It's not like people go looking for Linux boxes randomly.
I have many, many sshd/firewall logs that disagree with that. See here for some details of what people do if they can get in.
Crackers look specifically for Linux because your chances of finding an amateur administrator are far greater with Linux than BSD, Solaris, etc. I'd say it's also true of OS X, except Apple does a pretty good job of forcing updates down users throats which helps keep them fairly secure. There's tons of RedHat boxes out there that haven't been updated since RH EOLed the product line. And there's some pretty juicy tidbits to be found on them. I contacted a company that had been compromised in the afore mentioned group of attacks. Their box had their customers' credit card numbers on it, and with the keylogger installed in the rootkit, they were facing having other boxes that had been exposed.
crackers might not know what operating system the site is running until they attempt to infiltrate it.
Only the dumbest of script kiddies doesn't know what OS they are getting attacking.
Making available an old version of Linux BSD-style could raise a lot of money from e.g. embedded development companies
Why? Embedded developers are free to use it as is or do whatever they wish the one of the *BSDs. Embedded developers value-add with their hardware or the software that sits on top of the OS, so they're not going to gain much by getting a BSD licensed version, other than maybe being able to talk some CEO into it a little easier.
Furthermore, the "a lot of money" argument goes right out the window with the BSD license. Say this whole thing went through and I pay Jeff $50K to license it from him. I can now turn around and relicense it to whoever I like at whatever price I wish. Oops. There goes the "a lot of money."
there is some consensus among the developers about the price
Several of the key developers who've bothered to reply to the idiocy have stated no way, ever, at any price. The vast majority of the modern kernel has been developed *after* the BSD settlement, which means that developers have had the option of going with the BSD license which stands for one type of freedom or the GPL which stands for a very different one. Quite a few of the developers involved chose Linux specifically because of the freedom it guarantees.
Think about somebody who came out in 2004 claiming to have authored your favorite folklore song; I don't think any court would assign rights a posteriori, with the song being printed in thousands of song books marked "traditional".
I suggest you go read up about Alan Lomax.
Would such a procedure harm the open source/free software world?
Besides the mire of paperwork, arguments, and general wasting of time that it would involve, quite a few people would deem Linux code going into Windows to be a bad thing.
For any role I can imagine for a dual Opteron workstation, I can see a G5 in the same role for a considerably cheaper price.
Really? 6 months ago I paid ~$2800 for my dual Opteron that's my monster file server. The closest I could get on the Apple Store came to $5,950. Except...
The G5 only supports 8GB of RAM (think RAM cache for files whose average size is 300MB) rather than the 16 that my Opteron can handle. (It's currently at 2GB, but will be boosted shortly.)
The G5 has bigger and better OS drives than the Opteron, but I don't care. I'll never use more than a few gigs on the system drives.
The G5 DVD option also burns CDs. Big whoop.
To stay up to date with OS updates, a 3 year OS X Server plan is $1,000. With Linux I have any number of options that start at "free."
My Opteron has a better support plan - next day/overnight replacement policy.
On top of all of that, the Opteron integrates perfectly with my KVM system which I don't have the option of replacing.
So tell me again why I'm supposed to spend twice as much? The G5 may or may not be faster than the low end Opterons. I could care less about processor speed - I'll saturate my network connections with the files long before processor power becomes a bottleneck. The reason I went with Opterons is to have the ability to address very large RAM sizes.
release songs under the CC, when they couldn't even release their last album without a bunch of DRM?
According to their statement, all of the albums released by their label outside of.us and.uk (IIRC) have the copy protection on it. I'm not saying that the copy protection was a good thing, but it's not as if the group sat down and decided to use it, it was forced on them.
Plus, they're listing theirs under the 'Noncommercial Sampling Plus: Songs under this license allow noncommerical sharing and noncommercial sampling' which is fine and good for them; I'd be curious to know how many songs they've 'bitten' over the years that never got attributed.
I don't know for sure, but it may be that songs on the album use samples whose license forbids resampling.
[And just because I'm bored while huge files are copying]
Your criticism of my analogy is also flawed, because it fails to adknowledge the cost of making a quality recording. If the artist is counting on recouping that expense by selling copies of it, then they are taking a financial hit if people make unpaid copies. And unless you've ever used a U47 or an LA2A, don't tell me that great recordings don't have to be expensive because anyone can make one in their bedroom.
Do you wave the wand? If so, you've done the same thing as downloading a song.
Talk about flawed analogies. Very few people own a large number of cars. A handful of people might own three cars per person, and an even smaller number own tens or hundreds of cars. By contrast, virtually every seeks out a wide variety of entertainment media because they are inherantly different in how we use and consume them. I have approximately 27,000 songs in various formats and perhaps 1500 books. I have one car. I may from time to time wish I had a different car or perhaps a "fun" car to go along with my dumpy station wagon, but I have never wanted to have even 10 cars.
Because of this demand from consumers, the nature of creating cars and music (or movies or video games or whatever) are entirely different.
when you wave it, make a new car magically appear for you. The car will not be taken from anyone. It'll be a new one created out of thin air.
If such a wand existed, would Ford, Toyota, etc. cease to make cars? That is my point and has been the entire time, despite your rambling about physical objects.
And the only person who's actually cited badmouthing the VC-1 codec is the head of Vbrick. Let's see what Vbrick is financially inolved with. Why, it's H.264. (scroll down toward the bottom)
I'm not saying that he's wrong or right, but *everyone* involved in this "who's better" fight has heavy financial incentive to say the other is bad.
Those people who stop driving when they grow tired will continue to do so, and those that don't will disable the system
I partially agree with you, but I think there's quite a few people who could and would benefit from this if it were done well (which I agree with you, is not likely at this point). In a previous job (which I still do as freelance from time to time) the nature of the business dictated lots of long distance driving while tired. I'd like to think that I did so safely, and 5 years with hundreds of thousands of miles without an incident testify to that.
I did so with use of legal stimulants, knowing virtually all of my routes by heart, and by knowing where my actual limits were and getting off the road when I crossed them. If I had a system that would help alert me to those limits, I'd have considered using them.
Also, I'm willing to guess that many of the sleep deprivation related accidents are caused by drivers who aren't used to the same warning signs that I knew so well. A system that actually worked well would prolly be of great use to the large group of people who normally only commute around town and do the long drives a few times a year. Assuming that the drivers actually listen to the system...
Despite driving one of the notorius stretches of highway in the country (I-81 in VA if you care), I rarely felt threatened by the oft-sleep deprived truck drivers - it's the family trips and arrogant yuppies in SUVs that caused most of the accidents I witnessed.
We don't see eye to eye (which is not to say that either of us are necessarily wrong), so there's not much point in going back in forth. But if you insist:
My point and my analogy has nothing to do with physical ownership. It's pretty simple. Remove the financial incentive to do something and most people will stop. Got it?
My point is that whining "but I'm not hurting anyone because I would have never bought it anyway so they're not actually losing money" is a stupid copout.
My point is that a very large part of our economy is based entirely around adding value through effort rather than actually producing something physical and that destroying people's incomes by devaluing that work is both wrong and dangerous.
There is no perfect analogy, because by definition, an analogy shows some kind of similarity between things that are dissimilar. If they were exactly identical, it would not be an analogy. Jesus made an anlogy of his disciples with fishermen by calling them fishers of men, but they didn't start throwing baited hooks at people, nor were the people, in fact, fish, so therefore they couldn't actually be fishers, could they? Why don't you go complain at him about his broken analogy for a while?
Go look up the definition of analog and analogy. If I were to take a can of pasta sauce from my local grocery store and left behind their cost, it really wouldn't add much work. They stock enough that they are extremely unlikely to run out so they are unlikely to lose a sale due to my described action. They take stock and reorder on a regular basis regardless of my described action, so it doesn't actually add much work there. But nonetheless, if what I described were legal, there wouldn't be stores.
Without wanting to sound like a snob, the vast majority of the OS X users I know (working in an accademic environment) aren't computer or security experts. They don't use Macs because they're the mythical blend of Unix with an easy interface, they use them because they want to think about computers as little as possible and try to be productive. Most of them would write off being prompted for the password twice as some kind of fluke without giving it a second thought.
True, and this is why I would argue that we need a world language. So everyone can be bi or multi-lingual.
English is as close as it's going to get for a while. There will never be such a thing as a world language because humans invariably modify their languages with their peers. Witness the vast differences of English throughout the United States, not to mention England and Australia. Even though all three are tightly related, pronunciations and local slang can make it very hard for people to understand each other.
Cultural situations and experiences greatly shape people, and this is part of why people form clusters the way we do. Even with people that grew up in a very similar lifestyle to my teenage years, I feel a rather large gap between myself and the teenagers at the college where I work, even though they're only a decade younger than me. I don't understand their music and movie references, some of their slang, etc. Multiply this by the vast differences between the US, Africa, Middle-East, Asia?
It's a nice dream, but the last place I saw that takes Esparanto seriously is Red Dwarf.
How would you define "appropriate sex"?
Whatever male/female/transgender/whatever happens to please the person in question. So long as it doesn't harm anyone, I'm all for people doing whatever works for them.
No, I was disagreeing the the parent article that stated that universities are inept at security. We are unable to use many best practices in security because some professors view any kind of restriction on them as suppression of accademic freedom, and because the people that pay our bills (the students) will throw a royal fuss if they don't have access to all their toys.
Businesses don't (and shouldn't have to) assume that every single one of their clients is an enemy
That's the exact thinking that got companies smacked down by worms inside the firewall. All data is untrusted until it's been untainted. All computers are untrusted. Regardless of whether I'm working at a college or in a corporation, my servers are locked down to talk to exactly who they're supposed to and none others through firewalls and server configurations. Until a zero day exploit for ssh hits, people can bang away on my servers' sshd. The firewall bounces them away, and if the firewall fails, there's also rules set up in hosts.allow/deny.
Most actual penetration of businesses for data are inside jobs, not to mention people that use social engineering so as to appear to be an internal connection.
On the contrary, most major universities have the staff, software, equipment, and knowhow to maintain tight control over the network, it's that their hands are tied by professors who demand complete access to whatever they want in the name of accademic freedom and by the students who are paying $X thousands dollars for the experience, and by god, are going to use their $P2PSOFT.
My 27,000 student body university weathers most of the worms better than most large businesses, despite having little control over the computers on the network. And we keep our key servers safe. Assuming a lack of zero day exploits (as is true in this case), there's no reason an important server is any less safe in an accademic environment than a corporate one. Someone was asleep at the wheel, and you'll find that anywhere.
One of the first things I did when I got my most recent job was make sure I had a good set of coloured pencils to draw with. Schemas, interface designs, network layouts...
I'd find what you have to say entirely more interesting if I'd ever used the term steal or theft regarding intellectual property. The only place I used either term was in my example of what *isn't* a worry.
After drinking $BEER in an already long week, consider running posts discussing the importance of technical writing through a spellcheck before posting to/.
[snip - logical stuff adknowledged, there's no sense in bickering over whose definition of theft is correct]
I *do* only buy music from non-RIAA-affiliated artists or used so the RIAA doesn't get a share.
If you're interested, here's a few that I recommend:
Homunculus I had the priviledge of working with these guys 5 or 6 years ago, and am still raving about them. Their album, The Pulse of Directed Devotion, is amoung my all time bests. A mix of jazz, rock, and whatever grabs their attention. If you buy it and don't like it, I'll buy it from you.
The Elastic Purejoy - Dave Allen of Gang of Four fame's solo project. His self titled album is again, one of my truly meaningful ones. And again, many different styles. Harsh rock, Eno and Sabedoh covers, semi-Pinkfloydish. Covers a lot of bases.
Sky Cries Mary - Started out on Dave Allen's label. Neo-psychodelia at some of it's finest. The best of their indy releases was This Timeless Turning, which features an [to me] absolutely amazing piece that weaves around a recording of a baby crying that never ceases to amaze me. Some of their earlier stuff is likewise amazing - I love the song Rain (and other earlier stuff is downright painful). If you can stomach an RIAA released album, their one and only major label CD Moonbathing on Sleeping Leaves is fantastic, if you compare it with TTT, you can see that big label money does in fact make a huge difference.
Wolgemut - This is a fantastic group of early (~14th century) German Bagpipers. You can find their albums, of which I believe Danza is the best, on a few websites. Far different than Scottish pipes, and some gorgeous anchient songs.
On the other hand (just glancing at my at-work stack of CDs, RIAA labels have brought me Jeff and Tim Buckley, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Tori Amos, Leonard Cohen, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground, The Rapture, Crowded House/Neil and Tim Finn, James, the Waterboys, Black 47, Flogging Molly... All have written and performed music that means the world to me, and without the support of major labels, few, if any, would have become popular or been able to make the music that means so much to me.
This is stuff aimed at people without a whole lot of experience programming in first year CS courses.
1. Get a software engineering book, and study the concepts of software design. Even if you're just doing some small little "print a schedule" type assignment, thinking about how you would design a bigger project will help you.
2. Get a good book on algorithms. I'm partial to Introduction to Algorithms but there's lot's of good choices. So when your prof assigns you to do a project using a circular linked list, think about what might be better. But resist the temptation to smart off and try to do better, and complete the assignment the way (s)he says to. Perhaps ask the instructor what they wanted you to learn from the assignment if you feel that the algorithm is particularly inappropriate.
Don't just read the alogrithms, write them from scratch as well until you understand them. Be aware that some algorithms are completely different if you're using a language that starts arrays at [0] than at [1].
3. Take good technical writing courses. Many CS majors can't write well. Being able to clearly communicate is a great skill to have, regardless of what your position is, and it's a good way to differentiate yourself from the masses. Being able to write in American style English is something that many Indian/Chinese/etc. programmers won't be able to offer.
Take business courses, etc. Broaden your horizons in profitable ways.
4. Network, network, network. Not LANs and wireless, but people. They are the ones that will get you jobs in the future, who will provide you with sales leads and consulting. Mingle with people in the field. Mingle with business majors. Start it now, not in your senior year. Today's seniors may be the one's e-mailing you about a great position three years from now when you're about to graduate. I've seen very smart, very talented people sit for months without a job because they didn't start this process early.
5. Get out and enjoy yourself. You have the rest of your life for LAN parties and coding sessions. If you're in college and not working, you are likely never to have the same freedom that you do now. (Excepting unemployment...) Get out, go hiking, meet people of the appropriate sex, see concerts, learn to cook. Virtually no one dies wishing they'd spent more time in front of an LCD screen.
I highly (so to speak) advise avoiding coding under the influence of daytime cold medicine. The nighttime ones are not so bad, as they make me go to sleep and stay away from my keyboard. Dayquil on the other hand...
Well, the code was 100% accurate and fast, but when I went to refactor it, the logic was so bizarre that it was easier to rewrite it from scratch. It didn't run any faster [insert snide comment about my lack of skill here], but at least some random person could sit down and figure out what was going on afterwords.
So what, are you going to parrot the usual line that screwing over the artists is OK, because it helps bring down the big nasty publishers that you hate so much?
Do you think that the tales of "abuse" by distributors is new? Have you not heard the hundreds, thousands of songs bitching about record companies that have been recorded since the 60s? 50s? And yet, bands keep signing contracts... have you considered that there might be more to the business than you know about (I work in the music industry, most for small indy bands, though I have multi-grammy and platinum winning clients - what's your background)? Does it strike you as funny that Courtney Love only complains about record lables AFTER they spent millions of dollars making her a pop star rather than some drugged out widow of a rock star? Hmm...
I have friends who have gone from selling $500,000 profit worth of CDs per release to signing with record labels. (See my history for more details, I'm tired of typing it again and again.) Having heard all the songs/interviews whining about record labels, they do this of their own free will. Think they might know more than you do?
Remember how Steven King, one of the great pop writers of our lifespan, started an online experement with self publishing and gave it up as not-worthwhile, going back to the publishing industry? He's free to write his own contracts with them at this point; why would he go back to them if they didn't offer an advantage to the virtually free publishing that the internet offers?
P.S. If copywrite is so wrong, what have *you* offered to the public? Do you give anything back, or do you just take from others?
Slashdot Mirror
That would be great, if we were talking about G5s. However, we are in fact talking about G4s, which are *substantially* slower than G5s.
It's not like people go looking for Linux boxes randomly.
I have many, many sshd/firewall logs that disagree with that. See here for some details of what people do if they can get in.
Crackers look specifically for Linux because your chances of finding an amateur administrator are far greater with Linux than BSD, Solaris, etc. I'd say it's also true of OS X, except Apple does a pretty good job of forcing updates down users throats which helps keep them fairly secure. There's tons of RedHat boxes out there that haven't been updated since RH EOLed the product line. And there's some pretty juicy tidbits to be found on them. I contacted a company that had been compromised in the afore mentioned group of attacks. Their box had their customers' credit card numbers on it, and with the keylogger installed in the rootkit, they were facing having other boxes that had been exposed.
crackers might not know what operating system the site is running until they attempt to infiltrate it.
Only the dumbest of script kiddies doesn't know what OS they are getting attacking.
Making available an old version of Linux BSD-style could raise a lot of money from e.g. embedded development companies
Why? Embedded developers are free to use it as is or do whatever they wish the one of the *BSDs. Embedded developers value-add with their hardware or the software that sits on top of the OS, so they're not going to gain much by getting a BSD licensed version, other than maybe being able to talk some CEO into it a little easier.
Furthermore, the "a lot of money" argument goes right out the window with the BSD license. Say this whole thing went through and I pay Jeff $50K to license it from him. I can now turn around and relicense it to whoever I like at whatever price I wish. Oops. There goes the "a lot of money."
there is some consensus among the developers about the price
Several of the key developers who've bothered to reply to the idiocy have stated no way, ever, at any price. The vast majority of the modern kernel has been developed *after* the BSD settlement, which means that developers have had the option of going with the BSD license which stands for one type of freedom or the GPL which stands for a very different one. Quite a few of the developers involved chose Linux specifically because of the freedom it guarantees.
Think about somebody who came out in 2004 claiming to have authored your favorite folklore song; I don't think any court would assign rights a posteriori, with the song being printed in thousands of song books marked "traditional".
I suggest you go read up about Alan Lomax.
Would such a procedure harm the open source/free software world?
Besides the mire of paperwork, arguments, and general wasting of time that it would involve, quite a few people would deem Linux code going into Windows to be a bad thing.
For any role I can imagine for a dual Opteron workstation, I can see a G5 in the same role for a considerably cheaper price.
Really? 6 months ago I paid ~$2800 for my dual Opteron that's my monster file server. The closest I could get on the Apple Store came to $5,950. Except...
The G5 only supports 8GB of RAM (think RAM cache for files whose average size is 300MB) rather than the 16 that my Opteron can handle. (It's currently at 2GB, but will be boosted shortly.)
The G5 has bigger and better OS drives than the Opteron, but I don't care. I'll never use more than a few gigs on the system drives.
The G5 DVD option also burns CDs. Big whoop.
To stay up to date with OS updates, a 3 year OS X Server plan is $1,000. With Linux I have any number of options that start at "free."
My Opteron has a better support plan - next day/overnight replacement policy.
On top of all of that, the Opteron integrates perfectly with my KVM system which I don't have the option of replacing.
So tell me again why I'm supposed to spend twice as much? The G5 may or may not be faster than the low end Opterons. I could care less about processor speed - I'll saturate my network connections with the files long before processor power becomes a bottleneck. The reason I went with Opterons is to have the ability to address very large RAM sizes.
release songs under the CC, when they couldn't even release their last album without a bunch of DRM?
.us and .uk (IIRC) have the copy protection on it. I'm not saying that the copy protection was a good thing, but it's not as if the group sat down and decided to use it, it was forced on them.
According to their statement, all of the albums released by their label outside of
Plus, they're listing theirs under the 'Noncommercial Sampling Plus: Songs under this license allow noncommerical sharing and noncommercial sampling' which is fine and good for them; I'd be curious to know how many songs they've 'bitten' over the years that never got attributed.
I don't know for sure, but it may be that songs on the album use samples whose license forbids resampling.
Just a guess.
[And just because I'm bored while huge files are copying]
Your criticism of my analogy is also flawed, because it fails to adknowledge the cost of making a quality recording. If the artist is counting on recouping that expense by selling copies of it, then they are taking a financial hit if people make unpaid copies. And unless you've ever used a U47 or an LA2A, don't tell me that great recordings don't have to be expensive because anyone can make one in their bedroom.
Do you wave the wand? If so, you've done the same thing as downloading a song.
Talk about flawed analogies. Very few people own a large number of cars. A handful of people might own three cars per person, and an even smaller number own tens or hundreds of cars. By contrast, virtually every seeks out a wide variety of entertainment media because they are inherantly different in how we use and consume them. I have approximately 27,000 songs in various formats and perhaps 1500 books. I have one car. I may from time to time wish I had a different car or perhaps a "fun" car to go along with my dumpy station wagon, but I have never wanted to have even 10 cars.
Because of this demand from consumers, the nature of creating cars and music (or movies or video games or whatever) are entirely different.
when you wave it, make a new car magically appear for you. The car will not be taken from anyone. It'll be a new one created out of thin air.
If such a wand existed, would Ford, Toyota, etc. cease to make cars? That is my point and has been the entire time, despite your rambling about physical objects.
And the only person who's actually cited badmouthing the VC-1 codec is the head of Vbrick. Let's see what Vbrick is financially inolved with. Why, it's H.264. (scroll down toward the bottom)
I'm not saying that he's wrong or right, but *everyone* involved in this "who's better" fight has heavy financial incentive to say the other is bad.
Those people who stop driving when they grow tired will continue to do so, and those that don't will disable the system
I partially agree with you, but I think there's quite a few people who could and would benefit from this if it were done well (which I agree with you, is not likely at this point). In a previous job (which I still do as freelance from time to time) the nature of the business dictated lots of long distance driving while tired. I'd like to think that I did so safely, and 5 years with hundreds of thousands of miles without an incident testify to that.
I did so with use of legal stimulants, knowing virtually all of my routes by heart, and by knowing where my actual limits were and getting off the road when I crossed them. If I had a system that would help alert me to those limits, I'd have considered using them.
Also, I'm willing to guess that many of the sleep deprivation related accidents are caused by drivers who aren't used to the same warning signs that I knew so well. A system that actually worked well would prolly be of great use to the large group of people who normally only commute around town and do the long drives a few times a year. Assuming that the drivers actually listen to the system...
Despite driving one of the notorius stretches of highway in the country (I-81 in VA if you care), I rarely felt threatened by the oft-sleep deprived truck drivers - it's the family trips and arrogant yuppies in SUVs that caused most of the accidents I witnessed.
We don't see eye to eye (which is not to say that either of us are necessarily wrong), so there's not much point in going back in forth. But if you insist:
My point and my analogy has nothing to do with physical ownership. It's pretty simple. Remove the financial incentive to do something and most people will stop. Got it?
My point is that whining "but I'm not hurting anyone because I would have never bought it anyway so they're not actually losing money" is a stupid copout.
My point is that a very large part of our economy is based entirely around adding value through effort rather than actually producing something physical and that destroying people's incomes by devaluing that work is both wrong and dangerous.
There is no perfect analogy, because by definition, an analogy shows some kind of similarity between things that are dissimilar. If they were exactly identical, it would not be an analogy. Jesus made an anlogy of his disciples with fishermen by calling them fishers of men, but they didn't start throwing baited hooks at people, nor were the people, in fact, fish, so therefore they couldn't actually be fishers, could they? Why don't you go complain at him about his broken analogy for a while?
Go look up the definition of analog and analogy. If I were to take a can of pasta sauce from my local grocery store and left behind their cost, it really wouldn't add much work. They stock enough that they are extremely unlikely to run out so they are unlikely to lose a sale due to my described action. They take stock and reorder on a regular basis regardless of my described action, so it doesn't actually add much work there. But nonetheless, if what I described were legal, there wouldn't be stores.
I don't think I'm getting paid for my good looks, so I must be contributing something.
So in other words, no, you aren't contributing anything.
Wow. Ugly and stupid. You must have done poorly in the cosmic lottery.
Without wanting to sound like a snob, the vast majority of the OS X users I know (working in an accademic environment) aren't computer or security experts. They don't use Macs because they're the mythical blend of Unix with an easy interface, they use them because they want to think about computers as little as possible and try to be productive. Most of them would write off being prompted for the password twice as some kind of fluke without giving it a second thought.
Of course not. Now, just open it up in XPdf or print it off using CUPS.
(For those who have no idea what I'm talking about)
Just for the record, what have you contributed to this brave new world of yours? Or are you merely a consumer?
True, and this is why I would argue that we need a world language. So everyone can be bi or multi-lingual.
English is as close as it's going to get for a while. There will never be such a thing as a world language because humans invariably modify their languages with their peers. Witness the vast differences of English throughout the United States, not to mention England and Australia. Even though all three are tightly related, pronunciations and local slang can make it very hard for people to understand each other.
Cultural situations and experiences greatly shape people, and this is part of why people form clusters the way we do. Even with people that grew up in a very similar lifestyle to my teenage years, I feel a rather large gap between myself and the teenagers at the college where I work, even though they're only a decade younger than me. I don't understand their music and movie references, some of their slang, etc. Multiply this by the vast differences between the US, Africa, Middle-East, Asia?
It's a nice dream, but the last place I saw that takes Esparanto seriously is Red Dwarf.
How would you define "appropriate sex"?
Whatever male/female/transgender/whatever happens to please the person in question. So long as it doesn't harm anyone, I'm all for people doing whatever works for them.
No, I was disagreeing the the parent article that stated that universities are inept at security. We are unable to use many best practices in security because some professors view any kind of restriction on them as suppression of accademic freedom, and because the people that pay our bills (the students) will throw a royal fuss if they don't have access to all their toys.
Businesses don't (and shouldn't have to) assume that every single one of their clients is an enemy
That's the exact thinking that got companies smacked down by worms inside the firewall. All data is untrusted until it's been untainted. All computers are untrusted. Regardless of whether I'm working at a college or in a corporation, my servers are locked down to talk to exactly who they're supposed to and none others through firewalls and server configurations. Until a zero day exploit for ssh hits, people can bang away on my servers' sshd. The firewall bounces them away, and if the firewall fails, there's also rules set up in hosts.allow/deny.
Most actual penetration of businesses for data are inside jobs, not to mention people that use social engineering so as to appear to be an internal connection.
On the contrary, most major universities have the staff, software, equipment, and knowhow to maintain tight control over the network, it's that their hands are tied by professors who demand complete access to whatever they want in the name of accademic freedom and by the students who are paying $X thousands dollars for the experience, and by god, are going to use their $P2PSOFT.
My 27,000 student body university weathers most of the worms better than most large businesses, despite having little control over the computers on the network. And we keep our key servers safe. Assuming a lack of zero day exploits (as is true in this case), there's no reason an important server is any less safe in an accademic environment than a corporate one. Someone was asleep at the wheel, and you'll find that anywhere.
Draw pictures.
One of the first things I did when I got my most recent job was make sure I had a good set of coloured pencils to draw with. Schemas, interface designs, network layouts...
I'd find what you have to say entirely more interesting if I'd ever used the term steal or theft regarding intellectual property. The only place I used either term was in my example of what *isn't* a worry.
Note to self:
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but there's lot's of good choices.
Take good technical writing courses.
may be the one's
After drinking $BEER in an already long week, consider running posts discussing the importance of technical writing through a spellcheck before posting to
[snip - logical stuff adknowledged, there's no sense in bickering over whose definition of theft is correct]
I *do* only buy music from non-RIAA-affiliated artists or used so the RIAA doesn't get a share.
If you're interested, here's a few that I recommend:
Homunculus I had the priviledge of working with these guys 5 or 6 years ago, and am still raving about them. Their album, The Pulse of Directed Devotion, is amoung my all time bests. A mix of jazz, rock, and whatever grabs their attention. If you buy it and don't like it, I'll buy it from you.
The Elastic Purejoy - Dave Allen of Gang of Four fame's solo project. His self titled album is again, one of my truly meaningful ones. And again, many different styles. Harsh rock, Eno and Sabedoh covers, semi-Pinkfloydish. Covers a lot of bases.
Sky Cries Mary - Started out on Dave Allen's label. Neo-psychodelia at some of it's finest. The best of their indy releases was This Timeless Turning, which features an [to me] absolutely amazing piece that weaves around a recording of a baby crying that never ceases to amaze me. Some of their earlier stuff is likewise amazing - I love the song Rain (and other earlier stuff is downright painful). If you can stomach an RIAA released album, their one and only major label CD Moonbathing on Sleeping Leaves is fantastic, if you compare it with TTT, you can see that big label money does in fact make a huge difference.
Wolgemut - This is a fantastic group of early (~14th century) German Bagpipers. You can find their albums, of which I believe Danza is the best, on a few websites. Far different than Scottish pipes, and some gorgeous anchient songs.
On the other hand (just glancing at my at-work stack of CDs, RIAA labels have brought me Jeff and Tim Buckley, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Tori Amos, Leonard Cohen, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground, The Rapture, Crowded House/Neil and Tim Finn, James, the Waterboys, Black 47, Flogging Molly... All have written and performed music that means the world to me, and without the support of major labels, few, if any, would have become popular or been able to make the music that means so much to me.
This is stuff aimed at people without a whole lot of experience programming in first year CS courses.
1. Get a software engineering book, and study the concepts of software design. Even if you're just doing some small little "print a schedule" type assignment, thinking about how you would design a bigger project will help you.
2. Get a good book on algorithms. I'm partial to Introduction to Algorithms but there's lot's of good choices. So when your prof assigns you to do a project using a circular linked list, think about what might be better. But resist the temptation to smart off and try to do better, and complete the assignment the way (s)he says to. Perhaps ask the instructor what they wanted you to learn from the assignment if you feel that the algorithm is particularly inappropriate.
Don't just read the alogrithms, write them from scratch as well until you understand them. Be aware that some algorithms are completely different if you're using a language that starts arrays at [0] than at [1].
3. Take good technical writing courses. Many CS majors can't write well. Being able to clearly communicate is a great skill to have, regardless of what your position is, and it's a good way to differentiate yourself from the masses. Being able to write in American style English is something that many Indian/Chinese/etc. programmers won't be able to offer.
Take business courses, etc. Broaden your horizons in profitable ways.
4. Network, network, network. Not LANs and wireless, but people. They are the ones that will get you jobs in the future, who will provide you with sales leads and consulting. Mingle with people in the field. Mingle with business majors. Start it now, not in your senior year. Today's seniors may be the one's e-mailing you about a great position three years from now when you're about to graduate. I've seen very smart, very talented people sit for months without a job because they didn't start this process early.
5. Get out and enjoy yourself. You have the rest of your life for LAN parties and coding sessions. If you're in college and not working, you are likely never to have the same freedom that you do now. (Excepting unemployment...) Get out, go hiking, meet people of the appropriate sex, see concerts, learn to cook. Virtually no one dies wishing they'd spent more time in front of an LCD screen.
I highly (so to speak) advise avoiding coding under the influence of daytime cold medicine. The nighttime ones are not so bad, as they make me go to sleep and stay away from my keyboard. Dayquil on the other hand...
Well, the code was 100% accurate and fast, but when I went to refactor it, the logic was so bizarre that it was easier to rewrite it from scratch. It didn't run any faster [insert snide comment about my lack of skill here], but at least some random person could sit down and figure out what was going on afterwords.
So what, are you going to parrot the usual line that screwing over the artists is OK, because it helps bring down the big nasty publishers that you hate so much?
Do you think that the tales of "abuse" by distributors is new? Have you not heard the hundreds, thousands of songs bitching about record companies that have been recorded since the 60s? 50s? And yet, bands keep signing contracts... have you considered that there might be more to the business than you know about (I work in the music industry, most for small indy bands, though I have multi-grammy and platinum winning clients - what's your background)? Does it strike you as funny that Courtney Love only complains about record lables AFTER they spent millions of dollars making her a pop star rather than some drugged out widow of a rock star? Hmm...
I have friends who have gone from selling $500,000 profit worth of CDs per release to signing with record labels. (See my history for more details, I'm tired of typing it again and again.) Having heard all the songs/interviews whining about record labels, they do this of their own free will. Think they might know more than you do?
Remember how Steven King, one of the great pop writers of our lifespan, started an online experement with self publishing and gave it up as not-worthwhile, going back to the publishing industry? He's free to write his own contracts with them at this point; why would he go back to them if they didn't offer an advantage to the virtually free publishing that the internet offers?
P.S. If copywrite is so wrong, what have *you* offered to the public? Do you give anything back, or do you just take from others?