Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Sony is a Profit-Oriented Corporation (Score 1) 507

There is no Supply vs Demand here, the supply of digital items is effectively infinite, so the idea of automated price increases based on such doesn't make sense.

And some people might have rushed out to buy it because of the publicity her death generated ie this is the first time they've heard of her, or they heard some of her music they wanted to on one of the news clips.

Comment Re:Sony is a Profit-Oriented Corporation (Score 1) 507

There's a problem with capitalist theory though , people aren't rational agents with perfect knowledge (the vast majority of people will never even hear about this). If they were things like market dominance and regulatory capture couldn't happen. This is how capitalism , as it is practiced, can actually reward unethical behavior.

Comment Re:Curious (Score 1) 445

Not really, was tired when I wrote that,so I could easily be wrong about why.

But starting at both ends won't optimize that algorithm in the general case, it is the most efficient algorithm known for the task it solves (there are optimizations for Djikstra's Algorithm but they are for reduced classes like spase graphs, or are heuristic and thus aren't guaranteed to find an optimal solution).
 

Comment Re:Fragile development (Score 1) 445

I think the problem there is the "on Friday" bit. "Good enough" can be any threshold you set, including rigorous security and maintainability thresholds where necessary, the arbitrary deadline isn't a part of the Agile process any more than its part of the Waterfall Model.

Also I'd have to say your answer is a bit flawed, a project that is 6000 lines of code shouldn't have a documentation trail the size of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. That's the attitude that drives people away from documentation heavy models, and its one of the great flaws with University teaching of Software Engineering, they require you to do rigorous documentation of a toy task, so the only thing it teaches people is that rigorous documentation is a pointless nuisance and waste of time.

Essentially appropriate documentation and testing for the task is the correct answer, you don't want to little or to much. If you're developing a life support system for hospitals everything should be documented and tested to the utmost extent.

Comment Re:Content Creators Need to Assert Control (Score 1) 254

You've got the analogue conversion problem their for everything but interactive media. People can just record the clear text version on their display device.

You've got the key and lock problem for interactive media (that doesn't do a significant chunk of its processing server side and only send the results), ie you're trying to stop someone from accessing the content (making a copy) who you want to be able access the content (viewing it).

Encryption is great for stopping copying by intermediaries but as for stopping copying by the receiving party, the strength of the encryption is irrelevant (they have the key), you have to instead rely on the strength of your obfuscation of the key (and perhaps the encryption methodology).

Comment Re:Setup your own DNS server and point his PC at i (Score 1) 254

Or he's figuring that if enough people regard a law as illegitimate and refuse to obey it (or aren't aware of it and its not intuitively obvious) , it becomes unenforceable whether or not they all deliberately try to get caught (like what happened with the Prohibition, where instead of stopping alcohol sales it created an impressive criminal market because people weren't impressed by the law).

Pretty much every English-as-a-first-language person on the planet is guilty of infringing on Happy Birthday, see how well the enforcement campaign on that one would go over.

Comment Re:College does not tech the right skills and to m (Score 1) 373

Probably because a real job in CS isn't what you (or a lot of CS graduates) think it is. CS is not a different way of saying Software Engineering. CS is about how computing works and more efficient ways to do it (like improving the algorithmic efficiency of sorting), not about how to efficiently and effectively produce 1 000 000 lines of code dedicated to special case X (e.g. flying a plane). Some fields are like that, there's a difference between being a physicist (perhaps a mathematician might be more accurate even in some contexts) and an engineer too.

Comment Re:Scale (Score 2) 464

This is true. Most people only avoid cheap wines (relative to their budget) in situations where there is social pressure to do so (like being at a restaurant or party with people they don't know), when buying wine to drink privately or in the company of friends of a similar social class people tend to buy cheap wine and its not unusual for them to buy it by the box.

Slashdot Top Deals

Happiness is twin floppies.

Working...