There is no such thing as a ticket to a long-term, stable, happy job. I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to be a doctor in the United States -- you go through ten years of school to spend all your time juggling HMO paperwork, paying for malpractice insurance, and giving people advice to which they never listen.
Oh, and if you screw up majorly, you can kiss all that hard work goodbye. Sure, you're paid well, but that's not the sort of thing I'd want to deal with.
As far as some kid who tinkers being better than a fresh-out-of college grad, you're partially right, until you want him to do something. My general experience with the 'self-educated, don't need no stinkin' college' crowd is that, while they are very bright, they are also very arrogant, and not inclined to do dirty work -- they want to play with the shiny objects, not slog through miles of digital mud.
Before you tar me as jealous, understand that I *am* one of those tinkering kids -- started programming in grade school, have built my own primitive computer from components (transistors, resisters, diodes, plywood, protoboards), and generally love tinkering with technology. I also had the attitude when I graduated high school that college was mostly a waste of time, so I enrolled in community college just to keep my parents happy.
Worked full-time for about five years taking night classes, and you know what I came to realize?
All my 'talent' and 'intelligence' meant jack in the employment world; they don't care that I've got brains -- they want me to use them. I had to learn, in a hurry, that the majority of working in the computer industry consists of dealing with mundane crap.
College definitely helped with that, because there's a lot of mundane crap that you do as an undergrad.
I'm going to take some time away from proving the Cauchy estimates (is there anything that man *didn't* discover?) and write a response.
As a former Linux desktop user and full time Unix sysadmin-and-programmer, I care very much about my apps having a unified look and feel, because I want people to USE THEM. So, if you're only writing applications for your own personal use, and never plan on distributing said applications, you can stop reading here, because we aren't even on the same planet, much less a congruent ballpark.
I don't write software that just fits my needs; I write programs that help other people solve problems, too, and this is mostly because software has a kind of magic to it. Unlike a physical tool that solves to a physical problem, like a hammer or a chainsaw, I can give the entire world access to my software tool without having to spend a dime. I can fix a whole worlds' worth of the same problem, freeing up other people to work on more interesting problems, through open source software.
That's why this stuff is so awesome; not just because you can see what's under the hood, but because it isn't necessary to reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something.
So, I, presumably we, write software to solve problems. Part of this is to put food on the table, but part of the reason why programmers love to write software is that we are natural toolmakers; we love to write logical tools that solve problems, and we share these tools because it gives us a kick that a big pile of people out there use, like, nay, depend on the tool which we have created -- otherwise, why make it available in the first place?
Still here?
So, we want people to USE the software that we release, not just let it sit there. Now, if we're writing system tools, they can be cryptic and terse, because other people like us are the ones who need them -- it's not expected that Joe Sixpack is going to know what to do with fdisk, setattr, or mDNSResponder. But a GUI application is another beast; it is designed, in all likelihood, to be something that takes a whole bunch of low-level computing tasks (disk I/O, shared memory, codec libraries) and turn it into something easy to use for a specific task (an MP3 player application).
Because GUIs sure as hell aren't for daemons or partitioning tools.
So, when we write this GUI application, we want it to be self-explanitory. It should be easy to use. And part of that is that our application should look like every other application running on the computer. It should exhibit similar behavior unless there is some reason for it to act differently than other applications, and if so, there should be some sort of warning that said application does so.
And this isn't just for Joe Sixpack -- context switching is expensive no matter who does it. When you switch between applications that act differently, your brain needs to make a cognative 'jump'. The bigger the difference, the bigger the jump.
So there's a good reason for consistency in user interface design.
On top of that, needing five different widget libraries is hugely inefficient; why should I need to give disk space to qt, GTK, wxWindows, motif, and whatever library-du-jour that some coder decided to use? Why can't there just be some uberWindowKit that is themeable and flexible enough to get out of the way, so that I don't need to install five different window kits?
This is the one bone I have with the way people develop software under Linux; too much of the 'not made here' syndrome. Which is why we have hundreds of X toolkits, web browsers, word processors, XML parsers, and so on, but only one good browser, a crappy office suite, no desktop publishing or photo-ready image editing. People spend too much time writing windowing toolkits because 'theirs is better', rather than contributing to an existing project, and so the real things that keep Linux from being adopted on the desktop are left to corporate interests -- like Mozilla and OpenOffice.
It
Re:Meta-commentary: "Gorgeous" really relevant?
on
The Real Purpose of DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Before the parade of guys comes in ripping on the parent poster, I wanted to make a small comment.
I have a friend who is a former figure-skater and an otherwise knockout bombshell blonde. She's smart, witty, catty, and has legs that could stop an artillery shell. She also loves computers, and was working on finishing up a degree in Computer Science while working in IT.
That is, until all the geeks chased her out.
Asking her to crawl under a desk to fix a cable whenever she'd wear a skirt (never on the jeans days), making lewd comments 'just out of earshot', and all kinds of other crap nominally pulled by thirteen-year-old boys.
She got tired and left for the other side of the business world. Makes more money, and doesn't have to put up with the juvenile bullshit.
So, guys, listen up -- you want more geeky women, you've got to treat them like human beings, and not like sex objects.
Maybe this is because I was raised by a Jewish mother, but I refuse to pay ATM fees. I either use my bank's ATMs, or get cash when I purchase something -- usually, my weekly groceries. Even if you have to stop at a Longs and buy a pack of gum, you still end up with a cheaper 'fee' ($0.75), and you get something out of the whole transaction (the gum).
This does add up. Assume two ATM transactions per week. The average fee in my area seems to be around $1.75, and my bank charges an $0.75 'foreign ATM fee', so that's $2.50 in transacton fees per transaction, or $5.00 per week. Multiply that by 52, and it comes out to $210 in money to which I didn't literally set fire.
Of course, I've brought this argument up to friends who are always complaining about how they are broke, nevermind that they don't spend five minutes a day thinking about where their money goes. Everyone cares about 'convenience', and nobody seems to give a rat's ass about forethought.
To be honest, I can't be the only person who thinks that this sort of functionality is useless and distracting.
When I want to work with some file that I nominally deal with using a given application, I want to work in the familiar interface of that application. I don't want to screw around with some embedded-editing crap, especially when I need to have the full application installed anyway.
Likewise, being able to 'edit' files in an email is a horrible misfeature, because it encourages very lazy thinking about where data is stored. Where's the lastest copy of my presentation -- in an email? Is it the copy in my home directory? What about the copy on my keychain drive?
And, of course, none of this will be 'industry standard', so it will follow Microsoft's usual practice of nearly mandating an all-Microsoft shop...
I hate to tell you this, but not everything is a business, trying to generate profit.
Or, to put it differently: Do you feel that it's okay for your wife to sleep around so that she can find the most efficient lay?
Seriously, you need to go to China. I'm not saying this in a 'get the hell out' sort of way, but they have a government very much like the one you seem to want; no restrictions on business for the most part, very little taxation, cheap labor...
Which requires, of course, that they learn to configure the new system, because it sure as hell won't use the old configuration file format, and because the old system isn't even installable, they had to make a very quick set of decisions about upgrades.
A sendmail.cf file that is five years old still works. Ditto for qmail and postfix configurations, and BIND, and Samba, and Squid, and Apache...do you know why? Because there was no reason to make them not work. Even massive improvements to a piece of stable software should *never* require rewriting a configuration file; you should have to add or modify directives to invoke new features, but you should never have a system just 'stop working' because of an upgrade.
More importantly, should I, for some asinine reason, require a BIND 4 (read: prehistoric) name server on, oh, a Linux 2.0.11 kernel, it'll take me a few hours to build. What do I do if I need a WindowsNT installation but don't have install media? Oh, well, I guess I'm screwed, because I can't get it from Microsoft anymore.
I think you need to look up the definition of 'straw man'; I think that government access to financial records, which includes purcase records, mind you, was the topic.
Moreover, I hardly consider asking the government to abide by the Bill of Rights as an appeal to emotion, and I'd also think that suffices as a very concrete reason for being bothered. Nice try, though.
Of course, the person involved wasn't incarcerated, but they had to take time out of their normal daily lives to deal with overzealous law enforcement; that's potentially lost wages, a hell of a lot of stress, and a very big pile of resentment, because innocent people *really* *hate* being accused of a crime, and doubly so when the accusation is for an asinine reason.
More importantly, this guy did something small. Reeeeeeeeeeeally small. And he then had to justify his actions to law enforcement. What if he had done something only slightly more suspicious, like maybe paid off a few credit cards before nabbing some foreign currency for his upcoming vacation?
Now, here's the emotional part:
I am honestly scared every time I fly back into the U.S. I, personally, have never been mistreated by customs, but I've seen the harassment that more 'suspicious-looking' individuals have undergone, nevermind that I'm just as likely, if not more so, to be a terrorist as the Indian guy in line behind me.
I am really bothered that my countrymen see nothing wrong with ignoring the Constitution whenever convenient. That Americans like seeing all those new 'security measures' at the airport, nevermind that it means that I've got no choice but to check my bags in whenever I travel, because my nail clippers might be a 'deadly weapon of terrorism'. Of course, the wine bottle I've got on me is totally safe, and could never be used to hurt anyone...
More importantly, I'm really bothered that we pull stunts like this at home, along with the whole problem of not being able to run an election, while at the same time claiming abroad that we are 'champions of democracy and freedom'. People in other first-world countries don't hate Americans, but they certainly don't like our attitude when it comes to the soverignty of other countries.
I'm not saying that we're the worst, of course; the German government is very serious about making sure the Nazis never rise to power again, and I've had friends dragged in front of the police (German citizens) because they did something to tip off the Nazi-o-meter. But the Germans don't claim to be the 'Land of the Free', we do. Why don't we act like it?
Oh, I understand, but that's why we (in theory) have a represenative government -- to put supposedly wise people in between power and the slobbering masses. This is supposed to prevent decisions from being made impulsively by large-scale flash mobs.
Obviously, this isn't working, as politicans will more often than not encourage moblike behavior, because it makes it easier for them to get re-elected.
So I think that while the government *has* to do something, they shouldn't, because they're supposed to exercise more temperance and good judgement than Joe Sixpack. That way, the time can be taken to find effective solutions, and when the tide of 'do something, now!' blows over, the problem will actually be fixed.
Then again, that would be a rational way to deal with things.
So, you'd have no complaints being audited by the IRS for your 'suspicious' behavior of having a home business that earns more than the average, even though it'll cost you a nice chunk of time and money? I mean, after all, you came out of things without any harm, survived the audit, right?
You wouldn't mind being detained in a holding cell for a day because some overzealous cop thought you 'looked suspicious'? I mean, you got released the next day, so no harm, no foul?
How about having the police raid your home because you've bought a little too much cold medicine over the past month, and you also happened to place an order for some beakers for a halloween party? Because, you might be running a meth lab, and so the cops were able to get a nearly unrestricted warrant on that alone? I mean, it's no big deal, other than the day of work you missed, the neighbors watching the police crawl all over your property, and all those entries in the public records.
Seems a little more scary, doesn't it?
It has nothing to do with being a conspiracy, and everything to do with a big-ass violation of the Bill of Rights. You, as a citizen, have a right to be secure in your papers and effects, which is why we have this whole warrant system. It's supposed to be that, if the cops want to poke into your business, they have to show probable cause to a judge, and everything is public record (so you can see what they're saying about you, basically).
Basically, it's a huge pain in the ass, so why go through it unless you really think the person is a criminal?
Now, your entire life is practically open; law enforcement has access to all of your financial records, including taxes and bank account information, and all without needing a warrant, as long as you violate some arbitrary criteria as to what 'normal' is. Does this help them catch criminals? I doubt it; I mean, the crooks dumb enough to be cooking meth in their kitchens don't usually give a damn about pyrex or lab safety equipment, and the guys smart enough to build nuclear weapons in their basement aren't going to try and buy their supplies at Home Depot.
Personally, I'd rather our law enforcement dollars were spent on, oh, education, especially in high-crime areas, and in prison reform, so that inmates came out of prison, well, reformed, rather than better-trained in being criminals.
So, yeah, all of this does scare and bother me, not because I think that there is any big conspiracy, but because the government is violating my rights in exchange for some illusion of safety.
This could be good or bad, but personally, I'll stick with LOM and OpenBoot. Dell would get an order for God Knows How Many servers if they just implemented something functionally equivalent to LOM/OBT over a serial port.
IPMI could be okay, provided that you can (a) turn it off; and, (b) could restrict it to a second network card -- that way, you could have a separate network segement for servers in a rack that does nothing but handle IPMI data. Of course, serial would be a hell of a lot cheaper...
> In fact, it's now written into a lot of employment contracts that shutting > off the cell phone or failing to have it with you is grounds for > termination.
If you're being paid for being on-call, that makes sense; I am, as part of being a sysadmin, and so getting calls on a weekend (like I just did a few hours ago) to fix problems doesn't bother me, because I am compensated for it.
Should an employer want me to work 24/7/365 without paying me for it, they are going to get one very unproductive employee. Of course, I'll be reasonable and negotiate for on-call pay, increased compensation, flex time, and the like, but if management won't budge, they have another thing coming. Sure, I'll deal with on-call problems, the emergencies, but I will keep solid written records of every hour I work, make damn sure that I don't go over an average of forty hours a week (including the time required to handle my time accounting), and should they fire me for doing so, I will take that pile of paperwork to my attorney, and sue the piss out of my former employer for a big pile of labor law violations.
Of course, I will also be spending time, off the company clock, looking for a better job, and I will jump the second I find one.
I think the simple fact of the matter is that you get what you pay for; if you compensate people fairly, both in terms of money *and* in treating them like human beings (vacations, actual thank-you notes when you do a good job, etc.), they will voluntarily put in overtime, and go the extra mile to make the company successful.
I know that, for several employers, I've volunteered to put in extra time, sacrificed weekends and vacations, accepted a pay cuts, and so on, all because those employers treated me well, and I don't regret any of it.
The companies that bean-counted my work got exactly what they paid me for, and not one second more.
More often than not, the former type of company has remained in business, and the latter type has not.
I'm guessing you've never worked in IT, or had a job that required you to travel outside of your office.
First off, you should *never* *ever* *ever* use a public machine for connecting to any type of private data sources; you have no idea what kinds of keyloggers and spyware live on those beasts, and you won't know until all your data, and with it your customers' data, has gone to an IP address that lives in a country where you have no legal standing.
And before you tell me, 'Well, that's an unlikely scenario...', I've seen it happen. More than once. Traveling salespeople, using the hotel-provided internet kiosks (rather than the laptops provided by work), passwords stolen within a day (and one had his bank account broken into as well).
Second, unless you are just playing games, you don't need the equivalent of a full desktop to lug around, and lugging a 10lb laptop around the airport frankly sucks, not to mention that unless you're sitting in first class, your tray table won't be big enough to hold the thing anyway. The important things for people who travel and work with their machines are light weight and solid battery time.
I can sit for hours at the airport, on wireless, with my Powerbook G4. It isn't fast, and I won't be playing games on it[1], but I will be getting work done.
[1] Then again, I don't really play games on the computer all that much, outside of DDR. I have to spend enough time in front of a computer on account of work and my girlfriend, so when it's fun time, I go out and play in the big blue room.
Except that a starting sysadmin should make about $40K per year at a minimum, and I mean *minimum*; $50K is more in the ballpark for someone with the appropriate skills, and it goes up from there if the applicant has experience in a production environment.
That's why there's a pressure control; one side says 'weak' (yowai), the other side says 'strong' (tsuyoi). In Japanese, of course.
I had the pleasure of trying the cybernetic toilet seat (of the FUTURE!) out in my rental apartment this winter, and I *want* one of those things! It not only heats the water up, but you end up clean as a whistle down there, which is a godsend if you decided to go out for Mexican food the night before. Unfortunately, said toilet seats are horribly expensive; I looked at a department store, and they ranged from $500 to over $1000 (equivalent USD) if you wanted the deluxe model, with washer, heater, *and* starfish-dryer.
You know, I was raised the same way, and I agree; there is a room at my parents' house filled from floor to ceiling with books. Many of them are boring, or otherwise crap, or just on topics that I have no interest, but despite this, I have still ended up reading about half of that room, and ended up the better for it.
Strangely enough, I think only one or two of my peers was raised the same way; and these are the people I consider to be my closest friends. The nice thing is that we often end up exchanging stacks of books on a regular basis, and I've been exposed to a lot of fiction and non-fiction that I would never have otherwise run across; more importantly, I've gotten sucked into worthwhile hobbies (most notable being the Japanese language) because of these friends.
What's even more amusing, perhaps, is that when I moved out on my own, I instinctively started building my own library -- I own three overflowing bookshelves and no sofa or television. I can imagine myself raising my kids to look in the family library for entertainment, much as I did when I was younger.
My hat off to you, sir. You put into words a thought that had always echoed in my mind, but had never been properly expressed.
You have just totally missed the point of the parent poster.
Google's stock is priced for insane growth; and I do mean *insane*. They presently have 5.25B in revenue, with around 7.5B of cash in-the-bank, and no debt -- good financials, yes. Given their share price, their market cap is 118B US dollars.
Yahoo, the number-two player in the business, has a cap of 47 billion and slightly better margins. Yahoo also pulls in the same amount of cash on a yearly basis as Google, and they have about a third of what Google has in cash, plus about 750M in debt. So, give-or-take a billion dollars, Yahoo and Google are the same, in terms of finances, and to be honest, they're pretty similar in terms of services. Google search is a bit better, but Google Maps and Yahoo Maps are on an even par, plus Yahoo has a lot of e-commerce options for small businesses (Yahoo Stores), stuff for investors (Yahoo Finance), and a bunch of other little services.
Is google better? Yeah, sometimes. Is it 2.5-times-the-market-cap better? I don't think so.
Google holds about 50-70% of estimated 'search engine' market share, and while this makes them the market leader, they don't have a hell of a lot of room for growth in that market space. Sure, they've added some services, some of which are good (local.google.com), some of which are mediocre (GMail), and some of which flat-out suck (froogle), and they will see some growth in ad revenues, but enough to justify their current market cap? I think not. Where are they going to grow? Instant messaging? Please.
I like the company, but my investing dollar goes elsewhere, and I don't regret not buying at the IPO, because I'd be asking myself the above questions every day.
I'd like to post my agreement; VZ is generally a massive pile, is a resource hog extrodinare, and sucks royally compared to both Linux VServers and FreeBSD jails. HSPComplete is even uglier. I mean, the vzbackup scripts require SSH, even if you're using them to backup the local machine, and they have this nasty habit of locking on a random VPS and then dying silently.
It's not money that's the problem; it's a devotion to accruing every possible unit of negotiable currency that causes the problem. There are a lot of businesses, most of them privately held, that make 'slightly less' than a ton of money by doing something different, and caring about the customer instead of the bottom line.
Public companies don't have this luxury; they have to care about 'the bottom line', because they are responsible to their shareholders before they are responsible to their customers. In a private company, the customer comes first and foremost, and the difference in quality is measurable.
Look at BMW and Mercedes --- BMW is privately owned, and whether or not their styling appeals to you, it would be hard to argue that they aren't top-notch in terms of quality, funtionality, and service. Mercedes, on the other hand, canned the complimentary service option a few years ago[1], and offers far less 'bang-for-the-buck' in the luxury car market.
[1] It used to be that purchasing a luxury automobile meant that the manufacturer would stand behind your purchase in every conceivable way, and complimentary maintainence was a part of this package. Mercedes used to be very good at this, and had one of the best service packages in the industry. Now, you get to pay for your own service to go along with your top-of-the-market-priced car, and the build quilty has been nickel-and-dimed below that of a Nissan. Sad to see such a nice car company go down the tubes.
I'm surprised they and others* hadn't done this sooner; I've had such a power connector on a deep fryer for years. But it never occurred to me that laptops would be a great application for the idea.
Well, they've switched to Intel, so it's pretty obvious that Mac would choose to use other aspects of deep-fryer technology.
Talk about trolling flamebait. Apple makes money on hardware, not operating systems, so it behooves them to make their operating system work on their hardware. The nice thing about this is that they make some damn nice harware (I'm typing this on a PowerBook), and that they have very little incentive to 'feature-pack' their OS like Microsoft does -- so you get less in the way of quirky 'features', and a hell of a lot of functionality.
Plus, OS X is a Unix, which means it plays nicely with other Unices, and it behaves like a Unix on the command line -- so I get all the power of pipes, vi, Bash, the BSD ports collection (a la Darwinports), gcc, and so on. On the GUI side, it behaves like a Mac -- and I think you'd be hard-pressed to fault Apple for their GUI design.
Best of both worlds; you just have to shell out a slight premium for the hardware, and given that you get a REAL OS with it, I'd say that Mac offers a better bargain for the desktop user than any Dell or Gateway.
Scribus is crap next to inDesign; almost no color management, and it pretty much only supports Western character sets; and let's not even get into the font management under Linux...
DTP basically does not exist in the OSS world, which is a pity.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such thing as a ticket to a long-term, stable, happy job. I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to be a doctor in the United States -- you go through ten years of school to spend all your time juggling HMO paperwork, paying for malpractice insurance, and giving people advice to which they never listen.
Oh, and if you screw up majorly, you can kiss all that hard work goodbye. Sure, you're paid well, but that's not the sort of thing I'd want to deal with.
As far as some kid who tinkers being better than a fresh-out-of college grad, you're partially right, until you want him to do something. My general experience with the 'self-educated, don't need no stinkin' college' crowd is that, while they are very bright, they are also very arrogant, and not inclined to do dirty work -- they want to play with the shiny objects, not slog through miles of digital mud.
Before you tar me as jealous, understand that I *am* one of those tinkering kids -- started programming in grade school, have built my own primitive computer from components (transistors, resisters, diodes, plywood, protoboards), and generally love tinkering with technology. I also had the attitude when I graduated high school that college was mostly a waste of time, so I enrolled in community college just to keep my parents happy.
Worked full-time for about five years taking night classes, and you know what I came to realize?
All my 'talent' and 'intelligence' meant jack in the employment world; they don't care that I've got brains -- they want me to use them. I had to learn, in a hurry, that the majority of working in the computer industry consists of dealing with mundane crap.
College definitely helped with that, because there's a lot of mundane crap that you do as an undergrad.
I'm going to take some time away from proving the Cauchy estimates (is there anything that man *didn't* discover?) and write a response.
As a former Linux desktop user and full time Unix sysadmin-and-programmer, I care very much about my apps having a unified look and feel, because I want people to USE THEM. So, if you're only writing applications for your own personal use, and never plan on distributing said applications, you can stop reading here, because we aren't even on the same planet, much less a congruent ballpark.
I don't write software that just fits my needs; I write programs that help other people solve problems, too, and this is mostly because software has a kind of magic to it. Unlike a physical tool that solves to a physical problem, like a hammer or a chainsaw, I can give the entire world access to my software tool without having to spend a dime. I can fix a whole worlds' worth of the same problem, freeing up other people to work on more interesting problems, through open source software.
That's why this stuff is so awesome; not just because you can see what's under the hood, but because it isn't necessary to reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something.
So, I, presumably we, write software to solve problems. Part of this is to put food on the table, but part of the reason why programmers love to write software is that we are natural toolmakers; we love to write logical tools that solve problems, and we share these tools because it gives us a kick that a big pile of people out there use, like, nay, depend on the tool which we have created -- otherwise, why make it available in the first place?
Still here?
So, we want people to USE the software that we release, not just let it sit there. Now, if we're writing system tools, they can be cryptic and terse, because other people like us are the ones who need them -- it's not expected that Joe Sixpack is going to know what to do with fdisk, setattr, or mDNSResponder. But a GUI application is another beast; it is designed, in all likelihood, to be something that takes a whole bunch of low-level computing tasks (disk I/O, shared memory, codec libraries) and turn it into something easy to use for a specific task (an MP3 player application).
Because GUIs sure as hell aren't for daemons or partitioning tools.
So, when we write this GUI application, we want it to be self-explanitory. It should be easy to use. And part of that is that our application should look like every other application running on the computer. It should exhibit similar behavior unless there is some reason for it to act differently than other applications, and if so, there should be some sort of warning that said application does so.
And this isn't just for Joe Sixpack -- context switching is expensive no matter who does it. When you switch between applications that act differently, your brain needs to make a cognative 'jump'. The bigger the difference, the bigger the jump.
So there's a good reason for consistency in user interface design.
On top of that, needing five different widget libraries is hugely inefficient; why should I need to give disk space to qt, GTK, wxWindows, motif, and whatever library-du-jour that some coder decided to use? Why can't there just be some uberWindowKit that is themeable and flexible enough to get out of the way, so that I don't need to install five different window kits?
This is the one bone I have with the way people develop software under Linux; too much of the 'not made here' syndrome. Which is why we have hundreds of X toolkits, web browsers, word processors, XML parsers, and so on, but only one good browser, a crappy office suite, no desktop publishing or photo-ready image editing. People spend too much time writing windowing toolkits because 'theirs is better', rather than contributing to an existing project, and so the real things that keep Linux from being adopted on the desktop are left to corporate interests -- like Mozilla and OpenOffice.
It
Before the parade of guys comes in ripping on the parent poster, I wanted to make a small comment.
I have a friend who is a former figure-skater and an otherwise knockout bombshell blonde. She's smart, witty, catty, and has legs that could stop an artillery shell. She also loves computers, and was working on finishing up a degree in Computer Science while working in IT.
That is, until all the geeks chased her out.
Asking her to crawl under a desk to fix a cable whenever she'd wear a skirt (never on the jeans days), making lewd comments 'just out of earshot', and all kinds of other crap nominally pulled by thirteen-year-old boys.
She got tired and left for the other side of the business world. Makes more money, and doesn't have to put up with the juvenile bullshit.
So, guys, listen up -- you want more geeky women, you've got to treat them like human beings, and not like sex objects.
Maybe this is because I was raised by a Jewish mother, but I refuse to pay ATM fees. I either use my bank's ATMs, or get cash when I purchase something -- usually, my weekly groceries. Even if you have to stop at a Longs and buy a pack of gum, you still end up with a cheaper 'fee' ($0.75), and you get something out of the whole transaction (the gum).
This does add up. Assume two ATM transactions per week. The average fee in my area seems to be around $1.75, and my bank charges an $0.75 'foreign ATM fee', so that's $2.50 in transacton fees per transaction, or $5.00 per week. Multiply that by 52, and it comes out to $210 in money to which I didn't literally set fire.
Of course, I've brought this argument up to friends who are always complaining about how they are broke, nevermind that they don't spend five minutes a day thinking about where their money goes. Everyone cares about 'convenience', and nobody seems to give a rat's ass about forethought.
The only reason the U.S. isn't a group is because we don't have an identity. ;p
To be honest, I can't be the only person who thinks that this sort of functionality is useless and distracting.
When I want to work with some file that I nominally deal with using a given application, I want to work in the familiar interface of that application. I don't want to screw around with some embedded-editing crap, especially when I need to have the full application installed anyway.
Likewise, being able to 'edit' files in an email is a horrible misfeature, because it encourages very lazy thinking about where data is stored. Where's the lastest copy of my presentation -- in an email? Is it the copy in my home directory? What about the copy on my keychain drive?
And, of course, none of this will be 'industry standard', so it will follow Microsoft's usual practice of nearly mandating an all-Microsoft shop...
I hate to tell you this, but not everything is a business, trying to generate profit.
Or, to put it differently: Do you feel that it's okay for your wife to sleep around so that she can find the most efficient lay?
Seriously, you need to go to China. I'm not saying this in a 'get the hell out' sort of way, but they have a government very much like the one you seem to want; no restrictions on business for the most part, very little taxation, cheap labor...
Because vaccination was discovered and promited by a businessman...oh wait, no.
The Beethoven Corporation brought us a lot of great music...oh, wait, no.
I'm so happy businesses created this Internet thing that we're using...crap, no, they didn't do that, either.
I'm sorry, I'd like to provide more examples, but I think this is the stupidest thing that I have ever read.
Which requires, of course, that they learn to configure the new system, because it sure as hell won't use the old configuration file format, and because the old system isn't even installable, they had to make a very quick set of decisions about upgrades.
A sendmail.cf file that is five years old still works. Ditto for qmail and postfix configurations, and BIND, and Samba, and Squid, and Apache...do you know why? Because there was no reason to make them not work. Even massive improvements to a piece of stable software should *never* require rewriting a configuration file; you should have to add or modify directives to invoke new features, but you should never have a system just 'stop working' because of an upgrade.
More importantly, should I, for some asinine reason, require a BIND 4 (read: prehistoric) name server on, oh, a Linux 2.0.11 kernel, it'll take me a few hours to build. What do I do if I need a WindowsNT installation but don't have install media? Oh, well, I guess I'm screwed, because I can't get it from Microsoft anymore.
I think you need to look up the definition of 'straw man'; I think that government access to financial records, which includes purcase records, mind you, was the topic.
Moreover, I hardly consider asking the government to abide by the Bill of Rights as an appeal to emotion, and I'd also think that suffices as a very concrete reason for being bothered. Nice try, though.
Of course, the person involved wasn't incarcerated, but they had to take time out of their normal daily lives to deal with overzealous law enforcement; that's potentially lost wages, a hell of a lot of stress, and a very big pile of resentment, because innocent people *really* *hate* being accused of a crime, and doubly so when the accusation is for an asinine reason.
More importantly, this guy did something small. Reeeeeeeeeeeally small. And he then had to justify his actions to law enforcement. What if he had done something only slightly more suspicious, like maybe paid off a few credit cards before nabbing some foreign currency for his upcoming vacation?
Now, here's the emotional part:
I am honestly scared every time I fly back into the U.S. I, personally, have never been mistreated by customs, but I've seen the harassment that more 'suspicious-looking' individuals have undergone, nevermind that I'm just as likely, if not more so, to be a terrorist as the Indian guy in line behind me.
I am really bothered that my countrymen see nothing wrong with ignoring the Constitution whenever convenient. That Americans like seeing all those new 'security measures' at the airport, nevermind that it means that I've got no choice but to check my bags in whenever I travel, because my nail clippers might be a 'deadly weapon of terrorism'. Of course, the wine bottle I've got on me is totally safe, and could never be used to hurt anyone...
More importantly, I'm really bothered that we pull stunts like this at home, along with the whole problem of not being able to run an election, while at the same time claiming abroad that we are 'champions of democracy and freedom'. People in other first-world countries don't hate Americans, but they certainly don't like our attitude when it comes to the soverignty of other countries.
I'm not saying that we're the worst, of course; the German government is very serious about making sure the Nazis never rise to power again, and I've had friends dragged in front of the police (German citizens) because they did something to tip off the Nazi-o-meter. But the Germans don't claim to be the 'Land of the Free', we do. Why don't we act like it?
Ok, end the emotional side of my rant.
Oh, I understand, but that's why we (in theory) have a represenative government -- to put supposedly wise people in between power and the slobbering masses. This is supposed to prevent decisions from being made impulsively by large-scale flash mobs.
Obviously, this isn't working, as politicans will more often than not encourage moblike behavior, because it makes it easier for them to get re-elected.
So I think that while the government *has* to do something, they shouldn't, because they're supposed to exercise more temperance and good judgement than Joe Sixpack. That way, the time can be taken to find effective solutions, and when the tide of 'do something, now!' blows over, the problem will actually be fixed.
Then again, that would be a rational way to deal with things.
So, you'd have no complaints being audited by the IRS for your 'suspicious' behavior of having a home business that earns more than the average, even though it'll cost you a nice chunk of time and money? I mean, after all, you came out of things without any harm, survived the audit, right?
You wouldn't mind being detained in a holding cell for a day because some overzealous cop thought you 'looked suspicious'? I mean, you got released the next day, so no harm, no foul?
How about having the police raid your home because you've bought a little too much cold medicine over the past month, and you also happened to place an order for some beakers for a halloween party? Because, you might be running a meth lab, and so the cops were able to get a nearly unrestricted warrant on that alone? I mean, it's no big deal, other than the day of work you missed, the neighbors watching the police crawl all over your property, and all those entries in the public records.
Seems a little more scary, doesn't it?
It has nothing to do with being a conspiracy, and everything to do with a big-ass violation of the Bill of Rights. You, as a citizen, have a right to be secure in your papers and effects, which is why we have this whole warrant system. It's supposed to be that, if the cops want to poke into your business, they have to show probable cause to a judge, and everything is public record (so you can see what they're saying about you, basically).
Basically, it's a huge pain in the ass, so why go through it unless you really think the person is a criminal?
Now, your entire life is practically open; law enforcement has access to all of your financial records, including taxes and bank account information, and all without needing a warrant, as long as you violate some arbitrary criteria as to what 'normal' is. Does this help them catch criminals? I doubt it; I mean, the crooks dumb enough to be cooking meth in their kitchens don't usually give a damn about pyrex or lab safety equipment, and the guys smart enough to build nuclear weapons in their basement aren't going to try and buy their supplies at Home Depot.
Personally, I'd rather our law enforcement dollars were spent on, oh, education, especially in high-crime areas, and in prison reform, so that inmates came out of prison, well, reformed, rather than better-trained in being criminals.
So, yeah, all of this does scare and bother me, not because I think that there is any big conspiracy, but because the government is violating my rights in exchange for some illusion of safety.
This could be good or bad, but personally, I'll stick with LOM and OpenBoot. Dell would get an order for God Knows How Many servers if they just implemented something functionally equivalent to LOM/OBT over a serial port.
IPMI could be okay, provided that you can (a) turn it off; and, (b) could restrict it to a second network card -- that way, you could have a separate network segement for servers in a rack that does nothing but handle IPMI data. Of course, serial would be a hell of a lot cheaper...
That's just Ashcroft; he forgot to put his make-up on this morning.
> In fact, it's now written into a lot of employment contracts that shutting
> off the cell phone or failing to have it with you is grounds for
> termination.
If you're being paid for being on-call, that makes sense; I am, as part of being a sysadmin, and so getting calls on a weekend (like I just did a few hours ago) to fix problems doesn't bother me, because I am compensated for it.
Should an employer want me to work 24/7/365 without paying me for it, they are going to get one very unproductive employee. Of course, I'll be reasonable and negotiate for on-call pay, increased compensation, flex time, and the like, but if management won't budge, they have another thing coming. Sure, I'll deal with on-call problems, the emergencies, but I will keep solid written records of every hour I work, make damn sure that I don't go over an average of forty hours a week (including the time required to handle my time accounting), and should they fire me for doing so, I will take that pile of paperwork to my attorney, and sue the piss out of my former employer for a big pile of labor law violations.
Of course, I will also be spending time, off the company clock, looking for a better job, and I will jump the second I find one.
I think the simple fact of the matter is that you get what you pay for; if you compensate people fairly, both in terms of money *and* in treating them like human beings (vacations, actual thank-you notes when you do a good job, etc.), they will voluntarily put in overtime, and go the extra mile to make the company successful.
I know that, for several employers, I've volunteered to put in extra time, sacrificed weekends and vacations, accepted a pay cuts, and so on, all because those employers treated me well, and I don't regret any of it.
The companies that bean-counted my work got exactly what they paid me for, and not one second more.
More often than not, the former type of company has remained in business, and the latter type has not.
I'm guessing you've never worked in IT, or had a job that required you to travel outside of your office.
First off, you should *never* *ever* *ever* use a public machine for connecting to any type of private data sources; you have no idea what kinds of keyloggers and spyware live on those beasts, and you won't know until all your data, and with it your customers' data, has gone to an IP address that lives in a country where you have no legal standing.
And before you tell me, 'Well, that's an unlikely scenario...', I've seen it happen. More than once. Traveling salespeople, using the hotel-provided internet kiosks (rather than the laptops provided by work), passwords stolen within a day (and one had his bank account broken into as well).
Second, unless you are just playing games, you don't need the equivalent of a full desktop to lug around, and lugging a 10lb laptop around the airport frankly sucks, not to mention that unless you're sitting in first class, your tray table won't be big enough to hold the thing anyway. The important things for people who travel and work with their machines are light weight and solid battery time.
I can sit for hours at the airport, on wireless, with my Powerbook G4. It isn't fast, and I won't be playing games on it[1], but I will be getting work done.
[1] Then again, I don't really play games on the computer all that much, outside of DDR. I have to spend enough time in front of a computer on account of work and my girlfriend, so when it's fun time, I go out and play in the big blue room.
Except that a starting sysadmin should make about $40K per year at a minimum, and I mean *minimum*; $50K is more in the ballpark for someone with the appropriate skills, and it goes up from there if the applicant has experience in a production environment.
That's why there's a pressure control; one side says 'weak' (yowai), the other side says 'strong' (tsuyoi). In Japanese, of course.
I had the pleasure of trying the cybernetic toilet seat (of the FUTURE!) out in my rental apartment this winter, and I *want* one of those things! It not only heats the water up, but you end up clean as a whistle down there, which is a godsend if you decided to go out for Mexican food the night before. Unfortunately, said toilet seats are horribly expensive; I looked at a department store, and they ranged from $500 to over $1000 (equivalent USD) if you wanted the deluxe model, with washer, heater, *and* starfish-dryer.
You know, I was raised the same way, and I agree; there is a room at my parents' house filled from floor to ceiling with books. Many of them are boring, or otherwise crap, or just on topics that I have no interest, but despite this, I have still ended up reading about half of that room, and ended up the better for it.
Strangely enough, I think only one or two of my peers was raised the same way; and these are the people I consider to be my closest friends. The nice thing is that we often end up exchanging stacks of books on a regular basis, and I've been exposed to a lot of fiction and non-fiction that I would never have otherwise run across; more importantly, I've gotten sucked into worthwhile hobbies (most notable being the Japanese language) because of these friends.
What's even more amusing, perhaps, is that when I moved out on my own, I instinctively started building my own library -- I own three overflowing bookshelves and no sofa or television. I can imagine myself raising my kids to look in the family library for entertainment, much as I did when I was younger.
My hat off to you, sir. You put into words a thought that had always echoed in my mind, but had never been properly expressed.
You have just totally missed the point of the parent poster.
Google's stock is priced for insane growth; and I do mean *insane*. They presently have 5.25B in revenue, with around 7.5B of cash in-the-bank, and no debt -- good financials, yes. Given their share price, their market cap is 118B US dollars.
Yahoo, the number-two player in the business, has a cap of 47 billion and slightly better margins. Yahoo also pulls in the same amount of cash on a yearly basis as Google, and they have about a third of what Google has in cash, plus about 750M in debt. So, give-or-take a billion dollars, Yahoo and Google are the same, in terms of finances, and to be honest, they're pretty similar in terms of services. Google search is a bit better, but Google Maps and Yahoo Maps are on an even par, plus Yahoo has a lot of e-commerce options for small businesses (Yahoo Stores), stuff for investors (Yahoo Finance), and a bunch of other little services.
Is google better? Yeah, sometimes. Is it 2.5-times-the-market-cap better? I don't think so.
Google holds about 50-70% of estimated 'search engine' market share, and while this makes them the market leader, they don't have a hell of a lot of room for growth in that market space. Sure, they've added some services, some of which are good (local.google.com), some of which are mediocre (GMail), and some of which flat-out suck (froogle), and they will see some growth in ad revenues, but enough to justify their current market cap? I think not. Where are they going to grow? Instant messaging? Please.
I like the company, but my investing dollar goes elsewhere, and I don't regret not buying at the IPO, because I'd be asking myself the above questions every day.
I'd like to post my agreement; VZ is generally a massive pile, is a resource hog extrodinare, and sucks royally compared to both Linux VServers and FreeBSD jails. HSPComplete is even uglier. I mean, the vzbackup scripts require SSH, even if you're using them to backup the local machine, and they have this nasty habit of locking on a random VPS and then dying silently.
It's not money that's the problem; it's a devotion to accruing every possible unit of negotiable currency that causes the problem. There are a lot of businesses, most of them privately held, that make 'slightly less' than a ton of money by doing something different, and caring about the customer instead of the bottom line.
Public companies don't have this luxury; they have to care about 'the bottom line', because they are responsible to their shareholders before they are responsible to their customers. In a private company, the customer comes first and foremost, and the difference in quality is measurable.
Look at BMW and Mercedes --- BMW is privately owned, and whether or not their styling appeals to you, it would be hard to argue that they aren't top-notch in terms of quality, funtionality, and service. Mercedes, on the other hand, canned the complimentary service option a few years ago[1], and offers far less 'bang-for-the-buck' in the luxury car market.
[1] It used to be that purchasing a luxury automobile meant that the manufacturer would stand behind your purchase in every conceivable way, and complimentary maintainence was a part of this package. Mercedes used to be very good at this, and had one of the best service packages in the industry. Now, you get to pay for your own service to go along with your top-of-the-market-priced car, and the build quilty has been nickel-and-dimed below that of a Nissan. Sad to see such a nice car company go down the tubes.
I'm surprised they and others* hadn't done this sooner; I've had such a power connector on a deep fryer for years. But it never occurred to me that laptops would be a great application for the idea.
Well, they've switched to Intel, so it's pretty obvious that Mac would choose to use other aspects of deep-fryer technology.
(Rimshot!)
Talk about trolling flamebait. Apple makes money on hardware, not operating systems, so it behooves them to make their operating system work on their hardware. The nice thing about this is that they make some damn nice harware (I'm typing this on a PowerBook), and that they have very little incentive to 'feature-pack' their OS like Microsoft does -- so you get less in the way of quirky 'features', and a hell of a lot of functionality.
Plus, OS X is a Unix, which means it plays nicely with other Unices, and it behaves like a Unix on the command line -- so I get all the power of pipes, vi, Bash, the BSD ports collection (a la Darwinports), gcc, and so on. On the GUI side, it behaves like a Mac -- and I think you'd be hard-pressed to fault Apple for their GUI design.
Best of both worlds; you just have to shell out a slight premium for the hardware, and given that you get a REAL OS with it, I'd say that Mac offers a better bargain for the desktop user than any Dell or Gateway.
Scribus is crap next to inDesign; almost no color management, and it pretty much only supports Western character sets; and let's not even get into the font management under Linux...
DTP basically does not exist in the OSS world, which is a pity.