Blackberry's biggest strength is its secure email. That's why so many corporations allow it. Assuring paranoid corporate people that their email is safe with them is practically their entire business model!
I can't imagine it would be worth ruining that reputation just to keep such a small part of their market.
Take away that, and all they have left is their little keyboards.
I think this nails it perfectly. The question is biased in its very nature. How could someone possibly prove piracy failed their company, when someone can always just counter with "you just didn't get enough exposure" Which is very annoying, because thats basically what we all struggle to do. I don't think its ever the case that piracy caused something to fail, but its much more likely that it prevented the business from getting the chance to succeed.
(For the purpose of this debate, I'm ignoring the "collectors". I used to download everything under the sun, and I wouldn't have given a second thought if one of those companies died. Instead, I'm talking about the people who would have paid money for it had they not been able to find it for free. The "on the fence" people if you will, those are the ones that it really hurts to lose out on)
I run a small business selling software, and I can tell you that when my app got cracked, my sales dropped by more than 30%.
Ponder that for a second. Imagine walking into work one day, and finding out you got a 30% paycut. Because well, someone in China was just bored that day.
Right now, if things continue as they are, its unlikely I'll be able to continue doing this for more than a month or two, before the rest of my savings bleeds out, and I have to move on.
Of course, things could change, I could catch my lucky break. And I've obviously made some mistakes, it wasn't just piracy that put me in this position. But that doesn't change the fact that I would be more likely to survive if more of the people who downloaded it actually paid for it.
And that whole "piracy is a form of advertisement" is utter crap, because only the people who already know about the program pirate it. Its hard enough to get people to know about the program, but harder still when they leave your site to find it for free.
Now, you can look at my story and say, people might just be interest in my product. It's cold. But it may be true. I may have just gone after a market that wasn't there. So who cares if I fail?
And I think that's the deepest irony in all of this. Because you know who cares? The people who are pirating my program! Obviously, it fulfills a role they need, or they wouldn't download it. So, they have a need that they want fulfilled, but because they didn't pay for it, I can't improve the software they want to use.
One of the greater contrasts between work and college.
At work, you're expected to do all the things they consider wrong. If you can save time by finding the solution online, or delegating the task to someone else, than that just gives you more time to work on the things that haven't already been solved.
In fact if the first thing you do when you have a problem ISN'T googling the problem online to see if there's already a solution, than I'd have to seriously question your skills.
After all, the whole point of programming is to make life easier. Not over complicate it.
Yeah, I like this point. Its not how "good" the hardware is, its about how useful it is. And that tablet would have been pretty useless.
Case in point: That tablet only supports 4096 colors. Thats going to look like crap, and no amount of insisting that its the best hardware money can buy will change that. To put that in perspective, that's a whopping 16 shades of red,green, and blue to work with. You can pick up a crayonbox at Walgreens with more colors than that.
This is one of the things I struggle with working from home for myself. With no meetings and nothing to distract me, getting in the "zone" is awesome, but can be a little hazardous.
When I'm that into it, I stop getting hungry or thirsty, I don't get tired. I got to bed at around 6am, because the bright light hurts my eyes and distracts me long enough to think "you know, its 6am, maybe I should go to sleep" even though I'm not the slightest bit tired. My dreams are all about the tasks I'm programming, but of course, since they're not grounded in reality, any discoveries there are useless. 3 hours later, I'll wake up. I'll spend maybe an hour waking up, eating breakfast, maybe watch an ep of the dailyshow, and than its back to the project.
I did this for 5 days straight once. It's absolutely fun as hell. Challenge after challenge after challenge. Like the best video game you've ever played. Its crazy productive. 3 to 4 months tasks get done in days. And at the time your mind masks all the downsides from you. You never get exhausted or sick of it. You don't realise how much time or days has passed.
But than you snap out of it. Your bones ache because you've barely moved them. Friends have messaged you and called, and you didn't notice. The fact that you've barely gotten any sleep hits you hard. You'll be fine one second, take a step forward and than all bam, all of it hits you at once.
And thats if you're lucky enough to have finished your task. If you've forced your self out of it because of "health concerns", than your mind makes it painfully clear, that you don't actually have as much choice as you thought you did in this matter. Almost as though you're being held hostage, you won't be able to focus on anything else at all. Your mind will constantly come up with new ideas that make you REALLY want to go back and see if it works. If you want to watch a show or play a game, you'll be lucky if you can notice the title. If you try to hang out with friends you'll be distant and distracted. If you try to do anything that requires even the slightest amount of thought, you'll be utterly useless.
And finally, when you're not in the zone its a stuggle. On the one hand, you know that if you could go into the zone all the work you're wasting time on would be blown away. Why should you do any work in this unproductive state when you know you could do it way better and faster when you're in the zone? But at the same time, there's this fear too. I don't want to lose the next 3 or 4 days of my life. Will this next task be the one that sucks me in? If I start this now, will I be able to make it to my appointment tomorrow? And is this strategy even physically healthy?
I haven't really come to terms with it yet. But hopefully one day I'll find the perfect balance:)
Ah, indeed. I believe we live on in the memories of the people who we leave behind. And in our accomplishments as well.
But you don't need religion to believe that. In fact, if I was to make a broad sweeping claim with absolutely no information to back me up, I would say it is a belief that is much more likely in those who don't have any religion at all:p
That would be a valid, except for the fact that Heaven is supposed to be some kind of reward for doing good stuff. If you can get into heaven without doing those things, than it seems to defeat the point.
yeah, losing your individuality seems pretty much identital to there being no afterlife at all. If your not there to experience it, than, well, its not an afterlife.
I can't even explain it Philosophically, let alone with science!
I mean, if life is hard here because God gave us Free Will, but Heaven is Perfect with no pain. Doesn't that mean there's no free will there? And wouldn't that be way worse than life here? Are you really YOU without the ability to make your own choices?
If he lets us keep our freewill, and only lets people in who won't make things bad, than wouldn't that mean a pleasant personality trumps true acts of good? Would you rather have an asshole cop who saves lives every day, or a guy who makes witty comments and makes everyone laugh?
Check out http://comicreader.mobi/ The iphone and ipad version supports pdfs, and there's actually a small segment of users who bought it for the reason you just described. The program features a lens that autosizes to the text and pops out, and that seems to work well on normal pdfs too. Also, in order to accomadate a couple legally blind customers, the lens works up to 4x zoom:)
Well, fee the broadcaster paid includes provisions on the quality. So giving everyone the right to record a low definition fuzzy movie with lots of commercial breaks in it, does not give them the right to download a 1080p version with THX sound.
Also, you do not EVER have the right to share somebody else's work without their permission. EVER.I wish this statement didn't have to be tied to a discussion about movies, because their greedy actions cloud our logic. So, instead of thinking about movies, cause their such a crappy example. Try to think about anything else you love. Think about what makes things like the creative commons, GNU, or any open source license special. That author made the CHOICE to let the world have it for free. They decided that they wanted to give it away, or to let people learn from their work. And because of that we have all kinds of awesome projects like Dosbox and notepad++. But they are special because the author made that decision. You DO NOT have the right to make that choice for them.
But anyway, back to movies.
The movie industry is indeed quite greedy. There's no getting around that. If they could charge you per viewing they would. They tried (remember DIVX?). If they could limit the number of people who watched the DVD together, they would. They tried. They actually tried to claim that if your tv was over a certain size and you had more than a few people, than you needed to pay royalities for the community showing. (Although I might be confusing this with one of the sports things) And believe me they TRIED to get VCR recordings to be illegal too.
But don't confuse what the movie studio don't like with whats actually illegal. It doesn't matter how much you paid, you can't legally ditribute things that you don't have the rights to, and since filesharing is technically distributing, than they can get you on that.
Actually, my question was much more simple. I was merely wondering if you had double standards. But after reading your response, it seems pretty clear that you don't. So I apologize for that.
I didn't actually mean to discuss the morality of pirating media, but this is quite interesting, so I'd like to continue it.
If I had to come up with a clear cut definition of morality on the subject, than I would say: "Are you helping out those whose works you appreciate?" Which, I don't even know if it counts as view of morality, since it is so obviously to your advantage to support the the things that you like so that they can keep doing them. If you're upset that a game didn't get a sequal, but you never paid for that game, than well, I'm not sure what you expected there...
So, given that definition, I'd say there's no moral problems with you bypassing copyright restrictions on the stuff you paid for. You've done the key important part by paying them, and hopefully they'll use their cut to make more, but if it not, its still a good thank you.
Distrubuting the material, or cracks, would be morally wrong because you are potentially preventing people who would have paid from having the need to do so.
TV is NOT piracy, UNLESS your one of the houses that the survey group monitors to estimate the number of viewers each show has. Than you're a jackass, and I blame you for every single show that I loved and got canceled:p But seriously, advertisers pay the networks for the market potential the show has, not the actual number of viewers, because we don't have a way of monitoring that. That means that you watching the show on the air, or downloading it on your computer has absolutely no bearing on the amount of finances the show will recieve.
If there's anything you've said that I object to, than it would have to be that you've grouped "content creaters" and the movie and music industry as one and the same. Which is unfortunete, because, well, one, they're not actually the content creaters, and two, they have a very long history of not supporting the content creaters.
Its not copyrights fault that they've been bullying people so much. With that much lobbying and power, even if we abolished all copyright, they'd just have different laws passed to do the same thing, except for only them.
Perhaps I'm just projecting here, but I think as a society, we like the idea of copyright. We don't like seeing other people's idea's getting stolen, and we don't want our ideas to get stolen either. Obviously we'd want to protect people from that.
But now we mostly just associate it with larger companies picking on smaller companies or people, and rarely see the other side of it.
No, you're right. That was a poor choice of words on my part.
Its particularly regrettable, since it distracts from the conversation. I didn't mean it to cause guilt or any kind of emotional responce. I was only to emphasize which part you're actually getting in trouble for.
So, let us just call it distributing unauthorized content. I think thats the official term?
Also, (and this may be out of line, since I don't actually know your personal views, and am just assuming that you hold all the same views as the Slashdot community), isn't it hypocritical to sidestep the whole issue of morality in regards to piracy, and only focus on the letter of the law. But at the same time admonish Apple and Flash for doing something that is "wrong" even through it breaks no laws?
This is SUCH a good point, and its really sad that the Sony somehow forgot it.
Do they not remember the 50,000 dollar prize for the first person to get linux to run on the xbox? or the other 50,000 dollar prize for doing it without the need for physical mods?
Homebrew drives everything, and piracy is just a tack on. Because once you can run unsigned code, you can run pirated software.
Now they've gone and pissed off all those people, and unlike you're typical "oh, we'll boycott it, but not really" crowd, these guys actually have the skills to do something about it.
Its not at all a double standard, because the tv companies paid the companies to let them broadcast the movie. And they paid them enough money that the movie companies decided it was worth the risk of vcr tapings. It's just basic accounting at that point.
No one on the internet is paying them for the rights to distribute their movies. If someone decided to pay a small fortune for the right to distribute a movie on a torrent site, than we'd be seeing an entirely different dynamic.
Also, while they use the term downloading, because well, everyone loves to fear monger. It's not ACTUALLY the downloading that gets you in trouble, its the uploading part. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but basically anything you get from a public source you are not legally liable for. It would be like if your local newspaper decided to include an entire Harry Potter book in their paper with out permission. You, the costomer, can't get in trouble for whats in the paper. Only the newspaper can be held responsible for what they print. (Obviously, this doesn't hold for anything that's illegal to simply possess, like say child pornography)
Whenever you use a torrent, you share a part of the file with other people. And the second you do that, guess what, you are officially distributing stolen content. You can play dumb on downloading and claim good faith, but there are no cases where its ok to give away someone elses work without their permission. Its part of the reason that the fees are so astronomical. Because back in the days before the internet, when you caught someone was distributing stolen content, it actually was just as bad as it sounded. Even the most pro-piracy of Slashdotters would be hard pressed to say that it would be morally acceptable to go around giving other people's stuff away.
I hope you don't pay to much attention to this guy. The world is not nearly as dark as he's proclaiming.
I'm going to tell you a fact that you may or not find comforting.
9 out of 10 programmers who are applying for jobs suck. I'm probably being too generous here, but whatever. I've interviewed people at Microsoft, and I've interviewed people at small start ups. Doesn't matter, most interviewee's are just terrible. I don't blame this guy for being jaded. If you had to interview crappy programmer after crappy programmer, you would be too.
BUT if you're the 1 out of 10 who's actually good, than you have a very bright future ahead of you. Companies are always hiring, and if you're truely talented, they'll often hire you even if they weren't planning on it. No good company lets a great programmer get away when they find one. Entry level jobs have a lot of advantages, in that you're still new, and have no idea what you're actually worth. People are inheritantly loyal to the first company they work for, so they tend to stick around for a lot longer. Plus you get to train them to your style of programming.
Now in terms of actually getting those jobs...
Luckily for you, HR is ridiculously easy to get around. They don't know technology, and you can use that to your advantage. School, GPA, hobbies, cover letter, prior non programming work experience, awards... none of that matters. The only thing they care about is the programming buzzwords you have in there.
Right now, the big one is FLEX, or AS3. Learn that. Put it on your resume. There's a big shortage there, because most people who learn Flash are graphic designers with a minimal programming skill set. If you're a programmer with a minimal graphic design skill set, they'll love you.
Find out what else is "hot" but becareful not to confuse programmer trendy, with what's actually in demand. (Nobody in HR cares about Ruby on Rails).
Just pretend HR is nothing but a search engine that scans your resumes for keywords, and you'll be fine.
Now as far as experience goes. Work on an open source project. There's really no excuse not to. Just think about all the programs you use that are open source, find something that you'd like to change, and than go about learning how to change it. Don't "apply" and ask "what can I do to help". Just jump in and have at it. It's way easier to work on a project when you're doing something you want done anyway.
Math KNOWLEDGE may be debatable, but Math skills are essential. If you don't have the ability to break up and solve mathmatical formulas, how do you expect to be able to solve complex programming tasks?
Plus linear algrebra is awesome. And everytime I do anything even remotely 2d or 3d related, I always wish I had paid more attention in Geometry.
But more than anything, its good to know that there's an equation for that. Even if you don't remember what it is, or how it works, having the simple knowledge that it exists to look up is more than worth the time of taking the class.
Well said. If there's one thing Apple knows how to do, its sell stuff. So I really don't believe they'll actually do this.
But for the sake of argument, and killing time, I'll reply anyway.
I have an app on the appstore thats heavily pirated, so I hope it carries more weight when I say this:
Banning jailbroken phones from the appstore would be a very bad idea.
1st reason: You don't need a jailbroken phone for access to your apps: just go to My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Mobile Applications and you'll see all the ipa's you've bought.
2nd Reason: The goal is always to sell more copies, not punish those who didn't buy it. If you put a copy protection method in your code, the user has 3 choices: Stop using your app. Pay a couple bucks for your app. Or spend a significant amount of time to crack your app.
90% of the people will just stop using your app. But for the remaining few, its very important that you make buying app the easier choice. Because at the end of the day, we're much more lazy than we are cheap. Cracking an app beyond what a typical script can do is a LOT of work. Its hours and hours of using a hex editor, trying to find a specific value. Loading up the modified version, and waiting to see if message box will popup or if you were successful. Its tedius and boring, and no where near as glamourous as the movies make it out to be.
Its for this reason that cracking on the iphone hasn't really progressed. The technology has improved, but the adoption rate hasn't. My latest version was cracked using the same old version of crackulous that my first version was. I'm not going to pretend I understand why hackers do what they do, but after reading the forums with my cracked version one thing seems clear: They really don't give a crap about saving you a couple dollars. The typical response is: "it works fine on mine, just buy the app if it bothers you"
BUT if apple banned jailbroken phones, that would change EVERYTHING. If you take away the easy option, than you're forcing them into the hard one. If the only way for me to use one of my favorite apps was to spend several hours going through its assembly code, you can bet I would! Plus you'd start generating a lot more attention and interest from serious hackers. Its one thing to crack to save cheap people money, but its much different, much more noble if you're allowing people who can't use the program otherwise to be able to do so.
There's a version for the iPhone, iPad, Windows Phones, Blackberry, and even a desktop version.
Of course the biggest advantage of the software reader vs a hardware one, is that you have your phone with you all the time. So if you find yourself with some unexpected free time, you can always pull the phone out and read for however long you want to. Its great for when you need to kill 10 or 15 minutes. Which would be too short to warrant bringing dedicated hardware for.
Comics don't hurt my eyes when I read them on the lcd screen, but the style of comics is such that your eyes naturally move around more following the art, so you're never staring as intensly at the screen as you would reading pure text
Slashdot Mirror
Blackberry's biggest strength is its secure email. That's why so many corporations allow it. Assuring paranoid corporate people that their email is safe with them is practically their entire business model!
I can't imagine it would be worth ruining that reputation just to keep such a small part of their market.
Take away that, and all they have left is their little keyboards.
That was fun! Do you have another?
I think this nails it perfectly.
The question is biased in its very nature. How could someone possibly prove piracy failed their company, when someone can always just counter with "you just didn't get enough exposure"
Which is very annoying, because thats basically what we all struggle to do. I don't think its ever the case that piracy caused something to fail, but its much more likely that it prevented the business from getting the chance to succeed.
(For the purpose of this debate, I'm ignoring the "collectors". I used to download everything under the sun, and I wouldn't have given a second thought if one of those companies died. Instead, I'm talking about the people who would have paid money for it had they not been able to find it for free. The "on the fence" people if you will, those are the ones that it really hurts to lose out on)
I run a small business selling software, and I can tell you that when my app got cracked, my sales dropped by more than 30%.
Ponder that for a second. Imagine walking into work one day, and finding out you got a 30% paycut. Because well, someone in China was just bored that day.
Right now, if things continue as they are, its unlikely I'll be able to continue doing this for more than a month or two, before the rest of my savings bleeds out, and I have to move on.
Of course, things could change, I could catch my lucky break. And I've obviously made some mistakes, it wasn't just piracy that put me in this position. But that doesn't change the fact that I would be more likely to survive if more of the people who downloaded it actually paid for it.
And that whole "piracy is a form of advertisement" is utter crap, because only the people who already know about the program pirate it. Its hard enough to get people to know about the program, but harder still when they leave your site to find it for free.
Now, you can look at my story and say, people might just be interest in my product. It's cold. But it may be true. I may have just gone after a market that wasn't there. So who cares if I fail?
And I think that's the deepest irony in all of this. Because you know who cares? The people who are pirating my program! Obviously, it fulfills a role they need, or they wouldn't download it. So, they have a need that they want fulfilled, but because they didn't pay for it, I can't improve the software they want to use.
My Comic reader app does all that on Windows Mobile phones right now.
http://forums.comicreader.mobi/showthread.php?347-One-Year-Aniversary!-Special-Feature-annoucement!
As cool as it is, I wouldn't even dare call that an original idea.
But, if they're not going to listen to empirical evidence, that's not much you can do :p
This sounds familiar. Didn't this exact same thing happen with the DRAM chip makers like 10 or 15 years ago?
One of the greater contrasts between work and college.
At work, you're expected to do all the things they consider wrong. If you can save time by finding the solution online, or delegating the task to someone else, than that just gives you more time to work on the things that haven't already been solved.
In fact if the first thing you do when you have a problem ISN'T googling the problem online to see if there's already a solution, than I'd have to seriously question your skills.
After all, the whole point of programming is to make life easier. Not over complicate it.
Yeah, I like this point. Its not how "good" the hardware is, its about how useful it is. And that tablet would have been pretty useless.
Case in point: That tablet only supports 4096 colors. Thats going to look like crap, and no amount of insisting that its the best hardware money can buy will change that.
To put that in perspective, that's a whopping 16 shades of red,green, and blue to work with. You can pick up a crayonbox at Walgreens with more colors than that.
This is one of the things I struggle with working from home for myself. With no meetings and nothing to distract me, getting in the "zone" is awesome, but can be a little hazardous.
When I'm that into it, I stop getting hungry or thirsty, I don't get tired. I got to bed at around 6am, because the bright light hurts my eyes and distracts me long enough to think "you know, its 6am, maybe I should go to sleep" even though I'm not the slightest bit tired.
My dreams are all about the tasks I'm programming, but of course, since they're not grounded in reality, any discoveries there are useless.
3 hours later, I'll wake up. I'll spend maybe an hour waking up, eating breakfast, maybe watch an ep of the dailyshow, and than its back to the project.
I did this for 5 days straight once. It's absolutely fun as hell. Challenge after challenge after challenge. Like the best video game you've ever played. Its crazy productive. 3 to 4 months tasks get done in days. And at the time your mind masks all the downsides from you. You never get exhausted or sick of it. You don't realise how much time or days has passed.
But than you snap out of it. Your bones ache because you've barely moved them. Friends have messaged you and called, and you didn't notice. The fact that you've barely gotten any sleep hits you hard. You'll be fine one second, take a step forward and than all bam, all of it hits you at once.
And thats if you're lucky enough to have finished your task. If you've forced your self out of it because of "health concerns", than your mind makes it painfully clear, that you don't actually have as much choice as you thought you did in this matter. Almost as though you're being held hostage, you won't be able to focus on anything else at all. Your mind will constantly come up with new ideas that make you REALLY want to go back and see if it works. If you want to watch a show or play a game, you'll be lucky if you can notice the title. If you try to hang out with friends you'll be distant and distracted. If you try to do anything that requires even the slightest amount of thought, you'll be utterly useless.
And finally, when you're not in the zone its a stuggle. On the one hand, you know that if you could go into the zone all the work you're wasting time on would be blown away. Why should you do any work in this unproductive state when you know you could do it way better and faster when you're in the zone? But at the same time, there's this fear too. I don't want to lose the next 3 or 4 days of my life. Will this next task be the one that sucks me in? If I start this now, will I be able to make it to my appointment tomorrow? And is this strategy even physically healthy?
I haven't really come to terms with it yet. But hopefully one day I'll find the perfect balance :)
Ah, indeed. I believe we live on in the memories of the people who we leave behind. And in our accomplishments as well.
But you don't need religion to believe that. In fact, if I was to make a broad sweeping claim with absolutely no information to back me up, I would say it is a belief that is much more likely in those who don't have any religion at all :p
That would be a valid, except for the fact that Heaven is supposed to be some kind of reward for doing good stuff.
If you can get into heaven without doing those things, than it seems to defeat the point.
yeah, losing your individuality seems pretty much identital to there being no afterlife at all.
If your not there to experience it, than, well, its not an afterlife.
At first glance, I thought you were just being silly. But once I read the names next to them, its a very profound point.
Mistakes are often what the world so very interesting.
Without them, it would be quite boring.
I can't even explain it Philosophically, let alone with science!
I mean, if life is hard here because God gave us Free Will, but Heaven is Perfect with no pain. Doesn't that mean there's no free will there?
And wouldn't that be way worse than life here? Are you really YOU without the ability to make your own choices?
If he lets us keep our freewill, and only lets people in who won't make things bad, than wouldn't that mean a pleasant personality trumps true acts of good? Would you rather have an asshole cop who saves lives every day, or a guy who makes witty comments and makes everyone laugh?
Check out http://comicreader.mobi/ :)
The iphone and ipad version supports pdfs, and there's actually a small segment of users who bought it for the reason you just described. The program features a lens that autosizes to the text and pops out, and that seems to work well on normal pdfs too.
Also, in order to accomadate a couple legally blind customers, the lens works up to 4x zoom
Full Discloser: I'm the author of the app.
Well, fee the broadcaster paid includes provisions on the quality. So giving everyone the right to record a low definition fuzzy movie with lots of commercial breaks in it, does not give them the right to download a 1080p version with THX sound.
Also, you do not EVER have the right to share somebody else's work without their permission. EVER.I wish this statement didn't have to be tied to a discussion about movies, because their greedy actions cloud our logic. So, instead of thinking about movies, cause their such a crappy example. Try to think about anything else you love. Think about what makes things like the creative commons, GNU, or any open source license special. That author made the CHOICE to let the world have it for free. They decided that they wanted to give it away, or to let people learn from their work. And because of that we have all kinds of awesome projects like Dosbox and notepad++. But they are special because the author made that decision. You DO NOT have the right to make that choice for them.
But anyway, back to movies.
The movie industry is indeed quite greedy. There's no getting around that. If they could charge you per viewing they would. They tried (remember DIVX?).
If they could limit the number of people who watched the DVD together, they would. They tried. They actually tried to claim that if your tv was over a certain size and you had more than a few people, than you needed to pay royalities for the community showing. (Although I might be confusing this with one of the sports things)
And believe me they TRIED to get VCR recordings to be illegal too.
But don't confuse what the movie studio don't like with whats actually illegal. It doesn't matter how much you paid, you can't legally ditribute things that you don't have the rights to, and since filesharing is technically distributing, than they can get you on that.
Actually, my question was much more simple. I was merely wondering if you had double standards. But after reading your response, it seems pretty clear that you don't. So I apologize for that.
I didn't actually mean to discuss the morality of pirating media, but this is quite interesting, so I'd like to continue it.
If I had to come up with a clear cut definition of morality on the subject, than I would say:
"Are you helping out those whose works you appreciate?"
Which, I don't even know if it counts as view of morality, since it is so obviously to your advantage to support the the things that you like so that they can keep doing them. If you're upset that a game didn't get a sequal, but you never paid for that game, than well, I'm not sure what you expected there...
So, given that definition, I'd say there's no moral problems with you bypassing copyright restrictions on the stuff you paid for. You've done the key important part by paying them, and hopefully they'll use their cut to make more, but if it not, its still a good thank you.
Distrubuting the material, or cracks, would be morally wrong because you are potentially preventing people who would have paid from having the need to do so.
TV is NOT piracy, UNLESS your one of the houses that the survey group monitors to estimate the number of viewers each show has. Than you're a jackass, and I blame you for every single show that I loved and got canceled :p
But seriously, advertisers pay the networks for the market potential the show has, not the actual number of viewers, because we don't have a way of monitoring that. That means that you watching the show on the air, or downloading it on your computer has absolutely no bearing on the amount of finances the show will recieve.
If there's anything you've said that I object to, than it would have to be that you've grouped "content creaters" and the movie and music industry as one and the same. Which is unfortunete, because, well, one, they're not actually the content creaters, and two, they have a very long history of not supporting the content creaters.
Its not copyrights fault that they've been bullying people so much. With that much lobbying and power, even if we abolished all copyright, they'd just have different laws passed to do the same thing, except for only them.
Perhaps I'm just projecting here, but I think as a society, we like the idea of copyright. We don't like seeing other people's idea's getting stolen, and we don't want our ideas to get stolen either. Obviously we'd want to protect people from that.
But now we mostly just associate it with larger companies picking on smaller companies or people, and rarely see the other side of it.
No, you're right. That was a poor choice of words on my part.
Its particularly regrettable, since it distracts from the conversation. I didn't mean it to cause guilt or any kind of emotional responce. I was only to emphasize which part you're actually getting in trouble for.
So, let us just call it distributing unauthorized content. I think thats the official term?
Also, (and this may be out of line, since I don't actually know your personal views, and am just assuming that you hold all the same views as the Slashdot community), isn't it hypocritical to sidestep the whole issue of morality in regards to piracy, and only focus on the letter of the law. But at the same time admonish Apple and Flash for doing something that is "wrong" even through it breaks no laws?
This is SUCH a good point, and its really sad that the Sony somehow forgot it.
Do they not remember the 50,000 dollar prize for the first person to get linux to run on the xbox? or the other 50,000 dollar prize for doing it without the need for physical mods?
Homebrew drives everything, and piracy is just a tack on. Because once you can run unsigned code, you can run pirated software.
Now they've gone and pissed off all those people, and unlike you're typical "oh, we'll boycott it, but not really" crowd, these guys actually have the skills to do something about it.
Its not at all a double standard, because the tv companies paid the companies to let them broadcast the movie. And they paid them enough money that the movie companies decided it was worth the risk of vcr tapings. It's just basic accounting at that point.
No one on the internet is paying them for the rights to distribute their movies. If someone decided to pay a small fortune for the right to distribute a movie on a torrent site, than we'd be seeing an entirely different dynamic.
Also, while they use the term downloading, because well, everyone loves to fear monger. It's not ACTUALLY the downloading that gets you in trouble, its the uploading part. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but basically anything you get from a public source you are not legally liable for. It would be like if your local newspaper decided to include an entire Harry Potter book in their paper with out permission. You, the costomer, can't get in trouble for whats in the paper. Only the newspaper can be held responsible for what they print. (Obviously, this doesn't hold for anything that's illegal to simply possess, like say child pornography)
Whenever you use a torrent, you share a part of the file with other people. And the second you do that, guess what, you are officially distributing stolen content. You can play dumb on downloading and claim good faith, but there are no cases where its ok to give away someone elses work without their permission. Its part of the reason that the fees are so astronomical. Because back in the days before the internet, when you caught someone was distributing stolen content, it actually was just as bad as it sounded. Even the most pro-piracy of Slashdotters would be hard pressed to say that it would be morally acceptable to go around giving other people's stuff away.
I hope you don't pay to much attention to this guy. The world is not nearly as dark as he's proclaiming.
I'm going to tell you a fact that you may or not find comforting.
9 out of 10 programmers who are applying for jobs suck. I'm probably being too generous here, but whatever. I've interviewed people at Microsoft, and I've interviewed people at small start ups. Doesn't matter, most interviewee's are just terrible. I don't blame this guy for being jaded. If you had to interview crappy programmer after crappy programmer, you would be too.
BUT if you're the 1 out of 10 who's actually good, than you have a very bright future ahead of you. Companies are always hiring, and if you're truely talented, they'll often hire you even if they weren't planning on it. No good company lets a great programmer get away when they find one.
Entry level jobs have a lot of advantages, in that you're still new, and have no idea what you're actually worth. People are inheritantly loyal to the first company they work for, so they tend to stick around for a lot longer. Plus you get to train them to your style of programming.
Now in terms of actually getting those jobs...
Luckily for you, HR is ridiculously easy to get around. They don't know technology, and you can use that to your advantage. School, GPA, hobbies, cover letter, prior non programming work experience, awards... none of that matters. The only thing they care about is the programming buzzwords you have in there.
Right now, the big one is FLEX, or AS3. Learn that. Put it on your resume. There's a big shortage there, because most people who learn Flash are graphic designers with a minimal programming skill set. If you're a programmer with a minimal graphic design skill set, they'll love you.
Find out what else is "hot" but becareful not to confuse programmer trendy, with what's actually in demand. (Nobody in HR cares about Ruby on Rails).
Just pretend HR is nothing but a search engine that scans your resumes for keywords, and you'll be fine.
Now as far as experience goes. Work on an open source project. There's really no excuse not to. Just think about all the programs you use that are open source, find something that you'd like to change, and than go about learning how to change it. Don't "apply" and ask "what can I do to help". Just jump in and have at it. It's way easier to work on a project when you're doing something you want done anyway.
Good luck!
Math KNOWLEDGE may be debatable, but Math skills are essential.
If you don't have the ability to break up and solve mathmatical formulas, how do you expect to be able to solve complex programming tasks?
Plus linear algrebra is awesome. And everytime I do anything even remotely 2d or 3d related, I always wish I had paid more attention in Geometry.
But more than anything, its good to know that there's an equation for that. Even if you don't remember what it is, or how it works, having the simple knowledge that it exists to look up is more than worth the time of taking the class.
When you're having trouble selling a product, try and limit your available audience even more!
So, I clicked the link expecting something similar to the slashdot description and was shocked to find a real and relevant list!
Cross site scripting? sql injection? buffer overflow errors? Those are real problems and issues that any programmers would do well to learn about.
Really, presenting that information almost makes Slashdot seem, well ... responsible and informative.
I wonder if I just went to the wrong site...
Well said. If there's one thing Apple knows how to do, its sell stuff. So I really don't believe they'll actually do this.
But for the sake of argument, and killing time, I'll reply anyway.
I have an app on the appstore thats heavily pirated, so I hope it carries more weight when I say this:
Banning jailbroken phones from the appstore would be a very bad idea.
1st reason: You don't need a jailbroken phone for access to your apps: just go to My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Mobile Applications and you'll see all the ipa's you've bought.
2nd Reason: The goal is always to sell more copies, not punish those who didn't buy it. If you put a copy protection method in your code, the user has 3 choices: Stop using your app. Pay a couple bucks for your app. Or spend a significant amount of time to crack your app.
90% of the people will just stop using your app. But for the remaining few, its very important that you make buying app the easier choice. Because at the end of the day, we're much more lazy than we are cheap. Cracking an app beyond what a typical script can do is a LOT of work. Its hours and hours of using a hex editor, trying to find a specific value. Loading up the modified version, and waiting to see if message box will popup or if you were successful. Its tedius and boring, and no where near as glamourous as the movies make it out to be.
Its for this reason that cracking on the iphone hasn't really progressed. The technology has improved, but the adoption rate hasn't. My latest version was cracked using the same old version of crackulous that my first version was. I'm not going to pretend I understand why hackers do what they do, but after reading the forums with my cracked version one thing seems clear: They really don't give a crap about saving you a couple dollars. The typical response is: "it works fine on mine, just buy the app if it bothers you"
BUT if apple banned jailbroken phones, that would change EVERYTHING. If you take away the easy option, than you're forcing them into the hard one. If the only way for me to use one of my favorite apps was to spend several hours going through its assembly code, you can bet I would! Plus you'd start generating a lot more attention and interest from serious hackers. Its one thing to crack to save cheap people money, but its much different, much more noble if you're allowing people who can't use the program otherwise to be able to do so.
It'd be downright foolish not to plug my own product here:
http://comicreader.mobi
There's a version for the iPhone, iPad, Windows Phones, Blackberry, and even a desktop version.
Of course the biggest advantage of the software reader vs a hardware one, is that you have your phone with you all the time. So if you find yourself with some unexpected free time, you can always pull the phone out and read for however long you want to. Its great for when you need to kill 10 or 15 minutes. Which would be too short to warrant bringing dedicated hardware for.
Comics don't hurt my eyes when I read them on the lcd screen, but the style of comics is such that your eyes naturally move around more following the art, so you're never staring as intensly at the screen as you would reading pure text