Lots of dumb companies out there!
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 1
There seems to be two major problems in job-hunting for older (where older means 35+) IT staff. One is that the recruitment process is often in the hands of people who don't understand IT well enough to grasp that a programmer with 20+ years of experience in a variety of languages across a range of environments will likely have few problems picking up new ones. So older (meaning middle-aged) people often get filtered out because they don't have the buzzword du jour, and the recruiters (consultants, HR departments, etc) are too clueless to realise this isn't always relevant.
The second, and probably more significant factor, is that a 40 year old has a bunch of experience, not just of real-world implementation of theory, but dealing with business. A 40 year old is harder to screw than a fresh faced 20 year old, and will want a fair salary. Plenty of companies - I've seen 'em in action - like young staff because they are to naive to realise when they're getting screwed, and too inexperienced to know how to look after themselves when they realise what's happening. Young workers are cheap workers. The fact that young staff may not have enough real world experience to delivery as high a quality of work to customers as staff who've been around the block a few times isn't important, since customers keep coming back, right?
One of the things I like about my current gig is that we hire 40+ years olds as well as kids, so we can have some wise old heads who've got the scars and can teach the kids the pitfalls, rather than having the new staff learn on the customer's dime.
Does anyone remember when we all started using linux cause it was cool??
No, not really. The first person I knew to pick up Linux did so because the then-available BSD variants wouldn't deign to run on anything as lousy as his hardware, and Linux would.
Now, he first person I knew to pick up a BSD (Net, IIRC) did it because it was cool. I picked up Linux because I liked it.
Picking up Linux because it is cools is a far more recent phenomenon.
As one might expect, the majority of reaction on/. to this story has been negative, and I can sympathise with opposition to this move; one one hand, we have a criminal management (I am loathe to call it "justice") system which is ostensibly interested in rehabilition, and yet moves like this and sundry similar projects (offenders registers, f'rinstance) have the potential to undermine those attempts by exposing people who have served their time to an unproductive backlash.
However, name publication was originally intended to be an effective tool of the criminal management system; the notion that part of one's punishment as a criminal is that one has a criminal record and that others are freely allowed to republish and access the relevant details. In a sense, making it easier to find out whether an individual has a criminal record is entirely in line with a philosophy of using community and peer pressure to act as a deterrent to crime - I'll leave aside the question of the value of deterrence in crime management for a moment - and allowing people to be forewarned with regard to those with a criminal record. After all, many people would have few qualms offerring a job to someone with a minor offence committed many years ago, but most people would have more qualms about taking on a career criminal.
Re:GNU in front of Linux is RMS blowing his own ho
on
Thus Spake Stallman
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· Score: 1
and the FSF code in a typical Linux distribution. You might be suprised that it's all FSF software but the kernel!
Yes, for example, those well known pieces of FSF code like XFree86, apache, vixie-cron, and sendmail.
1. I'm willing to bet that most Americans, and even most government officials have at least one skeleton in their closet. Electronic evesdropping offers the potential for blackmail, and it does so unevenly. Inevitably those in power can use evesdropping to hurt those challenging their position, while their opponents have less potential to retaliate. Closer controls of evesdropping eliminates this potential for the unethical to prosper.
The truth of this proposition can be trivially seen in the FBI's attempts to blackmail Martin Luther King by threatening to expose his extramarital affairs unless he stopped his involvement in the Civil Rights movement. If one wishes to venture into the realms of (fairly well-supported) rumour, consider the suggestion that the Mafia was allowed to prosper in the United States, untouched by the FBI, largely because they threatend to expose J. Edgar Hoover's penchant for cross dressing and male "companions".
That's certainly what framers of the arguments in favour of providing minors with no rights would have one believe. I beg to differ. Moreover, having already acknowledged that Yes, children have rights as persons. it seems a little disingenious to then claim This is about what is or is not in the best interest of the child. and imply that a minor's ability to exercise his or her rights do not enter into the picture. In what way is it advantageous to deny said minot the ability to exercise rights? What about the learning experiances associated with said rights? Are some minors to wait until adulthood to learn basic life-lessons? In what way is this utile?
You go on to say:
Rights are based upon the assumption that the given person has the capacity for rational independent thought and the ability to take responsibility for their actions [...]...the event which marks the State's recognition of an individual's capacity to take responsibility for himself is the 18th birthday.
In short, a long-winded exposition of the notion that the excercise of rights is tied to the notion of moral agency and the assertion that the recognition of moral agency is tied to the 18th birthday (except for liquor).
The tying of moral agency to rights is a fairly standard argument, and one I find little or no fault with. Your argument that follows on, however, is fundamentally flawed because it is based on the premise - which you yourself acknowldge is false - that moral agency is some sort of binary switch the state and society recognise as being activated at age 18. While it is the case that one enters one's majority at 18 in most Western nations, most Western nations also recognise elements of moral agency, with the implicit rights thereof, well before 18. Most nations will allow a minor to face trial by their early teens, which clearly undermines your assertion that...the given child does not have the capacity to make those choices itself. since the customs and legal systems of most Western nations consider a child perfectly capable of making decisions about at least issues of the most serious sort. Otherwise, a 14 year old could not be tried for murder.
A cursory glance at the ages at which various rights accrue reinforce this impression; at 16, for example, any New Zealand minor, most UK minors, and many European and US minors have the right to make judgements relating to sexual activity - judgements which will be upheld as valid by the legal system. Having sex with a 15 year old in New Zealand can land you in jail if a parent objects, but having sex with a 16 year old will only land you in jail if they objected.
In short: our legal and social norms recognise that children have varying degrees of moral agency and, implicitly, rights as they work through their teenage years, yet the ACLU are prepared to ditch those rights for the expediency of their adult constituency. Bad form.
There is a very large body of work on paternalism and related issues in philosophy. A library is nearby, no doubt. Check it out.
I suppose I should be grateful you managed to restrain yourself to only one snide comment in your post. Perhaps you should spend less time directing other to libraries, and more time in them, preferably boning up on rhetoric, logic, and moral philosophy.
But in this case I don't think ACLU is backing a corperate solution, instead they are saying that a number of solutions exist without government intervention
The problem is that they're lending a de facto weight to privatizing censorship; I realise that in this case they're only trying to use it as a tactic to get the law struck down, but one of the reasons we see US state and federal government efforts to foist commercial products on libraries and schools is because opponents of the CDA used censorware to undermine the CDA - yet the CDA was arguably less damaging to expression that most private filters.
It isn't about choosing the lesser of evils, it is about keeping the choices in the hands of the individuals not a company or government.
In a sense, I agree, modulo the rights of minors to be able to explore things their parents don't agree with - if a 17 thinks she's bisexual, I don't see that Fundamentalist Christian parents should exert an absolute right to prevent her trying to get information to help her make decisions - but in a practical sense, one often has to choose between the lesser of two evils.
The problem with ages is that they're often poor measures of maturity; you're quite right. I can think of 25 year olds that aren't maure enough to conduct their sexual affairs and probably won't be when they're 45. And I'm sure there are 14 year olds who are. Problem is that maturity tests present some problems on a couple of levels:
They're cumbersome: sure, it would be nice if the age at which individuals can do stuff was tuned to the age they can handle it at, but the infrastructure required to asses this would be huge; consider the system required for drivers licenses. Age based rights are practical, even if they're often crummy in some ways, and, at some point, convenience needs to be a consideration in governance.
They can retard growth: One of the classic answers to the problems associated with young people screwing up at various things (sex, driving, drinking) is often to raise the age at which they're allowed to start trying them - for example, since 18-25 year old males are usually (in.nz, anyway) the worst idiots behind the wheel of a car, restrict them from getting a driver's license until they are 25, instead of leting them start at 16. What this fails to take into consideration is that part of the reason people make poor decisions when they first have access to a thing is that many, heck, most people need to get burned once or twice before they learn the lessons needed to behave sensibly. So a test of one's ability to handle a particular set of rights may permanently disenfranchise people who just need to make a couple of low-grade screwups before they start getting it right - but without those screwups, will never be able to get it right.
One of the problems I have with the ACLU's tactics in fighting censorship bills is the de facto legitimisation they are handing to the notion of privatized censorship.
Why? Well, privatized censorship is usually worse, not better, than government censorship in countries which are fundamentally free. Don't believe me? Go have look at the industry-backed censorship of the comics industy from the late 50's through to the early 80', which went way beond anything that could ever have been imposed by a government authority the industry had decided to self censor in an effort to avoid government regulation, and in the process bowdlerised the medium to a far greater extent than the government ever would have.
Similarly, the system of movie censorship in the United States strikes me as just plain insane, and I live in a country with government censorship. Yet movies are passed far more liberally here, and material which either never makes it to US cinemas, or only shows in 50, is accepted in New Zealand because the government-legislated censorship is concerned with the extreme cases of what society considers dangerous (positive depictions of rape, sex with children, etc), rather than what a bunch of industry-appointed individuals consider might cause more controversy than is good (ie might not increase ticket sales).
The ACLU is IMO playing a dangerous games, whose outcome could have a perverse effect in terms of chilling speech more, not less.
I certainly find it troubling that free speech advocates are basically flagging any notion of childrens' rights in the censorship debate. It becomes even more bizaare when one considers that the ACLU are willing to defend the notion that neo-Nazis have the right to free speech, on the grounds that failing to defend the most repugnant members of the community will lead to a loss of freedom for all, but are happy to allow US 17 year olds to be treated as their parents' chattel in the matter of their freedoms.
Hands up anyone who, as a teenager, wanted to look at stuff, or read things, or held opinions their parents didn't like? Hands up who's enthused about the notion you shouldn't have been treated as anything other than an extension of your parents?
The funny thing is, of course, that the US, like most Western nations, does have a firm notion that children have rights that over-ride their parents'. A parent can't molest or beat their children, because children have a right to a physically safe environment. They can't pull their kids out of school at 11 to work in a factory and boost the family income, because kids have a right to a decent education (or, failing that, whatever they get at the local school).
But the ACLU is happy to allow parents to exercise total control over a 17 year old's browsing habits, even though it may not be best for the long term development of the seventeen year old.
You are Al Gore and I claim my iron-fisted control over the Internet.
(You are aware that Al Gore suggested more control over material on the Internet would be a good way of stopping people from getting confused and "making bad decisions" in a speech a view years back, right?)
For some reason (I blame the Puritans 8) the English speaking West has an utterly warped view of sex, and on keeping children away from sex (where "children" seems to include, eg, 21 year olds if you're the US vice-president's wife).
This leads to insane anomalies, such as a 16 year old being able to view graphic depictions of violence being perpetrated for yucks, while people having sex in even the most conservative context (loving relationship), never mind fun, is walled away behind felony statutes. Heck, in many parts of the English-speaking world, people can legally have sex before they can view it. Which is nuts.
Meanwhile, other parts of the world worry more about, eg, the productizing of childhood (eg, Sweden's restrictions on advertising to children), or promoting the notion that violence is a good and fun way to solve problems (Germany's restrictions on pro-violence games). You'll forgive me if I think those countries have their heads screwed on right - I'd rather 14 year olds get the message that sex is natural and enjoyable (in the right circumstances) than thinking that beating people up is neat.
Broadcast, of course, with an end-to-end proprietary player whose manufacturer has aggresively attacked anyone attempting to reverse engineer players or servers.
I had one this long weekend. I started getting spam from my ISP. Not, you understand, a free ISP where Ive agreed to recieve spam, but an ISP where I pay for my Internet access.
So now the weasels are spamming me on behalf of their "business partners." While they certainly won't be my ISP past this weekend, and thier business partners (a nominally legitimate firm) will be getting told how pissed off I am), it's a pretty good example of the problem, with a slightly different spin.
Of course, this example raises it to a whole new level. Had it been the business spamming me, I could have gone after them. Instead, my ISP will doubtless simply retrospectively change their T&Cs to include, "and you will accept any crap our partners give us a kick-back for".
And if you're considering joining IHUG in.au or.nz, don't. Since you'll end up paying for a mountain of unsolicited crap in your inbox.
Yeah, but my first thought was still, "whoa, E-Type clone." It wasn't until I read the caption that I started scratching my head for possile Ferrari models it resembled.
Perhaps they're assuming the Ferrari will come to mind in the states more than the Jag. In any case, I can't see the point in kitting out an MX-5 to look like somehing else; it's IMO a classic in its own right.
Is it just me, or are some of the mods in the car show just plain nuts? Putting a low-rider set on a Landcruiser? WTF? And that kit to make an MX-5 look like a Ferrari makes it look more like an E-type. No bad thing, but it seems to have failed in its objective.
This cracks me up. Recall the the Mach 5 if you will, with its three projectile-looking front missles, difficult to see headlights, lack of roof, and other entirely unsafe, and un-roadworthy characteristics.
It seems an odd way to promote road saftey. I mean, heck, if you want to promote road safety with fast cars, why not just use F1 or Indy cars - hell, at least their drivers can survive 250 km/h + crashes.
Converting all my files to.zip format, because back when pkzip was da bomb on PCs, I had an Amiga (hell, I still have all my old Amigas). What I do remember, is racing compression programs and benchmarking compression rations between the iterations of LHA and PKZIP in order to get bragging rights in the teenage geek arguments of "my computer is better than yours". So I may not have used PKZIP, but it gave me hours of fun, anyway.
That's kind of sad 8)
But not as sad as someone talented drinking themselves to death at 37. Condolences to Katzs' family and friends.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be two major problems in job-hunting for older (where older means 35+) IT staff. One is that the recruitment process is often in the hands of people who don't understand IT well enough to grasp that a programmer with 20+ years of experience in a variety of languages across a range of environments will likely have few problems picking up new ones. So older (meaning middle-aged) people often get filtered out because they don't have the buzzword du jour, and the recruiters (consultants, HR departments, etc) are too clueless to realise this isn't always relevant.
The second, and probably more significant factor, is that a 40 year old has a bunch of experience, not just of real-world implementation of theory, but dealing with business. A 40 year old is harder to screw than a fresh faced 20 year old, and will want a fair salary. Plenty of companies - I've seen 'em in action - like young staff because they are to naive to realise when they're getting screwed, and too inexperienced to know how to look after themselves when they realise what's happening. Young workers are cheap workers. The fact that young staff may not have enough real world experience to delivery as high a quality of work to customers as staff who've been around the block a few times isn't important, since customers keep coming back, right?
One of the things I like about my current gig is that we hire 40+ years olds as well as kids, so we can have some wise old heads who've got the scars and can teach the kids the pitfalls, rather than having the new staff learn on the customer's dime.
(eg: Elite, Frontier), the Authors HAVE now released the source code. And congratulations to both Ian Bell AND David Braben for doing so!
Last I checked, Braben was trying to block Bell relasing the older games they co-wrote. Has he stopped?
Does anyone remember when we all started using linux cause it was cool??
No, not really. The first person I knew to pick up Linux did so because the then-available BSD variants wouldn't deign to run on anything as lousy as his hardware, and Linux would.
Now, he first person I knew to pick up a BSD (Net, IIRC) did it because it was cool. I picked up Linux because I liked it.
Picking up Linux because it is cools is a far more recent phenomenon.
postgres-sequel, surely.
(Cue pronounciation flame war. Perhaps we can get a definitive guide in the form of a .wav)
As one might expect, the majority of reaction on /. to this story has been negative, and I can sympathise with opposition to this move; one one hand, we have a criminal management (I am loathe to call it "justice") system which is ostensibly interested in rehabilition, and yet moves like this and sundry similar projects (offenders registers, f'rinstance) have the potential to undermine those attempts by exposing people who have served their time to an unproductive backlash.
However, name publication was originally intended to be an effective tool of the criminal management system; the notion that part of one's punishment as a criminal is that one has a criminal record and that others are freely allowed to republish and access the relevant details. In a sense, making it easier to find out whether an individual has a criminal record is entirely in line with a philosophy of using community and peer pressure to act as a deterrent to crime - I'll leave aside the question of the value of deterrence in crime management for a moment - and allowing people to be forewarned with regard to those with a criminal record. After all, many people would have few qualms offerring a job to someone with a minor offence committed many years ago, but most people would have more qualms about taking on a career criminal.
and the FSF code in a typical Linux distribution. You might be suprised that it's all FSF software but the kernel!
Yes, for example, those well known pieces of FSF code like XFree86, apache, vixie-cron, and sendmail.
Does Metallica and Dr Dre consist of 75% of the music industry?
And should we count Dre's opinion anyway, given he is guilty of exactly the crime he complains about.
1. I'm willing to bet that most Americans, and even most government officials have at least one skeleton in their closet. Electronic evesdropping offers the potential for blackmail, and it does so unevenly. Inevitably those in power can use evesdropping to hurt those challenging their position, while their opponents have less potential to retaliate. Closer controls of evesdropping eliminates this potential for the unethical to prosper.
The truth of this proposition can be trivially seen in the FBI's attempts to blackmail Martin Luther King by threatening to expose his extramarital affairs unless he stopped his involvement in the Civil Rights movement. If one wishes to venture into the realms of (fairly well-supported) rumour, consider the suggestion that the Mafia was allowed to prosper in the United States, untouched by the FBI, largely because they threatend to expose J. Edgar Hoover's penchant for cross dressing and male "companions".
We haven't gotten to the surface of Uranus for much the same reason we haven't gotten to the surface of Saturn.
That's because the black helicopters would come for all the children in the US! Beware the One World Government!
But seriously, I'm impressed that many countries have signed.
However, this isnt about rights.
That's certainly what framers of the arguments in favour of providing minors with no rights would have one believe. I beg to differ. Moreover, having already acknowledged that Yes, children have rights as persons. it seems a little disingenious to then claim This is about what is or is not in the best interest of the child. and imply that a minor's ability to exercise his or her rights do not enter into the picture. In what way is it advantageous to deny said minot the ability to exercise rights? What about the learning experiances associated with said rights? Are some minors to wait until adulthood to learn basic life-lessons? In what way is this utile?
You go on to say:
Rights are based upon the assumption that the given person has the capacity for rational independent thought and the ability to take responsibility for their actions [...] ...the event which marks the State's recognition of an individual's capacity to take responsibility for himself is the 18th birthday.
In short, a long-winded exposition of the notion that the excercise of rights is tied to the notion of moral agency and the assertion that the recognition of moral agency is tied to the 18th birthday (except for liquor).
The tying of moral agency to rights is a fairly standard argument, and one I find little or no fault with. Your argument that follows on, however, is fundamentally flawed because it is based on the premise - which you yourself acknowldge is false - that moral agency is some sort of binary switch the state and society recognise as being activated at age 18. While it is the case that one enters one's majority at 18 in most Western nations, most Western nations also recognise elements of moral agency, with the implicit rights thereof, well before 18. Most nations will allow a minor to face trial by their early teens, which clearly undermines your assertion that ...the given child does not have the capacity to make those choices itself. since the customs and legal systems of most Western nations consider a child perfectly capable of making decisions about at least issues of the most serious sort. Otherwise, a 14 year old could not be tried for murder.
A cursory glance at the ages at which various rights accrue reinforce this impression; at 16, for example, any New Zealand minor, most UK minors, and many European and US minors have the right to make judgements relating to sexual activity - judgements which will be upheld as valid by the legal system. Having sex with a 15 year old in New Zealand can land you in jail if a parent objects, but having sex with a 16 year old will only land you in jail if they objected.
In short: our legal and social norms recognise that children have varying degrees of moral agency and, implicitly, rights as they work through their teenage years, yet the ACLU are prepared to ditch those rights for the expediency of their adult constituency. Bad form.
There is a very large body of work on paternalism and related issues in philosophy. A library is nearby, no doubt. Check it out.
I suppose I should be grateful you managed to restrain yourself to only one snide comment in your post. Perhaps you should spend less time directing other to libraries, and more time in them, preferably boning up on rhetoric, logic, and moral philosophy.
But in this case I don't think ACLU is backing a corperate solution, instead they are saying that a number of solutions exist without government intervention
The problem is that they're lending a de facto weight to privatizing censorship; I realise that in this case they're only trying to use it as a tactic to get the law struck down, but one of the reasons we see US state and federal government efforts to foist commercial products on libraries and schools is because opponents of the CDA used censorware to undermine the CDA - yet the CDA was arguably less damaging to expression that most private filters.
It isn't about choosing the lesser of evils, it is about keeping the choices in the hands of the individuals not a company or government.
In a sense, I agree, modulo the rights of minors to be able to explore things their parents don't agree with - if a 17 thinks she's bisexual, I don't see that Fundamentalist Christian parents should exert an absolute right to prevent her trying to get information to help her make decisions - but in a practical sense, one often has to choose between the lesser of two evils.
Also, what's so magical about these ages?
The problem with ages is that they're often poor measures of maturity; you're quite right. I can think of 25 year olds that aren't maure enough to conduct their sexual affairs and probably won't be when they're 45. And I'm sure there are 14 year olds who are. Problem is that maturity tests present some problems on a couple of levels:
They're cumbersome: sure, it would be nice if the age at which individuals can do stuff was tuned to the age they can handle it at, but the infrastructure required to asses this would be huge; consider the system required for drivers licenses. Age based rights are practical, even if they're often crummy in some ways, and, at some point, convenience needs to be a consideration in governance.
They can retard growth: One of the classic answers to the problems associated with young people screwing up at various things (sex, driving, drinking) is often to raise the age at which they're allowed to start trying them - for example, since 18-25 year old males are usually (in .nz, anyway) the worst idiots behind the wheel of a car, restrict them from getting a driver's license until they are 25, instead of leting them start at 16. What this fails to take into consideration is that part of the reason people make poor decisions when they first have access to a thing is that many, heck, most people need to get burned once or twice before they learn the lessons needed to behave sensibly. So a test of one's ability to handle a particular set of rights may permanently disenfranchise people who just need to make a couple of low-grade screwups before they start getting it right - but without those screwups, will never be able to get it right.
One of the problems I have with the ACLU's tactics in fighting censorship bills is the de facto legitimisation they are handing to the notion of privatized censorship.
Why? Well, privatized censorship is usually worse, not better, than government censorship in countries which are fundamentally free. Don't believe me? Go have look at the industry-backed censorship of the comics industy from the late 50's through to the early 80', which went way beond anything that could ever have been imposed by a government authority the industry had decided to self censor in an effort to avoid government regulation, and in the process bowdlerised the medium to a far greater extent than the government ever would have.
Similarly, the system of movie censorship in the United States strikes me as just plain insane, and I live in a country with government censorship. Yet movies are passed far more liberally here, and material which either never makes it to US cinemas, or only shows in 50, is accepted in New Zealand because the government-legislated censorship is concerned with the extreme cases of what society considers dangerous (positive depictions of rape, sex with children, etc), rather than what a bunch of industry-appointed individuals consider might cause more controversy than is good (ie might not increase ticket sales).
The ACLU is IMO playing a dangerous games, whose outcome could have a perverse effect in terms of chilling speech more, not less.
I certainly find it troubling that free speech advocates are basically flagging any notion of childrens' rights in the censorship debate. It becomes even more bizaare when one considers that the ACLU are willing to defend the notion that neo-Nazis have the right to free speech, on the grounds that failing to defend the most repugnant members of the community will lead to a loss of freedom for all, but are happy to allow US 17 year olds to be treated as their parents' chattel in the matter of their freedoms.
Hands up anyone who, as a teenager, wanted to look at stuff, or read things, or held opinions their parents didn't like? Hands up who's enthused about the notion you shouldn't have been treated as anything other than an extension of your parents?
The funny thing is, of course, that the US, like most Western nations, does have a firm notion that children have rights that over-ride their parents'. A parent can't molest or beat their children, because children have a right to a physically safe environment. They can't pull their kids out of school at 11 to work in a factory and boost the family income, because kids have a right to a decent education (or, failing that, whatever they get at the local school).
But the ACLU is happy to allow parents to exercise total control over a 17 year old's browsing habits, even though it may not be best for the long term development of the seventeen year old.
You are Al Gore and I claim my iron-fisted control over the Internet.
(You are aware that Al Gore suggested more control over material on the Internet would be a good way of stopping people from getting confused and "making bad decisions" in a speech a view years back, right?)
For some reason (I blame the Puritans 8) the English speaking West has an utterly warped view of sex, and on keeping children away from sex (where "children" seems to include, eg, 21 year olds if you're the US vice-president's wife).
This leads to insane anomalies, such as a 16 year old being able to view graphic depictions of violence being perpetrated for yucks, while people having sex in even the most conservative context (loving relationship), never mind fun, is walled away behind felony statutes. Heck, in many parts of the English-speaking world, people can legally have sex before they can view it. Which is nuts.
Meanwhile, other parts of the world worry more about, eg, the productizing of childhood (eg, Sweden's restrictions on advertising to children), or promoting the notion that violence is a good and fun way to solve problems (Germany's restrictions on pro-violence games). You'll forgive me if I think those countries have their heads screwed on right - I'd rather 14 year olds get the message that sex is natural and enjoyable (in the right circumstances) than thinking that beating people up is neat.
his thoughts on Open Source vs. Everything Else,
Broadcast, of course, with an end-to-end proprietary player whose manufacturer has aggresively attacked anyone attempting to reverse engineer players or servers.
Nice graphics, multiple roles, multi-platform, decent physics, customisable ships, missions, trading... The list goes on.
If this puppy lives up to its billing, I've just found a great way of wasting a few months.
I had one this long weekend. I started getting spam from my ISP. Not, you understand, a free ISP where Ive agreed to recieve spam, but an ISP where I pay for my Internet access.
So now the weasels are spamming me on behalf of their "business partners." While they certainly won't be my ISP past this weekend, and thier business partners (a nominally legitimate firm) will be getting told how pissed off I am), it's a pretty good example of the problem, with a slightly different spin.
Of course, this example raises it to a whole new level. Had it been the business spamming me, I could have gone after them. Instead, my ISP will doubtless simply retrospectively change their T&Cs to include, "and you will accept any crap our partners give us a kick-back for".
And if you're considering joining IHUG in .au or .nz, don't. Since you'll end up paying for a mountain of unsolicited crap in your inbox.
Yeah, but my first thought was still, "whoa, E-Type clone." It wasn't until I read the caption that I started scratching my head for possile Ferrari models it resembled.
Perhaps they're assuming the Ferrari will come to mind in the states more than the Jag. In any case, I can't see the point in kitting out an MX-5 to look like somehing else; it's IMO a classic in its own right.
Is it just me, or are some of the mods in the car show just plain nuts? Putting a low-rider set on a Landcruiser? WTF? And that kit to make an MX-5 look like a Ferrari makes it look more like an E-type. No bad thing, but it seems to have failed in its objective.
This cracks me up. Recall the the Mach 5 if you will, with its three projectile-looking front missles, difficult to see headlights, lack of roof, and other entirely unsafe, and un-roadworthy characteristics.
It seems an odd way to promote road saftey. I mean, heck, if you want to promote road safety with fast cars, why not just use F1 or Indy cars - hell, at least their drivers can survive 250 km/h + crashes.
Danger, Will Robinson! Improper use of an apostrophe! That shoud, of course, have been Katz's.
Converting all my files to .zip format, because back when pkzip was da bomb on PCs, I had an Amiga (hell, I still have all my old Amigas). What I do remember, is racing compression programs and benchmarking compression rations between the iterations of LHA and PKZIP in order to get bragging rights in the teenage geek arguments of "my computer is better than yours". So I may not have used PKZIP, but it gave me hours of fun, anyway.
That's kind of sad 8)
But not as sad as someone talented drinking themselves to death at 37. Condolences to Katzs' family and friends.