Now you have companies banning people from smoking cigarettes ever because it raises their healthcare rates.
Wow, they can do that? That's pretty cool. I think I'm going to pass such a policy with my company.
Companies shouldnt be able to control anything you do on your spare time or they are basically your government.
The problem is the government is forcing the companies to provide all their workers with health care if they decide to provide any of them with it. Otherwise the solution would be simple: you can smoke if you want, but then we don't pay for your healthcare.
As for the larger point, I'm not sure if I agree or not. Think about pro athletes, for instance. Can't you require your star pitcher not to engage in behavior which puts him at great risk of breaking his arm? Can you at least ban them from taking steroids and therefore not being allowed to play? Even beyond that, what someone does in his or her spare time reflects a lot on that person's character, and why can't character count in an employment relationship just like any other? And then, what if it's a non-profit company, or any company with a purpose other than simply "to make as much money as possible"?
Saying that two watch makers can't date is one thing. But saying that a company can't consider what you do in your spare time at all goes too far in the other direction.
BTW. I believe in California, an employer cannot punish you for legal off duty conduct.
And in California they want to put a warning on French Fries saying that they cause cancer. What happens in California doesn't give much indication of what's going on in the rest of the world.
Reading the rule, that is clearly total bullshit, it clearly WOULD be interpreted to ban such association.
When I read the rule, before I even read the explanation of the ruling, I thought to myself "oh, this is just talking about romantic involvement."
Their claim that it only would be interpreted as being related to dating and entanglements is bull, since the rule mentions dating, and "fraternization" isn't a qualification of "dating" but an extension of the rule to ban protected behavior.
It's not a qualification of dating, just like "become overly friendly with" isn't a qualification of dating. But it seems clear that what they meant was for it to be of the same general sentiment.
Anyway, I don't see the big deal, since the rule has now been clarified anyway. Or do you think the company is going to turn around and fire someone for trying to organize a union, and actually get away with it?
What it probably means is that your company doesn't have one of these policies. The writeup makes it sound like this is a new law for all employees but it isn't. It's just that the NLRB has decided not to declare the policy of a particular employer to be illegal.
With IT workers so commonly producing some of our best work 'after hours,' even at home or in restaurants/bars, will this ruling come back to bite employers in the IT industry?
Of course not. Just because it's legal for IT companies to do this doesn't mean they're going to.
Can they really stop you from talking with your cubicle neighbor on the bus home, if they can't even stop you from reading Slashdot while on the clock?
No, but it gives you an excuse for them to fire you.
With a Wi-Max system, though, you only need a tower within range of your customers; all your calls go through IP, meaning the infrastructure is already there.
Cell phone companies can always buy a T1 from the phone company and route their calls through that. They choose to route most of their calls through their own network, but they don't have to. It's the same thing with Wi-Max. It's not like "going through IP" is free. The Wi-Max companies still have to peer with the rest of the Internet, and unless they happen to be a huge ISP, those peering fees are going to be be expenses, not revenues.
There's also the fact that cell companies are still trying to recoup the massive investment they made into buying frequencies and setting up 3G systems that pretty much nobody uses.
If Wi-Max really has a range anywhere near 30 miles, you can bet the frequencies aren't going to stay free.
In contrast, Wi-Max is capable of operating over unregulated spectrum, and isn't going to lead to 3G-type hysteria because it's all already data packets in standard, open formats and protocols.
If the unregulated spectrum really has a range measured in miles for a point to multipoint application, I highly doubt that spectrum is going to remain unregulated very long.
It's not the case in the US, but there are plenty of places in the world already where cell phones are cheaper than landlines
If you look at my comment though it was specifically directed at the US and its corrupt politicians in this area.
Not really. You'll spend far more money building an application with poor programmers regardless of the quality of the application. That is, if the poor programmers are ever able to finish at all.
This will eventually fall well below the level that any phone company can match because there is no 'last-mile' infrastructure to maintain, no cable to lay or repair, no expensive equipment for laying and repairing cable, no expensive vehicles to carry the equipment, no facilites to store the vehicles and equipment, and no employees to drive the vehicles, work the equipment, repair the lines, or administer and guard the facilities.
Kind of like how cell phones are so much cheaper than wired phones?
At a range of 30 miles, you can be certain the government is going to regulate it, and that means prices will be kept high to give the companies in bed with the politicians the kickbacks they've earned.
There are many uses for precise timers beyond time bombs.
Not ones that need one-second resolution tied to UTC over a period of many months.
Again, most of the examples I can think of come from spacecraft. Remember the Galileo probe? It separated from the mother ship five months before arrival at Jupiter, and during that time only a timer was running. At the appropriate moment, just before entering the atmosphere, it woke up.
That needs neither one second resolution, nor to be tied to UTC. Simply saying "wake up in X seconds" is fine, it doesn't matter what time it is when you wake up.
And the spin of the earth is arbitrary.
If the spin of the earth is arbitrary, then what isn't?
Otherwise we could predict and schedule leap seconds many years into the future.
Being chaotic is not the same thing as being arbitrary.
Better yet, we could have defined the second so that leap seconds weren't necessary, or at least that their long-term sum would be zero instead of positive.
There are different definitions of seconds. GMT and UT1 use a second which eliminates the necessity of leap seconds. These seconds aren't easily measured by atomic clocks, which is why UTC was invented.
The second is such a fundamental unit, and so much of the rest of physics depends on it, that it must be nailed down precisely. It also helps that time is the basic dimension we can measure most accurately, thanks to atomic clocks. That's why the meter is now defined in terms of the speed of light.
That's no reason that physicists need to use the same conversion unit as politicians. The unit generally cancels out anyway.
I have no problem with basing the official definition of UNIX time on UTC, and I suspect Thompson and Ritchie would agree. They specified GMT for the UNIX epoch only because UTC didn't exist yet; it came into being (replacing GMT) on January 1, 1972.
The point is, you don't define unix time one way and then fundamentally change things later. But besides that, using UTC for unix time isn't a good idea, because it doesn't easily convert to and from an integer.
It really depends on what your doing. I write real time software and in my problem domain the goal is to keep going if at all possible.
I don't deny that there are some domains that need this. But the original post I was responding to was implying that every operating system needs to behave this way.
However, I am more talking about systems where say a LAN card has a bad driver which keeps crashing the system. If the operator decides to reboot on such a failure that's one thing but I don't really want my OS designer to make those choices.
That's actually an excellent point, and I guess I have to agree with you there. If my LAN driver is buggy on a client box I don't want a BSOD or a kernel panic. It'd be acceptable to shut down the LAN driver if necessary, then I can save my work, and then I can reboot the system.
I am talking about 100's of CPU's on the same chip. They are all talking with the same HW and memory...
Well, I don't really see how having 100s of CPUs on the same chip all using the same memory is ever a good idea. I guess for some really massive number crunching applications, but even then there are probably smarter ways to do things.
Of course, what's even stupider is how both the Independent and, to an even stupider degree, the Inquirer make it sound all ominous and elitist that the scientists didn't release the info as soon as they found it. Like, maybe they didn't want to risk the media flaming them for prematurely announcing a tenth planet if they had to recant part of their data?
Couldn't they have at least told people "hey, look at this, isn't it cool?" Or did they do that?
The point is you can't trust software, drivers, or hardware.
Huh? I can't trust it for what? Playing doom?
If you want to see a real OS look at what people use on million +$ systems.
Not everyone has a million dollars. That said, I've written OS software that runs on million dollar systems.
UNIX is great for the type of hardware most people have on there desktop but it's not what people will be using in 50 years.
If UNIX is going to be around in 50 years it's going to be dramatically different. That's partly because improvements in hardware will enable more complicated software, and partly just because software development techniques will improve.
Intel could put out a CPU with 100's of processors but you start needing an OS that can work even if a few of those CPU's go bad.
A much better technique both now and in the foreseeable future is to implement high availability through multiple operating systems working in a distributed environment. When Google loses a CPU, the site doesn't shut down. The computer does, and someone goes and fixes it.
If you want stability you need to asume things that can break will break.
Of course you do. The question is what do you do when things break? Do you trust the operating system to try to repair itself, or do you shut the OS down, let another OS take over, and call for someone to come take a look at things?
Right now I'd definitely say the latter. Maybe some day things will be different. Maybe some day we'll have strong AI. But even then, there's a limit to the amount of self-fixing that can be done. Think Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
Imagine agreeing to do something at a certain future time, and then setting up a piece of hardware to do it.
If not for leap seconds, your hardware could be a simple down counter programmed with the difference between the agreed-upon future time and the current time.
It doesn't seem reasonable to me. You'd need to require to-the-second accuracy to a point many months in the future, and you'd need that point in time to be declared in a way recognizable to the rest of the world. You'd need an atomic clock in the computer, not just "a simple down counter", and even then you might not even wind up with something perfectly synchronous - time is relative. To get true TAI you'd have to synchronize with 200 other atomic clocks, since TAI is just an average. The simplest solution here would be to just attach a radio clock, GPS, or some external device.
But I still don't understand *why* you'd want to do such a thing. I guess if you're trying to make the perfect bomb which didn't rely on any radio signals and was set to go off at midnight 7/7/2007 at 7:17:07 or something. So the adoption of UTC has foiled a terrorist.:)
NORAD epoch times are UTC, and that creates a trap if you're not careful about leap seconds.
Oh boy, so you have to be careful. So what? Be careful.
Obviously that epoch date could not move around arbitrarily as a result of leap seconds, so it's based on "terrestrial time", another standard time scale related to TAI that doesn't follow leap seconds.
Leap seconds aren't arbitrary. They're based on the spin of the Earth.
Anyway, I don't see what this has to do with computing the number of "seconds" until a UTC date in the future. Obviously some people are going to use different methods of time. And remember, UTC is a hybrid system between GMT/UT1 and TAI. GMT would be a better system for human purposes, and in fact it's a modern version of the system we had back in Babalonian times, back before scientists decided to redefine the meaning of a second. The problem is that GMT isn't easily adapted to accurate clocks, such as atomic clocks, and you don't want to have to constantly send update information such as would be necessary with UT1. So you save up a whole second worth of updates and send them all at one time.
So I think we completely agree on the main point: UNIX's internal representation of time is fundamentally broken.
Yeah, the UNIX time system is broken in its design. You have no argument with me there.
It ought to be based on a count of seconds from some epoch on a timescale that does not use leap seconds, and conversion to or from UTC should be done only when needed for human consumption or input.
That'd be one way to do it. Of course, using UT1 would work too, and then you wouldn't need a table of historical leap seconds unless you wanted to convert to TAI. You'd just need to store the current offset between UT1 and UTC.
One could even argue that UNIX already does this, and it's the conversion routines that are broken. As you point out, a time_t value is supposed to be the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC. Well, that count for a given event is not going to change just because leap seconds were subsequently declared!
Without specifying a frame of reference, that definition is rather meaningless:).
So it's really the conversion routines that are broken...
I think I already linked to DJB's explanation, but in case I haven't, there it is. According to him it's a broken localtime(), combined with a broken xntpd which catered to the broken localtime().
But I also noticed that the original definition was in GMT. So really the error was in changing GMT to UTC instead of UT1, and in thinking that we meant TAI seconds instead of GMT seconds.
That'd be "the hitchiker's guide to things we consider important enough". The actual galaxy contains things such as hotels, bars, pubs, cafes, elementary schools, malls, shops, streets, and bus stops.
Slashdot Mirror
Now you have companies banning people from smoking cigarettes ever because it raises their healthcare rates.
Wow, they can do that? That's pretty cool. I think I'm going to pass such a policy with my company.
Companies shouldnt be able to control anything you do on your spare time or they are basically your government.
The problem is the government is forcing the companies to provide all their workers with health care if they decide to provide any of them with it. Otherwise the solution would be simple: you can smoke if you want, but then we don't pay for your healthcare.
As for the larger point, I'm not sure if I agree or not. Think about pro athletes, for instance. Can't you require your star pitcher not to engage in behavior which puts him at great risk of breaking his arm? Can you at least ban them from taking steroids and therefore not being allowed to play? Even beyond that, what someone does in his or her spare time reflects a lot on that person's character, and why can't character count in an employment relationship just like any other? And then, what if it's a non-profit company, or any company with a purpose other than simply "to make as much money as possible"?
Saying that two watch makers can't date is one thing. But saying that a company can't consider what you do in your spare time at all goes too far in the other direction.
BTW. I believe in California, an employer cannot punish you for legal off duty conduct.
And in California they want to put a warning on French Fries saying that they cause cancer. What happens in California doesn't give much indication of what's going on in the rest of the world.
Reading the rule, that is clearly total bullshit, it clearly WOULD be interpreted to ban such association.
When I read the rule, before I even read the explanation of the ruling, I thought to myself "oh, this is just talking about romantic involvement."
Their claim that it only would be interpreted as being related to dating and entanglements is bull, since the rule mentions dating, and "fraternization" isn't a qualification of "dating" but an extension of the rule to ban protected behavior.
It's not a qualification of dating, just like "become overly friendly with" isn't a qualification of dating. But it seems clear that what they meant was for it to be of the same general sentiment.
Anyway, I don't see the big deal, since the rule has now been clarified anyway. Or do you think the company is going to turn around and fire someone for trying to organize a union, and actually get away with it?
Why do you call the U.S.A the "land of the free"?
In part because we allow employers and employees to enter into consentual employment contracts such as this one.
What it probably means is that your company doesn't have one of these policies. The writeup makes it sound like this is a new law for all employees but it isn't. It's just that the NLRB has decided not to declare the policy of a particular employer to be illegal.
You'd think that every responder who's an employee (probably nearly 100%) would be outraged that employers even tried such a power grab over them.
Not me. My employer would never try this crap, and I already have a girlfriend anyway.
Seriously, nobody is forcing you, or anybody to work for a place with a policy like this.
Yeah, cause switching careers and letting your family starve to death is always an option.
or you can start your own competing company with better polices and hire away all the company's employees
Doing that would probably be against company policy too, not to mention pretty much impossible for the vast majority of people.
With IT workers so commonly producing some of our best work 'after hours,' even at home or in restaurants/bars, will this ruling come back to bite employers in the IT industry?
Of course not. Just because it's legal for IT companies to do this doesn't mean they're going to.
Can they really stop you from talking with your cubicle neighbor on the bus home, if they can't even stop you from reading Slashdot while on the clock?
No, but it gives you an excuse for them to fire you.
Because that's not how it works. When you sign up for WiMax service, the ISP gives you a CPE.
I don't see what the point is, then.
With a Wi-Max system, though, you only need a tower within range of your customers; all your calls go through IP, meaning the infrastructure is already there.
Cell phone companies can always buy a T1 from the phone company and route their calls through that. They choose to route most of their calls through their own network, but they don't have to. It's the same thing with Wi-Max. It's not like "going through IP" is free. The Wi-Max companies still have to peer with the rest of the Internet, and unless they happen to be a huge ISP, those peering fees are going to be be expenses, not revenues.
There's also the fact that cell companies are still trying to recoup the massive investment they made into buying frequencies and setting up 3G systems that pretty much nobody uses.
If Wi-Max really has a range anywhere near 30 miles, you can bet the frequencies aren't going to stay free.
In contrast, Wi-Max is capable of operating over unregulated spectrum, and isn't going to lead to 3G-type hysteria because it's all already data packets in standard, open formats and protocols.
If the unregulated spectrum really has a range measured in miles for a point to multipoint application, I highly doubt that spectrum is going to remain unregulated very long.
It's not the case in the US, but there are plenty of places in the world already where cell phones are cheaper than landlines
If you look at my comment though it was specifically directed at the US and its corrupt politicians in this area.
How bout Jon Johansen. That was free software, right?
Yes, but an elitist expert will simply spout off the kind of bullshit that an average person never would come up with.
If you have to pay someone to write "Hello World", then yes, it does apply.
Not really. You'll spend far more money building an application with poor programmers regardless of the quality of the application. That is, if the poor programmers are ever able to finish at all.
This will eventually fall well below the level that any phone company can match because there is no 'last-mile' infrastructure to maintain, no cable to lay or repair, no expensive equipment for laying and repairing cable, no expensive vehicles to carry the equipment, no facilites to store the vehicles and equipment, and no employees to drive the vehicles, work the equipment, repair the lines, or administer and guard the facilities.
Kind of like how cell phones are so much cheaper than wired phones?
At a range of 30 miles, you can be certain the government is going to regulate it, and that means prices will be kept high to give the companies in bed with the politicians the kickbacks they've earned.
That'd be about a T1's rate for about a T1's price.
And most likely without a T1s quality of service.
Haven't these Wimax claims been touted for well over a year now? Why didn't I see any Wimax cards last time I was at Best Buy?
Maybe it automatically turns down the power and uses a routing protocol?
Otherwise, I guess it's just built for countryfolk.
There are many uses for precise timers beyond time bombs.
Not ones that need one-second resolution tied to UTC over a period of many months.
Again, most of the examples I can think of come from spacecraft. Remember the Galileo probe? It separated from the mother ship five months before arrival at Jupiter, and during that time only a timer was running. At the appropriate moment, just before entering the atmosphere, it woke up.
That needs neither one second resolution, nor to be tied to UTC. Simply saying "wake up in X seconds" is fine, it doesn't matter what time it is when you wake up.
And the spin of the earth is arbitrary.
If the spin of the earth is arbitrary, then what isn't?
Otherwise we could predict and schedule leap seconds many years into the future.
Being chaotic is not the same thing as being arbitrary.
Better yet, we could have defined the second so that leap seconds weren't necessary, or at least that their long-term sum would be zero instead of positive.
There are different definitions of seconds. GMT and UT1 use a second which eliminates the necessity of leap seconds. These seconds aren't easily measured by atomic clocks, which is why UTC was invented.
The second is such a fundamental unit, and so much of the rest of physics depends on it, that it must be nailed down precisely. It also helps that time is the basic dimension we can measure most accurately, thanks to atomic clocks. That's why the meter is now defined in terms of the speed of light.
That's no reason that physicists need to use the same conversion unit as politicians. The unit generally cancels out anyway.
I have no problem with basing the official definition of UNIX time on UTC, and I suspect Thompson and Ritchie would agree. They specified GMT for the UNIX epoch only because UTC didn't exist yet; it came into being (replacing GMT) on January 1, 1972.
The point is, you don't define unix time one way and then fundamentally change things later. But besides that, using UTC for unix time isn't a good idea, because it doesn't easily convert to and from an integer.
It really depends on what your doing. I write real time software and in my problem domain the goal is to keep going if at all possible.
I don't deny that there are some domains that need this. But the original post I was responding to was implying that every operating system needs to behave this way.
However, I am more talking about systems where say a LAN card has a bad driver which keeps crashing the system. If the operator decides to reboot on such a failure that's one thing but I don't really want my OS designer to make those choices.
That's actually an excellent point, and I guess I have to agree with you there. If my LAN driver is buggy on a client box I don't want a BSOD or a kernel panic. It'd be acceptable to shut down the LAN driver if necessary, then I can save my work, and then I can reboot the system.
I am talking about 100's of CPU's on the same chip. They are all talking with the same HW and memory...
Well, I don't really see how having 100s of CPUs on the same chip all using the same memory is ever a good idea. I guess for some really massive number crunching applications, but even then there are probably smarter ways to do things.
But hey, you sold me on the LAN driver scenario.
Of course, what's even stupider is how both the Independent and, to an even stupider degree, the Inquirer make it sound all ominous and elitist that the scientists didn't release the info as soon as they found it. Like, maybe they didn't want to risk the media flaming them for prematurely announcing a tenth planet if they had to recant part of their data?
Couldn't they have at least told people "hey, look at this, isn't it cool?" Or did they do that?
The point is you can't trust software, drivers, or hardware.
Huh? I can't trust it for what? Playing doom?
If you want to see a real OS look at what people use on million +$ systems.
Not everyone has a million dollars. That said, I've written OS software that runs on million dollar systems.
UNIX is great for the type of hardware most people have on there desktop but it's not what people will be using in 50 years.
If UNIX is going to be around in 50 years it's going to be dramatically different. That's partly because improvements in hardware will enable more complicated software, and partly just because software development techniques will improve.
Intel could put out a CPU with 100's of processors but you start needing an OS that can work even if a few of those CPU's go bad.
A much better technique both now and in the foreseeable future is to implement high availability through multiple operating systems working in a distributed environment. When Google loses a CPU, the site doesn't shut down. The computer does, and someone goes and fixes it.
If you want stability you need to asume things that can break will break.
Of course you do. The question is what do you do when things break? Do you trust the operating system to try to repair itself, or do you shut the OS down, let another OS take over, and call for someone to come take a look at things?
Right now I'd definitely say the latter. Maybe some day things will be different. Maybe some day we'll have strong AI. But even then, there's a limit to the amount of self-fixing that can be done. Think Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
Imagine agreeing to do something at a certain future time, and then setting up a piece of hardware to do it.
If not for leap seconds, your hardware could be a simple down counter programmed with the difference between the agreed-upon future time and the current time.
It doesn't seem reasonable to me. You'd need to require to-the-second accuracy to a point many months in the future, and you'd need that point in time to be declared in a way recognizable to the rest of the world. You'd need an atomic clock in the computer, not just "a simple down counter", and even then you might not even wind up with something perfectly synchronous - time is relative. To get true TAI you'd have to synchronize with 200 other atomic clocks, since TAI is just an average. The simplest solution here would be to just attach a radio clock, GPS, or some external device.
But I still don't understand *why* you'd want to do such a thing. I guess if you're trying to make the perfect bomb which didn't rely on any radio signals and was set to go off at midnight 7/7/2007 at 7:17:07 or something. So the adoption of UTC has foiled a terrorist. :)
NORAD epoch times are UTC, and that creates a trap if you're not careful about leap seconds.
Oh boy, so you have to be careful. So what? Be careful.
Obviously that epoch date could not move around arbitrarily as a result of leap seconds, so it's based on "terrestrial time", another standard time scale related to TAI that doesn't follow leap seconds.
Leap seconds aren't arbitrary. They're based on the spin of the Earth.
Anyway, I don't see what this has to do with computing the number of "seconds" until a UTC date in the future. Obviously some people are going to use different methods of time. And remember, UTC is a hybrid system between GMT/UT1 and TAI. GMT would be a better system for human purposes, and in fact it's a modern version of the system we had back in Babalonian times, back before scientists decided to redefine the meaning of a second. The problem is that GMT isn't easily adapted to accurate clocks, such as atomic clocks, and you don't want to have to constantly send update information such as would be necessary with UT1. So you save up a whole second worth of updates and send them all at one time.
So I think we completely agree on the main point: UNIX's internal representation of time is fundamentally broken.
Yeah, the UNIX time system is broken in its design. You have no argument with me there.
It ought to be based on a count of seconds from some epoch on a timescale that does not use leap seconds, and conversion to or from UTC should be done only when needed for human consumption or input.
That'd be one way to do it. Of course, using UT1 would work too, and then you wouldn't need a table of historical leap seconds unless you wanted to convert to TAI. You'd just need to store the current offset between UT1 and UTC.
One could even argue that UNIX already does this, and it's the conversion routines that are broken. As you point out, a time_t value is supposed to be the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC. Well, that count for a given event is not going to change just because leap seconds were subsequently declared!
Without specifying a frame of reference, that definition is rather meaningless :).
So it's really the conversion routines that are broken...
I think I already linked to DJB's explanation, but in case I haven't, there it is. According to him it's a broken localtime(), combined with a broken xntpd which catered to the broken localtime().
But I also noticed that the original definition was in GMT. So really the error was in changing GMT to UTC instead of UT1, and in thinking that we meant TAI seconds instead of GMT seconds.
Some of them, sure, but lots of others are deleted.
That'd be "the hitchiker's guide to things we consider important enough". The actual galaxy contains things such as hotels, bars, pubs, cafes, elementary schools, malls, shops, streets, and bus stops.