Yeah, it's pretty grim out there. I preferred the approach of starting at the arse end of the IT business and working up from there. Lacking a degree does hold me back from certain jobs, but a decent track record in the field is fine so long as it's enough to get a recruiter to give you a chance to get to the interview stage.
Yeah, those are similar to my reasons for using Steam. Valve have done some pretty cool things with their marketing, and it's just incredibly convenient.
From an economics perspective, IP relies on legal and cultural protection. I really don't know if copying has a substantial effect on the bottom line, but certainly laws are not much use if the prevailing culture ignores them and there's no easy way to police those laws.
I wouldn't buy the slavery comparison, but I do agree that the "they can't afford it" line is a piss-poor justification for piracy. To start with, we're not talking about people stealing medicine for their sick children or taking food to avoid starvation. These are leisure items!
I think that few of us could honestly claim to have never copied a game, DVD or song, but it does take the piss when people think themselves entitled to welfare in the form of video games. Modern games are expensive - certainly for consoles, and we kind of have to accept our financial limits.
The most extensive pirates I've known over the years, which is really just anecdotal, download stuff for free because they can. Most of us have done this stuff, and it's only later when I began working a field where IP was created and valued the moral side of this became clear. Support the developers and companies trying to do the right thing. Restrictive DRM is a bad idea, but it's just plain wrong to consider okay to feel that there's no problem in ripping-off whatever we want. It's up to creators to decide how their material is distributed, and up to us as consumers to decide whether or not we think that their stuff is worth buying. If we're not willing to pay for it then we should find something we are willing to pay for, or find a genuinely free alternative.
You're kind of right in the context of modern times, in that the term PC is pretty much synonymous with the x86 platform, but I'll assume you slept through the 70s and 80s.
The term personal computer has been in use since at least as far back as the late 70s. Look up some old adverts and sales literature from that time period and you'll see that's true. The Commodore 64 *was* marketed as a personal computer (among other things), and many of us at the time would have used that term.
That and these hidden updates could cause problems in the corporate world. Normally when browsers are updated I see vendors advising users to wait until the browser has been tested. That mostly applies to major updates, but any kind of update could patch a hole that a web application relied on - or introduce a new bug.
Depends on your style of working. Personally I use online references a great deal - particularly for sample code, but I do like a printed book. It's quick to reference, and I can take it to the pub with me and fill it up with stickies. I've used Python and Objective-C books on my iPhone, and it was useful for reading, but not quite as easy as a paper book that I can flip through with the knowledge that I know pretty much where everything is found.
The people who watch those crappy channels are probably not reading much beyond weekly updates of the antics of Jordan and Peter Andre.
Specialisation and giving good advice count for a lot. I picked-up quite a few interesting books in a UK bookshop after a brief chat with one of the staff who had actually read some of the books and could offer a decent comparison between them. I suppose though that many people will go online these days when looking for book suggestions, and it's kind of difficult for a bookshop to retain staff who'd have broad enough interests to offer meaningful advice on the many areas. The guy who is well-read on his Christopher Hitchens is probably not going to be much in to Jordan's literature and angel-assisted healing shite.
That's silly. The flare will hit us, so we should prepare on the assumption that the intense magnetic forces will stop the core from spinning. We need some kind of tunneling machine, a lot of nuclear bombs, and perhaps some attractive people to undertake a mission to blow the crap out of the core.
A car without some limit on the sustained rpm could burn its engine out if the user jacks it up and floors the accelerator while the wheels aren't in contact with the tarmac?
Although in this case I don't think it's up to the game/application devs to worry about this kind of thing. They should be concerned with sensible use of system resources and power (not running intensive activities when the game should be relatively idle), but prevention of over-taxing should be occurring at a far lower level.
I agree. Hardware should be protecting itself - either through firmware or drivers. Application/Games developers should not have to deal with the energy management of hardware. That stuff should be happening at the firmware/kernel level, and even with people hitting the metal the hardware should take steps when it's being pushed beyond tolerance.
By that logic no-one should complain if wiretaps were to be installed in restaurants. It's not reasonable to expect that no-one will overhear a conversation in a public place but quite reasonable to expect that there won't be microphones in your beef satay - at least not without proper judicial oversight.
...except the file doesn't contain passwords, so it would be useless for what you're suggesting.
I'm not aware of any law prohibiting companies from looking around on the web to see what they're employees are doing. Problems may arise based on how they use the data. e.g. firing someone for things they do in their personal lives that have no bearing on their job or their employer.
The problem is that piracy only gives them more ammunition to send lobbyists after Congress to get more dumb legislation passed like the DMCA. The real response to this? People need to speak with their pocketbooks and show the economic viability of the legit distro models that work, that they like, whatever, by purchasing through those models.
This! I don't think that the RIAA and their ilk need much of an excuse, given that they'd still be pushing for harsher copyright laws and DRM if humanity was practically wiped out and all that was left was an RIAA lobyist and a congressman sitting in a smoking crater. Still, they can fire up a BitTorrent client and show that their intellectual property is being illegally shared, and that is something we really do not need.
So record labels are loan sharks giving away money in exchange for future earnings. Some might not be able to pay back the loan. Well, boo hoo.
The loan shark analogy would apply if loan sharks typically operated by using contracts to compel their customers to come work for the loan shark and pay of their debt through their salary. In some cases they'd surprise the employees by supplying pot plants and team nights out, the cost of which is then added to the debt.
I think perhaps that indentured servitude is a better way to describe some of these contracts. Yes they're silly for signing such contracts, or even entering the business without some decent advice. In that regard my sympathy is similar to that I'd have for someone who takes out a huge mortgage without considering their ability to repay it, but then the record business has operated as a de facto cartel for a long time. It is good to see people trying alternative models and succeeding.
Yeah, the mindset thing is problematic. My ex-housemate is a classic example someone who knows he can get things for free and sees no problem in doing so. I never know him to buy a single movie, yet most evenings a week he'd be happily movies he'd found via BitTorrent. I doubt he could afford to pay for the sheer number of movies he was watching, but he could certainly afford to pay for some of them; he just didn't see any reason to pay if he could get them for free.
In his case the reason why he continued seemed linked to his knowledge that this kind of thing wasn't taken very seriously. In the case of him and others like him I'm happy enough to see them prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and he probably won't stop doing this until he or something close to him is prosecuted or at least warned. Either that or shitbags like him will help provide the justification for industry groups to pressure ISPs to gimp our connections. They'll try to do that anyway, but there's no sense in making it easier for them.
That's the strange thing about school. As an adult, if another adult threatens you with violence or intimidation, you respond by appealing to another authority authorized to use more violence (i.e., the police). But somehow, it's cultural for kids to be told not to "tell", and to "solve their own problems." Another option you have as an adult is to move jobs or take a different route to work, which you don't have as a high-schooler. The fact is that high school is screwed up, both culturally and structurally, and is socially a poor preparation for the "real world".
It's a tricky balance. On one hand we shouldn't be encouraging kids to go Charles Bronson on people who threaten them, but we also need them to learn how to resolve conflicts and disagreements without the need to always appeal to an authority. To quote an example, if the neighbours in my apartment block play loud music late at night I can either go talk to them or just call the police. The latter is technically a valid option, but shouldn't be the first choice unless there's a good reason why talking to the neighbours would be dangerous or totally ineffective.
One would hope that adults would keep a close enough eye on the situation to know when they should step in and mediate. Kids need to learn to assert themselves, but no-one should face harassment of the extent to which she did. If they were adults they'd have long-ago been picked up by the police.
Yup, the campaigning here would have been funny if the situation hadn't been a serious one. Coir (a front for a militant pro-life Catholic fundie group) were particularly dishonest in their scaremongering. My favourite was the one in which we were threatened with the minimum wage coming down to around 2. Of course, when asked, the people producing those posters couldn't provide any source for that.
Yup, I was rather relieved to see it go through on the second vote. We're too bogged down in deference to the Catholic church, and corruption in Ireland is as common as Saturday morning hangovers.
I agree with most of what you said, but "life wasn't fundamentally that different than it is now" is just unsupportable unless we exclude everyone who isn't white (and the right kind of white), male, and financially secure. Also, it's highly subjective, since it depends on what you think the fundamental things are?
Life was considerably different, not necessarily harder, but certainly quite different. A quick look at legal and human rights history shows just one part of the picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's pretty grim out there. I preferred the approach of starting at the arse end of the IT business and working up from there. Lacking a degree does hold me back from certain jobs, but a decent track record in the field is fine so long as it's enough to get a recruiter to give you a chance to get to the interview stage.
Yeah, those are similar to my reasons for using Steam. Valve have done some pretty cool things with their marketing, and it's just incredibly convenient.
From an economics perspective, IP relies on legal and cultural protection. I really don't know if copying has a substantial effect on the bottom line, but certainly laws are not much use if the prevailing culture ignores them and there's no easy way to police those laws.
I wouldn't buy the slavery comparison, but I do agree that the "they can't afford it" line is a piss-poor justification for piracy. To start with, we're not talking about people stealing medicine for their sick children or taking food to avoid starvation. These are leisure items!
I think that few of us could honestly claim to have never copied a game, DVD or song, but it does take the piss when people think themselves entitled to welfare in the form of video games. Modern games are expensive - certainly for consoles, and we kind of have to accept our financial limits.
The most extensive pirates I've known over the years, which is really just anecdotal, download stuff for free because they can. Most of us have done this stuff, and it's only later when I began working a field where IP was created and valued the moral side of this became clear. Support the developers and companies trying to do the right thing. Restrictive DRM is a bad idea, but it's just plain wrong to consider okay to feel that there's no problem in ripping-off whatever we want. It's up to creators to decide how their material is distributed, and up to us as consumers to decide whether or not we think that their stuff is worth buying. If we're not willing to pay for it then we should find something we are willing to pay for, or find a genuinely free alternative.
You're kind of right in the context of modern times, in that the term PC is pretty much synonymous with the x86 platform, but I'll assume you slept through the 70s and 80s.
The term personal computer has been in use since at least as far back as the late 70s. Look up some old adverts and sales literature from that time period and you'll see that's true. The Commodore 64 *was* marketed as a personal computer (among other things), and many of us at the time would have used that term.
That and these hidden updates could cause problems in the corporate world. Normally when browsers are updated I see vendors advising users to wait until the browser has been tested. That mostly applies to major updates, but any kind of update could patch a hole that a web application relied on - or introduce a new bug.
No thank you. I'd rather use Linux if I wasn't using Solaris. Too much ideological baggage with FreeBSD.
Isn't that kind of like a homeopath yelling "quacks" at a phrenology convention?
You never made a spice rack or a dustpan in Manual Arts?
I read that as "Martial Arts". Sounded like Mr. Miyagi was back in the teaching business.
Depends on your style of working. Personally I use online references a great deal - particularly for sample code, but I do like a printed book. It's quick to reference, and I can take it to the pub with me and fill it up with stickies. I've used Python and Objective-C books on my iPhone, and it was useful for reading, but not quite as easy as a paper book that I can flip through with the knowledge that I know pretty much where everything is found.
The people who watch those crappy channels are probably not reading much beyond weekly updates of the antics of Jordan and Peter Andre.
Specialisation and giving good advice count for a lot. I picked-up quite a few interesting books in a UK bookshop after a brief chat with one of the staff who had actually read some of the books and could offer a decent comparison between them. I suppose though that many people will go online these days when looking for book suggestions, and it's kind of difficult for a bookshop to retain staff who'd have broad enough interests to offer meaningful advice on the many areas. The guy who is well-read on his Christopher Hitchens is probably not going to be much in to Jordan's literature and angel-assisted healing shite.
That's silly. The flare will hit us, so we should prepare on the assumption that the intense magnetic forces will stop the core from spinning. We need some kind of tunneling machine, a lot of nuclear bombs, and perhaps some attractive people to undertake a mission to blow the crap out of the core.
A car without some limit on the sustained rpm could burn its engine out if the user jacks it up and floors the accelerator while the wheels aren't in contact with the tarmac?
Although in this case I don't think it's up to the game/application devs to worry about this kind of thing. They should be concerned with sensible use of system resources and power (not running intensive activities when the game should be relatively idle), but prevention of over-taxing should be occurring at a far lower level.
I agree. Hardware should be protecting itself - either through firmware or drivers. Application/Games developers should not have to deal with the energy management of hardware. That stuff should be happening at the firmware/kernel level, and even with people hitting the metal the hardware should take steps when it's being pushed beyond tolerance.
By that logic no-one should complain if wiretaps were to be installed in restaurants. It's not reasonable to expect that no-one will overhear a conversation in a public place but quite reasonable to expect that there won't be microphones in your beef satay - at least not without proper judicial oversight.
Your attachment to due process and the constitution makes Henry Kissinger cry.
...except the file doesn't contain passwords, so it would be useless for what you're suggesting.
I'm not aware of any law prohibiting companies from looking around on the web to see what they're employees are doing. Problems may arise based on how they use the data. e.g. firing someone for things they do in their personal lives that have no bearing on their job or their employer.
The problem is that piracy only gives them more ammunition to send lobbyists after Congress to get more dumb legislation passed like the DMCA. The real response to this? People need to speak with their pocketbooks and show the economic viability of the legit distro models that work, that they like, whatever, by purchasing through those models.
This! I don't think that the RIAA and their ilk need much of an excuse, given that they'd still be pushing for harsher copyright laws and DRM if humanity was practically wiped out and all that was left was an RIAA lobyist and a congressman sitting in a smoking crater. Still, they can fire up a BitTorrent client and show that their intellectual property is being illegally shared, and that is something we really do not need.
Seems a good time to sneak in a crap joke.
What do you do when a drummer comes to your door?
Pay him for the pizza.
Or Kristin Hersh's CASH Music.
http://kristinhersh.cashmusic.org/
I still pick-up stuff on iTunes, but I'm increasingly drawn to systems like this one. Coulton of course remains a favourite.
So record labels are loan sharks giving away money in exchange for future earnings. Some might not be able to pay back the loan. Well, boo hoo.
The loan shark analogy would apply if loan sharks typically operated by using contracts to compel their customers to come work for the loan shark and pay of their debt through their salary. In some cases they'd surprise the employees by supplying pot plants and team nights out, the cost of which is then added to the debt.
I think perhaps that indentured servitude is a better way to describe some of these contracts. Yes they're silly for signing such contracts, or even entering the business without some decent advice. In that regard my sympathy is similar to that I'd have for someone who takes out a huge mortgage without considering their ability to repay it, but then the record business has operated as a de facto cartel for a long time. It is good to see people trying alternative models and succeeding.
Yeah, the mindset thing is problematic. My ex-housemate is a classic example someone who knows he can get things for free and sees no problem in doing so. I never know him to buy a single movie, yet most evenings a week he'd be happily movies he'd found via BitTorrent. I doubt he could afford to pay for the sheer number of movies he was watching, but he could certainly afford to pay for some of them; he just didn't see any reason to pay if he could get them for free.
In his case the reason why he continued seemed linked to his knowledge that this kind of thing wasn't taken very seriously. In the case of him and others like him I'm happy enough to see them prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and he probably won't stop doing this until he or something close to him is prosecuted or at least warned. Either that or shitbags like him will help provide the justification for industry groups to pressure ISPs to gimp our connections. They'll try to do that anyway, but there's no sense in making it easier for them.
It's a tricky balance. On one hand we shouldn't be encouraging kids to go Charles Bronson on people who threaten them, but we also need them to learn how to resolve conflicts and disagreements without the need to always appeal to an authority. To quote an example, if the neighbours in my apartment block play loud music late at night I can either go talk to them or just call the police. The latter is technically a valid option, but shouldn't be the first choice unless there's a good reason why talking to the neighbours would be dangerous or totally ineffective.
One would hope that adults would keep a close enough eye on the situation to know when they should step in and mediate. Kids need to learn to assert themselves, but no-one should face harassment of the extent to which she did. If they were adults they'd have long-ago been picked up by the police.
If everyone you know was harassed to this extent then I wonder where you're living? Sparta, Kronos, Cthulhu's School of Hard Knocks?
Yup, the campaigning here would have been funny if the situation hadn't been a serious one. Coir (a front for a militant pro-life Catholic fundie group) were particularly dishonest in their scaremongering. My favourite was the one in which we were threatened with the minimum wage coming down to around 2. Of course, when asked, the people producing those posters couldn't provide any source for that.
Yup, I was rather relieved to see it go through on the second vote. We're too bogged down in deference to the Catholic church, and corruption in Ireland is as common as Saturday morning hangovers.
I agree with most of what you said, but "life wasn't fundamentally that different than it is now" is just unsupportable unless we exclude everyone who isn't white (and the right kind of white), male, and financially secure. Also, it's highly subjective, since it depends on what you think the fundamental things are?
Life was considerably different, not necessarily harder, but certainly quite different. A quick look at legal and human rights history shows just one part of the picture.