While it would be nice if you could turn it off, I love this feature of P4. I would much rather fire off an IM to another developer to ask him/her to check-in/revert a file so that I can edit it than to have to merge my changes because they checked in their changes before I did. Merging sucks. File locking makes things so much easier when you have more than a couple of developers working on a project.
He can tell you some really interesting stories about times you can't remember, but he slows you down immensely so he usually gets left at the old folks home while you try to get where ever you're trying to go.
Also, there's quite a bit of documentation on the SWT project page (available from the homepage projects->The Eclipse Project->Platform->SWT)
I've yet to find online javadoc for the 3.0 version since they haven't had an official release yet and they only have it for official releases, not the milestones. If you want that, download SWT and run javadoc manually.
The problem with cell phones is that the end user isn't the customer for manufacturers like Nokia, Sony/Ericsson, Motorola, etc. The carriers (Cingular, AT&T, Verizon, etc) are the customers. So the features that end up in new cell phones are not what's most useful to the end user, but what's most useful to the carrier.
So you see things like full keyboards for sending $0.10/per text messages, cameras which are only really useful for sending $0.10/per picture messages and bluetooth which is mostly useful for selling over-priced hands-free devices (bluetooth might also be useful for other things, but you need only look at some of the half-assed attempts at implementing SyncML correctly to realize where cell phone manufacturers are concentrating.)
What you don't see are features like FM radio, LED flashlight (good idea mentioned by another poster), or other such features that cannot be used in add-on services sold by the carriers.
> (anecdotally, from many accounts, Indians tend not to raise questions, or think independently when a design sucks, etc.)
jesus christ that's such a racist thing to say, 'from many accounts' or not.
I cannot speak to the 'thinking independently' assertion, but from my experience working with teams in India, the 'raising questions' assertion is dead on. There is, however, a very good reason for this mindset. At my job, if the spec isn't clear, the programmer fires off an email and the owner of the spec sees it and replies pretty much immediately. Since the Indian programmer is working essentially the opposite hours as the spec owner, his questions have a full day turn around time. When wondering whether to ask about something, especially if it holds up your work, having to wait that long for a response definitely encourages you to take the shortcut and just guess.
As someone who's written specs for outsourced projects, you have to be orders of magnitude more careful in crafting the spec than you would with domestic programmers. It's similar to how programming used to be when using punch cards. When you submitted your program to be compiled and run and didn't receive the results until the next day, you proofread it much more carefully. But now you just write, then build/fix until finished. The iterative process is much easier when you don't have to wait.
if a business named themsleves P-something, and took out a large ad in the "adult entertainment" directory that just happened to be on the same page as Playboy's
In all fairness to your example, if someone is looking in the "adult entertainment" directory and they see a business named P-something, they will most certainly think it refers to something entirely separate from Playboy and they damn well doesn't have a monopoly on that!
You're making the assumption that you lose money over time. In that case, you absolutely want them to know how large of a donation you're making so they can give you the appropriate tote bag. But for people who play in a manner in which the house does not have a statistical edge (read: card counters), this kind of tracking is a pain in the neck.
Ever notice when you're sitting at a blackjack table and the pit boss comes over and asks the dealer how you're doing? If you think this is just about comps, you're fooling yourself. Casinos want to know whenever someone is up so they know who to watch for being a counter. Since there's nothing illegal about counting, the game is really about them identifying the counter before he takes too much of their money. It's that cat and mouse game that's where the real fun in Vegas lies for a lot of us.
That's what these RFID's are about...they're upping the ante for more simply identifying card counters. If you can have a computer monitor whether a player is up or down, you drastically reduce the number of people you have to watch. Currently, if you feel the pit boss is taking note of you, you can just color out and move to a different table. With RFIDs, they'd much more easily be able to watch you by the security cameras. That and they'd be able to track you between tables unless you visit the cashier every time (a pain, especially when you hit that magic $10,000 mark.)
They can talk about employee theft all they want, but as other posters have pointed out, security measures are already extremely tight and employee theft isn't really that big of an issue. The bigger issue is that blackjack has been broken statistically but is still makes very good profits because the vast majority of players are clueless. This seems like just another salvo in the war against the clued-in.
I think you under-estimate the ability of third-world countries to rapidly "ramp up" their productivity. There was a time when the words "Japanese Car" were a joke to most Americans. Witness what happened to the American automobile industry.
The economics that she doesn't understand is that you cannot depress wages and still hope to sell products. 10 years from now, she'll be complaining about how few pavilions and printer cartriges are being sold (or whatever HP is selling at the time) not realizing that the engineers who are her target market cannot afford her products since they only make $20,000 / year due to competition with outsourced labor.
The American market is the envy of the world. The sole advantage that US companies have when competing in the world arena is their home field advantage when it comes to making money in the US. If people lose their discretionary spending ability, US corporations will lose that advantage and there will be nothing to stop the same cheap labor source from starting their own companies and making all those "outsource the CEO" jokes a reality.
Whenever I mention Google to friends who have a website, the reaction is always the same, "Oh yeah, I love Google. I find almost always find whatever I'm looking for on the first attempt. One thing that bothers me...my site doesn't show up very highly. Is there something I can do to get it higher in the rankings?" Anyone else see the disconnect?
Face it webmasters...Google is not your friend. Websurfers are your friend and Google is their friend. Please web surfers and Google will reward you. But if you don't put content online that people want to browse to, don't expect Google to link to it (unless you buy a text ad, but how dare they think that a webmaster should actually pay to promote their site!)
Much of applied mathematics results in patents which are licensed to generate income. Anything purely academic is funded by academia and not really applicable to the entire software development field. There will always be true CS funded by universities just as they fund math. But real applications will, for the most part, continue to come from commercial entities.
Laws are free (usually), but politicians still get paid to write them.
Government subsidizes that. The government funds plenty of software development too, but I don't think we want to limit ourselves to the government funding all software development.
Phone books are free, but people still get paid to compile them.
Phone books are only free because they're either paid for with surcharges to your phone bill or there's advertising in them. But perhaps advertising is the way to go for free software.
int encrypt(char *message) {
int i = 0;
byte[1024] buffer;
/*
* Feeling Tired?
*
* Try new Jolt Cola. The extra caffeine will
* give you the lift you need to finish hacking
* this code.
*/
...
}
Include an open source license that grants complete rights to edit and redistribute so long as advertisements are not removed. Would this still count as free software?
The average user found out about backups when Carrie (Sex in the City) had her powerbook crash. Everyone kept asking her, "you mean you don't backup?"
...of course, the "backup" reference actually meant "copy to floppy" which those of us who've worked in a computer lab know is only slightly more reliable than "restore from oija board."
...and it seems like the process is relatively painless.
One tip for those who are thinking of trying to port their number. Do *not* do the process online. I ordered my new phone that way and the number ported two days before my new phone arrived. As soon as your number ports, your old phone stops working for anything besides 911 calls. Needless to say, I was without a cell phone for two days while I waited for my new phone to arrive.
When this story was first reported on/., I wrote this comment which I think is still applicable.
I doubt SBC really cares if it wins or loses. It's not like money beyond legal fees is at stake. If they lose, they turn over customer data. It's just important to them that they turn over that data by court order so they're covered from any possible liability that could result from cooperating with the RIAA.
There are plenty of good IP laws that can stop someone from pirating the latest Britney album. Simply employ a large number of young adults to hop onto KaZaA and look for content you own. Download it (noting the IP it came from, doing a simple ARIN lookup, requesting user information from ISP, etc), verify that the content is what you think it is and then send a bill for roughly half what you could sue for (a hefty sum). This is not a hard process. You could employ these people for under $20/hour and with the money made, the operation would pay for itself up until the time that people are too afraid of being caught to share copyrighted material on P2P networks.
What isn't needed is extensions to copyright law that lock up our current culture for an entire century. What isn't needed are laws that prevent inquisitive and creative people from being inquisitive and creative (*cough*DMCA*cough*). What isn't needed are laws that mandate disabling otherwise perfectly useful computers.
If the only way that you can think to innovate is through congressional mandate, you're not being creative enough. Use the laws that are on the books. Punish those who actually break copyright laws, and not the rest of us. If part of their collateral damage in the war against file sharing ends up being the freedoms of people who aren't engaged in sharing, then they aren't trying hard enough and you can damn well believe that we're going to bitch about it.
I don't know if this is the case elsewhere, but where I work I'm the Eclipse guy. When a new release comes out, only I download it. If I determine that it has features that make it worth the effort to upgrade, I package them and put them up on our internal upgrade site. It's the same with plugins as well.
All of the other users of eclipse in our office (all the developers and some of the qa/html people) simply restart eclipse when they come in every day and it checks the update site and installs new updates. This means we're constantly getting new features without anyone (except me, of course) having to do any real work upgrading the machines.
The Update Site feature make Eclipse easily the best choice for businesses that want to standardize on a platform for developers.
The problem is that any rights we have to affect change through voting has been completely marginalized by the monopolization of the process by the two ruling parties. I should say that I routinely throw my vote away by assigning it to whatever libertarian candidate is running, but most people try to affect what little change they can by voting for the lesser of two evils. Both of those choices would have backed this spending bill.
The current situation is analogous to asking someone whether they'd rather be hung or shot. Sure you can answer neither, but that answer won't be accepted. Until we have a real choice to choose from, voting won't matter. I do agree that voting is important and I think everyone should go and vote for whatever fringe option you're most closely aligned with, but I have complete sympathy for those who are dissallusioned to the point that they don't bother to expend the effort.
Simpson's fans might notice that my.sig is closely related to this topic.
Employee Retention...
on
Does IT Matter?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Will employees really want to work for a company that doesn't stay current with technology? I know I would be worried if I felt like my skillset was aging and I would be a less attractive hire to new employers.
I've met a lot of people who got into this industry because they enjoyed the "playful" nature of their work. Without the latest "toys" to play with, many IT workers won't enjoy their work.
Is public faith in the system more important than overall system security?
Faith is completely unimportant. Trust, on the other hand, is incredibly important. Faith is blind trust which is only important when the belief is not verifiable (think religion...you can't prove god exists, but you could have faith that he does.) Since e-voting is, at least, somewhat verifiable, faith shouldn't apply.
As the saying goes, "trust is earned." The only way to earn trust is to answer your detractors arguments to prove that your system is secure. You can be trusted once your detractors have no more valid points.
Re:Random examples of movie computing
on
Linux in Movies?
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· Score: 1
No, I describe "Hackers" as awful because it's a really stupid movie, not meant for anyone more mature than a seventh grade boy.
Hmmm...not that it's the answer to any of life's important questions, but I liked it. I can definitely think of worse ways to spend a couple of hours.
"The Matrix" gets passed off as some kind of weighty philosophical tract, but to me it has more in common with junk like "Blade"
IMHO, the matrix is intro philosophy...the "gateway drug" if you will. It packages what is basically an unanswerable question into a form that is easily understandable. Think philosophy for joe six-pack with enough stylized action thrown in to keep the ADD generation from falling asleep.
Terry Gilliam on the other hand is almost always fantastic, but then I can't think of any obvious use of computers in his movies
I mentioned Terry Gilliam, not in reference to any computer usage in his films, but in reference to the way handles reality in general. For instance, in Baron Munchausen, they fall through the center of the earth, climb to the tip of the moon, have a character die and then whatever the fuck happened at the end (I still don't really understand it). Normally, those kinds of things would bother me if they were in a movie that took itself seriously in any way, shape or form. But the movie invites you to suspend your disbelief by making no pretenses of being realistic, so it works. To me, that's what hackers does with the computer element. It essentially says, "this is so fake that there's no reason to question any of it."
Re:Random examples of movie computing
on
Linux in Movies?
·
· Score: 1
The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful.
Aww...come on. Hackers was great! Forgetting for a second the Angelina Jolie factor (which might have made it watchable in and of itself), I actually liked the way they dealt with computers.
If they'd been 100% accurate about how computers worked, the movie just wouldn't have worked. Even geeks would've been bored watching someone just type commands into a CLI.
They could've done what other movies did and hire someone who knows what they're doing as a consultant, but that doesn't really work either. Antitrust is a good example of that. Miguel de Icaza, among others, worked as a consultant on that film. That movie, while in some respects acurate, was still incredibly bothersome in many of the technical details.
They could've forgone the techical expert consultant route and just done what the director and writer envisioned as being somewhat accurate. That is the route most movies take...what you dubbed "MovieOS".
But instead, they made no pretense whatsoever about being in any way accurate. They made mistakes that even your average AOLer at the time would have caught. For instance, they confused the concepts of username and password. The less they grounded the film in reality, the more I was willing to accept (hacking traffic lights, school fire systems, etc.) If a movie willfully acknowledges from the beginning that it is not basing itself in reality, I'm much more willing to accept something unrealistic that it presents. Were it not for this principle, most Terry Gilliam films would be unwatchable.
Firstly, why do you assume that the program would be administered by the government? The CEO of Blue Cross (or shield, I forget which one) in California has openly suggested moving to a state-sponsored, universal health care model (with his company running things, of course). His argument is pretty compelling. Firstly, uninsured patients create a significant cost to people with insurance. Among other things, they spread diseases when they don't adequately seek treatment for their illnesses. It's also noteworthy that simplifying the process to where there is only one health carrier creates many cost savings (synergies, increased bargaining power, etc).
On top of those advantages, universal health care also has the advantage of making the state an attractive place to run a business since there is reduced overhead in not having to provide benefits to employees. Lee Iacocca (was CEO of chrysler, I'm not sure if he still is) was an outspoken advocate for state-funded health care. His argument was that for every car that rolled off the assembly lines, he was starting out (IIRC) $800 in the whole compared to his Japanese/German counterparts (that value already took into account the costs foreign carmakers paid in shipping/import taxes.) That meant his engineers had to figure out ways to cut $800 worth of corners in the manufacturing/design process in order to remaing cost competitive with his competition. Is it any wonder that American cars quickly got the reputation for being lower quality than those of the overseas competition?
If California could institute universal health care paid for by the state, it would create huge advantages for businesses operating out of California. The same would hold true of a national plan of the same nature...just because it is paid for by the government, doesn't mean it need be run by the government. I see no reason why health carriers couldn't buy off politicians for a while (take the burden off the RIAA) to ensure that the nationalized health care be administered by private enterprise. Once all data is maintained by insurance carriers instead of the government, all your constitutional objects become irrelevant.
Oh, and one last thing to keep in mind...of all the first-world nations, guess which one is the only one without a nationalized health care system? This type of thing isn't pinko-socialism. It's a tried-and-true organizational system that has been shown to work in developed societies. I'm sure that once we apply our capitalist thinking to the problem, we can surely come up with something that works much better than our current system.
If everyone (where everyone is the three single entities of Microsoft, AOL and Sendmail) would agree to implement a compatible HashCash solution (spec publicly available, of course), then SPAM would be prohibitively expensive (too slow since the sender is paying in CPU cycles).
As soon as you cross the threshold from profitability to loss, SPAM all but disappears from the internet. And unlike your "If everyone just..." scenarios, the everyone I'm describing is actually realistic.
As a current SBC DSL customer (I signed up when it was still Pacbell DSL), here's my take on it.
There's very little for SBC to lose if they wait for a court order forcing them to turn over customer information. They just have to make a few court appearances. On the other hand, since I've been a customer, I've had the opportunity to be a part of 6 class actions against SBC for things that always seemed really stupid (slower-than-advertised speeds due to being too far from the CO...what ever happened to actually reading about a product before you buy it???). Anyways, I've always opted out of the class actions because my service has been nearly flawless.
So, perhaps their legal council has advised them to make the RIAA do a little more leg work rather than opening them up for some scum-bag lawyer to file some multi-million dollar class action. Perhaps their user agreement says something about maintaining a user's privacy short of a court order. I've never actually seen the user agreement since their install tech agreed to it when he installed the software on my decoy windows box (the one that became my openBSD gateway:-)...I'm actually surprised there was never a class action about their installers doing that.
The fundamental flaw in your thinking is the assumption that you're making about what constitutes happiness in humans.
The dream of a "work-free time of abundancy" may seem like it offers happiness to everyone, but that's not the case. The reason people strive to achieve that on an individual level is that not everyone succedes in realizing that dream. Humans measure their own happiness relative to the happiness of others around them. If everyone is equally happy, no one is happy.
You also have to consider our forms of leisure. In a world where no one has to work, what incentive is there for people to become actors, musicians, professional athletes, etc? What would you do with your life if there were no new books being produced, you couldn't go to the movies, theater, sporting events, concerts, etc?
Utopia is a concept that people love in theory. Most major religions have some concept of "heaven"...it really helps draw converts. But there's too many human tendancies which make utopia impossible. We're designed to be competitive as a means of passing the most successful genes onto the next generation. This is the reason why we cannot stand a situation in which everyone is considered equal.
Slashdot Mirror
Cons:
...
- Requires manual checkout
While it would be nice if you could turn it off, I love this feature of P4. I would much rather fire off an IM to another developer to ask him/her to check-in/revert a file so that I can edit it than to have to merge my changes because they checked in their changes before I did. Merging sucks. File locking makes things so much easier when you have more than a couple of developers working on a project.
I'd say Comments are more like Grandpa...
He can tell you some really interesting stories about times you can't remember, but he slows you down immensely so he usually gets left at the old folks home while you try to get where ever you're trying to go.
Try Google (the second link)
Also, there's quite a bit of documentation on the SWT project page (available from the homepage projects->The Eclipse Project->Platform->SWT)
I've yet to find online javadoc for the 3.0 version since they haven't had an official release yet and they only have it for official releases, not the milestones. If you want that, download SWT and run javadoc manually.
The problem with cell phones is that the end user isn't the customer for manufacturers like Nokia, Sony/Ericsson, Motorola, etc. The carriers (Cingular, AT&T, Verizon, etc) are the customers. So the features that end up in new cell phones are not what's most useful to the end user, but what's most useful to the carrier.
So you see things like full keyboards for sending $0.10/per text messages, cameras which are only really useful for sending $0.10/per picture messages and bluetooth which is mostly useful for selling over-priced hands-free devices (bluetooth might also be useful for other things, but you need only look at some of the half-assed attempts at implementing SyncML correctly to realize where cell phone manufacturers are concentrating.)
What you don't see are features like FM radio, LED flashlight (good idea mentioned by another poster), or other such features that cannot be used in add-on services sold by the carriers.
> (anecdotally, from many accounts, Indians tend not to raise questions, or think independently when a design sucks, etc.)
jesus christ that's such a racist thing to say, 'from many accounts' or not.
I cannot speak to the 'thinking independently' assertion, but from my experience working with teams in India, the 'raising questions' assertion is dead on. There is, however, a very good reason for this mindset. At my job, if the spec isn't clear, the programmer fires off an email and the owner of the spec sees it and replies pretty much immediately. Since the Indian programmer is working essentially the opposite hours as the spec owner, his questions have a full day turn around time. When wondering whether to ask about something, especially if it holds up your work, having to wait that long for a response definitely encourages you to take the shortcut and just guess.
As someone who's written specs for outsourced projects, you have to be orders of magnitude more careful in crafting the spec than you would with domestic programmers. It's similar to how programming used to be when using punch cards. When you submitted your program to be compiled and run and didn't receive the results until the next day, you proofread it much more carefully. But now you just write, then build/fix until finished. The iterative process is much easier when you don't have to wait.
if a business named themsleves P-something, and took out a large ad in the "adult entertainment" directory that just happened to be on the same page as Playboy's
In all fairness to your example, if someone is looking in the "adult entertainment" directory and they see a business named P-something, they will most certainly think it refers to something entirely separate from Playboy and they damn well doesn't have a monopoly on that!
You're making the assumption that you lose money over time. In that case, you absolutely want them to know how large of a donation you're making so they can give you the appropriate tote bag. But for people who play in a manner in which the house does not have a statistical edge (read: card counters), this kind of tracking is a pain in the neck.
Ever notice when you're sitting at a blackjack table and the pit boss comes over and asks the dealer how you're doing? If you think this is just about comps, you're fooling yourself. Casinos want to know whenever someone is up so they know who to watch for being a counter. Since there's nothing illegal about counting, the game is really about them identifying the counter before he takes too much of their money. It's that cat and mouse game that's where the real fun in Vegas lies for a lot of us.
That's what these RFID's are about...they're upping the ante for more simply identifying card counters. If you can have a computer monitor whether a player is up or down, you drastically reduce the number of people you have to watch. Currently, if you feel the pit boss is taking note of you, you can just color out and move to a different table. With RFIDs, they'd much more easily be able to watch you by the security cameras. That and they'd be able to track you between tables unless you visit the cashier every time (a pain, especially when you hit that magic $10,000 mark.)
They can talk about employee theft all they want, but as other posters have pointed out, security measures are already extremely tight and employee theft isn't really that big of an issue. The bigger issue is that blackjack has been broken statistically but is still makes very good profits because the vast majority of players are clueless. This seems like just another salvo in the war against the clued-in.
I think you under-estimate the ability of third-world countries to rapidly "ramp up" their productivity. There was a time when the words "Japanese Car" were a joke to most Americans. Witness what happened to the American automobile industry.
The economics that she doesn't understand is that you cannot depress wages and still hope to sell products. 10 years from now, she'll be complaining about how few pavilions and printer cartriges are being sold (or whatever HP is selling at the time) not realizing that the engineers who are her target market cannot afford her products since they only make $20,000 / year due to competition with outsourced labor.
The American market is the envy of the world. The sole advantage that US companies have when competing in the world arena is their home field advantage when it comes to making money in the US. If people lose their discretionary spending ability, US corporations will lose that advantage and there will be nothing to stop the same cheap labor source from starting their own companies and making all those "outsource the CEO" jokes a reality.
Please...I see this all the time.
Whenever I mention Google to friends who have a website, the reaction is always the same, "Oh yeah, I love Google. I find almost always find whatever I'm looking for on the first attempt. One thing that bothers me...my site doesn't show up very highly. Is there something I can do to get it higher in the rankings?" Anyone else see the disconnect?
Face it webmasters...Google is not your friend. Websurfers are your friend and Google is their friend. Please web surfers and Google will reward you. But if you don't put content online that people want to browse to, don't expect Google to link to it (unless you buy a text ad, but how dare they think that a webmaster should actually pay to promote their site!)
Much of applied mathematics results in patents which are licensed to generate income. Anything purely academic is funded by academia and not really applicable to the entire software development field. There will always be true CS funded by universities just as they fund math. But real applications will, for the most part, continue to come from commercial entities.
Laws are free (usually), but politicians still get paid to write them.
Government subsidizes that. The government funds plenty of software development too, but I don't think we want to limit ourselves to the government funding all software development.
Phone books are free, but people still get paid to compile them.
Phone books are only free because they're either paid for with surcharges to your phone bill or there's advertising in them. But perhaps advertising is the way to go for free software.Include an open source license that grants complete rights to edit and redistribute so long as advertisements are not removed. Would this still count as free software?
The average user found out about backups when Carrie (Sex in the City) had her powerbook crash. Everyone kept asking her, "you mean you don't backup?"
...of course, the "backup" reference actually meant "copy to floppy" which those of us who've worked in a computer lab know is only slightly more reliable than "restore from oija board."
You think that's bad?
- In his response to the queen, all he sent was a cookie.
- The queen sent a typical GET request (Marie Antoinette who was sent a HEAD request.)
- I wonder if he had to fill out a form to receive his new POST.
- He made a bit of a scene when he searched his host's colon for some kind of port (ugh...bad wine joke)
- I guess he now has a 'close' connection with the queen.
...and it seems like the process is relatively painless.
One tip for those who are thinking of trying to port their number. Do *not* do the process online. I ordered my new phone that way and the number ported two days before my new phone arrived. As soon as your number ports, your old phone stops working for anything besides 911 calls. Needless to say, I was without a cell phone for two days while I waited for my new phone to arrive.
Other than that, everything went pretty smoothly.
When this story was first reported on /., I wrote this comment which I think is still applicable.
I doubt SBC really cares if it wins or loses. It's not like money beyond legal fees is at stake. If they lose, they turn over customer data. It's just important to them that they turn over that data by court order so they're covered from any possible liability that could result from cooperating with the RIAA.
There are plenty of good IP laws that can stop someone from pirating the latest Britney album. Simply employ a large number of young adults to hop onto KaZaA and look for content you own. Download it (noting the IP it came from, doing a simple ARIN lookup, requesting user information from ISP, etc), verify that the content is what you think it is and then send a bill for roughly half what you could sue for (a hefty sum). This is not a hard process. You could employ these people for under $20/hour and with the money made, the operation would pay for itself up until the time that people are too afraid of being caught to share copyrighted material on P2P networks.
What isn't needed is extensions to copyright law that lock up our current culture for an entire century. What isn't needed are laws that prevent inquisitive and creative people from being inquisitive and creative (*cough*DMCA*cough*). What isn't needed are laws that mandate disabling otherwise perfectly useful computers.
If the only way that you can think to innovate is through congressional mandate, you're not being creative enough. Use the laws that are on the books. Punish those who actually break copyright laws, and not the rest of us. If part of their collateral damage in the war against file sharing ends up being the freedoms of people who aren't engaged in sharing, then they aren't trying hard enough and you can damn well believe that we're going to bitch about it.
I don't know if this is the case elsewhere, but where I work I'm the Eclipse guy. When a new release comes out, only I download it. If I determine that it has features that make it worth the effort to upgrade, I package them and put them up on our internal upgrade site. It's the same with plugins as well.
All of the other users of eclipse in our office (all the developers and some of the qa/html people) simply restart eclipse when they come in every day and it checks the update site and installs new updates. This means we're constantly getting new features without anyone (except me, of course) having to do any real work upgrading the machines.
The Update Site feature make Eclipse easily the best choice for businesses that want to standardize on a platform for developers.
The problem is that any rights we have to affect change through voting has been completely marginalized by the monopolization of the process by the two ruling parties. I should say that I routinely throw my vote away by assigning it to whatever libertarian candidate is running, but most people try to affect what little change they can by voting for the lesser of two evils. Both of those choices would have backed this spending bill.
.sig is closely related to this topic.
The current situation is analogous to asking someone whether they'd rather be hung or shot. Sure you can answer neither, but that answer won't be accepted. Until we have a real choice to choose from, voting won't matter. I do agree that voting is important and I think everyone should go and vote for whatever fringe option you're most closely aligned with, but I have complete sympathy for those who are dissallusioned to the point that they don't bother to expend the effort.
Simpson's fans might notice that my
Will employees really want to work for a company that doesn't stay current with technology? I know I would be worried if I felt like my skillset was aging and I would be a less attractive hire to new employers.
I've met a lot of people who got into this industry because they enjoyed the "playful" nature of their work. Without the latest "toys" to play with, many IT workers won't enjoy their work.
Is public faith in the system more important than overall system security?
Faith is completely unimportant. Trust, on the other hand, is incredibly important. Faith is blind trust which is only important when the belief is not verifiable (think religion...you can't prove god exists, but you could have faith that he does.) Since e-voting is, at least, somewhat verifiable, faith shouldn't apply.
As the saying goes, "trust is earned." The only way to earn trust is to answer your detractors arguments to prove that your system is secure. You can be trusted once your detractors have no more valid points.
No, I describe "Hackers" as awful because it's a really stupid movie, not meant for anyone more mature than a seventh grade boy.
Hmmm...not that it's the answer to any of life's important questions, but I liked it. I can definitely think of worse ways to spend a couple of hours.
"The Matrix" gets passed off as some kind of weighty philosophical tract, but to me it has more in common with junk like "Blade"
IMHO, the matrix is intro philosophy...the "gateway drug" if you will. It packages what is basically an unanswerable question into a form that is easily understandable. Think philosophy for joe six-pack with enough stylized action thrown in to keep the ADD generation from falling asleep.
Terry Gilliam on the other hand is almost always fantastic, but then I can't think of any obvious use of computers in his movies
I mentioned Terry Gilliam, not in reference to any computer usage in his films, but in reference to the way handles reality in general. For instance, in Baron Munchausen, they fall through the center of the earth, climb to the tip of the moon, have a character die and then whatever the fuck happened at the end (I still don't really understand it). Normally, those kinds of things would bother me if they were in a movie that took itself seriously in any way, shape or form. But the movie invites you to suspend your disbelief by making no pretenses of being realistic, so it works. To me, that's what hackers does with the computer element. It essentially says, "this is so fake that there's no reason to question any of it."
The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful.
Aww...come on. Hackers was great! Forgetting for a second the Angelina Jolie factor (which might have made it watchable in and of itself), I actually liked the way they dealt with computers.
If they'd been 100% accurate about how computers worked, the movie just wouldn't have worked. Even geeks would've been bored watching someone just type commands into a CLI.
They could've done what other movies did and hire someone who knows what they're doing as a consultant, but that doesn't really work either. Antitrust is a good example of that. Miguel de Icaza, among others, worked as a consultant on that film. That movie, while in some respects acurate, was still incredibly bothersome in many of the technical details.
They could've forgone the techical expert consultant route and just done what the director and writer envisioned as being somewhat accurate. That is the route most movies take...what you dubbed "MovieOS".
But instead, they made no pretense whatsoever about being in any way accurate. They made mistakes that even your average AOLer at the time would have caught. For instance, they confused the concepts of username and password. The less they grounded the film in reality, the more I was willing to accept (hacking traffic lights, school fire systems, etc.) If a movie willfully acknowledges from the beginning that it is not basing itself in reality, I'm much more willing to accept something unrealistic that it presents. Were it not for this principle, most Terry Gilliam films would be unwatchable.
I think some of your assumptions are flawed.
Firstly, why do you assume that the program would be administered by the government? The CEO of Blue Cross (or shield, I forget which one) in California has openly suggested moving to a state-sponsored, universal health care model (with his company running things, of course). His argument is pretty compelling. Firstly, uninsured patients create a significant cost to people with insurance. Among other things, they spread diseases when they don't adequately seek treatment for their illnesses. It's also noteworthy that simplifying the process to where there is only one health carrier creates many cost savings (synergies, increased bargaining power, etc).
On top of those advantages, universal health care also has the advantage of making the state an attractive place to run a business since there is reduced overhead in not having to provide benefits to employees. Lee Iacocca (was CEO of chrysler, I'm not sure if he still is) was an outspoken advocate for state-funded health care. His argument was that for every car that rolled off the assembly lines, he was starting out (IIRC) $800 in the whole compared to his Japanese/German counterparts (that value already took into account the costs foreign carmakers paid in shipping/import taxes.) That meant his engineers had to figure out ways to cut $800 worth of corners in the manufacturing/design process in order to remaing cost competitive with his competition. Is it any wonder that American cars quickly got the reputation for being lower quality than those of the overseas competition?
If California could institute universal health care paid for by the state, it would create huge advantages for businesses operating out of California. The same would hold true of a national plan of the same nature...just because it is paid for by the government, doesn't mean it need be run by the government. I see no reason why health carriers couldn't buy off politicians for a while (take the burden off the RIAA) to ensure that the nationalized health care be administered by private enterprise. Once all data is maintained by insurance carriers instead of the government, all your constitutional objects become irrelevant.
Oh, and one last thing to keep in mind...of all the first-world nations, guess which one is the only one without a nationalized health care system? This type of thing isn't pinko-socialism. It's a tried-and-true organizational system that has been shown to work in developed societies. I'm sure that once we apply our capitalist thinking to the problem, we can surely come up with something that works much better than our current system.
If everyone (where everyone is the three single entities of Microsoft, AOL and Sendmail) would agree to implement a compatible HashCash solution (spec publicly available, of course), then SPAM would be prohibitively expensive (too slow since the sender is paying in CPU cycles).
As soon as you cross the threshold from profitability to loss, SPAM all but disappears from the internet. And unlike your "If everyone just..." scenarios, the everyone I'm describing is actually realistic.
As a current SBC DSL customer (I signed up when it was still Pacbell DSL), here's my take on it.
:-)...I'm actually surprised there was never a class action about their installers doing that.
There's very little for SBC to lose if they wait for a court order forcing them to turn over customer information. They just have to make a few court appearances. On the other hand, since I've been a customer, I've had the opportunity to be a part of 6 class actions against SBC for things that always seemed really stupid (slower-than-advertised speeds due to being too far from the CO...what ever happened to actually reading about a product before you buy it???). Anyways, I've always opted out of the class actions because my service has been nearly flawless.
So, perhaps their legal council has advised them to make the RIAA do a little more leg work rather than opening them up for some scum-bag lawyer to file some multi-million dollar class action. Perhaps their user agreement says something about maintaining a user's privacy short of a court order. I've never actually seen the user agreement since their install tech agreed to it when he installed the software on my decoy windows box (the one that became my openBSD gateway
The fundamental flaw in your thinking is the assumption that you're making about what constitutes happiness in humans.
The dream of a "work-free time of abundancy" may seem like it offers happiness to everyone, but that's not the case. The reason people strive to achieve that on an individual level is that not everyone succedes in realizing that dream. Humans measure their own happiness relative to the happiness of others around them. If everyone is equally happy, no one is happy.
You also have to consider our forms of leisure. In a world where no one has to work, what incentive is there for people to become actors, musicians, professional athletes, etc? What would you do with your life if there were no new books being produced, you couldn't go to the movies, theater, sporting events, concerts, etc?
Utopia is a concept that people love in theory. Most major religions have some concept of "heaven"...it really helps draw converts. But there's too many human tendancies which make utopia impossible. We're designed to be competitive as a means of passing the most successful genes onto the next generation. This is the reason why we cannot stand a situation in which everyone is considered equal.