Re:Just to start us off with a car analogy...
on
Lulu Introduces DRM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Opposing DRM is not some kind of religion, it is not even a moral position,
Opposing DRM is most definitely a moral position, on any number of grounds, starting with the ones you don't want to acknowledge down to the less obvious ones, such as opposing anything that makes life more difficult without providing any benefit or opposing the conflation of 'buy' with 'rent', as you never actually buy anything with DRM, you simply rent it.
Feel free to pretend you aren't doing anything wrong when you say there's nothing wrong with DRM. Just be aware that that's exactly what you're doing -- pretending.
Not trying to be a dick, but you do have the option of moving. Also, they clearly say when selling broadband "up to X", not "you will get X".
Except that you *cannot* get X. The best you could possibly get is 100% for 15 minutes plus 50% for fifteen minutes, lather, rinse, repeat.
Unless I've screwed up the math (entirely possible, it's late and I just spent an hour stuck in traffic), the maximum you can possibly get is (100+50)/2, or 75%.
Nah, they're all out for the main chance. Put them in competition with each other, and every damn one of them will figure he can steal customers from the others.
No, actually, that's not the case. The phone companies are theoretically in competition. I have exactly one choice, AT&T. At my previous address, I had exactly one choice, Verizon.
And if there was *ANYWHERE* that Verizon could compete with AT&T, it's here. I can stand in my daughter's bedroom, look out the window, and *see* Keller -- where Verizon rolled out the very first pilot of FIOS.
- Using general terms for an example: If you enter an instance with a Warrior, a Thief, Wizard, and a Cleric but you kill the dragon and get some Ranger bow everyone goes "BOOO!". The game knows what classes came in so instead of just tossing out static loot from a static table, start considering who walked in and what improvements they need.
Well, based on what I saw in Guild Wars, they're doing just this -- to ensure they rarely give you anything you can use. The chance of getting a good item for your class seemed to be a third or less of what it would have been if the loot was actually random.
I wanted to tell NetworkManager to do something specific (IIRC, use a specific DNS server rather than the one handed out by the DHCP server on my DSL gateway, but it's been a year or so) and couldn't. When I opened a ticket about it, it was closed WONTFIX with the notation that the idea behind it was zero-configuration and adding the ability to configure it to do this was therefore unacceptable.
I want gnome-terminal not to eat my right-clicks. People have been asking for that for *years* and are constantly told that the Gnome developers know better than they do about what they need.
I would love for the Gnome developers to sit in on that session.
And then be beaten with sledgehammers until they understand that the goal should not be 'unconfigurable' but 'no configuration needed 90% of the time, and configurable the remaining 10% of the time'.
It will also deal with all of these smug statistical analyses that talk about RAID rebuild times growing (in line with spindle size growth) such that second disk failures prior to the rebuild of an original disk failure taking out an entire array.
If you aren't using RAID6, I will point my finger and laugh when this happens to you.:)
Where I work, we've only got a few petabytes of NFS storage. And it's only used for mission critical (in the literal meaning of the term -- no access to data, no work gets done, literally $millions lost if a deadline is blown) data.
NetApp doesn't seem to be having any trouble selling NFS, either.
As it happens, I do storage administration for a living. My previous employer had 4.5PB, and was actively evaluating moving from tape to a disk backup (although, since they're a major financial company and have so much data, it won't be a fast transition). My _current_ employer has perhaps half that, and our primary backup system is snapvaulted to a remote site, and then backing that up to a virtual tape library. It will be our *only* backup system as soon as we have enough capacity there to handle what little remains on tape.
Tape is expensive, time consuming, and problematic. The media costs are higher than for disk, the labor is *far* higher, and we have more trouble with our tape backups than our disk backups.
And the media cost for disks becomes even greater when you consider that tape compression is streaming, but data dedupe gets to take into account everything on the virtual library (we're aiming at a compression ratio of ~11 for libraries which have a full backup cycle. I have no reason to believe we won't do better than that).
No, the perpetrators committed a crime much worse than theft -- plagiarism. Don't believe me? Go ask any tenured professor at your nearest university.
Steal something from a lab where you work, you'll probably lose your chance at tenure and the job. Commit plagiarism and you'd best start looking for a new career.
No, stealing, as in taking something and claiming they wrote it. That's really not the correct term, however; the term the original writer wanted was 'plagiarizing'.
That's funny. From my personal experience, most of the really good programmers that I know _do_ contribute to open source. That's how they got to be really good programmers, in fact. They had the chance to do things right, rather than being pushed to meet some arbitrary marketing deadline, or simply being too busy fighting fires to spend time improving their skill.
At $employer[-1], we had a suite of software which put any commercial SRM suite to shame (not just my opinion -- we evaluated all the ones we could find, as we were being pushed to use a vendor-supported system), but it could have been much better if we'd had time to go in and clean up parts of it that had been written over a decade ago. On the open-source stuff I write, I don't _have_ that problem. I can do it right. (I also have that luxury at my current job, at least so far, which is _really_ nice.)
If all you're doing is writing the same sort of code the same way, you aren't going to improve your skills, at least not in a reasonable timeframe. You have to stretch yourself, _and_ you have to be exposed to better (or at least different) practices. You have to have people pointing out not just where you've done things wrong, but where you could have done them better, and even -- no, especially -- where you could have done things 'better', even though 'better' is a matter of opinion and theirs differs; having to defend _why_ you think your opinion is right makes you think about it. It certainly does me, anyway. Heck, sometimes I even change my mind!
I've found that the best way to get that sort of exposure and criticism is by contributing to open source software. At work, I'm being paid to get things done, not to sit and argue the merits of one approach over another if either is 'good enough'; a little of that is reasonable, because it helps make sure they _are_ both 'good enough', but at the end of the day, I'm being paid to produce, not study. I'm being paid to write software to get things done, in a manner that other people on the team can maintain, not learn Erlang or Haskell to broaden my understanding of programming.
And I think that's perfectly reasonable. Improving my programming skill benefits _me_ primarily, and my employer secondarily, just as exercise benefits me primarily (by improving my health) and my employer secondarily (by reducing the number of days missed to illness). They don't pay me to exercise, and they don't pay me to improve my programming skill. They pay me to get things done.
Even if the programmer is very highly skilled, memory management is tedious and difficult, and it is impossible to never make a mistake.
This is simply false. I've never made such a mistake, not in 20 years of coding. When I'm the technical lead or architect for a project, there are no memory leaks in the project (or at leats none where I have authority). It's a matter of programming style (and using C++, not C). I have, however, had to fix others' memory leaks in garbage-collected languages. You have to try pretty hard to leak memory in C#, but it's not perfect.
That statement right there ensures that I would _never_ recommend you for any position that I had any say in. Either you're lying through your teeth, or you're so incompetent you never noticed your mistakes.
Pick whichever one you think makes you look better -- from where I stand, they're _both_ pretty damning.
A return is _also_ when I decide I'm tired of playing the replacement game and ask for my money back, which happened several times per year back when I bought stuff there regularly. You can't just say that anyone who returns more than X items a year is being a jackass.
If you said 'more than X _non-defective_ items per year', you might have a point.
So you clearly never shop at Fry's. I have roughly a 50% failure rate for things I buy there -- and there has been more than one case where I had to exchange something several times before giving up and asking for my money back.
I don't shop at Fry's if I have a choice anymore, but my returns didn't make _me_ a bad person.
Members of parliament also have other things to do than discussing and voting every law that goes through.
If you actually believe this, and it's typical of your country, I fear for the future of democracy in France.
No. They do _not_ have better things to do than 'discussing and voting on every law that goes through'. That is, in fact, their first duty, and it is a duty that transcends everything except family crises -- and it transcends any family crises that is not literally life and death.
As a side note, does the French parliament not have rules regarding the need for a quorum, to avoid just this sort of problem? Or did they find some way around that?
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Opposing DRM is not some kind of religion, it is not even a moral position,
Opposing DRM is most definitely a moral position, on any number of grounds, starting with the ones you don't want to acknowledge down to the less obvious ones, such as opposing anything that makes life more difficult without providing any benefit or opposing the conflation of 'buy' with 'rent', as you never actually buy anything with DRM, you simply rent it.
Feel free to pretend you aren't doing anything wrong when you say there's nothing wrong with DRM. Just be aware that that's exactly what you're doing -- pretending.
No, that's the maximum you can get over the period you paid for -- one month. You don't pay for your service in 15-minute chunks.
Not trying to be a dick, but you do have the option of moving. Also, they clearly say when selling broadband "up to X", not "you will get X".
Except that you *cannot* get X. The best you could possibly get is 100% for 15 minutes plus 50% for fifteen minutes, lather, rinse, repeat.
Unless I've screwed up the math (entirely possible, it's late and I just spent an hour stuck in traffic), the maximum you can possibly get is (100+50)/2, or 75%.
Nah, they're all out for the main chance. Put them in competition with each other, and every damn one of them will figure he can steal customers from the others.
No, actually, that's not the case. The phone companies are theoretically in competition. I have exactly one choice, AT&T. At my previous address, I had exactly one choice, Verizon.
And if there was *ANYWHERE* that Verizon could compete with AT&T, it's here. I can stand in my daughter's bedroom, look out the window, and *see* Keller -- where Verizon rolled out the very first pilot of FIOS.
But you will not find them competing *anywhere*.
- Using general terms for an example: If you enter an instance with a Warrior, a Thief, Wizard, and a Cleric but you kill the dragon and get some Ranger bow everyone goes "BOOO!". The game knows what classes came in so instead of just tossing out static loot from a static table, start considering who walked in and what improvements they need.
Well, based on what I saw in Guild Wars, they're doing just this -- to ensure they rarely give you anything you can use. The chance of getting a good item for your class seemed to be a third or less of what it would have been if the loot was actually random.
I wanted to tell NetworkManager to do something specific (IIRC, use a specific DNS server rather than the one handed out by the DHCP server on my DSL gateway, but it's been a year or so) and couldn't. When I opened a ticket about it, it was closed WONTFIX with the notation that the idea behind it was zero-configuration and adding the ability to configure it to do this was therefore unacceptable.
I want gnome-terminal not to eat my right-clicks. People have been asking for that for *years* and are constantly told that the Gnome developers know better than they do about what they need.
I would love for the Gnome developers to sit in on that session.
And then be beaten with sledgehammers until they understand that the goal should not be 'unconfigurable' but 'no configuration needed 90% of the time, and configurable the remaining 10% of the time'.
The problem is not a lack of standards. The problem is failing to follow standards.
Actually, no. If there was no contract, he wins. Slam dunk. Because copyright is automatic, and has to be explicitly transferred.
It will also deal with all of these smug statistical analyses that talk about RAID rebuild times growing (in line with spindle size growth) such that second disk failures prior to the rebuild of an original disk failure taking out an entire array.
If you aren't using RAID6, I will point my finger and laugh when this happens to you. :)
In a real datacenter the only raid seen is a raid 1 for the boot drives to get the server up into the operating system. The data lives on the SAN.
Hint: Do you think that's a raw drive you're seeing? No, you're seeing... a RAID5 volume presented as a drive by the array.
Not having RAID is simply not feasible in a 'real' datacenter, because you'll lose a disk or two each week -- if not day.
But then, what would I know -- I only work on a team handling several petabytes of space, having come from a team handling several *more* petabytes.
Where I work, we've only got a few petabytes of NFS storage. And it's only used for mission critical (in the literal meaning of the term -- no access to data, no work gets done, literally $millions lost if a deadline is blown) data.
NetApp doesn't seem to be having any trouble selling NFS, either.
So no, I don't think anyone uses NFS anymore.
>For real backup needs, tape is still king.
No, it's not.
As it happens, I do storage administration for a living. My previous employer had 4.5PB, and was actively evaluating moving from tape to a disk backup (although, since they're a major financial company and have so much data, it won't be a fast transition). My _current_ employer has perhaps half that, and our primary backup system is snapvaulted to a remote site, and then backing that up to a virtual tape library. It will be our *only* backup system as soon as we have enough capacity there to handle what little remains on tape.
Tape is expensive, time consuming, and problematic. The media costs are higher than for disk, the labor is *far* higher, and we have more trouble with our tape backups than our disk backups.
And the media cost for disks becomes even greater when you consider that tape compression is streaming, but data dedupe gets to take into account everything on the virtual library (we're aiming at a compression ratio of ~11 for libraries which have a full backup cycle. I have no reason to believe we won't do better than that).
Tape is obsolete.
I should have said 'a new career outside academia'. Politics, of course, is the sort of cesspool where plagiarism seems perfectly normal....
No, the perpetrators committed a crime much worse than theft -- plagiarism. Don't believe me? Go ask any tenured professor at your nearest university.
Steal something from a lab where you work, you'll probably lose your chance at tenure and the job. Commit plagiarism and you'd best start looking for a new career.
No, wait. If it's a copyright violation, doesn't that mean it's a copyleft... um... anti-violation?
And if a copyright violation and a copyleft violation collide, do you get mutual annihilation and a burst of BSD particles?
You know, now that I think about it, that would explain what happens in most debates about the GPL...
No, stealing, as in taking something and claiming they wrote it. That's really not the correct term, however; the term the original writer wanted was 'plagiarizing'.
That's funny. From my personal experience, most of the really good programmers that I know _do_ contribute to open source. That's how they got to be really good programmers, in fact. They had the chance to do things right, rather than being pushed to meet some arbitrary marketing deadline, or simply being too busy fighting fires to spend time improving their skill.
At $employer[-1], we had a suite of software which put any commercial SRM suite to shame (not just my opinion -- we evaluated all the ones we could find, as we were being pushed to use a vendor-supported system), but it could have been much better if we'd had time to go in and clean up parts of it that had been written over a decade ago. On the open-source stuff I write, I don't _have_ that problem. I can do it right. (I also have that luxury at my current job, at least so far, which is _really_ nice.)
If all you're doing is writing the same sort of code the same way, you aren't going to improve your skills, at least not in a reasonable timeframe. You have to stretch yourself, _and_ you have to be exposed to better (or at least different) practices. You have to have people pointing out not just where you've done things wrong, but where you could have done them better, and even -- no, especially -- where you could have done things 'better', even though 'better' is a matter of opinion and theirs differs; having to defend _why_ you think your opinion is right makes you think about it. It certainly does me, anyway. Heck, sometimes I even change my mind!
I've found that the best way to get that sort of exposure and criticism is by contributing to open source software. At work, I'm being paid to get things done, not to sit and argue the merits of one approach over another if either is 'good enough'; a little of that is reasonable, because it helps make sure they _are_ both 'good enough', but at the end of the day, I'm being paid to produce, not study. I'm being paid to write software to get things done, in a manner that other people on the team can maintain, not learn Erlang or Haskell to broaden my understanding of programming.
And I think that's perfectly reasonable. Improving my programming skill benefits _me_ primarily, and my employer secondarily, just as exercise benefits me primarily (by improving my health) and my employer secondarily (by reducing the number of days missed to illness). They don't pay me to exercise, and they don't pay me to improve my programming skill. They pay me to get things done.
Even if the programmer is very highly skilled, memory management is tedious and difficult, and it is impossible to never make a mistake.
This is simply false. I've never made such a mistake, not in 20 years of coding. When I'm the technical lead or architect for a project, there are no memory leaks in the project (or at leats none where I have authority). It's a matter of programming style (and using C++, not C). I have, however, had to fix others' memory leaks in garbage-collected languages. You have to try pretty hard to leak memory in C#, but it's not perfect.
That statement right there ensures that I would _never_ recommend you for any position that I had any say in. Either you're lying through your teeth, or you're so incompetent you never noticed your mistakes.
Pick whichever one you think makes you look better -- from where I stand, they're _both_ pretty damning.
Sucks to you. But hey, you have to expect that sort of thing when you take a job you know is immoral and unethical.
No, SCSI buses should be terminated _three_ times: Once at either end, and the goat in the middle.
Surprised, etc.
Or anything more than a single button in my app. ^^
That's pressed before you download the distro.
A return is _also_ when I decide I'm tired of playing the replacement game and ask for my money back, which happened several times per year back when I bought stuff there regularly. You can't just say that anyone who returns more than X items a year is being a jackass.
If you said 'more than X _non-defective_ items per year', you might have a point.
So you clearly never shop at Fry's. I have roughly a 50% failure rate for things I buy there -- and there has been more than one case where I had to exchange something several times before giving up and asking for my money back.
I don't shop at Fry's if I have a choice anymore, but my returns didn't make _me_ a bad person.
Members of parliament also have other things to do than discussing and voting every law that goes through.
If you actually believe this, and it's typical of your country, I fear for the future of democracy in France.
No. They do _not_ have better things to do than 'discussing and voting on every law that goes through'. That is, in fact, their first duty, and it is a duty that transcends everything except family crises -- and it transcends any family crises that is not literally life and death.
As a side note, does the French parliament not have rules regarding the need for a quorum, to avoid just this sort of problem? Or did they find some way around that?