NO. I've seen the documentary. Uncle Scrooge swims around in gold coins in a big vault on a hill. How could the bank be using that money to "finance their lending operations" when Uncle Scrooge is swimming, bathing, and probably even peeing in it? (It's a swimming pool. It happens.)
You and your fanciful "investment" theories. Get real! The rich just stockpile gold bars, everybody knows it.
This is exactly the point of the game. As a solo-play experience, WoW would be pretty fucking boring. Its adding the social element that makes it enjoyable, and I find that most of what I look forward to when I get online is getting a chance to unwind with some friends - some of whom don't live near enough for me to "see" short of a weekend trip & a plane ticket.
healing on a shaman is very different from healing on a discipline priest, so there was enough difference there to keep me interested, too
Right - the major difference, of course, being whether you prefer being awesome (as a priest) or lame (as a shaman)? Yes, I went there.:) My priest was my first 60, 70, and 80, and still the best. I *detest* totems, though I find I generally love healing roles.
I haven't gotten online yet today, hoping to get online for a bit tonight and check out the new stuff, but in general, I thought the Wrath questing was light years ahead of Vanilla & TBC questing, I'm hoping they continued that trend.
Your advice on avoiding drama is good, and spot-on - find an adult guild populated with some people you enjoy bantering with, or start your own. The new expansion makes raiding for the very best gear very accessible to 10 players, so there's no reason you couldn't start a small but quite successful raiding group. Trade chat has its moments, but a robust ignore list helps. I've never played on an RP server, though I found that PvE servers seem to be a little more laid back (and thus less douchey, on account of everybody being PvE Care Bears) than the average PvP server (which, as we all know, is where the srs bsns happens).
One other thing (for the guild officers out there) that's actually helped us a lot is asking people to get on a first-name basis... we've all got lots of alts, so it's easier for us to keep track of who's who if we know the person's name and can associate the alts with them. Plus it's a little easier to relate when you're not on vent calling out shit like "HolyCow, DI LegooooLASS and wipe it. HumanMage the Druid just got smoked by the blood beasts, and AngelLOLOL is our only healer left standing."
First I've seen about cameras not working - the report I read focused on unpowered USB devices, and didn't mention issues with cameras, though obviously it sounds like some people are seeing issues there as well.
It's not "making excuses" for them to explain what the change was - the decision was to limit the power emitted from the dock connector to 20 mA, where it was previously limited to 100 mA. The behavior being reported is that an error message is now popping up saying "this device requires too much power." Anything trying to draw more than that will be unable to, and will thus not function properly.
it won't enable you to do without owning a phone or a laptop.
It most certainly could replace a phone (skype, other voip apps allow this, even if it's not the most convenient form factor for somebody who walks around a lot), and unless you do huge amounts of text input via keyboard, it could easily replace a laptop too. You can browse the web, send emails, instant message, listen to / watch audio/video, read books, play games... for many people, that's pretty much what their laptop gets used for. If your use cases involve programming, and other text-entry heavy operations, it won't replace a laptop, but that doesn't mean that for people with lightweight "mostly-consumer" needs, a tablet wouldn't be absolutely perfect as a laptop replacement.
They limited the output to 20 mA from the previous 100 mA - this means that unpowered USB devices that could previously work with the power available through the dock connector may not work now. I've heard nothing to indicate any cameras are affected, since they have their own onboard batteries. It's the keyboards, mice, and other USB-powered things which may not work.
Unintended side effect may be that this will prompt manufacturers to find ways to reduce the power requirements of their USB devices, which will mean better battery life for any device that uses them.
So you've added a third group of people the government must serve, and whose interests compete with those of the file sharers and the RIAA, as well. Thanks for underscoring my point.
I never claimed that it was "basically free" to produce original material.
Producing original material is a necessary prerequisite for having something to make "infinite copies" of. The size of the market you intend to sell to is also quite relevant to the economics of music production: if you expect to sell only 1,000 copies of a record it cost you $10,000 to produce, then you are losing money if you sell them for a penny less than $10 per copy - whether it's digital or physical distribution doesn't matter. And yet we still have people arguing that 99 cents per song for 10 songs is just entirely too much money to spend on any music, ever, because it all should be "basically free."
I claimed that it was "basically free" to produce additional copies of that material.
And my point is that this is a disingenuous claim, because it ignores the cost of producing the original copy, which the sales of *all* of your "basically free" copies must compensate for. Should we assume that the size of the market is 7 billion people, and price everything accordingly, with a price that approaches (but will never reach) zero - even knowing that no artist will EVER come close to selling that many? Or should we instead be guided by the realization that most albums (or songs) will sell a few tens or hundreds of thousands of copies, and that the asking price should allow somebody who sells that number of copies to receive a reasonable compensation, even knowing that that means that somebody turns out to be wildly popular and sells a couple million copies might just end up rich?
I'd suggest that any society which thinks that its artists should *be* - and *remain* - "poor starving artists" are engaging in parasitism of the worst order: asking somebody else to suffer to produce something so that you can be entertained with minimal inconvenience.
It is not right to illegally acquire media, but its also not right to hold onto copyrights for hundreds of years.
Agreed - and as I said, neither side has clean hands. Some of the lawsuits being pursued by the RIAA are ridiculous, and the awards are ludicrous. But there's also a lot of self-styled "freedom fighters" who are simply calling themselves that because it's a convenient way to rationalize behavior that is illegal.
There's a lot of not-crappy indie (i.e., not-major-label-pap) music out there. Spend some time exploring, you might be surprised at the quality of music being self-produced by bands and musicians. And try to send your money that way - some of these artists and bands are starting their own smaller labels that are much more artist-friendly: cf. Righteous Babe, Saddle Creek, numerous others, and most of them are embracing a lot of the digital distribution methods that the majors are very reluctant to use.
If the state of music is trending in that direction, I'm not certain that says a good thing for the influence of digital distribution. I enjoyed Code Monkey once or twice when I heard it, but if your idea of a good time is listening to a slightly geekier version of Weird Al Yankovic 24x7, then we'll have to part ways there.
But it's basically free
No. It's not free. Nothing is "basically free". It may be *drastically* lower-cost to duplicate but, in the case of music, you have a host of very real and sizable production costs: studio space, mastering, audio engineer time & services, instrument purchase & maintenance, artists' cost-of-living (often spread across 3-6 people), web site support & maintenance, server space, electricity, physical hardware, bandwidth costs... all of this figures into the production of that MP3 file, and it's the result of spending all that money. The "duplication" costs even for a physical CD are fairly low when you compare them to the costs of all the rest. Electronic distribution drives the price down (and should), but declaring that it's basically "free" completely disregards the months of effort and spending that went into producing that MP3 or CD.
If you go very DIY, and spend $10,000 putting together an album (a month or two of rent, food, studio time, instruments, etc.), with the goal of earning $20k off it - enough to recoup your costs & maybe pay for a few more months while you tour and record something new, you have to look at the size of your market - can you sell 2000 copies of your CD at $10/CD? Can you sell 20,000 copies of your song at $1 per song?
When peoples' time, talent, and creative energy is involved, there is no such thing as "basically free" and "infinite supply". You're seriously misrepresenting (or fundamentally misunderstanding) the economics of producing a record if you truly believe that.
Legality - the specific action either is, or is not, against the law. In this case, file sharing of copyrighted works is quite clearly against the law. It *is* illegal.
Morality - the specific action either is, or is not, an ethical action - meaning, consistent with your values and beliefs, and demonstrating an integrity to those deeply held values and beliefs. In this case, file sharing of a copyrighted work may be 'moral' or 'immoral,' depending on your view of copyright law, and whether or not file sharing constitutes harm to someone.
These are not mutually exclusive - file sharing can be legal or illegal, and regardless of its legal status, an individual can have an opinion of whether or not it's moral or immoral to share. In this case, what TFA is saying (in lazy, sloppy english) is that the file sharers don't see what they're doing as "immoral," and as such, they don't see why it should be treated as illegal. This does not mean that it's "not" illegal, it means they believe the legal status of sharing should change.
Prohibition, abortion, and numerous other issues can be viewed on the same axes. People who voted for the prohibition laws certainly probably did feel they were doing the "moral" thing, but there were numerous people who violated the prohibition laws and felt that they were doing the "moral" thing as well. Legality is social; Morality is personal.
The government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.
That's true, but you have to realize in a disagreement between two groups of people, "serving the people" doesn't necessarily mean "Give me what I want, tell those other guys to fuck off." When two groups of people have competing interests, you can't just expect one of them to cede all of their rights & entitlements to the others with no consideration given in return. In other words: The RIAA is overcharging, and overzealously trying to preserve a business model that's outdated. The file sharers are underpaying, and overzealously trying to kill a business model in an industry with little regard for the sociopathic nature of their behavior.
Artists have a right to set a price for their work. It doesn't matter what the medium is that they choose to distribute it. If the price is too high, then you shouldn't pay them for their work - but you also should not TAKE a copy of their work without paying. If you don't find the enjoyment you get from the work to be worth the price the artist is asking for the work... then find another artist whose work you do value, or who sets a more reasonable price.
Problem is, you and I both know that the RIAA isn't typically hunting down the person who burns a mix CD for his girlfriend from his iTunes library, or the girl who emails her boyfriend a couple MP3s of songs she thinks he'll like. (How would they ever even know you've done this? They are not tracking 6 billion people in real time.) They're going after people sharing on file-sharing networks, and generally (though not always) the larger-scale offenders. There's sharing, and then there's massive worldwide distribution. I'd say when you start handing out more than a handful of copies to friends and family, and throw it open to anybody with a network connection, there's a legitimate problem. The RIAA/MPAA are certainly overzealous in their pursuit of "justice," but neither side has clean hands.
If the artist wants to share their music (and many do, with free downloads, previews, etc.), then great - but if you're taking it upon yourself to distribute that artist's music to any random stranger who wants a copy, and calling that some sort of altruistic sharing, I'd say you're overreaching in your attempt to rationalize behavior that is morally gray, and rather unambiguously illegal.
Really - you weren't provided with a copy of your service contract? The thing you had to sign in order to activate service? The contract you sign with AT&T, not Apple? And the "store workers" couldn't find a copy of the thing you needed to sign to activate service?
And you can't remember much about the contract, except that there's a part in there that was "awful, just awful," and you paraphrase it from memory, rather than, you know, citing relevant portions of the contract which is posted online for all to read?
You fail at trolling. Your story doesn't even pass the most rudimentary smell test. You're full of shit, you don't own an iphone, and this "story" never happened.
If you're labeling properly, that'll have more or less the same effect - the only time you should be 'falling through' to the/main/X clause is if it's a new element added after label "BASELINE" was applied, and if that's the case, then/main/0 should be/main/LATEST unless you're adopting this config spec halfway through a dev cycle and scared you'll pick up things you don't intend to.
You can do it right with a 4-line config spec. The config spec needs to include that/main/LATEST clause at the bottom because new elements being added to the branch aren't labeled with the baseline you're branching from.
The config spec should take the form of:
element * CHECKEDOUT element *.../branch/LATEST element * BASELINE -mkbranch branch element */main/LATEST -mkbranch branch
The only time the/main/LATEST rule will ever be evaluated is if an element is added to the branch after the BASELINE is applied, and even then, it will force development out to the branch.
I'm sorry, how does "automated testing of the main line via a CI tool after the changes are committed to the main line" assure that your main line stays stable?
"Virtually stable" is not "stable". When you work for a financial services firm whose livelihood depends on the market data and trading systems your team builds, "virtually stable" is nowhere near "stable" and doesn't even begin to approach "good enough".
I agree, and if the choice were mine, there are some people I work with who would be pink-slipped immediately... but, politics at a large-ish company being what they are, it's a matter of demonstrating to managers that the actions are counter-productive and costing us time and money... then letting them draw the proper conclusions. In a well-run meritocracy, these people would be gone for violating the "No Asshole" rule.
The problem is, some of the managers are over-promoted cowboys themselves - I've heard, no exaggeration, the following from a manager when I was arguing for locking down one of our production systems because people kept making changes live: "I know it's good policy, but as soon as policy slows down my developers, the policy goes out the window."
The technical problems are easy. It's this political maneuvering that requires the patience of a saint.
One of the guys I worked with at my first job working with ClearCase put it thus: "ClearCase is great, it's powerful and flexible. And it gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with."
Yep, this is standard practice if your scm support knows what they're doing. The only reason it's not "desirable" to only branch off of stable, 'known-good' baselines is developer laziness. It can take more time setting up the branch, and sometimes that quick checkout-edit-checkin on the trunk is just SOOOO tempting as a shortcut. I see this a lot in groups working on new products, too - "it's never been released to production, so we'll just branch from wherever, and call it a day." Usually they grow out of this type of practice after they spend a few days untangling a mess they've created, but there are some die-hards who just hate having to deal with anybody else, and insist on doing their own thing.
This is why it's important to have: 1) Management / leadership that understands the value of proper configuration management, and expects good practices to be used; 2) Support for your SCM system that knows how to set up these practices and is empowered to enforce them; 3) Mature developers who understand that "fastest" isn't always "best";
(Full disclosure: part of my role in my current job involves clearcase admin, and i've also worked with svn, cvs, pvcs, and (shudder) vss in varying capacities)
Kids have always been abused, traded, left alone, for all of human history, and it would have happened to whatever homo erectus and friends that existed before that.
So I'm confused - are you holding up pre-civilized notions of child rearing as "the way it should be done," here? Or are you just offended that somebody said that leaving a 5 year old home alone makes you a bad parent?
There are societies where 6 year olds are toting AK-47's and serving in rebel militias. I'd like to think that our laws against child neglect are a sign that we are slightly farther along the 'civilization' curve than those societies.
Slashdot Mirror
NO. I've seen the documentary. Uncle Scrooge swims around in gold coins in a big vault on a hill. How could the bank be using that money to "finance their lending operations" when Uncle Scrooge is swimming, bathing, and probably even peeing in it? (It's a swimming pool. It happens.)
You and your fanciful "investment" theories. Get real! The rich just stockpile gold bars, everybody knows it.
Yeah? Well I did that, plus the collector's editions from JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer.
READING IS SRS BSNS BRAH, not for CAREBEARS. YUMAD?
This is exactly the point of the game. As a solo-play experience, WoW would be pretty fucking boring. Its adding the social element that makes it enjoyable, and I find that most of what I look forward to when I get online is getting a chance to unwind with some friends - some of whom don't live near enough for me to "see" short of a weekend trip & a plane ticket.
Right - the major difference, of course, being whether you prefer being awesome (as a priest) or lame (as a shaman)? Yes, I went there. :) My priest was my first 60, 70, and 80, and still the best. I *detest* totems, though I find I generally love healing roles.
I haven't gotten online yet today, hoping to get online for a bit tonight and check out the new stuff, but in general, I thought the Wrath questing was light years ahead of Vanilla & TBC questing, I'm hoping they continued that trend.
Your advice on avoiding drama is good, and spot-on - find an adult guild populated with some people you enjoy bantering with, or start your own. The new expansion makes raiding for the very best gear very accessible to 10 players, so there's no reason you couldn't start a small but quite successful raiding group. Trade chat has its moments, but a robust ignore list helps. I've never played on an RP server, though I found that PvE servers seem to be a little more laid back (and thus less douchey, on account of everybody being PvE Care Bears) than the average PvP server (which, as we all know, is where the srs bsns happens).
One other thing (for the guild officers out there) that's actually helped us a lot is asking people to get on a first-name basis... we've all got lots of alts, so it's easier for us to keep track of who's who if we know the person's name and can associate the alts with them. Plus it's a little easier to relate when you're not on vent calling out shit like "HolyCow, DI LegooooLASS and wipe it. HumanMage the Druid just got smoked by the blood beasts, and AngelLOLOL is our only healer left standing."
First I've seen about cameras not working - the report I read focused on unpowered USB devices, and didn't mention issues with cameras, though obviously it sounds like some people are seeing issues there as well.
It's not "making excuses" for them to explain what the change was - the decision was to limit the power emitted from the dock connector to 20 mA, where it was previously limited to 100 mA. The behavior being reported is that an error message is now popping up saying "this device requires too much power." Anything trying to draw more than that will be unable to, and will thus not function properly.
It most certainly could replace a phone (skype, other voip apps allow this, even if it's not the most convenient form factor for somebody who walks around a lot), and unless you do huge amounts of text input via keyboard, it could easily replace a laptop too. You can browse the web, send emails, instant message, listen to / watch audio/video, read books, play games... for many people, that's pretty much what their laptop gets used for. If your use cases involve programming, and other text-entry heavy operations, it won't replace a laptop, but that doesn't mean that for people with lightweight "mostly-consumer" needs, a tablet wouldn't be absolutely perfect as a laptop replacement.
TL;DR: Not everybody has your requirements.
They limited the output to 20 mA from the previous 100 mA - this means that unpowered USB devices that could previously work with the power available through the dock connector may not work now. I've heard nothing to indicate any cameras are affected, since they have their own onboard batteries. It's the keyboards, mice, and other USB-powered things which may not work.
Unintended side effect may be that this will prompt manufacturers to find ways to reduce the power requirements of their USB devices, which will mean better battery life for any device that uses them.
So you've added a third group of people the government must serve, and whose interests compete with those of the file sharers and the RIAA, as well. Thanks for underscoring my point.
Or were you disagreeing?
Producing original material is a necessary prerequisite for having something to make "infinite copies" of. The size of the market you intend to sell to is also quite relevant to the economics of music production: if you expect to sell only 1,000 copies of a record it cost you $10,000 to produce, then you are losing money if you sell them for a penny less than $10 per copy - whether it's digital or physical distribution doesn't matter. And yet we still have people arguing that 99 cents per song for 10 songs is just entirely too much money to spend on any music, ever, because it all should be "basically free."
And my point is that this is a disingenuous claim, because it ignores the cost of producing the original copy, which the sales of *all* of your "basically free" copies must compensate for. Should we assume that the size of the market is 7 billion people, and price everything accordingly, with a price that approaches (but will never reach) zero - even knowing that no artist will EVER come close to selling that many? Or should we instead be guided by the realization that most albums (or songs) will sell a few tens or hundreds of thousands of copies, and that the asking price should allow somebody who sells that number of copies to receive a reasonable compensation, even knowing that that means that somebody turns out to be wildly popular and sells a couple million copies might just end up rich?
I'd suggest that any society which thinks that its artists should *be* - and *remain* - "poor starving artists" are engaging in parasitism of the worst order: asking somebody else to suffer to produce something so that you can be entertained with minimal inconvenience.
Agreed - and as I said, neither side has clean hands. Some of the lawsuits being pursued by the RIAA are ridiculous, and the awards are ludicrous. But there's also a lot of self-styled "freedom fighters" who are simply calling themselves that because it's a convenient way to rationalize behavior that is illegal.
There's a lot of not-crappy indie (i.e., not-major-label-pap) music out there. Spend some time exploring, you might be surprised at the quality of music being self-produced by bands and musicians. And try to send your money that way - some of these artists and bands are starting their own smaller labels that are much more artist-friendly: cf. Righteous Babe, Saddle Creek, numerous others, and most of them are embracing a lot of the digital distribution methods that the majors are very reluctant to use.
If the state of music is trending in that direction, I'm not certain that says a good thing for the influence of digital distribution. I enjoyed Code Monkey once or twice when I heard it, but if your idea of a good time is listening to a slightly geekier version of Weird Al Yankovic 24x7, then we'll have to part ways there.
No. It's not free. Nothing is "basically free". It may be *drastically* lower-cost to duplicate but, in the case of music, you have a host of very real and sizable production costs: studio space, mastering, audio engineer time & services, instrument purchase & maintenance, artists' cost-of-living (often spread across 3-6 people), web site support & maintenance, server space, electricity, physical hardware, bandwidth costs... all of this figures into the production of that MP3 file, and it's the result of spending all that money. The "duplication" costs even for a physical CD are fairly low when you compare them to the costs of all the rest. Electronic distribution drives the price down (and should), but declaring that it's basically "free" completely disregards the months of effort and spending that went into producing that MP3 or CD.
If you go very DIY, and spend $10,000 putting together an album (a month or two of rent, food, studio time, instruments, etc.), with the goal of earning $20k off it - enough to recoup your costs & maybe pay for a few more months while you tour and record something new, you have to look at the size of your market - can you sell 2000 copies of your CD at $10/CD? Can you sell 20,000 copies of your song at $1 per song?
When peoples' time, talent, and creative energy is involved, there is no such thing as "basically free" and "infinite supply". You're seriously misrepresenting (or fundamentally misunderstanding) the economics of producing a record if you truly believe that.
Two dimensions, AC:
Legality - the specific action either is, or is not, against the law. In this case, file sharing of copyrighted works is quite clearly against the law. It *is* illegal.
Morality - the specific action either is, or is not, an ethical action - meaning, consistent with your values and beliefs, and demonstrating an integrity to those deeply held values and beliefs. In this case, file sharing of a copyrighted work may be 'moral' or 'immoral,' depending on your view of copyright law, and whether or not file sharing constitutes harm to someone.
These are not mutually exclusive - file sharing can be legal or illegal, and regardless of its legal status, an individual can have an opinion of whether or not it's moral or immoral to share. In this case, what TFA is saying (in lazy, sloppy english) is that the file sharers don't see what they're doing as "immoral," and as such, they don't see why it should be treated as illegal. This does not mean that it's "not" illegal, it means they believe the legal status of sharing should change.
Prohibition, abortion, and numerous other issues can be viewed on the same axes. People who voted for the prohibition laws certainly probably did feel they were doing the "moral" thing, but there were numerous people who violated the prohibition laws and felt that they were doing the "moral" thing as well. Legality is social; Morality is personal.
That's true, but you have to realize in a disagreement between two groups of people, "serving the people" doesn't necessarily mean "Give me what I want, tell those other guys to fuck off." When two groups of people have competing interests, you can't just expect one of them to cede all of their rights & entitlements to the others with no consideration given in return. In other words: The RIAA is overcharging, and overzealously trying to preserve a business model that's outdated. The file sharers are underpaying, and overzealously trying to kill a business model in an industry with little regard for the sociopathic nature of their behavior.
Artists have a right to set a price for their work. It doesn't matter what the medium is that they choose to distribute it. If the price is too high, then you shouldn't pay them for their work - but you also should not TAKE a copy of their work without paying. If you don't find the enjoyment you get from the work to be worth the price the artist is asking for the work... then find another artist whose work you do value, or who sets a more reasonable price.
Problem is, you and I both know that the RIAA isn't typically hunting down the person who burns a mix CD for his girlfriend from his iTunes library, or the girl who emails her boyfriend a couple MP3s of songs she thinks he'll like. (How would they ever even know you've done this? They are not tracking 6 billion people in real time.) They're going after people sharing on file-sharing networks, and generally (though not always) the larger-scale offenders. There's sharing, and then there's massive worldwide distribution. I'd say when you start handing out more than a handful of copies to friends and family, and throw it open to anybody with a network connection, there's a legitimate problem. The RIAA/MPAA are certainly overzealous in their pursuit of "justice," but neither side has clean hands.
If the artist wants to share their music (and many do, with free downloads, previews, etc.), then great - but if you're taking it upon yourself to distribute that artist's music to any random stranger who wants a copy, and calling that some sort of altruistic sharing, I'd say you're overreaching in your attempt to rationalize behavior that is morally gray, and rather unambiguously illegal.
Really - you weren't provided with a copy of your service contract? The thing you had to sign in order to activate service? The contract you sign with AT&T, not Apple? And the "store workers" couldn't find a copy of the thing you needed to sign to activate service?
And you can't remember much about the contract, except that there's a part in there that was "awful, just awful," and you paraphrase it from memory, rather than, you know, citing relevant portions of the contract which is posted online for all to read?
You fail at trolling. Your story doesn't even pass the most rudimentary smell test. You're full of shit, you don't own an iphone, and this "story" never happened.
If you're labeling properly, that'll have more or less the same effect - the only time you should be 'falling through' to the /main/X clause is if it's a new element added after label "BASELINE" was applied, and if that's the case, then /main/0 should be /main/LATEST unless you're adopting this config spec halfway through a dev cycle and scared you'll pick up things you don't intend to.
You can do it right with a 4-line config spec. The config spec needs to include that /main/LATEST clause at the bottom because new elements being added to the branch aren't labeled with the baseline you're branching from.
The config spec should take the form of:
element * CHECKEDOUT .../branch/LATEST /main/LATEST -mkbranch branch
element *
element * BASELINE -mkbranch branch
element *
The only time the /main/LATEST rule will ever be evaluated is if an element is added to the branch after the BASELINE is applied, and even then, it will force development out to the branch.
Sure it does. You just have to adjust your expectations for what chicken tastes like.
It tastes the same as anything else: like chicken.
I'm sorry, how does "automated testing of the main line via a CI tool after the changes are committed to the main line" assure that your main line stays stable?
"Virtually stable" is not "stable". When you work for a financial services firm whose livelihood depends on the market data and trading systems your team builds, "virtually stable" is nowhere near "stable" and doesn't even begin to approach "good enough".
I agree, and if the choice were mine, there are some people I work with who would be pink-slipped immediately... but, politics at a large-ish company being what they are, it's a matter of demonstrating to managers that the actions are counter-productive and costing us time and money... then letting them draw the proper conclusions. In a well-run meritocracy, these people would be gone for violating the "No Asshole" rule.
The problem is, some of the managers are over-promoted cowboys themselves - I've heard, no exaggeration, the following from a manager when I was arguing for locking down one of our production systems because people kept making changes live: "I know it's good policy, but as soon as policy slows down my developers, the policy goes out the window."
The technical problems are easy. It's this political maneuvering that requires the patience of a saint.
Interestingly, that's also the premise behind the existence of wikileaks, isn't it?
+a million, spot on.
One of the guys I worked with at my first job working with ClearCase put it thus: "ClearCase is great, it's powerful and flexible. And it gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with."
Yep, this is standard practice if your scm support knows what they're doing. The only reason it's not "desirable" to only branch off of stable, 'known-good' baselines is developer laziness. It can take more time setting up the branch, and sometimes that quick checkout-edit-checkin on the trunk is just SOOOO tempting as a shortcut. I see this a lot in groups working on new products, too - "it's never been released to production, so we'll just branch from wherever, and call it a day." Usually they grow out of this type of practice after they spend a few days untangling a mess they've created, but there are some die-hards who just hate having to deal with anybody else, and insist on doing their own thing.
This is why it's important to have:
1) Management / leadership that understands the value of proper configuration management, and expects good practices to be used;
2) Support for your SCM system that knows how to set up these practices and is empowered to enforce them;
3) Mature developers who understand that "fastest" isn't always "best";
(Full disclosure: part of my role in my current job involves clearcase admin, and i've also worked with svn, cvs, pvcs, and (shudder) vss in varying capacities)
So I'm confused - are you holding up pre-civilized notions of child rearing as "the way it should be done," here? Or are you just offended that somebody said that leaving a 5 year old home alone makes you a bad parent?
There are societies where 6 year olds are toting AK-47's and serving in rebel militias. I'd like to think that our laws against child neglect are a sign that we are slightly farther along the 'civilization' curve than those societies.