Unfortunately, due to a complete lack of a standard for implementing interactive ads (unless you call Flash a standard, which you could almost do these days), Flash is only gunna be more and more popular as advertisers get less and less afraid to run them and agencies get more and more saavy at producing Flash creatives.
/. may have said that they wish to avoid them, but if their ultimate goal is to command higher prices for their inventory (ie, our eyeballs), I highly doubt they will be able to completely steer clear of Flash.
Well, that would be opt-in. I just mean that we should be classifying what you have to do, not based on _what_ data is collected, but a kind of earmarked 'intention' for use stated up front at collection time. If they wanna sell, opt-in. If they wanna mail you, opt-in. If they want to build multidimentional databases to analyse their consumer demographics (no selling, no contacting you, no sharing, no partnering), opt-out. I dont want _anything_ sold ever, but I do want them to be able to use my geographic location and age, gender, sexual orientation, etc, anything else, in order for them to know who they're attempting to serve.
This got me thinking that when you go into a store, in the very least, employees and gauge the demographics they are catering to, and adjust the way the store operates accordingly.
You have to admit, much of the information they want when you buy (where ya from, how old are you) is 'casually' available in physical stores. Online retailers have no such luxery of asking their sales force (cause there is none) who's buying, so I really dont think it's asking to much for the companies to want the provision of that kind of information to be standard procedure when buying online.
The physical retailers can provide this information based on sales data, the retailers physical location, and by virtue of the sales force being physically located where the buyer is. Virtual retailers arn't asking for anything new, other than potentially the granularity (IE, you live in this zipcode instead of you shop in this zipcode.)
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) said it continues to support industry self-regulation on privacy.
I support segreating 'opt-in', 'opt-out' not by what information is collected, but by what you are allowed to do with that information. 'opt-out' collection should allow retailers to do internal aggregated sales analytics, while you MUST provide 'opt-in' collection when you wish to use that information to proactively contact the customer.
yeah, and the beauty is, it 'breaks' the control that corperations are attempting to leverage on their consumer base through their partnerships.
For instance, if FedEX has an API I can hook into, I am not forced to use some partner of theirs [AB Inc, for the purposes of this example] because AB Inc has special permission or some manual corperate-driven method for providing their services integrated with FedEx. Now I can hook right into FedEx myself and not be forced to follow the 'carrot' of seamless integration based on their partnership strategies that force me into 'buyins' I dont really want to participate in.
Well, maybe a layman like me is best suited to take a stab at this from my casual knowledge on the subject:
Solar power: cells are expensive, relatively inefficient, and are not suited for all locations.
Wind power: ?? this is used where its effective, but again, not always on, you need _lots_ of mills or huge ones to get anything useful?
Nuclear power: considering that they are gunna start burying waste below mountains in nevada, isn't this somewhat self explainitory? nuclear power is great, but anything that makes garbage always comes back to haunt us, especially if that garbage is pretty dangerous.
And none of these three energy collection/production methods is suitable for the 'on the go' purposes of the car (except maybe solar I guess).
I think the unbquity with which hydrogen could be used is it's big selling point. Anywhere, anytime; and I'd imagine lots of things could be retrofitted to use hydrogen much easier than the alternatives?
Am I one of the only people that contend that THIS is what the whole 'web services' thing is all about?
I think this is ultra cool. Imagine, if you made an application that had skins or used plugins, or whatever. You could have an in-app browser, powered by google, to search for new add-ons to applications, etc.
.. but the tools to create biological viruses are not (generally speaking) available to my next door neighbours 14 year old. So, I'm not as interested in being aware of the nitty gritty details of potential biological threats.
Viruses, however.. enjoy a freedom in the form of 0$ in startup costs. Yes, it makes the posted code all that much more likely to be exploited, but it also means I'm at more risk in casually being infected at any point in time by anybody, regardless of their access to biological and chemical lab equipment.
Which is why I'd rather be aware of the nitty gritty details myself, so I can take appropriate action, such as stopping from running the software or patching the software myself, depending on the severity of the exploit and the true to life trivialness of its implementation and propogation. I've always felt that tha bad will __always__ happen, and the worst you can do is keep the good guys in the dark.
Can you please explain what part of a 'Warcraft III beta plays like this' article constitudes signalling support for the DMCA? Even, support for Vivendi, politically?
If slashdot, which relies on serving the hundreds upon hundreds of political alignments in its audience, refrained from being 'hypocritical', as you see it, there wouldn't be anything to write about. Nobody's hands are clean, so there's no point in trying to take/. down a notch.
In other words, you're going to be impotant if you dont play with those who's hands are a little dirty; it's the ultimate intent that should dictate who you support, and here I think/. is still miles ahead of most major media outlets, who seem to like the anti-DMCA thing as a nice side story to the whole tech industry; good fodder for quirky 'russian programmer arrested' articles.
> Seems like they could hire some staff and do this stuff in-house.
Nah, its must more cost effective to use ad networks; you can chain them together using redirects or rotate them. You basically have some flexibility if you are a large site, in terms of juggling multiple networks.
At any rate, building reporting systems for the immense data that comes from advertising is not trivial, especially considering the kind of criteria (unique users, frequency rate, etc) advertisers use to do media buys. And you need the reporting to sell your inventory effectively...
> Think about all the 12-year-olds -- script kiddies or not -- who will pretend to know a language and just type in a random collection of letters.
I dont know if you remember what it was like to be 12, but while I might have done what you'd proposed once, twice, I can't imagine the amount of 'noise' in this translation service coming from 12 years old who finally find their life long mischevious passion of offering 'bogus' translation services.
I mean, really, do you see 12 year olds downloading a distrbuted translation app, translating 'bogus'ly, and getting their jolies from this in any quantity that dimishes the value or effectiveness of this project? 12 year olds have much more important things to do, like learn how great masturbation is, and play videogames, and other forums where 'abuse' is fairly indistiguishable from proper use.
THATS THE FUCKING BEAUTY OF IT! Muwhaha, the way it is, if you do the paperwork, you get the credit! It's a lovely system for those of us that can hire office administrators....;)
It really is like this tho. Bill Gates was the opportunist, not the inventor. I mean, c'mon, Beethoven used to steal like 3 bars verbatim from other composers works. This story is the first/. story in a TON OF TIME to actually put some things in perspective, instead of holding the maginifying glass up to a social pattern most people don't even appreciate. The people rewarded are the ones who put the last piece in place. Hey, Newton said it best, I think? What was it, something about "standing on the shoulders of giants."
Haha, good thing we're strengthening the laws to protect the 'inventors', 'authors' and and 'composers'.;)
Re:Just because you _can_ doesn't mean you _wanna_
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Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 2
> Nope, that's just denial
Or maybe my lack of experience (only about 5 years in this industry, 2 as a techie, 3 as a programmer). Here, I'm pulling from my past two bosses. Both were someone that our investors, and my mother would call 'techies'. They wern't programmers, tho. And talented programmers in both jobs got up and left at cruicial points - not because they wern't getting paid high enough to sell their skillset souls, but because their skillset souls were unavailable at any price.
> And that's a good point, but not one that anybody except a mind-reader might have taken from your previous post.
Thats why I always enjoy taking these discussions so far... I find useful, valuable and new perspecives only once I find some context for someone's position and once I've been able to present them with how their message should be packaged, and because I know my messages dont always come across the first time either.:)
I'm still gunna stick with my distiction between techies and the programmers tho. I think the techies screwed shit up (including those able to program), but I stand firm that born-and-bread-I-made-choose-your-own-adventure-ga mes-when-I-was-7 programmers were always hesitant to oversell a technology who's shortcomings and differences between reality and brochure were only intimately and truely known by them.
Re:Just because you _can_ doesn't mean you _wanna_
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Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 2
>The techies were in the vanguard for that debacle
Um, maybe the opportunitists who knew enough about the technical side to hire programmers and such.. I'd say that generally, the programmers were not the 'techies' you're referring to. In fact, those 'techies' were simply one part pseudotechie (enough to sound like a technie to non techies, ie investors), one part management, and nine parts blind opportunists. In my experience, there were years there were management of people was completetly incidental to the management of perceived opportunities.
I dont have a difficult time concurring that lots of young technical saavy management types fooled alot of other types into thinking that headstones.com was a surefire money maker. However, I really dont think you'll find lots of hardcore programmers who honestly believed that the very knowledge and technology that ostracized and isolated them from relating to much of the non-techie society (ie, like when using websites to buy stuff was considered very 'geeky') would be the template for mainstream business money making tommorow like those pseudotechie opportunists.
And my parent post, in commenting about management, was more in reference to the young, new breed of manager rather than the older, admittedly more sane and skleptical manager. I find that managers with much more experience dont have near as much touble accepting my original contention (that its a bad idea to have people building things that they cannot comprehend the value of) than the younger set. The younger set seems to believe that the majority of talented, perceptive, well adjusted programmers are in it solely for the paycheque, instead of (what I believe from what I've seen) wanting to be able to better their world using the skills they either developed or were born with.
There may be a greater number of people than ever who can justify working only for the dough involved, but I think its a frighteningly reductionist generalization about a group of people who may be representing and developing the next major chunk of infrastructure that your society and economy depends on. History is rife with examples of how the morals, ethics, and values (where values is the most important factor in the context of this discussion) of specialized skilled workers cannot simply be bought, no matter the cost. Anyone who suggests programmers should just be able to show up, code, go home, and no give a damn is either going to find themselves with a very unloyal, costly group of people to support, or forced into admitting that despite there being a need for something, if nobody wants to build it, it may benifit society as a whole to face the reality of unrequited demand.
> Much better than building things that nobody wants, that's for sure.
Obvious rhetoric of the week award, just for you! My point was its still not as good (both for society, and for the quality of production) as when the builders value what they're building in the same manner as those demanding the product do. And my point was that that factor is often ignored in this day and age; I think the quality of things being built is suffering for it.
As the webmaster and CEO of statistis.com, I am hereby bringing to your attention my intention to sue the pants off your libelious ass.
Satan can not effectively and profitably doom souls and turn humanity to the evils of sin in a community where sladerous remarks can confuse consumers and associate his practices with those of the ill reputed petswarehouse.com.
Expect a call from my lawyer, Satan. (not that his choice of earthly career should be a surprise at this point;)
Just because you _can_ doesn't mean you _wanna_
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Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My main pet peeve with the IT generation of managers is that they equate what is technically possible ("Hey, programmer, can we do this?") with what their minions actually want to do.
I dont think you'll find many construction workers that like to build useless buildings (where the mgmt. in this scenario would cry, "Why not! You're building stuff! You're a builder!". In my mind, management tends to ignore the social aspects of project planning. I always like to say that I could write a scalable distributed inventory management solution in binary, if I really had to, but because of how utterly soul sucking and unfun that would be, I promise no matter how self-disciplined I might be, it will suck. Simply because I won't believe in _what_ I'm building, and thus my work will reflect that.
Management needs to do a better job of understanding why programmers and techies often seem to resentful when being assigned projects - as the.com flop showed, those grumblins and skeptical snide remarks by your programmers are often going to be the first sign that what you're building might not be worth the social and technical trouble that the project will cause.
Now, much of the IT industry is about spurring people against their will using rewards such as high salaries and job perks (nerf guns anyone?) to entice them to building things that businesses want. Programmers and techies can spot and sniff the 'empty promises' in technology (and there are tons), and it is a sign of bad management that ignores those types of hesitations and flies on the basis of what is 'techically possible' alone.
Arhg, running out of namespace!
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Exegesis 4 Out
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Ahhh, more control keywords! Good thing most perl code I've seen doesn't bother with the trouble of readable variable names, or running out of variable namespace would be an issue!;)
(BTW, I like perl. Like a big brother you just can't stop teasing...:)
1) Dillution: the more bad movies that come out, the less movies people will 'risk' seeing. So sure, there is a risk to releasing bad movies, because the more bad movies there are, the more people will likely opt to spend the night bowling instead of braving the latest release.
2) A movie can be so bad, it can lose money. Yes, it happens. (I can't say how often/rarely).
That being said, the risk is nearly irrelevant these days for three reasons I can think of:
1) Many movies are produced in a different way than they used to. When going forward with a movie project, extensive market research is conducted. Many, MANY movies now adays are based off of brands ("Spacejam" was the Jordan brand. Toy Story 2 was the Toy Story brand. Etc, etc.).. so while the movie may be crap, if the market research is done correctly, they tend to know that there are enough devotees to particular brands and franchises to garauntee a certain amount of revenue regardless of the quality of the film. Think about how many geeks saw Resident Evil.. it's common place to say, "I've gotta see this movie, cause I'm a total Resident Evil fan! I know it'll suck, but I have to!" There is a cultural emphasis placed on being pious to particular brands and franchises built into movies these days, so the risk of losing money on a poorly produced movie is reduced in this day and age because of the garaunteed revenues coming from people who feel they must pay penetance to a brand (or celebrity, or director, or franchise) regardless of how good the movie is.
2) Since the revenues in movies rely heavily on advertising, more so than they used to, X% (where X% is more than ever before from my understanding) of the costs of movies are recouped before they even hit the theatre.
3) Most movies can afford to to TERRIBLY in theatres. Rentals and DVD market sales generally result in breaking even, even on the movies that were in and out of theatres in a matter of days/weeks.
I dont think you can say that there is 'no risk at all', but due to the nature of brands co-opting cultural space these days, and revenues linked to in-movie adverterising, I believe those risks are at an all time low, or do not have the same weight in determining whether or not to go forward with projects as they used to.
As an example of this in action, and in reference to the parent post:
http://www.battlefieldearth.com/news/dvdtops.htm l
Battlefield Earth has made 72 mill against a 55 mill budget, including DVD sales. As a movie that was critiqued as one of the worst movies ever made (and I was outside the theatre on sneak prev. night for this movie when everyone got to see it for free, and EVERY SINGLE PERSON coming out of that movie wanted those 2 hours from their life back. EVERY SINGLE PERSON, out of maybe 250 people.)
This statement is, by definition, uncertain and unprovable. Two comments:
1. Inventing a wheel is a fixed time act. Once it's invented, its up to you to judge whether the returns you see were worth the fixed cost of inventing it. Its entirely possible and common that 'inventing the wheel again' is cheaper than renting it.
2. If it really is cheaper, why does the law need to force people to 'rent' that wheel? It seems to me that people would 'rent' the wheel in the first place, without even trying to invent the wheel themselves (behaviour that is totally at odds with what I see in my little corner of the software development world) if it made economic sense to do so. Why would you need a 20 year ban on 'reinventing it yourself' when it makes more economic sense (where time is almost the ONLY money required in most streams of software development) to do it yourself?
Dont get me wrong, I think patents in some shape or form are needed, but I have far more problems with the expiration dates, and cost of admission to the patent game than the droves of inapprorpriately approved patents being handed out. I can't help but think that long lease patents actually remove the impedus for a developer to innovate (once he has gotten one patent), because you can cruise on the success of a patent you got approved 5 years ago, as opposed to having moved on to develop and innovate more stuff. Those who continue to innovate and develop within the lifetime of another patent that they are seeing good royalties from are obviously in the game to innovate regardless of what 'motivators' are put into the law, and thus pretty much represent the case that patents are not designed to protect the inventor, but rather simply to force innovation that one seeks to profit from into the public domain. In so far as that goes, I think it shows that when you give patents longer life times, you are benifitting companies who can capitalize on enforcing and protecting royalty fees, discouraging would be inventors from bothering to patent work (and thus keeping that persons ideas from being published to increase the knowledge base of a society), and beginning to encourage, as we see plain as day today, the art of patenting novel technologies to be pushed on the market, simply for the sake of having another patent to add to your revenue stream.
> Fact: corporations don't patent things, individuals patent things
Fact: you need patent lawyers to apply for and to protect patents. Applying and protecting patents is extremely expensive. While the legal patent holder, in name, might be an individual (well, usually a few individuals), patents are virtually unattainable and unprotectable unless you're a corp. So, by the letter, you're right. In practice, nothing could be furthur from the truth. Note that this is not due to the US patent office granting patents where it shouldn't. (Although it could be argued that some of the cost of interfacing with the patent system is due to the large volume of patents in the US patent office collection, although I contend that its a classic example of how unchecked capitalism leads to the 'creation' of industries and 'middlemen'.)
> In fact, it mandates publishing your work so that others can benefit from it.
Can you explain to me how making the world aware of your idea, but a slave to your licensing terms for the next 20 years, benifits people? As RMS pointed out, people shared more often before all this IP furor began. While patents may mandate publishing, the fact is, there is plenty of historical evidence to show that most people will share their discoveries with others regardless of any 'inventor protection' system put in place.
> Well the last time I looked Netscape was fucking FREE
But what about the first time you looked? As memory serves, Netscape had to offer their browser for free because MS started offering IE for free. MS wouldn't have been able to afford to offer IE for free had they not used their success as an OS monopoly in the browser market.
Why does it not surprise me that XP tech support lacks any knowledge on the history of their own companies wrong doings?
I'm only pointing this out because you're asking for replies, and you seem to omit the aforementionned detail in this post, which really just furthur drives home why you work for Satan:)
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, due to a complete lack of a standard for implementing interactive ads (unless you call Flash a standard, which you could almost do these days), Flash is only gunna be more and more popular as advertisers get less and less afraid to run them and agencies get more and more saavy at producing Flash creatives.
/. may have said that they wish to avoid them, but if their ultimate goal is to command higher prices for their inventory (ie, our eyeballs), I highly doubt they will be able to completely steer clear of Flash.
Well, that would be opt-in. I just mean that we should be classifying what you have to do, not based on _what_ data is collected, but a kind of earmarked 'intention' for use stated up front at collection time. If they wanna sell, opt-in. If they wanna mail you, opt-in. If they want to build multidimentional databases to analyse their consumer demographics (no selling, no contacting you, no sharing, no partnering), opt-out. I dont want _anything_ sold ever, but I do want them to be able to use my geographic location and age, gender, sexual orientation, etc, anything else, in order for them to know who they're attempting to serve.
>and buying at a physical store doesn't lead to increased spam, or even junk mail.
You're kidding, right? Many stores request contact information if you want a warranty, and then just start forwarding promos and flyers to your house.
Don't be naive.
This got me thinking that when you go into a store, in the very least, employees and gauge the demographics they are catering to, and adjust the way the store operates accordingly.
You have to admit, much of the information they want when you buy (where ya from, how old are you) is 'casually' available in physical stores. Online retailers have no such luxery of asking their sales force (cause there is none) who's buying, so I really dont think it's asking to much for the companies to want the provision of that kind of information to be standard procedure when buying online.
The physical retailers can provide this information based on sales data, the retailers physical location, and by virtue of the sales force being physically located where the buyer is. Virtual retailers arn't asking for anything new, other than potentially the granularity (IE, you live in this zipcode instead of you shop in this zipcode.)
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) said it continues to support industry self-regulation on privacy.
I support segreating 'opt-in', 'opt-out' not by what information is collected, but by what you are allowed to do with that information. 'opt-out' collection should allow retailers to do internal aggregated sales analytics, while you MUST provide 'opt-in' collection when you wish to use that information to proactively contact the customer.
> The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) said it continues to support industry self-regulation on privacy.
I get the feeling they've already mailed out 50,000,000 emails and 40,000,000 smail mail flyers to convince the public of this.
yeah, and the beauty is, it 'breaks' the control that corperations are attempting to leverage on their consumer base through their partnerships.
For instance, if FedEX has an API I can hook into, I am not forced to use some partner of theirs [AB Inc, for the purposes of this example] because AB Inc has special permission or some manual corperate-driven method for providing their services integrated with FedEx. Now I can hook right into FedEx myself and not be forced to follow the 'carrot' of seamless integration based on their partnership strategies that force me into 'buyins' I dont really want to participate in.
Well, maybe a layman like me is best suited to take a stab at this from my casual knowledge on the subject:
Solar power: cells are expensive, relatively inefficient, and are not suited for all locations.
Wind power: ?? this is used where its effective, but again, not always on, you need _lots_ of mills or huge ones to get anything useful?
Nuclear power: considering that they are gunna start burying waste below mountains in nevada, isn't this somewhat self explainitory? nuclear power is great, but anything that makes garbage always comes back to haunt us, especially if that garbage is pretty dangerous.
And none of these three energy collection/production methods is suitable for the 'on the go' purposes of the car (except maybe solar I guess).
I think the unbquity with which hydrogen could be used is it's big selling point. Anywhere, anytime; and I'd imagine lots of things could be retrofitted to use hydrogen much easier than the alternatives?
Am I one of the only people that contend that THIS is what the whole 'web services' thing is all about?
I think this is ultra cool. Imagine, if you made an application that had skins or used plugins, or whatever. You could have an in-app browser, powered by google, to search for new add-ons to applications, etc.
Actually, the possibilities are quite cool.
Viruses, however
Which is why I'd rather be aware of the nitty gritty details myself, so I can take appropriate action, such as stopping from running the software or patching the software myself, depending on the severity of the exploit and the true to life trivialness of its implementation and propogation. I've always felt that tha bad will __always__ happen, and the worst you can do is keep the good guys in the dark.
spyware is not malicious, although I'm not sure the same thing can be said about its creators ...
Can you please explain what part of a 'Warcraft III beta plays like this' article constitudes signalling support for the DMCA? Even, support for Vivendi, politically?
/. down a notch.
/. is still miles ahead of most major media outlets, who seem to like the anti-DMCA thing as a nice side story to the whole tech industry; good fodder for quirky 'russian programmer arrested' articles.
If slashdot, which relies on serving the hundreds upon hundreds of political alignments in its audience, refrained from being 'hypocritical', as you see it, there wouldn't be anything to write about. Nobody's hands are clean, so there's no point in trying to take
In other words, you're going to be impotant if you dont play with those who's hands are a little dirty; it's the ultimate intent that should dictate who you support, and here I think
> Seems like they could hire some staff and do this stuff in-house.
...
Nah, its must more cost effective to use ad networks; you can chain them together using redirects or rotate them. You basically have some flexibility if you are a large site, in terms of juggling multiple networks.
At any rate, building reporting systems for the immense data that comes from advertising is not trivial, especially considering the kind of criteria (unique users, frequency rate, etc) advertisers use to do media buys. And you need the reporting to sell your inventory effectively
> Think about all the 12-year-olds -- script kiddies or not -- who will pretend to know a language and just type in a random collection of letters.
I dont know if you remember what it was like to be 12, but while I might have done what you'd proposed once, twice, I can't imagine the amount of 'noise' in this translation service coming from 12 years old who finally find their life long mischevious passion of offering 'bogus' translation services.
I mean, really, do you see 12 year olds downloading a distrbuted translation app, translating 'bogus'ly, and getting their jolies from this in any quantity that dimishes the value or effectiveness of this project? 12 year olds have much more important things to do, like learn how great masturbation is, and play videogames, and other forums where 'abuse' is fairly indistiguishable from proper use.
THATS THE FUCKING BEAUTY OF IT! Muwhaha, the way it is, if you do the paperwork, you get the credit! It's a lovely system for those of us that can hire office administrators .... ;)
/. story in a TON OF TIME to actually put some things in perspective, instead of holding the maginifying glass up to a social pattern most people don't even appreciate. The people rewarded are the ones who put the last piece in place. Hey, Newton said it best, I think? What was it, something about "standing on the shoulders of giants."
;)
It really is like this tho. Bill Gates was the opportunist, not the inventor. I mean, c'mon, Beethoven used to steal like 3 bars verbatim from other composers works. This story is the first
Haha, good thing we're strengthening the laws to protect the 'inventors', 'authors' and and 'composers'.
> Nope, that's just denial
... I find useful, valuable and new perspecives only once I find some context for someone's position and once I've been able to present them with how their message should be packaged, and because I know my messages dont always come across the first time either. :)
a mes-when-I-was-7 programmers were always hesitant to oversell a technology who's shortcomings and differences between reality and brochure were only intimately and truely known by them.
Or maybe my lack of experience (only about 5 years in this industry, 2 as a techie, 3 as a programmer). Here, I'm pulling from my past two bosses. Both were someone that our investors, and my mother would call 'techies'. They wern't programmers, tho. And talented programmers in both jobs got up and left at cruicial points - not because they wern't getting paid high enough to sell their skillset souls, but because their skillset souls were unavailable at any price.
> And that's a good point, but not one that anybody except a mind-reader might have taken from your previous post.
Thats why I always enjoy taking these discussions so far
I'm still gunna stick with my distiction between techies and the programmers tho. I think the techies screwed shit up (including those able to program), but I stand firm that born-and-bread-I-made-choose-your-own-adventure-g
>The techies were in the vanguard for that debacle
Um, maybe the opportunitists who knew enough about the technical side to hire programmers and such.. I'd say that generally, the programmers were not the 'techies' you're referring to. In fact, those 'techies' were simply one part pseudotechie (enough to sound like a technie to non techies, ie investors), one part management, and nine parts blind opportunists. In my experience, there were years there were management of people was completetly incidental to the management of perceived opportunities.
I dont have a difficult time concurring that lots of young technical saavy management types fooled alot of other types into thinking that headstones.com was a surefire money maker. However, I really dont think you'll find lots of hardcore programmers who honestly believed that the very knowledge and technology that ostracized and isolated them from relating to much of the non-techie society (ie, like when using websites to buy stuff was considered very 'geeky') would be the template for mainstream business money making tommorow like those pseudotechie opportunists.
And my parent post, in commenting about management, was more in reference to the young, new breed of manager rather than the older, admittedly more sane and skleptical manager. I find that managers with much more experience dont have near as much touble accepting my original contention (that its a bad idea to have people building things that they cannot comprehend the value of) than the younger set. The younger set seems to believe that the majority of talented, perceptive, well adjusted programmers are in it solely for the paycheque, instead of (what I believe from what I've seen) wanting to be able to better their world using the skills they either developed or were born with.
There may be a greater number of people than ever who can justify working only for the dough involved, but I think its a frighteningly reductionist generalization about a group of people who may be representing and developing the next major chunk of infrastructure that your society and economy depends on. History is rife with examples of how the morals, ethics, and values (where values is the most important factor in the context of this discussion) of specialized skilled workers cannot simply be bought, no matter the cost. Anyone who suggests programmers should just be able to show up, code, go home, and no give a damn is either going to find themselves with a very unloyal, costly group of people to support, or forced into admitting that despite there being a need for something, if nobody wants to build it, it may benifit society as a whole to face the reality of unrequited demand.
> Much better than building things that nobody wants, that's for sure.
Obvious rhetoric of the week award, just for you! My point was its still not as good (both for society, and for the quality of production) as when the builders value what they're building in the same manner as those demanding the product do. And my point was that that factor is often ignored in this day and age; I think the quality of things being built is suffering for it.
er, satanists.com
and yes, its a joke. i have no idea whats at that site, and I'm too lazy to check.
As the webmaster and CEO of statistis.com, I am hereby bringing to your attention my intention to sue the pants off your libelious ass.
;)
Satan can not effectively and profitably doom souls and turn humanity to the evils of sin in a community where sladerous remarks can confuse consumers and associate his practices with those of the ill reputed petswarehouse.com.
Expect a call from my lawyer, Satan. (not that his choice of earthly career should be a surprise at this point
My main pet peeve with the IT generation of managers is that they equate what is technically possible ("Hey, programmer, can we do this?") with what their minions actually want to do.
.com flop showed, those grumblins and skeptical snide remarks by your programmers are often going to be the first sign that what you're building might not be worth the social and technical trouble that the project will cause.
I dont think you'll find many construction workers that like to build useless buildings (where the mgmt. in this scenario would cry, "Why not! You're building stuff! You're a builder!". In my mind, management tends to ignore the social aspects of project planning. I always like to say that I could write a scalable distributed inventory management solution in binary, if I really had to, but because of how utterly soul sucking and unfun that would be, I promise no matter how self-disciplined I might be, it will suck. Simply because I won't believe in _what_ I'm building, and thus my work will reflect that.
Management needs to do a better job of understanding why programmers and techies often seem to resentful when being assigned projects - as the
Now, much of the IT industry is about spurring people against their will using rewards such as high salaries and job perks (nerf guns anyone?) to entice them to building things that businesses want. Programmers and techies can spot and sniff the 'empty promises' in technology (and there are tons), and it is a sign of bad management that ignores those types of hesitations and flies on the basis of what is 'techically possible' alone.
Ahhh, more control keywords! Good thing most perl code I've seen doesn't bother with the trouble of readable variable names, or running out of variable namespace would be an issue! ;)
... :)
(BTW, I like perl. Like a big brother you just can't stop teasing
Well, there is a risk. It's twofold:
.. so while the movie may be crap, if the market research is done correctly, they tend to know that there are enough devotees to particular brands and franchises to garauntee a certain amount of revenue regardless of the quality of the film. Think about how many geeks saw Resident Evil .. it's common place to say, "I've gotta see this movie, cause I'm a total Resident Evil fan! I know it'll suck, but I have to!" There is a cultural emphasis placed on being pious to particular brands and franchises built into movies these days, so the risk of losing money on a poorly produced movie is reduced in this day and age because of the garaunteed revenues coming from people who feel they must pay penetance to a brand (or celebrity, or director, or franchise) regardless of how good the movie is.
m l
1) Dillution: the more bad movies that come out, the less movies people will 'risk' seeing. So sure, there is a risk to releasing bad movies, because the more bad movies there are, the more people will likely opt to spend the night bowling instead of braving the latest release.
2) A movie can be so bad, it can lose money. Yes, it happens. (I can't say how often/rarely).
That being said, the risk is nearly irrelevant these days for three reasons I can think of:
1) Many movies are produced in a different way than they used to. When going forward with a movie project, extensive market research is conducted. Many, MANY movies now adays are based off of brands ("Spacejam" was the Jordan brand. Toy Story 2 was the Toy Story brand. Etc, etc.)
2) Since the revenues in movies rely heavily on advertising, more so than they used to, X% (where X% is more than ever before from my understanding) of the costs of movies are recouped before they even hit the theatre.
3) Most movies can afford to to TERRIBLY in theatres. Rentals and DVD market sales generally result in breaking even, even on the movies that were in and out of theatres in a matter of days/weeks.
I dont think you can say that there is 'no risk at all', but due to the nature of brands co-opting cultural space these days, and revenues linked to in-movie adverterising, I believe those risks are at an all time low, or do not have the same weight in determining whether or not to go forward with projects as they used to.
As an example of this in action, and in reference to the parent post:
http://www.battlefieldearth.com/news/dvdtops.ht
Battlefield Earth has made 72 mill against a 55 mill budget, including DVD sales. As a movie that was critiqued as one of the worst movies ever made (and I was outside the theatre on sneak prev. night for this movie when everyone got to see it for free, and EVERY SINGLE PERSON coming out of that movie wanted those 2 hours from their life back. EVERY SINGLE PERSON, out of maybe 250 people.)
This statement is, by definition, uncertain and unprovable. Two comments:
1. Inventing a wheel is a fixed time act. Once it's invented, its up to you to judge whether the returns you see were worth the fixed cost of inventing it. Its entirely possible and common that 'inventing the wheel again' is cheaper than renting it.
2. If it really is cheaper, why does the law need to force people to 'rent' that wheel? It seems to me that people would 'rent' the wheel in the first place, without even trying to invent the wheel themselves (behaviour that is totally at odds with what I see in my little corner of the software development world) if it made economic sense to do so. Why would you need a 20 year ban on 'reinventing it yourself' when it makes more economic sense (where time is almost the ONLY money required in most streams of software development) to do it yourself?
Dont get me wrong, I think patents in some shape or form are needed, but I have far more problems with the expiration dates, and cost of admission to the patent game than the droves of inapprorpriately approved patents being handed out. I can't help but think that long lease patents actually remove the impedus for a developer to innovate (once he has gotten one patent), because you can cruise on the success of a patent you got approved 5 years ago, as opposed to having moved on to develop and innovate more stuff. Those who continue to innovate and develop within the lifetime of another patent that they are seeing good royalties from are obviously in the game to innovate regardless of what 'motivators' are put into the law, and thus pretty much represent the case that patents are not designed to protect the inventor, but rather simply to force innovation that one seeks to profit from into the public domain. In so far as that goes, I think it shows that when you give patents longer life times, you are benifitting companies who can capitalize on enforcing and protecting royalty fees, discouraging would be inventors from bothering to patent work (and thus keeping that persons ideas from being published to increase the knowledge base of a society), and beginning to encourage, as we see plain as day today, the art of patenting novel technologies to be pushed on the market, simply for the sake of having another patent to add to your revenue stream.
> Fact: corporations don't patent things, individuals patent things
Fact: you need patent lawyers to apply for and to protect patents. Applying and protecting patents is extremely expensive. While the legal patent holder, in name, might be an individual (well, usually a few individuals), patents are virtually unattainable and unprotectable unless you're a corp. So, by the letter, you're right. In practice, nothing could be furthur from the truth. Note that this is not due to the US patent office granting patents where it shouldn't. (Although it could be argued that some of the cost of interfacing with the patent system is due to the large volume of patents in the US patent office collection, although I contend that its a classic example of how unchecked capitalism leads to the 'creation' of industries and 'middlemen'.)
> In fact, it mandates publishing your work so that others can benefit from it.
Can you explain to me how making the world aware of your idea, but a slave to your licensing terms for the next 20 years, benifits people? As RMS pointed out, people shared more often before all this IP furor began. While patents may mandate publishing, the fact is, there is plenty of historical evidence to show that most people will share their discoveries with others regardless of any 'inventor protection' system put in place.
> Well the last time I looked Netscape was fucking FREE
:)
But what about the first time you looked? As memory serves, Netscape had to offer their browser for free because MS started offering IE for free. MS wouldn't have been able to afford to offer IE for free had they not used their success as an OS monopoly in the browser market.
Why does it not surprise me that XP tech support lacks any knowledge on the history of their own companies wrong doings?
I'm only pointing this out because you're asking for replies, and you seem to omit the aforementionned detail in this post, which really just furthur drives home why you work for Satan
I'll fire off an email to verisign to chastize them. You should all do the same.