Your comments remind me of something I heard from my sister about a quicksilver (mercury) mining town in the Big Bend of Texas. The town is called Terlingua. Ironically, it's not quite the industrial wilderness that Pripyat now is. For one thing, it's much smaller and settled amid the natural ruggedness of the Big Bend. More tellingly, the Terlingua Ghost Town is a tourist attraction (if a hazardous one). I suppose that Terlingua is an industrialized natural disaster. I hesistate to call it a Chernobyl, though.
When I raised the question (doubt?) about SWA and its employee focus, I was thinking about some relatively recent labor difficulties with its flight attendants and their union, which usually suggests that there is "something rotten in the state of Denmark", as it were. I don't know the outcome of those negotiations, though, so I can't do more than raise questions. Thanks for the input.
That done, Marjorie Kelly makes a good point in her work The Divine Right of Capital that employees are are the wrong side of the ledger. People are expenses not stake holders. This creates the negative feedback that as productivity increases wages go down...not up.
I think the validity of that statement varies when applied to different firms. For some firms, who consider the shareholders (or worse, the top executives) to be the primary or sole stakeholders, it's probably very true. However, there probably are some companies (Southwest Airlines was one of them, though it may not be now) who consider the employees to be among their major or primary stakeholders. It all depends on the culture of the firm in question. I think one can distinguish the employee-focused firms from the others by watching for layoffs during a downturn. Those which lay off workers before making other cut-backs probably taken the employee==expense view. However, without concrete, non-anecdotal proof, I can't make those statements any more strongly than I do.
To add another wrinkle, the employee as expense (or employee!=stakeholder) view might vary with the size of the firm in question. A small company, such as a partnership with employees, would probably be less likely to take the employee = expense view because in a small firm, there is a greater chance that everyone literally knows everyone else and that the CEO and VPs have a personal concern in the well-being of their employees. Was that last sentence a run on sentence, I wonder?
Re:Just irresponsible...
on
Borg Cube Case
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Technically, all slashdottings are instances of a flash mob (or flash crowd).
flash crowd
Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what this does to the server may also be called slashdot effect). It has been pointed out that the effect was anticipated years earlier in Alfred Bester's 1956 The Stars My Destination.
This is just me thinking aloud, really, rather than answering your question, because I have no hope of doing so with any authority. I wonder how much of the scientific research done by NASA, ESA, et al. would be freely available to the Chinese aerospace industry and how much they would have to repeat for themselves. I'm thinking specifically about things like growing plants in orbit, the effects of null gee on bone density, etc. Some of that is fairly important, and if they don't have access to it (for whatever reason), then they may have to spend time re-inventing the wheel.
On the other hand, I don't think it unreasonable for them to launch Shenzhou 6 with little greater expectation than that it will return. They may intend for their crews to gain orbit experience by flying missions with increasingly longer orbit times. (I would suppose that one encounters situations during 5 days in orbit that one might never face during 36 hours in orbit. For one thing, the hardware has more exposure to micro-meteors, extreme temperature, etc.) Speaking in terms of the American manned space program, China seems to have skipped the Mercury and Gemini phases of the program entirely. They're on currently Apollo 4 or 5 without any of the experience the Americans accrued through the earlier programs. Even with the best hardware and most current research, they've still got some catching up to do.
But, for the sake of gathering information, I used IE. I noticed that some of the links display differently. In Moz1.6, the 'download now' button reads "Free trial". In IE6, the same button reads "Public Free Beta Sign-up." Why the difference, I wonder?
Requirements
Windows 98 SE/2000 SP1 (or later)
800 MHz Pentium III CPU (or faster)
At least 256 MB RAM
56K Internet connection (or faster)
400 MB free HD space
Any ATI RADEON graphics card, any NVIDIA GeForce, or NVIDIA nFORCE graphics card with at least 32 MB of video memory
If you have a Pentium III 1.2 GHz or faster, you can also use the following graphics cards: ATI RADEON VE, ATI RADEON 7000, ATI Mobility RADEON/M6, NVIDIA TNT2 (with at least 32MB of video memory), or Intel Extreme 3D Graphics (including Pentium-M notebooks and the i845, i852, i855, and i865 adapters)
I would suppose that the 5-7 day mission is meant to "test the waters", as it were, and perhaps to set a milestone, have the taikonauts talk to school-children, etc. The first few times that the USA and USSR put manned capsules into orbit, they did nothing more than orbit and re-enter. However, that's been done a lot (technology is proven, etc), so the Chinese may have to skip the orbiting for the sake of orbiting's sake and get right to work on whatever-they'll-do.
It's also interesting to note that the bottom 25 of the 50 highest uptimes are nearly identical to one another - same setup (Apache an BDS/OS), same firm, all giving very similar current and average uptimes. Perhaps it just goes to show one the power of standard operating procedure. One stands a chance of developing a wizardly admin and support team.
1) Submit the results from a iTunes number generator batch
2) Pepsi cancels the contest
3) ???
4) Profit?
I for one welcome our new...aww, forget it... I don't even own an iPod...or a Mac. grumble.
It's true that the worm you describe is a relatively polite worm, but it's still a worm. A gang of burglars which decides to stop breaking and entering in a certain neighborhood after a certain date is still a gang of burglars breaking, entering, and making off with other people's things.
I was employed as a support tech when the MSBlast/Welchia infections started in earnest. I spent a lot of time that could have been used much more productively cleaning it off machines all over the campus. As a once and future support tech, my tolerance for such is slim, and even slimmer when the worm is written to be 'helpful', given that Nachi was more of a problem than Blaster.
Perhaps the quantity of good things foregone is ultimately unknowable. While it would help to have some examples of some things which didn't come to market because the creator didn't think the market would pay rather than steal, the real answer may be out in the wilds of abandoned potential.
Stated as a rhetorical question, his point may be:
How much potential creative activity was foregone because the creators thought that the market would steal and not pay to gain access to it?
The answer, probably, is "We don't know". Provided that on considers creative activity a Good Thing in and of itself, the very fact that we don't know what we're missing is a problem.
However, one would need more specific proof of piracy's tendency to discourage innovation to make this case solidly. There may be (many) other reasons for creators to let their creativity lie fallow.
386DX20
4 MB RAM
60 MB HDD
PCDOS 7.0 (It had Win3.1, but on a PS/2 P70, win31 is more useless than usual, as the entire display is the same shade of red). So...
>cd Windows >del *.*
After than, he was better.
So, I guess I could run theoretically Linux on him. His name is Flint Fireforge.
for more info
Just to show my biases, I've got a 2k box, a 98 box, and various Mac and Linux boxen in various stages of construction (and destruction). I don't have any intention of upgrading to XP from 2k. I use XP regularly at school and work. It annoys me. I don't like it much. 2k I've gotten used to using. When it comes time to replace a computer, I'll probably go with OS X or Linux, if ever I soldier through to a useable desktop Linux box. That, however, is all beside the point, I guess.
I know it would be harder to do this, given that 2k is not really on the market anymore, but why not (consider|recommend) 2k? I'm thinking specifically of the "If you're stuck with Windows, use XP" statement, which to me seems like a standing broadjump over Windows 2000. It's kind of like saying "If you must use DOS, be sure to use MessDOS 6.22" while ignoring PCDOS 7 completely.
I assumed, based on the tone of his post, that the K was a pointed mis-spelling of the word, rather than a proper foreign-language spelling thereof. I hadn't considered the latter possibility before now. You have taught me. Thanks.
Re:Send These bastards To Jail
on
SCO's Plan Examined
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
The word is shining, not shinning. Unless you mean to imply that chasing the American dream actually involves getting kicked in the shins, repeatedly. If you're going to criticize my way of life, at least do it correctly.
Would you explain your definition of the American dream? The dream is different for different people. For me, for example, it has less to do with standing on the backs of others as much as it does standing on their shoulders. To me, the America dream is my own spread of land owned free-and-clear, the rights to my own chosen lifestyle. It is about making my own way in the world. Self-determination, in a word.
I know it's been said before, but apparently, it needs saying again. How is spelling America with a 'K' insightful? Insight, last time I checked, involved a particular ability to perceive the truth or understand its implications. Spelling America with a K may be incitefull, but I cannot see why it is incisive. America and its current elected officials may be seen as fascist pigs, but even where such criticism seems merited, it does not logically follow that we are all fascist pigs. That implication is not only illogical and ill-informed, but offensive and not-very-constructive.
It is telling, I think, that adds for computers have changed so much. This gem is more or less advertised as a wires-and-bits chemistry set. Today's retail computers, however, are marketed as the box that (does everything|entertains the user). I'm thinking, specifically of the Wintel boxen I see at Worst Buy, Circuit Shoddy, Office Despot, etc., though it may also apply to boxen sold to businesses.
I wonder what the likes of the TRMC thought of these? Were these babies the ken of hobbyists who didn't have access to Mainframe or Minicomputers? Out of cursiosity, where was this ad published?
As to your first point, about IBM risking heat from MSFT, I'm not sure you're correct. I'm not sure you're wrong, either.
OS/2 was originally developed (perhaps conceptualized would be a better word) by Big Blue and Redmond. Then, at some point, IBM and MS parted ways. IBM kept developing OS/2, but dropped it. MS changed the name of the product to NT and kept developing it. History, the rest is.
If the JFS code came from a part of MS contributed pre-fork OS/2, then I would think that IBM and MS might have issues to clear up. Then again, if that is so, why (didn't|hasn't) this issue come up before now? If MS feels threatened by IBM's Linux business, why not derail it with the kind of claim is now making? It would certainly make more sense to me, anyway, for Zeus (MS) to pick a fight with Cronos (IBM) that for David to come at Goliath with half-baked mudpies.
If, however, the JFS code was IBM's contribution all along and ended up in its own workstation OS, what would the problem be?
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically the camera dome on its back.
Miniature Robotic Guard Dromedary, anyone?
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!
Your comments remind me of something I heard from my sister about a quicksilver (mercury) mining town in the Big Bend of Texas. The town is called Terlingua. Ironically, it's not quite the industrial wilderness that Pripyat now is. For one thing, it's much smaller and settled amid the natural ruggedness of the Big Bend. More tellingly, the Terlingua Ghost Town is a tourist attraction (if a hazardous one). I suppose that Terlingua is an industrialized natural disaster. I hesistate to call it a Chernobyl, though.
We are no longer the Knights Who Read Slashdot...
And another apt quote: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more systems will slip through your fingers."
When I raised the question (doubt?) about SWA and its employee focus, I was thinking about some relatively recent labor difficulties with its flight attendants and their union, which usually suggests that there is "something rotten in the state of Denmark", as it were. I don't know the outcome of those negotiations, though, so I can't do more than raise questions. Thanks for the input.
The Force is with you, young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet.
I think the validity of that statement varies when applied to different firms. For some firms, who consider the shareholders (or worse, the top executives) to be the primary or sole stakeholders, it's probably very true. However, there probably are some companies (Southwest Airlines was one of them, though it may not be now) who consider the employees to be among their major or primary stakeholders. It all depends on the culture of the firm in question. I think one can distinguish the employee-focused firms from the others by watching for layoffs during a downturn. Those which lay off workers before making other cut-backs probably taken the employee==expense view. However, without concrete, non-anecdotal proof, I can't make those statements any more strongly than I do.
To add another wrinkle, the employee as expense (or employee!=stakeholder) view might vary with the size of the firm in question. A small company, such as a partnership with employees, would probably be less likely to take the employee = expense view because in a small firm, there is a greater chance that everyone literally knows everyone else and that the CEO and VPs have a personal concern in the well-being of their employees. Was that last sentence a run on sentence, I wonder?
Technically, all slashdottings are instances of a flash mob (or flash crowd).
flash crowd
Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what this does to the server may also be called slashdot effect). It has been pointed out that the effect was anticipated years earlier in Alfred Bester's 1956 The Stars My Destination.
Source: The Jargon File: flash crowd
In this case, /.ers are a flash mob and a swarm of Species 8472
This is just me thinking aloud, really, rather than answering your question, because I have no hope of doing so with any authority. I wonder how much of the scientific research done by NASA, ESA, et al. would be freely available to the Chinese aerospace industry and how much they would have to repeat for themselves. I'm thinking specifically about things like growing plants in orbit, the effects of null gee on bone density, etc. Some of that is fairly important, and if they don't have access to it (for whatever reason), then they may have to spend time re-inventing the wheel.
On the other hand, I don't think it unreasonable for them to launch Shenzhou 6 with little greater expectation than that it will return. They may intend for their crews to gain orbit experience by flying missions with increasingly longer orbit times. (I would suppose that one encounters situations during 5 days in orbit that one might never face during 36 hours in orbit. For one thing, the hardware has more exposure to micro-meteors, extreme temperature, etc.) Speaking in terms of the American manned space program, China seems to have skipped the Mercury and Gemini phases of the program entirely. They're on currently Apollo 4 or 5 without any of the experience the Americans accrued through the earlier programs. Even with the best hardware and most current research, they've still got some catching up to do.
Indeed. Very annoying.
But, for the sake of gathering information, I used IE. I noticed that some of the links display differently. In Moz1.6, the 'download now' button reads "Free trial". In IE6, the same button reads "Public Free Beta Sign-up." Why the difference, I wonder?
Requirements
Windows 98 SE/2000 SP1 (or later)
800 MHz Pentium III CPU (or faster)
At least 256 MB RAM
56K Internet connection (or faster)
400 MB free HD space
Any ATI RADEON graphics card, any NVIDIA GeForce, or NVIDIA nFORCE graphics card with at least 32 MB of video memory
If you have a Pentium III 1.2 GHz or faster, you can also use the following graphics cards: ATI RADEON VE, ATI RADEON 7000, ATI Mobility RADEON/M6, NVIDIA TNT2 (with at least 32MB of video memory), or Intel Extreme 3D Graphics (including Pentium-M notebooks and the i845, i852, i855, and i865 adapters)
I would suppose that the 5-7 day mission is meant to "test the waters", as it were, and perhaps to set a milestone, have the taikonauts talk to school-children, etc. The first few times that the USA and USSR put manned capsules into orbit, they did nothing more than orbit and re-enter. However, that's been done a lot (technology is proven, etc), so the Chinese may have to skip the orbiting for the sake of orbiting's sake and get right to work on whatever-they'll-do.
It's also interesting to note that the bottom 25 of the 50 highest uptimes are nearly identical to one another - same setup (Apache an BDS/OS), same firm, all giving very similar current and average uptimes. Perhaps it just goes to show one the power of standard operating procedure. One stands a chance of developing a wizardly admin and support team.
1) Submit the results from a iTunes number generator batch 2) Pepsi cancels the contest 3) ??? 4) Profit? I for one welcome our new...aww, forget it... I don't even own an iPod...or a Mac. grumble.
I think he left SmoothWall off the list ( smoothwall.org). It's in the bootable-business card, minimal firewall distro category.
It's true that the worm you describe is a relatively polite worm, but it's still a worm. A gang of burglars which decides to stop breaking and entering in a certain neighborhood after a certain date is still a gang of burglars breaking, entering, and making off with other people's things.
I was employed as a support tech when the MSBlast/Welchia infections started in earnest. I spent a lot of time that could have been used much more productively cleaning it off machines all over the campus. As a once and future support tech, my tolerance for such is slim, and even slimmer when the worm is written to be 'helpful', given that Nachi was more of a problem than Blaster.
Somehow, a 403 "forbidden" error seems a bit paradoxical when printed on underwear.
Perhaps the quantity of good things foregone is ultimately unknowable. While it would help to have some examples of some things which didn't come to market because the creator didn't think the market would pay rather than steal, the real answer may be out in the wilds of abandoned potential.
Stated as a rhetorical question, his point may be:
How much potential creative activity was foregone because the creators thought that the market would steal and not pay to gain access to it?
The answer, probably, is "We don't know". Provided that on considers creative activity a Good Thing in and of itself, the very fact that we don't know what we're missing is a problem.
However, one would need more specific proof of piracy's tendency to discourage innovation to make this case solidly. There may be (many) other reasons for creators to let their creativity lie fallow.
Some raspberry jam, perhaps? How about some nice, pulpy orange juice? I saw it yesterday on BBC Online, where it was called Bagle
386DX20
After than, he was better.4 MB RAM
60 MB HDD
PCDOS 7.0 (It had Win3.1, but on a PS/2 P70, win31 is more useless than usual, as the entire display is the same shade of red). So...
So, I guess I could run theoretically Linux on him. His name is Flint Fireforge.
for more info
Just to show my biases, I've got a 2k box, a 98 box, and various Mac and Linux boxen in various stages of construction (and destruction). I don't have any intention of upgrading to XP from 2k. I use XP regularly at school and work. It annoys me. I don't like it much. 2k I've gotten used to using. When it comes time to replace a computer, I'll probably go with OS X or Linux, if ever I soldier through to a useable desktop Linux box. That, however, is all beside the point, I guess.
I know it would be harder to do this, given that 2k is not really on the market anymore, but why not (consider|recommend) 2k? I'm thinking specifically of the "If you're stuck with Windows, use XP" statement, which to me seems like a standing broadjump over Windows 2000. It's kind of like saying "If you must use DOS, be sure to use MessDOS 6.22" while ignoring PCDOS 7 completely.
I assumed, based on the tone of his post, that the K was a pointed mis-spelling of the word, rather than a proper foreign-language spelling thereof. I hadn't considered the latter possibility before now. You have taught me. Thanks.
The word is shining, not shinning. Unless you mean to imply that chasing the American dream actually involves getting kicked in the shins, repeatedly. If you're going to criticize my way of life, at least do it correctly.
Would you explain your definition of the American dream? The dream is different for different people. For me, for example, it has less to do with standing on the backs of others as much as it does standing on their shoulders. To me, the America dream is my own spread of land owned free-and-clear, the rights to my own chosen lifestyle. It is about making my own way in the world. Self-determination, in a word.
I know it's been said before, but apparently, it needs saying again. How is spelling America with a 'K' insightful? Insight, last time I checked, involved a particular ability to perceive the truth or understand its implications. Spelling America with a K may be incitefull, but I cannot see why it is incisive. America and its current elected officials may be seen as fascist pigs, but even where such criticism seems merited, it does not logically follow that we are all fascist pigs. That implication is not only illogical and ill-informed, but offensive and not-very-constructive.
It is telling, I think, that adds for computers have changed so much. This gem is more or less advertised as a wires-and-bits chemistry set. Today's retail computers, however, are marketed as the box that (does everything|entertains the user). I'm thinking, specifically of the Wintel boxen I see at Worst Buy, Circuit Shoddy, Office Despot, etc., though it may also apply to boxen sold to businesses.
I wonder what the likes of the TRMC thought of these? Were these babies the ken of hobbyists who didn't have access to Mainframe or Minicomputers? Out of cursiosity, where was this ad published?
Now I understand. Thanks.
As to your first point, about IBM risking heat from MSFT, I'm not sure you're correct. I'm not sure you're wrong, either.
OS/2 was originally developed (perhaps conceptualized would be a better word) by Big Blue and Redmond. Then, at some point, IBM and MS parted ways. IBM kept developing OS/2, but dropped it. MS changed the name of the product to NT and kept developing it. History, the rest is.
If the JFS code came from a part of MS contributed pre-fork OS/2, then I would think that IBM and MS might have issues to clear up. Then again, if that is so, why (didn't|hasn't) this issue come up before now? If MS feels threatened by IBM's Linux business, why not derail it with the kind of claim is now making? It would certainly make more sense to me, anyway, for Zeus (MS) to pick a fight with Cronos (IBM) that for David to come at Goliath with half-baked mudpies.
If, however, the JFS code was IBM's contribution all along and ended up in its own workstation OS, what would the problem be?