Well there's a screenshot of a dialler, and the status screen shows an IMEI number, so I'm going with "yes it is a phone":) Nice hardware for sure, and open-ness is a benefit for us hacker types, but they need to work on that UI. Still, interesting!
I haven't ever tried setting it up, but I'll agree it doesn't look like too big of a deal. I have a sneaky feeling it's not quite as easy as you make out (because nothing ever is!) but I'm sure that I could get some IPv6 action going fairly quickly if I wanted to. Problem is, I don't. It just doesn't solve any problem I (as a fairly tech savvy user) care about. I've never been denied a v4 address when I've needed one, I don't have any problem with NAT and I've never found a server I wanted to contact which was only available via v6. Therefore, while I could do it, there's very little motivation for me to bother.
Oh good grief. How about "it'll be fun when we give these people guns and let them run around the world doing what they want". Doesn't make any more sense.
Nothing whatsoever, if that's what you choose. But 99% of users don't want to do that, and don't know how to configure things to allow it safely. In your case you can get a static IP or three, or even with NAT it's easy to setup port forwarding. I really don't see the loss unless you want every machine on your network to be a port 80 web server and don't want to pay for the static IPs, which is a pretty marginal case.
As someone who's spent a lot of time on IRC, no - no it isn't. If you want to equate it to IRC it's more like a setup where everyone has their own channel, and you can join many in a single session with the messages all being merged.
Seriously, I don't know what he's smoking. I pay roughly the same in income tax here in the US (once you add up federal, state and things like social security tax) as I did in the UK, but also get to pay for medical. Awesome!
- There are only two things that the employer wants to know during the interview: "Can you do the job?" and "Are you going to cause trouble?". The information on your resume will answer the first. Speaking as an interviewer, this is not great advice. Yes I want to know if you can do the job, but I also want to know that you're being honest when you say you can - that's what the interview is for (IMHO). You wouldn't be sitting in front of me if your resume wasn't promising, but I've lost count of how many candidates claimed to be super experienced in some field but couldn't answer the most basic questions about it. Rule no. 1 - Don't Lie on Your Resume. It's OK to not know something, it's not OK to pretend you do.
Keep your personal life personal and your special interests and hobbies to yourself unless they directly pertain to the job If you're inexperienced (and from what you say I'm going to assume you are) you're resume's going to be pretty short. Put those hobbies on there, they'll give us something to talk about - or I'll ignore them. No harm in having them on there. When I'm evaluating grads, personality and interests are really the keys. I want to know what makes you tick, why you're here (hint: you'll be a much better developer if you love coding than if you really want to be a painter but couldn't get into art school). Show me that you want to learn. Rule no. 2 - Show Me You Want to Work Here.
The advice about money, benefits, etc is spot on however. You'll usually get a separate talk with an HR person - not only am I not allowed to talk about such things, I typically have no idea about them anyway! Do however ask about how the teams operate, the kind of social stuff we do, etc. When you're expected to spend the better part of your waking life with a group of people it's perfectly reasonable to want to know a bit about them! Most of all, for new grads, try not to be nervous and make sure you treat me as a peer. I don't need an interviewee to keep calling me sir and being all humble - you're a candidate now but with any luck you'll be working with me in a few weeks - act that way! Rule no. 3 - It's A Conversation Not An Inquisition!
It's pretty clear that the free market (blockbuster) has established the value of a license at $3-$5 per week. But I don't think the game studios would be happy if they sold ten million physical copies on launch day for $5 a pop either.
I'm not sure the gamers would be happy about having to pay $5 a week forever if they want to keep those copies, either. Rental exists for gaming just like movies, and the individual consumer can choose which they prefer. Even selling at "product" prices (whatever that means) plenty of people still seem to want to buy.
Hundreds, but let me mention two very obvious ones you missed: Zune & J River. More, oh OK then - Media Monkey and foobar. Oh - and Winamp. You can find the rest yourself.
Too Good To Be True == 200 tracks for $2. They didn't sell that because they don't want to give stuff away so cheaply. How is that hard to understand?
It is a freaking digital copy, it is the exact same quality
Maybe, maybe not. I've never heard a pirate CD, but I've seen plenty of pirate DVDs. Some are direct digital copies of the original and look great, plenty are just burned torrent downloads (and so have compression artifacts everywhere). Some are screen cams. I'm sure the same holds for audio.
AIG is 'unwinding' the insane contracts that drove them out of business; rather than declaring bankruptcy and paying pennies on the dollar, they got 80-some billion dollars from the government and payed it to the people they had these contracts with
Indeed, because a failure of AIG would be a bad, bad thing on many levels. The whole reason AIG got that money was to pay back the people it owed, to try and bring some stability back to the financial system. GS was one of those creditors, as were many others. I'm sure much of the $13b GS got back went straight back out the door to people they owed, and so on - trickle down.
Secretary Paulson, who did much of the bailing out of AIG was a former Goldman CEO
And as such he was someone who clearly knew how the system works inside-and-out, hiring him was one of the few good decisions Bush ever made. He's also obviously got nothing to gain personally from GS doing well as he's not even a stockholder.
Sure, although this is my personal preference, so YMMV:)
Why Win7 is better than...
XP: Eye candy. It runs just as well as my XP install, but looks much, much better. Obviously I don't care about that for headless servers, but if I'm staring at a desktop for hours I like it to look nice. Other minor things - start up is quicker, wireless seems to connect faster and stay connected better.
OSX: Primary reason is that I grew up on Windows (well, DOS, but then Windows) and never really grokked OSX. There are too many things about it which annoy me - why doesn't maximize actually maximize? Why can I only resize a window from one place? What's with the shared toolbar? OSX obviously is slicker and shinier than XP, but Win7 catches up nicely - the first thing my wife said when she saw Win7 was "that looks just like the Mac". So maybe they copied the good bits, that's fine by me:) I also appreciate the vastly greater hardware support in Windows compared to OSX.
Ubuntu: This one is tricker. I run 8.10 on my server and wouldn't even consider a non-linux OS in that instance. I also started out with UNR (and the Dell Ubuntu distro) on my netbook, and liked it. But Win7 feels way more polished: the UI looks better, the wifi works MUCH better. When I enabled the fancy UI eyecandy on the Mini 9 it became pretty useless (too slow) but Aero runs just fine. I also got surprisingly confused with admin on Ubuntu - I'm used to using apt-get on the command line (which is awesome) but on the desktop version I had at least 4 different way of installing/uninstalling apps and they all seemed to work slightly differently and give me different options/errors. Utterly confusing!
Re:And what could be more pointless than Twitter?
on
The Twitter Book
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· Score: 1
Sounds like you need to find more interesting people to follow. Twitter's what you make of it, you need to be thoughtful about who you listen to.
My understanding from skimming the article is that damages can either be the money I lost because you copied my work, or the money you gained because you copied my work. In this case, it's hard to argue that the newspaper made much money from the act of copying (maybe they sold a few more papers?) and she certainly didn't actually lose anything - so the damages are low. In the RIAA case you mention, they claim that although the defendent didn't make any money from the infringment they lost $80k per song in missed royalties - hence high damages. As for the commercial aspect, my understanding (again, IANAL) is that the commercial intent aspect only really matters if you're trying to claim fair use as a defence.
Same here, really liking Win7. I've already switched my laptop over from Ubuntu to Win7, likewise my netbook (managed to get the install size down to under 5gb which is good for a small SSD!). I'm pretty sure my wife's machines will be moved over too once the retail version comes out. Personally, I prefer it to XP, OSX and Ubuntu - all of which I have at home on one machine or another.
As evidenced by the sheer quality of most third party Wii titles. Oh wait...
In reality all console manufacturers control access to their devkits tightly primarily in order to extract money from the devs/publishers (as they have no direct income from retail). To get a devkit, and to be allowed to publish, you have to sign a contract giving them x% of the take. Keeping the quality high is a concern obviously, as too much crap can endanger your brand, but here "quality" is usually more about reliability and political correctness than "quality" in terms of design or innovation.
Apple do the same thing, except they do have direct income from retail as they own the only store. So their upfront take from devs is much smaller ($100). This encourages more devs to take part, as the barrier to entry is lower. However they still approve everything before it goes out, so they still have the opportunity to enforce whatever definition of "quality" they choose. Which seems variable at best:)
Any artist who wants to self publish/promote is quite free to do so. However, most choose to sign with a label (major or otherwise). They've made their choice - they've willingly handed over their copyrights (at least in most cases, not all contracts involve transfer of copyrights) so why should they get them back now just because you or I don't particularly like the RIAA? We've got nothing to do with it, it's a business deal between the label and the artist - entered into willingly by both sides for the benefit of both sides.
Why would anyone in the market have had an interest in loaning to high-risk individuals
Because you can charge a higher interest rate. Yes, some will default, but you'll get more from those who don't, so you're still in the money. If you're good at deciding who to lend to you can make a lot of money that way (not just homeloans, any credit situation).
The reasons it's a bad deal are buried in the fine print that would take a real-estate attorney to sort out (which a typical sub-prime borrower couldn't afford).
My impression (and I may be misinformed here) was that the majority of these loans are going bad because people were given more than they could really afford, using a short-term ARM with a big uptick to make the payments look low initially. Now I might be out of line, but when signing something as important as a mortgage, isn't it really a good idea to understand it? The "truth in lending" papers are pretty comprehensive and explain exactly what an ARM is and what it means, as well as things like balloon payments. I know I had to sign many disclaimers indicating I had read the sheets and understood them, that my payments weren't fixed, etc.
Sure where there was upselling & fraud the brokers should be held accountable, but there's responsibility on the part of the borrower too, claiming to be too stupid to understand simple math is a pretty poor excuse in my book.
Slashdot Mirror
Well there's a screenshot of a dialler, and the status screen shows an IMEI number, so I'm going with "yes it is a phone" :) Nice hardware for sure, and open-ness is a benefit for us hacker types, but they need to work on that UI. Still, interesting!
And I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that will never happen.
I haven't ever tried setting it up, but I'll agree it doesn't look like too big of a deal. I have a sneaky feeling it's not quite as easy as you make out (because nothing ever is!) but I'm sure that I could get some IPv6 action going fairly quickly if I wanted to. Problem is, I don't. It just doesn't solve any problem I (as a fairly tech savvy user) care about. I've never been denied a v4 address when I've needed one, I don't have any problem with NAT and I've never found a server I wanted to contact which was only available via v6. Therefore, while I could do it, there's very little motivation for me to bother.
Oh good grief. How about "it'll be fun when we give these people guns and let them run around the world doing what they want". Doesn't make any more sense.
That just shows he doesn't know what he's doing. The exact same little python script could have generated a simple web form and submitted to the DB.
Nothing whatsoever, if that's what you choose. But 99% of users don't want to do that, and don't know how to configure things to allow it safely. In your case you can get a static IP or three, or even with NAT it's easy to setup port forwarding. I really don't see the loss unless you want every machine on your network to be a port 80 web server and don't want to pay for the static IPs, which is a pretty marginal case.
As someone who's spent a lot of time on IRC, no - no it isn't. If you want to equate it to IRC it's more like a setup where everyone has their own channel, and you can join many in a single session with the messages all being merged.
Seriously, I don't know what he's smoking. I pay roughly the same in income tax here in the US (once you add up federal, state and things like social security tax) as I did in the UK, but also get to pay for medical. Awesome!
Why you all pay so much for such mediocre service, I really don't know
Because it's a wonderful free market and we all have a choice. Oh, wait...
I live in the US but I'm British, so I know exactly what you mean. Orange wasn't great but it beat the crap out of AT&T...
- There are only two things that the employer wants to know during the interview: "Can you do the job?" and "Are you going to cause trouble?". The information on your resume will answer the first.
Speaking as an interviewer, this is not great advice. Yes I want to know if you can do the job, but I also want to know that you're being honest when you say you can - that's what the interview is for (IMHO). You wouldn't be sitting in front of me if your resume wasn't promising, but I've lost count of how many candidates claimed to be super experienced in some field but couldn't answer the most basic questions about it. Rule no. 1 - Don't Lie on Your Resume. It's OK to not know something, it's not OK to pretend you do.
Keep your personal life personal and your special interests and hobbies to yourself unless they directly pertain to the job
If you're inexperienced (and from what you say I'm going to assume you are) you're resume's going to be pretty short. Put those hobbies on there, they'll give us something to talk about - or I'll ignore them. No harm in having them on there. When I'm evaluating grads, personality and interests are really the keys. I want to know what makes you tick, why you're here (hint: you'll be a much better developer if you love coding than if you really want to be a painter but couldn't get into art school). Show me that you want to learn. Rule no. 2 - Show Me You Want to Work Here.
The advice about money, benefits, etc is spot on however. You'll usually get a separate talk with an HR person - not only am I not allowed to talk about such things, I typically have no idea about them anyway! Do however ask about how the teams operate, the kind of social stuff we do, etc. When you're expected to spend the better part of your waking life with a group of people it's perfectly reasonable to want to know a bit about them! Most of all, for new grads, try not to be nervous and make sure you treat me as a peer. I don't need an interviewee to keep calling me sir and being all humble - you're a candidate now but with any luck you'll be working with me in a few weeks - act that way! Rule no. 3 - It's A Conversation Not An Inquisition!
1 == First Class Honours
2:1 == Upper Second Class Honours
2:2 == Lower Second Class Honours
3 == Third Class Honours
If you want a decent job you really need at least a 2:1.
I'm not sure the gamers would be happy about having to pay $5 a week forever if they want to keep those copies, either. Rental exists for gaming just like movies, and the individual consumer can choose which they prefer. Even selling at "product" prices (whatever that means) plenty of people still seem to want to buy.
Hundreds, but let me mention two very obvious ones you missed: Zune & J River. More, oh OK then - Media Monkey and foobar. Oh - and Winamp. You can find the rest yourself.
Too Good To Be True == 200 tracks for $2. They didn't sell that because they don't want to give stuff away so cheaply. How is that hard to understand?
Maybe, maybe not. I've never heard a pirate CD, but I've seen plenty of pirate DVDs. Some are direct digital copies of the original and look great, plenty are just burned torrent downloads (and so have compression artifacts everywhere). Some are screen cams. I'm sure the same holds for audio.
Indeed, because a failure of AIG would be a bad, bad thing on many levels. The whole reason AIG got that money was to pay back the people it owed, to try and bring some stability back to the financial system. GS was one of those creditors, as were many others. I'm sure much of the $13b GS got back went straight back out the door to people they owed, and so on - trickle down.
And as such he was someone who clearly knew how the system works inside-and-out, hiring him was one of the few good decisions Bush ever made. He's also obviously got nothing to gain personally from GS doing well as he's not even a stockholder.
Sure, although this is my personal preference, so YMMV :)
Why Win7 is better than...
XP: Eye candy. It runs just as well as my XP install, but looks much, much better. Obviously I don't care about that for headless servers, but if I'm staring at a desktop for hours I like it to look nice. Other minor things - start up is quicker, wireless seems to connect faster and stay connected better.
OSX: Primary reason is that I grew up on Windows (well, DOS, but then Windows) and never really grokked OSX. There are too many things about it which annoy me - why doesn't maximize actually maximize? Why can I only resize a window from one place? What's with the shared toolbar? OSX obviously is slicker and shinier than XP, but Win7 catches up nicely - the first thing my wife said when she saw Win7 was "that looks just like the Mac". So maybe they copied the good bits, that's fine by me :) I also appreciate the vastly greater hardware support in Windows compared to OSX.
Ubuntu: This one is tricker. I run 8.10 on my server and wouldn't even consider a non-linux OS in that instance. I also started out with UNR (and the Dell Ubuntu distro) on my netbook, and liked it. But Win7 feels way more polished: the UI looks better, the wifi works MUCH better. When I enabled the fancy UI eyecandy on the Mini 9 it became pretty useless (too slow) but Aero runs just fine. I also got surprisingly confused with admin on Ubuntu - I'm used to using apt-get on the command line (which is awesome) but on the desktop version I had at least 4 different way of installing/uninstalling apps and they all seemed to work slightly differently and give me different options/errors. Utterly confusing!
Sounds like you need to find more interesting people to follow. Twitter's what you make of it, you need to be thoughtful about who you listen to.
Indeed, given the number of people who pirate windows it's probably much higher.
My understanding from skimming the article is that damages can either be the money I lost because you copied my work, or the money you gained because you copied my work. In this case, it's hard to argue that the newspaper made much money from the act of copying (maybe they sold a few more papers?) and she certainly didn't actually lose anything - so the damages are low. In the RIAA case you mention, they claim that although the defendent didn't make any money from the infringment they lost $80k per song in missed royalties - hence high damages. As for the commercial aspect, my understanding (again, IANAL) is that the commercial intent aspect only really matters if you're trying to claim fair use as a defence.
Same here, really liking Win7. I've already switched my laptop over from Ubuntu to Win7, likewise my netbook (managed to get the install size down to under 5gb which is good for a small SSD!). I'm pretty sure my wife's machines will be moved over too once the retail version comes out. Personally, I prefer it to XP, OSX and Ubuntu - all of which I have at home on one machine or another.
Why should they? The cobranding means they pay less/none of the advertising costs, and the carrier agreement gets them sales.
As evidenced by the sheer quality of most third party Wii titles. Oh wait...
In reality all console manufacturers control access to their devkits tightly primarily in order to extract money from the devs/publishers (as they have no direct income from retail). To get a devkit, and to be allowed to publish, you have to sign a contract giving them x% of the take. Keeping the quality high is a concern obviously, as too much crap can endanger your brand, but here "quality" is usually more about reliability and political correctness than "quality" in terms of design or innovation.
Apple do the same thing, except they do have direct income from retail as they own the only store. So their upfront take from devs is much smaller ($100). This encourages more devs to take part, as the barrier to entry is lower. However they still approve everything before it goes out, so they still have the opportunity to enforce whatever definition of "quality" they choose. Which seems variable at best :)
Any artist who wants to self publish/promote is quite free to do so. However, most choose to sign with a label (major or otherwise). They've made their choice - they've willingly handed over their copyrights (at least in most cases, not all contracts involve transfer of copyrights) so why should they get them back now just because you or I don't particularly like the RIAA? We've got nothing to do with it, it's a business deal between the label and the artist - entered into willingly by both sides for the benefit of both sides.
Because you can charge a higher interest rate. Yes, some will default, but you'll get more from those who don't, so you're still in the money. If you're good at deciding who to lend to you can make a lot of money that way (not just homeloans, any credit situation).
My impression (and I may be misinformed here) was that the majority of these loans are going bad because people were given more than they could really afford, using a short-term ARM with a big uptick to make the payments look low initially. Now I might be out of line, but when signing something as important as a mortgage, isn't it really a good idea to understand it? The "truth in lending" papers are pretty comprehensive and explain exactly what an ARM is and what it means, as well as things like balloon payments. I know I had to sign many disclaimers indicating I had read the sheets and understood them, that my payments weren't fixed, etc.
Sure where there was upselling & fraud the brokers should be held accountable, but there's responsibility on the part of the borrower too, claiming to be too stupid to understand simple math is a pretty poor excuse in my book.