My dad, for example, came here with the clothes on his back and now, 30 years later, enjoys a much better life than he ever would have had in his native country.
The fact that he was able to multiply his net worth by a factor of 50,000 just by being in America for 20 years speaks a lot about this country. He didn't have some brilliant idea. He didn't have a scam. He worked hard. Damned hard. But he still did the sensible thing, and his wife all 4 of his kids are much better off because of it. I could not imagine what my life would be like if my dad never came here. This is a completely different world, which most people can never appreciate.
Now, I'm sure people have also been thoroughly fucked in coming here. That sucks. I'm sorry. But I'm not going to accept that America is definitively bad for immigrants. I'm a direct result of America being good for immigrants. Sure, there's lots of room for improvement. We jail way too many people. We are a nation largely of racist idiots, but I could think of much worse places to be.
I'm not going to really have sympathy for people if they knew that their stay here was limited. Also, families? Doesn't marrying a US citizen make you a citizen?
While I am going to miss some people, they were obviously aware of the terms of their stay. You're in a foreign country under limited conditions, you'd be an idiot not to try to find out more about these conditions.
Why all the fuss?
I suppose it's easy for me to rant because I stand no chance of being sent back to a country that very well might be terrible, but I will stand by it. Please inform me otherwise if there's something I'm not understanding.
Just because you own a big pipe, it doesn't mean you're going to have that pipe filled 100%. Bandwidth still costs the same, even if you can theoretically fire more traffic to the end user.
Hell, there are still ISPs that can't even saturate 56k lines at peak hours.
Since I work at an ISP, we have to consider these issues, moreso than the end user. Rather than explain this every single time, I just wrote a paper and give out the URL:
http://netgraft.com/?item=3
So, even though their algorithm was going to become public domain on September 20th 2000 anyway, they decided to spin the situation from this:
"RSA Data Security, despite kicking and screaming, are no longer the sole holders of a mathematical equation used for encrypting data. On September 20th, 2000, this contraversial patent expired, leaving RSA Data Security powerless and helpless despite their otherwise greedy intentions.
While the patent has been challenged numerous times, it has always resulted in an out of court settlement and unfortunately a judge has never had the oppurtunity to rule on the legality of such a patent.
The world rejoices!"
into:
"The benevolant RSA Data Security, out of the good will of their hearts, has released their coveted RSA encryption algorithm into the public domain. A representative on hand commented 'It doesn't make sense for us to hold onto an algorithm so obvious. After 15 years, this is our gift to you, world.' God bless you freedom fighters!"
Many game developers are looking to turn their business model from selling products towards providing a service.
This should imply that obtaining the client is free (or a minimal physical cost, cost of media plus art + instructions) and playing on the service is a small monthly charge, and in return you get access to the online community and ideally, only pay if you use it.
Depending on the company, the users either love or hate this model. This gives the game developers much more control over how the game is played. Ideally, they could use this to bring the user into an even richer environment and enhance the experience, but many abuse this control (Ultima Online anyone?).
Their cease and desist letters are to be expected since a free (or minimal cost) client plus a free server would totally cut them out of the revenue stream. These server emulators threaten their very business.
I'm sure if Verant rationally and non-threateningly explained this to the server emulator developers (and maybe offering them a job wouldn't be out of order), they would see their point of view and realize that they may be hurting a reasonably decent company (you could do worse than Verant).
But barking out cease and desist orders pleases no one, and they are effectively drawing battle lines by doing this, a battle that they will certainly lose.
I've seen some clerks at a bank use a CDE interface to what I assume to be a backend script/logic thingy to what I assume gets stored in a RDBMS.
While I'm not sure if CDE has existed for this long, bank applications might be a good place to look.
Also, If you consider the man database to be
relational (it DOES tell you to see other man
pages:). xman is also copyright 1988 by MIT, or
at least that's the earliest implementation that I
can find.
We have the "war room" setup for the techies. Basically, it's one big room with the walls lined with desks with lots of computers laid on them. You basically create your own space and environment from that. Organize it however you want. We all share our manuals on a communal bookshelf. We usually have enough desk space to do what we want.
The happy hacking keyboard is a great way to reclaim needed desk space. I can't believe how much space traditional keyboards waste.
I've worked in cubicles before, and they're not all really that bad. Some companies have big cubicles (so you could fit say, 3 machines in them), some have medium sized ones (maybe 2 machines), and some try to cram you in closets.
As long as you're not in the last category, they're not all that bad. It's your own private universe where you can do whatever the hell you want to it, essentially.
I prefer the "war room" setup, though, just because there's more social interaction with the other geeks.
If you're in a position to dictate to the world what protocol it will now adopt in newer versions of their router software, why attack it with ICMP Traceback? Why not just make it a mandatory router policy to drop packets that couldn't possibly be outgoing packets if they came over a given interface?
For example, some ISPs (like us) have border routers that drop packets that have a source address different from the netblock that ARIN assigned us.
Yes, the problem here is that it's difficult to get 100% of the world to do this. How exactly would ICMP traceback have any better luck? It does less to solve the problem and still faces the same penetration issue.
If you made it impossible to spoof packets, attacks like smurf would become impossible and other attacks (such as SYN floods) would become much more difficult.
*shrug*
It sounds useful, but I can think of better ways to stop DoS attacks.
When I went to go see ESR speak at the world trade center, it was being hosted in one of Sybase's "Best-of-Breed" technology demo'ing facilities.
I think they had a screensaver locked and you had to press your thumb against the side of the mouse, it would then draw your fingerprint and tell you access denied (since I obviously wasn't the correct finger).
Hrmm, this doesn't appear to have been bent in Linux's favor. Many different systems/configurations were benchmarked by different vendors and the higher end Linux setup beat them all.
I'm sure each vendor did everything they possibly could to improve their SPECWeb99 results, since it's in their best interests. Does this mean that Linux is just better overall? Does it mean that it can be twisted the most to win any benchmark if you try hard enough?
The notion you get from reading linux-kernel is that they're totally against patching the kernel just to win a specific benchmark, but it obviously did very well in this one.
Then again, there are lies, damn lies, AND BENCHMARKS. I see this as being more credible than the Mindcraft benchmarks (Mindcraft, haha, that sounds suspicious) since it wasn't simply NT vs. Linux and multiple vendors are involved.
It would have been interesting to see FreeBSD thrown in, just because it's another open source system. Maybe there's a trend here? Easier to tweak open source systems to win benchmarks? Maybe they're just clearly better? Hmm.
Some asshole once stated that "You're going to force us to make songs that can only be played on one walkman". How would they do this?
You would go to their web site, you would plug in your walkman. Your walkman would send the web site it's public key. The web site will charge you $5.95 and encrypt the song with your walkman's public key and then let you download it. That song can now only be sent to your walkman, which decrypts it with it's private key moments before sending it to audial output systems.
Now, most keen people will say "Uh, big deal, I'll just record the output". Uber-leet hackers will go "Cool, a challenge" and take apart the walkman and yank out the private key, or simply figure out the algorithm and determine how to best crack it. If possible.
Now, here's the point. They know you'll crack their encryption. The entire point of encrypting it is so that they can point to the DMCA and say "Cracking cryptographic systems is illegal, and he did clearly this, using these steps." and the fun-loving hacker is carted off to prison and given a sentence that would make the sentence for rape seem like a slap on the wrist.
Mr. Asshole of the MPAA simply argued that DeCSS breaks CSS. The DMCA says breaking cryptography is illegal, whether you distribute the protected work or not. In fact, you would think that it was deliberately easy to crack so that you DID crack it simply to get you into a larger legal mess.
Cryptography kicks ass, but not when it's used to strip people's rights away.
FILTER HIM OUT. It's really easy and I could read comments to this story that aren't filled with people who seem to exist just to whine about every article he writes. Although I suppose that could be used against me to say that I should up my threshold.
I don't expect Jon Katz to be 100% correct in every story he writes. He's never been blatantly wrong, and his ideas still stand EVEN IF A CRYPTIC LITTLE technical issue is misrepresented.
I know that he makes me think more than any other slashdot author does, and he often has many ideas and viewpoints on a particular concept. They may be outlandish, but I like reading them.
In this article alone, I remembered things that I had long forgotten, books that I have read and doomsday/utopia ideas that I had thought of once and stuffed into the nether regions of my brain.
I like being exposed to as many possible lunatic ideas as I can. That's why I read slashdot:)
I've only been a sys admin for a year and a half, but there's some things that you can seem to pick up after experience.
As a sys admin for a smaller ISP, we usually have to field second-level tech support calls. That isn't so bad, especially if you schedule to work on low phone frequency days. (friday and saturday, but that has the drawback of taking away probably the most exciting days of the week from you).
Most sys admins don't treat users as if they knew what they were doing simply because 95% of users that call really have no idea. It's just natural to assume the person that calls up isn't going to understand you the first few times.
Basically, you have to assume the user is an idiot (and I mean *ID10T*) unless they prove otherwise. Even then it's hard because they use specific buzzwords they've heard that just might make themselves sound knowledgable.
It's unfortunate for the user that does know what they're doing, but if you want to get something out of a sys admin, you should probably state the exact nature of your problem (be specific) in as few words as you can. There are so many times when I've had a user ask me a question and I'll know what the answer to his problem is as soon as he opens his mouth, but he goes on and on. It's bad for business to yell at users over the phone.:)
Other than the misfortune of users calling up, my job is a blast. If something isn't broken, I usually spend the day optimizing typically used commands for our particular system (you DO have the source code to your system, don't you?:)
Lately I've been doing junk with NT. I know it sounds horrible and I feel somewhat tainted and dirty whenever I finish up what I'm doing on it, but it's almost tolerable if you install Perl.
While I would consider myself a sys admin, I also program considerable amounts when I'm not doing sys adminly things. It's hard to sum up the job accurately so I just use this equation:
Systems Admin + Programmer = Systems Development
I consider that my title. That work for anyone else or what?:)
Lighten the fuck up. Must everything have a clear and explicit purpose to be allowed to exist? I laughed out loud when I read that. Then I checked out the page and realized they were serious. It stopped being funny and I started fingering the possibilities.
Sure, Perl is butt slow, but so what? So is Java. Do we really have nothing better to do than complain that an application takes 8 seconds to load as opposed to 3 seconds? (Netscape vs. IE?)
I scoffed at Perl for awhile until I picked up the O'Reilly "Camel" book a few weeks ago and found that I loved it after I read the second chapter. Perl is an attempt to change the environment. To make things better. Something the inventor of Java has said once.:)
As a C programmer, I spend way too much time wondering what type a variable should be and how to save memory and gain precious nanoseconds of time. "Bah, don't use unsigned long, unsigned short is enough". Do I really need to waste precious seconds of my life to save two whole bytes of memory? Which cost what? $0.000012? That's an inefficient use of my life, since I usually throw pennies away rather than let them collect in my pocket. Not to mention that my processor is 98% idle most of the time.
Computers are fast enough. Let's work on something else. At this point I'll gladly trade in speed for decent functionality. If I can write what I do in C in Perl in 10% the time for a 1000% speed hit. I don't care.
I only wish I was good enough at Perl (only a week or two old here) to help this project out.
You know, I was waiting for this to happen. I'm sitting there reading what I thought was an excellent article.. and that was a clear indication of how negative and petty the comments following the article would be.
I have yet to see a single article posted here get more positive comments than negative unless it mentions so little that there is no room to disagree. I welcome future articles and it's becoming more evident each day that the only way to enjoy slashdot is to completely skip the comments.
Ok. I've noticed I've been happier with SGI lately than I have been angry at them. It's odd. SGI seems to be trying (hard or not) to do the "right thing" and one often questions why the heck they aren't taking the stingy backstabbing who cares what we want route. I figure they'd be a little more dedicated towards capitalizing...
I see three things:
1> SGI is really dumb and don't realize that this could hurt them in the longer run. (they're not exactly in the most financially stable state right now)
2> SGI is doing this out of the kindness of their hearts and doesn't seek any returns at all.
3> SGI sees this as a plan to profit, and in the process gives us exact what we want.
Idealistically, it'd be the second case.
Realistically, it's the third case, which if it is, has proven to me that capitalism really does work for everyone! hooray!
Oh come on, I almost shed a tear for the sniffiling Microsoft representative who cried "Why our benevolant corporation? Why are you doing this? What did we ever do to you?!"
If Microsoft had it's way, this site wouldn't exist, Linux would not exist, and Windows would be in every home, on every desk. (Which it's close enough to being)
Where do you want to go today? Right.
Nothing wrong with fighting back if it's not completely tasteless. Your mileage may vary.
I've been thinking about this for the past 3 years now. I'm someone who is arrogant enough to think that I don't need a college to teach me compiler design or operating system level programming. I think the entire system is bullshit. But only recently did I decide that I wanted to go.
It sounds like a total waste of time, I'll never get into MIT or whatever at this point, and I wouldn't want to foot the bill for it either. I'm sure there's plenty one can get from it, and if they came up to me and said "here, you can go to MIT for free, on us" I'd probably go for it. Realistically, it's not a future plan.
On the other hand, I've been going to school for 75% of my life. I'm growing so sick and bored of it. It's really disappointing when I learn more during summer vacation than I do the school years between them.
Everyone looks at me as if I'm a loser if I don't plan on going to college. It's really annoying that society has this hardwired into their brain that you have to pay money to an institution to learn anything. I suppose schools are targeted toward the mass populus who this would be applicable for (obviously). It's too bad that their CS degree will be worth more than my lifetime of experience with this technology.
I plan on putting college off for a few years once I graduate high school. I want to experience the world and live on my own. If I see that I've made a mistake, I'll go to town hall university (you know, that building the peons come out of in warcraft2?) and get some degree.
Even if I do finally go to college, I'm not taking CS. "Here, I'll give you money to teach me something I already know!" What fun that would be. I'll probably double major in Math and Physics. Yea.
You might be saying "Why don't you teach that to yourself too, assmaster?", I would, but it'd be easier on me (motivation/laziness) to just sit back and buy an education. "Town Hall University" is rather cheap.:)
Slashdot Mirror
My dad, for example, came here with the clothes on his back and now, 30 years later, enjoys a much better life than he ever would have had in his native country.
The fact that he was able to multiply his net worth by a factor of 50,000 just by being in America for 20 years speaks a lot about this country. He didn't have some brilliant idea. He didn't have a scam. He worked hard. Damned hard. But he still did the sensible thing, and his wife all 4 of his kids are much better off because of it. I could not imagine what my life would be like if my dad never came here. This is a completely different world, which most people can never appreciate.
Now, I'm sure people have also been thoroughly fucked in coming here. That sucks. I'm sorry. But I'm not going to accept that America is definitively bad for immigrants. I'm a direct result of America being good for immigrants. Sure, there's lots of room for improvement. We jail way too many people. We are a nation largely of racist idiots, but I could think of much worse places to be.
YMMV - I'm an American and proud of it.
While I am going to miss some people, they were obviously aware of the terms of their stay. You're in a foreign country under limited conditions, you'd be an idiot not to try to find out more about these conditions.
Why all the fuss?
I suppose it's easy for me to rant because I stand no chance of being sent back to a country that very well might be terrible, but I will stand by it. Please inform me otherwise if there's something I'm not understanding.
Hell, there are still ISPs that can't even saturate 56k lines at peak hours.
Since I work at an ISP, we have to consider these issues, moreso than the end user. Rather than explain this every single time, I just wrote a paper and give out the URL: http://netgraft.com/?item=3
"RSA Data Security, despite kicking and screaming, are no longer the sole holders of a mathematical equation used for encrypting data. On September 20th, 2000, this contraversial patent expired, leaving RSA Data Security powerless and helpless despite their otherwise greedy intentions.
While the patent has been challenged numerous times, it has always resulted in an out of court settlement and unfortunately a judge has never had the oppurtunity to rule on the legality of such a patent.
The world rejoices!"
into:
"The benevolant RSA Data Security, out of the good will of their hearts, has released their coveted RSA encryption algorithm into the public domain. A representative on hand commented 'It doesn't make sense for us to hold onto an algorithm so obvious. After 15 years, this is our gift to you, world.' God bless you freedom fighters!"
Only in America!
This should imply that obtaining the client is free (or a minimal physical cost, cost of media plus art + instructions) and playing on the service is a small monthly charge, and in return you get access to the online community and ideally, only pay if you use it.
Depending on the company, the users either love or hate this model. This gives the game developers much more control over how the game is played. Ideally, they could use this to bring the user into an even richer environment and enhance the experience, but many abuse this control (Ultima Online anyone?).
Their cease and desist letters are to be expected since a free (or minimal cost) client plus a free server would totally cut them out of the revenue stream. These server emulators threaten their very business.
I'm sure if Verant rationally and non-threateningly explained this to the server emulator developers (and maybe offering them a job wouldn't be out of order), they would see their point of view and realize that they may be hurting a reasonably decent company (you could do worse than Verant).
But barking out cease and desist orders pleases no one, and they are effectively drawing battle lines by doing this, a battle that they will certainly lose.
While I'm not sure if CDE has existed for this long, bank applications might be a good place to look.
Also, If you consider the man database to be relational (it DOES tell you to see other man pages :). xman is also copyright 1988 by MIT, or
at least that's the earliest implementation that I
can find.
The happy hacking keyboard is a great way to reclaim needed desk space. I can't believe how much space traditional keyboards waste.
I've worked in cubicles before, and they're not all really that bad. Some companies have big cubicles (so you could fit say, 3 machines in them), some have medium sized ones (maybe 2 machines), and some try to cram you in closets.
As long as you're not in the last category, they're not all that bad. It's your own private universe where you can do whatever the hell you want to it, essentially.
I prefer the "war room" setup, though, just because there's more social interaction with the other geeks.
For example, some ISPs (like us) have border routers that drop packets that have a source address different from the netblock that ARIN assigned us.
Yes, the problem here is that it's difficult to get 100% of the world to do this. How exactly would ICMP traceback have any better luck? It does less to solve the problem and still faces the same penetration issue.
If you made it impossible to spoof packets, attacks like smurf would become impossible and other attacks (such as SYN floods) would become much more difficult.
*shrug*
It sounds useful, but I can think of better ways to stop DoS attacks.
I think they had a screensaver locked and you had
to press your thumb against the side of the mouse,
it would then draw your fingerprint and tell
you access denied (since I obviously wasn't
the correct finger).
It was nifty. I hope I remember this correctly.
They should get their hands on gnu.net (owned by a kernel developer, I believe) and use it to combat the Microsoft.NET scandal.
gcc.gnu.net -- Download GCC on the Freedom to Software Network! ..in response to Microsoft's repugnant Freedom to Innovate campaign..
I'll go away.
I'm sure each vendor did everything they possibly could to improve their SPECWeb99 results, since it's in their best interests. Does this mean that Linux is just better overall? Does it mean that it can be twisted the most to win any benchmark if you try hard enough?
The notion you get from reading linux-kernel is that they're totally against patching the kernel just to win a specific benchmark, but it obviously did very well in this one.
Then again, there are lies, damn lies, AND BENCHMARKS. I see this as being more credible than the Mindcraft benchmarks (Mindcraft, haha, that sounds suspicious) since it wasn't simply NT vs. Linux and multiple vendors are involved.
It would have been interesting to see FreeBSD thrown in, just because it's another open source system. Maybe there's a trend here? Easier to tweak open source systems to win benchmarks? Maybe they're just clearly better? Hmm.
Some asshole once stated that "You're going to force us to make songs that can only be played on one walkman". How would they do this?
You would go to their web site, you would plug in your walkman. Your walkman would send the web site it's public key. The web site will charge you $5.95 and encrypt the song with your walkman's public key and then let you download it. That song can now only be sent to your walkman, which decrypts it with it's private key moments before sending it to audial output systems.
Now, most keen people will say "Uh, big deal, I'll just record the output". Uber-leet hackers will go "Cool, a challenge" and take apart the walkman and yank out the private key, or simply figure out the algorithm and determine how to best crack it. If possible.
Now, here's the point. They know you'll crack their encryption. The entire point of encrypting it is so that they can point to the DMCA and say "Cracking cryptographic systems is illegal, and he did clearly this, using these steps." and the fun-loving hacker is carted off to prison and given a sentence that would make the sentence for rape seem like a slap on the wrist.
Mr. Asshole of the MPAA simply argued that DeCSS breaks CSS. The DMCA says breaking cryptography is illegal, whether you distribute the protected work or not. In fact, you would think that it was deliberately easy to crack so that you DID crack it simply to get you into a larger legal mess.
Cryptography kicks ass, but not when it's used to strip people's rights away.
I don't expect Jon Katz to be 100% correct in every story he writes. He's never been blatantly wrong, and his ideas still stand EVEN IF A CRYPTIC LITTLE technical issue is misrepresented.
I know that he makes me think more than any other slashdot author does, and he often has many ideas and viewpoints on a particular concept. They may be outlandish, but I like reading them.
In this article alone, I remembered things that I had long forgotten, books that I have read and doomsday/utopia ideas that I had thought of once and stuffed into the nether regions of my brain.
I like being exposed to as many possible lunatic ideas as I can. That's why I read slashdot :)
I've only been a sys admin for a year and a half, but there's some things that you can seem to pick up after experience.
:)
:)
:)
As a sys admin for a smaller ISP, we usually have to field second-level tech support calls. That isn't so bad, especially if you schedule to work on low phone frequency days. (friday and saturday, but that has the drawback of taking away probably the most exciting days of the week from you).
Most sys admins don't treat users as if they knew what they were doing simply because 95% of users that call really have no idea. It's just natural to assume the person that calls up isn't going to understand you the first few times.
Basically, you have to assume the user is an idiot (and I mean *ID10T*) unless they prove otherwise. Even then it's hard because they use specific buzzwords they've heard that just might make themselves sound knowledgable.
It's unfortunate for the user that does know what they're doing, but if you want to get something out of a sys admin, you should probably state the exact nature of your problem (be specific) in as few words as you can. There are so many times when I've had a user ask me a question and I'll know what the answer to his problem is as soon as he opens his mouth, but he goes on and on. It's bad for business to yell at users over the phone.
Other than the misfortune of users calling up, my job is a blast. If something isn't broken, I usually spend the day optimizing typically used commands for our particular system (you DO have the source code to your system, don't you?
Lately I've been doing junk with NT. I know it sounds horrible and I feel somewhat tainted and dirty whenever I finish up what I'm doing on it, but it's almost tolerable if you install Perl.
While I would consider myself a sys admin, I also program considerable amounts when I'm not doing sys adminly things. It's hard to sum up the job accurately so I just use this equation:
Systems Admin + Programmer = Systems Development
I consider that my title. That work for anyone else or what?
Ick. It's late. I should sleep.
As I often start every one of my posts:
:)
What the hell is wrong with you people?
Lighten the fuck up. Must everything have a clear
and explicit purpose to be allowed to exist?
I laughed out loud when I read that. Then I
checked out the page and realized they were
serious. It stopped being funny and I started
fingering the possibilities.
Sure, Perl is butt slow, but so what? So is Java.
Do we really have nothing better to do than
complain that an application takes 8 seconds to
load as opposed to 3 seconds? (Netscape vs. IE?)
I scoffed at Perl for awhile until I picked up
the O'Reilly "Camel" book a few weeks ago and
found that I loved it after I read the second
chapter. Perl is an attempt to change the
environment. To make things better. Something
the inventor of Java has said once.
As a C programmer, I spend way too much time
wondering what type a variable should be and how
to save memory and gain precious nanoseconds of
time. "Bah, don't use unsigned long, unsigned
short is enough". Do I really need to waste
precious seconds of my life to save two whole
bytes of memory? Which cost what? $0.000012?
That's an inefficient use of my life, since I
usually throw pennies away rather than let them
collect in my pocket. Not to mention that my
processor is 98% idle most of the time.
Computers are fast enough. Let's work on something
else. At this point I'll gladly trade in speed
for decent functionality. If I can write what I
do in C in Perl in 10% the time for a 1000% speed
hit. I don't care.
I only wish I was good enough at Perl (only a week
or two old here) to help this project out.
To reiterate, lighten the fuck up.
You know, I was waiting for this to happen.
I'm sitting there reading what I thought was an
excellent article.. and that was a clear
indication of how negative and petty the comments
following the article would be.
I have yet to see a single article posted here
get more positive comments than negative unless
it mentions so little that there is no room to
disagree. I welcome future articles and it's
becoming more evident each day that the only way
to enjoy slashdot is to completely skip the
comments.
Idiots.
Ok. I've noticed I've been happier with SGI
lately than I have been angry at them. It's odd.
SGI seems to be trying (hard or not) to do the
"right thing" and one often questions why the heck
they aren't taking the stingy backstabbing who
cares what we want route. I figure they'd be
a little more dedicated towards capitalizing...
I see three things:
1> SGI is really dumb and don't realize that this
could hurt them in the longer run. (they're not
exactly in the most financially stable state
right now)
2> SGI is doing this out of the kindness of their
hearts and doesn't seek any returns at all.
3> SGI sees this as a plan to profit, and in the
process gives us exact what we want.
Idealistically, it'd be the second case.
Realistically, it's the third case, which if it
is, has proven to me that capitalism really does
work for everyone! hooray!
Three cheers for SGI!
Not!
Oh come on, I almost shed a tear for the
sniffiling Microsoft representative who
cried "Why our benevolant corporation? Why
are you doing this? What did we ever do to
you?!"
If Microsoft had it's way, this site wouldn't
exist, Linux would not exist, and Windows
would be in every home, on every desk. (Which
it's close enough to being)
Where do you want to go today? Right.
Nothing wrong with fighting back if it's not
completely tasteless. Your mileage may vary.
I've been thinking about this for the past 3 years now. I'm someone who is arrogant enough to think that I don't need a college to teach me compiler design or operating system level programming. I think the entire system is bullshit. But only recently did I decide that I wanted to go.
:)
It sounds like a total waste of time, I'll never get into MIT or whatever at this point, and I wouldn't want to foot the bill for it either. I'm sure there's plenty one can get from it, and if they came up to me and said "here, you can go to MIT for free, on us" I'd probably go for it. Realistically, it's not a future plan.
On the other hand, I've been going to school for 75% of my life. I'm growing so sick and bored of it. It's really disappointing when I learn more during summer vacation than I do the school years between them.
Everyone looks at me as if I'm a loser if I don't plan on going to college. It's really annoying that society has this hardwired into their brain that you have to pay money to an institution to learn anything. I suppose schools are targeted toward the mass populus who this would be applicable for (obviously). It's too bad that their CS degree will be worth more than my lifetime of experience with this technology.
I plan on putting college off for a few years once I graduate high school. I want to experience the world and live on my own. If I see that I've made a mistake, I'll go to town hall university (you know, that building the peons come out of in warcraft2?) and get some degree.
Even if I do finally go to college, I'm not taking CS. "Here, I'll give you money to teach me something I already know!" What fun that would be. I'll probably double major in Math and Physics. Yea.
You might be saying "Why don't you teach that to yourself too, assmaster?", I would, but it'd be easier on me (motivation/laziness) to just sit back and buy an education. "Town Hall University" is rather cheap.