I've come to trust the Dutch as a serious and civilized people, so I suspect that it more the kicking, beating, and menacing with a knife that got these bozos punished; not the 'theft of imaginary pixels'.
Exactly the opposite will happen. There will be more open source because the 'poor starving masses' with software development skills will have nothing else to do.
What will change will be the emphasis upon which open source will be focused. There will be less development on games and DRM bypassing and more on programs that connect people together for economic development. More CraigsList-type of development and less BitTorrent.
There will be a lot of development on software that builds groups with common economic interests that are separated by great distances. Things that corporations almost exclusively do now, such as buying and delivering groceries from distant farms or cereal processing factories.
In severe economic times, people will be less not more inclined to allow their labor to be diverted into the generation of corporate profit. The concept that software workers will be giving more time to well-paying jobs assumes that are actually going to be well-paying jobs for software workers. In a severe recession or Soviet-style economic collapse, that simply won't be the case.
$100K+ per college per year is more money than the sales of recorded product to the students would generate. Therefore the RIAA is getting paid twice: once through extortion ("we won't sue you for promoting piracy through providing high bandwidth...") and again through product sales to the students.
No wonder they want the current situation to continue.
The only real 'solution' is to convince students to wean themselves from RIAA/MPAA product. This will probably prove next to impossible since young people have been conditioned from birth to consume RIAA/MIAA product.
One thing to watch out for is any collusion between Wackenhut or Corrections Corporation of America and the RIAA/MPAA. These people are the two largest private prison corporations in the USA. It would be in their interest to criminalize with prison sentences any copyright offence like downloading. They make money by holding people in prison: the more people held int their prisons, the more profit that they make. And they have a responsibility to their stockholders to maximize their profits. If laws are passed turning file downloading into prison offenses, you can be sure that Wackenhut and CCA had a lot to do with it because these kind of laws will deliver a new large source of raw materal for them to process for profit. They have already got a lock on the Black underclass youth, which is no longer a growing source of product for the private prison corporations. So if you download files, (and you do), then this means you. Don't get tricked into a prison sentence by the RIAA/MPAA because you won't survive an period in an American corporate prison.
These companies are the modern day equivalent of slave-traders. Whenever a law is proposed on the state level to increase the penalties for drug possession, often it is Wackenhut and CCA who are behind it, usually by providing most of the campaign funds for the person who introduced the bill. Students should demand that their colleges disinvest any shares that their college endowment fund has in either of these corporations.
I'm not paranoid, this stuff really happens this way. Just beware and don't be naive. Young American white people put too far much emphasis on music recordings for some unknown reason. They have been conditioned to believe that this is the core of their culture. Well, learn to break your conditioning, that's what you are going to college for. Learn to play a musical instrument and learn to make films from public domain plays and your own scripts using inexpensive cameras and digital video edit programs.
Thank you and please don't mod me down simply because you disagree. Learning to handle diverse viewpoints in a civilized manner is another reason why you are spending so much money to go to college.
Any chance that they'll fix the problems of Win1? Like having the machine lock-up when you press the DoorOpen button on a CD drive when a disk is playing?
Or how about having Alt-F4 actually close a command-line window like it closes every other open window?
The non-othorginalities of the Windows user interface just drive me crazy when they won't fix them version after version. And exactly why is it necessary to change the user interface with every version of Windows?
Don't these bozos know that the operating system is supposed to be invisible (and it's supposed to work, hint, hint) and all the importance of a computer system is its user interface? If the user is aware that there is a new operating system then something is wrong with the design of this new operating system.
Computers are tools that increase their user's productivity; that's why people buy them. When you're spending time trying to understand how the stupid new version of a program works, then you're not being productive. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of having the suckers.
This morning somehow a large blue panel appeared on the left side of my File Explorer. Don't know how; don't know why. It just made it impossible to have many file explorer windows open at once because it took up so much screen real-estate for no reason at all. It took me about twenty minutes of web research to discover that I could get rid of it by selecting the 'Classic Windows Display Option' that was buried deep in the interface options. It seriously pisses me off that there is some schuck in Redmond making a lot more money than I am who thought that I would need a big blue panel on the left side of my file listings. These people should be making fries at the Burger King, not fooling around with productive people's user interfaces!
You can't have a trillion dollar bailout of the rich bankers, buy up every dishwasher's quarter-million dollar underwater mortgage, hold a permanent-endless war on the other side of the world,... and have a giant telescope on the moon. It's not possible, it's science fiction.
All the space exploration projects being talked about and planned for the 2020's may actually happen...in the 2120's or 2220's. Not in ten years from now.
I know that you're all young and starry-eyed, but in the bankrupt USA, reality rules. And reality says that there isn't going to any giant new space program in the 2010's-2020's.
Don't just mod me to -1 for simply telling you the truth. And don't tell me how small the giant new space program is compared to other absurd federal government programs. Those programs are toast also.
My American friends...you are simply broke... you have dreams... but you have no money.
Doesn't this nullify all the Apple mystique developed by them over the past thirty years? That they are a corporate community of driven, intelligent, and advanced people working together to build a new exciting and better future? If that were really true then what difference would it make whether the current leader passes on? Isn't the corporation a dynamic unity of the focused applied pure mental brilliance?
Well, it would appear not. It's a clusterfuck of neurotic grade-point angels fluttering around the whims of a single obsessive-compulsive dictator. Kind of like the Soviet Union without all the people with less than a B+ average in school.
The real question about Apple is whether Steven Jobs will take the entire company down with him when he inevitably goes insane. Consider it a parallel to Mao launching the Cultural Revolution after slipping into the dementia stage of tertiary syphilis, thus destroying the economy and lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese people for a generation.
I recommend brushing up on (or learning from the beginning) algorithm design techniques. These are formal ways to diagram how the code works before actually starting to write the program itself.
Avoid the primitive one-dimensional flow chart technique and learn instead the two-dimensional Warnier-Orr style of algorithm design. Google for tutorials.
Then, (as our programming teacher at Portland Community College used to tell us) get a big sheet of paper, a little pencil, and a really big eraser. Start with really simple programs and learn how to draw loops, branches, and linear instruction sequences. Get good with free-hand drawing of brackets. Draw lightly with the little pencil so that you can erase whole blocks of bracket drawings. When you master simple programs, learn to draw linked lists, binary trees, and recursive loops like the QuickSort and the Tower of Hanoi.
Learn how to walk through the Warnier-Orr drawing and try every thing that you can think of to make your walk-through crash. When it does, erase that section of the drawing and re-draw all the brackets and symbols for that procedure. Every hour spent successfully crashing the algorithm is many hours saved debugging actual code.
Do all this at home. You have a new job and your employers will question their decision to promote you to the programming crew if they see you drawing big brackets and symbols on a sheet of paper. Especially if you tell them that this is formal academic programmer training.
Firing someone? For goodness sake's be sure to do it in a way that allows them to get unemployment payments. I'm been fired from several jobs over the past twenty years. I'm not a bad worker. But this industry (electronics/computers/high tech) goes through employees like rubbers in a 5 dollar whorehouse and then tosses them away like used Kleenex when they've served their purpose.
Let's see. I got fired from Hewlett-Packard for having a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown (not nude) on my PC. 'Creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment' even though I was the only person working in the room.
Hmm... I got fired from a small medical equipment company in silicon valley when my boss overheard me say that 'white smocks are for white schmucks'. The boss decided that all employees had to wear white coats to work; blue jeans and button down shirts were no longer allowed. I actually got an unemployment check when I told the hearing judge that 'forcing Asian workers to wear white smocks was an insult because in VietNam and China only corpses were wrapped in white. The boss was telling the workers that they were nothing more than dead meat."
Oh and I got fired from Tektronix when I got blasted right in the eye with melted wax from a printer. No one noticed that the drain on eye-wash safety-station directed water directly onto a power strip. Of course it was all my fault. As always.
I got fired from the German milling machine company where I had worked for six years when I demanded that the American employees get the same stock-option package as the German employees when the company went public. Since the USA branch was a subsidiary, wholly-owned by the German parent. The German manager claimed that he felt threatened and intimidated: he was six foot-eight inches and I'm five-foot seven. Ja-Ja.
My point is that in a non-unionized cowboy industry like electronics people get fired constantly for practically nothing. If it hasn't happened to you, then it will sooner or later.
If you want to seriously decrease the possibility that someone will 'go postal' when you fire them, then you must do in a way that enables them to get unemployment insurance. Believe me the weekly checks go a long way to 'smooth out the transition process'. It's a no-brainer and it doesn't cost the company any money. I can't understand why managers would pride themselves on firing someone in a way that makes it impossible to get unemployment. But they do.
If a company is publicly owned and answers to shareholders for maximum profit, then it is in its best interest for them to be their own pirates. If they can sell an individual copy of the game for $30, but they can get $1000 from every person that they sue that has a copy of the game that wasn't purchased, then they should distribute as many 'illegal' copies of the game as possible. Suing your 'customers' is far more profitable than selling them games could ever be. They have an obligation to their stockholders to put most of their corporate resources into lawsuits instead of game development.
Activision should work with their distributors to get the names of young people who are using the 'illegal' games. First they sell for pennies a mediocre game and get the names and addresses of the people whom they are going to sue. Then Activision gives a copy of the hot new game (HNG) to the distributors. The distributors give the HNG to the people who bought the previous game, and then give the names and addresses of those people to Activision. Then the lawyers are released from hell, and instead of collecting $30 from each person for a game, they get $1000+ from each person who received a 'free' HNG. The distributors get 20% as a bounty.
Of course, it goes without saying that the distributors will tell the 'customers' that the HNG is an open-source program and that the only charge is 'register' your name and address. Activision should also remove all copyright notices from the HNG code and claim that it is a 'product under development'.
This kind of thing is frowned upon in legal circles as being a form of entrapment, but that doesn't apply to civil or copyright cases. Even if it did, any applicable laws could quickly be changed to maximize the profit for Activision.
In this situation, the customer base of Activision has four choices:
> they can give up using game programs from any source, free, paid, legal, illegal, bit-torrent, whatever.
> they can pay the $1000+ to Activision.
> they can pay the $1000+ to Activision, then find out where the children of the Activision lawyers go to school, kidnap them, and hold them until they get their $1000+ back.
> pay a finder's fee/bounty to a death-squad-for-hire to kill the lawyers and not pay Activision the $1000+.
This is how various mafia crime organizations get started. When it starts to make more financial sense to all chip in to hire a killer than it does to risk being sued/entrapped by corrupt organizations that discovered that it was much easier to sue people than provide them with a product/service at going market prices.
average employee generates 10GB of data per year at a cost of $5 per gigabyte to back it up...
I cry nonsense in the statement above.
I put a 25 cent blank DVD into the DVDwriter of my PC. Then I copy the entire contents of my 'C:\backup' folder onto this DVD. I start the program, and go do something else. Total dedicated time: 2 minutes
When the DVD write is done, I write a label code on the DVD (date, employee, backup number) and put the disk back on the stack in the file cabinet. Total dedicated time: 2 minutes
My salary and benefits: @ $18/hr time used on backup: 0.067 hrs My cost per gigabyte of backup: $1
So if I'm an average marginally competent employee, why can I do backup %500 more efficiently than the average. This statistic must be junk.
Why are they telling anyone about this in a public forum? To alert people of the 'dangers' of not erasing a hard disk before selling it? To check to see what's actually in the product before you ship it? As if we didn't know?
We keep being told by those who know that information is valuable; information is power; information creates wealth. Golly! (sheeet! in Eubonics_Jive) As IT people we certainly throw this line around a lot to people.
But only when information is limited and concentrated, and held discrete, and delivered discretely to the right people. Information that is open and publicly distributed loses its value very quickly.
So why would anyone who understands this principal violate it in such a silly and self-righteous manner as calling a press conference and claiming that you found valuable information accidentally left on a computer that you just purchased? To the right people, this information is worth at least the value of the laptop. If it wasn't, than it wouldn't be a topic on Slashdot. So who doesn't want a free cool laptop? Someone who definitely gets paid too much money.
IF, and that's a big-bottomed if, information is valuable; information is power; information creates wealth then don't degrade it by destroying it in such a cavalier fashion, my friend.
It reflects poorly on the rest of us who appreciate the value of fine, focused, and timely information.
Everyone laughs, but that doesn't change reality. Reality is that when you have a huge corporation with most of its assets tied up in advanced technology, then you have to pay to keep it protected.
If you move the technology off-shore to avoid taxes, then you lose the protection that those taxes provide. Both from criminals and from the police that are being paid by the taxes that your land-based operations incur. Does Google plan to hire Blackwater (the world's largest mercenary army) to keep people away from their floating data centers?
There is also the question of getting the money to build these floating structures. As I write on Monday morning Sept 15 2008, the banking structure of the USA is collapsing. The stock market is falling and several of the largest banks of the USA have declared bankruptcy. No banks means no capital for expansion. Granted this isn't such a big issue when Google has such a large stock value, but that stock value is mostly based on speculation and Google's price could fall as fast as it rose.
There is also the question of scale. One can claim that a huge data center could be powered by wave energy; it's another thing to actually do it. Especially when you are a public corporation and have to answer to entities that hold huge blocks of your stock.
Google is a company with an oversupply of young over-educated technological Grade-Point Angels (people whose most singular talent is to convince their teachers to give them high grades in order that the teachers will be able to reflect in their angel's glory). These people have a tendency to actually believe their fantasies, especially the fantasies that involve both ecology and advanced technology.
This factor has to be considered in all of their press releases and corporate projections.
I got the local library CD of RS Bigger Bang several years ago and dubbed it using Exact Audio Copy to my Windows PC. No problems with the transfer. Maybe the CD maker is putting some new code in the data stream to prevent people from listening to the music, as you suggested. Have you tried AudioCatalyst or some other ripping program? Or booting a Linux session from a CD ROM, using Linux audio ripping programs, and then using those MP3 files?
The music is competent, but no different that what the Rolling Stones were doing thirty years ago. The best way to be 21st century Rolling Stones fan is not to be concerned with getting perfect copies of their recordings, but rather to get a guitar and learn to play the Keith Richards/Ron Wood riffs in the alternate tunings that they use. There are internet postings of how to tune and play songs that they recorded 25 years ago. Since their style hasn't changed, learning to play their old stuff is the same as copying the recordings of their 'new' stuff.
The music 'industry' really needs to rethink their 20th-century mentality. Where one monolithic entity (posing as several individual global corporations) controls culture for everyone by distributing entertainment 'packages' from one central source. And by bringing the full force of state-controlled legal violence against anyone stepping outside of this Stalinist framework. There really is no difference in the mind-set between the RIAA and Soviet Orwellian Ministry of Culture. Neither of them work well in the real world; which consists of real people and real culture that can't be controlled by a centralized authority.
The only thing that government-controlled (or corporate-controlled) culture does is create a vast and illegal underground counter-culture. Artists end up imprisoned or spending all their creative energy hiding, fighting, or defending their work against the corporate Stalinist cement-heads. Society suffers, people suffer, other people and nations advance and your culture and people don't.
Culture and Art comes from the bottom up, not the top down. Especially in an era of inexpensive and widely available technology like high resolution digital video cameras, software audio mixing studios, and internet high-speed media distribution.
My advice is to stop sucking on Hollywood's Grand Tetons, get some gear, learn some literary and music theory, create your own works, distribute them discretely among your own trusted people, and ignore the RIAA/MIAA.
And for goodness sake's don't let the cement-heads steal your culture. We need to completely change our mentality from believing that artistic success is being a 'rock star' to a mentality where being an artistic success consists of being able to keep our important and meaningful works of art hidden from Hollywood.
Why would anybody investigate this goofy plan? [ An oversupply of government and foundation grants from brain-dead administrators? ]
Why would we automate the driving of vehicles when there is a serious unemployment problem? Automating the driving would greatly reduce the jobs for drivers. Isn't the Teamsters Union rather strong?
What does putting hundreds of thousands of expensive magnets in the road systems do to solve the problem of oil depletion?(which leads to fuel costs that exceed the value of the goods being shipped?)
How does putting hundreds of thousands of expensive magnets in the road systems lead to the massive increase in transportation efficiency needed to offset the increase in fuel costs arising from peak oil depletion in the coming decades?
The oil-based system of single isolated vehicles worked when there was (or seemed to be) an endless supply of cheap oil and raw materials. But the 20th century is over. And so is the era of isolated vehicles endlessly blasting up and down ribbons of highways.
What we need is a system of advanced high speed railways criss-crossing the North American continent. Instead of having thousands of trucks carrying goods from LA to Phoenix, we need to be able to have a big diesel 'rig' truck be able to be loaded in Long Beach from ship containers, drive to the rail terminal, and drive right onto the high speed train car and be secured. Then the train will carry the entire truck to Phoenix rail central. The truck will then be driven off the train (by a local driver) and the contents be delivered to their local destinations.
A vast and efficient 21st century rail system is the only way that we are going to be able to get the order-of-magnitude efficiency increases needed to keep our transportation system operating in the coming decades of massive transformation due to peak oil shocks and fossil-fuel depletion.
Not by some stupid idea of putting thousands of magnets in the roadways and having robots do steering.
What's wrong with these people? What are they thinking?
There is a serious possibility that the Americans will not be establishing a lunar base in the next twenty years. Regardless of the technology or science available.
The problem is one of money. Basically the US government is broke. It runs huge deficits. This didn't make any difference in the past when there was no other place but America for super-wealthy people and governments to put their money. That has changed.
What has also changed is that oil has gotten incredibly expensive. Cheap oil allows the economy to grow. A growing economy allows huge expensive social programs like pensions and medical care to people over 60, moon projects, massive government bureaus, and permanent endless war on the other side of the world.
When the economy stops growing, house prices stop rising, and the sources of easy credit dry up, serious choices have to be made. Everything can't be afforded: some things must be abandoned. This is reality in 2008. It's not 1967 anymore.
The moon projects are easy targets. Although these projects are popular among the young and educated, these projects are expendable. There are no voters on the moon. There's no oil there. There's no one there who can be shaken down with atomic bombs to be persuaded to buy USA Treasury bonds to finance the endless deficits.
It's easy for the NASA administrators to hold press conferences and announce grandiose plans. It's easy to put big budget programs into future federal budget projections. But the coming years, when the true extent of the bankruptcy of the US government becomes apparent, these space programs might be quietly dropped. This is reality of the 21st century. Again, it's not 1967 anymore.
Just exactly is information technology energy inefficient?
Is it through the use of thousands of PCs in a large corporation each using 400+ watts of power (PC and CRT combined)? Switch to laptops and large screen LCD monitors.
Is it because the output of the IT department isn't doing enough to reduce the overall company energy bill? Well, yes, the purpose of the IT department is to look for ways to reduce bottlenecks in the production process. Which means that it looks for ways to speed up production, which means using more energy.
Maybe they're trying to say that the IT department is using too much energy driving to work and they should just all stay home and work in their pajamas from their kitchen tables. Hell, maybe the IT department simply drinks too much coffee.
Sure they can order the IT department to tweak and focus and get their energy consumption down. After a whole year, the IT department just might save enough energy to match one trip in the corporate jet carrying a couple executives across the continent for the purpose of getting drunk with another couple of executives from another company. Nothing like real 'face time' when you need to close the big deal.
Let's face it. Everything that American management says is basically full of shit. Sometimes they actually know it and must say it anyway. Usually they don't. For that matter, much management statements from any country are BS. But the Americans are the world-masters at total corporate double-think and nonsense.
Dilbertize them and ignore them. In twenty years the smart managers will be still around and the vast majority of dumb ones will be most likely be dead. Simply because they don't know what to do to keep themselves alive and no one's going to go out of their way to see that they survive. You should survive, though. And don't be concerned about being green. You can't be lean, mean, serene, and green all at the same time.
I live near two little restaurants in Portland Oregon USA (the recycling capital of the USA). Every morning there are SIX loud 'big green trucks' that pull up next to my apartment between 5 and 7AM every single day to pick up the recycling. Three trucks for each restaurant: one for glass, one for paper, one for compost. Each loud truck with huge diesels shake the buildings of the entire apartment complex. We complain, but as typical of white-working-class people, the garbage drivers and managers just don't care. Pure redneck 'get 'er done, get 'er done...loud and proud' mentality is a true pain for really-productive people.
Recycling sucks. It is a sop to the upper-middle-class. The energy expended by driving all the extra 'big green trucks' around to pick up this stuff exceeds the energy saved by having the garbage go to different sections of the landfill. Recycling was a bold idea in the 1970s, it's obsolete now.
Recycling will only start to make sense in the era of $4.50/gallon diesel when people start bringing empty containers to the food store and refilling them with food. Things like thick, double-ply sugar bags and soy-sauce containers could be reused ten times
Doesn't the Apple iPod run on advanced microcontrollers whose capabilities were only available on million dollar computers in the 1970s?
Doesn't the Apple iPod store data on memory chips that millions of times the capabilities of the ICs available in 1970s (never mind the 'little beads in a wire-loom' memory used at that time)?
Doesn't the Apple iPod store music on tiny hard disks that were inconceivable in the 1970's?
Doesn't the iPod use an interface to access these thousands of music files from the hard disk that was completely unforseen in the 1970s?
Then where does this schmuck get off claiming that he 'invented' the iPod in the 1970s? (which is what a patent is all about, inventing this and that).
This is the weakest patent claim 'prior art' ever! Why is Apple taking this seriously?
Maybe this guy who is claiming that he 'invented' the iPod actually is an old 'pal' of Steve Jobs who is blackmailing him with something that Steve did long ago and this is way to pay him off (and take a tax deduction as well.)
It's the only thing that makes sense to me. Yes, I's quite confuuused about the whole thing.
Use YouTube. It's obvious the best real choice. If you want people to actually see your work, then this is the place that they will find it.
You are presenting your video in the marketplace. The marketplace of public attention. Unless you are a Hollywood star, that is someone who has previously introduced successful content into the pay-per-view marketplace, you are competing with everyone else in the marketplace of public attention.
The marketplace of public attention for video is YouTube. Put your work there (even with the low resolution) and the people who find your work interesting will make the effort to download your stuff at higher resolution. But first they have to know about you and your work. And YouTube is the place where that happens for entry-level video makers. And if you're not a Hollywood star, then you are an entry-level filmmaker by definition.
Don't pay serious attention to anything that anyone on Slashdot tells you, just post your video to YouTube.
Programmers can no longer charge more for their services. There are programmers throughout the world where people make $10-$15 a day. And the cost of living reflects this. Detailed code specs can be attached to an e-mail, and the code can be returned attached to e-mail. Payment can be made through Pay-Pal.
The 20th-century is over; it's a global marketplace for coders. There is no way that contract programmers can just charge more for their services when there are thousands of competent Windows programmers in Asia and Africa willing and happy to work for $10 an hour.
Here in Portland, Oregon, one of the major grocery store chains (Fred Meyer, Inc.) has an automated check-out line that has each station running on Windows. I don't know which version but I suspect that it is Win2000. Each station has a laser bar-code scanner for most items. After scanning the item, the user places it in a bag that is on a scale. The weight of each individual grocery item is in the store's data base. When the weight on the scale matches the bar-code, the system prompts the user to scan the next item. There is a touch screen for entering the type of produce by pre-assigned number. For payment there is a credit/debit card reader, a paper-currency scanner, and a coin-weighing unit.
There is a stand-alone PC running Windows for each station and they are connected to a store LAN. Embedded systems like this running Windows on standard PCs is very common. It's easy to develop for this platform. And when it crashes, and it does more than the robust real-time operating systems used on 32-bit microcontroller embedded designs, then the attendant simply opens the cabinet and reboots the PC.
The automatic bottle return machines that read the bar-codes on empties all use Windows. They are constantly crashing.
You don't find Windows running nuclear powerplants, wafer fabs, international bank transfers, or jet airliners. But you find it nearly everywhere else in embedded-systems. Grocery stores find that it's cheaper to throw together a hack job in Visual BASIC and then run it on a few $250 PCs with $50 Windows licenses than it is to pay a programmer $25/hr to write robust code that runs on $8 microcontrollers.
I'm a microcontroller-systems designer and I run into this situation all the time.
Since the first term of Ronald Reagan, the rich and super-rich have used the Republican party and the religious right to constantly lower their tax rate. Now they pay a significantly less percentage than working people. And that is before all the specialized tax breaks hidden in the 1000-page appropriations bills that no congressman ever reads.
This is never going to change, regardless of who wins what election.
The only way that ordinary people are going to get tax fairness, i.e. the same rates as the super-rich, is to cut corners, zap the books, write in extra kids on their W-2 forms, Yes, to cheat. Have you ever known anyone besides a few limousine-liberals who feel good about paying taxes? Fifty years ago, it was common in the USA. Not anymore. People realize that they need their money to pay for the things that government used to provide with all the taxes that they take right out of your check. And they're discovering new and creative ways to do protect their money from those who would just give it to Haliburton's permanent endless gravy train.
As the technological elite it would be in our best interest to 'look the other way' when we increasingly find people using technical means to protect their incomes that they need to support their families. If we rat them out, they will hate us. And Haliburton is not going to protect us from their wrath.
On the other hand, if we discover people that are withholding huge sums from the public knowledge, we should use our technical abilities to force them to contribute a reasonable percentage to the public good. These would be people like international drug dealers and other criminals who pay nothing in taxes, either legal taxes or contributions to community charities.
As in so many areas, as the government collapses into insanity or irrelevancy, the burden falls to the us, the technological elite, to decide and enforce the proper balances for the allocation of social resources.
We must do what we can, because we are the only ones with the can-do. This mentality seems weird in 2008, but it will be standard operating procedure in 2028, which is not that far away for most of us.
Thank you,... and be a mensch, stop modding me down to -1, just because you don't like what I say.
This is just Germans being German, but still it is incredibly stupid.
Isn't Germany the place where it is illegal for stores to put items on sale, except for a few days each year? Wasn't this law passed by Hitler (opps, my bad...can't say that word in Deutschland) because Jewish store owners were selling their inventory below cost in order to get the funds together to escape the holocast? Isn't it kept on the books and still enforced (against mostly Turks and other minorities running little stores in minority neighborhoods) simply because it is the German Law and German Law must be obeyed regardless of how mean and stupid and senseless it is? Good thing that they don't grow cotton in Germany, otherwise they would still have colored drinking fountains.
Good thing too that the Soviets and the Americans burned the whole country to the ground, killed millions of them, and chased the few good Germans (oh, excuse me, I meant to say 'the Nazis') to the ends of the earth. Otherwise they would still be throwing Jews, Gipsies, and homos into the gas chambers. After all, the law is the law, and it must be obeyed!
I can't understand this obsession with politics. It doesn't make any difference (I's white, so I don't use the double negative before the word difference) to most people who is their 'leader' in Washington DC. I wish that they would all simply disappear. Or at least, just shut up. There are so many things that are more important and more interesting than DC politics. Political reporting of the same non-story over-and-over day-after-day is a cheap but acceptable way to avoid doing any real reporting on real stories.
Fox is the worst, of course, but they are easy to avoid. NPR radio can be really hard to take sometimes with their endless number of over-educated middle-aged white women with grating metallic voices (shit, I almost said Jewish, but I didn't, caught myself just in time. My problem is with over-educated, over-bearing, insufferable middle-aged middle-class women of all ethnicities on the radio. And yes, that includes you, Ms. Elaine Butterworth-Berkowitz-Hernandez of WGBH Bahstahn, even if you were so hot in high school in Amherst back in the 1970s And the women come and go, talking of Michelanglo...)
NPR spent MILLIONs of hours in the 1990s endlessly covering the Israeli-Palestine thing. They were under the illusion that that (note the conjuction vs. indirect pronoun transposition, grammar Nazis) was somehow important. And they completely missed the biggest story of the decade, the rise of Asia and especially Shanghai from a dumpy seaport to one of the most important cities in the world.
So what are they missing now? What's the opportunity cost of all this insufferable coverage of minor insects like Joe Biden and this Alaskan twit? What's the big story of the decade that we're not hearing about?
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I've come to trust the Dutch as a serious and civilized people, so I suspect that it more the kicking, beating, and menacing with a knife that got these bozos punished; not the 'theft of imaginary pixels'.
Exactly the opposite will happen. There will be more open source because the 'poor starving masses' with software development skills will have nothing else to do.
What will change will be the emphasis upon which open source will be focused. There will be less development on games and DRM bypassing and more on programs that connect people together for economic development. More CraigsList-type of development and less BitTorrent.
There will be a lot of development on software that builds groups with common economic interests that are separated by great distances. Things that corporations almost exclusively do now, such as buying and delivering groceries from distant farms or cereal processing factories.
In severe economic times, people will be less not more inclined to allow their labor to be diverted into the generation of corporate profit. The concept that software workers will be giving more time to well-paying jobs assumes that are actually going to be well-paying jobs for software workers. In a severe recession or Soviet-style economic collapse, that simply won't be the case.
$100K+ per college per year is more money than the sales of recorded product to the students would generate. Therefore the RIAA is getting paid twice: once through extortion ("we won't sue you for promoting piracy through providing high bandwidth...") and again through product sales to the students.
No wonder they want the current situation to continue.
The only real 'solution' is to convince students to wean themselves from RIAA/MPAA product. This will probably prove next to impossible since young people have been conditioned from birth to consume RIAA/MIAA product.
One thing to watch out for is any collusion between Wackenhut or Corrections Corporation of America and the RIAA/MPAA. These people are the two largest private prison corporations in the USA. It would be in their interest to criminalize with prison sentences any copyright offence like downloading. They make money by holding people in prison: the more people held int their prisons, the more profit that they make. And they have a responsibility to their stockholders to maximize their profits. If laws are passed turning file downloading into prison offenses, you can be sure that Wackenhut and CCA had a lot to do with it because these kind of laws will deliver a new large source of raw materal for them to process for profit. They have already got a lock on the Black underclass youth, which is no longer a growing source of product for the private prison corporations. So if you download files, (and you do), then this means you. Don't get tricked into a prison sentence by the RIAA/MPAA because you won't survive an period in an American corporate prison.
These companies are the modern day equivalent of slave-traders. Whenever a law is proposed on the state level to increase the penalties for drug possession, often it is Wackenhut and CCA who are behind it, usually by providing most of the campaign funds for the person who introduced the bill. Students should demand that their colleges disinvest any shares that their college endowment fund has in either of these corporations.
I'm not paranoid, this stuff really happens this way. Just beware and don't be naive. Young American white people put too far much emphasis on music recordings for some unknown reason. They have been conditioned to believe that this is the core of their culture. Well, learn to break your conditioning, that's what you are going to college for. Learn to play a musical instrument and learn to make films from public domain plays and your own scripts using inexpensive cameras and digital video edit programs.
Thank you and please don't mod me down simply because you disagree. Learning to handle diverse viewpoints in a civilized manner is another reason why you are spending so much money to go to college.
Any chance that they'll fix the problems of Win1? Like having the machine lock-up when you press the DoorOpen button on a CD drive when a disk is playing?
Or how about having Alt-F4 actually close a command-line window like it closes every other open window?
The non-othorginalities of the Windows user interface just drive me crazy when they won't fix them version after version. And exactly why is it necessary to change the user interface with every version of Windows?
Don't these bozos know that the operating system is supposed to be invisible (and it's supposed to work, hint, hint) and all the importance of a computer system is its user interface? If the user is aware that there is a new operating system then something is wrong with the design of this new operating system.
Computers are tools that increase their user's productivity; that's why people buy them. When you're spending time trying to understand how the stupid new version of a program works, then you're not being productive. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of having the suckers.
This morning somehow a large blue panel appeared on the left side of my File Explorer. Don't know how; don't know why. It just made it impossible to have many file explorer windows open at once because it took up so much screen real-estate for no reason at all. It took me about twenty minutes of web research to discover that I could get rid of it by selecting the 'Classic Windows Display Option' that was buried deep in the interface options. It seriously pisses me off that there is some schuck in Redmond making a lot more money than I am who thought that I would need a big blue panel on the left side of my file listings. These people should be making fries at the Burger King, not fooling around with productive people's user interfaces!
Don't make big plans, 'cause you're broke...
You can't have a trillion dollar bailout of the rich bankers, buy up every dishwasher's quarter-million dollar underwater mortgage, hold a permanent-endless war on the other side of the world, ... and have a giant telescope on the moon. It's not possible, it's science fiction.
All the space exploration projects being talked about and planned for the 2020's may actually happen...in the 2120's or 2220's. Not in ten years from now.
I know that you're all young and starry-eyed, but in the bankrupt USA, reality rules. And reality says that there isn't going to any giant new space program in the 2010's-2020's.
Don't just mod me to -1 for simply telling you the truth. And don't tell me how small the giant new space program is compared to other absurd federal government programs. Those programs are toast also.
My American friends...you are simply broke... you have dreams... but you have no money.
Doesn't this nullify all the Apple mystique developed by them over the past thirty years? That they are a corporate community of driven, intelligent, and advanced people working together to build a new exciting and better future? If that were really true then what difference would it make whether the current leader passes on? Isn't the corporation a dynamic unity of the focused applied pure mental brilliance?
Well, it would appear not. It's a clusterfuck of neurotic grade-point angels fluttering around the whims of a single obsessive-compulsive dictator. Kind of like the Soviet Union without all the people with less than a B+ average in school.
The real question about Apple is whether Steven Jobs will take the entire company down with him when he inevitably goes insane. Consider it a parallel to Mao launching the Cultural Revolution after slipping into the dementia stage of tertiary syphilis, thus destroying the economy and lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese people for a generation.
I recommend brushing up on (or learning from the beginning) algorithm design techniques. These are formal ways to diagram how the code works before actually starting to write the program itself.
Avoid the primitive one-dimensional flow chart technique and learn instead the two-dimensional Warnier-Orr style of algorithm design. Google for tutorials.
Then, (as our programming teacher at Portland Community
College used to tell us) get a big sheet of paper, a little pencil, and a really big eraser. Start with really simple programs and learn how to draw loops, branches, and linear instruction sequences. Get good with free-hand drawing of brackets. Draw lightly with the little pencil so that you can erase whole blocks of bracket drawings. When you master simple programs, learn to draw linked lists, binary trees, and recursive loops like the QuickSort and the Tower of Hanoi.
Learn how to walk through the Warnier-Orr drawing and try every thing that you can think of to make your walk-through crash. When it does, erase that section of the drawing and re-draw all the brackets and symbols for that procedure. Every hour spent successfully crashing the algorithm is many hours saved debugging actual code.
Do all this at home. You have a new job and your employers will question their decision to promote you to the programming crew if they see you drawing big brackets and symbols on a sheet of paper. Especially if you tell them that this is formal academic programmer training.
It actually is, but they won't believe you.
Good luck.
Firing someone? For goodness sake's be sure to do it in a way that allows them to get unemployment payments. I'm been fired from several jobs over the past twenty years. I'm not a bad worker. But this industry (electronics/computers/high tech) goes through employees like rubbers in a 5 dollar whorehouse and then tosses them away like used Kleenex when they've served their purpose.
Let's see. I got fired from Hewlett-Packard for having a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown (not nude) on my PC. 'Creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment' even though I was the only person working in the room.
Hmm... I got fired from a small medical equipment company in silicon valley when my boss overheard me say that 'white smocks are for white schmucks'. The boss decided that all employees had to wear white coats to work; blue jeans and button down shirts were no longer allowed. I actually got an unemployment check when I told the hearing judge that 'forcing Asian workers to wear white smocks was an insult because in VietNam and China only corpses were wrapped in white. The boss was telling the workers that they were nothing more than dead meat."
Oh and I got fired from Tektronix when I got blasted right in the eye with melted wax from a printer. No one noticed that the drain on eye-wash safety-station directed water directly onto a power strip. Of course it was all my fault. As always.
I got fired from the German milling machine company where I had worked for six years when I demanded that the American employees get the same stock-option package as the German employees when the company went public. Since the USA branch was a subsidiary, wholly-owned by the German parent. The German manager claimed that he felt threatened and intimidated: he was six foot-eight inches and I'm five-foot seven. Ja-Ja.
My point is that in a non-unionized cowboy industry like electronics people get fired constantly for practically nothing. If it hasn't happened to you, then it will sooner or later.
If you want to seriously decrease the possibility that someone will 'go postal' when you fire them, then you must do in a way that enables them to get unemployment insurance. Believe me the weekly checks go a long way to 'smooth out the transition process'. It's a no-brainer and it doesn't cost the company any money. I can't understand why managers would pride themselves on firing someone in a way that makes it impossible to get unemployment. But they do.
If a company is publicly owned and answers to shareholders for maximum profit, then it is in its best interest for them to be their own pirates. If they can sell an individual copy of the game for $30, but they can get $1000 from every person that they sue that has a copy of the game that wasn't purchased, then they should distribute as many 'illegal' copies of the game as possible. Suing your 'customers' is far more profitable than selling them games could ever be. They have an obligation to their stockholders to put most of their corporate resources into lawsuits instead of game development.
Activision should work with their distributors to get the names of young people who are using the 'illegal' games. First they sell for pennies a mediocre game and get the names and addresses of the people whom they are going to sue. Then Activision gives a copy of the hot new game (HNG) to the distributors. The distributors give the HNG to the people who bought the previous game, and then give the names and addresses of those people to Activision. Then the lawyers are released from hell, and instead of collecting $30 from each person for a game, they get $1000+ from each person who received a 'free' HNG. The distributors get 20% as a bounty.
Of course, it goes without saying that the distributors will tell the 'customers' that the HNG is an open-source program and that the only charge is 'register' your name and address. Activision should also remove all copyright notices from the HNG code and claim that it is a 'product under development'.
This kind of thing is frowned upon in legal circles as being a form of entrapment, but that doesn't apply to civil or copyright cases. Even if it did, any applicable laws could quickly be changed to maximize the profit for Activision.
In this situation, the customer base of Activision has four choices:
> they can give up using game programs from any source, free, paid, legal, illegal, bit-torrent, whatever.
> they can pay the $1000+ to Activision.
> they can pay the $1000+ to Activision, then find out where the children of the Activision lawyers go to school, kidnap them, and hold them until they get their $1000+ back.
> pay a finder's fee/bounty to a death-squad-for-hire to kill the lawyers and not pay Activision the $1000+.
This is how various mafia crime organizations get started. When it starts to make more financial sense to all chip in to hire a killer than it does to risk being sued/entrapped by corrupt organizations that discovered that it was much easier to sue people than provide them with a product/service at going market prices.
Sure beats selling software for a living.
average employee generates 10GB of data per year at a cost of $5 per gigabyte to back it up...
I cry nonsense in the statement above.
I put a 25 cent blank DVD into the DVDwriter of my PC. Then I copy the entire contents of my 'C:\backup' folder onto this DVD. I start the program, and go do something else. Total dedicated time: 2 minutes
When the DVD write is done, I write a label code on the DVD (date, employee, backup number) and put the disk back on the stack in the file cabinet. Total dedicated time: 2 minutes
My salary and benefits: @ $18/hr time used on backup: 0.067 hrs My cost per gigabyte of backup: $1
So if I'm an average marginally competent employee, why can I do backup %500 more efficiently than the average.
This statistic must be junk.
Why are they telling anyone about this in a public forum? To alert people of the 'dangers' of not erasing a hard disk before selling it? To check to see what's actually in the product before you ship it? As if we didn't know?
We keep being told by those who know that information is valuable; information is power; information creates wealth. Golly! (sheeet! in Eubonics_Jive) As IT people we certainly throw this line around a lot to people.
But only when information is limited and concentrated, and held discrete, and delivered discretely to the right people. Information that is open and publicly distributed loses its value very quickly.
So why would anyone who understands this principal violate it in such a silly and self-righteous manner as calling a press conference and claiming that you found valuable information accidentally left on a computer that you just purchased? To the right people, this information is worth at least the value of the laptop. If it wasn't, than it wouldn't be a topic on Slashdot. So who doesn't want a free cool laptop? Someone who definitely gets paid too much money.
IF, and that's a big-bottomed if, information is valuable; information is power; information creates wealth then don't degrade it by destroying it in such a cavalier fashion, my friend.
It reflects poorly on the rest of us who appreciate the value of fine, focused, and timely information.
Thank you schmuck,
Simonetta
Everyone laughs, but that doesn't change reality. Reality is that when you have a huge corporation with most of its assets tied up in advanced technology, then you have to pay to keep it protected.
If you move the technology off-shore to avoid taxes, then you lose the protection that those taxes provide. Both from criminals and from the police that are being paid by the taxes that your land-based operations incur. Does Google plan to hire Blackwater (the world's largest mercenary army) to keep people away from their floating data centers?
There is also the question of getting the money to build these floating structures. As I write on Monday morning Sept 15 2008, the banking structure of the USA is collapsing. The stock market is falling and several of the largest banks of the USA have declared bankruptcy. No banks means no capital for expansion. Granted this isn't such a big issue when Google has such a large stock value, but that stock value is mostly based on speculation and Google's price could fall as fast as it rose.
There is also the question of scale. One can claim that a huge data center could be powered by wave energy; it's another thing to actually do it. Especially when you are a public corporation and have to answer to entities that hold huge blocks of your stock.
Google is a company with an oversupply of young over-educated technological Grade-Point Angels (people whose most singular talent is to convince their teachers to give them high grades in order that the teachers will be able to reflect in their angel's glory). These people have a tendency to actually believe their fantasies, especially the fantasies that involve both ecology and advanced technology.
This factor has to be considered in all of their press releases and corporate projections.
I got the local library CD of RS Bigger Bang several years ago and dubbed it using Exact Audio Copy to my Windows PC. No problems with the transfer. Maybe the CD maker is putting some new code in the data stream to prevent people from listening to the music, as you suggested. Have you tried AudioCatalyst or some other ripping program?
Or booting a Linux session from a CD ROM, using Linux audio ripping programs, and then using those MP3 files?
The music is competent, but no different that what the Rolling Stones were doing thirty years ago. The best way to be 21st century Rolling Stones fan is not to be concerned with getting perfect copies of their recordings, but rather to get a guitar and learn to play the Keith Richards/Ron Wood riffs in the alternate tunings that they use. There are internet postings of how to tune and play songs that they recorded 25 years ago. Since their style hasn't changed, learning to play their old stuff is the same as copying the recordings of their 'new' stuff.
The music 'industry' really needs to rethink their 20th-century mentality. Where one monolithic entity (posing as several individual global corporations) controls culture for everyone by distributing entertainment 'packages' from one central source. And by bringing the full force of state-controlled legal violence against anyone stepping outside of this Stalinist framework. There really is no difference in the mind-set between the RIAA and Soviet Orwellian Ministry of Culture. Neither of them work well in the real world; which consists of real people and real culture that can't be controlled by a centralized authority.
The only thing that government-controlled (or corporate-controlled) culture does is create a vast and illegal underground counter-culture. Artists end up imprisoned or spending all their creative energy hiding, fighting, or defending their work against the corporate Stalinist cement-heads. Society suffers, people suffer, other people and nations advance and your culture and people don't.
Culture and Art comes from the bottom up, not the top down. Especially in an era of inexpensive and widely available technology like high resolution digital video cameras, software audio mixing studios, and internet high-speed media distribution.
My advice is to stop sucking on Hollywood's Grand Tetons, get some gear, learn some literary and music theory, create your own works, distribute them discretely among your own trusted people, and ignore the RIAA/MIAA.
And for goodness sake's don't let the cement-heads steal your culture. We need to completely change our mentality from believing that artistic success is being a 'rock star' to a mentality where being an artistic success consists of being able to keep our important and meaningful works of art hidden from Hollywood.
Why would anybody investigate this goofy plan? [ An oversupply of government and foundation grants from brain-dead administrators? ]
Why would we automate the driving of vehicles when there is a serious unemployment problem? Automating the driving would greatly reduce the jobs for drivers. Isn't the Teamsters Union rather strong?
What does putting hundreds of thousands of expensive magnets in the road systems do to solve the problem of oil depletion?(which leads to fuel costs that exceed the value of the goods being shipped?)
How does putting hundreds of thousands of expensive magnets in the road systems lead to the massive increase in transportation efficiency needed to offset the increase in fuel costs arising from peak oil depletion in the coming decades?
The oil-based system of single isolated vehicles worked when there was (or seemed to be) an endless supply of cheap oil and raw materials. But the 20th century is over. And so is the era of isolated vehicles endlessly blasting up and down ribbons of highways.
What we need is a system of advanced high speed railways criss-crossing the North American continent. Instead of having thousands of trucks carrying goods from LA to Phoenix, we need to be able to have a big diesel 'rig' truck be able to be loaded in Long Beach from ship containers, drive to the rail terminal, and drive right onto the high speed train car and be secured. Then the train will carry the entire truck to Phoenix rail central. The truck will then be driven off the train (by a local driver) and the contents be delivered to their local destinations.
A vast and efficient 21st century rail system is the only way that we are going to be able to get the order-of-magnitude efficiency increases needed to keep our transportation system operating in the coming decades of massive transformation due to peak oil shocks and fossil-fuel depletion.
Not by some stupid idea of putting thousands of magnets in the roadways and having robots do steering.
What's wrong with these people? What are they thinking?
Please allow me to inject a note of reality here.
There is a serious possibility that the Americans will not be establishing a lunar base in the next twenty years. Regardless of the technology or science available.
The problem is one of money. Basically the US government is broke. It runs huge deficits. This didn't make any difference in the past when there was no other place but America for super-wealthy people and governments to put their money. That has changed.
What has also changed is that oil has gotten incredibly expensive. Cheap oil allows the economy to grow. A growing economy allows huge expensive social programs like pensions and medical care to people over 60, moon projects, massive government bureaus, and permanent endless war on the other side of the world.
When the economy stops growing, house prices stop rising, and the sources of easy credit dry up, serious choices have to be made. Everything can't be afforded: some things must be abandoned. This is reality in 2008. It's not 1967 anymore.
The moon projects are easy targets. Although these projects are popular among the young and educated, these projects are expendable. There are no voters on the moon. There's no oil there. There's no one there who can be shaken down with atomic bombs to be persuaded to buy USA Treasury bonds to finance the endless deficits.
It's easy for the NASA administrators to hold press conferences and announce grandiose plans. It's easy to put big budget programs into future federal budget projections. But the coming years, when the true extent of the bankruptcy of the US government becomes apparent, these space programs might be quietly dropped. This is reality of the 21st century. Again, it's not 1967 anymore.
Just exactly is information technology energy inefficient?
Is it through the use of thousands of PCs in a large corporation each using 400+ watts of power (PC and CRT combined)? Switch to laptops and large screen LCD monitors.
Is it because the output of the IT department isn't doing enough to reduce the overall company energy bill? Well, yes, the purpose of the IT department is to look for ways to reduce bottlenecks in the production process. Which means that it looks for ways to speed up production, which means using more energy.
Maybe they're trying to say that the IT department is using too much energy driving to work and they should just all stay home and work in their pajamas from their kitchen tables. Hell, maybe the IT department simply drinks too much coffee.
Sure they can order the IT department to tweak and focus and get their energy consumption down. After a whole year, the IT department just might save enough energy to match one trip in the corporate jet carrying a couple executives across the continent for the purpose of getting drunk with another couple of executives from another company. Nothing like real 'face time' when you need to close the big deal.
Let's face it. Everything that American management says is basically full of shit. Sometimes they actually know it and must say it anyway. Usually they don't. For that matter, much management statements from any country are BS. But the Americans are the world-masters at total corporate double-think and nonsense.
Dilbertize them and ignore them. In twenty years the smart managers will be still around and the vast majority of dumb ones will be most likely be dead. Simply because they don't know what to do to keep themselves alive and no one's going to go out of their way to see that they survive. You should survive, though. And don't be concerned about being green.
You can't be lean, mean, serene, and green all at the same time.
I live near two little restaurants in Portland Oregon USA (the recycling capital of the USA). Every morning there are SIX loud 'big green trucks' that pull up next to my apartment between 5 and 7AM every single day to pick up the recycling. Three trucks for each restaurant: one for glass, one for paper, one for compost. Each loud truck with huge diesels shake the buildings of the entire apartment complex. We complain, but as typical of white-working-class people, the garbage drivers and managers just don't care. Pure redneck 'get 'er done, get 'er done...loud and proud' mentality is a true pain for really-productive people.
Recycling sucks. It is a sop to the upper-middle-class. The energy expended by driving all the extra 'big green trucks' around to pick up this stuff exceeds the energy saved by having the garbage go to different sections of the landfill. Recycling was a bold idea in the 1970s, it's obsolete now.
Recycling will only start to make sense in the era of $4.50/gallon diesel when people start bringing empty containers to the food store and refilling them with food. Things like thick, double-ply sugar bags and soy-sauce containers could be reused ten times
Doesn't the Apple iPod run on advanced microcontrollers whose capabilities were only available on million dollar computers in the 1970s?
Doesn't the Apple iPod store data on memory chips that millions of times the capabilities of the ICs available in 1970s (never mind the 'little beads in a wire-loom' memory used at that time)?
Doesn't the Apple iPod store music on tiny hard disks that were inconceivable in the 1970's?
Doesn't the iPod use an interface to access these thousands of music files from the hard disk that was completely unforseen in the 1970s?
Then where does this schmuck get off claiming that he 'invented' the iPod in the 1970s? (which is what a patent is all about, inventing this and that).
This is the weakest patent claim 'prior art' ever! Why is Apple taking this seriously?
Maybe this guy who is claiming that he 'invented' the iPod actually is an old 'pal' of Steve Jobs who is blackmailing him with something that Steve did long ago and this is way to pay him off (and take a tax deduction as well.)
It's the only thing that makes sense to me. Yes, I's quite confuuused about the whole thing.
Use YouTube. It's obvious the best real choice. If you want people to actually see your work, then this is the place that they will find it.
You are presenting your video in the marketplace. The marketplace of public attention. Unless you are a Hollywood star, that is someone who has previously introduced successful content into the pay-per-view marketplace, you are competing with everyone else in the marketplace of public attention.
The marketplace of public attention for video is YouTube. Put your work there (even with the low resolution) and the people who find your work interesting will make the effort to download your stuff at higher resolution.
But first they have to know about you and your work. And YouTube is the place where that happens for entry-level video makers. And if you're not a Hollywood star, then you are an entry-level filmmaker by definition.
Don't pay serious attention to anything that anyone on Slashdot tells you, just post your video to YouTube.
Do it right now.
Programmers can no longer charge more for their services. There are programmers throughout the world where people make $10-$15 a day. And the cost of living reflects this. Detailed code specs can be attached to an e-mail, and the code can be returned attached to e-mail. Payment can be made through Pay-Pal.
The 20th-century is over; it's a global marketplace for coders. There is no way that contract programmers can just charge more for their services when there are thousands of competent Windows programmers in Asia and Africa willing and happy to work for $10 an hour.
Here in Portland, Oregon, one of the major grocery store chains (Fred Meyer, Inc.) has an automated check-out line that has each station running on Windows. I don't know which version but I suspect that it is Win2000. Each station has a laser bar-code scanner for most items. After scanning the item, the user places it in a bag that is on a scale. The weight of each individual grocery item is in the store's data base. When the weight on the scale matches the bar-code, the system prompts the user to scan the next item. There is a touch screen for entering the type of produce by pre-assigned number. For payment there is a credit/debit card reader, a paper-currency scanner, and a coin-weighing unit.
There is a stand-alone PC running Windows for each station and they are connected to a store LAN. Embedded systems like this running Windows on standard PCs is very common. It's easy to develop for this platform. And when it crashes, and it does more than the robust real-time operating systems used on 32-bit microcontroller embedded designs, then the attendant simply opens the cabinet and reboots the PC.
The automatic bottle return machines that read the bar-codes on empties all use Windows. They are constantly crashing.
You don't find Windows running nuclear powerplants, wafer fabs, international bank transfers, or jet airliners. But you find it nearly everywhere else in embedded-systems. Grocery stores find that it's cheaper to throw together a hack job in Visual BASIC and then run it on a few $250 PCs with $50 Windows licenses than it is to pay a programmer $25/hr to write robust code that runs on $8 microcontrollers.
I'm a microcontroller-systems designer and I run into this situation all the time.
Since the first term of Ronald Reagan, the rich and super-rich have used the Republican party and the religious right to constantly lower their tax rate. Now they pay a significantly less percentage than working people. And that is before all the specialized tax breaks hidden in the 1000-page appropriations bills that no congressman ever reads.
This is never going to change, regardless of who wins what election.
The only way that ordinary people are going to get tax fairness, i.e. the same rates as the super-rich, is to cut corners, zap the books, write in extra kids on their W-2 forms, Yes, to cheat. Have you ever known anyone besides a few limousine-liberals who feel good about paying taxes? Fifty years ago, it was common in the USA.
Not anymore. People realize that they need their money to pay for the things that government used to provide with all the taxes that they take right out of your check. And they're discovering new and creative ways to do protect their money from those who would just give it to Haliburton's permanent endless gravy train.
As the technological elite it would be in our best interest to 'look the other way' when we increasingly find people using technical means to protect their incomes that they need to support their families. If we rat them out, they will hate us. And Haliburton is not going to protect us from their wrath.
On the other hand, if we discover people that are withholding huge sums from the public knowledge, we should use our technical abilities to force them to contribute a reasonable percentage to the public good. These would be people like international drug dealers and other criminals who pay nothing in taxes, either legal taxes or contributions to community charities.
As in so many areas, as the government collapses into insanity or irrelevancy, the burden falls to the us, the technological elite, to decide and enforce the proper balances for the allocation of social resources.
We must do what we can, because we are the only ones with the can-do. This mentality seems weird in 2008, but it will be standard operating procedure in 2028, which is not that far away for most of us.
Thank you,... and be a mensch, stop modding me down to -1, just because you don't like what I say.
This is just Germans being German, but still it is incredibly stupid.
Isn't Germany the place where it is illegal for stores to put items on sale, except for a few days each year? Wasn't this law passed by Hitler (opps, my bad...can't say that word in Deutschland) because Jewish store owners were selling their inventory below cost in order to get the funds together to escape the holocast? Isn't it kept on the books and still enforced (against mostly Turks and other minorities running little stores in minority neighborhoods) simply because it is the German Law and German Law must be obeyed regardless of how mean and stupid and senseless it is? Good thing that they don't grow cotton in Germany, otherwise they would still have colored drinking fountains.
Good thing too that the Soviets and the Americans burned the whole country to the ground, killed millions of them, and chased the few good Germans (oh, excuse me, I meant to say 'the Nazis') to the ends of the earth. Otherwise they would still be throwing Jews, Gipsies, and homos into the gas chambers. After all, the law is the law, and it must be obeyed!
Jawohl!
I can't understand this obsession with politics. It doesn't make any difference (I's white, so I don't use the double negative before the word difference) to most people who is their 'leader' in Washington DC. I wish that they would all simply disappear. Or at least, just shut up. There are so many things that are more important and more interesting than DC politics. Political reporting of the same non-story over-and-over day-after-day is a cheap but acceptable way to avoid doing any real reporting on real stories.
Fox is the worst, of course, but they are easy to avoid. NPR radio can be really hard to take sometimes with their endless number of over-educated middle-aged white women with grating metallic voices (shit, I almost said Jewish, but I didn't, caught myself just in time. My problem is with over-educated, over-bearing, insufferable middle-aged middle-class women of all ethnicities on the radio. And yes, that includes you, Ms. Elaine Butterworth-Berkowitz-Hernandez of WGBH Bahstahn, even if you were so hot in high school in Amherst back in the 1970s And the women come and go, talking of Michelanglo...)
NPR spent MILLIONs of hours in the 1990s endlessly covering the Israeli-Palestine thing. They were under the illusion that that (note the conjuction vs. indirect pronoun transposition, grammar Nazis) was somehow important. And they completely missed the biggest story of the decade, the rise of Asia and especially Shanghai from a dumpy seaport to one of the most important cities in the world.
So what are they missing now? What's the opportunity cost of all this insufferable coverage of minor insects like Joe Biden and this Alaskan twit? What's the big story of the decade that we're not hearing about?