...yeah, I wish. I'm a "knowledge worker" (programmer) in the "service sector" (brokerage firm). I usually pull 45-55 hours in the office, plus I'm on call 24/7 for roughly one week a month, which means I usually lose either one or two nights of sleep or a Saturday working. And I'm salaried, which means no overtime pay.
Jon, you wrote that one of the tenets of "Microsoftism" is a "passion for mediocrity." Now, I hate Micros~1 as much as the next guy, but as the old adage says, "Never attribute to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity." Maybe I'm naive, but I really do believe that *someone* on their programming staff takes pride in his or her work, and feels bad when Marketing forces alpha or beta code into a box and onto the shelves. I'd even be able to forgive them their short-sightedness if they would stop charging for bug fixes.
The big problem is that Bill Gates and Micros~1 got where they are by marketing campaigns, and not by building a better mousetrap. Unfortunately, the company was perfectly poised to take advantage of what I call the "MTV Effect". In musical terms, it means that people would much rather spend their money on a crappy product with the right image associated (bikini chicks, gun-toting hip gangster wanna-bes), than on music that is in any way artistic if it was written by ugly guys. In software terms, Microsoft's ads have the pretty pastel colors and trance-inducing music suited perfectly to the reduced-attention-span set. Therefore, Marketing knows that all they have to do to sell a new product is advertise it, and it will fly off the shelves. These factors, I think, are why mediocrity is so pervasive there, not because the programmers willfully suck.
"Your right to reverse engineer can not be taken away by contract. License agreements during software installation, however, would not hold up in Norwegian court (AFAIK). Not like this is a problem anyway, just decompile the installation package and there you have the files." And he's only 16, folks!
How have your non-hacker friends in your normal life responded to your notoriety? Do you get weird looks in school, or at the supermarket? Any interesting propositions from the ladies? Does anyone even know or care about what you did?
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...yeah, I wish. I'm a "knowledge worker" (programmer) in the "service sector" (brokerage firm). I usually pull 45-55 hours in the office, plus I'm on call 24/7 for roughly one week a month, which means I usually lose either one or two nights of sleep or a Saturday working. And I'm salaried, which means no overtime pay.
The big problem is that Bill Gates and Micros~1 got where they are by marketing campaigns, and not by building a better mousetrap. Unfortunately, the company was perfectly poised to take advantage of what I call the "MTV Effect". In musical terms, it means that people would much rather spend their money on a crappy product with the right image associated (bikini chicks, gun-toting hip gangster wanna-bes), than on music that is in any way artistic if it was written by ugly guys. In software terms, Microsoft's ads have the pretty pastel colors and trance-inducing music suited perfectly to the reduced-attention-span set. Therefore, Marketing knows that all they have to do to sell a new product is advertise it, and it will fly off the shelves. These factors, I think, are why mediocrity is so pervasive there, not because the programmers willfully suck.
How have your non-hacker friends in your normal life responded to your notoriety? Do you get weird looks in school, or at the supermarket? Any interesting propositions from the ladies? Does anyone even know or care about what you did?