It's one thing to be critical of decreasing space program funding to pay for math & science education, it's another thing to imply that the funding will be diverted to handouts.
I love that you can assign functions like any other variable, and graft methods onto existing objects (overwriting things in some cases), but it definitely presents a problem in any sort of environment where you're not the only person who can insert code. See some of the problems the Greasemonkey folks had to worry about.
These problems aren't insurmountable, but I don't think you'd see them in C++ or Java.
Ah, yes. Scalability in a client-side scripting environment. For the times when a browser has to be able to handle requests from thousands of users at once!
It seems to me that many of you do not have your fingers on the pulse of the day to day users in a corporate enviornment. That is why you fail to see why companies use, and will continue to use, Windows as a base OS for their client systems.
It's true, I've been out of the cube farm for about a year and a half. And I think it's true that there, Windows still has significant penetration.
But consider the following:
(1) Even in the corporate world, users are ready to get off the upgrade treadmill at Windows XP. Precisely for the reason you mention "It works just fine for what these users need to do." Nobody needs the next version of Windows, nobody really cares, and Vista really isn't that great.
(2) There exist increasingly capable alternatives that also "work just fine for what these users need to do."
(3) More and more work is done on web apps.
It does not 'break' as often as you would like it to, or believe it to break
I'm sure that somewhere, there's a place where seasoned Windows sysadmins correctly administer Windows boxes built from well-selected reliable hardware so well that your statement is true. However, it certainly has not been the case in the business and home environments I've been a part of. And "as often as I'd like it to?" I'd be a happier man if it broke under my use not at all.
But even assuming your statement is truer than I think it is -- the other three points are what I really mean by "Windows is stagnating." Microsoft's licensing revenues certainly aren't going away overnight. But right now, in the main, Windows is pretty much headed to the ignominy of just another commodity.
very useful if you know how to apply design patterns.
If we're talking about *Javascript* design patterns -- common useful Javascript idioms -- then I think this is a useful statement. If we're talking about common idioms that have filtered out from C++ and Java known as "design patterns" as applied to languages that don't need to many of them, then I'd say Javascript is pretty useful even if you don't know much about them. Possibly more useful.
Microsoft who acted out of a personal interest to keep Yahoo independent. Something wrong with that? Oh, yeah... public company.
There's nothing wrong with acting in personal interests if there's a reasonable argument that it coincides with shareholder interests. And in this case, there certainly is.
Look at Google's value. Which companies are in any position at all to grab any significant share of what they're doing in the market? It's a short list. Yahoo's on it.
If you were holding onto a significant chunk of one of those companies, would you want to (a) sell it now for a quick but small profit or (b) figure out what changes you need to make in the company to have it better compete with Google and acquire value on that level?
Some shareholders might choose a. But b is certainly reasonable.
Frankly, so is the Microsoft antipathy. People like to talk as if the haters are just irrational folks who got up on the anti-MS side of the bed. Nevermind that there's a significant real technical and business history that would make any sane and competent person wary of them.
The web as a platform is open and expanding. Windows as a platform is stagnating and closed. Which do you want to be invested in for the next 10 years?
Alright, you've characterized my statement as childish. Now, how about actually providing a rebuttal to my claim
I'm not really inclined to spend a lot of time on this. My past experience suggests the kind of thinker who can seriously analogically level all taxation and theft generally can't be convinced of serious distinctions. It's like trying to argue with the people who genuinely believe public libraries == communism. You're either kind of person who can see the differences or you're not.
But cheer up. Maybe you're not because you have some special intellectual abilities that I and most of the rest of the world doesn't have. If only we appreciated you! We'll be sorry someday!
Look:
Scenario A: Hal walks down to the corner with a gun, offers James a choice between his wallet and immediate traumatic perforation.
Scenario B: Hal walks into a voting booth, and casts one of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of other votes in a race for a Senator Smith who is for charging socially participating citizens a tax of 20% per year instead of Senator Jones who is for charging 17%. James also has the opportunity to vote in this election, and to convince other people to vote, and to loudly scream about how the voting booth is *exactly the same* as when Hal robbed him on the corner with a gun. James is also entitled to equal protection with Hal under policy decisions and laws made by either Smith or Jones, regardless of who is elected.
Python et.al. are all languages that we who were there in the 80's remember with a combined horror/amusement when we had to write programs in Basic.
You have got to be kidding me.
This is a mistake on the order of "Cats are mortal. Aristotle is mortal. Therefore, Aristotle is a cat."
I'm not a particularly big user of Python, but I know enough to know the comparison with Basic is pretty shallow. There's an interpreter, and there's divergence from C syntax. I think that's about it. And there's all kinds of stuff in Python, Perl, Ruby, and even *PHP* that you could never dream of doing in any Basic I saw during the 1980s.
The lack of type-safe variables,
Type safety. Okay. You're one of those people. You're hereby sentenced to read all of Steve Yegge's blog posts for a year.
Alternatively, you're welcome to cite studies indicating higher productivity for type safe languages.
the possibility to write unreadable code
Which language have you found it impossible to write unreadable code in?
hunt for bugs that are caused because two files are incompatible.
Right. Like there exists a language that addresses this problem.
Interpreting languages has been tried before,and they are never working for large projects that shall live for a long time and has to be maintained by a lot of different programmers.
"Implementations with feature X have failed, therefore any implementation with feature X will fail." That sword can be wielded equally well against compiled "type safe" languages.
The fact that a language has an interpreter that implements it really doesn't have much to do with whether or not it can be compiled. Python can be compiled to Java class files, for instance, and probably a few other targets I don't know about. So can Javascript. Probably Ruby, too.
And as for large, sustainable projects You're posting on a system that's over 10 years old that's built in Perl. You've probably bought books or something else from a bigger site that uses it too. I've worked on a system that predates Slashdot that had a codebase that was 10% Perl and it's still going strong. This is to say nothing of highly visible examples of development in PHP of all things.
I have nothing against compiling when the situation demands it, and I can respect the fact that automatic tools for catching certain kinds of mistakes are helpful. That's not really a function of type safety, however. Ask Perl or PHP (and probably the others) to warn you if you've misspelled a variable or done other "bad" things with it, and they will, for example. But moreover, it's been a long time since most of the mistakes in my programming had anything to do with whether or not I fed the right variable the right type of primitive or reference, and I suspect the same is true of most experienced programmers.
As for the objections to getting stuck in a contract, all I have to say is WTF? If I'm going to spend $400 for a phone, I'm doing it with the intention of using that phone for at least a few years. And since we've already established that ALL of the carriers suck, I don't really see the advantage in being able to switch to a different one.
I pretty much agree with everything else you wrote, but there's one advantage in being able to switch: the carrier will be slightly less inclined to treat you like dogcrap in order to keep you from leaving.
Most of the Apple fans I know didn't buy an iPhone because of the AT&T decision. Most of them are still not planning on getting one because they hate AT&T more than they like Apple.
My hate for AT&T is strong, and I haven't bought an iPhone yet in part because of that.
However, if it'd been Verizon, I'd be even more unlikely to buy (as in "probably never"). Verizon is arguably as bad or worse than AT&T in terms of general evil towards their customers.
No, no, clearly we must continue demanding the funding at gunpoint from our own citizenry.
Saying we "demand funding at gunpoint from our own citizenry" is like saying we demand compliance with traffic law or *any* at gunpoint. I suppose there are some people out there who comply for *no other reason* other than that they might be shot or imprisoned (and those people are the reason why you need that stuff in the first place). The vast majority comply because they know it's part of a system that more or less works -- and that there are better ways to change it than puerile comparisons between taxation and theft.
Not exactly. More precisely, both houses have a slim Democratic majority, and they're more or less pressured to continue budgeting for policy recently created and executed by the R's.
Without the momentum of those policies -- especially without certain high-profile foreign military adventures -- it's pretty clear the budget picture would look pretty different. Heck, just by introducing competitive bidding on Iraqi reconstruction contracts, it's plausible to suggest the budget picture would look at least $5 mil different. And all that's to say nothing of the Bush tax cuts.
I'll still agree that this makes the Democrats somewhat complicit. Congress does have the authority to simply refuse to fund the war -- or to provide only limited funding for it, opting instead to fund other things, at least in theory.
But in practice, it's pretty obvious where that was going to go.
And it's always important to remember that for the most part, legislation doesn't happen without executive influence while the houses of congress are this closely split.
we all end up so worked up that we miss the point that the government should not be doing any of this stuff.
I don't agree. It's certainly an easy out -- you definitely don't have to worry about public accountability or effective government anymore if you simply say the government shouldn't be doing/funding anything -- but in so doing, you effectively throw out one of a somewhat limited array of societal tools for getting things done.
I'd love to be surprised here, but I expect that the level of accountability you can expect from Dreamhost is just about nil. Like just about everybody else in this space, I suspect that their terms of service basically say they can suspend your account at any time for any or no reason.
Unless you have an agreement that says otherwise, it's quite likely they're under no obligation to provide you with access to their machines, or any data residing on them.
Periodically you can read stories about people whose accounts were cut off, not only from Dreamhost, but from other hosts as well. The common refrain? They can't get to the data they had there.
I think somebody needs to start a movement to include a provision about data access and termination for hosting environments.
Look, a candidate who can write code obviously may not have an edge over one who can't -- in fact, given the aptness of Philip Greenspun's comparison of pilots vs programmers (see here: http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/aviation ), it's entirely possible programming skill isn't a great test of broad intellectual ability.:)
But tech issues absolutely underly quite a few other issues of economics and liberty, and those are certainly have a weight equal to other big issues like foreign policy.
But I think there's an even bigger reason why tech workers *definitely* should be looking at how candidates understand and address issues they understand. Because this is the arena where *you* may actually know enough, as a professional, to really gauge a candidates policy acumen. I doubt most slashdotters are experts in military tactics or nation building. Most of us have a shallow grasp of economics -- yes, even most of you Austrian school autodidacts. Same goes for health care, education, criminology, etc -- Slashdot readers may be smart laymen, but that's all most of us are in those fields.
But lots of us are IT pros. And if a candidate seems to really get it in the area where you can tell buzzspeak and platitudes from real knowledge, that tells you quite a bit about their ability to reach into an issue, understand it, and formulate a plan to do something about it.
I have no idea what Chuck Fish's interests are but if you want to change the market, it might be best to do it with someone who knows the market--or even has the ability to change it from the inside.
In other words, he's a real go-getter -- it doesn't matter what he decides to get done, just that he's got the connections, the can-do attitude, and the shark skills to get it done!
Look, I can take the point that execution skills matter. The problem with this is that what we're talking about here are policy advisors, and when it comes to understanding the potential of technology, Mr. Fish is quite likely going to be limited at *best* to its value as a corporate asset. And there's little evidence McCain has the ability to pick anybody better.
By contrast, Obama's selection shows that he knows where to start for picking people who understand the underlying knowledge domain. And there's definitely evidence to suggest that Obama has the ability to pick people and build an organization that can get things done to supplement to work of policy advisor that knows what's up.
$10/month. Slightly more expensive than Dreamhost, sane amounts of disk space and bandwidth rather than sky's-the-limit promises, but they deliver what they promise, and they're far more stable.
The vast majority of which are written by ignorant script kiddies
Nice pre-emptive ad hominem.
who think that for $10/month they should be allowed to utilize unlimited resources and slow down the server for everyone else on it.
That's the Dreamhost official line, anyway. What's closer to the truth is that if you actually try to *use* the resources Dreamhost *sells* to you, they can't deliver.
They've admitted they oversell. They *count* on their profile customer not being able to take advantage of what they offer. But inevitably, if you offer a product that's useful, customers will find a way to use it.
So they're now trying to find ways to back away from fulfilling their rather lofty limits on storage and bandwidth. "Non-web" content now carries a surcharge -- because a significant number customers have figured out that large amounts of storage are good for online-backup. It doesn't surprise me that email's next, because next to storage, it's probably the highest space consumer for the average user.
And their service?
As far as cheaped shared web hosts go, Dreamhost is one of the best. Certainly many people get lucky with other hosts, but most hosting companies have not had to deal with the technical issues that Dreamhost has overcome over the years.
It's always someone else, isn't it? Poor Dreamhost -- nobody else has had to deal with the issues they have!
It *is* possible to run a stable, adequate shared hosting service. Hurricane Electric has price comparable offerings to what Dreamhost has. Sure, they've never offered the sky's-the-limit resources that Dreamhost has promised -- but I've only seen technical issues manifest themselves *once* in *ten years* on HE.
Dreamhost's had at least a dozen in the 2 1/2 I've been with them. Hell, csoft.net's been doing better than that, and for years they were pretty fly-by-night. This isn't to mention their billing problems, random hostname changes, and flippant attitude that may be entertaining in a newsletter context but really gets grating when you're addressing actual problems.
All that said, Dreamhost is fine for the kind of small website that doesn't need to worry much about uptime or using the kinds of resources Dreamhost ostensibly offers. Despite the fact that I think they're far better marketers than hosters, I may choose to keep a non-critical domain or two there for a while longer, just because of the hassle involved in move them away. But I really can't stand the posturing that goes on when this kind of thing comes up. Dreamhost may attract a higher number of high-expectations low-ability customers, but the problem here is not *at all* limited to their customers.
... and if they require me to pipe my mail through Google, I'll take my business somewhere that doesn't.
They probably won't. If they do go down that road, I suspect what they'll do is charge extra for it, like they have recently when introduced a surcharge for "non-web content."
Dreamhost has a problem: they oversell. They've admitted it (http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/ ), but like a lot of other things they do, they try to spin it as being a positive. They claim that sure, they'll lose money on a few customers that actually find something to do with the promised 200-500GB of disk space, but that's just a minority and in the meanwhile everybody else is so happy with being offered that much space they gain a lot of customers.
The problem with this approach? Eventually, a large number of your customers will find something to do with what you're selling them, and if you haven't prepared to deliver it to all of them, you're in trouble.
I bring up disk space specifically because that's already happened. Can you think of any particular application that just about anybody with a 100-200GB hard drive might want that much disk space on a host for? Of course -- online backup! You might not sign up thinking about it, but once you've got it, and you've already learned to run an ftp client to move things up and down, it's eventually going to occur to you.
So, lo and behold, last October, Dreamhost changes its TOS to make a completely artificial distinction between bits sitting on a disk that are going to be served via HTTP, and bits just... sitting there. That is, non-web "backup" content now carries an additional surcharge.
To some extent, I understand they have to do this, because they otherwise can't actually deliver on what they've sold.
But this will happen to them again. If they offer a certain capacity of service, eventually, people will figure out how to use it.
For example, other than backup/online file storage, what kind of GB-level usage are we starting to see from average users?
Now, note in particular that Digidesign's struggles aren't limited to Leopard (see, for example "Digidesign and M-Audio Drivers Fail to Keep Pace with Vista, Leopard, and XP SP3") -- I personally think Digi as a company has a problem. But they're not the only vendor mentioning audio issues in 10.5.2, and there are others like MOTU who haven't been explicitly complaining but have had product release delays (DP 6 was supposed to be out Q2).
If insurance companies can't set pricing based on full knowledge and actuarial statistics, but people can, it will increase costs.
Because this would *totally* throw off the existing delicate balance of information symmetry that currently exists between insurance companies and consumers, right?
Finally, why shouldn't people at greater risk pay more? Discrimination is not necessarily a bad thing.
The more efficient discrimination becomes, the less what we're talking about here is actually insurance anymore.
But the reason none of them should have supported this is that the result can and will drive up the cost of health care for everyone.
Up? The health issues that genetics can predict *already exist* in the population -- the risks the insurance pool has taken on are already funded, now, no genetic testing involved. The only way this would drive costs up is if there's some significant population of people who, sans testing, would otherwise go uninsured, but when tested, will choose to be insured. That's a highly dubious thesis -- I strongly suspect that most people who can afford insurance purchase it -- but if you have reasonable evidence, I'm interested.
Textbook cult behavior. The fact that there is a 'process' at all is just so they can try and guilt trip you. Scientology has a similar process and it is so grueling few make it out that way unless they pretend to be suicidal.
It's barely even comparable -- if you're going to collapse the difference between getting out of the Mormon Church and getting out of Scientology, you may as well also collapse the difference between a divorce and having to click "OK" on a "Are you sure?" dialog when you go to delete something important.
When I say hassled, I'm talking about the same kind of social pressure you'd get from family if you just announced you wanted to quit your $100,000/year job and become a park ranger or public library staff at $10/hr. Nobody's going to actually stop you from doing it, but they are going to ask you questions and make sure this isn't just some weird episode.
More like "wildly inaccurate." At least on the Mormon front.
a short list of religions that fit this description would include not only Scientology, but Mormonism and Islam. All three of these fundamentally disallow their members from choosing not to be members, up to and including outright murder.
The Mormon church not only allows people to leave, there is an established process for removing your name from the records. You *will* be hassled about this if you opt to try it -- most leaders will make you ask a few times, they'll ask you if you're sure, they'll try to talk you out of it -- but in the end, they will drop you.
There's also the easier option, which consists of simply not going anymore and avoiding the people who periodically come by to try to reactivate you. I've heard a few outlandish tales of machinations in member's lives, but for the most part, the only tool the Mormon church has is outright preaching and a bit of peer pressure. It is remarkably easy to do whatever the hell you want, especially if you have even the smallest idea of when to keep your mouth shut.
an ex-Mormon in Salt Lake City is going to have a very hard time buying anything, anywhere.
I'd be interested to hear how you came by this the idea that everyday purchases are affected by religious affiliation with any real frequency in Utah, because it's complete bullshit.
There are a variety of problems I think someone who publicly leaves/denounces the Mormon church in Utah is likely to encounter, but with a few exceptions, they're pretty much all going to be directly related to coloring of social interactions with former peers inside of the church. But not only is there a significant enough non-Mormon presence inside of Utah that this wouldn't matter from an economic perspective, I don't believe I've met the Mormon that would actually refuse to sell to an ex-member.
This is brilliant, if Mr. Leiberman is really starting a public spat in order to cover a cozy relationship in which YouTube provides IP and other log information to government organizations who can then happily watch as terrorists use YouTube to telegraph their intentions and rough location.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the touch is the better deal. :P
Unless you're doing an end run around the AT&T contract (failing the credit check, going the prepaid route, jailbreaking the phone).
Or, alternatively,if you were going to be paying for a cell phone + data plan anyway...
,
Obama wants to slow the space program down to spend it on welfare.
Education, actually.
It's one thing to be critical of decreasing space program funding to pay for math & science education, it's another thing to imply that the funding will be diverted to handouts.
I love that you can assign functions like any other variable, and graft methods onto existing objects (overwriting things in some cases), but it definitely presents a problem in any sort of environment where you're not the only person who can insert code. See some of the problems the Greasemonkey folks had to worry about.
These problems aren't insurmountable, but I don't think you'd see them in C++ or Java.
Port a language with better scalability
Ah, yes. Scalability in a client-side scripting environment. For the times when a browser has to be able to handle requests from thousands of users at once!
basically everyone will lose except for Carl and his board.
Worth emphasizing. See Icahn's history with TWA.
It seems to me that many of you do not have your fingers on the pulse of the day to day users in a corporate enviornment. That is why you fail to see why companies use, and will continue to use, Windows as a base OS for their client systems.
It's true, I've been out of the cube farm for about a year and a half. And I think it's true that there, Windows still has significant penetration.
But consider the following:
(1) Even in the corporate world, users are ready to get off the upgrade treadmill at Windows XP. Precisely for the reason you mention "It works just fine for what these users need to do." Nobody needs the next version of Windows, nobody really cares, and Vista really isn't that great.
(2) There exist increasingly capable alternatives that also "work just fine for what these users need to do."
(3) More and more work is done on web apps.
It does not 'break' as often as you would like it to, or believe it to break
I'm sure that somewhere, there's a place where seasoned Windows sysadmins correctly administer Windows boxes built from well-selected reliable hardware so well that your statement is true. However, it certainly has not been the case in the business and home environments I've been a part of. And "as often as I'd like it to?" I'd be a happier man if it broke under my use not at all.
But even assuming your statement is truer than I think it is -- the other three points are what I really mean by "Windows is stagnating." Microsoft's licensing revenues certainly aren't going away overnight. But right now, in the main, Windows is pretty much headed to the ignominy of just another commodity.
very useful if you know how to apply design patterns.
If we're talking about *Javascript* design patterns -- common useful Javascript idioms -- then I think this is a useful statement. If we're talking about common idioms that have filtered out from C++ and Java known as "design patterns" as applied to languages that don't need to many of them, then I'd say Javascript is pretty useful even if you don't know much about them. Possibly more useful.
http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/show_session_view.jsp?presentationId=9542&showId=114
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000899.html
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/singleton-considered-stupid
Microsoft who acted out of a personal interest to keep Yahoo independent. Something wrong with that? Oh, yeah... public company.
There's nothing wrong with acting in personal interests if there's a reasonable argument that it coincides with shareholder interests. And in this case, there certainly is.
Look at Google's value. Which companies are in any position at all to grab any significant share of what they're doing in the market? It's a short list. Yahoo's on it.
If you were holding onto a significant chunk of one of those companies, would you want to (a) sell it now for a quick but small profit or (b) figure out what changes you need to make in the company to have it better compete with Google and acquire value on that level?
Some shareholders might choose a. But b is certainly reasonable.
Frankly, so is the Microsoft antipathy. People like to talk as if the haters are just irrational folks who got up on the anti-MS side of the bed. Nevermind that there's a significant real technical and business history that would make any sane and competent person wary of them.
The web as a platform is open and expanding. Windows as a platform is stagnating and closed. Which do you want to be invested in for the next 10 years?
Alright, you've characterized my statement as childish. Now, how about actually providing a rebuttal to my claim
I'm not really inclined to spend a lot of time on this. My past experience suggests the kind of thinker who can seriously analogically level all taxation and theft generally can't be convinced of serious distinctions. It's like trying to argue with the people who genuinely believe public libraries == communism. You're either kind of person who can see the differences or you're not.
But cheer up. Maybe you're not because you have some special intellectual abilities that I and most of the rest of the world doesn't have. If only we appreciated you! We'll be sorry someday!
Look:
Scenario A: Hal walks down to the corner with a gun, offers James a choice between his wallet and immediate traumatic perforation.
Scenario B: Hal walks into a voting booth, and casts one of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of other votes in a race for a Senator Smith who is for charging socially participating citizens a tax of 20% per year instead of Senator Jones who is for charging 17%. James also has the opportunity to vote in this election, and to convince other people to vote, and to loudly scream about how the voting booth is *exactly the same* as when Hal robbed him on the corner with a gun. James is also entitled to equal protection with Hal under policy decisions and laws made by either Smith or Jones, regardless of who is elected.
Naturally, these are the same thing.
Python et.al. are all languages that we who were there in the 80's remember with a combined horror/amusement when we had to write programs in Basic.
You have got to be kidding me.
This is a mistake on the order of "Cats are mortal. Aristotle is mortal. Therefore, Aristotle is a cat."
I'm not a particularly big user of Python, but I know enough to know the comparison with Basic is pretty shallow. There's an interpreter, and there's divergence from C syntax. I think that's about it. And there's all kinds of stuff in Python, Perl, Ruby, and even *PHP* that you could never dream of doing in any Basic I saw during the 1980s.
The lack of type-safe variables,
Type safety. Okay. You're one of those people. You're hereby sentenced to read all of Steve Yegge's blog posts for a year.
Alternatively, you're welcome to cite studies indicating higher productivity for type safe languages.
the possibility to write unreadable code
Which language have you found it impossible to write unreadable code in?
hunt for bugs that are caused because two files are incompatible.
Right. Like there exists a language that addresses this problem.
Interpreting languages has been tried before,and they are never working for large projects that shall live for a long time and has to be maintained by a lot of different programmers.
"Implementations with feature X have failed, therefore any implementation with feature X will fail." That sword can be wielded equally well against compiled "type safe" languages.
The fact that a language has an interpreter that implements it really doesn't have much to do with whether or not it can be compiled. Python can be compiled to Java class files, for instance, and probably a few other targets I don't know about. So can Javascript. Probably Ruby, too.
And as for large, sustainable projects You're posting on a system that's over 10 years old that's built in Perl. You've probably bought books or something else from a bigger site that uses it too. I've worked on a system that predates Slashdot that had a codebase that was 10% Perl and it's still going strong. This is to say nothing of highly visible examples of development in PHP of all things.
I have nothing against compiling when the situation demands it, and I can respect the fact that automatic tools for catching certain kinds of mistakes are helpful. That's not really a function of type safety, however. Ask Perl or PHP (and probably the others) to warn you if you've misspelled a variable or done other "bad" things with it, and they will, for example. But moreover, it's been a long time since most of the mistakes in my programming had anything to do with whether or not I fed the right variable the right type of primitive or reference, and I suspect the same is true of most experienced programmers.
As for the objections to getting stuck in a contract, all I have to say is WTF? If I'm going to spend $400 for a phone, I'm doing it with the intention of using that phone for at least a few years. And since we've already established that ALL of the carriers suck, I don't really see the advantage in being able to switch to a different one.
I pretty much agree with everything else you wrote, but there's one advantage in being able to switch: the carrier will be slightly less inclined to treat you like dogcrap in order to keep you from leaving.
Most of the Apple fans I know didn't buy an iPhone because of the AT&T decision. Most of them are still not planning on getting one because they hate AT&T more than they like Apple.
My hate for AT&T is strong, and I haven't bought an iPhone yet in part because of that.
However, if it'd been Verizon, I'd be even more unlikely to buy (as in "probably never"). Verizon is arguably as bad or worse than AT&T in terms of general evil towards their customers.
Not that a non-evil mobile operator exists.
No, no, clearly we must continue demanding the funding at gunpoint from our own citizenry.
Saying we "demand funding at gunpoint from our own citizenry" is like saying we demand compliance with traffic law or *any* at gunpoint. I suppose there are some people out there who comply for *no other reason* other than that they might be shot or imprisoned (and those people are the reason why you need that stuff in the first place). The vast majority comply because they know it's part of a system that more or less works -- and that there are better ways to change it than puerile comparisons between taxation and theft.
Umm, both houses are (D)
Not exactly. More precisely, both houses have a slim Democratic majority, and they're more or less pressured to continue budgeting for policy recently created and executed by the R's.
Without the momentum of those policies -- especially without certain high-profile foreign military adventures -- it's pretty clear the budget picture would look pretty different. Heck, just by introducing competitive bidding on Iraqi reconstruction contracts, it's plausible to suggest the budget picture would look at least $5 mil different. And all that's to say nothing of the Bush tax cuts.
I'll still agree that this makes the Democrats somewhat complicit. Congress does have the authority to simply refuse to fund the war -- or to provide only limited funding for it, opting instead to fund other things, at least in theory.
But in practice, it's pretty obvious where that was going to go.
And it's always important to remember that for the most part, legislation doesn't happen without executive influence while the houses of congress are this closely split.
we all end up so worked up that we miss the point that the government should not be doing any of this stuff.
I don't agree. It's certainly an easy out -- you definitely don't have to worry about public accountability or effective government anymore if you simply say the government shouldn't be doing/funding anything -- but in so doing, you effectively throw out one of a somewhat limited array of societal tools for getting things done.
I'd love to be surprised here, but I expect that the level of accountability you can expect from Dreamhost is just about nil. Like just about everybody else in this space, I suspect that their terms of service basically say they can suspend your account at any time for any or no reason.
Unless you have an agreement that says otherwise, it's quite likely they're under no obligation to provide you with access to their machines, or any data residing on them.
Periodically you can read stories about people whose accounts were cut off, not only from Dreamhost, but from other hosts as well. The common refrain? They can't get to the data they had there.
I think somebody needs to start a movement to include a provision about data access and termination for hosting environments.
Look, a candidate who can write code obviously may not have an edge over one who can't -- in fact, given the aptness of Philip Greenspun's comparison of pilots vs programmers (see here: http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/aviation ), it's entirely possible programming skill isn't a great test of broad intellectual ability. :)
But tech issues absolutely underly quite a few other issues of economics and liberty, and those are certainly have a weight equal to other big issues like foreign policy.
But I think there's an even bigger reason why tech workers *definitely* should be looking at how candidates understand and address issues they understand. Because this is the arena where *you* may actually know enough, as a professional, to really gauge a candidates policy acumen. I doubt most slashdotters are experts in military tactics or nation building. Most of us have a shallow grasp of economics -- yes, even most of you Austrian school autodidacts. Same goes for health care, education, criminology, etc -- Slashdot readers may be smart laymen, but that's all most of us are in those fields.
But lots of us are IT pros. And if a candidate seems to really get it in the area where you can tell buzzspeak and platitudes from real knowledge, that tells you quite a bit about their ability to reach into an issue, understand it, and formulate a plan to do something about it.
It's worth paying attention to.
I have no idea what Chuck Fish's interests are but if you want to change the market, it might be best to do it with someone who knows the market--or even has the ability to change it from the inside.
In other words, he's a real go-getter -- it doesn't matter what he decides to get done, just that he's got the connections, the can-do attitude, and the shark skills to get it done!
Look, I can take the point that execution skills matter. The problem with this is that what we're talking about here are policy advisors, and when it comes to understanding the potential of technology, Mr. Fish is quite likely going to be limited at *best* to its value as a corporate asset. And there's little evidence McCain has the ability to pick anybody better.
By contrast, Obama's selection shows that he knows where to start for picking people who understand the underlying knowledge domain. And there's definitely evidence to suggest that Obama has the ability to pick people and build an organization that can get things done to supplement to work of policy advisor that knows what's up.
448 days.
$10/month. Slightly more expensive than Dreamhost, sane amounts of disk space and bandwidth rather than sky's-the-limit promises, but they deliver what they promise, and they're far more stable.
The vast majority of which are written by ignorant script kiddies
Nice pre-emptive ad hominem.
who think that for $10/month they should be allowed to utilize unlimited resources and slow down the server for everyone else on it.
That's the Dreamhost official line, anyway. What's closer to the truth is that if you actually try to *use* the resources Dreamhost *sells* to you, they can't deliver.
They've admitted they oversell. They *count* on their profile customer not being able to take advantage of what they offer. But inevitably, if you offer a product that's useful, customers will find a way to use it.
So they're now trying to find ways to back away from fulfilling their rather lofty limits on storage and bandwidth. "Non-web" content now carries a surcharge -- because a significant number customers have figured out that large amounts of storage are good for online-backup. It doesn't surprise me that email's next, because next to storage, it's probably the highest space consumer for the average user.
And their service?
As far as cheaped shared web hosts go, Dreamhost is one of the best. Certainly many people get lucky with other hosts, but most hosting companies have not had to deal with the technical issues that Dreamhost has overcome over the years.
It's always someone else, isn't it? Poor Dreamhost -- nobody else has had to deal with the issues they have!
It *is* possible to run a stable, adequate shared hosting service. Hurricane Electric has price comparable offerings to what Dreamhost has. Sure, they've never offered the sky's-the-limit resources that Dreamhost has promised -- but I've only seen technical issues manifest themselves *once* in *ten years* on HE.
Dreamhost's had at least a dozen in the 2 1/2 I've been with them. Hell, csoft.net's been doing better than that, and for years they were pretty fly-by-night. This isn't to mention their billing problems, random hostname changes, and flippant attitude that may be entertaining in a newsletter context but really gets grating when you're addressing actual problems.
All that said, Dreamhost is fine for the kind of small website that doesn't need to worry much about uptime or using the kinds of resources Dreamhost ostensibly offers. Despite the fact that I think they're far better marketers than hosters, I may choose to keep a non-critical domain or two there for a while longer, just because of the hassle involved in move them away. But I really can't stand the posturing that goes on when this kind of thing comes up. Dreamhost may attract a higher number of high-expectations low-ability customers, but the problem here is not *at all* limited to their customers.
... and if they require me to pipe my mail through Google, I'll take my business somewhere that doesn't.
They probably won't. If they do go down that road, I suspect what they'll do is charge extra for it, like they have recently when introduced a surcharge for "non-web content."
Dreamhost has a problem: they oversell. They've admitted it (http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/ ), but like a lot of other things they do, they try to spin it as being a positive. They claim that sure, they'll lose money on a few customers that actually find something to do with the promised 200-500GB of disk space, but that's just a minority and in the meanwhile everybody else is so happy with being offered that much space they gain a lot of customers.
The problem with this approach? Eventually, a large number of your customers will find something to do with what you're selling them, and if you haven't prepared to deliver it to all of them, you're in trouble.
I bring up disk space specifically because that's already happened. Can you think of any particular application that just about anybody with a 100-200GB hard drive might want that much disk space on a host for? Of course -- online backup! You might not sign up thinking about it, but once you've got it, and you've already learned to run an ftp client to move things up and down, it's eventually going to occur to you.
So, lo and behold, last October, Dreamhost changes its TOS to make a completely artificial distinction between bits sitting on a disk that are going to be served via HTTP, and bits just... sitting there. That is, non-web "backup" content now carries an additional surcharge.
To some extent, I understand they have to do this, because they otherwise can't actually deliver on what they've sold.
But this will happen to them again. If they offer a certain capacity of service, eventually, people will figure out how to use it.
For example, other than backup/online file storage, what kind of GB-level usage are we starting to see from average users?
That's right, email.
Some recent discussion on audio in Leopard:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/tag/leopard/
Now, note in particular that Digidesign's struggles aren't limited to Leopard (see, for example "Digidesign and M-Audio Drivers Fail to Keep Pace with Vista, Leopard, and XP SP3") -- I personally think Digi as a company has a problem. But they're not the only vendor mentioning audio issues in 10.5.2, and there are others like MOTU who haven't been explicitly complaining but have had product release delays (DP 6 was supposed to be out Q2).
If insurance companies can't set pricing based on full knowledge and actuarial statistics, but people can, it will increase costs.
Because this would *totally* throw off the existing delicate balance of information symmetry that currently exists between insurance companies and consumers, right?
Finally, why shouldn't people at greater risk pay more? Discrimination is not necessarily a bad thing.
The more efficient discrimination becomes, the less what we're talking about here is actually insurance anymore.
But the reason none of them should have supported this is that the result can and will drive up the cost of health care for everyone.
Up? The health issues that genetics can predict *already exist* in the population -- the risks the insurance pool has taken on are already funded, now, no genetic testing involved. The only way this would drive costs up is if there's some significant population of people who, sans testing, would otherwise go uninsured, but when tested, will choose to be insured. That's a highly dubious thesis -- I strongly suspect that most people who can afford insurance purchase it -- but if you have reasonable evidence, I'm interested.
Textbook cult behavior. The fact that there is a 'process' at all is just so they can try and guilt trip you. Scientology has a similar process and it is so grueling few make it out that way unless they pretend to be suicidal.
/year job and become a park ranger or public library staff at $10/hr. Nobody's going to actually stop you from doing it, but they are going to ask you questions and make sure this isn't just some weird episode.
It's barely even comparable -- if you're going to collapse the difference between getting out of the Mormon Church and getting out of Scientology, you may as well also collapse the difference between a divorce and having to click "OK" on a "Are you sure?" dialog when you go to delete something important.
When I say hassled, I'm talking about the same kind of social pressure you'd get from family if you just announced you wanted to quit your $100,000
At the risk of being wildly un-PC
More like "wildly inaccurate." At least on the Mormon front.
a short list of religions that fit this description would include not only Scientology, but Mormonism and Islam. All three of these fundamentally disallow their members from choosing not to be members, up to and including outright murder.
The Mormon church not only allows people to leave, there is an established process for removing your name from the records. You *will* be hassled about this if you opt to try it -- most leaders will make you ask a few times, they'll ask you if you're sure, they'll try to talk you out of it -- but in the end, they will drop you.
There's also the easier option, which consists of simply not going anymore and avoiding the people who periodically come by to try to reactivate you. I've heard a few outlandish tales of machinations in member's lives, but for the most part, the only tool the Mormon church has is outright preaching and a bit of peer pressure. It is remarkably easy to do whatever the hell you want, especially if you have even the smallest idea of when to keep your mouth shut.
an ex-Mormon in Salt Lake City is going to have a very hard time buying anything, anywhere.
I'd be interested to hear how you came by this the idea that everyday purchases are affected by religious affiliation with any real frequency in Utah, because it's complete bullshit.
There are a variety of problems I think someone who publicly leaves/denounces the Mormon church in Utah is likely to encounter, but with a few exceptions, they're pretty much all going to be directly related to coloring of social interactions with former peers inside of the church. But not only is there a significant enough non-Mormon presence inside of Utah that this wouldn't matter from an economic perspective, I don't believe I've met the Mormon that would actually refuse to sell to an ex-member.
This is brilliant, if Mr. Leiberman is really starting a public spat in order to cover a cozy relationship in which YouTube provides IP and other log information to government organizations who can then happily watch as terrorists use YouTube to telegraph their intentions and rough location.
But I kindof doubt it.