There's a saying that americans are ignorant - can't point out Egypt on a map, don't know that Sweden and Schwitzerland aren't the same countries etc. With the risk of immideate "flamebait" moderation, I must confess that I agree with that view. Do a test sometime, and compare your knowledge (if you're american) about the world affairs with someone from Europe or Asia..
What bullshit!
"There's a saying that Europeans are ignorant - can't point out South Dakota on a map, don't know that West Virginia and Virgina aren't the same states etc. With the risk of immideate "flamebait" moderation, I must confess that I agree with that view. Do a test sometime, and compare your knowledge (if you're European) about the state affairs with someone from New York or California."
Dude, our states are the size of your countries. Give my fellow Americans a break if we don't have every one of yours memorized just yet.
You happen live in a place where your daily life crosses with other nations more frequently due to geography. You are more cognizant about world affairs because of this, not due to superior intellect, savviness, or coolness. This typical superiority complex annoys the hell out of me.
You'll find that a typical American knows as much about their local continent as much as you know about yours. The fact that our continent has only a few giant, countries where yours has lots of little ones says nothing about the intelligence of their people.
And yes, I can point out Egypt on a map. Before Sept 11.
This reminds me of a talk I had with our CEO when interviewing. I asked him if a port of our debugger to Linux was viable. He said sure, it was in the works, but didn't expect it to make any money at all. I thought the other way around- people have Linux on lots of systems because it's free, and now they're realizing they might need some good tools for it.
I went to SC2000 (the supercomputing tradeshow) last year. Almost everybody I talked was running MPI on Linux on PCs. Linux has made huge inroads in the scientific community working on ahem, clusters, of Linux boxes. It's actually quite amazing, consider the Linux market in this segment was close to nil a few years ago. Something about cash-strapped institutions not having to pay high OS licensing fees...
Anyway, it goes to show you that even though there is a free alternative (gdb/ddd) you can sell tools for Linux if you do things the free things can't, or do it better.
Any advice on how to ensure quality in our work without telling my boss it's either my way or the highway?
Sorry, you can't teach and old dog new tricks. And the bigger the dog is... the bigger a dog it is. Quality comes from within, it is not imposed upon from above.
Translated: if your company doesn't have an internal, automatic, innate, sense of quality, forget about it. A real company will either have bosses that unconditionally heed concerns about quality and say "go for it", or, they'll already know and you'll be doing it. Look for a new job on your spare time, and move when the time is right.
When building a bridge, the banker DOES NOT GET TO SAY "oh, use some less cable-ties here to save a few bucks". You're the engineer, they're the money-men. You engineer.
Windows XP Home Edition runs everything as root. How can you apologize for that?
Here's my guess: too much Windows software out there assumes you have "Administrator" privileges.
I recently installed Windows 2000 and, not being a complete idiot, I set up accounts for myself and my wife. I did not give myself Administrator privileges; instead, to make system changes, I log in as Admin and make changes. You know, just like on Real OS's.
Imagine my complete lack of suprise when all the apps that don't work properly. They all assume you have unfettered write access to any directory in the world. I've had to go down manually, guess which files each app wants to write, and then change the permission on those directories so that it can happen.
To MS's credit, Office did work properly. It's just that most Windows apps are not multi-user aware! Windows vendors, test your damn apps on NT without admin permissions!
Not that you said so, but isn't it scary that Happy Birthday isn't public domain? I always wondered why at Applebee's they sing that stupid pseudo-miliaristic not-quite-the-real-thing Happy Birthday tune.
Goddammit, the USA had declared folk music illegal. Isn't that sick?
To answer your question, if something becomes so popular that it's part of the national culture- be it a catch phrase, song, picture, movie, cartoon characters, etc., then the public owns it. Sure, the author/publisher deserves a some profit for it for a little while, perhaps a single lifetime. But dammit, the world owns Mickey Mouse by now, just as much as it owns Ichabod Crane, Merlin, or Oedipus.
Van Eck phreaking may very well be illegal now, even for cops.
Awhile back, there was a case where the cops used a heat scanner to detect marijana plants inside a house. The lights necessary to grow them efficently apparently give off a recognizable signature, and your average house doesn't have quite so many of them. However, it was ruled that this was an illegal "search".
I've gotten almost no spam since I bought my own domain. Here's some tricks that can help:
1) Use Google to search for your own email address every couple of months. This makes sure that you or no one else has intentionally or accidentally posting your address too publicly.
Contact the webmasters to encourage them to take them down or munge the address. If they refuse or ignore, the only way to start fresh is to get a new address.
The biggest culprit that I've found? Private mailing lists! You'd be surprised how many mailing lists are archived on the web with unmunged adresses. Sure, the list doesn't spam you, but if they archive everything in plain text, you will be eventually.
2) Plead with your family to only the use your private email address only for personal correspondance. Personal correspondence means email that you send yourself. The intent is to keep them from typing your name into those stupid webpages like shakin-baby-butts.com. Tell them to use your alternate spamtrap email (e.g., Yahoo with filters on) if they must type your name into anything EXCEPT the mailer's "To:" field.
3) Zap any mailto links in personal webpages. Someone suggested using a picture of the address, but I've found a nicer solution. Use HTML entities to screw up your name. For example, from my homepage, the HTML source is this:
s<!-- die spammers -->cott
<!-- die spammers --> <!-- die spammers --> @
<!-- die spammers --> <!-- die spammers -->
t&<!-- die spammers
-->ringali.or<!-- die spammers -->g
This allows visitors to cut and paste the mail address. The only bot that seems to be able to parse this is Google.
Holy crap, that lard-ass web page crashed Netscape three times in a row, even with Java off and Junkbuster. GameSpy, I hereby revoke up your copyright on pages if you load them down in 40MB of shit.
GameSpy has learned from Eidos that John Romero and Tom Hall have left Ion Storm Dallas.
In a statement released to GameSpy, Eidos said:
"John Romero and Tom Hall have decided to depart ION Storm to pursue other interests. We wish them luck in their future endeavors and thank them for their contribution to Ion Storm over the years, without which we would never have put together such talented teams in both our Austin and Dallas offices. Ion Storm will continue as a wholly owned subsidiary of Eidos and work on the sequels to the awarding winning Thief and Deus Ex titles as well as Deus Ex for the PS2."
Everyone at the Dallas office received a pink slip on Friday and that only a few administration and MIS personnel are left there to close down the office, said a former employee who was part of the layoff.
Eidos would not confirm that the Dallas staff was gone, but said they were waiting to on the sales figures for Anachronox.
Ion Storm Austin was not affected, but Warren Spector will now become head of the Ion Storm subsidiary. The Austin office is looking at changing its name from Ion Storm, but a new name has not yet been chosen.
"Though we went through some turbulent times, our relationship with ION was *super* beneficial at times," said Harvey Smith, who is heading up the Deus Ex 2 team at Ion Storm Austin. "ION gave Warren a place to start building up the earliest version of this studio. (Which is now working on Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3.) Without the initial support of ION Storm, who knows whether we would have been able to create Deus Ex. There were some great people there at the Dallas studio, with lots of passion, and I wish them all the best. The game industry ebbs and flows - heroes today are villains tomorrow, and vice versa."
For that money [$140K], a local company called the Gene Donati Orchestras will send a string quartet to your home and play on your patio once a week for more than a year.
They have got to be kidding! Does that quartet come with a free SUV, too?! When I was in music school, I can't recall how many gigs my friends and I played simply for food.
Let's see. $140/4 people = $35,000 per wirehead, and what, let's say 4 hours on the patio? So, that's 208 hours. That's $168/hr. That's attorney-range, not musician range.
Um, musicians don't make that kind of cash. (That's the reason I got a job being a programmer, not a pro musician.)
Even if the biz agency took a 90% cut, it's still ridiculous.
Re:Does ICANN hate hospitals?
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 2
I agree completely.
However, the poster wasn't asking about that. He stated that.med is already in an alternative root, but that's not good enough. He wants ICANN to put it in the "official" root. That's different.
Alternative roots are fine 'n dandy with me, but sadly, impotent. Email and URLs are only useful if we have one naming scheme. I'm not pointing my setup to Bubba's Root Server and Pork Rind Shop anytime soon. I'd rather communicate with people, get work done, and get information when I need it, than worry about people dicking around with pedantic naming issues. I don't care about the domain name of hospital down the street as long as I can communicate with it when I need to.
Sure, you're free to set up your own root, or use an alternative one, just as I'm free to ignore it.
Re:Does ICANN hate hospitals?
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 2
Huh? What makes hospitals so important than they need their own TLD, like .museum and other new too-narrow loser TLDs? Why not.car for automobile dealers? Why not.pub for the local pub?
Does ICANN also hate car dealerships and pubs, too? I don't know about you, but there are lot more car dealerships and pubs in my town than hospitals, so of course it makes sense for them to have their own TLDs.
Devolving into rant...
Why don't people bitch about the dewey decimal system, insisting that their favorite topic has a top-level number? I mean, hell, it's obvious discrimination, since we no scarcity: we have an unlimited supply of numbers, right?
Adding TLDs won't do squat to solve the problem: that idiot registrars don't enforce some semblance of rules in an organizational system.
Imagine if, as a publisher, you could spend a couple of extra bucks, so that your book appears in five or six different dewey-decimal numbers in the library, just to increase your "hits". Or they register lots close-enough numbers in case you made a typo in your number query.
Of course this is preposterous, as it obviously destroys the point of having an organizational system. But that's what happens today when company X decides it has to have X.* where * is all available TLDs that can be had.
I hope you don't take one loser to be a representative sample of the whole community.
I've found that most people who work on free software in their spare time are honest, fair, humble, self-motivated, and usually pretty good programmers too.
So, here's what I think: when I'm giving interviews, open source is a plus on their resume. It is good indicator that they love programming and are self-motivated. However, just because a person does open source development doesn't guarantee anything.
I think you got a bad egg. Why not try hiring some lower-profile developers?
To the OP: people aren't neatly categorized into "open source" and "propietary". I write propietary code for hire, but also write open source code for fun. Sure, you might have the RMS/Bill dichotomoy, but many of us fall in the middle somewhere!
Oh, wait, did you research this? No? Okay, I'll paste it in for you:
1. Application developers can incorporate the Encoder functionality into their applications by downloading the Windows Media Encoder SDK components and incorporating them into their applications. By accepting the terms in the Encoder SDK End-User License Agreement (EULA), developers have the right to redistribute these components. See the Encoder 7 SDK page page for information on how to download the SDK.
2.Service providers, content producers, print publications, and others who wish to distribute the Windows Media Encoder 7 end-user application from their Web sites or on a CD-ROM should obtain the Windows Media Encoder Licensing Agreement.
Any guesses in what's that EULA? (Hint: if there is a EULA at all, you can't do what you want with it.)
So what happens if WMA completely replaces MP3, and you try to make your own WMA hardware/sofware that MS doesn't like? Answer: squashed like grape.
Junkbuster, among other programs, allow you to forge your headers. Why?
Well, the biggest one is to prevent stupid sites from refusing to serve you just because you're not using browser X. They're almost always wrong. I'll take my chances, thank you, I don't need you playing Mommy.
If you're paranoid, there are certain browser-specific bugs that a malicious website can take advantage of if they know your exact version. Better to keep them guessing. (You have cleaned out your/etc/issue file so it doesn't say exactly what version of what OS you're running... right?! If you do, you might as well as change it to "PORTSCAN ME NOW, WORLD!")
And, it's always a good thing to throw some entropy into to some marketroid's demographics.
Plus, I hope I give some admins a good laugh now and then. If you ever see this in your server logs, you'll know it's me:
Have you ever used Word?? To save as an older format, you choose "save as" and choose the format from the list at the bottom. No brain surgery is required. It's about as easy as is can possibly be.
Sure, we know it's easy. But MS makes the new file format incompatible and they make it default. Your average office drone who is busy sending stupid elf-bowling.EXEs to you is not going to take the time to learn how save documents in a compatible format.
The only thing that will happen is this: Bob sends Ned Word-2005 files, but Ned can't open them. What should happen: Ned sends mail to Bob telling him not to be a dimwit and save his documents in the older format. What always happens: Ned calls IT and says "I NEED WORD 2005!". IT gets thousands of these calls, they buy Word 2005. Ooops, Word 2005 will only run on Windows 2005! Quick, buy Windows 2005 too!
This is the game that MS plays.
Truthfully, there have been no new features since Word 6.0 that are worth breaking compatability for. Save 'em all in 6.0 format.
There are other professions that need 24/7 coverage, and, are a little more important than a computer being up. Your local hospital, for instance.
Know some nurses? The ones I know get a flat-fee of $X for being on call for that night. It is, of course less than the full hourly rate, but you get it whether or not you're called in.
The call lasts a specific time, after which, the pager is shut off. That pay is mandatory in exchange for losing your life for one night: can't go out and drink, can't travel, etc. When you come in, you're on the clock, quite possibly for overtime.
It doesn't quite sound legal to expect you to be on-call 24/7 for free. Don't stand for it. Find out what your rights are and assert them, or move on.
All the bugs that I submit are important. They are severity one.
All the bugs that you submit are useless. They are severity five.
The point? Get an objective standard, and don't take the submitter's priority too seriously. Otherwise everything will be "highest", at which point you're better off having no priority system at all- you'll spend time pretending to prioritize things and have no results.
For some reason this comment conjures up the curious image:
Jon Katz, sitting in Lancaster, PA, by candlelight. He is typing furiously at an Underwood typewriter, writing articles about technology, of which he's actually never seen before. He has a stack of old "Wired" magazines as a reference.
At the end of the day, CmdrTaco stops by, picks up the manuscript, scans and OCRs it, and uploads it to Slashdot.
Which exist in your industry. IP exists everywhere, but the only place anyone's fighting for its' dismissal is in music. Why not software?
Because the software industry learned a long time ago that copy protection only pisses people off and does nothing to stop piracy. This was because our bits were smaller than the RIAA's, and could be flung around a lot easier.
The software industry grew up, and accepted piracy as a sad but necessary fact of doing business in that area. Software makes still make money despite piracy. Some even say some companies are better off today because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
What bullshit!
"There's a saying that Europeans are ignorant - can't point out South Dakota on a map, don't know that West Virginia and Virgina aren't the same states etc. With the risk of immideate "flamebait" moderation, I must confess that I agree with that view. Do a test sometime, and compare your knowledge (if you're European) about the state affairs with someone from New York or California."
Dude, our states are the size of your countries. Give my fellow Americans a break if we don't have every one of yours memorized just yet.
You happen live in a place where your daily life crosses with other nations more frequently due to geography. You are more cognizant about world affairs because of this, not due to superior intellect, savviness, or coolness. This typical superiority complex annoys the hell out of me.
You'll find that a typical American knows as much about their local continent as much as you know about yours. The fact that our continent has only a few giant, countries where yours has lots of little ones says nothing about the intelligence of their people.
And yes, I can point out Egypt on a map. Before Sept 11.
A few months later, TotalView was released for Linux x86. Guess which is one of our biggest sellers?
I went to SC2000 (the supercomputing tradeshow) last year. Almost everybody I talked was running MPI on Linux on PCs. Linux has made huge inroads in the scientific community working on ahem, clusters, of Linux boxes. It's actually quite amazing, consider the Linux market in this segment was close to nil a few years ago. Something about cash-strapped institutions not having to pay high OS licensing fees...
Anyway, it goes to show you that even though there is a free alternative (gdb/ddd) you can sell tools for Linux if you do things the free things can't, or do it better.
Sorry, you can't teach and old dog new tricks. And the bigger the dog is... the bigger a dog it is. Quality comes from within, it is not imposed upon from above.
Translated: if your company doesn't have an internal, automatic, innate, sense of quality, forget about it. A real company will either have bosses that unconditionally heed concerns about quality and say "go for it", or, they'll already know and you'll be doing it. Look for a new job on your spare time, and move when the time is right.
When building a bridge, the banker DOES NOT GET TO SAY "oh, use some less cable-ties here to save a few bucks". You're the engineer, they're the money-men. You engineer.
>slashdot.org
Camouflage.
I can't find Who Wants To Be A Millionaire or Deer Hunter at all on there. Goddamn elitists.
Here's my guess: too much Windows software out there assumes you have "Administrator" privileges.
I recently installed Windows 2000 and, not being a complete idiot, I set up accounts for myself and my wife. I did not give myself Administrator privileges; instead, to make system changes, I log in as Admin and make changes. You know, just like on Real OS's.
Imagine my complete lack of suprise when all the apps that don't work properly. They all assume you have unfettered write access to any directory in the world. I've had to go down manually, guess which files each app wants to write, and then change the permission on those directories so that it can happen.
To MS's credit, Office did work properly. It's just that most Windows apps are not multi-user aware! Windows vendors, test your damn apps on NT without admin permissions!
Hey, thanks for linking to the printer-friendly version. It loaded so fast it pleasantly shocked me. I wish more folks would do the same...
Goddammit, the USA had declared folk music illegal. Isn't that sick?
To answer your question, if something becomes so popular that it's part of the national culture- be it a catch phrase, song, picture, movie, cartoon characters, etc., then the public owns it. Sure, the author/publisher deserves a some profit for it for a little while, perhaps a single lifetime. But dammit, the world owns Mickey Mouse by now, just as much as it owns Ichabod Crane, Merlin, or Oedipus.
Awhile back, there was a case where the cops used a heat scanner to detect marijana plants inside a house. The lights necessary to grow them efficently apparently give off a recognizable signature, and your average house doesn't have quite so many of them. However, it was ruled that this was an illegal "search".
1) Use Google to search for your own email address every couple of months. This makes sure that you or no one else has intentionally or accidentally posting your address too publicly. Contact the webmasters to encourage them to take them down or munge the address. If they refuse or ignore, the only way to start fresh is to get a new address.
The biggest culprit that I've found? Private mailing lists! You'd be surprised how many mailing lists are archived on the web with unmunged adresses. Sure, the list doesn't spam you, but if they archive everything in plain text, you will be eventually.
2) Plead with your family to only the use your private email address only for personal correspondance. Personal correspondence means email that you send yourself. The intent is to keep them from typing your name into those stupid webpages like shakin-baby-butts.com. Tell them to use your alternate spamtrap email (e.g., Yahoo with filters on) if they must type your name into anything EXCEPT the mailer's "To:" field.
3) Zap any mailto links in personal webpages. Someone suggested using a picture of the address, but I've found a nicer solution. Use HTML entities to screw up your name. For example, from my homepage, the HTML source is this:
s<!-- die spammers -->cott
<!-- die spammers --> <!-- die spammers --> @
<!-- die spammers --> <!-- die spammers --> t&<!-- die spammers
-->ringali.or<!-- die spammers -->g
This allows visitors to cut and paste the mail address. The only bot that seems to be able to parse this is Google.
Thursday, 7/19/2001
Romero, Hall gone
Warrior | 12:50 | GameSpy News 13 Comments
GameSpy has learned from Eidos that John Romero and Tom Hall have left Ion Storm Dallas.
In a statement released to GameSpy, Eidos said:
"John Romero and Tom Hall have decided to depart ION Storm to pursue other interests. We wish them luck in their future endeavors and thank them for their contribution to Ion Storm over the years, without which we would never have put together such talented teams in both our Austin and Dallas offices. Ion Storm will continue as a wholly owned subsidiary of Eidos and work on the sequels to the awarding winning Thief and Deus Ex titles as well as Deus Ex for the PS2."
Everyone at the Dallas office received a pink slip on Friday and that only a few administration and MIS personnel are left there to close down the office, said a former employee who was part of the layoff.
Eidos would not confirm that the Dallas staff was gone, but said they were waiting to on the sales figures for Anachronox.
Ion Storm Austin was not affected, but Warren Spector will now become head of the Ion Storm subsidiary. The Austin office is looking at changing its name from Ion Storm, but a new name has not yet been chosen.
"Though we went through some turbulent times, our relationship with ION was *super* beneficial at times," said Harvey Smith, who is heading up the Deus Ex 2 team at Ion Storm Austin. "ION gave Warren a place to start building up the earliest version of this studio. (Which is now working on Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3.) Without the initial support of ION Storm, who knows whether we would have been able to create Deus Ex. There were some great people there at the Dallas studio, with lots of passion, and I wish them all the best. The game industry ebbs and flows - heroes today are villains tomorrow, and vice versa."
They have got to be kidding! Does that quartet come with a free SUV, too?! When I was in music school, I can't recall how many gigs my friends and I played simply for food.
Let's see. $140/4 people = $35,000 per wirehead, and what, let's say 4 hours on the patio? So, that's 208 hours. That's $168/hr. That's attorney-range, not musician range.
Um, musicians don't make that kind of cash. (That's the reason I got a job being a programmer, not a pro musician.)
Even if the biz agency took a 90% cut, it's still ridiculous.
However, the poster wasn't asking about that. He stated that .med is already in an alternative root, but that's not good enough. He wants ICANN to put it in the "official" root. That's different.
Alternative roots are fine 'n dandy with me, but sadly, impotent. Email and URLs are only useful if we have one naming scheme. I'm not pointing my setup to Bubba's Root Server and Pork Rind Shop anytime soon. I'd rather communicate with people, get work done, and get information when I need it, than worry about people dicking around with pedantic naming issues. I don't care about the domain name of hospital down the street as long as I can communicate with it when I need to.
Sure, you're free to set up your own root, or use an alternative one, just as I'm free to ignore it.
Devolving into rant...
Why don't people bitch about the dewey decimal system, insisting that their favorite topic has a top-level number? I mean, hell, it's obvious discrimination, since we no scarcity: we have an unlimited supply of numbers, right?
Adding TLDs won't do squat to solve the problem: that idiot registrars don't enforce some semblance of rules in an organizational system. Imagine if, as a publisher, you could spend a couple of extra bucks, so that your book appears in five or six different dewey-decimal numbers in the library, just to increase your "hits". Or they register lots close-enough numbers in case you made a typo in your number query.
Of course this is preposterous, as it obviously destroys the point of having an organizational system. But that's what happens today when company X decides it has to have X.* where * is all available TLDs that can be had.
I've found that most people who work on free software in their spare time are honest, fair, humble, self-motivated, and usually pretty good programmers too.
So, here's what I think: when I'm giving interviews, open source is a plus on their resume. It is good indicator that they love programming and are self-motivated. However, just because a person does open source development doesn't guarantee anything.
I think you got a bad egg. Why not try hiring some lower-profile developers?
To the OP: people aren't neatly categorized into "open source" and "propietary". I write propietary code for hire, but also write open source code for fun. Sure, you might have the RMS/Bill dichotomoy, but many of us fall in the middle somewhere!
# user-agent specifies treatment of the "User-Agent:" (and "UA-*:") header(s)
#user-agent @
user-agent Mozilla/6.666 (Atari 2600)
You can even report different agents to different websites. Good if you have to deal with dumbass websites on a regular basis.
Gee, is that speech or beer? Read this maze of twisty license agreements, all alike.
Oh, wait, did you research this? No? Okay, I'll paste it in for you:
Any guesses in what's that EULA? (Hint: if there is a EULA at all, you can't do what you want with it.)
So what happens if WMA completely replaces MP3, and you try to make your own WMA hardware/sofware that MS doesn't like? Answer: squashed like grape.
Well, the biggest one is to prevent stupid sites from refusing to serve you just because you're not using browser X. They're almost always wrong. I'll take my chances, thank you, I don't need you playing Mommy.
If you're paranoid, there are certain browser-specific bugs that a malicious website can take advantage of if they know your exact version. Better to keep them guessing. (You have cleaned out your /etc/issue file so it doesn't say exactly what version of what OS you're running... right?! If you do, you might as well as change it to "PORTSCAN ME NOW, WORLD!")
And, it's always a good thing to throw some entropy into to some marketroid's demographics.
Plus, I hope I give some admins a good laugh now and then. If you ever see this in your server logs, you'll know it's me:
Mozilla/6.666 (Atari 2600)
I like the images that this conjures.
Sure, we know it's easy. But MS makes the new file format incompatible and they make it default. Your average office drone who is busy sending stupid elf-bowling .EXEs to you is not going to take the time to learn how save documents in a compatible format.
The only thing that will happen is this: Bob sends Ned Word-2005 files, but Ned can't open them. What should happen: Ned sends mail to Bob telling him not to be a dimwit and save his documents in the older format. What always happens: Ned calls IT and says "I NEED WORD 2005!". IT gets thousands of these calls, they buy Word 2005. Ooops, Word 2005 will only run on Windows 2005! Quick, buy Windows 2005 too!
This is the game that MS plays.
Truthfully, there have been no new features since Word 6.0 that are worth breaking compatability for. Save 'em all in 6.0 format.
Know some nurses? The ones I know get a flat-fee of $X for being on call for that night. It is, of course less than the full hourly rate, but you get it whether or not you're called in.
The call lasts a specific time, after which, the pager is shut off. That pay is mandatory in exchange for losing your life for one night: can't go out and drink, can't travel, etc. When you come in, you're on the clock, quite possibly for overtime.
It doesn't quite sound legal to expect you to be on-call 24/7 for free. Don't stand for it. Find out what your rights are and assert them, or move on.
All the bugs that I submit are important. They are severity one.
All the bugs that you submit are useless. They are severity five.
The point? Get an objective standard, and don't take the submitter's priority too seriously. Otherwise everything will be "highest", at which point you're better off having no priority system at all- you'll spend time pretending to prioritize things and have no results.
Wasn't that in an Austin Powers movie?
Jon Katz, sitting in Lancaster, PA, by candlelight. He is typing furiously at an Underwood typewriter, writing articles about technology, of which he's actually never seen before. He has a stack of old "Wired" magazines as a reference.
At the end of the day, CmdrTaco stops by, picks up the manuscript, scans and OCRs it, and uploads it to Slashdot.
Because the software industry learned a long time ago that copy protection only pisses people off and does nothing to stop piracy. This was because our bits were smaller than the RIAA's, and could be flung around a lot easier.
The software industry grew up, and accepted piracy as a sad but necessary fact of doing business in that area. Software makes still make money despite piracy. Some even say some companies are better off today because of it.