I took a vow to never buy music from any RIAA approved site, nor from a band that does not release their mp3's for free. The consumers have the power for ONCE. Let's not be asses and give it back to the companies. There are enough good bands out there that are willing to make a living playing shows, and freely allow people to distribute/share their music. I'm only going to support them from now on.
There is a famous Japanese Folk Tale about Judge Ooka, where he essentially points out that certain things can't be charged for. The basic reality is that people haev the ability now to replicate anything that can be distributed in digital format. Once you make something available in that format, you have lost control of it.
Read Judge Ooka's story. Digital Music is like the scent of fish. Once you put it out into the world where many have access to it, you cannot expect to be able to charge them because they have the ability to replicate it.
I'm not saying people can charge for others work, feature it in a film, etc...but I do think that people can share and distribute freely anything they can create/replicate. Let the market determine what the music is worth.
We're a moderate sized copmany: 100 Employees, 500 customers, about 17.5 mill in sales yearly. We hired 2 developers: One Java/MySql/Linux monster, one HTML/JavaScript/Photoshop dude. We locked them in a room, and one year later they emerged with an integrated web based system for everything we did beforehand on 8 different systems/databases. The migration of all the data in one swell foop took another month to plan well. We brought in a contractor for that month who specialized in data migration. That might have been a rip off -- the Java/Oracle monkey swore he could handle it, but I figured get a "real" data expert in for a month...doesn't cost THAT much.
Anyway, 13 months later, total savings about 400k YEARLY. Considering the combined salaries of those two guys is about 130k, this is a no brainer. Of course part of their job was also building all the documentation, manuals, javadocs, schema diagrams, etc etc. So I could bring in another trained Java/MySql monkey, and he would be able to run the system, because the documentation is that strong.
So it's not that people can't afford to go to another way of doing things...it's that they don't currently know what to ask for.
I should perhaps clarify:
For me I can't see spending money when I can download free original music of comparable quality on mp3.com or some local band's site. I might pay $.10 for a song if I really really liked it...that's just it's value to me. Although honestly, I can;t think of many songs that are worth that much to me...If I were to consider my entire music collection, I don't think EVERY song I have is worth $.10
The Music industry won't change to the value being in the performance and not the digital media? I think they will have to...you'll see "Rock Stars" start to get paid like classical musicians. The money is mostly in performances. It's silly to argue the point...When it's necessary, someone will build a device that intercepts the signals going to the wireless speakers, and convert THAT back to a compressed digital format. And that will be impossible to stop.
The music industry isn't going to change just to meet the demands of a very small segment of the market that are total cheapskates. Hmmm, ask Red Hat what thye think about that.
The ACC format MUST be cracked already right? I don't actually know this, I'm just assuming. Aren't the music companies afraid that this will lead to nice high quality digitial copies?
I mean, if I were havenco or some other entrepeneur (hint hint), I would be using apple as my source for good quality music, and then reselling!
Of course, I honestly believe that this is still a dead end. In the long run, with people able to get music cheaply, $1.00 is way way WAY over priced. I think that about $0.10 is reasonable.
This joke will probably only make sense to americans, but I hope other nationalities will reply to this with their appropriate models
Q: What is the difference between a Firebird and a porcupine?
A: A porcupine has pricks on the outside.
Hmmm, I don't think it's fair to say it has become a forum for linux geeks to bash Microsoft.
/. was always thus...otherwise it woulda been called BACKslashdot.
Also, people need to distinguish between the poster's text and the submitter's. I'll give oyu a hint..., one is in italics. So now, look again. Do you think the phrases you found objectional were the poster's, or the submitter's?
Jeff Bezos has publicly said about many patents that they don't intend to enforce them, and are specificly acquiring them to be able to defend themselves. But of course there's this really famous one.
I do think of them as being SOMEWHAT altruistic. I mean, they haven't sued me so far over some of the ideas that are present on their web site and mine. Of course I'm not gonna list my URL either, in case they get any ideas (but I think I have prior art *grin*).
I'm not defending Amazon or the patent process by any stretch of the imagination. I worked for an online calendaring company, and somehow got my name on the patent for the ability to share appointments online. Which of course was nonsense. I and the developers pointed out that it was nonsense, and bucked against the filing of the patent.
The lawyers convinced us that filing the patent is the only way to prevent someone else from filing a patent, covering your technology, and then suing you, forcing you to PROVE to a court (always a chancy thing) that you had created prior art. And quite frankly every innovation we made to our online calendar showed up 3 months later in someone elses calendar. In fact we even found instances where people had literally cut and pasted our code, comments and all!
So we knew that there were unscroupulous bastards out there, willing to completely rip us off. So bearing that in mind, we agreed to file for patents, not so much to enforce them, but to protect ourselves from future suits.
I agree, if the system was healthy and working, we wouldn't need to have done that, but the system is already full of sharks -- I don't blame people for getting shark repellant. Applying for the patent HAS to be done nowadays. Enforcing the patents is when I start to get mad. I know it's a fine line...
Larry Page: "Google has been profitable since the first quarter of 2001. Why did we make becoming profitable such a priority? It's good that we did, because we might well be gone if we hadn't. The real reason is that we became profitable in the first quarter of 2001 because Sergey Brin made it a priority. You see, Sergey would try to go out on dates. He would call up women. And to impress them he would say, 'I'm the president of a money-losing dot-com.' But in Palo Alto in 2000, a huge number of people were presidents of money-losing dot-coms. And so they would not call him back. And he thought, 'If only I were president of a money-making dot-com, things would be very different...'"
What I need to know is has more advancements in science come as a result of an accident or as the result of some guy trying to impress chicks. And what is the overlap?
It was interesting...superb article. You're really missing out by not reading it.
The obligatory grumbling about the NYT should stop. They frequently provide quality content, and I don't think a registration is too much to ask. Of course you can use a fake email account, make up phony info, etc. You could run a web service that maintains "anonymous accounts" that everyone could use. Make it easy for people to post new accounts, and update accounts that might get deactivated. The really proactive person might make a web page with buttons that created new accounts with random names, and logged you in...
I don't need to go on with that --/. readers are clever enough to improve upon that idea and crank out something much better than what I described.
Of course the flip side is you could start thinking "registration with some fake info and a email address I clear out once a year is a fair price" And imho it's very fair.
Re:XML is NOT just text! (old school answer)
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
Good to know, thanks.
Re:XML is NOT just text! (old school answer)
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
Wow, are we arguing about what is text? Now that is an old school computing arguement that I'm not sure the kids will appreciate! (no offense intended.)
My $.02 : XML is composed of text because it only allows ascii characters. Thats it. Well-formed XML "the language" requires more definitions, but an xml "file" is just another text file format.
You're talking about nondeterministic finite automata quintuple that specifies how XML is parsed. understood, etc. But within that quintuple, I is the set of all ascii characters >= 32 and 128. At least I think that's true. Can someone post if I'm wrong? I appreciate learning of my misconceptions.
If you're one of those "blessed few" who doesn't have anything to learn from books, you're part of the problem too. Let me tell you, if you've never looked at a book, there's alot of code you've written that isn't gonna scale, and every "real" programmer hates the fact that you are wasting your intelligence by reinventing the wheel 9 times out of 10. Sad sad sad. You might be pretty damn smart, but it's always smarter still to read.
I remember this guy who spent 2 weeks trying to come up with a GREAT random number aloorithm, because some giant DB company that shall remain nameless had a random number algorithm that sucked in early JDBC. HE came up with a pretty slick method, clever, etc. But he had a copy of Knuth on his desk! Inside of which is one of the BEST random algorithms you'll ever see! But instead, he *had* to write his own.
And because he had never read -- because of the extra 2 weeks he took writing that function -- the whole dot com industry collapsed.
it's a command for IPTables, a firewalling utility. It says that packets that originate from the outside world, and want ot get into the lan, can only get in if they are coming in response to a request that someone inside the lan sent out.
I got a new game recently: The Oracle 9i install! I've been playing this for MONTHS now, and I'm still not sure how it's gonna turn out! I love the way you have to keep trying different things until you finally solve it! Please no spoilers!
I'm also a big fan of the "adding a non-standard serial device" game, but I'm not very good at it yet.
Well, I feel you (I learned that phrase from Stuar Scott while watching superbowl coverage), BUT sometimes if you finally get something complicated running *just right*, you don't want to upgrade for fear it won't work any more.
Like, my development box...I won't upgrade anything on it unless someone else has been running the upgrade for a while. That's what junior developers are for anyway.
That and doughnuts.
That's the real issue -- the RIAA fears you discovering music that they aren't pushing. They want to control what you are listening too. Honestly, the RIAA doesn't care about you're illegal copy of the White Album...they want to make sure that you don't discover a great unsigned band who has songs out on some p2p. The RIAA fears you finding these bands, telling your friends, and all of you actually buying an mp3 or two from the band's site for a few bucks.
Let's face it...we all know that someday great bands will entirely control the distribution of their music digitally, and there will be no true "labels" any more. The RIAA is just postponing that as long as they can...They don't care (so much) about the illegal music swapping. They want to completely stop the legal music swapping.
A good, free IDE is not a pipe dream!...Although I've found at the rate Borland and Visual Age crank out releases, you can get the trial versions, and go back and forth and never be using an illegal copy
Who I am--developer/architect..did the dot/com, did the successful Hardware company, currently working for a huge health care company writing educational software--though I must admit once a week I get asked to change the printer toner. I usually respond with "No Hablo Anglais!"
1) Be able to DEMONSTRATE that you can build industrial strength software.
Industrial Strength means that the software should NEVER fail because of it's own issues. BUT when it fails because of external issues it should have very good thorough logging and alerting procedures so that it is part of solving whatever went wrong. I hate working with developers who deliver products that don't produce readable logs and aren't configurable through a text file.
Also you HAVE to incorporate unit testing. If you can't build the tests you shouldn't be building the product.
You must be able to describe the process by which fail proof software gets created. From architecture to pseudocode/UML to planning the unit testing to planning scalability testing. It means that if you have a QA dept you know how to integrate them into the planning stage. A great buzz word to toss around is "multi-disciplinary." But even better than using the word is being able to proove in an interview that you understand that EVERYONE has an equal part in software creation, from user to DBA to QA to you the developer.
2) Love the code!
If you don't love the code, you should get out...the stuff you build will not be worthwhile. I don't mean that you have to love all the code you write, but you DO have to love refactoring, the well tuned application and that small little optimization gain you get by using the right data structure. If you don't love those things (or don't know what I mean!!) it will show up eventually, and you'll be found out...don't set up yourself for dissapointment by trying to last in a field where you don't belong.
3)Be able to sell yourself to the right people
If you can't sell yourself to ANYONE no one will hire you. If you want to be an architect, you have to be able to sell yourself to a suit. If you want to be a coder, you have to be able to sell yourself to an architect. I know this guy who is a damn fine coder, he does the work of any 2 other developers. But two years ago he could only sell himself to other developers who had seen his work. He got his first break by being hired by a company that was run by his cousin....Then his second job he got hired because the developers he worked with previously knew how good he was...during these years he tried to ge better positions, but other than being promoted internally, his quest for a better job outside the company was always thwarted by his lack of social skills. But now, he's out interviewing and getting offers...and it's not because his already exceptional coding skills have increased, but but becuase his previously deficient people skills are starting to catch up. If you can't realize that software development is a customer service industry, and you HAVE to make the customer/consumer happy, then you are not going to stay employed.
And again, be able to sell yourself to the right person. If you can't sell yourself to another developer, you're in the wrong line of work If you don't have friends who were developers and would hire you if they could, then you're probably not in the right line of work.
4) Embrace new technology
I'm a Java guy, but I learned C# (well, what there was of it that was new) when it came out. All you C developers who never bothered to learn Java...For shame. One of my standard questions when I interview people is "How many languages can you write 'Hello World' in?" If the number doesn't look right for the persons age, (you should have at least 4) the interview will go down hill from there. (I usually will let them count C++ and C as different languages because I'm generous). I'm not saying you have to be a pro...but please be able to write Hello World in Java, C and one scripting language. And show me that you've picked up a new language/skill in the last year.
And of course you have to read to keep your skills up!
Java is not currently an option for the high-performance numerical and immersive graphical aspect of our applications.
Read: "We don't want to learn Java"
No Java programmer who read that believes you. The answer is that what you can learn to do in Java in 5 DAYS won't be fast enough, but if you're willing to either hire a good contractor (for gods sake ask to SEE something he's built though), or take 8 weeks or so to get GOOD, you can EASILY do this in Java...Unless of course you are doing special effects for ILM, in which case I humbly apologize, and I've got some questions about the next movie.
Slashdot Mirror
I took a vow to never buy music from any RIAA approved site, nor from a band that does not release their mp3's for free. The consumers have the power for ONCE. Let's not be asses and give it back to the companies. There are enough good bands out there that are willing to make a living playing shows, and freely allow people to distribute/share their music. I'm only going to support them from now on.
There is a famous Japanese Folk Tale about Judge Ooka, where he essentially points out that certain things can't be charged for. The basic reality is that people haev the ability now to replicate anything that can be distributed in digital format. Once you make something available in that format, you have lost control of it.
Read Judge Ooka's story. Digital Music is like the scent of fish. Once you put it out into the world where many have access to it, you cannot expect to be able to charge them because they have the ability to replicate it.
I'm not saying people can charge for others work, feature it in a film, etc...but I do think that people can share and distribute freely anything they can create/replicate. Let the market determine what the music is worth.
Anyway, 13 months later, total savings about 400k YEARLY. Considering the combined salaries of those two guys is about 130k, this is a no brainer. Of course part of their job was also building all the documentation, manuals, javadocs, schema diagrams, etc etc. So I could bring in another trained Java/MySql monkey, and he would be able to run the system, because the documentation is that strong.
So it's not that people can't afford to go to another way of doing things...it's that they don't currently know what to ask for.
Oops, you already did? Maybe some /.er will post the old version around...maybe on a peer to peer?
I also wrote something about this before that I think people would enjoy reading.
I should perhaps clarify: For me I can't see spending money when I can download free original music of comparable quality on mp3.com or some local band's site. I might pay $.10 for a song if I really really liked it...that's just it's value to me. Although honestly, I can;t think of many songs that are worth that much to me...If I were to consider my entire music collection, I don't think EVERY song I have is worth $.10 The Music industry won't change to the value being in the performance and not the digital media? I think they will have to...you'll see "Rock Stars" start to get paid like classical musicians. The money is mostly in performances. It's silly to argue the point...When it's necessary, someone will build a device that intercepts the signals going to the wireless speakers, and convert THAT back to a compressed digital format. And that will be impossible to stop. The music industry isn't going to change just to meet the demands of a very small segment of the market that are total cheapskates. Hmmm, ask Red Hat what thye think about that.
The ACC format MUST be cracked already right? I don't actually know this, I'm just assuming. Aren't the music companies afraid that this will lead to nice high quality digitial copies? I mean, if I were havenco or some other entrepeneur (hint hint), I would be using apple as my source for good quality music, and then reselling! Of course, I honestly believe that this is still a dead end. In the long run, with people able to get music cheaply, $1.00 is way way WAY over priced. I think that about $0.10 is reasonable.
Only if it's a Daisy Wheel Printer
God made man, but Col. Colt made him equal.
This joke will probably only make sense to americans, but I hope other nationalities will reply to this with their appropriate models Q: What is the difference between a Firebird and a porcupine? A: A porcupine has pricks on the outside.
I do think of them as being SOMEWHAT altruistic. I mean, they haven't sued me so far over some of the ideas that are present on their web site and mine. Of course I'm not gonna list my URL either, in case they get any ideas (but I think I have prior art *grin*).
The lawyers convinced us that filing the patent is the only way to prevent someone else from filing a patent, covering your technology, and then suing you, forcing you to PROVE to a court (always a chancy thing) that you had created prior art. And quite frankly every innovation we made to our online calendar showed up 3 months later in someone elses calendar. In fact we even found instances where people had literally cut and pasted our code, comments and all!
So we knew that there were unscroupulous bastards out there, willing to completely rip us off. So bearing that in mind, we agreed to file for patents, not so much to enforce them, but to protect ourselves from future suits. I agree, if the system was healthy and working, we wouldn't need to have done that, but the system is already full of sharks -- I don't blame people for getting shark repellant. Applying for the patent HAS to be done nowadays. Enforcing the patents is when I start to get mad. I know it's a fine line...
What I need to know is has more advancements in science come as a result of an accident or as the result of some guy trying to impress chicks. And what is the overlap?
The obligatory grumbling about the NYT should stop. They frequently provide quality content, and I don't think a registration is too much to ask. Of course you can use a fake email account, make up phony info, etc. You could run a web service that maintains "anonymous accounts" that everyone could use. Make it easy for people to post new accounts, and update accounts that might get deactivated. The really proactive person might make a web page with buttons that created new accounts with random names, and logged you in...
I don't need to go on with that -- /. readers are clever enough to improve upon that idea and crank out something much better than what I described.
Of course the flip side is you could start thinking "registration with some fake info and a email address I clear out once a year is a fair price" And imho it's very fair.
Good to know, thanks.
My $.02 : XML is composed of text because it only allows ascii characters. Thats it. Well-formed XML "the language" requires more definitions, but an xml "file" is just another text file format. You're talking about nondeterministic finite automata quintuple that specifies how XML is parsed. understood, etc. But within that quintuple, I is the set of all ascii characters >= 32 and 128. At least I think that's true. Can someone post if I'm wrong? I appreciate learning of my misconceptions.
And because he had never read -- because of the extra 2 weeks he took writing that function -- the whole dot com industry collapsed.
it's a command for IPTables, a firewalling utility. It says that packets that originate from the outside world, and want ot get into the lan, can only get in if they are coming in response to a request that someone inside the lan sent out.
Let's not forget the old classic:
cat /var/spool/mail/hotgirl | grep sex
Although I think that's probably closly followed by 2 others:
$IPTABLES -A FORWARD -i $EXTIF -o $INTIF -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
tail - 200 access.log | grep "GET /scripts/root.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"
I got a new game recently: The Oracle 9i install! I've been playing this for MONTHS now, and I'm still not sure how it's gonna turn out! I love the way you have to keep trying different things until you finally solve it! Please no spoilers!
I'm also a big fan of the "adding a non-standard serial device" game, but I'm not very good at it yet.
Who wants to tell the 450lbs woman that you are going to scan her with the sonar that a Navy ship occasionally uses to detects whales?
Well, I feel you (I learned that phrase from Stuar Scott while watching superbowl coverage), BUT sometimes if you finally get something complicated running *just right*, you don't want to upgrade for fear it won't work any more. Like, my development box...I won't upgrade anything on it unless someone else has been running the upgrade for a while. That's what junior developers are for anyway. That and doughnuts.
That's the real issue -- the RIAA fears you discovering music that they aren't pushing. They want to control what you are listening too. Honestly, the RIAA doesn't care about you're illegal copy of the White Album...they want to make sure that you don't discover a great unsigned band who has songs out on some p2p. The RIAA fears you finding these bands, telling your friends, and all of you actually buying an mp3 or two from the band's site for a few bucks. Let's face it...we all know that someday great bands will entirely control the distribution of their music digitally, and there will be no true "labels" any more. The RIAA is just postponing that as long as they can...They don't care (so much) about the illegal music swapping. They want to completely stop the legal music swapping.
A good, free IDE is not a pipe dream!...Although I've found at the rate Borland and Visual Age crank out releases, you can get the trial versions, and go back and forth and never be using an illegal copy
1) Be able to DEMONSTRATE that you can build industrial strength software.
Industrial Strength means that the software should NEVER fail because of it's own issues. BUT when it fails because of external issues it should have very good thorough logging and alerting procedures so that it is part of solving whatever went wrong. I hate working with developers who deliver products that don't produce readable logs and aren't configurable through a text file. Also you HAVE to incorporate unit testing. If you can't build the tests you shouldn't be building the product. You must be able to describe the process by which fail proof software gets created. From architecture to pseudocode/UML to planning the unit testing to planning scalability testing. It means that if you have a QA dept you know how to integrate them into the planning stage. A great buzz word to toss around is "multi-disciplinary." But even better than using the word is being able to proove in an interview that you understand that EVERYONE has an equal part in software creation, from user to DBA to QA to you the developer.
2) Love the code!
If you don't love the code, you should get out...the stuff you build will not be worthwhile. I don't mean that you have to love all the code you write, but you DO have to love refactoring, the well tuned application and that small little optimization gain you get by using the right data structure. If you don't love those things (or don't know what I mean!!) it will show up eventually, and you'll be found out...don't set up yourself for dissapointment by trying to last in a field where you don't belong.
3)Be able to sell yourself to the right people
If you can't sell yourself to ANYONE no one will hire you. If you want to be an architect, you have to be able to sell yourself to a suit. If you want to be a coder, you have to be able to sell yourself to an architect. I know this guy who is a damn fine coder, he does the work of any 2 other developers. But two years ago he could only sell himself to other developers who had seen his work. He got his first break by being hired by a company that was run by his cousin....Then his second job he got hired because the developers he worked with previously knew how good he was...during these years he tried to ge better positions, but other than being promoted internally, his quest for a better job outside the company was always thwarted by his lack of social skills. But now, he's out interviewing and getting offers...and it's not because his already exceptional coding skills have increased, but but becuase his previously deficient people skills are starting to catch up. If you can't realize that software development is a customer service industry, and you HAVE to make the customer/consumer happy, then you are not going to stay employed. And again, be able to sell yourself to the right person. If you can't sell yourself to another developer, you're in the wrong line of work If you don't have friends who were developers and would hire you if they could, then you're probably not in the right line of work.
4) Embrace new technology
I'm a Java guy, but I learned C# (well, what there was of it that was new) when it came out. All you C developers who never bothered to learn Java...For shame. One of my standard questions when I interview people is "How many languages can you write 'Hello World' in?" If the number doesn't look right for the persons age, (you should have at least 4) the interview will go down hill from there. (I usually will let them count C++ and C as different languages because I'm generous). I'm not saying you have to be a pro...but please be able to write Hello World in Java, C and one scripting language. And show me that you've picked up a new language/skill in the last year. And of course you have to read to keep your skills up!
Java is not currently an option for the high-performance numerical and immersive graphical aspect of our applications. Read: "We don't want to learn Java" No Java programmer who read that believes you. The answer is that what you can learn to do in Java in 5 DAYS won't be fast enough, but if you're willing to either hire a good contractor (for gods sake ask to SEE something he's built though), or take 8 weeks or so to get GOOD, you can EASILY do this in Java...Unless of course you are doing special effects for ILM, in which case I humbly apologize, and I've got some questions about the next movie.