If I understand the objections, people feel they have the right to watch commercially produced material and ignore the advertising that funds the production of the material.
Where did this bit of insanity come from? Since when does the tedious serious of corporate-masturbatory advertisements for (for example) Disney movies that shows at the beginning of a legally-purchased tape or DVD of another Disney movie "fund the production of the material"?
It looked to me as though such a situation might very well be covered in the mass of bad "copyright protection" laws being discussed here.
Besides...what if I find the advertisements in question genuinely "objectionable"? Advertisers are not widely known for being tasteful in the US (or anywhere else for that matter).
Turn this around - I have legally paid for a television. I have kept up with the payments of my taxes to fund the FCC. A broadcaster spews radio-frequency signals through my home which my legally-purchased receivers can pick up. Are you saying that the broadcaster's ability to spew signals through my home gives them the right to compel me to watch particular portions of those signals? The fact that they don't mean ANY particular portions, but "only the advertisements" is even WORSE - the broadcaster generally does NOT own the copyrights on the advertisements, so this mandate not only means that the broadcaster can compel me to be a captive audience, but in particular that I can be compelled to be a captive audience for ANY agency. Can I be similarly compelled to go outside and listen to, say, a politician's re-election speech on the street outside if I happen to get any benefits from the government agency that the politician runs?
I find this line of argument an insidious and disturbing perversion of the free speech doctrines and practices that have, in my opinion, been one of the keys to making the US "great" (in both senses of the word). It saddens me to know that the US may lose all of this.
[...]first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.
Or, in the immortal words of the Great Philosopher, Calvin, discussing the nature and relative merits of money, power, and fame: "If you have enough money, you can buy power and fame."
I compiled up and played with a "MUSH" server once - I thought having a multi-player text adventure engine that you could program on-the-fly was nifty...
It was interesting to notice that I frequently found myself typing "ls" instead of "look" when I wanted to see the contents of a "room" that I was in. I hadn't previously realized the similarities between the CLI and a text adventure...
Where do I submit a patch to change all of the instances of "(filename): file not found" to "I see no (filename) here" in the standard command-line tools?
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase Think Tanks[...]
Suddenly I am struck by the realization that you can still consider these new entities "Think Tanks", but now the word "Tanks" is used in the military sense of the term (an offensive weapon, heavily armed with lawyers and armored with cash...), rather than in its original sense of "a container full of something*"
* - Well, it WOULD still be full of something, it's just that the something in question wouldn't be "thoughts" any more...
Hooray, yet another hardware platform that Linux will run on but Microsoft(r) Windows won't...
Does Microsoft's refusal to support the Itanium bother Intel at all? If so, will they perhaps "retaliate" by focussing a bit more on Linux support? Maybe even helping GCC develop good Itanium code optimization routines (I know Intel has a proprietary compiler, but the segment of the market that might buy Itanium hardware to run Linux AND be perfectly content only licensing Intel's proprietary compiler rather than being able to use GCC has got to be ridiculously small...)?
After dropping the ball so badly, initially, on the "Centrino" chipset support for Linux, it would be nice to see Intel have more reasons to more openly support Linux development. It sounds like Linux is really the only chance they have of finding future uses for the Itanium (other than perhaps ceasing production and using the existing stock to set up a "museum of market failures"...)
The answer to the first question, taken literally, is "yes, obviously". Presuming you really mean "anyone" as a casual way of saying for "a very large portion of the general market" then the answer right now is "no". But...
Does *nix really think it a chance in the desktop sector considering how entrenched Windows is?
This is a different question altogether, and the answer is "yes".
See, most people really DON'T care what OS brand name they use so much as they care about being able to play well with others - whether the "others" are other computer environments that the user is already familiar with, or other people playing the user's favorite game, or websites on the internet and email clients on their friend's computer, or being able to look at the slideshows that someone else produced and uploaded, or whatever...
Most people also don't want to blow wads of money on licensing if they don't have to.
The "typical" computer user these days seems to be interested almost entirely in email, web browsing, and "Mahjong" games. These basic functions are already well supported in *nix environments and ready to be sold as "appliances" running *nix to anyone who is satisfied with those basic requirements. Related to email and web, though, people also want to be able to watch all those little internet videos that their friends email to them, which are often in proprietary formats. Now, MPlayer already supports all of the major formats pretty well, and plugins are available to use it to play internet videos in Microsoft(r)'s formats, Apple(r) Quicktime(tm), and so forth, not to mention the existence of the Helix media player as well. So, that's possible to take care of.
The slideshows (I refuse to call it a "presentation" when there is nobody actually presenting...), word-processor documents, and spreadsheets can all be handled pretty well by OpenOffice. There are still a few formatting differences that come up sometimes when loading a file produced by a Microsoft(r) program, but I'd call it "good enough for typical home use". Plus, the ability to generate.pdf's natively built in means if someone is USING OpenOffice they can generate documents that look correct on everyone's computers. So, for ordinary home users, this is also at a "good enough" stage.
That's not all of the market, or I think even a majority, but it's a pretty big chunk. What's really missing, as the Slashdot discussion boards echo loudly with every time this subject comes up, is video games. Right now, most are written exclusively for the purpose of being installed on a Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) general-purpose operating system, and this does create a genuine speedbump in the path of *nix desktop marketshare.
However, the concept of having a dedicated "boot disk" for running a video game has been around for a very long time. Tech support people tend to love them, because when used, the video game in question ends up running on a known, well-characterized environment without other processes interfering. Because providing tech support costs money, software company tend to love anything that reduces the need for tech support.
Since it seems like most people who are playing anything more intensive than "Mahjong" or "Solitaire" usually play full-screen and dedicating all of their attention to the game (and generally want as little running in the background reducing their framerates as possible), the possibility of distributing videogames on self-contained boot CD's is very real. The boot disk might be a no-license-fee-paid-by-the-software-company Linux disk, as they've talked about doing (have already done?) with America's Army. I think the only technical capability lacking to make this really feasible is full write support for NTFS (since
...in the form of a flash animation may be found on newgrounds.com here...
Obviously in the real world, practical matters soften the idealistic
concepts in the animation, but it gives you a good idea of the direction
that Libertarian political philosophy takes.
[...]most libertarian and green voters lean closer to the dems.
Greens, yes. Libertarians, no. Libertarians until recently always seemed to lean mildly "Republican" (if you must compare them with "The Two Parties"). Being for less government influence, political authority being devolved down towards State (and smaller) levels from the Federal level, non-interference in free commerce, and so on.
The only reason they may seem more Democrat this time around is that Bush, quite frankly, seems to be pushing the aspects of Republicanism that Libertarians disagree with (speech-restricting "Campaign Finance Reform", "Foreign Entanglements", attempts to amend the constitution for things like allowing congress to criminalize "desecration of the flag" and "banning gay marriage", restricting civil liberties (e.g. the "PATRIOT" act) in the name of "security" and "patriotism"...) while slacking badly on most of the issues Libertarians tend to agree with (reducing the size and power of the Federal government, fiscally responsible government policies, etc.).
Typically, on social freedoms, Libertarians lean slightly "Democrat" - except that Democrats are more likely to want to use government force to "require" social freedoms (i.e. through legislation -as an example, perhaps a hypothetical federal law requiring all states to recognize any other state's legal marriage contracts, including "gay" ones if the state where it was issued allows it), where Libertarians tend to prefer non-coercive approaches (i.e. it's none of the Federal government's business at all WHAT kind of social arrangement adults give informed consent to enter into...). . Any power not explicitly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution belongs to the states or the people...
Or at least that's my (simplistically-stated) understanding of the political philosophy, anyway.
They're not paying for it yet - they're "raising funds" to pay the large fee for it.
Personally - I can only think that we've got two political parties still "unencumbered" by incumbent political games and still able to actually act out of principle (egad, that's a FAR less cynical statement than usually comes from me on political matters...). It's all I can figure - there's obviously no chance that the recount will show the Greens or Libertarians winning the election, and in fact I honestly suspect the vote recount won't change the final result, but I do think it's important to get an accurate accounting of the votes. In so doing, we'll also get a good picture of how innacurate the initial count was. If it's way off, even assuming the recount still shows Bush winning, we'll have proof that there is something wrong with the voting procedures, and probably some idea of WHAT is wrong. And then, next time around, there's a chance there'll be fewer problems...
Besides, bear in mind that while the Democrats can't reasonably make this demand or formally donate money to the effort without being accused of being big babies and spreading political FUD about the vote in Ohio...but INDIVIDUAL Democrats ought to be able to easily donate to the cause. Maybe somebody should call that rich Soros guy.
And, yes, I DID vote for Michael Badnarik in this election...
Anybody know what IP address ranges msnbot is using? Might be possible to limit the rate of connection from those addresses using firewall rules (or, for that matter, forbid connection entirely if that's your preference) to avoid the "hammering" that msnbot is said to be doing...
Mainly, I'd require the Presidential Debate corporation to include all candidates who are on the ballots in enough states to conceivably win (and make sure fair rules are in place to allow any semi-reasonable candidate who enough people would like to see on the ballot can do so). The biggest problem I see is the collusion between "The Two Parties(tm)" that keeps other voices out of the debate and other views away from the voting public.
I'd also like to see the voting public stop and think long enough to lose the stupid "throwing away your vote" attitude towards voting for anyone-but-the-established-political-corporations (Disneycrat/Rupertican). Personally, I see my vote for a less-famous party as making far more of a difference than another drop-in-the-ocean vote for "the same guy everyone else in the area is voting for".
And anyone who votes for someone just because they expect that someone to win should be beaten on public TV - yes, even if they voted for a candidate I like. People with the attitude that the presidential election is a "sporting event" and just wants to be "on the winning team" regardless of who that team is poisons the voting pool (and, yes, I have heard of people doing this in the last several elections...).
if it comes down to the popular vote across the nation, that means no one location is so critically important.
That's not strictly true - it means "densely-populated cities" become the "critically important" locations. A pure "popular vote" based mechanism means a proportionally sharp under-representation of non-urban areas.
Do you WANT the nation's garbage being dumped next to all the farm fields, just because the farmers are outvoted by "city folk" who just want to get rid of their garbage? Do you WANT all the water shipped to supply e.g. Los Angeles instead of growing food? There's a reason people have been proposing other, more complex replacements for the electoral college than a simple popular vote...
Not to say that I'm in favor of the current system, either - the "Electoral College" is rigged to require "major party" votes only get counted.
IT jobs are constantly being de-skilled. If you want to stay in the industry, you need to keep acquiring new skills.
I think this fact complements the one that a lot of people have been remarking on - the fact that a lot of people who had "IT" jobs during the market boom really shouldn't have, due to lack of real ability.
I think a lot of those people have the attitude of "I paid all that money for these degrees and certifications. Now that I have gotten these degrees and certifications, I'm done, right?".
Just like a degree or certification in science, medicine, or even law, if you don't KEEP educating yourself constantly, you don't really know what's going on, and IT is a field that moves very quickly.
Some words of advice to people being lured in by those DeVry, etc. ads: Don't even consider IT unless you already find you enjoy continually studying, learning, and experimenting with IT concepts and implementations, because if you expect to actually be any good at it, you'll have to do so constantly.
I'm cynical enough to think that kids old enough to go to college ought to be smart enough to know better than to major in obsolete or oversaturated fields...
[...] I know for a fact people attempt to abuse returns by "renting" equipment as well as attempting to return the wrong item inside original packaging.[...]
Agreed. Besides, THOSE people can just go to "Fry's Electronics" instead. Everyone wins.
(Yes, that was a joke. Well, mostly. Fry's IS well-known for their "just throw the returned box back on the shelf for the next sucker" approach to returns...)
I'm pretty new to the whole concept, but it looks like for a whopping $99.95, you can get One of these to build yourself a home software PBX on a POTS line. My ignorant assumption, though, is that it just acts as a phone-call router for your existing phone numbers in this case, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyone can tell us if VNC is appropriate to do end-user support and taking over control of his/her graphical desktop while enabling him/her to watch what you are doing remotely?
From my perspective, that's exactly what VNC is most appropriate for. The "enabling the user to watch" isn't always important, but it does come in handy regularly. It's also possible to run a "view only" VNC session, for when you want to show a bunch of people how to do something by remote. (And other posters have mentioned programs which can be used to record VNC sessions for playback later.)
VNC's other major benefit is its cross-platform availability - any combination of Microsoft(r) Windows, commercial Unix, non-proprietary Unix (*BSD), Linux, MacOSX, and I would have sworn some of the PDA OS's can all connect to each other with it. It beats paying a fortune for permission to use the Webex services for it. (Webex is actually a fairly nice package, but permission to use it is somewhat expensive, geared mainly towards mid-to-large corporate environments for teleconferencing...)
The one downside VNC has is that it seems to be a little slower than some of the more restricted-availability methods (much as I hate most of MS's software design, they DID seem to do a good job getting RDP working efficiently, for example).
As other posters have pointed out, for Microsoft(r) Windows(tm), the Remote Desktop protocol actually performs surprisingly well. While I personally despise Microsoft's business methods and nearly all of their software design, I have to admit that this is one of the things they seem to have implemented well.
That said, I've been wondering - is it possible to run a "remote assistance" session with rdesktop (that is, connecting to a Windows(tm) machine from a non-Windows machine)? And are there any RDP servers for X11 in development (or should that be an X11 'client'? That always throws me off in X11...)
Oh, but as a followup, I should point out that while IT can be a pretty crappy job, no, I don't think it would be anywhere near #3 on a "real" list of "the world's crappiest jobs". Worse than average, most likely, but there ARE plenty of worse things to do.
"Commission-only sales work" wasn't in the original list of "you should try these, and then you'll like IT" jobs in the original post, which is what I was addressing. You're right though - that WOULD be a worse job than most of IT. It will probably remain a worse job than most of IT unless the "Run the IT department like a business" concept catches on and is taken to the same sort of extreme that other management fads can be, in which case IT work may BECOME commission-only sales (based on "billable" hours).
"Telemarketing" is another one - just as much abuse and hatred from the people you talk to on the phone, but even less pay and respect than IT folks get.
Nonetheless, IT isn't usually a "free money for goofing off" field to work in, despite the somewhat baffling purple-faced hatred that comes out in some people whenever someone tries to point out that IT work isn't typically easy or relaxing. "YES IT IS, YOU LAZY SLACKER, BECAUSE SOMEONE SOMEWHERE HAS TO DEAL WITH SOMETHING WORSE FOR LESS PAY!"....
have the opportunity to use your brain at least once in a while
While I tend to agree with the basic sentiment here (ambition for personal growth=GOOD, slack-jawed laziness=BAD), this part isn't as clear-cut as it might seem.
I know that the boring rote labor jobs I've had left me with a LOT more ability to use my brain at the time than IT work where any time you try to pause to use your brain for something you're interrupted with inane complaints, "emergencies" that are either artificial or the result of ignoring sound advice, or outright personal abuse...
I can't bring myself to equate "remembering that rote labor jobs were a lot less stressful" with "not having any ambition". Especially given that the reason for the wistful thoughts of less stressful work seems to be a very high-demand, high-responsibility job which you can only get to with high ambition, which the original poster is describing being in...
Remember - "I wish I didn't have so much work to do." is NOT the same as "I wish I was a homeless bum so I wouldn't have to worry about mopping my kitchen floor"...
If you've never shovelled dirt, cleaned a toilet, flipped burgers or moved boxes
I don't know about IT Management, specifically, but each of those would make good metaphors for most of IT work...
At least in those more normal jobs, you don't normally get:
Upper management interrupting you regularly to complain that the dirt you're shoveling isn't the preferred brand of dirt [and it then turns out the that "preferred brand" is "used kitty-litter" because someone read about how wonderful "used kitty-litter" is in some magazine]
A bathroom patron showing up and pitching a fit because you cleaned a spot that they wanted left in there.
Someone complaining that you're making the burgers too hot, until upper management makes you cook at a lower temperature, at which point the complaining switches to "this is taking too long, hurry up", so upper management makes you take less time to cook it but still at the lower temperature, and then the complaint is "hey, how did I get this foodborne virus, don't you people cook this stuff enough?...", nor put up with snide comments from Certified Burger Technicians about chicken being a "niche player" or being derided as a "zealot"...
After moving the boxes, having to tape them together in various ways, and then having people complain about all the tape being visible, so you end up having to tie up the tape between the boxes into bundles and arrange them neatly, at which point someone decides they liked the boxes over THERE better after all, so you have to cut all the tape loose and start over...
Not to mention not having to keep up with 3 or 4 different dirt-shovelling, toilet-cleaning, burger-flipping, or box-moving magazines, pay someone to "certify" you in dirt-shovelling, toilet-cleaning, burger-flipping, or box-moving. Nor having someone deny you a job because you don't have a Master's degree in "Dirt-shovelling Science" or a B.S. in "Toiletry Studies" or 5 years of experience with Burger technology that's only been around for two years...
If/when you can get into IT jobs, the pay is usually okay, but just because it doesn't seem as demeaning or dehumanizing as boring old honest labor doesn't mean it's easy...
I think you hit that one right on its metaphorical head. As soon as the word "Manager" shows up in a title, it SHOULD indicate that the focus of the job at that point has moved to working at least as much with other people as with whatever other word or words go with "Manager". A "Finance Manager" should be spending as much time talking to people as sitting in front of a calculator counting dollars(/Euro/Rupees/Pesos/Whatever), for example.
The hard part is striking the right balance - managers who spend ALL of their time "dealing with people" and none of it understanding the technical side of their jobs (IT for IT Managers, Accounting such for Finance managers, etc etc) aren't good for much besides guest appearances as caricatures in Dilbert(tm) comics.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did this bit of insanity come from? Since when does the tedious serious of corporate-masturbatory advertisements for (for example) Disney movies that shows at the beginning of a legally-purchased tape or DVD of another Disney movie "fund the production of the material"?
It looked to me as though such a situation might very well be covered in the mass of bad "copyright protection" laws being discussed here.
Besides...what if I find the advertisements in question genuinely "objectionable"? Advertisers are not widely known for being tasteful in the US (or anywhere else for that matter).
Turn this around - I have legally paid for a television. I have kept up with the payments of my taxes to fund the FCC. A broadcaster spews radio-frequency signals through my home which my legally-purchased receivers can pick up. Are you saying that the broadcaster's ability to spew signals through my home gives them the right to compel me to watch particular portions of those signals? The fact that they don't mean ANY particular portions, but "only the advertisements" is even WORSE - the broadcaster generally does NOT own the copyrights on the advertisements, so this mandate not only means that the broadcaster can compel me to be a captive audience, but in particular that I can be compelled to be a captive audience for ANY agency. Can I be similarly compelled to go outside and listen to, say, a politician's re-election speech on the street outside if I happen to get any benefits from the government agency that the politician runs?
I find this line of argument an insidious and disturbing perversion of the free speech doctrines and practices that have, in my opinion, been one of the keys to making the US "great" (in both senses of the word). It saddens me to know that the US may lose all of this.
Or, in the immortal words of the Great Philosopher, Calvin, discussing the nature and relative merits of money, power, and fame: "If you have enough money, you can buy power and fame."
I compiled up and played with a "MUSH" server once - I thought having a multi-player text adventure engine that you could program on-the-fly was nifty...
It was interesting to notice that I frequently found myself typing "ls" instead of "look" when I wanted to see the contents of a "room" that I was in. I hadn't previously realized the similarities between the CLI and a text adventure...
Where do I submit a patch to change all of the instances of "(filename): file not found" to "I see no (filename) here" in the standard command-line tools?
Suddenly I am struck by the realization that you can still consider these new entities "Think Tanks", but now the word "Tanks" is used in the military sense of the term (an offensive weapon, heavily armed with lawyers and armored with cash...), rather than in its original sense of "a container full of something*"
* - Well, it WOULD still be full of something, it's just that the something in question wouldn't be "thoughts" any more...
Nothing too amazing, just swear three times and the game ends.
Then again, this was a game that did something unexpected when you looked up, too...
Hooray, yet another hardware platform that Linux will run on but Microsoft(r) Windows won't...
Does Microsoft's refusal to support the Itanium bother Intel at all? If so, will they perhaps "retaliate" by focussing a bit more on Linux support? Maybe even helping GCC develop good Itanium code optimization routines (I know Intel has a proprietary compiler, but the segment of the market that might buy Itanium hardware to run Linux AND be perfectly content only licensing Intel's proprietary compiler rather than being able to use GCC has got to be ridiculously small...)?
After dropping the ball so badly, initially, on the "Centrino" chipset support for Linux, it would be nice to see Intel have more reasons to more openly support Linux development. It sounds like Linux is really the only chance they have of finding future uses for the Itanium (other than perhaps ceasing production and using the existing stock to set up a "museum of market failures"...)
The answer to the first question, taken literally, is "yes, obviously". Presuming you really mean "anyone" as a casual way of saying for "a very large portion of the general market" then the answer right now is "no". But...
Does *nix really think it a chance in the desktop sector considering how entrenched Windows is?
This is a different question altogether, and the answer is "yes".
See, most people really DON'T care what OS brand name they use so much as they care about being able to play well with others - whether the "others" are other computer environments that the user is already familiar with, or other people playing the user's favorite game, or websites on the internet and email clients on their friend's computer, or being able to look at the slideshows that someone else produced and uploaded, or whatever...
Most people also don't want to blow wads of money on licensing if they don't have to.
The "typical" computer user these days seems to be interested almost entirely in email, web browsing, and "Mahjong" games. These basic functions are already well supported in *nix environments and ready to be sold as "appliances" running *nix to anyone who is satisfied with those basic requirements. Related to email and web, though, people also want to be able to watch all those little internet videos that their friends email to them, which are often in proprietary formats. Now, MPlayer already supports all of the major formats pretty well, and plugins are available to use it to play internet videos in Microsoft(r)'s formats, Apple(r) Quicktime(tm), and so forth, not to mention the existence of the Helix media player as well. So, that's possible to take care of.
The slideshows (I refuse to call it a "presentation" when there is nobody actually presenting...), word-processor documents, and spreadsheets can all be handled pretty well by OpenOffice. There are still a few formatting differences that come up sometimes when loading a file produced by a Microsoft(r) program, but I'd call it "good enough for typical home use". Plus, the ability to generate .pdf's natively built in means if someone is USING OpenOffice they can generate documents that look correct on everyone's computers. So, for ordinary home users, this is also at a "good enough" stage.
That's not all of the market, or I think even a majority, but it's a pretty big chunk. What's really missing, as the Slashdot discussion boards echo loudly with every time this subject comes up, is video games. Right now, most are written exclusively for the purpose of being installed on a Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) general-purpose operating system, and this does create a genuine speedbump in the path of *nix desktop marketshare.
However, the concept of having a dedicated "boot disk" for running a video game has been around for a very long time. Tech support people tend to love them, because when used, the video game in question ends up running on a known, well-characterized environment without other processes interfering. Because providing tech support costs money, software company tend to love anything that reduces the need for tech support.
Since it seems like most people who are playing anything more intensive than "Mahjong" or "Solitaire" usually play full-screen and dedicating all of their attention to the game (and generally want as little running in the background reducing their framerates as possible), the possibility of distributing videogames on self-contained boot CD's is very real. The boot disk might be a no-license-fee-paid-by-the-software-company Linux disk, as they've talked about doing (have already done?) with America's Army. I think the only technical capability lacking to make this really feasible is full write support for NTFS (since
...in the form of a flash animation may be found on newgrounds.com here...
Obviously in the real world, practical matters soften the idealistic concepts in the animation, but it gives you a good idea of the direction that Libertarian political philosophy takes.
Greens, yes. Libertarians, no. Libertarians until recently always seemed to lean mildly "Republican" (if you must compare them with "The Two Parties"). Being for less government influence, political authority being devolved down towards State (and smaller) levels from the Federal level, non-interference in free commerce, and so on.
The only reason they may seem more Democrat this time around is that Bush, quite frankly, seems to be pushing the aspects of Republicanism that Libertarians disagree with (speech-restricting "Campaign Finance Reform", "Foreign Entanglements", attempts to amend the constitution for things like allowing congress to criminalize "desecration of the flag" and "banning gay marriage", restricting civil liberties (e.g. the "PATRIOT" act) in the name of "security" and "patriotism"...) while slacking badly on most of the issues Libertarians tend to agree with (reducing the size and power of the Federal government, fiscally responsible government policies, etc.).
Typically, on social freedoms, Libertarians lean slightly "Democrat" - except that Democrats are more likely to want to use government force to "require" social freedoms (i.e. through legislation -as an example, perhaps a hypothetical federal law requiring all states to recognize any other state's legal marriage contracts, including "gay" ones if the state where it was issued allows it), where Libertarians tend to prefer non-coercive approaches (i.e. it's none of the Federal government's business at all WHAT kind of social arrangement adults give informed consent to enter into...). . Any power not explicitly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution belongs to the states or the people...
Or at least that's my (simplistically-stated) understanding of the political philosophy, anyway.
They're not paying for it yet - they're "raising funds" to pay the large fee for it.
Personally - I can only think that we've got two political parties still "unencumbered" by incumbent political games and still able to actually act out of principle (egad, that's a FAR less cynical statement than usually comes from me on political matters...). It's all I can figure - there's obviously no chance that the recount will show the Greens or Libertarians winning the election, and in fact I honestly suspect the vote recount won't change the final result, but I do think it's important to get an accurate accounting of the votes. In so doing, we'll also get a good picture of how innacurate the initial count was. If it's way off, even assuming the recount still shows Bush winning, we'll have proof that there is something wrong with the voting procedures, and probably some idea of WHAT is wrong. And then, next time around, there's a chance there'll be fewer problems...
Besides, bear in mind that while the Democrats can't reasonably make this demand or formally donate money to the effort without being accused of being big babies and spreading political FUD about the vote in Ohio...but INDIVIDUAL Democrats ought to be able to easily donate to the cause. Maybe somebody should call that rich Soros guy.
And, yes, I DID vote for Michael Badnarik in this election...
Anybody know what IP address ranges msnbot is using? Might be possible to limit the rate of connection from those addresses using firewall rules (or, for that matter, forbid connection entirely if that's your preference) to avoid the "hammering" that msnbot is said to be doing...
Mainly, I'd require the Presidential Debate corporation to include all candidates who are on the ballots in enough states to conceivably win (and make sure fair rules are in place to allow any semi-reasonable candidate who enough people would like to see on the ballot can do so). The biggest problem I see is the collusion between "The Two Parties(tm)" that keeps other voices out of the debate and other views away from the voting public.
I'd also like to see the voting public stop and think long enough to lose the stupid "throwing away your vote" attitude towards voting for anyone-but-the-established-political-corporations (Disneycrat/Rupertican). Personally, I see my vote for a less-famous party as making far more of a difference than another drop-in-the-ocean vote for "the same guy everyone else in the area is voting for".
And anyone who votes for someone just because they expect that someone to win should be beaten on public TV - yes, even if they voted for a candidate I like. People with the attitude that the presidential election is a "sporting event" and just wants to be "on the winning team" regardless of who that team is poisons the voting pool (and, yes, I have heard of people doing this in the last several elections...).
That's not strictly true - it means "densely-populated cities" become the "critically important" locations. A pure "popular vote" based mechanism means a proportionally sharp under-representation of non-urban areas.
Do you WANT the nation's garbage being dumped next to all the farm fields, just because the farmers are outvoted by "city folk" who just want to get rid of their garbage? Do you WANT all the water shipped to supply e.g. Los Angeles instead of growing food? There's a reason people have been proposing other, more complex replacements for the electoral college than a simple popular vote...
Not to say that I'm in favor of the current system, either - the "Electoral College" is rigged to require "major party" votes only get counted.
I think this fact complements the one that a lot of people have been remarking on - the fact that a lot of people who had "IT" jobs during the market boom really shouldn't have, due to lack of real ability.
I think a lot of those people have the attitude of "I paid all that money for these degrees and certifications. Now that I have gotten these degrees and certifications, I'm done, right?".
Just like a degree or certification in science, medicine, or even law, if you don't KEEP educating yourself constantly, you don't really know what's going on, and IT is a field that moves very quickly.
Some words of advice to people being lured in by those DeVry, etc. ads: Don't even consider IT unless you already find you enjoy continually studying, learning, and experimenting with IT concepts and implementations, because if you expect to actually be any good at it, you'll have to do so constantly.
I'm cynical enough to think that kids old enough to go to college ought to be smart enough to know better than to major in obsolete or oversaturated fields...
My default answer to "what do you do for a living?" is: "Professional Nerd."
Agreed. Besides, THOSE people can just go to "Fry's Electronics" instead. Everyone wins.
(Yes, that was a joke. Well, mostly. Fry's IS well-known for their "just throw the returned box back on the shelf for the next sucker" approach to returns...)
I'm pretty new to the whole concept, but it looks like for a whopping $99.95, you can get One of these to build yourself a home software PBX on a POTS line. My ignorant assumption, though, is that it just acts as a phone-call router for your existing phone numbers in this case, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
From my perspective, that's exactly what VNC is most appropriate for. The "enabling the user to watch" isn't always important, but it does come in handy regularly. It's also possible to run a "view only" VNC session, for when you want to show a bunch of people how to do something by remote. (And other posters have mentioned programs which can be used to record VNC sessions for playback later.)
VNC's other major benefit is its cross-platform availability - any combination of Microsoft(r) Windows, commercial Unix, non-proprietary Unix (*BSD), Linux, MacOSX, and I would have sworn some of the PDA OS's can all connect to each other with it. It beats paying a fortune for permission to use the Webex services for it. (Webex is actually a fairly nice package, but permission to use it is somewhat expensive, geared mainly towards mid-to-large corporate environments for teleconferencing...)
The one downside VNC has is that it seems to be a little slower than some of the more restricted-availability methods (much as I hate most of MS's software design, they DID seem to do a good job getting RDP working efficiently, for example).
As other posters have pointed out, for Microsoft(r) Windows(tm), the Remote Desktop protocol actually performs surprisingly well. While I personally despise Microsoft's business methods and nearly all of their software design, I have to admit that this is one of the things they seem to have implemented well.
That said, I've been wondering - is it possible to run a "remote assistance" session with rdesktop (that is, connecting to a Windows(tm) machine from a non-Windows machine)? And are there any RDP servers for X11 in development (or should that be an X11 'client'? That always throws me off in X11...)
Oh, but as a followup, I should point out that while IT can be a pretty crappy job, no, I don't think it would be anywhere near #3 on a "real" list of "the world's crappiest jobs". Worse than average, most likely, but there ARE plenty of worse things to do.
"Commission-only sales work" wasn't in the original list of "you should try these, and then you'll like IT" jobs in the original post, which is what I was addressing. You're right though - that WOULD be a worse job than most of IT. It will probably remain a worse job than most of IT unless the "Run the IT department like a business" concept catches on and is taken to the same sort of extreme that other management fads can be, in which case IT work may BECOME commission-only sales (based on "billable" hours).
"Telemarketing" is another one - just as much abuse and hatred from the people you talk to on the phone, but even less pay and respect than IT folks get.
Nonetheless, IT isn't usually a "free money for goofing off" field to work in, despite the somewhat baffling purple-faced hatred that comes out in some people whenever someone tries to point out that IT work isn't typically easy or relaxing. "YES IT IS, YOU LAZY SLACKER, BECAUSE SOMEONE SOMEWHERE HAS TO DEAL WITH SOMETHING WORSE FOR LESS PAY!"....
While I tend to agree with the basic sentiment here (ambition for personal growth=GOOD, slack-jawed laziness=BAD), this part isn't as clear-cut as it might seem.
I know that the boring rote labor jobs I've had left me with a LOT more ability to use my brain at the time than IT work where any time you try to pause to use your brain for something you're interrupted with inane complaints, "emergencies" that are either artificial or the result of ignoring sound advice, or outright personal abuse...
I can't bring myself to equate "remembering that rote labor jobs were a lot less stressful" with "not having any ambition". Especially given that the reason for the wistful thoughts of less stressful work seems to be a very high-demand, high-responsibility job which you can only get to with high ambition, which the original poster is describing being in...
Remember - "I wish I didn't have so much work to do." is NOT the same as "I wish I was a homeless bum so I wouldn't have to worry about mopping my kitchen floor"...
I don't know about IT Management, specifically, but each of those would make good metaphors for most of IT work...
At least in those more normal jobs, you don't normally get:
- Upper management interrupting you regularly to complain that the dirt you're shoveling isn't the preferred brand of dirt [and it then turns out the that "preferred brand" is "used kitty-litter" because someone read about how wonderful "used kitty-litter" is in some magazine]
- A bathroom patron showing up and pitching a fit because you cleaned a spot that they wanted left in there.
- Someone complaining that you're making the burgers too hot, until upper management makes you cook at a lower temperature, at which point the complaining switches to "this is taking too long, hurry up", so upper management makes you take less time to cook it but still at the lower temperature, and then the complaint is "hey, how did I get this foodborne virus, don't you people cook this stuff enough?...", nor put up with snide comments from Certified Burger Technicians about chicken being a "niche player" or being derided as a "zealot"
...
- After moving the boxes, having to tape them together in various ways, and then having people complain about all the tape being visible, so you end up having to tie up the tape between the boxes into bundles and arrange them neatly, at which point someone decides they liked the boxes over THERE better after all, so you have to cut all the tape loose and start over...
Not to mention not having to keep up with 3 or 4 different dirt-shovelling, toilet-cleaning, burger-flipping, or box-moving magazines, pay someone to "certify" you in dirt-shovelling, toilet-cleaning, burger-flipping, or box-moving. Nor having someone deny you a job because you don't have a Master's degree in "Dirt-shovelling Science" or a B.S. in "Toiletry Studies" or 5 years of experience with Burger technology that's only been around for two years...If/when you can get into IT jobs, the pay is usually okay, but just because it doesn't seem as demeaning or dehumanizing as boring old honest labor doesn't mean it's easy...
I think you hit that one right on its metaphorical head. As soon as the word "Manager" shows up in a title, it SHOULD indicate that the focus of the job at that point has moved to working at least as much with other people as with whatever other word or words go with "Manager". A "Finance Manager" should be spending as much time talking to people as sitting in front of a calculator counting dollars(/Euro/Rupees/Pesos/Whatever), for example.
The hard part is striking the right balance - managers who spend ALL of their time "dealing with people" and none of it understanding the technical side of their jobs (IT for IT Managers, Accounting such for Finance managers, etc etc) aren't good for much besides guest appearances as caricatures in Dilbert(tm) comics.