I have never had a training request accepted, despite having to use a wide array of tools in doing my job. I had to learn everything I know pretty much on my own, without so much as a mentor -- I couldn't even get the cost of my Oreilly books covered!
So I'm in a pretty good position to state what you really, really need when learning a new concept. Here's what I need:
1) Knowledge of the framework. A little of what's going on under the hood, a little of how to use the API, a firm basis on the simplest terms. Explicit API knowledge comes through use, and training on it would be forgotten anyway. However, no book can ever impart to you the most basic knowledge of an API. Take XML parsers for example. The most important idea in XML parsing is the idea of the node. Explain nodes, and the related terms, well and slowly, and you won't have to explain anything else.
2) Knowledge of the use. Every language and concept has its own niche. There is no broad, end all-be all in the computer world, though several swiss army tools -- Perl and Java among them -- exist to make things easier. Knowing where and why you'd use an API makes it much easier to understand what you're being trained on.
3) Knowledge of limitations. NO BOOK EVER TELLS YOU THIS, but it's essential! It's the reason why we need mentors. I spent three weeks writing a multithreaded VB app to learn that the reason it wouldn't give me any feedback is that the multithreading system expected me to do my own preemption for system events. Abuh...Java didn't expect me to do that, so I didn't expect VB (a "dummies" language, or so I thought until I started doing a lot of Win API work in it, and realised how much quicker is was for simple interaction than VC) to do it either. A visiting manager who knew VB (probably in the biblical sense) chastised me, asking where I learned VB. I told him MSDN.
Come on, folks, who's kidding who? If the price of.org goes down, it won't mean more nonprofits could afford domains...it'd mean more bandwagon domain prospectors and more work for ICANN, who obviously CANN'T handle the load they have now.
I have about six.org domain names. I bought them at $15 each per year. If.org dropped to $6, I would have about a hundred -- every possible abbreviation and misspelling I could think of. And I'm just one guy, running what used to be a web hosting co-op.
If anything, we need to jack up the price on.org. Organizations are not starving so much that they can't afford $15...hell, a single mailing costs more than ten times that, and it's about the price of two hours of one guy telemarketing. What.org needs is something to cause it to rise above commercial domains. If the price was more like $100 per domain, it would give more credibility to the domain holder as there would be less impetus to snipe these expensive domains.
Oh, and while we're at it, the profits from the additional price shouldn't go to a company. They should go to a serious of non profits, selected by the members when they register. EFF and FSF could be on the top of the list;).
You can get around any bandwidth issues with a sufficiently large amount of cabling. The whole idea of doing this in parellel implies that. Anyway, compare the bandwidth of digital photography with the physical bandwidth of looping film through an eyepiece at 12,000 frames per second and you come up with a very different problem -- you've got to use TINY film, with an effective resolution much lower than what some of you linux numbercrunchers are assuming. "SVGA resolutions?" Think more like 320x240 -- and don't expect more than a few seconds per cannister, high costs, etc.
No, the problem is light itself. You don't get much of it captured with a shutter speed of.000083 s. With low light, you need extremely sensitive equipment to even detect it and even more sensitive equipment to detect the subtle variations in wavelength that make up colors. Today's CCD cameras are very slow to register intensity light -- much slower than film. The chemical reaction in film triggered by exposure can be controlled much better, simply by changing the tolerance of the film -- which is why your high end, high speed shutter digital cameras are so godawful expensive. The $2500 Canon I've been looking at has roughly the same shutter speed as an equivalent $300 film camera. The extra price is NOT a "coolness" tax...it's for the set of three extremely high res CCD sensors and the chips capable of processing their information at that speed. My film prof used to say "digital ain't digital"...there's a quality factor of all digital electronics that can be poiled down to the quality of interpolation, quality of the ADC and of transistors leading up to it.
CCD kind of sucks, man. For all its glorious promise, the best CCD chipsets aren't all that much better than the wonderful X-10 spycam.
Re:this is very limited in usability
on
CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 2
I recently ran into the trouble that I could not reinstall Quark XPress 4.0x on my mac.
You see, they provided a license key on floppy, and I bought my mac after the Crusades. Ipso facto, no floppy drive.
I tried sticking it into the slot loading cd drive, but it doesn't go.
Quark's tech support was less than helpful. "You'll need to upgrade to 5," is not a valid answer to a developer who needs to test on 4.0.
Luckily, we have a warezkid in the office who was able to get me a cracked installer. So I could install software we paid for -- out the ass, too, considering Quark is little more than some boxes and perfectly calibrated text.
I'd like to point out that I have YET to find a kid's game that was copy protected. Hell, even "The Sims," which I can't get the kids I deal with to put down and still sells for $30, is perfectly copiable. You'd just better have a key for it.
Of course, nearly every PC game for adults (except Unreal Tournament...i lub j00 Epic) I've bought in the last year has made some pathetic ploy at copy protection. I've been able to copy most with my 2 year old copy of CloneCD, which is nice when you treat "in use" cds the way I do (storing them in stacks on top of a bookcase).
Oh, and another quick note: Mac software is hardly ever copy protected. And yet the software sales per hardware unit are always a lot higher than in the PC world. Why? Because people who buy expensive machines spend money on software, man. I guarantee you folks buying Alienware lappys do less pirating than Joe Q. Cheapdell.
Which is where Free software will come in. When Linux allows Walmart to sell $100 PCs that aren't windows compatible, suddenly we'll see a lot of shitty Walmart games for linux. DeerHunter 3d for Linux. Bachelorette in Cyberspace. Barbie's Dream S&M Website Designer.
Windows will suddenly find itself more upscale and that ratio -- installed machines to sold software units -- will increase.
The whole concept of "losing a sale" being theft is a serious fallacy. If I listen to your song on the radio and don't buy the album, you lost a sale. If I walk past your CD in the record store, you lost a sale. If my friend tells me the album sucks, you lost a sale too. Can't very well put me in prison for not buying your shitty album, as much as you'd like to -- this isn't Italy, 1939, yet.
You say, "but it's different when you download the mp3. You can burn it to CD and get the same product!" Bullshit. It is not the same product. It is compressed and crumbly. It lacks the cover art. You can't tell me this doesn't have value, because people with computers still buy CDs.
You say, "but people can rip the album perfectly and burn that!" True. But this kind of quality freak is the same type who has already bought your cd. I should know...I AM him. Last week I bought Deltron 3030 after being entranced by the MP3...an album that my loser friends have been trying to get me to buy for years. I spend about $200 every month on music. The record labels should love me. Instead, they want me to go to prison.
5 years in prison equals $12k in "lost sales", guys. Do the fucking math.
Right. And nothing that isn't in the constitution is valid, correct?
Bullshit. Times change. Otherwise, we'd still believe in the science of the 1790s...care to chat about the spontaneous generation of matter?
There are laws against marital infidelity, speeding, sodomy, carrying ducks on airplanes, and none of them are enforced. You see, we make things illegal because they should be. The nuance comes in interpretting and enforcing those laws. We don't arrest every homosexual in the country for sodomy anymore, because they're willing partners and as a country we've decided that is okay. We don't send every teenager caught smoking a fat spliff to prison, because kids make mistakes.
But the DOJ saying they'll go after file sharers is bad. The federal government has the manpower to be relentless. File sharing could be the next "war on drugs."
Only the mandate isn't there. People don't want to see my wife go to jail for her They Might Be Giants bootlegs. People don't want to see my Mom in prison for her Michael Smith collection. People don't think that posession of a 112 kbit encode of "Rhinestone COwboy" is as bas as possession of 112 grams of crack cocaine.
The majority of Americans want to free music. They want to share.
The majority of Americans do not see digital piracy as theft. The majority of Americans also do not see picking flowers at a public park as theft, or sneaking a grape at the supermarket. The majority of Americans drank alcohol before the legal age. Technically, we should all be in prison, but these minor crimes don't really hurt anybody, and so they are overlooked. Why, then, is the DOJ going after file sharers?
Isn't this a fucking democracy? Why is the majority submitting to laws made by the whims of the same companies that release O-Town records and other toxins into the environment? Why am I the only one sending daily letters to his Senator, that Clinton bitch, begging for support for our digital lifestyle?
I don't want to go to jail for pirating the new Pearl Jam or Queens of the Stone Age albums. I bought them anyway, but since I didn't clean them from my WinMX serving directory, i'm technically abetting piracy. This laxness could get me 5 years in a federal "pump me in the ass" prison, and that is wrong. I don't think I deserve it. I don't think my crime is that bad. I don't think that I'm depriving anyone of actual property or actual money they might have actually made, and I don't think the majority would argue with me.
Yeah, but I liked the ranches best of all. The abundance of health food stores in denver/co springs was also nice, as was the fanTASTIC beer from fort collins' New Belgium brewery.
When I was in Westcliffe, CO on vacation, I loved the environment so much I considered quitting my job and starting my own business, providing internet access for the acres of sparse plots of land connected only by dirt roads. However, it seemed fairly unfeasible -- since there's no power grid to fuel wireless repeaters and no public roads or conduits to piggyback -- so it was back to the grindstone for me.
How were you able to overcome the conditional sensitivity of high speed data in a rugged area with little or no public utilities? More importantly, how were you able to offset infrastructure costs for such a risky and inherently profitless venture -- did you receive any grants or did you simply float loans?
The first thing I ever did with my Thunderboard 8 bit mono sound card was buy a stereo to mono step down cable and rip a Weird Al song to VOC format. It took up roughly a quarter of my hard drive. The card was $100.
In 1997, when the first mp3s hit IRC, I pulled them down to my Cyrix-based win95 box with its 1.1 gig hard drive as fast as I could -- 19.2kbit. The line cost me $15 per month and the new and huge 3.5 gig drive around $300.
And when napster came out, I bought new headphones (Sennheisers, $170) so I wouldn't wake up my roommate trading Jiker tracks with Germans.
When I bought my burner ($240, plus the SCSI card), I turned it into a $30 per month CD habit. Mp3s, porno, whatever. Movie clips.
Then, suddenly, whole episodes. Vivo, then RM, then MPG when I got DSL ($50 per month). I got a new video disc array to rip my own hong kong films from the chinese place down the road( 2 40 gig drives, $500, raid card $170, videos $1 each plus $3.99 late fees).
Eventually, I started burning everything as VCD. To reencode I needed more ram and a dual processor machine ($800 plus cooling devices when I o/cd). VCDs played like shit on my player so i bought a new comb filter ($75) and a pioneer elite series dvd player ($500 plus 4 year service contract) to go with my AV setup (mostly McIntosh and Sherwood tube stuff, around $5000 in all).
Did I mention that I also bought everything I burnt to VCD the minute it came out on DVD? That I burn songs to CDs, then like the albums so much I head to borders and buy the originals (I call it "voting for good music")? That I have budgetted over $700 per month for CDs, books, movies, new hardware and internet lines?
If computer hardware companies think they're going to make MORE money when piracy dries up, they're fools. They should be fighting the CBDTPA tooth and nail.
What are your biggest influences, both as a chef and as a television producer? Seems to me your show has the frenetic pace of The Electric Company, the hands-on experimentation of Mr. Wizard and a secretive Abby Hoffman "Steal this cookbook" style of hints & tips, combined with the chemical correctness of Shirley Corriher and a certain culinary curtness that avoids a lot of the over spicing and excess ingredients of, say, B. Flay. What chefs interested you in a career in a telecuisine, and what's your flavor of non-cooking TV?
Well, because you'd need to get your cert on my machine to get that response. If you've got that kind of power, you've got the data anyway.
What did the third party prevent in this attack? Nothing.
If you want to put up WebsIum.net, and put up a cert, you're welcome to. But it's more likely that I'll be able to track down your copyright theft via your registrar than via Thawte.
The certificate issuer is not exactly a secure concept anyway. The whole idea of "trusted providers" being a list of folks engineered by the browser's authors is just asking for trouble. Any of those companies can "go rogue" and start issuing free certs to anybody who asks, which one of them did a while back (then they succombed to the pressures and revoked all the rights, which was pretty crummy).
Besides, the contracts of all cert providers totally absolves them from any crime or misuse of data undertaken by their issued members. Which is a strange definition of "trust"...that it can only be placed in an unknown third party who has no control nor responsibility over the site you're connecting to, and neither has any liability should your data wind up in the hands of ne'erdowells.
Which is why I self sign everything. Since it all boils down to whether or not you trust me, why should I spend $150 trying to trick you into thinking I've passed some rigorous test for "trust". All that matters is that the data users send me is encrypted, which it is. That $150 cuts into my already wafer thin margins, and it cuts even more when you think I'll have to get a different sert for each of my subdomains.
Which is where this bug is actually beneficial. It allows you to get signed once for all your domain names. No more paying exorbitant sums for the paltry 10,000 cycles of processor time it takes to generate a certificate, you can get www.yourdomain as well as yourdomain, yourmisspelleddomain, secure.yourdoman and mail.yourdomain certified for the price of one. Just sign the main site...and use the money to buy an escrow insurance policy.
I love it when somebody invents something that isn't new.
The first thing you learn about in psycholinguistics is the concept of the pidgin -- a common language which develops between two or more peoples who must interact but share no lingua franca. These simple languages, which sound like baby talk bastardizations of both languages, eventually turn into what's called a creole, such as that sexy patois spoken by fortune tellers on cable.
All these chaps have done is built their own version, and as the case of esperanto shows, manufactured language is very difficult to gain acceptance and adoption of. They'd have been better off locking a Croat and a Brit in a large office building with big gulps and no marked bathrooms. These guys would develop a pidgin pretty quick.
What you've heard is wrong. OSX IS unix. It IS easy to compile for. I compiled our application, written in Java for Solaris, using the mac and it runs great...better than it did on our dev server. I compiled postgres, openssl, apache, tomcat, ant, and a dozen other apps without incident or problem...something which isn't true with my cobalt linux server.
If stuff is missing, your friends probably didn't think to install the tools on the developer CD (sent free with the OS and continually updated). Such essentials as Make and grep are not installed by default because the majority of mac users don't (and, I content, the majority of desktop Linux users shouldn't -- why does my MOM need to compile everything?) need them.
The only major things that won't compile for mac are those which require x86 hardware for some bizarre reason (*cough* endian crap). And those won't work correctly in Yellow Dog, Mandrake or MkLinux either.
Furthermore, Mac OSX's interface is clunky on older machines because they aren't optimized for it. When OSX 10.1.5 finally offered 2d acceleration for my video card, it doubled the interface's usefulness. When I put in the g4 upgrade, it doubled again. This has little affect on the speed of serving pages or getting work done in the terminal -- only on graphics stuff. Which no server should be doing.
Don't need to remind me. I'm a shareholder of Apple. You know, Apple? That company that has consistantly made money since the 1970s? The company that made money even in the current slump as gateway, hp, compaq, micron, etc LOST money? The company that HASN'T had a massive layoff during the "slump?" The company which has been consistantly at the forefront of new technology and has maintained a relatively high market share despite proprietary everything?
The company whose stock keeps slipping lower and lower even though they're still making money? Yeah, nobody's getting rich off Apple. But at the same time, it's nice to get that check for $500 in dividends from a company about to fail. Spending that always makes me feel bad.
Companies that don't fuck around may get their asses kicked all over the Dow, but in ten years their executives are the ones who still have Maseratis and memberships to Pebble Beach. They're the ones who people turn around and say "huh, market's shit...better grab some johnson & johnson, mcdonalds..." Why people don't do that for apple, i don't know. Maybe they're too "innovative," making the first personal computer company too high risk for investors. Maybe it's because they don't cook the books or lie to investors, dulling the sheen of what's a great company. Maybe it's just too liberal in appearance...tree hugging racial homos that we all are (except for me...the white hetero moderate of the Apple stock world).
Parents: "Son, get your MBA. I'm proud of you and want you to make scads of money."
Friends: "MBA? You're so smart. You'll make so much more money than I will with my BA in Art History, which I enjoy very much."
Business Administration: "In times of decreased customer expenditure, it is often appropriate to reduce resources to appease the stockholders."
Business Ethics: "Humans are our greatest resource."
Marketting: ""
Accounting: "Payroll is the most expensive operating expense of any business."
Business Frat Poster: "Win real money in our fantasy stock game! Each person gets $10k to play the market and the person with the most cash after just 30 days is the recipient of a $1000 datek account thanks to Takka Alla Profits"
Smart folks are filling in the blanks, mate. Customers are not always right -- they're the morons who fell for our marketting. Employees? Get the best we can get for the shit we're paying...young folks especially, and train them to work 10 hour days. Your only boss is the stockholders, and these guys will believe anything that shounds like it will make them money.
Lying? Don't get caught. Stealing? Give it a nice name. Executives have privilidge, or else they wouldn't be executives, eh? We're better than those 30k plebians. Offer them 28k and we'll get Mexican -- how does Mexico sound? Shit, we should move our corporate office there...cheap work, no taxes, and thanks to NAFTA no bloody tariffs.
Naw, the problem isn't a lack of government bailouts -- it's your misunderstanding of WHY they bail these COs out.
Public Utilities? Fuck, those only affect PEOPLE. People can survive. Lockheed's failure directly affects the GOVERNMENT...it affects necessary defense contracts, and can you imagine the auction sales of Lockheed plans for those killer jets the second the plant closes?
Your problem is being too much of a humanist. Come over to the dark side of cynical realism, it's much more profitable.
So...you want to trade your decent BSD based OS with quality commercial support, a usable GUI, great built in software and ability to compile pretty much anything for Yellow Dog Linux?
If so, you may be interested in knowing that I've got a BMW 330i which I've taken the seats out and replaced with phone books and installed an engine from a 1972 Super Beetle. It's a good, solid engine, very hackable. Price is only $3000 more than a new Bimmer.
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Much funnier was Douglass Adams' (RIP) solution to this problem: have the universe ruled by an extreme objectivist with no belief at all.
You people get TRAINING?
I have never had a training request accepted, despite having to use a wide array of tools in doing my job. I had to learn everything I know pretty much on my own, without so much as a mentor -- I couldn't even get the cost of my Oreilly books covered!
So I'm in a pretty good position to state what you really, really need when learning a new concept. Here's what I need:
1) Knowledge of the framework. A little of what's going on under the hood, a little of how to use the API, a firm basis on the simplest terms. Explicit API knowledge comes through use, and training on it would be forgotten anyway. However, no book can ever impart to you the most basic knowledge of an API. Take XML parsers for example. The most important idea in XML parsing is the idea of the node. Explain nodes, and the related terms, well and slowly, and you won't have to explain anything else.
2) Knowledge of the use. Every language and concept has its own niche. There is no broad, end all-be all in the computer world, though several swiss army tools -- Perl and Java among them -- exist to make things easier. Knowing where and why you'd use an API makes it much easier to understand what you're being trained on.
3) Knowledge of limitations. NO BOOK EVER TELLS YOU THIS, but it's essential! It's the reason why we need mentors. I spent three weeks writing a multithreaded VB app to learn that the reason it wouldn't give me any feedback is that the multithreading system expected me to do my own preemption for system events. Abuh...Java didn't expect me to do that, so I didn't expect VB (a "dummies" language, or so I thought until I started doing a lot of Win API work in it, and realised how much quicker is was for simple interaction than VC) to do it either. A visiting manager who knew VB (probably in the biblical sense) chastised me, asking where I learned VB. I told him MSDN.
Come on, folks, who's kidding who? If the price of .org goes down, it won't mean more nonprofits could afford domains...it'd mean more bandwagon domain prospectors and more work for ICANN, who obviously CANN'T handle the load they have now.
.org domain names. I bought them at $15 each per year. If .org dropped to $6, I would have about a hundred -- every possible abbreviation and misspelling I could think of. And I'm just one guy, running what used to be a web hosting co-op.
.org. Organizations are not starving so much that they can't afford $15...hell, a single mailing costs more than ten times that, and it's about the price of two hours of one guy telemarketing. What .org needs is something to cause it to rise above commercial domains. If the price was more like $100 per domain, it would give more credibility to the domain holder as there would be less impetus to snipe these expensive domains.
;).
I have about six
If anything, we need to jack up the price on
Oh, and while we're at it, the profits from the additional price shouldn't go to a company. They should go to a serious of non profits, selected by the members when they register. EFF and FSF could be on the top of the list
You can get around any bandwidth issues with a sufficiently large amount of cabling. The whole idea of doing this in parellel implies that. Anyway, compare the bandwidth of digital photography with the physical bandwidth of looping film through an eyepiece at 12,000 frames per second and you come up with a very different problem -- you've got to use TINY film, with an effective resolution much lower than what some of you linux numbercrunchers are assuming. "SVGA resolutions?" Think more like 320x240 -- and don't expect more than a few seconds per cannister, high costs, etc.
.000083 s. With low light, you need extremely sensitive equipment to even detect it and even more sensitive equipment to detect the subtle variations in wavelength that make up colors. Today's CCD cameras are very slow to register intensity light -- much slower than film. The chemical reaction in film triggered by exposure can be controlled much better, simply by changing the tolerance of the film -- which is why your high end, high speed shutter digital cameras are so godawful expensive. The $2500 Canon I've been looking at has roughly the same shutter speed as an equivalent $300 film camera. The extra price is NOT a "coolness" tax...it's for the set of three extremely high res CCD sensors and the chips capable of processing their information at that speed. My film prof used to say "digital ain't digital"...there's a quality factor of all digital electronics that can be poiled down to the quality of interpolation, quality of the ADC and of transistors leading up to it.
No, the problem is light itself. You don't get much of it captured with a shutter speed of
CCD kind of sucks, man. For all its glorious promise, the best CCD chipsets aren't all that much better than the wonderful X-10 spycam.
Well, technically, two:
1) "Are you Das Megabyte?"
and
2) "How much do you want?"
I recently ran into the trouble that I could not reinstall Quark XPress 4.0x on my mac.
You see, they provided a license key on floppy, and I bought my mac after the Crusades. Ipso facto, no floppy drive.
I tried sticking it into the slot loading cd drive, but it doesn't go.
Quark's tech support was less than helpful. "You'll need to upgrade to 5," is not a valid answer to a developer who needs to test on 4.0.
Luckily, we have a warezkid in the office who was able to get me a cracked installer. So I could install software we paid for -- out the ass, too, considering Quark is little more than some boxes and perfectly calibrated text.
I'd like to point out that I have YET to find a kid's game that was copy protected. Hell, even "The Sims," which I can't get the kids I deal with to put down and still sells for $30, is perfectly copiable. You'd just better have a key for it.
Of course, nearly every PC game for adults (except Unreal Tournament...i lub j00 Epic) I've bought in the last year has made some pathetic ploy at copy protection. I've been able to copy most with my 2 year old copy of CloneCD, which is nice when you treat "in use" cds the way I do (storing them in stacks on top of a bookcase).
Oh, and another quick note: Mac software is hardly ever copy protected. And yet the software sales per hardware unit are always a lot higher than in the PC world. Why? Because people who buy expensive machines spend money on software, man. I guarantee you folks buying Alienware lappys do less pirating than Joe Q. Cheapdell.
Which is where Free software will come in. When Linux allows Walmart to sell $100 PCs that aren't windows compatible, suddenly we'll see a lot of shitty Walmart games for linux. DeerHunter 3d for Linux. Bachelorette in Cyberspace. Barbie's Dream S&M Website Designer.
Windows will suddenly find itself more upscale and that ratio -- installed machines to sold software units -- will increase.
The whole concept of "losing a sale" being theft is a serious fallacy. If I listen to your song on the radio and don't buy the album, you lost a sale. If I walk past your CD in the record store, you lost a sale. If my friend tells me the album sucks, you lost a sale too. Can't very well put me in prison for not buying your shitty album, as much as you'd like to -- this isn't Italy, 1939, yet.
You say, "but it's different when you download the mp3. You can burn it to CD and get the same product!" Bullshit. It is not the same product. It is compressed and crumbly. It lacks the cover art. You can't tell me this doesn't have value, because people with computers still buy CDs.
You say, "but people can rip the album perfectly and burn that!" True. But this kind of quality freak is the same type who has already bought your cd. I should know...I AM him. Last week I bought Deltron 3030 after being entranced by the MP3...an album that my loser friends have been trying to get me to buy for years. I spend about $200 every month on music. The record labels should love me. Instead, they want me to go to prison.
5 years in prison equals $12k in "lost sales", guys. Do the fucking math.
Right. And nothing that isn't in the constitution is valid, correct?
Bullshit. Times change. Otherwise, we'd still believe in the science of the 1790s...care to chat about the spontaneous generation of matter?
There are laws against marital infidelity, speeding, sodomy, carrying ducks on airplanes, and none of them are enforced. You see, we make things illegal because they should be. The nuance comes in interpretting and enforcing those laws. We don't arrest every homosexual in the country for sodomy anymore, because they're willing partners and as a country we've decided that is okay. We don't send every teenager caught smoking a fat spliff to prison, because kids make mistakes.
But the DOJ saying they'll go after file sharers is bad. The federal government has the manpower to be relentless. File sharing could be the next "war on drugs."
Only the mandate isn't there. People don't want to see my wife go to jail for her They Might Be Giants bootlegs. People don't want to see my Mom in prison for her Michael Smith collection. People don't think that posession of a 112 kbit encode of "Rhinestone COwboy" is as bas as possession of 112 grams of crack cocaine.
The majority of Americans want to free music. They want to share.
The majority of Americans do not see digital piracy as theft. The majority of Americans also do not see picking flowers at a public park as theft, or sneaking a grape at the supermarket. The majority of Americans drank alcohol before the legal age. Technically, we should all be in prison, but these minor crimes don't really hurt anybody, and so they are overlooked. Why, then, is the DOJ going after file sharers?
Isn't this a fucking democracy? Why is the majority submitting to laws made by the whims of the same companies that release O-Town records and other toxins into the environment? Why am I the only one sending daily letters to his Senator, that Clinton bitch, begging for support for our digital lifestyle?
I don't want to go to jail for pirating the new Pearl Jam or Queens of the Stone Age albums. I bought them anyway, but since I didn't clean them from my WinMX serving directory, i'm technically abetting piracy. This laxness could get me 5 years in a federal "pump me in the ass" prison, and that is wrong. I don't think I deserve it. I don't think my crime is that bad. I don't think that I'm depriving anyone of actual property or actual money they might have actually made, and I don't think the majority would argue with me.
So why are we letting it happen?
Yeah, but I liked the ranches best of all. The abundance of health food stores in denver/co springs was also nice, as was the fanTASTIC beer from fort collins' New Belgium brewery.
Alas, I am a careless Karma Whore and must have skipped that section. Sorry for the repeat.
When I was in Westcliffe, CO on vacation, I loved the environment so much I considered quitting my job and starting my own business, providing internet access for the acres of sparse plots of land connected only by dirt roads. However, it seemed fairly unfeasible -- since there's no power grid to fuel wireless repeaters and no public roads or conduits to piggyback -- so it was back to the grindstone for me.
How were you able to overcome the conditional sensitivity of high speed data in a rugged area with little or no public utilities? More importantly, how were you able to offset infrastructure costs for such a risky and inherently profitless venture -- did you receive any grants or did you simply float loans?
I have been pirating music digitally since 1992.
The first thing I ever did with my Thunderboard 8 bit mono sound card was buy a stereo to mono step down cable and rip a Weird Al song to VOC format. It took up roughly a quarter of my hard drive. The card was $100.
In 1997, when the first mp3s hit IRC, I pulled them down to my Cyrix-based win95 box with its 1.1 gig hard drive as fast as I could -- 19.2kbit. The line cost me $15 per month and the new and huge 3.5 gig drive around $300.
And when napster came out, I bought new headphones (Sennheisers, $170) so I wouldn't wake up my roommate trading Jiker tracks with Germans.
When I bought my burner ($240, plus the SCSI card), I turned it into a $30 per month CD habit. Mp3s, porno, whatever. Movie clips.
Then, suddenly, whole episodes. Vivo, then RM, then MPG when I got DSL ($50 per month). I got a new video disc array to rip my own hong kong films from the chinese place down the road( 2 40 gig drives, $500, raid card $170, videos $1 each plus $3.99 late fees).
Eventually, I started burning everything as VCD. To reencode I needed more ram and a dual processor machine ($800 plus cooling devices when I o/cd). VCDs played like shit on my player so i bought a new comb filter ($75) and a pioneer elite series dvd player ($500 plus 4 year service contract) to go with my AV setup (mostly McIntosh and Sherwood tube stuff, around $5000 in all).
Did I mention that I also bought everything I burnt to VCD the minute it came out on DVD? That I burn songs to CDs, then like the albums so much I head to borders and buy the originals (I call it "voting for good music")? That I have budgetted over $700 per month for CDs, books, movies, new hardware and internet lines?
If computer hardware companies think they're going to make MORE money when piracy dries up, they're fools. They should be fighting the CBDTPA tooth and nail.
What are your biggest influences, both as a chef and as a television producer? Seems to me your show has the frenetic pace of The Electric Company, the hands-on experimentation of Mr. Wizard and a secretive Abby Hoffman "Steal this cookbook" style of hints & tips, combined with the chemical correctness of Shirley Corriher and a certain culinary curtness that avoids a lot of the over spicing and excess ingredients of, say, B. Flay. What chefs interested you in a career in a telecuisine, and what's your flavor of non-cooking TV?
No way Alton would win. He never cooks ANYTHING in under an hour. It's all waiting...it's very Zen.
Well, because you'd need to get your cert on my machine to get that response. If you've got that kind of power, you've got the data anyway.
What did the third party prevent in this attack? Nothing.
If you want to put up WebsIum.net, and put up a cert, you're welcome to. But it's more likely that I'll be able to track down your copyright theft via your registrar than via Thawte.
Sorry for all the misspellings in this post. I had to go to the bathroom since I started typing it.
The certificate issuer is not exactly a secure concept anyway. The whole idea of "trusted providers" being a list of folks engineered by the browser's authors is just asking for trouble. Any of those companies can "go rogue" and start issuing free certs to anybody who asks, which one of them did a while back (then they succombed to the pressures and revoked all the rights, which was pretty crummy).
Besides, the contracts of all cert providers totally absolves them from any crime or misuse of data undertaken by their issued members. Which is a strange definition of "trust"...that it can only be placed in an unknown third party who has no control nor responsibility over the site you're connecting to, and neither has any liability should your data wind up in the hands of ne'erdowells.
Which is why I self sign everything. Since it all boils down to whether or not you trust me, why should I spend $150 trying to trick you into thinking I've passed some rigorous test for "trust". All that matters is that the data users send me is encrypted, which it is. That $150 cuts into my already wafer thin margins, and it cuts even more when you think I'll have to get a different sert for each of my subdomains.
Which is where this bug is actually beneficial. It allows you to get signed once for all your domain names. No more paying exorbitant sums for the paltry 10,000 cycles of processor time it takes to generate a certificate, you can get www.yourdomain as well as yourdomain, yourmisspelleddomain, secure.yourdoman and mail.yourdomain certified for the price of one. Just sign the main site...and use the money to buy an escrow insurance policy.
I love it when somebody invents something that isn't new.
The first thing you learn about in psycholinguistics is the concept of the pidgin -- a common language which develops between two or more peoples who must interact but share no lingua franca. These simple languages, which sound like baby talk bastardizations of both languages, eventually turn into what's called a creole, such as that sexy patois spoken by fortune tellers on cable.
All these chaps have done is built their own version, and as the case of esperanto shows, manufactured language is very difficult to gain acceptance and adoption of. They'd have been better off locking a Croat and a Brit in a large office building with big gulps and no marked bathrooms. These guys would develop a pidgin pretty quick.
What you've heard is wrong. OSX IS unix. It IS easy to compile for. I compiled our application, written in Java for Solaris, using the mac and it runs great...better than it did on our dev server. I compiled postgres, openssl, apache, tomcat, ant, and a dozen other apps without incident or problem...something which isn't true with my cobalt linux server.
If stuff is missing, your friends probably didn't think to install the tools on the developer CD (sent free with the OS and continually updated). Such essentials as Make and grep are not installed by default because the majority of mac users don't (and, I content, the majority of desktop Linux users shouldn't -- why does my MOM need to compile everything?) need them.
The only major things that won't compile for mac are those which require x86 hardware for some bizarre reason (*cough* endian crap). And those won't work correctly in Yellow Dog, Mandrake or MkLinux either.
Furthermore, Mac OSX's interface is clunky on older machines because they aren't optimized for it. When OSX 10.1.5 finally offered 2d acceleration for my video card, it doubled the interface's usefulness. When I put in the g4 upgrade, it doubled again. This has little affect on the speed of serving pages or getting work done in the terminal -- only on graphics stuff. Which no server should be doing.
Don't need to remind me. I'm a shareholder of Apple. You know, Apple? That company that has consistantly made money since the 1970s? The company that made money even in the current slump as gateway, hp, compaq, micron, etc LOST money? The company that HASN'T had a massive layoff during the "slump?" The company which has been consistantly at the forefront of new technology and has maintained a relatively high market share despite proprietary everything?
The company whose stock keeps slipping lower and lower even though they're still making money? Yeah, nobody's getting rich off Apple. But at the same time, it's nice to get that check for $500 in dividends from a company about to fail. Spending that always makes me feel bad.
Companies that don't fuck around may get their asses kicked all over the Dow, but in ten years their executives are the ones who still have Maseratis and memberships to Pebble Beach. They're the ones who people turn around and say "huh, market's shit...better grab some johnson & johnson, mcdonalds..." Why people don't do that for apple, i don't know. Maybe they're too "innovative," making the first personal computer company too high risk for investors. Maybe it's because they don't cook the books or lie to investors, dulling the sheen of what's a great company. Maybe it's just too liberal in appearance...tree hugging racial homos that we all are (except for me...the white hetero moderate of the Apple stock world).
I'll tell you what's being taught:
Parents:
"Son, get your MBA. I'm proud of you and want you to make scads of money."
Friends:
"MBA? You're so smart. You'll make so much more money than I will with my BA in Art History, which I enjoy very much."
Business Administration:
"In times of decreased customer expenditure, it is often appropriate to reduce resources to appease the stockholders."
Business Ethics:
"Humans are our greatest resource."
Marketting:
""
Accounting:
"Payroll is the most expensive operating expense of any business."
Business Frat Poster:
"Win real money in our fantasy stock game! Each person gets $10k to play the market and the person with the most cash after just 30 days is the recipient of a $1000 datek account thanks to Takka Alla Profits"
Smart folks are filling in the blanks, mate. Customers are not always right -- they're the morons who fell for our marketting. Employees? Get the best we can get for the shit we're paying...young folks especially, and train them to work 10 hour days. Your only boss is the stockholders, and these guys will believe anything that shounds like it will make them money.
Lying? Don't get caught. Stealing? Give it a nice name. Executives have privilidge, or else they wouldn't be executives, eh? We're better than those 30k plebians. Offer them 28k and we'll get Mexican -- how does Mexico sound? Shit, we should move our corporate office there...cheap work, no taxes, and thanks to NAFTA no bloody tariffs.
Naw, the problem isn't a lack of government bailouts -- it's your misunderstanding of WHY they bail these COs out.
Public Utilities? Fuck, those only affect PEOPLE. People can survive. Lockheed's failure directly affects the GOVERNMENT...it affects necessary defense contracts, and can you imagine the auction sales of Lockheed plans for those killer jets the second the plant closes?
Your problem is being too much of a humanist. Come over to the dark side of cynical realism, it's much more profitable.
So...you want to trade your decent BSD based OS with quality commercial support, a usable GUI, great built in software and ability to compile pretty much anything for Yellow Dog Linux?
If so, you may be interested in knowing that I've got a BMW 330i which I've taken the seats out and replaced with phone books and installed an engine from a 1972 Super Beetle. It's a good, solid engine, very hackable. Price is only $3000 more than a new Bimmer.