This causes two problems. First, it makes the magazines more speculative, since a larger portion of revenue comes from sales which occur after the magazine goes to print. Second, it increases the cost of the magazine significantly. Are you ready to pay $15-$20 (or more) for an issue that used to cost you $6, purely for the privilege of not having ads? Do you think >90% of consumers are?
I honestly see this as a nonstarter for most magazines, as much as I would like it. I believe Cooks Illustrated is done this way, so it does work for certain demographics. The cost of a yearly subscription is about 3-4 times what a similar ad-based pub is on a per-issue basis, IIRC.
When I started out assembly programming the 6502 as a kid, I didn't have the cash for an assembler, so I coded with pencil and paper, hand assembled to machine code, and entered byte by byte.
Kids these days...
Of course, what I wrote was a lot closer to Hello World than a GUI OS.:-)
By my math, that's at the top end of his estimate. Because a lot of transactions are small (now that CC companies forbid minimum charges in their TOS), the per-transaction fees often chraged - esp to small merchants - make the percentage large.
The industry is mature for exactly the reasons you state. The big bang is over, now we're all just sorting out the pieces and organizing everything neatly. The key is that most of the stuff is on the table, now. Revolutionary ideas are now rare, rather than commonplace.
Funny, though, much of what you talk about is like computers before we got large bandwidth networks and complex operating systems. Everything ran independently (remember being able to simply copy the application directory somewhere else and execute it from there?). Add a dynamic pointer and the novel Widget2010 is just like WidgetForDOS, but with the app on a server somewhere.
There will still be breakthroughs, as there are in other fields, but the day when there was so much undiscovered that was fantastically new (remember the first time you saw Visicalc?) is over. Makes me kind of sad, really.
If your future boss replies "yahoo," run the other way.
Seriously*, though, here are some tips:
I think it's appropriate to ask what kind of project backlog the group/company has, and whether that is low, average, or high
This will tell you where they are in their cycle, and if they're trying to shore up from ship-jumpers, replacing normal attrition, or growing - and how likely your job is to be there in a years time.
Dress code - you shouldn't need to ask about this one unless either
(a) everybody in the office is in a suit and tie, in which case you may ask if that is typical (or more cagily, if Fridays are casual)
(b) everybody is in shorts and a T-shirt, in which case you should ask if this is "casual day," and what normal work attire is
otherwise you can expected to wear what everyone else wears
General HR policy questions (leave/overtime/benefits) can wait until the offer - they're not salient tot he interview. Keep all of your questions about the position, the culture, the relationship of management to the team. That said, make sure you get a chance to review the employee handbook before you commit either way, and be certain that you have them fill in any missing information (if OT policy is omitted, for example).
Okay, that one was serious - jut don't ask it directly. If anyone actually uses Yahoo, stay clear. I'm 0 for 2 on employees that use it. One thankfully left of her own accord, the other I had to dismiss. Neither were worth half their salary.
That works perfectly until something won't install, at which point you get fired. Many people who feel they require that level of access, and install things which require it, know the difference.
But, hey, thanks for playing.
Disclaimer: I am "that guy" in my office. Having access to admin rights may not be critical 90% of the time, but hell hath no fury like an engineer under a deadline who need something to work NOW and doesn't have 2 hours to let the IT guy do it. Now, in my case I also happen to run IT, so there's no real conflict here. If something gets screwed up, I'm the one who has to pick up the pieces.
Seems reasonable from an evolutionary standpoint, I suppose. Better function comes from two kidneys, but two hearts are probably more prone to cause problems. Not sure how often a single kidney fails in the under-30 crowd, but with heart failure so rare during prime reproductive years there would be little advantage to having two even presuming that they worked in unison.
This is some pretty difficult, complex work. As a sibling post pointed out, there are very highly stressed systems. Whoever bid this - and, no, I don't know anything about how it was bid but I have my suspicions - probably didn't decide to go hire a crack team of the best assemblers in Europe. They figured their standard labor for guys (and gals) who wire up buildings, telecom, and other lab environments. I work with these types of people sometimes, and they're not always focused on the end product (to put it nicely). QA for a project like this can only be so rigorous until the QA dwarfs the scope and cost of the actual construction. Sometimes it's a conscious decision (Hubble), sometimes it's a matter of budget or politics. Regardless, it only takes a moderate percentage of not-quite-perfect workmanship to really foul things up when you push a system to its limits.
This just cements you in place as being very low on the corporate totem pole. Every hear CEO appreciation day? Management appreciation day? Doctor appreciation day? Engineer appreciation day (engineer's day in India doesn't count)? Lawyer appreciation day?
No?
How about teacher appreciation day? Secretary (or, ahem, administrative assistant) appreciation day? See where I'm going with this? I wouldn't take this as a compliment.
If they didn't have the right to sell it, and it's illegal to reposess such a work through legal means, then they need to pay the copyright owner for the copies distributed. The lawyers can hammer out an agreement which will make Jeff & Co. look just a little harder the next time they go publishing a work. Of course, since Amazon knows how many they sold, that will make it easy for the copyright holder to sue for damages based on statutory infringement should the talks break down
I've got a family plan - two phones sharing 700 minutes. It was the lowest available for a multi-line, national plan at the time. And I'm not going to mess with it willingly; they gave me unlimited data on my phone plus 200 text messages for $20/mo above the voice-only rate.
Get a real phone plan, or one from a decent provider. AT&T just capped my rollover minutes when I hit something like 4000 (in just 2 years on the minimal 700 minute a month plan). Does anyone really have a plan where they regularly go over their monthly allotment, and it's not cheaper to get the next tier?
If the 15 seconds is too painful, read up on the options to skip the message. As for the man up comment - that goes for you, too, Timothy. And while we're at it, why don't you go ahead and turn in your geek card for not knowing you could hit # and skip right to the beep.
Yes, I am in a foul mood this afternoon; thanks for asking.
For those of us in the Windows world, the need to identify server drives as letters (mostly for program functionality, if not for convenience in the GUI), and want to have access to our large* files when we're not hanging with the metrosexual crowd at the Starbucks (i.e. - those of use who have to do real work in the field, away from WiFi and often cell data) - having offline files is a godsend. Of course, the limitation is that you can only cache what you can store on your laptop HD.
With a gig of data, I should be able to cache the entire contents of both my data drive at work and home and most - if not all - of my FLAC collection. That last one is nice, since most programs like to "see" the same "drive", and aren't nearly as keen on looking at a local "synced" folder when disconnected.
*Many documents I like to reference in the field are >10MB, and some are 50MB or more; mostly PDFs of either architectural prints or code documents; sucking them over the 'net at any end-to-end wireless speed isn't really practical, and the remote options still aren't as nice as being on the local machine.
Oh, I'm not worried about spam pages - they're pretty easy to identify from the summary blurb in the search engines. I already ignore them almost completely. I realize that Bing is targeting idiots, I just hope that the demographic creep doesn't spread to good search sites. Bing sucks, by my experience, so it's not like it sucking worse - in a vacuum - will affect me. Of course, I thought that Yahoo existed so the people who were clueless could be identified by the rest of us (I will never hire anyone who claims Yahoo as their search engine of choice - two strikes is all it took for me).
just eliminate that "for academic materials" in your sentence. Why allow any transfer of rights from the creator. Set a specific limit on the rights that may be transferred from the creator to another entity - say exclusivity is banned, or is banned for any period exceeding (1,3,5) years. That, for one, would fix the death plus 90 years, since the rights wouldn't extend after the death of the creator (okay, that was just wishful thinking).
Would this mean that the content industries would no longer "discover" young talent and make them super-rich overnight? Yes, it probably would. Would this be a bad thing? I don't think so.
And why, might I ask, did you put it into the proceedings then?
If it were the property of your employer, you pretty much do what they say as you've already been paid for the work. If it were your own material, then you choose to do it or not. Now, you may have received some other compensation (tenure, perhaps - though that's not really fair since tenure does not hing on a single presentation).
I wonder how many would blink if you refused? I have had people ask for unlimited liability on several jobs, and specifically stated that they would go no less than $Xx10^6. I told them that $100k was my limit, and if that was too low they should find another designer. I ended up with the job, with my limit.
I suppose you just have to be in a situation where you can take your marbles and go home.
That last thing I need is "real people" screwing up the tags on a site. I recently got a new PC for home theater, and installed absolutely as little as possible on it (not even firefox - heresy, I know). I used the default search the first couple of times - forgetting that it wasn't google - and was amazed at how poorly the results came back. Even specific text known to be on the page (down to filenames I was trying to find for installing necessary codecs) wouldn't bring up the pages I needed. I can only assume that with (primarily) non-technical people typing in search keywords for pages it will just get worse.
You might say that a decade and a half of old search engine technology has trained me to make computer-based queries, but damnit it works, and I don't look forward to the unwashed masses breaking it.
Had I not lost my mod points, you'd have gotten a funny.
Since I don't, I'll do the next most popular thing on/. and point out your error. Silicone, which used to be used for fake boobies, has a specific gravity just above that of water (1.1 range). Silicon, which powers your computer, has a specific gravity of 2.3.
Again, this/. so I can see how things got mixed up. AFAICT, the latter form is more popular as a tool for personal gratification around here.
Taking the devil's advocate position, what reason would there be for private entities to research which markers indicate a particular condition? Without knowing what markers mean, there's no usefulness to the tests.
Back to the honest person's argument, the problem is that they are patenting a "fact." The rub here is that learning what the "facts" are takes effort, and in the IP world, the expectation is that anything which requires effort should be patentable.The argument most of/. is making is that this should not be the case. The mere need to apply effort to solve a problem should not be the sole hurdle to gaining a monopoly over that information.
If you want to know why healthcare is expensive, this is one of the two reasons (the other is manpower - HC takes contact time; insurance is a red herring). Eliminate IP restrictions and you will reduce healthcare costs. You will also slow the progress of the advancement of healthcare. TANSTAAFL
Are you sure? I was under the impression that typical DVD-R media is unwritable in the key area, which is why you can't copy a DVD bit-for-bit and have it play in a DVD player. I wasn't aware that a copy to a computer could be played back with licensed software. Then again, I decode before I rip, and I strip out all of the fluff before I rewrite the DVD to the server.
As for the DMCA, if backups are considered a fair-use, then decryption for the purpose of backing up is legal because it is fair use. The DMCA specifically indicates that the provisions of the law shall not infringe on fair use rights. Now, the law makes it illegal to sell you anything that decrypts the content, but not to use such software - which is why Slysoft is not located in the US (Antigua, I believe).
...that (a) this is a good thing (commercial operation) but that (b) the DMCA wasn't necessary at all. Aren't there theft of service laws already on the books for receiving private/pay TV services without paying for them? And, since this isn't actually a DMCA violation case, but rather a conspiracy to violate the DMCA, wouldn't it be just as much a conspiracy to illegally receive service?
Sir, I tip my hat to you. That was very possibly the best, and almost certainly the worst, joke in this thread. (I'd mod you up, as I have points, but you're at +5 already).
Slashdot Mirror
This causes two problems. First, it makes the magazines more speculative, since a larger portion of revenue comes from sales which occur after the magazine goes to print. Second, it increases the cost of the magazine significantly. Are you ready to pay $15-$20 (or more) for an issue that used to cost you $6, purely for the privilege of not having ads? Do you think >90% of consumers are?
I honestly see this as a nonstarter for most magazines, as much as I would like it. I believe Cooks Illustrated is done this way, so it does work for certain demographics. The cost of a yearly subscription is about 3-4 times what a similar ad-based pub is on a per-issue basis, IIRC.
When I started out assembly programming the 6502 as a kid, I didn't have the cash for an assembler, so I coded with pencil and paper, hand assembled to machine code, and entered byte by byte.
Kids these days...
Of course, what I wrote was a lot closer to Hello World than a GUI OS. :-)
All true, but slipping a dollar coin in a g-string is a non-starter. What were we talking about again?
By my math, that's at the top end of his estimate. Because a lot of transactions are small (now that CC companies forbid minimum charges in their TOS), the per-transaction fees often chraged - esp to small merchants - make the percentage large.
The industry is mature for exactly the reasons you state. The big bang is over, now we're all just sorting out the pieces and organizing everything neatly. The key is that most of the stuff is on the table, now. Revolutionary ideas are now rare, rather than commonplace.
Funny, though, much of what you talk about is like computers before we got large bandwidth networks and complex operating systems. Everything ran independently (remember being able to simply copy the application directory somewhere else and execute it from there?). Add a dynamic pointer and the novel Widget2010 is just like WidgetForDOS, but with the app on a server somewhere.
There will still be breakthroughs, as there are in other fields, but the day when there was so much undiscovered that was fantastically new (remember the first time you saw Visicalc?) is over. Makes me kind of sad, really.
If your future boss replies "yahoo," run the other way.
Seriously*, though, here are some tips:
I think it's appropriate to ask what kind of project backlog the group/company has, and whether that is low, average, or high
This will tell you where they are in their cycle, and if they're trying to shore up from ship-jumpers, replacing normal attrition, or growing - and how likely your job is to be there in a years time.
Dress code - you shouldn't need to ask about this one unless either
(a) everybody in the office is in a suit and tie, in which case you may ask if that is typical (or more cagily, if Fridays are casual)
(b) everybody is in shorts and a T-shirt, in which case you should ask if this is "casual day," and what normal work attire is
otherwise you can expected to wear what everyone else wears
General HR policy questions (leave/overtime/benefits) can wait until the offer - they're not salient tot he interview. Keep all of your questions about the position, the culture, the relationship of management to the team. That said, make sure you get a chance to review the employee handbook before you commit either way, and be certain that you have them fill in any missing information (if OT policy is omitted, for example).
Okay, that one was serious - jut don't ask it directly. If anyone actually uses Yahoo, stay clear. I'm 0 for 2 on employees that use it. One thankfully left of her own accord, the other I had to dismiss. Neither were worth half their salary.
That works perfectly until something won't install, at which point you get fired. Many people who feel they require that level of access, and install things which require it, know the difference.
But, hey, thanks for playing.
Disclaimer: I am "that guy" in my office. Having access to admin rights may not be critical 90% of the time, but hell hath no fury like an engineer under a deadline who need something to work NOW and doesn't have 2 hours to let the IT guy do it. Now, in my case I also happen to run IT, so there's no real conflict here. If something gets screwed up, I'm the one who has to pick up the pieces.
Seems reasonable from an evolutionary standpoint, I suppose. Better function comes from two kidneys, but two hearts are probably more prone to cause problems. Not sure how often a single kidney fails in the under-30 crowd, but with heart failure so rare during prime reproductive years there would be little advantage to having two even presuming that they worked in unison.
Seriously, I'm a troll?
This is some pretty difficult, complex work. As a sibling post pointed out, there are very highly stressed systems. Whoever bid this - and, no, I don't know anything about how it was bid but I have my suspicions - probably didn't decide to go hire a crack team of the best assemblers in Europe. They figured their standard labor for guys (and gals) who wire up buildings, telecom, and other lab environments. I work with these types of people sometimes, and they're not always focused on the end product (to put it nicely). QA for a project like this can only be so rigorous until the QA dwarfs the scope and cost of the actual construction. Sometimes it's a conscious decision (Hubble), sometimes it's a matter of budget or politics. Regardless, it only takes a moderate percentage of not-quite-perfect workmanship to really foul things up when you push a system to its limits.
...that's what happen when you hire the low bidder?
This just cements you in place as being very low on the corporate totem pole. Every hear CEO appreciation day? Management appreciation day? Doctor appreciation day? Engineer appreciation day (engineer's day in India doesn't count)? Lawyer appreciation day?
No?
How about teacher appreciation day? Secretary (or, ahem, administrative assistant) appreciation day? See where I'm going with this? I wouldn't take this as a compliment.
If they didn't have the right to sell it, and it's illegal to reposess such a work through legal means, then they need to pay the copyright owner for the copies distributed. The lawyers can hammer out an agreement which will make Jeff & Co. look just a little harder the next time they go publishing a work. Of course, since Amazon knows how many they sold, that will make it easy for the copyright holder to sue for damages based on statutory infringement should the talks break down
Why is this so hard?
I've got a family plan - two phones sharing 700 minutes. It was the lowest available for a multi-line, national plan at the time. And I'm not going to mess with it willingly; they gave me unlimited data on my phone plus 200 text messages for $20/mo above the voice-only rate.
Get a real phone plan, or one from a decent provider. AT&T just capped my rollover minutes when I hit something like 4000 (in just 2 years on the minimal 700 minute a month plan). Does anyone really have a plan where they regularly go over their monthly allotment, and it's not cheaper to get the next tier?
If the 15 seconds is too painful, read up on the options to skip the message. As for the man up comment - that goes for you, too, Timothy. And while we're at it, why don't you go ahead and turn in your geek card for not knowing you could hit # and skip right to the beep.
Yes, I am in a foul mood this afternoon; thanks for asking.
Label them as
"This file/product may stop working AT ANY TIME, including before you get to use it. No refunds will be issued."
For those of us in the Windows world, the need to identify server drives as letters (mostly for program functionality, if not for convenience in the GUI), and want to have access to our large* files when we're not hanging with the metrosexual crowd at the Starbucks (i.e. - those of use who have to do real work in the field, away from WiFi and often cell data) - having offline files is a godsend. Of course, the limitation is that you can only cache what you can store on your laptop HD.
With a gig of data, I should be able to cache the entire contents of both my data drive at work and home and most - if not all - of my FLAC collection. That last one is nice, since most programs like to "see" the same "drive", and aren't nearly as keen on looking at a local "synced" folder when disconnected.
*Many documents I like to reference in the field are >10MB, and some are 50MB or more; mostly PDFs of either architectural prints or code documents; sucking them over the 'net at any end-to-end wireless speed isn't really practical, and the remote options still aren't as nice as being on the local machine.
Oh, I'm not worried about spam pages - they're pretty easy to identify from the summary blurb in the search engines. I already ignore them almost completely. I realize that Bing is targeting idiots, I just hope that the demographic creep doesn't spread to good search sites. Bing sucks, by my experience, so it's not like it sucking worse - in a vacuum - will affect me. Of course, I thought that Yahoo existed so the people who were clueless could be identified by the rest of us (I will never hire anyone who claims Yahoo as their search engine of choice - two strikes is all it took for me).
just eliminate that "for academic materials" in your sentence. Why allow any transfer of rights from the creator. Set a specific limit on the rights that may be transferred from the creator to another entity - say exclusivity is banned, or is banned for any period exceeding (1,3,5) years. That, for one, would fix the death plus 90 years, since the rights wouldn't extend after the death of the creator (okay, that was just wishful thinking).
Would this mean that the content industries would no longer "discover" young talent and make them super-rich overnight? Yes, it probably would. Would this be a bad thing? I don't think so.
And why, might I ask, did you put it into the proceedings then?
If it were the property of your employer, you pretty much do what they say as you've already been paid for the work. If it were your own material, then you choose to do it or not. Now, you may have received some other compensation (tenure, perhaps - though that's not really fair since tenure does not hing on a single presentation).
I wonder how many would blink if you refused? I have had people ask for unlimited liability on several jobs, and specifically stated that they would go no less than $Xx10^6. I told them that $100k was my limit, and if that was too low they should find another designer. I ended up with the job, with my limit.
I suppose you just have to be in a situation where you can take your marbles and go home.
That last thing I need is "real people" screwing up the tags on a site. I recently got a new PC for home theater, and installed absolutely as little as possible on it (not even firefox - heresy, I know). I used the default search the first couple of times - forgetting that it wasn't google - and was amazed at how poorly the results came back. Even specific text known to be on the page (down to filenames I was trying to find for installing necessary codecs) wouldn't bring up the pages I needed. I can only assume that with (primarily) non-technical people typing in search keywords for pages it will just get worse.
You might say that a decade and a half of old search engine technology has trained me to make computer-based queries, but damnit it works, and I don't look forward to the unwashed masses breaking it.
Had I not lost my mod points, you'd have gotten a funny.
Since I don't, I'll do the next most popular thing on /. and point out your error. Silicone, which used to be used for fake boobies, has a specific gravity just above that of water (1.1 range). Silicon, which powers your computer, has a specific gravity of 2.3.
Again, this /. so I can see how things got mixed up. AFAICT, the latter form is more popular as a tool for personal gratification around here.
Taking the devil's advocate position, what reason would there be for private entities to research which markers indicate a particular condition? Without knowing what markers mean, there's no usefulness to the tests.
Back to the honest person's argument, the problem is that they are patenting a "fact." The rub here is that learning what the "facts" are takes effort, and in the IP world, the expectation is that anything which requires effort should be patentable.The argument most of /. is making is that this should not be the case. The mere need to apply effort to solve a problem should not be the sole hurdle to gaining a monopoly over that information.
If you want to know why healthcare is expensive, this is one of the two reasons (the other is manpower - HC takes contact time; insurance is a red herring). Eliminate IP restrictions and you will reduce healthcare costs. You will also slow the progress of the advancement of healthcare. TANSTAAFL
Are you sure? I was under the impression that typical DVD-R media is unwritable in the key area, which is why you can't copy a DVD bit-for-bit and have it play in a DVD player. I wasn't aware that a copy to a computer could be played back with licensed software. Then again, I decode before I rip, and I strip out all of the fluff before I rewrite the DVD to the server.
As for the DMCA, if backups are considered a fair-use, then decryption for the purpose of backing up is legal because it is fair use. The DMCA specifically indicates that the provisions of the law shall not infringe on fair use rights. Now, the law makes it illegal to sell you anything that decrypts the content, but not to use such software - which is why Slysoft is not located in the US (Antigua, I believe).
...that (a) this is a good thing (commercial operation) but that (b) the DMCA wasn't necessary at all. Aren't there theft of service laws already on the books for receiving private/pay TV services without paying for them? And, since this isn't actually a DMCA violation case, but rather a conspiracy to violate the DMCA, wouldn't it be just as much a conspiracy to illegally receive service?
Sir, I tip my hat to you. That was very possibly the best, and almost certainly the worst, joke in this thread. (I'd mod you up, as I have points, but you're at +5 already).