First of all the myth needs to be busted that somehow a continued education is magically going to equal success.
I've rarely heard that one. What I have heard is that the lack of a continued education is magical going to equal failure. Most people don't go to college to get ahead. They go to college to keep from falling too far behind.
"Hey, kid. Yeah, you. The eighteen-year-old with no life experience, and parents who got student loans back before they were predatory. Tell you what: we'll give you a quarter of a million dollars to get a degree. Oh, you'll be paying it back when you're 50, but big deal. People get mortgages, right? If you don't do it, have fun delivering pizza and living in your parents' basement! Of course, even if you do there's a good chance that we'll offshore your occupation and you'll be making about a third of what we're telling you to expect, but you'll find a way. If not, well, we'll just garnish your Social Security payments. LOL. You're 18! Have fun! Here's the cash."
I went to a reasonably-priced public university and have almost no student debt, so the above isn't making excuses for my own situation. But do you really expect the average teenager to make a rational decision in those circumstances? If so - frankly, you're a sociological idiot. People just don't act the way you seem to cross your fingers and hope they will.
FTFY. If you require a degree for a job that doesn't really need one, you're likely going to hire someone that only went to school to get the degree, barely paid attention as they jumped through the hoops, and doesn't have a clue how to apply their academic experience.
I got a CompSci degree while working 40+ hours as an ISP programmer/sysadmin/DBA/whatever-else-we-needed-that-day. I admit a general lack of sympathy to people complaining about not having enough time to get a degree because they were "too busy getting real-world experience".
I downloaded and tried Vlingo. First, Siri better suck a whole lot less for it to catch on. Second, Vlingo isn't ubiquitous inside the iPhone. You have to fire up the app and hope your request can be met by one of its seemingly very few plugins.
I'm a jealous iPhone 4 owner and installed Vlingo about 30 seconds after I heard of it. I uninstalled it about 2 minutes later.
Yet he's perfectly willing to give in to the same requirements in order to fly in a plane. I guess pragmatism wins over principle at some level of inconvenience.
I firmly refuse to install non-free software or tolerate its installed presence on my computer or on computers set up for me to use.
However, if I am visiting somewhere and the machines available nearby happen to contain non-free software, through no doing of mine, I don't refuse to touch them. I will use them briefly for tasks such as browsing. This limited usage doesn't give my assent to the software's license, or make me responsible its being present in the computer, or make me the possessor of a copy of it, so I don't see an ethical obligation to refrain from this. Of course, I explain why they should migrate the machines to free software, but I don't push so hard it would be counterproductive.
Likewise, I don't need to worry about what software is in a kiosk, pay phone, or ATM that I am using. I hope their owners migrate them to free software, for their sake, but there's no need for me to refuse to touch them until then. (I do consider what those machines and their owners might do with my personal data, but that's a different issue. My response to that issue is to minimize those activities which give them any data about me.)
That reasoning is based on the fact that I was not responsible for setting up those machines, or for how that was done. By contrast, if I were to ask or lead someone to set up a computer for me to use, that would make me ethically responsible for its software load. In such a case I insist on free software, just as if the machine were mine.
He'll use non-free systems whenever necessary if there's no alternative. There's not a good non-free alternative to air travel in the US, or to travel abroad in a timely manner.
Re:Just seems like a well thought out list
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 1
Some one with a brief case of being open minded to come with a new idea, he grasped onto that idea and then closed his mind shut, because he refuses to be proven wrong.
"All men are created equal." If you grasp that idea and internalize it, it's going to be pretty hard to convince you otherwise. Well, the equivalent for RMS is "software should be Free". If he believes that wholeheartedly, what compromise position would you suggest he reasonably adopt?
I guess you read it the way you want to. I interpreted his tone as "let's get down to business; here's what I need".
Re:Just seems like a well thought out list
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 1
I'm obviously just better socially adjusted than he is when I put up with these things.
I'm not sure if it's that, or that the minor things add up to a major aggravation if you travel for a living and have to deal with them daily. If you don't like eggs but everyone seems to want to serve you eggs each morning, I could see that wearing thin rather quickly.
This kinda pissed me off
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I saw a lot of RMS haters posting this and making fun of him for being a demanding ass. In particular, a lot of popular Mac people on Twitter were laughing at him for being a prima donna. I just don't get it. His requests are basically:
Don't misrepresent my position by describing me as advocating something I'm not.
I'm not rich, so don't make me pay for stuff out of my own pocket because I can't afford to.
I'd much rather sleep on someone's couch and hang out with locals than be chauffeured around and entertained constantly.
I don't think any of those are unreasonable at all. And as to the "parrot" part? Dude likes parrots. He goes out of his was to say not to buy one for just for his benefit, but if someone already has one he'd like to talk to it. I can't imagine a personal preference request being more accommodating.
A lot of people disagree with RMS and that's fine. But there's nothing in his tour rider that deserves derision, and I'm not sure why so many people are having fun at his expense when everything he asked for seemed perfectly reasonable.
If it is true, I would send the guy my heartfelt thanks, and not buy the expensive heatpump for this winter.
I would, so I could run it at 100% with all the windows open while I walk around in my boxers, pleasantly cool and horrifying the neighbors at the same time.
You can call their customer circus and play stump the clown, asking them to explain why you owe the charge and you will be told because it's on the invoice.
Ah, found the problem. You're asking for them for evidence proving them right. Forget that strategy; it never works. Instead, assert your position and challenge them to prove you wrong. "You changed my contract. As per federal law, I cancelled my account with you on [insert date here]. I owe you nothing. Don't send me a bill again." That puts the onus on them to demonstrate that your position is unreasonable, and if they can't, you win by default.
I was waiting on an SSD until they worked out the bugs and there were no articles about problems for awhile but with stories like these I'll keep waiting, it's just not worth the risk.
But Unix can give you that, too. My laptop continues to work properly no matter what the apps I'm running are doing, unless they hit the same limit points that would also force QNX to make hard decisions about what to keep and what to kill. I don't see QNX as being inherently better than Unix(-like) systems in this space. Maybe it'd be better in certain situations than current Android/iOS implementations, but I don't think there's anything in their designs that would prevent improvements.
In the happy side effect camp, the "immunity" to malaria involves sickle cell anemia which has its own huge set of problems. If you end malaria, then you also end natural selection for sickle cell and make their whole society healthier in the long term.
But what advantage does QNX offer here? I sure want an RTOS in my car's anti-lock braking system, but I couldn't care less if my phone is "just" a Unix derivate. If Linux is good enough to run Google and Wall Street, and BSD is good enough to run a huge chunk of Internet routers, then either of them are good enough to run my phone.
Enterprises are mainly built around Unix, IBM, or Windows. Medical is very often centered around Windows. Education gets by fine on Macs and Windows. RTOSes aren't especially good for gaming; those guaranteed latencies come at a cost in throughput.
So what does QNX actually bring to the table in this area? Not to slag it in any way. It's a great system! But I've never, ever had a problem with my phone that I thought an RTOS could solve.
I know it's hip to beat up on Perl these days, but perl is still way ahead of most languages in its ability to be expressive.
But far behind the languages that it's competing with in this space. There's a reason why literally ever Perl programmer I know has migrated to Ruby or Python.
I'd much rather write a web app in Perl than C or Pascal. And by roughly the same margin, I'd much rather write the same app on Rails or Django or Pyramid.
Must be great where you live. Your environment is the exception, though, and most of the rest of us are stuck in places where a B&N is a huge upgrade over the other offerings.
But why? A neuron is a pretty simple device. If you made a neural transplant that functions the same way, I'm not sure by which mechanism you'd start to experience alternated consciousness (which is a pretty high level function to be affecting).
And in the mean time, our company's mailserver has been at 100% availability outside planned service upgrade windows. 100%. Not a single unplanned outage, ever, in nearly a decade. If there were a multi-day service outage, several people (including me) would be having an extremely unpleasant meeting with the company's owner to explain why we should still be employed.
That's why I have no problem holding RIM accountable. For most people, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! are unpaid services. You pay dearly for BlackBerry service, though, and expect a higher level of professionalism out of them. I mean, there are circumstances that you just can't plan for. Rolling out a patch company-wide before testing it isn't one of them.
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First of all the myth needs to be busted that somehow a continued education is magically going to equal success.
I've rarely heard that one. What I have heard is that the lack of a continued education is magical going to equal failure. Most people don't go to college to get ahead. They go to college to keep from falling too far behind.
"Hey, kid. Yeah, you. The eighteen-year-old with no life experience, and parents who got student loans back before they were predatory. Tell you what: we'll give you a quarter of a million dollars to get a degree. Oh, you'll be paying it back when you're 50, but big deal. People get mortgages, right? If you don't do it, have fun delivering pizza and living in your parents' basement! Of course, even if you do there's a good chance that we'll offshore your occupation and you'll be making about a third of what we're telling you to expect, but you'll find a way. If not, well, we'll just garnish your Social Security payments. LOL. You're 18! Have fun! Here's the cash."
I went to a reasonably-priced public university and have almost no student debt, so the above isn't making excuses for my own situation. But do you really expect the average teenager to make a rational decision in those circumstances? If so - frankly, you're a sociological idiot. People just don't act the way you seem to cross your fingers and hope they will.
FTFY. If you require a degree for a job that doesn't really need one, you're likely going to hire someone that only went to school to get the degree, barely paid attention as they jumped through the hoops, and doesn't have a clue how to apply their academic experience.
I got a CompSci degree while working 40+ hours as an ISP programmer/sysadmin/DBA/whatever-else-we-needed-that-day. I admit a general lack of sympathy to people complaining about not having enough time to get a degree because they were "too busy getting real-world experience".
I downloaded and tried Vlingo. First, Siri better suck a whole lot less for it to catch on. Second, Vlingo isn't ubiquitous inside the iPhone. You have to fire up the app and hope your request can be met by one of its seemingly very few plugins.
I'm a jealous iPhone 4 owner and installed Vlingo about 30 seconds after I heard of it. I uninstalled it about 2 minutes later.
Yet he's perfectly willing to give in to the same requirements in order to fly in a plane. I guess pragmatism wins over principle at some level of inconvenience.
Well, of course it does. In his own words:
He'll use non-free systems whenever necessary if there's no alternative. There's not a good non-free alternative to air travel in the US, or to travel abroad in a timely manner.
Some one with a brief case of being open minded to come with a new idea, he grasped onto that idea and then closed his mind shut, because he refuses to be proven wrong.
"All men are created equal." If you grasp that idea and internalize it, it's going to be pretty hard to convince you otherwise. Well, the equivalent for RMS is "software should be Free". If he believes that wholeheartedly, what compromise position would you suggest he reasonably adopt?
I guess you read it the way you want to. I interpreted his tone as "let's get down to business; here's what I need".
I'm obviously just better socially adjusted than he is when I put up with these things.
I'm not sure if it's that, or that the minor things add up to a major aggravation if you travel for a living and have to deal with them daily. If you don't like eggs but everyone seems to want to serve you eggs each morning, I could see that wearing thin rather quickly.
I saw a lot of RMS haters posting this and making fun of him for being a demanding ass. In particular, a lot of popular Mac people on Twitter were laughing at him for being a prima donna. I just don't get it. His requests are basically:
I don't think any of those are unreasonable at all. And as to the "parrot" part? Dude likes parrots. He goes out of his was to say not to buy one for just for his benefit, but if someone already has one he'd like to talk to it. I can't imagine a personal preference request being more accommodating.
A lot of people disagree with RMS and that's fine. But there's nothing in his tour rider that deserves derision, and I'm not sure why so many people are having fun at his expense when everything he asked for seemed perfectly reasonable.
No, he didn't. At least he says he didn't.
If it is true, I would send the guy my heartfelt thanks, and not buy the expensive heatpump for this winter.
I would, so I could run it at 100% with all the windows open while I walk around in my boxers, pleasantly cool and horrifying the neighbors at the same time.
Same here. I'll adjust it a degree or two depending on mood and how heavily I'm dressed, but I otherwise forget it's there.
I kinda presumed they just did.
You can call their customer circus and play stump the clown, asking them to explain why you owe the charge and you will be told because it's on the invoice.
Ah, found the problem. You're asking for them for evidence proving them right. Forget that strategy; it never works. Instead, assert your position and challenge them to prove you wrong. "You changed my contract. As per federal law, I cancelled my account with you on [insert date here]. I owe you nothing. Don't send me a bill again." That puts the onus on them to demonstrate that your position is unreasonable, and if they can't, you win by default.
I was waiting on an SSD until they worked out the bugs and there were no articles about problems for awhile but with stories like these I'll keep waiting, it's just not worth the risk.
You didn't think HDDs have similar dumb BIOS errors?
But Unix can give you that, too. My laptop continues to work properly no matter what the apps I'm running are doing, unless they hit the same limit points that would also force QNX to make hard decisions about what to keep and what to kill. I don't see QNX as being inherently better than Unix(-like) systems in this space. Maybe it'd be better in certain situations than current Android/iOS implementations, but I don't think there's anything in their designs that would prevent improvements.
In the happy side effect camp, the "immunity" to malaria involves sickle cell anemia which has its own huge set of problems. If you end malaria, then you also end natural selection for sickle cell and make their whole society healthier in the long term.
Very true. It also needs people who can survive until the age when they can begin contributing to society. This vaccine might help with that.
But what advantage does QNX offer here? I sure want an RTOS in my car's anti-lock braking system, but I couldn't care less if my phone is "just" a Unix derivate. If Linux is good enough to run Google and Wall Street, and BSD is good enough to run a huge chunk of Internet routers, then either of them are good enough to run my phone.
Enterprises are mainly built around Unix, IBM, or Windows. Medical is very often centered around Windows. Education gets by fine on Macs and Windows. RTOSes aren't especially good for gaming; those guaranteed latencies come at a cost in throughput.
So what does QNX actually bring to the table in this area? Not to slag it in any way. It's a great system! But I've never, ever had a problem with my phone that I thought an RTOS could solve.
What's more elegant?
(or mystring = mystring.rstrip('\r\n') if you're pedantic about only removing EOL chars)
I know it's hip to beat up on Perl these days, but perl is still way ahead of most languages in its ability to be expressive.
But far behind the languages that it's competing with in this space. There's a reason why literally ever Perl programmer I know has migrated to Ruby or Python.
I'd much rather write a web app in Perl than C or Pascal. And by roughly the same margin, I'd much rather write the same app on Rails or Django or Pyramid.
Must be great where you live. Your environment is the exception, though, and most of the rest of us are stuck in places where a B&N is a huge upgrade over the other offerings.
I have said server cowed into terror. It knows I'd tear it down at the hardware level if I needed to so it's very obedient.
But why? A neuron is a pretty simple device. If you made a neural transplant that functions the same way, I'm not sure by which mechanism you'd start to experience alternated consciousness (which is a pretty high level function to be affecting).
And in the mean time, our company's mailserver has been at 100% availability outside planned service upgrade windows. 100%. Not a single unplanned outage, ever, in nearly a decade. If there were a multi-day service outage, several people (including me) would be having an extremely unpleasant meeting with the company's owner to explain why we should still be employed.
That's why I have no problem holding RIM accountable. For most people, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! are unpaid services. You pay dearly for BlackBerry service, though, and expect a higher level of professionalism out of them. I mean, there are circumstances that you just can't plan for. Rolling out a patch company-wide before testing it isn't one of them.