IP is NOT PROPERTY. We kinda treat it like it is, but if you can duplicate it for no cost, and you don't lose it when someone else gets it, IT IS NOT PROPERTY.
Oh, and those contracts that require handing over intellectual "property"? The problem with most musicians is that the people who write those contracts are the gatekeepers to national exposure, so if you don't play their game, you're limited in how far you can go. The Internet is slowly changing that, but old habits die hard.
I agree wholeheartedly, with one expansion to (b.):
Meetings must be limited to information that *everyone in the meeting* needs to know
I suppose that might be obvious to a programmer, but it's not always obvious to the PHB types;) If the meeting is applicable to what you're doing, you should be there. If not, you shouldn't. I've seen lots of places get off-track in both directions.
That old adage is eternally true... "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". The Windows guy that fixes stuff is seen as more valuable than the guy who prevents those things from going wrong in the first place. It's simply a human weakness. Reaction is observable, prevention isn't.
If you want a car that runs on non-Ford brand gas, make it yourself!
Standards are standards for a reason. Subverting the standard for anticompetitive reasons is wrong. Period.
Besides... who wants to install yet another damn program on their machine? I hate how each widget I get has some shitty driver it needs to have to get working with Windows, with some shitty software that never works. My Canon HF100? The video management software for it is abysmal. Palm is actually serving consumers by allowing them to keep their computers cleaner and use existing infrastructure, and you're getting upset at that? Fuck Apple.
Main problem I see is bribing the senior patent official. We need a little more base reform, such as denying patenting any kind of information such as genes, computer code, or algorithms. Process patents are way abused in many fields.
So allow a link to a single comic page, redirect an image to the page "wrapping" the comic or something. Not having a single link to point people to is very web-unfriendly. I know why you block other people from embedding images... I just don't know why the web design is so poor.
There are like, 54 different comics on that page. Which one is the relevant one? Why should a website be so poorly structured as to not have any direct links to single comics? That's just stupidity.
Re:Gaming is Amazing on Windows 7 (here's a list)
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Gaming On Windows 7
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I actually have Civilization 4 installed on my Win7 RC box, and it claims that there are known issues with it, but I haven't noticed anything other than some issues with corruption of the initial loading screen (before it even initializes the 3D graphics)
Umm... World of Warcraft, anyone? There are many types of games for which the PC is simply a superior interface, and it allows much more user control over the games than consoles do. There is a non-trivial population of "modders" and such that love being able to add and modify content in their games. You just can't really do that with consoles. Yes, consoles are where the mass of the market is, but you're saying "SUV's are dead, everyone is driving smaller cars now!". Most people do drive smaller cars, but many people find use for and own SUV's still.
Grandma doesn't want to run multiple monitors, though. It's usually technically proficient people. It's not intuitive or easy on Windows to set up multiple monitors, not on most machines. Only when you start using the drivers from Nvidia or ATI. And if you're using those instead of the drivers that came with your machine, you're technical enough to be able to type a few things at a terminal.
I know that. But C++ forces you to think about those issues, whereas Java/C# don't. That's why I recommend everyone at least learning a bit of C/C++, so they know where things come from. Do the development in Java, C#, Haskell, whatever. Have a ball. But realize that even if the language hides it from you, your structures and program still use resources. THAT is the problem I see coming from newer programmers.
Just because it is in the public domain, does not mean the public has a free right to it
Actually, that's exactly what it means. I don't care who does the packaging of a public domain work... that does not confer the copyright, and therefore control of COPYING that, to them. A CD is a completely different issue... it's still under copyright. And music performance is transformative... if it's a new performance of old work, it has a new copyright. But Edison's "Watson, come here, I need you" is not under copyright, and anyone who has a recording cannot legally do anything to prevent copying of it if they let anyone else have it. The court ruling was that the "packaging" was something that didn't change the actual work enough to make it newly copyrightable.
Then the courts fucked up and you should have appealed. Photographs of public domain paintings are also in the public domain due to the work not being transformative, only technical.
I understand that Microsoft doesn't want to enable any circumvention. But they don't have to actively block it, either. They're acting like an arm of Hollywood rather than a platform provider.
I've installed all of those programs I could get access to, and it still seems to not work. It's still Microsoft DRM getting in the way of what is arguably fair use. THAT is my complaint. Not that they don't enable me to do everything I want, but that they actively deny me the ability to do things I want, rather than take a neutral stance. If they don't trust me, I won't trust or use them for anything but a game loader.
The problem is that Microsoft is a monopoly. If you had the selection of cars that you did in computers, the only way you could get a sedan would be to get it from Ford. Would you think it is a "free market" if Ford forced all the people who wanted sedans to pay for a GPS system as well as a spoiler? Hey, you can go elsewhere and get a bicycle or whatever. You're not "forced" to buy a sedan...
And there are times when you want the memory management code for performance, and you can't get to it. I've seen such horrible Java programs from new programmers because they are never taught ANYTHING about memory management. You can't forget about memory in ANY language that you use. I highly value C/C++ as an initial learning language because it forces you to recognize that resources need to be allocated in order to use them. Java and other languages make implicit allocation easy, but it hides that from the programmer, which allows people to shit all over memory because they don't have a clue about removing objects when done, or even just removing all references to them. They just don't know.
I'd trust hacks from Carmack more than I'd trust some of the engineering that came from my classmates. He understands the whole system... many engineers get the math fine, but completely forget how it applies to the whole. And that makes some of the designs sub optimal at best, and highly dangerous at worst.
There are lawyers, and there are ambulance chasers. It's a common meme to say "kill all lawyers", but it's mostly in frustration with the current lawsuit-happy culture that a number of lawyers are more than willing to take their fee from. Don't forget... criminal and civil law are significantly different. Civil lawyers are WAY overpopulated. We need to cut off some of the lawsuit supply (fix copyrights/malpractice/tort law), at least cull a bit of the herd somehow.
So, lawyers, hairdressers, politicians and marketing people go on the B ark, and the engineers and scientists and such on the A ark? Let's launch the B ship first, because they're that much more important...
If you think Microsoft always intended to release the code, you must hold a very dim view of history. Microsoft does NOT like the GPL, and they have done nothing to give us a reason to think otherwise. Really... Microsoft has pulled the football away so many fucking times... are you really that stupid, Charlie Brown? Do you give it one more go?
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Stupidity is a mindset, not something that can be measured with an IQ test ;)
IP is NOT PROPERTY. We kinda treat it like it is, but if you can duplicate it for no cost, and you don't lose it when someone else gets it, IT IS NOT PROPERTY.
Oh, and those contracts that require handing over intellectual "property"? The problem with most musicians is that the people who write those contracts are the gatekeepers to national exposure, so if you don't play their game, you're limited in how far you can go. The Internet is slowly changing that, but old habits die hard.
I agree wholeheartedly, with one expansion to (b.):
;) If the meeting is applicable to what you're doing, you should be there. If not, you shouldn't. I've seen lots of places get off-track in both directions.
Meetings must be limited to information that *everyone in the meeting* needs to know
I suppose that might be obvious to a programmer, but it's not always obvious to the PHB types
That old adage is eternally true... "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". The Windows guy that fixes stuff is seen as more valuable than the guy who prevents those things from going wrong in the first place. It's simply a human weakness. Reaction is observable, prevention isn't.
Should be a lot easier to transform cruddy old Fortran to modern Fortran than it is to transform it into some other language.
If you want a car that runs on non-Ford brand gas, make it yourself!
Standards are standards for a reason. Subverting the standard for anticompetitive reasons is wrong. Period.
Besides... who wants to install yet another damn program on their machine? I hate how each widget I get has some shitty driver it needs to have to get working with Windows, with some shitty software that never works. My Canon HF100? The video management software for it is abysmal. Palm is actually serving consumers by allowing them to keep their computers cleaner and use existing infrastructure, and you're getting upset at that? Fuck Apple.
Main problem I see is bribing the senior patent official. We need a little more base reform, such as denying patenting any kind of information such as genes, computer code, or algorithms. Process patents are way abused in many fields.
So allow a link to a single comic page, redirect an image to the page "wrapping" the comic or something. Not having a single link to point people to is very web-unfriendly. I know why you block other people from embedding images... I just don't know why the web design is so poor.
In theory it does. In practice, not so much.
There are like, 54 different comics on that page. Which one is the relevant one? Why should a website be so poorly structured as to not have any direct links to single comics? That's just stupidity.
I actually have Civilization 4 installed on my Win7 RC box, and it claims that there are known issues with it, but I haven't noticed anything other than some issues with corruption of the initial loading screen (before it even initializes the 3D graphics)
Umm... World of Warcraft, anyone? There are many types of games for which the PC is simply a superior interface, and it allows much more user control over the games than consoles do. There is a non-trivial population of "modders" and such that love being able to add and modify content in their games. You just can't really do that with consoles. Yes, consoles are where the mass of the market is, but you're saying "SUV's are dead, everyone is driving smaller cars now!". Most people do drive smaller cars, but many people find use for and own SUV's still.
Grandma doesn't want to run multiple monitors, though. It's usually technically proficient people. It's not intuitive or easy on Windows to set up multiple monitors, not on most machines. Only when you start using the drivers from Nvidia or ATI. And if you're using those instead of the drivers that came with your machine, you're technical enough to be able to type a few things at a terminal.
Not me, but they did do something to the Golgafrincham's.
I know that. But C++ forces you to think about those issues, whereas Java/C# don't. That's why I recommend everyone at least learning a bit of C/C++, so they know where things come from. Do the development in Java, C#, Haskell, whatever. Have a ball. But realize that even if the language hides it from you, your structures and program still use resources. THAT is the problem I see coming from newer programmers.
Just because it is in the public domain, does not mean the public has a free right to it
Actually, that's exactly what it means. I don't care who does the packaging of a public domain work... that does not confer the copyright, and therefore control of COPYING that, to them. A CD is a completely different issue... it's still under copyright. And music performance is transformative... if it's a new performance of old work, it has a new copyright. But Edison's "Watson, come here, I need you" is not under copyright, and anyone who has a recording cannot legally do anything to prevent copying of it if they let anyone else have it. The court ruling was that the "packaging" was something that didn't change the actual work enough to make it newly copyrightable.
Then the courts fucked up and you should have appealed. Photographs of public domain paintings are also in the public domain due to the work not being transformative, only technical.
I understand that Microsoft doesn't want to enable any circumvention. But they don't have to actively block it, either. They're acting like an arm of Hollywood rather than a platform provider.
I've installed all of those programs I could get access to, and it still seems to not work. It's still Microsoft DRM getting in the way of what is arguably fair use. THAT is my complaint. Not that they don't enable me to do everything I want, but that they actively deny me the ability to do things I want, rather than take a neutral stance. If they don't trust me, I won't trust or use them for anything but a game loader.
The problem is that Microsoft is a monopoly. If you had the selection of cars that you did in computers, the only way you could get a sedan would be to get it from Ford. Would you think it is a "free market" if Ford forced all the people who wanted sedans to pay for a GPS system as well as a spoiler? Hey, you can go elsewhere and get a bicycle or whatever. You're not "forced" to buy a sedan...
And there are times when you want the memory management code for performance, and you can't get to it. I've seen such horrible Java programs from new programmers because they are never taught ANYTHING about memory management. You can't forget about memory in ANY language that you use. I highly value C/C++ as an initial learning language because it forces you to recognize that resources need to be allocated in order to use them. Java and other languages make implicit allocation easy, but it hides that from the programmer, which allows people to shit all over memory because they don't have a clue about removing objects when done, or even just removing all references to them. They just don't know.
I'd trust hacks from Carmack more than I'd trust some of the engineering that came from my classmates. He understands the whole system... many engineers get the math fine, but completely forget how it applies to the whole. And that makes some of the designs sub optimal at best, and highly dangerous at worst.
There are lawyers, and there are ambulance chasers. It's a common meme to say "kill all lawyers", but it's mostly in frustration with the current lawsuit-happy culture that a number of lawyers are more than willing to take their fee from. Don't forget... criminal and civil law are significantly different. Civil lawyers are WAY overpopulated. We need to cut off some of the lawsuit supply (fix copyrights/malpractice/tort law), at least cull a bit of the herd somehow.
So, lawyers, hairdressers, politicians and marketing people go on the B ark, and the engineers and scientists and such on the A ark? Let's launch the B ship first, because they're that much more important...
A movie theater? C'mon... that kind of budget would be worth at least a minor-league stadium or regional airport or something
If you think Microsoft always intended to release the code, you must hold a very dim view of history. Microsoft does NOT like the GPL, and they have done nothing to give us a reason to think otherwise. Really... Microsoft has pulled the football away so many fucking times... are you really that stupid, Charlie Brown? Do you give it one more go?