Re:I got pinged once (not SSI/BI) , turned them do
on
Bringing Bandwidth To Iraq
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· Score: 4, Interesting
PTSD is the main concern here ( I noticed you put it in parenthesis). Sure, all those things you could have done with the money would have helped you materially, but imagine going through the rest of your life, unable to get a good night's sleep, haunted by nightmares. Or a car back-firing triggering your nervous system to high-alert. Looking at Arab men on the street, wondering if they have an IED under their shirt. Could you get through grad school like that? You might never be able to rebuild your psyche after that. It would probably permanently change the course of your life.
I've spent some time overseas. While that's nowhere near a war experience, but it was intense enough that it made me an outsider amongst my friends. Their world was so small. I had to find a new contingent of friends who had broader backgrounds. Fortunately some of my other friends have since traveled; now we can relate better. There's a reason vets hang out at the VFW. It's to be with the other guys who have lived through that experience. You would become a totally different person and you would have a new community. I'm not saying that's bad; I'm just saying that all the benefits you would imagine having as a result of becoming a contractor might have to be completely re-evaluated in light of your new path. Hopefully with your practice you would be able to find healing and mental health for yourself and other vets if/when you came back.
My grandpa was in the invasion of Normandy. He never talked about it. A decade after his death, I heard this story: He was trapped behind enemy lines. There was a guard that he had to get past to get back to the allied front. For hours, he bid his time. Finally, the guard relaxed, and sat down to read. My grandfather snuck up and strangled him with a piece of barbed wire. He look at what the guard had been reading -- a handwritten letter and a picture of a young woman. He was so distraught by the time he got back to the front, he couldn't speak. The allies were about to kill him on the spot, because they thought he was a German spy, dressed up in an American uniform as a cover.
I don't know to what extent this story is dramatized. The biggest problem is that he never talked to *anyone*, *ever* about the war. I don't know in what circumstances he told this story. My Uncle told my mom after my grandfather had died, years after, but he doesn't remember where or when he heard it. It was sort of common knowledge among the men in my family.
My mom's family would go out to picnics, and my grandfather would sometimes disappear for hours. My male relatives were hunters; even they couldn't find him. When he came back, he would have no recollection of having disappeared. Everything was normal to him, nothing odd had happened. In my dark times, I imagine him trapped behind enemy Axis lines in some Ohio field, hiding, biding his time a few yards away from a ghostly guard.
"Any software vendors that were doing well in the Mac space did not have too much trouble switching to OSX."
This is the root of the problem. Because Apple had a quality development standard, it served as a filter that kept out bad programming. They were much better able to weather the storm of a platform transition, both internally and and in their development community. Meanwhile, MS has allowed utter crap to fester in their community for far too long. Their current infrastructure, both internally and in their development community, is structure to produce crap. When MS finally makes a decent platform, the developers who produce crap will find that their new quick-and-dirty apps no longer works on the MS system, and they will either have to raise their standards, or get out of the game because now they can't get away with the cheap development they were able to do in the past. I predict there will be a shake-out in terms of the product available on Windows platforms. No more crap, which is a good percentage of the market right now. Developers who were allowed to produce crap for Windows will no longer be able to do so; some will be able to upgrade their product, some won't.
"If a new computer is needed to run VISTA, as well as new software, it might be a good idea to look at Macs or Linux. Linux still needs much more computer knowhow than most people have. What does VISTA offer that Mac OSX10.4 doesn't?"
From a geek perspective, not much. You and I would probably enjoy the experience of learning a new OS, and the process of finding new and exciting alternative to what we are currently using.
However, Joe Dell User wants to spend as little time on the computer as possible. He doesn't want to install linux and find new apps or buy a Mac and learn OSX. That's a chore to him. He just wants to continue to use his quickbooks, as he has for the past 10 years, and do it on Windows, so he doesn't have to spend any more time on the computer than is absolutely necessary. This is the guy that MS relies on for their bread and butter. They can't afford to upset him. And they certainly can't afford to do anything that would cause him to consider another OS. They will have to bite the bullet, understanding that this will be *major* surgery.
"The vast majority of "Windows problems", including - heck, especially - those "Allow/Cancel" annoyances, are the fault of ignorant/incompetent/lazy software developers, not Microsoft."
Right, but the problem from Microsoft's perspective is that Windows will blame Microsoft, rather than the developer who sold them the crappy application. Even though the developer is at fault, MS will take the hit, in the eyes of the user. The user is on the side of the application developer, who gives them what they actually want from the computer -- accounting programs, etc. They view MS as a necessary evil, which allows them to get to their Quickbooks. If Quickbooks breaks, users will blame MS, not Quickbooks.
"What do you propose they change and how/why do you think it will help ?"
First of all, I'm not an OS developer, so I don't know specifically what they have to change. All I see is from a high-level perspective. They've allowed crap development to go own for too long; end-users are now dependent on the crappy products and environment, and when they fix the situation by breaking a lot of bad habits, users will bear the brunt of that transition. What Ms has to fix is their lousy software engineering culture -- both internally and in their developer community. The reason it will help, I believe, is that it will defeat a lot of the shortcuts they have allowed, which allow for easy development, both of end-user products, and also viruses, mal-ware, crappy drivers, ad-ware, etc.
Bottom line, I don't think there's a pain-free way forward for MS. They have to fix their lax development process, which will be painful for users when it comes. It's just a storm that they will have to weather, and it's been a long time building. I guess the quicker the better -- like yanking off a band-aid. The less time it takes, the less time there will be for negative sentiment against MS to fester in the computing public.
But ultimately, I don't know that MS can really take such a leap. Businesses are conservative by nature -- if it isn't broke, don't fix it. If you can get away with selling crappy products with minimal development investment, why should you practice safer programming? Can you convince management that you need to spend more development time creating a more secure application, when they've always been able to get away with less development time in the past? You're asking management to make a sort of 'capital investment' in better engineering, which will cut into margins. If the whole engineering department is set up to make quick-turn around, low-time-investment software and patches, that's what you're set up to make in the future, unless you make large structural changes in your practice. Which takes money, which therefore will be resisted by management. They just want a quick ROI.
I'm tempted to agree with you, given the track record of of the computer market for the home user, but I'm also of the mind that MS has reached the tipping point of being able provide backwards compatability with all the crapware out there that people rely on for the computer experience, defend the system against malware and adware, fail gracefully with crappy drivers, and so do without causing Windows to BSOD.
In the new internet computing environment, MS has to deal with a host of new threats that they didn't adequately prepare for when creating windows. This is exemplified in the 'Allow'/'Cancel' annoyances that early adopters of Vista are dealing with. Soon, MS will have to make a clean break from their crappy development habits, and that will cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst home users and application developers. Their choice will be to either continue crapware and malware to run rampant on Windows, possibly permanently souring the home user against MS products, or seriously break applications, thus demanding that application developers produce decent products.
"What do you mean I can't run Quickbooks on the new Windows? I've been running it for years! I don't care about hackers, just make it work!" "I'm sorry, sir, the new Quickbooks that works with Windows 2009 will be out in 6 months. Until that time you will have to run it on Windows Vista." There are software realities of problems of the Windows system model that will take time to fix, and that will be a painful time for users. Sort of like how Apple had to just let users hang with Adobe apps when they switch hardware architectures*.
This gives us a window of opportunity for a serious alternative to Windows to step up and provide a decent computing experience to Windows users, before MS has finalized a decent Windows environment and vendors have kept their products up with the new security requirements. I remember a time when computer users felt in the dark, and simply trusted whatever crap MS pumped out. Now they feel more competent, understand what they need from the computer (email, web browsing, word processing and spreadsheets). It used to be "I want a computer that will last me a while, therefore I will buy the $2000 model and the latest operating system to ensure that my purchase will last." Now they are beginning to understand that they don't need the latest and greatest to get their work done, they just want it to work, and they don't need to spend a lot of money and have the latest software to get what they want. They will learn if they are forced to go on the upgrade merry-go-round again with no obvious benefit for the costs they incur.
* I may not be remembering this exactly right, but IIRC, there were some apps that just did not work with OSX, and Apple left it up to the manufacturer to fix it, rather than provide backwards compatibility.
You, sir, are exactly right. The delays and debuts of such crappy products explain exactly MS's stance, as they said so so themselves in the Netscape and anti-trust trials; that they can't compete in a free and competitive marketplace. For as successful as they currently are, it could be undone in a matter of months if a serious alternative to MS' Windows ** for the Joe sixpack home user ** became available. Currently, this alternative is not linux. But ubuntu seems to be a great hope.
All MS does is embrace and extend products. For whatever reason, MS hasn't built their company in a way so that they can produce high-quality products. Given the still open nature of PC hardware, and the fact that is it relatively easy to produce multi-platform apps, if there were ever a serious competitor to MS' Windows platform, such as the ReactOS emulator or another incarnation of BEOS, MS would be in serious trouble in short order. They would be forced then to compete in a competitive marketplace, rather than rely on their monopoly position. Their ability to do so is seriously doubtful.
Instead of quality software, they sort of produce product 'hacks', which are buoyed by marketing and their monopolized installation base. All of their windows launches would have been failures in a competitive marketplace.
Expect MS' underhanded techniques to intensify as their position becomes more tenuous. I predict more legislative and hardware DRM pushes on their part. Soon you won't be able to purchase a computer that can run a non-DRM platform such as linux from major retailers, backed by legislation that "protects children against bogeymen," protects the media and software industry against pirates, and helps law enforcement monitor terrorists. It will be MS' only hope.
Given the number of libertarians that post on slashdot, I'm surprised nobody has enlightened you to the concept of Jury Nullification. In the US legal system, juries judge the case *and* the law. Here's more information.
It's part of the social contract. If you want to live in a place without government, move to the middle of the Amazon or Somalia, and live under tribe/gang warfare.
"Can someone please tell me how this can me more than a small nuisance (i.e. that's not me fix it now please)?"
The "now" part escalates it from being a nuisance to a process that can draw out from years. People have reported that it has been resolved at the nuisance level, but I have heard other stories of getting lawyers involved, which is an expensive process here in the US. It also affects your credit score to have outstanding issues, which affects the rate at which people will loan you money. If it takes months or years to resolve, this can pose problems in your life plans.
I think here in the US corporations have a more hostile relationship with their small-time at large public customers. At the beginning, US banks were charging their customers *extra* for on-line banking, even when it cost them less, while my Finnish buddies got the service for free ( Nowadays I think banks provide online banking for free -- maybe they used the initial charges to finance the new online-banking infrastructure they had to build) . Cell phone companies charge extra for text message service, even though it costs them less in terms of network bandwidth than providing voice service. All in all, I think Scandinavian companies still have some idea about providing for the society as a whole, whereas in the US, it's dog eat dog.
The credit card companies are going to lose money if they don't hold you accountable for the fraudulent charges. If they can drag the process out, they get to hold on to the money for that time, earning interest on it, and if you get frustrated and give up, they get to keep the money. And our lawmakers have no interest in interfering with the profitability of large corporations, over the interests of the consumer. That's my guess as to why it's more difficult in the US.
Twice I've had my credit card stolen (one local mugging and one pick-pocket over seas, and the fradulent charges were resolved in 3 months. However, when I initially reported my credit card stolen, the first company simply gave me mailed me another card with the same number, which means my account wasn't canceled and allowed the mugger to run up fraudulent charges. I called them a few hours after I was mugged. The second time, they canceled the *wrong* card. I called them the day after I got mugged, and the operator confirmed the card number she was canceling, which was the correct card when she read it to me. Fortunately the pick-pocketer didn't run up any bad charges; maybe he thought my cc company was on the ball and would cancel the card ( or maybe he couldn't get away with using a foreigner's card in the cash economy of Bolivia ). But this did give me problems with the legitimate companies who had my non-stolen but canceled card number. My conspiratorial mind says such 'mistakes' also makes money for the card company.
FYI, Wayne Madsen's conspiracy theory is that these data thefts are a black op that is being used to populate Total Information Awareness databases, which itself now is a black op.
"Hell, even a bank account with 1% interest would give you a better return than social security,"
Not if you get disabled at 25 and you draw social security benefits for the rest of your life.
Social Security is an insurance program. If we got rid of it, we would have destitute old people living out on the streets, like they did during the depression. If that's the society you want to live in, fine. I don't want to see that one bit.
"If so, why doesn't the body make more of it already? Would that be too biologically expensive, or would that have problematic effects we haven't recognized yet?"
The reason that we don't have more of it already is that there has been no selective pressure on our genome to produce more of it. That is, we reproduce ourselves well enough without it.
"Yeah, I'm not sure why anyone starting to build their infrastructure (not already locked in) would want to start with Windows. Even at $3 a copy, that's $3 more than Linux."
Well, maybe not. If MS is providing a retail box or install CDs for $3, that might actually beat the cost of acquiring linux. Here in the US, the market is fairly saturated with CD burners and broadband, but in the 3rd world, it might cost significantly more to download and burn a CD. I'm thinking of internet cafes that I've been in Ecuador and Bolivia.
Well, the novel claims to be non-fiction. If Sinclair had written this, and it wasn't true, why didn't the meat packing industry sue him for libel? Think of how much monetary damage he caused the meat industry by writing that book. Nobody could be sure that they weren't eating human flesh when they bought canned meat or lard!
I think you're right. Most libertarians would frown on mandatory labeling, but this particular libertarian proposed a system where the only function of government is to require and oversee accurate labeling. It was an interesting thought experiment.
"Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,--for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!"
That's the direct reference. Also note:
"There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,--they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off."
Do you think that all those lost digits were fished out of the machinery?
Before the FDA, there was *no* regulation whatsoever on food or drugs. States and municipalities might have them, but if not, what happened in the slaughterhouse stayed in the slaughterhouse.
Can you tell me more about the hybrid nature of corn? I had read that it was a few mutations different from its wild cousin, Teosinte. Or are you saying that most of the corn grown around the world is a modern hybrid of existing corn varieties?
I've read some libertarian postings that propose a complete and accurate information should be the only regulation that government imposes on business. Besides the problems that that poses as far as infrastructure and business cost, I can't think of a problem with it.
If we left labeling solely up to corporations, all we would get would be informationless, quasi-inaccurate or misleading feel-good marketing BS, or no labeling at all. Marketing is emotional manipulation, not factual communication. Back in the good old days, before the FDA, if a plant worker fell in the meat-processing machinery, a lot of people would wind up eating human flesh from a can of pork. I guess I can't say I would have a problem avoiding a can of meat that contained some amount of human flesh, so long as it was accurately labeled;)
"There are so many problems with FOREIGN KEYs that we don't know where to start."
These problems with foreign keys -- are they encountered when you are trying to develop them in the database you are making, or when a user actually uses them? I suspect that the developers were talking about the former.
"Gosh, it's so hard to program these damn foreign keys. You know what? We really don't need them, after all. Here's why..."
"My life hasn't changed; therefore everything the government has done it okay by me."
I, for one, don't like that my government has detained innocent people in Gitmo, or has tortured people. We used to be the good guys; now we are no longer.
But that doesn't affect me or you directly (I'm assuming you don't have a friend or relative in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib), so you might not care about it. I wonder, do you care that your government is monitoring your internet traffic, or making social network maps of everybody's calls, including yours?
Has the FBI searched your place while you were away? You may have no way of knowing if they have. What about the FBI reviewing the books you have checked out from the library?
How about the Total Information Awareness project, which aims to collect *every bit* of electronic data about *everybody* ( medical records, phone records, credit card purchases, library records, etc. ). Yes, the TIA program was disbanded due to public outcry. However, it's various functions have just been dissembled and given to various smaller projects. Information Awareness Office.
If nothing bad has happened to you so far, do you worry about potential abuse from future politicians?
Microsoft: "Guys? Hey guys! The browser wars are over! Can you hear me? The _war_ is _over_! Go ahead and lay down your weapons! Stop fighting! That's right, come out come out wherever you are! Put down the guns!"
The animal I was referring to was the sea squirt, and I mischaracterized it. In the first phase of its life, it has two ganglia, digestive and cerebral. When it implants itself onto coral, it consumes the cerebral ganglia and the digestive ganglia remains. So apparently all that the cerebral ganglia is used for is swimming.
"'m not entirely sure where intelligence fits into that. Like you said, it really moves us out of that system. In a lot of ways, the ability to create technology allows humans to "cheat the system""
I kind of disagree with your statement. There are plenty of successful life forms, such as bacteria, plants, corals, jellyfish, that have no intelligence ( they have no nerves, thus they cannot think in the classical sense, but some time in the future we might describe other biological processes, such as quorum sensing, that can be defined as 'thinking'. As it stands, we don't really have a definition for 'thought', as in what humans do. On one end of the spectrum, we have a native awareness of our own intelligence and though processes -- perhaps we can call this meta-thought or self-awareness -- and then we can see that the brain and the nervous system are the organs and tissues that generate this capability, therefore organism with nervous systems are capable of thought at some level. But we haven't yet bridged the gap between nerves and thoughts. We know *where* in the brain certain types of thoughts and emotions occur, but we haven't made the definitional jump from electro-chemical activity in nervous tissues to a particular emotion or thought ).
You seem to indicate that humans are still 'special' in some sense. There is an old western world-view, related to the Great Chain of Being and the various creation myths that describe man as half-animal or half-matter and half-spirit, a combination of material and divinity. It holds that you are not solely your body, but the real 'you' is a 'soul' or immaterial being that inhabits or co-exists with your body. Modern biology gives us no reason to believe we are any better, special or different than any other animal out there, yet people still try to find some way to place us outside evolution and material existence in some respect. Since the only valid evidence we accept these days are scientific, we latch onto some uniquely human feature, such as abstract thought, tool-use, language, etc. and then say say that that feature separates "us" from "the animals", rather than just saying we are another animal with a unique trait. "See? We aren't completely animal. We are still special".
I see no reason to categorize intelligence or language as conferring a special status on human beings. It's just another evolutionary feature like eyeballs or echolocation.
There is one view of intelligence that says that intelligence arises as a response of an organism that has muscles and needs to navigate through the environment. ( sorry, off the top of my head, I can't find a reference ). There is some animal that is the examplar of this theory -- again I can't remember what it is -- that begins its life as a tiny swimming creature in the ocean. Since it moves and swims, it has a nervous system that it uses to navigate to find its more permanent home. Once it finds a proper rock, it attaches itself and enters a vegetative phase, where it loses its entire nervous system. It lives just like a plant, filtering nutrient from the passing ocean water. So why did it ever have a nervous system? Apparently just to swim around. If a nervous system, and thus thought at some level, is such an all-around benefit, why would it have evolved to lose its nervous system at this stage of life? Well, it just isn't necessary. So the nervous system isn't special; this creature does not 'de-volve' at the vegetative stage of its life. Rather, it has a temporary adaption to its environment and its mode of interaction with that environment. Thinking is just for navigating and moving a mobile body. Of course, we have the most complex nervous system that we know of so far, but again, I don't think that places us in a special category or outside evolution.
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I'm curious, what brands do you consume?
PTSD is the main concern here ( I noticed you put it in parenthesis). Sure, all those things you could have done with the money would have helped you materially, but imagine going through the rest of your life, unable to get a good night's sleep, haunted by nightmares. Or a car back-firing triggering your nervous system to high-alert. Looking at Arab men on the street, wondering if they have an IED under their shirt. Could you get through grad school like that? You might never be able to rebuild your psyche after that. It would probably permanently change the course of your life.
I've spent some time overseas. While that's nowhere near a war experience, but it was intense enough that it made me an outsider amongst my friends. Their world was so small. I had to find a new contingent of friends who had broader backgrounds. Fortunately some of my other friends have since traveled; now we can relate better. There's a reason vets hang out at the VFW. It's to be with the other guys who have lived through that experience. You would become a totally different person and you would have a new community. I'm not saying that's bad; I'm just saying that all the benefits you would imagine having as a result of becoming a contractor might have to be completely re-evaluated in light of your new path. Hopefully with your practice you would be able to find healing and mental health for yourself and other vets if/when you came back.
My grandpa was in the invasion of Normandy. He never talked about it. A decade after his death, I heard this story: He was trapped behind enemy lines. There was a guard that he had to get past to get back to the allied front. For hours, he bid his time. Finally, the guard relaxed, and sat down to read. My grandfather snuck up and strangled him with a piece of barbed wire. He look at what the guard had been reading -- a handwritten letter and a picture of a young woman. He was so distraught by the time he got back to the front, he couldn't speak. The allies were about to kill him on the spot, because they thought he was a German spy, dressed up in an American uniform as a cover.
I don't know to what extent this story is dramatized. The biggest problem is that he never talked to *anyone*, *ever* about the war. I don't know in what circumstances he told this story. My Uncle told my mom after my grandfather had died, years after, but he doesn't remember where or when he heard it. It was sort of common knowledge among the men in my family.
My mom's family would go out to picnics, and my grandfather would sometimes disappear for hours. My male relatives were hunters; even they couldn't find him. When he came back, he would have no recollection of having disappeared. Everything was normal to him, nothing odd had happened. In my dark times, I imagine him trapped behind enemy Axis lines in some Ohio field, hiding, biding his time a few yards away from a ghostly guard.
I don't think you made the wrong decision at all.
Hopefully for MS, Vista will be the transition to quality programming that they have had to make for a long time now.
"Any software vendors that were doing well in the Mac space did not have too much trouble switching to OSX."
This is the root of the problem. Because Apple had a quality development standard, it served as a filter that kept out bad programming. They were much better able to weather the storm of a platform transition, both internally and and in their development community. Meanwhile, MS has allowed utter crap to fester in their community for far too long. Their current infrastructure, both internally and in their development community, is structure to produce crap. When MS finally makes a decent platform, the developers who produce crap will find that their new quick-and-dirty apps no longer works on the MS system, and they will either have to raise their standards, or get out of the game because now they can't get away with the cheap development they were able to do in the past. I predict there will be a shake-out in terms of the product available on Windows platforms. No more crap, which is a good percentage of the market right now. Developers who were allowed to produce crap for Windows will no longer be able to do so; some will be able to upgrade their product, some won't.
"If a new computer is needed to run VISTA, as well as new software, it might be a good idea to look at Macs or Linux. Linux still needs much more computer knowhow than most people have. What does VISTA offer that Mac OSX10.4 doesn't?"
From a geek perspective, not much. You and I would probably enjoy the experience of learning a new OS, and the process of finding new and exciting alternative to what we are currently using.
However, Joe Dell User wants to spend as little time on the computer as possible. He doesn't want to install linux and find new apps or buy a Mac and learn OSX. That's a chore to him. He just wants to continue to use his quickbooks, as he has for the past 10 years, and do it on Windows, so he doesn't have to spend any more time on the computer than is absolutely necessary. This is the guy that MS relies on for their bread and butter. They can't afford to upset him. And they certainly can't afford to do anything that would cause him to consider another OS. They will have to bite the bullet, understanding that this will be *major* surgery.
"The vast majority of "Windows problems", including - heck, especially - those "Allow/Cancel" annoyances, are the fault of ignorant/incompetent/lazy software developers, not Microsoft."
Right, but the problem from Microsoft's perspective is that Windows will blame Microsoft, rather than the developer who sold them the crappy application. Even though the developer is at fault, MS will take the hit, in the eyes of the user. The user is on the side of the application developer, who gives them what they actually want from the computer -- accounting programs, etc. They view MS as a necessary evil, which allows them to get to their Quickbooks. If Quickbooks breaks, users will blame MS, not Quickbooks.
"What do you propose they change and how/why do you think it will help ?"
First of all, I'm not an OS developer, so I don't know specifically what they have to change. All I see is from a high-level perspective. They've allowed crap development to go own for too long; end-users are now dependent on the crappy products and environment, and when they fix the situation by breaking a lot of bad habits, users will bear the brunt of that transition. What Ms has to fix is their lousy software engineering culture -- both internally and in their developer community. The reason it will help, I believe, is that it will defeat a lot of the shortcuts they have allowed, which allow for easy development, both of end-user products, and also viruses, mal-ware, crappy drivers, ad-ware, etc.
Bottom line, I don't think there's a pain-free way forward for MS. They have to fix their lax development process, which will be painful for users when it comes. It's just a storm that they will have to weather, and it's been a long time building. I guess the quicker the better -- like yanking off a band-aid. The less time it takes, the less time there will be for negative sentiment against MS to fester in the computing public.
But ultimately, I don't know that MS can really take such a leap. Businesses are conservative by nature -- if it isn't broke, don't fix it. If you can get away with selling crappy products with minimal development investment, why should you practice safer programming? Can you convince management that you need to spend more development time creating a more secure application, when they've always been able to get away with less development time in the past? You're asking management to make a sort of 'capital investment' in better engineering, which will cut into margins. If the whole engineering department is set up to make quick-turn around, low-time-investment software and patches, that's what you're set up to make in the future, unless you make large structural changes in your practice. Which takes money, which therefore will be resisted by management. They just want a quick ROI.
I'm tempted to agree with you, given the track record of of the computer market for the home user, but I'm also of the mind that MS has reached the tipping point of being able provide backwards compatability with all the crapware out there that people rely on for the computer experience, defend the system against malware and adware, fail gracefully with crappy drivers, and so do without causing Windows to BSOD.
In the new internet computing environment, MS has to deal with a host of new threats that they didn't adequately prepare for when creating windows. This is exemplified in the 'Allow'/'Cancel' annoyances that early adopters of Vista are dealing with. Soon, MS will have to make a clean break from their crappy development habits, and that will cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst home users and application developers. Their choice will be to either continue crapware and malware to run rampant on Windows, possibly permanently souring the home user against MS products, or seriously break applications, thus demanding that application developers produce decent products.
"What do you mean I can't run Quickbooks on the new Windows? I've been running it for years! I don't care about hackers, just make it work!" "I'm sorry, sir, the new Quickbooks that works with Windows 2009 will be out in 6 months. Until that time you will have to run it on Windows Vista." There are software realities of problems of the Windows system model that will take time to fix, and that will be a painful time for users. Sort of like how Apple had to just let users hang with Adobe apps when they switch hardware architectures*.
This gives us a window of opportunity for a serious alternative to Windows to step up and provide a decent computing experience to Windows users, before MS has finalized a decent Windows environment and vendors have kept their products up with the new security requirements. I remember a time when computer users felt in the dark, and simply trusted whatever crap MS pumped out. Now they feel more competent, understand what they need from the computer (email, web browsing, word processing and spreadsheets). It used to be "I want a computer that will last me a while, therefore I will buy the $2000 model and the latest operating system to ensure that my purchase will last." Now they are beginning to understand that they don't need the latest and greatest to get their work done, they just want it to work, and they don't need to spend a lot of money and have the latest software to get what they want. They will learn if they are forced to go on the upgrade merry-go-round again with no obvious benefit for the costs they incur.
* I may not be remembering this exactly right, but IIRC, there were some apps that just did not work with OSX, and Apple left it up to the manufacturer to fix it, rather than provide backwards compatibility.
You, sir, are exactly right. The delays and debuts of such crappy products explain exactly MS's stance, as they said so so themselves in the Netscape and anti-trust trials; that they can't compete in a free and competitive marketplace. For as successful as they currently are, it could be undone in a matter of months if a serious alternative to MS' Windows ** for the Joe sixpack home user ** became available. Currently, this alternative is not linux. But ubuntu seems to be a great hope.
All MS does is embrace and extend products. For whatever reason, MS hasn't built their company in a way so that they can produce high-quality products. Given the still open nature of PC hardware, and the fact that is it relatively easy to produce multi-platform apps, if there were ever a serious competitor to MS' Windows platform, such as the ReactOS emulator or another incarnation of BEOS, MS would be in serious trouble in short order. They would be forced then to compete in a competitive marketplace, rather than rely on their monopoly position. Their ability to do so is seriously doubtful.
Instead of quality software, they sort of produce product 'hacks', which are buoyed by marketing and their monopolized installation base. All of their windows launches would have been failures in a competitive marketplace.
Expect MS' underhanded techniques to intensify as their position becomes more tenuous. I predict more legislative and hardware DRM pushes on their part. Soon you won't be able to purchase a computer that can run a non-DRM platform such as linux from major retailers, backed by legislation that "protects children against bogeymen," protects the media and software industry against pirates, and helps law enforcement monitor terrorists. It will be MS' only hope.
Given the number of libertarians that post on slashdot, I'm surprised nobody has enlightened you to the concept of Jury Nullification. In the US legal system, juries judge the case *and* the law. Here's more information.
It's part of the social contract. If you want to live in a place without government, move to the middle of the Amazon or Somalia, and live under tribe/gang warfare.
"Can someone please tell me how this can me more than a small nuisance (i.e. that's not me fix it now please)?"
The "now" part escalates it from being a nuisance to a process that can draw out from years. People have reported that it has been resolved at the nuisance level, but I have heard other stories of getting lawyers involved, which is an expensive process here in the US. It also affects your credit score to have outstanding issues, which affects the rate at which people will loan you money. If it takes months or years to resolve, this can pose problems in your life plans.
I think here in the US corporations have a more hostile relationship with their small-time at large public customers. At the beginning, US banks were charging their customers *extra* for on-line banking, even when it cost them less, while my Finnish buddies got the service for free ( Nowadays I think banks provide online banking for free -- maybe they used the initial charges to finance the new online-banking infrastructure they had to build) . Cell phone companies charge extra for text message service, even though it costs them less in terms of network bandwidth than providing voice service. All in all, I think Scandinavian companies still have some idea about providing for the society as a whole, whereas in the US, it's dog eat dog.
The credit card companies are going to lose money if they don't hold you accountable for the fraudulent charges. If they can drag the process out, they get to hold on to the money for that time, earning interest on it, and if you get frustrated and give up, they get to keep the money. And our lawmakers have no interest in interfering with the profitability of large corporations, over the interests of the consumer. That's my guess as to why it's more difficult in the US.
Twice I've had my credit card stolen (one local mugging and one pick-pocket over seas, and the fradulent charges were resolved in 3 months. However, when I initially reported my credit card stolen, the first company simply gave me mailed me another card with the same number, which means my account wasn't canceled and allowed the mugger to run up fraudulent charges. I called them a few hours after I was mugged. The second time, they canceled the *wrong* card. I called them the day after I got mugged, and the operator confirmed the card number she was canceling, which was the correct card when she read it to me. Fortunately the pick-pocketer didn't run up any bad charges; maybe he thought my cc company was on the ball and would cancel the card ( or maybe he couldn't get away with using a foreigner's card in the cash economy of Bolivia ). But this did give me problems with the legitimate companies who had my non-stolen but canceled card number. My conspiratorial mind says such 'mistakes' also makes money for the card company.
FYI, Wayne Madsen's conspiracy theory is that these data thefts are a black op that is being used to populate Total Information Awareness databases, which itself now is a black op.
"Hell, even a bank account with 1% interest would give you a better return than social security,"
Not if you get disabled at 25 and you draw social security benefits for the rest of your life.
Social Security is an insurance program. If we got rid of it, we would have destitute old people living out on the streets, like they did during the depression. If that's the society you want to live in, fine. I don't want to see that one bit.
A chart of personal data stolen from laptops from government organizations, schools, and corporations.
"Does this stuff affect other viruses? "
Perhaps, but probably not.
"If so, why doesn't the body make more of it already? Would that be too biologically expensive, or would that have problematic effects we haven't recognized yet?"
The reason that we don't have more of it already is that there has been no selective pressure on our genome to produce more of it. That is, we reproduce ourselves well enough without it.
"Yeah, I'm not sure why anyone starting to build their infrastructure (not already locked in) would want to start with Windows. Even at $3 a copy, that's $3 more than Linux."
Well, maybe not. If MS is providing a retail box or install CDs for $3, that might actually beat the cost of acquiring linux. Here in the US, the market is fairly saturated with CD burners and broadband, but in the 3rd world, it might cost significantly more to download and burn a CD. I'm thinking of internet cafes that I've been in Ecuador and Bolivia.
Well, the novel claims to be non-fiction. If Sinclair had written this, and it wasn't true, why didn't the meat packing industry sue him for libel? Think of how much monetary damage he caused the meat industry by writing that book. Nobody could be sure that they weren't eating human flesh when they bought canned meat or lard!
I think you're right. Most libertarians would frown on mandatory labeling, but this particular libertarian proposed a system where the only function of government is to require and oversee accurate labeling. It was an interesting thought experiment.
From Upton Sinclair's The Jungle:
"Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,--for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! "
That's the direct reference. Also note:
"There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,--they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off."
Do you think that all those lost digits were fished out of the machinery?
Before the FDA, there was *no* regulation whatsoever on food or drugs. States and municipalities might have them, but if not, what happened in the slaughterhouse stayed in the slaughterhouse.
Can you tell me more about the hybrid nature of corn? I had read that it was a few mutations different from its wild cousin, Teosinte. Or are you saying that most of the corn grown around the world is a modern hybrid of existing corn varieties?
I've read some libertarian postings that propose a complete and accurate information should be the only regulation that government imposes on business. Besides the problems that that poses as far as infrastructure and business cost, I can't think of a problem with it.
;)
If we left labeling solely up to corporations, all we would get would be informationless, quasi-inaccurate or misleading feel-good marketing BS, or no labeling at all. Marketing is emotional manipulation, not factual communication. Back in the good old days, before the FDA, if a plant worker fell in the meat-processing machinery, a lot of people would wind up eating human flesh from a can of pork. I guess I can't say I would have a problem avoiding a can of meat that contained some amount of human flesh, so long as it was accurately labeled
"There are so many problems with FOREIGN KEYs that we don't know where to start."
These problems with foreign keys -- are they encountered when you are trying to develop them in the database you are making, or when a user actually uses them? I suspect that the developers were talking about the former.
"Gosh, it's so hard to program these damn foreign keys. You know what? We really don't need them, after all. Here's why..."
"My life hasn't changed; therefore everything the government has done it okay by me."
I, for one, don't like that my government has detained innocent people in Gitmo, or has tortured people. We used to be the good guys; now we are no longer.
But that doesn't affect me or you directly (I'm assuming you don't have a friend or relative in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib), so you might not care about it. I wonder, do you care that your government is monitoring your internet traffic, or making social network maps of everybody's calls, including yours?
Has the FBI searched your place while you were away? You may have no way of knowing if they have. What about the FBI reviewing the books you have checked out from the library?
How about the Total Information Awareness project, which aims to collect *every bit* of electronic data about *everybody* ( medical records, phone records, credit card purchases, library records, etc. ). Yes, the TIA program was disbanded due to public outcry. However, it's various functions have just been dissembled and given to various smaller projects. Information Awareness Office.
If nothing bad has happened to you so far, do you worry about potential abuse from future politicians?
Microsoft: "Guys? Hey guys! The browser wars are over! Can you hear me? The _war_ is _over_! Go ahead and lay down your weapons! Stop fighting! That's right, come out come out wherever you are! Put down the guns!"
The animal I was referring to was the sea squirt, and I mischaracterized it. In the first phase of its life, it has two ganglia, digestive and cerebral. When it implants itself onto coral, it consumes the cerebral ganglia and the digestive ganglia remains. So apparently all that the cerebral ganglia is used for is swimming.
"'m not entirely sure where intelligence fits into that. Like you said, it really moves us out of that system. In a lot of ways, the ability to create technology allows humans to "cheat the system""
I kind of disagree with your statement. There are plenty of successful life forms, such as bacteria, plants, corals, jellyfish, that have no intelligence ( they have no nerves, thus they cannot think in the classical sense, but some time in the future we might describe other biological processes, such as quorum sensing, that can be defined as 'thinking'. As it stands, we don't really have a definition for 'thought', as in what humans do. On one end of the spectrum, we have a native awareness of our own intelligence and though processes -- perhaps we can call this meta-thought or self-awareness -- and then we can see that the brain and the nervous system are the organs and tissues that generate this capability, therefore organism with nervous systems are capable of thought at some level. But we haven't yet bridged the gap between nerves and thoughts. We know *where* in the brain certain types of thoughts and emotions occur, but we haven't made the definitional jump from electro-chemical activity in nervous tissues to a particular emotion or thought ).
You seem to indicate that humans are still 'special' in some sense. There is an old western world-view, related to the Great Chain of Being and the various creation myths that describe man as half-animal or half-matter and half-spirit, a combination of material and divinity. It holds that you are not solely your body, but the real 'you' is a 'soul' or immaterial being that inhabits or co-exists with your body. Modern biology gives us no reason to believe we are any better, special or different than any other animal out there, yet people still try to find some way to place us outside evolution and material existence in some respect. Since the only valid evidence we accept these days are scientific, we latch onto some uniquely human feature, such as abstract thought, tool-use, language, etc. and then say say that that feature separates "us" from "the animals", rather than just saying we are another animal with a unique trait. "See? We aren't completely animal. We are still special".
I see no reason to categorize intelligence or language as conferring a special status on human beings. It's just another evolutionary feature like eyeballs or echolocation.
There is one view of intelligence that says that intelligence arises as a response of an organism that has muscles and needs to navigate through the environment. ( sorry, off the top of my head, I can't find a reference ). There is some animal that is the examplar of this theory -- again I can't remember what it is -- that begins its life as a tiny swimming creature in the ocean. Since it moves and swims, it has a nervous system that it uses to navigate to find its more permanent home. Once it finds a proper rock, it attaches itself and enters a vegetative phase, where it loses its entire nervous system. It lives just like a plant, filtering nutrient from the passing ocean water. So why did it ever have a nervous system? Apparently just to swim around. If a nervous system, and thus thought at some level, is such an all-around benefit, why would it have evolved to lose its nervous system at this stage of life? Well, it just isn't necessary. So the nervous system isn't special; this creature does not 'de-volve' at the vegetative stage of its life. Rather, it has a temporary adaption to its environment and its mode of interaction with that environment. Thinking is just for navigating and moving a mobile body. Of course, we have the most complex nervous system that we know of so far, but again, I don't think that places us in a special category or outside evolution.