Yes, but consider us relative to a given time. I live in Salem, so I have a little perspective on that particular era. It's not that we have always been an ideal society - but consider what we have typically been relative to the rest of the "civilized" world.
We treated Native Americans badly. Very badly. No doubt about it. We kept slaves after most of the rest of the world had stopped - certainly a stain. When Catholics started migrating here in quantity during the late 19th century, shops in Boston posted the infamous NINA signs (No Irish Need Apply). Until the civil rights upheval of the 1960's, blacks were excluded from many areas of society.
I know that - and I also know that other nations have had their moments of shame as well. The British locked out the Jewish refugees during World War II. We didn't take many of 'em, either. The French have had ample moments of blood and intolerance - the Vichy regime was awful, for instance, and the Reign of Terror deprived France of their best and brightest for half a century. Those are just two example countries, and relatively civilized ones. Look at the violence in the Balkans over ethnicity and religion - look at the conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, the guerrilla violence in Latin America, and the battles still raging in much of Asia - on Sri Lanka, in Tibet, and in Indonesia and the Phillipines.
Religion and Ethnicity have been sources of tribal conflict between humans since time began, and will continue to do so for the duration of the species. America, though, is the one place in history and time that has managed to rise most of the way past that in our short time (relative to history) as a nation. Acknowledging our failure to achieve perfection should not prevent us from taking credit for what we do have here - and should not encourage us to rest on our national laurels. We still have a ways to go, though we've come a long ways.
I have one of these now (with a Celery 366). It's only an option with Windows, though, since Linux DVD support is pretty much non-existent (I run Mandrake on mine - using it as a small server, and the i810 support is mediocre). Amptron also makes a VIA MVP4-based version of the Book PC with Linux support advertised as a benefit, but that's constrained to Socket 7 processors only.
I'd like to see a version that can run a Duron processor (Socket A), with perhaps an embedded nVIDIA chipset for graphics. It'd be worth a good penny as the ultimate LAN party machine, though the heat might be an issue. The local dealer who pushes these the hardest says Amptron has a i815-based version of this coming out that'll handle the newer flip chip Celerys in a few weeks.
But Linux is an ideal OS for one of these "appliance" class PC's, and that's why we need real DVD support in Linux and part of why the MPAA is a bunch of fools. To do this today, you need Windows, and that raises the cost (legally) as to make a PC versus a dedicated DVD player prohibitive.
Then, why will Georges W. Bush use a Bible to pledge allegence during the ceremony when he officially becomes the President?
And what's that written on your banknotes: In God We Trust.
Isn't that religious?
It's religious - but does not promote one particular religion (other than monotheism in general). The nation's founders were pretty insistent upon that point - and since we're such a polyglot to begin with a state religion has never reared it's head. There is no Constitutional requirement that the President be a Baptist (for instance), nor is there an official "Church of the United States" the way many other countries require similar things. In the UK, for instance, there is a "Church of England" who's titular head is the reigning monarch. Many of the other states of Europe have a dominant and/or state-supported religion in vaguely similar fashion. Here in the US we've had Methodists, Southern Baptists, Catholics, Presbytarians, Anglicans, and all sorts of other religions (granted, all were within the umbrella of Christianity, but that's the choices we've had so far) represented in our choices as President. A Jew was the Vice-Presidential candidate of one of the two major parties this year, and no one batted an eye over it. Yes, the currency says "in God we trust", but which God is entirely up to you in the end. The penalties for having different beliefs (if any) are social (in that if you butcher goats or something as a form of worship and don't bathe, people will probably avoid you), not legal.
Continuing that thought, we also have no "forbidden" religions here. Though there are people here who turn their noses up at the more esoteric faiths, there are no laws banning them. You can practice Falun Gong here until the cows (sacred cows to the Hindu!) come home, but not in the country of it's origin, China. Try being anything other than Shinto in Japan. Or a Christian in Egypt.
In my neighborhood, I'm a Jew married to a Catholic with houses on three sides of me. One is inhabited by Catholics, one by Protestants, and one by Wiccans. There are many places in this world where barbed wire would have gone up between our houses. But not in America.
I meant Western, not Northern. Oops. I used the Atlantic as my dividing line (but I guess that doesn't work either, since France still owns a little piece of rock - St'Pierre & Miquelon - off the coast of Newfie).
Actually, though we do have elected officials trying to make English our "official" language, that means that English IS NOT the official language at this time.
Unlike French in France, or say (to make an example in our own hemisphere) Quebec, for instance.
The biggest reason we have no official language is that there is no such thing as an ethnic "American" (not factoring in the Native American people) per se - we're generally much more of a mishmash than you see anywhere else in the world. This is partly because America was smart enough not to have an official religion (unlike most of the rest of the world) and partly because we're relatively new in the timetable of civilization and still have large numbers of immigrants assimilating into us.
The other side of this is that we do offer most of our government services in other languages (but it depends - you won't find the local Social Security office offering help in Spanish in the middle of Boston's Chinatown, for instance), and most public schools offer, at the very least, classes in English as a second language with some instruction in the student's native language. Again, this depends somewhat on just how obscure the student's language is, and if there's enough speakers of it for the school system to justify instruction - if you're the only Spanish speaker in Podunk, North Dakota you're not going to get any special help but if you're in Texas or Southern California you can live most of your life in a Spanish cocoon.
That said, English skills are essential to take advantage of this country's greatest asset: the ability to move freely in society according to merit and skill. If you only speak a different language, your life will be confined to the community of people who speak the same language as yourself and you deserve no better. I'd say the same of an English-only speaker in France, though. If you are going to make your life in a country you are a fool if you don't learn the dominant language of the nation as best as you can.
The French chauvinism towards language is pretty much unique, though. English, like many other languages, has assimilated words from other languages when they were the bast way to communicate a concept or thing. We've got words that are directly lifted from Spanish, German, French, and Latin, among others - and many more hybridized words. The average Frenchman may occasionally speak of ordering "le Big Mac", but for some reason that infuriates the French culture fanatics who see French civilization as the only proper way of life and everything else to be the mark of the "barbarians". Perhaps they're still bitter over Jerry Lewis. Or the Maginot line. Or how most grapes nowadays are grown from California root stock. Or something like that.
Yeah - Salem's a pretty good town for DSL in general. Covad and Northpoint are both in the CO, the infrastructure is pretty good, and the Verizon techs here in town get along well with the CLEC people - you can't overstate the value of good relations at the technician level in getting services provisioned.
I've had DSL (Flashcom/Northpoint) for a year and a half now, and that service has been pretty good and the installation was smooth. I'm switching to XO (also with Northpoint) due to Flascom's meltdown - and that line, too, has gone really well thus far in the installation process. Wednesday is the scheduled turn-up, and we'll see then if it's as smooth as the last one for certain.
Perhaps I mis-spoke somewhat here - it wouldn't be the first time I've done it.
The employee in question was a very smart person with a good amount of upside. She was being paid a reasonable amount of money for her current skill level and job requirements. She was doing well at the job, and, though she was not perfect (who is?), she was beginning to learn the more advanced skills she needed in order to progress at our company. She'd been in her fairly junior position for about a year, and had gotten two raises in that time.
Obviously, she thought she was ready, and the new employer did as well. One of the reasons that she was perceived as ready, though, was the new certification that we had paid to put her through. I expect she will adapt well and be worth every penny they give her as time goes by. But this particular person was not paid badly to begin with. We were paying a very good salary (given her age, relative skills, and background), paying for her college education, and her MCSE training. She then took the education we bought her that was intended to be for the benefit of both parties, and got another job. I'm not bitter about it - more power to her.
So there's the trade-off. An MCSE is seen as a career-enhancing certification. Personally, I value experience higher, but given the market (especially the NT sysadmin market), it's silly for everyone to hold as little value to the certification as I do (I remember far too many paper MCSE and CNE's over the years that couldn't figure out how to fix a loose connection if there was a big neon sign pointing to it, but I digress...), though - and there are things and skills to be gained for the employee by sitting in a class with other professionals that make it worthwhile.
But that training costs thousands of dollars. Is it unreasonable to expect that an employee stays long enough to let the employer gain some benefit from their investment? I like to think not. Requiring a year's commitment isn't ridiculous, and we're still sending employees for training - it's not holding anyone back. I wouldn't dream of letting us go in the opposite direction some companies do when trained people leave abruptly - cutting off all support for training whatsoever. That's ridiculous.
The carrot we offer the employee is free training and certification - potentially the equivalent of another $10K or so, and tax-free. And we'll pay for further certifications and updates on an ongoing basis. The stick is making them stick around for a year after getting the certification. If they don't let us gain benefit from the classes we pay for, what's the point of paying for it? Suggesting that the employee should simply get training, no strings attached, and have the employer pay is completely one-sided as well - for the employee's benefit. Ideally, we all need to meet in the middle.
I have a 4-person network staff at my company. We have had a company-wide policy since before my time that we would pay 100% of the cost of any college classes or professional certifications that are helpful to the job. We also give peoople a very nice work environment, good benefits, and competitive pay (not the top of the market, but pretty good compared to most). We also give my techies good toys to play with and a good deal of autonomy.
Anyhow, I sent two people through MCSE training - one in spring of 1999, and one in the fall of last year through winter. The first one who went was a fairly senior employee with loads of experience who already is commanding a pretty high salary. The other was a smart, but much less experienced person with a lower job level and salary accordingly (about right for her experience level, though, and she was getting regular raises). The experienced employee is still with us - the junior employee left a couple of months ago to go to a communications company at a substantial increase in pay.
Did I think she was ready for the job she took? No, not yet. Certification is nice as a checklist item, and the training process is useful, but you need real-world experience, too - and she didn't really have enough for the role yet. I expect she'll ultimately do very well there because she's a fast learner, but based on her current skills I couldn't have offered her equivalent pay to stay. However, she was being paid reasonably well, and did leave only a few months after completing MCSE training.
The bottom line for us out of this affair was that our company will still pay for education, but we have now added a 1-year requirement - they have to stay for at least a year after taking their final test for any sort of certification. We aren't counting the sort of periodic training that we send people to that isn't on a certification track, simply because those sort of classes aren't really resume checklist items.
Is it a little disappointing to add this policy? Yes - I liked the old way of just paying for everything, unconditionally. But one thing the prospective trainee doesn't realize sometimes is that companies that do train their employees are paying for it - in money spent and in time given up. We do this hoping that we can use the skills the employee gains to benefit the company. If they turn that training into another job immediately, then it's unfair to the company that just paid for the classes. The bargain we now require is "we'll pay you reasonably and pay for your advancement - but you have to promise us that you'll let us get some benefit from our investments".
The Pentium Pro was a dog of a chip for running the 16-bit code that was still prevalent back when it came out, and people jumped all over the chip and bashed the hell out of it. But a heck of a lot of servers were sold using 32-bit code and Pentium Pro processors, and we were very happy with the way they performed in a 32-bit world. I still have several dual Pentium Pro servers around, and they run very nicely still.
I think it's similar to the situation with the Pentium 3 and Pentium 4. The Pentium 3 is designed to take advantage of today's memory systems and bus technology, and the Pentium 4 is designed to work best with technology that really isn't in popular use yet (and may well never get there). So right now, pund for pund, the Pentium 4 looks like a bowser. Given code that's designed and optimized for the Pentium 4/Rambus combo, I'm sure it'll look much nicer than it looks running current apps. Nobody's bothered optimizing for that sort of environment yet.
What'll be interesting is what happens in the competition while Intel strives for Pentium 4 market acceptance. When the Pentium Pro came out, there was no competition in the high-end chip category, so Intel could afford to bide their time and wait for the marketplace to catch up. With the pressure AMD is applying in the high-end with Athlon, Intel can't afford to just sit and wait. They're going to have to be a lot more aggressive with Pentium 4 pricing, and push to get Rambus RDRAM pricing down in order to build any sort of demand.
Remember how 2000 was supposed to be the year of 64-bit computing? Looks like the priorities have shifted in the market.
Gnutella, being a real P2P applicaation, will suffer from scalability problems that a server-based system like Napster can work around. If Napster gets too popular, they can always add fatter pipes and bigger servers. But Gnutella is bandwidth-constrained since there is no central server farm tracking all the users.
The exchanges in Napster themselves may in fact be peer-to-peer, but we need to remember that they have big honking servers arbitrating the connections.
Gnutella's design is terrific (and a great hack), but unless they can re-jigger things to knock the slow connections down in priority (or some comparable solution), they're doomed to be a victim of their own success. I guess the other possibility would be for a minimum bandwidth requirement for the software to enforce. Perhaps some enterprising person will write a Gnutella that only allows, say, 144 Kbps and up connections on the network.
It would be interesting, though cruel, to relegate all the dialup people to second-class citizen status, but it would allow Gnutella to scale a lot past the existing limits.
We don't pay twice for software. We buy all our machines license-free, then apply our corporate Ghost image (NT 4 with IE 5.01 and Office 2000) to the box. Enterprise licensing lets you do that if your hardware vendor will cooperate.
Your ability to get license-free systems, though, depends on the size of the organization you work for. Larger companies generally have that option, but using the "small business" division of a major manufacturer (like Dell, Compaq, or Gateway) will force you to take OEM software.
Of course, virtually all white box systems are available stripped of license as well.
In the end, the best revenue maximization for Microsoft would come from a mix of retail and subscription-based licensing - it ensures steady revenue with the addition of revenue spikes clustered around new releases. A subscription-only model prevents the revenue lows (when all your new products are delayed and there's no new upgrade revenue in sight), but it also prevents the highs for the same reason.
So long as there still is an option to purchase at a flat fee for the retail customer, subscription licensing is a nice option to have. That's basically how most larger organizations (like mine) pay for Microsoft software today - and most of our other software, too.
I negotiate a price for the annual agreement, and the company, in turn, sends me discs (or gives me access to a download point) as long as the license is current. If we choose to extend the contract, we remain entitled to the product. If we don't renew it, we are legally obligated to get rid of it.
This is different from OEM licenses (which we don't get with our systems, since we have a Microsoft Enterprise agreement - so we don't have to pay twice) in that OEM software is licensed to the specific PC it enters the building with, and retail software which is generally allowed for a single PC, but you have the right to uninstall it and then reinstall it on a different system. Enterprise licensing is a flat fee per seat per year that covers Windows (any version), Office (any version Professional or below - not Premium), and BackOffice CALs to access the servers. If you subscribe to Enterprise and don't renew, you legally have to buy the software through other means (though the discs they send you aren't time-bombed) in order to keep using it.
It sounds restrictive, but it saves my company a lot of money, assuming I upgrade software every couple of years. It makes licensing a simple matter from a cost perspective, easy to track and predict, and the software we get already has product ID's burned into it so I don't have to use keys to install any of it.
In fact, my McAfee subscription works pretty much the same way (but for two-year terms), as do several of my other enterprise-wide products (and most of our mainframe applications). All this really does is extend the model down to smaller businesses and individuals who couldn't get on these type of plans before.
So I'd have to say I like it. So long as the traditional purchase option remains available, choice is a Good Thing.
Our regular business hours are 8AM-4PM, but we have room to vary that as needed. Also, our vacation time can be used in increments as small as 15 min. if need be. And we have a couple of telecommuters, too, in our claims department.
The way we handle flex time is on a department-by-department basis. As long as you have adequate coverage during the 8-4 timeframe (in the network group I define it as having at least two of my four staffers present during that time) when the bulk of the company works, you can work out other scheduled with your supervisor. But for my company, the typical flex shift is more like 7-3 or 9-5, though we do have people coming in to other areas of the company as early as 6AM.
Whether flex time works depends on the nature of the company. A software company or engineering shop will probably do better with flex time than an insurance company like mine does - but at the software company, for instance, the customer support reps need to work a fixed schedule - they need to be there when the customers normally call. So flex time doesn't work for everybody, all the time.
I do prefer the flexible schedule to what I had for scheduling at my old (and otherwise wonderful) company. At my job now I wale up at 6:30, go into work at around 7:30 and I usually work until 4-4:30 or so. It's no big deal since I live close by. At my old company I woke up at 5:30, hit the road by 7, and would get to work by 8:30. That sounds OK, except we had a culture there that drove people to stay until the last person finished the last job (it was a company that produced retail ads daily), so I usually left around 6-7PM. Or later. Even if I had no work to do. And I stayed because everyone else did too - it was a particularly harsh example of groupthink.
The insurance world is very easygoing by comparison.
With Verizon, it depends on the plan. The SingleRate East plan, for instance (the Bell Atlantic plan they started this with), has no roaming charges in the Northeast Corridor, and down into a few pockets of the Carolinas.
But the SingleRate National plan really is a no roaming or long-distance plan - the combined companies cover virtually the whole US in their footprint, and they don't charge you in the tiny areas where they use roaming agreements. The roaming just counts against your minute allowance. I'm not sure if the roaming service is analog or digital, though - I suspect it's usually analog (but still no extra $).
I can't stand Verizon the landline company, but I'm a raving fan of their cellular.
I've been a Verizon Wireless customer for about 4 years or so (well, actually I was a Nynex Mobile customer before mergers, but I digress...). Now that they have a nationwide company, I suggest using their SingleRate plan - about $50/month gets you 500 minutes with no separate long distance (all calls are included regardless of destination), and no roaming anywhere in the US.
They offer a Motorola Startac phone that's tri-band - it operates on 800MHz AMPS, 800MHz CDMA, and 1900MHz CDMA, which are all the various frequency bands they use nationwide (Verizon was formed from Bell Atlantic, GTE, PrimeCo, and AirTouch). The phone works quite well, and they have cheaper dual-band phones also.
Sprint PCS isn't bad if you're in a Sprint-served area, but you get brutally violated with huge roaming charges if you step outside their calling area. And the Sprint footprint is relatively small.
Then Dershowitz is a moron (as if we didn't know that). The weight of large versus small states is handled by the House of Representatives versus Senate split. That's why we have a bicameral Congress, for Pete's sake! The House is what balances the Senate, not the EC.
The House is apportioned by relative population - hence California has 52 House seats and Vermont 1. It's supposed to be a direct reflection of the "will of the people", and has shorter terms (2 year) accordingly. The Senate is designed to be a more deliberative body, with 2 Senators per state (regardless of size) and longer 6-year terms. That is how small states and large states keep one another in check.
The Electoral College exists because the average person in the late 18th century was a illiterate nincompoop, and the Framers felt they couldn't be trusted to directly vote for a President (or a Senator, for that matter). So under the original design of the Constitution, the Congressmen were directly elected by the people, and the Senators, President, and Vice-President were appointed by state legislatures and the Electoral College, respectively. Eventually direct election of the Senate was provided for in a constitutional amendment (I forget which one), and only the Electoral College remains.
The Electoral College numbers are determined by the total number of congressional districts plus the two Senate seats. It's that simple. I suspect nobody anticipated the sheer size this country would grow to in designing the system, else they might have set it up differently. Remember, when the Constitution was written there were only a handful of states, and all were pretty much just hugging the East Coast. The rest of the states didn't exist yet.
And this potential dichotomy between the popular and electoral votes hasn't happened in over 100 years (though small shifts in a couple of elections, notably 1960, would have caused this to happen). The remarkable thing is that, unlike virtually every other nation in the recorded history of the nation-state, this election fiasco has not resulted in men with guns running around on the streets rioting for their candidates. Yesterday morning millions of Americans woke up and went to work - just like any other day. And any questions will be resolved through the legal system, rather than on the streets. More than anything else, that makes me proud to be a citizen of this country.
Back in Columbus Day 1998, my wife and I were in western New York visiting friends of ours (they own a golf course - how cool is that), and we went to see one of these at a festival in scenic Busti, New York. Man, they were some cool machines...
The competition was broken into two categories - mechanically-powered devices (generally slingshots and catapults), and air or pressure-powered devices (the massive air cannons). The better slingshots could chuck the pumpkin around a hundred yards - the cannons could fire a half mile and up. The highlight was when one of the catapults misfired and tossed the pumpkin straight up about a hundred feet and slightly backwards, so it landed in the crowd (people just stepped a few feet away from the landing area and let it go splat).
It was actually a lot of fun - If I'm out there again during punkin' chunkin' season I'll go see it.
Also, one of the people I work with here is on a team that built an air cannon for the big festival that's in this article. I can't remember the name of it offhand but I'm trying to find the message with the group's website link - I'll post the link if I find it.
Gateway uses Athlons in some of their consumer PC lines (like the Select series), but their "corporate" systems (the Enterprise, or E-series) all use Intel chips. They have one desktop (the E1400) that's i810-based, one (the E3400) that uses the i815 without the built-in video, and a model (the E4400) that uses the i820 and RDRAM.
The difference is that the E-series have longer product lifecycles and offer more consistency in the devices that they use (for instance, they offer the same video card and Ethernet card throughout the product's lifespan). THe lifecycle also runs longer - usually about 18 months compared to the 6-12 months that a consumer PC might be available.
Most top-tier PC makers do something similar. The bleeding-edge and "cool" technologies go into consumer PC's (which small businesses also usually buy), and Big Business buys the managed systems (which are relatively boring, but consistent). Dell, as another example, has the Dimension PC's for home/small business, and they offer the Optiplex for their managed line (we used to be a Dell shop and switched to Gateway earlier this year).
When I last discussed their roadmap plans with Gateway, they were starting to consider the possibility of adding an Athlon-based E-series PC, but it's still a little immature to them.
Just to expound a little bit on my earlier statement here - I know Windows isn't particularly stable or secure compared to Linux (like I said, _I_ use Linux, and I run the network side of the house - I have the major voice in setting the policies in the first place. And I have a couple of Macs, too (I'm sitting at home writing this on one of them) - so I know about "alternative" platforms and the like. I'd love to use Linux on the desktop at work (and let other people use it), but it's not about me and what I like, it's about what's best for the company. And I don't decide that in a vacuum (though I do have the final say).
Windows may not be anything wonderful, but it's predictable, and we know what the important flaws are, and how to work around them for minimal user impact. We do use NT Workstation (and 2000 Pro on laptops), and we test patches and service packs before deploying them in production as well. I work for a corporate employer (an insurance company), not a small mom & pop company or a university or anything like that. Our idea of multiplatform development is writing COBOL code that runs on both the PC and on DOS/VSE.
Another thing the standardized environment gives us is the ability to actually take advantage of some of Microsoft's stuff - their development models aren't too bad in a homogenous environment. For instance, as a year 2000 project, our developers replaced a noncompliant mainframe-based financial system with a homegrown system based on SQL Server 6.5, writing procedures in COBOL to drive it. It works very well, and since the new system is on SQL Server, we were able to build an intranet site that uses embedded Office 2000 components to build ad-hoc queries off it. Since we built that, users can now get the information they need themselves and run their own "what if" scenarios directly from a web page - they don't need to have analysts go and do batch repots off the mainframe anymore. It may be Microsoft tech we used to do it, but it worked and it helped our productivity.
Unfortunately, you need Windows to use it. Virtually all our tools (and we have a lot of vertical market code in our company) are Windows-based, and, as a result of all this, Windows is our standard, for better or for worse. In a way, this reminds me of a discussion I was in on Usenet a few month ago. One fellow was insisting that vi + TeX was all a user should have for producing business documents, because the documents came out looking prettier, and that was what he gave his users.
I countered that I'd rather have nice, easy-to-understand writing from people made with tools that let them easily use things like mail merge, spell checking, and pasting in things from other programs if needed. In other words, Word (or other Office software). Let the users concentrate on just getting work done, and give them the environment and the tools to do so. If legitimate exceptions emerge, deal with them the right way when they happen.
It's not about power or ego, it's about doing our job (at least, that's how it is for most of us). Most people here who don't understand that will eventually, I hope, rise enough in their careers that they'll realize the difference.
I'm speaking here with my IT manager hat on, not my Linux geek hat in order to provide a little perspective. We don't hate Linux - in fact, probably the majority of us have a favorable opinion of Linux, too. Some of us even use it in our home/hobby lives, like I do (and have been since '94).
The problem we have is with unauthorized anything on our networks, not just Linux. You see, planning and running the corporate network is what we're paid to do. In most structured environments, nothing gets installed without IT's thumbs-up. Period. The business (and our jobs) depends on the network's being as stable and predictable as possible, and even though Linux is wonderful stuff, workers are required to use what the company provides because we know it. It's not just Linux that can get a worker fired at my shop. It's any software that didn't come in through our department's OK. And all those cute little.exe files that people e-mail to each other? We block them at the SMTP gateway. Yes, we're pains in the ass about it, but we have a stable network with very little downtime - and when the latest.VBS virus goes sweeping the Net we're safely locked away with no downtime. On the other hand, we don't filter or monitor e-mail content or web sites. We don't care about speech at my company (which a lot of companies restrict), just reliability and safety.
That's an important distinction. Some IT folks just reflexively hate that which they do not know. That's the wrong way to go about their job, but it covers the butt well. My attitude (and our policies are derived from it) is that the company provides the PC, so we get to decide what it runs, based on what you need to do your work. You don't get to decide unilaterally what runs on it - we do.
However, we're not entirely closed off to running "other" things or operating systems. If someone came to us and had a reason they needed Linux to do their job instead of NT, I'd test to make sure it didn't interfere with anything else on the LAN (like a misconfigured Samba could), and they'd get their Linux after we tested it. But the important point here is that we are flexible, provided you follow the "right way" of making sure your software is OK. When people do that, and give us the chance to test things, we approve things unless we find a specific technical reason not to.
But if someday Linux became our standard desktop OS at my company, you know what? We'd fire people who used Windows without authorization. Wouldn't that be an interesting turnabout?
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-Josh Turiel
If you think about it, it's close to the truth
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Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 2
Unix by itself is not an OS as the unwashed masses think of it nowadays. Unix (including virtually all the variations including Darwin/OS X) is really just a kernel that provides low-level services. The programs, tools, and shell that are bolted onto the kernel turn it into an operating system.
That doesn't make Every right (or is it Every right makes a wrong?), but he has a point. Linux, for instance, is an OS. But is the Linux kernel alone the OS? Not really, it's the kernel, GNU tools, daemons, and interface (whether just bash or the full KDE/GNOME GUI shebang) that make it into the Linux OS. Vendors may choose what goes into their particular version of the Linux OS, but they all do add to the kernel alone. MacOS X will also be an OS, but Mach itself isn't. Windows - well, who knows what that is, other than a blivet.
And I know this doesn't jibe with the textbook definition of an OS, but it's a practical definition for the non-academics.
I run the network area for an insurance company. Technically, I and my staff of four are on call all of the time, but we have practical limits, based on reasonableness. A couple of my workers have expertise in particular areas, so we'll call or page them as needed if after-hours problems occur in those areas. For all practical purposes that's about one or two times a year, though.
Then we have myself and our key network/mainframe guru on Skytel 2-way pagers, which we use to reply by e-mail as needed. We tell people to use the pager email addresses unless e-mail is down. That way we can usually attend to the issue with no phone call or trip required. Also, I get all the alert messages from our anti-virus system mailed to my pager - so it goes off a few times a day (I have a quiet time programmed into it).
When a crisis does happen, I'm first on the notification tree (I'm paid to be the boss, so I better be willing to back it up). If I can, I deal with it myself. If I can't, I call in whoever's appropriate. Basically, this drags in someone at a slightly off-hour a couple of times a year. I do all overnights myself if need be - again, it's a matter of being willing to walk the walk.
Our mainframe programming group (under a different manager) simply has a pager and laptop rotated to the on-call programmer. Each programmer gets a week on rotation where they need to deal with any issues that may arise when our batch jobs run at night. That's typically between 6-11PM. There are 8 programmers on the rotation, so they serve about a week every two months.
Neither of these generate any extra pay (neither for myself or my staff - we're all salaried) - but I give comp time pretty liberally if I have to drag one of my people into the office.
The Constitution was not designed to handle cases like the Internet. The Internet is a global entity, but invented in the US, and dominated by us as well. It exists on a cooperative basis (the Internet is merely a huge aggregation of computers and gateways running TCP/IP), but numbering and naming do need to be administered centrally, so cooperation isn't replaced by anarchy.
The problem was that it all worked fine when Jon Postel was the benevolent dictator in charge of the system - he was relatively unbiased and had the technical credentials and experience (he was there at the beginning) that were needed to give him credibility. His death left a huge void, in more ways than one. ICANN is a "best effort" by the US government (who paid for this all in the beginning, lest we forget) to replace him with an organization with some degree of legitimacy and credibility - the benevolent dictator model was broken with Jon's loss.
Given all that, ICANN is a reasonable compromise. Other parts of the world get a voice for the first time on Internet governance, numbers are assigned in normal fashion, DNS is still a little screwy but at least NSI doesn't have a total monopoly anymore, and things keep running as always. Do some aspects of ICANN suck? Absolutely. They are way too biased towards business in domian name disputes, Esther Dyson isn't that skilled a leader (to be fair, it was kind of thrust upon her), and the whole organization, being global in scope, is falling victim to "UN-itis" - a whole batch of bureaucrats travel over the globe and eat expensive meals while doing very little.
But overall, before slamming ICANN to the mat, think about the alternatives and if there's really a better solution, short of putting the US government back in charge. Governing a mutant entity like the Internet is a tough job, but someone has to do it. ICANN needs some fixes, but I think they're the best suited to the job. Screw the APA. The only APA that I worry about is the one with Bradshaw and Farooq.
And unfortunately, we don't have the option of putting Postel back in charge - the "Weekend at Bernie's" model of governance just doesn't work in practice.
That's the thing - I see a significant difference between repair and design. However, not all people see a line between them. My intention in pointing out the issue with embryos is fairly simple; it's given that every embryo represents potential life, and human life at that. I think I may have chosen my words poorly before.
However, given that embryos _are_ life to whatever extent we consider, do we have a moral obligation to make sure each one of those embryos has an opportunity to live? Or do we decide which ones to bring to term? I have no problem with deciding at that stage, though I find the idea of aborting that same person-to-be once it's in the womb to be repugnant (though I am pro-choice, my personal choice would be for life - I just consider it to be a personal moral issue rather than a societal one). And I believe that that line is drawn at the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, however early that point can be made by technology. When you are using technology to assist in creating a child, I have no problem with deliberately picking the "best" embryo - assuming the criteria is simply one that is robust (some embryos don't form as well - I've read in many places that roughly 30% of all fertilized eggs abort themselves at an early phase and never result in a term pregnancy) and free of known defects that will result in the likely or certain death of the child. I'm not concerned with screening for things that result in a social or physical disadvantage, and most "defects" don't necessarily have a bearing on a person's ability to live. Blindness is not incompatible with life. A misshapen arm isn't either. Huntington's is guaranteed early death, though - and I would not implant an embryo with that gene.
The difference is that things like a tendency towards breast cancer is just that - a tendency. It's not a certainty. Whereas Huntington's, for instance, is a death sentence - if you have that gene combination, you will die from it - the only question being when. And I think that distinction is how you stay ethically correct in these matters.
That particular government's efforts to create a homogenous people are horrible and brutal, but not (thankfully) in the lab - that line hasn't been (publically - maybe it's happening now somewhere in the world in private) crossed anywhere since the second world war. Neither of us have directly suffered as a result of this, for which we should be thankful. And I think society, as a whole, has learned some lessons from the era - namely that there _is_ a difference, however small, between enabling people to be born disease-free and eugenics. Most people are not willing to cross that line, and I won't either. The couple in the US having a child that does not suffer from their daughter's disease doesn't cross the line. The English couple (that you referred to in your link - it was an interesting article) that wants to specifically have a daughter - they're straddling the line. And to have a baby that'll be 6'5" male and run a 40-yd dash in 4.3 seconds because you screened for it - that's just plain wrong and veers perilously towards eugenics.
That said, when it's time to have our own implantation done (sometime next week), I simply want to implant the appropriate number of embryos that have the best chance of attaching and allowing my wife to bring them to term. And I don't give a shit about their sex, hair color, handedness, height, or anything else. I just want to see healthy children that can be brought to term safely, that we can love with everything we have and raise to be the best humans possible. That's all I ever want to ask for - the chance to be the best parent I can. And to me, that's what assisted reproduction is all about.
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Yes, but consider us relative to a given time. I live in Salem, so I have a little perspective on that particular era. It's not that we have always been an ideal society - but consider what we have typically been relative to the rest of the "civilized" world.
We treated Native Americans badly. Very badly. No doubt about it. We kept slaves after most of the rest of the world had stopped - certainly a stain. When Catholics started migrating here in quantity during the late 19th century, shops in Boston posted the infamous NINA signs (No Irish Need Apply). Until the civil rights upheval of the 1960's, blacks were excluded from many areas of society.
I know that - and I also know that other nations have had their moments of shame as well. The British locked out the Jewish refugees during World War II. We didn't take many of 'em, either. The French have had ample moments of blood and intolerance - the Vichy regime was awful, for instance, and the Reign of Terror deprived France of their best and brightest for half a century. Those are just two example countries, and relatively civilized ones. Look at the violence in the Balkans over ethnicity and religion - look at the conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, the guerrilla violence in Latin America, and the battles still raging in much of Asia - on Sri Lanka, in Tibet, and in Indonesia and the Phillipines.
Religion and Ethnicity have been sources of tribal conflict between humans since time began, and will continue to do so for the duration of the species. America, though, is the one place in history and time that has managed to rise most of the way past that in our short time (relative to history) as a nation. Acknowledging our failure to achieve perfection should not prevent us from taking credit for what we do have here - and should not encourage us to rest on our national laurels. We still have a ways to go, though we've come a long ways.
- -Josh Turiel
I have one of these now (with a Celery 366). It's only an option with Windows, though, since Linux DVD support is pretty much non-existent (I run Mandrake on mine - using it as a small server, and the i810 support is mediocre). Amptron also makes a VIA MVP4-based version of the Book PC with Linux support advertised as a benefit, but that's constrained to Socket 7 processors only.
I'd like to see a version that can run a Duron processor (Socket A), with perhaps an embedded nVIDIA chipset for graphics. It'd be worth a good penny as the ultimate LAN party machine, though the heat might be an issue. The local dealer who pushes these the hardest says Amptron has a i815-based version of this coming out that'll handle the newer flip chip Celerys in a few weeks.
But Linux is an ideal OS for one of these "appliance" class PC's, and that's why we need real DVD support in Linux and part of why the MPAA is a bunch of fools. To do this today, you need Windows, and that raises the cost (legally) as to make a PC versus a dedicated DVD player prohibitive.
- -Josh Turiel
It's religious - but does not promote one particular religion (other than monotheism in general). The nation's founders were pretty insistent upon that point - and since we're such a polyglot to begin with a state religion has never reared it's head. There is no Constitutional requirement that the President be a Baptist (for instance), nor is there an official "Church of the United States" the way many other countries require similar things. In the UK, for instance, there is a "Church of England" who's titular head is the reigning monarch. Many of the other states of Europe have a dominant and/or state-supported religion in vaguely similar fashion. Here in the US we've had Methodists, Southern Baptists, Catholics, Presbytarians, Anglicans, and all sorts of other religions (granted, all were within the umbrella of Christianity, but that's the choices we've had so far) represented in our choices as President. A Jew was the Vice-Presidential candidate of one of the two major parties this year, and no one batted an eye over it. Yes, the currency says "in God we trust", but which God is entirely up to you in the end. The penalties for having different beliefs (if any) are social (in that if you butcher goats or something as a form of worship and don't bathe, people will probably avoid you), not legal.
Continuing that thought, we also have no "forbidden" religions here. Though there are people here who turn their noses up at the more esoteric faiths, there are no laws banning them. You can practice Falun Gong here until the cows (sacred cows to the Hindu!) come home, but not in the country of it's origin, China. Try being anything other than Shinto in Japan. Or a Christian in Egypt.
In my neighborhood, I'm a Jew married to a Catholic with houses on three sides of me. One is inhabited by Catholics, one by Protestants, and one by Wiccans. There are many places in this world where barbed wire would have gone up between our houses. But not in America.
- -Josh Turiel
I meant Western, not Northern. Oops. I used the Atlantic as my dividing line (but I guess that doesn't work either, since France still owns a little piece of rock - St'Pierre & Miquelon - off the coast of Newfie).
"Le D'oh!"
- -Josh Turiel
Actually, though we do have elected officials trying to make English our "official" language, that means that English IS NOT the official language at this time.
Unlike French in France, or say (to make an example in our own hemisphere) Quebec, for instance.
The biggest reason we have no official language is that there is no such thing as an ethnic "American" (not factoring in the Native American people) per se - we're generally much more of a mishmash than you see anywhere else in the world. This is partly because America was smart enough not to have an official religion (unlike most of the rest of the world) and partly because we're relatively new in the timetable of civilization and still have large numbers of immigrants assimilating into us.
The other side of this is that we do offer most of our government services in other languages (but it depends - you won't find the local Social Security office offering help in Spanish in the middle of Boston's Chinatown, for instance), and most public schools offer, at the very least, classes in English as a second language with some instruction in the student's native language. Again, this depends somewhat on just how obscure the student's language is, and if there's enough speakers of it for the school system to justify instruction - if you're the only Spanish speaker in Podunk, North Dakota you're not going to get any special help but if you're in Texas or Southern California you can live most of your life in a Spanish cocoon.
That said, English skills are essential to take advantage of this country's greatest asset: the ability to move freely in society according to merit and skill. If you only speak a different language, your life will be confined to the community of people who speak the same language as yourself and you deserve no better. I'd say the same of an English-only speaker in France, though. If you are going to make your life in a country you are a fool if you don't learn the dominant language of the nation as best as you can.
The French chauvinism towards language is pretty much unique, though. English, like many other languages, has assimilated words from other languages when they were the bast way to communicate a concept or thing. We've got words that are directly lifted from Spanish, German, French, and Latin, among others - and many more hybridized words. The average Frenchman may occasionally speak of ordering "le Big Mac", but for some reason that infuriates the French culture fanatics who see French civilization as the only proper way of life and everything else to be the mark of the "barbarians". Perhaps they're still bitter over Jerry Lewis. Or the Maginot line. Or how most grapes nowadays are grown from California root stock. Or something like that.
Whatever.
- -Josh Turiel
This deserves Post Of The Year honors, if any post on Slashdot ever has. Bravo!
Now, if only a real judge was this good...
- -Josh Turiel
Yeah - Salem's a pretty good town for DSL in general. Covad and Northpoint are both in the CO, the infrastructure is pretty good, and the Verizon techs here in town get along well with the CLEC people - you can't overstate the value of good relations at the technician level in getting services provisioned.
I've had DSL (Flashcom/Northpoint) for a year and a half now, and that service has been pretty good and the installation was smooth. I'm switching to XO (also with Northpoint) due to Flascom's meltdown - and that line, too, has gone really well thus far in the installation process. Wednesday is the scheduled turn-up, and we'll see then if it's as smooth as the last one for certain.
- -Josh Turiel
Perhaps I mis-spoke somewhat here - it wouldn't be the first time I've done it.
The employee in question was a very smart person with a good amount of upside. She was being paid a reasonable amount of money for her current skill level and job requirements. She was doing well at the job, and, though she was not perfect (who is?), she was beginning to learn the more advanced skills she needed in order to progress at our company. She'd been in her fairly junior position for about a year, and had gotten two raises in that time.
Obviously, she thought she was ready, and the new employer did as well. One of the reasons that she was perceived as ready, though, was the new certification that we had paid to put her through. I expect she will adapt well and be worth every penny they give her as time goes by. But this particular person was not paid badly to begin with. We were paying a very good salary (given her age, relative skills, and background), paying for her college education, and her MCSE training. She then took the education we bought her that was intended to be for the benefit of both parties, and got another job. I'm not bitter about it - more power to her.
So there's the trade-off. An MCSE is seen as a career-enhancing certification. Personally, I value experience higher, but given the market (especially the NT sysadmin market), it's silly for everyone to hold as little value to the certification as I do (I remember far too many paper MCSE and CNE's over the years that couldn't figure out how to fix a loose connection if there was a big neon sign pointing to it, but I digress...), though - and there are things and skills to be gained for the employee by sitting in a class with other professionals that make it worthwhile.
But that training costs thousands of dollars. Is it unreasonable to expect that an employee stays long enough to let the employer gain some benefit from their investment? I like to think not. Requiring a year's commitment isn't ridiculous, and we're still sending employees for training - it's not holding anyone back. I wouldn't dream of letting us go in the opposite direction some companies do when trained people leave abruptly - cutting off all support for training whatsoever. That's ridiculous.
The carrot we offer the employee is free training and certification - potentially the equivalent of another $10K or so, and tax-free. And we'll pay for further certifications and updates on an ongoing basis. The stick is making them stick around for a year after getting the certification. If they don't let us gain benefit from the classes we pay for, what's the point of paying for it? Suggesting that the employee should simply get training, no strings attached, and have the employer pay is completely one-sided as well - for the employee's benefit. Ideally, we all need to meet in the middle.
- -Josh Turiel
I have a 4-person network staff at my company. We have had a company-wide policy since before my time that we would pay 100% of the cost of any college classes or professional certifications that are helpful to the job. We also give peoople a very nice work environment, good benefits, and competitive pay (not the top of the market, but pretty good compared to most). We also give my techies good toys to play with and a good deal of autonomy.
Anyhow, I sent two people through MCSE training - one in spring of 1999, and one in the fall of last year through winter. The first one who went was a fairly senior employee with loads of experience who already is commanding a pretty high salary. The other was a smart, but much less experienced person with a lower job level and salary accordingly (about right for her experience level, though, and she was getting regular raises). The experienced employee is still with us - the junior employee left a couple of months ago to go to a communications company at a substantial increase in pay.
Did I think she was ready for the job she took? No, not yet. Certification is nice as a checklist item, and the training process is useful, but you need real-world experience, too - and she didn't really have enough for the role yet. I expect she'll ultimately do very well there because she's a fast learner, but based on her current skills I couldn't have offered her equivalent pay to stay. However, she was being paid reasonably well, and did leave only a few months after completing MCSE training.
The bottom line for us out of this affair was that our company will still pay for education, but we have now added a 1-year requirement - they have to stay for at least a year after taking their final test for any sort of certification. We aren't counting the sort of periodic training that we send people to that isn't on a certification track, simply because those sort of classes aren't really resume checklist items.
Is it a little disappointing to add this policy? Yes - I liked the old way of just paying for everything, unconditionally. But one thing the prospective trainee doesn't realize sometimes is that companies that do train their employees are paying for it - in money spent and in time given up. We do this hoping that we can use the skills the employee gains to benefit the company. If they turn that training into another job immediately, then it's unfair to the company that just paid for the classes. The bargain we now require is "we'll pay you reasonably and pay for your advancement - but you have to promise us that you'll let us get some benefit from our investments".
- -Josh Turiel
The Pentium Pro was a dog of a chip for running the 16-bit code that was still prevalent back when it came out, and people jumped all over the chip and bashed the hell out of it. But a heck of a lot of servers were sold using 32-bit code and Pentium Pro processors, and we were very happy with the way they performed in a 32-bit world. I still have several dual Pentium Pro servers around, and they run very nicely still.
I think it's similar to the situation with the Pentium 3 and Pentium 4. The Pentium 3 is designed to take advantage of today's memory systems and bus technology, and the Pentium 4 is designed to work best with technology that really isn't in popular use yet (and may well never get there). So right now, pund for pund, the Pentium 4 looks like a bowser. Given code that's designed and optimized for the Pentium 4/Rambus combo, I'm sure it'll look much nicer than it looks running current apps. Nobody's bothered optimizing for that sort of environment yet.
What'll be interesting is what happens in the competition while Intel strives for Pentium 4 market acceptance. When the Pentium Pro came out, there was no competition in the high-end chip category, so Intel could afford to bide their time and wait for the marketplace to catch up. With the pressure AMD is applying in the high-end with Athlon, Intel can't afford to just sit and wait. They're going to have to be a lot more aggressive with Pentium 4 pricing, and push to get Rambus RDRAM pricing down in order to build any sort of demand.
Remember how 2000 was supposed to be the year of 64-bit computing? Looks like the priorities have shifted in the market.
- -Josh Turiel
Gnutella, being a real P2P applicaation, will suffer from scalability problems that a server-based system like Napster can work around. If Napster gets too popular, they can always add fatter pipes and bigger servers. But Gnutella is bandwidth-constrained since there is no central server farm tracking all the users.
The exchanges in Napster themselves may in fact be peer-to-peer, but we need to remember that they have big honking servers arbitrating the connections.
Gnutella's design is terrific (and a great hack), but unless they can re-jigger things to knock the slow connections down in priority (or some comparable solution), they're doomed to be a victim of their own success. I guess the other possibility would be for a minimum bandwidth requirement for the software to enforce. Perhaps some enterprising person will write a Gnutella that only allows, say, 144 Kbps and up connections on the network.
It would be interesting, though cruel, to relegate all the dialup people to second-class citizen status, but it would allow Gnutella to scale a lot past the existing limits.
- -Josh Turiel
We don't pay twice for software. We buy all our machines license-free, then apply our corporate Ghost image (NT 4 with IE 5.01 and Office 2000) to the box. Enterprise licensing lets you do that if your hardware vendor will cooperate.
Your ability to get license-free systems, though, depends on the size of the organization you work for. Larger companies generally have that option, but using the "small business" division of a major manufacturer (like Dell, Compaq, or Gateway) will force you to take OEM software.
Of course, virtually all white box systems are available stripped of license as well.
In the end, the best revenue maximization for Microsoft would come from a mix of retail and subscription-based licensing - it ensures steady revenue with the addition of revenue spikes clustered around new releases. A subscription-only model prevents the revenue lows (when all your new products are delayed and there's no new upgrade revenue in sight), but it also prevents the highs for the same reason.
- -Josh Turiel
So long as there still is an option to purchase at a flat fee for the retail customer, subscription licensing is a nice option to have. That's basically how most larger organizations (like mine) pay for Microsoft software today - and most of our other software, too.
I negotiate a price for the annual agreement, and the company, in turn, sends me discs (or gives me access to a download point) as long as the license is current. If we choose to extend the contract, we remain entitled to the product. If we don't renew it, we are legally obligated to get rid of it.
This is different from OEM licenses (which we don't get with our systems, since we have a Microsoft Enterprise agreement - so we don't have to pay twice) in that OEM software is licensed to the specific PC it enters the building with, and retail software which is generally allowed for a single PC, but you have the right to uninstall it and then reinstall it on a different system. Enterprise licensing is a flat fee per seat per year that covers Windows (any version), Office (any version Professional or below - not Premium), and BackOffice CALs to access the servers. If you subscribe to Enterprise and don't renew, you legally have to buy the software through other means (though the discs they send you aren't time-bombed) in order to keep using it.
It sounds restrictive, but it saves my company a lot of money, assuming I upgrade software every couple of years. It makes licensing a simple matter from a cost perspective, easy to track and predict, and the software we get already has product ID's burned into it so I don't have to use keys to install any of it.
In fact, my McAfee subscription works pretty much the same way (but for two-year terms), as do several of my other enterprise-wide products (and most of our mainframe applications). All this really does is extend the model down to smaller businesses and individuals who couldn't get on these type of plans before.
So I'd have to say I like it. So long as the traditional purchase option remains available, choice is a Good Thing.
- -Josh Turiel
Our regular business hours are 8AM-4PM, but we have room to vary that as needed. Also, our vacation time can be used in increments as small as 15 min. if need be. And we have a couple of telecommuters, too, in our claims department.
The way we handle flex time is on a department-by-department basis. As long as you have adequate coverage during the 8-4 timeframe (in the network group I define it as having at least two of my four staffers present during that time) when the bulk of the company works, you can work out other scheduled with your supervisor. But for my company, the typical flex shift is more like 7-3 or 9-5, though we do have people coming in to other areas of the company as early as 6AM.
Whether flex time works depends on the nature of the company. A software company or engineering shop will probably do better with flex time than an insurance company like mine does - but at the software company, for instance, the customer support reps need to work a fixed schedule - they need to be there when the customers normally call. So flex time doesn't work for everybody, all the time.
I do prefer the flexible schedule to what I had for scheduling at my old (and otherwise wonderful) company. At my job now I wale up at 6:30, go into work at around 7:30 and I usually work until 4-4:30 or so. It's no big deal since I live close by. At my old company I woke up at 5:30, hit the road by 7, and would get to work by 8:30. That sounds OK, except we had a culture there that drove people to stay until the last person finished the last job (it was a company that produced retail ads daily), so I usually left around 6-7PM. Or later. Even if I had no work to do. And I stayed because everyone else did too - it was a particularly harsh example of groupthink.
The insurance world is very easygoing by comparison.
- -Josh Turiel
With Verizon, it depends on the plan. The SingleRate East plan, for instance (the Bell Atlantic plan they started this with), has no roaming charges in the Northeast Corridor, and down into a few pockets of the Carolinas.
But the SingleRate National plan really is a no roaming or long-distance plan - the combined companies cover virtually the whole US in their footprint, and they don't charge you in the tiny areas where they use roaming agreements. The roaming just counts against your minute allowance. I'm not sure if the roaming service is analog or digital, though - I suspect it's usually analog (but still no extra $).
I can't stand Verizon the landline company, but I'm a raving fan of their cellular.
- -Josh Turiel
I've been a Verizon Wireless customer for about 4 years or so (well, actually I was a Nynex Mobile customer before mergers, but I digress...). Now that they have a nationwide company, I suggest using their SingleRate plan - about $50/month gets you 500 minutes with no separate long distance (all calls are included regardless of destination), and no roaming anywhere in the US.
They offer a Motorola Startac phone that's tri-band - it operates on 800MHz AMPS, 800MHz CDMA, and 1900MHz CDMA, which are all the various frequency bands they use nationwide (Verizon was formed from Bell Atlantic, GTE, PrimeCo, and AirTouch). The phone works quite well, and they have cheaper dual-band phones also.
Sprint PCS isn't bad if you're in a Sprint-served area, but you get brutally violated with huge roaming charges if you step outside their calling area. And the Sprint footprint is relatively small.
- -Josh Turiel
Then Dershowitz is a moron (as if we didn't know that). The weight of large versus small states is handled by the House of Representatives versus Senate split. That's why we have a bicameral Congress, for Pete's sake! The House is what balances the Senate, not the EC.
The House is apportioned by relative population - hence California has 52 House seats and Vermont 1. It's supposed to be a direct reflection of the "will of the people", and has shorter terms (2 year) accordingly. The Senate is designed to be a more deliberative body, with 2 Senators per state (regardless of size) and longer 6-year terms. That is how small states and large states keep one another in check.
The Electoral College exists because the average person in the late 18th century was a illiterate nincompoop, and the Framers felt they couldn't be trusted to directly vote for a President (or a Senator, for that matter). So under the original design of the Constitution, the Congressmen were directly elected by the people, and the Senators, President, and Vice-President were appointed by state legislatures and the Electoral College, respectively. Eventually direct election of the Senate was provided for in a constitutional amendment (I forget which one), and only the Electoral College remains.
The Electoral College numbers are determined by the total number of congressional districts plus the two Senate seats. It's that simple. I suspect nobody anticipated the sheer size this country would grow to in designing the system, else they might have set it up differently. Remember, when the Constitution was written there were only a handful of states, and all were pretty much just hugging the East Coast. The rest of the states didn't exist yet.
And this potential dichotomy between the popular and electoral votes hasn't happened in over 100 years (though small shifts in a couple of elections, notably 1960, would have caused this to happen). The remarkable thing is that, unlike virtually every other nation in the recorded history of the nation-state, this election fiasco has not resulted in men with guns running around on the streets rioting for their candidates. Yesterday morning millions of Americans woke up and went to work - just like any other day. And any questions will be resolved through the legal system, rather than on the streets. More than anything else, that makes me proud to be a citizen of this country.
- -Josh Turiel
Back in Columbus Day 1998, my wife and I were in western New York visiting friends of ours (they own a golf course - how cool is that), and we went to see one of these at a festival in scenic Busti, New York. Man, they were some cool machines...
The competition was broken into two categories - mechanically-powered devices (generally slingshots and catapults), and air or pressure-powered devices (the massive air cannons). The better slingshots could chuck the pumpkin around a hundred yards - the cannons could fire a half mile and up. The highlight was when one of the catapults misfired and tossed the pumpkin straight up about a hundred feet and slightly backwards, so it landed in the crowd (people just stepped a few feet away from the landing area and let it go splat).
It was actually a lot of fun - If I'm out there again during punkin' chunkin' season I'll go see it.
Also, one of the people I work with here is on a team that built an air cannon for the big festival that's in this article. I can't remember the name of it offhand but I'm trying to find the message with the group's website link - I'll post the link if I find it.
- -Josh Turiel
Gateway uses Athlons in some of their consumer PC lines (like the Select series), but their "corporate" systems (the Enterprise, or E-series) all use Intel chips. They have one desktop (the E1400) that's i810-based, one (the E3400) that uses the i815 without the built-in video, and a model (the E4400) that uses the i820 and RDRAM.
The difference is that the E-series have longer product lifecycles and offer more consistency in the devices that they use (for instance, they offer the same video card and Ethernet card throughout the product's lifespan). THe lifecycle also runs longer - usually about 18 months compared to the 6-12 months that a consumer PC might be available.
Most top-tier PC makers do something similar. The bleeding-edge and "cool" technologies go into consumer PC's (which small businesses also usually buy), and Big Business buys the managed systems (which are relatively boring, but consistent). Dell, as another example, has the Dimension PC's for home/small business, and they offer the Optiplex for their managed line (we used to be a Dell shop and switched to Gateway earlier this year).
When I last discussed their roadmap plans with Gateway, they were starting to consider the possibility of adding an Athlon-based E-series PC, but it's still a little immature to them.
- -Josh Turiel
Just to expound a little bit on my earlier statement here - I know Windows isn't particularly stable or secure compared to Linux (like I said, _I_ use Linux, and I run the network side of the house - I have the major voice in setting the policies in the first place. And I have a couple of Macs, too (I'm sitting at home writing this on one of them) - so I know about "alternative" platforms and the like. I'd love to use Linux on the desktop at work (and let other people use it), but it's not about me and what I like, it's about what's best for the company. And I don't decide that in a vacuum (though I do have the final say).
Windows may not be anything wonderful, but it's predictable, and we know what the important flaws are, and how to work around them for minimal user impact. We do use NT Workstation (and 2000 Pro on laptops), and we test patches and service packs before deploying them in production as well. I work for a corporate employer (an insurance company), not a small mom & pop company or a university or anything like that. Our idea of multiplatform development is writing COBOL code that runs on both the PC and on DOS/VSE.
Another thing the standardized environment gives us is the ability to actually take advantage of some of Microsoft's stuff - their development models aren't too bad in a homogenous environment. For instance, as a year 2000 project, our developers replaced a noncompliant mainframe-based financial system with a homegrown system based on SQL Server 6.5, writing procedures in COBOL to drive it. It works very well, and since the new system is on SQL Server, we were able to build an intranet site that uses embedded Office 2000 components to build ad-hoc queries off it. Since we built that, users can now get the information they need themselves and run their own "what if" scenarios directly from a web page - they don't need to have analysts go and do batch repots off the mainframe anymore. It may be Microsoft tech we used to do it, but it worked and it helped our productivity.
Unfortunately, you need Windows to use it. Virtually all our tools (and we have a lot of vertical market code in our company) are Windows-based, and, as a result of all this, Windows is our standard, for better or for worse. In a way, this reminds me of a discussion I was in on Usenet a few month ago. One fellow was insisting that vi + TeX was all a user should have for producing business documents, because the documents came out looking prettier, and that was what he gave his users.
I countered that I'd rather have nice, easy-to-understand writing from people made with tools that let them easily use things like mail merge, spell checking, and pasting in things from other programs if needed. In other words, Word (or other Office software). Let the users concentrate on just getting work done, and give them the environment and the tools to do so. If legitimate exceptions emerge, deal with them the right way when they happen.
It's not about power or ego, it's about doing our job (at least, that's how it is for most of us). Most people here who don't understand that will eventually, I hope, rise enough in their careers that they'll realize the difference.
- -Josh Turiel
I'm speaking here with my IT manager hat on, not my Linux geek hat in order to provide a little perspective. We don't hate Linux - in fact, probably the majority of us have a favorable opinion of Linux, too. Some of us even use it in our home/hobby lives, like I do (and have been since '94).
.exe files that people e-mail to each other? We block them at the SMTP gateway. Yes, we're pains in the ass about it, but we have a stable network with very little downtime - and when the latest .VBS virus goes sweeping the Net we're safely locked away with no downtime. On the other hand, we don't filter or monitor e-mail content or web sites. We don't care about speech at my company (which a lot of companies restrict), just reliability and safety.
The problem we have is with unauthorized anything on our networks, not just Linux. You see, planning and running the corporate network is what we're paid to do. In most structured environments, nothing gets installed without IT's thumbs-up. Period. The business (and our jobs) depends on the network's being as stable and predictable as possible, and even though Linux is wonderful stuff, workers are required to use what the company provides because we know it. It's not just Linux that can get a worker fired at my shop. It's any software that didn't come in through our department's OK. And all those cute little
That's an important distinction. Some IT folks just reflexively hate that which they do not know. That's the wrong way to go about their job, but it covers the butt well. My attitude (and our policies are derived from it) is that the company provides the PC, so we get to decide what it runs, based on what you need to do your work. You don't get to decide unilaterally what runs on it - we do.
However, we're not entirely closed off to running "other" things or operating systems. If someone came to us and had a reason they needed Linux to do their job instead of NT, I'd test to make sure it didn't interfere with anything else on the LAN (like a misconfigured Samba could), and they'd get their Linux after we tested it. But the important point here is that we are flexible, provided you follow the "right way" of making sure your software is OK. When people do that, and give us the chance to test things, we approve things unless we find a specific technical reason not to.
But if someday Linux became our standard desktop OS at my company, you know what? We'd fire people who used Windows without authorization. Wouldn't that be an interesting turnabout?
- -Josh Turiel
Unix by itself is not an OS as the unwashed masses think of it nowadays. Unix (including virtually all the variations including Darwin/OS X) is really just a kernel that provides low-level services. The programs, tools, and shell that are bolted onto the kernel turn it into an operating system.
That doesn't make Every right (or is it Every right makes a wrong?), but he has a point. Linux, for instance, is an OS. But is the Linux kernel alone the OS? Not really, it's the kernel, GNU tools, daemons, and interface (whether just bash or the full KDE/GNOME GUI shebang) that make it into the Linux OS. Vendors may choose what goes into their particular version of the Linux OS, but they all do add to the kernel alone. MacOS X will also be an OS, but Mach itself isn't. Windows - well, who knows what that is, other than a blivet.
And I know this doesn't jibe with the textbook definition of an OS, but it's a practical definition for the non-academics.
- -Josh Turiel
I run the network area for an insurance company. Technically, I and my staff of four are on call all of the time, but we have practical limits, based on reasonableness. A couple of my workers have expertise in particular areas, so we'll call or page them as needed if after-hours problems occur in those areas. For all practical purposes that's about one or two times a year, though.
Then we have myself and our key network/mainframe guru on Skytel 2-way pagers, which we use to reply by e-mail as needed. We tell people to use the pager email addresses unless e-mail is down. That way we can usually attend to the issue with no phone call or trip required. Also, I get all the alert messages from our anti-virus system mailed to my pager - so it goes off a few times a day (I have a quiet time programmed into it).
When a crisis does happen, I'm first on the notification tree (I'm paid to be the boss, so I better be willing to back it up). If I can, I deal with it myself. If I can't, I call in whoever's appropriate. Basically, this drags in someone at a slightly off-hour a couple of times a year. I do all overnights myself if need be - again, it's a matter of being willing to walk the walk.
Our mainframe programming group (under a different manager) simply has a pager and laptop rotated to the on-call programmer. Each programmer gets a week on rotation where they need to deal with any issues that may arise when our batch jobs run at night. That's typically between 6-11PM. There are 8 programmers on the rotation, so they serve about a week every two months.
Neither of these generate any extra pay (neither for myself or my staff - we're all salaried) - but I give comp time pretty liberally if I have to drag one of my people into the office.
- -Josh Turiel
The Constitution was not designed to handle cases like the Internet. The Internet is a global entity, but invented in the US, and dominated by us as well. It exists on a cooperative basis (the Internet is merely a huge aggregation of computers and gateways running TCP/IP), but numbering and naming do need to be administered centrally, so cooperation isn't replaced by anarchy.
The problem was that it all worked fine when Jon Postel was the benevolent dictator in charge of the system - he was relatively unbiased and had the technical credentials and experience (he was there at the beginning) that were needed to give him credibility. His death left a huge void, in more ways than one. ICANN is a "best effort" by the US government (who paid for this all in the beginning, lest we forget) to replace him with an organization with some degree of legitimacy and credibility - the benevolent dictator model was broken with Jon's loss.
Given all that, ICANN is a reasonable compromise. Other parts of the world get a voice for the first time on Internet governance, numbers are assigned in normal fashion, DNS is still a little screwy but at least NSI doesn't have a total monopoly anymore, and things keep running as always. Do some aspects of ICANN suck? Absolutely. They are way too biased towards business in domian name disputes, Esther Dyson isn't that skilled a leader (to be fair, it was kind of thrust upon her), and the whole organization, being global in scope, is falling victim to "UN-itis" - a whole batch of bureaucrats travel over the globe and eat expensive meals while doing very little.
But overall, before slamming ICANN to the mat, think about the alternatives and if there's really a better solution, short of putting the US government back in charge. Governing a mutant entity like the Internet is a tough job, but someone has to do it. ICANN needs some fixes, but I think they're the best suited to the job. Screw the APA. The only APA that I worry about is the one with Bradshaw and Farooq.
And unfortunately, we don't have the option of putting Postel back in charge - the "Weekend at Bernie's" model of governance just doesn't work in practice.
- -Josh Turiel
That's the thing - I see a significant difference between repair and design. However, not all people see a line between them. My intention in pointing out the issue with embryos is fairly simple; it's given that every embryo represents potential life, and human life at that. I think I may have chosen my words poorly before.
However, given that embryos _are_ life to whatever extent we consider, do we have a moral obligation to make sure each one of those embryos has an opportunity to live? Or do we decide which ones to bring to term? I have no problem with deciding at that stage, though I find the idea of aborting that same person-to-be once it's in the womb to be repugnant (though I am pro-choice, my personal choice would be for life - I just consider it to be a personal moral issue rather than a societal one). And I believe that that line is drawn at the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, however early that point can be made by technology. When you are using technology to assist in creating a child, I have no problem with deliberately picking the "best" embryo - assuming the criteria is simply one that is robust (some embryos don't form as well - I've read in many places that roughly 30% of all fertilized eggs abort themselves at an early phase and never result in a term pregnancy) and free of known defects that will result in the likely or certain death of the child. I'm not concerned with screening for things that result in a social or physical disadvantage, and most "defects" don't necessarily have a bearing on a person's ability to live. Blindness is not incompatible with life. A misshapen arm isn't either. Huntington's is guaranteed early death, though - and I would not implant an embryo with that gene.
The difference is that things like a tendency towards breast cancer is just that - a tendency. It's not a certainty. Whereas Huntington's, for instance, is a death sentence - if you have that gene combination, you will die from it - the only question being when. And I think that distinction is how you stay ethically correct in these matters.
That particular government's efforts to create a homogenous people are horrible and brutal, but not (thankfully) in the lab - that line hasn't been (publically - maybe it's happening now somewhere in the world in private) crossed anywhere since the second world war. Neither of us have directly suffered as a result of this, for which we should be thankful. And I think society, as a whole, has learned some lessons from the era - namely that there _is_ a difference, however small, between enabling people to be born disease-free and eugenics. Most people are not willing to cross that line, and I won't either. The couple in the US having a child that does not suffer from their daughter's disease doesn't cross the line. The English couple (that you referred to in your link - it was an interesting article) that wants to specifically have a daughter - they're straddling the line. And to have a baby that'll be 6'5" male and run a 40-yd dash in 4.3 seconds because you screened for it - that's just plain wrong and veers perilously towards eugenics.
That said, when it's time to have our own implantation done (sometime next week), I simply want to implant the appropriate number of embryos that have the best chance of attaching and allowing my wife to bring them to term. And I don't give a shit about their sex, hair color, handedness, height, or anything else. I just want to see healthy children that can be brought to term safely, that we can love with everything we have and raise to be the best humans possible. That's all I ever want to ask for - the chance to be the best parent I can. And to me, that's what assisted reproduction is all about.
- -Josh Turiel