> The purpose of the corporation should be to improve the lives of people, and should corporations fail to achieve that, they should be reformed or abolished.
When the hell did this happen?
I thought the Slashdot Libertarian Ethos was that "the corporation exists to make money for the shareholders, who were brave and took risks with their hard-earned money." Of course, this was back when we ourselves were all Brave Investors. Employees and consumers took no risks, and had no rights and no say, except, of course, the right to be employed elsewhere or buy from someone else. Back in the day, this was How It Should Be.
And government? Don't make me laugh. They're not even employees or consumers, just legalized shake-down artists.
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the parent poster. And, I've always believed that corporations should be at least partially accountable to the social apparatus that enforces their contracts, manages the currency of their transactions, and grants them their "invidualtiy" before the law. I just never thought I'd ever hear it on slashdot, is all...
For the record, the problem you describe actually is solveable within the Debian package system, although it comes under the heading of "advanced". You can build an actual package, of course, but short of that, you can make a "pseudo-package" that doesn't install anything, but has the required Debian package "provides" header. Then the apt package database will know about the capability, and will be able to install things which depend on the functionality you've put in by hand.
I mention Debian because I'm aware of it -- it may be that the RPM system has something similar, I don't know it as well.
We can get some idea what the re-entry will be like from history -- in January of 1978, a Soviet spy satellite with a nuclear reactor on board (not an RTG, an actively-cooled fission core) re-entered out of control and landed in the Canadian arctic. My recollection is that in this case, the reactor core failed to eject, and remained partially protected within the satellite, meaning that the core was still relatively compact when it hit the ground. In this respect, the event was unlike an atmospheric bomb test, and hopefully, also unlike the re-entry of a properly-ejected reactor core.
There were no direct casualties from the crash, but only a small fraction of the power supply was recovered. One website I found says the Canadian government billed the Soviets for $6 million (Canadian, 1978) dollars.
> But to answer you question, someone else would be in their position, with a different name...
Several people have given answers like this, and I admit I'm baffled. Is it really so hard to imagine that the office computer world might have been like, say, the academic workstation market in 1986 or so? Lots of powerful machines, Sun, HP, Apollo (pre-takeover), and even Digital (remember the microVax?) slugging it out within a Unix-like context? Contrary to MS FUD, it actually was possible to port software then, not only between Ultrix/SunOS/HPUX/Unix, but even, I am told, between Vaxes and the Unix-like systems. Yes, even commercial software!
If there had been no MS, it's at least possible that the workstation vendors would have found the business market. Everyone would use Unix-like workstations (with happy friendly desktop GUIs, of course) at work, and have Apple machines at home. It's also possible that heterogeneous hardware would have made software API standardization more urgent, and consequently, better.
Also, mandatory Slashdot MS bash: >...if Windows was really as crap as some people make it out to be, no-one would use it.... Depends which people, I suppose, but this sort of reasoning is dangerous -- it may be that Microsoft systems could survive in an honest competitive environment, but we don't know, because in actual fact, they don't -- Microsoft does manipulate people's choices, by sweetheart deals with hardware manufacturers, exclusive/punitive licensing arrangements, and so forth. They weren't convicted of monopoly practices in Federal court out of spite, you know.
Before using the Apollo missions as a strawman, keep in mind that there would be massive differences between the Apollo missions and whatever US, other national or international missions to Mars: almost everyone on the new missions would be a trained scientist and do far, far more scientific work.
This presumes that the funding would persist long enough after proof of concept and flags and footprints to actually do the science. Apollos 17, 18, and 19 were the "science" moon missions, with (I believe) trained geologists with spades and hammers and cameras. Of these, only Apollo 17 actually flew, and the scientific return was indeed excellent -- from one site, once. As mentioned in the article, 18 and 19 were cancelled, because the political objective had been achieved -- the razzle-dazzle was over, and the government didn't want to sink more money into it.
It may be true, as you say, that Mars missions would be different, that they'd start with science, but I didn't actually see that in the President's plan.
But's it's ok for RMS to force everyone and their mother to call linux for GNU/linux?
For the record, RMS merely kvetches endlessly on this topic. He has never, as far as I know, tried to make "GNU/Linux" a legally binding requirement of the use or redistribution of the GNU tools -- a legal move like that is literally against his religion.
> The creative act of assembling a database -- and if you don't think it's creative, you've never done it, it takes a TREMENDOUS effort to assemble and maintain a useful data relation even if you're using publically accessible information -- is something that should be protected.
Firstly, I'd like to dispute the implication that something is "creative" or somehow intrinsically worthwhile simply because it is difficult. Database construction may or may not be creative, I don't know, but the fact that it's difficult is not evidence one way or the other.
That said, I think I'd be willing to accept conceptual ownership of data collections provided it came with some responsibilities, mainly, database owners should make (enforceable) promises about the integrity of their data. Too many databases just hoover up information and put it in the tables, without ensuring that it correlates with the real world at all. If a database has an owner, then it creates the possibility that someone can be held accountable for the fidelity of the data.
I think this could go a significant distance to easing people's fears about data collection.
The mechanism you suggest is hard to implement, because of the requirement that it should be impossible to associate a particular vote with a particular person. The paper trail you want is the one that gives you access to all the legitimate votes, but does not give you any clue as to who made any given vote. This is, of course, to prevent votes from being sold or coerced. Consequently, the transmission path from the person's home to the polling place must be absolutely secure, and if you want individuals to be able to do post-hoc confirmation, it must remain secure indefinitely.
Obviously, this problem is hugely simplified if the person carries their vote to the polling place in their brain, transmits it locally to the counting machine, and does without post-hoc verification.
> Can they really write you a ticket if they know that your vehicle was speeding, but they don't know who was driving it?
They can and do. The District of Columbia has cameras activated by speed-sensing radar that photograph the license plate of speeding cars, and issue citations. You don't get any "points" off your license, but the vehicle owner gets fined no matter who was driving.
I also run a few Debian systems, although I mostly run "stable", with a few backports. For the examples I've seen cited in this thread, I don't use Debian packages at all -- my acroread, NVidia kernel drivers, and Blackdown Java are installed from the appropriate tarballs.
Now, this is not a general solution -- it only works on x86 systems, and going outside the package system only works if the thing you're getting isn't a dependency for other packages. Nevertheless, in my experience, this is almost always the case for nonfree software. Stuff that is so important that other stuff depends on it (in the package sense and in the vernacular sense) tends to have good free implementations.
So, for my particular case, if Debian stopped packaging nonfree software, it wouldn't affect me at all.
Why does this obviously-bad situation persist?
on
Orwellian Tech Support
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
OK, hopelessly naive question:
It seems that the root of the problem described in the article is that the contract with the company pays for calls completed, not problems solved. That company's customers are apparently enraged at their treatment. To the naive reader, it seems as though the contracting company could save money and improve customer relations at the same time by rewriting their phone-support contract to reward the call center based on actual problems solved.
All you guys from the real world, why doesn't this happen? Is it actually impossible to measure? Has anyone ever tried it?
Although since they're PowerPC chips, of course, even if they ran at 20 MHz, they'd still be a *lot* faster than comparable Intel. You can't just go by the specs. You have to benchmark it in real world applications and think about overall system performance...
Re:Radio astronomers have done this for years
on
Living on Mars Time
·
· Score: 1
Reply to self, naturally I got "longitude" and "latitude" backwards. Shoulda stuck with "declination" (moveable) and "right ascension" (have to wait...)
Radio astronomers have done this for years
on
Living on Mars Time
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
People talk about this as though it were a new requirement, but some astronomers have done this before. I was involved in a project which used the old 300 foot telescope at Green Bank, WVA, which was only moveable in "longitude" -- for "latitude", we had to wait for our target to pass overhead. This meant we worked on sidereal time, but the cafeteria stayed on mean solar time. It was only a few minutes a day difference, but it was still pretty disruptive.
There are lots of correct replies to this elsewhere, but yours is a good question worth responding to directly.
The first answer is a question of scope -- it's not within the responsibility of a DNS service to suggest alternates. Your request was in error, the RFCs require than an error message be returned. It's legal for somebody else (you, your ISP, whatever) to catch the error and handle it in a more user-friendly way than just reporting it. Catching the reported error and handling it is fine, failing to report it is wrong.
The second answer is related, its that not every DNS request is asking for a web page. Some of them might, God forbid, just be trying to resolve a host name. Sending a well-formed but unintended web page in reply to an incorrect request for an IP address is just rude. It would be like sending you AOL CDs every time you dialled a wrong number on your telephone, on the assumption that every phone call in the universe is really an attempt to dial-up AOL.
> I've always wondered what it would be like in the world if barriers for people to interact with people from other parts of the world, whether geographical or language were removed. Would we actually have world peace if people weren't so "isolated" as they are in the real world? And I believe we may soon find out, via MMORPGs.
Unlikely -- the most important demographic feature of MMORPGers is not their ethnic or national origin, it's that they're self-selecting in their desire to participate in an online community. Observing the effects of cultural and linguistic differences in these fora is interesting, but it's a mistake to imagine that they are little models of the real multiethnic world, whose most important demographic feature is precisely the opposite -- nobody self-selects to be born in any particular place, and except for the wealthy, moving is hard, so geographic proximity does not select for willingness to participate.
The point is that while MMORPGs remove some barriers to participation, they introduce others, most importantly the willingness to be involved. That makes them poor models of the real world.
Last year, my wife and I looked very hard at the 2002 Civic hybrid. I got cold feet because of the fact that there were rumors of insufficient pick-up, plus there was the problem that, for the standard-shift version, which I wanted, we would have to wait several extra months, because the automatics were being brought in first.
While we were waiting, it occurred to us that a standard-shift hybrid actually doesn't make much sense, if the point is efficiency, and that what we really wanted was a fun car, and also one that would be small enough to park in our congested urban neighborhood of DC. Also, I was concerned that we would not have an opportunity to test-drive the hybrid.
Another factor was my general sense that hybrid was likely to be a transitional technology, and that within a decade or so, fuel-cell cars might become common.
Anyways, we broke down and went the more selfish route, and got a Civic Si, and I'm very satisifed with it -- I take public transit to and from work, so my environmental impact isn't so bad.
It seemed clear the marketing surrounding the hybrid was all about practicality, which is of course fine. But if they want to sell one to me, they're going to have to make it more fun.
X network transparency makes the applications network transparent, which is not the same thing as making the desktop network-transparent. KDE has done the latter, and the difference is that it's a coordinated remove-viewability that includes the KDE toolbar, applets, desktop-statefulness, and so forth. I don't believe it's true, as you have implied, that KDE found X's network transparency to be flawed in some way and so had to work around it. KDE simply solved a different problem.
I personally am a regular user of X network transparency. At work, I run my editor and browser remotely off my laptop, and use the work machines for their full-size keyboards, big screens, and e-mail services. When I go home, I can use the laptop standalone, and still have my browser bookmarks and code to work on, and am liberated from the e-mail, which however I can still reach if I need to.
I don't know how common this usage is, but I like it, and have often wished I could remotely run GUI applications on different Windows machines.
Interestingly, Debian has taken you up on this. From www.debian.org:
> Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with more than 8710 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.
Slashdot Mirror
> The purpose of the corporation should be to improve the lives of people, and should corporations fail to achieve that, they should be reformed or abolished.
When the hell did this happen?
I thought the Slashdot Libertarian Ethos was that "the corporation exists to make money for the shareholders, who were brave and took risks with their hard-earned money." Of course, this was back when we ourselves were all Brave Investors. Employees and consumers took no risks, and had no rights and no say, except, of course, the right to be employed elsewhere or buy from someone else. Back in the day, this was How It Should Be.
And government? Don't make me laugh. They're not even employees or consumers, just legalized shake-down artists.
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the parent poster. And, I've always believed that corporations should be at least partially accountable to the social apparatus that enforces their contracts, manages the currency of their transactions, and grants them their "invidualtiy" before the law. I just never thought I'd ever hear it on slashdot, is all...
For the record, the problem you describe actually is solveable within the Debian package system, although it comes under the heading of "advanced". You can build an actual package, of course, but short of that, you can make a "pseudo-package" that doesn't install anything, but has the required Debian package "provides" header. Then the apt package database will know about the capability, and will be able to install things which depend on the functionality you've put in by hand.
I mention Debian because I'm aware of it -- it may be that the RPM system has something similar, I don't know it as well.
We can get some idea what the re-entry will be like from history -- in January of 1978, a Soviet spy satellite with a nuclear reactor on board (not an RTG, an actively-cooled fission core) re-entered out of control and landed in the Canadian arctic. My recollection is that in this case, the reactor core failed to eject, and remained partially protected within the satellite, meaning that the core was still relatively compact when it hit the ground. In this respect, the event was unlike an atmospheric bomb test, and hopefully, also unlike the re-entry of a properly-ejected reactor core.
There were no direct casualties from the crash, but only a small fraction of the power supply was recovered. One website I found says the Canadian government billed the Soviets for $6 million (Canadian, 1978) dollars.
Google on Cosmos 954 for more.
> But to answer you question, someone else would be in their position, with a different name...
...if Windows was really as crap as some people make it out to be, no-one would use it....
Several people have given answers like this, and I admit I'm baffled. Is it really so hard to imagine that the office computer world might have been like, say, the academic workstation market in 1986 or so? Lots of powerful machines, Sun, HP, Apollo (pre-takeover), and even Digital (remember the microVax?) slugging it out within a Unix-like context? Contrary to MS FUD, it actually was possible to port software then, not only between Ultrix/SunOS/HPUX/Unix, but even, I am told, between Vaxes and the Unix-like systems. Yes, even commercial software!
If there had been no MS, it's at least possible that the workstation vendors would have found the business market. Everyone would use Unix-like workstations (with happy friendly desktop GUIs, of course) at work, and have Apple machines at home. It's also possible that heterogeneous hardware would have made software API standardization more urgent, and consequently, better.
Also, mandatory Slashdot MS bash:
>
Depends which people, I suppose, but this sort of reasoning is dangerous -- it may be that Microsoft systems could survive in an honest competitive environment, but we don't know, because in actual fact, they don't -- Microsoft does manipulate people's choices, by sweetheart deals with hardware manufacturers, exclusive/punitive licensing arrangements, and so forth. They weren't convicted of monopoly practices in Federal court out of spite, you know.
Before using the Apollo missions as a strawman, keep in mind that there would be massive differences between the Apollo missions and whatever US, other national or international missions to Mars: almost everyone on the new missions would be a trained scientist and do far, far more scientific work.
This presumes that the funding would persist long enough after proof of concept and flags and footprints to actually do the science. Apollos 17, 18, and 19 were the "science" moon missions, with (I believe) trained geologists with spades and hammers and cameras. Of these, only Apollo 17 actually flew, and the scientific return was indeed excellent -- from one site, once. As mentioned in the article, 18 and 19 were cancelled, because the political objective had been achieved -- the razzle-dazzle was over, and the government didn't want to sink more money into it.
It may be true, as you say, that Mars missions would be different, that they'd start with science, but I didn't actually see that in the President's plan.
And why not? In some parts of Vegas, $500 is the market price for a screw...
YM "Furrfu". HTH.
But's it's ok for RMS to force everyone and their mother to call linux for GNU/linux?
For the record, RMS merely kvetches endlessly on this topic. He has never, as far as I know, tried to make "GNU/Linux" a legally binding requirement of the use or redistribution of the GNU tools -- a legal move like that is literally against his religion.
> The creative act of assembling a database -- and if you don't think it's creative, you've never done it, it takes a TREMENDOUS effort to assemble and maintain a useful data relation even if you're using publically accessible information -- is something that should be protected.
Firstly, I'd like to dispute the implication that something is "creative" or somehow intrinsically worthwhile simply because it is difficult. Database construction may or may not be creative, I don't know, but the fact that it's difficult is not evidence one way or the other.
That said, I think I'd be willing to accept conceptual ownership of data collections provided it came with some responsibilities, mainly, database owners should make (enforceable) promises about the integrity of their data. Too many databases just hoover up information and put it in the tables, without ensuring that it correlates with the real world at all. If a database has an owner, then it creates the possibility that someone can be held accountable for the fidelity of the data.
I think this could go a significant distance to easing people's fears about data collection.
The mechanism you suggest is hard to implement, because of the requirement that it should be impossible to associate a particular vote with a particular person. The paper trail you want is the one that gives you access to all the legitimate votes, but does not give you any clue as to who made any given vote. This is, of course, to prevent votes from being sold or coerced. Consequently, the transmission path from the person's home to the polling place must be absolutely secure, and if you want individuals to be able to do post-hoc confirmation, it must remain secure indefinitely.
Obviously, this problem is hugely simplified if the person carries their vote to the polling place in their brain, transmits it locally to the counting machine, and does without post-hoc verification.
> Can they really write you a ticket if they know that your vehicle was speeding, but they don't know who was driving it?
They can and do. The District of Columbia has cameras activated by speed-sensing radar that photograph the license plate of speeding cars, and issue citations. You don't get any "points" off your license, but the vehicle owner gets fined no matter who was driving.
I also run a few Debian systems, although I mostly run "stable", with a few backports. For the examples I've seen cited in this thread, I don't use Debian packages at all -- my acroread, NVidia kernel drivers, and Blackdown Java are installed from the appropriate tarballs.
Now, this is not a general solution -- it only works on x86 systems, and going outside the package system only works if the thing you're getting isn't a dependency for other packages. Nevertheless, in my experience, this is almost always the case for nonfree software. Stuff that is so important that other stuff depends on it (in the package sense and in the vernacular sense) tends to have good free implementations.
So, for my particular case, if Debian stopped packaging nonfree software, it wouldn't affect me at all.
OK, hopelessly naive question:
It seems that the root of the problem described in the article is that the contract with the company pays for calls completed, not problems solved. That company's customers are apparently enraged at their treatment. To the naive reader, it seems as though the contracting company could save money and improve customer relations at the same time by rewriting their phone-support contract to reward the call center based on actual problems solved.
All you guys from the real world, why doesn't this happen? Is it actually impossible to measure? Has anyone ever tried it?
This would happen to me -- my ISP forbids "consumer" clients such as myself from hosting any kind of server. Has nothing to do with the content.
You really think it's C code? Haven't they been telling us for years you can do everything and then some in VB.net?
More seriously, I bet you need Visual C++ OS Edition, with the Secret Real Office API plug-in from MSDN.
Although since they're PowerPC chips, of course, even if they ran at 20 MHz, they'd still be a *lot* faster than comparable Intel. You can't just go by the specs. You have to benchmark it in real world applications and think about overall system performance...
Reply to self, naturally I got "longitude" and "latitude" backwards. Shoulda stuck with "declination" (moveable) and "right ascension" (have to wait...)
People talk about this as though it were a new requirement, but some astronomers have done this before. I was involved in a project which used the old 300 foot telescope at Green Bank, WVA, which was only moveable in "longitude" -- for "latitude", we had to wait for our target to pass overhead. This meant we worked on sidereal time, but the cafeteria stayed on mean solar time. It was only a few minutes a day difference, but it was still pretty disruptive.
> Why am I in minority on this one?!?
There are lots of correct replies to this elsewhere, but yours is a good question worth responding to directly.
The first answer is a question of scope -- it's not within the responsibility of a DNS service to suggest alternates. Your request was in error, the RFCs require than an error message be returned. It's legal for somebody else (you, your ISP, whatever) to catch the error and handle it in a more user-friendly way than just reporting it. Catching the reported error and handling it is fine, failing to report it is wrong.
The second answer is related, its that not every DNS request is asking for a web page. Some of them might, God forbid, just be trying to resolve a host name. Sending a well-formed but unintended web page in reply to an incorrect request for an IP address is just rude. It would be like sending you AOL CDs every time you dialled a wrong number on your telephone, on the assumption that every phone call in the universe is really an attempt to dial-up AOL.
> I've always wondered what it would be like in the world if barriers for people to interact with people from other parts of the world, whether geographical or language were removed. Would we actually have world peace if people weren't so "isolated" as they are in the real world? And I believe we may soon find out, via MMORPGs.
Unlikely -- the most important demographic feature of MMORPGers is not their ethnic or national origin, it's that they're self-selecting in their desire to participate in an online community. Observing the effects of cultural and linguistic differences in these fora is interesting, but it's a mistake to imagine that they are little models of the real multiethnic world, whose most important demographic feature is precisely the opposite -- nobody self-selects to be born in any particular place, and except for the wealthy, moving is hard, so geographic proximity does not select for willingness to participate.
The point is that while MMORPGs remove some barriers to participation, they introduce others, most importantly the willingness to be involved. That makes them poor models of the real world.
Last year, my wife and I looked very hard at the 2002 Civic hybrid. I got cold feet because of the fact that there were rumors of insufficient pick-up, plus there was the problem that, for the standard-shift version, which I wanted, we would have to wait several extra months, because the automatics were being brought in first.
While we were waiting, it occurred to us that a standard-shift hybrid actually doesn't make much sense, if the point is efficiency, and that what we really wanted was a fun car, and also one that would be small enough to park in our congested urban neighborhood of DC. Also, I was concerned that we would not have an opportunity to test-drive the hybrid.
Another factor was my general sense that hybrid was likely to be a transitional technology, and that within a decade or so, fuel-cell cars might become common.
Anyways, we broke down and went the more selfish route, and got a Civic Si, and I'm very satisifed with it -- I take public transit to and from work, so my environmental impact isn't so bad.
It seemed clear the marketing surrounding the hybrid was all about practicality, which is of course fine. But if they want to sell one to me, they're going to have to make it more fun.
> Until then, assuming they are guilty....
Can we start by changing the part where we assume they're guilty?
> As Leon Brooks sums it up in his famous book "The Mythical Man Month"... Leon hit's the nail right on the head....
It's a shame we don't teach IT people the names of other practitioners in their field, or how to use apostrophes.
That'd be *Fredrick* Brooks.
And Bob.
X network transparency makes the applications network transparent, which is not the same thing as making the desktop network-transparent. KDE has done the latter, and the difference is that it's a coordinated remove-viewability that includes the KDE toolbar, applets, desktop-statefulness, and so forth. I don't believe it's true, as you have implied, that KDE found X's network transparency to be flawed in some way and so had to work around it. KDE simply solved a different problem.
I personally am a regular user of X network transparency. At work, I run my editor and browser remotely off my laptop, and use the work machines for their full-size keyboards, big screens, and e-mail services. When I go home, I can use the laptop standalone, and still have my browser bookmarks and code to work on, and am liberated from the e-mail, which however I can still reach if I need to.
I don't know how common this usage is, but I like it, and have often wished I could remotely run GUI applications on different Windows machines.
Interestingly, Debian has taken you up on this. From www.debian.org:
> Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with more than 8710 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.
Quote-unquote.