I'd assume that the phone would be for connectivity for the webcam. Doesn't that make a little more sense to you?
Yeah, I got that, and I was joking. The point is, there'd still be a nice computer and cell phone on board, actually making it an even more attractive target.
Besides being nearly impossible to impliment, I don't know that some kind of standard, EFF-reinforced contract is needed. I mean, contacting the EFF for legal advice is fine, but your contract between you and your employer is just that: between you and your employer.
As such, if it's even moderately sized, you probably have some breathing room to negotiate terms. First off, it really is critical that you *READ YOUR CONTRACT* before you sign. If it is has some rediculous thing like "anything done by employee at any time during employment is IP or employer," then talk to the HR person!
A much more reasonable contract is one that assigns all rights 1) relating to stuff you do on company time or equipment, or 2) relating to the subject matter you work on at work. If you do coding in your spare time, it's your business; your employer should recognize this. It's quite simple.
In other news, the following documents have also been announced by the EFF or GNU:
The GNU "use of the word hacker" license: under this document, the word "hacker" will be copyrighted by GNU, but the general public will be allowed to continue using it as long as they include the GNU official definition (differentiating it, of course, from the word "cracker") in a footnote and don't make proprietary extensions on the definition.
The EFF Open Dating Protocol, whereby geeks can register an (s) next to their names with the EFF (for "single") and they will be matched up for free with an available woman, at no cost to either party and ensuring that any pictures taken during the encounter are freely tradable on sites like "pronster" or hell, even IRC.
the GNU Owns Everything License: Under this contract, the entire world will sign everything over to the EFF, who, it is self-evident, know more about everything and will just generally manage stuff better. When contacted for comment, RMS was quoted as saying "You have no chance to survive make your time!!"
Now back to your regularly scheduled trolls. Thank you.
... towards what end? So you can see that someone has boarded your pontoon boat, call the cell phone lying on deck, hope that the intruders pick up and ask them to "please leave"?
I gotta admit, if I was gonna jump on a boat in the middle of nowhere, it would be unsettling to hear a phone ring. But I'd probably just take it.
hehe, getting off topic, but yeah, I thought the same thing: "playing with it and why it matters..." hell, if I say playing with it matters, then it matters!
Wow, I'm trying to respond without flaming here, but you sound like a really poor interviewer. I hope for your company's sake that it develops some kind of interview training or "norm"-ing process to counteract views like this.
If a candidate has knowledge that applies to the problem, then I say, by all means, hire her! "What exciting things are happening with java" sounds like a pretty nebulous question anyway, like something you'd find in a Sun press release or a hunt for buzzwords maybe. You even said she had used all the same technologies we use, and seemed to understand the technology well, it seems like she's got all her buzzwords in order.
Just because a candidate is maybe not someone you'd hang around with on weekends and might not share your hankering to install the newest whiz-bang gadget or GNOME revision, doesn't make him/her any less qualified to do the job at hand. Sure, curiosity and eagerness to learn are important, but those manifest themselves in other, more subtle ways as well, not just "geekiness."
They have _no incentive at all_ to produce more and varied music.
Actually they do, in a way. Here's why. Although the casual listeners are much maligned for accepting whatever is shoveled at them, they'll only take any one thing for so long. This goes for particular songs and artists as well as entire genres. People actually DO get sick of hearing the same old thing over and over; they're always eager to jump on the next "big thing."
Finding/manufacturing that next big thing is the job of the record companies. Withing a genre, it's easier (like trying to bring up Linkin Park when Papa Roach goes out of fashion or whatever). With genres, though, it's much harder; for example, in the 90s, labels knew they could only milk "alternative/grunge" for so long, and they didn't know what was coming next. So it suited them to have their fingers in a little of everything, all the while jockeying for control of what the next big thing would be.
In your example, this certainly isn't 100 different albums selling 100K copies each; it's more like the 10 1-million sellers. But they produced those 100 other records to find the "right" ten, at a profit of about zero.
I expect the margin isn't quite what we expect. Of course, musicians still go through the ringer, I'm not endorsing this system, but I think the major labels are more desperate than we think.
Nuh uh! I don't know which "most" you're reading, but I know there are at least some who do indeed put ads in the middle of their columns. However, tons of major ones (like nytimes, latimes, cnn, and washingtonpost) put them in rows or columns at the top or side of the page. Of course you might also cut off a menu when you scroll this off the screen, you can view just the news column and no ads, generally. Or at least quite frequently.
The NYTimes does not _need_ to advertise that heavily; it's shortsighted, greedy behavior and is akin to a sort of 'psychic pollution.'
Just for the record, yes they do. Any periodical does. That's how they survive. Take wired, for example. Just the print version, to simplify things. If you've every tried to publish a book or magazine yourself, you'd know that printing that many glossy pages and binding it that way costs at LEAST $3 per copy, and that's with a substantial volume discount. Yet they sell it for $1 to subscribers, and what? $4 on the newsstand? So there's no way they could ever, ever EVER subsist without "that many" ads. Just so you know.
Now, ad a website to that. Hell, might as well start talking about NYTimes now since that's the example in the article. The digital edition does not SAVE money because it does not directly eliminate the need for any particular printed copy. Plus there's additional overhead like syncing it up to the print edition, typical web admin duties, plus additional editors/columnists/photographers for special "online only" stories. And since they offer it FREE, it can only drain the main New York Times budget.
UNLESS, that is, they run more ads there. And actually persuade people to buy them.
So, your argument is really flawed. I don't think you're evil for skipping the ads, we all do, but don't say the papers don't NEED to run ads.
Personally I'm sick of people like this who consider banner ads successful ONLY when people click through immediately! To me, that's a McDonald's manager saying "Gee, advertisin' bob, traffic through our drivethrough only increased 0.3% in the 5 minutes after our commercial was run... I don't think TV advertising works!"
People aren't used to interacting with advertisements. In fact, I'd go so far as to say people don't WANT to. It's always "yup, there's an ad, I'm going on with my day." When I get up to read the news, I don't WANT to go buy a car, I want to read the %$#@ news!
I wish they'd look at it more like print ads, where you could just buy space on a web page, and there was LOTS of space. I mean, the NYTims shouldn't try interstitials, but it SHOULD sell that 2/3 of the screen not filled by the column. That just makes sense. Then if you don't want to read the ads, shrink your browser; think of it as folding back half of the newsprint page:)
I would never buy a cellphone, for the mere fact that I wouldn't want to be that accessible.
Um... they have power switches. How do you think I get the thing to shut up when I'm at the movies? And I'll bet you'll be sitting smugly in your car the next time you run out of gas in the middle of the desert, happy not to have a cell...
Hell, don't get one, I don't care. But the "I don't want to be that accessible" argument just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Just don't tell your boss the number.
And if any slashdot editors are reading this, the colors in this section absolutely freakin' rule. Much better than YRO, for instance, which has always made me feel like puking.
Sigh of relief... I was getting ready to write an epitaph for slackware. Glad I don't have to. I remember the first time I ran into slackware, it had kernel 1.2.13 in it; some guy tossed the CDs in with a computer I bought used in '96.
Of course, there are bound to be tons of "why use slackware?" posts. Well, I'll tell you why. At first, I hated it too; the first place I set it up was in my dorm room, connected to the bare internet, before they even set up the university firewall. I didn't know how to do ANYTHING. I had to scour the net just to get my vid card up so I could get out of text mode (twm! whoo hoo!).
The point is, on slackware 7.1, I can still use all those techniques to get the distro up and running 5 years later! I learned slackware well and my knowledge still applies. Of course there are new packages now, like KDE and GNOME, and I don't mind learning new stuff. But i DO really like that all the stuff I learned then, still applies on newer and more powerful systems.
I prefer this to redhat because, although it came closer to running out of the box, it didn't quite, and I never did get my soundcard working with redhat 6. Not to mention slackware is one of the better systems on which to compile and install your own kernel; I tried it with redhat and it just broke EVERYTHING. I got frustrated and switched back.
This is starting to sound like a guy whining about liking it the way things were "back in the day," and I guess to an extent it is. I don't know that i'd recommend slackware to a new user. But it's my personal favorite, and it's still really powerful and stable as hell.
Oh geez. I guess the only way I can have any privacy anymore will be to get up from my computer, leave the cell phone at home, and go TALK to somebody.
Hey, that makes me think, let's have a meatspace napster. It'll be a huge party in the town square where we all go and see if anyone is singing the songs we like:)
#99: "eCompany Now unveils the eCompany 40 in its March 2001 issue, touting its new portfolio as "40 Beat-Up Stocks That Will Rule the World." Since then, the stocks have shed more than 50 percent of their value."
Ha ha, stupid eCompany! Oh, wait, who's publishing this list again? oh yeah, it's eCompany.
This was the real problem with the internet "boom" and the ensuing stock market bubble -- totally incompetent people were offering market advice, and investors were actually taking it. eCompany isn't investment news, it's a Netscape portal toy publication. The thing that makes me sick is that the investment advice is so patently horrible that they even have the audacity to mock it outright in their own publication.
Of course this isn't the first time people have gotten burned by chasing a "sure thing" stock tip from some essentially anonymous source. "Let the buyer beware," I guess. And no, I'm not bitter; I didn't personally invest in any of the issues on eCompany's little list. It's just that I know a lot of retirees who have essentially lost their shirts following investment advice like this, and from more allegedly "reputable" places, too, like cnnfn and cbs marketwatch.
What it really goes to show, I guess, is the real watermark of the internet: irresponsible journalism. With all this hype, and columnists essentially a commodity, who has time to check facts?!
The same could easily be said for Windows XP. Believe it or not Microsoft has got to sell Windows XP. If Windows XP is chuck full of stupid "features" that are actually disincentives to the upgrade then people will stick with what they have.
*sigh*... no. Windows XP will be adopted for the same reason Windows ME is being adopted: OEM bundling. No one buys OSs on purpose, they buy a computer, and it needs an OS. What they get will be whatever Microsoft wants to give them.
And, given that XP is NT-based and ME is still basically a DOS patch, maybe old windows users will be essentially forced to upgrade -- if all the new programs come out "WinXP/2000 compatible," then you are stuck if you don't have an NT-based windows.
Oh man. I don't think degredation of media even comes into play sometimes. Have you ever tried to find a story from yesterday's paper on your local newspaper's website? A lot of times stuff just gets cycled out the next day.
Of course, the NYTimes, etc, have archive searches as a premium service, but there are just tons of media outlets that don't seem to archive, or if they do, don't seem concerned with letting people get at it. This seems like at least as much of a concern as degrading media: the organization and maintainence of archives in the FIRST place.
All we needed was a kernel. Linux provides that kernel.
Um... I was always under the impression that they feel the Linux kernel is a transitional solution -- only intended until the GNU Hurd kernel is complete. As an astute AC commented below, that hasn't progressed very far since Linux took the world by storm.
What?! Presumably you're saying that Linux wouldn't even have existed if the GNU kernel had been finished in 1992. Okay, maybe, but I don't think the GNU kernel is even "ready" now! Or if so, quite recently... So, yeah, it seems as if there was only an 8 year window of opportunity where Linux could have come about:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I got that, and I was joking. The point is, there'd still be a nice computer and cell phone on board, actually making it an even more attractive target.
So much for sarcasm.
As such, if it's even moderately sized, you probably have some breathing room to negotiate terms. First off, it really is critical that you *READ YOUR CONTRACT* before you sign. If it is has some rediculous thing like "anything done by employee at any time during employment is IP or employer," then talk to the HR person!
A much more reasonable contract is one that assigns all rights 1) relating to stuff you do on company time or equipment, or 2) relating to the subject matter you work on at work. If you do coding in your spare time, it's your business; your employer should recognize this. It's quite simple.
---
- The GNU "use of the word hacker" license: under this document, the word "hacker" will be copyrighted by GNU, but the general public will be allowed to continue using it as long as they include the GNU official definition (differentiating it, of course, from the word "cracker") in a footnote and don't make proprietary extensions on the definition.
- The EFF Open Dating Protocol, whereby geeks can register an (s) next to their names with the EFF (for "single") and they will be matched up for free with an available woman, at no cost to either party and ensuring that any pictures taken during the encounter are freely tradable on sites like "pronster" or hell, even IRC.
- the GNU Owns Everything License: Under this contract, the entire world will sign everything over to the EFF, who, it is self-evident, know more about everything and will just generally manage stuff better. When contacted for comment, RMS was quoted as saying "You have no chance to survive make your time!!"
Now back to your regularly scheduled trolls.Thank you.
---
I gotta admit, if I was gonna jump on a boat in the middle of nowhere, it would be unsettling to hear a phone ring. But I'd probably just take it.
hehe, getting off topic, but yeah, I thought the same thing: "playing with it and why it matters..." hell, if I say playing with it matters, then it matters!
If a candidate has knowledge that applies to the problem, then I say, by all means, hire her! "What exciting things are happening with java" sounds like a pretty nebulous question anyway, like something you'd find in a Sun press release or a hunt for buzzwords maybe. You even said she had used all the same technologies we use, and seemed to understand the technology well, it seems like she's got all her buzzwords in order.
Just because a candidate is maybe not someone you'd hang around with on weekends and might not share your hankering to install the newest whiz-bang gadget or GNOME revision, doesn't make him/her any less qualified to do the job at hand. Sure, curiosity and eagerness to learn are important, but those manifest themselves in other, more subtle ways as well, not just "geekiness."
Actually they do, in a way. Here's why. Although the casual listeners are much maligned for accepting whatever is shoveled at them, they'll only take any one thing for so long. This goes for particular songs and artists as well as entire genres. People actually DO get sick of hearing the same old thing over and over; they're always eager to jump on the next "big thing."
Finding/manufacturing that next big thing is the job of the record companies. Withing a genre, it's easier (like trying to bring up Linkin Park when Papa Roach goes out of fashion or whatever). With genres, though, it's much harder; for example, in the 90s, labels knew they could only milk "alternative/grunge" for so long, and they didn't know what was coming next. So it suited them to have their fingers in a little of everything, all the while jockeying for control of what the next big thing would be.
In your example, this certainly isn't 100 different albums selling 100K copies each; it's more like the 10 1-million sellers. But they produced those 100 other records to find the "right" ten, at a profit of about zero.
I expect the margin isn't quite what we expect. Of course, musicians still go through the ringer, I'm not endorsing this system, but I think the major labels are more desperate than we think.
Nuh uh! I don't know which "most" you're reading, but I know there are at least some who do indeed put ads in the middle of their columns. However, tons of major ones (like nytimes, latimes, cnn, and washingtonpost) put them in rows or columns at the top or side of the page. Of course you might also cut off a menu when you scroll this off the screen, you can view just the news column and no ads, generally. Or at least quite frequently.
heh. And the only reason I click on banner ads is because it's the only way to get a "patriotic campaign" going on at Astronest.
Just for the record, yes they do. Any periodical does. That's how they survive. Take wired, for example. Just the print version, to simplify things. If you've every tried to publish a book or magazine yourself, you'd know that printing that many glossy pages and binding it that way costs at LEAST $3 per copy, and that's with a substantial volume discount. Yet they sell it for $1 to subscribers, and what? $4 on the newsstand? So there's no way they could ever, ever EVER subsist without "that many" ads. Just so you know.
Now, ad a website to that. Hell, might as well start talking about NYTimes now since that's the example in the article. The digital edition does not SAVE money because it does not directly eliminate the need for any particular printed copy. Plus there's additional overhead like syncing it up to the print edition, typical web admin duties, plus additional editors/columnists/photographers for special "online only" stories. And since they offer it FREE, it can only drain the main New York Times budget.
UNLESS, that is, they run more ads there. And actually persuade people to buy them.
So, your argument is really flawed. I don't think you're evil for skipping the ads, we all do, but don't say the papers don't NEED to run ads.
People aren't used to interacting with advertisements. In fact, I'd go so far as to say people don't WANT to. It's always "yup, there's an ad, I'm going on with my day." When I get up to read the news, I don't WANT to go buy a car, I want to read the %$#@ news!
I wish they'd look at it more like print ads, where you could just buy space on a web page, and there was LOTS of space. I mean, the NYTims shouldn't try interstitials, but it SHOULD sell that 2/3 of the screen not filled by the column. That just makes sense. Then if you don't want to read the ads, shrink your browser; think of it as folding back half of the newsprint page :)
Oops, looks like they rolled out tomorrow's edition already. Er, today's. Whatever. Click "previous issue," or click here.
Um... they have power switches. How do you think I get the thing to shut up when I'm at the movies? And I'll bet you'll be sitting smugly in your car the next time you run out of gas in the middle of the desert, happy not to have a cell...
Hell, don't get one, I don't care. But the "I don't want to be that accessible" argument just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Just don't tell your boss the number.
And if any slashdot editors are reading this, the colors in this section absolutely freakin' rule. Much better than YRO, for instance, which has always made me feel like puking.
Well, okay, boot and root ones maybe, but still.
Of course, there are bound to be tons of "why use slackware?" posts. Well, I'll tell you why. At first, I hated it too; the first place I set it up was in my dorm room, connected to the bare internet, before they even set up the university firewall. I didn't know how to do ANYTHING. I had to scour the net just to get my vid card up so I could get out of text mode (twm! whoo hoo!).
The point is, on slackware 7.1, I can still use all those techniques to get the distro up and running 5 years later! I learned slackware well and my knowledge still applies. Of course there are new packages now, like KDE and GNOME, and I don't mind learning new stuff. But i DO really like that all the stuff I learned then, still applies on newer and more powerful systems.
I prefer this to redhat because, although it came closer to running out of the box, it didn't quite, and I never did get my soundcard working with redhat 6. Not to mention slackware is one of the better systems on which to compile and install your own kernel; I tried it with redhat and it just broke EVERYTHING. I got frustrated and switched back.
This is starting to sound like a guy whining about liking it the way things were "back in the day," and I guess to an extent it is. I don't know that i'd recommend slackware to a new user. But it's my personal favorite, and it's still really powerful and stable as hell.
Hey, that makes me think, let's have a meatspace napster. It'll be a huge party in the town square where we all go and see if anyone is singing the songs we like :)
Whoo hoo! 120 FPS on my crappy 200x100 cellphone screen! Quake Arena Mobile, here I come...
Ha ha, stupid eCompany! Oh, wait, who's publishing this list again? oh yeah, it's eCompany.
This was the real problem with the internet "boom" and the ensuing stock market bubble -- totally incompetent people were offering market advice, and investors were actually taking it. eCompany isn't investment news, it's a Netscape portal toy publication. The thing that makes me sick is that the investment advice is so patently horrible that they even have the audacity to mock it outright in their own publication.
Of course this isn't the first time people have gotten burned by chasing a "sure thing" stock tip from some essentially anonymous source. "Let the buyer beware," I guess. And no, I'm not bitter; I didn't personally invest in any of the issues on eCompany's little list. It's just that I know a lot of retirees who have essentially lost their shirts following investment advice like this, and from more allegedly "reputable" places, too, like cnnfn and cbs marketwatch.
What it really goes to show, I guess, is the real watermark of the internet: irresponsible journalism. With all this hype, and columnists essentially a commodity, who has time to check facts?!
*sigh*... no. Windows XP will be adopted for the same reason Windows ME is being adopted: OEM bundling. No one buys OSs on purpose, they buy a computer, and it needs an OS. What they get will be whatever Microsoft wants to give them.
And, given that XP is NT-based and ME is still basically a DOS patch, maybe old windows users will be essentially forced to upgrade -- if all the new programs come out "WinXP/2000 compatible," then you are stuck if you don't have an NT-based windows.
I think they've got this one in the bag. D'oh.
Great links, by the way; I hope you get a couple more karma points before this gets archived...
Of course, the NYTimes, etc, have archive searches as a premium service, but there are just tons of media outlets that don't seem to archive, or if they do, don't seem concerned with letting people get at it. This seems like at least as much of a concern as degrading media: the organization and maintainence of archives in the FIRST place.
F) People who will say that the gov't should open-source the Osprey drivers, magically fixing all bugs in the code.
Um... I was always under the impression that they feel the Linux kernel is a transitional solution -- only intended until the GNU Hurd kernel is complete. As an astute AC commented below, that hasn't progressed very far since Linux took the world by storm.
What?! Presumably you're saying that Linux wouldn't even have existed if the GNU kernel had been finished in 1992. Okay, maybe, but I don't think the GNU kernel is even "ready" now! Or if so, quite recently... So, yeah, it seems as if there was only an 8 year window of opportunity where Linux could have come about :)