What made it a revolution was that now the parts and techniques required are cheap and ubiquitous.
In 1989 there was a big to-do about 3-D output for computers, but the ultr-cheap miniature haptic sensors, color display units and other amenities that make stuff like the Oculus Rift possible weren't there yet.
Even television didn't spring up out of nothing.
Sometimes the revolution doesn't come until the time is right.
This "obviously trivial" research is worth a lot of money to the right people.
Just because you "know" something can be done doesn't mean that it can be done easily, economically, or effectively. And then there's the stuff that people "know" that's not so at all.
People in industrial and military espionage can now take heart in the knowledge that all sorts of top-secret plans can be stolen with 90+% accuracy by simply "accidentally" leaving a phone on a workbench. That means that they don't have to chance possibly less unobtrusive ways that they might also "know".
Conversely, security-minded installations have one more reason to prohibit cellphones in sensitive areas and even not-so-obviously sensitive ones like open production floors.
Now, what do we "know" about that FitBit you're wearing?
I'm presuming that the matter being used is sub-atomic, where you don't have to worry so much about too much sodium and not enough carbon, But then I always assumed that they were taking E=mc^2 to its logical conclusion so actual physical matter in any form wouldn't be required to start with.
As for beaming through shields, I can't walk through closed doors, either.
The reboot is ageist as hell. Everyone's about the same age.
To be fair, the real ages of most of the principals on TOS were fairly close, but the portrayed ages varied, from the aging Doctor and mature Senior Engineer, to the Captain who's young for his rank and reputation, down to seasoned junior officers and bottoming out with a junior Ensign and Yeoman. And then there's the Vulcan, who's likely on par with Scotty in terms of chronological age, experience and wisdom but presumed biologically pubescent. All of whom have come up through the ranks, though many faster than average.
In contrast, the reboot is basically a bunch of kids boost a starship. No separate careers coming together over the years, no earned ranks, essentially just a mob of fratboys running into each other all at once.
Or do they simply engage in a beauty contest and vote for people they like, or who make the biggest promises: "vote for me as your CEO and I'll give everyone a pay rise and annual bonus"
It all sounds lovely and group-huggy. But does it actually make the company more successful or a better place to work?
That's how we select the CEO for our country. And it's usually easier to switch employers than it is to switch homelands.
Regardless, the way we select CEOs now isn't gaining a lot of points for prosperity for many companies, much less the countries that grant them their corporate charters. In fact, the primary people who have been prospering lately have been the CEOs themselves, whether their companies succeed or fail.
The original expectations that sovereign nations had for chartering incorporated businesses was based on the idea that the shareholders would be fairly directly involved. That they would be in it for the long haul, not just for the next quarter or day-trade tick. And that the more involvement that they had financially, the more right they had to make the critical decisions. Thus, corporations are not democratic - instead of one person (employee or otherwise) one vote, it's one share one vote.
We lost the personal stakes long ago for the most part. These days, CEOs are mostly only answerable to a small group for a short time, and just to add insult to injury, becoming a CEO often brings with it actual shares or options that can be manipulated by the CEO for personal profit regardless of the long-term effect on the corporation, its employees or its customers.
So I suppose that a beauty contest might not be any worse than what we've cooked up on our own.
This is Microsoft. Periodically the fridge will lock up - like because of the bug where it you put a jam jar with an expiration date whose month is an odd number on the middle shelf between leftover Chinese takeout and a can of soda,
To reset the fridge and resume cooling, you will have to press the refrigerator-side door closed while cycling the icemaker and lifting up on the water dispenser lever.
Of course, if we REALLY wanted Linux to be more like Windows, we'd have to make it disable the GUI and all user processes for 15 minutes after rebooting while displaying "installing update 1 of 36" messages and then cripple system performance for an additional 20 minutes after login while the virus scan ran.
Maybe Poettering and Icaza have something in the works. They like the Windows approach.
The reason that people don't use it is because when they bought their computers, Windows was already installed. If Linux had been installed, people would be using that. Don't give me a lot of guff about Windows being easier to use - it isn't - or too much difference in OS's - Windows routinely scrambles even the most trivial of concepts between major releases. The only place where Linux fails miserably as a desktop OS is lack of a consistent cut/copy/paste.
The only time I boot Windows these days is to run TurboTax. And that's because Intuit's head is so far up Microsoft's butt that for them "export to Excel" means that you have to have a physical copy of Excel on the same machine because they use the OLE interface to transfer data instead of offering a CSV or XLS export option like everyone else in the world - including Microsoft - does.
The one major app that Linux lacks is Photoshop and people can argue about that one all day long, but I don't need Photoshop for my job or home use. And I'm sure that if Linux was routinely pre-installed on PCs that Adobe would respond quickly.
Linux runs the programs I need to run just fine. In fact, better than Windows, since a lot of stuff that I'd have to go out and purchase and install on Windows are stock packages on Linux installable and upgradable with a single command. And they don't "phone home" to the vendor, break because I don't have the secret key handy when I need to do an upgrade, make me dread a SWAT team from the BSA, or any of the other "joys" of the Windows world.
And, sadly, I can get better support on most Linux apps (and the OS) than I can from the commercial vendors. No "Please stay on the line your call is VERY important to us", no "Hi my name is Charlie" in an impenetrable accent, and even the free online forums typically have more knowledge and responsiveness than many commercial vendors provide these days.
If you have a competent AI running the company, the "CEO" job would devolve into something more like a Wal-Mart greeter. A friendly public human face for the company. I guess that puts Larry Ellison out of a job, though, doesn't it?
And why have "a" CEO if that's all the job entails? Hire an even half-dozen or so of them, take a quantity discount and never lack for corporate PR at all the best public functions.
Teach a man to fish and he and his family will starve become some rich/powerful asshole owns the lake, the boats and the bait and tackle shop and charges accordingly.
I don't even read my own voice memos. Lots of luck getting me to deal with anyone else's.
I'm very protective of my multi-media experiences. You want to drive me away? Load up on motion videos. Want to drive me away permanently? Make them auto-play audio at me.
If I had a boss who kept peppering me with voice messages all day long, I'd quickly be looking for another boss. It's bad enough when they do it in person, but at least the look of rage on my face when I'm interrupted in a delicate task makes them more considerate.
Corporations are groups with one sole charter: make money to appease the stockholders.
I think you really need to get educated on what corporate charters are, who issues them, and what they mean. A corporate charter is simply a mandate granted by the people to operate as a unit, with certain privileges and responsibilities that the individuals who incorporate don't have. The world is full of non-profit corporations as well as profit-making corporations who choose to temper their greed with other considerations. There's no law that demands that in exchange for the "Inc." you have to be a predatory rapist with no regard for humanity/
In any event, is this "making money to appease the stockholders" or is it liquidating assets to pocket a quick short-term savings before the reduced production capabilities kick in? Selling the future so someone can grab the cash and run in the present?
I made my money - quite a lot of it - from being a long-term Cisco stockholder. When they stopped being a good long-term investment, I sold my shares and put the money to more constructive use.
I have as much faith in "education" as I do in supply-side economics. Every day we find a new way to offshore or outright automate a once-secure profession. In fact, I'm just waiting for the day that the competitive companies are the ones that lay off all those overpriced executives and replace them with AI's. There are strong indications that a system like IBM's Watson may already be better at executive decision-making than meatbags are. AI's don't have to salve their egos with expensive toys or power games, so they're not going to be tempted to jerk corporate assets around for their own short-term benefit.
Something needs to change. We cannot "downsize our way to greatness" forever. If we lay everyone off, who buys our products? Few people have any hope that re-education is anything more than a hamster wheel with a motor spinning it increasingly faster.
Laying people off is a waste of resources. Unlike new hires, these are known quantities, have already learned the corporate ecocosm, and would be more motivate to work for the corporate benefit than a whole new group of people brought in knowing that they, too, are only there to be used and discarded. Why should recycling be a principle only applied to materials? Why aren't there any executives far-seeing enough to find new ways to exploit existing assets and to invest resources in molding them to new and profitable ends? We spend years on exploding executive compensation by rationalizing that these people were like Gods in their extra-ordinary wisdom and vision and deserved to be compensated accordingly. Why aren't they demonstrating these preternatural abilities to the benefit of the shareholders?
It's a good thing executives are so extra-ordinarily well-compensated. The first time an Artificial Intelligence can utilize a corporation's human resources that efficiently, they, too will start joining the ranks of the laid-off. Only whatever savings the made from those fat paychecks will allow them to distinguish themselves from the peons they sent before them.
That pile of rotting corpses would serve as more than that. It's a distinct health hazard and good luck getting someone to come in and treat you when you live like like that.
If you have to kill 10 people a day, you're seriously besieged. Any normal war would mean that probably 100 people would actually be trying to take you out if you were managing a 10-person kill ratio. And if there really are 10 people trying per day, it's virtual certainty that they'll start ganging up. How many can you take out at once? Or do you expect to have help? Don't forget to share out the bullets.
In fact, I think 10 percent is probably a good estimate for almost anything along those lines. Hunting? Unless you're better than predator cats, only about one attempt in 10 will bag you dinner. But even at a 100% kill rate and only one animal in the pot a week, expect the ammo to run out in around 20 years. Assuming you didn't use it up faster barricading your home with corpses.
That's because in the West, the post-1980 business philosophy has been "Efficiency to the Max!"
You are expected to give "110% percent". Everyone is running Big Data analytics. The bean-counters scour the numbers and do cherry-picking to get the big profits and lemon-dropping to discard the losers. JIT inventory. On-demand elastic clouds. And all in the context of the next quarter's earnings report.
No sane general would commit troops without maintaining reserves for the inevitable unforeseen, but modern western businesses cannot stand a moment of wasteful "idle time" or resources sitting around unused.
And so, when the inevitable happens - train wreck. There's no spare parts, no idle people to put to work, nothing. No reserve capacity.
As they used to say back when computers were expensive objects of reverence, "Never before in human history has it been possible to screw up so badly on so large a scale so quickly". Such is the 2-edged sword of modern technology.
Actually, as I understand it, Windows itself will honor a "/" as a path separator in some cases. Probably the biggest reason that DOS/Windows ended up using a backslash as a path separator was what a lot of the CP/M and MS-DOS paradigm came from the DEC OS world, where "/" was used as a switch prefix instead of the dash character used by the Unix OS. Making a "/" in a filepath potentially ambigous.
Java, on the other hand, will cheerfully honor a "real" (forward slash) as an abstract pathname separator on all OS's and convert as needed when using file path (java.io.File) references. It's a smart thing to do. Not only is the code more portable, but backslashes are used as escape characters when compiling Java strings, and you can cause yourself all sorts of grief by forgetting to double-up on them when coding DOS-style paths.
Slash and backslash aren't the only path separators I've seen in a long and evil career, I've also seen angle-brackets (<disk>directory>file) and colons (:disk:directory:file). But the OS's in question are more or less extinct now.
Libertarians are under the delusion that an armed population, with a substantial fraction of them willing to shoot a bully or (in the case of a gang attack) take as many as possible down before one of them gets them, tends to make bullies and gangsters back down, or at least go find somebody who isn't alert enough to get his gun out in time.
The irony of that statement is that there's a technical term for a self-organized group of people working at a common cause for the (alleged) benefit of all. That term is "government".
The problem with Libertarianism is that inside every small government, there's a big government trying to get out.
Yes, but that's because code targeted for Java 1.5 on Windows would run equally well under Linux. Because Java was designed from Day 1 to be future-proof and portable. Lotsa luck with those Visual J++ apps, though.
Now excuse me while I go trying to find what they've renamed Network Neighborhood to for this Windows release.
People never seem to figure out that software isn't write-once/run-forever. Over time, software rots from the outside in. Sure, the bits are all there, but the hardware and external services that they are designed to talk to eventually change so much that having the original bits is useless.
Budgeting software as a one-time expense is like buying a Mercedes and never doing an oil change.
There is a problem with Proprietary versus Open, though. I still have the source-code disks for Red Hat 7. Not the RHEL one with systemd, the original Red Hat version 7.2, circa Y2K. If my organization was tied tightly to it, having the source code means that if a problem arises relative to the OS, I could pay someone a no-doubt exorbitant amount of money to dig into that code and do something about it. You can't do that with Windows NT. Even if you had the deep pockets that allowed you source code access to NT, Microsoft probably repealed that by now. Essentially, if you need source code changes for Windows NT, the cost wouldn't be merely exorbitant, they'd probably be ruinous. And, of course, they could simply refuse to help you at all. Because as far as I am aware, Microsoft never licensed Windows unconditionally and in perpetuity to anyone, and if certainly wouldn't have been cheap if they did.
And cheap is a lot of why you end up with thousands of dead copies of XP running on critical systems daily.
"false assumption that resource shortages are fundamental problems with the world that cannot be corrected through technological means of increasing those resources"
Which is also a false assumption. People have the most annoying assumptions that everything goes in straight lines or simple curves, or endless cycles.
Technology can be used to mitigate problems. It cannot always make them go away forever, especially when on the bottom line there are only a finite amount of resources that can be exploited even after the best technological solutions in the world are used to leverage them. Usually you run into the Law of Diminishing Returns.
If you pull an all-nighter and write 1000 lines of code, then you're likely in violation of the "I only think as hard as I have to" part.
If, on the other hand, you spent your time daydreaming, a light bulb came on while you were taking a shower, and the net result is 20 minutes of work and 30 lines of brilliant code, then you qualify.
But management will ding you, because while you're supposed to work smarter and not harder, if they don't see you "working", then you're "obviously" not being "productive". So keep doing those all-nighters and job security will be yours. Maybe.
Slashdot Mirror
What made it a revolution was that now the parts and techniques required are cheap and ubiquitous.
In 1989 there was a big to-do about 3-D output for computers, but the ultr-cheap miniature haptic sensors, color display units and other amenities that make stuff like the Oculus Rift possible weren't there yet.
Even television didn't spring up out of nothing.
Sometimes the revolution doesn't come until the time is right.
This "obviously trivial" research is worth a lot of money to the right people.
Just because you "know" something can be done doesn't mean that it can be done easily, economically, or effectively. And then there's the stuff that people "know" that's not so at all.
People in industrial and military espionage can now take heart in the knowledge that all sorts of top-secret plans can be stolen with 90+% accuracy by simply "accidentally" leaving a phone on a workbench. That means that they don't have to chance possibly less unobtrusive ways that they might also "know".
Conversely, security-minded installations have one more reason to prohibit cellphones in sensitive areas and even not-so-obviously sensitive ones like open production floors.
Now, what do we "know" about that FitBit you're wearing?
I'm presuming that the matter being used is sub-atomic, where you don't have to worry so much about too much sodium and not enough carbon, But then I always assumed that they were taking E=mc^2 to its logical conclusion so actual physical matter in any form wouldn't be required to start with.
As for beaming through shields, I can't walk through closed doors, either.
The reboot is ageist as hell. Everyone's about the same age.
To be fair, the real ages of most of the principals on TOS were fairly close, but the portrayed ages varied, from the aging Doctor and mature Senior Engineer, to the Captain who's young for his rank and reputation, down to seasoned junior officers and bottoming out with a junior Ensign and Yeoman. And then there's the Vulcan, who's likely on par with Scotty in terms of chronological age, experience and wisdom but presumed biologically pubescent. All of whom have come up through the ranks, though many faster than average.
In contrast, the reboot is basically a bunch of kids boost a starship. No separate careers coming together over the years, no earned ranks, essentially just a mob of fratboys running into each other all at once.
It's utterly cringe-worthy.
Or do they simply engage in a beauty contest and vote for people they like, or who make the biggest promises: "vote for me as your CEO and I'll give everyone a pay rise and annual bonus"
It all sounds lovely and group-huggy. But does it actually make the company more successful or a better place to work?
That's how we select the CEO for our country. And it's usually easier to switch employers than it is to switch homelands.
Regardless, the way we select CEOs now isn't gaining a lot of points for prosperity for many companies, much less the countries that grant them their corporate charters. In fact, the primary people who have been prospering lately have been the CEOs themselves, whether their companies succeed or fail.
The original expectations that sovereign nations had for chartering incorporated businesses was based on the idea that the shareholders would be fairly directly involved. That they would be in it for the long haul, not just for the next quarter or day-trade tick. And that the more involvement that they had financially, the more right they had to make the critical decisions. Thus, corporations are not democratic - instead of one person (employee or otherwise) one vote, it's one share one vote.
We lost the personal stakes long ago for the most part. These days, CEOs are mostly only answerable to a small group for a short time, and just to add insult to injury, becoming a CEO often brings with it actual shares or options that can be manipulated by the CEO for personal profit regardless of the long-term effect on the corporation, its employees or its customers.
So I suppose that a beauty contest might not be any worse than what we've cooked up on our own.
This is Microsoft. Periodically the fridge will lock up - like because of the bug where it you put a jam jar with an expiration date whose month is an odd number on the middle shelf between leftover Chinese takeout and a can of soda,
To reset the fridge and resume cooling, you will have to press the refrigerator-side door closed while cycling the icemaker and lifting up on the water dispenser lever.
Considering that they've already 3-D printed functional rocket engines, I think that 3-D printing an airplane would a lesser challenge.
I'm sure they'd make me more productive.
Without that pesky appointment alarm, I'd never make it to any meetings!
Of course, if we REALLY wanted Linux to be more like Windows, we'd have to make it disable the GUI and all user processes for 15 minutes after rebooting while displaying "installing update 1 of 36" messages and then cripple system performance for an additional 20 minutes after login while the virus scan ran.
Maybe Poettering and Icaza have something in the works. They like the Windows approach.
The reason that people don't use it is because when they bought their computers, Windows was already installed. If Linux had been installed, people would be using that. Don't give me a lot of guff about Windows being easier to use - it isn't - or too much difference in OS's - Windows routinely scrambles even the most trivial of concepts between major releases. The only place where Linux fails miserably as a desktop OS is lack of a consistent cut/copy/paste.
The only time I boot Windows these days is to run TurboTax. And that's because Intuit's head is so far up Microsoft's butt that for them "export to Excel" means that you have to have a physical copy of Excel on the same machine because they use the OLE interface to transfer data instead of offering a CSV or XLS export option like everyone else in the world - including Microsoft - does.
The one major app that Linux lacks is Photoshop and people can argue about that one all day long, but I don't need Photoshop for my job or home use. And I'm sure that if Linux was routinely pre-installed on PCs that Adobe would respond quickly.
Linux runs the programs I need to run just fine. In fact, better than Windows, since a lot of stuff that I'd have to go out and purchase and install on Windows are stock packages on Linux installable and upgradable with a single command. And they don't "phone home" to the vendor, break because I don't have the secret key handy when I need to do an upgrade, make me dread a SWAT team from the BSA, or any of the other "joys" of the Windows world.
And, sadly, I can get better support on most Linux apps (and the OS) than I can from the commercial vendors. No "Please stay on the line your call is VERY important to us", no "Hi my name is Charlie" in an impenetrable accent, and even the free online forums typically have more knowledge and responsiveness than many commercial vendors provide these days.
Or not.
If you have a competent AI running the company, the "CEO" job would devolve into something more like a Wal-Mart greeter. A friendly public human face for the company. I guess that puts Larry Ellison out of a job, though, doesn't it?
And why have "a" CEO if that's all the job entails? Hire an even half-dozen or so of them, take a quantity discount and never lack for corporate PR at all the best public functions.
If aging is resolved, why would you retire?? Slave forever!
Not so. Technology will also replace all or most of the jobs as well. You won't so much retire as be retired!
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he and his family will starve become some rich/powerful asshole owns the lake, the boats and the bait and tackle shop and charges accordingly.
I don't even read my own voice memos. Lots of luck getting me to deal with anyone else's.
I'm very protective of my multi-media experiences. You want to drive me away? Load up on motion videos. Want to drive me away permanently? Make them auto-play audio at me.
If I had a boss who kept peppering me with voice messages all day long, I'd quickly be looking for another boss. It's bad enough when they do it in person, but at least the look of rage on my face when I'm interrupted in a delicate task makes them more considerate.
Corporations are groups with one sole charter: make money to appease the stockholders.
I think you really need to get educated on what corporate charters are, who issues them, and what they mean. A corporate charter is simply a mandate granted by the people to operate as a unit, with certain privileges and responsibilities that the individuals who incorporate don't have. The world is full of non-profit corporations as well as profit-making corporations who choose to temper their greed with other considerations. There's no law that demands that in exchange for the "Inc." you have to be a predatory rapist with no regard for humanity/
In any event, is this "making money to appease the stockholders" or is it liquidating assets to pocket a quick short-term savings before the reduced production capabilities kick in? Selling the future so someone can grab the cash and run in the present?
I made my money - quite a lot of it - from being a long-term Cisco stockholder. When they stopped being a good long-term investment, I sold my shares and put the money to more constructive use.
I have as much faith in "education" as I do in supply-side economics. Every day we find a new way to offshore or outright automate a once-secure profession. In fact, I'm just waiting for the day that the competitive companies are the ones that lay off all those overpriced executives and replace them with AI's. There are strong indications that a system like IBM's Watson may already be better at executive decision-making than meatbags are. AI's don't have to salve their egos with expensive toys or power games, so they're not going to be tempted to jerk corporate assets around for their own short-term benefit.
Something needs to change. We cannot "downsize our way to greatness" forever. If we lay everyone off, who buys our products? Few people have any hope that re-education is anything more than a hamster wheel with a motor spinning it increasingly faster.
Laying people off is a waste of resources. Unlike new hires, these are known quantities, have already learned the corporate ecocosm, and would be more motivate to work for the corporate benefit than a whole new group of people brought in knowing that they, too, are only there to be used and discarded. Why should recycling be a principle only applied to materials? Why aren't there any executives far-seeing enough to find new ways to exploit existing assets and to invest resources in molding them to new and profitable ends? We spend years on exploding executive compensation by rationalizing that these people were like Gods in their extra-ordinary wisdom and vision and deserved to be compensated accordingly. Why aren't they demonstrating these preternatural abilities to the benefit of the shareholders?
It's a good thing executives are so extra-ordinarily well-compensated. The first time an Artificial Intelligence can utilize a corporation's human resources that efficiently, they, too will start joining the ranks of the laid-off. Only whatever savings the made from those fat paychecks will allow them to distinguish themselves from the peons they sent before them.
That pile of rotting corpses would serve as more than that. It's a distinct health hazard and good luck getting someone to come in and treat you when you live like like that.
If you have to kill 10 people a day, you're seriously besieged. Any normal war would mean that probably 100 people would actually be trying to take you out if you were managing a 10-person kill ratio. And if there really are 10 people trying per day, it's virtual certainty that they'll start ganging up. How many can you take out at once? Or do you expect to have help? Don't forget to share out the bullets.
In fact, I think 10 percent is probably a good estimate for almost anything along those lines. Hunting? Unless you're better than predator cats, only about one attempt in 10 will bag you dinner. But even at a 100% kill rate and only one animal in the pot a week, expect the ammo to run out in around 20 years. Assuming you didn't use it up faster barricading your home with corpses.
That's because in the West, the post-1980 business philosophy has been "Efficiency to the Max!"
You are expected to give "110% percent". Everyone is running Big Data analytics. The bean-counters scour the numbers and do cherry-picking to get the big profits and lemon-dropping to discard the losers. JIT inventory. On-demand elastic clouds. And all in the context of the next quarter's earnings report.
No sane general would commit troops without maintaining reserves for the inevitable unforeseen, but modern western businesses cannot stand a moment of wasteful "idle time" or resources sitting around unused.
And so, when the inevitable happens - train wreck. There's no spare parts, no idle people to put to work, nothing. No reserve capacity.
As they used to say back when computers were expensive objects of reverence, "Never before in human history has it been possible to screw up so badly on so large a scale so quickly". Such is the 2-edged sword of modern technology.
Actually, as I understand it, Windows itself will honor a "/" as a path separator in some cases. Probably the biggest reason that DOS/Windows ended up using a backslash as a path separator was what a lot of the CP/M and MS-DOS paradigm came from the DEC OS world, where "/" was used as a switch prefix instead of the dash character used by the Unix OS. Making a "/" in a filepath potentially ambigous.
Java, on the other hand, will cheerfully honor a "real" (forward slash) as an abstract pathname separator on all OS's and convert as needed when using file path (java.io.File) references. It's a smart thing to do. Not only is the code more portable, but backslashes are used as escape characters when compiling Java strings, and you can cause yourself all sorts of grief by forgetting to double-up on them when coding DOS-style paths.
Slash and backslash aren't the only path separators I've seen in a long and evil career, I've also seen angle-brackets (<disk>directory>file) and colons (:disk:directory:file). But the OS's in question are more or less extinct now.
It's an easy thing to confuse. After all, we do count money!
Now if the numbers weren't all so darned small.
Except for the payables, of course.
Libertarians are under the delusion that an armed population, with a substantial fraction of them willing to shoot a bully or (in the case of a gang attack) take as many as possible down before one of them gets them, tends to make bullies and gangsters back down, or at least go find somebody who isn't alert enough to get his gun out in time.
The irony of that statement is that there's a technical term for a self-organized group of people working at a common cause for the (alleged) benefit of all. That term is "government".
The problem with Libertarianism is that inside every small government, there's a big government trying to get out.
Yes, but that's because code targeted for Java 1.5 on Windows would run equally well under Linux. Because Java was designed from Day 1 to be future-proof and portable. Lotsa luck with those Visual J++ apps, though.
Now excuse me while I go trying to find what they've renamed Network Neighborhood to for this Windows release.
People never seem to figure out that software isn't write-once/run-forever. Over time, software rots from the outside in. Sure, the bits are all there, but the hardware and external services that they are designed to talk to eventually change so much that having the original bits is useless.
Budgeting software as a one-time expense is like buying a Mercedes and never doing an oil change.
There is a problem with Proprietary versus Open, though. I still have the source-code disks for Red Hat 7. Not the RHEL one with systemd, the original Red Hat version 7.2, circa Y2K. If my organization was tied tightly to it, having the source code means that if a problem arises relative to the OS, I could pay someone a no-doubt exorbitant amount of money to dig into that code and do something about it. You can't do that with Windows NT. Even if you had the deep pockets that allowed you source code access to NT, Microsoft probably repealed that by now. Essentially, if you need source code changes for Windows NT, the cost wouldn't be merely exorbitant, they'd probably be ruinous. And, of course, they could simply refuse to help you at all. Because as far as I am aware, Microsoft never licensed Windows unconditionally and in perpetuity to anyone, and if certainly wouldn't have been cheap if they did.
And cheap is a lot of why you end up with thousands of dead copies of XP running on critical systems daily.
"false assumption that resource shortages are fundamental problems with the world that cannot be corrected through technological means of increasing those resources"
Which is also a false assumption. People have the most annoying assumptions that everything goes in straight lines or simple curves, or endless cycles.
Technology can be used to mitigate problems. It cannot always make them go away forever, especially when on the bottom line there are only a finite amount of resources that can be exploited even after the best technological solutions in the world are used to leverage them. Usually you run into the Law of Diminishing Returns.
If you pull an all-nighter and write 1000 lines of code, then you're likely in violation of the "I only think as hard as I have to" part.
If, on the other hand, you spent your time daydreaming, a light bulb came on while you were taking a shower, and the net result is 20 minutes of work and 30 lines of brilliant code, then you qualify.
But management will ding you, because while you're supposed to work smarter and not harder, if they don't see you "working", then you're "obviously" not being "productive". So keep doing those all-nighters and job security will be yours. Maybe.
"Own it (snicker) on DVD!"