Dude just embrace it. I grew out my beard as soon as I got this job as a sysadmin. It's just part of the business y'know? People won't take a man seriously unless he's got a serious beard, and though mine's pretty well trimmed and kept under control it still means business.
I should have been more clear. Saying I'm just fine with banning child pornography doesn't necessarily imply that I'm okay with the way that ban has been executed. It's a really difficult line to draw, though, you have to admit.
Basically what I mean is that while you and I can determine which things should and should not be prosecutedâ"and while admittedly there are enlightened prosecutors out there somewhere who can make these decisions tooâ"the fact remains that it is very challenging to exactly codify these notions into law such that they will always be interpreted correctly.
Instead of (simulated) violent pornography in the form of pictures or video, consider it as the written word.
That's what people usually don't do when considering laws such as this, and it's the reason why I have opposed similar legislative moves here in the US even though I don't myself enjoy violent pornography. If two consenting adults are involved then I can't see what crime has been committed there, and as has been pointed out previously it hardly makes sense to outlaw images of something that is completely legitimate.
It's not like the "consenting adults" thing is hard to enforce, either. We do it all the time here in the US (and elsewhere) to assure that the adults depicted are actually adults. It's only a small logical step to go from having forms on file ensuring all your actors are adults to having forms on file from actors basically saying "the acts depicted in [film title] were performed of my own volition and were disseminated with my full consent."
People (myself included) are okay with banning child pornography because it is a crime with a definite victim, but I fail to see who the victim would be here, unless one of the actors doesn't get paid enough.
The reason I don't like Photoshop's UI is for this reason: I have a dual monitor setup and I want my picture to fill all of monitor 1 while my tools sit on monitor 2.
That's how I have it set up in Photoshop on my mac. Tools on one monitor, image editing window full-screened on the other one.
To sort of elaborate on another earlier reply, the Mac interface for Photoshop is different because the window manager in OS X supports a lot of funky stuff that the Windows and Linux window managers really don't. This allows floating menus full of stuff that can be snapped to each other and moved around and still remain on top of the editing window. Things like full-screen editing are a lot easier to program, too.
Regarding your other point, not all of us mac users buy them because we're flaunting our vast riches;). They're actually about the same price if not cheaper than PCs that have similar specs. I still haven't seen any company in the PC world produce a laptop as powerful as a macbookpro that's as light as one. Whatever. The point is that I find gimp's UI abhorrent because it's so unlike the mac interface of Photoshop. It lacks the same polish. It's not just that the icons are in different places; it's also that the interface doesn't behave the same way.
What you ought to do is fix the computer, because that's your job, and just note to yourself that the user screwed it up and should no longer have such access. Idly telling them to fix their own computer defeats the entire purpose of having you around and just prevents other people from getting their work done. That is the primary purpose: getting work done. I just don't understand this weird office politics bullshit where people point fingers and blame each other rather than getting their work done.
Seriously the IT department's job is to manage stuff like this. Being a sysadmin and all-purpose IT guy for a tiny tiny company, I fix my users' computers when they break. It doesn't matter who broke them, if anybody. A couple of times I've had to ask a user not to do what they just did that hosed their system again, but then again that rarely happens because I don't tell users to administer their own machines. That's my job, not theirs, after all.
Try using a mac. It just works(tm). Seriously. With any combination of monitors I've ever tried, getting a pair of them to play nicely together is as trivial as plugging a second one in.
Yes. I'm writing this on my 30" cinema display that's right next to a cheap LG 20-ish" widescreen. Even the colours look right on both of them.
First of all, you're doing the/. community a great service by laying all this out. I'm lucky that I made enough mistakes early on to have figured a lot of that out already but a lot of people aren't so fortunate.
If I may add something, though, it really does help if you've got some other things going on besides being a geek. The girl I'm dating right now is actually the first geek I've ever dated, and it's actually her taste in music that first got me interested in her anyway. There's a whole wide crazy world out there and computers are just one tiny little piece of it. The rest is pretty rockin' too!
Personal hygiene is a much bigger deal. I understand how you can let it slip. I feel so sorry for anyone who was anywhere near me during my senior thesis but at least I still showered! I just, y'know, rocked the bitter alcoholic professor look for a few months. No biggie. Taste in clothes is way harder to pick up I guess, but it's not impossible. Folks just need to remember that spalding grey has NEVER been in style and 99.9% of women won't get it if you're wearing a shirt that says "1337" or basically anything written in binary.
Ok that was kind of rambling and repetitive but whatever. Welcome to my friend list:D.
These are bounced emails though, where company A has sent an automated email to a customer or something, and the email the customer gave them was wrong. So, if he did that, they'll just keep bouncing back and forth and back and forth.
If you had a VHS player and you wanted to watch your same movies that you had on blu-ray in there, why the hell shouldn't you be able to? Why you'd want to is an entirely different matter but really you're argument, based on the assertion that such a desire would be ridiculous, doesn't negate the fact that it ought to be possible and legal.
But copy protection doesn't really restrict pirates. For example with DVDs the CSS encryption doesn't even need to be broken. Just copy the DVD verbatim with the copy protection (and that "don't steal movies" cuteness) completely in tact. This is awkward to do in Windows but a linux computer just sees the optical drives as files.
dd if=/dev/dvd of=~/verbatim_image_of_dvd.img
Change device names to suit your system, of course. Works beautifully, no copy protection breaking required, and you can just take that image and burn it to another DVD or mount it and read it with VLC.
That's all well and good, but a side-effect of not wanting people to steal their movies is that we all have to feel like we're being treated like potential criminals because so many of our devices are locked down. We can still be pissed off at them because their crusade against movie piracy is proving to be terribly annoying at the least for the rest of us.
The copy protection is meant to prevent you from backing up your only copy of the disk to another device, which falls under fair use. Also, you cannot format-shift because of the copy protection. If you buy an HD movie and want to downsample it for use on your iPod, you can't unless you get past the copy protection.
The studio's line works just fine if you're okay only watching your movies in your Blu-Ray player and only if the keys to the disks are still valid and only if you even still have a blu-ray player years from now. If you buy a movie you should be able to enjoy it howsoever you see fit as long as that doesn't involve charging people money to view it or selling copies you've made from it.
Seriously. You must be new here 'cause I might just be modded redundant people have been over this so many times on Slashdot.
Get info on the file and there's an option to change the app that opens that specific file with another option to make that change apply to all files with the same extension.
On a mac, files that are downloaded off the internet are flagged as such and when you double-click them, if they're executable, a dialog box comes up asking you if you really wanted to execute that file, seeing as it's been downloaded off the internet. This is an effective enough safeguard I think.
If you just refuse to ever double click on anything, you are in the extreme minority. A double-click, for 99.999% of people, is easier than right-clicking and sifting through a list of applications. Right-clicking on a JPEG image on my mac, for instance, brings up basically a list of every single application I have.
But politicians by their very nature become public citizens once elected. What for a private citizen would be considered spying for a public citizen is a very different thing indeed.
Quite frankly I'd rather hear the music of people who are in it because they love it than those who are in it for the money. Bear in mind that up until the point where recording industry companies could make billions off each artist by artificially increasing the price of their works, most artists were poor. I'm an artist and I don't really have any wild expectations of getting rich off my work (I sell screenprints and photographs for booze money), because I recognize that I'm selling basically a few dollars' worth of materials and a few years' worth of experience with each print. Some people like my work enough to pay pretty well for it, but others don't and that's fine because it's all up to taste. If you're going into music as a career and expecting to become filthy stinking rich then you're really going about it the wrong way. Think of yourself as a minstrel and success, if you have it, will mean more to you.
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Dude just embrace it. I grew out my beard as soon as I got this job as a sysadmin. It's just part of the business y'know? People won't take a man seriously unless he's got a serious beard, and though mine's pretty well trimmed and kept under control it still means business.
I should have been more clear. Saying I'm just fine with banning child pornography doesn't necessarily imply that I'm okay with the way that ban has been executed. It's a really difficult line to draw, though, you have to admit.
Basically what I mean is that while you and I can determine which things should and should not be prosecutedâ"and while admittedly there are enlightened prosecutors out there somewhere who can make these decisions tooâ"the fact remains that it is very challenging to exactly codify these notions into law such that they will always be interpreted correctly.
That's what people usually don't do when considering laws such as this, and it's the reason why I have opposed similar legislative moves here in the US even though I don't myself enjoy violent pornography. If two consenting adults are involved then I can't see what crime has been committed there, and as has been pointed out previously it hardly makes sense to outlaw images of something that is completely legitimate.
It's not like the "consenting adults" thing is hard to enforce, either. We do it all the time here in the US (and elsewhere) to assure that the adults depicted are actually adults. It's only a small logical step to go from having forms on file ensuring all your actors are adults to having forms on file from actors basically saying "the acts depicted in [film title] were performed of my own volition and were disseminated with my full consent."
People (myself included) are okay with banning child pornography because it is a crime with a definite victim, but I fail to see who the victim would be here, unless one of the actors doesn't get paid enough.
That's how I have it set up in Photoshop on my mac. Tools on one monitor, image editing window full-screened on the other one.
To sort of elaborate on another earlier reply, the Mac interface for Photoshop is different because the window manager in OS X supports a lot of funky stuff that the Windows and Linux window managers really don't. This allows floating menus full of stuff that can be snapped to each other and moved around and still remain on top of the editing window. Things like full-screen editing are a lot easier to program, too.
Regarding your other point, not all of us mac users buy them because we're flaunting our vast riches ;). They're actually about the same price if not cheaper than PCs that have similar specs. I still haven't seen any company in the PC world produce a laptop as powerful as a macbookpro that's as light as one. Whatever. The point is that I find gimp's UI abhorrent because it's so unlike the mac interface of Photoshop. It lacks the same polish. It's not just that the icons are in different places; it's also that the interface doesn't behave the same way.
What you ought to do is fix the computer, because that's your job, and just note to yourself that the user screwed it up and should no longer have such access. Idly telling them to fix their own computer defeats the entire purpose of having you around and just prevents other people from getting their work done. That is the primary purpose: getting work done. I just don't understand this weird office politics bullshit where people point fingers and blame each other rather than getting their work done.
Seriously the IT department's job is to manage stuff like this. Being a sysadmin and all-purpose IT guy for a tiny tiny company, I fix my users' computers when they break. It doesn't matter who broke them, if anybody. A couple of times I've had to ask a user not to do what they just did that hosed their system again, but then again that rarely happens because I don't tell users to administer their own machines. That's my job, not theirs, after all.
Let's not start another religious war on slashdot!
Try using a mac. It just works(tm). Seriously. With any combination of monitors I've ever tried, getting a pair of them to play nicely together is as trivial as plugging a second one in.
Yes. I'm writing this on my 30" cinema display that's right next to a cheap LG 20-ish" widescreen. Even the colours look right on both of them.
On the contrary. Anonymous Coward is the oldest and most prolific member of the slashdot community.
First of all, you're doing the /. community a great service by laying all this out. I'm lucky that I made enough mistakes early on to have figured a lot of that out already but a lot of people aren't so fortunate.
If I may add something, though, it really does help if you've got some other things going on besides being a geek. The girl I'm dating right now is actually the first geek I've ever dated, and it's actually her taste in music that first got me interested in her anyway. There's a whole wide crazy world out there and computers are just one tiny little piece of it. The rest is pretty rockin' too!
Personal hygiene is a much bigger deal. I understand how you can let it slip. I feel so sorry for anyone who was anywhere near me during my senior thesis but at least I still showered! I just, y'know, rocked the bitter alcoholic professor look for a few months. No biggie. Taste in clothes is way harder to pick up I guess, but it's not impossible. Folks just need to remember that spalding grey has NEVER been in style and 99.9% of women won't get it if you're wearing a shirt that says "1337" or basically anything written in binary.
Ok that was kind of rambling and repetitive but whatever. Welcome to my friend list :D.
Best barely on-topic /. thread ever. Congrats!
What about "pwnt" or "hoistedbyhisownpetard"?
You forgot "...you insensitive clod!"
These are bounced emails though, where company A has sent an automated email to a customer or something, and the email the customer gave them was wrong. So, if he did that, they'll just keep bouncing back and forth and back and forth.
So we're having a low-UID pissing contest . . . but in reverse???
If you had a VHS player and you wanted to watch your same movies that you had on blu-ray in there, why the hell shouldn't you be able to? Why you'd want to is an entirely different matter but really you're argument, based on the assertion that such a desire would be ridiculous, doesn't negate the fact that it ought to be possible and legal.
But copy protection doesn't really restrict pirates. For example with DVDs the CSS encryption doesn't even need to be broken. Just copy the DVD verbatim with the copy protection (and that "don't steal movies" cuteness) completely in tact. This is awkward to do in Windows but a linux computer just sees the optical drives as files.
dd if=/dev/dvd of=~/verbatim_image_of_dvd.img
Change device names to suit your system, of course. Works beautifully, no copy protection breaking required, and you can just take that image and burn it to another DVD or mount it and read it with VLC.
MPAA goons: if you're out there, suck on that!
That's all well and good, but a side-effect of not wanting people to steal their movies is that we all have to feel like we're being treated like potential criminals because so many of our devices are locked down. We can still be pissed off at them because their crusade against movie piracy is proving to be terribly annoying at the least for the rest of us.
The copy protection is meant to prevent you from backing up your only copy of the disk to another device, which falls under fair use. Also, you cannot format-shift because of the copy protection. If you buy an HD movie and want to downsample it for use on your iPod, you can't unless you get past the copy protection.
The studio's line works just fine if you're okay only watching your movies in your Blu-Ray player and only if the keys to the disks are still valid and only if you even still have a blu-ray player years from now. If you buy a movie you should be able to enjoy it howsoever you see fit as long as that doesn't involve charging people money to view it or selling copies you've made from it.
Seriously. You must be new here 'cause I might just be modded redundant people have been over this so many times on Slashdot.
Get info on the file and there's an option to change the app that opens that specific file with another option to make that change apply to all files with the same extension.
On a mac, files that are downloaded off the internet are flagged as such and when you double-click them, if they're executable, a dialog box comes up asking you if you really wanted to execute that file, seeing as it's been downloaded off the internet. This is an effective enough safeguard I think.
If you just refuse to ever double click on anything, you are in the extreme minority. A double-click, for 99.999% of people, is easier than right-clicking and sifting through a list of applications. Right-clicking on a JPEG image on my mac, for instance, brings up basically a list of every single application I have.
But politicians by their very nature become public citizens once elected. What for a private citizen would be considered spying for a public citizen is a very different thing indeed.
Aw now it's not going to be as fun to read. Thanks for ruining slashdot! :(
Hemisphere-wide disco dance party everybody!!!!
\o|>
Quite frankly I'd rather hear the music of people who are in it because they love it than those who are in it for the money. Bear in mind that up until the point where recording industry companies could make billions off each artist by artificially increasing the price of their works, most artists were poor. I'm an artist and I don't really have any wild expectations of getting rich off my work (I sell screenprints and photographs for booze money), because I recognize that I'm selling basically a few dollars' worth of materials and a few years' worth of experience with each print. Some people like my work enough to pay pretty well for it, but others don't and that's fine because it's all up to taste. If you're going into music as a career and expecting to become filthy stinking rich then you're really going about it the wrong way. Think of yourself as a minstrel and success, if you have it, will mean more to you.