What the recruiter actually does is take your resume, add in a bunch of job requirements you may or may not have...
That's what shitty recruiters do, yes. It's not what all recruiters do. And saying "I'm not going to let a good recruiter do their job because I can't distinguish between shitty recruiters and good recruiters" is cutting off your own nose to spite your face.
Remember, adding fake qualifications isn't going to get you anything other than an interview. Once you're at that interview, your complete lack of knowledge about those skills will become apparent. So any recruiter worth their salt doesn't do this.
What I've seen with my own eyes are recruiters removing skills from a resume to ensure the skills that the employer is looking for are more prominent.
But that's not even the primary use. I've mostly seen them cut and paste resume information into a format that's more standardized so they can send three applicants to an employer and the employer can easily compare them.
Yes, a lot of recruiters are shit. But that doesn't mean that it's sane or sensible to make it impossible to do their job. You wouldn't refuse to bring your driver's license or trade-in to a car dealership simply because car dealers have a bad rep, would you?
I always send my CV in PDF form. As well as almost always displaying correctly on a variety of systems, it prevents information leakage. Last thing you want is for the prospective employer to hit ctrl-Z a few times and see what edits you made.
I'd prefer PDF but you'd be surprised how many US employers actually reject it. UK may be different.
The only people who have demanded Word documents have been recruiters. If they do, run. The only reasons they want the Word document are so that they can copy/paste the contents into a portfolio more easily, or so that they can edit it themselves.
Oh that'd be terrible if someone whose job it is to find my a job cleaned my resume. Heavens forfend that THEY DO THEIR FUCKING JOB!
Seriously, as long as they don't change what the resume says about me, they can have at it. A number have sent me back my resume with their suggestions - it's been helpful.
I tried LibreOffice too. Word (Word Starter Edition FWIW, you can run it under Windows 10 with the right patches) was my last choice because the f---ing ribbon makes it almost unusable, but it was the only way to produce a Word document with anything other than trivial formatting that appears correctly in Word. Indeed I didn't even try Office Online because I've had problems in that seeing tables correctly formatted.
I assume LibreOffice ownCloud is as compatible with word as desktop LibreOffice. Loading the file exported from Google Docs into (desktop) LibreOffice produced something closer to the Google Docs version (proving that it doesn't interpret.docx the same way Microsoft Office does either.)
Why not mention it? Well:
1. I haven't set up OwnCloud, I'm planning to, but I don't have the hardware ready for it.
2. Desktop LibreOffice's quirks when handling.docx files are well documented. LibreOffice itself even warns you when you try to save a file as.docx even if all you've done is load a.docx and tried to save it as one.
But sure, if you want me to state it explicitly, LibreOffice is not suitable for anything other than informal exchange of documents with Word users either.
I don't know about the mobile applications under discussion here, I'd hope they're more compatible than Office Online, but as of now the only version of Office I found works with Office is, well, Desktop Office.
I'm using Microsoft Word for my resume as most employers still need documents in.docx format, and I am seeing very real formatting issues when converting Google Docs documents to.docx.
I was hoping to use Google Docs for the entire thing, I used a Google Docs off-the-shelf template to build my resume and after filling everything in found two major issues:
1. It wouldn't print the bullets (WTF?).
2. When I exported it to Word, there were major issues with the settings for the tables. Margins were screwy. Horizontal lines that were part of the template were now inconsistent. Rows all started on new pages.
I really want to use Docs for this kind of thing, and if I ran my own multi-employee company I'd be seriously tempted to go full-on Google Apps for everything, but unfortunately I'm at the mercy of the standards everyone else has set. Hopefully long term other options will become more practical.
Yet again we see "The Cloud", a singularly great concept if implemented correctly, undermined by businesses making short term decisions to discontinue services ordinary people have come to love and rely upon. In this case, Twitter announced Vine, people came to believe in it, and now Twitter is pulling the plug.
As long as businesses fail to follow through when creating new Internet served applications, trust in the entire concept of Internet served applications is going to be undermined. Would you trust a third party service to manage your data? How many people would use a third party email system, for example, knowing that at any moment the owners can simply say "Hey, this is costing us money, let's pull the plug", leaving you disconnected and helpless.
We need better commitments from businesses who announce vital new services, or else the entire viability of the "cloud" will collapse, with few being willing to trust it.
This quagmire of businesses failing to provide trustworthy services that must be trustworthy to be adopted will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and PHONING YOUR CONGRESSMAN OR SENATOR RIGHT NOW. Tell them your concerns about Vine. Warn them that trillions of dollars are being lost because of these issues. Tell them this is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by organizations like Amazon and Google to make the cloud more dependable, but that without a stronger commitment to long term provisioning of services, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how Vine's discontinuation undermines all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies the cloud.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote. Today. For anyone who doesn't pander to Neo-Nazis. Even if they're a little "corrupt" in a "Washington is corrupt these days" way, which is still better than being, you know, a free speech trampling violence encouraging demagogue. FFS, PLEASE VOTE. PLEASE. I'm serious now. My God, we seriously got this far, we're this close to voting in a totalitarian lunatic for President because, in large part, people keep making up fake conspiracies about his opponent and she's not exactly anyone's first choice of President. DO SOMETHING, PLEASE.
I'm probably not the only one here who's getting sick and tired of hearing about yet another major Windows bug that we can't do anything about. While Microsoft makes their operating system even less stable, update to update, it also makes it harder for us to even pick the updates that we know work and leave those we don't aside.
That's a serious problem, and downtime due to computers crashing, needing to be reformatted and their operating systems re-installed, together with the time taken for users to learn about these problems and investigate workarounds, costs the world economy trillions every year. In this case the user loses whatever functionality lead them to wanting to plug a Kindle Fire into their Windows PCs in the first place, again having a real cost associated with it.
Yet while we waste time waiting for our computers to reboot, we feel helpless, unable to investigate workarounds or other ways to achieve the results we want.
This quagmire of people being unable to fix the problems caused by bugs and other issues will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them your concerns about bugs in Windows 10. Warn them that trillions of dollars are being lost because of these issues. Tell them this is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by organizations like Microsoft and Amazon to fix the bugs, but that without better QA and more reliable drivers, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how vicious, angry, arguments undermines all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on bugs in Windows 10.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Quick! Leave Slashdot while you still can! Don't post any more comments, just go! That goes for everyone considering posting a complaint about Beta in an unrelated discussion, ALL OF YOU, leav... uh I mean "boycott", Slashdot today!
Why wait? Start the boycott now! You, you who was planning to post something critical of Beta in an unrelated article, stop what you're doing, log out, and never log in again, in, uh, protest, that's it!
I know, it'll be hard when you occasionally revisit and see that only people who like the new look or who are interested in actual on-topic discussions are left, but you'll feel better.
In most parts of the country, it's illegal for developers to build homes and businesses in close enough proximity that public transportation and walking are viable options.
Bizarrely, it's the libertarians that are usually behind these laws, as nothing says freedom more than being forced to choose a particular form of transportation...
I used to live in Reading, which is a good 30 miles from Heathrow. I can tell you that Concorde flying over my home every day was loud enough to drown out the TV. It's fucking loud.
Boeing didn't invent anything. It was people in Concorde's flight path who complained about it, and then a rather bizarre set of "objective" methods that didn't measure noise were used to FUD us.
Sometimes it's tough being the only one who's right.
With misinformation common on the Internet, and with the difficulty of hunting down honest answers that'll confirm the truth or otherwise of any statement, users very often feel it necessary to base their opinions on the personalities of the arguers themselves. This very often leads to a situation where an argument can appear foolish simply because of the anger of the person making it, and in many cases a combined might of reasonable people assuming the more argumentative person is in the wrong, and posting as such, can overwhelmingly go against someone whose views may be right, but are obscured by hyperbolic allegations and confused, angry, rants.
This quagmire of people basing their views on the person whose statements seem most reasonable, rather than on the correctness of those statements, will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them your concerns about the ability to tell right from wrong on the basis of personalities. Warn them that hot button issues on the Internet typically enrage people and result in many undermining their own arguments through their own anger. Tell them this is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by organizations like Slashdot to provide free forums in which to discuss important topics but that without calm, collected, and reasonable arguments, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how vicious, angry, arguments undermines all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on Internet anger.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
I wish that people wouldn't be such leftist nidjits...
Absolutely. One of the major problems in today's society is that it is almost impossible to have a debate about modern technology, including Internet access technologies such as DSL, cable, and WiMAX, without the heavy involvement of leftist groups such as the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru, the Red Army Faction terror group in Germany, and the infamous OSI so-called "freedom fighters" of the US. Widely known for recruiting young, naive, soldiers in universities, brainwashing them into beliefs such as the moral superiority of forced redistributions of wealth, the bourgeois imperialist bankrupsy of representative democracy, and the superiority of a socialist, common ownership, share and share alike, model for the development of computer software, these groups cause immense damage to progress, which ironicly they hold up by preventing the trickle down effect, the engine of all progress, from having any realistic possibility of success.
While left wing terror groups continue to make their extreme, anti-economic, demands, politicians merely appease them and their demands. Some countries, for example, have initiated welfare state programs, guaranteeing a minimum level of living, while others have promised equal access to health care regardless of income. The state of Massachussets has gone one step better and actually forced their already over-burdened citizens to use open document formats to exchange information in a blatant attempt to pacify the OOO, the infamous breakaway faction of the OSI. In all these cases, state involvement has merely crippled the trickle down effect and made it impossible for billionaires to buy DSL connections.
Such actions have prevented progress, and as such have actually helped the leftist groups by allowing them to exploit the lack of progress as some kind of fault of crapitalism.
This quagmire of progress both being prevented by leftist groups, and the resulting lack of it helping those same groups
not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that
leftist threats to progress
is an issue that is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work
being done by
right-wing terror groups such as the Contras, Al-Qaida, the KKK, and the BSA
but that
unless something stronger is done to tackle leftism you will be forced
to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns
you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the impedement of progress from leftist groups harms all three. Let them
know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote,
and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their
policies on left wing terrorism.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
I think most of us find ourselves in your position. The fact is that today's world is technologically driven. People rely upon technology for critical communications, communications we're expected to be able to make today that, perhaps, five years ago we wouldn't have been. We're expected to have access to what you might term a digital hub, not, as Steve Jobs would put it, of the livingroom (for entertainment, for consumerism), but for our lives. We carry around cellphones, and PDAs, and MP3 players, and voice recorders. Most of us wear digital watches, or quartz-based fakes.
But as time has gone on, while we've become more reliant, dependent, and expectant, of technology, the technology itself has become no more practical. The integrated device is far away. While systems like the Nokia 9500 have gone so far, the fact is we can't rely upon such technologies for everything. Just entering text into any mobile device, for instance, remains a pain, a crucial barrier to the integrated digital world.
In some ways, the question may be raised: is this the direction we want to go in? The truth is, yes it is. We're expected to have this degree of communication because the world is becoming more complex, because as we gain efficiencies through our increased knowledge, we find ourselves having to manage the data flow.
And so, right now, we have to lug laptops around, with wifi and bluetooth connections, and cellphones, and iPods. Will this end? It has to. Because unless it does, we'll never be able to realise the next step of total information connectivity. Our ability to learn, and to take advantage of the information available will be decreased.
This quagmire of people being unable to take advantage of information while the technology itself remains a hinderance will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that
there has to be a nationwide program that provides technology at the point of need, ensuring total connectivity. Tell them this
is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work
being done by
good, American, companies from Cingular to Motorola, from IBM to Dell, from Apple to Microsoft
to support you with the technology you need in your life
but that
without a government mandated technology supply, ensuring those who need information can get it without the need to lug around laptops, you will be forced
to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns
you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a government program of technological availability will help all three. Let them
know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote,
and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their
policies on funding such a network.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Software development costs money. When people like Theo work their asses off to get us high quality programming, like OpenBSD, OpenSSH, PF, and a host of other excellent operating system level tools and frameworks that most of us use every day without thinking about it, they need to be rewarded, not just because they've done a good job, but because every minute they devote to making these things for us, is a minute they can't spend on work that puts food on their plates and roofs over their tables.
Unfortunately, they know that the best value they can give to the tools they provide is to make them free. But as long as the tools are free, there will always be those parts of society that do not contribute to the costs of their creation. And, unfortunately, that's not a minority of people. When was the last time YOU gave money to OpenBSD?
This quagmire of people being unable to develop that that should be free will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that
critical free software
is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work
being done by
the OpenBSD and GNU teams
to support you with the software you need in your life
but that if
cheapskates keep refusing to contribute to the projects, ensuring people like Theo are not forced to hold down proper jobs, you will be forced
to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns
you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a lack of money for Free Software harms all three. Let them
know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote,
and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their
policies on funding Free Software.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
I have to say I generally agree. There is a fundamental problem though in that most people lack the knowledge to realise that simply because something is sold as a CD, in with all the other CDs, looking identical to all the other CDs, with little or no warning on the packaging that it's not a CD save, in a minority of cases, for text that looks more like legalese worded to appear to be suggesting extra benefits of the package rather than to actually suggest the package is crippled, doesn't mean that, in fact, they are getting a standard "red book" CD. The fact that such widespread ignorance exists means that any content producer that wants to can actually remove their products from the market, as far as those who prefer open formats are concerned, and can only sell non-CDs, and all the incentives exist to actually encourage content publishers to do this.
If something isn't done about this soon, clearly network effects will result in pretty much every "CD" being DRM-encumbered, containing, as Sony did, software that actively damages the configuration of the systems the CD is meant to play upon. However, it would be entirely wrong to hold companies like Sony to account for this. They, after all, are merely trying to make money. It is entirely right that they should do so by taking advantage of ignorance to encourage people to do things that are entirely not in their best interest. If businesses were not able to do this, if businesses had incentives to make money when honest, then freedom itself would be at risk. Liberty would be in peril.
What kind of "choice" is it where you do not need to be a technology geek to decide whether or not to buy a "CD" of music? What kind of "freedom" does one have if every vendor of cellular service is telling the truth about their talk plan prices? How are we free if we do not, in practice even if we rarely do, have to hire a lawyer before taking a job or even installing software? Can we be described as supportive of liberty when a shop cannot put a price label on an item that actually reflects the retail price minus some "mail in rebate" the customer might not even qualify for, and if they do, might not get anyway?
Those who defend the intervention of government into these matters ignore market forces. Just as, say, if people like purple cars, the market will eventually end up producing purple cars, so it follows that what we're seeing here is market forces. People, through their unwillingness to spend every waking moment researching every aspect of the products they buy before they buy them, refusing to visit factories to determine environmental and employment issues, refusing to educate themselves about 14 bit 44.1KHz encoding, refusing to examine the contracts of the artists who produced the works, refusing to understand the lower level Win32 APIs and the registry, refusing to even design proxy-device drivers to understand these basic concepts, demonstrate that they want ignorance, and they consider being taken advantage of, being fooled, as actually a thing of value. We cannot have honesty in business when the market wants dishonesty.
But, no, there are those who want to smother consumers in regulation and red-tape. They want to prevent consumers from getting the products and services they deserve. And why? Because the more dishonest the market becomes, the more they scream and think something needs to be done.
This quagmire of people complaining about the market when the market is actually providing them with what they asked for will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are
prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that
the market
is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work
being done by
Sony, Steam, Kevin Jones Staples and Off
Re:A good solution
on
Broadband Blimps
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
While fiber has much more bandwidth, and eliminates the problems that shared bandwidth generates, it has its own problems. It's exceptionally expensive to lay, partially because of the cost of the fiber itself, but also because of the physical cost of digging up roads and laying the cable. This should not be underestimated, in built-up areas it typically costs something in the region of $10,000 per foot to lay cable.
In order to make the laying of fiber (or any other cable) profitable, typically companies have to hope for a monopoly service so they can charge whatever is necessary to recoup their costs. But, in an age in which other means of Internet and telephone access exist, that's an impossible requirement. Competition would exist from day one from cable and telephone operators, supplying a service that may be "good enough" for most consumers.
This quagmire of businesses being unable to guarantee the business case exists for producing a modern telecommunications infrastructure
will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are
prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing
will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that bandwidth is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work
being done by
telephone companies (both mobile and fixed line), cable operators, Craig McCaw, satellite operators, and now broadband-over-airship operators,
to create an infrastructure that will provide more plentisome bandwidth to a large group of people, but that if
new businesses
continue to be unable to justify the huge expense of laying a genuinely large enough pipe to every home to create enough bandwidth to support just about any application, you will be forced
to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns
you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of bandwidth harms all three. Let them
know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote,
and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their
policies on bandwidth.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
If the ends of many of my postings seem similar, it is only because it is an issue I feel strongly about. Do we always want to go the "libertarian" route of not telling anyone with power what we really think for fear of offending someone, or do we want to live in a thriving democracy in which our senators and congressmen work for us, and only for us? They exist to serve us, they are paid by us, by thunder they should do our bidding.
Another issue I feel strongly about is SMP in OpenBSD. It feels great to know that after all the lobbying, after all the calls to people to write to their elected representatives, we finally have SMP in OpenBSD. So ultimately the system works, and this is a lesson we should all learn.
I know I'm not the only one who's felt that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. SMP may not be high priority for security, but a secure OS that only gives you access to half the processing power of your system is always going to be a disappointment. And SMP, while not a priority, does help security in that it makes DoS attacks much more difficult.
(Why? Because many typical DoS attacks work on the basis of a single process hogging the CPU. If you have two, a system administrator can log in and kill the process. If you have one, that system administrator will find it more difficult to do so. It's not a cure-all, but it helps.)
In all, excellent news. Thanks to everyone who made this possible, regardless of whether you just coded, or you campaigned for support for the OpenBSD project.
This is great news as it looks like there's progress at last, a little too late, but it's happening, and it's providing alternatives to the current environments which compete on the basis of being "just good enough" rather than being what people actually need and want.
Back in the late eighties and early nineties we actually had a wide range of platforms and real choices when it came to computing. The Amiga was one of those choices, and were it not for some bad business decisions in the early nineties, perhaps it would remain a mainstream, if niche, platform today.
But it's hard for a platform to get noticed today. Just look at Linux. Despite overwhelming support from the PC establishment, it barely exists on more than 2-3% of desktops, with servers - used and operated primarily by geeks who know what they're doing - being the only area it's doing well in. The problem is that PC manufacturers are unwilling to cater for niche markets, and by doing so they're harming themselves and harming innovation. They're harming themselves by not producing something that will attract greater profit margins because it's sufficiently different from the mainstream to compete on somehting other than price, and they're harming innovation because without choices, innovation suffers. Apple has proven, by being the richest computer hardware company in the world, that you can profit in the niche. But it takes a will to get there. Why did Gateway not exploit the Amiga niche while they still had it?
This quagmire of artists, consumers, and PC manufacturers being unable to diversify in the platforms available
will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are
prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing
will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that a diversity of platforms is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work
being done by the hiers to the Amiga source and the work by the GNU/Linux community to create an infrastructure that will support true choice in the computing community, but that if PC manufacturers continue to be unable to overthrow their conservatism, instead disappearing into the void that is commodity hardware, you will be forced
to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives.
Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently
deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns
you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of platform choices harms all three. Let them
know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote,
and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their
policies on platform diversity.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Congratulations on your own. Judging from how my original was modded, obviously people fell for yours.
Yes, like we all understand what a 10 PRINT "HELLO" actually does behind the scenes
Well, I have a pretty good idea (it depends on the machine/OS of course, but...)
In any case, BASIC instructions are at a low enough level for this kind of thing to be a non issue. What PRINT does is take the arguments and send them to the operating system without further ado. You can't get much lower level than that.
Compare that to, say, a library that maintains an indexed database or that accesses ZIP files, or something as simple as a sort.
BASIC is a wonderful thing. My first memories of programming were on a VIC 20, and it had a BASIC programming environment that was one of the best (you could actually cursor up the screen and edit lines you'd just listed.) I moved on to various Sinclair machines and then bought my first computer that didn't have a native BASIC interpreter, the Amiga. Much as I loved the latter, in some ways the fun in computing started to die out as more and more computers came without programming tools, and those that came with them came with tools that were far removed from the fun stuff we all did on our 6502/Z80/6809 based machines.
I wonder, in some ways, if computing has been harmed by the removal of interpreters. Even when MSDOS came with QBASIC, BASIC programs became very much second class citizens in that environment. The fun and accessability has been removed from programming. Some of it is there in environments like Python under Linux, but even then there's a complexity and obscurity attached. It's not like the VIC 20, with its blinking cursor and "READY." prompt. You have to know the interpreter is there. You have to find it. You then have to go through a range of hurdles to know what it is capable of.
And in some ways, the lack of simplicity of environments like Python is harmful too. Much of the fun of programming was learning how to do amazing things at a relatively low level. Now languages are so complex, and libraries so relied upon, I'd venture to say most programmers do not understand how their programs will run, that something as simple as a change of data structure might make their program run 10,000% faster. Hashing? Sorting? Let the interpreter do it. That stuff's "too hard".
How do you make programming fun as long as we make computers complex? I'm not sure we can. And our computers will become steadily more complex, because increasingly the only people who program will be those with little love of the art. Those who think that a Python library is an adequate substitute for understanding. Just as society has moved to a "condemn, never understand" approach, so has programming moved to a "just get the job done, don't understand the results or the reasons" approach. This is wrong, but it's a vicious circle.
This quagmire of programming become more serious and more unnecessarily complex as the unnecessary complexities drives talented would-be "real" programmers out will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are
prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing
will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that programming is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work
being done by Guido to create a more modern alternative to BASIC that is accessable to even the most Texan village idiot, but that if computers are not made fun again you will be forced
to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives.
Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently
deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns
you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of a computer that boots into a READY prompt, ready for programming, harms all three. Let them
know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote,
and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their
policies on bringing back home computers.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Amen Brother. The truth is that unless we're willing to create decent ways of distributing wealth to artists that doesn't involve government intervention, we're never going to get the free (as in freedom) copyrightless utopia we wish for. Which is why, ultimately, we need to look into free market solutions for distributing the money.
The major issue is one of choice. Given the choice between not paying anything towards the creation of music, and paying something to an organization like the RIAA, clearly most people would rather do the former. If a non-governmental agency is to be put in charge of handing out grants to artists, it must have the ability to compell payment. There are multiple ways this can be achieved, currently we only provide a limited mechanism through copyrights. But if copyrights were to be reformed, we could institute this kind of compulsion while giving people their fair use rights back. This would suit everyone.
As you say, community values must also play a part in the creation of music, we can't allow rappers to advocate murder and receive funds that people have no choice but to pay. I would add to that the use of swearwords, and, for obvious constitutional reasons, bans on religious or speech content. These can always be funded through other means, rather than via compulsory contributions.
The real issue is getting there. Most people have no objections to such a system being instituted as long as they receive something in return, for example the free redistribution of content itself. But unless we can persuade the current content producers to accept such terms, something that cannot be done without also providing the means for them to receive money via the compulsory payment system evisaged above, they will not accept such a radical proposal.
This quagmire of artists and consumers being unable to accept a better environment for the funding of arts unless both are dealt with at the same time will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are
prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing
will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that free and open music is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work
being done by the libertarians to create an infrastructure that will support truly free - as in liberty - music, but that if the chicken and agg problem inherent in a sideways reform of copyright is not resolved, you will be forced
to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives.
Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently
deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns
you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of a mechanism whereby a private company can compell people to pay money to be ridistirbuted amongst artists harms all three. Tell them you will only accept such a system as long as strict limits are placed upon the type of content that can be funded, owing to the compulsory nature of the contributions. Let them
know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote,
and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their
policies on private music funding.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what shitty recruiters do, yes. It's not what all recruiters do. And saying "I'm not going to let a good recruiter do their job because I can't distinguish between shitty recruiters and good recruiters" is cutting off your own nose to spite your face.
Remember, adding fake qualifications isn't going to get you anything other than an interview. Once you're at that interview, your complete lack of knowledge about those skills will become apparent. So any recruiter worth their salt doesn't do this.
What I've seen with my own eyes are recruiters removing skills from a resume to ensure the skills that the employer is looking for are more prominent.
But that's not even the primary use. I've mostly seen them cut and paste resume information into a format that's more standardized so they can send three applicants to an employer and the employer can easily compare them.
Yes, a lot of recruiters are shit. But that doesn't mean that it's sane or sensible to make it impossible to do their job. You wouldn't refuse to bring your driver's license or trade-in to a car dealership simply because car dealers have a bad rep, would you?
I'd prefer PDF but you'd be surprised how many US employers actually reject it. UK may be different.
Oh that'd be terrible if someone whose job it is to find my a job cleaned my resume. Heavens forfend that THEY DO THEIR FUCKING JOB!
Seriously, as long as they don't change what the resume says about me, they can have at it. A number have sent me back my resume with their suggestions - it's been helpful.
I tried LibreOffice too. Word (Word Starter Edition FWIW, you can run it under Windows 10 with the right patches) was my last choice because the f---ing ribbon makes it almost unusable, but it was the only way to produce a Word document with anything other than trivial formatting that appears correctly in Word. Indeed I didn't even try Office Online because I've had problems in that seeing tables correctly formatted.
I assume LibreOffice ownCloud is as compatible with word as desktop LibreOffice. Loading the file exported from Google Docs into (desktop) LibreOffice produced something closer to the Google Docs version (proving that it doesn't interpret .docx the same way Microsoft Office does either.)
Why not mention it? Well:
1. I haven't set up OwnCloud, I'm planning to, but I don't have the hardware ready for it. .docx files are well documented. LibreOffice itself even warns you when you try to save a file as .docx even if all you've done is load a .docx and tried to save it as one.
2. Desktop LibreOffice's quirks when handling
But sure, if you want me to state it explicitly, LibreOffice is not suitable for anything other than informal exchange of documents with Word users either.
I don't know about the mobile applications under discussion here, I'd hope they're more compatible than Office Online, but as of now the only version of Office I found works with Office is, well, Desktop Office.
It sucks, but that's the situation.
I'm using Microsoft Word for my resume as most employers still need documents in .docx format, and I am seeing very real formatting issues when converting Google Docs documents to .docx.
I was hoping to use Google Docs for the entire thing, I used a Google Docs off-the-shelf template to build my resume and after filling everything in found two major issues:
1. It wouldn't print the bullets (WTF?).
2. When I exported it to Word, there were major issues with the settings for the tables. Margins were screwy. Horizontal lines that were part of the template were now inconsistent. Rows all started on new pages.
I really want to use Docs for this kind of thing, and if I ran my own multi-employee company I'd be seriously tempted to go full-on Google Apps for everything, but unfortunately I'm at the mercy of the standards everyone else has set. Hopefully long term other options will become more practical.
Yet again we see "The Cloud", a singularly great concept if implemented correctly, undermined by businesses making short term decisions to discontinue services ordinary people have come to love and rely upon. In this case, Twitter announced Vine, people came to believe in it, and now Twitter is pulling the plug.
As long as businesses fail to follow through when creating new Internet served applications, trust in the entire concept of Internet served applications is going to be undermined. Would you trust a third party service to manage your data? How many people would use a third party email system, for example, knowing that at any moment the owners can simply say "Hey, this is costing us money, let's pull the plug", leaving you disconnected and helpless.
We need better commitments from businesses who announce vital new services, or else the entire viability of the "cloud" will collapse, with few being willing to trust it.
This quagmire of businesses failing to provide trustworthy services that must be trustworthy to be adopted will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and PHONING YOUR CONGRESSMAN OR SENATOR RIGHT NOW. Tell them your concerns about Vine. Warn them that trillions of dollars are being lost because of these issues. Tell them this is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by organizations like Amazon and Google to make the cloud more dependable, but that without a stronger commitment to long term provisioning of services, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how Vine's discontinuation undermines all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies the cloud.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote. Today. For anyone who doesn't pander to Neo-Nazis. Even if they're a little "corrupt" in a "Washington is corrupt these days" way, which is still better than being, you know, a free speech trampling violence encouraging demagogue. FFS, PLEASE VOTE. PLEASE. I'm serious now. My God, we seriously got this far, we're this close to voting in a totalitarian lunatic for President because, in large part, people keep making up fake conspiracies about his opponent and she's not exactly anyone's first choice of President. DO SOMETHING, PLEASE.
I'm probably not the only one here who's getting sick and tired of hearing about yet another major Windows bug that we can't do anything about. While Microsoft makes their operating system even less stable, update to update, it also makes it harder for us to even pick the updates that we know work and leave those we don't aside.
That's a serious problem, and downtime due to computers crashing, needing to be reformatted and their operating systems re-installed, together with the time taken for users to learn about these problems and investigate workarounds, costs the world economy trillions every year. In this case the user loses whatever functionality lead them to wanting to plug a Kindle Fire into their Windows PCs in the first place, again having a real cost associated with it.
Yet while we waste time waiting for our computers to reboot, we feel helpless, unable to investigate workarounds or other ways to achieve the results we want.
This quagmire of people being unable to fix the problems caused by bugs and other issues will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them your concerns about bugs in Windows 10. Warn them that trillions of dollars are being lost because of these issues. Tell them this is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by organizations like Microsoft and Amazon to fix the bugs, but that without better QA and more reliable drivers, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how vicious, angry, arguments undermines all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on bugs in Windows 10.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Quick! Leave Slashdot while you still can! Don't post any more comments, just go! That goes for everyone considering posting a complaint about Beta in an unrelated discussion, ALL OF YOU, leav... uh I mean "boycott", Slashdot today!
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Why wait? Start the boycott now! You, you who was planning to post something critical of Beta in an unrelated article, stop what you're doing, log out, and never log in again, in, uh, protest, that's it!
I know, it'll be hard when you occasionally revisit and see that only people who like the new look or who are interested in actual on-topic discussions are left, but you'll feel better.
Any chance you could start that boycott a little earlier? KTHXBYE.
+5 insightful for making an assumption that implies you think Jerry Seinfeld writes romance novels. WTF? What an idiot.
In most parts of the country, it's illegal for developers to build homes and businesses in close enough proximity that public transportation and walking are viable options.
Bizarrely, it's the libertarians that are usually behind these laws, as nothing says freedom more than being forced to choose a particular form of transportation...
I used to live in Reading, which is a good 30 miles from Heathrow. I can tell you that Concorde flying over my home every day was loud enough to drown out the TV. It's fucking loud.
Boeing didn't invent anything. It was people in Concorde's flight path who complained about it, and then a rather bizarre set of "objective" methods that didn't measure noise were used to FUD us.
Sometimes it's tough being the only one who's right.
With misinformation common on the Internet, and with the difficulty of hunting down honest answers that'll confirm the truth or otherwise of any statement, users very often feel it necessary to base their opinions on the personalities of the arguers themselves. This very often leads to a situation where an argument can appear foolish simply because of the anger of the person making it, and in many cases a combined might of reasonable people assuming the more argumentative person is in the wrong, and posting as such, can overwhelmingly go against someone whose views may be right, but are obscured by hyperbolic allegations and confused, angry, rants.
This quagmire of people basing their views on the person whose statements seem most reasonable, rather than on the correctness of those statements, will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them your concerns about the ability to tell right from wrong on the basis of personalities. Warn them that hot button issues on the Internet typically enrage people and result in many undermining their own arguments through their own anger. Tell them this is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by organizations like Slashdot to provide free forums in which to discuss important topics but that without calm, collected, and reasonable arguments, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how vicious, angry, arguments undermines all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on Internet anger.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Absolutely. One of the major problems in today's society is that it is almost impossible to have a debate about modern technology, including Internet access technologies such as DSL, cable, and WiMAX, without the heavy involvement of leftist groups such as the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru, the Red Army Faction terror group in Germany, and the infamous OSI so-called "freedom fighters" of the US. Widely known for recruiting young, naive, soldiers in universities, brainwashing them into beliefs such as the moral superiority of forced redistributions of wealth, the bourgeois imperialist bankrupsy of representative democracy, and the superiority of a socialist, common ownership, share and share alike, model for the development of computer software, these groups cause immense damage to progress, which ironicly they hold up by preventing the trickle down effect, the engine of all progress, from having any realistic possibility of success.
While left wing terror groups continue to make their extreme, anti-economic, demands, politicians merely appease them and their demands. Some countries, for example, have initiated welfare state programs, guaranteeing a minimum level of living, while others have promised equal access to health care regardless of income. The state of Massachussets has gone one step better and actually forced their already over-burdened citizens to use open document formats to exchange information in a blatant attempt to pacify the OOO, the infamous breakaway faction of the OSI. In all these cases, state involvement has merely crippled the trickle down effect and made it impossible for billionaires to buy DSL connections.
Such actions have prevented progress, and as such have actually helped the leftist groups by allowing them to exploit the lack of progress as some kind of fault of crapitalism.
This quagmire of progress both being prevented by leftist groups, and the resulting lack of it helping those same groups not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that leftist threats to progress is an issue that is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by right-wing terror groups such as the Contras, Al-Qaida, the KKK, and the BSA but that unless something stronger is done to tackle leftism you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the impedement of progress from leftist groups harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on left wing terrorism.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
But as time has gone on, while we've become more reliant, dependent, and expectant, of technology, the technology itself has become no more practical. The integrated device is far away. While systems like the Nokia 9500 have gone so far, the fact is we can't rely upon such technologies for everything. Just entering text into any mobile device, for instance, remains a pain, a crucial barrier to the integrated digital world.
In some ways, the question may be raised: is this the direction we want to go in? The truth is, yes it is. We're expected to have this degree of communication because the world is becoming more complex, because as we gain efficiencies through our increased knowledge, we find ourselves having to manage the data flow.
And so, right now, we have to lug laptops around, with wifi and bluetooth connections, and cellphones, and iPods. Will this end? It has to. Because unless it does, we'll never be able to realise the next step of total information connectivity. Our ability to learn, and to take advantage of the information available will be decreased.
This quagmire of people being unable to take advantage of information while the technology itself remains a hinderance will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that there has to be a nationwide program that provides technology at the point of need, ensuring total connectivity. Tell them this is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by good, American, companies from Cingular to Motorola, from IBM to Dell, from Apple to Microsoft to support you with the technology you need in your life but that without a government mandated technology supply, ensuring those who need information can get it without the need to lug around laptops, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a government program of technological availability will help all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on funding such a network.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Unfortunately, they know that the best value they can give to the tools they provide is to make them free. But as long as the tools are free, there will always be those parts of society that do not contribute to the costs of their creation. And, unfortunately, that's not a minority of people. When was the last time YOU gave money to OpenBSD?
This quagmire of people being unable to develop that that should be free will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that critical free software is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by the OpenBSD and GNU teams to support you with the software you need in your life but that if cheapskates keep refusing to contribute to the projects, ensuring people like Theo are not forced to hold down proper jobs, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a lack of money for Free Software harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on funding Free Software.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
If something isn't done about this soon, clearly network effects will result in pretty much every "CD" being DRM-encumbered, containing, as Sony did, software that actively damages the configuration of the systems the CD is meant to play upon. However, it would be entirely wrong to hold companies like Sony to account for this. They, after all, are merely trying to make money. It is entirely right that they should do so by taking advantage of ignorance to encourage people to do things that are entirely not in their best interest. If businesses were not able to do this, if businesses had incentives to make money when honest, then freedom itself would be at risk. Liberty would be in peril.
What kind of "choice" is it where you do not need to be a technology geek to decide whether or not to buy a "CD" of music? What kind of "freedom" does one have if every vendor of cellular service is telling the truth about their talk plan prices? How are we free if we do not, in practice even if we rarely do, have to hire a lawyer before taking a job or even installing software? Can we be described as supportive of liberty when a shop cannot put a price label on an item that actually reflects the retail price minus some "mail in rebate" the customer might not even qualify for, and if they do, might not get anyway?
Those who defend the intervention of government into these matters ignore market forces. Just as, say, if people like purple cars, the market will eventually end up producing purple cars, so it follows that what we're seeing here is market forces. People, through their unwillingness to spend every waking moment researching every aspect of the products they buy before they buy them, refusing to visit factories to determine environmental and employment issues, refusing to educate themselves about 14 bit 44.1KHz encoding, refusing to examine the contracts of the artists who produced the works, refusing to understand the lower level Win32 APIs and the registry, refusing to even design proxy-device drivers to understand these basic concepts, demonstrate that they want ignorance, and they consider being taken advantage of, being fooled, as actually a thing of value. We cannot have honesty in business when the market wants dishonesty.
But, no, there are those who want to smother consumers in regulation and red-tape. They want to prevent consumers from getting the products and services they deserve. And why? Because the more dishonest the market becomes, the more they scream and think something needs to be done.
This quagmire of people complaining about the market when the market is actually providing them with what they asked for will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that the market is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by Sony, Steam, Kevin Jones Staples and Off
In order to make the laying of fiber (or any other cable) profitable, typically companies have to hope for a monopoly service so they can charge whatever is necessary to recoup their costs. But, in an age in which other means of Internet and telephone access exist, that's an impossible requirement. Competition would exist from day one from cable and telephone operators, supplying a service that may be "good enough" for most consumers.
This quagmire of businesses being unable to guarantee the business case exists for producing a modern telecommunications infrastructure will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that bandwidth is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by telephone companies (both mobile and fixed line), cable operators, Craig McCaw, satellite operators, and now broadband-over-airship operators, to create an infrastructure that will provide more plentisome bandwidth to a large group of people, but that if new businesses continue to be unable to justify the huge expense of laying a genuinely large enough pipe to every home to create enough bandwidth to support just about any application, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of bandwidth harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on bandwidth.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Another issue I feel strongly about is SMP in OpenBSD. It feels great to know that after all the lobbying, after all the calls to people to write to their elected representatives, we finally have SMP in OpenBSD. So ultimately the system works, and this is a lesson we should all learn.
(Why? Because many typical DoS attacks work on the basis of a single process hogging the CPU. If you have two, a system administrator can log in and kill the process. If you have one, that system administrator will find it more difficult to do so. It's not a cure-all, but it helps.)
In all, excellent news. Thanks to everyone who made this possible, regardless of whether you just coded, or you campaigned for support for the OpenBSD project.
Back in the late eighties and early nineties we actually had a wide range of platforms and real choices when it came to computing. The Amiga was one of those choices, and were it not for some bad business decisions in the early nineties, perhaps it would remain a mainstream, if niche, platform today.
But it's hard for a platform to get noticed today. Just look at Linux. Despite overwhelming support from the PC establishment, it barely exists on more than 2-3% of desktops, with servers - used and operated primarily by geeks who know what they're doing - being the only area it's doing well in. The problem is that PC manufacturers are unwilling to cater for niche markets, and by doing so they're harming themselves and harming innovation. They're harming themselves by not producing something that will attract greater profit margins because it's sufficiently different from the mainstream to compete on somehting other than price, and they're harming innovation because without choices, innovation suffers. Apple has proven, by being the richest computer hardware company in the world, that you can profit in the niche. But it takes a will to get there. Why did Gateway not exploit the Amiga niche while they still had it?
This quagmire of artists, consumers, and PC manufacturers being unable to diversify in the platforms available will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that a diversity of platforms is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by the hiers to the Amiga source and the work by the GNU/Linux community to create an infrastructure that will support true choice in the computing community, but that if PC manufacturers continue to be unable to overthrow their conservatism, instead disappearing into the void that is commodity hardware, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of platform choices harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on platform diversity.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
In any case, BASIC instructions are at a low enough level for this kind of thing to be a non issue. What PRINT does is take the arguments and send them to the operating system without further ado. You can't get much lower level than that.
Compare that to, say, a library that maintains an indexed database or that accesses ZIP files, or something as simple as a sort.
I wonder, in some ways, if computing has been harmed by the removal of interpreters. Even when MSDOS came with QBASIC, BASIC programs became very much second class citizens in that environment. The fun and accessability has been removed from programming. Some of it is there in environments like Python under Linux, but even then there's a complexity and obscurity attached. It's not like the VIC 20, with its blinking cursor and "READY." prompt. You have to know the interpreter is there. You have to find it. You then have to go through a range of hurdles to know what it is capable of.
And in some ways, the lack of simplicity of environments like Python is harmful too. Much of the fun of programming was learning how to do amazing things at a relatively low level. Now languages are so complex, and libraries so relied upon, I'd venture to say most programmers do not understand how their programs will run, that something as simple as a change of data structure might make their program run 10,000% faster. Hashing? Sorting? Let the interpreter do it. That stuff's "too hard".
How do you make programming fun as long as we make computers complex? I'm not sure we can. And our computers will become steadily more complex, because increasingly the only people who program will be those with little love of the art. Those who think that a Python library is an adequate substitute for understanding. Just as society has moved to a "condemn, never understand" approach, so has programming moved to a "just get the job done, don't understand the results or the reasons" approach. This is wrong, but it's a vicious circle.
This quagmire of programming become more serious and more unnecessarily complex as the unnecessary complexities drives talented would-be "real" programmers out will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that programming is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by Guido to create a more modern alternative to BASIC that is accessable to even the most Texan village idiot, but that if computers are not made fun again you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of a computer that boots into a READY prompt, ready for programming, harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on bringing back home computers.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
The major issue is one of choice. Given the choice between not paying anything towards the creation of music, and paying something to an organization like the RIAA, clearly most people would rather do the former. If a non-governmental agency is to be put in charge of handing out grants to artists, it must have the ability to compell payment. There are multiple ways this can be achieved, currently we only provide a limited mechanism through copyrights. But if copyrights were to be reformed, we could institute this kind of compulsion while giving people their fair use rights back. This would suit everyone.
As you say, community values must also play a part in the creation of music, we can't allow rappers to advocate murder and receive funds that people have no choice but to pay. I would add to that the use of swearwords, and, for obvious constitutional reasons, bans on religious or speech content. These can always be funded through other means, rather than via compulsory contributions.
The real issue is getting there. Most people have no objections to such a system being instituted as long as they receive something in return, for example the free redistribution of content itself. But unless we can persuade the current content producers to accept such terms, something that cannot be done without also providing the means for them to receive money via the compulsory payment system evisaged above, they will not accept such a radical proposal.
This quagmire of artists and consumers being unable to accept a better environment for the funding of arts unless both are dealt with at the same time will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that free and open music is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by the libertarians to create an infrastructure that will support truly free - as in liberty - music, but that if the chicken and agg problem inherent in a sideways reform of copyright is not resolved, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of a mechanism whereby a private company can compell people to pay money to be ridistirbuted amongst artists harms all three. Tell them you will only accept such a system as long as strict limits are placed upon the type of content that can be funded, owing to the compulsory nature of the contributions. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on private music funding.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.