Recycling is just part of the radical agenda to destroy America by making us drive smaller cars, which means smaller families which mean birth control which means the End of Christianity. I saw it on Fox News
PC Mag certainly didn't read the law — they borrowed the story from Gearlog. Nor did Gearlog read it: their post is just a summary of the Institute for Justice press release.
This story is all over the news sites and blogosphere, but except for the IfJ web site, every single post or story is more or less a quote of the Gearlog story. No serious news organizations seem to have picked up on this issue.
I also can't find any trace of Kiwi Computer, the Texas repair shop mentioned in the press release.
I guess you're one of those solipsistic programmers who just want to write cool stuff, and don't care that much if nobody uses it except a few of your friends. That's fine if you're off doing some private project, but not when you're creating software that's used by millions of people. Serious software has features that people actually need, not whatever features the engineers happen to think is cool. It also needs to be more reliable than Google's software currently is.
That means project management and testing, as boring as those concepts are. It also means stuffy bozos in suits telling you that features that are in the product plan are more important than the features you feel like working on.
Google will never have these things, because most of the company doesn't have to make any money. The whole ad-word thing keeps generating more and more money (absurd growth levels every year since they started selling them), and subsidizes everything else.
Maybe I'm just jealous of people who will get to spend the rest of their careers in a sort of playground for the overeducated techie. But to me, there's something really repulsive about the whole thing.
Program Managers need to understand the processes in the business in order to document them.
Did you miss the part where the guy said he had a degree in computer science? Being a lousy programmer != not understanding how they work.
I'm astonished that anybody would have the balls to admit that they'd managed to get a degree in CS without becoming a good programmer. This is a refreshing antidote to the common arrogant assumption in the CS crowd that only they should be allowed to develop software.
What on earth do you mean by "little-u unix"? BSD? Not FAIB. Academic Unix? Illegal to use except on the campus it was licensed to.
Yes, people made changes to Unix. My own employer in the early 80s took System V Unix, made many changes in it (in particular they merged in the virtual memory management from the Berkeley distribution) and sold it under their own name. But all this was done under license from AT&T.
No doubt a lot of people were playing with unlicensed copies of Unix. But they couldn't do any commercial work, unless they wanted AT&T's lawyers all over them.
I'm not sure I understand why the decision was so bad. They obviously did it so that people who watch movies separately would have to buy separate subscriptions. Aside from the fact that they weren't honest about why they were doing it (a repeat of their behavior when they were throttling heavy users, and pretending they weren't), that actually seems pretty equitable.
Say 4 people are sharing a 4-at-a-time account using 4 queues. (I hear this is pretty common in dorms.) Then they basically are getting the same service as 4 people with 1-at-a-time accounts, but for $6 each instead of $9 each. That extra $3 is not exactly a budget breaker, and yet the $9 total seems a pretty reasonable fee to rent 4 or 5 movies a month. Considering that the postage alone probably costs nearly $5.
It makes sense to give people with a single queue a discount per movie, because you either have a one-person household, or a household that watches all their movies together. So a household with a 4-at-a-time membership is probably not watching 4 times as many movies.
Not that it's a big moral issue either way. Netflix seems to be making money (though obviously not as much as they'd like) and people are getting entertained pretty cheaply (though obvious every $ counts, perhaps too much!).
I wouldn't have minded the absence of a "free software" movement. But it's commercially-oriented prodigal child, Open Source, is proving to be quite useful.
It's a nit if it's about a peripheral point. I was wrong about the crazy weather thing. Does that mean that all my opinions about climate change are crap? If not, you should accept my mea culpa and move on.
But you don't. You keep harping on it. That says to me that your only interest is to demonstrate my stupidity.
You can? You don't have any compatibility or interoperability issues? If not, you're pretty much in the minority.
You're about to mention Parallels. That option didn't exist when the antitrust case was active Macs did have x86-on-PowerPC emulation, but it never worked well enough for most corporate users; some people I know claim that Parallels still doesn't.
I am just trying to bring some reason to Slashdot.
No you're not. You're picking nits with people who disagree with you and not really addressing the issues they raise. You've never even considered the possibility that I'm the one that's better informed: you've taken it as a given that I take the global warming thing seriously because I've fallen in with a mindless fad. That does not represent respect for my intelligence.
You can use that logic if you care to. It's less than compelling to me. Anybody who says, "Should I get a Mac or a PC" demonstrates that there's competition between MS and Apple. It just hasn't been very effective competition.
Stephen Hawking. Ok, he's not even a climate scientist. But, as I said, the scenario is unlikely. Stop beating that dead horse. It's not crucial to the argument, unless you rely on the "everybody who believes in global warming is an idiot" argument. And if you're going to go down that route, why should I even talk to you.
Get over it and treat Global Warming like what it is. A theory. A theory that does have some pretty good evidence but still just a theory.
People who say "just a theory" have a poor understanding of what science is. All of science is "just a theory". That's how it works: scientists propound theories, check them against facts, and discard or refine them.
Newton's Laws are "just a theory". They've even been refuted! (By Einstein.) That doesn't change the fact that they describe reality well enough to be extremely useful.
But what you're really saying is that the whole global warming thing hasn't been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And (it may shock you to hear), I agree with you on that. But that's beside the point. When you have a theory that says that a disaster is likely to happen, it's stupid to demand that it be put to the ultimate test, just as it was stupid to put the Titanic to the ultimate test of its unsinkability. Your evidence needs to be strong (and many serious scientists believe it is), but not absolute.
There absolutely would not have been a Free Software movement. The whole thing started when RMS discovered that the academic license under which MIT people were granted access to Unix placed all kinds of restrictions on what they could do with it.
by that time the Berkeley distro had already been hatched, and unix was out of the barn.
Not sure what you mean by "out of the barn". Unix was still proprietary technology, and you couldn't put it in a commercial product without licensing it from AT&T. BSD, which originally contained a lot of AT&T code, didn't become a "free" product until 1992.
(Interesting timing. If that had happened a couple of years earlier, a certain Finish grad student probably wouldn't have bothered to write his own Unix-compatible kernel...)
AT&T could have just refused to sell any commercial licenses and had a monopoly on Unix-based systems. (For a while, they did have a monopoly on the UNIX trademark, which is why commercial Unixes all have different names.) Fortunately, they were smart enough to realize that would just killed commercial Unix. Instead, they chose to compete with their licensees in an open marketplace. Which would have been a smart move, if they'd understood the marketplace as well as their engineers understood the technology.
It's true that Bell Labs' many accomplishments (among which Unix is actually pretty minor!) wouldn't have been possible without all the money AT&T threw at it. A lot of important development gets done by scientists and engineers who are insulated from market forces and don't have to come up with a marketable idea every six months. However, I'm not sure that overpriced and out-of-date phones services are the best way to subsidize that kind of research.
Never mind "faster". I'm sure Ma Bell would have given us faster modems eventually, though maybe not as quickly.
But how about "cheaper" and "practical"? My first modem was a 1200 bps thing. I used a dumb terminal, but of course it wasn't long before that was replaced by a computer. For a few hundred bucks, I had a small device that I could easily connect to any phone line and any computer or terminal.
What was the AT&T equivalent? Even though they had already been forced to allow third-party devices to be connected to their system (though you still had to use those silly acoustic couplers) they felt no need to supply their customers with simple modems. Their closest equivalent was a a "data terminal station" with modem, monitor, and keyboard all built into a desk. And the annual lease was several times what my modem cost to buy.
This cluelessness is the main reason we're better off without the "Bell System". They never understood the marketplace. When they were a common carrier they didn't have to, and that was a very bad thing for everybody. After they became a regular commercial company, they still didn't get it, and that was also a bad thing, but only for their stockholders.
Astonishingly, they never did figure things out. They ended up spinning off their businesses one by one, until there was nothing left but the long-distance operation. Finally, they were bought by one of their own spinoffs — mainly for their name. Good riddance.
Antitrust is designed to thwart absence of competition. You're not seriously arguing that Apple has no competition?
When Apple releases a new product, fans demonstrate their grasping desire to possess that product by camping outside stores for hours or days. Yet when Apple tries to leverage that childish enthusiasm into a little extra profit, these same fans are up in arms. If you don't want to be a patsy, don't act like one.
Enough with your categorical nonsense. Plenty of reputable scientists believe the Venus scenario is possible. The consensus is that it's pretty unlikely, but neither is it impossible.
In any case, you're focusing on trivia. You can find all kinds of fault with specific hypotheses about what might happen as the planet gets warmer. That's true for any theory.
But here I am, doing what I said I wouldn't: repeating arguments you must have heard before. If you're seriously interested in the issue, go do some reading. If you just want to snipe, fuck off.
Slashdot Mirror
Recycling is just part of the radical agenda to destroy America by making us drive smaller cars, which means smaller families which mean birth control which means the End of Christianity. I saw it on Fox News
All true. But what does that have to do with the decision to eliminate secondary accounts?
Fixation?
Bored now.
PC Mag certainly didn't read the law — they borrowed the story from Gearlog. Nor did Gearlog read it: their post is just a summary of the Institute for Justice press release.
This story is all over the news sites and blogosphere, but except for the IfJ web site, every single post or story is more or less a quote of the Gearlog story. No serious news organizations seem to have picked up on this issue.
I also can't find any trace of Kiwi Computer, the Texas repair shop mentioned in the press release.
Either a hoax, or some weird kind of blog spam.
You're talking about "manager" as in "department manager", right? Not the same thing as a project manager.
I guess you're one of those solipsistic programmers who just want to write cool stuff, and don't care that much if nobody uses it except a few of your friends. That's fine if you're off doing some private project, but not when you're creating software that's used by millions of people. Serious software has features that people actually need, not whatever features the engineers happen to think is cool. It also needs to be more reliable than Google's software currently is.
That means project management and testing, as boring as those concepts are. It also means stuffy bozos in suits telling you that features that are in the product plan are more important than the features you feel like working on.
Google will never have these things, because most of the company doesn't have to make any money. The whole ad-word thing keeps generating more and more money (absurd growth levels every year since they started selling them), and subsidizes everything else.
Maybe I'm just jealous of people who will get to spend the rest of their careers in a sort of playground for the overeducated techie. But to me, there's something really repulsive about the whole thing.
But one meme that is way over the hill is the one that says that "meme" is good synonym for "lame joke".
Program Managers need to understand the processes in the business in order to document them.
Did you miss the part where the guy said he had a degree in computer science? Being a lousy programmer != not understanding how they work.
I'm astonished that anybody would have the balls to admit that they'd managed to get a degree in CS without becoming a good programmer. This is a refreshing antidote to the common arrogant assumption in the CS crowd that only they should be allowed to develop software.
...only outlaws will have optical grade polycarbonate!
Lame, but somebody had to say it.
So because they couldn't allow secondary accounts to stream movies, they decided to do away with the secondary accounts? That doesn't make sense.
What on earth do you mean by "little-u unix"? BSD? Not FAIB. Academic Unix? Illegal to use except on the campus it was licensed to.
Yes, people made changes to Unix. My own employer in the early 80s took System V Unix, made many changes in it (in particular they merged in the virtual memory management from the Berkeley distribution) and sold it under their own name. But all this was done under license from AT&T.
No doubt a lot of people were playing with unlicensed copies of Unix. But they couldn't do any commercial work, unless they wanted AT&T's lawyers all over them.
I'm not sure I understand why the decision was so bad. They obviously did it so that people who watch movies separately would have to buy separate subscriptions. Aside from the fact that they weren't honest about why they were doing it (a repeat of their behavior when they were throttling heavy users, and pretending they weren't), that actually seems pretty equitable.
Say 4 people are sharing a 4-at-a-time account using 4 queues. (I hear this is pretty common in dorms.) Then they basically are getting the same service as 4 people with 1-at-a-time accounts, but for $6 each instead of $9 each. That extra $3 is not exactly a budget breaker, and yet the $9 total seems a pretty reasonable fee to rent 4 or 5 movies a month. Considering that the postage alone probably costs nearly $5.
It makes sense to give people with a single queue a discount per movie, because you either have a one-person household, or a household that watches all their movies together. So a household with a 4-at-a-time membership is probably not watching 4 times as many movies.
Not that it's a big moral issue either way. Netflix seems to be making money (though obviously not as much as they'd like) and people are getting entertained pretty cheaply (though obvious every $ counts, perhaps too much!).
Anyway, cue the flames.
I wouldn't have minded the absence of a "free software" movement. But it's commercially-oriented prodigal child, Open Source, is proving to be quite useful.
It's a nit if it's about a peripheral point. I was wrong about the crazy weather thing. Does that mean that all my opinions about climate change are crap? If not, you should accept my mea culpa and move on.
But you don't. You keep harping on it. That says to me that your only interest is to demonstrate my stupidity.
You can? You don't have any compatibility or interoperability issues? If not, you're pretty much in the minority.
You're about to mention Parallels. That option didn't exist when the antitrust case was active Macs did have x86-on-PowerPC emulation, but it never worked well enough for most corporate users; some people I know claim that Parallels still doesn't.
I am just trying to bring some reason to Slashdot.
No you're not. You're picking nits with people who disagree with you and not really addressing the issues they raise. You've never even considered the possibility that I'm the one that's better informed: you've taken it as a given that I take the global warming thing seriously because I've fallen in with a mindless fad. That does not represent respect for my intelligence.
I stand corrected. Unfortunately, the "informative" mod points I got are non-transferable.
Sigh. Does this discussion have any point beyond your telling me that I'm an idiot? Fine, I'm an idiot. Now fuck off.
You can use that logic if you care to. It's less than compelling to me. Anybody who says, "Should I get a Mac or a PC" demonstrates that there's competition between MS and Apple. It just hasn't been very effective competition.
Stephen Hawking. Ok, he's not even a climate scientist. But, as I said, the scenario is unlikely. Stop beating that dead horse. It's not crucial to the argument, unless you rely on the "everybody who believes in global warming is an idiot" argument. And if you're going to go down that route, why should I even talk to you.
Get over it and treat Global Warming like what it is. A theory. A theory that does have some pretty good evidence but still just a theory.
People who say "just a theory" have a poor understanding of what science is. All of science is "just a theory". That's how it works: scientists propound theories, check them against facts, and discard or refine them.
Newton's Laws are "just a theory". They've even been refuted! (By Einstein.) That doesn't change the fact that they describe reality well enough to be extremely useful.
But what you're really saying is that the whole global warming thing hasn't been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And (it may shock you to hear), I agree with you on that. But that's beside the point. When you have a theory that says that a disaster is likely to happen, it's stupid to demand that it be put to the ultimate test, just as it was stupid to put the Titanic to the ultimate test of its unsinkability. Your evidence needs to be strong (and many serious scientists believe it is), but not absolute.
There absolutely would not have been a Free Software movement. The whole thing started when RMS discovered that the academic license under which MIT people were granted access to Unix placed all kinds of restrictions on what they could do with it.
by that time the Berkeley distro had already been hatched, and unix was out of the barn.
Not sure what you mean by "out of the barn". Unix was still proprietary technology, and you couldn't put it in a commercial product without licensing it from AT&T. BSD, which originally contained a lot of AT&T code, didn't become a "free" product until 1992.
(Interesting timing. If that had happened a couple of years earlier, a certain Finish grad student probably wouldn't have bothered to write his own Unix-compatible kernel...)
AT&T could have just refused to sell any commercial licenses and had a monopoly on Unix-based systems. (For a while, they did have a monopoly on the UNIX trademark, which is why commercial Unixes all have different names.) Fortunately, they were smart enough to realize that would just killed commercial Unix. Instead, they chose to compete with their licensees in an open marketplace. Which would have been a smart move, if they'd understood the marketplace as well as their engineers understood the technology.
It's true that Bell Labs' many accomplishments (among which Unix is actually pretty minor!) wouldn't have been possible without all the money AT&T threw at it. A lot of important development gets done by scientists and engineers who are insulated from market forces and don't have to come up with a marketable idea every six months. However, I'm not sure that overpriced and out-of-date phones services are the best way to subsidize that kind of research.
Look at how quickly modems got faster and faster.
Never mind "faster". I'm sure Ma Bell would have given us faster modems eventually, though maybe not as quickly.
But how about "cheaper" and "practical"? My first modem was a 1200 bps thing. I used a dumb terminal, but of course it wasn't long before that was replaced by a computer. For a few hundred bucks, I had a small device that I could easily connect to any phone line and any computer or terminal.
What was the AT&T equivalent? Even though they had already been forced to allow third-party devices to be connected to their system (though you still had to use those silly acoustic couplers) they felt no need to supply their customers with simple modems. Their closest equivalent was a a "data terminal station" with modem, monitor, and keyboard all built into a desk. And the annual lease was several times what my modem cost to buy.
This cluelessness is the main reason we're better off without the "Bell System". They never understood the marketplace. When they were a common carrier they didn't have to, and that was a very bad thing for everybody. After they became a regular commercial company, they still didn't get it, and that was also a bad thing, but only for their stockholders.
Astonishingly, they never did figure things out. They ended up spinning off their businesses one by one, until there was nothing left but the long-distance operation. Finally, they were bought by one of their own spinoffs — mainly for their name. Good riddance.
Antitrust is designed to thwart absence of competition. You're not seriously arguing that Apple has no competition?
When Apple releases a new product, fans demonstrate their grasping desire to possess that product by camping outside stores for hours or days. Yet when Apple tries to leverage that childish enthusiasm into a little extra profit, these same fans are up in arms. If you don't want to be a patsy, don't act like one.
Enough with your categorical nonsense. Plenty of reputable scientists believe the Venus scenario is possible. The consensus is that it's pretty unlikely, but neither is it impossible.
In any case, you're focusing on trivia. You can find all kinds of fault with specific hypotheses about what might happen as the planet gets warmer. That's true for any theory.
But here I am, doing what I said I wouldn't: repeating arguments you must have heard before. If you're seriously interested in the issue, go do some reading. If you just want to snipe, fuck off.