I'm an EE, I have a good friend who's an EE, and another good friend who's a software E.
Among us there are five kids, and every single one of them is a girl. (They each have two, I have one)
Obviously we weren't included in the survey.
And when I worked at Atari, the Engineers and game developers were convinced that CRTs kill male sperm because most of them had baby girls, in fact I believe it was over 90% girls.
Its obvious that stealing music is wrong. Just as software pirating is wrong, stealing TV is wrong, stealing movies is wrong, etc etc etc.
But the question I always ask myself when I hear about the RIAA and the MPAA suing individuals is, "What good can come from this?"
And the answer is obviously, "Nothing good can come from this."
Suing customers isn't going to help. Most people who steal media do so for the fun of it. Many are just collectors who would most likely not purchase the media if they couldn't steal it.
Are the lawsuits preventing the piracy? I don't think so. I think they are just driving the piracy deeper underground.
Are the lawsuits pissing off people? Just read slashdot, of course they are.
I think corporate America's whole tack on DRM is completely out of whack. Instead of attacking perspective customers, they should be trying to win their money by providing product that is more compelling than the free copy by being less expensive and easier to get than the illegal stuff.
Instead of being control freaks, trying to control all the people in America to prevent loss of money, they should focus on improving content and find ways lower the cost of digital media distrobution to the point that stealing isn't as fun anymore. Everyone has a different "fun" threshold and for many, releasing tunes for 33 cents or 50 cents a piece would remove the fun of trying to get a decent download.
And that's my main point. Its fun to get something for practically nothing and to collect a massive music collection on the cheap. And that's why people do it, for the fun of it. If Joe P2Per has 2 million mp3s on his music server, how often does he get to hear each and every one of them? Not very often. He sticks to the songs he really likes, and I'll bet he's got those on CD, because he wants to support the bands he likes because he wants them to succeed.
I think RIAA and MPAA need to step back and re-analyze the situation. I think they're going down the wrong path and they need to stop.
As a former game addict, as well as a guy who worked in the games industry, I feel that (game) addiction is not big a deal, its just a phase we all go through while we're maturing.
We all have our addictive moments and they are what teach us about addiction. They teach us how to find the balance point. It teaches us how to find moderation. If it weren't for going kind of crazy for a while, how would we know where non-crazy is?
If you make a big deal of this, your son may rebel and that would be a bad thing. If I were you, I'd talk to him about it and see what he feels. Does he realize his school work is suffering? Does he realize he's affecting his life? If he can't see it yet, then give him enough slack to mess things up for himself. Better now, as a child, than later as an adult (I speak from personal experience here).
The most critical thing is to insure that he never feels that you are against him. You must always come from the perspective, "I love you and I want to help you." If you make him an enemy by laying down the law or by becoming angry, then when he does finally realize he's gone off the deep end, he won't have you to turn to. That would be the worst case senario. Its up to you to prevent that by letting go of your fears of him failing or messing up his own life. Its his life to mess up -- let him mess it up if he wants to and love him anyway. That way when its time for him to fix his life, he'll have you as a resource, an experienced friend he can rely on for advice. That is the true meaning of unconditional love.
When he becomes aware of what's going on with him (and you have to have faith that he will), then you can help him learn moderation.
When I was a Tribes addict oh so many years ago, I made a rule for myself. I kept two lists of things I had to do. Critical ones with absolute need dates, and ones that needed to be done at some point but weren't so time intensive.
I made a rule for myself that I could only play tribes if my critical items were at least a week out (or so) and planned to be done on a certain date and I had done one of the items off the "some point" list.
This made it so I got at least one thing done per day before I could play, unless I had been procrastinating. Those times are hard. Sometimes I failed and I had to accept the consequences. That's the price I paid for procrastination.
Then, after a while I lost interest in the game. I had my fill of it so to speak.
I have a 4 mo old daughter. I hope I can help her learn early on, so she doesn't have to learn it as an irresponsible adult like I did...
Is this one of those announce and only ship a teeny tiny volume to top OEMs or are these parts really going to be shipping in volume to -- for example -- New Egg.
I guess my question is: did Intel do this announcement just to trump AMD, as they so often do, and not actually have volume silicon?
My prediction is: These will be hard to get, and the AMD parts will be all over the world on the day they announce.
Yep. Thanks for reminding me. WMS makes tons O money from Slots, Video Poker, etc... Pins are just not as lucrative because they are not as addictive, heh.
I worked for Atari Games in the 90s. They were ultimately bought by Williams at about the same time Williams started seriously considering killing their Pin Ball development.
The big problem with Pin Ball and Video Games is supporting the hardware. Kids are brutal with the hardware and it breaks down a lot. That support costs a lot of money and the arcade owners don't want to pay for it. Pin Ball is much more brutal than Video Games, maintenance wise and that's why Williams stopped producing more than a few models of the things per year while I worked for them.
They thought the future was in Video Games, and they were right, what they didn't know is that the video games would be in the home, not at the arcade.
Coin op video game hardware was out paced by the home computer and eventually the home video game. Coin op volumes and gross margins were so low, that not much could be spent on research and that removed the graphic advantage that coin op had originally used to bring in kids.
They could still make better interfaces (steering wheels, joysticks, track balls etc) but kids were dumbed down by their Nintendo controllers, they didn't need the fancy / different controllers anymore and maybe they didn't want them either.
Pin still exists because its a physical challenge with real physics, a real ball and real flippers. Its simply fun no matter how its put together and you don't have to spend six million dollars to model people and cars, etc like 3D video games, so the development overhead is controllable.
I imagine maintenance is still high, but Stern is the only game left in town, so he can charge the right amount and the remaining operators have to pay it, they have no choice.
I didn't know he still made new pins (that's how long its been since I went to an arcade) and I think its awesome he's still going.
He shouldn't have used that code in the first place, it was copyrighted and he plagorized it for his job.
Unless his company was willing to adhere to the GPL (by being informed and agreeing in advance) then the code should not have been used.
Since his company had no knowledge it was copyrighted code, this guy has put himself and his company in a very awkward position. I suggest he come clean and then get another engineer to completely rewrite all the copyrighted code in a clean room environment.
The only other option is to make the code and its modifications available to the community and that simply won't work.
As for the patents. Its pointless to patent a concept that already exists in GPL code. Prior art will crush the patent in court, whether it gets through the patent office or not.
The issue from a security point of view in my opinion is not which OS has more periods of security holes during which they can be hacked.
It is in fact a function of one immutable fact.
MS Windows is as secure as Microsoft makes it and linux is as secure as the sys-admin makes it.
Thus, out of the box MS is probably more secure, but given a few hours of tweaking, the linux box can be made very secure. Where as the MS box doesn't get much better with tweaking. (I'm not talking about detection, I'm talking about prevention)
And one other point (the point from my subject line). These guys compared servers. Servers in general are better than desktop machines because they lack the main security weakness: A human being with a mouse and web browser.
Lets compare desktop linux to Desktop windows and see which is more secure. Lets assume the biggest security ignorant user one can imagine and see which machine gets the most infections.
Right now the MS Windows box will be owned by hackers and spyware.
The why's for that fact are unimportant. The issue is: windows is insecure and thousands of machines are infected with hundreds of viruses and spywares and Microsoft is having a hell of a time fixing it.
The linux / windows pissing contest is pointless and wasting valuable resources. Fix the freaking problems, please!
If they make their anti-virus software free, then they'll they'll surely be sued by Symantec and others.
Basically they are trying to buy the anti spyware market and put other companies out of business.
Its true that it helps the end users (assuming it doesn't have more holes than it plugs) but utlimately I don't see this as an act of good will but just another way to dominate the software industry.
Then again, if there weren't so many holes, Symantec and other wouldn't have grown as big as they are.
Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away.
Raydude
For without Microsoft we would have been ignorant of how bad it could be.
Think about it. If Microsoft security weren't as easily exploited as it is, developers would never have started thinking about security in the way that they now do. The internet was naive. EMAIL and TCP/IP weren't designed to be secure or trace-able because no one considered the possibility that someone would want to harm others.
Because Microsoft was the first to get big, they became the first target for the nasties. And because they were the first to get whacked, the security of Linux, OSX, and other opperating systems are being greatly improved before it becomes an issue for them.
It could be argued that linux, OSX or FreeBSD would never have as many security issues as Windows did in the beginning, and that may be true, but Java, for example, is a universal application and I'm certain it is more secure now because of Microsoft's example of what not to do with system security.
I honestly believe that Microsoft's growing pains have greatly benefitted us all and thank god they have the deep pockets to pay for it.
So here's to Microsoft! Salute!
Raydude
I suspect that the Longhorn team are victims of the old "moving target specification" problem that we've all dealt with.
In other words, they get 80% of the way done and someone says, "Hey! Add this feature I just saw in Linux" or "add this media ability," or "fix this batch of security holes," or "how about making the code compile for both 32 and 64 bit systems," etc etc etc. Once they get 80% done again, the target moves again and they get stuck in a hell that engineers understand and fear.
I'm interested to see if there's any features, other than security, that I'm really going to care about. What can Longhorn do that Windows XP SP2 can't do?
Or more aptly, since I switched to linux a couple of months back, what can Longhorn do (besides play games) that Linux can't?
Raydude
I have a pump and it does not set off the metal detectors so they never even know I have it on.
I haven't had a big problem, have you tried just walking through the detector with it on?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an EE, I have a good friend who's an EE, and another good friend who's a software E.
Among us there are five kids, and every single one of them is a girl. (They each have two, I have one)
Obviously we weren't included in the survey.
And when I worked at Atari, the Engineers and game developers were convinced that CRTs kill male sperm because most of them had baby girls, in fact I believe it was over 90% girls.
I think someones just yanking our chain.
Raydude
Speaking of enlightenment, have you seen Enlightenment 0.17?
Now that's new, different, powerful, and I can't wait until its done.
Raydude
At 50 bucks an hour (a low estimate I suspect) it cost IBM $235,000.00 to produce these documents.
I wonder if they can sue SCO for costs and lawyers fees should they successfully defend the suit?
Raydude
Its obvious that stealing music is wrong. Just as software pirating is wrong, stealing TV is wrong, stealing movies is wrong, etc etc etc.
But the question I always ask myself when I hear about the RIAA and the MPAA suing individuals is, "What good can come from this?"
And the answer is obviously, "Nothing good can come from this."
Suing customers isn't going to help. Most people who steal media do so for the fun of it. Many are just collectors who would most likely not purchase the media if they couldn't steal it.
Are the lawsuits preventing the piracy? I don't think so. I think they are just driving the piracy deeper underground.
Are the lawsuits pissing off people? Just read slashdot, of course they are.
I think corporate America's whole tack on DRM is completely out of whack. Instead of attacking perspective customers, they should be trying to win their money by providing product that is more compelling than the free copy by being less expensive and easier to get than the illegal stuff.
Instead of being control freaks, trying to control all the people in America to prevent loss of money, they should focus on improving content and find ways lower the cost of digital media distrobution to the point that stealing isn't as fun anymore. Everyone has a different "fun" threshold and for many, releasing tunes for 33 cents or 50 cents a piece would remove the fun of trying to get a decent download.
And that's my main point. Its fun to get something for practically nothing and to collect a massive music collection on the cheap. And that's why people do it, for the fun of it. If Joe P2Per has 2 million mp3s on his music server, how often does he get to hear each and every one of them? Not very often. He sticks to the songs he really likes, and I'll bet he's got those on CD, because he wants to support the bands he likes because he wants them to succeed.
I think RIAA and MPAA need to step back and re-analyze the situation. I think they're going down the wrong path and they need to stop.
Raydude
As a former game addict, as well as a guy who worked in the games industry, I feel that (game) addiction is not big a deal, its just a phase we all go through while we're maturing.
We all have our addictive moments and they are what teach us about addiction. They teach us how to find the balance point. It teaches us how to find moderation. If it weren't for going kind of crazy for a while, how would we know where non-crazy is?
If you make a big deal of this, your son may rebel and that would be a bad thing. If I were you, I'd talk to him about it and see what he feels. Does he realize his school work is suffering? Does he realize he's affecting his life? If he can't see it yet, then give him enough slack to mess things up for himself. Better now, as a child, than later as an adult (I speak from personal experience here).
The most critical thing is to insure that he never feels that you are against him. You must always come from the perspective, "I love you and I want to help you." If you make him an enemy by laying down the law or by becoming angry, then when he does finally realize he's gone off the deep end, he won't have you to turn to. That would be the worst case senario. Its up to you to prevent that by letting go of your fears of him failing or messing up his own life. Its his life to mess up -- let him mess it up if he wants to and love him anyway. That way when its time for him to fix his life, he'll have you as a resource, an experienced friend he can rely on for advice. That is the true meaning of unconditional love.
When he becomes aware of what's going on with him (and you have to have faith that he will), then you can help him learn moderation.
When I was a Tribes addict oh so many years ago, I made a rule for myself. I kept two lists of things I had to do. Critical ones with absolute need dates, and ones that needed to be done at some point but weren't so time intensive.
I made a rule for myself that I could only play tribes if my critical items were at least a week out (or so) and planned to be done on a certain date and I had done one of the items off the "some point" list.
This made it so I got at least one thing done per day before I could play, unless I had been procrastinating. Those times are hard. Sometimes I failed and I had to accept the consequences. That's the price I paid for procrastination.
Then, after a while I lost interest in the game. I had my fill of it so to speak.
I have a 4 mo old daughter. I hope I can help her learn early on, so she doesn't have to learn it as an irresponsible adult like I did...
Raydude
Yep, and it'll be really outdated by then and will need to be replaced anyway.
But my company is moving away from Solaris because the new Dell Boxes are at least three times as fast as the fastest Sun we have.
And cost one third as much!
Raydude
What I want to see is quantities.
Is this one of those announce and only ship a teeny tiny volume to top OEMs or are these parts really going to be shipping in volume to -- for example -- New Egg.
I guess my question is: did Intel do this announcement just to trump AMD, as they so often do, and not actually have volume silicon?
My prediction is: These will be hard to get, and the AMD parts will be all over the world on the day they announce.
Raydude
I suspect the power requirements for this bi-polar transistor would make it impossible to build something on the scale of a P4.
Bipolar eats power.
I think these transistors, if found to be manufacturable, will probably be used in communications not digital logic.
Raydude
Yep. Thanks for reminding me. WMS makes tons O money from Slots, Video Poker, etc... Pins are just not as lucrative because they are not as addictive, heh.
I worked for Atari Games in the 90s. They were ultimately bought by Williams at about the same time Williams started seriously considering killing their Pin Ball development.
The big problem with Pin Ball and Video Games is supporting the hardware. Kids are brutal with the hardware and it breaks down a lot. That support costs a lot of money and the arcade owners don't want to pay for it. Pin Ball is much more brutal than Video Games, maintenance wise and that's why Williams stopped producing more than a few models of the things per year while I worked for them.
They thought the future was in Video Games, and they were right, what they didn't know is that the video games would be in the home, not at the arcade.
Coin op video game hardware was out paced by the home computer and eventually the home video game. Coin op volumes and gross margins were so low, that not much could be spent on research and that removed the graphic advantage that coin op had originally used to bring in kids.
They could still make better interfaces (steering wheels, joysticks, track balls etc) but kids were dumbed down by their Nintendo controllers, they didn't need the fancy / different controllers anymore and maybe they didn't want them either.
Pin still exists because its a physical challenge with real physics, a real ball and real flippers. Its simply fun no matter how its put together and you don't have to spend six million dollars to model people and cars, etc like 3D video games, so the development overhead is controllable.
I imagine maintenance is still high, but Stern is the only game left in town, so he can charge the right amount and the remaining operators have to pay it, they have no choice.
I didn't know he still made new pins (that's how long its been since I went to an arcade) and I think its awesome he's still going.
Raydude
If the comments are so simple that a machine parser can write them, how could they possibly be useful?
I thought the point of comments is to write the things that are not obvious. Obvious comments are coding spam where I work.
Raydude
Spock was about 100 years old (or so?) when Kirk was a teen ager, right?
Raydude
Hmmm. Sounds like RAMBUS.
Fascinating.
Raydude
He shouldn't have used that code in the first place, it was copyrighted and he plagorized it for his job.
Unless his company was willing to adhere to the GPL (by being informed and agreeing in advance) then the code should not have been used.
Since his company had no knowledge it was copyrighted code, this guy has put himself and his company in a very awkward position. I suggest he come clean and then get another engineer to completely rewrite all the copyrighted code in a clean room environment.
The only other option is to make the code and its modifications available to the community and that simply won't work.
As for the patents. Its pointless to patent a concept that already exists in GPL code. Prior art will crush the patent in court, whether it gets through the patent office or not.
Raydude
He didn't get some of MS's money...
Or maybe he gets some satisfaction out of the fact that he helped create the largest monopoly the world has ever seen.
Sad really...
Ray
Their spamming the universe! I hate to see what that Karma is going to be for that little stunt. *grin* Raydude
The issue from a security point of view in my opinion is not which OS has more periods of security holes during which they can be hacked.
It is in fact a function of one immutable fact.
MS Windows is as secure as Microsoft makes it and linux is as secure as the sys-admin makes it.
Thus, out of the box MS is probably more secure, but given a few hours of tweaking, the linux box can be made very secure. Where as the MS box doesn't get much better with tweaking. (I'm not talking about detection, I'm talking about prevention)
And one other point (the point from my subject line). These guys compared servers. Servers in general are better than desktop machines because they lack the main security weakness: A human being with a mouse and web browser.
Lets compare desktop linux to Desktop windows and see which is more secure. Lets assume the biggest security ignorant user one can imagine and see which machine gets the most infections.
Right now the MS Windows box will be owned by hackers and spyware.
The why's for that fact are unimportant. The issue is: windows is insecure and thousands of machines are infected with hundreds of viruses and spywares and Microsoft is having a hell of a time fixing it.
The linux / windows pissing contest is pointless and wasting valuable resources. Fix the freaking problems, please!
If they make their anti-virus software free, then they'll they'll surely be sued by Symantec and others. Basically they are trying to buy the anti spyware market and put other companies out of business. Its true that it helps the end users (assuming it doesn't have more holes than it plugs) but utlimately I don't see this as an act of good will but just another way to dominate the software industry. Then again, if there weren't so many holes, Symantec and other wouldn't have grown as big as they are. Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away. Raydude
For without Microsoft we would have been ignorant of how bad it could be. Think about it. If Microsoft security weren't as easily exploited as it is, developers would never have started thinking about security in the way that they now do. The internet was naive. EMAIL and TCP/IP weren't designed to be secure or trace-able because no one considered the possibility that someone would want to harm others. Because Microsoft was the first to get big, they became the first target for the nasties. And because they were the first to get whacked, the security of Linux, OSX, and other opperating systems are being greatly improved before it becomes an issue for them. It could be argued that linux, OSX or FreeBSD would never have as many security issues as Windows did in the beginning, and that may be true, but Java, for example, is a universal application and I'm certain it is more secure now because of Microsoft's example of what not to do with system security. I honestly believe that Microsoft's growing pains have greatly benefitted us all and thank god they have the deep pockets to pay for it. So here's to Microsoft! Salute! Raydude
I suspect that the Longhorn team are victims of the old "moving target specification" problem that we've all dealt with. In other words, they get 80% of the way done and someone says, "Hey! Add this feature I just saw in Linux" or "add this media ability," or "fix this batch of security holes," or "how about making the code compile for both 32 and 64 bit systems," etc etc etc. Once they get 80% done again, the target moves again and they get stuck in a hell that engineers understand and fear. I'm interested to see if there's any features, other than security, that I'm really going to care about. What can Longhorn do that Windows XP SP2 can't do? Or more aptly, since I switched to linux a couple of months back, what can Longhorn do (besides play games) that Linux can't? Raydude
Don't forget the first software will come from "Yoyodyne"
Thanks Phil. I believe its true, that's why I posted it. I wasn't trying to bait anyone.
Its difficult to stop a speeding train, even if its heading for a wreck.
I have a pump and it does not set off the metal detectors so they never even know I have it on. I haven't had a big problem, have you tried just walking through the detector with it on?