In today's economy, desire itself is the product. In fact it's usually the "hook" that advertising uses to make you want a product.
For example, if you use the razor or the deodorant, a hot chick will be drawn to you.
And if you'd like some peace of mind from the forever nagging kids, get the minivan with the VCR in the back so they can watch all their Disney favorites.
You are absolutely right, it's the market desires that are whacked. (puts on tap shoes to dance around Godwin's law) If there's one thing we ought to have learned from Goebbels, it's that advertising works. Oh, did I say advertising? I meant propaganda.:o
The clear way to keep a country Environmentally friendly (or Sound, smell, whatever friendly) is to let people have the freedom to avoid spending money at companies that don't support certain basic values that the people do. That is, if you want to remain capitalist.
Well, you're presenting a paradox here. Capitalist systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly. Thus, if you want to give people the "freedom" to choose which company gets their money, there has to be more than one company in that line of business. Government regulations against monopolies are about as anti-Capitalist as you can get.
The justification, of course, is that by discouraging monopolies, exactly the sorts of value propositions you mention are created -- Do I want to pay a little more for organic produce, for example.
But don't think that the power to "vote with your dollar" is built into the Capitalist system. It's not. Most people buy whatever's "cheapest" anyway, in part because they have no way of knowing the "true" cost of just about anything.
Sometimes the true cost might not be known for decades -- say in the case of a company that sold goods cheaply, who reduced their costs by dumping toxic waste, and years later the cleanup is being paid for with your tax dollars. You thought you were getting a good deal at the time...
I agree with parent comment. Yeah, sure the letter of the law might be violated when you do the bootleg thing. But what about the "rights" of consumers to, well, consume? If the IP holder is unwilling to share the IP, then as consumers I think we have every right to get it from alternative channels.
The whole "region coding" thing is the biggest farce. It made sense that once upon a time there were different formats for the different regions -- because different standards were adopted for TV broadcasts. Region Coding is a (possibly illegal) added layer of technological obscurity designed to HINDER our rights.
But, back to bootlegging. Once upon a time, my roommates found this audio tape. We have no idea where it came from. We loved it, and listened to it over and over again. Eventually we were able to find out who the band was and miraculously one roommate had a friend who collected vinyl, and he just happened to have the album. So we bought it, secondhand (or maybe third or fourth who knows).
Then we burned CDs of the vinyl because the tape was getting worn out, and now we all live in different parts of the country anyway. In fact I just burned another copy over the holidays (a copy of the copy) because my old roommate stole my last one...
I have looked for this album in used CD shops, on Ebay, wherever. It is simply not available. While I might technically be commiting a crime by copying the original, I really don't see what else a consumer is supposed to do. Go without a great record because nobody will sell it to me?
All you people who point accusing fingers at people who are bootlegging need to consider where your blind allegiance is taking us. So far it's given us artificial and abritrary Region Coding, the DMCA, and it's upgraded copyright violation from a civil crime in which harm had to be demonstrated to a federal felony where no harm needs to be shown and prosecution cost is paid with your tax dollars. Next stop is TCPA and Palladium. Care to take your heads out of your asses now?
The graffiti analogy works out fine if you change it so that they are spray-painting the inside of the store rather than the outside
Huh? The inside and the oustide of the store are both...parts of the store. What does it matter where the spraypaint is? I still put grafitti on someone's store, and its still against the law.
I think your mailbox baseball situation could go either way. If you said "yeah, I put in this extra touogh reinforced mailbox so the next punk who tried to hit it would break an arm" then you might be liable. if you said "I got this extra-sturdy mailbox, approved by usps guidelines, because i take pride in my home and dont want to have to replace this mailbox ever again" then you would probably be okay.
In other words, it goes to your intent. Do you want a mailbox that's sturdy enoug so it wont get destoyed, or are you trying to cause bodily harm to people who merely harm your property? One is not a crime, the other (probably) is.
Both events might cost the owner money. The mall might decide that in needs to upgrade to an autolocking door lock. The Bank would probably do a full and expensive security revue to correct its problems. In both cases you caused them to spend money.
No. The bank should be doing a security audit routinely. The mall should already have a better door.
What you meant to say is "Both events will cost he owner the money he should have spent in the first but didn't because he was cutting corners and trying to maximize profits."
Kinda like with pre-9-11 airline security. Sure it's the terrorists fault that the hijackings occurred, but some reasonable precautions (such as not letting an industry regualte themselves, and recognizing that airline safety is more than a minimum wage occupation) were being ignored by the airlines.
Or do you think that a bank should only do a security audit AFTER there's been a break-in?
Well, they sent me a hotmail inviting me to join, since I had previously signed up to beta-test an MP3 player or something. The url to sign up for beta testing is:
Oh, you know what, I think that's what I was very ineloquently getting at. The problem comes in when devices that are powered are pushing power to the non-powered ones. How does the power supply know if it needs to juice up it's neighbor?
(note special geek spelling of its)
My understanding (which clearly is limited) is that devices will send power to their neighbors when they are not supposed to. I would have to imagine the EE of so many different devices independently controlling their power requirements could make for an ugly circuit. One I would not want to have to solve on an exam.
It's quite possible that the problem has been solved in the new spec you mentioned.
All the devices are powered. Then they try to power each other. Then shit blows up, in a cascading overload kind of way.
This only happens when you chain like 20 drives together... The thingies you're hooking together on your FireWire chain need to be electrically (as in current-carring) isolated from each other.
You wouldn't run a train with the locomotives spaced out between every fifth boxcar, would you? No, they all go at the front. Firewire needs to learn that lesson. ANd if they're all locomotives (which they are) they need to just pull their own weight and not try to push the one in front of them.
Is there anyone out there who has chained together 20 firewire drives and NOT had their G4's firewire port blow up? If so I'd like to hear from them.
I realize that nobody is going to read comment #500 on this busy story, but here goes:
Certification in the computer industry is a waste of time, MOSTLY (with a few exceptions -- maybe general security practices, TCP/IP stuff, could be certified) It matters so little to me that the guy working on my computer has a piece of paper that says he took a test. Tests do not matter doodly-squat compared to hands-on experience.
True story: Former network admin here, MCSE, was backing up Exchange as though it was just another file. He never got priv.edb and pub.edb because (duh) Exchange keeps a lock on those babies. End result: Big Owie! (as the Gungans say). Paper tiger got burned. Me, with no cert but a clue, got his job.
One of the BEST things about the tech field is that it is relatively free from unions, guilds, and various other anti-competitive exclusionary practices. We need to keep it taht way. My highest-paid buddy only has a H.S. diploma, and he runs major web sites for big time companies. He didn't get hired because of some stupid piece of paper, but because he can get the job done.
Isn't that refreshing? We in the tech field have a self-sufficiency gene. We are all adults here, unlike teachers or policemen or the guy who bags your groceries at the Safeway -- we don't need a corrupt union to "watch out for our best interests" because we already know what our own best interests are! (href: all I wanted was a pepsi!)
Now, I wouldn't hold it against somebody that they had a tech certification. But it's much less important than their people skills, etc.
ANd how many of us haven't been ripped off at ASE-certified mechanics?
Okay, so I work on Windows systems, but it's obvious to me (and to my employer after they got burned) that MCSE and such is really all about marketing. It's supposed to demonstrate that MS has an army of highly-trained specialists who can help your organization. But it's crap, and we all know it.
Another example: a guy from Dell was here the other day to replace a failed HDD (in the Exchange server, as it turns out. God bless RAID). It took him like two hours to figure out that he needed to change the SCSI ID on the new HD. This guy was certified, but he had never heard of a SCSI ID? That's so pathetic.
If we are going to have certs, at least give me a way to file a complaint against the tech who takes two hours replacing a HDD in my mission-critical email server because he doesn't know what a SCSI ID is. Something like the Bar Association for lawyers. But I can already see where that would go: Right into the Llinux vs. Windows Flame Pit From Hell.
That's why those of us with open minds and a clue don't need any damn certs. We can stand on the merits of what we know, thank you very much.
There's a potential for abuse in pretty much any new technology, but I can also see when and where a 'trusted OS' will be a huge step forward.
Isn't one of.NET's selling points that is puts and end to.DLL Hell? And isnt' the way it accomplishes this by rolling all versions of a dll into one big dll, then letting the app specify that it needs, say, MDAC 2.5 to function.
Coincidentally, wasn't the MDAC vulnerability the one where Microsoft's solution was to remove Microsoft's name from the list of trusted entities? (Because, even though you upgraded the MDAC components on your computer, a malicious app could have the old, vulnerable, yet signed-by-MS MDAC components in its codebase and silently install them if Microsoft is "trusted.")
I don't think we'll be seeing "trusted OS" from Microsoft anytime soon. Well, it might carry the label trusted but there will be all the standard disclaimers that if hackers exploit known bugs that's not their problem.
Maybe the trick is to get a independent third party to sign off that something can be trusted. Otherwise it's kind of like Arthur Anderson's audit of Arthur Anderson turning up no irregularities.
Of course, the other reason to fear the "trusted OS" is: how can I run my own code on that puppy, without spending $$$ to get a digital seal of approval from MS or AMI or whoever. (Or get the approved development software suite) Thus taking computers out of the realm of the hobbyist once and for all. There's a lot of geeks who are going to fight to keep that from happening, and hack it if it does happen.
OTOH, maybe it's not that far off; CSS anyone? Having to buy the rights to the key so you can make a DVD player is pretty much the same thing, isn't it
How come my arrow keys aren't working anymore? Is that a Mozilla thing??
Bungi, I agree completely with everything you've said, except your (obviuosly exaggerated) 99.9% figure. it's probably more like 99.7%, and all those people secretly boot into Windows or Mac once in a while anyway.
Unfortunately, you've fallen into the Trent Lott trap. THe more you talk about it, the more poeple are going to decide that it's YOUR FAULT that Philips isn't writing Linux drivers. EVen though you've stated taht you WANT linux drivers.
I agree that MusicMatch is a lame choice, but on the other hand, it comes preinstalled with every Dell system. Clearly the philips product has a little bit too much to do with marketing and not enough to do with just getting the mp3s from your computer to your stereo...I bet that Philips came up with this idea in the dot-com days. That would account for why it looks great on paper but to us it has a
2. ???
somewhere in the marketing plan.
Interestingly enough, today I signed up to be a beta tester for the next generation of this device, the 250, which apparently does the same thing but using wi-fi. That would be cool, you could put it in the kitchen or bedroom or what have you. One of the questions for the beta test was: How many movies have you downloaded from the Internet? I did some quick math and decided that 500 one-minute pr0n clips probably equalled about 5-10 full length movies.:)
The did NOT ask Which OS are you using? Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBDS, ClosedBSD, BSBSD, iBSD, or BSD XP. And I think we can all understand why.
Well, we mostly agree. FDR's big government was definitely a mistake, though an understandable one considering the circumstances. I think the statistic is that when FDR came in to office, only about 25% of Americans had electricity in their homes. And that was only seventy years ago.
The FCC has obviously been subverted by media cartels.
The only detail that you seem to gloss over is that: Just because the economy is doing great, doesn't mean that Joe Average is any better off. Look at how CEO salaries have ballooned in the past two decades. Why hasn't that extra wealth been passed on to the workers? (And no, I'm not saying that the Government should enforce that. But whatever happened to Henry Ford's idealism?0
Large corporations skim the cream of the rest of the world and issue them HI-B visas, then move manufacturing jobs to Mexico. That is good for the economy, but it is not good for America. Too much I think we use the health of the economy as the sole measure of success. (Which gets back to my original point about how the endless cycle of industry isn't the only reason God (who I don't believe in) gave us thumbs.)
New housing starts, for example. Every time I hear that statistic, my stomach turns. The suburbs are a social and logistics nightmare -- designed in such a way as to necessitate ownership of an expensive, polluting car. But where I live, in the city, I can walk to work and ride my bike most places I want to go.
But there's more money to be made by building houses in the suburbs and making people buy cars than expanding cities. Since the almighty dollar rules, we go with the one that yields a higher initial return.
See, here's the thing: I would rather pay more taxes and have more social services.
The thing that cheeses me off the most is: Look at what our tax dollars actually go to. Taxes basically pay for our government to create a society in which big corporations are fucking me up the * daily.
But wait, I'm not done: Western Civilization seems in danger of the point. Let me try to explain: We have amasssed incredible amounts of technology and raw power at our disposal over the centuries. We are so good at simply making shit that the major cost of just about anything you buy is the cost of getting it to you. Example: A good PC case costs as much as a good CPU because, while the CPU is probably about a bajillion man-hours ahead technology-wise, they both had to be loaded onto a ship and pushed across the ocean, adding lots to the price of the case but practically nothing to the CPU.
Now, All this wealth we "create" has the ability to create more wealth. So you get a kind of snowball effect. In order to keep the cycle spinning, you have to create more, faster, and cheaper. Which places some inappropriate constraints (and fails to place some needed constraints) on the system.
I think probably the best example of where the constraints are broken is that town in Arkansas or whever that Monsanto poisoned. In an effort to be more profitable, they deliberately violated the law, based on calculations that it would be more costly to comply with the law than to break it and pay the fines.
From a shareholder perspecitve, the only thing they did wrong was to get caught. But shouldn't someone who dumps poison into a river for years on end spend the rest of their life in jail?
Meanwhile, our President transmutes business leaders into government officials, a whole bunch from a little company called Enron that you may have heard about. Hmmm I wonder..Which is greater: the average Californian's rebate, or the amount they overpaid for electricity in 2001?
So no, I'm not very excited about a tax cut. Someone needs to shine a big light on America and get the fucking cockroaches off of her.
Maybe you haven't noticed but the trend over the 20th century was towards a more regressive tax system. For example, the tax cuts that Bush came up with two years ago do much more for the rich than the poor. The lowest tax rates were cut a half a percent, the highest by a few percent.
Another example is the social security tax. You can only pay about $65,000 into this in a year. So "little folks" making under $millions pay the same percentage of their salary to SSI. But if you are making $millions, you pay a lesser percent because if you were taxed at the same rate as the common prole, you would pay way more than your $65,000. So you pay less taxes when you're rich. The result of this ceiling on pay-in to SSI, coupled with increasing salaries for top execs, is that about 35% of the wages paid in this country doesn't have any SSI deductions. 20 years ago that number was only about 20%. So the treasury is running out of funds because the rich aren't paying as much as the poor.
Adding insult to injury, when you pull the rip-cord on your golden parachute and collect your $millions in bonuses and options (i.e. retire) you can start collecting social security even though you have absolutely no need for the money. I think Reagan made that change.
No loop-holes no-deductions is not going to work because there are lobbyists and special interest groups who actively get the loopholes their clients pay them to get.
Soon, though, the Federal Government won't have any money, since we have all these tax breaks for the wealthy. My belief is that then we will have to sell off public lands (incl. mineral and timber rights, water rights, etc.) and privatize public services in order to balance the budget. And guess who's going to benefit from that? It's the same people who benefitted from the regressive tax system in the first place!
You should be listening to 89.3 WPFW. No corporate sponsors, no ads. Occasionally they ahve a pledge drive, during which time you can listen to HFS again and remember how horrible it was listening to commerical radio.
the market will punish bad decisions of corporations much more efficiently than the electoral system will punish bad decisions of government bodies.
You mean like the way the market punished Enron?
Oh, okay, Enron is out of business. But none of the execs are in jail. Looks like the free market only punished the worker bees at Enron, and all it cost was doubling the electicity rates of everyone on the west coast. Enron screwed the West Coast, and their punishment is that the poor slobs who were "only following orders" at Enron are out of a job, while the "evildoers" walk.
The incredible amounts of money that our regulated and semi-regulated industries deal in are far too tempting for private companies to not exploit, cook the books, what have you. Airlines, utilities, and rail travel all need to be run by the government (at least in large part.)
Look at RailTrack in the U.K. That worked well. Not.
While there is much less motivation to spend wealth wisely among politicians than among CEOs there is also much less incentive (or even possibility) to grant yourself huge stock options, bonuses, and multiple golden parachutes and escape clauses at the expense of your customers.
How can the "market" know who to punish when the CFOs at Enron and WorldCom are lying in their SEC filings? The market only finds out well after the crime has been committed, and hence it will always be reactive. What we need is a more proactive approach so we're not always cleaning up the next big corporate mess.
And how do you deal with the fact that private corporations will deliberately break the law, knowing that the fine is less than the cost of, say, disposing of hazardous waste properly? A public enterprise does not have the luxury of performing a cost-benefit analysis of doing something illegal. By contrast, a corporation is practically COMPELLED to consider illegal behavior if it represents an attractive value proposition to its shareholders.
Hentai, you have a point but I don't agree with it completely. There is a vast difference between getting screwed by Big Government and getting screwed by Big Business.
Some utilities, like the phone company, deal in sick amounts of money. On the order of a billion dollars a week in revenues. (Not sure of the exact number)
Put that much money in the hands of a government office, and they will bloat out and become horribly inefficient. You'll pay too much for your services, and libertarians will whine that the private sector would be sooo much more efficient.
What the libertarians overlook is the incredible temptation of huge, huge sums of money. I cannot say that I wouldn't do the same things as those Enron scumbags were I in their place, and had the chance to get away with it (as they pretty much have done so far.)
So while you're "screwed either way" there is definitely a great difference in the severity with which you will be screwed. As everybody on the West Coast found out.
I guess what I'm saying is, I'd rather have the Farmer in charge of the hen house rather than the Fox -- The Farmer, if he has a brain, won't kill all the hens at once because he needs them to make more hens. The Fox will go nuts, taking whatever he wants without any sort of a long-term vision thing guiding his efforts. The fox will rape and pillage with reckless abandon, since he knows The Farmer will tax the hens to pay for rebuilding the henhouse after it's turned in into a meth lab. The Farmer's vision might be misguided at times, but at least he sees us chickens as a tiny bit more than raw materials for his profit-making pleasure-taking machine.
Don't get me wrong, I recognize that the role of government is to provide a stable and functional enough societal framework to let the entrepreneurs play. In that sense the government's business is pimping its own people out to the capitalists. But there's a huge difference between the mission statement and the mindset of your public utility that provides your drinking water (a basic service that should be available to all) and a private coporation that provides your drinking water (a valuable product and if you can't afford it too bad).
Opponents of the proposed rules fear that, taken together, they ultimately could lead to a few powerful conglomerates controlling the flow of electronic information
Shouldn't that be fewer powerful conglomerates?
Deregulation of the telecom industry has brought us the lowest rates ever! Of course, we're paying fees, taxes, tariffs, surcharges, adjustments, and recoupments that didn't even exist before, but look -- deregulation must work because rates are lower.
The situation with deregulation in this country has put the foxes in charge of hen house.
For my opinion of FCC Chairman Michael Powell, read my other post.
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In today's economy, desire itself is the product. In fact it's usually the "hook" that advertising uses to make you want a product.
:o
For example, if you use the razor or the deodorant, a hot chick will be drawn to you.
And if you'd like some peace of mind from the forever nagging kids, get the minivan with the VCR in the back so they can watch all their Disney favorites.
You are absolutely right, it's the market desires that are whacked. (puts on tap shoes to dance around Godwin's law) If there's one thing we ought to have learned from Goebbels, it's that advertising works. Oh, did I say advertising? I meant propaganda.
The clear way to keep a country Environmentally friendly (or Sound, smell, whatever friendly) is to let people have the freedom to avoid spending money at companies that don't support certain basic values that the people do. That is, if you want to remain capitalist.
Well, you're presenting a paradox here. Capitalist systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly. Thus, if you want to give people the "freedom" to choose which company gets their money, there has to be more than one company in that line of business. Government regulations against monopolies are about as anti-Capitalist as you can get.
The justification, of course, is that by discouraging monopolies, exactly the sorts of value propositions you mention are created -- Do I want to pay a little more for organic produce, for example.
But don't think that the power to "vote with your dollar" is built into the Capitalist system. It's not. Most people buy whatever's "cheapest" anyway, in part because they have no way of knowing the "true" cost of just about anything.
Sometimes the true cost might not be known for decades -- say in the case of a company that sold goods cheaply, who reduced their costs by dumping toxic waste, and years later the cleanup is being paid for with your tax dollars. You thought you were getting a good deal at the time...
Technically, what we have is the corporations dictating to the politicians. :) Politicians are the "middle management" of America.
I agree with parent comment. Yeah, sure the letter of the law might be violated when you do the bootleg thing. But what about the "rights" of consumers to, well, consume? If the IP holder is unwilling to share the IP, then as consumers I think we have every right to get it from alternative channels.
The whole "region coding" thing is the biggest farce. It made sense that once upon a time there were different formats for the different regions -- because different standards were adopted for TV broadcasts. Region Coding is a (possibly illegal) added layer of technological obscurity designed to HINDER our rights.
But, back to bootlegging. Once upon a time, my roommates found this audio tape. We have no idea where it came from. We loved it, and listened to it over and over again. Eventually we were able to find out who the band was and miraculously one roommate had a friend who collected vinyl, and he just happened to have the album. So we bought it, secondhand (or maybe third or fourth who knows).
Then we burned CDs of the vinyl because the tape was getting worn out, and now we all live in different parts of the country anyway. In fact I just burned another copy over the holidays (a copy of the copy) because my old roommate stole my last one...
I have looked for this album in used CD shops, on Ebay, wherever. It is simply not available. While I might technically be commiting a crime by copying the original, I really don't see what else a consumer is supposed to do. Go without a great record because nobody will sell it to me?
All you people who point accusing fingers at people who are bootlegging need to consider where your blind allegiance is taking us. So far it's given us artificial and abritrary Region Coding, the DMCA, and it's upgraded copyright violation from a civil crime in which harm had to be demonstrated to a federal felony where no harm needs to be shown and prosecution cost is paid with your tax dollars. Next stop is TCPA and Palladium. Care to take your heads out of your asses now?
I would like a BIOS that keeps Anonymous Cowards off of Slashdot
Now from a practical point of view you are correct but this isn't about that.
:)
Thanks, this is why I come to Slashdot
The graffiti analogy works out fine if you change it so that they are spray-painting the inside of the store rather than the outside
Huh? The inside and the oustide of the store are both...parts of the store. What does it matter where the spraypaint is? I still put grafitti on someone's store, and its still against the law.
I think your mailbox baseball situation could go either way. If you said "yeah, I put in this extra touogh reinforced mailbox so the next punk who tried to hit it would break an arm" then you might be liable. if you said "I got this extra-sturdy mailbox, approved by usps guidelines, because i take pride in my home and dont want to have to replace this mailbox ever again" then you would probably be okay.
In other words, it goes to your intent. Do you want a mailbox that's sturdy enoug so it wont get destoyed, or are you trying to cause bodily harm to people who merely harm your property? One is not a crime, the other (probably) is.
Both events might cost the owner money. The mall might decide that in needs to upgrade to an autolocking door lock. The Bank would probably do a full and expensive security revue to correct its problems. In both cases you caused them to spend money.
No. The bank should be doing a security audit routinely. The mall should already have a better door.
What you meant to say is "Both events will cost he owner the money he should have spent in the first but didn't because he was cutting corners and trying to maximize profits."
Kinda like with pre-9-11 airline security. Sure it's the terrorists fault that the hijackings occurred, but some reasonable precautions (such as not letting an industry regualte themselves, and recognizing that airline safety is more than a minimum wage occupation) were being ignored by the airlines.
Or do you think that a bank should only do a security audit AFTER there's been a break-in?
You see, Vergon 6 was once filled with the super-dense substance known as dark matter, each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds.
Well, they sent me a hotmail inviting me to join, since I had previously signed up to beta-test an MP3 player or something. The url to sign up for beta testing is:
http://www.audio.philips.com/betatest.asp
Oh, you know what, I think that's what I was very ineloquently getting at. The problem comes in when devices that are powered are pushing power to the non-powered ones. How does the power supply know if it needs to juice up it's neighbor?
(note special geek spelling of its)
My understanding (which clearly is limited) is that devices will send power to their neighbors when they are not supposed to. I would have to imagine the EE of so many different devices independently controlling their power requirements could make for an ugly circuit. One I would not want to have to solve on an exam.
It's quite possible that the problem has been solved in the new spec you mentioned.
You know what sucks about firewire?
All the devices are powered. Then they try to power each other. Then shit blows up, in a cascading overload kind of way.
This only happens when you chain like 20 drives together... The thingies you're hooking together on your FireWire chain need to be electrically (as in current-carring) isolated from each other.
You wouldn't run a train with the locomotives spaced out between every fifth boxcar, would you? No, they all go at the front. Firewire needs to learn that lesson. ANd if they're all locomotives (which they are) they need to just pull their own weight and not try to push the one in front of them.
Is there anyone out there who has chained together 20 firewire drives and NOT had their G4's firewire port blow up? If so I'd like to hear from them.
I realize that nobody is going to read comment #500 on this busy story, but here goes:
Certification in the computer industry is a waste of time, MOSTLY (with a few exceptions -- maybe general security practices, TCP/IP stuff, could be certified) It matters so little to me that the guy working on my computer has a piece of paper that says he took a test. Tests do not matter doodly-squat compared to hands-on experience.
True story: Former network admin here, MCSE, was backing up Exchange as though it was just another file. He never got priv.edb and pub.edb because (duh) Exchange keeps a lock on those babies. End result: Big Owie! (as the Gungans say). Paper tiger got burned. Me, with no cert but a clue, got his job.
One of the BEST things about the tech field is that it is relatively free from unions, guilds, and various other anti-competitive exclusionary practices. We need to keep it taht way. My highest-paid buddy only has a H.S. diploma, and he runs major web sites for big time companies. He didn't get hired because of some stupid piece of paper, but because he can get the job done.
Isn't that refreshing? We in the tech field have a self-sufficiency gene. We are all adults here, unlike teachers or policemen or the guy who bags your groceries at the Safeway -- we don't need a corrupt union to "watch out for our best interests" because we already know what our own best interests are! (href: all I wanted was a pepsi!)
Now, I wouldn't hold it against somebody that they had a tech certification. But it's much less important than their people skills, etc.
ANd how many of us haven't been ripped off at ASE-certified mechanics?
Okay, so I work on Windows systems, but it's obvious to me (and to my employer after they got burned) that MCSE and such is really all about marketing. It's supposed to demonstrate that MS has an army of highly-trained specialists who can help your organization. But it's crap, and we all know it.
Another example: a guy from Dell was here the other day to replace a failed HDD (in the Exchange server, as it turns out. God bless RAID). It took him like two hours to figure out that he needed to change the SCSI ID on the new HD. This guy was certified, but he had never heard of a SCSI ID? That's so pathetic.
If we are going to have certs, at least give me a way to file a complaint against the tech who takes two hours replacing a HDD in my mission-critical email server because he doesn't know what a SCSI ID is. Something like the Bar Association for lawyers. But I can already see where that would go: Right into the Llinux vs. Windows Flame Pit From Hell.
That's why those of us with open minds and a clue don't need any damn certs. We can stand on the merits of what we know, thank you very much.
There's a potential for abuse in pretty much any new technology, but I can also see when and where a 'trusted OS' will be a huge step forward.
.NET's selling points that is puts and end to .DLL Hell? And isnt' the way it accomplishes this by rolling all versions of a dll into one big dll, then letting the app specify that it needs, say, MDAC 2.5 to function.
Isn't one of
Coincidentally, wasn't the MDAC vulnerability the one where Microsoft's solution was to remove Microsoft's name from the list of trusted entities? (Because, even though you upgraded the MDAC components on your computer, a malicious app could have the old, vulnerable, yet signed-by-MS MDAC components in its codebase and silently install them if Microsoft is "trusted.")
I don't think we'll be seeing "trusted OS" from Microsoft anytime soon. Well, it might carry the label trusted but there will be all the standard disclaimers that if hackers exploit known bugs that's not their problem.
Maybe the trick is to get a independent third party to sign off that something can be trusted. Otherwise it's kind of like Arthur Anderson's audit of Arthur Anderson turning up no irregularities.
Of course, the other reason to fear the "trusted OS" is: how can I run my own code on that puppy, without spending $$$ to get a digital seal of approval from MS or AMI or whoever. (Or get the approved development software suite) Thus taking computers out of the realm of the hobbyist once and for all. There's a lot of geeks who are going to fight to keep that from happening, and hack it if it does happen.
OTOH, maybe it's not that far off; CSS anyone? Having to buy the rights to the key so you can make a DVD player is pretty much the same thing, isn't it
How come my arrow keys aren't working anymore? Is that a Mozilla thing??
Yeah, it's the same reason it's OK to refuse service to niggers, you are still catering to 88% of the universe.
You are forgetting about all the dark matter out there in the Universe.
(rimshot!)
Bungi, I agree completely with everything you've said, except your (obviuosly exaggerated) 99.9% figure. it's probably more like 99.7%, and all those people secretly boot into Windows or Mac once in a while anyway.
:)
Unfortunately, you've fallen into the Trent Lott trap. THe more you talk about it, the more poeple are going to decide that it's YOUR FAULT that Philips isn't writing Linux drivers. EVen though you've stated taht you WANT linux drivers.
I agree that MusicMatch is a lame choice, but on the other hand, it comes preinstalled with every Dell system. Clearly the philips product has a little bit too much to do with marketing and not enough to do with just getting the mp3s from your computer to your stereo...I bet that Philips came up with this idea in the dot-com days. That would account for why it looks great on paper but to us it has a
2. ???
somewhere in the marketing plan.
Interestingly enough, today I signed up to be a beta tester for the next generation of this device, the 250, which apparently does the same thing but using wi-fi. That would be cool, you could put it in the kitchen or bedroom or what have you. One of the questions for the beta test was: How many movies have you downloaded from the Internet? I did some quick math and decided that 500 one-minute pr0n clips probably equalled about 5-10 full length movies.
The did NOT ask Which OS are you using? Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBDS, ClosedBSD, BSBSD, iBSD, or BSD XP. And I think we can all understand why.
Well, we mostly agree. FDR's big government was definitely a mistake, though an understandable one considering the circumstances. I think the statistic is that when FDR came in to office, only about 25% of Americans had electricity in their homes. And that was only seventy years ago.
:)
The FCC has obviously been subverted by media cartels.
The only detail that you seem to gloss over is that: Just because the economy is doing great, doesn't mean that Joe Average is any better off. Look at how CEO salaries have ballooned in the past two decades. Why hasn't that extra wealth been passed on to the workers? (And no, I'm not saying that the Government should enforce that. But whatever happened to Henry Ford's idealism?0
Large corporations skim the cream of the rest of the world and issue them HI-B visas, then move manufacturing jobs to Mexico. That is good for the economy, but it is not good for America. Too much I think we use the health of the economy as the sole measure of success. (Which gets back to my original point about how the endless cycle of industry isn't the only reason God (who I don't believe in) gave us thumbs.)
New housing starts, for example. Every time I hear that statistic, my stomach turns. The suburbs are a social and logistics nightmare -- designed in such a way as to necessitate ownership of an expensive, polluting car. But where I live, in the city, I can walk to work and ride my bike most places I want to go.
But there's more money to be made by building houses in the suburbs and making people buy cars than expanding cities. Since the almighty dollar rules, we go with the one that yields a higher initial return.
Yeah, we could go on about this for hours
See, here's the thing: I would rather pay more taxes and have more social services.
The thing that cheeses me off the most is: Look at what our tax dollars actually go to. Taxes basically pay for our government to create a society in which big corporations are fucking me up the * daily.
But wait, I'm not done: Western Civilization seems in danger of the point. Let me try to explain: We have amasssed incredible amounts of technology and raw power at our disposal over the centuries. We are so good at simply making shit that the major cost of just about anything you buy is the cost of getting it to you. Example: A good PC case costs as much as a good CPU because, while the CPU is probably about a bajillion man-hours ahead technology-wise, they both had to be loaded onto a ship and pushed across the ocean, adding lots to the price of the case but practically nothing to the CPU.
Now, All this wealth we "create" has the ability to create more wealth. So you get a kind of snowball effect. In order to keep the cycle spinning, you have to create more, faster, and cheaper. Which places some inappropriate constraints (and fails to place some needed constraints) on the system.
I think probably the best example of where the constraints are broken is that town in Arkansas or whever that Monsanto poisoned. In an effort to be more profitable, they deliberately violated the law, based on calculations that it would be more costly to comply with the law than to break it and pay the fines.
From a shareholder perspecitve, the only thing they did wrong was to get caught. But shouldn't someone who dumps poison into a river for years on end spend the rest of their life in jail?
Meanwhile, our President transmutes business leaders into government officials, a whole bunch from a little company called Enron that you may have heard about. Hmmm I wonder..Which is greater: the average Californian's rebate, or the amount they overpaid for electricity in 2001?
So no, I'm not very excited about a tax cut. Someone needs to shine a big light on America and get the fucking cockroaches off of her.
Maybe you haven't noticed but the trend over the 20th century was towards a more regressive tax system. For example, the tax cuts that Bush came up with two years ago do much more for the rich than the poor. The lowest tax rates were cut a half a percent, the highest by a few percent.
Another example is the social security tax. You can only pay about $65,000 into this in a year. So "little folks" making under $millions pay the same percentage of their salary to SSI. But if you are making $millions, you pay a lesser percent because if you were taxed at the same rate as the common prole, you would pay way more than your $65,000. So you pay less taxes when you're rich. The result of this ceiling on pay-in to SSI, coupled with increasing salaries for top execs, is that about 35% of the wages paid in this country doesn't have any SSI deductions. 20 years ago that number was only about 20%. So the treasury is running out of funds because the rich aren't paying as much as the poor.
Adding insult to injury, when you pull the rip-cord on your golden parachute and collect your $millions in bonuses and options (i.e. retire) you can start collecting social security even though you have absolutely no need for the money. I think Reagan made that change.
No loop-holes no-deductions is not going to work because there are lobbyists and special interest groups who actively get the loopholes their clients pay them to get.
Soon, though, the Federal Government won't have any money, since we have all these tax breaks for the wealthy. My belief is that then we will have to sell off public lands (incl. mineral and timber rights, water rights, etc.) and privatize public services in order to balance the budget. And guess who's going to benefit from that? It's the same people who benefitted from the regressive tax system in the first place!
Nice to see the system working!
The simple solution is to not use TurboTax. TaxAct.com has always worked for me. And it's free.
Or, pay an actual human being to do your taxes. I've never done it but I understand they know all about the loopholes and stuff.
You should be listening to 89.3 WPFW. No corporate sponsors, no ads. Occasionally they ahve a pledge drive, during which time you can listen to HFS again and remember how horrible it was listening to commerical radio.
the market will punish bad decisions of corporations much more efficiently than the electoral system will punish bad decisions of government bodies.
You mean like the way the market punished Enron?
Oh, okay, Enron is out of business. But none of the execs are in jail. Looks like the free market only punished the worker bees at Enron, and all it cost was doubling the electicity rates of everyone on the west coast. Enron screwed the West Coast, and their punishment is that the poor slobs who were "only following orders" at Enron are out of a job, while the "evildoers" walk.
The incredible amounts of money that our regulated and semi-regulated industries deal in are far too tempting for private companies to not exploit, cook the books, what have you. Airlines, utilities, and rail travel all need to be run by the government (at least in large part.)
Look at RailTrack in the U.K. That worked well. Not.
While there is much less motivation to spend wealth wisely among politicians than among CEOs there is also much less incentive (or even possibility) to grant yourself huge stock options, bonuses, and multiple golden parachutes and escape clauses at the expense of your customers.
How can the "market" know who to punish when the CFOs at Enron and WorldCom are lying in their SEC filings? The market only finds out well after the crime has been committed, and hence it will always be reactive. What we need is a more proactive approach so we're not always cleaning up the next big corporate mess.
And how do you deal with the fact that private corporations will deliberately break the law, knowing that the fine is less than the cost of, say, disposing of hazardous waste properly? A public enterprise does not have the luxury of performing a cost-benefit analysis of doing something illegal. By contrast, a corporation is practically COMPELLED to consider illegal behavior if it represents an attractive value proposition to its shareholders.
Hentai, you have a point but I don't agree with it completely. There is a vast difference between getting screwed by Big Government and getting screwed by Big Business.
Some utilities, like the phone company, deal in sick amounts of money. On the order of a billion dollars a week in revenues. (Not sure of the exact number)
Put that much money in the hands of a government office, and they will bloat out and become horribly inefficient. You'll pay too much for your services, and libertarians will whine that the private sector would be sooo much more efficient.
What the libertarians overlook is the incredible temptation of huge, huge sums of money. I cannot say that I wouldn't do the same things as those Enron scumbags were I in their place, and had the chance to get away with it (as they pretty much have done so far.)
So while you're "screwed either way" there is definitely a great difference in the severity with which you will be screwed. As everybody on the West Coast found out.
I guess what I'm saying is, I'd rather have the Farmer in charge of the hen house rather than the Fox -- The Farmer, if he has a brain, won't kill all the hens at once because he needs them to make more hens. The Fox will go nuts, taking whatever he wants without any sort of a long-term vision thing guiding his efforts. The fox will rape and pillage with reckless abandon, since he knows The Farmer will tax the hens to pay for rebuilding the henhouse after it's turned in into a meth lab. The Farmer's vision might be misguided at times, but at least he sees us chickens as a tiny bit more than raw materials for his profit-making pleasure-taking machine.
Don't get me wrong, I recognize that the role of government is to provide a stable and functional enough societal framework to let the entrepreneurs play. In that sense the government's business is pimping its own people out to the capitalists. But there's a huge difference between the mission statement and the mindset of your public utility that provides your drinking water (a basic service that should be available to all) and a private coporation that provides your drinking water (a valuable product and if you can't afford it too bad).
Opponents of the proposed rules fear that, taken together, they ultimately could lead to a few powerful conglomerates controlling the flow of electronic information
Shouldn't that be fewer powerful conglomerates?
Deregulation of the telecom industry has brought us the lowest rates ever! Of course, we're paying fees, taxes, tariffs, surcharges, adjustments, and recoupments that didn't even exist before, but look -- deregulation must work because rates are lower.
The situation with deregulation in this country has put the foxes in charge of hen house.
For my opinion of FCC Chairman Michael Powell, read my other post.