See the problem comes in when MS tries to make it more efficient and more user friendly. I bet you money that most of the metadata will be filled out automagically. Then you get the content provider metadata, so all your pr0n will be tagged "accurately". Amusing stuff. Going to be some red faces come upgrade time.
Heh. My 1270th comment, and my first first post. I'd like to thank my typing instructor, and my witty repartee coach, and all you east coast bastards who got the day off.
You can't expect such a large industry to be so flexible as to understand, in advance, the ramifications of p2p. Even now they persist in believing that they can stomp it out if they just put enough work into it, or that they can come up with a cheap technical fix which will roll back the clock all the way to LPs, where you couldn't make copies at all without permission.
So it's not surprising to me that they seem to think DRM is an addition to their product that consumers would find to be "valuable". Not sure how it's going to pan out in the long term. I think DRM is completely impossible for the next ten years...even if they got the ability to put flawless DRM capable hardware in all new TVs, DVD players, CD players, etc, it would still take at least that long to achieve sufficient market penetration with that DRM'd hardware, and that doesn't even count the inevitable flaws and backwards compaitbility issues, as well as the fact that there is no DRM standard.
Pretty cool, but it's damn hard to get enough shares to pull off something like that...Oracle has a market cap of 63 billion, Microsoft has a market cap of 283 billion, Sun only has a market cap of 15 billion, but I find I don't care so much about java these days...
We'd have to be able to pick up 25-35% of the stock to have a hope of forcing something like that, and we'd also have to be able to handle it if the release of the source caused the company to tank (which it might). Ugly scene. We might be better off putting our cash into creating better open source solutions. Damn patents are all kinds of annoying though.
What? I own a few shares of Microsoft stock, so if I go to a shareholders meeting and demand that the open their source code, somethings going to happen? DAMN! Why didn't I think of that before?!?
Unless he bought a metric buttload of stock, he's going to have no effect on the development of any of Take Twos games, and more than any other super-minority stockholder would have on product development at any other decent-sized company.
Jesus, their market cap is 1.26 billion I really don't think they have anything to worry about from a prick who was too cheap to pony up 10k to a charity.
Yea, I've got an old HP legacy app that requires the function keys. Not very useful. I do Perl programming as well, oh well.
I don't now about the people who design these things...If the purpose is to make a super compact keyboard, fine, but they sacrifice so much functionality. I had a "standard" compact keyboard and I couldn't handle it, and THAT had 30 more keys!
Yea, I think we're stuck with the keyboards we have, rather than the keyboards everyone thinks we should want. And just from my own perspective, 53 keys isn't anywhere near enough...I get the shakes if I don't have a number pad at least.
Hey, I started with Pascal, moved up to C++, then Java, and I just did some Cobol programming this morning. If yer company is too cheap to ditch the old stuff, you'll be maintaining it forever. One of the reasons I got my current job is because I spent a year doing Cobol programming like it was 1999...which...uh...it was.
Hell, if you got started so long ago that you're 60+ and programming now, then you started off with punchcards and manual switches.
That's a hell of a big change, a lot more than simple syntax and such. I mean, if you started with C (1972), then you're still in good shape with Perl (1987) and Python (1991). But if you started with Fortran (1957), Cobol (1959), and Lisp (1959), you're stuck with some seriously dead-end knowledge...Not that there aren't jobs around for those specialities, but what was hip in 1960 is fossilized today. You could be using Fortran 95, or Scheme, I suppose, but what would be the point?
Doesn't matter, because there are always people who specialize in legacy applications until they retire. My immediate predicessor programmed in Cobol and RPG, until she retired at 65.
That being said, I'm sure most of them do move into management as their specialties become obsolete, and why not? I'd rather be managed by someone who had technical knowledge, than someone who just has an MBA. And in your mid-50's, do you still want to be jumping on the next new thing, learning it down to the core, and then rolling it out into production? That's a young person's game.
Eh. Most scientists don't view Kuiper objects as true planets, so I think that offering them the prestige of names from the greek pantheon irks a lot of astronomers.
So they fall back on geek culture. I think after object X became "Xena" it was inevitable.
For me it all depends on the implementation. I loved NWN, can't wait for NWN 2. But there have been a lot of D&D games I absolutely couldn't stand, and there are a lot of places where I think they're going to run into issues.
WoW is simple, but it is also pretty elegant and well balanced. It's the best MMO I've ever played for that, and they've continued to do a lot of work on it. DDO is goign to have to do a lot of work to better that.
Free market forces. If DDO is better, people will flock to it, otherwise people will stay with WoW.
I've played most of the new MMORPGs to come out in the last 5 years...All of them that had a free trial, and a few others to boot. I stuck with the ones I liked for a while, and the ones I didn't like, I tossed.
I'm pretty big into WoW right now, but if a new MMORPG came along that I like better, I'll play it. Why not? Nobody owns my business, I haven't sold my soul to any MMO company, though I can't really bear to pass any money toward Sony, so I've been giving their products the big pass, even though I'm itching to play Planetside again to see if the 14 yr olds have left.
I have to say, I specifically made my WAP security shaky because of crap like this. You come in on my wireless, you get no access to anything but the internet, but you can do whatever you want with that. I also took the added security precaution of naming my WAP "I read yer email".
So when the RIAA comes beating on my door because some pirate shop in China's been spoofing an IP which randomly happens to be mine, I can just say, "Unsecured Wireless", and give them the finger.
From the article, it sounds like the guy has an open WAP, so even if it does have his IP and MAC address, without evidence that he physically had the movie at some point, they can't prove a thing.
The big problem with trying to secure wipe your drive is that it takes hours...Not really the kind of thing that you can do with the feds beating on your door. Even a secure wipe of the slack space (deleted files, swap file, etc) would take a significant amount of time.
You'd have to be savvy enough to know you need to secure erase, paranoid enough to think you might be nailed at any time, and proactive enough to schedule erasure for every night at 5:00am (Bedtime).
It's not that I don't think that a person could be those things. I do think, however, that a person who is ALL of those things would be unlikely to be mistaken for a neophyte by anyone.
Do not befriend the users. Do not tell them what is actually going wrong. Never accept blame. Do not rush to complete requests.
Here are the reasons why:
If you befriend them, they will cease to be able to do the simplest thing without your help. This is fine if they're hot, but not if they're not.
If you tell them what is actually wrong, they will get it more wrong when they report it up the line, and you will be blamed for something. Instead tell the users something hugely general that will fit into that comfortable place in their minds.
If you accept blame, users will view this as a sign of weakness, and assign blame the next time, without waiting for you to volunteer.
If you rush to complete non-critical, non-it projects, users will use this as a performace benchmark, and you'll be forced to complete all of their projects first to avoid the appearance of slacking off, in the course of this you will have to ignore critical maintenance that can get you in real trouble later.
Effing Dell technicians. I had one power down a system to switch a hotswap SCSI drive, and wipe out the whole RAID. I was ready do do some serious voodoo right there in the server room, and I'm not talking about sacrificing a goat here.
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See the problem comes in when MS tries to make it more efficient and more user friendly. I bet you money that most of the metadata will be filled out automagically. Then you get the content provider metadata, so all your pr0n will be tagged "accurately". Amusing stuff. Going to be some red faces come upgrade time.
Heh. My 1270th comment, and my first first post. I'd like to thank my typing instructor, and my witty repartee coach, and all you east coast bastards who got the day off.
Yea, a lot of people would pay 1 billion dollars just to look at AOL's content. OMGWTFLOLOLROFLCOPTERS
Jeez, why didn't they just use one of the damn free cds?
You can't expect such a large industry to be so flexible as to understand, in advance, the ramifications of p2p. Even now they persist in believing that they can stomp it out if they just put enough work into it, or that they can come up with a cheap technical fix which will roll back the clock all the way to LPs, where you couldn't make copies at all without permission.
So it's not surprising to me that they seem to think DRM is an addition to their product that consumers would find to be "valuable". Not sure how it's going to pan out in the long term. I think DRM is completely impossible for the next ten years...even if they got the ability to put flawless DRM capable hardware in all new TVs, DVD players, CD players, etc, it would still take at least that long to achieve sufficient market penetration with that DRM'd hardware, and that doesn't even count the inevitable flaws and backwards compaitbility issues, as well as the fact that there is no DRM standard.
Pretty cool, but it's damn hard to get enough shares to pull off something like that...Oracle has a market cap of 63 billion, Microsoft has a market cap of 283 billion, Sun only has a market cap of 15 billion, but I find I don't care so much about java these days...
We'd have to be able to pick up 25-35% of the stock to have a hope of forcing something like that, and we'd also have to be able to handle it if the release of the source caused the company to tank (which it might). Ugly scene. We might be better off putting our cash into creating better open source solutions. Damn patents are all kinds of annoying though.
What? I own a few shares of Microsoft stock, so if I go to a shareholders meeting and demand that the open their source code, somethings going to happen? DAMN! Why didn't I think of that before?!?
Unless he bought a metric buttload of stock, he's going to have no effect on the development of any of Take Twos games, and more than any other super-minority stockholder would have on product development at any other decent-sized company.
Jesus, their market cap is 1.26 billion I really don't think they have anything to worry about from a prick who was too cheap to pony up 10k to a charity.
Yea, I've got an old HP legacy app that requires the function keys. Not very useful. I do Perl programming as well, oh well.
I don't now about the people who design these things...If the purpose is to make a super compact keyboard, fine, but they sacrifice so much functionality. I had a "standard" compact keyboard and I couldn't handle it, and THAT had 30 more keys!
Yea, I think we're stuck with the keyboards we have, rather than the keyboards everyone thinks we should want. And just from my own perspective, 53 keys isn't anywhere near enough...I get the shakes if I don't have a number pad at least.
Actually that's an opinion, based on the fact that I've never, in my 10+ years as a programmer, had any use for my LISP knowledge.
I posted this with a better headline hours ago. I wish I knew the magic formula for getting a submission accepted.
Hey, I started with Pascal, moved up to C++, then Java, and I just did some Cobol programming this morning. If yer company is too cheap to ditch the old stuff, you'll be maintaining it forever. One of the reasons I got my current job is because I spent a year doing Cobol programming like it was 1999...which...uh...it was.
Not if you're good at it...
Hell, if you got started so long ago that you're 60+ and programming now, then you started off with punchcards and manual switches.
That's a hell of a big change, a lot more than simple syntax and such. I mean, if you started with C (1972), then you're still in good shape with Perl (1987) and Python (1991). But if you started with Fortran (1957), Cobol (1959), and Lisp (1959), you're stuck with some seriously dead-end knowledge...Not that there aren't jobs around for those specialities, but what was hip in 1960 is fossilized today. You could be using Fortran 95, or Scheme, I suppose, but what would be the point?
Doesn't matter, because there are always people who specialize in legacy applications until they retire. My immediate predicessor programmed in Cobol and RPG, until she retired at 65.
That being said, I'm sure most of them do move into management as their specialties become obsolete, and why not? I'd rather be managed by someone who had technical knowledge, than someone who just has an MBA. And in your mid-50's, do you still want to be jumping on the next new thing, learning it down to the core, and then rolling it out into production? That's a young person's game.
Eh. Most scientists don't view Kuiper objects as true planets, so I think that offering them the prestige of names from the greek pantheon irks a lot of astronomers.
So they fall back on geek culture. I think after object X became "Xena" it was inevitable.
For me it all depends on the implementation. I loved NWN, can't wait for NWN 2. But there have been a lot of D&D games I absolutely couldn't stand, and there are a lot of places where I think they're going to run into issues.
WoW is simple, but it is also pretty elegant and well balanced. It's the best MMO I've ever played for that, and they've continued to do a lot of work on it. DDO is goign to have to do a lot of work to better that.
Free market forces. If DDO is better, people will flock to it, otherwise people will stay with WoW.
I've played most of the new MMORPGs to come out in the last 5 years...All of them that had a free trial, and a few others to boot. I stuck with the ones I liked for a while, and the ones I didn't like, I tossed.
I'm pretty big into WoW right now, but if a new MMORPG came along that I like better, I'll play it. Why not? Nobody owns my business, I haven't sold my soul to any MMO company, though I can't really bear to pass any money toward Sony, so I've been giving their products the big pass, even though I'm itching to play Planetside again to see if the 14 yr olds have left.
I have to say, I specifically made my WAP security shaky because of crap like this. You come in on my wireless, you get no access to anything but the internet, but you can do whatever you want with that. I also took the added security precaution of naming my WAP "I read yer email".
So when the RIAA comes beating on my door because some pirate shop in China's been spoofing an IP which randomly happens to be mine, I can just say, "Unsecured Wireless", and give them the finger.
From the article, it sounds like the guy has an open WAP, so even if it does have his IP and MAC address, without evidence that he physically had the movie at some point, they can't prove a thing.
100,000 is the maximum fine as well. I think we can all agree that Coach Carter was not worth the maximum fine.
The big problem with trying to secure wipe your drive is that it takes hours...Not really the kind of thing that you can do with the feds beating on your door. Even a secure wipe of the slack space (deleted files, swap file, etc) would take a significant amount of time.
You'd have to be savvy enough to know you need to secure erase, paranoid enough to think you might be nailed at any time, and proactive enough to schedule erasure for every night at 5:00am (Bedtime).
It's not that I don't think that a person could be those things. I do think, however, that a person who is ALL of those things would be unlikely to be mistaken for a neophyte by anyone.
Cynical but true.
Do not befriend the users. Do not tell them what is actually going wrong. Never accept blame. Do not rush to complete requests.
Here are the reasons why:
If you befriend them, they will cease to be able to do the simplest thing without your help. This is fine if they're hot, but not if they're not.
If you tell them what is actually wrong, they will get it more wrong when they report it up the line, and you will be blamed for something. Instead tell the users something hugely general that will fit into that comfortable place in their minds.
If you accept blame, users will view this as a sign of weakness, and assign blame the next time, without waiting for you to volunteer.
If you rush to complete non-critical, non-it projects, users will use this as a performace benchmark, and you'll be forced to complete all of their projects first to avoid the appearance of slacking off, in the course of this you will have to ignore critical maintenance that can get you in real trouble later.
Effing Dell technicians. I had one power down a system to switch a hotswap SCSI drive, and wipe out the whole RAID. I was ready do do some serious voodoo right there in the server room, and I'm not talking about sacrificing a goat here.
It's almost impossible to make a program completely useproof...As soon as you idiot-proof it, they come up with a better idiot.
Yea, because one guy has an opinion, development on all other interfaces will be shut down.
Linus taking a side doesn't mean a thing in the overall KDE/Gnome holy war, any more than if he'd taken a side in Vi/Emacs.