If anything, its just an indication that we're running out of things to replace with computers...;) Lets just hope IT investors didn't read your post or they might start thinking that there are some areas in which Computers Dont Solve Your Problems (tm).
Reminds me of the "Life for a Loom" law Luddites were subjected to in the late 1800s (I think).. basically, if you attacked a loom, the penalty was death. (Luddites were seeing their jobs being usurped by looms and harsh factory working conditions, lower wages, etc, so they were attempting to stop the industrialization of the textile industry.)
It's pretty amazing, but this sort of thing has always happened in our technological state. Killing someone is one thing, but impeding "progress" (note the quotes) is severly punished. Of course, "progress" usually involves strenthening the position of the current winners, which is why its usually subject to resistance at some level by the population at large, and why people in power are far more interested in punishing people who impede the furthuring of their interests than punishing the DUI driver who kills somebody they'll never meet.
I think its crazy, but there you have it. This is pretty much a plutocracy (you need money to have your voice heard a la "lobbiest", "analyst", etc), so I'm not sure what methods we can use to oppose these things.
Doesn't it strike you that thats the point of surveys and statistical data? To tell us things about our world which do not neccessarily support our (often incorrect) intuition?
Do not look at your webstats. Your page is probably in english, and resolving geographical location by the top level domain name (.com,.uk, etc) yeilds some very incorrect numbers. I should know, as I work on advertising delivery engines; you can't use reverse name lookups to determine geographic location. Some companies make $$$ providing a database with an API to map ip addresses to a physical location, but those companies must work arm in arm with ISPs to ensure that the location IP address mapping is correct, and they are constantly updating their database.
But they put it in big letters on the box. Not for geeks. For normal people. Its pretty clear they are out trying to take advantage of people's misunderstanding of the rating. It's really as simple as that.
No wonder people have such crappy experiences with computers. They way they are sold, the companies go with the numbers that seem to fool the customers the best, the geeks yell "wise up" at people who don't have the opportunity to spend time learning about computers, and the point of sale folks and the companies with the best marketing strategies take the money and run.
Caveat Emptor is understandable in small amounts, but when the numbers companies use to assert competative advantage become meaningless, this isn't "buyer beware", its "buyer distrust". If you want to live in that world, go ahead. I don't, nor do I wish to subject my friends and family to a world where they need to become the super-geek I am in order to make smart purchases. When it comes to how technology is marketed, its little wonder non-computer people are so scared to spend their money without the advice of a computer nerd on hand.
> ... let us not give people the impression we're 14 year old script kiddies who think it's "cool" to munge corporate names.
_You_ are the one who conjurs up images of 14 yr old script kiddies. Most people dont even know what a script kiddie is, so you havn't much to fear. The usual reaction from my regular user friends when I use the namesakes for MS you so long to eschew actually gets a laugh from them. Hell, sometimes it even kind of coaxes a nod of understanding and relation from them; often users wonder if they're the only ones in the world who thinks Windows breaks for them.
And remember - much of the terminology you used as a kid displeased your elters, but became the norm for your generation. The language (and the methods of use thereof) evolves.. don't discredit a social movement or ideology simply because you have difficulty seperating the stereotypes from the lexicons.
Man, to live in a world as simple and cut and dried as yours. I'll take a Mocha Grande, please. With sprinkles.
I don't think Bruce is in any danger of not having a job. You assume the kid is screwed now, as his father is jobless. His father will have a job. The difference? It will be a job where his father can encourage the type of values he believes in and create the kind of world he wants his son to live in.
Attitudes like yours excuse employeed nazis, or employed members of organized crime, exployed spammers, employed cold call phone sales employees, etc, etc. I know HP != Third Reich, but its just to say that if you are unable to be happy providing for your child by working for somebody who opposes your ideals, chances are your unhappiness is going to affect the well being of the kid being raised. (You see this alot in the lower classes.. the quality of life affects the disposition of the parents, negatively, which in turn creates an environment at home that is non-ideal for raising a child in because the parents are never quite happy and thus have a much harder time imparting positive traits in their kids through example.)
At some point you have to fight the bigger battle, and I'd imagine in Bruces case, the whole job issue isn't even a concern to begin with.
Except if we assume they only produce as much as they sell, they'd be worse off if I bought one, and didn't buy any games or peripherals, as opposed to somebody else buying that specific unit and going out and spending their money on the money-making games for MS.
My theory is that the Xbox will still be sold - the question is more like, did they sell it to somebody who is eventually going to turn it into a profit generating sale, or did they sell it to me so I can banish it to the closet? In that case, it seems me not buying one Xbox is going to hurt them less because it increases the chances that somebody is going to buy it for the games.:)
I see what you're saying, but if they end up selling every last xbox, I'm not really hurting them worse by not buying one. But I can cause a hit on their ROI numbers by buying one and flushing it down the toilet because its one less sale that will turn into profit through the game licensing side.:)
Marketing is about real estate. Big part of the reason its hard to break out in the Real World is that most of the real estate (shelves, venues, etc ad nauseum) are owned by a small group of people.
You would need to create valuable real estate online (high traffic) and then stick yourself on the top front shelf.
That said, I'm really skeptical about the ability to market rock online. Seems to me that the Internet is really more of a tool for cross-promotional opportunities, where you can drive people from the Real World to real estate online in order to let them hear/get more of your material. I'm not sure how effective an effort to aquire new fans purely online would be, as the net seems much better suited to expound on the marketing materials we encounter in real life, rather than aquire new people. (This is mostly because in the Real World real estate, you can make your marketing materials highly targetted, where as online it is far more difficult to pitch only to your target geo/demo-graphic.. thus for very specific products like music, which appeal only to specific graphics, it'd be hard to get a good Return on Investment out of purely online marketing ventures.)
GM should give me 100$ because by not buying a $40,000 car of theirs, they're 'losing' (I think the term youre looking for is not realizing 40,000 dollars of revenue) more than just a tiny 100$? Is it preferable to them that I take 100$ from them instead of not buying a car since they 'lose' less that way?
Thats semantics - the public sector _is_ the public sector by virtue of spending your and my taxes. My whole point was that the government has an obligation to minimize the risk... thus its only natural, even proper, that they 'waste' money via operating costs through what is perceived as 'inefficiency' (aka red tape, caution, more rigerous research and analysis phases than the private sector when dealing with risk/reward decisions.)
The government risks your money, but it also risks *everyone's* money; private companies are capable of victimizing a small amount of people who generally can't raise a stink the way of a foresightless voting public does when the money is misspent. The private sector could waste *way* more money than the government, but they still wouldn't be on the recieiving end of complaints because the problems are localized to small groups of people. Its pretty obvious that if everybody is pooling their money together, any displeasure they have with respect to how its being spent is going to be a whole lot more visible in the public conciousness and media than the localized victims of the private sector. Once in awhile, you get a big flash in the pan (see Enron, WorldCom) that raises the public profile of the kind of waste the private sector is capable of.
Thats why its optics, my friend. At least with the public sector, if you get screwed, everybody gets screwed - so everybody must work together in order to address the problem. Private sector, everybody's on their own. Sure, some people like it this way (usually the monitory that increases their wealth over time, for some odd reason;), but it doesn't really help when dealing with the sorts of problems and issues that the government has the uneviable position of addressing.
OTOH, I have two entrepeneur friends whove wasted countless millions in private sector funding. They are motivated, ambitious and competant at spending money and building solutions to problems that do not exist.
Somebody, 'slowness' will come back in favour. The fast and loose world of the private sector can be personally fulfilling, but its all about risking (usually other people's) money. By-the-seat-of-your-pants 'innovation' found in the private sector can be a very self-serving career. Definately fun, like a roller coaster. You might make the mad cash, but what you actually produce is probably going to affect less people than the work public sector employees do.
Its called "The Parents Factor". Sure, parents are slow, uncool, not hip, too cautious, but what alotta folks don't realize is that the types of things the government, parents, and any governing body that must ensure and maintain the quality of life of people *requires* slowness and caution in order to avoid the crash-and-burn approach of the private sector. Failed private sector enterprises do not get punished by voters, and usually the 'motivated, ambitious' entrepeneurs escape with their wealth intact while investors scratch their heads. Slow and steady, thats the government, and considering the things that they are charged to do, I'm thankful for it. Folks that outright dismiss the public sector in favour of the private sector are simply suffering from a bad case of the optics - your perspective on the private sector hinges mostly on the wins, while the massive amounts of wasted money that comes from frivilous ambition to create shit usually flies under the radar of most people's perspectives.
The other option is to stop manufacturing these things in other countries, although you'd be trading the cheapness of labour for the clarity of the manuals... which do you prefer?
Humans are not machines. You simply do not up the hours that they are 'on', and it works.
Nevermind code quality - what about burnout, resentment towards management, and seeing domain knowledge go out the door when coders get sick of working 15 hour days and leave for another company?
Hetrosexual aids victims account for about 20% of victims.
Acceptable losses? Would your hetrosexual aids victims (not deserving, according to you) agree with your conclusion?
48% of adults with AIDS are females. Doesn't do much to support the 'targetting gays' argument.
The majority of HIV carriers are white. There goes the race argument.
Come back when you come up with real evidence to support your bigotry.
Even funnier is the notion that AIDS is smart enough to remove the 'undesirables', but that plane-crashing terrorists are so stupid they only attack the most underserving, right? Thats how you see it, right?
The point youre missing is that countries are more likely to pull themselves out of economic funks if they promote domestic development. When WIPO and WTO turn foreign countries' infrastructures over to american multinationals, the country ends up poorer, as it is americas economy that benifits from the profits of those infrastructures. Even the WTO admits their approach doesn't work very well, if you mine through their annual reports a few years back.
Open Source, which promotes competition via innovation instead of competition via information hoarding as closed source does, is a good way to spurn and encourage domestic development, which in turn pumps their economy up.
Its true that MS cant do much more than take your money, but how often do you think that money goes back into the country that spent it? Usually it just joins that 40 billion in the bank they have, which in no way helps those countries financially. And as we've all seen, simply owning the software itself does not allow you to generate wealth; software has become a neccessity in administrative tasks such as running countries, so why not shop for solutions in the homes & stores of your citizens and help them attain a higher standard of living.:)
Really, it was the classical capitalist thinkers of Smith's time that offered the the example that if you took a piece of land, and put some work into it, that land became yours (unless it was previously owned, of course). By adding value to something, you raised the worth of it, and thus it was your wealth to do with as you saw fit. You can read about The Hedge Wars to find more information on this.
I certainly have to agree that if all companies were indeed private, there would certainless be alot more happy employees in this world, although we'd probably have to give up the kind of massive economy of scale oeprations new-age CEOs have been jizzing about over the last 5 years. 'Course, thats fine by me.
Because my company prefers me being at work rather than taking a morning off just to sign for a package at home? So I get it sent to work; I can sign for it, and I dont miss any time.
Funny, I'd like to see how they (and what you really mean is us) can afford computers without my work? Its ironic, because I thought one of the tenants of capitalism was that by investing my work and effort into something (the company in this case) I can claim instrinsic ownership of the fruits of that labour, which would seem to include a partial ownership of the tools we use to achieve our goals (doubly and doublessly more legally so if you own stock in your company, right?)
This isn't a war, with a whiteline in the middle with an us and a they. We are us, and its sheep thinking such as yours, devoid of any true analysis of the reality of the situation that does us a disservice and simply ensures apathy reigns supreme.
For that matter, can I bring in my own computer to work? Should they get to spy on that? Consider what you say carefully, because you sound like you're simply regurgitating a way of thinking that doesn't have to be a part of our lives if we dont want it to be.
Hrm. Well the company doesn't go anywhere without my body and my mind. Does that mean I get to dictate the terms of use of these two things?
No. Remember you're the one who says because its their PC and their bandwidth (which they can only afford by virtue of the work I do for them, so really, they are mine) that it goes by they're rules. And who's they? Oh yeah, us.
I think you'll have to support your point a little more. There isn't any reason why your point is intrinsically true, especially given that the PC and bandwidth can only be purchased because of the work I do. I'm not going to roll over just because some people mistakeningly equates the ownership of property with absolute power of their use, and doubly so in a corperate envioronment where the equippment has only been purchased because of the employees.
The best way to make people rise up against this is simply to encourage employers to try to apply the goals and reasoning of software like this against traditional communication services.
How many people you think would be cool with their employer listening in on their personal phone calls, and opening all their personal mail that gets sent to the office?
Apply it to everything, and people will understand that this is an encroachment on what we currently have, not a reasonable measure for dealing with a newish technology.
I was going to say ethics, but then I forgot we've desperately been trying to replace those annoying things with technology that would just prevent us from being bad. It's the corperate software makers dream: If you can do it, it must be ok!
Of course, they dont seem comfortable sticking to this mantra when their software doesn't work as designed or is exploitable. Hows that for irony?
If you can show me that an IM is going to put more traffic on the wire depending on whether you're on broadband vs. dialup, go for it. By my reasoning, applications generate the same amount of traffic regardless of your connection type. Don't confuse your available bandwidth with any intrinsic tendancy for programs to use more bandwidth as your available bandwidth increases.
Until then, I have to assume you are a confused inidividual. An IM-only user isnt going to generate any more traffic on broadband than s/he will on a 56k modem.
Or are you referring to the fact that those 'light' users are going to suck up more of *your* bandwidth on a cable-internet loop? Wouldn't you prefer the light user sharing the loop with you rather than the heavy user?;)
That doesn't really cut it. Many 'normal' people today own computers that are way faster than what would have been an 'ubergeek' box 3 years ago. The need argument is pretty silly - we dont _need_ the Internet in the first place.
Normals will 'need' broadband when it becomes cost competative to dialup. (Its only a few bucks more here in Toronto, Ontario.) Its not about 'need', its about superior technology at the same price. Thats when it becomes a no brainer for the normals, and its a shame the US market hasn't been able to achieve this cost competative point with broadband yet. You wouldn't turn down broadband if it were available for the same price as dialup now, would you?
Slashdot Mirror
If anything, its just an indication that we're running out of things to replace with computers ... ;) Lets just hope IT investors didn't read your post or they might start thinking that there are some areas in which Computers Dont Solve Your Problems (tm).
Reminds me of the "Life for a Loom" law Luddites were subjected to in the late 1800s (I think) .. basically, if you attacked a loom, the penalty was death. (Luddites were seeing their jobs being usurped by looms and harsh factory working conditions, lower wages, etc, so they were attempting to stop the industrialization of the textile industry.)
It's pretty amazing, but this sort of thing has always happened in our technological state. Killing someone is one thing, but impeding "progress" (note the quotes) is severly punished. Of course, "progress" usually involves strenthening the position of the current winners, which is why its usually subject to resistance at some level by the population at large, and why people in power are far more interested in punishing people who impede the furthuring of their interests than punishing the DUI driver who kills somebody they'll never meet.
I think its crazy, but there you have it. This is pretty much a plutocracy (you need money to have your voice heard a la "lobbiest", "analyst", etc), so I'm not sure what methods we can use to oppose these things.
If the number sounds bogus, it must be. *laugh*
.uk, etc) yeilds some very incorrect numbers. I should know, as I work on advertising delivery engines; you can't use reverse name lookups to determine geographic location. Some companies make $$$ providing a database with an API to map ip addresses to a physical location, but those companies must work arm in arm with ISPs to ensure that the location IP address mapping is correct, and they are constantly updating their database.
Doesn't it strike you that thats the point of surveys and statistical data? To tell us things about our world which do not neccessarily support our (often incorrect) intuition?
Do not look at your webstats. Your page is probably in english, and resolving geographical location by the top level domain name (.com,
But they put it in big letters on the box. Not for geeks. For normal people. Its pretty clear they are out trying to take advantage of people's misunderstanding of the rating. It's really as simple as that.
No wonder people have such crappy experiences with computers. They way they are sold, the companies go with the numbers that seem to fool the customers the best, the geeks yell "wise up" at people who don't have the opportunity to spend time learning about computers, and the point of sale folks and the companies with the best marketing strategies take the money and run.
Caveat Emptor is understandable in small amounts, but when the numbers companies use to assert competative advantage become meaningless, this isn't "buyer beware", its "buyer distrust". If you want to live in that world, go ahead. I don't, nor do I wish to subject my friends and family to a world where they need to become the super-geek I am in order to make smart purchases. When it comes to how technology is marketed, its little wonder non-computer people are so scared to spend their money without the advice of a computer nerd on hand.
> ... let us not give people the impression we're 14 year old script kiddies who think it's "cool" to munge corporate names.
.. don't discredit a social movement or ideology simply because you have difficulty seperating the stereotypes from the lexicons.
_You_ are the one who conjurs up images of 14 yr old script kiddies. Most people dont even know what a script kiddie is, so you havn't much to fear. The usual reaction from my regular user friends when I use the namesakes for MS you so long to eschew actually gets a laugh from them. Hell, sometimes it even kind of coaxes a nod of understanding and relation from them; often users wonder if they're the only ones in the world who thinks Windows breaks for them.
And remember - much of the terminology you used as a kid displeased your elters, but became the norm for your generation. The language (and the methods of use thereof) evolves
Man, to live in a world as simple and cut and dried as yours. I'll take a Mocha Grande, please. With sprinkles.
.. the quality of life affects the disposition of the parents, negatively, which in turn creates an environment at home that is non-ideal for raising a child in because the parents are never quite happy and thus have a much harder time imparting positive traits in their kids through example.)
:)
I don't think Bruce is in any danger of not having a job. You assume the kid is screwed now, as his father is jobless. His father will have a job. The difference? It will be a job where his father can encourage the type of values he believes in and create the kind of world he wants his son to live in.
Attitudes like yours excuse employeed nazis, or employed members of organized crime, exployed spammers, employed cold call phone sales employees, etc, etc. I know HP != Third Reich, but its just to say that if you are unable to be happy providing for your child by working for somebody who opposes your ideals, chances are your unhappiness is going to affect the well being of the kid being raised. (You see this alot in the lower classes
At some point you have to fight the bigger battle, and I'd imagine in Bruces case, the whole job issue isn't even a concern to begin with.
Grow up.
Except if we assume they only produce as much as they sell, they'd be worse off if I bought one, and didn't buy any games or peripherals, as opposed to somebody else buying that specific unit and going out and spending their money on the money-making games for MS.
:)
:)
My theory is that the Xbox will still be sold - the question is more like, did they sell it to somebody who is eventually going to turn it into a profit generating sale, or did they sell it to me so I can banish it to the closet? In that case, it seems me not buying one Xbox is going to hurt them less because it increases the chances that somebody is going to buy it for the games.
I see what you're saying, but if they end up selling every last xbox, I'm not really hurting them worse by not buying one. But I can cause a hit on their ROI numbers by buying one and flushing it down the toilet because its one less sale that will turn into profit through the game licensing side.
Marketing is about real estate. Big part of the reason its hard to break out in the Real World is that most of the real estate (shelves, venues, etc ad nauseum) are owned by a small group of people.
.. thus for very specific products like music, which appeal only to specific graphics, it'd be hard to get a good Return on Investment out of purely online marketing ventures.)
You would need to create valuable real estate online (high traffic) and then stick yourself on the top front shelf.
That said, I'm really skeptical about the ability to market rock online. Seems to me that the Internet is really more of a tool for cross-promotional opportunities, where you can drive people from the Real World to real estate online in order to let them hear/get more of your material. I'm not sure how effective an effort to aquire new fans purely online would be, as the net seems much better suited to expound on the marketing materials we encounter in real life, rather than aquire new people. (This is mostly because in the Real World real estate, you can make your marketing materials highly targetted, where as online it is far more difficult to pitch only to your target geo/demo-graphic
Please explain.
GM should give me 100$ because by not buying a $40,000 car of theirs, they're 'losing' (I think the term youre looking for is not realizing 40,000 dollars of revenue) more than just a tiny 100$? Is it preferable to them that I take 100$ from them instead of not buying a car since they 'lose' less that way?
Thats semantics - the public sector _is_ the public sector by virtue of spending your and my taxes. My whole point was that the government has an obligation to minimize the risk ... thus its only natural, even proper, that they 'waste' money via operating costs through what is perceived as 'inefficiency' (aka red tape, caution, more rigerous research and analysis phases than the private sector when dealing with risk/reward decisions.)
;), but it doesn't really help when dealing with the sorts of problems and issues that the government has the uneviable position of addressing.
The government risks your money, but it also risks *everyone's* money; private companies are capable of victimizing a small amount of people who generally can't raise a stink the way of a foresightless voting public does when the money is misspent. The private sector could waste *way* more money than the government, but they still wouldn't be on the recieiving end of complaints because the problems are localized to small groups of people. Its pretty obvious that if everybody is pooling their money together, any displeasure they have with respect to how its being spent is going to be a whole lot more visible in the public conciousness and media than the localized victims of the private sector. Once in awhile, you get a big flash in the pan (see Enron, WorldCom) that raises the public profile of the kind of waste the private sector is capable of.
Thats why its optics, my friend. At least with the public sector, if you get screwed, everybody gets screwed - so everybody must work together in order to address the problem. Private sector, everybody's on their own. Sure, some people like it this way (usually the monitory that increases their wealth over time, for some odd reason
OTOH, I have two entrepeneur friends whove wasted countless millions in private sector funding. They are motivated, ambitious and competant at spending money and building solutions to problems that do not exist.
Somebody, 'slowness' will come back in favour. The fast and loose world of the private sector can be personally fulfilling, but its all about risking (usually other people's) money. By-the-seat-of-your-pants 'innovation' found in the private sector can be a very self-serving career. Definately fun, like a roller coaster. You might make the mad cash, but what you actually produce is probably going to affect less people than the work public sector employees do.
Its called "The Parents Factor". Sure, parents are slow, uncool, not hip, too cautious, but what alotta folks don't realize is that the types of things the government, parents, and any governing body that must ensure and maintain the quality of life of people *requires* slowness and caution in order to avoid the crash-and-burn approach of the private sector. Failed private sector enterprises do not get punished by voters, and usually the 'motivated, ambitious' entrepeneurs escape with their wealth intact while investors scratch their heads. Slow and steady, thats the government, and considering the things that they are charged to do, I'm thankful for it. Folks that outright dismiss the public sector in favour of the private sector are simply suffering from a bad case of the optics - your perspective on the private sector hinges mostly on the wins, while the massive amounts of wasted money that comes from frivilous ambition to create shit usually flies under the radar of most people's perspectives.
I like the fact that you started by criticizing the 'Ask Slashdot'.
/., good question or not.)
:)
Then you discussed it.
Then you said "But really, who cares, decide yourself." (A glib comment that could be lofted at any Ask
Then you criticized the piece again. (!)
To think, people wonder why some folks won't take the initiative to end abusive relationships. Funny stuff.
The other option is to stop manufacturing these things in other countries, although you'd be trading the cheapness of labour for the clarity of the manuals ... which do you prefer?
Humans are not machines. You simply do not up the hours that they are 'on', and it works.
Nevermind code quality - what about burnout, resentment towards management, and seeing domain knowledge go out the door when coders get sick of working 15 hour days and leave for another company?
15 hours? He's not serious, is he?
Nice try.
Hetrosexual aids victims account for about 20% of victims.
Acceptable losses? Would your hetrosexual aids victims (not deserving, according to you) agree with your conclusion?
48% of adults with AIDS are females. Doesn't do much to support the 'targetting gays' argument.
The majority of HIV carriers are white. There goes the race argument.
Come back when you come up with real evidence to support your bigotry.
Even funnier is the notion that AIDS is smart enough to remove the 'undesirables', but that plane-crashing terrorists are so stupid they only attack the most underserving, right? Thats how you see it, right?
The point youre missing is that countries are more likely to pull themselves out of economic funks if they promote domestic development. When WIPO and WTO turn foreign countries' infrastructures over to american multinationals, the country ends up poorer, as it is americas economy that benifits from the profits of those infrastructures. Even the WTO admits their approach doesn't work very well, if you mine through their annual reports a few years back.
:)
Open Source, which promotes competition via innovation instead of competition via information hoarding as closed source does, is a good way to spurn and encourage domestic development, which in turn pumps their economy up.
Its true that MS cant do much more than take your money, but how often do you think that money goes back into the country that spent it? Usually it just joins that 40 billion in the bank they have, which in no way helps those countries financially. And as we've all seen, simply owning the software itself does not allow you to generate wealth; software has become a neccessity in administrative tasks such as running countries, so why not shop for solutions in the homes & stores of your citizens and help them attain a higher standard of living.
I'm one better than that. I can type in double-rot13.
Really, it was the classical capitalist thinkers of Smith's time that offered the the example that if you took a piece of land, and put some work into it, that land became yours (unless it was previously owned, of course). By adding value to something, you raised the worth of it, and thus it was your wealth to do with as you saw fit. You can read about The Hedge Wars to find more information on this.
I certainly have to agree that if all companies were indeed private, there would certainless be alot more happy employees in this world, although we'd probably have to give up the kind of massive economy of scale oeprations new-age CEOs have been jizzing about over the last 5 years. 'Course, thats fine by me.
Because my company prefers me being at work rather than taking a morning off just to sign for a package at home? So I get it sent to work; I can sign for it, and I dont miss any time.
Funny, I'd like to see how they (and what you really mean is us) can afford computers without my work? Its ironic, because I thought one of the tenants of capitalism was that by investing my work and effort into something (the company in this case) I can claim instrinsic ownership of the fruits of that labour, which would seem to include a partial ownership of the tools we use to achieve our goals (doubly and doublessly more legally so if you own stock in your company, right?)
This isn't a war, with a whiteline in the middle with an us and a they. We are us, and its sheep thinking such as yours, devoid of any true analysis of the reality of the situation that does us a disservice and simply ensures apathy reigns supreme.
For that matter, can I bring in my own computer to work? Should they get to spy on that? Consider what you say carefully, because you sound like you're simply regurgitating a way of thinking that doesn't have to be a part of our lives if we dont want it to be.
Hrm. Well the company doesn't go anywhere without my body and my mind. Does that mean I get to dictate the terms of use of these two things?
No. Remember you're the one who says because its their PC and their bandwidth (which they can only afford by virtue of the work I do for them, so really, they are mine) that it goes by they're rules. And who's they? Oh yeah, us.
I think you'll have to support your point a little more. There isn't any reason why your point is intrinsically true, especially given that the PC and bandwidth can only be purchased because of the work I do. I'm not going to roll over just because some people mistakeningly equates the ownership of property with absolute power of their use, and doubly so in a corperate envioronment where the equippment has only been purchased because of the employees.
The best way to make people rise up against this is simply to encourage employers to try to apply the goals and reasoning of software like this against traditional communication services.
How many people you think would be cool with their employer listening in on their personal phone calls, and opening all their personal mail that gets sent to the office?
Apply it to everything, and people will understand that this is an encroachment on what we currently have, not a reasonable measure for dealing with a newish technology.
I was going to say ethics, but then I forgot we've desperately been trying to replace those annoying things with technology that would just prevent us from being bad. It's the corperate software makers dream: If you can do it, it must be ok!
Of course, they dont seem comfortable sticking to this mantra when their software doesn't work as designed or is exploitable. Hows that for irony?
If you can show me that an IM is going to put more traffic on the wire depending on whether you're on broadband vs. dialup, go for it. By my reasoning, applications generate the same amount of traffic regardless of your connection type. Don't confuse your available bandwidth with any intrinsic tendancy for programs to use more bandwidth as your available bandwidth increases.
;)
Until then, I have to assume you are a confused inidividual. An IM-only user isnt going to generate any more traffic on broadband than s/he will on a 56k modem.
Or are you referring to the fact that those 'light' users are going to suck up more of *your* bandwidth on a cable-internet loop? Wouldn't you prefer the light user sharing the loop with you rather than the heavy user?
That doesn't really cut it. Many 'normal' people today own computers that are way faster than what would have been an 'ubergeek' box 3 years ago. The need argument is pretty silly - we dont _need_ the Internet in the first place.
Normals will 'need' broadband when it becomes cost competative to dialup. (Its only a few bucks more here in Toronto, Ontario.) Its not about 'need', its about superior technology at the same price. Thats when it becomes a no brainer for the normals, and its a shame the US market hasn't been able to achieve this cost competative point with broadband yet. You wouldn't turn down broadband if it were available for the same price as dialup now, would you?