...but Yahoo! isn't a wolf, it's an entity composed of thinking human beings. They can choose to turn a blind eye (which is to say, to act unethically) or they can take a stand. There's an enormous difference between pursuing profit regardless of any other consideration and pursuing profit within parameters that don't debase the social context in which that profit is made. The former we call "Enron" and it's arguably true that what Yahoo! does is worse than what Enron did: Enron cheated people out of their life's savings, while Yahoo! is helping to take away their freedom.
Nope, not a troll. I'm perfectly serious, though I'll admit to a bit of drama. For my users, the gradations between memory and storage aren't meaningful. To them, the former is where active thinking occurs; the latter is where data is kept for later recall. (They find the analogy to human thought processes useful.) This distinction helps them communicate with tech support more clearly so that, for instance, they don't get more RAM when what they needed was a bigger hard drive.
So there is a practical distinction that matters for them.
Language occurs in context. You work in IT, you use IT-speak; you work in business, you use business-speak. In both contexts, the specific jargon serves to separate the initiates from the posers. I demand that users know the difference between "memory" and "storage," and they have a corresponding right to demand that I distinguish "value chain" from "value-add."
Personally, I suspect that Wikipedia's method is a somewhat viable way to shuffle out the stupids, as true statements will be less likely to be edited than untrue statements, so gradually over time Wikipedia will tend to be more and more likely to contain true statements.
Besides, when a company with 30B USD market cap becomes a part of a company with 170B USD market cap it's called an acquisition, not a "merger."
When a company with 30B USD market cap becomes part of a company with 170B USD market cap, it's a "pooling of interests." Calling it an acquisition would be surpassingly stupid in terms of the taxes incurred, bordering on a violation of the Intel board's fiduciary duty to the shareholders.
...in my experience they don't want to hear of anything but IE because...
The parent's reasons for IE-only attitudes of support staff are incomplete. There are other, perfectly understandable reasons. Many companies have portals and intranet applications that are built to IE. Usage results with other browsers are unspecified and unsupported. My company has built its intranet in Java on Unix, but because it must reach users in the field using desktop configurations over which we have no control, we build to the most likely standard. Indeed, a survey conducted as part of the standard definition effort indicated that an insignificant proportion of our users (less than 1%) used something other than IE.
So it isn't a robotic allegiance to Microsoft's latest tech direction, or a contractually-constrained ability to control our own destiny, or even sheer laziness, but the realities of our user base that require an IE orientation.
Actually, it's simple economics. Profit is a function of capital, labor, and the current level of technology. In the short run, your only variable is labor. In a down market, you can only reduce labor to ensure you show some profit. It's arguably better to benefit the organization as a whole by maintaining its profitability (and thus its stock price and credit rating, etc.) than it is by holding on to excess labor.
Not to say it doesn't suck for the people layed off, but it's a perfectly rational course for management to take. You're kidding yourself if you think you'd do it differently.
The site says that some attempts have been made to compile on Cygwin and, IIRC, the compiler works; the GUI does not. The project lead is looking for volunteers to continue this thread.
It's absolutely amazing that the head of one the biggest corporations can publcily say something so totally and utterly stupid.
He's not being stupid, just disingenuous. He doesn't actually believe what he's saying. Rather, he's trying to deflect attention away from the real cause of piracy. I imagine if you pressed him, his rationale would be that if someone contemplates a fixed spend on technology and a smaller percentage goes to hardware due to lower hardware costs, the remainder would go towards legitimate software purchases, thus reducing piracy.
My guess is that he'd like to see overall hardware demand increase through lower prices, thus juicing MS's bottom line via increased sales of pre-installed OS licenses. Given MS's margins on each license sold, he can't just come out and say that Dell and Intel should help him out by dropping their prices because their margins are too fat. They'd crucify him. So he makes the piracy argument and looks like a champion of the consumer.
I can't imagine that this would really upset Apple since you're still buying their hardware. It just lets you use the hardware with more applications. If iTunes is still the best and most elegant way, people will use that.
That's charming, but naive. Apple will object strenuously to any attempt to shift focus off its family of products. Apple is now, and has always been, all about lock-in. Steve Jobs is a visionary and, since he controls the company, he's not about to let others mess with his vision: Apple hardware, software, and services--exclusively. The only difference between Jobs and Gates is that Jobs is much pickier about how his domination of the world should look.
With military aircraft they bombed the block that MOVE lived on, then let it burn for an hour, wiping out 60 houses and killing a few. A few people at city hall got in trouble for it, but the Mayor who actually okayed it was granted immunity. It was quite an incident, I hope I got all the details right.
Almost. The "military aircraft" was simply a police helicopter. The bomb was supposed to stun the house's inhabitants, but they had volatile substances (possibly ammo) on the roof; this ignited and started the fire. Firemen tried to move in, but shots were fired (possibly the ammo discharging) and they kept back. Something like 60 houses in the Osage Avenue area burned. The city later paid for their reconstruction.
I also live in Philadelphia and I love it. For me, it's the best city I've ever lived in. Sure, it has its share of all the ills that any old, large city is subject to, but it has its beautiful/attractive areas as well: Rittenhouse Square, Old City, the museum district, Manayunk, the Main Line, Chestnut Hill, the gallery district, etc. It's a city of restaurants, from Le Bec Fin (one of the best in the world) to Monk's Cafe (best beer bar on the East Coast). It's a city of neighborhoods, where neighbors really watch out for each other. It's a blue-collar town: people work here. More than pure achievement, people here appreciate effort. Mike Schmidt was booed because he made it look so easy (until he got his 500th home run and fans realized what they had). Someone like Allen Iverson is appreciated because, though undersized, he gives everything each game. Think the Phillies in 1993.
My point is that it's typical of Philadelphians, who have a bad inferiority complex when comparing their city to New York or Boston, to talk about the bad stuff exclusively. Sal Wise and the two MOVE incidents don't even begin to represent Philadelphia.
Ever read any Trotsky? Or Lenin? Pascal sounds like any of the old Communists (not the later totalitarians, but the true believers who were old enough to have known Marx or Engels personally). His diatribe is entirely typical of the species. He gratuitously belittles his targets:
"Natural" perhaps for those without a grasp of data fundamentals.
(Yes, Fabian, the co-inventor of SQL probably doesn't have a grasp of data fundamentals.) He sprinkles his text liberally with "quotes" and italics so you can "feel" his anger, his dismay -- indeed, you can almost hear him spitting the words in Chamberlin's face. You can almost hear him chortling to himself as he bangs away on his keyboard, demolishing his opponents.
He venerates the Founder. Finding a quote that supports your argument settles the matter. Codd the Wise avoided the errors that Chamberlin made; clearly the latter is the inferior intellect. And there's only a small core with the Founder. "We" are the true believers; all others are apostates and heretics.
Overstatement is a definite tell. Chamberlin's explanation of the difference between SQL and XML data is "unbelievable." The nesting argument is "ridiculous." Industry pronouncements are "incoherent."
And most prominent of all is the cutting remark that's meaningless to anyone not in the know or already in agreement:
Unbelievable. Any wonder that SQL fails so abysmally at relational fidelity? We may not expect the average practitioner to distinguish between
pictures of relations, which are "flat" due to the presentation medium, and relations of N cardinality themselves, which are N-dimensional logical structures. But we sure expect "industry experts" to be aware of the difference.
And I sure expect a polemicist to know enough about his art to understand when he's descended into self-parody.
You've missed the point. What SCO does is create a relationship between Sinix and Minix where none existed before. They do this because Xenix (3.0, IIRC) is shown to have a relationship to Sinix. This allows them to claim that Minix is derived from Xenix--"their" Xenix.
Look at SCO's chart and follow the green dotted line. It drops from Unix to Sinix, then down to Minix. The reason for all the commotion is that the line they follow is a false connection. The line they trace from Sinix to Minix actually starts with Unix (the line above). The line connecting Unix to Minix is simply crossing the Sinix lifeline.
All lines end with an arrowhead. It seems safe to assume that if there's no arrowhead, then you should continue to follow the line. The lack of a connection from Sinix to Minix is plain to see for anyone without a hidden agenda or a predisposition to believe otherwise.
Ken Brown doesn't give a rat's ass about the money. He's already given us the real reason for publishing: he wants the book to influence policy makers in Washington to be more favorably disposed toward closed-source software companies. Having a change to the copyright laws passed that would gut the GPL would be worth more than a million dollars to him.
The spreadsheet is productive, very. In fact, it doesn't mimic paper+calc+pencil for doing banking, it superceeds it.
And yet VisiCalc was designed to mimic a real-world operation. IIRC, industrial planners used to have large blackboards divided into grids and each square in the grid could hold a number or an equation. When a number was changed in one square, all the dependent squares had to be recalculated. Of course, the concern was that something had been missed. I believe Bricklin heard one of his professors describe this process and chose it as his model for what eventually became VisiCalc.
I think I read this in Cringely's Accidental Empires.
Re:Some classic Christian D&D FUD
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The goal of the game [D&D] would be to see who could obtain the most erotic pleasure
I'm no fan of Chick, but the original quote is actually about a hypothetical game Chick describes. (The point of the description is to elicit the expected response of righteous Christian horror at eroticism.) Chick's complaint against D&D (and rock and roll, and sex, and modernity...) is stupid on its face; no need to pile on.
No wonder the new federal budget is so massive. One of these things could be used as a murder weapon or ballast. I'm sure the real reason for this new rule is that it takes more paper to print something in a bigger font, which looks more impressive on TV. See! Your tax dollars at work!
(Given the number of responses, I don't expect that many people to read this, but I'll post anyway, for the record.)
The parent is correct based on my experience, although the prescribed regimen is a bit more involved than I've ever needed. The process for me can be characterized as "cut back and cut over": (1) cut back caffeine consumption over some reasonable period of time (a month usually works) and (2) cut over from a caffeinated to a non-caffeinated state over a weekend.
In the cut-back phase, you consume less and less caffeine over time. My drug of choice is coffee, so I maintain my intake volume (drinking coffee is something to do during meetings or while you're thinking about something) by mixing decaf and high-test or by drinking green tea.
In the cut-over phase, stay up late on a Friday, but don't drink alcohol. Hydrate well before going to bed and take a couple of Benadryl (antihistamine only, not Benadryl-D) and some ibuprofen. Sleep in on Saturday morning, as long as you can stand it. When you finally get up, take more ibuprofen. Repeat on Sunday. By Monday, you should be relatively headache-free, although the lassitude will last for some time.
The toughest part of quitting is that drinking coffee (in my experience) is as much social habit and muscle memory as it is a means to fulfill a physical need (to stay awake during boring meetings). Also, one of the signal pleasures of my life is to sit in a coffee house all morning and screw around on my laptop. I imagine you can dredge up similarly pleasant associations, so my last piece of advice is that you shouldn't see this as a final swearing-off, but rather as a resetting of priorities. You'll drink coffee again; remember to do it in moderation and for good reason.
I think you're mixing two different things. MS's virus problems stem from the notion that documents should contain executable code, not from a document-centric computing metaphor.
To more closely model the real world, we should be able to simply open a document and have its application boot up to handle it. I shouldn't have to care what app I need to get my job done. The difficulty for software designers is that we still haven't developed a good way of handling this kind of functionality--Symphony and Framework being early, failed attempts.
What I'd like to see are different work organization systems (scroll to the third message) realized as software implementations, which we could then pick and choose from as our needs and personalities require.
And this is precisely why we should go out of our way to read articles that are critical of the open-source community. We need to know what others are thinking, particularly those who oppose open source because of some misguided view of its political underpinnings. We can act like the article's caricature--happy (clueless) proles linking arms and singing the "Internationale" (oh, please)--or we can be aware of how the public perceive us and work to correct those misconceptions.
The socialist references in the article are particularly telling. Apart from the fact that Linksys and Progress weren't required to use GPL'ed software as the basis for their code, should not cavil at honoring the license the code was released under, and would be more than happy to sue anyone who violated their licenses--apart from all that, I say, is this weird underlying theme that the GPL is offensive to capitalism. Lyons, the article's author, and by extension Forbes magazine seem to take it as a personal affront that someone should choose not to profit from their work. I didn't know that capitalism was a moral mandate; I wasn't aware that I am required to make a profit if I can possibly do so. Silly me, I thought I was free to choose. This is an odd stance, considering the state science would be in if most scientists weren't willing to share freely the fruits of their researches. Lyons might still be publishing his screeds by painting them on cave walls.
Slashdot Mirror
...but Yahoo! isn't a wolf, it's an entity composed of thinking human beings. They can choose to turn a blind eye (which is to say, to act unethically) or they can take a stand. There's an enormous difference between pursuing profit regardless of any other consideration and pursuing profit within parameters that don't debase the social context in which that profit is made. The former we call "Enron" and it's arguably true that what Yahoo! does is worse than what Enron did: Enron cheated people out of their life's savings, while Yahoo! is helping to take away their freedom.
Nope, not a troll. I'm perfectly serious, though I'll admit to a bit of drama. For my users, the gradations between memory and storage aren't meaningful. To them, the former is where active thinking occurs; the latter is where data is kept for later recall. (They find the analogy to human thought processes useful.) This distinction helps them communicate with tech support more clearly so that, for instance, they don't get more RAM when what they needed was a bigger hard drive.
So there is a practical distinction that matters for them.
Wimp. Submitter's a wimp too.
Language occurs in context. You work in IT, you use IT-speak; you work in business, you use business-speak. In both contexts, the specific jargon serves to separate the initiates from the posers. I demand that users know the difference between "memory" and "storage," and they have a corresponding right to demand that I distinguish "value chain" from "value-add."
Why would you think that?
Besides, when a company with 30B USD market cap becomes a part of a company with 170B USD market cap it's called an acquisition, not a "merger."
When a company with 30B USD market cap becomes part of a company with 170B USD market cap, it's a "pooling of interests." Calling it an acquisition would be surpassingly stupid in terms of the taxes incurred, bordering on a violation of the Intel board's fiduciary duty to the shareholders.
Agreed. And the best way to get a geek to do something is to tell him it's impossible. The next twenty years should be interesting.
The parent's reasons for IE-only attitudes of support staff are incomplete. There are other, perfectly understandable reasons. Many companies have portals and intranet applications that are built to IE. Usage results with other browsers are unspecified and unsupported. My company has built its intranet in Java on Unix, but because it must reach users in the field using desktop configurations over which we have no control, we build to the most likely standard. Indeed, a survey conducted as part of the standard definition effort indicated that an insignificant proportion of our users (less than 1%) used something other than IE.
So it isn't a robotic allegiance to Microsoft's latest tech direction, or a contractually-constrained ability to control our own destiny, or even sheer laziness, but the realities of our user base that require an IE orientation.
Actually, it's simple economics. Profit is a function of capital, labor, and the current level of technology. In the short run, your only variable is labor. In a down market, you can only reduce labor to ensure you show some profit. It's arguably better to benefit the organization as a whole by maintaining its profitability (and thus its stock price and credit rating, etc.) than it is by holding on to excess labor.
Not to say it doesn't suck for the people layed off, but it's a perfectly rational course for management to take. You're kidding yourself if you think you'd do it differently.
The site says that some attempts have been made to compile on Cygwin and, IIRC, the compiler works; the GUI does not. The project lead is looking for volunteers to continue this thread.
He's not being stupid, just disingenuous. He doesn't actually believe what he's saying. Rather, he's trying to deflect attention away from the real cause of piracy. I imagine if you pressed him, his rationale would be that if someone contemplates a fixed spend on technology and a smaller percentage goes to hardware due to lower hardware costs, the remainder would go towards legitimate software purchases, thus reducing piracy.
My guess is that he'd like to see overall hardware demand increase through lower prices, thus juicing MS's bottom line via increased sales of pre-installed OS licenses. Given MS's margins on each license sold, he can't just come out and say that Dell and Intel should help him out by dropping their prices because their margins are too fat. They'd crucify him. So he makes the piracy argument and looks like a champion of the consumer.
That's charming, but naive. Apple will object strenuously to any attempt to shift focus off its family of products. Apple is now, and has always been, all about lock-in. Steve Jobs is a visionary and, since he controls the company, he's not about to let others mess with his vision: Apple hardware, software, and services--exclusively. The only difference between Jobs and Gates is that Jobs is much pickier about how his domination of the world should look.
Almost. The "military aircraft" was simply a police helicopter. The bomb was supposed to stun the house's inhabitants, but they had volatile substances (possibly ammo) on the roof; this ignited and started the fire. Firemen tried to move in, but shots were fired (possibly the ammo discharging) and they kept back. Something like 60 houses in the Osage Avenue area burned. The city later paid for their reconstruction.
I also live in Philadelphia and I love it. For me, it's the best city I've ever lived in. Sure, it has its share of all the ills that any old, large city is subject to, but it has its beautiful/attractive areas as well: Rittenhouse Square, Old City, the museum district, Manayunk, the Main Line, Chestnut Hill, the gallery district, etc. It's a city of restaurants, from Le Bec Fin (one of the best in the world) to Monk's Cafe (best beer bar on the East Coast). It's a city of neighborhoods, where neighbors really watch out for each other. It's a blue-collar town: people work here. More than pure achievement, people here appreciate effort. Mike Schmidt was booed because he made it look so easy (until he got his 500th home run and fans realized what they had). Someone like Allen Iverson is appreciated because, though undersized, he gives everything each game. Think the Phillies in 1993.
My point is that it's typical of Philadelphians, who have a bad inferiority complex when comparing their city to New York or Boston, to talk about the bad stuff exclusively. Sal Wise and the two MOVE incidents don't even begin to represent Philadelphia.
He venerates the Founder. Finding a quote that supports your argument settles the matter. Codd the Wise avoided the errors that Chamberlin made; clearly the latter is the inferior intellect. And there's only a small core with the Founder. "We" are the true believers; all others are apostates and heretics.
Overstatement is a definite tell. Chamberlin's explanation of the difference between SQL and XML data is "unbelievable." The nesting argument is "ridiculous." Industry pronouncements are "incoherent." And most prominent of all is the cutting remark that's meaningless to anyone not in the know or already in agreement:
And I sure expect a polemicist to know enough about his art to understand when he's descended into self-parody.Pretty sneaky, no?
Look at SCO's chart and follow the green dotted line. It drops from Unix to Sinix, then down to Minix. The reason for all the commotion is that the line they follow is a false connection. The line they trace from Sinix to Minix actually starts with Unix (the line above). The line connecting Unix to Minix is simply crossing the Sinix lifeline.
All lines end with an arrowhead. It seems safe to assume that if there's no arrowhead, then you should continue to follow the line. The lack of a connection from Sinix to Minix is plain to see for anyone without a hidden agenda or a predisposition to believe otherwise.
Ken Brown doesn't give a rat's ass about the money. He's already given us the real reason for publishing: he wants the book to influence policy makers in Washington to be more favorably disposed toward closed-source software companies. Having a change to the copyright laws passed that would gut the GPL would be worth more than a million dollars to him.
And yet VisiCalc was designed to mimic a real-world operation. IIRC, industrial planners used to have large blackboards divided into grids and each square in the grid could hold a number or an equation. When a number was changed in one square, all the dependent squares had to be recalculated. Of course, the concern was that something had been missed. I believe Bricklin heard one of his professors describe this process and chose it as his model for what eventually became VisiCalc.
I think I read this in Cringely's Accidental Empires.
I'm no fan of Chick, but the original quote is actually about a hypothetical game Chick describes. (The point of the description is to elicit the expected response of righteous Christian horror at eroticism.) Chick's complaint against D&D (and rock and roll, and sex, and modernity...) is stupid on its face; no need to pile on.
No wonder the new federal budget is so massive. One of these things could be used as a murder weapon or ballast. I'm sure the real reason for this new rule is that it takes more paper to print something in a bigger font, which looks more impressive on TV. See! Your tax dollars at work!
The parent is correct based on my experience, although the prescribed regimen is a bit more involved than I've ever needed. The process for me can be characterized as "cut back and cut over": (1) cut back caffeine consumption over some reasonable period of time (a month usually works) and (2) cut over from a caffeinated to a non-caffeinated state over a weekend.
In the cut-back phase, you consume less and less caffeine over time. My drug of choice is coffee, so I maintain my intake volume (drinking coffee is something to do during meetings or while you're thinking about something) by mixing decaf and high-test or by drinking green tea.
In the cut-over phase, stay up late on a Friday, but don't drink alcohol. Hydrate well before going to bed and take a couple of Benadryl (antihistamine only, not Benadryl-D) and some ibuprofen. Sleep in on Saturday morning, as long as you can stand it. When you finally get up, take more ibuprofen. Repeat on Sunday. By Monday, you should be relatively headache-free, although the lassitude will last for some time.
The toughest part of quitting is that drinking coffee (in my experience) is as much social habit and muscle memory as it is a means to fulfill a physical need (to stay awake during boring meetings). Also, one of the signal pleasures of my life is to sit in a coffee house all morning and screw around on my laptop. I imagine you can dredge up similarly pleasant associations, so my last piece of advice is that you shouldn't see this as a final swearing-off, but rather as a resetting of priorities. You'll drink coffee again; remember to do it in moderation and for good reason.
Good luck!
Never mind the volume, did you see SCOX's P/E ratio? 87+?! Jeez, it's the last, faint echo of the dot-com collapse.
To more closely model the real world, we should be able to simply open a document and have its application boot up to handle it. I shouldn't have to care what app I need to get my job done. The difficulty for software designers is that we still haven't developed a good way of handling this kind of functionality--Symphony and Framework being early, failed attempts.
What I'd like to see are different work organization systems (scroll to the third message) realized as software implementations, which we could then pick and choose from as our needs and personalities require.
Are you dyslexic?
The socialist references in the article are particularly telling. Apart from the fact that Linksys and Progress weren't required to use GPL'ed software as the basis for their code, should not cavil at honoring the license the code was released under, and would be more than happy to sue anyone who violated their licenses--apart from all that, I say, is this weird underlying theme that the GPL is offensive to capitalism. Lyons, the article's author, and by extension Forbes magazine seem to take it as a personal affront that someone should choose not to profit from their work. I didn't know that capitalism was a moral mandate; I wasn't aware that I am required to make a profit if I can possibly do so. Silly me, I thought I was free to choose. This is an odd stance, considering the state science would be in if most scientists weren't willing to share freely the fruits of their researches. Lyons might still be publishing his screeds by painting them on cave walls.
But the idea of cognitive dissidence, which implies a brain at war with itself, seems fitting in SCO's case.