My fiance and I are about to get married a few months from now. She spent 8 years in school to earn her Masters. She now makes about $18K/yr, margianally more than a burger flipper.
As for me, I've got my Bachelors, 10 years of Unix under my belt, tons of experience, a wealth of skills, and quite a few career accolades & certifications. I have been out of work since April '02. If it weren't for my unemployment benefits, i'd be on the street. To make ends meet, I sift through junk at computer scrap yards hoping to find something worth selling on EBay.
The cashier at the 7-11 on the corner is fluent in XML. He can't find a job, needless to say. He's now reduced to making $8.50 an hour handing out cigs and lotto tickets.
When I started as a contractor here in town in Fall 2000, my department was comprised entirely of highly skilled, educated American workers. I earned $43,600/yr, well _under_ the 10-year industry average for my skill set. Had the dot-com tornado of shit never happened, I would be making upwards of $70-75k/yr.
By the time I got the axe in the department where I worked, every single engineer was replaced with a six-pack of Hindus, Nigerians, and other cheap labor. The entire department is now composed of largely of unskilled, inexperienced and uneducated foreign workers, many of whom can't even speak English clearly. Every single one of the highly skilled, highly educated American workers is out of a job, the first time many of them have been unemployed in the past 20 years. The quality of the products they make has cartwheeled straight into the crapper.
Here's a little example which points out what i'm talking about. One of my floor leads instructed me as to how to hook up an SSA drive enclosure for testing purposes. Attach the cable, and screw only one of the two posts in. "Shouldn't we screw both in?" I ask. Nope. Mbutu Kwanzaa says that letting the cable dangle there in the connector is fine. Two weeks later a problem occurs, nobody can figure out why. The company drops everything and flies a team of British engineers out here to inspect the gear. They're absolutely horrified at the condition of the testing gear. Everything is a fucking mess. They couldnt believe what they were seeing.. Specifically, the fact that we were instructed by this Nigerian moron to leave cables half-connected to the enclosures. It all added up to an *enormous* waste of time, money, and resources...All because they fired a guy who knew what we was doing for $45k a year, and replaced him with a shithead Nigerian who worked for bread & donuts.
It cost the company well over $30k to remedy this one particular problem, one of many which occur like every fuckin month. Work in England stopped while the shit was hammered out here in the states. Airfare. Lodging. Relo. And it happens every...fucking...month.
If that doesn't summarize the H1-B problem in a nutshell, I don't know what the hell will.
Bottom-feeders take jobs with the clueless. In the past, if i've taken a job only to find my co-workers are bozos, I start looking for a new job. No paycheck is worth dumbing down.
I'll be at the Linux Desktop Summit in San Diego in February. I'll be more than happy to discuss my ideas with you face to face. Infact, if all goes well, you'll be one face among a few hundred.
Here's a hint: Believe half of what you see and none of what you read. Do you _really_ think I could be this abrasive, and still function in real life? Come on.
Thank you. Seriously. It means alot to know that there are people who see the same things as I do, and solidly agree with me.
And i'm thinking the same thing -- All the forums where new ideas were once discussed are now openly hostile towards anyone who wants to put a new idea on the table. Its sickening. For a community that once prided itself on being something new and exiciting, its rapidly turning into the same brand of dog and pony show we once enjoyed poking fun of.
The community needs a think tank, independent of both GNOME and KDE. I'll ask the guys at iBiblio if they're willing to give us a mailing list.
Dvorak raises a point i've tried rather ungracefully to make over the past four years. There are very serious inherent flaws in how the open-source community approaches GUI development. Here's a brief rundown.
1) Everyone assumes the basic Windows 95 GUI design is good. No one stopped to ask whether replicating a WIndows 95 look and feel was a good thing or not. As anyone who used a computer other than a PC prior to 1995 can tell you, Windows 95 is among the worst desktop designs ever concieved. Nonetheless, both GNOME and KDE continue to strive to mimic its basic function and appearance.
2) By copying someone else's design, youre relegating your work to a "second place" not-quite-as-good-as-the-original monicker. Programmers are pragmatists. For every hundred of them, only one will be interested in building something new, and even then, they'll probably lose interest within a few days. Since programmers are pragmatists, they want to build something they know already works. By continually playing catchup to OS X, Win95/98/XP and others (and refusing to jump ahead of them) you're effectively resigning yourself to 2nd place instead of using your talents and intelligence to take the lead.
3) Bad designs make for bad habits. Its _extremely_ difficult to break people of their habits. You could recieve the blueprints for a new GUI from God himself, and people would still complain that it doesnt work like Win95. Not because Win95 is good (its not) but simply because they're used to it. Too many people are terrified of confronting users with a new idea. Everyone wants to swim in the pool, but no ones willing to jump in first. Its this sort of thinking that causes development to stagnate, as we continually paint ourselves into a corner where nothing short of revolution will fix it. The stagnation covers everything, from the users to the coders themselves. Users are just as hesitant to embrace new ideas as programmers are in implementing them.
The ideas are THERE. There are tons of them waiting to be picked up and looked at, and their merits talked about. The biggest hurdle to moving things forward is simply getting people to believe in the possibility that there may actually be something undiscovered which if it were actually made, could change everything.
The way things are right now, its just not working for us. Its as simple as that. By pointing out these things, i'm not taking a crap on the efforts of KDE and GNOME, and other efforts. All i'm saying is, we need to take what we know and move in new directions with it. We need to be open to building new things, and building new ideas. We all have to be willing to listen, but we have to be willing to do something about it as well.
The atmosphere on Mars is extremely thin --- Any mechanical butterfly you could put there would likely fall out of the sky and flail around on the ground within seconds. It aint Earth, kids.
Re:they were unique and ground-breaking because...
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
Here's a clue, Sherlock.
GEnie had close to 100,000 users by the time The WELL came into existance. Compuserve had close to a quarter of a million, having come into existance a full 15 years before The WELL. Lay off the hash and hop aboard the Clue Train (tm), hippy. Jesus Christ...
And Californians wonder why the rest of the country laughs at them..sheesh.
Re:they were unique and ground-breaking because...
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
please correct me if you know of any other online community having more:
marriages, pregnancies, screenplays, books of fiction, business plans, political changes, etc
I'll give you two. Compuserve and FIDOnet. Here's a link to Google to get you started. Have fun.
Cheers,
Re:If I have to hear one more thing about The Well
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
Fact is, The Well was full of writers and journalists and media-gurus-to-be.
So was Compuserve in 1975. A full decade before The WELL was even created.
Off the top of my head, Compuserve predates the Well by at *least* 10 years. See what I mean?
Re:If I have to hear one more thing about The Well
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
Hi Howard,
PCPursuit was a good story. FIDONet was a good story. BIX was a good story. CompuServe is a good story. QuantumLink is better story. Brainstorm/XNET is an even better story.
The WELL isn't a story. There were hundreds (if not thousands) of WELL-like enclaves that had come and gone years before these guys even flipped the power switch.
If you have a responsibility as an author to be honest to the story. The world doesn't need yet another person latching onto a piece of horseshit and perpetuating it as if it were fact. Wise up.
I'll use the same analogy I pointed out earlier... Who discovered America, Mr. Rheingold? By propping up The WELL as some sort of miracle happening, you're doing the literary equivalent of responding with "Well, Columbus, obviously"...
I would have more respect for you if you were to point out the equivalent of "The Americas have been continually inhabited by humans for at least the past 15,000 years. That, and archaeological evidence suggests that Norse explorers had arrived in North America and begun colonizing the reigon a full 800 years before Columbus."
Re:Thank you
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Don't give them any ideas. Just plant dynamite in the fault lines and pray that the whole fucking reigon goes underwater.
Now theres a thought -- Maybe The Well can be the first underwater online community!
Listening to bozos from The Well claim they were the first online community is like saying Columbus discovered America. You're just plain wrong, and wrong in so many ways its not even funny.
The IQ of a mob is the IQ of the least intelligent person, divided by the amount of media coverage, multiplied by the size of the crowd.
If I have to hear one more thing about The Well...
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...I think i'm going to puke.
Look, i'm only going to say this once.
THE WELL WAS NEITHER UNIQUE, NOR THE FIRST TRUE "ONLINE COMMUNITY". They were no more "visionaries" than the people who frequented countless other large BBS'es that were common in the late 70's and early 80's. Its just that these people tend to be a little more vocal and persistant in their whining for some reason, somehow feeling that they deserve to be repeatedly acknowledged for their vastly overhyped, overrated, earth-shattering contribution to society. And even if they actually HAD been the golly-gee pioneers they want desparately to be acknowledged as, guess what --- there were still communities before them. So get over it. Im sure they're nice people and all, but, sorry gang....there wasn't anything unique, profound, or ground-breaking about The Well. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
I love you.
Now STFU, and go back to Starbucks where you belong.
Too late, man. Hindi is obsolete!
Hindi++ is where it's at nowadays.
Let India worry about itself.
I need to eat.
Case in point:
My fiance and I are about to get married a few months from now. She spent 8 years in school to earn her Masters. She now makes about $18K/yr, margianally more than a burger flipper.
As for me, I've got my Bachelors, 10 years of Unix under my belt, tons of experience, a wealth of skills, and quite a few career accolades & certifications. I have been out of work since April '02. If it weren't for my unemployment benefits, i'd be on the street. To make ends meet, I sift through junk at computer scrap yards hoping to find something worth selling on EBay.
The cashier at the 7-11 on the corner is fluent in XML. He can't find a job, needless to say. He's now reduced to making $8.50 an hour handing out cigs and lotto tickets.
When I started as a contractor here in town in Fall 2000, my department was comprised entirely of highly skilled, educated American workers. I earned $43,600/yr, well _under_ the 10-year industry average for my skill set. Had the dot-com tornado of shit never happened, I would be making upwards of $70-75k/yr.
By the time I got the axe in the department where I worked, every single engineer was replaced with a six-pack of Hindus, Nigerians, and other cheap labor. The entire department is now composed of largely of unskilled, inexperienced and uneducated foreign workers, many of whom can't even speak English clearly. Every single one of the highly skilled, highly educated American workers is out of a job, the first time many of them have been unemployed in the past 20 years. The quality of the products they make has cartwheeled straight into the crapper.
Here's a little example which points out what i'm talking about. One of my floor leads instructed me as to how to hook up an SSA drive enclosure for testing purposes. Attach the cable, and screw only one of the two posts in. "Shouldn't we screw both in?" I ask. Nope. Mbutu Kwanzaa says that letting the cable dangle there in the connector is fine. Two weeks later a problem occurs, nobody can figure out why. The company drops everything and flies a team of British engineers out here to inspect the gear. They're absolutely horrified at the condition of the testing gear. Everything is a fucking mess. They couldnt believe what they were seeing.. Specifically, the fact that we were instructed by this Nigerian moron to leave cables half-connected to the enclosures. It all added up to an *enormous* waste of time, money, and resources...All because they fired a guy who knew what we was doing for $45k a year, and replaced him with a shithead Nigerian who worked for bread & donuts.
It cost the company well over $30k to remedy this one particular problem, one of many which occur like every fuckin month. Work in England stopped while the shit was hammered out here in the states. Airfare. Lodging. Relo. And it happens every...fucking...month.
If that doesn't summarize the H1-B problem in a nutshell, I don't know what the hell will.
Finally! A laptop with extra GAY!!!
Cheers,
Bottom-feeders take jobs with the clueless. In the past, if i've taken a job only to find my co-workers are bozos, I start looking for a new job. No paycheck is worth dumbing down.
I'll be at the Linux Desktop Summit in San Diego in February. I'll be more than happy to discuss my ideas with you face to face. Infact, if all goes well, you'll be one face among a few hundred.
Here's a hint: Believe half of what you see and none of what you read. Do you _really_ think I could be this abrasive, and still function in real life? Come on.
Jackass.
Saying that I'm openly hostile towards GNOME is like saying Ex-Lax is openly hostile towards a clogged intestine.
I will admit it, and gladly.
Ilan,
Thank you. Seriously. It means alot to know that there are people who see the same things as I do, and solidly agree with me.
And i'm thinking the same thing -- All the forums where new ideas were once discussed are now openly hostile towards anyone who wants to put a new idea on the table. Its sickening. For a community that once prided itself on being something new and exiciting, its rapidly turning into the same brand of dog and pony show we once enjoyed poking fun of.
The community needs a think tank, independent of both GNOME and KDE. I'll ask the guys at iBiblio if they're willing to give us a mailing list.
Or perhaps an Ask Slashdot is in order?
Cheers,
Bowie
Dvorak raises a point i've tried rather ungracefully to make over the past four years. There are very serious inherent flaws in how the open-source community approaches GUI development. Here's a brief rundown.
1) Everyone assumes the basic Windows 95 GUI design is good. No one stopped to ask whether replicating a WIndows 95 look and feel was a good thing or not. As anyone who used a computer other than a PC prior to 1995 can tell you, Windows 95 is among the worst desktop designs ever concieved. Nonetheless, both GNOME and KDE continue to strive to mimic its basic function and appearance.
2) By copying someone else's design, youre relegating your work to a "second place" not-quite-as-good-as-the-original monicker. Programmers are pragmatists. For every hundred of them, only one will be interested in building something new, and even then, they'll probably lose interest within a few days. Since programmers are pragmatists, they want to build something they know already works. By continually playing catchup to OS X, Win95/98/XP and others (and refusing to jump ahead of them) you're effectively resigning yourself to 2nd place instead of using your talents and intelligence to take the lead.
3) Bad designs make for bad habits. Its _extremely_ difficult to break people of their habits. You could recieve the blueprints for a new GUI from God himself, and people would still complain that it doesnt work like Win95. Not because Win95 is good (its not) but simply because they're used to it. Too many people are terrified of confronting users with a new idea. Everyone wants to swim in the pool, but no ones willing to jump in first. Its this sort of thinking that causes development to stagnate, as we continually paint ourselves into a corner where nothing short of revolution will fix it. The stagnation covers everything, from the users to the coders themselves. Users are just as hesitant to embrace new ideas as programmers are in implementing them.
The ideas are THERE. There are tons of them waiting to be picked up and looked at, and their merits talked about. The biggest hurdle to moving things forward is simply getting people to believe in the possibility that there may actually be something undiscovered which if it were actually made, could change everything.
The way things are right now, its just not working for us. Its as simple as that. By pointing out these things, i'm not taking a crap on the efforts of KDE and GNOME, and other efforts. All i'm saying is, we need to take what we know and move in new directions with it. We need to be open to building new things, and building new ideas. We all have to be willing to listen, but we have to be willing to do something about it as well.
Cheers,
Apparently, the Linux source code consists entirely of 300 megs worth of "La-losinge base line double quote"..
"Hopefully, our political think tanks will not get any such ideas."
Yeah.. Its not like youre posting the idea on Slashdot or anything.
Cheers,
It could be worse... They could make it so that your browser crashed whenever you went to certain webpa...
Oh wait. They already do that.
Nevermind.
Wait a minute... Its called 'Adult Swim' not 'Afraid Of Women Swim'....What gives?
Does anyone know if this sequel will make Anime less gay????
*snicker*
The atmosphere on Mars is extremely thin --- Any mechanical butterfly you could put there would likely fall out of the sky and flail around on the ground within seconds. It aint Earth, kids.
Here's a clue, Sherlock.
GEnie had close to 100,000 users by the time The WELL came into existance. Compuserve had close to a quarter of a million, having come into existance a full 15 years before The WELL. Lay off the hash and hop aboard the Clue Train (tm), hippy. Jesus Christ...
And Californians wonder why the rest of the country laughs at them..sheesh.
please correct me if you know of any other online community having more:
marriages, pregnancies, screenplays, books of fiction, business plans, political changes, etc
I'll give you two. Compuserve and FIDOnet. Here's a link to Google to get you started. Have fun.
Cheers,
Fact is, The Well was full of writers and journalists and media-gurus-to-be.
So was Compuserve in 1975. A full decade before The WELL was even created.
Cheers,
Off the top of my head, Compuserve predates the Well by at *least* 10 years. See what I mean?
Hi Howard,
PCPursuit was a good story.
FIDONet was a good story.
BIX was a good story.
CompuServe is a good story.
QuantumLink is better story.
Brainstorm/XNET is an even better story.
The WELL isn't a story. There were hundreds (if not thousands) of WELL-like enclaves that had come and gone years before these guys even flipped the power switch.
If you have a responsibility as an author to be honest to the story. The world doesn't need yet another person latching onto a piece of horseshit and perpetuating it as if it were fact. Wise up.
I'll use the same analogy I pointed out earlier... Who discovered America, Mr. Rheingold? By propping up The WELL as some sort of miracle happening, you're doing the literary equivalent of responding with "Well, Columbus, obviously"...
I would have more respect for you if you were to point out the equivalent of "The Americas have been continually inhabited by humans for at least the past 15,000 years. That, and archaeological evidence suggests that Norse explorers had arrived in North America and begun colonizing the reigon a full 800 years before Columbus."
See, *thats* an interesting story, Mr. Rheingold.
Cheers,
Damn you and your pagan "math"....
Its witchcraft! Witchcraft, I tell you!
Don't give them any ideas. Just plant dynamite in the fault lines and pray that the whole fucking reigon goes underwater.
Now theres a thought -- Maybe The Well can be the first underwater online community!
Listening to bozos from The Well claim they were the first online community is like saying Columbus discovered America. You're just plain wrong, and wrong in so many ways its not even funny.
The IQ of a mob is the IQ of the least intelligent person, divided by the amount of media coverage, multiplied by the size of the crowd.
...I think i'm going to puke.
Look, i'm only going to say this once.
THE WELL WAS NEITHER UNIQUE, NOR THE FIRST TRUE "ONLINE COMMUNITY". They were no more "visionaries" than the people who frequented countless other large BBS'es that were common in the late 70's and early 80's. Its just that these people tend to be a little more vocal and persistant in their whining for some reason, somehow feeling that they deserve to be repeatedly acknowledged for their vastly overhyped, overrated, earth-shattering contribution to society. And even if they actually HAD been the golly-gee pioneers they want desparately to be acknowledged as, guess what --- there were still communities before them. So get over it. Im sure they're nice people and all, but, sorry gang....there wasn't anything unique, profound, or ground-breaking about The Well. Period.
Cheers,
Whenever you buy gasoline, youre supporting terrorism.
Cheers,