The middle ground is the unstable tree of Debian. All the latest stuff, great package manager, and a small amount of excitement every once in a while.
Not quite. Debian unstable is too fast-paced for my taste. I've run it for a couple years, so I know what I'm talking about. It's mostly solid, but with ocassional glitches which can be very annoying. The problem is that it essentially encourages yous to upgrade everything, even the very basic OS stuff, every few days.
The middle ground I think would be FreeBSD (which I just started running on a new machine). The separation between the base system and the ports really makes sense; the ports are being upgraded constantly, while the base system is on a slower release schedule (but ages faster than Debian stable). Some time ago on the debian-devel list suggested splitting Debian into several independently managed collections to speed things up, which happens to be similar to what FreeBSD has in place.
But still, people should keep an eye on the Debian experimental testing distribution, which aims to be intermediate between stable and unstable. The page doesn't seem to have been updated in a while, though.
I'm going to dispute your simplistic analysis. The discrepency as well as mobility between the classes is not as great as you might think it is.
It is pretty large. This is a fact. Compare what the average worker and the average CEO make. Look at how people's socioeconomic status correlates with that of their parents.
Equivalent crimes meet equivalent enforcement. At least in the great state of LA, you are going to jail if you get caught by law enforcement. Fancy lawyers and family ties can help, but there's a limit. Push your luck and you'll pay the price.
But the key point is that where the limit lies depends on how much money you have, your skin color, education, etc.
Wealtheir people are more likely to be caught, but not by law enforcement.
You stretch the meaning of "caught" to a sense not relevant to the discussion at hand. Essentially, you've just said that wealthier people are less likely to be caught by law enforcement (just what I said), but twisted it in such a manner that it sounds like you are contradicting me.
Society also has more to loose when one of it's highly trained members fails. Think about it. It's not just that society has lavished resources on them to aquire that training, but they have proved both willing and capable of it.
No such thing is true of necessity, and often false. Those who get the best education and jobs get it mostly because they enjoyed enormous privileges throughout their lives. I know it full well, having studied at both at a low-middle-class student university in Puerto Rico and a big name US university where undergrads generally come from privileged families.
I think the main reason poilice aren't eager to raid clubs every night is if Joe DotCom wants to go to a club and take E or snort coke all night, who is he hurting? Maybe himself, but that's about it.
False.
The fact is that the U.S. is by far the biggest consumer of drugs among the world's nations. The rich people who pay premium cash to get drugged in clubs are the reason illegal drug trafficking rings exist, which have terrible effects on society all over America, e.g., Colombia.
Now if Jimmy Crackhead is out on the street robbing and stealing to pay for his crack habit, then the police have a much bigger problem.
There is a word for this situation, which you avoid: privilege. The rich have the privilege of breaking the law with impunity.
There was a big story in the NY Times recently about the re-emerging drug culture. basincally, just like in the early 80's, a bunch of people have a lot of money and can't figure out what to do with it to make their lives better, so drugs becomes the thing.
But the thing these stories fail to focus is how, despite these segments of the upper classes being the most intense consumers, the fact that the authorities don't clamp down on them strongly. Let's face it, if a high paid dot-commie in a posh club in SoMa snorts coke, it's perceived as normal and fully acceptable. The police won't go into the club and raid it, because they won't want to upset the owners and the powerful partygoers. If they do get caught, well, they can afford good lawyers to get them out; they can afford private drug clinics where they get the best detox and other services, and don't have to mingle with the poorer users. Their employers don't test them for drugs-- they pull out the "privacy arguments". However, somebody black guy smoking rocks in Oakland is a different business. There you get the full brunt not only of the law, but of society's rejection.
I am appalled nobody here has picked up on the class angle on this story. It's understandable that the big media won't, because of their ideological commitments, but/. readers? Surely if anybody should notice, it's us.
Signal 11 flunks Linguistics 101. News at 11.
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2 Views of Hackers
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Language is a method of communication. There is no democracy, no majority, nothing like that. Those are social conventions. Keep them seperate and distinct from language - they are NOT related. Don't go confusing the issue by injecting your own prejudiced views into the matter.
Eh, you've been talking right out of your ass this whole thread anyway, but here you are plain wrong.
Languages are social conventions. No linguist will seriously deny this-- some linguists might not consider that to be the most important feature of language, but none will deny the conventional nature of language. The fact that in English "elephant" denotes a kind of pachyderm, and "mouse" a kind of rodent, is purely a convention. And the kind of domain where this convention applies is a speech community, which is a social entity.
As to the discussion that provoked your inane, unfortunate and uninformed comment, both of you are enormously oversimplifying as to the whole issue of language attitidudes of the speech communities in question. It is not a question of "majority rules" (in that case, the likes of "ain't" or double negatives would be accepted as standard usage) or the technical knowledge of the subject matter of one small group in society (in that case, the shift in the meaning of "hacker" wouldn't happen).
What gives you the right to tell other people how to live, what work to pursue?
You don't get my point. I don't look at the lifestyle of these people in isolation; I look at it in the context of how everybody lives in the Valley.
If there weren't people living in poverty in one of the richest places in the world, I might judge the whole thing differently. But the fact remains that the wealth in SV is enough to give everybody there a comfortable life.
You are probably nothing but a elitist grad student who dreams of tenure and comfy job security, who thinks he is smarter and cultured than the rest of us. You're not in the dot com workforce because its just too fast pace and difficult for you. You probably wouldn't be able to last one day at a startup, or a McDonalds for that matter, because we all work too hard and fast for you.
That is the technical meaning of value in economic theory. The word has meaning prior to that. My Consise OED gives "the regard that something is held to deserve; importance or worth" as its first definition.
So enterprising immigrants (legal or otherwise) who arrive with ambition but no education and no local language, can still find work tending fields, cleaning buildings, cooking food, and so on. But their children and grandchildren may do much better - and perhaps they will as well, once they have developed skills that are in greater demand than supply.
You said it. They may do better. Have you actually considered their chances?
I am Puerto Rican. My countrymates are one of the largest immigrant populations in the east coast of the US since many years. Third generation Puerto Ricans in the US are mostly still poor, among the poorest ethnic groups in the US.
Yes, I've seen the recent spat between the Janitor's Union and the various local janitorial companies. It wasn't pretty. Guess what, though: several big high-tech companies came out on the side of the janitors. 3Com sticks in my mind as one. These companies were in favor of the janitors, even though this would probably hurt their bottom line. Gasp!
How many companies came out in favor of the janitors? And how many companies *refused* to come out in favor after being petitioned to do so? And, hasn't it occurred to you that the fact that the janitors were ready to strike had something to do with both the fact that some companies came out for them, and that the janitorial companies at the end settled?
I see nothing wrong with the arrangement where I expect them to do their job, and I do mine. My building should be "magically cleaned" in the morning, because that's what we're paying them for.
You're not paying them to clean your buildings with "magic" but with their work, which they provide at extremely inconvenient hours.
As for the racial remark, talk about being a bigot. Asians make up at least 30% of the yuppies, with foreigners another 20% or so.
Irrelevant. I was talking about the makeup of the working class.
Did it ever occur to the original ranter that the janitors and the Flash coders were both in Silicon Valley for the same reason?
Yes. But they aren't, as you would uncover immediately by talking with both dot-commers and janitors. The dot-commers are here to become *rich* in the economic boom. The janitors are here because they want to escape poverty.
I'm sure there's a Silicon Valley janitor bragging to his friends in Mexico about how much money he's making in California.
I doubt it happens much. Have you ever *really* talked with these people? Do you really think they pick up the phone and randomly call their friends in Mexico, and tell them "Hey, my family is living in an appartment with another family, all of us adults have two jobs, we clean toilets all night, and my kids are vegetarian because we can't afford to feed them meat"?
As a grad student at Stanford, you live a pretty charmed life: cheap housing, close to downtown Palo Alto, lots of cultural life within walking/biking distance, lots of interesting people to talk to, nearby gym, clean environment, convenient food.
I hate downtown Palo Alto.
Too many places for eating out are too expensive. Cooking for oneself, on the other hand, is pretty good here-- nice choices of ingredients, and a varied culture. I have come to love homemade Indian food-- that is, Indian food that friends have cooked me at their homes;), but I'll learn how to make it myself.
The bars mostly just suck-- the only one I've found close which is OK is Antonio's.
My apartment is nice enough. Those of my pals that just finished their undergrads here, and started working, aren't as nice. My friends that are getting booted off-campus will have the same situation.
I said the apartment is ok, not the neighborhood. It's isolationville, unless you've got kids, then it's pretty nice.
Most grad students one meets here are people spending a year doing a Masters in Engineering. Stanford obviously makes a bucketload of cash on these. These students take 21 units a quarter in order to be gone in a year. Doesn't make much for continuity.
And where I studied before IMHO there was a richer cultural life than in Stanford.
You're getting an education that, no matter what field it is in, ensures good job prospects, in academia or industry. With your $15k, you lead a much more comfortable life than many of the "yuppies" you complain about.
You are talking about material comfort? That's not what I'm talking about. Materially, I am far more comfortable here than I've ever been in my life. It is the social environment that pisses me off. I'd trade most of the material comfort I have for a decent social environment outside campus.
Next time you sit behind some 23-something guy bragging about Flash animations, realize that that guy is nowhere near as lucky as you to be attending Stanford, probably doesn't live in a place that's anywhere near as nice as a grad student dorm on campus, and is likely to be in deep trouble once the.com craze is over.
The.com craze is not over yet. I'll rejoice for the good its demise brings (though people will have to deal with the negative side effects of that demise, too). Meanwhile, people like that just piss me off.
I *am* lucky, far beyond what I ever expected, that's true. My friends back home are incredibly happy that I'm getting to do what we all dreamt of, and encourage me constantly. But luck doesn't mean that my life is as pleasant as it could, or should, be.
I do have to make the point that you totally didn't address my story about the janitors working late shifts. This is really, IMHO, the central point of what I was trying to say.
This is a democracy, and those governments were elected by the people who lived here, not by industry or outsiders. Apparently, the people who lived here wanted things that those corrupt politicians promised, otherwise they would have elected other officials.
So when elected officials violate their mandate, and do not act in the interest of those that elected them, it is the voters that are in the wrong, not the officials? Brilliant thinking, Sherlock.
You have a pretty warped idea of what "representative democracy" is supposed to mean.
Democracy is hard, and things go wrong all the time. I hope the Bay Area will be a good lesson to people when it comes to issues of urban planning and who to vote for. Maybe other areas can learn from it and be spared a similar fate.
This is the most cynical thing I've seen in a long while.
Tell us precisely who the Bay Area natives should have voted for, and show how this would have avoided their current situation. Then tell us how they could have known, at the relevant moments, that those were the choices they should have made. Otherwise, your argument is just so much hot air.
Moderators: this will be a very personal account. It may be offensive, provoke flames, and such, but, by goodness, it is fucking sincere. There is no (-1, Rant) option in the mod system, so please leave it as it is.
The Silicon Valley is a disgusting place. Believe me, I live in the very heart of it, as a grad student. I could care less about money; I just came here because I want to study what I like (Linguistics) with a bunch of amazingly talented people. I don't want to get rich quick, stock options, or a million dollar house, or to write software for search engines. I just want a postdoc somewhere after I'm done with my Ph.D., and a job as a prof. My perspective on SV is that of a grad student from another country, living in the Valley on $15k a year.
Here there's no sense of community, no care for the well-being of the local society, nothing. Just a bunch of money grubbing yuppies that like to boast about their success, and a bunch of poor mexicans, asians and blacks that keep it all together. I know this. I've worked a bit with the recent campaign to support the janitors' wage negotiations. I've met these people first hand. I've spoken with Mexican janitors, and they've told me in their own words, in Spanish, the language in which they dream and feel, how they live, how they are treated.
This society makes the janitors, who are truly *essential* to any society, invisible members. This is one of the most shocking things about SV for me. I mean, where I studied before (UPR), you knew the janitors, they worked the same hours you did, you'd talk to them, they'd have lunch with the secretaries and professors, and so on. Here in Stanford, the profs and secretaries don't speak the same language as the janitors; and more importantly, they don't work the same hours. The janitors work late shifts, starting around 8-9 PM, ending 2-3 AM. The people who work regular hours only see buildings that, seemingly by magic, clean themselves every night. They are totally disconnected from what keeps their workspaces functional.
Here's another story. Last time I went to SF (my easiest way of temporary escape), on the way back, I had the absolute misery of having to sit behind an asshole who bragged to a buddy about his work the whole fucking hour. He looked about my age (I'm 23), and did nothing but talk and talk (quite loudly) about how much of a fucking genius he was at doing Flash animations, how he wanted his boss' job, about how much better he was than the girl that was interning at his job, how much he was making, and how much of a success he was.
That very last bit was not my interpretation; I vividly remember the fucker uttering the words to his buddy: "You know what? I really feel like I'm a success." Here was a guy that, as far as his account showed, had done nothing in his life but stupid Flash animations. If he'd done something else in his life, he sure didn't mention it.
This idiot symbolizes for me what's wrong with the Valley: people making fortunes for what, when you come down to it, are just menial, unimportant jobs, people totally disconnected from the realities of social and communal life, and think themselves above everybody else. People who get easy money, and then just expect that just money will get them everything they want, with no idea about context (the building does not clean itself; the janitors clean it). They live their lives in front of a computer screen and lose contact with the very real world to which that computer is plugged.
I'll stop here because this is becoming less and less coherent.
The worst thing by far, besides the traffic, is it is literally impossible to exist in public places and not overhear a conversation about real estate or stock options. Maybe in a spanish speaking neighborhood you can pull it off.
You might not hear the amount of adult conversation you'd like in those neighborhoods. The inhabitants will be away working an inordinate amount of time.
I've worked with campaigns supporting workers like food service workers or janitors here in the Valley, focusing on Stanford. These jobs are worked mostly by mexicans or blacks; the wages the unionized workers make are below what is considered to be a living wage for the Bay Area, forcing people to do things like house themselves with multiple families in one apartment, take multiple jobs, and so on.
Yeah, the recent deal the janitor unions made has helped them some. But still, costs have increased here far more rapidly than the wages of the people who provide these essential services.
A bitchslap is a measure the/. crew can take on a user that does the following things:
Retroactively moderates all of the user's posts to -1. Irrespective of how they had been moderated before.
Makes the user have a default score of -1 on all of his/her subsequent posts, no matter how much karma they may gain.
This is a really senseless punishment that Rob & Co. have dished out arbitrarily in the past months to people who, for example, moderated Signal 11 down.
The problem here is one of *hypocrisy*. When are we going to get a/. story from Rob explaining to us what the bitchslap is, why he implemented it, and what are his criteria for applying it?
And when are we going to get straight talk about this lawsuit thing from Rob & Co.? What baout just a simple denial or confirmation?
I had only seen it here until you pointed this out. I browse at 0.
And, this is not spamming. Spamming is what the Real Beer Guy is doing in this very same story-- posting *many* copies of *crap*. This is just one copy in two stories of something that is either very important, or a troll. *If* it is true, whoever posted it is fully justified in so doing it.
And there's another thing I left out of my message above, in which Slashdot has definitely gone downhill.
This is the transparency of the moderatio process. Originally, whenever the/. crew were even *thinking* of making a change to the moderation system, they would post a story about it, and check on people's input. They would even post open-ended stories asking people for their ideas.
Now it's the opposite. There's all sort of stuff in the moderation system they don't acknowledge. Bitchslappings, losing karma for moderating, IP bans, etc.-- they mess with it at will, and don't tell anybody.
I really think "success" has gotten the better of them. Slashdot, RIP.
As an oldtimer in/. (look at my UID #), I find this possibility really disturbing. Things in the past have ocassionally been tough for unpopular posters, but nothing ever like this.
I really demand that Rob & Co. clear this up. If it turns out they have had any sort of legal dealings against this guy, I'm outta here.
I remember the days when Rob was all for the option of anonymity and the idea of freedom of expression. This were the ideas embodied in the moderation system; this was the only reason he managed to sell it to a suspicious horde of users crying "CENSORSHIP!!!". But, for a few months, I've had this idea creeping in the back of my mind that commercialism and economic success have spoiled the/. crew, and made them lose track of their original values.
Why have I been thinking that? The bitchslappings. Regarless of whether Andover is really suing osm, the bitchslappings are true. They represent a violation of the social contract on which/. moderation was founded-- that/. comments would run free of editorial intervention.
Overall,/. is not the place it used to be. And there is no real alternative. Kuro5hin sucks-- it's all the ignorance and dogmatism of the slashbots, but with even more anal self-righteousness and no sense of humor. Humor is looked down on in Kuro5hin.
If this lawsuit turns out to be true, I think it marks the end of an era; and we should all snap out of it. Slashdot, you have changed, and not for good.
Yeah, but Unix's legacy is from supporting real timesharing computers (minis from the 70s), while Window's legacy is maintaining compatibility with the 8086 IBM PC and MS-DOS, an 8-bit operating system with no memory management or multitasking.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. Debian unstable is too fast-paced for my taste. I've run it for a couple years, so I know what I'm talking about. It's mostly solid, but with ocassional glitches which can be very annoying. The problem is that it essentially encourages yous to upgrade everything, even the very basic OS stuff, every few days.
The middle ground I think would be FreeBSD (which I just started running on a new machine). The separation between the base system and the ports really makes sense; the ports are being upgraded constantly, while the base system is on a slower release schedule (but ages faster than Debian stable). Some time ago on the debian-devel list suggested splitting Debian into several independently managed collections to speed things up, which happens to be similar to what FreeBSD has in place.
But still, people should keep an eye on the Debian experimental testing distribution, which aims to be intermediate between stable and unstable. The page doesn't seem to have been updated in a while, though.
It is pretty large. This is a fact. Compare what the average worker and the average CEO make. Look at how people's socioeconomic status correlates with that of their parents.
Equivalent crimes meet equivalent enforcement. At least in the great state of LA, you are going to jail if you get caught by law enforcement. Fancy lawyers and family ties can help, but there's a limit. Push your luck and you'll pay the price.
But the key point is that where the limit lies depends on how much money you have, your skin color, education, etc.
Wealtheir people are more likely to be caught, but not by law enforcement.
You stretch the meaning of "caught" to a sense not relevant to the discussion at hand. Essentially, you've just said that wealthier people are less likely to be caught by law enforcement (just what I said), but twisted it in such a manner that it sounds like you are contradicting me.
Society also has more to loose when one of it's highly trained members fails. Think about it. It's not just that society has lavished resources on them to aquire that training, but they have proved both willing and capable of it.
No such thing is true of necessity, and often false. Those who get the best education and jobs get it mostly because they enjoyed enormous privileges throughout their lives. I know it full well, having studied at both at a low-middle-class student university in Puerto Rico and a big name US university where undergrads generally come from privileged families.
False.
The fact is that the U.S. is by far the biggest consumer of drugs among the world's nations. The rich people who pay premium cash to get drugged in clubs are the reason illegal drug trafficking rings exist, which have terrible effects on society all over America, e.g., Colombia.
Now if Jimmy Crackhead is out on the street robbing and stealing to pay for his crack habit, then the police have a much bigger problem.
There is a word for this situation, which you avoid: privilege. The rich have the privilege of breaking the law with impunity.
But the thing these stories fail to focus is how, despite these segments of the upper classes being the most intense consumers, the fact that the authorities don't clamp down on them strongly. Let's face it, if a high paid dot-commie in a posh club in SoMa snorts coke, it's perceived as normal and fully acceptable. The police won't go into the club and raid it, because they won't want to upset the owners and the powerful partygoers. If they do get caught, well, they can afford good lawyers to get them out; they can afford private drug clinics where they get the best detox and other services, and don't have to mingle with the poorer users. Their employers don't test them for drugs-- they pull out the "privacy arguments". However, somebody black guy smoking rocks in Oakland is a different business. There you get the full brunt not only of the law, but of society's rejection.
I am appalled nobody here has picked up on the class angle on this story. It's understandable that the big media won't, because of their ideological commitments, but /. readers? Surely if anybody should notice, it's us.
Eh, you've been talking right out of your ass this whole thread anyway, but here you are plain wrong.
Languages are social conventions. No linguist will seriously deny this-- some linguists might not consider that to be the most important feature of language, but none will deny the conventional nature of language. The fact that in English "elephant" denotes a kind of pachyderm, and "mouse" a kind of rodent, is purely a convention. And the kind of domain where this convention applies is a speech community, which is a social entity.
As to the discussion that provoked your inane, unfortunate and uninformed comment, both of you are enormously oversimplifying as to the whole issue of language attitidudes of the speech communities in question. It is not a question of "majority rules" (in that case, the likes of "ain't" or double negatives would be accepted as standard usage) or the technical knowledge of the subject matter of one small group in society (in that case, the shift in the meaning of "hacker" wouldn't happen).
I'd sell my acount no sweat, but yeah, I have the same problem. And I could probably ask 10 times as much money as you did, with my user number ;).
In any case, anybody out there also called Luis Casillas, who would like to have a nice, user #276 /. account?
You don't get my point. I don't look at the lifestyle of these people in isolation; I look at it in the context of how everybody lives in the Valley.
If there weren't people living in poverty in one of the richest places in the world, I might judge the whole thing differently. But the fact remains that the wealth in SV is enough to give everybody there a comfortable life.
You are probably nothing but a elitist grad student who dreams of tenure and comfy job security, who thinks he is smarter and cultured than the rest of us. You're not in the dot com workforce because its just too fast pace and difficult for you. You probably wouldn't be able to last one day at a startup, or a McDonalds for that matter, because we all work too hard and fast for you.
And where did all this nonsense come from?
You seem to worship them.
Value is what people are willing to pay.
That is the technical meaning of value in economic theory. The word has meaning prior to that. My Consise OED gives "the regard that something is held to deserve; importance or worth" as its first definition.
So enterprising immigrants (legal or otherwise) who arrive with ambition but no education and no local language, can still find work tending fields, cleaning buildings, cooking food, and so on. But their children and grandchildren may do much better - and perhaps they will as well, once they have developed skills that are in greater demand than supply.
You said it. They may do better. Have you actually considered their chances?
I am Puerto Rican. My countrymates are one of the largest immigrant populations in the east coast of the US since many years. Third generation Puerto Ricans in the US are mostly still poor, among the poorest ethnic groups in the US.
How many companies came out in favor of the janitors? And how many companies *refused* to come out in favor after being petitioned to do so? And, hasn't it occurred to you that the fact that the janitors were ready to strike had something to do with both the fact that some companies came out for them, and that the janitorial companies at the end settled?
I see nothing wrong with the arrangement where I expect them to do their job, and I do mine. My building should be "magically cleaned" in the morning, because that's what we're paying them for.
You're not paying them to clean your buildings with "magic" but with their work, which they provide at extremely inconvenient hours.
As for the racial remark, talk about being a bigot. Asians make up at least 30% of the yuppies, with foreigners another 20% or so.
Irrelevant. I was talking about the makeup of the working class.
Yes. But they aren't, as you would uncover immediately by talking with both dot-commers and janitors. The dot-commers are here to become *rich* in the economic boom. The janitors are here because they want to escape poverty.
I'm sure there's a Silicon Valley janitor bragging to his friends in Mexico about how much money he's making in California.
I doubt it happens much. Have you ever *really* talked with these people? Do you really think they pick up the phone and randomly call their friends in Mexico, and tell them "Hey, my family is living in an appartment with another family, all of us adults have two jobs, we clean toilets all night, and my kids are vegetarian because we can't afford to feed them meat"?
Actually, wasn't one of the motivations behind fvwm that twm was too heavy?
Yeah, I get that. I bet you find tinkering with your own computer is a lot of fun, but messing around with other's computers is annoying...
I hate downtown Palo Alto.
Too many places for eating out are too expensive. Cooking for oneself, on the other hand, is pretty good here-- nice choices of ingredients, and a varied culture. I have come to love homemade Indian food-- that is, Indian food that friends have cooked me at their homes ;), but I'll learn how to make it myself.
The bars mostly just suck-- the only one I've found close which is OK is Antonio's.
My apartment is nice enough. Those of my pals that just finished their undergrads here, and started working, aren't as nice. My friends that are getting booted off-campus will have the same situation.
I said the apartment is ok, not the neighborhood. It's isolationville, unless you've got kids, then it's pretty nice.
Most grad students one meets here are people spending a year doing a Masters in Engineering. Stanford obviously makes a bucketload of cash on these. These students take 21 units a quarter in order to be gone in a year. Doesn't make much for continuity.
And where I studied before IMHO there was a richer cultural life than in Stanford.
You're getting an education that, no matter what field it is in, ensures good job prospects, in academia or industry. With your $15k, you lead a much more comfortable life than many of the "yuppies" you complain about.
You are talking about material comfort? That's not what I'm talking about. Materially, I am far more comfortable here than I've ever been in my life. It is the social environment that pisses me off. I'd trade most of the material comfort I have for a decent social environment outside campus.
Next time you sit behind some 23-something guy bragging about Flash animations, realize that that guy is nowhere near as lucky as you to be attending Stanford, probably doesn't live in a place that's anywhere near as nice as a grad student dorm on campus, and is likely to be in deep trouble once the .com craze is over.
The .com craze is not over yet. I'll rejoice for the good its demise brings (though people will have to deal with the negative side effects of that demise, too). Meanwhile, people like that just piss me off.
I *am* lucky, far beyond what I ever expected, that's true. My friends back home are incredibly happy that I'm getting to do what we all dreamt of, and encourage me constantly. But luck doesn't mean that my life is as pleasant as it could, or should, be.
I do have to make the point that you totally didn't address my story about the janitors working late shifts. This is really, IMHO, the central point of what I was trying to say.
So when elected officials violate their mandate, and do not act in the interest of those that elected them, it is the voters that are in the wrong, not the officials? Brilliant thinking, Sherlock.
You have a pretty warped idea of what "representative democracy" is supposed to mean.
Democracy is hard, and things go wrong all the time. I hope the Bay Area will be a good lesson to people when it comes to issues of urban planning and who to vote for. Maybe other areas can learn from it and be spared a similar fate.
This is the most cynical thing I've seen in a long while.
Tell us precisely who the Bay Area natives should have voted for, and show how this would have avoided their current situation. Then tell us how they could have known, at the relevant moments, that those were the choices they should have made. Otherwise, your argument is just so much hot air.
Moderators: this will be a very personal account. It may be offensive, provoke flames, and such, but, by goodness, it is fucking sincere. There is no (-1, Rant) option in the mod system, so please leave it as it is.
The Silicon Valley is a disgusting place. Believe me, I live in the very heart of it, as a grad student. I could care less about money; I just came here because I want to study what I like (Linguistics) with a bunch of amazingly talented people. I don't want to get rich quick, stock options, or a million dollar house, or to write software for search engines. I just want a postdoc somewhere after I'm done with my Ph.D., and a job as a prof. My perspective on SV is that of a grad student from another country, living in the Valley on $15k a year.
Here there's no sense of community, no care for the well-being of the local society, nothing. Just a bunch of money grubbing yuppies that like to boast about their success, and a bunch of poor mexicans, asians and blacks that keep it all together. I know this. I've worked a bit with the recent campaign to support the janitors' wage negotiations. I've met these people first hand. I've spoken with Mexican janitors, and they've told me in their own words, in Spanish, the language in which they dream and feel, how they live, how they are treated.
This society makes the janitors, who are truly *essential* to any society, invisible members. This is one of the most shocking things about SV for me. I mean, where I studied before (UPR), you knew the janitors, they worked the same hours you did, you'd talk to them, they'd have lunch with the secretaries and professors, and so on. Here in Stanford, the profs and secretaries don't speak the same language as the janitors; and more importantly, they don't work the same hours. The janitors work late shifts, starting around 8-9 PM, ending 2-3 AM. The people who work regular hours only see buildings that, seemingly by magic, clean themselves every night. They are totally disconnected from what keeps their workspaces functional.
Here's another story. Last time I went to SF (my easiest way of temporary escape), on the way back, I had the absolute misery of having to sit behind an asshole who bragged to a buddy about his work the whole fucking hour. He looked about my age (I'm 23), and did nothing but talk and talk (quite loudly) about how much of a fucking genius he was at doing Flash animations, how he wanted his boss' job, about how much better he was than the girl that was interning at his job, how much he was making, and how much of a success he was.
That very last bit was not my interpretation; I vividly remember the fucker uttering the words to his buddy: "You know what? I really feel like I'm a success." Here was a guy that, as far as his account showed, had done nothing in his life but stupid Flash animations. If he'd done something else in his life, he sure didn't mention it.
This idiot symbolizes for me what's wrong with the Valley: people making fortunes for what, when you come down to it, are just menial, unimportant jobs, people totally disconnected from the realities of social and communal life, and think themselves above everybody else. People who get easy money, and then just expect that just money will get them everything they want, with no idea about context (the building does not clean itself; the janitors clean it). They live their lives in front of a computer screen and lose contact with the very real world to which that computer is plugged.
I'll stop here because this is becoming less and less coherent.
You might not hear the amount of adult conversation you'd like in those neighborhoods. The inhabitants will be away working an inordinate amount of time.
I've worked with campaigns supporting workers like food service workers or janitors here in the Valley, focusing on Stanford. These jobs are worked mostly by mexicans or blacks; the wages the unionized workers make are below what is considered to be a living wage for the Bay Area, forcing people to do things like house themselves with multiple families in one apartment, take multiple jobs, and so on.
Yeah, the recent deal the janitor unions made has helped them some. But still, costs have increased here far more rapidly than the wages of the people who provide these essential services.
This is a really senseless punishment that Rob & Co. have dished out arbitrarily in the past months to people who, for example, moderated Signal 11 down.
And when are we going to get straight talk about this lawsuit thing from Rob & Co.? What baout just a simple denial or confirmation?
And, this is not spamming. Spamming is what the Real Beer Guy is doing in this very same story-- posting *many* copies of *crap*. This is just one copy in two stories of something that is either very important, or a troll. *If* it is true, whoever posted it is fully justified in so doing it.
This is the transparency of the moderatio process. Originally, whenever the /. crew were even *thinking* of making a change to the moderation system, they would post a story about it, and check on people's input. They would even post open-ended stories asking people for their ideas.
Now it's the opposite. There's all sort of stuff in the moderation system they don't acknowledge. Bitchslappings, losing karma for moderating, IP bans, etc.-- they mess with it at will, and don't tell anybody.
I really think "success" has gotten the better of them. Slashdot, RIP.
I really demand that Rob & Co. clear this up. If it turns out they have had any sort of legal dealings against this guy, I'm outta here.
I remember the days when Rob was all for the option of anonymity and the idea of freedom of expression. This were the ideas embodied in the moderation system; this was the only reason he managed to sell it to a suspicious horde of users crying "CENSORSHIP!!!". But, for a few months, I've had this idea creeping in the back of my mind that commercialism and economic success have spoiled the /. crew, and made them lose track of their original values.
Why have I been thinking that? The bitchslappings. Regarless of whether Andover is really suing osm, the bitchslappings are true. They represent a violation of the social contract on which /. moderation was founded-- that /. comments would run free of editorial intervention.
Overall, /. is not the place it used to be. And there is no real alternative. Kuro5hin sucks-- it's all the ignorance and dogmatism of the slashbots, but with even more anal self-righteousness and no sense of humor. Humor is looked down on in Kuro5hin.
If this lawsuit turns out to be true, I think it marks the end of an era; and we should all snap out of it. Slashdot, you have changed, and not for good.
It's Canadian French. It's something somebody seems to have cut and pasted about the history of logging in the Saguenay area of Québec...
Yeah, but Unix's legacy is from supporting real timesharing computers (minis from the 70s), while Window's legacy is maintaining compatibility with the 8086 IBM PC and MS-DOS, an 8-bit operating system with no memory management or multitasking.
I read somewhere a couple of months back that the average 20something american nowadays can recognize more corporate logos than plant species...
They can't "integrate" Emacs into Windows. They can certainly distribute it, even in the same CD.