My family has been in San Jose over 100 years. We lived through many tech and population booms, but they were always manageable. Traffic wasn't too bad in the 70's and 80's. Schools were pretty good, housing was affordable, and there was enough space to feel like you could escape the bay area.
90's came, and that's when a huge influx of people started moving in. Every square inch of buildable land was built out. None of it had any of the charm, uniqueness or craftsmanship of the previous architecture. Slowly we started seeing OSB and stucco square boxes everywhere. A lot of places started doing "mixed use" putting retail on the bottom and residential on top. Our politicians, fueled by special interests began dismantling laws meant to keep the growth in check. As more people came in, the freeways congested. Not just Monday through Friday, but every day of the week. We had a small stall during 9/11 as the economic downturn caused a lot of people to lose their jobs, but through the 2000's and into the 2010's the growth was fast and steady.
Today it's very very hard living here. State income tax is sky high. Property taxes, home prices, hell even rentals are so high that it causes everything else to be expensive. Food, gas, clothes, cars, everything is $0.50 higher than it would be in any neighboring state. Even if you wanted to take a drive over the hill for the day to Santa Cruz, you can't, because everyone has the same idea. The gas is sky high, and a night at the movies for your family is a $100 affair. Some people act like $100 isn't a lot of money, well it is when you have a family of 4. Don't get me wrong, I love my kids, and in the words of Goonies Data's father, "My greatest invention" Your prison is basically stay home. At least my family has computers and can keep ourselves entertained, but we can't let the kids go out and play because there are 4 sex offenders on every block. It's not the life I grew up with.
At some point, maybe you do get a vacation. You pack your wife, kids, and dog into the car to drive up the Oregon coast. You realize that slower life you had, the decent people, the lack of trash, graffitti and income inequity simply don't exist. People don't go 15 miles under the speed limit in the fast lane, and if they do, they move over. Traffic doesn't crawl to a stop because of a little rain. Nobody tries to run you over in a crosswalk. You can all go to the movies for $40 less than in the bay area. Gas stations actually have employees that fill your tank so you don't have to get out of you car.. It's such an odd feeling NOT having to pump your own gas. As if.. customers were important up there. Please, thank you, you're welcome aren't considered quaint little constructs, but are demanded.
I'm really getting tired of living and working here. I just don't feel it anymore. I'm tired of the tribal politics. Tired of my neighbors constantly trying to get into my business, or my employer spying on my social media. I have to have some forms of "social media" now, every employer needs linkedin as a minimum. You also need indeed, monster, dice, all told at least a good 6 profiles so your employer knows you're a real person here.
It's not all bad, there are some good points, but are they even worth mentioning? Crime, cost of living, homeless suffering, bad schools, the list goes on. Not sure if it's worth the salary anymore.
I have the same (well a s8+) and I've found it extremely disappointing. Netflix VR isn't bad, it'd be great for an airplane trip but for home use I'm much happier on my 50' TV. I can sort of get it to work with my PC (Riftcat, etc) but it doesn't work 100% of the time, and the gearVR sensors are disabled. I mainly wanted to use it for things like flight sims (or mechwarrior) but the effort required isn't worth it.
Unfortunately Zuck doesn't seem to understand what we want VR for, and what it was created for. We want to play our current games in VR. That's all. We don't want it to become a walled garden like the Occulus store. We don't want it for social media. We only want it as a display, nothing more. I don't see why all this money is being blown to make it into something people don't want.
I'm surprised fair use is even being argued here. 20 years ago we wouldn't have argued over fair use. There's far right, far left, and then there was Slashdot, YRO informing the greater/. public at large about how laws were being created to change the legality of things we loved the most, hacking, figuring out how stuff worked.
When Bill Clinton brought forth the DMCA ALL of us banded together for the fight. We picked it apart, tried telling all of our family and friends (whom most of the time just stared back at us slackjawed with expressionless faces) go contact your senator! Write a letter! We lost that one, but those early days of slash are what formed my opinions for a long time to come. Open source wasn't just a license, it was a license for freedom of expression and derivative works.
Unfortunately I see knucklheads on this site now that have no clue about what this site is anymore. Maybe it's not the same, no more cowboyneal, cmdrtaco. Hell, I even miss Michael and his shitty submissions. Hey, we're still here though. A lot of people here are from long ago, and we mustn't forget that as shitty as the alt-right racists are, this is a derivative work. Yes, we hate how it's being used, but it's a derivative work none the less and that freedom MUST be defended.
To those claiming it isn't fair use, how was this fair use? Because it is derivative. I can't think of anything more vile than seeing my creations entwined in a orgy of bestial romance, but even vile works deserve to be protected under the 4 rules of copyright exception. Pepe falls under derivative, plain and simple.
If you can put up with the kid running OBS trying to get subscriptions tabbing out of the stream every so often to splash "SUBSCRIBE" across the screen and 15fps at 320x240 it wasn't 1/2 bad. Course he'll get shutdown by morning for copyright violation.
His case was hard fought and he won with the defense of registering a domain name with "sucks" in it is a criticism of the companies being featured. Good story from the early days of slashdot/the internet.
>...and just use a free, open source software emulator [fs-uae.net] if I ever want to reminisce.
I can dole out upvotes in the thread, but I feel it's important to address this.
Emulators miss ALOT. It's just not the same. It's like the difference between CRT and LCD monitors. LCD's are convenient because they're portable (much like an emulator), but I've had CRT's that could do 120hz in the 90's. I love using SID as an example because so many people know what a SID chip is. Sure, you can emulate a SID, but it just doesn't have the same warmth or character that a real SID chip has. I don't know anybody that was connecting their computers to anything other than the TV speaker in those days, but even that crappy tinny speaker is part of what we remember about that era. Emulating through today's modern 5.1 speakers let's you hear every single miss the emulator makes.
That being said, there's still die hards for some of the original equipment. I think Fatboy Slim still has an atari ST for stuff. Sure he could use an emulator, but you miss on on all the cool stuff, like the odd refresh rate of those atari monitors, the silky smoothness of the bit blittered mouse.
So that's why there's still a market for these kinds of upgrades. It's either an enhancement, or replacement for that original hardware, running at modern speeds, but with the same old warmth, grace and feel.
When she was 3-4 she started playing minecraft. When she was 6, we assembled her first PC. When she was 9, we upgraded her video card.
She's 11 now. She understands underlying components, she understands basic TCP/IP networking. She understands partitions, how to install an OS. She knows what to not click, and how to keep her computer free of crap. At 11, she's got an equal understanding of tech from when I started at 20. Yet she doesn't want to do it. She wants to be an artist. She thinks all babies are super cute. People call her "Mini-me" because she looks like me, and is good with computers like me. There's nothing wrong with saying, "She's biologically predisposed to not go into an engineering role"
She never played with dolls or barbies. Always computers, her choice. Yet she does not want to go into an engineering role like her mom and dad. (Actually, her mom moved onto management years ago)
I cut my teeth doing ISP support for the ricochet wireless modem in the 90's, and I saw first hand how support was regarded by the C level execs.
We all started out with normal, 10x10 cubicles. Then they wanted to pack more people into the space, so they reduced us to 2 per cube. Then they wanted to reduce that even further, and put us all in individual wall stations that were about 1' deep by 2' wide. After that job, I started seeing this become the norm for most support departments.
So in short, they increased the floor density of call centers, which made the noise worse.
IT is a black hole where money goes but never returns a wise friend once told me. Development/Engineering makes a product. Sales sells it. CEO's,CFO's, COO's all know how to quantify that kind of stuff, but an in-house service like IT? Makes their heads spin. We're also the department that helps inept employees look not so inept.
The real issue isn't a housing shortage, the real issue here is there are no jobs where housing is cheap.
There is plenty of cheap housing in California if you're willing to live anywhere but the bay area. Modesto, Stockton, Hollister, Tracy come to mind first. Problem is guys like Sam Altman want to live in Woodside, Atherton, or Los Altos. People like Sam Altman do not want to commute any more than 12 minutes to work. People like Sam Altman would never lower themselves to live in any of the aforementioned cities, much less start a company with decent paying wages in them.
We always hear the excuse, "WELL THE GOOD TALENT DOESN'T LIVE IN THOSE CITIES!" Really? Because I could have sworn we have over 100k H1b visa holders that were willing to live anywhere but where they came from. I could have sworn a lot of these folks would think that Stockton, even with it's high crime rate is a much better, much more civilized city than where they came from.
I've been preaching this for a while, seems like it would solve so many issues. Less traffic, less economic depression, and a foot up for people living in those cities. It's not like Atherton, Los Altos, or Woodside need anymore money. Give people a job, they won't need UBI.
>You kids. Try upgrading from Netware 3.11 to Netware 4.0, only 2 years later. You couldn't even have the versions co-exist on the same LAN at first!
You just brought back some bad memories I thought I had buried away. Madge Token Ring ISA bus cards, jumpers for IRQ, IO. I think I'm going to curl up into a fetal position in the corner and cry for a while you insensitive clod!
For years we've watched this happen over and over again. When are we going to draw the line in the sand? Trump *might* do some things, then again he might not do anything. He has no skin in the game so to speak. Here we finally have a candidate who's been through what many of us have been through. We need to make sure he has the support he needs to win. Hopefully he either knows how to run a campaign, or has people to do that stuff for him (Speaking as an IT guy that has done a TON of campaign volunteering)
To the Indian/.'ers.
This is nothing against you, but the way you've been leveraged to drive down US IT worker wages has been unfair to us. I know you're simply looking for a better life, but when you take that H1-B job, and you're being trained by the person you're replacing, just remember what karma is. This has happened over and over and over again. Besides hurting us, you're not getting any closer to being "American". Your visa is designed to turn you into a low wage indentured servant, it is not a path to citizenship. I've seen how you and your brothers get treated, and I can't imagine why you guys haven't risen up yourself to unchain yourselves from this oppression. My only guess is you come from someplace worse than here, and that fear of going back, and being called a "failure" by your family, your village also weighs heavily on your minds.
1. There's a certain number where something becomes an impulse buy. For me and 3d printers that was $200. Ultimately I decided that with inflation, I spent more on my original NES set years and years ago.
Makerbot could have killed it at that price, and still can if they can figure out how to do it at this price.
2. The only hurdle past price is having the needed skills to create things in 3d. Printing other peoples stuff off the web gets old after a while. Luckily the 3d modeling software I taught myself to use really well can output STL files.
A little late for some quality karma whoring here but....
We have some NVR software for our IP cameras. I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade the VM running it to windows 10. Huge mistake.. I can't fsck'ing control when the damn things reboot. (This is 10 pro)
So I'm downgrading our NVR machines to win 7. Sorry MS, 10 works great on the desktop, my GPO objects mostly work, but this reboot thing is a HUGE issue.
>If you're not being mistreated, then don't be a jerk.
I don't even think you have to be a jerk. I worked at company that's software product was devved and QA'd by Indian and Pakistani relatives. There was token non-Indians like me (We were also the most customer facing), and the nepotism was so rampant that the rest of us had to carry most of the work. The relatives were completely useless, completely clueless.
My boss called me a "Stupid baby" in front of the HR lady. We had gotten into it months earlier, I took a picture of a funny note I had left in the kitchen over some stolen pizza on facebook. He said, "People know you work for us, they're gonna think we have theives here" I had kept detailed documentation of all my work and just sat there calmly as he read me the riot act. It made him even more pissed off that I sat there with a smug look on my face presenting my side to HR. Even things like really nice letters from the customers, and my complete Jira history.
Thing was, I already had a job offer... The next morning I calmly walked in before he came in and sat down with the HR lady. I handed in my laptop, a printed sheet of passwords and told her I was done after the previous days meeting. What else could I say?
It made me pretty legendary status how cool I just left the situation. Just skated on out of there with a smile on my face. My job was going to get better, and this H1-B relative of another H1-B was still going to be working for his cousin.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, we just don't want to uproot our kids right now. When they get college age we're probably going to move.
My family has been in San Jose over 100 years. We lived through many tech and population booms, but they were always manageable. Traffic wasn't too bad in the 70's and 80's. Schools were pretty good, housing was affordable, and there was enough space to feel like you could escape the bay area.
90's came, and that's when a huge influx of people started moving in. Every square inch of buildable land was built out. None of it had any of the charm, uniqueness or craftsmanship of the previous architecture. Slowly we started seeing OSB and stucco square boxes everywhere. A lot of places started doing "mixed use" putting retail on the bottom and residential on top. Our politicians, fueled by special interests began dismantling laws meant to keep the growth in check. As more people came in, the freeways congested. Not just Monday through Friday, but every day of the week. We had a small stall during 9/11 as the economic downturn caused a lot of people to lose their jobs, but through the 2000's and into the 2010's the growth was fast and steady.
Today it's very very hard living here. State income tax is sky high. Property taxes, home prices, hell even rentals are so high that it causes everything else to be expensive. Food, gas, clothes, cars, everything is $0.50 higher than it would be in any neighboring state. Even if you wanted to take a drive over the hill for the day to Santa Cruz, you can't, because everyone has the same idea. The gas is sky high, and a night at the movies for your family is a $100 affair. Some people act like $100 isn't a lot of money, well it is when you have a family of 4. Don't get me wrong, I love my kids, and in the words of Goonies Data's father, "My greatest invention" Your prison is basically stay home. At least my family has computers and can keep ourselves entertained, but we can't let the kids go out and play because there are 4 sex offenders on every block. It's not the life I grew up with.
At some point, maybe you do get a vacation. You pack your wife, kids, and dog into the car to drive up the Oregon coast. You realize that slower life you had, the decent people, the lack of trash, graffitti and income inequity simply don't exist. People don't go 15 miles under the speed limit in the fast lane, and if they do, they move over. Traffic doesn't crawl to a stop because of a little rain. Nobody tries to run you over in a crosswalk. You can all go to the movies for $40 less than in the bay area. Gas stations actually have employees that fill your tank so you don't have to get out of you car.. It's such an odd feeling NOT having to pump your own gas. As if.. customers were important up there. Please, thank you, you're welcome aren't considered quaint little constructs, but are demanded.
I'm really getting tired of living and working here. I just don't feel it anymore. I'm tired of the tribal politics. Tired of my neighbors constantly trying to get into my business, or my employer spying on my social media. I have to have some forms of "social media" now, every employer needs linkedin as a minimum. You also need indeed, monster, dice, all told at least a good 6 profiles so your employer knows you're a real person here.
It's not all bad, there are some good points, but are they even worth mentioning? Crime, cost of living, homeless suffering, bad schools, the list goes on. Not sure if it's worth the salary anymore.
Well you still need a browser on the OS to download a better browser. At least it serves that purpose.
I like to fine tune the volume of my music when playing games. No such slider on this. Keep trying though plex team.
Sometimes I think the current administration is just doing things to purposely piss people off, like a heel in wrestling.
I used to hang out in the #2600 IRC, Drapers panache for young boys was being discussed as far back as 1998 according to my recollection.
I have the same (well a s8+) and I've found it extremely disappointing. Netflix VR isn't bad, it'd be great for an airplane trip but for home use I'm much happier on my 50' TV. I can sort of get it to work with my PC (Riftcat, etc) but it doesn't work 100% of the time, and the gearVR sensors are disabled. I mainly wanted to use it for things like flight sims (or mechwarrior) but the effort required isn't worth it.
Unfortunately Zuck doesn't seem to understand what we want VR for, and what it was created for. We want to play our current games in VR. That's all. We don't want it to become a walled garden like the Occulus store. We don't want it for social media. We only want it as a display, nothing more. I don't see why all this money is being blown to make it into something people don't want.
I'm surprised fair use is even being argued here. 20 years ago we wouldn't have argued over fair use. There's far right, far left, and then there was Slashdot, YRO informing the greater /. public at large about how laws were being created to change the legality of things we loved the most, hacking, figuring out how stuff worked.
When Bill Clinton brought forth the DMCA ALL of us banded together for the fight. We picked it apart, tried telling all of our family and friends (whom most of the time just stared back at us slackjawed with expressionless faces) go contact your senator! Write a letter! We lost that one, but those early days of slash are what formed my opinions for a long time to come. Open source wasn't just a license, it was a license for freedom of expression and derivative works.
Unfortunately I see knucklheads on this site now that have no clue about what this site is anymore. Maybe it's not the same, no more cowboyneal, cmdrtaco. Hell, I even miss Michael and his shitty submissions. Hey, we're still here though. A lot of people here are from long ago, and we mustn't forget that as shitty as the alt-right racists are, this is a derivative work. Yes, we hate how it's being used, but it's a derivative work none the less and that freedom MUST be defended.
To those claiming it isn't fair use, how was this fair use? Because it is derivative. I can't think of anything more vile than seeing my creations entwined in a orgy of bestial romance, but even vile works deserve to be protected under the 4 rules of copyright exception. Pepe falls under derivative, plain and simple.
If you can put up with the kid running OBS trying to get subscriptions tabbing out of the stream every so often to splash "SUBSCRIBE" across the screen and 15fps at 320x240 it wasn't 1/2 bad. Course he'll get shutdown by morning for copyright violation.
We used to love Dan Pirisi here on slashdot. The guy made a habit out of registering things he didn't like with "Sucks" at the end of it.
http://www.salon.com/2001/06/2...
His case was hard fought and he won with the defense of registering a domain name with "sucks" in it is a criticism of the companies being featured. Good story from the early days of slashdot/the internet.
> ...and just use a free, open source software emulator [fs-uae.net] if I ever want to reminisce.
I can dole out upvotes in the thread, but I feel it's important to address this.
Emulators miss ALOT. It's just not the same. It's like the difference between CRT and LCD monitors. LCD's are convenient because they're portable (much like an emulator), but I've had CRT's that could do 120hz in the 90's. I love using SID as an example because so many people know what a SID chip is. Sure, you can emulate a SID, but it just doesn't have the same warmth or character that a real SID chip has. I don't know anybody that was connecting their computers to anything other than the TV speaker in those days, but even that crappy tinny speaker is part of what we remember about that era. Emulating through today's modern 5.1 speakers let's you hear every single miss the emulator makes.
That being said, there's still die hards for some of the original equipment. I think Fatboy Slim still has an atari ST for stuff. Sure he could use an emulator, but you miss on on all the cool stuff, like the odd refresh rate of those atari monitors, the silky smoothness of the bit blittered mouse.
So that's why there's still a market for these kinds of upgrades. It's either an enhancement, or replacement for that original hardware, running at modern speeds, but with the same old warmth, grace and feel.
Nah, I went from SLI GTX 660's to a single 1080. The kids inherited my 660's.
When she was 3-4 she started playing minecraft.
When she was 6, we assembled her first PC.
When she was 9, we upgraded her video card.
She's 11 now. She understands underlying components, she understands basic TCP/IP networking. She understands partitions, how to install an OS. She knows what to not click, and how to keep her computer free of crap. At 11, she's got an equal understanding of tech from when I started at 20. Yet she doesn't want to do it. She wants to be an artist. She thinks all babies are super cute. People call her "Mini-me" because she looks like me, and is good with computers like me. There's nothing wrong with saying, "She's biologically predisposed to not go into an engineering role"
She never played with dolls or barbies. Always computers, her choice. Yet she does not want to go into an engineering role like her mom and dad. (Actually, her mom moved onto management years ago)
I cut my teeth doing ISP support for the ricochet wireless modem in the 90's, and I saw first hand how support was regarded by the C level execs.
We all started out with normal, 10x10 cubicles. Then they wanted to pack more people into the space, so they reduced us to 2 per cube. Then they wanted to reduce that even further, and put us all in individual wall stations that were about 1' deep by 2' wide. After that job, I started seeing this become the norm for most support departments.
So in short, they increased the floor density of call centers, which made the noise worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
For some reason that clip makes me think of what runs through Bezos and Gates mind.
IT is a black hole where money goes but never returns a wise friend once told me. Development/Engineering makes a product. Sales sells it. CEO's,CFO's, COO's all know how to quantify that kind of stuff, but an in-house service like IT? Makes their heads spin. We're also the department that helps inept employees look not so inept.
The real issue isn't a housing shortage, the real issue here is there are no jobs where housing is cheap.
There is plenty of cheap housing in California if you're willing to live anywhere but the bay area. Modesto, Stockton, Hollister, Tracy come to mind first. Problem is guys like Sam Altman want to live in Woodside, Atherton, or Los Altos. People like Sam Altman do not want to commute any more than 12 minutes to work. People like Sam Altman would never lower themselves to live in any of the aforementioned cities, much less start a company with decent paying wages in them.
We always hear the excuse, "WELL THE GOOD TALENT DOESN'T LIVE IN THOSE CITIES!" Really? Because I could have sworn we have over 100k H1b visa holders that were willing to live anywhere but where they came from. I could have sworn a lot of these folks would think that Stockton, even with it's high crime rate is a much better, much more civilized city than where they came from.
I've been preaching this for a while, seems like it would solve so many issues. Less traffic, less economic depression, and a foot up for people living in those cities. It's not like Atherton, Los Altos, or Woodside need anymore money. Give people a job, they won't need UBI.
>You kids. Try upgrading from Netware 3.11 to Netware 4.0, only 2 years later. You couldn't even have the versions co-exist on the same LAN at first!
You just brought back some bad memories I thought I had buried away. Madge Token Ring ISA bus cards, jumpers for IRQ, IO. I think I'm going to curl up into a fetal position in the corner and cry for a while you insensitive clod!
It was fun in the heyday of doom mods. I ran the simpsons mod with the atari levels.
Hello fellow /.ers.
For years we've watched this happen over and over again. When are we going to draw the line in the sand? Trump *might* do some things, then again he might not do anything. He has no skin in the game so to speak. Here we finally have a candidate who's been through what many of us have been through. We need to make sure he has the support he needs to win. Hopefully he either knows how to run a campaign, or has people to do that stuff for him (Speaking as an IT guy that has done a TON of campaign volunteering)
To the Indian /.'ers.
This is nothing against you, but the way you've been leveraged to drive down US IT worker wages has been unfair to us. I know you're simply looking for a better life, but when you take that H1-B job, and you're being trained by the person you're replacing, just remember what karma is. This has happened over and over and over again. Besides hurting us, you're not getting any closer to being "American". Your visa is designed to turn you into a low wage indentured servant, it is not a path to citizenship. I've seen how you and your brothers get treated, and I can't imagine why you guys haven't risen up yourself to unchain yourselves from this oppression. My only guess is you come from someplace worse than here, and that fear of going back, and being called a "failure" by your family, your village also weighs heavily on your minds.
1. There's a certain number where something becomes an impulse buy. For me and 3d printers that was $200. Ultimately I decided that with inflation, I spent more on my original NES set years and years ago.
Makerbot could have killed it at that price, and still can if they can figure out how to do it at this price.
2. The only hurdle past price is having the needed skills to create things in 3d. Printing other peoples stuff off the web gets old after a while. Luckily the 3d modeling software I taught myself to use really well can output STL files.
A little late for some quality karma whoring here but....
We have some NVR software for our IP cameras. I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade the VM running it to windows 10. Huge mistake.. I can't fsck'ing control when the damn things reboot. (This is 10 pro)
So I'm downgrading our NVR machines to win 7. Sorry MS, 10 works great on the desktop, my GPO objects mostly work, but this reboot thing is a HUGE issue.
>If you're not being mistreated, then don't be a jerk.
I don't even think you have to be a jerk. I worked at company that's software product was devved and QA'd by Indian and Pakistani relatives. There was token non-Indians like me (We were also the most customer facing), and the nepotism was so rampant that the rest of us had to carry most of the work. The relatives were completely useless, completely clueless.
My boss called me a "Stupid baby" in front of the HR lady. We had gotten into it months earlier, I took a picture of a funny note I had left in the kitchen over some stolen pizza on facebook. He said, "People know you work for us, they're gonna think we have theives here" I had kept detailed documentation of all my work and just sat there calmly as he read me the riot act. It made him even more pissed off that I sat there with a smug look on my face presenting my side to HR. Even things like really nice letters from the customers, and my complete Jira history.
Thing was, I already had a job offer... The next morning I calmly walked in before he came in and sat down with the HR lady. I handed in my laptop, a printed sheet of passwords and told her I was done after the previous days meeting. What else could I say?
It made me pretty legendary status how cool I just left the situation. Just skated on out of there with a smile on my face. My job was going to get better, and this H1-B relative of another H1-B was still going to be working for his cousin.
Why would it need a tube? Props are just fine for short hops.