might this prevent there from being a repeat of this promotion in the future?
Which is exactly what these jerks want. The Downhill Battle people are CHRONICALLY anti-pop. They hate everything about the industry, and want bands to start getting more profits RIGHT NOW. And for some reason, they're taking Apple to task for choosing to support the major labels (who have money, visibility and songs people actually want to buy) instead of the current nobodys yearning to be heard.
The internet, with its streamlined approach to music delviery offering low-cost warehousing and display mechanisms, offers that potential. And these guys seem to think that this means artists will get the good end of the stick immediately.
Wrongo. Are these guys joking? eMusic tried this already, offered uncrippled unlimited downloads of independent music, and they didn't last. What the Downhill Battle people are asking for is such a pipedream that doesn't even BEGIN to approach the problem...which is that too many people get their hands in commercial music, and the guy whose face is in the liner notes had very little to do with the finished product. Instead, they're attacking a symptom of that: the fact that artists get kind of a shitty cut of the take.
Corporate control of music has a number of other problems associated with it as well, not the least of which are lack of promotion, lack of airplay, and lack of localized availability of music. iTunes solves most of these by allowing their entire catalog to be available to all users who can sample them to taste. Any song I've ever bought from iTunes was the result of this flexibility. That's a pretty impressive feat for a piece of software.
And yet, these guys seem to think that unless iTunes solves ALL the problems independent artists face at the first go, it's crap. Bullshit. Apple is a business, a moderately successful one at that. In business, you have to move at exactly the right pace, and make just the right moves. Apple's first move towards market dominance was making deals with the major labels. Their second move was making deals with smaller labels, whose musical styles matched those of high sellers on the music store. They're adding thousands of new songs every day. Eventually, they'll come knocking on the doors of the garage independents like Asian Man and Hieroglyphics Imperium, and they'll put those artists RIGHT NEXT to John Melloncamp on iTunes. That association is some powerful shit...a LOT more powerful than just offering your songs on some forgotten website. And you can STILL do that, if you want to. iTunes is discouraging NOTHING.
It's that visibility which is going to make artists, Apple and the labels rich(er) -- not some magic "artist's take" feature or some slapdash music service for indies. Before you can get fans, they've got to HEAR you...and they've got to be able to purchase your records...and iTunes offers a much more robust and accessible solution for that then a couple of paypal links and one of your buddies with a stack of media mailers.
Oh please. If the environment mattered, there'd be a deposit on other canned goods, juice cans, mayo jars, etc.
The deposit is a tax on lazy soda drinkers who throw their cans out of car windows. In states with no deposit, you have to pay somebody to pick those up. Put a price on them, and surprise surprise...they get picked up for you. By streetfolk, college students and old people who still think $.05 is a lot of money.
So because in the past he was played by a white guy, there's no way he can be played by a black guy now?
Three years ago, Marvel began retelling the story of some of their superheroes in a more modern fashion. They made Nick Fury, the eye patched, cigar smoking leader of SHIELD, into a Samuel Jackson lookalike. And it was awesome...it has given the character an intriguing direction that he never had as a white bread GI Joe type.
Tokenism is tokenism when the character is preeminantly racial and mostly tacked on. Making a character who's integral to the story a black guy, when there's no mention of his race, that's just a casting decision.
I think fans are going to love Mos Def as Ford Prefect, and above all else I think Douglas Adams would himself have liked the casting choice. Putting an actor who's not strictly comedic nor overtly dramatic in the role of the cool straight man of the series (Zaphod being the insane, egomaniacal Kramer type and Arthur Dent being the insecure Neurotic type) is a brilliant casting decision. Choosing an actor who has the vocal ability to pull off complex, flowing British dialog and make it understandable is even better. The fact that he's a black guy is, well, not irrelevant, but not as important as the man's other credentials.
I'll be more worried if they start putting them in latex jumpsuits and stalking Vogons in Frog Star Fighters across the galaxy in a sexy aluminum Heart of Gold...
Ford: Hey poetry boy. Don't panic! [the Vogon fleet explodes. One of those dumb circular explosion rings expands towards the camera...]
Well, technically speaking, you're correct. murder is always illegal -- but until the jury finds you guilty, you are not a murderer.
Anti-competetive practices are also always illegal. But what, pray tell, are these anti-competive practices? They're hardly enumerated. If I sell an operating system and give away a free web browser with the OS, is that anti-trust? Maybe, if Microsoft does it. Apparently not when Apple does it. The difference is nothing but scale.
So it takes a jury to set the precedent that a particular activity falls under the cloak of anti-competetive practice. Until a jury does that, it's perfectly "legal," because there's no law specifically against it. It doesn't take willful ignorance...more like willful optimism.
Whoa there, randroid. I like to watch TV. I drink booze. I have friends.
And yet I haven't gotten a virus since 1994.
"Reading up" on internet security takes an hour out of every month or so. Hit trendmicro.com, look for badd'ns, run housecalls. My mom figured it out pretty quickly, too, once I showed her.
No, the reason most people are clueless about internet security is that most security pundits treat them like clueless, beer swilling morons who couldn't POSSIBLY understand the complexity of running a virus program or reading a list of uninstall steps. Because if people realized how EASY it was, they wouldn't pay them hundreds of dollars an hour.
I figure, why catch a fish for a man when you can teach him how to catch his own, but then again, I'm not an objectivist asshole.
You can also use them to shut down alien spacecraft. I'm guessing this is because complicated psychic hive minds run AppleTalk and Rendezvous. What do you think?
Ah, no. Microsoft overtook Apple using fair competitive practices, smart business moves (like getting an unlimited license to the Mac OS' look and feel in exchange for the continued ability to put inferior versions of BASIC on cassette tapes, a brilliant) and some incredibly marketting. They were so good at it that in the late 1990s they not only surpassed the Mac, but established a monopoly on the desktop.
At which point they illegally manipulated their monopoly by continuing the same shrewd business practices that got them the monopoly in the first place. Can you blame them?
Let's get theoretical, here. A series of legal business activities successfully makes a company money. At what point is the company supposed to throw out a plan because it has worked so well that nobody else can survive in the market? Is there some kind of monopoly alarm that goes off when you've sold a certain number of units?
I guess my point is this: Microsoft's activities weren't illegal until the judge said they were. Until then, they were just sleazy. And when Mac was still on top, they were merely competetive. Same activites, three seperate adjectives. It's our perception of these activities that changed them.
Uh, OSX 1.3 is only a few months old and has had a half dozen security updates and two complete OS upgrades. The latest is 1.3.2.
XP, on the other hand, came out in 2002. It's 2 years old. Apple's OS from 2 years ago, 10.1, has had at LEAST 13 upgrades since then.
The only real difference here is that Apple's OS has come out with far more distinct versions of their OS than Microsoft has. And they've charged for each one. Since I bought OS 10, I've probably sunk more than $300 for operating systems from Apple ($130 for 10, $30 for a 10.1 disc, $130 for 10.2, $130 for 10.3) just to maintain the best performance of my system. On the other hand, I'm still running on my PC the copy of Windows 2000 I got in 1999 for $99.
Granted, i didn't mind spending it. I love my mac. But that "pretty fucking sad" event that you prevented by buying a G5 cost you quite a bit more money. And said money could buy a pretty awesome firewall and some great antivirus software. If you're looking at computing from a cost-benefit point of view -- the way somebody who buys an eMachine probably does -- the Mac is an insanely expensive choice simply to prevent the minor inconvenience of some hacker getting control of your login to Allrecipes.com.
Uh, many criminals don't pay for their hardware. They card it. They steal it from the tables of open air cafes. So, you know what? They get the most expensive machines they can. And you know what? A lot of expensive machines are macs. I remember a bit of gonzo journalism a few years ago, where the guy tagged along with a carder and he got six powerbooks in the mail in one day...
Quite a few black people, actually. Indians, Europeans, Asians, and people of the Middle East as well. England has a fair trade in immigrants -- you didn't think they only came here, did you?
Mos Def, Gift to Gab, and J-Live are the most talented and erudite MCs in the business right now
You get no complaints here, but I think I'd add Aesop Rock, Slug (from Atmosphere), Mr. Lif and MF Doom to your list. They're all really pushing the boundaries of MCing while keeping true to the roots. Actually, these guys all put out records last year, and along with J-Live's last EP, they form my top 5 new records of 2003. I wasn't even into hip-hop...but last year was SHIT for rock. It's good to see somebody inventing and creating when bands like Jet are just spitting up reiterations of their influences...
Whoa. The book doesn't say what colour he is, but he's from another goddamn galaxy. Be glad the actor isn't teal or something, or with a second head sewn onto his shoulder like the LAST H2G2...
I for one am PUMPED to see what the mighty Mos Def can do for this film. He's an incredibly talented rhymer with a very distinct vocal style. His flow will match well with Davis' dialog. I'm already imagining him dropping great lines like "Muscle relaxant. You'll need it for hyperspace, it's unpleasantly like being drunk." "What's wrong with being drunk" "Ask a glass of water."
1) When I perform a patch on my Macintosh, I have to reboot as well. Is this a big Ouch for Apple and BSD? I often reboot after patching Linux installs...because while I could just shut down every reliant system manually (something which would be MADNESS on a commercial system), I want to be sure that everything in the system is going to come up in the right order. I've emerge'd packages and had that prevent PAM from starting after an outtage...better to be safe, right?
2) Yes. Apple should mention in their commercials that processors use in their computers 14 years ago were installed on a NASA rover that had a computer failure. That would be marketting gold.
Wow, that is a nice program. A nice program that does not run natively on Windows. So therefore, you know, it's pretty useless unless you already have a linux box, or enough linux knowledge to find your way around cygwin. And if your company has one or the other of these, you probably didn't get this virus, and therefore the fix is useless to you.
Incidentally, I had JUST found a (somewhat) native solution last week, installed it, and lo and behold, we were unaffected by the virus. The program in question is a front end to a specialized build of SpamAssassin, and it was only $300 for 50 mailboxes.
I know what you're thinking..."pay for apache licensed software? are you out of your goddamn mind?" But realize this: I'm the only guy in a company of 20 people who knows Linux. I am also in the middle of a big development project and have been spending WAY too much time securing the email server. Installing this program allowed me to push the management work off to other guys without having to teach them all of linux first. Plus, by paying the guy I have a little more trust that he'll be around to customize the NEXT install of SpamAssassin, a job I'd otherwise have to do myself.
Incidentally, similar products (that aren't as current) cost a lot more and require a subscription fee. Plus, you can't alter the ruleset...like I did, to add the content of this virus into our Bayes and subject filters...
I've heard this before. It's simply not true. Yes, they have a monopoly, but they didn't GET their monopoly through monopolistic, or even "unfair," practices. They got it through good software. When I bought Windows in 1991, I didn't do so because of unfair practices or a desktop monopoly. I bought it because Windows kicked the SHIT out of anything else on the market for PCs. It's still a nice operating system, even if XP has taken a giant step backward. If you make shitty products, it doesn't matter if you have a monopoly -- you'll fail.
In areas where Microsoft pushed bad software with their monopoly, they generally didn't win. They have bundled Paint with Windows since 3.0, it didn't stop Adobe from making millions off of Photoshop. MSN Messenger hasn't crushed AOL Instant Messenger, nor did NetMeeting. Hyperterminal was such shit that I bought Procomm a day after getting Windows 95. The first Internet Explorer they bundled with their OS was such crap that I had to buy Netscape 3. It was the only browser that really worked like NCSA Mosaic had, and that was, at the time, the standard browser implementation.
So Microsoft's major internet tools crushed nobody that wasn't already in danger of falling apart. Netscape was giving away their browser, just like Microsoft was, only Netscape's browser, during the key period in the "war", was complete shit. Their Gold package was complete shit, too, only it cost $70. My university forbade the use of IE on our computers out of respect for Netscape, and the students -- the STUDENTS, mind you, not Microsoft -- rose such hell that we had to change the policy. Netscape's 4.x browser was never fast enough, nor reliable enough, to take on Microsoft's, and their 6.x browser took YEARS to complete. Monopoly nothing, Netscape failed because it was a mismanaged clusterfuck when Microsoft was making steady improvements. And don't give me any of that "proprietary tag" crap...web designers were, and still are, an idealistic bunch. We wrote most of our pages to work with EITHER browser. If Microsoft did anything anti-competitive, it was making a browser that forgave the designer for making stupid mistakes that Netscape was too strict to allow. I don't see where that's anything but Netscape's fault for trying to impose their will on people...
In many areas, Microsoft's tools are sorely lacking. In some, they're pathetic toys -- Publisher comes to mind. Even in the area where they supposedly have a monopoly, they're fading fast as people replace expensive Windows servers with Linux, BSD, etc, running Apache instead of IIS, MySQL instead of SQL Server, etc.
Wheee. The problem I have with most of these studies (besides the fact that they are completely useless, as the decision is never as simple as "X is better than Y") is that the people who truly know -- those who have chosen one product over the other -- can apparently never be trusted, because they have a vested interest in it.
For example: our company writes software for Microsoft's.NET. We're updating all of our programs for DOS (programs which are still used and many people don't want to give them up). Our clients have a massive install base of Microsoft based tools, many of which were expensive and will never be updated, in some cases because the company that wrote them is no longer in business. It took a long time and a lot of research to come to the decision to use.NET. We looked at Java, Delphi, and C++ with a series of graphics toolkits, and we settled on.NET. The framework offered us a lot of flexibility and allowed us to write our first application with blinding speed. Our customers love it. In this, it has been a success for us.
If I were to write an article for an IT magazine praising.NET for custom desktop development, I would definitely be branded a Microsoft evangelist and my opinion ignored by the staunch open source community. Never mind that my webservers run Linux-based applications, or that before I started this job I had great success writing Java applications for use with Oracle. Never mind that, internally, I fough against.NET for months from a strictly anti-monopolistic standpoint, only to realize in the end that it wasn't a complete piece of shit gussied up by clever marketting.
Microsoft feels that their way of doing software is best. If they didn't, they'd be building on top of Open Source the way Apple is. Obviously, since they've got the biggest selling operating system in the world, other people think so as well. This can't be explained away by marketshare and FUD...I own several Linux machines and an OSX laptops, and I still use my Windows based PC most often. Mostly because my wife steals the laptop, but truth be told, I'm on the dumb PC. If a researcher called, and asked which machine I used most, and which machine I've spent the least time fighting with to get what I have to do done, I'd say the PC. Sorry guys.
I'm not saying this particular study isn't sleazy -- but if a third party comes up with valid data through valid double blind studies, the validity isn't immediately invalidated JUST because it favors the company that paid it to do the research in the first place. After all, drug companys have to pay to have their drugs tested -- that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be passed every time. My wife works as a contract archeologist. She's paid by developers to do research into the history of their projects, ostensibly to prove that there's no historic value. And you know, she's really objective about it. If there's something of historical merit, she reports it, even though it gets her screamed at by developers (whose projects are then set back MONTHS while the State Historic Preservation Office does its thing). In short: the fact that Microsoft funded this study does make it suspicious. But unless you've read it and found a problem with your data, you can't immediately assume it's been skewed.
This is defeatest bullshit. I have worked for several small companies, and they were all QUITE successful despite lacking most of these.
1) Developers can very easily man support lines by themselves for a short period of time. In fact, I've discovered that even in large companies, developers generally have to help with support for the first six months of a new program's release, and that this helps drive the bug discovery and repair process.
2) Why do you need a sales force? You can make a sizable profit with only one or two corporate sales, which you can get through simple advertising. Sure, eventually you'll want somebody to do cold calls and direct sales visits, but for the first year or so, if your software is a good enough value you'll be your own sales staff and still get more orders than you can fill.
3) You shouldn't think about getting into CompUSA as a start up anyway. Business should move SLOW, or else it burns up too much cash and too much energy. Start with a a web page. Move up to shipped sales. Then move into retail. Lots of companies, from WinZip to Globalscape, did this. And to make the most money...start wirh business services FIRST, then move to the consumers (who are worth less money and have greater support needs).
4) Outsource this. It costs practically nothing. And with a staff of fewer than 10 folks, chances are you can do it yourself.
5) Lawyers are only needed to finalize contracts. You'll be billed a few hours time, which may be expensive, but isn't the same as having a guy on retainer at all times. A good lawyer is your best friend, but that doesn't mean you have to bankroll him.
6) The key there is "eventually." I have worked in companies with 2 or 3 servers that provided better work and faster than companies with farms of them. Fewer servers means less IT work, and it can mean cleaner environments. Back ups cost $10 per month at our server coloc. And really, by the time you NEED a copier and a fax machine, you'll have the cash to pay for them. Otherwise, you're doing it wrong.
7) A receptionist is a major luxury. My boss has been doing this for 17 years, and only two years ago did he hire a receptionist. My first job, the receptionist was also the HR lady, also wrote contracts and pricing, and performed QA. Anyhow, the easiest way to avoid needing a receptionist is to have all meetings at your clients' offices. It's cheaper, and most of the time they prefer it.
What you're talking about is, indeed, essential for Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and even Adobe. But plenty of folks get on just fine without any of these artificial "business constructs."
Finding financing is NOT HARD. Finding venture capital is, but you don't need it. Venture capitalists expect the possibility of a major return on their investment (20%+). Banks, on the other hand, just want you to pay back what they loaned you. To get a bank to give you a business loan doesn't take much...prove there's a market, prove you can deliver to it, and you've got upwards of a few hundred grand. My boss does it twice a year -- our industry segment moves in cycles, he finance two quarters with loans and pays them off with money gained during the other two quarters, pumping the excess into growth. It's even easier if you're willing to work off credit...shit, webslum is a lazy project that doesn't really try to make any money, and we've been offered credit lines in the five digits. Think of all the hardware you could finance with that...and all the months of dedicated lines you could swipe, borrowing off future gains.
However, the problem is one of social networking and markettability. Since the 'bust' that put people out of work, I have been offered three jobs. Offered. Which says to me that the problem isn't the availability of work, but the ability of the currently unemployed people to find it and properly market their skills. And if you can't sell yourself, there's no way you'll be able to sell software. That's the first step!
Then there's the issue of drive. A lot of my friends who are out of work in the tech field don't WANT to work in the tech field. They just want to make a lot of money doing something "easy," and now that they can't they want to whine about it. After all, they slid through the CS program at some fancy pants college, shouldn't they be guaranteed a job? Newsflash folks: without the passion to learn how to write software, how to manage your own company, and to research what a market needs, you'll never be able to make it anywhere. A lot of people just want to find themselves in a job where they can get major paid to tap away for 8 hours and never really put any energy into anything. These people will never make it in the industry.
That said, I dare any of you to prove me wrong. Owning your own business is exciting and fun and can be a LOT more worthwhile than working for somebody else.
Best thing about the Fiero was the SEATS, which besides being comfortable, had two 4" speakers on either side. Many kit-car folks search for these seats because they go great in any small car -- I'm thinking of the Volkswagen Beetle, which has no real space for speakers so you have to improvise (I'm building a new dash for my '73 Super "Nightcrawler") but I've seen them in just about everything. Hell, in college I knew a guy who bought one for $5 at our local U-Pull-It junkyard, rigged one on to a dolly, and would wheel it out to play Gran Turismo. You know, once you got over the laughs, it was a lot of fun.
Word. The Wankel Rotary is one of my favorite engines of all time, fast, reliable as hell, and if it breaks you can fix 99% of the parts with JB weld. In fact, the next engine to go in my '73 Super Beetle will, indeed, be an engine from a Mazda RX-2.
Re:Another day, another batch of applications
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Joel Rants About Resumes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A BA in History (or any other liberal arts domain) does not invalidate your skills as a problem solver. Nor does a degree in Computer Science cement these skills. All a degree shows is that you've completed a series of tasks and tests that illustrate a base knowledge of the theory and method underlying a particular field. Which, for many tasks, is "enough"...if you don't have time to test every single applicant to gain confidence in their skills, stamping a "degree in related field or equivalent experience" sticker on your job listing is a good way to weed out the most unconfident of idiots. It does NOT, however, guarantee skill, and I'm sure any of us can atest to that.
In some cases, reading a nice, thick, well written book on a subject is unfathomably more useful than obtaining a university degree. I know that the introduction to O'Reilly's "Java in a Nutshell" taught me more than a semester of Data Structures in Java. Of course, having already taken Data Structures in Pascal, and again in C++, is what gave me the analytical basis to understand said introduction without banging my head...
But then again, when you say you're "entirely self taught," you invoke in most hiring manager's minds the image of some wild, cowboy programmer, bootstrapping his way along. It's your job as that wild talent to prove your skills...and the best way to do that is to maintain a glowing resume.
Mine's, uh, offline at the moment, due to wild, cowboy Linux administration bootstaps...
Actually, when I entered college, I fully intended on double-majoring with computer science but soon realized that a double majoring was a job for optimists and masochists who like being stressed out and antisocial. A double major forces a number of discordant requirements on hapless students while providing no real benefit over simply taking elective classes in the second major. It doesn't even improve your image with prospective employers much...at least, not as much as some of the other things you could be doing with that double-major time, like working an internship or volunteering time to an open source project.
In the end, I took quite a few math and CS courses out of interest and for the "easy A." But I focused my study in language and rhetoric. After all, I already knew how to speak with computers...I needed to learn how to speak to PEOPLE, and more importantly, how to convey my ideas to them without causing confusion. And between you, me, and the internet, it doesn't matter how incomplete or inaccurate you are: if you can explain something to a person's satisfaction without confusing them, you look like an expert.
Of course, once "released" into the Non-Academic world, I quickly learned three things. First, some subjects are nearly impossible to explain without confusion (routing tables, for instance, or how anti-spam filters work). Second, some people are very easily confused. Third, properly judging when NOT to say something to these people is more important than finding out HOW to say it to them.
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might this prevent there from being a repeat of this promotion in the future?
Which is exactly what these jerks want. The Downhill Battle people are CHRONICALLY anti-pop. They hate everything about the industry, and want bands to start getting more profits RIGHT NOW. And for some reason, they're taking Apple to task for choosing to support the major labels (who have money, visibility and songs people actually want to buy) instead of the current nobodys yearning to be heard.
The internet, with its streamlined approach to music delviery offering low-cost warehousing and display mechanisms, offers that potential. And these guys seem to think that this means artists will get the good end of the stick immediately.
Wrongo. Are these guys joking? eMusic tried this already, offered uncrippled unlimited downloads of independent music, and they didn't last. What the Downhill Battle people are asking for is such a pipedream that doesn't even BEGIN to approach the problem...which is that too many people get their hands in commercial music, and the guy whose face is in the liner notes had very little to do with the finished product. Instead, they're attacking a symptom of that: the fact that artists get kind of a shitty cut of the take.
Corporate control of music has a number of other problems associated with it as well, not the least of which are lack of promotion, lack of airplay, and lack of localized availability of music. iTunes solves most of these by allowing their entire catalog to be available to all users who can sample them to taste. Any song I've ever bought from iTunes was the result of this flexibility. That's a pretty impressive feat for a piece of software.
And yet, these guys seem to think that unless iTunes solves ALL the problems independent artists face at the first go, it's crap. Bullshit. Apple is a business, a moderately successful one at that. In business, you have to move at exactly the right pace, and make just the right moves. Apple's first move towards market dominance was making deals with the major labels. Their second move was making deals with smaller labels, whose musical styles matched those of high sellers on the music store. They're adding thousands of new songs every day. Eventually, they'll come knocking on the doors of the garage independents like Asian Man and Hieroglyphics Imperium, and they'll put those artists RIGHT NEXT to John Melloncamp on iTunes. That association is some powerful shit...a LOT more powerful than just offering your songs on some forgotten website. And you can STILL do that, if you want to. iTunes is discouraging NOTHING.
It's that visibility which is going to make artists, Apple and the labels rich(er) -- not some magic "artist's take" feature or some slapdash music service for indies. Before you can get fans, they've got to HEAR you...and they've got to be able to purchase your records...and iTunes offers a much more robust and accessible solution for that then a couple of paypal links and one of your buddies with a stack of media mailers.
Oh please. If the environment mattered, there'd be a deposit on other canned goods, juice cans, mayo jars, etc.
The deposit is a tax on lazy soda drinkers who throw their cans out of car windows. In states with no deposit, you have to pay somebody to pick those up. Put a price on them, and surprise surprise...they get picked up for you. By streetfolk, college students and old people who still think $.05 is a lot of money.
Three years ago, Marvel began retelling the story of some of their superheroes in a more modern fashion. They made Nick Fury, the eye patched, cigar smoking leader of SHIELD, into a Samuel Jackson lookalike. And it was awesome...it has given the character an intriguing direction that he never had as a white bread GI Joe type.
Tokenism is tokenism when the character is preeminantly racial and mostly tacked on. Making a character who's integral to the story a black guy, when there's no mention of his race, that's just a casting decision.
I think fans are going to love Mos Def as Ford Prefect, and above all else I think Douglas Adams would himself have liked the casting choice. Putting an actor who's not strictly comedic nor overtly dramatic in the role of the cool straight man of the series (Zaphod being the insane, egomaniacal Kramer type and Arthur Dent being the insecure Neurotic type) is a brilliant casting decision. Choosing an actor who has the vocal ability to pull off complex, flowing British dialog and make it understandable is even better. The fact that he's a black guy is, well, not irrelevant, but not as important as the man's other credentials.
I'll be more worried if they start putting them in latex jumpsuits and stalking Vogons in Frog Star Fighters across the galaxy in a sexy aluminum Heart of Gold...
Ah, I guess there's no free lunch.
No, it costs $7. And it's probably just a pathetic rehashing of an earlier lunch, with worse songs.
Well, technically speaking, you're correct. murder is always illegal -- but until the jury finds you guilty, you are not a murderer.
Anti-competetive practices are also always illegal. But what, pray tell, are these anti-competive practices? They're hardly enumerated. If I sell an operating system and give away a free web browser with the OS, is that anti-trust? Maybe, if Microsoft does it. Apparently not when Apple does it. The difference is nothing but scale.
So it takes a jury to set the precedent that a particular activity falls under the cloak of anti-competetive practice. Until a jury does that, it's perfectly "legal," because there's no law specifically against it. It doesn't take willful ignorance...more like willful optimism.
Whoa there, randroid. I like to watch TV. I drink booze. I have friends.
And yet I haven't gotten a virus since 1994.
"Reading up" on internet security takes an hour out of every month or so. Hit trendmicro.com, look for badd'ns, run housecalls. My mom figured it out pretty quickly, too, once I showed her.
No, the reason most people are clueless about internet security is that most security pundits treat them like clueless, beer swilling morons who couldn't POSSIBLY understand the complexity of running a virus program or reading a list of uninstall steps. Because if people realized how EASY it was, they wouldn't pay them hundreds of dollars an hour.
I figure, why catch a fish for a man when you can teach him how to catch his own, but then again, I'm not an objectivist asshole.
You can also use them to shut down alien spacecraft. I'm guessing this is because complicated psychic hive minds run AppleTalk and Rendezvous. What do you think?
Ah, no. Microsoft overtook Apple using fair competitive practices, smart business moves (like getting an unlimited license to the Mac OS' look and feel in exchange for the continued ability to put inferior versions of BASIC on cassette tapes, a brilliant) and some incredibly marketting. They were so good at it that in the late 1990s they not only surpassed the Mac, but established a monopoly on the desktop.
At which point they illegally manipulated their monopoly by continuing the same shrewd business practices that got them the monopoly in the first place. Can you blame them?
Let's get theoretical, here. A series of legal business activities successfully makes a company money. At what point is the company supposed to throw out a plan because it has worked so well that nobody else can survive in the market? Is there some kind of monopoly alarm that goes off when you've sold a certain number of units?
I guess my point is this: Microsoft's activities weren't illegal until the judge said they were. Until then, they were just sleazy. And when Mac was still on top, they were merely competetive. Same activites, three seperate adjectives. It's our perception of these activities that changed them.
Uh, OSX 1.3 is only a few months old and has had a half dozen security updates and two complete OS upgrades. The latest is 1.3.2.
XP, on the other hand, came out in 2002. It's 2 years old. Apple's OS from 2 years ago, 10.1, has had at LEAST 13 upgrades since then.
The only real difference here is that Apple's OS has come out with far more distinct versions of their OS than Microsoft has. And they've charged for each one. Since I bought OS 10, I've probably sunk more than $300 for operating systems from Apple ($130 for 10, $30 for a 10.1 disc, $130 for 10.2, $130 for 10.3) just to maintain the best performance of my system. On the other hand, I'm still running on my PC the copy of Windows 2000 I got in 1999 for $99.
Granted, i didn't mind spending it. I love my mac. But that "pretty fucking sad" event that you prevented by buying a G5 cost you quite a bit more money. And said money could buy a pretty awesome firewall and some great antivirus software. If you're looking at computing from a cost-benefit point of view -- the way somebody who buys an eMachine probably does -- the Mac is an insanely expensive choice simply to prevent the minor inconvenience of some hacker getting control of your login to Allrecipes.com.
Uh, many criminals don't pay for their hardware. They card it. They steal it from the tables of open air cafes. So, you know what? They get the most expensive machines they can. And you know what? A lot of expensive machines are macs. I remember a bit of gonzo journalism a few years ago, where the guy tagged along with a carder and he got six powerbooks in the mail in one day...
Quite a few black people, actually. Indians, Europeans, Asians, and people of the Middle East as well. England has a fair trade in immigrants -- you didn't think they only came here, did you?
2 99
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=
Mos Def, Gift to Gab, and J-Live are the most talented and erudite MCs in the business right now
You get no complaints here, but I think I'd add Aesop Rock, Slug (from Atmosphere), Mr. Lif and MF Doom to your list. They're all really pushing the boundaries of MCing while keeping true to the roots. Actually, these guys all put out records last year, and along with J-Live's last EP, they form my top 5 new records of 2003. I wasn't even into hip-hop...but last year was SHIT for rock. It's good to see somebody inventing and creating when bands like Jet are just spitting up reiterations of their influences...
Whoa. The book doesn't say what colour he is, but he's from another goddamn galaxy. Be glad the actor isn't teal or something, or with a second head sewn onto his shoulder like the LAST H2G2...
I for one am PUMPED to see what the mighty Mos Def can do for this film. He's an incredibly talented rhymer with a very distinct vocal style. His flow will match well with Davis' dialog. I'm already imagining him dropping great lines like "Muscle relaxant. You'll need it for hyperspace, it's unpleasantly like being drunk." "What's wrong with being drunk" "Ask a glass of water."
1) When I perform a patch on my Macintosh, I have to reboot as well. Is this a big Ouch for Apple and BSD? I often reboot after patching Linux installs...because while I could just shut down every reliant system manually (something which would be MADNESS on a commercial system), I want to be sure that everything in the system is going to come up in the right order. I've emerge'd packages and had that prevent PAM from starting after an outtage...better to be safe, right?
2) Yes. Apple should mention in their commercials that processors use in their computers 14 years ago were installed on a NASA rover that had a computer failure. That would be marketting gold.
Wow, that is a nice program. A nice program that does not run natively on Windows. So therefore, you know, it's pretty useless unless you already have a linux box, or enough linux knowledge to find your way around cygwin. And if your company has one or the other of these, you probably didn't get this virus, and therefore the fix is useless to you.
Incidentally, I had JUST found a (somewhat) native solution last week, installed it, and lo and behold, we were unaffected by the virus. The program in question is a front end to a specialized build of SpamAssassin, and it was only $300 for 50 mailboxes.
I know what you're thinking..."pay for apache licensed software? are you out of your goddamn mind?" But realize this: I'm the only guy in a company of 20 people who knows Linux. I am also in the middle of a big development project and have been spending WAY too much time securing the email server. Installing this program allowed me to push the management work off to other guys without having to teach them all of linux first. Plus, by paying the guy I have a little more trust that he'll be around to customize the NEXT install of SpamAssassin, a job I'd otherwise have to do myself.
Incidentally, similar products (that aren't as current) cost a lot more and require a subscription fee. Plus, you can't alter the ruleset...like I did, to add the content of this virus into our Bayes and subject filters...
I've heard this before. It's simply not true. Yes, they have a monopoly, but they didn't GET their monopoly through monopolistic, or even "unfair," practices. They got it through good software. When I bought Windows in 1991, I didn't do so because of unfair practices or a desktop monopoly. I bought it because Windows kicked the SHIT out of anything else on the market for PCs. It's still a nice operating system, even if XP has taken a giant step backward. If you make shitty products, it doesn't matter if you have a monopoly -- you'll fail.
In areas where Microsoft pushed bad software with their monopoly, they generally didn't win. They have bundled Paint with Windows since 3.0, it didn't stop Adobe from making millions off of Photoshop. MSN Messenger hasn't crushed AOL Instant Messenger, nor did NetMeeting. Hyperterminal was such shit that I bought Procomm a day after getting Windows 95. The first Internet Explorer they bundled with their OS was such crap that I had to buy Netscape 3. It was the only browser that really worked like NCSA Mosaic had, and that was, at the time, the standard browser implementation.
So Microsoft's major internet tools crushed nobody that wasn't already in danger of falling apart. Netscape was giving away their browser, just like Microsoft was, only Netscape's browser, during the key period in the "war", was complete shit. Their Gold package was complete shit, too, only it cost $70. My university forbade the use of IE on our computers out of respect for Netscape, and the students -- the STUDENTS, mind you, not Microsoft -- rose such hell that we had to change the policy. Netscape's 4.x browser was never fast enough, nor reliable enough, to take on Microsoft's, and their 6.x browser took YEARS to complete. Monopoly nothing, Netscape failed because it was a mismanaged clusterfuck when Microsoft was making steady improvements. And don't give me any of that "proprietary tag" crap...web designers were, and still are, an idealistic bunch. We wrote most of our pages to work with EITHER browser. If Microsoft did anything anti-competitive, it was making a browser that forgave the designer for making stupid mistakes that Netscape was too strict to allow. I don't see where that's anything but Netscape's fault for trying to impose their will on people...
In many areas, Microsoft's tools are sorely lacking. In some, they're pathetic toys -- Publisher comes to mind. Even in the area where they supposedly have a monopoly, they're fading fast as people replace expensive Windows servers with Linux, BSD, etc, running Apache instead of IIS, MySQL instead of SQL Server, etc.
Wheee. The problem I have with most of these studies (besides the fact that they are completely useless, as the decision is never as simple as "X is better than Y") is that the people who truly know -- those who have chosen one product over the other -- can apparently never be trusted, because they have a vested interest in it.
.NET. We're updating all of our programs for DOS (programs which are still used and many people don't want to give them up). Our clients have a massive install base of Microsoft based tools, many of which were expensive and will never be updated, in some cases because the company that wrote them is no longer in business. It took a long time and a lot of research to come to the decision to use .NET. We looked at Java, Delphi, and C++ with a series of graphics toolkits, and we settled on .NET. The framework offered us a lot of flexibility and allowed us to write our first application with blinding speed. Our customers love it. In this, it has been a success for us.
.NET for custom desktop development, I would definitely be branded a Microsoft evangelist and my opinion ignored by the staunch open source community. Never mind that my webservers run Linux-based applications, or that before I started this job I had great success writing Java applications for use with Oracle. Never mind that, internally, I fough against .NET for months from a strictly anti-monopolistic standpoint, only to realize in the end that it wasn't a complete piece of shit gussied up by clever marketting.
For example: our company writes software for Microsoft's
If I were to write an article for an IT magazine praising
Microsoft feels that their way of doing software is best. If they didn't, they'd be building on top of Open Source the way Apple is. Obviously, since they've got the biggest selling operating system in the world, other people think so as well. This can't be explained away by marketshare and FUD...I own several Linux machines and an OSX laptops, and I still use my Windows based PC most often. Mostly because my wife steals the laptop, but truth be told, I'm on the dumb PC. If a researcher called, and asked which machine I used most, and which machine I've spent the least time fighting with to get what I have to do done, I'd say the PC. Sorry guys.
I'm not saying this particular study isn't sleazy -- but if a third party comes up with valid data through valid double blind studies, the validity isn't immediately invalidated JUST because it favors the company that paid it to do the research in the first place. After all, drug companys have to pay to have their drugs tested -- that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be passed every time. My wife works as a contract archeologist. She's paid by developers to do research into the history of their projects, ostensibly to prove that there's no historic value. And you know, she's really objective about it. If there's something of historical merit, she reports it, even though it gets her screamed at by developers (whose projects are then set back MONTHS while the State Historic Preservation Office does its thing). In short: the fact that Microsoft funded this study does make it suspicious. But unless you've read it and found a problem with your data, you can't immediately assume it's been skewed.
This is defeatest bullshit. I have worked for several small companies, and they were all QUITE successful despite lacking most of these.
1) Developers can very easily man support lines by themselves for a short period of time. In fact, I've discovered that even in large companies, developers generally have to help with support for the first six months of a new program's release, and that this helps drive the bug discovery and repair process.
2) Why do you need a sales force? You can make a sizable profit with only one or two corporate sales, which you can get through simple advertising. Sure, eventually you'll want somebody to do cold calls and direct sales visits, but for the first year or so, if your software is a good enough value you'll be your own sales staff and still get more orders than you can fill.
3) You shouldn't think about getting into CompUSA as a start up anyway. Business should move SLOW, or else it burns up too much cash and too much energy. Start with a a web page. Move up to shipped sales. Then move into retail. Lots of companies, from WinZip to Globalscape, did this. And to make the most money...start wirh business services FIRST, then move to the consumers (who are worth less money and have greater support needs).
4) Outsource this. It costs practically nothing. And with a staff of fewer than 10 folks, chances are you can do it yourself.
5) Lawyers are only needed to finalize contracts. You'll be billed a few hours time, which may be expensive, but isn't the same as having a guy on retainer at all times. A good lawyer is your best friend, but that doesn't mean you have to bankroll him.
6) The key there is "eventually." I have worked in companies with 2 or 3 servers that provided better work and faster than companies with farms of them. Fewer servers means less IT work, and it can mean cleaner environments. Back ups cost $10 per month at our server coloc. And really, by the time you NEED a copier and a fax machine, you'll have the cash to pay for them. Otherwise, you're doing it wrong.
7) A receptionist is a major luxury. My boss has been doing this for 17 years, and only two years ago did he hire a receptionist. My first job, the receptionist was also the HR lady, also wrote contracts and pricing, and performed QA. Anyhow, the easiest way to avoid needing a receptionist is to have all meetings at your clients' offices. It's cheaper, and most of the time they prefer it.
What you're talking about is, indeed, essential for Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and even Adobe. But plenty of folks get on just fine without any of these artificial "business constructs."
Finding financing is NOT HARD. Finding venture capital is, but you don't need it. Venture capitalists expect the possibility of a major return on their investment (20%+). Banks, on the other hand, just want you to pay back what they loaned you. To get a bank to give you a business loan doesn't take much...prove there's a market, prove you can deliver to it, and you've got upwards of a few hundred grand. My boss does it twice a year -- our industry segment moves in cycles, he finance two quarters with loans and pays them off with money gained during the other two quarters, pumping the excess into growth. It's even easier if you're willing to work off credit...shit, webslum is a lazy project that doesn't really try to make any money, and we've been offered credit lines in the five digits. Think of all the hardware you could finance with that...and all the months of dedicated lines you could swipe, borrowing off future gains.
However, the problem is one of social networking and markettability. Since the 'bust' that put people out of work, I have been offered three jobs. Offered. Which says to me that the problem isn't the availability of work, but the ability of the currently unemployed people to find it and properly market their skills. And if you can't sell yourself, there's no way you'll be able to sell software. That's the first step!
Then there's the issue of drive. A lot of my friends who are out of work in the tech field don't WANT to work in the tech field. They just want to make a lot of money doing something "easy," and now that they can't they want to whine about it. After all, they slid through the CS program at some fancy pants college, shouldn't they be guaranteed a job? Newsflash folks: without the passion to learn how to write software, how to manage your own company, and to research what a market needs, you'll never be able to make it anywhere. A lot of people just want to find themselves in a job where they can get major paid to tap away for 8 hours and never really put any energy into anything. These people will never make it in the industry.
That said, I dare any of you to prove me wrong. Owning your own business is exciting and fun and can be a LOT more worthwhile than working for somebody else.
Best thing about the Fiero was the SEATS, which besides being comfortable, had two 4" speakers on either side. Many kit-car folks search for these seats because they go great in any small car -- I'm thinking of the Volkswagen Beetle, which has no real space for speakers so you have to improvise (I'm building a new dash for my '73 Super "Nightcrawler") but I've seen them in just about everything. Hell, in college I knew a guy who bought one for $5 at our local U-Pull-It junkyard, rigged one on to a dolly, and would wheel it out to play Gran Turismo. You know, once you got over the laughs, it was a lot of fun.
Guy I know...his dad used to buy a new Vega every year, fix it up, then run it until it got dirty. Never paid more than $500 for one.
Word. The Wankel Rotary is one of my favorite engines of all time, fast, reliable as hell, and if it breaks you can fix 99% of the parts with JB weld. In fact, the next engine to go in my '73 Super Beetle will, indeed, be an engine from a Mazda RX-2.
A BA in History (or any other liberal arts domain) does not invalidate your skills as a problem solver. Nor does a degree in Computer Science cement these skills. All a degree shows is that you've completed a series of tasks and tests that illustrate a base knowledge of the theory and method underlying a particular field. Which, for many tasks, is "enough"...if you don't have time to test every single applicant to gain confidence in their skills, stamping a "degree in related field or equivalent experience" sticker on your job listing is a good way to weed out the most unconfident of idiots. It does NOT, however, guarantee skill, and I'm sure any of us can atest to that.
In some cases, reading a nice, thick, well written book on a subject is unfathomably more useful than obtaining a university degree. I know that the introduction to O'Reilly's "Java in a Nutshell" taught me more than a semester of Data Structures in Java. Of course, having already taken Data Structures in Pascal, and again in C++, is what gave me the analytical basis to understand said introduction without banging my head...
But then again, when you say you're "entirely self taught," you invoke in most hiring manager's minds the image of some wild, cowboy programmer, bootstrapping his way along. It's your job as that wild talent to prove your skills...and the best way to do that is to maintain a glowing resume.
Mine's, uh, offline at the moment, due to wild, cowboy Linux administration bootstaps...
Actually, when I entered college, I fully intended on double-majoring with computer science but soon realized that a double majoring was a job for optimists and masochists who like being stressed out and antisocial. A double major forces a number of discordant requirements on hapless students while providing no real benefit over simply taking elective classes in the second major. It doesn't even improve your image with prospective employers much...at least, not as much as some of the other things you could be doing with that double-major time, like working an internship or volunteering time to an open source project.
In the end, I took quite a few math and CS courses out of interest and for the "easy A." But I focused my study in language and rhetoric. After all, I already knew how to speak with computers...I needed to learn how to speak to PEOPLE, and more importantly, how to convey my ideas to them without causing confusion. And between you, me, and the internet, it doesn't matter how incomplete or inaccurate you are: if you can explain something to a person's satisfaction without confusing them, you look like an expert.
Of course, once "released" into the Non-Academic world, I quickly learned three things. First, some subjects are nearly impossible to explain without confusion (routing tables, for instance, or how anti-spam filters work). Second, some people are very easily confused. Third, properly judging when NOT to say something to these people is more important than finding out HOW to say it to them.
"56k should be enough for everybody." --Cmdr Taco