Holy fuck! Jesus. I don't know if I just graduated at the wrong time (1992) or in the wrong place (Florida, but I looked in Boston too), but that kind of thing may as well come from a different planet. It's the first time I've ever heard of anything like that. Well, in the mid 80s when I was in high school I guess it was possible to get a programming job even without a CS or any other degree. That's what I heard at least and my cousin got a job like that (and he wasn't even a geek; but maybe that was an advantage). Was it like that in the early-mid 90s over there as well? I wish someone had told me. I would have moved in a heartbeat.
I'm not a script kiddie. I have an EE degree and absolutely loved writing assembly code as a teenager and writing C++ code with inline assembly, making small games etc. I got an A in every programming course I took in college and spent way too much time writing code to the detriment of my math and physics courses. Writing code is fun. It's like playing. I am of course jealous that you get payed to play.
What I want to know is how you got your first job out of college? Did you know someone? If I had graduated with my pathetic EE degree (worthless for actually getting a job IME) and found that there were programming jobs all over the place that only required a BS in CS I would have just gone back and got a CS degree and then landed myself a job writing code, and maybe I would be making 80k/year now instead of 10k. I tried everything I could think of but there was just nothing available for someone without professional experience. I looked both in Florida (where I went to school) and Boston (where I'm from), but such jobs simply did not exist as far as I could tell. Or if they did exist they certainly weren't being advertised anywhere. You had to know someone and I didn't know anyone. I was utterly defeated by the whole, "Can't get a job without experience and can't get experience without a job" situation. All of you seemed to have overcome that somehow. I'd love to know what your secret was.
I guess it's those sorts of experiences that have made me a bitter, cynical "life sucks; then you die" kind of guy. Or at least more than I would have been. Actually if someone had told me that getting a job right out of college without experience was pretty much impossible, well I would have still gone (I liked it), but I wouldn't have been so disenchanted with the pointlessness of job hunting afterward and I might have come up with some plan for actually making a living in a way that doesn't totally suck. Maybe ideas for starting a business. Although before the internet that was quite a bit harder. Now it's the only form of work that seems worth doing anyway. Wage slavery tends to suck.
The two most imporant lessons I've learned in life. These aren't universal. They just apply to me.
1. Getting a job doing something you don't totally hate is impossible. Getting a high paid job is impossible. At least if you have to rely on someone actually hiring you. Starting your own business is another matter. For that you just need money. Before the internet quite a lot of money. Not so much now for certain types of businesses.
Can you explain to me how you even got a job straight out of college? Did you answer an ad that said,"Programmers wanted. Bachelors in CS. No experience necessary." Do such ads really exist? I've never seen one.
In my state it takes years to get a plumbing license and in order to do that you have to work as plumbers assistant for years etc. I'd much rather write code for $40/hr or even $10-$15/hr. Not that that is an option for me. My aging degree is in EE not CS.
I've always loved coding. Mainly c/c++ and assembly. I've always imagined that if I were to go back to college for a CS degree and somehow manage to get a job as a programmer that I would start to hate it anyway and I didn't want to learn to hate programming. Actually this was based on some persuasive posts over the years from professional programmers right here on slashdot.
Also, when I graduated in the early 90s it simply wasn't possible, as far as I could determine, to get a job with only a CS degree where I lived. Even getting a masters wasn't enough. You needed a minimum of 2 years of real world professional programming experience to make it past HR. Period. I've never been much good with people and don't do well selling myself at job interviews. So it is and was beyond hopeless.
For the next decade after college I would search the job market from time to time, but if anything the situation just seemed worse, requiring experience and certifications of all kinds in languages that I didn't like or respect in addition to the other requirements that seemed impossible. It just seemed that there were already enough experienced programmers in the market. I guess there just wasn't any need for inexperienced ones, regardless of what degrees they had earned.
$40/hour for writing code? Seriously? Jesus. I'd do real work for that much. Unpleasant shit work. Cleaning monkey cages. Cleaning the inside of nuclear reactors. Now I think I understand why prices in the US are so absurdly high. You guys can afford to pay them. I make $10-$12/hour and that's when I'm lucky. My friend only makes $7.xx/hour.
I would *definitely* write code for $10/hour. Maybe even $8. I wouldn't need $40. Writing code is easy and frankly kind of fun. I do it for free all the time and greatly enjoy it. It isn't 'rocket science'. It's mostly basic logic. Especially nowadays when you aren't even expected to know assembly language or heavily optimize anything. Just write clear, well organized, easy to understand code and to hell with the number of cycles it takes to execute. Of course plumbers don't deserve to make $125/hour and electricians don't deserve to make $75/hour either but they do. At least in states with licensing requirements.
In order to make the reality show Lesbians on Mars profitable you'd have to make all of them hot. No way is a hot girl ever going on a suicide mission of any kind. Hot girls may threaten suicide from time to time, but they never actually do it. In addition they don't care about other planets or space stuff. In fact I would say, short of forcing them you would never get an attractive female on that ship. So you're basically talking about a bunch of guys with maybe a token crazy chick.
Suicide is not evidence that someone has brain damage or is insane or anything like that. It is often a brave and highly rational act. When I hear of a suicide I look for what it was in their environment that caused it. Not for what was wrong in their head. It is blaming the victim that is the real problem. Japanese society has a healthy view of suicide.
Sorry to say this, but, it's actually a whole lot easier than you think...
Not when you look like me. It was my life goal for decades until I finally gave up. It was just too difficult. I had to go back to electrical engineering and plasma physics. Much easier. If you're a pretty boy it's easy. If you're not it actually is a major achievement.
Maybe not obvious but certainly already well known. There will always be people that want to deny such things however. So the more evidence the better. Since most people who play football (of any sort) aren't exactly what you'd call intellectuals in the first place, the practical question for them is when will they actually become drooling vegetables unable to take care of themselves?
A minor quibble. The FBI investigated me, and I haven't done anything big or otherwise. The FBI are just national police. They don't only investigate 'serious' crimes. They investigate reports of any illegal activity outside of the jurisdiction of the local police. Period. It would be nice if the FBI only investigated serious crimes. It would also be nice if they only investigated people actually guilty of a crime. Neither is actually the case, however.
1. A person can live in more than one place in a lifetime. Some of these places may not have internet connections easily available. 2. It is possible to download the game before you depart for the Never Never and yet still play the game after you arrive. 3. I never said I did not have an internet connection right now. The point is not about right now. It is that at some point in the future (in my case probably sometime in the next 2 years) I may wish to live in a location without an internet connection and yet still be able to install/play games that I have paid for. 4. There are actually a great many people in the world who do not have internet connections. In such places people use ubiquitous and relatively cheap internet cafes for their online needs. Of course some of those people won't have computers either, but the fact remains that an internet connection is not something you can just assume everyone has at all times in their life.
Do I need to actually provide you with examples of places I have lived where internet was unavailable or impractical? I will avoid insulting your intelligence by doing so.
You do realize that "having to wait" can be years? Or never. Waiting several years to play a game or use other DRMed software is not acceptable for software that I have paid for.
I'm guessing you've never lived in a location where internet service is either unavailable or impractical. I have. I don't "need" to play any game, but I sure as hell am not going to pay even $1 for one that won't allow me to use it whenever I want.
Basically the publishers want to fuck me in the ass and then get paid for it. I guess a lot of people are willing to bend over and take it. I'm one of the millions of people who will not. I'd rather spend weeks cracking their software myself if necessary rather than pay them for it.
And I'll never understand people willing to fork over hard earned dollars for DRM laden crap when a completely DRM-free version is available, and for free no less. I'll take the DRM-free version thank you very much. If I like the game or other software I'd be happy to reward the developer, but I don't give a shit about the publisher pushing the DRMed crap. They can just go to hell. Also I assume you have never lived in a location without internet service available. Or where it is available but it is not practical to get it for various reasons. I have. And I probably will again. And when I do I like to be able to install and play any games or other software I have paid for. The publishers want to play hardball. Well two can play that game.
99.99999999999% of the time DRM is an utter failure, but what about those oh so rare exceptions?
I believe that many of those successes were 'protecting' software that just wasn't all that popular. Any sufficiently obscure software with DRM you pretty much have to crack yourself.
There have been occassional locked down hardware systems that have gone uncracked for years. The PS3 for instance.
I was dismayed to find that Audible.com's proprietary audio format:.aa/.aax, which supposedly is just a wrapper for mp3s, has gone uncracked for quite some time now. It remains 100% uncracked. However the quality of the 64 kbps.aax audio is high enough for its speech only content that the generation loss involved with burning to CD and re-encoding to mp3 is minimal. This workaround may be the reason no one has made any serious attempt to crack the.aax format.
Nevertheless it is disappointing. From the POV of Amazon/Audible the.aax format DRM has been a complete success. Their files cannot be distributed without generation loss. Is it possible they didn't anticipate that most people wouldn't particularly care about the minor loss in voice quality? Admittedly the higher quality 64 kbps.aax file is a somewhat recent addition. Before that there were only 32 kbps versions. Perhaps in that case the generation loss would have been much more noticeable.
If you are anti-DRM why buy the software in the first place? The reason you never hear of it here is because we are mostly techies. We know what DRM is and know to check for it before we buy the software. Only a non-geek would buy software and only later realize it has DRM.
i point to netflix and Steam as examples of DRM done right. If you make the customer feel they are getting more value in their purchase and the DRM is unobtrusive and just rides along? Most won't care. look at how many had a fight over the Humble bundle and I was surprised to see how many agreed with me that it didn't matter because Steam gives value like chat, updates, matchmaking, etc and I know many pirates that once they got netflix haven't bothered, they have so many shows to watch now that frankly they could live in front of the set and never see it all, so why bother pirating more?
I think you are missing the point of DRM. The point of DRM is to stop unauthorized people from using or copying or distributing your software. That is its purpose. It was never intended as some kind of additional feature to get more people to buy your software as people like you claim Steam has done.
In terms of stopping pirates from using software DRM has been an almost complete failure. There is the rare exception where the developers themselves devoted a large percentage of their development time to weaving DRM into thousands of different places to intentionally make things difficult/tedious for crackers, but those are rare exceptions. For the most part DRM has been an utter failure.
When I want to buy a game that is only available on Steam I download it from TPB or KAT instead. The torrent version has an additional feature other than its lower cost: it allows me to install it without an internet connection. That's the kind of feature that I don't need all that often, but when I need it I really need it. So I rationally choose the version which offers me the most value: the DRM free version.
There will always be a significant percentage of sheeple who don't care about DRM, no matter how draconian it is. Even the must-always-be-connected-to-server DRM sells many copies. Obviously less intrusive forms of DRM like steam will have fewer people objecting to it, but that doesn't mean the publisher isn't losing a significant number of sales from people who refuse to pay for DRM or who don't have reliable (or any) internet connections. Obviously such publishers just don't care about those people. They are willing to lose some number of customers in order to have that warm fuzzy feeling that delaying the release of their software on TPB for an extra 12 hours seems to give them. If I were a stockholder I would not be happy with that decision.
The half wolf, half pig creature looked up into the rolling meadows. As far as its hungry, greedy eyes could see were beasts of burden. Thousands of grey-white furry forms like the swirls in a wide, muddy stream. The hungry animal wished it could eat all of them. It roared/squeeled, not bothering with a stealthy approach.
Then it broke into a sprint and soon had an unlucky calf in its jaws, it's hot blood still pumping from its neck in spurts. The rest of the herd gradually dispersed. Although one was taken the rest were protected by their sheer numbers. Herd/swarm behavior evolved relatively quickly in the animal world because, at least for the majority, it works. Most of the animals worried little about being taken by predators and just went on with their lives. Someday it may be their turn, but the odds were against it.
Right. Because descriptions given by law enforcement are always accurate. There is no picture of it because it probably looks completely benign and it would be too embarrassing for the government.
He wasn't just detained. He was charged with a crime and now he will have to hire a lawyer and prove his innocence in court. If he was under the impression that he did not live in a police state I would guess that his views have now changed.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy fuck! Jesus. I don't know if I just graduated at the wrong time (1992) or in the wrong place (Florida, but I looked in Boston too), but that kind of thing may as well come from a different planet. It's the first time I've ever heard of anything like that. Well, in the mid 80s when I was in high school I guess it was possible to get a programming job even without a CS or any other degree. That's what I heard at least and my cousin got a job like that (and he wasn't even a geek; but maybe that was an advantage). Was it like that in the early-mid 90s over there as well? I wish someone had told me. I would have moved in a heartbeat.
I'm not a script kiddie. I have an EE degree and absolutely loved writing assembly code as a teenager and writing C++ code with inline assembly, making small games etc. I got an A in every programming course I took in college and spent way too much time writing code to the detriment of my math and physics courses. Writing code is fun. It's like playing. I am of course jealous that you get payed to play.
What I want to know is how you got your first job out of college? Did you know someone? If I had graduated with my pathetic EE degree (worthless for actually getting a job IME) and found that there were programming jobs all over the place that only required a BS in CS I would have just gone back and got a CS degree and then landed myself a job writing code, and maybe I would be making 80k/year now instead of 10k. I tried everything I could think of but there was just nothing available for someone without professional experience. I looked both in Florida (where I went to school) and Boston (where I'm from), but such jobs simply did not exist as far as I could tell. Or if they did exist they certainly weren't being advertised anywhere. You had to know someone and I didn't know anyone. I was utterly defeated by the whole, "Can't get a job without experience and can't get experience without a job" situation. All of you seemed to have overcome that somehow. I'd love to know what your secret was.
I guess it's those sorts of experiences that have made me a bitter, cynical "life sucks; then you die" kind of guy. Or at least more than I would have been. Actually if someone had told me that getting a job right out of college without experience was pretty much impossible, well I would have still gone (I liked it), but I wouldn't have been so disenchanted with the pointlessness of job hunting afterward and I might have come up with some plan for actually making a living in a way that doesn't totally suck. Maybe ideas for starting a business. Although before the internet that was quite a bit harder. Now it's the only form of work that seems worth doing anyway. Wage slavery tends to suck.
The two most imporant lessons I've learned in life. These aren't universal. They just apply to me.
1. Getting a job doing something you don't totally hate is impossible. Getting a high paid job is impossible. At least if you have to rely on someone actually hiring you. Starting your own business is another matter. For that you just need money. Before the internet quite a lot of money. Not so much now for certain types of businesses.
2. Getting a girlfriend is impossible.
Can you explain to me how you even got a job straight out of college? Did you answer an ad that said,"Programmers wanted. Bachelors in CS. No experience necessary." Do such ads really exist? I've never seen one.
In my state it takes years to get a plumbing license and in order to do that you have to work as plumbers assistant for years etc. I'd much rather write code for $40/hr or even $10-$15/hr. Not that that is an option for me. My aging degree is in EE not CS.
I've always loved coding. Mainly c/c++ and assembly. I've always imagined that if I were to go back to college for a CS degree and somehow manage to get a job as a programmer that I would start to hate it anyway and I didn't want to learn to hate programming. Actually this was based on some persuasive posts over the years from professional programmers right here on slashdot.
Also, when I graduated in the early 90s it simply wasn't possible, as far as I could determine, to get a job with only a CS degree where I lived. Even getting a masters wasn't enough. You needed a minimum of 2 years of real world professional programming experience to make it past HR. Period. I've never been much good with people and don't do well selling myself at job interviews. So it is and was beyond hopeless.
For the next decade after college I would search the job market from time to time, but if anything the situation just seemed worse, requiring experience and certifications of all kinds in languages that I didn't like or respect in addition to the other requirements that seemed impossible. It just seemed that there were already enough experienced programmers in the market. I guess there just wasn't any need for inexperienced ones, regardless of what degrees they had earned.
$40/hour for writing code? Seriously? Jesus. I'd do real work for that much. Unpleasant shit work. Cleaning monkey cages. Cleaning the inside of nuclear reactors. Now I think I understand why prices in the US are so absurdly high. You guys can afford to pay them. I make $10-$12/hour and that's when I'm lucky. My friend only makes $7.xx/hour.
I would *definitely* write code for $10/hour. Maybe even $8. I wouldn't need $40. Writing code is easy and frankly kind of fun. I do it for free all the time and greatly enjoy it. It isn't 'rocket science'. It's mostly basic logic. Especially nowadays when you aren't even expected to know assembly language or heavily optimize anything. Just write clear, well organized, easy to understand code and to hell with the number of cycles it takes to execute. Of course plumbers don't deserve to make $125/hour and electricians don't deserve to make $75/hour either but they do. At least in states with licensing requirements.
In order to make the reality show Lesbians on Mars profitable you'd have to make all of them hot. No way is a hot girl ever going on a suicide mission of any kind. Hot girls may threaten suicide from time to time, but they never actually do it. In addition they don't care about other planets or space stuff. In fact I would say, short of forcing them you would never get an attractive female on that ship. So you're basically talking about a bunch of guys with maybe a token crazy chick.
Suicide is not evidence that someone has brain damage or is insane or anything like that. It is often a brave and highly rational act. When I hear of a suicide I look for what it was in their environment that caused it. Not for what was wrong in their head. It is blaming the victim that is the real problem. Japanese society has a healthy view of suicide.
Sorry to say this, but, it's actually a whole lot easier than you think...
Not when you look like me. It was my life goal for decades until I finally gave up. It was just too difficult. I had to go back to electrical engineering and plasma physics. Much easier. If you're a pretty boy it's easy. If you're not it actually is a major achievement.
Maybe not obvious but certainly already well known. There will always be people that want to deny such things however. So the more evidence the better. Since most people who play football (of any sort) aren't exactly what you'd call intellectuals in the first place, the practical question for them is when will they actually become drooling vegetables unable to take care of themselves?
A minor quibble. The FBI investigated me, and I haven't done anything big or otherwise. The FBI are just national police. They don't only investigate 'serious' crimes. They investigate reports of any illegal activity outside of the jurisdiction of the local police. Period. It would be nice if the FBI only investigated serious crimes. It would also be nice if they only investigated people actually guilty of a crime. Neither is actually the case, however.
You are forgetting that we have nukes. And that Vega is the last place we would want to go within a 25 ly radius.
Has it not occured to you that:
1. A person can live in more than one place in a lifetime. Some of these places may not have internet connections easily available.
2. It is possible to download the game before you depart for the Never Never and yet still play the game after you arrive.
3. I never said I did not have an internet connection right now. The point is not about right now. It is that at some point in the future (in my case probably sometime in the next 2 years) I may wish to live in a location without an internet connection and yet still be able to install/play games that I have paid for.
4. There are actually a great many people in the world who do not have internet connections. In such places people use ubiquitous and relatively cheap internet cafes for their online needs. Of course some of those people won't have computers either, but the fact remains that an internet connection is not something you can just assume everyone has at all times in their life.
Do I need to actually provide you with examples of places I have lived where internet was unavailable or impractical? I will avoid insulting your intelligence by doing so.
and last i chcked WE were the government..
You work for the government?
You do realize that "having to wait" can be years? Or never. Waiting several years to play a game or use other DRMed software is not acceptable for software that I have paid for.
I'm guessing you've never lived in a location where internet service is either unavailable or impractical. I have. I don't "need" to play any game, but I sure as hell am not going to pay even $1 for one that won't allow me to use it whenever I want.
Basically the publishers want to fuck me in the ass and then get paid for it. I guess a lot of people are willing to bend over and take it. I'm one of the millions of people who will not. I'd rather spend weeks cracking their software myself if necessary rather than pay them for it.
And I'll never understand people willing to fork over hard earned dollars for DRM laden crap when a completely DRM-free version is available, and for free no less. I'll take the DRM-free version thank you very much. If I like the game or other software I'd be happy to reward the developer, but I don't give a shit about the publisher pushing the DRMed crap. They can just go to hell. Also I assume you have never lived in a location without internet service available. Or where it is available but it is not practical to get it for various reasons. I have. And I probably will again. And when I do I like to be able to install and play any games or other software I have paid for. The publishers want to play hardball. Well two can play that game.
99.99999999999% of the time DRM is an utter failure, but what about those oh so rare exceptions?
I believe that many of those successes were 'protecting' software that just wasn't all that popular. Any sufficiently obscure software with DRM you pretty much have to crack yourself.
There have been occassional locked down hardware systems that have gone uncracked for years. The PS3 for instance.
I was dismayed to find that Audible.com's proprietary audio format: .aa/.aax, which supposedly is just a wrapper for mp3s, has gone uncracked for quite some time now. It remains 100% uncracked. However the quality of the 64 kbps .aax audio is high enough for its speech only content that the generation loss involved with burning to CD and re-encoding to mp3 is minimal. This workaround may be the reason no one has made any serious attempt to crack the .aax format.
Nevertheless it is disappointing. From the POV of Amazon/Audible the .aax format DRM has been a complete success. Their files cannot be distributed without generation loss. Is it possible they didn't anticipate that most people wouldn't particularly care about the minor loss in voice quality? Admittedly the higher quality 64 kbps .aax file is a somewhat recent addition. Before that there were only 32 kbps versions. Perhaps in that case the generation loss would have been much more noticeable.
If you are anti-DRM why buy the software in the first place? The reason you never hear of it here is because we are mostly techies. We know what DRM is and know to check for it before we buy the software. Only a non-geek would buy software and only later realize it has DRM.
i point to netflix and Steam as examples of DRM done right. If you make the customer feel they are getting more value in their purchase and the DRM is unobtrusive and just rides along? Most won't care. look at how many had a fight over the Humble bundle and I was surprised to see how many agreed with me that it didn't matter because Steam gives value like chat, updates, matchmaking, etc and I know many pirates that once they got netflix haven't bothered, they have so many shows to watch now that frankly they could live in front of the set and never see it all, so why bother pirating more?
I think you are missing the point of DRM. The point of DRM is to stop unauthorized people from using or copying or distributing your software. That is its purpose. It was never intended as some kind of additional feature to get more people to buy your software as people like you claim Steam has done.
In terms of stopping pirates from using software DRM has been an almost complete failure. There is the rare exception where the developers themselves devoted a large percentage of their development time to weaving DRM into thousands of different places to intentionally make things difficult/tedious for crackers, but those are rare exceptions. For the most part DRM has been an utter failure.
When I want to buy a game that is only available on Steam I download it from TPB or KAT instead. The torrent version has an additional feature other than its lower cost: it allows me to install it without an internet connection. That's the kind of feature that I don't need all that often, but when I need it I really need it. So I rationally choose the version which offers me the most value: the DRM free version.
There will always be a significant percentage of sheeple who don't care about DRM, no matter how draconian it is. Even the must-always-be-connected-to-server DRM sells many copies. Obviously less intrusive forms of DRM like steam will have fewer people objecting to it, but that doesn't mean the publisher isn't losing a significant number of sales from people who refuse to pay for DRM or who don't have reliable (or any) internet connections. Obviously such publishers just don't care about those people. They are willing to lose some number of customers in order to have that warm fuzzy feeling that delaying the release of their software on TPB for an extra 12 hours seems to give them. If I were a stockholder I would not be happy with that decision.
The half wolf, half pig creature looked up into the rolling meadows. As far as its hungry, greedy eyes could see were beasts of burden. Thousands of grey-white furry forms like the swirls in a wide, muddy stream. The hungry animal wished it could eat all of them. It roared/squeeled, not bothering with a stealthy approach.
Then it broke into a sprint and soon had an unlucky calf in its jaws, it's hot blood still pumping from its neck in spurts. The rest of the herd gradually dispersed. Although one was taken the rest were protected by their sheer numbers. Herd/swarm behavior evolved relatively quickly in the animal world because, at least for the majority, it works. Most of the animals worried little about being taken by predators and just went on with their lives. Someday it may be their turn, but the odds were against it.
Rules are only of interest to the people who follow them. This is why I never seem to notice speed limit signs.
America used to be the greatest nation of tinkerers and inventors in the world.
When was this?
None of that was in the description. Were you there? If so is there more you could tell us?
Right. Because descriptions given by law enforcement are always accurate. There is no picture of it because it probably looks completely benign and it would be too embarrassing for the government.
Well we are still more free than North Korea. I think. At least we can still be proud of that.
He wasn't just detained. He was charged with a crime and now he will have to hire a lawyer and prove his innocence in court. If he was under the impression that he did not live in a police state I would guess that his views have now changed.