Thanks. I'm about as good with stocks as most people are with power tools. What little I know is dangerous.
SEC's link: Striking resemblance to the SCO filings on their own page. See my journal for the beginnings of drilling into each one and summarizing. Incidentally, almost half were Directors exercising options at.66 to 4.75, not selling. Only one director was clever enough (in my opinion) to sell everything he has immediately.
Next questions: where on SEC filings is a clue pointing to other forms of shifting value off the books. For example, the dillution of shares used to in buying up the other company that SCO was just pilloried for?
And can YOU find anywhere offering prices on Put Options avail for SCOX? I may just have to take the max-risk, low return path of either doing a limited short... but there's just not much joy in locking up $5k and watch it potentially grow before mid-2005 (court date, by my guess) just to see it fall about 90% at best. A staggered-sell short (accumulate shorts if/as the market climbs) improves the win value but could get staggeringly expensive if they push value up with rumors of a buyout (or (Horrors!) get bought out!. Microsoft's eagerness to kill Linux and it's huge warchest is a scary hypothetical to bet against...)
See, lacking a put option source, all I see is a scenario that looks like: Sell $5000 in shares... wait 2 years, buy back $500. Profit, 4500. 90% ROI in 2 years isn't shabby, but it also isn't worth the risk of seeing shares peak at $35 and get absorbed by a stable, large company, leaving me out roughly $13k (a minus of more than 200%). Or, short $1k, with plans to short another block each time the stock grows 60% or so (my so-called staggered-sell short plan... what's this called?)
Yes, if I were serious, I wouldn't do just $5k. Call it a hypothetical, or imagine the conversation I had with my wife... better yet, show me a way to shelter at $30 per share while betting SCOX is going down far and hard... Give me a bearable downside (worst case of $20k on the $5k invested), nothing at all if the change is under 20% either way, and a wicked payoff if and when SCOX tanks. Oh... and a long fuse in case we're still bitching about SCO in 2-3 years? Or am I asking for the sun, moon, stars, and whatever's behind door number three?
Except for this guy, Kevin Skousen... he's exercising an option at $10, if I read this right. What sort of upside does he see and what color is the sky in his world?!
Incidentally, can someone point me to a better spot that ir.sco.com to see 'SCO exec's dumping their stock over the weekend'... most edgar-ish sites seem to be a month or more behind in reporting compared to this page? Is the 24th the weekend AC meant?!
Hmm... I despise SCO enough that I'm finally found something journal-worthy... Details for the masses off http://ir.sco.com/edgar.cfm on my/. journal here in a few minutes... who had what # of shares when, etc. Otherwise, it's too much work to dig out a macro-trend for most people to waste all this effort tracking individual SEC filings.
PS: I propose a different kind of DDOS to the sco pages... lots of legalese asking for clarification of license terms for OpenLinux, FreeDos, BSD, or anything else. The tougher the question, the better. I suspect this is a method (overwork) that Shakespeare would feel applied when he said: First thing, let's kill all the Lawyers. (Henry IV or V?)
If any other product on the market (and cellular service is a product like any other) only worked 50% of the time it would be considered defective.
Heh, talk about a wide opening for microsoft-bashing... two that come to mind are "If any other product on the market only worked 50% of the time, I'd expect a Microsoft logo." and "Dude, you obviously never used Windows 3.1 or Bob or Word 2.0 or any other fledgling Microsoft products".
Yeah, I know... troll troll troll... still, can anyone else think of some good ones?
Luckily for **AA, copyrights will still be in effect for all currently-protected songs even after 2000 years, thanks to the Son-of-SonnyBono Act of 2010, Bono-Back-from-Beyond (2055), I-was-a-teenage-mutant-ninja-Bono Act of 2173, and Bono-until-the-year-2525 Act of 2225.
On the contrary. Humans expire just like copyrights. What are they going to sue, the person's heirs?
No wait, don't answer that...
RIAA: Who says copyrights expire!? Damn liar, step up and be seen!
PS: Has anyone else ever chuckled at the irony of perhaps lobbying for copyright to be extended retroactively forever, just so Mickey Mouse (and Sonny Bono's estate!) could get the bejeebers sued out of him by the estate of the Brothers Grimm, et al? It'd force a reality-check on the lobbyists who are whitewashing congress with this belief that consumers are the only cheap-ass nigglin' thieves who want to use stuff without paying a royalty.
Salary is not 100% of the game. Outsourcing requires a wicked learning curve for all new employees (it takes decades to create a regional workforce that achieves USA demands/expectations), there's overhead for infrastructure, office space (it costs a helluva lot to build/maintain an office building in a 3rd world, due to the lack of standardized and high-quality construction... I've spent time in sites where the A/C died and the servers are starting to malfunction due to heat, for lack of a part that'd be replaced within an hour in any office bldg in the USA), and management travel leaps from $2k per trip to $15k. And we all know how management hates to not have their hands in everything.
That said, Singapore, Malaysia, SKorea, and many more nations have done lots to meet these challenges. India is coming along nicely, I'd bet (I lack any experience there).
So, why aren't I worried? Well... funny thing about building a technical infrastructure and maintaining it... it takes all these IT guys. Most people don't want to fix their own PC, maintain their own network, etc. IT incomes may ebb, but they'll never vanish.
In the early 80's Byte had an article about self-coding systems. Computer-based code generation. This expectation pushed me away from CS, with other factors. Sure enough, the market was chilly for a long time after I got out of college in the late 80's (a few years is an eternity when you're lookin' for a first job). Then, funny thing... all these computer jobs popped up. Big money will push people to do some wild hand-waving on resumes. Now, there are some annoyingly un-qualified people still claiming computer abilities for those high-paying jobs. I clean up after them regularly, so I know. I also have watched as most of them shift back to insurance and real estate and other percieved-high-market jobs ("Buh-bye, see-ya").
That said, do I expect stellar payscales to ever return? Nah. Do I expect Oracle, Microsoft, CA and Intel to return to stellar revenues? Nah. But not because of international outsourcing. I look at typewriters. The office boom of the 19th and 20th century... and does anyone really remember the world buzzing about how typewriters drove the global economy in 1960-75? Nope. Commoditization, and elimination of the Microsoft tax will happen by the commoditization of software (we call it open source). Presto.
I never wanted working on computers to be glamourous. I like it for the intellectual challenge. Had I my life to do over, I think I'd have become a plumber, just because the same tech challenges exist and the pay isn't bad.
Plumbers. That's what we are, that's what we do. And 3/4 of the industry may run off to India. The glamour may fade. Thank god. But if we're in it for love of the challenge, there'll always be a local need for expertise.
Oh, and besides, I work in an area with 1/2 the costs/income of any metro area. Why move the work to India when rural america is a couple hops away and the costs compare favorably. Rather than stock, I own sixty acres around this small city I'm in. Decentralization is how I'll see that value climb until I can retire.
you shoulda skipped 'they simply could have said nothing.'. What's it matter if they say something, since they're NOT giving legal advice. If they said that Linux is likely to outlast any such challenge, so forge ahead merrily... that's not guessing at legal issues, it's stating the nature of open source will allow Linux to adapt around any legal claim that SCO tries to enforce, whether SCO wins or loses.
This isn't the first stupid thing I've heard Gartner say this year. More like the 4th. They're becoming a joke with the techies and business-minded geeks I know.
I'll take it you've never used CVS, and are not just Trolling.
CVS is largely line/text oriented. There are capabilities in it to handle binary, but they're incompatible with most front-end tools (wincvs, cvsweb, jcvs are ones I've used) and they are by default turned to an 'off' position. This means that typically CVS just notes the change and keeps a copy of each revision. You can move back to an old version, but you can't diff two versions intelligibly.
I believe I've read somewhere that Subversion (the currently 0.5 project which is designed to replace and improve on CVS) is geared toward some improvements on binary-handling, among the other things that are needed (directory moves). But for now, sticking doc files into CVS accomplishes nothing more than archiving old versions with a hefty size/storage penalty once docs get to be several megs in size.
To be honest, a binary version control system is troublesome, since diff and merge and other features become problematic or impossible. That's an advantage that text formatting tools like LaTeX or tagged-text (html, xml) have over binary (or undocumented proprietary) file formats.
For those that really need doc versioning tools, there's SourceSafe. Microsoft knows the file formats, so Microsoft can do version control intelligibly. God help all that take off down that path, though. Proprietary version control plus proprietary file formats... (shudders) brings to mind the line from Monty Python: "Water tarts distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government".
Complained to who? We're a small shop and I'd get full buy-in from everyone in-house. Damn, if it weren't for those pesky customers.
In my case, most of those 'pesky' customers are big entities like the US Government and banks. Knowing the hierarchy at these specific clients, I can say that management decisions are NOT made based on our input. Further, the decision-makers can't spell LaTeX properly, pronounce it, or for that matter even use Word at a complex enough level to appreciate my gripes (cue soundbite: "That's what secretaries are for").
Of course, that doesn't stop me from proselytizing the OneTrueWay. But I'm an old dog and I prefer to save my energy and IOU's for things that I can change, not barking at the moon.
I repeatedly heckle my coworkers about LaTeX whenever we do proposals.
1 - we're stuck using Word. Not likely to change. Proposals, like thesis work and peer-reviewed journals, are one of those times when you do *exactly* what the submission guidelines say, and everything we get says "submit in Word 97/2000 format." A couple of iconoclasts try to do their part in OOffice. Sadly, these proposals always get complicated enough that OOffice just destroys formatting throughout if any segment was created in OOffice. But we're trying to get off Word.
2 - Most of my coworkers have used LaTeX.
3 - We all depend heavily on CVS for our code work.
So, about the umpty-fifth time that Something Horrible* happened to a 40-page document we're rushing to beat a deadline on, I muttered something about how much more fun things would be if we reverted to LaTeX and used CVS to do shared builds until the proposal was done.
One of the guys almost was in tears... you could see him thinking back to how EASY LaTeX was, mentally superimposing a CVS framework, and literally melting down at the Criminal Stupidity* of using Word. Everone else either agreed, or (if they didn't have a LaTeX history) muttered that "anything beats the POS* we're using..."
* Something Horrible, POS, and Criminal Stupidity are all (TM) Microsoft. This rant brought to you by Microsoft, proud maker of the Incredible Biodegradeable Access Forms, VStudio.net's Autoexpiring Builds Bug, The Four Horsemen of Apocalyptic Nullness, and Bob.
My background happens to hit all of these 'physical' issues just right: I've done construction, construction management (a great excuse to watch EVERY trade for a few hours at a time to learn from their decades of hands-on experience), and more computer/network programming and infosec work than the others combined. I've done commercial retrofits of a building for electrical code, including bending a few thousand feet of conduit.
So, at home I've done a hybrid of everything mentioned in this thread. While I'm sure there are better ways on a lot of these pointers, my ways worked and didn't even leave me in trouble with the wife or heckled by appearance-attentive friends. Incidentally, all this is geared toward appearance/resale asthetics.
Graceful holes in sheetrock:
1 - Never use a hammer for drywall unless you're doing demolition. There's a skinny tapered saw made for small cuts in drywall. That's the best $5-15 you'll ever spend. 2 - Save the square you cut out of the wall. The alternative (cutting a new piece of drywall) takes forever. If the square is more than a few inches on a side, use short lengths of 2" x 1/4" wood (what I've always called lath) and screws to reattach this piece (the lath hides under the sheetrock, inside the wall... attach lath across the gap, then lay the piece in and attach it to the lath) before going to work with joint compound (sheetrocker's mud) for your patch. 3 - Too little mud is better than too much. Plan on 3 or so layers to get done. After the mud is firm (an hour, less for quickdry (a special mud)) use a broad blade (5" to 8") to knock down the high spots, a cheese-grater or coarse sandpaper to further feather it down, and then let it dry. Fill/sand/fill/sand until the surface feels flat and looks good. Find a pro and watch 'em work, if your technique sucks. It isn't rocket science, it isn't art, but it isn't trivial. But the raw materials are cheap enough you could create a test-wall and practice until you understood how to hide seams, etc. Oh, and most contractors thin the mud a titch with water and never use mud with lumps. Again, it's cheap... toss and start over with new mud.
Pick your battles:
Where I thought I wanted the soho switch for my network to be just wasn't as practical as where I put it, when I realized how many nasty wire-pulls I faced. It bugs me that I can't glance at net status LED's from my office, but the six times per year it matters I figure were worth not running all the wires back to that. Besides, I need the exercise.
I carefully placed my network connections. Wire's cheap (so go the long way if easier), and some rooms tolerate exposed wire (a garage, the laundry room, along the baseboard in closets). Further, a single 12" x 12" hole in one closet wall allowed me room to do a vertical drill-hole downward into the garage, then drag wire up and put a lead out into that closet and onto an ideal spot in the adjacent room. That way if I didn't like my sheetrock repairs, they were in a seldom-seen place.
There were a few spots that I felt would be cool locations to have a spigot to just surf... dining table, the patio, and a living room. All three were never going to allow an easy connection, so I've got a wireless AP. But where broadband matters (for my ReplayTV, my work PC's and a file sharing/media PC), switched cat-5 was worth the effort.
As for Wireless vulnerabilities: To secure 11b to an acceptable level, I have WEP turned on, defaults changed, and I change the WEP key every few weeks. Since my reading of the WEP vulnerabilities seems to point toward a need for nearly a gig of passive data capture, I figure I've got things adequately secured for my personal data. I would not recommend this for a corporate setting, but for home office use, I'm more secure than 90% of users. Just because I do infosec, I also configured firewalls to put the wireless PC's into a very narrow DMZ of their own. They can surf, and they can print. Frankly, most people's knowledge of in
Hey, slashdot, where's the obligatory/unavoidable 'you can preorder this for Sept 23 delivery from BN' link? C'mon, push those product links, make OSDN profitable!
Re:I like Ms. Ullman's writing, but...
on
The Bug
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· Score: 1
I haven't read Ullman's book, but I feel compelled to. 'Cause I know there's a story hiding here, even if she didn't *nail* the story. I'm sure I'm not the only one to get the same sort cold feeling just reading this review that one gets from Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now...
A Bug? Big deal, fix it. I do that 20 times a week or more
No, you fix bugs (lowercase B) 20 times a week. Many of them might even be your own (not disparaging your code... I'm talkin' about familiarity with the code and logic making finding lower-case-b bugs easier to find).
This is about a B (capital-B) Bug. One that may be intermittent. Even the apparent cause may morph (until you find the True Cause). But we're talkin' one that causes immense problems just by flaking out at the worst possible moment. One that puts your job on the line. One that puts your company out of business.
This isn't all the things you fix while pursuing the bug, either. This is the big kahuna. Even if you are SURE you fixed it, you get superstitious and afraid. Irrationally: Remedy code gets printed out and hand-carried home so you NEVER lose it. You don't tell people you're sure you fixed it for fear of it resurfacing AGAIN. A Bug so bad you find another job.
If you haven't seen a Bug like this before, you've been lucky or you weren't paying attention, or you did a bit of selective denial: 'aw heck, it's rare and if I ignore it either someone else will pick up on it or it'll go unnoticed and prove that it's so rare that nobody ever noticed'. Any bug you've walked away from after a while as just-not-worth-it might be a Bug.
Incidentally, Bugs aren't the only nasty out there. There are:
the 'Design Flaw Masquerading as a Bug' (nontech managers calculate times on these like they're bugs, yet no sane amount of time can fix these bastards),
the 'Latent Requirement' (where a key feature is left out of the design until too late to incorporate it),
the 'Design Dichotomy' (a team-oriented crisis, where two methodologies are implemented to solve some design need, and they don't merge worth a damn)
I don't know about you, but I've seen each of these, and probably could think of a few more (Kludges, for sure, deserve mention). One killed a company I worked for. Another convinced me I'm just NOT the code jock I was at 18. All of them together have me convinced that CS is still in the dark ages and that a full-tilt engineer mindset and methodology, followed by generations of software equivalents to the assembly line and interchangable parts are still out there in our future. For now, CMM and XP methodologies help, but the real future of CS remains unwritten so far, I suspect. We'll be anachronisms like alchemists and patent-remedy salesmen.
If each new year's cars were designed like Operating Systems, people would have given them up and gone back to walking...
NASA:This Carina sub-cloud is particularly striking partly because it's clear definition stimulates the human imagination (e.g. it could be perceived as a superhero flying through a cloud, arm up, with a saved person in tow below).
Rodney Dill:However, there is a great picture on the
Astronomy Picture of the Day that looks like its flipping you off.
Tomato, to-mah-to? I don't think so. It's da bird, nasa. Since it is a gas cloud that is being 'boiled' away by neighboring stars, that old 'Last Act of Defiance' cartoon comes to mind...
You're using several tactics I first learned from Lee Atwater, you goober. While there are only a few dozen ways I am NOT acting like the still-missing Katz, namecalling is the resort of weakmindedness to formulate a good counterargument, or an eagerness to change the subject. Pick your poison.
Me, I think you're choosing to argue the easy points, ignore the bigger ones.
1 - You say a line of eager signers is proof the contract is fair. I'd say it could be that they feel a bad 'standard contract' is better than no contract. Also, their decision might involve PT Barnum's quote about the mean birth rate of suckers. Classic deal-with-the-devil stuff.
As for decrying it as a single wrong opinion, my opinion is mirrored by a lot lot lot of people. In fact, try to find me a musician that signed the contract that thinks it's fair. Yours is the precious domain of a handful of dominant musicians, and everyone on the industry payroll that profits from the musicians. Since you're unlikely to be Lars Ulrich, I gotta ask... is there a chance you're motivated by a job in the industry?
On that subject, I offer up a simple case of occam's razor: either the contract isn't harshly biased toward the industry, or it is. Given that the industry writes contracts nonstop and that a typical musician gets at most one or two chances to sign one, who do YOU think dominates the thinking that goes into them. The music industry lawyers. SO... do you think they'd write a contract that is tilted toward them? See my first posting about a lawyer's ethical duty to concentrate on their client's best interests, and the answer should be obvious.
I'm late for work, but as for I think that concepts like Apple's iTunes will go a long way in providing a legal and convenient way for customers to obtain the music they want. But there will always be a significant population that believes they are entitled to free music, and will use just about anything to justify their position.:
1 - we ARE entitled, historically. The copyright law is a bad law gone amok. 2 - you've apparently fallen for the brainwashing that we have to pay the industry to enjoy the arts. In my opinion, you're a lost cause already. My audience is everyone who might listen to you... at a reply-to-a-mod-2, you're not worth it. Replying to a mod-5 was worth the effort, though. Dropping you anonymously was worth it. You're poisoning the well and any effort is worth silencing you, starting with the most effective.
Lackin' mod points to mod you down, I'll just call 'BS!'
-- The RIAA members routinely force artists to sign contracts that are unfair (in my opinion) -- The RIAA members routinely push for more stringent laws to prevent any act that they disagree with. -- The RIAA members routinely practice accounting in a way that deprives the artists of (in my opinion) what little royalties they're allowed after item 1 is done with them -- The RIAA uses lawsuits, laws, and any other measures they can deploy to fight any commercial product they dislike (MiniDisc, royalties on blank tapes, etc)
My point is, nobody cares what Hillary Rosen does in a quiet room with Michael Jackson, unless it serves to distract her from making it to her TV appearance. We're not against that. We're against a sanctimonious self-serving group of corporations that have turned the arts into a P&L sheet, have stolen MY public domain (I consider all copyright extension acts to be nothing less than legalized theft), and who are now are trying to pull some Orwellian anti-speak brainwashing to convince the masses that we don't own the tune we're whistling, let alone anything else they have claim to.
Is the RIAA perfect? No. Are they evil? Pretty much. How do we fight evil? Sometimes it takes the same hyperbole that Evil uses. They're brainwashing people, and we can't sit around saying tut-tut if we're going to stop this trend.
Honest and meaningful discussion is a phrase that has no business in any conversation about the RIAA. These people are lawyers, and a lawyer is trained from the beginning to focus on a client-side view, not what is *right*. Frankly, I don't disagree (I'm not bashing lawyers), but I refuse to bend over and take it up the asterisk.
Also using McLeodUSA (I'm in the intermountain west area). They're a bit lamebrained at times when I do have issues like questions on billing charges, there's no savings, Qwest makes the service calls, and when I dial '0', I get a Qwest operator. The long distance packages they offer don't work for me (I have an hour per month at most, on average, so a no-minimum, no-surcharge, per-minute package was what I found via abelltolls.com), and the calling area for local free calls is the same as Qwest's.
All told, I feel I took a teensy hit in QOS by the tradeover (2+ years ago), but I am ok with that because I long ago decided that certain corporations would never get another dime from me than I could let them. Qwest was at the top of that list, so I was happy to wean myself off.
Interestingly, a local ISP is offering Vonage-like VOIP service and if I could JUST talk my wife into it, that'd be fine. I declined on Vonage because I couldn't get a local number, which means 95% of my phone usage would become a toll call. That was a total nonstarter...
Sorry I can't remember the ISP's name, but I recommend just checking all the ISP's.
As for lackin' broadband, WTF were you doin' buying a house without paying attention to this detail?! That's like not lookin' to see if there's indoor plumbing! And you call yourself a slashdotter...
Very important is that you also need to get the TV-guide-snagging software configured, which is a bit painful. Perhaps worse, if it ever really catches on you can be sure the people who provide the guide info will want their slice(which is covered by the Tivo/ReplayTV subscriptions).
Years ago, I remember reading that the market value for TV Guide was greater than for the TV programming or tv stations themselves, or somesuch.
Since then, and especially in the face of this quote, I keep wondering WHY that should be. Without being cliche, this data really *wants* to be free, and at some point, an ad-hoc dataset for this is inevitable.
I own a ReplayTV. I have tested DishPVR (not shabby) and don't consider myself expert on Tivo enough to comment, but I have repeatedly (not a lot, but enough to be annoying) 'missed' part or all of a desired show due to bad guide data. That is part of what has pushed me to look at MythTV. Tivo/Replay/etc have slim economic incentive to push toward 100% correctness and give me better programming data because I'm a captive box-owner. I can't leave them in frustration without my PVR becoming a paperweight.
Getting another data source would be a welcome change to where we are now. The data just isn't worth $10, let alone the increased price of $13 a month! Hell, a paper copy of TV guide has higher distribution costs and is cheaper. My newspaper is cheaper per month and includes a paper guide.
With a mechanism like CDDI, guide data consolidation can easily become a shared/cooperative act.
Vendors (TV stations) will actively work to get their show data to the largest population:
A TV station can't afford to ignore a viewer segment because they're not listed in the guide.
I can't imagine that several hours configuring an XML or RSS-like adapter to their programming database will bother a TV station eager to get even a slight increase in viewership.
Fans, viewers, etc. will be more enabled to fix bad/defective information in a cooperative dataset.
So, let me ask again...
Who the hell thinks there is any sense to the pricing structure? Why should we pay $13 a month for a few megs of data (less if show/episode data was stored in a relational-database way, with keys for director, actor, genre, rerun, RottenTomatoes.com rating, fanpage URL's, and etc)?!
Everyone I know says Tivo's fee is less for the guide data and more for the added capabilities like season subscriptions and favorites lists. All of these features would be easier to create in software if we had CDDI-for-TV, incidentally.
Wouldn't it be the funniest thing if the countermeasure for this special degrading coating was to...
Put some windex on it ?
Seriously, does anyone think that some little startup has so completely exhausted the realm of human knowledge in proving there are no countermeasures? I doubt it.
There's nothing like 5 billion people looking for a Something-for-Nothing win to subvert a concept like this.
Hey, let the big corporations build these things. They did it before and they'll regret it again.
The analogy here is anti-piracy. For the last year, I have railed loud and long to everyone I met because I *KNOW* how to kick a corporation's ass when the subject is copy-protection^h^h^h^hprevention. One simply has to tell every joe-shmoe that this new something sucks, and go into detail.
So, the moment that I learned that TurboTax was using this shit, what did everyone do? They ranted, they bitched, and I even used a bit of FUD (I *very* intentionally would leave out the part where after a year the Product Craptivation (tm) would be turned off). Result: Intuit (who I used to adore for being an example of a little guy surviving in a war against Microsoft) took it in the shorts, financially. I (after over a decade of loyalty on tax software) am using TaxCut.
Evidence is STRONG that since introducing Product Crapivation (tm) even Microsoft is getting hammered. That's right... the ALMIGHTY-CANT-LIVE-WITHOUT-IT Microsoft can't overwhelm the public disdain for uncopyable stuff! There are plenty of paranoids that think Intuit will ALTER their Product Craptivation (tm) to something less insidious and nasty, but I'm here to tell you that MOST people will grumble unless a bypass is obvious.
And, given a choice, people will base buying decisions on this. It happened before in the first golden age of copy protection, it will happen again.
Oh, and the analogy to hold (Ediron's Rule) does involve DiVx a bit: if a 'feature' is universally rejected once (divx, or copy-protection), it will probably fail on subsequent reintroductions (self-destructing DVD's, or product activation).
And retailers are going to HATE having customers come back in with a disc that is unreadable in less than the warranted 48 hours. If a small army of pissed-off customers isn't enough to kill this idea, the lawyers that flock to this sort of mess will make bank until the idea dies dies dies.
---- Funny thing is, I'm looking forward cloning these disks onto never-expires media. More on that in a new post!
Maybe we should start putting the slashdot effect to good use as a form of net activism.
Anyone who dosen't like Verisign should take a moment to get to know the company better by reading their 2001 annual report (1.5 MB)
Even 100k people asking for a paper copy isn't going to give anyone a lot of trouble. At a few bucks per mailed Annual Report, a few trees die, and their revenue/expense ratio shifts 0.0001% Wahoo. Yawn.
Every corporation has an achille's heel. Find it and act accordingly. Congress critters are useful here. So are bureaucrats. For an unrelated example, when the local phone company burned me, I wrote to the state Public Utility commission, found out about a few upcoming rate increase requests, and protested each one. About 30 complaints to one of the rate increase requests got a $27 Million rate increase denied. That's the best chump-change I'd ever spent, in my book. Hell, that's been years ago and I still get all warm and happy at that number.
Which stores will they unleash us in?
on
Junkyard Wars Tour
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· Score: 5, Funny
To heck with attacking other robots, I wanna build a robot that I can turn loose into 'The Gap' and a few other choice targets.
Goombah99, I think you're suffering some selective memory, mergin' memories of Apples and Macs and perhaps Vic-20's (sprites) and who knows what else. Perhaps these were some IIgs features (the one apple II I never used), but by then there were PC's, Amigas, etc.
assumed it was just another comodore/trs-80/amiga toy: Amiga was '85-86, Apple was '77-87. And the words Another Amiga and Toy should never be used in a sentence together, man... that's just wrong.
mixing text and graphics on screen, not to mention sprites: No sprites, (unless they came in on IIgs) and the mixed mode was 4 lines of text at screen bottom. Certainly not mixed. In fact, for ages I hammered thru Bob Bishop's code trying to find out how he'd mixed them. Turns out he hadn't.
memory-mapped video: HORRENDOUS. It was an elegant hack for saving hardware costs, but the memory map wasn't linear. If you write to every byte in the screen range, you get line 0, then 64, then 128, then 192, then 8, 72, 136, then... then 24 lines later it would start over and give you 1, 65, 129, etc... just like a TV raster. I can still write indexed-indirect addressing code in my head because of some nifty offset-map code I used religiously to do hires code. But calling apple's use of memory for video elegant seems to me to be miles from reality. (In researching this, I see mention of a IIgs toggle to turn on linear memory addressing).
Soft-sectored floppies: Another cost-saving trick. Again, funky as all hell. And considering the ways that it allowed copy-protection schemes (like half-tracks, nibble-counting, spiralling, quarter-tracks, etc), I rate this one much worse than the evils of the screen memory controller. This one is a gift that keeps giving, too, since it has led to the real risk that I can't copy some commercial Apple II software, and I fear it will fade away because the freakin' copy-protection is so obsessively hardware-specific that it resists my efforts at making archival copies. No, I don't count memory-captures as the same thing (the copy-protection code is as fascinating as anything else on the disk).
Your bit about reprogramming for drive technology has me baffled. 13-sectors to 16 sectors? Sure. Wierd formats used for Pascal and a few other things? OK. While not actually changes to the DOS, I'll even buy a beer for any of the Beagle Bro's. But from 1978 to 1984, I don't recall a noteworthy improvement in drives or their storage capacity beyond the 13-to-16 improvement that was worth as much as us taking a hole punch to one edge of a disk to let us save stuff on both sides.
Giving apple credit for the 6502 is odd, since it was in Commodore's hardware.
That said, I miss knowing this much about a computer. I respect the above tricks (and would NEVER call them kludgy). They allowed improvements that were otherwise cost prohibitive on that price-level of hardware. I just went back and (in a few minutes) rebuilt the memory offset table on a spreadsheet to (hopefully) get my #'s right. I remember the HUGE sense of power that mastering the above idiosynchracies gave me. But there was enough to love about this that I don't have to delude myself into forgetting the hellish side effects of coding on a machine that pushed the envelope like the Apple II did.
Incidentally, it's damn funny that your 'see this message' posting in today's story got ranked a 5, while the longer, interesting one I replied to modded up to just a 4...
Here's my 'trade' story. Year is '96. A few months out of school, on my first job on a fast-track design-build of a semiconductor fab, I'm in the trailing end of a week-long crunch to make a milestone Monday morning.
During a break, I visit with one of the master pipefitters I'm watching (we were about to pass pressure testing of the pure-water piping throughout the fab), it's 3am on Monday, and 'cuz we're in Texas, even then it is hot, humid, and uncomfortable weather. He's smokin' a cigarette, I'm not. We're both tired and grimy (him for obvious reasons; me because of how carefully I'm checkin' stuff so my company will get the 6-figure bonus tied to making this milestone on time. )
So, anyway, I do a bit of mental math and realize another milestone was gonna happen on this next paycheck. You see, so far I'd sort of celebrated my first 4-digit pre-tax paycheck and first 4-digit after-taxes check. It sounds silly now, but after college that much money was surreal. This time, I'm lookin' at a $2000 pretax week because of all the OT (even though I am making just straight time, since I'm an 'exempt' (which means no overtime bonuses) that happens to at least get paid all the excess hours, due to the long hours the job demands).
I mention this to the pipefitter.
He does a bit of math in his head, and says that, adjusting for after-hours (what most of us in the US call 'time and a half'), weekend, beyond 40, beyond 80 and Sunday bonuses, he's on triple time, (or $37.50 an hour * 3 = 112.50) right now and his paycheck should have the equivalent of 170 hours of work with all the bonuses. As in $6k, more or less, for working the same week I just did.
He was 500 miles from home and missed his little girl when he was away on jobs like this for a few months at a time, but he typically made as much in 3-4 months as I did that year, so all the extra time at home and able to be *really* around with his kids was worth it, he said.
I'd already thought about it in school, but I'll say again what I said that night. If I could do it all over again, I'd be a chef or a plumber. Income's good, ability to work and live anywhere in the world is good, people are happy to see you, they are thrilled if you do great work, and nobody (I MEAN NOBODY) has ever looked over my shoulder and said "Wow... cool integral".
Incidentally, I'm finally fading away from that viewpoint. I've specialized in IT to where 9/10 of the time, I *love* my job, and I'm making double what I did then. I can safely bet that within a few years it'll double again. I work flexible hours so my little kids get lots of daddy time. There's no way I'd have made six figures per year and had this much work flexibility and fun as a plumber or a chef. But I know I'm lucky... I don't disagree with FadeAway's opinion at all, since just about everyone I know would be happier following his recipe than mine.
Slashdot Mirror
SEC's link: Striking resemblance to the SCO filings on their own page. See my journal for the beginnings of drilling into each one and summarizing. Incidentally, almost half were Directors exercising options at .66 to 4.75, not selling. Only one director was clever enough (in my opinion) to sell everything he has immediately.
Next questions: where on SEC filings is a clue pointing to other forms of shifting value off the books. For example, the dillution of shares used to in buying up the other company that SCO was just pilloried for?
And can YOU find anywhere offering prices on Put Options avail for SCOX? I may just have to take the max-risk, low return path of either doing a limited short... but there's just not much joy in locking up $5k and watch it potentially grow before mid-2005 (court date, by my guess) just to see it fall about 90% at best. A staggered-sell short (accumulate shorts if/as the market climbs) improves the win value but could get staggeringly expensive if they push value up with rumors of a buyout (or (Horrors!) get bought out!. Microsoft's eagerness to kill Linux and it's huge warchest is a scary hypothetical to bet against...)
See, lacking a put option source, all I see is a scenario that looks like: Sell $5000 in shares... wait 2 years, buy back $500. Profit, 4500. 90% ROI in 2 years isn't shabby, but it also isn't worth the risk of seeing shares peak at $35 and get absorbed by a stable, large company, leaving me out roughly $13k (a minus of more than 200%). Or, short $1k, with plans to short another block each time the stock grows 60% or so (my so-called staggered-sell short plan... what's this called?)
Yes, if I were serious, I wouldn't do just $5k. Call it a hypothetical, or imagine the conversation I had with my wife... better yet, show me a way to shelter at $30 per share while betting SCOX is going down far and hard... Give me a bearable downside (worst case of $20k on the $5k invested), nothing at all if the change is under 20% either way, and a wicked payoff if and when SCOX tanks. Oh... and a long fuse in case we're still bitching about SCO in 2-3 years? Or am I asking for the sun, moon, stars, and whatever's behind door number three?
Except for this guy, Kevin Skousen... he's exercising an option at $10, if I read this right. What sort of upside does he see and what color is the sky in his world?!
/. journal here in a few minutes... who had what # of shares when, etc. Otherwise, it's too much work to dig out a macro-trend for most people to waste all this effort tracking individual SEC filings.
Incidentally, can someone point me to a better spot that ir.sco.com to see 'SCO exec's dumping their stock over the weekend'... most edgar-ish sites seem to be a month or more behind in reporting compared to this page? Is the 24th the weekend AC meant?!
Hmm... I despise SCO enough that I'm finally found something journal-worthy... Details for the masses off http://ir.sco.com/edgar.cfm on my
PS: I propose a different kind of DDOS to the sco pages... lots of legalese asking for clarification of license terms for OpenLinux, FreeDos, BSD, or anything else. The tougher the question, the better. I suspect this is a method (overwork) that Shakespeare would feel applied when he said: First thing, let's kill all the Lawyers. (Henry IV or V?)
--
Advaitavedanta, and don't you forget it.
Heh, talk about a wide opening for microsoft-bashing... two that come to mind are "If any other product on the market only worked 50% of the time, I'd expect a Microsoft logo." and "Dude, you obviously never used Windows 3.1 or Bob or Word 2.0 or any other fledgling Microsoft products".
Yeah, I know... troll troll troll... still, can anyone else think of some good ones?
RIAA: Who says copyrights expire!? Damn liar, step up and be seen!
PS: Has anyone else ever chuckled at the irony of perhaps lobbying for copyright to be extended retroactively forever, just so Mickey Mouse (and Sonny Bono's estate!) could get the bejeebers sued out of him by the estate of the Brothers Grimm, et al? It'd force a reality-check on the lobbyists who are whitewashing congress with this belief that consumers are the only cheap-ass nigglin' thieves who want to use stuff without paying a royalty.
Salary is not 100% of the game. Outsourcing requires a wicked learning curve for all new employees (it takes decades to create a regional workforce that achieves USA demands/expectations), there's overhead for infrastructure, office space (it costs a helluva lot to build/maintain an office building in a 3rd world, due to the lack of standardized and high-quality construction... I've spent time in sites where the A/C died and the servers are starting to malfunction due to heat, for lack of a part that'd be replaced within an hour in any office bldg in the USA), and management travel leaps from $2k per trip to $15k. And we all know how management hates to not have their hands in everything.
That said, Singapore, Malaysia, SKorea, and many more nations have done lots to meet these challenges. India is coming along nicely, I'd bet (I lack any experience there).
So, why aren't I worried? Well... funny thing about building a technical infrastructure and maintaining it... it takes all these IT guys. Most people don't want to fix their own PC, maintain their own network, etc. IT incomes may ebb, but they'll never vanish.
In the early 80's Byte had an article about self-coding systems. Computer-based code generation. This expectation pushed me away from CS, with other factors. Sure enough, the market was chilly for a long time after I got out of college in the late 80's (a few years is an eternity when you're lookin' for a first job). Then, funny thing... all these computer jobs popped up. Big money will push people to do some wild hand-waving on resumes. Now, there are some annoyingly un-qualified people still claiming computer abilities for those high-paying jobs. I clean up after them regularly, so I know. I also have watched as most of them shift back to insurance and real estate and other percieved-high-market jobs ("Buh-bye, see-ya").
That said, do I expect stellar payscales to ever return? Nah. Do I expect Oracle, Microsoft, CA and Intel to return to stellar revenues? Nah. But not because of international outsourcing. I look at typewriters. The office boom of the 19th and 20th century... and does anyone really remember the world buzzing about how typewriters drove the global economy in 1960-75? Nope. Commoditization, and elimination of the Microsoft tax will happen by the commoditization of software (we call it open source). Presto.
I never wanted working on computers to be glamourous. I like it for the intellectual challenge. Had I my life to do over, I think I'd have become a plumber, just because the same tech challenges exist and the pay isn't bad.
Plumbers. That's what we are, that's what we do. And 3/4 of the industry may run off to India. The glamour may fade. Thank god. But if we're in it for love of the challenge, there'll always be a local need for expertise.
Oh, and besides, I work in an area with 1/2 the costs/income of any metro area. Why move the work to India when rural america is a couple hops away and the costs compare favorably. Rather than stock, I own sixty acres around this small city I'm in. Decentralization is how I'll see that value climb until I can retire.
you shoulda skipped 'they simply could have said nothing.'. What's it matter if they say something, since they're NOT giving legal advice. If they said that Linux is likely to outlast any such challenge, so forge ahead merrily... that's not guessing at legal issues, it's stating the nature of open source will allow Linux to adapt around any legal claim that SCO tries to enforce, whether SCO wins or loses.
This isn't the first stupid thing I've heard Gartner say this year. More like the 4th. They're becoming a joke with the techies and business-minded geeks I know.
I'll take it you've never used CVS, and are not just Trolling.
CVS is largely line/text oriented. There are capabilities in it to handle binary, but they're incompatible with most front-end tools (wincvs, cvsweb, jcvs are ones I've used) and they are by default turned to an 'off' position. This means that typically CVS just notes the change and keeps a copy of each revision. You can move back to an old version, but you can't diff two versions intelligibly.
I believe I've read somewhere that Subversion (the currently 0.5 project which is designed to replace and improve on CVS) is geared toward some improvements on binary-handling, among the other things that are needed (directory moves). But for now, sticking doc files into CVS accomplishes nothing more than archiving old versions with a hefty size/storage penalty once docs get to be several megs in size.
To be honest, a binary version control system is troublesome, since diff and merge and other features become problematic or impossible. That's an advantage that text formatting tools like LaTeX or tagged-text (html, xml) have over binary (or undocumented proprietary) file formats.
For those that really need doc versioning tools, there's SourceSafe. Microsoft knows the file formats, so Microsoft can do version control intelligibly. God help all that take off down that path, though. Proprietary version control plus proprietary file formats... (shudders) brings to mind the line from Monty Python: "Water tarts distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government".
heh...
Complained to who? We're a small shop and I'd get full buy-in from everyone in-house. Damn, if it weren't for those pesky customers.
In my case, most of those 'pesky' customers are big entities like the US Government and banks. Knowing the hierarchy at these specific clients, I can say that management decisions are NOT made based on our input. Further, the decision-makers can't spell LaTeX properly, pronounce it, or for that matter even use Word at a complex enough level to appreciate my gripes (cue soundbite: "That's what secretaries are for").
Of course, that doesn't stop me from proselytizing the OneTrueWay. But I'm an old dog and I prefer to save my energy and IOU's for things that I can change, not barking at the moon.
I repeatedly heckle my coworkers about LaTeX whenever we do proposals.
.net's Autoexpiring Builds Bug, The Four Horsemen of Apocalyptic Nullness, and Bob.
1 - we're stuck using Word. Not likely to change. Proposals, like thesis work and peer-reviewed journals, are one of those times when you do *exactly* what the submission guidelines say, and everything we get says "submit in Word 97/2000 format." A couple of iconoclasts try to do their part in OOffice. Sadly, these proposals always get complicated enough that OOffice just destroys formatting throughout if any segment was created in OOffice. But we're trying to get off Word.
2 - Most of my coworkers have used LaTeX.
3 - We all depend heavily on CVS for our code work.
So, about the umpty-fifth time that Something Horrible* happened to a 40-page document we're rushing to beat a deadline on, I muttered something about how much more fun things would be if we reverted to LaTeX and used CVS to do shared builds until the proposal was done.
One of the guys almost was in tears... you could see him thinking back to how EASY LaTeX was, mentally superimposing a CVS framework, and literally melting down at the Criminal Stupidity* of using Word. Everone else either agreed, or (if they didn't have a LaTeX history) muttered that "anything beats the POS* we're using..."
* Something Horrible, POS, and Criminal Stupidity are all (TM) Microsoft. This rant brought to you by Microsoft, proud maker of the Incredible Biodegradeable Access Forms, VStudio
Your question made me laugh about an old, old joke. Googled it up:
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/92q3/ol7.h
My background happens to hit all of these 'physical' issues just right: I've done construction, construction management (a great excuse to watch EVERY trade for a few hours at a time to learn from their decades of hands-on experience), and more computer/network programming and infosec work than the others combined. I've done commercial retrofits of a building for electrical code, including bending a few thousand feet of conduit.
So, at home I've done a hybrid of everything mentioned in this thread. While I'm sure there are better ways on a lot of these pointers, my ways worked and didn't even leave me in trouble with the wife or heckled by appearance-attentive friends. Incidentally, all this is geared toward appearance/resale asthetics.
Graceful holes in sheetrock:
1 - Never use a hammer for drywall unless you're doing demolition. There's a skinny tapered saw made for small cuts in drywall. That's the best $5-15 you'll ever spend.
2 - Save the square you cut out of the wall. The alternative (cutting a new piece of drywall) takes forever. If the square is more than a few inches on a side, use short lengths of 2" x 1/4" wood (what I've always called lath) and screws to reattach this piece (the lath hides under the sheetrock, inside the wall... attach lath across the gap, then lay the piece in and attach it to the lath) before going to work with joint compound (sheetrocker's mud) for your patch.
3 - Too little mud is better than too much. Plan on 3 or so layers to get done. After the mud is firm (an hour, less for quickdry (a special mud)) use a broad blade (5" to 8") to knock down the high spots, a cheese-grater or coarse sandpaper to further feather it down, and then let it dry. Fill/sand/fill/sand until the surface feels flat and looks good. Find a pro and watch 'em work, if your technique sucks. It isn't rocket science, it isn't art, but it isn't trivial. But the raw materials are cheap enough you could create a test-wall and practice until you understood how to hide seams, etc. Oh, and most contractors thin the mud a titch with water and never use mud with lumps. Again, it's cheap... toss and start over with new mud.
Pick your battles:
Where I thought I wanted the soho switch for my network to be just wasn't as practical as where I put it, when I realized how many nasty wire-pulls I faced. It bugs me that I can't glance at net status LED's from my office, but the six times per year it matters I figure were worth not running all the wires back to that. Besides, I need the exercise.
I carefully placed my network connections. Wire's cheap (so go the long way if easier), and some rooms tolerate exposed wire (a garage, the laundry room, along the baseboard in closets). Further, a single 12" x 12" hole in one closet wall allowed me room to do a vertical drill-hole downward into the garage, then drag wire up and put a lead out into that closet and onto an ideal spot in the adjacent room. That way if I didn't like my sheetrock repairs, they were in a seldom-seen place.
There were a few spots that I felt would be cool locations to have a spigot to just surf... dining table, the patio, and a living room. All three were never going to allow an easy connection, so I've got a wireless AP. But where broadband matters (for my ReplayTV, my work PC's and a file sharing/media PC), switched cat-5 was worth the effort.
As for Wireless vulnerabilities: To secure 11b to an acceptable level, I have WEP turned on, defaults changed, and I change the WEP key every few weeks. Since my reading of the WEP vulnerabilities seems to point toward a need for nearly a gig of passive data capture, I figure I've got things adequately secured for my personal data. I would not recommend this for a corporate setting, but for home office use, I'm more secure than 90% of users. Just because I do infosec, I also configured firewalls to put the wireless PC's into a very narrow DMZ of their own. They can surf, and they can print. Frankly, most people's knowledge of in
Hey, slashdot, where's the obligatory/unavoidable 'you can preorder this for Sept 23 delivery from BN' link? C'mon, push those product links, make OSDN profitable!
This is about a B (capital-B) Bug. One that may be intermittent. Even the apparent cause may morph (until you find the True Cause). But we're talkin' one that causes immense problems just by flaking out at the worst possible moment. One that puts your job on the line. One that puts your company out of business.
This isn't all the things you fix while pursuing the bug, either. This is the big kahuna. Even if you are SURE you fixed it, you get superstitious and afraid. Irrationally: Remedy code gets printed out and hand-carried home so you NEVER lose it. You don't tell people you're sure you fixed it for fear of it resurfacing AGAIN. A Bug so bad you find another job.
If you haven't seen a Bug like this before, you've been lucky or you weren't paying attention, or you did a bit of selective denial: 'aw heck, it's rare and if I ignore it either someone else will pick up on it or it'll go unnoticed and prove that it's so rare that nobody ever noticed'. Any bug you've walked away from after a while as just-not-worth-it might be a Bug.
Incidentally, Bugs aren't the only nasty out there. There are:
- the 'Design Flaw Masquerading as a Bug' (nontech managers calculate times on these like they're bugs, yet no sane amount of time can fix these bastards),
- the 'Latent Requirement' (where a key feature is left out of the design until too late to incorporate it),
- the 'Design Dichotomy' (a team-oriented crisis, where two methodologies are implemented to solve some design need, and they don't merge worth a damn)
I don't know about you, but I've seen each of these, and probably could think of a few more (Kludges, for sure, deserve mention). One killed a company I worked for. Another convinced me I'm just NOT the code jock I was at 18. All of them together have me convinced that CS is still in the dark ages and that a full-tilt engineer mindset and methodology, followed by generations of software equivalents to the assembly line and interchangable parts are still out there in our future. For now, CMM and XP methodologies help, but the real future of CS remains unwritten so far, I suspect. We'll be anachronisms like alchemists and patent-remedy salesmen.If each new year's cars were designed like Operating Systems, people would have given them up and gone back to walking...
Froth?
You're using several tactics I first learned from Lee Atwater, you goober. While there are only a few dozen ways I am NOT acting like the still-missing Katz, namecalling is the resort of weakmindedness to formulate a good counterargument, or an eagerness to change the subject. Pick your poison.
Me, I think you're choosing to argue the easy points, ignore the bigger ones.
1 - You say a line of eager signers is proof the contract is fair. I'd say it could be that they feel a bad 'standard contract' is better than no contract. Also, their decision might involve PT Barnum's quote about the mean birth rate of suckers. Classic deal-with-the-devil stuff.
As for decrying it as a single wrong opinion, my opinion is mirrored by a lot lot lot of people. In fact, try to find me a musician that signed the contract that thinks it's fair. Yours is the precious domain of a handful of dominant musicians, and everyone on the industry payroll that profits from the musicians. Since you're unlikely to be Lars Ulrich, I gotta ask... is there a chance you're motivated by a job in the industry?
On that subject, I offer up a simple case of occam's razor: either the contract isn't harshly biased toward the industry, or it is. Given that the industry writes contracts nonstop and that a typical musician gets at most one or two chances to sign one, who do YOU think dominates the thinking that goes into them. The music industry lawyers. SO... do you think they'd write a contract that is tilted toward them? See my first posting about a lawyer's ethical duty to concentrate on their client's best interests, and the answer should be obvious.
I'm late for work, but as for I think that concepts like Apple's iTunes will go a long way in providing a legal and convenient way for customers to obtain the music they want. But there will always be a significant population that believes they are entitled to free music, and will use just about anything to justify their position.:
1 - we ARE entitled, historically. The copyright law is a bad law gone amok.
2 - you've apparently fallen for the brainwashing that we have to pay the industry to enjoy the arts. In my opinion, you're a lost cause already. My audience is everyone who might listen to you... at a reply-to-a-mod-2, you're not worth it. Replying to a mod-5 was worth the effort, though. Dropping you anonymously was worth it. You're poisoning the well and any effort is worth silencing you, starting with the most effective.
Lackin' mod points to mod you down, I'll just call 'BS!'
-- The RIAA members routinely force artists to sign contracts that are unfair (in my opinion)
-- The RIAA members routinely push for more stringent laws to prevent any act that they disagree with.
-- The RIAA members routinely practice accounting in a way that deprives the artists of (in my opinion) what little royalties they're allowed after item 1 is done with them
-- The RIAA uses lawsuits, laws, and any other measures they can deploy to fight any commercial product they dislike (MiniDisc, royalties on blank tapes, etc)
My point is, nobody cares what Hillary Rosen does in a quiet room with Michael Jackson, unless it serves to distract her from making it to her TV appearance. We're not against that. We're against a sanctimonious self-serving group of corporations that have turned the arts into a P&L sheet, have stolen MY public domain (I consider all copyright extension acts to be nothing less than legalized theft), and who are now are trying to pull some Orwellian anti-speak brainwashing to convince the masses that we don't own the tune we're whistling, let alone anything else they have claim to.
Is the RIAA perfect? No. Are they evil? Pretty much. How do we fight evil? Sometimes it takes the same hyperbole that Evil uses. They're brainwashing people, and we can't sit around saying tut-tut if we're going to stop this trend.
Honest and meaningful discussion is a phrase that has no business in any conversation about the RIAA. These people are lawyers, and a lawyer is trained from the beginning to focus on a client-side view, not what is *right*. Frankly, I don't disagree (I'm not bashing lawyers), but I refuse to bend over and take it up the asterisk.
Also using McLeodUSA (I'm in the intermountain west area). They're a bit lamebrained at times when I do have issues like questions on billing charges, there's no savings, Qwest makes the service calls, and when I dial '0', I get a Qwest operator. The long distance packages they offer don't work for me (I have an hour per month at most, on average, so a no-minimum, no-surcharge, per-minute package was what I found via abelltolls.com), and the calling area for local free calls is the same as Qwest's.
All told, I feel I took a teensy hit in QOS by the tradeover (2+ years ago), but I am ok with that because I long ago decided that certain corporations would never get another dime from me than I could let them. Qwest was at the top of that list, so I was happy to wean myself off.
Interestingly, a local ISP is offering Vonage-like VOIP service and if I could JUST talk my wife into it, that'd be fine. I declined on Vonage because I couldn't get a local number, which means 95% of my phone usage would become a toll call. That was a total nonstarter...
Sorry I can't remember the ISP's name, but I recommend just checking all the ISP's.
As for lackin' broadband, WTF were you doin' buying a house without paying attention to this detail?! That's like not lookin' to see if there's indoor plumbing! And you call yourself a slashdotter...
Since then, and especially in the face of this quote, I keep wondering WHY that should be. Without being cliche, this data really *wants* to be free, and at some point, an ad-hoc dataset for this is inevitable.
I own a ReplayTV. I have tested DishPVR (not shabby) and don't consider myself expert on Tivo enough to comment, but I have repeatedly (not a lot, but enough to be annoying) 'missed' part or all of a desired show due to bad guide data. That is part of what has pushed me to look at MythTV. Tivo/Replay/etc have slim economic incentive to push toward 100% correctness and give me better programming data because I'm a captive box-owner. I can't leave them in frustration without my PVR becoming a paperweight.
Getting another data source would be a welcome change to where we are now. The data just isn't worth $10, let alone the increased price of $13 a month! Hell, a paper copy of TV guide has higher distribution costs and is cheaper. My newspaper is cheaper per month and includes a paper guide.
With a mechanism like CDDI, guide data consolidation can easily become a shared/cooperative act.
- Vendors (TV stations) will actively work to get their show data to the largest population:
- A TV station can't afford to ignore a viewer segment because they're not listed in the guide.
- I can't imagine that several hours configuring an XML or RSS-like adapter to their programming database will bother a TV station eager to get even a slight increase in viewership.
- Fans, viewers, etc. will be more enabled to fix bad/defective information in a cooperative dataset.
So, let me ask again...Who the hell thinks there is any sense to the pricing structure? Why should we pay $13 a month for a few megs of data (less if show/episode data was stored in a relational-database way, with keys for director, actor, genre, rerun, RottenTomatoes.com rating, fanpage URL's, and etc)?!
Everyone I know says Tivo's fee is less for the guide data and more for the added capabilities like season subscriptions and favorites lists. All of these features would be easier to create in software if we had CDDI-for-TV, incidentally.
Seriously, does anyone think that some little startup has so completely exhausted the realm of human knowledge in proving there are no countermeasures? I doubt it.
There's nothing like 5 billion people looking for a Something-for-Nothing win to subvert a concept like this.
Hey, let the big corporations build these things. They did it before and they'll regret it again.
The analogy here is anti-piracy. For the last year, I have railed loud and long to everyone I met because I *KNOW* how to kick a corporation's ass when the subject is copy-protection^h^h^h^hprevention. One simply has to tell every joe-shmoe that this new something sucks, and go into detail.
So, the moment that I learned that TurboTax was using this shit, what did everyone do? They ranted, they bitched, and I even used a bit of FUD (I *very* intentionally would leave out the part where after a year the Product Craptivation (tm) would be turned off). Result: Intuit (who I used to adore for being an example of a little guy surviving in a war against Microsoft) took it in the shorts, financially. I (after over a decade of loyalty on tax software) am using TaxCut.
Evidence is STRONG that since introducing Product Crapivation (tm) even Microsoft is getting hammered. That's right... the ALMIGHTY-CANT-LIVE-WITHOUT-IT Microsoft can't overwhelm the public disdain for uncopyable stuff! There are plenty of paranoids that think Intuit will ALTER their Product Craptivation (tm) to something less insidious and nasty, but I'm here to tell you that MOST people will grumble unless a bypass is obvious.
And, given a choice, people will base buying decisions on this. It happened before in the first golden age of copy protection, it will happen again.
Oh, and the analogy to hold (Ediron's Rule) does involve DiVx a bit: if a 'feature' is universally rejected once (divx, or copy-protection), it will probably fail on subsequent reintroductions (self-destructing DVD's, or product activation).
And retailers are going to HATE having customers come back in with a disc that is unreadable in less than the warranted 48 hours. If a small army of pissed-off customers isn't enough to kill this idea, the lawyers that flock to this sort of mess will make bank until the idea dies dies dies.
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Funny thing is, I'm looking forward cloning these disks onto never-expires media. More on that in a new post!
Anyone who dosen't like Verisign should take a moment to get to know the company better by reading their 2001 annual report (1.5 MB)
Even 100k people asking for a paper copy isn't going to give anyone a lot of trouble. At a few bucks per mailed Annual Report, a few trees die, and their revenue/expense ratio shifts 0.0001% Wahoo. Yawn.
Every corporation has an achille's heel. Find it and act accordingly. Congress critters are useful here. So are bureaucrats. For an unrelated example, when the local phone company burned me, I wrote to the state Public Utility commission, found out about a few upcoming rate increase requests, and protested each one. About 30 complaints to one of the rate increase requests got a $27 Million rate increase denied. That's the best chump-change I'd ever spent, in my book. Hell, that's been years ago and I still get all warm and happy at that number.
To heck with attacking other robots, I wanna build a robot that I can turn loose into 'The Gap' and a few other choice targets.
- assumed it was just another comodore/trs-80/amiga toy: Amiga was '85-86, Apple was '77-87. And the words Another Amiga and Toy should never be used in a sentence together, man... that's just wrong.
- mixing text and graphics on screen, not to mention sprites: No sprites, (unless they came in on IIgs) and the mixed mode was 4 lines of text at screen bottom. Certainly not mixed. In fact, for ages I hammered thru Bob Bishop's code trying to find out how he'd mixed them. Turns out he hadn't.
- memory-mapped video: HORRENDOUS. It was an elegant hack for saving hardware costs, but the memory map wasn't linear. If you write to every byte in the screen range, you get line 0, then 64, then 128, then 192, then 8, 72, 136, then
... then 24 lines later it would start over and give you 1, 65, 129, etc... just like a TV raster. I can still write indexed-indirect addressing code in my head because of some nifty offset-map code I used religiously to do hires code. But calling apple's use of memory for video elegant seems to me to be miles from reality. (In researching this, I see mention of a IIgs toggle to turn on linear memory addressing).
- Soft-sectored floppies: Another cost-saving trick. Again, funky as all hell. And considering the ways that it allowed copy-protection schemes (like half-tracks, nibble-counting, spiralling, quarter-tracks, etc), I rate this one much worse than the evils of the screen memory controller. This one is a gift that keeps giving, too, since it has led to the real risk that I can't copy some commercial Apple II software, and I fear it will fade away because the freakin' copy-protection is so obsessively hardware-specific that it resists my efforts at making archival copies. No, I don't count memory-captures as the same thing (the copy-protection code is as fascinating as anything else on the disk).
- Your bit about reprogramming for drive technology has me baffled. 13-sectors to 16 sectors? Sure. Wierd formats used for Pascal and a few other things? OK. While not actually changes to the DOS, I'll even buy a beer for any of the Beagle Bro's. But from 1978 to 1984, I don't recall a noteworthy improvement in drives or their storage capacity beyond the 13-to-16 improvement that was worth as much as us taking a hole punch to one edge of a disk to let us save stuff on both sides.
- Giving apple credit for the 6502 is odd, since it was in Commodore's hardware.
That said, I miss knowing this much about a computer. I respect the above tricks (and would NEVER call them kludgy). They allowed improvements that were otherwise cost prohibitive on that price-level of hardware. I just went back and (in a few minutes) rebuilt the memory offset table on a spreadsheet to (hopefully) get my #'s right. I remember the HUGE sense of power that mastering the above idiosynchracies gave me. But there was enough to love about this that I don't have to delude myself into forgetting the hellish side effects of coding on a machine that pushed the envelope like the Apple II did.Incidentally, it's damn funny that your 'see this message' posting in today's story got ranked a 5, while the longer, interesting one I replied to modded up to just a 4...
Here's my 'trade' story. Year is '96. A few months out of school, on my first job on a fast-track design-build of a semiconductor fab, I'm in the trailing end of a week-long crunch to make a milestone Monday morning.
During a break, I visit with one of the master pipefitters I'm watching (we were about to pass pressure testing of the pure-water piping throughout the fab), it's 3am on Monday, and 'cuz we're in Texas, even then it is hot, humid, and uncomfortable weather. He's smokin' a cigarette, I'm not. We're both tired and grimy (him for obvious reasons; me because of how carefully I'm checkin' stuff so my company will get the 6-figure bonus tied to making this milestone on time. )
So, anyway, I do a bit of mental math and realize another milestone was gonna happen on this next paycheck. You see, so far I'd sort of celebrated my first 4-digit pre-tax paycheck and first 4-digit after-taxes check. It sounds silly now, but after college that much money was surreal. This time, I'm lookin' at a $2000 pretax week because of all the OT (even though I am making just straight time, since I'm an 'exempt' (which means no overtime bonuses) that happens to at least get paid all the excess hours, due to the long hours the job demands).
I mention this to the pipefitter.
He does a bit of math in his head, and says that, adjusting for after-hours (what most of us in the US call 'time and a half'), weekend, beyond 40, beyond 80 and Sunday bonuses, he's on triple time, (or $37.50 an hour * 3 = 112.50) right now and his paycheck should have the equivalent of 170 hours of work with all the bonuses. As in $6k, more or less, for working the same week I just did.
He was 500 miles from home and missed his little girl when he was away on jobs like this for a few months at a time, but he typically made as much in 3-4 months as I did that year, so all the extra time at home and able to be *really* around with his kids was worth it, he said.
I'd already thought about it in school, but I'll say again what I said that night. If I could do it all over again, I'd be a chef or a plumber. Income's good, ability to work and live anywhere in the world is good, people are happy to see you, they are thrilled if you do great work, and nobody (I MEAN NOBODY) has ever looked over my shoulder and said "Wow... cool integral".
Incidentally, I'm finally fading away from that viewpoint. I've specialized in IT to where 9/10 of the time, I *love* my job, and I'm making double what I did then. I can safely bet that within a few years it'll double again. I work flexible hours so my little kids get lots of daddy time. There's no way I'd have made six figures per year and had this much work flexibility and fun as a plumber or a chef. But I know I'm lucky... I don't disagree with FadeAway's opinion at all, since just about everyone I know would be happier following his recipe than mine.
PS: what trade, FadeAway? I'm just curious.