Slashdot Mirror
Domain: thisoldhouse.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to thisoldhouse.com.
Comments · 8
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And he's already responded
His response:
http://mikerowe.com/2018/04/ot...
And interested students have until June 4th to submit an application for a scholarship from his foundation:
http://profoundlydisconnected....
It's also worth mentioning that he's been on This Old House this last season, as they've added apprenticing to the shows (which I really like, as they have someone to ask questions about why they're doing something) :
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Re: The Republicans will never....
* With a poor person i refer to someone that is unemployed and broke or receiving welfare.
And why does a poor person *need* to live in a flat in a city? Would not a room in a collective be enough?
And why does a poor person *need* a cellphone? Either a landline or pre-paid flip-phone would be enough ($20-40 per year should be more than enough)
And why does a poor person *need* a car? Public transportation works perfectly in most places.
Why does every "poor" person think society owes them a decent living without requiring them to perform any type of work or service? In case some type of UBI should be implemented it should be based on a "guarantee work" where they are guaranteed to always get a minimum-salary day-job where they clean the streets or helps out at a soup-kitchen or other type of tasks that are in need for the community you live in. You could even offer a self-study "job" to study to be able to provide a service that is in need in the workforce. (see it as a tiny scholarship, paid for by the companies that are in need)There are few things that a poor person needs... Water, food and a warm dwelling.. If the person has to work (bringing in wood for heating etc) to keep the dwelling warm should be quite normal and nothing that other people should have to pay for.. If you don't have a job you have a minimum of 8 hours a day to spend on things like that.. The name for this is "Homesteading".
If you don't have a job you are free to go to the countryside and get a *cheap* place (there are many) where you can grow your own food (as much as possible) and gather wood for heating.. Or spend on renovating the house (You can do it dirt-cheap if you just spend your own time on recycling from demolition-sites etc.)
Some examples:
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/i...
https://www.landcentury.com/un...I work 50+ hours a week. Why should i pay for your food/shelter/transportation without you performing any type of work? Find a service employed people wants/needs and perform that for whatever salary that pays... And fine, if you are completely worthless we can find a basic shelter you can stay in and and put some food in your stomach.. But i will not pay you for doing nothing.
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You already said it
...(beyond develop hobbies, spend time with family)...
Develop hobbies and spend time with your family.
Programming (or learning to program if you don't already know how) is a productive hobby. Get a train set. Repaint your house. Buy and restore a classic car by hand (although that can be quite expensive). Go hiking/kayaking/skiing/biking/fishing. Learn to play the guitar/bass/drums/piano/sax/trumpet/sousaphone. Have a barbeque. Build a barbeque. Go geocaching. Go geohashing . And get your kids/parents/spouse/siblings/friends/neighbors involved.
I only wish I have free time for these things
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Re:Amazing
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At the risk of being a troll, go non-wireless
Although this will come out as sounding elitist, you don't deserve to be called a slashdot geek if you can't run your own cable and crimp your own connectors. Heck, the kit from Computer Geeks is so cheap, you can subsidize the cost by crimping patch cables to sell to your friends for cheap. I know you live in an apartment, but there are plenty of ways to consolidate and conceal the cable (local hardware store has lots of goodies). Because of the small diameter of the cable, you can run it along baseboards or under carpet and not have it glaringly obvious. Going through drywall won't be a problem---and if you worry about doing it in an apartment, make the hole as small as possible and patch it up before the final walkthrough inpection when you're ready to move out. You can use surface mount keystone jacks that can be easily removed and holes patched up when you're done with them---they're as damaging to the wall as hanging mirrors and picture frames. At times like this, dealing with supposed "easier" technology like wifi can actually end up costing you more time and headache. Why not just say to heck with it all and go "low-tech" with wires?
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Check out this week's "This Old House"
According to my schedule the episode of This Old House on PBS this week will show how in Bermuda it is standard practice to collect rainwater for all a house's water needs - in fact if a family uses too much water, they're forced to buy water from the government. Show info here shows up to last week's episode: This Old House
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Re:Micropayments won't work
It's really depressing, I've been using Internet and it's precursors since 1985 for a variety of reasons, and I remember a time when it was all open and free for use. No pop-ups, no spam, no discussions about how to charge people money for everything they click on.
And in 1985, all you had was Usenet, perhaps some FTP sites, and maybe Archie. Do you really want to go back to that?
Or perhaps go back in time to 1994. You had a lot of 2-3 page personal pages, never updated, on a variety of inane topics (many were entertaining, but few were truly useful). True, new pages were added frequently because it was the new, novel thing to do back then.
A lot of the sites were hosted by educational institutions, meaning that those schools subsidized them. Try explaining that to a parent who wants to know why tuition went up by 7% this year when unemployment is so high.
Look at how many entertaining "personal" pages there are now. Not as many as in 1993. People lost interest in publishing them. I think that if you remove all the commercial sites (defined as having ads on them), you'll have 1/100th the information on the internet than there was in 1994. I don't think that many people would rush in with personal pages to fill the void, especially when a moderately successful site can rack up hundreds of dollars per month in hosting fees.
Do you think that you can operate Slashdot in a noncommercial way, purely as an open, free, no-advertising site?
I don't think that people really realize how much better the internet could be if people could make money by publishing content. I know I'd spend 60-100 hours a week adding to my site if I was able to be paid for my work. But because I need to spend 40-50 hours a week at my primary job, those are hours I can't spend making my site better.
Multiply my scenario by the thousands upon thousands of sites out there and try and envision how much is not being published due to lack of renumeration.
The internet was never this wild font of endlessly free information with absolutely no commercial aspects. Prior to commercialization here were niche sites catering mostly to a techincal audience; you didn't have sites like thisoldhouse.com giving you a variety of free information on any topic you chose.
Ralph -
features and costs of industrial-strength CMSWell, I've taken the training for QPS (hey, somebody wants to pay to fly me to Denver for a week of futzing around, who am I to say no?), I've done admin work in Cumulus, and worked with MediaSphere. So, based on that, I'ld say, yet again, ask to see screenshots of the admin tools, sample printouts, a list of prebuilt reports, and a list of functions and how they're accessed. Then, once you've done that, get a demo and you'll be able to see for yourself how easy or hard the system is to run.
Chances are that what they're calling "programming" (yeah, right!) is building the config file, which is admittedly a bitch. Personally, I always did that by wandering off to the park with the fifty or sixty pages of printout and editing it there. In other words, doing/majorly revising a config does require raw text, but in a good system it should be more like creating the accounting section of a large annual report than like, say, writing in C.
So if they're so easy (comparatively) to run, why do people get away with charging thousands of dollars? It's two things. To some extent they're just charging what the market will bear and to some extent it's simply that if a corporation plans to put somebody in charge of their crown jewels (and make no mistake, that's what content admin is) then they're perfectly content(heh), and appropriately so, to spend the extra two or three days of training to go over things the one last time that might prevent a mishap.
Personally, I once had a problem with the backup/archive application in a CMS and accidently (screen redraw problem, combined with faulty error message) put in the command to erase and zero out most of three issues of a major national magazine. Layouts, stories, photos, ad tracking logs. The works. Oops! Too bad. You didn't *really* want a Christmas issue, did you? I'm sure that General Motors won't mind letting you keep the fifty thousand dollars they paid for their ad.
The only thing that saved my butt was an absolutely obsessive awareness of how the system worked, right down to things like bugs in screen redraw, as a result of which I had built in a workaround just in case this very thing happened. I was able to cancel the command before it could fully execute (it was still running through its preparatory pre-erase automatic functions) and the editorial staff never even knew. Was this worth the extra couple thousand dollars it cost a multi-billion dollar company to get me trained to that level of knowledge? Yah, I'ld say so.
This brings up another problem. Let's say you want to offer training in a major CMS, let's say Vignette. It's the same problem airlines have when looking for experienced pilots. The gear costs a ton, there are fewer active seats to work the app in the entire world then there are PCs in one medium sized town, you can only really learn how it works with months of time managing the work of at least thirty or forty creatives/editors, and so forth.
The bottom line: how many qualified people are on the entire planet who aren't tied up in full time gigs? I know that just including my primary system (QPS) and my primary industry (large print pubs) drops me into a group of fewer than two thousand qualified admins WORLDWIDE. Reduce that down to those who are good teachers *and* aren't busy and it's slim pickins. Add to that the fact that there aren't enough customers to justify even two classes per city a month and of course it's expensive and difficult to get trainers.
Of course this is an important argument for scalable systems, where the skills learned in a three person shop apply to a seven hundred person shop. Yet another reason I'm sitting this out.
So, back to the original topic. In my experience a good CMS should be no harder to work with than a large, say, cc:mail installation. Like Go, you'll be quite busy enough working the implications of all that stuff moving around and all those users/statuses/groups to manage as it is.
Which takes us to yet another proof to me that the open source CMSes are still clueless. Look at any big production environment and you'll see at least ten different statuses that a document may be in. You've got (at least):
needs to be done but not yet assigned (as in "we'll need a turkey logo for the Thanksgiving page, see if you can give it some Flash functions")
assigned but not yet started ("Okay, Paolo, this is yours, here are the notes and template")
rough
first edit
second edit (some places have as many as six edit stages but we'll leave it at two)
ready for proof (known in my world as "blues" because they used to be run to press on special blue paper/ink)
final (no more changes allowed but not yet run)
live
archive
hold ("pull that story from this issue, we don't have the space/the interview fell through; we'll run it in another issue")
next/later specified edit cycle (the end of the year overview that's already in the works even though it's only March)
not for publication (trust me, if you don't create it, the edit staff will find a way to fake it. This is where you keep random stuff like mockups, joke documents, etc.)
Trash (yes, this is a status because a.)like the Windoze/Mac trash can sometimes you want to be able to change your mind and b.) some user classes who can be trusted to change a document status can't be trusted to permanently delete documents)
And keep in mind that a good CMS should change document characteristics (who can check it out, what aspects are still editable, who it gets default routed to) automagically when the status changes.
I could list another ten statuses and another four or five kinds of functionality without breathing hard but you get the idea. So, how is most of this stuff out there built? Rough, Final, Live, maybe one other, and usually none of them editable. Like I said, amateur hour.
Anyway, I'm late for a barbeque. See y'all later,
Rustin