Well, just because the students have the bandwidth doesn't mean they'll use it correctly
This is a... disturbing... sentiment. The degree to which it is disturbing can be measured by dropping out the term 'bandwidth' and replacing it with just about any other noun.
A good deal of the character of the net is as it is because the people who originally developed it, and were among its first users, simply wanted to _play_: multi-user interactive games predate the web, and all of the commercial and educational uses of the internet came much later.
That isn't to say that commercial and educational uses are bad --- far from it. But to castigate people who use the net for entertainment as 'not using it correctly' is, in essence, to assert that the people who built the web were not using it correctly.
I can confirm what other posters wrote: sex/moral and US society is hard to understand for a European. Let me tell my, totally subjective, impressions:
I was in Europe for most of the spring of 1998, during which time there were occasional news stories about the just-then-new Lewinsky scandal.
None of my European friends could believe that this was actually a serious issue. Of course men have affairs, the attitude seemed to be, and it's between him and his wife, and should be nobody else's business.
Ah, but the people who created the problem aren't the people who had to be on call over new year's weekend just in case, at least not for the most part.
I've been in the industry for 7 years. I haven't written any code which was date-vulnerable. Yet I was asked (I refused) to work over new year's --- because i was there, and they needed someone. The responsible parties have long since moved on leaving the rest of us holding the bag.
I emailed Rob on this very issue a while back and his response was that if those posting on defult 2 aren't insightful, etc, then the moderators should moderate them "-1 Overrated". The problem is that moderators do not do this often enough.
And with good reason. To mark something as 'overrated' is to say that a previous moderator screwed up --- which, even when you disagree with a moderation, is a hard thing to do; it flies in the very face of the idea that moderation is supposed to be independant of personal editorial opinion.
Maybe this would be easier to deal with if moderators could tell if a post's points came from an automagic extra point rather than from moderator points?
Yes and no... some people are reasonably qualified to discuss this. Example: My degree is in politics, with an emphasis on transitions in post-communist societies --- I spent four years studying the fall of communism and it's aftermath, before going into the computer industry; if anything, i'm _more_ qualified to talk about it than I am technical matters.
For what it's worth, Flughafen Frankfurt Am Main (in Germany) has had this technology in its international departure section for years, and it wouldnt' surprise me if other major airports in Europe have, as well.
I was a bit.... startled... by it the first time I noticed it, and then it stopped being an issue.
* UNIX programmers have long had a reputation for arrogance which has carried over into the linux movement.
* Most linux advocates are either programmers or hackers and, as such, fundamentally are incapable of thinking like a neophyte, or of understanding what it's like to truly have no clue how computers work.
* Most windows desktop users have no clue how their computer works --- the expectation is that it should be able to do whatever you want it to in a few clicks. (The SJ Mercury News ran an op-ed piece a few weeks ago decrying how computers in general are too hard to use --- and this isn't an uncommon sentiment outside our industry).
The confluence of these factors is... unpleasant. Most linux newbies, coming from the windows world, don't understand how a computer works, don't want to understand how a computer works, and expect everything to be simple and easy. Most linux advocates are incapable of understanding that viewpoint, and have absorbed a cultural arrogance.
Putting these people in the same room with each other is like handing a can of gasoline to a pyromaniac.
Most of the responses to this appear to be dealing with the issue of trying to train people technically --- linux is different from windows, how do we get people to understand that, etc, etc.
That's a serious issue, no doubt. But there's another problem, too: how do we react to the way that the influx of new people will change our culture? Regardless of how strong we believe our culture to be, it _will_.
Recent history is full of examples of this. Newsgroup culture was pretty much demolished in 94-95; instead of a wave of newbies once or twice a year who learned the social rules (or got smacked for not learning them) and settled down to become "good citizens", we got a continuous wave that overwhelmed the groups --- normal rules of conduct broke down, most of the groups collapsed under the weight of spam, and they didn't start regrouping until (a) anti-spam tools were developed and (b) most of the newbies left for the web. The fundamental failure there was a social one: the existing newsgroup members were unable to successfully communicate the social rules that held the newsgroups together to the wave of newbies.
The prevelance of email spam dates to about the same time. I remember having a long argument with an early spammer about this; despite the fact that there were normative social prescriptions against it, he refused to conform to the social norms --- and there, it turned out, was no way to enforce it.
Or consider the web. I remember --- as do many readers here --- the days when the web was almost exclusively the domain of (a) personal sites or (b) research information. Such things still exist, but they've been overwhelmed by the commercial presence --- and are hard to find unless you already know about them or have a lot of time on your hands, as search engines are largely useless.
What's the point in this recapitulation? Simply this: the linux community is experiencing a wave of newcomers; if it hasn't happened already, it will soon be true that the majority of linux users have been using it for less than a year; and the corporations are starting to muscle in, too. And, as the newsgroup communities and the nascent web were unalterably changed when they experienced this influx, so too will the linux world be --- and with it, many of the things that originally attracted people to the linux world will be diluted or go away entirely.
This reads like a reactionary social tract, and to a certain extent it is --- except that I don't think there's any point in fighting it; these things happen, and what comes out at the end will be an overall improvement for most people. But I do think it would be useful for us to think about the following questions:
* What are the things that first attracted us to linux, or to the linux community? * What are the things that are most important to not lose sight of, and still have, after the influx has passed? * How do we go about promoting those things and, in a sense, converting the new users to believe in them?
The question that's disturbing me the most:
* what happens when the stock price of companies which have recently converted to the open source movement fall? Do they continue to stick with open source, or do they retrench and pull back to the closed-source box? How do we convince them not to do the latter?
American presidential elections are, simply speaking, bizarre.
We think we're voting for a presidential candidate --- and the ballots claim we are --- but in fact we're voting for a group of people, usually named by the candidate, who say they'll vote for that candidate if sent to a meeting of a small select group that actually elects the president.
State law requires them to honor that statement of intent --- but those laws are unenforceable under the federal constitution. The pledges are rarely ignored, but it has happened, relatively recently; the "feature" isn't dead.
If nobody gets 50%+1 of the votes in that body, then the House decides --- from among the top _3_ vote getters. This has only happened once (1826), and came close to happening another time (1876: there was a debate about who actually got to sit in the electoral college), so it's anybody's bet what might happen, although political analysts in 1992 (when it could have happened had Perot played his cards differently) thought it likely that the vote would come down along party lines.
The last time this was done in the US in a presidential election was in 1896... the fusion candidate lost: the other party was able to argue that if he'd been endorsed by the extremist (ie., non-mainstream) party, it clearly meant he was a loony, and couldn't be trusted in government.
Problem with this, is that you might end up with a split goverment ala the stuff we see in parliamentary systems - where the legislature has no confidence in the executive "branch"
And this is different from having a Republican president and Democratic legislature (1987-1993) or a Democratic president and Republican legislature (1995-2001) how?
There's a ballot measure in California in March which would require as an option on the ballot 'none of the above.' It would be non-binding (which is to say, if none of the above won, the office would not remain empty) but would be tallied and reported like any other candidate.
In a bizarre irony, the political party which has long championed this issue in California has come out in opposition to the measure (because it's non-binding).
I guarantee you, the "other contacts" won't care: with one exception they're all drop-boxes designed for a specific purpose; mailing them would be as annoying as mass-mailing "postmaster@slashdot.org" about wanting a job working for slashdot.
The few addresses up there that lead to real people are not people who will have the power to influence upper management in any event: again, you'll merely succeed in irritating innocent bystanders.
Post here, or otherwise communicate through normal channels; don't send mail to random Borland e-mail addresses.
Congressional representatives are effectively owned by Big Money, and there are few institutions with more of that than the pharmaceuticals.
Which is of course a problem with the Feds assuming regulatory control; they are effectively controlled by Big Money.
Not that I see any alternative --- allowing the states to regulate sales over the internet is doomed to failure unless the states reinstitute border import controls (which would be a massive change in our economic structure that nobody is going to support).
I've conducted [6] online transactions in the last two months. I had some sort of problem with _each and every_ transaction. (Maybe I just have bad luck?)
In one case, the computer system on the other end rejected my address. They called to complain, left me a voice mail message, and for two weeks my attempts to call them back were greeted with "we're sorry all circuits are busy". Eventually I emailed them, the issue got cleared up, and the shipment was sent --- except they forgot to bill my credit card.
In another case, only half of the items I ordered were actually in stock despite the fact that the web site claimed all of them were.
In a third case, I was overcharged, complained, and was then credited the amount.
In a fourth case, the delivery agent was unable to ship to my PO box (not indicated on their web site, but it was an international shipment, so maybe that's not too bad), called my housemate, obtained my work address, and shipped it there.
In a fifth case, delivery --- using the most expensive delivery option --- for inexplicable reasons took six weeks.
I've conducted [6] online transactions in the last six weeks. I had some sort of problem with _each and every_ transaction. (Maybe I just have bad luck?)
In one case, the computer system on the other end rejected my address. They called to complain, left me a voice mail message, and for two weeks my attempts to call them back were greeted with "we're sorry all circuits are busy". Eventually I emailed them, the issue got cleared up, and the shipment was sent --- except they forgot to bill my credit card.
In another case, only half of the items I ordered were actually in stock despite the fact that the web site claimed all of them were.
In a third case, I was overcharged, complained, and was then credited the amount.
In a fourth case, the delivery agent was unable to ship to my PO box (not indicated on their web site, but it was an international shipment, so maybe that's not too bad), called my housemate, obtained my work address, and shipped it there.
In a fifth case, delivery --- using the most expensive delivery option --- for inexplicable reasons took six weeks.
with any luck most endangered species can have their embryos frozen and then can be birthed by more common cousin species
I'm not sure that's actually as helpful as it sounds. It would mean more individuals, sure, but those individuals would be from the same genetic pool, and so there would be massive species-wide susceptibility to disease due to lack of variation.
An improvement over the current situation, arguably, but not a panacea.
If anything dies off, then perhaps because they were weak and could not survive in todays harsh world. Is it worthwhile tobring them back to life, and would they be able to survive on their own? Or would we have to contain them at zoos and spend a lot of money to keep them going? Is it worth the effort?
Depends on why we are doing it. Knowing more about how, say, the mammoth functioned, might make it easier to understand how the elephant functions. It might also make it easier to find cures for certain diseases that other species weren't susceptible to, etc.
I've had a major gripe with both Java and Object Pascal over the lack of operator overloading; this is a feature that I desperately miss every time I get out of C++.
Free in this context generally does imply Open Source
Err... so what is the correct way to denote something which is 'software you don't have to pay for'?
I think it makes more sense to use either capitalization (Free=Open Source, free=no paying required), or distinct terms (Open Source = open source, free = no payment required), especially since to everyone _not_ in the Open Source community, "free" means "you don't have to pay for it."
My guess on that --- and I don't _know_, because I work on Delphi, not JBuilder --- is that it was only _tested_ under RedHat, and so we aren't ready to claim in public that it works under anything else. (As a former tech support person, i'm very much in favor of narrow system requirements). I can't imagine any good reason that it wouldn't work under a different flavor of Linux that had a reasonable JDK, tho.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, just because the students have the bandwidth doesn't mean they'll use it correctly
... disturbing ... sentiment. The degree to which it is disturbing can be measured by dropping out the term 'bandwidth' and replacing it with just about any other noun.
This is a
A good deal of the character of the net is as it is because the people who originally developed it, and were among its first users, simply wanted to _play_: multi-user interactive games predate the web, and all of the commercial and educational uses of the internet came much later.
That isn't to say that commercial and educational uses are bad --- far from it. But to castigate people who use the net for entertainment as 'not using it correctly' is, in essence, to assert that the people who built the web were not using it correctly.
"All work and no play makes jack a dull boy."
I can confirm what other posters wrote: sex/moral and US society is hard to understand for a European. Let me tell my, totally subjective, impressions:
I was in Europe for most of the spring of 1998, during which time there were occasional news stories about the just-then-new Lewinsky scandal.
None of my European friends could believe that this was actually a serious issue. Of course men have affairs, the attitude seemed to be, and it's between him and his wife, and should be nobody else's business.
Ah, but the people who created the problem aren't the people who had to be on call over new year's weekend just in case, at least not for the most part.
I've been in the industry for 7 years. I haven't
written any code which was date-vulnerable. Yet I was asked (I refused) to work over new year's --- because i was there, and they needed someone. The responsible parties have long since moved on leaving the rest of us holding the bag.
I emailed Rob on this very issue a while back and his response was that if those posting on defult 2 aren't insightful, etc, then the moderators should moderate them "-1 Overrated". The problem is that moderators do not do this often enough.
And with good reason. To mark something as 'overrated' is to say that a previous moderator screwed up --- which, even when you disagree with a moderation, is a hard thing to do; it flies in the very face of the idea that moderation is supposed to be independant of personal editorial opinion.
Maybe this would be easier to deal with if moderators could tell if a post's points came from an automagic extra point rather than from moderator points?
Yes and no ... some people are reasonably qualified to discuss this. Example: My degree is in politics, with an emphasis on transitions in post-communist societies --- I spent four years studying the fall of communism and it's aftermath, before going into the computer industry; if anything, i'm _more_ qualified to talk about it than I am technical matters.
For what it's worth, Flughafen Frankfurt Am Main (in Germany) has had this technology in its international departure section for years, and it wouldnt' surprise me if other major airports in Europe have, as well.
.... startled ... by it the first time I noticed it, and then it stopped being an issue.
I was a bit
There are a couple of problems here.
... unpleasant. Most linux newbies, coming from the windows world, don't understand how a computer works, don't want to understand how a computer works, and expect everything to be simple and easy. Most linux advocates are incapable of understanding that viewpoint, and have absorbed a cultural arrogance.
* UNIX programmers have long had a reputation for arrogance which has carried over into the linux movement.
* Most linux advocates are either programmers or hackers and, as such, fundamentally are incapable of thinking like a neophyte, or of understanding what it's like to truly have no clue how computers work.
* Most windows desktop users have no clue how their computer works --- the expectation is that it should be able to do whatever you want it to in a few clicks. (The SJ Mercury News ran an op-ed piece a few weeks ago decrying how computers in general are too hard to use --- and this isn't an uncommon sentiment outside our industry).
The confluence of these factors is
Putting these people in the same room with each other is like handing a can of gasoline to a pyromaniac.
Most of the responses to this appear to be dealing with the issue of trying to train people technically --- linux is different from windows, how do we get people to understand that, etc, etc.
That's a serious issue, no doubt. But there's another problem, too: how do we react to the way that the influx of new people will change our culture? Regardless of how strong we believe our culture to be, it _will_.
Recent history is full of examples of this. Newsgroup culture was pretty much demolished in 94-95; instead of a wave of newbies once or twice a year who learned the social rules (or got smacked for not learning them) and settled down to become "good citizens", we got a continuous wave that overwhelmed the groups --- normal rules of conduct broke down, most of the groups collapsed under the weight of spam, and they didn't start regrouping until (a) anti-spam tools were developed and (b) most of the newbies left for the web. The fundamental failure there was a social one: the existing newsgroup members were unable to successfully communicate the social rules that held the newsgroups together to the wave of newbies.
The prevelance of email spam dates to about the same time. I remember having a long argument with an early spammer about this; despite the fact that there were normative social prescriptions against it, he refused to conform to the social norms --- and there, it turned out, was no way to enforce it.
Or consider the web. I remember --- as do many readers here --- the days when the web was almost exclusively the domain of (a) personal sites or (b) research information. Such things still exist, but they've been overwhelmed by the commercial presence --- and are hard to find unless you already know about them or have a lot of time on your hands, as search engines are largely useless.
What's the point in this recapitulation? Simply this: the linux community is experiencing a wave of newcomers; if it hasn't happened already, it will soon be true that the majority of linux users have been using it for less than a year; and the corporations are starting to muscle in, too. And, as the newsgroup communities and the nascent web were unalterably changed when they experienced this influx, so too will the linux world be --- and with it, many of the things that originally attracted people to the linux world will be diluted or go away entirely.
This reads like a reactionary social tract, and to a certain extent it is --- except that I don't think there's any point in fighting it; these things happen, and what comes out at the end will be an overall improvement for most people. But I do think it would be useful for us to think about the following questions:
* What are the things that first attracted us to linux, or to the linux community?
* What are the things that are most important to not lose sight of, and still have, after the influx has passed?
* How do we go about promoting those things and, in a sense, converting the new users to believe in them?
The question that's disturbing me the most:
* what happens when the stock price of companies which have recently converted to the open source movement fall? Do they continue to stick with open source, or do they retrench and pull back to the closed-source box? How do we convince them not to do the latter?
American presidential elections are, simply speaking, bizarre.
We think we're voting for a presidential candidate --- and the ballots claim we are --- but in fact we're voting for a group of people, usually named by the candidate, who say they'll vote for that candidate if sent to a meeting of a small select group that actually elects the president.
State law requires them to honor that statement of intent --- but those laws are unenforceable under the federal constitution. The pledges are rarely ignored, but it has happened, relatively recently; the "feature" isn't dead.
If nobody gets 50%+1 of the votes in that body, then the House decides --- from among the top _3_ vote getters. This has only happened once (1826), and came close to happening another time (1876: there was a debate about who actually got to sit in the electoral college), so it's anybody's bet what might happen, although political analysts in 1992 (when it could have happened had Perot played his cards differently) thought it likely that the vote would come down along party lines.
The last time this was done in the US in a presidential election was in 1896 ... the fusion candidate lost: the other party was able to argue that if he'd been endorsed by the extremist (ie., non-mainstream) party, it clearly meant he was a loony, and couldn't be trusted in government.
Problem with this, is that you might end up with a split goverment ala the stuff we see in parliamentary systems - where the legislature has no confidence in the executive "branch"
And this is different from having a Republican president and Democratic legislature (1987-1993) or a Democratic president and Republican legislature (1995-2001) how?
There's a ballot measure in California in March which would require as an option on the ballot 'none of the above.' It would be non-binding (which is to say, if none of the above won, the office would not remain empty) but would be tallied and reported like any other candidate.
In a bizarre irony, the political party which has long championed this issue in California has come out in opposition to the measure (because it's non-binding).
The story about the guy who typed 'buy' ...
... boss ... I have some bad news for you ..."
instead of 'sell' and lost half a percent
of Chile's GNP is hysterical
"Uh
*grin*
Eeek!
*Please* don't send email to these addresses.
I guarantee you, the "other contacts" won't care: with one exception they're all drop-boxes designed for a specific purpose; mailing them would be as annoying as mass-mailing "postmaster@slashdot.org" about wanting a job working for slashdot.
The few addresses up there that lead to real people are not people who will have the power to influence upper management in any event: again, you'll merely succeed in irritating innocent bystanders.
Post here, or otherwise communicate through normal channels; don't send mail to random Borland e-mail addresses.
--Robert West
Delphi R&D
Congressional representatives are effectively
owned by Big Money, and there are few institutions with more of that than the pharmaceuticals.
Which is of course a problem with the Feds assuming regulatory control; they are effectively controlled by Big Money.
Not that I see any alternative --- allowing the states to regulate sales over the internet is doomed to failure unless the states reinstitute border import controls (which would be a massive change in our economic structure that nobody is going to support).
Anecdotal evidence isn't proof, but ...
I've conducted [6] online transactions in the last two months. I had some sort of problem with _each and every_ transaction. (Maybe I just have bad luck?)
In one case, the computer system on the other end rejected my address. They called to complain, left me a voice mail message, and for two weeks my attempts to call them back were greeted with "we're sorry all circuits are busy". Eventually I emailed them, the issue got cleared up, and the shipment was sent --- except they forgot to bill my credit card.
In another case, only half of the items I ordered were actually in stock despite the fact that the web site claimed all of them were.
In a third case, I was overcharged, complained, and was then credited the amount.
In a fourth case, the delivery agent was unable to ship to my PO box (not indicated on their web site, but it was an international shipment, so maybe that's not too bad), called my housemate, obtained my work address, and shipped it there.
In a fifth case, delivery --- using the most expensive delivery option --- for inexplicable reasons took six weeks.
Anecdotal evidence isn't proof, but ...
I've conducted [6] online transactions in the last six weeks. I had some sort of problem with _each and every_ transaction. (Maybe I just have bad luck?)
In one case, the computer system on the other end rejected my address. They called to complain, left me a voice mail message, and for two weeks my attempts to call them back were greeted with "we're sorry all circuits are busy". Eventually I emailed them, the issue got cleared up, and the shipment was sent --- except they forgot to bill my credit card.
In another case, only half of the items I ordered were actually in stock despite the fact that the web site claimed all of them were.
In a third case, I was overcharged, complained, and was then credited the amount.
In a fourth case, the delivery agent was unable to ship to my PO box (not indicated on their web site, but it was an international shipment, so maybe that's not too bad), called my housemate, obtained my work address, and shipped it there.
In a fifth case, delivery --- using the most expensive delivery option --- for inexplicable reasons took six weeks.
with any luck most endangered species can have their embryos frozen and then can be birthed by more common cousin species
I'm not sure that's actually as helpful as it sounds. It would mean more individuals, sure, but those individuals would be from the same genetic pool, and so there would be massive species-wide susceptibility to disease due to lack of variation.
An improvement over the current situation, arguably, but not a panacea.
If anything dies off, then perhaps because they were weak and could not survive in todays harsh world. Is it worthwhile tobring them back to life, and would they be able to survive on their own? Or would we have to contain them at zoos and spend a lot of money to keep them going? Is it worth the effort?
Depends on why we are doing it. Knowing more about how, say, the mammoth functioned, might make it easier to understand how the elephant functions. It might also make it easier to find cures for certain diseases that other species weren't susceptible to, etc.
No more so than does gcc incorporate the linux kernel. :)
(1) How much does it cost?
(2) Does it have the three laws of robotics imprinted into it's logic?
I've had a major gripe with both Java and Object Pascal over the lack of operator overloading; this is a feature that I desperately miss every time I get out of C++.
Free in this context generally does imply Open Source
... so what is the correct way to denote something which is 'software you don't have to pay for'?
Err
I think it makes more sense to use either capitalization (Free=Open Source, free=no paying required), or distinct terms (Open Source = open source, free = no payment required), especially since to everyone _not_ in the Open Source community, "free" means "you don't have to pay for it."
Yes and no --- the JDK is blackdown work, JBuilder isn't.
My guess on that --- and I don't _know_, because I work on Delphi, not JBuilder --- is that it was only _tested_ under RedHat, and so we aren't ready to claim in public that it works under anything else. (As a former tech support person, i'm very much in favor of narrow system requirements). I can't imagine any good reason that it wouldn't work under a different flavor of Linux that had a reasonable JDK, tho.