To take it a notch further, those same 'translation layers' between the customers and the company, can be used as translation layers between total geeks, which are people who are uninterested in the other, non-technical aspects (finance, accounting, reporting, economics, organizational behavior) and executives, sales, marketing, etc. No one was ever born knowing it all. True, hard core, knowledgable geeks (and I've met and worked with those at various companies, small and large) are absolutely marvelous at designing software architectures, software solutions, quick hacks, whatever - you name it, they can do it if asked. More importantly, I'd say 90-95% of the geek population could give a shit less about the other, business aspects of running a company. Do I blame them for it? No. I blame myself, because being a somewhat hardcore geek myself (a programmer, w/10 years exp, CS degree), I've run into these roadblocks myself, where I didn't understand a lot of these things that have now become apparent (thus the old adage about experience making you wise - experience is irreplacable). Thus, as of late, I've been thinking of getting an advanced degree, and as much as I adore computer science and programming/engineering solutions, I find the economic aspects of a software business equally, if not more, fascinating, and I'll go as far as saying that they're even more difficult than the programming aspects in a lot of regards. This goes precisely to the heart of the argument of why software sucks today - something was lost in translation between what was wanted/needed by the man/woman with the credit card and what was provided by the vendor.
I believe CS people, or at least the portion that is interested in this, should be expanding their horizons by educating themselves in the other nontechnical aspects of business as much as they put into their professional, geeky development. The personalmba.com is a good start for self-learners. Getting an MBA is another option. Granted, some of these things you will pick up in a successful company, provided you aren't ignorant and are willing to step outside of the engineering zone and into the twilight (business) zone, but nothing will prepare you, in my opinion, like formal education to bootstrap this process. If I'm wrong, then why does it take a 100 grand ones to get a Harvard or a Wharton MBA then?:)
Anyway, I really liked your 'translation layer' analogy since it seems to perfectly address why software sucks today. Engineers aren't stupid. Neither are the customers - they DO KNOW what they want. Problem is figuring it all out, and putting it in a formal proposals/processes that engineers can follow so they can deliver on something the customer wants....
> Steve Jobs wanted the whole computer pie and wouldn't settle for just controlling the operating system.
Right. And look where controlling "just the OS" has gotten Microsoft - to a point where they can't make moves like Apple where they virtually scrap/rewrite their kernel because it would break too many apps, and moreover it would take thousands of man hours to redo the 3rd party driver for every piece of hardware that Windows currently supports. Supporting a limited hardware+OS platform seems to be paying off for Apple. I can't say whether Jobs foresaw this 25-30 years ago, but as it is now, it's a better predicament (IMO) than Microsoft's (at least from a purely PR perspective, if nothing else:). If MS could do what Apple did between OS 9 and OS X, they would or could make both Linux+OSX irrelevant, but we all know that isn't going to happen in our lifetime...
merit =/perceived/ value. After all is said and done, and the b.s. layers removed - value is 100% subjective and in the eye of the beholder (much like beauty is). And figuring out what adds value to where you work is entirely, 100% context dependent.
Linux would indeed do well if it could unseat Symbian as the #1 smartphone OS. It's slowly eroding Symbian, but it isn't there yet.
So you are right, insofar as saying that if you get the "sneaky" devices blessed with Linux, most likely the desktop will follow too.
For corporations it's actually much easier to ditch Windows as a desktop, if they could somehow justify it to themselves (e.g. cost versus benefit), because they can _mandate_ that desktops be switched and have their users retrained, whereas it would be much more difficult to get Dell to offer Linux as an option on their desktops/laptops right along side Windows in the pulldown menu of "which OS you want to install with your custom computer."
As other people pointed out, software for Linux isn't there yet, and neither is device driver support - I run Edgy Eft, and two things that annoy me are lack of official QuickCam driver support from Logitech and an old version of Skype with no video support (which I use to talk to my mom overseas). Another thing I could think of is my Canon powershot SD900 which I got my wife for x-mas also does not work straight up from Ubuntu. All of these things work just fine from Windows.
There is no doubt of the technical superiority of UNIX (Linux, OS X) over Windows, however Linux isn't quite there on the hardware as well as software front. Can they be? Sure. But they are not there yet, and you can't 'take over' unless you can satisfy these relatively common needs - like any device that I plug into Ubuntu, it should work straight out of the box as it does on Windows or OS X....
If enough customers send emails to various vendors demanding device drivers, software for their needs/hardware,/and/ are willing to pony up cash for these vendors' hardware products/software, then vendors will eventually come around (or perish).
This is the only reason why I am probably going to switch to a Macbook Pro for my next laptop.:)
To those who are "level 60" or what not - there is life for you after World of Warcraft. I know it's hard to see now, but you eventually will come around. No, not even light, controlled play is acceptable. Get off the computer and go hang out with friends or at the gym. You will get far more satisfaction out of socializing or physical workout than you ever will out of becoming Level 60 in a dweeby game.
It has a nice overview of how humans perceive the world, or better yet, how everyone's worldview is formed. Not knowing these distinctions can be fatal to your intellectual development. Those who founded this country realized the power of thought, speech, science, etc. and the fact that certain types of speech can generate beliefs which are not backed by any sort of factual/scientific knowledge. This is why they probably produced the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (my belief).
It is the height of hubris for some individual, commercial or governmental entity to demand political correctness/tolerance from Wal-Mart because their beliefs differ from mine, or the 1200 people who posted on this thread (again, my belief, since the game doesn't harm me in any sort of physical way - and it is free to try and convert me into anything, if it can...).
Ultimately, all religions converge on the one and only one issue that plagues humans to this day, and will probably continue to plague us forever - "Does god exist?". Well, I have no idea - however, I _believe_ in the _belief_ that God does exist. Note I did not say I believe that God exists - which would imply some 'truthiness' or (false, weasly) authority in my statement (of which there isn't any).
And I'll tell you why God exists - because there is no freaking way I will ever be able to know the answer to every question that ever bugged me, or why things are the way they are, why electricity flows from positive to negative, why a pile of carbon-based compounds is called a 'human', etc etc. God knows the answers, and if I can get closer to God by educating myself in the ways that God (and other humans like me, and better than me, for the last N thousand years) created for me, whether it be computer science (which is what I studied), physics, chemistry, language and/or all combined, then that's what I'll do.
What I won't do is ask you to believe any of what I said. 'Cause I could be lying too.
I had two points in my previous post - one that GSM has no notion of soft-handoff, and the other one, was promoting CDMA as a better data connection than GSM, so I'm sorry if that confused the two points I was trying to make. GSM may "hand off well", which doesn't mean it has soft handoff, which is privy to CDMA.
UMTS is still lagging in coverage/deployment while CDMA2000 has been deployed for a few years now. UMTS (WCDMA) was (I dont know if this is the case any longer) technically more difficult to pull off than CDMA2000.
And I am quite sure WCDMA was 'invented' precisely because of Cingular's concern over licensing fees for CDMA2000 - the underlying technology in both standards UMTS and CDMA2K _is_ CDMA, however, since UMTS is deployed over existing GSM infrastructure, this means less cost in upgrading network infrastructure to CDMA2000 compliance. I'm not sure how this works out on the handset side, but there are probably huge savings there as well if Cingular can avoid using Qualcomm's MSM chips. So to say that the licensing concerns aren't an issue, at least from a superficial point of view, is laughable. I don't know the details of the licensing schemes, or Cingular's financials, but my guess is licensing fees are a big concern.
Either way, Qualcomm still gets royalties for either WCDMA or CDMA2000, except those may be reduced (by how much, I have no idea) for WCDMA.
As to phones working in every country - Verizon Wireless has a couple of phones, one from Samsung, that can work pretty much in any country right now - they support both CDMA+GSM (I believe they use some of Qualcomm's newer MSM's).
... and they can not possibly have the least amount of dropped calls when they are using technology that doesn't have the notion of soft-handoff between cell stations. CDMA, the technology that Sprint and Verizon uses supports this, so if anyone can brag about least amount of dropped phone calls is probably Verizon or Sprint. Cingular still runs on older technology like TDMA, analog and GSM.
Of course, most people could give a shit less or don't know any better about what the underlying technology is, so they buy into the TV propaganda about Cingular's 'least dropped calls'.
To Cingular's advantage, they did implement an overlapped GSM/GPRS network in most of the areas they cover, however, GPRS is like a hopped up GSM network, or for better analogy, like putting lipstick on a pig, whereas CDMA would be slapping the lipstick on Giselle..... CDMA is the next gen technology, they all know it, but aren't converting to it probably because it'll cost them too much in licensing fees.
Re:summary of ted stevens' bill?
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
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· Score: 2, Informative
In a nutshell it means that currently there is no QoS (quality of service, or otherwise known as priority queueing in computer science) at the last mile from the ISP to your home. This means all IP traffic arrives at the rate at which they are delivered to you, whether that is HTTP traffic, VoIP (Skype, Vonage, etc) traffic, or any other type of data. There is no discrimination of traffic.
A consequence of that is traffic that may need to be routed there in a more timely manner (like VoIP) may arrive later than desirable. What does this mean to you? You will experience jerkiness and stuttering in your VoIP conversation. Or jerkiness in your YouTube video, or whatever else requires realtime (or near realtime) quality of service.
The argument of the net neutrality people (albeit a dubious one) was that QoS can and will be used to stifle competition, free speech, etc - and hell will freeze over before anyone in America lets that happen.
The argument of the pro-QoS people was that "if you want better, higher quality internet service, we need to do QoS so your conversation over VoIP with your mom can continue flawlessly". The stuff about free speech, well that's a non issue to the pro-QoS people, because they think the net neutrality people are a bunch of paranoid schizos who have nothing better to do than complain.
Whom do you believe?:) (come on, pass judgment, it's ok)
About 12 years ago, while I was still in college, Netrek (I don't know if it even exists anylonger, it was a text-based start-trel like RPG) was able to hook me for 48-60 hrs straight, until I literally started seeing things (I kid you not, try playing, if you can, for super-excessive amounts of time, lots of caffeine and virtually nothing but bathroom breaks). Happened only once btw.
Today, I finally got my hands on a Wii - because I can play games like Zelda and the Wii Sports, which I don't feel guilty about shutting down at any minute, unlike Netrek (or World of Warcraft, which I only tried for 2 weeks, and immediately quit because I felt my old Netrek-self slowly creeping in, it fried my brain).
I'm 31, married and programmer by day, and I want to eventually have children. WoW and the like are anti-family, anti-health types of games. If you can take a single hint from me, don't play anything that has any sort of 'experience' based type of play, where you have to waste hours at an end to get somewhere. Buy a Wii, you'll get some exercise while at it, without the mental crack.
> That is likely, but sometimes losing your job is the best thing to do. I'm not a mercenary. Sure I do contract work, but I also work for an employer to whom I feel loyalty because of ethical considerations. > If not for those, I could make more money elsewhere. I don't, because money is not the most important thing in my life. I'm not even talking about abstract morals here, but quality of living. I'd rather > work for a boss I like and who grabs me a beer from the fridge at 9am, without looking at me funny than make another 40K and retire sooner.
I get it. Money's not the be all end all. But before you decide to lose your job, did you really re-examine all of your mental choices that got you to the point where you want to quit?
I love my current employer. The owner, one of them, I particularly respect, like my own father. He's wise, mature, well educated, has a really nice family and has, in my view, made it in life.
At my previous job, all that mattered to my previous employer/management was that I deliver on deadlines, in the face of inreased responsibilities. When you then screw up a few times, and get a bad review which shows you the door basically, whom do you blame? The employer for giving a shit less about my personal consideration, lack of time, lack of sleep (I was on a pager 5-6 days out of the week, _every month_)? Or should I blame myself for not knowing how to ask for more time, and limit my workload to what I can handle, versus to what I thought would make me look good and mighty?
So, while it is very convenient to blame the employer, or call it divine intervention that I found a job I am happy with 10 days after leaving that one - I choose to blame me for not adjusting to the mentality of my previous employer. Had I been more shrewd, selfish, bitchy, complaining - I would've probably gotten out of pager duty, and reduced my workload to a normal one, in a slow, purposeful manner over time.
let's just say once you get burned, you _learn_ how to readjust. As I said, unless someone is physically coercing you, or harassing you to the point of unbearable, leaving a job is typically a reflection of an employee's inability to adjust to the situation. Now, is that "right" or "wrong"? Shit if I know - I'll leave that to people with better judgment.
But I do know one thing - it is becoming a lot harder to string me along for a ride I do not like. At any employer. At any cost.
set my computer on fire and blows my monitor up into my face, I see no reason to re-examine the 1st Amendment. Seems it's been working fine for some 200+ years..
> I'm not the previous poster, but I certainly think economics is a tool that can be used to accomplish some moral or ethical goal. It is as related to ethics as say, law is.
Yes. As it can be used to accomplish immoral goals on a grand scale. So that was my point I suppose, but we veered off too far I suppose.
> Historically the US has almost always practiced socialism in the form of a navy a postal system and public schools.
Ok, so why not add healthcare into the picture then? You don't want to part with an additional.10 on the dollar for that? At least provide it for people who are between jobs, laid off.
US is still the most capitalist country in the world. And I'd like to think it looks at what others have tried to institute and not repeat their mistakes. The job market in the US is the best there is. Not Canada's, Germany's, Sweden's, or whatever... All those practice "socialism" on a grand scale, yet suffer in many ways. I suppose it's a matter of trade offs, but I like the tradeoffs the US has made here better than in other developed countries.
> referring to is instances where an economic system tried to move to move to an extreme.
Alright man - I dig it. A little bit of everything all rolled into one, but never afraid to try a new approach and back off if it don't work - that's the U.S. of A. Right on. As for concentration of wealth, you should probably look at some tax statistics on the irs.gov website:) on personal income tax returns. Please tell me the # of people filing with 10M+ as opposed to everyone else, percentage wise. Then we'll talk about extremes:). But you know what? Who cares. As long as they keep the country's consumerist spirit alive, and those who have money actually aren't afraid to spend it, well they can have it all. So we're extreme alright, in how wealth is apportioned, but seems those on the top of the "food chain" have, ok, I'm giving in - "moral values":), so they spend it wisely. Ball's rolling... in a sinusoidal manner.
> Make no mistake, however, our current balance of these elements is not a moral choice, but a practical one as determined by what works.
Right. And what works doesn't capture the attention of certain countries because their leaders allegedly know better. So they fly airplaines into buildings.
I get it man... and I think you're in tune. But let's get back to the original point of this whole thread - a dude was asking if he should wear his moral values on his sleeve in front of his boss at the cost of losing a shitty Flash developer job (I did not know there were such jobs, being that I write code in C,C++,Java,etc, but hey.. IT is big), and I opted for no don't do it, because that's what works, and I know this from prior experience. Most people with a sane head on their shoulders also responded to that effect. Seems slashdot is inhabited by a bunch of wussies so they moderate those down and moderate the ones that tell him to yeah, smack your boss with your moral values type of arguments, up. If he does that, he's bound to lose his job.
9 out of 10, morals only get in the way. The one time where you should hold onto them is very rare, and his case did not sound like one of those rare cases. It sounded like he's begging to be made an example out of.
Now, should he use his morals ? I dare him. Then he can come back here and ask another stupid ass slashdot question about where to get a job as a Flash developer.
Slashdot is, in my opinion, a bunch of fucking retards. About 3 people, you, Geoff and the missile guidance guy, made any fucking sense whatsoever. The rest is just some emotional/belief/moral drivel, completely misplaced and out of context.
Ok, you did not advocate anything - which is why I jabbed (because in all honesty, you said a lot, and I still found you hard to decipher as to what it is you "advocated"). But it appeared to me that you might be advocating equal (re)distribution of wealth. And that's like shooting for the stars right now.
I'm not opposed to anything, just for the record. If you are the one to find a way to keep everyone alive happy and blissful without a single complaint, more power to you. I won't have a problem following you.
It was I that misunderstood you as a wannabe communist:). Sorry.
Come to think of it, I found it pretty freaking slick at how you conflated economics and morality - but the more I think about it, the more I believe one doesn't follow the other. We are inherently different from one another, physically, intelectually, in many ways - if you require 1 lbs of meat sustenance per day to survive and I require 1/2 lbs, but we only have 1 lbs available - should I or you die in the face of limited resources?
I know what you will say next to subvert my argument - but please, spare me the moral bullshit - it does not work that way. I can obviously not think of too many examples where it doesn't right now (I'm a bit tired, 3am and all...), but let's say you were right - then you are basically advocating communism of sorts, or some sort of equal distribution of wealth, and I just can't buy that only on the account of prior historical instances. Not that I can necessarily prove or disprove whether it is possible to sustain communist/socialist/whatever past-liberal regimes, I'm just saying so far any attempts have failed.
Try slashdotting in another thousand years when we conflate organic and cybernetic tissue, become Borg, can self-repair/heal and have one collective mind working as one.
Are you saying I should feel bad that the United States and the G7 have a bigger piece of the pie than let's say 80 or 90% of the planet? Whatever. What are you, a socialist?
Where does it say that Pareto optimality is equitable?
That is what the parent was bitching about. Well, tough luck - it's the way of the world. If they can pry my pie piece from my cold dead hands by flying planes into buildings, let them try. All that will do is polarize people even more.
The US knows how to take as well as retain value then better than anyone else. Do you have a problem with that Geof? Are you a socialist or communist at heart by the way? Idealist perhaps? Just curious.
There's one thing I can tell you though - the US as a country and a collective intellect is a shitload more adept at making distinctions between morality and economics than some sand pounding hell hole in the middle east. No, I'm not racist, bigotted or anything. Just really _real_, as in painfully real, and aware that all that I consider "valuable" could evaporate the next day for X Y Z reason. You name one.
You should not only do that, but do that recursively until your head blows up. Just kidding:). There's finiteness in everything. Having principles is fine. Having misguided principles that will bury you because you somehow come to believe those principles are infallible, is not good. That's when you apply the function of questioning your principles, regardless of how entrenched up your a$$ they were, mmkay?
> If all the marketers in the world commited mass suicide, the world would be a much better place.
> I'm not exagerating my views here. What do marketers do? They convince people to want or need things that they otherwise don't want or need.
Yo bro - if I said "talk is cheap" right now. Will you agree or disagree with me?
If I said it in the thread of another Slashdot story on "256GB Geometrically Encoded Paper Storage Device" - would you agree or disagree there?
But what if you grew up believing that " 256GB Geometrically Encoded Paper Storage Device" is real without questioning it, and mom and dad told you so at age 6 and then I questioned that - what will you do then? Am I evil if I told you it isn't true?
Porn is evil because people like to fuck without condoms. And when we do that, we spread disease, and decimate society. Therefore, we web2.0 "tag" it as "evil and immoral" (oops, 6 billion people happened that way).
So, remind me again of why marketing people (or lawyers, let's go for the throat here, of all people who use language to make a living) are evil and should be crucified?
I can also paint you another story of them being evil, but I'll let that for someone else to follow up...
Moral dilemmas... why do you people bust your heads with this stuff? Just do what "feels" right, mmm-kay?
Slashdot Mirror
To take it a notch further, those same 'translation layers' between the customers and the company, can be used as translation layers between total geeks, which are people who are uninterested in the other, non-technical aspects (finance, accounting, reporting, economics, organizational behavior) and executives, sales, marketing, etc. No one was ever born knowing it all. True, hard core, knowledgable geeks (and I've met and worked with those at various companies, small and large) are absolutely marvelous at designing software architectures, software solutions, quick hacks, whatever - you name it, they can do it if asked. More importantly, I'd say 90-95% of the geek population could give a shit less about the other, business aspects of running a company. Do I blame them for it? No. I blame myself, because being a somewhat hardcore geek myself (a programmer, w/10 years exp, CS degree), I've run into these roadblocks myself, where I didn't understand a lot of these things that have now become apparent (thus the old adage about experience making you wise - experience is irreplacable). Thus, as of late, I've been thinking of getting an advanced degree, and as much as I adore computer science and programming/engineering solutions, I find the economic aspects of a software business equally, if not more, fascinating, and I'll go as far as saying that they're even more difficult than the programming aspects in a lot of regards. This goes precisely to the heart of the argument of why software sucks today - something was lost in translation between what was wanted/needed by the man/woman with the credit card and what was provided by the vendor.
:)
I believe CS people, or at least the portion that is interested in this, should be expanding their horizons by educating themselves in the other nontechnical aspects of business as much as they put into their professional, geeky development. The personalmba.com is a good start for self-learners. Getting an MBA is another option. Granted, some of these things you will pick up in a successful company, provided you aren't ignorant and are willing to step outside of the engineering zone and into the twilight (business) zone, but nothing will prepare you, in my opinion, like formal education to bootstrap this process. If I'm wrong, then why does it take a 100 grand ones to get a Harvard or a Wharton MBA then?
Anyway, I really liked your 'translation layer' analogy since it seems to perfectly address why software sucks today. Engineers aren't stupid. Neither are the customers - they DO KNOW what they want. Problem is figuring it all out, and putting it in a formal proposals/processes that engineers can follow so they can deliver on something the customer wants....
> Steve Jobs wanted the whole computer pie and wouldn't settle for just controlling the operating system.
:). If MS could do what Apple did between OS 9 and OS X, they would or could make both Linux+OSX irrelevant, but we all know that isn't going to happen in our lifetime...
Right. And look where controlling "just the OS" has gotten Microsoft - to a point where they can't make moves like Apple where they virtually scrap/rewrite their kernel because it would break too many apps, and moreover it would take thousands of man hours to redo the 3rd party driver for every piece of hardware that Windows currently supports. Supporting a limited hardware+OS platform seems to be paying off for Apple. I can't say whether Jobs foresaw this 25-30 years ago, but as it is now, it's a better predicament (IMO) than Microsoft's (at least from a purely PR perspective, if nothing else
Donald Trump did not learn business. He invented it.
merit = /perceived/ value. After all is said and done, and the b.s. layers removed - value is 100% subjective and in the eye of the beholder (much like beauty is). And figuring out what adds value to where you work is entirely, 100% context dependent.
G'day now, Bruce.
Linux would indeed do well if it could unseat Symbian as the #1 smartphone OS. It's slowly eroding Symbian, but it isn't there yet.
/and/ are willing to pony up cash for these vendors' hardware products/software, then vendors will eventually come around (or perish).
:)
So you are right, insofar as saying that if you get the "sneaky" devices blessed with Linux, most likely the desktop will follow too.
For corporations it's actually much easier to ditch Windows as a desktop, if they could somehow justify it to themselves (e.g. cost versus benefit), because they can _mandate_ that desktops be switched and have their users retrained, whereas it would be much more difficult to get Dell to offer Linux as an option on their desktops/laptops right along side Windows in the pulldown menu of "which OS you want to install with your custom computer."
As other people pointed out, software for Linux isn't there yet, and neither is device driver support - I run Edgy Eft, and two things that annoy me are lack of official QuickCam driver support from Logitech and an old version of Skype with no video support (which I use to talk to my mom overseas). Another thing I could think of is my Canon powershot SD900 which I got my wife for x-mas also does not work straight up from Ubuntu. All of these things work just fine from Windows.
There is no doubt of the technical superiority of UNIX (Linux, OS X) over Windows, however Linux isn't quite there on the hardware as well as software front. Can they be? Sure. But they are not there yet, and you can't 'take over' unless you can satisfy these relatively common needs - like any device that I plug into Ubuntu, it should work straight out of the box as it does on Windows or OS X....
If enough customers send emails to various vendors demanding device drivers, software for their needs/hardware,
This is the only reason why I am probably going to switch to a Macbook Pro for my next laptop.
To those who are "level 60" or what not - there is life for you after World of Warcraft. I know it's hard to see now, but you eventually will come around. No, not even light, controlled play is acceptable. Get off the computer and go hang out with friends or at the gym. You will get far more satisfaction out of socializing or physical workout than you ever will out of becoming Level 60 in a dweeby game.
This robot is way past that point... he even considers Mr. Data an inferior species.
Or worse, with a condom up your ass, not knowing how that got in there ....
Define "problem". :) (we can take this to infinity, you realize..)
relevant to this issue:
http://www.no2id.net/
http://www.papersplease.org/
Think hard about whether you really want to trade the last shred of privacy for a little bit of 'added security'.
Whenever discussions about beliefs (of any sort, religious or not) arise anywhere, I tend to point people to the following website:
http://www.arachnoid.com/levels/index.html
It has a nice overview of how humans perceive the world, or better yet, how everyone's worldview is formed. Not knowing these distinctions can be fatal to your intellectual development. Those who founded this country realized the power of thought, speech, science, etc. and the fact that certain types of speech can generate beliefs which are not backed by any sort of factual/scientific knowledge. This is why they probably produced the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (my belief).
It is the height of hubris for some individual, commercial or governmental entity to demand political correctness/tolerance from Wal-Mart because their beliefs differ from mine, or the 1200 people who posted on this thread (again, my belief, since the game doesn't harm me in any sort of physical way - and it is free to try and convert me into anything, if it can...).
Ultimately, all religions converge on the one and only one issue that plagues humans to this day, and will probably continue to plague us forever - "Does god exist?". Well, I have no idea - however, I _believe_ in the _belief_ that God does exist. Note I did not say I believe that God exists - which would imply some 'truthiness' or (false, weasly) authority in my statement (of which there isn't any).
And I'll tell you why God exists - because there is no freaking way I will ever be able to know the answer to every question that ever bugged me, or why things are the way they are, why electricity flows from positive to negative, why a pile of carbon-based compounds is called a 'human', etc etc. God knows the answers, and if I can get closer to God by educating myself in the ways that God (and other humans like me, and better than me, for the last N thousand years) created for me, whether it be computer science (which is what I studied), physics, chemistry, language and/or all combined, then that's what I'll do.
What I won't do is ask you to believe any of what I said. 'Cause I could be lying too.
So now, you can believe what you will.
Or Heywood... Heywood Jablowme.
just ask this fellow at the H pump. He could not have figured out a better distraction for the American public.
I had two points in my previous post - one that GSM has no notion of soft-handoff, and the other one, was promoting CDMA as a better data connection than GSM, so I'm sorry if that confused the two points I was trying to make. GSM may "hand off well", which doesn't mean it has soft handoff, which is privy to CDMA.
UMTS is still lagging in coverage/deployment while CDMA2000 has been deployed for a few years now. UMTS (WCDMA) was (I dont know if this is the case any longer) technically more difficult to pull off than CDMA2000.
And I am quite sure WCDMA was 'invented' precisely because of Cingular's concern over licensing fees for CDMA2000 - the underlying technology in both standards UMTS and CDMA2K _is_ CDMA, however, since UMTS is deployed over existing GSM infrastructure, this means less cost in upgrading network infrastructure to CDMA2000 compliance. I'm not sure how this works out on the handset side, but there are probably huge savings there as well if Cingular can avoid using Qualcomm's MSM chips. So to say that the licensing concerns aren't an issue, at least from a superficial point of view, is laughable. I don't know the details of the licensing schemes, or Cingular's financials, but my guess is licensing fees are a big concern.
Either way, Qualcomm still gets royalties for either WCDMA or CDMA2000, except those may be reduced (by how much, I have no idea) for WCDMA.
As to phones working in every country - Verizon Wireless has a couple of phones, one from Samsung, that can work pretty much in any country right now - they support both CDMA+GSM (I believe they use some of Qualcomm's newer MSM's).
... and they can not possibly have the least amount of dropped calls when they are using technology that doesn't have the notion of soft-handoff between cell stations. CDMA, the technology that Sprint and Verizon uses supports this, so if anyone can brag about least amount of dropped phone calls is probably Verizon or Sprint. Cingular still runs on older technology like TDMA, analog and GSM.
Of course, most people could give a shit less or don't know any better about what the underlying technology is, so they buy into the TV propaganda about Cingular's 'least dropped calls'.
To Cingular's advantage, they did implement an overlapped GSM/GPRS network in most of the areas they cover, however, GPRS is like a hopped up GSM network, or for better analogy, like putting lipstick on a pig, whereas CDMA would be slapping the lipstick on Giselle..... CDMA is the next gen technology, they all know it, but aren't converting to it probably because it'll cost them too much in licensing fees.
In a nutshell it means that currently there is no QoS (quality of service, or otherwise known as priority queueing in computer science) at the last mile from the ISP to your home. This means all IP traffic arrives at the rate at which they are delivered to you, whether that is HTTP traffic, VoIP (Skype, Vonage, etc) traffic, or any other type of data. There is no discrimination of traffic.
:) (come on, pass judgment, it's ok)
A consequence of that is traffic that may need to be routed there in a more timely manner (like VoIP) may arrive later than desirable. What does this mean to you? You will experience jerkiness and stuttering in your VoIP conversation. Or jerkiness in your YouTube video, or whatever else requires realtime (or near realtime) quality of service.
The argument of the net neutrality people (albeit a dubious one) was that QoS can and will be used to stifle competition, free speech, etc - and hell will freeze over before anyone in America lets that happen.
The argument of the pro-QoS people was that "if you want better, higher quality internet service, we need to do QoS so your conversation over VoIP with your mom can continue flawlessly". The stuff about free speech, well that's a non issue to the pro-QoS people, because they think the net neutrality people are a bunch of paranoid schizos who have nothing better to do than complain.
Whom do you believe?
About 12 years ago, while I was still in college, Netrek (I don't know if it even exists anylonger, it was a text-based start-trel like RPG) was able to hook me for 48-60 hrs straight, until I literally started seeing things (I kid you not, try playing, if you can, for super-excessive amounts of time, lots of caffeine and virtually nothing but bathroom breaks). Happened only once btw.
Today, I finally got my hands on a Wii - because I can play games like Zelda and the Wii Sports, which I don't feel guilty about shutting down at any minute, unlike Netrek (or World of Warcraft, which I only tried for 2 weeks, and immediately quit because I felt my old Netrek-self slowly creeping in, it fried my brain).
I'm 31, married and programmer by day, and I want to eventually have children. WoW and the like are anti-family, anti-health types of games. If you can take a single hint from me, don't play anything that has any sort of 'experience' based type of play, where you have to waste hours at an end to get somewhere. Buy a Wii, you'll get some exercise while at it, without the mental crack.
> That is likely, but sometimes losing your job is the best thing to do. I'm not a mercenary. Sure I do contract work, but I also work for an employer to whom I feel loyalty because of ethical considerations.
> If not for those, I could make more money elsewhere. I don't, because money is not the most important thing in my life. I'm not even talking about abstract morals here, but quality of living. I'd rather
> work for a boss I like and who grabs me a beer from the fridge at 9am, without looking at me funny than make another 40K and retire sooner.
I get it. Money's not the be all end all. But before you decide to lose your job, did you really re-examine all of your mental choices that got you to the point where you want to quit?
I love my current employer. The owner, one of them, I particularly respect, like my own father. He's wise, mature, well educated, has a really nice family and has, in my view, made it in life.
At my previous job, all that mattered to my previous employer/management was that I deliver on deadlines, in the face of inreased responsibilities. When you then screw up a few times, and get a bad review which shows you the door basically, whom do you blame? The employer for giving a shit less about my personal consideration, lack of time, lack of sleep (I was on a pager 5-6 days out of the week, _every month_)? Or should I blame myself for not knowing how to ask for more time, and limit my workload to what I can handle, versus to what I thought would make me look good and mighty?
So, while it is very convenient to blame the employer, or call it divine intervention that I found a job I am happy with 10 days after leaving that one - I choose to blame me for not adjusting to the mentality of my previous employer. Had I been more shrewd, selfish, bitchy, complaining - I would've probably gotten out of pager duty, and reduced my workload to a normal one, in a slow, purposeful manner over time.
let's just say once you get burned, you _learn_ how to readjust. As I said, unless someone is physically coercing you, or harassing you to the point of unbearable, leaving a job is typically a reflection of an employee's inability to adjust to the situation. Now, is that "right" or "wrong"? Shit if I know - I'll leave that to people with better judgment.
But I do know one thing - it is becoming a lot harder to string me along for a ride I do not like. At any employer. At any cost.
set my computer on fire and blows my monitor up into my face, I see no reason to re-examine the 1st Amendment. Seems it's been working fine for some 200+ years..
> I'm not the previous poster, but I certainly think economics is a tool that can be used to accomplish some moral or ethical goal. It is as related to ethics as say, law is.
.10 on the dollar for that? At least provide it for people who are between jobs, laid off.
:) on personal income tax returns. Please tell me the # of people filing with 10M+ as opposed to everyone else, percentage wise. Then we'll talk about extremes :). But you know what? Who cares. As long as they keep the country's consumerist spirit alive, and those who have money actually aren't afraid to spend it, well they can have it all. So we're extreme alright, in how wealth is apportioned, but seems those on the top of the "food chain" have, ok, I'm giving in - "moral values" :), so they spend it wisely. Ball's rolling... in a sinusoidal manner.
Yes. As it can be used to accomplish immoral goals on a grand scale. So that was my point I suppose, but we veered off too far I suppose.
> Historically the US has almost always practiced socialism in the form of a navy a postal system and public schools.
Ok, so why not add healthcare into the picture then? You don't want to part with an additional
US is still the most capitalist country in the world. And I'd like to think it looks at what others have tried to institute and not repeat their mistakes. The job market in the US is the best there is. Not Canada's, Germany's, Sweden's, or whatever... All those practice "socialism" on a grand scale, yet suffer in many ways. I suppose it's a matter of trade offs, but I like the tradeoffs the US has made here better than in other developed countries.
> referring to is instances where an economic system tried to move to move to an extreme.
Alright man - I dig it. A little bit of everything all rolled into one, but never afraid to try a new approach and back off if it don't work - that's the U.S. of A. Right on. As for concentration of wealth, you should probably look at some tax statistics on the irs.gov website
> Make no mistake, however, our current balance of these elements is not a moral choice, but a practical one as determined by what works.
Right. And what works doesn't capture the attention of certain countries because their leaders allegedly know better. So they fly airplaines into buildings.
I get it man... and I think you're in tune. But let's get back to the original point of this whole thread - a dude was asking if he should wear his moral values on his sleeve in front of his boss at the cost of losing a shitty Flash developer job (I did not know there were such jobs, being that I write code in C,C++,Java,etc, but hey.. IT is big), and I opted for no don't do it, because that's what works, and I know this from prior experience. Most people with a sane head on their shoulders also responded to that effect. Seems slashdot is inhabited by a bunch of wussies so they moderate those down and moderate the ones that tell him to yeah, smack your boss with your moral values type of arguments, up. If he does that, he's bound to lose his job.
9 out of 10, morals only get in the way. The one time where you should hold onto them is very rare, and his case did not sound like one of those rare cases. It sounded like he's begging to be made an example out of.
Now, should he use his morals ? I dare him. Then he can come back here and ask another stupid ass slashdot question about where to get a job as a Flash developer.
Slashdot is, in my opinion, a bunch of fucking retards. About 3 people, you, Geoff and the missile guidance guy, made any fucking sense whatsoever. The rest is just some emotional/belief/moral drivel, completely misplaced and out of context.
Ok, you did not advocate anything - which is why I jabbed (because in all honesty, you said a lot, and I still found you hard to decipher as to what it is you "advocated"). But it appeared to me that you might be advocating equal (re)distribution of wealth. And that's like shooting for the stars right now.
:). Sorry.
I'm not opposed to anything, just for the record. If you are the one to find a way to keep everyone alive happy and blissful without a single complaint, more power to you. I won't have a problem following you.
It was I that misunderstood you as a wannabe communist
Come to think of it, I found it pretty freaking slick at how you conflated economics and morality - but the more I think about it, the more I believe one doesn't follow the other. We are inherently different from one another, physically, intelectually, in many ways - if you require 1 lbs of meat sustenance per day to survive and I require 1/2 lbs, but we only have 1 lbs available - should I or you die in the face of limited resources?
I know what you will say next to subvert my argument - but please, spare me the moral bullshit - it does not work that way. I can obviously not think of too many examples where it doesn't right now (I'm a bit tired, 3am and all...), but let's say you were right - then you are basically advocating communism of sorts, or some sort of equal distribution of wealth, and I just can't buy that only on the account of prior historical instances. Not that I can necessarily prove or disprove whether it is possible to sustain communist/socialist/whatever past-liberal regimes, I'm just saying so far any attempts have failed.
Try slashdotting in another thousand years when we conflate organic and cybernetic tissue, become Borg, can self-repair/heal and have one collective mind working as one.
> Economics is inseperable from morality.
Are you saying I should feel bad that the United States and the G7 have a bigger piece of the pie than let's say 80 or 90% of the planet? Whatever. What are you, a socialist?
Where does it say that Pareto optimality is equitable?
That is what the parent was bitching about. Well, tough luck - it's the way of the world. If they can pry my pie piece from my cold dead hands by flying planes into buildings, let them try. All that will do is polarize people even more.
The US knows how to take as well as retain value then better than anyone else. Do you have a problem with that Geof? Are you a socialist or communist at heart by the way? Idealist perhaps? Just curious.
There's one thing I can tell you though - the US as a country and a collective intellect is a shitload more adept at making distinctions between morality and economics than some sand pounding hell hole in the middle east. No, I'm not racist, bigotted or anything. Just really _real_, as in painfully real, and aware that all that I consider "valuable" could evaporate the next day for X Y Z reason. You name one.
You should not only do that, but do that recursively until your head blows up. Just kidding :). There's finiteness in everything. Having principles is fine. Having misguided principles that will bury you because you somehow come to believe those principles are infallible, is not good. That's when you apply the function of questioning your principles, regardless of how entrenched up your a$$ they were, mmkay?
> If all the marketers in the world commited mass suicide, the world would be a much better place.
> I'm not exagerating my views here. What do marketers do? They convince people to want or need things that they otherwise don't want or need.
Yo bro - if I said "talk is cheap" right now. Will you agree or disagree with me?
If I said it in the thread of another Slashdot story on "256GB Geometrically Encoded Paper Storage Device" - would you agree or disagree there?
But what if you grew up believing that " 256GB Geometrically Encoded Paper Storage Device" is real without questioning it, and mom and dad told you so at age 6 and then I questioned that - what will you do then? Am I evil if I told you it isn't true?
Porn is evil because people like to fuck without condoms. And when we do that, we spread disease, and decimate society. Therefore, we web2.0 "tag" it as "evil and immoral" (oops, 6 billion people happened that way).
So, remind me again of why marketing people (or lawyers, let's go for the throat here, of all people who use language to make a living) are evil and should be crucified?
I can also paint you another story of them being evil, but I'll let that for someone else to follow up...
Moral dilemmas... why do you people bust your heads with this stuff? Just do what "feels" right, mmm-kay?