We've heard stories about computer repair technicians stealing everything up to and including porn off the computers they're servicing. There's a pretty low threshold for important when the data's sitting right there for the taking.
You seem to be saying that stealing the porn on someone's PC is more egregious than stealing financial information/credit card numbers etc...;)
I know it's wrong to expect anything more than a glib remark from a first post, but checking my e-mail from bed allows me to make an informed decision whether to leap out of bed and run to my office (emergency), get up quickly and go straight to my office (important) or rise leisurely, make a cup of tea and wander down the hallway (all clear). The first two aren't that common, but do happen.
Why not cite the actual source of the claim, rather than the marketing blog that tries to defend against it?
Anyway, the telling quotes from the original article are:
Hammerbacher quit Facebook in 2008, took some time off, and then co-founded Cloudera, a data-analysis software startup.
Unlike one of his more prominent Harvard acquaintances—Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg—Hammerbacher graduated. He took a job at Bear Stearns.
On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They're the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds.
So basically, he says that the "brightest minds of a generation" are being squandered targetting ads at users, and that's why he left Facebook. But before he went to Facebook he was a quant, that most hated of evil on/., making money from having a picosecond headstart on the competition. And after he left Facebook, he started Cloudera. Hardly curing all the world's ills is he?
Not a zero sum game. It's not like, if this class didn't exist, these students would all be working on improving Folding@Home, or developing a new kind of algorithm to help power companies optimise their electricity transmission infrastructure or some other equally "socially beneficial" task. Hell, some of those same students might be doing those things in one of their other classes.
As for bemoaning Facebook itself (if that's what you're doing) and crying out for a cure for cancer or for research into green energy, again, it's not a zero sum game. If not for Facebook, would Mark Zuckerberg have started a cobbled together laboratory out of his apartment and grown it to a billion-dollar medical research facility within the same time period? Could he have built the next "Mr. Fusion"? No. In this alternate reality, he'd just be another nameless droid in a big company. And you'd be completely ignorant of the fact that e.g. he managed to deliver that company's new Intranet application, and you'd be complaining about whatever other social network replaced MySpace.
What we should be discussing, (instead of bitching and moaning that them young folks are making money from silly ideas), is that instead of developing a web app for a project in class that helps a fictional hotelier manage bookings, billing etc. they developed a real product and put it out into the world. This, surely, is a good thing, no matter how trivial their product.
They are not mutually exclusive you ninny. Life isn't that black & white, but your pithy comment has been moderated "insightful" anyway. Ho-hum. Both Sony AND the users are the victims here. An analogy to aid understanding: If someone broke into my safety-deposit box at the bank, both I and the bank are victims. If the bank's security wasn't that great then I have every reason to be upset with them, but it doesn't change the fact that they were also victim.
FYI: I'm pretty sure that when someone says they are going to pay for a car or a house "with cash", they don't mean they're going to walk into the dealership/estate agent's office with a suitcase full of bank notes, they mean they're going to buy it with money they have on hand, rather than buy it on credit/with a mortgage.
Guy Fawkes was captured and tried in a court of law. Not, admittedly, under any conditions we'd call fair, but fair enough that it destroyed a lot of his support. Even then, despite all of that, it is Guy Fawkes who became legend and is remembered today. Guy Fawkes has an entire night to his own, with acts of remembrance. Don't recall seeing King Charles' Day on the calendar.
Hah! You dolt. "acts of remembrance"! What kind of confusion of ideas led you to this conclusion? Burning someone's body in effigy is an "act of remembrance"? You utter ninny. If (or when) Americans start parading Bin Laden through their streets and burning him in effigy, will you try and convince us all that his "martyrdom" rallied them to his cause? HAH!
You can have a decent life because you don't need to know how a hybrid electric automobile works, this is fair comment, so should schools be allowed to teach that small fairies and leprechauns sprinkle each motor with magic dust and that's what makes it work? Allowing children to remain ignorant of the theory of evolution is one thing, actively teaching them that creationism is just as valid as evolution is quite the other.
Your analogies are ridiculous and they fail spectacularly. They fail because we're not only talking about ignorance of subject matter, but also actively teaching an alternative "theory" (it's not a real theory because it can't be tested) which is based on hand-waving, supernatural mumbo-jumbo. Not all children will grow up to specialise in fields that require them to know about the theory of evolution, just as most won't need to know about the workings of the internal combustion engine, but why fuck them up before they begin?
It's not just about some petty squabble between two different ideologies. People are railing against a culture of willful ignorance and an inability to think critically that could have extremely serious implications in the future. If you can look further than the end of your own nose, you should be worried.
Each Steam install has a 64 bit ID. If a person has bought the game their 64 bit ID will show up on a list of sales of Garry's Mod. If not, it won't. Once they're sure the person is a pirate, only then do they mess with them. Clear?
Not everyone wants to risk installing malware on their machine. "Sure, just download this exe from a website with porn ads, read the instructions amid the childish ASCII art in the NFO file and you can play this game for free!"...Yeah...no thanks. I'd rather buy a game without intrusive DRM and avoid the truly egregious examples like the plague, but I understand why they feel the need to add it. Is it a hassle getting off my arse to get a CD off my shelf? Yes, but I'd rather do that than have the hassle of infecting my machine with some shady file downloaded from the wrong side of the internet. (I'm not as technologically backward as that sentence makes me sound). Casual piracy was when we, as 11 year olds, traded copied floppies of Chaos Engine or Zool or Monkey Island for the Amiga. I think it is no longer casual when you are forced to choose between buying the game and downloading untrusted content from the internet to get it working.
I love Steam. I might feel differently if I didn't have an always-on internet connection, but I do, so I don't. With the exception of Alien Vs. Predator which requires a CD in the drive, all my games bought through or which require Steam have the least intrusive DRM I have ever encountered and I remember having to look up words and pictures in game manuals and turn cardboard code-wheels. Because I always have an internet connection, I couldn't tell you if none, some or all of my games require connectivity... but I'm pretty sure the decision to require internet connectivity or a CD in the drive has nothing to do with Steam and everything to do with the publisher/developer. I would hold Steam up as an example of "DRM" at its best and least intrusive.
You've given 1 (ONE) example of an online check which prompted you to install a no-cd crack and a no-steam crack, which, despite your protestations, in all probability, broke your install. Did it do the check every time you started the game, or just the first time? Was the game installed on a machine that isn't always connected? The example you've given doesn't support your conclusion that "Anyone that thinks DRM works is retarded." and I find it odd that you'd rather run the risk of installing (further) malware on your machine than allow the game to connect to the internet.
Except they didn't do the leg-work. He did. They lifted the facts and some surrounding text from his blog and republished it without even the courtesy of a link by way of attribution. So what if they're facts? They wouldn't have had any idea what the facts were had he not done the work for them. All he wanted was a little courtesy, and they responded by trying to cover up what they'd done. Then they edited again to mock him.
So, even though you think they did nothing wrong by cribbing from him, they obviously think so.
Wait, what? C.M. Burns stuffing barrels of nuclear waste into trees? Nuclear workers rolling leaking barrels of nuclear waste down a hallway under foot? Homer preventing nuclear meltdown twice by selecting the "shutdown" button using "eenie-meenie-minie-mo"? Toxic waste flushing straight into a river?
The "portrait of nuclear energy" on the Simpsons is about as accurate as the portrait of the criminal justice system in the Simpsons. (I.e. not.)
Firstly, a little tongue-in-cheek lambasting of xkcd and, by extension, Tridus hardly constitutes a troll, unless you think trolling is vehemently expressing any opinion that conflicts with/. groupthink? My post was closer to a flame, but it would be thought a pretty tame one anywhere but my Grandmother's sewing circle. Also Real trolls are much more subtle than that. Maybe once you've been on the internet a while you'll learn the difference.;) (JOKE)
Anyway, back to my point: humour is just about the most subjective thing on the planet. xkcd can be funny, but I consider the "Bobby Tables" comic to be about as funny as when a technical book makes a reference to Monty Python in the footnotes, i.e. not funny. At all. Do I think Monty Python is funny? Yes. Do I think quoting Monty Python is funny? No. Do I think someone making a reference to something funny is in itself funny? No.
The person I was describing in my original reply to Tridus was me. You see, I identify with those of his programmers who don't laugh. One dry half-smile when it was first posted, followed by NEARLY FOUR YEARS of seeing that stupid fucking thing linked on Slashdot and elsewhere, what seems like every time a story summary or a comment contained "SQL"
Oh and if you think I'm adopting a contrary position for the fun of a flamewar....why? Because humour is objective? Because humour is subjective but that all Real Geeks find xkcd #327 funny? Rubbish. I honestly don't think that comic is funny and I'm not the only one who thinks so:
Oh and this doozy of a comment from the aforementioned xkcdsucks blog says it all:
aloria said...
Man, xkcd has become so boring and lame that it's actually sapped my will to snark on it. The only thing that works me into a lather anymore is when people incessantly link to the "Bobby Tables" comic every time SQL injection comes up on a message board. July 10, 2009 12:29 PM
That comment is from 2009, posted nearly 2 years ago, and bear in mind that was almost 2 years after the comic was first posted. I'll bet aloria has killed herself by now...
Yeah! Right on! Anyone who doesn't laugh is obviously bound to write code riddled with SQL injections!! I can't believe you taped it to your door! You must be the funniest person I've ever even heard of! BOBBY TABLES!!!! HAHAHAHAHA!
Or, and I think this is infinitely more probable, it's just not funny? Perhaps the people who don't laugh saw it once when it was posted on xkcd, raised an eyebrow and a half smile, then went on with their lives. Then, for the next THREE years, whenever a story about anything even the slightest bit tangential to SQL was posted on/., and xkcd 327 was linked, they clicked and were like, oh yeah...heh...finding it less and less funny until eventually they just started ignoring any xkcd 327 link (because it was linked to so often that they learnt its number). Congratulations though, now they can't ever get away from it, you cruel bastard.
P.S. If you're really tied to this way of vetting people, here's a useful link if you're ever looking for a babysitter: Dos and Don'ts with babies:)
And some God-like programmer is going to come along and demonstrate that you don't have to use c at all, you can magically XOR things or have a long string of a += b -= c += a or something and make it all work with only two variables. Obviously, they pass also.
A reluctant pass...firstly, they are, in all probability, not god-like (see footnote); most likely just a show-off, or someone who's indignant at being given such a trivial exercise. (see footnote)
So you give them a pass, then an Untrained Programmer will be working on their production code a year from now, see some XORs and run away whining for his mommy, who then hands it over to the aforementioned Real Programmer, who sees a clusterfuck of XORs in order to save on one temporary variable and replaces the whole mess with "c=a;a=b-a;b=b+c;" on the grounds that it's more readable to ALL programmers likely to be maintaining the code in the future, including the *80% of programmers who are merely average.
There are a lot of high numbers quoted for the percentage of a product's life-cycle it spends in maintenance mode, none of which I recall, but the point is, you don't want someone writing "clever" code if only they and other "clever" programmers (i.e. really clever programmers and those programmers who've been exposed to those particular "clever" idioms) can debug it.
*The remaining 20% being made up of the 19.99% of people who've been shown the XOR trick and the 0.01% of "god-like" programmers who intuit it.
You CANNOT just jump in and start watching the rebooted series...you MUST start at the very beginning and watch the episodes in order...
You know what? If anyone says that, pay no heed. Personally, I think if you're trying to get your wife interested, you should start with the first series of Matt Smith, beginning to end, that way you get a whole story arc which is really accessible and a really great Doctor. I considered recommending you start with the Ecclestone Doctor's first appearance, but he can be a little annoying and there is too much played upon a possible romantic connection between him and Rose, which I didn't enjoy...but your wife might.
Basically, what icannotthinkofaname said, but I think starting at the first Doctor, or any Doctor before...Tom Baker would turn your wife off it faster than you can blink. Hook her on Matt Smith/David Tennant/Christopher Eccelstone, then go back to the beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
We've heard stories about computer repair technicians stealing everything up to and including porn off the computers they're servicing. There's a pretty low threshold for important when the data's sitting right there for the taking.
You seem to be saying that stealing the porn on someone's PC is more egregious than stealing financial information/credit card numbers etc... ;)
What the fuck's a "yatch"? Suggest you ask for dictionary instead. ;)
I know it's wrong to expect anything more than a glib remark from a first post, but checking my e-mail from bed allows me to make an informed decision whether to leap out of bed and run to my office (emergency), get up quickly and go straight to my office (important) or rise leisurely, make a cup of tea and wander down the hallway (all clear). The first two aren't that common, but do happen.
Anyway, the telling quotes from the original article are:
Hammerbacher quit Facebook in 2008, took some time off, and then co-founded Cloudera, a data-analysis software startup.
Unlike one of his more prominent Harvard acquaintances—Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg—Hammerbacher graduated. He took a job at Bear Stearns.
On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They're the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds.
So basically, he says that the "brightest minds of a generation" are being squandered targetting ads at users, and that's why he left Facebook. But before he went to Facebook he was a quant, that most hated of evil on /., making money from having a picosecond headstart on the competition. And after he left Facebook, he started Cloudera. Hardly curing all the world's ills is he?
Not a zero sum game. It's not like, if this class didn't exist, these students would all be working on improving Folding@Home, or developing a new kind of algorithm to help power companies optimise their electricity transmission infrastructure or some other equally "socially beneficial" task. Hell, some of those same students might be doing those things in one of their other classes.
As for bemoaning Facebook itself (if that's what you're doing) and crying out for a cure for cancer or for research into green energy, again, it's not a zero sum game. If not for Facebook, would Mark Zuckerberg have started a cobbled together laboratory out of his apartment and grown it to a billion-dollar medical research facility within the same time period? Could he have built the next "Mr. Fusion"? No. In this alternate reality, he'd just be another nameless droid in a big company. And you'd be completely ignorant of the fact that e.g. he managed to deliver that company's new Intranet application, and you'd be complaining about whatever other social network replaced MySpace.
What we should be discussing, (instead of bitching and moaning that them young folks are making money from silly ideas), is that instead of developing a web app for a project in class that helps a fictional hotelier manage bookings, billing etc. they developed a real product and put it out into the world. This, surely, is a good thing, no matter how trivial their product.
They are not mutually exclusive you ninny. Life isn't that black & white, but your pithy comment has been moderated "insightful" anyway. Ho-hum. Both Sony AND the users are the victims here. An analogy to aid understanding: If someone broke into my safety-deposit box at the bank, both I and the bank are victims. If the bank's security wasn't that great then I have every reason to be upset with them, but it doesn't change the fact that they were also victim.
FYI: I'm pretty sure that when someone says they are going to pay for a car or a house "with cash", they don't mean they're going to walk into the dealership/estate agent's office with a suitcase full of bank notes, they mean they're going to buy it with money they have on hand, rather than buy it on credit/with a mortgage.
Guy Fawkes was captured and tried in a court of law. Not, admittedly, under any conditions we'd call fair, but fair enough that it destroyed a lot of his support. Even then, despite all of that, it is Guy Fawkes who became legend and is remembered today. Guy Fawkes has an entire night to his own, with acts of remembrance. Don't recall seeing King Charles' Day on the calendar.
Hah! You dolt. "acts of remembrance"! What kind of confusion of ideas led you to this conclusion? Burning someone's body in effigy is an "act of remembrance"? You utter ninny. If (or when) Americans start parading Bin Laden through their streets and burning him in effigy, will you try and convince us all that his "martyrdom" rallied them to his cause? HAH!
Now...if only the editors had a way to indicate that an error in the original text was reproduced verbatim from the original!
;)
Protip: They do.
You can have a decent life because you don't need to know how a hybrid electric automobile works, this is fair comment, so should schools be allowed to teach that small fairies and leprechauns sprinkle each motor with magic dust and that's what makes it work? Allowing children to remain ignorant of the theory of evolution is one thing, actively teaching them that creationism is just as valid as evolution is quite the other.
Your analogies are ridiculous and they fail spectacularly. They fail because we're not only talking about ignorance of subject matter, but also actively teaching an alternative "theory" (it's not a real theory because it can't be tested) which is based on hand-waving, supernatural mumbo-jumbo. Not all children will grow up to specialise in fields that require them to know about the theory of evolution, just as most won't need to know about the workings of the internal combustion engine, but why fuck them up before they begin?
It's not just about some petty squabble between two different ideologies. People are railing against a culture of willful ignorance and an inability to think critically that could have extremely serious implications in the future. If you can look further than the end of your own nose, you should be worried.
Sucks to be in pest-control, though I predict a golden age for the cheese-maker.
Each Steam install has a 64 bit ID. If a person has bought the game their 64 bit ID will show up on a list of sales of Garry's Mod. If not, it won't. Once they're sure the person is a pirate, only then do they mess with them. Clear?
If that's the case, and Slashdot is on some new ISO bent, why don't the editors use USA in all story summaries instead of US? Or GBR in place of UK?
Not everyone wants to risk installing malware on their machine. "Sure, just download this exe from a website with porn ads, read the instructions amid the childish ASCII art in the NFO file and you can play this game for free!"...Yeah...no thanks. I'd rather buy a game without intrusive DRM and avoid the truly egregious examples like the plague, but I understand why they feel the need to add it. Is it a hassle getting off my arse to get a CD off my shelf? Yes, but I'd rather do that than have the hassle of infecting my machine with some shady file downloaded from the wrong side of the internet. (I'm not as technologically backward as that sentence makes me sound). Casual piracy was when we, as 11 year olds, traded copied floppies of Chaos Engine or Zool or Monkey Island for the Amiga. I think it is no longer casual when you are forced to choose between buying the game and downloading untrusted content from the internet to get it working.
They can lend their games to others. Can't they? Which games only allow one install on one machine?
I love Steam. I might feel differently if I didn't have an always-on internet connection, but I do, so I don't. With the exception of Alien Vs. Predator which requires a CD in the drive, all my games bought through or which require Steam have the least intrusive DRM I have ever encountered and I remember having to look up words and pictures in game manuals and turn cardboard code-wheels. Because I always have an internet connection, I couldn't tell you if none, some or all of my games require connectivity... but I'm pretty sure the decision to require internet connectivity or a CD in the drive has nothing to do with Steam and everything to do with the publisher/developer. I would hold Steam up as an example of "DRM" at its best and least intrusive.
You've given 1 (ONE) example of an online check which prompted you to install a no-cd crack and a no-steam crack, which, despite your protestations, in all probability, broke your install. Did it do the check every time you started the game, or just the first time? Was the game installed on a machine that isn't always connected? The example you've given doesn't support your conclusion that "Anyone that thinks DRM works is retarded." and I find it odd that you'd rather run the risk of installing (further) malware on your machine than allow the game to connect to the internet.
and
Oh and one more for good measure: "If you are going to try to correct someone, at least have the good sense to make sure you're right."
Except they didn't do the leg-work. He did. They lifted the facts and some surrounding text from his blog and republished it without even the courtesy of a link by way of attribution. So what if they're facts? They wouldn't have had any idea what the facts were had he not done the work for them. All he wanted was a little courtesy, and they responded by trying to cover up what they'd done. Then they edited again to mock him.
So, even though you think they did nothing wrong by cribbing from him, they obviously think so.
Wait, what? C.M. Burns stuffing barrels of nuclear waste into trees? Nuclear workers rolling leaking barrels of nuclear waste down a hallway under foot? Homer preventing nuclear meltdown twice by selecting the "shutdown" button using "eenie-meenie-minie-mo"? Toxic waste flushing straight into a river?
The "portrait of nuclear energy" on the Simpsons is about as accurate as the portrait of the criminal justice system in the Simpsons. (I.e. not.)
Anyway, back to my point: humour is just about the most subjective thing on the planet. xkcd can be funny, but I consider the "Bobby Tables" comic to be about as funny as when a technical book makes a reference to Monty Python in the footnotes, i.e. not funny. At all. Do I think Monty Python is funny? Yes. Do I think quoting Monty Python is funny? No. Do I think someone making a reference to something funny is in itself funny? No.
The person I was describing in my original reply to Tridus was me. You see, I identify with those of his programmers who don't laugh. One dry half-smile when it was first posted, followed by NEARLY FOUR YEARS of seeing that stupid fucking thing linked on Slashdot and elsewhere, what seems like every time a story summary or a comment contained "SQL"
Oh and if you think I'm adopting a contrary position for the fun of a flamewar....why? Because humour is objective? Because humour is subjective but that all Real Geeks find xkcd #327 funny? Rubbish. I honestly don't think that comic is funny and I'm not the only one who thinks so:
http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2008/05/did-i-say-webcomic-i-meant-webreference.html
http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2008/03/guess-what-i-am-imagining-if-something.html
Oh and this doozy of a comment from the aforementioned xkcdsucks blog says it all:
That comment is from 2009, posted nearly 2 years ago, and bear in mind that was almost 2 years after the comic was first posted. I'll bet aloria has killed herself by now...
Yeah! Right on! Anyone who doesn't laugh is obviously bound to write code riddled with SQL injections!! I can't believe you taped it to your door! You must be the funniest person I've ever even heard of! BOBBY TABLES!!!! HAHAHAHAHA!
/., and xkcd 327 was linked, they clicked and were like, oh yeah...heh...finding it less and less funny until eventually they just started ignoring any xkcd 327 link (because it was linked to so often that they learnt its number). Congratulations though, now they can't ever get away from it, you cruel bastard.
:)
Or, and I think this is infinitely more probable, it's just not funny? Perhaps the people who don't laugh saw it once when it was posted on xkcd, raised an eyebrow and a half smile, then went on with their lives. Then, for the next THREE years, whenever a story about anything even the slightest bit tangential to SQL was posted on
P.S. If you're really tied to this way of vetting people, here's a useful link if you're ever looking for a babysitter: Dos and Don'ts with babies
Whoosh.
Hint: He's punning on "ferocity" and...ya know..."ferrous".
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence." Incompetence in this case is more likely laziness, but the point stands.
A reluctant pass...firstly, they are, in all probability, not god-like (see footnote); most likely just a show-off, or someone who's indignant at being given such a trivial exercise. (see footnote)
So you give them a pass, then an Untrained Programmer will be working on their production code a year from now, see some XORs and run away whining for his mommy, who then hands it over to the aforementioned Real Programmer, who sees a clusterfuck of XORs in order to save on one temporary variable and replaces the whole mess with "c=a;a=b-a;b=b+c;" on the grounds that it's more readable to ALL programmers likely to be maintaining the code in the future, including the *80% of programmers who are merely average.
There are a lot of high numbers quoted for the percentage of a product's life-cycle it spends in maintenance mode, none of which I recall, but the point is, you don't want someone writing "clever" code if only they and other "clever" programmers (i.e. really clever programmers and those programmers who've been exposed to those particular "clever" idioms) can debug it.
*The remaining 20% being made up of the 19.99% of people who've been shown the XOR trick and the 0.01% of "god-like" programmers who intuit it.
You CANNOT just jump in and start watching the rebooted series...you MUST start at the very beginning and watch the episodes in order...
You know what? If anyone says that, pay no heed. Personally, I think if you're trying to get your wife interested, you should start with the first series of Matt Smith, beginning to end, that way you get a whole story arc which is really accessible and a really great Doctor. I considered recommending you start with the Ecclestone Doctor's first appearance, but he can be a little annoying and there is too much played upon a possible romantic connection between him and Rose, which I didn't enjoy...but your wife might.
Basically, what icannotthinkofaname said, but I think starting at the first Doctor, or any Doctor before...Tom Baker would turn your wife off it faster than you can blink. Hook her on Matt Smith/David Tennant/Christopher Eccelstone, then go back to the beginning.