I guess the confusion here lies in the distinction between physically property and intellectual property. Is is really fair that someone can have exclusive rights to an 'idea' or should they just just be able to make money out of the application of this idea? Copyrights inhibit growth. They discourage people from reusing good ideas and building on top of them. They encourage people to rebuild their own type of wheel. so where does this fit with IP? People need to be able to make money out of the work that they do, but perhaps the current system is flawed. No matter how much they fight piracy and sharing it will always exist, it is the nature of humans to share things. "hey John have you heard this great new album by band X? its great,..no.... you can't listen to mine go buy your own".
There will always be free riders looking for a free lunch.....as i have been in the past...and sometimes i still am. But i believe that ultimatley it is only good for the artist / producer or whatever it is that is getting ripped off. If you were a band, that made an album or a video clip, would you rather sell 10,000 albums and have 10,000 fans with no one sharing your material, or sell 10,000 albums and have them sharing your work and have 1 million fans? what is better for your music and your future in the industry? I think that being know and getting noticed counts more than actual sales. It will always eventually lead back to sales, ticket sales for concerts etc. Even if only 5,000 people bought the album because the rest copied it, if they share it they are promoting your band which is basically free marketing. That will always lead to sales.
yeah....how is this different to the way that the government goes around every couple of years and does an appraisal of your house and area to get a government value for your house? (well that is what they do here in new zealand...we have a GV value for every house that is updated every few years....) It is done just from the street and based on publicly available records about your house, and is used by banks, insurance etc etc...
I think that this line is blurred. There is not a clear (perceived) distinction between computer science and software engineering or even web design. Younger generations tend to roll the whole lot all into one, without understanding the distinctions. However this is changing. The lack of people taking up computer science, is because people are starting to understand, for example, that they want to work in web design and they realize that they do not need a computer science degree to do this. In the past they may have got a CS degree
I would disagree with you a little bit (not on everything...because you make a lot of good points.) I actually think that 'computer science' as an education is viewed by youngsters today is irrelevant.
Why go to university to learn something that they can just muck around on the web or with a good book and learn how to do at home in their spare time. A novice could download visual studio express editions of C# or web and by the end of the week be coding up a basic website that looked great! Do enough of that and they can go get a job as a web designer. Which makes them think..."Who needs the degree?". The CS degree is worth while doing, but to be honest, there is no substitute for experience, and if you can get experience based on correct facts (ie a degree just forces you to do this, but you can do it yourself at home with a good book and/or the web).
Employers seek competence in people, not just a bit of paper. I my opinion i think we are seeing a shift from a focus on studies, back towards an apprenticeship model, where more people get jobs and learn as they go. Kids these days are loosing faith in the university system...because they are promised mega bucks...so they spend tons of money getting educated and then can't get a job, or they get one that pays them bugger all!
I was always under the impression that the focus of vista was on re-writing the stuff under the hood to make it more reliable and more secure (this is a direct benefit to the end user...isn't it?), not to make it do new flashy things. Some of that has been thrown in just to help market the product and keep up with the times....but i did not think that was the intention of vista.
But wouldn't it be cool if you only had 1 storage device, which could be used for all your devices...
ummm...errr....i think that is what we meant, however, what if that 'one' storage device to use with all your other devices, was actually all of those devices rolled into one as well. ie a storage/pda/phone/mp3/video/everything device. And sure, give it the ability to hook up to other things via Wifi and you are set...
if they can make a 20gb drive that small, why not just build them into phones. I do really need mass storage in my cell (well actually my smartphone/PDA), but one thing that i do not need is another thing to have to carry around...
I look forward to the day that the phone/PDA/camera/mp3 player/video camera are all rolled into one nice device.
anything that we enjoy in moderation is good for us. I think that we live longer if we have fun and enjoy ourselves.
Having a healthy outlook on life and enjoying good food, good drink and good times with others all help to contribute to this, whether it is over a drink, a meal or doing some activity; it does not really matter. The objective is to have a sense of achievement in our work and enjoy time with friends and family.
I imagine that drowning your daily woes with a lonely depressed drink everyday would actually shorten your life. However, sitting out in the sun enjoying a glass of wine or a beer with your wife or your friends and just generally relaxing, enjoying life will help you live longer.
My math says: Hard work + Fun (both in moderation...this is important)= Decrease stress = Joyful life = Live longer
You all seem to be expecting this type of technology to be very accurate? Is this really a realistic expectation? could facial recognition technology actually pinpoint one individual? Perhaps it could in your own private collection on your home PC, but perhaps not when searching billions of photos on the web...maybe you are more likely to have search results with thousands of 'possible' matches, much the same as if you currently try to find something on google. You very rarely get a positive 100% hit unless you know exactly what you are searching for.
I agree that rebooting your PC is slow, but to be honest I only restart my PC once every couple of weeks, and normally because I have installed something that requires it. I only ever find it really frustrating when I am doing something that requires multiple reboots....but it would be great if it were faster
Even if the boss is technical, they only have a slightly better idea of what is going on, and sometimes actually cause more trouble because they think they know better, when often they have not been deeply involved in all the lower level technical decisions and problems that you have already worked through.
We had a manager here that cause no end of grief because he questioned almost every decision that the developers made. He had once been a developer, and really he was just interested and wanted to know what what happening and be involved in making the decisions. Ultimately he drove developers nuts, they hated him and gradually pushed him into a corner and applied pressure in such a way that he decided to jump ship and go work somewhere else.
I think that this is more about association and the effect on a Childs development. Parents always want to vet their children's friends. They don't want them hanging out with Sammy smokes a lot down behind the bike sheds...and in just the same way friendships and associations that are formed on the web, either by frequenting certain forums, chatrooms or just certain websites they are having association with different 'opinions' many of which are healthy and many which are not.
We cannot have full control over who children associate with, but is there a difference between a seedy old man talking to a kid in the park, on the phone or on the internet? (obviously reduced physical risk when they are not there right with you, but aren't the other dangers just the same? the corruption, the manipulation etc?) in fact they are probably likely to be more trusting of someone on the web than if they met that same person as a stranger at the mall or down at the park. And therefore more susceptible to being manipulated or coerced into something that normally they would have no association with (whether it is just to do with the type of conversation they have or actually meeting with complete strangers etc)
Have any of you seen the movie "the Final Cut" (staring Robin Williams)?
It is based on this idea, where people have a chip in their head that records every moment of there life. Robin Williams job in the movie is as a 'cutter', the person who goes through the information once the person is dead and compiles the best memories to remember that person by. It tackles some of the ethical issues as well....but all up it is just a kinda creepy movie!
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A GUI is intended to make it easy and intuitive to find out how to do something when you are not sure how to do it (discovery made easy). This is its greatest asset and its greatest liability, because this encourages users to use the mouse and look for buttons to do things. Which is counter productive and slow, but makes it easy for a complete novice to find out how to do something.
The idea GUI makes it easy for the newbie to do something and as they use it more would teach them quicker ways to do things. For example, it would allow a user to find functionality quickly when it needs to be discovered, but then teach the user more efficient ways of doing that task. It could display recently discovered functionality, for example, 'cut' as a GUI button, but teach the user that they can use ctrl-C to achieve the same task. once the user starts to use the shortcut it could hide the GUI button, say after they have used the shortcut 5 times, saving valuable screen real-estate and not encouraging the user to always use the button. The user could easily discover it again if they needed, and perhaps lock certain buttons for complex tasks or things that they prefer to use the GUI for.
The unfortunate truth is though, that this type of functionality would only sell to 5% of the population (basically slashdotites), because the rest of the world thinks that something is easy to use only because it is pretty and has lots of nice buttons with easy to understand graphics (which is true for a system that makes discovery easy). They don't know what is good for them!
A lot of people may also buy cameras on price, not because it is the best. could this also skew the results? just becuase a lot of people own a type of camera does not mean that it is good...but i guess it would be an indication that it was at least an 'average' camera, as anything less does not make good sales.
I found this great explanation of change. Which I think applies nicely to the recording industry and where they currently stand.
"There are two forces which cause different effects. The first one is
ATTRACTION. If there is a position which is more attractive than the
original one, the thing starts to move towards that new position. Again,
this could be physical or mental. Thoughts could be moved to another
direction by an attractive idea. Water moves down from the mountain,
because of the gravitational attraction. In my workshops with students
I often use the vacuum cleaner as example of the attractive force.
The great attractivity - as I may use this word- of attraction is, that
the process of repositioning is a process under control. One could predict
the effects, the new position is known. These effects could be described
as 'concentration'. In other contributions, I have also used 'pulling' as
a synonym for attraction. In human behaviour, one could also speak of
'stimulating'.
The opposite of attractional force is REJECTION - pushing.
Rejection cause generally uncontrolled effects. It means that the original
place lost its attractivity, but there is no alternative. Something has to
move, but does not know where to go; it could be in all directions."
"...But think also of the effects of
punishment in human behaviour. This issue has been discussed on this list.
Punishment is comparable with 'pushing'; the very position is made as
unattractive as possible. The resulting effects of human behaviour are
very difficult to predict. A lot of governments - creating new rules and
laws to change behaviour by means of punishment, seem to neglect or
underestimate the possible effects of their actions. "
The RIAA is Rejecting the p2p phenomenon, and that is just going to cause more problems. Ultimately file sharing is here to stay. It is not going away. So they need to find a constructive way to work with it so that everyone benefits. In my opinion it is just the larger, more popular artists that loose (only money, they rep increases) as their sales can decrease due to people sharing their music instead of buying it. Smaller, unknown artists however, benefit in a big way, because it is cheap easy promotion, and ultimately they end up getting known. which leads to sales and great crowds at gigs.
What are the criteria that the RIAA use to select who they are going to file lawsuits against?
And other than the obvious "don't share or copy music" what can we do lessen the risk of having a lawsuit filed against us if we do decide to take part in p2p file sharing? Are there certain 'activities' that are more 'dangerous' than others?
How active are the RIAA in countries outside of the US? I live in New Zealand and have not heard anything about lawsuits here...
I agree. Some students learn better by being able to study at home, they can skip the bits that they already know. if they get confused they can just pause and google it...can't do that in an actual lecture. This also allows a student to not be bound by only the teachers understanding....however the danger here as far as passing exams goes is that it is the teacher that marks the tests....I found that when i was studying i learnt very little in lectures. I picked up on what the teacher though was important and what they placed emphasis on, and come study time this is where i foucused my energy (the unfortunate truth about getting a degree...it is not necessarily a good way to learn, but is the ultimate outcome of the current methods of teaching and testing). This information can still be obtained from watching videos of the lecture. And as long as the teacher is open to recieving emails or drop invisits to answer questions then you are covered.
Slashdot Mirror
the earth is going to become one giant hard disk. perhaps we should outsource to the moon...or mars.
I guess the confusion here lies in the distinction between physically property and intellectual property. Is is really fair that someone can have exclusive rights to an 'idea' or should they just just be able to make money out of the application of this idea? Copyrights inhibit growth. They discourage people from reusing good ideas and building on top of them. They encourage people to rebuild their own type of wheel. so where does this fit with IP? People need to be able to make money out of the work that they do, but perhaps the current system is flawed. No matter how much they fight piracy and sharing it will always exist, it is the nature of humans to share things. "hey John have you heard this great new album by band X? its great, ..no.... you can't listen to mine go buy your own".
There will always be free riders looking for a free lunch.....as i have been in the past...and sometimes i still am. But i believe that ultimatley it is only good for the artist / producer or whatever it is that is getting ripped off. If you were a band, that made an album or a video clip, would you rather sell 10,000 albums and have 10,000 fans with no one sharing your material, or sell 10,000 albums and have them sharing your work and have 1 million fans? what is better for your music and your future in the industry? I think that being know and getting noticed counts more than actual sales. It will always eventually lead back to sales, ticket sales for concerts etc. Even if only 5,000 people bought the album because the rest copied it, if they share it they are promoting your band which is basically free marketing. That will always lead to sales.
yeah, damn it. i don't want them to see the front of my house. I am happier with them just looking into my back yard with google earth.
yeah....how is this different to the way that the government goes around every couple of years and does an appraisal of your house and area to get a government value for your house? (well that is what they do here in new zealand...we have a GV value for every house that is updated every few years....) It is done just from the street and based on publicly available records about your house, and is used by banks, insurance etc etc...
I think that this line is blurred. There is not a clear (perceived) distinction between computer science and software engineering or even web design. Younger generations tend to roll the whole lot all into one, without understanding the distinctions. However this is changing. The lack of people taking up computer science, is because people are starting to understand, for example, that they want to work in web design and they realize that they do not need a computer science degree to do this. In the past they may have got a CS degree
I would disagree with you a little bit (not on everything...because you make a lot of good points.) I actually think that 'computer science' as an education is viewed by youngsters today is irrelevant.
Why go to university to learn something that they can just muck around on the web or with a good book and learn how to do at home in their spare time. A novice could download visual studio express editions of C# or web and by the end of the week be coding up a basic website that looked great! Do enough of that and they can go get a job as a web designer. Which makes them think..."Who needs the degree?". The CS degree is worth while doing, but to be honest, there is no substitute for experience, and if you can get experience based on correct facts (ie a degree just forces you to do this, but you can do it yourself at home with a good book and/or the web).
Employers seek competence in people, not just a bit of paper. I my opinion i think we are seeing a shift from a focus on studies, back towards an apprenticeship model, where more people get jobs and learn as they go. Kids these days are loosing faith in the university system...because they are promised mega bucks...so they spend tons of money getting educated and then can't get a job, or they get one that pays them bugger all!
I was always under the impression that the focus of vista was on re-writing the stuff under the hood to make it more reliable and more secure (this is a direct benefit to the end user...isn't it?), not to make it do new flashy things. Some of that has been thrown in just to help market the product and keep up with the times....but i did not think that was the intention of vista.
what? untested...? This might be the equivalent of throwing ice-cubes into a vat of hot oil...
ahh come on. I always right my niices as niice...you can't go rong with a word like that :P
I think that this emphisises how niiice it really is...
i love that! what a good quote... feels like here that at my work too....
if they can make a 20gb drive that small, why not just build them into phones. I do really need mass storage in my cell (well actually my smartphone/PDA), but one thing that i do not need is another thing to have to carry around... I look forward to the day that the phone/PDA/camera/mp3 player/video camera are all rolled into one nice device.
anything that we enjoy in moderation is good for us. I think that we live longer if we have fun and enjoy ourselves.
Having a healthy outlook on life and enjoying good food, good drink and good times with others all help to contribute to this, whether it is over a drink, a meal or doing some activity; it does not really matter. The objective is to have a sense of achievement in our work and enjoy time with friends and family.
I imagine that drowning your daily woes with a lonely depressed drink everyday would actually shorten your life. However, sitting out in the sun enjoying a glass of wine or a beer with your wife or your friends and just generally relaxing, enjoying life will help you live longer.
My math says: Hard work + Fun (both in moderation...this is important)= Decrease stress = Joyful life = Live longer
You all seem to be expecting this type of technology to be very accurate? Is this really a realistic expectation? could facial recognition technology actually pinpoint one individual? Perhaps it could in your own private collection on your home PC, but perhaps not when searching billions of photos on the web...maybe you are more likely to have search results with thousands of 'possible' matches, much the same as if you currently try to find something on google. You very rarely get a positive 100% hit unless you know exactly what you are searching for.
"A Cookie is a Sometimes Food". Do not overuse; may cause drowsiness, fatigue or a fat ass.
....in further breaking news: "...we would like to encourage the terrorist tourism trade to the UK; why would they cause any problems?"
I agree that rebooting your PC is slow, but to be honest I only restart my PC once every couple of weeks, and normally because I have installed something that requires it. I only ever find it really frustrating when I am doing something that requires multiple reboots....but it would be great if it were faster
Even if the boss is technical, they only have a slightly better idea of what is going on, and sometimes actually cause more trouble because they think they know better, when often they have not been deeply involved in all the lower level technical decisions and problems that you have already worked through. We had a manager here that cause no end of grief because he questioned almost every decision that the developers made. He had once been a developer, and really he was just interested and wanted to know what what happening and be involved in making the decisions. Ultimately he drove developers nuts, they hated him and gradually pushed him into a corner and applied pressure in such a way that he decided to jump ship and go work somewhere else.
I think that this is more about association and the effect on a Childs development. Parents always want to vet their children's friends. They don't want them hanging out with Sammy smokes a lot down behind the bike sheds...and in just the same way friendships and associations that are formed on the web, either by frequenting certain forums, chatrooms or just certain websites they are having association with different 'opinions' many of which are healthy and many which are not.
We cannot have full control over who children associate with, but is there a difference between a seedy old man talking to a kid in the park, on the phone or on the internet? (obviously reduced physical risk when they are not there right with you, but aren't the other dangers just the same? the corruption, the manipulation etc?) in fact they are probably likely to be more trusting of someone on the web than if they met that same person as a stranger at the mall or down at the park. And therefore more susceptible to being manipulated or coerced into something that normally they would have no association with (whether it is just to do with the type of conversation they have or actually meeting with complete strangers etc)
Have any of you seen the movie "the Final Cut" (staring Robin Williams)? It is based on this idea, where people have a chip in their head that records every moment of there life. Robin Williams job in the movie is as a 'cutter', the person who goes through the information once the person is dead and compiles the best memories to remember that person by. It tackles some of the ethical issues as well....but all up it is just a kinda creepy movie!
A GUI is intended to make it easy and intuitive to find out how to do something when you are not sure how to do it (discovery made easy). This is its greatest asset and its greatest liability, because this encourages users to use the mouse and look for buttons to do things. Which is counter productive and slow, but makes it easy for a complete novice to find out how to do something.
The idea GUI makes it easy for the newbie to do something and as they use it more would teach them quicker ways to do things. For example, it would allow a user to find functionality quickly when it needs to be discovered, but then teach the user more efficient ways of doing that task. It could display recently discovered functionality, for example, 'cut' as a GUI button, but teach the user that they can use ctrl-C to achieve the same task. once the user starts to use the shortcut it could hide the GUI button, say after they have used the shortcut 5 times, saving valuable screen real-estate and not encouraging the user to always use the button. The user could easily discover it again if they needed, and perhaps lock certain buttons for complex tasks or things that they prefer to use the GUI for.
The unfortunate truth is though, that this type of functionality would only sell to 5% of the population (basically slashdotites), because the rest of the world thinks that something is easy to use only because it is pretty and has lots of nice buttons with easy to understand graphics (which is true for a system that makes discovery easy). They don't know what is good for them!
A lot of people may also buy cameras on price, not because it is the best. could this also skew the results? just becuase a lot of people own a type of camera does not mean that it is good...but i guess it would be an indication that it was at least an 'average' camera, as anything less does not make good sales.
I found this great explanation of change. Which I think applies nicely to the recording industry and where they currently stand.
The RIAA is Rejecting the p2p phenomenon, and that is just going to cause more problems. Ultimately file sharing is here to stay. It is not going away. So they need to find a constructive way to work with it so that everyone benefits. In my opinion it is just the larger, more popular artists that loose (only money, they rep increases) as their sales can decrease due to people sharing their music instead of buying it. Smaller, unknown artists however, benefit in a big way, because it is cheap easy promotion, and ultimately they end up getting known. which leads to sales and great crowds at gigs.
What are the criteria that the RIAA use to select who they are going to file lawsuits against?
And other than the obvious "don't share or copy music" what can we do lessen the risk of having a lawsuit filed against us if we do decide to take part in p2p file sharing? Are there certain 'activities' that are more 'dangerous' than others?
How active are the RIAA in countries outside of the US? I live in New Zealand and have not heard anything about lawsuits here...
I agree. Some students learn better by being able to study at home, they can skip the bits that they already know. if they get confused they can just pause and google it...can't do that in an actual lecture. This also allows a student to not be bound by only the teachers understanding....however the danger here as far as passing exams goes is that it is the teacher that marks the tests....I found that when i was studying i learnt very little in lectures. I picked up on what the teacher though was important and what they placed emphasis on, and come study time this is where i foucused my energy (the unfortunate truth about getting a degree...it is not necessarily a good way to learn, but is the ultimate outcome of the current methods of teaching and testing). This information can still be obtained from watching videos of the lecture. And as long as the teacher is open to recieving emails or drop invisits to answer questions then you are covered.