With physical property, the onus is on the owner to both demarkate the protected area and mark it as "no trespassing". For example, I own a couple of vacant lots in town. Kids play there, college students cut across them as a shortcut to the local 7-11 etc. It's MY land, shouldn't I be able to sue every man-jack of 'em for using my resource without permission?
The answer is "NO". They're not violating a physical structure (which is assumed to have an implicit no-trespassing sign). I would have to fence (or otherwise deliniate) the area and post "No Trespassing" signs prominently around the perimeter before I can prosecute. The open, unfenced, unposted land is considered an implicit invitation.
So why, for real property, does the lack of a fence imply permission, while in the wacko-world of IP using an open router is a crime? The physical property laws, to me, are pretty logical.
For the record, I'm happy to see kids playing on the lots, and a bit less happy to have to pick of the trash folks drop there. However, I have no intention of slapping "No Trespassing" signs up and start suing folks. Can't we all just get along???;-)
Great comment -- always nice to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about. I used to dive a lot, but scared myself one too many times (I narc way too easily, and I don't like being stupid). I'm strictly a shallow-water dabbler now.
OK, so now the bad guys just have to wire an embedded roadside bomb that detonates when it STOPS receiving an otherwise uninterruped signal in the cell-phone frequency range. I'll bet most of us could wire that in under two cups of coffee.
My wife is a best-selling author, and depends on copyright for her living, so believe me when I say that we understand the importance of protecting her work. However, the point of copyright is to encourage new creation, which was intended to become part of the public domain. The public basically grants a short-term monopoloy on duplication in exchange for the eventual use of the product. This deal was fair and mutually beneficial.
Big business has bought the government, and the deal is altered past all bounds of recognition or sanity. DRM is the icing on the cake, insuring that even when our current insane copyright terms finally allow ancient works to fall into the public domain, they'll be 'protected' by additional restrictions, assuming terms aren't extended indefinitely.
Even people who need copyright to make a living are shaking their heads and wondering what flavor of Kool-Aid is being passed around the government. Artists don't need 200-year monopolies and draconion punishment of their audience to make a living. I'm not sure who these provisions are supposed to benefit. . . the great-great-great grandchildren of famous movie-makers maybe? Why should the public commons be eliminated for their sakes? Something's not right.
Hah! They're still running, despite claims to the contrary. Getting money into your account now involves getting a Blizzard gift card first, but that takes about five minutes. My downloads are running at break-neck speed while they're around. I think it's sad that the most user-friendly and effective music distribution site in the world is being shut down.
It's not about money, it's about control -- I don't want some DRM-damaged crap that won't be playable in five years. Allofmp3 delivers what the customer wants, everyone else is delivering what the RIAA tells them to. I buy LOTS of CD's (probably 7-10 per month), but NOTHING from the RIAA. If I want music from the groups they represent, I either use allofmp3 or buy the cd's USED on ebay -- even if it costs more than buying the same CD at WallMart. At the moment, I'm burning bandwidth!
You rock. I wish more people, regardless of their religious preferences, would lead a well-examined life, and show the sort of compassion and consideration you do. That's something that should be inherently human, but seems to be a rarity.
Excellent comment - I think Dada21 hit the nail on the proverbial head. I'm currently living in a modest manufactured home on 40-some acres in Montana, working for a great company that's happy with a 40-work work week. I spend my time with my wife of twenty years and our kids in some of the prettiest country in the world. Old cars, minimal debt. Same recipe the parent describes for the most part.
I've tried the high-pressure, high-expectation life, and it's a trap. Every possession you buy owns a piece of you. You worry about them, protect them from theft/damage, insure them from loss. Stuff takes space, so you need a bigger house . . . and now you're on the demented merry-go-round of avarice that drives America.
Cut back, find a job that fits your needs, and don't worry so much about the blasted pay-scale. Simplify. Guard your personal time jealously. Ultimately, life is made of time, don't sell any more of it than you need to.
The only thing I'd add to Dada's comments, is get a horse. I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I'm sure that any good hobby would serve a similar purpose . . . Nonetheless,there's an old saying "The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man". When I come home stressed out, I go feed the horses, and love 'em up for a minute before heading into the house -- don't know why it helps, but it does! All the stress stays out in the field with the critters, and a happy, relaxed me goes in to meet my family.
Re:Does any major site use pure CSS?
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CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 1
OK, I'm replying to my own comment, which probably makes me a troll of some sort. Several people have pointed out that CSS degrades more gracefully than HTML, where graceful means the content is still readable, even if the presentation is NOT what the author had in mind. Others object to the use of pixel sizes in my examples. Thus are holy wars begun!
A good web page should meet three criteria: Utility, accesibility and asethetics. Naturally, these three goals are effectively mutually exclusive, and EVERY page is a compromise between them. If I'm writing documents for computer consumption, XML offers the best utility: clear content divisions, easily parsed, and verifiable with a DTD. Plain old version 2.0 or so HTML runs a close second. However, if the entire web were composed of boring black-and white text, even with nice headers, titles etc. the internet wouldn't be very interesting. And adding graphics and motion and whiz-bang to that text is what brought us active content, graphics, CSS and a host of wildly-unsupported HTML tags, as well as accesibility concerns from those whose hardware or software couldn't correctly display all the new glitz.
So, when I design a page, I have to ask what the client finds important -- who are they trying to reach and what message do they want to send. Many clients want a very detailed, graphic-intensive, polished look to their site. Ever notice how it's the MARKETING department that's in charge of most web-sites? These guys usually have a handful of highly-paid graphic artists designing brochures and flyers, and they're accustomed to pixel-perfect placement. They rate aesthetics highly, and often don't understand, or don't care, about issues like browser compatibility and the fact that.0001% of the population may be trying to view their site in a black-and-white cellphone. In a perfect world, I should be able to build a glitzy page that pushes the newest graphics card to it's limits with sub-pixel shading and lighting effects, and yet degrades to an optimal display on a palm-pilot, cellphone, or adaptive reader for the blind. I'm not a web-designer by profession, I'm primarily a sysop, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing something. However, I haven't found a way to do this yet (I'm using XML/XSLT to provide several versions of a site). CSS is a powerful tool, which in my opinion, is severely hobbled by browser support (which admittedly is getting better all the time). Naturally, the CSS fan-boys disagree, and assert that CSS can do anything, and when it doesn't display as intended, at least it's readable.
I submit that, if a client who spent 10k having his graphic artists design a look for the web site, sees that site render in a cell-phone display, he's going to be firing a web-designer, though your milage may vary.
I am primarily a system administrator, not a web-guru, so it's not improbably
Re:Does any major site use pure CSS?
on
CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 5, Insightful
In my opinion, you've hit the nail on the head. I use CSS-based layouts on my web sites, mostly because it was supposed to be a "best practices" issue, and partially because the inheritance is powerful -- I can make the left menu on every page in the site a top or bottom menu by changing just a couple of lines. However, CSS layouts don't usually degrade well in older browsers: you may see al your elements sequentially, for example. And getting pixel-perfect layouts is STILL problematical. That is to say that I can usually define a left-menu that is, for example 100px wide, and below the header, but it may not be EXACTLY 100 px wide in all browsers, and if I'm nesting multiple elements these little differences can cause big headaches.
The solution, of course, is to rely on a bunch of hacks to present slightly different rules to different browsers, forcing all of them to display the correct bounding-box, margin, padding etc. And now we're writing unsupported, undocumented nasty hacks that will come back to bite us each time a browser is updated, which as a previous poster pointed out is an obvious no-no.
Nested tables are not elegant, they're not CSS-based, they're not extensible etc. But they work. A 100px cell displays as at 100 px pretty darn reliably, without a laundry-list of hacks and hints. A menu placed to the left of the content STAYS to the left of the content, it doesn't suddenly display after the content block. From a practical standpoint, tables are simply more robust and more reliable than CSS-based layouts, at least with the flakey browser support CSS layouts have. I've pulled lots of hair out to get my CSS layouts as good as they are, because I believe in CSS, but I think a smarter man would have used tables.
The Powerbooks were requested by sales and marketing because they considered them "sexier" than than the IBM machines, and somehow better for running photoshop and other "artsy" programs. In all honesty, they have great displays, and a solid feel to the hardware. I'm also a Linux geek, and I was kind of interested to try moving away from Microsoft.We support a small number of Apple/Mac systems, and to be honest I really like OS-X. Supporting a large number of PowerBooks would have been a bit of a stress on our IT department, which is geared largely toward windows laptops/desktops and unix servers.
When a company begins supporting a line of hardware, it's usually for the long haul, and represents a considerable investment. If I had purchased eight or nine Powerbooks, with all the trimmings, it would be extremely difficult to change my mind in six months or a year. My techs would be investing time and money getting up to speed at maintaining and servicing Macs, and we'd doubtless end up with Apple printers and supporting peripherials. Within months there would be custom apps written in those departments that would require additional time/effort to move to a different platform. I knew all this going in, and was tentatively prepared to support the extra workload that Mac's repsresented.
HOWEVER, Apple gave me a great demonstration of their customer support. They contorted the contract to insure that a six-month old item was magically not covered by the one year warranty, and then offered to fix the product for full retail. Notice that, had I taken that offer, they would have gotten the RETAIL not the WHOLESALE price for the replacement product -- what a deal, for them.
In contrast, I have had excellent experience with ThinkPads (particularly their upper-tier models), and IBM/Lenovo have offered excellent support, even in "gray areas", like a laptop getting dropped down a flight of stairs. When I have had to buy replacement parts/services they've been competitively priced (OK, the $300 dvd burners are awfully high, but that's an exception).
So given several competing products with similar specifications, why would I EVER choose to support a dishonest company whose customer support defines the low-water mark in my experience? Why would I enter to a long-term agreement with such a firm, especially using my company's money? Because the Mac's are "sexy"? Nice try, but not good enough.
If Apple offered a product that was so amazing, so superior that no competitor's product could even come close, and if my company truly NEEDED that product, I would consider buy the Apple product, despite my opinion of their customer support. Until that day comes, no Apple hardware will cross the threshold of this, or any company I consult for if I can help it. My job is to advise companies on how to solve their problems quickly, cheaply and with a minimum of effort. That includes a responsibility to help them select honest, reliable vendors -- which excludes Apple.
I bought an unopened iPod from ebay. After six months, it died. Apple refused to honor the warranty (apparently the bloke I purchased it from wasn't an official reseller, which let them weasel out of their obligation). They did offer an "out of warranty" repair, for $249, which was almost exactly the retail replacement cost, and certainly higher than their wholesale cost on the item.
So, I fixed the iPod myself, but that was the LAST Apple product I'll ever buy. Oh, and in case someone from Apple is reading, I just killed a proposal from marketing to buy Mac Powerbooks for all of our salesmen -- they're getting ThinkPads instead. Kiss 20k goodbye, and multiply that by the number of decisions I make each year for the next twenty years or so!
The synthetic stone "problem" is far from new. Previous posters have mentioned pearls, but Beryl and Corrundum-based gemstones (ruby, saphhire, emerald, aquamarine, etc) have been created in the lab for years. The whole issue of synthetic stones is facinating - the synthetics are chemically identical, and have the same hardness, cleavage etc as their natural counterparts. The color is easily controlled by adding the perfect amount of trace elements, and can be manipulated to consistently reflect the best natural stones. For example, the deep "emerald" green color is actually fairly rare in emeralds, and thus highly prized. In a synthetic, it's child's play to achieve.
Years ago, I worked with a jewler, and got a colored stones certificate from the Gemological Institute of America (GIA). Since diamonds are artifically scarce (DeBeers has warehouses full of them), they make a lousy investment, and I think they're grossly over-hyped. High-quality colored stones are honestly rare, and thus (hypothetically at least) valuable. And here's where the whole natural vs. synthetic thing gets messy. The synthetics are getting progressively harder to tell from the natural stones. Even a good gemologist will be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a truely exceptional natural emerald and a synthetic. Of course, the natural stone may appraise at 20k, while the synthetic is work a couple of bucks. For folks that have invested large sums in stones, this is frightening. The jewler I worked for quit purchasing high ticket beryl-based stones when the fakes got good enough he couldn't reliably spot them.
The perverse illogic of the situation is mind-boggling. If I, as a trained gemologist, can't tell you which of two stones is real, why do you care which one I use to make your jewelry? Especially if one of them is virtually free, and other costs more than your car? Yet, almost every time, the clients insist that they want natural stones. My wife wears a colored stone in her wedding ring -- perversely, it's a (quite spendy) natural stone. We're all insane!
I use the graphical login screen in GRUB, and fly fairly frequently. I think I'll make a custom version, just for use in airports. How about a nice shot of the twin-towers burning, with the login text in Arabic, and maybe some choice jihadist slogan at the top of the screen? On login, I could have the system display messages like:
SCANNING for radio transmission devices. . . . . DEVICES FOUND
SCANNING for evildoer dongle . . . . . . . . . NO DEVICE FOUND
SCANNING for secured network connection . . . . . ..NOT FOUND
SECURITY COMPROMISED. BOOTING INTO DECOY LINUX
Then boot into a plain vanilla Linux with power-puff girls wallpaper. For good measure maybe I should have a large secondary partition filled with completely random data.
My company has the usual "no expectation of privacy" balderdash in place, and we log on the main access point for the company. There are a couple of things that make this information less useful:
1) Sometimes high-demand files will be mirrored by helpful nerds at suspcious domains. Just because the domain name is hot-sexy-girls.com doesn't mean that the employee isn't reading technical documents. Only use this excuse if they have you dead-to-rights -- it's weak but true.
2) If I see a whole afternoon of surfing "anonymous.com" it doesn't tell me jack. Go anonymous!
3) Servers on the DMZ have unmonitored outbound connections, and anyone with a few brain cells can X-forward from a browser running on one of those boxes. Curiously, I've never gotten around to locking this little hole down. Maybe I'm lazy.
4) For a couple of doughnuts, server logs can get corrupted or deleted. After all, computers are fallible, and this data isn't on a high-availability mount point. "Sorry boss, looks like proccess XYZ ran amok last night, and the browser logs are mangled. Have a doughnut!".
5) In extreme cases, a quick grep over the log will clean off a few of the worst violaters. May I suggest a "grep -v slashdot.org" for example?
Amazingly well, actually. We live in a smaller house, and have had to cut back in a few areas, but overall we're much happier. Surprisingly, a large portion of the old budget went to restaurant dinners, and other means of coping with a hectic schedule. So, yes, even on less money, I'm much happier, and my wife seems to be as well. Weird, huh?
Decisions and Balance
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IT and Divorce?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
First, IT is not unique in being a demanding career. I'm getting to be a bit of a gray-hair, and have worked in several career fields. IT tends to attract people with obsessive/compulsive tendencies, which we politely describe as drive/curiosity/commitment. And yes, companies encourage our little work-a-holic souls to do their bidding 70 hours a week, if possible.
In my opinion, a boss saying "you're indespensible" or "there's a dealine friday" is just an ego-stroke, designed to keep you working unpaid overtime for the company. I should know, I've taken that bait more than once. No one is indespensible, and if the company were serious about the production schedule, they'd hire enough staff to come in on time. We're being played. Worse, we offer up our families on the alter to our egos. Grad school is a huge time commitment - having done it, I'm not sure it was worth the price.
Ultimately, companies rise and fall, whole fields of endeavor wax and wane, and the career that looks like gold today will likely be dross in time. Take time NOW for your wife, and kids if you have them. I know too many nerds that have a shelf filled with company awards, and go home to an empty house at night. No pretty little bauble on your brag-shelf will compensate for failure within the family. If your current job isn't family friendly, start printing resume's today.
I left a "big" job a few months ago. I kept it because after the dot-bomb I was afraid of being unemployed. They gradually demanded more and more of my time, and were fairly generous with the compensation. Eventually, I found myself arguing my wife of 20 years (a rare occurance), and it became apparent I didn't know the name of the school my daughters went to, or the names of their best friends. The next day, I talked with my boss, and when she wasn't receptive to my needs, started looking for new work. I am poorer financially, but FAR, FAR happier than I would have been had I stayed. I hope my wife will be at my side long after I've bid a final farewell to my career, it would be stupid to ruin something eternal for that which of little worth.
I am not a climatologist, but I've done a fair bit of biogeochemistry (aquatic chemsitry), and have considerable experience with H2S-saturated waters/sediments below the chemocline. Typically, waters below the chemocline are anoxic, and extremely basic. H2S is very toxic, and highly soluble in water. Fortunately, we usually only see large amounts of it trapped in sediments, but it CAN accumulate in the water column. Now, when you have deep waters with high H2S concentrations, and then transport those waters vertically (wind, waves, currents, earthquakes etc.) the pressure drops, and H2S degasses. Actually, this further reduces the density of the ascending water and speeds the ascent, often pulling additional deep waters up behind the initial volume. As these waters near the surface, they release considerable quantities of H2S into the atmosphere. There are areas with huge amounts of H2S locked away in sediments deep below the surface - a rapid overturn could be VERY unhealthy for we oxygen-breathing critters!
For the record, I once "accidently" entered an H2S pocket in Lake Michigan. Scuba diving along the bottom at about 60', my buddy and I suddenly "skimmed" over a deep, cave-like tube. The water there "shimmered", which frequently indicates a strong chemocline, and we were too bouyant to descend into the tube. Stupidly, we got more weights, went back. Almost immediately my skin began itching and burning. I could smell H2S strongly, even though I was breathing through a regulator. My dive buddy, ahead of me, was obviously in distress so we surfaced. On the surface, his breathing was still labored, and he didn't look good (I was just feeling nausiated), so we went to a hospital, where we were both treated for H2S toxicity. It binds to the hemoglobin and won't let go, causing asphyxiation, and can be absorbed throught the skin! We both had chemical burns from the water, and later I found much of the rubber on my dive gear to be gooey and partially dissolved. All this from less than a minute under the chemocline. This is how I got interested in biogeochemistry.
Sorry folks, but when I buy a wallet I'm looking for three things: durable, functional and THIN. I sit on my wallet all day long, and I don't want to develop a permanant list to port from sitting on a thick wedge of garbage all day long. I also want something that can stand up to years of abuse, and organizes the contents well. No flash, no glitz, no style points.
My current wallet (which I've had for nearly ten years) is made of "eelskin" (if memory serves, that's a nice marketing moniker for hagfish hide). It's very thin, looks good, and wears like iron. I carry a minimal number of cards and cash, and the result is thin enough (about.6 cm) that it's pretty comfortable to sit on.
I'll show my geek pride by shopping ThinkGeek for cube goodies and T-shirts.
Bravo! Well said parent. Ever since Star Trek, every junior-woodchuck nerd prides themselves on their "cold, emotionless logic". Ironically, these folks have little real understanding of logic.
I studied philosophy, with an emphasis on formal logic, though I only minored the field. It's a bit like mental push-ups in that it's probably good for you, but of of questionable utility. Formal logic is useful for solving a certain subset of well-defined problems -- mostly of the kind you find on Philosophy tests and GRE exams (that's a hint for those of you looking to take the GRE!). It is, however, ill suited for MOST of life's challenges.
Falling in love isn't logical. Sunsets, music, literature, and sports aren't logical. It's emotion that drives us, that adds meaning to our lives. Logic is kind of like the #20 torx screwdriver in your toolbox - it's not intended as a general-purpose tool, but it's great solution to a specific, specialized kind of problem. Trying to use it to drive nails is a recipe for frustration!
This just makes me sick. What happened to morals and ethics? Honor? Integrity? Those aren't just words -- they're concepts, and used to be considered the foundations of character. I hold three B.S. degrees, an M.S. and a host of additional credits obtained from various universities. I have never cheated on a class, nor seen a class that "required" cheating, though I have had to repeat a very few classes that I wasn't bright enough to pass on the first attempt. This, in my opinion, is to be expected when one undertakes a difficult course of study.
I agree with the previous poster from Harvard, who was appalled that cheating could be so widespread when it was conspicuously absent from my peer group. Why aren't the schools throwing these Bozo's out,with a nice note on their transcript about "violation of educational ethics"? No wonder the world is so screwed up, we're so busy trying to make a buck that we've forgotten the basis of civilization.
Machivellian behavior is only advantageus when it's statistically improbable. In primates, troops disband (often violently!) when trust degenerates below a minimum threshold. Since our society is based on similar social contracts (e.g. shared trust), I would expect extremely serious repercussions as the percentage of liars/cons/cheaters increases. I need a nice rock to hide under.
I'm old enough to have lived through the rice-crispy era, when music was filled with snap, crackle and popp (and flutter and hiss as well). I've owned a fair number of records, and good riddance to them. Records are heavy, delicate, and even with the best of care, degrade a bit each time they're played (You audiophiles with the half-speed masters playing on a 10k deck are excepted).
Without re-hashing the old arguments of "analog warmth" etc. the fact remains that my current music collection (ripped as Q7 oggs) sounds better, weighs far less, takes up less room, and is more easily searched than my old stack of records. It's also much more convenient for building playlists across albums, creating backups, and transferring to portable players. Why on earth would anyone want a stack of records? Other than gaining the owner a few retro-cool points, it's a vastly inferior format. If you miss snap, crackle and pop, there are plugins for several popular digital musical players that will add that back in for you!
Whoa there Bucky, them's fightin' words. Now I don't know about all you dandy's over 'cross the pond, but I live on a hundred-plus acres of mostly-frozen sagebrush in Montana. I drive a gol-danged Dodge 3500 1 ton 4x4 that'll pull a six-horse trailer up homestake pass at 80mph in a blizzard with room for six big folks and a couple of dogs to boot. I had one of them little fuel-efficient cars, but it fell into a pothole, and I was lucky to swim to safety. In addition, I had an accident one, bumped heads with a feller in a Saab. The helicopter whirled him off to the hospital, and the tow truck was hauling the wreckage off the road while I was working on polishing a bit of paint of my chrome. Gol-Dang I love a big truck - heck my tires weigh more than the average Yugo. Sure it costs a bit to drive, but the intimidation factor is amazing -- heck my trailer hitch is taller than the windshield on most fuel-efficient cars! And THAT's why we yanks get rotten milage!
This was an attempt at HUMOR. I'm a bit of a redneck, and do own a big red truck, but my usual commuter is an 86 VW Jetta. Also, I laugh at stupid cowboys who jack their rigs a foot in the air and think they're cool.
Excellent comment. I occasionally teach college-level courses, and in addition to the usual materials I often put considerable effort into a handful of very detailed drawings/diagrams that I feel clarify some difficult concepts.
I have, unfortunately, seen my work appear in published papers and even books without attribution. While I haven't pursued legal options, it irks me to have my work stolen blatently. If they'd ask permission, I'd grant it without hesitation or thoughts of renumeration, but it irks me to see others charging for my work. From now on I'll attach a creative commons license to it, and sleep better!
Thank you for a truly excellent suggestion!
Slashdot Mirror
With physical property, the onus is on the owner to both demarkate the protected area and mark it as "no trespassing". For example, I own a couple of vacant lots in town. Kids play there, college students cut across them as a shortcut to the local 7-11 etc. It's MY land, shouldn't I be able to sue every man-jack of 'em for using my resource without permission? The answer is "NO". They're not violating a physical structure (which is assumed to have an implicit no-trespassing sign). I would have to fence (or otherwise deliniate) the area and post "No Trespassing" signs prominently around the perimeter before I can prosecute. The open, unfenced, unposted land is considered an implicit invitation. So why, for real property, does the lack of a fence imply permission, while in the wacko-world of IP using an open router is a crime? The physical property laws, to me, are pretty logical. For the record, I'm happy to see kids playing on the lots, and a bit less happy to have to pick of the trash folks drop there. However, I have no intention of slapping "No Trespassing" signs up and start suing folks. Can't we all just get along??? ;-)
Great comment -- always nice to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about. I used to dive a lot, but scared myself one too many times (I narc way too easily, and I don't like being stupid). I'm strictly a shallow-water dabbler now.
OK, so now the bad guys just have to wire an embedded roadside bomb that detonates when it STOPS receiving an otherwise uninterruped signal in the cell-phone frequency range. I'll bet most of us could wire that in under two cups of coffee.
My wife is a best-selling author, and depends on copyright for her living, so believe me when I say that we understand the importance of protecting her work. However, the point of copyright is to encourage new creation, which was intended to become part of the public domain. The public basically grants a short-term monopoloy on duplication in exchange for the eventual use of the product. This deal was fair and mutually beneficial.
Big business has bought the government, and the deal is altered past all bounds of recognition or sanity. DRM is the icing on the cake, insuring that even when our current insane copyright terms finally allow ancient works to fall into the public domain, they'll be 'protected' by additional restrictions, assuming terms aren't extended indefinitely.
Even people who need copyright to make a living are shaking their heads and wondering what flavor of Kool-Aid is being passed around the government. Artists don't need 200-year monopolies and draconion punishment of their audience to make a living. I'm not sure who these provisions are supposed to benefit. . . the great-great-great grandchildren of famous movie-makers maybe? Why should the public commons be eliminated for their sakes? Something's not right.
Hah! They're still running, despite claims to the contrary. Getting money into your account now involves getting a Blizzard gift card first, but that takes about five minutes. My downloads are running at break-neck speed while they're around. I think it's sad that the most user-friendly and effective music distribution site in the world is being shut down.
It's not about money, it's about control -- I don't want some DRM-damaged crap that won't be playable in five years. Allofmp3 delivers what the customer wants, everyone else is delivering what the RIAA tells them to. I buy LOTS of CD's (probably 7-10 per month), but NOTHING from the RIAA. If I want music from the groups they represent, I either use allofmp3 or buy the cd's USED on ebay -- even if it costs more than buying the same CD at WallMart. At the moment, I'm burning bandwidth!
Death to the RIAA, long live allofmp3.com!
You rock. I wish more people, regardless of their religious preferences, would lead a well-examined life, and show the sort of compassion and consideration you do. That's something that should be inherently human, but seems to be a rarity.
I've tried the high-pressure, high-expectation life, and it's a trap. Every possession you buy owns a piece of you. You worry about them, protect them from theft/damage, insure them from loss. Stuff takes space, so you need a bigger house . . . and now you're on the demented merry-go-round of avarice that drives America.
Cut back, find a job that fits your needs, and don't worry so much about the blasted pay-scale. Simplify. Guard your personal time jealously. Ultimately, life is made of time, don't sell any more of it than you need to.
The only thing I'd add to Dada's comments, is get a horse. I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I'm sure that any good hobby would serve a similar purpose . . . Nonetheless,there's an old saying "The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man". When I come home stressed out, I go feed the horses, and love 'em up for a minute before heading into the house -- don't know why it helps, but it does! All the stress stays out in the field with the critters, and a happy, relaxed me goes in to meet my family.
A good web page should meet three criteria: Utility, accesibility and asethetics. Naturally, these three goals are effectively mutually exclusive, and EVERY page is a compromise between them. If I'm writing documents for computer consumption, XML offers the best utility: clear content divisions, easily parsed, and verifiable with a DTD. Plain old version 2.0 or so HTML runs a close second. However, if the entire web were composed of boring black-and white text, even with nice headers, titles etc. the internet wouldn't be very interesting. And adding graphics and motion and whiz-bang to that text is what brought us active content, graphics, CSS and a host of wildly-unsupported HTML tags, as well as accesibility concerns from those whose hardware or software couldn't correctly display all the new glitz.
So, when I design a page, I have to ask what the client finds important -- who are they trying to reach and what message do they want to send. Many clients want a very detailed, graphic-intensive, polished look to their site. Ever notice how it's the MARKETING department that's in charge of most web-sites? These guys usually have a handful of highly-paid graphic artists designing brochures and flyers, and they're accustomed to pixel-perfect placement. They rate aesthetics highly, and often don't understand, or don't care, about issues like browser compatibility and the fact that .0001% of the population may be trying to view their site in a black-and-white cellphone. In a perfect world, I should be able to build a glitzy page that pushes the newest graphics card to it's limits with sub-pixel shading and lighting effects, and yet degrades to an optimal display on a palm-pilot, cellphone, or adaptive reader for the blind. I'm not a web-designer by profession, I'm primarily a sysop, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing something. However, I haven't found a way to do this yet (I'm using XML/XSLT to provide several versions of a site). CSS is a powerful tool, which in my opinion, is severely hobbled by browser support (which admittedly is getting better all the time). Naturally, the CSS fan-boys disagree, and assert that CSS can do anything, and when it doesn't display as intended, at least it's readable.
I submit that, if a client who spent 10k having his graphic artists design a look for the web site, sees that site render in a cell-phone display, he's going to be firing a web-designer, though your milage may vary.
I am primarily a system administrator, not a web-guru, so it's not improbably
The solution, of course, is to rely on a bunch of hacks to present slightly different rules to different browsers, forcing all of them to display the correct bounding-box, margin, padding etc. And now we're writing unsupported, undocumented nasty hacks that will come back to bite us each time a browser is updated, which as a previous poster pointed out is an obvious no-no.
Nested tables are not elegant, they're not CSS-based, they're not extensible etc. But they work. A 100px cell displays as at 100 px pretty darn reliably, without a laundry-list of hacks and hints. A menu placed to the left of the content STAYS to the left of the content, it doesn't suddenly display after the content block. From a practical standpoint, tables are simply more robust and more reliable than CSS-based layouts, at least with the flakey browser support CSS layouts have. I've pulled lots of hair out to get my CSS layouts as good as they are, because I believe in CSS, but I think a smarter man would have used tables.
When a company begins supporting a line of hardware, it's usually for the long haul, and represents a considerable investment. If I had purchased eight or nine Powerbooks, with all the trimmings, it would be extremely difficult to change my mind in six months or a year. My techs would be investing time and money getting up to speed at maintaining and servicing Macs, and we'd doubtless end up with Apple printers and supporting peripherials. Within months there would be custom apps written in those departments that would require additional time/effort to move to a different platform. I knew all this going in, and was tentatively prepared to support the extra workload that Mac's repsresented.
HOWEVER, Apple gave me a great demonstration of their customer support. They contorted the contract to insure that a six-month old item was magically not covered by the one year warranty, and then offered to fix the product for full retail. Notice that, had I taken that offer, they would have gotten the RETAIL not the WHOLESALE price for the replacement product -- what a deal, for them.
In contrast, I have had excellent experience with ThinkPads (particularly their upper-tier models), and IBM/Lenovo have offered excellent support, even in "gray areas", like a laptop getting dropped down a flight of stairs. When I have had to buy replacement parts/services they've been competitively priced (OK, the $300 dvd burners are awfully high, but that's an exception).
So given several competing products with similar specifications, why would I EVER choose to support a dishonest company whose customer support defines the low-water mark in my experience? Why would I enter to a long-term agreement with such a firm, especially using my company's money? Because the Mac's are "sexy"? Nice try, but not good enough.
If Apple offered a product that was so amazing, so superior that no competitor's product could even come close, and if my company truly NEEDED that product, I would consider buy the Apple product, despite my opinion of their customer support. Until that day comes, no Apple hardware will cross the threshold of this, or any company I consult for if I can help it. My job is to advise companies on how to solve their problems quickly, cheaply and with a minimum of effort. That includes a responsibility to help them select honest, reliable vendors -- which excludes Apple.
So, I fixed the iPod myself, but that was the LAST Apple product I'll ever buy. Oh, and in case someone from Apple is reading, I just killed a proposal from marketing to buy Mac Powerbooks for all of our salesmen -- they're getting ThinkPads instead. Kiss 20k goodbye, and multiply that by the number of decisions I make each year for the next twenty years or so!
Anyone else notice that his IP fragments include 257? Must be those new routers. ;-)
Years ago, I worked with a jewler, and got a colored stones certificate from the Gemological Institute of America (GIA). Since diamonds are artifically scarce (DeBeers has warehouses full of them), they make a lousy investment, and I think they're grossly over-hyped. High-quality colored stones are honestly rare, and thus (hypothetically at least) valuable. And here's where the whole natural vs. synthetic thing gets messy. The synthetics are getting progressively harder to tell from the natural stones. Even a good gemologist will be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a truely exceptional natural emerald and a synthetic. Of course, the natural stone may appraise at 20k, while the synthetic is work a couple of bucks. For folks that have invested large sums in stones, this is frightening. The jewler I worked for quit purchasing high ticket beryl-based stones when the fakes got good enough he couldn't reliably spot them.
The perverse illogic of the situation is mind-boggling. If I, as a trained gemologist, can't tell you which of two stones is real, why do you care which one I use to make your jewelry? Especially if one of them is virtually free, and other costs more than your car? Yet, almost every time, the clients insist that they want natural stones. My wife wears a colored stone in her wedding ring -- perversely, it's a (quite spendy) natural stone. We're all insane!
I use the graphical login screen in GRUB, and fly fairly frequently. I think I'll make a custom version, just for use in airports. How about a nice shot of the twin-towers burning, with the login text in Arabic, and maybe some choice jihadist slogan at the top of the screen? On login, I could have the system display messages like: .NOT FOUND
SCANNING for radio transmission devices. . . . . DEVICES FOUND
SCANNING for evildoer dongle . . . . . . . . . NO DEVICE FOUND
SCANNING for secured network connection . . . . . .
SECURITY COMPROMISED. BOOTING INTO DECOY LINUX
Then boot into a plain vanilla Linux with power-puff girls wallpaper. For good measure maybe I should have a large secondary partition filled with completely random data.
My company has the usual "no expectation of privacy" balderdash in place, and we log on the main access point for the company. There are a couple of things that make this information less useful: 1) Sometimes high-demand files will be mirrored by helpful nerds at suspcious domains. Just because the domain name is hot-sexy-girls.com doesn't mean that the employee isn't reading technical documents. Only use this excuse if they have you dead-to-rights -- it's weak but true. 2) If I see a whole afternoon of surfing "anonymous.com" it doesn't tell me jack. Go anonymous! 3) Servers on the DMZ have unmonitored outbound connections, and anyone with a few brain cells can X-forward from a browser running on one of those boxes. Curiously, I've never gotten around to locking this little hole down. Maybe I'm lazy. 4) For a couple of doughnuts, server logs can get corrupted or deleted. After all, computers are fallible, and this data isn't on a high-availability mount point. "Sorry boss, looks like proccess XYZ ran amok last night, and the browser logs are mangled. Have a doughnut!". 5) In extreme cases, a quick grep over the log will clean off a few of the worst violaters. May I suggest a "grep -v slashdot.org" for example?
Amazingly well, actually. We live in a smaller house, and have had to cut back in a few areas, but overall we're much happier. Surprisingly, a large portion of the old budget went to restaurant dinners, and other means of coping with a hectic schedule. So, yes, even on less money, I'm much happier, and my wife seems to be as well. Weird, huh?
In my opinion, a boss saying "you're indespensible" or "there's a dealine friday" is just an ego-stroke, designed to keep you working unpaid overtime for the company. I should know, I've taken that bait more than once. No one is indespensible, and if the company were serious about the production schedule, they'd hire enough staff to come in on time. We're being played. Worse, we offer up our families on the alter to our egos. Grad school is a huge time commitment - having done it, I'm not sure it was worth the price.
Ultimately, companies rise and fall, whole fields of endeavor wax and wane, and the career that looks like gold today will likely be dross in time. Take time NOW for your wife, and kids if you have them. I know too many nerds that have a shelf filled with company awards, and go home to an empty house at night. No pretty little bauble on your brag-shelf will compensate for failure within the family. If your current job isn't family friendly, start printing resume's today.
I left a "big" job a few months ago. I kept it because after the dot-bomb I was afraid of being unemployed. They gradually demanded more and more of my time, and were fairly generous with the compensation. Eventually, I found myself arguing my wife of 20 years (a rare occurance), and it became apparent I didn't know the name of the school my daughters went to, or the names of their best friends. The next day, I talked with my boss, and when she wasn't receptive to my needs, started looking for new work. I am poorer financially, but FAR, FAR happier than I would have been had I stayed. I hope my wife will be at my side long after I've bid a final farewell to my career, it would be stupid to ruin something eternal for that which of little worth.
For the record, I once "accidently" entered an H2S pocket in Lake Michigan. Scuba diving along the bottom at about 60', my buddy and I suddenly "skimmed" over a deep, cave-like tube. The water there "shimmered", which frequently indicates a strong chemocline, and we were too bouyant to descend into the tube. Stupidly, we got more weights, went back. Almost immediately my skin began itching and burning. I could smell H2S strongly, even though I was breathing through a regulator. My dive buddy, ahead of me, was obviously in distress so we surfaced. On the surface, his breathing was still labored, and he didn't look good (I was just feeling nausiated), so we went to a hospital, where we were both treated for H2S toxicity. It binds to the hemoglobin and won't let go, causing asphyxiation, and can be absorbed throught the skin! We both had chemical burns from the water, and later I found much of the rubber on my dive gear to be gooey and partially dissolved. All this from less than a minute under the chemocline. This is how I got interested in biogeochemistry.
My current wallet (which I've had for nearly ten years) is made of "eelskin" (if memory serves, that's a nice marketing moniker for hagfish hide). It's very thin, looks good, and wears like iron. I carry a minimal number of cards and cash, and the result is thin enough (about .6 cm) that it's pretty comfortable to sit on.
I'll show my geek pride by shopping ThinkGeek for cube goodies and T-shirts.
Awesome quote -- I'm stealing it for my sig! Thanks.
I studied philosophy, with an emphasis on formal logic, though I only minored the field. It's a bit like mental push-ups in that it's probably good for you, but of of questionable utility. Formal logic is useful for solving a certain subset of well-defined problems -- mostly of the kind you find on Philosophy tests and GRE exams (that's a hint for those of you looking to take the GRE!). It is, however, ill suited for MOST of life's challenges.
Falling in love isn't logical. Sunsets, music, literature, and sports aren't logical. It's emotion that drives us, that adds meaning to our lives. Logic is kind of like the #20 torx screwdriver in your toolbox - it's not intended as a general-purpose tool, but it's great solution to a specific, specialized kind of problem. Trying to use it to drive nails is a recipe for frustration!
I agree with the previous poster from Harvard, who was appalled that cheating could be so widespread when it was conspicuously absent from my peer group. Why aren't the schools throwing these Bozo's out,with a nice note on their transcript about "violation of educational ethics"? No wonder the world is so screwed up, we're so busy trying to make a buck that we've forgotten the basis of civilization. Machivellian behavior is only advantageus when it's statistically improbable. In primates, troops disband (often violently!) when trust degenerates below a minimum threshold. Since our society is based on similar social contracts (e.g. shared trust), I would expect extremely serious repercussions as the percentage of liars/cons/cheaters increases. I need a nice rock to hide under.
Without re-hashing the old arguments of "analog warmth" etc. the fact remains that my current music collection (ripped as Q7 oggs) sounds better, weighs far less, takes up less room, and is more easily searched than my old stack of records. It's also much more convenient for building playlists across albums, creating backups, and transferring to portable players. Why on earth would anyone want a stack of records? Other than gaining the owner a few retro-cool points, it's a vastly inferior format. If you miss snap, crackle and pop, there are plugins for several popular digital musical players that will add that back in for you!
Whoa there Bucky, them's fightin' words. Now I don't know about all you dandy's over 'cross the pond, but I live on a hundred-plus acres of mostly-frozen sagebrush in Montana. I drive a gol-danged Dodge 3500 1 ton 4x4 that'll pull a six-horse trailer up homestake pass at 80mph in a blizzard with room for six big folks and a couple of dogs to boot. I had one of them little fuel-efficient cars, but it fell into a pothole, and I was lucky to swim to safety. In addition, I had an accident one, bumped heads with a feller in a Saab. The helicopter whirled him off to the hospital, and the tow truck was hauling the wreckage off the road while I was working on polishing a bit of paint of my chrome. Gol-Dang I love a big truck - heck my tires weigh more than the average Yugo. Sure it costs a bit to drive, but the intimidation factor is amazing -- heck my trailer hitch is taller than the windshield on most fuel-efficient cars! And THAT's why we yanks get rotten milage!
This was an attempt at HUMOR. I'm a bit of a redneck, and do own a big red truck, but my usual commuter is an 86 VW Jetta. Also, I laugh at stupid cowboys who jack their rigs a foot in the air and think they're cool.
Excellent comment. I occasionally teach college-level courses, and in addition to the usual materials I often put considerable effort into a handful of very detailed drawings/diagrams that I feel clarify some difficult concepts.
I have, unfortunately, seen my work appear in published papers and even books without attribution. While I haven't pursued legal options, it irks me to have my work stolen blatently. If they'd ask permission, I'd grant it without hesitation or thoughts of renumeration, but it irks me to see others charging for my work. From now on I'll attach a creative commons license to it, and sleep better! Thank you for a truly excellent suggestion!