I'm not a network expert in the least, but I had the impression that a WAN was multiple LANs linked by routers. It seems kind of stupid to me to change the name based on how long the cables are... is there really no difference in technology between a LAN and a WAN?
I don't understand the difference. In the real world, you are participating in the economy if you go find a diamond and sell it. In EQ, I am participating in the economy if I go kill an orc, pick up his loot, and sell it (for platinum pieces). People value the loot, otherwise there wouldn't be an exchange of real dollars for platinum pieces. The exchange rate indicates the 'real' value of platinum pieces in US dollars (or any other real world currency).
The only oddity is that the economy only produces things that can be used in Norrath, and that anyone anywhere can use that thing if they have a character in Norrath who owns the thing. Frankly, I have no idea how to relate that to a real/unreal economy. But, barring that, the analogy to an economy seems very firm.
Can you direct me to where I can learn more about this? I would love to be able to lock my session instead of having to log off every time someone else wants to get onto the PC.
Oh, I agree completely. But how do you give someone a ladder out of the culture in which they grew up? How did you recognize, as a 'gut' feeling, that you really could make your life different than the lives of those around you while you grew up?
Maybe I'm misremembering, but the way I remember it, I never believed that I would get intellectual work. I never specifically disbelieved it, and I had a high self-image; it was just alien to me.
Maybe I overrate the difficulty in getting over that cultural barrier; maybe all it takes is going to college, then you can get an interesting job with little effort, and advance based on merit at that point. But I had no idea of how to write a resume, how to behave in a professional interview, how to behave in a professional work environment, or even really what kinds of jobs existed.
This is everyday life for a large (at least 25+) percentage of the US. And a significant number of the people working these jobs are intelligent, capable people who simply have no exposure to cushy office jobs and don't really believe that they could get such a job.
I could easily have been such a person. I have an IQ in the upper.1%, but if I hadn't gotten a scholarship that left my parents needing to pay nothing for my college, I almost certainly would have been such a person. It is hard to convey just how easy it is to fall into the trap of believing that your life must turn out in the expected way. In any family in which the parents, aunts, uncles, etc. have all done manual labor their whole lives, it is almost certain that their children will do the same. Most of my family is _well_ over average intelligence (upper 25%, minimum) and they are not lazy, etc., yet almost all of them do some form of manual labor. It's a cultural thing.
It is mostly your good fortune in having people in your everyday life who work at what we consider reasonable jobs that has led you to lead the cushy life that most of you (and I) lead. I am one of the lucky few who have made the transition from a factory worker culture to a professional career. And make no mistake, it takes more than ability to make that transition; it takes luck. I am sure that parents in a factory worker culture could groom their children for professional careers, but it is the nature of the culture to not really believe that it is even a possibility.
So don't be so shocked that people work under the conditions described in this article. You can't manufacture goods to be sold at the prices you see in your local retail store without treating factory workers like another cog in the machine. And don't look down on the people who do those jobs (not that the parent poster did, but people often do). But for some luck, you could easily be in their place.
None as good as Napster in its day?!? Have you tried any of the FastTrack clients (Morpheus, Kazaa, Gift)? That you can download any file (not just music) and that there are ~.5 million users when I have used it would have made it a Napster killer, IMO. However, those benefits pale in comparison to the automatic resumption of downloads and (!!) the fact that it swarmcasts when it can find multiple sources. For a broadband user, that makes all the difference in the world. Just find ten or twenty dial-ups to feed you the file.
Napster sucks. It was a great (but simple) idea that was never implemented well until the clones.
I watched the show, and it was very good. WIth The Tick as their starting material, it could have been better, but I laughed my ass off and I don't watch TV, as a rule.
You are arguing about what is legal, with the tacit assumption that what is legal is right. This is not the case. It is our obligation to try to ensure that what is right is legal. If something that is wrong is legally mandated, or if something that is right is illegal, it is our obligation to break the law.
As an extreme case, I would imagine that one was legally obligated to turn in your Jewish neighbors in Nazi Germany. It doesn't take too much thought to recognize the fallacy of confusing morality with legality in this instance.
There are rules that are good for everyone if everyone follows them, but it's beneficial for the individual to break them. Everyone benefits if there is some entity there to enforce everyone behaving that way. That's what government is for. Anything that the government does beyond that is tyranny, and don't let them fool you into thinking that legality == morality. We give great power to the government, and if they can trick you into thinking that anything they use it for is by definition right, they will abuse it hideously.
So, to bring this back on-topic: Decide for yourself if it is beneficial for everyone overall to allow decrypting DVDs. Then try to make the government do what's right. Personally, I think that restricting reverse engineering, restricting people from reporting security flaws, and the lot of other restrictions that come with the DMCA is tragically imbalanced with the 'benefit' that it theoretically gives (helping put our money in the pockets of some already filthy-rich media executives).
Umm, so you think they should follow the philosophy of all of the 'internet appliance' companies that sold the PC at under cost expecting users to not hack it? Where are they today? Or do you think that Tivo should give away their monthly service? It does cost them something (admittedly not much) to keep that service going. Eventually they would go out of business.
Or do you just think that any business model that would require both that you own a piece of hardware, and that you pay for a subscription to get useful information for that hardware, should be outlawed?
Didn't you use the internet to post that comment? Didn't you pay for a PC, then pay a monthly fee for your internet access? Are you an idiot?
Re:Long-term versus Short-term incentives
on
Making It Personal
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
To get personalized service, I don't have to give my information to anyone. They just have to give my computer all of the different options, and let it choose locally which of those options to display to me.
There's no reason why (at least for internet based services) I can't get all the personalization I want without giving away any information at all. Even better, I don't even have to enter my preferences multiple times. If the companies could get together on a standard for how their client app looks for the personalized info, I can enter (for example) my address once and then I only have to click a button to let a company's client (locally) look at it.
So, I should go to your website, a client app should automatically download, then I can give it permission to ask info from my local preferences. When a pref doesn't exist, I get prompted (but just once) to enter it. Then prefs are available for all client apps that I give permission.
The only issue is that they could surreptitiously send info upstream even though they don't need to do so to personalize, but any app you download could do that, and people find out about such things and those companies get slapped down. Also, if the preferences are copyrighted to you, then it would be illegal for the bad companies to take it from you, thus it doesn't propogate on forever.
Re:Long-term versus Short-term incentives
on
Making It Personal
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand how an argument can be overused. An argument is either right or wrong. Use it when it is right, don't when it is wrong.
Certainly their immorality can be exposed, and I suppose it can affect stock price. I am unsure if it has a significant effect on stock price beyond the monetary loss expected to result from it. Those investors with 'big money' are going to make their decisions based on how the profits of the company are going to be affected; that's how they got big money. And the consumers have proven time and again that, as a group, they don't care. Even if they did, a company can rebrand a product and the consumer can't even see that the vilified company produced the product.
Can you name a large publicly traded company with a real, progressive environmental program?
I'm not saying that capitalism isn't the best system available now. I am saying that it isn't the best possible system, and that even if it is the best system now, it could stand a lot of improving.
Well, the problem that I see with this is that companies have no inherent self interest. If I, as a corporate decision maker, can make money from my company while hurting everyone else, then if I myself am punished less (either by leaving the company, selling my stock ahead of time, etc.) than the gains I made, then it is in my (albeit sick) interests to make those decisions. This is regardless of the consequences to the company.
What we need is for the people who make the decisions to get punished for what they do. Companies don't do bad (or good) things; people do.
Another point that we need to take into account is that punitive penalties must be made to ensure that these things don't happen again. If I can make twice as much money doing something that I have a ten percent chance of getting caught doing, and the penalty is only double the money I made, then that is a 'good gamble' for the company. Penalties should be the greater of two amounts:
1) the amount it takes to repair the damage that has been done
2) the amount it takes to remove the gains of the company times the inverse of the chance of getting caught, plus some fudge factor to make it a negative incentive to be evil rather than zero incentive
The problems that we have with companies like Monsanto and, to a much lesser extent, Microsoft, are symptoms of a deeper cultural and legal problem.
In the USA (I'm sure this applies to other western countries too; I'll just talk about the one I'm familiar with) publicly traded companies have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Think about that. They have a legal obligation to ignore any ethical or moral issues in favor of putting dollars in the pockets of their shareholders, primarily people who are already wealthy. It seems obvious to me that this will lead to corporate cultures with ethics that are upside down from anything sensible. If we're obliged to maximize profits at the expense of all else, doesn't it make sense that successful companies will establish corporate cultures in which the dollar is almighty? In which the the health of non-shareholders is of insignificant importance compared to the profits of the company?
In my opinion, publicly held companies and our notion of the corporation as a legal entity equivalent to a person exacerbate the already existing problem of corporate greed a hundred-fold.
The problems that we have with companies like Monsanto and, to a much lesser extent, Microsoft, are symptoms of a deeper cultural and legal problem.
In the USA (I'm sure this applies to other western countries too; I'll just talk about the one I'm familiar with) publicly traded companies have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Think about that. They have a legal obligation to ignore any ethical or moral issues in favor of putting dollars in the pockets of their shareholders, primarily people who are already wealthy. It seems obvious to me that this will lead to corporate cultures with ethics that are upside down from anything sensible. If we're obliged to maximize profits at the expense of all else, doesn't it make sense that successful companies will establish corporate cultures in which the dollar is almighty? In which the the health of non-shareholders is of insignificant importance compared to the profits of the company?
In my opinion, publicly held companies and our notion of the corporation as a legal entity equivalent to a person exacerbate the already existing problem of corporate greed a hundred-fold.
I'd also like to commend the gnumeric folks on their dedication to producing a stable and useful product. One of the developers has already contacted me asking for the file that crashed Gnumeric:)
There was no such file (see my other reply), but it's nice that they're so aggressive looking for ways to improve their product.
I should point out again (since several people who replied didn't read the post very well before they went off) that Gnumeric _does not_ crash when I load the file; it crashes when I try to print or print preview the file. What I didn't specify is that it crashes for me when I print or print preview any file that I load. I'm sure that it must be some configuration issue on my PC, but I have no idea what it could be.
So, my problem with Gnumeric is not that it won't load the file. The problem is that it crashes when I load any file then try to print or print preview. Strangely enough, it doesn't crash when I print or print preview a file that I created by hand - only files that I load from disk.
Well, I have yet to find any spreadsheet program on Linux that will read in my invoice in MS Excel format. I used the MS Excel invoice template to build the invoice.
Gnumeric 0.7 crashes when I try to print or print preview the file, KSpread just won't read the file, and StarOffice won't save the file after I change it! I have tried various methods of saving as different formats, and even totally rebuilding my invoice (not based on any MS crap). I have yet to find a useful tool or method for printing a pretty invoice under Linux.
Also, "save as Gnumeric XML file format" produces a binary file. I've never seen a binary XML file before...
While I agree that the post to which you're replying takes a cynical view, I still agree that even if you have been programming since 16, your 'years of experience' don't start then.
When you tell someone about your professional experience, it should be just that. You should definitely also tell them about your pre-professional experience, but you're misleading them if you lump your junior high and high school programming/networking/admin days in with work you did in a professional environment.
BTW, I started programming (in Basic and 6502 assembler) when I was 12 years old. I am now 31, and I tell people I have 7 years of experience, which I do. I have never counted my experience as starting at 12!
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I'm not a network expert in the least, but I had the impression that a WAN was multiple LANs linked by routers. It seems kind of stupid to me to change the name based on how long the cables are... is there really no difference in technology between a LAN and a WAN?
I don't understand the difference. In the real world, you are participating in the economy if you go find a diamond and sell it. In EQ, I am participating in the economy if I go kill an orc, pick up his loot, and sell it (for platinum pieces). People value the loot, otherwise there wouldn't be an exchange of real dollars for platinum pieces. The exchange rate indicates the 'real' value of platinum pieces in US dollars (or any other real world currency).
The only oddity is that the economy only produces things that can be used in Norrath, and that anyone anywhere can use that thing if they have a character in Norrath who owns the thing. Frankly, I have no idea how to relate that to a real/unreal economy. But, barring that, the analogy to an economy seems very firm.
Thanks much!
Can you direct me to where I can learn more about this? I would love to be able to lock my session instead of having to log off every time someone else wants to get onto the PC.
Because he has a ferrari and we don't. Is there a better reason?
Oh, I agree completely. But how do you give someone a ladder out of the culture in which they grew up? How did you recognize, as a 'gut' feeling, that you really could make your life different than the lives of those around you while you grew up?
Maybe I'm misremembering, but the way I remember it, I never believed that I would get intellectual work. I never specifically disbelieved it, and I had a high self-image; it was just alien to me.
Maybe I overrate the difficulty in getting over that cultural barrier; maybe all it takes is going to college, then you can get an interesting job with little effort, and advance based on merit at that point. But I had no idea of how to write a resume, how to behave in a professional interview, how to behave in a professional work environment, or even really what kinds of jobs existed.
How did you do it?
This is everyday life for a large (at least 25+) percentage of the US. And a significant number of the people working these jobs are intelligent, capable people who simply have no exposure to cushy office jobs and don't really believe that they could get such a job.
.1%, but if I hadn't gotten a scholarship that left my parents needing to pay nothing for my college, I almost certainly would have been such a person. It is hard to convey just how easy it is to fall into the trap of believing that your life must turn out in the expected way. In any family in which the parents, aunts, uncles, etc. have all done manual labor their whole lives, it is almost certain that their children will do the same. Most of my family is _well_ over average intelligence (upper 25%, minimum) and they are not lazy, etc., yet almost all of them do some form of manual labor. It's a cultural thing.
I could easily have been such a person. I have an IQ in the upper
It is mostly your good fortune in having people in your everyday life who work at what we consider reasonable jobs that has led you to lead the cushy life that most of you (and I) lead. I am one of the lucky few who have made the transition from a factory worker culture to a professional career. And make no mistake, it takes more than ability to make that transition; it takes luck. I am sure that parents in a factory worker culture could groom their children for professional careers, but it is the nature of the culture to not really believe that it is even a possibility.
So don't be so shocked that people work under the conditions described in this article. You can't manufacture goods to be sold at the prices you see in your local retail store without treating factory workers like another cog in the machine. And don't look down on the people who do those jobs (not that the parent poster did, but people often do). But for some luck, you could easily be in their place.
None as good as Napster in its day?!? Have you tried any of the FastTrack clients (Morpheus, Kazaa, Gift)? That you can download any file (not just music) and that there are ~.5 million users when I have used it would have made it a Napster killer, IMO. However, those benefits pale in comparison to the automatic resumption of downloads and (!!) the fact that it swarmcasts when it can find multiple sources. For a broadband user, that makes all the difference in the world. Just find ten or twenty dial-ups to feed you the file.
Napster sucks. It was a great (but simple) idea that was never implemented well until the clones.
I watched the show, and it was very good. WIth The Tick as their starting material, it could have been better, but I laughed my ass off and I don't watch TV, as a rule.
You are arguing about what is legal, with the tacit assumption that what is legal is right. This is not the case. It is our obligation to try to ensure that what is right is legal. If something that is wrong is legally mandated, or if something that is right is illegal, it is our obligation to break the law.
As an extreme case, I would imagine that one was legally obligated to turn in your Jewish neighbors in Nazi Germany. It doesn't take too much thought to recognize the fallacy of confusing morality with legality in this instance.
There are rules that are good for everyone if everyone follows them, but it's beneficial for the individual to break them. Everyone benefits if there is some entity there to enforce everyone behaving that way. That's what government is for. Anything that the government does beyond that is tyranny, and don't let them fool you into thinking that legality == morality. We give great power to the government, and if they can trick you into thinking that anything they use it for is by definition right, they will abuse it hideously.
So, to bring this back on-topic: Decide for yourself if it is beneficial for everyone overall to allow decrypting DVDs. Then try to make the government do what's right. Personally, I think that restricting reverse engineering, restricting people from reporting security flaws, and the lot of other restrictions that come with the DMCA is tragically imbalanced with the 'benefit' that it theoretically gives (helping put our money in the pockets of some already filthy-rich media executives).
Umm, so you think they should follow the philosophy of all of the 'internet appliance' companies that sold the PC at under cost expecting users to not hack it? Where are they today? Or do you think that Tivo should give away their monthly service? It does cost them something (admittedly not much) to keep that service going. Eventually they would go out of business.
Or do you just think that any business model that would require both that you own a piece of hardware, and that you pay for a subscription to get useful information for that hardware, should be outlawed?
Didn't you use the internet to post that comment? Didn't you pay for a PC, then pay a monthly fee for your internet access? Are you an idiot?
Or at least that's what the submission infers.
You mean implies.
To get personalized service, I don't have to give my information to anyone. They just have to give my computer all of the different options, and let it choose locally which of those options to display to me.
There's no reason why (at least for internet based services) I can't get all the personalization I want without giving away any information at all. Even better, I don't even have to enter my preferences multiple times. If the companies could get together on a standard for how their client app looks for the personalized info, I can enter (for example) my address once and then I only have to click a button to let a company's client (locally) look at it.
So, I should go to your website, a client app should automatically download, then I can give it permission to ask info from my local preferences. When a pref doesn't exist, I get prompted (but just once) to enter it. Then prefs are available for all client apps that I give permission.
The only issue is that they could surreptitiously send info upstream even though they don't need to do so to personalize, but any app you download could do that, and people find out about such things and those companies get slapped down. Also, if the preferences are copyrighted to you, then it would be illegal for the bad companies to take it from you, thus it doesn't propogate on forever.
s/fragrant\/flagrant/fragrant\/flagrant\//
I don't understand how an argument can be overused. An argument is either right or wrong. Use it when it is right, don't when it is wrong.
Certainly their immorality can be exposed, and I suppose it can affect stock price. I am unsure if it has a significant effect on stock price beyond the monetary loss expected to result from it. Those investors with 'big money' are going to make their decisions based on how the profits of the company are going to be affected; that's how they got big money. And the consumers have proven time and again that, as a group, they don't care. Even if they did, a company can rebrand a product and the consumer can't even see that the vilified company produced the product.
Can you name a large publicly traded company with a real, progressive environmental program?
I'm not saying that capitalism isn't the best system available now. I am saying that it isn't the best possible system, and that even if it is the best system now, it could stand a lot of improving.
Well, the problem that I see with this is that companies have no inherent self interest. If I, as a corporate decision maker, can make money from my company while hurting everyone else, then if I myself am punished less (either by leaving the company, selling my stock ahead of time, etc.) than the gains I made, then it is in my (albeit sick) interests to make those decisions. This is regardless of the consequences to the company.
What we need is for the people who make the decisions to get punished for what they do. Companies don't do bad (or good) things; people do.
Another point that we need to take into account is that punitive penalties must be made to ensure that these things don't happen again. If I can make twice as much money doing something that I have a ten percent chance of getting caught doing, and the penalty is only double the money I made, then that is a 'good gamble' for the company. Penalties should be the greater of two amounts:
1) the amount it takes to repair the damage that has been done
2) the amount it takes to remove the gains of the company times the inverse of the chance of getting caught, plus some fudge factor to make it a negative incentive to be evil rather than zero incentive
The problems that we have with companies like Monsanto and, to a much lesser extent, Microsoft, are symptoms of a deeper cultural and legal problem.
In the USA (I'm sure this applies to other western countries too; I'll just talk about the one I'm familiar with) publicly traded companies have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Think about that. They have a legal obligation to ignore any ethical or moral issues in favor of putting dollars in the pockets of their shareholders, primarily people who are already wealthy. It seems obvious to me that this will lead to corporate cultures with ethics that are upside down from anything sensible. If we're obliged to maximize profits at the expense of all else, doesn't it make sense that successful companies will establish corporate cultures in which the dollar is almighty? In which the the health of non-shareholders is of insignificant importance compared to the profits of the company?
In my opinion, publicly held companies and our notion of the corporation as a legal entity equivalent to a person exacerbate the already existing problem of corporate greed a hundred-fold.
The problems that we have with companies like Monsanto and, to a much lesser extent, Microsoft, are symptoms of a deeper cultural and legal problem.
In the USA (I'm sure this applies to other western countries too; I'll just talk about the one I'm familiar with) publicly traded companies have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Think about that. They have a legal obligation to ignore any ethical or moral issues in favor of putting dollars in the pockets of their shareholders, primarily people who are already wealthy. It seems obvious to me that this will lead to corporate cultures with ethics that are upside down from anything sensible. If we're obliged to maximize profits at the expense of all else, doesn't it make sense that successful companies will establish corporate cultures in which the dollar is almighty? In which the the health of non-shareholders is of insignificant importance compared to the profits of the company?
In my opinion, publicly held companies and our notion of the corporation as a legal entity equivalent to a person exacerbate the already existing problem of corporate greed a hundred-fold.
God bless you. I just installed apt-get from your instructions (my first experience with SRPMs. I am but a Linux neophyte) and escaped rpm hell!
I'd also like to commend the gnumeric folks on their dedication to producing a stable and useful product. One of the developers has already contacted me asking for the file that crashed Gnumeric :)
There was no such file (see my other reply), but it's nice that they're so aggressive looking for ways to improve their product.
I should point out again (since several people who replied didn't read the post very well before they went off) that Gnumeric _does not_ crash when I load the file; it crashes when I try to print or print preview the file. What I didn't specify is that it crashes for me when I print or print preview any file that I load. I'm sure that it must be some configuration issue on my PC, but I have no idea what it could be.
So, my problem with Gnumeric is not that it won't load the file. The problem is that it crashes when I load any file then try to print or print preview. Strangely enough, it doesn't crash when I print or print preview a file that I created by hand - only files that I load from disk.
Well, I have yet to find any spreadsheet program on Linux that will read in my invoice in MS Excel format. I used the MS Excel invoice template to build the invoice.
Gnumeric 0.7 crashes when I try to print or print preview the file, KSpread just won't read the file, and StarOffice won't save the file after I change it! I have tried various methods of saving as different formats, and even totally rebuilding my invoice (not based on any MS crap). I have yet to find a useful tool or method for printing a pretty invoice under Linux.
Also, "save as Gnumeric XML file format" produces a binary file. I've never seen a binary XML file before...
Mod parent up. bmetz cut through the contentious parts of the discussion to what's important - how should you deal with this.
;)
I would ignore the 'first' part, though, unless you just want a lively debate instead of a solution
While I agree that the post to which you're replying takes a cynical view, I still agree that even if you have been programming since 16, your 'years of experience' don't start then.
When you tell someone about your professional experience, it should be just that. You should definitely also tell them about your pre-professional experience, but you're misleading them if you lump your junior high and high school programming/networking/admin days in with work you did in a professional environment.
BTW, I started programming (in Basic and 6502 assembler) when I was 12 years old. I am now 31, and I tell people I have 7 years of experience, which I do. I have never counted my experience as starting at 12!
Oh, and 13.5 * 1.5 = 20.25, not 19.25.