What a surprise. Losers who totally fucked up in everything they tried are less arrogant than people who stand at the top of a successful, well paid, career?
are you implying that people who are mentally ill are to blame for their condition?
Your girlfriend seems to be have a rather intolerant personality. She needs to work with people that are clearly inferior to her, because she can't stand the sugestion that anyone could be superior to herself.
very insightful! by this "logic" we can assume that programmers have an even bigger inferiority complex because they work with computers: machines that can't do anything without being told to do so.
If she can't stand the occasional banter from colleagues with good humor she surely isn't fit to work with geeks
uh, no: sexist, misogynist and emotionally stunted trolls aren't fit to work with her.
Or do you think it's easy, from a human point of view, to be called a "geek" or a "nerd"
er, don't you know when people call you those "pejorative" terms they're just engaging in "occasional banter from colleagues with good humour"? nice double standard, bud. thanks for helping make my point!
maybe attitudes like this are the reason there aren't that many women in programming.
my girlfriend spent four years at school and three years in the industry going from one software shop before she finally quit the whole biz because of attitudes like that. she works at a homeless shelter now and says that her mentally ill and drug addicted clients are easier to work with than the average alpha geek.
Your system (as you described it) lacks two things:
what his system really lacks is this: it's not radio
fm radio is the perfect and obvious solution here. go get one of these pci fm transmitter cards, plug it into any old x86 box with a massive hard drive and a copy of the dejaneiro browser-controlled mp3 player, hook up your local lan for control and voila! instant broadcast of your music when you want it.
In high school I was on the newspaper staff for a while. We had a major part of an issue planned... The principal vetoed the whole deal.
the thing that everyone is forgetting is this: high school is not now nor has it ever been anything like "real life".
witness: in school, teachers routinely punish the entire class until the party guilty of a particular offense comes forward. in real life, we would call this sort of activity by authorities "terrorism". in school, the mantra of maintaining order is "i don't care who started it." in the real world, we spend billions of dollars on a justice system to figure out "who started it."
since the dawn of the formal state educational system we have been creatinga purly artificial environment for our children with values, mores and codes of conduct that bear no resemblence to the real world whatsoever.
Good management should replace bad techies long before the project fails
great... but who replaces the bad managers?
my experience is that projects fail because of managers who get caught between two opposing forces, clients and tech staff, and can't broker a compromise.
the client wants a million features for next to no money and wants the product by thursday noon. since they're paying the bills, they can exert a lot of pressure on a manager. the techies want clear direction on technical issues that neither the client nor management really groks, tonnes of time and the right to overrule bad decisions made by the client. since the techies are the people who are actually doing the building, they have a lot of leverage.
when management cannot broker a compromise between these two positions, the project fails. i've seen management say 'yes' to every demand and timeline from a client, then go to the techies and say the client is clueless and stubborn and insist that corners be cut to meet the deadline. when the poject fails, the manager blames the techies and hands out some pink slips to mollify the client.
When you are your own business you end up putting up money for various things, and when your incomming payments start to lag, you can end up in serious trouble
hey, the same thing happens to your boss if you work for a start up or small company! so it really boils down to the two choices:
do you want to spend your time programming and let someone else deal with all the business angles or...
do you have the attitude of "if you want it done right, do it yourself" and are willing to invest all that extra time and effort to make sure your company is run the way you want
personally, i fall into the former choice category and it's always worked out for me. but then again, i have killer job hunting skills!
I am having a hard time deciding if you are trolling or not....
actually, i'm having a hard time deciding whether the original poster, cliff, is a cop from china. posting a request for chinese citizens to publicly state:
that they are breaking the law
and explain how they are doing it
sounds a bit like a sting operation to me. if i were a citizen of china and i could get throught he great firewall, i sure as hell wouldn't be talking about it on slashdot.
and I *don't* hear you dissing the Newton. I know many a fan sites that would come whuppin' your azz for talking like that!
i realize you're being sarcastic... but i think that labelling the newton as a "bad idea" is wrong.
yes, the newton didn't become popular. yes, apple lost a boatload of money on it. but these failings didn't happen because the world doesn't want a hand-held computing device. on the contrary, the market of pda's is massive and continues to grow. the failing of the newton was because the device was too early for the technology and attempted to do way too much.
the newton failed because apple was too prescient of consumer needs, not because they weren't prescient enough.
this goes against the apple business model of the last six or seven years: offer a "cheapish" mac and make a thin margin on it. make it a self-contained widget that the avg joe can't muck about in easily and then reap the fat margin on the upgrades.
Saying that Java is good because it works on all platforms is like saying that anal sex is good because it works on all genders.
if you're old enough to remember back that far, you will recall that when k&r released the c language, on of the big "selling points" was that it was a hardware/os agnostic language. you could write applications in c for a variety of different operating systems running on lots of different hardware and even re-use code, libs and entire applications (so long as you had the compiler, obviously).
the "write once" mantra has been with us for 30+ years... and, in that regard, java beats the living pants off the other contenders.
ari_j, emacs user writes:
Some friends and I were actually going to make a footboard [for emacs] once
Taladar, critic of vim writes: You forgot to mention the mode-change-key (or however vim users call it) that is for some strange reason the one key worse reachable than almost every other: Escape
given the choice between a text editor that requires me to hit the escape key and one that is so complex that a footboard is proposed a solution to control key chaos, i'd choose the escape key!
any market that Microsoft has entered (financial software, spreadsheets, etc.), the effect has been a dramatic reduction in prices and an expansion of output and innovation
this relationship looks correlational rather than causal. as the market for a certain type of home software expands, the price goes down. the same market force also attracts microsoft. both are the result of a common cause: the market.
I have seen plenty of people with high-school diplomas or two year degrees from a community college/tech school do just as well (if not better) than me and my more expensive four-year degree.
i have come to the conclusion that the self-taught are the people you want to work with and for.
the self-taught have a better skillset at picking up new skillsets when the pressure is on, they're more willing to and capable of learning by experimentation, they tend to be far more flexible and diverse in their abilities and they're are often more motivated to try out new solutions.
Damn greedy hollywood stuck their hand in the cookie jar and got caught.
well, of course their greedy: that's the whole point of this "free enterprise" thing that everyone seems to think is so neat.
what bugs me is the hypocrisy, though. if you rip off hollywood for the $4 cost of a rental by downloading ghost dad 2 from some p2p network, the mpaa will sue your ass... but they seem to have no compunction about taking liberties with mr. lee's intilectual property.
heck, i bet the producers even photocopied some spiderman comics without getting prior written consent.
well, it is pretty obvious. although the key phrase here is "if the user's security settings are set low enough."
i mean, any operating system is vulnerable to an exploit if it's security infrastructure is sufficiently loose. if you set your entire filesystem to 777 then you're completely vulnerable on any unix-based os too.
He didn't say it was right for crackers to attack the website and extort money from them. He just said that he doesn't feel sorry for the victim. There's a difference.
and what if the real victim of that ddos is a charity? in the eu and other places, a lot of online lottery offerings are operated for charities.
None of the legal attacks on open source or Linux have been successful. None of that stuff has gone anywhere. That's the biggest story.
well, if you consider that the biggest threat to oss this last year was sco, it's not very surprising that the success rate for legal attacks has been low.
but sco, really, is a bit player run by lunatics. if ibm or sun or any of the actually big-and-sane players decide to do a 180 on their oss commitment... well, that's a whole differnet, and scarier, kettle of fish.
mickos' statements sound, to me, akin to saying "heavy rain has failed to damage this tank, ergo it is battle ready."
ultimately, i think you're stretching the concept of property rights a bit!
An example of a REAL free market, win-win situation is if I have a house for sale for $100K
yes, that is a "real win-win situation"... but, again it doesn't include externalities since, by definition, externalities have no direct effect on price. did you read the wikipedia article?
More importantly, free market exchanges are win-win scenarios.
well, there's a bit of a dramatic oversimplification...
while it is potentially true that free market exchanges benefit the two consenting parties (although this is not always the case, especially where highly inelastic goods and services are involved. think: crack dealer) there is often a strong negative effect on non-consenting third parties.
these by-effects of free marketism are called "externalities". for those of you who slept through econ 220, the technical definition of an externality is "when the actions of one agent (in a free exchange) affect the interests of another agent other than by affecting prices".
the classic example of an externality as posited by milton friedman is that of the company with the smoke stack that dirties someone's shirt downwind. the owner of the shirt must pay for its cleaning and that cost is not borne by the factory owner. it's freebie. we've see a lot of externalities in the modern "free market" economy, the most obvious ones being environmental: ie, the chemical company that dumps its waste into the river for "free".
of course there are tonnes of other externalities in the modern economy. the wiki page on it is here but you'll need to have been awake for econn 220 to grok it.
bottom line: saying that a free market transaction benefits both parties is an oversimplification and does nothing to contribute to a meaningful debate on economics.
Re:My personal favorite
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 2, Funny
During one of the 2004 presidential debates: "We increased federal wetlands by 3 million!" -- GWB
it should be "3 million plus or minus 2% 19 times out of 20", right?
Whatever happen to the (past) predictions for 2004?
well, the cnn tech predictions for 2004 is right here.
ultimately last year's predictions were a bust: voip didn't take off, outsourcing didn't become an election issue, the nasdaq didn't rally like crazy. in fact, the only prediction hellwig got right was that digital music did continue to be popular and record labels did continue to be pissed off about it. really just a "more of the same" prediction.
bottom line: if you really know what's going to happen next year, you're probably a multimillionaire stock broker instead of some hack journalist.
Slashdot Mirror
are you implying that people who are mentally ill are to blame for their condition?
Your girlfriend seems to be have a rather intolerant personality. She needs to work with people that are clearly inferior to her, because she can't stand the sugestion that anyone could be superior to herself.
very insightful! by this "logic" we can assume that programmers have an even bigger inferiority complex because they work with computers: machines that can't do anything without being told to do so.
If she can't stand the occasional banter from colleagues with good humor she surely isn't fit to work with geeks
uh, no: sexist, misogynist and emotionally stunted trolls aren't fit to work with her.
Or do you think it's easy, from a human point of view, to be called a "geek" or a "nerd"
er, don't you know when people call you those "pejorative" terms they're just engaging in "occasional banter from colleagues with good humour"? nice double standard, bud. thanks for helping make my point!
maybe attitudes like this are the reason there aren't that many women in programming.
my girlfriend spent four years at school and three years in the industry going from one software shop before she finally quit the whole biz because of attitudes like that. she works at a homeless shelter now and says that her mentally ill and drug addicted clients are easier to work with than the average alpha geek.
what his system really lacks is this: it's not radio
fm radio is the perfect and obvious solution here. go get one of these pci fm transmitter cards, plug it into any old x86 box with a massive hard drive and a copy of the dejaneiro browser-controlled mp3 player, hook up your local lan for control and voila! instant broadcast of your music when you want it.
man, if you have a time machine, words like "immediately" don't really mean anything.
the thing that everyone is forgetting is this: high school is not now nor has it ever been anything like "real life".
witness: in school, teachers routinely punish the entire class until the party guilty of a particular offense comes forward. in real life, we would call this sort of activity by authorities "terrorism". in school, the mantra of maintaining order is "i don't care who started it." in the real world, we spend billions of dollars on a justice system to figure out "who started it."
since the dawn of the formal state educational system we have been creatinga purly artificial environment for our children with values, mores and codes of conduct that bear no resemblence to the real world whatsoever.
so... why should these results be a surprise?
great... but who replaces the bad managers?
my experience is that projects fail because of managers who get caught between two opposing forces, clients and tech staff, and can't broker a compromise.
the client wants a million features for next to no money and wants the product by thursday noon. since they're paying the bills, they can exert a lot of pressure on a manager. the techies want clear direction on technical issues that neither the client nor management really groks, tonnes of time and the right to overrule bad decisions made by the client. since the techies are the people who are actually doing the building, they have a lot of leverage.
when management cannot broker a compromise between these two positions, the project fails. i've seen management say 'yes' to every demand and timeline from a client, then go to the techies and say the client is clueless and stubborn and insist that corners be cut to meet the deadline. when the poject fails, the manager blames the techies and hands out some pink slips to mollify the client.
hey, the same thing happens to your boss if you work for a start up or small company! so it really boils down to the two choices:
personally, i fall into the former choice category and it's always worked out for me. but then again, i have killer job hunting skills!
original post: that the software is not accurate; 'tagging' virtually every audio or video file it finds based on file extensions.
mpaa tracking software successfully reverse engineered!
find . -name "*p*" > ./.mpaa && mail spooks@mpaa.com ./.mpaa
actually, i'm having a hard time deciding whether the original poster, cliff, is a cop from china. posting a request for chinese citizens to publicly state:
- that they are breaking the law
- and explain how they are doing it
sounds a bit like a sting operation to me. if i were a citizen of china and i could get throught he great firewall, i sure as hell wouldn't be talking about it on slashdot.now... where did i put that tinfoil hat?
i realize you're being sarcastic... but i think that labelling the newton as a "bad idea" is wrong.
yes, the newton didn't become popular. yes, apple lost a boatload of money on it. but these failings didn't happen because the world doesn't want a hand-held computing device. on the contrary, the market of pda's is massive and continues to grow. the failing of the newton was because the device was too early for the technology and attempted to do way too much.
the newton failed because apple was too prescient of consumer needs, not because they weren't prescient enough.
this goes against the apple business model of the last six or seven years: offer a "cheapish" mac and make a thin margin on it. make it a self-contained widget that the avg joe can't muck about in easily and then reap the fat margin on the upgrades.
if you're old enough to remember back that far, you will recall that when k&r released the c language, on of the big "selling points" was that it was a hardware/os agnostic language. you could write applications in c for a variety of different operating systems running on lots of different hardware and even re-use code, libs and entire applications (so long as you had the compiler, obviously).
the "write once" mantra has been with us for 30+ years... and, in that regard, java beats the living pants off the other contenders.
well, a sample population of one person on the farthest possible end of the bell curve is a pretty crappy sample. sorry.
Some friends and I were actually going to make a footboard [for emacs] once
Taladar, critic of vim writes:
You forgot to mention the mode-change-key (or however vim users call it) that is for some strange reason the one key worse reachable than almost every other: Escape
given the choice between a text editor that requires me to hit the escape key and one that is so complex that a footboard is proposed a solution to control key chaos, i'd choose the escape key!
waitaminnit... did you use the web to uncover a questionable business practice (advert masquerading as news content) on behalf of viking canada?
case made!
this relationship looks correlational rather than causal. as the market for a certain type of home software expands, the price goes down. the same market force also attracts microsoft. both are the result of a common cause: the market.
i have come to the conclusion that the self-taught are the people you want to work with and for.
the self-taught have a better skillset at picking up new skillsets when the pressure is on, they're more willing to and capable of learning by experimentation, they tend to be far more flexible and diverse in their abilities and they're are often more motivated to try out new solutions.
three cheers for the autodidacts
well, of course their greedy: that's the whole point of this "free enterprise" thing that everyone seems to think is so neat.
what bugs me is the hypocrisy, though. if you rip off hollywood for the $4 cost of a rental by downloading ghost dad 2 from some p2p network, the mpaa will sue your ass... but they seem to have no compunction about taking liberties with mr. lee's intilectual property.
heck, i bet the producers even photocopied some spiderman comics without getting prior written consent.
well, it is pretty obvious. although the key phrase here is "if the user's security settings are set low enough."
i mean, any operating system is vulnerable to an exploit if it's security infrastructure is sufficiently loose. if you set your entire filesystem to 777 then you're completely vulnerable on any unix-based os too.
the real questions here are:
and what if the real victim of that ddos is a charity? in the eu and other places, a lot of online lottery offerings are operated for charities.
well, if you consider that the biggest threat to oss this last year was sco, it's not very surprising that the success rate for legal attacks has been low.
but sco, really, is a bit player run by lunatics. if ibm or sun or any of the actually big-and-sane players decide to do a 180 on their oss commitment... well, that's a whole differnet, and scarier, kettle of fish.
mickos' statements sound, to me, akin to saying "heavy rain has failed to damage this tank, ergo it is battle ready."
well, you can take that up with milton friedman, champion of neoliberalism. it's his example.
ultimately, i think you're stretching the concept of property rights a bit!
An example of a REAL free market, win-win situation is if I have a house for sale for $100K
yes, that is a "real win-win situation"... but, again it doesn't include externalities since, by definition, externalities have no direct effect on price. did you read the wikipedia article?
well, there's a bit of a dramatic oversimplification...
while it is potentially true that free market exchanges benefit the two consenting parties (although this is not always the case, especially where highly inelastic goods and services are involved. think: crack dealer) there is often a strong negative effect on non-consenting third parties.
these by-effects of free marketism are called "externalities". for those of you who slept through econ 220, the technical definition of an externality is "when the actions of one agent (in a free exchange) affect the interests of another agent other than by affecting prices".
the classic example of an externality as posited by milton friedman is that of the company with the smoke stack that dirties someone's shirt downwind. the owner of the shirt must pay for its cleaning and that cost is not borne by the factory owner. it's freebie. we've see a lot of externalities in the modern "free market" economy, the most obvious ones being environmental: ie, the chemical company that dumps its waste into the river for "free".
of course there are tonnes of other externalities in the modern economy. the wiki page on it is here but you'll need to have been awake for econn 220 to grok it.
bottom line: saying that a free market transaction benefits both parties is an oversimplification and does nothing to contribute to a meaningful debate on economics.
it should be "3 million plus or minus 2% 19 times out of 20", right?
well, the cnn tech predictions for 2004 is right here.
ultimately last year's predictions were a bust: voip didn't take off, outsourcing didn't become an election issue, the nasdaq didn't rally like crazy. in fact, the only prediction hellwig got right was that digital music did continue to be popular and record labels did continue to be pissed off about it. really just a "more of the same" prediction.
bottom line: if you really know what's going to happen next year, you're probably a multimillionaire stock broker instead of some hack journalist.