Typical gaijin (foreigner) view. There is plenty of room to keep PC stuff around. Japanese people have small houses because they don't need big ones. The home serves as a functional place to eat and rest. Modern homes are starting to get larger living rooms due to TV usage, but Japan is also light years ahead of the US in flat panel usage. Unlike wetsern cultures, the Japanese do not regularly entertain in the home. IF you ever have lived in Japan, you know there is a park and about 30 bars and izakayas (place to eat and drink...designed for parties) within a 30 minute walk of any home in the urban areas. Giant cities like Tokyo and Osake may require a short train ride as well. It is more reasonable for them to entertain in a public venue like this. You can usually get stuffed and hammered at an izakaya for about 3000 yen ($27).
Since you are now no longer using your home as a social gathering point, just add an extra shelf above the dining table to stack your used cases and power supplies. That is, if there isn't already one there holding the rice cooker and your wife's sewing machine.
Lack of space is a good thing sometimes. It's the main thing that has kept me from spending myself into poverty when I go to Akihabara. (Imagine an entire city of cheap Best Buys and Radio Shacks)
One thing I never did budge on was the tatami room. I have a nice soft queen size bed sitting on the mats;)
The Truman Show had this nailed years ago. It's a win-win situation for everyone. No commercials means more programming. More programming means more visibility time for actors and products. More visibility builds recognition which directly translates to sales. More sales means more money to pay for expensive product placement. More commercial revenues means more money for better sets/actors/special effects. Thus, more entertainment for me. This also produces mad revenue for Tivo, since we all now require the ability to pause a show for food/bathroom breaks. And, if we all own stock in Tivo, we make money too!!!
OK, I realize this fits the "too good to be true" test, but I still think it's a good thing.
Their involvement in the RIAA is vastly overshadowed by the Playstation. I would like to think of Sony as the cool kid who's just presently hanging out with a bad crowd.
I seriously doubt that there will be no record. I got yelled at by a cop when I was 10 years old for setting off fireworks in my backyard. 8 years later while I'm trying to join the military, I get the third degree because I didn't list the "incident" back in '85,
Ironically enough, I was stationed at MCLB in '94 and '95 with the Band. Yeah yeah yeah...heard all the jokes. Anyways, MCLB is not part of the Operating Forces. It is a non-deploying base. I didn't even have to check out 782 gear while I was there. As I recall, network support was pretty solid on that base, but that was also BANYAN Vines and I never really got a straight answer as to whether it was connected to the internet. Despite all attempts I was never able to get email to flow between work and home back then.
My view is particularly jaded due to the high turnover we have out her in Okinawa. I'm sure the US bases where unaccompanied tours are 3 years probably have a little bit better level of support.
You're not. And if you invite me over to your house, leave the door unlocked, your computer unsecured, and I just happen to burn all your mp3's to CD, you haven't done anything wrong either.
But when you knowingly place copyrighted music into a public forum via the internet, that's the same as you using your own casette recorder to make copies and giving them away.
Sorry, but I don't think saying that you didn't realize people were actually downloading the mp3's you shared over Kazaa will hold up as a legal defense.
Enlisted and Officers alike receive bare minimum training. The junior enlisted are divided into two pipelines, but mostly came from the old consolidated MOS of 4066 - Small Systems Computer Specialist (Name varies depending on who you talk to). Their course is about 2 months of learning how to install windows and other basic software, run basic network management tools, and generic introductions to major end uses of computers i.e. web, database, exchange, etc. They also receive a very quick course on the basics of networking with switches and routers, although most PFCs give you a blank stare if you ask for the Broadcast, Gateway, and IP range of a/26 net. Officers get an even more watered down course because they are also trying to soak in LF/HF/VHF/SAT radio principles and other management related skills. No background is considered whatsoever other than the math score on the ASVAB. You will often find officers with history degrees in charge of IT budgets.
The junior Marines get out into the Operating Forces and are promptly bombarded with distractions. Mess duty still exists in places, Camp services to keep the base clean, Camp guard, rifle range for two weeks a year, and a whole slew of minor classes, seminars, and stand downs that have no bearing on IT at all. Add in deployment time where they are stuck working a help desk, or worse, an admin related billet. Then add in weekends, holidays, and vacation time. We did the math out here in Japan where most single folks only stay for 1 year and out of 365 days, we only get 142 days of work out of someone. Unless they are spending their free time keeping up with the industry, they are rapidly growing into an NCO who knows just enough to bullshit his way past any problem, but not actually solve it.
Senior enlisted are even worse. The junior enlisted who are legitimate geeks almost always spend their 4 years focussing on their own education, often during work hours playing with production servers. After they have pissed everyone off by bringing the exchange server down once every other month, they have learned enough to get certified and get out for a "real job". This produces holes in the ranks which are often filled by senior enlisted from other job fields who have to find an open MOS, or get out. My last two comm chiefs were both infantry up to the rank of Sergeant. Of course a few good geeks who love being Marines stay around and generally become the Miracle workers of their commands, but for the most part, the quality of service garnered is grossly lacking. Hopefully, my description of the system is evidence that it is not the people's fault.
NMCI brings a small ray of hope in just getting a level of corporate knowledge. I don't know how many times I've called the server farm to hear, "Cpl Smith is the database guy, but He's on deployment until next month."
Here is an example of how the general level of inexperience hurts. The Blaster Virus attacks via DCOM RPC calls on port 135. The Base networking solution was to simply scan all computers for activity on that port and shut down any subnets that had activity. HELLO!!, port 135 is one of the key ports that NETBIOS communicates over which is a legitimate service. We've spent the past 3 days responding to reports that computer X has the virus only to find the machine clean. I haven't even begun to add up the lost man-hours as a result of NETWORK managers not understanding BASIC NETWORK protocols.
Don't even get me started on the complete lack of UNIX knowledge and support.
I could also rant on the officer side, but it boils down to the same thing....too many distractions to keep up with modern IT and not enough education/background to rapidly grasp the information. To a certain extent, the Marine Corps has hired civillians to manage the Enterprise and we do have one of the most stable and secure Nets in the DOD, but the system could be so much better if IT staffing was completely re-engineered.
The flip side of course, is that Network manager is capable of taking the network into a forward environment and competently defend it as a riflemen. The last time I saw members of the AF and Navy with guns, it scared me.
The main reason it works is word of mouth. They hooked one of my friends in here in Okinawa, he got me convinced, and I've convinced 4 of my friends to switch. I signed up over the internet, had my modem delivered in 4 days and was online. First thing I did was download the 187MB demo to Dungeon Seige...it only took 3 minutes. I've now had the service(12 MBit) for over 1 year with zero downtime.
And my friends in the states wonder why I want to live here forever.
No, they hold the copyright on Stupidity itself...
They will soon begin filing lawsuits claiming that if anyone else makes money off of stupidity, they have to pay SCO $1 Billion Dollars...Mua Ha HA HA HA.
Actually, the article is not brilliant by any stretch of the imagination.
Let's take your average Summer Blockbuster. Average pricetag with good actors and good special affects and some reasonable marketing seems to be around the $100M mark. But that was just the cost of making the movie. Now we need to make it into a DVD.
Lets add another $20M for: * The cost of converting 35mm Kodak into digital form. * Editing time to get a seperate made for TV "Full Screen" version. * Paying spanish and french voice artists to do some dubbing. * More editing and remastering time for the "Making Of" mini-feature. * Interview time with important cast members. * Various royalties associated with having DVD player software come bundled with the disk so you can just pop it into your computer and watch it.
Now that you have this $120M master disk, how many copies do you make? How much money are you going to invest in packaging and additional goodies to make the DVD more tempting? How much do blank DVD's run in uber-bulk quantities? How much does the distribution chain cost to get the DVD from your warehouse to the self of the local Wall-Mart in Bum-F*ck, Idaho? If sales are slow, how much is your warehouse space costing per day because you made too many copies?
According to IRS.gov, there are approximately 130M individual income tax filings. Let's make a conservative estimate that 10M of these are teenagers or newly married couples who chose to file seperately, but live in the same household. That gives us 120M households who may want to purchase your $120M masterpeice. Let's say it's really popular and 10% of these people decide they need their own copy. 12M copies at $10 a pop would barely cover the cost of making it and you still haven't covered the packaging, storage and distribution costs....plus you want to make a little money in profit because your a well adjusted capitalist like the rest of us. $20 a copy should make this work, but then there's the little issue of your last movie that sucked and lost $70M. Then there's the reality that it's a fat chance that 1 in 10 people would purchase a movie for $20 that they can easily rent for $2.
The reason why DVD's can afford to exist on a $10 to $20 price range is because 12M people already went to a theater and shelled out $10 to see it on the big screen and most of these costs have already been covered. The music equivilant would be a live concert which you just can't do on that scale.
I'll be the first to say that the RIAA needs to find a new way of doing business, but I'll also be the first to admit that it's not as simple as most folks would think.
In the case, the article was trying to compare apples to oranges.
The real suprise is the lack of choices. I run SETI@HOME and Cancer due to personal interrests, but there is so much more that grid computing could be applied to.
I'm suprised corporations aren't getting involved in the grid arena. I'm as capitalistic as the next guy, but if donating my CPU time to AMD would speed up the release time on their next Opteron, that benefits me. The same applies to Toyota (Hybrid cars), Sony (Plasma TV's), etc...
For example, someone with a history of alzheimers(sp?) disease may want to devote their spare cycles to that. Someone who is a motorcycle enthusiast may want to devote time to Harley Davidson trying to make their bikes break less.
I realize this sounds very self serving, but the point is that there are so many other areas where massive grid computing could easily be applied to improving the aspects of life that we consider to be important to us.
Add money to the mix and it makes you wonder even more. i.e. if it costs Pixar $1 per CPU day to render their movies, I'll gladly offer my machines out at $0.10 per day if it means thay will increase the release cycle and/or improve the quality. Imagine the movie Final Fantasy except rendered on 50,000 machines. Less trivial matters such as NASA research could also benefit. Hell, I'd give those guys my CPU time for free, but imagine if you could earn enough money on your spare cycles to where Income - CPU electricity = Profit.
I don't think any of those factors have anything to do with it. When I was a kid, it was a common thing to ask a friend to make a tape of their newest cassett for you. In College, it was burn a new CD. Now it's send me the mp3.
What has changed is quality. 10 years ago, Digital Signal Processing (DSP) technology wasn't good enough to make boob toting hacks like Britany Spears sound good. Now we are inundated with manufactured bands who don't have the quality or maturity of the groups who cut their teeth playing in local pubs to crowds of 4 people. NSYNC isn't famous because of an increasing demand of local fans. They are famous because the RIAA packaged and marketed them down the throats of the 12 to 18 demographic.
Bottom line is that the crowd with the real money (adults with real jobs) is only going to pay for something they will want to listen for a long time and "BackStreat's Back" is NOT it.
On top of the certifications making the claim, programmers do exactly what engineers do....build better tools. I guarentee you there is nothing you can come up with that engineers or programmers produce that cannot be described as a tool for some purpose. (Even video games, viruses, and microsoft products are tools for entertainment, havoc, and well...non-productivity)
My shop does data mining and is often tasked with creating some radically different report to help manage a specific problem area in supply or maintenance chain management.
We are also often given an unreasonably short deadline. Hence, the reason we have posted a sign on our office reading:
"Custom reports and Warp Drive in 30 minutes or less"
For those of us who still prefer a little light reading, Marshall Savage penned a book in 1994 entitled The Millennial Project: Colonizing The Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps. While the book is generally lacking in detail for some of the more core engineering disciplines, it gives a very thorough look at OTEC theory to include the concept of a self-sustaining, floating city powered by the technology. The book covers a whole span of ideas in a very plain language that is both easy to follow and entertaining.
Warning to those who religiously follow the reviews on Amazon: There is a pretty negative review by someone claiming to be an engineer who claims to have found the book grossly off in every major engineering discipline. I AM an engineer and others will back me up on this. Engineering is way too broad for any single person to be able to speak critically on the theoretical ideas from every aspect of engineering. After a year and a half of studying Electrical Engineering and over 5 years of applying it practically, I know enough to say I don't know nearly enough to intelligently critique any one else's ideas.
Just like Star Trek, none of the ideas he presents are so far fetched that they cannot be acheived through a little more effort and research. And just like Star Trek, this book definitely will inspire one to dream.
Or one below I would think. In most bars I've been to, those decorations came from customers. Even here in Japan it is considered rude to whip out the keitai(pr. 'kay-tie' - cell phone) and start playing with it in a social setting. I know this is a tuff one to handle geeks, but girls usually get dressed up and go to a bar to TALK to someone, not get a crick in their neck looking up at the TV cause the cute geek at the bar is too engrossed in playing with the new toy.
You've been programming for 16 years in all those languages? Mighty impressive. Strange you don't know things like it's Motorola (since you wrote it twice, I assume it wasn't a mis-spelling).
I wrote that response in a hurry, so it may have been a bit unclear, and yes, I did mis-spell Motorola. I have not been using ALL of those languages for 16 years. In the past 16 years, those are the languages I have used to write code that I got paid for. I started on Basic like most students did back then. Started using assembly about 12 years ago. still occasionally use it now to write device drivers for folks doing hobby work.
Yes, people use proprietary programs, and no, they aren't that expensive. Shocking huh?
Last time I checked, the per processor fee for Oracle 9i was almost $25K. I call that expensive when MySQL and PostgreSQL are basically free.
wtf are you supposed to mean by that? You can implement things totally unrelated to any RFC by using RFC standards?
I was responding to integrated services such as email. It is actually quite easy to open a socket on port 25 to a SMTP(RFC based) server and send a MIME(RFC based) compliant email(RFC based). Perhaps reading the parent post would help you out.
First you complain about proprietary software and now open source? You're one fun troll aren't you:)
Again, was writing the response quickly. I am a huge proponent of open source. The DOD, on the other hand, generally mistrusts anything that is freeware, or not backed by a credible company. Thus I am stuck coding for M$ based products.
Why the hell would you want to copy loops and ifs? The reason you ever copy code is to AVOID branching
Branching is a result of decision making no matter how you code it. If there are a lot of deciding factors, you can either use multiple decision statements, or squeak out a few extra percentage points in performance by making one giant, hard to read decision statement. Loops are unavoidable when reading data from a DB connection unless of course you always knew the number of returned rows at compile time.
Never ever fucking read something one character at a time.
OK, 2 at a time, 10 at a time, 10000 at a time. The point was if your code is depending on an outside source limmiting it's input, then your code is likely vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. There are other methods to avoid it, but controlling the input in your code by doing the count yourself is a sure bet on avoiding overflows.
Obviously all you know is C. It must be some kind of "geek pride" thing.
I've been programming for 16 years...here is a short list of the languages I have used in real-world (i.e. I got paid) applications:
C, C++, COBOL, VB (eventually rewritten in C when it hit the scalability wall), Intel x86 ASM, Motorolla 6809 ASM, and Motorolla 6502 ASM.
The list of languages I have worked with either in private, or an academic setting is quite large and are not listed above because I either wouldn't trust them for real work, or my employer wouldn't trust them.
ADO and OLEDB...Oracle
Proprietary. Proprietary. Proprietary, but at least somewhat portable; however, waaayyy too expensive unless you are dealing with massive amounts of data/users or are coding for government/businesses that require namebrand stuff.
some people... write virii... the REST... write groupware.
This is true. However, I have yet to run into anything that I couldn't replicate in C/C++ using RFC standards. Some of the more nifty features of Exchange would need some reverse engineering, but I've never had the need to provide them.
why the hell are you still writing in C? I thought Perl, Java, and PHP4 were the gold standard for web apps... Aren't you afraid of buffer overruns??? Lord knows half the system calls in C are vulnerable...
Don't get me started on the gross mis-management job Sun has done on JAVA. It has never lived up to Sun's promise of being platform independant. Security is another problem depending on whether you are talking about client side, or server side. What happens if you have a customer whose security policy disables JAVA on the browsers? For server side, I challenge you to name something you can do in JAVA that you can't do just as easily in C/C++. The language has its advantages, but most of them can be reproduced in other languages with minimal effort.
Perl and PHP are very nice for simple straight forward page production. However, I code for US DOD and the security issues with both of those as well as a general distrust of anything open source has prevented their use on a general basis. I have seen some stuff done for DOD in those languages, but it was either in violation of policy, or contracted out and not on a.mil server. Additionally, they are interpreted languages. If you need to pull 4 million items into memory, consolidate the duplicates, calculate usage stats over multiple time periods, then filter out those that don't meet a usage to property hit list, Scripted languages are either way too slow, or simply incapable of doing that kind of complex filtering on a large quantity of data. The above process can be done in about 400 lines of C code, most of which is copy and pasted loops and if statements and it's fast.
Buffer overruns are easy....don't rely on the server to feed your script data. Write the code to pull the data from the server and set a cutoff limit where extra data is ignored. Write a simple filter command to break attempts at embedding malicious SQL commands in data and your done. You can do this in any language, but yet you still occasionally see AIVAs about buffer overflow vulnerabilies in everything under the sun.
System calls? Don't know what to tell you there. Been coding web based stuff for two years in C and never had to make one. Or are you referring to anything that handles I/O as a system call? If so, read your input one character at a time and COUNT them...stop when you hit your buffer's pre-defined limit. If you do hit a limit, have the app make a log entry. Either your code has failed to expect a wierd user need that requires sending large amounts of data, or someone is trying to attack your script....the latter is far more likely. I'd rather have a random user complaint once in a blue moon for lack of flexibility, than all my users pissed because someone rooted the box and defaced the web site.
don't knock VB until you need to code a quick dbaccess (or other simple) app in a couple of days for internal use.
Maybe if you're a beginning programmer. My shop codes exclusively in C and I can even create rather complex apps in a few days because:
#1 I know what I'm doing, and..
#2 It's called libraries....be it STL, MFC, MyStack.h or whatever. Code re-use is the key to rapid and robust application development.
And my code is platform independant and usually weighs in at less than 100K (for a simple DB app). Web-based,Web-based,Web-based...can I make it any clearer? I'm talking about real-world, mission-critical data applications where bandwidth is paid for and no one gives a fsck if the button turns neon pink and spins in a circle when you mouse over it.
VB has its place in small businesses and first year programming courses where its not a big deal if the code is messy, non-portable, slow and bloated. If your company is paying full time salaried VB programmers who have no other skills, start familiarizing yourself with the procedures involved in signing up for unemployment. You company is eventually going to grow to a point where VB totally fails and you find that your job was the one cut in order to dish out the money for someone else's software that actually works. Either that or your company just goes tits up. Dot Com anyone?
The real question is...is this a trend that will be spread throughout all pro sports, or is this just one of the death throws of a once popular sport trying desperately to find more fans?
There's a reason why those stadiums aren't being packed anymore. Partially due to fscking over the fans with two strikes in the past decade, also partially due to other sports simply being marketed better.
Here's the real kicker....McD's in Tokyo has already been providing WiFi. Except not with the retarded marketing scheme being pushed in the US. In Tokyo, you have an account with a major provider and McD's just provides the connection. The provider kicks back a percentage to McD's who now can compete directly with starbucks as a place where people can go for a coffee break and take work with them. No one really stays all that long; just long enough to tweak a spreadsheet while sipping a cup of coffee in a less crowded and possibly more convenient place than the local starbucks. I've noticed a lot of people coming in around the 9 to 11 mark when business is traditionally slow to read email and watch news on the 42in Plasma TV's thay have.
The idea works in Tokyo because McD's is really not doing anything outside of their core business. Network support is contracted out, so they just have to keep making cofee and food. The US side is trying to add sysadmin tasks to the McDonald's worker as well as bank on folks using a computer while they eat a big mac. The only reason why I go to McD's over here is because they still have the fried apple pies, not that baked crap the US stores have served for the last 10 years. I'm not going to buy a value meal just to get on the net when I can do it at work for free, or home for what I'm already paying my ISP.
Poor docs, now they'll have to carry Medical DoS Insurance
The sad thing is this is probably true. Between medical malpractice and patent suits over the stupid trash icon America is slowly sueing itself into an economic hole where we are too afraid to innovate and experiment.
It's no wonder why we are slowly slipping further behind other countries in these areas. Meanwhile, some lazy fsck will sue his employer for "damages" after being fired over "discrimination" issues. The employer was in the right since the firing actually occured because the lazy fsck was a lazy fsck. The monetary "damages" are enough to keep the lazy fsck hapily unemployed for a year while the rest of the company loses their Christmas bonuses.
Being that I am currently living on a tiny island in the middle of the East China Sea, I would love to have the comfort of knowing a critical operation could be done on me within hours as opposed to the days it would take to either get me to the doctor or vice versa. But it will never happen via American Doctors because they're too afraid a lost packet will scar or kill me and cost them millions. Meanwhile if I died on the plane flight trying to get to the doctor, they'd just give my mom a card and say "sorry, there was nothing that could be done."
Opposite. Older people from Okinawa will correct you and incorrectly refer to themselves as OKINAWAJIN (of Okinawan Nationality). This would be like saying my nationality is Floridian. This is mostly due to them being pissed about the way the Japanese military treated them in WWII and then subsequently having the US "give" Okinawa back to Japan in 1972.
Okinawa used to be a seperate kindom called the Ryukyu Kingdom. I forget the year, but Japan forcefully occupied it a while back without much effort as Okinawan people are really peaceful and laid back, thus not seeing a need for a signifigant army.
Thursday: middle of the business week. Would you want construction on the road you take to work on a work day?
Midnight: Upgrade to a system that tracks planes in the air. If there are no planes in the air, how can you test it? The upgrade was most likely done around midnight, but didn't see any signifigant use until the heavy part of the travelling day. The article indicated it was due to an interface with a defense system. JIEITAI (Japanese military) usually hit the office between 7 and 8, which was when the delays started. I could be wrong about the work time for the folks in Tokyo, but the two units I've worked with in Okinawa and Hokkaido were usually rolling in to hit their first cup of coffee just after 7.
Despite the lack of information in the article, passengers were not stranded. If their flight was cancelled, they were re-booked and most likely in the air within the hour of their original scheduled flight. Japanese air systems are extremely efficient, although I have no clue how they could be making any money.
Slashdot Mirror
Typical gaijin (foreigner) view. There is plenty of room to keep PC stuff around. Japanese people have small houses because they don't need big ones. The home serves as a functional place to eat and rest. Modern homes are starting to get larger living rooms due to TV usage, but Japan is also light years ahead of the US in flat panel usage. Unlike wetsern cultures, the Japanese do not regularly entertain in the home. IF you ever have lived in Japan, you know there is a park and about 30 bars and izakayas (place to eat and drink...designed for parties) within a 30 minute walk of any home in the urban areas. Giant cities like Tokyo and Osake may require a short train ride as well. It is more reasonable for them to entertain in a public venue like this. You can usually get stuffed and hammered at an izakaya for about 3000 yen ($27).
;)
Since you are now no longer using your home as a social gathering point, just add an extra shelf above the dining table to stack your used cases and power supplies. That is, if there isn't already one there holding the rice cooker and your wife's sewing machine.
Lack of space is a good thing sometimes. It's the main thing that has kept me from spending myself into poverty when I go to Akihabara. (Imagine an entire city of cheap Best Buys and Radio Shacks)
One thing I never did budge on was the tatami room. I have a nice soft queen size bed sitting on the mats
The Truman Show had this nailed years ago. It's a win-win situation for everyone. No commercials means more programming. More programming means more visibility time for actors and products. More visibility builds recognition which directly translates to sales. More sales means more money to pay for expensive product placement. More commercial revenues means more money for better sets/actors/special effects. Thus, more entertainment for me. This also produces mad revenue for Tivo, since we all now require the ability to pause a show for food/bathroom breaks. And, if we all own stock in Tivo, we make money too!!!
OK, I realize this fits the "too good to be true" test, but I still think it's a good thing.
Their involvement in the RIAA is vastly overshadowed by the Playstation. I would like to think of Sony as the cool kid who's just presently hanging out with a bad crowd.
I seriously doubt that there will be no record. I got yelled at by a cop when I was 10 years old for setting off fireworks in my backyard. 8 years later while I'm trying to join the military, I get the third degree because I didn't list the "incident" back in '85,
I was 10 years old for cripes sake!!!
Ironically enough, I was stationed at MCLB in '94 and '95 with the Band. Yeah yeah yeah...heard all the jokes. Anyways, MCLB is not part of the Operating Forces. It is a non-deploying base. I didn't even have to check out 782 gear while I was there. As I recall, network support was pretty solid on that base, but that was also BANYAN Vines and I never really got a straight answer as to whether it was connected to the internet. Despite all attempts I was never able to get email to flow between work and home back then.
My view is particularly jaded due to the high turnover we have out her in Okinawa. I'm sure the US bases where unaccompanied tours are 3 years probably have a little bit better level of support.
You're not. And if you invite me over to your house, leave the door unlocked, your computer unsecured, and I just happen to burn all your mp3's to CD, you haven't done anything wrong either.
But when you knowingly place copyrighted music into a public forum via the internet, that's the same as you using your own casette recorder to make copies and giving them away.
Sorry, but I don't think saying that you didn't realize people were actually downloading the mp3's you shared over Kazaa will hold up as a legal defense.
Here's the straight scoop from the USMC:
/26 net. Officers get an even more watered down course because they are also trying to soak in LF/HF/VHF/SAT radio principles and other management related skills. No background is considered whatsoever other than the math score on the ASVAB. You will often find officers with history degrees in charge of IT budgets.
Enlisted and Officers alike receive bare minimum training. The junior enlisted are divided into two pipelines, but mostly came from the old consolidated MOS of 4066 - Small Systems Computer Specialist (Name varies depending on who you talk to). Their course is about 2 months of learning how to install windows and other basic software, run basic network management tools, and generic introductions to major end uses of computers i.e. web, database, exchange, etc. They also receive a very quick course on the basics of networking with switches and routers, although most PFCs give you a blank stare if you ask for the Broadcast, Gateway, and IP range of a
The junior Marines get out into the Operating Forces and are promptly bombarded with distractions. Mess duty still exists in places, Camp services to keep the base clean, Camp guard, rifle range for two weeks a year, and a whole slew of minor classes, seminars, and stand downs that have no bearing on IT at all. Add in deployment time where they are stuck working a help desk, or worse, an admin related billet. Then add in weekends, holidays, and vacation time. We did the math out here in Japan where most single folks only stay for 1 year and out of 365 days, we only get 142 days of work out of someone. Unless they are spending their free time keeping up with the industry, they are rapidly growing into an NCO who knows just enough to bullshit his way past any problem, but not actually solve it.
Senior enlisted are even worse. The junior enlisted who are legitimate geeks almost always spend their 4 years focussing on their own education, often during work hours playing with production servers. After they have pissed everyone off by bringing the exchange server down once every other month, they have learned enough to get certified and get out for a "real job". This produces holes in the ranks which are often filled by senior enlisted from other job fields who have to find an open MOS, or get out. My last two comm chiefs were both infantry up to the rank of Sergeant. Of course a few good geeks who love being Marines stay around and generally become the Miracle workers of their commands, but for the most part, the quality of service garnered is grossly lacking. Hopefully, my description of the system is evidence that it is not the people's fault.
NMCI brings a small ray of hope in just getting a level of corporate knowledge. I don't know how many times I've called the server farm to hear, "Cpl Smith is the database guy, but He's on deployment until next month."
Here is an example of how the general level of inexperience hurts. The Blaster Virus attacks via DCOM RPC calls on port 135. The Base networking solution was to simply scan all computers for activity on that port and shut down any subnets that had activity. HELLO!!, port 135 is one of the key ports that NETBIOS communicates over which is a legitimate service. We've spent the past 3 days responding to reports that computer X has the virus only to find the machine clean. I haven't even begun to add up the lost man-hours as a result of NETWORK managers not understanding BASIC NETWORK protocols.
Don't even get me started on the complete lack of UNIX knowledge and support.
I could also rant on the officer side, but it boils down to the same thing....too many distractions to keep up with modern IT and not enough education/background to rapidly grasp the information. To a certain extent, the Marine Corps has hired civillians to manage the Enterprise and we do have one of the most stable and secure Nets in the DOD, but the system could be so much better if IT staffing was completely re-engineered.
The flip side of course, is that Network manager is capable of taking the network into a forward environment and competently defend it as a riflemen. The last time I saw members of the AF and Navy with guns, it scared me.
The main reason it works is word of mouth. They hooked one of my friends in here in Okinawa, he got me convinced, and I've convinced 4 of my friends to switch. I signed up over the internet, had my modem delivered in 4 days and was online. First thing I did was download the 187MB demo to Dungeon Seige...it only took 3 minutes. I've now had the service(12 MBit) for over 1 year with zero downtime.
And my friends in the states wonder why I want to live here forever.
No, they hold the copyright on Stupidity itself...
They will soon begin filing lawsuits claiming that if anyone else makes money off of stupidity, they have to pay SCO $1 Billion Dollars...Mua Ha HA HA HA.
Actually, the article is not brilliant by any stretch of the imagination.
Let's take your average Summer Blockbuster. Average pricetag with good actors and good special affects and some reasonable marketing seems to be around the $100M mark. But that was just the cost of making the movie. Now we need to make it into a DVD.
Lets add another $20M for:
* The cost of converting 35mm Kodak into digital form.
* Editing time to get a seperate made for TV "Full Screen" version.
* Paying spanish and french voice artists to do some dubbing.
* More editing and remastering time for the "Making Of" mini-feature.
* Interview time with important cast members.
* Various royalties associated with having DVD player software come bundled with the disk so you can just pop it into your computer and watch it.
Now that you have this $120M master disk, how many copies do you make? How much money are you going to invest in packaging and additional goodies to make the DVD more tempting? How much do blank DVD's run in uber-bulk quantities? How much does the distribution chain cost to get the DVD from your warehouse to the self of the local Wall-Mart in Bum-F*ck, Idaho? If sales are slow, how much is your warehouse space costing per day because you made too many copies?
According to IRS.gov, there are approximately 130M individual income tax filings. Let's make a conservative estimate that 10M of these are teenagers or newly married couples who chose to file seperately, but live in the same household. That gives us 120M households who may want to purchase your $120M masterpeice. Let's say it's really popular and 10% of these people decide they need their own copy. 12M copies at $10 a pop would barely cover the cost of making it and you still haven't covered the packaging, storage and distribution costs....plus you want to make a little money in profit because your a well adjusted capitalist like the rest of us. $20 a copy should make this work, but then there's the little issue of your last movie that sucked and lost $70M. Then there's the reality that it's a fat chance that 1 in 10 people would purchase a movie for $20 that they can easily rent for $2.
The reason why DVD's can afford to exist on a $10 to $20 price range is because 12M people already went to a theater and shelled out $10 to see it on the big screen and most of these costs have already been covered. The music equivilant would be a live concert which you just can't do on that scale.
I'll be the first to say that the RIAA needs to find a new way of doing business, but I'll also be the first to admit that it's not as simple as most folks would think.
In the case, the article was trying to compare apples to oranges.
The real suprise is the lack of choices. I run SETI@HOME and Cancer due to personal interrests, but there is so much more that grid computing could be applied to.
I'm suprised corporations aren't getting involved in the grid arena. I'm as capitalistic as the next guy, but if donating my CPU time to AMD would speed up the release time on their next Opteron, that benefits me. The same applies to Toyota (Hybrid cars), Sony (Plasma TV's), etc...
For example, someone with a history of alzheimers(sp?) disease may want to devote their spare cycles to that. Someone who is a motorcycle enthusiast may want to devote time to Harley Davidson trying to make their bikes break less.
I realize this sounds very self serving, but the point is that there are so many other areas where massive grid computing could easily be applied to improving the aspects of life that we consider to be important to us.
Add money to the mix and it makes you wonder even more. i.e. if it costs Pixar $1 per CPU day to render their movies, I'll gladly offer my machines out at $0.10 per day if it means thay will increase the release cycle and/or improve the quality. Imagine the movie Final Fantasy except rendered on 50,000 machines. Less trivial matters such as NASA research could also benefit. Hell, I'd give those guys my CPU time for free, but imagine if you could earn enough money on your spare cycles to where Income - CPU electricity = Profit.
Seems like a grossly untapped resource to me.
I don't think any of those factors have anything to do with it. When I was a kid, it was a common thing to ask a friend to make a tape of their newest cassett for you. In College, it was burn a new CD. Now it's send me the mp3.
What has changed is quality. 10 years ago, Digital Signal Processing (DSP) technology wasn't good enough to make boob toting hacks like Britany Spears sound good. Now we are inundated with manufactured bands who don't have the quality or maturity of the groups who cut their teeth playing in local pubs to crowds of 4 people. NSYNC isn't famous because of an increasing demand of local fans. They are famous because the RIAA packaged and marketed them down the throats of the 12 to 18 demographic.
Bottom line is that the crowd with the real money (adults with real jobs) is only going to pay for something they will want to listen for a long time and "BackStreat's Back" is NOT it.
Let's also not forget how rock solid the commercial sector is on hitting release dates.
After all, Micro$oft had at least two weeks of breathing room before they would have been forced to rename Win95 to Win96.
On top of the certifications making the claim, programmers do exactly what engineers do....build better tools. I guarentee you there is nothing you can come up with that engineers or programmers produce that cannot be described as a tool for some purpose. (Even video games, viruses, and microsoft products are tools for entertainment, havoc, and well...non-productivity)
My shop does data mining and is often tasked with creating some radically different report to help manage a specific problem area in supply or maintenance chain management.
We are also often given an unreasonably short deadline. Hence, the reason we have posted a sign on our office reading:
"Custom reports and Warp Drive in 30 minutes or less"
For those of us who still prefer a little light reading, Marshall Savage penned a book in 1994 entitled The Millennial Project: Colonizing The Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps. While the book is generally lacking in detail for some of the more core engineering disciplines, it gives a very thorough look at OTEC theory to include the concept of a self-sustaining, floating city powered by the technology. The book covers a whole span of ideas in a very plain language that is both easy to follow and entertaining.
Warning to those who religiously follow the reviews on Amazon: There is a pretty negative review by someone claiming to be an engineer who claims to have found the book grossly off in every major engineering discipline. I AM an engineer and others will back me up on this. Engineering is way too broad for any single person to be able to speak critically on the theoretical ideas from every aspect of engineering. After a year and a half of studying Electrical Engineering and over 5 years of applying it practically, I know enough to say I don't know nearly enough to intelligently critique any one else's ideas.
Just like Star Trek, none of the ideas he presents are so far fetched that they cannot be acheived through a little more effort and research. And just like Star Trek, this book definitely will inspire one to dream.
Or one below I would think. In most bars I've been to, those decorations came from customers. Even here in Japan it is considered rude to whip out the keitai(pr. 'kay-tie' - cell phone) and start playing with it in a social setting. I know this is a tuff one to handle geeks, but girls usually get dressed up and go to a bar to TALK to someone, not get a crick in their neck looking up at the TV cause the cute geek at the bar is too engrossed in playing with the new toy.
You've been programming for 16 years in all those languages? Mighty impressive. Strange you don't know things like it's Motorola (since you wrote it twice, I assume it wasn't a mis-spelling).
:)
I wrote that response in a hurry, so it may have been a bit unclear, and yes, I did mis-spell Motorola. I have not been using ALL of those languages for 16 years. In the past 16 years, those are the languages I have used to write code that I got paid for. I started on Basic like most students did back then. Started using assembly about 12 years ago. still occasionally use it now to write device drivers for folks doing hobby work.
Yes, people use proprietary programs, and no, they aren't that expensive. Shocking huh?
Last time I checked, the per processor fee for Oracle 9i was almost $25K. I call that expensive when MySQL and PostgreSQL are basically free.
wtf are you supposed to mean by that? You can implement things totally unrelated to any RFC by using RFC standards?
I was responding to integrated services such as email. It is actually quite easy to open a socket on port 25 to a SMTP(RFC based) server and send a MIME(RFC based) compliant email(RFC based). Perhaps reading the parent post would help you out.
First you complain about proprietary software and now open source? You're one fun troll aren't you
Again, was writing the response quickly. I am a huge proponent of open source. The DOD, on the other hand, generally mistrusts anything that is freeware, or not backed by a credible company. Thus I am stuck coding for M$ based products.
Why the hell would you want to copy loops and ifs? The reason you ever copy code is to AVOID branching
Branching is a result of decision making no matter how you code it. If there are a lot of deciding factors, you can either use multiple decision statements, or squeak out a few extra percentage points in performance by making one giant, hard to read decision statement. Loops are unavoidable when reading data from a DB connection unless of course you always knew the number of returned rows at compile time.
Never ever fucking read something one character at a time.
OK, 2 at a time, 10 at a time, 10000 at a time. The point was if your code is depending on an outside source limmiting it's input, then your code is likely vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. There are other methods to avoid it, but controlling the input in your code by doing the count yourself is a sure bet on avoiding overflows.
Seriously, fun troll
I think you missed the point.
Obviously all you know is C. It must be some kind of "geek pride" thing.
... write virii ... the REST ... write groupware.
.mil server. Additionally, they are interpreted languages. If you need to pull 4 million items into memory, consolidate the duplicates, calculate usage stats over multiple time periods, then filter out those that don't meet a usage to property hit list, Scripted languages are either way too slow, or simply incapable of doing that kind of complex filtering on a large quantity of data. The above process can be done in about 400 lines of C code, most of which is copy and pasted loops and if statements and it's fast.
I've been programming for 16 years...here is a short list of the languages I have used in real-world (i.e. I got paid) applications:
C, C++, COBOL, VB (eventually rewritten in C when it hit the scalability wall), Intel x86 ASM, Motorolla 6809 ASM, and Motorolla 6502 ASM.
The list of languages I have worked with either in private, or an academic setting is quite large and are not listed above because I either wouldn't trust them for real work, or my employer wouldn't trust them.
ADO and OLEDB...Oracle
Proprietary. Proprietary. Proprietary, but at least somewhat portable; however, waaayyy too expensive unless you are dealing with massive amounts of data/users or are coding for government/businesses that require namebrand stuff.
some people
This is true. However, I have yet to run into anything that I couldn't replicate in C/C++ using RFC standards. Some of the more nifty features of Exchange would need some reverse engineering, but I've never had the need to provide them.
why the hell are you still writing in C? I thought Perl, Java, and PHP4 were the gold standard for web apps... Aren't you afraid of buffer overruns??? Lord knows half the system calls in C are vulnerable...
Don't get me started on the gross mis-management job Sun has done on JAVA. It has never lived up to Sun's promise of being platform independant. Security is another problem depending on whether you are talking about client side, or server side. What happens if you have a customer whose security policy disables JAVA on the browsers? For server side, I challenge you to name something you can do in JAVA that you can't do just as easily in C/C++. The language has its advantages, but most of them can be reproduced in other languages with minimal effort.
Perl and PHP are very nice for simple straight forward page production. However, I code for US DOD and the security issues with both of those as well as a general distrust of anything open source has prevented their use on a general basis. I have seen some stuff done for DOD in those languages, but it was either in violation of policy, or contracted out and not on a
Buffer overruns are easy....don't rely on the server to feed your script data. Write the code to pull the data from the server and set a cutoff limit where extra data is ignored. Write a simple filter command to break attempts at embedding malicious SQL commands in data and your done. You can do this in any language, but yet you still occasionally see AIVAs about buffer overflow vulnerabilies in everything under the sun.
System calls? Don't know what to tell you there. Been coding web based stuff for two years in C and never had to make one. Or are you referring to anything that handles I/O as a system call? If so, read your input one character at a time and COUNT them...stop when you hit your buffer's pre-defined limit. If you do hit a limit, have the app make a log entry. Either your code has failed to expect a wierd user need that requires sending large amounts of data, or someone is trying to attack your script....the latter is far more likely. I'd rather have a random user complaint once in a blue moon for lack of flexibility, than all my users pissed because someone rooted the box and defaced the web site.
don't knock VB until you need to code a quick dbaccess (or other simple) app in a couple of days for internal use.
Maybe if you're a beginning programmer. My shop codes exclusively in C and I can even create rather complex apps in a few days because:
#1 I know what I'm doing, and..
#2 It's called libraries....be it STL, MFC, MyStack.h or whatever. Code re-use is the key to rapid and robust application development.
And my code is platform independant and usually weighs in at less than 100K (for a simple DB app). Web-based,Web-based,Web-based...can I make it any clearer? I'm talking about real-world, mission-critical data applications where bandwidth is paid for and no one gives a fsck if the button turns neon pink and spins in a circle when you mouse over it.
VB has its place in small businesses and first year programming courses where its not a big deal if the code is messy, non-portable, slow and bloated. If your company is paying full time salaried VB programmers who have no other skills, start familiarizing yourself with the procedures involved in signing up for unemployment. You company is eventually going to grow to a point where VB totally fails and you find that your job was the one cut in order to dish out the money for someone else's software that actually works. Either that or your company just goes tits up. Dot Com anyone?
The real question is...is this a trend that will be spread throughout all pro sports, or is this just one of the death throws of a once popular sport trying desperately to find more fans?
There's a reason why those stadiums aren't being packed anymore. Partially due to fscking over the fans with two strikes in the past decade, also partially due to other sports simply being marketed better.
The directions clearly said that copies should be handed out. You're just gonna have to wait.
;)
OK...fine...maybe someone will email it to you
Here's the real kicker....McD's in Tokyo has already been providing WiFi. Except not with the retarded marketing scheme being pushed in the US. In Tokyo, you have an account with a major provider and McD's just provides the connection. The provider kicks back a percentage to McD's who now can compete directly with starbucks as a place where people can go for a coffee break and take work with them. No one really stays all that long; just long enough to tweak a spreadsheet while sipping a cup of coffee in a less crowded and possibly more convenient place than the local starbucks. I've noticed a lot of people coming in around the 9 to 11 mark when business is traditionally slow to read email and watch news on the 42in Plasma TV's thay have.
The idea works in Tokyo because McD's is really not doing anything outside of their core business. Network support is contracted out, so they just have to keep making cofee and food. The US side is trying to add sysadmin tasks to the McDonald's worker as well as bank on folks using a computer while they eat a big mac. The only reason why I go to McD's over here is because they still have the fried apple pies, not that baked crap the US stores have served for the last 10 years. I'm not going to buy a value meal just to get on the net when I can do it at work for free, or home for what I'm already paying my ISP.
Poor docs, now they'll have to carry Medical DoS Insurance
The sad thing is this is probably true. Between medical malpractice and patent suits over the stupid trash icon America is slowly sueing itself into an economic hole where we are too afraid to innovate and experiment.
It's no wonder why we are slowly slipping further behind other countries in these areas. Meanwhile, some lazy fsck will sue his employer for "damages" after being fired over "discrimination" issues. The employer was in the right since the firing actually occured because the lazy fsck was a lazy fsck. The monetary "damages" are enough to keep the lazy fsck hapily unemployed for a year while the rest of the company loses their Christmas bonuses.
Being that I am currently living on a tiny island in the middle of the East China Sea, I would love to have the comfort of knowing a critical operation could be done on me within hours as opposed to the days it would take to either get me to the doctor or vice versa. But it will never happen via American Doctors because they're too afraid a lost packet will scar or kill me and cost them millions. Meanwhile if I died on the plane flight trying to get to the doctor, they'd just give my mom a card and say "sorry, there was nothing that could be done."
Opposite. Older people from Okinawa will correct you and incorrectly refer to themselves as OKINAWAJIN (of Okinawan Nationality). This would be like saying my nationality is Floridian. This is mostly due to them being pissed about the way the Japanese military treated them in WWII and then subsequently having the US "give" Okinawa back to Japan in 1972.
Okinawa used to be a seperate kindom called the Ryukyu Kingdom. I forget the year, but Japan forcefully occupied it a while back without much effort as Okinawan people are really peaceful and laid back, thus not seeing a need for a signifigant army.
Thursday: middle of the business week. Would you want construction on the road you take to work on a work day?
Midnight: Upgrade to a system that tracks planes in the air. If there are no planes in the air, how can you test it? The upgrade was most likely done around midnight, but didn't see any signifigant use until the heavy part of the travelling day. The article indicated it was due to an interface with a defense system. JIEITAI (Japanese military) usually hit the office between 7 and 8, which was when the delays started. I could be wrong about the work time for the folks in Tokyo, but the two units I've worked with in Okinawa and Hokkaido were usually rolling in to hit their first cup of coffee just after 7.
Despite the lack of information in the article, passengers were not stranded. If their flight was cancelled, they were re-booked and most likely in the air within the hour of their original scheduled flight. Japanese air systems are extremely efficient, although I have no clue how they could be making any money.