The age of wars being "soldiers lining up and shooting at each other" is long over. It looks like the neighborhood cop walking a beat is following.
Things like the Juarez Police Chief getting essentially run out of town to the forces that pushed the Russians out of afghanistan (and the USA in Iraq).
Police in some places have a real fear that simply by being identified as police officers could get their families killed. (masked policemen)
There are games that take both strategies, such as City of Heroes. Zones can "become full", causing a new instance of that zone to be created, presumably handled by a different piece of hardware. But also, City of Heroes has several entirely different servers.
Even WoW evolved a compromise: instances. And part of why the newer "cities" in WoW don't have auction houses is to spread the pain a bit. (I'm on a low-pop server, and I cringe to think what Dalaran is like on a high-pop server...)
In the same way, EVE has worked a bit to encourage people to spread out. Regional economics, and having a huge F-ing universe to play in, for instance.
But sharded or not sharded, if you don't have a fallback plan, you will fail. You might recall the episode in the Star Wars Galaxies MMO, where as a protest action, a large number of the players went to a single location, and the server repeatedly crashed because of it until the GMs intervened with (effectively) riot gear?
Most land with good sized waterfalls is either public land (park/national forest), or exceptionally expensive.
Then there's the cost of building your 'micro-hydro' system. A brief search brought up some micro hydro generators for in the range of $1K. On the other hand, it made it clear that what the generator needed was simply a swift moving stream. A waterfall isn't necessary.
But being near a stream, you'll want to be sure you're not going to get flooded out in the next 100-year flood. (Having seen a couple of those come by in the last decade, I'm in the "twice shy" camp.)
So... if you can afford land with a good sized waterfall, you probably aren't going to be worried about the cost of the generator...
Anyone that quits early loses their redundancy payouts.
You shouldn't think that the software industry is immune to this, or that it is unique to Australia.
I'd heard fairly recently (and perhaps even on slashdot) of a company setting up to outsource development, that retained some of their developers specifically to train the offshore outsourcer replacements. And like your Pacific Brands, if you didn't take that deal, you were out right then.
Once a company decides to take your job and move it elsewhere, your only remaining value to the company is in what you know that they can hoover out of you. And your only options are: play along, walk, or try to convince or force the company to change its mind. And in a case where there are no replacement workers to heckle (because the manufacturing has gone elsewhere), your best places to go are the press and the government.
I would say that it is a successful business strategy, if your company has positioned itself so that, in the event that it fails, the government is obligated to bail them out.
You've shifted risk onto someone else. And if what you did is made illegal, well, that's only one risky behavior out of an infinite number. From the company's perspective, what's not to like?
"That's a mighty nice economy you've got there. Shame if anything happened to it..."
Too much sense?... except for the fact that walking into a brick-and-mortar store, walking out with an album without having paid for it is theft, not copyright infringement.
No unauthorized copy was made. Physical object taken unjustly.
If an anonymous statement holds no weight, then why is journalism filled with "anonymous sources say" and "unnamed government officials state"? Just because you don't give any weight to anonymous statements doesn't mean the rest of the world ignores them.
You're right, it really is a matter of trust.
In the case of journalism that you mention, the reporter is being trusted, not the anonymous sources directly. That is, we trust that the reporter trusts his anonymous sources.
In the case of a forum, you are getting the information firsthand. It's the equivalent of seeing a handbill on your front porch in the morning, or a call in the middle of the night from someone you don't know. You don't have the intermediary of the 'trusted reporter'.
Of course, contractor rate has to be at LEAST 3x salaried/hourly rate, just to keep your take-home amount up. As an independent contractor, you get the joys of paying the employer's share of various taxes.
Then there's the skim needed for being a contractor and having to plan for down time between jobs. Call it another 3x (6x total), in this economy.
Anything on top of that is revenge money. But you're already going to cost the company a lot more simply due to YOUR business case.
"Disorderly Conduct" also allows them to charge a person with a Misdemeanor instead of a felony, such as assault. Misdemeanors often have terms like restraining orders, fines, and community service. Felonies generally have jail time.
And you ignore the fact that the police can use it to lean on someone YOU don't like. Such as the guy who walks into a church with his boombox turned up to 11 and refuses to go away. Peeping Toms often come under the Disorderly Conduct label as well.
The definitions of Disorderly Conduct are often quite soft. Which makes it easy to charge, and much harder to prosecute.
One other commenter to your post mentioned the eve wiki available through the In Game Browser (IGB). It's not my favorite, but it does have the eve-online database behind it. Other wikis include www.eve-wiki.net (my favorite), as well as one run through wikia (eve.wikia.com). Each of these provides links to yet more eve resource sites.
The advantage of the wikis, of course, is that when you find your answer through other means, you can add that information to the wiki for the next poor lost soul looking for help.
A carpenter makes his living as much with his hammer as I do with code. It won't do anything without someone skilled operating it.
Can I have all your code for free, then? Since I'm not a "skilled operator", I wouldn't be impacting your business, even if I give it out free to your customers, right?
You disappoint me, after the well reasoned comments previously, even if the GP's analogy is murky.
If PitaBred works in IT, the code he produces would be the tool used to solve particular problems. In that case, while passing the code around might result in security problems, the code itself would not be terribly useful out of context.
If he works in development, the code is the finished product. The "Giving it out free" analogue for the carpenter would be passing out the chairs and desks, etc, his total work output. Not quite what either of you probably intended.
Of course, the analogy would have been better substituting "carving tool" for "hammer", being a tool that requires some skill to get useful results. All it takes to wield a hammer is opposable digits.
Electrician's bill:
Turning one screw a quarter turn to solve the problem: $0.25
Knowing which screw to turn: $2000
> Does your mechanic, dentist, doctor, explain to you each and every thing they do to you or your car in intimate detail ? No.
My mechanic, dentist, and doctor will, on request, explain each procedure they intend to do, why they feel it needs to be done, and how they intend to do it. If I wish, I can get a second opinion before the procedure is done, by going to another provider.
Microsoft is the only provider. They don't offer to explain in any detail what will be done. They don't explain in detail why it needs to be done.
Also, for each procedure done by the mechanic, et al, I pay per procedure. Microsoft, I've already paid.
Your analogy could stand some improvement.
> An finally, if you distrust MS SO much - why did you have Windows Updates on anyway!?
What, you'd prefer they run pre-SP1 Win XP? What parts of "monopoly" and "defective product" weren't clear?
"We're sorry, but this product is only licensed for the Orion arm of the Milky Way. Please call our service department in Andromeda and ask for availability in other regions. Thank you, and have a good epoch."
Write down each title you were planning to buy, but were prevented from doing so by the online activation. (Or whatever your particular reason is.)
Contact each publisher. Be polite, not fuming. Present them with the list (of their titles, of course). Tell them precisely why you declined to buy their title.
Conclude your letter/email with something like "you may feel you need to protect your property from piracy, but this method cost you these sales. Learn from this, or continue losing sales."
It's cathartic for you. And maybe, just maybe, if enough people do this, they'll get a clue.
If you can, encourage your friends to do the same.
The more personal you can make it (IE not just standard 'contact us email', and paper > bits) the more memorable it will be, and thus the more impact it can make.
A single, small rock is not a threat. An avalanche can be.
I agree, it meets the definition of Open Source, in that you can compile it yourself.
That in itself does not make it secure, though. Particularly, while I can read C++, I know little of encryption algorithms. I could check for buffer overflows easy enough. But I wouldn't necessarily know that some particular operation made a crypto routine crackable in N time instead on e^N time.
And that's if I took the time to run over the entire code base.
Having not followed your link, I am only assuming that the code base consists of C, C++ and assembly in various amounts. If it was describing 3 separate versions of the code, I'd pass out popcorn for folks watching the ones trying to read and understand the assembly version. (It'd probably be permanent job security, that.)
> On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to prioritize traffic that they *know* is sensitive to delays.... because I get REAL grumpy when my WoW connection gets laggy.
Slashdot Mirror
The age of wars being "soldiers lining up and shooting at each other" is long over. It looks like the neighborhood cop walking a beat is following.
Things like the Juarez Police Chief getting essentially run out of town to the forces that pushed the Russians out of afghanistan (and the USA in Iraq).
Police in some places have a real fear that simply by being identified as police officers could get their families killed. (masked policemen)
I think that Bilski might have something to say about this patent. ... were this patent not (ahem) patently for entertainment only.
There are games that take both strategies, such as City of Heroes. Zones can "become full", causing a new instance of that zone to be created, presumably handled by a different piece of hardware. But also, City of Heroes has several entirely different servers.
Even WoW evolved a compromise: instances. And part of why the newer "cities" in WoW don't have auction houses is to spread the pain a bit. (I'm on a low-pop server, and I cringe to think what Dalaran is like on a high-pop server...)
In the same way, EVE has worked a bit to encourage people to spread out. Regional economics, and having a huge F-ing universe to play in, for instance.
But sharded or not sharded, if you don't have a fallback plan, you will fail. You might recall the episode in the Star Wars Galaxies MMO, where as a protest action, a large number of the players went to a single location, and the server repeatedly crashed because of it until the GMs intervened with (effectively) riot gear?
No, no, that's the Heisenberg Trophy. We keep giving that one to people, and they put it on a shelf, and can never find it again.
Only if we keep watching.
Good luck with that.
Most land with good sized waterfalls is either public land (park/national forest), or exceptionally expensive.
Then there's the cost of building your 'micro-hydro' system. A brief search brought up some micro hydro generators for in the range of $1K. On the other hand, it made it clear that what the generator needed was simply a swift moving stream. A waterfall isn't necessary.
But being near a stream, you'll want to be sure you're not going to get flooded out in the next 100-year flood. (Having seen a couple of those come by in the last decade, I'm in the "twice shy" camp.)
So... if you can afford land with a good sized waterfall, you probably aren't going to be worried about the cost of the generator...
Anyone that quits early loses their redundancy payouts.
You shouldn't think that the software industry is immune to this, or that it is unique to Australia.
I'd heard fairly recently (and perhaps even on slashdot) of a company setting up to outsource development, that retained some of their developers specifically to train the offshore outsourcer replacements. And like your Pacific Brands, if you didn't take that deal, you were out right then.
Once a company decides to take your job and move it elsewhere, your only remaining value to the company is in what you know that they can hoover out of you. And your only options are: play along, walk, or try to convince or force the company to change its mind. And in a case where there are no replacement workers to heckle (because the manufacturing has gone elsewhere), your best places to go are the press and the government.
I would say that it is a successful business strategy, if your company has positioned itself so that, in the event that it fails, the government is obligated to bail them out.
You've shifted risk onto someone else. And if what you did is made illegal, well, that's only one risky behavior out of an infinite number. From the company's perspective, what's not to like?
"That's a mighty nice economy you've got there. Shame if anything happened to it..."
They lose their rights to the entry if they accept the prize.
I wonder what Maxis would do if someone entered the contest, won, then refused the prize?
Particularly if the contestant was prepared to defend their rights...
Too much sense? ... except for the fact that walking into a brick-and-mortar store, walking out with an album without having paid for it is theft, not copyright infringement.
No unauthorized copy was made. Physical object taken unjustly.
Analogy rejected.
Sorry Ray,
But once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny...
Even as a bastion of hope, you have been Touched by the Shadows.
(* runs off, with the meme abuse police in hot pursuit *)
If an anonymous statement holds no weight, then why is journalism filled with "anonymous sources say" and "unnamed government officials state"?
Just because you don't give any weight to anonymous statements doesn't mean the rest of the world ignores them.
You're right, it really is a matter of trust.
In the case of journalism that you mention, the reporter is being trusted, not the anonymous sources directly. That is, we trust that the reporter trusts his anonymous sources.
In the case of a forum, you are getting the information firsthand. It's the equivalent of seeing a handbill on your front porch in the morning, or a call in the middle of the night from someone you don't know. You don't have the intermediary of the 'trusted reporter'.
Of course, contractor rate has to be at LEAST 3x salaried/hourly rate, just to keep your take-home amount up. As an independent contractor, you get the joys of paying the employer's share of various taxes.
Then there's the skim needed for being a contractor and having to plan for down time between jobs. Call it another 3x (6x total), in this economy.
Anything on top of that is revenge money. But you're already going to cost the company a lot more simply due to YOUR business case.
Perhaps this is just one of his less funny dead-pan jokes?
"Disorderly Conduct" also allows them to charge a person with a Misdemeanor instead of a felony, such as assault. Misdemeanors often have terms like restraining orders, fines, and community service. Felonies generally have jail time.
And you ignore the fact that the police can use it to lean on someone YOU don't like. Such as the guy who walks into a church with his boombox turned up to 11 and refuses to go away. Peeping Toms often come under the Disorderly Conduct label as well.
The definitions of Disorderly Conduct are often quite soft. Which makes it easy to charge, and much harder to prosecute.
We use a vastly greater amount of fuel to burn (cremate) dead bodies than they would provide as a fuel source.
And it's been that way since bodies were first put on funeral pyres.
The eve forums are pretty good at providing help.
One other commenter to your post mentioned the eve wiki available through the In Game Browser (IGB). It's not my favorite, but it does have the eve-online database behind it. Other wikis include www.eve-wiki.net (my favorite), as well as one run through wikia (eve.wikia.com). Each of these provides links to yet more eve resource sites.
The advantage of the wikis, of course, is that when you find your answer through other means, you can add that information to the wiki for the next poor lost soul looking for help.
A carpenter makes his living as much with his hammer as I do with code. It won't do anything without someone skilled operating it.
Can I have all your code for free, then? Since I'm not a "skilled operator", I wouldn't be impacting your business, even if I give it out free to your customers, right?
You disappoint me, after the well reasoned comments previously, even if the GP's analogy is murky.
If PitaBred works in IT, the code he produces would be the tool used to solve particular problems. In that case, while passing the code around might result in security problems, the code itself would not be terribly useful out of context.
If he works in development, the code is the finished product. The "Giving it out free" analogue for the carpenter would be passing out the chairs and desks, etc, his total work output. Not quite what either of you probably intended.
Of course, the analogy would have been better substituting "carving tool" for "hammer", being a tool that requires some skill to get useful results. All it takes to wield a hammer is opposable digits.
Electrician's bill:
Turning one screw a quarter turn to solve the problem: $0.25
Knowing which screw to turn: $2000
> Does your mechanic, dentist, doctor, explain to you each and every thing they do to you or your car in intimate detail ? No.
My mechanic, dentist, and doctor will, on request, explain each procedure they intend to do, why they feel it needs to be done, and how they intend to do it. If I wish, I can get a second opinion before the procedure is done, by going to another provider.
Microsoft is the only provider. They don't offer to explain in any detail what will be done. They don't explain in detail why it needs to be done.
Also, for each procedure done by the mechanic, et al, I pay per procedure. Microsoft, I've already paid.
Your analogy could stand some improvement.
> An finally, if you distrust MS SO much - why did you have Windows Updates on anyway!?
What, you'd prefer they run pre-SP1 Win XP? What parts of "monopoly" and "defective product" weren't clear?
"We're sorry, but this product is only licensed for the Orion arm of the Milky Way. Please call our service department in Andromeda and ask for availability in other regions. Thank you, and have a good epoch."
My opinion (take it for what it is worth):
Write down each title you were planning to buy, but were prevented from doing so by the online activation. (Or whatever your particular reason is.)
Contact each publisher. Be polite, not fuming. Present them with the list (of their titles, of course). Tell them precisely why you declined to buy their title.
Conclude your letter/email with something like "you may feel you need to protect your property from piracy, but this method cost you these sales. Learn from this, or continue losing sales."
It's cathartic for you. And maybe, just maybe, if enough people do this, they'll get a clue.
If you can, encourage your friends to do the same.
The more personal you can make it (IE not just standard 'contact us email', and paper > bits) the more memorable it will be, and thus the more impact it can make.
A single, small rock is not a threat. An avalanche can be.
It might be a different matter if you could 'download' skins for your car. (Gee, it LOOKS like a Ferrari, but drives like a suburban!)
Or less facetiously, pay a subscription fee for the car.
But I'd really hate to see the car that required frequent patches (recall notices).
If the business model isn't based on "selling cars", but instead on selling peripherals to the car, what do you get?
I agree, it meets the definition of Open Source, in that you can compile it yourself.
That in itself does not make it secure, though. Particularly, while I can read C++, I know little of encryption algorithms. I could check for buffer overflows easy enough. But I wouldn't necessarily know that some particular operation made a crypto routine crackable in N time instead on e^N time.
And that's if I took the time to run over the entire code base.
Having not followed your link, I am only assuming that the code base consists of C, C++ and assembly in various amounts. If it was describing 3 separate versions of the code, I'd pass out popcorn for folks watching the ones trying to read and understand the assembly version. (It'd probably be permanent job security, that.)
What, and you thought talking to the sales representative would get you to someone who could waive charges?
For that, you need to ask for the Elves in Customer Retention.
> On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to prioritize traffic that they *know* is sensitive to delays. ... because I get REAL grumpy when my WoW connection gets laggy.
Just sayin'.