The coolest experience ever was when we discovered you could kill the mutant shrubs by getting it to stand
in a doorway and watch the door smash it to bits! We laughed for hours after.
Dungeon Master's gameplay was truly awesome. I used to play it with two other buddies in my 7th-grade science teacher's classroom. We'd hurry to finish out work, then pile up in front of the Atari ST and play for the rest of class. Best damn science class I ever had.
The gameplay rocked: smashing baddies in the doors was great, but how about throwing rocks down stairs to beat them up? We killed at least a couple of dragons that way, when our party was too badly beaten up to face them directly. (I guess you could call that an AI bug--dumb big dragon just waits at the bottom of the stairs and gets thumped--but at the time, the very idea that that dragon was still there when we were on a different level, well it was pretty cool).
Unfortunately, I'm stuck here at school today, so no DM playing for a while yet.
The input by the sociology expert should be very interesting, and hopefully give it an unusual angle.
Holy crap! Someone just invoked sociology in a positive light on slashdot! I think I might weep. Long have I and my finely trained army of sociologist colleagues awaited this day.
Seriously, though, without having read The Hacker Ethic (BTW, Weber's book is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) maybe I can comment a little on the historical protestant ethic. Weber sought to explain why capitalism seemed to flourish uniquely in Europe and early America, far more so than in the rest of the world at that time. The factor he identified was the worldview that surrounded Protestantism: Hard work and strict accounting of one's deeds. The configuration of work and spirituality, argued Weber, was unique to the Western world, and fundamentally shaped the success of capitalism.
That said, I have to admit I'm a little skeptical of Himanen's claims that the hacker ethic will revolutionize work and play. If we believe Weber's construction of capitalism, we have to accept that it's based on a much "smaller" world, one inhabited for instance largely by Protestants--after all, that's why early America was so uniquely poised to propel capitalism.
I find it more likely that the products of the hacker ethic -- good hardware and software, for instance -- are what will continue to permeate daily life, rather than the ethic of those products' creators. (Just as capitalism now thrives where Protestantism does not dominate)
Unfortunately, the effect of that pervasive technology may be the opposite of Himanen's new work and play ethics. Modern home appliances aren't really all that liberating: Many scholars argue that home cooking and cleaning appliances really just bind more people to doing more work -- far from being liberated by the machines, we have the propensity to become too attached to them. (How many of you have programmed your linux box to wake you up by playing your favorite mp3s? You may like to tinker with that perl script, but the end result is that you're still waking up to an alarm clock!).
Anyway, that said, it sounds like an interesting argument. The cultural transformation that really could hook the hacker ethics of a product's production to its eventual use might be pretty neat. But I don't think I'll hold my breath.
American Demographics dedicates itself to "Consumer trends for business leaders." Pardon me if I question their motives for abrogating the digital divide: They're not concerned with democracy, access, or quality of "life" on the net; their January issue (the digital divide "study" isn't available online yet) is about how to market to "green" consumers and how to make better commercial web sites.
Saying that the digital divide is disappearing is just another way to sell more banner ads.
It is however pointed out that it crashes some (Helix?)GNOME applets. Which is true, as far as I can tell, but only for "freshly out of box" 7.2 sold commercially
There was some discussion of the review on mandrake's forum. What was noted there is that Helix explicitly says that their packages don't yet work with mandrake 7.2. The reviewer essentially tried to install an incompatible package, and then complained when it didn't work. That's far from what I'd call "intelligent reviewing."
Sorry, but it's still an unauthorized, rogue player.
Didn't you hear? "Rogue players" have been changed to "players of concern."
-schussat
Re:Unions are such parasites
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 1
I particularly like the Baby Ducks for Jesus crack... Seriously, though:
What I am really against is the large unions like the auto workers, teacher's unions and social workers. Too much power in the hands of too few and the all-too-true adage which states "Power Corrupts." -- When you have 100k union members the leaders are just so out of touch and have so much money and pull that they're no longer representing the people; they're representing themselves with the money of the masses and that is dangerous.
I completely agree with that, and I think it's unfortunate that the practice of unions has often been warped to that point. Too often that kind of power hasn't been used responsibly.
even $50k will help out more than you may believe.
As one of those overworked, underpaid RA/TAs I mentioned, I sure do believe it. Hell, a few hundred bucks a month makes a big difference. I have trouble seeing how "ad-hoc gangs" of workers can really effect change in their institution, however. This school is a gigantic bureaucracy, and even if my entire department ganged up on the graduate college, we might get a meeting with a dean, but we sure wouldn't get better benefits for our trouble. Other departments have tried it; no dice.
I don't have so much union experience as you--though I do have plenty of high tech experience--but my seemingly intractable position here vis-a-vis the university makes the idea of having collective voice to bargain with seem like a pretty good idea. I'm sure none of the union activists around here want to see the unions-gone-bad as you describe them, and I remain optimistic that a union, properly administrated, could remain in control of the RA/TAs who built it, rather than in the hands of an out-of-control bureaucracy.
Maybe just pipe dreams. We'll see.
-schussat
Re:Unions are such parasites
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 1
And stagnation? Nothing is worse than union bureaucracy. Union demands that force companies into adopting seniority based promotion and raise schedules, and make it difficult to drop deadwood and crappy workers from the system are the epitomy of what's WRONG with the old economy ways of doing business.
I think that's an outmoded perception of the way unions can work. High-tech and white-collar unions have made great strides in terms of moving beyond bureaucratic structures. They're not about the union boss and protecting deadwood. Since when does one have to forgoe individualism--and personal merit--in order to believe in the strength of collectivity? That's a knee-jerk rejection of unions based on past, but not present, realities.
-schussat
Re:I have to question the point of this exercise.
on
GeekCorps v2.0
·
· Score: 2
Doesn't it strike anybody else that this whole exercise is patronising and absurd? Jesus, save the technical talk and trying to bring them into the 21st century - lets bring them into the 19th century first.
I do agree with you up to a point -- my first reaction was this was a patronizing effort: "If only the world had ICQ and hackers, they'd be as good as us." But at the same time, despite the somewhat self-aggrandizing nature of "GeekHalla" and "GeekCorps," I can see value in what they're doing. Some of their projects are helping small businesses and training workers.
One could argue that they should all be there as Peace Corps volunteers, building aqueducts and sustainable agriculture--developing countries certainly need that infrastructure as much or more as they need IT. But at the same time I think there's something admirable about putting one's skills to work in this kind of way. Is it possible that it's just as narrowminded to neglect technological training and development as it is to neglect basic education and safe water? It seems that they both are part of a comprehensive development program.
-schussat
Re:Unions are such parasites
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 1
Why can you respect that? If you're unskilled you can get a job pretty much anywhere sweeping floors, turning wrenches, packing boxes, whatever... you just have to accept what they offer because you have nothing to offer in return. Unions don't protect the unskilled labourer, they protect the lazy worker and the stupid worker. They protect the ones who want to do the least amount of work and complain the loudest. If I'm working my ass off, unions don't do shit for me. I dare you to prove otherwise. And let's keep this in the present time and tech industry, not in the coal mines of the early twentieth.
The ignorance and bigotry around slashdot about unions is really astounding. For a place that otherwise seems to celebrate the cause of the "little guy" against the corporation, an awful lot of people around here, I think, just don't get it.
That the union represents lazy or unskilled workers is exactly what the PR firms of corporations want you to believe. You want to believe that Amazon.com is a different kind of company that doesn't need unions? If it's a different kind of company, why is it hiring corporate execs from some of the largest companies in America?
Technical and other skilled workers all over the country are unionizing and looking to collective action to improve their conditions. Remember a year or so ago when Boeing's entire cadre of engineers went on strike? Those are the people who design airplanes. I'm not inclined to think of them as either lazy or unskilled.
Okay, let's keep this in the present time, not the coal mines. How about research and teaching assistants at large universities. Where I'm in grad school, RA/TAs work lots of hours for a wage that is publically accepted by the school as being sub-par for both our peer institutions and for the community in which we live; they acknowledge that they don't pay us enough to live here. Nor do they provide employee health care to people who work the same number of hours as the "employees" who do get health benefits. This is campus-wide. It's not just the socialists in the humanities (who teach ungodly course loads for a "stipend"), but the skilled people over in computer science and neurology (who have no recourse if they are fired capriciously, for instance).
The hackneyed anti-union argument regarding skilled workers is to say "they're skilled; they must be dumbasses if they just don't leave their jobs and go somewhere else." Well I'd propose two things: That works great when the economy is booming, but that won't always be the case; second, why do so many slashdotters think there's something wrong with wanting to be treated fairly by your employer, whoever that is?
What the hell exactly does the KSU police spokesperson mean by "fruits and instrumentalities" of a computer crime?
I went and looked at their web site. If you didn't know it was a starcraft clan, you might be a little thrown: Pictures of guys in prison garb tied to chairs are a little unsettling. But come on. Yeah yeah, it's "post-Columbine," but all it would take is a little more reading of the site to actually figure out that these guys are not the next trenchcoat mafia. It's a friggin' game!
The fact that there seems to be some confusion over exactly why they went in there with a warrant is a little troubling, too. There are two stories: Worry over a "computer crime" and concern about "improper use" of the school's computers.
Was there really a crime there? Evidence of a crime? Is "improper" resource use enough for a search warrant?
Any why didn't anybody go and talk with them? Sheesh, they all had appointments with the dorm administrators, which were suddenly cancelled. This just reeks of improperly-implemented policies and paranoia, enabled by woefully bad fact-checking by whoever is supposed to be looking out for students.
-schussat
Re:Clifford Stoll wrote a book on this
on
Kids and Computers
·
· Score: 2
Stoll's book High Tech Heretic gives many of the argumetns against the overuse of computers.
I read his earlier Silicon Snake Oil and found it very thought-provoking, if a little rambling. However, that one referred readers to Theodore Roszak's Cult of Information, which is a measured and scholarly warning about the myth of computer literacy leading to better schools and smarter students. That one's a very good read.
I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who makes a lack of computers in schools tantamount to the greatest moral crisis of a young generation.
Yeah, I got a kick out of that, too. I mean, come on, 11 months of his life has just -got- to be worth more than three million bucks. I'd balk too, if somebody made me an insulting offer like that.
I find it disconcerting that Yahoo promulgates something like a press release from the suing law firm, and passes it off as "financial news." Without any consideration of the lawsuit's merits or seeking further sources of information, the press release tells people they can even join the lawsuit!
Obviously there's a whole lot more to this story. I don't dispute its potential news-worthiness and appropriateness for posting here. But the creation of news that is so uncritically "reported" by simply issuing a press release seems somehow opportunistic and irresponsible.
Oh yeah, we're talking about lawyers and news online. Never mind.
You've got this bizarre idea that the whole world revolves around computer gaming and the Internet. Believe it or not, some people still watch TV, read books (gasp!) or even go outside and take a walk.
Agreed. I would bet that more people identify deer hunting as far more a mainstream cultural activity than gaming.
I think this navel-gazing has gone on long enough. Gamers are fun people who enjoy their activities, and the rise of gaming may be part of a neat cultural shift in America, but it certainly isn't the most prominent representative of that shift, nor is it the cause.
I'm surprised to see that junkbuster hasn't been mentioned more prominently. I've been using it for several months on my home linux pc, and it works great. It blocks cookies and ads through a blocklist, which you can edit to allow cookies from certain sites -- like your bank. It looks like it works similarly to guidescope, mentioned earlier, but I would guess that it's a little faster since the blocklist is stored locally, rather than on guidescope's servers. (The downside, of course, is that you have to update your blocklist semi-regularly; but there are dozens of good lists to be downloaded these days.)
Re:Printing Press Did Not Bring About Renaissance
on
The Renaissance
·
· Score: 2
Gutenberg produced the first Bible c. 1455, but the Italian Renaissance was in full swing by then, largely an outcome of the mercantile culture of the Italian city-states. The later European Renaissance movements were more outgrowths of the Italian one than spawned by the printing press. They too seem to have been caused mostly by the growth of town culture and the rise of the middle class.
Good point -- I've been trying to remember all that renaissance history I learned when I spent a semester in Rome. You summed it up pretty well.
Further, I'd add that many of the artistic developments of the renaissance were fueled by the rediscovery of ancient Roman works of art -- not the development of new technologies, and certainly not the printing press. The development of perspective certainly owes something to the study of geometry, but that was also relatively late in the scheme of things (and had nothing to do with the press). I don't know when books like On Painting were first actually printed. Maybe the press aided their diffusion? (Although I imagine that diffusion would be rather late behind the diffusion of perspective through traveling artists...)
It really depends on the size of the nonprofit; I worked for a year as a part-time sysadmin for a nonprofit org. that had a PC for each employee (right about 15 Pentium 133s, which was usually enough for everybody to do their work). The NT network was actually really stable, so most of my time was spent planning and doing general maintenance (and occasionally drilling holes in the walls for more cat5 cable).
Anyway, if the org. had more demanding computer needs (beyond your standard small-office sorts of things), they would have definitely needed more than a part-time employee to do it all. I was pretty swamped as it was.
Nonetheless, it's extremely satisfying to do work for a non-profit that one believes in, especially when other staff are as passionate and dedicated as they were. (Going for beers with the staff is always good.)
I may as well chime in that I'm a little suspicious of the statement that the time programmers spend not "enhancing" and "producing" software is wasted time. I agree with folks who have said that debugging is part of any programming task. Further, I disagree with the idea that time spent on projects that are not completed is similarly wasted -- it's time to learn, develop algorithms, and so forth. The authors of the "study" seem almost to be saying that the reason for all that so-called wasted time is shoddy quality control, but that proposition only stands up if you believe it's wasted time.
It seems a little to me like a desperate search for an IT "crisis" when there are probably better things to be doing. This doesn't strike me as a way to solve a worker shortage.
An improved method and apparatus for downloading compressed audio/visual (AV) data and/or graphical/tabular information from a remote Server to an End User Station (EUS) for the purpose of decompressing and/or displaying said downloaded data. The EUS may transmit a query to the Server
Maybe it's just me, and maybe it's just a mis-read from that small excerpt from the whole patent, but this really does seem absurd. This makes it sound like the patent covers any kind of server-side data processing that sends output to the user -- Say I log on to a server, run some statistical software on a big data set that I otherwise could not do on my own end (or "EUS".. sheesh), and ask the server to display a table of the output, say correlation coefficients.
Haven't I done everything that appears to be patented? Unless you demand that the data be compressed or something -- in which case it sure seems like the wording is vague, as it appears to use data compression/decompression as an example, not a material part of the process.
The tech industry is everywhere. Why work at a Dot Com when you can do your wizz-bang computer stuff elsewhere? Even if you work at a sleezy bar, they may well be willing to pay you to set up a good computer accounting system, a website, or something else.
I like that point a lot, and just want to echo my sentiments. I worked as a sysadmin for a year for a nonprofit organization -- I worked with fantastic, passionate people, got to do lots of fun tech work, and made enough money (not dot.com style cash, but not dot.com style hours, either).
Now I'm in grad school, doing occasional tech stuff, and I only occasionally feel envious of my college buddies who are off at startups. I can do the tech stuff I like and enjoy, without the pressure of the Technology Scene.
It is up to N2H2's *clients* to decide which categories are blocked and are unblocked.
As far as I know, that's not really a new idea. The problem persists that the people who make the categorizations can be biased or inaccurate, or that the categories are too broadly defined.
Why be a dick about it? "It embarasses me"? No, your Mom dressing you like that embarasses you.
Wow. "How not to respond to someone with a complaint."
The fact that you know people submit duplicate stories sure isn't an excuse for posting them again. Isn't that why sites have editors?
A whole lot of people have a lot of time and effort put into slashdot -- and it's not just all of you who run the site. There's a lot of discussion going on here by a lot of people who care about what slashdot is all about. I wouldn't have said that it's embarassing to see duplicate stories, but all the same, what are we all supposed to think when we see it happening more and more? One thing, that I don't particularly like to think, is that people don't care enough to know their own site anymore. Now, I'm pretty sure that's not the case. I have lots of faith that Taco and the rest of you really thrive on what goes on at slashdot. So we all want this place to be quality.
You were in a position to say, "Hey guys, the load gets heavy and what with slashdot getting hacked and all, it's hard to keep our eyes uncrossed, let alone monitor the stories. We're working on it." Instead, you insulted this whole thread, when my intent was just to express that we think this place is cool we and hate to see it less than stellar. So much for reasonable discussion.
I won't complain as vitriolically as some about the recent spate of duplicate stories on slashdot, but the fact that this same story was posted two or three days ago (see it here) is troubling.
Has slashdot grown so large that there are perhaps too many people with the ability to post stories? Or does it need someone "at the top" to make sure duplicates like this don't get through? Is slashdot so big that it just can't be managed by anybody? I hope not, but I'm really curious; what's breaking down so much that this keeps happening?
Maybe we can have some constructive discussion instead of the regular round of "slashdot's gone downhill" talk. To CmdrTaco and the rest: We know you're all busy. But can you work this out?
Katz writes that Stone's book is "long overdue," but notes that it is in its third printing. It's been out since 1995. When I read it then, I found it a little bit banal. Somewhat interesting, but so couched in froofy text that the book left me with little room to be thoughtful about what the author was saying. No interpretation: It's either opaque enough to be unreadable, or blunt enough to knock you out.
That said, I wonder how it has held up to time. The web was in its infancy (or not even existent) when Stone began writing this book. The nature of porn online has changed, becoming far more salient than in the early 1990s. Some of the forms of technological desire remain, but they've changed, and others may have disappeared or completely transformed.
I'm glad people are thoughtful about our intersections with technology. I wish obfuscated postmodernism wasn't the only mode of that thought.
would like to see them create live action based on *a lot* of plots. For instance I think the newer Batman Beyond has taken some cool dark themes (BM murdering Com. Gordon)... and I also remember some *brilliantly* dark stories written by guest authors in a book I read once (btw... anyone know what book that was? not a comic, but guest authors writing BM stories)...
I'm not sure if I'm thinking of the same concept, but I have a Batman story called (I think) Red Rain, which is a modern Batman vs. vampire story, set in a really cool Victorian-style context. Great art, really vivid colors and a neat story: Batman is visited by a woman who slowly turns him into a vampire in order to defeat Dracula, who is building an army of undead from the homeless and prostitutes of Gotham.
Anyway, my original point was that the introduction to the story said it would be part of a series of Batman stories set in dramatically different contexts than the "normal" Gotham -- Is that the Batman Beyond series? It would be neat to see more of those.
As for the movie, maybe it's time to retire the Batman movie franchise. I mean, Miller's Dark Knight is awesome and all, but maybe it's better on paper than as a Big Movie.
-schussat
Another good book-finding resource (Re:Library?)
on
Hackers
·
· Score: 1
Library's a good suggestion. Another good book-finding resource (saved me about $45 on a hideously expensive statistics textbook) is addall. Give it your request and it will return a list of 30 or 40 online retailers that sell it, ranked by price. They do used books, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Dungeon Master's gameplay was truly awesome. I used to play it with two other buddies in my 7th-grade science teacher's classroom. We'd hurry to finish out work, then pile up in front of the Atari ST and play for the rest of class. Best damn science class I ever had.
The gameplay rocked: smashing baddies in the doors was great, but how about throwing rocks down stairs to beat them up? We killed at least a couple of dragons that way, when our party was too badly beaten up to face them directly. (I guess you could call that an AI bug--dumb big dragon just waits at the bottom of the stairs and gets thumped--but at the time, the very idea that that dragon was still there when we were on a different level, well it was pretty cool).
Unfortunately, I'm stuck here at school today, so no DM playing for a while yet.
-schussat
Holy crap! Someone just invoked sociology in a positive light on slashdot! I think I might weep. Long have I and my finely trained army of sociologist colleagues awaited this day.
Seriously, though, without having read The Hacker Ethic (BTW, Weber's book is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) maybe I can comment a little on the historical protestant ethic. Weber sought to explain why capitalism seemed to flourish uniquely in Europe and early America, far more so than in the rest of the world at that time. The factor he identified was the worldview that surrounded Protestantism: Hard work and strict accounting of one's deeds. The configuration of work and spirituality, argued Weber, was unique to the Western world, and fundamentally shaped the success of capitalism.
That said, I have to admit I'm a little skeptical of Himanen's claims that the hacker ethic will revolutionize work and play. If we believe Weber's construction of capitalism, we have to accept that it's based on a much "smaller" world, one inhabited for instance largely by Protestants--after all, that's why early America was so uniquely poised to propel capitalism.
I find it more likely that the products of the hacker ethic -- good hardware and software, for instance -- are what will continue to permeate daily life, rather than the ethic of those products' creators. (Just as capitalism now thrives where Protestantism does not dominate)
Unfortunately, the effect of that pervasive technology may be the opposite of Himanen's new work and play ethics. Modern home appliances aren't really all that liberating: Many scholars argue that home cooking and cleaning appliances really just bind more people to doing more work -- far from being liberated by the machines, we have the propensity to become too attached to them. (How many of you have programmed your linux box to wake you up by playing your favorite mp3s? You may like to tinker with that perl script, but the end result is that you're still waking up to an alarm clock!).
Anyway, that said, it sounds like an interesting argument. The cultural transformation that really could hook the hacker ethics of a product's production to its eventual use might be pretty neat. But I don't think I'll hold my breath.
-schussat
Saying that the digital divide is disappearing is just another way to sell more banner ads.
-schussat
There was some discussion of the review on mandrake's forum. What was noted there is that Helix explicitly says that their packages don't yet work with mandrake 7.2. The reviewer essentially tried to install an incompatible package, and then complained when it didn't work. That's far from what I'd call "intelligent reviewing."
-schussat
Didn't you hear? "Rogue players" have been changed to "players of concern."
-schussat
What I am really against is the large unions like the auto workers, teacher's unions and social workers. Too much power in the hands of too few and the all-too-true adage which states "Power Corrupts." -- When you have 100k union members the leaders are just so out of touch and have so much money and pull that they're no longer representing the people; they're representing themselves with the money of the masses and that is dangerous.
I completely agree with that, and I think it's unfortunate that the practice of unions has often been warped to that point. Too often that kind of power hasn't been used responsibly.
even $50k will help out more than you may believe.
As one of those overworked, underpaid RA/TAs I mentioned, I sure do believe it. Hell, a few hundred bucks a month makes a big difference. I have trouble seeing how "ad-hoc gangs" of workers can really effect change in their institution, however. This school is a gigantic bureaucracy, and even if my entire department ganged up on the graduate college, we might get a meeting with a dean, but we sure wouldn't get better benefits for our trouble. Other departments have tried it; no dice.
I don't have so much union experience as you--though I do have plenty of high tech experience--but my seemingly intractable position here vis-a-vis the university makes the idea of having collective voice to bargain with seem like a pretty good idea. I'm sure none of the union activists around here want to see the unions-gone-bad as you describe them, and I remain optimistic that a union, properly administrated, could remain in control of the RA/TAs who built it, rather than in the hands of an out-of-control bureaucracy.
Maybe just pipe dreams. We'll see.
-schussat
I think that's an outmoded perception of the way unions can work. High-tech and white-collar unions have made great strides in terms of moving beyond bureaucratic structures. They're not about the union boss and protecting deadwood. Since when does one have to forgoe individualism--and personal merit--in order to believe in the strength of collectivity? That's a knee-jerk rejection of unions based on past, but not present, realities.
-schussat
I do agree with you up to a point -- my first reaction was this was a patronizing effort: "If only the world had ICQ and hackers, they'd be as good as us." But at the same time, despite the somewhat self-aggrandizing nature of "GeekHalla" and "GeekCorps," I can see value in what they're doing. Some of their projects are helping small businesses and training workers.
One could argue that they should all be there as Peace Corps volunteers, building aqueducts and sustainable agriculture--developing countries certainly need that infrastructure as much or more as they need IT. But at the same time I think there's something admirable about putting one's skills to work in this kind of way. Is it possible that it's just as narrowminded to neglect technological training and development as it is to neglect basic education and safe water? It seems that they both are part of a comprehensive development program.
-schussat
The ignorance and bigotry around slashdot about unions is really astounding. For a place that otherwise seems to celebrate the cause of the "little guy" against the corporation, an awful lot of people around here, I think, just don't get it.
That the union represents lazy or unskilled workers is exactly what the PR firms of corporations want you to believe. You want to believe that Amazon.com is a different kind of company that doesn't need unions? If it's a different kind of company, why is it hiring corporate execs from some of the largest companies in America?
Technical and other skilled workers all over the country are unionizing and looking to collective action to improve their conditions. Remember a year or so ago when Boeing's entire cadre of engineers went on strike? Those are the people who design airplanes. I'm not inclined to think of them as either lazy or unskilled.
Okay, let's keep this in the present time, not the coal mines. How about research and teaching assistants at large universities. Where I'm in grad school, RA/TAs work lots of hours for a wage that is publically accepted by the school as being sub-par for both our peer institutions and for the community in which we live; they acknowledge that they don't pay us enough to live here. Nor do they provide employee health care to people who work the same number of hours as the "employees" who do get health benefits. This is campus-wide. It's not just the socialists in the humanities (who teach ungodly course loads for a "stipend"), but the skilled people over in computer science and neurology (who have no recourse if they are fired capriciously, for instance).
The hackneyed anti-union argument regarding skilled workers is to say "they're skilled; they must be dumbasses if they just don't leave their jobs and go somewhere else." Well I'd propose two things: That works great when the economy is booming, but that won't always be the case; second, why do so many slashdotters think there's something wrong with wanting to be treated fairly by your employer, whoever that is?
-schussat
I went and looked at their web site. If you didn't know it was a starcraft clan, you might be a little thrown: Pictures of guys in prison garb tied to chairs are a little unsettling. But come on. Yeah yeah, it's "post-Columbine," but all it would take is a little more reading of the site to actually figure out that these guys are not the next trenchcoat mafia. It's a friggin' game!
The fact that there seems to be some confusion over exactly why they went in there with a warrant is a little troubling, too. There are two stories: Worry over a "computer crime" and concern about "improper use" of the school's computers.
Was there really a crime there? Evidence of a crime? Is "improper" resource use enough for a search warrant?
Any why didn't anybody go and talk with them? Sheesh, they all had appointments with the dorm administrators, which were suddenly cancelled. This just reeks of improperly-implemented policies and paranoia, enabled by woefully bad fact-checking by whoever is supposed to be looking out for students.
-schussat
I read his earlier Silicon Snake Oil and found it very thought-provoking, if a little rambling. However, that one referred readers to Theodore Roszak's Cult of Information, which is a measured and scholarly warning about the myth of computer literacy leading to better schools and smarter students. That one's a very good read.
I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who makes a lack of computers in schools tantamount to the greatest moral crisis of a young generation.
-schussat
-schussat
Obviously there's a whole lot more to this story. I don't dispute its potential news-worthiness and appropriateness for posting here. But the creation of news that is so uncritically "reported" by simply issuing a press release seems somehow opportunistic and irresponsible.
Oh yeah, we're talking about lawyers and news online. Never mind.
-schussat
Agreed. I would bet that more people identify deer hunting as far more a mainstream cultural activity than gaming.
I think this navel-gazing has gone on long enough. Gamers are fun people who enjoy their activities, and the rise of gaming may be part of a neat cultural shift in America, but it certainly isn't the most prominent representative of that shift, nor is it the cause.
-schussat
It's at junkbuster.com.
-schussat
Good point -- I've been trying to remember all that renaissance history I learned when I spent a semester in Rome. You summed it up pretty well.
Further, I'd add that many of the artistic developments of the renaissance were fueled by the rediscovery of ancient Roman works of art -- not the development of new technologies, and certainly not the printing press. The development of perspective certainly owes something to the study of geometry, but that was also relatively late in the scheme of things (and had nothing to do with the press). I don't know when books like On Painting were first actually printed. Maybe the press aided their diffusion? (Although I imagine that diffusion would be rather late behind the diffusion of perspective through traveling artists...)
-schussat
Anyway, if the org. had more demanding computer needs (beyond your standard small-office sorts of things), they would have definitely needed more than a part-time employee to do it all. I was pretty swamped as it was.
Nonetheless, it's extremely satisfying to do work for a non-profit that one believes in, especially when other staff are as passionate and dedicated as they were. (Going for beers with the staff is always good.)
I may as well chime in that I'm a little suspicious of the statement that the time programmers spend not "enhancing" and "producing" software is wasted time. I agree with folks who have said that debugging is part of any programming task. Further, I disagree with the idea that time spent on projects that are not completed is similarly wasted -- it's time to learn, develop algorithms, and so forth. The authors of the "study" seem almost to be saying that the reason for all that so-called wasted time is shoddy quality control, but that proposition only stands up if you believe it's wasted time.
It seems a little to me like a desperate search for an IT "crisis" when there are probably better things to be doing. This doesn't strike me as a way to solve a worker shortage.
-schussat
Maybe it's just me, and maybe it's just a mis-read from that small excerpt from the whole patent, but this really does seem absurd. This makes it sound like the patent covers any kind of server-side data processing that sends output to the user -- Say I log on to a server, run some statistical software on a big data set that I otherwise could not do on my own end (or "EUS" .. sheesh), and ask the server to display a table of the output, say correlation coefficients.
Haven't I done everything that appears to be patented? Unless you demand that the data be compressed or something -- in which case it sure seems like the wording is vague, as it appears to use data compression/decompression as an example, not a material part of the process.
What a mess.
-schussat
I like that point a lot, and just want to echo my sentiments. I worked as a sysadmin for a year for a nonprofit organization -- I worked with fantastic, passionate people, got to do lots of fun tech work, and made enough money (not dot.com style cash, but not dot.com style hours, either).
Now I'm in grad school, doing occasional tech stuff, and I only occasionally feel envious of my college buddies who are off at startups. I can do the tech stuff I like and enjoy, without the pressure of the Technology Scene.
-schussat
As far as I know, that's not really a new idea. The problem persists that the people who make the categorizations can be biased or inaccurate, or that the categories are too broadly defined.
-schussat
Wow. "How not to respond to someone with a complaint."
The fact that you know people submit duplicate stories sure isn't an excuse for posting them again. Isn't that why sites have editors?
A whole lot of people have a lot of time and effort put into slashdot -- and it's not just all of you who run the site. There's a lot of discussion going on here by a lot of people who care about what slashdot is all about. I wouldn't have said that it's embarassing to see duplicate stories, but all the same, what are we all supposed to think when we see it happening more and more? One thing, that I don't particularly like to think, is that people don't care enough to know their own site anymore. Now, I'm pretty sure that's not the case. I have lots of faith that Taco and the rest of you really thrive on what goes on at slashdot. So we all want this place to be quality.
You were in a position to say, "Hey guys, the load gets heavy and what with slashdot getting hacked and all, it's hard to keep our eyes uncrossed, let alone monitor the stories. We're working on it." Instead, you insulted this whole thread, when my intent was just to express that we think this place is cool we and hate to see it less than stellar. So much for reasonable discussion.
-schussat
Has slashdot grown so large that there are perhaps too many people with the ability to post stories? Or does it need someone "at the top" to make sure duplicates like this don't get through? Is slashdot so big that it just can't be managed by anybody? I hope not, but I'm really curious; what's breaking down so much that this keeps happening?
Maybe we can have some constructive discussion instead of the regular round of "slashdot's gone downhill" talk. To CmdrTaco and the rest: We know you're all busy. But can you work this out?
-schussat
That said, I wonder how it has held up to time. The web was in its infancy (or not even existent) when Stone began writing this book. The nature of porn online has changed, becoming far more salient than in the early 1990s. Some of the forms of technological desire remain, but they've changed, and others may have disappeared or completely transformed.
I'm glad people are thoughtful about our intersections with technology. I wish obfuscated postmodernism wasn't the only mode of that thought.
-schussat
I'm not sure if I'm thinking of the same concept, but I have a Batman story called (I think) Red Rain, which is a modern Batman vs. vampire story, set in a really cool Victorian-style context. Great art, really vivid colors and a neat story: Batman is visited by a woman who slowly turns him into a vampire in order to defeat Dracula, who is building an army of undead from the homeless and prostitutes of Gotham.
Anyway, my original point was that the introduction to the story said it would be part of a series of Batman stories set in dramatically different contexts than the "normal" Gotham -- Is that the Batman Beyond series? It would be neat to see more of those.
As for the movie, maybe it's time to retire the Batman movie franchise. I mean, Miller's Dark Knight is awesome and all, but maybe it's better on paper than as a Big Movie.
-schussat
-schussat