Why would anyone doing professional 3D work for hollywood use 3dsmax with Wine or even Blender for that reason? If they feel they need to use Linux there's a native release of Maya (unless they've discontinued it, I've really only used the OSX version for the last couple of years).
Here in Sweden it is equally hard to get a netbook with Linux pre-installed, not that you'd want one of those though, their default distros tend to be pretty bad. Personally I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 and installed Linux from a USB stick, worked like a charm once I got past the issues with it labeling the USB stick as/dev/sda and the hard drive as/dev/sdb (which resulted in it writing GRUB to the USB stick's MBR the first time around, that's what I get for not paying attention).
/Mikael (according to the statistics I'm running Windows, yay!)
I wasn't calling condoms a stopgap measure, I was trying to point out that you were ignoring the core issue which would be women who deceive men in order to get pregnant and then force the men to take "responsibility" for the deception of the women.
And reasoning the same way the rape problem should be solved by having women avoid situations in which they could be raped, and of course avoid dressing "provocatively". After all, the stopgap measures should be just fine, right? no reason to fix the root problem...
Actually, if technocrats were making the decisions on this it would probably be thrown out ASAP, but I suspect you're using "technocrat" in that other way...
(Those who don't get it: some people use "technocracy" to describe totalitarian societies)
I'd listen to your arguments but I noticed that way too many of them focused on things that weren't relevant by the time even my father was born, and several wouldn't even have been relevant by the time my grandfather was born. Now, if they didn't apply to neither my father nor my grandfather, why should I have to take the blame? And do you really think most men were very privileged back in the days when things like slavery, indentured servitude and the like were common? do you think all men were lords in high castles who lived lives of grandeur? Most men back in those days had it far worse than most women have now, hell they had it worse than women had 50 or even 100 years ago (but then to be honest I don't know what backwards hellhole you're from, please take note of where I'm from before replying).
I've always regarded the popularity of the whole "all windows maximised all the time" way of using a computer as a relic from the days when those using MS Windows normally ran it at 640x480 or 800x600, meanwhile the UNIX and Mac users generally drove their monitors at much higher resolutions (1280x1024 @ 72Hz was a pretty common *nix setup in the days of 640x480 @ 60Hz with Windows) and thus became used to running their windows as windows as opposed to "walls" (yes, that's meant to be a bit of mockery).
/Mikael (Who has never been able to stand dealing with a setup where all apps are maximised, guess which camp I'm in)
To my knowledge PWM had tabs before both Fluxbox and Ion (although I've heard scores of Fluxbox users who have claimed that Fluxbox was the first WM with tabs even though Fluxbox didn't even exist until some time after PWM was released (the other popular lightweight WM at the time was Blackbox and Fluxbox was, to many PWM users, basically just Blackbox with PWM's tabs)).
So, you treat the internet like cable TV? Anyone who uses their service for anything other than mindlessly receiving stuff is evil? How about you just stop overselling?
As stated in another post, I'm in Sweden and I don't know of any ISPs around here who do throttling of caps on wired connections (although a few did back in the late 90s and early 00s) so my POV is a bit different from the US "caps are necessary because all the (US) ISPs say so".
"Up to" is only fair advertising if the "up to" is a CYA for issues with your ISP's peering or if your connection to the ISP can't handle the bandwidth. At least that's how it seems to be treated here in.se where nothing but wireless connections has caps, I suspect US ISPs have another definition...
I take it by your "government is always worse than private sector" bias that you're most likely american.
Here in Sweden the general consensus seems to be that SVT ("Sveriges Television" lit. "The swedish television") is the most reliable broadcaster while private ones are considered a lot less reliable by most people except for the extreme right who insist on SVT being "communist", "leftist" and "government controlled", they even use these descriptions now even though we currently have a right-wing coalition government.
What's important is that there is separation between government-funded media outlets and the government that funds them, not that governments shouldn't fund media outlets (SVT has a lot of advantages over privately funded television networks, such as how they can broadcast shows that only appeal to a fairly small subset of the population while the private networks prefer constantly going for the least common denominator).
That's why I normally don't have info installed, something which has been a very bad decision on those occasions where I've found myself on a Linux box unable to install packages (I'm normally more of a BSD guy).
Not to mention the GNU apps that have manpages that (at least on some Linux distros) basically say "Yeah, it's a piece of software, if you want more docs install the info package for it" which is completely unhelpful when you're on a system that barely boots and you can't install packages with the system in its current state.
/Mikael (who recently installed a Linux distro for the first time in a while, FreeBSD just didn't want to play with the netbook)
Well, if he's that high up in the hierarchy then you can expect him to bill the clients at least a few hundred bucks per hour though, ever hear of a sysadmin successfully billing his employer that much for one of those "Joanne in accounting tried updating some stuff ten minutes ago and it didn't work, fix it now!" emergency fixes at 03:00?
As a swede (who is a union member) I'd like to give my opinion on this.
Suppress wages
Not really, they generally only demand guaranteed minimum raises (which are normally just a little over inflation) and minimum pay dependent on the field people work in. So they don't really suppress wages, they just make sure employers don't try to stick their employees with miserably low pay, and that employers are forced to give out raises that at least match inflation.
defend the inept
Most of the legal action I've seen from unions has been against employers who have insisted on 15 year-old 15" CRT monitors being ergonomically equivalent to new TFT monitors, that employees should come in to work ten minutes early without pay and similar silliness that affects "all" employees ("all" with quotation marks because obviously management has brand-spanking-new 24" TFT monitors because the old CRTs would somehow hamper their ability to work efficiently even though they're perfectly fine for everyone else) or individual cases where an employer wrongfully fired someone and the union offered legal assistance.
petty crap during "bargaining" years
Ah, but the employers are even worse in this regard, nothing like moving assets out of one daughter company with a lot of employees into another daughter company just so you can say the business division is doing poorly and can't afford respectable raises for the employees.
strong arming members
Never heard of this, sometimes individual union representatives can have some wonky demands on employers though, although the only times I've heard of this have involved employers who were notorious for always trying to "bend" labor laws so there was a clear power struggle between the employer and the union to begin with.
and take money away for political purposes.
There are definitely a few unions that do this, they're mostly the classic big "social democrat" unions like LO who have a historic connection to various political parties though.
I'm glad that I'm a union member, it has saved my ass a few times when employers have tried various bullshit.
But these days people don't use run-of-the-mill insults and actual technical data to argue the issue, they prefer to use insults like "shitkocks", "butfaget" and "cawksokker" and they'd rather accuse each other of having deviant sexualities than argue over unimportant technical details (who cares what technology is best suited for a task when it is obvious that all SSD users are mactalibanfaggets because you can buy macs with SSD drives?). (Yes, I miss the days when usenet was still alive and useable).
You've probably got an official title that shows up somewhere on your business card or a sign on your desk - something like Lead Web Developer or Senior Database Developer or whatever. That's nice and specific and says something about your role in the company. But it won't really mean much to people who don't know what it means to develop software... Or what makes database development unique... Or the kind of effort it takes to become a "lead" or "senior" developer... To them, you just work with computers. Which makes you an IT guy.
My father is an optometrist [wikipedia.org]. At conventions and whatnot, various professional environments, he will refer to himself as such. When around friends and family, however, he just calls himself an "eye doctor" - since most people don't know or care about the differences between optometry and opthalmology [wikipedia.org].
This is my point, your father doesn't call himself a "health guy", he still refers to himself as an "eye doctor" which says 1) He's a doctor, not a nurse or an orderly and 2) He's specialized in eyes in some way.
It's the same way for most "IT guys" I know, it's not that they want to be called "senior database interface developer for Oracle cluster #4", they would just like people to at least acknowledge that they're developers and not "IT guys" much in the same way that most medical professionals I know would hate to be called "health guy/girl".
If anything it would help if we could get people to make that distinction because I'm tired of users strolling up to me asking if I can get them a new keyboard while I'm eating lunch (since the answer is "no" because it's not my job and I don't even know which pile of keyboards in the store room has broken keyboards in it and which one has new keyboards in it).
But at the end of the day you'll still say you went to the Dentist.
That's like saying "I went over to IT".
When I call an Electrician to fix something, I have no idea who they're sending out and who is doing the work in my house. It might be a fully licensed/qualified/insured Electrician... Or it might be one of their apprentices/trainees. I'll still refer to them as an Electrician. Same thing goes for Plumbers and Carpenters and whatever else...
Yeah, but there's still the implication that a tradesman fixed something and that he/she was either fully trained or an apprentice, the equivalent would be if all helpdesk guys occasionally got referred to as "software engineers" but no one really cared because 95% of them were training to become software engineers anyway.
They've got some people who are familiar with networking and data transmission who work on the ISP side of things... And they've got some very basic installers who just drill holes and run cables... But they're frequently referred to as just the "Cable Guy."
Ah yes, but most of those guys (at least the ones I've worked with) fulfill both roles, so even though some of them have additional skills the basic job is still "cable guy" (the actual title seemingly being different depending on employer). If you check the contract I've signed with my employer it clearly states that my job involves software development and some related system administration, they can't legally force me to do helpdesk stuff, and it's definitely not part of my everyday duties, yet to most people at the company I'm an "IT guy", just like the keyboard replacement guy.
My point is that with IT/computers/software it gets "dumbed down" to "IT guy" while with other professions it tends to run the other way, you don't call all medical professionals "health people" or "orderlies", in fact most people seem to prefer accidentally calling a nurse a doctor than the other way around (because they know it's insulting to a doctor to be called a nurse while most nurses probably won't be insulted if someone mistakes them for a doctor).
A cardiac surgeon doesn't know much otolaryngology; an EE doesn't know much about steam turbines; a personal injury lawyer isn't going to be much help with your corporate takeover.
Comparisons:
IT guy: helpdesk guy through to ph.d. who works with high-end clusters.
Health guy: orderly through to highly specialized surgeon.
Electric stuff guy: from the guy who moves crates of PCBs through electricians through to EE.
Law guy: Secretary at law firm through to top tier lawyer who's spent his/her entire career specializing.
Now, don't you think those on the right side of the above descriptions would frown own being referred to as health/electric stuff/law guy if the terms had the meanings I gave them above? And for "IT guy" that's exactly how the term is commonly used, the guy who gives you a new keyboard when you spill coffee on it gets referred to as an "IT guy" and so do your senior developers and sysadmins, guess why they're grumpy about it...
While it is true that Slashdot is US-centric a fairly large chunk of the users are not americans and it would make sense to at least provide a summary that gave just a little info as to what the story was about, because outside the US "Video Professor" seems to be completely unheard of.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would anyone doing professional 3D work for hollywood use 3dsmax with Wine or even Blender for that reason? If they feel they need to use Linux there's a native release of Maya (unless they've discontinued it, I've really only used the OSX version for the last couple of years).
/Mikael
Here in Sweden it is equally hard to get a netbook with Linux pre-installed, not that you'd want one of those though, their default distros tend to be pretty bad. Personally I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 and installed Linux from a USB stick, worked like a charm once I got past the issues with it labeling the USB stick as /dev/sda and the hard drive as /dev/sdb (which resulted in it writing GRUB to the USB stick's MBR the first time around, that's what I get for not paying attention).
/Mikael (according to the statistics I'm running Windows, yay!)
I wasn't calling condoms a stopgap measure, I was trying to point out that you were ignoring the core issue which would be women who deceive men in order to get pregnant and then force the men to take "responsibility" for the deception of the women.
/Mikael
And reasoning the same way the rape problem should be solved by having women avoid situations in which they could be raped, and of course avoid dressing "provocatively". After all, the stopgap measures should be just fine, right? no reason to fix the root problem...
/Mikael
Actually, if technocrats were making the decisions on this it would probably be thrown out ASAP, but I suspect you're using "technocrat" in that other way...
(Those who don't get it: some people use "technocracy" to describe totalitarian societies)
/Mikael
I'd listen to your arguments but I noticed that way too many of them focused on things that weren't relevant by the time even my father was born, and several wouldn't even have been relevant by the time my grandfather was born. Now, if they didn't apply to neither my father nor my grandfather, why should I have to take the blame? And do you really think most men were very privileged back in the days when things like slavery, indentured servitude and the like were common? do you think all men were lords in high castles who lived lives of grandeur? Most men back in those days had it far worse than most women have now, hell they had it worse than women had 50 or even 100 years ago (but then to be honest I don't know what backwards hellhole you're from, please take note of where I'm from before replying).
/Mikael
So you're saying "It's ok for women to be dishonest and then use the legal system to gain financial advantages from their dishonesty"?
/Mikael
Yes, and PWM had it nine years ago, hardly newsworthy that KDE finally gets a feature that's been around for almost a decade.
/Mikael
I've always regarded the popularity of the whole "all windows maximised all the time" way of using a computer as a relic from the days when those using MS Windows normally ran it at 640x480 or 800x600, meanwhile the UNIX and Mac users generally drove their monitors at much higher resolutions (1280x1024 @ 72Hz was a pretty common *nix setup in the days of 640x480 @ 60Hz with Windows) and thus became used to running their windows as windows as opposed to "walls" (yes, that's meant to be a bit of mockery).
/Mikael (Who has never been able to stand dealing with a setup where all apps are maximised, guess which camp I'm in)
To my knowledge PWM had tabs before both Fluxbox and Ion (although I've heard scores of Fluxbox users who have claimed that Fluxbox was the first WM with tabs even though Fluxbox didn't even exist until some time after PWM was released (the other popular lightweight WM at the time was Blackbox and Fluxbox was, to many PWM users, basically just Blackbox with PWM's tabs)).
/Mikael
Russia, where Sweden would be if the russians hadn't forged a pact with the danes, norwegians and saxons. :P
/Mikael
"...or caps on wired...", should've checked the preview a bit more closely.
So, you treat the internet like cable TV? Anyone who uses their service for anything other than mindlessly receiving stuff is evil? How about you just stop overselling?
As stated in another post, I'm in Sweden and I don't know of any ISPs around here who do throttling of caps on wired connections (although a few did back in the late 90s and early 00s) so my POV is a bit different from the US "caps are necessary because all the (US) ISPs say so".
/Mikael
"Up to" is only fair advertising if the "up to" is a CYA for issues with your ISP's peering or if your connection to the ISP can't handle the bandwidth. At least that's how it seems to be treated here in .se where nothing but wireless connections has caps, I suspect US ISPs have another definition...
/Mikael
I take it by your "government is always worse than private sector" bias that you're most likely american.
Here in Sweden the general consensus seems to be that SVT ("Sveriges Television" lit. "The swedish television") is the most reliable broadcaster while private ones are considered a lot less reliable by most people except for the extreme right who insist on SVT being "communist", "leftist" and "government controlled", they even use these descriptions now even though we currently have a right-wing coalition government.
What's important is that there is separation between government-funded media outlets and the government that funds them, not that governments shouldn't fund media outlets (SVT has a lot of advantages over privately funded television networks, such as how they can broadcast shows that only appeal to a fairly small subset of the population while the private networks prefer constantly going for the least common denominator).
/Mikael
That's why I normally don't have info installed, something which has been a very bad decision on those occasions where I've found myself on a Linux box unable to install packages (I'm normally more of a BSD guy).
/Mikael
Not to mention the GNU apps that have manpages that (at least on some Linux distros) basically say "Yeah, it's a piece of software, if you want more docs install the info package for it" which is completely unhelpful when you're on a system that barely boots and you can't install packages with the system in its current state.
/Mikael (who recently installed a Linux distro for the first time in a while, FreeBSD just didn't want to play with the netbook)
Honestly, it sounds to me like your problem wasn't unions in general but rather the teachers' union in the US.
/Mikael
Well, if he's that high up in the hierarchy then you can expect him to bill the clients at least a few hundred bucks per hour though, ever hear of a sysadmin successfully billing his employer that much for one of those "Joanne in accounting tried updating some stuff ten minutes ago and it didn't work, fix it now!" emergency fixes at 03:00?
/Mikael
As a swede (who is a union member) I'd like to give my opinion on this.
Suppress wages
Not really, they generally only demand guaranteed minimum raises (which are normally just a little over inflation) and minimum pay dependent on the field people work in. So they don't really suppress wages, they just make sure employers don't try to stick their employees with miserably low pay, and that employers are forced to give out raises that at least match inflation.
defend the inept
Most of the legal action I've seen from unions has been against employers who have insisted on 15 year-old 15" CRT monitors being ergonomically equivalent to new TFT monitors, that employees should come in to work ten minutes early without pay and similar silliness that affects "all" employees ("all" with quotation marks because obviously management has brand-spanking-new 24" TFT monitors because the old CRTs would somehow hamper their ability to work efficiently even though they're perfectly fine for everyone else) or individual cases where an employer wrongfully fired someone and the union offered legal assistance.
petty crap during "bargaining" years
Ah, but the employers are even worse in this regard, nothing like moving assets out of one daughter company with a lot of employees into another daughter company just so you can say the business division is doing poorly and can't afford respectable raises for the employees.
strong arming members
Never heard of this, sometimes individual union representatives can have some wonky demands on employers though, although the only times I've heard of this have involved employers who were notorious for always trying to "bend" labor laws so there was a clear power struggle between the employer and the union to begin with.
and take money away for political purposes.
There are definitely a few unions that do this, they're mostly the classic big "social democrat" unions like LO who have a historic connection to various political parties though.
I'm glad that I'm a union member, it has saved my ass a few times when employers have tried various bullshit.
/Mikael
But these days people don't use run-of-the-mill insults and actual technical data to argue the issue, they prefer to use insults like "shitkocks", "butfaget" and "cawksokker" and they'd rather accuse each other of having deviant sexualities than argue over unimportant technical details (who cares what technology is best suited for a task when it is obvious that all SSD users are mactalibanfaggets because you can buy macs with SSD drives?). (Yes, I miss the days when usenet was still alive and useable).
/Mikael
You've probably got an official title that shows up somewhere on your business card or a sign on your desk - something like Lead Web Developer or Senior Database Developer or whatever. That's nice and specific and says something about your role in the company. But it won't really mean much to people who don't know what it means to develop software... Or what makes database development unique... Or the kind of effort it takes to become a "lead" or "senior" developer... To them, you just work with computers. Which makes you an IT guy. My father is an optometrist [wikipedia.org]. At conventions and whatnot, various professional environments, he will refer to himself as such. When around friends and family, however, he just calls himself an "eye doctor" - since most people don't know or care about the differences between optometry and opthalmology [wikipedia.org].
This is my point, your father doesn't call himself a "health guy", he still refers to himself as an "eye doctor" which says 1) He's a doctor, not a nurse or an orderly and 2) He's specialized in eyes in some way.
It's the same way for most "IT guys" I know, it's not that they want to be called "senior database interface developer for Oracle cluster #4", they would just like people to at least acknowledge that they're developers and not "IT guys" much in the same way that most medical professionals I know would hate to be called "health guy/girl".
If anything it would help if we could get people to make that distinction because I'm tired of users strolling up to me asking if I can get them a new keyboard while I'm eating lunch (since the answer is "no" because it's not my job and I don't even know which pile of keyboards in the store room has broken keyboards in it and which one has new keyboards in it).
/Mikael
But at the end of the day you'll still say you went to the Dentist.
That's like saying "I went over to IT".
When I call an Electrician to fix something, I have no idea who they're sending out and who is doing the work in my house. It might be a fully licensed/qualified/insured Electrician... Or it might be one of their apprentices/trainees. I'll still refer to them as an Electrician. Same thing goes for Plumbers and Carpenters and whatever else...
Yeah, but there's still the implication that a tradesman fixed something and that he/she was either fully trained or an apprentice, the equivalent would be if all helpdesk guys occasionally got referred to as "software engineers" but no one really cared because 95% of them were training to become software engineers anyway.
They've got some people who are familiar with networking and data transmission who work on the ISP side of things... And they've got some very basic installers who just drill holes and run cables... But they're frequently referred to as just the "Cable Guy."
Ah yes, but most of those guys (at least the ones I've worked with) fulfill both roles, so even though some of them have additional skills the basic job is still "cable guy" (the actual title seemingly being different depending on employer). If you check the contract I've signed with my employer it clearly states that my job involves software development and some related system administration, they can't legally force me to do helpdesk stuff, and it's definitely not part of my everyday duties, yet to most people at the company I'm an "IT guy", just like the keyboard replacement guy.
My point is that with IT/computers/software it gets "dumbed down" to "IT guy" while with other professions it tends to run the other way, you don't call all medical professionals "health people" or "orderlies", in fact most people seem to prefer accidentally calling a nurse a doctor than the other way around (because they know it's insulting to a doctor to be called a nurse while most nurses probably won't be insulted if someone mistakes them for a doctor).
/Mikael
A cardiac surgeon doesn't know much otolaryngology; an EE doesn't know much about steam turbines; a personal injury lawyer isn't going to be much help with your corporate takeover.
Comparisons:
Now, don't you think those on the right side of the above descriptions would frown own being referred to as health/electric stuff/law guy if the terms had the meanings I gave them above? And for "IT guy" that's exactly how the term is commonly used, the guy who gives you a new keyboard when you spill coffee on it gets referred to as an "IT guy" and so do your senior developers and sysadmins, guess why they're grumpy about it...
/Mikael
While it is true that Slashdot is US-centric a fairly large chunk of the users are not americans and it would make sense to at least provide a summary that gave just a little info as to what the story was about, because outside the US "Video Professor" seems to be completely unheard of.
/Mikael