Okay, so lets take a more personal example; you get spam, and track it down to a Verizon account. You contact them to ask them to intervene, and they shrug and tell you it's not their problem, and you should adapt to take care of the problem. Still okay?
For a very long time the general policy on the Internet is that ISPs have conditions in their ToS where they can disconnect your for various activities; spamming and cracking being obvious ones, but trolling will probably be covered if you read carefully. This works fairly well; in many cases people can be shocked out of bad behavior by being contacted by their ISP, and those that can't will find themselves more or less excluded from the Internet.
Wikipedia could require proof of ID and a financial desposit before you can edit, that's forfeited if you spam/troll, and it would solve this problem. E-mail could be refused without a cryptographic signature from someone your trust, and it would solve spam. However, we have to compromise somewhere, and disconnection by ISP seems to be a good one...
Having inadvertantly taken my fingerprints off one hand at one point (yes, it was VERY painful, thank you), and found (as many others have) that they grow back... can you actually damage them so bad/repeatedly they don't grow back, and still have things like, erm, fingertips?
However, do I want to? Well, it's a bit like a cut down version of Java. It never seemed to work as well, or as fast. The language seems to be moving slowly.
C# on the other hand has Mono, which is fairly much the platform to use for non-Windows, and even sometines with Windows. It's a faster moving language that as-is improves on parts of Java, and is making good progress fowards. I'd argue it would be a lot harder for MS to successfully pull evil tricks with C#...
Maybe I'm being naive, but right now C# looks fairly tempting. MS aren't pulling strange "premium VM" tricks, Mono is well developed and generally works as expected, and it's not a huge leap in terms of language. Many libraries in Java have C# equivalents (Bouncy Castle, iText, etc.). If we were going to leap from Java, C# would definitely be top of my likely destinations.
But no, obviously we're more likely to jump to a language I've never heard of before, with none of the libraries we use, and no experience base to pull from...
"Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge."
- GPL v3, section 6b
So... as long as they can offer it from a networked server, they're fine. You don't actually need to ship the code with it.
Agreed. I'm going to turn around and find something else to do 9 times out of 10, but if I care about your content enough to work through this, they might as well trade me a little money for less hassle.
On the other hand, micro-payments never did seem to work to well, did they...
The sort of folks who obsessively block ads aren't good customers anyway...
What?
I mean... if this is a site that makes money through Internet advertising, sure. I also fully support any site that makes their money that way, from telling me to unblock them or get off their site.
However, Disney and EA are in that list. I may not buy much Disney stuff, but I do generally buy a lot of DVDs, and I certainly buy a lot of games. I already give up out of not caring enough when faced with a game site that wants me to wait for a few minutes while it loads an overgrown bunch of Flash, this is even more likely to put me off actually looking at a product I might buy.
In short, anyone who fails university can be considered a failure at the point of admissions. No-one wants to see a student waste a year, possibly several years, of their life on a degree they cannot succeed at.
In reality, there's always going to be a few who could do the course, but something else stops them (lack of self discipline, RL concerns), or who discover their limitations a year or two in, but the fewer people this is, the better.
> consumers aren't doing their part to make 2010 the year of 3D TV
Oh, I'm terribly sorry that you thought I wanted to buy a new TV and Blu-ray player, plus enough glasses for everyone who might want to watch, in order to watch Avatar in 3D at home.
No, wait, I'm not.
It was BLOODY STUPID IDEA and the "consumers" are doing our part by responsibly looking at you like the MUPPET you are.
Oddly, no, I comfort myself with the knowledge that being ill can never bankrupt me.
I'm not really sure that given the options of "Increased cost transparency" and "Paying for the overheads and profits of the medical insurance industry", the latter is really the better option...
22% of income. Another 5-ish% to the government pension scheme, doing the maths off the top of my head. Another 5% local tax, and finally the rather scary 17.5% sales tax.
So... if you add together all your taxes, then throw medical costs on top, how does it work out?
Fortunately, companies have a long history of taking their website down, then replacing it not too long afterwards with cryptic notices about future challenges, and being there next week, and it turning out to be just a giant joke.
No, wait, they don't.
Experience told me that their message amounted to "We've realised our business model isn't working, and we're currently trying to find a way of wrapping up everything neatly, and if you're really lucky you'll be able to download your games before we fold". Did they lie? No. Was it mis-representative? I'd say yes.
> Does your organisation have enough crises happening frequently enough to stop these people getting bored?
I'm co-ordinating an A-Team-alike (actually, we prefer to go with the Impossible Mission analogy, but eh), and I'd agree with this. Some really huge organisations may be big enough to warrant a full time independent troubleshooting team (which is what we're really talking about, daft movie analogies aside), but mostly if you need a group like this either something is terribly wrong, or something was terribly wrong in the recent past. We're slowing putting ourselves out of a job, by fixing a very long list of problems that are well overdue anyone looking at.
Structure is also totally different to the ideas the article has. There's three core team members; at the moment I primarily handle co-ordination, both tracking what individual team members are doing, and tracking what's going on with other departments. We have another techy, who at the moment primarily handles logic (so when someone says something can't be described in a machine readable format, he's the guy we pass the problem to), and the third member of the team is less techy, more people person, and does training, support, and general customer relations.
We then hire, bribe, beg, borrow or whatever we need to do, to get others who we need for the current project. Need proof-reading in Russian (no, seriously, we needed that recently for the current project)? Find someone on staff who knows Russian, and borrow them. There is no point in having a fixed group, though, because if problems had a standard one-size-fits-all answer, we wouldn't be dealing with them. This also helps with the ego issue, as we tend not to involve many people for very long.
We're here, taking note. I would want to know what the drone was doing when it crashed, for example are we talking fairly standard fly from A to B stuff, or doing stunts at low altitude? I would also say... I don't think pilots are unnecessary yet, but the days of requiring two pilots in a passenger jet are numbered. Possibly just with really big numbers...
I'm not saying it's a huge amount, or that MS doesn't provide something in return, I'm questioning the analysts' assertion that this should be expected because their costs will be going up.
With hardware becoming both cheaper and more powerful, their costs should have been coming down rapidly over time, and should be a fraction (half, at most) of what they were when XBox Live first launched. Or am I missing costs that aren't going to be hardware related?
I was wondering this too. Maybe it's just because we're an internal development team, so it's easier for us to go "Look, we can implement shiny thing a, or we can fix bug x that you're complaining about, which do you want first?", but we keep the software continually either ready to go live, or near-ready to go live. Defensive coding is also a major priority for us (that was harder to find time for, though), and that means errors tend to be minor and caught quickly.
Also, are there any other developer/sys-admin cross-overs out there? Never going to claim I'm the world' best sys-admin, but I run production for some systems (complete with split-personality on how quickly updates should go live), am I the only one?
> Consider, he says, that graphics chips are doubling in capacity every six months. That translates into a thousandfold increase in capacity over a five-year period -- the average shelf life of most game platforms. "We've never seen anything like it in any industry," he says.
> At the same time, colleges can't adapt their curricula fast enough to prepare students for the complexities of cloud computing and virtualization, not to mention specific technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint, observers say. Recent graduates also seem naive when it comes to business basics and how computing foundations apply to the real world, says David Buzzell, CIO at The Sedona Group, a Moline, Ill.-based workforce management services provider.
That's not new. Most colleges/universities do theory-heavy courses designed to let you learn the next big technology. If you want a MS certificate to say you grok Sharepoint, you can get that for a LOT less than a college degree.
I've been trying to find these certificates to remove them. They don't appear to be anywhere on Ubuntu (probably for the best)... is that just me, or are they hiding under a strange name?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so lets take a more personal example; you get spam, and track it down to a Verizon account. You contact them to ask them to intervene, and they shrug and tell you it's not their problem, and you should adapt to take care of the problem. Still okay?
For a very long time the general policy on the Internet is that ISPs have conditions in their ToS where they can disconnect your for various activities; spamming and cracking being obvious ones, but trolling will probably be covered if you read carefully. This works fairly well; in many cases people can be shocked out of bad behavior by being contacted by their ISP, and those that can't will find themselves more or less excluded from the Internet.
Wikipedia could require proof of ID and a financial desposit before you can edit, that's forfeited if you spam/troll, and it would solve this problem. E-mail could be refused without a cryptographic signature from someone your trust, and it would solve spam. However, we have to compromise somewhere, and disconnection by ISP seems to be a good one...
> unless you destroy your fingerprints
Having inadvertantly taken my fingerprints off one hand at one point (yes, it was VERY painful, thank you), and found (as many others have) that they grow back... can you actually damage them so bad/repeatedly they don't grow back, and still have things like, erm, fingertips?
Thing is, I can move to Kaffe, right, for Java?
However, do I want to? Well, it's a bit like a cut down version of Java. It never seemed to work as well, or as fast. The language seems to be moving slowly.
C# on the other hand has Mono, which is fairly much the platform to use for non-Windows, and even sometines with Windows. It's a faster moving language that as-is improves on parts of Java, and is making good progress fowards. I'd argue it would be a lot harder for MS to successfully pull evil tricks with C#...
Maybe I'm being naive, but right now C# looks fairly tempting. MS aren't pulling strange "premium VM" tricks, Mono is well developed and generally works as expected, and it's not a huge leap in terms of language. Many libraries in Java have C# equivalents (Bouncy Castle, iText, etc.). If we were going to leap from Java, C# would definitely be top of my likely destinations.
But no, obviously we're more likely to jump to a language I've never heard of before, with none of the libraries we use, and no experience base to pull from...
You almost can...
"Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge."
- GPL v3, section 6b
So... as long as they can offer it from a networked server, they're fine. You don't actually need to ship the code with it.
I despair gently over the fact that copyright is /.'s worst enemy 90% of the time, and then someone mentions GPL...
Agreed. I'm going to turn around and find something else to do 9 times out of 10, but if I care about your content enough to work through this, they might as well trade me a little money for less hassle.
On the other hand, micro-payments never did seem to work to well, did they...
The sort of folks who obsessively block ads aren't good customers anyway...
What?
I mean... if this is a site that makes money through Internet advertising, sure. I also fully support any site that makes their money that way, from telling me to unblock them or get off their site.
However, Disney and EA are in that list. I may not buy much Disney stuff, but I do generally buy a lot of DVDs, and I certainly buy a lot of games. I already give up out of not caring enough when faced with a game site that wants me to wait for a few minutes while it loads an overgrown bunch of Flash, this is even more likely to put me off actually looking at a product I might buy.
No.
In short, anyone who fails university can be considered a failure at the point of admissions. No-one wants to see a student waste a year, possibly several years, of their life on a degree they cannot succeed at.
In reality, there's always going to be a few who could do the course, but something else stops them (lack of self discipline, RL concerns), or who discover their limitations a year or two in, but the fewer people this is, the better.
> consumers aren't doing their part to make 2010 the year of 3D TV
Oh, I'm terribly sorry that you thought I wanted to buy a new TV and Blu-ray player, plus enough glasses for everyone who might want to watch, in order to watch Avatar in 3D at home.
No, wait, I'm not.
It was BLOODY STUPID IDEA and the "consumers" are doing our part by responsibly looking at you like the MUPPET you are.
Customers. The word is CUSTOMERS.
Okay, so... Googling my real name gets you someone else. We can't both be the top set of results. Now what?
The problem isn't Yahoo/Google, the problem is companies that think real names are a unique identifier.
Erm, that should have been "Decreased cost transparency", or they're the same option, sorry.
Oddly, no, I comfort myself with the knowledge that being ill can never bankrupt me.
I'm not really sure that given the options of "Increased cost transparency" and "Paying for the overheads and profits of the medical insurance industry", the latter is really the better option...
22% of income. Another 5-ish% to the government pension scheme, doing the maths off the top of my head. Another 5% local tax, and finally the rather scary 17.5% sales tax.
So... if you add together all your taxes, then throw medical costs on top, how does it work out?
Fortunately, companies have a long history of taking their website down, then replacing it not too long afterwards with cryptic notices about future challenges, and being there next week, and it turning out to be just a giant joke.
No, wait, they don't.
Experience told me that their message amounted to "We've realised our business model isn't working, and we're currently trying to find a way of wrapping up everything neatly, and if you're really lucky you'll be able to download your games before we fold". Did they lie? No. Was it mis-representative? I'd say yes.
> Does your organisation have enough crises happening frequently enough to stop these people getting bored?
I'm co-ordinating an A-Team-alike (actually, we prefer to go with the Impossible Mission analogy, but eh), and I'd agree with this. Some really huge organisations may be big enough to warrant a full time independent troubleshooting team (which is what we're really talking about, daft movie analogies aside), but mostly if you need a group like this either something is terribly wrong, or something was terribly wrong in the recent past. We're slowing putting ourselves out of a job, by fixing a very long list of problems that are well overdue anyone looking at.
Structure is also totally different to the ideas the article has. There's three core team members; at the moment I primarily handle co-ordination, both tracking what individual team members are doing, and tracking what's going on with other departments. We have another techy, who at the moment primarily handles logic (so when someone says something can't be described in a machine readable format, he's the guy we pass the problem to), and the third member of the team is less techy, more people person, and does training, support, and general customer relations.
We then hire, bribe, beg, borrow or whatever we need to do, to get others who we need for the current project. Need proof-reading in Russian (no, seriously, we needed that recently for the current project)? Find someone on staff who knows Russian, and borrow them. There is no point in having a fixed group, though, because if problems had a standard one-size-fits-all answer, we wouldn't be dealing with them. This also helps with the ego issue, as we tend not to involve many people for very long.
Same reason anyone cares about the US, because you keep meddling.
We're here, taking note. I would want to know what the drone was doing when it crashed, for example are we talking fairly standard fly from A to B stuff, or doing stunts at low altitude? I would also say... I don't think pilots are unnecessary yet, but the days of requiring two pilots in a passenger jet are numbered. Possibly just with really big numbers...
As someone who last got out of a proper bed 28 hours ago, of which 9 was a transcontinental flight, that sounds good...
Must... not... sleep yet...
I'm not saying it's a huge amount, or that MS doesn't provide something in return, I'm questioning the analysts' assertion that this should be expected because their costs will be going up.
With hardware becoming both cheaper and more powerful, their costs should have been coming down rapidly over time, and should be a fraction (half, at most) of what they were when XBox Live first launched. Or am I missing costs that aren't going to be hardware related?
All those extra features with no ongoing costs, and it's a real pity computer services aren't getting cheaper... No, wait...
Anyone else disappointed this wasn't an obscure Terminator model?
I was wondering this too. Maybe it's just because we're an internal development team, so it's easier for us to go "Look, we can implement shiny thing a, or we can fix bug x that you're complaining about, which do you want first?", but we keep the software continually either ready to go live, or near-ready to go live. Defensive coding is also a major priority for us (that was harder to find time for, though), and that means errors tend to be minor and caught quickly.
Also, are there any other developer/sys-admin cross-overs out there? Never going to claim I'm the world' best sys-admin, but I run production for some systems (complete with split-personality on how quickly updates should go live), am I the only one?
> Consider, he says, that graphics chips are doubling in capacity every six months. That translates into a thousandfold increase in capacity over a five-year period -- the average shelf life of most game platforms. "We've never seen anything like it in any industry," he says.
Yes. I definitely remember my XBox 360 being 3 orders of magnitude more powerful than the XBox. I hate to cite Wikipedia, but this appears to show a 5 times increase in 4 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transistor_count&oldid=374101890#GPUs
> At the same time, colleges can't adapt their curricula fast enough to prepare students for the complexities of cloud computing and virtualization, not to mention specific technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint, observers say. Recent graduates also seem naive when it comes to business basics and how computing foundations apply to the real world, says David Buzzell, CIO at The Sedona Group, a Moline, Ill.-based workforce management services provider.
That's not new. Most colleges/universities do theory-heavy courses designed to let you learn the next big technology. If you want a MS certificate to say you grok Sharepoint, you can get that for a LOT less than a college degree.
> Another didn't know what an invoice was.
If you advertise for a someone with 2-5 years experience of a software package with 2007 in the name... http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=101&dockey=xml/0/5/0598524509067860fbf7aef52a6ae982@endecaindex&c=1&source=20
I've been trying to find these certificates to remove them. They don't appear to be anywhere on Ubuntu (probably for the best)... is that just me, or are they hiding under a strange name?