I don't believe that most of the population is stupid. If I did, I would realize that our republic is doomed and that saying so on a public forum was a waste of time venting instead of going out and whooping it up in the final days before armageddon (or whatever the depressed/ing previous poster pictures coming to pass here).
Fortunately, -most- people are rational self actualizers. I can count on them to persue their own self interest. And Freedom is the one thing that is in everyones self interest. Cally me Polly Anna, but our grand experiment ain't over yet.
Actually, in the last two months one of NRA's ILA FAX alerts has been about how email is largely dismissed in the capitol. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but I really echo the sentiment here that personal letters -bceause- they take time to write tend to have more impact. Do both, make your email a first draft of your letter. All just IMO.
Well as an armchair economist let me say you've made my day. I expect Gold bugs (on the rare occaision) when I browse freerepublic, but right here on good ol'/.? Warms the cockles o' me heart to think that my geek friends are expanding the horizons of their curiosity, I'll assume the resounding wrongness of the conclusion you reach is just because this direction of intelectual exploration is new to you.
OR... on the other hand perhaps you're right! If you find yourself burdened with a lot of meaningless cash (or FRNs as the freepers say) to carry around, post that here and we'll find a convenient way for you to offload it.
wich is really what costs are. Or, put another way your ultimate property is your Life. As you use that LifeTime(tm) you get percieved value and it's in the self interest of everyone here (okay, except Bill) to increase the percieved value that open source developers get for their LifeTime(tm) investment.
Yes, and if the original poster wasn't posting stuff that you could arrogantly demean, where would you post your winking frownies? Ah the great cycle of life...
Dunno where you live but in the United States cops are emphatically NOT allowed to just start whupping somebody's ass. In Beautiful Seattle Washington, a cop came across two young ladies who were filming from inside their car as they drove down a closed street (during WTO riots). I have no patience for the rioters but in this case, where the cop improperly hosed down the inside of their car when he saw the camcorder) he was disciplined (I think he's sans a career at this point but can't find the data right now) and the two ladies are now fairly wealthy thanks to the tax paying sheeple er, folks of Seattle (hey, you elect a mayor like Schell you get what you voted for).
Footage of a cop running up to you right before your camcorder dies makes for pretty compelling evidence in after action civil suits. All IMO
PERSPECTIVE do any of the posters here have perspective? I -often- see people posting this "but you don't have anything to fear..." tripe. Now, I appreciate that this is a geek forum (so presumably skewed away from liberal arts/history backgrounds) but didn't any of you people have history in high school? Who popularized this "You have nothing to fear..." Big Lie?
The point of resistance to these things isn't to save kiddie porn salesmen an inconvenience, it's to point out the obvious abusability of these systems. Yes, you like your government today. And here in the US people often whine about term limits but when it comes down to it they like their gov'mnt enough to keep voting the same people in.
But you do not -know- the future. You do not -know- that your home will never be swept with a tyrranical fervor in the future (USSR, Germany, Laos, Vietnam, China on and on). So it is not "paranoid" to build governmental systems that would work poorly for tyrants. That is why (hypothetically) the US is built on three counter balancing branches of government, that's why the constitution here checks the powers of those balancing branches, that's why it is stupid to talk about powerful governmental systems (like the "anti terrorist" cameras in London) in these good soldier Schwiek terms. Was Jefferson "paranoid"? Did he have "something to hide"? No, he knew good government from bad government and he knew that inefficiencies (as some foolishly label our checks and balances) in the longest running experiment would ultimately make it strong. All IMO.
Running "around with cameras acting like a bunch of annoying jerks" does not preclude "doing something hard but constructive". What is it, did everyone on/. today wake up and take their grumpy pill??
Boyd, who regularly "runs around with cameras..." (-Most- people I know keep disposable cameras in their vehicles... sprinkle them around.)
IANAL but yes, that crime is a misdemeanor. Of course, once you have the picture why would you stay in a place where you're not wanted? These "you could be detained" worries seem like a lot of tiffle to me, we don't live in a gulag yet folks. It's important that we act like it. All IMO.
Most of the "free" (rediculous word great movement) wireless networks have diagrams on the net for DIY pringles can directional antennas. Dunno where you'd buy a signal strength meter for the frequencies involved, but I can think of three radio shops in my area that would tell me. Given that the users of wireless are usually in fairly open public spaces... I think it would be easier to find a wireless user given you don't have to, like, pick locks on telephone closets to get at the signal. All IMO
I live in a large upper middle class (and more diverse then it's detractors admit) suburb east of Seattle. I am mere yards outside the wire length limit for DSL. My next door neighbor with cable modem says it normally sucks. I live in a telecommunications desert despite it's status as a burgeoning urban center.
My Girlfriend lives 40 minutes east, in the Cascade mountains. The quaint villa there (she's on 3 acres, has 2 horses 1.5 chickens and, for the moment, 4 cats) gets 56k DSL that occaisionally seems to lose it's cap (thank you centurytell : ). Turns out, "the sticks" in her case is nestled across a major AT&T east west Fiber route.
It sucks to live in the city : (
He did not ask you to pay for Ximian. The number of folks here who are replying to the messages in their head (ie not to the messages posted or the original article) is really frustrating.
He asked you to pay for faster updates. Ximian is free, the mirrors are free, move along.
Yes, perhaps a graduated pricing solution like the EXISTING -free- offering?? Hmm? Really, has anyone responding here read the article? The free update service still exists folks...
It's astounding the volume of folks here not reading the article and or the posts. You do NOT get a free OS for $9.95 per month, you get a speed increase in update downloads. You can still get the OS free, you can still get the updates (more slowly) free, nothing changes for the folks who like the current setup. It changes nothing.
Speed has -always- cost money in computing, why is this one companies try (amidst the giant sucking sound of the tech sector economy) such a big deal??
Yeah, and how about those damn computers all they do is crash and whine about kernel32.dll why heck I bet those darned things aren't long for the market place. Soon you'll be able to pick up a pentium 3 doorstop or a pentium 4 space heater for next to nothing at a garage sale. 'Course no one will want them because they're so cumbersome by the door and suck so much juice for heating. Maybe if there were a way to sell them to third world countries so we keep em all out of our landfills... Damned newfangled fratzen...
It's only "who" in a "controlled" economy. Here, it's not who, but what: The aggregate demand of all of the people that know about the different products. Markets are a wonderful thing.
In the city I live in garbage collectors get teamster benefits (WAY better then mine) and about 40k a year... Perhaps "complicated" would describe market economics (esp pricing) better then "twisted".
Garbage collectors enjoy monopoly rents based on government enforced geographical "franchises". Also the supply of people who can drive stinky trucks and lift dripping piles of waste all day is limited in comparison to many other skills. There is a scarcity in the supply of Bankers because most students prefer classes in "the history of Jazz" to "finance 101; moving 10975 poorly classified dollar amounts from 200 random columns to the correct ones). At least I know I did ; )
Artists, generally with an academic background, make excellent money when they run with the right marketing people. There's just less wall space in the world then there is garbage (or need for organized capital). Sucky, but true.
Oh yeah, "appropriate" if you only want people exactly like the readers of slashdot to run Linux. Sure, if you want Linux/*nix to stagnate while M$ powers on with millions of dollars of advertising a month winning thousands of new users a month to the dark side. But, if you want to actually see Linux/*nix have some impact in the market. If you would LIKE to see more people find out about open source software then just maybe we need to set aside our elitist "everybodys a haxor like me" attitude and noodle around a little with the idea that computer users come in different types. For instance, the first geek who tells my 60YO aunt (who cannot spell FAQ) to RTFM rather then calling her nephew gets some special treats from me. Support depends on the user, for 99% of the population, the 99% that have never heard "RTFM" and wouldn't know what you were suggesting if they did, the 99% that we need to switch from Windoze where there "Man page" doesn't exist (and so would make no sense to suggest) RTFM is entirely and completely INappropriate
Having a first line that does not "really know thier product" is absolutely not the problem. Those "not so brilliant" people on the front line of technical support know the product or they would never have gotten in the door. They are NOT ALLOWED to answer your question because corporate policy requires one or more layers of triage. Don't blame the person on the phone, blame the 3rd level "mentor" and the shift manager who enforce the metrics that prevent that first line from even taking the time to communicate effectively (wich is why you'll find yourself re explaining the problem to tiers 2 and 3). Front line technical support jobs effectively weed out employees who want to take time with a customer, you do that, and they fire your ass. It's a (short sighted and stupid) corporate decision that they (foolishly) believe saves them money.
This is why, instead of a valuable feedback to the development process, rather then being the front line in driving quality in software (no, that needn't be an oxymoron), technical support is treated like the leper of the software industry: The industry sees no value in it so they set up work metrics that gaurantee it will have no value. And yes, I think it will actually get worse.
Boyd Kneeland
If you are comparing contract support (like from Red Hat) to contract support (you are payin for your support from MS, compare it only to paid support from a Linux distro) then
1) It all sucks, the market doesn't support technical support infrastructure (ask me how I know) and
2) No one should have told you to RTFM.
What I suspect happened here was you posted some newbie questions in a "free" support forum for linux and got told RTFM (wich seems, pretty distressingly, to be a real hobby for many people in those forums).
In such a case you aren't making a fair comparison: Windoze builds the cost of "free" support into the product (so, it ain't free you are paying for it) and such support shouldn't be compared to the truly free (as in unpaid for) support in many linux forums.
Go buy yourself a linux distributions contract support, it will knock your socks off compared to the stuff you pay for from Redmond. I think the original posters point here really was that Microsoft is known in the industry for poor paid support, I would agree with that. And one day I will write a thesis on why it was inevitable and unlikely to change.
Sincerely, A former technical support person of nearly 15 years. (Acces and MS SQL geek available Jan1) BK
This is stupid, the case to meet isn't that -every- line be checked. The case would be that enough lines are checked that someone (not in the conspiracy) notices that someone (in the conspiracy) is trying to ship big gobs of trojans and crap into a code tree. I am not a programmer, but it is obvious to me that in the processes of testing and revising (let alone reviewing) chunks of code someone would notice some of this. (If in fact it were happening, wich is a hell of a stretch.) At that point, the FBI is only a toll free call away and every nerf gun in the hall (and a few of the OS guys can do better) is looking for the perp. Yeesh.
That's a news story. (That the union won't let volunteers make good happen there.) Presumably the neighborhood this school is in has media, if the larger papers and radio stations don't grab the idea and run with it start calling the smaller weekly papers. What you have is an over the transom news story. Go tell people.
No problem, laws already measure bad behaviour based on harm. Murder harms you by taking your ultimate possession, burglary harms you (somewhat less) by depriving you of the time spent earning the burgled property and by depriving you of the use of that property. This is routine and easy for legal systems.
Um... they are not being used (to "scan everybody") because you have a constitutionally protected (for now) right to a reasonable expectation of privacy. Lets not go suggesting this stuff!
Millimeter radar is used though in some of the baggage screening machines.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe that most of the population is stupid. If I did, I would realize that our republic is doomed and that saying so on a public forum was a waste of time venting instead of going out and whooping it up in the final days before armageddon (or whatever the depressed/ing previous poster pictures coming to pass here). Fortunately, -most- people are rational self actualizers. I can count on them to persue their own self interest. And Freedom is the one thing that is in everyones self interest. Cally me Polly Anna, but our grand experiment ain't over yet.
Actually, in the last two months one of NRA's ILA FAX alerts has been about how email is largely dismissed in the capitol. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but I really echo the sentiment here that personal letters -bceause- they take time to write tend to have more impact. Do both, make your email a first draft of your letter. All just IMO.
Well as an armchair economist let me say you've made my day. I expect Gold bugs (on the rare occaision) when I browse freerepublic, but right here on good ol' /.? Warms the cockles o' me heart to think that my geek friends are expanding the horizons of their curiosity, I'll assume the resounding wrongness of the conclusion you reach is just because this direction of intelectual exploration is new to you.
OR... on the other hand perhaps you're right! If you find yourself burdened with a lot of meaningless cash (or FRNs as the freepers say) to carry around, post that here and we'll find a convenient way for you to offload it.
wich is really what costs are. Or, put another way your ultimate property is your Life. As you use that LifeTime(tm) you get percieved value and it's in the self interest of everyone here (okay, except Bill) to increase the percieved value that open source developers get for their LifeTime(tm) investment.
Yes, and if the original poster wasn't posting stuff that you could arrogantly demean, where would you post your winking frownies? Ah the great cycle of life...
Dunno where you live but in the United States cops are emphatically NOT allowed to just start whupping somebody's ass. In Beautiful Seattle Washington, a cop came across two young ladies who were filming from inside their car as they drove down a closed street (during WTO riots). I have no patience for the rioters but in this case, where the cop improperly hosed down the inside of their car when he saw the camcorder) he was disciplined (I think he's sans a career at this point but can't find the data right now) and the two ladies are now fairly wealthy thanks to the tax paying sheeple er, folks of Seattle (hey, you elect a mayor like Schell you get what you voted for).
Footage of a cop running up to you right before your camcorder dies makes for pretty compelling evidence in after action civil suits. All IMO
PERSPECTIVE do any of the posters here have perspective? I -often- see people posting this "but you don't have anything to fear..." tripe. Now, I appreciate that this is a geek forum (so presumably skewed away from liberal arts/history backgrounds) but didn't any of you people have history in high school? Who popularized this "You have nothing to fear..." Big Lie?
The point of resistance to these things isn't to save kiddie porn salesmen an inconvenience, it's to point out the obvious abusability of these systems. Yes, you like your government today. And here in the US people often whine about term limits but when it comes down to it they like their gov'mnt enough to keep voting the same people in.
But you do not -know- the future. You do not -know- that your home will never be swept with a tyrranical fervor in the future (USSR, Germany, Laos, Vietnam, China on and on). So it is not "paranoid" to build governmental systems that would work poorly for tyrants. That is why (hypothetically) the US is built on three counter balancing branches of government, that's why the constitution here checks the powers of those balancing branches, that's why it is stupid to talk about powerful governmental systems (like the "anti terrorist" cameras in London) in these good soldier Schwiek terms. Was Jefferson "paranoid"? Did he have "something to hide"? No, he knew good government from bad government and he knew that inefficiencies (as some foolishly label our checks and balances) in the longest running experiment would ultimately make it strong. All IMO.
Running "around with cameras acting like a bunch of annoying jerks" does not preclude "doing something hard but constructive". What is it, did everyone on /. today wake up and take their grumpy pill??
Boyd, who regularly "runs around with cameras..." (-Most- people I know keep disposable cameras in their vehicles... sprinkle them around.)
IANAL but yes, that crime is a misdemeanor. Of course, once you have the picture why would you stay in a place where you're not wanted? These "you could be detained" worries seem like a lot of tiffle to me, we don't live in a gulag yet folks. It's important that we act like it. All IMO.
It's a cup of the history of networking. Read the article.
Most of the "free" (rediculous word great movement) wireless networks have diagrams on the net for DIY pringles can directional antennas. Dunno where you'd buy a signal strength meter for the frequencies involved, but I can think of three radio shops in my area that would tell me. Given that the users of wireless are usually in fairly open public spaces... I think it would be easier to find a wireless user given you don't have to, like, pick locks on telephone closets to get at the signal. All IMO
I live in a large upper middle class (and more diverse then it's detractors admit) suburb east of Seattle. I am mere yards outside the wire length limit for DSL. My next door neighbor with cable modem says it normally sucks. I live in a telecommunications desert despite it's status as a burgeoning urban center.
My Girlfriend lives 40 minutes east, in the Cascade mountains. The quaint villa there (she's on 3 acres, has 2 horses 1.5 chickens and, for the moment, 4 cats) gets 56k DSL that occaisionally seems to lose it's cap (thank you centurytell : ). Turns out, "the sticks" in her case is nestled across a major AT&T east west Fiber route.
It sucks to live in the city : (
The IRS wants you to work as a W2 employee. Many IRS agents have guns...
He did not ask you to pay for Ximian. The number of folks here who are replying to the messages in their head (ie not to the messages posted or the original article) is really frustrating.
He asked you to pay for faster updates.
Ximian is free, the mirrors are free, move along.
Yes, perhaps a graduated pricing solution like the EXISTING -free- offering?? Hmm? Really, has anyone responding here read the article? The free update service still exists folks...
It's astounding the volume of folks here not reading the article and or the posts. You do NOT get a free OS for $9.95 per month, you get a speed increase in update downloads. You can still get the OS free, you can still get the updates (more slowly) free, nothing changes for the folks who like the current setup. It changes nothing. Speed has -always- cost money in computing, why is this one companies try (amidst the giant sucking sound of the tech sector economy) such a big deal??
Yeah, and how about those damn computers all they do is crash and whine about kernel32.dll why heck I bet those darned things aren't long for the market place. Soon you'll be able to pick up a pentium 3 doorstop or a pentium 4 space heater for next to nothing at a garage sale. 'Course no one will want them because they're so cumbersome by the door and suck so much juice for heating. Maybe if there were a way to sell them to third world countries so we keep em all out of our landfills... Damned newfangled fratzen...
It's only "who" in a "controlled" economy. Here, it's not who, but what: The aggregate demand of all of the people that know about the different products. Markets are a wonderful thing.
In the city I live in garbage collectors get teamster benefits (WAY better then mine) and about 40k a year... Perhaps "complicated" would describe market economics (esp pricing) better then "twisted".
Garbage collectors enjoy monopoly rents based on government enforced geographical "franchises". Also the supply of people who can drive stinky trucks and lift dripping piles of waste all day is limited in comparison to many other skills. There is a scarcity in the supply of Bankers because most students prefer classes in "the history of Jazz" to "finance 101; moving 10975 poorly classified dollar amounts from 200 random columns to the correct ones). At least I know I did ; )
Artists, generally with an academic background, make excellent money when they run with the right marketing people. There's just less wall space in the world then there is garbage (or need for organized capital). Sucky, but true.
Oh yeah, "appropriate" if you only want people exactly like the readers of slashdot to run Linux. Sure, if you want Linux/*nix to stagnate while M$ powers on with millions of dollars of advertising a month winning thousands of new users a month to the dark side. But, if you want to actually see Linux/*nix have some impact in the market. If you would LIKE to see more people find out about open source software then just maybe we need to set aside our elitist "everybodys a haxor like me" attitude and noodle around a little with the idea that computer users come in different types. For instance, the first geek who tells my 60YO aunt (who cannot spell FAQ) to RTFM rather then calling her nephew gets some special treats from me. Support depends on the user, for 99% of the population, the 99% that have never heard "RTFM" and wouldn't know what you were suggesting if they did, the 99% that we need to switch from Windoze where there "Man page" doesn't exist (and so would make no sense to suggest) RTFM is entirely and completely INappropriate
Having a first line that does not "really know thier product" is absolutely not the problem.
Those "not so brilliant" people on the front line of technical support know the product or they would never have gotten in the door. They are NOT ALLOWED to answer your question because corporate policy requires one or more layers of triage. Don't blame the person on the phone, blame the 3rd level "mentor" and the shift manager who enforce the metrics that prevent that first line from even taking the time to communicate effectively (wich is why you'll find yourself re explaining the problem to tiers 2 and 3). Front line technical support jobs effectively weed out employees who want to take time with a customer, you do that, and they fire your ass. It's a (short sighted and stupid) corporate decision that they (foolishly) believe saves them money.
This is why, instead of a valuable feedback to the development process, rather then being the front line in driving quality in software (no, that needn't be an oxymoron), technical support is treated like the leper of the software industry: The industry sees no value in it so they set up work metrics that gaurantee it will have no value. And yes, I think it will actually get worse. Boyd Kneeland
If you are comparing contract support (like from Red Hat) to contract support (you are payin for your support from MS, compare it only to paid support from a Linux distro) then
1) It all sucks, the market doesn't support technical support infrastructure (ask me how I know) and
2) No one should have told you to RTFM.
What I suspect happened here was you posted some newbie questions in a "free" support forum for linux and got told RTFM (wich seems, pretty distressingly, to be a real hobby for many people in those forums).
In such a case you aren't making a fair comparison: Windoze builds the cost of "free" support into the product (so, it ain't free you are paying for it) and such support shouldn't be compared to the truly free (as in unpaid for) support in many linux forums.
Go buy yourself a linux distributions contract support, it will knock your socks off compared to the stuff you pay for from Redmond. I think the original posters point here really was that Microsoft is known in the industry for poor paid support, I would agree with that. And one day I will write a thesis on why it was inevitable and unlikely to change. Sincerely, A former technical support person of nearly 15 years. (Acces and MS SQL geek available Jan1) BK
This is stupid, the case to meet isn't that -every- line be checked. The case would be that enough lines are checked that someone (not in the conspiracy) notices that someone (in the conspiracy) is trying to ship big gobs of trojans and crap into a code tree. I am not a programmer, but it is obvious to me that in the processes of testing and revising (let alone reviewing) chunks of code someone would notice some of this. (If in fact it were happening, wich is a hell of a stretch.) At that point, the FBI is only a toll free call away and every nerf gun in the hall (and a few of the OS guys can do better) is looking for the perp. Yeesh.
That's a news story. (That the union won't let volunteers make good happen there.) Presumably the neighborhood this school is in has media, if the larger papers and radio stations don't grab the idea and run with it start calling the smaller weekly papers. What you have is an over the transom news story. Go tell people.
No problem, laws already measure bad behaviour based on harm. Murder harms you by taking your ultimate possession, burglary harms you (somewhat less) by depriving you of the time spent earning the burgled property and by depriving you of the use of that property. This is routine and easy for legal systems.
Um... they are not being used (to "scan everybody") because you have a constitutionally protected (for now) right to a reasonable expectation of privacy. Lets not go suggesting this stuff! Millimeter radar is used though in some of the baggage screening machines.