I agree it's annoying, but you have to start from the facts of the situation. The laws are what they are. If you want a change in the laws, your options are limited. Given the premise that you aren't interested in working within the system to change them, then your alternatives come down to:
Hide from them. Either get rid of your land line (since cell phones are still excluded), or use caller ID or an answering machine to screen your calls. Or get somebody else to answer your phone.
Drive the industry out of business. There are thousands of call centers. There is not (and will probably never be) a do-not-call list for research. To make them stop calling, you would need to use guerrilla tactics to convince the industry that phone research is worthless. Start a visible grass-roots movement of people deliberately giving false results on polls. Take out newspaper ads. File frivolous lawsuits. Go on a hunger strike. I don't think any of these things would get results but knock yourself out.
Or just do what I do. Take the polls that sound like you might be able to influence policy in a way that you'd like. Tell the others 'no.' Don't waste your time saying "don't call me again" because there's no mechanism for the polling house to do anything with that request. In fact, a cornerstone of proper research is that each respondent must be kept anonymous. Ranting won't and can't get passed on to the Senator who commissioned the survey.
And no matter how mean and rude you are to the caller, remember this is just a low-paid wage slave earning money to buy peanut butter for the kids.
Political surveys and other legitimate research are explicitly exempted from all do-not-call laws. Why? Because what politician would vote to ban political surveys? They rely on these results for their lifeblood. I can't believe that I don't see any mention of this in earlier posts. If you don't like being called for surveys, complain to your elected officials. (But don't count on getting much attention.)
This being said, legitimate surveys are totally different from telemarketing. The results actually a) ARE NOT used to maintain a list of who you are and what you say and b) ARE used to guide the decisions of bozos who can't make decisions on their own. Political pollsters are actually, by and large, pretty straight shooters. That's because there's a whole science of opinion research, and if they break the rules their results aren't valid. Politicians are very tuned in to the need for valid results, because they make their campaign decisions based on what they learn through polls. Polling firms are very high in the food chain. For example, telemarketing firms NEVER do political polling, and vice versa. Telemarketers are bottom feeders; legitimate researchers are -- well, legitimate. (This how the politicos view the matter. It's basically an accurate view.)
Moreover, opinion polls are having a very hard time these days, because of the low cooperation rates they get when calling folks like us on the phone. We don't want to take their polls; or perhaps we only have cell phones, which are generally excluded from polling samples. So the pollsters are casting their nets wider and wider.
If you DO respond to a poll, you actually DO influence the outcome. Most polls target a small number of respondents -- e.g. 600, a common goal. 600 respondents, if selected via a proper random sample, provide a statistically significant result (which is basic science, even if it seems hard to believe). So...if you answer the poll, your responses probably represent 1/600th of the conclusion reached by the politician asking the questions. One-in-six hundred odds of affecting your politicos are a helluvalot better odds than buying a ticket for your state lottery. So think about participating. Don't leave it all to the folks who have no opinion.
I did this about 10 years ago for the same reason. It fixed my wrist/hand issues, improved my left-hand dexterity (if you'll pardon the word), and also provides passive security for my computer (righties go berzerk trying to use a left-handed mouse).
Working with electric utility clients through the years, and going to industry trade shows, I've heard this topic discussed by knowledgable folks many times. It should be obvious to most people that, if underground cabling were a no-brainer with no tradeoffs, then it would already have been adopted in lots more places (though there is already a good deal of it in use). The various utilities are independent, and make their own decisions. There's no conspiracy to blot the skyline.
Andrew points out two important factors -- distance per customer and the need for ongoing network changes due to regional growth. These make the U.S. power situation different from many other countries. There are other issues as well.
The U.S. electric power infrastructure is in general much older than in other parts of the world. As we all know, backward-compatibility introduces lots of technical, cost, training, inventory, and other factors -- factors that can be ignored with new construction.
There are significant differences between locations that affect the suitability and cost of underground cabling in terms of population density, power requirements, soil conditions, ground movement due to frost heaves, frequency of new construction digging, and myriad other factors that I can't recall at the moment but that make the situation complex. I had one client with a mixture of above-ground and below-ground facilities, depending on where they were within the service territory. Certain areas had lots of below-ground problems; others did not because too many problems resulted.
In countries where power utilities are state-run, the economics are very different. It's easy (well, easier) to decide "In our country we will preserve our skyline and bury all power lines" when there's no need to run a profit or compete with lower-cost providers. Would you be prepared to pay double your electric rates for no overhead facilities? Triple? Would all your neighbors? Would your local businesses be willing to subsidize the extra costs?
There are very different technical requirements for power transmission, sub-transmission, and distribution networks, each of which require very different solutions for underground facilities. So it's not a one-size-fits-all issue.
Finally, Andrew's comment about the caliber of power company field people matches my own experience. I have constantly been amazed at how dedicated and public-spirited these people prove to be. When there's a bad storm or other emergency, nobody in the company sleeps, and everybody sweats the details. Having worked with clients in many different industries, I was quite surprised to find that most electric and gas utilities are full of conscientious people striving to make the right decisions. (This was very different from my experience with telecommunications vendors, for example, where many are good but many are appalling.)
Bottom line: This is an important topic, but I don't believe it is a no-brainer.
Oh, you mean that Mesa DID get practical use. I thought you were saying the reverse, that Mesa was an unimportant side project. Yes, of course you're right, and I didn't mean to imply that Mesa was just a theoretical exercise. I should have said "didn't get widespread production use and public visibility."
Unfortunately PARC was always a bastion of great ideas, great technology, great human-factors vision...but limited commercial success. Of course it was a lab universe -- R&D with an emphasis on R. So it's not fair to judge PARC as a product development center. Better to compare it to Project MAC or CSRG, or the Sarnoff labs. Still, it always seemed that Xerox managed to shoot itself in the foot when trying to leverage the wonderful output of its lab environment. And some of it SHOULD have been leveraged, because it grew into robust, mature technology, far advanced from the ad hoc benchtop experiments we think of as typical lab output.
Just think if Visual Basic had been Visual Cedar. (Though of course VB started as Visual Ruby, didn't it, still a big paradigm shift.) Oh well. I'm glad a few of us dinosaurs remember the progress in software architecture that was made in the 70s-80s, back when hardware was expensive, and smart thinking and bespoke languages/systems could really make sense. Some of those good ideas are probably lost. Instead we have XML.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "you are wrong concerning Mesa." Do you mean it isn't in the diagram, wasn't important theoretically, didn't evolve with input from Smalltalk and Interlisp, or wasn't interesting?
I found Mesa (and its embedding in the Pilot environment on the Alto platform, suggesting the famous Ingalls aphorism "an operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language -- there shouldn't be one") very interesting, and the source of important ideas for language design that were assimilated by an army of PARC followers. Obviously the applications built with Mesa were also interesting, as you say, though there are chicken-and-egg aspects to their relationship with the implementation platform.
I of course felt that Cedar was much more interesting than Mesa, being further evolved, but many important seeds came from the Mesa concepts.
Of course since I'm replying to an AC post, nobody will probably see this comment.
Uh, sorry, Mesa and Cedar are both there in the middle of the 1st diagram, just above the Smalltalk thread, shown as deriving in 1977 from Algol and Pascal influences (which actually doesn't strike me as telling the whole story -- Smalltalk and Interlisp were both important sources of ideas).
Both Mesa and Cedar were very important languages from a theoretical standpoint, IMO, though neither got much practical use because of their limited distribution/implementation.
Yeah, thanks for the insightful comment. I never looked at it from your wise perspective. I've been an idiot through the years, working round the clock on cool projects like writing operating systems and designing languages, when I could have made more money installing accounting systems. I guess 25 years in the business hiring and firing morons like you didn't teach me anything.
Whether or not you personally would take a pay cut to build games is irrelevant. Plenty of folks will, do, and have. So long as that's true, it will drive the salaries down, and it will let some employers abuse the situation. They're not right for doing it, but the idea that every kind of developer deserves the same pay scale with a 40-hour work week would be goofy.
How many developers would give their eye teeth, work 80 hour weeks, and take a cut in pay in order to work at a game vendor? Would you? Everybody and his dog wants to work in this environment. Naturally the pay is low. It's like working in Hollywood. There is a long line of people who would be happy to help on a big movie project for a fraction of what they'd expect working the same hours at a bank, insurance company, or flipping burgers. Why are we surprised that you don't get a fat paycheck writing games? Obviously a rotten employer deserves everybody's contempt, but if they're rotten enough people will quit and go work somewhere else. The system is self-correcting. It's not like they're working in a mine or a steel mill for the only employer in town. This is a luxury, boutique industry, and most people working in it are tickled pink to be getting paid ANYTHING rather than doing it for free.
I'm curious what you will do with this information -- what can you do that you couldn't do before?
Well, I used it to verify whether I was vulnerable. I was. I'm glad to observe it. I've downloaded the new firmware and hope to be safe. They couldn't contact me via registration card because I NEVER send in those things. They're just marketing gimmicks used as an opt-in.
Moreover, the script kiddies will manage to get this information whether or not it's publicly posted. This way, I have it as well as them.
Our legal system is based on more than just the laws passed by legislators -- the whole foundation provided by English Common Law, for example. Judges rely (and are expected to rely) very heavily on precedent when deciding how to interpret the Law. If they reverse the position taken by the Courts on previous similar decisions, there are real ramifications.
At any rate, the point here was about whether Corporations have rights in law. The bottom line is that, if you took legal action based on the premise that Corporations don't have rights, you'd lose. This has been tested over and over in the courts. It's not a grey area.
It is possible that, through a lengthy process of judicial and political action, the situation could be changed. I would applaud this, just as I'd applaud many other changes -- such as making it harder to extort through litigation (by making the loser pay legal costs in more situations, as they do in the U.K.); and I wish that patents and copyrights were less stupid and less stupidly litigated.
But just because you and I may think it's a good idea that only 'Natural Persons' should have rights, and just because you can read the Constitution and the statue books and say 'there's no law giving Corporations these rights,' the fact remains that for decades the judges have not been agreeing, and have specifically and at length been deciding cases in their favor based on the existence of such rights.
In practice, "the law" isn't what's printed in a book; it's a concatenation of factors that makes it likely or unlikely for you to win a given case through the legal system at a point in time.
If you're talking about a small setup, i.e. less then a dozen systems, it's hard to beat the tradeoff of price versus slickness. Commodity systems in normal small form-factor towers and desktops are so much cheaper than rackmount systems, and it's really not hard to come up with a way to hook 'em up. True, your 'ideal' system can save on duplicate CD/ROM drives etc., and the cable runs look infinitely better, but this savings won't generally reduce your net cost.
Get good standard systems, used ones if they suit your needs, and put 'em on a set of tables or shelves. If space is tight, use rack shelves and snug the systems in, but I've never looked at my CPU jungle and said "I need to invest a few thousand bucks to trim this down from 30 cubic feet to 12." I ALWAYS use that money to buy something I need more (or more likely I blow it on a nice weekend). Space per se is just not that big a problem, not as compared to power, cooling, and component diversity. Besides, I'll need to replace the systems in a year or two anyway. And I'd probably be better off with more commodity systems, especially if I'm trying to duplicate field conditions.
(Unless you find a source for CHEAP rack mount gear, in which case obviously we'd all pick that. It does look much more engineeroid.)
> > If you don't like it, move to a state that doesn't have a sales & use tax. > Or, vote to repeal it. Of course. Or take any other legitimate action rather than just indignantly whining "they can't do that."
> > you don't really have a leg to stand on > Except the Constitution. Well, naturally, but these state laws are not new and they have stood up to many constitutional challenges. It may feel good to say "That's not constitutional," but when the legal rubber hits the road, challenging a law on constitutional grounds doesn't usually succeed, especially if there's decades of legal precedent. This is not to say it doesn't, can't, or won't happen, but I'd not advise someone to evade their taxes and count on a constitutional challenge in court to save them.
> > California, whatever, then deal with it. > Yeah. "Deal with it" was tried recently in California. The voters liked it so much they recalled the Governor and passed two laws changing the entire budget process. Exactly. That's how to fix the problem. Move away, change the laws, or fight them in court. Something a little more serious than saying "I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!"
Most of the time/. is full of insightful posts. This thread seems to have brought out the goofs. I cringe to see how many people have posted messages here saying a) "This is a new kind of tax," b) "They can't get away with it!", c) "They'll never catch me," d) "This must be unconstitutional," e) "It can't apply to me," f) "It's way too much paperwork/effort/headache for me." I hate them too...but sales & use taxes are the law of the land in most states, and have been for many years.
If you buy something out of state, via internet, USPS, telephone, or goddamn Pony Express, you probably owe your home state the same tax you would have paid if you bought it locally. Usually you can deduct the taxes paid out of state. It's a pain in the ass but it's not new -- and it's not the state taking a diabolical liberty because of the Internet. If you don't like it, move to a state that doesn't have a sales & use tax. There are a few.
When states crack down on use tax violations, and most of them do from time to time, they hit violators pretty hard. You shouldn't be surprised at how easy it is to catch violators. If you use your credit card to buy stuff from out of state, and it gets delivered inside state borders, you don't really have a leg to stand on. Most states don't really go after you until they have a strong motive, e.g. they are already auditing your income tax return, or they get info from a vendor about a $10K purchase. But when they get the bit between their teeth, they come after you hard. Why wouldn't they? The tax, fines, and interest will pay for a lot of investigator salary.
Really, this is just Life 101 stuff. You can't evade other kinds of tax; why do you think you can dodge this one? Again, if you don't like it, move to a state that doesn't do it. If you want to stay in New York, Connecticut, Illinois, California, whatever, then deal with it.
I love Groklaw and can't wait for each new installment. But I wish some of the heavyweight contributors there could get the hang of putting an "Executive Summary" at the beginning of the long detailed rants. Not just a short list of the conclusions (equally important), but a summary of the key facts as well.
This article is a perfect example. I understood it just fine, but, as much as I like minutiae, I stopped reading in detail and started skimming after about 75% through -- it became much-of-a-muchness. There were a bunch of really important points in there, but they were buried, so that only the geeks would read them. And the geeks already understand the situation!
Oh well. As I said, Groklaw rules, and they're doing such fine work...so I mustn't complain, and I don't have the time or the specialized knowledge to step up to the plate myself.
But I keep wishing that somebody active there would grasp The Big Picture a little more vividly -- The Big Picture as seen by an outsider. Many of the postings there seem just to be preaching to the choir.
In my experience, ABI is a relatively recent term.
In 'the olden days' the single term 'API' was used, and it covered the entire range of entry points, calling parameters, communication protocols, error handlers, return codes, and anything else a programmer would need to use the interface in question. This usage dates at least back to the early '70's and probably earlier.
While I like the precision of ABI and other neologisms, this does lead to confusion when we recast an old term like 'API' under a more restrictive definition.
Probably because they taste bad to you but taste good to most of the rest of us. We aren't pretending we like the taste -- we really do like it. Anyway, chacun a son gout: each to his own taste.
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> stripping of personal choice, expression, and speech
But of course an employer can do this, legally; and since the employer is providing the building, paying the salaries, etc., this is also basically ethical, unless the employer crosses certain well-defined lines of unfair discrimination. Such rules can be obnoxious, and if we work for somebody who's a jerk about trivial things, we quit. But it's not illegal to be a jerk.
Re:Can't believe you're allowed to do this
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There's a huge difference between enforcing political correctness within a private organization, which is obnoxious but reflects policies that are the prerogative of each employer, and avoiding state-sponsored religious imagery in public institutions, which is a Constitutional issue.
Since founding my business in 1980, I've had offices approximately 25% of the time. The rest of the time, work and residence were colocated. Sometimes, there were other employees/business partners involved; about half the time I was flying solo.
Obviously, everybody is different, and will react differently to the benefits and pressures of long-term work at home. Some people couldn't handle it at all -- you definitely have issues separating work and nonwork activities. The snotty comments in this thread notwithstanding, it really is a serious issue, like the decision to go into business on your own. Some people simply cannot do it, and it's hard to decide which group you're in until you try it.
If you have decent work motivation, then I'd say it's great for up to a couple of years. You get a lot done, and you waste less time on nonproductive crap that can fill a day at an office.
Nevertheless, though I don't mind work at home, each time I've moved into an office I've been delighted by the separation and focus that result. It always energizes me, and it's a good time to institute big changes in how you organize, plan, and document your work. (Think "New Year's Resolutions.")
As you point out, life other than work can get lost in the home office situation. For most people, I expect that having an office is ultimately a good thing, and is worth the cost if you're billing enough. I have always found that, as long as I was busy, the office has paid for itself.
If you're on the borderline, or just must make it work, here are some suggestions that worked for me:
Establish a clear work/nonwork schedule and try to follow it. When you're working, WORK. Don't allow distractions to draw you away, like running errands, doing housework, or watching TV. Schedule those things.
Be sure to plan time for nonwork activities that are important to you -- playing music, reading, getting laid, whatever. It's true that a heads-down project can turn you into a solitary geek, and if you tend in that direction you'll need to take explicit steps to avoid solipsism.
Create a good, practical workspace and treat it like a real office. Don't comingle all your activities. The separation will give you some of the benefits of an office.
Figure out where you're going with this. Do you want to run an independent business? Do you want to telecommute? Are you just waiting for a job offer? If you're serious about doing freelance work, approach this like a technical problem. "What's the most efficient way to use my time/space/resources to be productive and still have a decent life?"
Take finances seriously. Be sure you are spending and saving appropriately. Buy that new printer you need. Get a comfortable chair. (Related topic: I have never tried to claim home office space and resources as a tax deduction. My experience, and advice from experts, has convinced me that the small potential savings is more than offset by the chances to shoot yourself in the foot.) (Another related thought: Long ago, my accountant advised me "never make a business decision for tax reasons." In other words, decide what's best for business reasons, and then make tax decisions to support your plans. This has proven to be good advice.)
Take advantage of the situation. Some folks not built for work at home gradually become less and less productive as they get sucked up in nonwork activities. They wash out. If you're not one of them, you probably have the reverse problem: work will dominate what you do. Be sure to use the freedom allowed by not being in an office. On a beautiful day, blow off the afternoon and go for a walk. Do errands on Tuesday morning when the shops are empty. Go to the museum while everybody else is being a wage slave. Many folks will think this advice is ridiculous and unnecessary, but it's easy to fall into the habit of simulating a horrible cubeland at your home, rather than what you should be doin
It's all a bit disappointing. If I were a RedHat executive, I hope I'd perceive that the corporation's greatest intangible asset has been a large, loyal user base that has served as the first line of the sales/delivery/support process. This new plan has basically dumped that asset, in one swell foop. Do they know what they're giving up?
This situation has reminded me of another dubious business choice; this is a long analogy but is perhaps worth repeating. Long ago, I was a developer at Sears, Roebuck, when the company went through an interesting business-wide change. They decided to get rid of nearly all their seasoned full-time store employees, and to replace them with part-time, low-cost, low-benefits employees. This was back in the 70's when Sears was going strong. It seemed like a good business/economic decision on paper; but it overlooked that fact that, more than anything else, the thing that had given Sears the edge for years was its base of fanatically loyal, experienced, skilled personnel. (Suppliers HATED dealing with Sears because they couldn't schmooze or bribe their way around quality or price issues.) In the course of a couple of years, Sears replaced that strong workforce, by creating what today we'd call McJobs. The few full-timers left were bitter and resentful. (Wallmart eventually reaped the benefit of the Sears restructuring, by doing the same thing on a grander scale.)
Like the Sears decision, the RedHat choice may in fact be the correct strategic choice. From the outside, without all the facts, it's hard to know. But each of these decisions seems to discount what, on the surface, seems to represent a core asset. I hope RedHat is taking its decision very seriously.
They may have just gone public, but their site says "The Cornell and Virginia teams have taken a number of steps to try to work with Red Hat regarding use of the name Fedora(TM). At this date, Red Hat has refused our request...." My guess is that they started waving their hands as soon as it became public knowledge, but as usual it took a while for everybody to hear about everybody else -- by which time it's a little late to get the toothpaste back into the tube.
Slashdot Mirror
Or just do what I do. Take the polls that sound like you might be able to influence policy in a way that you'd like. Tell the others 'no.' Don't waste your time saying "don't call me again" because there's no mechanism for the polling house to do anything with that request. In fact, a cornerstone of proper research is that each respondent must be kept anonymous. Ranting won't and can't get passed on to the Senator who commissioned the survey.
And no matter how mean and rude you are to the caller, remember this is just a low-paid wage slave earning money to buy peanut butter for the kids.
Political surveys and other legitimate research are explicitly exempted from all do-not-call laws. Why? Because what politician would vote to ban political surveys? They rely on these results for their lifeblood. I can't believe that I don't see any mention of this in earlier posts. If you don't like being called for surveys, complain to your elected officials. (But don't count on getting much attention.)
This being said, legitimate surveys are totally different from telemarketing. The results actually a) ARE NOT used to maintain a list of who you are and what you say and b) ARE used to guide the decisions of bozos who can't make decisions on their own. Political pollsters are actually, by and large, pretty straight shooters. That's because there's a whole science of opinion research, and if they break the rules their results aren't valid. Politicians are very tuned in to the need for valid results, because they make their campaign decisions based on what they learn through polls. Polling firms are very high in the food chain. For example, telemarketing firms NEVER do political polling, and vice versa. Telemarketers are bottom feeders; legitimate researchers are -- well, legitimate. (This how the politicos view the matter. It's basically an accurate view.)
Moreover, opinion polls are having a very hard time these days, because of the low cooperation rates they get when calling folks like us on the phone. We don't want to take their polls; or perhaps we only have cell phones, which are generally excluded from polling samples. So the pollsters are casting their nets wider and wider.
If you DO respond to a poll, you actually DO influence the outcome. Most polls target a small number of respondents -- e.g. 600, a common goal. 600 respondents, if selected via a proper random sample, provide a statistically significant result (which is basic science, even if it seems hard to believe). So...if you answer the poll, your responses probably represent 1/600th of the conclusion reached by the politician asking the questions. One-in-six hundred odds of affecting your politicos are a helluvalot better odds than buying a ticket for your state lottery. So think about participating. Don't leave it all to the folks who have no opinion.
JMO...but I've been in the biz for a long time.
I did this about 10 years ago for the same reason. It fixed my wrist/hand issues, improved my left-hand dexterity (if you'll pardon the word), and also provides passive security for my computer (righties go berzerk trying to use a left-handed mouse).
Andrew points out two important factors -- distance per customer and the need for ongoing network changes due to regional growth. These make the U.S. power situation different from many other countries. There are other issues as well.
Finally, Andrew's comment about the caliber of power company field people matches my own experience. I have constantly been amazed at how dedicated and public-spirited these people prove to be. When there's a bad storm or other emergency, nobody in the company sleeps, and everybody sweats the details. Having worked with clients in many different industries, I was quite surprised to find that most electric and gas utilities are full of conscientious people striving to make the right decisions. (This was very different from my experience with telecommunications vendors, for example, where many are good but many are appalling.)
Bottom line: This is an important topic, but I don't believe it is a no-brainer.
Oh, you mean that Mesa DID get practical use. I thought you were saying the reverse, that Mesa was an unimportant side project. Yes, of course you're right, and I didn't mean to imply that Mesa was just a theoretical exercise. I should have said "didn't get widespread production use and public visibility."
Unfortunately PARC was always a bastion of great ideas, great technology, great human-factors vision...but limited commercial success. Of course it was a lab universe -- R&D with an emphasis on R. So it's not fair to judge PARC as a product development center. Better to compare it to Project MAC or CSRG, or the Sarnoff labs. Still, it always seemed that Xerox managed to shoot itself in the foot when trying to leverage the wonderful output of its lab environment. And some of it SHOULD have been leveraged, because it grew into robust, mature technology, far advanced from the ad hoc benchtop experiments we think of as typical lab output.
Just think if Visual Basic had been Visual Cedar. (Though of course VB started as Visual Ruby, didn't it, still a big paradigm shift.) Oh well. I'm glad a few of us dinosaurs remember the progress in software architecture that was made in the 70s-80s, back when hardware was expensive, and smart thinking and bespoke languages/systems could really make sense. Some of those good ideas are probably lost. Instead we have XML.
Cheers.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "you are wrong concerning Mesa." Do you mean it isn't in the diagram, wasn't important theoretically, didn't evolve with input from Smalltalk and Interlisp, or wasn't interesting?
I found Mesa (and its embedding in the Pilot environment on the Alto platform, suggesting the famous Ingalls aphorism "an operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language -- there shouldn't be one") very interesting, and the source of important ideas for language design that were assimilated by an army of PARC followers. Obviously the applications built with Mesa were also interesting, as you say, though there are chicken-and-egg aspects to their relationship with the implementation platform.
I of course felt that Cedar was much more interesting than Mesa, being further evolved, but many important seeds came from the Mesa concepts.
Of course since I'm replying to an AC post, nobody will probably see this comment.
Uh, sorry, Mesa and Cedar are both there in the middle of the 1st diagram, just above the Smalltalk thread, shown as deriving in 1977 from Algol and Pascal influences (which actually doesn't strike me as telling the whole story -- Smalltalk and Interlisp were both important sources of ideas).
Both Mesa and Cedar were very important languages from a theoretical standpoint, IMO, though neither got much practical use because of their limited distribution/implementation.
Yeah, thanks for the insightful comment. I never looked at it from your wise perspective. I've been an idiot through the years, working round the clock on cool projects like writing operating systems and designing languages, when I could have made more money installing accounting systems. I guess 25 years in the business hiring and firing morons like you didn't teach me anything.
Whether or not you personally would take a pay cut to build games is irrelevant. Plenty of folks will, do, and have. So long as that's true, it will drive the salaries down, and it will let some employers abuse the situation. They're not right for doing it, but the idea that every kind of developer deserves the same pay scale with a 40-hour work week would be goofy.
How many developers would give their eye teeth, work 80 hour weeks, and take a cut in pay in order to work at a game vendor? Would you? Everybody and his dog wants to work in this environment. Naturally the pay is low. It's like working in Hollywood. There is a long line of people who would be happy to help on a big movie project for a fraction of what they'd expect working the same hours at a bank, insurance company, or flipping burgers. Why are we surprised that you don't get a fat paycheck writing games? Obviously a rotten employer deserves everybody's contempt, but if they're rotten enough people will quit and go work somewhere else. The system is self-correcting. It's not like they're working in a mine or a steel mill for the only employer in town. This is a luxury, boutique industry, and most people working in it are tickled pink to be getting paid ANYTHING rather than doing it for free.
JMHO
I'm curious what you will do with this information -- what can you do that you couldn't do before?
Well, I used it to verify whether I was vulnerable. I was. I'm glad to observe it. I've downloaded the new firmware and hope to be safe. They couldn't contact me via registration card because I NEVER send in those things. They're just marketing gimmicks used as an opt-in.
Moreover, the script kiddies will manage to get this information whether or not it's publicly posted. This way, I have it as well as them.
Just my view.
Our legal system is based on more than just the laws passed by legislators -- the whole foundation provided by English Common Law, for example. Judges rely (and are expected to rely) very heavily on precedent when deciding how to interpret the Law. If they reverse the position taken by the Courts on previous similar decisions, there are real ramifications.
At any rate, the point here was about whether Corporations have rights in law. The bottom line is that, if you took legal action based on the premise that Corporations don't have rights, you'd lose. This has been tested over and over in the courts. It's not a grey area.
It is possible that, through a lengthy process of judicial and political action, the situation could be changed. I would applaud this, just as I'd applaud many other changes -- such as making it harder to extort through litigation (by making the loser pay legal costs in more situations, as they do in the U.K.); and I wish that patents and copyrights were less stupid and less stupidly litigated.
But just because you and I may think it's a good idea that only 'Natural Persons' should have rights, and just because you can read the Constitution and the statue books and say 'there's no law giving Corporations these rights,' the fact remains that for decades the judges have not been agreeing, and have specifically and at length been deciding cases in their favor based on the existence of such rights.
In practice, "the law" isn't what's printed in a book; it's a concatenation of factors that makes it likely or unlikely for you to win a given case through the legal system at a point in time.
I agree with your sentiment that they shouldn't. But in law they do, at least in this century. See http://www.nancho.net/corperson/corptime.html et al.
If you're talking about a small setup, i.e. less then a dozen systems, it's hard to beat the tradeoff of price versus slickness. Commodity systems in normal small form-factor towers and desktops are so much cheaper than rackmount systems, and it's really not hard to come up with a way to hook 'em up. True, your 'ideal' system can save on duplicate CD/ROM drives etc., and the cable runs look infinitely better, but this savings won't generally reduce your net cost.
Get good standard systems, used ones if they suit your needs, and put 'em on a set of tables or shelves. If space is tight, use rack shelves and snug the systems in, but I've never looked at my CPU jungle and said "I need to invest a few thousand bucks to trim this down from 30 cubic feet to 12." I ALWAYS use that money to buy something I need more (or more likely I blow it on a nice weekend). Space per se is just not that big a problem, not as compared to power, cooling, and component diversity. Besides, I'll need to replace the systems in a year or two anyway. And I'd probably be better off with more commodity systems, especially if I'm trying to duplicate field conditions.
(Unless you find a source for CHEAP rack mount gear, in which case obviously we'd all pick that. It does look much more engineeroid.)
> > If you don't like it, move to a state that doesn't have a sales & use tax.
> Or, vote to repeal it.
Of course. Or take any other legitimate action rather than just indignantly whining "they can't do that."
> > you don't really have a leg to stand on
> Except the Constitution.
Well, naturally, but these state laws are not new and they have stood up to many constitutional challenges. It may feel good to say "That's not constitutional," but when the legal rubber hits the road, challenging a law on constitutional grounds doesn't usually succeed, especially if there's decades of legal precedent. This is not to say it doesn't, can't, or won't happen, but I'd not advise someone to evade their taxes and count on a constitutional challenge in court to save them.
> > California, whatever, then deal with it.
> Yeah. "Deal with it" was tried recently in California. The voters liked it so much they recalled the Governor and passed two laws changing the entire budget process.
Exactly. That's how to fix the problem. Move away, change the laws, or fight them in court. Something a little more serious than saying "I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!"
Most of the time /. is full of insightful posts. This thread seems to have brought out the goofs. I cringe to see how many people have posted messages here saying a) "This is a new kind of tax," b) "They can't get away with it!", c) "They'll never catch me," d) "This must be unconstitutional," e) "It can't apply to me," f) "It's way too much paperwork/effort/headache for me." I hate them too...but sales & use taxes are the law of the land in most states, and have been for many years.
If you buy something out of state, via internet, USPS, telephone, or goddamn Pony Express, you probably owe your home state the same tax you would have paid if you bought it locally. Usually you can deduct the taxes paid out of state. It's a pain in the ass but it's not new -- and it's not the state taking a diabolical liberty because of the Internet. If you don't like it, move to a state that doesn't have a sales & use tax. There are a few.
When states crack down on use tax violations, and most of them do from time to time, they hit violators pretty hard. You shouldn't be surprised at how easy it is to catch violators. If you use your credit card to buy stuff from out of state, and it gets delivered inside state borders, you don't really have a leg to stand on. Most states don't really go after you until they have a strong motive, e.g. they are already auditing your income tax return, or they get info from a vendor about a $10K purchase. But when they get the bit between their teeth, they come after you hard. Why wouldn't they? The tax, fines, and interest will pay for a lot of investigator salary.
Really, this is just Life 101 stuff. You can't evade other kinds of tax; why do you think you can dodge this one? Again, if you don't like it, move to a state that doesn't do it. If you want to stay in New York, Connecticut, Illinois, California, whatever, then deal with it.
Congrats, you win the prize for best /. post.
I gotta get me one of those crackpot-o-meters. Does James Randi have the local distributorship for this octant of the galaxy?
I love Groklaw and can't wait for each new installment. But I wish some of the heavyweight contributors there could get the hang of putting an "Executive Summary" at the beginning of the long detailed rants. Not just a short list of the conclusions (equally important), but a summary of the key facts as well.
This article is a perfect example. I understood it just fine, but, as much as I like minutiae, I stopped reading in detail and started skimming after about 75% through -- it became much-of-a-muchness. There were a bunch of really important points in there, but they were buried, so that only the geeks would read them. And the geeks already understand the situation!
Oh well. As I said, Groklaw rules, and they're doing such fine work...so I mustn't complain, and I don't have the time or the specialized knowledge to step up to the plate myself.
But I keep wishing that somebody active there would grasp The Big Picture a little more vividly -- The Big Picture as seen by an outsider. Many of the postings there seem just to be preaching to the choir.
Well, back to my hymnal.
In my experience, ABI is a relatively recent term.
In 'the olden days' the single term 'API' was used, and it covered the entire range of entry points, calling parameters, communication protocols, error handlers, return codes, and anything else a programmer would need to use the interface in question. This usage dates at least back to the early '70's and probably earlier.
While I like the precision of ABI and other neologisms, this does lead to confusion when we recast an old term like 'API' under a more restrictive definition.
Probably because they taste bad to you but taste good to most of the rest of us. We aren't pretending we like the taste -- we really do like it. Anyway, chacun a son gout: each to his own taste.
> stripping of personal choice, expression, and speech
But of course an employer can do this, legally; and since the employer is providing the building, paying the salaries, etc., this is also basically ethical, unless the employer crosses certain well-defined lines of unfair discrimination. Such rules can be obnoxious, and if we work for somebody who's a jerk about trivial things, we quit. But it's not illegal to be a jerk.
There's a huge difference between enforcing political correctness within a private organization, which is obnoxious but reflects policies that are the prerogative of each employer, and avoiding state-sponsored religious imagery in public institutions, which is a Constitutional issue.
Obviously, everybody is different, and will react differently to the benefits and pressures of long-term work at home. Some people couldn't handle it at all -- you definitely have issues separating work and nonwork activities. The snotty comments in this thread notwithstanding, it really is a serious issue, like the decision to go into business on your own. Some people simply cannot do it, and it's hard to decide which group you're in until you try it.
If you have decent work motivation, then I'd say it's great for up to a couple of years. You get a lot done, and you waste less time on nonproductive crap that can fill a day at an office.
Nevertheless, though I don't mind work at home, each time I've moved into an office I've been delighted by the separation and focus that result. It always energizes me, and it's a good time to institute big changes in how you organize, plan, and document your work. (Think "New Year's Resolutions.")
As you point out, life other than work can get lost in the home office situation. For most people, I expect that having an office is ultimately a good thing, and is worth the cost if you're billing enough. I have always found that, as long as I was busy, the office has paid for itself.
If you're on the borderline, or just must make it work, here are some suggestions that worked for me:
Keep suing people till someone decides to buy them and put them out of our misery?? -- bgh
Seems like a pretty sound policy so far.
Very well summarized.
It's all a bit disappointing. If I were a RedHat executive, I hope I'd perceive that the corporation's greatest intangible asset has been a large, loyal user base that has served as the first line of the sales/delivery/support process. This new plan has basically dumped that asset, in one swell foop. Do they know what they're giving up?
This situation has reminded me of another dubious business choice; this is a long analogy but is perhaps worth repeating. Long ago, I was a developer at Sears, Roebuck, when the company went through an interesting business-wide change. They decided to get rid of nearly all their seasoned full-time store employees, and to replace them with part-time, low-cost, low-benefits employees. This was back in the 70's when Sears was going strong. It seemed like a good business/economic decision on paper; but it overlooked that fact that, more than anything else, the thing that had given Sears the edge for years was its base of fanatically loyal, experienced, skilled personnel. (Suppliers HATED dealing with Sears because they couldn't schmooze or bribe their way around quality or price issues.) In the course of a couple of years, Sears replaced that strong workforce, by creating what today we'd call McJobs. The few full-timers left were bitter and resentful. (Wallmart eventually reaped the benefit of the Sears restructuring, by doing the same thing on a grander scale.)
Like the Sears decision, the RedHat choice may in fact be the correct strategic choice. From the outside, without all the facts, it's hard to know. But each of these decisions seems to discount what, on the surface, seems to represent a core asset. I hope RedHat is taking its decision very seriously.
They may have just gone public, but their site says "The Cornell and Virginia teams have taken a number of steps to try to work with Red Hat regarding use of the name Fedora(TM). At this date, Red Hat has refused our request...." My guess is that they started waving their hands as soon as it became public knowledge, but as usual it took a while for everybody to hear about everybody else -- by which time it's a little late to get the toothpaste back into the tube.