every content provider is looking to incorporate more and more DRM as the quality, cost, and ease of creation of copies improves.
the music industry doesn't care about people copying songs off the radio. it didn't even really get its panties in a bunch when CD-Rs first hit the market. or when mp3s hit the ftp servers. It went ballistic when anyone could download a single application and instantly find a never ending stream of perceptibility loss-less perfect digital copies.
likewise with the MPAA and DVD encryption, likewise with the new Cable Set-top standard.
They want to cut out MythTV, Tivo, splitters, H-cards, and cable descramblers. It's becoming too easy to get at the current data, so they want a change.
with the analog system working (fairly) well as is, why else would they create a new 'standard' for the digital system? It certainly isn't in the interest of the consumer.
Why doesn't Sony support the Blu-Ray with its stock rewritable feature? Why did Disney/Circuit City/et al try to push (the bad) Divx onto the market in the first place?
It isn't because consumers are clamoring for less control or cheaper movies.
The time is coming when content producers are going to have to realize that their profits will no longer come from format-updates (repurchasing 8-tracks as CDs, VHS classics as DVDs, etc), and will -not- come from service-style access to data. Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.
Cable will realize that a move to pay-per-channel is the way to support content without advertising in our new time-shifted digital reality. Some people -will- pay $1/mo for TLC. Home Depot will still pay for product placements in Trading Spaces. Maybe the Super-station will go away - but the cable companies, and popular channels, need not.
the film industry has already shown that the theatre experience is not losing out to cheap cam copies. they've learned that feature-rich dvds or dirt-cheap dvds are preferred to the customer over hacked-together recompressed copies on filesharing networks.
The record companies will need to realize that to win with digital music requires providing the best quality, with the least hassle. They will need to realize that they must beat file-sharing on features. People will give up hunting around for a good (not mislabeled)256kbps rip of Britney's newest song - if they know they can just hit iTunes or its ilk and cough up $1.
Fair Use needs to win out. These purported 'losses' from file-sharing need to be revealed to be grossly overestimated fabrications. (A PSA from a supposed union set painter claiming that file sharing is killing the movie industry, and threatening his job - airing during it's highest grossing year of all time is particularly tactless)
DRM is the tool of the content dinosaur. If they concentrated on actual content piracy rings - where big money is being made off black-market copies, and abandoned their fruitless DRM research - their profits could be higher than ever.
But such is not the reaction of anti-competitive cabals. Being forced to -compete- is not what they do. Suing, threatening, bullying, bribing - these are the blunt instruments they wield instead of the precise tools of innovation, imagination and competition.
So in the meantime - expect every advance to carry DRM in the fine print.
For Novell, I think the biggest challenge is to keep revenue stable while customers transition from NetWare to Linux, without losing too many customers to Windows in the process.
NetWare is still pretty expensive on the server. A 50-user copy is about $150 a seat on CDW retail ($7,500), about $50 a seat under a licensing agreement ($2,500).
SuSE is $999 per server with no client licenses fees.
Figuring NetWare to be about 50% of Novell's one billion in revenue, that means Novell would stand to lose more that 25% of their total revenue assuming everyone switched to SuSE. Novell might make this up with SuSE/Ximian desktop revenue, but I see large amounts of revenue from Linux on the desktop as being a long time in the making.
The estimates for SuSE revenue for 2003 were for about $40 million in revenue. As near as I can tell Ximan never really made any money to speak of.
So, if I haven't bored anyone to death yet, Novell NetWare is a $500 million revenue stream, SuSE is a $40 million revenue stream. Novell needs to very carefully transition from NetWare to SuSE if they want to keep revenue even. They can also grow by taking customers from Microsoft or Red Hat. But, it appears to me that Novell will have to shrink about 25% in size in order to remain profitable in the short term. Red Hat, with a more mature Linux strategy, only made $100 million in the last four quarters.
None of this is a bad thing, and I wish Novell the best of luck. I used to work there, and I still have friends there. Just doing the math though it seems like they will need to get smaller before they get bigger again.
Those are all great, but to me, I want to know if Tiger has another "new feature": Does it make my computer feel faster?
Pretty much every previous release of MacOS X has brought speed improvements, and I want to know if Tiger will continue that tradition. Not all of us can afford G5s at the moment, and a speed increase would really make it shelling out another 80 bucks or so (.edu discount) worth it.
That's true, when I started using the pike scripting language, an OO language based on lpc. Each chapter on a subject was a reference with an example being expanded on with each of the referenced functions used. At the end of a chapter on say Stdio.FILE you would have a little network daemon. I readlly liked the way the graphics chapter was set up too, each function started with a base graphic and showed what would happen if this function, with arguments, was applied to the graphic in question.
Sadly I don't use the language anymore. I quit around version 7 as it was getting overly complex to program with, and the documentation was no longer up to par with the language. And not to forget the menory leaks...
[Company Name] [c/o] First & LastName StreetName Number[-Appartment/Suite] COUNTRYCODE PostalCode, City Country
AFAIK the internationally accepted way of putting a country code in is as part of, ie preceding, the postalcode. I just append country for the casual reader, such as the postman.
Every so often I go round these sites and do their tests which then tell me I'm eligable. I then write then a mail and ask them how much they want to pay me to join.
They don't get the joke and explain that I have to pay them, how stupid are these smart people?
I'd just like to say, YOU IDIOT!!! Always get a SIGNED agreement!!!
Now that's out of the way, your company can claim all they want, if it's based on prior work under CONTRACT you are reasonably safe AFAIK, IANAL! Don't forget that your company can't force you to violate a previously running CONTRACT you accepted, and the GPL is a CONTRACT. And by writing/modifying the code you accepted.
Why would they pick the lock, afaik cops have a jimmy in their cop cars. They just pop the lock like that. Otherwise there is also a device which you insert into the lock which pops the lock in seconds...
In the Netherlands and many other European countries - I'm not sure about the US - there are free daily print newspapers handed to commuters. I know in the Netherlands that these have more readers than the regular printed press and survive on advertising space only. It's true they often print the messages from the newswire verbatim. (Reuters, ANP, etc)
It has actually raised the number of regular newspaper readers from the awful numbers that are regularly quoted in other countries.
I don't understand what they are so fussed about. If you want more readers give your print paper away, go tabloid and sell more advertising space.
I'm sure there's an Underpants Gnome just waiting to profit from this.
all my mail and news archives (messages I wanted saved for posterity) are stored in mbox format in my cvs. It does mean I have to resolve some conflict from time to time, due to the way diff matches changes, but that's only really on high volume lists like lkml and beowulf, or identical mails which might have come in in a different order on different machines.
Funnily enough I had a similar conversation with somebody who wasn't a native speaker.
It seems non-native speakers are sticklers for rules such as this, and adhere to them even when a common source - Yahoo! in this case - shows that common usage, 978,000 results, of "Who to contact" far exceeds the 227,000 results for "Whom to contact".
Sadly I lost the argument, as my only counter argument was: "It makes you look like a wanker!"
I'm not sure I entirely agree with 3 and 4, but generally think you're right.
3. I have actually had an Exception be null, this was due to a race condition in the code, so the check wouldn't have been needed except for his fact.
4. I've seen a couple of high end programs, which write error logs to disk, not checking for EFBIG or ENOSPC after writting. Or if they actually check errno they call the error log function, regardless of the value of errno, and try to write the message to disk.
Some of the code the novice writes in 4, will be created by the experts after they run tests on the code. The novice just overcompensates for his lack of experience.
Coming in hungover and actually trying to read the code you wrote the day before is a great equalizer. (What can I say, don't schedule office parties for weekdays.;)
One time, after sitting at my desk with my pint of coffee for an hour thinking: "What the fuck was I trying to say here?" I deleted the contents of the function and rewrote it in a children's story way.
I don't want to say it was the best code I've ever written, but it was a hell of a lot better than the code I'd replaced and somehow managed to compile first time. (I didn't believe it either and spend the next day testing it just to be sure.)
DISCLAMER: Obviously I checked it when I was sober and had backups.
The reason I posted this as a reply to this comment eludes me now, but I'm sure I had one. Probably the literature comment. Thinking about it I probably couldn't read Dostojevski hungover either.
I actually have this book and learned a bit from it, even though I've been coding from the age of 6, not in c obviously. It actually contained examples of a few of the mistakes I made and enough of the examples allowed me to pat myself on the back.
I never got as far as the chapter on tools, but I'd like to add a note here on what I do for code readability:
As I have my own style I like to and can easily read code in that style, this is neither the BSD or Linux style, so I fire up the old indent program an convert it to the format I use. (It took me hours to tweak until I had the right settings.) Then I can read it in the style I find useful.
When I realease code I run indent over it to convert it to the style most used by most of the people in the project, or as in some projects the style that was defined as the project style.
I most note that sometimes I find myself typing functions as:
int func(var1,var2,var3)
int var1;
int var2;
int var3; {// cuz I'm a bit of a nut... }
which I then have to change for the release versions.
Note: I have no degrees so all I'm offering is personal opinion.
I've always heard, from most of the people I've worked with who actually had the degree, that a BS in Computer Science is just that, BS. From this I formed my opinion that CS is a little to general, although I'm sure you learned a lot of cool stuff I don't know.
I know a couple of people who have a BS in CS with AI specialization, which personally sounds a lot more interesting. Mostly because they also did some of Psychology and some Electrical Engineering.
If I ever decided to get a degree I'd probably go for something like Mathematics. (Mostly so I wouldn't have to muddle through the real complex mathematical parts of cryptography, having to look up information every two sentences.) And because I think pure math is kinda cute. (I'm a geek.) Or maybe Electronic Engineering, which will probably help me to figure out what I'm consistantly doing wrong with my designs. (They always work though.)
What do I think you should do?
Hmm, what do you like besides from Computers, see if you can't get a degree in that. I know plenty of people who did things like Botany, Languages, History or something else who have great jobs in the computer industry.
Do you want to learn everything from the Technical niche? Or do you aspire to something more like Homo Universalis?
I've been reading through these posts at -1 and have noticed that there are 2 trains of thought. The first is to keep the job and look for something better, the second is to go for it and step into the deep end.
The first is the wise practical sollution, the well thought out reliable you. Keep the house, the car, make sure the children are fed and in clothes. Personally I think that if you have dependents this is the way to go. The choice between feeding your children, doing a job you don't like, and starving, looking for a job you like, is difficult. and many people seem to treat this lightly. (At least in the comments.) They forget however that thing you always said as a child, I don't want to end up like my parents in a dead end job, doing something I don't like just for my children. I want them to see that life is fun. Luckly the example I got was my father quiting his well paid job to go and do what he wanted; to get out of life what he needed and although I know he sometimes doubted himself for oursake, we never wanted for anything.
The second is the set into the deep end, the unknown, space the final front ear. And it's scary, it's scary as hell. This is the way I go, probably because of the example I got, and it doesn't always work out. Although somehow it always does for me in the end.
I quit a job I had in May last year, not because I didn't like the people or because of the fact that the owner had shafted my friends a couple of years back. (They all work for him now.) I quit because I wasn't getting what I should from my boss; a thank you; a please. I had just saved the company 500.000 euros in yearly license fees - I don't need a bonus, but thanks would be nice. I had just had a break up too and thought that it was just wat I needed, a fresh start. So I told them that I was going to go, and told them the reasons why.
I left and was unemployed for 6 months, literally surviving hand to mouth on the odd jobs I could get. Ok, so there was a little consulting work here and there. Then I got a call from a friend saying he had been offered a job, but couldn't take it as he was working for my former employer. It was in another country and might lead to more work, but paid well and looked like it would be heavenly.
And the rest as they say is history. I now work in Zurich as a consultant and will soon be moving to Leeds for more consulting work. In between I'll have 6 months of holiday, to make up for the 6 months of unemployment hell.
Anyway, my basic message is value yourself and others will value you.
Slashdot Mirror
every content provider is looking to incorporate more and more DRM as the quality, cost, and ease of creation of copies improves.
the music industry doesn't care about people copying songs off the radio. it didn't even really get its panties in a bunch when CD-Rs first hit the market. or when mp3s hit the ftp servers. It went ballistic when anyone could download a single application and instantly find a never ending stream of perceptibility loss-less perfect digital copies.
likewise with the MPAA and DVD encryption, likewise with the new Cable Set-top standard.
They want to cut out MythTV, Tivo, splitters, H-cards, and cable descramblers. It's becoming too easy to get at the current data, so they want a change.
with the analog system working (fairly) well as is, why else would they create a new 'standard' for the digital system? It certainly isn't in the interest of the consumer.
Why doesn't Sony support the Blu-Ray with its stock rewritable feature?
Why did Disney/Circuit City/et al try to push (the bad) Divx onto the market in the first place?
It isn't because consumers are clamoring for less control or cheaper movies.
The time is coming when content producers are going to have to realize that their profits will no longer come from format-updates (repurchasing 8-tracks as CDs, VHS classics as DVDs, etc), and will -not- come from service-style access to data. Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.
Cable will realize that a move to pay-per-channel is the way to support content without advertising in our new time-shifted digital reality. Some people -will- pay $1/mo for TLC. Home Depot will still pay for product placements in Trading Spaces. Maybe the Super-station will go away - but the cable companies, and popular channels, need not.
the film industry has already shown that the theatre experience is not losing out to cheap cam copies. they've learned that feature-rich dvds or dirt-cheap dvds are preferred to the customer over hacked-together recompressed copies on filesharing networks.
The record companies will need to realize that to win with digital music requires providing the best quality, with the least hassle. They will need to realize that they must beat file-sharing on features. People will give up hunting around for a good (not mislabeled)256kbps rip of Britney's newest song - if they know they can just hit iTunes or its ilk and cough up $1.
Fair Use needs to win out. These purported 'losses' from file-sharing need to be revealed to be grossly overestimated fabrications. (A PSA from a supposed union set painter claiming that file sharing is killing the movie industry, and threatening his job - airing during it's highest grossing year of all time is particularly tactless)
DRM is the tool of the content dinosaur. If they concentrated on actual content piracy rings - where big money is being made off black-market copies, and abandoned their fruitless DRM research - their profits could be higher than ever.
But such is not the reaction of anti-competitive cabals. Being forced to -compete- is not what they do. Suing, threatening, bullying, bribing - these are the blunt instruments they wield instead of the precise tools of innovation, imagination and competition.
So in the meantime - expect every advance to carry DRM in the fine print.
For Novell, I think the biggest challenge is to keep revenue stable while customers transition from NetWare to Linux, without losing too many customers to Windows in the process.
NetWare is still pretty expensive on the server. A 50-user copy is about $150 a seat on CDW retail ($7,500), about $50 a seat under a licensing agreement ($2,500).
SuSE is $999 per server with no client licenses fees.
Figuring NetWare to be about 50% of Novell's one billion in revenue, that means Novell would stand to lose more that 25% of their total revenue assuming everyone switched to SuSE. Novell might make this up with SuSE/Ximian desktop revenue, but I see large amounts of revenue from Linux on the desktop as being a long time in the making.
The estimates for SuSE revenue for 2003 were for about $40 million in revenue. As near as I can tell Ximan never really made any money to speak of.
So, if I haven't bored anyone to death yet, Novell NetWare is a $500 million revenue stream, SuSE is a $40 million revenue stream. Novell needs to very carefully transition from NetWare to SuSE if they want to keep revenue even. They can also grow by taking customers from Microsoft or Red Hat. But, it appears to me that Novell will have to shrink about 25% in size in order to remain profitable in the short term. Red Hat, with a more mature Linux strategy, only made $100 million in the last four quarters.
None of this is a bad thing, and I wish Novell the best of luck. I used to work there, and I still have friends there. Just doing the math though it seems like they will need to get smaller before they get bigger again.
Those are all great, but to me, I want to know if Tiger has another "new feature": Does it make my computer feel faster?
Pretty much every previous release of MacOS X has brought speed improvements, and I want to know if Tiger will continue that tradition. Not all of us can afford G5s at the moment, and a speed increase would really make it shelling out another 80 bucks or so (.edu discount) worth it.
You can use fixed width fonts on windows, it's called notepad... Only in the case that you can't find a fixed width font in Word.
That's one thing they will do.
s/ebst/best/ ;)
That's true, when I started using the pike scripting language, an OO language based on lpc. Each chapter on a subject was a reference with an example being expanded on with each of the referenced functions used. At the end of a chapter on say Stdio.FILE you would have a little network daemon.
I readlly liked the way the graphics chapter was set up too, each function started with a base graphic and showed what would happen if this function, with arguments, was applied to the graphic in question.
Sadly I don't use the language anymore. I quit around version 7 as it was getting overly complex to program with, and the documentation was no longer up to par with the language. And not to forget the menory leaks...
For those thinking I forgot the state, this is part of the postalcode.
[Company Name]
[c/o] First & LastName
StreetName Number[-Appartment/Suite]
COUNTRYCODE PostalCode, City
Country
AFAIK the internationally accepted way of putting a country code in is as part of, ie preceding, the postalcode. I just append country for the casual reader, such as the postman.
Which means my PC in Switzerland is:
CH [pc], Zurich
and my PC in The Netherlands is:
NL [pc], Amsterdam
Every so often I go round these sites and do their tests which then tell me I'm eligable. I then write then a mail and ask them how much they want to pay me to join.
;)
They don't get the joke and explain that I have to pay them, how stupid are these smart people?
What can I say, smart people get bored too...
I'd just like to say, YOU IDIOT!!! Always get a SIGNED agreement!!!
Now that's out of the way, your company can claim all they want, if it's based on prior work under CONTRACT you are reasonably safe AFAIK, IANAL! Don't forget that your company can't force you to violate a previously running CONTRACT you accepted, and the GPL is a CONTRACT. And by writing/modifying the code you accepted.
This seems to me like some groklaw fun...
I know it's off topic, but cool sig
Why would they pick the lock, afaik cops have a jimmy in their cop cars. They just pop the lock like that. Otherwise there is also a device which you insert into the lock which pops the lock in seconds...
In the Netherlands and many other European countries - I'm not sure about the US - there are free daily print newspapers handed to commuters. I know in the Netherlands that these have more readers than the regular printed press and survive on advertising space only. It's true they often print the messages from the newswire verbatim. (Reuters, ANP, etc)
It has actually raised the number of regular newspaper readers from the awful numbers that are regularly quoted in other countries.
I don't understand what they are so fussed about. If you want more readers give your print paper away, go tabloid and sell more advertising space.
I'm sure there's an Underpants Gnome just waiting to profit from this.
all my mail and news archives (messages I wanted saved for posterity) are stored in mbox format in my cvs. It does mean I have to resolve some conflict from time to time, due to the way diff matches changes, but that's only really on high volume lists like lkml and beowulf, or identical mails which might have come in in a different order on different machines.
Just like my homedir.
TFA??? Tree-based Floorplanning Algorithm?
Funnily enough I had a similar conversation with somebody who wasn't a native speaker.
It seems non-native speakers are sticklers for rules such as this, and adhere to them even when a common source - Yahoo! in this case - shows that common usage, 978,000 results, of "Who to contact" far exceeds the 227,000 results for "Whom to contact".
Sadly I lost the argument, as my only counter argument was: "It makes you look like a wanker!"
I actually meant:
;)
In reply to 3 you said:
I just knew that someone would bring up the complications of threads.
Then in reply to 4 you said:
Checking for possible but rare error conditions is robustness
I was trying to make a joke that you comment wasn't robust, because you didn't take into account that somebody would bring up threads.
Perhaps I'm dim, Remo Williams??? The TV series?
I think you answered you comments to 3 with your comments to 4.
Checking for possible but rare error conditions is robustness
I'm not sure I entirely agree with 3 and 4, but generally think you're right.
3. I have actually had an Exception be null, this was due to a race condition in the code, so the check wouldn't have been needed except for his fact.
4. I've seen a couple of high end programs, which write error logs to disk, not checking for EFBIG or ENOSPC after writting. Or if they actually check errno they call the error log function, regardless of the value of errno, and try to write the message to disk.
Some of the code the novice writes in 4, will be created by the experts after they run tests on the code. The novice just overcompensates for his lack of experience.
Coming in hungover and actually trying to read the code you wrote the day before is a great equalizer. (What can I say, don't schedule office parties for weekdays. ;)
One time, after sitting at my desk with my pint of coffee for an hour thinking: "What the fuck was I trying to say here?" I deleted the contents of the function and rewrote it in a children's story way.
I don't want to say it was the best code I've ever written, but it was a hell of a lot better than the code I'd replaced and somehow managed to compile first time. (I didn't believe it either and spend the next day testing it just to be sure.)
DISCLAMER: Obviously I checked it when I was sober and had backups.
The reason I posted this as a reply to this comment eludes me now, but I'm sure I had one. Probably the literature comment. Thinking about it I probably couldn't read Dostojevski hungover either.
I actually have this book and learned a bit from it, even though I've been coding from the age of 6, not in c obviously. It actually contained examples of a few of the mistakes I made and enough of the examples allowed me to pat myself on the back.
// cuz I'm a bit of a nut...
I never got as far as the chapter on tools, but I'd like to add a note here on what I do for code readability:
As I have my own style I like to and can easily read code in that style, this is neither the BSD or Linux style, so I fire up the old indent program an convert it to the format I use. (It took me hours to tweak until I had the right settings.) Then I can read it in the style I find useful.
When I realease code I run indent over it to convert it to the style most used by most of the people in the project, or as in some projects the style that was defined as the project style.
I most note that sometimes I find myself typing functions as:
int func(var1,var2,var3)
int var1;
int var2;
int var3;
{
}
which I then have to change for the release versions.
Note: I have no degrees so all I'm offering is personal opinion.
I've always heard, from most of the people I've worked with who actually had the degree, that a BS in Computer Science is just that, BS. From this I formed my opinion that CS is a little to general, although I'm sure you learned a lot of cool stuff I don't know.
I know a couple of people who have a BS in CS with AI specialization, which personally sounds a lot more interesting. Mostly because they also did some of Psychology and some Electrical Engineering.
If I ever decided to get a degree I'd probably go for something like Mathematics. (Mostly so I wouldn't have to muddle through the real complex mathematical parts of cryptography, having to look up information every two sentences.) And because I think pure math is kinda cute. (I'm a geek.)
Or maybe Electronic Engineering, which will probably help me to figure out what I'm consistantly doing wrong with my designs. (They always work though.)
What do I think you should do?
Hmm, what do you like besides from Computers, see if you can't get a degree in that. I know plenty of people who did things like Botany, Languages, History or something else who have great jobs in the computer industry.
Do you want to learn everything from the Technical niche? Or do you aspire to something more like Homo Universalis?
I've been reading through these posts at -1 and have noticed that there are 2 trains of thought. The first is to keep the job and look for something better, the second is to go for it and step into the deep end.
The first is the wise practical sollution, the well thought out reliable you. Keep the house, the car, make sure the children are fed and in clothes. Personally I think that if you have dependents this is the way to go. The choice between feeding your children, doing a job you don't like, and starving, looking for a job you like, is difficult. and many people seem to treat this lightly. (At least in the comments.)
They forget however that thing you always said as a child, I don't want to end up like my parents in a dead end job, doing something I don't like just for my children. I want them to see that life is fun. Luckly the example I got was my father quiting his well paid job to go and do what he wanted; to get out of life what he needed and although I know he sometimes doubted himself for oursake, we never wanted for anything.
The second is the set into the deep end, the unknown, space the final front ear. And it's scary, it's scary as hell. This is the way I go, probably because of the example I got, and it doesn't always work out. Although somehow it always does for me in the end.
I quit a job I had in May last year, not because I didn't like the people or because of the fact that the owner had shafted my friends a couple of years back. (They all work for him now.) I quit because I wasn't getting what I should from my boss; a thank you; a please. I had just saved the company 500.000 euros in yearly license fees - I don't need a bonus, but thanks would be nice. I had just had a break up too and thought that it was just wat I needed, a fresh start. So I told them that I was going to go, and told them the reasons why.
I left and was unemployed for 6 months, literally surviving hand to mouth on the odd jobs I could get. Ok, so there was a little consulting work here and there. Then I got a call from a friend saying he had been offered a job, but couldn't take it as he was working for my former employer. It was in another country and might lead to more work, but paid well and looked like it would be heavenly.
And the rest as they say is history. I now work in Zurich as a consultant and will soon be moving to Leeds for more consulting work. In between I'll have 6 months of holiday, to make up for the 6 months of unemployment hell.
Anyway, my basic message is value yourself and others will value you.