First, it's great fun. Inventing is cathartic. Second, patents look great on your resume. Third, you can keep your job. No big anyway, because now your resume has patents on it. Fourth, you get a lot of exposure to the intellectual property legal system.
It's time to get over the whole "software patents suck thing:" they already exist, they already affect you, and your failure to patent something doesn't mean someone else won't try to patent it.
In a war, you have to shoot people because they are shooting at you. If you don't kill them, they will kill you. This software patent thing is a war. You enlisted when you took a computer job. So what if you've been in the rear echelon since basic training. Every Marine a rifleman, every coder an inventor.
If one of us dropped a rootkit on Sony's computers, we'd go to jail. If Sony does it to us, they can mea culpa and smile? Did they buy out the Mentos plant so they could get away with ANYTHING?
Since the rootkit installs even when you decline the EULA, Sony needs to be prosecuted under the same laws we enforce upon script kiddies. All of them. There is no compensation that a 15 year old kid can give Sony (how about a download, Sonycorp?) that would stop them from pursuing civil and criminal lawsuits, and there should be nothing Sony can do to avoid the same discussions in open court. People at Sony made a really bad decision, and they should pay for transgressions in the same way a 15 year old kid would: with hard time.
When we are all classified as a "Development Resource" or a "Testing Resource," (or whatever you happen to be called today), instead of valued for our unique abilities to contribute, we will all be subject to brain drain.
Brain drain is about paying the minimum amount possible for a given task-- thus, Project Managers or Business People find people with the minimum price to perform the task. Our efforts are commoditized when they are marked as "just needs a tester." Why pay more?
Until we as a community can find a way to show PMs and business people that we can contribute in unique ways-- past "Development Resource," we can just forget our jobs. Some of us may impress our capabilities upon individuals, but for the most part, PMs and business people follow the same best practice: purchase commodity work at commodity prices.
If nothing in your skill set or bag of tricks makes you unique to your situation, or if your boss is not using your unique capabilities, you are a commodity. Further, if your boss is paying you more than average for commodity effort, Don't Tell Him. Save the difference between an average salary for your position and what you make. You will need it when he figures out how much he really should be paying for commodity work-- for a resource on a Gantt chart-- and discovers that the next person to do your job will be from a country "guilty" of Brain Drain.
Heh. Guilty of Brain Drain == ability to deliver commodity work for less.
All the best product announcements come out on/. Man, if I want to know about a nerdly phone or an LCD monitor that/matters,/ I'm going to be sure to click through to the cool product announcements.
Can we please create a Product Announcements Section and let me turn it off?
That would be the nerdliest way to deal with this stuff: organize it right out of my existance.
Re:Inconsistent Metaphor?
on
The Neuron Drive
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The colors are well-chosen for the theme. The oil execution really evokes a sense of "brains." I appreciate the theme and the style.
I think the neurons should each have a drive in them-- maybe a USB thumb drive each. That could eliminate the fans. You could put a USB hub in the back. Neuron Drive owners could RAID their neurons together.
In Version 2.0, the core team comes along and performs the following optimizations:
1. rename/dev/cat to/dev/catfeeder. 2. add/dev/cat pointing to the cat itself. Reading/dev/cat blocks until the cat is hungry. 3. add a device for/dev/catfoodbin. Reading/dev/catfoodbin returns the number of feedings left in it. 4. add crontab entry corrected to take advantage of these capabilities.
Then the source forks when a Microsoft astroturfing campaign tries to add DRM to the cat food (see that other Funny post)
Nice. I, too, had a couple of Iris systems doing exactly the same quantum chemistry work. I worked for a supercomputer center. People ran their code on "supercomputers" and visualized the results on the SGIs.
So we read things like, "And in the Future, there will be robot factories that turn moon dust into fuel!" So who's up for building the first?
Here is a stab at requirements: The money goes to the first team that builds a robot factory to convert moon dust to blocks of moon dust suitable for construction. 1. Internally powered 2. Acquires its own input material (lunar soil, lunar water, etc) 3. Shoots out enough 20cm x 10cm x 5cm solid moon bricks in a week to build a 4m x 3m x 2.5m moon brick building. Bricks should last 20 years in the lunar sun. 4. Stacks the resulting blocks for easy transport 5. Capable of unattended operation for up to 2 weeks (essentially at least a 2-week system-wide MTBF) 6. Not made of Lego Mindstorms. 7. You can turn it off 8. Substitute plain dirt on Earth for testing (or another suitable soil)
Requirement 2 will be fun! This is the digging part, yummy! And item 4 implies the factory can build a staging area. The robot factory might consider local resource exhaustion as a reason to mark the current brick dump and relocate the whole factory 500m away.
If such factories really exist or are in the making, please help me and reply with a URL?
Well, different code sure can lead to different renderings on different systems. The hacking problem is just a manifestation of the choice to write adaptable code.
Different renderings might help people make choices they wouldn't have. Say I'm playing Baldur's Gate XXIII: Scourge of Your Mama. If putting my mouse cursor on a scenery item is supposed to make it turn dark green for OKAY and light green for TRAPPED, but on the simpleton renderer the two colors are too similar, what happens? Boom, the scenery item explodes in my face and I reload from the last savegame.
Okay, so imagine we've got a FPS set on the water (just for kicks, call it Waterworld). You have the sine wave water and I have the sophisticated uberalgorithm water. When you shoot me, your client-side model for water thinks I am in spot A, while my uberalgorithm water thinks I'm in B. You shoot me -- but from my perspective (pun intended!) you couldn't have seen me.
Sounds like about 10 million "he hacks!" calls waiting to happen.
I remember people turning the smoke off in their Halflife clients because they wanted to see through it. At one point, my graphics card driver wouldn't even/render/ the smoke.
Let's try an alternate approach: let's market the games for the sophisticated gamer and that will get more people to buy better machines. Not everyone is rich, but (see above) It's the Graphics Card, Baby!
I saw the dots on Underworld--don't judge me by my taste in movies, please! I thought the dots might be some form of coded serial number to track the relationship between theaters and films. If someone were stupid enough to send out the film over the Internet with the dots on it, the MPAA movie police might have a better chance to catch the person-- especially if the film gets out before any embargo dates.
6 kills, 2 seconds, wiped out the whole opposing side. My ghosting friends (pre 1.3) said it looked like a John Woo movie.
When I was shooing, I had no concept that there was a difference between me and the game. I/saw/ my game hand move on the screen. I/felt/ my real hand move in Real Life.
I think I was in another Zone quantum.
Sure, I've been in the Zone the same way you're talking about above, I think a couple-three times. I hope others can back me up on this game connection, especially for FPS.
Re:Time to start doing this with CDs
on
Free as in Books?
·
· Score: 1
Darn! I just lost moderator access. Sorry, GothChip! This is such a great idea! I'm going to release some CDs very soon.
Watermarking mustn't change the perception of the song or movie that you're playing. This means that these watermarking data must show up in the least-significant bit(s) of the converted data.
Let's say I'm watermarking a song for distribution on a CD. I'll use the bottom bit for my watermark, and distribute my song with "Grondak Was Here\0" encoded every 136 samples. (Real watermarks better be more interesting:) )
Now it comes time for you to make a digital recording through your analog playback device. When your ADC samples a datastream, it outputs a fixed number of bits of data per sample (e.g. 10 bits/sample, 14 bit/sample, 24 bits/sample, etc.)
If your ADC has too few bits of resolution (eg, A2D converter sample size is 10 bits instead of the 14/16 bits originally used to encode the CD), the watermark will disappear! (This is because the most-significant bits have to match up, output to input.)
What do we do now!? Bust everyone who owns an old-school ADC by throwing the DMCA book at 'em?
Further, if someone encodes the watermark by using level deltas between samples volumes, low sample rate A2D conversion becomes illegal under the DMCA because some high-frequency deltas will also disappear. Good bye delta-based watermark. Analog filters could also be illegal, by the way. Shoot, a crappy microphone is illegal once they plug that analog hole. Even the phone system only handles 300-3300Hz, so delta-encoded watermarks might disappear if they're presented faster than 3300 deltas/sec. Are we saying we want our phone system to be illegal under the DMCA?
I think the only solution to this problem is to replace the human senses with all-digital versions.:)
An MCSD isn't an MCSE. Your audience is a group developers. They're not interested in sysadminstuff. They're interested in developer tools.
You've got two tracks to cover here, as I see it. 1) "Free stuff" that makes Linux distros good for developers, 2) Generally free stuff that they wouldn't see as "pure" MCSDs (due to the ties between "Linux" and "free")
For 1), show them stuff that comes with the distro of your choice, like compilers, IDEs, change management tools. Show them MySQL and Postgres, yes. Show them editors.
For 2) Don't forget Java-- Eclipse, JBoss, etc. Don't forget the Mozilla developer aids like Bugzilla. Sourceforge & Freshmeat & Slashdot.:)
Finally, the MCSD has this development process framework called "MSF." Show these guys something fun like Extreme Programming.
Slashdot Mirror
If swiping cars isn't every bit as easy as stealing apples from a neighbor's tree, then the game has no reason to exist anymore.
The natural price of cars in GTA is zero: anything you can get for free, you will get for free.
First, it's great fun. Inventing is cathartic.
Second, patents look great on your resume.
Third, you can keep your job. No big anyway, because now your resume has patents on it.
Fourth, you get a lot of exposure to the intellectual property legal system.
It's time to get over the whole "software patents suck thing:" they already exist, they already affect you, and your failure to patent something doesn't mean someone else won't try to patent it.
In a war, you have to shoot people because they are shooting at you. If you don't kill them, they will kill you. This software patent thing is a war. You enlisted when you took a computer job. So what if you've been in the rear echelon since basic training. Every Marine a rifleman, every coder an inventor.
Hooah
If one of us dropped a rootkit on Sony's computers, we'd go to jail.
If Sony does it to us, they can mea culpa and smile? Did they buy out the Mentos plant so they could get away with ANYTHING?
Since the rootkit installs even when you decline the EULA, Sony needs to be prosecuted under the same laws we enforce upon script kiddies. All of them. There is no compensation that a 15 year old kid can give Sony (how about a download, Sonycorp?) that would stop them from pursuing civil and criminal lawsuits, and there should be nothing Sony can do to avoid the same discussions in open court. People at Sony made a really bad decision, and they should pay for transgressions in the same way a 15 year old kid would: with hard time.
When we are all classified as a "Development Resource" or a "Testing Resource," (or whatever you happen to be called today), instead of valued for our unique abilities to contribute, we will all be subject to brain drain.
Brain drain is about paying the minimum amount possible for a given task-- thus, Project Managers or Business People find people with the minimum price to perform the task. Our efforts are commoditized when they are marked as "just needs a tester." Why pay more?
Until we as a community can find a way to show PMs and business people that we can contribute in unique ways-- past "Development Resource," we can just forget our jobs. Some of us may impress our capabilities upon individuals, but for the most part, PMs and business people follow the same best practice: purchase commodity work at commodity prices.
If nothing in your skill set or bag of tricks makes you unique to your situation, or if your boss is not using your unique capabilities, you are a commodity. Further, if your boss is paying you more than average for commodity effort, Don't Tell Him. Save the difference between an average salary for your position and what you make. You will need it when he figures out how much he really should be paying for commodity work-- for a resource on a Gantt chart-- and discovers that the next person to do your job will be from a country "guilty" of Brain Drain.
Heh. Guilty of Brain Drain == ability to deliver commodity work for less.
All the best product announcements come out on /. Man, if I want to know about a nerdly phone or an LCD monitor that /matters,/ I'm going to be sure to click through to the cool product announcements.
Can we please create a Product Announcements Section and let me turn it off?
That would be the nerdliest way to deal with this stuff: organize it right out of my existance.
That's...
Newer Orleans
The colors are well-chosen for the theme. The oil execution really evokes a sense of "brains." I appreciate the theme and the style.
I think the neurons should each have a drive in them-- maybe a USB thumb drive each. That could eliminate the fans. You could put a USB hub in the back. Neuron Drive owners could RAID their neurons together.
I compulsively buy gas in multiples of 10 gallons, so I don't lose out on the $0.001 change per gallon.
So what if my tank is never full? Why give those companies ANY MORE THAN THEY DESERVE?
Huh?!
In Version 2.0, the core team comes along and performs the following optimizations:
/dev/cat to /dev/catfeeder. /dev/cat pointing to the cat itself. Reading /dev/cat blocks until the cat is hungry. /dev/catfoodbin. Reading /dev/catfoodbin returns the number of feedings left in it.
1. rename
2. add
3. add a device for
4. add crontab entry corrected to take advantage of these capabilities.
Then the source forks when a Microsoft astroturfing campaign tries to add DRM to the cat food (see that other Funny post)
Enhanced to extinction. There ya go.
Nice. I, too, had a couple of Iris systems doing exactly the same quantum chemistry work. I worked for a supercomputer center. People ran their code on "supercomputers" and visualized the results on the SGIs.
Seeya
Come on.
So we read things like, "And in the Future, there will be robot factories that turn moon dust into fuel!" So who's up for building the first?
Here is a stab at requirements:
The money goes to the first team that builds a robot factory to convert moon dust to blocks of moon dust suitable for construction.
1. Internally powered
2. Acquires its own input material (lunar soil, lunar water, etc)
3. Shoots out enough 20cm x 10cm x 5cm solid moon bricks in a week to build a 4m x 3m x 2.5m moon brick building. Bricks should last 20 years in the lunar sun.
4. Stacks the resulting blocks for easy transport
5. Capable of unattended operation for up to 2 weeks (essentially at least a 2-week system-wide MTBF)
6. Not made of Lego Mindstorms.
7. You can turn it off
8. Substitute plain dirt on Earth for testing (or another suitable soil)
Requirement 2 will be fun! This is the digging part, yummy! And item 4 implies the factory can build a staging area. The robot factory might consider local resource exhaustion as a reason to mark the current brick dump and relocate the whole factory 500m away.
If such factories really exist or are in the making, please help me and reply with a URL?
Stupidly,
Well, different code sure can lead to different renderings on different systems. The hacking problem is just a manifestation of the choice to write adaptable code.
Different renderings might help people make choices they wouldn't have. Say I'm playing Baldur's Gate XXIII: Scourge of Your Mama. If putting my mouse cursor on a scenery item is supposed to make it turn dark green for OKAY and light green for TRAPPED, but on the simpleton renderer the two colors are too similar, what happens? Boom, the scenery item explodes in my face and I reload from the last savegame.
Different Code -> Different Bugs
Okay, so imagine we've got a FPS set on the water (just for kicks, call it Waterworld). You have the sine wave water and I have the sophisticated uberalgorithm water. When you shoot me, your client-side model for water thinks I am in spot A, while my uberalgorithm water thinks I'm in B. You shoot me -- but from my perspective (pun intended!) you couldn't have seen me.
/render/ the smoke.
Sounds like about 10 million "he hacks!" calls waiting to happen.
I remember people turning the smoke off in their Halflife clients because they wanted to see through it. At one point, my graphics card driver wouldn't even
Let's try an alternate approach: let's market the games for the sophisticated gamer and that will get more people to buy better machines. Not everyone is rich, but (see above) It's the Graphics Card, Baby!
I saw the dots on Underworld--don't judge me by my taste in movies, please! I thought the dots might be some form of coded serial number to track the relationship between theaters and films. If someone were stupid enough to send out the film over the Internet with the dots on it, the MPAA movie police might have a better chance to catch the person-- especially if the film gets out before any embargo dates.
Quick, patent this!
... and what level?
4?
5?
Gashes, arrow wounds, wow, he definitely had more than 10hp!
Nice Fortitude saves, too
Isn't SYN supposed to be TCP's job?
Does IE have a custom TCP layer in it?
Does MS's TCP stack exhibit this behavior for other programs? What API call do I make to get my own program to act like this?
Seems to me like our pal can't stand on his "skateboard", either. Can he fall off? Will we see Aibo in Thrasher Magazine?
Finally! I can put my stacks and stacks of C64s to good use! I'll just make them into a "huge" MTD!
Some assembly required.
I have been listening to way too much techno lately. :)
I had no clue these guys were in court over a patent!
6 kills, 2 seconds, wiped out the whole opposing side. My ghosting friends (pre 1.3) said it looked like a John Woo movie.
/saw/ my game hand move on the screen. I /felt/ my real hand move in Real Life.
When I was shooing, I had no concept that there was a difference between me and the game. I
I think I was in another Zone quantum.
Sure, I've been in the Zone the same way you're talking about above, I think a couple-three times. I hope others can back me up on this game connection, especially for FPS.
Darn! I just lost moderator access. Sorry, GothChip! This is such a great idea! I'm going to release some CDs very soon.
Watermarking mustn't change the perception of the song or movie that you're playing. This means that these watermarking data must show up in the least-significant bit(s) of the converted data.
:) )
:)
Let's say I'm watermarking a song for distribution on a CD. I'll use the bottom bit for my watermark, and distribute my song with "Grondak Was Here\0" encoded every 136 samples. (Real watermarks better be more interesting
Now it comes time for you to make a digital recording through your analog playback device. When your ADC samples a datastream, it outputs a fixed number of bits of data per sample (e.g. 10 bits/sample, 14 bit/sample, 24 bits/sample, etc.)
If your ADC has too few bits of resolution (eg, A2D converter sample size is 10 bits instead of the 14/16 bits originally used to encode the CD), the watermark will disappear! (This is because the most-significant bits have to match up, output to input.)
What do we do now!? Bust everyone who owns an old-school ADC by throwing the DMCA book at 'em?
Further, if someone encodes the watermark by using level deltas between samples volumes, low sample rate A2D conversion becomes illegal under the DMCA because some high-frequency deltas will also disappear. Good bye delta-based watermark. Analog filters could also be illegal, by the way. Shoot, a crappy microphone is illegal once they plug that analog hole. Even the phone system only handles 300-3300Hz, so delta-encoded watermarks might disappear if they're presented faster than 3300 deltas/sec. Are we saying we want our phone system to be illegal under the DMCA?
I think the only solution to this problem is to replace the human senses with all-digital versions.
As if.
I just hope the ad guys don't make a mistake and try to substitute photonic crystals for my coffee!
An MCSD isn't an MCSE. Your audience is a group developers. They're not interested in sysadminstuff. They're interested in developer tools.
:)
You've got two tracks to cover here, as I see it.
1) "Free stuff" that makes Linux distros good for developers,
2) Generally free stuff that they wouldn't see as "pure" MCSDs (due to the ties between "Linux" and "free")
For 1), show them stuff that comes with the distro of your choice, like compilers, IDEs, change management tools. Show them MySQL and Postgres, yes. Show them editors.
For 2) Don't forget Java-- Eclipse, JBoss, etc. Don't forget the Mozilla developer aids like Bugzilla. Sourceforge & Freshmeat & Slashdot.
Finally, the MCSD has this development process framework called "MSF." Show these guys something fun like Extreme Programming.
TTFN