And don't give me the crap about never having a chance to get REAL experience. Download GCC and hack at a kernel...write some code for a design contest...build something outside of class. It doesn't have to be for a company or a school project.
They don't care! If I didn't spend years working in a cubicle, it doesn't count to them. Take VB. I know it's a horrible language but bear with me. I spent my senior year in high school in a real job working with it. But I also had 3 or 4 classes with large projects in it as well as writing a dozen useful little apps on the side, and I've said so on my resume. And every HR chump I come across looks at it and says, "What, only one year of experience?" I can only restrain myself from throttling them for so long.
Wait a minute! The DMCA shouldn't apply at all in this case!
They claim that bnetd is a copy protection circumvention device. Namely, that it allows you to play without a unique CD-key, i.e., a pirated copy. Problem is, the only thing the copy protection does is prohibit access to Blizzard's Battlenet. It doesn't keep you from playing single or multiplayer games at all. Bnetd is only a circumvention device if the people using it gain access to Battlenet where they otherwise wouldn't. That is not the case.
It's like claiming a left-handed catcher's mitt is a circumvention device because people who use it won't be using the right-handed version to play baseball, ignoring the fact that you can still play without either.
Blizzard doesn't sell Battlenet; it's a free service to owners of their games. So it's more like, "Oh boy, a company won't let me do what I want with the game I bought with real money."
If anyone sold you a book and said you could only use official [publisher] bookmarks in it, since reverse-engineering their patented bookmark technology is illegal, you'd laugh your head off. How about a sack of potatoes which you are not allowed to make into waffle fries like Chick-Fil-A's, or a box of pens with which you are not allowed to write anything about the manufacture of writing utencils, past present or future. Absolutely nobody would think these to be even remotely reasonable restrictions on usage of something I purchased. Why then is the DMCA seen as good and proper by anyone at all?
If you want to talk about knee-jerk reactions, look at the guys who thought up the DMCA. You know, the ones who think that Congress is only there to guarantee their continued income. "Oh no, new technology threatens our revenues. Our lawyers tell us that the only solution is to make it illegal to do anything we do not explicitly permit." Gee, what a great idea.
It's probably something to do with attitude and presentation to the public more than skills.
But... I always thought people liked a 'holier-than-thou' attitude!
Seriously, I dunno what's going on. 95% of everything I send out, emails, faxes, voice messages even, just disappears into a void. Follow up contacts aren't much more successful. The few times someone has actually been willing to overlook the lack of past jobs, I'm up against 10 zillion other candidates and don't stand a chance. Everywhere I look, it's "must have 3-5 years experience", no exceptions.
So essentially, one reason you don't have hardware is because you don't have good looks? I should think that it would be a shortage in software (of the feminine variety) that would result...
I graduated from a computer-oriented Magnet high school with a 4.2, worked at a junior programming job my senior year, got a 4-year CS degree at Georgia Tech in under 3 years, and fucking CompUSA won't even hire me. How humiliating is that?
The very concept of an R&D department for a company is odd; "Let's spend money so as to make our current products and procedures obsolete, and then have to spend more money changing the equipment and retraining the employees."
But it never ceases to amaze me the gaping difference between companies like Intel and even Microsoft, whose existence practically centers around the obsolecence of their old products, and the member companies of the RIAA, who not only aren't interested in R&D but rather employ a large and expensive workforce, their lawyers, to try and maintain the technological status quo. An Anti-R&D, you might call it.
is that MS is a corporation. in the business for making money
I think most of us do realize this. But really, M$ is a very greedy and childish entity that has, to this date, followed through on only a very few of their promises, no matter how bad it may be for them. The Cryptogram article outlines a few things they'll have to do to become more 'Trustworthy', points out that many of them are fundamentally against the grain of M$'s behavior thus far, and then proceeds to ask, "Will they actually do this?". Placing release dates ahead of product completion, creeping featuritis, claiming that their bugs are their own concern and the world had better shut up about them. These are all things that they have continually done in the past and are well known to be extremely naughty, yet despite the multitude of spotlights on their actions and the sheer dependence of so many people on their software, they ignored all suggestions to do otherwise. Will they start using some well proven secure programming techniques or instead try to 'Embrace and Extend' them, blazing a bold new Public Relations trail into the world of security, in the process dooming themselves and the precious data of millions before they are given up as a bad job?
Certainly, no program is ever completely secure. But Outlook set new records when it came to disseminating virii using 'bugs' that were purposely put in as features. Outlook wasn't screwed over by some arcane gap in its security. Everything it did as a result of those those email scripts it did because that was exactly what it was supposed to do. The ability to write and send emails, to peruse through caches and address books; these are things that were not done on accident.
Things are bad enough with mere oversights on MS' part. When they deliberately build poor security, it all goes straight to hell.
No, they say they're going to focus on security. Given the kind of BS they've spouted off in the past along these lines, why should we take them at face value now?
Until they actually prove themselves with a fairly secure product, I'm going to be wary of any company that employs a 'Security Assurance Director'.
Apparently this is common practice at many stores, in many industries. Oddly enough though, we never had much of a problem with this at the Papa Johns I used to work at. The freezer shelf life of the stuff was always much greater than the time it would go unused; dough sometimes got hard to work with, but we'd never have to throw away more than a few trays out of a hundred, and dough was by far the cheapest part of the thing anyway. Any mistakes were either used in someone else's order, eaten by the staff, or given to one of the bums outside.
But it really is apalling that it is cheaper to destroy extremely valuable stuff, especially computer equipment, rather than give it away to some charity or other needy organiztion. Anyone have ideas on solving it that doesn't involve new legislation?
Oh, well, why stop with future techs. Power sources using any kind of fossil fuels. Mechanized agriculture. Antibiotics. The atlatl, for crying out loud.
Every single technological advance has a potential downside. Don't act as if there haven't been any good sides to go along with them.
So if my body isn't capable of dealing with dust and pollen, I should just have to suffer through it? Or how about I get an bad infection and my body is incapable of fighting it off. Should I just die? Deafness, blindness, lost limbs, paralysis, failing organs, senility, all of these may very well be fixed with near 100% reliability in the upcoming years, yet you tell me that "If it isn't natural, I'm not supposed to. Period."
You want to go live in the stone age, enjoy yourself. Keep me out of it.
Nuclear research:
"How could you experiment with dangerous isotopes and risk exposing the populace to them!"
"How could you let fossil fuel consumption go on forever without developing alternatives!"
Robotics:
"How could you take away workers' jobs with these monstrosities!"
"How could you force workers to continue doing dangerous tasks!"
Genetics:
"How could you fiddle with God's handiwork!"
"How could you let humans suffer from genetic diseases without looking for a cure!"
Pocket calculators:
"How could you remove incentive for children to learn arithmetic!"
"How could you force them to do rote math forever when there's automation to help!"
I agree that the number of people using languages that aren't well supported by.NET would be small, but even one half of one percent of all programmers is still a lot of programmers, and there are certainly things in those languages that cannot easily be done by C# or its 'skins', as the article called them.
It's one thing to make a common runtime that doesn't support them and quite another to do so and then claim that it is "totally language-neutral" when there are languages that cannot be supported at all. M$'s marketing department at work again.
We had a certain amount of credit in our accounts, and when it ran out, that was it. No more runs. Yes, we did much more careful desk checking "back in the day".
Indeed. I sometimes wish I had started programming on that kind of equipment and thus would have been forced to develop excellent code debugging habits. I'm ashamed to admit I rely far too heavily on runtime checking:( But I'm trying!
Of course NASA has to select only the best. They have to because it's so friggin ridiculously expensive to go into space and they have absolutely zero margin for error. This is the primary problem with the entire space industry. It's a government toy. With all the billions sunk into them over the decades, the only two useful things NASA's managed to do that couldn't be done otherwise was to put GPS and downward-looking satellites in orbit. Absolutely everything else has been PR stunts and fluff. Interesting and often quite amazing, but otherwise useless.
NASA has had 40 years to bring launch costs down to point where normal citizens and less-than-mega-corps could have access to space. A free market was the West's biggest advantage during the Cold War, but rather than try to bring it to bear on the difficulties of space, they left it entirely in the hands of bureaucrats. And now they are going so far as to say that the people who pay their wages, the people who grew up on legends about the lunar landings, the people who have for years dreamed of going into space themselves, are all totally unfit to dirty up NASA's pristine activities in their own private playground. I think this rather clearly indicates their lack of desire to open space up for people other than their own handpicked elite.
Anybody run any numbers on what it would take to make money mining asteroids? Obviously there's the enormous cost up front of aquiring the rock (and a comet, cheaper in the long run than continually resupplying volatiles) and building the facilities, but how cheap is it to drop the stuff back down to earth? Platinum, for instance, is worth a good $400 or $500 an ounce. and iridium is almost as much. Both of them are extremely difficult to find around here but are much more common in space. If they could be dropped for a few hundred dollars per kilo there's still a ton of profit left over.
The New World isn't quite as good a comparison. The colonists didn't have to bring much with them and survival was, if not easy, not inordinately difficult. There were also factors contributing to increasing emigration other than pure profit (persecution, quests for utopia, etc). It was also not quite as expensive to come here.
You're saying that our shape itself is not a limiting factor to our physical capabilities?
That is exactly what I am saying. Our shape, what our unadorned bodies are capable of, no longer matters (much). Our bodies cannot fly; they are totally unsuited to aviation. Yet we fly anyway, ignoring the trivial problems of our body density and low surface area that birds spent eons overcoming. Suppose we made a sentient octopus and taught him how to build an airplane. Would his original 8-limbed aquatic origins matter anymore? He could fly with the best of us.
The fact that we have machinery to get over physical limitations is proof that we have these limitations in the first place.
Absolutely. I never said that the forces that limit our abilities ceased to exist. I said they have ceased to matter, which in terms of biology and evolution means the same thing. What does it matter to us that there's no rainfall in the desert? Or Antarctica never gets above freezing? Or the jungles are teeming with things that want to eat us, preferably while still kicking? Or that space is a giant vacuum being constantly seared with nasty radiation? We can survive and thrive and breed in virtually any environment we might find on Earth, and quite a few we wouldn't.
Ask any obese person or someone with gigantism whether this is true
Ok. Take a terrifically obese person; weighs in at seven or eight hundred pounds. Despite being barely able to get out of bed in the morning and not having seen his feet in years, he could get into an airplane and leave the ground behind. He is neither swift nor agile, yet he never has trouble finding a meal. He would die of heatstroke in weather hotter then 80 degrees, but he'll grow old sitting under an air conditioner. He couldn't defend himself from a fly and yet his lifespan will be limited only by the abilities of modern medicine. Most people would find him sexually revolting and unlikely in the extreme to breed, yet there may be a woman somewhere who will want his child, or he might be a sperm donor and will procreate that way.
There you go, you have some of the commonest factors influencing evolution, yet not one of them applies to this man. They no more matter to him than they do to Adonis, the black-belted Olympic athlete who hunts wild boar with a spear and builds whole villages from popsicle sticks in his spare time.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't care! If I didn't spend years working in a cubicle, it doesn't count to them. Take VB. I know it's a horrible language but bear with me. I spent my senior year in high school in a real job working with it. But I also had 3 or 4 classes with large projects in it as well as writing a dozen useful little apps on the side, and I've said so on my resume. And every HR chump I come across looks at it and says, "What, only one year of experience?" I can only restrain myself from throttling them for so long.
They claim that bnetd is a copy protection circumvention device. Namely, that it allows you to play without a unique CD-key, i.e., a pirated copy. Problem is, the only thing the copy protection does is prohibit access to Blizzard's Battlenet. It doesn't keep you from playing single or multiplayer games at all. Bnetd is only a circumvention device if the people using it gain access to Battlenet where they otherwise wouldn't. That is not the case.
It's like claiming a left-handed catcher's mitt is a circumvention device because people who use it won't be using the right-handed version to play baseball, ignoring the fact that you can still play without either.
The SSSCA would do exactly that.
If anyone sold you a book and said you could only use official [publisher] bookmarks in it, since reverse-engineering their patented bookmark technology is illegal, you'd laugh your head off. How about a sack of potatoes which you are not allowed to make into waffle fries like Chick-Fil-A's, or a box of pens with which you are not allowed to write anything about the manufacture of writing utencils, past present or future. Absolutely nobody would think these to be even remotely reasonable restrictions on usage of something I purchased. Why then is the DMCA seen as good and proper by anyone at all?
If you want to talk about knee-jerk reactions, look at the guys who thought up the DMCA. You know, the ones who think that Congress is only there to guarantee their continued income. "Oh no, new technology threatens our revenues. Our lawyers tell us that the only solution is to make it illegal to do anything we do not explicitly permit." Gee, what a great idea.
But... I always thought people liked a 'holier-than-thou' attitude!
Seriously, I dunno what's going on. 95% of everything I send out, emails, faxes, voice messages even, just disappears into a void. Follow up contacts aren't much more successful. The few times someone has actually been willing to overlook the lack of past jobs, I'm up against 10 zillion other candidates and don't stand a chance. Everywhere I look, it's "must have 3-5 years experience", no exceptions.
So essentially, one reason you don't have hardware is because you don't have good looks? I should think that it would be a shortage in software (of the feminine variety) that would result...
Ahh, but do you get to exaggerate and lie on the same scale?
I graduated from a computer-oriented Magnet high school with a 4.2, worked at a junior programming job my senior year, got a 4-year CS degree at Georgia Tech in under 3 years, and fucking CompUSA won't even hire me. How humiliating is that?
But it never ceases to amaze me the gaping difference between companies like Intel and even Microsoft, whose existence practically centers around the obsolecence of their old products, and the member companies of the RIAA, who not only aren't interested in R&D but rather employ a large and expensive workforce, their lawyers, to try and maintain the technological status quo. An Anti-R&D, you might call it.
And if "The Man" started summarily executing or imprisoning people who spread DeCSS code? Many of those mirrors would disappear quite quickly.
I think most of us do realize this. But really, M$ is a very greedy and childish entity that has, to this date, followed through on only a very few of their promises, no matter how bad it may be for them. The Cryptogram article outlines a few things they'll have to do to become more 'Trustworthy', points out that many of them are fundamentally against the grain of M$'s behavior thus far, and then proceeds to ask, "Will they actually do this?". Placing release dates ahead of product completion, creeping featuritis, claiming that their bugs are their own concern and the world had better shut up about them. These are all things that they have continually done in the past and are well known to be extremely naughty, yet despite the multitude of spotlights on their actions and the sheer dependence of so many people on their software, they ignored all suggestions to do otherwise. Will they start using some well proven secure programming techniques or instead try to 'Embrace and Extend' them, blazing a bold new Public Relations trail into the world of security, in the process dooming themselves and the precious data of millions before they are given up as a bad job?
Stay tuned, updates at eleven...
Things are bad enough with mere oversights on MS' part. When they deliberately build poor security, it all goes straight to hell.
Until they actually prove themselves with a fairly secure product, I'm going to be wary of any company that employs a 'Security Assurance Director'.
But it really is apalling that it is cheaper to destroy extremely valuable stuff, especially computer equipment, rather than give it away to some charity or other needy organiztion. Anyone have ideas on solving it that doesn't involve new legislation?
Every single technological advance has a potential downside. Don't act as if there haven't been any good sides to go along with them.
Haha, no kidding. "Men will willingly give up sex just to be rid of women". I wonder what the weather's like in her world...
You want to go live in the stone age, enjoy yourself. Keep me out of it.
Nuclear research:
"How could you experiment with dangerous isotopes and risk exposing the populace to them!"
"How could you let fossil fuel consumption go on forever without developing alternatives!"
Robotics:
"How could you take away workers' jobs with these monstrosities!"
"How could you force workers to continue doing dangerous tasks!"
Genetics:
"How could you fiddle with God's handiwork!"
"How could you let humans suffer from genetic diseases without looking for a cure!"
Pocket calculators:
"How could you remove incentive for children to learn arithmetic!"
"How could you force them to do rote math forever when there's automation to help!"
Notice the pattern here?
It's one thing to make a common runtime that doesn't support them and quite another to do so and then claim that it is "totally language-neutral" when there are languages that cannot be supported at all. M$'s marketing department at work again.
Indeed. I sometimes wish I had started programming on that kind of equipment and thus would have been forced to develop excellent code debugging habits. I'm ashamed to admit I rely far too heavily on runtime checking :( But I'm trying!
NASA has had 40 years to bring launch costs down to point where normal citizens and less-than-mega-corps could have access to space. A free market was the West's biggest advantage during the Cold War, but rather than try to bring it to bear on the difficulties of space, they left it entirely in the hands of bureaucrats. And now they are going so far as to say that the people who pay their wages, the people who grew up on legends about the lunar landings, the people who have for years dreamed of going into space themselves, are all totally unfit to dirty up NASA's pristine activities in their own private playground. I think this rather clearly indicates their lack of desire to open space up for people other than their own handpicked elite.
The New World isn't quite as good a comparison. The colonists didn't have to bring much with them and survival was, if not easy, not inordinately difficult. There were also factors contributing to increasing emigration other than pure profit (persecution, quests for utopia, etc). It was also not quite as expensive to come here.
Applause
That is exactly what I am saying. Our shape, what our unadorned bodies are capable of, no longer matters (much). Our bodies cannot fly; they are totally unsuited to aviation. Yet we fly anyway, ignoring the trivial problems of our body density and low surface area that birds spent eons overcoming. Suppose we made a sentient octopus and taught him how to build an airplane. Would his original 8-limbed aquatic origins matter anymore? He could fly with the best of us.
The fact that we have machinery to get over physical limitations is proof that we have these limitations in the first place.
Absolutely. I never said that the forces that limit our abilities ceased to exist. I said they have ceased to matter, which in terms of biology and evolution means the same thing. What does it matter to us that there's no rainfall in the desert? Or Antarctica never gets above freezing? Or the jungles are teeming with things that want to eat us, preferably while still kicking? Or that space is a giant vacuum being constantly seared with nasty radiation? We can survive and thrive and breed in virtually any environment we might find on Earth, and quite a few we wouldn't.
Ask any obese person or someone with gigantism whether this is true
Ok. Take a terrifically obese person; weighs in at seven or eight hundred pounds. Despite being barely able to get out of bed in the morning and not having seen his feet in years, he could get into an airplane and leave the ground behind. He is neither swift nor agile, yet he never has trouble finding a meal. He would die of heatstroke in weather hotter then 80 degrees, but he'll grow old sitting under an air conditioner. He couldn't defend himself from a fly and yet his lifespan will be limited only by the abilities of modern medicine. Most people would find him sexually revolting and unlikely in the extreme to breed, yet there may be a woman somewhere who will want his child, or he might be a sperm donor and will procreate that way.
There you go, you have some of the commonest factors influencing evolution, yet not one of them applies to this man. They no more matter to him than they do to Adonis, the black-belted Olympic athlete who hunts wild boar with a spear and builds whole villages from popsicle sticks in his spare time.
Well, it was an interesting thought experiment nonetheless.