``I mentioned the GPL, and my teacher looked at me as if I were green and had antennae. When I described it to her, she passed me off as if I were off my rocker.''
When I read this quote in the original post, I had to wonder what the heck most high school instructors would be teaching about software licensing in the first place! I'll bet that this discussion came up, primarily, to get across some points about how you're not supposed to pirate software. --
``but then I come home and look through my mail to find I've received health insurance statements for someone who lived here three years ago.''
I'm no fan of the bloated bureacracy that is the USPO but the problem you described can hardly be blamed on them. After all, it was the health insurance company that addressed the envelope. AFAIK, the Post Office doesn't verify who lives at a particular address.
To get back on topic... It might be very appropriate for the PO to get involved in domain name management but for the U.S. only. It couldn't be any worse than when Network Solutions had their little monopoly. (Of course, having said that, I'll probably think of several nightmare scenarios.) --
``While source code is GPL'd, documentation isn't. Anyone could look at the source and document the class specs and charge for it. But in the spirit of open development and abstraction(I wouldn't want to spend time interpreting what a function does if someone else could tell me),...''
Well, then, just include the important parts of the spec as comments in the source.:-) --
Since it's pretty unreasonable to expect individual OSS developers to ante up $2500 for the privilege of writing software, what about some organization such as the FSF paying the fee for the specs and signing up people to develop drivers, etc.
Is there some sort of nondisclosure that restricts anyone from doing this? Or are only commercial software vendors invited to the USB party?
This smells a little like the fracus that resulted when Intel closed some specs a while back. Didn't they eventually relent?
Finally, the wiseguy who thought the editor should research before posting should have checked the links on the URL he posted. The link to go to the class specs was indeed password protected. --
Reasons for not socializing more.
on
LonelyNet
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· Score: 2
``Interestingly (and, to me, dubiously), the survey defined loneliness in this way: whether you spend physical time with family and friends, whether you attend fewer social events, whether you spend less time reading newspapers and watching TV, shopping in stores, or are working more at home than before. In other words, the survey defines a radically new environment by nearly ancient measures of human contact.''
It seems that performing nearly any of the activities that they use to decide that you're not socializing means that you're not doing any of the others. While I sometimes read the newspaper while listening to the TV (and watching when something catches my attention), I rarely
watch TV and shop in stores (unless I'm shopping for a TV:-))
socializing with friends while I'm watching TV (that's rude)
socializing with friends while reading the newspaper (that's really rude!)
Nearly all of these activities are mutually exclusive. If I say `yes' to one, I'm saying `no' to all the others. How does that affect their result, I wonder?
If the author's of this study are watching this site, here's some reasons I do or don't engage in these ``social'' activities:
physical time with family and friends -- I get to spend most weekday evenings with my family. Weekends usually has one or both sets of grandparents over to visit. Getting together with friends is more difficult. Their families make plans and avoiding conflicts can be difficult. Sometimes business travel gets in the way. And just when do the author's of the Stanford study do their grocery shopping?
social events -- If you mean getting in the car and driving to some event? Gee that happens less and less and it's not because of the internet. Blame it on the fact that parking costs are ludicrous and gas prices have gone up 30 cents a gallon in the past 6-8 weeks. Also with the traffic in most metropolitan areas getting to be nearly 24 hour gridlock, you almost need to take a day off from work to get to the event. Yes I do get out but it's usually only every couple of months to see a band making a rare, late night appearance at some small club.
reading newspapers -- Part of my daily ritual. I either take it to the office and read it over lunch or read it when I get home from work. Hardly ever miss it.
watching TV -- Back when I had cable (before it got to be too expensive and repetitive), I decided that C-SPAN was more entertaining than 99.99% of everything that was on network TV. As of late, our TV viewing is about 50% broadcast content (mostly the evening news and Sunday morning talk shows for me, cartoons for the girls) and 50% rented and purchased videos... and the latter is becoming more and more dominant. (Not everybody loves Raymond and if I want to hear anything about sopranos I'll turn on the local classical music station)
shopping in stores -- Been to malls lately? The parking stinks, the selections stink, the prices stink, and they don't call them `malls' for nothing.
working more at home than before -- than before what? I try very hard and, to date, have been very successful in not bringing work home although I occasionally work at home on those rare occasions when I'm not sick enough to be bed-ridden but too sick to be in the office. It's a good time to catch up on documentation.
I looked at a few of the study's graphs and noticed that it appears that their conclusions would especially of interest to the phone companies. Horrible, horrible! People aren't talking to their friends and family on the telephone! Now neither my wife or I have seen a compelling need for a cellular phone yet (If I'd stayed in the consulting field I suppose that would change my mind) so the phone company thinks we're some sort of freaks of nature. Bet this study spurs the phone company to increase their advertising (and cold calls at dinner time). We'd much rather have high speed 'net access and do emails to friends and family instead of dropping everything and trying to carry on a converation while I'm frying bacon or giving the kids a bath (``Sorry I can't talk right now. Could you possibly call again at some other inconvenient time?''). Lately, it seems that no phone in the house, a high-speed internet connection (server in the basement), and an unlisted cellular phone would be the best choice for us. If we could only get affordable dedicated service in our area.
Finally, I saw one of the author's of the study on PBS and he was such a pompous #$%. Seemed to spend most of his time telling everyone that they were right and everyone else's studies were wrong. If you want to find out what's driving indicuduals away from their friends and families look to the ever increasing demands on our time made by businesses.
``occasional beeper time that is compensated for in the form of a 2nd phone line installed at my home''
I'll bet they your employer thinks that they can call you and get immediate response now that they've gotten that foothold into your home. Not bad for a measly $20-$25 per month. Bet it got your boss a bigger raise.
``...standing firm that there can only be ONE "number one" priority project.... draw plenty of blank stares and slack jaws from some''
I was the IT representative to an internal user group that spent an hour or so each week going over outstanding problems and/or projects, discussing progress, etc. (My main job was to see that they didn't pull something like dump two dozen projects into our lap that required a gazillion man-hours.) They used a rating system where each task was given a weight ranging from 0 through 99 (where `0' meant ``We should not do this.'' and `99' meant ``Why wasn't this done last quarter?''). It was a constant source of amusement that each week on a the 5-6 page list of tasks, all were ranked at 99 with, perhaps, 3-4 tasks ranked at 0. I never once saw any tasks that fell somewhere between those two ratings. I could easily see several tasks ranked at 99 -- perhaps each person has a 99 task but when everything's given the highest priority you begin to see real deficiencies in management. If everything's at the highest priority then nothing has priority. (Oh, sure you can choose one to spend the majority of your time this week but expect to get nailed for not putting enough time into the other 37 tasks you were given.) I once tried pointing out the problem with the rating system by asking which tasks were really the top priority. I got to see firsthand those ``blank stares and slack jaws'' you mentioned. Nothing changed except their opinion of me as a team player was probably reduced.
``My boss once told me "You can be either successful or happy".''
Just my opinion, mind you, but your boss is an idiot. This is one of those comments that, for most people, would start them thinking that a better job is out there.
``...most of the places I've worked have been chronically understaffed in the technical department (this does not seem to carry over to marketting, however). It's my personal belief that shoddy software coming from a lot of places is a direct result of this''
So, apparently, the increased level of staffing in marketing is necessary if shoddy software is being produced. This makes some sense. If only 10% of your potential customers buys the shoddy software, and you need 20% in order to make a profit, then the only way to double your sales is to hire twice as many people in marketing so they can call on twice as many potential customers. It wouldn't make sense for the marketing people to work the longer hours since the people they need to talk to work more or less normal hours (and when they're working late they're crzay about being interrupted by a sales call).
I think the more interesting question is why doesn't management see that if they hired more and better programmers and better programming managers, they'd turn out software that wasn't shoddy. It wouldn't be so hard to sell software that wasn't shoddy, eh?. Taken to its extreme, you could get by with only a handful of people in marketing as the software would be so-o-o good that your company's reputation grows to the point that customers would be calling and wanting to buy. Don't most cold sales calls end up in no sale?
``Commuting is not part of working.... But it is your choice where you live. Obviously there are grey areas.''
In a perfect world, perhaps. Maybe where you live all housing is affordable and your personal time is worth nothing.
If I were working in downtown Chicago (and I did for several years), it would be nice if I lived in the city or one of the close-in suburbs. But there are so many drawbacks that you don't really have the choice that you seem to think. If you have children, most people would not want to live in Chicago (the schools are not so hot). If you want to live in a nearby suburb... well you can't afford to; housing costs in the closest 'burbs are out of sight. If you want to live in an apartment all your working life and take the tax hit, then perhaps you can move at will. If you own a home, moving in order to minimize your commute is not practical. The same killer commutes and housing costs exist in the S.F. area. I'll bet it's not unusual in any large market.
At the salaries that most IT jobs are offering in the city, most of their workers can't afford to live nearby. The commute is a cost that you have to take into account when you consider accepting an offer from one of these companies. If 2-3 hours per day on the road or on public transportation is something you want to do, then fine. And besides the time element, there's the cost of transportation (train ticket, parking, or gas and maintenance of your auto -- not insignificant when taking the train, which is heralded as the most cost effective means of getting to downtown Chicago, runs you nearly $2000/year). Luckily, I did find a nice position that's 15 minutes from home. My commute to downtown Chicago would be around 90 minutes door-to-door (not the sort of response time I want to provide when there's a big problem at work) and, on top of the normal 9 hour work day, that's 60 hours devoted to work-related activities. And who really only is at the office for only 9 hours? When I was working in the Loop, I was spending around 14 hrs/day commuting and working and, believe me, getting home at 8:30 PM gets real old, real fast (and doing this on about 5 hours of sleep a day).
Bottom line is that most people live where they can afford to or where their family has the fewest hits on quality of life. Living a few minutes away from work is one choice. Living where the schools are crappy and your children wind up running the gauntlet of crack houses and gangbangers is a choice. Living in a nice town with decent schools is yet another choice. They're not equal choices though.
Nice images, although I think the high resolution images at the NASA site are more impressive (there's a 20MB TIFF image of part of the Great Wall that's... whew!). But why on Earth did they make them in GIF format? I would have thought that the content of the images would have made JPEG a more appropriate format. Will Unisys come knocking now?
As much as some people might wish it to be true, M$ would have to be incredibly stupid (and I mean stupidity of titanic proportions) to be behind the DoS attacks in an attempt to blacken the eyes of UNIX operating systems.
The article appeared to me to be nothing more than the self serving, self promotion of ``Nelson'' (whoever he is -- Jeez doesn't anyone with an editor have someone on staff who's actually been an editor before?) who's, it seemed to me, an employee of Network Associates and/or myCIO and is trying to drum up business for their whiz-bang DoS detection software.
Say, Rob, I'm probably not the only one to have this complaint: Too damned many anonymous postings. When you hit PageDown and see nothing but screen after screen of posts from Anonymous Coward it real old, real fast. Are we reading replies made by real people or a bot? Howzabout clamping a limit on the number of anonymous postings that can be made in response to an article? I know you don't want to discourage participation but the number of AC posts is getting ridiculous.
OK, guys. Flame away! I've got on my asbestos longjohns!
So a corporation, who would not even exist if it weren't given permission to do so by a state government, has the same rights as a real, honest-to-god human being. (Incorporation is done by the state government here in the U.S. Well, at least I'm not aware of any Federally authorized corporations and I'm not sure how corporations come into being in other countries.) And, apparently, some lawyers seem to think that corporations have additional rights over and above those of private citizens. Truly scary!!!
Is this another case made possible by the now infamous Millenium Copyright Act? Business speech? What the heck is business speech? You say something an entity, whose existence is granted by the government of the people, by the people, etc., etc., doesn't care to hear and they can have the police enter your home and rifle through your personal belongings? If the PC was owned by the corporation but used by the individual at home for business purposes, I'd have an easier time understanding the legal basis for this otherwise gross invasion of privacy. Are you allowed to deny entry to your home until your own lawyer can be present? Once the police take something from your home, you'll never get it back. There's plenty of cases that show that.
It seems that the New Middle Ages are almost here. Except our existence won't be granted by the local duke/prince/king. We will be allowed to exist only according to the whim of the corporations! They'll decide what you can say, what you can see, what equipment you can see it on, etc.
Guess I need to put smileys in my posts so that the Microsoft drones can tell when someone's poking a little fun at something.
I was a Word user back when it came on floppies and ran on my XT clone with a CGA adapter and watched become the most bloated hunk of junk I could imagine. I can't imagine the so-called ``effort'' that went into turning Word from a nice little word processor into the monster that it is today. I don't know anyone who bothers to learn what Microsoft passes off as essential features. There's so much crap in it that most people glaze over when they try to do something that they used to be able to do in previous versions. And what's their problem with file format consistency. If Microsoft is putting any effort into their software ``design'' it's aimed toward screwing their customers into spending more money for a new version of a product that they don't need but have to buy because the newer versions make using their own already paid for version essentially unusable (``Sorry Bill, couldn't read your document. My version of Word doesn't recognize the Word document format du jour that you sent me.''). Is there some burning need, beyond making working software break, that requires changing the format of a document? I cannot see anything new to Word that requires this.
While you might not like recompiling code, I've still got code that was written way back when my home UNIX setup was Coherent running on a 2MB 386 (dual booting to Windows 3.1). I can still use that code today. The version of vi that I used back then is still available and runs under Linux and I'll bet that it'd even compile nicely on my Tru64 box at work. I can barely read old Word documents from that time using the new versions of Word without losing a good portion of the formatting. Gee, my code still works but my data is invalid. How does Microsoft's design effort allow this to happen unless breaking your data was part one of the design goals?
``Whatever the artisans in the "bazzar" come out with this week gets piled in.''
That's: ``bazaar'' (call me picky). Although I can see how some programmers used to working on a large corporate environment might see that as ``bizaare''. You should spend a little time reading the dialog that takes place on Kernel Traffic and you'll find, I think, that not just anything makes it into Linux. The discussions that take place there are the equal to any design meetings that I've ever been involved in. And just as heated, as well.
And yes, I am a big fan of Linux. If you looked at it and were able to get past its not having a ``Start'' button, you'd see the underlying design and how consistent it is. Of course, being a long time UNIX user I've had the time to become familiar with the UNIX way of doing things. Most people fail to understand a new operating system because of all the baggage they bring with them. Mainframe users griping about their PC because that they can't find the PF1 key, VMS users complaining that UNIX needs to have God's own editor, TPU, before they use it, etc.
I particularly liked how many of the questions seemed to come from the assumption that anything that the DoJ does that might change how Microsoft does business is somehow going to cost comsumers more money. What proof exists that this would happen? Well, of course there's the additional cost of the lawyers that Microsoft'll have to hire to ensure that they're in compliance with those heinous regulations. And you know it's going to cost Microsoft a ton of money to design (actually it might jut be that they'll need to introduce an actual design phase into their software process (wink)) software that plays nice with other vendor's software.
Really, this is just more Microsoft FUD designed to turn public opinion against the DoJ. (``You know, Bill, we could raise prices and make consumers believe that those additional costs are directly due to the government's case against us. Those sheep'll believe anything.'')
``Wireless electronic devices are still FAR off from ever achieving what the PC can do.''
Oh yes! That's right... I can't wait to go from my nice 19-inch monitor on which I can actually see a document, email, or web page without destroying my eyesight to a toy with a 2-inch screen. If these teeny devices are so great, why is big-screen TV, home theater, etc. so popular?
TI has never been anything but a minor player in the PC market. Anyone remember their XT clone that had voice recognition? The one that it was impossible to run a generic copy of MS-DOS on forcing you to buy a wholly proprietary version under which most applications wouldn't run? That should have been the end of the PC era... at least as far as TI's concerned.
Boy, they've got some major cojones to be predicting the end of the PC.
``Year 2000 compliance efforts...: It *IS* the year 2000!! They'd have already done it all!!''
Red Hat may have but CA didn't. The only software package that we had a problem with on January 1st was a CA product which they claimed was certified as Y2K-compliant.
OK, to be a little bit fair, the product itself was compliant. Trouble was the so-called upgrade procedure from the previous version was broken and it didn't update the pieces of the product that weren't Y2k-ready. You had to delete the software and re-install it in order to get the software to work. Am I out of line for thinking that they're at fault? No way! Their people had us do this upgrade back in May/June '99 when we talked to them about Y2K issues. They didn't know that their upgrade procedure was broken for 6-7 months? Give me a break!
Just another item in my file of why we won't be selecting CA as a software vendor (at least if I have anything to say about it anyways).
I keep this old trade journal article in my files just so I can drag it out whenever someone suggests that we do more business with CA.
A few quotes from the article:
``Dead last with a bullet''
that said by an IS director who followed with
``he's moving away from CA products because he isn't getting the support he needs.''
``In our experience, if you have a package you like and then CA acquires the company, that's unfortunate.... We've seen a dramatic drop-off in service for products now under CA's control.''
``CA has acquired so many products that it's forced to choose which ones it will support while leaving the rest of its users to work out their own problems.''
Our own experience is that their technical support people have absolutely no clue as to how the software works. My coworkers and I strongly suspect that they've outsourced the support to a totally clueless organization.
We attended a CA ``roadmap'' session last Fall and were fed such a load of bull. The overall message from CA was that we should all be running TNG and Jasmine. The overall message from the customers in attendance was ``When the hell are you going to issue upgrades to these products that you purchased to fix the problems that we been carping about for the last N years?''
Our department has been using several of their products for several years and they don't even have a record of what products we're using. They sent a couple of suits out to talk to us and they wanted to know what sort of concerns we had and then proceeded to show us a list of products that they had on record as things we'd been using. Not one of them was correct. To date, we've yet to get a correct list from them. We actually had to track down purchase order to show them what we were running. They ended the meeting by attempting to pick our brains for the names of managers that they should be talking to. Just great! Turn our meeting into a ``give us some sales leads'' session. The CA tech support website that they made such a big deal about (which took several online attempts and at least one angry phone call before we were registered and allowed in) didn't list any software for which we were licensed. The online technical support database may actually exist somewhere but the information that they claim is available on their website is non-existent.
We used a so-called current release of a CA product that is only qualified and supported when used in conjunction with another vendor's product that has been taken off active support over a year ago. They don't support use with versions of the other software that have been on the market for two years.
Needless to say, we are actively looking for vendors for replacements for the CA products that are running on our large UNIX servers. (Hell, I replaced one of them with a Perl script that took, oh, about a half hour to write. Saved the company upwards of $10K/year in support. We are planning on replacing two other CA products with locally written software to save about another $20k/year.)
Our conclusion based on several man-years of experience with CA is that they don't really know UNIX well enough to be selling products for it. I, for one, am disappointed that Red Hat seemed to think that they needed CA's blessing. I would strongly suspect that some of the people who experience CA's lack of support for software running on Linux are going to get a bad impression of Linux. Third-party software vendors can spoil the otherwise good reputation of a hardware or operating system vendor when they fail to deliver a decent product and then fail to even properly support their customers. (Seen it happen too many times.)
``or think that if they dump a massive tar file onto a DAT once a day they are doing enough.''
You'd be surprised how many places I've worked where they barely even did that. I got so-o-o sick of writing backup procedures and attempting to get the idea across to the xylopated people who were supposed to be administering these systems that backups aren't optional (they always seemed to be something they thought about around 4:30 Friday afternoon after they'd finished playing with the latest demo of some piece of crud software for Win95/NT) that I was about ready to take up goat herding.
The advantage of an e-mail address is that IT'S NOT TIED TO A STUPID PHYSICAL ADDRESS!. When I move, my e-mail address doesn't have to change. Are these geniuses suffering from a condition brought on by sitting on their brains or what?
And if I move I suppose their idea of convenience is for me to have take an afternoon off from work to stand in line at the post office to fill out a change of e-mail address form?
``Of course, this would increase the complexity of the i/o chipset - almost to the point where the i/o processor is as important as the main cpu. Hmmm...what a concept.''
Yah, it's called a balanced system design. Since most PCs are used mainly for servicing a few keyboard interrupts per second and an occasional disk I/O (their most demanding tasks involve pushing the pixels that form a paperclip around;-) such a concept is, indeed, foreign.
``I still have a Maxtor LXT-213S, 213M SCSI-1 (CCS) drive. That drive is over 10 years old and is still purring along -- it's living up to its MTBF.''
HAH! My pair of LXT-213s trumps yours... Seriously, though, these are nice drives. I still have two of them humming along. I'm about to replace them but only because it's cheaper to replace these drives with larger capacity spindles than to find some other way to cram an additional drive into an old case (and perhaps create a heat problem by blocking air flow). They are a bit on the slow side in the seek department nowadays.
For a while, I'd turn down any offer of a 200MB IDE drive while I'd take the same size SCSI drive. Why? Well if I only had one bus where I could hang disks from, IDE drives would limit me to one 1/3 the storage that I could get with SCSI. (BTW, Our lower limit has been increased and donations of free SCSI disks must be in the 1GB or above range. We're sorry for any inconvenience.:-)
And what's with the four device limit in IDE? This might have seemed like a lot back when it first came out but becomes a severe limitation for anyone beyond your casual Windows user. My main system at home has grown to six hard drives, a CD-ROM, a scanner, and a tape drive (all SCSI). I can just imagine how many oddball parallel port adapters and dedicated controller cards I'd need to worry about if I hadn't gone the SCSI route ten years ago. (But I guess that's the problem that USB is supposed to eliminate, eh?)
--
Some people ask ``Are you going to finish those fries?'' but I ask ``Are you going to throw that hard disk out?''
``There are actually many many worker in THIS country who work at home on such projects as electronics assembly ( lead in the solder ), and sewing.''
Aaahh! That explains the solder blobs that were stuck all over the carpet of the apartment we lived in back in the early '90s.
While I've never really done any telecommuting, my wife did after our girls were born. But, she had to quit and become a contractor in order to telecommute (due to the dinosaur-brained reasoning of the company's HR people) and, basically, do the same programming job she had before. They did not supply her with a PC but she had my old one that was sitting around after I upgraded. They did supply her with the versions of any software she'd need to use on the PC in order to do the work (Office, Notes, etc.) and were pretty damned helpful in providing timely phone support while she get it installed and configured. But, as far as ergonimics was concerned, she had a better setup at home than she had at the company's headquarters. Most office environments are still pretty awful with regard to the proper ergonomics needed for extended computer use. Usually, the desktops are too high for use as a keyboard support. And I've never met anyone who's been able to tolerate those under-the-desktop, swing-up keyboard trays for more than a day.
At a previous employer, they were trying to encourage some people to telecommute! Of course, I think it was a perk/ploy to keep some key people from quitting, but they were supplying just about anything you'd need to do it (PCs, etc.). Trouble was that most of the people they were letting do this were in positions that made telecommuting really tough. It's a bear trying to do remote administration of the systems that these guys had to support (guess what kind those were [wink]) or to install printers when you're at home.
Would I want OSHA coming into our home to check out the workspace? Heck no! Glad they said they wouldn't be doing that. Would I want to have my employer coming in to inspect the setup? Again, heck no, but I might just tolerate it. Especially if it meant that I wasn't driving for 90 minutes one-way or spending two-plus hours getting to work via train and on foot. Unfortunately, my commute is only 10-15 minutes nowadays but it would still be nice to work at home. After a tough day, even a 15 minute commute is a pain. Funny how spoiled we get, eh? Of course, if I ever change jobs and I want to keep my commute short it'll probably mean starting a home-based business.
BTW, what is the smallest size company that comes under OSHA's jurisdiction? Anyone know off the top of their head? Somebody else posted that they thought that this OSHA decision would adversely affect the SOHO area.
It took a study from a think tank to figure that one out?
Still, I'm thinking that this new information isn't going to make much difference in the way that the major music companies, and their pet pit bull -- the RIAA, deal with the phenomena? They (the major labels) have the expertise in PR that they can deploy to label file-sharing folk as criminals. How much media attention will be paid to this study? Just think of the potential royalties that could be going back to the musicians if the music labels weren't funding these smear campaigns? Hmm... perhaps emailing a copy of the report to your congressperson would help.
\begin{aside}
I picked up a copy of an audiophile magazine over the holidays and was quite disturbed that the audio electronics industry seems quite prepared to roll over to the wishes of the music distribution megacorporations by planning on incorporating whatever protection schemes they want imposed on consumers. While the magazine didn't tout it as some great new feature, the tone was that ``it's coming so you better be prepared''. What a way to ruin one's holiday cheer! I may be buying new equipment in the future but it looks like I'd better hang on to the old stuff; it may be the only way to playback my existing collection.
Slashdot Mirror
When I read this quote in the original post, I had to wonder what the heck most high school instructors would be teaching about software licensing in the first place! I'll bet that this discussion came up, primarily, to get across some points about how you're not supposed to pirate software.
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I'm no fan of the bloated bureacracy that is the USPO but the problem you described can hardly be blamed on them. After all, it was the health insurance company that addressed the envelope. AFAIK, the Post Office doesn't verify who lives at a particular address.
To get back on topic... It might be very appropriate for the PO to get involved in domain name management but for the U.S. only. It couldn't be any worse than when Network Solutions had their little monopoly. (Of course, having said that, I'll probably think of several nightmare scenarios.)
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Aahh... Either a fan of old British kids TV shows or a Chris Spedding fan.
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Well, then, just include the important parts of the spec as comments in the source. :-)
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Since it's pretty unreasonable to expect individual OSS developers to ante up $2500 for the privilege of writing software, what about some organization such as the FSF paying the fee for the specs and signing up people to develop drivers, etc.
Is there some sort of nondisclosure that restricts anyone from doing this? Or are only commercial software vendors invited to the USB party?
This smells a little like the fracus that resulted when Intel closed some specs a while back. Didn't they eventually relent?
Finally, the wiseguy who thought the editor should research before posting should have checked the links on the URL he posted. The link to go to the class specs was indeed password protected.
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It seems that performing nearly any of the activities that they use to decide that you're not socializing means that you're not doing any of the others. While I sometimes read the newspaper while listening to the TV (and watching when something catches my attention), I rarely
- watch TV and shop in stores (unless I'm shopping for a TV
:-)) - socializing with friends while I'm watching TV (that's rude)
- socializing with friends while reading the newspaper (that's really rude!)
Nearly all of these activities are mutually exclusive. If I say `yes' to one, I'm saying `no' to all the others. How does that affect their result, I wonder?If the author's of this study are watching this site, here's some reasons I do or don't engage in these ``social'' activities:
I looked at a few of the study's graphs and noticed that it appears that their conclusions would especially of interest to the phone companies. Horrible, horrible! People aren't talking to their friends and family on the telephone! Now neither my wife or I have seen a compelling need for a cellular phone yet (If I'd stayed in the consulting field I suppose that would change my mind) so the phone company thinks we're some sort of freaks of nature. Bet this study spurs the phone company to increase their advertising (and cold calls at dinner time). We'd much rather have high speed 'net access and do emails to friends and family instead of dropping everything and trying to carry on a converation while I'm frying bacon or giving the kids a bath (``Sorry I can't talk right now. Could you possibly call again at some other inconvenient time?''). Lately, it seems that no phone in the house, a high-speed internet connection (server in the basement), and an unlisted cellular phone would be the best choice for us. If we could only get affordable dedicated service in our area.
Finally, I saw one of the author's of the study on PBS and he was such a pompous #$%. Seemed to spend most of his time telling everyone that they were right and everyone else's studies were wrong. If you want to find out what's driving indicuduals away from their friends and families look to the ever increasing demands on our time made by businesses.
I'll bet they your employer thinks that they can call you and get immediate response now that they've gotten that foothold into your home. Not bad for a measly $20-$25 per month. Bet it got your boss a bigger raise.
I was the IT representative to an internal user group that spent an hour or so each week going over outstanding problems and/or projects, discussing progress, etc. (My main job was to see that they didn't pull something like dump two dozen projects into our lap that required a gazillion man-hours.) They used a rating system where each task was given a weight ranging from 0 through 99 (where `0' meant ``We should not do this.'' and `99' meant ``Why wasn't this done last quarter?''). It was a constant source of amusement that each week on a the 5-6 page list of tasks, all were ranked at 99 with, perhaps, 3-4 tasks ranked at 0. I never once saw any tasks that fell somewhere between those two ratings. I could easily see several tasks ranked at 99 -- perhaps each person has a 99 task but when everything's given the highest priority you begin to see real deficiencies in management. If everything's at the highest priority then nothing has priority. (Oh, sure you can choose one to spend the majority of your time this week but expect to get nailed for not putting enough time into the other 37 tasks you were given.) I once tried pointing out the problem with the rating system by asking which tasks were really the top priority. I got to see firsthand those ``blank stares and slack jaws'' you mentioned. Nothing changed except their opinion of me as a team player was probably reduced.
Just my opinion, mind you, but your boss is an idiot. This is one of those comments that, for most people, would start them thinking that a better job is out there.
So, apparently, the increased level of staffing in marketing is necessary if shoddy software is being produced. This makes some sense. If only 10% of your potential customers buys the shoddy software, and you need 20% in order to make a profit, then the only way to double your sales is to hire twice as many people in marketing so they can call on twice as many potential customers. It wouldn't make sense for the marketing people to work the longer hours since the people they need to talk to work more or less normal hours (and when they're working late they're crzay about being interrupted by a sales call).
I think the more interesting question is why doesn't management see that if they hired more and better programmers and better programming managers, they'd turn out software that wasn't shoddy. It wouldn't be so hard to sell software that wasn't shoddy, eh?. Taken to its extreme, you could get by with only a handful of people in marketing as the software would be so-o-o good that your company's reputation grows to the point that customers would be calling and wanting to buy. Don't most cold sales calls end up in no sale?
In a perfect world, perhaps. Maybe where you live all housing is affordable and your personal time is worth nothing.
If I were working in downtown Chicago (and I did for several years), it would be nice if I lived in the city or one of the close-in suburbs. But there are so many drawbacks that you don't really have the choice that you seem to think. If you have children, most people would not want to live in Chicago (the schools are not so hot). If you want to live in a nearby suburb... well you can't afford to; housing costs in the closest 'burbs are out of sight. If you want to live in an apartment all your working life and take the tax hit, then perhaps you can move at will. If you own a home, moving in order to minimize your commute is not practical. The same killer commutes and housing costs exist in the S.F. area. I'll bet it's not unusual in any large market.
At the salaries that most IT jobs are offering in the city, most of their workers can't afford to live nearby. The commute is a cost that you have to take into account when you consider accepting an offer from one of these companies. If 2-3 hours per day on the road or on public transportation is something you want to do, then fine. And besides the time element, there's the cost of transportation (train ticket, parking, or gas and maintenance of your auto -- not insignificant when taking the train, which is heralded as the most cost effective means of getting to downtown Chicago, runs you nearly $2000/year). Luckily, I did find a nice position that's 15 minutes from home. My commute to downtown Chicago would be around 90 minutes door-to-door (not the sort of response time I want to provide when there's a big problem at work) and, on top of the normal 9 hour work day, that's 60 hours devoted to work-related activities. And who really only is at the office for only 9 hours? When I was working in the Loop, I was spending around 14 hrs/day commuting and working and, believe me, getting home at 8:30 PM gets real old, real fast (and doing this on about 5 hours of sleep a day).
Bottom line is that most people live where they can afford to or where their family has the fewest hits on quality of life. Living a few minutes away from work is one choice. Living where the schools are crappy and your children wind up running the gauntlet of crack houses and gangbangers is a choice. Living in a nice town with decent schools is yet another choice. They're not equal choices though.
Nice images, although I think the high resolution images at the NASA site are more impressive (there's a 20MB TIFF image of part of the Great Wall that's... whew!). But why on Earth did they make them in GIF format? I would have thought that the content of the images would have made JPEG a more appropriate format. Will Unisys come knocking now?
As much as some people might wish it to be true, M$ would have to be incredibly stupid (and I mean stupidity of titanic proportions) to be behind the DoS attacks in an attempt to blacken the eyes of UNIX operating systems.
The article appeared to me to be nothing more than the self serving, self promotion of ``Nelson'' (whoever he is -- Jeez doesn't anyone with an editor have someone on staff who's actually been an editor before?) who's, it seemed to me, an employee of Network Associates and/or myCIO and is trying to drum up business for their whiz-bang DoS detection software.
Say, Rob, I'm probably not the only one to have this complaint: Too damned many anonymous postings. When you hit PageDown and see nothing but screen after screen of posts from Anonymous Coward it real old, real fast. Are we reading replies made by real people or a bot? Howzabout clamping a limit on the number of anonymous postings that can be made in response to an article? I know you don't want to discourage participation but the number of AC posts is getting ridiculous.
OK, guys. Flame away! I've got on my asbestos longjohns!
So a corporation, who would not even exist if it weren't given permission to do so by a state government, has the same rights as a real, honest-to-god human being. (Incorporation is done by the state government here in the U.S. Well, at least I'm not aware of any Federally authorized corporations and I'm not sure how corporations come into being in other countries.) And, apparently, some lawyers seem to think that corporations have additional rights over and above those of private citizens. Truly scary!!!
Is this another case made possible by the now infamous Millenium Copyright Act? Business speech? What the heck is business speech? You say something an entity, whose existence is granted by the government of the people, by the people, etc., etc., doesn't care to hear and they can have the police enter your home and rifle through your personal belongings? If the PC was owned by the corporation but used by the individual at home for business purposes, I'd have an easier time understanding the legal basis for this otherwise gross invasion of privacy. Are you allowed to deny entry to your home until your own lawyer can be present? Once the police take something from your home, you'll never get it back. There's plenty of cases that show that.
It seems that the New Middle Ages are almost here. Except our existence won't be granted by the local duke/prince/king. We will be allowed to exist only according to the whim of the corporations! They'll decide what you can say, what you can see, what equipment you can see it on, etc.
Guess I need to put smileys in my posts so that the Microsoft drones can tell when someone's poking a little fun at something.
I was a Word user back when it came on floppies and ran on my XT clone with a CGA adapter and watched become the most bloated hunk of junk I could imagine. I can't imagine the so-called ``effort'' that went into turning Word from a nice little word processor into the monster that it is today. I don't know anyone who bothers to learn what Microsoft passes off as essential features. There's so much crap in it that most people glaze over when they try to do something that they used to be able to do in previous versions. And what's their problem with file format consistency. If Microsoft is putting any effort into their software ``design'' it's aimed toward screwing their customers into spending more money for a new version of a product that they don't need but have to buy because the newer versions make using their own already paid for version essentially unusable (``Sorry Bill, couldn't read your document. My version of Word doesn't recognize the Word document format du jour that you sent me.''). Is there some burning need, beyond making working software break, that requires changing the format of a document? I cannot see anything new to Word that requires this.
While you might not like recompiling code, I've still got code that was written way back when my home UNIX setup was Coherent running on a 2MB 386 (dual booting to Windows 3.1). I can still use that code today. The version of vi that I used back then is still available and runs under Linux and I'll bet that it'd even compile nicely on my Tru64 box at work. I can barely read old Word documents from that time using the new versions of Word without losing a good portion of the formatting. Gee, my code still works but my data is invalid. How does Microsoft's design effort allow this to happen unless breaking your data was part one of the design goals?
That's: ``bazaar'' (call me picky). Although I can see how some programmers used to working on a large corporate environment might see that as ``bizaare''. You should spend a little time reading the dialog that takes place on Kernel Traffic and you'll find, I think, that not just anything makes it into Linux. The discussions that take place there are the equal to any design meetings that I've ever been involved in. And just as heated, as well.
And yes, I am a big fan of Linux. If you looked at it and were able to get past its not having a ``Start'' button, you'd see the underlying design and how consistent it is. Of course, being a long time UNIX user I've had the time to become familiar with the UNIX way of doing things. Most people fail to understand a new operating system because of all the baggage they bring with them. Mainframe users griping about their PC because that they can't find the PF1 key, VMS users complaining that UNIX needs to have God's own editor, TPU, before they use it, etc.
I particularly liked how many of the questions seemed to come from the assumption that anything that the DoJ does that might change how Microsoft does business is somehow going to cost comsumers more money. What proof exists that this would happen? Well, of course there's the additional cost of the lawyers that Microsoft'll have to hire to ensure that they're in compliance with those heinous regulations. And you know it's going to cost Microsoft a ton of money to design (actually it might jut be that they'll need to introduce an actual design phase into their software process (wink)) software that plays nice with other vendor's software.
Really, this is just more Microsoft FUD designed to turn public opinion against the DoJ. (``You know, Bill, we could raise prices and make consumers believe that those additional costs are directly due to the government's case against us. Those sheep'll believe anything.'')
``Wireless electronic devices are still FAR off from ever achieving what the PC can do.''
Oh yes! That's right... I can't wait to go from my nice 19-inch monitor on which I can actually see a document, email, or web page without destroying my eyesight to a toy with a 2-inch screen. If these teeny devices are so great, why is big-screen TV, home theater, etc. so popular?
TI has never been anything but a minor player in the PC market. Anyone remember their XT clone that had voice recognition? The one that it was impossible to run a generic copy of MS-DOS on forcing you to buy a wholly proprietary version under which most applications wouldn't run? That should have been the end of the PC era... at least as far as TI's concerned.
Boy, they've got some major cojones to be predicting the end of the PC.
Red Hat may have but CA didn't. The only software package that we had a problem with on January 1st was a CA product which they claimed was certified as Y2K-compliant.
OK, to be a little bit fair, the product itself was compliant. Trouble was the so-called upgrade procedure from the previous version was broken and it didn't update the pieces of the product that weren't Y2k-ready. You had to delete the software and re-install it in order to get the software to work. Am I out of line for thinking that they're at fault? No way! Their people had us do this upgrade back in May/June '99 when we talked to them about Y2K issues. They didn't know that their upgrade procedure was broken for 6-7 months? Give me a break!
Just another item in my file of why we won't be selecting CA as a software vendor (at least if I have anything to say about it anyways).
I keep this old trade journal article in my files just so I can drag it out whenever someone suggests that we do more business with CA.
A few quotes from the article:
that said by an IS director who followed withOur own experience is that their technical support people have absolutely no clue as to how the software works. My coworkers and I strongly suspect that they've outsourced the support to a totally clueless organization.
We attended a CA ``roadmap'' session last Fall and were fed such a load of bull. The overall message from CA was that we should all be running TNG and Jasmine. The overall message from the customers in attendance was ``When the hell are you going to issue upgrades to these products that you purchased to fix the problems that we been carping about for the last N years?''
Our department has been using several of their products for several years and they don't even have a record of what products we're using. They sent a couple of suits out to talk to us and they wanted to know what sort of concerns we had and then proceeded to show us a list of products that they had on record as things we'd been using. Not one of them was correct. To date, we've yet to get a correct list from them. We actually had to track down purchase order to show them what we were running. They ended the meeting by attempting to pick our brains for the names of managers that they should be talking to. Just great! Turn our meeting into a ``give us some sales leads'' session. The CA tech support website that they made such a big deal about (which took several online attempts and at least one angry phone call before we were registered and allowed in) didn't list any software for which we were licensed. The online technical support database may actually exist somewhere but the information that they claim is available on their website is non-existent.
We used a so-called current release of a CA product that is only qualified and supported when used in conjunction with another vendor's product that has been taken off active support over a year ago. They don't support use with versions of the other software that have been on the market for two years.
Needless to say, we are actively looking for vendors for replacements for the CA products that are running on our large UNIX servers. (Hell, I replaced one of them with a Perl script that took, oh, about a half hour to write. Saved the company upwards of $10K/year in support. We are planning on replacing two other CA products with locally written software to save about another $20k/year.)
Our conclusion based on several man-years of experience with CA is that they don't really know UNIX well enough to be selling products for it. I, for one, am disappointed that Red Hat seemed to think that they needed CA's blessing. I would strongly suspect that some of the people who experience CA's lack of support for software running on Linux are going to get a bad impression of Linux. Third-party software vendors can spoil the otherwise good reputation of a hardware or operating system vendor when they fail to deliver a decent product and then fail to even properly support their customers. (Seen it happen too many times.)
You'd be surprised how many places I've worked where they barely even did that. I got so-o-o sick of writing backup procedures and attempting to get the idea across to the xylopated people who were supposed to be administering these systems that backups aren't optional (they always seemed to be something they thought about around 4:30 Friday afternoon after they'd finished playing with the latest demo of some piece of crud software for Win95/NT) that I was about ready to take up goat herding.
The advantage of an e-mail address is that IT'S NOT TIED TO A STUPID PHYSICAL ADDRESS!. When I move, my e-mail address doesn't have to change. Are these geniuses suffering from a condition brought on by sitting on their brains or what?
And if I move I suppose their idea of convenience is for me to have take an afternoon off from work to stand in line at the post office to fill out a change of e-mail address form?
From now on I think I'll prefilter all of my anonymous online posts using:
Let's see how easy it is to track those posts down after that.
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Yah, it's called a balanced system design. Since most PCs are used mainly for servicing a few keyboard interrupts per second and an occasional disk I/O (their most demanding tasks involve pushing the pixels that form a paperclip around ;-) such a concept is, indeed, foreign.
HAH! My pair of LXT-213s trumps yours... Seriously, though, these are nice drives. I still have two of them humming along. I'm about to replace them but only because it's cheaper to replace these drives with larger capacity spindles than to find some other way to cram an additional drive into an old case (and perhaps create a heat problem by blocking air flow). They are a bit on the slow side in the seek department nowadays.
For a while, I'd turn down any offer of a 200MB IDE drive while I'd take the same size SCSI drive. Why? Well if I only had one bus where I could hang disks from, IDE drives would limit me to one 1/3 the storage that I could get with SCSI. (BTW, Our lower limit has been increased and donations of free SCSI disks must be in the 1GB or above range. We're sorry for any inconvenience. :-)
And what's with the four device limit in IDE? This might have seemed like a lot back when it first came out but becomes a severe limitation for anyone beyond your casual Windows user. My main system at home has grown to six hard drives, a CD-ROM, a scanner, and a tape drive (all SCSI). I can just imagine how many oddball parallel port adapters and dedicated controller cards I'd need to worry about if I hadn't gone the SCSI route ten years ago. (But I guess that's the problem that USB is supposed to eliminate, eh?)
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Some people ask ``Are you going to finish those fries?'' but I ask ``Are you going to throw that hard disk out?''
Aaahh! That explains the solder blobs that were stuck all over the carpet of the apartment we lived in back in the early '90s.
While I've never really done any telecommuting, my wife did after our girls were born. But, she had to quit and become a contractor in order to telecommute (due to the dinosaur-brained reasoning of the company's HR people) and, basically, do the same programming job she had before. They did not supply her with a PC but she had my old one that was sitting around after I upgraded. They did supply her with the versions of any software she'd need to use on the PC in order to do the work (Office, Notes, etc.) and were pretty damned helpful in providing timely phone support while she get it installed and configured. But, as far as ergonimics was concerned, she had a better setup at home than she had at the company's headquarters. Most office environments are still pretty awful with regard to the proper ergonomics needed for extended computer use. Usually, the desktops are too high for use as a keyboard support. And I've never met anyone who's been able to tolerate those under-the-desktop, swing-up keyboard trays for more than a day.
At a previous employer, they were trying to encourage some people to telecommute! Of course, I think it was a perk/ploy to keep some key people from quitting, but they were supplying just about anything you'd need to do it (PCs, etc.). Trouble was that most of the people they were letting do this were in positions that made telecommuting really tough. It's a bear trying to do remote administration of the systems that these guys had to support (guess what kind those were [wink]) or to install printers when you're at home.
Would I want OSHA coming into our home to check out the workspace? Heck no! Glad they said they wouldn't be doing that. Would I want to have my employer coming in to inspect the setup? Again, heck no, but I might just tolerate it. Especially if it meant that I wasn't driving for 90 minutes one-way or spending two-plus hours getting to work via train and on foot. Unfortunately, my commute is only 10-15 minutes nowadays but it would still be nice to work at home. After a tough day, even a 15 minute commute is a pain. Funny how spoiled we get, eh? Of course, if I ever change jobs and I want to keep my commute short it'll probably mean starting a home-based business.
BTW, what is the smallest size company that comes under OSHA's jurisdiction? Anyone know off the top of their head? Somebody else posted that they thought that this OSHA decision would adversely affect the SOHO area.
It took a study from a think tank to figure that one out?
Still, I'm thinking that this new information isn't going to make much difference in the way that the major music companies, and their pet pit bull -- the RIAA, deal with the phenomena? They (the major labels) have the expertise in PR that they can deploy to label file-sharing folk as criminals. How much media attention will be paid to this study? Just think of the potential royalties that could be going back to the musicians if the music labels weren't funding these smear campaigns? Hmm... perhaps emailing a copy of the report to your congressperson would help.
\begin{aside}
I picked up a copy of an audiophile magazine over the holidays and was quite disturbed that the audio electronics industry seems quite prepared to roll over to the wishes of the music distribution megacorporations by planning on incorporating whatever protection schemes they want imposed on consumers. While the magazine didn't tout it as some great new feature, the tone was that ``it's coming so you better be prepared''. What a way to ruin one's holiday cheer! I may be buying new equipment in the future but it looks like I'd better hang on to the old stuff; it may be the only way to playback my existing collection.
\end{aside}
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