There could be a connection. We're old enough to remember when interactive computing was the exception rather than the rule, and we had to learn how to keep the pipes full of work (and the advantages of organizing some kinds of work that way). Today it's hard to get a lot of newer developers/maintainers to even believe that there's a reason to think about noninteractive use of any given tool. I sometimes wonder how they develop the powers of concentration needed to think about large software projects.
Okay, different people work in different ways, so it's reasonable to *provide* IM for those who take to it, but not reasonable to *mandate* IM except in very special circumstances. I'm so unlike the normal IM fan that I'd probably write a special client which would batch up all the messages and email them to me twice a day, if I were required to run one and I got more than a tiny trickle of messages. People would soon learn that it really works better to email me.
The distinction trickles down to individuals, too. If you know you're working with a curmudgeon like me, send email; if you know your correspondent prefers IM, use IM. I can see a need for an addressbook field storing the recipient's preferred mode, so I don't have to remember who loves IM and who hates it. (With a really nice office equipment setup, it could even dial the phone for you, if the other guy works in phone mode, and tell you to pick up and wait.)
"Knowledge of harrassment" sounds like a formal complaint to me. That is, a piece of paper with a signature and specifics that would allow me to limit the search (and our exposure) rather severely. And even then, absent a court order, I'd want our counsel's opinion that we would be permitted to make such a search. We can be sued by *either party* if we do the wrong thing.
Oh, yeah, television. I remember TV. It's what we used to watch before we got all these DVDs. Aside from Jeopardy! I can't recall when I last watched video coming from outside my house. It's just not worth my time.
[Because of duty to combat harrassment etc.] "companies have an obligation to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises."
Wouldn't blanket monitoring open the company to *increased* liability? Surely the way to go is to wait for a complaint/subpoena and then monitor *only* what is requested by the court.
Time zones, eh? So, the guy in Delhi IMs me, but I'm at home asleep. Huh -- no answer. If he'd emailed me I'd have seen it next morning and fired off an answer for him to read when *he* wakes up.
What I wouldn't have given, years ago, to be able to email that development group in Australia instead of waiting for the time when I might find someone by the phone!
I remain unconvinced. Much of what people want me to do is not U R G E N T but can wait until I take care of it. The truly urgent stuff that happens maybe three times a year can be handled by phone.
Send me an email. If I'm at my desk, tkbiff makes a noise and I'll probably deal with it immediately; if I'm away from my desk you won't get much from me until I return anyway.
I remember IM from the days of PLATO. (Anybody here old enough to remember PLATO?) My first two thoughts were, "wow, neato!" and "but what would I actually do with it?" There was some DECnet chat thingy that I played with for a few minutes, which pretty much confirmed my opinion of chat thingies even before DEC took it out. Before that it was possible to link terminals on TOPS-20 and communicate by typing Exec comments to each other, and wow wasn't that less rewarding than expected.
Some of us work best asynchronously. Put some work in my queue and it'll get done. Distract me with IM and I'll turn the IM gadget off.
Indeed, we must speak carefully when discussing "the death of Unix". Do we mean "Unix(tm)", or "Unix and all that other stuff that looks pretty much just like it"? The former could indeed be killed off by the remainder of the latter; the latter group still has a long future IMHO.
"More importantly, when we stop using the word, will people forget what slavery is and just make all the same mistakes?"
Probably. And then they'll invent a new word for it. And eventually others will figure out what it means and be offended all over again.
It's like the process by which sexual and scatological terms multiply. People who want or need to talk about such things keep coming up with new words when the old ones are declared improper by those who want to prevent others having such thoughts. The inevitable result is a language rich in "dirty" words, rather than one scrubbed clean of uncomfortable ideas.
[IBM mainframe "slave" drives sync.ed to master's speed]
Sounds bogus to me. The motors in those old washing-machine sized drives were locked to multiples of the powerline frequency, so they'd be in sync. without any collusion. (3600RPM if memory serves) Power companies are *good* at long-term frequency stability.
But you did remind me of the J2/J3 powerup sequencers on DEC drives (and other large gear), which could be chained to start one after another to avoid popping the breaker by throwing all those big motor starting transients onto the circuit concurrently. It was mildly amusing to watch a big system come to life as various bits turned on and then passed the torch to the next in line.
We actually had a flag day, a few years ago, when a load of new comm. gear came in. The comm. guys spent days pulling up several layers of old cable 'cos they needed the space for the new. It made working under the floor much nicer. Now if we could get the power guys to stop laying 100kg of copper on top of our phone and data cables.... (Yeah, a structured wiring plan would help.)
And whenever I retire a cable, or find that some less industrious person has abandoned one, I pull it up *now* before it becomes part of a mat that's too much to deal with. It's a great way to be productive late on Friday afternoon when you don't want to touch production software just before the weekend. But then, I actually fasten the holddown screws on connector shells, too, so I'm obviously a fringe nutcase.:-|
If A is selling something for $15.00, and B is giving away the same thing for free, wouldn't a person with just a trace of common sense think it prudent to find out how the market can support both suppliers? For example, if a song really has zero cost, shouldn't the price of a piece of cheap plastic with the song in it be driven a LOT lower? I mean, I can buy a *much* bigger sheet of polycarbonate for $15 when it has no song in it. Shouldn't that suggest that the song has a nonzero cost, and B is either stupidly losing his shirt or failing to pay what he owes?
Gotta ask my kid what they're teaching in school these days, if they're not teaching stuff like that. Not that he gets away with only knowing what the schools teach, mind you....
"Until the nuclear industry stops lying through it's teeth about how "clean" everything nuclear is we won't see much irradiation of food going on."
You touch upon a large part of the impasse. There is no debate; the topic is controlled by propagandists on both sides, and until they are sidelined no progress will ever be made. Weak, fearful people have gotten into the positions of power and cannot afford to grant their opponents anything. People who are strong enough to listen to criticism must roll up their sleeves and toss the weaklings out of the way, somehow.
Well, reprocessing "spent" fuel to get the unconsumed U back was what I meant by "recycling". It's a good idea and, if we can do it right, we ought to do it.
By "reuse" I meant take the stuff that's no good for large-scale power reactor fuel and use it for something else. Like sterilization or probing metal castings for flaws. And if all else fails, someone else pointed out that the gunk still produces quite a bit of heat -- not enough for a commercial electric plant, but maybe enough for something that has to sit in an inaccessible place for decades without resupply.
Hydro...yeah, come to Indianapolis and ask the old-timers where Dandy Trail is. (It's at the bottom of a reservoir now, not such a fun place to go anymore.)
Stuff like solar, wind, tides, etc. can be stored as compressed air, used to extract hydrogen from water, pushed into high-performance flywheels, etc. so batteries are not necessarily needed.
Tidal generation might actually be a good thing for e.g. the barrier island systems of the North American east coast. Hmmm.
Oh, and coal mines are hard to clean up too. Ask about all the acid runoff. Ditto the mines that produce whatever materials go into your favorite alternative energy source.
We could boil all this down pretty compactly: energy production is messy and dangerous. So's millions dying of cold or fighting the wolves off with sharp sticks, though.
Oh, good, let's have the global warming slapfight again.
Yes, the climate changes without our help. It has changed drastically many times before humans were capable of any visible effect on it.
Yes, human activity is now able to make significant changes to the climate. We need to manage our planet.
Until we can separate the human and nonhuman components of climate change, we won't understand the problem well enough to have the best ideas about what to do. However, at the point that we do gain that understanding, it would be good to already have some solutions waiting on the shelf. And there are human components which are understood well enough that we can start working out the details. After all, in learning how to safely cool our planet we also learn a lot about safely warming it up, and some day we might need to know that too....
Whatever happened to vitrification? Mix the stuff into glass, cast into handy-sized lumps, bury in moist earth, post a guard to keep the bad guys from digging it up. As deep as they want to bury it, any post-catastrophe society capable of reaching the stuff should be developed enough to figure out that it is dangerous, particularly since, unlike natural ores (which are also dangerous), the stuff will be *marked*.
Also, we've done well with Reduce and Recycle, but how are we doing with Re-use? It seems to me that much rad"waste" is just a resource for which nobody has tried hard enough to find a use. Medicine, nondestructive testing, long-term preservation of organic matter, etc. all have uses for long-lasting sources of radiation. (I tell my kids to remember where the landfills are, because their grandchildren will want to mine them.)
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There could be a connection. We're old enough to remember when interactive computing was the exception rather than the rule, and we had to learn how to keep the pipes full of work (and the advantages of organizing some kinds of work that way). Today it's hard to get a lot of newer developers/maintainers to even believe that there's a reason to think about noninteractive use of any given tool. I sometimes wonder how they develop the powers of concentration needed to think about large software projects.
Okay, but anybody who tries that sort of stuff on me should be wondering what kind of a paper trail *I* am building on *him*. :-}
Harrassment only works on the relatively powerless, or those who *think they are*.
Okay, different people work in different ways, so it's reasonable to *provide* IM for those who take to it, but not reasonable to *mandate* IM except in very special circumstances. I'm so unlike the normal IM fan that I'd probably write a special client which would batch up all the messages and email them to me twice a day, if I were required to run one and I got more than a tiny trickle of messages. People would soon learn that it really works better to email me.
The distinction trickles down to individuals, too. If you know you're working with a curmudgeon like me, send email; if you know your correspondent prefers IM, use IM. I can see a need for an addressbook field storing the recipient's preferred mode, so I don't have to remember who loves IM and who hates it. (With a really nice office equipment setup, it could even dial the phone for you, if the other guy works in phone mode, and tell you to pick up and wait.)
"Knowledge of harrassment" sounds like a formal complaint to me. That is, a piece of paper with a signature and specifics that would allow me to limit the search (and our exposure) rather severely. And even then, absent a court order, I'd want our counsel's opinion that we would be permitted to make such a search. We can be sued by *either party* if we do the wrong thing.
I've trained people to ask themselves whether something is really urgent enough to justify the cost of phoning me. They usually pick email.
Oh, yeah, television. I remember TV. It's what we used to watch before we got all these DVDs. Aside from Jeopardy! I can't recall when I last watched video coming from outside my house. It's just not worth my time.
I like that "fear of leaving a paper trail". It makes people forget about badmouthing others and cut to the actual problem.
I like formality. When people take the time to figure out how to say what they think, I spend less time trying to figure it out for them.
[Because of duty to combat harrassment etc.] "companies have an obligation to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises."
Wouldn't blanket monitoring open the company to *increased* liability? Surely the way to go is to wait for a complaint/subpoena and then monitor *only* what is requested by the court.
Time zones, eh? So, the guy in Delhi IMs me, but I'm at home asleep. Huh -- no answer. If he'd emailed me I'd have seen it next morning and fired off an answer for him to read when *he* wakes up.
What I wouldn't have given, years ago, to be able to email that development group in Australia instead of waiting for the time when I might find someone by the phone!
I remain unconvinced. Much of what people want me to do is not U R G E N T but can wait until I take care of it. The truly urgent stuff that happens maybe three times a year can be handled by phone.
Send me an email. If I'm at my desk, tkbiff makes a noise and I'll probably deal with it immediately; if I'm away from my desk you won't get much from me until I return anyway.
I remember IM from the days of PLATO. (Anybody here old enough to remember PLATO?) My first two thoughts were, "wow, neato!" and "but what would I actually do with it?" There was some DECnet chat thingy that I played with for a few minutes, which pretty much confirmed my opinion of chat thingies even before DEC took it out. Before that it was possible to link terminals on TOPS-20 and communicate by typing Exec comments to each other, and wow wasn't that less rewarding than expected.
Some of us work best asynchronously. Put some work in my queue and it'll get done. Distract me with IM and I'll turn the IM gadget off.
Indeed, we must speak carefully when discussing "the death of Unix". Do we mean "Unix(tm)", or "Unix and all that other stuff that looks pretty much just like it"? The former could indeed be killed off by the remainder of the latter; the latter group still has a long future IMHO.
"More importantly, when we stop using the word, will people forget what slavery is and just make all the same mistakes?"
Probably. And then they'll invent a new word for it. And eventually others will figure out what it means and be offended all over again.
It's like the process by which sexual and scatological terms multiply. People who want or need to talk about such things keep coming up with new words when the old ones are declared improper by those who want to prevent others having such thoughts. The inevitable result is a language rich in "dirty" words, rather than one scrubbed clean of uncomfortable ideas.
[IBM mainframe "slave" drives sync.ed to master's speed]
Sounds bogus to me. The motors in those old washing-machine sized drives were locked to multiples of the powerline frequency, so they'd be in sync. without any collusion. (3600RPM if memory serves) Power companies are *good* at long-term frequency stability.
But you did remind me of the J2/J3 powerup sequencers on DEC drives (and other large gear), which could be chained to start one after another to avoid popping the breaker by throwing all those big motor starting transients onto the circuit concurrently. It was mildly amusing to watch a big system come to life as various bits turned on and then passed the torch to the next in line.
"The Civilian Conservation Corps.?"
No, the Cosmic Construction Corps.
You know, like the dubbed foreign films where the actor works his mouth for half a minute and then the soundtrack says, "what's up?"
...them's *pull strings*!
We actually had a flag day, a few years ago, when a load of new comm. gear came in. The comm. guys spent days pulling up several layers of old cable 'cos they needed the space for the new. It made working under the floor much nicer. Now if we could get the power guys to stop laying 100kg of copper on top of our phone and data cables.... (Yeah, a structured wiring plan would help.)
:-|
And whenever I retire a cable, or find that some less industrious person has abandoned one, I pull it up *now* before it becomes part of a mat that's too much to deal with. It's a great way to be productive late on Friday afternoon when you don't want to touch production software just before the weekend. But then, I actually fasten the holddown screws on connector shells, too, so I'm obviously a fringe nutcase.
Huhhuhuh, he said "SCO", huhhuh.
And can the USPS [insert your local postal system if outside the U.S.A.] be sued for permitting people to transact business by mail, bypassing AT&T?
If A is selling something for $15.00, and B is giving away the same thing for free, wouldn't a person with just a trace of common sense think it prudent to find out how the market can support both suppliers? For example, if a song really has zero cost, shouldn't the price of a piece of cheap plastic with the song in it be driven a LOT lower? I mean, I can buy a *much* bigger sheet of polycarbonate for $15 when it has no song in it. Shouldn't that suggest that the song has a nonzero cost, and B is either stupidly losing his shirt or failing to pay what he owes?
Gotta ask my kid what they're teaching in school these days, if they're not teaching stuff like that. Not that he gets away with only knowing what the schools teach, mind you....
Naah, the lobby's fine, but all of the corner offices need complete refurbishment.
"Until the nuclear industry stops lying through it's teeth about how "clean" everything nuclear is we won't see much irradiation of food going on."
You touch upon a large part of the impasse. There is no debate; the topic is controlled by propagandists on both sides, and until they are sidelined no progress will ever be made. Weak, fearful people have gotten into the positions of power and cannot afford to grant their opponents anything. People who are strong enough to listen to criticism must roll up their sleeves and toss the weaklings out of the way, somehow.
Well, reprocessing "spent" fuel to get the unconsumed U back was what I meant by "recycling". It's a good idea and, if we can do it right, we ought to do it.
By "reuse" I meant take the stuff that's no good for large-scale power reactor fuel and use it for something else. Like sterilization or probing metal castings for flaws. And if all else fails, someone else pointed out that the gunk still produces quite a bit of heat -- not enough for a commercial electric plant, but maybe enough for something that has to sit in an inaccessible place for decades without resupply.
Hydro...yeah, come to Indianapolis and ask the old-timers where Dandy Trail is. (It's at the bottom of a reservoir now, not such a fun place to go anymore.)
Stuff like solar, wind, tides, etc. can be stored as compressed air, used to extract hydrogen from water, pushed into high-performance flywheels, etc. so batteries are not necessarily needed.
Tidal generation might actually be a good thing for e.g. the barrier island systems of the North American east coast. Hmmm.
Oh, and coal mines are hard to clean up too. Ask about all the acid runoff. Ditto the mines that produce whatever materials go into your favorite alternative energy source.
We could boil all this down pretty compactly: energy production is messy and dangerous. So's millions dying of cold or fighting the wolves off with sharp sticks, though.
Oh, good, let's have the global warming slapfight again.
Yes, the climate changes without our help. It has changed drastically many times before humans were capable of any visible effect on it.
Yes, human activity is now able to make significant changes to the climate. We need to manage our planet.
Until we can separate the human and nonhuman components of climate change, we won't understand the problem well enough to have the best ideas about what to do. However, at the point that we do gain that understanding, it would be good to already have some solutions waiting on the shelf. And there are human components which are understood well enough that we can start working out the details. After all, in learning how to safely cool our planet we also learn a lot about safely warming it up, and some day we might need to know that too....
Whatever happened to vitrification? Mix the stuff into glass, cast into handy-sized lumps, bury in moist earth, post a guard to keep the bad guys from digging it up. As deep as they want to bury it, any post-catastrophe society capable of reaching the stuff should be developed enough to figure out that it is dangerous, particularly since, unlike natural ores (which are also dangerous), the stuff will be *marked*.
Also, we've done well with Reduce and Recycle, but how are we doing with Re-use? It seems to me that much rad"waste" is just a resource for which nobody has tried hard enough to find a use. Medicine, nondestructive testing, long-term preservation of organic matter, etc. all have uses for long-lasting sources of radiation. (I tell my kids to remember where the landfills are, because their grandchildren will want to mine them.)