that emails get lower priority than phone calls, faxes, or snail mail. I don't like it
I like it-- someone who writes a letter cares enough to take the few extra minutes to print the thing out and mail it. If people took the time to spell and sanity-check their letters, and to think about what they said rather than flinging them out into the ether, Congressmen would take them seriously, too. As is, most of the e-mails they get are probably form-letters and flames, with a few intellegent comments nestled somewhere in a deep inbox.
I'm not sure about that. Companies that have password entry websites (e.g. all of those "registered developers only" sites) consider them private and would probably do nasty things to you if you gained access through a method they didn't approve of.
IP blocking to password protection to encryption is just a matter of degree-- the intent is the same. Most companies connect all of their machines to the net, but consider the resources private and get incensed if you find an unprotected way of getting to them.
Hell, in this day of EULA's, you can probably write "I do not give you permission to look at this" on top of a site and sue anybody who reads futher. I know many laywers actually write stuff like that in their e-mail sigs.
Not to mention the six or seven totally leap-of-faith correct conclusions that Byers draws during the episode. I really like TLG on X-files, and was dissapointed with the pilot. Lee Harvey Oswald having sex-changed into a hacker babe was the nth straw too many.
I hope it picks up, because, man, what a great show concept for nerds.
If you worked on your side project while working for the company, there is a good chance that it is owned by them. Almost all employment contracts say this. I think you're out of luck, here.
There have been several (sometimes unrelated movies) with the same or similar names. Does anybody know what this movie-mark thing anyway, and who regulates it?
Similarly confusing titles that leap to mind are: "Blown Away" and "Blown Away", "The Chase", and "The Chase", "Il Postino" and "The Postman".
Most schools have "Electrical Engineering" -- meaning hardward and analog electronics, and "Computer Science" -- meaning software.
What they don't actually distinguish between is Engineering and Science, which are subdisciplines of anything: electrical work, computer work, physics, nuclear work, etc.
Engineers use known facts to build new systems. A lot of the work of an engineer is figuring out the most efficient way of doing x, solving the system issues, trying to make it affordable, robust, etc. Sometimes it is an issue of trying to make it bigger or smaller than ever before.
Scientists research new "facts." They know techniques for exploring new areas of mathematics and can whip up prototypes, but generally are idea generators, not idea refiners.
Most people with CS and EE degrees write software. Being a programmer is being an engineer (arguably, a software engineer). Most companies don't actually want to hire "computer scientists." Universities and research centers want scientists. Most companies want programmers.
Too many people come out of school with a CS degree and are lousy programmers. A PhD in CS may be a brilliant person, but likely as not they can't write good enough code to land a basic programming job on that alone. Likewise, a lot of people assume that because they can program they have the skills to develop complex new algorithms. A small set of people have both skill sets. They usually end up at companies developing far range concepts.
So, regardless of what your degree says, make sure the experience you gain in college actually leads towards the career you want. If you want to program, don't take the theoretical math classes recommended by your computer science curriculum-- you need to learn systems engineering, algorithms, and lots of languages. Some business classes wouldn't hurt, either. If you want to do research, you need to primarily learn a lot of math, not 20 languages, debugging techniques, and details of the development process.
Pretty damn close, excepting the "Moderator" stage, where you suddenly have all of this power and try to use it wisely.
You have to lower your reading level from +3 so you can see all of the posts to start moding some of them up. You weigh the decision: post, or moderate? for each discussion. You feel dismayed that the really crappy troll posts never show up when you have moderation points, cause you'd love to smack down some of the crap that sometimes makes it up to your usual reading level.
Doom3 just looks amazing. Even these early tech demo scenes make it clear that they have reached the photorealistic level. Say whatever you want about NVidia, but Carmack made that card fly...
Remember: the game is running on GeForce3, which is currently Mac only. Mac's are automatically gamma corrected, so images created on a Mac look really dark on a PC (since PC's aren't usually corrected).
Yes, DOOM3 is dark, but probably not as dark as what you are seeing in the screenshots-- look at those shots on a Mac or SGI instead of a PC and you'll be surprised how bright they are.
2. What's going to stop people from sharing Napster accounts?
General cheapness, access to billing information, one-login-at-a-time. Why does AOL have so many members?
Napster works because it is easy to use-- no copyright protection stuff, passwords (beyond one you type once and forget), identity proof, etc. I can use it on all of my computers without any problem. Remember when computer games and software were like this? Right, before they became such huge business (software companies argue before piracy grew).
An on-line music service that is a major hassle is a no-go. I'd pay a lot of money for a Napster that gets me legal, high quality songs. I wouldn't pay if it is a pain in the ass to use. If I can't connect from home because I forgot to log out at home, that sucks. If I'm paying and it's using a peer-to-peer architecture, I expect some kind of credit for the disk space and upload bandwidth I'm losing (how cool would that be for both the consumer and company-- a product that gets cheaper the more you use it).
Amen! The major hassle I hit while negotiating contracts is that too many other contractors are willing to sign away all of their rights without realizing what they are doing.
This isn't just supply and demand at work-- people who sign away more than they really can afford to are effectively selling their services below cost. A $20k dev. contract or even a $100k/yr job isn't worth exposing yourself to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit amd injunctions.
Companies push "standard" contracts because they have enough market force to push them on us. The only way to get back on top is to have the programmers push back with their own "standard" contract. This is sort of like EULA's vs. GPL. I fear that we're not having much success at organizing, however; the market is just so good right now that many people don't care about liability.
I'm very dissapointed in Mitch Pellagi (and Jonathan Frakes for the alien autopsy business). Even William Shatner only stooped to idiotic commercials, not blatant disinformation.
I've tried to upgrade to Netscape 6.0 on a number of Windows computers I use. Invariably, it crashes after a few minutes of casual browsing.
I'd rather not be forced to upgrade if this is what I get. You know, come to think of it, I don't remember Mosaic ever crashing on me. Maybe I should downgrade:)
OpenSSH should compromise because what they are doing is illegal. Look, the guy wrote SSH and trademarked that name. He was really nice about it and release the source and supported open source projects. When a trademark is diluted, you legally loose your trademark (Kleenex and Xerox are the textbook examples). Don't stab him in the back for supporting open source by taking away his brand name, which was a major marketing investment.
A company has to show just cause for termination, however (unless you signed that away and are an "employee at will"). It is very hard for a company to fire somebody if they are actually doing their job well but the company doesn't like something else about them.
-m
I never considered collisions between ships much of a problem (I mean, hey, there's a lot of ocean out there) until I sailed a 48' sailboat across an ocean. It turns out that the ocean is pretty crowded.
In 14 days of sailing, we had to change course five or six times to avoid collisions with tankers and other large shipping vessels. A fast ship would have made this impossible. On the open ocean, you can't see farther than about 4 miles around you (that dang curved earth thing). A large, fast moving ship would plow through anything less than 100' long because it wouldn't even notice them and they wouldn't be high enough to see it coming.
I was thinking of the fact that you can make moves that are good for you but not bad for your opponents (e.g. move the robber away from someone's field, trade at a harbor on behalf of another player). Ultimately there is one winner, but there is a lot of mutual benefit during the game.
...is not zero-sum. It also has the neat property that typically everyone is collaborating, not competing. WOTC just released a very nice 3rd edition of D&D at http://www.wizards.com/dnd/main.asp?x=dnd/brand,3
I think the card game Settlers of Catan is a more traditional board/card game that is also not zero-sum.
We have bad electricity at work and a UPS on every box. My laptop can last about two days on the UPS w/o external power because of power management. The file servers (which are not being used 100% of the time) and my desktop only get about 2 hours before dying.
Despair has also petitioned the court to require defendants to submit a handwritten letter which repeats the phrase ":-( is a registered trademark of Despair, Inc." one-thousand times.
Or the blatantly faked picture of the CEO with Jeff Bezos.
Slashdot Mirror
I like it-- someone who writes a letter cares enough to take the few extra minutes to print the thing out and mail it. If people took the time to spell and sanity-check their letters, and to think about what they said rather than flinging them out into the ether, Congressmen would take them seriously, too. As is, most of the e-mails they get are probably form-letters and flames, with a few intellegent comments nestled somewhere in a deep inbox.
-m
magic
IP blocking to password protection to encryption is just a matter of degree-- the intent is the same. Most companies connect all of their machines to the net, but consider the resources private and get incensed if you find an unprotected way of getting to them.
Hell, in this day of EULA's, you can probably write "I do not give you permission to look at this" on top of a site and sue anybody who reads futher. I know many laywers actually write stuff like that in their e-mail sigs.
-m
-m
I hope it picks up, because, man, what a great show concept for nerds.
-m
-m
-m
Similarly confusing titles that leap to mind are: "Blown Away" and "Blown Away", "The Chase", and "The Chase", "Il Postino" and "The Postman".
-m
What they don't actually distinguish between is Engineering and Science, which are subdisciplines of anything: electrical work, computer work, physics, nuclear work, etc.
Engineers use known facts to build new systems. A lot of the work of an engineer is figuring out the most efficient way of doing x, solving the system issues, trying to make it affordable, robust, etc. Sometimes it is an issue of trying to make it bigger or smaller than ever before.
Scientists research new "facts." They know techniques for exploring new areas of mathematics and can whip up prototypes, but generally are idea generators, not idea refiners.
Most people with CS and EE degrees write software. Being a programmer is being an engineer (arguably, a software engineer). Most companies don't actually want to hire "computer scientists." Universities and research centers want scientists. Most companies want programmers.
Too many people come out of school with a CS degree and are lousy programmers. A PhD in CS may be a brilliant person, but likely as not they can't write good enough code to land a basic programming job on that alone. Likewise, a lot of people assume that because they can program they have the skills to develop complex new algorithms. A small set of people have both skill sets. They usually end up at companies developing far range concepts.
So, regardless of what your degree says, make sure the experience you gain in college actually leads towards the career you want. If you want to program, don't take the theoretical math classes recommended by your computer science curriculum-- you need to learn systems engineering, algorithms, and lots of languages. Some business classes wouldn't hurt, either. If you want to do research, you need to primarily learn a lot of math, not 20 languages, debugging techniques, and details of the development process.
-m
You have to lower your reading level from +3 so you can see all of the posts to start moding some of them up. You weigh the decision: post, or moderate? for each discussion. You feel dismayed that the really crappy troll posts never show up when you have moderation points, cause you'd love to smack down some of the crap that sometimes makes it up to your usual reading level.
-m
Doom3 just looks amazing. Even these early tech demo scenes make it clear that they have reached the photorealistic level. Say whatever you want about NVidia, but Carmack made that card fly...
-magic
Yes, DOOM3 is dark, but probably not as dark as what you are seeing in the screenshots-- look at those shots on a Mac or SGI instead of a PC and you'll be surprised how bright they are.
magic
Napster works because it is easy to use-- no copyright protection stuff, passwords (beyond one you type once and forget), identity proof, etc. I can use it on all of my computers without any problem. Remember when computer games and software were like this? Right, before they became such huge business (software companies argue before piracy grew).
An on-line music service that is a major hassle is a no-go. I'd pay a lot of money for a Napster that gets me legal, high quality songs. I wouldn't pay if it is a pain in the ass to use. If I can't connect from home because I forgot to log out at home, that sucks. If I'm paying and it's using a peer-to-peer architecture, I expect some kind of credit for the disk space and upload bandwidth I'm losing (how cool would that be for both the consumer and company-- a product that gets cheaper the more you use it).
-m
This isn't just supply and demand at work-- people who sign away more than they really can afford to are effectively selling their services below cost. A $20k dev. contract or even a $100k/yr job isn't worth exposing yourself to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit amd injunctions.
Companies push "standard" contracts because they have enough market force to push them on us. The only way to get back on top is to have the programmers push back with their own "standard" contract. This is sort of like EULA's vs. GPL. I fear that we're not having much success at organizing, however; the market is just so good right now that many people don't care about liability.
-magic
Wish I had mod points to bring this up
I'm very dissapointed in Mitch Pellagi (and Jonathan Frakes for the alien autopsy business). Even William Shatner only stooped to idiotic commercials, not blatant disinformation.
-m
I'd rather not be forced to upgrade if this is what I get. You know, come to think of it, I don't remember Mosaic ever crashing on me. Maybe I should downgrade :)
-magic
-m
A company has to show just cause for termination, however (unless you signed that away and are an "employee at will"). It is very hard for a company to fire somebody if they are actually doing their job well but the company doesn't like something else about them. -m
In 14 days of sailing, we had to change course five or six times to avoid collisions with tankers and other large shipping vessels. A fast ship would have made this impossible. On the open ocean, you can't see farther than about 4 miles around you (that dang curved earth thing). A large, fast moving ship would plow through anything less than 100' long because it wouldn't even notice them and they wouldn't be high enough to see it coming.
-m
-m
-m
I think the card game Settlers of Catan is a more traditional board/card game that is also not zero-sum.
-m
This is a very well written and informative book review-- thanks! -m
-m
Great article!
-m