If these people really did care about America being a meritocracy, they would give away their fortunes like many
of last century's elite did (e.g Andrew Carnegie).
In related news, about a week ago B.G.'s foundataion just happened to give $100Million to the aids vaccine project, which actually is on the verge of producing something (they've isolated a source of immunity, it's now just a matter of making a reliable vaccine from it). Do a search on Yahoo!news; I'm slightly too lazy to look up the link.
Don't get me wrong; I still think microsoft is crap just good enough to sell, and Evil(tm) as a business (I mostly use unix and occasionally macs for what I do, for so many reasons). But I do have respect for the man for doing that. Absolutely.
Interestingly, I never provide salary history, and it's never stopped me from getting hired yet. Out of politeness, if asked about it, I'll give a range ("mid-whatevers" or "low-whatever") from wherever I previously worked, but since I switch between contract and permanent work anyway, it's just not always relevant.
And yes, for reference, I'm in my 20s too. Sure there are plenty of inflexible, our-way-or-else employers out there - but there are also more clueful shops too. Keep looking....
As someone posted above, it depends on the laws of the state you're working in whether or not it's legal (some states, like Texas, are "employment at-will" - translation, no reason is ever required by law for letting someone go). In practice, it may be somewhat shaky legal ground, but your safest bet (and surest way to stay out of court, whether or not you'd win) is just to find another job. It's also less stressful; if that's management's clue level, do you really *want* to see what they do next?
At a recent job (I won't name the company), I asked on the way in about the agreement. They didn't have one at the time, fine. Two months later, they come in with a heavy-duty con-compete contract (with no compensation provisions in it, either!) and told us "sign it or you're fired".
I walked. There are enough companies looking for programmers that I didn't even lose sleep over it. I wasn't the only one, either. Eventually, maybe corporate bosses will get a Clue(tm) that doing that serves precisely to drive out the people they're trying to keep....
After all that's the whole point here, right? Myself, I just got back into computer games after not playing (really, almost avioding them) for 10+ years, because 'most everything I saw looked derivative and sucked, and I didn't have the newest, fastest computer needed to run 'em anyway.
Last year a friend introduced my girlfriend and I to Starcraft - which has actual strategy, actual interaction (speaking solely of multiplayer), and actually meets most (but not all) of Dogma's criteria. It plays like a good automated board game, and I got hooked, much to my amazement. I've also been intrigued more recently by the Dreamcast game "Jet Grind Radio" which actually *would* score a perfect 10 on Dogma2001.
The point is that these games actually, just like you said, didn't depend on the latest graphics cards or 3D rendered textures. Quake-n is a fine game, but that's the point - it's already made. Different is good....
Macs have always tried (and often succeeded) in being the "prettiest" desktops around, sure - nobody said M$ was stupid about whose UI ideas they ripped off (what they did with 'em is another matter). Now that Apple has finally got a stable core OS (a full-featured unix, at that), what's wrong with going for the eye candy? Go surf over to www.themes.org and tell me that nobody's interested in how their UI looks.:)
BTW, through a friend who's a Mac programmer (I'm totally on Linux/Intel and other unix boxen, myself), I've gotten to see some of the recent builds of OSX - and it's sweet, folks. As the debug code gets stripped out, it's sped up a *lot* from the public beta. This could be fun once it ships.
Here's the relevane page from the study about media and games. The result? There's quite possibly a real association, but it's *small*, and likely just an indicator of tendancies already there.
While any industry agreeing to pre-censor itself is certainly a bad thing, and I hope that this measure fails quickly, I don't actually think it would prevent all these games from being made. Did anyone here buy Q3 as a result of advertising, as opposed to word of mouth?
Don't get me wrong; I'm not an enormous fan of "really violent" games, and there are only a couple in that category I play. On the other hand, it seems ludicrous to be concerned with showing animated pixel blood when eny night of the week cable TV shows far far worse (which bothers you more: seeing a bunch of polygons fall off the side of a sprite in a shower of red pixels, or watching a very realistic representation of an actor's arm being shot off, complete with fake blood and screams? Don't answer all at once...) But whether any of these are "appropriate" for a given audience is a question for individuals and families, not the courts. Or it should be.
Java, like any language, is a tool. Use it where it fits (and nearly any UI app work I do is in Java these days - and all my work's on linux or other unix platforms). No, I wouldn't write a network driver in it, no I couldn't write a kernel in it - there are other tools for those jobs.
But then, I've had a hard time explaining to some managers what Java does - they hear about it, but for too many people java is still "applets and something else like that, right?". *sigh* apparently that mentality thrives here, too...
Someone already responded, but I will too. Any contant legal concerns would still be present - the only advantage.alt would give you in that regard is that you could point to the "created-explicitly-as-non-mainstream".alt in your domain and hopefully be able to say that anyone who went there, should understand what that means - just like "alt." is unmoderated, etc. Whether or not this actually helps is another question.
What.alt hopefully would get you is, as the agreements say, a TLD explicitly stating that trademarks are not a condition for domain names. Whether by the time this happens, web-trademark laws are passed in the US pass to make this a moot (i.e. useless) provision (since they'd undoubtably just say "any website domain name"), we'll have to wait and see. I think it's definately worth a try.
Incidentally, remember when TLD's *did* mean something? I.e. Jon Postel's RFC specifying.com for commercial and general,.net for network providers ONLY, and.org for organizations and whoever else? It springs to mind whenever I see Network Solutions' "register your.net address! Can be used just like.com, and it's not as crowded!" ads. *Sigh*. I must be getting old.
If the format spec didn't change, the way Word uses it apparently did - I've seen this trying to use word processors which handle word-97 files properly, watching them make ugly messes out of word-2000 documents with such features as revision tracking, some list formatting options, etc.
You don't have to change very much to have a compatibility problem, at least for the people - professional users, mostly - who use those advanced features.
Microsoft Word has a file format only slightly less complex than the human brain. - Linux Magazine, from a month or two ago.
That WMaker news is what I was looking for/ wondering about. Too bad - I've got a Thinkpad I'm about to add linux to (it came with w98, and is currently my only computer that *isn't* linux). I use Suse usually, but was curious to try mandrake.
But I'm not going to switch desktops just to for an easier install. (FWIW, Suse's "old" install has worked fine for me so far, although it's long and complex in the way that the old slack installs were - you spend a short eternity picking packages and configurations; their new tool's still buggy. It's a wonderful distro once you're installed, though.:)
I wonder if anyone else saw these problems with windowmaker on mandrake?
My favorite part was re-reading Jon Postel's comments about intended uses for the existing TLDs:
NET - This domain is intended to hold only the computers of network providers, that is the NIC and NOC computers, the administrative computers, and the network node computers. The customers of the network provider would have domain names of their own (not in the NET TLD).
Did anyone else see Network Solutions' propoganda push recently to "encourage people to start using.net domains, which are widely available, for commercial purposes since.com is getting crowded"? Yeah, this is an RFC and not a cast-in-stone law, but it still makes me wonder if anyone there even remembers this.
The average american workday has been on the rise again for years now. (And that's white-collar professionals, not counting those who hold down second jobs to pay the rent in cities like mine where "minimum wage" won't even pay the rent). I'm a programmer, like many here, and 8-hour days (not counting lunch) are the short ones, most weeks.
Meanwhile, the people I see (and work with) who live in large houses, drive expensive cars, go on vacations, etc. also owe truly enormous amounts of money - the kind of debt that I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing I was responsible for. In a boom economy, well, you can get by with that. If/when there's trouble....
Netpliance had to do something to stop people from buying the boxes at $99 and not subscribing - they lost a few hundred dollars every time someone did that, and they weren't going to stay in business long with that happening. They did a knee-jerk reaction at first, but everything I've heard from them since has been fairly mature, in making sure that they don't lose money selling the hardware (which would be rather stupid and moreover, if they went broke, that would be the end of those terminals at any price), while trying to find a way to approach the new demand - namely, the new, unforseen use the community found for them. So they made refurbs available (and I wouldn't complain if I got one, either!). Within days of the fiasco earlier, they said "we want to work with this - how can we do it?" And it looks for all the world like they're trying.
I'm not sure if that top-of-the-story blurb was supposed to spark discussion, but it came across rather troll-ish. I don't think Netpliance has been acting anti-linux since the first days of the hardware hack, when they had a money-sucking crisis on their hands.
...that we could arrange for a situation where the requirements are all fixed and locked down, and documented, before any coding begins? In industry jobs, I've never seen a project that wasn't having some marketing group force "critical" changes the whole time something was being written.
You get what you pay for, and take the time for. These days, most people and companies seem quite willing to settle for "bad, buggy programs now" rather than "better programs, later". Of course, without organization (also common), it's possible to wait and get nothing later, too. Process is expensive in terms of people involved and time, but it's a lot cheaper in the long run than the alternative.:)
Open-source projects actually follow this - every successful open project I've seen has a definate hierarchy of people managing patches and controling what winds up in the latest sub-point build, and making key architectural decisions so nothing derails them. Oh - and there's no one who'll fire you if marketings last-minute changes aren't rushed through.:)
In case anyone reads that and wonders, there's no chance of those spreading or doing anything. We were very careful about not letting those critters escape. Aside from that, they wouldn't have worked outside of our organization (Notes "/O=" organization, that is), would be stripped out by a Notes MTA-SMTP gateway so they couldn't travel the net, didn't destroy files (well, except unsaved work:), and had to be opened in Notes to run. So there's no possible virus danger or scare there, lest anyone wonder.
Agreed, as a relative thing (having worked in a Notes shop before). However, I seem to remember different Notes versions installing by default with different ECC settings, some of which were way too liberal. Me and another programmer used to compete to write the most destructive email - we actually found a way to shut down your Notes session by opening a message, using LotusScript, but you *did* have to have your ECC set to allow it to work. Sadly, R5 made this effort a bit easier... (I wrote C++ and java, but by osmosis and necessity learned notes programming too).
And later: Microsoft does not grant you any right to implement this Specification.
sure enough, this seems (IANAL) to directly state that if you use this spec to implement or imitate MS-Kerberus, you've violated the agreement and can probably be sued, etc. The download is just necessary to wrap the license agreement around it.
This is kinda novel - "We'll even tell you what we're doing, but fsck if we'll let you do it too." Documentation doesn't help at all if it comes with a condition like that. What's the next step, patenting the writing of MS-Word format to keep all those pesky filters at bay?
As has already been said, it's a public forum. the point is, Katz/Hemos OR ANYYONE ELSE can quote from it. That has nothing to do with who owns the posts.
...is that the energy a photon carries is a function of it's wavelength - short wavelengths (i.e. violet, UV, etc) carry far more energy than long wavelengths (red, IR, etc). Try it - grab a solar calculator and stick it under a red light (you *do* have one handy, right?:) It won't work. Try it under flourescent lighting, or anything else with a blue or violet component, and voila!
The point of crypto, etc, has always seemed to be to limit (hopefully, cut off) access your data to people you don't wish to see it - really, that's all crypto can do. In recent times, it becomes increasingly obvious that crypto, of course, does nothing to stop people from collecting their own data about you, or (legally) forcing you to open your communications/not use crypto/restrict access to crypto/etc. No technology in the world will help with this - the "fundamental problem" of electronic privacy has moved up a notch.
So the community is realizing this fact, that there's always both social and technological issues here. No big surprise. How the writer of this article turns this into a major philospohical-political treatise leaves me a bit mystified.
No technology will make you immune from laws governing technology. There's incredible naivete in the beliefs the writer so casually seems to attribute to the community here. The conclusions seem to be on a tangent from the evidence the article provides.
Slashdot Mirror
If these people really did care about America being a meritocracy, they would give away their fortunes like many of last century's elite did (e.g Andrew Carnegie).
In related news, about a week ago B.G.'s foundataion just happened to give $100Million to the aids vaccine project, which actually is on the verge of producing something (they've isolated a source of immunity, it's now just a matter of making a reliable vaccine from it). Do a search on Yahoo!news; I'm slightly too lazy to look up the link.
Don't get me wrong; I still think microsoft is crap just good enough to sell, and Evil(tm) as a business (I mostly use unix and occasionally macs for what I do, for so many reasons). But I do have respect for the man for doing that. Absolutely.
Interestingly, I never provide salary history, and it's never stopped me from getting hired yet. Out of politeness, if asked about it, I'll give a range ("mid-whatevers" or "low-whatever") from wherever I previously worked, but since I switch between contract and permanent work anyway, it's just not always relevant.
And yes, for reference, I'm in my 20s too. Sure there are plenty of inflexible, our-way-or-else employers out there - but there are also more clueful shops too. Keep looking....
As someone posted above, it depends on the laws of the state you're working in whether or not it's legal (some states, like Texas, are "employment at-will" - translation, no reason is ever required by law for letting someone go). In practice, it may be somewhat shaky legal ground, but your safest bet (and surest way to stay out of court, whether or not you'd win) is just to find another job. It's also less stressful; if that's management's clue level, do you really *want* to see what they do next?
At a recent job (I won't name the company), I asked on the way in about the agreement. They didn't have one at the time, fine. Two months later, they come in with a heavy-duty con-compete contract (with no compensation provisions in it, either!) and told us "sign it or you're fired".
I walked. There are enough companies looking for programmers that I didn't even lose sleep over it. I wasn't the only one, either. Eventually, maybe corporate bosses will get a Clue(tm) that doing that serves precisely to drive out the people they're trying to keep....
After all that's the whole point here, right? Myself, I just got back into computer games after not playing (really, almost avioding them) for 10+ years, because 'most everything I saw looked derivative and sucked, and I didn't have the newest, fastest computer needed to run 'em anyway.
Last year a friend introduced my girlfriend and I to Starcraft - which has actual strategy, actual interaction (speaking solely of multiplayer), and actually meets most (but not all) of Dogma's criteria. It plays like a good automated board game, and I got hooked, much to my amazement. I've also been intrigued more recently by the Dreamcast game "Jet Grind Radio" which actually *would* score a perfect 10 on Dogma2001.
The point is that these games actually, just like you said, didn't depend on the latest graphics cards or 3D rendered textures. Quake-n is a fine game, but that's the point - it's already made. Different is good....
Macs have always tried (and often succeeded) in being the "prettiest" desktops around, sure - nobody said M$ was stupid about whose UI ideas they ripped off (what they did with 'em is another matter). Now that Apple has finally got a stable core OS (a full-featured unix, at that), what's wrong with going for the eye candy? Go surf over to www.themes.org and tell me that nobody's interested in how their UI looks. :)
BTW, through a friend who's a Mac programmer (I'm totally on Linux/Intel and other unix boxen, myself), I've gotten to see some of the recent builds of OSX - and it's sweet, folks. As the debug code gets stripped out, it's sped up a *lot* from the public beta. This could be fun once it ships.
good point, good link.
c e/sgreport/Chapter4/appendix4bsec2.htm#TelevisionF ilm
Here's the relevane page from the study about media and games. The result? There's quite possibly a real association, but it's *small*, and likely just an indicator of tendancies already there.
http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/youthviolen
While any industry agreeing to pre-censor itself is certainly a bad thing, and I hope that this measure fails quickly, I don't actually think it would prevent all these games from being made. Did anyone here buy Q3 as a result of advertising, as opposed to word of mouth?
Don't get me wrong; I'm not an enormous fan of "really violent" games, and there are only a couple in that category I play. On the other hand, it seems ludicrous to be concerned with showing animated pixel blood when eny night of the week cable TV shows far far worse (which bothers you more: seeing a bunch of polygons fall off the side of a sprite in a shower of red pixels, or watching a very realistic representation of an actor's arm being shot off, complete with fake blood and screams? Don't answer all at once...) But whether any of these are "appropriate" for a given audience is a question for individuals and families, not the courts. Or it should be.
Legislating morality = a bad thing.
Amen to that.
Java, like any language, is a tool. Use it where it fits (and nearly any UI app work I do is in Java these days - and all my work's on linux or other unix platforms). No, I wouldn't write a network driver in it, no I couldn't write a kernel in it - there are other tools for those jobs.
But then, I've had a hard time explaining to some managers what Java does - they hear about it, but for too many people java is still "applets and something else like that, right?". *sigh* apparently that mentality thrives here, too...
Someone already responded, but I will too. Any contant legal concerns would still be present - the only advantage .alt would give you in that regard is that you could point to the "created-explicitly-as-non-mainstream" .alt in your domain and hopefully be able to say that anyone who went there, should understand what that means - just like "alt." is unmoderated, etc. Whether or not this actually helps is another question.
.alt hopefully would get you is, as the agreements say, a TLD explicitly stating that trademarks are not a condition for domain names. Whether by the time this happens, web-trademark laws are passed in the US pass to make this a moot (i.e. useless) provision (since they'd undoubtably just say "any website domain name"), we'll have to wait and see. I think it's definately worth a try.
.com for commercial and general, .net for network providers ONLY, and .org for organizations and whoever else? It springs to mind whenever I see Network Solutions' "register your .net address! Can be used just like .com, and it's not as crowded!" ads. *Sigh*. I must be getting old.
What
Incidentally, remember when TLD's *did* mean something? I.e. Jon Postel's RFC specifying
If the format spec didn't change, the way Word uses it apparently did - I've seen this trying to use word processors which handle word-97 files properly, watching them make ugly messes out of word-2000 documents with such features as revision tracking, some list formatting options, etc.
You don't have to change very much to have a compatibility problem, at least for the people - professional users, mostly - who use those advanced features.
Microsoft Word has a file format only slightly less complex than the human brain. - Linux Magazine, from a month or two ago.
That WMaker news is what I was looking for/ wondering about. Too bad - I've got a Thinkpad I'm about to add linux to (it came with w98, and is currently my only computer that *isn't* linux). I use Suse usually, but was curious to try mandrake.
:)
But I'm not going to switch desktops just to for an easier install. (FWIW, Suse's "old" install has worked fine for me so far, although it's long and complex in the way that the old slack installs were - you spend a short eternity picking packages and configurations; their new tool's still buggy. It's a wonderful distro once you're installed, though.
I wonder if anyone else saw these problems with windowmaker on mandrake?
My favorite part was re-reading Jon Postel's comments about intended uses for the existing TLDs:
.net domains, which are widely available, for commercial purposes since .com is getting crowded"? Yeah, this is an RFC and not a cast-in-stone law, but it still makes me wonder if anyone there even remembers this.
NET - This domain is intended to hold only the computers of network providers, that is the NIC and NOC computers, the administrative computers, and the network node computers. The customers of the network provider would have domain names of their own (not in the NET TLD).
Did anyone else see Network Solutions' propoganda push recently to "encourage people to start using
Actually, I'm not sure who you're considering.
The average american workday has been on the rise again for years now. (And that's white-collar professionals, not counting those who hold down second jobs to pay the rent in cities like mine where "minimum wage" won't even pay the rent). I'm a programmer, like many here, and 8-hour days (not counting lunch) are the short ones, most weeks.
Meanwhile, the people I see (and work with) who live in large houses, drive expensive cars, go on vacations, etc. also owe truly enormous amounts of money - the kind of debt that I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing I was responsible for. In a boom economy, well, you can get by with that. If/when there's trouble....
Netpliance had to do something to stop people from buying the boxes at $99 and not subscribing - they lost a few hundred dollars every time someone did that, and they weren't going to stay in business long with that happening. They did a knee-jerk reaction at first, but everything I've heard from them since has been fairly mature, in making sure that they don't lose money selling the hardware (which would be rather stupid and moreover, if they went broke, that would be the end of those terminals at any price), while trying to find a way to approach the new demand - namely, the new, unforseen use the community found for them. So they made refurbs available (and I wouldn't complain if I got one, either!). Within days of the fiasco earlier, they said "we want to work with this - how can we do it?" And it looks for all the world like they're trying.
I'm not sure if that top-of-the-story blurb was supposed to spark discussion, but it came across rather troll-ish. I don't think Netpliance has been acting anti-linux since the first days of the hardware hack, when they had a money-sucking crisis on their hands.
Barring that it is a very strange motherboard, or a 'unique' power supply, wires should be black to black in general.
:)
Dude! OBVIOUSLY it's a unique power supply.
Whether it's real or not... well... remains to be seen. I've tried batteries-from-lemons myself, and got pretty small max currents.... hrmm.
...that we could arrange for a situation where the requirements are all fixed and locked down, and documented, before any coding begins? In industry jobs, I've never seen a project that wasn't having some marketing group force "critical" changes the whole time something was being written.
:)
:)
You get what you pay for, and take the time for. These days, most people and companies seem quite willing to settle for "bad, buggy programs now" rather than "better programs, later". Of course, without organization (also common), it's possible to wait and get nothing later, too. Process is expensive in terms of people involved and time, but it's a lot cheaper in the long run than the alternative.
Open-source projects actually follow this - every successful open project I've seen has a definate hierarchy of people managing patches and controling what winds up in the latest sub-point build, and making key architectural decisions so nothing derails them. Oh - and there's no one who'll fire you if marketings last-minute changes aren't rushed through.
In case anyone reads that and wonders, there's no chance of those spreading or doing anything. We were very careful about not letting those critters escape. Aside from that, they wouldn't have worked outside of our organization (Notes "/O=" organization, that is), would be stripped out by a Notes MTA-SMTP gateway so they couldn't travel the net, didn't destroy files (well, except unsaved work :), and had to be opened in Notes to run. So there's no possible virus danger or scare there, lest anyone wonder.
Agreed, as a relative thing (having worked in a Notes shop before). However, I seem to remember different Notes versions installing by default with different ECC settings, some of which were way too liberal. Me and another programmer used to compete to write the most destructive email - we actually found a way to shut down your Notes session by opening a message, using LotusScript, but you *did* have to have your ECC set to allow it to work. Sadly, R5 made this effort a bit easier... (I wrote C++ and java, but by osmosis and necessity learned notes programming too).
And later: Microsoft does not grant you any right to implement this Specification.
sure enough, this seems (IANAL) to directly state that if you use this spec to implement or imitate MS-Kerberus, you've violated the agreement and can probably be sued, etc. The download is just necessary to wrap the license agreement around it.
This is kinda novel - "We'll even tell you what we're doing, but fsck if we'll let you do it too." Documentation doesn't help at all if it comes with a condition like that. What's the next step, patenting the writing of MS-Word format to keep all those pesky filters at bay?
As of 9:40 AM CDT, with netscape 4.7 on HPUX, the article's gone - the page containd the big header paragraph, a couple banner ads, then /html.
Anyone else (not) seeing this? Site issue? or browser issue?
As has already been said, it's a public forum. the point is, Katz/Hemos OR ANYYONE ELSE can quote from it. That has nothing to do with who owns the posts.
...is that the energy a photon carries is a function of it's wavelength - short wavelengths (i.e. violet, UV, etc) carry far more energy than long wavelengths (red, IR, etc). Try it - grab a solar calculator and stick it under a red light (you *do* have one handy, right? :) It won't work. Try it under flourescent lighting, or anything else with a blue or violet component, and voila!
The point of crypto, etc, has always seemed to be to limit (hopefully, cut off) access your data to people you don't wish to see it - really, that's all crypto can do. In recent times, it becomes increasingly obvious that crypto, of course, does nothing to stop people from collecting their own data about you, or (legally) forcing you to open your communications/not use crypto/restrict access to crypto/etc. No technology in the world will help with this - the "fundamental problem" of electronic privacy has moved up a notch.
So the community is realizing this fact, that there's always both social and technological issues here. No big surprise. How the writer of this article turns this into a major philospohical-political treatise leaves me a bit mystified.
No technology will make you immune from laws governing technology. There's incredible naivete in the beliefs the writer so casually seems to attribute to the community here. The conclusions seem to be on a tangent from the evidence the article provides.