Hmm.. I do note your reference to 'Server' there. That, I have no problems with. However, putting that level of service into the everyday computer, for the average person? I see trouble brewing. As for trusting Phoenix to do it right? I'd stick with Sun, HP and IBM to do that job, thank ye very much.
Interesting view. Especially considering that all research done on the topic of reliability, trust and managability has pointed to exactly the opposite of what you say. Simple is easy to understand. You can trust it by understanding it, and add complexity from the building blocks until it does EXACTLY what you want. Simple is managable. When you only have to manage a few things, there's less that may slip your mind, and thus go wrong. Simple is reliable. Less to go wrong in the first place. You seem to have the idea that complexity is self contained. Well, one clue to look for, is going deeper into it at a finer level. And inside the complexity, you'll find rather a large amount of simple systems. Just the emergent behaviour is complex. So, your idea that simplicity never gives rise to trust, security and managability is self defeating. After all, I completely trust a computer that has had the power lead yanked out. That's pretty simple, and I can guarantee it'll not be hacked then, unless someone takes a screwdriver to it, and yanks it apart. Forcing someone to accept complexity that they don't want, or need is a bad thing: What you don't know is a security hole. What you don't understand, you can't manage. What you don't deal with, you can't trust.
Personally, I like the idea of a SIMPLE BIOS. I understand it, therefore I can trust it to do what I want it to do, I can manage it to make it do what I need, and, unless someone's at the keyboard, it's secure (you check for damaging stuff at the application layer).
Actually, after having worked for others, both good and bad, and myself (having employed others), I've come to the conclusion that it's often not a mistake to believe the boss is the root of all evil.
A good boss is one that knows what you're meant to be doing, and communicates it to you effectively, then lets you do what you're hired to do, and get on with it. The unfortunately all too frequent boss is indeed one who knows the buzzwords (after all, that's how (s)he got hired). After that, it's all about making themself look good. I worked in one place, where the manager (actually, tech director) produced a lovely little Gantt chart with all the work schedules I was meant to be doing for the next 60 days. All with pretty, and short titles, so they looked neat on the side of the page. Unfortunately, on asking what the first 5 days of work actually entailed, I got the answer that he didn't know (and he wrote the project plan!). Same with the second and third 5 days. It took me 4 days of running round the company, talking with anyone I could find, until I found anyone (one of the sales chaps that met with the clients on a particular meeting) that had any idea what it was meant to be. Then, it turned out the estimate was wrong. Every step of the way, all I got from the boss was 'You're meant to be at this point now, the chart says so..'.
However, having worked for a great boss, I know the other side of things also. That chap used to have a project planner talk to us, explain how we should tailor our estimates by bringing up questions about how long debugging would take, talking to other people, unexpected errors that always creep up.. In the end, he got reasonable figures from us on how long it would really take. Higher management often didn't like the figures, but he let it be known that they could have crap for less time, and probably end up with people leaving, and a working solution for the time given, and hold onto experienced employees. He then left us to get on with work, while intercepting all attempts from above to poke and prod us at our desks, and otherwise get in the way. He was good enough at the job to know we weren't slacking, and a good enough manager to know how to get the best out of people. That, trust me, is a great rarity in the business world, where it's often believed that the numbers are what people adhere to, rather than people defining what the numbers should say. When the numbers say what people should be doing, you give rise to books such as the headliner for this topic..
Troll, to be sure, but I'll rise to the bait. At work, you search for the printer based on building and floor.. Well, that's great. Sure your feet will be tired afterwards, but what on earth does that have to do with drivers? You can do that with Linux from the location settings of discovered drivers. I tend to use Mandrake as a desktop these days. I want to add a printer? For all the ones I use (epson colour 640, and laserjet 6p), I click the buttons, and it 'Just works'. Both printers work 100%, no tweaks. Why? Because they're set up correctly on the server! Now, speaking as one of the techs who, long ago used to have to set up those print queues in the first place, so the tech clueless only had to press a button to install things and have them 'just work', those queues could be a nightmare! You've just shown the current corporate misconception that just because you don't have to spend hours making hardware or software work, it just 'magically happens'.. By the way, I use Linux (debian, slackware, redhat and Mandrake), Windows from 3.0 to XP. Server and Desktop. Commercially. As far as printer support goes, I'd say Linux is just about on par with Windows. Both work pretty well.. Being in a 100% MS shop doesn't make your point invalid, just you showing that you don't have much to compare with, and not actually doing the hard stuff yourself makes your point invalid. XP can mess up as well as the next OS. As can Linux and MacOS at times. Horses for courses. Choose what's best for the job. That's why I know how to use and maintain a whole slew of Operating Systems. Only when you're familiar with the range, can you really make an objective decision about how good it really is compared to something else.
Now there's nothing wrong with your view of loving someone for more than thier body.. However, that does kinda enter the equation somewhere... Half of the fun of being with someone is purely abstract and emotional. The other half is purely physical. Like most things, a balance gives you the best all round view of things. A rigid adherance to a particular view only prevents you seeing things that may be of use. However, if you're happy with missing out on a particular view of life, then, nobody should try and force you into an uncomfortable position about it. Porn and the various texts on sex (which have been around since time immemorial, Kama Sutra et. al.) help provide pointers, and commentaries on experience that are designed to heighten the physical pleasure you experience with a partner. How you choose to maintain a partner (be it on an hourly paid, nightly stand, weekly fling, or lifetime of marriage) is part of the emotional side. Personally, I'd prefer the lifetime bit. Gives you time to really get to know how to push someone's buttons,and the other way round (for the better). However, it rarely works on the first try. I do kind of take exception to calling them 'Dirty Images' though. Unless of course, they're actually physically stained. Smutty, sure. Erotic, absolutely. I've read my share of Porn in my time, and not one gal that I've ever dated has come away with the idea that she's merely been an 'object'. And none of them were. I see no value in your premise that reading Porn devalues people. Only emotional conditioning can do that. And that's completely independant of any pictures/videos you may watch. What it DOES desensitise you to though, is the taboo surrounding sex, and makes you more able to function without blushing in conversations about it (trust me, I still do to this day sometimes!). Porn is sex. Pure and simple, with the element of emotion removed. Just as old romance novels are emotion, pure and simple, with all sex and physical removed. Opposite ends of the spectrum. somewhere in the middle, with a knowledge of both sides of the coin, I think you have a chance for a truly deep and meaningful, and highly physically active life.
As a note, to make this relevant to the main topic.. Teach your kids that people think and feel the same way they do. They're not alone, and neither is the world there merely to be their toy to be used and thrown away. Basically, be a good, old fashioned parent. Do your best for them in whatever way you can. Firm but fair. And teach them to think for themselves. Once you do that, they'll be a LOT safer when they do get alone on the net, in the street, or anywhere, as they inevitably will. And try not to think of this as anything new. for generations, parents have been trying to find ways of stopping children seeing or doing things they don't want them to.. Libraries, and bookstands, and holes to peep through have been around for just as long, and kids will be curious..
Parenting isn't a cut and dry thing. It's the one thing your parents never taught you, but one of the things they gave you a pattern to work with. You sound a decent kinda person, to even be asking these questions.. So why not treat your kids in the same manner your folks treated you, when you went skulking around, and trying to do things behind your folks back without them knowing?
Most people are stupid, too, but I won't try to make any statistical connections, here.
Yer a braver man than I to post that, when you may well be a member of that same target group. Could be a point scored against yourself that has bearing on the rest of your points.
Economies react in timescales longer than any four-year presidential term.
Well, in normal usage, yes, the cycles are long, and delicate nudges take a while to steer an economy correctly. Now, if you pull the plug on the money pool, and spend WAY over what you should, or take action known to be rather heavy on finance, then the economy will show very rapid alteration.
I wholeheartedly agree that it's corruption that's compromising the future though. The question is, what can be done about it without dismantling an otherwise pretty reasonable system?
The only thing I can think of it to educate people that honour is worth more than a wad of cash.
Actually, yes they do. A monoculture in Linux is still a monoculture. Any monoculture leads to stagnation and inherant weaknesses evolving. Competition is what ignites the evolution towards stronger performance and efficiency. Good ideas from Suse that create a standard will most likely hit a note with the Linux distros as a whole, and be incorporated across the board in short time. Any silly ideas just won't make the grade, and will be supplanted by real stuff for real people in short order. Distros on the whole can only be better for the competition in the market place (think where Windows would be if there were multiple competing companies not able to use the law as a beating stick to stop anyone else from entering their territory.. Much much further ahead, more open standards, much easier integration all round, better security, cheaper etc). This will only make the Microsoft against Linux 'war' easier in the areas Linux is better at, and perhaps even warm up areas that are core MS at the moment. Besides, it's not about a 'war' with Microsoft. It's about giving people what they want and need. And this is definately a step in the right direction for the end user (admins, companies etc).
Yeesh.. I think I'd prefer to go and buy the whole paper for about 40p, and have eternal rights to look at it whenever! Don't think they're going to get much joy from that kinda license...
Re:I wouldn't buy the Athlon anyway
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'll stick with Intel, thanks. Any of you guys actually have a *good* AMD processor?
Well, I've got the old K5PR133 sitting on a shelf now that did years of sterling service, first as my main desktop CPU, then moving back to the firewall CPU, until it got replaced by the K6 II 350 (which is still in the firewall machine, and has been there, running solidly, day in, day out since about 1999, and was my desktop CPU before that,replacing the K5).
Replaced the K6 II with an Athlon 700 (original slot A). That ran fine, until the board fritzed, due to the old capacitor problem that ran rampant in late 99, early 2000.. The board lasted until 2002. The only reason it's not in the firewall box now is that I can't get another board for less than it'd cost to put a faster athlon in a cheap board..
The 2002 set I bought was a nice Athlon 1700 in an Abit board. Ran stably and never a problem..
That's now in the girlfriend's machine (built one for her from the last generation of hardware I had lurking), and now I'm using an NForce2 board with an Athlon 2500 (Barton core).
No problems with any of them.
If the college computer broke, are you sure it's the CPU? Not memory, motherboard, power supply or any of a myriad of other issues?
For the laptop, is it a problem with the manufacturers not putting good cooling and airflow in the laptop (or, heaven forbid, a desktop CPU in a laptop case to save money/add a little extra speed)?
By all means, stick with Intel if it keeps you happy, but I've had a long history of using AMD chips, and I like 'em. If I saw a reason to use Intel's chips, I would.. I just never have to date...
You're eminently trackable in your car. For most purposes, people don't bother. But, if they were to look, they could easily say 'Ah. I see a car of a this colour, this make, this registration with a driver that looks like this on this street'. That's pretty precise tracking if you ask me. And of course car plates broadcast! Everyone around can see 'em, and identify them.
Again, you're eminently trackable on foot (unless you're wearing a hood, and disguising every identifying feature, in which case you'll likely be pulled up by a travelling cop anyway for acting suspicious).
You walk anywhere where there are other people, and you're being 'tracked' by someone. You talk in a public place, and someone will overhear.
Personally, I don't mind the 'voice in a street' style overhear. I need routers to carry my net traffic. I need someone to host my link. If I really want privacy, I'll find myself the net equivalent of a locked room, and encrypt what I want to say or do.
Don't know how you managed to get to the exposed system and exploiter argument from what I posted previously, that's a whole different kettle of fish. If you've ever worked in security tho, you'll realise that the only way to be absolutely sure you won't get compromised is not to connect to the internet. Good compromise there. Really..
Most places have the 'security guards' and 'locks on the door'. Just most of them also have 'bathroom windows' and 'doors' that can be gemmied open, or have their locks picked.
The whole point of my original post was to say something along the lines of, when you're on the net, you're going public. Drop the connection, and you're at home, in private. When in public, people look at you. Most will forget about you in 5 minutes, unless they find you mugging old grannies, in which case, you can expect them to give your description to the local police. That's pretty much what having a non-anonymous IP is to me.
However, as the thread was going, I'd raise merry hell if someone kept running round me in the street, looking at my watch and my shoes and my trousers, and calling the local authorities every five minutes complaining that I may be infringing on their fashion house look that they made up.
That latter is the RIAA (sorta). The street weirdo that smells of beer, and never leaves your side until you give them 50p, at which point they call you a miserable bugger anyway.
The sheer annoyance they bring about tho, isn't worth the price of being completely unidentifiable on a street. After all, I'd hate to have hundreds of unidentifiable beer smelling people asking for 50p chasing me round the place. I kinda like to know where not to go.:)
Nice, except for then the ISPs become script kiddie heaven. There needs to be some form of ability to track someone, for those few cases where "really bad things" are done. I'm sure nobody here would like spammers given anonymous IP addresses in a net block. However, given that we do have identifiable addresses, it's good to see that policy in the ISPs is FOR the end user, and against frivolous acquisition of their data. Like most things in life, the solutions aren't black and white, they're shades of grey, and require common sense to come up with something that's a happy, or at least workable compromise. Good to see that at least the ISPs seem to be following the common sense path this time against the RIAA Inquisition.
Because, within about 10 years, the royalties you get on a book are peanuts. It's a small stream of money that pays the bills while you write the next book. Just think, from the Author's side... Wouldn't it be nice to be paid monthly, even if you don't do much that month, or if your project turns into a flop, or any other amount of things. That safety net isn't there. Also, I don't believe the publisher has any author's pension schemes. The book rights are the author's pensions. Their investment in their future. They don't do many books, they shortly end up not being able to pay the rent. They do lots of good sellers, they have the equivalent of a full time job with constant income while they write more, and then at the end, get to retire with a modest income until they push up daisies.
And how you can class patenting a '1 click shop' idea and holding it for 25 years, against the year or two it takes to write a decent book (all the revisions etc).. If time and effort were commensurate with half the patents we see today, copyright would last a couple of centuries.
I can understand what you were trying to say in your post, but I think you missed considering the lesser income long term, and the having to survive to write more. It's not regular big bucks from a one book wonder.
I still don't get where you call it 'stealing'... Person A pays person B a lot of money to distribute an item for free to anybody and everybody is ok. Now, person C puts a very small amount of this out, and it's called 'stealing'.
Weird if you ask me. But that's about the way it's being taken.
In this case, person A is the recording industry, person B is a radio staion, and person C is a private individual.
Lets say, for example, person C records the track from a radio broadcast. This is effectively given away free, by the recording industry. More accurately, they pay to have it taken off their hands and given for free. The caveat is that the receiver of the track will be listening at a lower quality. If you want the nice product with good quality, and you think it's something worth hanging on to for posterity, you buy the CD. If person C distributes this given away copy, is it stealing? Not really. It may be in breach of some contractual obligation on retransmission (depending on where you are in the world and your local laws), but it's not stealing.
Stealing from the company would be breaking into their warehouses, and taking the master copy, or some of the physical media. Anything else is breach of copyright, or some other contractual structure. There IS a difference. Morally, it hits a kinda grey area. You aren't truly damaging anything (quote the 'loss of revenue all you like', but the industry has tried to maintain a luxury price tag on music, while complaining that it doesn't fit with the movement patterns for the commodity market. Duh, of course it won't. Bad economy, loss of luxury sales. Commodity items aren't as badly hit. Recent lowerings of price plans show that they're beginning to wise up on this, and finally aim at commodity market, rather than luxury, which is where they should have been positioned for years).
Also, being that they were found guilty of price fixing, and not a lot has honestly been done about it (prices still extremely high, and artificially maintained), it could equally be argued that they have been stealing from the consumer (yes, they were found guilty in a court of law of price fixing, which does actually deprive a consumer of resource, namely money).
So, morally, is it bad to steal from a thief (who believes that stealing is ok)? Grey area. You're abiding by what someone else believes is ok, which may be less than your usual standards. But, you're simply playing by someone else's rules. Otherwise where would we be? Say it's ok for a thief to keep their ill gotten gains?
Bear in mind also, that all this file trading/sharing is frequently used as a means of seeing if a track is worth expending your money on (it's still a luxury price tag. It's non-trivial cash for a goodly many people), for obtaining a permanent, good quality archive. Not in all cases, admittedly, but in most. Personally, I don't know anyone (apart from a few posters here) who share to hoard, and have never gone and bought stuff they found in random browsing that they liked, and wanted a 'proper' copy of.
Again, it's morally grey. It's not a bright and shining example of being the model citizen, and it's certainly not being a thief.
I'm not saying 'You are wrong' here, just pointing out that I think your perception may be flawed in the greater debate, by omission of certain considerations.
Also, mine is also conceivably flawed by things I omit. I just believe this is a grey area. Like any tool, it can be used for many things, and sharing is not, in my opinion, stealing. It's 'try before you buy' luxury sampling.
The joy being, the hirers are hiring the coder, as he's supposed to know what tool's the best for the job, not just carry on as "it's always been done this way.".
The best analogy is a roving journalist, who may be hired by different countries to write stories.
If all the journalist knows is English, sure he can write and sell to most places, but it's highly inefficient to have to rely on the native's grasp of english to make up for the journalist's lack of flexibility.
I've come across bugs in software dev tools that I've only been able to work around by knowing the architecture of the system I'm coding on..
And there are some languages I'll use for certain tasks, and other languages for others.
Knowing the fundamentals gives you a firm framework in which to base your assumptions when you work in higher level languages, and sometimes insights into why something may not work a particular way.
This reminds me of my old old old PC from 1990 (An old Apricot Qi) which came with what was quaintly termed 'Apricot LOC Technology'.
The hard disks were encrypted in hardware even back then. Also, there was no reliance on any USB dongle to just get the disk unencrypted.
LOC tech worked by the user having an IR transmitting card which authenticated you to the machine. If it was in secure mode, you had to transmit from your card (encrypted transmission.. No copying the transmission and replaying), which then gave you the login screen for your user (this is the first point the keyboard unlocked).
You enter the password and it lets you use the system.
The encryption was independant of OS. This was damn cool 'paranoid' gear. It won me a few contract jobs on the basis that nobody else could get into the machine apart from me, and a couple of my clients at the time were pretty much requiring security and confidentiality.
Nice for the single user PC where you really don't want someone else turning it on and reading your email.
Still, I'd much prefer to use something that can be used to hold differently available data depending on the user.. The day they put rubberhose in hardware, I think they'll really have a winner...
Still, it seems odd they they are trying to hype tech that's a cutdown version of 13 year old tech as something new and revolutionary..
Hey, the real version was only twice that!! Seriously though, the full version, I finished in a night, from beginning to end, on normal level. I went throuigh afterwards, and tried to alter certain events to see if I'd missed sidelines, and nope. Nothing changable.. Try as hard as you can, they're merely scripted events. The idea of putting out a Demo that's shorter.. Whoah.. They must be putting a tenth of a level out there to show you how pretty the engine can be, but nothing to really play.
Thus, you can have rather long 'ignore' lists, that simply filter out whatever they say.. Plus, you can always go somewhere else as a newbie... Irritating, but not the end of the earth...
Except, if you vote in someone else's place, they can't then vote, so, yes, you'd stolen something.
However, if they could still then vote also, it would be as in the analogy. He would still have what he started with. Just you'd have it too.
Me? Buy it? Hehehehe.. Think I'll share a lot of your views on it.. Just didn't want to diss it out of hand, without even looking.. I was trying for a little bit of an optimistic streak.:)
I believe that the GMs and the techs operate in different ways. The GM will have a lot of 'in game' power. But just about everything they do will be logged to a game logged. This log can be perused by the techs and other admin. If a GM summons loads of gold/respawns expensive things, it'll show up like a lightbulb. That's just the way I understand things to be happening there..
Hmm.. Maybe (and by no means do I mean 'certainly') they have got their physics that well modelled. After all, it wouldn't be the first time that real things got built after testing in a 'game'.
Some teenagers have too much time on their hands. Some teenagers have cd writers. Some teenagers copy copyrighted material. Some teenagers copy copyrighted material using a computer. All teenagers are people.
Therefore, according to your argument, all people copy copyrighted material using a computer.
If you don't agree with that conclusion (and you'd have to be a few crumbs short of a biscuit to agree with it!), then why are _all_ people being charged? All people are being 'taxed' if they buy a computer, and it's a tax that is implemented by a corporation (who aren't actually allowed to tax people anyway). I run a company, and, like I keep saying, that is NOT the way to run one. If you have to rely on 'taxing' your customer base (and even those that aren't), then your business model is wacked. Get a new one.
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Hmm.. I do note your reference to 'Server' there.
That, I have no problems with.
However, putting that level of service into the everyday computer, for the average person?
I see trouble brewing.
As for trusting Phoenix to do it right?
I'd stick with Sun, HP and IBM to do that job, thank ye very much.
Interesting view. Especially considering that all research done on the topic of reliability, trust and managability has pointed to exactly the opposite of what you say.
Simple is easy to understand. You can trust it by understanding it, and add complexity from the building blocks until it does EXACTLY what you want.
Simple is managable. When you only have to manage a few things, there's less that may slip your mind, and thus go wrong.
Simple is reliable. Less to go wrong in the first place.
You seem to have the idea that complexity is self contained. Well, one clue to look for, is going deeper into it at a finer level.
And inside the complexity, you'll find rather a large amount of simple systems.
Just the emergent behaviour is complex.
So, your idea that simplicity never gives rise to trust, security and managability is self defeating.
After all, I completely trust a computer that has had the power lead yanked out. That's pretty simple, and I can guarantee it'll not be hacked then, unless someone takes a screwdriver to it, and yanks it apart.
Forcing someone to accept complexity that they don't want, or need is a bad thing:
What you don't know is a security hole.
What you don't understand, you can't manage.
What you don't deal with, you can't trust.
Personally, I like the idea of a SIMPLE BIOS.
I understand it, therefore I can trust it to do what I want it to do, I can manage it to make it do what I need, and, unless someone's at the keyboard, it's secure (you check for damaging stuff at the application layer).
Actually, after having worked for others, both good and bad, and myself (having employed others), I've come to the conclusion that it's often not a mistake to believe the boss is the root of all evil.
A good boss is one that knows what you're meant to be doing, and communicates it to you effectively, then lets you do what you're hired to do, and get on with it.
The unfortunately all too frequent boss is indeed one who knows the buzzwords (after all, that's how (s)he got hired). After that, it's all about making themself look good.
I worked in one place, where the manager (actually, tech director) produced a lovely little Gantt chart with all the work schedules I was meant to be doing for the next 60 days.
All with pretty, and short titles, so they looked neat on the side of the page.
Unfortunately, on asking what the first 5 days of work actually entailed, I got the answer that he didn't know (and he wrote the project plan!).
Same with the second and third 5 days.
It took me 4 days of running round the company, talking with anyone I could find, until I found anyone (one of the sales chaps that met with the clients on a particular meeting) that had any idea what it was meant to be.
Then, it turned out the estimate was wrong.
Every step of the way, all I got from the boss was 'You're meant to be at this point now, the chart says so..'.
However, having worked for a great boss, I know the other side of things also.
That chap used to have a project planner talk to us, explain how we should tailor our estimates by bringing up questions about how long debugging would take, talking to other people, unexpected errors that always creep up..
In the end, he got reasonable figures from us on how long it would really take.
Higher management often didn't like the figures, but he let it be known that they could have crap for less time, and probably end up with people leaving, and a working solution for the time given, and hold onto experienced employees.
He then left us to get on with work, while intercepting all attempts from above to poke and prod us at our desks, and otherwise get in the way.
He was good enough at the job to know we weren't slacking, and a good enough manager to know how to get the best out of people.
That, trust me, is a great rarity in the business world, where it's often believed that the numbers are what people adhere to, rather than people defining what the numbers should say.
When the numbers say what people should be doing, you give rise to books such as the headliner for this topic..
Troll, to be sure, but I'll rise to the bait.
At work, you search for the printer based on building and floor.. Well, that's great. Sure your feet will be tired afterwards, but what on earth does that have to do with drivers? You can do that with Linux from the location settings of discovered drivers.
I tend to use Mandrake as a desktop these days.
I want to add a printer? For all the ones I use (epson colour 640, and laserjet 6p), I click the buttons, and it 'Just works'.
Both printers work 100%, no tweaks. Why? Because they're set up correctly on the server!
Now, speaking as one of the techs who, long ago used to have to set up those print queues in the first place, so the tech clueless only had to press a button to install things and have them 'just work', those queues could be a nightmare!
You've just shown the current corporate misconception that just because you don't have to spend hours making hardware or software work, it just 'magically happens'..
By the way, I use Linux (debian, slackware, redhat and Mandrake), Windows from 3.0 to XP. Server and Desktop. Commercially.
As far as printer support goes, I'd say Linux is just about on par with Windows. Both work pretty well..
Being in a 100% MS shop doesn't make your point invalid, just you showing that you don't have much to compare with, and not actually doing the hard stuff yourself makes your point invalid.
XP can mess up as well as the next OS. As can Linux and MacOS at times.
Horses for courses. Choose what's best for the job.
That's why I know how to use and maintain a whole slew of Operating Systems.
Only when you're familiar with the range, can you really make an objective decision about how good it really is compared to something else.
Now there's nothing wrong with your view of loving someone for more than thier body..
However, that does kinda enter the equation somewhere...
Half of the fun of being with someone is purely abstract and emotional.
The other half is purely physical.
Like most things, a balance gives you the best all round view of things. A rigid adherance to a particular view only prevents you seeing things that may be of use.
However, if you're happy with missing out on a particular view of life, then, nobody should try and force you into an uncomfortable position about it.
Porn and the various texts on sex (which have been around since time immemorial, Kama Sutra et. al.) help provide pointers, and commentaries on experience that are designed to heighten the physical pleasure you experience with a partner.
How you choose to maintain a partner (be it on an hourly paid, nightly stand, weekly fling, or lifetime of marriage) is part of the emotional side.
Personally, I'd prefer the lifetime bit. Gives you time to really get to know how to push someone's buttons,and the other way round (for the better). However, it rarely works on the first try.
I do kind of take exception to calling them 'Dirty Images' though.
Unless of course, they're actually physically stained.
Smutty, sure. Erotic, absolutely.
I've read my share of Porn in my time, and not one gal that I've ever dated has come away with the idea that she's merely been an 'object'.
And none of them were.
I see no value in your premise that reading Porn devalues people. Only emotional conditioning can do that. And that's completely independant of any pictures/videos you may watch.
What it DOES desensitise you to though, is the taboo surrounding sex, and makes you more able to function without blushing in conversations about it (trust me, I still do to this day sometimes!).
Porn is sex. Pure and simple, with the element of emotion removed.
Just as old romance novels are emotion, pure and simple, with all sex and physical removed.
Opposite ends of the spectrum.
somewhere in the middle, with a knowledge of both sides of the coin, I think you have a chance for a truly deep and meaningful, and highly physically active life.
As a note, to make this relevant to the main topic.. Teach your kids that people think and feel the same way they do. They're not alone, and neither is the world there merely to be their toy to be used and thrown away.
Basically, be a good, old fashioned parent. Do your best for them in whatever way you can.
Firm but fair.
And teach them to think for themselves.
Once you do that, they'll be a LOT safer when they do get alone on the net, in the street, or anywhere, as they inevitably will.
And try not to think of this as anything new. for generations, parents have been trying to find ways of stopping children seeing or doing things they don't want them to..
Libraries, and bookstands, and holes to peep through have been around for just as long, and kids will be curious..
Parenting isn't a cut and dry thing. It's the one thing your parents never taught you, but one of the things they gave you a pattern to work with.
You sound a decent kinda person, to even be asking these questions..
So why not treat your kids in the same manner your folks treated you, when you went skulking around, and trying to do things behind your folks back without them knowing?
Most people are stupid, too, but I won't try to make any statistical connections, here.
Yer a braver man than I to post that, when you may well be a member of that same target group. Could be a point scored against yourself that has bearing on the rest of your points.
Economies react in timescales longer than any four-year presidential term.
Well, in normal usage, yes, the cycles are long, and delicate nudges take a while to steer an economy correctly. Now, if you pull the plug on the money pool, and spend WAY over what you should, or take action known to be rather heavy on finance, then the economy will show very rapid alteration.
I wholeheartedly agree that it's corruption that's compromising the future though. The question is, what can be done about it without dismantling an otherwise pretty reasonable system?
The only thing I can think of it to educate people that honour is worth more than a wad of cash.
What about Buffalo Technology? They seem good to me, and never had a problem with the stuff they put out...
Actually, yes they do. A monoculture in Linux is still a monoculture.
Any monoculture leads to stagnation and inherant weaknesses evolving. Competition is what ignites the evolution towards stronger performance and efficiency.
Good ideas from Suse that create a standard will most likely hit a note with the Linux distros as a whole, and be incorporated across the board in short time.
Any silly ideas just won't make the grade, and will be supplanted by real stuff for real people in short order.
Distros on the whole can only be better for the competition in the market place (think where Windows would be if there were multiple competing companies not able to use the law as a beating stick to stop anyone else from entering their territory.. Much much further ahead, more open standards, much easier integration all round, better security, cheaper etc).
This will only make the Microsoft against Linux 'war' easier in the areas Linux is better at, and perhaps even warm up areas that are core MS at the moment.
Besides, it's not about a 'war' with Microsoft. It's about giving people what they want and need. And this is definately a step in the right direction for the end user (admins, companies etc).
Cheers,
Malk
Yeesh.. I think I'd prefer to go and buy the whole paper for about 40p, and have eternal rights to look at it whenever!
Don't think they're going to get much joy from that kinda license...
I'll stick with Intel, thanks. Any of you guys actually have a *good* AMD processor?
Well, I've got the old K5PR133 sitting on a shelf now that did years of sterling service, first as my main desktop CPU, then moving back to the firewall CPU, until it got replaced by the K6 II 350 (which is still in the firewall machine, and has been there, running solidly, day in, day out since about 1999, and was my desktop CPU before that,replacing the K5).
Replaced the K6 II with an Athlon 700 (original slot A). That ran fine, until the board fritzed, due to the old capacitor problem that ran rampant in late 99, early 2000.. The board lasted until 2002. The only reason it's not in the firewall box now is that I can't get another board for less than it'd cost to put a faster athlon in a cheap board..
The 2002 set I bought was a nice Athlon 1700 in an Abit board. Ran stably and never a problem.. That's now in the girlfriend's machine (built one for her from the last generation of hardware I had lurking), and now I'm using an NForce2 board with an Athlon 2500 (Barton core).
No problems with any of them.
If the college computer broke, are you sure it's the CPU? Not memory, motherboard, power supply or any of a myriad of other issues?
For the laptop, is it a problem with the manufacturers not putting good cooling and airflow in the laptop (or, heaven forbid, a desktop CPU in a laptop case to save money/add a little extra speed)?
By all means, stick with Intel if it keeps you happy, but I've had a long history of using AMD chips, and I like 'em. If I saw a reason to use Intel's chips, I would.. I just never have to date...
You're eminently trackable in your car.
:)
For most purposes, people don't bother. But, if they were to look, they could easily say 'Ah. I see a car of a this colour, this make, this registration with a driver that looks like this on this street'.
That's pretty precise tracking if you ask me.
And of course car plates broadcast! Everyone around can see 'em, and identify them.
Again, you're eminently trackable on foot (unless you're wearing a hood, and disguising every identifying feature, in which case you'll likely be pulled up by a travelling cop anyway for acting suspicious).
You walk anywhere where there are other people, and you're being 'tracked' by someone. You talk in a public place, and someone will overhear.
Personally, I don't mind the 'voice in a street' style overhear.
I need routers to carry my net traffic. I need someone to host my link.
If I really want privacy, I'll find myself the net equivalent of a locked room, and encrypt what I want to say or do.
Don't know how you managed to get to the exposed system and exploiter argument from what I posted previously, that's a whole different kettle of fish.
If you've ever worked in security tho, you'll realise that the only way to be absolutely sure you won't get compromised is not to connect to the internet.
Good compromise there. Really..
Most places have the 'security guards' and 'locks on the door'. Just most of them also have 'bathroom windows' and 'doors' that can be gemmied open, or have their locks picked.
The whole point of my original post was to say something along the lines of, when you're on the net, you're going public. Drop the connection, and you're at home, in private.
When in public, people look at you. Most will forget about you in 5 minutes, unless they find you mugging old grannies, in which case, you can expect them to give your description to the local police.
That's pretty much what having a non-anonymous IP is to me.
However, as the thread was going, I'd raise merry hell if someone kept running round me in the street, looking at my watch and my shoes and my trousers, and calling the local authorities every five minutes complaining that I may be infringing on their fashion house look that they made up.
That latter is the RIAA (sorta). The street weirdo that smells of beer, and never leaves your side until you give them 50p, at which point they call you a miserable bugger anyway.
The sheer annoyance they bring about tho, isn't worth the price of being completely unidentifiable on a street.
After all, I'd hate to have hundreds of unidentifiable beer smelling people asking for 50p chasing me round the place. I kinda like to know where not to go.
Nice, except for then the ISPs become script kiddie heaven.
There needs to be some form of ability to track someone, for those few cases where "really bad things" are done.
I'm sure nobody here would like spammers given anonymous IP addresses in a net block.
However, given that we do have identifiable addresses, it's good to see that policy in the ISPs is FOR the end user, and against frivolous acquisition of their data.
Like most things in life, the solutions aren't black and white, they're shades of grey, and require common sense to come up with something that's a happy, or at least workable compromise.
Good to see that at least the ISPs seem to be following the common sense path this time against the RIAA Inquisition.
Because, within about 10 years, the royalties you get on a book are peanuts.
It's a small stream of money that pays the bills while you write the next book.
Just think, from the Author's side... Wouldn't it be nice to be paid monthly, even if you don't do much that month, or if your project turns into a flop, or any other amount of things.
That safety net isn't there.
Also, I don't believe the publisher has any author's pension schemes.
The book rights are the author's pensions. Their investment in their future.
They don't do many books, they shortly end up not being able to pay the rent.
They do lots of good sellers, they have the equivalent of a full time job with constant income while they write more, and then at the end, get to retire with a modest income until they push up daisies.
And how you can class patenting a '1 click shop' idea and holding it for 25 years, against the year or two it takes to write a decent book (all the revisions etc)..
If time and effort were commensurate with half the patents we see today, copyright would last a couple of centuries.
I can understand what you were trying to say in your post, but I think you missed considering the lesser income long term, and the having to survive to write more. It's not regular big bucks from a one book wonder.
I still don't get where you call it 'stealing'...
Person A pays person B a lot of money to distribute an item for free to anybody and everybody is ok.
Now, person C puts a very small amount of this out, and it's called 'stealing'.
Weird if you ask me. But that's about the way it's being taken.
In this case, person A is the recording industry, person B is a radio staion, and person C is a private individual.
Lets say, for example, person C records the track from a radio broadcast. This is effectively given away free, by the recording industry. More accurately, they pay to have it taken off their hands and given for free. The caveat is that the receiver of the track will be listening at a lower quality.
If you want the nice product with good quality, and you think it's something worth hanging on to for posterity, you buy the CD.
If person C distributes this given away copy, is it stealing? Not really. It may be in breach of some contractual obligation on retransmission (depending on where you are in the world and your local laws), but it's not stealing.
Stealing from the company would be breaking into their warehouses, and taking the master copy, or some of the physical media.
Anything else is breach of copyright, or some other contractual structure.
There IS a difference.
Morally, it hits a kinda grey area. You aren't truly damaging anything (quote the 'loss of revenue all you like', but the industry has tried to maintain a luxury price tag on music, while complaining that it doesn't fit with the movement patterns for the commodity market. Duh, of course it won't. Bad economy, loss of luxury sales. Commodity items aren't as badly hit. Recent lowerings of price plans show that they're beginning to wise up on this, and finally aim at commodity market, rather than luxury, which is where they should have been positioned for years).
Also, being that they were found guilty of price fixing, and not a lot has honestly been done about it (prices still extremely high, and artificially maintained), it could equally be argued that they have been stealing from the consumer (yes, they were found guilty in a court of law of price fixing, which does actually deprive a consumer of resource, namely money).
So, morally, is it bad to steal from a thief (who believes that stealing is ok)?
Grey area. You're abiding by what someone else believes is ok, which may be less than your usual standards. But, you're simply playing by someone else's rules.
Otherwise where would we be? Say it's ok for a thief to keep their ill gotten gains?
Bear in mind also, that all this file trading/sharing is frequently used as a means of seeing if a track is worth expending your money on (it's still a luxury price tag. It's non-trivial cash for a goodly many people), for obtaining a permanent, good quality archive. Not in all cases, admittedly, but in most.
Personally, I don't know anyone (apart from a few posters here) who share to hoard, and have never gone and bought stuff they found in random browsing that they liked, and wanted a 'proper' copy of.
Again, it's morally grey. It's not a bright and shining example of being the model citizen, and it's certainly not being a thief.
I'm not saying 'You are wrong' here, just pointing out that I think your perception may be flawed in the greater debate, by omission of certain considerations.
Also, mine is also conceivably flawed by things I omit. I just believe this is a grey area. Like any tool, it can be used for many things, and sharing is not, in my opinion, stealing. It's 'try before you buy' luxury sampling.
You wouldn't perchance be an anaesthatist, pretending that your nice little linux box in the theatre is one of the monitors now, would you? :)
The joy being, the hirers are hiring the coder, as he's supposed to know what tool's the best for the job, not just carry on as "it's always been done this way.".
The best analogy is a roving journalist, who may be hired by different countries to write stories.
If all the journalist knows is English, sure he can write and sell to most places, but it's highly inefficient to have to rely on the native's grasp of english to make up for the journalist's lack of flexibility.
I've come across bugs in software dev tools that I've only been able to work around by knowing the architecture of the system I'm coding on..
And there are some languages I'll use for certain tasks, and other languages for others.
Knowing the fundamentals gives you a firm framework in which to base your assumptions when you work in higher level languages, and sometimes insights into why something may not work a particular way.
This reminds me of my old old old PC from 1990 (An old Apricot Qi) which came with what was quaintly termed 'Apricot LOC Technology'.
The hard disks were encrypted in hardware even back then. Also, there was no reliance on any USB dongle to just get the disk unencrypted.
LOC tech worked by the user having an IR transmitting card which authenticated you to the machine. If it was in secure mode, you had to transmit from your card (encrypted transmission.. No copying the transmission and replaying), which then gave you the login screen for your user (this is the first point the keyboard unlocked).
You enter the password and it lets you use the system.
The encryption was independant of OS. This was damn cool 'paranoid' gear. It won me a few contract jobs on the basis that nobody else could get into the machine apart from me, and a couple of my clients at the time were pretty much requiring security and confidentiality.
Nice for the single user PC where you really don't want someone else turning it on and reading your email.
Still, I'd much prefer to use something that can be used to hold differently available data depending on the user.. The day they put rubberhose in hardware, I think they'll really have a winner...
Still, it seems odd they they are trying to hype tech that's a cutdown version of 13 year old tech as something new and revolutionary..
Malk
Whoah. A whole 7 replies to this, before the site melted down. Fastest /. I've seen yet..
Hey, the real version was only twice that!!
Seriously though, the full version, I finished in a night, from beginning to end, on normal level.
I went throuigh afterwards, and tried to alter certain events to see if I'd missed sidelines, and nope. Nothing changable.. Try as hard as you can, they're merely scripted events.
The idea of putting out a Demo that's shorter.. Whoah.. They must be putting a tenth of a level out there to show you how pretty the engine can be, but nothing to really play.
Thus, you can have rather long 'ignore' lists, that simply filter out whatever they say..
Plus, you can always go somewhere else as a newbie... Irritating, but not the end of the earth...
Except, if you vote in someone else's place, they can't then vote, so, yes, you'd stolen something.
However, if they could still then vote also, it would be as in the analogy. He would still have what he started with. Just you'd have it too.
Me? Buy it? Hehehehe.. Think I'll share a lot of your views on it.. Just didn't want to diss it out of hand, without even looking.. I was trying for a little bit of an optimistic streak. :)
I believe that the GMs and the techs operate in different ways. The GM will have a lot of 'in game' power. But just about everything they do will be logged to a game logged.
This log can be perused by the techs and other admin.
If a GM summons loads of gold/respawns expensive things, it'll show up like a lightbulb.
That's just the way I understand things to be happening there..
Hmm.. Maybe (and by no means do I mean 'certainly') they have got their physics that well modelled. After all, it wouldn't be the first time that real things got built after testing in a 'game'.
Ok, back to logic:
Some teenagers have too much time on their hands.
Some teenagers have cd writers.
Some teenagers copy copyrighted material.
Some teenagers copy copyrighted material using a computer.
All teenagers are people.
Therefore, according to your argument, all people copy copyrighted material using a computer.
If you don't agree with that conclusion (and you'd have to be a few crumbs short of a biscuit to agree with it!), then why are _all_ people being charged? All people are being 'taxed' if they buy a computer, and it's a tax that is implemented by a corporation (who aren't actually allowed to tax people anyway).
I run a company, and, like I keep saying, that is NOT the way to run one. If you have to rely on 'taxing' your customer base (and even those that aren't), then your business model is wacked. Get a new one.