How about this angle... Isn't the RIAA fighting a problem of their own making. Maybe their products are over priced. Maybe if they lowered the price more people will find enough value in their music to buy it. For example, Les Schwabb is a tire store in the pacific northwest of the U.S.A. They can charge a high price for their tires and they are still swamped from opening to closing every day. They can do it because they are the best when it comes to customer service. People see the value in them so they fork out the bucks. The RIAA thing is, in my opinion, more of a value thing than a piracy thing. Piracy is just a symptom of the problem. Fat Cat Music Execs and artists are too used to their salaries and won't see that what they put out doesn't match the price they are charging!
Here's the difference.
If the Firefox web browser sucks, the average Joe can uninstall that web browser from a Windows box....
yes! It comes done this! This doesn't come up as much anymore because this issue has been out for a long long time. The fact that this issue has been 'resolved' or been out there for a while makes it no less valid. The fact that Mozilla has what it has market share wise, I believe, only supports how good of a product it is. If the battle field were equal, I think Firefox would of won this fight 6 months ago.
I found that reading and knowing the right people has much more to do with my productivity as a programmer. Fancy keyboards and the such only help if for some reason a piece of equipment is causing you pain. Multiple monitors and stuff like that are nice, don't get me wrong but I would rather save my C notes to buy technical books. From working with many programmers, I think they should do the same thing. Another thing that I saw mentioned was buying a 500 dollar chair. Can we say overkill? Personnally I can't code very often for more than an hour straight without wanting to get up and take a walk or something. A 50 dollar chair is confortable enough for me. I think a lot of this fancy equipment is more of an image thing, if you have a 500 dollar chair, 3 19 inch LCDs and a blazing fast PC then one seems to think they are cooler. I am a professional programmer, I get paid to think and produce. Give me the extra cash as a bonus, I wills stick with my 400 dell, 50 dollar chair and 17 inch lcd.
At first I was going to post a comment that maybe workers are to busy to worry about security so they leave it to IT to fix problems, but I thought about it and came to the conclusion if somone really is too busy then they won't have time for SPAM type email or for surfing.
So, I thought about it some more and came to the conclusion that it may simply be because of laziness. I work in a group of 12 programmers, 6 of which are either naturally tech savy or keep up with tech. These people have no issues with viruses and stuff like that. The others, the programmers who have been programming the same programming language, in the same industry, in the same one or two programs for 10+ years(granted there are some programmers with 10+ experiance and are not like this but most of them are) haven't read a technical book or done anything but the absolute bare mininum to get by for years and years. If 50% of programmers who SHOULD know better are too lazy to know exactly what they are doing when they are at a computer, what hope do IT departments have with people who think that there job is strictly whatever (accounting, being a doctor, being a pharmacist, etc) and the computers are for IT/Geeks. Too many people do not take pride in everything they do. They are content with being good enough. They are Lazy.
While I agree with you that parenting is hard, I don't agree with you that it is a battle that cannot be won against the mass marketing companies do. First, don't have a T.V. in your house or at least don't subscribe to any type of cable service. Second, make sure your kids are hanging out with kids who are 'good'. Third, and most importantly, educate your kids, take a proactive stance in their education. Given these three things, you as a parent have a good chance of raising kids that aren't so easily swayed by mass marketing.
Second, it is a parents responsibility what comes into THEIR home.
People who don't wish to take an active part of a childs lives by educating them and showing them how to live by example shouldn't have kids. Plain and simple.
Lastly, I don't think the goverment should have any business in rating games like they do. First because as I have just been indirectly talking about, I think it is the parents job to both keep filth out of their home and second because parents and kids should be 'educated' enough to make wise decisions. Second, we as a People should be very wary about giving the government rights over how we run our lives. People of power will take power for the sake of having it until someone stops them.
Is this a sign that the economy has recovered to the point people are being visible about which toilets they're flushing their cash surplus down?
Why is this a troll? I think this is a valid thought. I think most companies would think twice before spending money on a 'fringe' thing like online gaming if they were short on cash. I would also think that/.ers would think more deeply about an issue and ponder/mull over the possibility that the sponsership of online gaming may be less about the popularity of online gaming and more to do with the amount of online cash a company has.
As with many things this story can be understood by relating it to Rounders the movie. When Knish says, "Alimony, child support, my kids eat. I'm not playing for the thrill of f**king victory." Competitive programming, oh my, I program for money, not prizes. Even if those prizes are some cash. At the end of the day I want my check every time, I don't care if I am the absolute best, crap, I am better than most without even putting effort in. If I want to gamble I go to the Hold'em tables.
One, a lot of the time the people interviewing you and setting your salary are not as technically savy as you are. A certification is tangible stuff they can grasp onto. They also can justify lets saying paying Mr. Cert Guy 20K more a year than Mr. NoCert Guy. That is the common arguement for getting certs.
Two, the less common arguement is this. Going through getting a cert forces you to get a broad understanding of a subject area. To have in your mind things that you won't necessarily get from on the job experiance. For example if a C programmer got thrown into developing.NET with no experiance he may missed built in application configuration files or the built in tracing objects. But, the newbie programmer that has a Cert in.NET will for sure know about them. I would of come up with a better example, but I am a newbee.NET developer going for my MCSD.
Overall, I think Certs are a good thing. I work with around 12 other programmers and I am willing to bet that in the last 3 years, less than 3 techical books have been read by all of them (probably none, not including manuals read at work of course, and excluding me(I have averaged at least 3 a year in the last 3 years)). Certs, at least show that a programmer has picked up a book and read something about their field.
Adding to what you said (parent post was long, didn't want to copy it all).
The reason why it concedered by many as 'babysitting' is because most parents do not foster in their kids the love of learning. They expect teachers to do it. If the love of learning doesn't start at home, then teachers will always have an uphill battle. Even, sorry to say, to the point that some people will call it 'babysitting'
While I will consider putting this book on my reading list to get a broader view of ideas of the sofware industry... have you read a classic of software developing, The Mythical Man Month. This book is 30 years old now and assertions that it makes are largely all true. Software is no where near being made like stuff is made in a factory.
There are two ways to look at this. One is yes, interdisciplinary degrees can make you more marketable and attractive. It goes along the same lines of what the authors of the "pragmatic programmer" say, To diversify. Just like in investing. You are investing in what you are able to do and how much you will be able to make. That is the 'perfect world' thinking.
So, the other way to think about this is no, interdisciplinary degrees are not so much more attractive in that the students who choose this route may not be up to the challenge of a CS degree. Many of the students I went to college weren't hard core CS type people and hence, bitched a lot. Diversifying for them would be a good option in their eyes because they get recognition as a techy but don't have to put in quite so rigorous a schedule in demanding CS courses. It's like a cheap paint job for a car, it may look great from 50 feet away or with a person who knows nothing about car paint jobs, but for people who know or people that look closely, diversifying is a cheap substitute for the real thing.
ROTFLMAO, I work with a company full of programmers...EVERYONE DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM...There are the imatators, and then there are the few who do their own work and fix the mess others make.
Working in a company full of programmers is a microcosm of the world Ayn Rand created in Atlas Shrugged. There are the producers and the leaches.
I am assumming the poster is not a programmer. Programming is a complex task! I don't think online games will ever be hack proof. It is more like the real world, an arms race between the game programmers and the exploiters.
A simple solution to this mugging problem that I use is having LAN parties. I think they are more enjoyable because you know who your playing and you don't have to worry about hacking. Well, if someone hacks the game, then you can simply get up and beat his a@@.
If you ask me, I find it amazing that businesses still rely on Microsoft.
I know most/'ers hate all things Microsoft, but Windows 2000 is a pretty solid OS. I used it for years and I really don't notice a huge differance in my XP machine now. As far as businesses are concerned, from my experiance on the job, managers tend to resist change. Sort of like the Supreme court slows the rate of change that the executive or legislative branches can make. Managers have there place in much the same way. If they haven't changed, then the people who's job it is to inform them aren't doing their jobs...I.T. PEOPLE. Either that or they haven't a good enough arguement to change.
Dude, don't even use 'weed' in analogies. Then programmers might figure out like I did that you code much more effectively while stoned. Let them first figure out that beer has a direct correlation to the quality of code. Forget caffiene, that is for script kiddies!
I think a parent needs to make a conscious decision into what their children will and will not be exposed too. The more restictive they are, then the more dilligent they have to be in order to enforce what they have decided. And the battle is hard. Video games is just the tip of the ice burg. Parents have to monitor TV watching, what music they are listening too, who they are hanging out with, what they are reading, who they associate with in general, where specifically they are at and what they can be exposed to. That is a lot of work. These days I think Parents generally don't consciously decide where they will make there stand and in doing so they decide implicitly that they will be leniant towards everything. Sad, but I think increasing parents are viewing kids more and more as low maintenance people that they have to take care of.
first of all evolution is a word that can mean many things. Micro evolution has been proven and I have no problem with that, but Macro evolution has not been proven. People still point to the fossil record when it doesn't prove evolution at all. There are huge gaps in the record and 'scientists' forget to tell you that examples such as the horse line are taken from vastly different places on the earth and are placed in an order that isn't chronological. Oh yes, lets speak of chronological. Scientist define time in terms of the geological column, but they don't have an answer for trees standing upright through millions of millions years worth of layers. Or Scientist don't mention that they define the number of years back a layer is by the animals they find in the layer and they define the age of the animals by the layer they are found in. Circular reasoning anyone? Someone who hasn't read up on the topic may say, wait, carbon dating. Ok, lets go to carbon dating. Carbon dating is not accurate to the millions of years. Read about it, it is true. Also, Carbon dating also assumes that the level of carbon has been constant which is a big assumption, especially when you consider the amount of time being considered. I am not saying a reasonable person can believe in evolution and the big bang, but their are intelligent reasons to believe in Intelligent Design too. At the very least there are huge weak points to evolution that one should consider.
The big bang is not science either. It is a theroy. It cannot be reproduced in a lab or anywhere else by man. It is 'scientists' best guess. So by your own definition the big bang and for that matter evolution is not science and should not be taught in school.
what are the chances of the/. legions generally knowing it is sys admin day if it isn't posted here. Now the real service would be personnized messages for all of us who get so into their work that they forget important days like anniverseries.
It doesn't have to be that way. If the SysAdmins just did whatever I wanted them to do and there stuff is up more than 99% of the time and they wash my car every friday, I would have no issue with them.
you ignorant communist. Go ahead and move to a country where decisions are made for you. See what happens.
Oh, you are setting yourself up fine for that, replying as an anonymous coward. Those kind of people work really well as communists!
I have seen this arguement on /. many times...
How about this angle... Isn't the RIAA fighting a problem of their own making. Maybe their products are over priced. Maybe if they lowered the price more people will find enough value in their music to buy it. For example, Les Schwabb is a tire store in the pacific northwest of the U.S.A. They can charge a high price for their tires and they are still swamped from opening to closing every day. They can do it because they are the best when it comes to customer service. People see the value in them so they fork out the bucks. The RIAA thing is, in my opinion, more of a value thing than a piracy thing. Piracy is just a symptom of the problem. Fat Cat Music Execs and artists are too used to their salaries and won't see that what they put out doesn't match the price they are charging!
Here's the difference. If the Firefox web browser sucks, the average Joe can uninstall that web browser from a Windows box....
yes! It comes done this! This doesn't come up as much anymore because this issue has been out for a long long time. The fact that this issue has been 'resolved' or been out there for a while makes it no less valid. The fact that Mozilla has what it has market share wise, I believe, only supports how good of a product it is. If the battle field were equal, I think Firefox would of won this fight 6 months ago.
I found that reading and knowing the right people has much more to do with my productivity as a programmer. Fancy keyboards and the such only help if for some reason a piece of equipment is causing you pain. Multiple monitors and stuff like that are nice, don't get me wrong but I would rather save my C notes to buy technical books. From working with many programmers, I think they should do the same thing. Another thing that I saw mentioned was buying a 500 dollar chair. Can we say overkill? Personnally I can't code very often for more than an hour straight without wanting to get up and take a walk or something. A 50 dollar chair is confortable enough for me. I think a lot of this fancy equipment is more of an image thing, if you have a 500 dollar chair, 3 19 inch LCDs and a blazing fast PC then one seems to think they are cooler. I am a professional programmer, I get paid to think and produce. Give me the extra cash as a bonus, I wills stick with my 400 dell, 50 dollar chair and 17 inch lcd.
At first I was going to post a comment that maybe workers are to busy to worry about security so they leave it to IT to fix problems, but I thought about it and came to the conclusion if somone really is too busy then they won't have time for SPAM type email or for surfing.
So, I thought about it some more and came to the conclusion that it may simply be because of laziness. I work in a group of 12 programmers, 6 of which are either naturally tech savy or keep up with tech. These people have no issues with viruses and stuff like that. The others, the programmers who have been programming the same programming language, in the same industry, in the same one or two programs for 10+ years(granted there are some programmers with 10+ experiance and are not like this but most of them are) haven't read a technical book or done anything but the absolute bare mininum to get by for years and years. If 50% of programmers who SHOULD know better are too lazy to know exactly what they are doing when they are at a computer, what hope do IT departments have with people who think that there job is strictly whatever (accounting, being a doctor, being a pharmacist, etc) and the computers are for IT/Geeks. Too many people do not take pride in everything they do. They are content with being good enough. They are Lazy.
While I agree with you that parenting is hard, I don't agree with you that it is a battle that cannot be won against the mass marketing companies do. First, don't have a T.V. in your house or at least don't subscribe to any type of cable service. Second, make sure your kids are hanging out with kids who are 'good'. Third, and most importantly, educate your kids, take a proactive stance in their education. Given these three things, you as a parent have a good chance of raising kids that aren't so easily swayed by mass marketing.
Second, it is a parents responsibility what comes into THEIR home.
People who don't wish to take an active part of a childs lives by educating them and showing them how to live by example shouldn't have kids. Plain and simple.
Lastly, I don't think the goverment should have any business in rating games like they do. First because as I have just been indirectly talking about, I think it is the parents job to both keep filth out of their home and second because parents and kids should be 'educated' enough to make wise decisions. Second, we as a People should be very wary about giving the government rights over how we run our lives. People of power will take power for the sake of having it until someone stops them.
Is this a sign that the economy has recovered to the point people are being visible about which toilets they're flushing their cash surplus down?
/.ers would think more deeply about an issue and ponder/mull over the possibility that the sponsership of online gaming may be less about the popularity of online gaming and more to do with the amount of online cash a company has.
Why is this a troll? I think this is a valid thought. I think most companies would think twice before spending money on a 'fringe' thing like online gaming if they were short on cash. I would also think that
As with many things this story can be understood by relating it to Rounders the movie. When Knish says, "Alimony, child support, my kids eat. I'm not playing for the thrill of f**king victory." Competitive programming, oh my, I program for money, not prizes. Even if those prizes are some cash. At the end of the day I want my check every time, I don't care if I am the absolute best, crap, I am better than most without even putting effort in. If I want to gamble I go to the Hold'em tables.
One, a lot of the time the people interviewing you and setting your salary are not as technically savy as you are. A certification is tangible stuff they can grasp onto. They also can justify lets saying paying Mr. Cert Guy 20K more a year than Mr. NoCert Guy. That is the common arguement for getting certs.
.NET with no experiance he may missed built in application configuration files or the built in tracing objects. But, the newbie programmer that has a Cert in .NET will for sure know about them. I would of come up with a better example, but I am a newbee .NET developer going for my MCSD.
Two, the less common arguement is this. Going through getting a cert forces you to get a broad understanding of a subject area. To have in your mind things that you won't necessarily get from on the job experiance. For example if a C programmer got thrown into developing
Overall, I think Certs are a good thing. I work with around 12 other programmers and I am willing to bet that in the last 3 years, less than 3 techical books have been read by all of them (probably none, not including manuals read at work of course, and excluding me(I have averaged at least 3 a year in the last 3 years)). Certs, at least show that a programmer has picked up a book and read something about their field.
Adding to what you said (parent post was long, didn't want to copy it all).
The reason why it concedered by many as 'babysitting' is because most parents do not foster in their kids the love of learning. They expect teachers to do it. If the love of learning doesn't start at home, then teachers will always have an uphill battle. Even, sorry to say, to the point that some people will call it 'babysitting'
Not an exact quote, but Rockerfeller was asked how much money was enough and his response was something to the tune of a little more than I have.
few people have what it takes to walk away from income in the millions even if they already have millions.
While I will consider putting this book on my reading list to get a broader view of ideas of the sofware industry... have you read a classic of software developing, The Mythical Man Month. This book is 30 years old now and assertions that it makes are largely all true. Software is no where near being made like stuff is made in a factory.
There are two ways to look at this. One is yes, interdisciplinary degrees can make you more marketable and attractive. It goes along the same lines of what the authors of the "pragmatic programmer" say, To diversify. Just like in investing. You are investing in what you are able to do and how much you will be able to make. That is the 'perfect world' thinking.
So, the other way to think about this is no, interdisciplinary degrees are not so much more attractive in that the students who choose this route may not be up to the challenge of a CS degree. Many of the students I went to college weren't hard core CS type people and hence, bitched a lot. Diversifying for them would be a good option in their eyes because they get recognition as a techy but don't have to put in quite so rigorous a schedule in demanding CS courses. It's like a cheap paint job for a car, it may look great from 50 feet away or with a person who knows nothing about car paint jobs, but for people who know or people that look closely, diversifying is a cheap substitute for the real thing.
It may not be illegal to card count, but the casino can still ask you to leave. Good thing there a soo many casinos!
ROTFLMAO, I work with a company full of programmers...EVERYONE DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM...There are the imatators, and then there are the few who do their own work and fix the mess others make.
Working in a company full of programmers is a microcosm of the world Ayn Rand created in Atlas Shrugged. There are the producers and the leaches.
I am assumming the poster is not a programmer. Programming is a complex task! I don't think online games will ever be hack proof. It is more like the real world, an arms race between the game programmers and the exploiters.
A simple solution to this mugging problem that I use is having LAN parties. I think they are more enjoyable because you know who your playing and you don't have to worry about hacking. Well, if someone hacks the game, then you can simply get up and beat his a@@.
If you ask me, I find it amazing that businesses still rely on Microsoft.
/'ers hate all things Microsoft, but Windows 2000 is a pretty solid OS. I used it for years and I really don't notice a huge differance in my XP machine now. As far as businesses are concerned, from my experiance on the job, managers tend to resist change. Sort of like the Supreme court slows the rate of change that the executive or legislative branches can make. Managers have there place in much the same way. If they haven't changed, then the people who's job it is to inform them aren't doing their jobs...I.T. PEOPLE. Either that or they haven't a good enough arguement to change.
I know most
Dude, don't even use 'weed' in analogies. Then programmers might figure out like I did that you code much more effectively while stoned. Let them first figure out that beer has a direct correlation to the quality of code. Forget caffiene, that is for script kiddies!
I think a parent needs to make a conscious decision into what their children will and will not be exposed too. The more restictive they are, then the more dilligent they have to be in order to enforce what they have decided. And the battle is hard. Video games is just the tip of the ice burg. Parents have to monitor TV watching, what music they are listening too, who they are hanging out with, what they are reading, who they associate with in general, where specifically they are at and what they can be exposed to. That is a lot of work. These days I think Parents generally don't consciously decide where they will make there stand and in doing so they decide implicitly that they will be leniant towards everything. Sad, but I think increasing parents are viewing kids more and more as low maintenance people that they have to take care of.
first of all evolution is a word that can mean many things. Micro evolution has been proven and I have no problem with that, but Macro evolution has not been proven. People still point to the fossil record when it doesn't prove evolution at all. There are huge gaps in the record and 'scientists' forget to tell you that examples such as the horse line are taken from vastly different places on the earth and are placed in an order that isn't chronological. Oh yes, lets speak of chronological. Scientist define time in terms of the geological column, but they don't have an answer for trees standing upright through millions of millions years worth of layers. Or Scientist don't mention that they define the number of years back a layer is by the animals they find in the layer and they define the age of the animals by the layer they are found in. Circular reasoning anyone? Someone who hasn't read up on the topic may say, wait, carbon dating. Ok, lets go to carbon dating. Carbon dating is not accurate to the millions of years. Read about it, it is true. Also, Carbon dating also assumes that the level of carbon has been constant which is a big assumption, especially when you consider the amount of time being considered. I am not saying a reasonable person can believe in evolution and the big bang, but their are intelligent reasons to believe in Intelligent Design too. At the very least there are huge weak points to evolution that one should consider.
The big bang is not science either. It is a theroy. It cannot be reproduced in a lab or anywhere else by man. It is 'scientists' best guess. So by your own definition the big bang and for that matter evolution is not science and should not be taught in school.
what are the chances of the /. legions generally knowing it is sys admin day if it isn't posted here. Now the real service would be personnized messages for all of us who get so into their work that they forget important days like anniverseries.
It doesn't have to be that way. If the SysAdmins just did whatever I wanted them to do and there stuff is up more than 99% of the time and they wash my car every friday, I would have no issue with them.
RUN LINUX
LOL, touché
you ignorant communist. Go ahead and move to a country where decisions are made for you. See what happens. Oh, you are setting yourself up fine for that, replying as an anonymous coward. Those kind of people work really well as communists!