An organization like the one in this article is "after the fact." It's made up of mostly established artists who already got their wealth and fame from record companies and only now want to leave them when they have the money to fund their own distribution.
Well:
A) What's wrong with that? You completed your contract with an organization you felt was screwing you and now you want to form your own organization which you hope will screw you less. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution to me. Let's ignore, for the moment, any evidence that the RIAA is evil or designed to screw artists. Let's just look at the fact that some artist, "Bob", having signed with the RIAA and either by gaming the system or pure talent has gathered enough of a fan base and enough money to help fund this "artist's collective" version of a record company. Currently Bob makes $0.50 a record, his label has offered him $0.75 a record for a new contract, this new group hopefully expects that he can make $1.50 a record, though he may sell a few less records without the label backing him. What's wrong with him deciding to take his chances? (The fact that he's screwing the RIAA out of his theoretically considerable talents and making a bunch of slashdotters happy not withstanding)
B) Even if it's started "after the fact" this type of organization could be very useful to new up and coming artists. The fact is that as things stand now the big four record labels has a oligopoly on professional music making above the level of street buskers. You are right that no one has a right to be famous, or the right to make money by playing music, but it is also true that the RIAA and its member companies set up a "barrier to entry" that prevents people who don't want to "play the game" from making any kind of living off of music. There are limited exceptions (like there are to any monopoly or oligopoly), but by and large if you want to live by playing and creating music you need to at least start off signed to one of the big four or one of their "independent" feeder labels. Even if this new organization never gets more than 10% market share, that's a big bite of the RIAAs current (near to 100% share) market. It would give new artists somewhere to turn to.
No, GP said the "market" was rational. Meaning that the people in the market react rationally to news (even if that reaction is to model other, irrational, actions). If the market were "rational", the market would have checked to see if Jobs were actually dead before costing Apple 9% of its value. People waiting for the value of a stock to drop before buying do not cause a drop in value. People selling causes a drop in value. "Rationally" there were two possible reaction to the incorrect news (assuming the person checked the veracity of the news first, which is the only "rational" first response): first, they could have held their stock, knowing that as soon as the news proves false it will bounce back, second they could have waited for others to panic and sell then buy only after the value have dropped significantly. Immediately selling (which is what causes valuation drops, more people selling then want to buy)is a panicked reaction. The market did not react rationally (which is what the GGP claims) though some individual brokers may have (in which case they made money).
The market moves based on rational people forecasting when others will act irrationally.
Riiight, cause it was completely rational to assume, based on the the function equivalent of an anonymous newsgroup post, that a ~55 year old man keeled over and died. Then proceed to act on that assumption as if it were fact and tank the stock of a stable company. Those are totally rational actions. Rational people can't be bothered to, oh, say, call Apple and verify a completely unfounded rumor containing no evidence before going, "OMFG! Steve jobs is dead! Sell! Sell! Sell!"
The market moves based on the actions of stock brokers, who are as subject to irrational panics as anyone else. Now I will grant you that had Jobs ACTUALLY been dead (and this fact had been verified through some trusted or trustable source), the sell off would have been an attempt to rationally model the irrational actions of consumers. Since he wasn't however, the sell off was an irrational action by a bunch of panicked investors.
Sometimes the market moves based on rational people attempting to model the irrational behavior of consumers or others who affect the value of companies. Sometimes the market moves because the brokers and investors themselves are irrational actors. No one is immune to irrational panics (or, at any rate, very, very few people are) including those with who move the market.
Get Small Business Server from Microsoft, have all the capabilities, anyone can manage it, and you own all the data. Most small businesses would prefer that to giving away 100% of their data to someone else and lose the capability to work if their Internet is down. That would be insane.
Since they were talking about an online store, you've got it backwards. You'd rather have the RackSpace solution, that way even if your Internet service is down people can still get to your store and buy stuff. It is nearly always the case that a good Colo provider will have more server and network uptime than a small shop, not matter how well provided. Reliability is what they're selling. For that matter, an Amazon store will likely have more uptime too. With externally facing sites, you're far more worried that the world can get to you than whether you can get to your data at any one exact moment in time.
I do thank RMS for the many contributions he's made to the free software movement. It is probably true that if it hadn't been him, it would have been someone, but the fact is that he's done a lot. It's also true that he is a zealot who does as much to hurt his cause as he does to help it. He seems determined to piss off the creator of one of his license's most successful products, He publishes screeds against anyone who disagrees with him, he refuses to compromise in any way, and he talks down to the people he is trying to convince. Surely he must realize that cordial public relations with your allies is a good thing? That sometimes compromise and "baby steps" toward a goal are more valuable than no progress at all?
RMS is attempting to solve a problem which has technical, philosophical, and social components. Having a superior technical and philosophical argument are only half the battle. The rest involves convincing people, a lot of people, many of whom have minimal understanding of either the technical or philosophical underpinnings of the situation, that he is right. He has proven to be consistently bad at this. At best you can say that he has won over a percentage (though not all, or even most) of those most able to fully appreciate all facets of his argument. He's made no inroads at all with people who aren't "geeks" and frequently annoys or seems to work against even those who support his ideals.
The man has his good points. He's done some really good things. He's also one of his own worst enemies. It never killed anyone to be nice and it certainly never hurt someone who claims to be working for social change to, you know, be social. If he is really incapable of being polite and politic, if he is really unable to bring himself to cut his hair, trim his beard, and wear some nice, well pressed clothes, than surely he can find a person in the FSF to be his voice and his face so he can sit in his dark little room writing code and manifestos?
Here's the problem. You see I went on vacation last week, and couldn't log in for a few days. Now the town I log out in is overrun and I'm dead. Just cause I had to take a week off. And since this is deep in Zombie territory now, even if there's a "respawn" concept I'm in for hours of "ghost running" to get to a safe place.
A half a dozen level three players, acting together should be able to take down a single player at the level cap.
I think there's a balance problem here. Let's use WoW's level system as an example. So we set it up so that 5 level 20's can take a level 70. (I'm not even going to go down as far as level 3, you'll see why in a sec.) That's great for PvP balance, I totally agree. It's silly that one character can be SOOO powerful that he can literally destroy legions of people 20 or 30 levels below him. Now let's look at PvE. If 5 level 20's can take down a level 70, then those same 5 level 20's can do solo level 70 content. If they put together a raid they can can do level 70 5 mans with 25 people. Now if I can do level 70 content at level 20, what's the point of getting to level 70? With 10 level 40's I can do all level 70 content below raids, and with 20 or 40 level 40's I can do most of those. Now, in order to create content that ONLY level 70's can do, the game company needs to create massive raid dungeons that need 50 or 60 people in order to make putting together a double or treble sized group completely impractical. Even then, the difference between say, a level 65 and level 70 is, by definition of the games rules, fairly minimal. If you need 50 level 70s to do the content, 55 level 65's can probably handle it.
Now if 6 level 3's can take out a level 70, the problem is even more exaggerated. There's going to minimal difference between a level 50 and a level 70. You'll essentially be at "end game" about halfway through the level system and additional levels will yield incremental improvements, currently equivalent to getting a minor enchant or something.
Honestly, it seems to me that most of the inflation in WoW has been caused by Blizzard. When a level 70 can earn 200-300 gold a day just by doing simple daily quests, money becomes something that anybody with a level 70 (let alone more than one) doesn't worry about. I've got two 70's, conceivably I could earn over 500G day just doing 2-3 hours of dailies. So now when I see a 300G epic weapon in the Auction House for my level 37 I shrug and pay it. I can earn that in an hour or two.
I want Open, no matter the cost. I want to be able to open it, dismantle it, reconfigure it, alter it, change it (not necessarily *do* and of those things; just be able to). That's why I got one.
You know, I can understand and respect his attitude. I can also tell you that 99.9% of the population doesn't care. I realize that you don't care what the rest of the population thinks, but sadly what they think impacts the bottom line. The FOSS model works (where it does work, which is certainly not everywhere) because the cost of entry into software creation is essentially zero. It costs nothing but time, and hobbyist have time. It's what makes them hobbyists.
This is a real physical device with real costing money components in it. If these guy don't get something that can reliably make a phone call first or second time, every time, without the user having to recompile the phone app, install Debian, or stand on one foot in the bathroom of the Denny's on I-10, it's not going to survive. "It'll improve" works for Free Software to some extent. It's not like you NEED to have people using your software to improve it. If it takes you 5 years to get the thing working well enough that anybody wants to download it, well, it did. No biggie. You're a hobbyist, you were gonna fiddle with it anyway. This is different. Unless these guys have found some serious generous donors, they need people to buy the phone in order to continue development of the phone. If the people don't buy it, eventually they'll run out of money and there goes the support for your phone.
Software development might continue past this, but the phone itself will be a dead project that you paid $400 for. Most people are going to be pretty unwilling to spend much time of software ports for a device that almost no one owns either.
You know, it never really occurred to me to think about this. Whenever the Best Buy dude at the sales counter asks if I want to spend an extra [$50, $100, whatever] to have the Geek Squad "optimize" my new computer I've said no without thinking. I can, after all, "optimize" myself (last time it involved downgrading to XP on my wife's new lap top). Now I'm thinking about it... How many people actually consider it necessary to give Best Buy MORE money so that they can actually USE the computer they just spent $500-$1500 on? How may of those people are actually right? What does this say about an industry that an entire second industry exists just to make the first industry's products actually usable by people who just bought them?
Bright flippin' Gods. This really brings home just how off the PC industry is, and why so many people do like Macs.
You're quoting out of context. I said it was a model with strengths and weaknesses. I never said it only had one flaw, the parent simply presented one flaw, I said that the flaw he presented did not necessarily invalidate the model.
Also a lot of the rules made sense in the context of how ancient people thought. Many of the Kosher dietary restrictions were created during the Babylonian captivity, as a way to keep the Hebrew National Identity alive. Many of them specifically forbid dietary practices common to Babylonian society of the time in order to limit the contact between Hebrews and Babylonians. Breaking bread and eating together have been symbols of friendship since time immemorial, limiting the ability of Hebrews to so so with their captors slowed assimilation (Ironically Kosher laws have performed similar duties many times since).
Similarly, religious laws require sacrifice of food stuffs made great sense in the ancient world. Sure people thought the Gods wanted the stuff they were sacrificing (and why not when you have a very anthropomorphic concept of God), but since most of the food sacrificed was taken and stored by the priestly classes, it also conveniently provided food storage for emergency use and a way to feed and cloth such non-essential people as artists, scribes and administrators. It is arguable that sacrificing food to the Gods was the basis for civilizations (or at least one of them).
The way he said it was kind of a cop out, but the idea has some reasonable basis. Let us assume for a moment a supreme being. this being is so vast and powerful as to be incomprehensible to human brains. Let us assume that his supreme being has,through out history, acted through Avatars (Christ, Buddha, Krishna, etc) to reveal portions of itself to mortal man. Being limited, these people who have been shown some portion of Truth, believe that they have seen the whole Truth. They are wrong, but they believe it.
The Supreme being, being.. well.. Supreme... understands that people cannot see all of It, and therefore considers all followers to be Its followers. No religion, even the ones that claim a monopoly on truth need be entirely right, but none need be entirely wrong either. From a logical prospective, religions have many individual tenants each conceivably with its own truthness and falseness. You're presenting a scenario where if any one piece of the religion is false than it must all be false. Think how it would be if science were held to same standard:
'Oh, well, ya know I thought we had something with his whole evolution model, but i can't figure out how this one piece fits so we'll just have to scrap the whole thing.'
Religions, from this point of view are analogous to sweeping models, not to individual facts which can be proven or disproven. Like every model, some parts are going to be stronger than other parts, and you're never likely to able to be sure of the whole thing.
Now I'll grant you that some people are far to dogmatic to look at their religions that way, but it doesn't mean it not a viable way of looking at them, and many people use some modified version of this way of thinking of their and other religions. Unitarian Universalists and many Neo-Pagans think of religion this way for certain.
But movies like Shrek, Toy Story, Monsters, Inc, and many many others proves that just because a movies is targeted at kids doesn't mean it can't also be made enjoyable for adults. Not to say i plan to be one of the ones crying (I never even say Revenge of the Sith), but it sound to me from the reviews like Lucas Films missed the boat. It is a kids movie, so no one should expect it to be otherwise, but lots of kids movies are still a lot of fun to watch.
That was one of my favorite parts of Knights of the Old Republic. The game was buggy and all, but it had an engaging storyline, and there were several non-force powered characters who were still useful and fun.
Well, I'm speaking from an exclusively US based perspective here, so don't quote me, YMMV, etc.
Usually to do research at a university you have to have a PhD. You get your PhD, spend a few years (anywhere from 4-8 depending on job availability and your own record of accomplishments) working for someone else as a "Post-Doc" helping with their research, and then you can get a junior faculty position somewhere and start doing your own research.
You can also find jobs doing pure research type CS stuff at the big national laboratories. These are often (but not always) run by a university and funded by grants from both the government and private sectors. Usually the people that run projects at these places are PhD's too, but they often have openings for 'research scientists', 'computer scientists', and other such such titles that you can get with a masters or occasionally even a bachelors. These types of jobs are almost like "permanent Post-docs". You do much of the same sort of work as a post-doc at a university, but not being a PhD yourself you can never really have your "own" projects. At least not that you can get paid for. Much more rarely I've seen similar types of positions available at universities that don't have big labs attached. Usually some PhD has gotten a particularly large grant and need lots of worker bees.
There are also sometimes these sort of research type positions available for people with masters and bachelors degrees with really big hardware and software companies (think IBM, MS, Apple, Sun here) in their research labs. Those jobs tend to be harder to get and somewhat less stable I think, but I don't know a lot about them.
Bad me for replying to my own comment, but I've just read you response to someone else and this occurred to me. Have you considered going back for an advanced degree and getting a research job? Guys at universities and national labs (at least here in the US) get to work on esoteric stuff like this all day.
I hate to say it, but that's a pretty arcane bit of coding you've done there. Having taken a sound processing class at university, I'd probably hire you on the spot if the damn thing works like you say it does. Purely on the "If he can figure out how to do this on his own, he'll probably figure out whatever I set him" theory. On the other hand, a lot of people are going to look at this like it's an impractical exercise outside of a few very specific applications.
You might try volunteering some time on a larger project with a more understandable goal. This gives you a) practical experience working with a team (usually pretty important in development work), b) something that an average manager will understand when you show them what you did, and c) a potential reference from someone else in the team who is already in industry and thus has standing to recommend you.
Your personal project has two thing working against it as useful "experience". First, few people are going to really understand what you did, or how difficult it was. Second, you're not actually getting what they would consider useful professional experience. "Real" projects are developed by teams, with schedules, check-ins and outs, a team leader that everyone else reports to, and some sort of hierarchical development plan. This is often more than half of what companies want to see when they ask for "experience". They assume people learned how to pound code into an IDE in in university, they want to see that you can fit into a dev team and do your part.
Well, assuming you're really buying locally (as in, buying locally grown, locally made products) it's reducing the carbon footprint of the purchase astronomically. Even buying from a "local" big box store helps this to some extent. Walmart and Best Buy ship their products very efficiently compared to the "Mail one box to your house" method used for online purchases. Think about it:
1) Grown/make a item yourself- zero gas or oil used in shipment 2) Item grown/made locally- Only fuel needed to get it from local producer to local market needed 3) Item grown/made far away, bought at local store- fuel needed for maximum efficient shipment fro producer to store (potentially a lot) 4) Item grown/made far away, bought online- Same as three (the stuff had to get to the warehouse), plus the fuel needed to get it from the warehouse to your door in a single items shipping container.
It's not a perfect analogy, I might actually be saving fuel overall if I buy online directly from the manufacturer. Especially if the manufacturer is a small "local" business in a another locality, but in general buying online is the least fuel efficient way to get a product.
I can certainly do all of those things and more, that's not the point. I can't afford to work as help desk tech (unless it were like level three or four tech for a HUGE company), it would be a huge pay decrease. I can write code, but I'm not qualified to be a Java developer... at least not a senior enough one that I could pay my bills. I could probably get someone to take a chance on me as an entry level developer, but that would also cost me money. For more senior positions they want to see real experience on large project, which I don't have. I've written lots of scripts and small programs for myself and others, but I haven't been part of the kind formal development process that a mid-level or senior developer needs experience with. Security analyst is less of a stretch, and I've applied for some mid level security jobs, but I'm not really a "Senior Security Analyst". That implies years of working specifically in security.
"IT" is a field with specialties. In the field we may be able to function outside of our specialties, or even change our specialties, but I think the days are gone when you might get hired to be a sys admin and wind up programming the accounting systems. Except in the smallest one or two man IT operations we all might do a little of everything, but we're HIRED to do something fairly specific. After ten year of supporting users and administering Unix systems I just don't see anyone hiring me to develop C++ apps. My ability to so not withstanding.
Crying "racism" and "xenophobia" are ways to say that you can't refute my argument any other way. Throw in a good nazi analogy while you're at it, then you can really godwin yourself.
Oh, so sorry. I was misunderstanding comments such as:
"Similarly, instead of being able to get a human (or substandard indian variant thereof)"
"Got nothing but idiot Indians with accents thick enough to strangle a moose"
"jobs are moved to third-world crap countries."
and of course this entire paragraph:
"An illegal mexican built your house, and you paid the price: money out of YOUR pocket on repairs, plus YOUR inflated tax bill to pay for his illegal family's medical bills in the emergency room, his anchor baby's birth in the local hospital, his illegal kids' schooling (stealing directly from YOUR kid's education), the crimes committed by his illegal friends and his kids in gangs [wikipedia.org], and of course the fact that HE and HIS ILLEGAL FAMILY are stealing someone's social security number to run up debt in their name."
As being racist and xenophobic simply because they imply such things as: "Indians are sub-human", "All Mexicans are criminals", "people should not have accents", and "Third world countries have crappy people."
Now based on your reply I realize that you're not being racist at all. You realize that there are fine people in India and Mexico, or at least there were. Thankfully they have all already legally immigrated here, so we can feel free to despise the ones that stayed or were, for one reason or another, unable to get a visa. Certainly all of them ARE criminals, lazy, or even sub-human.
Whatever you meant (and I'm sad to say that while your intentions may not have been racist per se, they do display a disturbing lack of empathy for people outside of this country), you came across as spewing racist xenophobia. The quotes above show exactly that. While you may not have meant to include all Indians, or all Mexicans, you use both terms in the plural and don't clarify that you're speaking of a subset. I will grant that when talking about Mexicans you always specify "illegal Mexicans", but you don't subdivide Indians at all and your overall tone suggests that you are the type of person who considers all Mexicans to be "illegal Mexicans".
I have in fact met "Illegal Mexicans", I lived in New Orleans after Katrina. There were many migrants there from all over South America trying to make a few bucks in the rebuild. There was a significant rise in crime when they arrived, and it's true that the Mexican gangs follow the migrants. It's easy to hide amongst them. That doesn't mean that there weren't also good, smart, and hard working people scattered in too. A few were even giving part of their incredibly meager incomes to the relief agencies.
That is a pretty serious problem. I recently quit my job as Senior Sys Admin of a small but very technical niche company. I'm not having much problem getting bites on new jobs, so there is clearly demand (Hopefully that demand translates in to a job soon but I'm still feeling pretty confident).
All of this to say that I've realized since I started serious hunting for a new job, that almost no one outside the field has any idea what I do. I've been sent ads for everything from programming jobs, to help desk jobs, to senior security analyst jobs by friends and family. We've created a modern version of the Masons. No one knows what we do, what our specialties mean, or how we accomplish the stuff that they see on their screens.
if I go into a marketing meeting, I can contribute. I'm not a trained marketer, my ideas might need polish or might not even be good, but I understand what they are doing. I can say stuff and not look completely clueless. A marketer in a tech meeting may as well be on Mars. We're barely speaking English, it's acronyms and abbreviations and source code. Unless you are in the cabal you can hardly understand what you don't understand.
The question is: can this be fixed? It's an inherently complex topic in which higher math and logic are par for the course in getting basic concepts. How can we make so people are capable pf grokking without years of training, experience or both?
By industry CS is usually considered IT. The people that do it are, as often as not, under the CIO. The exception is very large software/computer companies that have "R&D" (think IBM, MS, Apple here) or research facilities. Even then, I think the Labor Department still considers it all IT.
The sad bits of truth sprinkled throughout this rant are completely neutralized by your obvious racism and xenophobia. It's really a shame, you make some excellent points, but a) clearly blame the wrong people, and b) clearly hate and fear those people. None of this is the fault of the Indian tech support guy, or the illegal Mexican. They're just trying to do the best they can with very little. I've known plenty of Indians and Mexicans; their intelligence and work ethic vary across the same spectrum as any American's. These people just want the same thing you do, a chance at a living wage in comfortable circumstances, and many of them have far more challenges to over come in finding that goal than you ever will.
Feel free to believe that the government and corporations are shipping your jobs overseas or giving you substandard service. It's certain true in some cases. Don't blame a bunch of poor people in developing countries for your problems though.
Slashdot Mirror
An organization like the one in this article is "after the fact." It's made up of mostly established artists who already got their wealth and fame from record companies and only now want to leave them when they have the money to fund their own distribution.
Well:
A) What's wrong with that? You completed your contract with an organization you felt was screwing you and now you want to form your own organization which you hope will screw you less. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution to me. Let's ignore, for the moment, any evidence that the RIAA is evil or designed to screw artists. Let's just look at the fact that some artist, "Bob", having signed with the RIAA and either by gaming the system or pure talent has gathered enough of a fan base and enough money to help fund this "artist's collective" version of a record company. Currently Bob makes $0.50 a record, his label has offered him $0.75 a record for a new contract, this new group hopefully expects that he can make $1.50 a record, though he may sell a few less records without the label backing him. What's wrong with him deciding to take his chances? (The fact that he's screwing the RIAA out of his theoretically considerable talents and making a bunch of slashdotters happy not withstanding)
B) Even if it's started "after the fact" this type of organization could be very useful to new up and coming artists. The fact is that as things stand now the big four record labels has a oligopoly on professional music making above the level of street buskers. You are right that no one has a right to be famous, or the right to make money by playing music, but it is also true that the RIAA and its member companies set up a "barrier to entry" that prevents people who don't want to "play the game" from making any kind of living off of music. There are limited exceptions (like there are to any monopoly or oligopoly), but by and large if you want to live by playing and creating music you need to at least start off signed to one of the big four or one of their "independent" feeder labels. Even if this new organization never gets more than 10% market share, that's a big bite of the RIAAs current (near to 100% share) market. It would give new artists somewhere to turn to.
There is a kid in Shattrath City who mocks the inability of Lakeshire (the town in Redridge) to ever finish their bridge. That was mildly amusing..
No, GP said the "market" was rational. Meaning that the people in the market react rationally to news (even if that reaction is to model other, irrational, actions). If the market were "rational", the market would have checked to see if Jobs were actually dead before costing Apple 9% of its value. People waiting for the value of a stock to drop before buying do not cause a drop in value. People selling causes a drop in value. "Rationally" there were two possible reaction to the incorrect news (assuming the person checked the veracity of the news first, which is the only "rational" first response): first, they could have held their stock, knowing that as soon as the news proves false it will bounce back, second they could have waited for others to panic and sell then buy only after the value have dropped significantly. Immediately selling (which is what causes valuation drops, more people selling then want to buy)is a panicked reaction. The market did not react rationally (which is what the GGP claims) though some individual brokers may have (in which case they made money).
The market moves based on rational people forecasting when others will act irrationally.
Riiight, cause it was completely rational to assume, based on the the function equivalent of an anonymous newsgroup post, that a ~55 year old man keeled over and died. Then proceed to act on that assumption as if it were fact and tank the stock of a stable company. Those are totally rational actions. Rational people can't be bothered to, oh, say, call Apple and verify a completely unfounded rumor containing no evidence before going, "OMFG! Steve jobs is dead! Sell! Sell! Sell!"
The market moves based on the actions of stock brokers, who are as subject to irrational panics as anyone else. Now I will grant you that had Jobs ACTUALLY been dead (and this fact had been verified through some trusted or trustable source), the sell off would have been an attempt to rationally model the irrational actions of consumers. Since he wasn't however, the sell off was an irrational action by a bunch of panicked investors.
Sometimes the market moves based on rational people attempting to model the irrational behavior of consumers or others who affect the value of companies. Sometimes the market moves because the brokers and investors themselves are irrational actors. No one is immune to irrational panics (or, at any rate, very, very few people are) including those with who move the market.
Get Small Business Server from Microsoft, have all the capabilities, anyone can manage it, and you own all the data. Most small businesses would prefer that to giving away 100% of their data to someone else and lose the capability to work if their Internet is down. That would be insane.
Since they were talking about an online store, you've got it backwards. You'd rather have the RackSpace solution, that way even if your Internet service is down people can still get to your store and buy stuff. It is nearly always the case that a good Colo provider will have more server and network uptime than a small shop, not matter how well provided. Reliability is what they're selling. For that matter, an Amazon store will likely have more uptime too. With externally facing sites, you're far more worried that the world can get to you than whether you can get to your data at any one exact moment in time.
I do thank RMS for the many contributions he's made to the free software movement. It is probably true that if it hadn't been him, it would have been someone, but the fact is that he's done a lot. It's also true that he is a zealot who does as much to hurt his cause as he does to help it. He seems determined to piss off the creator of one of his license's most successful products, He publishes screeds against anyone who disagrees with him, he refuses to compromise in any way, and he talks down to the people he is trying to convince. Surely he must realize that cordial public relations with your allies is a good thing? That sometimes compromise and "baby steps" toward a goal are more valuable than no progress at all?
RMS is attempting to solve a problem which has technical, philosophical, and social components. Having a superior technical and philosophical argument are only half the battle. The rest involves convincing people, a lot of people, many of whom have minimal understanding of either the technical or philosophical underpinnings of the situation, that he is right. He has proven to be consistently bad at this. At best you can say that he has won over a percentage (though not all, or even most) of those most able to fully appreciate all facets of his argument. He's made no inroads at all with people who aren't "geeks" and frequently annoys or seems to work against even those who support his ideals.
The man has his good points. He's done some really good things. He's also one of his own worst enemies. It never killed anyone to be nice and it certainly never hurt someone who claims to be working for social change to, you know, be social. If he is really incapable of being polite and politic, if he is really unable to bring himself to cut his hair, trim his beard, and wear some nice, well pressed clothes, than surely he can find a person in the FSF to be his voice and his face so he can sit in his dark little room writing code and manifestos?
Here's the problem. You see I went on vacation last week, and couldn't log in for a few days. Now the town I log out in is overrun and I'm dead. Just cause I had to take a week off. And since this is deep in Zombie territory now, even if there's a "respawn" concept I'm in for hours of "ghost running" to get to a safe place.
A half a dozen level three players, acting together should be able to take down a single player at the level cap.
I think there's a balance problem here. Let's use WoW's level system as an example. So we set it up so that 5 level 20's can take a level 70. (I'm not even going to go down as far as level 3, you'll see why in a sec.) That's great for PvP balance, I totally agree. It's silly that one character can be SOOO powerful that he can literally destroy legions of people 20 or 30 levels below him. Now let's look at PvE. If 5 level 20's can take down a level 70, then those same 5 level 20's can do solo level 70 content. If they put together a raid they can can do level 70 5 mans with 25 people. Now if I can do level 70 content at level 20, what's the point of getting to level 70? With 10 level 40's I can do all level 70 content below raids, and with 20 or 40 level 40's I can do most of those. Now, in order to create content that ONLY level 70's can do, the game company needs to create massive raid dungeons that need 50 or 60 people in order to make putting together a double or treble sized group completely impractical. Even then, the difference between say, a level 65 and level 70 is, by definition of the games rules, fairly minimal. If you need 50 level 70s to do the content, 55 level 65's can probably handle it.
Now if 6 level 3's can take out a level 70, the problem is even more exaggerated. There's going to minimal difference between a level 50 and a level 70. You'll essentially be at "end game" about halfway through the level system and additional levels will yield incremental improvements, currently equivalent to getting a minor enchant or something.
Honestly, it seems to me that most of the inflation in WoW has been caused by Blizzard. When a level 70 can earn 200-300 gold a day just by doing simple daily quests, money becomes something that anybody with a level 70 (let alone more than one) doesn't worry about. I've got two 70's, conceivably I could earn over 500G day just doing 2-3 hours of dailies. So now when I see a 300G epic weapon in the Auction House for my level 37 I shrug and pay it. I can earn that in an hour or two.
I want Open, no matter the cost. I want to be able to open it, dismantle it, reconfigure it, alter it, change it (not necessarily *do* and of those things; just be able to). That's why I got one.
You know, I can understand and respect his attitude. I can also tell you that 99.9% of the population doesn't care. I realize that you don't care what the rest of the population thinks, but sadly what they think impacts the bottom line. The FOSS model works (where it does work, which is certainly not everywhere) because the cost of entry into software creation is essentially zero. It costs nothing but time, and hobbyist have time. It's what makes them hobbyists.
This is a real physical device with real costing money components in it. If these guy don't get something that can reliably make a phone call first or second time, every time, without the user having to recompile the phone app, install Debian, or stand on one foot in the bathroom of the Denny's on I-10, it's not going to survive. "It'll improve" works for Free Software to some extent. It's not like you NEED to have people using your software to improve it. If it takes you 5 years to get the thing working well enough that anybody wants to download it, well, it did. No biggie. You're a hobbyist, you were gonna fiddle with it anyway. This is different. Unless these guys have found some serious generous donors, they need people to buy the phone in order to continue development of the phone. If the people don't buy it, eventually they'll run out of money and there goes the support for your phone.
Software development might continue past this, but the phone itself will be a dead project that you paid $400 for. Most people are going to be pretty unwilling to spend much time of software ports for a device that almost no one owns either.
You know, it never really occurred to me to think about this. Whenever the Best Buy dude at the sales counter asks if I want to spend an extra [$50, $100, whatever] to have the Geek Squad "optimize" my new computer I've said no without thinking. I can, after all, "optimize" myself (last time it involved downgrading to XP on my wife's new lap top). Now I'm thinking about it... How many people actually consider it necessary to give Best Buy MORE money so that they can actually USE the computer they just spent $500-$1500 on? How may of those people are actually right? What does this say about an industry that an entire second industry exists just to make the first industry's products actually usable by people who just bought them?
Bright flippin' Gods. This really brings home just how off the PC industry is, and why so many people do like Macs.
You're quoting out of context. I said it was a model with strengths and weaknesses. I never said it only had one flaw, the parent simply presented one flaw, I said that the flaw he presented did not necessarily invalidate the model.
Also a lot of the rules made sense in the context of how ancient people thought. Many of the Kosher dietary restrictions were created during the Babylonian captivity, as a way to keep the Hebrew National Identity alive. Many of them specifically forbid dietary practices common to Babylonian society of the time in order to limit the contact between Hebrews and Babylonians. Breaking bread and eating together have been symbols of friendship since time immemorial, limiting the ability of Hebrews to so so with their captors slowed assimilation (Ironically Kosher laws have performed similar duties many times since).
Similarly, religious laws require sacrifice of food stuffs made great sense in the ancient world. Sure people thought the Gods wanted the stuff they were sacrificing (and why not when you have a very anthropomorphic concept of God), but since most of the food sacrificed was taken and stored by the priestly classes, it also conveniently provided food storage for emergency use and a way to feed and cloth such non-essential people as artists, scribes and administrators. It is arguable that sacrificing food to the Gods was the basis for civilizations (or at least one of them).
The way he said it was kind of a cop out, but the idea has some reasonable basis. Let us assume for a moment a supreme being. this being is so vast and powerful as to be incomprehensible to human brains. Let us assume that his supreme being has,through out history, acted through Avatars (Christ, Buddha, Krishna, etc) to reveal portions of itself to mortal man. Being limited, these people who have been shown some portion of Truth, believe that they have seen the whole Truth. They are wrong, but they believe it.
The Supreme being, being.. well.. Supreme... understands that people cannot see all of It, and therefore considers all followers to be Its followers. No religion, even the ones that claim a monopoly on truth need be entirely right, but none need be entirely wrong either. From a logical prospective, religions have many individual tenants each conceivably with its own truthness and falseness. You're presenting a scenario where if any one piece of the religion is false than it must all be false. Think how it would be if science were held to same standard:
'Oh, well, ya know I thought we had something with his whole evolution model, but i can't figure out how this one piece fits so we'll just have to scrap the whole thing.'
Religions, from this point of view are analogous to sweeping models, not to individual facts which can be proven or disproven. Like every model, some parts are going to be stronger than other parts, and you're never likely to able to be sure of the whole thing.
Now I'll grant you that some people are far to dogmatic to look at their religions that way, but it doesn't mean it not a viable way of looking at them, and many people use some modified version of this way of thinking of their and other religions. Unitarian Universalists and many Neo-Pagans think of religion this way for certain.
But movies like Shrek, Toy Story, Monsters, Inc, and many many others proves that just because a movies is targeted at kids doesn't mean it can't also be made enjoyable for adults. Not to say i plan to be one of the ones crying (I never even say Revenge of the Sith), but it sound to me from the reviews like Lucas Films missed the boat. It is a kids movie, so no one should expect it to be otherwise, but lots of kids movies are still a lot of fun to watch.
That was one of my favorite parts of Knights of the Old Republic. The game was buggy and all, but it had an engaging storyline, and there were several non-force powered characters who were still useful and fun.
Well, I'm speaking from an exclusively US based perspective here, so don't quote me, YMMV, etc.
Usually to do research at a university you have to have a PhD. You get your PhD, spend a few years (anywhere from 4-8 depending on job availability and your own record of accomplishments) working for someone else as a "Post-Doc" helping with their research, and then you can get a junior faculty position somewhere and start doing your own research.
You can also find jobs doing pure research type CS stuff at the big national laboratories. These are often (but not always) run by a university and funded by grants from both the government and private sectors. Usually the people that run projects at these places are PhD's too, but they often have openings for 'research scientists', 'computer scientists', and other such such titles that you can get with a masters or occasionally even a bachelors. These types of jobs are almost like "permanent Post-docs". You do much of the same sort of work as a post-doc at a university, but not being a PhD yourself you can never really have your "own" projects. At least not that you can get paid for. Much more rarely I've seen similar types of positions available at universities that don't have big labs attached. Usually some PhD has gotten a particularly large grant and need lots of worker bees.
There are also sometimes these sort of research type positions available for people with masters and bachelors degrees with really big hardware and software companies (think IBM, MS, Apple, Sun here) in their research labs. Those jobs tend to be harder to get and somewhat less stable I think, but I don't know a lot about them.
Bad me for replying to my own comment, but I've just read you response to someone else and this occurred to me. Have you considered going back for an advanced degree and getting a research job? Guys at universities and national labs (at least here in the US) get to work on esoteric stuff like this all day.
I hate to say it, but that's a pretty arcane bit of coding you've done there. Having taken a sound processing class at university, I'd probably hire you on the spot if the damn thing works like you say it does. Purely on the "If he can figure out how to do this on his own, he'll probably figure out whatever I set him" theory. On the other hand, a lot of people are going to look at this like it's an impractical exercise outside of a few very specific applications.
You might try volunteering some time on a larger project with a more understandable goal. This gives you a) practical experience working with a team (usually pretty important in development work), b) something that an average manager will understand when you show them what you did, and c) a potential reference from someone else in the team who is already in industry and thus has standing to recommend you.
Your personal project has two thing working against it as useful "experience". First, few people are going to really understand what you did, or how difficult it was. Second, you're not actually getting what they would consider useful professional experience. "Real" projects are developed by teams, with schedules, check-ins and outs, a team leader that everyone else reports to, and some sort of hierarchical development plan. This is often more than half of what companies want to see when they ask for "experience". They assume people learned how to pound code into an IDE in in university, they want to see that you can fit into a dev team and do your part.
Well, assuming you're really buying locally (as in, buying locally grown, locally made products) it's reducing the carbon footprint of the purchase astronomically. Even buying from a "local" big box store helps this to some extent. Walmart and Best Buy ship their products very efficiently compared to the "Mail one box to your house" method used for online purchases. Think about it:
1) Grown/make a item yourself- zero gas or oil used in shipment
2) Item grown/made locally- Only fuel needed to get it from local producer to local market needed
3) Item grown/made far away, bought at local store- fuel needed for maximum efficient shipment fro producer to store (potentially a lot)
4) Item grown/made far away, bought online- Same as three (the stuff had to get to the warehouse), plus the fuel needed to get it from the warehouse to your door in a single items shipping container.
It's not a perfect analogy, I might actually be saving fuel overall if I buy online directly from the manufacturer. Especially if the manufacturer is a small "local" business in a another locality, but in general buying online is the least fuel efficient way to get a product.
I can certainly do all of those things and more, that's not the point. I can't afford to work as help desk tech (unless it were like level three or four tech for a HUGE company), it would be a huge pay decrease. I can write code, but I'm not qualified to be a Java developer... at least not a senior enough one that I could pay my bills. I could probably get someone to take a chance on me as an entry level developer, but that would also cost me money. For more senior positions they want to see real experience on large project, which I don't have. I've written lots of scripts and small programs for myself and others, but I haven't been part of the kind formal development process that a mid-level or senior developer needs experience with. Security analyst is less of a stretch, and I've applied for some mid level security jobs, but I'm not really a "Senior Security Analyst". That implies years of working specifically in security.
"IT" is a field with specialties. In the field we may be able to function outside of our specialties, or even change our specialties, but I think the days are gone when you might get hired to be a sys admin and wind up programming the accounting systems. Except in the smallest one or two man IT operations we all might do a little of everything, but we're HIRED to do something fairly specific. After ten year of supporting users and administering Unix systems I just don't see anyone hiring me to develop C++ apps. My ability to so not withstanding.
Crying "racism" and "xenophobia" are ways to say that you can't refute my argument any other way. Throw in a good nazi analogy while you're at it, then you can really godwin yourself.
Oh, so sorry. I was misunderstanding comments such as:
"Similarly, instead of being able to get a human (or substandard indian variant thereof)"
"Got nothing but idiot Indians with accents thick enough to strangle a moose"
"jobs are moved to third-world crap countries."
and of course this entire paragraph:
"An illegal mexican built your house, and you paid the price: money out of YOUR pocket on repairs, plus YOUR inflated tax bill to pay for his illegal family's medical bills in the emergency room, his anchor baby's birth in the local hospital, his illegal kids' schooling (stealing directly from YOUR kid's education), the crimes committed by his illegal friends and his kids in gangs [wikipedia.org], and of course the fact that HE and HIS ILLEGAL FAMILY are stealing someone's social security number to run up debt in their name."
As being racist and xenophobic simply because they imply such things as: "Indians are sub-human", "All Mexicans are criminals", "people should not have accents", and "Third world countries have crappy people."
Now based on your reply I realize that you're not being racist at all. You realize that there are fine people in India and Mexico, or at least there were. Thankfully they have all already legally immigrated here, so we can feel free to despise the ones that stayed or were, for one reason or another, unable to get a visa. Certainly all of them ARE criminals, lazy, or even sub-human.
Whatever you meant (and I'm sad to say that while your intentions may not have been racist per se, they do display a disturbing lack of empathy for people outside of this country), you came across as spewing racist xenophobia. The quotes above show exactly that. While you may not have meant to include all Indians, or all Mexicans, you use both terms in the plural and don't clarify that you're speaking of a subset. I will grant that when talking about Mexicans you always specify "illegal Mexicans", but you don't subdivide Indians at all and your overall tone suggests that you are the type of person who considers all Mexicans to be "illegal Mexicans".
I have in fact met "Illegal Mexicans", I lived in New Orleans after Katrina. There were many migrants there from all over South America trying to make a few bucks in the rebuild. There was a significant rise in crime when they arrived, and it's true that the Mexican gangs follow the migrants. It's easy to hide amongst them. That doesn't mean that there weren't also good, smart, and hard working people scattered in too. A few were even giving part of their incredibly meager incomes to the relief agencies.
That is a pretty serious problem. I recently quit my job as Senior Sys Admin of a small but very technical niche company. I'm not having much problem getting bites on new jobs, so there is clearly demand (Hopefully that demand translates in to a job soon but I'm still feeling pretty confident).
All of this to say that I've realized since I started serious hunting for a new job, that almost no one outside the field has any idea what I do. I've been sent ads for everything from programming jobs, to help desk jobs, to senior security analyst jobs by friends and family. We've created a modern version of the Masons. No one knows what we do, what our specialties mean, or how we accomplish the stuff that they see on their screens.
if I go into a marketing meeting, I can contribute. I'm not a trained marketer, my ideas might need polish or might not even be good, but I understand what they are doing. I can say stuff and not look completely clueless. A marketer in a tech meeting may as well be on Mars. We're barely speaking English, it's acronyms and abbreviations and source code. Unless you are in the cabal you can hardly understand what you don't understand.
The question is: can this be fixed? It's an inherently complex topic in which higher math and logic are par for the course in getting basic concepts. How can we make so people are capable pf grokking without years of training, experience or both?
By industry CS is usually considered IT. The people that do it are, as often as not, under the CIO. The exception is very large software/computer companies that have "R&D" (think IBM, MS, Apple here) or research facilities. Even then, I think the Labor Department still considers it all IT.
The sad bits of truth sprinkled throughout this rant are completely neutralized by your obvious racism and xenophobia. It's really a shame, you make some excellent points, but a) clearly blame the wrong people, and b) clearly hate and fear those people. None of this is the fault of the Indian tech support guy, or the illegal Mexican. They're just trying to do the best they can with very little. I've known plenty of Indians and Mexicans; their intelligence and work ethic vary across the same spectrum as any American's. These people just want the same thing you do, a chance at a living wage in comfortable circumstances, and many of them have far more challenges to over come in finding that goal than you ever will.
Feel free to believe that the government and corporations are shipping your jobs overseas or giving you substandard service. It's certain true in some cases. Don't blame a bunch of poor people in developing countries for your problems though.