Eventually something happens that requires technical knowledge, and a manager who doesn't have it will need to depend on the advice of others, who may be thinking of their own paychecks, or company politics, or not thinking at all.
Good point. My job is a technical job for a company that is primarily customer service oriented, so it's a different situation. If the company's main product is software, I think you're right.
Also, I think that people who work in IT often underestimate their ability to lead, and the amount of work that is required to lead.
Agreed. I think the GP post also shows narrowmindedness in calling a non-tech savvy CEO an "idiot."
My bosses don't understand a lot of what I do, but they obviously understand business enough to build a successful company. Leadership is not knowing everything, but finding people with the knowledge you need, and fitting them together into the "big picture."
My bosses have assigned me tasks that I thought were irrelevant to my job, only for me to find that, hey, this actually helps me improve at what I do.
There are more kinds of smarts than just tech smarts.
Same for me. Yahoo is now my throwaway account for useless website registrations, and even then I'm so disgusted by the amount of spam when I log in that, out of pity, I try to mark a little of it before logging out. I don't know if they're cross-referencing spam reports from different users, though.
Bundle it, eh? Some will say "hooray, more functionality!" Others will cry, "unfair competition!" Microsoft will make more money, more people will stick with a mediocre Microsoft product out of inertia and/or lock-in, and, in other news, the sun will rise.
Just stop calling yourself an artist. An artist wants an audience. Everyone else just wants a paycheck.
<sarcasm> Right. And a real engineer just loves bridges. And a real teacher just loves teaching. And a real carpenter just loves building. None of them need to get paid for their work, or they are frauds.</sarcasm>
The fact is that passion for your work and needing a paycheck are not incompatible. I'd also argue that a real artist wants to devote most of his/her time to his/her art - not be stuck doing unrelated work 8 hours a day. It is this passion which drives the desire to make a living at artistic work.
Again, from a pragmatic point of view, most of the really great artists/musicians you can name have this in common: they made a living from their work. Therefore, they were able to devote most of their energy to doing what they loved, and we all benefit from their increased output.
Regardless of how the money gets made - sales, patronage, t-shirts, product placement, etc - it's odd to say that, just because a musician or moviemaker's work CAN be copied, and a carpenter's or sculptor's CAN'T, that therefore the musician or moviemaker SHOULDN'T be paid.
Morals aside - what's the end result?
on
Sony BMG Dropping DRM
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I have no problem whatever making life miserable for thieves and miscreants like those bastards who run the entertainment industries.
In context, I presume you mean pirating their work. Without getting into a moral argument, I do think you should consider the practical effects of your behavior.
We all know that labels screw artists and DRM is bad and blah blah blah, but what happens if your favorite action films cost $50 million to make, but suddenly all of the customers have "digital content wants to be free" philosophies?
Frankly, if nobody pays to see movies, no movies will get made - or at least, only cheap movies where the person making them can afford to eat the cost. No more magical Hollywood special effects. You're not going to see Lord of the Rings get produced under a Creative Commons license.
Even if the whole business isn't "respectable" by your standards, you obviously respect their work enough to watch it. To never pay is to vote for a world where that work is never produced.
So let's get this straight. I'm the rational being, frustrated with this machine because it doesn't respond helpfully to my requests. So they want the computer to be able to recognize my frustration and... do what? Start working? Play soothing music?
If the thing is smart enough to know WHY I'm frustrated, it would be smart enough to fix the problem. More likely, it will guess wrong and frustrate me further. "Dangit, stop formatting this paragraph as a bulleted list," I say, and up pops Clippy. "I see that you're frustrated. Are you trying to make a bulleted list?" Cue explosion noises.
Also more likely is that the computer will waste computing power running its frustration-detection algorithm, bog down, and - surprise - frustrate the user.
Hey, how about just making computers that work better?
In the US, "entree" means main course, rather than a starter.
True. Supposedly this dates from a time when many-course meals were the norm in wealthy circles; the "entree" was the first of several main courses, so it was the "entrance" to the main part of the meal.
As time went on, the other main dishes were dropped, so that nowadays, unless you have dessert, the "entrance" is generally the last thing you eat.
And if independent artists are also limited to 5 years' copyright, what's to prevent a label from discovering them, liking their songs, but leaving them in obscurity for 5 years until they can take their songs and get some pretty boy band to record them?
Sounds to me like you'd be handing the industry a gold mine of free songs and screwing the little guy. After all, which one has the marketing and payola to make sure something is an instant hit? Which one has to struggle for a decade to become an "overnight" success?
If we want to encourage invention, instead of granting a monopoly right, a patent could merely give the holder the right to a paycheck, for example modified by the number of sold products including that patent. Corporations, instead of having to negotiate a license, would simply report what inventions they use in their products (and would have no financial incentive not to report it).
I think this is a great idea. There is incentive to invent, but market competition is still in full force.
Eh, if you look at the patent system today you'd do financially better serving fries with that and playing the lottery.
That's not what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that the concept of a patent system is good.
Look, if I were to invent a super-efficient solar cell, how would I get it manufactured? Unless I happen to be both an engineer AND a businessman, it's going to be tough to found my own company, build my own factories, etc. And even if I do, without patents, a large company could just buy my cells, reverse engineer them, mass produce them, and put me out of business.
Not only would I feel wronged, I would also be discouraged from inventing anything else - and so would everyone who saw my plight. Why spend years of your life working on something, only to have someone else reap the fruits of your labor? Better to get a job with a corporation and get a steady paycheck.
I agree that we need to find ways to:
Prevent people/corporations from patenting obvious things
Prevent patents on general concepts that prevent actual implementations
Try to prevent people from stealing and patenting other people's ideas
Put limits on how much control a patent holder can exercise over their invention (for example, you MUST license it if someone offers a high enough cut of the profits)
Etc. etc.
But I definitely don't think that the current problems mean we should scrap the whole idea.
I should have said this in my parent post, but the X Prizes are a good example. Would teams compete so hard to design efficient cards if there were no prize money, and if big auto companies could simply take their designs without paying for them?
We just had a story on the Automotive X Prize recently. I'm excited to see what it will produce.
Even if many inventions were actually the result of several people rushing to create the same thing, doesn't the possibility of fame and fortune help to drive all of them? Patents help to create that possibility - that the inventor will get to make a fortune, rather than having his/her idea copied and dominated by people who simply have better manufacturing capacities.
Only one runner wins a race, but all the runners compete with the prize in mind. I don't think you can assume that since there are many runners, the prize isn't important.
I do understand that patent trolling makes the whole system look useless, but I think that reform is the answer, not abandonment.
...but they won't agree (demand, even) to audio recording?
Bizarrely enough, yes. People want to dictate to reporters what will and won't go in the article. I had people wanting to insert "off the record, blah blah blah" into their comments all the time. In most cases, it was their opinion or grudge, and it didn't really matter, so I ignored it. But in one case, a police officer told me something and then said, "off the record," and proceeded to tell me the exact opposite. I was appalled. Rather than try to sort it out, I just didn't quote him at all. (By the way, in journalism school they taught us that unless we both agree it's off the record before something is said, it's fair game.)
In political reporting, if you must talk to the same sources often (a city manager, for example), you develop a basic relationship with them - not too chummy, but enough to hear their private gripes once in a while. Sometimes they will give you background information that they won't let you quote, but which will help you find that info from another source.
So at least in my experience, it would have been harder to get the same amount of information if I'd wanted to record everything. And given the time and cost involved (ever tried to transcribe a 1-hour interview?) and the fact that we were nearly never challenged on accuracy, it wasn't worth it. Maybe that would be different in another time or at another newspaper.
This article doesn't say much of anything new - it mostly uses screen shots and explanations that the folks at Google put in their original announcement videos.
That said, I'm personally very pumped about getting an Android phone. I hear people dissing Google here a lot, but everything that I've used that is made by Google works great - Gmail, Picassa, Google Earth, Google Maps, and the search engine itself. If these guys make something, I pretty much believe it will be cool.
Up till now, I've had very little interest in a "smart phone" - the ones I've had my hands on are clunky, and that includes Blackberries. But if I can get a phone with Android next time my contract is up, I just might do it. If nothing else, the possibility of having features that aren't controlled by the carrier is awesome. And announcements like Android seem to be pressuring carriers to go in that direction, even though Android doesn't specifically prohibit lockdown.
When I worked as a reporter, the people I quoted sometimes remarked on the fact that I was the rare reporter who quoted them correctly. I honestly think that this was not because other reporters are dishonest, but because I type quickly and most of my interviews were over the phone. It was much harder for me to get direct quotes when interviewing with pad and paper.
While I think this is good, because it allows for sources to respond to an article, I think it's important to remember that the sources themselves may not always be truthful. If they don't like the way an article came out, they could say they were misquoted, even when they weren't.
I suppose the journalist's safeguard for this is to audio-record every interview, but danged if most sources would agree to that. There will inevitably be some "he said, she said."
Seriously, IF the older films are an authentic art that deserves preservation, the why is most of it scrapped on the cutting room floor?
I see your point, but in many cases, books and films may have historical value that isn't apparent right now. Very old movies that we'd hardly enjoy now still sometimes interesting because they contain propaganda or ideas that became influential.
I have no interest in watching the "Saw" movies, for example, and would not personally choose to preserve them. But future historians may learn something important about our time period by seeing that people were entertained by such cruelty and suffering.
The legs of giraffes are filled with various types of fruit juice. You see, giraffes love drinking fruit juices - pineapple, boysenberry, mango-lemon - but their bodes have no real use for fruit juice, so it all trickes down to their legs where it stays and squishes around. This should have been obvious to you.
Midsize cars, large cars, minivans, and import luxury cars are all statistically safer for the driver than an SUV.
I read an article once that claimed this, and gave statistics to show that although an SUV may give you more protection during an accident, it also makes you more likely to have an accident. The reason, they said, was that SUVs are less maneuverable.
I don't know if this is true, but in my Camry, I have personally avoided two major crashes by being able to swerve when somebody pulled into my lane without warning.
I'm not sure if this is common knowledge, but they also have software that sorts the day's packages into truck routes, organizes them based on an optimal delivery order, and tells the guys loading the truck what order to put the packages in the truck so that the next one to be dropped off is always at the back.
If you are 18 and are going out with a 17 year old and you're a monster, what are you if you are 17 and going out with a 16 year old?
Unless I'm missing something, the law doesn't set limits on who can date, just on who can have sex or marry. So sexually inactive teens are OK. (What few there are.) And it says nothing about the 45-35 age gap you mention because they're both adults who are (presumably) capable of making decisions for themselves.
With regard to the 18 1/2 and 17 3/4 example, I would make two comments:
You have to draw the line somewhere if you want a law that makes kids off-limits, and the line happens to be at 18. Anywhere you put it could be called "arbitrary." Do you have an argument for a different age?
Perhaps for the sake of victimization, it would make more sense to have the rule in this case be something about the age difference between the two parties. I think many people would say there's a big difference between 18 and 17 versus 40 and 17.
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Good point. My job is a technical job for a company that is primarily customer service oriented, so it's a different situation. If the company's main product is software, I think you're right.
Also, thanks for your gracious tone of reply. :)
Agreed. I think the GP post also shows narrowmindedness in calling a non-tech savvy CEO an "idiot."
My bosses don't understand a lot of what I do, but they obviously understand business enough to build a successful company. Leadership is not knowing everything, but finding people with the knowledge you need, and fitting them together into the "big picture."
My bosses have assigned me tasks that I thought were irrelevant to my job, only for me to find that, hey, this actually helps me improve at what I do.
There are more kinds of smarts than just tech smarts.
Same for me. Yahoo is now my throwaway account for useless website registrations, and even then I'm so disgusted by the amount of spam when I log in that, out of pity, I try to mark a little of it before logging out. I don't know if they're cross-referencing spam reports from different users, though.
Bundle it, eh? Some will say "hooray, more functionality!" Others will cry, "unfair competition!" Microsoft will make more money, more people will stick with a mediocre Microsoft product out of inertia and/or lock-in, and, in other news, the sun will rise.
Wow. It's pretty sick for you to immediately jump from the concept of loving parenting to the concept of child abuse.
<sarcasm> Right. And a real engineer just loves bridges. And a real teacher just loves teaching. And a real carpenter just loves building. None of them need to get paid for their work, or they are frauds.</sarcasm>
The fact is that passion for your work and needing a paycheck are not incompatible. I'd also argue that a real artist wants to devote most of his/her time to his/her art - not be stuck doing unrelated work 8 hours a day. It is this passion which drives the desire to make a living at artistic work.
Again, from a pragmatic point of view, most of the really great artists/musicians you can name have this in common: they made a living from their work. Therefore, they were able to devote most of their energy to doing what they loved, and we all benefit from their increased output.
Regardless of how the money gets made - sales, patronage, t-shirts, product placement, etc - it's odd to say that, just because a musician or moviemaker's work CAN be copied, and a carpenter's or sculptor's CAN'T, that therefore the musician or moviemaker SHOULDN'T be paid.
In context, I presume you mean pirating their work. Without getting into a moral argument, I do think you should consider the practical effects of your behavior.
We all know that labels screw artists and DRM is bad and blah blah blah, but what happens if your favorite action films cost $50 million to make, but suddenly all of the customers have "digital content wants to be free" philosophies?
Frankly, if nobody pays to see movies, no movies will get made - or at least, only cheap movies where the person making them can afford to eat the cost. No more magical Hollywood special effects. You're not going to see Lord of the Rings get produced under a Creative Commons license.
Even if the whole business isn't "respectable" by your standards, you obviously respect their work enough to watch it. To never pay is to vote for a world where that work is never produced.
So let's get this straight. I'm the rational being, frustrated with this machine because it doesn't respond helpfully to my requests. So they want the computer to be able to recognize my frustration and... do what? Start working? Play soothing music?
If the thing is smart enough to know WHY I'm frustrated, it would be smart enough to fix the problem. More likely, it will guess wrong and frustrate me further. "Dangit, stop formatting this paragraph as a bulleted list," I say, and up pops Clippy. "I see that you're frustrated. Are you trying to make a bulleted list?" Cue explosion noises.
Also more likely is that the computer will waste computing power running its frustration-detection algorithm, bog down, and - surprise - frustrate the user.
Hey, how about just making computers that work better?
True. Supposedly this dates from a time when many-course meals were the norm in wealthy circles; the "entree" was the first of several main courses, so it was the "entrance" to the main part of the meal.
As time went on, the other main dishes were dropped, so that nowadays, unless you have dessert, the "entrance" is generally the last thing you eat.
And if independent artists are also limited to 5 years' copyright, what's to prevent a label from discovering them, liking their songs, but leaving them in obscurity for 5 years until they can take their songs and get some pretty boy band to record them?
Sounds to me like you'd be handing the industry a gold mine of free songs and screwing the little guy. After all, which one has the marketing and payola to make sure something is an instant hit? Which one has to struggle for a decade to become an "overnight" success?
I think this is a great idea. There is incentive to invent, but market competition is still in full force.
Where do I go to sign the petition? :)
That's not what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that the concept of a patent system is good.
Look, if I were to invent a super-efficient solar cell, how would I get it manufactured? Unless I happen to be both an engineer AND a businessman, it's going to be tough to found my own company, build my own factories, etc. And even if I do, without patents, a large company could just buy my cells, reverse engineer them, mass produce them, and put me out of business.
Not only would I feel wronged, I would also be discouraged from inventing anything else - and so would everyone who saw my plight. Why spend years of your life working on something, only to have someone else reap the fruits of your labor? Better to get a job with a corporation and get a steady paycheck.
I agree that we need to find ways to:
- Prevent people/corporations from patenting obvious things
- Prevent patents on general concepts that prevent actual implementations
- Try to prevent people from stealing and patenting other people's ideas
- Put limits on how much control a patent holder can exercise over their invention (for example, you MUST license it if someone offers a high enough cut of the profits)
Etc. etc.But I definitely don't think that the current problems mean we should scrap the whole idea.
I should have said this in my parent post, but the X Prizes are a good example. Would teams compete so hard to design efficient cards if there were no prize money, and if big auto companies could simply take their designs without paying for them?
We just had a story on the Automotive X Prize recently. I'm excited to see what it will produce.
Even if many inventions were actually the result of several people rushing to create the same thing, doesn't the possibility of fame and fortune help to drive all of them? Patents help to create that possibility - that the inventor will get to make a fortune, rather than having his/her idea copied and dominated by people who simply have better manufacturing capacities.
Only one runner wins a race, but all the runners compete with the prize in mind. I don't think you can assume that since there are many runners, the prize isn't important.
I do understand that patent trolling makes the whole system look useless, but I think that reform is the answer, not abandonment.
If the other galaxy doesn't learn to fight back now, it's going to get pushed around for the rest of its life.
Bizarrely enough, yes. People want to dictate to reporters what will and won't go in the article. I had people wanting to insert "off the record, blah blah blah" into their comments all the time. In most cases, it was their opinion or grudge, and it didn't really matter, so I ignored it. But in one case, a police officer told me something and then said, "off the record," and proceeded to tell me the exact opposite. I was appalled. Rather than try to sort it out, I just didn't quote him at all. (By the way, in journalism school they taught us that unless we both agree it's off the record before something is said, it's fair game.)
In political reporting, if you must talk to the same sources often (a city manager, for example), you develop a basic relationship with them - not too chummy, but enough to hear their private gripes once in a while. Sometimes they will give you background information that they won't let you quote, but which will help you find that info from another source.
So at least in my experience, it would have been harder to get the same amount of information if I'd wanted to record everything. And given the time and cost involved (ever tried to transcribe a 1-hour interview?) and the fact that we were nearly never challenged on accuracy, it wasn't worth it. Maybe that would be different in another time or at another newspaper.
This article doesn't say much of anything new - it mostly uses screen shots and explanations that the folks at Google put in their original announcement videos.
That said, I'm personally very pumped about getting an Android phone. I hear people dissing Google here a lot, but everything that I've used that is made by Google works great - Gmail, Picassa, Google Earth, Google Maps, and the search engine itself. If these guys make something, I pretty much believe it will be cool.
Up till now, I've had very little interest in a "smart phone" - the ones I've had my hands on are clunky, and that includes Blackberries. But if I can get a phone with Android next time my contract is up, I just might do it. If nothing else, the possibility of having features that aren't controlled by the carrier is awesome. And announcements like Android seem to be pressuring carriers to go in that direction, even though Android doesn't specifically prohibit lockdown.
Down with carrier control! Up with open access! :)
When I worked as a reporter, the people I quoted sometimes remarked on the fact that I was the rare reporter who quoted them correctly. I honestly think that this was not because other reporters are dishonest, but because I type quickly and most of my interviews were over the phone. It was much harder for me to get direct quotes when interviewing with pad and paper.
While I think this is good, because it allows for sources to respond to an article, I think it's important to remember that the sources themselves may not always be truthful. If they don't like the way an article came out, they could say they were misquoted, even when they weren't.
I suppose the journalist's safeguard for this is to audio-record every interview, but danged if most sources would agree to that. There will inevitably be some "he said, she said."
I see your point, but in many cases, books and films may have historical value that isn't apparent right now. Very old movies that we'd hardly enjoy now still sometimes interesting because they contain propaganda or ideas that became influential.
I have no interest in watching the "Saw" movies, for example, and would not personally choose to preserve them. But future historians may learn something important about our time period by seeing that people were entertained by such cruelty and suffering.
They call this science? Bah. Everything you need to know about giraffes is contained in this brilliant, revolutionary book:
http://www.amazon.com/Giraffes-Doris-Haggis-Whey/dp/1932416978
For example:
I read an article once that claimed this, and gave statistics to show that although an SUV may give you more protection during an accident, it also makes you more likely to have an accident. The reason, they said, was that SUVs are less maneuverable.
I don't know if this is true, but in my Camry, I have personally avoided two major crashes by being able to swerve when somebody pulled into my lane without warning.
I'm not sure if this is common knowledge, but they also have software that sorts the day's packages into truck routes, organizes them based on an optimal delivery order, and tells the guys loading the truck what order to put the packages in the truck so that the next one to be dropped off is always at the back.
3,500 books? That takes up a lot of space. Why not just get a Kindle? [ducks barrage of lexical projectiles]
Um... toilet paper wasn't invented this year, buddy. Sorry if you just got the word.
Unless I'm missing something, the law doesn't set limits on who can date, just on who can have sex or marry. So sexually inactive teens are OK. (What few there are.) And it says nothing about the 45-35 age gap you mention because they're both adults who are (presumably) capable of making decisions for themselves.
With regard to the 18 1/2 and 17 3/4 example, I would make two comments: