I disagree with your assertion - I live in Manhattan, and I know a number of people with problem-free DSL installs and none with Verizon. Personally, I have had two different DSL lines in two different apartments here, with no problems at all (Mindspring/Covad in the past and Speakeasy/WCOM at present).
I don't entirely disagree with your assertion about large companies, but I don't think it's as pervasive as you think. There are plenty of large corporations (the one I work for, for instance) which are totally commited to their customers and the satisfaction thereof.
I am certainly a huge cell user - so I agree with your conclusions about the necessity of a mobile phone. I do however disagree with your conclusions about a number of things:
driving on the left side - almost everyone in the world drives on the left side, on a percentage basis of countries
mobile phone frequencies - more important here is the technology. CDMA is so much better than GSM - over and over you see engineering analyses which state the clear superiority of CDMA (more extendability, more calls per frequency). GSM is technology by legislation - it's illegal to use any other cell technology in Europe.
Now, that said, imperial measurements are stupid, and the US mobile phone market is fucked up:) There are two major problems with it: lack of handset portability and lack of number portability. The second is supposed to be available by law by next November (a long time away, I know). The first is a subject of some potential legislation - CDMA vendors lock the phones into their networks, which isn't a great state of affairs.
Furthermore, the smaller three of five major carriers in the US (AT&T, Cingular, and T-Mobile) newest generation networks are all GSM. That doesn't stop them from largely being oversaturated and just shitty. The real fact of the matter is that the lack of handset and number portability fucks your average consumer into being stuck with the same shitty carrier and the lock-in factor for the consumer prevents them from shifting their business away from carriers whose network sucks.
Actually, while this seems to be a reflection of the technological backwardness of the US - it's really a reflection on the failed socialist policies of European states. I used to work with a guy who had emigrated from Romainia - he's like, "of course everyone in Romania has cell phone - it costs hundreds of dollars and takes months to get a landline" - state telecom monopolies are not known for their quick service. Also, in Europe, people are accustomed to paying per minute for their local landline calls - concepts foreign to Americans who can secure a landline in a couple of days and feel entitled to unlimited free local calls. It's not much of a leap to get someone who is accustomed to paying $0.05/min for their calls to get them to pay $0.10/min for a mobile phone - but people who are accustomed to not paying for their calls at all - it's another matter.
Re:Rector Park (Battery Park City)
on
The Wireless City
·
· Score: 1
Definitely! I live in the financial district, and in addition to my (thoroughtly locked down) net, there are five others accessible from my apartment. God knows what I would get if I sat on my roof deck:)
Have you ever leased a car? Millions do - and they're not that pissed off about the limited amount of miles they can drive a month.
The rest of us geeks will just start paying what our service actually costs.
If you read the actual news article, instead of Slashdot's summary, as usual, you'll get a clearer picture of the real situation.
In this instance, we are NOT talking about government-funded research. We're talking about aggregation of articles and reports from various research journals. The actual information is already published elsewhere, and the DoE's free value-add was an aggregation service. It was not the publication of research which was eliminated, but the aggregation service that DoE was providing.
In the case of honest-to-god publicly-funded research, of course that information should be publicly available - but that's just not the issue at hand here.
You overestimate my cynicism. It certainly does not extend to eliminating educational opportunities for people based on their financial situation. I myself grew up in a lower-middle class (if that) household.
However, you speak of "progress" as if it is antithetical to the interests of profit driven corporations. Commercial success is the major driver of "progress" today. All the government funding in the world couldn't do for the Internet what Steve Case and a million sub-100 IQ midwesterners did:)
Personally, I'd like to see a 50% cut in the federal budget. While I realize this is of course not realistic, I'm not willing to be a victim of a quid pro quo such as you propose, wherein we say, "well, if they're going to waste X dollars on Y, then they can waste Z dollars on my pet service too." The fact of the matter is that while we go on and on about economic stimulus and what we can do to promote growth and help jobless people and the like, what we could really do is free up some of the $50,000 in taxes I pay annually to go toward giving someone a JOB so that they can support themselves in an honorable fashion, instead of on the dole.
I believe that the federal government should provide only the services it is not practical or reasonable for commercial enterprises or state and local governments to provide.
The fact of the matter is that if Slashdot had posted the article in reverse - "PROGRAMMERS AND SYSADMINS LOSE JOBS BECAUSE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GIVES AWAY THEIR PRODUCT" then the slashdot socialist crowd would be up in arms.
The DoE web site did the exact thing that the publishers had been doing for a long time, except for the fact that it was a taxpayer funded site. Why should your taxes fund something a private company already does for the small segment of the population who will use the information?
While your anger is useful, it's misplaced. Why should your tax dollars be paying for gathering this information in the first place?
Answer: it's some congressman's pork barrel project.
Eat pork, don't make it law.
No, in fact, the corporations collected the same information on their own - the federal agency just duplicated their efforts, at taxpayer expense. Whereas taxpayers have no choice (other than voting Republican) to pay for the government's products and services, anyone who has (or hasn't!) already paid their tax bill is reluctant to pay again for something they've already paid for.
Your second sentence is the whole point. Why should my tax dollars pay to collect information for a small segment of society? I don't want my already astronomical federal tax bill (which exceds America's average income) to be yet higher to provide free information to a small segment of society. Will they have a PubCompSci where they give the newest coding tips? a PubPr0n where they show some T&A? The government is not a publisher, and my tax dollars for SURE are not for publishing. There are a lot of things the federal government is good for doing, because it would be impractical to have any other entity do it - defense, foreign relations, etc. - but the government is not a be all end all provider of whatever any little constituency thinks they should get.
Obviously there are exceptions - that's how this occurred - unless of course you are suggesting that the maintainer of this package was complicit in adding the trojan.
In reply to other comments, of course Trojans get added to binaries all the time. (Although, relatively rarely to actual commercially distributed binaries - most often to pirated ones) However, this trojan is in the source - which goes back to my comment about employees (and I suppose hackers too).
What a load of shit! This is one of the biggest weaknesses of open source... any Joe Schmoe, typically without any positive identification, can insert this type of malicious code in a common codebase. With commercial closed source code, an employee is clearly identified, usually undergoes a thorough criminal and financial background check, and their livelihood depends on their continued employment. This is a significant disincentive toward performing illegal activity like this on the job. If for some reason an employee is stupid enough to do such a thing, the employer has all the information necessary to send Johnny Law knocking on their door.
slashdot.info is NOT in fact owned by Z-D, but by Nathaniel Wilkerson of Orem, UT. The web server randomly picks other internet sites to masquerade as. When I went, it was E! Online, a couple more refreshes later, it was CNet, and on to a few other sites. Very interesting. I know the UDRP is against slashdot's religion, but, no time like the present to get the name back from someone who's clearly using it in bad faith.
This post and the original are so typically representative of the OSS community. I am an avid Microsoft fan, and a professional developer, with Microsoft products being among (but not the entirety of) my skillset. Most other professional software developers I know are also avid Microsoft fans. There is a substantial Microsoft "community" in newsgroups, IRC, and, most importantly of all, among the ranks of paid developers.
I would say that if you polled professional developers with salaries over $75,000, a substantial majority would likely prefer developing with Microsoft products over similar OSS projects.
Conversely, your average employed OSS fan is a disgruntled propeller head with poor communication skills and no business sense who refers to the people above him as "Management".
As for a "Linux desktop boom", Mom and Pop will never buy any PC without toll-free tech support - they're not about to post to a mailing list for help - so keep dreaming.
Of course what everyone fails to recall is this: The US government founded the Internet and owns the root DNS system. ICANN serves as an administrator only at the pleasure of the Commerce Department, et. al. Therefore, by eliminating or replacing ICANN, we [used in a collective 'by the people for the people' sense - I don't work for the government...] are only retaking control of what is already ours.
Obviously, the teachers in your area were paid more than they were worth (hence the grammatical bankruptcy of your post).
There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth related to the cost of living in NJ - as a Manhattan resident and former NJ resident, I feel like I should weigh in: The vast majority of NJ is _NOT_ an expensive place to live, probably on average with the rest of the US. There are certainly luxury developments attached to the NYC commuting arteries that are priced almost as sky-high as Manhattan itself (but then, why would a NJ teacher need to live in such an area?).
Now, let's get a little perspective: These teachsers, who make an AVERAGE of $56,000 annually (newbies surely make less and the experienced teachers are definitely making more) are striking in explicit defiance of a judge's order. For what exactly are they striking? What amounts to a _three_hundred_dollar_ decrease in their annual incomes. They are striking to make a point to newly elected political leaders in New Jersey: "Step back! This is a Workers' Paradise and WE are running the show!" Unions are vile bastions of socialism and teachers' unions are the worst of all - stifling education by ensuring that even the least competent teachers are retained and promoted.
FWIW, I do agree that teachers are generally underpaid - my mom is a primary school teacher in VA and makes less than $30k. However, I think that the root cause is the fact that we get so little for our dollar from the educational system... Urban crime is a direct result of poor parenting and even poorer education. If we paid for performance instead of longevity and/or credentials, we might get our money's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with your assertion - I live in Manhattan, and I know a number of people with problem-free DSL installs and none with Verizon. Personally, I have had two different DSL lines in two different apartments here, with no problems at all (Mindspring/Covad in the past and Speakeasy/WCOM at present). I don't entirely disagree with your assertion about large companies, but I don't think it's as pervasive as you think. There are plenty of large corporations (the one I work for, for instance) which are totally commited to their customers and the satisfaction thereof.
I meant the RIGHT side of the road, of course. It is called the 'right' side for a reason. :)
- driving on the left side - almost everyone in the world drives on the left side, on a percentage basis of countries
- mobile phone frequencies - more important here is the technology. CDMA is so much better than GSM - over and over you see engineering analyses which state the clear superiority of CDMA (more extendability, more calls per frequency). GSM is technology by legislation - it's illegal to use any other cell technology in Europe.
Now, that said, imperial measurements are stupid, and the US mobile phone market is fucked upFurthermore, the smaller three of five major carriers in the US (AT&T, Cingular, and T-Mobile) newest generation networks are all GSM. That doesn't stop them from largely being oversaturated and just shitty. The real fact of the matter is that the lack of handset and number portability fucks your average consumer into being stuck with the same shitty carrier and the lock-in factor for the consumer prevents them from shifting their business away from carriers whose network sucks.
Actually, while this seems to be a reflection of the technological backwardness of the US - it's really a reflection on the failed socialist policies of European states. I used to work with a guy who had emigrated from Romainia - he's like, "of course everyone in Romania has cell phone - it costs hundreds of dollars and takes months to get a landline" - state telecom monopolies are not known for their quick service. Also, in Europe, people are accustomed to paying per minute for their local landline calls - concepts foreign to Americans who can secure a landline in a couple of days and feel entitled to unlimited free local calls. It's not much of a leap to get someone who is accustomed to paying $0.05/min for their calls to get them to pay $0.10/min for a mobile phone - but people who are accustomed to not paying for their calls at all - it's another matter.
Definitely! I live in the financial district, and in addition to my (thoroughtly locked down) net, there are five others accessible from my apartment. God knows what I would get if I sat on my roof deck :)
Have you ever leased a car? Millions do - and they're not that pissed off about the limited amount of miles they can drive a month. The rest of us geeks will just start paying what our service actually costs.
If you read the actual news article, instead of Slashdot's summary, as usual, you'll get a clearer picture of the real situation.
In this instance, we are NOT talking about government-funded research. We're talking about aggregation of articles and reports from various research journals. The actual information is already published elsewhere, and the DoE's free value-add was an aggregation service. It was not the publication of research which was eliminated, but the aggregation service that DoE was providing.
In the case of honest-to-god publicly-funded research, of course that information should be publicly available - but that's just not the issue at hand here.
You overestimate my cynicism. It certainly does not extend to eliminating educational opportunities for people based on their financial situation. I myself grew up in a lower-middle class (if that) household.
:)
However, you speak of "progress" as if it is antithetical to the interests of profit driven corporations. Commercial success is the major driver of "progress" today. All the government funding in the world couldn't do for the Internet what Steve Case and a million sub-100 IQ midwesterners did
Personally, I'd like to see a 50% cut in the federal budget. While I realize this is of course not realistic, I'm not willing to be a victim of a quid pro quo such as you propose, wherein we say, "well, if they're going to waste X dollars on Y, then they can waste Z dollars on my pet service too." The fact of the matter is that while we go on and on about economic stimulus and what we can do to promote growth and help jobless people and the like, what we could really do is free up some of the $50,000 in taxes I pay annually to go toward giving someone a JOB so that they can support themselves in an honorable fashion, instead of on the dole. I believe that the federal government should provide only the services it is not practical or reasonable for commercial enterprises or state and local governments to provide. The fact of the matter is that if Slashdot had posted the article in reverse - "PROGRAMMERS AND SYSADMINS LOSE JOBS BECAUSE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GIVES AWAY THEIR PRODUCT" then the slashdot socialist crowd would be up in arms.
The DoE web site did the exact thing that the publishers had been doing for a long time, except for the fact that it was a taxpayer funded site. Why should your taxes fund something a private company already does for the small segment of the population who will use the information?
While your anger is useful, it's misplaced. Why should your tax dollars be paying for gathering this information in the first place? Answer: it's some congressman's pork barrel project. Eat pork, don't make it law.
No, in fact, the corporations collected the same information on their own - the federal agency just duplicated their efforts, at taxpayer expense. Whereas taxpayers have no choice (other than voting Republican) to pay for the government's products and services, anyone who has (or hasn't!) already paid their tax bill is reluctant to pay again for something they've already paid for.
Your second sentence is the whole point. Why should my tax dollars pay to collect information for a small segment of society? I don't want my already astronomical federal tax bill (which exceds America's average income) to be yet higher to provide free information to a small segment of society. Will they have a PubCompSci where they give the newest coding tips? a PubPr0n where they show some T&A? The government is not a publisher, and my tax dollars for SURE are not for publishing. There are a lot of things the federal government is good for doing, because it would be impractical to have any other entity do it - defense, foreign relations, etc. - but the government is not a be all end all provider of whatever any little constituency thinks they should get.
Obviously there are exceptions - that's how this occurred - unless of course you are suggesting that the maintainer of this package was complicit in adding the trojan.
In reply to other comments, of course Trojans get added to binaries all the time. (Although, relatively rarely to actual commercially distributed binaries - most often to pirated ones) However, this trojan is in the source - which goes back to my comment about employees (and I suppose hackers too).
What a load of shit! This is one of the biggest weaknesses of open source... any Joe Schmoe, typically without any positive identification, can insert this type of malicious code in a common codebase. With commercial closed source code, an employee is clearly identified, usually undergoes a thorough criminal and financial background check, and their livelihood depends on their continued employment. This is a significant disincentive toward performing illegal activity like this on the job. If for some reason an employee is stupid enough to do such a thing, the employer has all the information necessary to send Johnny Law knocking on their door.
slashdot.info is NOT in fact owned by Z-D, but by Nathaniel Wilkerson of Orem, UT. The web server randomly picks other internet sites to masquerade as. When I went, it was E! Online, a couple more refreshes later, it was CNet, and on to a few other sites. Very interesting. I know the UDRP is against slashdot's religion, but, no time like the present to get the name back from someone who's clearly using it in bad faith.
This post and the original are so typically representative of the OSS community. I am an avid Microsoft fan, and a professional developer, with Microsoft products being among (but not the entirety of) my skillset. Most other professional software developers I know are also avid Microsoft fans. There is a substantial Microsoft "community" in newsgroups, IRC, and, most importantly of all, among the ranks of paid developers.
I would say that if you polled professional developers with salaries over $75,000, a substantial majority would likely prefer developing with Microsoft products over similar OSS projects.
Conversely, your average employed OSS fan is a disgruntled propeller head with poor communication skills and no business sense who refers to the people above him as "Management".
As for a "Linux desktop boom", Mom and Pop will never buy any PC without toll-free tech support - they're not about to post to a mailing list for help - so keep dreaming.
Of course what everyone fails to recall is this: The US government founded the Internet and owns the root DNS system. ICANN serves as an administrator only at the pleasure of the Commerce Department, et. al. Therefore, by eliminating or replacing ICANN, we [used in a collective 'by the people for the people' sense - I don't work for the government...] are only retaking control of what is already ours.
Obviously, the teachers in your area were paid more than they were worth (hence the grammatical bankruptcy of your post).
There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth related to the cost of living in NJ - as a Manhattan resident and former NJ resident, I feel like I should weigh in: The vast majority of NJ is _NOT_ an expensive place to live, probably on average with the rest of the US. There are certainly luxury developments attached to the NYC commuting arteries that are priced almost as sky-high as Manhattan itself (but then, why would a NJ teacher need to live in such an area?).
Now, let's get a little perspective: These teachsers, who make an AVERAGE of $56,000 annually (newbies surely make less and the experienced teachers are definitely making more) are striking in explicit defiance of a judge's order. For what exactly are they striking? What amounts to a _three_hundred_dollar_ decrease in their annual incomes. They are striking to make a point to newly elected political leaders in New Jersey: "Step back! This is a Workers' Paradise and WE are running the show!" Unions are vile bastions of socialism and teachers' unions are the worst of all - stifling education by ensuring that even the least competent teachers are retained and promoted.
FWIW, I do agree that teachers are generally underpaid - my mom is a primary school teacher in VA and makes less than $30k. However, I think that the root cause is the fact that we get so little for our dollar from the educational system... Urban crime is a direct result of poor parenting and even poorer education. If we paid for performance instead of longevity and/or credentials, we might get our money's worth.