I'm still really enjoying IT. Sure there are good days and bad days, but it's far better than any other type of job I've had (Steel Mill Melt Shop, Coffe Shop Barista, Movie Theater Usher, Administrative Assistant, etc.). Trust me, the one thing that all of the crummy jobs I've had had in common were the PHBs hired for any reason other than skill.
I think we need to return to the question of what happens as we automate more and more of society. Do we really need everyone having a menial job? Couldn't we just have something like welfare, so people who want to work can do so and be productive, and we can keep the majority of people out of work, comfortably at home playing video games all day? Isn't much of PHB syndrome caused by people trying to justify their paycheck?
Not to mention that if you accidentally do a bit of swerving in that Hummer you might be upside down quickly. It would be rather difficult to flip a Fit. Most of the bad accidents I see these days involve rollovers.
Guess we need better roofs. Or people could just stop buying SUVs since as this article points out there is little safety in weight.
Do you ever worry that your feelings are trying to get you killed?
1998 Toyota Corolla - 40mph into side of truck that turned left in front of me for no apparent reason. Drove the car to a parking lot and got out without a scratch. Car totalled.
2001 Toyota Echo - car driving horizontally to traffic plowed into my left front bumper sending me across a lane of traffic and hitting a concrete highway divider twice. Tires, were resting against the divider. Got out without a scratch. Car totalled.
Now granted I have bad luck. But my experience is telling me your feelings are trying to get you killed. No matter how good a driver you are if someone decides to turn left at exactly the right moment or drive against the flow of traffic, there's very little you can do evasively.
Ok, well we'll go ahead and take the electric cars then. We'll just point and laugh when you're trying to figure out how to afford to fuel up your Jimmy when gas hits $12/gallon. After all, it was an important investment.
And it'll definitely be hard to power your planes and tanks once we run out of oil. Not to mention the number of things the military does that are based on small $500 million grants. The military understands the point of science even if you're too ignorant.
My point was that $500 million dollars is not an important line item. And if you do care about the military you should care about the US developing the best electric engines in the world. Thankfully the US military actually takes energy concerns much more seriously than the Republican party, and has lots of projects to deal with energy crisis and the potential fallout of global crisis change. Including hybrid vehicle projects. These were started under George Bush, who is an environmentalist (check out the tech on his ranch) who happens to believe the market is the best vehicle for solving the problem. He never lived in some magical mystery land where oil will always be cheap and plentiful like the Republican party seems to do now. I can't believe I'm defending Bush, but that's how nutty your party has become.
And Seriously? Race over party? You wonder why Republicans have a reputation for being a bunch of ignorant racists? John McCain was an uninspiring candidate who abandoned every single thing that made anyone want to vote for him to try to appeal to the "Republican base". He got a running mate who made Perot's choice of Admiral Stockdale seem inspired.
Many of John McCain's friends didn't vote for him. White Republican friends.
Not really. You just plan what months of the year you're willing to try. I live in Texas so my wife had no interest in trying for a baby in November through January.
People who plan their pregnancies are more likely to be educated, married, and not teenagers. People who plan pregnancies are not likely to try to target November - January, because it's cold and they won't want their babies birth close to Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Ok. Then I'll take my half a trillion dollars and stop investing it in the military. Seems like a much better tax savings than $500 million. $500 million is a rounding error.
It's not Colin Powell's fault that his party has become completely irrelevant.
No you missed the point again. What does this have to do with politics? And why shouldn't they be best buddies? What's wrong with trying to create something new and great together? Regardless of my political affiliation I'd be much more interested in investing $500 million in something new than $500 billion in old car companies that have proven completely unable to plan for the future. This is absolutely captialism at its best, not some sort of bizarre back room political dealings.
1) Is true 2) Is called a "recession". If you were here during the dot-com bust you would remember this exact same environment under a different police chief. 3) He should harass them. There were I believe 3 fatalities during the ROT rally this year due to un-helmeted riders. The rallies do not increase crime in the city, no matter what business owners would contend. Therefore it's appropriate for the police chief to go after middle-aged white people aren't wearing helmets, over black kids who are being noisy and not causing any harm. 4) I live in South-East Austin. We're very thankful for the increased patrolling in our neighborhood and it's brought down crime substantially.
While I agree that number 1 is police-statish, the rest are just him doing his job.
Feel free to add the arts to this list. American Musical Theater seems to dominate most people's ideas of theater (just like the Hollywood blockbuster), and plays like "Inherit the Wind" that while good are more about patting the viewer on the back for their enlightenment than actually challenging them. Sure there's an audience for challenging new work, but it's about the same size as the audience for a scientific journal.
I'm not sure anything has changed though. Even during the 1950s and 60s, I'm sure most people were just sitting in their suburban homes watching TV. About as involved in the scientific inquiry as football fans are involved in the game.
I'd actually contend that it was the fierce competition that created that climate. Perhaps the solution would be for the US to challenge Germany to a contest (like getting a man on the moon). Use our natural xenophobia productively.
We know they're frauds. We know that we're buying a ponzi scheme. They're the only ones who seem to believe their "models" have a basis in reality. Sort of like how facebook "models" my friends.
Well except that this is private industry, not the government. Let me make that more accurate for you:
The next step is to put equipment on your body that continuously monitors your activities where each Jaywalk and other minor infringements result in changes to your life insurance deductible. You health insurance company will also adjust your deductible for each offending word that comes out of your mouth, as it shows that you haven't been dealing with stress in your life properly and are liable to die quickly.
Why do we need the government when we can pay hyper-efficient private industry to do it for us? Granted that the private insurance companies make the government look slim and trim, but who wouldn't want a privately held unaccountable bureaucratic corporation deciding whether we live or die? It's like the government, but without a voting stake. Sign me up today!
I actually develop an appliance - Uplogix - that hooks into the serial ports on your devices. We hook into pretty much everything DRAC, ILOM, ILO, IPMI, and the plain old serial console. I can forward ports. I can launch a remote instance of firefox with access to my remote network. I can ssh. I can control power controllers in case the remote access card hangs.
I only go into the office twice a week and almost never have to walk into the server room. There's no reason with modern technology to have to visit your server room unless you need to physically pull a cable. Investigate these technologies. If your server is even remotely modern you can control it through one of the above technologies. And if you can't figure it out feel free to buy one of our boxes and we'll show you
Any business that thinks that they're going to take Office and put it online and make $20/month rather than $150/4 years, doesn't realize that the cloud lets someone build it and give it away. Their customers don't have to use only Macs or Windows machines to use their app. And that's the appeal. Most of us don't live in homogenous environments anymore. We have windows machines, and apples, and ubuntu, and iphones, and blackberrys, and wiis and playstations and we want our apps to work on all of them. We want new features every week or month, not every two years.
From a tech perspective it allows us to build applications and easily expand the servers powering the apps as we add users. And we can do that for almost no money and without having an IT staff at a datacenter racking and provisioning. Which means more resources dedicated to innovating. It means offering applications for very little to no money and still being able to make a profit because the overhead is so low.
Sure thing. Nothing prevents them from doing that. They just can't sell the entire company to a competitor who is in pretty much every market they're in. I don't hear them trying to spin off their business into discrete segments that can be sold easily. If they sold their server business to IBM and their java business to Oracle, then there wouldn't be quite the antitrust fears. They know there are going to be antitrust issues, so this is really just another in a long line of bad management decisions. I have no clue why people blame the government when it acts logically and consistently. If you know the government is going to block and/or slow down your merger because it's done the same thing with the last 100 mergers, don't you think you should plan for it? Isn't doing otherwise negligent? It's like these companies are selling drugs in public and then complaining how they don't like our drug laws when they get caught. It's a bad decision, no matter what your take is on the law.
And let's not forget - *Share holders are taking on risk*. Taking a stake in a big company is still a risk. There's been plenty of time to cut your losses on sun. Plenty of time to analyze the risk. You made a bad decision. That's free market capitalism.
Oracle shouldn't be able to merge with Sun for antitrust reasons. Sun's disintegration opens up room for new players in the marketplace. What exactly do you free-market capitalists have a problem with?
I didn't say that kids couldn't read. The problem is that they read by memorizing entire words until the age of about 6, that system isn't scalable. I wasn't saying kids couldn't read earlier. Too bad your Larousse encyclopedia didn't have any information on cognitive development.
My point was that most of childhood kids are absorbing so fast, and learning so fast that there's no need for additional stimulai. The sound the fridge makes is frickin' cool for them. Watching clouds in the sky stimulates them.
Still has nothing to do with parenting. It has to do with brain development. Kids brains are learning very distinct things at very distinct phases. Training them to text is just training them to be parrots (I'm probably insulting parrots in this post.). Kids can't read in an intelligent fashion (i.e. parsing pieces of words to form wholes, acquisition of new words though context) until they're about six. Exactly what kind of texting are they going to be doing? This has nothing to do with learning technology, it's about brain development. And while you CAN do it, they question is whether you SHOULD do it. I can also drill my kid with flashcards 8 hours a day, but I'm probably going to make them hate school in the long run, not be incredible scholars.
"Of course for them it was just something they could do while we fed them"
You do realize that you can just have kids eat while you feed them right? My kids just sit at a table and eat. Since they haven't mastered things like knives yet, it's still a pretty exciting process (and they can always decide which food that they used to love that they're not going to eat tonight). Young kids don't get bored. The world's still too damn exciting.
Why oh why aren't we investigating News Corp for antitrust? This guy is publicly asking his competitors to be anti-competitive. What exactly do you need to do to be investigated these days? Isn't that the definition of anti-competitive, trying to convince your competition to fix prices for the benefit of existing market players?
They moved their first call center out of Austin not because their employees were demanding high wages, but because they'd so pissed off everyone even remotely technical in town that they couldn't hire anyone in the first place. The great thing about following Dell is at least you know you're going to go into bankruptcy really, really slowly. I guess that's a business plan.
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I'm still really enjoying IT. Sure there are good days and bad days, but it's far better than any other type of job I've had (Steel Mill Melt Shop, Coffe Shop Barista, Movie Theater Usher, Administrative Assistant, etc.). Trust me, the one thing that all of the crummy jobs I've had had in common were the PHBs hired for any reason other than skill.
I think we need to return to the question of what happens as we automate more and more of society. Do we really need everyone having a menial job? Couldn't we just have something like welfare, so people who want to work can do so and be productive, and we can keep the majority of people out of work, comfortably at home playing video games all day? Isn't much of PHB syndrome caused by people trying to justify their paycheck?
Not to mention that if you accidentally do a bit of swerving in that Hummer you might be upside down quickly. It would be rather difficult to flip a Fit. Most of the bad accidents I see these days involve rollovers.
Guess we need better roofs. Or people could just stop buying SUVs since as this article points out there is little safety in weight.
Do you ever worry that your feelings are trying to get you killed?
1998 Toyota Corolla - 40mph into side of truck that turned left in front of me for no apparent reason. Drove the car to a parking lot and got out without a scratch. Car totalled.
2001 Toyota Echo - car driving horizontally to traffic plowed into my left front bumper sending me across a lane of traffic and hitting a concrete highway divider twice. Tires, were resting against the divider. Got out without a scratch. Car totalled.
Now granted I have bad luck. But my experience is telling me your feelings are trying to get you killed. No matter how good a driver you are if someone decides to turn left at exactly the right moment or drive against the flow of traffic, there's very little you can do evasively.
Ok, well we'll go ahead and take the electric cars then. We'll just point and laugh when you're trying to figure out how to afford to fuel up your Jimmy when gas hits $12/gallon. After all, it was an important investment.
And it'll definitely be hard to power your planes and tanks once we run out of oil. Not to mention the number of things the military does that are based on small $500 million grants. The military understands the point of science even if you're too ignorant.
My point was that $500 million dollars is not an important line item. And if you do care about the military you should care about the US developing the best electric engines in the world. Thankfully the US military actually takes energy concerns much more seriously than the Republican party, and has lots of projects to deal with energy crisis and the potential fallout of global crisis change. Including hybrid vehicle projects. These were started under George Bush, who is an environmentalist (check out the tech on his ranch) who happens to believe the market is the best vehicle for solving the problem. He never lived in some magical mystery land where oil will always be cheap and plentiful like the Republican party seems to do now. I can't believe I'm defending Bush, but that's how nutty your party has become.
And Seriously? Race over party? You wonder why Republicans have a reputation for being a bunch of ignorant racists? John McCain was an uninspiring candidate who abandoned every single thing that made anyone want to vote for him to try to appeal to the "Republican base". He got a running mate who made Perot's choice of Admiral Stockdale seem inspired.
Many of John McCain's friends didn't vote for him. White Republican friends.
Agreed, all of our terminology is based on the idea that every pregnancy is always deliberate. Really we're talking about procreative sex planning.
We're human. We plan. Even thought it often seems somewhat silly in retrospect.
Not really. You just plan what months of the year you're willing to try. I live in Texas so my wife had no interest in trying for a baby in November through January.
People who plan their pregnancies are more likely to be educated, married, and not teenagers. People who plan pregnancies are not likely to try to target November - January, because it's cold and they won't want their babies birth close to Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Ok. Then I'll take my half a trillion dollars and stop investing it in the military. Seems like a much better tax savings than $500 million. $500 million is a rounding error.
It's not Colin Powell's fault that his party has become completely irrelevant.
No you missed the point again. What does this have to do with politics? And why shouldn't they be best buddies? What's wrong with trying to create something new and great together? Regardless of my political affiliation I'd be much more interested in investing $500 million in something new than $500 billion in old car companies that have proven completely unable to plan for the future. This is absolutely captialism at its best, not some sort of bizarre back room political dealings.
Right. It's Capitalism when government money goes to a monopoly corporation. Socialism is when it goes to a startup.
1) Is true
2) Is called a "recession". If you were here during the dot-com bust you would remember this exact same environment under a different police chief.
3) He should harass them. There were I believe 3 fatalities during the ROT rally this year due to un-helmeted riders. The rallies do not increase crime in the city, no matter what business owners would contend. Therefore it's appropriate for the police chief to go after middle-aged white people aren't wearing helmets, over black kids who are being noisy and not causing any harm.
4) I live in South-East Austin. We're very thankful for the increased patrolling in our neighborhood and it's brought down crime substantially.
While I agree that number 1 is police-statish, the rest are just him doing his job.
That's nicely circular. Also, when people get out of control there's no one to regulate them but other people.
Are you even aware of what a government is?
Feel free to add the arts to this list. American Musical Theater seems to dominate most people's ideas of theater (just like the Hollywood blockbuster), and plays like "Inherit the Wind" that while good are more about patting the viewer on the back for their enlightenment than actually challenging them. Sure there's an audience for challenging new work, but it's about the same size as the audience for a scientific journal.
I'm not sure anything has changed though. Even during the 1950s and 60s, I'm sure most people were just sitting in their suburban homes watching TV. About as involved in the scientific inquiry as football fans are involved in the game.
I'd actually contend that it was the fierce competition that created that climate. Perhaps the solution would be for the US to challenge Germany to a contest (like getting a man on the moon). Use our natural xenophobia productively.
We know they're frauds. We know that we're buying a ponzi scheme. They're the only ones who seem to believe their "models" have a basis in reality. Sort of like how facebook "models" my friends.
Well except that this is private industry, not the government. Let me make that more accurate for you:
The next step is to put equipment on your body that continuously monitors your activities where each Jaywalk and other minor infringements result in changes to your life insurance deductible. You health insurance company will also adjust your deductible for each offending word that comes out of your mouth, as it shows that you haven't been dealing with stress in your life properly and are liable to die quickly.
Why do we need the government when we can pay hyper-efficient private industry to do it for us? Granted that the private insurance companies make the government look slim and trim, but who wouldn't want a privately held unaccountable bureaucratic corporation deciding whether we live or die? It's like the government, but without a voting stake. Sign me up today!
I actually develop an appliance - Uplogix - that hooks into the serial ports on your devices. We hook into pretty much everything DRAC, ILOM, ILO, IPMI, and the plain old serial console. I can forward ports. I can launch a remote instance of firefox with access to my remote network. I can ssh. I can control power controllers in case the remote access card hangs.
I only go into the office twice a week and almost never have to walk into the server room. There's no reason with modern technology to have to visit your server room unless you need to physically pull a cable. Investigate these technologies. If your server is even remotely modern you can control it through one of the above technologies. And if you can't figure it out feel free to buy one of our boxes and we'll show you
Those are business wonk answers.
Any business that thinks that they're going to take Office and put it online and make $20/month rather than $150/4 years, doesn't realize that the cloud lets someone build it and give it away. Their customers don't have to use only Macs or Windows machines to use their app. And that's the appeal. Most of us don't live in homogenous environments anymore. We have windows machines, and apples, and ubuntu, and iphones, and blackberrys, and wiis and playstations and we want our apps to work on all of them. We want new features every week or month, not every two years.
From a tech perspective it allows us to build applications and easily expand the servers powering the apps as we add users. And we can do that for almost no money and without having an IT staff at a datacenter racking and provisioning. Which means more resources dedicated to innovating. It means offering applications for very little to no money and still being able to make a profit because the overhead is so low.
That's cloud computing.
Sure thing. Nothing prevents them from doing that. They just can't sell the entire company to a competitor who is in pretty much every market they're in. I don't hear them trying to spin off their business into discrete segments that can be sold easily. If they sold their server business to IBM and their java business to Oracle, then there wouldn't be quite the antitrust fears. They know there are going to be antitrust issues, so this is really just another in a long line of bad management decisions. I have no clue why people blame the government when it acts logically and consistently. If you know the government is going to block and/or slow down your merger because it's done the same thing with the last 100 mergers, don't you think you should plan for it? Isn't doing otherwise negligent? It's like these companies are selling drugs in public and then complaining how they don't like our drug laws when they get caught. It's a bad decision, no matter what your take is on the law.
And let's not forget - *Share holders are taking on risk*. Taking a stake in a big company is still a risk. There's been plenty of time to cut your losses on sun. Plenty of time to analyze the risk. You made a bad decision. That's free market capitalism.
Oracle shouldn't be able to merge with Sun for antitrust reasons. Sun's disintegration opens up room for new players in the marketplace. What exactly do you free-market capitalists have a problem with?
That's all I want. Washing Machine and Dryer. I'd get so much more laundry done if I knew the minute the Dryer was done.
I didn't say that kids couldn't read. The problem is that they read by memorizing entire words until the age of about 6, that system isn't scalable. I wasn't saying kids couldn't read earlier. Too bad your Larousse encyclopedia didn't have any information on cognitive development.
My point was that most of childhood kids are absorbing so fast, and learning so fast that there's no need for additional stimulai. The sound the fridge makes is frickin' cool for them. Watching clouds in the sky stimulates them.
Still has nothing to do with parenting. It has to do with brain development. Kids brains are learning very distinct things at very distinct phases. Training them to text is just training them to be parrots (I'm probably insulting parrots in this post.). Kids can't read in an intelligent fashion (i.e. parsing pieces of words to form wholes, acquisition of new words though context) until they're about six. Exactly what kind of texting are they going to be doing? This has nothing to do with learning technology, it's about brain development. And while you CAN do it, they question is whether you SHOULD do it. I can also drill my kid with flashcards 8 hours a day, but I'm probably going to make them hate school in the long run, not be incredible scholars.
"Of course for them it was just something they could do while we fed them"
You do realize that you can just have kids eat while you feed them right? My kids just sit at a table and eat. Since they haven't mastered things like knives yet, it's still a pretty exciting process (and they can always decide which food that they used to love that they're not going to eat tonight). Young kids don't get bored. The world's still too damn exciting.
Why oh why aren't we investigating News Corp for antitrust? This guy is publicly asking his competitors to be anti-competitive. What exactly do you need to do to be investigated these days? Isn't that the definition of anti-competitive, trying to convince your competition to fix prices for the benefit of existing market players?
They moved their first call center out of Austin not because their employees were demanding high wages, but because they'd so pissed off everyone even remotely technical in town that they couldn't hire anyone in the first place.
The great thing about following Dell is at least you know you're going to go into bankruptcy really, really slowly. I guess that's a business plan.