the recording industry thinks they can change this sort of thing, by requiring all analog to digital converts (ADCs) to respect some sort of digital protection. Those dumb shits...:)
I think they could do it. Add a "watermark" into the audio data -- just encode a little bit of information into some band where human perception isn't that great -- and outlaw the production or import (or possession!) of any and that doesn't respect the restrictions implied in this recording (and maybe telephone whoever the RIAA hires to police this).
Of course this could even be defeated. But you'd need to either modify the ADC, or you'd need to have a physical piece of electronics that could filter out the copy protection signal. Not only would these be illegal to distribute (or maybe even possess!), but once people have to go and purchase something like this, rather than download some software, it's that much more likely they'd just pay for the music.
Don't imagine it can't be done. It's technologically feasible, if the right laws got into place. I'd certainly hope the tech industry would fight this tooth and nail, and that WE would fight it tooth and nail, but it's certainly not outside the realm of imagination, or possibility.
Re:Most Resume Advice is Totally Subjective?
on
Resume Tips For Jobs
·
· Score: 1
drop the bit about Missionary work. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who simply do not like mormons. There are a lot of self-righteous people of other Christian denominations who consider it a cult. There are a lot of people who are going to stereotype and infer that a) mormons have lots of kids, so b) this guy is going to cost us a lot of insurance money and c) ask for a lot of time off.
Hmmmm. I hadn't thought of that... maybe I've been living and working in Utah for too long.
I didn't have the missionary stuff in for a while. About 8 months ago, I expanded the section on volunteer work from a half-inch side mention to its current half-of-the-back-page glory.... because I'm interested in moving into the NGO/non-profit world, or possibly something with a policy research institute. That's when I threw in the missionary service, figuring it (and the other stuff) would play well with the progressive crowd I'm interested in working with.
Do Latter-Day Saints really have a foaming-at-mouth fundamentalist image? I've met a number of solidly Baptist who don't like me because I'm a Mormon, and smart people who like to spar over matters of faith and epistemology (which I don't mind), but have generally found that I get along with most educated and/or progressive people... then again, reading a resume is not the same thing as taking the measure of a person by meeting them in person.
Maybe it would be enough to tell people that I'm single, 30, and don't vote republican?
Most Resume Advice is Totally Subjective?
on
Resume Tips For Jobs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I first wrote a real resume (i.e., not just a high school assignment) about 10 years ago. I spent a lot of time worrying about the format and language. Up until recently, every time I updated it, I assiduously read tips given by job-hunting and other professionals. I spoke with friends who were technical writers and document design specialists. Earlier this year I read a few books on it and asked all my professional friends and a few unprofessional friends and finally, and after much ado the conclusion I came to....
The advice is often useless.
Well, not totally useless. But very, very subjective. Some people will tell you to put in an objective. Others will tell you it's irrelevant. Some people will tell you hobbies are irrelevant; others will tell you it shows a holistic person who'll have more to give to a job. Some people will tell you being holistic is important; others will tell you that focus on skills relevant to the job is all that matters. Some people will tell you to use action buzzwords; others will tell you those will get you dismissed as a charlatan. You get the idea.
My guess is they're all correct. Resume design is an art, not a science. Every person looking at your resume is looking for different things from a slightly different perspective. I've come to the conclusion that there's no set of tips you can follow to get you a resume that will get you in the door. You just have to design and refine as professionally as possible, think a little bit about your audience, and hope the message you intended to send gets across.
And sometimes I think that your own judgement may be as important as someone else's. If you walk into an interview with a resume you are confident in, that's a good precursor to success.
This is the result of my thinking. Feel free to send/post critiques of the thing. Or job offers, for that matter.
Why oh why do I live in a world where the only real political choices are: support the lying extremists who make the environmental situation look worse than it is, or support the lying extremists who won't even acknowlege the obvious environmental problems that have already been proven?
Because you're not an activist or running for office.
Also, don't you think that if there's potential for an undesirable environmental consequence, the safest approach is to not follow through until you really understand what's going on?
OK, sufficiently undesireable. Otherwise we'd rarely do anything...
Toad the Wet Sprocket did this 5 years ago. May of 1997 was the release date for their album Coil. If you bought Coil, you got two special bonuses:
A free ticket to a promo tour they were doing for the album
When you visited their website with the CD in the drive, you could play a hidden track on the CD. There was a contest, too -- the first person to correctly identify all the lyrics from this song won a signed guitar.
The result: my brother and sister and I bought four copies for the three of us and a friend we would take to the concert. Ticket prices were usually well above the $12.99 promo price for the CD. Even though I had access to a burner and blank CDs cheaply, it simply didn't make sense NOT to buy the CDs with the ticket incentive. The multimedia was nice, too.
Linkin Park apparent got on appropriate IRC and other IM/Chat channels where music was being discussed, and pretended they weren't in the band and told people to go check them out. See this article, taken from Time Magazine Jan 28 2002.
Get yourself a Soundscan barcode, and start tracking sales with it religiously. Labels notice if your soundscan numbers jump.
Finally, ask yourself what's really important to you. Labels will try to make you famous if they think it's a good investment that fits with their concept. They'll take your art and most of the money from the resulting fame, though. If your desire is to be huge, go the label route. If your desire is simply to make music and make a living, re-read the article I linked to above. That artist is making a living in Utah, a place with nearly no real local music venues or radio support. Several others are too. They had something in them that appealed to a large enough audience, and word got out. That's the real trick.
Your advice is well-taken, but I think the poster was more looking for other ideas than he was social approval from an overgrown weblog/bulletin board.
Take, for example, personalized Titanium rings. Some embedded with other precious stones with actual value. Cheaper, enduring, modern, cool.
1)If she's over twenty, statistically, chances are better than not that she won't have a working body to support the finger 70 years from now.
2) $2000 x compound interest x 70 years.... if she is alive, she can have a lot better than a piece of metal and a mineral all but worthless except in certain industrial applications.
3) For some people, experiences are more important than things.
For others, who live in a world where the diamond mythos looms large and in which they will be constantly judged by diamond size (both husband and wife, yes), well, maybe the diamond is worth it.
It depends on the girl. If you propose to someone who sees through the Matrix, then there are other possibilities. Seriously, I know a few girls that honestly don't care. Two of my friends married with gold bands, and others who saw this said they'd do the same. Another friend of mine is single, but she says she doesn't want a diamond for exactly the same reason as the article submittor mentioned; she's too conscious both of the direct abuses of the industry and the costs to society when we're sold a bill of goods that way.
There's also a whole set of people who are in between. They don't really care about the diamond, but they do care about the appearances and don't want to take flak from society. I know a number of couples in this category who've just gone cubic zirconia.
There are also girls who are totally caught by the mythos the diamond/jewelry people have sold society. If you think your life will be happier living with one of these girls, then your choice is clear. You pay the price, just like you pay the price by accepting the downsides of anyone's character in return for the positives and possibilities they have to offer.
A friend of mine from a very outside-the-mainstream family actually makes jewelry. She took a guitar string, and very neatly rolled it up into a ring for me (this is harder to do well than it sounds). She knew I was thinking about a special someone, and suggested I take it to a smith and have them coat it with a prescious metal (so's not to turn one's finger green, a practical consideration, as well as the aesthetic value), and give it to said someone. Anyone who knows me would know there was a lot of personal meaning tied up in the gesture. Enough to overpower the personal legend marketed to women? Again, it would depend on the woman. But I'm toying with the idea of proposing that way (if not actually leaving said ring as the sole physical token), and I think that how a potential fiancee/wife would respond to that might say a lot about her potential as a suitable fiancee/wife for me.
For a moment, I thought the article was going to focus on the law that states that things of a non-urgent nature must be delivered by USPS, and things like that. Interesting to find out they were looking into official electronic mail in the 70s, and interesting that the solution that finally popped up was distributed and came out of defense research.
By the way, if anyone has any information about the history of letter delivery, and especially things like the Ed Baker Memorial Postal Conspiracy or other postal conspiracies, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Unusually, lots of information is not readily available from a Google search.
Everyone is going to be thinking of video applications... but what I want is audio. The ability to place a mic anywhere in a room arbitrarily would make me happy.
Of course noise is going to be a problem, and hovering too, but that's my wish.....
"Roberts, I want to see you in the office in back of the kitchen at once"
"Yes, sir"
[walking, door closes]
"Roberts, I've just received some information that's rather disturbing to me, to say the least"
"May I ask what, sir?"
"It looks like you lied to us on your resume..."
[silence]
"There are several omissions that you've made... I was talking to an old friend and discovered he was a former employer of yours at IBM. We expect our pizza delivery drivers to have the highest degree of integrity. Now, I'm going to ask you a few questions to see if these things I've heard are true."
"All right, sir."
"Now, is it true that rather than managing an Avis Rent-a-car desk for the last two years, you were actually managing an IBM project to develop a complex XML-Java based reservation tracking system that would have been deployed throughout Avis?"
"Well, yes sir, it is."
"And I also understand you were not a branch manager for McDonalds the two years previous -- you actually spearheaded the content management system development for their website."
"Yes, sir, that's also true, but I didn't actually lie about that, I just said I supervised a small production team at McDonalds."
"Yes, well, your omission in the education department is perhaps more disturbing. You have a B.S. in Operations Research from MIT"
"It didn't seem relevant to the job sir, I just left it out."
"My friend informed me that while there you volunteered to work on a team that built a solar car to be entered in nationwide a race."
"Well, automobile engineering's always been sortof a hobby for me, and..."
"Roberts, this sort of thing just can't be tolerated. How do I know what else you're lying about? Integrity is an important part of our commitment to Quality. I'm not sure we can let you continue to be a Domino's driver. Go home. I'll call you back."
I've always wanted to write a book called "Teach Yourself C Programming in 21 months, if you're lucky, and forget about C++".
The syntax of a language? Easy to master in a short period of time. Usage in expressing ideas? Months. Years. It's amazing what people think they can get away with shortcutting.
People have point of view. The internet makes publications that cater to all points of view more easily available. Many people (most?) will seek out publications that cater to their own points of view -- after all, those are the ones that are insightful and have things straight, right? These publications reinforce their views, making it harder for them to accept other views. They get progressively narrow minded.
There's a few weblogs I visit out there that cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which seem to beleive that one side or another is carrying on a completely righteous/just war against an evil/insane opposition. It doesn't matter which is which. The rhetoric is pretty much the same, even some of the supporting facts are the same (though obviously not all), but the interpretations are different. I've gone to these sites and played devil's advocate, and let me tell you, there's no quarter on the part of frequent visitors.
Of course perfect objectivity is a myth; we all filter things through webs of personal significance, and desire validation. But it's just a little scary to me to see people who are so sure they're right they're willing to reject any outside point of view -- and convinced they're justified, meanwhile feeding only their own point of view.
And yes, this happened before the internet, but I think the internet makes it easier.
Of course, Microsoft really is evil and the DMCA is one of the worst travesties to ever leave congress, and anyone who says otherwise is some sort of right-wing idiot pig.
Do you want to live in a world where there's Draconian DRM or a world where there's DRM that makes casual piracy hard?
OK, there's the third, remote possibility that we'll end up in an another world in which "information wants to be free" rules, but the sorry, true fact is that whatever information wants, people want to own information and charge other people for it. Especially people with lots of money. And therefore power, and therefore clout to shape the world.
There's a growing body of opinion that holds the best way to keep us from getting draconian DRM is NOT to shrilly scream about free information/content and drop into a frenzy of distribution violations, but rather, to show how a mild solution can give us the best of "fair use" and "new economy" rules while not totally threatening the status quo (just enough to keep 'em on their toes).
In that light, digital watermarking for mp3 and divx is good. 5 letter acronyms introduced to congress are bad....
Well, not useless, maybe. But not perfect, because simplicity is a value judgement, and so relative simplicity can be too. Furthermore, simplicity can change depending on the symbolic system (language) used to express a concept.
Still, I prefer to beleive the world I live in is actually there, rather than a huge simulation projected into my brain by a machine that wants to use me as a human battery....
Wait a sec, here. This article almost implies the settlement has already happened. Did Kollar-Kottely accept the PFJ and I missed it? Or does the term "penalty phase" mean something I'm not aware of.
The paranoid part of me worries about articles like this. Implying the game is already over encourages resignation....
Paul Ford wrote a hilarious piece on what life might be like if google tried to index the world.
Me, I think that the reason that the Harry Potter film ended up looking uncannily like what was in everybody's head is because Google can index the brain.
I see this... and that's what the trademark suit was all about (I can't remember if MS won or lost). I'm just not sure how this all fits in with the Anti-trust action...
You know, as I understand it, the basic problem with Microsoft is that they use their market power to lock other people out, rather than compete with them.
Netscape: Hey OEM! We have this product! It's great! It adds value to your system! We'll license it to you cheaply! Please bundle it!
OEM: OK! Sounds Good!
Microsoft: Hey OEM! We don't want you bundling this product. Stop it or else we'll yank your Windows license... or maybe you'll just lose your "discount".
OEM(1): Yikes! We'll stop... hey, that IE 3.x product looks OK.
OEM(2): I don't know, our customers really like Netscape... maybe we could display IE prominently and still include Netscape?
Microsoft: Well, the price of producing Windows _is_ going up.... but you are a good customer, maybe we can work something out.
So it's easy to see that at first, Microsoft didn't compete on quality or even simply bundle. They tried to lock Netscape out. To a great degree, they were succesful. Netscape lost licensing revenues and mindshare which might have been used to fund good development....
But I don't see how this happened with Sun. Does Sun have contracts with OEMs to distribute JVMs or class libraries? Did they try, and were locked out? Or is it that they distributed with Netscape, and were locked out? Or are they still whining about incompatibilities with Microsoft's own terrible Java?
I may not know the facts here, but I don't see how Sun is a victim in the same way that Netscape is, much as I think Microsoft's business practices are deplorable.
I don't see anyone bemoaning Byan vines' loss of marketshare when Microsoft started shipping WFW/NT4. No one seems to miss Trumpet Winsock (or any of the other TCP/IP stacks you had to pay for) when Microsoft shipped TCP/IP standard on NT4/Win9x. Yet when Microsoft beats Netscape into the ground by putting their browser to shame and making IE one of the best browsers in the world, everyone is up in arms.
Key difference: It wasn't just the bundling that defeated Netscape. It wasn't just the quality of IE -- Netscape was very feature/quality competetive with IE through the 4.x times. The problem was Microsoft cutting off Netscapes "air supply" at the OEMs and ISPs. They robbed them of revenue and key screen real esatate. Netscape had the popularity and mindshare and good-enough product to keep these things -- if Microsoft hadn't put pressure on those organizations to ditch them. Microsoft knows that location, location, location (visibility and accesibility on the desktop) is key, and they've got zoning for downtown all locked up. Cross them and you don't get in.
It's possible Netscape would have slipped up and lost to IE eventually anyway, and we'd be in much the same state we are today. But they might have had the revenue and mindshare to keep going, better, faster, longer, and they may have even been able to more quickly smoothly transition to Mozilla/6.0. We'll never know. But we DO know Microsoft broke the law.
Trumpet Winsock and Banyan Vines are harder cases. Yeah, they got squeezed out by bundling. Was there the same kind of pressure on OEMs? Probably not. I don't recall ever getting a computer with either installed during the Win 3.1 and early Win95 era when they were prevalently used. There wasn't the same kind of political/financial pressure brought to bear, AFAIK.
In short: I don't mind Microsoft "Innovating" and adding features. I do mind their manipulating distribution channels and locking others out.
Go Outside
on
To The Pain
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So, just yesterday I was having a conversation with this guy from the Netherlands, and he was telling me how weird the Germans are. I told him they seemed pretty much like everyone else to me. Today, I'm not so sure.
But hey, if you want to be involved with activities where there is potential for pain if you mess up, may I suggest the following:
Mountain Biking: Ever seen the "radius" seperated from the "ulna" and sticking "out of the arm"? Mmmm. Compound fractures.
Rock climbing: You'll probably be saved from most permanent injury by clipping in, but it doesn't always stop people from breaking both kneecaps on a bad fall.
In-line skating: Actually, ice skating can work too, but gravel or pavement are better surfaces for abrasive punishment on top of impact punishment. They absorb blood better, too.
Playing with Microwave/EM Cores. What's that smell? Liver? (Don't do this. Seriously. Don't.)
Dating: Nothing gives good internal pain without permanant damage like dating (well, maybe not permanent).
River rafting: I'll never forget my dislocated shoulder. Sigh.
Really, I don't know why adding pain to an activity is an accomplishment. Sure, it makes the "stakes" more real, but if you want real stakes, do something real.
The campaign contribution probably isn't needed to get his attention if he's actually savvy enough to get the issue -- and stand up for individual rights. But hey, it might help him get re-elected. And I'll bet "Thank You" is a letter congressment barely get. : )
I would be interested in discovering exactly how they settled this.
One wonders if there shouldn't be a law REQUIRING public disclosure of any settlement for any patent related suit. After all, patents were once ostensibly about stimulating general progress and the public interest, so it's a public interest matter.
Slashdot Mirror
the recording industry thinks they can change this sort of thing, by requiring all analog to digital converts (ADCs) to respect some sort of digital protection. Those dumb shits... :)
I think they could do it. Add a "watermark" into the audio data -- just encode a little bit of information into some band where human perception isn't that great -- and outlaw the production or import (or possession!) of any and that doesn't respect the restrictions implied in this recording (and maybe telephone whoever the RIAA hires to police this).
Of course this could even be defeated. But you'd need to either modify the ADC, or you'd need to have a physical piece of electronics that could filter out the copy protection signal. Not only would these be illegal to distribute (or maybe even possess!), but once people have to go and purchase something like this, rather than download some software, it's that much more likely they'd just pay for the music.
Don't imagine it can't be done. It's technologically feasible, if the right laws got into place. I'd certainly hope the tech industry would fight this tooth and nail, and that WE would fight it tooth and nail, but it's certainly not outside the realm of imagination, or possibility.
drop the bit about Missionary work. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who simply do not like mormons. There are a lot of self-righteous people of other Christian denominations who consider it a cult. There are a lot of people who are going to stereotype and infer that a) mormons have lots of kids, so b) this guy is going to cost us a lot of insurance money and c) ask for a lot of time off.
Hmmmm. I hadn't thought of that... maybe I've been living and working in Utah for too long.
I didn't have the missionary stuff in for a while. About 8 months ago, I expanded the section on volunteer work from a half-inch side mention to its current half-of-the-back-page glory.... because I'm interested in moving into the NGO/non-profit world, or possibly something with a policy research institute. That's when I threw in the missionary service, figuring it (and the other stuff) would play well with the progressive crowd I'm interested in working with.
Do Latter-Day Saints really have a foaming-at-mouth fundamentalist image? I've met a number of solidly Baptist who don't like me because I'm a Mormon, and smart people who like to spar over matters of faith and epistemology (which I don't mind), but have generally found that I get along with most educated and/or progressive people... then again, reading a resume is not the same thing as taking the measure of a person by meeting them in person.
Maybe it would be enough to tell people that I'm single, 30, and don't vote republican?
I first wrote a real resume (i.e., not just a high school assignment) about 10 years ago. I spent a lot of time worrying about the format and language. Up until recently, every time I updated it, I assiduously read tips given by job-hunting and other professionals. I spoke with friends who were technical writers and document design specialists. Earlier this year I read a few books on it and asked all my professional friends and a few unprofessional friends and finally, and after much ado the conclusion I came to....
The advice is often useless.
Well, not totally useless. But very, very subjective. Some people will tell you to put in an objective. Others will tell you it's irrelevant. Some people will tell you hobbies are irrelevant; others will tell you it shows a holistic person who'll have more to give to a job. Some people will tell you being holistic is important; others will tell you that focus on skills relevant to the job is all that matters. Some people will tell you to use action buzzwords; others will tell you those will get you dismissed as a charlatan. You get the idea.
My guess is they're all correct. Resume design is an art, not a science. Every person looking at your resume is looking for different things from a slightly different perspective. I've come to the conclusion that there's no set of tips you can follow to get you a resume that will get you in the door. You just have to design and refine as professionally as possible, think a little bit about your audience, and hope the message you intended to send gets across.
And sometimes I think that your own judgement may be as important as someone else's. If you walk into an interview with a resume you are confident in, that's a good precursor to success.
This is the result of my thinking. Feel free to send/post critiques of the thing. Or job offers, for that matter.
Why oh why do I live in a world where the only real political choices are: support the lying extremists who make the environmental situation look worse than it is, or support the lying extremists who won't even acknowlege the obvious environmental problems that have already been proven?
Because you're not an activist or running for office.
Also, don't you think that if there's potential for an undesirable environmental consequence, the safest approach is to not follow through until you really understand what's going on?
OK, sufficiently undesireable. Otherwise we'd rarely do anything...
The result: my brother and sister and I bought four copies for the three of us and a friend we would take to the concert. Ticket prices were usually well above the $12.99 promo price for the CD. Even though I had access to a burner and blank CDs cheaply, it simply didn't make sense NOT to buy the CDs with the ticket incentive. The multimedia was nice, too.
Linkin Park apparent got on appropriate IRC and other IM/Chat channels where music was being discussed, and pretended they weren't in the band and told people to go check them out. See this article, taken from Time Magazine Jan 28 2002.
Get some of your music on a p2p service. Some people think it helps.
Get yourself a Soundscan barcode, and start tracking sales with it religiously. Labels notice if your soundscan numbers jump.
Finally, ask yourself what's really important to you. Labels will try to make you famous if they think it's a good investment that fits with their concept. They'll take your art and most of the money from the resulting fame, though. If your desire is to be huge, go the label route. If your desire is simply to make music and make a living, re-read the article I linked to above. That artist is making a living in Utah, a place with nearly no real local music venues or radio support. Several others are too. They had something in them that appealed to a large enough audience, and word got out. That's the real trick.
Your advice is well-taken, but I think the poster was more looking for other ideas than he was social approval from an overgrown weblog/bulletin board.
Take, for example, personalized Titanium rings. Some embedded with other precious stones with actual value. Cheaper, enduring, modern, cool.
1)If she's over twenty, statistically, chances are better than not that she won't have a working body to support the finger 70 years from now.
2) $2000 x compound interest x 70 years.... if she is alive, she can have a lot better than a piece of metal and a mineral all but worthless except in certain industrial applications.
3) For some people, experiences are more important than things.
For others, who live in a world where the diamond mythos looms large and in which they will be constantly judged by diamond size (both husband and wife, yes), well, maybe the diamond is worth it.
It depends on the girl. If you propose to someone who sees through the Matrix, then there are other possibilities. Seriously, I know a few girls that honestly don't care. Two of my friends married with gold bands, and others who saw this said they'd do the same. Another friend of mine is single, but she says she doesn't want a diamond for exactly the same reason as the article submittor mentioned; she's too conscious both of the direct abuses of the industry and the costs to society when we're sold a bill of goods that way.
There's also a whole set of people who are in between. They don't really care about the diamond, but they do care about the appearances and don't want to take flak from society. I know a number of couples in this category who've just gone cubic zirconia.
There are also girls who are totally caught by the mythos the diamond/jewelry people have sold society. If you think your life will be happier living with one of these girls, then your choice is clear. You pay the price, just like you pay the price by accepting the downsides of anyone's character in return for the positives and possibilities they have to offer.
A friend of mine from a very outside-the-mainstream family actually makes jewelry. She took a guitar string, and very neatly rolled it up into a ring for me (this is harder to do well than it sounds). She knew I was thinking about a special someone, and suggested I take it to a smith and have them coat it with a prescious metal (so's not to turn one's finger green, a practical consideration, as well as the aesthetic value), and give it to said someone. Anyone who knows me would know there was a lot of personal meaning tied up in the gesture. Enough to overpower the personal legend marketed to women? Again, it would depend on the woman. But I'm toying with the idea of proposing that way (if not actually leaving said ring as the sole physical token), and I think that how a potential fiancee/wife would respond to that might say a lot about her potential as a suitable fiancee/wife for me.
For a moment, I thought the article was going to focus on the law that states that things of a non-urgent nature must be delivered by USPS, and things like that. Interesting to find out they were looking into official electronic mail in the 70s, and interesting that the solution that finally popped up was distributed and came out of defense research.
By the way, if anyone has any information about the history of letter delivery, and especially things like the Ed Baker Memorial Postal Conspiracy or other postal conspiracies, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Unusually, lots of information is not readily available from a Google search.
Everyone is going to be thinking of video applications... but what I want is audio. The ability to place a mic anywhere in a room arbitrarily would make me happy.
Of course noise is going to be a problem, and hovering too, but that's my wish.....
"Roberts, I want to see you in the office in back of the kitchen at once"
"Yes, sir"
[walking, door closes]
"Roberts, I've just received some information that's rather disturbing to me, to say the least"
"May I ask what, sir?"
"It looks like you lied to us on your resume..."
[silence]
"There are several omissions that you've made... I was talking to an old friend and discovered he was a former employer of yours at IBM. We expect our pizza delivery drivers to have the highest degree of integrity. Now, I'm going to ask you a few questions to see if these things I've heard are true."
"All right, sir."
"Now, is it true that rather than managing an Avis Rent-a-car desk for the last two years, you were actually managing an IBM project to develop a complex XML-Java based reservation tracking system that would have been deployed throughout Avis?"
"Well, yes sir, it is."
"And I also understand you were not a branch manager for McDonalds the two years previous -- you actually spearheaded the content management system development for their website."
"Yes, sir, that's also true, but I didn't actually lie about that, I just said I supervised a small production team at McDonalds."
"Yes, well, your omission in the education department is perhaps more disturbing. You have a B.S. in Operations Research from MIT"
"It didn't seem relevant to the job sir, I just left it out."
"My friend informed me that while there you volunteered to work on a team that built a solar car to be entered in nationwide a race."
"Well, automobile engineering's always been sortof a hobby for me, and..."
"Roberts, this sort of thing just can't be tolerated. How do I know what else you're lying about? Integrity is an important part of our commitment to Quality. I'm not sure we can let you continue to be a Domino's driver. Go home. I'll call you back."
I've always wanted to write a book called "Teach Yourself C Programming in 21 months, if you're lucky, and forget about C++".
The syntax of a language? Easy to master in a short period of time. Usage in expressing ideas? Months. Years. It's amazing what people think they can get away with shortcutting.
Here's the phenomenon I'm afraid of:
People have point of view. The internet makes publications that cater to all points of view more easily available. Many people (most?) will seek out publications that cater to their own points of view -- after all, those are the ones that are insightful and have things straight, right? These publications reinforce their views, making it harder for them to accept other views. They get progressively narrow minded.
There's a few weblogs I visit out there that cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which seem to beleive that one side or another is carrying on a completely righteous/just war against an evil/insane opposition. It doesn't matter which is which. The rhetoric is pretty much the same, even some of the supporting facts are the same (though obviously not all), but the interpretations are different. I've gone to these sites and played devil's advocate, and let me tell you, there's no quarter on the part of frequent visitors.
Of course perfect objectivity is a myth; we all filter things through webs of personal significance, and desire validation. But it's just a little scary to me to see people who are so sure they're right they're willing to reject any outside point of view -- and convinced they're justified, meanwhile feeding only their own point of view.
And yes, this happened before the internet, but I think the internet makes it easier.
Of course, Microsoft really is evil and the DMCA is one of the worst travesties to ever leave congress, and anyone who says otherwise is some sort of right-wing idiot pig.
Do you want to live in a world where there's Draconian DRM or a world where there's DRM that makes casual piracy hard?
OK, there's the third, remote possibility that we'll end up in an another world in which "information wants to be free" rules, but the sorry, true fact is that whatever information wants, people want to own information and charge other people for it. Especially people with lots of money. And therefore power, and therefore clout to shape the world.
There's a growing body of opinion that holds the best way to keep us from getting draconian DRM is NOT to shrilly scream about free information/content and drop into a frenzy of distribution violations, but rather, to show how a mild solution can give us the best of "fair use" and "new economy" rules while not totally threatening the status quo (just enough to keep 'em on their toes).
In that light, digital watermarking for mp3 and divx is good. 5 letter acronyms introduced to congress are bad....
I hate Occam's Razor. It's really quite useless.
Well, not useless, maybe. But not perfect, because simplicity is a value judgement, and so relative simplicity can be too. Furthermore, simplicity can change depending on the symbolic system (language) used to express a concept.
Still, I prefer to beleive the world I live in is actually there, rather than a huge simulation projected into my brain by a machine that wants to use me as a human battery....
Wait a sec, here. This article almost implies the settlement has already happened. Did Kollar-Kottely accept the PFJ and I missed it?
Or does the term "penalty phase" mean something I'm not aware of.
The paranoid part of me worries about articles like this. Implying the game is already over encourages resignation....
He even mentions Lemonade Stand! I remember playing that game when I was about seven!
Wow. Lemonade Stand. This where I first heard the Gershwin Tune "Summertime" and the "We're in the money" song.
Anyone know how to get this in emulation? Or source? I'd love to have it around for offspring....
Paul Ford wrote a hilarious piece on what life might be like if google tried to index the world.
Me, I think that the reason that the Harry Potter film ended up looking uncannily like what was in everybody's head is because Google can index the brain.
Just a theory.
I see this... and that's what the trademark suit was all about (I can't remember if MS won or lost). I'm just not sure how this all fits in with the Anti-trust action...
You know, as I understand it, the basic problem with Microsoft is that they use their market power to lock other people out, rather than compete with them.
Netscape: Hey OEM! We have this product! It's great! It adds value to your system! We'll license it to you cheaply! Please bundle it!
OEM: OK! Sounds Good!
Microsoft: Hey OEM! We don't want you bundling this product. Stop it or else we'll yank your Windows license... or maybe you'll just lose your "discount".
OEM(1): Yikes! We'll stop... hey, that IE 3.x product looks OK.
OEM(2): I don't know, our customers really like Netscape... maybe we could display IE prominently and still include Netscape?
Microsoft: Well, the price of producing Windows _is_ going up.... but you are a good customer, maybe we can work something out.
So it's easy to see that at first, Microsoft didn't compete on quality or even simply bundle. They tried to lock Netscape out. To a great degree, they were succesful. Netscape lost licensing revenues and mindshare which might have been used to fund good development....
But I don't see how this happened with Sun. Does Sun have contracts with OEMs to distribute JVMs or class libraries? Did they try, and were locked out? Or is it that they distributed with Netscape, and were locked out? Or are they still whining about incompatibilities with Microsoft's own terrible Java?
I may not know the facts here, but I don't see how Sun is a victim in the same way that Netscape is, much as I think Microsoft's business practices are deplorable.
I don't see anyone bemoaning Byan vines' loss of marketshare when Microsoft started shipping WFW/NT4. No one seems to miss Trumpet Winsock (or any of the other TCP/IP stacks you had to pay for) when Microsoft shipped TCP/IP standard on NT4/Win9x.
Yet when Microsoft beats Netscape into the ground by putting their browser to shame and making IE one of the best browsers in the world, everyone is up in arms.
Key difference: It wasn't just the bundling that defeated Netscape. It wasn't just the quality of IE -- Netscape was very feature/quality competetive with IE through the 4.x times. The problem was Microsoft cutting off Netscapes "air supply" at the OEMs and ISPs. They robbed them of revenue and key screen real esatate. Netscape had the popularity and mindshare and good-enough product to keep these things -- if Microsoft hadn't put pressure on those organizations to ditch them. Microsoft knows that location, location, location (visibility and accesibility on the desktop) is key, and they've got zoning for downtown all locked up. Cross them and you don't get in.
It's possible Netscape would have slipped up and lost to IE eventually anyway, and we'd be in much the same state we are today. But they might have had the revenue and mindshare to keep going, better, faster, longer, and they may have even been able to more quickly smoothly transition to Mozilla/6.0. We'll never know. But we DO know Microsoft broke the law.
Trumpet Winsock and Banyan Vines are harder cases. Yeah, they got squeezed out by bundling. Was there the same kind of pressure on OEMs? Probably not. I don't recall ever getting a computer with either installed during the Win 3.1 and early Win95 era when they were prevalently used. There wasn't the same kind of political/financial pressure brought to bear, AFAIK.
In short: I don't mind Microsoft "Innovating" and adding features. I do mind their manipulating distribution channels and locking others out.
So, just yesterday I was having a conversation with this guy from the Netherlands, and he was telling me how weird the Germans are. I told him they seemed pretty much like everyone else to me. Today, I'm not so sure.
But hey, if you want to be involved with activities where there is potential for pain if you mess up, may I suggest the following:
- Mountain Biking: Ever seen the "radius" seperated from the "ulna" and sticking "out of the arm"? Mmmm. Compound fractures.
- Rock climbing: You'll probably be saved from most permanent injury by clipping in, but it doesn't always stop people from breaking both kneecaps on a bad fall.
- In-line skating: Actually, ice skating can work too, but gravel or pavement are better surfaces for abrasive punishment on top of impact punishment. They absorb blood better, too.
- Playing with Microwave/EM Cores. What's that smell? Liver? (Don't do this. Seriously. Don't.)
- Dating: Nothing gives good internal pain without permanant damage like dating (well, maybe not permanent).
- River rafting: I'll never forget my dislocated shoulder. Sigh.
Really, I don't know why adding pain to an activity is an accomplishment. Sure, it makes the "stakes" more real, but if you want real stakes, do something real.The campaign contribution probably isn't needed to get his attention if he's actually savvy enough to get the issue -- and stand up for individual rights. But hey, it might help him get re-elected. And I'll bet "Thank You" is a letter congressment barely get. : )
I would be interested in discovering exactly how they settled this.
One wonders if there shouldn't be a law REQUIRING public disclosure of any settlement for any patent related suit. After all, patents were once ostensibly about stimulating general progress and the public interest, so it's a public interest matter.