Representatives are still necessary, but for different reasons than "we can't all vote." The major decisions our government make require careful thought, research and consideration. Most voters do not give careful thought, research, and consideration to voting decisions (hell, some of my family vote "party ticket" in every election).
Ideally, we will elect representatives most capable of the due dilegence required in those important decisions. Think of it as the same reason why you hire a lawyer or a doctor, but on a much larger scale. You are hiring experts to work on your behalf.
The Internet-voting could be useful to express public opinion to guide leaders. As a simple example, we all vote "What is most important, 1) Economy, 2) Social Programs, or 3) Prosecuting the war on Terrorism." While the vote isn't binding, it gives our leaders some direction in what the public at large wants them working on.
Now, the flaw is that, in my opinion, we don't always pick the most qualified among us as our duly appointed representatives. Too often choose because of a single issue, or which party a person is in, or because of the way they look, or because they don't like the other guy. I don't know how to solve that problem.
We are talking apples and oranges here. No, I would not blame a female jogger. But, when I leave me house during the day, I lock my door. If I didn't lock my house, and it wsa robbed, obviously it is the robbers fault, but I have to at least admit I could have been smarter.
I believe you are committing the falacy of analogy. Why don't you say: "File sharing is illegal, but you defend it. Murder is illegal. Therefore you defend murder." Sorry, but that just doesn't hold water. Relying on analogies as the sole justification for an argument often shows a weak argument.
The government of Tiwan is a government, not a female jogger. It has certain duties. Let's say that our military left guns lying around unguarded, and someone stole them and attacked us. Would you let the military completly off the hook because "its not our fault, we were robbed, which is illegal"?
I recall when "Cyberpunk" was cool. One of my favorite underground boards back in the late 80's, when you accessed the "protected" section, used as a heading "What have you done for the cause today" on everything.
Fight the man!
Even back then we predicted this type of thing, now China is doing it. What about the bigger, more dangerous predictions? How long until someone hacks cooling control systems and makes a nuclear plant go critical? What about causing planes to crash by hacking the ATC? Someday...
Because of the vast popularity and many weaknesses of the Windows operating system, most of the damage is done to Windows users, Tsai said.
So Tiawan decides to use a weak OS, and its China's fault for attacking it? Ok, not defending China, but this is like blaming a shark for eating a kid who's bleeding off a rubber life-raft.
If Tiawan makes itself an easy victim, it shouldn't be suprised if it gets attacked. This is like a bank choosing to store all of its cash on the public sidewalk, unguarded at night, then complianing when someone steals. I'm sorry they stole it, but you were being stupid.
Windows has been insecure since the very day it was released (15 years ago, 'round about?), and everyone knows that. If they choose to use it anyway, they deserve to get hacked. Get a mission-critical-grade OS for mission-critical uses.
The RIAA is defending their own property. You may not think it should be their property, but it is. You may not like the way they are enforcing it, but it is legel.
If someone steals something of mine, I will do everything I can to enforce my property rights. In other words, someone steals from me, I'm going to fight. Does that make me wrong or evil?
The RIAA is doing that on a large scale.
I, for one, hate the RIAA and most of the industry. I express my distaste the best way: I refuse to buy their products or listen to their music, free or no.
How about some protections for democracy back home first? This is utterly unacceptable.
Actually, America's form of government is Constitutional Republic (ie, representative rule), not Democracy (ie, majority rule). It doesn't suprise me that the public doens't know this; after all, look at how many politicians keep saying we live in a democracy.
On the protections, you are right, we need stronger protections for our voting rights. I don't even like the paper system, because to me, if I choose not to vote for any candidate on a slate, what stops someone from voting on my behalf?
I saw something written about a system where when you voted, it had a code that was broken into two halves. You were given one, and the other was stored (after the vote was talied into the totals). It also stored the other half, which, by itself, you could not tell who you voted for. If the vote needed to be audited, you could bring in your half, combine them, and verify your votes, and then re-verify the tallies.
At any rate, I'm not an expert on this subject, but running headlong into electronic voting is a mistake. We don't understand how easy our rights can be done away with with tampering; you can change entire elections. Let's not forgot the commonly held theory about JFK winning his election due to vote tampering in Chicago.
If you can elect a president dishonestly, then any other vote can be changed. We need a fundamentally new way of voting, and hopefully someone much smarter than me will come up with one.
IBM providing very expensive legal coucil to all its customers...
IBM is using is massive legal and financial muscle to beat SCO, a tiny spec of a company, into submission. Hopefully this will happen without going to court. And everyone in the Open Source world is cheering.
When the RIAA does the exact same thing - use its massive legal and financial muscle to scare people into submission - then this same community (ok, many people that are in both communities) cry fowl.
Whats the difference? Sounds like "The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend" thinking. That thinking has gotten many groups - and countries - into trouble, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to do it.
SCO's case should get its day in court to evaluate its merits (which, I personally feel, there aren't many). IBM using its massive influence and resources against SCO - even if IBM happens to be the good guy this time - is wrong, and our legal system should prevent that. We should all get our equal chance in court, whether its little SCO vs big IBM, or little guy vs RIAA, or whatever.
People seem to keep getting caught up in technicalities. People that are trying to say "What if I had a virus...." or "What if someone stole my account..." are as bad as the RIAA. They are looking for loopholes and technicalities, not trying to see the spirit of the law and its protections for ALL parties.
The RIAA is trying to find and get relief from misappropriation of protected property (ie, the copyrighted songs) that people neither need (in the survival sense) nor have any intrinsic right to. They are going about it in a very poor way, granted, but, there is nothing wrong with trying to defend your property. After all, at night, if I forget to lock the door on my house, I still don't think anyone has the right to barge in and use it. Its my property, and I get to decide how it is used.
I think everyone knows the spirit of this. The RIAA does not want to sue people who have not infringed their copyrights. If they issue subenpoes for the wrong people, they want it corrected. No purpose is served for any party if the wrong people are punished. Their intention is to only go after people that have actually participated in infringed copyrights.
For that matter, they aren't really after song-swappers or P2P networks, at least in a purist sense. If I record a song (which I won't, becuse, like many very popular singers, I can't sing) and people trade it, the RIAA doesn't care. They only care about trading of songs where the copyright owner does not wish his property to be used in that manner (and, of course, said owner is a member of the RIAA... I doubt they care about non-members).
If you put your "reasonable, common-sense, business-thinking" hat on, I think it is easy to see what the RIAA is doing and why they are doing it. Disagreeing with them is one thing, but trying to pick away on technicalaities is just not a useful excersice.
Re:Living wage
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Saving the Net
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Jumping in, against my better judgement...
As a discloser, I am what you would probably classify upper-class (I never can keep it straight). I support tax cuts across the board for people who pay taxes, as a general rule, to stimulate the economy.
With that said, frankly, the taxes I pay are fair. My tax bracket is the highest, but, due to the magic of tax brackets, my effective tax rate is 26% (people forget that your tax bracket is what you pay on the last dollar you earn, not every dollar you earn). At first glance, you think, "wow, paying a quarter of all you make in taxes." But for it, I get defense, police, roads, etc, etc. Easily worth 25%. Not worth 60%, worth more than 10%. I think the 25% I pay is about right. (I also lean toward a flat-tax, but thats a different argument).
I am a major believer in free-market economics. You may think this strange, but I support a living-wage. Yes, economically, it skews the labor market. Yes, it sends some jobs oversees (but not service jobs). Yes, regulation is generally bad. Res, yes yes.
But I grew up in a single-parent family with a mother working 2 minumum wage jobs. She worked very, very hard. She managed money very, very well. I didn't realize how badly out of style her clothes were; she didn't buy ANY new clothes that I can remember. Her kids came first. In short, she did everything right, everything that conservatives support, yet we were still short on money.
We survived. One Christmas there were no presents for me and my sister. My Mom severly cut her finger and did not go to the hospital; we couldn't afford it. No one should live that way, least of all a single-mother with small children doing everything right.
It is said that a society can be judged by its treatment of its old, its young, its poor, its sick, and its criminal. Our criminals get great food and healthcare, yet we let hard-working, honest people struggle to merely survive. While economically a bad idea, for shere humanity, we need a living wage law.
The problem is, the requirements are rarely fully specified. It today's time-to-market and features-are-better-than-quality driven world, development - both for products and corporate IT - is very often expected to take off and work with incomplete requirements.
That is why developers that understand the target use-case and market are so valuable. They can fill in the gaps to make sure of product quality and fitness for purpose. No, its not the ideal situation, but it is reality.
I've never seen product management FULLY specify integrated, consistent logging and a unified configuration & management interface, but good developers know it is required. Developers with business knowledge of the target application can really help flesh out requirements and provide some sanity.
It is obviously possible to hire just "pure developers" without domain knowledge, but, in my personal experience, the results are better with developers with specialized business knowledge (but they are harder to come by, and more expensive, so some companies settle for less).
Developers with business knowledge also make the development process cheaper and faster overall, because fully-specified requirements simply aren't needed. This reduces cost (all of those hours of writing requirements and training developers) and time to market.
As soon as customers start putting more emphasis on quality than time & money, then these realities will change. But, until that happens (if ever, I don't think it will), those developers who are focused on the market will continue to be the most valuable contributors.
I am sorry you feel that way. I never said that I was any smarter than anyone else. Making that claim would be presumptiuous of me. I was only saying that in my work in large, distributed systems, I often required the command-line, and anyone who works on those systems would have a similiar experience.
There are many examples. For instance, I once had a program bug that actually rolled the last access times of many, many files in many, many directories forward, causing a serious amount of grief for the OS. I know of no developer GUI tool to fix that, but a quickie little command-line script fixed hundreds of times in a couple (2) minutes of work.
In database programming, people spend a lot of time at the database command-line (isql, sqlplus). Even the GUI for those is just a command-line with an output window. There is no substitute often for hand-crafted database commands.
In the distributed environment, I am often working over slow network-links, and GUIs are just unusable over slow links (try XWindows over a modem sometime). So I write my code in VI (if the link is even fast enough for that... sometimes, I write it locally and FTP it), then I compile and debug using all command-line tools on a remote system.
Then there is my work on the AS/400. There simply isn't good GUI tools there as far as I'm concerned. However, I am just as productive with what is provided. IBM did a good job of development environment on that platform.
As I said in my posting, I work in highly-distributed environments, where, sometimes, even if a tool existed, a GUI is not available.
As a matter of productivity, I've never seen anyone who could work as fast in their GUI editor as I do in VI. For instance, I make use of many of the copy/paste buffers so I can copy several seperate things from one file, switch files, then paste in at different places, with only one "file switch". I routinly set markers around the file so I can jump between them with just 2 buttons. That is more personal accomplishment, I guess, since few people ever learn enough about VI to be quite that productive, but VI and EMACS can be amazingly productive if you learn them.
The same is true with any tool, including GUI tools. After all, tools are only as good as the people using them.
Well, I've been using Linux since 0.96c+ (hey, if you want to start that war...)
Anyway, you're the AC doing the Delphi to AS/400, right? That's great stuff. AS/400 is one of my favorite systems, and I'm real handy with RPG, systems programming, etc. Alas, these days, 99% of what I work on is UNIX.
Getting back on topic, that is what I always perceived as Mac's weakness: integrating with other systems. Granted, that is an outsiders point of view since, as I said, I've never worked on Mac as a programmer.
That is why I liked their move to UNIX for OS X. I think that could really open up their platform and put them on a better competative foot in the corporate environment. In their traditional market (academia, publishing), back-end integration wasn't so important, but in the enterprise market, it is vital.
I wish I had a crystal ball. I eye a new G4 or G5 all the time, I just haven't quite committed yet. I understand that it can work with my Nec MultiSync 90 monitor now, is that right? I mean, as opposed to the "old days", when I had to have a special Apple monitor (taking up more real-estate on my crowded desk).
I have found the command-line essential, even when programming Windows. Even though the Mac (a system I have never been a developer on, but may learn) has a terrific UI, leaving out the command-line would be a mistake, and the author was right to include that content.
When programmers are beginning, it is easy to avoid the command-line altogether, since their projects are probably simpler. I imagine that the author's previous books on introductory topics focused on the GUI.
I am a software professional as well, and specialize in large distributed systems and massive-parallel (I can never spell that word) processing. No matter how good the tools, you can never escape from the command-line for complex systems.
Its been a long time since I've developed single-tier, single-user apps, so perhaps my knowledge of tools in those areas is dated, and you can develop those without command-line usage. Someone else will have to educate me on that.
You have to be careful doing that sort of thing in a trackable way. Yes, sometimes, brides are necessary.
The down part, is there is a specific law in America that prevents citizens from contributing to a bribery system. The law is something like "Foreign Corupt Organizations Act", or something to that effect, and was passed in the 1970's. The penalties are fairly steep if you are caught, and could include jail time.
It actually puts Americans at somewhat of a disadvantage. If you are a European company, for the most part, you are not legally prevented from bribing, but an American is. That means that if you are an American competing with a European for a foreign-government deal in a third-world country, life could be hard.
Of course, it still happens, you just have to cover your tracks and not have accounting code lying around;)
In my personal opinion, I think that a bribery system seriously hurts the country where it is (and economic studies back this up). America helps third-world countries by trying to clean that system up. However, it will only work when all developed countries outlaw foreign bribery and, of course, enforce the ban.
Boeing - which is under government scrutiny and has to keep its nose clean - has recently lost several deals in developing countries to Airbus, which has been implicating in many bribery scandals in the past (including a debacle in the mid-1990's with Kuwait Airlines). Pratt & Whitney just lost a major jet-engine supply contract to Airbus, even though it was the best bidder (equiv product at better price). If the tables aren't even, very often, those with the highest ethics are the biggest losers (financially, anyway... but the moral high-ground can be a place of hunger).
If you look deeper, you may discover that the govenment is protecting an [in-efficient] monopoly.
For instance, many countries disallow consumer VoIP usage (India, for instance, last time I checked). The reason is that their big, government controlled international phone carrier (BSNL) makes most of its profit from international calls. Government enterprises are protected by the government through a system of regulations, leading generally to higher prices and lower service all around.
Maybe the government is protecting a government ISP or wireless provider. Yes, it could be mobile phone protection; many government regulators don't notice a different between GSM, 3G and 802.11b/g.
To get around the licensing, you may can convince/bribe some government minister that you won't be competing with the protected enterprise. Otherwise, maybe you can take your case to the public and hope for a rules change. No matter what, changing protectionist regulations is a nightmare. Just ask Europe how easy it would be to get France to consider dropping the CAP and going for free-market food-production.
Remember that cars started out as something for th very rich. Then the rich. Then we had mass production, or, cars for everyone. Cars used to be a status symbol (just owning one, I mean). Now, I don't care how far you are below the poverty line, if you are in America, you most likely own a car.
Did a few people get very rich? Yes. Did everyone win in the end? I believe, the answer is yes.
There is a/. story about missles flying through space and bombing things within 2 hours. What about a civilian use of that? Imagine if you could have an affordable, 2 hour flight to Asia? Thats not just for the rich; thats for south-Asian immigrants who just want to go home for a wedding, funeral or a simple visit. Again, everyone wins.
The government monopoly certainly won't deliver on that goal. Why not let the private sector give it a shot?
I wasn't saying the outlived the product line. They outlived the competative threat.
Doing what they do, the redefined the game for DOS. There is no mass-competition on DOS anymore because Microsoft redefined the game to be Windows, something they could more easily monopolize (for a long variety of reasons, mostly the complexity of the system, bug-for-bug compatability, etc).
For OS/2, hey, great OS, just no longer a threat. I believe it was a thread at one point (although people will debate that), but it is certainly not a threat to any Microsoft product now.
I believe that advances for humanity would be gained under the theory of "enlightsened self-interest". As a for instance, Bell invented the telephone in the context of a business (in other words, for money), but didn't we all benifit?
The problem with the government space program is that government has a monopoly. They aren't driven to innovate.
Let's say rich people start wanting to blast themselves into space. Well, even if you are rich, we are still talking about quite a bit of money. There would be great competition for cheaper, reusable launch vehicles (something NASA is having trouble with). Imagine if we imposed a tax to counter the environmental effects of a launch (something NASA just ignores), then our space program gets more environmentally friendly.
Would rich people that risk big money on new things reap big rewards if they suceed? Of course. Thats what risk taking is about. But everyone could be a risk taker. There would be highly-speculative corporations for space exploring that anyone could invest in, with high-risk, but potentially reward. It would not be unlike bio-tech stocks.
Finally, we could end some of the missions of no value except political or international appeal (John Glenn back into space... why again?). With solid economic drivers, either there are good reasons (which could include high-earning tourists with money, or research for potential new drugs or inventions), or the enterprise wouldn't do it.
All in all, America is the most profit-driven country, and the most innovative (as measured by patents awarded, scientific nobel-prizes, and other similiar distinctions). What's wrong with extending what has worked for us this far into space?
CORBA does not use distributed reference counting, ever, unless it is a developers choice in design. CORBA is more inclined to leases. I think you are thinking of Java Remote Message Protocol, the original RMI transport. It used destributed reference counting (as was a performance/scalability disaster, hence the switch to IIOP for RMI).
J2EE uses IIOP (by tunneling RMI over IIOP) as its protocol. Seems pretty fundamental to me. Not to mention transactions, security, naming. All of those core services are vital to the app server.
J2EE app-server interop is based entirely on CORBA. Of course, its Java-only CORBA, but whats the harm in that? You can even get C++ to Java app-servers with CORBA, it just requires implementing way too many value-types for my taste.
Actually, J2EE is built using RMI-IIOP (or Internet-InterORB Protocol, or the CORBA protocol), not the original RMI-JRMP (Java Remote Message Protocol). J2EE transactions are CORBA transactions. J2EE security is CORBA security. JNDI naming is CORBA naming. That is how all of the cross-app-server compatability works (or rather, will work, in the future, hopefully, but thats an entirely different topic)
You should read the J2EE specifications, its all in there. J2EE hides all of that CORBA stuff, but its in there.
CORBA is quite alive and well, with new specifications arriving all the time, especially in the telco arena (for network management, etc, there is still lots of active work).
That depends on what you call a "passing thru" technology.
CORBA has been around since at least 1991 (longer, I think), and most agree that it beat Microsoft in the DCOM-CORBA "Object Wars" (as evidenced by Microsoft moving on to Web Services). Although CORBA now provides the underlying technology for things such as J2EE, it is largely gone as far as a standalone technology. Was CORBA "passing thru" or was/is it a real technology?
OS/2 was also around for quite a number of years, and was until very recently an actual product. Great OS, IMHO. If we want to define Linux as being around long enough to not be "passing thru", then that applies to OS/2 as well.
DR-DOS? PC-DOS? Microsoft outlived them both. Or, to be fair, Microsoft did what it does best, redefined the game.
Mac OS? Doesn't get me started (although I like to think its making a comeback with OS X... made me a convert... UNIX OS with great apps and interface)
Now, I'm no defender of Microsoft, but I think what Bill Gates was probably saying was "Hey, we've faced down stiff competition before, and won. How is this different?" On that point, I have to agree. Maybe they will lose this time, but they have definatly been down this road before and know a little something about smashing threats.
(no, this is not a troll. My favorite OS'es are Linux and Mac OS. Just trying to credit where its due)
I make, frankly, good money. Several family members are jealous and think I enjou quite a good life (which, I guess, I do, now).
I started my first job in this industry (high-tech) working for $100/week repairing printers. My pay came out to well less than minimum wage as I worked sometimes 80 hours a week.
Through that company, I had paid training, etc. I worked my way up. I have had to up-heave my life moving between 5 states in 5 years at one point just to keep moving upwards.
Even today, I rarely work less than 40 hours. I now have lots of vacation time (which I negotiate for), but I rarely use it (thank you, Mr. Economy). That is not a problem for the government to fix; its just facts.
People that complain about other's pay and benifits should compare work ethics. In my career, I've been able to tell you which entry-level people would succeed, and which would fail, just by observing them in their low-paid jobs for a few months. After a while, those with the "right stuff", move up.
Re:People work harder in the U.S.?
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Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Plenty of slackers work over 40-hours a week for the money. Their motivation is money. At a factory I used to work at, I knew of entire crews that diliberaty slowed down their machines in order to get to work over 40-hours for the money.
In response to the "slap in the face", this is a market-oriented economy. If the reward isn't there for over-40 hours, then don't do it. If you will get fired as a result, find a new job. If people refused to work at jobs that abused them, those employers would be forced to change there ways.
No, I'm not talking about unionizing everything. A union is just a form of labor colusion. How exactly can people get together to price-fix their services, and it be right, when other people (company management), get together to price-fix the products or services, and its wrong? What exactly is the difference?
Anyway, people should just not work at abusive jobs. If enough people refuse to work for abusive jobs, then abusive businesses would go bankrupt. Thats the beauty of a market-oriented system.
Re:Working Hard?
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Working Hard?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What is it with this assumption that people who make good money don't work. I have relatives that make $15 - $20 an hour, and, for some reason, assume people who make 6 figures are lazy.
Most executives I know, especially these days, work insane amounts of hours, with no overtime pay, at all. If you do the math on their hours and pay, you see they aren't making that much more than the normal working person (I'm not talking officers like CEOs, etc, just normal Director and VP level executives).
People that work hard and do the right things (the right things over the course of their life, not just in the past couple years or when it suits them), by and large, get promoted and make good money.
All of this overtime, FLSA, etc, just interfere with the natural flow of markets (the labour market, in this case).
Re:For crying out loud
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My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 2, Insightful
All the old kernel would prove is that some point their property was in Linux. It would still hurt their chase for liability (money). Like everything business, this is about money, not right and wrong.
Lets say I'm a corporate user of Linux. I see the evidence, I believe it, and I know that I may owe SCO some licensing money. Then someone issues a new kernel without the stuff. I install that kernal and delete my copies of the old kernel.
While SCO can show the code was in the kernel at some point, they cannot show that I ever had that kernel, ergo, they cannot get me for damages (ie, money).
Like I said, thats just one reason. Another is that this is a FUD campaign that Microsoft organized. Still another is that they have no evidence (although the court will throw them out before trail if that is the case). Another is that they have real evidence, but it is weak, but are going to try to use public opinion to extort a settlement. All valid reasons to keep the evidence secret.
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Ideally, we will elect representatives most capable of the due dilegence required in those important decisions. Think of it as the same reason why you hire a lawyer or a doctor, but on a much larger scale. You are hiring experts to work on your behalf.
The Internet-voting could be useful to express public opinion to guide leaders. As a simple example, we all vote "What is most important, 1) Economy, 2) Social Programs, or 3) Prosecuting the war on Terrorism." While the vote isn't binding, it gives our leaders some direction in what the public at large wants them working on.
Now, the flaw is that, in my opinion, we don't always pick the most qualified among us as our duly appointed representatives. Too often choose because of a single issue, or which party a person is in, or because of the way they look, or because they don't like the other guy. I don't know how to solve that problem.
I believe you are committing the falacy of analogy. Why don't you say: "File sharing is illegal, but you defend it. Murder is illegal. Therefore you defend murder." Sorry, but that just doesn't hold water. Relying on analogies as the sole justification for an argument often shows a weak argument.
The government of Tiwan is a government, not a female jogger. It has certain duties. Let's say that our military left guns lying around unguarded, and someone stole them and attacked us. Would you let the military completly off the hook because "its not our fault, we were robbed, which is illegal"?
Fight the man!
Even back then we predicted this type of thing, now China is doing it. What about the bigger, more dangerous predictions? How long until someone hacks cooling control systems and makes a nuclear plant go critical? What about causing planes to crash by hacking the ATC? Someday...
So Tiawan decides to use a weak OS, and its China's fault for attacking it? Ok, not defending China, but this is like blaming a shark for eating a kid who's bleeding off a rubber life-raft.
If Tiawan makes itself an easy victim, it shouldn't be suprised if it gets attacked. This is like a bank choosing to store all of its cash on the public sidewalk, unguarded at night, then complianing when someone steals. I'm sorry they stole it, but you were being stupid.
Windows has been insecure since the very day it was released (15 years ago, 'round about?), and everyone knows that. If they choose to use it anyway, they deserve to get hacked. Get a mission-critical-grade OS for mission-critical uses.
If it's crap, why would you ever download it?
The RIAA is defending their own property. You may not think it should be their property, but it is. You may not like the way they are enforcing it, but it is legel.
If someone steals something of mine, I will do everything I can to enforce my property rights. In other words, someone steals from me, I'm going to fight. Does that make me wrong or evil?
The RIAA is doing that on a large scale.
I, for one, hate the RIAA and most of the industry. I express my distaste the best way: I refuse to buy their products or listen to their music, free or no.
Actually, America's form of government is Constitutional Republic (ie, representative rule), not Democracy (ie, majority rule). It doesn't suprise me that the public doens't know this; after all, look at how many politicians keep saying we live in a democracy.
On the protections, you are right, we need stronger protections for our voting rights. I don't even like the paper system, because to me, if I choose not to vote for any candidate on a slate, what stops someone from voting on my behalf?
I saw something written about a system where when you voted, it had a code that was broken into two halves. You were given one, and the other was stored (after the vote was talied into the totals). It also stored the other half, which, by itself, you could not tell who you voted for. If the vote needed to be audited, you could bring in your half, combine them, and verify your votes, and then re-verify the tallies.
At any rate, I'm not an expert on this subject, but running headlong into electronic voting is a mistake. We don't understand how easy our rights can be done away with with tampering; you can change entire elections. Let's not forgot the commonly held theory about JFK winning his election due to vote tampering in Chicago.
If you can elect a president dishonestly, then any other vote can be changed. We need a fundamentally new way of voting, and hopefully someone much smarter than me will come up with one.
IBM providing very expensive legal coucil to all its customers...
IBM is using is massive legal and financial muscle to beat SCO, a tiny spec of a company, into submission. Hopefully this will happen without going to court. And everyone in the Open Source world is cheering.
When the RIAA does the exact same thing - use its massive legal and financial muscle to scare people into submission - then this same community (ok, many people that are in both communities) cry fowl.
Whats the difference? Sounds like "The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend" thinking. That thinking has gotten many groups - and countries - into trouble, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to do it.
SCO's case should get its day in court to evaluate its merits (which, I personally feel, there aren't many). IBM using its massive influence and resources against SCO - even if IBM happens to be the good guy this time - is wrong, and our legal system should prevent that. We should all get our equal chance in court, whether its little SCO vs big IBM, or little guy vs RIAA, or whatever.
People seem to keep getting caught up in technicalities. People that are trying to say "What if I had a virus...." or "What if someone stole my account..." are as bad as the RIAA. They are looking for loopholes and technicalities, not trying to see the spirit of the law and its protections for ALL parties.
The RIAA is trying to find and get relief from misappropriation of protected property (ie, the copyrighted songs) that people neither need (in the survival sense) nor have any intrinsic right to. They are going about it in a very poor way, granted, but, there is nothing wrong with trying to defend your property. After all, at night, if I forget to lock the door on my house, I still don't think anyone has the right to barge in and use it. Its my property, and I get to decide how it is used.
I think everyone knows the spirit of this. The RIAA does not want to sue people who have not infringed their copyrights. If they issue subenpoes for the wrong people, they want it corrected. No purpose is served for any party if the wrong people are punished. Their intention is to only go after people that have actually participated in infringed copyrights.
For that matter, they aren't really after song-swappers or P2P networks, at least in a purist sense. If I record a song (which I won't, becuse, like many very popular singers, I can't sing) and people trade it, the RIAA doesn't care. They only care about trading of songs where the copyright owner does not wish his property to be used in that manner (and, of course, said owner is a member of the RIAA... I doubt they care about non-members).
If you put your "reasonable, common-sense, business-thinking" hat on, I think it is easy to see what the RIAA is doing and why they are doing it. Disagreeing with them is one thing, but trying to pick away on technicalaities is just not a useful excersice.
Jumping in, against my better judgement...
As a discloser, I am what you would probably classify upper-class (I never can keep it straight). I support tax cuts across the board for people who pay taxes, as a general rule, to stimulate the economy.
With that said, frankly, the taxes I pay are fair. My tax bracket is the highest, but, due to the magic of tax brackets, my effective tax rate is 26% (people forget that your tax bracket is what you pay on the last dollar you earn, not every dollar you earn). At first glance, you think, "wow, paying a quarter of all you make in taxes." But for it, I get defense, police, roads, etc, etc. Easily worth 25%. Not worth 60%, worth more than 10%. I think the 25% I pay is about right. (I also lean toward a flat-tax, but thats a different argument).
I am a major believer in free-market economics. You may think this strange, but I support a living-wage. Yes, economically, it skews the labor market. Yes, it sends some jobs oversees (but not service jobs). Yes, regulation is generally bad. Res, yes yes.
But I grew up in a single-parent family with a mother working 2 minumum wage jobs. She worked very, very hard. She managed money very, very well. I didn't realize how badly out of style her clothes were; she didn't buy ANY new clothes that I can remember. Her kids came first. In short, she did everything right, everything that conservatives support, yet we were still short on money.
We survived. One Christmas there were no presents for me and my sister. My Mom severly cut her finger and did not go to the hospital; we couldn't afford it. No one should live that way, least of all a single-mother with small children doing everything right.
It is said that a society can be judged by its treatment of its old, its young, its poor, its sick, and its criminal. Our criminals get great food and healthcare, yet we let hard-working, honest people struggle to merely survive. While economically a bad idea, for shere humanity, we need a living wage law.
The problem is, the requirements are rarely fully specified. It today's time-to-market and features-are-better-than-quality driven world, development - both for products and corporate IT - is very often expected to take off and work with incomplete requirements.
That is why developers that understand the target use-case and market are so valuable. They can fill in the gaps to make sure of product quality and fitness for purpose. No, its not the ideal situation, but it is reality.
I've never seen product management FULLY specify integrated, consistent logging and a unified configuration & management interface, but good developers know it is required. Developers with business knowledge of the target application can really help flesh out requirements and provide some sanity.
It is obviously possible to hire just "pure developers" without domain knowledge, but, in my personal experience, the results are better with developers with specialized business knowledge (but they are harder to come by, and more expensive, so some companies settle for less).
Developers with business knowledge also make the development process cheaper and faster overall, because fully-specified requirements simply aren't needed. This reduces cost (all of those hours of writing requirements and training developers) and time to market.
As soon as customers start putting more emphasis on quality than time & money, then these realities will change. But, until that happens (if ever, I don't think it will), those developers who are focused on the market will continue to be the most valuable contributors.
I am sorry you feel that way. I never said that I was any smarter than anyone else. Making that claim would be presumptiuous of me. I was only saying that in my work in large, distributed systems, I often required the command-line, and anyone who works on those systems would have a similiar experience.
There are many examples. For instance, I once had a program bug that actually rolled the last access times of many, many files in many, many directories forward, causing a serious amount of grief for the OS. I know of no developer GUI tool to fix that, but a quickie little command-line script fixed hundreds of times in a couple (2) minutes of work.
In database programming, people spend a lot of time at the database command-line (isql, sqlplus). Even the GUI for those is just a command-line with an output window. There is no substitute often for hand-crafted database commands.
In the distributed environment, I am often working over slow network-links, and GUIs are just unusable over slow links (try XWindows over a modem sometime). So I write my code in VI (if the link is even fast enough for that... sometimes, I write it locally and FTP it), then I compile and debug using all command-line tools on a remote system.
Then there is my work on the AS/400. There simply isn't good GUI tools there as far as I'm concerned. However, I am just as productive with what is provided. IBM did a good job of development environment on that platform.
As I said in my posting, I work in highly-distributed environments, where, sometimes, even if a tool existed, a GUI is not available.
As a matter of productivity, I've never seen anyone who could work as fast in their GUI editor as I do in VI. For instance, I make use of many of the copy/paste buffers so I can copy several seperate things from one file, switch files, then paste in at different places, with only one "file switch". I routinly set markers around the file so I can jump between them with just 2 buttons. That is more personal accomplishment, I guess, since few people ever learn enough about VI to be quite that productive, but VI and EMACS can be amazingly productive if you learn them.
The same is true with any tool, including GUI tools. After all, tools are only as good as the people using them.
Well, I've been using Linux since 0.96c+ (hey, if you want to start that war...)
Anyway, you're the AC doing the Delphi to AS/400, right? That's great stuff. AS/400 is one of my favorite systems, and I'm real handy with RPG, systems programming, etc. Alas, these days, 99% of what I work on is UNIX.
Getting back on topic, that is what I always perceived as Mac's weakness: integrating with other systems. Granted, that is an outsiders point of view since, as I said, I've never worked on Mac as a programmer.
That is why I liked their move to UNIX for OS X. I think that could really open up their platform and put them on a better competative foot in the corporate environment. In their traditional market (academia, publishing), back-end integration wasn't so important, but in the enterprise market, it is vital.
I wish I had a crystal ball. I eye a new G4 or G5 all the time, I just haven't quite committed yet. I understand that it can work with my Nec MultiSync 90 monitor now, is that right? I mean, as opposed to the "old days", when I had to have a special Apple monitor (taking up more real-estate on my crowded desk).
I have found the command-line essential, even when programming Windows. Even though the Mac (a system I have never been a developer on, but may learn) has a terrific UI, leaving out the command-line would be a mistake, and the author was right to include that content.
When programmers are beginning, it is easy to avoid the command-line altogether, since their projects are probably simpler. I imagine that the author's previous books on introductory topics focused on the GUI.
I am a software professional as well, and specialize in large distributed systems and massive-parallel (I can never spell that word) processing. No matter how good the tools, you can never escape from the command-line for complex systems.
Its been a long time since I've developed single-tier, single-user apps, so perhaps my knowledge of tools in those areas is dated, and you can develop those without command-line usage. Someone else will have to educate me on that.
You have to be careful doing that sort of thing in a trackable way. Yes, sometimes, brides are necessary.
;)
The down part, is there is a specific law in America that prevents citizens from contributing to a bribery system. The law is something like "Foreign Corupt Organizations Act", or something to that effect, and was passed in the 1970's. The penalties are fairly steep if you are caught, and could include jail time.
It actually puts Americans at somewhat of a disadvantage. If you are a European company, for the most part, you are not legally prevented from bribing, but an American is. That means that if you are an American competing with a European for a foreign-government deal in a third-world country, life could be hard.
Of course, it still happens, you just have to cover your tracks and not have accounting code lying around
In my personal opinion, I think that a bribery system seriously hurts the country where it is (and economic studies back this up). America helps third-world countries by trying to clean that system up. However, it will only work when all developed countries outlaw foreign bribery and, of course, enforce the ban.
Boeing - which is under government scrutiny and has to keep its nose clean - has recently lost several deals in developing countries to Airbus, which has been implicating in many bribery scandals in the past (including a debacle in the mid-1990's with Kuwait Airlines). Pratt & Whitney just lost a major jet-engine supply contract to Airbus, even though it was the best bidder (equiv product at better price). If the tables aren't even, very often, those with the highest ethics are the biggest losers (financially, anyway... but the moral high-ground can be a place of hunger).
If you look deeper, you may discover that the govenment is protecting an [in-efficient] monopoly.
For instance, many countries disallow consumer VoIP usage (India, for instance, last time I checked). The reason is that their big, government controlled international phone carrier (BSNL) makes most of its profit from international calls. Government enterprises are protected by the government through a system of regulations, leading generally to higher prices and lower service all around.
Maybe the government is protecting a government ISP or wireless provider. Yes, it could be mobile phone protection; many government regulators don't notice a different between GSM, 3G and 802.11b/g.
To get around the licensing, you may can convince/bribe some government minister that you won't be competing with the protected enterprise. Otherwise, maybe you can take your case to the public and hope for a rules change. No matter what, changing protectionist regulations is a nightmare. Just ask Europe how easy it would be to get France to consider dropping the CAP and going for free-market food-production.
This is an excellent point.
/. story about missles flying through space and bombing things within 2 hours. What about a civilian use of that? Imagine if you could have an affordable, 2 hour flight to Asia? Thats not just for the rich; thats for south-Asian immigrants who just want to go home for a wedding, funeral or a simple visit. Again, everyone wins.
Remember that cars started out as something for th very rich. Then the rich. Then we had mass production, or, cars for everyone. Cars used to be a status symbol (just owning one, I mean). Now, I don't care how far you are below the poverty line, if you are in America, you most likely own a car.
Did a few people get very rich? Yes. Did everyone win in the end? I believe, the answer is yes.
There is a
The government monopoly certainly won't deliver on that goal. Why not let the private sector give it a shot?
I wasn't saying the outlived the product line. They outlived the competative threat.
Doing what they do, the redefined the game for DOS. There is no mass-competition on DOS anymore because Microsoft redefined the game to be Windows, something they could more easily monopolize (for a long variety of reasons, mostly the complexity of the system, bug-for-bug compatability, etc).
For OS/2, hey, great OS, just no longer a threat. I believe it was a thread at one point (although people will debate that), but it is certainly not a threat to any Microsoft product now.
I believe that advances for humanity would be gained under the theory of "enlightsened self-interest". As a for instance, Bell invented the telephone in the context of a business (in other words, for money), but didn't we all benifit?
The problem with the government space program is that government has a monopoly. They aren't driven to innovate.
Let's say rich people start wanting to blast themselves into space. Well, even if you are rich, we are still talking about quite a bit of money. There would be great competition for cheaper, reusable launch vehicles (something NASA is having trouble with). Imagine if we imposed a tax to counter the environmental effects of a launch (something NASA just ignores), then our space program gets more environmentally friendly.
Would rich people that risk big money on new things reap big rewards if they suceed? Of course. Thats what risk taking is about. But everyone could be a risk taker. There would be highly-speculative corporations for space exploring that anyone could invest in, with high-risk, but potentially reward. It would not be unlike bio-tech stocks.
Finally, we could end some of the missions of no value except political or international appeal (John Glenn back into space... why again?). With solid economic drivers, either there are good reasons (which could include high-earning tourists with money, or research for potential new drugs or inventions), or the enterprise wouldn't do it.
All in all, America is the most profit-driven country, and the most innovative (as measured by patents awarded, scientific nobel-prizes, and other similiar distinctions). What's wrong with extending what has worked for us this far into space?
CORBA does not use distributed reference counting, ever, unless it is a developers choice in design. CORBA is more inclined to leases. I think you are thinking of Java Remote Message Protocol, the original RMI transport. It used destributed reference counting (as was a performance/scalability disaster, hence the switch to IIOP for RMI).
J2EE uses IIOP (by tunneling RMI over IIOP) as its protocol. Seems pretty fundamental to me. Not to mention transactions, security, naming. All of those core services are vital to the app server.
J2EE app-server interop is based entirely on CORBA. Of course, its Java-only CORBA, but whats the harm in that? You can even get C++ to Java app-servers with CORBA, it just requires implementing way too many value-types for my taste.
Actually, J2EE is built using RMI-IIOP (or Internet-InterORB Protocol, or the CORBA protocol), not the original RMI-JRMP (Java Remote Message Protocol). J2EE transactions are CORBA transactions. J2EE security is CORBA security. JNDI naming is CORBA naming. That is how all of the cross-app-server compatability works (or rather, will work, in the future, hopefully, but thats an entirely different topic)
You should read the J2EE specifications, its all in there. J2EE hides all of that CORBA stuff, but its in there.
CORBA is quite alive and well, with new specifications arriving all the time, especially in the telco arena (for network management, etc, there is still lots of active work).
That depends on what you call a "passing thru" technology.
CORBA has been around since at least 1991 (longer, I think), and most agree that it beat Microsoft in the DCOM-CORBA "Object Wars" (as evidenced by Microsoft moving on to Web Services). Although CORBA now provides the underlying technology for things such as J2EE, it is largely gone as far as a standalone technology. Was CORBA "passing thru" or was/is it a real technology?
OS/2 was also around for quite a number of years, and was until very recently an actual product. Great OS, IMHO. If we want to define Linux as being around long enough to not be "passing thru", then that applies to OS/2 as well.
DR-DOS? PC-DOS? Microsoft outlived them both. Or, to be fair, Microsoft did what it does best, redefined the game.
Mac OS? Doesn't get me started (although I like to think its making a comeback with OS X... made me a convert... UNIX OS with great apps and interface)
Now, I'm no defender of Microsoft, but I think what Bill Gates was probably saying was "Hey, we've faced down stiff competition before, and won. How is this different?" On that point, I have to agree. Maybe they will lose this time, but they have definatly been down this road before and know a little something about smashing threats.
(no, this is not a troll. My favorite OS'es are Linux and Mac OS. Just trying to credit where its due)
You are absolutly right.
I make, frankly, good money. Several family members are jealous and think I enjou quite a good life (which, I guess, I do, now).
I started my first job in this industry (high-tech) working for $100/week repairing printers. My pay came out to well less than minimum wage as I worked sometimes 80 hours a week.
Through that company, I had paid training, etc. I worked my way up. I have had to up-heave my life moving between 5 states in 5 years at one point just to keep moving upwards.
Even today, I rarely work less than 40 hours. I now have lots of vacation time (which I negotiate for), but I rarely use it (thank you, Mr. Economy). That is not a problem for the government to fix; its just facts.
People that complain about other's pay and benifits should compare work ethics. In my career, I've been able to tell you which entry-level people would succeed, and which would fail, just by observing them in their low-paid jobs for a few months. After a while, those with the "right stuff", move up.
Plenty of slackers work over 40-hours a week for the money. Their motivation is money. At a factory I used to work at, I knew of entire crews that diliberaty slowed down their machines in order to get to work over 40-hours for the money.
In response to the "slap in the face", this is a market-oriented economy. If the reward isn't there for over-40 hours, then don't do it. If you will get fired as a result, find a new job. If people refused to work at jobs that abused them, those employers would be forced to change there ways.
No, I'm not talking about unionizing everything. A union is just a form of labor colusion. How exactly can people get together to price-fix their services, and it be right, when other people (company management), get together to price-fix the products or services, and its wrong? What exactly is the difference?
Anyway, people should just not work at abusive jobs. If enough people refuse to work for abusive jobs, then abusive businesses would go bankrupt. Thats the beauty of a market-oriented system.
What is it with this assumption that people who make good money don't work. I have relatives that make $15 - $20 an hour, and, for some reason, assume people who make 6 figures are lazy.
Most executives I know, especially these days, work insane amounts of hours, with no overtime pay, at all. If you do the math on their hours and pay, you see they aren't making that much more than the normal working person (I'm not talking officers like CEOs, etc, just normal Director and VP level executives).
People that work hard and do the right things (the right things over the course of their life, not just in the past couple years or when it suits them), by and large, get promoted and make good money.
All of this overtime, FLSA, etc, just interfere with the natural flow of markets (the labour market, in this case).
All the old kernel would prove is that some point their property was in Linux. It would still hurt their chase for liability (money). Like everything business, this is about money, not right and wrong.
Lets say I'm a corporate user of Linux. I see the evidence, I believe it, and I know that I may owe SCO some licensing money. Then someone issues a new kernel without the stuff. I install that kernal and delete my copies of the old kernel.
While SCO can show the code was in the kernel at some point, they cannot show that I ever had that kernel, ergo, they cannot get me for damages (ie, money).
Like I said, thats just one reason. Another is that this is a FUD campaign that Microsoft organized. Still another is that they have no evidence (although the court will throw them out before trail if that is the case). Another is that they have real evidence, but it is weak, but are going to try to use public opinion to extort a settlement. All valid reasons to keep the evidence secret.