What does the inauguration have to do with anything? It's big because a lot of people showed up.
As for "exuberance", irrational or otherwise, what's wrong with it in this context? If Obama actually accomplishes anything (no certainty about that, but let's give the dude a shot) it will be by harnessing the "exuberance" of the public at large. We've had a long period of self-fulfilling cynicism; it's past time we tried the alternative.
Slightly offtopic: "irrational exuberance" was coined by a Fed Chairman whose economic libertarianism led him to rely on pronouncements like that instead of doing his regulatory job. In his case, it was a way of saying "que sera sera".
You seem to be taking your family experience with one job and scaling it up to the whole government. And not a policy job either, or even a civil service job as we now know them. In those days postmaster slots were "patronage" jobs — they were quite blatantly handed out as political rewards. That's why the Postmaster-General was usually the chairman of the President's party. And it's why they finally took control of the postal system away from the presidency and gave it to an independent commission.
In your grandfather's day, the Post Office was a corrupt and inefficient organization. Not a lot your grandfather could do about it, but the problem did get solved on a higher level.
It's true, one person working alone can't fix anything. Which is precisely why the pervasive cynicism is self-fulfilling.
A certain politician just got himself elected POTUS almost purely because he convinced a lot of people that he knows how to change all that. Maybe he's full of it, maybe not. But if he actually does what he claims he can do, it won't be through any top-down process. It'll be him and a lot of other people working with him, not for him.
Yeah, I drank the Obama koolaid. Still waiting to see if it stays down.
It's not reading incomprehension day, it's you-know-what-I-mean day, which seems to be every day at Slashdot. Somebody expresses themselves poorly, gets misread, and whines about people "putting words in my mouth". Unless you're Pudge, in which case you accuse people of "lying" about what you said.
It may be obvious to you that "government of DC" refers to the people who run DC rather than the federal government. But to most people it sounds like a sloppy way of saying "federal government".
That's especially true because what you meant to say (or say you meant to say) doesn't make a lot of sense. Would you really consider a city a bad place to live just because it has a bad city government? DC may be a sucky place to live, but if so, a sucky city government is probably not the only reason.
Unless Obama delegates some serious executive power over the federal bureaucracy, this will just be a cushy job for the next several years.
I completely agree. But, at the risk of suffering a crisis of cynicism, perhaps you could explain why you're so certain that Obama won't delegate serious power to this position?
Right, the government sucks, so by no means should you consider working for the government, even if the point of the particular job they're offering you is to make the government less sucky. I guess the suckiness of government is somebody else's problem.
Apologies for not reading the post more carefully. Still, I really don't think that most email infrastructures are that labor un-intensive. I mean jeez, $30 a user/year? But that's just my uneducated opinion, I don't have the figures to back it up.
MS-DOS was a port of Seattle DOS to the 86. And Seattle DOS was not a port of anything, because to port software you have to have access to the source code. (Which they didn't have, unless you believe the urban legends about pirated source code.) Seattle DOS was a clone of CP/M. By which I mean that it was a feature-by-feature re-implementation of CP/M, with the developer coding each feature from scratch, often coming up with a much inferior implementation, and sometimes simply not understanding how the feature was supposed to work.
I find I lack to energy to nitpick you point by point. (Except I have to mention that I actually used some pretty powerful OSs that ran on pretty much the same hardware as the PC.) So I'm going to take an end-run around your argument and rely on an appeal to authority. Yes, I know that's a fallacy, but I'm aiming more to make you rethink your argument on your own so I won't have to go to all the trouble of refuting it.
The authority I'm referring to was the guy who IBM contracted to help choose an official OS. His first choice was CP/M, unsurprisingly. It was only when he couldn't put a deal together IBM and Digital Research (insert favorite folkloric reason here) that he started looking around for alternatives. And he was desperate for an alternative, because he was hoping to sell development tools for this new platform, and he saw the opportunity rapidly evaporating. For that same reason, it had to be pretty close to CP/M.
So he hurriedly acquired a license to turn Seattle DOS into an x86 OS. He and his minions did a quick and dirty job of this, making a messy OS even messier.
In other words, the specific software we ended up with was not chosen by the marketplace, it was not chosen for technical superiority. It was chosen because somebody with more luck and marketing skill than technical savvy need it to be chosen.
By now, most readers will have guess the name of this consultant: Bill Gates.
What do you mean "PC-DOS was no worse?" Do you mean that the feature set was the same? It could hardly be otherwise, since PC/MS-DOS started out as a rebranded Seattle DOS, which was meant to be a CP/M clone.
But there's more to a product comparison than features. Seattle DOS was written by a geek who thought that he could create an operating system without any real knowledge of or training in OS concepts. The result was a piece of software that in theory implemented each and every CP/M feature, but in practice was full of APIs that simply didn't work well enough to be replied on. Which is why early MS-DOS programmers resorted to bypassing the OS so much of the time.
MS-DOS 1.0 was a software platform that was full of rotten planks. It took a long time to replace many of these planks, and others were never replaced, until MS finally gave up and switched to NT.
I'm perfectly open to the idea that Dvorak is overrated. I'm afraid I don't have the patience to work through this particular old ideological rant to dredge up whatever even older arguments it's touting.
I am curious as to whether or not the mention of MS-DOS as a parallel example is in TFA or an invention of the submitter. I don't have the patience to read TFA to find out. In any case, it's a childish suggestion. The inferiority of MS-DOS isn't some ex post facto invention. It's a grim fact that was painfully obvious to anybody who used multiple x86 OSs at the time MS-DOS was introduced.
Even adding things like anti-virus and spam filtering doesn't push us up to $8.47 per person per month.
Really? What about the time you spend maintaining all these systems? If your outage rates are really that low, then the people who do your infrastructure planning and administration are exceptionally good at their jobs. The time spent by such people is not free. I don't see personnel costs anyway in your calculations. And yet for most IT functions, they're the biggest single cost.
No, he doesn't. He still wants to let them expire in two years. He did back down to the extent of not asking for their immediate repeal. Can you guess why?
says it will take a while to figure out how best to close Gitmo
Ok, smart guy, you tell me how to shut a major prison facility overnight. Give everybody a plane ticket and an apology?
Right, let's judge the entire tech policy of the Obama administration by the fuckups of their party planners.
For that matter, can you name any organization that streams lots of video in a reliable, non-kludgy, platform independent manner that doesn't force you to update your client software twice a week? The only media client that doesn't drive me crazy is Flash — and we all have heard from folks who hate Flash with true bitterness.
I blame a messed up, IP-obsessed, monopolistic media industry for problems like this. Plus the sorry state of our telecom infrastructure. I'll judge BO by what be does about these things, not by the fact that his inauguration committee can't cope with a technical problem that has everybody tearing their hair out.
I don't think any of his advisers are telling Obama "give up your Blackberry because you can't micromanage". They might be thinking that, but officially it's all about legal and security issues.
Anyway, keeping in touch with your subordinates is not the same thing as micromanagement. Some of the great micromanagers (Jimmy Carter comes to mind, as do several people I've worked for) manage to do it without technical aids. And Obama's right when he says that past Presidents have been too isolated. One hopes that he's smart enough to "break the bubble" without trying to micromanage every government employee.
You're taking it as a given that those missing emails got trashed on purpose. But this is the kind of IT screwup that happens every day. Innocent until proven guilty, yada yada. Like so many things that have happened in the last eight years, that episode deserves to be observed with Hanlon's Razor in mind. Really, GWB is the poster child for that principle.
I admit that the Bush administration has a pretty bad record when it comes to obeying the law. But their usual strategy is to hide behind weird legal theories that don't stand up in court (an outcome that any sane lawyer would predict). They're simply not competent enough to succeed at the kind of conspiratorial skullduggery you give them credit for.
Sarcasm aside, it is a bit annoying that suddenly, the choice of dog and the use of a communication device is "big news."
We've already beaten the device issue to death, but the dog issue isn't as trivial as all that. I have a niece who volunteers in animal rescue, and she's bloody thrilled at all the publicity the rescue movement is getting out of the First Dog. The fact that the Obamas are canvassing the shelters instead of the breeders will cause a lot of others to do the same, which could save thousands of animals from being euthanized.
That's not a small thing. It's not the end of the recession or OBL's head on a pike, but if you care about the 9 million or so animals that get euthanized every year, it's not a small matter.
How is this a "small change"? I don't know what kind of schedule you work, but getting a day off every two weeks would be a big deal for most of us. As would working longer hours for no extra pay. Both are possible with this kind of schedule gimmick, and neither would have the same impact on your life as using a different kind of toothbrush.
I'm usually the one writing the "why is this an Ask Slashdot"? And that authorizes me to tell you your post is kinda dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
What does the inauguration have to do with anything? It's big because a lot of people showed up.
As for "exuberance", irrational or otherwise, what's wrong with it in this context? If Obama actually accomplishes anything (no certainty about that, but let's give the dude a shot) it will be by harnessing the "exuberance" of the public at large. We've had a long period of self-fulfilling cynicism; it's past time we tried the alternative.
Slightly offtopic: "irrational exuberance" was coined by a Fed Chairman whose economic libertarianism led him to rely on pronouncements like that instead of doing his regulatory job. In his case, it was a way of saying "que sera sera".
Thank you for the cliche. I'm tempted to reply by quoting Murphy's Law, which is just as (ir)relevant.
Funny, your "joke" sounded like an angry rant. Maybe you should use smilies next time.
You seem to be taking your family experience with one job and scaling it up to the whole government. And not a policy job either, or even a civil service job as we now know them. In those days postmaster slots were "patronage" jobs — they were quite blatantly handed out as political rewards. That's why the Postmaster-General was usually the chairman of the President's party. And it's why they finally took control of the postal system away from the presidency and gave it to an independent commission.
In your grandfather's day, the Post Office was a corrupt and inefficient organization. Not a lot your grandfather could do about it, but the problem did get solved on a higher level.
It's true, one person working alone can't fix anything. Which is precisely why the pervasive cynicism is self-fulfilling.
A certain politician just got himself elected POTUS almost purely because he convinced a lot of people that he knows how to change all that. Maybe he's full of it, maybe not. But if he actually does what he claims he can do, it won't be through any top-down process. It'll be him and a lot of other people working with him, not for him.
Yeah, I drank the Obama koolaid. Still waiting to see if it stays down.
It's not reading incomprehension day, it's you-know-what-I-mean day, which seems to be every day at Slashdot. Somebody expresses themselves poorly, gets misread, and whines about people "putting words in my mouth". Unless you're Pudge, in which case you accuse people of "lying" about what you said.
It may be obvious to you that "government of DC" refers to the people who run DC rather than the federal government. But to most people it sounds like a sloppy way of saying "federal government".
That's especially true because what you meant to say (or say you meant to say) doesn't make a lot of sense. Would you really consider a city a bad place to live just because it has a bad city government? DC may be a sucky place to live, but if so, a sucky city government is probably not the only reason.
Unless Obama delegates some serious executive power over the federal bureaucracy, this will just be a cushy job for the next several years.
I completely agree. But, at the risk of suffering a crisis of cynicism, perhaps you could explain why you're so certain that Obama won't delegate serious power to this position?
Right, the government sucks, so by no means should you consider working for the government, even if the point of the particular job they're offering you is to make the government less sucky. I guess the suckiness of government is somebody else's problem.
You know, your attitude sucks.
Apologies for not reading the post more carefully. Still, I really don't think that most email infrastructures are that labor un-intensive. I mean jeez, $30 a user/year? But that's just my uneducated opinion, I don't have the figures to back it up.
MS-DOS was a port of Seattle DOS to the 86. And Seattle DOS was not a port of anything, because to port software you have to have access to the source code. (Which they didn't have, unless you believe the urban legends about pirated source code.) Seattle DOS was a clone of CP/M. By which I mean that it was a feature-by-feature re-implementation of CP/M, with the developer coding each feature from scratch, often coming up with a much inferior implementation, and sometimes simply not understanding how the feature was supposed to work.
Any other misinformation you wish to share?
Sigh. And why, do you suppose CP/M cost extra?
I find I lack to energy to nitpick you point by point. (Except I have to mention that I actually used some pretty powerful OSs that ran on pretty much the same hardware as the PC.) So I'm going to take an end-run around your argument and rely on an appeal to authority. Yes, I know that's a fallacy, but I'm aiming more to make you rethink your argument on your own so I won't have to go to all the trouble of refuting it.
The authority I'm referring to was the guy who IBM contracted to help choose an official OS. His first choice was CP/M, unsurprisingly. It was only when he couldn't put a deal together IBM and Digital Research (insert favorite folkloric reason here) that he started looking around for alternatives. And he was desperate for an alternative, because he was hoping to sell development tools for this new platform, and he saw the opportunity rapidly evaporating. For that same reason, it had to be pretty close to CP/M.
So he hurriedly acquired a license to turn Seattle DOS into an x86 OS. He and his minions did a quick and dirty job of this, making a messy OS even messier.
In other words, the specific software we ended up with was not chosen by the marketplace, it was not chosen for technical superiority. It was chosen because somebody with more luck and marketing skill than technical savvy need it to be chosen.
By now, most readers will have guess the name of this consultant: Bill Gates.
I'm not convinced that CP/M 86 was really that much superior....
Because...
What do you mean "PC-DOS was no worse?" Do you mean that the feature set was the same? It could hardly be otherwise, since PC/MS-DOS started out as a rebranded Seattle DOS, which was meant to be a CP/M clone.
But there's more to a product comparison than features. Seattle DOS was written by a geek who thought that he could create an operating system without any real knowledge of or training in OS concepts. The result was a piece of software that in theory implemented each and every CP/M feature, but in practice was full of APIs that simply didn't work well enough to be replied on. Which is why early MS-DOS programmers resorted to bypassing the OS so much of the time.
MS-DOS 1.0 was a software platform that was full of rotten planks. It took a long time to replace many of these planks, and others were never replaced, until MS finally gave up and switched to NT.
I'm perfectly open to the idea that Dvorak is overrated. I'm afraid I don't have the patience to work through this particular old ideological rant to dredge up whatever even older arguments it's touting.
I am curious as to whether or not the mention of MS-DOS as a parallel example is in TFA or an invention of the submitter. I don't have the patience to read TFA to find out. In any case, it's a childish suggestion. The inferiority of MS-DOS isn't some ex post facto invention. It's a grim fact that was painfully obvious to anybody who used multiple x86 OSs at the time MS-DOS was introduced.
Even adding things like anti-virus and spam filtering doesn't push us up to $8.47 per person per month.
Really? What about the time you spend maintaining all these systems? If your outage rates are really that low, then the people who do your infrastructure planning and administration are exceptionally good at their jobs. The time spent by such people is not free. I don't see personnel costs anyway in your calculations. And yet for most IT functions, they're the biggest single cost.
How is "give up" insightful? Is wireless supposed to be a passing fad or something?
Wants to renew Bush's tax cuts
No, he doesn't. He still wants to let them expire in two years. He did back down to the extent of not asking for their immediate repeal. Can you guess why?
says it will take a while to figure out how best to close Gitmo
Ok, smart guy, you tell me how to shut a major prison facility overnight. Give everybody a plane ticket and an apology?
Right, let's judge the entire tech policy of the Obama administration by the fuckups of their party planners.
For that matter, can you name any organization that streams lots of video in a reliable, non-kludgy, platform independent manner that doesn't force you to update your client software twice a week? The only media client that doesn't drive me crazy is Flash — and we all have heard from folks who hate Flash with true bitterness.
I blame a messed up, IP-obsessed, monopolistic media industry for problems like this. Plus the sorry state of our telecom infrastructure. I'll judge BO by what be does about these things, not by the fact that his inauguration committee can't cope with a technical problem that has everybody tearing their hair out.
Everybody has something to hide.
I don't think any of his advisers are telling Obama "give up your Blackberry because you can't micromanage". They might be thinking that, but officially it's all about legal and security issues.
Anyway, keeping in touch with your subordinates is not the same thing as micromanagement. Some of the great micromanagers (Jimmy Carter comes to mind, as do several people I've worked for) manage to do it without technical aids. And Obama's right when he says that past Presidents have been too isolated. One hopes that he's smart enough to "break the bubble" without trying to micromanage every government employee.
I'm honestly sorry for offending you. It's not clear to me how I did. I made an off-the-wall response to what I took to be an off-the-wall post.
You're taking it as a given that those missing emails got trashed on purpose. But this is the kind of IT screwup that happens every day. Innocent until proven guilty, yada yada. Like so many things that have happened in the last eight years, that episode deserves to be observed with Hanlon's Razor in mind. Really, GWB is the poster child for that principle.
I admit that the Bush administration has a pretty bad record when it comes to obeying the law. But their usual strategy is to hide behind weird legal theories that don't stand up in court (an outcome that any sane lawyer would predict). They're simply not competent enough to succeed at the kind of conspiratorial skullduggery you give them credit for.
When you're a real girl, and not just a girl in training, you'll have reason to complain!
Sarcasm aside, it is a bit annoying that suddenly, the choice of dog and the use of a communication device is "big news."
We've already beaten the device issue to death, but the dog issue isn't as trivial as all that. I have a niece who volunteers in animal rescue, and she's bloody thrilled at all the publicity the rescue movement is getting out of the First Dog. The fact that the Obamas are canvassing the shelters instead of the breeders will cause a lot of others to do the same, which could save thousands of animals from being euthanized.
That's not a small thing. It's not the end of the recession or OBL's head on a pike, but if you care about the 9 million or so animals that get euthanized every year, it's not a small matter.
How is this a "small change"? I don't know what kind of schedule you work, but getting a day off every two weeks would be a big deal for most of us. As would working longer hours for no extra pay. Both are possible with this kind of schedule gimmick, and neither would have the same impact on your life as using a different kind of toothbrush.
I'm usually the one writing the "why is this an Ask Slashdot"? And that authorizes me to tell you your post is kinda dumb.