Sorry, but many companies aren't interested in hiring scraggly-bearded hotshot hacker-wannabes to write payroll code. They're looking for stable and mature people who will show up, on time, everyday. Not finger-signing really cool dudes who part-tay every weekend then come in with hangovers on Monday and spend the rest of the week trying to put undetectable backdoors into the check printing code or copy the executive payroll file for their own enjoyment.
The poster who noted that leading-edge programming languages are only leading-edge for a couple of weeks is absolutely correct. COBOL may not be cool, but it was once leading-edge and has persisted because it works. Want to take bets on whether applications written in COBOL or applications written in (enter name of flashy new language here) are more likely to still be running in 20 years>
Such righteous indignation. Such disdain for people with different beliefs. Such ignorance of history.
Listen up. Here it is. "Sweatshop", while not a strictly defined legal term, is not meaningless. It has been used and understood by Americans for the last 150 years. Webster defines it as: "a shop where employees work long hours at low wages under poor working conditions". If you think that the offshore factories of many American corporations don't fit that definition, you are sadly mistaken. Do I think that the locals are possibly better off stitching shoes for Nike than scavanging the local dump? Sure.
I don't think that the Bill of Rights should extend to corporations to any extent whatsoever. They are legal entities designed primarily to shield owners and executives from personal responsibility when the corporation gets caught acting illegally.
Note that I'm a registered Republican and have been for a lot of years. Enough years, in fact, that I voted for Barry Goldwater. And I worked for a few years for an American firm with manufacturing operations in Malaysia and the Marshall Islands. And I still think that Nike is guilty of operating sweatshops.
The real question is whether or not a corporation has any Constitutional rights whatsoever. The founding fathers considered the issue and reserved such rights to real human beings. For the next 100 years, corporate lawyers attempted to blur the line between real human beings and the artifical personage of corporations. Apparently, 100 years of political maneuverings were all it took. Because in the completely inexplicable and unprecedented Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, corporations were extended rights under the 14th amendment to the Constitution. Interestingly, this is NOT what the Court had been asked to consider in the case - they simply stated that they'd decided unilaterally that corporations had the same rights as people and didn't want to hear any more cases that suggested otherwise. So much for the opinions of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and a few hundred years of English Common Law.
This thread, like nearly every other thread on nearly every other subject, is, indeed, boiling over with ignorance.
I'm beginning to think that only about 40% of all/. posters have actually read any article they're reacting to. And most of them didn't understand it.
The large percentage of posts are mindless rants for/against Linux or Microsoft or Sun or some other vendor or product and seem written by semi-literate and/or knee-jerk and/or free-market and/or Libertarian high school dropouts. Yes, there is a reason to know how to spell. Yes, punctuation is a good thing. No, the current state of U.S. capitalism doesn't resemble a free-market economy.
Yes, there is a role for government in squashing monopolists who ultimately do a huge disservice to the populace (that would be me and you), ensuring that the stock market is run honestly (or that the dishonest go to jail), that banks and other financial institutions don't steal your money (or at least have to give it back when they do), and that the air is breathable and the water drinkable.
Those who think otherwise really need to go back and study history. Not ancient history, recent history. Find out about the state of the country, and the laissez faire capitalists who thought they owned it (and damn near did), prior to the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt.
Sorry, I don't feel like entering into this particular pissing contest. Suffice it to say that Microsoft is in breach of their contract with Sun and will (hopefully) end up giving Sun a few hundred million dollars in punititive damages.
Microsoft has been ordered by the court to ship Java with their OS(s) as a remedy for their past performance.
Remember: Microsoft contracted with Sun to ship untainted and current versions of Java with their OS products. Microsoft then corrupted their version of Java in order to make it no longer cross-platform compliant. Then they quit updating their version. The result was that many, who think that Microsoft keeps them up to date with the latest and best, came to regard Java as buggy, incompatible with other platforms, and out of date.
Sun sued Microsoft for breach of contract for developing the corrupt version and then stopping updates. Microsoft retaliated by pulling Java completely.
Sun is suing Microsoft to live by the terms of the contract. The court has ordered Microsoft to do so as the legal process continues.
I didn't see any sign-up sheet for a boycott, but I certainly joined one - starting over a year ago. And so did hundreds of thousands or millions of others in the U.S. And its working. How do I know? The MPAA and the RIAA are kind enough to publish figures showing that revenue is down in both the movie and music industries.
Napster? File sharing? DVD copying? Nope. A lot of us just got sick and tired of bad movies, bad music, and B.S. from the conglomerates pushing them and started staying home.
I used to go to the movies once every couple of weeks. Not because the movies were guaranteed to be great, but because I genuinely like movies. Between the high prices, poor accommodations, and poorer movies, I quit going. Now I find myself renting classics from Blockbuster.
I used to buy a lot of CDs (and before them cassettes and vinyl). Similar complaint. Mostly crap and at high prices.
I'm not alone in this. There are millions like me. We didn't join a boycott, we just quit buying. And won't be likely to start again any time soon.
Yep, ny observation also. I started buying Sony electronics over 35 years ago and they were fantastic. Rugged, well-designed, well-assembled, heavy, and repairable - although they almost never needed repair. All made in Japan.
About 10 years ago I started noticing that my various new Sony things were flimsy, lightweight, and prone to breakage - both mechanical and electronic. All made in Malaysia, the Phillipines, or (now) China.
I learned my lesson well. If it's Sony and made in Japan it's probably OK. If it's made elsewhere, I might as well buy the cheapest thing on sale at Kmart.
You don't have to be particularly clever to have seen this one coming. And to see its almost certain inevitability.
There have been revelations that manufacturers have been thinking about building "security" (read copyright enforcement) features into disk drives (and announcing that they were really weren't serious about it when the public noticed) and next-generation DVD and CD drives. Mention has been made of the same ideas for displays and sound cards. Now CPUs and operating systems. The only things left are interface and memory chips - and who knows what's going on there?
When all of the CPUs, motherboards, memory cards, interface cards, and peripherals available in the market enforce "security", we're pretty much screwed.
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Sorry, but many companies aren't interested in hiring scraggly-bearded hotshot hacker-wannabes to write payroll code. They're looking for stable and mature people who will show up, on time, everyday. Not finger-signing really cool dudes who part-tay every weekend then come in with hangovers on Monday and spend the rest of the week trying to put undetectable backdoors into the check printing code or copy the executive payroll file for their own enjoyment.
The poster who noted that leading-edge programming languages are only leading-edge for a couple of weeks is absolutely correct. COBOL may not be cool, but it was once leading-edge and has persisted because it works. Want to take bets on whether applications written in COBOL or applications written in (enter name of flashy new language here) are more likely to still be running in 20 years>
Such righteous indignation. Such disdain for people with different beliefs. Such ignorance of history.
Listen up. Here it is. "Sweatshop", while not a strictly defined legal term, is not meaningless. It has been used and understood by Americans for the last 150 years. Webster defines it as: "a shop where employees work long hours at low wages under poor working conditions". If you think that the offshore factories of many American corporations don't fit that definition, you are sadly mistaken. Do I think that the locals are possibly better off stitching shoes for Nike than scavanging the local dump? Sure.
I don't think that the Bill of Rights should extend to corporations to any extent whatsoever. They are legal entities designed primarily to shield owners and executives from personal responsibility when the corporation gets caught acting illegally.
Note that I'm a registered Republican and have been for a lot of years. Enough years, in fact, that I voted for Barry Goldwater. And I worked for a few years for an American firm with manufacturing operations in Malaysia and the Marshall Islands. And I still think that Nike is guilty of operating sweatshops.
The real question is whether or not a corporation has any Constitutional rights whatsoever. The founding fathers considered the issue and reserved such rights to real human beings. For the next 100 years, corporate lawyers attempted to blur the line between real human beings and the artifical personage of corporations. Apparently, 100 years of political maneuverings were all it took. Because in the completely inexplicable and unprecedented Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, corporations were extended rights under the 14th amendment to the Constitution. Interestingly, this is NOT what the Court had been asked to consider in the case - they simply stated that they'd decided unilaterally that corporations had the same rights as people and didn't want to hear any more cases that suggested otherwise. So much for the opinions of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and a few hundred years of English Common Law.
This thread, like nearly every other thread on nearly every other subject, is, indeed, boiling over with ignorance.
/. posters have actually read any article they're reacting to. And most of them didn't understand it.
I'm beginning to think that only about 40% of all
The large percentage of posts are mindless rants for/against Linux or Microsoft or Sun or some other vendor or product and seem written by semi-literate and/or knee-jerk and/or free-market and/or Libertarian high school dropouts. Yes, there is a reason to know how to spell. Yes, punctuation is a good thing. No, the current state of U.S. capitalism doesn't resemble a free-market economy.
Yes, there is a role for government in squashing monopolists who ultimately do a huge disservice to the populace (that would be me and you), ensuring that the stock market is run honestly (or that the dishonest go to jail), that banks and other financial institutions don't steal your money (or at least have to give it back when they do), and that the air is breathable and the water drinkable.
Those who think otherwise really need to go back and study history. Not ancient history, recent history. Find out about the state of the country, and the laissez faire capitalists who thought they owned it (and damn near did), prior to the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt.
Sorry, I don't feel like entering into this particular pissing contest. Suffice it to say that Microsoft is in breach of their contract with Sun and will (hopefully) end up giving Sun a few hundred million dollars in punititive damages.
Microsoft has been ordered by the court to ship Java with their OS(s) as a remedy for their past performance.
Remember: Microsoft contracted with Sun to ship untainted and current versions of Java with their OS products. Microsoft then corrupted their version of Java in order to make it no longer cross-platform compliant. Then they quit updating their version. The result was that many, who think that Microsoft keeps them up to date with the latest and best, came to regard Java as buggy, incompatible with other platforms, and out of date.
Sun sued Microsoft for breach of contract for developing the corrupt version and then stopping updates. Microsoft retaliated by pulling Java completely.
Sun is suing Microsoft to live by the terms of the contract. The court has ordered Microsoft to do so as the legal process continues.
I didn't see any sign-up sheet for a boycott, but I certainly joined one - starting over a year ago. And so did hundreds of thousands or millions of others in the U.S. And its working. How do I know? The MPAA and the RIAA are kind enough to publish figures showing that revenue is down in both the movie and music industries.
Napster? File sharing? DVD copying? Nope. A lot of us just got sick and tired of bad movies, bad music, and B.S. from the conglomerates pushing them and started staying home.
I used to go to the movies once every couple of weeks. Not because the movies were guaranteed to be great, but because I genuinely like movies. Between the high prices, poor accommodations, and poorer movies, I quit going. Now I find myself renting classics from Blockbuster.
I used to buy a lot of CDs (and before them cassettes and vinyl). Similar complaint. Mostly crap and at high prices.
I'm not alone in this. There are millions like me. We didn't join a boycott, we just quit buying. And won't be likely to start again any time soon.
Yep, ny observation also. I started buying Sony electronics over 35 years ago and they were fantastic. Rugged, well-designed, well-assembled, heavy, and repairable - although they almost never needed repair. All made in Japan.
About 10 years ago I started noticing that my various new Sony things were flimsy, lightweight, and prone to breakage - both mechanical and electronic. All made in Malaysia, the Phillipines, or (now) China.
I learned my lesson well. If it's Sony and made in Japan it's probably OK. If it's made elsewhere, I might as well buy the cheapest thing on sale at Kmart.
You don't have to be particularly clever to have seen this one coming. And to see its almost certain inevitability.
There have been revelations that manufacturers have been thinking about building "security" (read copyright enforcement) features into disk drives (and announcing that they were really weren't serious about it when the public noticed) and next-generation DVD and CD drives. Mention has been made of the same ideas for displays and sound cards. Now CPUs and operating systems. The only things left are interface and memory chips - and who knows what's going on there?
When all of the CPUs, motherboards, memory cards, interface cards, and peripherals available in the market enforce "security", we're pretty much screwed.