Even in a downturn, IT will become too important to a company to cut them as drastically as they might like to.
yes, but when the companies themselves are going out of business, IT people may find themselves in the same bread line as the people from HR and marketing.
You laugh, but this might help end some of the frivolous lawsuits being filed on behalf of stupid consumers. ("But I thought the contraceptive jelly worked if I just put it on my toast!")
This is just another example of how an old company wants to do business the way they always have been. "We tape things, edit them up nice, and play them for all of the masses between 7pm and 11pm." They're being small minded by not wanting to either a) show things live or b) show video on demand (admittedly costlier). Sigh... So much for innovation in the new millenium.
your toaster or microwave make you watch an ad before you can open it and remove your food
Can open, worms everywhere:
So maybe the toaster can tailor the ads to match your food choices? If you put a lot of bread in the toaster, will you be shown ads for jelly? Perhaps something like the supermarket checkout thingies which give you coupons for competing brands. If you're always microwaving Celeste Pizza for One, maybe your microwave will force you to watch an ad for Stouffer's French Bread Pizza?
And I don't even want to think about what the privacy advocates are going to say about this.
The scary thing is that sounds like the Microsoft fix-it-with-a-patch mentality.
I think James Thurbur worte a short story about something like this. I forget the name of it, but I remember the moral was: "Don't get it right, just get it written."
would it be considered "rude" to comment the code and send it back to the original developer in hopes that he'd include it in his next release?
On the contrary! I think that any developer would be tickled pink to know that you had been reading his code. (It's open source for a reason!) So long as you're polite about it, I think that any developer who believes in open source would appreciate comments, suggestions, re-writes, additions, beautifications, and questions about what they've done.
I think it could be really interesting to
try and write a program that loses at pousse as soon as possible
Didn't you take 6.170 and learn to play AntiChess?
(If you don't get this, I can't explain it to you...)
What's under the hood
on
Free For All
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot readers, for instance, may know that Apache serves the majority of today's Web sites, but does the average Barnes and Noble browser, even in the computer section, know just what Apache is?
Ok, fine, but how many people know exactly how their cars run, or even what type of engine they have? For most people, knowing what kind of machinery makes the thing work isn't really important. So long as the car drives, the web browser surfs, and the world goes round, everything is good. Let the Slashdot readers, the people who actually have to set up the web server, know which ones work well and which ones don't.
Minor nitpick: Judges are appointed by elected officials. Once they have been apppointed, they cannot be removed for any reason except if they resign or are found to be unethical.
Well, one good way to do it is to offer to host the network connections for your competitors. Reading e-mail about their next product and then getting to market with it faster could make an extra R2D2 pay for itself in no time. Maybe start a "front" company to move in next door. (e.g. If I'm Tropicana, start "The Alexander Music Company" right next to the Dole Juice company.)
Much much better saner jobs await you... Unless you like long hours with poor pay and the occasional game of quake to keep you from doing the real thing to your co-workers...
Like all jobs that let you create something, writing games requires a big commitment, lots of time, and sometimes a lot of pressure. But with all tough jobs, if there's something else that you can stand to do, DO IT. If you're just going to work to get a paycheck, there are lots of cushy high paying jobs. If you love coding and gaming, then maybe you should look into the pain...
Screw journalistic integrity, that's not ABC's business. ABC is in the business of selling advertising. The content they provide on their web site is merely a means to show you ads. (This is also the basis of free television in America...) Why should they care if the article is factual or not? In fact, ABC probably wants to post provoking pieces to show those web banner posting advertisers that it's good way to market things to the technologically inclined... ($REFERRING_PAGE =~/\.slashdot\.org$/ && $showGeekAd = 1).
If you want to hit ABC where it hurts, you would have to convince the advertisers that you won't buy their products because they advertise on ABC. -- I'm not saying that will be effective, but it would get their attention...
The sad thing though, is that while hacking the Tivo represents the classical definition of hacking (i.e. making hardware do something useful it wasn't necessarily intended to do), it will be reported, and seen by the media as, the new version of hacking (i.e. evil, criminal, breaking and entering type activity). The TiVo people want you buying hardware from them, not building it yourself, so they're going to use the 'h' word in its negative conotation when they report this...
Which is why you don't see too many text adventure games anymore. They probably had the maximum ratio of thought and effort to features available. A game without eye popping graphics and 3D-realism just wouldn't fly today.
You want answers? I think I'm entitled-- You want answers? I want the truth! You can't handle the truth! The truth is that we live in a world that has source code, and that source code has to be guarded by men with guns. Who's going to do it? You? You Mr./. reader? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for 2600 and you curse the MPAA. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that banning the DeCSS code, while tragic, probably makes people money. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, makes me a hell of a lot of money. You don't want the truth because, deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me in your computer system, you need me on that computer system. We use words like copyright, code, royalty. We use these words as the backbone of defending a an ancient business model. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very exorbitant prices that I charge and then questions the manner in which I charge them. I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a DVD player and start buying movies at forty bucks a pop. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!
A company in is business for one reason: make money. They're not concerned with actually educating people, just getting people to buy their products. If you've ever taken a "course" from a vendor, you learn how every problem that exists can be solved by one of their products. Anything else you encounter is simply "an exercise for the reader."
How do they intend to manage something so big? AOL claims to have in excess of 20 million users, and that's big--but 120 million? Can we say slow?
Perhaps worse than the SPAM, speed, or even privacy implications that have been discussed up until now, is the fact that managing a large, high availability network requires a LOT of geeks. And these days geeks (well, good ones anyway), are paid pretty damn well. Have you seen the GS pay scale lately? Given the government's track record with computer people, they'll probably try to hire people at the GS-12 level (fairly high up, but only about $60,000 a year), which is not going to get the best and brighest America has to offer, if you know what I mean.
So sit back, relax, and enjoy as M$ software (and you know that's who they're going to use. They have the best relationship with government of any vendor) is set-up, run, and managed by those people who are still looking for the ANY key...
There have been fights against every kind of media that consumers could record on using the argument that people would copy materials instead of buying them. That's why your VCR records in low quality and cassette tapes weren't so great.
The difference is that now you can make perfect copies quickly and easily. Cassette tapes and VCR tapes degrade the quality each time. That's why this fight is different: the copies are just as good as the store bought stuff.
Well, although a large part of crypto depends on breaking codes, an even larger part depends on capitalizing on your enemy's mistakes and on human intelligence.
That is, why waste a lot of time, effort, money, and computational power on breaking a code when you can just recuit a spy to bring the codebook to you? The cost of a $2.5 million dollar supercomputer plus the people to run it is a helluva lot more than a one-time $100,000 payoff to some broke government bureaucrat with a gambling problem...
That, and there are lots of examples of screwups that led to compromises of cryptosystems. In WWII, a lot of times messages were sent on the exact day a crypotosystem change was specified. The receipient of those messages get transmissions in the new code, can't read them, and write back in the old (and perhaps broken) cryptosystem, "Hey, we didn't get that, can you try again with yesterday's codes." ta da! Known plaintext attack... Makes it almost too easy...
First, let the record show that I never called the users "sheep," rather that the software was simple enough for a sheep to use. (I have sheep experience, don't ask.)
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with people not knowing about how their computer really works. (Who in here really knows how their car works?) Irregardless of their level of knowledge, it is the masses, the sometimes unwitting people all around us, who drive what happens in this country.
Remember, before all of these sheep got interested in the Internet (and corporations thought they could make money off of it), nobody really cared about the 'net...
Well, yes, there is a large population who is willing to sit down, fiddle with a few settings and get a client like Napigator or Gnutella working. But you're forgetting that a large portion of Napster users are the same people who can't remember not to open e-mail attachments from random people and are still looking for the 'any' key.
The majority of computer users out there are not the saavy people who read/.. The whole appeal of Napster is that it's so simple a sheep could use it. Just type the artist name and title, and boom, "[music] You've got MP3s!"
The popularity of Napster is built on word of mouth communication, and not too many people have heard of Gnutella or the alternatives. I worry that without a strong unified alternative to step in and take Napster's place that the sharing of music industry may be stunted (for the sheep at least) for a while. (Don't get me wrong, we can't put the genie back in the bottle now, but it may take a little while to recover...)
Slashdot Mirror
yes, but when the companies themselves are going out of business, IT people may find themselves in the same bread line as the people from HR and marketing.
You laugh, but this might help end some of the frivolous lawsuits being filed on behalf of stupid consumers. ("But I thought the contraceptive jelly worked if I just put it on my toast!")
HAL9000: This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error...
This is just another example of how an old company wants to do business the way they always have been. "We tape things, edit them up nice, and play them for all of the masses between 7pm and 11pm." They're being small minded by not wanting to either a) show things live or b) show video on demand (admittedly costlier). Sigh... So much for innovation in the new millenium.
Can open, worms everywhere:
So maybe the toaster can tailor the ads to match your food choices? If you put a lot of bread in the toaster, will you be shown ads for jelly? Perhaps something like the supermarket checkout thingies which give you coupons for competing brands. If you're always microwaving Celeste Pizza for One, maybe your microwave will force you to watch an ad for Stouffer's French Bread Pizza?
And I don't even want to think about what the privacy advocates are going to say about this.
So if we put a BFG9000 on it....
I think James Thurbur worte a short story about something like this. I forget the name of it, but I remember the moral was: "Don't get it right, just get it written."
On the contrary! I think that any developer would be tickled pink to know that you had been reading his code. (It's open source for a reason!) So long as you're polite about it, I think that any developer who believes in open source would appreciate comments, suggestions, re-writes, additions, beautifications, and questions about what they've done.
Didn't you take 6.170 and learn to play AntiChess? (If you don't get this, I can't explain it to you...)
Ok, fine, but how many people know exactly how their cars run, or even what type of engine they have? For most people, knowing what kind of machinery makes the thing work isn't really important. So long as the car drives, the web browser surfs, and the world goes round, everything is good. Let the Slashdot readers, the people who actually have to set up the web server, know which ones work well and which ones don't.
Minor nitpick: Judges are appointed by elected officials. Once they have been apppointed, they cannot be removed for any reason except if they resign or are found to be unethical.
Ahh, democracy...
Well, one good way to do it is to offer to host the network connections for your competitors. Reading e-mail about their next product and then getting to market with it faster could make an extra R2D2 pay for itself in no time. Maybe start a "front" company to move in next door. (e.g. If I'm Tropicana, start "The Alexander Music Company" right next to the Dole Juice company.)
Like all jobs that let you create something, writing games requires a big commitment, lots of time, and sometimes a lot of pressure. But with all tough jobs, if there's something else that you can stand to do, DO IT. If you're just going to work to get a paycheck, there are lots of cushy high paying jobs. If you love coding and gaming, then maybe you should look into the pain...
If you want to hit ABC where it hurts, you would have to convince the advertisers that you won't buy their products because they advertise on ABC. -- I'm not saying that will be effective, but it would get their attention...
The sad thing though, is that while hacking the Tivo represents the classical definition of hacking (i.e. making hardware do something useful it wasn't necessarily intended to do), it will be reported, and seen by the media as, the new version of hacking (i.e. evil, criminal, breaking and entering type activity). The TiVo people want you buying hardware from them, not building it yourself, so they're going to use the 'h' word in its negative conotation when they report this...
Which is why you don't see too many text adventure games anymore. They probably had the maximum ratio of thought and effort to features available. A game without eye popping graphics and 3D-realism just wouldn't fly today.
I'm just waiting to hear this in the courtroom:
You want answers? /. reader? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for 2600 and you curse the MPAA. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that banning the DeCSS code, while tragic, probably makes people money. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, makes me a hell of a lot of money. You don't want the truth because, deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me in your computer system, you need me on that computer system. We use words like copyright, code, royalty. We use these words as the backbone of defending a an ancient business model. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very exorbitant prices that I charge and then questions the manner in which I charge them. I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a DVD player and start buying movies at forty bucks a pop. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!
I think I'm entitled--
You want answers?
I want the truth!
You can't handle the truth! The truth is that we live in a world that has source code, and that source code has to be guarded by men with guns. Who's going to do it? You? You Mr.
A company in is business for one reason: make money. They're not concerned with actually educating people, just getting people to buy their products. If you've ever taken a "course" from a vendor, you learn how every problem that exists can be solved by one of their products. Anything else you encounter is simply "an exercise for the reader."
Perhaps worse than the SPAM, speed, or even privacy implications that have been discussed up until now, is the fact that managing a large, high availability network requires a LOT of geeks. And these days geeks (well, good ones anyway), are paid pretty damn well. Have you seen the GS pay scale lately? Given the government's track record with computer people, they'll probably try to hire people at the GS-12 level (fairly high up, but only about $60,000 a year), which is not going to get the best and brighest America has to offer, if you know what I mean.
So sit back, relax, and enjoy as M$ software (and you know that's who they're going to use. They have the best relationship with government of any vendor) is set-up, run, and managed by those people who are still looking for the ANY key...
The difference is that now you can make perfect copies quickly and easily. Cassette tapes and VCR tapes degrade the quality each time. That's why this fight is different: the copies are just as good as the store bought stuff.
But look at the wonders that self regulation has done for cleaning up the airline industry and for getting sex and violence off of television!
That is, why waste a lot of time, effort, money, and computational power on breaking a code when you can just recuit a spy to bring the codebook to you? The cost of a $2.5 million dollar supercomputer plus the people to run it is a helluva lot more than a one-time $100,000 payoff to some broke government bureaucrat with a gambling problem...
That, and there are lots of examples of screwups that led to compromises of cryptosystems. In WWII, a lot of times messages were sent on the exact day a crypotosystem change was specified. The receipient of those messages get transmissions in the new code, can't read them, and write back in the old (and perhaps broken) cryptosystem, "Hey, we didn't get that, can you try again with yesterday's codes." ta da! Known plaintext attack... Makes it almost too easy...
Even the best math is useless is misused.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with people not knowing about how their computer really works. (Who in here really knows how their car works?) Irregardless of their level of knowledge, it is the masses, the sometimes unwitting people all around us, who drive what happens in this country.
Remember, before all of these sheep got interested in the Internet (and corporations thought they could make money off of it), nobody really cared about the 'net...
The majority of computer users out there are not the saavy people who read /.. The whole appeal of Napster is that it's so simple a sheep could use it. Just type the artist name and title, and boom, "[music] You've got MP3s!"
The popularity of Napster is built on word of mouth communication, and not too many people have heard of Gnutella or the alternatives. I worry that without a strong unified alternative to step in and take Napster's place that the sharing of music industry may be stunted (for the sheep at least) for a while. (Don't get me wrong, we can't put the genie back in the bottle now, but it may take a little while to recover...)