I think his point is this: Try getting cable or sat television without a Disney-owned channel on it.
Sure, you can cut the cable and all, but it's kind of funny that Disney has insinuated themselves that damned deeply into the entertainment industry, no?
Think of it as not being able to get municipal water without being forced to have Brawndo pumped into the pipes at regular intervals throughout the day. I mean, sure you can drill a well and get your own water and all, but...
Oh, come on. They just want to kill off 3Delight or something like that.
You're close - they likely want to kill off licensing money for 3Delight (you can get the engine yourself and use it for free). For instance, these guys license 3Delight as the render engine inside the DAZ Studio product, as do many other hobbyist and lower-end toolsets. They pay quite a bit for the privilege.
There's a decent amount of money to be made not by selling the engine as a product, but by licensing it out to other software houses, much like they licensed out the Unreal or Quake game engines. Making and maintaining a complex CG engine (rendering, game physics, subdivision, etc) is programmatically a PITA, and it's easier to use an existing wheel than to just re-invent it.
The camera was the main reason why I went up a little bit... plus I hated the round corners and smaller screens of the lower-cost models.
this is what I settled on - sure, there's no magnetic compass thingy in it, nor advanced accelerometers, but really - I have no need for that crap, and it's been working quite well.:)
(Now if I was into having 10 jillion apps I'd get something with more internal storage, but seriously - I only use about half of what I have in this little thing now...)
I bought my little Android phone intentionally. At $150 with a Net10 sub ($45/mo for unlimited everything, and it uses Verizon's towers), the little Huawei Ascend is cheap, it does what I want it to do, and runs quite nicely. Why am I so cheap about my phone? Because if it gets lost, broke or stolen, so what? I'll just get another one.
By contrast, a $600 iPhone or Galaxy or whatever with the typical carrier's shitty plan/contract/caps/bullshit/etc isn't exactly my idea of Nirvana. I got better things to do with the extra dosh.
Mind you, I'm not a fanboy of any camp; I have an Android phone, a box at home running Linux Mint, and a MacBook Pro (I prefer UNIX/Linux for my lap/desktop - sue me.) Pint is, Android has its limitations (esp. when integrating with the MBP), but it also has its advantages (like actual file management instead of $#@^! iTunes).
To each their own... I've begun to reach an age where watching fanboys go nuts trying to defend their idol is entertainment, not a call to arms (well, except when it comes to Microsoft... fuck Microsoft.)
It is a shame the next update still won't have the promised start menu.
Yeah, but funny as hell that, combined, Windows 8.x (all versions) is only ~25% after three years (a complete tech cycle in the consumer realm). It's doubly funny that this is in spite of every bix-box OEM pimping 8.x as hard as they friggin' can (go ahead and try to buy a laptop in BestBuy or Wal-Mart with something other than Windows 8 in it...)
Now compare that crappy growth curve to XP, 98, 95...
They are designed to be installed and then you forget about them. So the "classic" mitigation technique doesn't work. This is a big problem.
Hell, I thought the "classic" mitigation schemata for embedded devices was to not have them networked at all, leaving them to run for years (decades?) on end. (See also the hordes of NT Telecom PBXes out there which are likely still around, requiring a goofball proprietary connection to a computer running OS/2 (!?) in order to patch it (or more commonly, you did it to add new/licensed features or to fix something gone corrupt).)
Therein lies the whole problem with the paradigm, truth be told - originally, embedded devices didn't communicate with jack shit - you unpacked it, turned it on, maybe configured it, and then you forget that it existed until it broke (at which time the vendor/contractor sent someone out to fix it), or got replaced.
All that said, hell, we already have a testbed for this nightmare - an ocean of smartphones whose carriers and manufacturers ceased to give a crap whether their wares ever got upgraded.
Something as popular and heavily-supported as the Linux Kernel? Fuggit - Torvalds has his pick of talented people to choose from, and uses his rather entertaining personality to insure that the slackers and dullards behave themselves. Note that his commit refusals are usually well spelled-out (if it even gets to his level - usually one the the 2nd or 3rd-level maintainers will reject it for some reason or other, so if Torvalds gets involved, it's usually based on some architectural or philosophical reason, and that in turn is usually very well explained.)
Now for Joe Sixpack's Uber-l33t CMS Mod for Drupal? Umm, okay... you take what you can get and you'll like it, but honestly, the same method can apply. If someone pulls a boner and tries to commit it, you explain in precise and objective terms *why* the thing was rejected. If the reason is philosophical, you explain it in a neutral manner, promoting the philosophy in question, and explaining why the rejected change doesn't meet it.
Note that none of this applies to a professional environment, where the team members are being *paid* for their skills. Also note that there's a lot of reasons why the guy is the low-man on the team totem pole - few of them having to do with coding ability.
I mean it this way: if you have a team full of rockstars, the 'idiot' may well be a planet-crushing badass by developer standards, but isn't as good as the other guys on the team - sort of like a top-notch AAA athlete finding himself playing on a pro MLB team. Or, it may be that the 'idiot' is a coding rockstar in a team full of ordinary devs, but he's a bit anti-social, hates or cannot fully grok the team's particular interpretation of Agile/Waterfall/Whatever-your-team-is-using, or for some similar reason isn't the guy who looks as good in the scrum master's eyes.
Long story short - the concept would need a friggin' book to explain in full, and requires more than just light managerial skills.
A decade ago, this was predicted to be the realm of Java..
Not Java specifically, but Jini, since Java didn't have a networking stack built-in and was too big (even then) to do cooperative processing/communications w/o requiring a far beefier CPU than most embedded devices could muster at the time (which is why Sun started the whole Jini project in the first place).
If, at the beginning, the first general use of the Internet had been porn sites featuring beastiality, rape, etc. then you can be sure it would not be around today.
You've never ever heard of alt.binaries.*, have you?
Oh riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. It's me that constantly brings up the socially equalizing force of guns...
Then again, even the biggest, burliest, and most methed-up biker dude is going to at least stop and think before trying to tackle a 98-lb weakling pointing a loaded pistol in his direction, no? Minus the gun, what other incentive would stop a larger dude with bad intent?
Right, because computers are something you can make in your back yard. Don't be dense.
The vast majority of people lack the expertise to build or program computers which would be the actual parallel in this bizarre metaphor you've drawn up.
Not a very apt comparison, is it?
While (back in the day, and even now) building a computer from scratch requires at least an EE level of education plus a crap-ton of actual CS experience, making a working firearm requires a whole lot less.
After all, humanity has been making the things with crap technology since what, the 13th Century or so (counting cannons)?
The whole idea behind a homemade firearm boils down to materials (that can handle upwards of 40,000 psi or more), tight tolerances (so the gases are directed towards pushing the bullet out instead of leaking back through the receiver or blowing past the bullet out the barrel), and a bit of mechanical engineering (so you can build a reliable trigger, a reliable extraction mechanism, prevent jams, etc).
It's something like a whole order of magnitude less complex than building a whole computer from, say, Mouser/RadioShack parts.Hell, zip guns have been around for years, and it doesn't take any specialized kind of rocket science to 3D-print a firearm that allows a metal sleeve for the barrel (or has the facility to screw a barrel into it), or make one sufficiently useful for one shot.
Privacy can be controlled (e.g. VPN), so the lesser of two evils is still Google Fiber.
*sigh* - if only I could just use the fiber and be my own ISP with one single IP and firewall. Too bad they only do blocks for that sort of thing (IIRC).
They could get a minivan that has better millage then the gas guzzling SUV.
Not really sure if I want to haul bulk fertilizer for the garden in a minivan (or lumber, or trash that the local garbageman won't pick up, or...)...and I haven't even mentioned what a fully-laden minivan does (or rather, does not do) on the often-steep inclines we like to call highways around here...
While war tends to kill a metric shitload of innocent people, there are distinct differences between it and simple mass murder.
I'm not saying that either one is right or just, but at least try to learn the differences. Simple equivocation of the two is a sign of ignorance and/or naiveté. Please stop doing that.
Actually, I saw a program just like that (see above) - the company gets a solid tax break, the inmates' money is put into a savings account in their name (minus a small monthly stipend for housing), and they even had classes to help the inmate learn how to function as a normal human being.
The soon-to-be-ex-con gets a job and a chance to prove themselves. I know of one who not only worked his ass off at the plant, but after he got out they hired him on as a supervisor with a nice raise to boot. Many of the inmates there did pretty well (most likely because the selection process to get there in the first place, the requirement to be a non-violent offender, etc.)
Actually, some states do (did?) exactly that. Long ago, I worked at a poultry processing plant in Arkansas, and many of the workers there lived in 'halfway houses', where they were part of a program to ease inmates of the state prison farms back into society. It was a parole alternative for non-violent offenders/convicts, but they got out of prison earlier, depending on behavior. They were paid the regular wages, worked regular shifts, but went home every day/night in a van, and the halfway house was locked up. If anyone did anything dumb, they went back to the farm, but aside from a few re-integration classes and being confined to the home when they weren't working, they were treated like anyone else.
Now if he named folks like Snowden, Manning, and similar (where folks could actually go "yeah - they uncovered government badness and were whistleblowers", he could have gotten at least some support.
I mean, c'mon: he could have even stopped short and not even named anybody. At first I figured okay, he probably got a bad shake and deserves the compensation for his maltreatment. But nooo... he goes on to let his freak flag fly, and name those dumbasses as his heroes. My thoughts immediately became: "fuck that."
Mind you, the government is still way the hell in the wrong for locking him up if all he did was uncover a security flaw (and didn't sell or exploit it for personal gain), but holy shit...
IMHO, the sucky part is that unless the story arc skips ahead as many years, the by-now old/wrinkle-bound actors are going to look really out of place...
(then again, in the interests of honesty, I never read eps 7-9, so...)
When is the last time you painted a picture with your keyboard or mouse? People make different content. Obviously the content you make it with a keyboard+mouse, sitting down at a desk, in an office probably.
As a former Wacom addict, I can tell you right now that a simple stylus/tablet combo flat-out sucks for artwork. Unless that stylus/tablet combo can dynamically recognize both pressure and sweep with any real precision, it's worse than worthless for artwork. Bad news is, MSFT can't even get touch beyond a basic moducim of usability for its UI, so I'm not holding out hope that you can use it like a palette. May as well use an Android tablet and a cheap plastic stick.
I do it for $45/mo. and that's in addition to making phone calls, receiving email, and playing games on it. Oh, and the company pays for that anyway because I receive corporate email on it too.
A separate laptop lets me do work while riding transit without having to pay a huge data bill for VPN and RDP/SSH.
True, but that was an example in extremis to prove the point that size doesn't really matter too much nowadays when it comes to mobile computing.
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yes Disney MAKES you pay for cable.
I think his point is this: Try getting cable or sat television without a Disney-owned channel on it.
Sure, you can cut the cable and all, but it's kind of funny that Disney has insinuated themselves that damned deeply into the entertainment industry, no?
Think of it as not being able to get municipal water without being forced to have Brawndo pumped into the pipes at regular intervals throughout the day. I mean, sure you can drill a well and get your own water and all, but...
Oh, come on. They just want to kill off 3Delight or something like that.
You're close - they likely want to kill off licensing money for 3Delight (you can get the engine yourself and use it for free). For instance, these guys license 3Delight as the render engine inside the DAZ Studio product, as do many other hobbyist and lower-end toolsets. They pay quite a bit for the privilege.
There's a decent amount of money to be made not by selling the engine as a product, but by licensing it out to other software houses, much like they licensed out the Unreal or Quake game engines. Making and maintaining a complex CG engine (rendering, game physics, subdivision, etc) is programmatically a PITA, and it's easier to use an existing wheel than to just re-invent it.
The camera was the main reason why I went up a little bit... plus I hated the round corners and smaller screens of the lower-cost models.
this is what I settled on - sure, there's no magnetic compass thingy in it, nor advanced accelerometers, but really - I have no need for that crap, and it's been working quite well. :)
(Now if I was into having 10 jillion apps I'd get something with more internal storage, but seriously - I only use about half of what I have in this little thing now...)
I bought my little Android phone intentionally. At $150 with a Net10 sub ($45/mo for unlimited everything, and it uses Verizon's towers), the little Huawei Ascend is cheap, it does what I want it to do, and runs quite nicely. Why am I so cheap about my phone? Because if it gets lost, broke or stolen, so what? I'll just get another one.
By contrast, a $600 iPhone or Galaxy or whatever with the typical carrier's shitty plan/contract/caps/bullshit/etc isn't exactly my idea of Nirvana. I got better things to do with the extra dosh.
Mind you, I'm not a fanboy of any camp; I have an Android phone, a box at home running Linux Mint, and a MacBook Pro (I prefer UNIX/Linux for my lap/desktop - sue me.) Pint is, Android has its limitations (esp. when integrating with the MBP), but it also has its advantages (like actual file management instead of $#@^! iTunes).
To each their own... I've begun to reach an age where watching fanboys go nuts trying to defend their idol is entertainment, not a call to arms (well, except when it comes to Microsoft... fuck Microsoft.)
It is a shame the next update still won't have the promised start menu.
Yeah, but funny as hell that, combined, Windows 8.x (all versions) is only ~25% after three years (a complete tech cycle in the consumer realm). It's doubly funny that this is in spite of every bix-box OEM pimping 8.x as hard as they friggin' can (go ahead and try to buy a laptop in BestBuy or Wal-Mart with something other than Windows 8 in it...)
Now compare that crappy growth curve to XP, 98, 95...
They are designed to be installed and then you forget about them. So the "classic" mitigation technique doesn't work. This is a big problem.
Hell, I thought the "classic" mitigation schemata for embedded devices was to not have them networked at all, leaving them to run for years (decades?) on end.
(See also the hordes of NT Telecom PBXes out there which are likely still around, requiring a goofball proprietary connection to a computer running OS/2 (!?) in order to patch it (or more commonly, you did it to add new/licensed features or to fix something gone corrupt).)
Therein lies the whole problem with the paradigm, truth be told - originally, embedded devices didn't communicate with jack shit - you unpacked it, turned it on, maybe configured it, and then you forget that it existed until it broke (at which time the vendor/contractor sent someone out to fix it), or got replaced.
All that said, hell, we already have a testbed for this nightmare - an ocean of smartphones whose carriers and manufacturers ceased to give a crap whether their wares ever got upgraded.
Depends on the project.
Something as popular and heavily-supported as the Linux Kernel? Fuggit - Torvalds has his pick of talented people to choose from, and uses his rather entertaining personality to insure that the slackers and dullards behave themselves. Note that his commit refusals are usually well spelled-out (if it even gets to his level - usually one the the 2nd or 3rd-level maintainers will reject it for some reason or other, so if Torvalds gets involved, it's usually based on some architectural or philosophical reason, and that in turn is usually very well explained.)
Now for Joe Sixpack's Uber-l33t CMS Mod for Drupal? Umm, okay... you take what you can get and you'll like it, but honestly, the same method can apply. If someone pulls a boner and tries to commit it, you explain in precise and objective terms *why* the thing was rejected. If the reason is philosophical, you explain it in a neutral manner, promoting the philosophy in question, and explaining why the rejected change doesn't meet it.
Note that none of this applies to a professional environment, where the team members are being *paid* for their skills. Also note that there's a lot of reasons why the guy is the low-man on the team totem pole - few of them having to do with coding ability.
I mean it this way: if you have a team full of rockstars, the 'idiot' may well be a planet-crushing badass by developer standards, but isn't as good as the other guys on the team - sort of like a top-notch AAA athlete finding himself playing on a pro MLB team. Or, it may be that the 'idiot' is a coding rockstar in a team full of ordinary devs, but he's a bit anti-social, hates or cannot fully grok the team's particular interpretation of Agile/Waterfall/Whatever-your-team-is-using, or for some similar reason isn't the guy who looks as good in the scrum master's eyes.
Long story short - the concept would need a friggin' book to explain in full, and requires more than just light managerial skills.
A decade ago, this was predicted to be the realm of Java..
Not Java specifically, but Jini, since Java didn't have a networking stack built-in and was too big (even then) to do cooperative processing/communications w/o requiring a far beefier CPU than most embedded devices could muster at the time (which is why Sun started the whole Jini project in the first place).
If, at the beginning, the first general use of the Internet had been porn sites featuring beastiality, rape, etc. then you can be sure it would not be around today.
You've never ever heard of alt.binaries.*, have you?
Oh riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. It's me that constantly brings up the socially equalizing force of guns...
Then again, even the biggest, burliest, and most methed-up biker dude is going to at least stop and think before trying to tackle a 98-lb weakling pointing a loaded pistol in his direction, no? Minus the gun, what other incentive would stop a larger dude with bad intent?
Err, it's "Filipino".
But yeah - I think they were talking about 3D-printed guns w/ no added parts, not zip guns.
Right, because computers are something you can make in your back yard. Don't be dense.
The vast majority of people lack the expertise to build or program computers which would be the actual parallel in this bizarre metaphor you've drawn up.
Not a very apt comparison, is it?
While (back in the day, and even now) building a computer from scratch requires at least an EE level of education plus a crap-ton of actual CS experience, making a working firearm requires a whole lot less.
After all, humanity has been making the things with crap technology since what, the 13th Century or so (counting cannons)?
The whole idea behind a homemade firearm boils down to materials (that can handle upwards of 40,000 psi or more), tight tolerances (so the gases are directed towards pushing the bullet out instead of leaking back through the receiver or blowing past the bullet out the barrel), and a bit of mechanical engineering (so you can build a reliable trigger, a reliable extraction mechanism, prevent jams, etc).
It's something like a whole order of magnitude less complex than building a whole computer from, say, Mouser/RadioShack parts.Hell, zip guns have been around for years, and it doesn't take any specialized kind of rocket science to 3D-print a firearm that allows a metal sleeve for the barrel (or has the facility to screw a barrel into it), or make one sufficiently useful for one shot.
People still use BASH (and yes, it's still hella usable if the task is simple).
If the tool fits and does the job, use it.
I kept thinking "I am the very model of a modern Major Perl Framework..."
Privacy can be controlled (e.g. VPN), so the lesser of two evils is still Google Fiber.
*sigh* - if only I could just use the fiber and be my own ISP with one single IP and firewall. Too bad they only do blocks for that sort of thing (IIRC).
So, umm, what if you were born before Apollo 11 launched?
You. My Lawn. Remove Thyself.
They could get a minivan that has better millage then the gas guzzling SUV.
Not really sure if I want to haul bulk fertilizer for the garden in a minivan (or lumber, or trash that the local garbageman won't pick up, or...) ...and I haven't even mentioned what a fully-laden minivan does (or rather, does not do) on the often-steep inclines we like to call highways around here...
The tax breaks are there. The resume-building is there. The gaining of a good track-record is there. What more did you seek?
While war tends to kill a metric shitload of innocent people, there are distinct differences between it and simple mass murder.
I'm not saying that either one is right or just, but at least try to learn the differences. Simple equivocation of the two is a sign of ignorance and/or naiveté. Please stop doing that.
Actually, I saw a program just like that (see above) - the company gets a solid tax break, the inmates' money is put into a savings account in their name (minus a small monthly stipend for housing), and they even had classes to help the inmate learn how to function as a normal human being.
The soon-to-be-ex-con gets a job and a chance to prove themselves. I know of one who not only worked his ass off at the plant, but after he got out they hired him on as a supervisor with a nice raise to boot. Many of the inmates there did pretty well (most likely because the selection process to get there in the first place, the requirement to be a non-violent offender, etc.)
Actually, some states do (did?) exactly that. Long ago, I worked at a poultry processing plant in Arkansas, and many of the workers there lived in 'halfway houses', where they were part of a program to ease inmates of the state prison farms back into society. It was a parole alternative for non-violent offenders/convicts, but they got out of prison earlier, depending on behavior. They were paid the regular wages, worked regular shifts, but went home every day/night in a van, and the halfway house was locked up. If anyone did anything dumb, they went back to the farm, but aside from a few re-integration classes and being confined to the home when they weren't working, they were treated like anyone else.
Agreed.
Now if he named folks like Snowden, Manning, and similar (where folks could actually go "yeah - they uncovered government badness and were whistleblowers", he could have gotten at least some support.
I mean, c'mon: he could have even stopped short and not even named anybody. At first I figured okay, he probably got a bad shake and deserves the compensation for his maltreatment. But nooo... he goes on to let his freak flag fly, and name those dumbasses as his heroes. My thoughts immediately became: "fuck that."
Mind you, the government is still way the hell in the wrong for locking him up if all he did was uncover a security flaw (and didn't sell or exploit it for personal gain), but holy shit...
IMHO, the sucky part is that unless the story arc skips ahead as many years, the by-now old/wrinkle-bound actors are going to look really out of place...
(then again, in the interests of honesty, I never read eps 7-9, so...)
When is the last time you painted a picture with your keyboard or mouse? People make different content. Obviously the content you make it with a keyboard+mouse, sitting down at a desk, in an office probably.
As a former Wacom addict, I can tell you right now that a simple stylus/tablet combo flat-out sucks for artwork. Unless that stylus/tablet combo can dynamically recognize both pressure and sweep with any real precision, it's worse than worthless for artwork. Bad news is, MSFT can't even get touch beyond a basic moducim of usability for its UI, so I'm not holding out hope that you can use it like a palette. May as well use an Android tablet and a cheap plastic stick.
Can you get service on that smartphone for $84?
I do it for $45/mo. and that's in addition to making phone calls, receiving email, and playing games on it. Oh, and the company pays for that anyway because I receive corporate email on it too.
A separate laptop lets me do work while riding transit without having to pay a huge data bill for VPN and RDP/SSH.
True, but that was an example in extremis to prove the point that size doesn't really matter too much nowadays when it comes to mobile computing.