...and am a very heavy user, for an individual. I mail 6-8 letters/postcards/packages a day, none of which is ebay or anything like that. That's what you get from having friends all over the place, Postcrossing, etc.
I like my postman, and I like the fact that in Portland I am usually near a post office or postbox. I have many fond memories of going to the PO when I was a kid, I used to collect stamps, etc. However...
The USPS needs to get away from banker's hours. Hell, banks need to get away from banker's hours! We all work 9-5. The airport office here is open until 10pm (yes, counter service at USPS at 10pm!), but that is a very rare post office. And you have to drive to the airport which is a pretty good drive for me even though I live near the airport.
I am continuously offended by the asinine idiocy of "you must take all packages weighing 16 oz or more to the counter". This is supposedly a Unibomber-era security regulation but in reality it's a way for the union to keep window staff high.
The real problem with USPS is the union. High, inflexible labor costs. No ability to terminate people without an Act of Congress, no ability to do layoffs, etc. By all accounts (some of them quite entertaining), the Post Office is an awful place to work: management that's rotted in place, hip-deep paperwork and bureaucracy, bitter people who do the barest minimum to avoid being fired, no incentives to do better, etc.
The trouble is apply this to every industry and all of a sudden it's not overcharging fat cats that add no value that are affect: Suddenly there is no way to make a decent living. The only industries that survive are the ones that require qualifications.
In other words I agree that charging $5000 for 3 logo concepts isn't necessarily reasonable, but I don't want to see only amateurs compete for a single prize pool of $269 either. Effectively most people are working for free. That's not reasonable either. Surely there's a middle ground?
Nope. Welcome to globalization! Billions of third world people just waiting to do what you do for 1/10th the price. Expect your living standard to trend towards theirs, because if it's one thing this planet has, it's a huge excess of available labor.
I don't think it's "FOSS" as much as the fact that with every generation, people's computer skills are developed at a younger age. In the 1980s, simply being proficient at using a word processor was a marketable skill. Companies held training sessions on how to use Windows. Today, if you show up at a job, it's expected that you know how to use Microsoft Office, surf the web, understand email, etc.
Same thing is happening in other IT skills. I'm not a graphic designer but I know Photoshop as well as someone who's taken a course. It's just not that hard...and of course, it gets easier because they add features that do more with each release. Ditto for many, many areas.
While clients may or may not be getting "Walmart-quality" designs, they're certainly paying Walmart prices. Logo payouts can run as low as $211, while a webpage design package starts at just $499--rates considered absurdly low by some in the business.
Hate to be the one tell you artists this, but that's hardly low. Lots of people simply google for attractive website templates and pay $50 them, or some small amount to get them exclusively.
For those who want more custom work, places like vworker, freelancer, etc. have an abundance of people who'll do graphic design work for peanuts. True, it may not be as fantabulous as something costing thousands, but you can get a logo design for $20 and for 80% of the people in the marketplace, it's good enough to have your company's name in some sort of distinctive design.
The world is lousy with art students and third world people with cracked copies of Photoshop. Graybeards from the 80s are annoyed that this work is no longer geographically bound and the Internet has made cheap labor abundant. Not everything about the Internet is good for every person.
I'm sure this "burnout" isn't confined to journalism. Virtually everybody I know who is shackled to a deskjob with an email account faces the same problem.
Exactly. This is whining. Oh poor me, I have to sit in an air conditioned office and type all day, it's all...just...too horrible!
Try working in a mine. Or on a farm. Whiny little twits.
A related problem is that my dog could get a degree in journalism. It's like a degree in "communications". The reason the world is lousy with excess journalists, sociologists, teachers, etc. is that getting a degree in journalism or education is trivial. The world, you may notice, does not have a giant excess of chemical engineers or nuclear physicists.
I'm sorry all you twentysomething crusaders who thought you'd take up the cudgels for truth, freedom, and the socialist way and strike a literary blow for the blah blah but you're just going to have to get real jobs. And work hard.
Yes, the hysteria is starting to fade a bit but in the meantime departments such as Homeland Security have grown into unwieldy beasts. I hope you Americans reclaim your civil freedoms soon: you know the ones that have been eroded in the "War on Terror." Terror to who? The occasional nut they do catch or the millions inconvenienced every day just trying to get on a plane? Secret lists... I could go on, the point is stop cowering and be Free again.
Compared to where? We have lower taxes, and as Mencken said, the only freedom worth a damn is economic freedom. We can also buy and own guns of all sorts (in most parts). Hate speech laws are still relatively rare, pornography is ubiquitous, and I can drive for thousands of miles without showing my passport. None of that is true for Europe, Asia, etc.
I'm not saying the US of A is perfect or that we're perfectly free, but it's all in what you're comparing it to.
This should really get exciting once the icepack around the lost Operation Hat SNAP reactor melts.
If you've never heard the story...briefly...in 1965, the US put a spy station in the Himalayas to observe Chinese nuclear tests. It had a SNAP (keg-sized) nuclear reactor as its power source. Unfortunately, it was lost in an avalanche. It's still there, buried under a pile of snow, its plutonium poised over the headwaters of the Ganges...
Fully automated systems are discouraged.. But what if a big law firm wantted to analyze all previous decisions on a subjuct, then apply a statistical liklihood that a given judge will decide in your favor, based on the judge's previous judicial bias?
It's not much different than trying to predict the stock market, really. Though it does add a few more variables.
As we said: wrist-slashingly dull. Law is just excruciatingly boring to most people.
Maybe, but for me "weird arch" Linux equals security through obfuscation.
The grandparent was not discussing security at all, but rather a distro "for code debugging purposes". I know you just learned about security by obscurity and how to modify/etc/passwd from reading a blog today and can't wait to use this new knowledge, but your multi-paragraph was kind of silly.
...I thought "gaming without a safety blanket" would be a discussion of how real men play roguelikes, where you have only one life and the game may take weeks/months to complete and death means starting over...
"Heat rays just slap at the problem. Nerve gas solves it."
Re:if that happens i'll have to file a bug report
on
Wine 1.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
So now I've got Wine running Cygwin which is running Wine which is running Cygwin, etc., down to 37 layers deep, after which it hangs. I've heard that if I get to 42 layers it will rip a hole in the space-time continuum and collapse the black hole that contains our universe. I'm guessing that would be a bad thing.
I read the same thing in the Necronomicon! Many Shubs and Zulls will know what it is like to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day, I can tell you!
But FUCK RUPERT MURDOCH with the rotting corpses of every single one of the Fox News talking heads that he is using to turn the US populace into brain damaged morons
Dude, seriously...if you think MSNBC, CNN, or any of the old TLA news networks are a scintilla better, you're just a partisan shill.
Slashdot Mirror
...and am a very heavy user, for an individual. I mail 6-8 letters/postcards/packages a day, none of which is ebay or anything like that. That's what you get from having friends all over the place, Postcrossing, etc.
I like my postman, and I like the fact that in Portland I am usually near a post office or postbox. I have many fond memories of going to the PO when I was a kid, I used to collect stamps, etc. However...
The real problem with USPS is the union. High, inflexible labor costs. No ability to terminate people without an Act of Congress, no ability to do layoffs, etc. By all accounts (some of them quite entertaining), the Post Office is an awful place to work: management that's rotted in place, hip-deep paperwork and bureaucracy, bitter people who do the barest minimum to avoid being fired, no incentives to do better, etc.
I prefer C++ to Java but I agree with both bashings
I found them rather korny.
That's 5 minutes in Photoshop. Did you notice the dot in your "i" is not flush with the orange and hangs down by a couple pixels?
You overpaid.
The trouble is apply this to every industry and all of a sudden it's not overcharging fat cats that add no value that are affect: Suddenly there is no way to make a decent living. The only industries that survive are the ones that require qualifications.
In other words I agree that charging $5000 for 3 logo concepts isn't necessarily reasonable, but I don't want to see only amateurs compete for a single prize pool of $269 either. Effectively most people are working for free. That's not reasonable either. Surely there's a middle ground?
Nope. Welcome to globalization! Billions of third world people just waiting to do what you do for 1/10th the price. Expect your living standard to trend towards theirs, because if it's one thing this planet has, it's a huge excess of available labor.
I don't think it's "FOSS" as much as the fact that with every generation, people's computer skills are developed at a younger age. In the 1980s, simply being proficient at using a word processor was a marketable skill. Companies held training sessions on how to use Windows. Today, if you show up at a job, it's expected that you know how to use Microsoft Office, surf the web, understand email, etc.
Same thing is happening in other IT skills. I'm not a graphic designer but I know Photoshop as well as someone who's taken a course. It's just not that hard...and of course, it gets easier because they add features that do more with each release. Ditto for many, many areas.
While clients may or may not be getting "Walmart-quality" designs, they're certainly paying Walmart prices. Logo payouts can run as low as $211, while a webpage design package starts at just $499--rates considered absurdly low by some in the business.
Hate to be the one tell you artists this, but that's hardly low. Lots of people simply google for attractive website templates and pay $50 them, or some small amount to get them exclusively.
For those who want more custom work, places like vworker, freelancer, etc. have an abundance of people who'll do graphic design work for peanuts. True, it may not be as fantabulous as something costing thousands, but you can get a logo design for $20 and for 80% of the people in the marketplace, it's good enough to have your company's name in some sort of distinctive design.
The world is lousy with art students and third world people with cracked copies of Photoshop. Graybeards from the 80s are annoyed that this work is no longer geographically bound and the Internet has made cheap labor abundant. Not everything about the Internet is good for every person.
...you could always use RentACoder (er, Vworker.com now) and hire someone for pennies to do it.
Cracks me up that this was modded flamebait. I was guess the sense of entitlement runs deep...
I'm sure this "burnout" isn't confined to journalism. Virtually everybody I know who is shackled to a deskjob with an email account faces the same problem.
Exactly. This is whining. Oh poor me, I have to sit in an air conditioned office and type all day, it's all...just...too horrible!
Try working in a mine. Or on a farm. Whiny little twits.
A related problem is that my dog could get a degree in journalism. It's like a degree in "communications". The reason the world is lousy with excess journalists, sociologists, teachers, etc. is that getting a degree in journalism or education is trivial. The world, you may notice, does not have a giant excess of chemical engineers or nuclear physicists.
I'm sorry all you twentysomething crusaders who thought you'd take up the cudgels for truth, freedom, and the socialist way and strike a literary blow for the blah blah but you're just going to have to get real jobs. And work hard.
You get what you pay for
Unless you're a Slashdot subscriber. Then you get the same thing others get for free.
Yes, the hysteria is starting to fade a bit but in the meantime departments such as Homeland Security have grown into unwieldy beasts. I hope you Americans reclaim your civil freedoms soon: you know the ones that have been eroded in the "War on Terror." Terror to who? The occasional nut they do catch or the millions inconvenienced every day just trying to get on a plane? Secret lists... I could go on, the point is stop cowering and be Free again.
Compared to where? We have lower taxes, and as Mencken said, the only freedom worth a damn is economic freedom. We can also buy and own guns of all sorts (in most parts). Hate speech laws are still relatively rare, pornography is ubiquitous, and I can drive for thousands of miles without showing my passport. None of that is true for Europe, Asia, etc.
I'm not saying the US of A is perfect or that we're perfectly free, but it's all in what you're comparing it to.
That is nothing! My 92 years old grandfather is watching porn on his Ubuntu laptop that he build himself.
My 92-year-old grandfather is starring in the porn that your grandfather is watching! He recorded it all on his Altair kit!
This should really get exciting once the icepack around the lost Operation Hat SNAP reactor melts.
If you've never heard the story...briefly...in 1965, the US put a spy station in the Himalayas to observe Chinese nuclear tests. It had a SNAP (keg-sized) nuclear reactor as its power source. Unfortunately, it was lost in an avalanche. It's still there, buried under a pile of snow, its plutonium poised over the headwaters of the Ganges...
Companies should be regulated, and the implied warranties should be extended, to cover more things for certain products.
This message brought to you by the Trial Lawyers of America, LLC.
On the other hand, I just love your web page. I will certainly check back soon!
Fully automated systems are discouraged.. But what if a big law firm wantted to analyze all previous decisions on a subjuct, then apply a statistical liklihood that a given judge will decide in your favor, based on the judge's previous judicial bias? It's not much different than trying to predict the stock market, really. Though it does add a few more variables.
As we said: wrist-slashingly dull. Law is just excruciatingly boring to most people.
I was thinking it might be fun to make a linux distro like this. I would have called it "OpenLinux - Opening your Systems to the World!"
The possible logos just draw themselves.
> Something philosophically similar
Maybe, but for me "weird arch" Linux equals security through obfuscation.
The grandparent was not discussing security at all, but rather a distro "for code debugging purposes". I know you just learned about security by obscurity and how to modify /etc/passwd from reading a blog today and can't wait to use this new knowledge, but your multi-paragraph was kind of silly.
"I'm an idea man, Chuck..."
+1 for obscure reference.
...I thought "gaming without a safety blanket" would be a discussion of how real men play roguelikes, where you have only one life and the game may take weeks/months to complete and death means starting over...
This is totally horrible.
I agree. Think of all the millions wasted on research for this, when we've had nerve gas technology for decades.
"Heat rays just slap at the problem. Nerve gas solves it."
So now I've got Wine running Cygwin which is running Wine which is running Cygwin, etc., down to 37 layers deep, after which it hangs. I've heard that if I get to 42 layers it will rip a hole in the space-time continuum and collapse the black hole that contains our universe. I'm guessing that would be a bad thing.
I read the same thing in the Necronomicon! Many Shubs and Zulls will know what it is like to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day, I can tell you!
But FUCK RUPERT MURDOCH with the rotting corpses of every single one of the Fox News talking heads that he is using to turn the US populace into brain damaged morons
Dude, seriously...if you think MSNBC, CNN, or any of the old TLA news networks are a scintilla better, you're just a partisan shill.