We fought all these years to hear the message from the other side, and all they have to tell us is "Drink Coca Cola?"
Actually they discovered that it's still the same. Instead of a dictator telling people what to think and what to do, we have corporations telling people how to think (advertising and the "news") and what to do (M$ Windows). Instead of Stalin, we have Bill Gates. Actually it's worse than that. Every sector of the economy is controlled by a different dictator who only cares about domination and hoarding money.
Arrogance - Most people are not willing to go to jail for this.
I would not be willing to go to jail for this, but it has nothing to do with arrogance. I have a family to take care of. Not everyone can be a revolutionary.
When slashdotters insert "NOSPAM" in their email addresses, making them incorrect and misleading, it's fine.
The difference is that posting on Slashdot is *not* email. You have to go to Shashdot which means it is a choice you make. Email comes to you and hence is a burden. If the sender fakes the address, only then is it forgery.
If the publishers released their books in plaintext or HTML, the effects would be disastrous.
I think this is silly. You know the same could be said of software and look what M$ turned into.
I just bought a copy of Design Patterns by GOF on CD. It is in HTML format. It was cheaper than paper - probably because it is easier to copy. It's more convenient for me because I can read it at work and no one will notice! I certainly would not have bought it if it was in e-book format.
IIRC, it doesn't DROP the records, it simply does not retreive & display them after the table they reside in gets to be a certain size.
That's fine I suppose. So if I go to a jewelry store and try to buy an expensive diamond and I say I want to pay in cash. Then I say here's the money, you can't see it because it's invisible. Don't you think I would get laughed out of the store? The effect is the same, it's not really there.
If someone suggests using a M$ database server, they should get laughed out of a job.
I can't believe all the negative postings about Aeron chairs in the office. I had the fortune of having one at my last client site. They are great. Sure they are not for everyone.
But what really bothers me is the posts saying that they are a waste of money. They are not. Since when should programmers be forced to work in an office based on the cheapest stuff money can buy? The chair is very important for your health because a good one (properly configured) can save you from permanent aches and pains later in life. Another point is that they are a perk used to hire good employees. Let's say you are a good programmer and you have 2 job offers in front of you for a similar position. Now one job offers Aeron chairs for everyone and the other has the cheapest crap from Office Depot. Which would you choose? I know what I would do.
I've worked in an office with the cheapest furniture possible and you know what? It was ugly as all get-out. It was depressing to come to the office every day. I quit after a few months.
People, there is no reason that we have to work in sub-standard conditions. Aeron chairs are a bargain at twice the price. We should expect to work in nice offices and it shouldn't be considered a luxury. Why do some programmers feel like they should work with the cheapest stuff all day while their executives doubtless have huge offices with real wood furniture and better than (or at least more $$$$ than) Aeron chairs.
The watermark each CD sold with a unique serial number embedded into the music. Once an MP3 is rip'd from this CD, the record label would be able to determine whose copy an MP3 came from.
Besides the fact that this would be very hard, you can always buy a CD with cash and not be identified.
Actually, burn-in-store gives you the opportunity to uniquely tag the CD, and tie it to the person who bought it. When it shows up on KaZaA or wherever, you know exactly who put it there.
I just cracked the advanced *32-bit* encryption scheme used on Microsoft IIS with my hi-tech Pentium processor - even with the logic bug. Boy did it heat up my apartment doing all those calculations - I have the AC on and it's the dead of Winter here in Siberia! I found out this *top secret* information from the source code about what IIS stands for:
Also, when they are stupid enough to put an 800 type number up, call from a *pay phone*. Why? Because it is untraceable and it costs the spammer whatever the pay phone costs ($0.35 in most of the USA right now) plus long distance charges. I keep a list of all the spammers phone numbers that I need to put on the internet for all to benefit.
Last I saw, OS X comes with CD buring software, a pretty decent movie maker, DVD authoring software, a decent mail client, and much more. Where do you draw the line?
This is so ignorant it is laughable. All of those software components can be removed completely from the hard drive *without* affecting the OS. That is completely different from winbloze which integrates them. Fact is, you cannot completely remove IE from winbloze due to all the libraries that the rest of the OS rely's on.
In fact, all of those software applications that Apple includes have superior 3rd party competitors.
Apple gives you enough to get you going, but leaves the best implementation for 3rd party developers. This is in stark contrast to M$ who clearly tries to kill competitors.
Verizon has to be one the worst companies in existance. I agree that union labor is partly to blame. My Verizon phone line is really terrible quality. I never can get higher than 26.4 on a modem because of the poor line quality. Plus my phone has gone out about 4 times this past year. This last occurance I managed to get them to finally put a NIC box on the outside of my house. Now I don't have to answer the dumb question of Are you sure it's not your internal lines? nonsense. BTW, it was always the Verizon line being down and not my lines. I have seen, I'm not kidding here, Verizon trucks in my neighborhood every day for the last couple of years.
Anyway, Starpower is bringing a new fiber optic line into my neighborhood and they are offering phone service through it (as well as cable)!! I already told them I want to sign up as soon as possible. I have had dreams about the moment I no longer have to rely on Verizon for anything! Strangely enough, Verizon is digging new phone lines for my neighborhood at the same time. We have 2 work crews now - it's like a war zone here.
I've been telling those idiots that we needed new lines for years and now that there's real competition, they finally give it to us. Well sorry Verizon, too little, too late. Hello Starpower!
What to make signficiant change to the
company? Get large groups of people to buy stock in the company, and change the damn company yourselves.
You are forgetting one simple fact, one vote per share. While your idea sounds good in theory, the truth is that the average consumer, even banded together by the 1000s will have zero impact on companies. You can own a few hundred shares at the most, maybe a few thousand if you concentrate your resources. Even if you get 1000 people to do the same who think like you do (good luck!) that's something like 1 million shares (at 1000 shares per person). Well the rich people own far more than that individually and there are a bunch of them. They are called the CEO, the board of directors, the high up execs, etc. I won't even bother to mention the mutual funds and companies which do things like buy a few percent of the company (many millions of shares depending on the company of course). Us non-rich and non-privileged people (speaking for myself of course) don't stand a chance against that.
I am envious of Japan and their love of technology. Americans are downright Luddites and we are going to become a 2nd rate country if this continues. I speak as an American living in the USA.
Telephones are one area that other countries completely do better than the US. Americans simply do not embrace the new technologys. The reason:
We are too damn conservative!
Too much corporate power has caused monopolies which send us back to the stone ages. Bell invented the telephone over 100 years ago in the US. We were the leaders in communications for decades. But what happened. F****** Ma Bell. That monopoly stifled progress until the government broke them up - somewhat at least, now the monster is reforming. The standard phone is basically the same boring technology used 100 years ago. The main advances have been touch tone (which actually costs more $$ even though it is cheaper to use - look it up in your phone book), automated switching to remove operators (because they were too cheap to pay for them), and caller ID. Everything else is silly. My phone line quality *sucks*. F*** you Bell Atlantic - I mean Verizon.
But companies are not the only ones to blame. It's also the American lemming mentality to follow whatever is perceived to be the "leader". Witness the rule of Micro$oft. Low quality, high prices and people eat it up.
Come on America - Think different (with all due respect to Apple). Stop being satisfied with corporate control of your lives.
OK, rant over. I could, and should, write an entire book about American apathy and mediocrity.
The problem with the business model of spending $1 Million on a product, giving it away for free and then depending on charging for support to make
money...
Is it encourages building crap products.
This also applies to commercial software. I mean why else do companies charge for tech support and have paid upgrades?
But this is where competition is supposed to step in, the better products will get used by more people and thus have an advantage over the crappy products (free or otherwise). If M$ gets their way, there will be no competition and hence we get more of their (already) crappy products.
Re:Broadcast TV generally isn't worth it anyways
on
Digital TV Approaches
·
· Score: 1
As for music, I'm now buying way more than ever before because I'm listening to the radio instead and hearing way more that I ever heard on MTV.
I hate to burst your bubble but the radio sucks almost as much as MTV. Whereas MTV and VH-1 are owned by one large company (Viacom ?), commercial radio is basically owned by 3 large corporations and the selections are payed for by music companies. I stopped listening years ago and only tune to NPR (National Public Radio) because it is not a commercial for manufactured crap like Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, Slim Shady, etc. Now college radio stations are cool because they actually play music they like, not based on the dictates of corporate greed.
There was a good Salon article about this a while back.
"let's sue gracenote for stealing the information that we have all given them to create their db in the first place... "
Ummm.. you GAVE them that information, they can do whatever they want with it. Sure it's mean and nasty, but that's the way to world works. We should have thought about it before giving it away.
Actually, there is a legal precedent for this. A long time ago, AOL used volunteers to administrate their user groups (or something like that - I never used AOL). Well those *free* volunteers who had never signed any contract (I think) ended up (class action) suing AOL and *won*.
uhh, have you ever worked for a software company? Have you ever looked at their code? In all the companies I've worked in they have had coding standards. You submit code to be reviewed that isn't up to the coding standard (that means, is not clear enough, does not have sensible comment blocks, does not do what it is supposed to do, does not have the proper asserts and safety checks in it, etc) and your code gets rejected. You have to fix the shit before you submit.
Well in all companies I've worked at - Fortune 500 ones - the inhouse software *is* crap and poorly written. They do nothing like what you say above. Standards are usually left to the particular programmer, if they have any, and thus most programs have many "standards" in them.
Let's boycott a tax-subsidized train sytem.
The fewer people who ride, the less far that free money will have to spread. If you really want to hurt Amtrak, lobby Congress to cut off federal funding.
And then what will happen? More people will use our subsidized road system.
The most recent information a quick google search turned up was that Amtrak got $555 million in 1999.
My *state* (Maryland), got more money than that to subsidize its roads. Less train users means more car drivers. This means the more traffic and road repairs/building. Why do you favor giving money to GM and Ford?
When you guys get laid off without severance pay in a couple of months because your department's project is being moved to a subcontractor in Russia
or India, let's see how anti-union you are.
I'm not afraid of that situation. While I'm not denying that happens, Fortune 500 companies in the USA do not work that way. Business deals are made at golf courses and fancy dinners. It's a giant old-boys network. Why do you think so many CEOs are white males? Same with presidents. The USA is a still a white male dominated country. The reason most hi-tech *stays* in the USA is because large consulting companies keep it here. The Indian programmers can't play golf to save their life and that's why I still have a job. In fact, my client is going to be hiring very soon for my project. Out of all my friends, I've never known a single one to lose a hi-tech job to work outsourced to a foreign country. Chapter 11 sure, but that's it. Please take your unions and shove them, I am not a commodity and I'm willing to play the game based on how good my skills are, not my "seniority".
Slashdot Mirror
We fought all these years to hear the message from the other side, and all they have to tell us is "Drink Coca Cola?"
Actually they discovered that it's still the same. Instead of a dictator telling people what to think and what to do, we have corporations telling people how to think (advertising and the "news") and what to do (M$ Windows). Instead of Stalin, we have Bill Gates. Actually it's worse than that. Every sector of the economy is controlled by a different dictator who only cares about domination and hoarding money.
Arrogance - Most people are not willing to go to jail for this.
I would not be willing to go to jail for this, but it has nothing to do with arrogance. I have a family to take care of. Not everyone can be a revolutionary.
When slashdotters insert "NOSPAM" in their email addresses, making them incorrect and misleading, it's fine.
The difference is that posting on Slashdot is *not* email. You have to go to Shashdot which means it is a choice you make. Email comes to you and hence is a burden. If the sender fakes the address, only then is it forgery.
If the publishers released their books in plaintext or HTML, the effects would be disastrous.
I think this is silly. You know the same could be said of software and look what M$ turned into.
I just bought a copy of Design Patterns by GOF on CD. It is in HTML format. It was cheaper than paper - probably because it is easier to copy. It's more convenient for me because I can read it at work and no one will notice! I certainly would not have bought it if it was in e-book format.
IIRC, it doesn't DROP the records, it simply does not retreive & display them after the table they reside in gets to be a certain size.
That's fine I suppose. So if I go to a jewelry store and try to buy an expensive diamond and I say I want to pay in cash. Then I say here's the money, you can't see it because it's invisible. Don't you think I would get laughed out of the store? The effect is the same, it's not really there.
If someone suggests using a M$ database server, they should get laughed out of a job.
I can't believe all the negative postings about Aeron chairs in the office. I had the fortune of having one at my last client site. They are great. Sure they are not for everyone.
But what really bothers me is the posts saying that they are a waste of money. They are not. Since when should programmers be forced to work in an office based on the cheapest stuff money can buy? The chair is very important for your health because a good one (properly configured) can save you from permanent aches and pains later in life. Another point is that they are a perk used to hire good employees. Let's say you are a good programmer and you have 2 job offers in front of you for a similar position. Now one job offers Aeron chairs for everyone and the other has the cheapest crap from Office Depot. Which would you choose? I know what I would do.
I've worked in an office with the cheapest furniture possible and you know what? It was ugly as all get-out. It was depressing to come to the office every day. I quit after a few months.
People, there is no reason that we have to work in sub-standard conditions. Aeron chairs are a bargain at twice the price. We should expect to work in nice offices and it shouldn't be considered a luxury. Why do some programmers feel like they should work with the cheapest stuff all day while their executives doubtless have huge offices with real wood furniture and better than (or at least more $$$$ than) Aeron chairs.
The watermark each CD sold with a unique serial number embedded into the music. Once an MP3 is rip'd from this CD, the record label would be able to determine whose copy an MP3 came from.
Besides the fact that this would be very hard, you can always buy a CD with cash and not be identified.
Actually, burn-in-store gives you the opportunity to uniquely tag the CD, and tie it to the person who bought it. When it shows up on KaZaA or wherever, you know exactly who put it there.
No it doesn't. Just pay in cash anonymously.
I just cracked the advanced *32-bit* encryption scheme used on Microsoft IIS with my hi-tech Pentium processor - even with the logic bug. Boy did it heat up my apartment doing all those calculations - I have the AC on and it's the dead of Winter here in Siberia! I found out this *top secret* information from the source code about what IIS stands for:
No! You can put anything in your prefs.js but you have to quit Mozilla *first*. Then they will stay permanently.
Also, when they are stupid enough to put an 800 type number up, call from a *pay phone*. Why? Because it is untraceable and it costs the spammer whatever the pay phone costs ($0.35 in most of the USA right now) plus long distance charges. I keep a list of all the spammers phone numbers that I need to put on the internet for all to benefit.
Last I saw, OS X comes with CD buring software, a pretty decent movie maker, DVD authoring software, a decent mail client, and much more. Where do you draw the line?
This is so ignorant it is laughable. All of those software components can be removed completely from the hard drive *without* affecting the OS. That is completely different from winbloze which integrates them. Fact is, you cannot completely remove IE from winbloze due to all the libraries that the rest of the OS rely's on.
In fact, all of those software applications that Apple includes have superior 3rd party competitors.
Apple gives you enough to get you going, but leaves the best implementation for 3rd party developers. This is in stark contrast to M$ who clearly tries to kill competitors.
Quartz is based on Display Postscript
No, it's based on Display PDF - big difference actually.
Verizon has to be one the worst companies in existance. I agree that union labor is partly to blame. My Verizon phone line is really terrible quality. I never can get higher than 26.4 on a modem because of the poor line quality. Plus my phone has gone out about 4 times this past year. This last occurance I managed to get them to finally put a NIC box on the outside of my house. Now I don't have to answer the dumb question of Are you sure it's not your internal lines? nonsense. BTW, it was always the Verizon line being down and not my lines. I have seen, I'm not kidding here, Verizon trucks in my neighborhood every day for the last couple of years.
Anyway, Starpower is bringing a new fiber optic line into my neighborhood and they are offering phone service through it (as well as cable)!! I already told them I want to sign up as soon as possible. I have had dreams about the moment I no longer have to rely on Verizon for anything! Strangely enough, Verizon is digging new phone lines for my neighborhood at the same time. We have 2 work crews now - it's like a war zone here.
I've been telling those idiots that we needed new lines for years and now that there's real competition, they finally give it to us. Well sorry Verizon, too little, too late. Hello Starpower!
What to make signficiant change to the company? Get large groups of people to buy stock in the company, and change the damn company yourselves.
You are forgetting one simple fact, one vote per share. While your idea sounds good in theory, the truth is that the average consumer, even banded together by the 1000s will have zero impact on companies. You can own a few hundred shares at the most, maybe a few thousand if you concentrate your resources. Even if you get 1000 people to do the same who think like you do (good luck!) that's something like 1 million shares (at 1000 shares per person). Well the rich people own far more than that individually and there are a bunch of them. They are called the CEO, the board of directors, the high up execs, etc. I won't even bother to mention the mutual funds and companies which do things like buy a few percent of the company (many millions of shares depending on the company of course). Us non-rich and non-privileged people (speaking for myself of course) don't stand a chance against that.
I am envious of Japan and their love of technology. Americans are downright Luddites and we are going to become a 2nd rate country if this continues. I speak as an American living in the USA.
Telephones are one area that other countries completely do better than the US. Americans simply do not embrace the new technologys. The reason:
We are too damn conservative!
Too much corporate power has caused monopolies which send us back to the stone ages. Bell invented the telephone over 100 years ago in the US. We were the leaders in communications for decades. But what happened. F****** Ma Bell. That monopoly stifled progress until the government broke them up - somewhat at least, now the monster is reforming. The standard phone is basically the same boring technology used 100 years ago. The main advances have been touch tone (which actually costs more $$ even though it is cheaper to use - look it up in your phone book), automated switching to remove operators (because they were too cheap to pay for them), and caller ID. Everything else is silly. My phone line quality *sucks*. F*** you Bell Atlantic - I mean Verizon.
But companies are not the only ones to blame. It's also the American lemming mentality to follow whatever is perceived to be the "leader". Witness the rule of Micro$oft. Low quality, high prices and people eat it up.
Come on America - Think different (with all due respect to Apple). Stop being satisfied with corporate control of your lives.
OK, rant over. I could, and should, write an entire book about American apathy and mediocrity.
On the other hand, I have no sympathy for roxio. Their software is pretty low quality and high priced.
You obviously have not used Toast, their premier product. Oh, wait, you must be using a PC... it's no wonder you don't like it.
The problem with the business model of spending $1 Million on a product, giving it away for free and then depending on charging for support to make money...
Is it encourages building crap products.
This also applies to commercial software. I mean why else do companies charge for tech support and have paid upgrades?
But this is where competition is supposed to step in, the better products will get used by more people and thus have an advantage over the crappy products (free or otherwise). If M$ gets their way, there will be no competition and hence we get more of their (already) crappy products.
As for music, I'm now buying way more than ever before because I'm listening to the radio instead and hearing way more that I ever heard on MTV.
I hate to burst your bubble but the radio sucks almost as much as MTV. Whereas MTV and VH-1 are owned by one large company (Viacom ?), commercial radio is basically owned by 3 large corporations and the selections are payed for by music companies. I stopped listening years ago and only tune to NPR (National Public Radio) because it is not a commercial for manufactured crap like Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, Slim Shady, etc. Now college radio stations are cool because they actually play music they like, not based on the dictates of corporate greed.
There was a good Salon article about this a while back.
You have every right to put your message out to the world at your own expense.
I simply disagree with this assertion. For me all of these forms of spam cost me something far more important. My time. Ban it all.
The funniest thing about this comment is the moderation. It is given a 5, *insightful*!! Even funnier is that I agree with that moderation.
"let's sue gracenote for stealing the information that we have all given them to create their db in the first place... " Ummm.. you GAVE them that information, they can do whatever they want with it. Sure it's mean and nasty, but that's the way to world works. We should have thought about it before giving it away.
Actually, there is a legal precedent for this. A long time ago, AOL used volunteers to administrate their user groups (or something like that - I never used AOL). Well those *free* volunteers who had never signed any contract (I think) ended up (class action) suing AOL and *won*.
uhh, have you ever worked for a software company? Have you ever looked at their code? In all the companies I've worked in they have had coding standards. You submit code to be reviewed that isn't up to the coding standard (that means, is not clear enough, does not have sensible comment blocks, does not do what it is supposed to do, does not have the proper asserts and safety checks in it, etc) and your code gets rejected. You have to fix the shit before you submit.
Well in all companies I've worked at - Fortune 500 ones - the inhouse software *is* crap and poorly written. They do nothing like what you say above. Standards are usually left to the particular programmer, if they have any, and thus most programs have many "standards" in them.
Let's boycott a tax-subsidized train sytem.
The fewer people who ride, the less far that free money will have to spread. If you really want to hurt Amtrak, lobby Congress to cut off federal funding.
And then what will happen? More people will use our subsidized road system.
The most recent information a quick google search turned up was that Amtrak got $555 million in 1999.
My *state* (Maryland), got more money than that to subsidize its roads. Less train users means more car drivers. This means the more traffic and road repairs/building. Why do you favor giving money to GM and Ford?
When you guys get laid off without severance pay in a couple of months because your department's project is being moved to a subcontractor in Russia or India, let's see how anti-union you are.
I'm not afraid of that situation. While I'm not denying that happens, Fortune 500 companies in the USA do not work that way. Business deals are made at golf courses and fancy dinners. It's a giant old-boys network. Why do you think so many CEOs are white males? Same with presidents. The USA is a still a white male dominated country. The reason most hi-tech *stays* in the USA is because large consulting companies keep it here. The Indian programmers can't play golf to save their life and that's why I still have a job. In fact, my client is going to be hiring very soon for my project. Out of all my friends, I've never known a single one to lose a hi-tech job to work outsourced to a foreign country. Chapter 11 sure, but that's it. Please take your unions and shove them, I am not a commodity and I'm willing to play the game based on how good my skills are, not my "seniority".