Since I tune out the commercials, I don't know, but I think it would be very few.
When I'm doing discretionary-type shopping (e.g. new furniture), I tend to rely on the experience of people who've already bought a specific product or bought from a specific store. Sure, *they* may have been influenced by advertising, but I'm getting their perspective after they've bought, hopefully when reality has set in.
For essentials-type shopping (e.g. groceries), I largely buy the same stuff I've bought in the past and maybe throw in a few other things that are on special. I'm not aware of being influenced by advertising, although I probably am more inclined to e.g. buy the stuff that's near the checkouts.
One thing I've noticed over the past few years is that TV advertising just doesn't register with me any more. I'll be watching TV with my partner, ads will come on and she'll ask me what I think about product X. I'll ask "What brought that question on?", she'll point at the TV and the ad will still be showing. It simply never registered with me at all.
After 42 years, it seems I've developed an excellent TV content filter, that just needs a bit more tweaking to filter out reality and "talent contest" programs to make me happy.
I'm curious: is anyone else in the same boat? Has advertising become effectively invisible to you?
I've got 3 boxes on Mepis and 2 on Ubuntu. I've been running Mepis since it first came out, and Ubuntu for several months.
Pluses for Mepis: - the live CD is the install CD. For Ubuntu, they are separate CDs - I prefer KDE - better menus; if I apt-get install in Ubuntu, sometimes the apps don't wind up in the Gnome menu (not sure why). I haven't seen this problem with Mepis
Pluses for Ubuntu: - the packages seem to be more stable, probably because Ubuntu is employing several people now to do package migration. Mepis relies on Debian's testing/unstable packages, which can be a mixed bag at times - has a "server install", which gives you a bare bones system but with Ubuntu's nice hardware detection - regular 6 month release cycles. Not a big deal for home use, but it's nice to have a known release cycle for business use - hype. Like it or not, there's lots of work being done on Ubuntu now as a direct result of the hype
Pluses for both distributions: - community support is great - Debian-based - ease of use - very reliable
I see them as being broadly equivalent; no reason to switch from one to the other if you're already satisfied with what you have now.
Watching Big Brother is marginally more stimulating than watching "snow".
Of course, the late night Big Brother - those nights where the "contestants" are all asleep and thus incredibly boring - makes for great "car crash" viewing. Watching the poor host, a guy with little to no prior TV experience, try to invent entertainment out of thin air for a couple of hours can be pretty hilarious.
"Oh look, someone's just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep again. Let's watch that in slow motion, from every conceivable angle, to see whether there was a wardrobe malfunction". 2-3 minutes pass, then "No, it doesn't look like there was. Still, if there was, woo-hoo. If there's anyone who'd like to phone in to talk about whose nipple would make the best viewing, do so now - our lines are wide open"...
On and on, show after show, for weeks on end - the guy hosting this endless stream of thought rambling deserves some sort of award, but I'm not sure which one. He's a modern day Jack Kerouac.
> How long do you think the careers of a politician > who "forced" MS out would be with their > constituency being companies, government agencies > and private individuals being forced to switch to > an alternative?
I realise we're talking about a highly unlikely set of events here.
However, I don't see that it's necessarily such a huge issue. The EU isn't the US; MS isn't an EU company. Money spent on MS products leaves the EU and heads to the US.
If MS was banned, you can be dead sure any number of EU-based alternative companies would fall over themselves to fill the space. Sure, 100% file compatibility may not be achieved, but the negative of that would be overwhelmingly addressed by the fact that some/most/all of the money spent on software would remain in the EU.
Any politician who "forced" MS out might well be applauded by EU individuals, governments and companies on this basis.
I had the job of translating some Swedish surveying software into English. I also had to convert it for use in the southern hemisphere, which was non-trivial as well.
By the time I finished, I swear I knew every line of that code. It's a BRUTAL job, trying to translate variable, class, functions etc. names to English. You know how you may abbreviate a variable named "count" to "cnt"? Guess what, they do the same in Sweden too, except they abbreviate Swedish words.
If I was doing this again, I'd - NOT agree to have it working within a specific timeframe, because the work consists of loads of breakthrough thoughts and ideas that are essentially unplannable - give serious thought to a rewrite from scratch. As your code is VB6 which is now out of MS support, and not that easy to support anyway, you may want to consider this option - demand a local, bi-lingual coder who'd worked on the code to work with me, at least in the initil phases - state very clearly that I'd be working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and no more on this project. It's extremely easy to fall into working huge hours with a project of this type, as you wind up having to hold huge amounts of info in your head and time just blows out the window in those cases - try to get a work partner, as the task is mentally draining and you need someone else to look at things when your brain starts to wind down
Good luck, and enjoy Japan - it's an incredibly beautiful place to visit. Make sure you set aside time to have a look around
You're missing the point that the music and movie industries have thrived for many years before DRM. The movie industry complained when VCRs appeared; instead, the net result was that more people went to the movies. The record companies complained when blank cassettes appeared; their product sales soared afterwards.
Why is the Internet so fundamentally different? Sure, the scope is there for someone to rip and share the latest Britney CD; where's the evidence that this is impacting anyone's bottom line? You can trot out the argument that a download=a missed sale, but that argument simply doesn't hold water in the face of record music sales over the past few years.
From my personal perspective, a media product with DRM is a product that I won't buy. Now you can argue that I'm unique in that stance and/or out of touch with reality, but that's one sale missed as a direct result of DRM. Look around Slashdot - admittedly not representative of consumers worldwide - and you'll find others with the same opinion as mine.
The big question boils down to: Does imposing DRM lose more sales than it generates? I've got no idea, but I know how *I* feel about it and where *my* dollars go.
A 2nd big question: Does taking the big stick to DRM "violators" and "pirates" alienate your customers?
A 3rd: Does prosecuting children for uploading music alienate your customers? It'd be interesting to know how many of those prosecuted kids' parents curtail their CD purchases in the future.
A 4th: Do we need our customers more than they need us, and could we eventually alienate our customers to the point where they'll simply go away en masse and we won't be able to get them back?
My feeling is that the music industry is like a drug dealer (no, hear me out!) in that it relies heavily on peer pressure to sell its product. It relies on being "cool" to generate sales. Once a critical mass of kids have heard and/or bought the new Britney CD, their peers have to buy it themselves or risk being sidelined socially.
Envision a future where that critical mass of kids didn't exist; where enough people had been alienated by the music industry that they could no longer sell to this critical mass of kids. Sales of popular music won't just drop at that point; they'll plummet. That's what the music industry faces in the future, unless they put away the stick and bring out the carrots.
> As I said, I believe this attitude of mine is due > in part to my Gen X demographic. Baby boomers and > older -- those presumably running XXAA -- grew up > not expecting reviewing capability.
Not true - us Baby Boomers grew up with VHS and cassette tapes, so we're extremely familiar with the concept of being able to record and playback at our leisure.
Unfortunately, it was both expensive and time-consuming to use these media, relative to what's around now. Copying a cassette or VHS tape had to happen in real-time (i.e. 90 minutes to copy a 90 minute cassette), unless you had expensive non-consumer gear to do it. And, of course, we didn't have the Internet as a cheap distribution mechanism.
On that basis, I think a lot more Baby Boomers than you know are against DRM. As a group, we're not prepared to download loads of stuff for free, but we don't expect to pay over and over again to listen to the same music or watch the same movies because we didn't have to do so as kids.
> What if the alternative is not being able to > download legally at all?
You raise some interesting points, but let me respond to just this one in the context of music downloads.
I'm rapidly nearing the point where I'm prepared to only download content from legitimate, DRM-free sites. As others have said, I don't want to pay for something that's ultimately controlled by someone else, who may or may not be able to disable it at will; if I've paid for it, I want it to be mine.
It's that simple.
That's why I don't run Windows any more, except on the one PC where I'm forced to. I just don't want to pay MS for their OS, then for Office, then for Project etc., then have them able to either change the terms of the agreement and leave me little choice but to accept the change, or chop me off and leave me unable to read their new file formats without paying for an upgrade. No thanks; I'll go to OOo, and rely on the collective ability of the OOo community to be able to deal with new file formats if/when they appear.
Years ago, I used to buy vinyl records, then "rip" them to cassette because everyone had cassette players. 20-30 years later, I can still rip those same vinyl records to MP3/AAC/whatever, *and* I do so because some of that music never made it to CD.
Fast forward to 2030, and what chance do you think I'll have of being able to play my ITMS downloads? Sure, I can download them and then burn to CD, but compared to going out and buying a CD I'm sacrificing quality, convenience and actual product (liner notes, etc) at that point; thanks, but I'll jump in the car and buy the CD from a shop.
The big conceptual leap that we're being asked to make is to consider music as a consumable item, like food; you buy it once, then next week/month/year you go and buy the same thing again and pay for it a second time (e.g. for your new iPod). Sorry, but I've had many years of music not being a consumable, in that sense; I'm not about to change my stance on that, and the record companies are going to have to offer me carrots rather than sticks to get me to reconsider.
What you're missing is that my rights haven't changed. If I buy music on a CD, I'm allowed to copy it and listen to it on the device of my choice. Copyright says I can't give it to my friends, but I can ask them over to listen to it with me.
My message to the music industry is simple: sell me what I want, and I'll gladly pay for it. Try to limit me from using it how I want (within well-established legal boundaries), and I'll ignore you; either I'll break your protection mechanisms, or I'll stop buying and using your product completely. I'm not interested in breaking your copyrights; I am interested in preserving my own rights.
Within those boundaries, there's still a lot of scope for the music industry to sell its product to me. It could give away low quality copies, which I could then listen to and would pay for the "real thing" if I liked it. It could sell me heavily-encrypted product that it could stream to me and I could listen to on (cheap) dedicated, non-PC hardware, then charge me on a usage basis (e.g. 2c per listen). It could give away its product on download sites and charge me for related stuff (e.g. merchandise, concert tickets) that it could sell from the same site.
Or it could really piss me off, have me walk away as a customer and spend my money somewhere else.
I've been using Perl since the mid-90s; I can clearly recall the Perl 4 days, and I've written some reasonably sizeable systems with Perl 5.
That said, I'm also looking at switching my people from Perl to either Ruby or Python.
Things I love about Perl that I'll be sorry to walk away from: - CPAN; an amazing resource - for 100 line scripts, the ability to code as quickly as I can type, with few errors when I try to run for the first time - Perl's ability to bolt stuff together that was never meant to be bolted together - DBI model; it's so simple and elegant - regular expressions; don't know why, but Perl's regex's seem to be more natural than any other language's equivalent
Things I'll be glad to put behind me: - how easy it is to write unsupportable code with Perl. I've lost count of how many times I've had to get people to rewrite working Perl code to make it comprehensible - the OO model; it's a bad bolt-on at best - "sacred code" (see two points above). Several times, I've come across "sacred code" written in Perl. It works now, but every time anyone tries to alter it, it breaks in unexpected ways. Yep, I/we could walk through it with the debugger to work out how it does its magic; nope, it often takes so long that you're better to take the hit and rewrite from scratch - TMTOWTDI. As a concept, it's fine, but being able to code the same small piece of functionality in 143 ways using 37 different functions kills supportability - the books. I don't know how many Perl books there are, but only a small percentage seem to push any sort of sensible approach to coding in the large. Damian Conway's "Object Oriented Perl" is a gem; a truly great coding book that shows people how to write scalable maintainable Perl. Many others seem to focus on cool ways to solve a small problem in very few lines of code, which gives readers the impression that this is actually a desirable way for coders to code
I'll keep an eye on Perl 6, but I suspect it'll break a lot of CPAN libraries. If so, then the most compelling reason to use Perl will disappear with it.
Here's a suggestion: - software patents only apply to companies or individuals seeking financial gain. To put it another way, if you're developing open source software, you can do so without fear of litigation over software patent issues; essentially, FOSS is exempt from patent issues
Obviously, MS would not be pleased about this. Obviously, there would be subsequent discussions required as to exactly what defines "open source" and "financial gain". However, I don't think these issues would be anything like as messy as the current patent systems in use around the world
The patent system was originally put in place to allow inventors to have a brief monopoly period over their work. The reasoning was that inventors had spent some time and effort developing their inventions, and should be compensated so they'd keep inventing more and more useful stuff that would benefit the public overall.
If Oracle/IBM/MS/SAP/... invent something and patent it, it seems reasonable to protect their work from their direct competitors for a period of time. However, if I, working in my house, can develop something that does the same thing, surely releasing it for free to the world benefits the world.
I won't be allowed to benefit from it financially, because someone else came before me, invented it and patented it. However, if I can duplicate it and give it away for free, well that pretty much forces the original inventor to keep raising the bar. More importantly, they can't build enormous proprietary, locked down systems based on a single piece of patented technology; well they could try, but as soon as that system reached a certain "must have it" factor, FOSS equivalents would emerge to compete. Hopefully that would spell the end of "embrace and extend, with patent protection".
Patent-holders would have an advantage over me - they can sell their invention for a profit, whereas I can only give it away - but that also means they can't lock it away in a "glass case" and say "look but don't touch"; if they did that, then people could just come to me and get my version for free.
Why wouldn't people just come to me for my free version? Several reasons: many can be equated to "why do people buy products from MS & Oracle now when they can just download notionally equivalent products for free?". The patent-holder can market their product to death; I can't afford to because I'm not getting paid for it. The patent-holder can support and maintain their product with a big budget; I can't. The patent-holder can cross-licence their patent with other companies in exchange for access to their patents; I can't. Software patents would still have value, but they wouldn't have the "unlimited piles of gold" value they have today.
> Calling downloading "civil disobedience" is an > insult to those, like the civil rights protesters > and the protesters in Tiananmen Square, who have > used civil disobedience to try to right the wrongs > of society. File sharing is stealing to avoid > paying the cost, not civil disobedience--it > directly benefits the protester. Civil rights > protesters did not directly benefit from their > protests. The only thing they got was a change in > the laws--the whole point of their protest..
This is absolutely right.
Downloading illegal files as a form of civil disobedience is akin to robbing banks as a protest against government monetary policy.
> Newitz says that "recent reports indicate that > file sharing is bigger than ever--and so are the > record industry's profits. As a result, it's hard > to see the suits as anything other than a > wrongheaded attempt by the old media industry to > push upstart innovators out of the marketplace > rather than working with them."
This is a ridiculous argument.
If the record industry is making bigger and bigger profits, that in no way obliges them to ignore illegal downloads of their product.
Like it or not, it is their product; they *own* it. If someone starts distributing it for free, then they'd be mad not to try to stop it happening.
For the record, I think IP laws, as exist in much of the world, are fundamentally flawed and will be substantially revised within the next several years. Business models that they encourage - companies like Eolas with no employees and no tangible assets, holding patents with ridiculous scope, capable of suing huge corporates and/or stopping development dead - doesn't benefit society at all and won't be acceptable to either individuals or major companies in the long run.
The record companies will die out in their present form, because they can't put the genii back in the bottle now. All they've ever offered as pluses to music creators are marketing and distribution; the Internet already handles distribution better than the record companies could ever do, so all they now bring to the table is marketing.
At this point, many established groups - the ones who generate most of the profit for music companies - think they're now big enough to do their own marketing. If these groups stand up and say "We'll do our own marketing", what does the music business have to offer them?
Off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of is underwriting their touring costs; a really big group (think "U2") spends big dollars putting a tour together, and would probably appreciate someone else underwriting the tour and would be happy to share the profit on that basis.
I've been on both sides of the fence here. I've been employed by a startup consulting firm, and I've been part-owner of a startup software company. I've worked for nothing for months at a time, trying to get a product out the door. I've also got a partner who's been employed by a startup tech firm for the past few years.
Remember that, during those times when the company was bringing in ~$0, staff/employees were getting paid, their health insurance was getting paid, their mortgages and car leases were getting paid, their kids' school fees were getting paid, etc. The sole risk they were taking was that the company might not succeed, and they may need to go get another job.
The owners were getting nothing coming in, but were paying staff anyway. How? Either out of their pockets, or via VC/angel cash that they have had to raise by selling bits of their company. The risk the owners have taken on is much greater; the company has to actually *sell something* for them to get even $1 in their pockets. This is worth repeating; if the company never sells anything, and lots of software companies founder on that one point, then the owners have essentially funded the lifestyles of the employees for the entire period of their employment.
Next time you're commuting to work, look at the guy standing next to you and imagine what it would take to pay his salary out of your pocket for several months.
I've got no problem with giving key people equity, but you're living in a dream world if you expect the proceeds from the sale of a startup company to be split on some sort of even vaguely equal basis.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the conditions > for a patent being valid that there must be no > prior art and that the invention must not be > obvious for those versed in the art?
Ah, clearly you missed the all-important qualification "...on the Internet", which instantly created a whole new area of patentable IP.
"Sir, we're suing you for patent infringement"
"On what grounds?"
"Not sure yet, but since you've done things on the Internet we're pretty sure you'll have infringed a patent somewhere. If not one of ours, then we'll track down one owned by someone else and collect a spotter's fee. So, do you want to confess now, or take us on in court?"
Technically, I could, but the templates are the corporate standard of the company I'm working at so it's not really appropriate to do so.
As another response stated, the goal of OOo's Word import feature should be interoperability; users shouldn't have to change their templates and documents to suit OOo's limitations in this respect.
It's generally within Word that the problem becomes obvious; that's because I'm working with a partner (he on MS Office, me on OOo) writing documentation and reviewing each other's work. I tend to review on the screen, and he likes to print things out and read them offline.
I've confirmed that the problem is truly being caused within OOo by taking a MS Word doc, printing it, then opening the same doc in OOo and printing it again. The version printed from OOo is laid out incorrectly on the printed page.
As I said, when I can reduce the problem to a relatively small document, I'll send it to the developers to look at.
Note that this problem is only biting me just at the moment, and only because the templates for these docs have a form of table-frenzy. Aside from this one issue, I'd switch to OOo outright; I already have on my home PCs and have no reason yet to change back.
I've already got a highly effective PBX firewall in place. It's called "leaving the phone off the hook", and it's very effective around dinner time to ensure we don't get snowed by phone calls to our teenage daughters.
Even better, it comes with a highly effective content filter. Callers with truly important news will, upon finding the house phone is engaged, call one of our mobile phones. However, teenagers, with their inherent lack of cash and memories of past confrontations with parents over mobile phone call costs, will instead retry the home phone approximately every 60 seconds. I can guarantee that, from the instant I replace the phone after dinner, it's never more than 60 seconds till it starts ringing again.
I've given it a decent try for several days now, and it keeps screwing up tables when it imports them from MS Word.
The tables I've got aren't complex, but there is a fair bit of "tables within tables" for the sake of formatting. While I know there's better ways of doing this sort of "poor man's page layout" within Word, unfortunately I'm stuck with using these templates for the forseeable future.
I'm trying to isolate the problem at the moment to give a nice small document to the OOo developers to work with, but be warned - some of these table layout bugs only become obvious when the document is printed and the layout is all wrong.
Other than that, OOo 2 seems a lot more stable and is pretty much a rock solid replacement for MS Office in my experience to date. If you don't have to muck around with stupid Word tables in document templates, I'd say go for it!
> Most Slashdotters may well disdain Flash, but I > really like the ability to integrate Flash with > web services. The Flash provides an interface > unatainable in regular HTML + javascript
If you make that HTML+Javascript+CSS, is that (still) true? Well, I suppose Flash is still more capable in theory than DHTML, but what about in practice...?
The most visually impressive sites at the moment seem to be doing amazing stuff without Flash. Sure, you'll still use Flash for anything approaching advertising because of its "gee whiz" factor, but Flash seems to be getting pushed more and more into the advertising niche.
> By that I mean people who become executives and > mid- and upper level managers are people who > should love the political/people stuff as much as > a programmer loves technology
Not sure if I agree with that.
My impression is that the people who *get stuff done* are the ones that do well over at least the past several years, regardless of whether it's technology, management or whatever (politics is another example). From a career development perspective, it's more important to make a decision quickly and act on it, than to analyse it deeply and come up with the right answer over and extended period of time.
Not saying that's the way it should be, but it seems that that's the way it is.
Bottom line: if you move into management, do so with a desire to get stuff done.
In that respect, the job isn't that much different to being a coder; the biggest problem I see with techos who move into management is that they get strung out trying to find the perfect solution to a given problem. Where people working for you are concerned, quite often the perfect solution doesn't exist, or only exists in the mind of the person/s with the problem - that's why good managers tend to get their teams to come up with solutions, rather than tell them what the solution is.
Remember that a blog is replacing normal face-to-face conversation for a lot of people. Now I don't know about you, but a lot of the conversations I hear day to day are about idiotic things, by people whose opinions aren't worth that much IMNSHO.
Just like blogs.
However, there are people out there whose blogs are worth reading. Just as I'd make efforts to attend a public speech by these people, I make a point of checking their blogs every so often because I think they've got something to say that's of interest to me.
These people, few as they may seem amongst the enormous pile of blog sputum, are out there in their thousands, and I think there's a chance that they could form the basis of future media.
I suspect it'll all become clearer over the next year or two.
Work out which distro you and your team have most experience with. If it's Debian (or something based on it), Redhat or SuSE, go with that as your "corporate standard". Anything else (e.g. Gentoo, Mandrake, etc.) and you need to bear in mind that, if you choose that as your "corporate standard", you (a) may have trouble finding/building/retaining a team of experts, and (b) may be at a career-limiting juncture on that basis if it all goes pear-shaped and you don't have the necessary in-house expertise to fix mission-critical systems.
Once you've nominated your "corporate standard" distro, build all your "generic" boxes (e.g. file&print, qmail/sendmail/postfix, Postgres/MySQL, firewalls, etc) using that distro and start getting them deployed and into production. Work on refining your processes so you can spit out these systems in a generic build as quickly as possible. Once you can knock out these systems quickly, faultlessly and repeatably, you've justified whatever your distro choice was.
You *will* find instances where you need to use another distro - possibly because e.g. Oracle doesn't support your choice and an app only works on Oracle. No problem; put in the Oracle-recommended box and leverage your existing Linux expertise to support it. Maybe you'll have to use rpm instead of e.g. emerge or apt-get to keep these boxes updated; learn how to do so.
That's it - nothing very exciting, and nothing very radical. That's how businesses like IT to be.
Slashdot Mirror
> How many of the advertised products do you buy?
Since I tune out the commercials, I don't know, but I think it would be very few.
When I'm doing discretionary-type shopping (e.g. new furniture), I tend to rely on the experience of people who've already bought a specific product or bought from a specific store. Sure, *they* may have been influenced by advertising, but I'm getting their perspective after they've bought, hopefully when reality has set in.
For essentials-type shopping (e.g. groceries), I largely buy the same stuff I've bought in the past and maybe throw in a few other things that are on special. I'm not aware of being influenced by advertising, although I probably am more inclined to e.g. buy the stuff that's near the checkouts.
One thing I've noticed over the past few years is that TV advertising just doesn't register with me any more. I'll be watching TV with my partner, ads will come on and she'll ask me what I think about product X. I'll ask "What brought that question on?", she'll point at the TV and the ad will still be showing. It simply never registered with me at all.
After 42 years, it seems I've developed an excellent TV content filter, that just needs a bit more tweaking to filter out reality and "talent contest" programs to make me happy.
I'm curious: is anyone else in the same boat? Has advertising become effectively invisible to you?
I've got 3 boxes on Mepis and 2 on Ubuntu. I've been running Mepis since it first came out, and Ubuntu for several months.
Pluses for Mepis:
- the live CD is the install CD. For Ubuntu, they are separate CDs
- I prefer KDE
- better menus; if I apt-get install in Ubuntu, sometimes the apps don't wind up in the Gnome menu (not sure why). I haven't seen this problem with Mepis
Pluses for Ubuntu:
- the packages seem to be more stable, probably because Ubuntu is employing several people now to do package migration. Mepis relies on Debian's testing/unstable packages, which can be a mixed bag at times
- has a "server install", which gives you a bare bones system but with Ubuntu's nice hardware detection
- regular 6 month release cycles. Not a big deal for home use, but it's nice to have a known release cycle for business use
- hype. Like it or not, there's lots of work being done on Ubuntu now as a direct result of the hype
Pluses for both distributions:
- community support is great
- Debian-based
- ease of use
- very reliable
I see them as being broadly equivalent; no reason to switch from one to the other if you're already satisfied with what you have now.
Agreed.
Watching Big Brother is marginally more stimulating than watching "snow".
Of course, the late night Big Brother - those nights where the "contestants" are all asleep and thus incredibly boring - makes for great "car crash" viewing. Watching the poor host, a guy with little to no prior TV experience, try to invent entertainment out of thin air for a couple of hours can be pretty hilarious.
"Oh look, someone's just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep again. Let's watch that in slow motion, from every conceivable angle, to see whether there was a wardrobe malfunction". 2-3 minutes pass, then "No, it doesn't look like there was. Still, if there was, woo-hoo. If there's anyone who'd like to phone in to talk about whose nipple would make the best viewing, do so now - our lines are wide open"...
On and on, show after show, for weeks on end - the guy hosting this endless stream of thought rambling deserves some sort of award, but I'm not sure which one. He's a modern day Jack Kerouac.
> How long do you think the careers of a politician
> who "forced" MS out would be with their
> constituency being companies, government agencies
> and private individuals being forced to switch to
> an alternative?
I realise we're talking about a highly unlikely set of events here.
However, I don't see that it's necessarily such a huge issue. The EU isn't the US; MS isn't an EU company. Money spent on MS products leaves the EU and heads to the US.
If MS was banned, you can be dead sure any number of EU-based alternative companies would fall over themselves to fill the space. Sure, 100% file compatibility may not be achieved, but the negative of that would be overwhelmingly addressed by the fact that some/most/all of the money spent on software would remain in the EU.
Any politician who "forced" MS out might well be applauded by EU individuals, governments and companies on this basis.
I had the job of translating some Swedish surveying software into English. I also had to convert it for use in the southern hemisphere, which was non-trivial as well.
By the time I finished, I swear I knew every line of that code. It's a BRUTAL job, trying to translate variable, class, functions etc. names to English. You know how you may abbreviate a variable named "count" to "cnt"? Guess what, they do the same in Sweden too, except they abbreviate Swedish words.
If I was doing this again, I'd
- NOT agree to have it working within a specific timeframe, because the work consists of loads of breakthrough thoughts and ideas that are essentially unplannable
- give serious thought to a rewrite from scratch. As your code is VB6 which is now out of MS support, and not that easy to support anyway, you may want to consider this option
- demand a local, bi-lingual coder who'd worked on the code to work with me, at least in the initil phases
- state very clearly that I'd be working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and no more on this project. It's extremely easy to fall into working huge hours with a project of this type, as you wind up having to hold huge amounts of info in your head and time just blows out the window in those cases
- try to get a work partner, as the task is mentally draining and you need someone else to look at things when your brain starts to wind down
Good luck, and enjoy Japan - it's an incredibly beautiful place to visit. Make sure you set aside time to have a look around
You're missing the point that the music and movie industries have thrived for many years before DRM. The movie industry complained when VCRs appeared; instead, the net result was that more people went to the movies. The record companies complained when blank cassettes appeared; their product sales soared afterwards.
Why is the Internet so fundamentally different? Sure, the scope is there for someone to rip and share the latest Britney CD; where's the evidence that this is impacting anyone's bottom line? You can trot out the argument that a download=a missed sale, but that argument simply doesn't hold water in the face of record music sales over the past few years.
From my personal perspective, a media product with DRM is a product that I won't buy. Now you can argue that I'm unique in that stance and/or out of touch with reality, but that's one sale missed as a direct result of DRM. Look around Slashdot - admittedly not representative of consumers worldwide - and you'll find others with the same opinion as mine.
The big question boils down to: Does imposing DRM lose more sales than it generates? I've got no idea, but I know how *I* feel about it and where *my* dollars go.
A 2nd big question: Does taking the big stick to DRM "violators" and "pirates" alienate your customers?
A 3rd: Does prosecuting children for uploading music alienate your customers? It'd be interesting to know how many of those prosecuted kids' parents curtail their CD purchases in the future.
A 4th: Do we need our customers more than they need us, and could we eventually alienate our customers to the point where they'll simply go away en masse and we won't be able to get them back?
My feeling is that the music industry is like a drug dealer (no, hear me out!) in that it relies heavily on peer pressure to sell its product. It relies on being "cool" to generate sales. Once a critical mass of kids have heard and/or bought the new Britney CD, their peers have to buy it themselves or risk being sidelined socially.
Envision a future where that critical mass of kids didn't exist; where enough people had been alienated by the music industry that they could no longer sell to this critical mass of kids. Sales of popular music won't just drop at that point; they'll plummet. That's what the music industry faces in the future, unless they put away the stick and bring out the carrots.
> As I said, I believe this attitude of mine is due
> in part to my Gen X demographic. Baby boomers and
> older -- those presumably running XXAA -- grew up
> not expecting reviewing capability.
Not true - us Baby Boomers grew up with VHS and cassette tapes, so we're extremely familiar with the concept of being able to record and playback at our leisure.
Unfortunately, it was both expensive and time-consuming to use these media, relative to what's around now. Copying a cassette or VHS tape had to happen in real-time (i.e. 90 minutes to copy a 90 minute cassette), unless you had expensive non-consumer gear to do it. And, of course, we didn't have the Internet as a cheap distribution mechanism.
On that basis, I think a lot more Baby Boomers than you know are against DRM. As a group, we're not prepared to download loads of stuff for free, but we don't expect to pay over and over again to listen to the same music or watch the same movies because we didn't have to do so as kids.
> What if the alternative is not being able to
> download legally at all?
You raise some interesting points, but let me respond to just this one in the context of music downloads.
I'm rapidly nearing the point where I'm prepared to only download content from legitimate, DRM-free sites. As others have said, I don't want to pay for something that's ultimately controlled by someone else, who may or may not be able to disable it at will; if I've paid for it, I want it to be mine.
It's that simple.
That's why I don't run Windows any more, except on the one PC where I'm forced to. I just don't want to pay MS for their OS, then for Office, then for Project etc., then have them able to either change the terms of the agreement and leave me little choice but to accept the change, or chop me off and leave me unable to read their new file formats without paying for an upgrade. No thanks; I'll go to OOo, and rely on the collective ability of the OOo community to be able to deal with new file formats if/when they appear.
Years ago, I used to buy vinyl records, then "rip" them to cassette because everyone had cassette players. 20-30 years later, I can still rip those same vinyl records to MP3/AAC/whatever, *and* I do so because some of that music never made it to CD.
Fast forward to 2030, and what chance do you think I'll have of being able to play my ITMS downloads? Sure, I can download them and then burn to CD, but compared to going out and buying a CD I'm sacrificing quality, convenience and actual product (liner notes, etc) at that point; thanks, but I'll jump in the car and buy the CD from a shop.
The big conceptual leap that we're being asked to make is to consider music as a consumable item, like food; you buy it once, then next week/month/year you go and buy the same thing again and pay for it a second time (e.g. for your new iPod). Sorry, but I've had many years of music not being a consumable, in that sense; I'm not about to change my stance on that, and the record companies are going to have to offer me carrots rather than sticks to get me to reconsider.
What you're missing is that my rights haven't changed. If I buy music on a CD, I'm allowed to copy it and listen to it on the device of my choice. Copyright says I can't give it to my friends, but I can ask them over to listen to it with me.
My message to the music industry is simple: sell me what I want, and I'll gladly pay for it. Try to limit me from using it how I want (within well-established legal boundaries), and I'll ignore you; either I'll break your protection mechanisms, or I'll stop buying and using your product completely. I'm not interested in breaking your copyrights; I am interested in preserving my own rights.
Within those boundaries, there's still a lot of scope for the music industry to sell its product to me. It could give away low quality copies, which I could then listen to and would pay for the "real thing" if I liked it. It could sell me heavily-encrypted product that it could stream to me and I could listen to on (cheap) dedicated, non-PC hardware, then charge me on a usage basis (e.g. 2c per listen). It could give away its product on download sites and charge me for related stuff (e.g. merchandise, concert tickets) that it could sell from the same site.
Or it could really piss me off, have me walk away as a customer and spend my money somewhere else.
I agree with your sentiments entirely.
I've been using Perl since the mid-90s; I can clearly recall the Perl 4 days, and I've written some reasonably sizeable systems with Perl 5.
That said, I'm also looking at switching my people from Perl to either Ruby or Python.
Things I love about Perl that I'll be sorry to walk away from:
- CPAN; an amazing resource
- for 100 line scripts, the ability to code as quickly as I can type, with few errors when I try to run for the first time
- Perl's ability to bolt stuff together that was never meant to be bolted together
- DBI model; it's so simple and elegant
- regular expressions; don't know why, but Perl's regex's seem to be more natural than any other language's equivalent
Things I'll be glad to put behind me:
- how easy it is to write unsupportable code with Perl. I've lost count of how many times I've had to get people to rewrite working Perl code to make it comprehensible
- the OO model; it's a bad bolt-on at best
- "sacred code" (see two points above). Several times, I've come across "sacred code" written in Perl. It works now, but every time anyone tries to alter it, it breaks in unexpected ways. Yep, I/we could walk through it with the debugger to work out how it does its magic; nope, it often takes so long that you're better to take the hit and rewrite from scratch
- TMTOWTDI. As a concept, it's fine, but being able to code the same small piece of functionality in 143 ways using 37 different functions kills supportability
- the books. I don't know how many Perl books there are, but only a small percentage seem to push any sort of sensible approach to coding in the large. Damian Conway's "Object Oriented Perl" is a gem; a truly great coding book that shows people how to write scalable maintainable Perl. Many others seem to focus on cool ways to solve a small problem in very few lines of code, which gives readers the impression that this is actually a desirable way for coders to code
I'll keep an eye on Perl 6, but I suspect it'll break a lot of CPAN libraries. If so, then the most compelling reason to use Perl will disappear with it.
Here's a suggestion:
- software patents only apply to companies or individuals seeking financial gain. To put it another way, if you're developing open source software, you can do so without fear of litigation over software patent issues; essentially, FOSS is exempt from patent issues
Obviously, MS would not be pleased about this. Obviously, there would be subsequent discussions required as to exactly what defines "open source" and "financial gain". However, I don't think these issues would be anything like as messy as the current patent systems in use around the world
The patent system was originally put in place to allow inventors to have a brief monopoly period over their work. The reasoning was that inventors had spent some time and effort developing their inventions, and should be compensated so they'd keep inventing more and more useful stuff that would benefit the public overall.
If Oracle/IBM/MS/SAP/... invent something and patent it, it seems reasonable to protect their work from their direct competitors for a period of time. However, if I, working in my house, can develop something that does the same thing, surely releasing it for free to the world benefits the world.
I won't be allowed to benefit from it financially, because someone else came before me, invented it and patented it. However, if I can duplicate it and give it away for free, well that pretty much forces the original inventor to keep raising the bar. More importantly, they can't build enormous proprietary, locked down systems based on a single piece of patented technology; well they could try, but as soon as that system reached a certain "must have it" factor, FOSS equivalents would emerge to compete. Hopefully that would spell the end of "embrace and extend, with patent protection".
Patent-holders would have an advantage over me - they can sell their invention for a profit, whereas I can only give it away - but that also means they can't lock it away in a "glass case" and say "look but don't touch"; if they did that, then people could just come to me and get my version for free.
Why wouldn't people just come to me for my free version? Several reasons: many can be equated to "why do people buy products from MS & Oracle now when they can just download notionally equivalent products for free?". The patent-holder can market their product to death; I can't afford to because I'm not getting paid for it. The patent-holder can support and maintain their product with a big budget; I can't. The patent-holder can cross-licence their patent with other companies in exchange for access to their patents; I can't. Software patents would still have value, but they wouldn't have the "unlimited piles of gold" value they have today.
Anyone got any thoughts on this suggestion?
> Calling downloading "civil disobedience" is an
> insult to those, like the civil rights protesters
> and the protesters in Tiananmen Square, who have
> used civil disobedience to try to right the wrongs
> of society. File sharing is stealing to avoid
> paying the cost, not civil disobedience--it
> directly benefits the protester. Civil rights
> protesters did not directly benefit from their
> protests. The only thing they got was a change in
> the laws--the whole point of their protest..
This is absolutely right.
Downloading illegal files as a form of civil disobedience is akin to robbing banks as a protest against government monetary policy.
> Newitz says that "recent reports indicate that
> file sharing is bigger than ever--and so are the
> record industry's profits. As a result, it's hard
> to see the suits as anything other than a
> wrongheaded attempt by the old media industry to
> push upstart innovators out of the marketplace
> rather than working with them."
This is a ridiculous argument.
If the record industry is making bigger and bigger profits, that in no way obliges them to ignore illegal downloads of their product.
Like it or not, it is their product; they *own* it. If someone starts distributing it for free, then they'd be mad not to try to stop it happening.
For the record, I think IP laws, as exist in much of the world, are fundamentally flawed and will be substantially revised within the next several years. Business models that they encourage - companies like Eolas with no employees and no tangible assets, holding patents with ridiculous scope, capable of suing huge corporates and/or stopping development dead - doesn't benefit society at all and won't be acceptable to either individuals or major companies in the long run.
The record companies will die out in their present form, because they can't put the genii back in the bottle now. All they've ever offered as pluses to music creators are marketing and distribution; the Internet already handles distribution better than the record companies could ever do, so all they now bring to the table is marketing.
At this point, many established groups - the ones who generate most of the profit for music companies - think they're now big enough to do their own marketing. If these groups stand up and say "We'll do our own marketing", what does the music business have to offer them?
Off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of is underwriting their touring costs; a really big group (think "U2") spends big dollars putting a tour together, and would probably appreciate someone else underwriting the tour and would be happy to share the profit on that basis.
Good luck!
I've been on both sides of the fence here. I've been employed by a startup consulting firm, and I've been part-owner of a startup software company. I've worked for nothing for months at a time, trying to get a product out the door. I've also got a partner who's been employed by a startup tech firm for the past few years.
Remember that, during those times when the company was bringing in ~$0, staff/employees were getting paid, their health insurance was getting paid, their mortgages and car leases were getting paid, their kids' school fees were getting paid, etc. The sole risk they were taking was that the company might not succeed, and they may need to go get another job.
The owners were getting nothing coming in, but were paying staff anyway. How? Either out of their pockets, or via VC/angel cash that they have had to raise by selling bits of their company. The risk the owners have taken on is much greater; the company has to actually *sell something* for them to get even $1 in their pockets. This is worth repeating; if the company never sells anything, and lots of software companies founder on that one point, then the owners have essentially funded the lifestyles of the employees for the entire period of their employment.
Next time you're commuting to work, look at the guy standing next to you and imagine what it would take to pay his salary out of your pocket for several months.
I've got no problem with giving key people equity, but you're living in a dream world if you expect the proceeds from the sale of a startup company to be split on some sort of even vaguely equal basis.
More risk = more reward
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the conditions
> for a patent being valid that there must be no
> prior art and that the invention must not be
> obvious for those versed in the art?
Ah, clearly you missed the all-important qualification "...on the Internet", which instantly created a whole new area of patentable IP.
"Sir, we're suing you for patent infringement"
"On what grounds?"
"Not sure yet, but since you've done things on the Internet we're pretty sure you'll have infringed a patent somewhere. If not one of ours, then we'll track down one owned by someone else and collect a spotter's fee. So, do you want to confess now, or take us on in court?"
Technically, I could, but the templates are the corporate standard of the company I'm working at so it's not really appropriate to do so.
As another response stated, the goal of OOo's Word import feature should be interoperability; users shouldn't have to change their templates and documents to suit OOo's limitations in this respect.
It's generally within Word that the problem becomes obvious; that's because I'm working with a partner (he on MS Office, me on OOo) writing documentation and reviewing each other's work. I tend to review on the screen, and he likes to print things out and read them offline.
I've confirmed that the problem is truly being caused within OOo by taking a MS Word doc, printing it, then opening the same doc in OOo and printing it again. The version printed from OOo is laid out incorrectly on the printed page.
As I said, when I can reduce the problem to a relatively small document, I'll send it to the developers to look at.
Note that this problem is only biting me just at the moment, and only because the templates for these docs have a form of table-frenzy. Aside from this one issue, I'd switch to OOo outright; I already have on my home PCs and have no reason yet to change back.
I've already got a highly effective PBX firewall in place. It's called "leaving the phone off the hook", and it's very effective around dinner time to ensure we don't get snowed by phone calls to our teenage daughters.
Even better, it comes with a highly effective content filter. Callers with truly important news will, upon finding the house phone is engaged, call one of our mobile phones. However, teenagers, with their inherent lack of cash and memories of past confrontations with parents over mobile phone call costs, will instead retry the home phone approximately every 60 seconds. I can guarantee that, from the instant I replace the phone after dinner, it's never more than 60 seconds till it starts ringing again.
I've given it a decent try for several days now, and it keeps screwing up tables when it imports them from MS Word.
The tables I've got aren't complex, but there is a fair bit of "tables within tables" for the sake of formatting. While I know there's better ways of doing this sort of "poor man's page layout" within Word, unfortunately I'm stuck with using these templates for the forseeable future.
I'm trying to isolate the problem at the moment to give a nice small document to the OOo developers to work with, but be warned - some of these table layout bugs only become obvious when the document is printed and the layout is all wrong.
Other than that, OOo 2 seems a lot more stable and is pretty much a rock solid replacement for MS Office in my experience to date. If you don't have to muck around with stupid Word tables in document templates, I'd say go for it!
> Most Slashdotters may well disdain Flash, but I
> really like the ability to integrate Flash with
> web services. The Flash provides an interface
> unatainable in regular HTML + javascript
If you make that HTML+Javascript+CSS, is that (still) true? Well, I suppose Flash is still more capable in theory than DHTML, but what about in practice...?
The most visually impressive sites at the moment seem to be doing amazing stuff without Flash. Sure, you'll still use Flash for anything approaching advertising because of its "gee whiz" factor, but Flash seems to be getting pushed more and more into the advertising niche.
> By that I mean people who become executives and
> mid- and upper level managers are people who
> should love the political/people stuff as much as
> a programmer loves technology
Not sure if I agree with that.
My impression is that the people who *get stuff done* are the ones that do well over at least the past several years, regardless of whether it's technology, management or whatever (politics is another example). From a career development perspective, it's more important to make a decision quickly and act on it, than to analyse it deeply and come up with the right answer over and extended period of time.
Not saying that's the way it should be, but it seems that that's the way it is.
Bottom line: if you move into management, do so with a desire to get stuff done.
In that respect, the job isn't that much different to being a coder; the biggest problem I see with techos who move into management is that they get strung out trying to find the perfect solution to a given problem. Where people working for you are concerned, quite often the perfect solution doesn't exist, or only exists in the mind of the person/s with the problem - that's why good managers tend to get their teams to come up with solutions, rather than tell them what the solution is.
> And they think they're the future of the media?
I've still got an open mind on this.
Remember that a blog is replacing normal face-to-face conversation for a lot of people. Now I don't know about you, but a lot of the conversations I hear day to day are about idiotic things, by people whose opinions aren't worth that much IMNSHO.
Just like blogs.
However, there are people out there whose blogs are worth reading. Just as I'd make efforts to attend a public speech by these people, I make a point of checking their blogs every so often because I think they've got something to say that's of interest to me.
These people, few as they may seem amongst the enormous pile of blog sputum, are out there in their thousands, and I think there's a chance that they could form the basis of future media.
I suspect it'll all become clearer over the next year or two.
Is there any reason why Linux distros in general don't default to having Apache (and other servers, for that matter) run in a chroot jail?
There could be an obvious explanation; it's early here and I'm just having my first caffeine injection for the day...
Work out which distro you and your team have most experience with. If it's Debian (or something based on it), Redhat or SuSE, go with that as your "corporate standard". Anything else (e.g. Gentoo, Mandrake, etc.) and you need to bear in mind that, if you choose that as your "corporate standard", you (a) may have trouble finding/building/retaining a team of experts, and (b) may be at a career-limiting juncture on that basis if it all goes pear-shaped and you don't have the necessary in-house expertise to fix mission-critical systems.
Once you've nominated your "corporate standard" distro, build all your "generic" boxes (e.g. file&print, qmail/sendmail/postfix, Postgres/MySQL, firewalls, etc) using that distro and start getting them deployed and into production. Work on refining your processes so you can spit out these systems in a generic build as quickly as possible. Once you can knock out these systems quickly, faultlessly and repeatably, you've justified whatever your distro choice was.
You *will* find instances where you need to use another distro - possibly because e.g. Oracle doesn't support your choice and an app only works on Oracle. No problem; put in the Oracle-recommended box and leverage your existing Linux expertise to support it. Maybe you'll have to use rpm instead of e.g. emerge or apt-get to keep these boxes updated; learn how to do so.
That's it - nothing very exciting, and nothing very radical. That's how businesses like IT to be.