This is symptomatic of what is wrong with HDTV, and why it's still not caught on a decade later.
Early adopters, later adopters, yesterday adopters...everyone screwed because it all keeps changing every year.
Component video...no wait, DVI video, no...we meant HDMI. Pick a format and live with the limitations already. That's why other formats have lasted for decade after decade, analog TV, FM, AM, CD, etc. They made a choice, then stuck with it.
I put off buying into HDTV until the standards all stabilized and the kinks worked out, but the clock is ticking and I'm not going to live forever! damn!!!
Actually, a wheat beer is known to enjoy a little bit of citrus floating in it. I've had several varieties of wheat beer which the manufacturer reccomended some orange in it.
While the beer may enjoy it, I do not, and it irritates me to have to tell bartenders to keep the fruit out of my beer.
My opinion is that if a beer needs me to add something to it to make it better, I'm just going to drink a better beer.
I managed a software store almost 10 years ago, and we sold earring, keyrings, tie bars, etc all made out of PC parts.
Hell, I'm holding in my hand a keyring made out of a pentium cpu die sealed in plastic. It's so old it's not even cool to carry around any more.
so I'm asking, what exactly does it take to make a front page story on Slashdot? I submitted a report on Dotster.com compromising customer PII data and trying to cover it up, but that didn't even warrant a "go F*ck yourself".
I'll bet if I skid marked my underwear and it looked like Steve Jobs hugging Larry Ellison it'd be the story of the day.
...but, isn't it arrogant of him to think himself above any kind of proficiency test? Does he think he's perfect and should be hired with no showing of his actual ability?
That was exactly my thought after reading the article. The guy obviously thinks interviewing for a job is completely beneath him because he's already put in his dues.
I've interviewed a LOT of people for a lot of different jobs, including CTO candidates once when our company leadership though subordinate interviews would be a good idea (it was). Nobody, and I mean NOBODY gets a job without an interview, and without justifying their skills.
Words on paper are worth exactly how much you spent on the paper.
the better solution is a massive warez server in each dorm with a cross server request system to keep outgoing and intra-building bandwith usage down,
I think this is probably the most common solution implemented worldwide. The only drawbacks are the extremely high risk exposure for the guy with the server under his desk.
Doesn't sound like such a great deal anymore, does it?
That would seem to be an issue irrespective of price or market demand, and therefore appears to be more of a paranoid rant than an actual contribution to this thread.
I'd pay that price only if the files were in MP3 or Ogg or some other (relatively) hassle-free format. I don't like arbitrary restrictions being placed on my purchases. If I want to put my song on my Desktop, Server, Work PC, or portable player, I should be able to, with the player of my choosing.
That's a valid point, and brings us back to the issue of price versus pain in the ass.
You can DRM and usage restrict music all you like, and I'll buy it, but the price I'm willing to pay for it is going to slide down, down, down every time my enjoyment of it is impacted by some bullshit protection scheme. I might be willing to pay.50 for a generic.MP3 track, but if it were a proprietary, non-portable format, it'd be more like.05.
I'm actually not all that worried about it though, because I have faith in the idea that any DRM scheme designed in corporate america is going to survive uncracked for about 10 minutes in the wild.
The only DRM scheme that has ever been effective (cringing, waiting for rebuttal of that overbroad statment) is the smartcard type used for DSS television. A rotating encryption that has to be updated periodically is the only thing that's going to work.
facts: downloading music illegally is a pain in the ass. problems like quality, difficulty in finding what you want, bandwidth on both supply and demand ends, and the fear of getting arrested all are things that discourage illegal music trading.
So why does it still go on? This is the easy part: Legally purchased music is expensive enough that the trouble and risk are worth it. If you want to eliminate (or at least reduce it to irrelevance) you need to lower the price below the "pain in the ass" threshold.
99 cents a song seems to be the current pricetag everyone is being offered. Sounds low, right? But when a CD I can buy for $9.99 is going to cost me $14 to download, downloading just became my THIRD choice, behind purchase and piracy.
Basically, the music industry is using online distribution as a new and better way to gouge the consumers at at even GREATER gross margin than ever before. They don't have to make the CD's, ship them, or worry about inventory at all, it's the deal of the century for hte record companies.
$5 a CD,.50 a song. Piracy will blow away like dust in the wind, and profits will soar like never before.
There are so many harsh names in the/. reactions! This isn't an anarchist cyber-criminal mafioso terrorist, it's just a kid. At that age, I was mixing potassium nitrate with charcoal and sulphur, and I made some very nice craters with the resulting gunpowder. It's only later that I realized the full impact (pun intended) of what I was doing. At the time it was thrilling but there was no sense of real danger (if something had gone wrong, I'd be sitting in a wheelchair right now - best case scenario).
Apples and oranges
If this "kid" (19 years old is a legal adult to the best of my knowledge) created a worm for his own amusement and played with it in his own home network, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
He didn't just mess around with it, he created the worm, then maliciously released it into the wild. You may have played with blowing stuff up, as most of us did, but we didn't go to the step of attacking other people with our otherwise harmless hobbies.
He's not "just a kid". He's an adult that comitted a very serious crime, and I hope he goes to jail just like any other criminal.
once again, the victim aren't the administrators or the software companies.
the victims are the end users.
I might agree up until the point you started talking about prosecuting them. That kind of makes them "victims" in my book.
I've also (as a sysadmin) had a crapload of weekends "victimized" by exploits and virii.
Your point of view seems very black and white. Either code is written 100% uncrackably secure, or programmers should be prosecuted for exploitability.
Every OS and application on the market has security holes, assuming it has a wide enough distribution to justify the effort of finding them. Do you blame all of them, or only the ones you don't personally like?
Yea, as a matter of fact, Prosecute application coders and lazy sysadmins for failing to secure their systems. They share at least some of the blame, but accept none of the responsibility.
If you leave your doors unlocked and wide open, why the fuck wouldn't you expect someone to walk right on in?
The juvenile immaturity (intentionally redundant) overflowing from this post says volumes about the poster.
Here's an analogy for you: You can lock your house up to the best of your ability, and I guarantee I'll be inside it in under 60 seconds. You have windows? I'll smash one and step over the sill. You have bars on your windows? I'll take a chainsaw and cut through the wall like it was butter.
What it comes down to is in a polite society we respect each others privacy and property. Those who don't, we prosecute under the law. We don't blame the victim for not doing enough, because there's no such thing. It goes the same for data that it does for your house.
If you honestly believe in the tripe you posted, please post your home address and then next week we'll discuss how much of the blame or responsiblity you're willing to take.
Interesting conundrum for the legal system - do you let him off easy and give him a job at a security company - or hit him hard, and ruin a promising (although mischevious) programmer?
in my opinion there's no conundrum at all.
I'd no more consider this guy for a job in my organization than I would a person who keeps losing jobs for punching his coworkers in the face.
This line of thinking, while being unfortunately common, is extremely flawed in that it assumes that these "black hat" types are more skilled than responsible and reputable people in the industry.
So you hire an anarchist criminal because he's good at what your company does. Guess what, now you have an anarchist with a criminal mindset working INSIDE your company.
I'm not bullshitting you. I'm a cabinetmaker who lives a mile from one of the largest timber yards in Europe and they've got 1000s of feet of stuff thats marked-up as mahogany - African or Brazilian. No bigleaf or "real" mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) as it's endangered. [defenders.org]
I'm not going to presume to know anything about the lumber industry in Europe, but I do know that in the US Bigleaf mahogany is not difficult to find, just expensive (like most hardwood these days).
That link to defenders.org is typical of the half-truths you get from environmentalist websites. Most commercial mahogany is plantation grown from private resources. Logging of "wild" trees is illegal in several (not all) countries because individual countries have listed their "crop" as endangered. The species itself is not endangered, or even threatened. I read that the US is far and away the largest importer of mahogany in the world, so that may account for the differences in supply here versus Europe.
Also, the species Swietenia macrophylla is native to Brazil, so you may be discounting "Brazilian Mahogany" unfairly.
You can't get your hands on real big-leaf mahogany nowadays as it's very rare and there has been talk of protecting it under CITES. Most reputable timber yards won't handle it.
That is utter BS, Mahogany may be on the more expensive end of hardwoods, but it's not exactly rare or difficult to find. Try going to a real lumberyard, not Home Depot.
It's not like I've been buying it on the black market, I go in to the lumberyard and say "hey, I want to dig through the mahogany", and they say "whatever..." (the same teenage punks work there that do at Home Depot".
Lauan is a species that is sometimes passed off as mahogany, but usually only in plywood products. Any supplier that tried to pass off bogus hardwood wouldn't get very far, that would be like a Hyundai dealer selling his cars as Mercedes.
The fact that an environmental organization is interested in "protecting" (read: banning) something is hardly interesting.
The various replacements that are sold as "mahogany" are too soft and not dense enough
mahogany is an extremely soft wood (as opposed to softwood, hah...wood joke), it's hard to imagine a "replacement" being softer.
Slashdot Mirror
The Atari 2600 predated almost every cabinet game in existance, except Pong. Yes, that's right...at one time Pong was a coin-op game.
I must be using a different definition of "prominent", cuz I've never heard of either of these guys.
Early adopters, later adopters, yesterday adopters...everyone screwed because it all keeps changing every year.
Component video...no wait, DVI video, no...we meant HDMI. Pick a format and live with the limitations already. That's why other formats have lasted for decade after decade, analog TV, FM, AM, CD, etc. They made a choice, then stuck with it.
I put off buying into HDTV until the standards all stabilized and the kinks worked out, but the clock is ticking and I'm not going to live forever! damn!!!
I didn't know they got Slashdot out in the Bayou...
My opinion is that if a beer needs me to add something to it to make it better, I'm just going to drink a better beer.
My reaction to the statement "eewweee it tasts yucky" is usually "why are you still here"?
I guess it's going to be a long weekend of explaing WTF is up with the pinapples slices in my hefeweizen.
I stand corrected. I'm sure you'll look very pretty.
Hell, I'm holding in my hand a keyring made out of a pentium cpu die sealed in plastic. It's so old it's not even cool to carry around any more.
so I'm asking, what exactly does it take to make a front page story on Slashdot? I submitted a report on Dotster.com compromising customer PII data and trying to cover it up, but that didn't even warrant a "go F*ck yourself".
I'll bet if I skid marked my underwear and it looked like Steve Jobs hugging Larry Ellison it'd be the story of the day.
I've interviewed a LOT of people for a lot of different jobs, including CTO candidates once when our company leadership though subordinate interviews would be a good idea (it was). Nobody, and I mean NOBODY gets a job without an interview, and without justifying their skills.
Words on paper are worth exactly how much you spent on the paper.
as long as that guy isn't you, it's a win/win!
You can DRM and usage restrict music all you like, and I'll buy it, but the price I'm willing to pay for it is going to slide down, down, down every time my enjoyment of it is impacted by some bullshit protection scheme. I might be willing to pay .50 for a generic .MP3 track, but if it were a proprietary, non-portable format, it'd be more like .05.
I'm actually not all that worried about it though, because I have faith in the idea that any DRM scheme designed in corporate america is going to survive uncracked for about 10 minutes in the wild.
The only DRM scheme that has ever been effective (cringing, waiting for rebuttal of that overbroad statment) is the smartcard type used for DSS television. A rotating encryption that has to be updated periodically is the only thing that's going to work.
facts: downloading music illegally is a pain in the ass. problems like quality, difficulty in finding what you want, bandwidth on both supply and demand ends, and the fear of getting arrested all are things that discourage illegal music trading.
So why does it still go on? This is the easy part: Legally purchased music is expensive enough that the trouble and risk are worth it. If you want to eliminate (or at least reduce it to irrelevance) you need to lower the price below the "pain in the ass" threshold.
99 cents a song seems to be the current pricetag everyone is being offered. Sounds low, right? But when a CD I can buy for $9.99 is going to cost me $14 to download, downloading just became my THIRD choice, behind purchase and piracy.
Basically, the music industry is using online distribution as a new and better way to gouge the consumers at at even GREATER gross margin than ever before. They don't have to make the CD's, ship them, or worry about inventory at all, it's the deal of the century for hte record companies.
$5 a CD, .50 a song. Piracy will blow away like dust in the wind, and profits will soar like never before.
Then I realized I'd read it in Samuel L. Jackson mental voice, and not Morgan Freeman. So I went back and read it again, but it wasn't as funny.
If this "kid" (19 years old is a legal adult to the best of my knowledge) created a worm for his own amusement and played with it in his own home network, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
He didn't just mess around with it, he created the worm, then maliciously released it into the wild. You may have played with blowing stuff up, as most of us did, but we didn't go to the step of attacking other people with our otherwise harmless hobbies.
He's not "just a kid". He's an adult that comitted a very serious crime, and I hope he goes to jail just like any other criminal.
I've also (as a sysadmin) had a crapload of weekends "victimized" by exploits and virii.
Your point of view seems very black and white. Either code is written 100% uncrackably secure, or programmers should be prosecuted for exploitability.
Every OS and application on the market has security holes, assuming it has a wide enough distribution to justify the effort of finding them. Do you blame all of them, or only the ones you don't personally like?
If I needed a security company, "we hire convicted felons" is not something I'd want to find on the "about us" page.
And only my friends call me Rapmaster. You may call me Mr T.
Here's an analogy for you: You can lock your house up to the best of your ability, and I guarantee I'll be inside it in under 60 seconds. You have windows? I'll smash one and step over the sill. You have bars on your windows? I'll take a chainsaw and cut through the wall like it was butter.
What it comes down to is in a polite society we respect each others privacy and property. Those who don't, we prosecute under the law. We don't blame the victim for not doing enough, because there's no such thing. It goes the same for data that it does for your house.
If you honestly believe in the tripe you posted, please post your home address and then next week we'll discuss how much of the blame or responsiblity you're willing to take.
I'd no more consider this guy for a job in my organization than I would a person who keeps losing jobs for punching his coworkers in the face.
This line of thinking, while being unfortunately common, is extremely flawed in that it assumes that these "black hat" types are more skilled than responsible and reputable people in the industry.
So you hire an anarchist criminal because he's good at what your company does. Guess what, now you have an anarchist with a criminal mindset working INSIDE your company.
That makes you sleep better why?
That link to defenders.org is typical of the half-truths you get from environmentalist websites. Most commercial mahogany is plantation grown from private resources. Logging of "wild" trees is illegal in several (not all) countries because individual countries have listed their "crop" as endangered. The species itself is not endangered, or even threatened. I read that the US is far and away the largest importer of mahogany in the world, so that may account for the differences in supply here versus Europe.
Also, the species Swietenia macrophylla is native to Brazil, so you may be discounting "Brazilian Mahogany" unfairly.
It's not like I've been buying it on the black market, I go in to the lumberyard and say "hey, I want to dig through the mahogany", and they say "whatever..." (the same teenage punks work there that do at Home Depot".
Lauan is a species that is sometimes passed off as mahogany, but usually only in plywood products. Any supplier that tried to pass off bogus hardwood wouldn't get very far, that would be like a Hyundai dealer selling his cars as Mercedes.
The fact that an environmental organization is interested in "protecting" (read: banning) something is hardly interesting.
mahogany is an extremely soft wood (as opposed to softwood, hah...wood joke), it's hard to imagine a "replacement" being softer.Seems like you'd need to be spending a LOT of time calling international to make this worthwhile.