Yes and no. That practice grew through the 1800s. But patronship was still a huge part of the model, slowly waning through the century. I guess I should've said less so of the 1800s...
Care to posit one, perhaps? Why would anyone pay for something they can get for free? Would you pay for GIMP? How about EMACS? How about a Linux distro (w/out support)?
Without DRM, music is free. And the public will never accept DRM. QED.
In the 21st century, no successful business model will be constructed based on the sale of recorded music for any price -- without the widespread implementation of DRM technologies which will surely be rejected by the body politic. If DRM isn't rejected, well then, it's a whole new ball game...
I think that they'll probably move to a niche market (as much of it is already), and become either free on the 'net or have artists who will be forced to take day jobs to support themselves.
I will repeat explicity what was the implicit statement in my original post: In the 21st century, no successful business model will be constructed based on the sale of recorded music for any price -- without the widespread implementation of DRM technologies which will surely be rejected by the body politic. If DRM isn't rejected, well then, it's a whole new ball game. But in the meantime, the artists you are speaking of will either A) get day jobs or B) cater to people who are willing to pay explicity for the recorded-style music, much like many today will pay to go hear music at Carnegie Hall, because classical is truly a style that no recording can do justice to.
The problems of the music industry are quickly reaching critical mass. Let's take a look at a few points:
1) Radio monopolies. As has previously been discussed on/., this means that few bands ever get play time on the radio. In fact, radio today pretty much sucks unless you really like "Top 40" music. Now, there's a reason that Top 40 music used to be Top 40 -- it was popular (and usually fairly good) music. But that's not really the case anymore.
2) Paying artists. The Music Industry can whine all it wants about "artists getting money" this and "artists getting money that" but the truth of the matter is, Item No. 1 makes the music industry so competitive that, after all the marketing is finished, they can't really afford to give any money back to the artists. Artists in today's music industry are somewhat like the sweatshop girls who make Abercrombie and Fitch cargo pants (or Nike shoes, or you name it): they produce a product sold for an extreme premium but are poorly paid. Incidentally, the premium goes not directly into the pockets of the responsible corporation, but instead into marketing and promotion -- but only of the artists which the record company likes.
I firmly believe that we're about to experience a paradigm shift in entertainment delivery. The era of free music -- as it was in the 16, 17, and 1800s -- will once more be upon us. Recorded music will be free, and niche internet radio/community music sites will be responsible for the creation of new hits and pop sensatia (remember Michelle Branch? MP3.com, not the radio, was instrumental in her stardom). Artists will instead earn their money as they did 100 years ago: in concert. Ticket prices will skyrocket (and fans will pay), and probably move to an auction-dominated system -- which will equilibrize ticket prices. Some artists might be forced to get day jobs. But art, music, etc., they will all move onward...
I think we need to distinguish between a "bug" and the lack of a feature. Not locking a file, as can readily be evidenced by the rest of the comments in this thread, is not necessarily a bug.
The concept of a bug is the most overused in the software world today. Software not acting how you want it to does not mean that its buggy. Software not working how the author intended it to, that's buggy.
I do a lot of my consulting for digital media companies, and we been getting SCSI-like performance out of ATA drives for years -- using RAID. An inexpensive RAID setup of four IDE drives w/controller, using 1+0 or 10, or 3 drives using RAID 5, is still cheaper than SCSI per megabyte -- and you get the added redundency..
To see this idea taken to it's logical extreme, see the Apple Xraid. One of my clients, a post-production video house, has been working with two of them for about a week now. They are amazing pieces of equipment, just as fast if not faster than the SCSI drives they are about to replace -- and are based on ATA 100/133.
That's a very fair thing to say, and for the most part I completely agree with you -- but I will also say that it varies by where you live and the character of your local PD (due to some intensive and fair-minded recruiting on behalf of some surprisingly good-minded local officials, mine is about 25% black in a community that's 85% white and 10% Asian).
Anybody know if you can attach a CD-ROM or floppy to it somehow to boot from? I'm not really interested in installing Windows, but I'm not the biggest fan of the Lindows distro, and would rather replace it with either another flavor of Linux. How about rescuing drivers?
A better comparison would be various models by sony, sold both here in the US and abroad. They weigh about 3-5 lbs, and like what I have dubbed the lBook have FireWire (huge plus for external CD-ROMs). They tend to have Intel P-III 800-1ghz processors, and they tend to cost $900-$1800
The subnotebook market doesn't get fast. It's all about travel weight and heat, two directly related factors that fast P4 and Celery notebooks tend to be bad at.
This notebook, regardless of OS, seems to be a phenomenal deal. I wonder if its too good to be true.
Generally, these things are defined by weight and not size. If you can fit a 12.1 inch screen into a 3 lb. package (which seems to me to be either a dubious claim or a fan-tastic feat of engineering), it's a subnotebook.
nuff said
If you read through their privacy agreement (you know, the one you were supposed to read through when you signed up for eBay in the first place), you'll find that they really don't say much about protecting your privacy. I'm not at all surprised, either. And I'm not sure that its a bad thing. There's certainly criminal activity on eBay -- Slashdot was wild a few months ago with the story of a guy whose hard work caught the man who defrauded him of his Mac laptop.
Contrary to the impressions of many/. readers, law enforcement are not "out to get you." They're out to do their job. If you are a law-abiding citizen, and you cooperate fully, you're not going to have any problems.
In fact, I would argue that it is the responsibility of a civic-minded law abiding citizen -- or corporation -- to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that is permitted them by law (i.e., without breaking a contract). eBay is just doing what any good-minded citizen should do.
It's important to remember that your constitutional right to privacy only extends to the Federal Gov'ment peering into your own home, or your own activities. It doesn't really protect you from them going after other sources of information. Unless you got the other party to sign or offer a privacy agreement, you really don't have any rights to indirect privacy whatsoever.
This happened to a guy in the town where I live -- made front page papers for a while; I know him because a long while back he was a teacher of mine in high school. The solution he had was to countersue the police department for violation of due process rights. He won a huge settlement, in addition to meriting the dismissal of the chief of police and a few related officers.
Most PDs know of stuff like this. If you don't give them any lip, they tend to be pretty nice to you.
If you're innocent, and you don't have anything to hide, fully cooperate with the police. Doing otherwise arouses their suspicion, and will result in situations like the one you just described. I'm a law-abiding citizen (for the most part, anyway). When they come knocking, I tell them whatever they want to know, the full-out truth, warrant or no.
It's your responsibility as a law-abiding citizen to cooperate with law enforcement to the fullest extent to which you are able.
Well, he does have a point. Microsoft has never released a new version of software solely to fix bugs, which is what the article talks about. They release service packs for that, and they tend to work.
As a side issue, I work with Microsoft (yes, and Linux, and Apple) software almost every day; and I work with technical people who debug on those three platforms. Generally speaking, the bugs are rarely with the Microsoft software (and, as flameproofing, Linux tends to be pretty un-buggy as well). The bugs tend to be with non-Microsoft software running on the Microsoft platform. I have a laptop that runs Windows 2000, MS Word, IE 5, and a pretty plain-vanilla printer driver. It runs nothing else, and I always run it in a fairly protected mode. It works fine. I've never encountered a bug, or a bluescreen, or a crash (which I can't say for my other boxen, Linux or Windows, which have been stressed).
Granted, there may be bugs in other software, or libraries, or DLLs, or any other system components, which cause those software to fail -- but I've found precious little in terms of bugs in the base software put out by MS. They do a fairly good job at that, for all the other things they can't do right...
Interesting. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that having cigarettes shipped to you from a foreign country is illegal. It is only legal to import cigarettes if they are on your person, and in fact I'm pretty sure this violates several laws (first, on importing cigarettes without paying relevant duties, and second on importing cigarettes without the relevant health labels). Can anybody back me up on this?
Amazon collecting taxes for Target, Toys 'R' Us, etc., is fairly easy: match zip code to sales tax for zip code, add tax to order. Amazon then just tacks it on to whatever they report to Toys 'R' Us, Target, etc. It would not be difficult for Amazon to simply charge tax for all its orders.
However, what does pose a problem is the backoffice end of charging taxes. Bricks 'n' Morter retailers are often internally organized by state, or by region. One of the main reasons they do this is so that they can keep track, from an accounting standpoint, of the money they're earning, where they're earning it, and where they owe sales tax. Almost all major retailers have a geographical component to their corporate heirarchy, thus the administrative infrastructure for collecting sales taxes is basically present from the get-go.
Amazon has no such infrastructure in place; in fact, one of the reasons they can be so cheap is the thoroughly streamlined infrastructure. While Amazon could probably write scripts of some sort to automate much of the work, taxes still must be filed by a human being (even if filed electronically), resulting in much more administrative overhead than Amazon probably wants to get into.
The administrative cost of taxing online orders will eventually be passed on to the consumer. Catalogs have been going untaxed since the glory days of Sears-Roebuck. In an ideal situtation, it would be great to keep the status quo -- but the Federal Government is resistant to raising state aid and state governments are suffering from unprecedented fiscal crises, and thus they are looking for new ways of raising revenue. Taxing e-commerce looks like a plump fruit ripe for the picking.
1) About the whole NSA thing. That's a little overblown. The NSA routinely approaches top math graduate students (PhD, Masters) and offers them two to three times what they could earn working in academia or the private sector. Thus the NSA employs some of the worlds best mathematicians. Google likes hiring some of the worlds best mathematicians. I don't see the whole "big brother" thing there.
2) I want to see sources for the data on Google Watch. I'm high suspicious of any reports -- such as the cookie -- that don't have sources attached to them. A cursory inspection of my hard drive found that my Google cookie expires this MAY. That's what made me decide not to trust these guys
Humor aside, maybe we do need a google-watch-watch.com. These folks need to start publishing their sources in order to be credible.
Seems to me that there are a few relevant legal points here (even if we don't agree with them, they're still part of the law):
1) The US Constitution lets Congress extend copyrights to authors, and authors in turn can choose whomever they want to manage that copyright. Regardless of some alternative theories, copyrights are generally a good thing. They help authors, artists, and producers get paid for their hard work. Like most good things, however, they can most certainly be abused.
2) A digital signal, encrypted or not, is certainly a created work and thus can be copyrighted. Thus it's possible to copyright any unique string of 1s and 0s.
3) So now we've got a string of 1s and 0s, our encrypted signal. So decrypting that signal is creating a "derivative work," something which has been covered under copyright law for about as long as the concept has existed. It's the same concept which protects authors when thier books are translated into English, French, Russian, Klingon and Sanskrit.
4) So these guys are selling hardware with the express purpose of its being used to sell unlicensed derivative works. Sounds fairly illegal to me. No DMCA really necessary, though it certainly clarifies things.
As for all the people who write about how the signals are their "property" because they fall on their lawn, or roof or somesuch. That's a nonsensical legal argument. By that token, it would be legal for you to decrypt and listen in on your neighbors encrypted (or not encrypted) cell phone. Or for me to park outside your house, on public property, and crack your WEP 128 to steal your credit card numbers, or other personal information.
Interesting analogy. If I were to take a radio station at random, let's say one that broadcasts Howard Stern. And then I found a translator, and I had the translator rebroadcast on another frequency, Howard Stern's show, without his permission. Well, that would most certainly be illegal. His show is copyrighted, and you are creating a translation (derivitive work) without his permission.
I think that the relevant portion of copyright law (and I'll repost this elsewhere, most likely) have to do with derivitive works. An encrypted digital signal is a copyrighted set of 0s and 1s. The decryption of that signal is a derivitive work. Hence illegal to create without permission of the owner of the original copyright.
A while ago I submitted to Ask Slashdot about command line/GUI interfunctionality (you can look up the post for yourself, it's a while old -- but look through my info and you'll probably find it).
Anyway, I think that the issue of the GUI is a great example. Programmers got carried away with the GUI, and now applications and OSes are completely over-GUIed. The mouse is much, much slower than they keyboard when it comes to many tasks. I use graphic design programs on a regular basis, and I would give an arm and a leg to have a quick and easy command line interface in, say, Adobe Illustrator, for precise object manipulation. Same goes for Photoshop. AutoCAD and other programs have a decent implementation of the CLI, but it could get much better.
I would love to see programmers get out of the object-oriented point-and-click mode that they've been stuck in since the invention of the original Macintosh.
GUIs are great for representing data, and they are great for the visual manipulation of data. But visual manipulation is often imprecise. For precise data manipulation, the CLI is still necessary -- clicking through a menu and two dialog boxes to finally find a text box with the field to rotate an object by 20 degrees, or add a 2nd column to the page, or fix page margins; that's absolutely ludicrous. There should be a simple, (preferably standardized) command line that's accessible from all applications. Remember the ~ in the original Quake? That was a huge step forward. We need it in more applications. How much productivity has been lost by over-mousing?
-Shylock0
Questions and comments welcome. Flames ignored. Post responsibly.
I seem to remember a while back, maybe five years, when there was a movement to force software companies to make user's type their name on the license screen and not somewhere else... thereby actually "signing" the agreement. If I remember, the movement pretty much fizzled...
True. But if I have access to a (potential) employee's credit history, I can ask them about it in an interview. If the explanation is rational, that says something. If the explanation isn't, that says something as well...
First, I just wanted to point out one thing: at least they asked you for your permission. Legally, they are supposed to. But in practice, many (if not most) mid-size (40) and larger companies either run or request to run a credit check on potential employees as a part of the process -- particularly when the employee is accepting a high level position. Many companies just get the report without asking. It's really not hard; it's made even easier by the fact that they probably have your SS# already. I challenge anybody on Slashdot to prove to me that they can't get their next-door neighbor's credit history, without their consent. If businesses want your credit history, they're going to get it.
Is credit history a good thing for an employer to ask for? As an employer, I say certainly (though I have NEVER gotten a potential employees credit history without their written consent -- but I have also never had a problem getting that consent). Dilligence and competence as a worker often comes through in references, personal responsibility less so. (Nevermind the fact that poor credit and other personal problems can ultimately affect an employee's performance in the workplace). I want to know, esepecially if I'm hiring a right-hand-man sort of position, what kind of life the person leads. I want to know if they're going to do anything that might be potentially damaging to the reputation of my firm. Credit history is a great way to check up on personal responsibility.
Not long ago, I was looking to hire a new team manager, which is a fairly high level within my firm. The guy looked great in terms of his references and past experience, and was about 28. He had moved because his wife had been promoted, and now he was trying to find a new job. He let me access his credit history, which, quite frankly, painted a starkly reckless picture. For a position paying around $100,000 a year (and, I can say now, his wife wasn't earning much more), the guy was $60,000 into credit card debt with hefty mortgage on top of it.
I gave the guy the benefit of the doubt, and hired him. It turned out to be a mistake. He liked to live large, which became apparent from his second week on the job, but he didn't let it interfere with his work. Two months later, he was leaving work early two or three days a week. He starting becoming irritable at work, and then apologize by taking his entire team out for dinner at a nice restaurant in New York City (let's say a $1,000 price tag). The man was obviously out of control.
I found out later that he'd been spiraling into debt since he left college. The early days were to Atlantic City. There should have been a red flag in the beginning. But there wasn't. Personal fiscal responsibility is a highly desirable quality in an employee, both in terms of how it effects job performance and how it reflects on personal character -- a quality which I find important but which seems to have waned from favor in the past few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. That practice grew through the 1800s. But patronship was still a huge part of the model, slowly waning through the century. I guess I should've said less so of the 1800s...
Without DRM, music is free. And the public will never accept DRM. QED.
In the 21st century, no successful business model will be constructed based on the sale of recorded music for any price -- without the widespread implementation of DRM technologies which will surely be rejected by the body politic. If DRM isn't rejected, well then, it's a whole new ball game...
I will repeat explicity what was the implicit statement in my original post: In the 21st century, no successful business model will be constructed based on the sale of recorded music for any price -- without the widespread implementation of DRM technologies which will surely be rejected by the body politic. If DRM isn't rejected, well then, it's a whole new ball game. But in the meantime, the artists you are speaking of will either A) get day jobs or B) cater to people who are willing to pay explicity for the recorded-style music, much like many today will pay to go hear music at Carnegie Hall, because classical is truly a style that no recording can do justice to.
1) Radio monopolies. As has previously been discussed on /., this means that few bands ever get play time on the radio. In fact, radio today pretty much sucks unless you really like "Top 40" music. Now, there's a reason that Top 40 music used to be Top 40 -- it was popular (and usually fairly good) music. But that's not really the case anymore.
2) Paying artists. The Music Industry can whine all it wants about "artists getting money" this and "artists getting money that" but the truth of the matter is, Item No. 1 makes the music industry so competitive that, after all the marketing is finished, they can't really afford to give any money back to the artists. Artists in today's music industry are somewhat like the sweatshop girls who make Abercrombie and Fitch cargo pants (or Nike shoes, or you name it): they produce a product sold for an extreme premium but are poorly paid. Incidentally, the premium goes not directly into the pockets of the responsible corporation, but instead into marketing and promotion -- but only of the artists which the record company likes.
I firmly believe that we're about to experience a paradigm shift in entertainment delivery. The era of free music -- as it was in the 16, 17, and 1800s -- will once more be upon us. Recorded music will be free, and niche internet radio/community music sites will be responsible for the creation of new hits and pop sensatia (remember Michelle Branch? MP3.com, not the radio, was instrumental in her stardom). Artists will instead earn their money as they did 100 years ago: in concert. Ticket prices will skyrocket (and fans will pay), and probably move to an auction-dominated system -- which will equilibrize ticket prices. Some artists might be forced to get day jobs. But art, music, etc., they will all move onward...
The concept of a bug is the most overused in the software world today. Software not acting how you want it to does not mean that its buggy. Software not working how the author intended it to, that's buggy.
I was so uncool when I was twelve, if I could go back in time I'd probably beat myself up...
To see this idea taken to it's logical extreme, see the Apple Xraid. One of my clients, a post-production video house, has been working with two of them for about a week now. They are amazing pieces of equipment, just as fast if not faster than the SCSI drives they are about to replace -- and are based on ATA 100/133.
That's a very fair thing to say, and for the most part I completely agree with you -- but I will also say that it varies by where you live and the character of your local PD (due to some intensive and fair-minded recruiting on behalf of some surprisingly good-minded local officials, mine is about 25% black in a community that's 85% white and 10% Asian).
Anybody know if you can attach a CD-ROM or floppy to it somehow to boot from? I'm not really interested in installing Windows, but I'm not the biggest fan of the Lindows distro, and would rather replace it with either another flavor of Linux. How about rescuing drivers?
The subnotebook market doesn't get fast. It's all about travel weight and heat, two directly related factors that fast P4 and Celery notebooks tend to be bad at.
This notebook, regardless of OS, seems to be a phenomenal deal. I wonder if its too good to be true.
Generally, these things are defined by weight and not size. If you can fit a 12.1 inch screen into a 3 lb. package (which seems to me to be either a dubious claim or a fan-tastic feat of engineering), it's a subnotebook. nuff said
Contrary to the impressions of many /. readers, law enforcement are not "out to get you." They're out to do their job. If you are a law-abiding citizen, and you cooperate fully, you're not going to have any problems.
In fact, I would argue that it is the responsibility of a civic-minded law abiding citizen -- or corporation -- to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that is permitted them by law (i.e., without breaking a contract). eBay is just doing what any good-minded citizen should do.
It's important to remember that your constitutional right to privacy only extends to the Federal Gov'ment peering into your own home, or your own activities. It doesn't really protect you from them going after other sources of information. Unless you got the other party to sign or offer a privacy agreement, you really don't have any rights to indirect privacy whatsoever.
Most PDs know of stuff like this. If you don't give them any lip, they tend to be pretty nice to you.
If you're innocent, and you don't have anything to hide, fully cooperate with the police. Doing otherwise arouses their suspicion, and will result in situations like the one you just described. I'm a law-abiding citizen (for the most part, anyway). When they come knocking, I tell them whatever they want to know, the full-out truth, warrant or no.
It's your responsibility as a law-abiding citizen to cooperate with law enforcement to the fullest extent to which you are able.
As a side issue, I work with Microsoft (yes, and Linux, and Apple) software almost every day; and I work with technical people who debug on those three platforms. Generally speaking, the bugs are rarely with the Microsoft software (and, as flameproofing, Linux tends to be pretty un-buggy as well). The bugs tend to be with non-Microsoft software running on the Microsoft platform. I have a laptop that runs Windows 2000, MS Word, IE 5, and a pretty plain-vanilla printer driver. It runs nothing else, and I always run it in a fairly protected mode. It works fine. I've never encountered a bug, or a bluescreen, or a crash (which I can't say for my other boxen, Linux or Windows, which have been stressed).
Granted, there may be bugs in other software, or libraries, or DLLs, or any other system components, which cause those software to fail -- but I've found precious little in terms of bugs in the base software put out by MS. They do a fairly good job at that, for all the other things they can't do right...
Interesting. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that having cigarettes shipped to you from a foreign country is illegal. It is only legal to import cigarettes if they are on your person, and in fact I'm pretty sure this violates several laws (first, on importing cigarettes without paying relevant duties, and second on importing cigarettes without the relevant health labels). Can anybody back me up on this?
However, what does pose a problem is the backoffice end of charging taxes. Bricks 'n' Morter retailers are often internally organized by state, or by region. One of the main reasons they do this is so that they can keep track, from an accounting standpoint, of the money they're earning, where they're earning it, and where they owe sales tax. Almost all major retailers have a geographical component to their corporate heirarchy, thus the administrative infrastructure for collecting sales taxes is basically present from the get-go.
Amazon has no such infrastructure in place; in fact, one of the reasons they can be so cheap is the thoroughly streamlined infrastructure. While Amazon could probably write scripts of some sort to automate much of the work, taxes still must be filed by a human being (even if filed electronically), resulting in much more administrative overhead than Amazon probably wants to get into.
The administrative cost of taxing online orders will eventually be passed on to the consumer. Catalogs have been going untaxed since the glory days of Sears-Roebuck. In an ideal situtation, it would be great to keep the status quo -- but the Federal Government is resistant to raising state aid and state governments are suffering from unprecedented fiscal crises, and thus they are looking for new ways of raising revenue. Taxing e-commerce looks like a plump fruit ripe for the picking.
2) I want to see sources for the data on Google Watch. I'm high suspicious of any reports -- such as the cookie -- that don't have sources attached to them. A cursory inspection of my hard drive found that my Google cookie expires this MAY. That's what made me decide not to trust these guys
Humor aside, maybe we do need a google-watch-watch.com. These folks need to start publishing their sources in order to be credible.
1) The US Constitution lets Congress extend copyrights to authors, and authors in turn can choose whomever they want to manage that copyright. Regardless of some alternative theories, copyrights are generally a good thing. They help authors, artists, and producers get paid for their hard work. Like most good things, however, they can most certainly be abused.
2) A digital signal, encrypted or not, is certainly a created work and thus can be copyrighted. Thus it's possible to copyright any unique string of 1s and 0s.
3) So now we've got a string of 1s and 0s, our encrypted signal. So decrypting that signal is creating a "derivative work," something which has been covered under copyright law for about as long as the concept has existed. It's the same concept which protects authors when thier books are translated into English, French, Russian, Klingon and Sanskrit.
4) So these guys are selling hardware with the express purpose of its being used to sell unlicensed derivative works. Sounds fairly illegal to me. No DMCA really necessary, though it certainly clarifies things.
As for all the people who write about how the signals are their "property" because they fall on their lawn, or roof or somesuch. That's a nonsensical legal argument. By that token, it would be legal for you to decrypt and listen in on your neighbors encrypted (or not encrypted) cell phone. Or for me to park outside your house, on public property, and crack your WEP 128 to steal your credit card numbers, or other personal information.
I think that the relevant portion of copyright law (and I'll repost this elsewhere, most likely) have to do with derivitive works. An encrypted digital signal is a copyrighted set of 0s and 1s. The decryption of that signal is a derivitive work. Hence illegal to create without permission of the owner of the original copyright.
Anyway, I think that the issue of the GUI is a great example. Programmers got carried away with the GUI, and now applications and OSes are completely over-GUIed. The mouse is much, much slower than they keyboard when it comes to many tasks. I use graphic design programs on a regular basis, and I would give an arm and a leg to have a quick and easy command line interface in, say, Adobe Illustrator, for precise object manipulation. Same goes for Photoshop. AutoCAD and other programs have a decent implementation of the CLI, but it could get much better.
I would love to see programmers get out of the object-oriented point-and-click mode that they've been stuck in since the invention of the original Macintosh.
GUIs are great for representing data, and they are great for the visual manipulation of data. But visual manipulation is often imprecise. For precise data manipulation, the CLI is still necessary -- clicking through a menu and two dialog boxes to finally find a text box with the field to rotate an object by 20 degrees, or add a 2nd column to the page, or fix page margins; that's absolutely ludicrous. There should be a simple, (preferably standardized) command line that's accessible from all applications. Remember the ~ in the original Quake? That was a huge step forward. We need it in more applications. How much productivity has been lost by over-mousing? -Shylock0
Questions and comments welcome. Flames ignored. Post responsibly.
I seem to remember a while back, maybe five years, when there was a movement to force software companies to make user's type their name on the license screen and not somewhere else... thereby actually "signing" the agreement. If I remember, the movement pretty much fizzled...
That's why it's a stealth pc...
True. But if I have access to a (potential) employee's credit history, I can ask them about it in an interview. If the explanation is rational, that says something. If the explanation isn't, that says something as well...
Is credit history a good thing for an employer to ask for? As an employer, I say certainly (though I have NEVER gotten a potential employees credit history without their written consent -- but I have also never had a problem getting that consent). Dilligence and competence as a worker often comes through in references, personal responsibility less so. (Nevermind the fact that poor credit and other personal problems can ultimately affect an employee's performance in the workplace). I want to know, esepecially if I'm hiring a right-hand-man sort of position, what kind of life the person leads. I want to know if they're going to do anything that might be potentially damaging to the reputation of my firm. Credit history is a great way to check up on personal responsibility.
Not long ago, I was looking to hire a new team manager, which is a fairly high level within my firm. The guy looked great in terms of his references and past experience, and was about 28. He had moved because his wife had been promoted, and now he was trying to find a new job. He let me access his credit history, which, quite frankly, painted a starkly reckless picture. For a position paying around $100,000 a year (and, I can say now, his wife wasn't earning much more), the guy was $60,000 into credit card debt with hefty mortgage on top of it.
I gave the guy the benefit of the doubt, and hired him. It turned out to be a mistake. He liked to live large, which became apparent from his second week on the job, but he didn't let it interfere with his work. Two months later, he was leaving work early two or three days a week. He starting becoming irritable at work, and then apologize by taking his entire team out for dinner at a nice restaurant in New York City (let's say a $1,000 price tag). The man was obviously out of control.
I found out later that he'd been spiraling into debt since he left college. The early days were to Atlantic City. There should have been a red flag in the beginning. But there wasn't. Personal fiscal responsibility is a highly desirable quality in an employee, both in terms of how it effects job performance and how it reflects on personal character -- a quality which I find important but which seems to have waned from favor in the past few years.