Re:Philosophy and physics overlap
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
Still, to quote Bertrand Russell "When a thousand people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing."
...richie
Re:Is it so hard to accept the possibility?
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
And the truth is..?
Just because certain event is very unlikely, it does not mean that it will never occur.
For example, flip a coin 50 times and write down the sequence of heads and tails. Now the probability of this particular event occuring is 1/2^50 (which is pretty small). Was it a miracle?
Do the same with 1000 flips. Is an event whose probability of occuring 1/2^1000 a miracle?
..but these kinds of books are written for people who can't handle the mathematics. To really understand physics in general and quantume mechanics in particular, you've got know the math.
) They apparently had NO contract or other written or verbal agreement giving them the right ot use the universities PRIVATELY owned network (it's not a public right, you know..). So.. instead of paying the appropriate fees to the university, they used a connection they had no business using. What's the problem here? They WERE stealing.
They are tuition paying students with accounts on OSU's computers. No?
This to me sounds like they had the perfect right to use the network.
Consider that the $24 price difference is not a fee but a discount for having a room without an ethernet connection.
So, they paid tuition, they had every right to use the network. What was the crime again?
So they weren't paying for the access; that's service theft. Technically, the university has the right to arrest them.
Just a minute. They had rightful access to the OSU ethernet from a computer on another floor. So what service were they actually stealing?
The rooms they were in are probably cheaper because they have no ethernet cables. These students got the cables (they probably had to buy them) and did the work of actually running them from their room to the hub.
They were allowed access to the network from another room. The rooms they were in did not have ethernet wires, so they were $24 cheaper (that's $24 per semester).
These guys went out and bought the cable and hooked it up. Now tell me again, what was it they were stealing?
Many of these artists work on their music full time, and so need to make a living from it.
Right. So they need to find a sponsor that is willing to pay for their work. Record companies do that today, but the artists must sell all the rights to their music and they completely loose control over their creations.
So, if the current model doesn't work, and neither does the live performance one, are there any alternatives?
There are alternatives. Start your own record label to produce and sell your music. Get a deal with a DJ or many DJs who play dance music in clubs, and let them have the fist shot at playing your stuff for a fee. Come up with a new piece for each weekend.
But why can't the internet be used to filter the stuff that I want to hear? Why can't the net be used to promote it as well? The cost of distribution via the Net is zero. If you encourage your listeners to copy the files you don't even need a big server.
The problem with record companies is that they spend too much money of the stuff that is not music at all, and to recoup their cost they need to sell millions of CDs at $18 a shot.
The artists I like will never appeal to such a large audience. Does that mean they should never be heard from?
I like to listen to a lot of jazz and blues. Some of the greatest jazz recordings probably never sold million copies. We are lucky that the musicians who made them prefered to make music rather than money.
It is sad and unfortunate that artists are often forced into unfair contracts by record companies. But without those companies is unlikely that these artists would ever become successful on their own.
I don't know. There were famous artists in past centuries, who managed to be famous and make a good living without the record companies. You may have heard of Bach or Mozart.
Right. So we should try and create a culture that encourages sharing of code, as long as we get proper credit. A lot of open source projects are exactly like that.
It takes hours and hours and days and days in the studio to produce this, and there's often no good way to perform it live. What about us? How do we get compensated?
Well, find someone willing to pay for your music or if you really are only interested in money become an investment banker.
While your experiences with they might be giants sound okay, I'd hardly assume that's how the rest of the music scene goes. Remember, they're a HUGE band, in a position where they have some influence. They also know they've got a LOT of loyal fans. Bands starting out don't have either of those luxuries.
I am sure than any band that's starting up would LOVE to have a free MP3 of their songs shared by 1 million listeners.
And the thing is, this applies not just to music, but other forms of art as well. Take visual art. How can someone who makes digital imagery (stills, or animations, movies...) make a living by doing "live performances"? What about software developers? These are all really special cases of the same thing: digital media.
But most programmers today don't get paid for each copy of their program. Rather we are commisioned to develop software. I wrote a lot of banking software and I was a salaried worker when I did. The bank did not sell the software, nor do I get paid each time they use it.
Composers, painters and skulptors often are paid to do a specific work, without getting any money for each "viewing" of the work.
The point is that you get paid for working, not for sitting around and collecting royalties.
Jon is not quite saying this, but the net is actually blurring the line between producers and consumers, or between performers and audiences.
That's why the old-fashioned models fails on the net. Consider who the author of this thread is? Is it Jon? Not really, he just started the thread.
When Jon posts an article I'm more interested in the comments people make than in the actual article. The comments are often more insightful.
...richie
Re:You're Lucky you even got hired for Java!
on
Finding a Linux Job
·
· Score: 1
Not me:-) I hope to programming for a while yet.
Yeah!
For some reason people consider programming like an athletic skill, which fades with age. I think that programming is more like playing jazz. You get better with age.
Some of the best jazz musicians (Duke Ellington, Miles Davis etc) performed and created new music until the very end of their lives.
I expect to be writing open source code when I'm 64....
The really depressing thing about Napster and all those MP3 sharing programs, is that being an artist will no longer be a viable employment, as there won't be money in it. But what can I say, I have 1gb worth of MP3's on my comp.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
The artists make a living by performing and creating new music. Not by pressing and distributing CDs. The record companies make money by manufacturing and distributing CDs. It's the record companies that are being made obsolete by the Internet.
The key word here is successful. Being polite, acknowledging everyone's contribution, and keeping the coders happy is important regardless of if it's open-source or not. In a corporate setting, you can browbeat your staff into writing anything you want them to. However, this approach is unlikely to result in a very successful outcome -- your end product will be (at best) mediocre, and you'll probably drive your best people away in the process.
But how do you judge success? Some are obvious (eg. Linux), but others less so. For example, my most successful project eGTK has about 4 to 5 active developers, about 60 subscribers to our mailing list and I don't really know how many users. Does this qualify?
In a corporation you can assign tasks to people. In an open source project you have to hope that someone will come and say "oh, that's interesting let me code that".
Also, I don't believe that you can lead an open-source project without coding yourself, whereas I've worked on many projects where the project manager did not write a line of code.
Another big difference between open-source and corporate project is schedules. OSS project have none - this makes a big difference.
I've been programming professionally for nearly 12 years, and have worked on a lot of different projects in that time.
Well, I've been coding for money for about twice as long...:-)
The real question here is, I think, "How do you run a successful open-source software project." The answer is that running a successful open-source project isn't much different than running a sucessful closed-source project. From a programming & leadership standpoint, there isn't really much difference between the two.
Actually I think there is a lot of difference. In an OSS project you cannot force anyone to do anything, and it would be very hard to lead a project without doing a lot of coding yourself.
You must stay polite at all times, and make sure to acknowledge everyone's contribution. After all the developers aren't getting paid to code.
Actually I think that email is a secondary form of developer communication. The first is the source code for the project. You want to see what other developers are thinking, read the code.
I think that this continual code review contributes to quality of the software more than anything else.
By using the software, parents are implicitly agreeing that they agree with the censorware's author's idea of what and what is not acceptable.
Not exactly. The parents never get to see the list of the blocked sites so they cannot check that in fact they agree with publisher on the choice of sites, since the list is secret.
Also what about having the parents add or remove items from the list? Is it possible?
The ability to make numerous copies of something is NOT really the issue, when you buy a CD you are at least paying a share of all of the time that went into producing that work - which is not just the artist's time to play that tune once - it's the hours of studio time, it's the years of practicing and honing their craft - you're not buying a piece of plastic, you're buying someones time.
The problem is that less than 10% of the price goes to the artist and the rest goes to the person making and distributing the plastic. Furthermore, to get this artists are forced to sign away the rights to their own creations.
The Internet removes the need for making and distributing plastic.
I agree that it makes sense to do some of the innovation ourselves, but we can't depend upon that for our consumer rights - we have to simply say that the Government has no right to regulate our private use of products we pay for.
The problem is that individual citizens are more and more disconnected from the political process and corporations can use their vast amounts of money to get many laws passed.
You're rights are being sold by your congressmen.
I'm in the middle of reading a rather depressing book by Arianna Huffington, "How to Overthrow the Goverment", in which she details some of these nasty connections between big bussiness and the goverment.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because certain event is very unlikely, it does not mean that it will never occur.
For example, flip a coin 50 times and write down the sequence of heads and tails. Now the probability of this particular event occuring is 1/2^50 (which is pretty small). Was it a miracle?
Do the same with 1000 flips. Is an event whose probability of occuring 1/2^1000 a miracle?
No yet. Try 10,000. See...
Sorry...
They are tuition paying students with accounts on OSU's computers. No?
This to me sounds like they had the perfect right to use the network.
Consider that the $24 price difference is not a fee but a discount for having a room without an ethernet connection.
So, they paid tuition, they had every right to use the network. What was the crime again?
Just a minute. They had rightful access to the OSU ethernet from a computer on another floor. So what service were they actually stealing?
The rooms they were in are probably cheaper because they have no ethernet cables. These students got the cables (they probably had to buy them) and did the work of actually running them from their room to the hub.
I don't understand where the problem is.
These guys went out and bought the cable and hooked it up. Now tell me again, what was it they were stealing?
Many of these artists work on their music full time, and so need to make a living from it.
Right. So they need to find a sponsor that is willing to pay for their work. Record companies do that today, but the artists must sell all the rights to their music and they completely loose control over their creations.
So, if the current model doesn't work, and neither does the live performance one, are there any alternatives?
There are alternatives. Start your own record label to produce and sell your music. Get a deal with a DJ or many DJs who play dance music in clubs, and let them have the fist shot at playing your stuff for a fee. Come up with a new piece for each weekend.
Use your imagination...
The problem with record companies is that they spend too much money of the stuff that is not music at all, and to recoup their cost they need to sell millions of CDs at $18 a shot.
The artists I like will never appeal to such a large audience. Does that mean they should never be heard from?
I like to listen to a lot of jazz and blues. Some of the greatest jazz recordings probably never sold million copies. We are lucky that the musicians who made them prefered to make music rather than money.
I don't know. There were famous artists in past centuries, who managed to be famous and make a good living without the record companies. You may have heard of Bach or Mozart.
Well, find someone willing to pay for your music or if you really are only interested in money become an investment banker.
I am sure than any band that's starting up would LOVE to have a free MP3 of their songs shared by 1 million listeners.
But most programmers today don't get paid for each copy of their program. Rather we are commisioned to develop software. I wrote a lot of banking software and I was a salaried worker when I did. The bank did not sell the software, nor do I get paid each time they use it.
Composers, painters and skulptors often are paid to do a specific work, without getting any money for each "viewing" of the work.
The point is that you get paid for working, not for sitting around and collecting royalties.
That's why the old-fashioned models fails on the net. Consider who the author of this thread is? Is it Jon? Not really, he just started the thread.
When Jon posts an article I'm more interested in the comments people make than in the actual article. The comments are often more insightful.
Yeah!
For some reason people consider programming like an athletic skill, which fades with age. I think that programming is more like playing jazz. You get better with age.
Some of the best jazz musicians (Duke Ellington, Miles Davis etc) performed and created new music until the very end of their lives.
I expect to be writing open source code when I'm 64....
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
The artists make a living by performing and creating new music. Not by pressing and distributing CDs. The record companies make money by manufacturing and distributing CDs. It's the record companies that are being made obsolete by the Internet.
But how do you judge success? Some are obvious (eg. Linux), but others less so. For example, my most successful project eGTK has about 4 to 5 active developers, about 60 subscribers to our mailing list and I don't really know how many users. Does this qualify?
In a corporation you can assign tasks to people. In an open source project you have to hope that someone will come and say "oh, that's interesting let me code that".
Also, I don't believe that you can lead an open-source project without coding yourself, whereas I've worked on many projects where the project manager did not write a line of code.
Another big difference between open-source and corporate project is schedules. OSS project have none - this makes a big difference.
I've been programming professionally for nearly 12 years, and have worked on a lot of different projects in that time.
Well, I've been coding for money for about twice as long... :-)
Actually I think there is a lot of difference. In an OSS project you cannot force anyone to do anything, and it would be very hard to lead a project without doing a lot of coding yourself.
You must stay polite at all times, and make sure to acknowledge everyone's contribution. After all the developers aren't getting paid to code.
I think that this continual code review contributes to quality of the software more than anything else.
Not exactly. The parents never get to see the list of the blocked sites so they cannot check that in fact they agree with publisher on the choice of sites, since the list is secret.
Also what about having the parents add or remove items from the list? Is it possible?
Cool. I'm listening to it right now....
The problem is that less than 10% of the price goes to the artist and the rest goes to the person making and distributing the plastic. Furthermore, to get this artists are forced to sign away the rights to their own creations.
The Internet removes the need for making and distributing plastic.
The problem is that individual citizens are more and more disconnected from the political process and corporations can use their vast amounts of money to get many laws passed.
You're rights are being sold by your congressmen.
I'm in the middle of reading a rather depressing book by Arianna Huffington, "How to Overthrow the Goverment", in which she details some of these nasty connections between big bussiness and the goverment.