If those are the actions of the religion...then that is most certaintly what the religion stands for.
Religions don't act. People do.
A religion is just a philosophy that concerns itself with man's relationship to some concept of divinity. The fact that some people commit acts that are inconsistant with the philosophy which that religion promotes, does not mean that the religion can be said to promote the act of that person.
Quite the opposite... it means that the person in question is what the muslims call an "infidel" (break down the latin, and "infidel" means, roughly "a person who is not purely faithful"). My evaluation of Islam is not dictated by the actions of nut-jobs like Khadafi, nor does the failure of one Pope to speak out strongly against Hitler change my view of the Catholic dogma, nor do punks like Oral Roberts color my understanding of Southern Baptists. The typical faithful worshiper of any of those three belief systems is a kind and compasionate person, who I would much rather spend a day fishing with than the typical angry anti-religion champion.
you surely must concede that the the two main derivatives of Judaism (Islam, Christianae) are exceptionally violent belief systems.
I, for one, do not. Both belief systems preach non-violence. The fact that some leaders of some sects happened to support evil causes is not a reflection of what those belief systems stand for, but rather a reflection of how horrible those particular individuals were.
Christianity, in particular, stresses humility and grace at all times... "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword", "if a man strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other, also", "blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God", etc. Almost every word that Jesus spoke challenged us to love more.
So while I can see how you might have reached your conclusion about violence being central to these religions, because it's only the violent members who make the 6:00 news, the actual core faiths of Islam and Christianity, as practiced by millions upon millions of people, are peaceful and loving.
Let's see: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: greeks. Solomon, Moses: hebrews. Who is the Westerner here?
Excuse me, but I got the impression that his point was not that these great thinkers were Westerners, but rather that the Islamic scholars of Istanbul and the Catholic monks of Ireland were almost soley responsible for the preservation of their works after the fall of Rome.
Were it not for those monks, all those great classical texts (which made the Renaissance possible) would probably have been lost forever.
Just a guess here, but the person who posted this probably just got done reading "How The Irish Saved Civilization", a very entertaining histroical book by Thomas Cahill, which focuses most of its emphasis on this very point.
Is there or is there not a problem with corporate monoplies on the internet.
There is not. There are lots of other tech sectors which are monopoly-dominated, but business on the Internet is crammed with lots of competing firms.
Is there or is there not a major trend towards proprietary software and "nasty cookie" dropping sites out there.
There is not. The trend, if there is one, appears to be towars open source (Linux, Apache) and standards (W3C). You still see some companies using content that requires browser enhancements that have not been standardized (yet), but more and more of these proprietary tools are being replaced by open, standard tools which will eventually reside in the code of every browser out there.
As for "nasty cookie" dropping... the only people who really fear cookies are those who are listening to hype, rather than sitting down with a copy of something like "CGI Programming with Perl" (O'Reilly) and learning exactly what cookies can and can't do by actually implementing them.
If yes, is this or is this not a threat to the net savvy computer user?
Well, it's no, as I pointed out... but even if it was "yes", it would, at worst, be a threat to the net ignorant computer user. The savvy users know exactly how to look after themselves.
If yes, a reasonable method for the preservation of internet rights and anonymity must be devised.
News flash: unless you are always going through some kind of third-party proxy (like anonymizer.com), you never were invisible to begin with. From a privacy perspective, browsing corporate sites is just like walking along the sidewalk in front of a strip mall... people can see you, see what store-fronts you stop to look into, and see the logos on the bags you are carrying. There are ways you can avoid detection if you are afraid people might find out that you just bought the new Britney Spears CD, but it should not be the responsibility of anybody else to help you hide your face, even for something as shameful as listening to teen bubble-gum princesses.
To summarize, I feel that each of us needs to be able align ourselves with one of the following statements, 1. "There is a legal and reasonable way to fight the corporate and governmental juggernaut and it is........." 2. "I believe that purposeful and directed hactivisism is currently the best way we have to maintain our rights."
you left out 3. "I believe that most anti-corporate rants are little more than chicken-little fearmongering. I believe that being free to participate in the market is good, that being able to sell shares in your company (re: form a corporation) to help your company grow is also good, and that doing so does not make your company an evil entity which must be fought against, by legal means or otherwise."
The only difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter: one's on our side.
Not quite. A freedom fighter fights for... (drum roll)... freedom.
Do you really believe that the PLO, should they win, would establish any kind of government that is based on freedom and human liberty? It seems to me that Arafat's agenda is the re-establishment independant religious monarchy, known as "Palestine". We can argue all day about the Palestinian right to statehood, and just how much land Israel should be allowed to call his own, (personally, I think that the Palestinians have been getting the shaft all along, and everybody knows it), but to suggest that their struggle has anything to do with establishing a free state is simply not correct.
As a side note, if it were up to me, I would establish a new Palestinian homeland... in the US. Pick a spot somewhere in South Dakota or somewhere, near a good river. Make sure it's and ideal spot to build a city, and homestead it out to any and all exiled Palestinians who are willing to emmigrate. (It would have to be some cherry real estate, or else would be perceived as a sort of "reservation", which would be bad. This would be land that they would own to do with what they like, sell it, live on it, open a store, whatever.) Throw in some guaranteed low-interest loans (using the money we would otherwise be spendign on dealing with the problems the exile problem is causeing), to build a house and/or a business.
The vast majority of the Palestinian people are well education, speak at least some English, and can be active participants in our economy almost immediately... just the sort of immigration that every nation WANTS to have. It would be good for them, good for the US, and good for stability in the Middle East.
Such a thing would never happen, because too many people would have hostile emotional responses to such a concept, but one can dream. Also, some Palestinians would probably prefer not to live on the other side of the globe from Mecca.
The real danger here is that halo-touting self-proclaimed 'hacktivists' will be given an altogether different label: terrorists.
That's because they are terrorists.
I'm sorry, but burning your draft card and marching in protest of an unjust war is one thing. Vandalism of somebody else's property, motivated by unjustified anger for daring to (gasp!) open a factory in Hong Kong, is completely different. In the first case, we are talking about conciencious objection and free speech against excessive military force, in the second, we are talking about cowardly attacks on the institutions which create the economy that allows you the free time to commit these childish crimes.
Go ahead, mod me down as "flamebait" if you are so inclined... as if I give a fuck about what some isolationist, paranoid, hot-headed, jobless web-vandal thinks.
Real hackers are typically working as consultants to global companies, not wrecking their stuff.
Even if everyone has them, the people who get the most from their cars are the people who have the time, skill, effort and money to maintain the cars themselves.
That's not even a little bit true. People who just drive into their local express Lube shop every 3000 miles, and let the mechanics replace parts when the book says they should, are going to get 150,000 to 200,000 out of just about any car.
The maintenace of modern, high-performance, high-efficiency engines is such that it is outside the realm of the typical "car guy" anyway. You might be able to completely disassemble and reassemble the engine of a 1975 F100 Ford truck, but just replacing the spark plugs in my 2001 truck is a $3000 job, which must be done in a professional shop with specialty tools. (Fortunately, the plugs are made to last 120,000 miles before they need to be changed.) On the bright side, I get much better power, feul economy, cab room, and towing capacity that that old Ford could ever have given me, and it cost me less in adjusted dollars than that Ford did when it was new.
With computers, on the other hand, we haven't really been through such a revolution. GUI's made things a little simpler, sure, and CPU speeds have moved more or less according to Moore's Law, but I would say that the computing industry is not yet even in the '75 Ford stage of development... I would say we've only begun to move past the first-generation Oldsmobiles. ("A fine downhill car," was the joke at the time, because the Olds was notorious for struggling on even modest inclines, and the engine sounded best when a slope was moving you forward anyway. Does that remind anybody else of the last 10 years of Windows?)
That post was probably just meant to be humorous, nostalgic, or an fp attempt, but he has a point.
If you have not bought at least a game or two for yourself, you probably don't know the market as well as the people who have been collecting these games for a couple years.
So the answer to your question is: Yes. Spend a few months getting into the game collector scene via eBay and other trading resources, as a hobbiest. After a few months of doing so, you might learn that there are reasons why nobody else has gotten rich doing this yet... or you might realize that it's a rich gold mine that few know about... or you might find a way to enter the business in a way that has not already been tried.
In short, know the market first, then think about entering it.
In the mean time, there might be something that you already know a lot about which you can use to start a business. Look at the guys at ThinkGeek. They turned a fondness for pithy little geek sig files into their own little T-shirt and bumper-sticker empire.
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Connect a man to the Internet, and he's still hungry, but gets free porn.
You can get a computer for almost nothing in a garage sale, and get an Internet dial-up for nothing if you are willing to put up with ads, so anybody who really can't afford to connect to the Internet at this point probably doesn't need it as much as they need shoes, a place to sleep, and a job.
The only "divide" is a social one. Those who think computer literacy is worth learning and an Internet connection is worth having, they will go through the trouble of getting it. As getting on line gets easier for clueless newbies and as the marketing of the net continues, more and more people have both the ability and the desire to connect.
Those Jeff Goldbloom iMac ads may seem really silly to us, but the truth is that it is bringing us closer to the mad dream that Steve Jobs had back in the 80's: The computer as a ubiquitous and simple home appliance.
Most "poor" homes have TV's, phones, and microwave ovens. When they become simple enough and usefull enough, the "bottom quintile" will have net terminals of some kind as well.
Except inner cities are able to tax the hell out of their business districts, so while there is a funding gap, it's not actually as big as you might think, and I've seen some very advanced classrooms in urban areas where you would not expect it.
The problem is, students who have absent or apathetic parents are more likely to have emotional, behavioral, and developmental issues, which means that these students are much, much more expensive to educate. Running a school full of fatherless kids means spending more on counciling, rehab services, tutoring, etc.
He used to write for WIRED. Back then, I'm sure it seemed to him like there really was a "Digerati" (of which he considered himself a part of), which was monolithic and shared a common view.
A little background: The culture at WIRED these days seems like that of a "Salon" magazine with more tech-oriented stories, but back in the days before they fired Katz, they really seemed to believe they were part of some kind of social revolution. They were trying very to become to 90's geeks what The Whole Earth Catalog was to hippies a couple decades earlier.
Actual geeks never really took WIRED very seriously, so they evolved into more of a tech-business journal. Mr. Katz, one of the would-be revolutionaries, did not fit in with a magazine that reported actual news, so he was cut loose and landed on Slashdot.
His perspective is not that of an actual geek, but as a geek observer who is trying to parse meaning out of what he thinks he sees. The tone of this article seems to indicate that he might be coming to the realization that there isn't one; that that the only thing that really sets geeks apart from everybody else is math aptitude, and all other stereotypes fail to apply as well an editorialist looking for a "cultural shift" might have been hoping for.
It seems to be Mr. Kat's modus operandi to argue against a case that nobody out there is making. It allows him to be seen as fighting for something without actually fighting against anybody.
Somehow he gets roasted by many of the people here anyway, and not just the trolls.
I've seen him post replies to comments, so I'm fairly sure he reads them all... but he only seems to reply to the trolls and FP'ers, with comments like "you obviously did not take the time to read my entire article". Those who do read his article, and offer legitimate criticism, he tends to ignore.
It seems the best we can hope for after each of his "stories" is for the/. crowd here to have an interesting discussion about the issues his columns should have addressed, based on the topic in question.
No, it just means that the 8-20 year-old hackers from 1976, who made the net what it is during their teens and twenties, are now 33-45, and got all their friends to log on.
In other words, old people who did not learn about the net are starting to die off, while young people who did learn about it are starting to get old.
The average age is continuing to rise because we are all continuing to get older. (Astonishing, ain't it?)
Yet another example of why statistics are often worthless.
Thank you, Codeala... 48 posts went by before somebody pointed out that the Emperor has no clothes. If I had mod points to offer, I would be throwing a "+1, Insightful" your way.
For those who do not know, the film that the inspiration for R2 and 3P0 come from is usually known to American audiences as "The Hidden Fortress".
It's an obscure film directed by Akira Kurosawa (who also made "Yojimbo", "The Seven Samurai", and "RAN"... all of which are movies you should see before getting around to "The Hidden Fortress").
Yep, and Lou Grant gave us The Mary Tyler Moore show, along with a couple others. Also, the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" spin-off "Angel" has started to get a following of its own. Very noir style of show, once you get into it.
My personal nomination for the Worst Spin-off Of All Time goes to: "After-M*A*S*H".
There were also the episodes where there was no deus-ex-machina needed, because the perceived "threat" turned out to be less interested in destroying the Enterprise than they thought, and would leave peacefully in the final 5 minuts.
They must have pulled that one out of storage at least 50 times over their 7 seasons.
One of the things that baffled me about the war years on DS9 was the lack of additional production of the Defiant's class. Part of the premise of DS9 was that the Federation military and industrial capacity was drastically reduced by the Borg attack (and the recent skirmishes with the Cardassians), and spread thin thanks to those pesky Romulans. The Defiant arrived at DS9 just as the Federation were starting to get their shit together again, so a large fleet of them would probably be too much to expect.
Voyager got slightly better because all the best DS9 writers started working for Voyager when DS9 was cancelled.
But the characters on Voyager are so flat and unoriginal (and several of them are really reheated just leftovers from the previous shows) that I can't bring myself to care about them. I'll probably watch the series finale, though... because I just might get to see one or two of them die. That would be nice.
Hopefully they have put a little more thought into the development of the new series than they did with Voyager.
Alternatively, instead of answering the question, you can do the old politician's soft-pedal:
Interviewer: "How much were you making at your previous position?"
The Truth: "I am making ten bucks an hour changing back-up tapes while reading the K&R book and surfing Slashdot, but I think I can figure out how to do the job and should get paid $105 thousand per year for it."
What You Tell Them: "I'm looking for something in the range of $115 thousand per year, but I might be willing to accept slightly less. I've been doing a lot of training beyond the required skill-set of my current job, and I am ready to move up."
It is the policy of the HR departments in most companies to not say anything more than is required, which is either "yes, he worked for us during those dates" or "no, he did not."
Besides, in the time you worked for a company, you probably had several different bosses. As long as you are not a total screw-up, some of them probably like you and wish you the best. Choose one who wants to help you, and list that former boss as your "employer" from that company. Then you will have one more voice cheerleading for you (and not volunteering anything you don't want shared). Problem solved.
From memory (and it was a while ago) Lotus 123 were late to windows and produced a more expensive product because "they owned spreadsheets" (just like visicalc before them)
Nice antecdote. Nothing to do with my point, but interesting. The point is that Excel is probably the most expensive spreadsheet on the market right now. If you think otherwise, name three that cost more.
Apple screwed up not licensing their hardware, end of story
Again, irrelivant. I never said that Apple should have won the desktop wars in my post. The only two things I said about Apple was 1. Apple introduced affordable desktop computers tot he world (TRUE), and 2. When Windows 3.1 came out it was vastly inferior, by almost any measure, to the Macintosh OS. (ALSO TRUE)
Errmm Oracle outperforms SQL on Sun Starfires, not what I choose to run as I'm not rich. SQL is nore usable, more stable (its a newer codebase) and hasn't sold its ass to Java
I didn't say running Oracle was cheap. In fact I said people pay more to use it. My point was that if performance is what matters most to you, it is a better choice than SQL. I noticed that you chose to ignore my point that PostgreSQL, which also works great and stacks up to MS-SQL quite well, is completely free and can run on a completely free OS.
The netscape thing is not true, ie1/2 sucked to the max, ie3 rocked and thats when netscape tanked - they failed to innovate, got arrogant, lost a few good engineers...
Sorry, but IE3 also sucked. It was enough better than IE2 that people didn't completely hate it, but coercing OEM's to drop Navigator and bundling IE with Windows is what killed Netscape, not a better browser. Microsoft's own internal documents acknowledged that they could NEVER have beaten Netscape on a level playing field.
Wrong on the engineering side, I've seen presentations by Dave Cutler, Charles Simonyi, Jim Grey, Hal Berenson, Dave Campbell and Goetz Graefe - these guys are comp sci giants
Okay, you saw some some spiffy lectures, I'm very happy for you. I don't know what that has to do with my point, but congratulations.
I'm afraid your post is pretty innacurate and your arrogant crack at the end puts you in the sad bearded & sandled UNIX bigot league.
If you are going to call me innacurate, you should at least point out ONE thing I said that was incorrect. Also, I don't know what you mean by "arrogant crack at the end". Do you mean my signature file? That's always there, and it's only meant to make you chuckle. Sorry if it didn't amuse you. As for the "sad bearded $ sandled UNIX bigot league"... You could not be further from the truth. If the depth of your comments are anything to go by, I probably have more experience with NT servers than you do. I have several different platforms, including a couple versions of Windows, runnung on my systems at home, and use Solaris, Linux, Windows, and even MacOS at work.
I choose Windows for somethings, Solaris for others, and MVS for others - horses for courses. ....and I value my fellow workers
For somebody who claims to be so open minded, you sure launched a tantrum in my direction.
Of course, there is nothing stopping you from lying to them if they are short-sighted enough to ask.
If you are making $35K per year, and applying for a job that pays $105K per year... tell them that your last job payed $98K per year. There's really no easy way for them to check on it, and probably wouldn't bother if there was.
Worst case, they find out and fire you... in which case, you can now honestly go to other employers and say "my last job payed $105K per year."
Slashdot Mirror
Religions don't act. People do.
A religion is just a philosophy that concerns itself with man's relationship to some concept of divinity. The fact that some people commit acts that are inconsistant with the philosophy which that religion promotes, does not mean that the religion can be said to promote the act of that person.
Quite the opposite... it means that the person in question is what the muslims call an "infidel" (break down the latin, and "infidel" means, roughly "a person who is not purely faithful"). My evaluation of Islam is not dictated by the actions of nut-jobs like Khadafi, nor does the failure of one Pope to speak out strongly against Hitler change my view of the Catholic dogma, nor do punks like Oral Roberts color my understanding of Southern Baptists. The typical faithful worshiper of any of those three belief systems is a kind and compasionate person, who I would much rather spend a day fishing with than the typical angry anti-religion champion.
I, for one, do not. Both belief systems preach non-violence. The fact that some leaders of some sects happened to support evil causes is not a reflection of what those belief systems stand for, but rather a reflection of how horrible those particular individuals were.
Christianity, in particular, stresses humility and grace at all times... "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword", "if a man strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other, also", "blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God", etc. Almost every word that Jesus spoke challenged us to love more.
So while I can see how you might have reached your conclusion about violence being central to these religions, because it's only the violent members who make the 6:00 news, the actual core faiths of Islam and Christianity, as practiced by millions upon millions of people, are peaceful and loving.
Excuse me, but I got the impression that his point was not that these great thinkers were Westerners, but rather that the Islamic scholars of Istanbul and the Catholic monks of Ireland were almost soley responsible for the preservation of their works after the fall of Rome.
Were it not for those monks, all those great classical texts (which made the Renaissance possible) would probably have been lost forever.
Just a guess here, but the person who posted this probably just got done reading "How The Irish Saved Civilization", a very entertaining histroical book by Thomas Cahill, which focuses most of its emphasis on this very point.
As opposed to Isrealis with carbine rifles? I think it would be a welcome change.
Yes, let's.
Is there or is there not a problem with corporate monoplies on the internet.
There is not. There are lots of other tech sectors which are monopoly-dominated, but business on the Internet is crammed with lots of competing firms.
Is there or is there not a major trend towards proprietary software and "nasty cookie" dropping sites out there.
There is not. The trend, if there is one, appears to be towars open source (Linux, Apache) and standards (W3C). You still see some companies using content that requires browser enhancements that have not been standardized (yet), but more and more of these proprietary tools are being replaced by open, standard tools which will eventually reside in the code of every browser out there.
As for "nasty cookie" dropping... the only people who really fear cookies are those who are listening to hype, rather than sitting down with a copy of something like "CGI Programming with Perl" (O'Reilly) and learning exactly what cookies can and can't do by actually implementing them.
If yes, is this or is this not a threat to the net savvy computer user?
Well, it's no, as I pointed out... but even if it was "yes", it would, at worst, be a threat to the net ignorant computer user. The savvy users know exactly how to look after themselves.
If yes, a reasonable method for the preservation of internet rights and anonymity must be devised.
News flash: unless you are always going through some kind of third-party proxy (like anonymizer.com), you never were invisible to begin with. From a privacy perspective, browsing corporate sites is just like walking along the sidewalk in front of a strip mall... people can see you, see what store-fronts you stop to look into, and see the logos on the bags you are carrying. There are ways you can avoid detection if you are afraid people might find out that you just bought the new Britney Spears CD, but it should not be the responsibility of anybody else to help you hide your face, even for something as shameful as listening to teen bubble-gum princesses.
To summarize, I feel that each of us needs to be able align ourselves with one of the following statements, 1. "There is a legal and reasonable way to fight the corporate and governmental juggernaut and it is........." 2. "I believe that purposeful and directed hactivisism is currently the best way we have to maintain our rights."
you left out 3. "I believe that most anti-corporate rants are little more than chicken-little fearmongering. I believe that being free to participate in the market is good, that being able to sell shares in your company (re: form a corporation) to help your company grow is also good, and that doing so does not make your company an evil entity which must be fought against, by legal means or otherwise."
Not quite. A freedom fighter fights for... (drum roll)... freedom.
Do you really believe that the PLO, should they win, would establish any kind of government that is based on freedom and human liberty? It seems to me that Arafat's agenda is the re-establishment independant religious monarchy, known as "Palestine". We can argue all day about the Palestinian right to statehood, and just how much land Israel should be allowed to call his own, (personally, I think that the Palestinians have been getting the shaft all along, and everybody knows it), but to suggest that their struggle has anything to do with establishing a free state is simply not correct.
As a side note, if it were up to me, I would establish a new Palestinian homeland... in the US. Pick a spot somewhere in South Dakota or somewhere, near a good river. Make sure it's and ideal spot to build a city, and homestead it out to any and all exiled Palestinians who are willing to emmigrate. (It would have to be some cherry real estate, or else would be perceived as a sort of "reservation", which would be bad. This would be land that they would own to do with what they like, sell it, live on it, open a store, whatever.) Throw in some guaranteed low-interest loans (using the money we would otherwise be spendign on dealing with the problems the exile problem is causeing), to build a house and/or a business.
The vast majority of the Palestinian people are well education, speak at least some English, and can be active participants in our economy almost immediately... just the sort of immigration that every nation WANTS to have. It would be good for them, good for the US, and good for stability in the Middle East.
Such a thing would never happen, because too many people would have hostile emotional responses to such a concept, but one can dream. Also, some Palestinians would probably prefer not to live on the other side of the globe from Mecca.
That's because they are terrorists.
I'm sorry, but burning your draft card and marching in protest of an unjust war is one thing. Vandalism of somebody else's property, motivated by unjustified anger for daring to (gasp!) open a factory in Hong Kong, is completely different. In the first case, we are talking about conciencious objection and free speech against excessive military force, in the second, we are talking about cowardly attacks on the institutions which create the economy that allows you the free time to commit these childish crimes.
Go ahead, mod me down as "flamebait" if you are so inclined... as if I give a fuck about what some isolationist, paranoid, hot-headed, jobless web-vandal thinks.
Real hackers are typically working as consultants to global companies, not wrecking their stuff.
That's not even a little bit true. People who just drive into their local express Lube shop every 3000 miles, and let the mechanics replace parts when the book says they should, are going to get 150,000 to 200,000 out of just about any car.
The maintenace of modern, high-performance, high-efficiency engines is such that it is outside the realm of the typical "car guy" anyway. You might be able to completely disassemble and reassemble the engine of a 1975 F100 Ford truck, but just replacing the spark plugs in my 2001 truck is a $3000 job, which must be done in a professional shop with specialty tools. (Fortunately, the plugs are made to last 120,000 miles before they need to be changed.) On the bright side, I get much better power, feul economy, cab room, and towing capacity that that old Ford could ever have given me, and it cost me less in adjusted dollars than that Ford did when it was new.
With computers, on the other hand, we haven't really been through such a revolution. GUI's made things a little simpler, sure, and CPU speeds have moved more or less according to Moore's Law, but I would say that the computing industry is not yet even in the '75 Ford stage of development... I would say we've only begun to move past the first-generation Oldsmobiles. ("A fine downhill car," was the joke at the time, because the Olds was notorious for struggling on even modest inclines, and the engine sounded best when a slope was moving you forward anyway. Does that remind anybody else of the last 10 years of Windows?)
If you have not bought at least a game or two for yourself, you probably don't know the market as well as the people who have been collecting these games for a couple years.
So the answer to your question is: Yes. Spend a few months getting into the game collector scene via eBay and other trading resources, as a hobbiest. After a few months of doing so, you might learn that there are reasons why nobody else has gotten rich doing this yet... or you might realize that it's a rich gold mine that few know about... or you might find a way to enter the business in a way that has not already been tried.
In short, know the market first, then think about entering it.
In the mean time, there might be something that you already know a lot about which you can use to start a business. Look at the guys at ThinkGeek. They turned a fondness for pithy little geek sig files into their own little T-shirt and bumper-sticker empire.
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Connect a man to the Internet, and he's still hungry, but gets free porn.
You can get a computer for almost nothing in a garage sale, and get an Internet dial-up for nothing if you are willing to put up with ads, so anybody who really can't afford to connect to the Internet at this point probably doesn't need it as much as they need shoes, a place to sleep, and a job.
The only "divide" is a social one. Those who think computer literacy is worth learning and an Internet connection is worth having, they will go through the trouble of getting it. As getting on line gets easier for clueless newbies and as the marketing of the net continues, more and more people have both the ability and the desire to connect.
Those Jeff Goldbloom iMac ads may seem really silly to us, but the truth is that it is bringing us closer to the mad dream that Steve Jobs had back in the 80's: The computer as a ubiquitous and simple home appliance.
Most "poor" homes have TV's, phones, and microwave ovens. When they become simple enough and usefull enough, the "bottom quintile" will have net terminals of some kind as well.
The problem is, students who have absent or apathetic parents are more likely to have emotional, behavioral, and developmental issues, which means that these students are much, much more expensive to educate. Running a school full of fatherless kids means spending more on counciling, rehab services, tutoring, etc.
A little background: The culture at WIRED these days seems like that of a "Salon" magazine with more tech-oriented stories, but back in the days before they fired Katz, they really seemed to believe they were part of some kind of social revolution. They were trying very to become to 90's geeks what The Whole Earth Catalog was to hippies a couple decades earlier.
Actual geeks never really took WIRED very seriously, so they evolved into more of a tech-business journal. Mr. Katz, one of the would-be revolutionaries, did not fit in with a magazine that reported actual news, so he was cut loose and landed on Slashdot.
His perspective is not that of an actual geek, but as a geek observer who is trying to parse meaning out of what he thinks he sees. The tone of this article seems to indicate that he might be coming to the realization that there isn't one; that that the only thing that really sets geeks apart from everybody else is math aptitude, and all other stereotypes fail to apply as well an editorialist looking for a "cultural shift" might have been hoping for.
Somehow he gets roasted by many of the people here anyway, and not just the trolls.
I've seen him post replies to comments, so I'm fairly sure he reads them all... but he only seems to reply to the trolls and FP'ers, with comments like "you obviously did not take the time to read my entire article". Those who do read his article, and offer legitimate criticism, he tends to ignore.
It seems the best we can hope for after each of his "stories" is for the /. crowd here to have an interesting discussion about the issues his columns should have addressed, based on the topic in question.
In other words, old people who did not learn about the net are starting to die off, while young people who did learn about it are starting to get old.
The average age is continuing to rise because we are all continuing to get older. (Astonishing, ain't it?)
Yet another example of why statistics are often worthless.
Just to piss her off, I think I will have my name changed to Celine Dion amd register all of these new TLD's.
Better yet, I'll change my name to Celine Online, and make ICANN force her to give me www.celineonline.com. :)
Thank you, Codeala... 48 posts went by before somebody pointed out that the Emperor has no clothes. If I had mod points to offer, I would be throwing a "+1, Insightful" your way.
It's an obscure film directed by Akira Kurosawa (who also made "Yojimbo", "The Seven Samurai", and "RAN"... all of which are movies you should see before getting around to "The Hidden Fortress").
My personal nomination for the Worst Spin-off Of All Time goes to: "After-M*A*S*H".
Anyone else remember that big floating steamer?
They must have pulled that one out of storage at least 50 times over their 7 seasons.
One of the things that baffled me about the war years on DS9 was the lack of additional production of the Defiant's class. Part of the premise of DS9 was that the Federation military and industrial capacity was drastically reduced by the Borg attack (and the recent skirmishes with the Cardassians), and spread thin thanks to those pesky Romulans. The Defiant arrived at DS9 just as the Federation were starting to get their shit together again, so a large fleet of them would probably be too much to expect.
But the characters on Voyager are so flat and unoriginal (and several of them are really reheated just leftovers from the previous shows) that I can't bring myself to care about them. I'll probably watch the series finale, though... because I just might get to see one or two of them die. That would be nice.
Hopefully they have put a little more thought into the development of the new series than they did with Voyager.
Interviewer: "How much were you making at your previous position?"
The Truth: "I am making ten bucks an hour changing back-up tapes while reading the K&R book and surfing Slashdot, but I think I can figure out how to do the job and should get paid $105 thousand per year for it."
What You Tell Them: "I'm looking for something in the range of $115 thousand per year, but I might be willing to accept slightly less. I've been doing a lot of training beyond the required skill-set of my current job, and I am ready to move up."
Besides, in the time you worked for a company, you probably had several different bosses. As long as you are not a total screw-up, some of them probably like you and wish you the best. Choose one who wants to help you, and list that former boss as your "employer" from that company. Then you will have one more voice cheerleading for you (and not volunteering anything you don't want shared). Problem solved.
Nice antecdote. Nothing to do with my point, but interesting. The point is that Excel is probably the most expensive spreadsheet on the market right now. If you think otherwise, name three that cost more.
Apple screwed up not licensing their hardware, end of story
Again, irrelivant. I never said that Apple should have won the desktop wars in my post. The only two things I said about Apple was 1. Apple introduced affordable desktop computers tot he world (TRUE), and 2. When Windows 3.1 came out it was vastly inferior, by almost any measure, to the Macintosh OS. (ALSO TRUE)
Errmm Oracle outperforms SQL on Sun Starfires, not what I choose to run as I'm not rich. SQL is nore usable, more stable (its a newer codebase) and hasn't sold its ass to Java
I didn't say running Oracle was cheap. In fact I said people pay more to use it. My point was that if performance is what matters most to you, it is a better choice than SQL. I noticed that you chose to ignore my point that PostgreSQL, which also works great and stacks up to MS-SQL quite well, is completely free and can run on a completely free OS.
The netscape thing is not true, ie1/2 sucked to the max, ie3 rocked and thats when netscape tanked - they failed to innovate, got arrogant, lost a few good engineers...
Sorry, but IE3 also sucked. It was enough better than IE2 that people didn't completely hate it, but coercing OEM's to drop Navigator and bundling IE with Windows is what killed Netscape, not a better browser. Microsoft's own internal documents acknowledged that they could NEVER have beaten Netscape on a level playing field.
Wrong on the engineering side, I've seen presentations by Dave Cutler, Charles Simonyi, Jim Grey, Hal Berenson, Dave Campbell and Goetz Graefe - these guys are comp sci giants
Okay, you saw some some spiffy lectures, I'm very happy for you. I don't know what that has to do with my point, but congratulations.
I'm afraid your post is pretty innacurate and your arrogant crack at the end puts you in the sad bearded & sandled UNIX bigot league.
If you are going to call me innacurate, you should at least point out ONE thing I said that was incorrect. Also, I don't know what you mean by "arrogant crack at the end". Do you mean my signature file? That's always there, and it's only meant to make you chuckle. Sorry if it didn't amuse you. As for the "sad bearded $ sandled UNIX bigot league"... You could not be further from the truth. If the depth of your comments are anything to go by, I probably have more experience with NT servers than you do. I have several different platforms, including a couple versions of Windows, runnung on my systems at home, and use Solaris, Linux, Windows, and even MacOS at work.
I choose Windows for somethings, Solaris for others, and MVS for others - horses for courses.
....and I value my fellow workers
For somebody who claims to be so open minded, you sure launched a tantrum in my direction.
If you are making $35K per year, and applying for a job that pays $105K per year... tell them that your last job payed $98K per year. There's really no easy way for them to check on it, and probably wouldn't bother if there was.
Worst case, they find out and fire you... in which case, you can now honestly go to other employers and say "my last job payed $105K per year."