A point I think the article misses on, and a fairly important one, is the current education system in the US.
Although I'll agree that the public education system isn't so hot these days (one needs only to survey the grammatical horrors from a single page of slashdot for all the evidence one could hope to find), this isn't really that relevant to the butchering of the American IT workforce.
It is unrelated to talent or quality. It's all about money. Period.
Take two Sunni children and two Shi'ite children, give them a mud-making machine away from all the adults
Everone else has already pounded your larger points into a fine-grained powder, so it looks like it's up to me to ask the question everyone has been avoiding: what the fuck is this "mud-making machine" you keep babbling about?
No, seriously.
Where you come from, what happens when you combine dirt and water without mechanical aid?
We have Win2K boxes at my office which are only rebooted when major pieces of software change. They're on isolated test LANs so we don't even worry too much about updates unless it directly affects something we're doing. One set in particular stayed up and running for more than six months -- all while supporting developers connecting via TS to do dev & testing on SQL2K and IIS/ASP.
My XP boxes at home are never rebooted except for the occasional service pack. It isn't unusual to notice that my home desktop hasn't been rebooted for a couple of months. (Even driver updates and many Windows patches no longer require reboots.)
The last true BSOD I saw was when my stashed-in-a-closet Win2K Pro MP3 server box didn't take kindly to a new NIC driver I installed about a year ago. That's another box which is NEVER shut down. Right now it's been up and running continuously for probably close to a year, serving up files almost 10 or 12 hours a day on most days.
the source of the quote "it uses NT" comes from the Guardian
Exactly. And I'm willing to bet The Guardian doesn't "call itself a geek". They meant NT4.
NT is still in widespread use within the US military (a few of my friends do various types of computer-related military contract work), so it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case in other large militaries as well.
Nobody inside Microsoft has referred to anything but the early betas of Win2K as NT since NT4. I know a lot of those people and talk to them about this kind of thing on a regular basis. If you said NT to anybody inside Microsoft, they would instantly assume you mean NT4, and nothing else.
And you're wrong about the branching of the Windows product line. There are four branches these days -- Home, Server, Enterprise and Data Center. Most people would assume the last three are really just marketing-speak, but there are very large groups fully dedicated to each of the four branches. To MS, the separation is quite real.
I did, however, get a laugh out of your RedHat 8 joke. I actually overheard that awhile back here at the office (various MS geeks went through a spasm of "switching" to Linux -- and mostly switched back).
I agree, but that doesn't explain the grandparent's assertion that French was the dominant language of science. I think a later response adequately explains that, however. People (and presumably the grandparent poster) misinterpret "franco" as a reference to the French. It is an Italian word referring to Europeans in general. I will admit I have made the same mistake.
In Chinese, the term for computer is "dien now" which literally means "electric brain".
What on earth makes the abstract concept of "electric brain" superior to the more descriptive and accurate phrase "computer", which literally describes what the device is actually doing (i.e. computing)? I don't believe or even pretend that my computer is or has a brain, and I know the meaning of the word compute, just as I understand that the "er" ending is a way of indicating that the object so-named performs the action implied by the root word. Just because you have a thing for a primitive pictographic language doesn't mean the rest of us need to be saddled with that garbage.
"Awesome" is another stupid example from your post. According to etymologists, the first recorded use dates from 1598. I'm pretty sure whomever lived in California in 1598 didn't spend their days surfing and inventing new words just to bother whining transplants from the Far East.
And of course, Asian speakers don't alrays plonounce Engrish wolds so creary either. (For the record, the etymological roots of the word "stereotype" comes to us from the French, c.1798.)
once you do GT and touch any other racer, the way the cars move feel fake and alien
Unless, of course, that "other racer" is a real race car. In that case, GT feels like shit. It's like an almost realistic simulation, with all the wrong things magnified to ridiculous levels. Most people I know with a PS2 and an Xbox complain that PGR II doesn't feel realistic, and I've always argued that it's far more realistic than GT3. And lately I've noticed, the guys who actually race are the ones who agree with me. It's the couch car-guys who like GT3 better.
I also think that it might be based on the Project Gotham engine, and I hated the way that game drove.
Speaking as someone who has driven quite a few of the cars featured in PGR II on one race track or another, I can tell you that the PGR II engine is rather extremely realistic. Far more realistic than any of the GT games, and yeah, I've played all of those, too.
Sorry, but once again, for this car junkie Sony fails to impress.
It's not a HUGE impact, but there is an impact. Besides, I was thinking less of slashdot and more of heavily slanted publications such as just about everything printed by ZDNet.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but that's a completely different topic than whether or not you can buy an MS-free machine (and more specifically, whether the "Microsoft Tax" is a myth). Indeed, even if Janus succeeds, by definition Apple and other large companies aren't going to just roll over and die. It seems likely there will at some mechanism permitting others to play the Janus game. In that case, your choices may not include freebie Linux (although I personally doubt things will go that far), but I strongly doubt the PC world will become an all-MS-or-nothing proposition for anybody who cares enough to expend the effort to find an alternative.
At the moment I'm typing this on a Sager NP4780-S which I bought four months ago. Besides being a far better machine than almost anything sold by the likes of Dell or HP, I ordered it without an operating system. It took me about 30 minutes of screwing around online to locate it and make my decision.
Above and beyond anything else, the one thing that always ticks me off is when a game relies on arbitrary limitations of the game itself to make something really hard. The best example is always JUMPING.
It never fails -- if you're in a game that allows the player to jump, there will be some level or test which requires you to RUN right up to the teeter-tottering edge of plunging to your death, then perform an AMAZING jump, which will allow you to just BARELY make it to safety on the other side.
In my opinion, it's rarely much fun. Doom did this a few times and I still remember how annoyed I was. I mean, if you were that super badass Marine, wouldn't you just say Screw It and grab the ledge and haul yourself up or something? "Dammit, I'm a badass Marine fighting the minions of Hell, yet I just can't seem to manage those extra two pixels!"
The sad part is, it isn't even remotely realistic.
Project Gotham II is probably one of the most realistic racing games (of the video gamey lots-of-cars-to-choose-from genre) that I've played so far. (I'd have said Sega GT 2000 except that the relative vehicle performance is so messed up.)
Slashdot Mirror
A point I think the article misses on, and a fairly important one, is the current education system in the US.
Although I'll agree that the public education system isn't so hot these days (one needs only to survey the grammatical horrors from a single page of slashdot for all the evidence one could hope to find), this isn't really that relevant to the butchering of the American IT workforce.
It is unrelated to talent or quality. It's all about money. Period.
Internet: CERN, Geneve (Switzerland)
DARPA. US. Heard of it?
Take two Sunni children and two Shi'ite children, give them a mud-making machine away from all the adults
Everone else has already pounded your larger points into a fine-grained powder, so it looks like it's up to me to ask the question everyone has been avoiding: what the fuck is this "mud-making machine" you keep babbling about?
No, seriously.
Where you come from, what happens when you combine dirt and water without mechanical aid?
Finally, does this remind anyone else of the Animatrix, on how the skies were darkened to stop the machines?
No, but it does remind me of The Matrix, and how the skies were darkened to stop the machines.
WHAT A BIZARRE COINCIDENCE!
Well said.
We have Win2K boxes at my office which are only rebooted when major pieces of software change. They're on isolated test LANs so we don't even worry too much about updates unless it directly affects something we're doing. One set in particular stayed up and running for more than six months -- all while supporting developers connecting via TS to do dev & testing on SQL2K and IIS/ASP.
My XP boxes at home are never rebooted except for the occasional service pack. It isn't unusual to notice that my home desktop hasn't been rebooted for a couple of months. (Even driver updates and many Windows patches no longer require reboots.)
The last true BSOD I saw was when my stashed-in-a-closet Win2K Pro MP3 server box didn't take kindly to a new NIC driver I installed about a year ago. That's another box which is NEVER shut down. Right now it's been up and running continuously for probably close to a year, serving up files almost 10 or 12 hours a day on most days.
the source of the quote "it uses NT" comes from the Guardian
Exactly. And I'm willing to bet The Guardian doesn't "call itself a geek". They meant NT4.
NT is still in widespread use within the US military (a few of my friends do various types of computer-related military contract work), so it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case in other large militaries as well.
Nobody inside Microsoft has referred to anything but the early betas of Win2K as NT since NT4. I know a lot of those people and talk to them about this kind of thing on a regular basis. If you said NT to anybody inside Microsoft, they would instantly assume you mean NT4, and nothing else.
And you're wrong about the branching of the Windows product line. There are four branches these days -- Home, Server, Enterprise and Data Center. Most people would assume the last three are really just marketing-speak, but there are very large groups fully dedicated to each of the four branches. To MS, the separation is quite real.
I did, however, get a laugh out of your RedHat 8 joke. I actually overheard that awhile back here at the office (various MS geeks went through a spasm of "switching" to Linux -- and mostly switched back).
Well said.
In many ways, terrorists are like hackers/crackers.
Funny. When you say it, you get +1 Insightful.
When Congress says it, everybody freaks out.
And I can't decide which is worse.
Tip: No matter what you shoot out of your wrist, the phrase "Look at me, I'm Spiderman!" will not impress actual girls.
next to zill
It's nil or zilch, pick one.
I agree, but that doesn't explain the grandparent's assertion that French was the dominant language of science. I think a later response adequately explains that, however. People (and presumably the grandparent poster) misinterpret "franco" as a reference to the French. It is an Italian word referring to Europeans in general. I will admit I have made the same mistake.
and Big Black's "Songs About Fucking."
:)
Man, until today I thought I was the only person who actually bought that.
Or did you just download it from me back in the Napster days?
If you have ever coded an advanced hello world programm in nearly any language
What, precisely, constitutes an advanced "Hello, world" program???
In Chinese, the term for computer is "dien now" which literally means "electric brain".
What on earth makes the abstract concept of "electric brain" superior to the more descriptive and accurate phrase "computer", which literally describes what the device is actually doing (i.e. computing)? I don't believe or even pretend that my computer is or has a brain, and I know the meaning of the word compute, just as I understand that the "er" ending is a way of indicating that the object so-named performs the action implied by the root word. Just because you have a thing for a primitive pictographic language doesn't mean the rest of us need to be saddled with that garbage.
"Awesome" is another stupid example from your post. According to etymologists, the first recorded use dates from 1598. I'm pretty sure whomever lived in California in 1598 didn't spend their days surfing and inventing new words just to bother whining transplants from the Far East.
And of course, Asian speakers don't alrays plonounce Engrish wolds so creary either. (For the record, the etymological roots of the word "stereotype" comes to us from the French, c.1798.)
Or back in the 1800s French was the language of Science.
Actually I've always read it was German, but your main point still stands.
once you do GT and touch any other racer, the way the cars move feel fake and alien
Unless, of course, that "other racer" is a real race car. In that case, GT feels like shit. It's like an almost realistic simulation, with all the wrong things magnified to ridiculous levels. Most people I know with a PS2 and an Xbox complain that PGR II doesn't feel realistic, and I've always argued that it's far more realistic than GT3. And lately I've noticed, the guys who actually race are the ones who agree with me. It's the couch car-guys who like GT3 better.
I also think that it might be based on the Project Gotham engine, and I hated the way that game drove.
Speaking as someone who has driven quite a few of the cars featured in PGR II on one race track or another, I can tell you that the PGR II engine is rather extremely realistic. Far more realistic than any of the GT games, and yeah, I've played all of those, too.
Sorry, but once again, for this car junkie Sony fails to impress.
Damned parking lot cone-racers.
:)
Signed,
Going to Sebring This Weekend (beytoch!)
http://www.portablez.com has good prices and good hardware.
It's where I bought my Sager.
Damn, you're right. Oh well. Probably thinking of Quake.
It's not a HUGE impact, but there is an impact. Besides, I was thinking less of slashdot and more of heavily slanted publications such as just about everything printed by ZDNet.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but that's a completely different topic than whether or not you can buy an MS-free machine (and more specifically, whether the "Microsoft Tax" is a myth). Indeed, even if Janus succeeds, by definition Apple and other large companies aren't going to just roll over and die. It seems likely there will at some mechanism permitting others to play the Janus game. In that case, your choices may not include freebie Linux (although I personally doubt things will go that far), but I strongly doubt the PC world will become an all-MS-or-nothing proposition for anybody who cares enough to expend the effort to find an alternative.
Not true.
At the moment I'm typing this on a Sager NP4780-S which I bought four months ago. Besides being a far better machine than almost anything sold by the likes of Dell or HP, I ordered it without an operating system. It took me about 30 minutes of screwing around online to locate it and make my decision.
Above and beyond anything else, the one thing that always ticks me off is when a game relies on arbitrary limitations of the game itself to make something really hard. The best example is always JUMPING.
It never fails -- if you're in a game that allows the player to jump, there will be some level or test which requires you to RUN right up to the teeter-tottering edge of plunging to your death, then perform an AMAZING jump, which will allow you to just BARELY make it to safety on the other side.
In my opinion, it's rarely much fun. Doom did this a few times and I still remember how annoyed I was. I mean, if you were that super badass Marine, wouldn't you just say Screw It and grab the ledge and haul yourself up or something? "Dammit, I'm a badass Marine fighting the minions of Hell, yet I just can't seem to manage those extra two pixels!"
The sad part is, it isn't even remotely realistic.
Project Gotham II is probably one of the most realistic racing games (of the video gamey lots-of-cars-to-choose-from genre) that I've played so far. (I'd have said Sega GT 2000 except that the relative vehicle performance is so messed up.)
Signed,
A Real Life Racer