the best code, so suck up his tirades, you average workers". Exactly the opposite.
Oh, so you want to say that holding hands and singing whateveryounameit (are you referring to the silly teambuilding practices HR folks enjoy so much?)is the priority? How do you find time to produce anything, then?
Well there is one exception when a customer is deserving to be called a cretin he/she is.
It's when a customer makes a tragedy over a simple bug, or changes requirements at the slightest whim, or has requirements so custom that no part of his/her product cannot be reused for anyone else, without having properly understood that those things are going to cost extra.
In my experience, the worst nitpickers are notorious cheapskates, and as such don't deserve to have deals with —you're gonna end up with negative balance and headaches. And the business is about turning some profits, innit?
If I find an Apple hater, or a Windows hater, or a Ubuntu-hater, or a RedHat-hater... they ain't gonna work in my company.
If I find someone to whom GPL is a "religion"... they don't work at my company either.
If someone exhibits contempt for potential customers (including customers of the competition), they're out.
Haters, purists, jackasses... they all have one thing in common. They're "right" because they're "smarter than everyone else, especially YOU", and that's the end of it.
Would you mind sir, if I make a point by saying that, in your post above, you sound like a typical self-righteous purist company owner?
Maybe it helped you to earn a buck or two, but this approach of yours has got a strong smell of hypocrisy.
You need a worker because there's a problem to solve. If I prefer a tool over another tool to solve precisely that problem, it's because I have the damn experience with it, and I just happen to know my own set of skills better than you. There is no hatred for tools, but there's hatred for people who force broken tools on their workers ("because we have invested large sums of money in them anyway") and still expect them to deliver ahead of an unbelievably ridiculous schedule conceived by a bunch of childish folks all shouting to have their ponies right now no matter what.
P. S. As for customers, they may be idiots (and that's their right which I deeply respect as long as they are paying customers), but I would cuddle them all night long if it brought us some extra thousands of cash. Not sure however, what the proper wording on the invoice should be.
Linking is the equivalent to pointing and shouting "Oh look, a deer!" in the real world.
Go learn HTML 101. There are forms of linking which look exactly like copying.
Why don't you put some pictures on your web server?
I will put up some IMG objects on my site, and point the SRC= attribute to your server, then add text saying that these are my images.
Or how about I target an anchor, using your web page, to a frame inside my page? Look ma, no scroll bars or any kind of border or indication that this area of the screen is not my website but someone else's!
"Oh look, a moron".
I remember some bloke having the exact same way of thinking.
Back a few years ago, my colleague was tasked with making a few pages of HTML —you know, a kind of website just to explain that there is such and such company making such and such things, here's the telephone, here's the email address and here are some examples of what we do. A "business card" sort of stuff.
So when he made it and shown the demo running off his own server, the customer told him he didn't like it and wouldn't pay a single buck for it. So far, so good. But in a few days time, my colleague hit the friggin' web site after noticing some unusual activities in his demo server's access logs, and saw that the customer had actually used his design. The pages were ripped straight off the demo server. The catch was that those pages had absolute links in them, for both CSS and images, still pointing to the demo server.
Then my colleague did the obvious: he just replaced CSSs on his own server so that the pages now resembled an angry fruit salad mixed with psychodelic motifs garish enough to make a Pink Floyd fan cry, all fonts changed to Comic Sans, and every image replaced with something utterly silly, I cannot tell if he used goatse or not. Now that site was hanging on the interwebs for quite a while. Shortly after that, the unfortunate ex-customer went out of business, but I think the culprit was not the website but the business practices he used to employ.
I think there must have been a fsckin' reason behind choosing an acronym so astonishingly reminiscent of "mafia".
It must be understood, that all "agility" is about is not producing the best, the fastest and the cheapest. It is about having an average-quality (a firm and predictable average, I would say) product in an acceptable timeframe. Then you add up polishing iterations until it goes from average to good enough if you need it.
See, nothing about miracles, but lots about actual manageability.
Agile works best when you're a small team, the customers aren't really sure what they want, and you still want to earn some revenue. You see, big folks such as IBM can allow retarted processes and practices because they mostly have enough money to cover it up.
However, I mean agile not Agile. This means: no cargo cult rituals, just enough communication to get work done in an acceptable way: tasks broken up into chunks easy to chew through in a foreseeable time, code well tested and workable at the end of each day, code written in a fashion that anyone on the team can pick it up and improve it without lots of "what the fuck is THAT?" questions, the code is reusable so that it can be easily sold multiple times.
But you can easily see that this is plain common sense and survival techniques, and not any kind of a new religion (that is why I'm mostly pro-extreme and anti-Agile; extreme folks are more mature in their judgments by now).
On a big team, cargo-cult Agile can easily lead to a disaster. Say you have a big, really big projects. You split your 100 programmers into 10 teams, the project is split into 10 subprojects, and then you want to sync the efforts after some iterations. Only then you see that 1) the integration is unthought of and thus a mess, 2) the splitting into smaller subprojects was wrong from the day one but no one knew, 3) Upper Management blames agile methodology and not the implementation, 4) an angry programmer writes a comment on /. about how Agile fails. ;-)
I was on stand-up meetings of 30 or so people. By the time the meeting ended (it was unmoderated, and there were lots of irrelevant discussions), I was tired and unfit for any useful kind of work through the rest of the day.
I think that you spent your time in a wrong kind of stand-ups.
You see, if you have up to 10 people on your team, and each one gives precise answers to those three scrum questions, you are gonna spend no more than 15 minutes in that meeting. After that, you know what all other people are busy with, so should any issue pop up, you know who to ask. This is less time to spend than if each one were asking another one by one.
Scrum done wrong: 1) a half an hour stand up; 2) scrum done in teams with more than 10 people; 3) off-topic discussions during the stand ups.
If you are saying you can fix half a dozen bugs in 15 minutes, then what the heck were you doing yesterday? Pushing trivial to fix bugs so that you can overclock your bugfixing karma the next day? Doesn't look like competent, anyway.
I'm wondering if it will be possible to at least half automate that shit. If what is needed for an average IT shop can be at least 90% algorithmized, I'll happily spend a month or two to do an open source thing to have it done and leave 10% of really complicated cases to handle for myself.
From what I hear from my accountant friends, "it's all so complicated," but I really suspect they are just saying that to keep themselves pricey and necessary.
In Soviet Russian Army, every soldier which is ever expected to shoot with a gun, is required to be able to take it apart and reassemble it in under 30 seconds. And he wouldn't ever dare say things like "I don't care how it works I just want it to shoot", or some sort of disciplinary measures would follow very shortly.
Now how do you handle that: the Boss sends a PDF memo. PDF is not an executable, alright, the user opens it with the whitelisted Adobe® Reader(TM), and some bad code gets executed via some kind of a buffer overflow Adobe was so generous to include as its bonus package. The problem being, of course, "how dare you restrict the Boss' access to the 'Net? I'm gonna fire you! (The 'Net here means, of course, some clown fetish porn sites and the like, but that's none of your business)"
Okay, ditch that PDF, send a JPEG. A convenient hole in Microsoft® Outlook(TM), and here go zombies, ready for master's commands, not even having to click anything, just skim through the message.
That's why people like us have advantage over you. We can see the wonders of the Universe and have fun for less than 30 altarian dollars a day, and be quite happy with our lives, no matter which kind of depression you get into.
What are you talking about? We all know that Windows Seven never breaks, on any hardware. Ever.