This comment and theoriginal posting are quite possibly the most disagreable things I've ever seen on Slashdot. I hunted through your previous postings to see more of your writing, as I was sure that I'd come across a well written Troll. I though surely this was designed to suck the unwary slashdotter into heated arguments initiated with inflamatory comment about "making people conform". Alas, it seems to be earnestly written by a bitter, old (IBM engineered) Eeyore.
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are unattainable? That's surely the statement of a very bitter man, moreover, it's untrue, as you've make it a sweeping statement - I can easily find a counter-example of each.
Your arguments about art are also fallacious, by this argument engineering is equally condemnable due to it's vulnerability to misuse.
Yes, all the great minds are like your fellow engineers at IBM, in that they're greyish, weigh about three pounds, and are encased in a cranium.
We shouldn't fill our children's minds with false hopes of what cannot be achieved. We should give them the skills to make it in this life the best they can, before they eventually succumb to their mortal fate. It's the compassionate thing to do.
"What cannot be acheived" is an unknown quantity. It is largely because of those with hopes and dreams that what the scope of what has been acheived has been expanded.
I weep for a world where the only accessible education is in engineering and the classics.
This is a very real problem: I had a job while I attended university (See HRDC for number and details of failed classes) that involved processing companies' mailing lists for the purposes of direct marketing (read junk mail and telemarketing). No Flames please! I've since moved on to more respectable work.
We would take a mailing list (name, address, city, province), check that against Canada Post's postal code database (software readily available) to correct and add postal codes. This postal code would then be used to geolocate that individual (within a range of less than a block in an urban setting. Try it at www.mablast.com.) Using the StatsCan census data (also mapped to geographic regions) and some geographic information software we would produce demographic profiles of databases.
A simple postal code can produce a lot of probabilities about a person. (For example, if you live in a neighborhood where the average income is about $30,000, then you aren't very likely to be making $60,000. You aren't very likely to be targetted for new car ads either).
The above is an example of what can be done with publicly available information, and was limited by the keys that could be used to match. Govt DBs contain Social Insurance Numbers (there is a complaint in the comissioner's report about overuse of SINs) and can match at will.
I agree that the result (and probably intent) of this is that "It allows companies to bill their customers cheaper." I can't remember Canada Post ever providing any innovation in their services targeted at individuals. I think they realised that individual people rarely use letter-mail to communicate with other individuals anymore, instead it is individuals communicating with organisations and organisations communicating with other organisations.
I'm sceptical that this will be a successful service, as they are attempting to provide a middleman service using a medium that, I'm sure you will agree, has an excellent track record in removing burdomsome middlemen. (As an example, think of how easy it is to get information on buying a car from the Net, as opposed to from a salesman). Some companies are already providing methods of getting your bills without mailing them to you. Bell Canada, for example, offers an e-bill (their name) in PDF format. In using this, you get your bill directly from Bell, and pay through your regular direct banking method. No middle man required and Bell trades the postage cost for the development cost of the system. The customer gets the benefit of dealing with only two bone-headed, customer-hostile companies rather than three. (The phone company, the bank and the post-office - there's a combination to ruin anybody's day.)
The benefits that I can see for customers are: as someone stated above, consolidation, and the perception of reliability. Some customers will pay to have everything in one place. Hell, I pay for convenience. Some will pay because they trust Canada Post to get it there. I don't.
Bell Canada (and probably other Stentor companies) also offers a competing service based on their screenphones. Companies can sign up to use that as a delivery medium, and most of the telephone banking companies (not mine however) already are integrated into the system.
My conclusion: they are offering a service with very little innovation, that offers an unnecessary middleman service, and that other people can do better. What should Canada Post be doing instead? See Effugas' comment "Postal Services: The Ultimate Escrow Architecture" - that's what I'd like to see them offer.
Actually the problem IS with the OS, specifically with the API that the OS provides to the applications. This API (for writing text) in this case doesn't conform to the proper codage standard.
Linux in this case is merely a reference to his current project of getting it running. I agree that if he were working on a Mac (or in BeOS, MS-DOS, UNIX, or hell, even on a PDP-11 connected to a DecWriter paper terminal) he wouldn't have this problem.
He does have a problem when writing HTML using any application that uses the standard Windows API. Check out RandySC's post for a detailed description of the problem and a good program to fix it.
As for the decent apps on Linux, who can beat vi, sed, awk and emacs for all your integrated office suite needs?;-) Oh yeah, throw in Netscape for easy writing of busted HTML.
Seriously, I've never found myself wanting in the apps department, I just wish they'd develop Total Annihilation and others for Linux.
Look like it's time to switch to Linux for good John. You've been made to look like an idiot by Microsoft "smart quotes" - a prime example of de-commodification of standards. Microsoft smart quotes are those specially formatted `` , '' and ' (as single chars) symbols. Applications running on windows tend to through them in regardless of what charset they are supposed to be using. They're characters with decimal codes somewhere in the 128-159 range.
They don't work on anything except Windows. That's why we have to read through all those ?'s in your text.
This problem appears to infect a growing number of products under W95: probably some OSR patch changed the common text-edit widget to enable these extended characters without any input from the application itself. I have seen the problem from:
Outlook
Netscape
Eudora, and Eudora Pro
and I think Pegasus.
The insidious bit is that applications get them without asking (or wanting) them. - Richard Perrin
Slashdot Mirror
This comment and theoriginal posting are quite possibly the most disagreable things I've ever seen on Slashdot. I hunted through your previous postings to see more of your writing, as I was sure that I'd come across a well written Troll. I though surely this was designed to suck the unwary slashdotter into heated arguments initiated with inflamatory comment about "making people conform". Alas, it seems to be earnestly written by a bitter, old (IBM engineered) Eeyore.
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are unattainable? That's surely the statement of a very bitter man, moreover, it's untrue, as you've make it a sweeping statement - I can easily find a counter-example of each.
Your arguments about art are also fallacious, by this argument engineering is equally condemnable due to it's vulnerability to misuse.
Yes, all the great minds are like your fellow engineers at IBM, in that they're greyish, weigh about three pounds, and are encased in a cranium.
"What cannot be acheived" is an unknown quantity. It is largely because of those with hopes and dreams that what the scope of what has been acheived has been expanded.
I weep for a world where the only accessible education is in engineering and the classics.
This is a very real problem: I had a job while I attended university (See HRDC for number and details of failed classes) that involved processing companies' mailing lists for the purposes of direct marketing (read junk mail and telemarketing). No Flames please! I've since moved on to more respectable work.
We would take a mailing list (name, address, city, province), check that against Canada Post's postal code database (software readily available) to correct and add postal codes. This postal code would then be used to geolocate that individual (within a range of less than a block in an urban setting. Try it at www.mablast.com.) Using the StatsCan census data (also mapped to geographic regions) and some geographic information software we would produce demographic profiles of databases.
A simple postal code can produce a lot of probabilities about a person. (For example, if you live in a neighborhood where the average income is about $30,000, then you aren't very likely to be making $60,000. You aren't very likely to be targetted for new car ads either).
The above is an example of what can be done with publicly available information, and was limited by the keys that could be used to match. Govt DBs contain Social Insurance Numbers (there is a complaint in the comissioner's report about overuse of SINs) and can match at will.
I agree that the result (and probably intent) of this is that "It allows companies to bill their customers cheaper." I can't remember Canada Post ever providing any innovation in their services targeted at individuals. I think they realised that individual people rarely use letter-mail to communicate with other individuals anymore, instead it is individuals communicating with organisations and organisations communicating with other organisations.
I'm sceptical that this will be a successful service, as they are attempting to provide a middleman service using a medium that, I'm sure you will agree, has an excellent track record in removing burdomsome middlemen. (As an example, think of how easy it is to get information on buying a car from the Net, as opposed to from a salesman). Some companies are already providing methods of getting your bills without mailing them to you. Bell Canada, for example, offers an e-bill (their name) in PDF format. In using this, you get your bill directly from Bell, and pay through your regular direct banking method. No middle man required and Bell trades the postage cost for the development cost of the system. The customer gets the benefit of dealing with only two bone-headed, customer-hostile companies rather than three. (The phone company, the bank and the post-office - there's a combination to ruin anybody's day.)
The benefits that I can see for customers are: as someone stated above, consolidation, and the perception of reliability. Some customers will pay to have everything in one place. Hell, I pay for convenience. Some will pay because they trust Canada Post to get it there. I don't.
Bell Canada (and probably other Stentor companies) also offers a competing service based on their screenphones. Companies can sign up to use that as a delivery medium, and most of the telephone banking companies (not mine however) already are integrated into the system.
My conclusion: they are offering a service with very little innovation, that offers an unnecessary middleman service, and that other people can do better. What should Canada Post be doing instead? See Effugas' comment "Postal Services: The Ultimate Escrow Architecture" - that's what I'd like to see them offer.
Actually the problem IS with the OS, specifically with the API that the OS provides to the applications. This API (for writing text) in this case doesn't conform to the proper codage standard.
Linux in this case is merely a reference to his current project of getting it running. I agree that if he were working on a Mac (or in BeOS, MS-DOS, UNIX, or hell, even on a PDP-11 connected to a DecWriter paper terminal) he wouldn't have this problem.
He does have a problem when writing HTML using any application that uses the standard Windows API. Check out RandySC's post for a detailed description of the problem and a good program to fix it.
As for the decent apps on Linux, who can beat vi, sed, awk and emacs for all your integrated office suite needs? ;-) Oh yeah, throw in Netscape for easy writing of busted HTML.
Seriously, I've never found myself wanting in the apps department, I just wish they'd develop Total Annihilation and others for Linux.
- Richard Perrin
The questions marks are from Netscape in Linux incorrectly formatting the HTML code.
Uhhh. No. Read De-commodification below. The problem in that's it's not proper HTML. (Or even a proper text charset).
- Richard Perrin
Look like it's time to switch to Linux for good John. You've been made to look like an idiot by Microsoft "smart quotes" - a prime example of de-commodification of standards. Microsoft smart quotes are those specially formatted `` , '' and ' (as single chars) symbols. Applications running on windows tend to through them in regardless of what charset they are supposed to be using. They're characters with decimal codes somewhere in the 128-159 range.
They don't work on anything except Windows. That's why we have to read through all those ?'s in your text.
From someone on the Ottawa-Carleton LUG mailing list:
The insidious bit is that applications get them without asking (or wanting) them. - Richard Perrin