As stated earlier, and in other posts, you have essentially answered your own question. The answer depends on how persuasive you are. Management is not going to allow even antiquated code out to pasture in this manner if you cannot rationalize a business (ie: MONEY) reason that they should permit it.
I went through this myself about 6 years ago with some code I wrote for my employer, and that's what I thought too. I went up to my department head and laid the economic arguments out (all of which came to fruition for them, BTW). He called in our top software guy in his group to discuss it with.
The funny thing is, economics was not what decided it. It was the moral argument that did it. In this case, that we make use of a large amount of OpenSource software tools to do our work here, and its only right to give back. Other than myself, and my manager agreeing at the outset that we would never use it ourselves as a product or competitive advantage, financial issues were never even brought up!
At the time I was a big ESR believer, so this was a huge shock to me. Now that I have seen the process first hand, I've come to the conclusion that in the great ESR/Stallman (or OpenSource/Free Software) debate, Stallman is not only Right, but right. You can perhaps motivate a few pathalogically greedy people with economic arguments. But if you want true power; the ability to really motivate people, you have to talk about morality. What is Right? To toally remove moral arguments like the "OpenSource" camp is trying to do only serves to emasculate the movement.
Windows Vista has "Support" for DRM, which means content creators such as music and movie makers can CHOOSE to use DRM... IF they want to. HOWEVER, there is no "DRM FORCE" on the user.
...except that I can't do multi-monitor gaming in Vista anymore. This was disabled so that Vista can "support" DRM. It doesn't matter whether I ever view DVDs on my computer or not (hint: I don't). I can't take anything out of the OS to disable this feature and get my multi-monitor gaming back. So yes, in a way their DRM is being forced on me.
I actually rather like Vista, suprisingly. Yes, even the UAC (it prevents my kids from installing random crap they found online while I'm at work).
However, there is one "feature" of Vista that would have been a deal-breaker for me, had I known about it ahead of time. I *still* haven't seen anyone talking about it publicly. So I'm here to warn you all that if you upgrade to Vista, you will loose multi-monitor span. As a gamer who loves the extra peripheral vision provided by using two monitors, I will *not* go back to one.
For those unfamiliar with multi-monitor setups, I don't want you to get me wrong: Vista supports multiple monitors just fine. However, most games don't. I think there are internal DirectX problems with making objects that have parts on two different display devices at once. "Span" mode is where your video driver internally combines the monitors itself, and presents the OS with what looks like one large monitor. This shows up in nearly every game as one extra wide resolution.
Apparently, allowing users to install device drivers which present the OS with a "virtual" display device like this could potentially allow a digial way around Vista's DRM, so its not allowed. In plain english, you can't play games multi-monitor because of Vista's retarded DRM!
The only way I found around this is with one of these nifty Matrox devices. They are kinda expensive though. The full digital model will run you about $300. The semi-digital two head model is more like $200. So if you are a multi-monitor gamer, plan on adding about $300 to the cost of any planned upgrade that includes Vista.
My only Vista complaint is that it 'forgets' about my printer. Every now and then, usually when I need to print something asap, I sent a document to my printer and nada. I take a look and it thinks my printer is offline. The only solution I have found so far is to delete the printer and re-add it.
Out of curiosity, is your printer added by IP address? And does your printer get its IP address via DHCP (rather than having a static IP)? I got a new HP laser printer for Xmas, and that's my situation. I have to delete and readd the darn thing pretty much every time I print because of this. If you don't do that, it looks "offline", and documents sent to it never print (of course).
I suppose there's probably a way to add it by dns name, but I couldn't figure out how to do that in 5 minutes fiddling with it, and I don't really feel like blowing a whole day off futzing with it. Too many murlocs need killin'.
If the whole premise of this is the best "game machine" of all time, I have to argue that the Commodore 64 was the best game console of all time.
BS. The Atari 800 was a contemporary system which was superior in pretty much every way. It was even more of a console than the C64, as it took ROM cartriges (the standard console media of the time).
Most of those games you mention were Atari 800 games ported to the C64 later. Heck, Electronic Arts was created to build games for the Atari 800.
It's easy to say the real artists will be the ones making the money from live performance again, but what if I'm a songwriter but not a singer, or a playwright with no interest or talent for being a director/producer, or a novelist, or... you get the idea.
I'm a coder, but not a businessman. Is that close enough? I still get paid. My company does not make its money off of copyright either. It makes its money selling time on the hardware that my software (and that of hundreds of my co-workers) operates. Occasionally it sells the hardware (along with the software that makes it work) outright too.
I could see plenty of situations where a singer might want to pay someone to write them a new song, or a producer might want to pay someone to write them a great new play to produce, all to be paid for by the proceeds from the performances.
None of this auction crap. Just let the corporations and the FCC pick their most athletic (least nerdy?) employees, and pit them against each other on the Eliminator(tm)
No good. Chuck Norris works for Viacom. No one else would even bother to compete.
Both C and Java have their purposes. I'd use C to teach pointers, memory management, recursion and maybe even complex data structures and algorithms.
C would be an extremely good language to use to teach pointers and memory management with, as you can't really get by in C without them. For those other purposes, I have to disagree.
From my own experience, I never really grokked recursion until I took a course that used Lisp. Its the basic method of iteration there (it has traditional loops too, but they are really a bolt-on to the language). It also teaches functional-style programming. Functional programming is something that can be applied in most languages, but only functional languages like Lisp really *force* you to learn it. So I really think a good CS education should include one sememster using a functional programming language.
For learning data structures, C is really inferior simply because it isn't strongly typed enough. Not that it can't be done well in C, but a language that is strict about type compatability (like Pascal, Ada, or Modula-2) forces you to think hard about the design of the types in your program. Perhaps pros can do without that, but students should be forced to do this for a while.
Re:The Next Medical Malpractice?
on
Geekonomics
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· Score: 1
OK, so now that doctors are operating at near-zero profits, malpractice lawyers need a new profession to plunder.
I've heard doctors claim that too. The day I see one living in a cheaper house than mine and driving a crappier car than mine is the day I start believing it.
I suspect their *real* problem (much like the RIAA) is loss of control. It used to be that their judgments went practically unquestioned. I remember doctors being notorious for having "God Complexes". Now they have HMO's telling them what they can and can't charge and what they can and can't prescribe, internet-using patients who can sanity check diagnoses themselves, and yes, lawyers actually having the gall to hold them accountable for any bad decisions that end up hurting people. They still make much more money than blue-collar workers, but all the reverence they used to command is gone.
I was going to post this myself, so I'm glad to see it.
One thing I'd add is that there is, as you mentioned, the possbility that the humans brought their palm fruit with them.
There's also a possible indirect relationship. If fragile humans in rikety boats can make it that far, why couldn't palm friuts? After all, they are *designed* (or evolved if you prefer) to spread to islands in just this way.
Notice that it refers to MMOs and not necessarily MMORPGs which, IMHO, is the most common kind of MMO. The two primary activities in MMORPGs are questing and grinding, and I don't think those activities lend themselves to accomplishing the goals NASA has set out.
You could pick up "Lobying" as a profession, and grind Congress for reputation.
The singular usage of "they" is attested all the way back to Shakespearean times (in fact, to Shakespeare himself)
Any idea exactly where? I have Shakespeare-loving english majors getting on my case constantly for using the singular "they". It'd be really fun to throw "The Bard" back in their face at them. (Plural this time. Sorry.)
"Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed.
This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC field circus engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.
It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?" Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at the local 'humane' society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey.
Maybe I'm being naive here, but if I can get DRM-free, reasonably encoded music at a reasonable price, why would I want to continue sharing music on p2p networks? I mean, wasn't that the entire point?
No, not really. I have about 400 CDs at home, but ripping them myself manually is a royal PITA. It takes a long time (with 400 frigging CDs), and basicly takes over my machine for the duration. Its much easier and quicker to download the CD (or song) from someone else who's already done the work.
Also you can download an album to see if any of the stuff that isn't on the radio is any good before shelling out money for it. I have done that in the past Ended up buying the album too. Wouldn't have otherwise.
I have also in the past used it to get hold of songs that are not being sold anymore. Try purchasing Zebra's second album somtime. I'm not even sure it was ever released on CD.
And then we have the fact that filesharing isn't limited to music at all. It can be *any* kind of file.
Who's going to provide this functionality, for that matter?
Let's hope it's not Microsoft, or rewiring the traffic lights won't be enough, they'll also need to add lamps -- red to stop, yellow to pay attention, green to go ahead, and Blue Light Of Death on system crash.
It would be Yellow for go and Green for stop. Who cares if drivers have been using other colors for the same thing for years? These are Microsoft roads. The best way to solve any confusion would be to get rid of all those "legacy" roads and standardize on Microsoft.
What about that third color for changing from "go" to "stop", some might ask? There never was such a color! There may be some old "road geeks" who used such a thing, but *real* roads don't work that way. You don't need it anyway, as you can kinda tell when its about to change. The new animated signals take several seconds (on current equipment) to implode and rotate away the "go" signal and explode and rotate out the "stop".
Perhaps in 5 years or so they will introduce a third transitional color (probably orange) to tell you when a stop signal is about to change to a go. If you want to know the reverse, you can crane your neck around and look a the signal 90 degrees from yours. That will work most of the time.
I'm hoping that this is going to shift the discussion of the last extinction event *away* from the Clovis people finally.... Mammoths are not exactly easy creatures to take out
Why are you so anxious to exonerate Clovis people? Not that I care much one way or the other, but it is an odd coincidence that all these large creatures exist for millions of years, then suddenly disappear relatively simultaniously with the arrival of humans. I generally don't believe in conincidence.
The implication that Clovis couldn't possibly have hunted the large mammals is particularly silly, as the thing that defines Clovis people is their toolset, which was adapted to the needs of hunting larger mammals. For instance, you are right that just shooting a normal arrow in a Mammoth wouldn't do much of anything. It takes a lot more than a pinprick for something that size bleed to death. But Clovis arrowheads and spearpoints had grooves cut in the edges. This would have made them not penetrate creatures as easily, but would help facilitate bleeding when they did. This special Clovis toolset disappeared when the big mammals did.
You can argue that Clovis people may not have been the precise cause of the demise of mammoths, but it is nearly inarguable that Clovis == Mammoth hunters.
So it's Jefferson's supposed hypocrisy that bothers you? Even though his actions were perfectly in line with societal norm at the time? Even though he supported efforts towards the reduction of slavery?
...except he didn't. You can find a few instances where he said he supported such efforts. But when he actually had it in his power to do something about it, he didn't. Instead, he did exactly the opposite. There were efforts to phase out slavery in Virgina, like was done in New York. There were efforts to allow (yes, allow Virgina slaveholders to free their slaves. The thing is, Jefferson didn't believe blacks were capable of being productive citizens, and thus did not want free blacks in his state in any form whatsoever. So when push came to shove, you could always find Jefferson fighting against such efforts.
Even by the standards of the time, Jefferson was unusually bigoted. It was also noted in his own time that he was rather hypocritical. So I don't think its unfair at all that someone makes the same point now.
and we all speak english... words like 'cleave' and 'table' can have two meanings which are diametrically opposed to each other
Heh. I now see your ".ca" email address, but this one sentence gave you away as not American or English the instant I read it. In both those countries "table" (in relation to proposals) has only one meaning. However, the meaning it has is indeed the opposite in the two countries. In order for it to actually have both meanings to you, you'd have to live somewhere that got a lot of linguistic influence from both countries. Canada is best candidate there.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite so. Thank goodness we have human editors here to catch such blatant errors...
I went through this myself about 6 years ago with some code I wrote for my employer, and that's what I thought too. I went up to my department head and laid the economic arguments out (all of which came to fruition for them, BTW). He called in our top software guy in his group to discuss it with.
The funny thing is, economics was not what decided it. It was the moral argument that did it. In this case, that we make use of a large amount of OpenSource software tools to do our work here, and its only right to give back. Other than myself, and my manager agreeing at the outset that we would never use it ourselves as a product or competitive advantage, financial issues were never even brought up!
At the time I was a big ESR believer, so this was a huge shock to me. Now that I have seen the process first hand, I've come to the conclusion that in the great ESR/Stallman (or OpenSource/Free Software) debate, Stallman is not only Right, but right. You can perhaps motivate a few pathalogically greedy people with economic arguments. But if you want true power; the ability to really motivate people, you have to talk about morality. What is Right? To toally remove moral arguments like the "OpenSource" camp is trying to do only serves to emasculate the movement.
I actually rather like Vista, suprisingly. Yes, even the UAC (it prevents my kids from installing random crap they found online while I'm at work).
However, there is one "feature" of Vista that would have been a deal-breaker for me, had I known about it ahead of time. I *still* haven't seen anyone talking about it publicly. So I'm here to warn you all that if you upgrade to Vista, you will loose multi-monitor span. As a gamer who loves the extra peripheral vision provided by using two monitors, I will *not* go back to one.
For those unfamiliar with multi-monitor setups, I don't want you to get me wrong: Vista supports multiple monitors just fine. However, most games don't. I think there are internal DirectX problems with making objects that have parts on two different display devices at once. "Span" mode is where your video driver internally combines the monitors itself, and presents the OS with what looks like one large monitor. This shows up in nearly every game as one extra wide resolution.
Apparently, allowing users to install device drivers which present the OS with a "virtual" display device like this could potentially allow a digial way around Vista's DRM, so its not allowed. In plain english, you can't play games multi-monitor because of Vista's retarded DRM!
The only way I found around this is with one of these nifty Matrox devices. They are kinda expensive though. The full digital model will run you about $300. The semi-digital two head model is more like $200. So if you are a multi-monitor gamer, plan on adding about $300 to the cost of any planned upgrade that includes Vista.
Out of curiosity, is your printer added by IP address? And does your printer get its IP address via DHCP (rather than having a static IP)? I got a new HP laser printer for Xmas, and that's my situation. I have to delete and readd the darn thing pretty much every time I print because of this. If you don't do that, it looks "offline", and documents sent to it never print (of course).
I suppose there's probably a way to add it by dns name, but I couldn't figure out how to do that in 5 minutes fiddling with it, and I don't really feel like blowing a whole day off futzing with it. Too many murlocs need killin'.
BS. The Atari 800 was a contemporary system which was superior in pretty much every way. It was even more of a console than the C64, as it took ROM cartriges (the standard console media of the time).
Most of those games you mention were Atari 800 games ported to the C64 later. Heck, Electronic Arts was created to build games for the Atari 800.
Gadget: Dialing: Mother
User: Hey!
I'm a coder, but not a businessman. Is that close enough? I still get paid. My company does not make its money off of copyright either. It makes its money selling time on the hardware that my software (and that of hundreds of my co-workers) operates. Occasionally it sells the hardware (along with the software that makes it work) outright too.
I could see plenty of situations where a singer might want to pay someone to write them a new song, or a producer might want to pay someone to write them a great new play to produce, all to be paid for by the proceeds from the performances.
No good. Chuck Norris works for Viacom. No one else would even bother to compete.
C would be an extremely good language to use to teach pointers and memory management with, as you can't really get by in C without them. For those other purposes, I have to disagree.
From my own experience, I never really grokked recursion until I took a course that used Lisp. Its the basic method of iteration there (it has traditional loops too, but they are really a bolt-on to the language). It also teaches functional-style programming. Functional programming is something that can be applied in most languages, but only functional languages like Lisp really *force* you to learn it. So I really think a good CS education should include one sememster using a functional programming language.
For learning data structures, C is really inferior simply because it isn't strongly typed enough. Not that it can't be done well in C, but a language that is strict about type compatability (like Pascal, Ada, or Modula-2) forces you to think hard about the design of the types in your program. Perhaps pros can do without that, but students should be forced to do this for a while.
I've heard doctors claim that too. The day I see one living in a cheaper house than mine and driving a crappier car than mine is the day I start believing it.
I suspect their *real* problem (much like the RIAA) is loss of control. It used to be that their judgments went practically unquestioned. I remember doctors being notorious for having "God Complexes". Now they have HMO's telling them what they can and can't charge and what they can and can't prescribe, internet-using patients who can sanity check diagnoses themselves, and yes, lawyers actually having the gall to hold them accountable for any bad decisions that end up hurting people. They still make much more money than blue-collar workers, but all the reverence they used to command is gone.
I was going to post this myself, so I'm glad to see it.
One thing I'd add is that there is, as you mentioned, the possbility that the humans brought their palm fruit with them.
There's also a possible indirect relationship. If fragile humans in rikety boats can make it that far, why couldn't palm friuts? After all, they are *designed* (or evolved if you prefer) to spread to islands in just this way.
You could pick up "Lobying" as a profession, and grind Congress for reputation.
Any idea exactly where? I have Shakespeare-loving english majors getting on my case constantly for using the singular "they". It'd be really fun to throw "The Bard" back in their face at them. (Plural this time. Sorry.)
From the jargon file:
So it will be this person's job to surf MySpace for porn?
That's gotta look great on a resume.
If you want to hit them with more losses, you should buy their hybrid rather than boycott them.
No, not really. I have about 400 CDs at home, but ripping them myself manually is a royal PITA. It takes a long time (with 400 frigging CDs), and basicly takes over my machine for the duration. Its much easier and quicker to download the CD (or song) from someone else who's already done the work.
Also you can download an album to see if any of the stuff that isn't on the radio is any good before shelling out money for it. I have done that in the past Ended up buying the album too. Wouldn't have otherwise.
I have also in the past used it to get hold of songs that are not being sold anymore. Try purchasing Zebra's second album somtime. I'm not even sure it was ever released on CD.
And then we have the fact that filesharing isn't limited to music at all. It can be *any* kind of file.
It would be Yellow for go and Green for stop. Who cares if drivers have been using other colors for the same thing for years? These are Microsoft roads. The best way to solve any confusion would be to get rid of all those "legacy" roads and standardize on Microsoft.
What about that third color for changing from "go" to "stop", some might ask? There never was such a color! There may be some old "road geeks" who used such a thing, but *real* roads don't work that way. You don't need it anyway, as you can kinda tell when its about to change. The new animated signals take several seconds (on current equipment) to implode and rotate away the "go" signal and explode and rotate out the "stop".
Perhaps in 5 years or so they will introduce a third transitional color (probably orange) to tell you when a stop signal is about to change to a go. If you want to know the reverse, you can crane your neck around and look a the signal 90 degrees from yours. That will work most of the time.
For one thing, we all know a seat cushion will make a terrible flotation device.
I wish I had a website that was such a big "failure".
We already have that word. Its called a bit
Why are you so anxious to exonerate Clovis people? Not that I care much one way or the other, but it is an odd coincidence that all these large creatures exist for millions of years, then suddenly disappear relatively simultaniously with the arrival of humans. I generally don't believe in conincidence.
The implication that Clovis couldn't possibly have hunted the large mammals is particularly silly, as the thing that defines Clovis people is their toolset, which was adapted to the needs of hunting larger mammals. For instance, you are right that just shooting a normal arrow in a Mammoth wouldn't do much of anything. It takes a lot more than a pinprick for something that size bleed to death. But Clovis arrowheads and spearpoints had grooves cut in the edges. This would have made them not penetrate creatures as easily, but would help facilitate bleeding when they did. This special Clovis toolset disappeared when the big mammals did.
You can argue that Clovis people may not have been the precise cause of the demise of mammoths, but it is nearly inarguable that Clovis == Mammoth hunters.
Even by the standards of the time, Jefferson was unusually bigoted. It was also noted in his own time that he was rather hypocritical. So I don't think its unfair at all that someone makes the same point now.
Heh. I now see your ".ca" email address, but this one sentence gave you away as not American or English the instant I read it. In both those countries "table" (in relation to proposals) has only one meaning. However, the meaning it has is indeed the opposite in the two countries. In order for it to actually have both meanings to you, you'd have to live somewhere that got a lot of linguistic influence from both countries. Canada is best candidate there.