Well, the way my employer does it -- and I'm another of the lucky ones, for the most part -- is by whether the applications I deliver have the features they need. It's not as simple as "number of widgets," I agree, but it's also not impossible. It does, however, require having a boss who a) understands the field, and b) pays attention to what his employees are actually doing. The problem is that a lot of managerial types (particularly those with nothing but "management education" who think they learned to "manage" any employee in any field, without actually knowing anything about the job itself) are what we used to call in the service the "EBR's" -- "echelons beyond reality."
I agree that it's ludicrous, but it's how a lot of employers think. Your wife is very very lucky that she has an employer who looks at what she actually gets done, not the amount of time she spends; there are a whole lot of employers out there who would look at her time vs. her predecessors' and conclude that she was only working 57% as hard.
In the last three years, profits at the seven largest companies in Silicon Valley by market value have increased by an average of more than 500 percent while Santa Clara County employment has declined to 767,600, from 787,200. During the previous economic recovery, between 1995 and 1997, the county, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, added more than 82,800 jobs.
And this is happening all over the place, not just in Silicon Valley, and in all industries, not just IT. In other words, folks, whatever you call the current economic situation, it is not a recovery. Traditional aggregate measures like size of GDP, or GDP per capita, or total corporate income -- and the changes in them that have traditionally been used to define words like "depression," "recession," "recovery," and "boom" -- are meaningless if the number and quality of jobs don't keep pace. It really doesn't matter how much the executives and boardmembers are making. If the increased profits don't translate into good jobs at good pay for regular workers, nobody's recovering a damn thing.
File sharing also, however, falls under Section 8 Clause 8 of the same constitution, wherein authors are guaranteed exclusive right to their writings for a limited time.
No, it does not; because file sharing in and of itself has nothing to do at all with copyright. It may be the tool by which copyright is infringed, but by itself, it's simply an exercise of speech, which is protected. Do you see the distinction here?
Difference is though, right to software piracy isn't constitutionally protected like the right to bear arms is.
The Founding Fathers wrote:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
File sharing definitely falls under freedom of speech and press; an argument could also be made for freedom of assembly. "Piracy" is a specific application of file sharing, just as murder is a specific application of weapons -- the presumption built into the Constitution is that the right is worth protecting for its own sake, regardless of whether or not some people take advantage of the right to do bad things.
I wouldn't count on the Supreme Court even understanding what you just said, let alone give you a favorable ruling...
Oh come on. The Supremes may be tech-illiterate, but the GPL is a legal document, not a technical one. I'm sure people with the level of legal experience on the Supreme Court are capable of understanding both the GPL itself and its implications... in fact, quite possibly, they understand it a hell of a lot better than the average geek does. This doesn't make their decisions necessarily right, of course, but those decisions are unlikely to be founded in utter ignorance.
Well, I'll be damned -- that's a pretty dramatic difference. I stand by what I said about the potential speed of solid-state vs. mechanical memory; but obviously the flash engineers have a long way to go.
Oops, you're right. Not sure why I thought the flashback episode was the one called "Serenity" -- maybe because the ship was really the central character of that one?
Anyway. Yeah, the point is, that particular episode was hard to make sense of for anyone who hadn't seen at least a couple of preceding episodes, so it's too bad that that's the only one OP has seen in its entirety.
While I'm sure that there are a number of different engineering approaches underlying the development, it seems to me that one of the requirements for anything to be called "flash memory" is (or ought to be) that it doesn't require continuous power to maintain its data. I certainly hope they're not talking about battery-powered RAM, because I'd really hate to lose everything on my main drive just because a battery wore out.
My impression is that the speed of USB thumb drives and hard drives is about equivalent, which leads me to think that USB (even 2.0) is the bottleneck, not the drive itself. But determining this would take rigorous testing, of course. Certainly the potential speed of solid-state devices is much, much higher. The hoops that hard drive engineers have to jump through these days to get acceptable speed relative to the rest of the computer are just insane.
So far, the reaction hasn't been mockery, but rather interest and a degree of respect for Whedon and the fans for pulling it off.
A big part of it, I think, is that there isn't (yet, and hopefully won't be) the same cult-like display that the worst of the Star Trek crowd puts on (and which then turns into a stereotype of everyone who likes ST, regardless of whether or not they're fanatics.) You know, we're not seeing people having Firefly weddings and insisting that they have a Constitutional right to wear their brown coats at work and, for God's sake, getting cosmetic surgery to make them look more like characters on the show. As long as we don't display that degree of kookiness, I think it'll be all right.
Seriously, that was the first thing that came to mind. TFA claims that flash memory is "more robust" than hard drives -- that may be true in the sense that a flash chip can take more physical shock than a hard drive and still keep its data, but it definitely wasn't true in terms of capacity for repeated use, last time I checked. Has this changed recently? I mean, I'd absolutely love it if HD's could be replaced by flash memory with similar durability, but I'll take some convincing before I believe it.
The episode you saw (also titled Serenity, IIRC) was neither the worst nor the best of the series, but it happened to be one that required having watched a good deal of the series to really get into that particular storyline. This is a problem with a lot of Whedon's work, actually -- not a problem for serious fans, of course, but it does sometimes put off the more casual viewer. OTOH, the long, intricate story arcs in all of his series are one of the reasons the guy has so many dedicated fans, so it cuts both ways. He's telling stories, not episodes; if a story takes one episode to tell, that's great, but he'll also tell it in ten episodes if needed.
If you're willing to give Firefly another shot, I'd recommend finding someone who has the DVD boxed set, and watching the series premiere (the real premiere, the two-hour one, not the fairly mediocre episode that Fox actually showed first) and then, if you like it, watching the rest of the episodes in sequence.
What's so great about it? Well, for me, it's pretty much the same stuff I think is so great about all of Whedon's work to date: terrific dialogue, immensely likable characters, intricate storytelling, and a willingness both to use cliches as needed and then discard them the instant they're no longer useful. Buffy, Angel, and Firefly all managed to surprise me, repeatedly, just when I thought I was being led down a familiar path. Hardly any TV shows ever do that, and few enough movies.
It's the characters who make it work, ultimately. You may not always agree with them, or admire them, or even understand them, but you like them, and you care what happens to them. They're not archetypes; they are, even when they're fighting vampires or flying spaceships, people you feel like you could sit down and have a beer with. This is Whedon's great talent, and it's what keeps his fans coming back to his work.
Not sure if this answer is un-cult-like enough for you, but it's what I've got.;)
Oh, I'm sure he does know that, and that's fine; we're happy because we feel included and get a great movie, he's happy because we buy tickets to his movie, everybody wins. My point is that it feels a lot less cynical than the standard Hollywood formula of, "Okay, here's an action sequence for the guys, here's a romance subplot for the chicks, here's something cute for the kids, here's something dramatic for the critics..." etc.
FWIW, the impression I got wasn't that he'd lost his belief in the Alliance, but that he'd lost his belief in himself -- i.e., his whole purpose in life was to be scary-deadly-secret-agent-guy, and having failed in that, he "fell on his sword."
... and yeah, pretty much everything the article says is right. (How often does that happen?) The crowd was much less over the top than, say, the stereotypical Star Wars / Star Trek / LOTR opening night crowd; very few costumes. We were there to see the movie, and we did, and we walked out grinning from ear to ear. It's great stuff.
Oh, it's not perfect yet (lots of editing still to be done, I think) but it was still, in its unfinished form, the best movie I've seen in a long time. And the fact that Whedon et al. are actually paying attention to the fans -- treating us as part of the effort of making the movie instead of $TARGET_DEMOGRAPHIC -- is really damn cool.
It occurs to me that what's happening with Firefly/Serenity is very similar to what happened with Star Trek way back when. The fans basically kept alive what was originally considered a failed series for over ten years between the cancellation of the series and the greenlight for the first movie. We should count ourselves lucky that things moved faster this time around.
Anyway. This is some of the best storytelling you'll ever see on screen. Don't miss it.
Fair enough; I would argue, however, that free markets tend to evolve into corporate aristocracies, and as distasteful as it may be to ideologues, a reasonable level of government intervention is the only way to prevent this.
Bingo -- it's a matter of network effects. Hotspots are useful only for a small number of people who are willing and able to go to those hotspots to get their work done. Always-on, available-everywhere wifi (used in the generic sense, not meaning any specific flavor of 802.11) is useful to... well... everybody, because it encourages the adoption of the technology that makes it useful.
Cell phones only became a universally accepted technology once coverage was good enough that you could be assured of getting a signal in just about any urban or suburban area, and most rural ones as well. Going a bit farther back, I believe the same is true of TV, and before that, radio. It would be absurd to look at a small-scale experiment like this and conclude "municipal wifi doesn't work."
the corporations are concerned they do not need to do a mac port now their product is usable on the mac platform
Those corporations, I suspect, are the ones which currently don't offer Mac ports of their applications at all, or they do, offer only poorly-thought-out versions that look like their Windows counterparts. The people who put effort into developing good Mac apps will have no reason not to continue doing so.
Because it's politically incorrect it can't possibly be true?
No.
Because all the old bullshit ideas about men being inherently superior to women, whites inherently superior to blacks, etc., which right-wing airheads like to call "politically incorrect" to make themselves feel like Bold Rebels Against The Liberal System, have been disproven so many times that it is appropriate to be extremely skeptical whenever these ideas crop up again.
And because, as GP poster points out, the guy's from a business school, which means that he wimped out on real education. B-school is for people who want to call themselves educated without doing any real work.
here in Denver-metro I beleve the busses stop running at 10pm
In some outlying areas, that's true. In much of the city and metro area, it's 24/7. The buses don't run often late at night, it's true, but they do run.
WRT the larger issue: I really wish people would realize that public and private services are complementary. If everyone had to rely on privately owned vehicles (including taxis) to get where they're going, a lot of people couldn't get where they're going. Ditto if everyone had to rely on buses and trains. There is no reason except ideology that the two can't peacefully coexist; and this is as true of getting to the Moon as it is of getting across town.
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Well, the way my employer does it -- and I'm another of the lucky ones, for the most part -- is by whether the applications I deliver have the features they need. It's not as simple as "number of widgets," I agree, but it's also not impossible. It does, however, require having a boss who a) understands the field, and b) pays attention to what his employees are actually doing. The problem is that a lot of managerial types (particularly those with nothing but "management education" who think they learned to "manage" any employee in any field, without actually knowing anything about the job itself) are what we used to call in the service the "EBR's" -- "echelons beyond reality."
Heh. Good point.
I agree that it's ludicrous, but it's how a lot of employers think. Your wife is very very lucky that she has an employer who looks at what she actually gets done, not the amount of time she spends; there are a whole lot of employers out there who would look at her time vs. her predecessors' and conclude that she was only working 57% as hard.
In the last three years, profits at the seven largest companies in Silicon Valley by market value have increased by an average of more than 500 percent while Santa Clara County employment has declined to 767,600, from 787,200. During the previous economic recovery, between 1995 and 1997, the county, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, added more than 82,800 jobs.
And this is happening all over the place, not just in Silicon Valley, and in all industries, not just IT. In other words, folks, whatever you call the current economic situation, it is not a recovery. Traditional aggregate measures like size of GDP, or GDP per capita, or total corporate income -- and the changes in them that have traditionally been used to define words like "depression," "recession," "recovery," and "boom" -- are meaningless if the number and quality of jobs don't keep pace. It really doesn't matter how much the executives and boardmembers are making. If the increased profits don't translate into good jobs at good pay for regular workers, nobody's recovering a damn thing.
File sharing also, however, falls under Section 8 Clause 8 of the same constitution, wherein authors are guaranteed exclusive right to their writings for a limited time.
No, it does not; because file sharing in and of itself has nothing to do at all with copyright. It may be the tool by which copyright is infringed, but by itself, it's simply an exercise of speech, which is protected. Do you see the distinction here?
You wrote:
Difference is though, right to software piracy isn't constitutionally protected like the right to bear arms is.
The Founding Fathers wrote:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
File sharing definitely falls under freedom of speech and press; an argument could also be made for freedom of assembly. "Piracy" is a specific application of file sharing, just as murder is a specific application of weapons -- the presumption built into the Constitution is that the right is worth protecting for its own sake, regardless of whether or not some people take advantage of the right to do bad things.
I wouldn't count on the Supreme Court even understanding what you just said, let alone give you a favorable ruling...
... in fact, quite possibly, they understand it a hell of a lot better than the average geek does. This doesn't make their decisions necessarily right, of course, but those decisions are unlikely to be founded in utter ignorance.
Oh come on. The Supremes may be tech-illiterate, but the GPL is a legal document, not a technical one. I'm sure people with the level of legal experience on the Supreme Court are capable of understanding both the GPL itself and its implications
Well, I'll be damned -- that's a pretty dramatic difference. I stand by what I said about the potential speed of solid-state vs. mechanical memory; but obviously the flash engineers have a long way to go.
Oops, you're right. Not sure why I thought the flashback episode was the one called "Serenity" -- maybe because the ship was really the central character of that one?
Anyway. Yeah, the point is, that particular episode was hard to make sense of for anyone who hadn't seen at least a couple of preceding episodes, so it's too bad that that's the only one OP has seen in its entirety.
While I'm sure that there are a number of different engineering approaches underlying the development, it seems to me that one of the requirements for anything to be called "flash memory" is (or ought to be) that it doesn't require continuous power to maintain its data. I certainly hope they're not talking about battery-powered RAM, because I'd really hate to lose everything on my main drive just because a battery wore out.
My impression is that the speed of USB thumb drives and hard drives is about equivalent, which leads me to think that USB (even 2.0) is the bottleneck, not the drive itself. But determining this would take rigorous testing, of course. Certainly the potential speed of solid-state devices is much, much higher. The hoops that hard drive engineers have to jump through these days to get acceptable speed relative to the rest of the computer are just insane.
So far, the reaction hasn't been mockery, but rather interest and a degree of respect for Whedon and the fans for pulling it off.
A big part of it, I think, is that there isn't (yet, and hopefully won't be) the same cult-like display that the worst of the Star Trek crowd puts on (and which then turns into a stereotype of everyone who likes ST, regardless of whether or not they're fanatics.) You know, we're not seeing people having Firefly weddings and insisting that they have a Constitutional right to wear their brown coats at work and, for God's sake, getting cosmetic surgery to make them look more like characters on the show. As long as we don't display that degree of kookiness, I think it'll be all right.
Heh.
Seriously, that was the first thing that came to mind. TFA claims that flash memory is "more robust" than hard drives -- that may be true in the sense that a flash chip can take more physical shock than a hard drive and still keep its data, but it definitely wasn't true in terms of capacity for repeated use, last time I checked. Has this changed recently? I mean, I'd absolutely love it if HD's could be replaced by flash memory with similar durability, but I'll take some convincing before I believe it.
The episode you saw (also titled Serenity, IIRC) was neither the worst nor the best of the series, but it happened to be one that required having watched a good deal of the series to really get into that particular storyline. This is a problem with a lot of Whedon's work, actually -- not a problem for serious fans, of course, but it does sometimes put off the more casual viewer. OTOH, the long, intricate story arcs in all of his series are one of the reasons the guy has so many dedicated fans, so it cuts both ways. He's telling stories, not episodes; if a story takes one episode to tell, that's great, but he'll also tell it in ten episodes if needed.
;)
If you're willing to give Firefly another shot, I'd recommend finding someone who has the DVD boxed set, and watching the series premiere (the real premiere, the two-hour one, not the fairly mediocre episode that Fox actually showed first) and then, if you like it, watching the rest of the episodes in sequence.
What's so great about it? Well, for me, it's pretty much the same stuff I think is so great about all of Whedon's work to date: terrific dialogue, immensely likable characters, intricate storytelling, and a willingness both to use cliches as needed and then discard them the instant they're no longer useful. Buffy, Angel, and Firefly all managed to surprise me, repeatedly, just when I thought I was being led down a familiar path. Hardly any TV shows ever do that, and few enough movies.
It's the characters who make it work, ultimately. You may not always agree with them, or admire them, or even understand them, but you like them, and you care what happens to them. They're not archetypes; they are, even when they're fighting vampires or flying spaceships, people you feel like you could sit down and have a beer with. This is Whedon's great talent, and it's what keeps his fans coming back to his work.
Not sure if this answer is un-cult-like enough for you, but it's what I've got.
Oh, I'm sure he does know that, and that's fine; we're happy because we feel included and get a great movie, he's happy because we buy tickets to his movie, everybody wins. My point is that it feels a lot less cynical than the standard Hollywood formula of, "Okay, here's an action sequence for the guys, here's a romance subplot for the chicks, here's something cute for the kids, here's something dramatic for the critics ..." etc.
FWIW, the impression I got wasn't that he'd lost his belief in the Alliance, but that he'd lost his belief in himself -- i.e., his whole purpose in life was to be scary-deadly-secret-agent-guy, and having failed in that, he "fell on his sword."
... and yeah, pretty much everything the article says is right. (How often does that happen?) The crowd was much less over the top than, say, the stereotypical Star Wars / Star Trek / LOTR opening night crowd; very few costumes. We were there to see the movie, and we did, and we walked out grinning from ear to ear. It's great stuff.
Oh, it's not perfect yet (lots of editing still to be done, I think) but it was still, in its unfinished form, the best movie I've seen in a long time. And the fact that Whedon et al. are actually paying attention to the fans -- treating us as part of the effort of making the movie instead of $TARGET_DEMOGRAPHIC -- is really damn cool.
It occurs to me that what's happening with Firefly/Serenity is very similar to what happened with Star Trek way back when. The fans basically kept alive what was originally considered a failed series for over ten years between the cancellation of the series and the greenlight for the first movie. We should count ourselves lucky that things moved faster this time around.
Anyway. This is some of the best storytelling you'll ever see on screen. Don't miss it.
Fair enough; I would argue, however, that free markets tend to evolve into corporate aristocracies, and as distasteful as it may be to ideologues, a reasonable level of government intervention is the only way to prevent this.
The free market is self cleansing, it always will be.
What's the weather like on your planet?
A city running something like that would give me the willies anyway. Who's to say they wouldn't be monitoring every piece of information
Who's to say your ISP isn't monitoring every packet you send and receive right now?
Bingo -- it's a matter of network effects. Hotspots are useful only for a small number of people who are willing and able to go to those hotspots to get their work done. Always-on, available-everywhere wifi (used in the generic sense, not meaning any specific flavor of 802.11) is useful to ... well ... everybody, because it encourages the adoption of the technology that makes it useful.
Cell phones only became a universally accepted technology once coverage was good enough that you could be assured of getting a signal in just about any urban or suburban area, and most rural ones as well. Going a bit farther back, I believe the same is true of TV, and before that, radio. It would be absurd to look at a small-scale experiment like this and conclude "municipal wifi doesn't work."
the corporations are concerned they do not need to do a mac port now their product is usable on the mac platform
Those corporations, I suspect, are the ones which currently don't offer Mac ports of their applications at all, or they do, offer only poorly-thought-out versions that look like their Windows counterparts. The people who put effort into developing good Mac apps will have no reason not to continue doing so.
Ok, but does bash or ksh run on windows?
...
As a matter of fact
Um ... right ... because only nerds are interested in curing diseases?
Because it's politically incorrect it can't possibly be true?
No.
Because all the old bullshit ideas about men being inherently superior to women, whites inherently superior to blacks, etc., which right-wing airheads like to call "politically incorrect" to make themselves feel like Bold Rebels Against The Liberal System, have been disproven so many times that it is appropriate to be extremely skeptical whenever these ideas crop up again.
And because, as GP poster points out, the guy's from a business school, which means that he wimped out on real education. B-school is for people who want to call themselves educated without doing any real work.
here in Denver-metro I beleve the busses stop running at 10pm
In some outlying areas, that's true. In much of the city and metro area, it's 24/7. The buses don't run often late at night, it's true, but they do run.
WRT the larger issue: I really wish people would realize that public and private services are complementary. If everyone had to rely on privately owned vehicles (including taxis) to get where they're going, a lot of people couldn't get where they're going. Ditto if everyone had to rely on buses and trains. There is no reason except ideology that the two can't peacefully coexist; and this is as true of getting to the Moon as it is of getting across town.