I was actually surprised by that figure. It actually seems low given the people who came up with it.
Considering the past history of ludicrously high damage claims and the huge amount of infringing content they probably actually have, I figured they'd be making up new words to describe the number they came up with...
But that's how it goes with dinosaurs. They are way too big and have way too much invested in the way they've always done things, that when times change their first instinct isn't to adapt, but instead to send out the lawyers and lobbyists and stop it.
Rather than find new ways to profit in the new reality of media and data, they've stuck with their mindset of media as a physical thing that one person at a time owns.
Most importantly, I think there is a lack of rational viewpoints and thinking. No one is trying to come up with a solution that accomodates all needs. Both sides are full of extremists and it's getting us nowhere.
Personally I think people have the right to make money off their product. The fact that a copy of something "costs nothing" doesn't mean anything if the first copy cost several million dollars and you are "sharing" it with several thousand strangers. I also tend to disagree with this entitled "if I can't have it the way I want at a price I want, I'll steal it" attitude.
That said, I think the media industry goes way too far. They want to control what you view, how you view it, what you view it on... and they abuse the law as a standard practice. They want to inhibit all progress in how we use media because the old way is so damn profitable. They want to sell us something and include a list of unreasonable restrictions. If I buy something, I should own it and be allowed to do whatever I want with it.
As I understand it, it's not so much bleeding as lack of filtering. Lack of filtering because the chunk of spectrum was slotted for low powered satellite to earch communication, not the high power they want to use it for.
They are trying to get permission to use it for a purpose it was never intended for, as part of that they have to prove that the change won't interfere with anything.. and of course.. it is interfering with stuff.
I really do feel for them.. it's a pretty shitty deal.. but it's not like they bought a chunk of land to build something and can't get rid of the squatters. It's like they bought a chunk of land in a residential area and are trying to put up a skyscraper.
I can actually see LightSquared perspective. In an ideal world, the solution would be to fix all those devices that are affected by things they shouldn't be affected by. Just not likely to happen.
At the same time, they are using something slotted for satellite communication, so it's somewhat reasonable for GPS devices to not have been designed to filter something they never expected to be subjected to.
I get that different things make people happy, but damn, that attitude is depressing.
don't need to constantly talk to people
Of course not.. that gets annoying.
or pretend to be their friend
You can try _actually_ being their friend.. it's pretty nifty.
to get by
Guess that depends on the person, their interests, and their definition of "getting by".
It's been my experience working in software that the guys with no social skill tend to stay at the bottom rungs. They do their job and can communicate well enough, but no one wants to promote them beyond the standard yearly evaluation "Level 2c programmer to Level 2d programmer" type stuff. You don't see them moving into architect or leadership type positions, nor getting on the cool tasks, and you do tend to see them as the first to go when layoffs come around (it's a choice between Bill who was just at lunch talking about his new deck.. and Jim... you know.. never talks to anyone, headphones on all day.. wonder who's out the door?).
Obviously there are exceptions, but that's generally what I've seen. I think the days where geeks were rare and as such could get away with anything are mostly over. It's not even fair to say that people should be judged purely on their job performance, because social skills imo _are_ part of the job now. You don't have coders working in silos, you have teams working together..
To venture even further off-topic.. I'll say that my biggest frustration with Java wasn't so much the large frameworks and tools.. as the foreign and pedantic vocabulary around them. Stuff like EJB is straight forward(ish), but you have to learn EJB-speak first. Maven isn't a build tool, it's a "project comprehension tool".. and naturally there is no build script, but a "project object model" definition.. and it's not templates, it's "archtypes". *starts frothing*
(Actually, the headache today is learning APIs. Everything seems to come with an API with hundreds to thousands of functions, some of which work, some of which sort of work, and some of which don't work at all. The documentation usually consists of examples rather than a reference manual. Worst case, it's a wiki.)
Indeed. Learning a new language is generally trivial. It's learning the tool stack and community around the language that is hard.
A c++ programmer can move to Java pretty fast.. but becoming familiar with the whole "enterprise stack" takes time.. especially because as you said, there is often a right and wrong way to do things (or in some cases wrong and less-wrong)... and these may not be intuitive, requiring a background of previous experience and failures.
Computers are interesting but they just aren't that hard (and you know it, too).
Don't necessarily agree with that (it's still something you can spend a lifetime trying to progress our use and understanding of), but I do agree with the general point of your post. High school is about bringing everyone to a basic common level and primarily about social development. University is about becoming more well rounded, specializing in some areas, and yes, _some_ job training. This proposed school sounds more like replacing high school with a trade school.. which that early on.. sounds like a bad idea.
I think I would have jumped at the opportunity when I was in school.
However, looking back, I don’t think it would have been a great idea. I’ve said it many times, but if left to my own devices, I would have spent most of my free time glued to a computer. As it stood I had a few non-computer geek friends who would figuratively drag me out of my basement every once in a while and looking back, I had a lot of fun.
Maybe I would be a slightly better programmer.. but I think I would have missed out on a lot of important experiences, and more practically, development of social skills (which I’ve found are becoming more important as I’ve progressed through my career).
In other words, diversity in peers is a good thing. Not having to “deal with” people who are outside of your interests and being surrounded by like minded individuals may sound great, but that kind of narrow focus so early on just sounds like a bad idea.
Fair enough., I will say that while you expect to have to read through some documentation the first time installing something like Gentoo, something that provides an installation utility I'd expect not to need to.
I went the "install only basic packages" route anyway as it's what I tend to do on any distro, but if this is the actual intended method, putting a note to that effect in the installer itself might be a good idea (if not already done). I can't be the only one who doesn't see "step by step install utility" and immediately think "oh man, better read through the docs first before attempting that shit".
I tried arch and wasn't impressed.. it didn't seem to do anything better than any of the other distros, and had some measure of.. unusualness. I also found the install process fairly unwieldy (especially package selection).
Personally I'm a Gentoo user. Not really for the recompiling for hardware thing.. I just prefer the way they handle certain things in contrast to say, Debian.
Certainly, there are no end of cases of people looking up symptoms on the internet and deciding that they have a combination of ebola, bubonic plague and some obscure disease that only affected horses in 13th century Denmark, when in fact they have the flu. It wastes a lot of medical time and effort that would better be spent elsewhere.
Yup! As a personal rule I don't google my symptoms any more. If I'm that worried about something, I go see my doctor. The internet can turn a cough into congestive heart failure.. and because the craziest and scariest cases tend to float to the top, it is definitely not the place to reassure yourself that it's "probably nothing".
Finding more information about something you have, however, I think is still a valid use.. as long as you take everything with a metric tonne of salt, and talk to your doctor before doing anything. Even if it's not for your treatment, knowing more about something you have can be a good feeling.
The internet provides a great deal of medical information, however you still need someone with experience to relate it to a specific case. Patients trying to make sense of their own medical info combined with the amount of information out there (some good, a lot bad, some terrifying) may lead to some issues.
I think people have started working around the problem is the main reason.
Photos is the best example.. who "sends" anyone an image file any more? Everyone posts it on some service.
Documents are generally small enough for email.
Music and video: torrents, youtube.
It's only every once when someone has a large non-standard file to send you do you realize that there is actually no simple way for a non-geek to do it.
As I recall, google actually had a hard time getting investors early on because no one thought there was any more money in search. It was seen as a mundane, solved problem.
I remember back when RAC was ok-ish. You'd get not what you were worth, but enough that it was worth it for a student (and beat flipping burgers).
Then you started seeing the insanely low bids. I had a great rating on the site.. so I could still get _some_ business for a decent rate.. but when you bid $500 and someone bids $10 (not hyperbole.. that happened a lot).. you are pretty much screwed.
And of course the $10 guy did really shitty work, so all the legit buyers left and the site became a slave labour clearing house for people needing "100 articles for my ad riddled new website" or "1000 blog comments pushing my scam".
And that was years ago.. I don't even want to think about what it has devolved to now (assuming it is even still around).
The thing that leads to multicar pileups is cars are driving at such a speed and in such proximity that it is actually impossible to stop in time. I think even if the system automatically engaged the brakes (and assuming the guy behind you has the same system).. you'd still get a crash in most cases.
* it's almost always programming + <some industry>
* Personally I think that <some industry> part adds a lot of interest
Slashdot feature suggestion: yes we get that we have a forced preview.. but we are lazy. Maybe check what's between the < and > and if it isn't something that makes sense.. warn the user!
Very few jobs are pure programming.. software is rarely written for the sake of software, it's almost always programming + . A lot of people don't factor that in.. figuring if they are doing cool c++, the reason probably doesn't matter.
Personally I think that part adds a lot of interest to a job and when you get to a point where you can be a little choosier about your job (vice out of school when you get the first job that gives you the time of day) it would seem sensible to aim in an area you enjoy.
I can sympathize with not wanting to start your own company.
Marketing, accounting, networking, hell just coming up with an idea all things I very much detest. Being a wage slave sucks in a lot of ways but at the same time: you show up, do the thing you love (for the most part) and get paid enough to be happy. You don’t have to worry about how it makes money or where the next project is coming from... that’s someone else’s job.
If you can partner up with a guy who has the same passion for wearing suits and working in power point as you do for cranking out killer code... then maybe it would be alright.. but having to deal with all that stuff yourself (in addition to actually writing the software) sounds like a nightmare to me at least.
Obviously some people enjoy the whole package.. but we don’t all have that entrepreneurial drive, and I think going that route just to get more interesting coding projects is a bad move.
Ideally the best system would confirm the something you know without you revealing it. Kinda like human PKI.
Obviously such a system would be tremendously unwieldy.. probably requiring the user to do some kind of calculation in their heads.. but might be useful for ultra high security type applications.
I've always wondered how I'd fare with biometrics... my fingers are usually pretty damn chewed up from playing guitar. At a minimum it would introduce a lot of inconsistency.
In general I think biometrics have a place in authentication as part of a multi-factor system. Using them on their own seems like a really bad idea as once someone steals an image of your fingerprints.. you can't exactly revoke them, as was said.. but they would add an extra block an attacker has to deal with.
Once biometric phishing shows up or a database gets popped, your prints are out there... and as was said, you can't exactly go out and get new ones.
I've always been a fan of multifactor for stuff we want secure (banking mainly).. yes you can copy someones fingerprint, steal someones keyfob, and snatch someones password.. but doing all three is tricky without them noticing.
For stuff we care less about, passwords will probably be king for a long time, because anything more secure is also more of a pain..
Slashdot Mirror
I was actually surprised by that figure. It actually seems low given the people who came up with it.
Considering the past history of ludicrously high damage claims and the huge amount of infringing content they probably actually have, I figured they'd be making up new words to describe the number they came up with...
Indeed.
But that's how it goes with dinosaurs. They are way too big and have way too much invested in the way they've always done things, that when times change their first instinct isn't to adapt, but instead to send out the lawyers and lobbyists and stop it.
Rather than find new ways to profit in the new reality of media and data, they've stuck with their mindset of media as a physical thing that one person at a time owns.
Most importantly, I think there is a lack of rational viewpoints and thinking. No one is trying to come up with a solution that accomodates all needs. Both sides are full of extremists and it's getting us nowhere.
Personally I think people have the right to make money off their product. The fact that a copy of something "costs nothing" doesn't mean anything if the first copy cost several million dollars and you are "sharing" it with several thousand strangers. I also tend to disagree with this entitled "if I can't have it the way I want at a price I want, I'll steal it" attitude.
That said, I think the media industry goes way too far. They want to control what you view, how you view it, what you view it on... and they abuse the law as a standard practice. They want to inhibit all progress in how we use media because the old way is so damn profitable. They want to sell us something and include a list of unreasonable restrictions. If I buy something, I should own it and be allowed to do whatever I want with it.
Hmm, I was unaware of all that.
I guess yeah, I don't feel much sympathy for them any more. If that's actually how it went down, they've got what's coming to them.
As I understand it, it's not so much bleeding as lack of filtering. Lack of filtering because the chunk of spectrum was slotted for low powered satellite to earch communication, not the high power they want to use it for.
They are trying to get permission to use it for a purpose it was never intended for, as part of that they have to prove that the change won't interfere with anything.. and of course.. it is interfering with stuff.
I really do feel for them.. it's a pretty shitty deal.. but it's not like they bought a chunk of land to build something and can't get rid of the squatters. It's like they bought a chunk of land in a residential area and are trying to put up a skyscraper.
I can actually see LightSquared perspective. In an ideal world, the solution would be to fix all those devices that are affected by things they shouldn't be affected by. Just not likely to happen.
At the same time, they are using something slotted for satellite communication, so it's somewhat reasonable for GPS devices to not have been designed to filter something they never expected to be subjected to.
I get that different things make people happy, but damn, that attitude is depressing.
don't need to constantly talk to people
Of course not.. that gets annoying.
or pretend to be their friend
You can try _actually_ being their friend.. it's pretty nifty.
to get by
Guess that depends on the person, their interests, and their definition of "getting by".
It's been my experience working in software that the guys with no social skill tend to stay at the bottom rungs. They do their job and can communicate well enough, but no one wants to promote them beyond the standard yearly evaluation "Level 2c programmer to Level 2d programmer" type stuff. You don't see them moving into architect or leadership type positions, nor getting on the cool tasks, and you do tend to see them as the first to go when layoffs come around (it's a choice between Bill who was just at lunch talking about his new deck.. and Jim... you know.. never talks to anyone, headphones on all day.. wonder who's out the door?).
Obviously there are exceptions, but that's generally what I've seen. I think the days where geeks were rare and as such could get away with anything are mostly over. It's not even fair to say that people should be judged purely on their job performance, because social skills imo _are_ part of the job now. You don't have coders working in silos, you have teams working together ..
To venture even further off-topic.. I'll say that my biggest frustration with Java wasn't so much the large frameworks and tools.. as the foreign and pedantic vocabulary around them. Stuff like EJB is straight forward(ish), but you have to learn EJB-speak first. Maven isn't a build tool, it's a "project comprehension tool".. and naturally there is no build script, but a "project object model" definition.. and it's not templates, it's "archtypes". *starts frothing*
(Actually, the headache today is learning APIs. Everything seems to come with an API with hundreds to thousands of functions, some of which work, some of which sort of work, and some of which don't work at all. The documentation usually consists of examples rather than a reference manual. Worst case, it's a wiki.)
Indeed. Learning a new language is generally trivial. It's learning the tool stack and community around the language that is hard.
A c++ programmer can move to Java pretty fast.. but becoming familiar with the whole "enterprise stack" takes time.. especially because as you said, there is often a right and wrong way to do things (or in some cases wrong and less-wrong)... and these may not be intuitive, requiring a background of previous experience and failures.
Computers are interesting but they just aren't that hard (and you know it, too).
Don't necessarily agree with that (it's still something you can spend a lifetime trying to progress our use and understanding of), but I do agree with the general point of your post. High school is about bringing everyone to a basic common level and primarily about social development. University is about becoming more well rounded, specializing in some areas, and yes, _some_ job training. This proposed school sounds more like replacing high school with a trade school .. which that early on.. sounds like a bad idea.
I think I would have jumped at the opportunity when I was in school.
However, looking back, I don’t think it would have been a great idea. I’ve said it many times, but if left to my own devices, I would have spent most of my free time glued to a computer. As it stood I had a few non-computer geek friends who would figuratively drag me out of my basement every once in a while and looking back, I had a lot of fun.
Maybe I would be a slightly better programmer .. but I think I would have missed out on a lot of important experiences, and more practically, development of social skills (which I’ve found are becoming more important as I’ve progressed through my career).
In other words, diversity in peers is a good thing. Not having to “deal with” people who are outside of your interests and being surrounded by like minded individuals may sound great, but that kind of narrow focus so early on just sounds like a bad idea.
Fair enough., I will say that while you expect to have to read through some documentation the first time installing something like Gentoo, something that provides an installation utility I'd expect not to need to.
I went the "install only basic packages" route anyway as it's what I tend to do on any distro, but if this is the actual intended method, putting a note to that effect in the installer itself might be a good idea (if not already done). I can't be the only one who doesn't see "step by step install utility" and immediately think "oh man, better read through the docs first before attempting that shit".
I agree.
I tried arch and wasn't impressed.. it didn't seem to do anything better than any of the other distros, and had some measure of .. unusualness. I also found the install process fairly unwieldy (especially package selection).
Personally I'm a Gentoo user. Not really for the recompiling for hardware thing .. I just prefer the way they handle certain things in contrast to say, Debian.
Certainly, there are no end of cases of people looking up symptoms on the internet and deciding that they have a combination of ebola, bubonic plague and some obscure disease that only affected horses in 13th century Denmark, when in fact they have the flu. It wastes a lot of medical time and effort that would better be spent elsewhere.
Yup! As a personal rule I don't google my symptoms any more. If I'm that worried about something, I go see my doctor. The internet can turn a cough into congestive heart failure .. and because the craziest and scariest cases tend to float to the top, it is definitely not the place to reassure yourself that it's "probably nothing".
Finding more information about something you have, however, I think is still a valid use.. as long as you take everything with a metric tonne of salt, and talk to your doctor before doing anything. Even if it's not for your treatment, knowing more about something you have can be a good feeling.
This is kind of what worries me.
The internet provides a great deal of medical information, however you still need someone with experience to relate it to a specific case. Patients trying to make sense of their own medical info combined with the amount of information out there (some good, a lot bad, some terrifying) may lead to some issues.
I think people have started working around the problem is the main reason.
Photos is the best example.. who "sends" anyone an image file any more? Everyone posts it on some service.
Documents are generally small enough for email.
Music and video: torrents, youtube.
It's only every once when someone has a large non-standard file to send you do you realize that there is actually no simple way for a non-geek to do it.
As I recall, google actually had a hard time getting investors early on because no one thought there was any more money in search. It was seen as a mundane, solved problem.
Anytime on RAC will show one that.
Oh man.. nailed that one on the head.
I remember back when RAC was ok-ish. You'd get not what you were worth, but enough that it was worth it for a student (and beat flipping burgers).
Then you started seeing the insanely low bids. I had a great rating on the site.. so I could still get _some_ business for a decent rate.. but when you bid $500 and someone bids $10 (not hyperbole.. that happened a lot) .. you are pretty much screwed.
And of course the $10 guy did really shitty work, so all the legit buyers left and the site became a slave labour clearing house for people needing "100 articles for my ad riddled new website" or "1000 blog comments pushing my scam".
And that was years ago.. I don't even want to think about what it has devolved to now (assuming it is even still around).
I don't know if it would really help.
The thing that leads to multicar pileups is cars are driving at such a speed and in such proximity that it is actually impossible to stop in time. I think even if the system automatically engaged the brakes (and assuming the guy behind you has the same system) .. you'd still get a crash in most cases.
fack..
* it's almost always programming + <some industry>
* Personally I think that <some industry> part adds a lot of interest
Slashdot feature suggestion: yes we get that we have a forced preview.. but we are lazy. Maybe check what's between the < and > and if it isn't something that makes sense.. warn the user!
I totally agree, and this is heavily overlooked.
Very few jobs are pure programming .. software is rarely written for the sake of software, it's almost always programming + . A lot of people don't factor that in.. figuring if they are doing cool c++, the reason probably doesn't matter.
Personally I think that part adds a lot of interest to a job and when you get to a point where you can be a little choosier about your job (vice out of school when you get the first job that gives you the time of day) it would seem sensible to aim in an area you enjoy.
I can sympathize with not wanting to start your own company.
Marketing, accounting, networking, hell just coming up with an idea all things I very much detest. Being a wage slave sucks in a lot of ways but at the same time: you show up, do the thing you love (for the most part) and get paid enough to be happy. You don’t have to worry about how it makes money or where the next project is coming from... that’s someone else’s job.
If you can partner up with a guy who has the same passion for wearing suits and working in power point as you do for cranking out killer code... then maybe it would be alright.. but having to deal with all that stuff yourself (in addition to actually writing the software) sounds like a nightmare to me at least.
Obviously some people enjoy the whole package.. but we don’t all have that entrepreneurial drive, and I think going that route just to get more interesting coding projects is a bad move.
Ideally the best system would confirm the something you know without you revealing it. Kinda like human PKI.
Obviously such a system would be tremendously unwieldy .. probably requiring the user to do some kind of calculation in their heads.. but might be useful for ultra high security type applications.
I've always wondered how I'd fare with biometrics... my fingers are usually pretty damn chewed up from playing guitar. At a minimum it would introduce a lot of inconsistency.
In general I think biometrics have a place in authentication as part of a multi-factor system. Using them on their own seems like a really bad idea as once someone steals an image of your fingerprints.. you can't exactly revoke them, as was said.. but they would add an extra block an attacker has to deal with.
The big problem I see is revocation.
Once biometric phishing shows up or a database gets popped, your prints are out there... and as was said, you can't exactly go out and get new ones.
I've always been a fan of multifactor for stuff we want secure (banking mainly) .. yes you can copy someones fingerprint, steal someones keyfob, and snatch someones password .. but doing all three is tricky without them noticing.
For stuff we care less about, passwords will probably be king for a long time, because anything more secure is also more of a pain ..
Low paying crummy jobs tend not to attract the best candidates.