It's creative, in the sense that you put together programs in a language the same way a writer puts together a book.
To expand on this a bit more, when writing any non-trivial program (basically, anything more complex than PRINT "HELLO WORLD") the programmer engages in exactly the same creative process as the author of any novel. An author makes a more-or-less arbitrary decision as to whether his protagonist shoots to kill or shoots to wound the antagonist in chapter 3. And he decides if it's worthwhile to describe the picket fence in detail; maybe it's an important clue in chapter 10.
In a similar vein, a programmer makes numerous more-or-less arbitrary decisions as to whether to use a for loop or a while loop to deal with a user's input, and he makes the same decisions as to what exact wording and screen design/layout to use when asking for that input. Variable names? Sort the data? How? Print the report? To the screen? Printer? What's the layout? Column headings? Order?
It seems obvious to me that both occupations embody a similar creative and artistic activity. In fact, most programmers that I know are or can be reasonable writers when they put their mind to it. I suspect that many authors could also be reasonable programmers if they chose to learn how it's done.
Isn't General Unix Philosophy "Make small simple tools which consist of small sections of code. Every of them do one specific thing, but do it in the best way. And at last but not least combine them thru all kinds of Interproces and other types of communications between them to provide solutions for bigger problems"
It's also the design philosophy behind C. Not surprising, when you consider that C was invented for the purpose of writing Unix.
I'm not even quite sure what they'll get royalties for. I mean will they get royalties for every mp3s transfered?
Flat rate per customer paid by all ISP's, plus a percentage (10% requested) of the ISP's gross advertising revenue.
Will they get them for music they dont even own?
They already do. It is my understannding that Socan collects a fee from all Canadian restaurants, hockey rinks and so on, for performance of any music, regardless of its origin.
Expect business costs in particular to soar. Yes, I know that similar can be said of CD-Rs... but you don't use CD-Rs for essential communications, to perform transactions, or to maintain a shop front.
Many of the folks on Slashdot go through mounds/heaps/piles of CDR's for business purposes. Backups for client and business-related systems, software distribution to clients, what-have-you.
If you are paying for a service then its legit. If they tax music swapping, then music swapping has to be a legit operation. You don't see special categories of taxes for income from bank raids!
Actually, that's incorrect. If you are engaged in an illegal money-making activity then you are required to pay income tax on that income just like on any other income that you receive.
Remember, that's how they jailed Al Capone -- for tax evasion on income from illegal bootlegging.
If you think about it, marketing as a whole is idiotic. Marketing doesn't produce anything. It's just about steering the masses toward one product at the expense of a competitor, whose product could actually be better.
I own and operate a movie theatre in a small town. I send a monthly flyer out in the mail that lists the shows coming up in the next month. That's marketing. I'm not competing with anyone else, I have the only theatre in town.
Would the owner of the brown Nissan Sentra parked near the front door please come to the front of the store? Your car seems to be on fire. Again, would the owner of a late-model brown Nissan Sentra please come to the front of the store -- your car is on fire. *squawk!*
I own and operate a small-town movie theatre. A couple of years back, I had a kid walk in off of the street and say, "One of your customers' cars is on fire." Yeah, sure kid. However, I went outside to look and sure enough, a little yellow car was going up pretty well. I dashed back inside and told my concession girl to call the fire department, then turned the movie soundtrack off and went into the auditorium and announced that whoever owned the little yellow car had better come out because it's on fire. Then I turned the soundtrack back on and thought everyone would go back to watching the movie.
To my surprise (at the time) about half of the crowd zipped out to the lobby to see the fire.
Watch as the clerk counts it up and keys in the $10.12 they have (that will take longer than it should.) Then the POS computer tells them to hand you $3.50. Watch as they get the 3 dollars, then three dimes before the light bulb goes off and they figure that it will work as two solid quarters. They put back the dimes, grab the quarters, and hand you your change.
The problem that most people have when making correct change is twofold.
First, they depend on the computer to tell them how much change to give.
Second, nobody knows how to make change any more. You don't try to subtract then make the change. You count it up! Change for a 32 cent purchase on a five dollar bill? 3 pennies makes 35, a nickel makes 40, a dime makes 50, two quarters makes one dollar, four dollars makes five. Thank you sir, and have a good day. How much change did I give him, exactly? Who cares? It's the correct amount.
It's when people try subtracting then calculating the change that things get screwed up.
Yes, but what if you had a bag of pot dropped on your front yard?
A few months back, the 8-year-old son of a friend of mine brought a potted plant home and told his dad that they had given it to him at school. A week or so later (after this plant had been sitting on their kitchen table for that period of time) Bill said that he thought that looked like a marijuana plant. He confronted his son about it and eventually the son admitted that he had found this potted plant in a wooded area behind his school and brought it home from there.
Now, Bill turned this plant in to the police when he found out about this, but what if someone had come along and noticed this on his kitchen table earlier? He really didn't realize that it was a pot plant for a week or so.
Because that's contrary to the MS "home-user" mindset.
You can't do X because Y is not turned on.
No! You must allow the user to do X if he wants to, and he shouldn't have to worry about anything at all that's under the hood.
That's the MS mindset and a lot of home-users also think that is the way it should be.
It's the same mindset as saying, "Why do I have to carry five pounds of keys on this ring when I can have one single masterkey for the every door that I need to get into." If your masterkey is compromised....
Back in the day, I believe that the Turbo-series (Pascal, C, Basic) were priced at $99. Which I think is a reasonable price for a programming language and well within the price range for a casual or beginner programmer to pick up and learn with. Hit him with a bill for $1000, though, and that beginner programmer will go elsewhere when he wants to find a language to learn.
Windows (and DOS) should have never seen a desktop,
The first part of your statement I'll agree with, but DOS?
I have always been of the opinion that DOS is a very good, minimalist single-tasking operating system that does a decent job of getting out of your way and letting you program things to work the way that you want them to.
It does get some internal cobwebs if it's left to run for days at a time without a reboot, but if it's rebooted once per day through a timed batch file or whatever, then it's very stable.
If you buy an e-mail account from them, why should you be able to set the "MAIL FROM"-header?
Because the mere fact that you choose to purchase an email account from one provider doesn't mean that you choose to abandon any and all other email accounts that you may have for various purposes, perhaps.
I may have an email account for responding to work-related email and another for personal messages, for one example.
Use some common sense then, and don't spend a quarter on each postcard! Sheesh... That's a huge amount of money to spend on a one-shot thing that will end up in the trashcan on the corner.
Buy yourself a nice Risograph (you can lease them for a relatively reasonable price from office supply stores) and print flyers on plain white 8.5x11 paper, or coloured if you want to spend about 3x more for the paper. Buy your paper in lots of about 100 reams at a time for the best price, and shop around for the paper.
But I wish I could find a way to get in contact with the many people who would probably come see the plays that my theater troupe puts on if they only knew it existed.
It just so happens that I own a theatre myself. *ba-da-bing!*
Actually, it's a movie theatre but the same principle applies, I'd think.
In my case, my main advertisement is a monthly flyer that I distribute by mail and in the local newspaper, listing each of the shows and showtimes for the forthcoming month. I also advertise on the front page of a buy-and-sell (classified ads) paper that is printed and distributed in the district.
I have a phone line that's answered by a machine that tells you what's currently playing, too.
You had that right the first time. What's the rush for any of these guys? Vote for them this month, the winner can take office next month and the incumbent can continue in the meantime. Need the new man in place by November 1? Fine, hold the vote at the end of September. Problem solved.
There is truly no rush (and should not be a rush) when counting votes. Sure, everyone wants to know who won and so on, but we can damn well keep our pants on for a few days if that's what it takes to achieve a proper and accurate count.
there was only one 'spoiled' ballot, and that was spoiled intentionally by some student who was insistant that it was a political statement.
And it most likely was.
After all, what more direct way can there be to make a political statement or protest than at the ballot box?
Seriously.
If 500 people in a particular district are sufficiently upset, angry, pissed-off, or whatever, and each one makes a political statemnt using his ballot, I'd imagine it would be noticed more by the top dogs than the same 500 people protesting on a street corner where the limosine just whizzed by.
A ballot is (or should be) the common man's way to express his choice for government. And he should be able to express that choice on his ballot. Period.
Unfortunately, the idea is completely unrealistic today.
Believe it or not, you are describing something similar to the actual communist system. Not the bastardization that's the Soviet/Korean/whatever system, but communism as described by Marx in The Communist Manifesto. If you haven't read that, read it sometime and be amazed. The man had some great ideas and provides much food for thought. However, communism in that form is unworkable for the same obvious reasons that you allude to in your post.
$60 a year with no overhead beyond bandwidth. Think about it.
I did. You forgot the rest of the overhead:
Programmers' salaries and benefits. Hardware. Accounting. Phone answering. (Doesn't matter how simple it is, some folks will still be dialing their number and someone has to answer the phone.) Property taxes on the extra office space required to host and support the update operations. Sales and advertising costs.
Slashdot Mirror
It's creative, in the sense that you put together programs in a language the same way a writer puts together a book.
To expand on this a bit more, when writing any non-trivial program (basically, anything more complex than PRINT "HELLO WORLD") the programmer engages in exactly the same creative process as the author of any novel. An author makes a more-or-less arbitrary decision as to whether his protagonist shoots to kill or shoots to wound the antagonist in chapter 3. And he decides if it's worthwhile to describe the picket fence in detail; maybe it's an important clue in chapter 10.
In a similar vein, a programmer makes numerous more-or-less arbitrary decisions as to whether to use a for loop or a while loop to deal with a user's input, and he makes the same decisions as to what exact wording and screen design/layout to use when asking for that input. Variable names? Sort the data? How? Print the report? To the screen? Printer? What's the layout? Column headings? Order?
It seems obvious to me that both occupations embody a similar creative and artistic activity. In fact, most programmers that I know are or can be reasonable writers when they put their mind to it. I suspect that many authors could also be reasonable programmers if they chose to learn how it's done.
Being able to tell that someone is in a particular bathroom stall rather than in the west wing is not that useful.
Except when the building is on fire.
Isn't General Unix Philosophy "Make small simple tools which consist of small sections of code. Every of them do one specific thing, but do it in the best way. And at last but not least combine them thru all kinds of Interproces and other types of communications between them to provide solutions for bigger problems"
It's also the design philosophy behind C. Not surprising, when you consider that C was invented for the purpose of writing Unix.
I'm not even quite sure what they'll get royalties for. I mean will they get royalties for every mp3s transfered?
Flat rate per customer paid by all ISP's, plus a percentage (10% requested) of the ISP's gross advertising revenue.
Will they get them for music they dont even own?
They already do. It is my understannding that Socan collects a fee from all Canadian restaurants, hockey rinks and so on, for performance of any music, regardless of its origin.
Expect business costs in particular to soar. Yes, I know that similar can be said of CD-Rs... but you don't use CD-Rs for essential communications, to perform transactions, or to maintain a shop front.
Many of the folks on Slashdot go through mounds/heaps/piles of CDR's for business purposes. Backups for client and business-related systems, software distribution to clients, what-have-you.
If you are paying for a service then its legit. If they tax music swapping, then music swapping has to be a legit operation. You don't see special categories of taxes for income from bank raids!
Actually, that's incorrect. If you are engaged in an illegal money-making activity then you are required to pay income tax on that income just like on any other income that you receive.
Remember, that's how they jailed Al Capone -- for tax evasion on income from illegal bootlegging.
If you think about it, marketing as a whole is idiotic. Marketing doesn't produce anything. It's just about steering the masses toward one product at the expense of a competitor, whose product could actually be better.
I own and operate a movie theatre in a small town. I send a monthly flyer out in the mail that lists the shows coming up in the next month. That's marketing. I'm not competing with anyone else, I have the only theatre in town.
I'm still marketing, though.
Hasn't anyone heard of the FDIC? Banks don't pass the cost of theft on to their customers; they're insured.
And of course everyone knows that insurance is free!
Try again...
Would the owner of the brown Nissan Sentra parked near the front door please come to the front of the store? Your car seems to be on fire. Again, would the owner of a late-model brown Nissan Sentra please come to the front of the store -- your car is on fire. *squawk!*
I own and operate a small-town movie theatre. A couple of years back, I had a kid walk in off of the street and say, "One of your customers' cars is on fire." Yeah, sure kid. However, I went outside to look and sure enough, a little yellow car was going up pretty well. I dashed back inside and told my concession girl to call the fire department, then turned the movie soundtrack off and went into the auditorium and announced that whoever owned the little yellow car had better come out because it's on fire. Then I turned the soundtrack back on and thought everyone would go back to watching the movie.
To my surprise (at the time) about half of the crowd zipped out to the lobby to see the fire.
Watch as the clerk counts it up and keys in the $10.12 they have (that will take longer than it should.) Then the POS computer tells them to hand you $3.50. Watch as they get the 3 dollars, then three dimes before the light bulb goes off and they figure that it will work as two solid quarters. They put back the dimes, grab the quarters, and hand you your change.
The problem that most people have when making correct change is twofold.
First, they depend on the computer to tell them how much change to give.
Second, nobody knows how to make change any more. You don't try to subtract then make the change. You count it up! Change for a 32 cent purchase on a five dollar bill? 3 pennies makes 35, a nickel makes 40, a dime makes 50, two quarters makes one dollar, four dollars makes five. Thank you sir, and have a good day. How much change did I give him, exactly? Who cares? It's the correct amount.
It's when people try subtracting then calculating the change that things get screwed up.
Yes, but what if you had a bag of pot dropped on your front yard?
A few months back, the 8-year-old son of a friend of mine brought a potted plant home and told his dad that they had given it to him at school. A week or so later (after this plant had been sitting on their kitchen table for that period of time) Bill said that he thought that looked like a marijuana plant. He confronted his son about it and eventually the son admitted that he had found this potted plant in a wooded area behind his school and brought it home from there.
Now, Bill turned this plant in to the police when he found out about this, but what if someone had come along and noticed this on his kitchen table earlier? He really didn't realize that it was a pot plant for a week or so.
A person unusually skilled in a particular activity: a card shark.
That's skill and not cheating (see the "sharp" reference above). It's also two words.
Why not just disable the services by default?
Because that's contrary to the MS "home-user" mindset.
You can't do X because Y is not turned on.
No! You must allow the user to do X if he wants to, and he shouldn't have to worry about anything at all that's under the hood.
That's the MS mindset and a lot of home-users also think that is the way it should be.
It's the same mindset as saying, "Why do I have to carry five pounds of keys on this ring when I can have one single masterkey for the every door that I need to get into." If your masterkey is compromised....
Back in the day, I believe that the Turbo-series (Pascal, C, Basic) were priced at $99. Which I think is a reasonable price for a programming language and well within the price range for a casual or beginner programmer to pick up and learn with. Hit him with a bill for $1000, though, and that beginner programmer will go elsewhere when he wants to find a language to learn.
So exactly why, in your opinion, are the local voting officials, who had nothing to do with the selection of technology inept?
Simply because they accepted and undertook to do a job for which they lack the appropriate level of knowledge and/or experience to handle.
Since when is it a requirement for the people who run the local precints to be experts on computers?
Since the introduction of touch-screen voting technology into the polling places that they are supposed to be in charge of.
The people who order and paid for the system, as well as the company that developed it and didn't stress test it could certainly be labeled as inept,
Agreed.
but definitely not the local officials.
See above.
It met my personal requirements of human readable and immutable.
You left out anonymous which, if you were the only person requesting a paper ballot at that poll your vote certainly won't be.
If you don't mark a candidate, it will require an election official to make sure that you did, in fact, mean to leave it blank.
How is it the business of "an election official" to know that you choose to leave a particular field blank on your ballot?
Windows (and DOS) should have never seen a desktop,
The first part of your statement I'll agree with, but DOS?
I have always been of the opinion that DOS is a very good, minimalist single-tasking operating system that does a decent job of getting out of your way and letting you program things to work the way that you want them to.
It does get some internal cobwebs if it's left to run for days at a time without a reboot, but if it's rebooted once per day through a timed batch file or whatever, then it's very stable.
Your experience has been different?
If you buy an e-mail account from them, why should you be able to set the "MAIL FROM"-header?
Because the mere fact that you choose to purchase an email account from one provider doesn't mean that you choose to abandon any and all other email accounts that you may have for various purposes, perhaps.
I may have an email account for responding to work-related email and another for personal messages, for one example.
I've lost money on the printing.
Use some common sense then, and don't spend a quarter on each postcard! Sheesh... That's a huge amount of money to spend on a one-shot thing that will end up in the trashcan on the corner.
Buy yourself a nice Risograph (you can lease them for a relatively reasonable price from office supply stores) and print flyers on plain white 8.5x11 paper, or coloured if you want to spend about 3x more for the paper. Buy your paper in lots of about 100 reams at a time for the best price, and shop around for the paper.
But I wish I could find a way to get in contact with the many people who would probably come see the plays that my theater troupe puts on if they only knew it existed.
It just so happens that I own a theatre myself. *ba-da-bing!*
Actually, it's a movie theatre but the same principle applies, I'd think.
In my case, my main advertisement is a monthly flyer that I distribute by mail and in the local newspaper, listing each of the shows and showtimes for the forthcoming month. I also advertise on the front page of a buy-and-sell (classified ads) paper that is printed and distributed in the district.
I have a phone line that's answered by a machine that tells you what's currently playing, too.
But why do you need then quickly?
You had that right the first time. What's the rush for any of these guys? Vote for them this month, the winner can take office next month and the incumbent can continue in the meantime. Need the new man in place by November 1? Fine, hold the vote at the end of September. Problem solved.
There is truly no rush (and should not be a rush) when counting votes. Sure, everyone wants to know who won and so on, but we can damn well keep our pants on for a few days if that's what it takes to achieve a proper and accurate count.
My humble opinion.
there was only one 'spoiled' ballot, and that was spoiled intentionally by some student who was insistant that it was a political statement.
And it most likely was.
After all, what more direct way can there be to make a political statement or protest than at the ballot box?
Seriously.
If 500 people in a particular district are sufficiently upset, angry, pissed-off, or whatever, and each one makes a political statemnt using his ballot, I'd imagine it would be noticed more by the top dogs than the same 500 people protesting on a street corner where the limosine just whizzed by.
A ballot is (or should be) the common man's way to express his choice for government. And he should be able to express that choice on his ballot. Period.
Unfortunately, the idea is completely unrealistic today.
Believe it or not, you are describing something similar to the actual communist system. Not the bastardization that's the Soviet/Korean/whatever system, but communism as described by Marx in The Communist Manifesto. If you haven't read that, read it sometime and be amazed. The man had some great ideas and provides much food for thought. However, communism in that form is unworkable for the same obvious reasons that you allude to in your post.
$60 a year with no overhead beyond bandwidth. Think about it.
I did. You forgot the rest of the overhead:
Programmers' salaries and benefits.
Hardware.
Accounting.
Phone answering. (Doesn't matter how simple it is, some folks will still be dialing their number and someone has to answer the phone.)
Property taxes on the extra office space required to host and support the update operations.
Sales and advertising costs.
And so on down the list.