It’s a really strange feeling, what you read in sci-fi stories coming true. First they made it possible to generate believable images purely out of bits and pixels. And now you can create a complete animation just with a movie script.
I have stumbled upon STATE via sjjh today. Check out the demo.
I wonder what will be possible next? Hopefully not immortality. There are too many cool things to discover before.
There is a discussion going on about founding The Pirate Party in TürkiyeTurkish. Serdar Kuzuloğlu recently said what if there was a tax on sharing?Turkish. The idea is basically you pay a fixed amount of tax for the content you share, regardless of the amount or if you share at all.
This might sound nice at first. If you are pirating music, movies or whatever, and feel guilty, this way you can say I'm paying my tax, therefore my conscience is clear. Pirating is suddenly legit, content is finally free as in free speech. Moreover there is a good sum of money in the Piracy Tax pool now. Yay! We saved the music industry (or content producers in general)! No, you didn’t. You just eased your conscience.
Let’s get real. Suppose you passed the bill of Piracy Tax at the parliament and a good number of people are paying this tax. That’s just one part of the equation. How will this money be distributed? What will determine the relative share between artists? Do we need distributors anymore? Do we even need producers anymore? And most importantly when you cap the total amount of earnings, will this have any negative effects on creativity? And finally which problem exactly is this Piracy Tax solving?
In the comments of Serdar Kuzuloğlu’s post, several people stated that it should be trivial to gather reliable statistics on downloads. This is not true at all. Even if there was a single distributor (I hope we agree this is undesirable) there will be statistical errors. No system is 100% reliable. But HTTP, i.e. web sites are especially not suitable for transactional operations. Aside from this fact, there will likely be a dozen of services. Are you just planning on adding the figures to calculate the final share? How about the differences in these services’ reach? Don’t you think simply adding the figures makes the system easy to game?
Something everybody seems to forget is there will be always piracy a.k.a P2P1. It would take you to the wrong conclusion to assume everybody is the same. Not everybody is using Windows, not everybody has Flash, there are even people who doesn’t have a graphical browser. Do you even know what a text browser is?2 It is not wise to ignore these people because they are the minority. These people are Internet residents, like it or not you are just tourists. They have practically invented the Internet. So please don’t make the mistake of ignoring the possible effects of technologies like tor and the culture of FLOSS.
In any case, statistical errors are unavoidable. I would suggest 3% is an acceptable error margin. Then what happens to the independent artist or the small production company that should have 0.25% and ends up having 0.025% share? Is this fair now? The pirate tax pool would likely benefit the big players and crush the independents. Big players have already been employing portfolio management strategies, independents just can’t do that. It is naive to think Piracy Tax could sweep so called low-quality productions away and elevate finer artists. It will be exactly the opposite.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it. (George Bernard Shaw)
Piracy Tax will severe the already severed bonds between the artists (the producers of art) and us (the consumers) even more. When we buy a DVD or CD it is not just bread on the tables. It is also sending the message “I like what you do. Here, I even choose to give my hard earned money willingly to support your art”. Emphasis on willingly and supporting art. It’s not a passive action like listening to the radio. You (consumer) take a conscious step. Your contributions are small materially, but it should mean something to the artist even at the individual level. We need art. It is not just listening to music or whatever. But we need art to compete in the neverending race of civilization. No art, no culture. No culture, no civilization. Lack of civilization is inevitable slavery. So, we need to learn to support our artists willingly and directly. Piracy Tax is an obstacle for this social goal.
What about opting-out? If I opted out will I still be able to use legal download services? If I am not allowed to opt out but I continue pirating3 your download statistics will be further skewed. If this is being done to free the content then why do we have to give up our freedom4. If this is being done to increase the profits of content industry… Well, then it makes sense.
If the free market is a bad idea, why don’t we shift the whole economy to a controlled market? With pirate tax in effect, content industry’s income is not only centralized but falls under government control. The government controls the art. I don’t like that idea. Art should be free. In short I don’t think Piracy Tax is the way to go.
I have been thinking hard about Pirate Party and the problem of piracy. The question is not what should we do about piracy? Unless you want to treat the symptoms. The question is how will content industry adapt to the information age? We adapted to information age quite well, didn’t we? Why can’t they do the same? I don’t want to believe they are so stupid that they don’t really know how. As far as I can understand they don’t want to change. Because change has a price. And they don’t want to pay. They want us to pay the price for them stagnating like that. Let’s stop beating around the bush and see it as it is.
Smart artists are already making the move. They let you download their movies and songs for free, and find other channels of monetization. Lots of concerts for example. Not necessarily huge stadium concerts. If you take all those middlemen out of the equation you don’t have to be all that popular. All in all, it is much better than continuously whine about piracy.
My proposal is not to engage ourselves with Piracy Tax5. There has to be a better solution. At least a solution that doesn’t necessarily make big players more powerful than they are. Let’s support far-sighted artists who take the steps to adapt new conditions for now. And continue to discuss alternatives.
1: I know piracy doesn’t equal to P2P. It is possible to share content legally via P2P networks. Also P2P is not the only channel you can distribute pirate content. I just think they are interchangeable in the context of this post.
2: It does matter. Let’s not go to the extreme. It would be a waste of time and energy for me to even subscribe to a web based service. Torrents are much easier and flexible for me. And I have a graphical browser with Flash capability.
3: See 2 above.
4: Money can buy freedom, any objections?
5: I would like to remind those who would suggest Piracy Tax as a temporary solution; laws might end up being in effect for too long.
This list is somewhat specific to Django and #django channel on freenode.net.
Psychic support is what people are looking for when they expect others to just know their development environment and their code. If one doesn’t supply enough information on the problem, no matter how good a hacker the person on the other end of the conversation, it becomes a silly guessing game. So the following list is actually about avoiding psychic support and similar situations.
competency. It’s unkind to try testing people whether they are worthy of your question or not. This’ll only decrease your chances to get an answer.you-dont-need-to-know-that attitude. If you know so much, why are you asking here?one) line, use a pasting service.Traceback header. Django is civilized.1: Some of us have work to do you know. 
2: Reasonable depends on the number of messages and the number of joins/leaves. In my opinion you should wait 5 minutes at least.
3: Use manage.py shell command to enter the Django shell.
A regular surfer might not have proper netiquette. It is desirable, but I wouldn’t blame her if she makes something inappropriate. Learning rules and conventions of Internet takes time. As you get more and more exposed to different communities and tools and situations, you should pick it up.
An Internet startup however is a completely different story. If you are doing business online you are supposed to know what you can and can not do. You can’t SPAM for instance. You just can’t. There’s no excuse for such an act from Internet companies. Correcting such mistakes is marginally harder than correcting technical mistakes. Once people mark you evil, it is painful to fix.
Here’s a summary what happened between a Turkish startup CVyolla.com and me last week. They are service that send your CV’s to companies.
This may not sound extraordinary, since that’s what they do. But I don’t have a corporate account with them, or any other kind of membership. I might have visited their homepage a couple of times, that doesn’t count as a sign up, does it? So CVyolla.com is SPAMming people.
I noticed a username (my email address) and a login address at the bottom of this message. So I thought I should check it out1.
Before I could log in, I had to request my password via forgot my password link. I couldn’t possibly remember a password that I have never created, could I? It became clear once I logged in (see image below). Company name Muhuk, WTF? CVyolla.com is creating accounts on your behalf to inflate their company portfolio. This is not just uncool, this is immoral. Shame on you CVyolla.com.
CVyolla.com Stealing My Identity
I have never signed up in your service, I have never accepted your terms of service. How impudent of you to think you can just create a mock account on my behalf and start sending stuff to my personal e-mail!
Despite things being clear enough, I wanted to hear the story from their side. Maybe there has been a mistake of some sort. Or maybe they would understand what they have been doing is wrong. I would be writing a completely different post today if they had just accepted both SPAMming and identity theft were wrong and assured me that they’d stop doing it. But, no. Instead they have sent me some nonsense reply. Before I get into the contents of this reply, there’s one very important issue with this reply.
Just as many other Internet companies, CVyolla.com was lacking the decency to reply my message with a real name and a real e-mail address. See, I am sending you with my real name, as a person, naturally I expect to communicate with a person. It is simply rude to reply your visitors/customers with a faceless nameless e-mail. If you are having difficulty to figure out how to configure your e-mails, drop me a line and I’ll try to help, seriously. Show some respect to your correspondents.
OK, back to the contents of CVyolla.com’s reply to my inquiry, faceless representative says:
Let’s see;
I wish CVyolla.com handled this a little better. If you don’t manage your online conversations professionally, or if you try the same management strategy with offline customer relations, you fail. If you SPAM, you fail. If you tell people crap like opt-out, you fail. If you make up accounts on other people/entities without their consent, you fail big time. I hope they correct these wrongs soon.
PS: Just as I was preparing to submit this post, I got another CV from CVyolla.com. So much from freezing my account upon my request, eh! Mega-fail, if you ask me.
1: Having a terrible memory, I though for a second, maybe I had signed up once and then I forgot about it. But that’s not the case, read on.
2: I don’t display this e-mail in my work site, it is only displayed in my personal site. Where there is no mention to work related stuff.
3: This e-mail is not mentioned in any job listing.
4: Again, it’s not listed in such places.
I met the founders of kariyerGENÇ last week. It is job search service for new graduates. During our conversation Sinan asked told me I should sign up too. I must say I’ve found it flattering that he considered me young. So I signed up. The service is built around the main value of building your CV online easily. OK, let’s build a CV. Aren’t CV’s fun.
I have edited and edited and edited… Finally, last section; proficiencies. Huh, which proficiencies could a new graduate possibly have? Let’s make it the last part.1 I scrolled through the dropdown of options to find Python and Django. No Python! Unsurprisingly no Django. But wait, the list doesn’t have Ruby, RoR, LISP either. But they included some programming languages I have never heard of; like HTML. What is this HTML programming language?
Basically I was left with the choices of Java and C. I couldn’t select them because neither is my main programming language. I can only select them after I select Python. So I left that section blank and sent them a contact form thing. It’s not cool not having an e-mail in your contact us section guys. If you are concerned about SPAM there are ways to evade e-mail harvesting bots. Please don’t be afraid of people who prefer using e-mail. I got a timely reply. From a nobody. Again, not cool. I am person and I’d like to communicate with another person. It’s OK to publish a generic e-mail on the site. But the reply should come from a employee e-mail and contain the employees name. I give you my name and e-mail when I contact you, right? You should have the decency to do the same when you reply.
Anyway, the reply I got was brief. In short it said “OK, we’ll do it.” Nice. Except they didn’t. I checked yesterday and they still had HTML programming language and not Python. Oh, well. So much for the orange ties. I deleted my account for the reason of being totally useless. It could be useful feedback if you asked why, when your users delete their accounts, you know?
In fact kariyerGENÇ is not doing it wrong. They’re just taking a picture of The Industry. The picture is correct, The Industry is doing it wrong. But that’s another topic for discussion2. What was disappointing for me was the lack of agile in kariyerGENÇ. I don’t mean agile methodology here, I mean agile technology. Technology and infrastructure that changes and adopts fast. For instance; how long would it take to make the change in a Django project? Yes, Django. The framework most people ignore or haven’t even heard of. You would just log-in the admin, add a new proficiency, save, optionally run a custom management command. 10 minutes at most.
It doesn’t matter much even if they add new proficiencies now. First of all a fixed list of options doesn’t work well where there are virtually unlimited possibilities. Second of all that dropdown is hideous, and increasing the number of options will only make it worse. Instead they should just let people tag themselves, WordPress style. Django-tagging does that automagically. You know, Django, the framework you don’t list in your proficiencies.
The language for web development in Türkiye is PHP. Java is on the rise, in a couple of years it will be as popular as PHP. I am not kidding myself; these two and that horrible propriety thing that I don’t even want to name are industry standart in the world. But they also use other technologies. At least they experiment. At least they know that other alternatives exist. Here those minorities doesn’t even exist.
I frequently hear people saying “Python is a toy language“. Because for them there are serious, proper programming languages for grown-ups and serious, proper frameworks for grown-ups as Cal Henderson said …and everything else is a toy. You can’t use Python/Django for anything professional. Well, Markafoni did, with much success.
Think about it for a second; if what the majority have generally chosen the best, wouldn’t we live in a better society & environment than this? Just think about it.
Meanwhile I’ll be playing with my toys. 
1: Actually kariyerGENÇ got it right here; in reality most of the new graduates have no proficiency. So, they’ll pick I know Word and Excel here even though they aren’t really proficient.
2: …and flame wars.
