This is such bullshit. The real question is, why should the poor widow have to give her whole living? She shouldn't. They can give in other ways that have more impact.
In this parable, the widow's mite didn't contribute shit towards the cause at hand. Sorry to be pragmatic about it, but its true. That story is the equivalent of Warren Buffet, a billionaire, doing community service to help charity but not giving any money at all.
People should be giving in ways that will have the most impact. If all you have to give is a penny, then don't. Go down to the shelter and help give meals to the homeless for fuck's sake.
Its not about doing what is easy or hard when contributing to charity. Its about people giving in a way where they will have the most impact.
I agree with you completely, by the way. When I say "free" market, I am being totally facetious. I think in my original post, I put it in "quotes". I should have done it in the title, as well.
What do you propose then? Flexible labor markets are key to making sure there are plenty of jobs.
Huh? Since when does outsourcing to other nations, helping their economies, ensure that we have plenty of jobs here? That makes zero sense. All you need to do is ask automotive workers, textile workers, and manufacturing workers how they feel about the practice. I assure you, you aren't going to get a positive response.
The undeniable fact is that companies avoid countries with labor laws that make it difficult to fire people (look at the horribly slow job growth of France and Germany.
I'm not saying that we have to enact laws that make it difficult to fire people. I'm saying that a company should not be permitted to displace 10,000 people's jobs by moving them to a foreign country. The practice damages American lives.
Personally, I believe the main thing that's needed are laws that make it easier to hire people and make discrimination more difficult (including prohibitions on using credit rating data, drug tests, criminal records beyond 5-7 years in judging a job candidate. Further, I'd like to see a system where resumes are submittedly "blindly" (with no name) to prevent google name searches on canidate's names, as well as hidden college information (so that people are not chosen simply because they went to one college or another--just as long as the college is accreditated.) That will allow people who have been left out of the market labor a chance to break-in.
Well, I disagree with the entire statement. But more importantly, it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. If you want to save American jobs, you have to start by keeping the jobs here. That is accomplished through legislation.
These days, US companies will always sacrifice their employees to lower the bottom line and increase profits. We should be preventing companies from exercising abhorrent practices simply to save a dollar.
This practice truly disgusts me. The textile and manufacturing industries saw this same exact thing occur with everything moving to China, Taiwan, and Mexico. Now the same thing is occurring with IT functions.
But this "problem" isn't the real problem, its a symptom of an overly "free" market with little or no controls. The politicians in this country have not introduced any kind of real legislation which protects US jobs. And this is because big business donates billions of dollars to politicians to prevent them from doing it. That is an absolute travesty.
If the only jobs located in the United States are going to be jobs which require geographic residence within the United States, then we have a huge problem.
Unfortnately, I don't see a solution to this problem for the United States. The only real solution is to move to a country which believes in protecting the jobs and skills of its citizenry. Because almost every country other than the United States does this.
I manage developers for a living, and for me, mentoring is the most valuable thing. Especially if someone doesn't have a whole lot of "on the job" experience. I would think IT would be the same way. But I don't think mentoring is really done much anymore.
When I first started programming, I came into a company as a full-time "apprentice" programmer. I made *barely* 20k per year, but I was learning under incredible people. It was invaluable.
As a manager now, I look to who people have worked with. Do I know those people? Who does the applicant say they have learned from?
Certifications don't tell me anything. I really wish that IT and CS people these days had the humility to be mentored by people greater than themselves. But I hardly see it anymore.
I'm sorry, but what you have said is a total stereotype. Look at police and fire departments.
Every neighborhood or region has its own department and/or precinct. All of these serve a very specific area. These "satellites" pretty much run themselves. But they still are held accountable to all the policies and procedures. They are held accountable to "the law". There are audit systems in place to ensure compliance or investigate lack thereof.
Having one huge department that doesn't answer to any business function directly... yet is responsible for all business function related IT issues... makes NO sense.
There are good reasons... shared resources/experts/support-contracts/interopeabilit y/unified budgets, etc... Why have 7 departments get a database guy, when you can have two guys run DBs shared by all?
It all depends on the situation. If seven departments agreed to this situation, then fine. But if one department needs better response time, better accountability, and better domain knowledge, then they may choose to hire their own DBA.
There isn't necessarily a disconnect between "Divest entirely" and "Have business unit accountability". You can do both successfully.
Absolutely, and that was my whole point. I used the word "completely" in my original post. IT deparments don't have to be completely centralized. Anymore than they have to be completely decentralized. Some things make sense to centralize. Some things make NO sense to centralize.
A lot of orgs I've been a part of, though, don't make that distinction. Everything goes through one huge department. This definitely causes way more problems than it solves.
Do we have to have a centralized IT to install a memory upgrade? How about a new hard drive? How about a departmental network share or file server? How about installing Photoshop on a few machines? How about purchasing a printer for use by a department?
These kinds of functions DO NOT need to be addressed by a centralized IT department. Let the centralized (corporate) IT department take care of things such as DNS servers, mail servers, enterprise architecture guidelines, security standards, et cetera.
But don't deny a department the ability to be able to service their own users if it is within their means. Doing that is totally moronic.
If John Doe in accounts receivable can fulfill a request to install memory one hour after it is requested, how much money does that save compared to calling the central IT helpdesk, going through triage, filling out paperwork, et cetera?
You mention having "corporate architectural guidelines" that your IT folks would adhere to... but if they're not accountable to corporate, and the person they are accountable to wants a new Blackberry/VPN access/porn hosting/you name it service that's against the guidelines, do you really think they're going to tell their source of funding to sod off?
They are accountable to their department, and their department is accountable to corporate. IT doesn't have to be its own monolithic department to have accountability. Leave compliance to the departmental level. Some departments will be in compliance, others won't. Treat them accordingly.
How much is your company spending on IT? With a centralized structure that's an easy question to answer. When each department is responsible for their own IT funding, it becomes less so. And what level of return are you getting on IT investments? Same thing as above.
How do you figure? This is EASY to answer at a departmental level. You can just pull up purchase orders and IT-staff salaries. Done. You want to answer ROI? That is WAY EASIER to answer at a departmental level. I can easily say, "this server provides this value to my deparment and to the organization." Good luck doing that at the corporate IT level. Centralized IT departments have absolutely no way to generate real ROI based on business functions.
Discounts come from bulk purchases, but if every department is running their own ship you'll never achieve the volume needed to achieve those discounts. And 24/7 tech support? You think you're gonna get that out of your department's lone IT guy?
Purchases don't have to be made all at once to get discounts. Not sure if you've done purchasing before, but I can negotiate a discount/pricing schedule with Dell, HP, IBM or anyone based on what I expect to purchase throughout the year. All you have to do is negotiate for it.
And 24/7 tech support? Sure... if the department needs 24/7 tech support, then yes... they should have 24/7 tech support. And if my department needs that, then I will hire to staff it. Its my department.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that nothing is centralized. But EVERYTHING doesn't have to be. Sure.. mail servers can be run in a centralized fashion. Maybe a few other things.
But memory installation doesn't have to be centralized. Hardware purchases don't have to be centralized. Network shares don't have to be centralized. Hard disk upgrades don't have to be centralized... etc... etc.
Centralize those things that make sense to centralize... and decentralize/departmentalize the rest.
Dude, you obviously have no idea where enterprise-class IT management thinking has been going for the last ten years. And maybe even missed the disastrous ten years before that. Please go away and come back when you've been tasked with identifying ways to save $400 million from a $4 billion **annual** IT budget like I was.
Dude, I've been around enterprise IT for more years than I care to count. And I've been around IT *before* it was IT. Back then, it was IS or MIS. And back then, they had decentralized models that worked VERY WELL.
The key is properly defining your business functions in ways that make sense. Nobody should have to go to one uber-department to get a service pack upgrade. Or to have Photoshop installed. Or to get more memory. And then wait WEEKS potentially for a response. That is idiotic.
You want to shave 10% off of an annual IT budget? Decentralize. Having one single monolithic department tending to all IT-related tasks in an organization is a huge, bureaucratic drain.
Completely centralized IT should die a paintful death. I'm not sure where this concept of having to centralize all IT functions... but it seems totally idiotic to me.
If I manage a group of 40 people, I should be able to hire an IT person to service my 40 people. Their salary should come out of my budget. My IT person should have to adhere to corporate architectural guidelines. But this IT person should report to me and be accountable to me.
Internal corporate IT SLAs are a joke. If an SLA is violated, it turns into nothing but a moronic yelling match complete with finger-pointing, et cetera. Meanwhile... the end-user still suffers.
Down with centralied IT, I say. Put IT staff inside of each business function. Make them accountable to that business group/function... where it belongs.
I certainly see some need (in certain cases) for asychronous activity in a web application. All of us have used Javascript and hidden IFRAME hacks before. Not pretty, but it works.
All that being said, I can't understand all this hype. If I want a rich, interactive application, distributable over the web, then I would probably opt to write it in Java and distribute it as an applet or through Java Web Start. If I wanted native widtets, I'd write it using SWT.
Am I the only one who thinks that dynamic page updates are overrated and unnecessary 99% of the time?
Yeah, this is a hot button for me. People in a work environment who dress in garbage such as sandals, shorts, and grungy T-shirts have a predominate lack of respect. Lack of respect for themselves. Lack of respect for their profession. Lack of respect for their outward presentation. And that goes a long way towards explaning the attitude of most people in this business. Generally, dev-minded people have little or no respect for others, for authority, they are highly cynical and sarcastic, they don't like structure, they don't respect their customers. They all want to be fucking cowboys riding free on the range. Whatever. It is a total joy for me when I get to fire these idiots. I'd trade ten respectable, respectful developers who were good teammates over one genius who was a pariah and dressed like a moron who had nothing to lose.
I sincerely hope some level of professionalism and respect comes back to this business at some point.
I've been leading programming teams for quite awhile now. I've used several different development methodologies, and had them all fail and succeed at some point. Every success or failure came down to one thing... PEOPLE. If you have a good team, that team can accomplish anything using pretty much any development methodology. Crappy teams will yield crappy results. Good teams will yield good results.
Good people know how to make a process work for them, whether its XP, Scrum, Waterfall, or RUP. Bad people become a slave to the process and end up failing. I'm not saying process isn't important. I think process is very important. But process will never replace good people and good synergy.
Seriously. I think some patterns are fine for some things, but as a previous poster has stated, more ugly-as-shit code has been written using design patterns than not.
I know that in the OO languages world, this book is hailed by many as the holy book, but to me, there really is only one... "Code Complete".
The one book teaches the fundamentals of good programming *in any language* better than any programming book ever written.
Case in point, I don't think any shit code has been written as a result of applying the techniques and best practices in "Code Complete". I certainly can't say the same about "Design Patterns".
I actually thought that the reason daylight savings time existed was to conserve power during World War I.
With the extension of daylight by one hour, it means that it saves one hour worth of time where people will not be turning on all the lights in their house. When added up over hundreds of thousands of homes, this is a huge power savings. You want people to be going to bed as close to sunset as possible to save the most amount of "after work - at home" energy.
You are playing the "chicken-and-egg" game. Which is fine. I could go one step back from that. But it doesn't get us anywhere.
My point is that something that is learned/grokked/comprehended means *zero* if you can't remember it. Otherwise, you'd have to re-learn everything over again every time you needed it.
Eesh... I can't believe that people are denying the importance of memory. You actually think that I want to derive the geometric theorems through relationships every time I want to calculate the area of a rectangle?
Of course not. Length x width. Straight from memory. Doesn't matter if I know WHY or not. Knowing the "WHY" means very little to most things when it comes to the "HOW".
I worked with data entry operators for a period early in my working career. And I don't think the magic number is 3 or 4. I think the magic number depends on how you are accustomed to looking at numbers.
I saw contracted data entry operators entering tons of tax forms an hour able to memorize several social security numbers in a matter of minutes.
Its all in the rhythm. In their case, these data entry operators became accustomed to memorizing numeric data in chunks of nine. It was incredible. And a large number of these people didn't have high-school diplomas.
For me, I can remember phone numbers (groups of seven) easily. However, if you ask me to remember five numbers... forget it.
What does it matter if I use 300KiB/sec or 15 friends each use 20KiB/sec? Oh wait, you as the ISP are counting on me not using the connection... TOO FUCKING BAD!
The difference is that I sold access to the product to *you*. I didn't sell it to your 15 friends. If you want that kind of an agreement, then purchase a different kind of license from me. If you want to be a reseller, then come to me as a reseller. Don't masquerade as an individual consumer and then go behind my back.
That being said, the reseller has to make sure that they are not being anti-competitive in their reseller agreements, as well. This is where I think the most work needs to be done.
On one hand, I can see how great it would be to have free WiFi. Hell, it is great to get free ANYTHING these days. However...... if I owned an ISP, and somebody was basically using my line to give away internet access for free (or for a fee), that would piss me off under certain circumstances. This is also seriously compromises my consumer market. This kind of behavior is anti-competitive to say the least. I don't care if it is a municipality, a company, or an an individual.
Its probably beating a dead horse, but it bears saying. Purchasing a product doesn't necessarily mean that you can do whatever you want with it. And I'm glad for this... otherwise things like the GPL would be rendered meaningless.
I realize that there is a monopoly/oligopoly issue here which further muddies the issue. But anti-competitive behavior still goes two ways. Companies have to play nice for the good of the market, and consumers have to play nice for the good of the market.
I'm still out to lunch on this issue, but there has to be a balance somewhere where consumers can be happy and the upstream providers can be happy.
I use Thunderbird as an email client. But the GMail interface just does not make sense to me. I don't see the huge innovation.
Gmail's web client is nowhere near as functional or easy-to-use as an email client such as Thunderbird. I have tried for the life of me to try to use labels, and I don't see the point. I don't care if I can apply a label to more than one message. Its not a folder. Using IMAP, I can have public and private folders. Labels != Folders.
Some of us actually like to arrange our stuff using the folder/directory concept.
In Thunderbird, I can mark a message as important simply by "flagging" it. I also can "label" a message if I want (work, todo, important, personal, etc). If I want to do a search, I can search using damned near any criteria.
Labeling and placing message in folders should not be mutually exclusive conepts.
Re:Damn, whatever happened to just being humane?
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
I see what you are getting at, Randall, but I don't think you hit at the heart of the issue. The whole problem isn't any policy. The problem is greed and selfishness. This country is simply not willing to take the initiative to do right by its lower class citizens.
Policies are driven by *principles*. And policies always benefit someone at the sacrifice of another. The questions are... who benefits? Who sacrifices? Whose best interest was the policy serving?
Again, I understand what you are saying, but getting at the MOTIVE of a policy is probably a much more compelling argument than arguing interpretation of numbers. Especially when dealing with issues of humanity and of the heart.
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This is such bullshit. The real question is, why should the poor widow have to give her whole living? She shouldn't. They can give in other ways that have more impact.
In this parable, the widow's mite didn't contribute shit towards the cause at hand. Sorry to be pragmatic about it, but its true. That story is the equivalent of Warren Buffet, a billionaire, doing community service to help charity but not giving any money at all.
People should be giving in ways that will have the most impact. If all you have to give is a penny, then don't. Go down to the shelter and help give meals to the homeless for fuck's sake.
Its not about doing what is easy or hard when contributing to charity. Its about people giving in a way where they will have the most impact.
I agree with you completely, by the way. When I say "free" market, I am being totally facetious. I think in my original post, I put it in "quotes". I should have done it in the title, as well.
Anyways, I'm totally with you, bro. Well spoken.
Huh? Since when does outsourcing to other nations, helping their economies, ensure that we have plenty of jobs here? That makes zero sense. All you need to do is ask automotive workers, textile workers, and manufacturing workers how they feel about the practice. I assure you, you aren't going to get a positive response.
I'm not saying that we have to enact laws that make it difficult to fire people. I'm saying that a company should not be permitted to displace 10,000 people's jobs by moving them to a foreign country. The practice damages American lives.
Well, I disagree with the entire statement. But more importantly, it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. If you want to save American jobs, you have to start by keeping the jobs here. That is accomplished through legislation.
These days, US companies will always sacrifice their employees to lower the bottom line and increase profits. We should be preventing companies from exercising abhorrent practices simply to save a dollar.
This practice truly disgusts me. The textile and manufacturing industries saw this same exact thing occur with everything moving to China, Taiwan, and Mexico. Now the same thing is occurring with IT functions.
But this "problem" isn't the real problem, its a symptom of an overly "free" market with little or no controls. The politicians in this country have not introduced any kind of real legislation which protects US jobs. And this is because big business donates billions of dollars to politicians to prevent them from doing it. That is an absolute travesty.
If the only jobs located in the United States are going to be jobs which require geographic residence within the United States, then we have a huge problem.
Unfortnately, I don't see a solution to this problem for the United States. The only real solution is to move to a country which believes in protecting the jobs and skills of its citizenry. Because almost every country other than the United States does this.
I manage developers for a living, and for me, mentoring is the most valuable thing. Especially if someone doesn't have a whole lot of "on the job" experience. I would think IT would be the same way. But I don't think mentoring is really done much anymore.
When I first started programming, I came into a company as a full-time "apprentice" programmer. I made *barely* 20k per year, but I was learning under incredible people. It was invaluable.
As a manager now, I look to who people have worked with. Do I know those people? Who does the applicant say they have learned from?
Certifications don't tell me anything. I really wish that IT and CS people these days had the humility to be mentored by people greater than themselves. But I hardly see it anymore.
I'm sorry, but what you have said is a total stereotype. Look at police and fire departments.
Every neighborhood or region has its own department and/or precinct. All of these serve a very specific area. These "satellites" pretty much run themselves. But they still are held accountable to all the policies and procedures. They are held accountable to "the law". There are audit systems in place to ensure compliance or investigate lack thereof.
Having one huge department that doesn't answer to any business function directly... yet is responsible for all business function related IT issues... makes NO sense.
There are good reasons... shared resources/experts/support-contracts/interopeabilit y/unified budgets, etc... Why have 7 departments get a database guy, when you can have two guys run DBs shared by all?
It all depends on the situation. If seven departments agreed to this situation, then fine. But if one department needs better response time, better accountability, and better domain knowledge, then they may choose to hire their own DBA.
There isn't necessarily a disconnect between "Divest entirely" and "Have business unit accountability". You can do both successfully.
Absolutely, and that was my whole point. I used the word "completely" in my original post. IT deparments don't have to be completely centralized. Anymore than they have to be completely decentralized. Some things make sense to centralize. Some things make NO sense to centralize.
A lot of orgs I've been a part of, though, don't make that distinction. Everything goes through one huge department. This definitely causes way more problems than it solves.
Do we have to have a centralized IT to install a memory upgrade? How about a new hard drive? How about a departmental network share or file server? How about installing Photoshop on a few machines? How about purchasing a printer for use by a department?
These kinds of functions DO NOT need to be addressed by a centralized IT department. Let the centralized (corporate) IT department take care of things such as DNS servers, mail servers, enterprise architecture guidelines, security standards, et cetera.
But don't deny a department the ability to be able to service their own users if it is within their means. Doing that is totally moronic.
If John Doe in accounts receivable can fulfill a request to install memory one hour after it is requested, how much money does that save compared to calling the central IT helpdesk, going through triage, filling out paperwork, et cetera?
EVERYTHING doesn't have to be centralized.
You mention having "corporate architectural guidelines" that your IT folks would adhere to... but if they're not accountable to corporate, and the person they are accountable to wants a new Blackberry/VPN access/porn hosting/you name it service that's against the guidelines, do you really think they're going to tell their source of funding to sod off?
They are accountable to their department, and their department is accountable to corporate. IT doesn't have to be its own monolithic department to have accountability. Leave compliance to the departmental level. Some departments will be in compliance, others won't. Treat them accordingly.
How much is your company spending on IT? With a centralized structure that's an easy question to answer. When each department is responsible for their own IT funding, it becomes less so. And what level of return are you getting on IT investments? Same thing as above.
How do you figure? This is EASY to answer at a departmental level. You can just pull up purchase orders and IT-staff salaries. Done. You want to answer ROI? That is WAY EASIER to answer at a departmental level. I can easily say, "this server provides this value to my deparment and to the organization." Good luck doing that at the corporate IT level. Centralized IT departments have absolutely no way to generate real ROI based on business functions.
Discounts come from bulk purchases, but if every department is running their own ship you'll never achieve the volume needed to achieve those discounts. And 24/7 tech support? You think you're gonna get that out of your department's lone IT guy?
Purchases don't have to be made all at once to get discounts. Not sure if you've done purchasing before, but I can negotiate a discount/pricing schedule with Dell, HP, IBM or anyone based on what I expect to purchase throughout the year. All you have to do is negotiate for it.
And 24/7 tech support? Sure... if the department needs 24/7 tech support, then yes... they should have 24/7 tech support. And if my department needs that, then I will hire to staff it. Its my department.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that nothing is centralized. But EVERYTHING doesn't have to be. Sure.. mail servers can be run in a centralized fashion. Maybe a few other things.
But memory installation doesn't have to be centralized. Hardware purchases don't have to be centralized. Network shares don't have to be centralized. Hard disk upgrades don't have to be centralized... etc... etc.
Centralize those things that make sense to centralize... and decentralize/departmentalize the rest.
Dude, I've been around enterprise IT for more years than I care to count. And I've been around IT *before* it was IT. Back then, it was IS or MIS. And back then, they had decentralized models that worked VERY WELL.
The key is properly defining your business functions in ways that make sense. Nobody should have to go to one uber-department to get a service pack upgrade. Or to have Photoshop installed. Or to get more memory. And then wait WEEKS potentially for a response. That is idiotic.
You want to shave 10% off of an annual IT budget? Decentralize. Having one single monolithic department tending to all IT-related tasks in an organization is a huge, bureaucratic drain.
Completely centralized IT should die a paintful death. I'm not sure where this concept of having to centralize all IT functions... but it seems totally idiotic to me.
If I manage a group of 40 people, I should be able to hire an IT person to service my 40 people. Their salary should come out of my budget. My IT person should have to adhere to corporate architectural guidelines. But this IT person should report to me and be accountable to me.
Internal corporate IT SLAs are a joke. If an SLA is violated, it turns into nothing but a moronic yelling match complete with finger-pointing, et cetera. Meanwhile... the end-user still suffers.
Down with centralied IT, I say. Put IT staff inside of each business function. Make them accountable to that business group/function... where it belongs.
I certainly see some need (in certain cases) for asychronous activity in a web application. All of us have used Javascript and hidden IFRAME hacks before. Not pretty, but it works.
All that being said, I can't understand all this hype. If I want a rich, interactive application, distributable over the web, then I would probably opt to write it in Java and distribute it as an applet or through Java Web Start. If I wanted native widtets, I'd write it using SWT.
Am I the only one who thinks that dynamic page updates are overrated and unnecessary 99% of the time?
Yeah, this is a hot button for me. People in a work environment who dress in garbage such as sandals, shorts, and grungy T-shirts have a predominate lack of respect. Lack of respect for themselves. Lack of respect for their profession. Lack of respect for their outward presentation. And that goes a long way towards explaning the attitude of most people in this business. Generally, dev-minded people have little or no respect for others, for authority, they are highly cynical and sarcastic, they don't like structure, they don't respect their customers. They all want to be fucking cowboys riding free on the range. Whatever. It is a total joy for me when I get to fire these idiots. I'd trade ten respectable, respectful developers who were good teammates over one genius who was a pariah and dressed like a moron who had nothing to lose.
I sincerely hope some level of professionalism and respect comes back to this business at some point.
I've been leading programming teams for quite awhile now. I've used several different development methodologies, and had them all fail and succeed at some point. Every success or failure came down to one thing... PEOPLE. If you have a good team, that team can accomplish anything using pretty much any development methodology. Crappy teams will yield crappy results. Good teams will yield good results.
Good people know how to make a process work for them, whether its XP, Scrum, Waterfall, or RUP. Bad people become a slave to the process and end up failing. I'm not saying process isn't important. I think process is very important. But process will never replace good people and good synergy.
Seriously. I think some patterns are fine for some things, but as a previous poster has stated, more ugly-as-shit code has been written using design patterns than not.
I know that in the OO languages world, this book is hailed by many as the holy book, but to me, there really is only one... "Code Complete".
The one book teaches the fundamentals of good programming *in any language* better than any programming book ever written.
Case in point, I don't think any shit code has been written as a result of applying the techniques and best practices in "Code Complete". I certainly can't say the same about "Design Patterns".
I actually thought that the reason daylight savings time existed was to conserve power during World War I.
With the extension of daylight by one hour, it means that it saves one hour worth of time where people will not be turning on all the lights in their house. When added up over hundreds of thousands of homes, this is a huge power savings. You want people to be going to bed as close to sunset as possible to save the most amount of "after work - at home" energy.
You are playing the "chicken-and-egg" game. Which is fine. I could go one step back from that. But it doesn't get us anywhere.
My point is that something that is learned/grokked/comprehended means *zero* if you can't remember it. Otherwise, you'd have to re-learn everything over again every time you needed it.
Eesh... I can't believe that people are denying the importance of memory. You actually think that I want to derive the geometric theorems through relationships every time I want to calculate the area of a rectangle?
Of course not. Length x width. Straight from memory. Doesn't matter if I know WHY or not. Knowing the "WHY" means very little to most things when it comes to the "HOW".
I worked with data entry operators for a period early in my working career. And I don't think the magic number is 3 or 4. I think the magic number depends on how you are accustomed to looking at numbers.
I saw contracted data entry operators entering tons of tax forms an hour able to memorize several social security numbers in a matter of minutes.
Its all in the rhythm. In their case, these data entry operators became accustomed to memorizing numeric data in chunks of nine. It was incredible. And a large number of these people didn't have high-school diplomas.
For me, I can remember phone numbers (groups of seven) easily. However, if you ask me to remember five numbers... forget it.
I disagree.
Memorizing PI is key to understanding what PI means. If you can't remember what PI is... how can you calculate the circumference of a circle?
Memorization is the key to learning. How can you begin to understand P&S geometry without memorizing the theorems?
Lets not forget that being able to REMEMBER (or memorize) what you have learned is necessary. Otherwise, you have to learn things over and over again.
Like it or not, we are creatures of habit, pattern recognition, and memorization.
What does it matter if I use 300KiB/sec or 15 friends each use 20KiB/sec? Oh wait, you as the ISP are counting on me not using the connection... TOO FUCKING BAD!
The difference is that I sold access to the product to *you*. I didn't sell it to your 15 friends. If you want that kind of an agreement, then purchase a different kind of license from me. If you want to be a reseller, then come to me as a reseller. Don't masquerade as an individual consumer and then go behind my back.
That being said, the reseller has to make sure that they are not being anti-competitive in their reseller agreements, as well. This is where I think the most work needs to be done.
On one hand, I can see how great it would be to have free WiFi. Hell, it is great to get free ANYTHING these days. However... ... if I owned an ISP, and somebody was basically using my line to give away internet access for free (or for a fee), that would piss me off under certain circumstances. This is also seriously compromises my consumer market. This kind of behavior is anti-competitive to say the least. I don't care if it is a municipality, a company, or an an individual.
Its probably beating a dead horse, but it bears saying. Purchasing a product doesn't necessarily mean that you can do whatever you want with it. And I'm glad for this... otherwise things like the GPL would be rendered meaningless.
I realize that there is a monopoly/oligopoly issue here which further muddies the issue. But anti-competitive behavior still goes two ways. Companies have to play nice for the good of the market, and consumers have to play nice for the good of the market.
I'm still out to lunch on this issue, but there has to be a balance somewhere where consumers can be happy and the upstream providers can be happy.
... but the rest is useless for me.
I use Thunderbird as an email client. But the GMail interface just does not make sense to me. I don't see the huge innovation.
Gmail's web client is nowhere near as functional or easy-to-use as an email client such as Thunderbird. I have tried for the life of me to try to use labels, and I don't see the point. I don't care if I can apply a label to more than one message. Its not a folder. Using IMAP, I can have public and private folders. Labels != Folders.
Some of us actually like to arrange our stuff using the folder/directory concept.
In Thunderbird, I can mark a message as important simply by "flagging" it. I also can "label" a message if I want (work, todo, important, personal, etc). If I want to do a search, I can search using damned near any criteria.
Labeling and placing message in folders should not be mutually exclusive conepts.
Hooray!
I see what you are getting at, Randall, but I don't think you hit at the heart of the issue. The whole problem isn't any policy. The problem is greed and selfishness. This country is simply not willing to take the initiative to do right by its lower class citizens.
Policies are driven by *principles*. And policies always benefit someone at the sacrifice of another. The questions are... who benefits? Who sacrifices? Whose best interest was the policy serving?
Again, I understand what you are saying, but getting at the MOTIVE of a policy is probably a much more compelling argument than arguing interpretation of numbers. Especially when dealing with issues of humanity and of the heart.