Or you could use, you know, a camera, and skip the part where you share some of your most personal moments with the whole damn world. What you're describing is a neat tool for narcissists who don't mind polluting social media with their unfiltered palaver. But I'm getting off-topic. This sort of functionality still doesn't directly compete with the desktop. Now, if you actually want to take the trouble of sculpting your media for publishing to a wider audience, a desktop is still the best tool.
This underscores what tweeting and instagramming are mostly about: somewhere between a heightened form of consumerism (just saw this movie/ate this pizza/watched this sporting event), and passive journalism (usually reactive, pithy commentary).
Of course twitter also has its use as a social organizational tool, but this is a category largely orthogonal to the desktop PC's traditional range of uses, and has had a far more disruptive effect on the mobile phone industry (who writes sms anymore?).
There is no true death here: only an inevitable and natural partitioning of platforms based on target usage. Desktop PCs had a good run (three decades) as a platform for both creation and consumption, but the world has changed. Phones and tablets are better-suited for consumption (literature, movies, music, games, web-browsing), but PCs are still the best practical platform for creation (writing, editing, composition, game development, web-site building). And yet this is all pretty obvious. Of course PC market-share will go down, way down, as it must. But the sensationalist media can't help but to bandy about terms like "living dead" when describing the desktop PC industry because - as any MBA is more than happy to tell us - in business, lack of growth equals death.
It's as though they have seized upon a mercantilist mentality of a world divided exclusively into winners and losers. World ain't like that.
After years in the academic backwater of Little Rock Tech and little to show for it except a few paltry offerings to low-impact journals, Professor Y. realized he was facing the end: his funding pool nearly dried up, he knew he would have to let his post-doc Xian fend for himself - likely he would be deported. The professor loved research, loved the hunt, the lure of bold new ideas, but he just wasn't having much luck lately: Team X at MIT had already beat him to the punch a couple times regarding minor breakthroughs in epidemiology - better staffed, better funded, it was no wonder they had beat him, yet he had come so close . And the worst part? The worst part was that he wold have to start teaching again.
It was with such thoughts that he was ambling down Center Street, eyes cast down and hands sunk deeply in his pockets. He reached a corner and almost walked right into a steady stream of gun-rack laden pickup trucks, one of which had apparently drawn a bead on the absent-minded professor. The driver slammed his brakes just in time and unleashed a semi-intelligible curse regarding questionable inter-sibling liaisons before speeding away in a huff.
Professor Y. suddenly stirred from his reverie and looked up. He had barely registered the indignant driver, but the item he now stared at held his undivided attention. It was a marquee for a feature film: "Brad Pitt. World War Z". Then it hit him, hit him like a thunderclap on an otherwise calm day, and his knees buckled with the enormity of his epiphany. The professor solemnly bowed his head and whispered one word: Zombies.
But this kind of pop media exposure is manna from heaven for researchers. The research itself is fatuous and risible, but the simple fact that a lot of eyes are now focused on these people means that the exposure of their "serious" work has been increased by several orders of magnitude. And often that's what really matters - not the underlying scientific value of your work - but that that work is attuned to tackle problems deemed more fashionable and relevant to society as a whole. Lacking a direct profit motive, fellowship committees have other priorities which are nevertheless rather worldly when determining the allocation of grant money.
The issue is that he's being either incredibly naive or disingenuous. The way the legal system is formulated in this or any country basically ensures that all but the most anally retentive citizens have broken any number of laws. It's how its laws are enforced which really determines much of the character of a government - is it a government of dogmatic enforcement or one of practical tolerance? You just think about that the next time you get pulled over or are interviewed by the DHS.
Law enforcement in the US is clearly headed in the wrong direction: witness the monstrosity that is its for-profit prison system, replete with minor drug offenders, and absurd situations like this that seem to crop up with increasing frequency. It's becoming a government of the assholes, by the assholes, and for the assholes.
Oh you mean that pesky bit about "unreasonable search and seizure"? Turns out that nothing is unreasonable anymore. #terrorists #nukes #thinkofthechildren
Now I never said there weren't good programmers in the third world. That's ridiculous. There are good people everywhere. All I was trying to say is that for a lot of coding work, it is very difficult to make a decent wage in the first world, because of the high and rising costs of living - especially in major metropolitan areas - and the fact that you can find people who can do the same work for a lot cheaper because their costs of living are much much lower. Purchase price parity. The only way you can possibly compete in the job market is if you bring higher and higher levels of expertise to prospective employers. But that pool is also shrinking, as your message testifies to, as companies realize they can get the same work done for a lot less.
The main problem with this is that you will have an increasingly large number of highly educated people who have spent a big chunk of their life learning a trade suddenly realizing they cannot support their family on their salary, if they have a job at all. Of course, it's not a problem for the companies, is it?
The difference is between 1999 and 2013 is that corporations demand accountability
...from everybody except themselves. I mean I'd call you a shill, but you probably aren't being paid to write this drivel. What does that make you? Huh, probably an Objectivist.
Of course they were lucky. Luck was by far the biggest factor in their success. There are ten of thousands of people who worked just as hard, and are just as smart, but don't have much to show for it. Right place, right time, absurd rewards. And if you honestly believe Facebook is worth over a 100 billion bucks, then there really is nothing further to discuss.
Why did Facebook succeed whereas MySpace and Orkut did not? Don't tell me just because of the sweat and perseverance of the founders, cuz we're not buying that American dream bullshit here... Fortune is often that razor blade which separates plodding mediocrity from great success, especially in technology, where minute differences are magnified a thousandfold. For every Gates there are hundreds of Gary Kildalls and Robert Taylors. Do you even know who they are, bro?
And did I say it was just a matter of luck? No, I did not. Your whole post reeks of poor reading comprehension.
It's easy for these assholes to talk, they were the extremely lucky ones in a winner-take-all industry which often metes out its rewards in absurd and haphazard ways.
You really want to make this world a fairer place: how about paying all your employees a decent wage, and maybe even take a cut from your ridiculously high comps? Then you might be providing an actual reason for more people to get into coding, including the ones with vaginas.
Sounds like an excellent way to skate along the cusp of poverty. Out of curiosity, do you have a long-term plan to break the cycle, perhaps a phase two?
This sort of menial programming work is crowded out by "third world" programmers - they do a good enough job at bargain basement prices. After all, no one is asking them to refactor a GUI or build drivers for an OS. There's no way to compete with that and expect to earn a decent living in a western country.
Used to be that a programming job guaranteed a decent standard of living. Now it's just laughable. To be a good programmer requires the same sort of commitment and training regime that a lawyer or doctor has to endure. Big difference: doctors and lawyers are essentially guildmembers. They have a code and rites of passage which help to maintain a certain standard and limit supply. With programmers it's each man for himself.
Completely agree with the "good" press assessment. Not so long ago I recall being force-fed (well, when screens are right in front of your nose, it's hard to look away) images of Musk on Bloomberg when he was their flavor-of-the-month, a real media darling. I suppose now that the novelty has worn thin, and he's lost a bit of that celebrity aura, not so much.
They are rather fickle fuckers.
But that is the thing, isn't it? We as a society have become utterly obsessed with celebrity and glamour and this notion of finding "rock-stars" in all manner of professional fields that we end up with this cycle of pumping people up and knocking them down. We want great people, but we want them to be flawed. We exalt people to great heights, but we don't mind if a few of them come crashing down. Is the media feeding off this desire, or are they feeding the desire? Probably both. Which is another way of saying: I don't know. All I know is that if the world was on fire, the media would quietly be rooting for the fire. There is little these days to distinguish journalism from other forms of entertainment.
And there you have the key difference between your view and mine: you believe that journalism should be essentially a product, largely meant for consumption by its client base, while I believe (in my quixotic frame of mind, I admit), that journalism should - in its ideal form - be a service, meant to serve the public good.
It's a shame that your view is far closer to reality than mine.
So you're saying there is a genuine, substantive story to report with these Tesla fires - enough to warrant all this coverage - and not some drummed-up panic designed to get eyeballs on websites? What then, in your estimation is the real issue in this particular case, if indeed the media is merely a reflection of an underlying reality?
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could use, you know, a camera, and skip the part where you share some of your most personal moments with the whole damn world. What you're describing is a neat tool for narcissists who don't mind polluting social media with their unfiltered palaver. But I'm getting off-topic. This sort of functionality still doesn't directly compete with the desktop. Now, if you actually want to take the trouble of sculpting your media for publishing to a wider audience, a desktop is still the best tool.
I hate hate group hate.
This underscores what tweeting and instagramming are mostly about: somewhere between a heightened form of consumerism (just saw this movie/ate this pizza/watched this sporting event), and passive journalism (usually reactive, pithy commentary).
Of course twitter also has its use as a social organizational tool, but this is a category largely orthogonal to the desktop PC's traditional range of uses, and has had a far more disruptive effect on the mobile phone industry (who writes sms anymore?).
Salts.
There is no true death here: only an inevitable and natural partitioning of platforms based on target usage. Desktop PCs had a good run (three decades) as a platform for both creation and consumption, but the world has changed. Phones and tablets are better-suited for consumption (literature, movies, music, games, web-browsing), but PCs are still the best practical platform for creation (writing, editing, composition, game development, web-site building). And yet this is all pretty obvious. Of course PC market-share will go down, way down, as it must. But the sensationalist media can't help but to bandy about terms like "living dead" when describing the desktop PC industry because - as any MBA is more than happy to tell us - in business, lack of growth equals death.
It's as though they have seized upon a mercantilist mentality of a world divided exclusively into winners and losers. World ain't like that.
Should change their name to Treacle.
when you're busy trying to figure out which Hawaiian island to buy?
After years in the academic backwater of Little Rock Tech and little to show for it except a few paltry offerings to low-impact journals, Professor Y. realized he was facing the end: his funding pool nearly dried up, he knew he would have to let his post-doc Xian fend for himself - likely he would be deported. The professor loved research, loved the hunt, the lure of bold new ideas, but he just wasn't having much luck lately: Team X at MIT had already beat him to the punch a couple times regarding minor breakthroughs in epidemiology - better staffed, better funded, it was no wonder they had beat him, yet he had come so close . And the worst part? The worst part was that he wold have to start teaching again.
It was with such thoughts that he was ambling down Center Street, eyes cast down and hands sunk deeply in his pockets. He reached a corner and almost walked right into a steady stream of gun-rack laden pickup trucks, one of which had apparently drawn a bead on the absent-minded professor. The driver slammed his brakes just in time and unleashed a semi-intelligible curse regarding questionable inter-sibling liaisons before speeding away in a huff.
Professor Y. suddenly stirred from his reverie and looked up. He had barely registered the indignant driver, but the item he now stared at held his undivided attention. It was a marquee for a feature film: "Brad Pitt. World War Z". Then it hit him, hit him like a thunderclap on an otherwise calm day, and his knees buckled with the enormity of his epiphany. The professor solemnly bowed his head and whispered one word: Zombies.
But this kind of pop media exposure is manna from heaven for researchers. The research itself is fatuous and risible, but the simple fact that a lot of eyes are now focused on these people means that the exposure of their "serious" work has been increased by several orders of magnitude. And often that's what really matters - not the underlying scientific value of your work - but that that work is attuned to tackle problems deemed more fashionable and relevant to society as a whole. Lacking a direct profit motive, fellowship committees have other priorities which are nevertheless rather worldly when determining the allocation of grant money.
The issue is that he's being either incredibly naive or disingenuous. The way the legal system is formulated in this or any country basically ensures that all but the most anally retentive citizens have broken any number of laws. It's how its laws are enforced which really determines much of the character of a government - is it a government of dogmatic enforcement or one of practical tolerance? You just think about that the next time you get pulled over or are interviewed by the DHS.
Law enforcement in the US is clearly headed in the wrong direction: witness the monstrosity that is its for-profit prison system, replete with minor drug offenders, and absurd situations like this that seem to crop up with increasing frequency. It's becoming a government of the assholes, by the assholes, and for the assholes.
Oh you mean that pesky bit about "unreasonable search and seizure"? Turns out that nothing is unreasonable anymore. #terrorists #nukes #thinkofthechildren
'Murica.
Now I never said there weren't good programmers in the third world. That's ridiculous. There are good people everywhere. All I was trying to say is that for a lot of coding work, it is very difficult to make a decent wage in the first world, because of the high and rising costs of living - especially in major metropolitan areas - and the fact that you can find people who can do the same work for a lot cheaper because their costs of living are much much lower. Purchase price parity. The only way you can possibly compete in the job market is if you bring higher and higher levels of expertise to prospective employers. But that pool is also shrinking, as your message testifies to, as companies realize they can get the same work done for a lot less.
The main problem with this is that you will have an increasingly large number of highly educated people who have spent a big chunk of their life learning a trade suddenly realizing they cannot support their family on their salary, if they have a job at all. Of course, it's not a problem for the companies, is it?
The difference is between 1999 and 2013 is that corporations demand accountability
...from everybody except themselves. I mean I'd call you a shill, but you probably aren't being paid to write this drivel. What does that make you? Huh, probably an Objectivist.
Of course they were lucky. Luck was by far the biggest factor in their success. There are ten of thousands of people who worked just as hard, and are just as smart, but don't have much to show for it. Right place, right time, absurd rewards. And if you honestly believe Facebook is worth over a 100 billion bucks, then there really is nothing further to discuss.
Why did Facebook succeed whereas MySpace and Orkut did not? Don't tell me just because of the sweat and perseverance of the founders, cuz we're not buying that American dream bullshit here... Fortune is often that razor blade which separates plodding mediocrity from great success, especially in technology, where minute differences are magnified a thousandfold. For every Gates there are hundreds of Gary Kildalls and Robert Taylors. Do you even know who they are, bro?
And did I say it was just a matter of luck? No, I did not. Your whole post reeks of poor reading comprehension.
It's easy for these assholes to talk, they were the extremely lucky ones in a winner-take-all industry which often metes out its rewards in absurd and haphazard ways.
You really want to make this world a fairer place: how about paying all your employees a decent wage, and maybe even take a cut from your ridiculously high comps? Then you might be providing an actual reason for more people to get into coding, including the ones with vaginas.
Not that there isnt squeeky tight times, but for 5 years now we have kept the lights on and food on the plate and it is getting easier.
So basically you're a member of the American middle class. Keep on Truckin'...
Now drink.
Sounds like an excellent way to skate along the cusp of poverty. Out of curiosity, do you have a long-term plan to break the cycle, perhaps a phase two?
This sort of menial programming work is crowded out by "third world" programmers - they do a good enough job at bargain basement prices. After all, no one is asking them to refactor a GUI or build drivers for an OS. There's no way to compete with that and expect to earn a decent living in a western country.
Used to be that a programming job guaranteed a decent standard of living. Now it's just laughable. To be a good programmer requires the same sort of commitment and training regime that a lawyer or doctor has to endure. Big difference: doctors and lawyers are essentially guildmembers. They have a code and rites of passage which help to maintain a certain standard and limit supply. With programmers it's each man for himself.
Except in Hollywood, the box is bigger.
Indeed, there's a whole office of boxes.
Seems that in much the same way that having too little stifles creativity, so does having too much.
What they did here, basically, was shit a bunch of times into nice neat little carefully marked boxes, and then picked the one which stank the least.
I would call this process anti-creativity. Also, coincidentally, how most movies in Hollywood are now made.
Oh, ok. Thanks.
What's the plural of asshole?
Completely agree with the "good" press assessment. Not so long ago I recall being force-fed (well, when screens are right in front of your nose, it's hard to look away) images of Musk on Bloomberg when he was their flavor-of-the-month, a real media darling. I suppose now that the novelty has worn thin, and he's lost a bit of that celebrity aura, not so much.
They are rather fickle fuckers.
But that is the thing, isn't it? We as a society have become utterly obsessed with celebrity and glamour and this notion of finding "rock-stars" in all manner of professional fields that we end up with this cycle of pumping people up and knocking them down. We want great people, but we want them to be flawed. We exalt people to great heights, but we don't mind if a few of them come crashing down. Is the media feeding off this desire, or are they feeding the desire? Probably both. Which is another way of saying: I don't know. All I know is that if the world was on fire, the media would quietly be rooting for the fire. There is little these days to distinguish journalism from other forms of entertainment.
Who knows, they might surprise us with something new and good.
Ya mean like George Lucas and Ridley Scott did with their magnum opi?
And there you have the key difference between your view and mine: you believe that journalism should be essentially a product, largely meant for consumption by its client base, while I believe (in my quixotic frame of mind, I admit), that journalism should - in its ideal form - be a service, meant to serve the public good.
It's a shame that your view is far closer to reality than mine.
So you're saying there is a genuine, substantive story to report with these Tesla fires - enough to warrant all this coverage - and not some drummed-up panic designed to get eyeballs on websites? What then, in your estimation is the real issue in this particular case, if indeed the media is merely a reflection of an underlying reality?