Car analogy time. If you've driven enough, at some point you've probably felt a shimmy, or vibration in the steering wheel, or heard some funny noise while driving down a highway. What did you do about it? Ignore it and keep driving! And when the vibration or noise got worse a few miles later, then what? Ignore it and keep driving! Obviously the road construction crew was in cahoots with the local auto repair shops! The crew must have been bribed to make the road rougher than necessary.
Every case I ever heard where the person kept driving, disaster resulted. Sometimes the vibration is a tire slowly failing. When it blows, the driver sometimes loses control, sometimes just ending up in the ditch, but sometimes wrapping the car around a tree. One person I knew had a light duty pickup with a u-joint that was going bad. It made a fearful racket, but she kept on driving the truck, day after day, until it finally broke. The truck needed a new yoke, for $25 extra. Lucky it was that cheap. Lucky the driveshaft was only scuffed, and didn't need rebalancing. Even so, if she had fixed the problem sooner, she would have needed only the u-joint, for about $10. She was very lucky it wasn't much worse. Imagine if it had broken while she was on the freeway. The driveshaft could have slid free of the transmission and bounced on the road. One bad bounce, and the truck runs over its own driveshaft. Maybe it punches a hole in the truck bed or the gas tank, or causes an accident behind her.
You're like an ungrateful, freeloading hitchhiker, complaining when the others in the car detect a problem and stop. It's not your car, you don't care. You even noticed the signs yourself, but you're insisting there is no problem, saying cars are tough and it must have been the road or that the alarming behaviour is perfectly normal, and pushing everyone to get back in the car and move on.
You make the same mistakes they do. I didn't say they shouldn't make a living from art. I said, they shouldn't try to make a living from monetizing copying. It doesn't work. It asks too much of us, that we should honor-- honor, since force does not work-- a system based on artificial scarcity, to the detriment of us all.
Freely. Wihtout agenda. Isn't that the type of art we want to see?... Is that not worth paying artists a living for?
Of course it is. Are they and you totally unable to think of any other way to compensate artists for their efforts? You know, patronage? National Endowment for the Arts? Kickstarter? Indiegogo? Humble Bundle? Musopen, with projects to set Chopin free? Ah, but you don't believe in any of those, don't think they work well enough. Or they work, but only for big names. Maybe right now they aren't very good, but I think they can be. Your artist friends should be asking themselves how to grow those methods, not asking how water can be made to flow uphill, how a spaceship can be made to travel faster than light, or how copyright can be forced to work.
They fear for their work being lost on the net with no trace back home, and therefore no commissions, and therefore no pay.
Now you mix in separate issues. Copying is one issue. Plagiarism is another. A 3rd is "anonymizing", the loss of information about the art. Copy protection can't protect against any of those. Many file formats, even old ones like mp3 and JPEG, have means to tack on a little arbitrary text data, but this can of course be easily stripped out. Automatic stripping becomes desirable the moment such features are used abusively, to add viruses or spam. What can protect against plagiarism and anonymizing is the storing of digital hashes of the works. Don't know who produced some work of art? Compute the MD5 or SHA256 sum, and search for that on digital notaries, which will have all the records. The notaries can date stamp and digitally sign the hashes as well. It really would not be difficult to set up free digital notaries. Biggest problem might be how to prevent them from being overwhelmed by spam, but if a search engine can do it, they should be able to as well.
Artists who fear copying need to get over it. They fear the loss of what they shouldn't have at all. The ability to monetize a work by charging for copies was entirely dependent on the primitiveness of our copying methods. When good quality copying was an operation took lots of expensive equipment, material, space, and time, it was possible to regulate it. Now copying takes very little of any of that. There's no turning back the clock.
This DRM idea is ridiculous. It's Blu-Ray with unskippable commercials and previews all over again. Any one who accesses the walled off part, whether by paying or cracking, can instantly share a superior version with the world. What the heck were the creators of this file format thinking? Stop listening to the snivelings of these "great" artists who profess being completely unable to envision any other way to make a living from art, despite being so brilliant. Madonna banged out #1 hits and moved art in directions that no one else could, but she can't, or more like won't, understand that monetizing copying is dead? Is she stupid? Well, the creators of Bundle were stupid to listen to those artists. Of all the problems humanity faces. they went and wasted time trying to "solve" something that is both unsolvable and good. Now they will learn the hard way, as they watch their file format be ignored.
Steam is a reason to use Windows?! I dual boot, not because of Steam but because of the graphics drivers. If there were decent graphics drivers for Linux, and by that I mean open and supports 3D acceleration, games would be a lot more playable in Linux. But now, there are big changes brewing in the GUI. XWindows has loads of 1980s cruft that no one has used for at least a decade. We may have to wait for Wayland, or possibly Mir.
Seems like everyone kinda likes Steam. Why? It's DRM. It may be smoother, nicer, less obstructive and intrusive DRM, but it's still DRM. What happens if Steam's servers go down? Haven't heard Steam has done much yet for offline play.
I agree this effort could be harmful. And, for more reasons than you give. This is playing the patent trolls' game. These heroes are trying to work within a bad system, rather than change the system itself.
What is the best direction to take? How about, abolish software patents? How can that be accomplished? Perhaps the best way is to make patents so painful that even big companies start to think they'd be better off without them. In this respect, trolls are actually doing us all a service. The more that trolls gouge Apple, MS, Oracle, IBM, Google, and the rest of the big tech companies, cost them millions in legal fees, court costs, awards of damages, injunctions that compel them to pass up opportunities, inconvenience and lose customers, the more these politically weighty companies might decide to instruct their bought congress critters to consider eliminating software patents. I would guess RIM saw the light a few years back when NTP sued them. Hope the trolls are also working over Big Pharma, plus Monsanto. Big Pharma may be the major group that most fervently supports strong intellectual property laws, more even than Big Media.
Effective grass roots efforts are hard to pull off. Have to be very big and noisy to scare representatives into heeding them. Last one that really worked was the effort to stop SOPA and PIPA. I think it only worked because Wikipedia got in on the act, and shut down their encyclopedia for one day.
You made a whole bunch of assumptions with that start. If the patent isn't for something obvious, perhaps so obvious that no investment at all was required to develop it, and if it wasn't actually someone else's invention and investment for which the patent holder did not pay, and if it doesn't cover something that shouldn't be patentable at all, such as a mathematical formula or other fact of nature, and if the patent isn't overly broad, and if there isn't prior art, then perhaps "earning back your investment" is a fair statement.
In that way the system works
Fantasy. The patent system isn't working as intended. It simply has too many built in incorrect assumptions about the processes by which inventions are created. The mythical lone genius inventor toiling away in a garage in obscurity is just one of the figures distorted and caricatured by powerful interests that think stronger patent law is to their advantage.
The whole legal process is the problem
Yes, that is certainly a big part of the problem. The legal profession has a vested interest in opposing any reforms that clean the system up and lead to fewer lawsuits and less work for them. They encouraged the patent office to go ahead with the idea of kicking the can down the road. Instead of the patent office doing their job of screening out the obvious and overly broad, they grant the patent, collect the fees, and let the courts and lawyers figure out later whether the patent is valid or applicable. They're also happy to ally themselves with any tech firms that think that patents, while costly, are still worth having for such purposes as litigating small competitors into the ground. In short, these big tech companies think monopolies are worth having so long as it is they who have the monopolies.
You should use all the data that is available. The deniers have often played games with the starting line. One such work I read chose 1979 for the starting line, for no valid reason. We have plenty of perfectly fine data going back to the 1930s, and even into the 19th century. So why not include it? Starting with 1979 was part of a very feeble attempt to make it look like the climate could be cycling, rather than warming.
Circa 1750 has often been used as a starting point because it was thought that industrialization, which really got going in the 1830s, is the major cause of the increase in CO2. And so 1750 should be far enough before 1830 to serve as a good baseline. However, I have read research that shows 1750 isn't early enough, and that there is a measurable increase in CO2 even then, just from the gradually increasing population needing to burn more wood for heat and cooking. Have to go back at least to the Dark Ages (circa 400-800) for an unbiased start point, and even then there are older periods where mankind's influence shows up. The Roman Empire produced enough CO2 to affect the climate.
Black lie is what I call it. These scum knew what they were doing. They've been told, repeatedly, that they are wrong and why they are wrong, and they just dismiss and ignore everything and say those lies again anyway. They were printing propaganda. Throwing raw meat to the conservatives. That's all the WSJ's opinion section has been since Murdoch bought it.
It's like the black knight skit in Quest for the Holy Grail. "It's only a flesh wound" and "The earth has had worse." Won't quit fighting even after his legs have been cut out from under him.
Big Oil definitely engages in propaganda. That is, they tell the public things that they know are not true. They lie. Knowingly lie. And go unpunished. What are the consequences? Few, and that only if they get ugly, as the Heartland institute did when it claimed that the Unabomber "believed" in Global Warming. A few organizations stopped supporting Heartland. But no one stood trial for anything.
Scientists who are caught lying get disciplined swiftly. No one will trust them, no journals will want to publish their lies, no schools who care about their reputation will want them on the faculty. Think about Hwang Woo-suk, once a star researcher in cloning. Other scientists could not reproduce his results, and that is how he was eventually found out. He lied. Seoul National University fired him. There was also the infamous Cold Fusion research that turned out to be wrong. Here it seems the scientists were simply mistaken, not lying. And also, were rushed. What happened is that the university was too eager, and wanted to patent it if they had indeed discovered a way to do cold fusion. To improve their chances of securing a patent, they rushed out preliminary results about cold fusion before the scientists were finished checking. Nevertheless, the consequences to the 2 scientists behind it were severe. They had to move. Couldn't continue at a university where such rash actions had lead to such a big mess.
You talk like you don't understand how research works, but you think you do. Researchers are always building on prior research. If that prior research is wrong, this will be suspected the moment someone tries to extend it and can't reproduce the original results. Other scientists will weigh in, trying to reproduce the results themselves. This will lead to further scrutiny, which can often reveal whether it was an honest mistake, or deliberate cheating. Either way, a scientist gains by exposing errors. If it is actually fraud, the risks of playing along are so high as to be hopeless to expect that the fraud can be continued. Every time other scientists look, they have to be brought on board. If just one won't play along, the whole thing collapses. And why should anyone play along? They risk their careers if they play along, for no gain at all, whereas blowing the whistle scores them points.
And you think there's no difference between corporate propaganda and scientific research?
There's deliberate mixing of issues going on. This new unit is supposed to police "illegal downloads" and "counterfeit DVDs". There's a huge difference between a counterfeit of a physical item, and a digital copy. As you say, counterfeits can be of inferior quality. Counterfeits are fraudulently misrepresented as the real thing.
I have no problem with going after counterfeits. What I object to is calling this an "intellectual property" enforcement action, as if there is no difference between busting a counterfeit goods operation, and busting ordinary citizens sharing data. They should call the crime what it is, fraud, and not try to say the chief crime was copyright violation. Physical items were misrepresented. These items happen to be media that contain copyrighted data. Money was fraudulently collected, by deliberately fostering a misunderstanding of where that money was going. Some buyers may have figured out their game, but undoubtedly, many buyers thought they were supporting the artists.
Many people purchase physical media not because they are compelled to, but because they genuinely want to support the artists, and that's the only means the idiot industry has blessed. Yes, the industry grudgingly allows downloading for a price, but they don't like it. A purchase of physical media is really a donation to the artists. Let's not pretend that the content can't be easily copied for free. Pretending to collect donations for some cause, and then pocketing the money, is fraud and theft. Big Media loves it whenever that kind of crime is equated with simple downloading. Most file sharers are not trying to misrepresent the data in any way at all, or collect money. Unfortunately, there are plenty who try to use downloading as a vehicle to commit other crimes, such as injecting viruses into computer systems. And they get away with it because they know no one is busting people for that, not when the attitude is that the "thieving" downloaders got what they deserved.
Once again, Big Media has tricked government into wasting taxpayer money on trying to force their sick, dark fantasy world of total ownership of all content on the public. This new police unit should at the least be given a more accurate name, and its duties more carefully defined. Or it should be dismantled. Too much chance that they will now wade into file sharing, seeing rampant crime everywhere in activities that shouldn't be criminal at all. Police are wont to see crimes where none exist, out of sheer self-interest. They get to stay employed that way. They're real suckers for sob stories of alleged victimization of those poor little giant media conglomerates, I mean, starving artists, by mean, delinquent teenage pirates.
Helps a lot. But there are many factors that affect power usage.
Power supplies used to be awful. I've heard of efficiencies as bad as 55%. Power supplies have their own fans because they burn a lot of power. Around 5 years ago, manufacturers started paying attention to this huge waste of power. Started a website, 80plus.org. Today, efficiencies can be as high as 92%, even 95% at the sweet spot.
GPUs can be real power pigs. I've always gone with the low end graphics not just because it's cheap, but to avoid another fan, and save power. The low end cards and integrated graphics use around 20W, which is not bad. I think a high end card can use over 100W.
A CRT is highly variable, using about 50W if displaying an entirely black image at low resolution, going up to 120W to display an all white image at its highest resolution. An older flatscreen, with, I think, fluorescent backlighting, uses about 30W no matter what is being displayed. A newer flatscreen with LEDs takes about 15W.
Hard drives aren't big power hogs. Motors take lots of power compared to electronics, but it doesn't take much to keep a platter spinning at a constant speed. Could be moving the heads takes most of the power.
These days, a typical budget desktop computer system, excluding the monitor, takes about 80W total. Can climb over 100W easy if the computer is under load. So, yes, a savings of 5W or more is significant enough to be noticed, even on a desktop system.
The point that hasn't been mentioned yet is that copying and sharing are good. Everyone is talking like piracy is some kind of unsolvable problem, and morally wrong, when it isn't a problem or wrong at all. The problem is these rent seeking, anti-social businesses that want to keep our natural rights from us, and which unfortunately, and despite their heavy handed campaigning against piracy, still have most of the public convinced that copying is very naughty. It's all too easy to frame copying as loss-- we seem to be wired to think that way-- and play on the basic human emotion of fear of loss.
Copyright is not holy, and not the one and only way that artists can make a living. Copyright is only a means to pay for work, and a very poor and problem riddled means at that. There are many other ways. Tell a typical author that copyright should be abolished, and most of them will instantly, and with great histrionics, accuse you of wanting a free ride, of wanting to steal, and of wanting to destroy the publication business and authors' means of earning a living. None of that is true, but their knee jerk reaction is to make those unwarranted connections. Point out that there are other ways, such as patronage, and they will refuse to believe any could work. The first thing they think of patronage is that only rich people can be patrons. Guess they've never heard of Kickstarter and indiegogo, to name just two. When I mention that, they make further objections. Those can only work for established names, they say, as if it isn't possible to tweak that model so it would work for anyone, if that is, it doesn't already. The one genre in which I find this attitude particularly inexcusable is Science Fiction. I find it so ridiculous whenever some futuristic society is portrayed as still using intellectual property law. A classic example of this is in the Star Trek episode "I, Mudd"
Stop calling copying stealing. Copying is not stealing. You immediately prejudice the debate when you use loaded, inaccurate terms like that. It should not be a crime, and not be thought immoral or somehow unfair to a small group of people, to copy an idea. No one should own an idea. The very rise of civilization owes everything to the sharing of ideas. When you uncritically accept these propositions that an idea is something that can be owned, same as a physical good, and therefore can be "stolen", as if everyone who thought of it earlier suddenly can no longer remember it, you play into the hands of these patent trolls and their lawyer friends. It is sad to see the victims of this wrong thinking passionately defending the supposed rights of these parasites. Might as well suggest that it is unfair to mosquitos and ticks to not let them suck your blood. They need blood, how can you be so cruel as to deny them?
In Sumerian times, the ability to read was considered a privilege that only priests and nobility were allowed. It was sacrilege to teach a commoner how to read, and sacrilege for a commoner to learn to read. Words were thought to possess magical power. To write something down or read it aloud was to do more than merely record or repeat information, it could possibly create new truth. Thus many of the legends of spells and magic. Limiting the ability to read to a select few was even enforced by the police and military of the time. Likely the common soldiers were encouraged to hate and fear any fellow soldier or ordinary citizen who could read or write. Maintenance of this monopoly on reading and writing was helped by the difficulty of learning those languages and their huge alphabets. It should be easy to see that a society with such a restrictive attitude towards basic communications is repressive, and weak. By the time of Hammurabi, the monopoly had to be in tatters, or else how could people read Hammurabi's Code of Laws?
Today, we try to teach children how to read and write as soon as possible, and we regard literacy as a fundamental necessity of civlization and democracy. We shoot for 100% literacy, and we get close. So I think it will be for copying and sharing eventually. Copying should be much more than something grudgingly allowed because it can't be stopped, it should be encouraged as a social goodness and fundamental function of civilization. If copying was something that had to be learned, like reading and writing, we should teach children how to do it at the youngest age they can learn it. All of education is a massive copying of the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years of civilization to the brains of children. We very much need the sharing of ideas if we are to meet the challenges we face. There are many ways we could screw up and fall. Global Warming is only one of many possible dangers. What if an enemy nation advanced their science beyond ours? How long could we stand up to them? If we have the knowledge in hand to save ourselves, but we can't use it because we've allowed rent seeking parasites to cripple our sharing of that knowledge, we will have only ourselves to blame should civilization collapse.
In the patent infringement case used as an example, the article wasn't explicit about whether the patents were on software. Probably they were software patents, since the example was about a software app.
The patent troll problem can easily extend beyond software or business methods. Doesn't have to be software to have prior art or to be too obvious. The reform of abolishing software patents wouldn't fix all the problems. We would still have a patent system that grants too many bad patents because of the conflicts of interest. The patent office generates more revenue, and lawyers get more work. The article mentioned plans for 5 executive actions to curb the problem, but didn't say what they are.
At least companies are honest when they screw over their employees.
LOL, where to begin with that line? You think companies are honest about that? And you think it feels any better when a screwing is in your face rather than behind your back?
Anywhere power is concentrated, there is potential for abuse. Companies are concentrations of power that lie, cheat, and steal, and get away with it, more often than any other powerful organizations I hear about. In America, upper management gets ridiculously large compensation packages. It's so bad we even have a term for CEO severance packages: golden parachute.
What holds powerful companies in check? What are the checks and balances? Regulators? Whistleblowers? Unions? Lawyers? The Media? The Competition? Customers? None of those have had much success, certainly not in reining in the outrageous pay, nor in getting them to pay taxes, nor in the other games they play to weasel around their obligations. Doubt is their product. They've captured regulators, silenced scientists, persecuted whistleblowers, beat down unions, bought the media, fought lawyers with delay tactics and more lawyers, colluded with competitors, and gulled, brainwashed, and silenced customers. I find it tragically comic that so many people raise a ruckus over any hint of government abuse, even just the potential for abuse, but let corporations walk all over them. Bank of America, Chase, Citi, and Wells Fargo should be broken and dead for their too-big-to-fail brinksmanship with the entire world economy, yet many people still do business with these thieving megabanks.
The way minimum wage is done is a case in point. We let them get away with proposing a reasonable seeming fixed amount. Then they laugh while inflation whittles away at it. Minimum wage should at the least be indexed to inflation. But that's still not enough. I'd like to see minimum wage linked to the maximum pay packages companies put together, have it be something like that the minimum wage cannot be less than 1/20th of the maximum. Then, companies would face a choice. Either they can pay their workers more, or they can pay their CEO less.
When lawyers score wins with class action lawsuits, you should salute them. We'd all like better ways to police big, bad corporations, but this has had to do.
Yes, they are as bad as you've heard. They'll do stuff like insist a used car is a cream puff even though it has worse dents than door dings, and will keep insisting it's a cream puff even after you point out the dents. Or if there's a big puddle of transmission fluid or oil under the car, they'll suggest it's just a leaky seal, and not a sign that the transmission or engine is shot. You also have to check carefully for water damage. You could try to visually examine the car, but it's better to run a check on the VIN. Many cars are lost in floods, written off by the insurance industry as totalled, and this has to be reported which is why checking the VIN is a good idea. Instead of being scrapped like they are supposed to be, these cars are "laundered" so to speak, and end up in used car lots. Be especially careful if major flooding happened recently, and don't think that being several states away is enough distance to keep those cars out of the local dealers' lots. Then there's the whole four-square business, in which they try to hide how much you're really paying for a car by trying to talk only about the monthly payment, not the interest rates or total cost. Finally, when you think you at last have a deal, they spring a few surprises on you. They know you're busy and don't want all the time you spent examining a car to go to waste, and they try to hold that hostage. The "check with my manager" is often just a ploy to burn more of your precious time, make you sweat. Often they don't know jack about the specific models you want, and will be unable to answer technical questions. Not that they are the least interested in answering such questions anyway. You have to research the models yourself, beforehand, if you want to know anything beyond what you can see with a hasty look.
On the other hand, a big dealership has to watch its reputation. The salespeople are slime, but the dealership is going to check over any used car they get, and fix it up or junk it. They don't want an angry customer coming back within the month with some major mechanical problem.
I really don't know why the American public puts up with the sales crap. Or why most dealers continue to stick with that much hated system.
Some other careers would make a better comparsion.
I don't think the answers are as hard to figure out as we're making them. It's just that the answers are politically incorrect.
Men and women have more differences than the obvious physical attributes. It shouldn't be at all surprising that the male brain and the female brain are different. Differences means that each will be better at some kinds of thinking than the other.
The unfortunate part is that the kind of thinking that the male brain is better at is the kind of thinking we as a society have put a higher value on, and found easier to measure. For instance, the typical IQ test is designed by men and is biased in favor of men. One kind of question those tests favor is geometric manipulations, in which you have to mentally rotate or otherwise juggle objects. Chess has long been considered a good measure of intelligence. Overall, women simply aren't as good at chess. This has made it all too easy to conclude that women are mentally inferior.
Now however, we have computers that are better at chess through sheer brute force. However, no one concluded that computers have at last become smarter than us, and that we have achieved the goal of creating AI. Despite the display on the chess board, they are obviously extremely limited. Chess computers are the ultimate idiot savants, better than any person at chess, and completely clueless about any other kind of problem, even games of the same sort such as Go. What did this really prove? Only that chess is not a good measure of intelligence. We always knew there are very smart people who are poor at chess, but through the 20th century we accepted good chess playing as a sign of intelligence. The Soviet Union believed in this to such an extent that they made it into one of the battlefields of the Cold War. State support of chess has never been higher than during the Cold War.
If one of our most cherised measures of intelligence, the game of chess, is now seen to be a rather poor measure in many ways, what about our other measures? IQ tests all seem to ask the same kinds of questions, logic sorts of questions that all play to the same strengths that makes for a good chess player. The problem goes even further. How do we define intelligence? Is intelligence merely an aptitude for solving logic puzzles? What of an ability to construct puzzles and games, see and model the essential features of problems? How could that be measured? No multiple choice style of test can capture that kind of intelligence. When you have a near infinite number of hypotheses that could explain some baffling observations, an ability to cut through the chaos and lift the best possibilities out of the mess, especially those possibilities that are counterintuitive and so would be missed by most, seemingly could be a better measure of intelligence. But that's what programming is. A programming problem is a much more open ended kind of problem than a logic puzzle. Most logic puzzles are like Sudoku, dealing with such a small number of options that you can just try everything until you find one that works. But a measure that captures programming ability is also not going to be good enough to fully measure intelligence. Like the logic puzzles, it will only measure some kinds of intelligence.
I think it simply does not make sense that women should not be as smart as men. Where is the evolutionary advantage in that? Why would life evolve in such a way as to make females significantly dumber than males? Think of all the biological machinery it would require to dumb down women. And what would any species gain in exchange for such a trade? Does the idea of nonsentient females, as with Niven's Kzinti, make sense? Women would need less food for their smaller brains? But if the female keeps ending up dead because she did something stupid, or more like didn't do anything to save herself when threatened, the advantage of lower energy requirements is shot right there. Men simply cannot a
Oh come now. Ballmer is so bad even a monkey or a vacant chair would do a better job as CEO.
What's wrong with MS, and what to do about it isn't that hard to see, and hairyfeet touches on a good bit of it. Change the corporate culture, starting with elimination of stack ranking. Don't dictate to the users by taking away the start button "for their own good". Ditto with the arrogant insult to our intelligence they try to call Windows Genuine "Advantage". And then there was that whole OOXML fiasco. It was such a blatantly obvious and very dirty attempt to derail ODF. MS barely tried to make a case for OOXML on the merits, because they knew very well that it didn't have any. Instead, they played dirty, bribing and leaning on the standards voters. No organization, however big and powerful, can ever afford to wallow in filth. It's easy to see though that their entire approach to standardizing file formats is a reflection of the treachery within.
Developers trying to use their dogfood will eventually run into marketing hype where one expects documentation. For the most part, the documentation is okay, but sometimes you're trying to find out what something is and what it does, and all you get is empty verbiage about how this "powerful" product will "spark your imagination" and "increase your productivity". Just makes MS look even more stupidly treacherous and arrogant. They don't call a spade a spade. And they can't even muster a bit of cunning anymore. Those are hardly the only problems. Think that their penchant for rearrangement stops with their menus? They keep changing their APIs around. They don't fix bugs in a timely manner, instead they are more likely to roll out a whole new library with a totally different API that may or may not work better. All the more infuriating when you realize they do some of that solely to break competitors' products.
Not that MS was once a model tech company. They got hauled into court and convicted, but that didn't impress them in the least. They were not persuaded to mend their ways. They've always been ruthlessly competitive, but largely forgiven because people liked their stuff, and that because it mostly worked. Now, when people don't like MS's products, because their stuff doesn't work so well any more, all those problems they've managed to keep swept under the rug all these years are stinking worse than ever. I'm seeing users chuck their Wintel boxes and switch to MacIntoshes. 15 years ago, in those college labs that were about 50-50 on PCs and Macs, the Macs would sit there, unused and unloved, even when the PCs were all taken and had a waiting list. I wonder what I would see now in those labs? Forlorn PCs and a line for Macs?
MS blew it big on DRM
on
Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 4, Interesting
And that is totally MS's fault. They still don't get it. If they did, they would remove all DRM from Windows. That includes the whole product key and activation nonsense they continue to harass all users with, legitimate and otherwise.
There was a day when MS was cool. They broke the early Office software monopolies, software such as Word Perfect. They reduced Apple and their MacIntosh to a small niche market. MacIntoshes were more user friendy, but MS-DOS on a PC was way, way cheaper. MS didn't rest on their laurels either, they rolled out Windows to challenge the Macs. Then in the 1990s, MS started to slip. MS's slowness gave IBM a chance to grab back the OS crown with OS/2. Lucky for MS, IBM blew it. MS also nearly got the Internet wrong. Remember that at first they pooh-poohed browsers. They came to their senses in time, barely. Windows 95 was very nearly too late. In the early 2000s, even the anti-trust conviction didn't much damage the MS brand. People still believed MS knew tech.
But now? MS has made many mistakes, but I could hardly believe it some years back when MS signed onto the RIAA and MPAA position on DRM. One might expect entertainment organizations to fail to understand that DRM is a bad idea, but a tech company? MS should have been savvier than that. Instead, they happily poodled to the RIAA! Let the entertainment industry do their thinking for them! They should have been educating the entertainment giants, not the other way around. It was a terrible show of incompetence and anti-customer positioning. Having backed themselves into a corner on DRM, they then turned to their customers and compounded the mistake, trying to sell us on the idea that DRM is good for us, talking down to us most insultingly. DRM helps stop us from being naughty pirates, and that's why it's good for us, right? Windows Genuine Advantage, ha ha! MS treated those moronic entertainment moguls like they really know stuff, and then treated their customers, many of whom are quite tech savvy, like a pack of adolescents who would try to sneak a few beers if they weren't carded all the time. They further magified the disaster by then insisting that Vista was doing very well. MS lost a great deal of credibilty.
It is only sheer size and inertia that has allowed MS to survive such bad blunders. I don't know how much more blundering MS can tolerate. Quite a bit, I suppose. Will they pick a decent CEO? There any reason to think they will pick a winner there?
Shortage of good candidates? If that is true, and you'd like to know who is responsible, look in a mirror.
One can have only just so many horrifying Dilbertesque employment experiences before ideas like a change of careers, or early retirement start to look attractive. Trying to become an independent consultant or start your own business looks daunting, but that's the direction I've been pushed. The prices that a sweatshop employer asks-- the humiliations, constant accusations of laziness and incompetence, demands for putting in extra hours, and then the really out of bounds stuff like being asked to falsify test results or show your "commitment" to your work by getting yourself financially upsidedown, with the threat of being terminated maintained as a festering ache in the back of the mind-- are so high that the benefits of being able to focus on technical work, especially programming, and not having to bother with administrative, managerial, and sales work, are insufficient compensation. Money is not the issue, not when an employer is pushing employees to lie and cheat, and even break the law and risk a stint in prison. Of course if, or more like when, the moment of truth arrives, the employer sure as hell isn't going to back their employees, no, quite the opposite. The employer will sell out those who bowed to the pressure to cheat.
I keep seeing all these surveys that rank software engineering as one of the top 10 or 5 or 3 best careers to follow, and I just can't believe it. Dilbert would not have the traction it does if the dark humor of it wasn't all too true. Too many complaints of worker shortages have been revealed as self-serving lies, part of a general effort to beat down compensation in any and every way possible, quality of the workers be damned. Maybe, this time, you, Mr. Employer, really are having troubles finding good workers. Have you tried the last resort, of offering more pay? If there really is wage inflation, then I'll believe. But forgive me for feeling just a bit cynical.
What, may I ask, are employers doing about all this? Whining to the government for more H1Bs? Outsourcing? But that's not what I mean. Don't you think employers' acts need a lot of cleaning up? What are you doing about that? I suppose it hasn't occurred to employers that anything needed to be done, certainly not by employers.
Enforcers have been dreaming of facial recognition good enough to match faces from a database of millions to faces in crowds scarcely smaller. Every time there's been improvement in facial recognition, they're eager to try to scale up massively. They don't seem to appreciate how good the facial recognition has to be to avoid thousands of false positives. I don't know where facial recognition is now, but 6 years ago, 90% accuracy was the best I'd heard of, and the method was that good only with lots of outside help to remove variations in lighting, viewing angle, facial expression, and so on. No one was anywhere close to 99%, let alone 99.99999%.
Also, lot of the news about facial recognition has been overhyped. Companies always try to make their products sound better than they really are. The media is also eager to report on the next big breakthrough, and is prone to reading far too much into research results.
I don't get asked to receive a security code. Instead, after 3 tries Facebook says:
Please choose one of the following methods to confirm your identity:
Provide your birthday (hourly limit exceeded)
Or, try logging into Facebook from a device you've logged in with before.
I can try guessing again after an hour. So far I have gone through many dates I thought I'd be likely to pick, stuff like Jan 1 of every year before 1995. No luck yet. There are only a few thousand dates, so I may eventually hit on the right one.
Okay, I'll say this again: deaths are not a good measure of safety.
The "nuclear power causes fewer deaths" has been another popular but wrong argument. By that measure, Hurricane Andrew, which killed only 39 people, was a smaller disaster than many passenger airplane crashes that you've probably never heard of.
If instead you look at how much land has been rendered useless for decades, perhaps even centuries, nuclear stands out as by far the worst. There has never been an "exclusion zone" created for a coal or hydroelectric disaster. Look also at the amounts of the damage caused by nuclear accidents. Damage from Fukushima is very roughly $100 billion.
Slashdot Mirror
Car analogy time. If you've driven enough, at some point you've probably felt a shimmy, or vibration in the steering wheel, or heard some funny noise while driving down a highway. What did you do about it? Ignore it and keep driving! And when the vibration or noise got worse a few miles later, then what? Ignore it and keep driving! Obviously the road construction crew was in cahoots with the local auto repair shops! The crew must have been bribed to make the road rougher than necessary.
Every case I ever heard where the person kept driving, disaster resulted. Sometimes the vibration is a tire slowly failing. When it blows, the driver sometimes loses control, sometimes just ending up in the ditch, but sometimes wrapping the car around a tree. One person I knew had a light duty pickup with a u-joint that was going bad. It made a fearful racket, but she kept on driving the truck, day after day, until it finally broke. The truck needed a new yoke, for $25 extra. Lucky it was that cheap. Lucky the driveshaft was only scuffed, and didn't need rebalancing. Even so, if she had fixed the problem sooner, she would have needed only the u-joint, for about $10. She was very lucky it wasn't much worse. Imagine if it had broken while she was on the freeway. The driveshaft could have slid free of the transmission and bounced on the road. One bad bounce, and the truck runs over its own driveshaft. Maybe it punches a hole in the truck bed or the gas tank, or causes an accident behind her.
You're like an ungrateful, freeloading hitchhiker, complaining when the others in the car detect a problem and stop. It's not your car, you don't care. You even noticed the signs yourself, but you're insisting there is no problem, saying cars are tough and it must have been the road or that the alarming behaviour is perfectly normal, and pushing everyone to get back in the car and move on.
You make the same mistakes they do. I didn't say they shouldn't make a living from art. I said, they shouldn't try to make a living from monetizing copying. It doesn't work. It asks too much of us, that we should honor-- honor, since force does not work-- a system based on artificial scarcity, to the detriment of us all.
Freely. Wihtout agenda. Isn't that the type of art we want to see? ... Is that not worth paying artists a living for?
Of course it is. Are they and you totally unable to think of any other way to compensate artists for their efforts? You know, patronage? National Endowment for the Arts? Kickstarter? Indiegogo? Humble Bundle? Musopen, with projects to set Chopin free? Ah, but you don't believe in any of those, don't think they work well enough. Or they work, but only for big names. Maybe right now they aren't very good, but I think they can be. Your artist friends should be asking themselves how to grow those methods, not asking how water can be made to flow uphill, how a spaceship can be made to travel faster than light, or how copyright can be forced to work.
They fear for their work being lost on the net with no trace back home, and therefore no commissions, and therefore no pay.
Now you mix in separate issues. Copying is one issue. Plagiarism is another. A 3rd is "anonymizing", the loss of information about the art. Copy protection can't protect against any of those. Many file formats, even old ones like mp3 and JPEG, have means to tack on a little arbitrary text data, but this can of course be easily stripped out. Automatic stripping becomes desirable the moment such features are used abusively, to add viruses or spam. What can protect against plagiarism and anonymizing is the storing of digital hashes of the works. Don't know who produced some work of art? Compute the MD5 or SHA256 sum, and search for that on digital notaries, which will have all the records. The notaries can date stamp and digitally sign the hashes as well. It really would not be difficult to set up free digital notaries. Biggest problem might be how to prevent them from being overwhelmed by spam, but if a search engine can do it, they should be able to as well.
Artists who fear copying need to get over it. They fear the loss of what they shouldn't have at all. The ability to monetize a work by charging for copies was entirely dependent on the primitiveness of our copying methods. When good quality copying was an operation took lots of expensive equipment, material, space, and time, it was possible to regulate it. Now copying takes very little of any of that. There's no turning back the clock.
This DRM idea is ridiculous. It's Blu-Ray with unskippable commercials and previews all over again. Any one who accesses the walled off part, whether by paying or cracking, can instantly share a superior version with the world. What the heck were the creators of this file format thinking? Stop listening to the snivelings of these "great" artists who profess being completely unable to envision any other way to make a living from art, despite being so brilliant. Madonna banged out #1 hits and moved art in directions that no one else could, but she can't, or more like won't, understand that monetizing copying is dead? Is she stupid? Well, the creators of Bundle were stupid to listen to those artists. Of all the problems humanity faces. they went and wasted time trying to "solve" something that is both unsolvable and good. Now they will learn the hard way, as they watch their file format be ignored.
Steam is a reason to use Windows?! I dual boot, not because of Steam but because of the graphics drivers. If there were decent graphics drivers for Linux, and by that I mean open and supports 3D acceleration, games would be a lot more playable in Linux. But now, there are big changes brewing in the GUI. XWindows has loads of 1980s cruft that no one has used for at least a decade. We may have to wait for Wayland, or possibly Mir.
Seems like everyone kinda likes Steam. Why? It's DRM. It may be smoother, nicer, less obstructive and intrusive DRM, but it's still DRM. What happens if Steam's servers go down? Haven't heard Steam has done much yet for offline play.
I agree this effort could be harmful. And, for more reasons than you give. This is playing the patent trolls' game. These heroes are trying to work within a bad system, rather than change the system itself.
What is the best direction to take? How about, abolish software patents? How can that be accomplished? Perhaps the best way is to make patents so painful that even big companies start to think they'd be better off without them. In this respect, trolls are actually doing us all a service. The more that trolls gouge Apple, MS, Oracle, IBM, Google, and the rest of the big tech companies, cost them millions in legal fees, court costs, awards of damages, injunctions that compel them to pass up opportunities, inconvenience and lose customers, the more these politically weighty companies might decide to instruct their bought congress critters to consider eliminating software patents. I would guess RIM saw the light a few years back when NTP sued them. Hope the trolls are also working over Big Pharma, plus Monsanto. Big Pharma may be the major group that most fervently supports strong intellectual property laws, more even than Big Media.
Effective grass roots efforts are hard to pull off. Have to be very big and noisy to scare representatives into heeding them. Last one that really worked was the effort to stop SOPA and PIPA. I think it only worked because Wikipedia got in on the act, and shut down their encyclopedia for one day.
Patents are a way of earning back your investment
You made a whole bunch of assumptions with that start. If the patent isn't for something obvious, perhaps so obvious that no investment at all was required to develop it, and if it wasn't actually someone else's invention and investment for which the patent holder did not pay, and if it doesn't cover something that shouldn't be patentable at all, such as a mathematical formula or other fact of nature, and if the patent isn't overly broad, and if there isn't prior art, then perhaps "earning back your investment" is a fair statement.
In that way the system works
Fantasy. The patent system isn't working as intended. It simply has too many built in incorrect assumptions about the processes by which inventions are created. The mythical lone genius inventor toiling away in a garage in obscurity is just one of the figures distorted and caricatured by powerful interests that think stronger patent law is to their advantage.
The whole legal process is the problem
Yes, that is certainly a big part of the problem. The legal profession has a vested interest in opposing any reforms that clean the system up and lead to fewer lawsuits and less work for them. They encouraged the patent office to go ahead with the idea of kicking the can down the road. Instead of the patent office doing their job of screening out the obvious and overly broad, they grant the patent, collect the fees, and let the courts and lawyers figure out later whether the patent is valid or applicable. They're also happy to ally themselves with any tech firms that think that patents, while costly, are still worth having for such purposes as litigating small competitors into the ground. In short, these big tech companies think monopolies are worth having so long as it is they who have the monopolies.
You should use all the data that is available. The deniers have often played games with the starting line. One such work I read chose 1979 for the starting line, for no valid reason. We have plenty of perfectly fine data going back to the 1930s, and even into the 19th century. So why not include it? Starting with 1979 was part of a very feeble attempt to make it look like the climate could be cycling, rather than warming.
Circa 1750 has often been used as a starting point because it was thought that industrialization, which really got going in the 1830s, is the major cause of the increase in CO2. And so 1750 should be far enough before 1830 to serve as a good baseline. However, I have read research that shows 1750 isn't early enough, and that there is a measurable increase in CO2 even then, just from the gradually increasing population needing to burn more wood for heat and cooking. Have to go back at least to the Dark Ages (circa 400-800) for an unbiased start point, and even then there are older periods where mankind's influence shows up. The Roman Empire produced enough CO2 to affect the climate.
Black lie is what I call it. These scum knew what they were doing. They've been told, repeatedly, that they are wrong and why they are wrong, and they just dismiss and ignore everything and say those lies again anyway. They were printing propaganda. Throwing raw meat to the conservatives. That's all the WSJ's opinion section has been since Murdoch bought it.
It's like the black knight skit in Quest for the Holy Grail. "It's only a flesh wound" and "The earth has had worse." Won't quit fighting even after his legs have been cut out from under him.
Big Oil definitely engages in propaganda. That is, they tell the public things that they know are not true. They lie. Knowingly lie. And go unpunished. What are the consequences? Few, and that only if they get ugly, as the Heartland institute did when it claimed that the Unabomber "believed" in Global Warming. A few organizations stopped supporting Heartland. But no one stood trial for anything.
Scientists who are caught lying get disciplined swiftly. No one will trust them, no journals will want to publish their lies, no schools who care about their reputation will want them on the faculty. Think about Hwang Woo-suk, once a star researcher in cloning. Other scientists could not reproduce his results, and that is how he was eventually found out. He lied. Seoul National University fired him. There was also the infamous Cold Fusion research that turned out to be wrong. Here it seems the scientists were simply mistaken, not lying. And also, were rushed. What happened is that the university was too eager, and wanted to patent it if they had indeed discovered a way to do cold fusion. To improve their chances of securing a patent, they rushed out preliminary results about cold fusion before the scientists were finished checking. Nevertheless, the consequences to the 2 scientists behind it were severe. They had to move. Couldn't continue at a university where such rash actions had lead to such a big mess.
You talk like you don't understand how research works, but you think you do. Researchers are always building on prior research. If that prior research is wrong, this will be suspected the moment someone tries to extend it and can't reproduce the original results. Other scientists will weigh in, trying to reproduce the results themselves. This will lead to further scrutiny, which can often reveal whether it was an honest mistake, or deliberate cheating. Either way, a scientist gains by exposing errors. If it is actually fraud, the risks of playing along are so high as to be hopeless to expect that the fraud can be continued. Every time other scientists look, they have to be brought on board. If just one won't play along, the whole thing collapses. And why should anyone play along? They risk their careers if they play along, for no gain at all, whereas blowing the whistle scores them points.
And you think there's no difference between corporate propaganda and scientific research?
That fact that there are billions of dollars in grants to be had from gullible tax payers to institutions
No, actually, much science has had funding cut.
You accuse scientists of conspiring for grant money, but give Big Oil a free pass on the anti global warming propaganda we know they've pumped out.
It's okay to build the Keystone XL pipeline because it creates jobs, but funding scientists to create jobs isn't okay?
There's deliberate mixing of issues going on. This new unit is supposed to police "illegal downloads" and "counterfeit DVDs". There's a huge difference between a counterfeit of a physical item, and a digital copy. As you say, counterfeits can be of inferior quality. Counterfeits are fraudulently misrepresented as the real thing.
I have no problem with going after counterfeits. What I object to is calling this an "intellectual property" enforcement action, as if there is no difference between busting a counterfeit goods operation, and busting ordinary citizens sharing data. They should call the crime what it is, fraud, and not try to say the chief crime was copyright violation. Physical items were misrepresented. These items happen to be media that contain copyrighted data. Money was fraudulently collected, by deliberately fostering a misunderstanding of where that money was going. Some buyers may have figured out their game, but undoubtedly, many buyers thought they were supporting the artists.
Many people purchase physical media not because they are compelled to, but because they genuinely want to support the artists, and that's the only means the idiot industry has blessed. Yes, the industry grudgingly allows downloading for a price, but they don't like it. A purchase of physical media is really a donation to the artists. Let's not pretend that the content can't be easily copied for free. Pretending to collect donations for some cause, and then pocketing the money, is fraud and theft. Big Media loves it whenever that kind of crime is equated with simple downloading. Most file sharers are not trying to misrepresent the data in any way at all, or collect money. Unfortunately, there are plenty who try to use downloading as a vehicle to commit other crimes, such as injecting viruses into computer systems. And they get away with it because they know no one is busting people for that, not when the attitude is that the "thieving" downloaders got what they deserved.
Once again, Big Media has tricked government into wasting taxpayer money on trying to force their sick, dark fantasy world of total ownership of all content on the public. This new police unit should at the least be given a more accurate name, and its duties more carefully defined. Or it should be dismantled. Too much chance that they will now wade into file sharing, seeing rampant crime everywhere in activities that shouldn't be criminal at all. Police are wont to see crimes where none exist, out of sheer self-interest. They get to stay employed that way. They're real suckers for sob stories of alleged victimization of those poor little giant media conglomerates, I mean, starving artists, by mean, delinquent teenage pirates.
Helps a lot. But there are many factors that affect power usage.
Power supplies used to be awful. I've heard of efficiencies as bad as 55%. Power supplies have their own fans because they burn a lot of power. Around 5 years ago, manufacturers started paying attention to this huge waste of power. Started a website, 80plus.org. Today, efficiencies can be as high as 92%, even 95% at the sweet spot.
GPUs can be real power pigs. I've always gone with the low end graphics not just because it's cheap, but to avoid another fan, and save power. The low end cards and integrated graphics use around 20W, which is not bad. I think a high end card can use over 100W.
A CRT is highly variable, using about 50W if displaying an entirely black image at low resolution, going up to 120W to display an all white image at its highest resolution. An older flatscreen, with, I think, fluorescent backlighting, uses about 30W no matter what is being displayed. A newer flatscreen with LEDs takes about 15W.
Hard drives aren't big power hogs. Motors take lots of power compared to electronics, but it doesn't take much to keep a platter spinning at a constant speed. Could be moving the heads takes most of the power.
These days, a typical budget desktop computer system, excluding the monitor, takes about 80W total. Can climb over 100W easy if the computer is under load. So, yes, a savings of 5W or more is significant enough to be noticed, even on a desktop system.
The point that hasn't been mentioned yet is that copying and sharing are good. Everyone is talking like piracy is some kind of unsolvable problem, and morally wrong, when it isn't a problem or wrong at all. The problem is these rent seeking, anti-social businesses that want to keep our natural rights from us, and which unfortunately, and despite their heavy handed campaigning against piracy, still have most of the public convinced that copying is very naughty. It's all too easy to frame copying as loss-- we seem to be wired to think that way-- and play on the basic human emotion of fear of loss.
Copyright is not holy, and not the one and only way that artists can make a living. Copyright is only a means to pay for work, and a very poor and problem riddled means at that. There are many other ways. Tell a typical author that copyright should be abolished, and most of them will instantly, and with great histrionics, accuse you of wanting a free ride, of wanting to steal, and of wanting to destroy the publication business and authors' means of earning a living. None of that is true, but their knee jerk reaction is to make those unwarranted connections. Point out that there are other ways, such as patronage, and they will refuse to believe any could work. The first thing they think of patronage is that only rich people can be patrons. Guess they've never heard of Kickstarter and indiegogo, to name just two. When I mention that, they make further objections. Those can only work for established names, they say, as if it isn't possible to tweak that model so it would work for anyone, if that is, it doesn't already. The one genre in which I find this attitude particularly inexcusable is Science Fiction. I find it so ridiculous whenever some futuristic society is portrayed as still using intellectual property law. A classic example of this is in the Star Trek episode "I, Mudd"
Stop calling copying stealing. Copying is not stealing. You immediately prejudice the debate when you use loaded, inaccurate terms like that. It should not be a crime, and not be thought immoral or somehow unfair to a small group of people, to copy an idea. No one should own an idea. The very rise of civilization owes everything to the sharing of ideas. When you uncritically accept these propositions that an idea is something that can be owned, same as a physical good, and therefore can be "stolen", as if everyone who thought of it earlier suddenly can no longer remember it, you play into the hands of these patent trolls and their lawyer friends. It is sad to see the victims of this wrong thinking passionately defending the supposed rights of these parasites. Might as well suggest that it is unfair to mosquitos and ticks to not let them suck your blood. They need blood, how can you be so cruel as to deny them?
In Sumerian times, the ability to read was considered a privilege that only priests and nobility were allowed. It was sacrilege to teach a commoner how to read, and sacrilege for a commoner to learn to read. Words were thought to possess magical power. To write something down or read it aloud was to do more than merely record or repeat information, it could possibly create new truth. Thus many of the legends of spells and magic. Limiting the ability to read to a select few was even enforced by the police and military of the time. Likely the common soldiers were encouraged to hate and fear any fellow soldier or ordinary citizen who could read or write. Maintenance of this monopoly on reading and writing was helped by the difficulty of learning those languages and their huge alphabets. It should be easy to see that a society with such a restrictive attitude towards basic communications is repressive, and weak. By the time of Hammurabi, the monopoly had to be in tatters, or else how could people read Hammurabi's Code of Laws?
Today, we try to teach children how to read and write as soon as possible, and we regard literacy as a fundamental necessity of civlization and democracy. We shoot for 100% literacy, and we get close. So I think it will be for copying and sharing eventually. Copying should be much more than something grudgingly allowed because it can't be stopped, it should be encouraged as a social goodness and fundamental function of civilization. If copying was something that had to be learned, like reading and writing, we should teach children how to do it at the youngest age they can learn it. All of education is a massive copying of the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years of civilization to the brains of children. We very much need the sharing of ideas if we are to meet the challenges we face. There are many ways we could screw up and fall. Global Warming is only one of many possible dangers. What if an enemy nation advanced their science beyond ours? How long could we stand up to them? If we have the knowledge in hand to save ourselves, but we can't use it because we've allowed rent seeking parasites to cripple our sharing of that knowledge, we will have only ourselves to blame should civilization collapse.
Do you think e=mc^2 should be patentable? It certainly was valuable. We wouldn't understand nuclear power without it.
There may not be any such thing as a good software patent. Software shouldn't be patentable.
In the patent infringement case used as an example, the article wasn't explicit about whether the patents were on software. Probably they were software patents, since the example was about a software app.
The patent troll problem can easily extend beyond software or business methods. Doesn't have to be software to have prior art or to be too obvious. The reform of abolishing software patents wouldn't fix all the problems. We would still have a patent system that grants too many bad patents because of the conflicts of interest. The patent office generates more revenue, and lawyers get more work. The article mentioned plans for 5 executive actions to curb the problem, but didn't say what they are.
At least companies are honest when they screw over their employees.
LOL, where to begin with that line? You think companies are honest about that? And you think it feels any better when a screwing is in your face rather than behind your back?
Anywhere power is concentrated, there is potential for abuse. Companies are concentrations of power that lie, cheat, and steal, and get away with it, more often than any other powerful organizations I hear about. In America, upper management gets ridiculously large compensation packages. It's so bad we even have a term for CEO severance packages: golden parachute.
What holds powerful companies in check? What are the checks and balances? Regulators? Whistleblowers? Unions? Lawyers? The Media? The Competition? Customers? None of those have had much success, certainly not in reining in the outrageous pay, nor in getting them to pay taxes, nor in the other games they play to weasel around their obligations. Doubt is their product. They've captured regulators, silenced scientists, persecuted whistleblowers, beat down unions, bought the media, fought lawyers with delay tactics and more lawyers, colluded with competitors, and gulled, brainwashed, and silenced customers. I find it tragically comic that so many people raise a ruckus over any hint of government abuse, even just the potential for abuse, but let corporations walk all over them. Bank of America, Chase, Citi, and Wells Fargo should be broken and dead for their too-big-to-fail brinksmanship with the entire world economy, yet many people still do business with these thieving megabanks.
The way minimum wage is done is a case in point. We let them get away with proposing a reasonable seeming fixed amount. Then they laugh while inflation whittles away at it. Minimum wage should at the least be indexed to inflation. But that's still not enough. I'd like to see minimum wage linked to the maximum pay packages companies put together, have it be something like that the minimum wage cannot be less than 1/20th of the maximum. Then, companies would face a choice. Either they can pay their workers more, or they can pay their CEO less.
When lawyers score wins with class action lawsuits, you should salute them. We'd all like better ways to police big, bad corporations, but this has had to do.
Yes, they are as bad as you've heard. They'll do stuff like insist a used car is a cream puff even though it has worse dents than door dings, and will keep insisting it's a cream puff even after you point out the dents. Or if there's a big puddle of transmission fluid or oil under the car, they'll suggest it's just a leaky seal, and not a sign that the transmission or engine is shot. You also have to check carefully for water damage. You could try to visually examine the car, but it's better to run a check on the VIN. Many cars are lost in floods, written off by the insurance industry as totalled, and this has to be reported which is why checking the VIN is a good idea. Instead of being scrapped like they are supposed to be, these cars are "laundered" so to speak, and end up in used car lots. Be especially careful if major flooding happened recently, and don't think that being several states away is enough distance to keep those cars out of the local dealers' lots. Then there's the whole four-square business, in which they try to hide how much you're really paying for a car by trying to talk only about the monthly payment, not the interest rates or total cost. Finally, when you think you at last have a deal, they spring a few surprises on you. They know you're busy and don't want all the time you spent examining a car to go to waste, and they try to hold that hostage. The "check with my manager" is often just a ploy to burn more of your precious time, make you sweat. Often they don't know jack about the specific models you want, and will be unable to answer technical questions. Not that they are the least interested in answering such questions anyway. You have to research the models yourself, beforehand, if you want to know anything beyond what you can see with a hasty look.
On the other hand, a big dealership has to watch its reputation. The salespeople are slime, but the dealership is going to check over any used car they get, and fix it up or junk it. They don't want an angry customer coming back within the month with some major mechanical problem.
I really don't know why the American public puts up with the sales crap. Or why most dealers continue to stick with that much hated system.
Some other careers would make a better comparsion.
I don't think the answers are as hard to figure out as we're making them. It's just that the answers are politically incorrect.
Men and women have more differences than the obvious physical attributes. It shouldn't be at all surprising that the male brain and the female brain are different. Differences means that each will be better at some kinds of thinking than the other.
The unfortunate part is that the kind of thinking that the male brain is better at is the kind of thinking we as a society have put a higher value on, and found easier to measure. For instance, the typical IQ test is designed by men and is biased in favor of men. One kind of question those tests favor is geometric manipulations, in which you have to mentally rotate or otherwise juggle objects. Chess has long been considered a good measure of intelligence. Overall, women simply aren't as good at chess. This has made it all too easy to conclude that women are mentally inferior.
Now however, we have computers that are better at chess through sheer brute force. However, no one concluded that computers have at last become smarter than us, and that we have achieved the goal of creating AI. Despite the display on the chess board, they are obviously extremely limited. Chess computers are the ultimate idiot savants, better than any person at chess, and completely clueless about any other kind of problem, even games of the same sort such as Go. What did this really prove? Only that chess is not a good measure of intelligence. We always knew there are very smart people who are poor at chess, but through the 20th century we accepted good chess playing as a sign of intelligence. The Soviet Union believed in this to such an extent that they made it into one of the battlefields of the Cold War. State support of chess has never been higher than during the Cold War.
If one of our most cherised measures of intelligence, the game of chess, is now seen to be a rather poor measure in many ways, what about our other measures? IQ tests all seem to ask the same kinds of questions, logic sorts of questions that all play to the same strengths that makes for a good chess player. The problem goes even further. How do we define intelligence? Is intelligence merely an aptitude for solving logic puzzles? What of an ability to construct puzzles and games, see and model the essential features of problems? How could that be measured? No multiple choice style of test can capture that kind of intelligence. When you have a near infinite number of hypotheses that could explain some baffling observations, an ability to cut through the chaos and lift the best possibilities out of the mess, especially those possibilities that are counterintuitive and so would be missed by most, seemingly could be a better measure of intelligence. But that's what programming is. A programming problem is a much more open ended kind of problem than a logic puzzle. Most logic puzzles are like Sudoku, dealing with such a small number of options that you can just try everything until you find one that works. But a measure that captures programming ability is also not going to be good enough to fully measure intelligence. Like the logic puzzles, it will only measure some kinds of intelligence.
I think it simply does not make sense that women should not be as smart as men. Where is the evolutionary advantage in that? Why would life evolve in such a way as to make females significantly dumber than males? Think of all the biological machinery it would require to dumb down women. And what would any species gain in exchange for such a trade? Does the idea of nonsentient females, as with Niven's Kzinti, make sense? Women would need less food for their smaller brains? But if the female keeps ending up dead because she did something stupid, or more like didn't do anything to save herself when threatened, the advantage of lower energy requirements is shot right there. Men simply cannot a
Oh come now. Ballmer is so bad even a monkey or a vacant chair would do a better job as CEO.
What's wrong with MS, and what to do about it isn't that hard to see, and hairyfeet touches on a good bit of it. Change the corporate culture, starting with elimination of stack ranking. Don't dictate to the users by taking away the start button "for their own good". Ditto with the arrogant insult to our intelligence they try to call Windows Genuine "Advantage". And then there was that whole OOXML fiasco. It was such a blatantly obvious and very dirty attempt to derail ODF. MS barely tried to make a case for OOXML on the merits, because they knew very well that it didn't have any. Instead, they played dirty, bribing and leaning on the standards voters. No organization, however big and powerful, can ever afford to wallow in filth. It's easy to see though that their entire approach to standardizing file formats is a reflection of the treachery within.
Developers trying to use their dogfood will eventually run into marketing hype where one expects documentation. For the most part, the documentation is okay, but sometimes you're trying to find out what something is and what it does, and all you get is empty verbiage about how this "powerful" product will "spark your imagination" and "increase your productivity". Just makes MS look even more stupidly treacherous and arrogant. They don't call a spade a spade. And they can't even muster a bit of cunning anymore. Those are hardly the only problems. Think that their penchant for rearrangement stops with their menus? They keep changing their APIs around. They don't fix bugs in a timely manner, instead they are more likely to roll out a whole new library with a totally different API that may or may not work better. All the more infuriating when you realize they do some of that solely to break competitors' products.
Not that MS was once a model tech company. They got hauled into court and convicted, but that didn't impress them in the least. They were not persuaded to mend their ways. They've always been ruthlessly competitive, but largely forgiven because people liked their stuff, and that because it mostly worked. Now, when people don't like MS's products, because their stuff doesn't work so well any more, all those problems they've managed to keep swept under the rug all these years are stinking worse than ever. I'm seeing users chuck their Wintel boxes and switch to MacIntoshes. 15 years ago, in those college labs that were about 50-50 on PCs and Macs, the Macs would sit there, unused and unloved, even when the PCs were all taken and had a waiting list. I wonder what I would see now in those labs? Forlorn PCs and a line for Macs?
And that is totally MS's fault. They still don't get it. If they did, they would remove all DRM from Windows. That includes the whole product key and activation nonsense they continue to harass all users with, legitimate and otherwise.
There was a day when MS was cool. They broke the early Office software monopolies, software such as Word Perfect. They reduced Apple and their MacIntosh to a small niche market. MacIntoshes were more user friendy, but MS-DOS on a PC was way, way cheaper. MS didn't rest on their laurels either, they rolled out Windows to challenge the Macs. Then in the 1990s, MS started to slip. MS's slowness gave IBM a chance to grab back the OS crown with OS/2. Lucky for MS, IBM blew it. MS also nearly got the Internet wrong. Remember that at first they pooh-poohed browsers. They came to their senses in time, barely. Windows 95 was very nearly too late. In the early 2000s, even the anti-trust conviction didn't much damage the MS brand. People still believed MS knew tech.
But now? MS has made many mistakes, but I could hardly believe it some years back when MS signed onto the RIAA and MPAA position on DRM. One might expect entertainment organizations to fail to understand that DRM is a bad idea, but a tech company? MS should have been savvier than that. Instead, they happily poodled to the RIAA! Let the entertainment industry do their thinking for them! They should have been educating the entertainment giants, not the other way around. It was a terrible show of incompetence and anti-customer positioning. Having backed themselves into a corner on DRM, they then turned to their customers and compounded the mistake, trying to sell us on the idea that DRM is good for us, talking down to us most insultingly. DRM helps stop us from being naughty pirates, and that's why it's good for us, right? Windows Genuine Advantage, ha ha! MS treated those moronic entertainment moguls like they really know stuff, and then treated their customers, many of whom are quite tech savvy, like a pack of adolescents who would try to sneak a few beers if they weren't carded all the time. They further magified the disaster by then insisting that Vista was doing very well. MS lost a great deal of credibilty.
It is only sheer size and inertia that has allowed MS to survive such bad blunders. I don't know how much more blundering MS can tolerate. Quite a bit, I suppose. Will they pick a decent CEO? There any reason to think they will pick a winner there?
Shortage of good candidates? If that is true, and you'd like to know who is responsible, look in a mirror.
One can have only just so many horrifying Dilbertesque employment experiences before ideas like a change of careers, or early retirement start to look attractive. Trying to become an independent consultant or start your own business looks daunting, but that's the direction I've been pushed. The prices that a sweatshop employer asks-- the humiliations, constant accusations of laziness and incompetence, demands for putting in extra hours, and then the really out of bounds stuff like being asked to falsify test results or show your "commitment" to your work by getting yourself financially upsidedown, with the threat of being terminated maintained as a festering ache in the back of the mind-- are so high that the benefits of being able to focus on technical work, especially programming, and not having to bother with administrative, managerial, and sales work, are insufficient compensation. Money is not the issue, not when an employer is pushing employees to lie and cheat, and even break the law and risk a stint in prison. Of course if, or more like when, the moment of truth arrives, the employer sure as hell isn't going to back their employees, no, quite the opposite. The employer will sell out those who bowed to the pressure to cheat.
I keep seeing all these surveys that rank software engineering as one of the top 10 or 5 or 3 best careers to follow, and I just can't believe it. Dilbert would not have the traction it does if the dark humor of it wasn't all too true. Too many complaints of worker shortages have been revealed as self-serving lies, part of a general effort to beat down compensation in any and every way possible, quality of the workers be damned. Maybe, this time, you, Mr. Employer, really are having troubles finding good workers. Have you tried the last resort, of offering more pay? If there really is wage inflation, then I'll believe. But forgive me for feeling just a bit cynical.
What, may I ask, are employers doing about all this? Whining to the government for more H1Bs? Outsourcing? But that's not what I mean. Don't you think employers' acts need a lot of cleaning up? What are you doing about that? I suppose it hasn't occurred to employers that anything needed to be done, certainly not by employers.
Yes, this.
Enforcers have been dreaming of facial recognition good enough to match faces from a database of millions to faces in crowds scarcely smaller. Every time there's been improvement in facial recognition, they're eager to try to scale up massively. They don't seem to appreciate how good the facial recognition has to be to avoid thousands of false positives. I don't know where facial recognition is now, but 6 years ago, 90% accuracy was the best I'd heard of, and the method was that good only with lots of outside help to remove variations in lighting, viewing angle, facial expression, and so on. No one was anywhere close to 99%, let alone 99.99999%.
Also, lot of the news about facial recognition has been overhyped. Companies always try to make their products sound better than they really are. The media is also eager to report on the next big breakthrough, and is prone to reading far too much into research results.
Treat this news with healthy skepiticism.
I don't get asked to receive a security code. Instead, after 3 tries Facebook says:
Please choose one of the following methods to confirm your identity:
Provide your birthday (hourly limit exceeded)
Or, try logging into Facebook from a device you've logged in with before.
I can try guessing again after an hour. So far I have gone through many dates I thought I'd be likely to pick, stuff like Jan 1 of every year before 1995. No luck yet. There are only a few thousand dates, so I may eventually hit on the right one.
Okay, I'll say this again: deaths are not a good measure of safety.
The "nuclear power causes fewer deaths" has been another popular but wrong argument. By that measure, Hurricane Andrew, which killed only 39 people, was a smaller disaster than many passenger airplane crashes that you've probably never heard of.
If instead you look at how much land has been rendered useless for decades, perhaps even centuries, nuclear stands out as by far the worst. There has never been an "exclusion zone" created for a coal or hydroelectric disaster. Look also at the amounts of the damage caused by nuclear accidents. Damage from Fukushima is very roughly $100 billion.