Cobol programmers still don't use algebraic expressions? That points up one of the reasons some of us never took Cobol seriously. Hopper thought she was making the language more "natural" by giving it a pseudo-English syntax. What didn't occur to her that real English is much more complicated and ambiguous than any computer language, and requires special carbon-based processors to for even the most rudimentary tasks.
To a COBOL person, that probably looks as clear as i++;. Which brings up a point people always overlook when they argue about whether one programming language is "better" than another.
People think of programming language in terms of language specs and compilers or interpreters. But those things don't define a language -- they just describe and implement it. A programming language is defined by the community of programmers that use it. As long as that community persists, so will the programming language. It should come as no suprise that Cobol people find it easier to invent a Cobol-like script language than to switch to a totally new form of coding. Just as scientists and engineers (the original kind, not the software kind) insist on using Fortran, an ancient language that's a nightmare to compile and debug.
Come to think of it, programming languages are not different in this respect from ordinary human language. Which people are always trying to "fix" but which remains stubbornly illogical and inefficient. Consider Han Characters, the oldest and most absurdly complex writing system on the planet. Yet it's a primary communication tool for 1/3 of the human race, and will certainly remain so as long as human literacy persists.
Your process will inevitably lead to the employee leaving and with the evil system unchanged. Indeed, the suits are likely to view the departure of a "underperforming" employee as proof that the system works.
Which is not to say that your advice is bad. Indeed, it's just about the only thing you can do if the system doesn't work for you. The sad fact is the an individual can do very little to reform this kind of management nonsense. But it does make for a lot of spirited "Ask Slashdot" discussions!
At least this company doesn't do what many companies do, which is to regularly fire the bottom level of "low performers". Microsoft does this, and the famous industry pundit Penelope Trunk credits it with their success. This was when I stopped reading her columns, since she didn't seem to notice that it also leads to their notorious overreliance on contractors, and that a lot of their success comes from simple blind luck in owning a piece of software everybody has to buy.
Last time I looked, Penelope herself was unemployed. So much for performance!
Yikes! Sony's software must have been really bad for for Real software to be an improvement!
I own a Sony voice recorder that's designed to look like a disk drive when you plug it into an USB port. So retrieving voice files is easy, and presumably it would work on Linux without a special driver. But the voice files are a proprietary Sony format, so you still need their software to listen to them. Which puts you at Sony's mercy, a situation I don't care for.
Since you don't care that Digital Research was not Digital Equipment Corp, I won't say anything. But did you know that DR was originally call Intergalactic Digital Research?
Ok, here we have the usual misunderstanding about exactly what multitasking is. From the user point of view, mutlitasking is what happens when you run two programs at once. But that's just a feature that multitasking supports. Really, multitasking is the ability to schedule and coordinate multiple tasks.
If memory serves, MS-DOS had multitasking somewhere along the line, but because of screwups in the way the kernel was coded, you had to be very careful how you used it. Most programs didn't even try. So from a user point of view, it wasn't a multitasking system, even though it had the API for it.
What's the point of linking a story that simply repeats, word for word, the Slashdot story?
And you might have mentioned, for those who think that the only OSs are Windows, Linux, and MacOS, that DR-DOS is the current incarnation of CP/M -- the OS that would have been the OS if the folks at Digital Research hadn't been so paranoid about NDAs.
I certainly agree that politics have gotten too polarized. But for a conservative to complain about it on a "liberal" website (which isn't quite my perception of Slashdot!) is pot and kettle territory. Watch or listen to opinion shows, read the editorial pages, browse political web sites, and catalog bumber stickers. Total these up. How many of these accuse everybody of opposing views of being stupid, ill-informed, malicious, treasonous, larcenous, greedy, or just plain gross? And of these, how many express right wing views and how many express left wing ones?
You are right about one thing: Democrats do tend to copy the Republicans. And unfortunately hot-button deliberately offensive brainless rhetoric is at the top of their borrowings. But at least they haven't gotten quite as good at it yet.
Only partial answer. I think there's also a widespread fascination with technology in these countries, that makes introducing something like residential fibre less of a risk.
From what I recall of this Jesus dude, he paid closer attention to what people said than you do. The guy didn't say "Christians", he said "born-again evangelican christians (also known as religio-loonies)". That's still more bigoted than I care for personally, but it still doesn't represent a blanket condemnation of the Christian community. It simply stereotypes a certain portion of it as ignorant and intolerant. Probably not a fair stereotype, but one many evangelicals work rather hard at perpetuating.
Well, the point of those whistles is that they're supposed to sound at a frequency deer are sensitive too. But since Andy seems to know what he's talking about, I'll save my $8.
Ever had anyone tailgate you, nearly run you off the road passing you (he was straddling the double yellow), and then slam on their brakes in front of you because he was pissed that you were only driving the speed limit?
Actually, I have. Which is scary in a Honda Civic. Don't even care to think about it on a motorcycle.
But deer in ones and twoos like you see in this country is not what Elena is up against. She's beginning to encounter huge herds, not just of deer, but also of wild boar. Even more aggressive than an SUV driver, though arguably much more intelligent!
You are. First, users don't pay the license fees, programmers do. Second, you supposedly avoid having the commercial license apply to you if you simply distribute all your source code in the open-source-approved manner.
I know, that's not what the quoted license text seems to say. Perhaps it has to do with the dual-licensing scheme, perhaps we're just reading it out of context. IANAL!
Your logic is assuming that there is a large enough potential viewer base to financially justify producing that form of programming over another.
And yours assumes that all programming costs the same. It doesn't cost that much to start a cable channel -- the big item is satellite time, which almost anybody can afford. So small operators can compete with the big guys, cause they don't need a big audience to make a living. Nor are cable companies loath to carry cheapo channels, because diverse programming means a bigger audience.
So if cable companies could make bigger profits by filling up their slots with cheap channels, why don't they? Well, they used to. Then a few big media companies bought up the most popular channels used them to create bundles that cable companies have to subscribe to on an all-or-nothing basis. So they have to pull the indies to make room for all the bundles they buy, just to get a few popular channels.
Why is there 100 channels with nothing on? Because all these channels come from just a few sources. Not cool.
Its like playing poker with no limit. Existing cable companies have already paid for their infrastructure so they can reduce rates to 0 margin.
It gets worse. Established cable companies have all been consolidated into a few big companies with vast resources. If a local franchise needs to cut rates in order to keep out compeition, they don't even have to make a profit!
Monopolies are never a good thing, but the way media companies have been allowed to "consolidate" is just plain evil. It denies consumers one of the most important choices there are: the choice of who they listen to.
That's not what I think would happen. Note that your cable provider is in the same fix you are. In order to show you (say) Cartoon Network, the provider has to buy it from TimeWarner. But they can't buy it ala carte either: they have to buy it in a bundle with a bunch of other channels: TBS, TCM, and god knows what else. That's why you have 100 channels but programming that only comes from a few sources.
Technically, TimeWarner could still force your provider to take these bundles, even though they have to split them up to sell them to you. But if nobody subscribes to TBS (I can't imagine anybody paying extra for it!), it's going to be a lot harder for TimeWarner to force providers to buy them.
If providers had to sell each of their channels on an individual basis, they'd probably carry more indepedent channels, which cost them relatively little to buy. This is what they actually did, before they had bundling forced on them, and all the channel slots got used up by a few big producers.
Not suprising. RCN probably went into competition with the original franchisee (whoever Comcast inherited their system from) with the hopes of stealing enough customers to compete on an equal footing. But they weren't able to steal enough customers from the franchisee (which probably just cut its rates until RCN ceased to be a threat) to sustain good service. So now they're stuck in a loop where they can't get customers because of bad service, and they can't finance service improvements because they don't have the customers. So much for competition through deregulation!
Reality shows draw large audiences, but not everybody cares for them. The big media companies like them because they're cheap to produce, and have a guaranteed audience. Crap programming like that is the product of a creative monoculture. If there were more people competing for your viewing dollar (as there would be if people had more choice), you'd see more varied programming.
However, less-watched channels that serve distinct but smaller audiences, such as TechTV and BET, may not survive, because not enough viewers would pay for them. Under the current system, consumers effectively subsidize less-popular channels, which cable companies say provides diversity in the cable and satellite universe.
That's both true and false. Less-popular channels are subsidized by their more popular sibs. But that doesn't make for diverse programming, since all the channels in the bundle come from the same source.
Before bundling, there were actually a lot more channels aiming at a limited audience. It isn't terribly expensive or difficult to create a cable TV channel. You need content of some kind (public domain movies, tapes of local pastors on their pulpits, interviews with local "celebrities"), an uplink disk, and enough money to rent satellite time (a few hundred an hour, I think). The hard part is getting cable companies to carry you. But that didn't used to be a problem, because local companies were all too happy to find cheap programming.
A few years ago, the cable company in Santa Cruz ditched all its independent channels in favor of "more popular" channels. Meaning new channels they'd been forced to carry after contract renegotiation. Many of these channels were just placeholders, showing old TV shows that nobody else wanted -- the providers' lawyers had been ahead of their programmers! There were complaints from people who missed the Eternal Word channel, but the cable company didn't really have a choice.
Actually, the government does allow competing cable companies. The 1984 deregulation law that allowed this is also the main reason rates are so high. It eliminated the local monopoly, but also eliminated local authorities' power to set rates. The idea was that new cable companies would move in, and the market would set the rates. Problem is, nobody wanted to spend a lot of money to build redundant cable systems in the vague hope of wooing away existing cable customers. So the cable companies get to have it both ways: they're a competitive business for regulary purposes, but in the actual marketplace, they're monopolies.
Well, there's satellite. Which doesn't seem to be competition enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Cobol programmers still don't use algebraic expressions? That points up one of the reasons some of us never took Cobol seriously. Hopper thought she was making the language more "natural" by giving it a pseudo-English syntax. What didn't occur to her that real English is much more complicated and ambiguous than any computer language, and requires special carbon-based processors to for even the most rudimentary tasks.
People think of programming language in terms of language specs and compilers or interpreters. But those things don't define a language -- they just describe and implement it. A programming language is defined by the community of programmers that use it. As long as that community persists, so will the programming language. It should come as no suprise that Cobol people find it easier to invent a Cobol-like script language than to switch to a totally new form of coding. Just as scientists and engineers (the original kind, not the software kind) insist on using Fortran, an ancient language that's a nightmare to compile and debug.
Come to think of it, programming languages are not different in this respect from ordinary human language. Which people are always trying to "fix" but which remains stubbornly illogical and inefficient. Consider Han Characters, the oldest and most absurdly complex writing system on the planet. Yet it's a primary communication tool for 1/3 of the human race, and will certainly remain so as long as human literacy persists.
Which is not to say that your advice is bad. Indeed, it's just about the only thing you can do if the system doesn't work for you. The sad fact is the an individual can do very little to reform this kind of management nonsense. But it does make for a lot of spirited "Ask Slashdot" discussions!
At least this company doesn't do what many companies do, which is to regularly fire the bottom level of "low performers". Microsoft does this, and the famous industry pundit Penelope Trunk credits it with their success. This was when I stopped reading her columns, since she didn't seem to notice that it also leads to their notorious overreliance on contractors, and that a lot of their success comes from simple blind luck in owning a piece of software everybody has to buy.
Last time I looked, Penelope herself was unemployed. So much for performance!
The "U" in "UML" stands for "Unified". One of the things that got Unified into UML is Use Case Diagrams.
I'm not sure it's correct to say that NT is based on VMS. It is true that the same guy architected both.
I own a Sony voice recorder that's designed to look like a disk drive when you plug it into an USB port. So retrieving voice files is easy, and presumably it would work on Linux without a special driver. But the voice files are a proprietary Sony format, so you still need their software to listen to them. Which puts you at Sony's mercy, a situation I don't care for.
Since you don't care that Digital Research was not Digital Equipment Corp, I won't say anything. But did you know that DR was originally call Intergalactic Digital Research?
If memory serves, MS-DOS had multitasking somewhere along the line, but because of screwups in the way the kernel was coded, you had to be very careful how you used it. Most programs didn't even try. So from a user point of view, it wasn't a multitasking system, even though it had the API for it.
I never used Dr DOS, but I was under the impression that its multitasking was the real deal. Unlike the broken multitasking in MS-DOS.
And you might have mentioned, for those who think that the only OSs are Windows, Linux, and MacOS, that DR-DOS is the current incarnation of CP/M -- the OS that would have been the OS if the folks at Digital Research hadn't been so paranoid about NDAs.
You are right about one thing: Democrats do tend to copy the Republicans. And unfortunately hot-button deliberately offensive brainless rhetoric is at the top of their borrowings. But at least they haven't gotten quite as good at it yet.
Only partial answer. I think there's also a widespread fascination with technology in these countries, that makes introducing something like residential fibre less of a risk.
From what I recall of this Jesus dude, he paid closer attention to what people said than you do. The guy didn't say "Christians", he said "born-again evangelican christians (also known as religio-loonies)". That's still more bigoted than I care for personally, but it still doesn't represent a blanket condemnation of the Christian community. It simply stereotypes a certain portion of it as ignorant and intolerant. Probably not a fair stereotype, but one many evangelicals work rather hard at perpetuating.
Well, the point of those whistles is that they're supposed to sound at a frequency deer are sensitive too. But since Andy seems to know what he's talking about, I'll save my $8.
But deer in ones and twoos like you see in this country is not what Elena is up against. She's beginning to encounter huge herds, not just of deer, but also of wild boar. Even more aggressive than an SUV driver, though arguably much more intelligent!
I know, that's not what the quoted license text seems to say. Perhaps it has to do with the dual-licensing scheme, perhaps we're just reading it out of context. IANAL!
If your box is more than a couple years old, they probably don't really want it back. They just want a chance to bill you for not returning it!
So if cable companies could make bigger profits by filling up their slots with cheap channels, why don't they? Well, they used to. Then a few big media companies bought up the most popular channels used them to create bundles that cable companies have to subscribe to on an all-or-nothing basis. So they have to pull the indies to make room for all the bundles they buy, just to get a few popular channels.
Why is there 100 channels with nothing on? Because all these channels come from just a few sources. Not cool.
Monopolies are never a good thing, but the way media companies have been allowed to "consolidate" is just plain evil. It denies consumers one of the most important choices there are: the choice of who they listen to.
Technically, TimeWarner could still force your provider to take these bundles, even though they have to split them up to sell them to you. But if nobody subscribes to TBS (I can't imagine anybody paying extra for it!), it's going to be a lot harder for TimeWarner to force providers to buy them.
If providers had to sell each of their channels on an individual basis, they'd probably carry more indepedent channels, which cost them relatively little to buy. This is what they actually did, before they had bundling forced on them, and all the channel slots got used up by a few big producers.
Not suprising. RCN probably went into competition with the original franchisee (whoever Comcast inherited their system from) with the hopes of stealing enough customers to compete on an equal footing. But they weren't able to steal enough customers from the franchisee (which probably just cut its rates until RCN ceased to be a threat) to sustain good service. So now they're stuck in a loop where they can't get customers because of bad service, and they can't finance service improvements because they don't have the customers. So much for competition through deregulation!
Reality shows draw large audiences, but not everybody cares for them. The big media companies like them because they're cheap to produce, and have a guaranteed audience. Crap programming like that is the product of a creative monoculture. If there were more people competing for your viewing dollar (as there would be if people had more choice), you'd see more varied programming.
Before bundling, there were actually a lot more channels aiming at a limited audience. It isn't terribly expensive or difficult to create a cable TV channel. You need content of some kind (public domain movies, tapes of local pastors on their pulpits, interviews with local "celebrities"), an uplink disk, and enough money to rent satellite time (a few hundred an hour, I think). The hard part is getting cable companies to carry you. But that didn't used to be a problem, because local companies were all too happy to find cheap programming.
A few years ago, the cable company in Santa Cruz ditched all its independent channels in favor of "more popular" channels. Meaning new channels they'd been forced to carry after contract renegotiation. Many of these channels were just placeholders, showing old TV shows that nobody else wanted -- the providers' lawyers had been ahead of their programmers! There were complaints from people who missed the Eternal Word channel, but the cable company didn't really have a choice.
Well, there's satellite. Which doesn't seem to be competition enough.
... is a right-wing, right-to-life militarist. But if he runs for President again I might have to vote for him!