I realize this story is way down on the front page, but for posterity, I thought I'd mention this, even if it's tangential to your point.
Musicians don't make 10 cents on the dollar when you buy a CD. In general, a recording contract offers 9-12% of the cost of a CD to the artist, AFTER enough units are sold to recoup the label's costs. "Costs" are defined in the contract in such a way that it really means "Makes a moderate amount of profit." Also any upfront payment the artist received counts against the artist's royalties.
In other words, for a majority of CDs produced (80% seems to be a widely accepted number) the artist never makes a penny if you buy the damn disk.
Now, this could be misleading. Most people pirate popular music that has already crossed the profitability threshold for the artist, and artists who teeter on the brink of profitability are also hurt by piracy - it can prevent their CD from hitting critical mass. But regardless, this is why concerts are so damn valuable to the artist, as they receive 100% of the profits. And a successful CD (for everyone but the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) is really just a damn good ad for the tour.
Seligman is one of the more brilliant psychological researchers working today. Learned Optimism is an extension of his earlier work on learned helplessness.
If your goal is to be happy, then not blaming yourself for you failures is a pretty decent tactic. If you tend to believe that causes of your failure are external, temporary, and specific to the incident, then you tend to feel good about yourself, and continue to take risks. If you feel that the causes of your failure are internal, permanent and generalized, you will stop taking risks, and become depressed.
Seligman himself said it best. "Stupidity abides" - if you believe that you are too stupid to get a job, you'll stop trying, and become miserable. If you blame the job market - well, the job market changes. You'll keep trying, and be happier about it
Because the demo disk contained unsigned, unencrypted code, which means that arbitrary code could potentially be run. Locking out the demo disk means that crackers can't find out how to run unsigned code on the machine, preventing softmodding
Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long. In the last year we've seen the discovery of a super giant squid, the first videos of a giant squid in the wild, and now this!
Look.
Do you know how fucking big a sperm whale is? It's huge. HUGE. And giant squid eat them. Listen to your heart - no matter what the scientists tell you, 4th grade ecology has convinced us all that whales are intelligent loving animals. Did you see Star Trek 4. They're the freakin' saviours of humanity man.
And giant squid eat them
Eat them
Not beacause it's easy. Oh no, not because a sperm whale is an easy catch. Big, remember? No. It's because squid are evil incarnate
Do you know how long they've been down there? No one does. But my guess is the squid and it's precurser have been down there in the depths for a lot longer than man has been knucklewalking. That's old. And you know they think down there. Brood down there. Their tentacles floating like the limbs of children relaxing in the water, they brood and wonder how to conquer us from below.
Things that think and brood also dream. And things that dream begin to worship the stuff of dreams. Out of man's insecurity we have sublimated a great father figure into the sky, according to Freud. What about the tentacled things in the watery darkness, whose females are larger than their males?
I'll tell you what they worship
A great multilimbed mother of the dark watery brood. Deep down in the very molten cracks of the earth filling the sea with inky blackness. THAT's what they worship. We killed men in the crusades. Men who looked the same as other men. What will the dark octupi and squid do to US who are mere flabby bloodsacks to rip apart and drink out fluids with their beaky maws? What in the name of their Dark Mother goddess will they do to us when they rise into our airy realm?
Think about it dudes
Us computer geeks are basically fucked
Re:This one has it all - sony, the queen, arrows,
on
The 2005 IT Year In Quotes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I may also be true.
Queen Elizabeth the II is 79 years old. There are, what, 203 countries in the world, roughly, depending on how you count? Considering the revolutions in Africa, and the disolving of Soviet Russia, and the aftermath of World War II (which brought many colonized states into revolution and eventually nationhood) it's not hard to imagine that 102 countries have emerged in the last 80 years, depending on how one counts the age of a country.
The Slashdot effect seems to have left the server standing, but expired the content in their ad server, leaving only the weird animated "Default Banner" gif, which actually doesn't fit in the provided space.
Let's not forget what we are testing for here. We're not saying that this gene makes people dumb. We're saying that boys with this gene score more poorly than boys without this gene. We're using a purely operational definition of intelligence (IQ score), and not making a value judgement.
This is interesting science, despite those who are spending their energy railing against IQ tests. IQ tests are terrible indicators of how "bright" someone is, but they are fairly consistent tests, in which people tend to get the same results over time, so they are measuring something with accuracy. And whatever that is, is hurt by this gene.
Is it attention? Does this gene make your balls itch, thus distracting you from standardized tests (also explaining why it only affects boys)? Perhaps, does it affect mathematico-spatial ability specifically, which boys tend to do better on than girls (very likely for social reasons), and thus the generally poor performance of girls in this part of the test accounts for the gender variation (a floor effect)?
Who knows. But a strong correlation between a gene and a standardized test score (especially a well established one like most IQ tests) in a not insignifigant sample (300 kids) is nothing to sneeze at - 20 points in a sample that large tends to indicate it's a real effect. Don't let the articles journalistic simplifications ("Gene makes boys dumb") throw you from seeing what that is.
BellSouth does have a fiber to the home program. It's mostly secret, but they're moving everyone over to a BBG backend which they think will help them support the number of customers that their fiber plan is going to generate. (It won't, their BroadBand Gateway system is so awful it's redonkulous, and if you know a major BLS technician, he'll admit to you it's so, and likely to be so for years).
Lots of customers are already on fiber to the curb, especially in Florida. It's speed capped at the NOC in software for competition reasons, and it costs the same as DSL currently, but they want everyone on fiber to the home in a few years.
Most of this is stuff you only know if you put 2 and 2 together, but it's obviously their plan.
The reason MS can't patch anything is because MS has exactly the same technical challanges that every major Linux distro has. Dependency hell.
MS likes to pretend that windows is immune to such things, but the truth is every piece of software is interconnected. MS creates the illusion of no dependency problems by solving as much of it as possible behind closed doors, and wrapping the results in binary installers. The sheer amount of effort to resolve the problem is high
I think we're mixing client and protocol. A good client for me fully supports as many protocols as I need, and provides little nicities like Gaim's buddy pounces, and plugins.
A good protocol is Japper, which is really an arbitrary XML routing protocol that can be easily extended to manage more features and links up otherwise divergent networks
I had this job interview where I was asked if I started a new project right now what programming language would I write it in.
I said "That would of course depend heavily on the project"
This got me the job, because I was the only person who didn't answer "Java" or "PHP" - a clear indicator that the prospective employee was either feeding you the line they'd gotten in CSCI 102 at the local university, or reacting against that line.
The same thing about garbage collection. Come on, if I'm writing a web application with 10000 concurrent users, I'm going to write in Perl or PHP, because I can throw hardware at the performance problems, and the hell with stupid memory bugs in an app difficult to run in a debugger or profiler.
And if I'm writing a device driver? C. Duh. I don't want the compiler doing anything stupid with my memory mapped registers.
I hate to say it that you do not know what you are talking about (despite being right).
Microwave emittors do not have the same trouble with efficiency that a bulb or resistor has. Microwaves also penetrate far, and thus can affect larger volumes of mass at the same time, this allows a more consistent heat, in a shorter amount of time, more efficiently
The cosmological constant was a "hack". Einstein was right to retract it. I have always felt that Einstein's genius was his intuition and his ability to do "thought experiments" where he ran certain physical models until they contradicted common sense.
But Einstein's intuition did him in and he was convinced the Universe was not expanding, so in comes the cosmological constant. It was the wrong reason to add it to his math models, despite subsequent evidence that some form of "fudge factor" may be needed to make the models work.
In some ways it's better to be wrong in the right way.
I realize both that this story is old, and that since you posted as Anony you'll likely never see this response. Still, for the record, I'll respond.
Social answers to social problems. Technical answers for technical problems.
What I am asking from MS is a public admonishment of Sony for misuse of certain programming techniques and being shady about the deployment. I agree with every one of your technical points. I'm not asking MS to change the technology (I've not installed the Sony RK, but I do know that an unsigned driver, like a rootkit, will make XP complain a bunch - if the Sony RK doesn't generate that complaint, then Sony is exploiting a security hole, and that I inisit change), merely that they say that Sony is misusing the technology.
The whole problem with Digital Restrictions Management is that it is a technical answer to a social problem. You conflate the two yourself, thus missing why I consider asking MS to act to be so important.
I'm putting together a letter to Microsoft right now, regarding this Sony rootkit disaster. Basically, it asks MS to publically come out opposed to this sort of behavior. This is exactly the kind of programming that MS (claims, at least) gives Windows a bad name. MS consistently says that it is bad applications and bad drivers that cause stability problems, and that spyware and viruses are mostly Windows centric because Windows is the most dominanat desktop platform.
Yet when Sony installs a DRM rootkit, with now exposed security and stability issues, MS says nothing. Sony's DRM only works on Windows, thus giving a reason to move to Mac OS and Linux, and by not censuring this kind of behavior, MS effectively says "it's okay for vendors to cripple our OS and drive business to our competitors, it's okay for Sony to implicitly install a bad driver, it's okay for Sony to make a mockery of our OS, and to make public one of it's weaknesses".
It's embarassing for those folks who administer Windows machines to have to go into work, and be asked why they still run Window's boxen when the one big advantage of MS - support from a large company - is nowhere to be found when blackhat tactics like rootkits are used by a major vendor. Even a well written rootkit (which this is not) still will introduce bugs in other applications that must go through the same subsystem the kit is bound to - having this kind of tactic tacitly approved of by the software vendor only leads to a world where it's more dangerous to upgrade applications, for fear of conflict - the traditional Linux distro problem, now twice as bad in the Windows world.
I urge everyone to point these facts out to MS. Even if MS approves of this kind of user bait and switch, and over invasive DRM on principle, I believe these arguments will force MS into the position of having to publically disapprove. Which has the nice side effect of giving this invasion of consumer rights the attention in the media that it deserves.
All you need is one piece of information if you are a good con man.
In other words, the SSN may in fact be critical to most realy disastrous identity thefts, but a smart thief can get the SSN based on very little prior information.
For example, you can get a official copy of a birth certificate with a wink and a smile. With that you can register for classes at the local community college. A student ID with your birth certificate is enough to get your Social Security card, even if you don't know the number. Student ID can also qualify as proof of residence in an area, which combined with the aforementioned social security card and birth certificate is enough to get a state ID or drivers license.
Badda boom, you have a complete identity, including paper trail, without anything more complicated than forging a signature
I don't think so. Or rather, if this kills off the PS2 and the like, then so be it.
Allard is essentially saying "Lets open up the hardware platform" the same way most of us have been begging tech companies to do for a while because it's better for consumers, it eliminates lockin, yadda yadda. Since that is a competitive advantage, then by all means, let them kill their competition
At one time, if something was urgent, you called. If something was less urgent you snail mailed. Snail mail accumulated, and you could deal with it in large passes.
Phone calls interuppted your work and required your attention, but was usually urgent, so that was understandable.
But as you point out, an email can vary across that entire spectrum, and requires scanning it to determine when to respond. So email effectively interrupts your work like a telephone call, even when it's completely unurgent.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize this story is way down on the front page, but for posterity, I thought I'd mention this, even if it's tangential to your point.
Musicians don't make 10 cents on the dollar when you buy a CD. In general, a recording contract offers 9-12% of the cost of a CD to the artist, AFTER enough units are sold to recoup the label's costs. "Costs" are defined in the contract in such a way that it really means "Makes a moderate amount of profit." Also any upfront payment the artist received counts against the artist's royalties.
In other words, for a majority of CDs produced (80% seems to be a widely accepted number) the artist never makes a penny if you buy the damn disk.
Now, this could be misleading. Most people pirate popular music that has already crossed the profitability threshold for the artist, and artists who teeter on the brink of profitability are also hurt by piracy - it can prevent their CD from hitting critical mass. But regardless, this is why concerts are so damn valuable to the artist, as they receive 100% of the profits. And a successful CD (for everyone but the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) is really just a damn good ad for the tour.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
But, look at me still talking when there is GMail to do.
Seligman is one of the more brilliant psychological researchers working today. Learned Optimism is an extension of his earlier work on learned helplessness.
If your goal is to be happy, then not blaming yourself for you failures is a pretty decent tactic. If you tend to believe that causes of your failure are external, temporary, and specific to the incident, then you tend to feel good about yourself, and continue to take risks. If you feel that the causes of your failure are internal, permanent and generalized, you will stop taking risks, and become depressed.
Seligman himself said it best. "Stupidity abides" - if you believe that you are too stupid to get a job, you'll stop trying, and become miserable. If you blame the job market - well, the job market changes. You'll keep trying, and be happier about it
Because the demo disk contained unsigned, unencrypted code, which means that arbitrary code could potentially be run. Locking out the demo disk means that crackers can't find out how to run unsigned code on the machine, preventing softmodding
Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long. In the last year we've seen the discovery of a super giant squid, the first videos of a giant squid in the wild, and now this!
Look.
Do you know how fucking big a sperm whale is? It's huge. HUGE. And giant squid eat them. Listen to your heart - no matter what the scientists tell you, 4th grade ecology has convinced us all that whales are intelligent loving animals. Did you see Star Trek 4. They're the freakin' saviours of humanity man.
And giant squid eat them
Eat them
Not beacause it's easy. Oh no, not because a sperm whale is an easy catch. Big, remember? No. It's because squid are evil incarnate
Do you know how long they've been down there? No one does. But my guess is the squid and it's precurser have been down there in the depths for a lot longer than man has been knucklewalking. That's old. And you know they think down there. Brood down there. Their tentacles floating like the limbs of children relaxing in the water, they brood and wonder how to conquer us from below.
Things that think and brood also dream. And things that dream begin to worship the stuff of dreams. Out of man's insecurity we have sublimated a great father figure into the sky, according to Freud. What about the tentacled things in the watery darkness, whose females are larger than their males?
I'll tell you what they worship
A great multilimbed mother of the dark watery brood. Deep down in the very molten cracks of the earth filling the sea with inky blackness. THAT's what they worship. We killed men in the crusades. Men who looked the same as other men. What will the dark octupi and squid do to US who are mere flabby bloodsacks to rip apart and drink out fluids with their beaky maws? What in the name of their Dark Mother goddess will they do to us when they rise into our airy realm?
Think about it dudes
Us computer geeks are basically fucked
I may also be true.
Queen Elizabeth the II is 79 years old. There are, what, 203 countries in the world, roughly, depending on how you count? Considering the revolutions in Africa, and the disolving of Soviet Russia, and the aftermath of World War II (which brought many colonized states into revolution and eventually nationhood) it's not hard to imagine that 102 countries have emerged in the last 80 years, depending on how one counts the age of a country.
The Slashdot effect seems to have left the server standing, but expired the content in their ad server, leaving only the weird animated "Default Banner" gif, which actually doesn't fit in the provided space.
- 0/Dbanner.gif
http://ds.serving-sys.com/BurstingRes/Site-0/Type
Let's not forget what we are testing for here. We're not saying that this gene makes people dumb. We're saying that boys with this gene score more poorly than boys without this gene. We're using a purely operational definition of intelligence (IQ score), and not making a value judgement.
This is interesting science, despite those who are spending their energy railing against IQ tests. IQ tests are terrible indicators of how "bright" someone is, but they are fairly consistent tests, in which people tend to get the same results over time, so they are measuring something with accuracy. And whatever that is, is hurt by this gene.
Is it attention? Does this gene make your balls itch, thus distracting you from standardized tests (also explaining why it only affects boys)? Perhaps, does it affect mathematico-spatial ability specifically, which boys tend to do better on than girls (very likely for social reasons), and thus the generally poor performance of girls in this part of the test accounts for the gender variation (a floor effect)?
Who knows. But a strong correlation between a gene and a standardized test score (especially a well established one like most IQ tests) in a not insignifigant sample (300 kids) is nothing to sneeze at - 20 points in a sample that large tends to indicate it's a real effect. Don't let the articles journalistic simplifications ("Gene makes boys dumb") throw you from seeing what that is.
BellSouth does have a fiber to the home program. It's mostly secret, but they're moving everyone over to a BBG backend which they think will help them support the number of customers that their fiber plan is going to generate. (It won't, their BroadBand Gateway system is so awful it's redonkulous, and if you know a major BLS technician, he'll admit to you it's so, and likely to be so for years).
Lots of customers are already on fiber to the curb, especially in Florida. It's speed capped at the NOC in software for competition reasons, and it costs the same as DSL currently, but they want everyone on fiber to the home in a few years.
Most of this is stuff you only know if you put 2 and 2 together, but it's obviously their plan.
The reason MS can't patch anything is because MS has exactly the same technical challanges that every major Linux distro has. Dependency hell.
MS likes to pretend that windows is immune to such things, but the truth is every piece of software is interconnected. MS creates the illusion of no dependency problems by solving as much of it as possible behind closed doors, and wrapping the results in binary installers. The sheer amount of effort to resolve the problem is high
I think we're mixing client and protocol. A good client for me fully supports as many protocols as I need, and provides little nicities like Gaim's buddy pounces, and plugins.
A good protocol is Japper, which is really an arbitrary XML routing protocol that can be easily extended to manage more features and links up otherwise divergent networks
As North Carolinian, let me say: w00+!
I had this job interview where I was asked if I started a new project right now what programming language would I write it in.
I said "That would of course depend heavily on the project"
This got me the job, because I was the only person who didn't answer "Java" or "PHP" - a clear indicator that the prospective employee was either feeding you the line they'd gotten in CSCI 102 at the local university, or reacting against that line.
The same thing about garbage collection. Come on, if I'm writing a web application with 10000 concurrent users, I'm going to write in Perl or PHP, because I can throw hardware at the performance problems, and the hell with stupid memory bugs in an app difficult to run in a debugger or profiler.
And if I'm writing a device driver? C. Duh. I don't want the compiler doing anything stupid with my memory mapped registers.
What if you are a government official?
Well, you might form a panel which includes forces in the technology sector, like MS and the FSF. Seems reasonable.
How does this not resemble exactly what is described?
I hate to say it that you do not know what you are talking about (despite being right).
Microwave emittors do not have the same trouble with efficiency that a bulb or resistor has. Microwaves also penetrate far, and thus can affect larger volumes of mass at the same time, this allows a more consistent heat, in a shorter amount of time, more efficiently
The cosmological constant was a "hack". Einstein was right to retract it. I have always felt that Einstein's genius was his intuition and his ability to do "thought experiments" where he ran certain physical models until they contradicted common sense.
But Einstein's intuition did him in and he was convinced the Universe was not expanding, so in comes the cosmological constant. It was the wrong reason to add it to his math models, despite subsequent evidence that some form of "fudge factor" may be needed to make the models work.
In some ways it's better to be wrong in the right way.
Actually, that's a bandwidth artifact. There is a white background that takes some time to load, due to the site being Slashdotted
Interestingly, none of those are the OS used in the only top 5 computer not running Linux.
It's AIX.
I realize both that this story is old, and that since you posted as Anony you'll likely never see this response. Still, for the record, I'll respond.
Social answers to social problems. Technical answers for technical problems.
What I am asking from MS is a public admonishment of Sony for misuse of certain programming techniques and being shady about the deployment. I agree with every one of your technical points. I'm not asking MS to change the technology (I've not installed the Sony RK, but I do know that an unsigned driver, like a rootkit, will make XP complain a bunch - if the Sony RK doesn't generate that complaint, then Sony is exploiting a security hole, and that I inisit change), merely that they say that Sony is misusing the technology.
The whole problem with Digital Restrictions Management is that it is a technical answer to a social problem. You conflate the two yourself, thus missing why I consider asking MS to act to be so important.
I'm putting together a letter to Microsoft right now, regarding this Sony rootkit disaster. Basically, it asks MS to publically come out opposed to this sort of behavior. This is exactly the kind of programming that MS (claims, at least) gives Windows a bad name. MS consistently says that it is bad applications and bad drivers that cause stability problems, and that spyware and viruses are mostly Windows centric because Windows is the most dominanat desktop platform.
Yet when Sony installs a DRM rootkit, with now exposed security and stability issues, MS says nothing. Sony's DRM only works on Windows, thus giving a reason to move to Mac OS and Linux, and by not censuring this kind of behavior, MS effectively says "it's okay for vendors to cripple our OS and drive business to our competitors, it's okay for Sony to implicitly install a bad driver, it's okay for Sony to make a mockery of our OS, and to make public one of it's weaknesses".
It's embarassing for those folks who administer Windows machines to have to go into work, and be asked why they still run Window's boxen when the one big advantage of MS - support from a large company - is nowhere to be found when blackhat tactics like rootkits are used by a major vendor. Even a well written rootkit (which this is not) still will introduce bugs in other applications that must go through the same subsystem the kit is bound to - having this kind of tactic tacitly approved of by the software vendor only leads to a world where it's more dangerous to upgrade applications, for fear of conflict - the traditional Linux distro problem, now twice as bad in the Windows world.
I urge everyone to point these facts out to MS. Even if MS approves of this kind of user bait and switch, and over invasive DRM on principle, I believe these arguments will force MS into the position of having to publically disapprove. Which has the nice side effect of giving this invasion of consumer rights the attention in the media that it deserves.
http://arstechnica.com/columns/linux/linux-2005090 7.ars
All you need is one piece of information if you are a good con man.
In other words, the SSN may in fact be critical to most realy disastrous identity thefts, but a smart thief can get the SSN based on very little prior information.
For example, you can get a official copy of a birth certificate with a wink and a smile. With that you can register for classes at the local community college. A student ID with your birth certificate is enough to get your Social Security card, even if you don't know the number. Student ID can also qualify as proof of residence in an area, which combined with the aforementioned social security card and birth certificate is enough to get a state ID or drivers license.
Badda boom, you have a complete identity, including paper trail, without anything more complicated than forging a signature
It's also notable that a 1 in 12 statistic is not as far off of american cinema as you would like to believe.
I don't think so. Or rather, if this kills off the PS2 and the like, then so be it.
Allard is essentially saying "Lets open up the hardware platform" the same way most of us have been begging tech companies to do for a while because it's better for consumers, it eliminates lockin, yadda yadda. Since that is a competitive advantage, then by all means, let them kill their competition
That's exactly the point of the article.
At one time, if something was urgent, you called. If something was less urgent you snail mailed. Snail mail accumulated, and you could deal with it in large passes.
Phone calls interuppted your work and required your attention, but was usually urgent, so that was understandable.
But as you point out, an email can vary across that entire spectrum, and requires scanning it to determine when to respond. So email effectively interrupts your work like a telephone call, even when it's completely unurgent.