Nobody is forcing them to work where implants are required, there's plenty of other places to work for the people to chose from, if they don't like it, they can go work somewhere else. I stand by my "real world" comment.
Unemployment rates are high in the western world, and that ignores the fact that most published numbers are average. My company has a branch in one city where unemployment is just short of 20%. If you are not one of the few people with knowledge and/or experience that is actually in demand, you do not have the choice to "go work somewhere else". Your choice is more along the lines of living on unemployment money or moving someplace else where there might be jobs - if you can afford to move, that is.
I work in a position where I have first-hand experience of just how these things work. A lot of the people who ask me for advise would like to quit, except that they can't afford to do it. They've got a car, or a house, that they need to pay, and being unemployed for even a few months might mean losing that.
Now tell me, when you have to choose between you and your family becoming homeless, and getting an implant - how much "choice" do you really have?
Can you even answer that question? Do you support a family?
implants are no different than requiring that employees follow a dress code. Except that you can remove your company dress when you go home, at weekends, or when you quit. You can not seriously believe that doesn't make a massive difference.
Welcome to the real world, things work a bit different here then wherever you come from.
Employee "choice" is largely non-existent. The relation between employees and employers is not one between peers, so a level playing field only exists if the weaker side gets some protection.
Finally, there are many good arguments to limit what can be done, irrespective of "choice".
So this time, MS has applied "Embrace, extend and extinguish" to the standard process itself.
There's a lot of smart, not-yet-bought people in ISO. I'm sure they already realized that unless they can fix this up, ISO will be done with. Its image has already very much suffered. That might even be intentional, for even if MS fails in pushing OOXML through, they might succeed in damaging ISO so much that ODF being an ISO standard and OOXML not doesn't matter as much as it used to.
1.) DVD Jon was actualy a pretty knowledgeable hardcore geek way before he did the CSS crack. 2.) He actually DID get sued. By big companies. On several occasions. Yes, but grandparent is still right. Jon did not do the actual hack, he's openly acknowledged that from the start. He never went away (in neither direction) from his "an unidentified german guy" story.
People do what they feel necessary to keep themselves "running". You can outlaw it, but that doesn't change the fact that they do it, maybe you can change what exactly they do.
If it's not the Internet it's smoke-breaks, talking at the coffee/water machine, or just looking out of the window. Also, lots of people are good at appearing busy.
And I think that's ok.
One, if you really put people in the grinder, force them to work 8 hours, no breaks or diversions, I'm sure you will soon see the quality of their work plummet, as well as their motivation. If you're a factory in backland China that might be a winning strategy, if your business is in any way dependent on thinking employees, it isn't.
Two, if you pay by the hour, and your people are only there for the money, then two things shouldn't surprise you. One, that they try to get as much money for as little work as possible. You do the same, except that you don't call it "goofing off", but "profit maximizing", or maybe your consultants have found an even nicer buzzword. But it's just capitalism. If you don't like it, go somewhere where they haven't dumped Communism, yet. Two, you shouldn't be surprised that someday soon, some institute, consultant or survey will reveal your employees are rather badly motivated. Money alone doesn't do it. Do your homework in leadership. Throughout history, brilliant leaders weren't the guys who paid best, and that's not they are remembered for.
I give up, you don't get it. This is not about doubting that people lived a full life 50 years ago, or 500, or 5000 or any other random number.
I also put "(nerve)" in brackets for a reason. In a two-term construct with one term in brackets, by convention the non-bracketed one is the more important one, but if you want to insist concentrating your counter-argument on the one in brackets - don't be my guest.
Read something about Emergence. Some people write books because they're better at explaining the concept than I am on/. - maybe because they've got editors and a year of time to do it.
This is a dreadful analogy, because humans have many capabilities that single celled organisms lack, e.g: Now you leave your own analogy.
Computers can do things that books can't - animated 3D graphics, for example. Computers can do things that games can't - providing AI players, for example. Computers can do things that the mail service can't - delivering to many recipients at the same time and price, for example.
Now in the grandparent post, the argument was "but basically these are the same things, just more refined, faster, etc." - I could say the same thing about humans and single cells. Sure we have vision, but it is based on light sensitivity - something a single-cell organism can have - and (nerve) pulses being delivered - also something present in single-cell organisms. At a much, much simpler and lower incarnation.
But either both arguments are true, or both are false, because they are so similiar. You can't pick and choose.:-)
For the communities: Sure we had communities for as long as we know. But still there are considerable differences. To many different communities did your ancestors belong, 500 years ago? Two? Three? To how many different communities do you belong? 20? 30? More importantly: How many of those can you choose to give up at any time, if you want? How much choice did your ancestors have regarding their communities?
Don't tell me that's only a difference in numbers. It makes a huge difference in how we deal with our lives. How we see ourselves and others.
Sure there's a lot of stuff of the "just like offline, just online" variety. But not everything is of that kind. A lot is not just faster, or more convenient, but an entirely different class of thing that simply didn't exist 100 years ago.
Did they cheat somehow? No, They followed the rule required to vote - they payed the fees. Your definition of "cheating" needs updating.
If I find a bug in WoW that allows me to get a million gold everytime I click a specific key combo, you, Blizzard and every WoW player would call it cheating, even though the "rules" of the game include that bug at that point.
Cheating is not breaking the rules. Cheating is breaking the spirit of the rules, whether or not you literaly break them. In fact, most cheating happens by lawyer-weaseling your way through the loopholes in the rules. Most board game rules do not explicitly forbid you to look at the cards stacked face-down on the board, but everyone would agree that doing so is cheating.
Depending on how they have this set up it could be a VERY effective deterrent to setting up an undergorund "pirate" internet radio station. Not in the least. It's a very effective deterrent to setting up an underground "pirate" internet radio using Vista. Which, as things are right now, will mean one less Vista computer around, and one more internet radio station, not the other way.
No, the real thing probably is, as other posters alleged, the whole DRM crap being wrapped in lots of "do not interrupt me, I'm doing terribly important things" kernel locks. And if a package arrives during that time, sorry your CPU is busy with its Digital Restrictions Management.
There is a justified discussion about quantity/speed emerging new qualities.
Hey, humans don't do anything that single-cell organisms couldn't do, just slower and simpler. But in the end, a human is a different thing despite that, much like an online community is a different thing, even though anyone could mail anyone else 500 years ago. There is certain behaviour emerged in humans that doesn't exist in single-cell organisms, just like there are features of online communities that could not emerge if communication would consist of everyone taking 500 letters to 500 people to the post-office and waiting two to three weeks for a reply.
Incidentally, any true monopoly must be government granted. Not true, go back to university. There are so-called natural monopolies. There are also local monopolies especially in small, geographically isolated markets. Finally, there are markets that have successfully been cornered and where the difference between monopoly and oligopoly is purely academic.
ME was released 2 years after '98. It wasn't announced with 10% of the media hype that Vista was announce with. It also wasn't the default for all future OEM deals.
I'm certain a company the size of MS pays a few people to think about the big picture. I'm likewise sure the big picture right now isn't "great move", but more like "how do we get out of this mess?".
MS apparently no longer regards its customers as its first priority. MS never regarded its customers as first priority. From the first days on, it switched between con artist ("I have an OS in Cairo for sale, and it's gonna be the best, THE best, I tell you!") and mobster ("nice data you have there, would be a shame if you couldn't read it anymore just because you switched to another office package...").
MS for a long time regarded developers with a high priority.
You see, they couldn't stop people from cracking DRM and copying music. And they couldn't stop people from going online and sharing their music. But, Billy has one last ace up his sleave: You can't do both at the same time! There! Ha!
Mainly because in the past they have seen so many useless pop-ups warning them about potentially harmful things that others have told them they should click away (like getting a warning when you delete something). A pop-up no longer is an alerting event that requires attention, it is just a stupid window that gets in the way of your "internet experience". Exactly. That's as if you had sensors in your clothes to ring a bell every time someone touches you, because he might be a pickpocket. I guarantee you that after one day in the city, you'll turn it off. Or if you can't do that, start to ignore it. Boom, suddenly you are an easier target than you would be without the "alarm system". You got desensitised.
Oh, and also because most of those warnings are really not useful for the user. They shove the responsibility on the one person least suited to actually make the call. "Hey, loser, W32kdrv.dll wants to access 0xf4a50cb to do CrypicThing() which could result in Lengthytechnobabblethatsoundsverymuchlikethenonsen seyouhearonstartreck - do you now want to disallow it not doing it?"
But the user is not a technical system. When you deal with users, you need to follow good user interface guidelines, not just technical, binary thinking. That's where MS - despite their money, years of experience, own research center and all - still produced a total failure. UAC is one of the worst abominations of user interface design ever. You can give an entire presentation on its shortcomings.
If your systems are up and running, that is the headcount of the company. If a server is down, it's headcount minus number of people who rely on that server.
You could also use an even simpler one: Number of IT bosses who have a job because I'm doing mine. (one: you)
Third time's charm: If you want to be a bit sarcastic use this one:
Hours spent administrating the servers vs. hours spent on pointless paperwork that contributes nothing to our SLAs.
as an example, they are trying to raise the state support for the parties (i.e. mostly themselves) by 15% and call that "to correct inflation". This is AFAIK not true. They want to raise the state support because of all their lost paying members Of course that's the real reason. I should've been clearer: The proclaimed reason is inflation correction. Everything I've read on the subject so far made it obvious that that's a scam and a lie. I don't follow the evening news or the newspapers very much, so what I've read is not a representative sample, but anyone who cares to check can get that information and lots more from readily available publications.
What format does Apple's Pages/Keynote save to? A container format that has copies of images and the actual document in an XML format inside.
Is it an open standard? No, it isn't. Most importantly: Apple doesn't try to fasttrack it through the ISO to make it one. More importantly, it im- and exports quite a lot of other, competitive formats. Even more importantly: It is horrible XML but it doesn't have "MakeSpacingLikeThisOtherProgram(butI'mnotsayingho wthatdoesit)" tags.
Which is kind of non-surprising, as Germany is in a quagmire of corruption right now, with the great coalition probably the best time for decades to put your party members into all layers of the administration (i.e. the layers that are not elected). Germanies democracy has been completely undermined by the major parties at this point, and they will do anything for power and money - as an example, they are trying to raise the state support for the parties (i.e. mostly themselves) by 15% and call that "to correct inflation". For one, real inflation is nowhere that high, and two just a few months ago they rejected inflation correction for unemployment benefits. The only sliver of hope this has of failing is bad timing: They started it late in the summer break and many newspapers did pick it up.
First comment I've read who actually mentions what the problem with this is.
It's a software solution. Hello? Anyone at home in the government? They do have technical advisors (even if the other 99% don't know the difference between email and websites). They should realize that software is never tamper-proof. Software isn't even tamper-resistant. And for someone who knows what he's doing, it's quite possible to make it appear that the software is running and working properly when in fact it is neither. Or to selectively disable it ("hey, monitor my/. reading for all I care. But this other browser window, where I'm posting to my pirate friends' board is invisible to you").
Unfortunately, a box at the network level isn't the solution, either. It can't tell the content of encrypted communications. And no, the IPs are worthless as well, it's easy to set up an ssh server somewhere with forwarding.
Neither is a keystroke logger the holy grail. My Mac has fairly good speech recognition, I'm sure there is something useable for windos at well, or if all else fails then cut&paste with the mouse will also (slowly) get you there.
Fact is: There's no easy solution. So software is probably as good as anyone, with a credible threat that if he's caught messing around with it, he'll be very sorry.
But if both are caused by a third variable, the same money spent on that variable will almost certainly cause a larger effect and in both of these positive effects.
If we agree that it isn't working, then we don't have much of a difference.
I also think it's extremely counter-productive. Everyone with more than three brain-cells knows that kids are most interested in the forbidden, in the hidden and in the unknown.
Making something all three is an absolute guarantee to spark their curiosity.
Actually, most religious practices are a little more than just "borderline" insane. But that's a different discussion.
I don't follow the argument. It is naive at best, misguided certainly and destructive most likely. Teen pregnancy has been shown to be more likely in under-educated families. It seems if 14 year old Suzie knows nothing about sex (but her hormones are starting to drive her to do it), she is more, not less likely to become pregnant.
So keeping kids away from sex is - at least on this scale - not beneficial to them, nor their families.
Slashdot Mirror
Unemployment rates are high in the western world, and that ignores the fact that most published numbers are average. My company has a branch in one city where unemployment is just short of 20%. If you are not one of the few people with knowledge and/or experience that is actually in demand, you do not have the choice to "go work somewhere else". Your choice is more along the lines of living on unemployment money or moving someplace else where there might be jobs - if you can afford to move, that is.
I work in a position where I have first-hand experience of just how these things work. A lot of the people who ask me for advise would like to quit, except that they can't afford to do it. They've got a car, or a house, that they need to pay, and being unemployed for even a few months might mean losing that.
Now tell me, when you have to choose between you and your family becoming homeless, and getting an implant - how much "choice" do you really have?
Can you even answer that question? Do you support a family? implants are no different than requiring that employees follow a dress code. Except that you can remove your company dress when you go home, at weekends, or when you quit. You can not seriously believe that doesn't make a massive difference.
Welcome to the real world, things work a bit different here then wherever you come from.
Employee "choice" is largely non-existent. The relation between employees and employers is not one between peers, so a level playing field only exists if the weaker side gets some protection.
Finally, there are many good arguments to limit what can be done, irrespective of "choice".
So this time, MS has applied "Embrace, extend and extinguish" to the standard process itself.
There's a lot of smart, not-yet-bought people in ISO. I'm sure they already realized that unless they can fix this up, ISO will be done with. Its image has already very much suffered. That might even be intentional, for even if MS fails in pushing OOXML through, they might succeed in damaging ISO so much that ODF being an ISO standard and OOXML not doesn't matter as much as it used to.
2.) He actually DID get sued. By big companies. On several occasions. Yes, but grandparent is still right. Jon did not do the actual hack, he's openly acknowledged that from the start. He never went away (in neither direction) from his "an unidentified german guy" story.
People do what they feel necessary to keep themselves "running". You can outlaw it, but that doesn't change the fact that they do it, maybe you can change what exactly they do.
If it's not the Internet it's smoke-breaks, talking at the coffee/water machine, or just looking out of the window. Also, lots of people are good at appearing busy.
And I think that's ok.
One, if you really put people in the grinder, force them to work 8 hours, no breaks or diversions, I'm sure you will soon see the quality of their work plummet, as well as their motivation. If you're a factory in backland China that might be a winning strategy, if your business is in any way dependent on thinking employees, it isn't.
Two, if you pay by the hour, and your people are only there for the money, then two things shouldn't surprise you. One, that they try to get as much money for as little work as possible. You do the same, except that you don't call it "goofing off", but "profit maximizing", or maybe your consultants have found an even nicer buzzword. But it's just capitalism. If you don't like it, go somewhere where they haven't dumped Communism, yet.
Two, you shouldn't be surprised that someday soon, some institute, consultant or survey will reveal your employees are rather badly motivated. Money alone doesn't do it. Do your homework in leadership. Throughout history, brilliant leaders weren't the guys who paid best, and that's not they are remembered for.
I give up, you don't get it. This is not about doubting that people lived a full life 50 years ago, or 500, or 5000 or any other random number.
/. - maybe because they've got editors and a year of time to do it.
I also put "(nerve)" in brackets for a reason. In a two-term construct with one term in brackets, by convention the non-bracketed one is the more important one, but if you want to insist concentrating your counter-argument on the one in brackets - don't be my guest.
Read something about Emergence. Some people write books because they're better at explaining the concept than I am on
Computers can do things that books can't - animated 3D graphics, for example.
Computers can do things that games can't - providing AI players, for example.
Computers can do things that the mail service can't - delivering to many recipients at the same time and price, for example.
Now in the grandparent post, the argument was "but basically these are the same things, just more refined, faster, etc." - I could say the same thing about humans and single cells. Sure we have vision, but it is based on light sensitivity - something a single-cell organism can have - and (nerve) pulses being delivered - also something present in single-cell organisms. At a much, much simpler and lower incarnation.
But either both arguments are true, or both are false, because they are so similiar. You can't pick and choose.
For the communities: Sure we had communities for as long as we know. But still there are considerable differences. To many different communities did your ancestors belong, 500 years ago? Two? Three? To how many different communities do you belong? 20? 30? More importantly: How many of those can you choose to give up at any time, if you want? How much choice did your ancestors have regarding their communities?
Don't tell me that's only a difference in numbers. It makes a huge difference in how we deal with our lives. How we see ourselves and others.
Sure there's a lot of stuff of the "just like offline, just online" variety. But not everything is of that kind. A lot is not just faster, or more convenient, but an entirely different class of thing that simply didn't exist 100 years ago.
2.5k times 20 companies makes 50k.
Thats pretty darn cheap for buying an entire countries vote on an international standard.
Scale that to the entire ISO and you can have anything you want bought through for a few million bucks.
Wow.
I would've thought that if anyone than the standard groups would know about building resilient systems.
If I find a bug in WoW that allows me to get a million gold everytime I click a specific key combo, you, Blizzard and every WoW player would call it cheating, even though the "rules" of the game include that bug at that point.
Cheating is not breaking the rules. Cheating is breaking the spirit of the rules, whether or not you literaly break them. In fact, most cheating happens by lawyer-weaseling your way through the loopholes in the rules. Most board game rules do not explicitly forbid you to look at the cards stacked face-down on the board, but everyone would agree that doing so is cheating.
And that's exactly what happened here.
No, the real thing probably is, as other posters alleged, the whole DRM crap being wrapped in lots of "do not interrupt me, I'm doing terribly important things" kernel locks. And if a package arrives during that time, sorry your CPU is busy with its Digital Restrictions Management.
There is a justified discussion about quantity/speed emerging new qualities.
Hey, humans don't do anything that single-cell organisms couldn't do, just slower and simpler. But in the end, a human is a different thing despite that, much like an online community is a different thing, even though anyone could mail anyone else 500 years ago. There is certain behaviour emerged in humans that doesn't exist in single-cell organisms, just like there are features of online communities that could not emerge if communication would consist of everyone taking 500 letters to 500 people to the post-office and waiting two to three weeks for a reply.
Nice theory, but flawed.
ME was released 2 years after '98. It wasn't announced with 10% of the media hype that Vista was announce with. It also wasn't the default for all future OEM deals.
I'm certain a company the size of MS pays a few people to think about the big picture. I'm likewise sure the big picture right now isn't "great move", but more like "how do we get out of this mess?".
MS for a long time regarded developers with a high priority.
You see, they couldn't stop people from cracking DRM and copying music. And they couldn't stop people from going online and sharing their music. But, Billy has one last ace up his sleave: You can't do both at the same time! There! Ha!
Oh, and also because most of those warnings are really not useful for the user. They shove the responsibility on the one person least suited to actually make the call. "Hey, loser, W32kdrv.dll wants to access 0xf4a50cb to do CrypicThing() which could result in Lengthytechnobabblethatsoundsverymuchlikethenonse
Technically, yes.
But the user is not a technical system. When you deal with users, you need to follow good user interface guidelines, not just technical, binary thinking. That's where MS - despite their money, years of experience, own research center and all - still produced a total failure. UAC is one of the worst abominations of user interface design ever. You can give an entire presentation on its shortcomings.
Number of people able to work.
If your systems are up and running, that is the headcount of the company. If a server is down, it's headcount minus number of people who rely on that server.
You could also use an even simpler one: Number of IT bosses who have a job because I'm doing mine. (one: you)
Third time's charm: If you want to be a bit sarcastic use this one:
Hours spent administrating the servers vs. hours spent on pointless paperwork that contributes nothing to our SLAs.
This is AFAIK not true. They want to raise the state support because of all their lost paying members Of course that's the real reason. I should've been clearer: The proclaimed reason is inflation correction. Everything I've read on the subject so far made it obvious that that's a scam and a lie. I don't follow the evening news or the newspapers very much, so what I've read is not a representative sample, but anyone who cares to check can get that information and lots more from readily available publications.
Which is kind of non-surprising, as Germany is in a quagmire of corruption right now, with the great coalition probably the best time for decades to put your party members into all layers of the administration (i.e. the layers that are not elected).
Germanies democracy has been completely undermined by the major parties at this point, and they will do anything for power and money - as an example, they are trying to raise the state support for the parties (i.e. mostly themselves) by 15% and call that "to correct inflation". For one, real inflation is nowhere that high, and two just a few months ago they rejected inflation correction for unemployment benefits. The only sliver of hope this has of failing is bad timing: They started it late in the summer break and many newspapers did pick it up.
First comment I've read who actually mentions what the problem with this is.
/. reading for all I care. But this other browser window, where I'm posting to my pirate friends' board is invisible to you").
It's a software solution. Hello? Anyone at home in the government? They do have technical advisors (even if the other 99% don't know the difference between email and websites). They should realize that software is never tamper-proof. Software isn't even tamper-resistant. And for someone who knows what he's doing, it's quite possible to make it appear that the software is running and working properly when in fact it is neither. Or to selectively disable it ("hey, monitor my
Unfortunately, a box at the network level isn't the solution, either. It can't tell the content of encrypted communications. And no, the IPs are worthless as well, it's easy to set up an ssh server somewhere with forwarding.
Neither is a keystroke logger the holy grail. My Mac has fairly good speech recognition, I'm sure there is something useable for windos at well, or if all else fails then cut&paste with the mouse will also (slowly) get you there.
Fact is: There's no easy solution. So software is probably as good as anyone, with a credible threat that if he's caught messing around with it, he'll be very sorry.
Maybe.
But if both are caused by a third variable, the same money spent on that variable will almost certainly cause a larger effect and in both of these positive effects.
If we agree that it isn't working, then we don't have much of a difference.
I also think it's extremely counter-productive. Everyone with more than three brain-cells knows that kids are most interested in the forbidden, in the hidden and in the unknown.
Making something all three is an absolute guarantee to spark their curiosity.
Actually, most religious practices are a little more than just "borderline" insane. But that's a different discussion.
I don't follow the argument. It is naive at best, misguided certainly and destructive most likely. Teen pregnancy has been shown to be more likely in under-educated families. It seems if 14 year old Suzie knows nothing about sex (but her hormones are starting to drive her to do it), she is more, not less likely to become pregnant.
So keeping kids away from sex is - at least on this scale - not beneficial to them, nor their families.