You seem to imply that those two bullet points aren't very important..and so the economy is pretty much a zero sum game, except for a little bit of gain because of productivity and population increases.
If that's what you mean, you're incorrect; the productivity thing is what has increased human wealth so enormously, ever since the discovery of agriculture.
There's a very old (circa WWII) tradition in Science Fiction fandom of putting H's in the wrong place for humerous effect, or to print words that were forbidden in the 1940s ("Bheer" or "Ghod"). Perhaps this is the deal.
We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why?
I think it's because BSD didn't have a super-powerful, single personality driving it. GNU has RMS, Linux has Linus, Apple has Jobs, Microsoft has Gates. BSD has always had a collection of people, none of whom is suitable for the Napoleon.
The database required already exists, local number portability has been in effect for landlines for years....All the telcos have to do is pay for the database dips.
Indeed it does exist...I worked on Telcordia's SCP while that was being setup. LNP sold an awful lot of systems for Telcordia...and I'm sure that cost was passed on to consumers.:-) But it's not just a question of flicking a switch to make the dips. Something has to change in the MSCs to have them make the query.
And what about the whole HLR ("Home Location Register" migration thing? Mobile networks have this concept of the "Home" of a mobile number, to deal with roaming. The HLR is the network element that has the info on the number...it gets queried by the switch closest to the antenna your phone is using. If you want to move a mobile number, there has to be a way to transfer the HLR data between different vendors. Like, T-Mobile has to have a way to take over some of Verizon's HLR data. Whoa.
I've only thought about this for 10 minutes and my head hurts.
But, in any case, I didn't mean to say it was impossible, just that it's a lot of work, and a lot of money. Yes, there's a business reason, to hold on to customers, but that's not the only reason.
There's actually a RFC about this (2916; It's called "ENUM." The idea is to put telephone numbers (aka E.164 numbers in the ISO telephony standards world) into DNS. It's related to the VoIP/SIP work.
In a related issue, what's up with email address portability? Isn't it annoying that when your ISP goes out of business, you need to change email addresses? It's really the same problem.
My guess is that the typical Slashdotter can see what a pain it would be to have email address portability. Telephone number portability is just as bad. Not that you can't do it, but it's really hard and expensive. Every phone call becomes a database dip. Consider the size and speed of that distributed database.
...a pop-sci book by Jared Diamond. He spends a lot of time demonstrating how close our behaviour is to our chimp cousins.
The title of the book is a reference to the idea that there are (or should be) 3 species of chimps: the normal ones, the bonobo or pygmy chimp, and us.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was. Of course GPUs are turing machines...a pad and pencil is a turing machine. But I wouldn't want to port an OS to it.
You've missed my point. I'm not "stooping to legalism," I'm explaining how your analogy evokes a (hopefully) non-existant situation, where the police are in charge.
The police and army do not "do the prosecuting." The police and army are dangerous, a blunt instrument used for briefest time, in the most extreme situation, and them immediately thanked and relieved. They need to be held in check by a civilian legal system, lest society become a banana republic. You seem to miss that idea, which is why you also support the notion that the UN has no place in national building Iraq, since they didn't do the fighting. Your analogy has the same flaw as your thinking on Iraq, which is why I found it telling.
One doesn't want the warriors to run the peace--that kind of militarism nearly destroyed the world twice in the 20th century.
Don't mistake me for a pacifist--I believe in military intervention in cases like Ruwanda, or Kosovo, or Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But to say that countries that disagree in the use of military action in a particular instance have no place in helping to rebuild afterward is to completely miss the point of the intervention in the first place. We're not Imperial Rome, here, we're supposed to be liberators.
If a police force refused to arrest a rapist/mugger...and the army subsequently arrest said rapist, why should the police force then have any say in how the rapist is sentenced?
It's very telling that your analogy involves the police and the army sentencing criminals. In liberal democracies (which is supposed to be what we're making the world safe for), civilian courts do that, and they're independent of the arresting forces.
Witness France refusing to allow the US (and allies) to rampage around in Iraq, and then subsequently demanding a hand in choosing how the resulting gummint is organised.
Fuckin A! After all, a doctor is only qualified to treat a gunshot would if he fired the pistol.
There is no way a bank would ever try to enforce such a clause. In the US we have all these rapid investigative journalists who just love stories like this--you wouldn't go to court, you'd go to Geraldo. This clause is so egregious that camera-hungry Congressman might even get involved.
I've always thought that if I find something in a contract that's completely insane, I needed really t worry about it, because it'll never happen. It's only the things that aren't insane, just immoral that are dangerous.
Eventually, you'll learn to understand the accent better, and then it'll be okay.
You can't fight this...it's like people who complain
that their job requires them to use a computer now, when it didn't used to and they hate computers. That's the way it is. Adapt to the changes.
In America, we hire Americans. We don't sublet to another country to save money and backstab our own people.
Wow, what America do you live in? Who made your sneakers? Who picked the California orange you had for breakfast? Who bused the table at the Friday's where you had lunch?
At least in Europe they're honest about the whole "guest worker" thing.
Well...there's a theory that the original
inhabitants of Australia did a lot to create
the Western Desert using slash-n-burn techniques.
And also, the orginal inhabitants of the Americas
almost certainly drove the vast majority of the
large American mammals to extinction. (The buzzword
for the Google search here is "overkill.")
Neither of these facts have anything to do with some kind of bizarre "divine retribution" theory of natural disasters though. I suspect the original post here was just a troll.
I once worked on a telecom project that used IBM servers (running AIX). As part of getting them approved for installation in Central Offices, they had to prove you could drop one a certain distance (6 inches? Sorry, I forget), and it would still work. These servers were in racks about 6 feet high. That's the seismic protection part.
If I remember correctly, it wasn't until we sold to PacBell (as they were called then) in California that IBM actually went through that test.
These servers were dual everything. One of the regression tests was to start them processing phone calls (about 50/sec), walk behind them, and pull out a NIC card. You weren't allowed to loose any calls.
Slashdot Mirror
RFC 2916, aka "ENUM" is trying to do this kind of thing. Here's some info on it
If that's what you mean, you're incorrect; the productivity thing is what has increased human wealth so enormously, ever since the discovery of agriculture.
If I just misunderstood your point, sorry.
It used to be, back in SCO OpenServer(TM) Release 5:
dev2: ls -l /bin/true
/bin/true -> /var/opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/true
/var/opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/true
/var/opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/true
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Jul 23 2002
dev2: ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 0 Jul 23 2002
There's a very old (circa WWII) tradition in Science Fiction fandom of putting H's in the wrong place for humerous effect, or to print words that were forbidden in the 1940s ("Bheer" or "Ghod"). Perhaps this is the deal.
I think it's because BSD didn't have a super-powerful, single personality driving it. GNU has RMS, Linux has Linus, Apple has Jobs, Microsoft has Gates. BSD has always had a collection of people, none of whom is suitable for the Napoleon.
So that's a good runtime optimization for now, but it'll be bad in a couple of years, yeah?
In any case, it's more difficult to develop that than just doing a database dip everytime...as you'd expect with an optimization-type thing.
Indeed it does exist...I worked on Telcordia's SCP while that was being setup. LNP sold an awful lot of systems for Telcordia...and I'm sure that cost was passed on to consumers. :-) But it's not just a question of flicking a switch to make the dips. Something has to change in the MSCs to have them make the query.
And what about the whole HLR ("Home Location Register" migration thing? Mobile networks have this concept of the "Home" of a mobile number, to deal with roaming. The HLR is the network element that has the info on the number...it gets queried by the switch closest to the antenna your phone is using. If you want to move a mobile number, there has to be a way to transfer the HLR data between different vendors. Like, T-Mobile has to have a way to take over some of Verizon's HLR data. Whoa.
I've only thought about this for 10 minutes and my head hurts.
But, in any case, I didn't mean to say it was impossible, just that it's a lot of work, and a lot of money. Yes, there's a business reason, to hold on to customers, but that's not the only reason.
In a related issue, what's up with email address portability? Isn't it annoying that when your ISP goes out of business, you need to change email addresses? It's really the same problem.
My guess is that the typical Slashdotter can see what a pain it would be to have email address portability. Telephone number portability is just as bad. Not that you can't do it, but it's really hard and expensive. Every phone call becomes a database dip. Consider the size and speed of that distributed database.
Am I the only one who doesn't think these quotes make Stallman and Perens look bad?
...a party at Grover's Mill!
Hang on: "blog" isn't a word, but "weblog" is?
The title of the book is a reference to the idea that there are (or should be) 3 species of chimps: the normal ones, the bonobo or pygmy chimp, and us.
Is there already a gcc port to the processor? :-)
Or do they?
The police and army do not "do the prosecuting." The police and army are dangerous, a blunt instrument used for briefest time, in the most extreme situation, and them immediately thanked and relieved. They need to be held in check by a civilian legal system, lest society become a banana republic. You seem to miss that idea, which is why you also support the notion that the UN has no place in national building Iraq, since they didn't do the fighting. Your analogy has the same flaw as your thinking on Iraq, which is why I found it telling.
One doesn't want the warriors to run the peace--that kind of militarism nearly destroyed the world twice in the 20th century.
Don't mistake me for a pacifist--I believe in military intervention in cases like Ruwanda, or Kosovo, or Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But to say that countries that disagree in the use of military action in a particular instance have no place in helping to rebuild afterward is to completely miss the point of the intervention in the first place. We're not Imperial Rome, here, we're supposed to be liberators.
It's very telling that your analogy involves the police and the army sentencing criminals. In liberal democracies (which is supposed to be what we're making the world safe for), civilian courts do that, and they're independent of the arresting forces.
Thanks for making my point again.
Fuckin A! After all, a doctor is only qualified to treat a gunshot would if he fired the pistol.
I've always thought that if I find something in a contract that's completely insane, I needed really t worry about it, because it'll never happen. It's only the things that aren't insane, just immoral that are dangerous.
You can't fight this...it's like people who complain that their job requires them to use a computer now, when it didn't used to and they hate computers. That's the way it is. Adapt to the changes.
Wow, what America do you live in? Who made your sneakers? Who picked the California orange you had for breakfast? Who bused the table at the Friday's where you had lunch?
At least in Europe they're honest about the whole "guest worker" thing.
Wow, he's talking about capitalism and ethics in the same paragraph. That's kinda strange.
Neither of these facts have anything to do with some kind of bizarre "divine retribution" theory of natural disasters though. I suspect the original post here was just a troll.
If I remember correctly, it wasn't until we sold to PacBell (as they were called then) in California that IBM actually went through that test.
These servers were dual everything. One of the regression tests was to start them processing phone calls (about 50/sec), walk behind them, and pull out a NIC card. You weren't allowed to loose any calls.
Some of the Matrix Orbital LCDs have "General Purpose Output" connections that you can use for this kind of thing.