>> Corporations vary by their level of indifference towards their
>> customers' interests.
>
> No. Corporations vary by how much they expect to benefit/lose from
> satisfied/unhappy customers.

There have been corporations who have a mentality that making their 
customers happy is literally the most important thing in the world. More 
important than making a profit, even. Now, whether anybody who thinks 
like this stays in business for more than five minutes is somewhat open 
to debate. But clearly some businesses do operate like this.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find companies who would quite 
happily provoke global thermonuclear warfare if they thought it would be 
profitable.

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Le 2011-06-03 05:08, Invisible a écrit :
>
> At the other end of the spectrum, we find companies who would quite
> happily provoke global thermonuclear warfare if they thought it would be
> profitable.

"Our earning forecast for the next quarter is for a double-digit growth, 
however, the outlook for the longer term is a little less optimistic. We 
will need to study the market and adapt our strategy to focus on growth 
sectors."

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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On 03/06/2011 01:43 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
> Le 2011-06-03 05:08, Invisible a écrit :
>>
>> At the other end of the spectrum, we find companies who would quite
>> happily provoke global thermonuclear warfare if they thought it would be
>> profitable.
>
> "Our earning forecast for the next quarter is for a double-digit growth,
> however, the outlook for the longer term is a little less optimistic. We
> will need to study the market and adapt our strategy to focus on growth
> sectors."

lolrus

Yeah, well, big business is somewhat noted for short-sighted decisions...

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Am 03.06.2011 11:08, schrieb Invisible:
>>> Corporations vary by their level of indifference towards their
>>> customers' interests.
>>
>> No. Corporations vary by how much they expect to benefit/lose from
>> satisfied/unhappy customers.
>
> There have been corporations who have a mentality that making their
> customers happy is literally the most important thing in the world. More
> important than making a profit, even. Now, whether anybody who thinks
> like this stays in business for more than five minutes is somewhat open
> to debate. But clearly some businesses do operate like this.

But why do they do it? Because they think it benefits /them/ to have a 
corporate image of acting morally.

Small companies led by their owners in person (or even large companies 
led by their owners in person, though those are quite rare) are a 
different story. But corporations led by a board & traded on stock 
exchange markets? Show me a single one that acts morally for the pure 
sake of it.

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Le 03/06/2011 14:43, Francois Labreque a écrit :
> Le 2011-06-03 05:08, Invisible a écrit :
>>
>> At the other end of the spectrum, we find companies who would quite
>> happily provoke global thermonuclear warfare if they thought it would be
>> profitable.
> 
> "Our earning forecast for the next quarter is for a double-digit growth,
> however, the outlook for the longer term is a little less optimistic. We
> will need to study the market and adapt our strategy to focus on growth
> sectors."

It's the new nomadic way of life: hunt, rape, burn and move further.

The opposite way (as in Cain vs Abel) could sound:

"Our installed based is stable and we foresee no interesting events for
the next quarter. We are studying a long term evolution to provide more
facilities and ease the life of everyone."

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On Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:45:33 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>>>> Those two statements contradict each other.  PowerShell is a command
>>>> prompt, is it not?
>>>
>>> PowerShell is a replacement for the old MS-DOS command prompt
>>> emulator.
>>
>> So that would be "yes" then. :)
> 
> The old MS-DOS emulator is deprecated. CLI interfaces in general are
> not, no.

But that's what you seemed to be saying.

>> MS is in it for the money and for their self-interest.  That's what
>> drives the organization.  (That's certainly true of most for-profit
>> businesses)
> 
> Corporations vary by their level of indifference towards their
> customers' interests.

Some corporations are happy to *tell* the customer what the customer's 
interest is.

Jim

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On 6/1/2011 3:51, Invisible wrote:
> How random is that?

It's not at all random. It's also the reason you can unmount a drive where 
your cwd is set in Windows and not in UNIX.

Remember that DOS 1 was based on CP/M, and thus didn't have directories at 
all. When directories were added, the idea was that for each drive letter, 
you set the directory you wanted, then started up the program which would 
not refer to directories at all, but only to DOS 1 a la CP/M drive letters.

How come every time you come across legacy support, you say it's a kludge or 
a wtf or a random? :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 6/2/2011 0:56, Invisible wrote:
> Isn't that kind of the original *point* of Java?

Sort of. The idea was to insulate you from whatever was underneath, so you 
could write UI applications and such (the sorts of things you'd see on a 
smart TV or DVR or whatever) without worrying about porting them to other 
machines.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 6/2/2011 7:38, Invisible wrote:
> Every OS I know is based around a series of assumptions. In particular, that
> a "program" is just a monolithic block of machine code, and that the only
> "services" that it needs from the OS is resource allocation, protection, and
> control over the hardware.

You should read about Singularity, wherein this is exactly the problem being 
addressed. "Why do all the OSes do this? Because that's what an OS was 
needed for in the 1970's, the early days of timeshare. Let's see what an OS 
needs to do today...."

> ...until you realise that changing the design of the GC is likely to break
> all your applications. Unless they're written in a sufficiently high-level
> language that they can't "see" this level of detail.

Yep. That's exactly what Singularity does. Except the "high-level language" 
is basically MSIL, and the GC engine is compiled into each program, so 
different programs can use different GC engines.

> That makes you start to think what /other/ kinds of services you might want
> the OS to provide. For example, this whole "a command is a file name, and
> its arguments are strings passed uninterpretted to the program" thing.
> Surely we can do better.

If you really want to see, look at some of the new OS research. Read the 
Singularity design documents, for example. There's some really cool stuff in 
there when you get an OS that can rely on your programs actually declaring 
in their manifest what resources they need and the OS can rely on the 
programs actually obeying the semantics of the OS. (E.g., you get stuff like 
bits of the kernel being compiled into the executable code for efficiency, 
stuff like page faults being handled in user space, etc.)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 6/2/2011 7:38, Invisible wrote:
> That makes you start to think what /other/ kinds of services you might want
> the OS to provide.

Or, alternately, look at Eros or Ameoba. Both are pretty easy to understand, 
both are very very unlike the usual timeshare OSes.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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