And, if the user just has to go into the terminal line, make the commands easier to understand and more intuitive. Move instead of mv, delete instead of whatever is there now, list instead of ls, find instead of grep, help instead of man, etc.
Is learning to type "move x y" really any harder than learning "mv x y"?
Microsoft's renaming of the wheel to make it more user friendly ("Microsoft Motility Assistant") actually makes their products less intuitive. Take one concept that was already well established by the time Internet Explorer was released: the browser cache. A nice, clean metaphor that encapsulates what the thing does succinctly. So do they call IE's equivalent the browser cache? No! Someone thought cache was too esoteric a word, so they called it "Temporary Internet Files," losing the metaphor and muddying up the concept. Then there was e-mail filtering, a well-established concept with a metaphor that is easy to understand. So did they call their equivalent a filter? No! They called it "Message Rules." WTF? Why do I need to have rules about my messages? How does this make anything easier?
I've never slept so well as when I was a college freshman in a big Intro to European Civilization lecture. The high-ceilinged, dimly lit lecture hall, the comfortable chairs, the gentle baritone of the prof droning on about the economic and demographic causes of the Franco-Prussian war, in a thick Hungarian accent...
iTunes can replicate part of the experience, but you really need the lecture hall and the furniture. Some kind of virtual reality helmet?
Exercising options are not the same as a long term capital gains tax. When you exercise an option, you are taxed at the difference between the market price and the strike price (the price the option was granted at). This is treated like normal income. These shares were granted at $0 (according to SEC filings).
So they are paying the maximum state and federal taxes (35% fed, 9.3% state).
You're insane if you think they're paying the income tax rate.
From what I recall from when I exercised options, the capital gains rate applies when you exercise the options at their strike price and own the stock for a certain amount of time; I think it's a year or something like that. Surely they have taken the steps necessary to ensure that they pay the capital gains rate. As other posters have mentioned, I think they actually own the stock, not stock options.
When I exercised my stock options, I paid the income tax rate. This was because I bought and sold the shares on the same day. If I'd exercised the option and held onto the stock for a while, I would have been eligible to pay at the capital gains rate. But that would have required me to have some confidence that the stock would retain its value. Which I did not have! What a great company I was working for.
Since capital gains tax maxes out at 15 percent rather than the 38 percent tax on income, they pay a smaller percentage to the federal treasury than their secretaries. Not to mention that they also get out of paying into the Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment systems.
Of course, they aren't unique in this regard. The same is true of most people for whom salary is not the primary means of support.
I'm no novelist, but the 20,000 word novella I wrote as an undergrad had to do with a fascination with Scottish history and being recently, painfully, dumped. Therapy? Mostly.
But even if your novella were a work of genius, it would hardly matter, since the market demand for novellas just isn't there. A wordier, but perhaps more accurate title for this essay might be: "How to do what you love, provided you love accounting or something else for which there is market demand, like selling your online store technology to Yahoo at the height of the dotcom boom."
Double-shot of scotch and a demotivator, stat!
on
How to Do What You Love
·
· Score: 3, Funny
What a load of crud. Somebody send him to Demotivators, quickly.
Newspaper editors work under a hard deadline and deal with these questions every day. Slashdot editors pretend they don't exist.
I know. I've worked as a reporter and as a copy editor at a daily newspaper! I see Slashdot as a different sort of beast. Most obviously: submitters are not full-time Slashdot employees who you can call on the phone and expect them to pick up immediately. They're goofing off at work. Think they want to spend time rewriting a submission to Slashdot? Hell, no.
While I expect a submission to have at least one good link and to follow some basic rules of style (pretty much in line with Taco's guidelines), I see a submission more as a jumping off point for discussion rather than something to be fully fleshed out. At Slashdot, the real action is in the comments section, not the initial writeup. I'd rather have a large number of interesting discussions than a small number of perfectly crafted writeups. I'm not saying that Slashdot should restrict itself to one-sentence writeups ala Fark; God, no! But there is some wisdom in that approach. The links are where it's at, not the writeups (although I guess they place some importance on good headlines; still the emphasis is on the link and a brief description, not on fully fleshed out essays.)
Rob, with all due respect, I am not impressed. Slashdot would be so much better if you all would either a) act like real editors (e.g. fact check, give feedback to submitters, spelling/grammar check), or b) admit that you are basically superfluous and get out of the way (e.g. like Digg).
This is good to the extent that it doesn't slow down the posting of articles too much. Contrast Slashdot with another site based on Slashcode, plastic.com. It seems that they spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking the submissions, often asking the submitters to resubmit several times. Most submitters just don't want to deal with it, so they end up with it seems like the same 4-5 submitters submitting all the write-ups, and not nearly enough posts.
Spelling and grammar are easy to fix, but returning the writeups to the submitter for revision is a bit much. This ain't tne New Yorker.
Anyway, claiming September 11th had a negative aspect on the business of computer book publishing is far from unbased.
I was working at a Silicon Valley dotcom at the time, had friends who worked in tech publishing, and the collapse was already well underway. Tourism in San Francisco also steeply declined, but I can't imagine that many people beyond a 25-mile radius of the WTC actually changed their vacation plans because of 9/11. Corporate scandals and the dotcom collapse were far greater cataclysms as far as our economy was concerned. With the stock market in the dumps after years of irrational exuberance, people just didn't have the money to travel. And with the dotcoms collapsing, many people simply no longer had a reason to travel to the Bay Area. People who would have visited Fisherman's Wharf while in the city on business no longer had business to conduct (except for, I guess, Google, which was busy buying up acre upon acre of data center space at fire sale prices...)
I bought one at a taqueria about a week ago that just listed sugar, not corn syrup. It isn't universally the case that Mexican groceries never sell the stuff with corn syrup, though.
Privatization is always a scam. ALWAYS. It is always backed by well-placed insiders who want to line their pockets by providing the same-or-lesser service at greater cost. If you expect any such scheme to work out well for taxpayers while the current GOP is in power, you're a rube.
Rebates are used, Baker says, because unlike regular sales, people perceive them as a one-time opportunity to get a product at a lower price than it would normally be sold at.
So an industry consultant says that mail-in rebates are used because consumers demand them?
Of course! Me and my friends talk all the time about how we'd rather mail in a proof of purchase than receive a discount at the store. I uncritically accept every word this guy is telling me.
Say... did anyone ever actually manage to use up all their Gmail invites? Every time I got close, they gave me more. Did they start everyone out with a small number on purpose, so they'd feel "special"? Just a hypothesis. I have no proof.
A return to some mythical golden age when you could call customer service and a highly qualified person would pick up the phone and solve your problem instantly, for no charge, is NOT going to happen, for reasons that should be obvious.
I don't mind automated systems, most of the time. Given the choice between waiting 10 minutes for a human to take my call, and an automated system instantly picking up, I'll take the latter. 90 percent of the time, the automated system is perfectly adequate, and a lot of times, it's better.
What I *hate* is when the system tries to hide the fact that human customer service is available. A little while ago, I needed to have FedEx recall a shipment I sent. This was not something I could do via the automated system, but the system didn't tell me how to reach an operator, nor did anything on FedEx's Web site that I could see. After fumbling around the system for 10 minutes or so, a thought occurred to me: "Hey, what happens if I hit '0'?"
This worked. A disaster was averted. Would it have killed FedEx to make it clear this choice is available?
Anybody else notice that most of their "current headlines" come from China's propaganda agency, Xinhua News Agency?
It's funny because they're right-wing and presumably anti-communist, but I expect this is simply lack of competence on their part. Xinhua is available with a lot of newsfeed packages and is very, very cheap. Might even be free. We used to get Xinhua when my company subscribed to a newsfeed a few years ago.
Still, if they doing any filtering of their newsfeeds I wouldn't expect they'd let Xinhua flood everything like that.
So it expires 24 hours after playback begins, not after download, which isn't as bad as it could be. Still: Would it kill them to make it expire after a month? Are they really afraid that I'll watch the movie more than once during that time, cheating them out of revenue for something that probably wasn't making any money at all for them before they offered it via p2p?
Moreover... Jerry Springer?! Why would I even bother to download that? You could pay me to download it via a superfast iTunes-like service with no DRM and I still wouldn't be interested.
This seems deliberately designed to fail. What their motivation could be, I have no idea.
Cars, matches and lighters, and cellphones are all very useful items that in some cases have innately dangerous qualities, people should exert caution with them but we lose a lot of benefit if people stop using them entirely. Cigarrettes on the other hand have no real benefits thus nothing is lost if people stop using them.
No real benefits? If there were no real benefits, people wouldn't use them, now, would they? I count among the benefits: (1) They make you feel good, at least until you start to overdo it (2) It's a social ritual.
Cars, on the other hand, are leading cause of death, and most of those deaths are unnecessary since a lot of people could take much safer forms of public transit.
You're the first person I've met (besides my ex-girlfriend) who thinks that saving money is a bad thing.
I mean, when you only pay a couple hundred bucks for Windows do you slap yourself on the forehead and say "Damn! If only I'd paid twice as much, I'd be putting twice as much into the economy! Curse this retail establishment and its insanely low prices!"
He wants to take $80-120 billion a year out of the economy and create a new tax payer funded federal agency? This is a good idea?
$80-120 billion is his estimated savings for consumers.
When you save money by using free software instead of paying for it, is that money taken out of the economy, or money that is free for you to spend on something else. Think really hard about this. Yeesh indeed. You're the first person I've met (besides my ex-girlfriend) who thinks that saving money is a bad thing.
What educationally useful things will the child do with the laptop?
Making a larger variety of educational materials available would be useful in *any* public school system. I remember going to elementary school in the '80s: History books that stop at the Nixon administration; filmstrips that promise Man will one day walk on the moon. Public elementary schools can't afford to replace all their textbooks every year. Damn, I wish we'd had Wikipedia when I was a kid.
Ideally, I'd like a wider variety of books to be available, so that K-12 English and history courses would be more like what I had in college (ie, learning from primary sources instead of boring textbooks.) But this is more expensive than a $100 laptop. The laptop could be a cost-effective first step, if done right.
[Indians]... speak English, very often better than USians or even British people
Well... no. Not always. I know that India is a former British colony, but most of the people there don't speak English as their first language, and many don't speak it at all. Speaking grammatically perfect English is a sign of having picked it up in school rather than as your native tongue.
And why do you have to say "USian," anyway? We're called Americans. People from Canada are called Canadians, people from Mexico are called Mexicans, even though we all reside on the same continent. OK? It's not the least bit confusing, unless you choose to make it so for some purpose that completely escapes me. We don't call ourselves Americans because we think we're more authentic residents of the continent than Canadians or Mexicans, but because "USian" or "United Statesian" sounds fucking moronic.
Slashdot Mirror
And, if the user just has to go into the terminal line, make the commands easier to understand and more intuitive. Move instead of mv, delete instead of whatever is there now, list instead of ls, find instead of grep, help instead of man, etc.
Is learning to type "move x y" really any harder than learning "mv x y"?
Microsoft's renaming of the wheel to make it more user friendly ("Microsoft Motility Assistant") actually makes their products less intuitive. Take one concept that was already well established by the time Internet Explorer was released: the browser cache. A nice, clean metaphor that encapsulates what the thing does succinctly. So do they call IE's equivalent the browser cache? No! Someone thought cache was too esoteric a word, so they called it "Temporary Internet Files," losing the metaphor and muddying up the concept. Then there was e-mail filtering, a well-established concept with a metaphor that is easy to understand. So did they call their equivalent a filter? No! They called it "Message Rules." WTF? Why do I need to have rules about my messages? How does this make anything easier?
Think about the popular distros that are out there now. None of them are backed in any significant way by any large companies.
And why do you suppose that is?
I've never slept so well as when I was a college freshman in a big Intro to European Civilization lecture. The high-ceilinged, dimly lit lecture hall, the comfortable chairs, the gentle baritone of the prof droning on about the economic and demographic causes of the Franco-Prussian war, in a thick Hungarian accent...
iTunes can replicate part of the experience, but you really need the lecture hall and the furniture. Some kind of virtual reality helmet?
Exercising options are not the same as a long term capital gains tax. When you exercise an option, you are taxed at the difference between the market price and the strike price (the price the option was granted at). This is treated like normal income. These shares were granted at $0 (according to SEC filings).
So they are paying the maximum state and federal taxes (35% fed, 9.3% state).
You're insane if you think they're paying the income tax rate.
From what I recall from when I exercised options, the capital gains rate applies when you exercise the options at their strike price and own the stock for a certain amount of time; I think it's a year or something like that. Surely they have taken the steps necessary to ensure that they pay the capital gains rate. As other posters have mentioned, I think they actually own the stock, not stock options.
When I exercised my stock options, I paid the income tax rate. This was because I bought and sold the shares on the same day. If I'd exercised the option and held onto the stock for a while, I would have been eligible to pay at the capital gains rate. But that would have required me to have some confidence that the stock would retain its value. Which I did not have! What a great company I was working for.
Since capital gains tax maxes out at 15 percent rather than the 38 percent tax on income, they pay a smaller percentage to the federal treasury than their secretaries. Not to mention that they also get out of paying into the Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment systems.
Of course, they aren't unique in this regard. The same is true of most people for whom salary is not the primary means of support.
I'm no novelist, but the 20,000 word novella I wrote as an undergrad had to do with a fascination with Scottish history and being recently, painfully, dumped. Therapy? Mostly.
But even if your novella were a work of genius, it would hardly matter, since the market demand for novellas just isn't there. A wordier, but perhaps more accurate title for this essay might be: "How to do what you love, provided you love accounting or something else for which there is market demand, like selling your online store technology to Yahoo at the height of the dotcom boom."
What a load of crud. Somebody send him to Demotivators, quickly.
http://www.despair.com/potential.html
Newspaper editors work under a hard deadline and deal with these questions every day. Slashdot editors pretend they don't exist.
I know. I've worked as a reporter and as a copy editor at a daily newspaper! I see Slashdot as a different sort of beast. Most obviously: submitters are not full-time Slashdot employees who you can call on the phone and expect them to pick up immediately. They're goofing off at work. Think they want to spend time rewriting a submission to Slashdot? Hell, no.
While I expect a submission to have at least one good link and to follow some basic rules of style (pretty much in line with Taco's guidelines), I see a submission more as a jumping off point for discussion rather than something to be fully fleshed out. At Slashdot, the real action is in the comments section, not the initial writeup. I'd rather have a large number of interesting discussions than a small number of perfectly crafted writeups. I'm not saying that Slashdot should restrict itself to one-sentence writeups ala Fark; God, no! But there is some wisdom in that approach. The links are where it's at, not the writeups (although I guess they place some importance on good headlines; still the emphasis is on the link and a brief description, not on fully fleshed out essays.)
Rob, with all due respect, I am not impressed. Slashdot would be so much better if you all would either a) act like real editors (e.g. fact check, give feedback to submitters, spelling/grammar check), or b) admit that you are basically superfluous and get out of the way (e.g. like Digg).
This is good to the extent that it doesn't slow down the posting of articles too much. Contrast Slashdot with another site based on Slashcode, plastic.com. It seems that they spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking the submissions, often asking the submitters to resubmit several times. Most submitters just don't want to deal with it, so they end up with it seems like the same 4-5 submitters submitting all the write-ups, and not nearly enough posts.
Spelling and grammar are easy to fix, but returning the writeups to the submitter for revision is a bit much. This ain't tne New Yorker.
Proving that iPod users are either scrupulously honest or more paranoid they'll get sued by RIAA than owners of lesser music players.
Or, more obviously, people who prefer iPod alternatives also prefer iTunes alternatives, the primary of which is p2p file sharing.
Duh?
Anyway, claiming September 11th had a negative aspect on the business of computer book publishing is far from unbased.
I was working at a Silicon Valley dotcom at the time, had friends who worked in tech publishing, and the collapse was already well underway. Tourism in San Francisco also steeply declined, but I can't imagine that many people beyond a 25-mile radius of the WTC actually changed their vacation plans because of 9/11. Corporate scandals and the dotcom collapse were far greater cataclysms as far as our economy was concerned. With the stock market in the dumps after years of irrational exuberance, people just didn't have the money to travel. And with the dotcoms collapsing, many people simply no longer had a reason to travel to the Bay Area. People who would have visited Fisherman's Wharf while in the city on business no longer had business to conduct (except for, I guess, Google, which was busy buying up acre upon acre of data center space at fire sale prices...)
I bought one at a taqueria about a week ago that just listed sugar, not corn syrup. It isn't universally the case that Mexican groceries never sell the stuff with corn syrup, though.
Privatization is always a scam. ALWAYS. It is always backed by well-placed insiders who want to line their pockets by providing the same-or-lesser service at greater cost. If you expect any such scheme to work out well for taxpayers while the current GOP is in power, you're a rube.
Around here (California) Mexican/Central American groceries sell 12 oz. glass bottles of Coca Cola made with cane sugar.
Rebates are used, Baker says, because unlike regular sales, people perceive them as a one-time opportunity to get a product at a lower price than it would normally be sold at.
So an industry consultant says that mail-in rebates are used because consumers demand them?
Of course! Me and my friends talk all the time about how we'd rather mail in a proof of purchase than receive a discount at the store. I uncritically accept every word this guy is telling me.
Say... did anyone ever actually manage to use up all their Gmail invites? Every time I got close, they gave me more. Did they start everyone out with a small number on purpose, so they'd feel "special"? Just a hypothesis. I have no proof.
A return to some mythical golden age when you could call customer service and a highly qualified person would pick up the phone and solve your problem instantly, for no charge, is NOT going to happen, for reasons that should be obvious.
I don't mind automated systems, most of the time. Given the choice between waiting 10 minutes for a human to take my call, and an automated system instantly picking up, I'll take the latter. 90 percent of the time, the automated system is perfectly adequate, and a lot of times, it's better.
What I *hate* is when the system tries to hide the fact that human customer service is available. A little while ago, I needed to have FedEx recall a shipment I sent. This was not something I could do via the automated system, but the system didn't tell me how to reach an operator, nor did anything on FedEx's Web site that I could see. After fumbling around the system for 10 minutes or so, a thought occurred to me: "Hey, what happens if I hit '0'?"
This worked. A disaster was averted. Would it have killed FedEx to make it clear this choice is available?
Anybody else notice that most of their "current headlines" come from China's propaganda agency, Xinhua News Agency?
It's funny because they're right-wing and presumably anti-communist, but I expect this is simply lack of competence on their part. Xinhua is available with a lot of newsfeed packages and is very, very cheap. Might even be free. We used to get Xinhua when my company subscribed to a newsfeed a few years ago.
Still, if they doing any filtering of their newsfeeds I wouldn't expect they'd let Xinhua flood everything like that.
So it expires 24 hours after playback begins, not after download, which isn't as bad as it could be. Still: Would it kill them to make it expire after a month? Are they really afraid that I'll watch the movie more than once during that time, cheating them out of revenue for something that probably wasn't making any money at all for them before they offered it via p2p?
Moreover... Jerry Springer?! Why would I even bother to download that? You could pay me to download it via a superfast iTunes-like service with no DRM and I still wouldn't be interested.
This seems deliberately designed to fail. What their motivation could be, I have no idea.
Cars, matches and lighters, and cellphones are all very useful items that in some cases have innately dangerous qualities, people should exert caution with them but we lose a lot of benefit if people stop using them entirely. Cigarrettes on the other hand have no real benefits thus nothing is lost if people stop using them.
No real benefits? If there were no real benefits, people wouldn't use them, now, would they? I count among the benefits: (1) They make you feel good, at least until you start to overdo it (2) It's a social ritual.
Cars, on the other hand, are leading cause of death, and most of those deaths are unnecessary since a lot of people could take much safer forms of public transit.
It is. Spending money makes the US economy go round. Take a look at Macro Economics.
In that case... Can I have some money?
You're the first person I've met (besides my ex-girlfriend) who thinks that saving money is a bad thing.
I mean, when you only pay a couple hundred bucks for Windows do you slap yourself on the forehead and say "Damn! If only I'd paid twice as much, I'd be putting twice as much into the economy! Curse this retail establishment and its insanely low prices!"
He wants to take $80-120 billion a year out of the economy and create a new tax payer funded federal agency? This is a good idea?
$80-120 billion is his estimated savings for consumers.
When you save money by using free software instead of paying for it, is that money taken out of the economy, or money that is free for you to spend on something else. Think really hard about this. Yeesh indeed. You're the first person I've met (besides my ex-girlfriend) who thinks that saving money is a bad thing.
What educationally useful things will the child do with the laptop?
Making a larger variety of educational materials available would be useful in *any* public school system. I remember going to elementary school in the '80s: History books that stop at the Nixon administration; filmstrips that promise Man will one day walk on the moon. Public elementary schools can't afford to replace all their textbooks every year. Damn, I wish we'd had Wikipedia when I was a kid.
Ideally, I'd like a wider variety of books to be available, so that K-12 English and history courses would be more like what I had in college (ie, learning from primary sources instead of boring textbooks.) But this is more expensive than a $100 laptop. The laptop could be a cost-effective first step, if done right.
[Indians]... speak English, very often better than USians or even British people
Well... no. Not always. I know that India is a former British colony, but most of the people there don't speak English as their first language, and many don't speak it at all. Speaking grammatically perfect English is a sign of having picked it up in school rather than as your native tongue.
And why do you have to say "USian," anyway? We're called Americans. People from Canada are called Canadians, people from Mexico are called Mexicans, even though we all reside on the same continent. OK? It's not the least bit confusing, unless you choose to make it so for some purpose that completely escapes me. We don't call ourselves Americans because we think we're more authentic residents of the continent than Canadians or Mexicans, but because "USian" or "United Statesian" sounds fucking moronic.