It would be a interesting twist. In most cases, being elected president increases one's power and influence in the world. In Mr. Gate's case, it would be a demotion.
Why do you even need a skill set when you have something a thousand times more valuable than a skill set...a famous name.
I have very little doubt that there are thousands of people who could program circles around Mitnick, who do not have a name, and probably aren't in the game for "a name" anyway.
The bankruptcy is just a ruse. The real reason for the project "folding" is that the Bush Administration doesn't want all of the aliens out there accessing millions of computer across the world. Think of the security risk! Aliens could be broadcasting anything, who knows what they would end up putting the computers.
Fraud is one of those things that get worse when not addressed. The deal is that someone figures out how to pull off a fraud. They tell the other dudes in the dorm. Voila, thirty people pulling the same scam.
I've been with companies and watched how the fraud works it way through the system. There will generally be one or two players trying different combos to hack the system. When they get a scheme that works, they broadcast it to their buddies, and you instantly have a thousand duplicates.
I've actually seen people posting fraud recipes on forums. The folks out pulling ebay fraud are probably bragging about it, and bringing in more perps.
Although corporate America doesn't give a c^#% about customers, fraud generally rises to a point where it shows up big time on a marketer's precious little excel spreadsheet.
As for the end user being able to bring things to small claims court. Well, small claims courts kind of fall apart when you deal with Interstate traffic.
What prevents the defrauders from using stolen credit cards, or cancelling their credit card before ebay runs the charge? Certainly people defrauding buyers would have no compunction about doing the same to credit card vendors.
The credit card scheme also puts EBay into dealing with buyer's fraud...people who claim that they never received a given piece of merchandise. Many eBay sellers are living on the brink, and would be prepared for such things.
Of course, now that eBay owns Paypal, they could redesign that so the seller doesn't get the cash for 30 days. It is easier to not release funds than to take funds.
Does anyone do it right. Do even the authors of CSS have the slightest clue of what right is. None of it shows up the same on different browsers. I have several books on CSS, I run their code through CSS validators and it generally fails. I doubt there is such a thing as CSS done right.
But you are right on one issue, people tweak their CSS to achieve effects for ie on Win32, and forget the rest of the world...helping us keep the MS monopoly growing.
Wow, if only we had a single monopoly that controlled all communications, why then we could have a free ISP (well free in the part that you are still paying for it with your phone bill.)
Gosh, they have almost 900,000 of 63 million people online. That is over a full percent! Instead, we have all these greedy little ISPs running around charging people for service.
Can any of you remember how great it was when ATT was the only company, and we didn't have all this annoying fax, cellular, nickel a minute LD stuff? It was like paradise on earth.
I think we should all get off this open source wagon, and jump back on the one company ruling the world wagon...like Bill Gates would like. For that matter, I am sure MS would be more than happy to give the US free internet access, if we gave them the monopoly of all software and internet publishing as the fee.
Unfortunately, when you don't have one company controlling the entire market, it is really hard to rob Peter to pay Paul.
Woody Norris wants to tell you something--and he can put the words inside your head from 100 yards away.
Woody Norris thinks he is most clever scientist of the 21st century...but did Woody notice the yellow eyed green creature parked in a silver disk on the limbs the green tree 100 yards outside his office...
The tech stocks killed themselves with the mantra of reinvesting 100% of profits. Traditionally stocks would pay dividends or buyback shares. With tech stocks reinvesting 110% of profits, you couldn't tell which companies were making it, and which were covering operating expenses with investor capital. It even made investors fall for gullible schemes like branding.
The other nasty thing about reinvesting 100% of profits is that eventually you become the victim of the law of diminishing returns. Happens in every industry. Restaurants and stores often go under when they expand with the assumption that demand will always follow supply.
Isn't that like creating a new Google just for open source software? Why not just use the resources we already have?... SourceForge... is the one place where almost all open source projects are listed.
I think the answer to your question is pretty much the same as the answer to the question "Why should there be any software companies besides Microsoft?"
Diversity rocks. There needs be a market that supports a number of competing solutions to the same question.
Jumping back to your Google Reference. The Google relevancy engine depends on smaller sites that essentially vote for their favorites sites with links pages.
For casual users, this would be a good way to scaroo the local telco. Your neighbors with cell phones could even cancel their telco service...magnifying the savings. Watch out-the local telecos might try bearing down on you, cause they are a bunch of jerks.
Of course, the big problem is that one of the bozos in the neighborhood might try running P2P on the pipe--ruining the whole thing for everyone else; so you would have to monitor the system and be prepared to bear down on your neighbors who hog the bandwidth.
It's up to Intel/AMD to come up with ways to reduce power consumption at 2.5 Ghz
Instead of marketing to the screaming speed crowd, it is up to the industry to realize that there is a huge market for slower machines with a longer battery life.
If the computer industry published metrics on overall power consumption (like they do for appliances), the computer market would find a very eager crowd willing to sacrifice speed for economy.
The next great invention will be TV Spam...to watch a TV show, you will first have to look through 100 unsolicited programs on breast enlargement and Nigerian bank frauds. Bring on the white noise!!!!
A clear fair legal system where outcomes can be reasonably assured.
I don't think anyone could call results in US courts assured. The results from the US courts are as wild and unpredictable as anywhere else.
The thing that mattered in the US was that, for a long time, people practiced a common sense philosophy and tried a lot harder to be fair an honest in their dealings. When the majority trying to understand and work within the system, it will work better than one where power players sit around and twist the rules to their ends.
Look at accounting and Wall Street. When the majority of accountants were trying to come up with figures that fit within the generally accepted definitions, then you had a situation where investors could glean a great deal of information about the health of the company from the books.
Today's MBAs and accountants seemed to have accepted the new economy (which is really a recycling of Kantian/Marxist thinking) and feel that that are appointed to dink and twist definitions to their ends.
The courts can't fix this system. The only way to fix the system is wait and hope that some day we will dump all the new agisms and get back to a market where accountants strive to use the same definitions, and not manipulate and change the definition of terms.
I thought I said that (of course I tend to ramble). The US also wanted an extension on destroying anti-tank mines with depleted uranium for environmental reasons. This was only a minor issue compared to Korea.
What I remember from Landmines.org and other sites is that the main US minefield is the buffer zone between North and South Korea. The mines here are supposedly well marked. But this field is the main reason that the US did not sign the recent global anti landmine act. I have to admit that Korea is a problem because the fields are part of a fragile piece, no-one wants it to be too easy to start Korea War II.
According to people who are working on landmine clean up in Afghanistan, neither the US nor the Taliban planted mines during that conflict. Apparently most of the mines are from the Russian and various tribal conflicts...predating the current war.
There is, however, a really big problem of unexploded ordinance. Things we dropped on the Afghans that haven't exploded yet.
I remember, the other complaint that the US had with the landmine ban (of 199?) was that it required destruction of stockpiles before the US could complete the environmental impact statement. Aparently, some anti tank mines have nasty things like depleted uranium, and you don't want to just blow them up...because of the damage to the environment.
The US has been playing a major role in the landmine ban, but did not sign the treaty. We have a habit of doing things like this.
trademark claims are weak when there's no commercial element involved.
Uh, have you seen the collection plates these guys rake in. There is a bigger commericial element in the typical fundamentalist sect than in most dot coms.
[I think NASA should concentrate on the long term and come up with solutions for making space travel cheaper and commercially viable]
Come on, NASA is run by the US government. They are incapable of making something commercially viable. Read the news...AMTRAK just proved that the government can't make trains commercially viable.
I was thinking back to win95. The reason I threw that in as an example was a white paper I remembered where an MS guru advocated burying the data in the "Program Files" "folder." This yahoo wanted to hide the files to save the user the unfriendly terms like "files" and "directories."
Okay, hiding the fact that an excel spreadsheet stores information in a file saves you from having to tell the end user about files...but the poor end user is extremely confused when they can't find any of the work they spent the last three weeks creating.
I have no doubt XP and 2000 are getting better.
[[ Logical soundness or the lack has little to do with ease of use Logical soundness or the lack has little to do with ease of use ]]
I agree that I am a twit and my grammar is poor, but on the only substantive part of your rant, I strongly disagree. Creating a product that logically and accurately does what needs to be done is, in the long run, the easiest system to use, learn and master.
As for your comments about using CONCRETE NOUNS and ACTIVE verbs, that will probably change when some future generation is fed up with reading everything at fourth grade level. The byte-ebonics rag is partially true...I assume you mean when a program is more concerned with the inner workings of the machines (bytes) than what the end user is trying to accomplish with the program.
I confess, I am not as smart as you, and can't really figure out why a dead french child psychaitrist is the last word on adult education, but if your program has to sort multidimensional arrays to work, then, uh, four year olds, and people who stopped learning at four won't be able to use it.
I wish people would talk about "logically sound" rather than this completely nebulous concept of "user friendly."
Look at Windows. A great deal of the garbage we hate in Bill's operating system was stuffed down our throats under the guise of being "user friendly." For example, changing the name directory to "folders" because directory has unfriendly latin roots. The actual result of this great "user friendly" move was Microsoft now stuffs the end user's data in a bunch of folders that you cannot find...making back ups harder. The goal of an OS should be to concentrate on creating a logically sound, secure foundation on which you can build other applications. But we compromise the foundation for an undefinable user friendliness.
It is so funny. I see it time and again. People love the "user friendliness" of MS word when they log on the first time. A few years later they are pulling out hairs as they find their systems clogged with gigabytes of files, odd templates, virii and other mysterious things that happen with word documents as systems age.
That really crappy registry thing we have to deal with came out with a great deal of hype about a "user friendly" registry replacing unfriendly ini files. Instead of coming up with a logically sound and versatile and extensible mechanism for recording intialization parameters...we have this supposedly user friendly monster that bites our tails when things go wrong. The only way we can deal with problems in the registry is to hope that some programmer somewhere was good enough that their 5 year old win 98 program will fix the registry problem with XP when you reinstall.
The parent of this thread was "Learning Curve." The result of the user friendly movement has been to add a bunch of garbage to programs to get the public to a feel good level, but the garbage ends up blocking them from complete mastery, since you know have a garbage user friendly layer in the way.
Instead of "user friendly", if you aimed at the goal of logically sound...you would find yourself with products that have only a slightly higher initial learning curve, but that people can master and build on. Take the threads about driving. The configuration of the driver seat has a nice logically sound foundation. It is driven by the logic of the vehicle and it works better.
When you really have a sound logical foundation, the actual workings of the product is all but driven from that foundation. A phone is totally un understandable until you know the logical premise that you have to hold it to your ear, and that different phones have numbers that you must dial before calling.
Imagine a car designed by the "user friendly" gurus of MS. A six year old could get it out of the driveway, but it would take a certified MCD (Microsoft Certified Driver) to get it back in.
I cut my teeth on the old style orange data terminal with fixed width fonts and no pictures. When designed well, the end user's learning curve was extremely low. New people, with no computer experience, were up and working within an hour of their new job.
After moving to GUI (Windows) and OO formats, the learning curve increased, and quality of data and data entry speed decreased. For pure number crunching, data entry and access, these old systems were lean and mean, and accurate, and have not been improved upon by the GUI world. Of course, pure number crunching or efficiency is not end of existence or only consideration in designing a system...however I don't buy into the argument that the Java/XML/OO world is better in every way to ideas from the past.
Different approaches have different strengthes.
Slashdot Mirror
A good editor could easily cut that article in half without loss of any information.
It would be a interesting twist. In most cases, being elected president increases one's power and influence in the world. In Mr. Gate's case, it would be a demotion.
Why do you even need a skill set when you have something a thousand times more valuable than a skill set...a famous name. I have very little doubt that there are thousands of people who could program circles around Mitnick, who do not have a name, and probably aren't in the game for "a name" anyway.
The bankruptcy is just a ruse. The real reason for the project "folding" is that the Bush Administration doesn't want all of the aliens out there accessing millions of computer across the world. Think of the security risk! Aliens could be broadcasting anything, who knows what they would end up putting the computers.
Fraud is one of those things that get worse when not addressed. The deal is that someone figures out how to pull off a fraud. They tell the other dudes in the dorm. Voila, thirty people pulling the same scam.
I've been with companies and watched how the fraud works it way through the system. There will generally be one or two players trying different combos to hack the system. When they get a scheme that works, they broadcast it to their buddies, and you instantly have a thousand duplicates.
I've actually seen people posting fraud recipes on forums. The folks out pulling ebay fraud are probably bragging about it, and bringing in more perps.
Although corporate America doesn't give a c^#% about customers, fraud generally rises to a point where it shows up big time on a marketer's precious little excel spreadsheet.
As for the end user being able to bring things to small claims court. Well, small claims courts kind of fall apart when you deal with Interstate traffic.
What prevents the defrauders from using stolen credit cards, or cancelling their credit card before ebay runs the charge? Certainly people defrauding buyers would have no compunction about doing the same to credit card vendors. The credit card scheme also puts EBay into dealing with buyer's fraud...people who claim that they never received a given piece of merchandise. Many eBay sellers are living on the brink, and would be prepared for such things. Of course, now that eBay owns Paypal, they could redesign that so the seller doesn't get the cash for 30 days. It is easier to not release funds than to take funds.
Does anyone do it right. Do even the authors of CSS have the slightest clue of what right is. None of it shows up the same on different browsers. I have several books on CSS, I run their code through CSS validators and it generally fails. I doubt there is such a thing as CSS done right. But you are right on one issue, people tweak their CSS to achieve effects for ie on Win32, and forget the rest of the world...helping us keep the MS monopoly growing.
Wow, if only we had a single monopoly that controlled all communications, why then we could have a free ISP (well free in the part that you are still paying for it with your phone bill.) Gosh, they have almost 900,000 of 63 million people online. That is over a full percent! Instead, we have all these greedy little ISPs running around charging people for service. Can any of you remember how great it was when ATT was the only company, and we didn't have all this annoying fax, cellular, nickel a minute LD stuff? It was like paradise on earth. I think we should all get off this open source wagon, and jump back on the one company ruling the world wagon...like Bill Gates would like. For that matter, I am sure MS would be more than happy to give the US free internet access, if we gave them the monopoly of all software and internet publishing as the fee. Unfortunately, when you don't have one company controlling the entire market, it is really hard to rob Peter to pay Paul.
Woody Norris wants to tell you something--and he can put the words inside your head from 100 yards away.
Woody Norris thinks he is most clever scientist of the 21st century...but did Woody notice the yellow eyed green creature parked in a silver disk on the limbs the green tree 100 yards outside his office...
1986? How long does a patent last? I thought it was in the teens...like 15 years.
The tech stocks killed themselves with the mantra of reinvesting 100% of profits. Traditionally stocks would pay dividends or buyback shares. With tech stocks reinvesting 110% of profits, you couldn't tell which companies were making it, and which were covering operating expenses with investor capital. It even made investors fall for gullible schemes like branding. The other nasty thing about reinvesting 100% of profits is that eventually you become the victim of the law of diminishing returns. Happens in every industry. Restaurants and stores often go under when they expand with the assumption that demand will always follow supply.
If it is something that you are giving to programmers, you would probably want to call them grants.
Isn't that like creating a new Google just for open source software? Why not just use the resources we already have? ... SourceForge ... is the one place where almost all open source projects are listed.
I think the answer to your question is pretty much the same as the answer to the question "Why should there be any software companies besides Microsoft?"
Diversity rocks. There needs be a market that supports a number of competing solutions to the same question.
Jumping back to your Google Reference. The Google relevancy engine depends on smaller sites that essentially vote for their favorites sites with links pages.
For casual users, this would be a good way to scaroo the local telco. Your neighbors with cell phones could even cancel their telco service...magnifying the savings. Watch out-the local telecos might try bearing down on you, cause they are a bunch of jerks.
Of course, the big problem is that one of the bozos in the neighborhood might try running P2P on the pipe--ruining the whole thing for everyone else; so you would have to monitor the system and be prepared to bear down on your neighbors who hog the bandwidth.
It's up to Intel/AMD to come up with ways to reduce power consumption at 2.5 Ghz
Instead of marketing to the screaming speed crowd, it is up to the industry to realize that there is a huge market for slower machines with a longer battery life.
If the computer industry published metrics on overall power consumption (like they do for appliances), the computer market would find a very eager crowd willing to sacrifice speed for economy.
The next great invention will be TV Spam...to watch a TV show, you will first have to look through 100 unsolicited programs on breast enlargement and Nigerian bank frauds. Bring on the white noise!!!!
A clear fair legal system where outcomes can be reasonably assured.
I don't think anyone could call results in US courts assured. The results from the US courts are as wild and unpredictable as anywhere else.
The thing that mattered in the US was that, for a long time, people practiced a common sense philosophy and tried a lot harder to be fair an honest in their dealings. When the majority trying to understand and work within the system, it will work better than one where power players sit around and twist the rules to their ends.
Look at accounting and Wall Street. When the majority of accountants were trying to come up with figures that fit within the generally accepted definitions, then you had a situation where investors could glean a great deal of information about the health of the company from the books.
Today's MBAs and accountants seemed to have accepted the new economy (which is really a recycling of Kantian/Marxist thinking) and feel that that are appointed to dink and twist definitions to their ends.
The courts can't fix this system. The only way to fix the system is wait and hope that some day we will dump all the new agisms and get back to a market where accountants strive to use the same definitions, and not manipulate and change the definition of terms.
I thought I said that (of course I tend to ramble). The US also wanted an extension on destroying anti-tank mines with depleted uranium for environmental reasons. This was only a minor issue compared to Korea.
What I remember from Landmines.org and other sites is that the main US minefield is the buffer zone between North and South Korea. The mines here are supposedly well marked. But this field is the main reason that the US did not sign the recent global anti landmine act. I have to admit that Korea is a problem because the fields are part of a fragile piece, no-one wants it to be too easy to start Korea War II.
According to people who are working on landmine clean up in Afghanistan, neither the US nor the Taliban planted mines during that conflict. Apparently most of the mines are from the Russian and various tribal conflicts...predating the current war.
There is, however, a really big problem of unexploded ordinance. Things we dropped on the Afghans that haven't exploded yet.
I remember, the other complaint that the US had with the landmine ban (of 199?) was that it required destruction of stockpiles before the US could complete the environmental impact statement. Aparently, some anti tank mines have nasty things like depleted uranium, and you don't want to just blow them up...because of the damage to the environment.
The US has been playing a major role in the landmine ban, but did not sign the treaty. We have a habit of doing things like this.
Uh, have you seen the collection plates these guys rake in. There is a bigger commericial element in the typical fundamentalist sect than in most dot coms.
[I think NASA should concentrate on the long term and come up with solutions for making space travel cheaper and commercially viable]
Come on, NASA is run by the US government. They are incapable of making something commercially viable. Read the news...AMTRAK just proved that the government can't make trains commercially viable.
I was thinking back to win95. The reason I threw that in as an example was a white paper I remembered where an MS guru advocated burying the data in the "Program Files" "folder." This yahoo wanted to hide the files to save the user the unfriendly terms like "files" and "directories." Okay, hiding the fact that an excel spreadsheet stores information in a file saves you from having to tell the end user about files...but the poor end user is extremely confused when they can't find any of the work they spent the last three weeks creating. I have no doubt XP and 2000 are getting better.
[[ Logical soundness or the lack has little to do with ease of use Logical soundness or the lack has little to do with ease of use ]]
I agree that I am a twit and my grammar is poor, but on the only substantive part of your rant, I strongly disagree. Creating a product that logically and accurately does what needs to be done is, in the long run, the easiest system to use, learn and master.
As for your comments about using CONCRETE NOUNS and ACTIVE verbs, that will probably change when some future generation is fed up with reading everything at fourth grade level. The byte-ebonics rag is partially true...I assume you mean when a program is more concerned with the inner workings of the machines (bytes) than what the end user is trying to accomplish with the program.
I confess, I am not as smart as you, and can't really figure out why a dead french child psychaitrist is the last word on adult education, but if your program has to sort multidimensional arrays to work, then, uh, four year olds, and people who stopped learning at four won't be able to use it.
I wish people would talk about "logically sound" rather than this completely nebulous concept of "user friendly."
Look at Windows. A great deal of the garbage we hate in Bill's operating system was stuffed down our throats under the guise of being "user friendly." For example, changing the name directory to "folders" because directory has unfriendly latin roots. The actual result of this great "user friendly" move was Microsoft now stuffs the end user's data in a bunch of folders that you cannot find...making back ups harder. The goal of an OS should be to concentrate on creating a logically sound, secure foundation on which you can build other applications. But we compromise the foundation for an undefinable user friendliness.
It is so funny. I see it time and again. People love the "user friendliness" of MS word when they log on the first time. A few years later they are pulling out hairs as they find their systems clogged with gigabytes of files, odd templates, virii and other mysterious things that happen with word documents as systems age.
That really crappy registry thing we have to deal with came out with a great deal of hype about a "user friendly" registry replacing unfriendly ini files. Instead of coming up with a logically sound and versatile and extensible mechanism for recording intialization parameters...we have this supposedly user friendly monster that bites our tails when things go wrong. The only way we can deal with problems in the registry is to hope that some programmer somewhere was good enough that their 5 year old win 98 program will fix the registry problem with XP when you reinstall.
The parent of this thread was "Learning Curve." The result of the user friendly movement has been to add a bunch of garbage to programs to get the public to a feel good level, but the garbage ends up blocking them from complete mastery, since you know have a garbage user friendly layer in the way.
Instead of "user friendly", if you aimed at the goal of logically sound...you would find yourself with products that have only a slightly higher initial learning curve, but that people can master and build on. Take the threads about driving. The configuration of the driver seat has a nice logically sound foundation. It is driven by the logic of the vehicle and it works better.
When you really have a sound logical foundation, the actual workings of the product is all but driven from that foundation. A phone is totally un understandable until you know the logical premise that you have to hold it to your ear, and that different phones have numbers that you must dial before calling.
Imagine a car designed by the "user friendly" gurus of MS. A six year old could get it out of the driveway, but it would take a certified MCD (Microsoft Certified Driver) to get it back in.
I cut my teeth on the old style orange data terminal with fixed width fonts and no pictures. When designed well, the end user's learning curve was extremely low. New people, with no computer experience, were up and working within an hour of their new job. After moving to GUI (Windows) and OO formats, the learning curve increased, and quality of data and data entry speed decreased. For pure number crunching, data entry and access, these old systems were lean and mean, and accurate, and have not been improved upon by the GUI world. Of course, pure number crunching or efficiency is not end of existence or only consideration in designing a system...however I don't buy into the argument that the Java/XML/OO world is better in every way to ideas from the past. Different approaches have different strengthes.