Fetishising over ones tools is nothing new. Our Engineering Mascot at U of Waterloo was a 6 foot long Rigid wrench - one of only 5 in the world. We didn't do anything but worship it. It was a 'waste' of a wrench (at least with mods you can still use the tool), but it certainly isn't an isolated case.
Asides, why are cars stylish? Answer: because you have to look at them a lot, so asthetics are important. Why are computer mods stylish (and build by people who use their computers alot): because the user has to look at it a lot, for long periods of time, thus its stylish.
Everything is a tool. Should we design buildings to all look stylistically exactly the same? What are you, a borg?:)
We dont cheer when businesses fail. We cheer when a business fails, but the product it made has a chance to keep living. Its ludicrous to lament the loss of jobs (which are replacable) but ignore the utter waste of energy and money that went into building something that fails because it wasn't marketed properly.
Software has a very low physical barrier to access the tools to build and maintain, compared to traditional goods. When Coke fails, its implausible to see a group of people want to keep making it in their basement. But with software, if it can be done, and people want to do it, why the fuck not?
If anything, it demonstrates how the business world often gets it wrong - if business fail because there is no demand for their product, how on earth can you explain our happiness when products that have the chance to fall into the public domain when the business fails?
Newsflash: sometimes, its because those people losing their jobs deserved it (not all, of course).. they had something good, and couldn't figure out how to sell it properly. (Or worse, some other company was able to use advantages other than technical superiority in order to reduce the chance of that product making money in the market place.) I dont want to live in a world where you place more importance on keeping people in jobs than actually having the fruits of people's work available to people. If I lose my job, I can find another one. If you toss out all the work I've done over the past 2 years (more likely, my lawyers or management or whatever if we go kaput), I'd feel a hell of alot worse off, personally. Our entire product might not be the best, but like any wreck, there are always parts that *can and should* be salvaged. To oppose that would be to encourage inefficiency and waste.
As the other replies pointed out, once a program reaches a certain lvl of complexity, all the design in the world couldn't prodict what parts of your app youll need to optimize. With locks, mutexes, inturrupts, etc flying about your system in a multithreaded app, you can _design_ upfront, but you can't _optimize_ upfront.
Anyhow, whats the definition of optimize... make something better _than it already is_. Kinda hard to optimize something that doesn't exist. You're first 'optimized' version of something you designed well up front isn't optimized for the obvious reason that you havn't actually optimized it yet!;)
When Sony's in-dash mp3 player lets you bluetooth a song over to that guy in the lane next to you, I think you'll see the RIAA et al go after em.
It's not the ripping that bothers the RIAA (well, it does, but they dont have too much leverage here since ripping can be fair use), its the sharing that scares the shit outta them.
you can find out by going here, then clicking on the orange menu in the lower left corner, scrolling down the page until you see the link entitled 'deep linking explained', and then clicking on 'details' in the top menu bar on that page, and then pressing the 'i agree' button that appears on the subsequent page.
(sorry, I would have provided a direct link, but its illegal)
I dont get it. Are these, like, 40 year old project manager trolls? Or, like, 19 year old scriptkiddie "Nike makes the best shoes, MS makes the best software" trolls?
I wanna know the demographic profile here that for some reason feels threatened by Open Source. Pure curiosity.
Unfortunately, you cannot distinguish between reationalism and reactionism, which is what makes us so much better than our parents.
I hate people who kill other people. I do not hate racial groups because a few of them killed people. By this logic, I can kill you, because Timothy McVeigh is an American Amry psycho. Does he represent americans?
The whole point is, islam is not a tumour, it is the living body, and the individuals who commit these acts are the tumors. Fine, remove them, charge them, whatever. The point is, dont throw away the body to spite the tumour, a view you seem to endorse.
Aawww, your brainless rage is cute. Its almost worth me offering 100$ to somebody to go out, find you, lock you up so I can put you in a cage and parade you around my neighbourhood on a leash.
I promise to say lots of nice things about islam so you get to spew your rhetoric all the time like I know you wanna. (Otherwise, when this all dies down, youll be bored from not getting to be so hateful and racist, a concern I know you have.):)
If you were capable of using any of those things, you'd probably be talking about other things, rather than using the easiest, most spineless rhetoric americans have been priviledged to in years.
Wait and find out what has happened, like people capable of using their brains do.
Your government must make an attempt to stick to standards when they are dealing with accessibility. They have to use technologies that have had some time to settle. By virtue of you pointing out that DTDs are 3 years old and you consider them obsolete, you reinforce the point that by selecting bleeding-edge formats/technologies/etc, they might be investing time and some of your money into something that wont be around in a year or two.
And then in a year or two, you'd just complain how the government cant choose their technologies right.
Start thinking about where you're getting this 'government is stupid/terrible/lazy/blah/blah' message from - alot of it is from private interests that enjoy the freedom and lack of public accountability to select their technological infrastructure based on higher demoninators than your government should. While the 'saavy' factor will always be higher in the private sector, dont *always* take this as an indication that government must be technologically inept (although, like anybody who's core competancy isn't technology, they frequently are)... often they are doing something much smarter than private interests give them credit for. All of this is moot, of course, when discussing moves the government makes on _behalf_ of powerful private interests, but thats another argument and does not apply in this situation.
It's like being a private teacher vs public. Private teachers can probably be more 'progressive', but at the cost of maybe teaching in ways that might soon be proven to be ineffectual or bad, while public systems generally must move slower in order to ensure that the ideas have been vetted and that everyone has a moderately equal opportunity to access the fruits of the system.
Like parents, sysadmins, anybody who has an onus to cater to the greater good rather than the richer good, sometimes you have to make decisions that are going to be publicly derided even if its for the common good. Sometimes you have to just give the benifit of the doubt, though I realize this kind of attitude is in short supply these days.
Thats the best part! I always hated that excuse, especially considering how insulting it should be to artists.
Stop and think about this - claiming the arts will die if hollywood dies is like saying the habit of breathing oxygen will die if the SCUBA industry goes belly up.
> Government needs to require all entertainment content to be made available to any distributor who wants to sell it subject to RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) license payments if they want to establish a free market.
Exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Even if it's unlikely without a significant, long, probably dirty revolt from consumers.)
Copyright was brought in to force work intop the public domain. I contend that they missed a very important point - the author is not legally allowed to give exclusive access to that content to one distributor. That should be against the law. In the same way that consumers should be free to participate in the market with a reasonable lack of outside influence, so should distributors all have fair and equal access to content, such that their success is built on how well they can deliver and price it, not how much culture, art and content can they withhold from the market and at what price will the market bear _access_ to that content.
Distributors should be in the business of.. distributing. Currently, its ironic that labels and such, the distributors are doing the very opposite of that - opposing all new forms of distribution and attempting to squeeze success out of creating scarcity of content.
Have you forgotten that "monopolies" are LEGAL? And MS is one? Dont you think its a little obvious MS has a monopoly on OSes? Man, sometimes I have a hard time distinguishing between religious folks and people who place their faith in uber-free markets.
> That's why you vote with your dollar and don't give in to the temptation to purchase products from companies who you don't want to "rule" the market.
The point he was trying to make is that consumers dont have the luxury to do this. We might think, as individuals we do, but by virtue of existing monopolies (and the fact that they have sprung up in numerous forms over the past 500 years) shows that it is not a viable solution to tell people not to participate in a market where the only viable choices are choices they do not wish to make.
Too often the consumer is forced to pick the lesser of evils instead of the best of breed. That, I think, is what bothers many people.
The alternative to free markets (capitalism), and state-controlled markets (communism) was proposed by an economist called Polyani, post WWII (I think.) He proposed, much like the checks and balances in government, groups of producers and consumers haggling over pricing until both producers and consumers were happy. Thus, no product could be sold until the consumers (now as powerful as the collective powers of producers by virtue of this process, where the might of collective teamwork is finally an advantage consumers can have too) had agreed on what price the market will bear. Everyone pays the same price, and you dont get the phenomenon we have now, where MS extorts higher and higher prices out of fewer and fewer people, but effectively allows them to keep controlling the market by the sheer ubiquity of their product. Remember when MS offered to give away software to schools?
Sure, I can vote by not purchasing something, but as it stands, as individuals, we have difficulty amassing and and using our collective might in the market, while companies have the advantage of making money from working as a team.
This is why, historically, the 'supply' end of the market has been disproportionately more powerful and more prone to natural monopolies in markets where the product is a second-tier need (not air, water food, but telephone, publishing (art and culture), PC and OS, etc) rather than a luxury.
>I see writing like this I immediately conclude that the author cannot be bothered to make even a basic attempt
If you're stupid enough to disqualify a programmer based on a hurried post on a discussion board on a website (not that googling isn't effective due diligence), you are the one I would not employ.
He clearly didn't make a basic attempt, because this is a chat board. If you know anything about psychology, one's environment has a dominant role in determining one's behaviour.
For example, all things being equal, people are more likely to hop turnstyles (sp?) in a graffiti-covered subway station than in a clean one. Since there is plenty of abuse of the english language here (for that matter, you can't even be sure if the parent posters' first language is English), other people who would otherwise post proper, correct grammer are more likely to do a rush job to get the post up.
Nobody dies or loses any money from his poor spelling in this scenario. What you should really care about is whether or not he can effectively gauge his context and meet the standards of that context. It makes me laugh to no end when people place uniform standards of behaviour across multiple situations. This demonstates a clear failure to understand a significant chunk of the human condition, and usually serves as a good inidicator of a poor (but not neccessarily unsuccessful, because plenty can be achieved through connections and pure dumb luck) leader.
I'm going to take this wildly off topic, because something flashed inside my brain.
----
I'm waiting for the anti-piracy posters to flame all over your post - your stealing your proffessors IP! How can he make a living - you're one less might-be student to extort!;)
This is tongue and cheek of course, but hey, those 'then everyone will steal the CD, theyll just go without the paper CD insert' people should be chiming in 'then nobdy will pay for school, theyll just go without the tests' any minute now, right?
Okay, I gather the next thing someone might say is that a school gives you official accredation. A piece of paper that means, "We think that this person knows their stuff, so we vouch for them." So, a diploma is, in many ways, a brand. Its not just that you completed your courses, its that that school says you're as capable as the other folks they've turned out, which employers presumably have some sort of track record with.
Now, with CDs, the 'brand' is the official gear. The official CD. The official 'making of' CD. Its a diploma, from the school of "I'm a fan of so-and-so".
Anyhow, I've long since felt that people don't buy music/art/culture because they want the cold hard media - they want to get the 'diploma'.. the official recognition and accredation as their stats, whether they be a history grad or an official fan. Your suggestion is the corollary but demonstrates an exciting point - its clearly benificial to society in this case to let you sit in on class, since there will never be a shortage of paying folks there for the 'official gear' to support the industry financially. Any 'run-off' like sitting in or copying a CD is simply a bonus - free info back to the people, free advertising for the content creator, and everyone saves on card scanners, security gaurds, and DRM OSes!
Now if only you could use it to whack the whiners ("MySQL doesn't let you use transactional inserts using subselects in stored procedures! Cry!") over the head to knock some sense into 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
Fetishising over ones tools is nothing new. Our Engineering Mascot at U of Waterloo was a 6 foot long Rigid wrench - one of only 5 in the world. We didn't do anything but worship it. It was a 'waste' of a wrench (at least with mods you can still use the tool), but it certainly isn't an isolated case.
:)
Asides, why are cars stylish? Answer: because you have to look at them a lot, so asthetics are important. Why are computer mods stylish (and build by people who use their computers alot): because the user has to look at it a lot, for long periods of time, thus its stylish.
Everything is a tool. Should we design buildings to all look stylistically exactly the same? What are you, a borg?
I have a job.
.. they had something good, and couldn't figure out how to sell it properly. (Or worse, some other company was able to use advantages other than technical superiority in order to reduce the chance of that product making money in the market place.) I dont want to live in a world where you place more importance on keeping people in jobs than actually having the fruits of people's work available to people. If I lose my job, I can find another one. If you toss out all the work I've done over the past 2 years (more likely, my lawyers or management or whatever if we go kaput), I'd feel a hell of alot worse off, personally. Our entire product might not be the best, but like any wreck, there are always parts that *can and should* be salvaged. To oppose that would be to encourage inefficiency and waste.
I'm not going to be specific to Blender here.
We dont cheer when businesses fail. We cheer when a business fails, but the product it made has a chance to keep living. Its ludicrous to lament the loss of jobs (which are replacable) but ignore the utter waste of energy and money that went into building something that fails because it wasn't marketed properly.
Software has a very low physical barrier to access the tools to build and maintain, compared to traditional goods. When Coke fails, its implausible to see a group of people want to keep making it in their basement. But with software, if it can be done, and people want to do it, why the fuck not?
If anything, it demonstrates how the business world often gets it wrong - if business fail because there is no demand for their product, how on earth can you explain our happiness when products that have the chance to fall into the public domain when the business fails?
Newsflash: sometimes, its because those people losing their jobs deserved it (not all, of course)
As the other replies pointed out, once a program reaches a certain lvl of complexity, all the design in the world couldn't prodict what parts of your app youll need to optimize. With locks, mutexes, inturrupts, etc flying about your system in a multithreaded app, you can _design_ upfront, but you can't _optimize_ upfront.
... make something better _than it already is_. Kinda hard to optimize something that doesn't exist. You're first 'optimized' version of something you designed well up front isn't optimized for the obvious reason that you havn't actually optimized it yet! ;)
Anyhow, whats the definition of optimize
Kinda gives a new meaning to 'listening to speed metal'.
When Sony's in-dash mp3 player lets you bluetooth a song over to that guy in the lane next to you, I think you'll see the RIAA et al go after em.
It's not the ripping that bothers the RIAA (well, it does, but they dont have too much leverage here since ripping can be fair use), its the sharing that scares the shit outta them.
you can find out by going here, then clicking on the orange menu in the lower left corner, scrolling down the page until you see the link entitled 'deep linking explained', and then clicking on 'details' in the top menu bar on that page, and then pressing the 'i agree' button that appears on the subsequent page.
(sorry, I would have provided a direct link, but its illegal)
now do you get it?
I dont get it. Are these, like, 40 year old project manager trolls? Or, like, 19 year old scriptkiddie "Nike makes the best shoes, MS makes the best software" trolls?
I wanna know the demographic profile here that for some reason feels threatened by Open Source. Pure curiosity.
> words such "gay" or "jew" will not be tolerated
:(
This is going to be weird for most FPS fans. From personal experience, thats like, 90% of the vocabulary used in Quake 3 online.
Where are the parents? Or maybe they dont care.
Unfortunately, you cannot distinguish between reationalism and reactionism, which is what makes us so much better than our parents.
I hate people who kill other people. I do not hate racial groups because a few of them killed people. By this logic, I can kill you, because Timothy McVeigh is an American Amry psycho. Does he represent americans?
The whole point is, islam is not a tumour, it is the living body, and the individuals who commit these acts are the tumors. Fine, remove them, charge them, whatever. The point is, dont throw away the body to spite the tumour, a view you seem to endorse.
Aawww, your brainless rage is cute. Its almost worth me offering 100$ to somebody to go out, find you, lock you up so I can put you in a cage and parade you around my neighbourhood on a leash.
:)
I promise to say lots of nice things about islam so you get to spew your rhetoric all the time like I know you wanna. (Otherwise, when this all dies down, youll be bored from not getting to be so hateful and racist, a concern I know you have.)
> Imagination, Creativity, Free Will.
If you were capable of using any of those things, you'd probably be talking about other things, rather than using the easiest, most spineless rhetoric americans have been priviledged to in years.
Wait and find out what has happened, like people capable of using their brains do.
Personally, I dont think he was talking about Terrorism. You people gotta get your mind off that shit. Life does not revolve around terrorists.
Um, they are persecuted political groups. But so are other groups that shouldn't be persecuted.
Technology, ANY technology, helps your enemies as effectively as it helps your friends. Get over it.
Your government must make an attempt to stick to standards when they are dealing with accessibility. They have to use technologies that have had some time to settle. By virtue of you pointing out that DTDs are 3 years old and you consider them obsolete, you reinforce the point that by selecting bleeding-edge formats/technologies/etc, they might be investing time and some of your money into something that wont be around in a year or two.
... often they are doing something much smarter than private interests give them credit for. All of this is moot, of course, when discussing moves the government makes on _behalf_ of powerful private interests, but thats another argument and does not apply in this situation.
And then in a year or two, you'd just complain how the government cant choose their technologies right.
Start thinking about where you're getting this 'government is stupid/terrible/lazy/blah/blah' message from - alot of it is from private interests that enjoy the freedom and lack of public accountability to select their technological infrastructure based on higher demoninators than your government should. While the 'saavy' factor will always be higher in the private sector, dont *always* take this as an indication that government must be technologically inept (although, like anybody who's core competancy isn't technology, they frequently are)
It's like being a private teacher vs public. Private teachers can probably be more 'progressive', but at the cost of maybe teaching in ways that might soon be proven to be ineffectual or bad, while public systems generally must move slower in order to ensure that the ideas have been vetted and that everyone has a moderately equal opportunity to access the fruits of the system.
Like parents, sysadmins, anybody who has an onus to cater to the greater good rather than the richer good, sometimes you have to make decisions that are going to be publicly derided even if its for the common good. Sometimes you have to just give the benifit of the doubt, though I realize this kind of attitude is in short supply these days.
Ok, rant off.
> Save the arts from extinction
Thats the best part! I always hated that excuse, especially considering how insulting it should be to artists.
Stop and think about this - claiming the arts will die if hollywood dies is like saying the habit of breathing oxygen will die if the SCUBA industry goes belly up.
It is.
> Government needs to require all entertainment content to be made available to any distributor who wants to sell it subject to RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) license payments if they want to establish a free market.
.. distributing. Currently, its ironic that labels and such, the distributors are doing the very opposite of that - opposing all new forms of distribution and attempting to squeeze success out of creating scarcity of content.
Exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Even if it's unlikely without a significant, long, probably dirty revolt from consumers.)
Copyright was brought in to force work intop the public domain. I contend that they missed a very important point - the author is not legally allowed to give exclusive access to that content to one distributor. That should be against the law. In the same way that consumers should be free to participate in the market with a reasonable lack of outside influence, so should distributors all have fair and equal access to content, such that their success is built on how well they can deliver and price it, not how much culture, art and content can they withhold from the market and at what price will the market bear _access_ to that content.
Distributors should be in the business of
Have you forgotten that "monopolies" are LEGAL? And MS is one? Dont you think its a little obvious MS has a monopoly on OSes? Man, sometimes I have a hard time distinguishing between religious folks and people who place their faith in uber-free markets.
> That's why you vote with your dollar and don't give in to the temptation to purchase products from companies who you don't want to "rule" the market.
The point he was trying to make is that consumers dont have the luxury to do this. We might think, as individuals we do, but by virtue of existing monopolies (and the fact that they have sprung up in numerous forms over the past 500 years) shows that it is not a viable solution to tell people not to participate in a market where the only viable choices are choices they do not wish to make.
Too often the consumer is forced to pick the lesser of evils instead of the best of breed. That, I think, is what bothers many people.
The alternative to free markets (capitalism), and state-controlled markets (communism) was proposed by an economist called Polyani, post WWII (I think.) He proposed, much like the checks and balances in government, groups of producers and consumers haggling over pricing until both producers and consumers were happy. Thus, no product could be sold until the consumers (now as powerful as the collective powers of producers by virtue of this process, where the might of collective teamwork is finally an advantage consumers can have too) had agreed on what price the market will bear. Everyone pays the same price, and you dont get the phenomenon we have now, where MS extorts higher and higher prices out of fewer and fewer people, but effectively allows them to keep controlling the market by the sheer ubiquity of their product. Remember when MS offered to give away software to schools?
Sure, I can vote by not purchasing something, but as it stands, as individuals, we have difficulty amassing and and using our collective might in the market, while companies have the advantage of making money from working as a team.
This is why, historically, the 'supply' end of the market has been disproportionately more powerful and more prone to natural monopolies in markets where the product is a second-tier need (not air, water food, but telephone, publishing (art and culture), PC and OS, etc) rather than a luxury.
I'm starting to wonder if the RIAA should just cut costs and stick to its core competancy - irony.
>I see writing like this I immediately conclude that the author cannot be bothered to make even a basic attempt
If you're stupid enough to disqualify a programmer based on a hurried post on a discussion board on a website (not that googling isn't effective due diligence), you are the one I would not employ.
He clearly didn't make a basic attempt, because this is a chat board. If you know anything about psychology, one's environment has a dominant role in determining one's behaviour.
For example, all things being equal, people are more likely to hop turnstyles (sp?) in a graffiti-covered subway station than in a clean one. Since there is plenty of abuse of the english language here (for that matter, you can't even be sure if the parent posters' first language is English), other people who would otherwise post proper, correct grammer are more likely to do a rush job to get the post up.
Nobody dies or loses any money from his poor spelling in this scenario. What you should really care about is whether or not he can effectively gauge his context and meet the standards of that context. It makes me laugh to no end when people place uniform standards of behaviour across multiple situations. This demonstates a clear failure to understand a significant chunk of the human condition, and usually serves as a good inidicator of a poor (but not neccessarily unsuccessful, because plenty can be achieved through connections and pure dumb luck) leader.
Probably the same reason SUV's are popular these days. Its not what people _need_, its what they _think_ they need.
(Above and beyond the obvious "bigger, faster" ideology that seems to be ever so popular with consumers these days.)
I'm going to take this wildly off topic, because something flashed inside my brain.
;)
.. the official recognition and accredation as their stats, whether they be a history grad or an official fan. Your suggestion is the corollary but demonstrates an exciting point - its clearly benificial to society in this case to let you sit in on class, since there will never be a shortage of paying folks there for the 'official gear' to support the industry financially. Any 'run-off' like sitting in or copying a CD is simply a bonus - free info back to the people, free advertising for the content creator, and everyone saves on card scanners, security gaurds, and DRM OSes!
----
I'm waiting for the anti-piracy posters to flame all over your post - your stealing your proffessors IP! How can he make a living - you're one less might-be student to extort!
This is tongue and cheek of course, but hey, those 'then everyone will steal the CD, theyll just go without the paper CD insert' people should be chiming in 'then nobdy will pay for school, theyll just go without the tests' any minute now, right?
Okay, I gather the next thing someone might say is that a school gives you official accredation. A piece of paper that means, "We think that this person knows their stuff, so we vouch for them." So, a diploma is, in many ways, a brand. Its not just that you completed your courses, its that that school says you're as capable as the other folks they've turned out, which employers presumably have some sort of track record with.
Now, with CDs, the 'brand' is the official gear. The official CD. The official 'making of' CD. Its a diploma, from the school of "I'm a fan of so-and-so".
Anyhow, I've long since felt that people don't buy music/art/culture because they want the cold hard media - they want to get the 'diploma'
Indeed, MySQLFront is a real time saver.
Now if only you could use it to whack the whiners ("MySQL doesn't let you use transactional inserts using subselects in stored procedures! Cry!") over the head to knock some sense into 'em.