I bring the specifications from the customers to the engineers... well, my secretary does that. Engineers are not good at dealing with customers. I have PEOPLE SKILLS!
To give you another point... In California we have "employment at will", which means that the employer can let go of the employee without having any reason, or even telling the employee what the reason is, if it exists. This is a double standard, however, because despite the law, many fired employees sue their former employers claiming any wildass thing they can think of. Often the employee wins the case. This makes it hard for employers to fire people for low performance. Interestingly it's quite easy to "lay off" people during a period of downsizing. This gives employees basically no incentive to perform... because high performers get laid off at exactly the same time as low performers... no one is let go for performance reasons. Combine that with non-performance related wage increases, (or wage freezes), and many have no incentive to do anything at work but read and post to Slashdot.
I tend to think that the actual cost of launching one of these people is greater than what they pay to get on board. It's not a profitable model. The only reason it seems to work now is because the US is subsidising the russian space program. So if you live in the US, it's YOUR money that's getting N*Sync stars into space. The X-prize is about making PROFITABLE commericial space travel, which would be very cool indeed.
Clockwork orange? In that movie the bad boy stays bad. Not in Bad Santa. The change in his character during the final moments was too abrubt. The ending to bad santa made me remember I was watching a movie. It was just way too unrealistic.
I always thought that "scsi emulation" wasn't really that, but rather "SCSI host adapter support for ATAPI devices", and that ATAPI devices use SCSI commands to communicate over IDE. Why is it so bad to have this in the kernel? Seems to me, it's the perfect place for it. If the implementation is wrong, that's one thing... we should fix it, but just saying "don't use it" seems quite odd indeed. Should every program that needs to interact more directly with an ATAPI device be it's own SCSI host adapter?
Personally I've used ide-scsi for quite some time, and I find that it has other benefits than CD burning... ripping is also more accurate (though I don't know why).
Maybe I'm not getting it... anyone care to enlighten me?
Um... the supposed "infringing" source (if it exists) already HAS been released... What SCO has been asked to do is point at the parts of the LINUX kernel that supposedly "infringe". SCO is now saying that the public will not get to see this pointing. Keeping this secret could have no other benefit than to pave the way for the future extortion of Linux users. If SCO never has to pony up the information about what "violations" there are, it can continue its threats and posturing.
Personally, I don't believe SCO really has this "gag order". SCO's executives have a real problem with the truth... SCO's stock price is falling, so they needed some good news quick! They just pull press releases out of their asses whenever they want to "pump" the stock price a little. Move along... there's nothing to see here.
The answer is: No. It's not even close for the kind of work AA did. His technology (large format film) and hand-tweaked processing is still the best available for doing poster-size, amazingly high quality prints with stunning contrast.
End of story. I mean I like digital for snapping photos of friends, but really... Does anyone really believe digital is good enough to capture this?
I have a very simple PVR based on a Hauppage PVR-250 card, a few shell scripts, and CRON. MythTv and freevo were too much overhead for me. They're really based on the idea that it will be a dedicated box. Who's got the space and money for that?
Here's what I like about my system
1) No GUI. I can log in via SSH and change my crontab anytime I want 2) CPU Usage. I don't notice when my machine is recording. This is because the PVR-250 has hardware MPEG2 encoding. 3) Because of #2, I can use the machine for other tasks without worrying about screwing up my recordings. 4) It has amazingly good A/V quality 5) I can buy a DVD burner and burn my recordings directly to DVD
You're right about the fact that you don't "own" ideas, but I think your explanation isn't quite right.
Property implies transferability through barter. Imagine if you wanted to "sell" an idea to someone else. You would have to divulge the idea to them in a secure fashion, then expunge your brain of the very same idea to make the transfer complete. You can't sell an idea because you can't barter it. If you can't barter it, it's not your property.
It makes much more sense to declare a transferrable monopoly on reproduction. The whole concept of "liscensing" is a bit of a bastardization of this, implying that you need a "liscense" to use a product.. has that ever been held up in court? The GPL is probably the liscense closest to the idea of copyright, since it talks about the role of the monopoly on reproduction, and transfers it appropriately.
In summary, ideas do not belong to society... they're not "property" at all because they're not transferrable. Monopolies on reproduction (copyrights) are transferrable, and therefore are property.
Yeah. It's dumb. Other posts have covered what these dumbass abbreviations mean.
It's basically a variant of "l33tsp33k" that spomehow made its way into the corproate jargon. I refuse to use it. I spell out words IN ENGLISH, because that's the language I write in.
Fight the current. Stop this idiotic intentional mis-spelling. Let's save the language.
It's been done... "Your Name Here"
on
Recycling TV Ads
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Have a look at "Your Name Here" on the internet archive... It's designed to be generic, and takes some great cheap shots at the advertising industry
>Not only did he write much of the code that makes up the GNU/Linux operating system...
I've often wondered about this... Obviously Linux woudn't be much use without GCC or the GNU C Library, but specifically which parts of "GNU/Linux" did RMS personally write? I know he wrote Emacs (and probably Info), but I don't use either of those. Really, which programs on a typical linux system, besides Emacs, were written by RMS?
Doesn't work in California. We have medians to keep the really bad drivers on the right side. It's quite scary, but I don't think a lot of them could manage to stay on the right side unless they bump into the median. It's like bowling with bumpers. So it woudldn't work in california unless... we could devise a median that would open and close with a device that would be for emergency vehicles only..:)
>The idea is to sell insurance in case they have any intellectual property, without promising that you're buying anything of value.
I'm not sure that's actually legal. IANAL (lawyers chime in), but any legal contract must be a quid pro quo arrangement. This means that if I lose something (money) by entering into a particular contract, but gain nothing, the contract is invalid. If they were selling $699 pieces of paper, that stated they were worth no more than the paper they were printed on, I would gain a piece of paper for my $699, but they want to sell "nothing" for $699. I think if someone wasn't too embarrased to admit they fell for it, they may be able to get their money back on the grounds that there was no legal contract.
I agree with your points about fear mongering... Just imagine how much resources we spend to "fight terrorism" and how little resources terrorists need to make us panic. By "fighting terrorism" on such a large scale, we're doing the very things that make terrorists win their battles: Hurt the economy of their enemy.
>how silly most fears regarding terrorists using atomic (and to a degree, biological and even chemical weapons is) are.
However, I have to disagree with that. Do you believe that a terrorist could not get access to any amount of radioactive material? Do you believe that a terrorist could not figure out how to blow up such material with a conventional explosive? Of course they could. Unless they got a hold of something really nasty like weapons grade plutonium or plutonium dust, they couldn't cause real mass destruction, but they certainly could induce the panic necessary to cause us to "fight terrorism" even more, sending us into further economic chaos.
Apparently they're legit. Google shows refereces to people that have purchased these rocks. Frankly I'm jealous of the sheer audacity needed to do this. I mean, selling ROCKS to place on your equipement to make it SOUND BETTER. Making money at that puts many of the great grifters and con-artists of the last few centuries to shame. I've simply GOT to get a hold of their mailing list!
>Dev-C++ a free C++ compiler. I use VC++ 6.0, but this is free, and I think it's pretty good.
Actually MinGW is the compiler, which is one of two ports of GCC for Windows. Dev-C++ is just an IDE. I'd recommend Eclipse instead as the IDE, as it supports MinGW and Java, and is a fine, extensible development studio overall.
Actually in open source, there's a different mechanism available: code review. That means that many of the "holes" are not found by crackers, but by developers. These "holes" are fixed before they're ever expoited. This is quite contrary to what happens in the Windows world, where an exploit is not noticed until websites are defaced and credit card numbers are stolen.
You're trying to tell me that you're having TROUBLE FINDING QUALIFIED SOFTWARE ENGINEERS? Surely you jest. Why not just put an ad on Monster.com and look through a few of the thousands of resumes you'll get. If you're too lazy for that, I can forward you twenty or thirty names. Damn, you can't throw a dead cat in Sillicon Valley without hitting an unemployed software engineer with excellent credentials.
While we're at it, I'm having trouble finding a starbucks in the San Francisco Bay Area. Can Slashdot help? Please send me the addresses of the one closest to me. I'd also like a free Frappucino.
Just to be devil's advocate... Gym memberships work much the same way as broadband access. A certain set of shared resources are used by those that show up, but the majority of the profit comes from the people that buy a membership, but don't actually go to the gym. Now in the broadband scenario, the low end market (people who don't use the net very often) is cornered by simple dialup. People buy broadband so they have a much bigger pipe to the internet. Why do they buy it? Because they want to use it. I find it hard to sympathize with providers that never thought of that. If my gym decided it could sell more memberships if its members used less resources, and started telling me which days I was allowed to appear and which hours I could use the facilities, I'd switch to a different gym. Likewise, there's no reason to put up with ISPs that don't figure out their business plan up front and offer a service they can actually provide.
Yes there is a lot of software out there in VB that integrates various office features. I wrote some of it. Naturally I was resistant to the idea. What resulted was a set of interrelated "documents" with bizzare code inside them, linking them all together. It probably took me a week to do everything. In the same amount of time, I could have written a web-based database application that did the same thing, but be infintely more stable and easy to roll out to users. Use the right tool for the job. VB inside Word or Excel has serious drawbacks that make it almost always the wrong tool for a particular job.
Slashdot Mirror
I bring the specifications from the customers to the engineers... well, my secretary does that. Engineers are not good at dealing with customers. I have PEOPLE SKILLS!
To give you another point... In California we have "employment at will", which means that the employer can let go of the employee without having any reason, or even telling the employee what the reason is, if it exists. This is a double standard, however, because despite the law, many fired employees sue their former employers claiming any wildass thing they can think of. Often the employee wins the case. This makes it hard for employers to fire people for low performance. Interestingly it's quite easy to "lay off" people during a period of downsizing. This gives employees basically no incentive to perform... because high performers get laid off at exactly the same time as low performers... no one is let go for performance reasons. Combine that with non-performance related wage increases, (or wage freezes), and many have no incentive to do anything at work but read and post to Slashdot.
I tend to think that the actual cost of launching one of these people is greater than what they pay to get on board. It's not a profitable model. The only reason it seems to work now is because the US is subsidising the russian space program. So if you live in the US, it's YOUR money that's getting N*Sync stars into space. The X-prize is about making PROFITABLE commericial space travel, which would be very cool indeed.
Clockwork orange? In that movie the bad boy stays bad. Not in Bad Santa. The change in his character during the final moments was too abrubt. The ending to bad santa made me remember I was watching a movie. It was just way too unrealistic.
WTF is a WMA compliant MP3 player? Wouldn't that be a WMA player?
Hm...
I always thought that "scsi emulation" wasn't really that, but rather "SCSI host adapter support for ATAPI devices", and that ATAPI devices use SCSI commands to communicate over IDE. Why is it so bad to have this in the kernel? Seems to me, it's the perfect place for it. If the implementation is wrong, that's one thing... we should fix it, but just saying "don't use it" seems quite odd indeed. Should every program that needs to interact more directly with an ATAPI device be it's own SCSI host adapter?
Personally I've used ide-scsi for quite some time, and I find that it has other benefits than CD burning... ripping is also more accurate (though I don't know why).
Maybe I'm not getting it... anyone care to enlighten me?
Um... the supposed "infringing" source (if it exists) already HAS been released... What SCO has been asked to do is point at the parts of the LINUX kernel that supposedly "infringe". SCO is now saying that the public will not get to see this pointing. Keeping this secret could have no other benefit than to pave the way for the future extortion of Linux users. If SCO never has to pony up the information about what "violations" there are, it can continue its threats and posturing.
Personally, I don't believe SCO really has this "gag order". SCO's executives have a real problem with the truth... SCO's stock price is falling, so they needed some good news quick! They just pull press releases out of their asses whenever they want to "pump" the stock price a little. Move along... there's nothing to see here.
>Is digital better than film?
Good question.
The answer is: No. It's not even close for the kind of work AA did. His technology (large format film) and hand-tweaked processing is still the best available for doing poster-size, amazingly high quality prints with stunning contrast.
End of story. I mean I like digital for snapping photos of friends, but really... Does anyone really believe digital is good enough to capture this?
I have a very simple PVR based on a Hauppage PVR-250 card, a few shell scripts, and CRON. MythTv and freevo were too much overhead for me. They're really based on the idea that it will be a dedicated box. Who's got the space and money for that?
Here's what I like about my system
1) No GUI. I can log in via SSH and change my crontab anytime I want
2) CPU Usage. I don't notice when my machine is recording. This is because the PVR-250 has hardware MPEG2 encoding.
3) Because of #2, I can use the machine for other tasks without worrying about screwing up my recordings.
4) It has amazingly good A/V quality
5) I can buy a DVD burner and burn my recordings directly to DVD
You're right about the fact that you don't "own" ideas, but I think your explanation isn't quite right.
Property implies transferability through barter. Imagine if you wanted to "sell" an idea to someone else. You would have to divulge the idea to them in a secure fashion, then expunge your brain of the very same idea to make the transfer complete. You can't sell an idea because you can't barter it. If you can't barter it, it's not your property.
It makes much more sense to declare a transferrable monopoly on reproduction. The whole concept of "liscensing" is a bit of a bastardization of this, implying that you need a "liscense" to use a product.. has that ever been held up in court? The GPL is probably the liscense closest to the idea of copyright, since it talks about the role of the monopoly on reproduction, and transfers it appropriately.
In summary, ideas do not belong to society... they're not "property" at all because they're not transferrable. Monopolies on reproduction (copyrights) are transferrable, and therefore are property.
That was unintentional. That's different.
Yeah. It's dumb. Other posts have covered what these dumbass abbreviations mean.
It's basically a variant of "l33tsp33k" that spomehow made its way into the corproate jargon. I refuse to use it. I spell out words IN ENGLISH, because that's the language I write in.
Fight the current. Stop this idiotic intentional mis-spelling. Let's save the language.
Have a look at "Your Name Here" on the internet archive... It's designed to be generic, and takes some great cheap shots at the advertising industry
. ph p?collection=prelinger&collectionid=01681
http://www.archive.org/movies/movies-details-db
Imagine you're doing any business critical work and your box shows up as Windows! That's running the business without a seatbelt.
Your ideas aren't that important or valuable. Get over yourself. It's just a game.
>Not only did he write much of the code that makes up the GNU/Linux operating system...
I've often wondered about this... Obviously Linux woudn't be much use without GCC or the GNU C Library, but specifically which parts of "GNU/Linux" did RMS personally write? I know he wrote Emacs (and probably Info), but I don't use either of those. Really, which programs on a typical linux system, besides Emacs, were written by RMS?
Doesn't work in California. We have medians to keep the really bad drivers on the right side. It's quite scary, but I don't think a lot of them could manage to stay on the right side unless they bump into the median. It's like bowling with bumpers. So it woudldn't work in california unless... we could devise a median that would open and close with a device that would be for emergency vehicles only.. :)
>The idea is to sell insurance in case they have any intellectual property, without promising that you're buying anything of value.
I'm not sure that's actually legal. IANAL (lawyers chime in), but any legal contract must be a quid pro quo arrangement. This means that if I lose something (money) by entering into a particular contract, but gain nothing, the contract is invalid. If they were selling $699 pieces of paper, that stated they were worth no more than the paper they were printed on, I would gain a piece of paper for my $699, but they want to sell "nothing" for $699. I think if someone wasn't too embarrased to admit they fell for it, they may be able to get their money back on the grounds that there was no legal contract.
I agree with your points about fear mongering...
Just imagine how much resources we spend to "fight terrorism" and how little resources terrorists need to make us panic. By "fighting terrorism" on such a large scale, we're doing the very things that make terrorists win their battles: Hurt the economy of their enemy.
>how silly most fears regarding terrorists using atomic (and to a degree, biological and even chemical weapons is) are.
However, I have to disagree with that. Do you believe that a terrorist could not get access to any amount of radioactive material? Do you believe that a terrorist could not figure out how to blow up such material with a conventional explosive? Of course they could. Unless they got a hold of something really nasty like weapons grade plutonium or plutonium dust, they couldn't cause real mass destruction, but they certainly could induce the panic necessary to cause us to "fight terrorism" even more, sending us into further economic chaos.
Apparently they're legit. Google shows refereces to people that have purchased these rocks. Frankly I'm jealous of the sheer audacity needed to do this. I mean, selling ROCKS to place on your equipement to make it SOUND BETTER. Making money at that puts many of the great grifters and con-artists of the last few centuries to shame. I've simply GOT to get a hold of their mailing list!
>Dev-C++ a free C++ compiler. I use VC++ 6.0, but this is free, and I think it's pretty good.
Actually MinGW is the compiler, which is one of two ports of GCC for Windows. Dev-C++ is just an IDE. I'd recommend Eclipse instead as the IDE, as it supports MinGW and Java, and is a fine, extensible development studio overall.
Actually in open source, there's a different mechanism available: code review. That means that many of the "holes" are not found by crackers, but by developers. These "holes" are fixed before they're ever expoited. This is quite contrary to what happens in the Windows world, where an exploit is not noticed until websites are defaced and credit card numbers are stolen.
You're trying to tell me that you're having TROUBLE FINDING QUALIFIED SOFTWARE ENGINEERS? Surely you jest. Why not just put an ad on Monster.com and look through a few of the thousands of resumes you'll get. If you're too lazy for that, I can forward you twenty or thirty names. Damn, you can't throw a dead cat in Sillicon Valley without hitting an unemployed software engineer with excellent credentials.
While we're at it, I'm having trouble finding a starbucks in the San Francisco Bay Area. Can Slashdot help? Please send me the addresses of the one closest to me. I'd also like a free Frappucino.
Just to be devil's advocate... Gym memberships work much the same way as broadband access. A certain set of shared resources are used by those that show up, but the majority of the profit comes from the people that buy a membership, but don't actually go to the gym. Now in the broadband scenario, the low end market (people who don't use the net very often) is cornered by simple dialup. People buy broadband so they have a much bigger pipe to the internet. Why do they buy it? Because they want to use it. I find it hard to sympathize with providers that never thought of that. If my gym decided it could sell more memberships if its members used less resources, and started telling me which days I was allowed to appear and which hours I could use the facilities, I'd switch to a different gym. Likewise, there's no reason to put up with ISPs that don't figure out their business plan up front and offer a service they can actually provide.
Yes there is a lot of software out there in VB that integrates various office features. I wrote some of it. Naturally I was resistant to the idea. What resulted was a set of interrelated "documents" with bizzare code inside them, linking them all together. It probably took me a week to do everything. In the same amount of time, I could have written a web-based database application that did the same thing, but be infintely more stable and easy to roll out to users. Use the right tool for the job. VB inside Word or Excel has serious drawbacks that make it almost always the wrong tool for a particular job.