Ah yeah, those phone support and programmers in India, man, the environmental damage they do! Like, I swear, just the other day, uhm, hmm. Never mind that.
In fact, the people doing outsourced and offshored work are paid quite well by their local standards.
So, as usual, this boils down to you thinking that you're somehow better than those nasty swarthy people in other countries.
There are good arguments against outsourcing and offshoring. Not many, but a few. You haven't touched on any of them.
This seems more like a case of the exception proving the rule than anything else.
As for the move hurting Linux, maybe. But OSX has been hurting Linux on the desktop for a while as it is. Lots of hackers are switching; they get the power of the CLI when they want it, with no need to fuck around when they want to view video, plug in hardware and have it reliably work, etc.
Some people don't like mediocrity, and are frustrated by the suspicion that just a little bit more work (checking for duplicate stories, editing submissions, etc) would make the site a lot better.
(Above, I use the word "suspicion" because most people don't know what it's like to run a site so large, and can only speculate.)
The faq says they want to get the stories out fast, but that's bogus.
Sound cancelling headphones really don't make things much quieter. You don't hear anything (other than music), yet you can still feel pressure on your ears, which can be unpleasant.
All of the English books I've noticed in Sanborns are Dan Brown/John Grisham/etc type books. Maybe 20 or 30 of them. Their magazine section ispretty good, though. I usually buy the Economist there. The airport has an even better magazine selection, but I never noticed the books. (Probably because, when I'm in the airport, I'm going to Boston, which has many good bookstores.)
I should just buckle down and start using Amazon, really. The market for good English books is just too small here, so nobody sells them.
In general, movies for kids are dubbed, and those for adults are subtitled. There are exceptions, of course.
The quality of subtitling varies - I try to avoid reading the subtitles, although my eyes move towards written words seemingly instinctively. In the case of ROTS, the bits I read seemed well done; Yoda uses funny word order in Spanish too, for example.
Humor, especially when based on wordplay, is often poorly translated. But sometimes it's done very well. In Pulp Fiction, when Uma Thurman tells the tomato family goes for a walk...catch up joke, the punchline is "apurete!" (Grammatically incorrect, but still quite funny.)
So, really, the movies are fine here. I just wish I could find a bookstore that doesn't totally suck (and has English books).
The simple fact is that today, in 2005, wireless doesn't work well at all. In the cases where it does work well, check how close the AP is. You'll see that it is so close that you might as well be using a cable anyway.
Total agreement - that's one reason working in the suburbs sucks. Almost nothing good to eat, and what little there is is too far. Before my employer was bought by a behemouth, my biggest fear was that we'd be bought and moved to the suburbs.
(We were bought eventually, and moved from Boston to Kendall Square, which is as suburbian and sterile and boring as you can get while being in the city, but it could have been a lot worse.)
The other bad thing about working in the burbs is that you need a car.
It solves [*] a real problem if you're an expat. There are things I can't watch or listen to on television or radio where I live now, particularly sporting events. I don't think many of them are even available by other, more dubious means, even if I didn't mind catching a game or a match a few days after it was played.
[*] For a certain, very loose definition of solve. It may be ten year old technology, but it's still crap, unfortunately.
If only there were sheep! It's so hard to find good lamb in supermarkets.
On the other hand, there are more turkey products available in the US than there are in many other countries, so I guess that kind of makes up for it.
Mmmm, turkey.
If only there were some sort of middle of the line release which was neither as cutting edge as unstable or as refined and old as stable...
This assessment of debian as out-of-date is a bogus argument, which I think is more often made by people who don't use debian, because it doesn't match the experience of using it.
I followed your link. From the page:
This release started as a copy of woody, and is currently in a state called "testing". That means that things should not break as bad as in unstable or experimental distributions, because packages are allowed to enter this distribution only after a certain period of time has passed, and when they don't have any release-critical bugs filed against them.
Please note that security updates for "testing" distribution are not managed by the security team. Hence, "testing" does not get security updates in a timely manner. For more information please see the Security Team's FAQ.
That's not very confidence inspiring. I think that running Debian Testing on a production machine, where there are money and careers on the line, would be irresponsible. If you can devote enough time to the machine to keep it reliable and secure, great, but I've never had the time for that in the working world. Have you?
It's been retroactively been given a meaning, thanks to Debian's inability to release anything else which could be called stable within a reasonable amount of time.
That doesn't mean there's not some good stuff in Debian, but no admin I respect as as an admin would ever run Debian Unstable on a real server. And far fewer are running Stable, either, because it's so old; the world's moved on.
Cricket has room for similar statistical analysis, although I don't think anyone's approached cricket stats with the same level of rigour as the sabremetricians have studied baseball. I'd sure like to see it, though.
Clearly, the specific stats that will be gathered
will be different, because despite some similaries, baseball and cricket are quit different - but excellent - games. I guess they'd start tracking things like how batsmen fare in different balls within the over, how many consecutive balls they've faced, how they respond to different fielding arrangements, and so on. Likewise for bowlers: whose wickets, and of what style of batsman, they most often take, how many consecutive overs they need to bowl before reaching peak effectiveness, and how many they can bowl before their effectiveness dips, what fielding arrangements work best given a bowler/batsman combination, and so on.
Sooner or later it will happen, and teams with enlightened coaching, captains, and selectors will approach the game better prepared, and will win despite having seemingly less talented players. When it does, most people in the cricket world will be completely dumbfounded.
Note that it wasn't the poster who got the distinction between trademark and copyright wrong - it was the "editor", who's been at it since late 1997, more than 7 years.
I guess further evidence that our public education system is failing miserably.
Hmm. Maybe. The system certainly isn't perfect, but it has a tough task to do.
Many people will tell you that writing according to the rules is less important than getting your message across. Others will tell you that many English rules are the result of scholars hundreds of years ago trying to shoehorn Latin rules onto English.
They're both good points. Still, you do need to know the rules before you can effectively break them. (It just occurred to me, by the way, that "tired cliche" is a tired cliche.)
So, I guess the problem is partly one of people taking legit reasons to break the rules and applying them to excuse what really is laziness. And a lot of people encourage it, too.
Top posting bothers me as well, but I'm mostly used to it by now. And really, if you're using a mail reader that can display messages by thread (and you don't delete old mail right away) there's really not much of a problem with top-posted mail.
Unless, of course, it's incoherent for other reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the people doing outsourced and offshored work are paid quite well by their local standards.
So, as usual, this boils down to you thinking that you're somehow better than those nasty swarthy people in other countries.
There are good arguments against outsourcing and offshoring. Not many, but a few. You haven't touched on any of them.
So you're saying that overpaying for things is good for the economy?
I am pretty sure they still do argue that skin-peeling burns are bad.
As for the move hurting Linux, maybe. But OSX has been hurting Linux on the desktop for a while as it is. Lots of hackers are switching; they get the power of the CLI when they want it, with no need to fuck around when they want to view video, plug in hardware and have it reliably work, etc.
(Above, I use the word "suspicion" because most people don't know what it's like to run a site so large, and can only speculate.)
The faq says they want to get the stories out fast, but that's bogus.
Sound cancelling headphones really don't make things much quieter. You don't hear anything (other than music), yet you can still feel pressure on your ears, which can be unpleasant.
I should just buckle down and start using Amazon, really. The market for good English books is just too small here, so nobody sells them.
The quality of subtitling varies - I try to avoid reading the subtitles, although my eyes move towards written words seemingly instinctively. In the case of ROTS, the bits I read seemed well done; Yoda uses funny word order in Spanish too, for example.
Humor, especially when based on wordplay, is often poorly translated. But sometimes it's done very well. In Pulp Fiction, when Uma Thurman tells the tomato family goes for a walk...catch up joke, the punchline is "apurete!" (Grammatically incorrect, but still quite funny.)
So, really, the movies are fine here. I just wish I could find a bookstore that doesn't totally suck (and has English books).
-Expat living in Mexico
The simple fact is that today, in 2005, wireless doesn't work well at all. In the cases where it does work well, check how close the AP is. You'll see that it is so close that you might as well be using a cable anyway.
(We were bought eventually, and moved from Boston to Kendall Square, which is as suburbian and sterile and boring as you can get while being in the city, but it could have been a lot worse.)
The other bad thing about working in the burbs is that you need a car.
You should have followed the job to Mexico City. I took a job voluntarily here, including a pretty big pay cut, and have never been happier.
[*] For a certain, very loose definition of solve. It may be ten year old technology, but it's still crap, unfortunately.
That sort of attitude doesn't go over well in the OS community....
Really, dude, you need to pay more attention. There's all sorts of nepotism going on.
On the other hand, there are more turkey products available in the US than there are in many other countries, so I guess that kind of makes up for it. Mmmm, turkey.
... As opposed to the unAustralian NSW Government?
What's a pager?
This assessment of debian as out-of-date is a bogus argument, which I think is more often made by people who don't use debian, because it doesn't match the experience of using it.
I followed your link. From the page:
That's not very confidence inspiring. I think that running Debian Testing on a production machine, where there are money and careers on the line, would be irresponsible. If you can devote enough time to the machine to keep it reliable and secure, great, but I've never had the time for that in the working world. Have you?It's been retroactively been given a meaning, thanks to Debian's inability to release anything else which could be called stable within a reasonable amount of time.
That doesn't mean there's not some good stuff in Debian, but no admin I respect as as an admin would ever run Debian Unstable on a real server. And far fewer are running Stable, either, because it's so old; the world's moved on.
Clearly, the specific stats that will be gathered will be different, because despite some similaries, baseball and cricket are quit different - but excellent - games. I guess they'd start tracking things like how batsmen fare in different balls within the over, how many consecutive balls they've faced, how they respond to different fielding arrangements, and so on. Likewise for bowlers: whose wickets, and of what style of batsman, they most often take, how many consecutive overs they need to bowl before reaching peak effectiveness, and how many they can bowl before their effectiveness dips, what fielding arrangements work best given a bowler/batsman combination, and so on.
Sooner or later it will happen, and teams with enlightened coaching, captains, and selectors will approach the game better prepared, and will win despite having seemingly less talented players. When it does, most people in the cricket world will be completely dumbfounded.
Note that it wasn't the poster who got the distinction between trademark and copyright wrong - it was the "editor", who's been at it since late 1997, more than 7 years.
I use cpan2rpm for this reason. A little bit more work in the immediate term, but it's always paid off longer-term.
Nobody worthy of being called a guru would use the word "n00b". Nobody. Ever.
Spamcop? Sheesh? They make the spamming problem worse, not better.
Hmm. Maybe. The system certainly isn't perfect, but it has a tough task to do.
Many people will tell you that writing according to the rules is less important than getting your message across. Others will tell you that many English rules are the result of scholars hundreds of years ago trying to shoehorn Latin rules onto English.
They're both good points. Still, you do need to know the rules before you can effectively break them. (It just occurred to me, by the way, that "tired cliche" is a tired cliche.)
So, I guess the problem is partly one of people taking legit reasons to break the rules and applying them to excuse what really is laziness. And a lot of people encourage it, too.
That, and crappy schools, too.
Unless, of course, it's incoherent for other reasons.