Why is it on Slashdot that any thing that restricts any sort of digital rights is a massively bad thing and any research that breaks those elements (even if they are used for nefarious purposes) are good, physics and astronomy research is also always "good", meanwhile massive advances in bio-tech are always "think of the children" topics.
Sure Ebola is dangerous, but labs are working around the world with massively dangerous pathogens. Britain's numpties in the bio-farming area managed to release Foot and Mouth into the wild (genius) so of course there is a risk. The question is whether it is safe and what can be achieved by doing this, not simply thinking about the Horror flick that played a ridiculous story line out. Bio-shock story lines are just as realistic as techno-shock ones, i.e. about as realistic as a George Bush explanation on Iraqi WMD.
Bio-science is one of the most real frontiers in science today and its simply stunning what is being done. Sure there need to be controls, but educated people need to stop behaving like Fox News Anchors.
Who the hell bothers with Bootcamp? As a corporate Mac OSX user with a standard corporate XP image I have to say that its miles better to run a VM on Mac OSX with Parallels rather than Bootcamp... that way when the security patch causes the XP machine to freeze I can still work on the Mac.
He isn't disqualified because he is faster (he isn't faster than the fast guys) its because he is more efficient. What this means is that in a 400m race he has more energy coming down the last straight than the competition does which is clearly unfair.
The only real surprise is that he hadn't worked this out and competed at the 800m, 1500m or even the 5,000m as that efficiency would really pay off.
Its an artificial aid in the same was a drugs are or riding a bike would be. Its unfortunate for the chap but its the right decision, otherwise you might as well let Marion Jones back in with a terminator suit and a jet-pack.
You seem to be thinking I hate the company... oh no its much more personal than that. I hate the product and anyone who buys or manages that product is tainted by that evil.
Its SCO Unix I hate, its a specific hate and it follows the product like the curse of the Mummy.
One thing that annoys me in these posts is all these Johnny Come Lately people who have just started to hate SCO as a result of their actions against Linux. I've been actively hating SCO ever since I had to use their piece of crap OS in 1993 on a 286 PC. All the bugger had to do was keep the modem connection open so we could send email but would it stay up? Would it buggery. It was falling over all the time and in the end we had to go 3 months without email to the outside world, a contributory factor in the company going bust.
So you think you have come to loathe SCO over these last few years? Let me tell you that real hatred takes 15 years to mature:)
Repeat your question but add in the monkey denier Huckerbee instead of the Pope. This is why people should speak up against would be leaders who are anti-science.
You need to have this sort of thing because you can't let the terrorists win, so what if you have to give up basic fundamental rights like privacy at least the terrorists won't have won.....
Oh hang on we were fighting for freedom and liberty weren't we? So you need to give up all your freedoms to protect your freedom? You'd almost thought that the government was a repressive regime that wanted to subjugate people.
The number 1 most important skill if you want to have a decent career in IT that won't disappear to South America or India is to be able to speak to business people about IT concepts in their own language. The standard of communication in IT is woeful with the US (IMO) being towards the bottom of the league in terms of the number of IT people who can speak to business people in a way that makes sense to their audience.
The number 2 thing is the theory. Most new technology trends boil down to new applications of well understood theories. If you understand about distributed computing then you know the problem domain and just have to learn the detail of Web Services/REST/CORBA/.NET etc, if you don't know the theory you are stuffed.
Communication and Theory matter. The programming languages don't. After graduating from a good university that gave me that base I went to one interview and said "yes I know C", one week later I had to do a programming test... I had to learn C in that week and still came top out of the interviewees. That was the theory helping. Today however I find more and more that its the communication part that is important both in communicating with the business and explaining the theory to those who don't understanding it within IT.
Reading the referenced article it seems to almost applaud the success of the attack. This isn't a "good" attack its a very bad attack in that it has been successful and could potentially inflict damage on thousands or even millions of users. Its like claiming that something was a very "good" fraud because it robbed thousands of old folks of their life savings.
Its a bad attack, its bad that its been successful and the people who did it are scum. These aren't some rebels fighting against the system they are criminal scum who are aiming to inflict damage on large numbers of people. Remember all those times when you have to clean up your parents/in-law/friends computers because they get compromised by this crap? Well the scum behind this have just given you a whole lot more time doing crappy boring work.
Remember that it wasn't murdering people or bootlegging that got Capone done, it was Tax evasion.
So the point here is that yes the SPAM penalties should possible be higher but what you really want is the law enforcement people to be so irritated that they find out what else a SPAMmer is doing illegally.
Now I'm not defending the Russian Government, but the extraordinary rendition policy of the US, the detention of people in violation of the Geneva convention and the invasion of a country on a false premise and without a UN mandate sounds exactly the same sort of scale as what Russia gets up to.
Getting good IT practices is about establishing a business professionalism in IT that is respected. This means that you have to explain to the business what "good" looks like, you have to understand the business drivers so you can put your challenges into that context and you have to talk to the business in terms it understands.
All too often IT folks bitch and moan about coding, testing, requirements, design time or whatever and how its all the fault of the business. This is victim mentality IT, the way to change it is to actually work out what "good" would be for the business and then work with them to deliver it.
This means the most important coding skill in successful IT departments is the ability to communicate.
Depends on the rules, but certainly when the UK government did a similar exercise around 3G (raising masses of cash in the process) the penalty was pretty strict. There is no reason why the penalty couldn't be "we keep the money and take back the license selling it to the 2nd placed bidder".
Remember officially the government "own" this stuff so they get to define the terms that they want.
Now what would be really radical would be to allow more global competition for the US marketplace. One of the biggest issues at the moment is that there are a small number of companies who know their only competition comes from inside the US and there is no way that anyone outside could aggressively target the market. As much as Rupert Murdoch isn't my favourite person in the world it has to be admitted that he, as an Australian who sold his nationality for commercial gain, has shaken up the broadcast side and distribution sides of the market. Why not allow more people in from outside to see what they could do and to wake up what should be the world's most competitive market but which unfortunately is probably one of its least.
The problem isn't 30% or whatever the problem is lack of choice and competition.
One thing that has confused me on the "E" rating is that for some reason boxing isn't considered violent. In Europe its a 7+ game but in the US its "Everyone". Now sure talking a shotgun to someone's head is definately at the top end scale of violence but surely pounding someone's head with your fists even after they start to go down is pretty damned violent too.
Now its not an M, but is punching people in the head really "E"? Even if its done cartoon style?
The bit that this "analysis" misses is what we are talking about is the shift away from a pre-bundled offer as the only way to transport the content (music) as the distribution cost for single elements were too low towards a user bundling approach. In other words its moving away from CostCo and the great big packets and towards those nicer supermarkets where you can actually choose what you want. This means moving towards more retailing offers like Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF) and the like. This will tend to mean that albums won't be able to contain filler tracks that are just rubbish but you will be able to buy more dynamic combinations of elements from a single company, band or shop.
Chirping away about "Used to be $10 for a CD now its $1 for a track" is just plain silly as saying its the end of the industry. What it means is that the distribution cost has now been practically eliminated so all that is pretty much left for the companies is the profitable bit, remember the creation and shipping of a CD (although cheap) is a business cost.
The industry has big big issues, but that has nothing to do with albums v mixed basket and everything to do with actively preventing people buying music in a mixed basket approach.
each state has different requirements, but all have some sort of ethics requirement
Errr ethics for lawyers? What is the question "would you sell your grandmother for a BMW or cash?" The "ethical" answer being cash as cars contribute to global warming.
Wouldn't it be better to start with an open standard around the election process for information exchange and the like? This Already Exists and is "recommended" by the US Government. Why only recommended? Surely this exactly the sort of thing that should be enforced as a basic requirement. Its not like the US Government could claim "we can't enforce that standard as vendors might not want to use it" its the US frigging Government legislate is what they do.
So a good start on the standards but it would be good to see compulsion come in.
Comparing with a phone service is correct, if they did this to a commercial customer and deliberately stopped a certain percentage of calls that had to then be re-dialled they would be accused of blocking calls.
He should have said "its like a set of tubes its just that P2P traffic is heavier so it sinks to the bottom, and as everyone knows with rivers they flow slower at the bottom so we aren't delaying them its just that P2P traffic is like a Pike, its a heavier fish that swims at the bottom while the normal internet stuff is like a salmon at the surface. Pike also eat cute little ducklings so P2P is evil"
UK != Europe either (UK is much higher than 3k euro a month)
Some basic reasons
1) Employers Tax. The US and UK don't penalize companies for employing people. The UK has a small employer tax and some US states have none. Most continental countries have a significant company tax burden for each employee.
2) Culture. The US and UK have pretty dynamic IT markets with people not remaining with one company for a long time, this means people pay more to attract talent knowing that this will help.
3) Cost of firing. The US (more than the UK, but the UK is less than the continent) has very little employee protection which means you can get rid of poor employees or during a down turn. In the continent this isn't the case so the wages are lower as employers have to employ good and crap people and have to factor in the cost of not getting rid of them.
The other thing that shouldn't be overlooked is the fact that English is the lingua franca of computing, this does tend to mean that top people from all countries move towards the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) and that everyone has to speak english thus meaning there is more international competition for jobs in the US and UK markets.
With the way that the dollar is at the moment the average UK IT salary could well be above our cousins over the pond.
I do love it when people make statements like this. Microsoft to stop selling in the EU, to stop selling into the worlds single largest market by value? Do you mean selling everything? So no XBOX 360 in Europe? No Windows Mobile in Europe? No Office in Europe? How would Electronic Arts or Eidos look at the PC as a games platform if they had 1/3 of their market cut?
Yes of course it is much more sensible to cut out about a third of your revenue stream options, drive competition in one of the worlds most advanced technological markets and generally just wait for the bitch slapping to arrive. The concept that consumers in the EU, or businesses, would be afraid (after all their old software will keep working) is a bit bizarre.
Microsoft cannot afford to pull out of the EU for many, many reasons. Mainly however because there is no way to cut the picture without Microsoft suffering in the rest of the world as well. This isn't a technology thing, its a business thing.
Seriously, you have noticed that the world isn't flat haven't you? When planes fly they go north because that creates the shortest route (the grand circle) hence the reason that when flying to Asia the planes often go from Europe straight over the north pole. In terms of mileage this is a massive change (think multiples not percentages) over the existing routes and is the reason why the EU and US are already pushing for it to be an international (rather than Canadian) trade route.
So yes it looks similar on Google maps, but it looks completely different on Google Earth.
Venezuela voted along with the USA in supporting this....
In Washington there were sounds of heads imploding at the idea that they'd found something they agreed on. Meanwhile further evidence of the UK's distancing themselves from the US came with the UK voting a strong "no", but Australia with George Bush visiting today decided to go for the less politically charged "abstain".
Will Balmer declare a new Axis of Evil? News at 11.
Seriously though, its hard to argue even if you support OOXML that this isn't a bad thing as it now means that the standard will be subject to proper review, surely the least worrying decision from a committee of all time.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it on Slashdot that any thing that restricts any sort of digital rights is a massively bad thing and any research that breaks those elements (even if they are used for nefarious purposes) are good, physics and astronomy research is also always "good", meanwhile massive advances in bio-tech are always "think of the children" topics.
Sure Ebola is dangerous, but labs are working around the world with massively dangerous pathogens. Britain's numpties in the bio-farming area managed to release Foot and Mouth into the wild (genius) so of course there is a risk. The question is whether it is safe and what can be achieved by doing this, not simply thinking about the Horror flick that played a ridiculous story line out. Bio-shock story lines are just as realistic as techno-shock ones, i.e. about as realistic as a George Bush explanation on Iraqi WMD.
Bio-science is one of the most real frontiers in science today and its simply stunning what is being done. Sure there need to be controls, but educated people need to stop behaving like Fox News Anchors.
Who the hell bothers with Bootcamp? As a corporate Mac OSX user with a standard corporate XP image I have to say that its miles better to run a VM on Mac OSX with Parallels rather than Bootcamp... that way when the security patch causes the XP machine to freeze I can still work on the Mac.
Best working experience ever.
He isn't disqualified because he is faster (he isn't faster than the fast guys) its because he is more efficient. What this means is that in a 400m race he has more energy coming down the last straight than the competition does which is clearly unfair.
The only real surprise is that he hadn't worked this out and competed at the 800m, 1500m or even the 5,000m as that efficiency would really pay off.
Its an artificial aid in the same was a drugs are or riding a bike would be. Its unfortunate for the chap but its the right decision, otherwise you might as well let Marion Jones back in with a terminator suit and a jet-pack.
You seem to be thinking I hate the company... oh no its much more personal than that. I hate the product and anyone who buys or manages that product is tainted by that evil.
Its SCO Unix I hate, its a specific hate and it follows the product like the curse of the Mummy.
Nope I don't I mean this one. It was SCO Unix was the truly abortive piece of crap that failed to do its job properly.
Its 100% these guys that I've loathed and detested all that time. I think they spun off Tarentella (not a bad product) in order to distract me.
One thing that annoys me in these posts is all these Johnny Come Lately people who have just started to hate SCO as a result of their actions against Linux. I've been actively hating SCO ever since I had to use their piece of crap OS in 1993 on a 286 PC. All the bugger had to do was keep the modem connection open so we could send email but would it stay up? Would it buggery. It was falling over all the time and in the end we had to go 3 months without email to the outside world, a contributory factor in the company going bust.
:)
So you think you have come to loathe SCO over these last few years? Let me tell you that real hatred takes 15 years to mature
Repeat your question but add in the monkey denier Huckerbee instead of the Pope. This is why people should speak up against would be leaders who are anti-science.
Good on them, bad on Iowa
You need to have this sort of thing because you can't let the terrorists win, so what if you have to give up basic fundamental rights like privacy at least the terrorists won't have won.....
Oh hang on we were fighting for freedom and liberty weren't we? So you need to give up all your freedoms to protect your freedom? You'd almost thought that the government was a repressive regime that wanted to subjugate people.
The number 1 most important skill if you want to have a decent career in IT that won't disappear to South America or India is to be able to speak to business people about IT concepts in their own language. The standard of communication in IT is woeful with the US (IMO) being towards the bottom of the league in terms of the number of IT people who can speak to business people in a way that makes sense to their audience.
The number 2 thing is the theory. Most new technology trends boil down to new applications of well understood theories. If you understand about distributed computing then you know the problem domain and just have to learn the detail of Web Services/REST/CORBA/.NET etc, if you don't know the theory you are stuffed.
Communication and Theory matter. The programming languages don't. After graduating from a good university that gave me that base I went to one interview and said "yes I know C", one week later I had to do a programming test... I had to learn C in that week and still came top out of the interviewees. That was the theory helping. Today however I find more and more that its the communication part that is important both in communicating with the business and explaining the theory to those who don't understanding it within IT.
Reading the referenced article it seems to almost applaud the success of the attack. This isn't a "good" attack its a very bad attack in that it has been successful and could potentially inflict damage on thousands or even millions of users. Its like claiming that something was a very "good" fraud because it robbed thousands of old folks of their life savings.
Its a bad attack, its bad that its been successful and the people who did it are scum. These aren't some rebels fighting against the system they are criminal scum who are aiming to inflict damage on large numbers of people. Remember all those times when you have to clean up your parents/in-law/friends computers because they get compromised by this crap? Well the scum behind this have just given you a whole lot more time doing crappy boring work.
Remember that it wasn't murdering people or bootlegging that got Capone done, it was Tax evasion.
So the point here is that yes the SPAM penalties should possible be higher but what you really want is the law enforcement people to be so irritated that they find out what else a SPAMmer is doing illegally.
"See that? Its the world's smallest projector showing a blue screen of death just for you"
Scale?
Now I'm not defending the Russian Government, but the extraordinary rendition policy of the US, the detention of people in violation of the Geneva convention and the invasion of a country on a false premise and without a UN mandate sounds exactly the same sort of scale as what Russia gets up to.
Getting good IT practices is about establishing a business professionalism in IT that is respected. This means that you have to explain to the business what "good" looks like, you have to understand the business drivers so you can put your challenges into that context and you have to talk to the business in terms it understands.
All too often IT folks bitch and moan about coding, testing, requirements, design time or whatever and how its all the fault of the business. This is victim mentality IT, the way to change it is to actually work out what "good" would be for the business and then work with them to deliver it.
This means the most important coding skill in successful IT departments is the ability to communicate.
Depends on the rules, but certainly when the UK government did a similar exercise around 3G (raising masses of cash in the process) the penalty was pretty strict. There is no reason why the penalty couldn't be "we keep the money and take back the license selling it to the 2nd placed bidder".
Remember officially the government "own" this stuff so they get to define the terms that they want.
Now what would be really radical would be to allow more global competition for the US marketplace. One of the biggest issues at the moment is that there are a small number of companies who know their only competition comes from inside the US and there is no way that anyone outside could aggressively target the market. As much as Rupert Murdoch isn't my favourite person in the world it has to be admitted that he, as an Australian who sold his nationality for commercial gain, has shaken up the broadcast side and distribution sides of the market. Why not allow more people in from outside to see what they could do and to wake up what should be the world's most competitive market but which unfortunately is probably one of its least.
The problem isn't 30% or whatever the problem is lack of choice and competition.
One thing that has confused me on the "E" rating is that for some reason boxing isn't considered violent. In Europe its a 7+ game but in the US its "Everyone". Now sure talking a shotgun to someone's head is definately at the top end scale of violence but surely pounding someone's head with your fists even after they start to go down is pretty damned violent too.
Now its not an M, but is punching people in the head really "E"? Even if its done cartoon style?
The bit that this "analysis" misses is what we are talking about is the shift away from a pre-bundled offer as the only way to transport the content (music) as the distribution cost for single elements were too low towards a user bundling approach. In other words its moving away from CostCo and the great big packets and towards those nicer supermarkets where you can actually choose what you want. This means moving towards more retailing offers like Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF) and the like. This will tend to mean that albums won't be able to contain filler tracks that are just rubbish but you will be able to buy more dynamic combinations of elements from a single company, band or shop.
Chirping away about "Used to be $10 for a CD now its $1 for a track" is just plain silly as saying its the end of the industry. What it means is that the distribution cost has now been practically eliminated so all that is pretty much left for the companies is the profitable bit, remember the creation and shipping of a CD (although cheap) is a business cost.
The industry has big big issues, but that has nothing to do with albums v mixed basket and everything to do with actively preventing people buying music in a mixed basket approach.
each state has different requirements, but all have some sort of ethics requirement
Errr ethics for lawyers? What is the question "would you sell your grandmother for a BMW or cash?" The "ethical" answer being cash as cars contribute to global warming.
Wouldn't it be better to start with an open standard around the election process for information exchange and the like? This Already Exists and is "recommended" by the US Government. Why only recommended? Surely this exactly the sort of thing that should be enforced as a basic requirement. Its not like the US Government could claim "we can't enforce that standard as vendors might not want to use it" its the US frigging Government legislate is what they do.
So a good start on the standards but it would be good to see compulsion come in.
Comparing with a phone service is correct, if they did this to a commercial customer and deliberately stopped a certain percentage of calls that had to then be re-dialled they would be accused of blocking calls.
He should have said "its like a set of tubes its just that P2P traffic is heavier so it sinks to the bottom, and as everyone knows with rivers they flow slower at the bottom so we aren't delaying them its just that P2P traffic is like a Pike, its a heavier fish that swims at the bottom while the normal internet stuff is like a salmon at the surface. Pike also eat cute little ducklings so P2P is evil"
UK != Europe either (UK is much higher than 3k euro a month)
Some basic reasons
1) Employers Tax. The US and UK don't penalize companies for employing people. The UK has a small employer tax and some US states have none. Most continental countries have a significant company tax burden for each employee.
2) Culture. The US and UK have pretty dynamic IT markets with people not remaining with one company for a long time, this means people pay more to attract talent knowing that this will help.
3) Cost of firing. The US (more than the UK, but the UK is less than the continent) has very little employee protection which means you can get rid of poor employees or during a down turn. In the continent this isn't the case so the wages are lower as employers have to employ good and crap people and have to factor in the cost of not getting rid of them.
The other thing that shouldn't be overlooked is the fact that English is the lingua franca of computing, this does tend to mean that top people from all countries move towards the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) and that everyone has to speak english thus meaning there is more international competition for jobs in the US and UK markets.
With the way that the dollar is at the moment the average UK IT salary could well be above our cousins over the pond.
I do love it when people make statements like this. Microsoft to stop selling in the EU, to stop selling into the worlds single largest market by value? Do you mean selling everything? So no XBOX 360 in Europe? No Windows Mobile in Europe? No Office in Europe? How would Electronic Arts or Eidos look at the PC as a games platform if they had 1/3 of their market cut?
Yes of course it is much more sensible to cut out about a third of your revenue stream options, drive competition in one of the worlds most advanced technological markets and generally just wait for the bitch slapping to arrive. The concept that consumers in the EU, or businesses, would be afraid (after all their old software will keep working) is a bit bizarre.
Microsoft cannot afford to pull out of the EU for many, many reasons. Mainly however because there is no way to cut the picture without Microsoft suffering in the rest of the world as well. This isn't a technology thing, its a business thing.
Seriously, you have noticed that the world isn't flat haven't you? When planes fly they go north because that creates the shortest route (the grand circle) hence the reason that when flying to Asia the planes often go from Europe straight over the north pole. In terms of mileage this is a massive change (think multiples not percentages) over the existing routes and is the reason why the EU and US are already pushing for it to be an international (rather than Canadian) trade route.
So yes it looks similar on Google maps, but it looks completely different on Google Earth.
Venezuela voted along with the USA in supporting this....
In Washington there were sounds of heads imploding at the idea that they'd found something they agreed on. Meanwhile further evidence of the UK's distancing themselves from the US came with the UK voting a strong "no", but Australia with George Bush visiting today decided to go for the less politically charged "abstain".
Will Balmer declare a new Axis of Evil? News at 11.
Seriously though, its hard to argue even if you support OOXML that this isn't a bad thing as it now means that the standard will be subject to proper review, surely the least worrying decision from a committee of all time.
Steve