And let's face it, how many people buying a CD actually give a flying fsck about the record company? We the consumers like what the artist makes. Somewhere in our heads we beleive that the money handed over goes (as it should) to the artist. We don't want to think about that cake being sliced into a bazillion pieces and the artist being lucky if they get to lick the plate.
They deserve a reasonable slice.
Hey musicians: here's an idea. Stop signing shitty contracts! If the bloated RIAA (sic) chums can't sign any new acts, they'll very quickly be fucked. Which would be nice, IMO.
They may be evil, but they are not a necessary evil, as Courtney so clearly stated.
Of course, I will make exceptions for some of the smaller indie record companies (such as 4AD, who seem to be a bit more focussed on creativity rather than the lucre. I know that with them, if they have an artist I like, they are likely to have others. This is a good thing.
"The greatest trick the record companies ever pulled was convincing the world that the bands they signed are the best."
In-your-face advertising. Completely sensory immersion for a generally sedentary society. For some, advertising could be the only exciting thing that ever happens. Promoters know this.
Wouldn't it be nice to have digital music recorded 32 bits per channel, 500kHz sample rate? A lot of classical music would sound a hell of a lot better.
Corporations are amoral evil gluttonous creatures who have no more empathy for the consumer than a wolf has for a sheep.
They see the revolution coming and are attempting
to make walls illegal so as not to be the first against it.
Actually, I get the impression that as long as they can keep feeding the sheep their mind-altering drugs such as television, they really are quite realistic in being complacent. The Majority doesn't give a shit, and has no intention of getting off its fat ass.
I don't think it's naive just wishful. In every medium people want to believe that it has some form of ideals or principles and the like. It's just to avoid nihilism.
I don't think that nihilism is inappropriate, and even if it was, I wouldn't want my inner void fulfilled by having capitalist propaganda spewed into it. Thank you very much.
I'm on a H1-B visa, and I have to say that as an Australian senior (I'm 28) analyst/programmer (specializing in web applications) currently working in Los Angeles, I could earn more money at home, working on better managed projects with better educated people. So obviously, the money is not why I am in the USA. I am here to experience something different.
The difference in IT development between Australia and the USA is that Australian Capital Gains Tax makes Australia an unattractive place for venture capitalists. Therefore the proliferation of new, interesting projects is smaller per capita. But enough about Australia.
A couple of things I will say to people considering H1-B, especially if a recruitment agency is handling your visa proceessing:
Handle ALL your own money. If they say the package is $x or something, make sure you get all that. Don't let them take any deductions off you: I guarantee you will be screwed over if you let them "make life simple for you". It's not that hard to arrange your own accomodation over the internet.
Investigate cost of living. You will get a nasty surprise otherwise. Living in California is not cheap, and if you live withing EMP distance of the Bay Area then a typical wage offered by a certain Fortune 500 asshole finance corporation that I did my first H1-B stint with would not feed and house a dog. Don't accept anything that doesn't pay at least 80 grand in California. Talk to people who live in the place where you will be living. Figure it out.
Don't sign anything until you get done with your research. Don't allow them to pressure you. If there is too much pressure, then screw 'em. There's plenty of jobs around.
Read the fine print. Never assume that anyone has your best interests in mind. You are nothing more than a cheap import labour resource, and it is more than possible that the company you work for will treat you accordingly. (I experienced this firsthand - a massive development project with people from non-IT backgrounds in charge - did not listen to educated opinions of development staff - the most infuriatingly frustrating experience of my life, and then there was the apartheid-like segregation and discrepancies in treatment - needless to say after two years of code and burning out over 50 people, the piece of crap is going to flop, and I am long gone.)
As previously stated by others, it is no big deal to change your H1-B over to another job if you find that what you've been stuck with is unacceptable. Don't take shit - you don't owe anyone anything if you're being treated without respect. Go for a place where there is respect.
I heard a few years ago the Microsoft was scheming on a way to get a few millicents on each transaction on the Internet.
Imagine this. An entity whose sole purpose is to make money for its owners becomes the major monetary transport media in the US. Pretty soon, MSFT is a two-digit proportion of the US GDP. Democratically elected representatives of the people feeding this beast quiver in fear and reverence, and pander slaveringly. MS representatives garner considerable airtime and begin to influence mass public opinion by pointing out failures of government to meet certain needs of public. Public agrees with MS and decides to like them. MS hikes up their cut on transactions, buys most big media outlets, and pummels govt with plebian consipiracy theories...
God, this train of thought is too sickening to contemplate!
Now why is it that the following sequence seems to be reiterating over and over?
George Lucas
L. Ron Hubbard
George Lucas
L. Ron Hubbard
Dehumanizing aspects of technology, men of VISION dammit, and what else, oh yeah, rich as fsck. Perhaps we should also mention the hordes of mindless followers perfectly willing to expend hard-earned dollars, and since time is money, spending their lives making these fat old bastards fatter.
I think that fonts and font rendering are much bigger stumbling blocks. Star Office... by default produces documents that look hideous on screen because of font scaling issues. That is ridiculous in this day and age.
Amen to that. And just about every other X app. I love Linux, but for crying out loud, it can't be that hard to implement antialiased fonts, can it?
It wouldn't be that much of a hack (for 24-bit displays at least) to have 16 or 256 Greyscale levels in the bitmap to indicate opacity for each pixel in the font.
I know there's some guys who are working on support for TTF in X, and there's already scalable font support, but that font server needs some kind of beefin' up.
Average users think the current fonts look ubercrappy, and they are right. There's no good reason to settle for less than what's possible. Is X just such a convoluted pile of junk that making antialiasing of fonts a default setting is nigh on impossible? Even the kernel hackers amongst us could benefit from more readable screens (well, when they are bothering to use X).
The point is, X is the face of Linux for a lot of users. The font problem makes that face "not pretty enough" for them. 'Specially managerial types. The face just confirms their suspicions that Linux was haphazardly thrown together from bits of old junk by a bunch of anarchist teenage hackers, and they wouldn't want such a thing compromising their beige little world.
corporations only gain control over people by buying off lawmakers. ooops, i mean lobbying. be careful what you wish for...
Or by employing them. Since we can assume that your average Joe Consumer is going to get himself into a horrendous amount of debt during his working life, or wants to save some money, he'll stick to that job like shit to an army blanket, and put up with all kinds of personal sacrifices and compromises and perhaps even abuse.
For the even more weak-minded there is what I can only assume to be advertising-driven compulsions to do one or more of the following things:
Wear particular brands of clothing whose cost far exceeds their actual value. "Nike" and "Hilfiger" and all that kind of crap. Said clothing brands are often heavily advertised on the actual product. (Smells like a virus).
Eat a particular food when in a particular mood. Usually a high-carbohydrate, low nutritional value junk food.
And these are just two examples of mind control that corporations inflict on people that are detrimental in some way. I'm sure some of our fellow slashdotters can think of many more, any meme heads in the house?
On another note, it was mentioned previously that the cyberpunk culture has been anticipating in dread a world controlled by ultramegacorporations. A world in which individuals supposedly feel powerless against these behemoths. A world in which governments (and hence military, police and intelligence forces) apparently are merely pawns to be pushed around by these corporate beasts. A world in which the all-important Market, a million-headed Hydra consuming everything in its path, cannot be killed unless every head is squashed simultaneously. A world of exploitation of millions of people for no other reason than they don't have as much of this imaginary money as their exploiters. A world of behaviour modification, excessive social repression, isolation, and bizzarre psychological disorders. A world that does not value the unique characteristics of individual people.
Since the end of World War I we have been treading the path toward this world, sometimes
with joy, sometimes with the horrible knowledge
that we are going to fsck everything up (depending on what mood is more "newsworthy").
When the US president after World War II declared that "the purpose of the American economy is to produce more consumer goods", this set the precedent for the rest of the century.
The twentieth century was strange, as centuries
go. Consider the impact of technology here: the automobile, the television, the myriad of household labor saving devices and subsequent proliferation of divertainment devices. All
this time freed up so that Consumer Dogma may
be absorbed from the various media.
Of course, the dogma doesn't have to be direct. Most of the time, watching the vast majority of TV shows, it is an assumed fundamental axoim on which TV-Reality is based. Thou shalt consume and shut the fsck up.
You might beleive that something is fundamentally wrong with the way all this is set up, but you don't know who to complain to, and you doubt anyone would listen, because you're possibly young, and what would you know?
Here's what I think:
Governments should exert much tighter controls on corporations. 1. Their size should be limited to a market cap of (say) ten billion dollars, for starters. This will not only encourage competition and help prevent monopolies, but create jobs. Adam Smith would be happier with that. 2. Corporations should not be allowed to hold stock in other corporations. A corporation is not a human being and should have not nearly as many right as a human being. 3. Directors and executives should be made personally responsible for the actions of the corporation, including bankruptcy. 4. Corporations should not be allowed to do in foreign countries what is illegal in their home country, to prevent sweatshop slavery and raping of natural resources.
Corporations will always evolve to survive in changing market conditions (of course, those that don't survive are replaced by a better-adapted competitor). This is why governments should have no fear in tightening the leash on corporations, instead of pandering to them (which sickens me to watch).
Therefore, everyone who is pissed off about this kind of stuff should be making lots of noise about it. If everyone told the governments of their respective countries, either at the ballot box or in writing or in protest, what's pissing them off, then that would be something acheived becuase whether the action is successful or not, more people will be made aware of the source of the problem.
It's times like these that I wish that Java's graphics performance was more reasonable. With a decent vector library, Java would be quite kick ass, and just about every user already has Java capability. (I remember the despair at the fact that no user had even heard of PNG, let alone downloaded a plugin for this extremely worthy bitmap format).
Anyway, my point is that transporting some kind of graphics manipulation code as Java bytecode might be easy IN SOME CASES, and a hell of a lot less frustrating than waiting for the major browser vendors to implement support for SVG. There's always more than one way to do it;-)
"The function of an operating system is fixed." - One of the Big Heads said something along this line.
Instead of writing new operating systems that virtually nobody is going to install, it would be far simpler and more cost-effective to simply develop a Distributed Processing API Library and/or supporting system services for existing operating systems that are capable of handling it. Like that MOSIX project.
Obviously most Unices fall into the boat, as would Java-based environments, but you could probably even do it on NT if you were really desperate.
Of course, your really big-ass gov/mil/edu houses may not be too concerned about the cost:-)
Seems like the Java platform would be the best way to get this kind of thing to the masses, nearly everyone has some kind of Java Runtime Environment installed, and not many non-techies are going to want to mess around with their kernel.
Does anyone know if there is any research being done into the prospect of self-replicating nanomachines?
I find this to be a particularly fascinating idea. Say for example if there were nanites that could manufacture themselves out of the carbon in your adipose tissue. You could make the little beasties go through and eat up all your fat, and when you run out of fat, they die. You'd probably die too, but hey, it's an interesting possible surgical use, and certainly would be easier to develop than nanites that look for cancer cells.
I'm pretty sure that the book's author isn't the first person out there who has suggested color-coded object modelling, but given that most system design documentation out there is going to be read on paper, what's the point?
Also, since most IT development people are male, we have a much higher percentage of color-blind people amongst us than the general population. I personally know three other developers just in my circle of peers who are completely, if not partially color-blind.
It's fine if you can read and understand a diagramming method, but what about the person who ineviably must follow in your footsteps? We ought to try to always consider the person following in our footsteps, because most of the time, we are following someone else ourselves.
I saw this written somewhere: "I always try to write my code as if the guy who has to maintain it is a psychotic axe-murderer who has my name and address." - the same approach should be taken to documentation.
It seems like these Script Kiddies are seeking to make themselves appear notorious and threatening. What is strange is their choice of target.
Considering what others have said on the subject of Script Kiddie Psychology, it figures that these kids would attack those in a position to make compare favourably to them.
It struck me that this point of view is essentially identical to that of the schoolyard bully who picks on smart kids, because everyone is always telling him he's not smart (for example).
Still, I find it strange that these kids would want to attack someone who may be a fellow IT peer a few years down the track. All depends on who you feel most threatened by, no? The schoolyard bully sees more threat in the nonviolent academic kids than in the schoolyard principal.
Anyway, I don't want to start generalizing. I am only talking about this particular instance of the scriptkiddies.
Those developers deserve a big hand as they propel Linux into a more advanced phase of user interfaces. If you ask me, those screen shots look one hell of a lot better than the recent slatherings of Macintosh "Aqua" themes that have been lurking about.
Looking long term, however, we must look to see which code base will serve us better in years to come, and make it the base. In cases like these it's nearly always the better-designed product that is more flexible and maintainable. Let's keep it that way.
Microsoft are going to do this company what they do to every other company that they notice has an innovative product. They go into a deal like this.
Sooner or later MS is going to want in on the development cycle. They'll take a good look at this product, and a few months later they'll announce their wonderful identical product, and sever the ties with the company whose idea they just stole.
Either that, or they'll just buy them outright, and casually remove linux support...
Heh... I used to think those dimensionx guys were cool too...
Why not with music and movies? I have a huge VHS collection. Am I going to have to upgrade all this in 5 years because VHS VCRs don't exist anymore, and mine's inevitably dead? That's a completely crappy deal if you ask me.
Same with CDs. No matter how careful you are (and I am pretty damn careful) they scratch like buggery, and are generally useless after 5 years. Why do they even bother selling them, why not just call it a three year license at the end of which you could pay a buck or two and get the media replaced. I've ripped all my CDs (well all the ones that don't suck) for my personal use just so I don't damage the damn things any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey musicians: here's an idea. Stop signing shitty contracts! If the bloated RIAA (sic) chums can't sign any new acts, they'll very quickly be fucked. Which would be nice, IMO. They may be evil, but they are not a necessary evil, as Courtney so clearly stated.
Of course, I will make exceptions for some of the smaller indie record companies (such as 4AD, who seem to be a bit more focussed on creativity rather than the lucre. I know that with them, if they have an artist I like, they are likely to have others. This is a good thing.
"The greatest trick the record companies ever pulled was convincing the world that the bands they signed are the best."
In-your-face advertising. Completely sensory immersion for a generally sedentary society. For some, advertising could be the only exciting thing that ever happens. Promoters know this.
Wouldn't it be nice to have digital music recorded 32 bits per channel, 500kHz sample rate? A lot of classical music would sound a hell of a lot better.
--
They see the revolution coming and are attempting to make walls illegal so as not to be the first against it.
Actually, I get the impression that as long as they can keep feeding the sheep their mind-altering drugs such as television, they really are quite realistic in being complacent. The Majority doesn't give a shit, and has no intention of getting off its fat ass.
--
Corporations seem to have more free speech than individuals these days. Does this seem fair to you, voters?
--
I don't think that nihilism is inappropriate, and even if it was, I wouldn't want my inner void fulfilled by having capitalist propaganda spewed into it. Thank you very much.
--
But this would be a debit card on a cash account. Get it recharded when it runs out. Great way to launder cash too.
Which is probably why the pr0n freaks aren't all using it to make their mirror sites right now.
Did I mention Natalie Portman?
--
The difference in IT development between Australia and the USA is that Australian Capital Gains Tax makes Australia an unattractive place for venture capitalists. Therefore the proliferation of new, interesting projects is smaller per capita. But enough about Australia.
A couple of things I will say to people considering H1-B, especially if a recruitment agency is handling your visa proceessing:
--
Imagine this. An entity whose sole purpose is to make money for its owners becomes the major monetary transport media in the US. Pretty soon, MSFT is a two-digit proportion of the US GDP. Democratically elected representatives of the people feeding this beast quiver in fear and reverence, and pander slaveringly. MS representatives garner considerable airtime and begin to influence mass public opinion by pointing out failures of government to meet certain needs of public. Public agrees with MS and decides to like them. MS hikes up their cut on transactions, buys most big media outlets, and pummels govt with plebian consipiracy theories...
God, this train of thought is too sickening to contemplate!
--
As a token of our company's appreciation for you saving us millions of dollars in commissions for pesky sales people, we'd like to say, well, thanks!
We look forward to your continued baseless conjecture.
ILM
--
Dehumanizing aspects of technology, men of VISION dammit, and what else, oh yeah, rich as fsck. Perhaps we should also mention the hordes of mindless followers perfectly willing to expend hard-earned dollars, and since time is money, spending their lives making these fat old bastards fatter.
Stuff that for a joke.
--
WHAT? You mean they're not?
Damn, there goes the entire foundation of my sense of self and reality, then.
PS. You really were kidding, right? *fret, fret*
--
Amen to that. And just about every other X app. I love Linux, but for crying out loud, it can't be that hard to implement antialiased fonts, can it?
It wouldn't be that much of a hack (for 24-bit displays at least) to have 16 or 256 Greyscale levels in the bitmap to indicate opacity for each pixel in the font.
I know there's some guys who are working on support for TTF in X, and there's already scalable font support, but that font server needs some kind of beefin' up.
Average users think the current fonts look ubercrappy, and they are right. There's no good reason to settle for less than what's possible. Is X just such a convoluted pile of junk that making antialiasing of fonts a default setting is nigh on impossible? Even the kernel hackers amongst us could benefit from more readable screens (well, when they are bothering to use X).
The point is, X is the face of Linux for a lot of users. The font problem makes that face "not pretty enough" for them. 'Specially managerial types. The face just confirms their suspicions that Linux was haphazardly thrown together from bits of old junk by a bunch of anarchist teenage hackers, and they wouldn't want such a thing compromising their beige little world.
--
Or by employing them. Since we can assume that your average Joe Consumer is going to get himself into a horrendous amount of debt during his working life, or wants to save some money, he'll stick to that job like shit to an army blanket, and put up with all kinds of personal sacrifices and compromises and perhaps even abuse.
For the even more weak-minded there is what I can only assume to be advertising-driven compulsions to do one or more of the following things:
- Wear particular brands of clothing whose cost far exceeds their actual value. "Nike" and "Hilfiger" and all that kind of crap. Said clothing brands are often heavily advertised on the actual product. (Smells like a virus).
- Eat a particular food when in a particular mood. Usually a high-carbohydrate, low nutritional value junk food.
And these are just two examples of mind control that corporations inflict on people that are detrimental in some way. I'm sure some of our fellow slashdotters can think of many more, any meme heads in the house?--
On another note, it was mentioned previously that the cyberpunk culture has been anticipating in dread a world controlled by ultramegacorporations. A world in which individuals supposedly feel powerless against these behemoths. A world in which governments (and hence military, police and intelligence forces) apparently are merely pawns to be pushed around by these corporate beasts. A world in which the all-important Market, a million-headed Hydra consuming everything in its path, cannot be killed unless every head is squashed simultaneously. A world of exploitation of millions of people for no other reason than they don't have as much of this imaginary money as their exploiters. A world of behaviour modification, excessive social repression, isolation, and bizzarre psychological disorders. A world that does not value the unique characteristics of individual people.
Since the end of World War I we have been treading the path toward this world, sometimes with joy, sometimes with the horrible knowledge that we are going to fsck everything up (depending on what mood is more "newsworthy"). When the US president after World War II declared that "the purpose of the American economy is to produce more consumer goods", this set the precedent for the rest of the century.
The twentieth century was strange, as centuries go. Consider the impact of technology here: the automobile, the television, the myriad of household labor saving devices and subsequent proliferation of divertainment devices. All this time freed up so that Consumer Dogma may be absorbed from the various media.
Of course, the dogma doesn't have to be direct. Most of the time, watching the vast majority of TV shows, it is an assumed fundamental axoim on which TV-Reality is based. Thou shalt consume and shut the fsck up.
You might beleive that something is fundamentally wrong with the way all this is set up, but you don't know who to complain to, and you doubt anyone would listen, because you're possibly young, and what would you know?
Here's what I think:
Governments should exert much tighter controls on corporations. 1. Their size should be limited to a market cap of (say) ten billion dollars, for starters. This will not only encourage competition and help prevent monopolies, but create jobs. Adam Smith would be happier with that. 2. Corporations should not be allowed to hold stock in other corporations. A corporation is not a human being and should have not nearly as many right as a human being. 3. Directors and executives should be made personally responsible for the actions of the corporation, including bankruptcy. 4. Corporations should not be allowed to do in foreign countries what is illegal in their home country, to prevent sweatshop slavery and raping of natural resources.
Corporations will always evolve to survive in changing market conditions (of course, those that don't survive are replaced by a better-adapted competitor). This is why governments should have no fear in tightening the leash on corporations, instead of pandering to them (which sickens me to watch).
Therefore, everyone who is pissed off about this kind of stuff should be making lots of noise about it. If everyone told the governments of their respective countries, either at the ballot box or in writing or in protest, what's pissing them off, then that would be something acheived becuase whether the action is successful or not, more people will be made aware of the source of the problem.
--
Anyway, my point is that transporting some kind of graphics manipulation code as Java bytecode might be easy IN SOME CASES, and a hell of a lot less frustrating than waiting for the major browser vendors to implement support for SVG. There's always more than one way to do it ;-)
--
Kudos to the Mozilla squad. Keep up the good work guys.
Just keep it lean. DO ONE THING WELL. Good philosophy for a tool, a la Unix, a la Emacs... leave the silly stuff for plug-ins.
--
Instead of writing new operating systems that virtually nobody is going to install, it would be far simpler and more cost-effective to simply develop a Distributed Processing API Library and/or supporting system services for existing operating systems that are capable of handling it. Like that MOSIX project.
Obviously most Unices fall into the boat, as would Java-based environments, but you could probably even do it on NT if you were really desperate.
Of course, your really big-ass gov/mil/edu houses may not be too concerned about the cost :-)
Seems like the Java platform would be the best way to get this kind of thing to the masses, nearly everyone has some kind of Java Runtime Environment installed, and not many non-techies are going to want to mess around with their kernel.
Go on, you know you want to:
CLICK HERE TO ENSLAVE YOUR COMPUTER IN THE BORG COLLECTIVE
--
I find this to be a particularly fascinating idea. Say for example if there were nanites that could manufacture themselves out of the carbon in your adipose tissue. You could make the little beasties go through and eat up all your fat, and when you run out of fat, they die. You'd probably die too, but hey, it's an interesting possible surgical use, and certainly would be easier to develop than nanites that look for cancer cells.
Is there a microbiologist in the house?
--
Also, since most IT development people are male, we have a much higher percentage of color-blind people amongst us than the general population. I personally know three other developers just in my circle of peers who are completely, if not partially color-blind.
It's fine if you can read and understand a diagramming method, but what about the person who ineviably must follow in your footsteps? We ought to try to always consider the person following in our footsteps, because most of the time, we are following someone else ourselves.
I saw this written somewhere: "I always try to write my code as if the guy who has to maintain it is a psychotic axe-murderer who has my name and address." - the same approach should be taken to documentation.
--
Considering what others have said on the subject of Script Kiddie Psychology, it figures that these kids would attack those in a position to make compare favourably to them.
It struck me that this point of view is essentially identical to that of the schoolyard bully who picks on smart kids, because everyone is always telling him he's not smart (for example).
Still, I find it strange that these kids would want to attack someone who may be a fellow IT peer a few years down the track. All depends on who you feel most threatened by, no? The schoolyard bully sees more threat in the nonviolent academic kids than in the schoolyard principal.
Anyway, I don't want to start generalizing. I am only talking about this particular instance of the scriptkiddies.
--
How many polygons was that again?
--
Those developers deserve a big hand as they propel Linux into a more advanced phase of user interfaces. If you ask me, those screen shots look one hell of a lot better than the recent slatherings of Macintosh "Aqua" themes that have been lurking about.
Looking long term, however, we must look to see which code base will serve us better in years to come, and make it the base. In cases like these it's nearly always the better-designed product that is more flexible and maintainable. Let's keep it that way.
PS. That translucent window is especially funky.
--
Sooner or later MS is going to want in on the development cycle. They'll take a good look at this product, and a few months later they'll announce their wonderful identical product, and sever the ties with the company whose idea they just stole.
Either that, or they'll just buy them outright, and casually remove linux support...
Heh... I used to think those dimensionx guys were cool too...
Turing's Halting Problem comes to mind. And fun stuff too:
Why not with music and movies? I have a huge VHS collection. Am I going to have to upgrade all this in 5 years because VHS VCRs don't exist anymore, and mine's inevitably dead? That's a completely crappy deal if you ask me.
Same with CDs. No matter how careful you are (and I am pretty damn careful) they scratch like buggery, and are generally useless after 5 years. Why do they even bother selling them, why not just call it a three year license at the end of which you could pay a buck or two and get the media replaced. I've ripped all my CDs (well all the ones that don't suck) for my personal use just so I don't damage the damn things any more.
--
Ye manglers of code
Who twist and scrape the data
The find the motherlode
Blessed be, ye hackers
:-)
Inquisitive lads and lasses
Keep curiosity burning
While you sit there on your asses
--