A more democratic structure, perhaps? I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in Oz, unions are typically organized around a somewhat authoritarian model, on the pretext that worker solidarity is needed to achieve their goals.
As with virtually anything in politics, it's up to the people to make sure that unions don't become corrupt. We should be skeptical of our union leaders just as we should be skeptical of our government.
In a world where communication is quick and valid, the market can move at a fast enough pace that companies with poor management practices will quickly wither on the vine.
Yes, and that would explain why bad management practices and lousy working conditions are so prevalent in the tech industry today, wouldn't it. There have been numerous stories on/. about bad treatment of tech workers, particularly in shit-kicker positions like tech support, simply because no workforce has ever united against bad management. Sure, an individual can take a stand or walk out of a job he/she doesn't like, but what are isolated individuals going to achieve in the greater scheme of things?
It's time that tech workers united, be it as a union or at workplace level, not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of the clients/customers who put up with bad products as the result of bad management.
This is a specific instance of the perennial question "How old do you have to be to reach majority?" There's really no easy answer, and there's a large grey area around the upper end of the adolescent age bracket, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
Re:Quicktime Streaming Server is slashdot friendly
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Live Streaming Video?
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· Score: 1
Um, no.
It'll only compile for what APIs the developers coded support for. While POSIX will give you a working binary on most *nix systems and NT, it won't work, for example, on Win9x. Even if you did abstract out the system calls and did a native Win32 implementation, Win9x doesn't implement all of the functionality of the Win32 API. For some things you'll get a "I suck so I can't do that" error return, for others (like background file I/O), they'll work, but not in the way you intended (continuing with previous example, background file I/O will run in the foreground on Win9x, blocking your process until completion; not what you originally intended:)).
Has anyone ever tried putting Vogon poetry through the fish? I'd do it, but I'm busy, and anyway, they might get annoyed at me if their server blows up.:)
"It works there - the BBC is renowned worldwide for its high quality programming and services. Why can't this model work for other mediums?"
Firstly, the BBC is a public broadcaster, and the license fee is the way that the organization gets all of its funding. You don't get any special rights over content, especially not that broadcast over the other commercial networks. Your analogy falls over there, I'm afraid.
Having said that, the idea you propose has some merit. The big question is: how should the loot from media sales be distributed amongst competing labels/artists. I mean, everybody could be listening to artist A, but what's to stop artist B (who's talentless and whom nobody listens to) from getting a cut?
I have absolutely no problem with browser-specific HTML. But the whole point was that if you did use non-standard tags, you should code your site in such a way that it would degrade nicely when rendered by browsers that didn't support the funny markup (the div tag is a nice example of this, I think, although I'm not sure). Frames may be evil, but at least you had the noframes tag.
I realize that this is probably impossible now, but lack of standards compliance is ultimately the fault of the people who create the unfriendly pages, not some insidious conspiracy by Microsoft/AOLTimezilla/whoever. If some e-commerce site makes a transgression, the best way to fight it is not buy stuff from that site, and e-mail them telling them why they're not going to get your custom.
Sorry, I probably should have put all that in rant tags.
I think the goals of the community have changed over time, which is what you would expect from a dynamic, living social organism.
A while ago, the emphasis was just on creating a good, stable OS that techies would appreciate and love. Since most techies don't make their mind up about what OS to use on the basis of what they see on the nightly news or the front page of the major daily newspapers, the effect of the media was therefore largely irrelevant.
Nowadays, the objective has shifted to World Domination and the defeat of Microsoft. We're trying to actively recruit mainstream users, and to do that, you need to concentrate on useability and public perception.
I don't think we'll see a technical degradation in the quality of Linux, however, because the community is quite large and diverse and people will always specialize in whatever most interests them. You'll have the die-hard techies working on keeping the kernel and other system components up to snuff, and others (eg Miguel) doing the UI stuff.
But then again, I could be wrong. Who knows? Trying to predict the course of future events in computing and IT almost never works.
I am an Australian, and I basically agree with all your points (although I'm not entirely up on the bandwidth situation right now). With regard to R&D, it would seem that the government is already trying to do what Microsoft want by trying to wean universities and other institutions off the public purse and get them hooked on corporate sponsorship (something with which I vehemently disagree). I don't know what they're complaining about.:)
I don't think the government necessarily wants to annoy the tech sector, they just don't understand it, don't understand its importance, and regard IT-related issues as a tool or bargaining chip to achieve their own political ends.
To wit, the censorship regime was first introduced when the government was trying to garner the support of a moral conservative in the Senate (Brian Harradine) for a controversial piece of tax legislation. Coincidence? Hardly. (The senator in question just said "Thank you very much" and voted against said tax legislation anyway.)
Similarly, the new digital broadcasting regime is simply an attempt to appease the most powerful television mogul in the country (who also happens to be the richest man in the country), Kerry Packer. (There was an excellent piece on the ABC's Four Corners program about this, but I don't know whether there's a transcript online.)
And the underfunding of universities is simply another facet of the conservative "privatise everything that isn't nailed down" ideology that's rampant in this country right now.
In short, don't blame malice when utter, total stupidity will do.
Given the techie background of the audience I can't imagine any reason why anyone would want to see a book in print, besides the fetish and fondlement value of the binding.
Personally, I hate having to read reference material off a monitor. I have poor eyesight, which just exacerbates the problems of eyestrain/bad posture of reading stuff online.
Also, books are still far more convenient to lug around wherever and whenever you choose, allowing you to get in a little reading whenever you have a spare moment (no batteries required is also a nice feature).
Of course, both of those points will eventually be rendered moot by advances in portable computing and display technology, but until then, given the (relatively) low infrastructure costs of setting up a vanity press as described, I would advise the original poster to make hay while the sun shines.
A voting system really needs to be open source so that voting procedures can be changed if necessary and if the people want change. I wouldn't want voting reform dictated by whether or not a private company felt like mucking around with its closed source.
This is exactly right. When you take the dynamics equations from special relativity and apply them to everyday situations, they look identical to traditional Newtonian mechanics. Which is what you would expect, becuase Newtonian mechanics works in everyday situations. Newton's equations are therefore "laws" for such cases. It's just that in unusual situations (high relative velocity, or the area surrounding a black hole), things are now different, and you have to fall back on the "more fundamental" laws provided by relativity.
Newton wasn't wrong, he just didn't have the full picture. By seeing what happens in unusual and extreme situations, we find out whether our models are correct, or whether they are specific cases in more accurate models, or rather, models that more completely describe physical reality.
There are also vast oceanic mud-flats which also provide a good option for waste sites. They are geologically stable, biologically non-productive (i.e. giant undersea wastelands), and if (when) the containers breach, the stuff inside will only seep through the mud at a rate of a few metres every hundred thousand years. Scientific American had this article on the subject back in 1997.
Back on subduction zones, didn't they use this in David Brin's Uplift series for all waste? The idea was that when a civilization left a planet, all trace of their existence would be destroyed by natural geological processes (not leaving any mysterious artefacts for native sentients to find).
I know nothing about surgery, but I wonder how much a surgeon relies on feel during delicate procedures. The da Vinci system certainly affords a far greater deal of precision than is normally available, but is this a factor that needs to be considered when designing these remote surgery systems?
No, but all those beasties live near hydrothermal vents, which (as the name suggests), provide a lot of heat. They usually metabolize all the sulphur compounds and other toxic goodies around the vent.
Re:Much better value than a trip to MIR
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Space Tourism
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If memory serves correctly, I believe there was a "round the world trip in less than 36 hours" on the Concorde about ten years ago (maybe more). Also, people paid a fair bit of money just to be on a 747 over the South Pole at the stroke of midnight on 31/12/99. So yes, I think there is a novelty factor associated with air travel (still).
But yes, I do get your point, although unless I was crossing the pond on a regular basis, I think I'd just fly subsonic in business class.
Re:Much better value than a trip to MIR
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Space Tourism
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Don't get me wrong, going into space is cool, but for $26K I'd like a bit more than just a fancy plane ride. I guess I'm just one of those whining "how can you waste money on such a pointless exercise when there are people starving?" bores. Apologies for the inconvenience and waste of electrons.:-)
Re:Much better value than a trip to MIR
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Space Tourism
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· Score: 1
Yes, but three hours stuck in a plane. Okay, so the view would be excellent (too bad if you don't get a windo seat), as would the weightlessness, but apart from the "wow" factor, I'm afraid I don't see the point.
Still, as pointed out, people fly the Concorde for the novelty, so maybe there will be a good take-up of this.
Incidentally, was the fp for this article the first ever serious fp in/. history? Congrats to the author. My faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature and the prospect of a better future for us all has been restored.
Too true. If America really believed in democracy, it would give everybody affected by its ridiculous (and downright dangerous) foreign policy the right to vote for American political positions. It's tragic that people can die just to satisfy America's "domestic political concerns".
We know the Linux kernel is made of something called "machine code", which is formed by artificial processes from a substance called "source code", not stone, therefore, why do some people insist on calling their kernels "monolithic"?
The article does make reference to an Athlon on a 760 board with DDR RAM at the bottom of this section, and makes note of the fact that the Athlon pretty well matches performance for a better price. I don't think that the authors are biased, maybe they thought the article was encrusted with enough numbers, and trusted readers who wanted to compare to check the relevant review.
Does it seem like the 2nd GHz mark is approaching a lot faster than the first one did?
Well, yes. If power doubles every 18 months, you would expect this kind of increase in growth over time. It took over a decade to get from 4.77 MHz to 100 MHz, and then look what happened.
Apologies if this gets past the pedantry filter...
Slashdot Mirror
As with virtually anything in politics, it's up to the people to make sure that unions don't become corrupt. We should be skeptical of our union leaders just as we should be skeptical of our government.
Yes, and that would explain why bad management practices and lousy working conditions are so prevalent in the tech industry today, wouldn't it. There have been numerous stories on /. about bad treatment of tech workers, particularly in shit-kicker positions like tech support, simply because no workforce has ever united against bad management. Sure, an individual can take a stand or walk out of a job he/she doesn't like, but what are isolated individuals going to achieve in the greater scheme of things?
It's time that tech workers united, be it as a union or at workplace level, not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of the clients/customers who put up with bad products as the result of bad management.
This is a specific instance of the perennial question "How old do you have to be to reach majority?" There's really no easy answer, and there's a large grey area around the upper end of the adolescent age bracket, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
It'll only compile for what APIs the developers coded support for. While POSIX will give you a working binary on most *nix systems and NT, it won't work, for example, on Win9x. Even if you did abstract out the system calls and did a native Win32 implementation, Win9x doesn't implement all of the functionality of the Win32 API. For some things you'll get a "I suck so I can't do that" error return, for others (like background file I/O), they'll work, but not in the way you intended (continuing with previous example, background file I/O will run in the foreground on Win9x, blocking your process until completion; not what you originally intended :)).
Has anyone ever tried putting Vogon poetry through the fish? I'd do it, but I'm busy, and anyway, they might get annoyed at me if their server blows up. :)
Firstly, the BBC is a public broadcaster, and the license fee is the way that the organization gets all of its funding. You don't get any special rights over content, especially not that broadcast over the other commercial networks. Your analogy falls over there, I'm afraid.
Having said that, the idea you propose has some merit. The big question is: how should the loot from media sales be distributed amongst competing labels/artists. I mean, everybody could be listening to artist A, but what's to stop artist B (who's talentless and whom nobody listens to) from getting a cut?
I realize that this is probably impossible now, but lack of standards compliance is ultimately the fault of the people who create the unfriendly pages, not some insidious conspiracy by Microsoft/AOLTimezilla/whoever. If some e-commerce site makes a transgression, the best way to fight it is not buy stuff from that site, and e-mail them telling them why they're not going to get your custom.
Sorry, I probably should have put all that in rant tags.
A while ago, the emphasis was just on creating a good, stable OS that techies would appreciate and love. Since most techies don't make their mind up about what OS to use on the basis of what they see on the nightly news or the front page of the major daily newspapers, the effect of the media was therefore largely irrelevant.
Nowadays, the objective has shifted to World Domination and the defeat of Microsoft. We're trying to actively recruit mainstream users, and to do that, you need to concentrate on useability and public perception.
I don't think we'll see a technical degradation in the quality of Linux, however, because the community is quite large and diverse and people will always specialize in whatever most interests them. You'll have the die-hard techies working on keeping the kernel and other system components up to snuff, and others (eg Miguel) doing the UI stuff.
But then again, I could be wrong. Who knows? Trying to predict the course of future events in computing and IT almost never works.
I am an Australian, and I basically agree with all your points (although I'm not entirely up on the bandwidth situation right now). With regard to R&D, it would seem that the government is already trying to do what Microsoft want by trying to wean universities and other institutions off the public purse and get them hooked on corporate sponsorship (something with which I vehemently disagree). I don't know what they're complaining about. :)
I absolutely concur on that count. It's unfortunate that the ALP offers no real alternative to the Coalition in this area.
To wit, the censorship regime was first introduced when the government was trying to garner the support of a moral conservative in the Senate (Brian Harradine) for a controversial piece of tax legislation. Coincidence? Hardly. (The senator in question just said "Thank you very much" and voted against said tax legislation anyway.)
Similarly, the new digital broadcasting regime is simply an attempt to appease the most powerful television mogul in the country (who also happens to be the richest man in the country), Kerry Packer. (There was an excellent piece on the ABC's Four Corners program about this, but I don't know whether there's a transcript online.)
And the underfunding of universities is simply another facet of the conservative "privatise everything that isn't nailed down" ideology that's rampant in this country right now.
In short, don't blame malice when utter, total stupidity will do.
Personally, I hate having to read reference material off a monitor. I have poor eyesight, which just exacerbates the problems of eyestrain/bad posture of reading stuff online.
Also, books are still far more convenient to lug around wherever and whenever you choose, allowing you to get in a little reading whenever you have a spare moment (no batteries required is also a nice feature).
Of course, both of those points will eventually be rendered moot by advances in portable computing and display technology, but until then, given the (relatively) low infrastructure costs of setting up a vanity press as described, I would advise the original poster to make hay while the sun shines.
A voting system really needs to be open source so that voting procedures can be changed if necessary and if the people want change. I wouldn't want voting reform dictated by whether or not a private company felt like mucking around with its closed source.
Newton wasn't wrong, he just didn't have the full picture. By seeing what happens in unusual and extreme situations, we find out whether our models are correct, or whether they are specific cases in more accurate models, or rather, models that more completely describe physical reality.
Back on subduction zones, didn't they use this in David Brin's Uplift series for all waste? The idea was that when a civilization left a planet, all trace of their existence would be destroyed by natural geological processes (not leaving any mysterious artefacts for native sentients to find).
I know nothing about surgery, but I wonder how much a surgeon relies on feel during delicate procedures. The da Vinci system certainly affords a far greater deal of precision than is normally available, but is this a factor that needs to be considered when designing these remote surgery systems?
No, but all those beasties live near hydrothermal vents, which (as the name suggests), provide a lot of heat. They usually metabolize all the sulphur compounds and other toxic goodies around the vent.
But yes, I do get your point, although unless I was crossing the pond on a regular basis, I think I'd just fly subsonic in business class.
Don't get me wrong, going into space is cool, but for $26K I'd like a bit more than just a fancy plane ride. I guess I'm just one of those whining "how can you waste money on such a pointless exercise when there are people starving?" bores. Apologies for the inconvenience and waste of electrons. :-)
Still, as pointed out, people fly the Concorde for the novelty, so maybe there will be a good take-up of this.
Incidentally, was the fp for this article the first ever serious fp in /. history? Congrats to the author. My faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature and the prospect of a better future for us all has been restored.
Too true. If America really believed in democracy, it would give everybody affected by its ridiculous (and downright dangerous) foreign policy the right to vote for American political positions. It's tragic that people can die just to satisfy America's "domestic political concerns".
We know the Linux kernel is made of something called "machine code", which is formed by artificial processes from a substance called "source code", not stone, therefore, why do some people insist on calling their kernels "monolithic"?
The article does make reference to an Athlon on a 760 board with DDR RAM at the bottom of this section, and makes note of the fact that the Athlon pretty well matches performance for a better price. I don't think that the authors are biased, maybe they thought the article was encrusted with enough numbers, and trusted readers who wanted to compare to check the relevant review.
Well, yes. If power doubles every 18 months, you would expect this kind of increase in growth over time. It took over a decade to get from 4.77 MHz to 100 MHz, and then look what happened.
Apologies if this gets past the pedantry filter...