If you go off trying to learn something just because it's lucrative you'll probably end up in a job where you're maintaining some obsolete system that's held together with duct tape.
The problem becomes when you have an application which has been worked on for 30+ years, and which is tightly integrated with everything at the company.
I've seen several attempts to replace those type things which have failed utterly, because it was impossible for a new vendor to write the same functionality, as well as the tight integration with every other system at the company.
There's a reason mainframes are still sold and supported, because many organizations have learned it's easier, cheaper, and less disruptive to keep using the stuff that works, instead of trying to build it from scratch.
And, as I've said elsewhere, I've known people who were retired and getting 4-5x their previous salary to maintain those systems.
Throw enough zeroes on the pay, and obsolete systems paying super well can be an attractive option.
Of course, the problem has always been with these system that going out and learning the environment doesn't give you the equivalent of the years of experience people have with these systems... if you don't already have a lot of experience, these systems aren't really going to be made available to you to learn on. Because the people who have them, really really need them and rely on them.
I don't think LOGO was ever actually used for anything but teaching programming.
I think I learned it when I was around 10 or so (yes, that was back in dickety doo)... it was good for teaching concepts, but I would be surprised if there's anything doing any real work at companies using it (or if there ever was).
Though, I'm sure someone will tell me how utterly wrong I am, and that something like the air traffic systems still runs on it.;-)
I haven't thought of that language in years. Thanks for that.:-P
The story implies that COBOL is an ancient outdated language. But this is not true.
Well, let's face it... it is an ancient and outdated language. It was when I was in university 20+ years ago.
But... it's still entrenched in a lot of places and isn't going to go away any time soon, simply because there are legacy systems out there which can't readily be replaced.
Years ago I was working with a client, and one of their people was retired from the company after something like 35-40 years. He was getting his pension, but he was also getting paid something like 4-5x his previous salary as a consultant to maintain the systems he used to simply because there wasn't anybody else on the planet who knew it.
So, sometimes, you accept that you're working with ancient technology, because nobody else knows it well enough, and because you'd just as soon make buckets full of money.
Because, really, would you rather work for a shorter number of years for much more than you'd make normally if you had the chance and your skillset was sufficiently arcane that you could get paid boatloads of money?
For a buck, I'd buy it. Hell, I'd buy it for $20 or $30, even though it's within the confines of Amazon. It's not like the entire phone is going to be locked down to just Amazon. You'd surely still have a browser and apps to do various things outside of Amazon. And probably wifi service if you wanted to connect it to your home network or something.
Of course, as a cynical, tin-foil hat wearing individual I'll say that anything you do can and will be monitored and tracked by Amazon for their own purposes, even when not directly using their products.
Or, I've seen games which try to span multiple segments and fail miserably and am skeptical you could make it successful.
Sure it won't appeal to the Michael Bay market, but Wes Anderson makes profitable movies too.
Well, given that I had to google who he is, my point about it being a much smaller market seems to stand.
a game that involves competing for finding and collecting some sort of resource (Sonic style coin collecting, with 'weapons' being shrink ray, freeze rays, blinding rays etc could easily come up with a formula that is fun and gets the same feel of mayhem without the murder.
So, Mario Kart then, but with running and silly weapons? Sure, maybe.
But it's either going to have to be an offline game, in which case you play against dumb AIs or in some form of split screen... or if it's going to be an MMO, the parents won't want their kids playing online, or the people who play MMOs won't be interested. (Or someone will just hang around and grief the kiddies all day.)
I'm not saying nobody could create such a game. I'm not saying nobody would play it.
What I am saying is that it's not going to appeal to the core shooter market, is going to have to be dumbed down for children (or people like me who don't play shooters), and is going to appeal to a much smaller segment of the market.
You really think you're going to get recurring subscription fees for a game targeted at 8 year old kids?
So you still need to make the game mechanics work, and the economics of the title viable.
And I think that is a much bigger challenge.
I don't think it's impossible, I do think it's unlikely the kind of game you describe would be a broad success -- in which case companies will just say to heck with it and focus on existing shooters, because they know those sell.
And, yet, we've seen articles recently which say the ocean may be absorbing some of the heat, and this one saying the levels are at the highest ever and have increased by the most ever.
So, yes, you probably are a denier, because you seem to be wanting to ignore the actual evidence out there.
Do we understand our climate and all of the factors 100%? Nope. Do we have really strong indications we're causing change? Absolutely.
Will we be really screwed if we keep acting like nothing is happening until it's too late? Betcherass we will.
It's mostly the fossil fuel industry and people who own their stocks who have the most stake in saying "not to worry, nothing is happening, you can't prove it, la la la".
It's a mentality of keep levels the same so we can keep profits up, and until we're faced with 100% irrefutable proof we'll keep claiming nothing is happening.
That's either stupidly ignoring the problem, or actively trying to divert attention and making it sound like nothing is happening.
The problem is that they won't tell us what they're using in the fracking water, which means we have little way of knowing what's in it, and how contaminated it actually is.
To date (at least as far as I've seen), the companies have been keeping the mixture as a trade secret, and refusing to let any independent science take place.
It's all just "don't worry, it's safe", even when people are ending up with contaminated wells.
There must be some concept that involves the same skills as an FPS, but without the murder and super high end graphics that people want?
Duck hunt or a carnival shooter maybe.
But, really, there is little overlap between what you want for your children and what the people who play shooters want.
I think a game like you describe would be lame for people who play shooters, and not really remove the stuff you want except to mask them in paintball.
Kind of like trying to make a zombie movie without people getting eaten... it might be a novelty, but it's not going to appeal to many people.
Sure they suck. But would it suck worse for the government to mandate first class seats throughout?
That's a bit of a false dichotomy. It's not "worst possible seats ever" versus "personal cocoon of comfort with hot towels".
Yes, airline travel is far more convenient than any other long distance travel. But there should be some minimum standard of passenger space and comfort.
If more than half the population physically cannot get into your seats, adjust their position, or cross and uncross their legs... then I think seats are way too small. Some seats are so damned small you literally are unable to move the entire time without elbowing your neighbor.
And, really, half is way too low.
Because, really, who wants to ride like you're in a Jeepney from Mumbai while in an airplane?
As I recall, it's not free... it's available to people who are already Comcast subscribers.
In other words, this should be no different from any other context in which you connect to the interwebs via your Comcast service.
Except Comcast is letting the people who host the routers pay the electrical bill, and injecting even more ads into it.
And I definitely agree that modifying other people's content is getting into a sketchy area of copyright, and possibly stealing the ad revenue from those site owners.
Because, if the people who actually own the sites aren't having their ads serves, but suddenly someone else's ads are showing up, then isn't Comcast just skimming from someone else's stuff?
What isn't tolerable in any way, shape, or form is confiscation of my property because some dimwitted, local yokel cop *thought* about drugs while looking at my car.
I'm no longer willing to accept "dimwitted local yokel".
I go straight to assuming they know damned well they can do it, that they benefit from it, and since they don't really require any proof, why not do it and make themselves look good? I don't believe it's credible they do this in good faith.
And, of course, I'm sure they skim a little off the top for themselves.
The rest of the police complain that it's a few bad apples who do this, and that it makes the rest of them look bad. If the honest cops want to stop this perception, start arresting the crooked ones.
Right, and presumably if they did find such a prosecutor, all of the people who profit from this scheme would just find reason to harass said prosecutor?
Congratulations, America, you've jumped the shark.
Desert Snow contract employees took in more than $1 million over six months from drivers on the state's highways, including Interstate 40 west of Oklahoma City. Under its contract, the firm was allowed to keep 25 percent of the cash.
When Caddo County District Court Judge David A. Stephens learned that Desert Snow employees were not sworn law enforcement officers in Oklahoma, he denounced the arrangement as "shocking," and he threatened to put David in jail if it continued.
The state's American Civil Liberties Union chapter called for an investigation of the district attorney and criminal charges against Desert Snow employees for impersonating law enforcement officers.
Wait, so these guys are doing traffic stops and seizures (where they benefit from it) and they're not actually law enforcement?
So basically they're a shakedown racket? The more they seize the more profit they make? That's RICO level stuff there.
This kind of stuff is appalling, and it just means that a lot of stuff is being put into the private sector so they can ignore all of those pesky laws.
Eventually if nobody fits in the seats, then people will stop booking seats on that airline.
Assuming of course the airline actually publishes their seat sizes and seat pitch (and that that isn't just a best-case). And it assumes that there is another airline servicing your airport which gives you choice. And that it won't be a zillion times more expensive.
In my case, my shoulders are at about the physical limit of seat width in many economy seats -- I mean my actual skeleton here. And I'm not what I consider especially broad in the shoulders.
But, really, another half inch or so, and the person next to me and I are going to have to cuddle during the flight. There's simply no more room for me to have less room to fit into.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to have a "Skinny Ass Airlines" where you publish that all of your seats are 12" wide, but when airlines are talking about cramming an additional seat or two into a row -- you're quickly reaching a point where an awful lot of people physically do not fit into the seats.
There's a reason why it's called "Cattle Class". And some of the airlines are going out of their way to give less service for more money, not give a damn if they don't uphold their contract, and act like they're doing you a favor.
calling for government regulation of airplane seat spacing
You know, I can't speak to the rest of this, but the airline industry has been steadily making seats smaller and smaller for a long time now.
Eventually, you reach a point where your seat is smaller than at least half of the population -- some seats are reaching the point where they barely fit your average teenager.
Throw in people who are deciding that they can choose whether or nor people can recline the seat they paid for... and air travel has become a really shitty experience to be avoided.
And that's before we get to the shitty customer service, overselling aircraft, and everything else. I wouldn't fly United Airlines unless there was no recourse and I absolutely had no choice, because they've gone from bad, to terrible -- and even then, you probably get a shitty regional carrier who does an even worse job.
Is it the ads? For all that site operators hate Ad blockers they forget to look at the bandwidth and compute resources their own advertisements take up. Especially flash ads.
They don't forget, they simply don't care.
There's a huge difference. The guys in marketing want their fancy ads and their impressions, they don't care about your bandwidth.
If you read the blog entry, this is talking about Windows 3.1's BSOD. A screen I honestly did not know existed
LOL, then I can only conclude you never actually used Windows 3.1.
Back in '92 or so, it took less than a week of using Windows on a newly purchased PC to cause my ex to ask me to install Linux on her machine for her.
so Windows 3.1 was cooperatively multitasked
I'm not sure what it's technically called, but it was more like "if you have three things running, they each get 1/3 of the CPU... whether they need it or not at the moment". It was pretty terrible.
Meanwhile, some of us were running real multi-tasking Linux machines, running X. Ahh, good times.
Nothing like installing Slackware from 100+ floppies.
You know, these are the same people who have put the meaningless error messages like "something bad happened, if this problem persists contact your administrator".
Gee, thanks, it's my fscking machine, I'm the admin... how about you tell me something meaningful about the issue so I can try to find it?
Microsoft seems to be eternally stuck between dumbing something down so far as to make debugging impossible, and spitting out gibberish messages that you need a wizard level guru to decipher.
And, more on topic... Big Fair Hairy Fscking Deal... Ballmer re-wrote the text of the terrible error message, are we supposed to be impressed or something??? Now, if only they'd spent as much time in eliminating the terrible error in the first place.
If you're polishing your turd, you're doing it wrong. It should not be no no, when the system crashes completely, it should be in 17 point helvetica. At that point, it's like wall papering over the giant hole in your wall.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem becomes when you have an application which has been worked on for 30+ years, and which is tightly integrated with everything at the company.
I've seen several attempts to replace those type things which have failed utterly, because it was impossible for a new vendor to write the same functionality, as well as the tight integration with every other system at the company.
There's a reason mainframes are still sold and supported, because many organizations have learned it's easier, cheaper, and less disruptive to keep using the stuff that works, instead of trying to build it from scratch.
And, as I've said elsewhere, I've known people who were retired and getting 4-5x their previous salary to maintain those systems.
Throw enough zeroes on the pay, and obsolete systems paying super well can be an attractive option.
Of course, the problem has always been with these system that going out and learning the environment doesn't give you the equivalent of the years of experience people have with these systems ... if you don't already have a lot of experience, these systems aren't really going to be made available to you to learn on. Because the people who have them, really really need them and rely on them.
I don't think LOGO was ever actually used for anything but teaching programming.
I think I learned it when I was around 10 or so (yes, that was back in dickety doo) ... it was good for teaching concepts, but I would be surprised if there's anything doing any real work at companies using it (or if there ever was).
Though, I'm sure someone will tell me how utterly wrong I am, and that something like the air traffic systems still runs on it. ;-)
I haven't thought of that language in years. Thanks for that. :-P
Well, let's face it ... it is an ancient and outdated language. It was when I was in university 20+ years ago.
But ... it's still entrenched in a lot of places and isn't going to go away any time soon, simply because there are legacy systems out there which can't readily be replaced.
Years ago I was working with a client, and one of their people was retired from the company after something like 35-40 years. He was getting his pension, but he was also getting paid something like 4-5x his previous salary as a consultant to maintain the systems he used to simply because there wasn't anybody else on the planet who knew it.
So, sometimes, you accept that you're working with ancient technology, because nobody else knows it well enough, and because you'd just as soon make buckets full of money.
Because, really, would you rather work for a shorter number of years for much more than you'd make normally if you had the chance and your skillset was sufficiently arcane that you could get paid boatloads of money?
Of course, as a cynical, tin-foil hat wearing individual I'll say that anything you do can and will be monitored and tracked by Amazon for their own purposes, even when not directly using their products.
So, really, are you actually any better off?
No kidding. For all the talk about Apple's walled garden, Amazon seems to have more crippled devices with higher walls.
And, really, if Microsoft or any other vendor could lock people into their walled gardens they'd do it in a heartbeat.
You're right.
China has gotten better (in some ways).
And the US (and the rest of the world) has gotten far worse (in some ways).
Or, I've seen games which try to span multiple segments and fail miserably and am skeptical you could make it successful.
Well, given that I had to google who he is, my point about it being a much smaller market seems to stand.
So, Mario Kart then, but with running and silly weapons? Sure, maybe.
But it's either going to have to be an offline game, in which case you play against dumb AIs or in some form of split screen ... or if it's going to be an MMO, the parents won't want their kids playing online, or the people who play MMOs won't be interested. (Or someone will just hang around and grief the kiddies all day.)
I'm not saying nobody could create such a game. I'm not saying nobody would play it.
What I am saying is that it's not going to appeal to the core shooter market, is going to have to be dumbed down for children (or people like me who don't play shooters), and is going to appeal to a much smaller segment of the market.
You really think you're going to get recurring subscription fees for a game targeted at 8 year old kids?
So you still need to make the game mechanics work, and the economics of the title viable.
And I think that is a much bigger challenge.
I don't think it's impossible, I do think it's unlikely the kind of game you describe would be a broad success -- in which case companies will just say to heck with it and focus on existing shooters, because they know those sell.
And, yet, we've seen articles recently which say the ocean may be absorbing some of the heat, and this one saying the levels are at the highest ever and have increased by the most ever.
So, yes, you probably are a denier, because you seem to be wanting to ignore the actual evidence out there.
Do we understand our climate and all of the factors 100%? Nope. Do we have really strong indications we're causing change? Absolutely.
Will we be really screwed if we keep acting like nothing is happening until it's too late? Betcherass we will.
It's mostly the fossil fuel industry and people who own their stocks who have the most stake in saying "not to worry, nothing is happening, you can't prove it, la la la".
It's a mentality of keep levels the same so we can keep profits up, and until we're faced with 100% irrefutable proof we'll keep claiming nothing is happening.
That's either stupidly ignoring the problem, or actively trying to divert attention and making it sound like nothing is happening.
That's pretty much the definition of denial.
The problem is that they won't tell us what they're using in the fracking water, which means we have little way of knowing what's in it, and how contaminated it actually is.
To date (at least as far as I've seen), the companies have been keeping the mixture as a trade secret, and refusing to let any independent science take place.
It's all just "don't worry, it's safe", even when people are ending up with contaminated wells.
Duck hunt or a carnival shooter maybe.
But, really, there is little overlap between what you want for your children and what the people who play shooters want.
I think a game like you describe would be lame for people who play shooters, and not really remove the stuff you want except to mask them in paintball.
Kind of like trying to make a zombie movie without people getting eaten ... it might be a novelty, but it's not going to appeal to many people.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy. It's not "worst possible seats ever" versus "personal cocoon of comfort with hot towels".
Yes, airline travel is far more convenient than any other long distance travel. But there should be some minimum standard of passenger space and comfort.
If more than half the population physically cannot get into your seats, adjust their position, or cross and uncross their legs ... then I think seats are way too small. Some seats are so damned small you literally are unable to move the entire time without elbowing your neighbor.
And, really, half is way too low.
Because, really, who wants to ride like you're in a Jeepney from Mumbai while in an airplane?
As I recall, it's not free ... it's available to people who are already Comcast subscribers.
In other words, this should be no different from any other context in which you connect to the interwebs via your Comcast service.
Except Comcast is letting the people who host the routers pay the electrical bill, and injecting even more ads into it.
And I definitely agree that modifying other people's content is getting into a sketchy area of copyright, and possibly stealing the ad revenue from those site owners.
Because, if the people who actually own the sites aren't having their ads serves, but suddenly someone else's ads are showing up, then isn't Comcast just skimming from someone else's stuff?
I'm no longer willing to accept "dimwitted local yokel".
I go straight to assuming they know damned well they can do it, that they benefit from it, and since they don't really require any proof, why not do it and make themselves look good? I don't believe it's credible they do this in good faith.
And, of course, I'm sure they skim a little off the top for themselves.
The rest of the police complain that it's a few bad apples who do this, and that it makes the rest of them look bad. If the honest cops want to stop this perception, start arresting the crooked ones.
Right, and presumably if they did find such a prosecutor, all of the people who profit from this scheme would just find reason to harass said prosecutor?
Congratulations, America, you've jumped the shark.
The question is ... is it legal?
Or is this just one of many ways in which law enforcement no longer considers themselves subject to the law?
Wait, so these guys are doing traffic stops and seizures (where they benefit from it) and they're not actually law enforcement?
So basically they're a shakedown racket? The more they seize the more profit they make? That's RICO level stuff there.
This kind of stuff is appalling, and it just means that a lot of stuff is being put into the private sector so they can ignore all of those pesky laws.
Unbelievable.
Assuming of course the airline actually publishes their seat sizes and seat pitch (and that that isn't just a best-case). And it assumes that there is another airline servicing your airport which gives you choice. And that it won't be a zillion times more expensive.
In my case, my shoulders are at about the physical limit of seat width in many economy seats -- I mean my actual skeleton here. And I'm not what I consider especially broad in the shoulders.
But, really, another half inch or so, and the person next to me and I are going to have to cuddle during the flight. There's simply no more room for me to have less room to fit into.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to have a "Skinny Ass Airlines" where you publish that all of your seats are 12" wide, but when airlines are talking about cramming an additional seat or two into a row -- you're quickly reaching a point where an awful lot of people physically do not fit into the seats.
There's a reason why it's called "Cattle Class". And some of the airlines are going out of their way to give less service for more money, not give a damn if they don't uphold their contract, and act like they're doing you a favor.
You know, I can't speak to the rest of this, but the airline industry has been steadily making seats smaller and smaller for a long time now.
Eventually, you reach a point where your seat is smaller than at least half of the population -- some seats are reaching the point where they barely fit your average teenager.
Throw in people who are deciding that they can choose whether or nor people can recline the seat they paid for ... and air travel has become a really shitty experience to be avoided.
And that's before we get to the shitty customer service, overselling aircraft, and everything else. I wouldn't fly United Airlines unless there was no recourse and I absolutely had no choice, because they've gone from bad, to terrible -- and even then, you probably get a shitty regional carrier who does an even worse job.
Yo, Dawg ... I hear you like review panels ...
They don't forget, they simply don't care.
There's a huge difference. The guys in marketing want their fancy ads and their impressions, they don't care about your bandwidth.
Someone rushes a product to market, with absolutely zero thought about security.
This sounds like some pretty epic incompetence (or laziness).
That they then roll this out to 9 million students is pretty sad.
LOL, then I can only conclude you never actually used Windows 3.1.
Back in '92 or so, it took less than a week of using Windows on a newly purchased PC to cause my ex to ask me to install Linux on her machine for her.
I'm not sure what it's technically called, but it was more like "if you have three things running, they each get 1/3 of the CPU ... whether they need it or not at the moment". It was pretty terrible.
Meanwhile, some of us were running real multi-tasking Linux machines, running X. Ahh, good times.
Nothing like installing Slackware from 100+ floppies.
Oh, I don't know ... Slashdot's "varnish cache server" is up there. :-P
LOL ... that's it ... Bennet is essentially Gilderoy Lockhart!!
You, sir, are brilliant!
You know, these are the same people who have put the meaningless error messages like "something bad happened, if this problem persists contact your administrator".
Gee, thanks, it's my fscking machine, I'm the admin ... how about you tell me something meaningful about the issue so I can try to find it?
Microsoft seems to be eternally stuck between dumbing something down so far as to make debugging impossible, and spitting out gibberish messages that you need a wizard level guru to decipher.
And, more on topic ... Big Fair Hairy Fscking Deal ... Ballmer re-wrote the text of the terrible error message, are we supposed to be impressed or something??? Now, if only they'd spent as much time in eliminating the terrible error in the first place.
If you're polishing your turd, you're doing it wrong. It should not be no no, when the system crashes completely, it should be in 17 point helvetica. At that point, it's like wall papering over the giant hole in your wall.