I remember coding away at my keyboard with Borland C++ 3.1, TASM & Turbo Pascal 7.0 back when i was a kid. Looking back it was some of the best programming experiences i've had in my life, even though the code quality was probably crappy.
Anyone else yearning for the days when programming was low level and just getting a stupid plasma effect to work smoothly gave you that warm fuzzy feeling in your stomach?
Even though we have it really good now (thank god for OS X, decent IDEs & Libraries) a lot of fun factor seems to have dissapeared. It doesn't matter what you write somebody else has already done a lot of the hard stuff for you (most of the time anyway) in the libs you use.
Which planet do these guys live on, that it's normal to work 16 hours/day without looking for better management alternatives?
If you're going to work that much you may as well start your own company doing whatever it is you want to do. That way you get 100% say in how things are run & you 100% of the dinero.
Really strange, these people don't seem to have any lives whatsoever outside work. Kinda sad when you think about it!
Seriously, women are coming up to you in public, commenting on your hardware & you're complaining?
Dude, I (and i'm sure many a geek/hacker type) have enough trouble complaining why my place looks like a server farm without women running out of the house screaming (the anime doesn't help either).
Consider yourself lucky & focus on using your laptop to create something cool. Otherwise there are many many "hacker" 1995 stickers to make you look "cool".
I dont' get kids these days. The reason I (and a lot of people of my generation) learned to program was to code/hack cool shit!
Nowadays it seems very rare to find a 13 year old hacking games or teaching himself assembler just for the fun of it. People just seem to want to learn stuff to finish school courses & land decent jobs.
Where is the fun element? I get that some people just like solving problems and see computers as just another tool to do it. But what about the hacker breed? People learning stuff just for the fun of it, not for profit?
While these people are still bred into existance I fear the point & click generation of operating systems and the "commercialization" (take that to mean what you will) of computers & the internet has taken the fun out of it.
A computer is now just a tool, not some cool strict machine that does just what you tell it and punishes you if you make mistakes & act stupid. Sometimes I truly do wish it was the late 80s/early 90s when it was so easy to write something cool and people who wanted to program didn't ask these sorts of questions.
Please forgive my rant, you may now go on with your lives fellow Slashdot readers.
I don't know what's worse, the fact that such ridiculous laws exist or the fact the goverment rigidly enforces it.
I mean, come on. Send the guy a letter actually means that they had meetings about this and actively pursue suing people who wish to state facts. Facts mind you the publication of which doesn't incure financial loss to the Australian government. Fictional lala (RIAA) land loss or real world monetary loss.
I agree 100% If this guys kid wants to program he'll find a way to.
As a kid being able to program a computer to do what I wanted it to do & being able to crack games was an indescribable rush. Like you I wanted a computer ever since i first saw one, not having any particular use for it.
The difficult thing is though that everythings gui these days. Back in the day you had to know a bit of basic just to run a program. Even after that dos was bundled with QBASIC & you had to understand memory limitations to run gumes (Remember DOS=HIGH,UMB).
These days everything is just point & click and easy to use. Just because someone is "interested in computers" doesn't mean (s)he is a computer geek like in days of yore. I get the feeling less & less people are learning to program as kids. It's a shame!
And of course the inevitable "wasn't me". I can see problems where people will use your comments online in court against you, especially as google has "verified" that you are who you say you are.
I don't think the problem is people buying lots of gadgets, the problem is the story never ends. Gadgets will always deprecate in value fairly quickly (dvd players worth 50 euros now have the same fucntionality that dvdplayers worth 500 euros had a few years ago) and one also needs to get a replacement every x years (computer/laptop/ipod). Also because of technological progress, a gadget can bacome obsolete fairly quickly (palm/newton) for those wanting the latest features.
While I myself love gadgets too and always have the newest computers/phone/ipod/laptop etc me & my fellow geeks have to accept the cold hard truth: it is money thrown down the drain.
But nowhere does it say she'll have access to sensitive material and what type of projects she'll be working on. If the data/project is highly sensitive then of course her identity should be validated. However, there should also be transparancy as to what is done with the data and when it will be destroyed following termination of the employer/employee relationship.
I don't know what the laws in the US are about this, but it should be clear what happens with your personal data, when it will be destroyed and what punishment a firm can expect for not adhering to the law.
Extreme background checking should be an exception, whereas more and more it seems to be becoming the norm. This is a very dangerous course that's being taken.
However, I hadn't thought of the fact that not everyone has a passport.
I'm sorry but that's complete & utter nonsense. A copy of your passport can easily be used so that they know who you are if something happens. Sure this can be forged, but within reason so can anything (you could even bribe the sheriff that fingerprints you).
Thank god stuff like that isn't the norm here in the EU, as a lot of people would just plain out refuse it. It's troubling to read the "what's the problem if you have nothing to hide" comments here on slashdot, as the people who post here should know better (check out the archives for examples of where this mentality gets you).
That something like this develops into a lawsuit is just plain sad. The worst thing is that crap like this ties up the court system unneededly. it's just plain pathetic if you think about it.
Weird shit happens all over the world. But i specifically mean teachers going loco and suing their students when childish pranks like this are pulled. I mean, seriously. We were all kids once. Everyone has pulled prank in their time. Get a life.
This sounds more like some low production 80s high school comedy (in an alternate universe where myspace exists) than real life. How come this sort of absurd stuff only seems to happen in the States (incidents that I know of anyway). Any sane person wouldn't give two shits about this and get on with his/her life.
Amen. I'm still not convinced why I should use this over QuickSilver. If they were to finally port picasa to the Mach though, that would beat iPhoto hands down....
Amen. I've got my own via Nehemiah low power based server with a few hard disks attatched & 512 MB of RAM. On it I run subversion server/apache/torrentflux/samba/imap so it's pretty much my personal server for everything and it only costs a few hundred bucks to put together in total.
Advantage of this is that you don't need to run you pc 24/7 and your resources aren't drained. Not to mention the fact that I can access my mail & initiate bittorent downloads anywhere on the planet from my smartphone.
Moral of the story is, if your geeky enough to need a special network card for bittorrent you may as well go the extra few yards and get a totally custom based solution;)
One thing I miss about the good old days when anyone who even looked at a computer was considered a nerd was that you didn't get these kinds of questions. The words IT & career in the same sentance just bring a foul taste to my mouth.
Sure, if you just want to make a living IT is an industry that will probably always have a job for you. However if you aspire to become a master at something it has to be something you live & breathe. Just figure out what you like doing and roll with it.
You like organizing people become a manager. You like helping people work at a helpdesk. You like figuring out how computers work get a job making device drivers. You like php become a web developer... You get the idea. Doing something just because it's hot is a sure recipie for disaster.
The golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. What you musn't forget here is that in connection bandwidth & hard drive space is increasing dramatically every year.
10 years ago it took an hour to download one mp3 and it would take up 2.5% of your hard drive, even though it's only 96/128k. Fast forward to now. 320 gig hard drives are sold for about 80-90 euros and they can hold about 50 days worth of continous FLAC music, more music than the average person buys in a lifetime. Not to mention that it now takes just 5 minutes to download a whole album.
Now lets fast forward 10 years where you can probably get a 320 terrabyte hard drive for the same price. That's more than 46 years of not hearing the same song twice. And don't even want to think about how long it will take to download an album, probably seconds.
P2P is here and it's here to stay. Whereas warez & piracy was once an "underground" thing where you had to know someone or have something to get to the good shit, these days any moron can download whatever he wants in no time at all without contributing anything.
The record companies HAVE to evolve eventually, or they will die the death they deserve. They may wield much power, but p2p gives power to the masses and unites them. Give people good service and quality and they will pay you a decent price for it.
I agree with you on this. Online distribution of music can only really take off with the best possible quality. Seing as the ideal service is already DRM free and bandwidth costs nothing these days, selling FLAC instead of mp3 is a no brainer (at least this is what one would think).
I'm not talking about me, i'm talking about 99% of the buying public. Love it or hate it most people just wanna listen to the stuff they hear on MTV, not some obscure indie artist from Berlin.
By all means, if you enjoy music support the artist. I know I do:)
True. But people won't pay for a service that's inconvenient to use (& overpriced) when p2p makes things so easy these days. Why go to all the trouble to subscribe to a piece of shit service when you can download exactly the same (better, because it's not DRMed) quality for free?
True. But it's becoming tougher to sell them. Where as before (at least here in holland) a cd would cost 20 euros when it first came out, 5 years later it would still cost 20 euros. Now cds are already discounted weeks after they come out, as they should be.
While there will probably always be some market for cds, if mp3s were sold the same way (maybe $1 when they first come out, and then 10 cents cheaper every x months) everyone would buy mp3s instead. Better still if you can offer a subscription service for let's say $10 / month. That means that normal people that usually buy a couple of cds a year now get a new one every month.
While I agree with you that people will not conciously try to avoid supporting the RIAA, they still stick it to the man every time they download an mp3 over their favourite p2p network.
Until music is sold without DRM in mp3/flac form for reasonable prices people will continue to download and nobody will buy cds. Unfortunatley (for them) RIAA & friends dont want to sell mp3/flacs without DRM. Therefore they are digging their own graves a little more every day.
One day even these dinosaurs will have to face reality and see that they are no longer needed in their current form and they grow less powerful everyday. Just as a meteor one day killed all the dinosaurs and made way for man, so will p2p smite the record companies and finally free the independant artist from their evil chains (please excuse the dramatism;) )
They're digging their own graves with this type of behaviour. People want freedom of choice. Thanks to P2P people get freedom of choice. If internet radio can't compete this will just stimulate even more people to download what they want to listen to.
Because of their arrogance the music industry wil now have 0 revenue where before it could get something.
I'm sorry, but how does logging what everybody does and giving that data away willy nilly help prevent the things you stated? These are stupid laws created by people who have absolutely no understanding of the internet or what constitutes a threat. The only people they inconvenience & punish are the innocent and they also create a dangerous precident for walking all over your rights.
We are now opening a pandora's box with grave consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember coding away at my keyboard with Borland C++ 3.1, TASM & Turbo Pascal 7.0 back when i was a kid. Looking back it was some of the best programming experiences i've had in my life, even though the code quality was probably crappy.
Anyone else yearning for the days when programming was low level and just getting a stupid plasma effect to work smoothly gave you that warm fuzzy feeling in your stomach?
Even though we have it really good now (thank god for OS X, decent IDEs & Libraries) a lot of fun factor seems to have dissapeared. It doesn't matter what you write somebody else has already done a lot of the hard stuff for you (most of the time anyway) in the libs you use.
Exactly!
Which planet do these guys live on, that it's normal to work 16 hours/day without looking for better management alternatives?
If you're going to work that much you may as well start your own company doing whatever it is you want to do. That way you get 100% say in how things are run & you 100% of the dinero.
Really strange, these people don't seem to have any lives whatsoever outside work. Kinda sad when you think about it!
Seriously, women are coming up to you in public, commenting on your hardware & you're complaining?
Dude, I (and i'm sure many a geek/hacker type) have enough trouble complaining why my place looks like a server farm without women running out of the house screaming (the anime doesn't help either).
Consider yourself lucky & focus on using your laptop to create something cool. Otherwise there are many many "hacker" 1995 stickers to make you look "cool".
I dont' get kids these days. The reason I (and a lot of people of my generation) learned to program was to code/hack cool shit!
Nowadays it seems very rare to find a 13 year old hacking games or teaching himself assembler just for the fun of it. People just seem to want to learn stuff to finish school courses & land decent jobs.
Where is the fun element? I get that some people just like solving problems and see computers as just another tool to do it. But what about the hacker breed? People learning stuff just for the fun of it, not for profit?
While these people are still bred into existance I fear the point & click generation of operating systems and the "commercialization" (take that to mean what you will) of computers & the internet has taken the fun out of it.
A computer is now just a tool, not some cool strict machine that does just what you tell it and punishes you if you make mistakes & act stupid. Sometimes I truly do wish it was the late 80s/early 90s when it was so easy to write something cool and people who wanted to program didn't ask these sorts of questions.
Please forgive my rant, you may now go on with your lives fellow Slashdot readers.
I don't know what's worse, the fact that such ridiculous laws exist or the fact the goverment rigidly enforces it.
I mean, come on. Send the guy a letter actually means that they had meetings about this and actively pursue suing people who wish to state facts. Facts mind you the publication of which doesn't incure financial loss to the Australian government. Fictional lala (RIAA) land loss or real world monetary loss.
I agree 100% If this guys kid wants to program he'll find a way to.
As a kid being able to program a computer to do what I wanted it to do & being able to crack games was an indescribable rush. Like you I wanted a computer ever since i first saw one, not having any particular use for it.
The difficult thing is though that everythings gui these days. Back in the day you had to know a bit of basic just to run a program. Even after that dos was bundled with QBASIC & you had to understand memory limitations to run gumes (Remember DOS=HIGH,UMB).
These days everything is just point & click and easy to use. Just because someone is "interested in computers" doesn't mean (s)he is a computer geek like in days of yore. I get the feeling less & less people are learning to program as kids. It's a shame!
And of course the inevitable "wasn't me". I can see problems where people will use your comments online in court against you, especially as google has "verified" that you are who you say you are.
I don't think the problem is people buying lots of gadgets, the problem is the story never ends. Gadgets will always deprecate in value fairly quickly (dvd players worth 50 euros now have the same fucntionality that dvdplayers worth 500 euros had a few years ago) and one also needs to get a replacement every x years (computer/laptop/ipod). Also because of technological progress, a gadget can bacome obsolete fairly quickly (palm/newton) for those wanting the latest features.
While I myself love gadgets too and always have the newest computers/phone/ipod/laptop etc me & my fellow geeks have to accept the cold hard truth: it is money thrown down the drain.
But nowhere does it say she'll have access to sensitive material and what type of projects she'll be working on. If the data/project is highly sensitive then of course her identity should be validated. However, there should also be transparancy as to what is done with the data and when it will be destroyed following termination of the employer/employee relationship.
I don't know what the laws in the US are about this, but it should be clear what happens with your personal data, when it will be destroyed and what punishment a firm can expect for not adhering to the law.
Extreme background checking should be an exception, whereas more and more it seems to be becoming the norm. This is a very dangerous course that's being taken.
However, I hadn't thought of the fact that not everyone has a passport.
I'm sorry but that's complete & utter nonsense. A copy of your passport can easily be used so that they know who you are if something happens. Sure this can be forged, but within reason so can anything (you could even bribe the sheriff that fingerprints you).
Thank god stuff like that isn't the norm here in the EU, as a lot of people would just plain out refuse it. It's troubling to read the "what's the problem if you have nothing to hide" comments here on slashdot, as the people who post here should know better (check out the archives for examples of where this mentality gets you).
That something like this develops into a lawsuit is just plain sad. The worst thing is that crap like this ties up the court system unneededly. it's just plain pathetic if you think about it.
Weird shit happens all over the world. But i specifically mean teachers going loco and suing their students when childish pranks like this are pulled. I mean, seriously. We were all kids once. Everyone has pulled prank in their time. Get a life.
This sounds more like some low production 80s high school comedy (in an alternate universe where myspace exists) than real life. How come this sort of absurd stuff only seems to happen in the States (incidents that I know of anyway). Any sane person wouldn't give two shits about this and get on with his/her life.
Amen. I'm still not convinced why I should use this over QuickSilver. If they were to finally port picasa to the Mach though, that would beat iPhoto hands down....
Amen. I've got my own via Nehemiah low power based server with a few hard disks attatched & 512 MB of RAM. On it I run subversion server/apache/torrentflux/samba/imap so it's pretty much my personal server for everything and it only costs a few hundred bucks to put together in total.
;)
Advantage of this is that you don't need to run you pc 24/7 and your resources aren't drained. Not to mention the fact that I can access my mail & initiate bittorent downloads anywhere on the planet from my smartphone.
Moral of the story is, if your geeky enough to need a special network card for bittorrent you may as well go the extra few yards and get a totally custom based solution
Exactly,
One thing I miss about the good old days when anyone who even looked at a computer was considered a nerd was that you didn't get these kinds of questions. The words IT & career in the same sentance just bring a foul taste to my mouth.
Sure, if you just want to make a living IT is an industry that will probably always have a job for you. However if you aspire to become a master at something it has to be something you live & breathe. Just figure out what you like doing and roll with it.
You like organizing people become a manager. You like helping people work at a helpdesk. You like figuring out how computers work get a job making device drivers. You like php become a web developer... You get the idea. Doing something just because it's hot is a sure recipie for disaster.
The golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. What you musn't forget here is that in connection bandwidth & hard drive space is increasing dramatically every year.
10 years ago it took an hour to download one mp3 and it would take up 2.5% of your hard drive, even though it's only 96/128k. Fast forward to now. 320 gig hard drives are sold for about 80-90 euros and they can hold about 50 days worth of continous FLAC music, more music than the average person buys in a lifetime. Not to mention that it now takes just 5 minutes to download a whole album.
Now lets fast forward 10 years where you can probably get a 320 terrabyte hard drive for the same price. That's more than 46 years of not hearing the same song twice. And don't even want to think about how long it will take to download an album, probably seconds.
P2P is here and it's here to stay. Whereas warez & piracy was once an "underground" thing where you had to know someone or have something to get to the good shit, these days any moron can download whatever he wants in no time at all without contributing anything.
The record companies HAVE to evolve eventually, or they will die the death they deserve. They may wield much power, but p2p gives power to the masses and unites them. Give people good service and quality and they will pay you a decent price for it.
I agree with you on this. Online distribution of music can only really take off with the best possible quality. Seing as the ideal service is already DRM free and bandwidth costs nothing these days, selling FLAC instead of mp3 is a no brainer (at least this is what one would think).
I'm not talking about me, i'm talking about 99% of the buying public. Love it or hate it most people just wanna listen to the stuff they hear on MTV, not some obscure indie artist from Berlin.
:)
By all means, if you enjoy music support the artist. I know I do
True. But people won't pay for a service that's inconvenient to use (& overpriced) when p2p makes things so easy these days. Why go to all the trouble to subscribe to a piece of shit service when you can download exactly the same (better, because it's not DRMed) quality for free?
True. But it's becoming tougher to sell them. Where as before (at least here in holland) a cd would cost 20 euros when it first came out, 5 years later it would still cost 20 euros. Now cds are already discounted weeks after they come out, as they should be.
While there will probably always be some market for cds, if mp3s were sold the same way (maybe $1 when they first come out, and then 10 cents cheaper every x months) everyone would buy mp3s instead. Better still if you can offer a subscription service for let's say $10 / month. That means that normal people that usually buy a couple of cds a year now get a new one every month.
To bad the RIAA doesn't see it that way though.
While I agree with you that people will not conciously try to avoid supporting the RIAA, they still stick it to the man every time they download an mp3 over their favourite p2p network.
;) )
Until music is sold without DRM in mp3/flac form for reasonable prices people will continue to download and nobody will buy cds. Unfortunatley (for them) RIAA & friends dont want to sell mp3/flacs without DRM. Therefore they are digging their own graves a little more every day.
One day even these dinosaurs will have to face reality and see that they are no longer needed in their current form and they grow less powerful everyday. Just as a meteor one day killed all the dinosaurs and made way for man, so will p2p smite the record companies and finally free the independant artist from their evil chains (please excuse the dramatism
They're digging their own graves with this type of behaviour. People want freedom of choice. Thanks to P2P people get freedom of choice. If internet radio can't compete this will just stimulate even more people to download what they want to listen to.
Because of their arrogance the music industry wil now have 0 revenue where before it could get something.
Euhm...I was replying to this guy:
2 58702
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225468&cid=18
I'm sorry, but how does logging what everybody does and giving that data away willy nilly help prevent the things you stated? These are stupid laws created by people who have absolutely no understanding of the internet or what constitutes a threat. The only people they inconvenience & punish are the innocent and they also create a dangerous precident for walking all over your rights.
We are now opening a pandora's box with grave consequences.