I know you're talking about the News.com article. But, just to clarify, the article is based on the Consumer Reports survey. Consumer Reports doesn't take advertising to avoid the kind of potential conflicts you're talking about.
Congratulations. You've just very concisely described the modern workplace.
Perhaps your workplace, unfortunate AC, but certainly not mine. I have a boss who's a nice guy and who does everything he can to make my job enjoyable and productive. I try my best to do the same with the people I supervise. There really are pleasant places to work out there.
And if something were to happen to make my current job intolerable then there are other places I could make a living in my chosen career. An evil boss might give me a bad reference, but no one's going to blackball me for life or tell me I can't make a living. Unlike certain musicians.
If you had a job that you loved to death, but it meant that there was only one boss in the world that would hire you, would you stand up to him?
But how much would I love my job if I woke up every morning knowing that I was essentially an indentured servant, entirely dependent on the pleasure of a boss who cared nothing about me at all and who would happily replace me and destroy my career on a whim?
Maybe it's just my frustration speaking, but I think artists who allow themselves to get suckered into that kind of codependent relationship deserve what they get.
I'm frankly getting tired of hearing how powerless they are. They're the ones who create the music, without which there would be no music industry. The RIAA has only as much power as the artists want them to have, and if they really want things to change then they're going to have to grow some backbone and start making it happen. They can't fight the RIAA by proxy.
The RIAA claims that it's only a few disaffected artists who are unsatisfied with the current situation, and for all I know they might actually be right (though I'm pretty sure it's not.) Consumer and governmetn pressure is hard enough to mobilize when you have hard facts, and anonymous grumblings and anecdotes can only go so far.
Preach on, brother. We were partially successful at convincing the admissions folks that I work with not to use SSN's like this.
I think the people who work with student records, of all people, should realize how insecure SSNs really are. To their credit my co-workers did consider the issues and adjust the policy, but I don't think they'd have thought of if we hadn't been persistent. (Even more scary, the company that created the software assumed that SSNs would be used and was puzzled when we decided against it.)
Schools have to be especially careful where privacy is concerned. FERPA, the Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act (aka the Buckley Amendment) limits the release of many kinds of academic information.
No, they have a good point. True, grammar and spelling don't seperate good ideas from bad ideas, but they are valid indicators of how much you actually care about what you've written.
Checking spelling (even if you're writing longhand and using a dictionary) is trivial, and asking someone else to read through your text will often weed out most obvious grammatical errors.
I'm hardly perfect when it comes to grammar and spelling, but if an issue is important enough to inspire me to sit down and write a letter to my representative then I'm going to do everything I can to be sure that it clearly conveys exactly the meaning I intend. If I can't be bothered to spend a minute or two to check the basic readability of my writing, then how much thought and effort actually went into the ideas I express?
No, you're mistaken. Americans practice civil disobedience all the time. It's practically second nature for Americans to ignore or defy laws that they don't think are necessary or just. Heck, defying authority is practically a reflex action over here.
In most cases this is actually a pretty effective strategy. Contrary to what some might believe, law enforcement folks have opinions and priorities too and they're generally no more anxious to waste their time with dumb laws than anyone else is. There are lots of laws hanging around that are never really enforced except under highly unusual circumstances, and when they are enforced those laws generally get a lot of active (and usually negative) attention.
Unfortunately there are other times when this isn't such a good strategy, and when our national habit of "ignore the law and it'll go away" is less effective. The DMCA is probably a good example of this. Folks will gleefully violate it whenever it's convenient and say when asked how foolish the provisions are, but many people don't realize how bad it would be if the provisions of law were vigorously enforced. DMCA advocates see this as a danger too, which is why individuals are almost never targeted by the law. That's when someone like Bruce Perens can force the issue, changing it from an academic debate into a real issue that less involved people realize might effect them too.
You're absolutely right. I think an even more fundemental problem is that the government is assuming those responsibilities in the first place. The reason it fails is because the system is being asked to do something beyond its function.
There's a reason that private businesses aren't structured like the federal government, and it's the same reason why the government isn't structured like a business. They're different structures designed for very different purposes with different types of controls on their behaviors.
Hybridized monstrosities like ICANN typically exhibit the worst of both systems, an opauque beauracracy without even the most minimal restraints of market dynamics or regulatory accountability that a real corporation would face.
The fact that Atta wasn't caught while using his real identity says more about the poor quality of pre-9/11 intelligence than the practice of checking IDs. And simply because Atta wasn't on the watch-lists doesn't mean that the next terrorist won't be. Some of the current security procedures make more sense than others, but ID checks are a relatively painless and reasonable precaution.
Oh, and FYI: John Gilmore has gotten quite a bit of harassment for declining to show an ID at an airport.
I imagine he's treated just like anyone else who prefers to act as though the present rules don't apply to them. Whether it's harassement or not is the issue in question.
All the things you name are indeed problems with many modern houses. But I don't think AC destroyed the good architecture, it just made the rotten architecture that was later adopted tolerable enough to keep around.
The treeless lots are a huge problem around here, and one of the reasons I moved into an older neighborhood. Not only do developers cut down everything in sight, but a friend of mine in PA lives in a neighborhood that actually prohibits having trees in the front yards! Insane.
I think commercial architecture is an even worse offender, with stupid windows that don't open, acres of glass baking the poor people inside even when the AC is on, and generally bad ventilation. BTW, for anyone who's interested in the poor usability of modern buildings and how people react to them a really good book to read is "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand of Whole Earth catalog fame. It's a recurring theme.
Besides, specialization makes sense in this case. Companies WANT their coders to spend time programming and their writers to spend their time documenting the project/process.
Well, sort of. It's really kind of hard to write good technical documentation without familiarity with the application or close communication with the developers. I think that kind of collaboration is lacking in the Linux community, and that's one of the reasons why most Linux documentation is not very good.
Film and other "analog" media degrade, too. And it's a far more difficult to make and store high-quality archival copies of negatives and slides than it is to periodically duplicate your digital images over to whatever media is popular. There are no doubt millions of lovely and historically important photographs moldering away because the people who own them don't know or care how to take care of them, just like the vaults full of old movies that are gradually disintegrating into their component molecules.
The article is unnecessarily alarmist and rather short on facts. Sure, hard drives fail and people delete stuff. But the real-world equivalents have been happening for centuries on a much larger scale. That's not a good thing, but it's not the start of a new dark age. In fact, the perfect duplication that digital data allows makes me far more confident that the data will survive into the future.
I was watching some talking head on one of the tv money shows the other night. They were discussing, what else, corporate mismanagement. This guy was some kind of hot-shot investor, and he was all hot and bothered because company executives had forgotten their one true purpose: to serve the shareholders!.
WTF?!
Both of you are correct, actually, but I think you're a little bit more correct.
Shareholders have to get some return on their investment or they won't stay shareholders or attract new ones. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Of course, the proper way to give them a return on their investment is please the customers who buy their products, thereby keeping the company healthy, and ultimately delivering some profits that can be distributed back to the investors (and/or re-invested to fund the continued operation of the company.) So, yeah, make money for the shareholders by having lots of happy, paying customers.
But pleasing consumers and making competitive products can be hard work. So some CEOs, for their own immediate benefit and to satisfy impatient shareholders, have taken advantage of all sorts of short-cuts to make profits appear without the hard work of actually offering decent products or services. It might be massive "cost cutting" that fires the most competent employees or sells off strong but unglamourous assets, accounting tricks to hide poor sales and bad investments, or lots of other things. All of these get rich quick schemes tend to maximize short-term financial gain at the expense of the long-term health of the company. So it's not really matter of selfishness vs. pleasing the customer. It's more a matter of enlightened self-interest vs. immediate gain with no interest in the ultimate consequences.
Something I think is just as bad is the current demand for constant growth. It forces otherwise sane companies to overextend themselves with pointless acquisitions and other silly corporate strategies simply for the sake of keeping irrational market advisors happy. Corporate growth, like growth in living things, must be directed, purposeful, and carefully controlled or it weakens the body rather than strengthening it.
(I think obligatory MS-bashing there at the end is a bit off base, BTW. MS can do whatever it wants with its products, and they're really no worse than many other companies as far as rampant upgrades are concerned. MS has supported some bad legislation in the past, but they're boy scouts compared to really nasty companies like Monsanto, which can do way more real-world damage than any computer company ever dreamed of.)
Thank you for allowing me to bask in the glow of your reflected wisdom. I'm sure that one day not too long from now when the MS Palladium Police smash down my door I'll think of you and wish I'd been half as insightful.
Anyone using MS products today is quite likely still buying them today. If they need new products, that is.
Palladium doesn't exist yet. Making strategic corporate technology decisions based on the announced Palladium strategy is premature. (Heck, even if such a strategy was warranted there's hardly been enough time since the initial press coverage for anyone to do the job properly.)
As we're just talking probabilities, I'll conjecture that most companies that use them have also ignored the mid term licensing and ownership issues, and the long term costs of being locked in to a proprietary solution, with every increasing costs to leave
Doubtful, considering it's a rather hot topic everytime MS tweaks their licensing agreements. At the same time one considers the costs one must also factor in the benefits. Of course, if you're completely unwilling to recognize any benefits whatsoever from using MS software then your conclusions are likely to be rather skewed.
It's also worth noting that the cost of switching does not necessarily increase over time. A hypothetical transition to a Linux-based network would go far more smoothly now than even one year ago.
What I'm trying to convey here is that everyone who disagrees with you and your particular recommendations isn't necessarily stupid. Pretending otherwise will probably do wonders for your karma, but it won't make your conclusions any more valid.
Seriously. Anyone still buying Microsoft today is doing so because they have to, because they're counting down the years until retirement and don't want to take a risk (nobody ever got sacked for buying Microsoft), or because they really are just too dumb to see that if they don't bail out before Palladium arrives, they'll never get out. I pity those people, but I don't expect any of them to suffer an attack of clue in the near future.
Yes, I suppose that in your imaginary world everyone who uses MS products is stupid, lazy, corrupt, or incompetent. But over here on planet Earth there are a great many people who use MS products and, remarkably enough, most of them are fairly happy staying right where they are for all sorts of very good reasons.
You'd never know that from reading Slashdot, of course, but it is true. Windows 2000/XP are damn good server and desktop environments, and most companies that use them have most likely reviewed the alternatives and found them wanting. Or perhaps useful in conjunction with existing MS products but not as a direct replacement. But don't let that change your mind - since they disagree with your conclusions they're undoubtedly stupid, lazy, etc. anyway.
Grow up. Insulting, patronizing responses like this one do far more to damage the credibility of open-source advocates than anything MS can do.
Of course they werent. They are extremly inefficient, and burn DIESEL! Oh My God! Not DIESEL! If you bothered to check you'd discover that diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines. Especially large diesel engines like these. And there's less particulate matter and other nasty stuff like CO too, since they're using biodiesel made from vegetable oils.
Diesel-electric locomotives are basically just rolling generators already. These guys are just using the electricity generated for something other than moving trains. A clever hack.
So you're suggesting that a company selling legalized drugs would be protected against lawsuits because they have a warning on the package? That doesn't make sense.
Cigarettes sold in the US have had increasingly strident government-mandated warnings on every package since 1966. Radio and television ads for tobacco products have been forbidden since 1971. For at least 30 years everyone has known pretty definitively that cigarettes were bad for you (and quite possibly for other people around you), it's just a matter of how bad they are.
Despite all this there are stupid people who start smoking every day. And despite having ample warning it hasn't stopped the tobacco companies from being hammered by lawsuits filed by some of those same stupid people.
Combine that same stupidity, the disregard for personal safetly we already see with alcohol, and the even more severely intoxicating effects of many drugs. Now, tell me again how legalizing drugs will make everything better.
Of course, the reason that companies began offering huge stock options was as a means of directly tying company performance to CEO salaries, which wasn't a bad idea at all. If a CEO ran a company into the ground then the stock would be devalued and their personal compensation would suffer. The assumption was that the CEO you hired to run your company would not place his own personal well-being over that of the company itself. That's not really unreasonable; all employers must place some trust their employees, and I'd guess that many of us here are in a position where we could abuse our own administrative authority for personal gain if we were dishonest bastards willing to do so. Unfortunately it's now become clear that some CEOs and many of their cronies are, indeed, dishonest bastards. Nothing more than scam artists and thieves, with major accounting firms complicit in the crimes.
There's far more to the threat of terrorism than the destructive acts themselves. Terrorist organizations need money to support their operations and they have very complex means in place to gather those funds. Terrorists have often subverted legitimate governments, organizations and companies in order to benefit financially; it's just like organized crime, only with somewhat different goals.
So, if a known terrorist or terrorist organization orchestrates a financial crisis in order to make a target more vulnerable to other more overt terrorist activies then it's still terrorism. If they raise money by committing financial fraud and diverting the profits to fund acts of terror, then it's also legitimately called terrorism.
I think it's unlikely that the current accounting and financial woes of Wall Street have anything to do with terrorist organizations. But narrowly defining terrorism as "things that scare people" is missing a rather big part of the problem.
There's never been an expectation of privacy in any public place, pretty much by definition. Once you step out of your house and into a public place there's nothing at all preventing me from following you around, watching where you go, who you talk to, etc. I can even stand nearby and listen to your conversations. And if I'm discreet you'd never even know you were being observed.
Chances are that no one will bother to do any of these things, of course, but none of it is illegal.
In the United States of America Free Speech IS a RIGHT... check out the constitution.
Free speech is a right everywhere, part of every human being's birthright. It's not granted by the Constitution, just recognized, and it can't be revoked by any government.
What many people seem to forget is that even a God-given right doesn't absolve you of the consequences of your actions. You can exersize your free speech by lying under oath, but you're still guilty of perjury. You can falsely yell "fire!" in a crowded theatre, but if you try it should expect to end up in jail. There are also laws against making threats, libel, slander, incitement to riot, harassment, etc. You may also agree to voluntarily limit your own speech in return for certain kinds of employment or to gain access to sensitive information, maybe by taking an oath or signing a contract.
For any society to function there have to be some rules of interaction. Sometimes that includes limiting access to information that is a threat to society. Obviously the hard part is deciding what is truly a threat, and what limitations are justified. To argue that all such limits are equally bad is unrealistic.
1) The linked to articals where about derailing Nuclea Waste Trains, not passenger trains
2) Would you rather have ppl discusing how to do this with out killing any one, or just let the carnage begin
Oh yes, because deliberately derailing trains carrying nuclear waste is a perfectly safe and sane thing to do. Idiots.
Anyone who would act on these instructions is a moron. The judge's ruling is still stupid, and the content in question shouldn't be censored by these extreme measures, but that doesn't mean that the content is in any way deserving of respect or praise.
Re:Especially true for Adobe products
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Version Fatigue
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· Score: 2
Now, what's the solution? I keep saying that there's no way for Adobe to add new features w/o incrementally changing the way you interact with the application... but maybe I'm wrong? I dunno.
The obvious solution is for Adobe to implement the same UI customization features in their products that have become common elsewhere. Most new features actually mesh pretty smoothly with the existin functionality, but for some reason their UI guys seem compelled to change things to highlight the latest neat feature at the expense of longtime users (the new Band Aid tool, for example, should probably be a variation of the Rubber Stamp clone tool.) Even this attitude wouldn't bother me but for the fact that there's no way for me to change it back.
In fact, true keyboard shortcut and tool pallete customization is one of the most frequently and loudly requested features on the Adobe's Photoshop forums. They've never give a straight answer as to why they don't do it, other than the occasional ridiculous claim that allowing users to change things would be too confusing. Of course, when _they_ change the tool pallet to include infrequently used tools and randomly reassign keys to different functions it's not confusing at all.
Re:Worse than 'brutally stupid'
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Blogspace vs. NPR
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· Score: 3, Funny
Wow, what a dumb policy. An an interesting glimpse into the mindset of the people who run the place, I'm sure.
This part is interesting:
"No one, individual, entity, organization, etc., may utilize Calumet City's site for any derogatory, profane, or otherwise inappropriate use that may contain any
fowl or otherwise inappropriate content." (emphasis mine)
"Fowl"? What does Calumet City have against content about birds?
The same applies to free software. Those who write free software (myself included) do so because we love to do it, not because we are trying to get rich doing so. If you're writing free software because you hope to get rich by doing so, then you're in the wrong field.
The amount of great software I've received for free, not to mention the amount of freedom I've gained in both my business and home life by using free software, more than compensates me for the time I put into it, whether it is writing stuff as a hobby, or testing it (and reporting bugs) for my job. The payoff is in the collaboration, a collaboration to a degree which wouldn't exist between people blinded by their myopic, Ayn Randian Greed.
Your scope is too narrow and your argument is therefore flawed. No one seriously claims that every human transaction is driven by some simplistic concept of monetary greed. Folks tend to act, ultimately, out of enlightened self-interest. That's much more basic than money. You code for the reasons you note above and you are satisfied that you benefit from doing so. Likewise, I work in my garden because I enjoy the work and enjoy eating the fresh vegetables that result. I give away fresh vegetables to my neighbors because I like them and because I like to do my part in maintaining a friendly social atmosphere in my neighborhood. Making money's not really a factor.
Free software isn't free, it's simply subsidized. Unless you're independently wealthy or living off someone else's paycheck you'd better be making money doing something or you're going to have difficulties paying for your hobbies. The amount of time people can spend working on free software or flying airplanes, like any other project not done for money, is limited by how much time they're willing to spare from doing other more necessary things in life.
There are already problems with students putting formulae into calculators.
Frankly, anyone who would regard referencing forumulae as cheating is a poor excuse for a teacher. Who cares? Let the student look up the damn formula, already, like real people do here in the real world.
The best mathematics teacher I ever had was strict as hell, but when she gave tests she let students bring a single 3x5 card filled up with anything they thought they might need. Formulae, tables, reminders, tips--anything you could fit on there.
She also held timed open-book pop quizzes. Her reasoning was simple: the more time you needed to spend looking things up the less time you'd have to actually do the math. That policy encouraged students to remember those things they used most often without forcing them to fixate on memorizing every random thing that might be conceivably needed. Both policies also give students some reassurance that a random oversight or memory glitch won't mean failing a whole test.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're talking about the News.com article. But, just to clarify, the article is based on the Consumer Reports survey. Consumer Reports doesn't take advertising to avoid the kind of potential conflicts you're talking about.
Congratulations. You've just very concisely described the modern workplace.
Perhaps your workplace, unfortunate AC, but certainly not mine. I have a boss who's a nice guy and who does everything he can to make my job enjoyable and productive. I try my best to do the same with the people I supervise. There really are pleasant places to work out there.
And if something were to happen to make my current job intolerable then there are other places I could make a living in my chosen career. An evil boss might give me a bad reference, but no one's going to blackball me for life or tell me I can't make a living. Unlike certain musicians.
If you had a job that you loved to death, but it meant that there was only one boss in the world that would hire you, would you stand up to him?
But how much would I love my job if I woke up every morning knowing that I was essentially an indentured servant, entirely dependent on the pleasure of a boss who cared nothing about me at all and who would happily replace me and destroy my career on a whim?
Maybe it's just my frustration speaking, but I think artists who allow themselves to get suckered into that kind of codependent relationship deserve what they get.
I'm frankly getting tired of hearing how powerless they are. They're the ones who create the music, without which there would be no music industry. The RIAA has only as much power as the artists want them to have, and if they really want things to change then they're going to have to grow some backbone and start making it happen. They can't fight the RIAA by proxy.
The RIAA claims that it's only a few disaffected artists who are unsatisfied with the current situation, and for all I know they might actually be right (though I'm pretty sure it's not.) Consumer and governmetn pressure is hard enough to mobilize when you have hard facts, and anonymous grumblings and anecdotes can only go so far.
Preach on, brother. We were partially successful at convincing the admissions folks that I work with not to use SSN's like this.
I think the people who work with student records, of all people, should realize how insecure SSNs really are. To their credit my co-workers did consider the issues and adjust the policy, but I don't think they'd have thought of if we hadn't been persistent. (Even more scary, the company that created the software assumed that SSNs would be used and was puzzled when we decided against it.)
Schools have to be especially careful where privacy is concerned. FERPA, the Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act (aka the Buckley Amendment) limits the release of many kinds of academic information.
No, they have a good point. True, grammar and spelling don't seperate good ideas from bad ideas, but they are valid indicators of how much you actually care about what you've written.
Checking spelling (even if you're writing longhand and using a dictionary) is trivial, and asking someone else to read through your text will often weed out most obvious grammatical errors.
I'm hardly perfect when it comes to grammar and spelling, but if an issue is important enough to inspire me to sit down and write a letter to my representative then I'm going to do everything I can to be sure that it clearly conveys exactly the meaning I intend. If I can't be bothered to spend a minute or two to check the basic readability of my writing, then how much thought and effort actually went into the ideas I express?
No, you're mistaken. Americans practice civil disobedience all the time. It's practically second nature for Americans to ignore or defy laws that they don't think are necessary or just. Heck, defying authority is practically a reflex action over here.
In most cases this is actually a pretty effective strategy. Contrary to what some might believe, law enforcement folks have opinions and priorities too and they're generally no more anxious to waste their time with dumb laws than anyone else is. There are lots of laws hanging around that are never really enforced except under highly unusual circumstances, and when they are enforced those laws generally get a lot of active (and usually negative) attention.
Unfortunately there are other times when this isn't such a good strategy, and when our national habit of "ignore the law and it'll go away" is less effective. The DMCA is probably a good example of this. Folks will gleefully violate it whenever it's convenient and say when asked how foolish the provisions are, but many people don't realize how bad it would be if the provisions of law were vigorously enforced. DMCA advocates see this as a danger too, which is why individuals are almost never targeted by the law. That's when someone like Bruce Perens can force the issue, changing it from an academic debate into a real issue that less involved people realize might effect them too.
You're absolutely right. I think an even more fundemental problem is that the government is assuming those responsibilities in the first place. The reason it fails is because the system is being asked to do something beyond its function.
There's a reason that private businesses aren't structured like the federal government, and it's the same reason why the government isn't structured like a business. They're different structures designed for very different purposes with different types of controls on their behaviors.
Hybridized monstrosities like ICANN typically exhibit the worst of both systems, an opauque beauracracy without even the most minimal restraints of market dynamics or regulatory accountability that a real corporation would face.
The fact that Atta wasn't caught while using his real identity says more about the poor quality of pre-9/11 intelligence than the practice of checking IDs. And simply because Atta wasn't on the watch-lists doesn't mean that the next terrorist won't be. Some of the current security procedures make more sense than others, but ID checks are a relatively painless and reasonable precaution.
Oh, and FYI: John Gilmore has gotten quite a bit of harassment for declining to show an ID at an airport.
I imagine he's treated just like anyone else who prefers to act as though the present rules don't apply to them. Whether it's harassement or not is the issue in question.
All the things you name are indeed problems with many modern houses. But I don't think AC destroyed the good architecture, it just made the rotten architecture that was later adopted tolerable enough to keep around.
The treeless lots are a huge problem around here, and one of the reasons I moved into an older neighborhood. Not only do developers cut down everything in sight, but a friend of mine in PA lives in a neighborhood that actually prohibits having trees in the front yards! Insane.
I think commercial architecture is an even worse offender, with stupid windows that don't open, acres of glass baking the poor people inside even when the AC is on, and generally bad ventilation. BTW, for anyone who's interested in the poor usability of modern buildings and how people react to them a really good book to read is "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand of Whole Earth catalog fame. It's a recurring theme.
Film and other "analog" media degrade, too. And it's a far more difficult to make and store high-quality archival copies of negatives and slides than it is to periodically duplicate your digital images over to whatever media is popular. There are no doubt millions of lovely and historically important photographs moldering away because the people who own them don't know or care how to take care of them, just like the vaults full of old movies that are gradually disintegrating into their component molecules.
The article is unnecessarily alarmist and rather short on facts. Sure, hard drives fail and people delete stuff. But the real-world equivalents have been happening for centuries on a much larger scale. That's not a good thing, but it's not the start of a new dark age. In fact, the perfect duplication that digital data allows makes me far more confident that the data will survive into the future.
Shareholders have to get some return on their investment or they won't stay shareholders or attract new ones. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Of course, the proper way to give them a return on their investment is please the customers who buy their products, thereby keeping the company healthy, and ultimately delivering some profits that can be distributed back to the investors (and/or re-invested to fund the continued operation of the company.) So, yeah, make money for the shareholders by having lots of happy, paying customers.
But pleasing consumers and making competitive products can be hard work. So some CEOs, for their own immediate benefit and to satisfy impatient shareholders, have taken advantage of all sorts of short-cuts to make profits appear without the hard work of actually offering decent products or services. It might be massive "cost cutting" that fires the most competent employees or sells off strong but unglamourous assets, accounting tricks to hide poor sales and bad investments, or lots of other things. All of these get rich quick schemes tend to maximize short-term financial gain at the expense of the long-term health of the company. So it's not really matter of selfishness vs. pleasing the customer. It's more a matter of enlightened self-interest vs. immediate gain with no interest in the ultimate consequences.
Something I think is just as bad is the current demand for constant growth. It forces otherwise sane companies to overextend themselves with pointless acquisitions and other silly corporate strategies simply for the sake of keeping irrational market advisors happy. Corporate growth, like growth in living things, must be directed, purposeful, and carefully controlled or it weakens the body rather than strengthening it.
(I think obligatory MS-bashing there at the end is a bit off base, BTW. MS can do whatever it wants with its products, and they're really no worse than many other companies as far as rampant upgrades are concerned. MS has supported some bad legislation in the past, but they're boy scouts compared to really nasty companies like Monsanto, which can do way more real-world damage than any computer company ever dreamed of.)
Thank you for allowing me to bask in the glow of your reflected wisdom. I'm sure that one day not too long from now when the MS Palladium Police smash down my door I'll think of you and wish I'd been half as insightful.
Anyone using MS products today is quite likely still buying them today. If they need new products, that is.
Palladium doesn't exist yet. Making strategic corporate technology decisions based on the announced Palladium strategy is premature. (Heck, even if such a strategy was warranted there's hardly been enough time since the initial press coverage for anyone to do the job properly.)
As we're just talking probabilities, I'll conjecture that most companies that use them have also ignored the mid term licensing and ownership issues, and the long term costs of being locked in to a proprietary solution, with every increasing costs to leave
Doubtful, considering it's a rather hot topic everytime MS tweaks their licensing agreements. At the same time one considers the costs one must also factor in the benefits. Of course, if you're completely unwilling to recognize any benefits whatsoever from using MS software then your conclusions are likely to be rather skewed.
It's also worth noting that the cost of switching does not necessarily increase over time. A hypothetical transition to a Linux-based network would go far more smoothly now than even one year ago.
What I'm trying to convey here is that everyone who disagrees with you and your particular recommendations isn't necessarily stupid. Pretending otherwise will probably do wonders for your karma, but it won't make your conclusions any more valid.
You'd never know that from reading Slashdot, of course, but it is true. Windows 2000/XP are damn good server and desktop environments, and most companies that use them have most likely reviewed the alternatives and found them wanting. Or perhaps useful in conjunction with existing MS products but not as a direct replacement. But don't let that change your mind - since they disagree with your conclusions they're undoubtedly stupid, lazy, etc. anyway.
Grow up. Insulting, patronizing responses like this one do far more to damage the credibility of open-source advocates than anything MS can do.
Of course they werent.
They are extremly inefficient, and burn DIESEL!
Oh My God! Not DIESEL! If you bothered to check you'd discover that diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines. Especially large diesel engines like these. And there's less particulate matter and other nasty stuff like CO too, since they're using biodiesel made from vegetable oils.
Diesel-electric locomotives are basically just rolling generators already. These guys are just using the electricity generated for something other than moving trains. A clever hack.
So you're suggesting that a company selling legalized drugs would be protected against lawsuits because they have a warning on the package? That doesn't make sense.
Cigarettes sold in the US have had increasingly strident government-mandated warnings on every package since 1966. Radio and television ads for tobacco products have been forbidden since 1971. For at least 30 years everyone has known pretty definitively that cigarettes were bad for you (and quite possibly for other people around you), it's just a matter of how bad they are.
Despite all this there are stupid people who start smoking every day. And despite having ample warning it hasn't stopped the tobacco companies from being hammered by lawsuits filed by some of those same stupid people.
Combine that same stupidity, the disregard for personal safetly we already see with alcohol, and the even more severely intoxicating effects of many drugs. Now, tell me again how legalizing drugs will make everything better.
Of course, the reason that companies began offering huge stock options was as a means of directly tying company performance to CEO salaries, which wasn't a bad idea at all. If a CEO ran a company into the ground then the stock would be devalued and their personal compensation would suffer.
The assumption was that the CEO you hired to run your company would not place his own personal well-being over that of the company itself. That's not really unreasonable; all employers must place some trust their employees, and I'd guess that many of us here are in a position where we could abuse our own administrative authority for personal gain if we were dishonest bastards willing to do so.
Unfortunately it's now become clear that some CEOs and many of their cronies are, indeed, dishonest bastards. Nothing more than scam artists and thieves, with major accounting firms complicit in the crimes.
Please think, don't rant.
There's far more to the threat of terrorism than the destructive acts themselves. Terrorist organizations need money to support their operations and they have very complex means in place to gather those funds. Terrorists have often subverted legitimate governments, organizations and companies in order to benefit financially; it's just like organized crime, only with somewhat different goals.
So, if a known terrorist or terrorist organization orchestrates a financial crisis in order to make a target more vulnerable to other more overt terrorist activies then it's still terrorism. If they raise money by committing financial fraud and diverting the profits to fund acts of terror, then it's also legitimately called terrorism.
I think it's unlikely that the current accounting and financial woes of Wall Street have anything to do with terrorist organizations. But narrowly defining terrorism as "things that scare people" is missing a rather big part of the problem.
Has "privacy in public" every actually existed?
There's never been an expectation of privacy in any public place, pretty much by definition. Once you step out of your house and into a public place there's nothing at all preventing me from following you around, watching where you go, who you talk to, etc. I can even stand nearby and listen to your conversations. And if I'm discreet you'd never even know you were being observed.
Chances are that no one will bother to do any of these things, of course, but none of it is illegal.
Free speech is a right everywhere, part of every human being's birthright. It's not granted by the Constitution, just recognized, and it can't be revoked by any government.
What many people seem to forget is that even a God-given right doesn't absolve you of the consequences of your actions. You can exersize your free speech by lying under oath, but you're still guilty of perjury. You can falsely yell "fire!" in a crowded theatre, but if you try it should expect to end up in jail. There are also laws against making threats, libel, slander, incitement to riot, harassment, etc. You may also agree to voluntarily limit your own speech in return for certain kinds of employment or to gain access to sensitive information, maybe by taking an oath or signing a contract.
For any society to function there have to be some rules of interaction. Sometimes that includes limiting access to information that is a threat to society. Obviously the hard part is deciding what is truly a threat, and what limitations are justified. To argue that all such limits are equally bad is unrealistic.
The obvious solution is for Adobe to implement the same UI customization features in their products that have become common elsewhere. Most new features actually mesh pretty smoothly with the existin functionality, but for some reason their UI guys seem compelled to change things to highlight the latest neat feature at the expense of longtime users (the new Band Aid tool, for example, should probably be a variation of the Rubber Stamp clone tool.) Even this attitude wouldn't bother me but for the fact that there's no way for me to change it back.
In fact, true keyboard shortcut and tool pallete customization is one of the most frequently and loudly requested features on the Adobe's Photoshop forums. They've never give a straight answer as to why they don't do it, other than the occasional ridiculous claim that allowing users to change things would be too confusing. Of course, when _they_ change the tool pallet to include infrequently used tools and randomly reassign keys to different functions it's not confusing at all.
This part is interesting:
"Fowl"? What does Calumet City have against content about birds?
Your scope is too narrow and your argument is therefore flawed. No one seriously claims that every human transaction is driven by some simplistic concept of monetary greed. Folks tend to act, ultimately, out of enlightened self-interest. That's much more basic than money. You code for the reasons you note above and you are satisfied that you benefit from doing so. Likewise, I work in my garden because I enjoy the work and enjoy eating the fresh vegetables that result. I give away fresh vegetables to my neighbors because I like them and because I like to do my part in maintaining a friendly social atmosphere in my neighborhood. Making money's not really a factor.
Free software isn't free, it's simply subsidized. Unless you're independently wealthy or living off someone else's paycheck you'd better be making money doing something or you're going to have difficulties paying for your hobbies. The amount of time people can spend working on free software or flying airplanes, like any other project not done for money, is limited by how much time they're willing to spare from doing other more necessary things in life.
Frankly, anyone who would regard referencing forumulae as cheating is a poor excuse for a teacher. Who cares? Let the student look up the damn formula, already, like real people do here in the real world.
The best mathematics teacher I ever had was strict as hell, but when she gave tests she let students bring a single 3x5 card filled up with anything they thought they might need. Formulae, tables, reminders, tips--anything you could fit on there.
She also held timed open-book pop quizzes. Her reasoning was simple: the more time you needed to spend looking things up the less time you'd have to actually do the math. That policy encouraged students to remember those things they used most often without forcing them to fixate on memorizing every random thing that might be conceivably needed. Both policies also give students some reassurance that a random oversight or memory glitch won't mean failing a whole test.