Many people have this negative connotation about propaganda, assuming it means lies you tell people in order to manipulate populations. That is one way propaganda has been, and is, used. But, generally speaking, propaganda just means communicating the government's message. That message could be false, or true. One critical truth is, the insurrectionists and terrorists have plenty of propagandists out there spreading half-truths or outright lies about the US and it's mission in Iraq and elsewhere.
If we are to have any hope of succeeding, we need to present our side of the story to the rest of the world, and particularly to Muslims. If anything, the US government has done too poor a job of propaganda, not too good of a job. I will say that doing things like bribing journalists makes you look bad, makes it looks like you are corrupt, and can't get anyone to carry your story unless they too, are corrupt. The current administration has ham-handedly gone about propaganda, but it must be recognized that propaganda is essential in any operation.
Which is, how can any project which is non-commercial ever be doomed, as long as the maintainers are still interested in it? Now, if someone wants to start an Open Source company, where they need a product which generates revenue streams, they might be doomed for not being mature enough.
But the projects which are either a labor of love (probably most Open Source projects), or which fill a need better than any other OSS/Free Software (Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc) will continue to plug along, without much corporate adoption, until they either die from lack of interest/competition, or reach a critical mass where they are suddenly the hot new Open Source tool that everybody starts using. But, the plugging along phase can last a long long time given dedication from the developer(s).
Since Free Software is fundamentally different from commercial software, I would say it can NEVER be doomed the way a proprietary software package can be. Often, when the companies that make proprietary software go under, it's gone forever, because whoever inherits the source code after the bankruptcy (assuming the source even survives), will probably never do anything with it, and never let anyone else do anything with it.
Open Source/Free Software, however, can easily have a second life. If anyone ever gets interested in the software again, they can use the source code to re-start development. Free Software can, basically, never truly die. . . just go inactive for awhile, or indefinitely.
I bought Uru because I was a fan of Myst, and was intrigued by the idea of a cooperative, multiplayer Myst (although, I was, honeslty, a little puzzled how they would pull that off - I figured cooperative puzzles that required players to be at different locations, do things together - although, again, how could they ever create enough puzzles to keep the game from getting old very fast. ..?).
Nevertheless, I bought Uru, and then was disappointed when I figured out that the multiplayer experience wasn't even online yet at the time they sold it. I registered for a Beta invite, and was finally invited. . . then they shut down the server a week later, before I had even really had a chance to try it out much.
Add to that the fact that while the single player game ran fine on my computer, the multiplayer experience, even though I never got out of my private 'neighborhood', so never even ran into any other people, was incredibly slow and laggy. To the point where it made it hard to explore the game properly. I shrugged this off though thinking to myself. . . it's a Beta, that's only to be expected. It'll get better nearer to release.
I really think Uru was a cool idea, but I'm still left wondering why it got canned before it ever even had a chance. The reason given for the funding cuts was that there was not enough interest/response. How can there be a lot of response for a game that never even had a decently working beta? Did they measure the response based on the sales of the single-player game? I don't think I ever saw much advertising/marketting for Uru. I just happened to see it in Best Buy and, being the fan I am, bought it.
Uru seems like it never got the chance to be the game it could be, which makes me sad. It also made me angry that they sold it as a multiplayer game, when the multiplayer component wasn't ready when I installed the game, and *never* was ready. But, being both poor, and a fan, I never considered trying to sue for false advertising or anything. It's just like, well, what can you do. You can't force them to finish the multiplayer component, the most you could get is a refund. But I didn't want a refund. . . I wanted the multiplayer game that the box promised.
I really liked the Uru game engine. Full 3d, full motion. You could *jump* - something no other Myst game ever let you do (I know some people hate jump puzzles, but if done in moderation, I find them to be kind of fun). I thought Uru was a better game than Myst 4 Revelation, not that Myst 4 is bad, but after playing Uru, it seemed more limited, like going backwards in game development instead of forwards. Like going from Super Mario Bros 3 back to Super Mario Bros - the original SMB was a great game, but after playing 3, it would be less satisfying.
I really truly hope that maybe Uru can be brought back to life. I'll probably even go seek an invite, just to show Cyan my continued interest. Maybe if enough people try to get on the shard, they can demonstrate sufficient interest to this mysterious source of funding, to get the funding necessary to continue the project and create new content.
Although. . . I'm rather puzzled that Cyan needs 3rd party funding. Myst was (and may still be) the best selling game of all time (at least it held that title for awhile). How could Cyan not have a development warchest to do whatever they want with?
It kind of seems analogous to Blizzard saying they can't develop a new game for lack of funding.
And all those Olympic Games. They're just silly kid stuff. And Pro Football "Games", and Pro Basketball, Baseball, Soccer, Hockey, ad naseum. People have been calling very grow-up activities 'games' for a long time.
Sometimes Slashdot runs some really STUPID opinions on the front page, and I'd say this article qualifies.
You seem to be implaying that the article said, "moved to become the first major Internet telephony player", as opposed to what it really says, "moved to become the first major Internet telephony player to go public". The main idea being conveyed is that they are the first to try to go public (with Internet telephony being a modifier of that), not the first VOIP company. Now, it may be that your company is a public company, but by your own admission they are not a major player in the Internet telephony market.
It's a good thing you posted as anonymous coward, because now everyone thinks you're an idiot with such bad Attention Defecit Disorder that you can't even finish reading a simple, easy to understand, sentence.
I've personally always fealt this was the right war, but for the wrong reasons. The Bush administration needed to come up with some reasons to go to war, but they didn't want to admit the truth of why, so they made up these cock-and-bull stories.
I can't really speak to what the Bush administrations true motives were. I suspect, that, mostly, Bush did think that Saddam Hussein was a growing threat to the US and the Western World, and didn't want to give him any chance to acquire any more WMD than he had. Maybe they sexed up the intelligence (which, btw, if they did do, I don't condone).
Why do I feel this was the right war? Perhaps my limited knowledge of history is incorrect, but, it is my current understanding that Europe and the US have played 'chess' with the Middle East for most of the 20th century, and that, to a large extent, Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq because earlier administrations had propped him up. The U.S. has, purportedly, done some very bad things in the region, including: Iran had, at one time, a democratic government. The CIA apparently helped overthrow the democratic government and install a dictator (I don't know that he was a *bad* dictator per se, but still), which lead to the Iranian revolution which installed the current Theocracy we all know and love. It my understanding that the US then propped up Saddam Hussein as a sort of first-line-of-defense against Iran.
Personally, I feel America needs to give the middle east an apology for so much meddling, and get the hell out of their business. But, alas, Saddam Hussein was part of that meddling. And so, to try to get things somewhat 'right' before leaving, we are forced to meddle some more. And that, I feel, is the truest and best justification for the current actions in Iraq. To turn over the future of Iraq to the Iraqi people. As for Iran, as much as I don't like the current government (espcially the hate-mongering, former-terrorist president of Iran) it should also be recognized that, for to some extent, the current government of Iran represents the people of Iran, and outside of defending ourselves against them, we need to let their politics run their own course.
Of course, I may be completely wrong. I can only go by the history that I have learned, and it is within possibility that the history I've been taught is either completely wrong, or incomplete in some critical way.
The sad thing is though, that what history will likely remember is that we entered into this action on bad intelligence and bull-crap stories from Bush & Cheney, LLP. And, because we entered into it the wrong way, with the wrong communication to the Iraqi people, and the rest of the Muslim world, it will probably have the wrong outcome - forcing us to meddle further in Middle Eastern affairs.
Are you and I even on the same website? We must be, but I don't know how you came to that conclusion reading the Slashdot blurb, nevermind the actual interview.
Kind of off-topic, but I saw your comment about DAoC's friar and remembered the disaster of a character system that DAoC has, that is best illustrated by my Warden.
DAoC had a kind of worst-of-all-worlds approach to characters. They had character classes with 'specializations' within the character classes. The problem was, most character classes had one specizlization that worked fairly well for that type, and two specializations that would leave you, often, with a royally gimp character. They gave you a limited amount of specialization points, and you had to spend them on 1-2 of the specializations (for the most part - certain character classes, like rangers, got both more specializations to persue, and more spec points).
Now, to my Warden. Warden was a character type that the game manual (Tip for MMOG newbies: most game manuals LIE blatently about character types in their descriptions. Don't pay any attention to them) described as being a hybrid healer/fighter. The truth is, they had something like 4 specializations - a weapon spec, a healing spec, a buffing, and a shielding spec. They actually did the best with the shielding spec (they had these magical shields they could put on people, that helped quite a lot - they reflected a portion of damage that enemies attacked you with back at the enemies, which simultaneously reduced incoming damage, and increased damage to enemies).
Well, as I recall, the Warden was my first or 2nd character, and after like 15 levels, I ended up with an almost hopelessly screwed up character, because early on, I didn't really understand the specialization choices I was making, and DAoC had a specialization system where, if you were specced to your character level in your 1 or 2 specs you could max, you were fine, but if you tried to generalize by spreading points into 3 or 4 of the specs, you were totallly, completely useless.
But, even when they introduced respecs into the game, so you could have an opportunity to re-allocate your spec points, it turns out that some specializations were just MUCH better than others. I tried speccing my Warden as primarily a fighter with some healing. Turned out that even specced to my own level in the weapon ability, and with good gear (armor, weapons, etc), I was *still* a highly innefective fighter, with weak heals.
The point of this post is, an MMOG designer, if they are going to try to choose a hybrid system, which gives people choices, it is their responsibility to make sure that all choices are fairly viable. In DAoC, there were certain character types that were sub-par overall, or sub-par unless they chose the ONE TRUE PATH for that character type. Any other choice led you down a road of complete frustration.
I'm completely convinced, to this day, that DAoC, while it's basic design (the Realm vs Realm system, backstory, etc) was pretty cool, it had the worst character system I've ever encountered, and to boot was pretty badly mis-managed. The management of the game was more interested in releasing expansion pack after expansion pack, than fixing badly designed specializations and powers.
Yeah, I'm a little bitter lol.
Re:Information and programs does not leak!
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IE7 Leaked
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, I suppose you are mostly correct.
BUT, that being said, sometimes leaks aren't from within the company. Sometimes they are from partners, reviewers, or beta testers who've been given early access to the product, but who have no legal right to give it to anyone else. . . but do anyhow.
At first, I thought the article poster was adding their own commentary. If you read the article, however, you will see those are direct quotes from the article.
The article itself, I would categorize as flaimbait, -1. However, despite that, it's still interesting that they have figured out bee flight.
I should probably just stop there, but I'm going to take the bait (to an extent), and say this:
Just because we've figured out bee flight doesn't mean intelligent design is false. Just because we couldn't previously figure out how bees fly doesn't prove itelligent design is true. Intelligent Design is a philosophy, not a scientific theory. I happen to be a Christian, and a believer in creation. I also think that God may have used evolution as a tool of creation. Which, of course, puts me in the camp that EVERYBODY else despises. *sigh*
All I can say to the parent poster is, you can choose to live life in a seqoistered bubble, or you can put on your asbestos undershorts and deal with the real world. If you are going to move in the world of nerds, which includes science and technology, you need to just deal with the fact that there is a certain element of the scientific world which is openly hostile to your beliefs. Deal with is. Sheesh.
As for the hostile people, all I can say is, well not all of us believe that Intelligent Design should be taught in a science curriculum AS SCIENCE, because it is fundamentally a matter of faith. But, some of us find it hard to believe that random chance, un-guided, could possibly produce the complexity we see in nature. Bee flight is still an example of amazing complexity, which even though we can understand it, doesn't make it any less impressive. I am still inclined to believe that a higher power guided the evolution of bee DNA to produce such wondorous 'technology'.
Maybe you think that makes me stupid. I don't really care.
Technically, bandwidth shaping based on port is not content-based filtering. 1) It does not look at the content of the packet in any way, just the headers. They don't know or care if you are transferring child-Pr0n or Linux.iso files, they are slowing down all traffic on that port. Does it suck? Absolutely, so get another ISP (if you can - if you live in a country with state-enforced monopolies on broadband access, all I can say is get involved in your government enough to change the situation and open up competition).
As long as an ISP passes all content through without inspecting it to find out what the particular data being transmitted is, they are, I'm fairly sure, still quite safe in terms of Common Carrier protection. That is, VoIP can be legal or illegal, depending on how the talkers are using it, but the ISP, when giving higher priority to that port, still has no idea what the conversation is about.
If they started looking inside the packets and blocking 'offensive' material, then I would agree, they immediately lose the liability protection of being a common carrier.
And, I personally would not mind ISP's doing a bit of QoS bandwidth shaping for stuff like VoIP, games, etc. What I don't like (and I suspect you yourself do not like), is the idea of them arbitrarily putting a hard cap on 'lower-priority' services, like P2P file transfers, or artificially reducing the bandwidth available from 'non-preferred' content providers.
There is a type of QoS where the network always tries to move everything as fast as possible, BUT, if bandwidth becomes 100% utilized, it moves higher-priority traffic first, in order to maintain an acceptable level of service for things that are highly-time sensitive, and slows down less-time-sensitive packets. I don't think anyone would argue that is illegal, or even bad for consumers. And yet, by your argument, any ISP implementing any QoS at all would suddenly lose common carrier status. That just makes absolutely no sense.
You might wish there was a legal argument here, and maybe there is (IANAL), but I just don't see it. Common carrier has always been about knowing exactly what specific traffic is being carried, vs a generic categorization of traffic.
I think, generally speaking, you might be right. In this case, I don't think Jack is currently involved in any active cases against them because, as you say, he was kicked off the cases he was working on (I think).
As a stockholder, you don't necessarily make any money of the company - only if the share value goes up.:-p
But, this tactic of buying a stock in a company you are aligned against isn't uncommon. It gives you, as the article mentions, the right to attend the shareholders meeting, and potentially some other benefits as well.
You would see that Dvorak got his valuation of Opera (approx $400 Million), by calculating the total value of all outstanding Opera stock on the Norwegian stock exchange. So, YES, Opera is a public company.
I don't so much have a problem with getting information from Amateurs - I've always thought Wikipedia was a cool idea - not that it would be the highest expression of knowledge on any subject, but that it could give me a decent intro to any subject, with links/references to more expert works.
The problem, as the parent points out, isn't when someone just makes a mistake, because their knowledge is limited. The problem arises when people start editting Wikipedia articles, purposely introducing innaccuracies and/or opinions, to push an agenda, whether it is political, religious, sociological, or economic.
As it currently stands, Wikipedia is just too prone to being hacked by people who don't give a crap about Wikipedia, and just want to push their own agenda.
I'm not sure what would explain this, but just about every single one of the graphs exhibited this almost mechanical jagginess for search popularity (during the 'normal' demand levels, not considering the short-period popularity spikes). I wonder if the local maximums correspond with weakly peak-periods, and the local minimums represent non-peak periods of the week. It's the only thing I could come up with for the almost identical jagginess of all searches.
It might be nice (or not) to date another computer geek. You'd at least have something in common. How much do I have in common with an Art History major? Or even a physics or engineering major? An Engineering major I *might* have more in common with, as I think CompSci tends to be fairly closely aligned with Engineering and Mathematics curriculum.
I think, fundamentally, though, that people tend to spend the most time with people in their own discipline. Your opportunities to meet people are largely (though not solely) influenced by your academic and professional activities.
So, more women in computing means more chances to meet women that would potentially be interesting to me. Sure, I try to meet people outside my discipline as much as possible, but the fact remains that a large part of my interactions with other computer people almost always tend to be men. Go to a computer conference lately (like a Linux users expo)? You're going to mostly meet men there, and the few women who are at them seem to be mostly already in a relationship.
A lot of relationships over the years have been formed by people who were in college classes together. If there are few women in my computer science classes, and computer science classes are a majority of my classes, that reduces my chance to meet women who might be more compatible with/interested in me. Sure, there are still general ed classes, you can still go flirt in the library, gym, or student union building. But some of us aren't the best at flirting with strangers, and do better in a situation like a class where you have some potential to interact with people that is provided by the structure of the class.
You're right, you don't have to date someone in your discipline, and you could even make an argument that perhaps looking outside your discipline is a superior way to meet people. But, some of us would at least like to have more of an oportunity. . .
I don't think the ISP's have indicated any intention to limit traffic based on content, but rather to provide different levels of service (QoS) for some providers, and for, e.g. P2P, relegate that traffic to the 'lower' tier of service. But all packets would still go through (although, as part of QoS, I wouldn't be suprised if you get significant packet loss for games and things - hard to say how they will treat packets for, e.g. Quake/Call of Duty/etc).
I think the ISPs can and will make the claim that they aren't actually doing content *filtering*, which would trigger loss of Common Carrier as you say. They will claim that they are providing different levels of service for different types of traffic from different origins, *regardless* of the content of those packets. That is, I think the argument can be made that, e.g. giving packets destined for the port used commonly for a particular P2P program a lower priority doesn't really take into account the *contents* of the packet, but rather just what port it is sent on.
I'm not saying it's right in the moral sense. I'm just saying that, from what I understand of the proposal which may be wrong, they are just creating multiple levels of service, someting common carriers have done for ages.
You used a Fedex example. Fedex has overnight delivery, 2 day, and 3-4 day 'regular' delivery. I expect the ISPs that are lobbying for this to argue that this is exactly the same situation.
"Once upon a time, the government recognized the value of unfettered communication to our democracy. So it held at bay those who wanted to privatize it, meter it , and restrict access."
I'm not sure, but it's my understanding that the reason communications was metered for so long is that the way telco's and cable television systems came about, there were necessary reasons that you would only have ONE phone company and cable television company in any geographic region. The nature of running cables to people's houses demanded that public property (right-of ways to place utility poles, or run underground cables) be utilized, and granted the local phone/cable company a monopoly. Since you can have no competition in an industry with guaranteed monopolies, government regulation (price controls, guarantees of service levels, etc) was absolutely necessary.
Basically, these industries were non-capitalistic business in a primarily capitalist country, and the people wouldn't allow them to go un-regulated.
"But it has grown big enough and widepsread enough, that the capitalists want to own it now."
Uhh, reality check. They already own/control the internet, at least to the extent that they own the portion of the internet that you use to access the internet. I think this two-tier pricing is going to bite them in the ass, however, when customers flock to other ISP's that don't do this extortion racket. Or, maybe customers won't care.
Probably, a lot of web-sites will start detecting customers from these two-tier ISPs, and constantly send them warnings that "Your Internet Service Provider, , provides lower quality of service to you when accessing this service. If you have problems with the site being slow, or a loss of quality in video,audio, or game streams, this is due to your ISP reducing download speeds and/or dropping packets from our servers. If you experience difficulty, we recommend choosing another ISP: ".
If enough web-sites started doing this, it would no doubt hurt the revenue of such ISP's to the point where they *have* to scrap this idea. If I ran a web site that got hit by this extortion racket, I'd do this in a heartbeat. And, if the ISP's dared to block my little warning message, I'd sue them to have their Common Carrier status stripped, at which point they'd be open to an avelanche of lawsuits from now till the end of the world (as we know it).
"What they miss is that it grew exactly because it wasn't owned privately by people whose only vision is profit."
Partly right. At least in the very early days. But since about 1995, the internet has largely been 'owned' (in the sense of the physical infrastructure) by private corporations who very much are driven by profit. But, the reason we haven't seen this nonsense before (and why I don't think it'll last), is because there is too much competition in the ISP business.
I realize the ISP game is consolidating down a lot, to become mostly telco or cable co as your options, but as long as all the ISP's don't conspire together to bring this about, then I suspect people will switch to whatever service gives them the best service. That's the power of open, competitive markets. If you have competition who is willing to take care of their customers better than you do, then you *must* give approximately the same service at about the same price, or else go out of business.
"There are some things too precious to give to those who worship profit above all else and the handful of brilliant men that founded this nation tried to anticipate the rapaciousness of the capitalist"
I think you meant the 'rapaciousness of the monopolist'. The scenarios you describe are what happens when you get monopolies or oligopolies (a very small number of competitors who all conspire to drive up prices, etc). Right now, there is quite a lot of competition in the ISP market, *but* it is, admittedly, reducing somewhat rapidly.
Capitalism, in the sense of open, vigorous competition, usually leads to bett
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an apologist for SBC - I think this is a horrible idea, because customers ALREADY pay for higher download speeds in the form of a higher bandwidth connectioin (and the same goes for content providers like Google, et. al, who pay a lot of money for bandwidth, one way or another). They basically want to double charge me - "Oh, you payed for a 768k DSL line? Well, if you actually want to DOWNLOAD data at 768k [which you already payed for], then the content provider you are downloading from has to pay us too".
But, as far as the common carrier argument goes - airlines, trainlines, and ship-lines are also, I believe considered common carriers, but they can have multi-tiered pricing schemes (1st class vs coach, state room vs steerage, etc) for levels of service. And the ISP's that want this will claim that is all this is - it doesn't *prevent* anyone from getting access to certain content (at least, not directly), but only affects the level of service based on price.
I'm no lawayer, but trust me, the argument that introducing pricing levels to content providers for higher priority traffic endangers their common carrier status, or require a special act of congress to allow, is pretty much nonsense. They can't do it currently, but I don't think it has anything to do with common carrier, and more to do with FCC regulations.
The title is a little tongue-in-cheek, but I was amused by your observation that "We've worked a number of years solely on manufacturing and assembly clients and they're the absolute worst in believing that technology can make them more profitable." Because, the whole idea behind the Industrial Revolution was the concept that you could use technology to make production of goods *much* cheaper, faster, and on a massively larger scale.
I think IS *generally* isn't involved to a great deal in the production side of the business (although I think it is becoming more so - I'm sure the parent would have more knowledge about this than I), but I would just tend to think that manufacturing businesses would be always at the forefront of using technology to make business more profitable, as that is the whole concept behind modern manufacturing.
I also think, if the mindset you mentioned is wide-spread in the industry, it might explain to a large extent why US 'hard-industry' is having such difficulty competing against foreign competitors . . . because those foreign competitors might be out-revolutionizing them (in addition to having cheaper labor;-) ).
I'm sure there is an answer to this question, but how do you estimate costs like, e.g. the cost of not having email service for X number hours/days/weeks if your email server goes down? For a government contractor, I suspect that nowadays, a lot of communication with government agencies for which you are contracting is done via email, so email would probably be very important to your business. Yet, how do you set a value on that?
I mean, I could think of a few worst-case scenarios for impact of email being down. . . namely that you miss some kind of Request for Proposal broadcast email sent by a government agency to all registered contractors, and end up missing out on a contract, or having a project delayed because of communication problems. But all that is highly variable.
I agree that the best way to approach management about investing money on IT resources is to bring them dollar figures that can help them understand the cost/benefit of the status quo, vs the cost/benefit of the proposed improvement, but how do you actually do that?
I bet this is the type of question that people make an MBA/MIS Doctoral Thesis out of lol.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but not necessarily about the 'poor' graphics.
I agree that this isn't going to have a fancy accellerated 3D chipset. But all you need for most of the types of apps you describe is a basic 2D chipset with basic 2D accellerations. This has been available as a dirt-cheap integration option built-right into motherboards for a very long time.
Heck, something that is equivalent in power to the ATI Rage Pro 3D (which was released way back in like 1998), or the intel i810 chipset, should not be expensive to add into the motherboard of these laptops. Now, the speed of the CPU *may* tend to cause these to run a little slower, but it doesn't take that much CPU power to run most basic 2D applications.
No one will probably ever see this comment anyhow, since the article is like 3 days old. But, to answer your question, they probably would *not* lose common carrier designation. Airlines, cruise lines, and trains, generally all have the concept of tiered pricing. In the case of Airlines, first class gives you better seats, better food, and possibly some other perks, because you pay more. But, an airline is still a common carrier.
The US Postal Service has 3rd class mail, 2nd class mail, 1st class mail, and Express Mail. Yet they are still a common carrier.
The main criteria for a common carrier is that they will accept content/passengers from anyone *who is willing to pay* (just because an airline is a common carrier doesn't mean I can fly free). That is, for example, internet providers don't screen content and allow some and deny other (well, outside of stuff that has been reported as violating copyright, child porn, etc - and that only gets blocked after a complaint has been registered and verified).
In this case, the phone co's are still saying they will pass content for anyone - but the level of service given is determined by how much they are willing to pay.
Don't think from this article that I am a supporter of the Telco's on this. I'm just trying to answer the question about common carrier. I think if the Telco's get their way on this, it will be more of a problem for them than anything.
Managers do need to be experts in their field
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Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
"One might argue that the manager is incompetent if he can't tell the difference between good code and bad code, but that's really not the manager's job. The manager's job is to find and motivate good programmers (who know how to write good code)."
See, this is what seperates well run companies from poorly run companies, often times. How, how, HOW in the world is the manager ever possibly supposed to do the latter, if he can't do the former (that is, how can he find and motivate good programmers, if he can't look at their code and figure out how good a programmer they are)?
I want a construction manager to know how stuff is built *the best way*, I want an engineering manager to know how stuff is designed *the best way*, I want a programming manager who knows how stuff is designed and coded *the best way*.
If you have an incompetent person in management, it is likely that you will, eventually, end up with a department full of incompetents (because the manager will drive out anyone more competent than him/her-self in most cases, or at least get in the way, or just not recognize the good ones and weed out the bad ones leading to a potentially discouraging, frustrating, or, in some cases, hostile work environment for the competent ones).
Slashdot Mirror
Many people have this negative connotation about propaganda, assuming it means lies you tell people in order to manipulate populations. That is one way propaganda has been, and is, used. But, generally speaking, propaganda just means communicating the government's message. That message could be false, or true. One critical truth is, the insurrectionists and terrorists have plenty of propagandists out there spreading half-truths or outright lies about the US and it's mission in Iraq and elsewhere.
If we are to have any hope of succeeding, we need to present our side of the story to the rest of the world, and particularly to Muslims. If anything, the US government has done too poor a job of propaganda, not too good of a job. I will say that doing things like bribing journalists makes you look bad, makes it looks like you are corrupt, and can't get anyone to carry your story unless they too, are corrupt. The current administration has ham-handedly gone about propaganda, but it must be recognized that propaganda is essential in any operation.
Which is, how can any project which is non-commercial ever be doomed, as long as the maintainers are still interested in it? Now, if someone wants to start an Open Source company, where they need a product which generates revenue streams, they might be doomed for not being mature enough.
But the projects which are either a labor of love (probably most Open Source projects), or which fill a need better than any other OSS/Free Software (Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc) will continue to plug along, without much corporate adoption, until they either die from lack of interest/competition, or reach a critical mass where they are suddenly the hot new Open Source tool that everybody starts using. But, the plugging along phase can last a long long time given dedication from the developer(s).
Since Free Software is fundamentally different from commercial software, I would say it can NEVER be doomed the way a proprietary software package can be. Often, when the companies that make proprietary software go under, it's gone forever, because whoever inherits the source code after the bankruptcy (assuming the source even survives), will probably never do anything with it, and never let anyone else do anything with it.
Open Source/Free Software, however, can easily have a second life. If anyone ever gets interested in the software again, they can use the source code to re-start development. Free Software can, basically, never truly die. . . just go inactive for awhile, or indefinitely.
I bought Uru because I was a fan of Myst, and was intrigued by the idea of a cooperative, multiplayer Myst (although, I was, honeslty, a little puzzled how they would pull that off - I figured cooperative puzzles that required players to be at different locations, do things together - although, again, how could they ever create enough puzzles to keep the game from getting old very fast. . .?).
Nevertheless, I bought Uru, and then was disappointed when I figured out that the multiplayer experience wasn't even online yet at the time they sold it. I registered for a Beta invite, and was finally invited. . . then they shut down the server a week later, before I had even really had a chance to try it out much.
Add to that the fact that while the single player game ran fine on my computer, the multiplayer experience, even though I never got out of my private 'neighborhood', so never even ran into any other people, was incredibly slow and laggy. To the point where it made it hard to explore the game properly. I shrugged this off though thinking to myself. . . it's a Beta, that's only to be expected. It'll get better nearer to release.
I really think Uru was a cool idea, but I'm still left wondering why it got canned before it ever even had a chance. The reason given for the funding cuts was that there was not enough interest/response. How can there be a lot of response for a game that never even had a decently working beta? Did they measure the response based on the sales of the single-player game? I don't think I ever saw much advertising/marketting for Uru. I just happened to see it in Best Buy and, being the fan I am, bought it.
Uru seems like it never got the chance to be the game it could be, which makes me sad. It also made me angry that they sold it as a multiplayer game, when the multiplayer component wasn't ready when I installed the game, and *never* was ready. But, being both poor, and a fan, I never considered trying to sue for false advertising or anything. It's just like, well, what can you do. You can't force them to finish the multiplayer component, the most you could get is a refund. But I didn't want a refund. . . I wanted the multiplayer game that the box promised.
I really liked the Uru game engine. Full 3d, full motion. You could *jump* - something no other Myst game ever let you do (I know some people hate jump puzzles, but if done in moderation, I find them to be kind of fun). I thought Uru was a better game than Myst 4 Revelation, not that Myst 4 is bad, but after playing Uru, it seemed more limited, like going backwards in game development instead of forwards. Like going from Super Mario Bros 3 back to Super Mario Bros - the original SMB was a great game, but after playing 3, it would be less satisfying.
I really truly hope that maybe Uru can be brought back to life. I'll probably even go seek an invite, just to show Cyan my continued interest. Maybe if enough people try to get on the shard, they can demonstrate sufficient interest to this mysterious source of funding, to get the funding necessary to continue the project and create new content.
Although. . . I'm rather puzzled that Cyan needs 3rd party funding. Myst was (and may still be) the best selling game of all time (at least it held that title for awhile). How could Cyan not have a development warchest to do whatever they want with?
It kind of seems analogous to Blizzard saying they can't develop a new game for lack of funding.
And all those Olympic Games. They're just silly kid stuff. And Pro Football "Games", and Pro Basketball, Baseball, Soccer, Hockey, ad naseum. People have been calling very grow-up activities 'games' for a long time.
Sometimes Slashdot runs some really STUPID opinions on the front page, and I'd say this article qualifies.
You seem to be implaying that the article said, "moved to become the first major Internet telephony player", as opposed to what it really says, "moved to become the first major Internet telephony player to go public". The main idea being conveyed is that they are the first to try to go public (with Internet telephony being a modifier of that), not the first VOIP company. Now, it may be that your company is a public company, but by your own admission they are not a major player in the Internet telephony market.
It's a good thing you posted as anonymous coward, because now everyone thinks you're an idiot with such bad Attention Defecit Disorder that you can't even finish reading a simple, easy to understand, sentence.
I've personally always fealt this was the right war, but for the wrong reasons. The Bush administration needed to come up with some reasons to go to war, but they didn't want to admit the truth of why, so they made up these cock-and-bull stories.
I can't really speak to what the Bush administrations true motives were. I suspect, that, mostly, Bush did think that Saddam Hussein was a growing threat to the US and the Western World, and didn't want to give him any chance to acquire any more WMD than he had. Maybe they sexed up the intelligence (which, btw, if they did do, I don't condone).
Why do I feel this was the right war? Perhaps my limited knowledge of history is incorrect, but, it is my current understanding that Europe and the US have played 'chess' with the Middle East for most of the 20th century, and that, to a large extent, Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq because earlier administrations had propped him up. The U.S. has, purportedly, done some very bad things in the region, including: Iran had, at one time, a democratic government. The CIA apparently helped overthrow the democratic government and install a dictator (I don't know that he was a *bad* dictator per se, but still), which lead to the Iranian revolution which installed the current Theocracy we all know and love. It my understanding that the US then propped up Saddam Hussein as a sort of first-line-of-defense against Iran.
Personally, I feel America needs to give the middle east an apology for so much meddling, and get the hell out of their business. But, alas, Saddam Hussein was part of that meddling. And so, to try to get things somewhat 'right' before leaving, we are forced to meddle some more. And that, I feel, is the truest and best justification for the current actions in Iraq. To turn over the future of Iraq to the Iraqi people. As for Iran, as much as I don't like the current government (espcially the hate-mongering, former-terrorist president of Iran) it should also be recognized that, for to some extent, the current government of Iran represents the people of Iran, and outside of defending ourselves against them, we need to let their politics run their own course.
Of course, I may be completely wrong. I can only go by the history that I have learned, and it is within possibility that the history I've been taught is either completely wrong, or incomplete in some critical way.
The sad thing is though, that what history will likely remember is that we entered into this action on bad intelligence and bull-crap stories from Bush & Cheney, LLP. And, because we entered into it the wrong way, with the wrong communication to the Iraqi people, and the rest of the Muslim world, it will probably have the wrong outcome - forcing us to meddle further in Middle Eastern affairs.
Are you and I even on the same website? We must be, but I don't know how you came to that conclusion reading the Slashdot blurb, nevermind the actual interview.
Kind of off-topic, but I saw your comment about DAoC's friar and remembered the disaster of a character system that DAoC has, that is best illustrated by my Warden.
DAoC had a kind of worst-of-all-worlds approach to characters. They had character classes with 'specializations' within the character classes. The problem was, most character classes had one specizlization that worked fairly well for that type, and two specializations that would leave you, often, with a royally gimp character. They gave you a limited amount of specialization points, and you had to spend them on 1-2 of the specializations (for the most part - certain character classes, like rangers, got both more specializations to persue, and more spec points).
Now, to my Warden. Warden was a character type that the game manual (Tip for MMOG newbies: most game manuals LIE blatently about character types in their descriptions. Don't pay any attention to them) described as being a hybrid healer/fighter. The truth is, they had something like 4 specializations - a weapon spec, a healing spec, a buffing, and a shielding spec. They actually did the best with the shielding spec (they had these magical shields they could put on people, that helped quite a lot - they reflected a portion of damage that enemies attacked you with back at the enemies, which simultaneously reduced incoming damage, and increased damage to enemies).
Well, as I recall, the Warden was my first or 2nd character, and after like 15 levels, I ended up with an almost hopelessly screwed up character, because early on, I didn't really understand the specialization choices I was making, and DAoC had a specialization system where, if you were specced to your character level in your 1 or 2 specs you could max, you were fine, but if you tried to generalize by spreading points into 3 or 4 of the specs, you were totallly, completely useless.
But, even when they introduced respecs into the game, so you could have an opportunity to re-allocate your spec points, it turns out that some specializations were just MUCH better than others. I tried speccing my Warden as primarily a fighter with some healing. Turned out that even specced to my own level in the weapon ability, and with good gear (armor, weapons, etc), I was *still* a highly innefective fighter, with weak heals.
The point of this post is, an MMOG designer, if they are going to try to choose a hybrid system, which gives people choices, it is their responsibility to make sure that all choices are fairly viable. In DAoC, there were certain character types that were sub-par overall, or sub-par unless they chose the ONE TRUE PATH for that character type. Any other choice led you down a road of complete frustration.
I'm completely convinced, to this day, that DAoC, while it's basic design (the Realm vs Realm system, backstory, etc) was pretty cool, it had the worst character system I've ever encountered, and to boot was pretty badly mis-managed. The management of the game was more interested in releasing expansion pack after expansion pack, than fixing badly designed specializations and powers.
Yeah, I'm a little bitter lol.
Well, I suppose you are mostly correct.
BUT, that being said, sometimes leaks aren't from within the company. Sometimes they are from partners, reviewers, or beta testers who've been given early access to the product, but who have no legal right to give it to anyone else. . . but do anyhow.
At first, I thought the article poster was adding their own commentary. If you read the article, however, you will see those are direct quotes from the article.
The article itself, I would categorize as flaimbait, -1. However, despite that, it's still interesting that they have figured out bee flight.
I should probably just stop there, but I'm going to take the bait (to an extent), and say this:
Just because we've figured out bee flight doesn't mean intelligent design is false. Just because we couldn't previously figure out how bees fly doesn't prove itelligent design is true. Intelligent Design is a philosophy, not a scientific theory. I happen to be a Christian, and a believer in creation. I also think that God may have used evolution as a tool of creation. Which, of course, puts me in the camp that EVERYBODY else despises. *sigh*
All I can say to the parent poster is, you can choose to live life in a seqoistered bubble, or you can put on your asbestos undershorts and deal with the real world. If you are going to move in the world of nerds, which includes science and technology, you need to just deal with the fact that there is a certain element of the scientific world which is openly hostile to your beliefs. Deal with is. Sheesh.
As for the hostile people, all I can say is, well not all of us believe that Intelligent Design should be taught in a science curriculum AS SCIENCE, because it is fundamentally a matter of faith. But, some of us find it hard to believe that random chance, un-guided, could possibly produce the complexity we see in nature. Bee flight is still an example of amazing complexity, which even though we can understand it, doesn't make it any less impressive. I am still inclined to believe that a higher power guided the evolution of bee DNA to produce such wondorous 'technology'.
Maybe you think that makes me stupid. I don't really care.
Technically, bandwidth shaping based on port is not content-based filtering. 1) It does not look at the content of the packet in any way, just the headers. They don't know or care if you are transferring child-Pr0n or Linux .iso files, they are slowing down all traffic on that port. Does it suck? Absolutely, so get another ISP (if you can - if you live in a country with state-enforced monopolies on broadband access, all I can say is get involved in your government enough to change the situation and open up competition).
As long as an ISP passes all content through without inspecting it to find out what the particular data being transmitted is, they are, I'm fairly sure, still quite safe in terms of Common Carrier protection. That is, VoIP can be legal or illegal, depending on how the talkers are using it, but the ISP, when giving higher priority to that port, still has no idea what the conversation is about.
If they started looking inside the packets and blocking 'offensive' material, then I would agree, they immediately lose the liability protection of being a common carrier.
And, I personally would not mind ISP's doing a bit of QoS bandwidth shaping for stuff like VoIP, games, etc. What I don't like (and I suspect you yourself do not like), is the idea of them arbitrarily putting a hard cap on 'lower-priority' services, like P2P file transfers, or artificially reducing the bandwidth available from 'non-preferred' content providers.
There is a type of QoS where the network always tries to move everything as fast as possible, BUT, if bandwidth becomes 100% utilized, it moves higher-priority traffic first, in order to maintain an acceptable level of service for things that are highly-time sensitive, and slows down less-time-sensitive packets. I don't think anyone would argue that is illegal, or even bad for consumers. And yet, by your argument, any ISP implementing any QoS at all would suddenly lose common carrier status. That just makes absolutely no sense.
You might wish there was a legal argument here, and maybe there is (IANAL), but I just don't see it. Common carrier has always been about knowing exactly what specific traffic is being carried, vs a generic categorization of traffic.
I think, generally speaking, you might be right. In this case, I don't think Jack is currently involved in any active cases against them because, as you say, he was kicked off the cases he was working on (I think).
:-p
As a stockholder, you don't necessarily make any money of the company - only if the share value goes up.
But, this tactic of buying a stock in a company you are aligned against isn't uncommon. It gives you, as the article mentions, the right to attend the shareholders meeting, and potentially some other benefits as well.
You would see that Dvorak got his valuation of Opera (approx $400 Million), by calculating the total value of all outstanding Opera stock on the Norwegian stock exchange. So, YES, Opera is a public company.
I don't so much have a problem with getting information from Amateurs - I've always thought Wikipedia was a cool idea - not that it would be the highest expression of knowledge on any subject, but that it could give me a decent intro to any subject, with links/references to more expert works.
The problem, as the parent points out, isn't when someone just makes a mistake, because their knowledge is limited. The problem arises when people start editting Wikipedia articles, purposely introducing innaccuracies and/or opinions, to push an agenda, whether it is political, religious, sociological, or economic.
As it currently stands, Wikipedia is just too prone to being hacked by people who don't give a crap about Wikipedia, and just want to push their own agenda.
I'm not sure what would explain this, but just about every single one of the graphs exhibited this almost mechanical jagginess for search popularity (during the 'normal' demand levels, not considering the short-period popularity spikes). I wonder if the local maximums correspond with weakly peak-periods, and the local minimums represent non-peak periods of the week. It's the only thing I could come up with for the almost identical jagginess of all searches.
Would be interesting to find the real reason.
It might be nice (or not) to date another computer geek. You'd at least have something in common. How much do I have in common with an Art History major? Or even a physics or engineering major? An Engineering major I *might* have more in common with, as I think CompSci tends to be fairly closely aligned with Engineering and Mathematics curriculum.
I think, fundamentally, though, that people tend to spend the most time with people in their own discipline. Your opportunities to meet people are largely (though not solely) influenced by your academic and professional activities.
So, more women in computing means more chances to meet women that would potentially be interesting to me. Sure, I try to meet people outside my discipline as much as possible, but the fact remains that a large part of my interactions with other computer people almost always tend to be men. Go to a computer conference lately (like a Linux users expo)? You're going to mostly meet men there, and the few women who are at them seem to be mostly already in a relationship.
A lot of relationships over the years have been formed by people who were in college classes together. If there are few women in my computer science classes, and computer science classes are a majority of my classes, that reduces my chance to meet women who might be more compatible with/interested in me. Sure, there are still general ed classes, you can still go flirt in the library, gym, or student union building. But some of us aren't the best at flirting with strangers, and do better in a situation like a class where you have some potential to interact with people that is provided by the structure of the class.
You're right, you don't have to date someone in your discipline, and you could even make an argument that perhaps looking outside your discipline is a superior way to meet people. But, some of us would at least like to have more of an oportunity. . .
I don't think the ISP's have indicated any intention to limit traffic based on content, but rather to provide different levels of service (QoS) for some providers, and for, e.g. P2P, relegate that traffic to the 'lower' tier of service. But all packets would still go through (although, as part of QoS, I wouldn't be suprised if you get significant packet loss for games and things - hard to say how they will treat packets for, e.g. Quake/Call of Duty/etc).
I think the ISPs can and will make the claim that they aren't actually doing content *filtering*, which would trigger loss of Common Carrier as you say. They will claim that they are providing different levels of service for different types of traffic from different origins, *regardless* of the content of those packets. That is, I think the argument can be made that, e.g. giving packets destined for the port used commonly for a particular P2P program a lower priority doesn't really take into account the *contents* of the packet, but rather just what port it is sent on.
I'm not saying it's right in the moral sense. I'm just saying that, from what I understand of the proposal which may be wrong, they are just creating multiple levels of service, someting common carriers have done for ages.
You used a Fedex example. Fedex has overnight delivery, 2 day, and 3-4 day 'regular' delivery. I expect the ISPs that are lobbying for this to argue that this is exactly the same situation.
"Once upon a time, the government recognized the value of unfettered communication to our democracy. So it held at bay those who wanted to privatize it, meter it , and restrict access."
I'm not sure, but it's my understanding that the reason communications was metered for so long is that the way telco's and cable television systems came about, there were necessary reasons that you would only have ONE phone company and cable television company in any geographic region. The nature of running cables to people's houses demanded that public property (right-of ways to place utility poles, or run underground cables) be utilized, and granted the local phone/cable company a monopoly. Since you can have no competition in an industry with guaranteed monopolies, government regulation (price controls, guarantees of service levels, etc) was absolutely necessary.
Basically, these industries were non-capitalistic business in a primarily capitalist country, and the people wouldn't allow them to go un-regulated.
"But it has grown big enough and widepsread enough, that the capitalists want to own it now."
Uhh, reality check. They already own/control the internet, at least to the extent that they own the portion of the internet that you use to access the internet. I think this two-tier pricing is going to bite them in the ass, however, when customers flock to other ISP's that don't do this extortion racket. Or, maybe customers won't care.
Probably, a lot of web-sites will start detecting customers from these two-tier ISPs, and constantly send them warnings that "Your Internet Service Provider, , provides lower quality of service to you when accessing this service. If you have problems with the site being slow, or a loss of quality in video,audio, or game streams, this is due to your ISP reducing download speeds and/or dropping packets from our servers. If you experience difficulty, we recommend choosing another ISP: ".
If enough web-sites started doing this, it would no doubt hurt the revenue of such ISP's to the point where they *have* to scrap this idea. If I ran a web site that got hit by this extortion racket, I'd do this in a heartbeat. And, if the ISP's dared to block my little warning message, I'd sue them to have their Common Carrier status stripped, at which point they'd be open to an avelanche of lawsuits from now till the end of the world (as we know it).
"What they miss is that it grew exactly because it wasn't owned privately by people whose only vision is profit."
Partly right. At least in the very early days. But since about 1995, the internet has largely been 'owned' (in the sense of the physical infrastructure) by private corporations who very much are driven by profit. But, the reason we haven't seen this nonsense before (and why I don't think it'll last), is because there is too much competition in the ISP business.
I realize the ISP game is consolidating down a lot, to become mostly telco or cable co as your options, but as long as all the ISP's don't conspire together to bring this about, then I suspect people will switch to whatever service gives them the best service. That's the power of open, competitive markets. If you have competition who is willing to take care of their customers better than you do, then you *must* give approximately the same service at about the same price, or else go out of business.
"There are some things too precious to give to those who worship profit above all else and the handful of brilliant men that founded this nation tried to anticipate the rapaciousness of the capitalist"
I think you meant the 'rapaciousness of the monopolist'. The scenarios you describe are what happens when you get monopolies or oligopolies (a very small number of competitors who all conspire to drive up prices, etc). Right now, there is quite a lot of competition in the ISP market, *but* it is, admittedly, reducing somewhat rapidly.
Capitalism, in the sense of open, vigorous competition, usually leads to bett
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an apologist for SBC - I think this is a horrible idea, because customers ALREADY pay for higher download speeds in the form of a higher bandwidth connectioin (and the same goes for content providers like Google, et. al, who pay a lot of money for bandwidth, one way or another). They basically want to double charge me - "Oh, you payed for a 768k DSL line? Well, if you actually want to DOWNLOAD data at 768k [which you already payed for], then the content provider you are downloading from has to pay us too".
But, as far as the common carrier argument goes - airlines, trainlines, and ship-lines are also, I believe considered common carriers, but they can have multi-tiered pricing schemes (1st class vs coach, state room vs steerage, etc) for levels of service. And the ISP's that want this will claim that is all this is - it doesn't *prevent* anyone from getting access to certain content (at least, not directly), but only affects the level of service based on price.
I'm no lawayer, but trust me, the argument that introducing pricing levels to content providers for higher priority traffic endangers their common carrier status, or require a special act of congress to allow, is pretty much nonsense. They can't do it currently, but I don't think it has anything to do with common carrier, and more to do with FCC regulations.
The title is a little tongue-in-cheek, but I was amused by your observation that "We've worked a number of years solely on manufacturing and assembly clients and they're the absolute worst in believing that technology can make them more profitable." Because, the whole idea behind the Industrial Revolution was the concept that you could use technology to make production of goods *much* cheaper, faster, and on a massively larger scale.
;-) ).
I think IS *generally* isn't involved to a great deal in the production side of the business (although I think it is becoming more so - I'm sure the parent would have more knowledge about this than I), but I would just tend to think that manufacturing businesses would be always at the forefront of using technology to make business more profitable, as that is the whole concept behind modern manufacturing.
I also think, if the mindset you mentioned is wide-spread in the industry, it might explain to a large extent why US 'hard-industry' is having such difficulty competing against foreign competitors . . . because those foreign competitors might be out-revolutionizing them (in addition to having cheaper labor
Quick minor correction to the last sentence of my post above - should be "MBA/MIS or Doctoral Thesis".
I'm sure there is an answer to this question, but how do you estimate costs like, e.g. the cost of not having email service for X number hours/days/weeks if your email server goes down? For a government contractor, I suspect that nowadays, a lot of communication with government agencies for which you are contracting is done via email, so email would probably be very important to your business. Yet, how do you set a value on that?
I mean, I could think of a few worst-case scenarios for impact of email being down. . . namely that you miss some kind of Request for Proposal broadcast email sent by a government agency to all registered contractors, and end up missing out on a contract, or having a project delayed because of communication problems. But all that is highly variable.
I agree that the best way to approach management about investing money on IT resources is to bring them dollar figures that can help them understand the cost/benefit of the status quo, vs the cost/benefit of the proposed improvement, but how do you actually do that?
I bet this is the type of question that people make an MBA/MIS Doctoral Thesis out of lol.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but not necessarily about the 'poor' graphics.
I agree that this isn't going to have a fancy accellerated 3D chipset. But all you need for most of the types of apps you describe is a basic 2D chipset with basic 2D accellerations. This has been available as a dirt-cheap integration option built-right into motherboards for a very long time.
Heck, something that is equivalent in power to the ATI Rage Pro 3D (which was released way back in like 1998), or the intel i810 chipset, should not be expensive to add into the motherboard of these laptops. Now, the speed of the CPU *may* tend to cause these to run a little slower, but it doesn't take that much CPU power to run most basic 2D applications.
No one will probably ever see this comment anyhow, since the article is like 3 days old. But, to answer your question, they probably would *not* lose common carrier designation. Airlines, cruise lines, and trains, generally all have the concept of tiered pricing. In the case of Airlines, first class gives you better seats, better food, and possibly some other perks, because you pay more. But, an airline is still a common carrier.
The US Postal Service has 3rd class mail, 2nd class mail, 1st class mail, and Express Mail. Yet they are still a common carrier.
The main criteria for a common carrier is that they will accept content/passengers from anyone *who is willing to pay* (just because an airline is a common carrier doesn't mean I can fly free). That is, for example, internet providers don't screen content and allow some and deny other (well, outside of stuff that has been reported as violating copyright, child porn, etc - and that only gets blocked after a complaint has been registered and verified).
In this case, the phone co's are still saying they will pass content for anyone - but the level of service given is determined by how much they are willing to pay.
Don't think from this article that I am a supporter of the Telco's on this. I'm just trying to answer the question about common carrier. I think if the Telco's get their way on this, it will be more of a problem for them than anything.
"One might argue that the manager is incompetent if he can't tell the difference between good code and bad code, but that's really not the manager's job. The manager's job is to find and motivate good programmers (who know how to write good code)."
See, this is what seperates well run companies from poorly run companies, often times. How, how, HOW in the world is the manager ever possibly supposed to do the latter, if he can't do the former (that is, how can he find and motivate good programmers, if he can't look at their code and figure out how good a programmer they are)?
I want a construction manager to know how stuff is built *the best way*, I want an engineering manager to know how stuff is designed *the best way*, I want a programming manager who knows how stuff is designed and coded *the best way*.
If you have an incompetent person in management, it is likely that you will, eventually, end up with a department full of incompetents (because the manager will drive out anyone more competent than him/her-self in most cases, or at least get in the way, or just not recognize the good ones and weed out the bad ones leading to a potentially discouraging, frustrating, or, in some cases, hostile work environment for the competent ones).