stop taking off-hours support calls, or at least limit them, if they're making it at all difficult for you to be a 9 to 5 person at a company that cares about this horses**t. And know that there are companies that respect what you're doing. Mine would.
show up 5 minutes early.
leave at 5:01, or whenever is 'normal'.
Learn seven polite and politically-defensible ways to say no. Better yet, learn the japanese trick of saying 'yes' in a way that means 'no'. Theirs is sort of a very-polite 'yeah, right!', although the literal translation is 'That's Fine.' Use these whenever you're asked to overextend yourself. The best is to simply not pick up the phone and drop the pager/cell into some ice tea (acidic saturation is hell on circuit boards).
Move on as soon as you can. It's always better to quit than be fired.
Once you're out the door, recognize that your team lead also just (indirectly) told you that (s)he is unwilling or incapable of standing up for you. That, not the thought of getting canned, is why you need to get out now.
It might be possible to look up the org chart and find someone that will champion you where your lead won't. If so, ask for their mentorship and help, but be graceful. If it helps, offer to give them VERY BRIEF summaries on the stuff you're doing after hours, to show why you're concerned both for your job and the company's best interests.
Take to reading the daily shark. It's therapeutic. Even now, 4 years away from my last job-from-hell, I occasionally grate my teeth at the idiotic s**t people submit there. I'm still not over the damage they did... that's how bad that long-gone job was.
Oh, and once you're out the door, take to submitting to the shark. Even more therapeutic. Be careful about specifics, since coworkers at that job-from-hell put 2 and 2 together, showed it to the boss, and now she hates me. C'est la vie.
As for seeking greener pastures, I worked 3 or 4 truly hellish jobs. One firm moved me 4 times in a year; my colleagues had resumes that spanned 20-40 job sites in 5 to 10 years. Another was small enough that the ceo and his wife split managerial duties, and their marital strife led to us getting conflicting orders twice a day. And so on... until I got in with a company full of wizards and acolytes that was managed with an eye toward us having balanced lives. Full telecommute privileges, anything-goes flexibility to hours we worked, etc. What I'd call 'professionals leading professionals' is so much better than the crap you're enduring. Yeah, I work wicked long hours, but I do it in my own fashion: I come in late, I stay a bit late, I go home and play with my kids and then go to my computer room and work for another few hours (or not) at my own discretion. From that first good gig, I've gone to another firm with similar rules. The work's fun and cutting-edge, with plenty of time for retrospection and self-training. Oh, and I make double what I did for any of the sweatshops. As the kid says, "I highly recommend it."
One last comment: having been around the field for quite a while, I suspect that we're still shedding non-geeks from the DotBomb years. The extra pressure and strain is a good thing in that respect: it gets rid of people that don't do this out of love. A few more years and we should be back to where demand exceeds supply just enough to give us more options.
Yeah, I know that flies in the face of outsourcing/etc, but a guy can dream. Everything I see still points toward no end to the problem of expanding complexity and increased I/T security risks. That, for me, means plenty of work to be done.
Let me start by saying I don't know Moglen, Stallman, or Torvalds, yet all appearances are that they're all willing to engage in sensible debate when warranted. They're also busy.
Considering Messr's Moglen and Stallman will be certainly involved in any GPL3 litigation, I'd be fine with them writing GPL3 without a lick of input.
At it's worst, opening the authoring process would mean that Moglen and Stallman could be stuck with language that they're not happy with, yet are forced to support in court. Put another way, everything they've learned so far is going to infuse the language they use. To argue with every joe schmoe would mean they'd waste an inordinate amount of time writing a zillion 'well, back in 98 we had a case like X that would have made that problematic' responses. Man, I'd kill myself before opening up the editorial process that far.
That said, other replies say they're open to suggestions and discussion. That's just about where I want 'em to be.
A couple hours ago, I started to answer someone on the/. story about Linus being too cathedral-ish (they thought a committee would work better). Someone walked in and I had to close a few windows quickly, so let me just offer up my (deleted) remark from then:
If you don't like it, feel free to fork the process and start things up in your preferred fashion. All the tools are free for download, all the prior source is there, all the discussions. Just become an expert and you can offer an alternative GPL (or Kernel). Frankly, about halfway through, you'll probably agree that these guys are doing a smashing job and it'd be easier to help them than to reinvent the process yourself.
Forks happen. But they happen rarely because it's not trivial to gain a consensus of enough supporters to keep things alive and move forward.
I plan to wash my car this week.
I plan to publish an article this year.
I plan to see my kids thru college this decade.
I plan to retire someday.
Blanketing a city: this year.
Rocket-science-meets-interplanetary-anything: a decade is ambitious.
If some quick nimble little nation wants to bite off a Mars mission,
I say 'you go, girl.' But let's be fair about the levels of
complexity involved. Planting a few hundred wifi AP's is trivial by comparison.
Put another way, years ago a friend got wind that a chain was about to open competition to his store, across the street from him. He contacted them and said he'd have the agility to make their store suffer nonstop for years... or they could buy him out. Then, he started listing off the ads, the marketing tricks, the loyalty promotions, and etc. that he'd specifically do. Being one store, he planned to push the envelope and shift nimbly enough that he *literally* would have beaten them (you can beat a chain, but it requires some unique skills).
They shrugged him off. Six months after opening, they paid more than his initial amount to buy him out. I think this is an accurate mirror to what you're talking about. Small guys can beat big guys one-on-one.
Yes, being small and nimble can be an advantage. Yes, the US carries a lot of bureaucratic inertia. But Lichtenstein is no more likely to go to Mars than my wife is likely to play in the NBA. Sometimes, you need size on your side.
Oh, and 'Cloak'? That's one wierd choice of words, Michael. To Cloak is to obscure, which a wifi grid is antithetical of.
IANAL, but I end up talking with corporate staff on self-inflicted risks like this:
The app has to work, somewhat, or a checksum will be used to assist warez-collectors as they declare good and bad warez versions. Ineptly at first, but this sort of incentive will improve the checksum awareness amongst pirates.
So, to be an effective trojan for more than a few days, it'd need to mimic the installer, present a EULA, and work. And if it presents a EULA, Valve would only be protected from any liability if they could prove Valve wasn't the author. If they author a fake EULA, signed by them, they're putting themselves at legal risk the moment that they install Trojan software:
Joe-Attorney's son (Jr) buys HL2. HL2 dies. Jr researches on the 'net. Jr finds replacement (Hl2-Warez) via BT. Jr installs HL2-warez. Joe realizes he's been trojanned. Risk of Loss of Confidentiality is bad enough, Joe sues Valve. Valve can't deny responsibility, any more than a store can deny responsibility if sued for harming a customer while trying to catch shoplifters. The existence of a trojan that communicates with the home office by a firm is very very very damning evidence, in my book. I'd never let that risk fly by, if I were Valve's attorney.
Obligatory Princess Bride Quote:
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is: "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." But, only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line!"
A better ObQuote: Never wrestle with a pig. You'll just get covered in shit and the pig enjoys it.
...they confront the
sister who admits...she bought some rat poison when she was in Chicago for a business trip and had an affair with the dead guy....They confront her again and this time she admits she did it.
She did WHAT? With HER BROTHER?!
Oh, ick.
I know that was likely unintentional, but the high Nielson ratings for crap like that are why I laugh when pundits say a 51% majority on Nov 2 was a referendum on moral values. Folks want Father Knows Best in real life, but can't live without CSI and Desperate Wives for entertainment.
Oh, and props for the funny story. It's exactly why I cringe and walk out when my wife's watching CSI, the SciFi channel, Charmed, etc etc etc. I love her, but she's got this thing for crapulous bad-science shows that I can't fathom. The bad news is that Tivo now dishes up a dozen episodes on demand for her.
Oh, and the dot-com years didn't see a surge in computer experts?
Ask any attorney that's been practicing long enough about the LA Law effect.
One of my best friends sells advertising for TV. When we first got out of college, she'd always rag on about the terrible pay and high competition for working in front of a camera. Being a broadcast journalist (ha!) in Nowhere earns pay just above the poverty line, yet every opening gets hundreds of applicants. The glamour is worth it, I guess.
It's late or I'd rustle up some other counterexamples. Increased profile and a sense of glamour (regardless of reality) leads to a surge in college enrollments and more people in the job market.
Luckily for dedicated forensic pathologists, day-in-day-out dealing with rotten this and dead that, not to mention a steady, stinking stream of decomposers (the least-offensive of which are maggots and worms) will stop most of the pikers. But given how few CSI-ish jobs there are, that'll be enough to glut the job market.
Given that anyone dedicated enough to get a degree can swerve into other bio-research work, that's a result I'm ok with. After all, we all seem to agree that there are enough interesting things to study in Genetics/Bio/Chem to keep everyone busy for 50-200 years, don't we?
I've never seen a lot of details, but I understand that the 'Dixar' contract stated that the characters were free for Disney to use if Pixar refused to do a sequel.
Surely, there's some tactic that would allow Pixar to thwart Disney without wasting their best talent on yet-another-sequel. For example,
Pixar could remain involved just enough to meet contractual obligations and force quality as high as possible.
Failing that, get things snarled up into such a hairball of licensing and permissions that TS3 never sees release (take a page from Heavy Metal's legal hassles, Pixar). Better yet, have a long chain of entanglements, so Disney gets a clue after the first or second years-long delay.
Do something that Disney can't countenance: kill off a few TS1 characters, march off into politically-charged topics (Disney avoids controversy at all costs), etc.
Join in, create a compelling set of new characters, then refuse to license 'em. Make a character or two *more* compelling than Buzz Lightyear. Create prequels and sequels to box Disney in utterly (so their only option is to pull some sort of Highlander-3 'oops, pretend like 2 never happened' shizzle).
Most importantly, find the legal looopholes needed to put a twilight on this arrangement: get Disney's ugly freakin' paws off the TS character set forever, no matter the cost.
I'd suggest buying out this contract clause, but frankly the market will ignore crap for free. Why bother.
Wow, I only thought I despised Disney before hearing about this. How much lower can they go?
Haven't seen Lion King 1 1/2, but P & P has been playing almost nonstop at my house lately. It doesn't completely suck; I rate it higher than 'Tarzan and Jane' (a movie so-oo bad we wrote a new rule: all direct-to-video movies are rented before being bought... gack!)
That said, you brought up an interesting question, so I dug around a bit:
Lion King 1-1/2
79% at RottenTomatoes.com, my favorite review site
-- at metacritic.com -- never heard of it, I guess
6.6 at imdb.com (out of 10)
3.5 at Amazon (out of 5)
Princess & the Pauper
-- at RottenTomatoes.com, too few reviews to score it.
-- at metacritic.com -- never heard of it, either.
3.8 at imdb.com (out of 10)
5.0at Amazon (out of 5)
On the other hand, I'd bet money on the scores for Strong Bad, the DVD.
Sorry, but I was told once that 'Anyone who says there's just one point is missing the point.' Like 'Moderation in all things, including Moderation', this is a favorite axiom of mine.
In my case, the point would be to build the cluster. Period. Full stop. To. Build. A. Cluster.
Since I don't need one at work, my boss surely won't pay for highest-end-commodity-machines. Since I might want to have a clustering credential on my resume or chase jobs involving clustering, I'd prefer spending a grand or two to create my own working cluster. Then I can either sell it off or use the xboxes as xbmc's afterward.
add in MMORPG's, websurfing, porn, p2p, and a few percentage points (apparently that's all) for legitimate uses, etc.
and Skype has *how* many million people using it for VoIP, a bandwidth-intensive use?
How did we get some wierd sort of n-dimensional internet capable of several times it's own capacity! ? And is there a RealLife version of this that'd let me only show up for 2 hours per workday?
Derivative works are protected by a new copyright. This applies where digital enhancements are made, colorization is done, etc. The original remains public domain, however.
That's what makes life plus 70 so insane:
The mere transferral from film to dvd is sufficient to protect 'steamboat willie' for another term, within the limitation that (once in the public domain) anyone else would be free to find old 'steamboat willie' film and create a competitive product. That's primarily what Disney fears: the dilution of their claim to any image or reproduction of mickey mouse, even if it is a version that is recognizably different from how he is drawn today.
Frankly, the whole thing makes me sick to my stomach. There are a zillion profitable ways to advance a product or a story or a brand that don't demand aggressive copyright extensions: imagine if there were annual rereleases of top movies, with new 'commentary' tracks, new behind-the-scenes footage, etc.
Imagine if some old bit-part actor/musician could contract with someone other than the original studio to create their own retelling (I can't be the only one that'd enjoy hearing a handful of supporting staffers talk about the *real* dynamics of various classic movies, from Star Wars to Casablanca).
On the public-domain/creative commons front, fans and experts could assist with close-captioning, additional audio tracks, and pop-up commentaries via home-brew tools, rather than being forced to live with crappy captions, bland commentary tracks, and typos in captions, etc. One could see deeper internationalizations done, and we'd likely see film-school variants of films, with commentary talking about the directorial decisions, the acting cues, lighting, special effects, or whatever.
The sheer size of the damage done to the wider market in the name of protecting Disney literally boggles the mind. There'd be a lot of crap (not to mention startling/offensive surprises, like porn or other shock-oriented remakes of classics), but there'd be a wider market possible again.
And don't even get me started on ephemeral creations like newspapers and sports broadcasts. Protecting them for life plus 70 makes no sense whatsoever, and I'm sure this has been a subtle factor in crushing the newspaper industry. Hmm.. that'd be a fun creative-commons goal: a newspaper chain that embraced short-lived copyright or some other modification per the CC.
I've also started to wonder if one could start from scratch, using CC or OSS ideas, to build characters that were allowed widespread use. Counter the encumbered industry by creating some quality less-protected alternatives, a la Linux.
Since google's (ahem) prime directive is to not be evil, an IM client provides a fascinating glimpse into whether that directive can survive (has survived) their IPO:
If google chooses to use an existing protocol, or creates a well-engineered protocol and publishes it widely for non-google developers, we can guess that they're sticking to their rule.
If, on the other hand, they act like Microsoft, AOL, and others, so much for 'Don't Be Evil.'
A proprietary protocol has profit advantages over shared ones, in the short term. However, a large company putting their weight behind such a protocol isn't a guarantee of success, given MSN and AOL and Yahoo and other well-established chat providers. Taken another way, publishing the protocol and finding some other way to profit (relevant ads, increased market share for other profitable products, etc) would be a way to gain share rapidly. So, there could be other reasons than 'don't be evil' in favor of choice #1 above. But the only motive for guarding a protocol (choice #2) would be putting profit ahead of the customer's interests.
Incidentally, I still think google pretty much is breaking down. One out of ten searches I do gets dominated by astroturfed commercial sites with nothing relevant. Try finding an impartial web-hosting review site, for example. A competitor could eat google's lunch simply by allowing trusted reviewers to flag any site that seems too high on the list. If it is there improperly (by creating whole hierarchies of interlinked websites), prune it and any egregious peers. Get us back to where the top link is nearly always useful.
Obviously, that's backwards logic: if B&N or Walmart adds RFID, it still won't trigger any reaction by UPS dropping the wrong box off at an indy shop that's running without RFID. They're proximity devices, not *magic*.
Re:Add to the question about book endings!!!
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
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· Score: 1
A quote? I must have misread. Meanwhile, I know what you mean -- my other comment y'day was on someone else's question: Is there such a thing as an ending consultant, and would you please use one. I about died laughing, cuz that seems to be everyone's reaction to NS.
Glad you didn't completely wig on my (fairly harsh) negative response. But I guess that just means there's someone else out there (two if you count Pournelle) that'll add me to their Foes list.
Re:Add to the question about book endings!!!
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Strange Attractor wrote ( shades of the infamous Shatner SNL skit):
Also, I'd asked you this in person when you had given a talk at Georgia Tech - about the endings of your books, to which you had replied that you were quite happy with them the way they were.
But -- if you could have ended them differently, what kind of alternate endings do you think you would have come up with?
Shatner: Um... That mare had a foal?!
Moderators and editors - PLEASE add this thought to the highly-moderated question earlier about Neal's endings. I'd rather hear this followup, rather than waste one of of 10-12 questions on a reiteration of "I'm happy with them the way they are".
Or let's just not mod StrangeA's question up.
The underlying question remains asked and answered *to StrangeA* (dodging the question is an answer),
it smacks of "Da Vinci, what other expressions would you like to paint on the Mona Lisa?", if you'll forgive the highfalutin' comparison of NielS to DaVinci. They're done. Fiddlin' with finished art gains nothing, and damages the ambiguity that lets the same piece give many messages.
As a writer, I would loathe seriously answering a question like this. I can *forever* keep tweaking my writing, but by the end I am always quite happy. And looking back is hard work, since adjusting the ending would mean weeding out inconsistencies, adjusting plot, dialog, reveals, ordering, pacing. That's just ugly, compared to starting over with blank paper.
And to what good could this rethink-your-work effort ever come? If Niel's lucky, he'll find StrangeA's fanfic ending adaptation published online in a year. If he's unlucky, critics and readers will forever hold his own criticism against him. Eeew, yuck.
The only time I'd put up with this question is if it came from a trusted friend, informally, over beers. And even then, I'd let them lead the way. That's the only way anyone gets to ask me what-if's capable of turning my livelihood upside-down.
Did I mention the question sounds a bit too basement-boy? I'm really sorry, StrangeA, but that is the vibe you're putting out by overpursuing this question. There's a whole realm of real-world examples of fans overstepping their relationship boundaries with their favorite celebrities/stars/writers. Again, eew-yuck.
Coincidentally, I love his books, but I feel NS's endings are sucky and wierd. I just feel that this question sucks more.
Oh, and most nonfiction by favorite SF authors includes useful insight into the mind of an SF writer, if that could help you to get some of what you're after here, StrangeA. Asimov's stuff, Harlan Ellison's editorial comments in his books, Spider Robinson's old book review columns, online interviews, boingboing.net, etc. In fact, the only author whose nonFic ramblings seldom taught me a thing about writing was Jerry Pournelle (Chaos Manor).
I'm browsing now, looking for prior questions before posting the following:
"What happens to you at the end of the books you write? Every one of your novels starts out breathtakingly rich and full of stuff that is some of the best near-future SF I've read in 30+ years, but staged within a context that is conventionally acceptable. But each of the few novels of yours I've read swerves wierdly in late chapters. Are you schizophrenic, is there a hidden agenda here, or what?"
Yeah, I'm really masochistic/stupid enough to RATFC's.
A very nice product, although 8 hour battery life is somewhat lacking for a GPS. Garmin has a similar product: http://www.garmin.com/products/iQue3200/ but it's not as beefy
Now, from Garmin's specs for the iQue3200:
PowerSource: Lithium-ion battery
Battery Life: Approximately 2 weeks standby time or approximately 16 days if used an average of 30 minutes per day with backlight off. Battery life will vary depending upon backlight level, temperature, and individual use patterns.
So... the garmin runs for 8 hours, too.
If *ever* there was a slashdot storyline that profoundly demonstrated how stupid the slashmob mentality is, this is it. The mob has grumbled about
The poor battery life (when, in fact, 8 *hours* of gadget-use is about the norm for brief-use devices like pdas and gps and the talk-time ratings for cell phones)
taking devices camping
the poor ruggedization of other devices
of how this is less valuable than outdoor skills
military use
outdoor screen readability of other devices
Wireless internet while camping
how people need to disconnect when they go camping
it'll only be useful to wilderness guides who, lacking any outdoor skills, will need this to show peeps where they are on a map (ow, my sides hurt)
The need for portable rechargability
Windows XP prospects
That it is available in too many colors
raindrops/branches vs. touchscreens
The poor range of bluetooth increasing the risk you could 'lose' your hiking companions (oh... migod! Bluetooth? How about just *shouting*?!)
Doesn't need wifi
Other devices are similar enough that this one is useless (WTF? Since when has anything been governed by a one-size-fits-all market?)
There are a thousand interesting things to note on this product, and a few were well-addressed in the above context (interesting uses in military, museum, and ruggedized-portable-gadget markets; programmability of this one is an improvement over the Garmin Rino; outdoor screen readability needs attention on a lot of devices: how does this one do?; etc). But that sort of intelligent commentary is just *gone* in the noise. What scares me is that the noise is mod-4 or higher.
Hmm... I wonder why nobody sticks utilities and simple games in Tivos and settop cable/satellite boxen? Wow, if that wouldn't invert the microsoft global-media-domination plan... start out for free, publish the API, sell better apps or secondary services (bill-pay, websurfing, chat, and snail-mail: upload it and we'll stamp and send it!), etc.
Then again, MythTV allows games, web, news, slide-shows...
In addition to death penalties, some other penalties could be
remarkably effective in cleaning up corporate misdeeds:
Jail: A criminal corp gets shut down for X days. Even a few days or weeks can be devastating for a company, since it will lose customers, critical employees, and suppliers.
Prison: Hard time for hard crimes. More of the same sort of damage, but for *years!* Imagine Exxon trying to explain to shareholders how the decision to use cheaper single-hull ships was worth not being able to do anything for the next 5 years.
Parole/probation: Putting a company and it's employees on a short leash for a few years. Again, the secondary economic damage is significant.
Asset Forfeiture: It's not enough to stop misdeeds. The product of those misdeeds should be taken away.
Restraining orders: Imagine a court saying: "Sorry, Microsoft, but you're not allowed to have any dealings with [Balmer | Intel] as one penalty for your conspiracy to further a monopoly."
Of course, a zillion countermeasures just spring up: endless appeals, shell corps and dummy corps, byzantine / fictional governance structures designed to hide corporate culpability, venue-shopping for court cases, hiding via internationalization, etc. Right now us 'meat-sacks' are at a disadvantage. See Shit Sandwich
Unfortunately, just imagine how much grief a megacorp could inflict on some small-business by abusing these laws.
Slashdot Mirror
As for seeking greener pastures, I worked 3 or 4 truly hellish jobs. One firm moved me 4 times in a year; my colleagues had resumes that spanned 20-40 job sites in 5 to 10 years. Another was small enough that the ceo and his wife split managerial duties, and their marital strife led to us getting conflicting orders twice a day. And so on... until I got in with a company full of wizards and acolytes that was managed with an eye toward us having balanced lives. Full telecommute privileges, anything-goes flexibility to hours we worked, etc. What I'd call 'professionals leading professionals' is so much better than the crap you're enduring. Yeah, I work wicked long hours, but I do it in my own fashion: I come in late, I stay a bit late, I go home and play with my kids and then go to my computer room and work for another few hours (or not) at my own discretion. From that first good gig, I've gone to another firm with similar rules. The work's fun and cutting-edge, with plenty of time for retrospection and self-training. Oh, and I make double what I did for any of the sweatshops. As the kid says, "I highly recommend it."
One last comment: having been around the field for quite a while, I suspect that we're still shedding non-geeks from the DotBomb years. The extra pressure and strain is a good thing in that respect: it gets rid of people that don't do this out of love. A few more years and we should be back to where demand exceeds supply just enough to give us more options.
Yeah, I know that flies in the face of outsourcing/etc, but a guy can dream. Everything I see still points toward no end to the problem of expanding complexity and increased I/T security risks. That, for me, means plenty of work to be done.
Maybe g'parent is correct, and this is some new standard. RFID may be RF for IDiots. Or the RF-IDaho standard. Spud-space transmission and all that.
Kudos. Thank god for jargon: it makes it so easy for clued people to quietly recognize blathering idiots.
Considering Messr's Moglen and Stallman will be certainly involved in any GPL3 litigation, I'd be fine with them writing GPL3 without a lick of input.
At it's worst, opening the authoring process would mean that Moglen and Stallman could be stuck with language that they're not happy with, yet are forced to support in court. Put another way, everything they've learned so far is going to infuse the language they use. To argue with every joe schmoe would mean they'd waste an inordinate amount of time writing a zillion 'well, back in 98 we had a case like X that would have made that problematic' responses. Man, I'd kill myself before opening up the editorial process that far.
That said, other replies say they're open to suggestions and discussion. That's just about where I want 'em to be.
A couple hours ago, I started to answer someone on the /. story about Linus being too cathedral-ish (they thought a committee would work better). Someone walked in and I had to close a few windows quickly, so let me just offer up my (deleted) remark from then:
If you don't like it, feel free to fork the process and start things up in your preferred fashion. All the tools are free for download, all the prior source is there, all the discussions. Just become an expert and you can offer an alternative GPL (or Kernel). Frankly, about halfway through, you'll probably agree that these guys are doing a smashing job and it'd be easier to help them than to reinvent the process yourself.
Forks happen. But they happen rarely because it's not trivial to gain a consensus of enough supporters to keep things alive and move forward.
waitaminit... wasn't one of the 'evils' of drugs that it was so addictive, people wanted it 'more than (insert list), even sex!'?
I plan to publish an article this year.
I plan to see my kids thru college this decade.
I plan to retire someday.
Blanketing a city: this year.
Rocket-science-meets-interplanetary-anything: a decade is ambitious.
If some quick nimble little nation wants to bite off a Mars mission, I say 'you go, girl.' But let's be fair about the levels of complexity involved. Planting a few hundred wifi AP's is trivial by comparison.
Put another way, years ago a friend got wind that a chain was about to open competition to his store, across the street from him. He contacted them and said he'd have the agility to make their store suffer nonstop for years... or they could buy him out. Then, he started listing off the ads, the marketing tricks, the loyalty promotions, and etc. that he'd specifically do. Being one store, he planned to push the envelope and shift nimbly enough that he *literally* would have beaten them (you can beat a chain, but it requires some unique skills).
They shrugged him off. Six months after opening, they paid more than his initial amount to buy him out. I think this is an accurate mirror to what you're talking about. Small guys can beat big guys one-on-one.
Yes, being small and nimble can be an advantage. Yes, the US carries a lot of bureaucratic inertia. But Lichtenstein is no more likely to go to Mars than my wife is likely to play in the NBA. Sometimes, you need size on your side.
Oh, and 'Cloak'? That's one wierd choice of words, Michael. To Cloak is to obscure, which a wifi grid is antithetical of.
The app has to work, somewhat, or a checksum will be used to assist warez-collectors as they declare good and bad warez versions. Ineptly at first, but this sort of incentive will improve the checksum awareness amongst pirates.
So, to be an effective trojan for more than a few days, it'd need to mimic the installer, present a EULA, and work. And if it presents a EULA, Valve would only be protected from any liability if they could prove Valve wasn't the author. If they author a fake EULA, signed by them, they're putting themselves at legal risk the moment that they install Trojan software:
Joe-Attorney's son (Jr) buys HL2. HL2 dies. Jr researches on the 'net. Jr finds replacement (Hl2-Warez) via BT. Jr installs HL2-warez. Joe realizes he's been trojanned. Risk of Loss of Confidentiality is bad enough, Joe sues Valve. Valve can't deny responsibility, any more than a store can deny responsibility if sued for harming a customer while trying to catch shoplifters. The existence of a trojan that communicates with the home office by a firm is very very very damning evidence, in my book. I'd never let that risk fly by, if I were Valve's attorney.
Obligatory Princess Bride Quote:
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is: "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." But, only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line!"
A better ObQuote: Never wrestle with a pig. You'll just get covered in shit and the pig enjoys it.
Oh, ick.
I know that was likely unintentional, but the high Nielson ratings for crap like that are why I laugh when pundits say a 51% majority on Nov 2 was a referendum on moral values. Folks want Father Knows Best in real life, but can't live without CSI and Desperate Wives for entertainment.
Oh, and props for the funny story. It's exactly why I cringe and walk out when my wife's watching CSI, the SciFi channel, Charmed, etc etc etc. I love her, but she's got this thing for crapulous bad-science shows that I can't fathom. The bad news is that Tivo now dishes up a dozen episodes on demand for her.
Oh, and the dot-com years didn't see a surge in computer experts?
Ask any attorney that's been practicing long enough about the LA Law effect.
One of my best friends sells advertising for TV. When we first got out of college, she'd always rag on about the terrible pay and high competition for working in front of a camera. Being a broadcast journalist (ha!) in Nowhere earns pay just above the poverty line, yet every opening gets hundreds of applicants. The glamour is worth it, I guess.
It's late or I'd rustle up some other counterexamples. Increased profile and a sense of glamour (regardless of reality) leads to a surge in college enrollments and more people in the job market.
Luckily for dedicated forensic pathologists, day-in-day-out dealing with rotten this and dead that, not to mention a steady, stinking stream of decomposers (the least-offensive of which are maggots and worms) will stop most of the pikers. But given how few CSI-ish jobs there are, that'll be enough to glut the job market.
Given that anyone dedicated enough to get a degree can swerve into other bio-research work, that's a result I'm ok with. After all, we all seem to agree that there are enough interesting things to study in Genetics/Bio/Chem to keep everyone busy for 50-200 years, don't we?
- Pixar could remain involved just enough to meet contractual obligations and force quality as high as possible.
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Failing that, get things snarled up into such a hairball of licensing and permissions that TS3 never sees release (take a page from Heavy Metal's legal hassles, Pixar). Better yet, have a long chain of entanglements, so Disney gets a clue after the first or second years-long delay.
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Do something that Disney can't countenance: kill off a few TS1 characters, march off into politically-charged topics (Disney avoids controversy at all costs), etc.
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Join in, create a compelling set of new characters, then refuse to license 'em. Make a character or two *more* compelling than Buzz Lightyear. Create prequels and sequels to box Disney in utterly (so their only option is to pull some sort of Highlander-3 'oops, pretend like 2 never happened' shizzle).
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Most importantly, find the legal looopholes needed to put a twilight on this arrangement: get Disney's ugly freakin' paws off the TS character set forever, no matter the cost.
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I'd suggest buying out this contract clause, but frankly the market will ignore crap for free. Why bother.
Wow, I only thought I despised Disney before hearing about this. How much lower can they go?- Princess & the Pauper
- -- at RottenTomatoes.com, too few reviews to score it.
- -- at metacritic.com -- never heard of it, either.
- 3.8 at imdb.com (out of 10)
- 5.0at Amazon (out of 5)
On the other hand, I'd bet money on the scores for Strong Bad, the DVD.(snickering)
Very reminiscent of the first day I heard Apple try to say SCSI was 'Sexy', not 'Scuzzy.'
Market wonks can't conquer the geek sense of humor.
In my case, the point would be to build the cluster. Period. Full stop. To. Build. A. Cluster.
Since I don't need one at work, my boss surely won't pay for highest-end-commodity-machines. Since I might want to have a clustering credential on my resume or chase jobs involving clustering, I'd prefer spending a grand or two to create my own working cluster. Then I can either sell it off or use the xboxes as xbmc's afterward.
How did we get some wierd sort of n-dimensional internet capable of several times it's own capacity! ? And is there a RealLife version of this that'd let me only show up for 2 hours per workday?
Derivative works are protected by a new copyright. This applies where digital enhancements are made, colorization is done, etc. The original remains public domain, however.
That's what makes life plus 70 so insane:
The mere transferral from film to dvd is sufficient to protect 'steamboat willie' for another term, within the limitation that (once in the public domain) anyone else would be free to find old 'steamboat willie' film and create a competitive product. That's primarily what Disney fears: the dilution of their claim to any image or reproduction of mickey mouse, even if it is a version that is recognizably different from how he is drawn today.
Frankly, the whole thing makes me sick to my stomach. There are a zillion profitable ways to advance a product or a story or a brand that don't demand aggressive copyright extensions: imagine if there were annual rereleases of top movies, with new 'commentary' tracks, new behind-the-scenes footage, etc.
Imagine if some old bit-part actor/musician could contract with someone other than the original studio to create their own retelling (I can't be the only one that'd enjoy hearing a handful of supporting staffers talk about the *real* dynamics of various classic movies, from Star Wars to Casablanca).
On the public-domain/creative commons front, fans and experts could assist with close-captioning, additional audio tracks, and pop-up commentaries via home-brew tools, rather than being forced to live with crappy captions, bland commentary tracks, and typos in captions, etc. One could see deeper internationalizations done, and we'd likely see film-school variants of films, with commentary talking about the directorial decisions, the acting cues, lighting, special effects, or whatever.
The sheer size of the damage done to the wider market in the name of protecting Disney literally boggles the mind. There'd be a lot of crap (not to mention startling/offensive surprises, like porn or other shock-oriented remakes of classics), but there'd be a wider market possible again.
And don't even get me started on ephemeral creations like newspapers and sports broadcasts. Protecting them for life plus 70 makes no sense whatsoever, and I'm sure this has been a subtle factor in crushing the newspaper industry. Hmm.. that'd be a fun creative-commons goal: a newspaper chain that embraced short-lived copyright or some other modification per the CC.
I've also started to wonder if one could start from scratch, using CC or OSS ideas, to build characters that were allowed widespread use. Counter the encumbered industry by creating some quality less-protected alternatives, a la Linux.
Sigh... I'm getting senile and going blind, I guess.
A dozen times today (I was busy, or it'd have been
many more!) I misread the headline as a 7-hour
history on the BBC.
A proprietary protocol has profit advantages over shared ones, in the short term. However, a large company putting their weight behind such a protocol isn't a guarantee of success, given MSN and AOL and Yahoo and other well-established chat providers. Taken another way, publishing the protocol and finding some other way to profit (relevant ads, increased market share for other profitable products, etc) would be a way to gain share rapidly. So, there could be other reasons than 'don't be evil' in favor of choice #1 above. But the only motive for guarding a protocol (choice #2) would be putting profit ahead of the customer's interests.
Incidentally, I still think google pretty much is breaking down. One out of ten searches I do gets dominated by astroturfed commercial sites with nothing relevant. Try finding an impartial web-hosting review site, for example. A competitor could eat google's lunch simply by allowing trusted reviewers to flag any site that seems too high on the list. If it is there improperly (by creating whole hierarchies of interlinked websites), prune it and any egregious peers. Get us back to where the top link is nearly always useful.
Obviously, that's backwards logic: if B&N or Walmart adds RFID, it still won't trigger any reaction by UPS dropping the wrong box off at an indy shop that's running without RFID. They're proximity devices, not *magic*.
A quote? I must have misread. Meanwhile, I know what you mean -- my other comment y'day was on someone else's question: Is there such a thing as an ending consultant, and would you please use one. I about died laughing, cuz that seems
to be everyone's reaction to NS.
Glad you didn't completely wig on my (fairly harsh) negative response. But I
guess that just means there's someone else out there (two if you count Pournelle) that'll add me to their Foes list.
- The underlying question remains asked and answered *to StrangeA* (dodging the question is an answer),
- it smacks of "Da Vinci, what other expressions would you like to paint on the Mona Lisa?", if you'll forgive the highfalutin' comparison of NielS to DaVinci. They're done. Fiddlin' with finished art gains nothing, and damages the ambiguity that lets the same piece give many messages.
- As a writer, I would loathe seriously answering a question like this. I can *forever* keep tweaking my writing, but by the end I am always quite happy. And looking back is hard work, since adjusting the ending would mean weeding out inconsistencies, adjusting plot, dialog, reveals, ordering, pacing. That's just ugly, compared to starting over with blank paper.
- And to what good could this rethink-your-work effort ever come? If Niel's lucky, he'll find StrangeA's fanfic ending adaptation published online in a year. If he's unlucky, critics and readers will forever hold his own criticism against him. Eeew, yuck.
- The only time I'd put up with this question is if it came from a trusted friend, informally, over beers. And even then, I'd let them lead the way. That's the only way anyone gets to ask me what-if's capable of turning my livelihood upside-down.
- Did I mention the question sounds a bit too basement-boy? I'm really sorry, StrangeA, but that is the vibe you're putting out by overpursuing this question. There's a whole realm of real-world examples of fans overstepping their relationship boundaries with their favorite celebrities/stars/writers. Again, eew-yuck.
Coincidentally, I love his books, but I feel NS's endings are sucky and wierd. I just feel that this question sucks more.Oh, and most nonfiction by favorite SF authors includes useful insight into the mind of an SF writer, if that could help you to get some of what you're after here, StrangeA. Asimov's stuff, Harlan Ellison's editorial comments in his books, Spider Robinson's old book review columns, online interviews, boingboing.net, etc. In fact, the only author whose nonFic ramblings seldom taught me a thing about writing was Jerry Pournelle (Chaos Manor).
W00t!
I'm browsing now, looking for prior questions before posting the following:
"What happens to you at the end of the books you write? Every one of your novels starts out breathtakingly rich and full of stuff that is some of the best near-future SF I've read in 30+ years, but staged within a context that is conventionally acceptable. But each of the few novels of yours I've read swerves wierdly in late chapters. Are you schizophrenic, is there a hidden agenda here, or what?"
Yeah, I'm really masochistic/stupid enough to RATFC's.
Hope you get the Q.
Heh, I think you've just coined the astro version of 'Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things'
[me: clicks link on Slashdot FAQ] .... mumble mumble... us-centric... mumble... omlette... mumble Jon Katz
Ack!
Curse you, I thought I'd finally gotten to a point where I'd never see *his* name again!
If *ever* there was a slashdot storyline that profoundly demonstrated how stupid the slashmob mentality is, this is it. The mob has grumbled about
- The poor battery life (when, in fact, 8 *hours* of gadget-use is about the norm for brief-use devices like pdas and gps and the talk-time ratings for cell phones)
- taking devices camping
- the poor ruggedization of other devices
- of how this is less valuable than outdoor skills
- military use
- outdoor screen readability of other devices
- Wireless internet while camping
- how people need to disconnect when they go camping
- it'll only be useful to wilderness guides who, lacking any outdoor skills, will need this to show peeps where they are on a map (ow, my sides hurt)
- The need for portable rechargability
- Windows XP prospects
- That it is available in too many colors
- raindrops/branches vs. touchscreens
- The poor range of bluetooth increasing the risk you could 'lose' your hiking companions (oh... migod! Bluetooth? How about just *shouting*?!)
- Doesn't need wifi
- Other devices are similar enough that this one is useless (WTF? Since when has anything been governed by a one-size-fits-all market?)
There are a thousand interesting things to note on this product, and a few were well-addressed in the above context (interesting uses in military, museum, and ruggedized-portable-gadget markets; programmability of this one is an improvement over the Garmin Rino; outdoor screen readability needs attention on a lot of devices: how does this one do?; etc). But that sort of intelligent commentary is just *gone* in the noise. What scares me is that the noise is mod-4 or higher.Hmm... I wonder why nobody sticks utilities and simple games in Tivos and settop cable/satellite boxen? Wow, if that wouldn't invert the microsoft global-media-domination plan... start out for free, publish the API, sell better apps or secondary services (bill-pay, websurfing, chat, and snail-mail: upload it and we'll stamp and send it!), etc.
Then again, MythTV allows games, web, news, slide-shows...
- Jail: A criminal corp gets shut down for X days. Even a few days or weeks can be devastating for a company, since it will lose customers, critical employees, and suppliers.
- Prison: Hard time for hard crimes. More of the same sort of damage, but for *years!* Imagine Exxon trying to explain to shareholders how the decision to use cheaper single-hull ships was worth not being able to do anything for the next 5 years.
- Parole/probation: Putting a company and it's employees on a short leash for a few years. Again, the secondary economic damage is significant.
- Asset Forfeiture: It's not enough to stop misdeeds. The product of those misdeeds should be taken away.
- Restraining orders: Imagine a court saying: "Sorry, Microsoft, but you're not allowed to have any dealings with [Balmer | Intel] as one penalty for your conspiracy to further a monopoly."
Of course, a zillion countermeasures just spring up: endless appeals, shell corps and dummy corps, byzantine / fictional governance structures designed to hide corporate culpability, venue-shopping for court cases, hiding via internationalization, etc. Right now us 'meat-sacks' are at a disadvantage. See Shit SandwichUnfortunately, just imagine how much grief a megacorp could inflict on some small-business by abusing these laws.