I have several friends who have completed PhD's in established fields: philosophy, biology, and computer science. The process of getting PhD was a monumental struggle. Then getting a job is a challenge -- though not for the computer science PhD: he got a research job outside of academia.
Once you get an academic job your struggle has just begun. You are pitted against other young professors in a battle to get tenure. You either get tenure or you are asked to leave after a number of years of intense politics, research, writing, and brown nosing. Very stressful And these people were in established fields.
I am not saying don't pursue this if you have a real passion for it but consider other alternatives. Get a practical career as say a compter programmer and make history your hobby. You can get good enough at it to write books and papers without being dependent on the academy for approval. For example, look at Eric Raymond. He is a geek who has established himself as an excellent historian, anthropologist, and philosopher -- but he does not depend on academia for his livelehood. He has written some well respected papers and books.
I have several friends who got PhD's in the last few years. Once you get the teaching job your struggle has just begun. There is huge pressure to 'publish or perish' which means you have to publish a lot of research over a number of years to prove yourself. Then you are either awarded tenure or asked to leave. You are in cut throat competition with your peers. It is not an easy life in the least especially in the liberal arts.
Engineering and computer science are better because there is a shortage of professors. The competition for tenure is a little less intense.
Exactly right: Office is the single greatest barrier to Linux on the desktop, at least in the business world. Virtually everyone uses Office. The average user doesn't care if he or she is using Office or the coffee maker, as long as Office runs! If it will run on Linux without BSOD's and having to reboot all the time, then the average user will be all in favor.
Many Linux users use Linux at home but at work they use Windows on the desktop. System Administrators, even if they run Linux servers, have users that run Windows. Windows is completely dominant on the desktop.
Why in practical terms is Windows so dominant on the desktop (forget about unfair competition for a moment? The answer is that Windows is basically a platform for running Office. Almost every business runs Office. That's how work is done. And, frankly, Office has gotten a lot better in recent years -- so most people don't want to switch.
MS realizes they have a winner in Office so they want to extend its reach. If they port it to Linux they will sell more copies of Office -- and, they think, bring more people to Windows. What it actually will do is remove the greatest barrier, in the business world, to running Linux on the desktop. Tell people: what if I could set you up with a desktop where you could continue your work as normal except few reboots and no BSOD's?!? You would get a good reception as long as you made X start on boot, and you provided some basic training. Now, you've got Linux/Samba/Apache on the server, and Linux/Office on the desktops. That would be a huge step in the right direction.
MS is banking on their ability to continually improve Office and make a product so good that it will stay dominant, even as Linux ascends. Of course, that battle's outcome is far from certain given all the promising developments lately.
They may finally be realizing that trying to hold on to a monopoly in the OS market is a futile exercise. The real strength of MS is not in making a good OS but instead in making user friendly Office applications. They realize that the future for MS on the desktop will be software not in the OS.
If true, this will be good for Linux and good for MS. A lot of people have to use Office for work but hate Windows and would switch to Linux in a second if Office were ported to Linux. This is good for MS because it expands their present and future market for software; this is good for Linux because it removes this tremendous barrier to using Linux in the work place. It would actually be an enlightened move on MS's part to do this.
So the source code of Linux can be changed and not documented by an incompetent member of the IT staff. This may happen in rare cases, but so may all manner of other sorts of incompetence.
When I started my current position, I inhereted, among other things a grossly misconfigured Windows NT 4.0 server. I won't go into too many details but, for example, *everything* was on one partition -- applications and data. The rest of the drive was unpartitioned free space.
The moral of the story is that incompetence and sloth don't require open source. In fact, since a closed source OS like Windows NT/2000 requires little knowledge to use and to network -- it is more likely to be done in a half-assed manner.
I have only been a geek for about 4 years now and have needed help at various times. When I was first starting out, people came to my home to teach me things. On many occasions I have gotten information from emailing friends and especially from Usenet groups. At my current job I have a mentor who works at a different company. Usually we communicate through email -- but one day I was really struggling with something and he showed up at my work out of the blue to help me. This almost brought tears to my eyes.
I am saying this because I cannot imagine people in most other professions spending that much time and effort helping other people in their profession to make progress. Geeks, however, think that to help other geeks make progress helps the whole community advance. This is altruism. To say that geeks are selfish is to not have a very deep understanding of the culture. Anyone who has spent time working and playing in the geek culture, realizes how profoundly generous we are with our most precious resource -- knowledge.
> Bush made a major political shift the other day, > from conservitive to progressive. Read the
> pundit's editorials about it. It was
> interesting. Al gore needs to do something
> desperate to catch up on the 20pt lead Bush has.
It is rational political strategy to pretend to move to the center in order to pickup the centrists. The center is where elections are decided -- as the party faithful already know who they are going to vote for. It is the so called swing votes that the candidates will fight for until November. Don't be fooled.
Slashdot is more like the editorial and the oped section of a newspaper. Nearly every post has at least an implicit bias. This is OK in a forum like/. The way to deal with bias is to argue against the view to which you disagree. But it is not useful to argue against bias itself; if you do you are battle you cannot win.
I think that it is important to oppose George W. Bush. He is beholden to the Right Wing Christian wing of the Republican party. That branch would like nothing better than to use the laws and the government to impose their view of morality on the rest of America. That wing of the Republican party values freedom less than any other major political grouping in the America right now. That George W. gets a tremendous amount of support from this wing of the party should be reason enough to oppose him.
What are you talking about? Slashdot is more like the editorial and oped (letters to the editor) section of a newspaper then actual news. Sure, news is often the basis posts but most of the posts have at least an implicit bias.
The key to dealing with bias is to make your own decisions. If you don't agree with a bias then post your disagreement with an explicit or an implicit bias. But I don't think it is useful to oppose bias itself.
From the article I gathered that companies were confused and frustrated by the licensing agreement -- which should be straight forward and easy to understand. Even MS supporters would have to acknowledge that it makes MS look like weasals. It also makes them look desparate and unsteady like a ship that has sprung a major leak.
Observe the verbal acrobatics engaged in by the MS spin machine: "The first important point is that we are absolutely not trying to overcharge customers," said Noury Bernard-Hason, Microsoft's group product manager for Windows. "It's unfortunate that the analyst who wrote the memo chose to take that view. That's certainly not what we're doing."
Like rats off of a sinking ship they will jump, just give it time.
If RMS visits you should make sure he can get his email, make him a cup of tea, and take him to a good restaurant of his choosing. That is not excessive at all.
In return for your effort you get the benefit of a day spent with RMS. That's worth a stop at a store to pick up some good tea! You'd want to know information like that regarding any potential guest speaker.
An artificial life project of some sort would be interesting. This has been done before, of course, so they'd could research how it has been done in the past.
Actually that Linux bugs are publically acknowledged should be looked upon as an asset not a liability. In fact, openess and honesty are the very core of the Open Source philosophy. With Linux there are no incentives to hide bugs from developers or from users.
I have lost count on how many unacknowledged (by Microsoft) bugs I have found in MS products. But if a bug shows up in an Open Source product it is reported and dealt with swiftly.
What broad group does have a unified agenda?
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 1
Sure, doctors have the AMA, lawyers have the BAR association, and I am sure every profession has organizations that are involved in politics. But these professional groups mostly look after their own interests and are not selflessly pursuing a just world. Why are geeks held to such a standard? Doctors are not criticized because not everyone decided to make the years of sacrifices needed to get through medical school. Some people are willing to sacrifice some present indulgence in order to learn useful skills and knowledge, whether it be IT or some other profession. Often, people who are willing to make some sacrifices are rewarded financially. Those who want instant gratification and are not willing to devote themselves to learning something useful are likely to suffer financially. That is the way of the market. It is not any more reasonable to expect geeks to have a unified front fighting for social justice then it is to expect any other profession to have such a front.
Drugs are a risk. Clearly this is true. Some people use drugs responsibly and some do not. Alcohol is a risk and certainly driving is a risk. Both alcohol and driving (sometimes together) cause huge amounts of lost productivity, injury, and loss of life. Roughly 50,000 Americans die each year in car crashes, which is about how many American soldiers died in about 10 years of fighting in Vietnam.
Just as it is a personal decision to drink it should be a personal decision to use drugs or not. Of course, if you get caught on the road on drugs you should be punished just as with drunk drivers.
My point is that as a society we accept a certain amount of risk every day. We allow people to make decisions that could potentially be life threatening, such as getting behind the wheel of a vehicle. We let people decide if they want to drink their liver into the ground if they want. Yet Marijuana is illegal. It is not logical.
I smoked pot in college and experimented with psychelics as well. But I found that interest in drugs was well distributed among people with different interests -- with no notable concentration amongst people interested in computers. What I did notice is that many people used their experiences with pot and psychedelics to think in different ways about that which they were interested: computer science, biology, psychology, physics, even politics.
It does not follow that because some people think and talk about politics while tripping, that politics and tripping are somehow linked. In the same way it is not rational to say that because some people think about computers and cyberspace or even neural networks while they are stoned, that somehow drug and computer use go together. They don't go together and it is not useful to suggest otherwise.
My view or drugs is they should neither be glorified nor demonized. The decision to use or not use drugs should be a personal decision. The governments war on drugs is a failure and a resourse sink. This should be acknowledged and rational policies developed.
If you throw a frog in boiling water it will hop out; but if you put a frog in cold water and then slowly bring the water to a boil, the frog will be content and will not resist. The pollster calls Mr. Frog and he reports that the water is fine... User friendliness and configurability are not mutually exclusive goals. Linux will become more user friendly. You will turn on your new computer right out of the box and the KDE Window manager (or whatever) will start right up, and you will see icons to connect to the Internet, office suites, etc. It will in time be easier than Windows. The beauty of the whole thing is that the work and play of kernal hackers won't be diminished. It is not a zero sum game. Neolithic
Slashdot Mirror
I have several friends who have completed PhD's in established fields: philosophy, biology, and computer science. The process of getting PhD was a monumental struggle. Then getting a job is a challenge -- though not for the computer science PhD: he got a research job outside of academia.
Once you get an academic job your struggle has just begun. You are pitted against other young professors in a battle to get tenure. You either get tenure or you are asked to leave after a number of years of intense politics, research, writing, and brown nosing. Very stressful And these people were in established fields.
I am not saying don't pursue this if you have a real passion for it but consider other alternatives. Get a practical career as say a compter programmer and make history your hobby. You can get good enough at it to write books and papers without being dependent on the academy for approval. For example, look at Eric Raymond. He is a geek who has established himself as an excellent historian, anthropologist, and philosopher -- but he does not depend on academia for his livelehood. He has written some well respected papers and books.
I have several friends who got PhD's in the last few years. Once you get the teaching job your struggle has just begun. There is huge pressure to 'publish or perish' which means you have to publish a lot of research over a number of years to prove yourself. Then you are either awarded tenure or asked to leave. You are in cut throat competition with your peers. It is not an easy life in the least especially in the liberal arts.
Engineering and computer science are better because there is a shortage of professors. The competition for tenure is a little less intense.
Your mom doesn't care if she runs Office on Windows or Linux. You could easily persuade her and many other Windows users to switch to Linux!
Exactly right: Office is the single greatest barrier to Linux on the desktop, at least in the business world. Virtually everyone uses Office. The average user doesn't care if he or she is using Office or the coffee maker, as long as Office runs! If it will run on Linux without BSOD's and having to reboot all the time, then the average user will be all in favor.
Many Linux users use Linux at home but at work they use Windows on the desktop. System Administrators, even if they run Linux servers, have users that run Windows. Windows is completely dominant on the desktop.
Why in practical terms is Windows so dominant on the desktop (forget about unfair competition for a moment? The answer is that Windows is basically a platform for running Office. Almost every business runs Office. That's how work is done. And, frankly, Office has gotten a lot better in recent years -- so most people don't want to switch.
MS realizes they have a winner in Office so they want to extend its reach. If they port it to Linux they will sell more copies of Office -- and, they think, bring more people to Windows. What it actually will do is remove the greatest barrier, in the business world, to running Linux on the desktop. Tell people: what if I could set you up with a desktop where you could continue your work as normal except few reboots and no BSOD's?!? You would get a good reception as long as you made X start on boot, and you provided some basic training. Now, you've got Linux/Samba/Apache on the server, and Linux/Office on the desktops. That would be a huge step in the right direction.
MS is banking on their ability to continually improve Office and make a product so good that it will stay dominant, even as Linux ascends. Of course, that battle's outcome is far from certain given all the promising developments lately.
They may finally be realizing that trying to hold on to a monopoly in the OS market is a futile exercise. The real strength of MS is not in making a good OS but instead in making user friendly Office applications. They realize that the future for MS on the desktop will be software not in the OS.
If true, this will be good for Linux and good for MS. A lot of people have to use Office for work but hate Windows and would switch to Linux in a second if Office were ported to Linux. This is good for MS because it expands their present and future market for software; this is good for Linux because it removes this tremendous barrier to using Linux in the work place. It would actually be an enlightened move on MS's part to do this.
So the source code of Linux can be changed and not documented by an incompetent member of the IT staff. This may happen in rare cases, but so may all manner of other sorts of incompetence.
When I started my current position, I inhereted, among other things a grossly misconfigured Windows NT 4.0 server. I won't go into too many details but, for example, *everything* was on one partition -- applications and data. The rest of the drive was unpartitioned free space.
The moral of the story is that incompetence and sloth don't require open source. In fact, since a closed source OS like Windows NT/2000 requires little knowledge to use and to network -- it is more likely to be done in a half-assed manner.I have only been a geek for about 4 years now and have needed help at various times. When I was first starting out, people came to my home to teach me things. On many occasions I have gotten information from emailing friends and especially from Usenet groups. At my current job I have a mentor who works at a different company. Usually we communicate through email -- but one day I was really struggling with something and he showed up at my work out of the blue to help me. This almost brought tears to my eyes.
I am saying this because I cannot imagine people in most other professions spending that much time and effort helping other people in their profession to make progress. Geeks, however, think that to help other geeks make progress helps the whole community advance. This is altruism. To say that geeks are selfish is to not have a very deep understanding of the culture. Anyone who has spent time working and playing in the geek culture, realizes how profoundly generous we are with our most precious resource -- knowledge.
> Bush made a major political shift the other day, > from conservitive to progressive. Read the > pundit's editorials about it. It was > interesting. Al gore needs to do something > desperate to catch up on the 20pt lead Bush has. It is rational political strategy to pretend to move to the center in order to pickup the centrists. The center is where elections are decided -- as the party faithful already know who they are going to vote for. It is the so called swing votes that the candidates will fight for until November. Don't be fooled.
Slashdot is more like the editorial and the oped section of a newspaper. Nearly every post has at least an implicit bias. This is OK in a forum like /. The way to deal with bias is to argue against the view to which you disagree. But it is not useful to argue against bias itself; if you do you are battle you cannot win.
I think that it is important to oppose George W. Bush. He is beholden to the Right Wing Christian wing of the Republican party. That branch would like nothing better than to use the laws and the government to impose their view of morality on the rest of America. That wing of the Republican party values freedom less than any other major political grouping in the America right now. That George W. gets a tremendous amount of support from this wing of the party should be reason enough to oppose him.
What are you talking about? Slashdot is more like the editorial and oped (letters to the editor) section of a newspaper then actual news. Sure, news is often the basis posts but most of the posts have at least an implicit bias.
The key to dealing with bias is to make your own decisions. If you don't agree with a bias then post your disagreement with an explicit or an implicit bias. But I don't think it is useful to oppose bias itself.
The facts are correct but the tone is wrong. See, if you focus on facts then you are getting the tone wrong. What you need to do is focus on the spin.
From the article I gathered that companies were confused and frustrated by the licensing agreement -- which should be straight forward and easy to understand. Even MS supporters would have to acknowledge that it makes MS look like weasals. It also makes them look desparate and unsteady like a ship that has sprung a major leak.
Observe the verbal acrobatics engaged in by the MS spin machine:"The first important point is that we are absolutely not trying to overcharge customers," said Noury Bernard-Hason, Microsoft's group product manager for Windows. "It's unfortunate that the analyst who wrote the memo chose to take that view. That's certainly not what we're doing."
Like rats off of a sinking ship they will jump, just give it time.
Eric Raymond could explain things well -- or even just circulate some of his written work.
If RMS visits you should make sure he can get his email, make him a cup of tea, and take him to a good restaurant of his choosing. That is not excessive at all.
In return for your effort you get the benefit of a day spent with RMS. That's worth a stop at a store to pick up some good tea! You'd want to know information like that regarding any potential guest speaker.
An artificial life project of some sort would be interesting. This has been done before, of course, so they'd could research how it has been done in the past.
Actually that Linux bugs are publically acknowledged should be looked upon as an asset not a liability. In fact, openess and honesty are the very core of the Open Source philosophy. With Linux there are no incentives to hide bugs from developers or from users.
I have lost count on how many unacknowledged (by Microsoft) bugs I have found in MS products. But if a bug shows up in an Open Source product it is reported and dealt with swiftly.
Sure, doctors have the AMA, lawyers have the BAR association, and I am sure every profession has organizations that are involved in politics. But these professional groups mostly look after their own interests and are not selflessly pursuing a just world. Why are geeks held to such a standard? Doctors are not criticized because not everyone decided to make the years of sacrifices needed to get through medical school. Some people are willing to sacrifice some present indulgence in order to learn useful skills and knowledge, whether it be IT or some other profession. Often, people who are willing to make some sacrifices are rewarded financially. Those who want instant gratification and are not willing to devote themselves to learning something useful are likely to suffer financially. That is the way of the market. It is not any more reasonable to expect geeks to have a unified front fighting for social justice then it is to expect any other profession to have such a front.
Drugs are a risk. Clearly this is true. Some people use drugs responsibly and some do not. Alcohol is a risk and certainly driving is a risk. Both alcohol and driving (sometimes together) cause huge amounts of lost productivity, injury, and loss of life. Roughly 50,000 Americans die each year in car crashes, which is about how many American soldiers died in about 10 years of fighting in Vietnam.
Just as it is a personal decision to drink it should be a personal decision to use drugs or not. Of course, if you get caught on the road on drugs you should be punished just as with drunk drivers.
My point is that as a society we accept a certain amount of risk every day. We allow people to make decisions that could potentially be life threatening, such as getting behind the wheel of a vehicle. We let people decide if they want to drink their liver into the ground if they want.
Yet Marijuana is illegal. It is not logical.
I smoked pot in college and experimented with psychelics as well. But I found that interest in drugs was well distributed among people with different interests -- with no notable concentration amongst people interested in computers. What I did notice is that many people used their experiences with pot and psychedelics to think in different ways about that which they were interested: computer science, biology, psychology, physics, even politics.
It does not follow that because some people think and talk about politics while tripping, that politics and tripping are somehow linked. In the same way it is not rational to say that because some people think about computers and cyberspace or even neural networks while they are stoned, that somehow drug and computer use go together. They don't go together and it is not useful to suggest otherwise.
My view or drugs is they should neither be glorified nor demonized. The decision to use or not use drugs should be a personal decision. The governments war on drugs is a failure and a resourse sink. This should be acknowledged and rational policies developed.
If you throw a frog in boiling water it will hop out; but if you put a frog in cold water and then slowly bring the water to a boil, the frog will be content and will not resist. The pollster calls Mr. Frog and he reports that the water is fine... User friendliness and configurability are not mutually exclusive goals. Linux will become more user friendly. You will turn on your new computer right out of the box and the KDE Window manager (or whatever) will start right up, and you will see icons to connect to the Internet, office suites, etc. It will in time be easier than Windows. The beauty of the whole thing is that the work and play of kernal hackers won't be diminished. It is not a zero sum game. Neolithic