It's very easy to sit back today and say, "Wow it could have been so much better!" But that is armchair crap at the best of times...
Sure, but you don't have to be some kind of genius to see that protocols like FTP and SMTP have some problems. Although I'm not qualified to do anything about it, I suffer some problems due to some of those problems and limitations, so I'd like to reserve the right to complain even if it is "armchair crap".
I *do* find it frustrating how common and necessary FTP can be in spite of it being really awful, particularly because I know that FTP is used largely out of inertia and familiarity, and out of ignorance of its flaws.
I'm not arguing that there's anything very new or interesting in the article, though.
I'd like to just add on to your post, because I think otherwise part of your point may be missed. The reason this judgement is good is not because it protects people who have child pornography, but because it protects people who don't have it.
If you make an exception and say that it's ok to do otherwise illegal searches so long as you're looking for child pornography, then you've opened a back door for police to search *any* computer under the guise of looking for child porn. So then, some day in the future, some police officer would be able to take your computer without a warrant, scan your hard drive, and then say, "Well, we were looking for child pornography, so what we did was legal, but we found instead this other information. Since the search was completely legal, we can use that information against you."
In effect, it would mean that they wouldn't need a warrant to search computers anymore.
You can put it in airplane mode, which I'm sure would do the trick. But also I believe that any equipment that is specifically designed to be used with the iPhone should be shielded against the interference.
A website's "terms of service" are not the Ten Commandments. They're not laws, or even moral rules.
This raises the question in my mind, "What are 'terms of service'?" Is it something akin to a contract, or is it merely a statement about what you should or should not expect from someone providing service? Because I think you have a decent point, here. If a site says something to the effect of, "we don't want you to open multiple accounts and we reserve the right to close your accounts if we believe you've been opening multiple accounts," then it's not necessarily unethical to open multiple accounts. It may just be that the company providing the service is covering its own ass in cases where there's gross abuse.
I don't know-- I've seen it with multiple of my own phones, phones without data capabilities from both Nokia and Motorola, before I got my iPhone. And I've definitely seen it from GSM phones, without data, when they weren't receiving a call or text message.
Phones constantly check in with towers even when there's no specific activity, meaning the radio is sending/receiving signals even when you're not talking or sending data. There may be an increase in frequency or intensity of these noises with the iPhone, but not enough that I've noticed or thought it was remarkable.
Correct, lots of cell phones do this. If people are noticing it more with the iPhone, it's probably because people are more likely to want to hook the iPhone into audio equipment than with other cell phones.
Email is a good documentation tool. "Clarify" the request, asking if this is what he intends for you to do. Remove the emotion. Put in only facts. Put in a piece about your not being sure, but this may be a violation of terms of service. Ask if he wants you to proceed. Forward your sent email to a personal account.
Email is good also because you can CC people. You have to be careful because politically you might not be able to do something quite as bold as copying your boss's boss, but you might be able to bring someone else into the conversation. Think about whether there's someone who might have influence over your boss, would probably be on your side, and who you might plausibly CC innocently.
Also, it helps if you can make a business case for why you shouldn't be doing these things, beyond the ethical issues. Bring up possible legal ramifications (not just "it's illegal" but "what if we get sued?"). Raise the issue that, since you're just screen scraping, you might have to redevelop if they restructure their page. See if you can find some way in which using multiple accounts will cost more in development or maintenance that it would to get a single pay account.
I know that we'd all like to think that being on the right/legal side of the argument is enough, but in reality it helps to have money and politics on your side.
I'm not against DRM. I'm against incompetence and time-wasting. Too much of current DRM is nothing more than snakeoil for publishers.
But all DRM is going to be crackable. The purpose of DRM is (a) to prevent casual copying and/or (b) to encourage legitimate users to buy multiple copies. In the best case, DRM is unobtrusive enough in operation and difficult enough to crack that people won't really bother to find a way to crack the DRM.
Uncrackable DRM is a fantasy, but if the "snakeoil" successfully prevents casual copying, it's about as effective as DRM is going to get.
You shouldn't really have to reinstall, but I'm not positive what the best/easiest method of fixing this is if you don't already know what you're doing. You should be able to use the Ubuntu install CD as a LiveCD and boot your machine. From there you should be able to edit your X11org.conf, or else chroot to the installed OS and use apt-get to remove the restricted drivers.
I don't know if that's better or worse for you than re-installing, but if you're interested you could use this as an opportunity to learn some things. Or not-- I don't know whether you *want* to learn some things.
I really hate this logic. Just because you understand something about a computer or security does not make you smarter than anyone else. You have an area of expertise, that doesn't make you more intelligent.
You did finish reading my post, right? I said "stupid people" for dramatic effect, and then later: "Ok, to be fair, it's not just stupid people. There are smart people who simply don't have the computer or security expertise"
What version of Windows XP are you using? Any time I've installed XP from a normal disk, it requires at least agreeing to some license agreement, partitioning, formating, configuring your network to some degree, choosing username, clicking "Next" a bunch of times, some other random stupid things I'm preobably not remembering, and then installing several drivers. I'd love a copy of XP that installed as easily as hitting the "install" button.
Anyway, yeah, Ubuntu is about as easy as installing Windows-- potentially easier because it's likely that it will recognize more of your hardware without installing drivers. Also, you can boot up the install CD as a LiveCD and try using the OS before you install.
I'd say that you're right, except that you're ignoring one source of problems: stupid people. Stupid people can't "stop doing things that put [them] at risk for viruses" because they aren't smart enough to understand the difference between risky behavior and safe behavior. Even if you explain it to them, they won't understand it, and they'll forget your instructions.
Ok, to be fair, it's not just stupid people. There are smart people who simply don't have the computer or security expertise necessary to be able to understand the difference between a safe download and a risky one. They don't understand, and they have other things to do besides spending all their time learning, investigating, and figuring it out.
For those people, it helps to secure the system through various methods, one of which might be an AV program.
I don't work helpdesk, but I do know the sort of thing the GP is talking about.
For the record, I didn't mean to claim that this was in any way unique to helpdesk jobs. It was just meant to be an obvious example of a tech job where you're effectively "on call". When starting out, I had a couple helpdesk jobs where I was literally paid to be present in an office in case a problem came up. I would ask my boss if he wanted me to do anything during that time, and he said he didn't have anything for me to do except to be there. It was my job to sit at my desk 9-6 every day, regardless of how slow the day was or how bored I got, and look professional. There were plenty of days where I had a few uninterrupted hours of "nothing to do", and could have played video games, without hurting my performance, except that it violated the "look professional" part of the job. In a different work environment, video games might have been fine. It's pretty clear-cut.
Now almost all jobs have some kind of occasional downtime, but I would imagine being a developer makes the issue a little more obscure. Even if your job is very project-oriented, there might be cases where someone very productive might finish their project early, and that person might just need to wait for coworkers to catch up. Like let's say you and I are working on interlocking parts, I finish my part before you finish yours, and I can't continue my work until you finish yours. You only need another hour to complete your job, which given the workflow of the company means that I don't have time find another project to work on, and I've already finished a lot of my side projects. So maybe I take an hour break. What's the problem?
Being productive and getting other people to be productive really isn't that simple. Being a good manager requires being creative and adapting to the situation. It's difficult and complex, which is why there are so many bad managers out there-- and even decent managers screw things up often enough.
Or maybe you're a skilled worker, very good at your job, but just have a slow day now and then without much to do. Ideally, in those cases, you'd be able to just take the day off. With the people I manage, I don't want people taking the day off just because they think they're having a slow day. I need people to be there in case something comes up, in case a client calls, or whatever. I need them there just in case I need them for something.
So I make them come to work and stay there every day, they're skilled in general and trained for their particular jobs, they're very valuable employees, and some days they still have a light load of work. It happens. If I can think of another project that they could be working on, I'll ask them to do that. Otherwise, I don't care very much how they spend their time as long as they're present, willing to get to work when it comes up, and not interfering with others' work.
I much prefer the idea of get in, work hard, get out after 8 hours, don't put in more than 40 if you can help it.
Well that's you, and that's probably based on the job you have, your view of "work", and your home situation. There have been times when I felt the same way as you. And then I've had situations where I was willing to work some extra hours, but I needed to be able to take breaks and work at my own pace in order to maintain sanity.
I'd say it really depends on the job and the situation-- there's no single right answer here. Some jobs you just have to be there for set hours, whether you have work to do or not. As I mentioned in another post, sometimes part of the job is to be there, just in case something goes wrong or some work comes in, and the rest of the time you're sitting around waiting. In those cases, what's the problem with people playing games when they're sitting around waiting, as long as they're willing to drop the game when work comes in?
In other cases, it's not the hours that are important, but it's more about achieving set goals within a timeline. In those cases, what's the problem with people playing games during work hours, so long as they're achieving the goals set for them within the deadline?
The problem isn't really that there's something inherently wrong with keeping a console in the office. Even if you want to come in, work as few hours as necessary, and get out quickly, you still have the option of not playing and keeping your nose to the grindstone. The real problem here is that lots of people don't have a lot of self-discipline and aren't great at managing their own time. People won't drop the game when work comes in, or people won't reach goals before deadlines.
People give into distractions and don't get their work done, and so as a manager, it can be a really bad idea to introduce more distractions. That's why I would say that letting people play video games on the job is often a bad idea, but not always a bad idea.
Whether or not this is a good/bad idea depends on a lot of things. In most situations, I agree, it's not a great idea. On the other hand, there are some jobs with genuine down-time. I mean, lots of jobs have some amount of down-time, and lots of times there are other productive things that people can be doing during those times, but sometimes not. Sometimes there are genuinely jobs that, when there's nothing to do, there's nothing to do.
What some people don't always recognize is, sometimes the job is to sit around and wait. Helpdesk jobs can be like this, for example. It may be that a person's job is entirely reactive, and on a day that nothing breaks, there might be nothing to do. Unless you actually want to create a task for yourself of finding things for them to do, you have to accept that they're going to surf the web, play flash games, etc.
Now you might say, "Fine, let them do that. But why would I spend extra money that's going to distract them?" To that I'd say, it depends on the people, and it depends on the work environment. Sometimes you might do something like this just for a perk, to keep good people around and keep moral up. Also, I know for myself, sometimes I can be more productive if I get a genuine break. If I can get up, get away from my desk, and get engaged in something else for 10 minutes, then I'll come back more productive than if I sat in front of my computer playing flash games. It actually helps to have a clearer distinction from when/where I'm "taking a break" vs. "working".
So because of these reasons (and some others) I let me people play Rock Band in the office. I know when people have work to do, and I can see when they're playing Rock Band. It's a little bit of team building, keeps people happy, and in the past 6 months or so, no one has neglected their work in favor of Rock Band to any noticeable degree.
Beyond all that, with regards to the question, "Are you trying to be their manager or their friend?" I agree that sometimes being someone's boss/manager means you can't really be their friends. Once you have some kind of power over someone, they're going to hate you a little. Still, you have to manage that hatred. Sometimes, if they hate you too much, it gets to be counter-productive, so it can be worthwhile to do nice things for the people you manage.
If you put a Jedi and a simple Trooper in the SW MMO you get either a big unbalance or the Jedi and/or Trooper will be weaker/stronger than they should be.
Just to geek out here for a second: I've thought about this and I'm not sure it's true. We know that there are some people who the force is particularly strong with them, and those people would seem to have an advantage regardless of their position or training. It might be somewhat like what a lot of RPGs would give you as a "luck" stat, i.e. you'd get better results more often. So a well trained soldier, say, with whom the force was particularly strong, might be more powerful than a weak and poorly trained Jedi.
Then there's a separate issue of having received various kinds of Jedi training, which would increase the payoff of your force strength, but arguably anyone could receive some amount of training. At least from the original movies, a lot of things were unclear. It didn't seem at all clear to me, for example, that Han would have been completely untrainable, but rather that he wasn't as naturally gifted as Luke. Also-- perhaps it's hinted that the Jedi didn't offer training freely because of the fear of a trainee gaining power before turning to the dark side.
Anyway, my point is that you could carefully craft a game where skills were a bit more balanced, especially since you could make Jedi training arbitrarily rare and difficult. The main problem with this is that other Star Wars games (e.g. Force Unleashed) have set a precedent for Jedis being unreasonably powerful from the get-go, and backing off of that in subsequent games could run afoul of fan expectations. To satisfy fan expectations, there's been a constant increase in Jedis powers, to the point where a single Sith can do ridiculous things. But think back to the original movies, and what could a Jedi do? Luke had increased agility and intuitiveness, minor telekinesis, an occasional skill for seeing ahead to a possible future, and the ability to influence the weak minded. That's about it.
I design and implement mathematical models. But because of that, I also know what mathematical models can't do.
Indeed. Since you're an expert, tell me if I'm wrong here: One thing mathematical models can't do is control reality. You can make a computer model of what would happen to our solar system if gravity was doubled, but that won't actually double the force of gravity in the world. Unfortunately, making a mathematical model that says you'll make loads of money and have little risk of losing it doesn't mean that you won't lose your money in the real world.
I didn't say the federal government should do fine-grained civic planning across the country, but only that our country suffers from poor civic planning.
However, the Federal government does have a role in development and maintenance of national infrastructure, and therefore exerts influence over the sort of civic planning that takes place. Putting a bigger focus on the interstate highway system and destroying the railroad system has helped shaped our country into a place where you can't get by without a car. Once everyone has cars, there isn't much point in local governments investing in public transportation.
The purpose of RAID5 isn't to minimize the risk of failure, but only to mitigate an increased risk of failure. If you want to minimize the risk of failure, then you maximize redundancy, and will probably prefer to choose RAID1 (or RAID 10, or more generally something that uses mirroring rather than parity).
It's (at least technically) possible for a RAID5 to have a greater likelihood of failure and any data loss than a single drive.
So to exaggerate the situation, imagine you could choose to use a single 1TB drive, or a RAID5 of 1,001 1GB drives. It's true that with the 1TB drive, you'd only need one drive to fail in order to lose your data, whereas with the RAID you'd need 2 drives to fail. However, I'd bet that the RAID is much more likely to fail in a given time period.
In case it's not immediately apparent why, let's imagine that all the drives you're talking about had a.1 chance of failure within 10 years. So if those odds played out at the end of 10 years, then it's likely that 100 of those drives in the RAID will have gone bad within 10 years, and all you need is for 2 of those 100 to go bad at roughly the same time. Make sense?
On the other hand, I agree that if you're going to use a small number of disks, RAID5 may be safer than using those disks completely independently. If you had 3 500GB disks and only needed 1TB, but wanted a little extra safety, then RAID5 would be a good choice.
One of my biggest gripes is the lack of community planning since the 1950s.
Bingo. What a lot of the people responding to you are failing to recognize is that "community planning" doesn't necessarily mean that everyone has to live in completely urban areas.
For example, you could have suburbs that well planned, where you have commercial property and residential property well spaced out, and you have a yard *and* you can walk a couple blocks to your grocery store. You can have a garage and a car *and* have the option of living a complete life relying on public transportation, in the same area.
America just hasn't done a good job of civic planning or infrastructure development for a very long time.
The last problem I had was a bad RAID controller. What happens when the controller itself goes bad? So I need two controllers? A RAID 5 on each, RAID 1 between them?
That's why it's a good idea to get as redundant as you can afford (completely separate systems at different locations, if possible). And of course, you should be doing a backup anyway. Backups protect from more than just hardware failures. It's a good thing to remember that there's only so safe you can get on a set budget.
What lots of people forget about this sort of security (as well as security in general), is that you can't ever be completely safe. You're just managing your risks, categorizing some as acceptable and some as unacceptable, and then determining what you can do within your budget to eliminate the unacceptable risks. But when you're all done, there's still going to be a possibility that you'll lose all of your data.
How reliable RAID5 is depends, because actually the more disks you have, the greater the likelihood that one of them will fail in any set period of time. So obviously if you have a RAID 0 of lots of disks, then there is a much better chance that the RAID will fail than that any particular disk will fail.
So the purpose of RAID5 is not so much to make it orders of magnitude more reliable than just having a single disk, but rather to mitigate the increased risk that would come from having a RAID0. So you'd have to calculate, for the number of disks and the failure rate of any particular drive, what are the chances of having 2 drives fail at the same time (given a certain response rate to drive failure). If you have enough drives and a slow enough response to disk failures, it's at least theoretically possible (I haven't done the math) that a single drive is safer.
You don't charge others to receive a show flyer (which could take a few hours to design, plus hours to print and many hours to distribute), so why charge for music?
Really there are a couple different issues to talk about. The first question is, what's your policy toward consumers of your products? This question seems to be what your post is focussing in on, and I agree that there's probably a good business model for content with loose controls.
But that doesn't require that you actually repudiate your copyright claims, and copyright takes care of other issues too. For example, you talked about releasing your writings without restricting distribution, and requesting $20 in the final chapter. Is it still acceptable for me to take your books, alter the final chapter to request that people send $20 to me instead of you, and republish them? Because if you've really given up your copyright, then there's nothing to stop me from doing that.
Also, though the Internet is a terrific distribution medium, lots of books are still sold in book stores. So let's say I make a deal with a small publisher to print up a bunch of copies of my book and sell it in book stores, and it becomes wildly successful. What then stops another publisher from taking my book, republishing it, and selling it themselves without giving any money to me or the original publisher? What stops the big publishers from simply driving smaller publishers out of business?
I think copyright still has a purpose to serve. It has just gotten a bad name over the past several years due to chronic abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
It's very easy to sit back today and say, "Wow it could have been so much better!" But that is armchair crap at the best of times...
Sure, but you don't have to be some kind of genius to see that protocols like FTP and SMTP have some problems. Although I'm not qualified to do anything about it, I suffer some problems due to some of those problems and limitations, so I'd like to reserve the right to complain even if it is "armchair crap".
I *do* find it frustrating how common and necessary FTP can be in spite of it being really awful, particularly because I know that FTP is used largely out of inertia and familiarity, and out of ignorance of its flaws.
I'm not arguing that there's anything very new or interesting in the article, though.
I'd like to just add on to your post, because I think otherwise part of your point may be missed. The reason this judgement is good is not because it protects people who have child pornography, but because it protects people who don't have it.
If you make an exception and say that it's ok to do otherwise illegal searches so long as you're looking for child pornography, then you've opened a back door for police to search *any* computer under the guise of looking for child porn. So then, some day in the future, some police officer would be able to take your computer without a warrant, scan your hard drive, and then say, "Well, we were looking for child pornography, so what we did was legal, but we found instead this other information. Since the search was completely legal, we can use that information against you."
In effect, it would mean that they wouldn't need a warrant to search computers anymore.
You can put it in airplane mode, which I'm sure would do the trick. But also I believe that any equipment that is specifically designed to be used with the iPhone should be shielded against the interference.
I thought "those in the know start to advise against use of the software" happens minutes after the announcement that it's being developed.
Yes, I'm flattering Slashdotters by referring to them as "those in the know".
A website's "terms of service" are not the Ten Commandments. They're not laws, or even moral rules.
This raises the question in my mind, "What are 'terms of service'?" Is it something akin to a contract, or is it merely a statement about what you should or should not expect from someone providing service? Because I think you have a decent point, here. If a site says something to the effect of, "we don't want you to open multiple accounts and we reserve the right to close your accounts if we believe you've been opening multiple accounts," then it's not necessarily unethical to open multiple accounts. It may just be that the company providing the service is covering its own ass in cases where there's gross abuse.
I don't know-- I've seen it with multiple of my own phones, phones without data capabilities from both Nokia and Motorola, before I got my iPhone. And I've definitely seen it from GSM phones, without data, when they weren't receiving a call or text message.
Phones constantly check in with towers even when there's no specific activity, meaning the radio is sending/receiving signals even when you're not talking or sending data. There may be an increase in frequency or intensity of these noises with the iPhone, but not enough that I've noticed or thought it was remarkable.
Correct, lots of cell phones do this. If people are noticing it more with the iPhone, it's probably because people are more likely to want to hook the iPhone into audio equipment than with other cell phones.
Email is a good documentation tool. "Clarify" the request, asking if this is what he intends for you to do. Remove the emotion. Put in only facts. Put in a piece about your not being sure, but this may be a violation of terms of service. Ask if he wants you to proceed. Forward your sent email to a personal account.
Email is good also because you can CC people. You have to be careful because politically you might not be able to do something quite as bold as copying your boss's boss, but you might be able to bring someone else into the conversation. Think about whether there's someone who might have influence over your boss, would probably be on your side, and who you might plausibly CC innocently.
Also, it helps if you can make a business case for why you shouldn't be doing these things, beyond the ethical issues. Bring up possible legal ramifications (not just "it's illegal" but "what if we get sued?"). Raise the issue that, since you're just screen scraping, you might have to redevelop if they restructure their page. See if you can find some way in which using multiple accounts will cost more in development or maintenance that it would to get a single pay account.
I know that we'd all like to think that being on the right/legal side of the argument is enough, but in reality it helps to have money and politics on your side.
I'm not against DRM. I'm against incompetence and time-wasting. Too much of current DRM is nothing more than snakeoil for publishers.
But all DRM is going to be crackable. The purpose of DRM is (a) to prevent casual copying and/or (b) to encourage legitimate users to buy multiple copies. In the best case, DRM is unobtrusive enough in operation and difficult enough to crack that people won't really bother to find a way to crack the DRM.
Uncrackable DRM is a fantasy, but if the "snakeoil" successfully prevents casual copying, it's about as effective as DRM is going to get.
You shouldn't really have to reinstall, but I'm not positive what the best/easiest method of fixing this is if you don't already know what you're doing. You should be able to use the Ubuntu install CD as a LiveCD and boot your machine. From there you should be able to edit your X11org.conf, or else chroot to the installed OS and use apt-get to remove the restricted drivers.
I don't know if that's better or worse for you than re-installing, but if you're interested you could use this as an opportunity to learn some things. Or not-- I don't know whether you *want* to learn some things.
I really hate this logic. Just because you understand something about a computer or security does not make you smarter than anyone else. You have an area of expertise, that doesn't make you more intelligent.
You did finish reading my post, right? I said "stupid people" for dramatic effect, and then later: "Ok, to be fair, it's not just stupid people. There are smart people who simply don't have the computer or security expertise"
What version of Windows XP are you using? Any time I've installed XP from a normal disk, it requires at least agreeing to some license agreement, partitioning, formating, configuring your network to some degree, choosing username, clicking "Next" a bunch of times, some other random stupid things I'm preobably not remembering, and then installing several drivers. I'd love a copy of XP that installed as easily as hitting the "install" button.
Anyway, yeah, Ubuntu is about as easy as installing Windows-- potentially easier because it's likely that it will recognize more of your hardware without installing drivers. Also, you can boot up the install CD as a LiveCD and try using the OS before you install.
I'd say that you're right, except that you're ignoring one source of problems: stupid people. Stupid people can't "stop doing things that put [them] at risk for viruses" because they aren't smart enough to understand the difference between risky behavior and safe behavior. Even if you explain it to them, they won't understand it, and they'll forget your instructions.
Ok, to be fair, it's not just stupid people. There are smart people who simply don't have the computer or security expertise necessary to be able to understand the difference between a safe download and a risky one. They don't understand, and they have other things to do besides spending all their time learning, investigating, and figuring it out.
For those people, it helps to secure the system through various methods, one of which might be an AV program.
I don't work helpdesk, but I do know the sort of thing the GP is talking about.
For the record, I didn't mean to claim that this was in any way unique to helpdesk jobs. It was just meant to be an obvious example of a tech job where you're effectively "on call". When starting out, I had a couple helpdesk jobs where I was literally paid to be present in an office in case a problem came up. I would ask my boss if he wanted me to do anything during that time, and he said he didn't have anything for me to do except to be there. It was my job to sit at my desk 9-6 every day, regardless of how slow the day was or how bored I got, and look professional. There were plenty of days where I had a few uninterrupted hours of "nothing to do", and could have played video games, without hurting my performance, except that it violated the "look professional" part of the job. In a different work environment, video games might have been fine. It's pretty clear-cut.
Now almost all jobs have some kind of occasional downtime, but I would imagine being a developer makes the issue a little more obscure. Even if your job is very project-oriented, there might be cases where someone very productive might finish their project early, and that person might just need to wait for coworkers to catch up. Like let's say you and I are working on interlocking parts, I finish my part before you finish yours, and I can't continue my work until you finish yours. You only need another hour to complete your job, which given the workflow of the company means that I don't have time find another project to work on, and I've already finished a lot of my side projects. So maybe I take an hour break. What's the problem?
Being productive and getting other people to be productive really isn't that simple. Being a good manager requires being creative and adapting to the situation. It's difficult and complex, which is why there are so many bad managers out there-- and even decent managers screw things up often enough.
Maybe.
Or maybe you're a skilled worker, very good at your job, but just have a slow day now and then without much to do. Ideally, in those cases, you'd be able to just take the day off. With the people I manage, I don't want people taking the day off just because they think they're having a slow day. I need people to be there in case something comes up, in case a client calls, or whatever. I need them there just in case I need them for something.
So I make them come to work and stay there every day, they're skilled in general and trained for their particular jobs, they're very valuable employees, and some days they still have a light load of work. It happens. If I can think of another project that they could be working on, I'll ask them to do that. Otherwise, I don't care very much how they spend their time as long as they're present, willing to get to work when it comes up, and not interfering with others' work.
I much prefer the idea of get in, work hard, get out after 8 hours, don't put in more than 40 if you can help it.
Well that's you, and that's probably based on the job you have, your view of "work", and your home situation. There have been times when I felt the same way as you. And then I've had situations where I was willing to work some extra hours, but I needed to be able to take breaks and work at my own pace in order to maintain sanity.
I'd say it really depends on the job and the situation-- there's no single right answer here. Some jobs you just have to be there for set hours, whether you have work to do or not. As I mentioned in another post, sometimes part of the job is to be there, just in case something goes wrong or some work comes in, and the rest of the time you're sitting around waiting. In those cases, what's the problem with people playing games when they're sitting around waiting, as long as they're willing to drop the game when work comes in?
In other cases, it's not the hours that are important, but it's more about achieving set goals within a timeline. In those cases, what's the problem with people playing games during work hours, so long as they're achieving the goals set for them within the deadline?
The problem isn't really that there's something inherently wrong with keeping a console in the office. Even if you want to come in, work as few hours as necessary, and get out quickly, you still have the option of not playing and keeping your nose to the grindstone. The real problem here is that lots of people don't have a lot of self-discipline and aren't great at managing their own time. People won't drop the game when work comes in, or people won't reach goals before deadlines.
People give into distractions and don't get their work done, and so as a manager, it can be a really bad idea to introduce more distractions. That's why I would say that letting people play video games on the job is often a bad idea, but not always a bad idea.
Whether or not this is a good/bad idea depends on a lot of things. In most situations, I agree, it's not a great idea. On the other hand, there are some jobs with genuine down-time. I mean, lots of jobs have some amount of down-time, and lots of times there are other productive things that people can be doing during those times, but sometimes not. Sometimes there are genuinely jobs that, when there's nothing to do, there's nothing to do.
What some people don't always recognize is, sometimes the job is to sit around and wait. Helpdesk jobs can be like this, for example. It may be that a person's job is entirely reactive, and on a day that nothing breaks, there might be nothing to do. Unless you actually want to create a task for yourself of finding things for them to do, you have to accept that they're going to surf the web, play flash games, etc.
Now you might say, "Fine, let them do that. But why would I spend extra money that's going to distract them?" To that I'd say, it depends on the people, and it depends on the work environment. Sometimes you might do something like this just for a perk, to keep good people around and keep moral up. Also, I know for myself, sometimes I can be more productive if I get a genuine break. If I can get up, get away from my desk, and get engaged in something else for 10 minutes, then I'll come back more productive than if I sat in front of my computer playing flash games. It actually helps to have a clearer distinction from when/where I'm "taking a break" vs. "working".
So because of these reasons (and some others) I let me people play Rock Band in the office. I know when people have work to do, and I can see when they're playing Rock Band. It's a little bit of team building, keeps people happy, and in the past 6 months or so, no one has neglected their work in favor of Rock Band to any noticeable degree.
Beyond all that, with regards to the question, "Are you trying to be their manager or their friend?" I agree that sometimes being someone's boss/manager means you can't really be their friends. Once you have some kind of power over someone, they're going to hate you a little. Still, you have to manage that hatred. Sometimes, if they hate you too much, it gets to be counter-productive, so it can be worthwhile to do nice things for the people you manage.
If you put a Jedi and a simple Trooper in the SW MMO you get either a big unbalance or the Jedi and/or Trooper will be weaker/stronger than they should be.
Just to geek out here for a second: I've thought about this and I'm not sure it's true. We know that there are some people who the force is particularly strong with them, and those people would seem to have an advantage regardless of their position or training. It might be somewhat like what a lot of RPGs would give you as a "luck" stat, i.e. you'd get better results more often. So a well trained soldier, say, with whom the force was particularly strong, might be more powerful than a weak and poorly trained Jedi.
Then there's a separate issue of having received various kinds of Jedi training, which would increase the payoff of your force strength, but arguably anyone could receive some amount of training. At least from the original movies, a lot of things were unclear. It didn't seem at all clear to me, for example, that Han would have been completely untrainable, but rather that he wasn't as naturally gifted as Luke. Also-- perhaps it's hinted that the Jedi didn't offer training freely because of the fear of a trainee gaining power before turning to the dark side.
Anyway, my point is that you could carefully craft a game where skills were a bit more balanced, especially since you could make Jedi training arbitrarily rare and difficult. The main problem with this is that other Star Wars games (e.g. Force Unleashed) have set a precedent for Jedis being unreasonably powerful from the get-go, and backing off of that in subsequent games could run afoul of fan expectations. To satisfy fan expectations, there's been a constant increase in Jedis powers, to the point where a single Sith can do ridiculous things. But think back to the original movies, and what could a Jedi do? Luke had increased agility and intuitiveness, minor telekinesis, an occasional skill for seeing ahead to a possible future, and the ability to influence the weak minded. That's about it.
I design and implement mathematical models. But because of that, I also know what mathematical models can't do.
Indeed. Since you're an expert, tell me if I'm wrong here: One thing mathematical models can't do is control reality. You can make a computer model of what would happen to our solar system if gravity was doubled, but that won't actually double the force of gravity in the world. Unfortunately, making a mathematical model that says you'll make loads of money and have little risk of losing it doesn't mean that you won't lose your money in the real world.
I didn't say the federal government should do fine-grained civic planning across the country, but only that our country suffers from poor civic planning.
However, the Federal government does have a role in development and maintenance of national infrastructure, and therefore exerts influence over the sort of civic planning that takes place. Putting a bigger focus on the interstate highway system and destroying the railroad system has helped shaped our country into a place where you can't get by without a car. Once everyone has cars, there isn't much point in local governments investing in public transportation.
So to exaggerate the situation, imagine you could choose to use a single 1TB drive, or a RAID5 of 1,001 1GB drives. It's true that with the 1TB drive, you'd only need one drive to fail in order to lose your data, whereas with the RAID you'd need 2 drives to fail. However, I'd bet that the RAID is much more likely to fail in a given time period.
In case it's not immediately apparent why, let's imagine that all the drives you're talking about had a .1 chance of failure within 10 years. So if those odds played out at the end of 10 years, then it's likely that 100 of those drives in the RAID will have gone bad within 10 years, and all you need is for 2 of those 100 to go bad at roughly the same time. Make sense?
On the other hand, I agree that if you're going to use a small number of disks, RAID5 may be safer than using those disks completely independently. If you had 3 500GB disks and only needed 1TB, but wanted a little extra safety, then RAID5 would be a good choice.
One of my biggest gripes is the lack of community planning since the 1950s.
Bingo. What a lot of the people responding to you are failing to recognize is that "community planning" doesn't necessarily mean that everyone has to live in completely urban areas.
For example, you could have suburbs that well planned, where you have commercial property and residential property well spaced out, and you have a yard *and* you can walk a couple blocks to your grocery store. You can have a garage and a car *and* have the option of living a complete life relying on public transportation, in the same area.
America just hasn't done a good job of civic planning or infrastructure development for a very long time.
The last problem I had was a bad RAID controller. What happens when the controller itself goes bad? So I need two controllers? A RAID 5 on each, RAID 1 between them?
That's why it's a good idea to get as redundant as you can afford (completely separate systems at different locations, if possible). And of course, you should be doing a backup anyway. Backups protect from more than just hardware failures. It's a good thing to remember that there's only so safe you can get on a set budget.
What lots of people forget about this sort of security (as well as security in general), is that you can't ever be completely safe. You're just managing your risks, categorizing some as acceptable and some as unacceptable, and then determining what you can do within your budget to eliminate the unacceptable risks. But when you're all done, there's still going to be a possibility that you'll lose all of your data.
How reliable RAID5 is depends, because actually the more disks you have, the greater the likelihood that one of them will fail in any set period of time. So obviously if you have a RAID 0 of lots of disks, then there is a much better chance that the RAID will fail than that any particular disk will fail.
So the purpose of RAID5 is not so much to make it orders of magnitude more reliable than just having a single disk, but rather to mitigate the increased risk that would come from having a RAID0. So you'd have to calculate, for the number of disks and the failure rate of any particular drive, what are the chances of having 2 drives fail at the same time (given a certain response rate to drive failure). If you have enough drives and a slow enough response to disk failures, it's at least theoretically possible (I haven't done the math) that a single drive is safer.
You don't charge others to receive a show flyer (which could take a few hours to design, plus hours to print and many hours to distribute), so why charge for music?
Really there are a couple different issues to talk about. The first question is, what's your policy toward consumers of your products? This question seems to be what your post is focussing in on, and I agree that there's probably a good business model for content with loose controls.
But that doesn't require that you actually repudiate your copyright claims, and copyright takes care of other issues too. For example, you talked about releasing your writings without restricting distribution, and requesting $20 in the final chapter. Is it still acceptable for me to take your books, alter the final chapter to request that people send $20 to me instead of you, and republish them? Because if you've really given up your copyright, then there's nothing to stop me from doing that.
Also, though the Internet is a terrific distribution medium, lots of books are still sold in book stores. So let's say I make a deal with a small publisher to print up a bunch of copies of my book and sell it in book stores, and it becomes wildly successful. What then stops another publisher from taking my book, republishing it, and selling it themselves without giving any money to me or the original publisher? What stops the big publishers from simply driving smaller publishers out of business?
I think copyright still has a purpose to serve. It has just gotten a bad name over the past several years due to chronic abuse.