Finally, some actual companies are getting into the mix on monitor development! If they stay in it, we might actually see sane monitor prices! If anyone out there works at a company that makes monitors, please cut your gentials out because I don't want the gene pool to be infected with your lazy, mediocre kind.
Seriously, monitor developers haven't done jack shit for decades until someone shits out megabucks LCD screens. Now the monitor industry is no doubt sitting back and settling in for another 20 year price freeze where nothing new comes out and no prices move.
Its a good thing that IBM and Toshiba are greedy, otherwise we'd be stuck with the situation, but thanks to them, we'll get price cuts and cooler screens!
Name just one company that can survive with 0 sales or with even 50% of its current sales without changing the practices that you believe are stopping you from being happy.
I'd put money on it that you can't do it, but I'm experienced with your kind and money destroys you.
Esperandi Money is not a tool of oppression, it is the only tool of freedom. Without greed, innovation has no motivation. Greed is the mother of necessity.
Uhhmm.. huh? My mind is boggling right now over your post. Have you ever heard of guns? Do you know what money actually is?
There is only one way in which people are forced to do anything at all and only one way in which people -- with a gun (imprisonmnet is done at the point of a gun so it fits in here) and that's the government. The gun should be there to stop people from things like murder and such and it will always be there.
Anything else is free, objective choice. If you don't like your choice, that is NO excuse for making the wrong choice. If making the right choice is "hard", you deal with it. You weigh the advantages and disadvantages and you choose the one which is in your personal best interest.
On to money. Money is not a form of pressure. Sit back and realize what is required to survive. A meal every few days, water, and shelter. That's it, and you can get it all without money. When you want to trade in the world of money, you enter into its rules. Its rules are not published and they are not unrealistic or harsh. You do work for someone and he gives you money. This is a win-win situation because it is backed by the principle that you must make one of those free choices. Is the payment he offers worth it to you? If not, you don't do it. Period. You don't do it. If you do it and then want a union and want this and want that, you're defrauding the system and you're going to be unhappy for the rest of your life and start talking about the "common man" and junk.
Money does not create a class structure. Money does not endorse a class structure. A janitor is not as valuable as a company founder and that is a cold, hard fact in reality. There are no classes here, there is one man doing what he excels at at a wage that he agreed to be paid and the emplyer agreed to pay. They are both the picture of human virtue until the head of the company tries to cheat the janitor or the janitor tries to cheat the head of the company or brings the gun into it (a union is a gun since their only arguing tactic is violence). When that happens, whoever is being cheated should retain their virtuous status either by quitting or firing. If they are "backed into a corner", they might rail and whine about being forced, but unless the threat of violence or imprisonment is there, they are wrong. It is a hard choice and they want to abdicate that freedom so that someone else will take care of it for them.
Oh, no, i wasn;t saying give over your PC or be happy about this, i was just commenting about being unhappy with your job in a more general fashion, ie the thing that made these people mount the sick-out, a complete act of cowardice which they should be fired for.
When it omes to giving up the PCs or data or hard drives or whatever, I say fight that to the death. Takeit to the Supreme Court and you will win. You could defend this one yourself and win it, you don't even need a lawyer... ignoring the fact that the EFF would probably donate one or a lawyer would donate his time, this would be a high-profile case that would be easy to win, wouldn't take many lawyer-hours... the otherside will waste millions fighting a fight they have no chance to win. The courts have already ruled that free speech applies to email like it does to every other kind of speech so this is a no-brainer.
Perhaps you should read my entire post, I said if the burden of quitting is too great, you then have to reliaze that you are making a conscious choice and you need to stop bitching.
Esperandi But don't give over your PC or data in your home, take that to the Supreme Court, you WILL win.
Do any of these employees have grounds for a lawsuit here?
YES! While I agree with all of the fines and think the union should have been fined out of existence for such a practice (I guess its preferrable to the usual union practice of arguing with nothing but violence), this was going way too far and if these people DONT challenge this order, well, they're morons.
Esperandi Morons DO deserve what they get contrary to popular belief.
Actually, if you just make sure you have legal ownership of the PC (possession is 9/10ths of the law too), you're safe, privacy agreement or no... excepting an anti-privacy agreement they might want you to sign. In such a case, do not accept the PC is that is a concern to you. If you sign and accept and bitch about getting searched or asked for keys to your PGP encrypted mail and even get a court order for them, pony up or you deserve a smack in the face.
Esperandi People who sign a contract with no intent to uphold it really, REALLY need to be jailed.
Sure, it might be hard to get a job, sure, it might mean a change of career, but you have to weigh those things. Its all very simple. Either its worth it to quit or not. If its not, quit your bitching, it could only be worse, right? If its not a big deal to quit, or its not a BIGGER deal to quit put more appropriately, quit.
People just get in a rut and are too scared to think for themselves and go find a new rut.
I was already composing my "it's not THEIR computers" assuming this was another retarded story about employees getting pissed about not being allowed to have porn on the companies computers in their cubicle... but this really IS the employees computers!
This is not only not right, this is downright and unquestionably illegal. There is no chance in hell that this company is going to get out of this without being sued into the ground. The vast majority of the time, I don't give a rats ass about privacy issues, and I don't really care whether or not the company fires people for organizing a "sick-out". But the fact that they searched peoples computers for this evidence is abhorrent. I can't imagine them being able to search for this sort of thing unless they went through and read email piece by piece. Number 1, they shouldn't be reading peoples email like that. Number 2, if they find this "evidence", they are (not they kinda are, not this is a metaphor for, they *ARE*) violating the first amendment. A lot of people will scream this without even thinking and sound retarded, but I've studeied the first amendment a bit. This is a perfect example of what is called the "chilling effect" on speech. Even talking about your company in an unfavorable light is becoming chilled here. People won't do it for fear of their employer searching their PC and them getting fired for it.
The first amendment was created to protect speech that people want to stop --- not to protect speech no one cares about like saying "nice day". You should be able to talk about anything you want within bounds (the bounds are laid out by the supreme court and I agree with them).
On a deeper note, any person that participated in this SHOULD be fired, for their own good. They are obviously unable to deal with their employer in a productive manner individually to improve their situation to make it positive for both parties. Every single person in such a situation should either quit their job or be fired. Employment should be a win-win situation. The employer pays what they are willing to pay and you accept a certain level of payment. If you want more, you bargain or you quit. period. You do not join a union and use violence and intimidation or things like "sick-outs" to get your point across. You don't fight for raises for the person next to you, you fight for your own raise and you out-produce the person next to you to get it.
Esperandi While you're talking about the "damn slackers" around the water cooler, I'm working my ass off and I WILL have your job.
Heard what part? I'll gladly answer, but I don't know what you're looking for;) If you mean why scratching the label side screws the CD while scraping the underside doesn't hurt it, that's easy to explain. You see, they wanted CDs to last forever, so they put a huge (thinking to scale here;) layer of protective material to guard against scratches. Only problem is that it caused the situation we have now, we have the label, then diretly on the other side of the label we've got the nickel substrate that the laser reflects off of. Then we hav ea bunch of protective layer. A lot of good that does when people are setting them down label-side-down all the time;)
I'm not sure if this is a beautiful piece, I found myself shouting "BLAH BLAH BLAH" all throughout.
I control my PC. I tell it what to do with lines of code. If its doing something I don't want it to, I stop it. It is not an uncontrollable beast looming over my 9-to-5 day (I don't have a 9-to-5 day).
You know what this sounds like? It sounds like an advanced version of the 1950s pinheads who thought robots would enslave mankind, computers would put everyone out of work, etc, etc.
Esperandi *** NO ONE GIVES A FLYING FUCK ABOUT WHAT YOU DO ONLINE ***
I've been thinking for awhile about the possibility of making the Internet into its own country... not thinking about literally doing it, but whether or not it would be possible. With this, I think it would be. Now, it would only be its own country for as long as it takes the big companies that provide us with all the backbones to cut those cables...
Esperandi Yes, Slashdot comes to you over a fat wire owned by a megacorporation! Fear!
Please tell me they're gonna make this stuff look COOL when they produce them? I mean, harddrive could look cool, but instead they chose to hide them in a metal box inside the computer (they coulda mounted it in plexiglass and had it mount in the front face). I'm thinking of a tray that you can eject like a CD-ROM tray but has the cube with the lasers around it sitting right there, maybe even add some sort of fluorescence to the process so you can see "glitter" when the laser hits a denatured spot (or a non-denatured spot, wouldn't make much difference)...
Oh, and make it an eerie green like the green used in The Tommyknockers movie..
If this is true and the "decay" is predictable, this is easy to fix. You want to store 0xEF43? Pass it thru a filter that turns it into something that when corrupted turns back into 0xEF43... then after you read it once, refresh the store.
Of course if that doesn't work, error-checking code could easily make all of this possible.
Sounds like this would allow them to get RAM into much smaller places if the bare parts of the iron modules they use (the ones that just hold one bit) are smaller than a dozen or so transistors, these could easily replace the latches used in memory now.
Esperandi Up next: The hard drive of the future will be based on a rotary drum
I know what you're going to say, CDs are reliable ways to store data. And you're right. They're also unstable. So how do we take an unstable media and make it into a reliable data storage device? Hamming code. Complex error checking. Its a bit of overhead, but you don't have to worry about the instability and you still get some of the data density increase.
Esperandi BTW, about CDs, if you scratch the "bottom", the CD will survive. If you scratch the label side, you're screwed, so quit laying them down label-side-down!
If the data density is as increased as everyone says it is, we can easily eliminate errors by compensating for them with hamming code. We already do it on CDs and tons of other types of data storage that has the possibility of loss.
That just shows you don't understand egomaniacs... Egomaniacs are down-to-earth. They admit their stupid mistakes because that's how they learn... they admit them, but they don't feel bad about them like you pointed out that he doesn't... the posers who claim to have invented the Internet (just an example, I have no political feelings towards Al Gore) and feel that image is everything are just that, all image with lies as their substrate;)
Maybe if AMD started releasing computers with Linux pre-installed my news submission about AMD demonstrating a 1.1GHz Athon using copper-interconnect technology wouldn't have been rejected.
You want him to feel bad and/or guilty about being good. You want him to grovel and say that his ability comes not from the power of his own mind, but from somewhere else. You want to be able to walk up to him and say "you're no better than me because your power comes from a higher source and someone got you to believe that."
I hope to eternity that he never "finds religion" and destroys himself like you yearn for him to do.
For John Carmack, i would venture to say that coding is the most important thing in life.
If we lived in a utopia, everyones work would be their primary focus in life and they would all enjoy it. Don't begrudge a man, call him immoral, or tell him he might be hurting other peoples feelings when he's found the closest thing to paradise.
The man deserves an ego. He has done great things and he should get and claim every single bit of credit for them. Most people read "ego" as "liar" and call liars egomaniacs... real egomaniacs are great people or at least have done great things and they recognize how great those things are... if they overstep how great those things are, then they turn into liars;)
Esperandi Mine is better then yours because its mine
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, some actual companies are getting into the mix on monitor development! If they stay in it, we might actually see sane monitor prices! If anyone out there works at a company that makes monitors, please cut your gentials out because I don't want the gene pool to be infected with your lazy, mediocre kind.
Seriously, monitor developers haven't done jack shit for decades until someone shits out megabucks LCD screens. Now the monitor industry is no doubt sitting back and settling in for another 20 year price freeze where nothing new comes out and no prices move.
Its a good thing that IBM and Toshiba are greedy, otherwise we'd be stuck with the situation, but thanks to them, we'll get price cuts and cooler screens!
Esperandi
Greed IS Good.
Simply because the courts allowed it does not mean that it is CONSTITUTIONAL which is what the Supreme Court rules on
Esperandi
Name just one company that can survive with 0 sales or with even 50% of its current sales without changing the practices that you believe are stopping you from being happy.
I'd put money on it that you can't do it, but I'm experienced with your kind and money destroys you.
Esperandi
Money is not a tool of oppression, it is the only tool of freedom. Without greed, innovation has no motivation. Greed is the mother of necessity.
Uhhmm.. huh? My mind is boggling right now over your post. Have you ever heard of guns? Do you know what money actually is?
There is only one way in which people are forced to do anything at all and only one way in which people -- with a gun (imprisonmnet is done at the point of a gun so it fits in here) and that's the government. The gun should be there to stop people from things like murder and such and it will always be there.
Anything else is free, objective choice. If you don't like your choice, that is NO excuse for making the wrong choice. If making the right choice is "hard", you deal with it. You weigh the advantages and disadvantages and you choose the one which is in your personal best interest.
On to money. Money is not a form of pressure. Sit back and realize what is required to survive. A meal every few days, water, and shelter. That's it, and you can get it all without money. When you want to trade in the world of money, you enter into its rules. Its rules are not published and they are not unrealistic or harsh. You do work for someone and he gives you money. This is a win-win situation because it is backed by the principle that you must make one of those free choices. Is the payment he offers worth it to you? If not, you don't do it. Period. You don't do it. If you do it and then want a union and want this and want that, you're defrauding the system and you're going to be unhappy for the rest of your life and start talking about the "common man" and junk.
Money does not create a class structure. Money does not endorse a class structure. A janitor is not as valuable as a company founder and that is a cold, hard fact in reality. There are no classes here, there is one man doing what he excels at at a wage that he agreed to be paid and the emplyer agreed to pay. They are both the picture of human virtue until the head of the company tries to cheat the janitor or the janitor tries to cheat the head of the company or brings the gun into it (a union is a gun since their only arguing tactic is violence). When that happens, whoever is being cheated should retain their virtuous status either by quitting or firing. If they are "backed into a corner", they might rail and whine about being forced, but unless the threat of violence or imprisonment is there, they are wrong. It is a hard choice and they want to abdicate that freedom so that someone else will take care of it for them.
Esperandi
Oh, no, i wasn;t saying give over your PC or be happy about this, i was just commenting about being unhappy with your job in a more general fashion, ie the thing that made these people mount the sick-out, a complete act of cowardice which they should be fired for.
When it omes to giving up the PCs or data or hard drives or whatever, I say fight that to the death. Takeit to the Supreme Court and you will win. You could defend this one yourself and win it, you don't even need a lawyer... ignoring the fact that the EFF would probably donate one or a lawyer would donate his time, this would be a high-profile case that would be easy to win, wouldn't take many lawyer-hours... the otherside will waste millions fighting a fight they have no chance to win. The courts have already ruled that free speech applies to email like it does to every other kind of speech so this is a no-brainer.
Esperandi
Perhaps you should read my entire post, I said if the burden of quitting is too great, you then have to reliaze that you are making a conscious choice and you need to stop bitching.
Esperandi
But don't give over your PC or data in your home, take that to the Supreme Court, you WILL win.
Do any of these employees have grounds for a lawsuit here?
YES! While I agree with all of the fines and think the union should have been fined out of existence for such a practice (I guess its preferrable to the usual union practice of arguing with nothing but violence), this was going way too far and if these people DONT challenge this order, well, they're morons.
Esperandi
Morons DO deserve what they get contrary to popular belief.
Actually, if you just make sure you have legal ownership of the PC (possession is 9/10ths of the law too), you're safe, privacy agreement or no... excepting an anti-privacy agreement they might want you to sign. In such a case, do not accept the PC is that is a concern to you. If you sign and accept and bitch about getting searched or asked for keys to your PGP encrypted mail and even get a court order for them, pony up or you deserve a smack in the face.
Esperandi
People who sign a contract with no intent to uphold it really, REALLY need to be jailed.
Quit.
Sure, it might be hard to get a job, sure, it might mean a change of career, but you have to weigh those things. Its all very simple. Either its worth it to quit or not. If its not, quit your bitching, it could only be worse, right? If its not a big deal to quit, or its not a BIGGER deal to quit put more appropriately, quit.
People just get in a rut and are too scared to think for themselves and go find a new rut.
Esperandi
I was already composing my "it's not THEIR computers" assuming this was another retarded story about employees getting pissed about not being allowed to have porn on the companies computers in their cubicle... but this really IS the employees computers!
This is not only not right, this is downright and unquestionably illegal. There is no chance in hell that this company is going to get out of this without being sued into the ground. The vast majority of the time, I don't give a rats ass about privacy issues, and I don't really care whether or not the company fires people for organizing a "sick-out". But the fact that they searched peoples computers for this evidence is abhorrent. I can't imagine them being able to search for this sort of thing unless they went through and read email piece by piece. Number 1, they shouldn't be reading peoples email like that. Number 2, if they find this "evidence", they are (not they kinda are, not this is a metaphor for, they *ARE*) violating the first amendment. A lot of people will scream this without even thinking and sound retarded, but I've studeied the first amendment a bit. This is a perfect example of what is called the "chilling effect" on speech. Even talking about your company in an unfavorable light is becoming chilled here. People won't do it for fear of their employer searching their PC and them getting fired for it.
The first amendment was created to protect speech that people want to stop --- not to protect speech no one cares about like saying "nice day". You should be able to talk about anything you want within bounds (the bounds are laid out by the supreme court and I agree with them).
On a deeper note, any person that participated in this SHOULD be fired, for their own good. They are obviously unable to deal with their employer in a productive manner individually to improve their situation to make it positive for both parties. Every single person in such a situation should either quit their job or be fired. Employment should be a win-win situation. The employer pays what they are willing to pay and you accept a certain level of payment. If you want more, you bargain or you quit. period. You do not join a union and use violence and intimidation or things like "sick-outs" to get your point across. You don't fight for raises for the person next to you, you fight for your own raise and you out-produce the person next to you to get it.
Esperandi
While you're talking about the "damn slackers" around the water cooler, I'm working my ass off and I WILL have your job.
Heard what part? I'll gladly answer, but I don't know what you're looking for ;) If you mean why scratching the label side screws the CD while scraping the underside doesn't hurt it, that's easy to explain. You see, they wanted CDs to last forever, so they put a huge (thinking to scale here ;) layer of protective material to guard against scratches. Only problem is that it caused the situation we have now, we have the label, then diretly on the other side of the label we've got the nickel substrate that the laser reflects off of. Then we hav ea bunch of protective layer. A lot of good that does when people are setting them down label-side-down all the time ;)
Esperandi
Remember in the 50s how people feared robots would take over the world and sodomize their children? Well, this is the 2000 equivalent.
Esperandi
That and fear of "big, scary corporations"
I'm not sure if this is a beautiful piece, I found myself shouting "BLAH BLAH BLAH" all throughout.
I control my PC. I tell it what to do with lines of code. If its doing something I don't want it to, I stop it. It is not an uncontrollable beast looming over my 9-to-5 day (I don't have a 9-to-5 day).
You know what this sounds like? It sounds like an advanced version of the 1950s pinheads who thought robots would enslave mankind, computers would put everyone out of work, etc, etc.
Esperandi
*** NO ONE GIVES A FLYING FUCK ABOUT WHAT YOU DO ONLINE ***
I've been thinking for awhile about the possibility of making the Internet into its own country... not thinking about literally doing it, but whether or not it would be possible. With this, I think it would be. Now, it would only be its own country for as long as it takes the big companies that provide us with all the backbones to cut those cables...
Esperandi
Yes, Slashdot comes to you over a fat wire owned by a megacorporation! Fear!
Please tell me they're gonna make this stuff look COOL when they produce them? I mean, harddrive could look cool, but instead they chose to hide them in a metal box inside the computer (they coulda mounted it in plexiglass and had it mount in the front face). I'm thinking of a tray that you can eject like a CD-ROM tray but has the cube with the lasers around it sitting right there, maybe even add some sort of fluorescence to the process so you can see "glitter" when the laser hits a denatured spot (or a non-denatured spot, wouldn't make much difference)...
Oh, and make it an eerie green like the green used in The Tommyknockers movie..
Esperandi
If this is true and the "decay" is predictable, this is easy to fix. You want to store 0xEF43? Pass it thru a filter that turns it into something that when corrupted turns back into 0xEF43... then after you read it once, refresh the store.
Of course if that doesn't work, error-checking code could easily make all of this possible.
Esperandi
Sounds like this would allow them to get RAM into much smaller places if the bare parts of the iron modules they use (the ones that just hold one bit) are smaller than a dozen or so transistors, these could easily replace the latches used in memory now.
Esperandi
Up next: The hard drive of the future will be based on a rotary drum
I know what you're going to say, CDs are reliable ways to store data. And you're right. They're also unstable. So how do we take an unstable media and make it into a reliable data storage device? Hamming code. Complex error checking. Its a bit of overhead, but you don't have to worry about the instability and you still get some of the data density increase.
Esperandi
BTW, about CDs, if you scratch the "bottom", the CD will survive. If you scratch the label side, you're screwed, so quit laying them down label-side-down!
If the data density is as increased as everyone says it is, we can easily eliminate errors by compensating for them with hamming code. We already do it on CDs and tons of other types of data storage that has the possibility of loss.
Esperandi
Buy stock in vibrating mirrors!
No, lack of an ego is a sign of insecurity - maybe if you dont' take credit for your success they'll let you slide when you fuck up.
Esperandi
That just shows you don't understand egomaniacs... Egomaniacs are down-to-earth. They admit their stupid mistakes because that's how they learn... they admit them, but they don't feel bad about them like you pointed out that he doesn't... the posers who claim to have invented the Internet (just an example, I have no political feelings towards Al Gore) and feel that image is everything are just that, all image with lies as their substrate ;)
Esperandi
Maybe if AMD started releasing computers with Linux pre-installed my news submission about AMD demonstrating a 1.1GHz Athon using copper-interconnect technology wouldn't have been rejected.
Sigh.
Esperandi
You want him to feel bad and/or guilty about being good. You want him to grovel and say that his ability comes not from the power of his own mind, but from somewhere else. You want to be able to walk up to him and say "you're no better than me because your power comes from a higher source and someone got you to believe that."
I hope to eternity that he never "finds religion" and destroys himself like you yearn for him to do.
Esperandi
For John Carmack, i would venture to say that coding is the most important thing in life.
If we lived in a utopia, everyones work would be their primary focus in life and they would all enjoy it. Don't begrudge a man, call him immoral, or tell him he might be hurting other peoples feelings when he's found the closest thing to paradise.
Esperandi
The man deserves an ego. He has done great things and he should get and claim every single bit of credit for them. Most people read "ego" as "liar" and call liars egomaniacs... real egomaniacs are great people or at least have done great things and they recognize how great those things are... if they overstep how great those things are, then they turn into liars ;)
Esperandi
Mine is better then yours because its mine