1) I hope you don't get modded down. UYou bring up some interesting points.
Bill Gates has been a vicious, tenacious, dangerous, and violent pit bull for his entire career. When people were building a software community of openness and sharing, he came along to poison the well by actually charging MONEY for his pet project--DOS. Without Bill Gates, where would we be? Not paying $700 for a bloody office productivity suite, that's for sure; but possibly without that suite existing at all. Without the dirt, money-grubbing, and sliminess that MS stands for, we probably wouldn't be nearly as far along on the development curve. Stuff like this house are an excellent example of pushing the envelope, for the sake of finding out what directions to take research next.
Kind of embodies the US capitalist idea in many ways, both the good and the bad.
Microsoft has been building a 'home of the future' about once a year for a while. This is their forth, I believe.
Always interesting, always, controversial, and always full of a bunch of half-baked ideas. No problem--that's what showcases are for!
I'm about the last person on the planet to defend MS, but the idea of creating a 'what if' house once every year or so is brilliant. The answer to some of those "if" questions is often bad ('if we did this, it would SUCK!!!!') but asking them as an exercise is exactly, precisely how we move the state of the art forward.
This is the biggest pile of pseudoscience, misread anecdotal CRAP I have ever read on slashdot! To be so blatantly silly it MUST be a troll, but still...there's something genuine and honest about it. If it's a troll, I confess myself taken in.
Assuming you're serious, and also assuming that there is a corrolary between the cotton gloves and the lack of pain, then I can think of at least three explanations which are FAR more plausible than a 'plastic reaction.' In fact, I could probably spend all day thinking up reasons for the change, and not come close to anything as silly as a reaction to plastic on your fingertips causing pain in your wrists.
Just keep your self-diagnosis to yourself please, and don't let anyone else be misled.
But seriously, many musicians do suffer badly. My brother, a professional drummer and drum teacher, wears splints for long gigs. Look at the number of professional guitarists out there whose styles have changed because they can't hold up a Les Paul Standard anymore.
As in using the MS stuff that doesn't conform to the HTML standard? Then you're not really using HTML at all--just a MS markup language that looks somewhat like HTML, and displays in their web browser.
I still say that creating formatted text in HTML (or this extended pseudo-HTML) is a ***BAD*** idea, even in the context of wanting reveal codes.
This is why junk faxes are illegal in Canada (don't know about the US). Also it's the basis for how/why email spam could be taken to court, if someone was so incined.
HTML has its place, and that place is web pages. Writing formatted text documents in HTML is slightly less painful than banging your head against a stucco wall.
Oh, wait a minute--I meant to say MORE painful. Sorry about that.
HTML should not be used for fixed text formatting.
In the situation described, the best you can hope for is that you are out of the loop on unimportant matters. If it's important, and you keep refusing to read a document in a company standard format, someone is eventually going to go to your boss and say, "hey, tell Jack to read his F'ing email! I'm sick of his crap, and I'm not wasting my time converting for mr. Open Standards."
The problem here is that your behavior directly hurts office productivity in the short term. Do this and you'll get canned. (or if you have a more tolerant office, maybe just caned:-)
However, most of the crap and exploitation pulled by the managers is illegal. Working extra hours with no pay? In most of the first and second worlds, that's strictly illegal, unless covered by a specific employment contract provision. (and even then, it's often not considered an allowable clause)
Most unions I see today exist for two purposes: The well being of the union (first and foremost), and the exploitation of the company for the increased benefit of the workers. Both of these are bad.
The first is pretty obvious. People repeatedly ask me why the second is bad though, and you've hit one of the two nails squarely on the head.
1) The union should exist for the well being of the employee and the company both. 2) The union should ensure that the employee gets treated fairly--not better every year than the one before.
This second point is a bit awkwardly written, but I can't think of a better way to word it. When I hear about unions bargaining tools, they invariably want:
- better BASE pay (above and beyond cost of living and merit increases) - better benefits (with no regard to the current benefits package) - absolute job security (creating a disconnect between performance and security)
Now I will be the first to jump up and down about fair pay, good benefits, and just job security; but unions seem to be pushing hard to make sure that every year increases their well-being at the expense of the company. Furthermore, they do it by invoking/enforcing the dual image of management as utterly evil capitalists, and non-union workers as helpless opressed slaves. This is just crap.
Good, working unions aren't a bad thing at all, but they're needed rarely these days, and are almost entirely non-existent.
The parent poster didn't mention anything about strikes, walkouts, or unions. You took this as a reason to push the standard 'unions now, because management is inherently evil' shtick, which helps nobody, and weakens your position.
Working extra hours for free is your choice, ultimately. Admittedly you may be HEAVILY pressured into it (I once had a manager that said he'd fire anyone who worked less than 50 hours/week), but you can decide whether or not to succumb. You have some other options. Consider any or all of the following:
1) Go home at 5:00 (or whatever) every night. When your manager complains, 2) Work late and submit your overtime hours to HR. The larger the company, the more effective this is. 3) Report the company anonymously to the local labour relations board. 4) Be prepared to take the company to court.
But before doing any of these, make sure you have somewhere to land. In a market like this, the squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease, it usually gets the axe!
Hmm. Mostly I agree. Depends on the particular segment of the IT market, though.
We have a department that's considering the same thing, and in our case the department used to be an entire company. If we walked together, we'd walk across the street to the company that would be our major (only?) competitor if they had the people to do so (i.e. us).
In other words, my team could walk en masse, and be hired en masse which makes it more viable. In fact, quitting in a group increases the odds of employment, since there may well be a company out there thinking of expanding into a new area--yours. If the staff present themselves, they might start it up.
Of course as I said, it depends on what part of IT you work in. I'm in a segment that's actually growing right now, which puts me in a tiny minority.
I don't know what the status of OpenOffice is right now, but for those looking at StarOffice, I say wait!
6.1 is in its second beta refresh, which from Sun generally means that the next release will be final.
6.1 has two features that make it VASTLY better than 6.0: antialiased fonts (no more disappearing text in a window!!!) and substantial speed/performance gains. There are, of course tons of other features--much better MS office support, export to PDF, etc. etc.
6.0 has been my office package for the last year or so, out of necessity. 6.1 will be my package out of choice.
Oh man, the days of typing in programs from Compute! and Softside. (and to a lesser extent, Byte)
I lived through the same thing with a borrowed Pet, and then our shiny, fancy, colourful Atari 400. I learned to type, I learned to program, and I learned to read code--all from the magazines. I've often lamented the lack of that sort of environment these days, but it really is impossible to build it with the internet providing the code as it does.
What we need is some way of creating a similarly productive learning environment. Perhaps a real-time interpreter for the languages would help. (i.e. type a command, 'press enter,' and watch it work or not)
Any other ideas? Command line languages (C, perl, etc.) probably aren't the place to start either. TCL/Tk strikes me as being ideal, in that it is cross-platform, easy to learn, structured, and graphical in nature.
I just like that word. Suckage. It's so nice and effective.
ANYHOO...I remember V the first time around, and after two episodes, thought it sucked. I've seen it on reruns, and...it still sucks. Having run out of good shows to copy and sequelise, are we doomed to a TV life of rehashing unsuccessful shows now?
So what happens when, for instance, your shopping list is computerised and will give you an exact price for 'n' items, just by pointing your control at the item?
Multiplication and division are already becoming less relevant--trip computers in our car free us from needing to convert from speed and distance to time. In the grocery stores here, everything that comes in a pack of '6 for $5.31' or whatever also has the unit price on the sticker, making comparison shopping easier.
I'm afraid that we're getting too quick to toss away basic skills as being obsolete, and I actually _can_ see a day when basic math falls into that category as well.
Restrictive, I'll agree with. That's part of form. Ugly, however, is the very last thing I would think of when talking about good handwriting. (not my own, I hasten to add)
"Not that I don't think it is important to get the basic concepts in grade school"
Hmm. Exactly how do we define what qualifies as a basic concept?
When I was in school (yeah, I'm an old bastard), handwriting was an essential skill. Didn't get past grade four with it. Same with multiplication. Long division, I believe, came in grade 5.
Now I can still do a square root by hand, but with calculators, it's no longer an essential skill. Realistically, why is knowledge of basic multiplication essential? Or handwriting, for that matter?
Cursive writing is an art. It is a symbol of humans elevating themselves beyond the mundane and utilitarian to accomplish something of note (pun intended).
The 'efficiency' argument is irrelevant. Cursive writing is one of the higher skills, like poetry and playing an instrument that define our species as more than bloodthirsty animals.
"I feel that this is a sales tactic and that there really is no compelling reason for us to ever use the 'enterprise' version. After all, it is Linux and it is open source, and we have enough in-house talent to not need Red Hat support. Why would we ever need or care about a five-year product lifetime? Am I wrong, and if so, could you set us straight?"
Well I'll try to set you straight without being patronising or snide about it.
In an enterprise environment, a business is run on stability and predictability. Red Hat is free, which is fine, but how much money will your company pay to make sure that someone is there to take responsibility for but fixes over the next five years? I'll give you a hint--if you're a private, profit-making company and YOU are expected to fix the OS after a year, then get out now--you'll be living in hell for another year until your company goes under.
As cliche'd as it is, companies buy solutions. I don't want to buy Red Hat v8 or 9 or SUSE whatever, or slackware or Windows XP or Solaris--I want to buy a system that does the job I give to it, and I want a vendor to back it for at least half a decade.
If you're a professional company, don't even consider trying to 'do it yourself' with hobbiest level software. Get a conservative, supported package; and work with the vendor as much as possible. Don't waste time and money trying to go it alone.
The problem with most Mars programs is that the code seems to be developed like code everywhere else. Budgets overruns, working late to meet deadlines, and generally living the 'coder life.' This is NOT now critical software needs to be developed, and in fact isn't how most software should be developed.
To those proposing the 'more eyes open source' model, consider this: There's nothing in that model that GUARANTEES formal and complete code review. Something more rigorous is needed for projects like this.
No offense, but do you know how far $12k will get you in a case like this? Nowhere! With a completely and utterly frivolous suit, an organisation the size of the RIAA can drag it out for a year or more, and force the guy to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending himself.
And if the court rules in favour of him, they MAY decide that the RIAA has to reimburse his court costs, but that's not until he's already paid all of that money.
$12000 is chicken feed in corporate lawsuits. Settling is the only thing he could have done.
Slashdot Mirror
1) I hope you don't get modded down. UYou bring up some interesting points.
Bill Gates has been a vicious, tenacious, dangerous, and violent pit bull for his entire career. When people were building a software community of openness and sharing, he came along to poison the well by actually charging MONEY for his pet project--DOS. Without Bill Gates, where would we be? Not paying $700 for a bloody office productivity suite, that's for sure; but possibly without that suite existing at all. Without the dirt, money-grubbing, and sliminess that MS stands for, we probably wouldn't be nearly as far along on the development curve. Stuff like this house are an excellent example of pushing the envelope, for the sake of finding out what directions to take research next.
Kind of embodies the US capitalist idea in many ways, both the good and the bad.
Microsoft has been building a 'home of the future' about once a year for a while. This is their forth, I believe.
Always interesting, always, controversial, and always full of a bunch of half-baked ideas. No problem--that's what showcases are for!
I'm about the last person on the planet to defend MS, but the idea of creating a 'what if' house once every year or so is brilliant. The answer to some of those "if" questions is often bad ('if we did this, it would SUCK!!!!') but asking them as an exercise is exactly, precisely how we move the state of the art forward.
http://store.repriserec.com/store/product.asp?upc= 075992608121&type=music&mscssid=DGC6GHNDCLUC8N5QTD 13NF3K372A4MDF
This is the biggest pile of pseudoscience, misread anecdotal CRAP I have ever read on slashdot! To be so blatantly silly it MUST be a troll, but still...there's something genuine and honest about it. If it's a troll, I confess myself taken in.
Assuming you're serious, and also assuming that there is a corrolary between the cotton gloves and the lack of pain, then I can think of at least three explanations which are FAR more plausible than a 'plastic reaction.' In fact, I could probably spend all day thinking up reasons for the change, and not come close to anything as silly as a reaction to plastic on your fingertips causing pain in your wrists.
Just keep your self-diagnosis to yourself please, and don't let anyone else be misled.
I'd like to see a guitarist's nipple. :-)
But seriously, many musicians do suffer badly. My brother, a professional drummer and drum teacher, wears splints for long gigs. Look at the number of professional guitarists out there whose styles have changed because they can't hold up a Les Paul Standard anymore.
Extended HTML???!!!
As in using the MS stuff that doesn't conform to the HTML standard? Then you're not really using HTML at all--just a MS markup language that looks somewhat like HTML, and displays in their web browser.
I still say that creating formatted text in HTML (or this extended pseudo-HTML) is a ***BAD*** idea, even in the context of wanting reveal codes.
Yep.
This is why junk faxes are illegal in Canada (don't know about the US). Also it's the basis for how/why email spam could be taken to court, if someone was so incined.
Yuck!
HTML has its place, and that place is web pages. Writing formatted text documents in HTML is slightly less painful than banging your head against a stucco wall.
Oh, wait a minute--I meant to say MORE painful. Sorry about that.
HTML should not be used for fixed text formatting.
Bah!
:-)
In the situation described, the best you can hope for is that you are out of the loop on unimportant matters. If it's important, and you keep refusing to read a document in a company standard format, someone is eventually going to go to your boss and say, "hey, tell Jack to read his F'ing email! I'm sick of his crap, and I'm not wasting my time converting for mr. Open Standards."
The problem here is that your behavior directly hurts office productivity in the short term. Do this and you'll get canned. (or if you have a more tolerant office, maybe just caned
Heh.
Unlike some of the rabid pro-union activists posting here, you make some very good points.
However, most of the crap and exploitation pulled by the managers is illegal. Working extra hours with no pay? In most of the first and second worlds, that's strictly illegal, unless covered by a specific employment contract provision. (and even then, it's often not considered an allowable clause)
Most unions I see today exist for two purposes: The well being of the union (first and foremost), and the exploitation of the company for the increased benefit of the workers. Both of these are bad.
The first is pretty obvious. People repeatedly ask me why the second is bad though, and you've hit one of the two nails squarely on the head.
1) The union should exist for the well being of the employee and the company both.
2) The union should ensure that the employee gets treated fairly--not better every year than the one before.
This second point is a bit awkwardly written, but I can't think of a better way to word it. When I hear about unions bargaining tools, they invariably want:
- better BASE pay (above and beyond cost of living and merit increases)
- better benefits (with no regard to the current benefits package)
- absolute job security (creating a disconnect between performance and security)
Now I will be the first to jump up and down about fair pay, good benefits, and just job security; but unions seem to be pushing hard to make sure that every year increases their well-being at the expense of the company. Furthermore, they do it by invoking/enforcing the dual image of management as utterly evil capitalists, and non-union workers as helpless opressed slaves. This is just crap.
Good, working unions aren't a bad thing at all, but they're needed rarely these days, and are almost entirely non-existent.
And your point is???
The parent poster didn't mention anything about strikes, walkouts, or unions. You took this as a reason to push the standard 'unions now, because management is inherently evil' shtick, which helps nobody, and weakens your position.
Working extra hours for free is your choice, ultimately. Admittedly you may be HEAVILY pressured into it (I once had a manager that said he'd fire anyone who worked less than 50 hours/week), but you can decide whether or not to succumb. You have some other options. Consider any or all of the following:
1) Go home at 5:00 (or whatever) every night. When your manager complains,
2) Work late and submit your overtime hours to HR. The larger the company, the more effective this is.
3) Report the company anonymously to the local labour relations board.
4) Be prepared to take the company to court.
But before doing any of these, make sure you have somewhere to land. In a market like this, the squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease, it usually gets the axe!
Hmm. Mostly I agree. Depends on the particular segment of the IT market, though.
We have a department that's considering the same thing, and in our case the department used to be an entire company. If we walked together, we'd walk across the street to the company that would be our major (only?) competitor if they had the people to do so (i.e. us).
In other words, my team could walk en masse, and be hired en masse which makes it more viable. In fact, quitting in a group increases the odds of employment, since there may well be a company out there thinking of expanding into a new area--yours. If the staff present themselves, they might start it up.
Of course as I said, it depends on what part of IT you work in. I'm in a segment that's actually growing right now, which puts me in a tiny minority.
I don't know what the status of OpenOffice is right now, but for those looking at StarOffice, I say wait!
6.1 is in its second beta refresh, which from Sun generally means that the next release will be final.
6.1 has two features that make it VASTLY better than 6.0: antialiased fonts (no more disappearing text in a window!!!) and substantial speed/performance gains. There are, of course tons of other features--much better MS office support, export to PDF, etc. etc.
6.0 has been my office package for the last year or so, out of necessity. 6.1 will be my package out of choice.
Oh man, the days of typing in programs from Compute! and Softside. (and to a lesser extent, Byte)
I lived through the same thing with a borrowed Pet, and then our shiny, fancy, colourful Atari 400. I learned to type, I learned to program, and I learned to read code--all from the magazines. I've often lamented the lack of that sort of environment these days, but it really is impossible to build it with the internet providing the code as it does.
What we need is some way of creating a similarly productive learning environment. Perhaps a real-time interpreter for the languages would help. (i.e. type a command, 'press enter,' and watch it work or not)
Any other ideas? Command line languages (C, perl, etc.) probably aren't the place to start either. TCL/Tk strikes me as being ideal, in that it is cross-platform, easy to learn, structured, and graphical in nature.
I just like that word. Suckage. It's so nice and effective.
ANYHOO...I remember V the first time around, and after two episodes, thought it sucked. I've seen it on reruns, and...it still sucks. Having run out of good shows to copy and sequelise, are we doomed to a TV life of rehashing unsuccessful shows now?
"One could argue that this show was made in an era that didn't have the same political sensitivities that we have today."
One could...if one wasn't there.
The world hasn't changed that much, really. We're just getting more (not necessarily better--just more) news about it.
So what happens when, for instance, your shopping list is computerised and will give you an exact price for 'n' items, just by pointing your control at the item?
Multiplication and division are already becoming less relevant--trip computers in our car free us from needing to convert from speed and distance to time. In the grocery stores here, everything that comes in a pack of '6 for $5.31' or whatever also has the unit price on the sticker, making comparison shopping easier.
I'm afraid that we're getting too quick to toss away basic skills as being obsolete, and I actually _can_ see a day when basic math falls into that category as well.
Ugly? Cursive scripts are ugly??!!!
Restrictive, I'll agree with. That's part of form. Ugly, however, is the very last thing I would think of when talking about good handwriting. (not my own, I hasten to add)
"Not that I don't think it is important to get the basic concepts in grade school"
Hmm. Exactly how do we define what qualifies as a basic concept?
When I was in school (yeah, I'm an old bastard), handwriting was an essential skill. Didn't get past grade four with it. Same with multiplication. Long division, I believe, came in grade 5.
Now I can still do a square root by hand, but with calculators, it's no longer an essential skill. Realistically, why is knowledge of basic multiplication essential? Or handwriting, for that matter?
One word: Art.
Cursive writing is an art. It is a symbol of humans elevating themselves beyond the mundane and utilitarian to accomplish something of note (pun intended).
The 'efficiency' argument is irrelevant. Cursive writing is one of the higher skills, like poetry and playing an instrument that define our species as more than bloodthirsty animals.
"I feel that this is a sales tactic and that there really is no compelling reason for us to ever use the 'enterprise' version. After all, it is Linux and it is open source, and we have enough in-house talent to not need Red Hat support. Why would we ever need or care about a five-year product lifetime? Am I wrong, and if so, could you set us straight?"
Well I'll try to set you straight without being patronising or snide about it.
In an enterprise environment, a business is run on stability and predictability. Red Hat is free, which is fine, but how much money will your company pay to make sure that someone is there to take responsibility for but fixes over the next five years? I'll give you a hint--if you're a private, profit-making company and YOU are expected to fix the OS after a year, then get out now--you'll be living in hell for another year until your company goes under.
As cliche'd as it is, companies buy solutions. I don't want to buy Red Hat v8 or 9 or SUSE whatever, or slackware or Windows XP or Solaris--I want to buy a system that does the job I give to it, and I want a vendor to back it for at least half a decade.
If you're a professional company, don't even consider trying to 'do it yourself' with hobbiest level software. Get a conservative, supported package; and work with the vendor as much as possible. Don't waste time and money trying to go it alone.
The colours, the horrible colours!
Blue links and black test on a dark grey background. What was this guy thinking?
NASA writes better software than perhaps anyone else on the planet. It's what runs the shuttle. Go read about how REAL software projects are undertaken.
The problem with most Mars programs is that the code seems to be developed like code everywhere else. Budgets overruns, working late to meet deadlines, and generally living the 'coder life.' This is NOT now critical software needs to be developed, and in fact isn't how most software should be developed.
To those proposing the 'more eyes open source' model, consider this: There's nothing in that model that GUARANTEES formal and complete code review. Something more rigorous is needed for projects like this.
No offense, but do you know how far $12k will get you in a case like this? Nowhere! With a completely and utterly frivolous suit, an organisation the size of the RIAA can drag it out for a year or more, and force the guy to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending himself.
And if the court rules in favour of him, they MAY decide that the RIAA has to reimburse his court costs, but that's not until he's already paid all of that money.
$12000 is chicken feed in corporate lawsuits. Settling is the only thing he could have done.