Out of curiosity, and I'm not trying to be an ass or flame here, how do you have conversations with people?
When someone is relating events in their life, and giving details beyond the basic "I went to the mall" - do you just absorb these as dry fact? Are you actually incapable of visualizing something you have not directly experienced? How do you plan to do something different, like take a trip somewhere? Do you ever fantasize about the same/opposite sex? Is it just a "textual" description in your head?
Your post saddened me, because if we truly have people like yourself in society - well, it's no wonder some of us have zero empathy. Also, I feel for you - an active imagination is all that keeps me sane most days, I truly don't know how you cope with only the bare facts of life.
Yeesh. Hardcore gamers are still struggling to "get" the Wii in the first place. Every single Wii story on Slashdot since November has been littered with the following post, usually modded up by another gamer (mix and match sentences as appropriate):
"Yeah, Nintendo may make a few dollars from Grandma, but I'm a hardcore gamer. I bought one on release and there just aren't any good games that I like now. I've gotten bored of it and it's collecting dust in my closet. I'm back to playing GTA for the 14th time on my PS2. I'm selling my Wii as I wait for MGS to come out for PS3. The Wii's graphics look dated, come on Nintendo, you're going to lose my dollars here! I don't see what the big deal is with the Wiimote, it's just a gimick and will rapidly become boring to people. I'm already sick of the Wiimote and wish Nintendo would release some good 70-hour long RPGs."
Etc, etc, etc.
The hardcore gamers STILL don't understand that the Wii, with all of its perceived warts (to them, anyway), is outselling EVERYONE. By the end of the summer there will be more Wiis out there than 360s (the next largest market). And Nintendo still can't keep these things in stock. All with "no good games" to buy.
No shit the hardcore gamers don't understand the new games - hell, they never understood the old games in the first place (ie: why any of us enjoyed Twilight Princess as much as we did - the Wiimote was just a gimick, right??).
Now to watch people respond to this post with exactly the dialog I quoted above;)
Take anything Gartner says and apply the old adage: a stopped clock is correct twice a day. That seems to just about cover their accuracy in most technical matters.
If it was something used in casual conversation all the time, why on Earth would there be?
For the record, though, as an adult who deals with other adults in a somewhat socially liberal country, I've never had anyone give me static for using the same vocabulary they use. Do I verbally harass people? Hell no. Do I say things like "man, the traffic was shit today" to my boss? All the time. Actually, I've told him to go to hell once or twice, now that you mention it - usually with a smile to go along with it.:)
Someday in a utopic future, people like yourself will be able to distinguish between tone/context and the particular word used. Until such time, I'll continue to try to explain to people that not everything Mom & Dad told you was true.
if he hears people throwing it around in casual conversation multiple times a day, there is going to be a problem.
I'd be curious as to why a word used in casual conversation, multiple times a day, could possibly be considered harmful/bad/verbotem/problematic to a child. Beyond "well, my parents raised me that it's a bad word, and the FCC agrees".
The CRA website used to use, and may still use, an ActiveX control for their registration thing. MOST of the site works fine, but if you ever needed an account - for example, to change your address online, you HAD to use IE. It's not just a Linux thing - or wasn't, last time I tried.
It's not just you. This is becoming a discussion almost rising to the level of pointless white noise on Slashdot, because it's getting re-hashed to death.
Look, folks, what *your* school taught you under the umbrella of (CS/IT/IS/MIS/SWE/CE) is not what every school teaches it as. I've actually found 2 schools up here in Canada that teach 2 subjects in exactly opposite directions - one has CS being mainly theoretical and programming, with CE being hardware and such - and the other school used the labels entirely in reverse. So when hiring, a "CS" degree could mean 2 entirely different disciplines.
I think what we're seeing is our industry maturing, so we're no long just "CS" like in the 80s - but mostly, we're seeing thes typical trends that've hit a lot of reasonably-lucrative fields over the years: degree farms. People who don't want to work hard for their education. People who want a 2 year course instead of the 4 year course. Employers who no longer understand what the point of the education was in the first place.
Me? Solid CS degree. High math component. Probably used 25 different languages for various courses. My job? 100% IT/sysadmin work. Plenty of programming, with languages that aren't taught at a College/University level. Plenty of work that has very little to do with graph theory, combinatorics, calculus, assembly language debugging, or any of the dozens of courses I took in school. But I excel at my job - because a CS degree combined with an actual interest in this stuff (hey, I get off on learning what's going on in the silicon) means you can really figure things out quickly.
There's nothing more rewarding than watching a group of (MIS/IS/"hey computer stuff seems like a good way to make money, what 12 month course can I take to get in") people work on a problem for a week, then saunter into the conversation, ask a few questions, and solve their problem in 15 minutes. Knowing what the people who designed these systems took in school is invaluable in trying to troubleshoot them - hell, only a diehard CS nerd would have written most of the IP protocols the way they did.:)
Why you would want to search for explicitly open source, vs. just knowing what is on a corporate PC doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Because many companies have explicit policies forbidding open source, period.
I've seen it get so stupid as to call it "shareware", ie: unlicensed software. The lack of a vendor really freaks out a lot of PHBs, and heck, a LOT of older IT folks who still are scared by open source. Don't forget, OSS is less secure because everyone can see the source code, and it's less reliable because you don't have a multi-billion dollar vendor backing you when things go wrong. (not sure if I really need the sarcasm tag with that last sentence or if it's obvious enough)
This whole question to me can be summed up in a single 15 minute debate I had in an ethics class years ago. One of the (female) students was arguing that surveillance cameras all over public places were a very good thing, because they could help prevent (or at least prosecute) rape/assault.
When I pointed out to her that she is many more times as likely to be assaulted/raped by her boyfriend/husband, and then asked her if it wouldn't make more sense to put a camera in her bedroom. I then asked if we should have the police monitoring her daughter 24/7, especially in their beds and in the bathroom, because again, they're far more likely to be abused by a family member (and in such private places as that)... at this point she stopped arguing.
I never have spam issues. My real email address is rarely used..only for friends and legitimate sites(Secure businesses w/ encryption, like my credit card). My real email address is from a privately registered domain, which costs me only $20/yr. When I sign up for anything else (including this site), I use one of my free accounts.
Horse puckies. This might have worked 5 years ago, and it might work if you have a very complicated username on your email address, but dictionary-attack spamming has long since made your "advice" into a lie. I have email addresses that have never once been used anywhere on the Internet (created specifically for this purpose), that get 100+ spam messages a day at this point.
Your advice is along the lines of "only open email from people you know". ie: great advice, if this was still 1999 and the bad folks hadn't long since thought past that one.
And $3000 in 1990 dollars, what a half-decent desktop PC cost back then, is $5169 in 2006 dollars. Except a half-decent PC is 1/10th that price. Could you imagine spending $5000+ on a PC these days? Yet they're faster, have more storage, massive improvements in graphics hardware...
Technology gets CHEAPER. Far out-pacing inflation. The PS3 pricing is a joke when compared to any other modern consumer electronics - then again, game consoles pretty much have been for a while now.
Correction: Canada has a more stable cost of living. You don't need to earn 150k/year to live well up here, and nationwide health-care is an oft-quoted perk of being Canadian.
A developer earning 50-60k up here is considered middle-upper class. He can afford a house on his own, along with all the latest tech toys. Try that in Redmond... yeah right!
Except Microsoft is opening this up in Vancouver, the most expensive city in Canada to live in. Average house price: $750,000.
50-60k is most certainly not middle-upper class in the bigger cities in Canada. Not Vancouver, not Calgary, not Edmonton, not Toronto. Maybe Regina or Winnipeg.
I have seen Canadian health care first hand. 5 hours waiting to get your teeth clean??
No, you have not seen Canadian health care first hand.
Teeth cleanings, like all non-emergency dental work, are in no way, shape, or form covered by Canada's medicare plan. Dental work is entirely private, entirely for-profit, and a whole different world from our general healthcare system. We even have (often employer-provided) insurance to cover it. Last time I had my teeth cleaned, it took about 20 minutes - for which I had an appointment.
That statement alone shows that you not only don't know the first thing about the Canadian healthcare system, but you're also willing to completely make up stories just to back your claims.
For the record, the US currently spends more tax dollars per capita than Canada. TAX dollars. You could take Canada's public system, tomorrow, and save yourselves billions of dollars. And have universal basic coverage to boot.
Who actually wanted a Segway and thought it would be good for more than looking like a sidewalk surfing idiot.
The exact same people who are writing about how the iPhone is so revolutionary, cities will be re-designed around it!
Seriously, I think the iPhone will do rather well - but until someone in the general public actually owns one of these puppies, it's Segway all the way in my books. Very apt comparison on the part of the OP.
My vendor sets up the firewall for the appropriate level of paranoia "out of the box".
My Linux "vendor" (and most of them, these days) doesn't even set up a firewall at all. Because they don't need to. Because with a default desktop install, there's nothing to firewall off - no listening network ports.
Sorry, Microsoft, but until you get to this point, you're going to be more vulnerable. It's only a matter of time before someone compromises a software firewall.
You know, people have been browsing the web on Blackberries and Treos for quite a while now, right? While many sites decided to go the "mobile." route, a good chunk of the web works just fine on a smartphone. Has for a long time.
Mostly it's things like tables and oddball CSS that bugger up smartphones. I can't say that I've ever experienced an "OMG NO MOUSEOVER" moment with my Crackberry.
Shit, Google even has several of its apps specifically released for smartphones, because they realize the AJAX stuff only half works right. Google Maps + Blackberry == invaluable when travelling in another city.
But eventually this expansion will cause a similar fissure to open under an ocean and allow the world's seas to drain, thus eliminating the fabricated risk of rising sea levels
Well of course. Where do YOU think all that water went after the Great Flood?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Out of curiosity, and I'm not trying to be an ass or flame here, how do you have conversations with people?
When someone is relating events in their life, and giving details beyond the basic "I went to the mall" - do you just absorb these as dry fact? Are you actually incapable of visualizing something you have not directly experienced? How do you plan to do something different, like take a trip somewhere? Do you ever fantasize about the same/opposite sex? Is it just a "textual" description in your head?
Your post saddened me, because if we truly have people like yourself in society - well, it's no wonder some of us have zero empathy. Also, I feel for you - an active imagination is all that keeps me sane most days, I truly don't know how you cope with only the bare facts of life.
Yeesh. Hardcore gamers are still struggling to "get" the Wii in the first place. Every single Wii story on Slashdot since November has been littered with the following post, usually modded up by another gamer (mix and match sentences as appropriate):
;)
"Yeah, Nintendo may make a few dollars from Grandma, but I'm a hardcore gamer. I bought one on release and there just aren't any good games that I like now. I've gotten bored of it and it's collecting dust in my closet. I'm back to playing GTA for the 14th time on my PS2. I'm selling my Wii as I wait for MGS to come out for PS3. The Wii's graphics look dated, come on Nintendo, you're going to lose my dollars here! I don't see what the big deal is with the Wiimote, it's just a gimick and will rapidly become boring to people. I'm already sick of the Wiimote and wish Nintendo would release some good 70-hour long RPGs."
Etc, etc, etc.
The hardcore gamers STILL don't understand that the Wii, with all of its perceived warts (to them, anyway), is outselling EVERYONE. By the end of the summer there will be more Wiis out there than 360s (the next largest market). And Nintendo still can't keep these things in stock. All with "no good games" to buy.
No shit the hardcore gamers don't understand the new games - hell, they never understood the old games in the first place (ie: why any of us enjoyed Twilight Princess as much as we did - the Wiimote was just a gimick, right??).
Now to watch people respond to this post with exactly the dialog I quoted above
You forgot to include the word "groupthink" in your post.
Take anything Gartner says and apply the old adage: a stopped clock is correct twice a day. That seems to just about cover their accuracy in most technical matters.
If it was something used in casual conversation all the time, why on Earth would there be?
:)
For the record, though, as an adult who deals with other adults in a somewhat socially liberal country, I've never had anyone give me static for using the same vocabulary they use. Do I verbally harass people? Hell no. Do I say things like "man, the traffic was shit today" to my boss? All the time. Actually, I've told him to go to hell once or twice, now that you mention it - usually with a smile to go along with it.
Someday in a utopic future, people like yourself will be able to distinguish between tone/context and the particular word used. Until such time, I'll continue to try to explain to people that not everything Mom & Dad told you was true.
if he hears people throwing it around in casual conversation multiple times a day, there is going to be a problem.
I'd be curious as to why a word used in casual conversation, multiple times a day, could possibly be considered harmful/bad/verbotem/problematic to a child. Beyond "well, my parents raised me that it's a bad word, and the FCC agrees".
Coming up with a bunch of non-sensical arguments that practically none of the environmental movement has ever made --> strawman.
Posting something that makes it seem like you're "thinking outside of the box", when you're really just attacking arguments no one made --> karma.
The CRA website used to use, and may still use, an ActiveX control for their registration thing. MOST of the site works fine, but if you ever needed an account - for example, to change your address online, you HAD to use IE. It's not just a Linux thing - or wasn't, last time I tried.
That isn't gaining geek points they are looser points in my book.
Well, he DID technically loose the book...
It's not just you. This is becoming a discussion almost rising to the level of pointless white noise on Slashdot, because it's getting re-hashed to death.
:)
Look, folks, what *your* school taught you under the umbrella of (CS/IT/IS/MIS/SWE/CE) is not what every school teaches it as. I've actually found 2 schools up here in Canada that teach 2 subjects in exactly opposite directions - one has CS being mainly theoretical and programming, with CE being hardware and such - and the other school used the labels entirely in reverse. So when hiring, a "CS" degree could mean 2 entirely different disciplines.
I think what we're seeing is our industry maturing, so we're no long just "CS" like in the 80s - but mostly, we're seeing thes typical trends that've hit a lot of reasonably-lucrative fields over the years: degree farms. People who don't want to work hard for their education. People who want a 2 year course instead of the 4 year course. Employers who no longer understand what the point of the education was in the first place.
Me? Solid CS degree. High math component. Probably used 25 different languages for various courses. My job? 100% IT/sysadmin work. Plenty of programming, with languages that aren't taught at a College/University level. Plenty of work that has very little to do with graph theory, combinatorics, calculus, assembly language debugging, or any of the dozens of courses I took in school. But I excel at my job - because a CS degree combined with an actual interest in this stuff (hey, I get off on learning what's going on in the silicon) means you can really figure things out quickly.
There's nothing more rewarding than watching a group of (MIS/IS/"hey computer stuff seems like a good way to make money, what 12 month course can I take to get in") people work on a problem for a week, then saunter into the conversation, ask a few questions, and solve their problem in 15 minutes. Knowing what the people who designed these systems took in school is invaluable in trying to troubleshoot them - hell, only a diehard CS nerd would have written most of the IP protocols the way they did.
And the point of the post you're replying to is that YOU as a single user aren't likely to have skewed these statistics in any meaningful way.
I'd eat my hat if more than 0.01% of the web-browsing public even KNEW what a UA string was, let alone how to change it.
Why is this modded funny? Maybe the poster is unemployed, you insenitive cl^H^Hmods!
Why you would want to search for explicitly open source, vs. just knowing what is on a corporate PC doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Because many companies have explicit policies forbidding open source, period.
I've seen it get so stupid as to call it "shareware", ie: unlicensed software. The lack of a vendor really freaks out a lot of PHBs, and heck, a LOT of older IT folks who still are scared by open source. Don't forget, OSS is less secure because everyone can see the source code, and it's less reliable because you don't have a multi-billion dollar vendor backing you when things go wrong. (not sure if I really need the sarcasm tag with that last sentence or if it's obvious enough)
No, you pull down THEIR pants.
... at this point she stopped arguing.
This whole question to me can be summed up in a single 15 minute debate I had in an ethics class years ago. One of the (female) students was arguing that surveillance cameras all over public places were a very good thing, because they could help prevent (or at least prosecute) rape/assault.
When I pointed out to her that she is many more times as likely to be assaulted/raped by her boyfriend/husband, and then asked her if it wouldn't make more sense to put a camera in her bedroom. I then asked if we should have the police monitoring her daughter 24/7, especially in their beds and in the bathroom, because again, they're far more likely to be abused by a family member (and in such private places as that)
I never have spam issues. My real email address is rarely used..only for friends and legitimate sites(Secure businesses w/ encryption, like my credit card). My real email address is from a privately registered domain, which costs me only $20/yr. When I sign up for anything else (including this site), I use one of my free accounts.
Horse puckies. This might have worked 5 years ago, and it might work if you have a very complicated username on your email address, but dictionary-attack spamming has long since made your "advice" into a lie. I have email addresses that have never once been used anywhere on the Internet (created specifically for this purpose), that get 100+ spam messages a day at this point.
Your advice is along the lines of "only open email from people you know". ie: great advice, if this was still 1999 and the bad folks hadn't long since thought past that one.
And $3000 in 1990 dollars, what a half-decent desktop PC cost back then, is $5169 in 2006 dollars. Except a half-decent PC is 1/10th that price. Could you imagine spending $5000+ on a PC these days? Yet they're faster, have more storage, massive improvements in graphics hardware...
Technology gets CHEAPER. Far out-pacing inflation. The PS3 pricing is a joke when compared to any other modern consumer electronics - then again, game consoles pretty much have been for a while now.
Many of us learned how to use non-integers in the real world a long time ago :)
Correction: Canada has a more stable cost of living. You don't need to earn 150k/year to live well up here, and nationwide health-care is an oft-quoted perk of being Canadian.
A developer earning 50-60k up here is considered middle-upper class. He can afford a house on his own, along with all the latest tech toys. Try that in Redmond... yeah right!
Except Microsoft is opening this up in Vancouver, the most expensive city in Canada to live in. Average house price: $750,000.
50-60k is most certainly not middle-upper class in the bigger cities in Canada. Not Vancouver, not Calgary, not Edmonton, not Toronto. Maybe Regina or Winnipeg.
I have seen Canadian health care first hand. 5 hours waiting to get your teeth clean??
No, you have not seen Canadian health care first hand.
Teeth cleanings, like all non-emergency dental work, are in no way, shape, or form covered by Canada's medicare plan. Dental work is entirely private, entirely for-profit, and a whole different world from our general healthcare system. We even have (often employer-provided) insurance to cover it. Last time I had my teeth cleaned, it took about 20 minutes - for which I had an appointment.
That statement alone shows that you not only don't know the first thing about the Canadian healthcare system, but you're also willing to completely make up stories just to back your claims.
For the record, the US currently spends more tax dollars per capita than Canada. TAX dollars. You could take Canada's public system, tomorrow, and save yourselves billions of dollars. And have universal basic coverage to boot.
Who actually wanted a Segway and thought it would be good for more than looking like a sidewalk surfing idiot.
The exact same people who are writing about how the iPhone is so revolutionary, cities will be re-designed around it!
Seriously, I think the iPhone will do rather well - but until someone in the general public actually owns one of these puppies, it's Segway all the way in my books. Very apt comparison on the part of the OP.
My vendor sets up the firewall for the appropriate level of paranoia "out of the box".
My Linux "vendor" (and most of them, these days) doesn't even set up a firewall at all. Because they don't need to. Because with a default desktop install, there's nothing to firewall off - no listening network ports.
Sorry, Microsoft, but until you get to this point, you're going to be more vulnerable. It's only a matter of time before someone compromises a software firewall.
Sure makes me happy that things like Linux exist.
$240? Chasing around a myriad of shareware tools? No thanks.
You know, people have been browsing the web on Blackberries and Treos for quite a while now, right? While many sites decided to go the "mobile." route, a good chunk of the web works just fine on a smartphone. Has for a long time.
Mostly it's things like tables and oddball CSS that bugger up smartphones. I can't say that I've ever experienced an "OMG NO MOUSEOVER" moment with my Crackberry.
Shit, Google even has several of its apps specifically released for smartphones, because they realize the AJAX stuff only half works right. Google Maps + Blackberry == invaluable when travelling in another city.
But eventually this expansion will cause a similar fissure to open under an ocean and allow the world's seas to drain, thus eliminating the fabricated risk of rising sea levels
;)
Well of course. Where do YOU think all that water went after the Great Flood?
Medicine Lake in Alberta, Canada, fills up every year and usually drains by the fall.
I've watched it cycle throughout a season, it's pretty creepy. This lake is 7km long, it ain't just a puddle in the ground.