As for talent leaving, the article provides one example of 3 employees who left because they were unsure of Oracle's commitment to their work.
In addition to that example that article also had the most hilarious attempt at making the brain-drain seem significant EVER: "Talent defections are common in acquisitions. Losing the JRuby crew [the three employees in question] isn't quite as bad as losing James Gosling, the creator of Java. He remains firmly with Sun but his departure would be devastating if it did happen."
In other words, "yeah, I know the loss of these guys doesn't seem like a big deal but imagine if someone important left! We're not saying anyone will, and there hasn't been any indication that they might, but imagine what would happen if they did!"
BSD people just want the code to be used for the good of society; if you make money off it, so what.
That's fine with me. What I don't get are the anti-GPL BSD people. So you have a goal, the other developers have the goal of promoting code to be publicly available no matter what. They're different goals, there should be different licenses.
I also remember the fiasco a while back when BSD people got up at arms when some wireless driver code got placed in the Linux kernel under the GPL. So it's ok to take the code, create a derivative of it and re-license the derivative with a proprietary license, but you can't take the code, and re-license the derivative as GPL? What gives?
Blah, of course it would not make it harder than if no code existed, but it could make it significantly easier if a reasonable license was used.
So, you write code that is proprietary, but does what I want. I want to use your code. Damnit, your license won't allow me to do so. You will license it for me for lots of cash though, but the cost is too high. I guess I'm going to have to go write my own, but gosh darnit, it would make it significantly easier if you had chosen a reasonable license. It's exactly the same situation as the GPL, but in that case the "cost" is not directly monetary, but instead a requirement of open sourcing any derivative code you distribute.
Listen if EVERYONE were required to make their license BSD, there would be no need for the GPL. As it is, your complaint that code has already been written but you can't use it is precisely the reason the GPL exists. It's trying to ensure that if you write code using it, that everybody else can make use of it as well. If you make it proprietary, the code has been written, but nobody else gets to use it. That's a situation Stallman didn't like, and apparently neither do you, so what exactly is it that you dislike about the GPL?
So both sides agree, why are you fighting? The whole point of licensing your work as GPL is that you're interested in eliminating proprietary software. If you want to write proprietary software, I don't want you to use my code. I'm not "happy" because my awesome work wasn't enough to make you turn away from proprietary work, but I'm ok with that. You're not "happy" because you had to go find an alternate solution either by making it yourself or finding something with a more agreeable license, but you're ok with that too.
We're both ok with the current situation and neither of us would be better suited by changing. I don't achieve my goals by switching away from the GPL because my goal isn't getting proprietary software to use my code. You don't achieve your goals by using my code because you don't want to release things under the GPL. Basically, there's nothing wrong with your decision to not use GPL software and there's nothing wrong with my decision to license software as GPL. Discussion is over, what's next?
Pull a stunt like that and you'd strike out if I was interviewing you.
You say that as if it were a bad thing. What makes you think he'd want to work for you?
To each their own, but fer christ sakes it is an email client not your main development tool!
He doesn't care about the e-mail client. He's trying to gauge whether he has total freedom to choose whatever tools he wants, or if the IT department pretty much dictates what he can or can't use. If he doesn't have total freedom, he doesn't want to work for you, and if you "strike him out" it doesn't matter because he already decided he would refuse your offer anyway.
The whole point of his "we don't tell Babe Ruth how to hold his bat" story is that he wants to work in a place where his management tells him, "here's what we want done, and we don't care how you do it." There are places like that, I work in one of them. They're usually small businesses, so the salary isn't really competitive, but then again there's a lot less stress (and I'll make that choice any day). I also managed to skip the mass layoffs of the big companies last year because every employee we have is vital for the continued existence of the place. When we lose contracts, we each get less work, but none of us can be fired because nobody else here is qualified to do anybody else's job. As long as we have ONE contract to work on, we're all needed. So, basically, the only way anyone gets fired is if the company goes under entirely or we're incompetent at our duties.
A lot of people think of interviews as being one-sided where the potential new employee just wants a way to pay for his bills. The fact that anyone still holds this belief is why we need more unions. The interview should be a place where you're as worried that the person you're interviewing might refuse your offer as he is that you might find somebody more suitable for the job. Assuming you both want to work together that is, which is not supposed to be a given.
How old are these machines that some people are running? My families oldest computer is from 1997 and runs Windows 95, should people expect that to be supported?
You shouldn't "expect it," but it's a certainly a plus when it works. The aim should always be to to write code that performs as well as possible for the task at hand and if you could boast that your software runs on a 486 with 16mb of ram, the response shouldn't be, "but who runs 486's these days?" The response should be "awesome, that means it'll be instant on my modern computer while keeping plenty of resources available for other apps to run AND I can recommend it to my grandfather who refuses to upgrade."
There would need to significant financial incentives for Tesla to become a serious contender in the automobile market. Asit is, there is a little incentive to buy a greener car these days, but not enough to cover the gap in price.
You remember last year when we had $4 / gallon gas? If you don't think that's going to be back by this time next year and that 3 years from now the cost will get to at least $5 / gallon, then you're living in la-la land. The financial incentive is coming in fast.
Honestly, I'm amazed we still have public libraries. I mean, they let people read FOR FREE for crying out loud. People are gaining knowledge, cultures are being distributed, ideas are being thought... and it's not being monetized?! This madness has to stop!
You jest, but if you read some of the comments in the recent slashdot poll about how many items you currently have on loan from the library you'll find that quite a few people want to see them ended. Some people believe it's not worth their tax money. Others argue that entertainment books as opposed to purely educational books should not exist in a library.
Honestly, I fully expect that public libraries will cease to exist in my lifetime. That will be a sad day that will may well mark the beginning of the end of our civilization but, between the greed of publishers and waning citizen support, it's inevitable that it will happen.
gcc is doing precisely the wrong thing - optimising out the if on the theory that the app would have crashed if it was null.
No, that's not the theory. They weren't optimizing the if out because the app would have crashed, they were optimizing the if out because if the programmer is dereferencing foo beforehand without testing, one can assume that the programmer is sure that foo is not null by that point. I agree with you that a warning should be thrown (and I'm not sure if it is or isn't), but that if really should be optimized out.
But do competitors have the right to profit using your own trademark? That's more the case in point. It's not that they are doing it better. It's that they are using the name recognition of the Rosetta Software to peddle their own product.
That's not a problem, and that's as it should be so as to not give someone entrenched in the market an advantage. Trademarks aren't there to protect against the case you're describing. The reason trademark exists is to protect against someone pretending to be you. That is, it should be perfectly fine for Pepsi to say, "if you like Coke, try Pepsi! You'll like it better!" It should be perfectly fine for pepsi to show up in a search for coke, as long as coke also shows up. In fact, it's preferable, because I might want to look into similar products. It's not alright for Pepsi to release a drink and call it Coke because that leads to confusion and people not knowing whether or not they're buying Coke or Pepsi's Coke. That's what trademarks are made to prevent.
I wouldn't trade my internet access for his staff of servants...
On the contrary. By your argument, you should give up your internet access, move to a trailer, and accept a job that takes 1/10th of your current salary and still be ecstatically happy. Your standard of living if you did that would still beat the standard of living of people in most of human history.
Which is my point. You're saying internet access and modern medicine improves quality of life over a time when these did not exist. I agree, and nobody would argue otherwise. However, you're contradicting yourself by saying you couldn't live without those things and be as happy. If you compare your standard of living without them with the standard of living in the past, you're still winning.
Do you think feudalism works as well as a political system as the system we have today? Because a vassal's life also improves as technology improves, so why should he care about anything else?
Ideally, individual liberties will be maximally respected and upheld.
Yes, sure. What does this have to do with anything? Oh, I see...you're a libertarian, now I understand the posts. You lack any reasonable understanding of economics, as most libertarians do.
If that goal is accomplished, it will pretty much guarantee that the poor will get richer at a rapid clip.
By your convenient definition, sure. If you're better off today then people were 300 years ago, they're "richer" than they were 300 years ago.
And if that goal is accomplished, why should anyone care whether the poor get richer at a faster rate than the rich get richer, or vice versa?
Because when you control more resources, you become in a position to control everybody else's lives. A minimum-wage employee can't bargain with her employer at the same level. The employer can say, "I want you to work this weekend." If the employee refuses, the employer can threaten to terminate his employment. On the other hand, if the working conditions are bad, the employee can't threaten to quit, because it would hurt him (no money to buy food next month) more than it would hurt his employer (decreased output).
Similarly, a pure unregulated market works fine when there's plenty of competition, and that's what people always cite when they talk about the benefits of the free market. However they forget that monopolies are also an equilibrium position, and the free market doesn't work as a monopoly. There's also collusion, which grants companies some of the benefits of monopolies over customers.
Basically, the moment anyone actually puts some thought into it, they realize monopoly anti-trust regulations are necessary. They realize that heavy consumer-friendly regulation is necessary. They realize taxation that performs some amount of wealth redistribution is necessary. Anybody else might be covering their eyes and ears going "la-la-la-la" but they'd still be wrong. And it's your right to be wrong, I'll grant you that. Luckily for us, your position is unsustainable and the pendulum must always swing back. The "captains of industry" can't go and make their own society in a John Galt fashion because they need labor. If the medium-class / upper-class gap rises too much, that means the unhappy middle-class outnumbers the upper-class in elections and they get to vote for that wealth redistribution. Basically, you may not like it, but you're stuck with it.
Because "rich" and "poor" is relative, and "middle class" is defined as being between those two relative states. You know, "middle."
Suppose an omnipotent being offered to transform society as follows: all the inventions of the last 300 years would be erased, but you, personally, would be 1000 times richer than the average miserable sod. I would not take that deal -- I'd lose access to computers, modern medicine, and lots of other stuff that I love.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Yes, we as a whole are better off. No, I don't want all of society to be worse off in exchange for being comparatively better off. Where was that implied?
I'd rather be an average shmoe in 2009 -- even if I'm not middle-class, by your definition -- than fabulously wealthy in 1709. I don't care if the gap between me and the "rich" increases exponentially, if it means things keep getting better for me.
Ok. Obviously. So would I. What the hell is your point? That 2009 is better than 1709? No shit. If you were living in 1709 you'd be happy being being middle class then because it was better than middle class from 1509. Would you be happy living in 2009 with a standard of living from the middle class of 1709? No? Why not? It's still an improvement over the middle class of 1509 and by your definition all that matters is that there is an improvement over time!
That's why you can't compare it to the past. You don't compare the standard of living of today directly with the standard of living of the past. It's simply not applicable. Nobody can have access to computers, cars, or modern medicine in 1709 because those things did not exist. It was impossible for even the stinking rich to have. You are therefore not making a comparison of wealth.
Wealth is what you can afford based on things that currently exist. So the only way to make a valid comparison is to examine how the richest of the rich live today. The define what is possible. Then you compare how far away you are from them. Then you compare how far away people in the equivalent class in 1709 were from their upper class. Now you're comparing wealth: what you can afford that actually exists in your time.
It seems like you would hurt the living standards of average people simply out of spite for the rich. Shame on you.
I never implied the rich getting poorer is an acceptable compromise to the expansion of the middle class. Obviously that implies we're all worse off. However, everyone's wealth should increase proportionally at the very least (assuming better technology but no social advances) and ideally, the gap between the classes should diminish by having the wealth in the lower and middle classes increase at a faster rate than the upper class (everyone has increased access to the resources of the time).
Compared to what and when? The middle class of forty years ago would never have considered themselves to middle class if they had two cars, four televisions, mobile phones, fresh produce from Chile flown into their local grocery store every day, etc. If people today deliberately stuck to similarly scaled expectations and monthly overhead, they'd live far, far better than the middle class to which you seem to be comparing them. They're not vanishing - you're just changing the definition.
Oh please. You're missing two important points:
You can't compare the middle class of today with the middle class of forty years ago. The middle class is defined by the income differences of people living at the same time. The question you need to ask is whether the difference in income between the richest people and our current middle class has stayed proportionally the same or whether the gap is bigger. If we do it your way, you can pick the poorest people in the globe and claim that they are "rich" because their standard of living beats the crap out of the standard of living of our cave-dwelling and cave-painting artist ancestors.
Can we really afford those two cars, four televisions, and mobile phones or are do we just have more people with an income per household (middle-class married women rarely worked outside the home forty-years ago) and generally have increased debt just to keep up with the neighbors in the way of toys?
No. Fear isn't all or nothing. It's stupid not to fear terrorism at all.
No, it is not. If you're going to be afraid of things that have almost no chance of ever affecting you at all, you're not going to live your life normally. In fact, we're NOT living our lives normally because of that stupid fear. We're putting up with crap we would never have put up with before 9/11. Get the number of American deaths due to terrorism (any type, including not on american soil) over the past 10 years. Get the number of American deaths due to traffic accidents over the past 10 years. Then tell me the fear is justified.
19 guys were able to do significant damage to the US. They since have successfully operated in Britain and Spain. Isn't that frightening on some level?
No more than Timothy McVeigh's bombing, but nobody seemed to go batshit insane after that (2 people caused ~600 deaths with the oklahoma city bombing vs 19 people caused ~3000 deaths with 9/11...I'm not sure why this is relevant, but your point seemed to be that because only 19 people caused all that damage, this is something that has never happened before, so I guess I should point out that in actually deaths per person responsible ratios were higher with an event of terrorism that happened before). They found out who was responsible, had a trial and that was that.
Look, I'm not saying law enforcement and intelligence agencies don't need to take steps to try to prevent that type of thing, but it's a pure law enforcement problem. It's like gang violence. You don't change your life because some kid on the other side of your town got shot. You don't change your life because some nutjobs are killing people. You worry about things that actually have a chance of affecting you. You don't want to die of cancer, be afraid of smoking cigarettes. You want to avoid dying in a traffic accident? Try to be a more attentive and careful driver. You're afraid of heart disease? Try to eat healthier. Those steps you take will have a much greater positive effect in your life than getting fingerprinted when you leave the country ever will.
I really don't get it. Some crazed American anarchist bombs a building and people react normally to it (there's grief, there's anger, that's all normal. We don't have a fundamental change and start fingerprinting people who enter the proximity of federal buildings). Some crazed religious nutjobs hijack planes and crash them into buildings and everyone freaks out because they're foreign and hold a religion not of their own and people start thinking it's ok to wiretap our phones without warrants, it's ok to fingerprint americans just because they're leaving the country, it's ok to hold people prisoner without trials...
Also, fear is usally not of death. More people are frightened of public speaking than death.
Alright, "fear of public speaking" is a fear, but it's a completely different fear than fear of death. It gives you some knots in your stomach, depending on your anxiety levels it might even cause you to avoid speaking in public at all. If you're genuinely afraid that you're going to die, you're going to do things that you would never do under any other circumstances. People were jumping off the towers because they'd rather die by splatting in the concrete than in the fire. You're not going to jump off a building because you're rather not make that 3pm presentation. This is my entire point, btw...you should be more scared of traffic accidents than terrorism, just like you should be more scared of death than of public speaking.
Fear of violence, uncontrolled violence, is scarier than dynig at an old age in a medical bed
Seriously? Dying a slow, possibly painful, most likely undignified (being unable to go to the bathroom by yourself) death is scarier to you than 2 minutes of panic followed by a quick death?
Sure. Terrorism is scary. It's false bravado to claim you aren't worried about it to some degree.
Bullshit. I have one or two orders of magnitude greater chance of dying from heart disease, but I still eat greasy burgers. But I don't fear it enough to stop eating greasy burgers. I have a greater chance of dying on a car accident, but I don't fear it enough to avoid getting in my car everyday to go to work. You're telling me I should fear fucking terrorism enough to inconvenience me to take my shoes off at an airport? Fuck that. I don't, and I can't possibly understand how anyone else in the security line can justify it when they had the courage to drive to the airport and eat mcdonalds for lunch. Hell, the chances of their plane crashing from accidental causes is greater.
Terrorism is a non-threat. When you believe otherwise, you're doing the terrorists a favor because terrorizing you is the whole point.
I hate to have to be the one to break this to you, but they've been lying to you. Not every single work of fiction is some deep allegory for some aspect of the human condition.
Actually, they haven't, and you're wrong. No, not every single work of fiction is deep allegory for some aspect of the human condition. The vast majority of it has a really obvious message about the human condition that they beat you over the head with, and sometimes actually state it with words. However, everything you've ever experienced that was made by human beings was about some aspect of the human condition. There's no getting around it.
Pong is not about the futility of existence.
No. Pong is also not a story. It is a representation of the game of Ping Pong as a videogame. And activities which humans find entertaining very much tells you something about us.
our favorite porn video, that one with the really great anal scene, is not about sexism in modern culture.
No. It's about our need for sex, which is very much a part of the human condition. The fact that they bother to include plots in porn movies also tells you that some level of fantasy is important to people. It also tells you about the kind of weird fantasies we have. We'd like the girl delivering pizza to accept "alternate" methods of payment and other equally ridiculous stuff. Do you know why porn plots include shit like that? Because people genuinely have that fantasy when a hot chick comes to deliver their pizza. That's interesting stuff, exactly how much we think about sex, under what circumstances, and what we wish would happen in our everyday lives even though we don't actually believe it's anywhere near possible.
And Terminator is not about anything but blowing shit up and causal loops.
First of all, the first Terminator movie was much deeper than you give it credit for. Second, despite your stupid elitist attitude, the very fact that "blowing shit up" brings in an audience tells you something about the human condition. It tells you we're violent by nature. You can see that in a lot of the games we play as well.
There's nothing a human being does that isn't about human beings. There's nothing a human being creates that isn't art. Believing anything else is a crappy attempt to feel like you're better than others because you think you're smart enough to enjoy "real art" while everyone else is enjoying so-called "low-brow" pop-culture. Newsflash, pal: if you don't "get" pop-culture, you're not that smart, and if you don't see the artistic value of the "low-brow" culture, you're missing many of the tools you need to proper understand the "high brow" art.
I don't care that they lack the knowledge. I care that they lack the understanding that they lack it.
Yeah, precisely. Although not always the case, I'd also say that's the symptom of a greater problem. When they don't understand that they are ignorant about a subject, that's when they ignore IT rules because "oh, the rules were made for people who aren't as computer literate as I am."
Oh, and kudos to the excellent username!
Thanks. Unlike Slartibartfast's threat, my username actually means I was late. I tried registering ArthurDent but, predictably, it was already taken. I was actually kinda surprised mine wasn't, I thought it was an obvious second choice (and perhaps even better).
agreed. In the example of the radiator, they might say radiator but it could be a thermostat, hose or water pump.
I think everyone's missing the point. We don't expect users to understand what all the components of their computers are. We expect them to stop pretending they do.
I'm really very ignorant about cars, and if something goes wrong with my car, I don't take it to a mechanic and start guessing: "it's a problem with the radiator." I tell him, "there's a problem with my car and explain the symptoms. Let him figure it out.
Similarly, users saying, "my hard drive is broken" when they mean the computer would seriously piss me off. Just say, "there's a problem with my computer" and explain the problem. Let the experts figure out what's wrong and stop trying to use technical terms you don't understand.
I cannot speak to CS, but in electrical engineering having a Masters doesn't mean anything.
According to average salaries information from this site, you are dead wrong: no masters, masters
That's been my personal experience as well. When your boss all but laughs and says, "having that masters degree doesn't mean anything here" he's trying to make you satisfied with your current salary, which is probably below average for your education. He might be right that it doesn't mean anything at the place where you work now but all that means is that you should be looking into working elsewhere. That's assuming you care about the money more than you care about your working conditions (your working conditions where you are now could be fantastic, and I'd take that over money every time, personally). If that's not the case though, get the hell out.
A couple of things I found amusing - first, I was born in 1986, and yet I still got into PC games in DOS. I started formulating this reply as soon as I read that you thought one had to be born before 1984 for this to be true:)
You were born in 1986 and your parents already let you be on the internet? You can't be more than...wait...holy fuck...you're probably done with college
As long as he is not so young that he still has his hair... that would be simply unacceptable -- Picard with hair!
No, unacceptable was when they tried to pretend he didn't have hair when he was young in Nemesis, even though it had already been Established in Tapestry (and mentioned in Insurrection) that he did.
2) jailbreak - then you truly own it, but things can and do break and generally don't work as well as with an non-jailbroken phone (in my experience, your mileage may vary).
Not really trying to prove you wrong here, because I also only have my own experience to draw upon, but what kind of problems did you run into? Pretty much the only difference I noticed between my iPhone and a non-jailbroken version is that I can ssh into it, and have access to a non-apple "app store" in the form of cydia.
Stability, compatibility with apple's stuff (like the app store and itunes), all seems to be the same. Could it be that you installed a buggy app from cydia, and that it's not actually the jailbreaking that caused your phone to "not work as well"?
AOL based their entire business on local dial up and they had no plan for transitioning to broadband. Any fool can see that in 2009 and their valuation at the time of the merger looks silly in hindsight.
Dude, I know hindsight is 20/20, but everyone except Time Warner executives knew the merger was a bad idea back in 2000. Another person above posted this article from The Onion from back then.
I remember every single person I knew going, "what the fuck?" when we heard of the merger. It was 2000! I was wasn't exactly living in an urban metropolis, but I already had had access to broadband for over a year. Everyone knew AOL was going to crumble and quick.
Slashdot Mirror
As for talent leaving, the article provides one example of 3 employees who left because they were unsure of Oracle's commitment to their work.
In addition to that example that article also had the most hilarious attempt at making the brain-drain seem significant EVER: "Talent defections are common in acquisitions. Losing the JRuby crew [the three employees in question] isn't quite as bad as losing James Gosling, the creator of Java. He remains firmly with Sun but his departure would be devastating if it did happen."
In other words, "yeah, I know the loss of these guys doesn't seem like a big deal but imagine if someone important left! We're not saying anyone will, and there hasn't been any indication that they might, but imagine what would happen if they did!"
any links to that story?
It was actually on Slashdot a while back. I remember having seen it.
BSD people just want the code to be used for the good of society; if you make money off it, so what.
That's fine with me. What I don't get are the anti-GPL BSD people. So you have a goal, the other developers have the goal of promoting code to be publicly available no matter what. They're different goals, there should be different licenses.
I also remember the fiasco a while back when BSD people got up at arms when some wireless driver code got placed in the Linux kernel under the GPL. So it's ok to take the code, create a derivative of it and re-license the derivative with a proprietary license, but you can't take the code, and re-license the derivative as GPL? What gives?
Blah, of course it would not make it harder than if no code existed, but it could make it significantly easier if a reasonable license was used.
So, you write code that is proprietary, but does what I want. I want to use your code. Damnit, your license won't allow me to do so. You will license it for me for lots of cash though, but the cost is too high. I guess I'm going to have to go write my own, but gosh darnit, it would make it significantly easier if you had chosen a reasonable license. It's exactly the same situation as the GPL, but in that case the "cost" is not directly monetary, but instead a requirement of open sourcing any derivative code you distribute.
Listen if EVERYONE were required to make their license BSD, there would be no need for the GPL. As it is, your complaint that code has already been written but you can't use it is precisely the reason the GPL exists. It's trying to ensure that if you write code using it, that everybody else can make use of it as well. If you make it proprietary, the code has been written, but nobody else gets to use it. That's a situation Stallman didn't like, and apparently neither do you, so what exactly is it that you dislike about the GPL?
THEN DON'T USE IT
We won't. That's the whole point being made here
So both sides agree, why are you fighting? The whole point of licensing your work as GPL is that you're interested in eliminating proprietary software. If you want to write proprietary software, I don't want you to use my code. I'm not "happy" because my awesome work wasn't enough to make you turn away from proprietary work, but I'm ok with that. You're not "happy" because you had to go find an alternate solution either by making it yourself or finding something with a more agreeable license, but you're ok with that too.
We're both ok with the current situation and neither of us would be better suited by changing. I don't achieve my goals by switching away from the GPL because my goal isn't getting proprietary software to use my code. You don't achieve your goals by using my code because you don't want to release things under the GPL. Basically, there's nothing wrong with your decision to not use GPL software and there's nothing wrong with my decision to license software as GPL. Discussion is over, what's next?
Pull a stunt like that and you'd strike out if I was interviewing you.
You say that as if it were a bad thing. What makes you think he'd want to work for you?
To each their own, but fer christ sakes it is an email client not your main development tool!
He doesn't care about the e-mail client. He's trying to gauge whether he has total freedom to choose whatever tools he wants, or if the IT department pretty much dictates what he can or can't use. If he doesn't have total freedom, he doesn't want to work for you, and if you "strike him out" it doesn't matter because he already decided he would refuse your offer anyway.
The whole point of his "we don't tell Babe Ruth how to hold his bat" story is that he wants to work in a place where his management tells him, "here's what we want done, and we don't care how you do it." There are places like that, I work in one of them. They're usually small businesses, so the salary isn't really competitive, but then again there's a lot less stress (and I'll make that choice any day). I also managed to skip the mass layoffs of the big companies last year because every employee we have is vital for the continued existence of the place. When we lose contracts, we each get less work, but none of us can be fired because nobody else here is qualified to do anybody else's job. As long as we have ONE contract to work on, we're all needed. So, basically, the only way anyone gets fired is if the company goes under entirely or we're incompetent at our duties.
A lot of people think of interviews as being one-sided where the potential new employee just wants a way to pay for his bills. The fact that anyone still holds this belief is why we need more unions. The interview should be a place where you're as worried that the person you're interviewing might refuse your offer as he is that you might find somebody more suitable for the job. Assuming you both want to work together that is, which is not supposed to be a given.
How old are these machines that some people are running? My families oldest computer is from 1997 and runs Windows 95, should people expect that to be supported?
You shouldn't "expect it," but it's a certainly a plus when it works. The aim should always be to to write code that performs as well as possible for the task at hand and if you could boast that your software runs on a 486 with 16mb of ram, the response shouldn't be, "but who runs 486's these days?" The response should be "awesome, that means it'll be instant on my modern computer while keeping plenty of resources available for other apps to run AND I can recommend it to my grandfather who refuses to upgrade."
There would need to significant financial incentives for Tesla to become a serious contender in the automobile market. Asit is, there is a little incentive to buy a greener car these days, but not enough to cover the gap in price.
You remember last year when we had $4 / gallon gas? If you don't think that's going to be back by this time next year and that 3 years from now the cost will get to at least $5 / gallon, then you're living in la-la land. The financial incentive is coming in fast.
In fact, implementation would be trivial.
10 PRINT "What?" 20 PRINT "I don't understand" 30 PRINT "Where's the tea?" 40 GOTO 10
What?
Honestly, I'm amazed we still have public libraries. I mean, they let people read FOR FREE for crying out loud. People are gaining knowledge, cultures are being distributed, ideas are being thought... and it's not being monetized?! This madness has to stop!
You jest, but if you read some of the comments in the recent slashdot poll about how many items you currently have on loan from the library you'll find that quite a few people want to see them ended. Some people believe it's not worth their tax money. Others argue that entertainment books as opposed to purely educational books should not exist in a library.
Honestly, I fully expect that public libraries will cease to exist in my lifetime. That will be a sad day that will may well mark the beginning of the end of our civilization but, between the greed of publishers and waning citizen support, it's inevitable that it will happen.
Given the code:
a = foo->bar;
if(foo) something()
gcc is doing precisely the wrong thing - optimising out the if on the theory that the app would have crashed if it was null.
No, that's not the theory. They weren't optimizing the if out because the app would have crashed, they were optimizing the if out because if the programmer is dereferencing foo beforehand without testing, one can assume that the programmer is sure that foo is not null by that point. I agree with you that a warning should be thrown (and I'm not sure if it is or isn't), but that if really should be optimized out.
But do competitors have the right to profit using your own trademark? That's more the case in point. It's not that they are doing it better. It's that they are using the name recognition of the Rosetta Software to peddle their own product.
That's not a problem, and that's as it should be so as to not give someone entrenched in the market an advantage. Trademarks aren't there to protect against the case you're describing. The reason trademark exists is to protect against someone pretending to be you. That is, it should be perfectly fine for Pepsi to say, "if you like Coke, try Pepsi! You'll like it better!" It should be perfectly fine for pepsi to show up in a search for coke, as long as coke also shows up. In fact, it's preferable, because I might want to look into similar products. It's not alright for Pepsi to release a drink and call it Coke because that leads to confusion and people not knowing whether or not they're buying Coke or Pepsi's Coke. That's what trademarks are made to prevent.
I wouldn't trade my internet access for his staff of servants...
On the contrary. By your argument, you should give up your internet access, move to a trailer, and accept a job that takes 1/10th of your current salary and still be ecstatically happy. Your standard of living if you did that would still beat the standard of living of people in most of human history.
Which is my point. You're saying internet access and modern medicine improves quality of life over a time when these did not exist. I agree, and nobody would argue otherwise. However, you're contradicting yourself by saying you couldn't live without those things and be as happy. If you compare your standard of living without them with the standard of living in the past, you're still winning.
Do you think feudalism works as well as a political system as the system we have today? Because a vassal's life also improves as technology improves, so why should he care about anything else?
Ideally, individual liberties will be maximally respected and upheld.
Yes, sure. What does this have to do with anything? Oh, I see...you're a libertarian, now I understand the posts. You lack any reasonable understanding of economics, as most libertarians do.
If that goal is accomplished, it will pretty much guarantee that the poor will get richer at a rapid clip.
By your convenient definition, sure. If you're better off today then people were 300 years ago, they're "richer" than they were 300 years ago.
And if that goal is accomplished, why should anyone care whether the poor get richer at a faster rate than the rich get richer, or vice versa?
Because when you control more resources, you become in a position to control everybody else's lives. A minimum-wage employee can't bargain with her employer at the same level. The employer can say, "I want you to work this weekend." If the employee refuses, the employer can threaten to terminate his employment. On the other hand, if the working conditions are bad, the employee can't threaten to quit, because it would hurt him (no money to buy food next month) more than it would hurt his employer (decreased output).
Similarly, a pure unregulated market works fine when there's plenty of competition, and that's what people always cite when they talk about the benefits of the free market. However they forget that monopolies are also an equilibrium position, and the free market doesn't work as a monopoly. There's also collusion, which grants companies some of the benefits of monopolies over customers.
Basically, the moment anyone actually puts some thought into it, they realize monopoly anti-trust regulations are necessary. They realize that heavy consumer-friendly regulation is necessary. They realize taxation that performs some amount of wealth redistribution is necessary. Anybody else might be covering their eyes and ears going "la-la-la-la" but they'd still be wrong. And it's your right to be wrong, I'll grant you that. Luckily for us, your position is unsustainable and the pendulum must always swing back. The "captains of industry" can't go and make their own society in a John Galt fashion because they need labor. If the medium-class / upper-class gap rises too much, that means the unhappy middle-class outnumbers the upper-class in elections and they get to vote for that wealth redistribution. Basically, you may not like it, but you're stuck with it.
Why do you want to define it that way?
Because "rich" and "poor" is relative, and "middle class" is defined as being between those two relative states. You know, "middle."
Suppose an omnipotent being offered to transform society as follows: all the inventions of the last 300 years would be erased, but you, personally, would be 1000 times richer than the average miserable sod. I would not take that deal -- I'd lose access to computers, modern medicine, and lots of other stuff that I love.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Yes, we as a whole are better off. No, I don't want all of society to be worse off in exchange for being comparatively better off. Where was that implied?
I'd rather be an average shmoe in 2009 -- even if I'm not middle-class, by your definition -- than fabulously wealthy in 1709. I don't care if the gap between me and the "rich" increases exponentially, if it means things keep getting better for me.
Ok. Obviously. So would I. What the hell is your point? That 2009 is better than 1709? No shit. If you were living in 1709 you'd be happy being being middle class then because it was better than middle class from 1509. Would you be happy living in 2009 with a standard of living from the middle class of 1709? No? Why not? It's still an improvement over the middle class of 1509 and by your definition all that matters is that there is an improvement over time!
That's why you can't compare it to the past. You don't compare the standard of living of today directly with the standard of living of the past. It's simply not applicable. Nobody can have access to computers, cars, or modern medicine in 1709 because those things did not exist. It was impossible for even the stinking rich to have. You are therefore not making a comparison of wealth.
Wealth is what you can afford based on things that currently exist. So the only way to make a valid comparison is to examine how the richest of the rich live today. The define what is possible. Then you compare how far away you are from them. Then you compare how far away people in the equivalent class in 1709 were from their upper class. Now you're comparing wealth: what you can afford that actually exists in your time.
It seems like you would hurt the living standards of average people simply out of spite for the rich. Shame on you.
I never implied the rich getting poorer is an acceptable compromise to the expansion of the middle class. Obviously that implies we're all worse off. However, everyone's wealth should increase proportionally at the very least (assuming better technology but no social advances) and ideally, the gap between the classes should diminish by having the wealth in the lower and middle classes increase at a faster rate than the upper class (everyone has increased access to the resources of the time).
the middle class is vanishing in America
Compared to what and when? The middle class of forty years ago would never have considered themselves to middle class if they had two cars, four televisions, mobile phones, fresh produce from Chile flown into their local grocery store every day, etc. If people today deliberately stuck to similarly scaled expectations and monthly overhead, they'd live far, far better than the middle class to which you seem to be comparing them. They're not vanishing - you're just changing the definition.
Oh please. You're missing two important points:
No. Fear isn't all or nothing. It's stupid not to fear terrorism at all.
No, it is not. If you're going to be afraid of things that have almost no chance of ever affecting you at all, you're not going to live your life normally. In fact, we're NOT living our lives normally because of that stupid fear. We're putting up with crap we would never have put up with before 9/11. Get the number of American deaths due to terrorism (any type, including not on american soil) over the past 10 years. Get the number of American deaths due to traffic accidents over the past 10 years. Then tell me the fear is justified.
19 guys were able to do significant damage to the US. They since have successfully operated in Britain and Spain. Isn't that frightening on some level?
No more than Timothy McVeigh's bombing, but nobody seemed to go batshit insane after that (2 people caused ~600 deaths with the oklahoma city bombing vs 19 people caused ~3000 deaths with 9/11...I'm not sure why this is relevant, but your point seemed to be that because only 19 people caused all that damage, this is something that has never happened before, so I guess I should point out that in actually deaths per person responsible ratios were higher with an event of terrorism that happened before). They found out who was responsible, had a trial and that was that.
Look, I'm not saying law enforcement and intelligence agencies don't need to take steps to try to prevent that type of thing, but it's a pure law enforcement problem. It's like gang violence. You don't change your life because some kid on the other side of your town got shot. You don't change your life because some nutjobs are killing people. You worry about things that actually have a chance of affecting you. You don't want to die of cancer, be afraid of smoking cigarettes. You want to avoid dying in a traffic accident? Try to be a more attentive and careful driver. You're afraid of heart disease? Try to eat healthier. Those steps you take will have a much greater positive effect in your life than getting fingerprinted when you leave the country ever will.
I really don't get it. Some crazed American anarchist bombs a building and people react normally to it (there's grief, there's anger, that's all normal. We don't have a fundamental change and start fingerprinting people who enter the proximity of federal buildings). Some crazed religious nutjobs hijack planes and crash them into buildings and everyone freaks out because they're foreign and hold a religion not of their own and people start thinking it's ok to wiretap our phones without warrants, it's ok to fingerprint americans just because they're leaving the country, it's ok to hold people prisoner without trials...
Also, fear is usally not of death. More people are frightened of public speaking than death.
Alright, "fear of public speaking" is a fear, but it's a completely different fear than fear of death. It gives you some knots in your stomach, depending on your anxiety levels it might even cause you to avoid speaking in public at all. If you're genuinely afraid that you're going to die, you're going to do things that you would never do under any other circumstances. People were jumping off the towers because they'd rather die by splatting in the concrete than in the fire. You're not going to jump off a building because you're rather not make that 3pm presentation. This is my entire point, btw...you should be more scared of traffic accidents than terrorism, just like you should be more scared of death than of public speaking.
Fear of violence, uncontrolled violence, is scarier than dynig at an old age in a medical bed
Seriously? Dying a slow, possibly painful, most likely undignified (being unable to go to the bathroom by yourself) death is scarier to you than 2 minutes of panic followed by a quick death?
Bottom line is that
Sure. Terrorism is scary. It's false bravado to claim you aren't worried about it to some degree.
Bullshit. I have one or two orders of magnitude greater chance of dying from heart disease, but I still eat greasy burgers. But I don't fear it enough to stop eating greasy burgers. I have a greater chance of dying on a car accident, but I don't fear it enough to avoid getting in my car everyday to go to work. You're telling me I should fear fucking terrorism enough to inconvenience me to take my shoes off at an airport? Fuck that. I don't, and I can't possibly understand how anyone else in the security line can justify it when they had the courage to drive to the airport and eat mcdonalds for lunch. Hell, the chances of their plane crashing from accidental causes is greater.
Terrorism is a non-threat. When you believe otherwise, you're doing the terrorists a favor because terrorizing you is the whole point.
I hate to have to be the one to break this to you, but they've been lying to you. Not every single work of fiction is some deep allegory for some aspect of the human condition.
Actually, they haven't, and you're wrong. No, not every single work of fiction is deep allegory for some aspect of the human condition. The vast majority of it has a really obvious message about the human condition that they beat you over the head with, and sometimes actually state it with words. However, everything you've ever experienced that was made by human beings was about some aspect of the human condition. There's no getting around it.
Pong is not about the futility of existence.
No. Pong is also not a story. It is a representation of the game of Ping Pong as a videogame. And activities which humans find entertaining very much tells you something about us.
our favorite porn video, that one with the really great anal scene, is not about sexism in modern culture.
No. It's about our need for sex, which is very much a part of the human condition. The fact that they bother to include plots in porn movies also tells you that some level of fantasy is important to people. It also tells you about the kind of weird fantasies we have. We'd like the girl delivering pizza to accept "alternate" methods of payment and other equally ridiculous stuff. Do you know why porn plots include shit like that? Because people genuinely have that fantasy when a hot chick comes to deliver their pizza. That's interesting stuff, exactly how much we think about sex, under what circumstances, and what we wish would happen in our everyday lives even though we don't actually believe it's anywhere near possible.
And Terminator is not about anything but blowing shit up and causal loops.
First of all, the first Terminator movie was much deeper than you give it credit for. Second, despite your stupid elitist attitude, the very fact that "blowing shit up" brings in an audience tells you something about the human condition. It tells you we're violent by nature. You can see that in a lot of the games we play as well.
There's nothing a human being does that isn't about human beings. There's nothing a human being creates that isn't art. Believing anything else is a crappy attempt to feel like you're better than others because you think you're smart enough to enjoy "real art" while everyone else is enjoying so-called "low-brow" pop-culture. Newsflash, pal: if you don't "get" pop-culture, you're not that smart, and if you don't see the artistic value of the "low-brow" culture, you're missing many of the tools you need to proper understand the "high brow" art.
I don't care that they lack the knowledge. I care that they lack the understanding that they lack it.
Yeah, precisely. Although not always the case, I'd also say that's the symptom of a greater problem. When they don't understand that they are ignorant about a subject, that's when they ignore IT rules because "oh, the rules were made for people who aren't as computer literate as I am."
Oh, and kudos to the excellent username!
Thanks. Unlike Slartibartfast's threat, my username actually means I was late. I tried registering ArthurDent but, predictably, it was already taken. I was actually kinda surprised mine wasn't, I thought it was an obvious second choice (and perhaps even better).
agreed. In the example of the radiator, they might say radiator but it could be a thermostat, hose or water pump.
I think everyone's missing the point. We don't expect users to understand what all the components of their computers are. We expect them to stop pretending they do.
I'm really very ignorant about cars, and if something goes wrong with my car, I don't take it to a mechanic and start guessing: "it's a problem with the radiator." I tell him, "there's a problem with my car and explain the symptoms. Let him figure it out.
Similarly, users saying, "my hard drive is broken" when they mean the computer would seriously piss me off. Just say, "there's a problem with my computer" and explain the problem. Let the experts figure out what's wrong and stop trying to use technical terms you don't understand.
I cannot speak to CS, but in electrical engineering having a Masters doesn't mean anything.
According to average salaries information from this site, you are dead wrong: no masters, masters
That's been my personal experience as well. When your boss all but laughs and says, "having that masters degree doesn't mean anything here" he's trying to make you satisfied with your current salary, which is probably below average for your education. He might be right that it doesn't mean anything at the place where you work now but all that means is that you should be looking into working elsewhere. That's assuming you care about the money more than you care about your working conditions (your working conditions where you are now could be fantastic, and I'd take that over money every time, personally). If that's not the case though, get the hell out.
A couple of things I found amusing - first, I was born in 1986, and yet I still got into PC games in DOS. I started formulating this reply as soon as I read that you thought one had to be born before 1984 for this to be true :)
You were born in 1986 and your parents already let you be on the internet? You can't be more than...wait...holy fuck...you're probably done with college
Thanks pal. Now I feel old.
As long as he is not so young that he still has his hair... that would be simply unacceptable -- Picard with hair!
No, unacceptable was when they tried to pretend he didn't have hair when he was young in Nemesis, even though it had already been Established in Tapestry (and mentioned in Insurrection) that he did.
2) jailbreak - then you truly own it, but things can and do break and generally don't work as well as with an non-jailbroken phone (in my experience, your mileage may vary).
Not really trying to prove you wrong here, because I also only have my own experience to draw upon, but what kind of problems did you run into? Pretty much the only difference I noticed between my iPhone and a non-jailbroken version is that I can ssh into it, and have access to a non-apple "app store" in the form of cydia.
Stability, compatibility with apple's stuff (like the app store and itunes), all seems to be the same. Could it be that you installed a buggy app from cydia, and that it's not actually the jailbreaking that caused your phone to "not work as well"?
AOL based their entire business on local dial up and they had no plan for transitioning to broadband. Any fool can see that in 2009 and their valuation at the time of the merger looks silly in hindsight.
Dude, I know hindsight is 20/20, but everyone except Time Warner executives knew the merger was a bad idea back in 2000. Another person above posted this article from The Onion from back then.
I remember every single person I knew going, "what the fuck?" when we heard of the merger. It was 2000! I was wasn't exactly living in an urban metropolis, but I already had had access to broadband for over a year. Everyone knew AOL was going to crumble and quick.