Me too, for exactly the reasons you described. Plus, with dollars you need to pull out your wallet and count to see how many you have left; with dollar coins, you just need to jangle your pocket to see if there's more than one.:)
Hey, everyone's situation is different. The last company I worked for, the CEO said something in an office-wide meeting during a visit, and afterwards I sent him an email and said "If you really have that personnel information [about performance vs pay scale], I want to see where I fall." It took a few months to coordinate, but HE kept following up with ME, and eventually sat down with me for an hour or so. Keep in mind I was sub-director, sub-architect, sub-manager.
He gave me the information I asked for, and illustrated that (due to a recent transition I had made within the company that wasn't going well) I was performing very poorly according to the information he had. Turns out he found out about my performance -after- I had sent him that email, and he judged that my interest in my performance (that I showed by asking him for the info) made him think twice about simply throwing my name up as a likely-to-let-go.
In fact, by the time we sat down that day, he had talked to one of my higher-ups and said "did you know that [my name] is performing really low for his salary?" and the higher-up said "yep, but I'm not worried, because he just transitioned into the role, and he performed really well in the previous role." Once he had assured me he wasn't going to fire me, we talked about various project-related hoohah, and experimented with some alternative project performance (as opposed to personnel performance) metrics. All in all, a very nice and useful meeting, seemingly for both of us.
And to think, if he hadn't read that email from me, I probably wouldn't have been kept on as personnel. Mind you, it might -also- be the fact that he had been CEO since the company started, financed it all with his and his partner's own capital, and had frozen their salaries at around $51,000 yearly (don't cry for him, of course; the company performs, and he has long since made a fortune on the stock).
Postscript: I have since left the company, but only because the amount of travel didn't jibe with my personal life plans, and were it not for that, I wouldn't have left.
Heh -- a few days ago while looking for an mpeg2 encoder, I found a freeware windows product that (a) said "warning: some antivirus software inaccurately reports this program as a trojan, but this is FALSE" and (b) said that it required the user to have admin rights for the installation. Both of these items were on the download page, for heaven's sake -- yet I have no doubt that tons of people download and install that software each day. Lord knows what it does.
As a left-leaning-type-person, I can honestly say I've never held the UK up as the model for what we should be trying to achieve, for past occurances similar (but in smaller scale) to this. I tend to lean towards Canada as a model.
If I remember correctly, WinMX was merely a Windows client developed to operate using the same protocol as BeShare on BeOS.
At the time, BeOS popularity was waning, and as web sites supporting it started shutting down, the BeShare network quickly became -the- place to get freeware and shareware applications that no longer had download mirrors available, and were unsupported by the original developer.
If memory serves, there was quite a bit of porn on it, too, but not a lot of music -- applications, drivers, config files and BeOS demos were definitely the overwhelming offering.
Of course, once WinMX came out and Windows people started using the network, it became overwhelmed with music trades. Still, for once, you can safely claim that this particular P2P "network" was created not to trade in pirated goods (which was frowned upon in the BeShare days) but in fact as a technical proof-of-concept that was quickly leveraged as a legal software distribution tool, much like BitTorrent is trying to be.
I don't have any free research to donate to your paper, but here's a possible title: "The Network Creates The Network: Delivering Television Programming Profitably Using Open Source Software"
True, that the user generally sees the computer as a tool, and doesn't care about formats.
The flipside of that, of course, is that once the tool bites them in the arse, they care -a lot- about formats. It's how I came to care, and it's the "right" way anyway -- people can't be coerced into giving a dang, they need to learn on their own.
A tool-based correlary: you can happily use a specific type of screw and screwdriver for years of your life, until you discover that you've lost the screwdriver and you can no longer buy a new one, but you desperately need to remove some of your old screws. Are people stupid for not realizing this would be a problem earlier? I'd say no, because manufacturers spent copious amounts of money convincing consumers that their product is "best", will be around forever, and is a smart thing to do. What chance does common sense have against a marketing monolith?
I know how you feel; I had an original music composition -- one of my first, and still best -- stored in a non-midi, non-standard format. Years later, when I tried to open it, I couldn't, as the software used to create it no longer existed.
I finally found someone online who still had a copy of the software laying around, and who was kind enough to copy it to a midi file for me, for which I remain eternally grateful.
That's the day I converted to open formats all the time, personally, and the primary reason I'm so pro-open-source these days.
Hell, consider David Niven -- I'm fairly certain he conceived of the idea of geosynchronous satellites in stable orbits around the earth, even going so far as to calculate how it might be accomplished (as far as speed and distance from earth) -- and turned out to be right on the money.
I know how you feel. So many people don't seem to grasp that the Internet is a really flexible, groovy tool that has a lot of sharp edges. The more you remove the sharp edges, the less useful the tool becomes. I can give you the world's "safest" Internet (and also the least useful): Block everything except 127.0.0.1.
I like the idea that someone could hang up on someone else, and when the other person complains, the first one could say "you were being a jerk!" "no I wasn't!" "yes you were -- the PHONE even said so." Which is a jerky thing to say, and which would prompt the other person to hang up.
Also fun: the idea that someone would need a phone to decide whether or not to hang up. Wonder if one could call, do a lot of "smooth" heavy breathing, and the other person would just stare at the phone monitor waiting for it to suggest they hang up.
Silliness, true; but remember, there are people who, in early testing of computer car navigation aids, would turn right when the computer voice said "turn right!" even if there was no street to turn on to...
No, actually, according to the article, the deployment of "solutions" (read: applets and things) in StarOffice, optimized for Open Source software, was causing problems of accessibility in other departments. According to the article:
"It was also more difficult to configure the open-source software so that police officers could access their files from any police station."
Actually, in combination with the article's mention of other police stations still using microsoft products, I read this to mean that when officers wanted to open their StarOffice docs in police stations equipped with Microsoft Products, they couldn't do so unless they'd been saved as.doc files, and once returning to their home station the.doc importing was less than ideal.
If that's the case, it merely bolsters the case for this being an issue of microsoft interoperability as a prerequisite for success, and as the primary reason for abandoning StarOffice.
>I know many people will respond with "Well I can do it, so it's ok, because if it's possible to find out, it's public, and there's no difference between information being buried in the net and it being collected in one place and published as a news story". No, it isn't ok and yes there is a difference.
and then
>There's such a thing as personal responsibility. You have rights, but you also have moral obligations.
Do you think that individuals who are attempting to make a profit running a business or service are somehow exempt from these moral obligations you're so fond of?
If not, then how can you justify the folks at google making a huge, huge pile of money (to paraphrase you) "collecting information that is buried on the net in one place and publishing it"?
If so, then how can you justify your apparent double-standard, wherein this behavior is morally reprehensible if it's "gratuitous" but morally appropriate if it's for a profit?
It is this specific double standard that is being pointed out by CNet UK, by the way.
Just wanted to mention that DSL in the hands of a good (non-telco) ISP can be the greatest thing ever, too -- depends on the ISP.
I've had the same ISP for years, for instance, and I get over 2400 down/430 up, five static IPs, the ability to run my own mail server (they block port 25 on everyone to prevent spam, unless you say "can I have port 25 open?" and they'll open it up and just check to make sure you're not an open relay every so often), amazing customer service (2 in the morning, someone picks up the phone) and so on.
Cable could touch the speeds, and perhaps provide a better price, but static IPs, servers allowed, great customer service and proactive open relay prevention? Never seen it anywhere else, DSL or cable.
And if this ruling goes through, it's over,because telco DSL doesn't offer that either. Sigh.
Well, in theory you COULD backup in person the first time, then do a nightly rsync -- but that's assuming you can find a service that will do that. Not likely.
>instead of fucking with the damn clock, why not encourage employers to let employees work flexible hours, or even change their work schedules in the summer months?
Indeed. I set my own hours at my current job, and find myself waking up with the sun now -- which ironically makes me wake up earlier than I used to with an alarm. So I end up going to work the same time I used to during the winter, and earlier than I used to during the summer. Hurray for circadian rhythms!
I agree. I've been waiting for years for a standard to be developed wherein I could drop this markup in:
and the browser would either show a selection menu of some kind on click or pop multiple tabs (newer compatible browsers) or ignore all except the last href/alt pair (older incompatible browsers). No javascript, no dhtml, just:
x ---- xxx yyy zzz
alas, that would be useful, so it will never happen. heh.
I just spent ten minutes preparing a story about something for MetaFilter, including time spent searching for key phrases to see if it was a dupe. No matches were found on any of my attempts.
Then when I previewed the story, it found a dupe -- the posting itself didn't contain ANY of the key words I tried (the original author was trying to be intentionally vague) but the preview script picked up the matching link URL and showed me the old story.
So yeah, this functionality could be really useful indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Me too, for exactly the reasons you described. Plus, with dollars you need to pull out your wallet and count to see how many you have left; with dollar coins, you just need to jangle your pocket to see if there's more than one. :)
Hey, everyone's situation is different. The last company I worked for, the CEO said something in an office-wide meeting during a visit, and afterwards I sent him an email and said "If you really have that personnel information [about performance vs pay scale], I want to see where I fall." It took a few months to coordinate, but HE kept following up with ME, and eventually sat down with me for an hour or so. Keep in mind I was sub-director, sub-architect, sub-manager.
He gave me the information I asked for, and illustrated that (due to a recent transition I had made within the company that wasn't going well) I was performing very poorly according to the information he had. Turns out he found out about my performance -after- I had sent him that email, and he judged that my interest in my performance (that I showed by asking him for the info) made him think twice about simply throwing my name up as a likely-to-let-go.
In fact, by the time we sat down that day, he had talked to one of my higher-ups and said "did you know that [my name] is performing really low for his salary?" and the higher-up said "yep, but I'm not worried, because he just transitioned into the role, and he performed really well in the previous role." Once he had assured me he wasn't going to fire me, we talked about various project-related hoohah, and experimented with some alternative project performance (as opposed to personnel performance) metrics. All in all, a very nice and useful meeting, seemingly for both of us.
And to think, if he hadn't read that email from me, I probably wouldn't have been kept on as personnel. Mind you, it might -also- be the fact that he had been CEO since the company started, financed it all with his and his partner's own capital, and had frozen their salaries at around $51,000 yearly (don't cry for him, of course; the company performs, and he has long since made a fortune on the stock).
Postscript: I have since left the company, but only because the amount of travel didn't jibe with my personal life plans, and were it not for that, I wouldn't have left.
Heh -- a few days ago while looking for an mpeg2 encoder, I found a freeware windows product that (a) said "warning: some antivirus software inaccurately reports this program as a trojan, but this is FALSE" and (b) said that it required the user to have admin rights for the installation. Both of these items were on the download page, for heaven's sake -- yet I have no doubt that tons of people download and install that software each day. Lord knows what it does.
As a left-leaning-type-person, I can honestly say I've never held the UK up as the model for what we should be trying to achieve, for past occurances similar (but in smaller scale) to this. I tend to lean towards Canada as a model.
If I remember correctly, WinMX was merely a Windows client developed to operate using the same protocol as BeShare on BeOS.
At the time, BeOS popularity was waning, and as web sites supporting it started shutting down, the BeShare network quickly became -the- place to get freeware and shareware applications that no longer had download mirrors available, and were unsupported by the original developer.
If memory serves, there was quite a bit of porn on it, too, but not a lot of music -- applications, drivers, config files and BeOS demos were definitely the overwhelming offering.
Of course, once WinMX came out and Windows people started using the network, it became overwhelmed with music trades. Still, for once, you can safely claim that this particular P2P "network" was created not to trade in pirated goods (which was frowned upon in the BeShare days) but in fact as a technical proof-of-concept that was quickly leveraged as a legal software distribution tool, much like BitTorrent is trying to be.
I don't have any free research to donate to your paper, but here's a possible title: "The Network Creates The Network: Delivering Television Programming Profitably Using Open Source Software"
Piece 'o pie, bud?
True, that the user generally sees the computer as a tool, and doesn't care about formats.
The flipside of that, of course, is that once the tool bites them in the arse, they care -a lot- about formats. It's how I came to care, and it's the "right" way anyway -- people can't be coerced into giving a dang, they need to learn on their own.
A tool-based correlary: you can happily use a specific type of screw and screwdriver for years of your life, until you discover that you've lost the screwdriver and you can no longer buy a new one, but you desperately need to remove some of your old screws. Are people stupid for not realizing this would be a problem earlier? I'd say no, because manufacturers spent copious amounts of money convincing consumers that their product is "best", will be around forever, and is a smart thing to do. What chance does common sense have against a marketing monolith?
I know how you feel; I had an original music composition -- one of my first, and still best -- stored in a non-midi, non-standard format. Years later, when I tried to open it, I couldn't, as the software used to create it no longer existed.
I finally found someone online who still had a copy of the software laying around, and who was kind enough to copy it to a midi file for me, for which I remain eternally grateful.
That's the day I converted to open formats all the time, personally, and the primary reason I'm so pro-open-source these days.
That's sort of what I was thinking -- regenerative zombie dogs would make one hell of an army.
Hell, consider David Niven -- I'm fairly certain he conceived of the idea of geosynchronous satellites in stable orbits around the earth, even going so far as to calculate how it might be accomplished (as far as speed and distance from earth) -- and turned out to be right on the money.
Nah, they'll love it; you'll have to purchase a piercing "subscription", and come in for regular renewals.
I know how you feel. So many people don't seem to grasp that the Internet is a really flexible, groovy tool that has a lot of sharp edges. The more you remove the sharp edges, the less useful the tool becomes. I can give you the world's
"safest" Internet (and also the least useful): Block everything except 127.0.0.1.
Quoth the article:
"Skype is currently the only provider to allow calls to landlines and cellphones."
Not so; Yahoo!'s instant messenger for PC has a beta VOIP capability based on Net2Phone, and it allows calls to landlines and cellphones.
I'm sure there are others as well.
I like the idea that someone could hang up on someone else, and when the other person complains, the first one could say "you were being a jerk!" "no I wasn't!" "yes you were -- the PHONE even said so." Which is a jerky thing to say, and which would prompt the other person to hang up.
Also fun: the idea that someone would need a phone to decide whether or not to hang up. Wonder if one could call, do a lot of "smooth" heavy breathing, and the other person would just stare at the phone monitor waiting for it to suggest they hang up.
Silliness, true; but remember, there are people who, in early testing of computer car navigation aids, would turn right when the computer voice said "turn right!" even if there was no street to turn on to...
No, actually, according to the article, the deployment of "solutions" (read: applets and things) in StarOffice, optimized for Open Source software, was causing problems of accessibility in other departments. According to the article:
.doc files, and once returning to their home station the .doc importing was less than ideal.
"It was also more difficult to configure the open-source software so that police officers could access their files from any police station."
Actually, in combination with the article's mention of other police stations still using microsoft products, I read this to mean that when officers wanted to open their StarOffice docs in police stations equipped with Microsoft Products, they couldn't do so unless they'd been saved as
If that's the case, it merely bolsters the case for this being an issue of microsoft interoperability as a prerequisite for success, and as the primary reason for abandoning StarOffice.
Just one quick thing to say:
>I know many people will respond with "Well I can do it, so it's ok, because if it's possible to find out, it's public, and there's no difference between information being buried in the net and it being collected in one place and published as a news story". No, it isn't ok and yes there is a difference.
and then
>There's such a thing as personal responsibility. You have rights, but you also have moral obligations.
Do you think that individuals who are attempting to make a profit running a business or service are somehow exempt from these moral obligations you're so fond of?
If not, then how can you justify the folks at google making a huge, huge pile of money (to paraphrase you) "collecting information that is buried on the net in one place and publishing it"?
If so, then how can you justify your apparent double-standard, wherein this behavior is morally reprehensible if it's "gratuitous" but morally appropriate if it's for a profit?
It is this specific double standard that is being pointed out by CNet UK, by the way.
In addition to backups, I highly recommend running RAID (software RAID has been very very very very very very good to me).
Already patented. You owe me $200 or go directly to jail.
Just wanted to mention that DSL in the hands of a good (non-telco) ISP can be the greatest thing ever, too -- depends on the ISP.
I've had the same ISP for years, for instance, and I get over 2400 down/430 up, five static IPs, the ability to run my own mail server (they block port 25 on everyone to prevent spam, unless you say "can I have port 25 open?" and they'll open it up and just check to make sure you're not an open relay every so often), amazing customer service (2 in the morning, someone picks up the phone) and so on.
Cable could touch the speeds, and perhaps provide a better price, but static IPs, servers allowed, great customer service and proactive open relay prevention? Never seen it anywhere else, DSL or cable.
And if this ruling goes through, it's over,because telco DSL doesn't offer that either. Sigh.
Well, in theory you COULD backup in person the first time, then do a nightly rsync -- but that's assuming you can find a service that will do that. Not likely.
>instead of fucking with the damn clock, why not encourage employers to let employees work flexible hours, or even change their work schedules in the summer months?
Indeed. I set my own hours at my current job, and find myself waking up with the sun now -- which ironically makes me wake up earlier than I used to with an alarm. So I end up going to work the same time I used to during the winter, and earlier than I used to during the summer. Hurray for circadian rhythms!
Duh, should have previewed...
the markup should have showed a standard 'a' tag, with one alt attribute and multiple href attributes.
although technically it should have been one alt, one href, and a slew of althref attributes (that older browsers would just ignore).
I agree. I've been waiting for years for a standard to be developed wherein I could drop this markup in:
and the browser would either show a selection menu of some kind on click or pop multiple tabs (newer compatible browsers) or ignore all except the last href/alt pair (older incompatible browsers). No javascript, no dhtml, just:
x
----
xxx
yyy
zzz
alas, that would be useful, so it will never happen. heh.
I just spent ten minutes preparing a story about something for MetaFilter, including time spent searching for key phrases to see if it was a dupe. No matches were found on any of my attempts.
Then when I previewed the story, it found a dupe -- the posting itself didn't contain ANY of the key words I tried (the original author was trying to be intentionally vague) but the preview script picked up the matching link URL and showed me the old story.
So yeah, this functionality could be really useful indeed.