The geologically active zones are pretty well identified, and I've never heard of any of Iceland's hydroelectric dams being destroyed by earthquake or volcano. And you would hear if it happened, because it would be a major disaster -- some of those things hold enough water to sink the Netherlands.
Iceland is of a similar size to California, and it has one of the most geologically active land-based faultlines on the planet. Yet Silicon Valley is in California.
It's comical how they treat Geert as some sort of Himmler instead of the hero he is. When Amsterdam has a Sharia district setup by the left so as to not "make Muslims feel different or ostracized from Mainstream Dutch life" we will panic and vote in 50 more of him but also 10 more that push that line of what is acceptable (i.e. deportation based on religion/ethnicity or even worse).
It's comical how they treat Himmler as some sort of Robespierre instead of the hero he is. When Berlin has a Kibbutz setup by the left so as to not "make Jews feel different or ostracized from Mainstream German life" we will panic and vote in 50 more of him but also 10 more that push that line of what is acceptable (i.e. deportation based on religion/ethnicity or even worse).
the movie/tv industry just seems to have it's cake and eats it, too. they must be getting scared though. someday, there will be a format that will not need updating for generations. how will they make stuff obsolete on purpose, solely to get people to buy the same title for the 7th, 8th time?
Once 3D TVs have bedded in, they'll release a new type of TV that can reproduce the polarity of light, so you'll be buying all your favourite films with "digitally reconstructed RealPolarityTM". Tell an average viewer that the difference is only visible to an octopus or cuttlefish and they'll tell you that you need a new nitrogenised titanium-platinum SHDMI cable, cos your signal is clearly suffering bit-rot.
The thing is that before DRM we had certain rights, but we were physically capable of exceeding those rights. For example, in the UK we've got a time limit on timeshifting, so technically recordings have to be wiped or destroyed after a certain length of time, but it's something that couldn't be enforced by the technology.
I'm not sure that this was ever codified legally (I suspect it's like the "8 pages/10%" photocopying limit -- an assumed standard), so it's something that can be rightly and fairly set as part of the move to DRM technologies. The BBC iPlayer Desktop app is good for this. You can stream programmes or download them to your PC for later viewing. The DRM manages a limited time-shifting, so you can't just hold on to it ad infinitum. That's right and that's fair.
Except that it only works on Windows, which is my big problem with DRM: vendor specificity.
Woah there, nelly. When someone installs cable TV, I expect to be able to plug it into any consumer TV and watch the stuff. The problem with DRM is that it is necessarily platform specific, and it closes out my options. It won't work on your cheap little linux netbook. There aren't that many out there, true, but the EeePC did establish Linux as a personal computing OS, definitively.
Compare computer DRM with cable TV. Imagine you want to subscrive to a cable service for standard-def video. You have a working SD TV that has served you for years without fault. A lovely big screen, and fantastic stereo from a linked hi-fi. But the cable provider wants to make sure you don't pirate their stuff, so mandates DRM, which in TV world means HDMI. HDMI? That's a hi-def standard, right? Why would you want it for SD content? Well, the cable company has to protect their investment, right? And HDMI is the only way. So you're forced into buying a new device that is highly overspecced, simply to continue getting what is supposed to be the same level of service you're currently getting....
You weren't asking me, but I would explain them as a minority language act. I haven't met many people who are involved in minority language song and expect to make a serious living at it -- they mostly record as a means of language activism.
You could argue that the drought in the Spanish recording industry levels the field for minority languages in that it "deprofessionalises" majority-language music and brings majority-language acts down to the amateur/semi-pro status of the minority acts.
It's an interesting angle and I might use it in an essay for uni later this year....
I agree that the idea of a "digital native" is a bit silly, but for slightly different reasons.
The article suggests that most computer services are inappropriate metaphors of real-world services. There's a hulking great elephant in the room that's being ignored: almost all computer interfaces are inappropriate metaphors of real-world services. How can these so-called "digital natives" be native if the computers all "speak human" rather than having the users "speak computer"?
I don't consider myself a "digital native", but I feel I'm closer to being one than the under 20s, and I'm 32. Because while I wasn't "speaking computer", like the guys who could read a page of hexadecimal text and tell you what 6502 processor was doing, I at least learnt to deal with disk catalogues and command lines and the like. I only programmed in BASIC until I went to university, but I still learned variable handling and testing before I ever encountered algebra in maths.
If there are any "digital natives" out there, they're the children of early adopters, and they're mostly in their 30s.
Now back to topic. When I fire up an application, I expect it to load instantaneously. If it does not, then I look at the laptop's HDD LED light to check for HDD activity (the HDD is always the bottleneck here). I don't need a splash screen because I know (through the blinking HDD LED) that the application is running and I wait for it. However this is my case, which is an exception because I know about OSes and Computers. Most (regular) users run the application and if they don't see any feedback in the screen, they run it again and again until it works; completely ignoring subtle feedback tips from the mouse icon or even the laptop LED indicators. In those cases, I strongly believe a splashscreen is obligatory.
OK, fine. But the answer's not in the app, it's in the OS. Windows knows it's opening the app, so Windows should tell you.
How? Well, what about putting the app where you'd expect to find it? - on the taskbar. The Windows 7 taskbar encodes a fair amount of information graphically, including allowing the display of progress bars as a green fill behind the icon. So why not add a "loading" state to the taskbar display? If they can't get an acurate measure of progress then they could simply superimpose the now-obligatory "wait-state-spinny-thing" over the icon.
Actually, that makes me think...
If they're monitoring your emails, start appending links to three random charities in each email, and demand that those charities get their cut....
I was about to say that I don't see the difference between URL-as-reference and international-standard-Harvard-system-referencing. Neither gives the reader access to something they wouldn't otherwise be able to see, and neither reproduces any content. This is a ludicrous state of affairs.
Online and distance education is a very broad field. Even one small part-time course can make you look more appealing if it's the right course for the right job. An introduction to accounts or management shows you're willing to take the first step. Couple that with a sideways shift within your current company, and you'll be more appealing than you think.
But man, talk about having to constantly reiterate basic concepts...don't get me wrong, sales engineers can serve as fantastic bridges between tech reality and business demands, but this sounds like exactly what the submitter is trying to avoid.
Actually, it may not be a bad idea. The submitter's problem is that his management don't understand the problem. His management therefore isn't in a position to explain the problem to the customer, and the problem then has to be dealt with inefficiently in order to match the client expectation that the manager has set up. If someone who knows his way around the technology is speaking directly to the client, the client can get realistic expectations, which means the problem is fixed properly (not just bodged around by hassled coders) and everyone's happy.
And if it turns out that it really is a job from hell, then at least it's good CV fodder for whatever other non-coding jobs the submitter ends up applying for. A sort of "intermediate step" to break out of dev world.
It's also a seasonal job. And you get to deal with all manner of... disorganized people and less than fully intellectually developed people. And it's a three month long exercise in burnout level hours for a wage that works out annually to something less than minimum wage.
Then get a second other-seasonal job. Like contract developer. Except that contract work isn't all that stable and many family men are concerned about stability.
I was about to say "project management". It is relatively easy to get into a PM role in your current field, and project management is seen by many, rightly or wrongly, as a single skill, so if you can manage a coding project you can manage any other type of project. If you can convince your current employer that you'll make a good PM, you can hopefully talk them into training you up for 6Sigma or a similar bit of CV-improving nonsense.
While in 100% technical terms all people carrying out actions on behalf of the state are "agents of the state", the word "agent" has certain connotations... ie special law enforcement and espionage. We have FBI "agents", we have CIA, MI5 and KGB "agents". You say "agent", people don't think of a pleasant nursery teacher in a flowery dress.
Plus, there is a major difference between a technical "agent of the state" and the close compound "state agents". When you say "state agent", you are unequivocally talking about law enforcement or espionage -- that is the only way the term is used.
Who the heck cares if she was charged or not? The issue is whether or not the school / state has any business deciding how a child will be fed over and against the wishes of the parent.
Youre changing the issue onto something completely irrelevant.
"has any wishes" and "over and against" imply that you think not. The state has a duty to protect the welfare of a child if the parents are causing the child harm. Poor diet is harmful. Therefore they do. The problem is that in this case, the individual charged with carrying out the policy was an idiot. That's all.
Actually, it was the lack of "milk". Ignoring the fact that cheese is effectively just the best bits of milk concentrated down into an easy-to-store package. The real story isn't "nanny state", it isn't "unnecessarily nasty or confusing letters", it's the sheer dumb numskullery of the checklist and its overly-literal interpretation by civil servants. And what is over-literal interpretation a sign of? A lack of... (drum roll, please)... education!
So while I agree with the instigation of healthy eating policies, and even of the enforcement of such policies on parents (a kid shouldn't suffer a lifetime of ill health due to parental ignorance), the people enforcing the policies should understand the policies, rather than simply working to a checklist....
Markets are markets. I've been to Spain, France and Italy in the last couple of years, and I can personally attest that adventure games -- including the old Lucasarts titles -- are more prominent in games shops than in the UK. There are studios actively developing adventures in Spain (Pendulo) and in Germany (Crimson Cow). Central/Western Europe is there best target market.
But what if you're not the two biggest names in adventure gaming? How is some unknown supposed to get funding for a really good game? Double Fine didn't give any information about what the game will be -- they didn't have to, because they're who they are. But an unknown backroom programming squad is going to have to give more info than that... then watch as some big budget software house dedicates umpteen corporate programmers to producing something to his spec and making a fortune....
Except that this is not the case here. The original Kickstarter target wouldn't have covered costs, and they would have needed sales. Even now, I suspect they will still need additional sales to make a profit. They won't be giving it away for free, so they may end up still complaining about piracy...
That's all very fair, but that's not what you said before -- I argued against what you said, not against that. I agree that copyright terms are too long, and I agree that they should be reduced. But I don't agree with releasing everything into the public domain immediately on the author's death, because dead or alive, they still should be recompensed.
if he is a "commercial flop" and fails, he finds himself looking for work elsewhere doing something else.
Even if he loses his job, he's still already been paid for the work he did. A royalty-based worker who sell no work makes no money -- in fact, in many creative sectors he actually loses money, as he'll have invested a lot in producing his latest work.
I don't hear you advocating paying the salaried worker perpetually along with his children and his children's children for work he did during his career, though.
Of course not, because he's already been paid. That's what a salary is. His children and grandchildren inherit whatever is left in his savings when he dies. Someone working for royalties isn't paid when he puts the work in, and instead gets paid when (and if!) the work sells.
While it may be the job of a company, as an entity, to make money, the company is made of individuals
Individuals? People? Does not compute!
A modern company isn't made of individuals, it's made of systems, procedures and algorithms. The most likely explanation is that some algorithm somewhere automatically makes popular items full-price and drops prices when they're not selling well. Demand went up, price went up. There's no active "decision" in there, just an automated process.
If you work for a salary, you get paid up front for your work. You can spend your money or save and invest it. If you save it, and you die, that money goes to your next of kin. You don't forfeit that money simply because you didn't spend it while you were alive.
If you work for royalties, you don't get paid up front -- you get paid as returns on investments. An artist's back catalogue is the artist's savings plan (Noddy Holder of Slade has described the song Merry Christmas Everybody as his "pension", as have several other people with UK Christmas hits). The artist working on royalties already has the risk of being a commercial flop, a risk the salaried worker doesn't have. Taking away his right to continue earning posthumously would really skew the risk:reward ratio.
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The geologically active zones are pretty well identified, and I've never heard of any of Iceland's hydroelectric dams being destroyed by earthquake or volcano. And you would hear if it happened, because it would be a major disaster -- some of those things hold enough water to sink the Netherlands.
Iceland is of a similar size to California, and it has one of the most geologically active land-based faultlines on the planet. Yet Silicon Valley is in California.
It's comical how they treat Geert as some sort of Himmler instead of the hero he is. When Amsterdam has a Sharia district setup by the left so as to not "make Muslims feel different or ostracized from Mainstream Dutch life" we will panic and vote in 50 more of him but also 10 more that push that line of what is acceptable (i.e. deportation based on religion/ethnicity or even worse).
It's comical how they treat Himmler as some sort of Robespierre instead of the hero he is. When Berlin has a Kibbutz setup by the left so as to not "make Jews feel different or ostracized from Mainstream German life" we will panic and vote in 50 more of him but also 10 more that push that line of what is acceptable (i.e. deportation based on religion/ethnicity or even worse).
the movie/tv industry just seems to have it's cake and eats it, too. they must be getting scared though. someday, there will be a format that will not need updating for generations. how will they make stuff obsolete on purpose, solely to get people to buy the same title for the 7th, 8th time?
Once 3D TVs have bedded in, they'll release a new type of TV that can reproduce the polarity of light, so you'll be buying all your favourite films with "digitally reconstructed RealPolarityTM". Tell an average viewer that the difference is only visible to an octopus or cuttlefish and they'll tell you that you need a new nitrogenised titanium-platinum SHDMI cable, cos your signal is clearly suffering bit-rot.
The thing is that before DRM we had certain rights, but we were physically capable of exceeding those rights. For example, in the UK we've got a time limit on timeshifting, so technically recordings have to be wiped or destroyed after a certain length of time, but it's something that couldn't be enforced by the technology.
I'm not sure that this was ever codified legally (I suspect it's like the "8 pages/10%" photocopying limit -- an assumed standard), so it's something that can be rightly and fairly set as part of the move to DRM technologies. The BBC iPlayer Desktop app is good for this. You can stream programmes or download them to your PC for later viewing. The DRM manages a limited time-shifting, so you can't just hold on to it ad infinitum. That's right and that's fair.
Except that it only works on Windows, which is my big problem with DRM: vendor specificity.
Woah there, nelly. When someone installs cable TV, I expect to be able to plug it into any consumer TV and watch the stuff. The problem with DRM is that it is necessarily platform specific, and it closes out my options. It won't work on your cheap little linux netbook. There aren't that many out there, true, but the EeePC did establish Linux as a personal computing OS, definitively.
Compare computer DRM with cable TV. Imagine you want to subscrive to a cable service for standard-def video. You have a working SD TV that has served you for years without fault. A lovely big screen, and fantastic stereo from a linked hi-fi. But the cable provider wants to make sure you don't pirate their stuff, so mandates DRM, which in TV world means HDMI. HDMI? That's a hi-def standard, right? Why would you want it for SD content? Well, the cable company has to protect their investment, right? And HDMI is the only way. So you're forced into buying a new device that is highly overspecced, simply to continue getting what is supposed to be the same level of service you're currently getting....
Then how do you explain, for example, Xera?
You weren't asking me, but I would explain them as a minority language act. I haven't met many people who are involved in minority language song and expect to make a serious living at it -- they mostly record as a means of language activism.
You could argue that the drought in the Spanish recording industry levels the field for minority languages in that it "deprofessionalises" majority-language music and brings majority-language acts down to the amateur/semi-pro status of the minority acts.
It's an interesting angle and I might use it in an essay for uni later this year....
I agree that the idea of a "digital native" is a bit silly, but for slightly different reasons.
The article suggests that most computer services are inappropriate metaphors of real-world services. There's a hulking great elephant in the room that's being ignored: almost all computer interfaces are inappropriate metaphors of real-world services. How can these so-called "digital natives" be native if the computers all "speak human" rather than having the users "speak computer"?
I don't consider myself a "digital native", but I feel I'm closer to being one than the under 20s, and I'm 32. Because while I wasn't "speaking computer", like the guys who could read a page of hexadecimal text and tell you what 6502 processor was doing, I at least learnt to deal with disk catalogues and command lines and the like. I only programmed in BASIC until I went to university, but I still learned variable handling and testing before I ever encountered algebra in maths.
If there are any "digital natives" out there, they're the children of early adopters, and they're mostly in their 30s.
Now back to topic. When I fire up an application, I expect it to load instantaneously. If it does not, then I look at the laptop's HDD LED light to check for HDD activity (the HDD is always the bottleneck here). I don't need a splash screen because I know (through the blinking HDD LED) that the application is running and I wait for it. However this is my case, which is an exception because I know about OSes and Computers. Most (regular) users run the application and if they don't see any feedback in the screen, they run it again and again until it works; completely ignoring subtle feedback tips from the mouse icon or even the laptop LED indicators. In those cases, I strongly believe a splashscreen is obligatory.
OK, fine. But the answer's not in the app, it's in the OS. Windows knows it's opening the app, so Windows should tell you.
How? Well, what about putting the app where you'd expect to find it? - on the taskbar. The Windows 7 taskbar encodes a fair amount of information graphically, including allowing the display of progress bars as a green fill behind the icon. So why not add a "loading" state to the taskbar display? If they can't get an acurate measure of progress then they could simply superimpose the now-obligatory "wait-state-spinny-thing" over the icon.
Problem solved.
Actually, that makes me think... If they're monitoring your emails, start appending links to three random charities in each email, and demand that those charities get their cut....
If I put a link to my blog in my sig, does that mean I get paid to send emails...?
I was about to say that I don't see the difference between URL-as-reference and international-standard-Harvard-system-referencing. Neither gives the reader access to something they wouldn't otherwise be able to see, and neither reproduces any content. This is a ludicrous state of affairs.
Online and distance education is a very broad field. Even one small part-time course can make you look more appealing if it's the right course for the right job. An introduction to accounts or management shows you're willing to take the first step. Couple that with a sideways shift within your current company, and you'll be more appealing than you think.
But man, talk about having to constantly reiterate basic concepts...don't get me wrong, sales engineers can serve as fantastic bridges between tech reality and business demands, but this sounds like exactly what the submitter is trying to avoid.
Actually, it may not be a bad idea. The submitter's problem is that his management don't understand the problem. His management therefore isn't in a position to explain the problem to the customer, and the problem then has to be dealt with inefficiently in order to match the client expectation that the manager has set up. If someone who knows his way around the technology is speaking directly to the client, the client can get realistic expectations, which means the problem is fixed properly (not just bodged around by hassled coders) and everyone's happy.
And if it turns out that it really is a job from hell, then at least it's good CV fodder for whatever other non-coding jobs the submitter ends up applying for. A sort of "intermediate step" to break out of dev world.
It's also a seasonal job. And you get to deal with all manner of... disorganized people and less than fully intellectually developed people. And it's a three month long exercise in burnout level hours for a wage that works out annually to something less than minimum wage.
Then get a second other-seasonal job. Like contract developer. Except that contract work isn't all that stable and many family men are concerned about stability.
I was about to say "project management". It is relatively easy to get into a PM role in your current field, and project management is seen by many, rightly or wrongly, as a single skill, so if you can manage a coding project you can manage any other type of project. If you can convince your current employer that you'll make a good PM, you can hopefully talk them into training you up for 6Sigma or a similar bit of CV-improving nonsense.
While in 100% technical terms all people carrying out actions on behalf of the state are "agents of the state", the word "agent" has certain connotations... ie special law enforcement and espionage. We have FBI "agents", we have CIA, MI5 and KGB "agents". You say "agent", people don't think of a pleasant nursery teacher in a flowery dress.
Plus, there is a major difference between a technical "agent of the state" and the close compound "state agents". When you say "state agent", you are unequivocally talking about law enforcement or espionage -- that is the only way the term is used.
Who the heck cares if she was charged or not? The issue is whether or not the school / state has any business deciding how a child will be fed over and against the wishes of the parent.
Youre changing the issue onto something completely irrelevant.
"has any wishes" and "over and against" imply that you think not. The state has a duty to protect the welfare of a child if the parents are causing the child harm. Poor diet is harmful. Therefore they do. The problem is that in this case, the individual charged with carrying out the policy was an idiot. That's all.
Actually, it was the lack of "milk". Ignoring the fact that cheese is effectively just the best bits of milk concentrated down into an easy-to-store package. The real story isn't "nanny state", it isn't "unnecessarily nasty or confusing letters", it's the sheer dumb numskullery of the checklist and its overly-literal interpretation by civil servants. And what is over-literal interpretation a sign of? A lack of ... (drum roll, please) ... education!
So while I agree with the instigation of healthy eating policies, and even of the enforcement of such policies on parents (a kid shouldn't suffer a lifetime of ill health due to parental ignorance), the people enforcing the policies should understand the policies, rather than simply working to a checklist....
Markets are markets. I've been to Spain, France and Italy in the last couple of years, and I can personally attest that adventure games -- including the old Lucasarts titles -- are more prominent in games shops than in the UK. There are studios actively developing adventures in Spain (Pendulo) and in Germany (Crimson Cow). Central/Western Europe is there best target market.
But what if you're not the two biggest names in adventure gaming? How is some unknown supposed to get funding for a really good game? Double Fine didn't give any information about what the game will be -- they didn't have to, because they're who they are. But an unknown backroom programming squad is going to have to give more info than that... then watch as some big budget software house dedicates umpteen corporate programmers to producing something to his spec and making a fortune....
Except that this is not the case here. The original Kickstarter target wouldn't have covered costs, and they would have needed sales. Even now, I suspect they will still need additional sales to make a profit. They won't be giving it away for free, so they may end up still complaining about piracy...
That's all very fair, but that's not what you said before -- I argued against what you said, not against that. I agree that copyright terms are too long, and I agree that they should be reduced. But I don't agree with releasing everything into the public domain immediately on the author's death, because dead or alive, they still should be recompensed.
if he is a "commercial flop" and fails, he finds himself looking for work elsewhere doing something else.
Even if he loses his job, he's still already been paid for the work he did. A royalty-based worker who sell no work makes no money -- in fact, in many creative sectors he actually loses money, as he'll have invested a lot in producing his latest work.
I don't hear you advocating paying the salaried worker perpetually along with his children and his children's children for work he did during his career, though.
Of course not, because he's already been paid. That's what a salary is. His children and grandchildren inherit whatever is left in his savings when he dies. Someone working for royalties isn't paid when he puts the work in, and instead gets paid when (and if!) the work sells.
This is pretty simple stuff, really....
While it may be the job of a company, as an entity, to make money, the company is made of individuals
Individuals? People? Does not compute!
A modern company isn't made of individuals, it's made of systems, procedures and algorithms. The most likely explanation is that some algorithm somewhere automatically makes popular items full-price and drops prices when they're not selling well. Demand went up, price went up. There's no active "decision" in there, just an automated process.
You're not exactly comparing like for like.
If you work for a salary, you get paid up front for your work. You can spend your money or save and invest it. If you save it, and you die, that money goes to your next of kin. You don't forfeit that money simply because you didn't spend it while you were alive.
If you work for royalties, you don't get paid up front -- you get paid as returns on investments. An artist's back catalogue is the artist's savings plan (Noddy Holder of Slade has described the song Merry Christmas Everybody as his "pension", as have several other people with UK Christmas hits). The artist working on royalties already has the risk of being a commercial flop, a risk the salaried worker doesn't have. Taking away his right to continue earning posthumously would really skew the risk:reward ratio.