*Especially* if you're in California: as the NYT reported yesterday, and CA papers have been full of for weeks, our electrical system is on the edge of utter collapse (largely because deregulation was horribly mismanaged).
After a while it dawned on me - we here in the US are the only people in the world who don't have name that uniquely represents ourselves.
Depends. I tend to call myself a Californian (which obviously doesn't describe the entire country); another trick which often works is to describe yourself as a yankee.
Yes, the French economy is so good that hardly anything gets built without illegal/immigrant labor.
Same's true in California; in both cases the immigration happens because it's better for the immigrant to live in the destination country, and it's cheaper to pay people who are working illegally and are more exploitable (they can't complain about working conditions, etc).
This isn't necessarily a reflection of the tax structure of the state in question --- it will *always* be cheaper to pay immigrants from a country whose standard of living is lower, and are afraid to complain if you are mistreating them.
. I am not a potsmoker, or anything remotely similar.
Granted, this is mildly OT, but most of my social circle consists of pot smokers (including me), and most of my social circle are successful programmers --- and every one of them who have children are good parents, too.
The fact of the matter is that, contrary to popular belief, parents have become MORE involved (especially amongst middle/upper-middle/upper class parents) in their kids lives than ever before.
What statistics are you using for the comparison in time spent with children between today and the past? I'd be interested to see the study.
Nevertheless, what you are saying *in and of itself* suggests a problem --- middle/upper-middle/upper class parents are involved in their children's lives... but really poor parents generally *aren't*, and poorer people, statistically speaking, have more children.
I think that everyone here knows that no company has a monopoly, virtual or otherwise, on either food or clothing.
Clothing, yes. Food? In the US, you could make a good argument that Monsanto effectively has a monopoly on certain types of seed, and that therefore they have a monopoly (of sorts) on the food produced by those seeds.
Or that Archer Daniels Midland *effectively* has a monopoly on the growing of certain grains.
You could also make a case that they don't --- but it's close, either way.
but NOT on *technical standards*. Let the companies fight it out and the best one win.
In general I agree with you, but sometimes government imposition of a standard *is* necessary.
Traditional television is a good example of this --- could you imagine what it would be like if each of the dozen stations in say, the San Francisco metropolitcan area, were each broadcasting using a different mechanism for data encoding? Building recievers would be a nightmare!
The point is that on occasion the *details* of the standard are less important than *simply having a standard* and moving on. Sure, the end result is that you get tied to that standard and a better way of doing whatever the standard describes doesn't materialize --- but it also means that there are things which rely on the existence of the standard that can happen *now*, not ten years from now. Absent a standard for television encoding, as an example, television couldn't possibly have become the mass market entertainment form it is now.
That's not to say that government always has to set the standard, either --- but sometimes if the companies can't agree, then *someone* has to set a standard, and that's one of the things governments are useful for.
Even Anheiser-Busch has to refrain from selling a beer called Budweiser in some markets, because that name was already taken.
By a company selling a similar type of beer. If 'Budweiser' had been the name of a bestselling vodka, they probably could have come to an arrangement.
Trademark law generally allows that a trademark on a name in one realm (say, software) doesn't necessarily obviate the ability to use the same name in another realm (say, soft drinks). Thus apple computer and apple records were able to coexist.
If you think about it for a bit, you'll see that this *must* be so --- there's a limited number of valid words; if it's not ok for different companies to use the same word in different spheres of operations, soon all company and product names will be things like xzytrph because all of the words are already trademarked.
Makes sense --- i'm *not* sure that I would want to post that in public right now, tho, as it could make *him* a victim of spam.:(
Re:Hooray, some analysis instead of paranoia
on
The Myth Of The Borg
·
· Score: 2
Finding and fixing structural problems is more complex and less dramatic than blaming everything negative on some sort of personified evil.
I often find myself significantly frustrated in political conversations with people in the tech industry. My academic background is in political science, so I have a tendency to want to analyze *how the structure of our economic relationships and social organizations causes problems*, with a pragmatic end in mind --- figuring out how to amerliorate the structure so as to fix the problems.
All too often, the people i'm talking to object to pragmatic solutions because they're "just not right" on some moral ground, and assert that their actions couldn't possibly be contributing to the problem.
I had one infuriating discussion recently about the housing crisis in silicon valley. Someone said to me: "it's people like us that are causing the problem", which is reasonable (as tech industry workers make significantly more on average than non-tech workers, and are thus able to drive the housing price up); my response was "which is why we are responsible for finding a solution to the problem", to which he responded "it's not *my* responsibility, i didn't cause the problem".
. Taco is better than most, but he's still not perfect.
Sure --- and expecting perfection from anyone is religious.:)
This whole Open Source movement is about openness and doing what's right for the community even when it's not convenient. I believe in that, and I think Taco still does too, in spite of everything.
So do I --- the only reason i'm still willing to read/.
My gripe with this thread is that there are noises going around that/. was somehow responsible for what happened to Kuro5hin --- which I see no evidence for, and which strikes me as being irresponsible attacks against people whose actions indicate that, by and large, they are on the 'right' side of things.
I can believe that pissed off/. readers were involved, or the same people that feel it is necessary to mention 'grits' in every post, but given that the creators of/. have *been through this themselves*, it is unimagineable to me that they would be involved.
Their response, and the assistance they are saying they are providing, has been above-and-beyond the call of duty and should be commended, not flamed.
I don't have Rusty's email address, but I would also be willing to donate.
Additionally, I intend to be unemployed for a couple of weeks in August, and would happily volunteer time to do grunt coding work, etc, if they need it.
And who would reap the benefits should that ultimately come to pass? In other words, is it really in the interest of well-monied companies to stop these attacks?
That's unfortunately a good point. A lot of it boils down to how much money the company is spending trying to prevent this sort of attack --- the more they are spending, the more interested they are going to be in *not* spending it any more.
ULtimately, though, the volunteers in the community are going to have to realize that the companies *are a different community* with different interests and goals, and that we shouldn't automagically expect them to share our interests and goals.
We need to take respect in what we do -- and in what our fellow programmers do. We need to understand, that be it volunteer site, or evil corporate empire, we can't do this shit. Period. This isn't hacking. But thats what it gets reported as to them. This isn't who we are, but thats what gets reported.
Sure. Nobody here would disagree (except maybe the trolls, but we all ignore them anyway).
Only ---
what do you do with people who violate the unwritten rules? You can (a) pursue legal action, but that's difficult and *time consuming*; the legal system doesn't work on internet time --- and you may not even be able to identify the guy without going after him. You can (b) apply social sanctions --- but the 'script kiddies' aren't part of our social order; they respond to different pressures and rules, and our social sanctions are *useless* against them. You can (c) retaliate and take them out; or you can (d) ignore them and keep being victimized.
For the most part, I agree with:
Access to computers should be unlimited and total. All information should be free. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization. Hackers should be judged by their hacking not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. You create art and beauty on a computer, Computers can change your life for the better.
But something has to be done about the people that are undermining all of it in the name of a joyride.
It's not an argument. It's not a validation. It's not a justification. It's an excuse for a bunch of juvenile delinquents to violate and destroy other people's property without any moral qualms.
Yes and no. I have no problem with people breaking into systems (including my own) in order to find holes, snoop data, etc --- as long as they don't *prevent things from working*.
I won't leave an open door, because that's (obviously) inviting trouble; but I don't object to non-destructive behavior.
Deliberately knocking a system off of the net, however, is f****d up, and the people responsible should be beaten within an inch of their lives.
This has got to be the saddest / most infuriating thing I've seen happen on the net in a long time.
It's sad to see Kuro5hin go --- it was a neat site, in many ways a smaller, more comfortable, more tribal version of/. . It sucks to watch people put their hearts into a volunteer project to build a community, only to see it destroyed by random a*****s with nothing better to do.
But it says something infuriating about the net community, and its future, and the level of childishness prevelant on the net. It means that *anything* which comes into the public eye is vulnerable, and that there is no such thing as respect on-line; it means that the only people who can succeed are those with enough time and money to fight off the barbarians, and anyone who is just trying to do a good thing because they care is doomed to failure.
It's worse than the tragedy of the commons ---- it's not just communal space which is being destroyed, but anything which is built by someone who doesn't have the internet equivalent of tanks and anti-aircraft guns to protect them.
It calls up a pretty serious flaw in the architecture of the net --- the designers assumed that everyone would play nicely. That's been clearly untrue for years now, but what can we do about it? The first response is to agitate for a law (after all, repeatedly throwing molotov cocktails in a store window would be construed as criminal activity), but how would that law be enforceable?
Elections law in most places is extraordinarily complex. In CA, for example, petitions have to be vetted by the Secretary of State (or the county clerk, if it's local) and then circulated for *exactly X days*, and then the signatures *sorted by county* have to be turned in for verification (is this person a registered voter? are there duplicates? are they a member of the party they claim to be a member of?), etc.
The Secretary of State's office is investigating the possibility of online voting (three ballot measures to mandate it failed to qualify), but it's expected to take a while, and there are serious concerns about its safety / fairness.
In the meantime, there are small steps. The petition being circulated by the pissed off people demanding a recall of the Insurance Commissioner can be downloaded from www.peoplesvote.org, but you have to print it out, fill it out, and mail it in. The next step would be to allow digital signatures for petitions --- sorted by county, of course --- which might happen as early as 2002.
Direct online initiatives are harder, and wouldn't happen until significantly after voting online becomes normal --- although, it would be *cheaper*, and so the expense angle might be a good way in.
I don't fully understand the Attribute support, after several readings. It seems as if you could provide your own modifiers and such, sort of a hybrid interface, but they don't seem to document it much either. How odd. Has anyone made sense of this yet?
I haven't read the file yet --- waiting for it to print --- but I've been trying to get useful information from MS about attribute support for *more than a year*.
VS7 is supposed to include the ability to declare COM objects in C++ with some syntactic sugar to allow you to define IDL attributes *in your C++ code*, thereby simplifying the process of creating COM objects. This was supposed to be part of 'COM+', but got pushed off into the next Visual Studio release.
The general idea is that you could do something like:
class foo [Apartment_threaded, Pooling: Yes] : public IBar....
and have the compiler automagically take the attributive information and generate behind-the-scenes code needed to ensure that the object behaves appropriately for those attributes, and is registered with those attribtues.
For obvious reasons, i've been trying to find out what the *syntax* is going to be, as well as which attributes will be supported; it would be nice to be able to make our compiler support this stuff in projects brought over from VC7. Unfortunately, the information hasn't been out there in any meaningful way --- which means i'll be buying VC7 *the day it is released*, in order to find out what the situation is.
Slashdot Mirror
The quality of service, availability and reliability is excelent.
That *definitely* depends on the country. Landline service is poor in spain and italy, and next to useless in eastern europe.
Hell, even your electricity sucks. :)
*Especially* if you're in California: as the NYT reported yesterday, and CA papers have been full of for weeks, our electrical system is on the edge of utter collapse (largely because deregulation was horribly mismanaged).
After a while it dawned on me - we here in the US are the only people in the world who don't have name that uniquely represents ourselves.
Depends. I tend to call myself a Californian (which obviously doesn't describe the entire country); another trick which often works is to describe yourself as a yankee.
Yes, the French economy is so good that hardly anything gets built without illegal/immigrant labor.
Same's true in California; in both cases the immigration happens because it's better for the immigrant to live in the destination country, and it's cheaper to pay people who are working illegally and are more exploitable (they can't complain about working conditions, etc).
This isn't necessarily a reflection of the tax structure of the state in question --- it will *always* be cheaper to pay immigrants from a country whose standard of living is lower, and are afraid to complain if you are mistreating them.
. I am not a potsmoker, or anything remotely similar.
... but really poor parents generally *aren't*, and poorer people, statistically speaking, have more children.
Granted, this is mildly OT, but most of my social circle consists of pot smokers (including me), and most of my social circle are successful programmers --- and every one of them who have children are good parents, too.
The fact of the matter is that, contrary to popular belief, parents have become MORE involved (especially amongst middle/upper-middle/upper class parents) in their kids lives than ever before.
What statistics are you using for the comparison in time spent with children between today and the past? I'd be interested to see the study.
Nevertheless, what you are saying *in and of itself* suggests a problem --- middle/upper-middle/upper class parents are involved in their children's lives
I think that everyone here knows that no company has a monopoly, virtual or otherwise, on either food or clothing.
Clothing, yes. Food? In the US, you could make a good argument that Monsanto effectively has a monopoly on certain types of seed, and that therefore they have a monopoly (of sorts) on the food produced by those seeds.
Or that Archer Daniels Midland *effectively* has a monopoly on the growing of certain grains.
You could also make a case that they don't --- but it's close, either way.
but NOT on *technical standards*. Let the companies fight it out and the best one win.
In general I agree with you, but sometimes government imposition of a standard *is* necessary.
Traditional television is a good example of this --- could you imagine what it would be like if each of the dozen stations in say, the San Francisco metropolitcan area, were each broadcasting using a different mechanism for data encoding? Building recievers would be a nightmare!
The point is that on occasion the *details* of the standard are less important than *simply having a standard* and moving on. Sure, the end result is that you get tied to that standard and a better way of doing whatever the standard describes doesn't materialize --- but it also means that there are things which rely on the existence of the standard that can happen *now*, not ten years from now. Absent a standard for television encoding, as an example, television couldn't possibly have become the mass market entertainment form it is now.
That's not to say that government always has to set the standard, either --- but sometimes if the companies can't agree, then *someone* has to set a standard, and that's one of the things governments are useful for.
Even Anheiser-Busch has to refrain from selling a beer called Budweiser in some markets, because that name was already taken.
By a company selling a similar type of beer. If 'Budweiser' had been the name of a bestselling vodka, they probably could have come to an arrangement.
Trademark law generally allows that a trademark on a name in one realm (say, software) doesn't necessarily obviate the ability to use the same name in another realm (say, soft drinks). Thus apple computer and apple records were able to coexist.
If you think about it for a bit, you'll see that this *must* be so --- there's a limited number of valid words; if it's not ok for different companies to use the same word in different spheres of operations, soon all company and product names will be things like xzytrph because all of the words are already trademarked.
I didn't even realize you were allowed to use 'quelle' to refer to source code. It certainly doesn't sound good *to me*.
Bzzt! look again. :)
... mislead ... their customers.
There's the 'Hard Rock Cafe', which is a chain.
There are also 'Rock Hard Cafe's, which are trying to
Sooner or later it would end up in the pocket of my jeans...in the wash
....
I made the mistake of doing that to my passport once --- while I was out of the country, no less.
I was very embarassed when I showed up at the embassy with the ruins of my passport begging for a new one
Depends how close you come.
There are lots of places which call themselves the 'Rock Hard Cafe', with a very similar logo.
Makes sense --- i'm *not* sure that I would want to post that in public right now, tho, as it could make *him* a victim of spam. :(
Finding and fixing structural problems is more complex and less dramatic than blaming everything negative on some sort of personified evil.
I often find myself significantly frustrated in political conversations with people in the tech industry. My academic background is in political science, so I have a tendency to want to analyze *how the structure of our economic relationships and social organizations causes problems*, with a pragmatic end in mind --- figuring out how to amerliorate the structure so as to fix the problems.
All too often, the people i'm talking to object to pragmatic solutions because they're "just not right" on some moral ground, and assert that their actions couldn't possibly be contributing to the problem.
I had one infuriating discussion recently about the housing crisis in silicon valley. Someone said to me: "it's people like us that are causing the problem", which is reasonable (as tech industry workers make significantly more on average than non-tech workers, and are thus able to drive the housing price up); my response was "which is why we are responsible for finding a solution to the problem", to which he responded "it's not *my* responsibility, i didn't cause the problem".
*sigh*
. Taco is better than most, but he's still not perfect.
:)
/.
/. was somehow responsible for what happened to Kuro5hin --- which I see no evidence for, and which strikes me as being irresponsible attacks against people whose actions indicate that, by and large, they are on the 'right' side of things.
Sure --- and expecting perfection from anyone is religious.
This whole Open Source movement is about openness and doing what's right for the community even when it's not convenient. I believe in that, and I think Taco still does too, in spite of everything.
So do I --- the only reason i'm still willing to read
My gripe with this thread is that there are noises going around that
I can believe that pissed off /. readers were involved, or the same people that feel it is necessary to mention 'grits' in every post, but given that the creators of /. have *been through this themselves*, it is unimagineable to me that they would be involved.
Their response, and the assistance they are saying they are providing, has been above-and-beyond the call of duty and should be commended, not flamed.
I don't have Rusty's email address, but I would also be willing to donate.
Additionally, I intend to be unemployed for a couple of weeks in August, and would happily volunteer time to do grunt coding work, etc, if they need it.
Robert West
aphrael@nospam@burble.org
And who would reap the benefits should that ultimately come to pass? In other words, is it really in the interest of well-monied companies to stop these attacks?
That's unfortunately a good point. A lot of it boils down to how much money the company is spending trying to prevent this sort of attack --- the more they are spending, the more interested they are going to be in *not* spending it any more.
ULtimately, though, the volunteers in the community are going to have to realize that the companies *are a different community* with different interests and goals, and that we shouldn't automagically expect them to share our interests and goals.
We need to take respect in what we do -- and in what our fellow programmers do. We need to understand, that be it volunteer site, or evil corporate empire, we can't do this shit. Period. This isn't hacking. But thats what it gets reported as to them. This isn't who we are, but thats what gets reported.
Sure. Nobody here would disagree (except maybe the trolls, but we all ignore them anyway).
Only ---
what do you do with people who violate the unwritten rules? You can (a) pursue legal action, but that's difficult and *time consuming*; the legal system doesn't work on internet time --- and you may not even be able to identify the guy without going after him. You can (b) apply social sanctions --- but the 'script kiddies' aren't part of our social order; they respond to different pressures and rules, and our social sanctions are *useless* against them. You can (c) retaliate and take them out; or you can (d) ignore them and keep being victimized.
For the most part, I agree with:
Access to computers should be unlimited and total.
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
You create art and beauty on a computer,
Computers can change your life for the better.
But something has to be done about the people that are undermining all of it in the name of a joyride.
It's not an argument. It's not a validation. It's not a justification. It's an excuse for a bunch of juvenile delinquents to violate and destroy other people's property without any moral qualms.
Yes and no. I have no problem with people breaking into systems (including my own) in order to find holes, snoop data, etc --- as long as they don't *prevent things from working*.
I won't leave an open door, because that's (obviously) inviting trouble; but I don't object to non-destructive behavior.
Deliberately knocking a system off of the net, however, is f****d up, and the people responsible should be beaten within an inch of their lives.
This has got to be the saddest / most infuriating thing I've seen happen on the net in a long time.
/. . It sucks to watch people put their hearts into a volunteer project to build a community, only to see it destroyed by random a*****s with nothing better to do.
It's sad to see Kuro5hin go --- it was a neat site, in many ways a smaller, more comfortable, more tribal version of
But it says something infuriating about the net community, and its future, and the level of childishness prevelant on the net. It means that *anything* which comes into the public eye is vulnerable, and that there is no such thing as respect on-line; it means that the only people who can succeed are those with enough time and money to fight off the barbarians, and anyone who is just trying to do a good thing because they care is doomed to failure.
It's worse than the tragedy of the commons ---- it's not just communal space which is being destroyed, but anything which is built by someone who doesn't have the internet equivalent of tanks and anti-aircraft guns to protect them.
It calls up a pretty serious flaw in the architecture of the net --- the designers assumed that everyone would play nicely. That's been clearly untrue for years now, but what can we do about it? The first response is to agitate for a law (after all, repeatedly throwing molotov cocktails in a store window would be construed as criminal activity), but how would that law be enforceable?
*sigh*
Since the end of the series pretty strongly implied that Cooper had been taken over, wouldn't that require the *evil* Cooper to show up in the XFiles?
...)
(Not that that wouldn't be entertaining
Quit with the nostalgia-envy and wait for Matrix 2.
:)
**** that. I'm waiting for _Fellowship of the Ring_.
Elections law in most places is extraordinarily complex. In CA, for example, petitions have to be vetted by the Secretary of State (or the county clerk, if it's local) and then circulated for *exactly X days*, and then the signatures *sorted by county* have to be turned in for verification (is this person a registered voter? are there duplicates? are they a member of the party they claim to be a member of?), etc.
The Secretary of State's office is investigating the possibility of online voting (three ballot measures to mandate it failed to qualify), but it's expected to take a while, and there are serious concerns about its safety / fairness.
In the meantime, there are small steps. The petition being circulated by the pissed off people demanding a recall of the Insurance Commissioner can be downloaded from www.peoplesvote.org, but you have to print it out, fill it out, and mail it in. The next step would be to allow digital signatures for petitions --- sorted by county, of course --- which might happen as early as 2002.
Direct online initiatives are harder, and wouldn't happen until significantly after voting online becomes normal --- although, it would be *cheaper*, and so the expense angle might be a good way in.
I don't fully understand the Attribute support, after several readings. It seems as if you could provide your own modifiers and such, sort of a hybrid interface, but they don't seem to document it much either. How odd. Has anyone made sense of this yet?
....
I haven't read the file yet --- waiting for it to print --- but I've been trying to get useful information from MS about attribute support for *more than a year*.
VS7 is supposed to include the ability to declare COM objects in C++ with some syntactic sugar to allow you to define IDL attributes *in your C++ code*, thereby simplifying the process of creating COM objects. This was supposed to be part of 'COM+', but got pushed off into the next Visual Studio release.
The general idea is that you could do something like:
class foo [Apartment_threaded, Pooling: Yes] : public IBar
and have the compiler automagically take the attributive information and generate behind-the-scenes code needed to ensure that the object behaves appropriately for those attributes, and is registered with those attribtues.
For obvious reasons, i've been trying to find out what the *syntax* is going to be, as well as which attributes will be supported; it would be nice to be able to make our compiler support this stuff in projects brought over from VC7. Unfortunately, the information hasn't been out there in any meaningful way --- which means i'll be buying VC7 *the day it is released*, in order to find out what the situation is.