"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing."[4] named after Nathan Poe who formulated it on christianforums.com in 2005.[5] Although it originally referred to creationism, the scope later widened to religious fundamentalism.
but when I'm half-way through and the requirements drastically change or I finish and I have to make a 20-page step by step test sheet for someone to follow who doesn't want to learn more beyond the bare minimum of making a program work, or when I have to sit through multiple meetings with the customer because they don't even know what they want the program to do I get annoyed and like my job a little less.
there are guys who just sit in a corner and code all day. they live in india and make $10 a day. you want to make more than that, you have to do more than that. that means developing and using your people skills.
i mostly agree. the IT world is in a state of flux, but it's not anything new. IT is perpetually in flux because technology itself is perpetually in flux.
For IT professionals, this has got to be confusing and frustrating. You train a lifetime for a career and you're now caught between two worlds.
this is where i disagree. i have been in the IT trenches for 13 years and i have already re-learned everything at least three times. all technology has a shelf life.
but you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. routing and wiring problems to the mainframe have been replaced with firewall and plugin problems for web apps. irq conflicts were replaced with dll conflicts, which were replaced with java/.net/citrix versioning conflicts. virtualization is everything you hate about real computing, plus virtualization problems. in other words, technology will always need care and feeding, which means there will always be IT types.
sure, more and more of the hands on hardware type stuff will be replaced with remote software/service type stuff, but at the end of the day, your average knowledge worker will always need technical support for stuff that is beyond the scope of his or her expertise.
i don't think significant change will happen in IT until businesses decentralize things a bit more by moving away from traditional departments and start using more contractors and consultants in purely project oriented roles.
if more of the workforce moves away from w2 type work to 1099 type consulting, IT in general will move that way as well.
mobility and cloud computing could mean fewer people working in corporate office parks on assets issued by corporate, and more people working in arbitrary locations on personally owned equipment. that could mean that instead of working for the IT department you end up being a consultant that gets hired by consultants to fix problems.
but really, all that means is that more remote and mobile work will mean more remote and mobile support.
Furthermore, while the two may serve as similar goods to one another, if Garth Brooks chooses to charge for his music, if I am unwilling to pay for music, I must instead listen to Randy Travis' free music. I must not, however, insist that the correct cost of Garth Brooks' music should be zero and download it through unauthorized channels.
none of that matters. the simple fact is that any music/movie/book that has a following will be made available for free regardless of what anyone wants, says, or believes.
another simple fact is that this distribution cannot be stopped. morality has nothing to do with it.
it's never going to be more difficult to copy bits than it is right now. with every bit that gets copied, the process gets easier.
that's just how the world works. if artists want to make money they have to change the way they do business and start selling what people are willing to buy.
i know you would prefer that we just pretend that the internet and file sharing do not exist, but they do. file sharing exists. it's easy, it's fun, and it's impossible to stop.
no amount of whining or moral hand wringing is going to change that fact.
that means if I am on a street corner, and I talk to someone and POINT to another street corner and say "there are drug dealers there", that means *I* am guilty of the same crime, right?
yes. absolutely. in fact, pointing to drug dealers is far worse than the actual dealing of drugs because while there may be thousands of anonymous drug dealers that are hard to track down, there is only one you and you are calling attention to yourself, which makes you a convenient target.
especially as new jobs are created through people who can now better afford services for web based businesses.
or how about the jobs created by people running those businesses. even if these new "web based businesses" employ only the owner, those owners will still need to buy groceries, pay electric bills, have cars serviced, have packages shipped and delivered, have books books kept, and roofs repaired.
helping businesses compete, especially small ones, is just about always a net win for the economy.
Not really, right now the companies pay BIG $$$ to be in cities, they won't be willing to pay as much if they aren't exclusive. So the City would be lose money evein if more people did subscribe
i disagree. more competition means more subscriptions, that means more users, more applications, more build outs, and more equipment sold. that translates to more businesses (start ups, small businesses, and more support businesses) which means more jobs and more tax revenues, both from businesses and employees of those businesses.
creating jobs grows tax revenues and the overall economy because people with jobs by goods and services.
give a politician a way to create good jobs, and he will see more campaign contributions from ordinary taxpayers than any corporation could contribute.
The real purpose is to get around the right of first sale, and destroy the used game market.
nah, pure downloads will destroy the used game market. steam is a great example, and the 4th generation of consoles probably won't even bother with discs.
The funny thing is about that, and I'm sure it's true, is that when you go to the major torrent search engines and see all the latest "games" posted for download 95% of them are all console games... ie Nintendo DS, Xbox360, PS3 etc.
they want you to stop playing PC games, where each game requires it's own crack, and start playing console games where you crack the console and every game is instantly cracked.
the other fun thing about cracked consoles is that given enough time, an emulator comes out and you don't even need the console anymore :-)
People use to aspire to getting label deals. Now they aspire to make a middle class income by working social media and selling stuff other than their recorded music. Just as most weren't going to get label deals, now most won't make enough to live on. A band of four needs at a minimum $100,000 to $120,000 a year to pay everyone $20,000 a year and have something left over to pay all band expenses.
so why not reduce "band expenses"? why not figure out how to live on middle class incomes? why not figure out how to build a community around your content and leverage that to make money?
and what's wrong with middle class incomes? every kid who wants to be an athlete, actor, writer, or musician gets told by his or her parents that they should have something to fall back on in case they don't make it. parents tell you that because those professions are crap shoots.
it sounds like you are stuck with that lottery mentality that prevents a lot of music types from seeing the writing on the wall.
outside of the world of showbiz, working for a living sucks too. sure it's a bit safer when you have a real job, and it's easier to make those middle class wages, but real jobs, even the truly great ones, are not much fun.
if i could make $20k a year doing something i loved, i would sacrifice pretty much everything so i could do it. if i could work 9-5 and spend weekends traveling and meeting people that loved me and my work, i would do whatever it took to make that a reality.
so rather than lament the fact that the average income for a musician is falling, why not help musicians figure out how to make that money go further, by reducing costs, or help them do things that generate more income, like connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy.
Counter Example (author): Cory Doctorow. Every book he releases is available for FREE (gratis, not libre) online the moment it's done. This has worked out incredibly well for him, and he often describes how other authors could benefit from the same activity.
i have read all of his electronic versions and have given physical copies to my friends and family as gifts, "little brother" in particular.
by reading his books for free, i have purchased something like a half dozen dead tree versions of his works.
rick dakan is another author whom i have read the electronic versions and have then given the physical copies as gifts to another person. i bought my copy of his third novel "blackhat blues" directly from dakan at a hacker convention with an autograph without even bothering with the digital version.
When do the Media Companies stop Routing around what the customer wants, and change? If the "Pirates" give up, both loose (Media looses a distribution platform, and a sub-culture wrapped around their products). If Big Media gives up, they will eventually become popular again. Bonus if they find a way to make money off of the "Pirates", while they "appear" to be giving up...
it's a war of attrition. both sides wail away until one side is out of resources.
problem is the media companies' resources are finite. they only have so much money to invest in these games before it affects their profits.
the other problem is the p2p side is using ulimited resources. they primarily on time and talent.
when framed that way, the question is simple: how much money can the media companies waste before they just start giving people what they want?
They pirate stuff because it's easy, it's safe, and they don't need to know anything other than how to turn on their computers. and download utorrent.
people just downloaded napster and napster got shut down. then more people just downloaded kazaa and that got shut down. then more people downloaded utorrent...
with each wave of shutdowns, the tools improve. the centralized system that napster and kazaa relied on was eliminated. distributed hash tables and magnet URI's have all but eliminated the hosting of torrent files.
there is no "hard work", the tools just improve and things return to normal and then usage increases because each time the tools improve, more people use them.
bit torrent moves way more stuff to way more people than napster ever could and the thing that replaces BT will move even more.
It's like trying to stop the incoming tide with a chain link fence. Every now and then the fence still needs maintenance. Doesn't do it any good though.
i like your analogy better than my own. i always likened fighting p2p to playing chicken with a train. your opponent isn't going to alter its course, indeed it lacks the capability to do so even if it wanted to. even if you win, you just get plowed under.
So an alien race that's 1000 years ahead of our technology may do an excellent job at creating a very cheap computer system that can easily and very accurately and completely analyze our Internet and our systems with no problems at all. But because their own systems are so much more sophisticated and advanced, that same technology would do a very poor job of analyzing their own infrastructure and methodologies of circumventing their analytical technologies. So it's a double edged sword.
also, said technology would soon fall into the hands of the people that big brother was trying to monitor. at that point, the advantage falls back to the "insurgents".
On the post: Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures Using Over 1,000 Shell Companies To Hide Patent Shakedown
1,110 shell companies? *yawn*
On the post: Sarcasm Wars: Proprietary SarcMark Gets Some Sarcastic Open Competition
Re: Pointless
"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing."[4] named after Nathan Poe who formulated it on christianforums.com in 2005.[5] Although it originally referred to creationism, the scope later widened to religious fundamentalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law_%28religious_fundamentalism%29#N.E2.80.9 3Q
On the post: Do IT People Hate Their Jobs?
Re:
there are guys who just sit in a corner and code all day. they live in india and make $10 a day. you want to make more than that, you have to do more than that. that means developing and using your people skills.
On the post: Do IT People Hate Their Jobs?
Re: End of an era
For IT professionals, this has got to be confusing and frustrating. You train a lifetime for a career and you're now caught between two worlds.
this is where i disagree. i have been in the IT trenches for 13 years and i have already re-learned everything at least three times. all technology has a shelf life.
but you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. routing and wiring problems to the mainframe have been replaced with firewall and plugin problems for web apps. irq conflicts were replaced with dll conflicts, which were replaced with java/.net/citrix versioning conflicts. virtualization is everything you hate about real computing, plus virtualization problems. in other words, technology will always need care and feeding, which means there will always be IT types.
sure, more and more of the hands on hardware type stuff will be replaced with remote software/service type stuff, but at the end of the day, your average knowledge worker will always need technical support for stuff that is beyond the scope of his or her expertise.
i don't think significant change will happen in IT until businesses decentralize things a bit more by moving away from traditional departments and start using more contractors and consultants in purely project oriented roles.
if more of the workforce moves away from w2 type work to 1099 type consulting, IT in general will move that way as well.
mobility and cloud computing could mean fewer people working in corporate office parks on assets issued by corporate, and more people working in arbitrary locations on personally owned equipment. that could mean that instead of working for the IT department you end up being a consultant that gets hired by consultants to fix problems.
but really, all that means is that more remote and mobile work will mean more remote and mobile support.
On the post: Confusing Economic Factors With Moral Ones; Explaining Economics Is Not Anti-Intellectual
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
none of that matters. the simple fact is that any music/movie/book that has a following will be made available for free regardless of what anyone wants, says, or believes.
another simple fact is that this distribution cannot be stopped. morality has nothing to do with it.
it's never going to be more difficult to copy bits than it is right now. with every bit that gets copied, the process gets easier.
that's just how the world works. if artists want to make money they have to change the way they do business and start selling what people are willing to buy.
i know you would prefer that we just pretend that the internet and file sharing do not exist, but they do. file sharing exists. it's easy, it's fun, and it's impossible to stop.
no amount of whining or moral hand wringing is going to change that fact.
On the post: UK Court Finds That Simply Linking To Infringing Videos Is Not Infringing
Re: So, by that logic..
yes. absolutely. in fact, pointing to drug dealers is far worse than the actual dealing of drugs because while there may be thousands of anonymous drug dealers that are hard to track down, there is only one you and you are calling attention to yourself, which makes you a convenient target.
i'm glad that we finally understand one another.
On the post: Incumbents Blocking Broadband Stimulus Efforts Because They Don't Like Competition
Re: Re:
or how about the jobs created by people running those businesses. even if these new "web based businesses" employ only the owner, those owners will still need to buy groceries, pay electric bills, have cars serviced, have packages shipped and delivered, have books books kept, and roofs repaired.
helping businesses compete, especially small ones, is just about always a net win for the economy.
On the post: Would A Moron In A Hurry Be Confused By The Difference Between A High School And A Pickup Truck?
Re: I know! I know!
On the post: Or Will Broadband Competition Look Like.... Google?
Re: Re: Re: Googles roadblock
i disagree. more competition means more subscriptions, that means more users, more applications, more build outs, and more equipment sold. that translates to more businesses (start ups, small businesses, and more support businesses) which means more jobs and more tax revenues, both from businesses and employees of those businesses.
creating jobs grows tax revenues and the overall economy because people with jobs by goods and services.
give a politician a way to create good jobs, and he will see more campaign contributions from ordinary taxpayers than any corporation could contribute.
On the post: BioShock 2, Loaded Up With Annoying DRM That Pisses Off Fans, Cracked Immediately Anyway
Re: DRM
nah, pure downloads will destroy the used game market. steam is a great example, and the 4th generation of consoles probably won't even bother with discs.
On the post: BioShock 2, Loaded Up With Annoying DRM That Pisses Off Fans, Cracked Immediately Anyway
Re: Re: PC games.
they want you to stop playing PC games, where each game requires it's own crack, and start playing console games where you crack the console and every game is instantly cracked.
the other fun thing about cracked consoles is that given enough time, an emulator comes out and you don't even need the console anymore :-)
On the post: NBC Continues To Do The Exact Wrong Thing When It Comes To The Olympics Online
Re: Sigh
i noticed in 2008 when all these stupid olympics torrents polluted my RSS feeds.
On the post: The New Middleclass Musicians: I Fight Dragons
Re: There have always been working musicians
so why not reduce "band expenses"? why not figure out how to live on middle class incomes? why not figure out how to build a community around your content and leverage that to make money?
and what's wrong with middle class incomes? every kid who wants to be an athlete, actor, writer, or musician gets told by his or her parents that they should have something to fall back on in case they don't make it. parents tell you that because those professions are crap shoots.
it sounds like you are stuck with that lottery mentality that prevents a lot of music types from seeing the writing on the wall.
outside of the world of showbiz, working for a living sucks too. sure it's a bit safer when you have a real job, and it's easier to make those middle class wages, but real jobs, even the truly great ones, are not much fun.
if i could make $20k a year doing something i loved, i would sacrifice pretty much everything so i could do it. if i could work 9-5 and spend weekends traveling and meeting people that loved me and my work, i would do whatever it took to make that a reality.
so rather than lament the fact that the average income for a musician is falling, why not help musicians figure out how to make that money go further, by reducing costs, or help them do things that generate more income, like connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy.
On the post: Research Shows Unauthorized Digital Books Leads To 'Significant Jump In Sales'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Gravy
i have read all of his electronic versions and have given physical copies to my friends and family as gifts, "little brother" in particular.
by reading his books for free, i have purchased something like a half dozen dead tree versions of his works.
rick dakan is another author whom i have read the electronic versions and have then given the physical copies as gifts to another person. i bought my copy of his third novel "blackhat blues" directly from dakan at a hacker convention with an autograph without even bothering with the digital version.
On the post: Italy Blocks The Pirate Bay Yet Again
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
it's a war of attrition. both sides wail away until one side is out of resources.
problem is the media companies' resources are finite. they only have so much money to invest in these games before it affects their profits.
the other problem is the p2p side is using ulimited resources. they primarily on time and talent.
when framed that way, the question is simple: how much money can the media companies waste before they just start giving people what they want?
On the post: Italy Blocks The Pirate Bay Yet Again
Re: Re:
people just downloaded napster and napster got shut down. then more people just downloaded kazaa and that got shut down. then more people downloaded utorrent...
with each wave of shutdowns, the tools improve. the centralized system that napster and kazaa relied on was eliminated. distributed hash tables and magnet URI's have all but eliminated the hosting of torrent files.
there is no "hard work", the tools just improve and things return to normal and then usage increases because each time the tools improve, more people use them.
bit torrent moves way more stuff to way more people than napster ever could and the thing that replaces BT will move even more.
On the post: Italy Blocks The Pirate Bay Yet Again
Re:
i like your analogy better than my own. i always likened fighting p2p to playing chicken with a train. your opponent isn't going to alter its course, indeed it lacks the capability to do so even if it wanted to. even if you win, you just get plowed under.
On the post: Appeals Court Says Internet Content Should Be Held To Standards Of Strictest Jurisdiction
Re: Canadian law and jurisdiction
WHAT ever you do where ever you do it canadian law applies
the reverse is also true. for example: if you die in canada you also die in the real world.
On the post: Appeals Court Says Internet Content Should Be Held To Standards Of Strictest Jurisdiction
Re: Community standards
decent people shouldn't be using the internet. they would be happier doing something else.
On the post: You Can't Get Rid Of Anonymity Online, Even If You Wanted To
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
let's try this again:
So an alien race that's 1000 years ahead of our technology may do an excellent job at creating a very cheap computer system that can easily and very accurately and completely analyze our Internet and our systems with no problems at all. But because their own systems are so much more sophisticated and advanced, that same technology would do a very poor job of analyzing their own infrastructure and methodologies of circumventing their analytical technologies. So it's a double edged sword.
also, said technology would soon fall into the hands of the people that big brother was trying to monitor. at that point, the advantage falls back to the "insurgents".
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