Is all that really worth it to save a few hundred bucks per seat?
Depends - you;re counting immediate costs, not long-term.
When you consider the amount of retraining needed for each new version of MS Office to come out the pipe nowadays (starting with the stupid ribbon and going downhill from there), even with folks who are already mega-power-users on the thing? When you consider the never-ending EA agreement cycle (and that's the cheap way to do it when we talk these numbers)? When you consider that it takes fewer sysadmins to produce/maintain higher numbers of Linux servers? When you consider the higher downtime, Winrot, A/V and cleanups, and all the other headaches that are exclusive to Microsoft products?
I'd say the savings really do add up on the Linux side of the balance sheet.
Most cities/townships actually try to notify the businesses at least 3 months beforehand, and go out of their way (in most cases) to accommodate the businesses affected.
There's also the demonstrable need to do road maintenance, else the entrance to your business eventually winds up a potholed obstacle course.
Man, if you got your wish, the art would well and truly suck.;)
Besides, it'd never work in the practical realm. Communism tried that... failed miserably. Seems it opens things up for too many political operators to slide in and own the joint.
The first one was looking for some woman. I simply asked to speak to the supervisor, explained that I had just got the phone number, and that was that.
The second had some asshat of a debt collection company. After trying to convince them I wasn't that guy, and the chick on the other end not transferring me to a supervisor, I finally told them the following: "Put up or shut up - take me to court - I fucking dare you to sue me." I never heard from them again.
I like the recording thing you mentioned, though:)
...well, until some perp gets a competent lawyer (either during the trial or any of the appeals), who demands access to the thing for his own analysis on it. Fail to do that, and suddenly there's a reason for mistrial.
Not loo long ago, it used to be quite the opposite... Crysis, Unreal Tournament (towards the end of the series), and many more had hardware specs that, while they would technically run on ordinary machines, would almost demand that you go out and buy a fire-breather just to run the stuff. The reason why had less to do with developer ego than with the fact that graphics programming was still mostly in infancy back then, coupled with the fact that GPUs were fairly new tech. Hardware was also evolving pretty damned fast back then - nowadays most improvements are incremental at best.
(Though to be fair, id Software was historically pretty good about making games that ran fairly well on fairly crap specs.)
And then it'll stop being an overpriced joke where the only cool part is that you just paid 500 dollars to get a fancy LED on your case.
Oh wait, what the fuck is cool about that shit?
Admittedly, it was cool back in 1998 at the LAN parties - but only if you soldered the little bastard on yourself.
Same with the lucite case window, the jerry-rigged liquid cooling system, the LED lights inside, the massive power supply, and the ginormous fan bolted on the side - just to make it look as if your bargain-basement system actually needed the same CFM rating as a Peterbilt radiator fan**.
'course, those days are long-the-hell gone, but I'm man enough to admit that I got into it once. I'll even admit to a twinge of nostalgia when I think about it.
** true story - I bolted an old 12" Amstrad cooling fan onto the side of a case once, just to see my old LAN buddies' eyes pop out. At 110VAC (1/2 the rated voltage), it ran whisper quiet, but having to find an extra plug was a bitch sometimes.
FYI: CenturyLink already does #2, and their DSL service is crap....they used to satisfy condition #3 out in my area, until Charter moved in... at least 3/4 of my neighborhood immediately switched. I suspect the rest are marking time, waiting for their contracts to die off. With Dish doing uncapped Internet Satellite, I suspect options are only getting better for the typical (read: non-gaming) farmers and retirees who live out here.
Unless they start making only electric-firing cartridges (e.g. Remington's failed Etronic type), then make it so that the primer only kicks off after a super-funky software key exchange? Well, it is pretty trivial to take one of a zillion existing firing-pin trigger mechanism designs out there, and customize one to suit the gun.
Considering the existence of reloading gear and the stupendous mass of existing guns + ammunition? At low-end guessing, "long-term" would be at least a century before the stuff sitting around today got too expensive to use, even if you banned all existing "dumb" guns and ammunition today.
1) I'd like to see valid statistics on what actions are being demanded. Any poll that boils down to "do something, I don't care what" can mean nearly anything. 2) You do know that media loves to hype things, right?
That's cute - you assume that all hacks are digital.
You completely forgot that someone with a bit of machinist experience and a few decent tools could simply replace the whole damned trigger/firing-pin/whatever-else assembly.
Small point of order: The reason for that minor (at best) "fear" is because it causes a shitload of internal strife, a massive amount of resentment between employees, and overall, unless the salary is structured and/or standardized, it wrecks morale. Well, at least it does all of this for anyone not making the biggest salary in the department.
Incidentally, the opposite of being able to hire/fire at will is being able to apply-for/leave a job at will. That is, you're not forced to sign a contract that says you have to stay - you can find/get a better job and leave your current employer no matter what, and at any time.
Hellfire; if you write.NET or even PowerShell correctly it's perfectly readable. If you comment it correctly it can be perfectly maintainable, too (well, for as long as all the parts are non-obsolete, anyway).
But noOOoo.... everyone's gotta be the cleverest mofo in the effing room, forgetting all about the poor slob who has to maintain the damned thing 2 years later...
Nah - I chalk it up to incompetence this go 'round.
If they really wanted to troll, they'd chuck in a mention of how they should use it instead of C to write the FreeBSD kernel, or say that JS is somehow going to replace.NET.
I'm still wondering how Perl was discovered "during the advent of C and C++" . *boggles* . To wit: I sincerely doubt that Perl was around in 1969 or the early 1980's, FFS......that, or more likely, both submitter and editor need to look up what in the hell the word "advent" means.
So where exactly can one get one of these alleged jobs as a university prof that don't involve having an academic career and involve no stress?
I did one for six years.
I sort of fell into it: The state of Utah had a program which hired folks in the industry as profs for their Applied Tech College, and paid a decent (at the time) salary (I made about $50k when I left). It was a year-round position (they did have 9-month jobs), and to be honest, it really wasn't all that stressful for the first five years of it. Only in the last year (extreme budget cuts) did anything get ugly.
[...] Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air...."
...emphasis mine, which kind of explains the rest. Being a Humanities PhD? The tech equivalent is kind of like being a a PMP-certified project manager now, or being MCSE-certified admin in 2001. There's too many out there, more on the way, and so the market has no room for you.
Now if you have a PhD in chemistry, engineering, or a field where there is some chance of using it to get a kick-ass job out in private industry? Suddenly your chances of landing a solid job in academia (esp. with industry/applied experience) isn't so dismal, and any uni with a half-intelligent leadership know that in competing w/ the outside world, they have to offer something at least half as attractive.
Slashdot Mirror
Is all that really worth it to save a few hundred bucks per seat?
Depends - you;re counting immediate costs, not long-term.
When you consider the amount of retraining needed for each new version of MS Office to come out the pipe nowadays (starting with the stupid ribbon and going downhill from there), even with folks who are already mega-power-users on the thing? When you consider the never-ending EA agreement cycle (and that's the cheap way to do it when we talk these numbers)? When you consider that it takes fewer sysadmins to produce/maintain higher numbers of Linux servers? When you consider the higher downtime, Winrot, A/V and cleanups, and all the other headaches that are exclusive to Microsoft products?
I'd say the savings really do add up on the Linux side of the balance sheet.
Point of order:
Most cities/townships actually try to notify the businesses at least 3 months beforehand, and go out of their way (in most cases) to accommodate the businesses affected.
There's also the demonstrable need to do road maintenance, else the entrance to your business eventually winds up a potholed obstacle course.
Man, if you got your wish, the art would well and truly suck. ;)
Besides, it'd never work in the practical realm. Communism tried that... failed miserably. Seems it opens things up for too many political operators to slide in and own the joint.
As a bonus, you might even collect enough money to pay them back!
This, right here.
I had exactly two instances of this.
The first one was looking for some woman. I simply asked to speak to the supervisor, explained that I had just got the phone number, and that was that.
The second had some asshat of a debt collection company. After trying to convince them I wasn't that guy, and the chick on the other end not transferring me to a supervisor, I finally told them the following: "Put up or shut up - take me to court - I fucking dare you to sue me." I never heard from them again.
I like the recording thing you mentioned, though :)
...well, until some perp gets a competent lawyer (either during the trial or any of the appeals), who demands access to the thing for his own analysis on it. Fail to do that, and suddenly there's a reason for mistrial.
Not loo long ago, it used to be quite the opposite... Crysis, Unreal Tournament (towards the end of the series), and many more had hardware specs that, while they would technically run on ordinary machines, would almost demand that you go out and buy a fire-breather just to run the stuff. The reason why had less to do with developer ego than with the fact that graphics programming was still mostly in infancy back then, coupled with the fact that GPUs were fairly new tech. Hardware was also evolving pretty damned fast back then - nowadays most improvements are incremental at best.
(Though to be fair, id Software was historically pretty good about making games that ran fairly well on fairly crap specs.)
And then it'll stop being an overpriced joke where the only cool part is that you just paid 500 dollars to get a fancy LED on your case.
Oh wait, what the fuck is cool about that shit?
Admittedly, it was cool back in 1998 at the LAN parties - but only if you soldered the little bastard on yourself.
Same with the lucite case window, the jerry-rigged liquid cooling system, the LED lights inside, the massive power supply, and the ginormous fan bolted on the side - just to make it look as if your bargain-basement system actually needed the same CFM rating as a Peterbilt radiator fan**.
'course, those days are long-the-hell gone, but I'm man enough to admit that I got into it once. I'll even admit to a twinge of nostalgia when I think about it.
** true story - I bolted an old 12" Amstrad cooling fan onto the side of a case once, just to see my old LAN buddies' eyes pop out. At 110VAC (1/2 the rated voltage), it ran whisper quiet, but having to find an extra plug was a bitch sometimes.
Got no need to bash it - hell, I think he's allowed to do it all he wants. His servers, his rules.
Not sure anyone here ever agreed to charge $100/email during the previous conversations you refer to, though...
$390? You got 6 iPhones and an OC-12 on your bill or something?
Genuinely curious, because my crappy little Crackberry is paid for by the employer, and my 30mbps Internet is a mere $30/mo.
FYI: CenturyLink already does #2, and their DSL service is crap. ...they used to satisfy condition #3 out in my area, until Charter moved in... at least 3/4 of my neighborhood immediately switched. I suspect the rest are marking time, waiting for their contracts to die off. With Dish doing uncapped Internet Satellite, I suspect options are only getting better for the typical (read: non-gaming) farmers and retirees who live out here.
Unless they start making only electric-firing cartridges (e.g. Remington's failed Etronic type), then make it so that the primer only kicks off after a super-funky software key exchange? Well, it is pretty trivial to take one of a zillion existing firing-pin trigger mechanism designs out there, and customize one to suit the gun.
Considering the existence of reloading gear and the stupendous mass of existing guns + ammunition? At low-end guessing, "long-term" would be at least a century before the stuff sitting around today got too expensive to use, even if you banned all existing "dumb" guns and ammunition today.
This is a clever trick designed by Slashdot to make people RTFA.
You're not making me fall into that trap, by gum...
TFA points out that people are demanding action.
Couple o' bits:
1) I'd like to see valid statistics on what actions are being demanded. Any poll that boils down to "do something, I don't care what" can mean nearly anything.
2) You do know that media loves to hype things, right?
That's cute - you assume that all hacks are digital.
You completely forgot that someone with a bit of machinist experience and a few decent tools could simply replace the whole damned trigger/firing-pin/whatever-else assembly.
McVeigh's action were damned sure not defensive by any means, hence the fact that no sane person looks up to him.
That alone destroys what little argument you thought you had.
Small point of order: The reason for that minor (at best) "fear" is because it causes a shitload of internal strife, a massive amount of resentment between employees, and overall, unless the salary is structured and/or standardized, it wrecks morale. Well, at least it does all of this for anyone not making the biggest salary in the department.
Incidentally, the opposite of being able to hire/fire at will is being able to apply-for/leave a job at will. That is, you're not forced to sign a contract that says you have to stay - you can find/get a better job and leave your current employer no matter what, and at any time.
Err, it would be if you, like, you know... commented a little in the damned thing. ;)
Hellfire; if you write .NET or even PowerShell correctly it's perfectly readable. If you comment it correctly it can be perfectly maintainable, too (well, for as long as all the parts are non-obsolete, anyway).
But noOOoo.... everyone's gotta be the cleverest mofo in the effing room, forgetting all about the poor slob who has to maintain the damned thing 2 years later...
Nah - I chalk it up to incompetence this go 'round.
If they really wanted to troll, they'd chuck in a mention of how they should use it instead of C to write the FreeBSD kernel, or say that JS is somehow going to replace .NET.
(/me ducks and runs like hell...)
I'm still wondering how Perl was discovered "during the advent of C and C++" ...that, or more likely, both submitter and editor need to look up what in the hell the word "advent" means.
.
*boggles*
.
To wit: I sincerely doubt that Perl was around in 1969 or the early 1980's, FFS...
*ahem* ;)
So where exactly can one get one of these alleged jobs as a university prof that don't involve having an academic career and involve no stress?
I did one for six years.
I sort of fell into it: The state of Utah had a program which hired folks in the industry as profs for their Applied Tech College, and paid a decent (at the time) salary (I made about $50k when I left). It was a year-round position (they did have 9-month jobs), and to be honest, it really wasn't all that stressful for the first five years of it. Only in the last year (extreme budget cuts) did anything get ugly.
[...] Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ..."
...emphasis mine, which kind of explains the rest. Being a Humanities PhD? The tech equivalent is kind of like being a a PMP-certified project manager now, or being MCSE-certified admin in 2001. There's too many out there, more on the way, and so the market has no room for you.
Now if you have a PhD in chemistry, engineering, or a field where there is some chance of using it to get a kick-ass job out in private industry? Suddenly your chances of landing a solid job in academia (esp. with industry/applied experience) isn't so dismal, and any uni with a half-intelligent leadership know that in competing w/ the outside world, they have to offer something at least half as attractive.
You and every other person on this planet, you're an animal. With the requisite biological drives.
I agree, but are you saying we should never strive for better?