I realise the comparison may seem odd, but my point is that being open about problems is a far better way to reach solutions, whatever field it is applied to..
That is actually an excellent example (and hardly off-topic) but in that case as well as software development, it only works when those responsible are actually interested in finding solutions. Far too often the goal is simple suppression of any negative information. That can be for any number of reasons, but true openness requires a degree of, well, maturity that is in rather short supply nowadays. It doesn't help that there are thousands of hungry attorneys out there just waiting to pounce on any misstep (from a purely legal perspective, honesty is not necessarily but the best policy.)
Yes, indeed. As a matter of fact, I understand that Google's hiring test procedures involve having to pee in a cup from several feet away. This tends to select for male engineers with exceptionally large penises, of course, and definitely puts the opposite sex at a disadvantage, but hey... it's their company.
Mere image problems can be corrected by the application of a sufficient quantity of PR dollars. Microsoft's problem is that they have an actual security problem. One that isn't going to go away until they toss their codebase and start over. Or do what Apple did and pick an existing secure OS kernel as the foundation of their next-generation products, but I can't see that happening (Hell freezing over and all that.)
The reason that would be a waste of time is that most of these people are really, really smart.
Not that smart. In-depth personality profiles (like the MMPI I mentioned in my original post) can be extremely difficult to fudge, unless you have an eidetic memory. Sociopathy can be detected... it might even be an expensive process, but from society's perspective, so would be another Enron. If you're gonna pay a prospective CEO a few million a year in salary (not to mention stock options and any golden parachute) it might be worth spending a few grand up front to see if the guy is actually human on the inside.
I don't believe (and America's recent experience with corporate America would seem to bear me out) that threats of punishment have much effect on high-level sociopaths. For a deterrent to have any effect, those to whom it is aimed must believe that they are susceptible to it. Most of these people don't, and when you get in the realm of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, odds are they aren't much frightened of the law. And even if they are, they will probably consider the rewards to far outweigh the risk. They're right about that, that's for sure.
That was the point of my post: you can't really deter those who have no business or personal ethic, or simply don't have the ability to be afraid of any deterrent you provide. The only rational solution is the eliminate them before they achieve positions of power, rather than wait until they do what they inevitably will. That can be done, but any such solution will be fought tooth and nail by the nut jobs already in power.
Well, since bus drivers and construction workers (and, yes, software engineers) have to take invasive tests (I had to pee in a cup... kinda irritated me at the time but I wanted the job and they didn't require any kind of non-compete agreement so I figured it was a reasonable tradeoff) of one sort or another in order to obtain work, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be a requirement for corporate upper management to have to take an APD test. At the very least, they should have to take something like the old MMPI so that we have at least some idea if they are complete whackjobs or not.
I'm not saying that should result in their not being hired for such positions: that would depend upon an individual corporation's policies. But if the results of such testing were required to be a matter of public record, it would be the first thing a potential investor would examine. It would also discourage other sociopaths from even applying for such positions: the last thing a true sociopath wants is to be unmasked. Yes, I know... that's rather private data and isn't something that most people would want available to anyone, but if you're not willing to submit to such a test, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to run a major corporation.
Now, granted, there are those that will complain that such testing and publication would be grossly unfair and violate various civil liberties and all that. And I suppose they'll be right in that: I'm not an attorney so I have no idea of what laws such testing would run afoul. But the unfortunately reality is that many of these individuals absolutely cannot be trusted and some means of early detection needs to be put in place. It really doesn't help when the Ken Lays and Bernie Ebbers and others like them are eventually caught (if they are ever caught) because by then the damage has been done, people have been hurt. Look at what Ms. Fiorina accomplished in just a few short years, and managed to walk away from scot-free. It's also obvious that stringing a few of them up hasn't had the desired deterrent effect either. And why should it? If you feel that you're above the law you're not going to let the law get in your way.
My girlfriend and I walked out of Walgreen's... and the detector went off. The only things we had bought were a couple of Cokes that we we're carrying in our hands. We're regular customers so nobody gave us a hard time: but we stood there in front of the detector pylons going through her purse to see what was going on. Turned out that every time her compact mirror (it was in a metal case) touched a particular metallic lipstick tube the buzzer would sound. I have no idea how that's possible but it was weird.
Good question. There are several commercially-available DOS clones that have various levels of support attached (not that Microsoft's "support" of MS-DOS was all that valuable anyway) and those are used heavily, particularly for embedded apps. DOS is also a very old, very stable, relatively predictable environment. It's pretty much a commodity item, doesn't change much, and there really isn't much support actually required anymore. That's obviously not the case for a commercial Windows or Linux application, but for DOS stuff you can get away with it.
In any event, if you're in a situation where you are actually using MS-DOS, support is a good reason to go with an open-source option such as FreeDOS, assuming it's compatible enough. If nothing else, you can support it yourself if you have the expertise.
Sorry, I forgot about ME since, well, a lot of people including Microsoft wish they could forget ME. But so far as the general user bases of Windows 9x and ME was concerned, DOS didn't exist and that's pretty much how Microsoft wanted it. But from the standpoint of someone like myself that was developing and shipping DOS apps at the time, I wasn't happy about having to use a product as my primary operating system that was being treated as a mere loader program for Microsoft Windows. At that point, I just stuck with DOS 6.22 since at least it was sold as a standalone product and I'd had some years experience with it.
You're right in what you say about FreeDOS, but to be fair they do include a copy of the 4DOS shell with the full package, which I immediately switched to when I was playing around with it (their shell didn't feel right, I agree.) I had used 4DOS for years and became very comfortable with it. And you're right about their developers not all being DOS users... a lot of them appear to have come from the Linux/Unix world. Many of the apps included in FreeDOS are Linux ports, and as I said before the whole thing has rather a Linux distro feel to it (that's not necessarily bad, but it's definitely different.) They don't claim it's perfect yet either: for example, I noticed that some of the commands (like CHKDSK!) don't handle FAT32 yet, and LFN support is spotty.
Still, unlike MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS and the usual DOS boxes it's a GPLed open-source product so if there's sufficient interest I expect those nitpicks to get fixed.
Because you can't buy MS-DOS even if you wanted to. Besides, FreeDOS offers a lot more capabilities than MS-DOS 7.x ever had. 7.x was the final release of MS-DOS, and it was never sold as a standalone product, only as part of Windows 9x.
And if DOS is important to you (as it is to many, many people and companies) and completely open-source GPL'ed version that is beyond Microsoft's reach is certainly a good thing.
Couldn't agree more, probably because I've spent about twenty-odd years in industrial control. The embedded world runs a Texas shitload of DOS, and the arrogance of people that assume that if it doesn't run from a hard disk and have a GUI it's obsolete just astounds me. FreeDOS claims that it can be ROMmed... if so, it's a viable replacement for a lot of expensive industrial DOS clones out there (datalight and others.) People just don't realize the sheer number of embedded systems that support their lifestyles, they really don't.
Forgetting the embedded space for a moment, I downloaded FreeDOS 1.0 yesterday just for the heck of it, and installed it on an old P166 laptop I had lying around. I dumped a bunch of MP3 files onto it, and immediately began playing them with the included MPXPlay package. It took a while to get TCP/IP working on a 3COM 3C575 Cardbus adapter, but once that was done I had a nice DOS system with browsing, email, and a ton of other stuff.
As a matter of fact, FreeDOS is organized much like a typical Linux distro (even uses some of the standard DOS disk tools that come with most Linuxes) and includes a lot of applications if you get the full download. Memory management is very good: right out of the box it got more conventional RAM than I ever got with QEMM in years past. Some of the utilities are still a bit lacking in support for FAT32 and LFN, but overall a very useful package. Jim Hall and other contributors to the project are to be commended for their efforts.
DOS is as obsolete as the internal combustion engine.
Re:A theory of late games and program development
on
Duke in Trouble?
·
· Score: 1
Because those "special cases" aren't necessarily obvious, which is the point I was trying to convey. For example, I sometimes see code using "magic numbers". That irritates me because it isn't readily apparent why the programmer multiplied a float by, say,.03092938E-3 to get the desired result (usually several constants were boiled down to one.) Often there are good reasons for coding that way, particularly in embedded systems with limited resources. But for the guy who comes along later, undocumented crap like that make it very time-consuming to rewrite a large body of code from scratch because you spend half your time deciphering the contents of the original developer's head. I guess what it comes down to is that code that wasn't designed and written well at the outset is hard to maintain and even harder to rewrite. I try to code for the future, which means thinking about maintainability as I work, but when you're dealing with a large base of legacy code you have to move deliberately and carefully.
If crimes committed in real life could be punished in a game, I'd be... oh wait.
Re:A theory of late games and program development
on
Duke in Trouble?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well, maybe not completely impossible... but the reality is that code tends to move from elegance to thorniness, and not the other way 'round. Call it ScrewMaster's Rule of Developmental Entropy. Fixes for this and fixes for that: over time the code will be inelegant as hell yet reliable and perfectly functional, but nobody in their right mind would dare try to rewrite it because nobody remembers why all those hacks and patches are there. I deal with that a lot in some of the older code I have to support and maintain. I wasn't the original coder, and I'd love to dig in and rewrite some of the stuff that truly offends my engineering sensibilities. I don't dare, however, because if I did I'd miss some of the special cases taken care of by all the thorns, wreak havoc amongst our customers, and would probably end up spending just as much time to make my new code work as well as the old. At which point, it would be just as thorny anyway.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that it is very difficult (if not impossible) for even a very good, clean, thoughtful initial design to account for all the eventualities that a codebase will have to face. You may truly want to leave that code cleaner when you leave, but odds are that time pressure alone will sometimes leave you with what you know in your heart is a hack. Trying to do everything perfectly all the time takes forever, which is unacceptable in most production environments. 3DRealms may be different in that regard. Certainly they don't mind giving their developers all the time they need.
The United States' various governments have been eroding personal property "rights" for many years now. The essence of ownership is control... if I don't control it, I don't really own it no matter what a piece of paper says. I bought a home a few years ago, but if I ever get behind on my property taxes (interesting concept in it's own right) my home can be sold out from under me for a fraction of its value just to pay the balance due. Granted, I'm only a few years into my mortgage but even if I pay it off in full, I still have to pay my property taxes. So, really: what does it really mean to say that you "own" a home? If somebody has to power to take it away at any time without compensation... you don't.
True... but the issue is less that it is "prior art" (I mean, I've been a programmer for over twenty five years and I'm absolutely sure that I could find something equally stupid somewhere in that morass of code to sue Apple over) but that it is bloody damned obvious. That's really the problem with software patents, in that they aren't protecting novel ideas but existing "prior art" (often developed by someone other than the patent-holder) and the blame for that lies squarely at the feet of the Patent Office (well, Congress, really.) Frankly, if they are no longer competent to judge patent applications effectively, perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to issue them anymore.
Some years ago I called up J.U.L.I.E. and had them mark all the underground stuff my yard so I could dig without accidentally cutting a telephone trunk or punching a hole in a sewer (my town had aboveground power lines, so I wasn't too worried about that.) Once I knew that the space between my neighbor's house and mine was clear, we trenched a length of CAT-5 between our homes so he could share my 4 Mb @Home connection (4 mbit/sec symmetric in those days, pretty cool.) We had a lot of fun with that setup: I had a dozen machines in my basement at the time, and we (and our friends) played Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior and since he was a part of my LAN he could join up anytime. Would have been easier with a WRT54G or a DI624, I suppose, but those weren't available back then.
I disagree. Sociopathy, as a pathological condition, is not so easily categorized or pigeonholed. Sociopaths are not always so distinct from the regular population, and the fact that they cover themselves so well makes it difficult to estimate their actual numbers. It's not as if sociopathy makes one totally dysfunctional, as many other psychological disorders do, nor is it remotely obvious to the onlooker. They fit in, do their jobs, raise families, often appear to be well above average... and unless they screw up and get caught doing something unusually bad nobody is the wiser. Hell, many of us admire these awful people because of the very success their illness permits them to achieve.
There are mild cases and there are severe ones, the mild ones are far more common than you might think, and are evident everywhere from the local used car lot to the upper management of large corporations. Note also that sociopaths can get worse over time, if they find themselves in a situation that rewards their bad behavior (or at least doesn't discourage it.) You're probably not going to be able to tell if your local shopkeeper is unable to empathize with another person... he can still be a perfectly good businessman and do all the right things to make that business successful. The Ken Lays, Bernie Ebbers, and Carly "The American worker doesn't have a God-given right to a job" Fiorinas stand out only because of the magnitude of their sociopathy... but lesser examples abound.
Just look at the problem the United States is having caring for the elderly. Nobody gives a damn about these people, not even their own children who would rather abandon them in a nursing home and ignore them until they die alone (and the staff of many of these fine institutions are no better.) America is fast becoming a sociopathic culture, my friend. And those uncaring people that willingly leave their parents to die slowly in a tiny room all by themselves sometimes become corporate execs. How can one expect them to treat their employees any better?
Yes, but this is Slashdot, where tacky is in, bucko. Besides, it's just a quote from The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer.
And you're right... neither company has much to recommend it anymore, at least not in comparison to what they once were. And that's too bad, particularly in the case of Hewlett-Packard. Sadly, that can be said of a lot of once-great American manufacturers. Heck, HP isn't even an American manufacturer anymore: everything I've seem from them in the past decade or so has had "Made in China" stamped on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I realise the comparison may seem odd, but my point is that being open about problems is a far better way to reach solutions, whatever field it is applied to..
That is actually an excellent example (and hardly off-topic) but in that case as well as software development, it only works when those responsible are actually interested in finding solutions. Far too often the goal is simple suppression of any negative information. That can be for any number of reasons, but true openness requires a degree of, well, maturity that is in rather short supply nowadays. It doesn't help that there are thousands of hungry attorneys out there just waiting to pounce on any misstep (from a purely legal perspective, honesty is not necessarily but the best policy.)
Yes, indeed. As a matter of fact, I understand that Google's hiring test procedures involve having to pee in a cup from several feet away. This tends to select for male engineers with exceptionally large penises, of course, and definitely puts the opposite sex at a disadvantage, but hey ... it's their company.
MS has an image problem when it comes to security
Mere image problems can be corrected by the application of a sufficient quantity of PR dollars. Microsoft's problem is that they have an actual security problem. One that isn't going to go away until they toss their codebase and start over. Or do what Apple did and pick an existing secure OS kernel as the foundation of their next-generation products, but I can't see that happening (Hell freezing over and all that.)
Personally, I think the real reason she left Microsoft is because she hit the glass ceiling.
Heh. Heh heh heh.
The reason that would be a waste of time is that most of these people are really, really smart.
... it might even be an expensive process, but from society's perspective, so would be another Enron. If you're gonna pay a prospective CEO a few million a year in salary (not to mention stock options and any golden parachute) it might be worth spending a few grand up front to see if the guy is actually human on the inside.
Not that smart. In-depth personality profiles (like the MMPI I mentioned in my original post) can be extremely difficult to fudge, unless you have an eidetic memory. Sociopathy can be detected
I don't believe (and America's recent experience with corporate America would seem to bear me out) that threats of punishment have much effect on high-level sociopaths. For a deterrent to have any effect, those to whom it is aimed must believe that they are susceptible to it. Most of these people don't, and when you get in the realm of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, odds are they aren't much frightened of the law. And even if they are, they will probably consider the rewards to far outweigh the risk. They're right about that, that's for sure.
That was the point of my post: you can't really deter those who have no business or personal ethic, or simply don't have the ability to be afraid of any deterrent you provide. The only rational solution is the eliminate them before they achieve positions of power, rather than wait until they do what they inevitably will. That can be done, but any such solution will be fought tooth and nail by the nut jobs already in power.
Whether or not plugging a leak is an admirable goal depends entirely on the nature of what was being leaked.
Well, since bus drivers and construction workers (and, yes, software engineers) have to take invasive tests (I had to pee in a cup ... kinda irritated me at the time but I wanted the job and they didn't require any kind of non-compete agreement so I figured it was a reasonable tradeoff) of one sort or another in order to obtain work, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be a requirement for corporate upper management to have to take an APD test. At the very least, they should have to take something like the old MMPI so that we have at least some idea if they are complete whackjobs or not.
... that's rather private data and isn't something that most people would want available to anyone, but if you're not willing to submit to such a test, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to run a major corporation.
I'm not saying that should result in their not being hired for such positions: that would depend upon an individual corporation's policies. But if the results of such testing were required to be a matter of public record, it would be the first thing a potential investor would examine. It would also discourage other sociopaths from even applying for such positions: the last thing a true sociopath wants is to be unmasked. Yes, I know
Now, granted, there are those that will complain that such testing and publication would be grossly unfair and violate various civil liberties and all that. And I suppose they'll be right in that: I'm not an attorney so I have no idea of what laws such testing would run afoul. But the unfortunately reality is that many of these individuals absolutely cannot be trusted and some means of early detection needs to be put in place. It really doesn't help when the Ken Lays and Bernie Ebbers and others like them are eventually caught (if they are ever caught) because by then the damage has been done, people have been hurt. Look at what Ms. Fiorina accomplished in just a few short years, and managed to walk away from scot-free. It's also obvious that stringing a few of them up hasn't had the desired deterrent effect either. And why should it? If you feel that you're above the law you're not going to let the law get in your way.
My girlfriend and I walked out of Walgreen's ... and the detector went off. The only things we had bought were a couple of Cokes that we we're carrying in our hands. We're regular customers so nobody gave us a hard time: but we stood there in front of the detector pylons going through her purse to see what was going on. Turned out that every time her compact mirror (it was in a metal case) touched a particular metallic lipstick tube the buzzer would sound. I have no idea how that's possible but it was weird.
Good question. There are several commercially-available DOS clones that have various levels of support attached (not that Microsoft's "support" of MS-DOS was all that valuable anyway) and those are used heavily, particularly for embedded apps. DOS is also a very old, very stable, relatively predictable environment. It's pretty much a commodity item, doesn't change much, and there really isn't much support actually required anymore. That's obviously not the case for a commercial Windows or Linux application, but for DOS stuff you can get away with it.
In any event, if you're in a situation where you are actually using MS-DOS, support is a good reason to go with an open-source option such as FreeDOS, assuming it's compatible enough. If nothing else, you can support it yourself if you have the expertise.
Fog of War == Blind as a Bat
Just out of curiosity, may I ask the nature of your application? It's good to hear about DOS development now and then.
Sorry, I forgot about ME since, well, a lot of people including Microsoft wish they could forget ME. But so far as the general user bases of Windows 9x and ME was concerned, DOS didn't exist and that's pretty much how Microsoft wanted it. But from the standpoint of someone like myself that was developing and shipping DOS apps at the time, I wasn't happy about having to use a product as my primary operating system that was being treated as a mere loader program for Microsoft Windows. At that point, I just stuck with DOS 6.22 since at least it was sold as a standalone product and I'd had some years experience with it.
... a lot of them appear to have come from the Linux/Unix world. Many of the apps included in FreeDOS are Linux ports, and as I said before the whole thing has rather a Linux distro feel to it (that's not necessarily bad, but it's definitely different.) They don't claim it's perfect yet either: for example, I noticed that some of the commands (like CHKDSK!) don't handle FAT32 yet, and LFN support is spotty.
You're right in what you say about FreeDOS, but to be fair they do include a copy of the 4DOS shell with the full package, which I immediately switched to when I was playing around with it (their shell didn't feel right, I agree.) I had used 4DOS for years and became very comfortable with it. And you're right about their developers not all being DOS users
Still, unlike MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS and the usual DOS boxes it's a GPLed open-source product so if there's sufficient interest I expect those nitpicks to get fixed.
Because you can't buy MS-DOS even if you wanted to. Besides, FreeDOS offers a lot more capabilities than MS-DOS 7.x ever had. 7.x was the final release of MS-DOS, and it was never sold as a standalone product, only as part of Windows 9x.
And if DOS is important to you (as it is to many, many people and companies) and completely open-source GPL'ed version that is beyond Microsoft's reach is certainly a good thing.
Couldn't agree more, probably because I've spent about twenty-odd years in industrial control. The embedded world runs a Texas shitload of DOS, and the arrogance of people that assume that if it doesn't run from a hard disk and have a GUI it's obsolete just astounds me. FreeDOS claims that it can be ROMmed ... if so, it's a viable replacement for a lot of expensive industrial DOS clones out there (datalight and others.) People just don't realize the sheer number of embedded systems that support their lifestyles, they really don't.
Forgetting the embedded space for a moment, I downloaded FreeDOS 1.0 yesterday just for the heck of it, and installed it on an old P166 laptop I had lying around. I dumped a bunch of MP3 files onto it, and immediately began playing them with the included MPXPlay package. It took a while to get TCP/IP working on a 3COM 3C575 Cardbus adapter, but once that was done I had a nice DOS system with browsing, email, and a ton of other stuff.
As a matter of fact, FreeDOS is organized much like a typical Linux distro (even uses some of the standard DOS disk tools that come with most Linuxes) and includes a lot of applications if you get the full download. Memory management is very good: right out of the box it got more conventional RAM than I ever got with QEMM in years past. Some of the utilities are still a bit lacking in support for FAT32 and LFN, but overall a very useful package. Jim Hall and other contributors to the project are to be commended for their efforts.
DOS is as obsolete as the internal combustion engine.
Because those "special cases" aren't necessarily obvious, which is the point I was trying to convey. For example, I sometimes see code using "magic numbers". That irritates me because it isn't readily apparent why the programmer multiplied a float by, say, .03092938E-3 to get the desired result (usually several constants were boiled down to one.) Often there are good reasons for coding that way, particularly in embedded systems with limited resources. But for the guy who comes along later, undocumented crap like that make it very time-consuming to rewrite a large body of code from scratch because you spend half your time deciphering the contents of the original developer's head. I guess what it comes down to is that code that wasn't designed and written well at the outset is hard to maintain and even harder to rewrite. I try to code for the future, which means thinking about maintainability as I work, but when you're dealing with a large base of legacy code you have to move deliberately and carefully.
If crimes committed in real life could be punished in a game, I'd be ... oh wait.
Well, maybe not completely impossible ... but the reality is that code tends to move from elegance to thorniness, and not the other way 'round. Call it ScrewMaster's Rule of Developmental Entropy. Fixes for this and fixes for that: over time the code will be inelegant as hell yet reliable and perfectly functional, but nobody in their right mind would dare try to rewrite it because nobody remembers why all those hacks and patches are there. I deal with that a lot in some of the older code I have to support and maintain. I wasn't the original coder, and I'd love to dig in and rewrite some of the stuff that truly offends my engineering sensibilities. I don't dare, however, because if I did I'd miss some of the special cases taken care of by all the thorns, wreak havoc amongst our customers, and would probably end up spending just as much time to make my new code work as well as the old. At which point, it would be just as thorny anyway.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that it is very difficult (if not impossible) for even a very good, clean, thoughtful initial design to account for all the eventualities that a codebase will have to face. You may truly want to leave that code cleaner when you leave, but odds are that time pressure alone will sometimes leave you with what you know in your heart is a hack. Trying to do everything perfectly all the time takes forever, which is unacceptable in most production environments. 3DRealms may be different in that regard. Certainly they don't mind giving their developers all the time they need.
The United States' various governments have been eroding personal property "rights" for many years now. The essence of ownership is control ... if I don't control it, I don't really own it no matter what a piece of paper says. I bought a home a few years ago, but if I ever get behind on my property taxes (interesting concept in it's own right) my home can be sold out from under me for a fraction of its value just to pay the balance due. Granted, I'm only a few years into my mortgage but even if I pay it off in full, I still have to pay my property taxes. So, really: what does it really mean to say that you "own" a home? If somebody has to power to take it away at any time without compensation ... you don't.
True ... but the issue is less that it is "prior art" (I mean, I've been a programmer for over twenty five years and I'm absolutely sure that I could find something equally stupid somewhere in that morass of code to sue Apple over) but that it is bloody damned obvious. That's really the problem with software patents, in that they aren't protecting novel ideas but existing "prior art" (often developed by someone other than the patent-holder) and the blame for that lies squarely at the feet of the Patent Office (well, Congress, really.) Frankly, if they are no longer competent to judge patent applications effectively, perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to issue them anymore.
Some years ago I called up J.U.L.I.E. and had them mark all the underground stuff my yard so I could dig without accidentally cutting a telephone trunk or punching a hole in a sewer (my town had aboveground power lines, so I wasn't too worried about that.) Once I knew that the space between my neighbor's house and mine was clear, we trenched a length of CAT-5 between our homes so he could share my 4 Mb @Home connection (4 mbit/sec symmetric in those days, pretty cool.) We had a lot of fun with that setup: I had a dozen machines in my basement at the time, and we (and our friends) played Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior and since he was a part of my LAN he could join up anytime. Would have been easier with a WRT54G or a DI624, I suppose, but those weren't available back then.
- Don't connect it to the Internet
- Don't turn it off
No problem.
Better yet, somebody throw up a torrent and link us to it.
I disagree. Sociopathy, as a pathological condition, is not so easily categorized or pigeonholed. Sociopaths are not always so distinct from the regular population, and the fact that they cover themselves so well makes it difficult to estimate their actual numbers. It's not as if sociopathy makes one totally dysfunctional, as many other psychological disorders do, nor is it remotely obvious to the onlooker. They fit in, do their jobs, raise families, often appear to be well above average ... and unless they screw up and get caught doing something unusually bad nobody is the wiser. Hell, many of us admire these awful people because of the very success their illness permits them to achieve.
... he can still be a perfectly good businessman and do all the right things to make that business successful. The Ken Lays, Bernie Ebbers, and Carly "The American worker doesn't have a God-given right to a job" Fiorinas stand out only because of the magnitude of their sociopathy ... but lesser examples abound.
There are mild cases and there are severe ones, the mild ones are far more common than you might think, and are evident everywhere from the local used car lot to the upper management of large corporations. Note also that sociopaths can get worse over time, if they find themselves in a situation that rewards their bad behavior (or at least doesn't discourage it.) You're probably not going to be able to tell if your local shopkeeper is unable to empathize with another person
Just look at the problem the United States is having caring for the elderly. Nobody gives a damn about these people, not even their own children who would rather abandon them in a nursing home and ignore them until they die alone (and the staff of many of these fine institutions are no better.) America is fast becoming a sociopathic culture, my friend. And those uncaring people that willingly leave their parents to die slowly in a tiny room all by themselves sometimes become corporate execs. How can one expect them to treat their employees any better?
Pot, meet kettle...
... neither company has much to recommend it anymore, at least not in comparison to what they once were. And that's too bad, particularly in the case of Hewlett-Packard. Sadly, that can be said of a lot of once-great American manufacturers. Heck, HP isn't even an American manufacturer anymore: everything I've seem from them in the past decade or so has had "Made in China" stamped on it.
Yes, but this is Slashdot, where tacky is in, bucko. Besides, it's just a quote from The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer.
And you're right
sort of tacky to me.