Here's a thought. Just from my own personal scanning of press releases, "About Us" blurbs on software company sites, and discussions with various people about their developer groups, here's a preliminary estimate if I were to believe everything I read/hear:
75% of all programmers who work for software companies are in the top 10% of all the programmers in existence.
88% of the programmers working freelance or within non-software companies are in the "bottom 5%" of geeks everywhere, because they stink.
96% of the software released in recent years, even by those developers in the aforementioned bottom 5%, is "cutting edge and top of the line" stuff.
76% of all statistics are made up on the spot. 43% of all average people know that.
<rant>
Remember, numbers don't lie, but liars do numbers. We live in a country where a guy can put a bunch of lies into print and get fired from the NY Times, but if other people do the same thing and put a company logo on it, it's called "marketing". Of course everyone has the "best of the best" in that environment.
</rant>
Yes, I exaggerate. It's up to all of us to figure out how much though, because I'm honestly not too sure myself.
Amen. I can't even count the number of workspaces I've had, either at my own workplace or at client sites, that have the plugs at ground level & right up against, say, the 76-ton (empty weight) steel file cabinet full of small rocks. While I don't see a great deal of use for the HDTV in an environment where people are supposed to be working, I'm a huge fan of this line-of-sight stuff, and other than the "dear God I'm blind" shade of green, it really does look like a nifty place to work. Big straight tables for collaborative sitting/hanging out/pair work and doors that close, plus millions of LAN ports (no mention of any wireless stuff that I could find, though) and color-coded sockets to easily figure out what goes where based on which electronics need UPS goodness, and did I mention the doors? This article should be from the "Geek Eye for the Clueless PHB Guy Who Likes to Pack Coders in Like Sad Little Cube-Dwelling Sardines" department. Heck, I can see all kinds of potential for enhanced productivity (or at least more/. reading and LAN gaming) in this setup just for me and a bunch of my best geek buddies.
It's a pitiful wasted dream to imagine that programming-types working for non-software companies will ever see this sort of environment, if the idea takes off anywhere else at all. Pity the child who reads this article and will never live to touch the promised land...
While the article provides little to no other real information besides "hey, OK shot down something that people at the Federal level brought into existence, the call-spammers are happy, everybody else isn't", what I'm really interested in is the effect this has on me, a non-OK resident. If, as the parent says, it makes everyone on the DNC list legally available to OK-based call-spammers again (provided the OK courts get away with this), then that sucks. If, on the other hand, it opens up the OK numbers on the DNC list to any call-spammer from anywhere in the country, then it sucks to be them and I'm glad I don't live there.
If it works both ways, well...who's up for a real live torch-and-pitchfork vigilante party? Friggin' state courts, anyway.
"It's either going to work in the short term, or they're going to have to pull the plug on it." </snip>
Okay, so can someone explain to me the significant differences between the recent SCO pump'n'dump scheme vs. the RIAA's "BS across America" campaign? I mean, yes, according to all the available evidence SCO's "IP" is a bunch of centuries-old code that was running in a stable release form around the dawn of civilization, and their allegations that people stole their stuff are questionable on a good day (read:outright lies, damned lies!), and while pump'n'dumps are probably illegal I think the RIAA's "target and destroy customer base with extreme prejudice" plan is more stupid than unlawful, but here's a little mental exercise... There exists a company "Foo" in recent news such that:
They say you've got their stuff and must pay up, to the tune of $unreasonable_dollar_figure.
They appear to have done little or no real fact-finding, and frankly it's your responsibility to prove you haven't done something wrong.
There's no detectable pattern, rhyme or reason to any of their attacks, unless one considers "let's cast a really wide net and hope that a bunch of suckers will pay up fast" as a strategy.
/.ers hate them, violently. With a passion, and stuff.
Now, tell me this. Who am I talking about, RIAA or SCO? I suppose you could stretch this to include BSA (not the Anti-Homosexual Male Scouts of America, the other BSA) and some other actively-disliked organizations, but yeah. Kind of makes me wonder, anyway.
Good point. Disturbingly so. Since this is a government entity attempting to interact with, nay, regulate, something in cyberspace, I'm very afraid of the possibilities here. If, as I'm frequently told and haven't ever bothered to learn for myself, a good techie-type can dig through the forged headers and faked sender info to discover the true origins of a message, then this entire anti-spam plan would hinge upon hiring enough of the right kind of geeks to investigate every claim. "Step 3: Geeks Profit!" would have to be religiously adhered to, because I can think of few jobs more dull than sifting through possibly-faked message info. If I've been misinformed and a really well-faked e-mail is indistinguishable from the genuine article, or if the gov't suits refuse to pay geeks good money to waste time investigating this stuff, I can look into the future and see all kinds of poo-poo hitting the spinning blades.
The third choice, I guess, is to set up a Beowulf cluster of SCO-kerneled Linux boxen, give each spammer an original sig, and declare that forevermore all unsolicited e-mail shall originate from billgates@microsoft.com. I'd pay $699 to watch that unfold.
This is why, in my ideal world, in a few months we'd see some restrospective "Queer Eye" shows and a follow-up article doing a sort of "where are they now" that details all of the stuff that's fallen by the wayside and/or been destroyed by small children as compared to the geek-toys that are still in use. I have to agree with other posters here, once you've got your plasma TV and Tivo, I seriously doubt you're going to revert on purpose.
For some reason, I'm reminded of "Query Eye for the Database Guy" (anyone read Foxtrot? Bueller? Bueller?). Remember, a null pointer doesn't have to be a dull pointer!
But really.... "and stacks random CDs behind the TV and on top of the dryer."? *shudder*
Pearls before swine, says I.
Okay, something's been bothering me for...oh, the last several hundred articles/posts about "file sharing". The parent post talking about "a very broad definition...this does fall under 'file sharing', but...not in the same sense" reminds me of the girls I knew in junior high who would run around the halls and say things like "so do you like him? yeah, I like him, just not like that." It seems to me like this is a part of the FUD campaign that the **AA-types and others in their thrall are spreading, and it's working pretty well from the look of things.
Let's look at "file sharing", shall we? "File", I think we can all agree, refers in this context to a collection of 1's and 0's on a computer's hard drive, CD, or other digital storage media of some sort. "Sharing" is the sort of thing you did as a child when Mary Jane Snotnose wanted to borrow your bike and you let her. Now, we all know that in cyberspace, you're able to retain a copy of files that you want to lend to other people as well, which is what makes this internet thing so neat sometimes. The concept of "file sharing", however, does not mean specifically audio or video files, copyrighted or not, as far as I've been able to tell. Sure, the evil empires of the world want us to believe that it's all bad because one of the (apparently) primary uses of P2P applications (supposedly) hurts their business, but if you want to read a poem I wrote in the third grade that I just happen to have in electronic format and have made accessible to the world, that's file sharing. So is your working remotely on a computer game for work (it's Doom 3 or Duke Nukem, isn't it? Hurry up, dammit!), though that's probably a lot more restricted in terms of who you're supposed to share those files with than, say, my freely available list of favorite drink mixes.
By equating "file sharing" with "copyright infringement", "theft", and "communism", the bad guys are trying to subtly convince ISPs and PHBs the world over that the entire concept and anything associated with it is illegal, immoral, and fattening. How many people have thought about hearing (or have already heard) something like "oh, file sharing? You get 5 to 30 in a federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison for that, right?" I haven't heard it much either, but just tell me with a straight face that the suits aren't trying to guide the public's perception in that direction.
Another thing I've got to get off my chest: One of the biggest complaints I've heard from the RIAA is that file-sharing programs make it "easy to search for and distribute files". I can think of some pre-P2P stuff that they should be going after, if the "ease of use" complaint is the biggest problem they have: the web, newsgroups, e-mail (well, for ease of distribution, not so much searching for new files to share).
Mod me, spank me, make me write bad checks. That's all I have to say about that.
Okay, okay, just RTFB (blurb) already. Not only does it refer to "Sun", which is a bringer of light and all things good and shiny, which is obviously anti-MS, but the/. blurb also claims that the licensing is $100 per employee. If it were an MS strategy, there'd be some extra zeroes...either that, or it'd be $150 per to start and $100 per "essential patch", plus complete ownership of any and all works produced by any users, authorized or not, while using the system. Duh.
Seriously, this doesn't seem like such a horrendous idea in and of itself, but I wonder if there are any companies x such that y number of users within the organization will not want to/be able to switch, or be required to run, say, Mac OSX on lime-green iThingies because they're tied to some Mac-only apps. Would companies still be charged per-employee in that case? Still a very good deal I'd argue, if said employees were in a significant minority, but some CTO out there might not like his $50K quarterly bonus being eaten into to the tune of $699...er, $700 for that handful of marketing drones. I'm sure that a question like this will pop up eventually, or not.
I've been primarily using SQL Server [release of the moment] throughout my working life, with a little teeny bit of Oracle and (very recently) turned MySQL from something I play with as a hobby into part of a project my boss has me working on. Of those three, only MySQL (arguably because I haven't been working with it in a business/production environment for even a year yet, but still) has never let me down. I've had all manner of glitches, inexplicable crashes, and entire tables changing their datatypes and horking the applications I had hooked up to them from Oracle & SQL Server, which I'll admit can probably be blamed on the clueless admins (whose most common response was "uh...data type?"), but I was exceptionally clueless when I started playing with MySQL a couple of years ago and I have yet to see any signs of horkage. Heck, I'm nowhere near MySQL-certifiable, and like the parent says I see no reason that it's not a good setup within certain conditions. I wouldn't use it for everything, mind you, but I also don't eat my soup with a pitchfork. ...though from the environments I've worked in, it appears that "the right tool for the job" is Phil, that creepy guy in Marketing. Ew.
But the remedy to problems like this is...to introduce people to alternatives to RIAA-backed crap.</snip> This is a useful tool that I discovered earlier today that purports to show whether or not buying a particular CD will support the very soul of evil, or a non-RIAA label/artist instead. I did a few quick searches and was pleasantly surprised by some, had my fears confirmed by others. Until someone proves to me that buying used will support the madness, that's the route I'll take for any RIAA-tainted stuff that I've just got to have for now.
How soon before the/. article reporting a lawsuit against the Litigation Instigation Association of Asshats for continuing to put itself forward as the "RIAA", in direct violation of several truth in advertising laws?
Out of curiousity, and to find a list of labels & artists that I won't be supporting until the RIAA crumbles, I browsed on over to RIAA.org to look at their party line and see if I could find any heartfelt tributes to influential members of the Nazi party. I came across this, which says that in order to obtain a subpeona "The copyright owner may then present a subpoena request to the Clerk of the Court..." and then, farther down the page, states that people who object to the RIAA getting information about their identities should realize that "Simply sending a letter to the Clerk of the Court has no legal effect." In addition, "The DMCA does not require ISPs to notify subscribers that they've been served with a DMCA subpoena."
Now, I don't feel any better about a young disadvantaged honors student getting sued (they pay close to $30 a month for what? someone theorized that it was internet access and not KaZaa, but isn't that kind of steep unless the people in the friggin' HOUSING DEVELOPMENT can afford some kind of broadband?), but it seems to me that we're all 12-year-old girls, here. Forget the fact that the **AAs have millions of dollars that they're willing to throw at this, and few (if any) individuals have even a thousandth of that earmarked for defense against legal horking. The simple fact is, even if you and I are both on the exact same legal budget, I (as the copyright holder to 6 million lines of Windows code and the author of 17 Britney songs) have the high ground when the game starts if I decide to come after you. Of course that's only if I have "a good faith belief" that I might be able to get some money out of you.
That being said, I can't wait until this whole mess comes to a head, hopefully not in the RIAA's favor, and becomes the source of a new generation of really bad jokes. (So the top brass of SCO and RIAA are on this plane, right, and it's about to crash and there's only one parachute for every third person...)
From Amazon.com, result of a search for "Firefly DVD":
<snip> Firefly - The Complete Series (2002) Availability: NOT YET RELEASED: The studio is currently not producing this title on DVD, but to be notified when it is available, enter your e-mail address at right. You'll also be voting for this release; we'll let the studio know how many customers are waiting for this title.
</snip>
Does anyone else think that's a strange message to display, given that it's set to be released in December and people have gotten pre-orders already?
As I see it, AOL should be able to do what they like with regards to data entering/exiting their network True, true. I agree with you completely, what with AOL not being a public service and all that.
I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that they have words to that effect in their customer contract. I'm willing to agree with you. I've never read their TOS and I hope I'm never forced to, but I think that one would be hard-pressed to find an AOL-like service that doesn't have a limitation of the company's liability, "you only see what we want you to see while we agree to show it to you" clauses, and "we can/will change this agreement at any time, but only if we feel like it" bits. However, what about the people who don't always read that stuff in its entirety, a group that could be successfully argued is in the majority?
I mean, caveat emptor and all that sort of thing, but isn't there some sort of requirement that the AOL TV spots and promo CDs that you see all over the place accurrately portray the fact that server-side spam filters are in use that prevent mail from reaching the client, and the spam filters in question yield a nonzero number of false positives? Yes, truly intelligent internet users will steer clear of AOL anyway. Yes, real men use Linux. What about my mother-in-law, who expects AOL to "bring the wide world of the inter-web right to the front door"? (I know, I still can't talk sense into her...) Isn't there a responsibility to ensure that the service you talk about in your advertising bears some passing resemblance to the service that I'll get when I give you my credit card number because I liked the "6 million dollar man" knockoff ads? Sure, it's probably all quite legal because AOL is its own entity, not beholden to G-d or man. Sure, if you believe all that crap about speed and reliability and uptime and how it'll help you score with supermodels, it's your own stupid fault. It's probably perfectly legal, to the extent of my IANAL-level knowledge of such things...but is it ethical?
People shuld learn to trust Microsoft just as most people trust their computer systems.
Oh, we do, we do... It's much more likely that the statement "M$ will do <<something>> that makes/.ers in general (angry or afraid)" will be true than "Performing <<action>> in a <<M$ operating system>> environment will always result in (bluescreen or no bluescreen)", due to the predictably evil nature of M$ and the unreliable nature of machines running Windoze. By this logic, people generally trust Microsoft a great deal more than most people trust their computer systems. Trust them to do what, exactly, is open to discussion.
The problem isn't ease of tracking down eBay sellers. In a perfect world, or even one that works the way I sort of expect it to, eBay sellers are very easy to track down. under normal conditions, eBay provides buyers and sellers with methods of contacting one another, and presumably (not speaking from experience here) provides some sort of escalation process in the event of a problem. If 133t_eBayer42 promises to sell you something and doesn't send the Darth Maul lunchbox once you've paid him, I'm pretty sure that's fraud (taking money in exchange for goods that are never delivered), and LEOs typically investigate fraud if it's reported to them (I said in a perfect world). Presumably, this would involve a court order for eBay to hand over its seller info, and bang! Easy to track. What bothers me is the theoretical guy who makes a business of selling crap on eBay out of his home, or the college kid who sells his Autographed Bruce Campbell Femur (RARE!!!) for five bucks and never sells anything again. Neither one of them has ever had a problem with eBay, their buyers, or other sellers, and are both fairly decent human beings. Both of these people can have their personal information laid bare to LEOs on a whim, simply because the guy in his house pissed off his ex-wife, who is now dating a cop who decides to have some fun with him, or because somebody takes offense to finding a femur available for sale on the internet.
I agree completely that there need to be controls and consequences for scumbags on eBay just like any other arena, especially if said scumbag never sent me that MIP TELETUBBIES PR0N DVD (All Regionz) that I won. I just don't see where lack of court order + eBay handing out personal information right and left + oblivious sellers who probably never realized this (or never read the agreement when they signed up, which is another thread altogether) = necessarily a good thing.
One could easily argue that if I don't like it, I should just stop selling my navel lint online, at least at that particular site. Fine with me, if that's the only way my info will ever truly be safe from that mouth-breathing cro-magnon grunt who used to beat me up in the third grade...who is now one of the LEOs in question. He may even be serving and protecting you today. Cheers!
I have to agree with the parent here. MySQL and MSQL is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same caliber as any other O'Reilly book that I own or have read. If I had paid full price for my copy, I would probably have been disappointed. As someone who doesn't work professionally with MySQL and will probably never need the level of impressive knowledge and coolness that comes from most of the "in a Nutshell" books, however, it's not a particularly offensive read. Yes, it's probably less useful than the aforementioned online manual, but I wouldn't hold it up as the database world's answer to Valley of the Dolls or anything.
Re:This book is irrelevant, it will be assimilated
on
Dancing Barefoot
·
· Score: 1
That'll teach me to skim reviews.
Also provides a reminder that there are more than two online booksellers on the planet. D'oh.
Interestingly, the entire library section of Wheaton's blog site links to Amazon, and the books in "What I'm Currently Reading" and "Essential Computer and Geek Books" are...intruiguing.
This book is irrelevant, it will be assimilated.
on
Dancing Barefoot
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· Score: 1
After checking Amazon and Barnes & Noble for the ISBN and title, there is no record of this book anywhere according to the my two favorite online book peddlers. Thae makes me sad.
For the first time ever, inspired by this article, I checked out WIL WHEATON DOT NET (the newest programming language from M$? Aye, sir...), and was very pleased with the experience. Not all blogs suck, apparently. Yes, I'm a geek.
If anyone can find a dead-tree merchant who's taking pre-orders for (or acknowledges the existence of) books by Wil Wheaton, post it here? Please?
If this does become technically feasible and relatively inexpensive, who wants to make a bet on the display that's commonly hooked up to next generation of office desktop machines? Certain companies already monitor their employees to what I believe is an obsessive extent, and the ability to take a "scan" of what's in front of the monitor every X minutes is something I can see being used and abused by the "w3 0wnz j00" philosophy that a lot of businesses have with respect to their employees. Worse yet, look at this technology after a few iterations and a few million dollars, and you've got screen = scanner = webcam.
In the dark, uncertain future of cubicle dwellers, there will be no need for paranoia...your computer is, in fact, watching you.
This answered a lot of questions for me...
on
Microsoft Caste System
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· Score: 5, Insightful
And one wonders, based on the assumed validity of the claims made in this article, why there are so many useful "features" in the MS family of software. Think about what it means that "Sometimes you might not be involved in some spec review that is essential to your job function"...one can imagine Microsoft's business plan here if the orange-badges really are a vital part of the workforce:
1. Put contractors in vital development roles 2. Treat all contractors like utter crap 3. Exclude contractors from having the most current and accurate information with respect to project specs, company standards, and their team's vision & progress by excluding them from important meetings 4. Depend heavily on the quality of the work the contractors do, including their code in the latest version of MS BugMaker 2003. 5. Whine about the mean lawyers and judges who make you play nice with the other kids 6. Charge an exorbitant per-seat license for each application that expires approximately 27 minutes and 3 seconds after registration, but includes a feature that automatically takes out a second mortgage on your home so that you're able to continue working 7. Profit!
Seriously, I can think of a number of other companies that have similar caste systems, sometimes even within the hierarchy of permanent positions in the company. Unless I missed the graphic descriptions of inhuman torture and anal probing, I can think of several businesses that I've been told are much worse places to temp for. Reading this article I couldn't help but think that MS is doing the same thing to contractor abuse that it did with DOS a couple of decades ago- they didn't actually invent the concept, but it's been lovingly adopted and taken in directions that only MS would dare to go. Where would you like to be screwed today?
Amen to that. In this particular instance, I think that the golden rule should apply...either that or "an eye for an eye", take your pick. In the interest of fairness, this gentleman should have all of the same rights and protections of his personal contact information that he extends to the rest of the world. What this will mean in practice, at least in the way that I understand the concept, is that Thou Shalt Not Spam. Attempting to enforce a double standard that favors spammers could have hordes of geeks (and even normal end-users) up in arms, which is probably A Very Bad Thing.
The most amusing bit from that article was the poor spammer's claim that he'd probably have heard about it by now if he were doing something wrong. Of course, that's referring to the allegations of piracy, but maybe it's time for anti-spammers everywhere to let him know that yes, spamming is in fact doing something wrong.
Be sure to include several flashy, multiple-megabyte images in your HTML-formatted message, as well as a prominently displayed notice that "THIS IS NOT SPAM, you have solicited this e-mail by...etc." at the bottom of the page.
Give me a freaking break. Next we'll hear complaints from AOL when they receive the shipment of 13 million "X number of free hours!" CDs that I've been collecting over the years. Bunch o' spineless whiners.
My concern exactly. Also, what about black eyes, pinkeye, or some sort of serious facial injury or issues with contact lenses possibly inhibiting a correct scan or one of about a billion other variables? I'm not familiar enough with the tech involved to comment intelligently on the things that could mess up an otherwise good iris, but someone with two glass eyes would certainly throw things off for any system I can imagine.
Possibly a blood/DNA scan for those people who don't have "valid" irises to scan? Is anyone else thinking that TV commercial with the password/blood sample/hair sample security system on all the office PCs where the entire staff was bald? I have seen the future, and it makes me queasy.
I think that the practice of letting computers/searches/scripts do all of the work without applying any human intelligence to the process has become more and more common. Yes, it's worse in my mind when the BSA does it because I'm biased against them in the first place, but to be fair it's spread to just about everybody in my recent experience. I just moved, and when my wife and I changed our driver's licenses over she got a semi-threatening letter because she didn't also change over her car registration (our only car is registered in my name for no reason I can think of). I recently had my account put on hold by PayPal and then restored, but in the interim I sent a question to their help staff regarding something else entirely. Someone (apparently a bot?) from PP replied to me and said, basically "we can't restore your account until you do X, Y , and Z. Please contact us if you have any further questions. Thank you!"
I don't think it's a good thing that organizations have become this brain-dead, but the BSA certainly can't patent a method for making themselves look like idiots by letting a search tool plow blindly through a set of data for them. Plenty of prior art there...
Slashdot Mirror
75% of all programmers who work for software companies are in the top 10% of all the programmers in existence.
<rant>88% of the programmers working freelance or within non-software companies are in the "bottom 5%" of geeks everywhere, because they stink.
96% of the software released in recent years, even by those developers in the aforementioned bottom 5%, is "cutting edge and top of the line" stuff.
76% of all statistics are made up on the spot. 43% of all average people know that.
Remember, numbers don't lie, but liars do numbers.
We live in a country where a guy can put a bunch of lies into print and get fired from the NY Times, but if other people do the same thing and put a company logo on it, it's called "marketing". Of course everyone has the "best of the best" in that environment.
</rant>
Yes, I exaggerate. It's up to all of us to figure out how much though, because I'm honestly not too sure myself.
Amen. I can't even count the number of workspaces I've had, either at my own workplace or at client sites, that have the plugs at ground level & right up against, say, the 76-ton (empty weight) steel file cabinet full of small rocks. While I don't see a great deal of use for the HDTV in an environment where people are supposed to be working, I'm a huge fan of this line-of-sight stuff, and other than the "dear God I'm blind" shade of green, it really does look like a nifty place to work. /. reading and LAN gaming) in this setup just for me and a bunch of my best geek buddies.
Big straight tables for collaborative sitting/hanging out/pair work and doors that close, plus millions of LAN ports (no mention of any wireless stuff that I could find, though) and color-coded sockets to easily figure out what goes where based on which electronics need UPS goodness, and did I mention the doors? This article should be from the "Geek Eye for the Clueless PHB Guy Who Likes to Pack Coders in Like Sad Little Cube-Dwelling Sardines" department. Heck, I can see all kinds of potential for enhanced productivity (or at least more
It's a pitiful wasted dream to imagine that programming-types working for non-software companies will ever see this sort of environment, if the idea takes off anywhere else at all. Pity the child who reads this article and will never live to touch the promised land...
While the article provides little to no other real information besides "hey, OK shot down something that people at the Federal level brought into existence, the call-spammers are happy, everybody else isn't", what I'm really interested in is the effect this has on me, a non-OK resident. If, as the parent says, it makes everyone on the DNC list legally available to OK-based call-spammers again (provided the OK courts get away with this), then that sucks. If, on the other hand, it opens up the OK numbers on the DNC list to any call-spammer from anywhere in the country, then it sucks to be them and I'm glad I don't live there.
If it works both ways, well...who's up for a real live torch-and-pitchfork vigilante party? Friggin' state courts, anyway.
"It's either going to work in the short term, or they're going to have to pull the plug on it."
</snip>
Okay, so can someone explain to me the significant differences between the recent SCO pump'n'dump scheme vs. the RIAA's "BS across America" campaign? I mean, yes, according to all the available evidence SCO's "IP" is a bunch of centuries-old code that was running in a stable release form around the dawn of civilization, and their allegations that people stole their stuff are questionable on a good day (read:outright lies, damned lies!), and while pump'n'dumps are probably illegal I think the RIAA's "target and destroy customer base with extreme prejudice" plan is more stupid than unlawful, but here's a little mental exercise...
There exists a company "Foo" in recent news such that:
They say you've got their stuff and must pay up, to the tune of $unreasonable_dollar_figure.
They appear to have done little or no real fact-finding, and frankly it's your responsibility to prove you haven't done something wrong.
There's no detectable pattern, rhyme or reason to any of their attacks, unless one considers "let's cast a really wide net and hope that a bunch of suckers will pay up fast" as a strategy.
/.ers hate them, violently. With a passion, and stuff.
Now, tell me this. Who am I talking about, RIAA or SCO? I suppose you could stretch this to include BSA (not the Anti-Homosexual Male Scouts of America, the other BSA) and some other actively-disliked organizations, but yeah. Kind of makes me wonder, anyway.
"Step 3: Geeks Profit!" would have to be religiously adhered to, because I can think of few jobs more dull than sifting through possibly-faked message info. If I've been misinformed and a really well-faked e-mail is indistinguishable from the genuine article, or if the gov't suits refuse to pay geeks good money to waste time investigating this stuff, I can look into the future and see all kinds of poo-poo hitting the spinning blades.
The third choice, I guess, is to set up a Beowulf cluster of SCO-kerneled Linux boxen, give each spammer an original sig, and declare that forevermore all unsolicited e-mail shall originate from billgates@microsoft.com. I'd pay $699 to watch that unfold.
This is why, in my ideal world, in a few months we'd see some restrospective "Queer Eye" shows and a follow-up article doing a sort of "where are they now" that details all of the stuff that's fallen by the wayside and/or been destroyed by small children as compared to the geek-toys that are still in use. I have to agree with other posters here, once you've got your plasma TV and Tivo, I seriously doubt you're going to revert on purpose.
For some reason, I'm reminded of "Query Eye for the Database Guy" (anyone read Foxtrot? Bueller? Bueller?). Remember, a null pointer doesn't have to be a dull pointer!
But really....
"and stacks random CDs behind the TV and on top of the dryer."? *shudder*
Pearls before swine, says I.
Let's look at "file sharing", shall we? "File", I think we can all agree, refers in this context to a collection of 1's and 0's on a computer's hard drive, CD, or other digital storage media of some sort. "Sharing" is the sort of thing you did as a child when Mary Jane Snotnose wanted to borrow your bike and you let her. Now, we all know that in cyberspace, you're able to retain a copy of files that you want to lend to other people as well, which is what makes this internet thing so neat sometimes. The concept of "file sharing", however, does not mean specifically audio or video files, copyrighted or not, as far as I've been able to tell. Sure, the evil empires of the world want us to believe that it's all bad because one of the (apparently) primary uses of P2P applications (supposedly) hurts their business, but if you want to read a poem I wrote in the third grade that I just happen to have in electronic format and have made accessible to the world, that's file sharing. So is your working remotely on a computer game for work (it's Doom 3 or Duke Nukem, isn't it? Hurry up, dammit!), though that's probably a lot more restricted in terms of who you're supposed to share those files with than, say, my freely available list of favorite drink mixes.
By equating "file sharing" with "copyright infringement", "theft", and "communism", the bad guys are trying to subtly convince ISPs and PHBs the world over that the entire concept and anything associated with it is illegal, immoral, and fattening. How many people have thought about hearing (or have already heard) something like "oh, file sharing? You get 5 to 30 in a federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison for that, right?"
I haven't heard it much either, but just tell me with a straight face that the suits aren't trying to guide the public's perception in that direction.
Another thing I've got to get off my chest: One of the biggest complaints I've heard from the RIAA is that file-sharing programs make it "easy to search for and distribute files". I can think of some pre-P2P stuff that they should be going after, if the "ease of use" complaint is the biggest problem they have: the web, newsgroups, e-mail (well, for ease of distribution, not so much searching for new files to share).
Mod me, spank me, make me write bad checks. That's all I have to say about that.
Thought it was MS, never mind, my bad. ;)
Okay, okay, just RTFB (blurb) already. Not only does it refer to "Sun", which is a bringer of light and all things good and shiny, which is obviously anti-MS, but theSeriously, this doesn't seem like such a horrendous idea in and of itself, but I wonder if there are any companies x such that y number of users within the organization will not want to/be able to switch, or be required to run, say, Mac OSX on lime-green iThingies because they're tied to some Mac-only apps. Would companies still be charged per-employee in that case? Still a very good deal I'd argue, if said employees were in a significant minority, but some CTO out there might not like his $50K quarterly bonus being eaten into to the tune of $699...er, $700 for that handful of marketing drones. I'm sure that a question like this will pop up eventually, or not.
I've been primarily using SQL Server [release of the moment] throughout my working life, with a little teeny bit of Oracle and (very recently) turned MySQL from something I play with as a hobby into part of a project my boss has me working on. Of those three, only MySQL (arguably because I haven't been working with it in a business/production environment for even a year yet, but still) has never let me down. I've had all manner of glitches, inexplicable crashes, and entire tables changing their datatypes and horking the applications I had hooked up to them from Oracle & SQL Server, which I'll admit can probably be blamed on the clueless admins (whose most common response was "uh...data type?"), but I was exceptionally clueless when I started playing with MySQL a couple of years ago and I have yet to see any signs of horkage. Heck, I'm nowhere near MySQL-certifiable, and like the parent says I see no reason that it's not a good setup within certain conditions. I wouldn't use it for everything, mind you, but I also don't eat my soup with a pitchfork.
...though from the environments I've worked in, it appears that "the right tool for the job" is Phil, that creepy guy in Marketing. Ew.
But the remedy to problems like this is...to introduce people to alternatives to RIAA-backed crap.</snip> /. article reporting a lawsuit against the Litigation Instigation Association of Asshats for continuing to put itself forward as the "RIAA", in direct violation of several truth in advertising laws?
This is a useful tool that I discovered earlier today that purports to show whether or not buying a particular CD will support the very soul of evil, or a non-RIAA label/artist instead. I did a few quick searches and was pleasantly surprised by some, had my fears confirmed by others. Until someone proves to me that buying used will support the madness, that's the route I'll take for any RIAA-tainted stuff that I've just got to have for now.
How soon before the
Out of curiousity, and to find a list of labels & artists that I won't be supporting until the RIAA crumbles, I browsed on over to RIAA.org to look at their party line and see if I could find any heartfelt tributes to influential members of the Nazi party. I came across this, which says that in order to obtain a subpeona "The copyright owner may then present a subpoena request to the Clerk of the Court..." and then, farther down the page, states that people who object to the RIAA getting information about their identities should realize that "Simply sending a letter to the Clerk of the Court has no legal effect." In addition, "The DMCA does not require ISPs to notify subscribers that they've been served with a DMCA subpoena."
Now, I don't feel any better about a young disadvantaged honors student getting sued (they pay close to $30 a month for what? someone theorized that it was internet access and not KaZaa, but isn't that kind of steep unless the people in the friggin' HOUSING DEVELOPMENT can afford some kind of broadband?), but it seems to me that we're all 12-year-old girls, here. Forget the fact that the **AAs have millions of dollars that they're willing to throw at this, and few (if any) individuals have even a thousandth of that earmarked for defense against legal horking. The simple fact is, even if you and I are both on the exact same legal budget, I (as the copyright holder to 6 million lines of Windows code and the author of 17 Britney songs) have the high ground when the game starts if I decide to come after you. Of course that's only if I have "a good faith belief" that I might be able to get some money out of you.
That being said, I can't wait until this whole mess comes to a head, hopefully not in the RIAA's favor, and becomes the source of a new generation of really bad jokes. (So the top brass of SCO and RIAA are on this plane, right, and it's about to crash and there's only one parachute for every third person...)
From Amazon.com, result of a search for "Firefly DVD":
<snip>
Firefly - The Complete Series (2002)
Availability: NOT YET RELEASED: The studio is currently not producing this title on DVD, but to be notified when it is available, enter your e-mail address at right. You'll also be voting for this release; we'll let the studio know how many customers are waiting for this title.
</snip>
Does anyone else think that's a strange message to display, given that it's set to be released in December and people have gotten pre-orders already?
True, true. I agree with you completely, what with AOL not being a public service and all that.
I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that they have words to that effect in their customer contract.
I'm willing to agree with you. I've never read their TOS and I hope I'm never forced to, but I think that one would be hard-pressed to find an AOL-like service that doesn't have a limitation of the company's liability, "you only see what we want you to see while we agree to show it to you" clauses, and "we can/will change this agreement at any time, but only if we feel like it" bits. However, what about the people who don't always read that stuff in its entirety, a group that could be successfully argued is in the majority?
I mean, caveat emptor and all that sort of thing, but isn't there some sort of requirement that the AOL TV spots and promo CDs that you see all over the place accurrately portray the fact that server-side spam filters are in use that prevent mail from reaching the client, and the spam filters in question yield a nonzero number of false positives? Yes, truly intelligent internet users will steer clear of AOL anyway. Yes, real men use Linux. What about my mother-in-law, who expects AOL to "bring the wide world of the inter-web right to the front door"? (I know, I still can't talk sense into her...) Isn't there a responsibility to ensure that the service you talk about in your advertising bears some passing resemblance to the service that I'll get when I give you my credit card number because I liked the "6 million dollar man" knockoff ads?
Sure, it's probably all quite legal because AOL is its own entity, not beholden to G-d or man. Sure, if you believe all that crap about speed and reliability and uptime and how it'll help you score with supermodels, it's your own stupid fault. It's probably perfectly legal, to the extent of my IANAL-level knowledge of such things...but is it ethical?
People shuld learn to trust Microsoft just as most people trust their computer systems.
/.ers in general (angry or afraid)" will be true than "Performing <<action>> in a <<M$ operating system>> environment will always result in (bluescreen or no bluescreen)", due to the predictably evil nature of M$ and the unreliable nature of machines running Windoze. By this logic, people generally trust Microsoft a great deal more than most people trust their computer systems. Trust them to do what, exactly, is open to discussion.
Oh, we do, we do...
It's much more likely that the statement "M$ will do <<something>> that makes
The problem isn't ease of tracking down eBay sellers. In a perfect world, or even one that works the way I sort of expect it to, eBay sellers are very easy to track down. under normal conditions, eBay provides buyers and sellers with methods of contacting one another, and presumably (not speaking from experience here) provides some sort of escalation process in the event of a problem. If 133t_eBayer42 promises to sell you something and doesn't send the Darth Maul lunchbox once you've paid him, I'm pretty sure that's fraud (taking money in exchange for goods that are never delivered), and LEOs typically investigate fraud if it's reported to them (I said in a perfect world). Presumably, this would involve a court order for eBay to hand over its seller info, and bang! Easy to track. What bothers me is the theoretical guy who makes a business of selling crap on eBay out of his home, or the college kid who sells his Autographed Bruce Campbell Femur (RARE!!!) for five bucks and never sells anything again. Neither one of them has ever had a problem with eBay, their buyers, or other sellers, and are both fairly decent human beings. Both of these people can have their personal information laid bare to LEOs on a whim, simply because the guy in his house pissed off his ex-wife, who is now dating a cop who decides to have some fun with him, or because somebody takes offense to finding a femur available for sale on the internet.
I agree completely that there need to be controls and consequences for scumbags on eBay just like any other arena, especially if said scumbag never sent me that MIP TELETUBBIES PR0N DVD (All Regionz) that I won. I just don't see where lack of court order + eBay handing out personal information right and left + oblivious sellers who probably never realized this (or never read the agreement when they signed up, which is another thread altogether) = necessarily a good thing.
One could easily argue that if I don't like it, I should just stop selling my navel lint online, at least at that particular site. Fine with me, if that's the only way my info will ever truly be safe from that mouth-breathing cro-magnon grunt who used to beat me up in the third grade...who is now one of the LEOs in question. He may even be serving and protecting you today. Cheers!
I have to agree with the parent here. MySQL and MSQL is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same caliber as any other O'Reilly book that I own or have read. If I had paid full price for my copy, I would probably have been disappointed. As someone who doesn't work professionally with MySQL and will probably never need the level of impressive knowledge and coolness that comes from most of the "in a Nutshell" books, however, it's not a particularly offensive read. Yes, it's probably less useful than the aforementioned online manual, but I wouldn't hold it up as the database world's answer to Valley of the Dolls or anything.
That'll teach me to skim reviews. Also provides a reminder that there are more than two online booksellers on the planet. D'oh. Interestingly, the entire library section of Wheaton's blog site links to Amazon, and the books in "What I'm Currently Reading" and "Essential Computer and Geek Books" are...intruiguing.
After checking Amazon and Barnes & Noble for the ISBN and title, there is no record of this book anywhere according to the my two favorite online book peddlers. Thae makes me sad.
For the first time ever, inspired by this article, I checked out WIL WHEATON DOT NET (the newest programming language from M$? Aye, sir...), and was very pleased with the experience. Not all blogs suck, apparently. Yes, I'm a geek.
If anyone can find a dead-tree merchant who's taking pre-orders for (or acknowledges the existence of) books by Wil Wheaton, post it here? Please?
Certain companies already monitor their employees to what I believe is an obsessive extent, and the ability to take a "scan" of what's in front of the monitor every X minutes is something I can see being used and abused by the "w3 0wnz j00" philosophy that a lot of businesses have with respect to their employees. Worse yet, look at this technology after a few iterations and a few million dollars, and you've got screen = scanner = webcam.
In the dark, uncertain future of cubicle dwellers, there will be no need for paranoia...your computer is, in fact, watching you.
1. Put contractors in vital development roles
Seriously, I can think of a number of other companies that have similar caste systems, sometimes even within the hierarchy of permanent positions in the company. Unless I missed the graphic descriptions of inhuman torture and anal probing, I can think of several businesses that I've been told are much worse places to temp for.2. Treat all contractors like utter crap
3. Exclude contractors from having the most current and accurate information with respect to project specs, company standards, and their team's vision & progress by excluding them from important meetings
4. Depend heavily on the quality of the work the contractors do, including their code in the latest version of MS BugMaker 2003.
5. Whine about the mean lawyers and judges who make you play nice with the other kids
6. Charge an exorbitant per-seat license for each application that expires approximately 27 minutes and 3 seconds after registration, but includes a feature that automatically takes out a second mortgage on your home so that you're able to continue working
7. Profit!
Reading this article I couldn't help but think that MS is doing the same thing to contractor abuse that it did with DOS a couple of decades ago- they didn't actually invent the concept, but it's been lovingly adopted and taken in directions that only MS would dare to go. Where would you like to be screwed today?
Amen to that. In this particular instance, I think that the golden rule should apply...either that or "an eye for an eye", take your pick. In the interest of fairness, this gentleman should have all of the same rights and protections of his personal contact information that he extends to the rest of the world. What this will mean in practice, at least in the way that I understand the concept, is that Thou Shalt Not Spam. Attempting to enforce a double standard that favors spammers could have hordes of geeks (and even normal end-users) up in arms, which is probably A Very Bad Thing. The most amusing bit from that article was the poor spammer's claim that he'd probably have heard about it by now if he were doing something wrong. Of course, that's referring to the allegations of piracy, but maybe it's time for anti-spammers everywhere to let him know that yes, spamming is in fact doing something wrong. Be sure to include several flashy, multiple-megabyte images in your HTML-formatted message, as well as a prominently displayed notice that "THIS IS NOT SPAM, you have solicited this e-mail by...etc." at the bottom of the page. Give me a freaking break.
Next we'll hear complaints from AOL when they receive the shipment of 13 million "X number of free hours!" CDs that I've been collecting over the years. Bunch o' spineless whiners.
My concern exactly. Also, what about black eyes, pinkeye, or some sort of serious facial injury or issues with contact lenses possibly inhibiting a correct scan or one of about a billion other variables? I'm not familiar enough with the tech involved to comment intelligently on the things that could mess up an otherwise good iris, but someone with two glass eyes would certainly throw things off for any system I can imagine. Possibly a blood/DNA scan for those people who don't have "valid" irises to scan? Is anyone else thinking that TV commercial with the password/blood sample/hair sample security system on all the office PCs where the entire staff was bald? I have seen the future, and it makes me queasy.
I think that the practice of letting computers/searches/scripts do all of the work without applying any human intelligence to the process has become more and more common. Yes, it's worse in my mind when the BSA does it because I'm biased against them in the first place, but to be fair it's spread to just about everybody in my recent experience. I just moved, and when my wife and I changed our driver's licenses over she got a semi-threatening letter because she didn't also change over her car registration (our only car is registered in my name for no reason I can think of). I recently had my account put on hold by PayPal and then restored, but in the interim I sent a question to their help staff regarding something else entirely. Someone (apparently a bot?) from PP replied to me and said, basically "we can't restore your account until you do X, Y , and Z. Please contact us if you have any further questions. Thank you!" I don't think it's a good thing that organizations have become this brain-dead, but the BSA certainly can't patent a method for making themselves look like idiots by letting a search tool plow blindly through a set of data for them. Plenty of prior art there...