The original post mentioned business as the focus, although it did say that consumers were in mind. I work for a company that would consider its broadband connection essential (it's an e-fulfillment company).
Now tell me, as an e-fullfillment company do you get your bandwidth via a cable modem or consumer grade DSL(the type that has the price cap in Canada)? Or do you pay a little more for your connection to get some sort of contractual garuntee on speed and uptime?
What I do see as a useful quasi-regulatory function for the CRTC or FCC is as a type of telecomm complaint department for home users and small businesses to go to when the cable company/telco is dragging their feet or otherwise being a dick. I think someone in another post said he'd had good luck using the CRTC as such a stick to beat providers with when not delivering.
pretty much the same way as every houshold has tv and most have phone connections, if the net 'jack' is there and people only plug in to surf, they will give it a shot. especially if the monthly fees can not exceed a government enforced amount.
Two things, first are you somehow implying that a TV in every home is a good thing? Second the reason that nearly everyone has a TV has nothing to do with building codes or government intervention, people buy TV's so they can watch mindless tripe like "who wants to be a millionare", "survivor" and the continuing election coverage.
Internet access is no more a right than cable tv is. Being able to make your own choices about how to spend your money is a right though. Besides every home is already wired with internet access points, they are called phone lines, people can just plug in their (insert 'net device here) and surf, people that want to drop the $200 bucks or so and pay the monthly fee are doing this, those that prefer to spend the money on an extra fifty channels of Regis and malt liqour aren't buying internet access now. Do you honestly think that the unwired masses are holding out for subsidized broadband?
I'm sorry while I can agree that telephones should be considered an essential service mainly for contacting emergency services, I just don't see broadband as an essential service that needs to be regulated for QoS like the phone network. It's not as if a cable modem outage could cost someone their life (aghh Bob's having a heart attact, call 911, shit the dsl is down again, sorry bob) About the only thing you could really lose from a cable modem outage is money and if rock solid 24/7/365 uptime is essential to your business your web server shouldn't be plugged into the cable modem and sitting your living room.
On the other hand the 5 and 8 days of outages per month quoted in the article are just plain unacceptable, if my cable modem service were that bad I switch to DSL in a heartbeat, but then again I pay $40US (actually $60 but I pay extra for a static IP and a "double speed" cable modem, well worth the expense to run acerbic.org out of my living room;-) for my service, which means my ISP can afford redundent equipment and enough staff to keep things humming. In the 18 months or so I've had the cable modem I've had maybe 5 days of downtime that weren't the fault of some piss poor wiring in my building, maybe 10 days of downtime that were due to the wiring and 7 of those were in my first month of service as they were trying to nail down the problem. Pretty damn good service considering that I live in the unregulated US. I should also point out that I do live in Alaska, so the climate and infrastructure is probably less forgiving than in eastern Canada.
I'd also like to point out that I have my choice of two DSL providors and one cable modem provider, this is true for all of Anchorage and any community within 60-70 miles of Anchorage. Statewide nearly every city/town/village with >5k people has at least one broadband option. Plus AT&T has chosen Anchorage to be a test market in 2001 for a wireless broadband pilot program, if nothing else that'll encourage even more spee/price competition. Ah the joys of fast, reliable, reasonably priced, unregulated broadband. For all geeks across Canada I truely hope you manage to get rid of regulated broadband.
This is not logical: Since the planes can be networked and thus know each other'srelative positions, preventing friendly fire is a much simpler problem than the visual recognition required to determine what to shoot at, unless you don't mind hitting non-military targets
Since the first generation of craft would be "wild weasles" going after enemy air defences their is no danger of them shooting at each other, thus them knowing each others positions is meaningless, they aren't looking for air targets. The freindly fire danger I see would be in one of these buggers getting lost and homing in on freindly air defences, either from their own bases or some other allied position. If the craft is damaged and "forgets" where the good guys are supposed to be the potential for it to destroy the first anti-aircraft radar it finds is kinda scary. I'd feel better knowing that humans and humans only can make the decision to fire.
IFF and other ident systems are mostly reliable, automated target recognition via radar profile is faster and more accurate by far than what humans can do, but radar signatures can be spoofed, IFF signals can be faked etc... It may be hard or near impossible today but it won't be impossible for ever.
Asides from the technical problems of completly automated combat systems there is of course the ethical dilema of allowing machines to make the decision to kill human beings. Humans, even the enemy, deserve the thought and consideration of another human before being killed, we owe each other that small dignity even in war. Modern warfare is already remote and cold enough as it is, removing any more of the humanity and allowing our weapons to do our killing for us makes the prospect of war all too simple a thing, all too bloodless an affair, and I fear that the decision to attack or not will be taken too lightly in such a case. Not to mention the very real (in say 50+ years) of our own AI's turning on us, and making the decision to kill all humans. If they've never been allowed to decide on their own to kill humans they would (hopefully) be less likely to see it as an option if they do turn on us.
Not that this story is giving me fears of SkyNet or anything, just some things to think about when considering the concept of allowing computers to do our killing for us.
God I hope so! What's up with some of these people using "" this was lifted right from the page source of the article. Why the hell would anyone specify -1 font size?!?!?!?!
Certian companies may have a wire monopoly but that monopoly is not mandated by the city, they have a wire monopoly because they own the fucking wire and can do whatever the hell they want to do with it (or should, but when it comes to telecomm the feds like to play fast and loose with private property rights.) Nothing is stopping another carrier from coming in and laying wire but the cost of doing so, if you're really that upset about your choices raise some capital and build your own network. The only way I can see how the city could somehow sanction a monopoly would be by a corrupt offical denying access to city owned right of ways to a competitor wishing to lay wire, of course if that ever happened in a sizable market you can bet that the competitors being locked out in this way would be screaming bloody murder to the FCC.
If I read the article right this guys main claim to the history files is that the school is publicly funded and as a taxpaying citizen he has a right to know, under FOI laws, what exactly the state is doing with his money. So he'll get acess to the browsing history of all the students in the school district. What about other public institutions though? Couldn't some one under the same FOI laws request the broswer histories/proxy logs of every state employee surfing at work? Provided of course any personally identifiable information is removed this also seems like a reasonable request. I'd personally like to know (and publish) the browsing record of say the governors office.
Polls here in Alaska polls close at 8pm, alaska standard time, which is four hours behind EST. I believe that Hawaii is actually has the last polls to close.
Well said. The state has no business regulated what people do to their own bodies, including any lifeforms you happened to be host to. Abortion should be a decision made soley by the two parties involved, no one else has a right to decide in this situation what is right or wrong for you.
Staying at home for 5 years will
kill any chance they have at a long, successful career in a field of their choosing.
Bullshit! My mother put her career on hold to be a stay at home mom until I was eight (and my little sister was four) for those eight years she was mostly at home, during lean years she would work part time at night, after my dad was home. I nearly always had a parent around when I was a wee tyke, and it wasn't until my little sis was in school that mom started working on her career again, HR managment. She is doing quite well despite her eight year handicap, and more importantly she managed to raise two healthy, happy, (mostly) well adjusted childern.
When I eventually start a family one of us will take time off from our precious career for a few years to do something truly important.
I don't know about everyone else but I plan on wathing Comedy Centrals live edition of the Daily Show for all of my election night updates and analysis!
The original guy didn't say his was a god of reason, he said that reason is his god, in other words for him reason is the ultimate power/driving force of the universe.
Atheism takes two general forms, one camp believes there is no god. The other camp (to which I belong, btw) simply doesn't believe in any god, but could presumably be convinced if one made a convicning apperance. It's a subtle but important distinction.
Just schedule a cron job that rsync's you're body and computer selfs at least daily that way you can
copy over your brain to your linux box and still keep your body for running around (doing all those fun things you can only do with a body like eating pizza, drinking beer, having sex) but still have the super humongous computer brain.;->
I agree with you whole heartedly about the lameness of that particular article. The ridiculus overblown machismo of the article is only eclisped by that of the announcers on the show (the fact that there weak sports-like commentary seems to be universally reviled here on/. should be at least midly encouraging)
If it makes a difference such stereotypes (mental inferiority, lack of tech ability) DO NOT exist in my particular group of geeks freinds/co-workers. That's not to say that stereotypes don't exist but it's not universal and female freindly IT shops do exist, including the one I work at. As a matter of fact I happen to prefer having at least as many female techs around as males, the whole department is more productive when we have that balance.
Anyway just wanted to comment that not all (or even most IMO) male-geeks have their head in the sand about perserving the old "boys club" mindset.
Believe it or not they don't teach "how to screw your employees" in business school. In fact they teach us just the opposite, alot of the examples Katz cited in his article are very close to examples used in class to illustrate how NOT to manage. A little background, I am a senior going for my BBA in Management at UAA. One of the reasons I chose managment over cios/mis programs was simply because I didn't think (and still don't) that many managers understand geeks at all. And just as bad most geeks don't know, and don't want to know, jack shit about running a business, hence many startups have shitty shitty management. It's from that shitty management that you get the 18 hour days, high turnovers and the lay-off and outsource mentality. Here's an interesting tidbit for ya'll: loosing and replacing one "normal" employee costs the company roughly 4 times that persons salary for the time it takes to replace them (ie if it takes a month to replace them it costs 4 months salary in hiring costs, lost work etc...) for a tech worker I've heard it being as high as 10 times salary for replacement. High turnover is bad M'kay? Believe me, trained competent employees are any company's most valuable assets.
Ok so why is there so much shitty managment and boneheaded HR moves then? I have a theory, at least for the technology sector. Most professional managers, good or bad, don't have an understanding of the geek subculture, they don't know how to motivate us and keep us happy. At first they fall back on what works for "norms" standard bennie packages, bizzare sports related pep talks, lame incentive programs, and finally in frustration slip either into a comatose state where they make no decisions and play solitare all day or become fire breathing assholes who drive off all the best workers. On the other side you get some very talented geek types that start their own business, they can code like the devil but know nothing of running a business. Maybe they do well at first when it's just a small group of friends sweating out all nighters together to get the first product out the door. The success begins to take it's toll, and these very talented programmers find themselves at the helm of a company with 50 other employees. Some turn out to be natural leaders, like Linus for example, who can herd cats and get a job done, others find they can't do it and fall back to coding. So instead of delegating specific tasks out to the staff the founders are still pulling all nighters working in one direction while the other employees are following suit by pulling all nighters working on what they think the company needs. Opps. Then they get frustrated and quit.
Anyway that's just my take on it. Sadly I havn't encountered any other full-fledged geeks in the management program here, but on the bright side alot of the other younger managment majors seem to at least understand that geek types have different motivations that other employees will and will hopefully do a better job than the current generation of management in the tech field.
Incidently I graduate in May if anyone has a PHB they want to replace;->
1) stuff which requires insane amount of capitalization, such as massive chip-making foundries or huge construction
projects - probably only the government would be able to afford stuff like this
Well I for one wouldn't have a job if it wern't for privately owned chip fabs, we certianlly wouldn't have slashdot and a public internet. Without the ability to spread and limit risk in the legal structure large commercial ventures would be impossible and we would have to rely on the government for large capital projects. I point to the former USSR as an example of why that's a BAD idea, along with former east germany, north korea, most of mainland china etc... Marxism has never and will never be a successful or effient means of running a government/economy, history has proven this, over and over again. The USSR which has more and richer farmland than the US, and more mineral resources was barely able to feed itself by the end of the cold war and broke the back of it's economy trying to keep up with us on the weapons front. On the other hand we capitalist pigdogs from the west were exporting grain to the USSR, feeding ourselves plenty, building a globe stratteling empire (and the armed forces to control it) while civillains barely felt the pinch as the US standard of living rose. Yes we had recessions during this time, and a bad gas shortage, but even during the worse recessions average Americans were better off the average soviet citizens.
While it is possible even for a large nation to survive and feed itself with only small farms and cottage industry but that's all it'll do, survive. Without economies of scale afforded by large corporations, and the massive, government rivaling capital they can raise our modern economy and way of life would vanish. Incidentally you also get dis-economies of scale as an organization grows to large to easily control. This does a pretty good job of keeping corporations from becoming too large and dominate in a free market, to exist beyond a certain size a company needs government assistence to prevent competition (the old local phone monoplies, the entertainment cartels RIAA, MPAA etc can only continue to exist by bribing a large and corrupt state to build a legal shield to protect them from competition.) As far as leaving high capital projects solely in the hands of a state organization, which also BTW tend to suffer from the same dis-economies of scale, may I direct your attention to NASA and the space shuttle?
While at the time the lawsuits were filed DeCSS was still legal for the authors to create and use, the problem is that it is "illegal" to distribute circumvention tools, and that provision didn't have a delay on it. The MPAA didn't go after Johanson or 2600 et al for using DeCSS, they went after them for distributing it.
If you look at the last paragraph in this article they mention this problem, that even if broad exceptions are granted for circumventing content locks, it's still illegal to hand out the code to do so. Sucks huh?
I would personally like to see a mac emulator for linux, I have fond memories of older Mac software from many years ago, much of it share/freeware that I really enjoyed playing around with. And there was one program in particular I'd like to play with in emulation. There was this program that basically made the energizer bunny run across your screen, neat by itself but if it was installed on multiple machines on an appletalk network it would run from machine to machine. This was both funny as hell and annoying. Funny if you were on the "master" computer that could trigger it, annoying if you were trying to use the other computers, really annoying if you happened to be the monitor of a computer lab that had this installed, and embarassingly annoying if you were the lab monitor and the one who installed it. What I would love to do would be to run several copies of MacOS whatever (7.x i think) on the same PC, setup a virtual appletalk network for them and trigger the bunny. Scary that this is the first thing I thought of when I saw "Apple" and "emulator" together.
Hmm I wonder how well this would run under VMWare, or maybe with WINE;-> I should probably stop posting this close to bedtime, I'll probably regret this in the morning, oh well.;->
If you read the about the creator section of the web site it mentions that he has access to the design and milling equipment at work, not personally owned stuff.
Though you might want to check educational electronics catalouges, I seem to remember playing with very basic CAM setup in a highschool technology class about 5-6 years ago, worked with an Apple ][ iirc, and could only mill plastic.
It's a convience thing. Dedicated MP3 computer plugged into the stereo let's me easily play all the music in my collection, in any order I want, with no annoying lags for a CD changer to swap discs or for me to get up and physically replace a tape. If I want a custom mix for the car it's a helluva lot easier to sort a dozen songs on the computer in the order I want and burn them to CD. MP3/Vorbis type technologies give the user far greater control over how he/she is able to listen to music. Plus I don't even own a tape deck.
As a matter of fact there is a pretty good paper up at: Unix-vs-NT.org describing a similar migration process. Kirch hasn't updated the page in a while but IIRC this guy did pretty much the same thing, though I don't think he had any custom VB stuff to deal with. On the whole it's a pretty good site with alot of Unix and NT comparsions, not much in the way of benchmarks, instead it offers a good view from the trenchs so to speak.
As a matter of fact that's already being done. The most common method is lay hot water pipes in the cement for the driveway, then keep warm water circulating during the winter. This is pretty expensive as you have to be careful when laying the pipes and pouring the concrete, plus can get pricey to operate, that's a lot of hot water to keep circulating. I do know of at least one guy here in Anchorage doing it, probably quite a few. Though it's not being done here, I've heard that some other northern cities are doing that to downtown streets/sidewalks, funded at least partially by the shops along said roads. In a busy commercial area the savings of not having the roads shutdown/slowed by snow and removeal equipment probably offsets the costs.
Now the interesting question. Did the gag order forbid these people from getting in contact with someone who might
come to their aid? If not being allowed to make a press release kept the ACLU from getting interested, I'd say there is a
pretty serious problem.
As a matter of fact it did. If you read the overview at ejournalism.com he talks about how the gag prevented him from soliciting advice from others in the industry or other groups that could file an amicus breif or provide any other type of assistance. I take that to mean that he couldn't contact the ACLU, EFF, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The original post mentioned business as the focus, although it did say that consumers were in mind. I work for a company that would consider its broadband connection essential (it's an e-fulfillment company).
Now tell me, as an e-fullfillment company do you get your bandwidth via a cable modem or consumer grade DSL(the type that has the price cap in Canada)? Or do you pay a little more for your connection to get some sort of contractual garuntee on speed and uptime?
What I do see as a useful quasi-regulatory function for the CRTC or FCC is as a type of telecomm complaint department for home users and small businesses to go to when the cable company/telco is dragging their feet or otherwise being a dick. I think someone in another post said he'd had good luck using the CRTC as such a stick to beat providers with when not delivering.
pretty much the same way as every houshold has tv and most have phone connections, if the net 'jack' is there and people only plug in to surf, they will give it a shot. especially if the monthly fees can not exceed a government enforced amount.
Two things, first are you somehow implying that a TV in every home is a good thing? Second the reason that nearly everyone has a TV has nothing to do with building codes or government intervention, people buy TV's so they can watch mindless tripe like "who wants to be a millionare", "survivor" and the continuing election coverage.
Internet access is no more a right than cable tv is. Being able to make your own choices about how to spend your money is a right though. Besides every home is already wired with internet access points, they are called phone lines, people can just plug in their (insert 'net device here) and surf, people that want to drop the $200 bucks or so and pay the monthly fee are doing this, those that prefer to spend the money on an extra fifty channels of Regis and malt liqour aren't buying internet access now. Do you honestly think that the unwired masses are holding out for subsidized broadband?
I'm sorry while I can agree that telephones should be considered an essential service mainly for contacting emergency services, I just don't see broadband as an essential service that needs to be regulated for QoS like the phone network. It's not as if a cable modem outage could cost someone their life (aghh Bob's having a heart attact, call 911, shit the dsl is down again, sorry bob) About the only thing you could really lose from a cable modem outage is money and if rock solid 24/7/365 uptime is essential to your business your web server shouldn't be plugged into the cable modem and sitting your living room.
;-) for my service, which means my ISP can afford redundent equipment and enough staff to keep things humming. In the 18 months or so I've had the cable modem I've had maybe 5 days of downtime that weren't the fault of some piss poor wiring in my building, maybe 10 days of downtime that were due to the wiring and 7 of those were in my first month of service as they were trying to nail down the problem. Pretty damn good service considering that I live in the unregulated US. I should also point out that I do live in Alaska, so the climate and infrastructure is probably less forgiving than in eastern Canada.
On the other hand the 5 and 8 days of outages per month quoted in the article are just plain unacceptable, if my cable modem service were that bad I switch to DSL in a heartbeat, but then again I pay $40US (actually $60 but I pay extra for a static IP and a "double speed" cable modem, well worth the expense to run acerbic.org out of my living room
I'd also like to point out that I have my choice of two DSL providors and one cable modem provider, this is true for all of Anchorage and any community within 60-70 miles of Anchorage. Statewide nearly every city/town/village with >5k people has at least one broadband option. Plus AT&T has chosen Anchorage to be a test market in 2001 for a wireless broadband pilot program, if nothing else that'll encourage even more spee/price competition. Ah the joys of fast, reliable, reasonably priced, unregulated broadband. For all geeks across Canada I truely hope you manage to get rid of regulated broadband.
Since the first generation of craft would be "wild weasles" going after enemy air defences their is no danger of them shooting at each other, thus them knowing each others positions is meaningless, they aren't looking for air targets. The freindly fire danger I see would be in one of these buggers getting lost and homing in on freindly air defences, either from their own bases or some other allied position. If the craft is damaged and "forgets" where the good guys are supposed to be the potential for it to destroy the first anti-aircraft radar it finds is kinda scary. I'd feel better knowing that humans and humans only can make the decision to fire.
IFF and other ident systems are mostly reliable, automated target recognition via radar profile is faster and more accurate by far than what humans can do, but radar signatures can be spoofed, IFF signals can be faked etc... It may be hard or near impossible today but it won't be impossible for ever.
Asides from the technical problems of completly automated combat systems there is of course the ethical dilema of allowing machines to make the decision to kill human beings. Humans, even the enemy, deserve the thought and consideration of another human before being killed, we owe each other that small dignity even in war. Modern warfare is already remote and cold enough as it is, removing any more of the humanity and allowing our weapons to do our killing for us makes the prospect of war all too simple a thing, all too bloodless an affair, and I fear that the decision to attack or not will be taken too lightly in such a case. Not to mention the very real (in say 50+ years) of our own AI's turning on us, and making the decision to kill all humans. If they've never been allowed to decide on their own to kill humans they would (hopefully) be less likely to see it as an option if they do turn on us.
Not that this story is giving me fears of SkyNet or anything, just some things to think about when considering the concept of allowing computers to do our killing for us.
God I hope so! What's up with some of these people using "" this was lifted right from the page source of the article. Why the hell would anyone specify -1 font size?!?!?!?!
Certian companies may have a wire monopoly but that monopoly is not mandated by the city, they have a wire monopoly because they own the fucking wire and can do whatever the hell they want to do with it (or should, but when it comes to telecomm the feds like to play fast and loose with private property rights.) Nothing is stopping another carrier from coming in and laying wire but the cost of doing so, if you're really that upset about your choices raise some capital and build your own network. The only way I can see how the city could somehow sanction a monopoly would be by a corrupt offical denying access to city owned right of ways to a competitor wishing to lay wire, of course if that ever happened in a sizable market you can bet that the competitors being locked out in this way would be screaming bloody murder to the FCC.
If I read the article right this guys main claim to the history files is that the school is publicly funded and as a taxpaying citizen he has a right to know, under FOI laws, what exactly the state is doing with his money. So he'll get acess to the browsing history of all the students in the school district. What about other public institutions though? Couldn't some one under the same FOI laws request the broswer histories/proxy logs of every state employee surfing at work? Provided of course any personally identifiable information is removed this also seems like a reasonable request. I'd personally like to know (and publish) the browsing record of say the governors office.
Polls here in Alaska polls close at 8pm, alaska standard time, which is four hours behind EST. I believe that Hawaii is actually has the last polls to close.
Bullshit! My mother put her career on hold to be a stay at home mom until I was eight (and my little sister was four) for those eight years she was mostly at home, during lean years she would work part time at night, after my dad was home. I nearly always had a parent around when I was a wee tyke, and it wasn't until my little sis was in school that mom started working on her career again, HR managment. She is doing quite well despite her eight year handicap, and more importantly she managed to raise two healthy, happy, (mostly) well adjusted childern.
When I eventually start a family one of us will take time off from our precious career for a few years to do something truly important.
I don't know about everyone else but I plan on wathing Comedy Centrals live edition of the Daily Show for all of my election night updates and analysis!
The original guy didn't say his was a god of reason, he said that reason is his god, in other words for him reason is the ultimate power/driving force of the universe.
Atheism takes two general forms, one camp believes there is no god. The other camp (to which I belong, btw) simply doesn't believe in any god, but could presumably be convinced if one made a convicning apperance. It's a subtle but important distinction.
Hemos didn't write that, you'll notice that the entire writeup was in italics. Those were the words of "risotto" the guy who submitted the story.
copy over your brain to your linux box and still keep your body for running around (doing all those fun things you can only do with a body like eating pizza, drinking beer, having sex) but still have the super humongous computer brain.
I agree with you whole heartedly about the lameness of that particular article. The ridiculus overblown machismo of the article is only eclisped by that of the announcers on the show (the fact that there weak sports-like commentary seems to be universally reviled here on /. should be at least midly encouraging)
If it makes a difference such stereotypes (mental inferiority, lack of tech ability) DO NOT exist in my particular group of geeks freinds/co-workers. That's not to say that stereotypes don't exist but it's not universal and female freindly IT shops do exist, including the one I work at. As a matter of fact I happen to prefer having at least as many female techs around as males, the whole department is more productive when we have that balance.
Anyway just wanted to comment that not all (or even most IMO) male-geeks have their head in the sand about perserving the old "boys club" mindset.
Believe it or not they don't teach "how to screw your employees" in business school. In fact they teach us just the opposite, alot of the examples Katz cited in his article are very close to examples used in class to illustrate how NOT to manage. A little background, I am a senior going for my BBA in Management at UAA. One of the reasons I chose managment over cios/mis programs was simply because I didn't think (and still don't) that many managers understand geeks at all. And just as bad most geeks don't know, and don't want to know, jack shit about running a business, hence many startups have shitty shitty management. It's from that shitty management that you get the 18 hour days, high turnovers and the lay-off and outsource mentality. Here's an interesting tidbit for ya'll: loosing and replacing one "normal" employee costs the company roughly 4 times that persons salary for the time it takes to replace them (ie if it takes a month to replace them it costs 4 months salary in hiring costs, lost work etc...) for a tech worker I've heard it being as high as 10 times salary for replacement. High turnover is bad M'kay? Believe me, trained competent employees are any company's most valuable assets.
;->
Ok so why is there so much shitty managment and boneheaded HR moves then? I have a theory, at least for the technology sector. Most professional managers, good or bad, don't have an understanding of the geek subculture, they don't know how to motivate us and keep us happy. At first they fall back on what works for "norms" standard bennie packages, bizzare sports related pep talks, lame incentive programs, and finally in frustration slip either into a comatose state where they make no decisions and play solitare all day or become fire breathing assholes who drive off all the best workers. On the other side you get some very talented geek types that start their own business, they can code like the devil but know nothing of running a business. Maybe they do well at first when it's just a small group of friends sweating out all nighters together to get the first product out the door. The success begins to take it's toll, and these very talented programmers find themselves at the helm of a company with 50 other employees. Some turn out to be natural leaders, like Linus for example, who can herd cats and get a job done, others find they can't do it and fall back to coding. So instead of delegating specific tasks out to the staff the founders are still pulling all nighters working in one direction while the other employees are following suit by pulling all nighters working on what they think the company needs. Opps. Then they get frustrated and quit.
Anyway that's just my take on it. Sadly I havn't encountered any other full-fledged geeks in the management program here, but on the bright side alot of the other younger managment majors seem to at least understand that geek types have different motivations that other employees will and will hopefully do a better job than the current generation of management in the tech field.
Incidently I graduate in May if anyone has a PHB they want to replace
projects - probably only the government would be able to afford stuff like this
Well I for one wouldn't have a job if it wern't for privately owned chip fabs, we certianlly wouldn't have slashdot and a public internet. Without the ability to spread and limit risk in the legal structure large commercial ventures would be impossible and we would have to rely on the government for large capital projects. I point to the former USSR as an example of why that's a BAD idea, along with former east germany, north korea, most of mainland china etc... Marxism has never and will never be a successful or effient means of running a government/economy, history has proven this, over and over again. The USSR which has more and richer farmland than the US, and more mineral resources was barely able to feed itself by the end of the cold war and broke the back of it's economy trying to keep up with us on the weapons front. On the other hand we capitalist pigdogs from the west were exporting grain to the USSR, feeding ourselves plenty, building a globe stratteling empire (and the armed forces to control it) while civillains barely felt the pinch as the US standard of living rose. Yes we had recessions during this time, and a bad gas shortage, but even during the worse recessions average Americans were better off the average soviet citizens.
While it is possible even for a large nation to survive and feed itself with only small farms and cottage industry but that's all it'll do, survive. Without economies of scale afforded by large corporations, and the massive, government rivaling capital they can raise our modern economy and way of life would vanish. Incidentally you also get dis-economies of scale as an organization grows to large to easily control. This does a pretty good job of keeping corporations from becoming too large and dominate in a free market, to exist beyond a certain size a company needs government assistence to prevent competition (the old local phone monoplies, the entertainment cartels RIAA, MPAA etc can only continue to exist by bribing a large and corrupt state to build a legal shield to protect them from competition.) As far as leaving high capital projects solely in the hands of a state organization, which also BTW tend to suffer from the same dis-economies of scale, may I direct your attention to NASA and the space shuttle?
While at the time the lawsuits were filed DeCSS was still legal for the authors to create and use, the problem is that it is "illegal" to distribute circumvention tools, and that provision didn't have a delay on it. The MPAA didn't go after Johanson or 2600 et al for using DeCSS, they went after them for distributing it.
If you look at the last paragraph in this article they mention this problem, that even if broad exceptions are granted for circumventing content locks, it's still illegal to hand out the code to do so. Sucks huh?
I would personally like to see a mac emulator for linux, I have fond memories of older Mac software from many years ago, much of it share/freeware that I really enjoyed playing around with. And there was one program in particular I'd like to play with in emulation. There was this program that basically made the energizer bunny run across your screen, neat by itself but if it was installed on multiple machines on an appletalk network it would run from machine to machine. This was both funny as hell and annoying. Funny if you were on the "master" computer that could trigger it, annoying if you were trying to use the other computers, really annoying if you happened to be the monitor of a computer lab that had this installed, and embarassingly annoying if you were the lab monitor and the one who installed it. What I would love to do would be to run several copies of MacOS whatever (7.x i think) on the same PC, setup a virtual appletalk network for them and trigger the bunny. Scary that this is the first thing I thought of when I saw "Apple" and "emulator" together.
Hmm I wonder how well this would run under VMWare, or maybe with WINE
If you read the about the creator section of the web site it mentions that he has access to the design and milling equipment at work, not personally owned stuff.
Though you might want to check educational electronics catalouges, I seem to remember playing with very basic CAM setup in a highschool technology class about 5-6 years ago, worked with an Apple ][ iirc, and could only mill plastic.
It's a convience thing. Dedicated MP3 computer plugged into the stereo let's me easily play all the music in my collection, in any order I want, with no annoying lags for a CD changer to swap discs or for me to get up and physically replace a tape. If I want a custom mix for the car it's a helluva lot easier to sort a dozen songs on the computer in the order I want and burn them to CD. MP3/Vorbis type technologies give the user far greater control over how he/she is able to listen to music. Plus I don't even own a tape deck.
Unix-vs-NT.org
describing a similar migration process. Kirch hasn't updated the page in a while but IIRC this guy did pretty much the same thing, though I don't think he had any custom VB stuff to deal with. On the whole it's a pretty good site with alot of Unix and NT comparsions, not much in the way of benchmarks, instead it offers a good view from the trenchs so to speak.
As a matter of fact that's already being done. The most common method is lay hot water pipes in the cement for the driveway, then keep warm water circulating during the winter. This is pretty expensive as you have to be careful when laying the pipes and pouring the concrete, plus can get pricey to operate, that's a lot of hot water to keep circulating. I do know of at least one guy here in Anchorage doing it, probably quite a few. Though it's not being done here, I've heard that some other northern cities are doing that to downtown streets/sidewalks, funded at least partially by the shops along said roads. In a busy commercial area the savings of not having the roads shutdown/slowed by snow and removeal equipment probably offsets the costs.
As a matter of fact it did. If you read the overview at ejournalism.com he talks about how the gag prevented him from soliciting advice from others in the industry or other groups that could file an amicus breif or provide any other type of assistance. I take that to mean that he couldn't contact the ACLU, EFF, etc.