the craftier despondent ones don't commit suicide until after...
None of the cases you cite have anything to do with blacklists. Some of the murderers hadn't even been fired or the grievances weren't work related. How you can describe any of these people as "crafty" is a mystery. "Pathetic" is more acurate and more charitable.
maybe it'd be best to outlaw things like blacklists
Outlawing blacklists won't get rid of them since they tend to be informal, word-of-mouth things. The crafty employee avoids them altogether.
The risk of a broken man with no place to go who can't find a job because he was blacklisted...
Actually, I believe they are more likely to commit suicide. All of the cases I know of where an employee went postal, the firing appears to have been justified.
The employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy when their doctor calls them on the phone whether it is at work or home.
Legally perhaps, but in practical terms employees should assume their employers are listening and act accordingly. Individual employees are virtually powerless when dealing with their employers unless they are in a union and their actions are protected by the contract.
And expect to have your chances of promotion severely limited if you don't get summarily dismissed. And if you apply for a job somewhere in the future and they call your previous employer for a reference, expect to have your litigious behavior mentioned and the fact that you were carrying on personal business on company time.
And don't forget the large legal bills for your suit, particularly if the company counter-sues. Also the years of litigation.
One can only hope you had something important to say in your instant messaging session to justify all this trouble and expense.
It appears that Aristotle would disagree with your analysis of incontinence in your original post:
These are just incontinent people. They understand that neglecting family, work, friends and what not is wrong, but they freely choose to do so. There's no physical addiction, their hair won't hurt when they stop playing, they can stop if they want to.
Aristotle said in Nicomachean Ethics regarding incontinent people: So, too, to the unjust and to the self-indulgent man it was open at the beginning not to become men of this kind, and so they are unjust and selfindulgent voluntarily; but now that they have become so it is not possible for them not to be so.
In other words, they can't simply stop if they want to, at least, according to Aristotle.
I've actually been quite sucuessfull in persuading a large quantitiy of French people that personal responsibility and personal accountability are the true choice of a Liberty seeking people
Perhaps they were delighted to have an American explain what their true choice should be as a libery-seeking people. After all, the French had only abolished slavery in France a mere 70 years before it was abolished in the U.S.
Perhaps the French had no paragons of personal responsibility and accountability to match Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton and thus were happy to use your humble self as a working example.
Now perhaps some of your fellow Americans could stand some similar enlightenment.
As far as I'm concerned, your French should be bowing down to America on a daily basis..
To a large extent, America owes its independence to French assistance during the Revolution as this history attests: Throughout the war France dealt liberally with the colonies. She had driven no hard bargain, when she promised them her aid; if it had not been for French assistance, the army of Washington would have disbanded because the states were unable or unwilling to raise the money to supply the needs of the soldiers; had it not been for the assistance of the French army and fleet, Yorktown would not have been taken.
Perhaps it is you who should be bowing down on a daily basis.
Canadians tend to be acutely aware of what's going on stateside, because the Canadian economy tends to flow North-South rather than East-West and small changes within the US can have large impacts on Canadians.
No, it's because American television is so readily available and popular in Canada.
And "acutely" does not accurately characterize Canadian awareness of the U.S. Canadian perceptions are formed by American media the way American perceptions are. Canadian perceptions may be tinged with envy and resentment, but that's as close to acute as Canadians gets.
If Joe Idiot Customer wants a program that doesn't blue screen all the time, then he needs to wait long enough for quality code to be produced.
Mozilla is not a commercial venture so it can afford to tell customers to wait as long as it wants. If Joe Customer gets tired of waiting and switches to IE, that's what customers do.
You claim that Netscape should have made their code more flexible.
Not at all. I have no idea if they could have or not. My point was that even if they could have, no one should come along years later and call anyone connected with Netscape or any other mature codebase an idiot.
Joe Idiot Manager says, "Ahh, it looks good, but can you make it do my laundry?"
The problem isn't with Joe Idiot Manager but with Joe Idiot Customer who ultimately pays Joe Idiot Programmer's salary. Joe Idiot Customer wishes to buy the feature now instead of when Joe Idiot Programmer feels the code base is right.
If you're writing a piece of software the second time around, you know what mistakes you made the first time, and can avoid them.
And if the original code base was so inflexible that it couldn't support much enhancement, then you can blame Joe Idiot Programmer and his Idiot Manager who, alas, developed it without the benefit of knowing what mistakes they made the first time were.
Programmers who join a thriving business should show some humility and realize they stand on the shoulders of giants, not idiots.
I want an entertainment experience that will not only allow me to loose the bonds of reality, but to also educate me.
Can't be done. Education is fundamentally hard and frequently frustrating. It constantly pushes reality into your face, particularly your own limits. It never allows you to "loose the bonds of reality". If you want education, why not go for the pure thing, unadulterated and no sugarcoating?
The capacity to play is as highly developed in humans as intellect. There's no shame in exercising either for its own sake. Entertainment, like pure research, requires no further justification.
...a dump truck with a solid gold hood ornament doesn't perform any better than one with a chrome bulldog.
You persist in comparing luxury items like Mount Blanc pens and hood ornaments to tools, which are used to make things of much greater value than the tool. Perhaps many people in fact look at their tools as luxuries because what they produce has so little value.
If you say cost doesn't matter on all of them, you better be producing gold from lead, or your operation won't be making payroll.
Most successful companies worry more about making their employees more productive by getting them to use their tools effectively than in saving money on their tools. It's because the investment in salaries is generally much greater than the investment in tools. When they start trying to save money on the tools, they are already in trouble for other reasons.
After a few years they grow up and grow out of it.
Life would be much simpler if everything one learned was true. Unfortunately, students by definition start from a position of relative ignorance and can only learn what's true by trying out different ideas.
People who "grow out it" have often come to precisely the wrong conclusion, that protest is futile and a quiet and comfortable life is preferable. What they should be learning is more sophisticated and effective means of protest and what sacrifices and compromises those means require.
You realize you just suggested that very few software projects should have any programmers.
His observation follows logically from Brooks' Law that adding programmers to a late project makes it later.
If you start with no programmers, the project will be behind schedule on Day 1. If you subsequently add a programmer, it follows that it will be even further behind.
Brooks' Paradox states that if you have zero programmers the project will never get done. If you add a programmer, it will get done even later.
Anything students wrote using a computer in those days...
And spellcheckers were an optional add-on in the form of a large book, which contained the most used words in the language in alphabetical order and a brief definition of each. Incredibly, many students had memorized almost the entire book and were able to spellcheck the document as they typed it, much like modern wordprocessors. Indeed, getting outside help to check the spelling was frowned on as it indicated insufficient command of the language, the acquisition of which was one of the objectives of education.
Would that justify everyone going out to buy a $1000 Mount Blanc Pen to sign them?
Flawed analogy. Because War and Peace was written with a quill pen doesn't mean authors don't need to use a wordprocessor today.
It's a bean counter mentality to spend more time thinking about the cost of the tool than the quality of the product. If the product made with a tool is not worth a lot, you're going to go out of business no matter how cheap your tools are.
And they don't mind paying $800 for it (or $1,400 with the SGML add-on). When you are going to spend hundreds of hours working on a document, the price of the platform should be the least important consideration.
The article lists some basic MS Office features and says: It's a waste to use $480 worth of Office suite for such simple work.
It depends on how important the work is. A PowerPoint sales presentation may be worth thousands of dollars in sales, an Excel spreadsheet could manage a large budget, a Word document could be a report on an important project or a book manuscript. Any one of these examples would be worth more than $480 by itself. In fact, the time spent creating the document would exceed $480 many times over.
If what you do with an office suite isn't worth $480, maybe you should do something else that is.
a tool should do one thing and do that one thing well.
In the case of email, 3 things: It should download the messages, store them locally, and send messages. The rest would be APIs for displaying, composing, indexing, sorting, and PIM features. All of these other features would be plug-ins from various vendors that could be upgraded or replaced when better plug-ins came along.
The tricky question is what the local storage format would be. Probably, the simpler the better: store the messages as files in the order they're received using the file system to break them up by year, month and day. An indexing or folder API would provide more sophisticated retrieval.
I believe Web-based clients that interact with sendmail work this way.
Slashdot Mirror
the craftier despondent ones don't commit suicide until after...
None of the cases you cite have anything to do with blacklists. Some of the murderers hadn't even been fired or the grievances weren't work related. How you can describe any of these people as "crafty" is a mystery. "Pathetic" is more acurate and more charitable.
maybe it'd be best to outlaw things like blacklists
Outlawing blacklists won't get rid of them since they tend to be informal, word-of-mouth things. The crafty employee avoids them altogether.
The risk of a broken man with no place to go who can't find a job because he was blacklisted ...
Actually, I believe they are more likely to commit suicide. All of the cases I know of where an employee went postal, the firing appears to have been justified.
But really, do you want a blacklist of anyone that sues an employer?
My desires have nothing to do with it. The risk of blacklisting is real and the prudent employee will deal with it as best he can.
The employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy when their doctor calls them on the phone whether it is at work or home.
Legally perhaps, but in practical terms employees should assume their employers are listening and act accordingly. Individual employees are virtually powerless when dealing with their employers unless they are in a union and their actions are protected by the contract.
you can sue them for copyright infringement
And expect to have your chances of promotion severely limited if you don't get summarily dismissed. And if you apply for a job somewhere in the future and they call your previous employer for a reference, expect to have your litigious behavior mentioned and the fact that you were carrying on personal business on company time.
And don't forget the large legal bills for your suit, particularly if the company counter-sues. Also the years of litigation.
One can only hope you had something important to say in your instant messaging session to justify all this trouble and expense.
And this is where the Bill of Rights failed. And here.
Aristotle described four categories of people
It appears that Aristotle would disagree with your analysis of incontinence in your original post:
Aristotle said in Nicomachean Ethics regarding incontinent people: So, too, to the unjust and to the self-indulgent man it was open at the beginning not to become men of this kind, and so they are unjust and selfindulgent voluntarily; but now that they have become so it is not possible for them not to be so.
In other words, they can't simply stop if they want to, at least, according to Aristotle.
I've actually been quite sucuessfull in persuading a large quantitiy of French people that personal responsibility and personal accountability are the true choice of a Liberty seeking people
Perhaps you succeeded where Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man failed.
Perhaps they were delighted to have an American explain what their true choice should be as a libery-seeking people. After all, the French had only abolished slavery in France a mere 70 years before it was abolished in the U.S.
Perhaps the French had no paragons of personal responsibility and accountability to match Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton and thus were happy to use your humble self as a working example.
Now perhaps some of your fellow Americans could stand some similar enlightenment.
As far as I'm concerned, your French should be bowing down to America on a daily basis..
To a large extent, America owes its independence to French assistance during the Revolution as this history attests:
Throughout the war France dealt liberally with the colonies. She had driven no hard bargain, when she promised them her aid; if it had not been for French assistance, the army of Washington would have disbanded because the states were unable or unwilling to raise the money to supply the needs of the soldiers; had it not been for the assistance of the French army and fleet, Yorktown would not have been taken.
Perhaps it is you who should be bowing down on a daily basis.
Canadians tend to be acutely aware of what's going on stateside, because the Canadian economy tends to flow North-South rather than East-West and small changes within the US can have large impacts on Canadians.
No, it's because American television is so readily available and popular in Canada.
And "acutely" does not accurately characterize Canadian awareness of the U.S. Canadian perceptions are formed by American media the way American perceptions are. Canadian perceptions may be tinged with envy and resentment, but that's as close to acute as Canadians gets.
If Joe Idiot Customer wants a program that doesn't blue screen all the time, then he needs to wait long enough for quality code to be produced.
Mozilla is not a commercial venture so it can afford to tell customers to wait as long as it wants. If Joe Customer gets tired of waiting and switches to IE, that's what customers do.
You claim that Netscape should have made their code more flexible.
Not at all. I have no idea if they could have or not. My point was that even if they could have, no one should come along years later and call anyone connected with Netscape or any other mature codebase an idiot.
Joe Idiot Manager says, "Ahh, it looks good, but can you make it do my laundry?"
The problem isn't with Joe Idiot Manager but with Joe Idiot Customer who ultimately pays Joe Idiot Programmer's salary. Joe Idiot Customer wishes to buy the feature now instead of when Joe Idiot Programmer feels the code base is right.
If you're writing a piece of software the second time around, you know what mistakes you made the first time, and can avoid them.
And if the original code base was so inflexible that it couldn't support much enhancement, then you can blame Joe Idiot Programmer and his Idiot Manager who, alas, developed it without the benefit of knowing what mistakes they made the first time were.
Programmers who join a thriving business should show some humility and realize they stand on the shoulders of giants, not idiots.
Big fucking deal. Can you all just get your head out of your collective asses...
Spoken like a true American with a degree in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies.
I want an entertainment experience that will not only allow me to loose the bonds of reality, but to also educate me.
Can't be done. Education is fundamentally hard and frequently frustrating. It constantly pushes reality into your face, particularly your own limits. It never allows you to "loose the bonds of reality". If you want education, why not go for the pure thing, unadulterated and no sugarcoating?
The capacity to play is as highly developed in humans as intellect. There's no shame in exercising either for its own sake. Entertainment, like pure research, requires no further justification.
You persist in comparing luxury items like Mount Blanc pens and hood ornaments to tools, which are used to make things of much greater value than the tool. Perhaps many people in fact look at their tools as luxuries because what they produce has so little value.
If you say cost doesn't matter on all of them, you better be producing gold from lead, or your operation won't be making payroll.
Most successful companies worry more about making their employees more productive by getting them to use their tools effectively than in saving money on their tools. It's because the investment in salaries is generally much greater than the investment in tools. When they start trying to save money on the tools, they are already in trouble for other reasons.
After a few years they grow up and grow out of it.
Life would be much simpler if everything one learned was true. Unfortunately, students by definition start from a position of relative ignorance and can only learn what's true by trying out different ideas.
People who "grow out it" have often come to precisely the wrong conclusion, that protest is futile and a quiet and comfortable life is preferable. What they should be learning is more sophisticated and effective means of protest and what sacrifices and compromises those means require.
Here is The Periodic Table of Rejected Elements including delirium, geranium, belgium and the criminal elements.
There's a favorable revue on ZDNet with a warning about some minor drawbacks.
You realize you just suggested that very few software projects should have any programmers.
His observation follows logically from Brooks' Law that adding programmers to a late project makes it later.
If you start with no programmers, the project will be behind schedule on Day 1. If you subsequently add a programmer, it follows that it will be even further behind.
Brooks' Paradox states that if you have zero programmers the project will never get done. If you add a programmer, it will get done even later.
Anything students wrote using a computer in those days...
And spellcheckers were an optional add-on in the form of a large book, which contained the most used words in the language in alphabetical order and a brief definition of each. Incredibly, many students had memorized almost the entire book and were able to spellcheck the document as they typed it, much like modern wordprocessors. Indeed, getting outside help to check the spelling was frowned on as it indicated insufficient command of the language, the acquisition of which was one of the objectives of education.
Would that justify everyone going out to buy a $1000 Mount Blanc Pen to sign them?
Flawed analogy. Because War and Peace was written with a quill pen doesn't mean authors don't need to use a wordprocessor today.
It's a bean counter mentality to spend more time thinking about the cost of the tool than the quality of the product. If the product made with a tool is not worth a lot, you're going to go out of business no matter how cheap your tools are.
The point is that a vast marjority of documents are actually very simple and do not require the features of Microsoft Office to produce.
To paraphrase what others have said, when all you have is a small hammer, pretty much everything begins to look like a small nail.
real pros use Framemaker
And they don't mind paying $800 for it (or $1,400 with the SGML add-on). When you are going to spend hundreds of hours working on a document, the price of the platform should be the least important consideration.
The article lists some basic MS Office features and says: It's a waste to use $480 worth of Office suite for such simple work.
It depends on how important the work is. A PowerPoint sales presentation may be worth thousands of dollars in sales, an Excel spreadsheet could manage a large budget, a Word document could be a report on an important project or a book manuscript. Any one of these examples would be worth more than $480 by itself. In fact, the time spent creating the document would exceed $480 many times over.
If what you do with an office suite isn't worth $480, maybe you should do something else that is.
a tool should do one thing and do that one thing well.
In the case of email, 3 things: It should download the messages, store them locally, and send messages. The rest would be APIs for displaying, composing, indexing, sorting, and PIM features. All of these other features would be plug-ins from various vendors that could be upgraded or replaced when better plug-ins came along.
The tricky question is what the local storage format would be. Probably, the simpler the better: store the messages as files in the order they're received using the file system to break them up by year, month and day. An indexing or folder API would provide more sophisticated retrieval.
I believe Web-based clients that interact with sendmail work this way.