I assumed that if he really wanted to work on compilers or kernels, then it must be a personal interest.
And that's a horrible assumption. He wants to work on compilers and kernels because he spent a lot of time and money being taught to work on compilers and kernels in college and he has also been taught that a college degree is a requirement for a job in the software field. So, naturally, he assumes that his time was not wasted and he might be required to put some of those skills to use in the real world.
Unfortunately, he likely won't ever get to even *look* at the code for a compiler, let alone write any in his career. In fact, he might not even be asked for a college degree. College is a waste of time and money for most people because they spend a lot of effort teaching things that are of little value in the real world.
It has nothing to do with "working for the man". It has to do with the fact that it doesn't take thousands of CS graduates per year to maintain the handful of compilers and kernels in widespread use in the world.
You *are* old if you worked during college. These days, college is an expensive, full-time responsibility. Student loans come with high interest rates. The job market is treacherous, to say the least. Failure to obtain a degree, let alone get a job quickly after college, is financially crippling. Working a minimum wage job comes nowhere close to making up for the lost opportunity cost of time that could be spent studying, and making better grades. And college students aren't usually considered for jobs that make more than minimum wage.
I will agree that there is a huge disconnect between academia and the workplace. But it sounds like you aren't aware of the realities of college.
Additionally, speaking as someone who didn't graduate but who has lots of "front-line experience" that you claim to value, somehow I doubt you would even consider me for a job I have been doing quite successfully for over six years.
I'm sure by "xenophobic bullshit" you mean the "us versus them" "war on terror", preceded by the red scare. But there are different types of xenophobia, not all of which benefit the military/industrial complex.
Profit-seeking producers in a capitalistic society will seek to 1) monopolize natural resources and 2) use them to create low-quality products for as wide a market as possible. US companies are basically the experiment that proves this model almost without exception.
It's obvious how global military adventurism helps to realize this goal. It's not so obvious how opening the borders and importing third-worlders to the US creates a new market of consumers for American cheeze-whiz-inspired mass-produced garbage, opens foreign countries' resources to American control, and furthers the same goal of maximizing corporate profits.
Xenophobia can be quite healthy for Americans when it isn't being used to manipulate them against their own interests.
It's simply foolish to ignore the suggestions of new hires. By the time that I'm fully "trained" on the job, if there actually is training, I will be completely unmotivated to attempt to try to change the practices of the 40 other people in my department.
Instead I will be doing one of two things, depending on the state of the company at the time. If the company (and my salary) is growing, I will be working to entrench my position and responsibilities, so that I can kick my feet up every afternoon and demand an assistant along with everyone else in the company. If the company is not growing, I will be padding my resume with new skills and searching for someplace else to work. Depending on how inefficient your practices are, "someplace else" is likely to be your competitor who is more willing to listen to my suggestions.
This is how white-collar corporate America works. To pretend otherwise is naive.
I couldn't possibly agree more. The work environment in the vast majority of businesses is oppressive, to say the least. It is truly tragic that American businesses have adopted a culture that is opposed to telecommuting. But it's not just telecommuting. For a "capitalist" society, our businesses are completely unable to evaluate employees based on cost/performance, and instead work to weed out differences even when they are ultimately more productive.
With the current economic crisis, more recent graduates will choose to go into business for themselves rather than navigate the murky waters of corporate America. It is not easy, and requires a wide skillset far outside the narrowly-defined regimen of a CS degree. And while it will be difficult for many of them, it is vital to a functional market that businesses (even large ones) be deprived of human capital when the work environment and compensation they offer are not in line with the market.
Unfortunately, it is also not good for the economy as a whole when talented, educated people choose to be under-employed in small businesses rather than having access to the vast physical capital of corporate America. In a functional economy, (absent intervention, cronyism and bail-outs) that capital would eventually be re-allocated to successful small businesses more able to make effective use of it. I'm not so sure about ours, though.
We also know that in 95% of deployments it can be bypassed trivially and only serves to piss off productive endusers. And in the other 5% of instances, a competent admin is present who can accomplish the exact same thing in Linux with just a bit more effort.
In short, it serves absolutely no purpose other than to give incompetent Windows admins a false sense of security and accomplishment, and Microsoft a legion of loyal bleating idiots willing to purchase their shoddy, overpriced software.
I know what it does. I just don't find any of it to be very compelling.
But since you keep asserting that Windows "domain infrastructure" is very valuable and cheap, why don't you tell us more about what you find so useful?
The only advantage you've pointed out so far is the ability to quickly move machines around between "customized departments", which I'm assuming is primarily related to printer settings.
Quite frankly, I'm aware of the epidemic of middle-managers who like to re-arrange their cubicles every six months, and I find the practice to be retarded. Even so, Linux package managers enable configuration settings (any configuration setting, not just printers) and installed software, as well as *groups* of configuration settings and installed software, *with dependencies*, to be defined and installed and removed easily and quickly.
Computers, at least those running Linux, should only rarely need to be physically moved. As I pointed out, Linux package managers are mature and flexible enough to completely redefine a given computer's role without physically moving it.
But, hey, I don't know. Maybe you have some good reason why weak pasty Linux admins should start migrating their desktop computers all over the building like Windows admins do? For exercise?
Windows admins typically need some checkboxes to click in order to give them a sense of authority and accomplishment, along with some buzzword-laden "policy enforcement" protocol-speak to regale their boss with, in order to give the impression that they impart value to the enterprise.
Whether any of it is necessary or actually accomplishes anything in the way of promoting productive work or preventing users from screwing up their systems is completely beside the point.
The only point is to give the impression that the admin is in "control" of the "network systems". The fact that a stray boot floppy or any of a handful of zero-day exploits (or even something as mundane as an end-user hacking around restrictions with links to cmd.exe and rundll) completely undermines their "authority" makes absolutely no difference. To the average pointy-haired-boss, Windows is a bastion of command and control (and therefore productive employees) and their trusty Windows admin is the gateway to maintaining law and order in the corporate environment.
(usually lithium carbonate -- $5-7/kg)... Show me where the expensive raw materials are in this list.
You're right that this isn't particularly expensive, but it is more expensive than steel at less than $0.50/lb or aluminum at approx. $1/lb which is what is used on every other car. Copper motor windings are also more expensive than steel and aluminum.
Secondly, since the battery is a bigger cost (which provides benefits in terms of operations costs), it makes more sense to build out of lighter materials in an EV than it does in a gasoline car -- you raise the body cost but lower the pack cost.
This is only true when the benefits of using an electric drivetrain (subsidies, lower operation costs) are large enough to make up for the increased cost of both the expensive drivetrain and the expensive body components. Otherwise, the economic viability of lightweight and aerodynamic body materials is completely independent of the economic viability of electric drivetrains.
Absent a large enough benefit in operational savings, choosing an expensive body part because you chose to use an expensive drivetrain will never make your car more economical than a car that uses a cheap drivetrain with the same expensive body parts.
And this seems to be the path the automotive industry is currently on. If carbon taxes are imposed, electricity prices are set to rise faster than the cost of gasoline and natural gas. The lower manufacturing costs of aerodynamic, lightweight gasoline cars already outweigh the operational cost savings of electric cars, and the operational cost benefits of electric vehicles appear to be shrinking.
Pontificating morons, talking of man and god and law while they suck up the most tax dollars and have the highest rates of divorce and general ass-backwardness in the entire nation.
I will point out that Oklahoma, at least, is probably the *only* state that consistently sends representatives to Congress who vote against sending more tax dollars to worthless morons in Oklahoma and elsewhere. So what's your excuse?
You give god too much credit to suppose that denial of his existence is a fundamental belief rather than a mere consequence of a belief in logical positivism.
The Bible never actually says anything about how long it took to create the world (unless, of course, you take a literal look at the Bible, and then it's 6 days).
You know, sometimes I marvel at how, despite the overwhelming odds of complete failure, evolution can create as complex a web of interdependent systems as a human.
I think that the vast majority of people would have to be seriously defective, somehow, for natural selection to have a strong effect. And yet I look around, and most people are quite healthy, and functional, and capable of working and reading and writing and reproducing. And the majority of children, even without the small amount of postnatal care that Western medicine provides, would survive into adulthood to be (by most criteria) perfectly functional people. And of the millions of children born annually, most of them do not have third arms or twelve toes or weird horns or hair on their eyeballs. And the vast majority can not only easily breathe air and digest foods but even heal wounds and withstand bacterial infection. It's really amazing when you think about it.
But then I see something like this; a post, in the middle of a rather serious public intellectual discussion about logic and religion and matters of deep consideration; a post, so utterly devoid of meaning or even review as to call into question not only the judgment of it's author, but the purely horrifying Lovecraftian processes that must have spawned it. Every once in a while I see something like this and it reminds me of how the rest of you drooling retards are mostly just thinly-veiled automatons masquerading as thinking people, barely managing to do a slightly better job of interpreting and regurgitating what you have heard than a twelve-line Perl script; that it's a miracle you manage to continue breathing and using indoor plumbing despite what should be crippling mental defects. And it temporarily restores my faith in evolution.
Legitimization of the CDS market is absolutely not a solution. As it is now, it is nothing more than fraud. But even with a clearing house, it is little more than unregulated insurance. Any bank or company stupid enough to have participated in it should have been sent to bankruptcy.
The same goes for the stock market, by the way. You idiots complaining that your 401k's have tanked, because your government encouraged you to invest in a derivative market of which 90% of people are completely ignorant, get what you deserve. We would all be better off if you invested in something more tangible.
That's right, I said stocks were derivatives. The value of a stock is dependent upon the first order derivative, or rate of change, of a company's assets. You are not buying a part of a company. You are betting that it's sales will go up.
Most of the problems with desktop Linux at that time revolved around the fact that you need to need to break the law to in Red Hat's country of origin to distribute a useable system
I won't argue with the other two, but this one is not correct.
1. Redhat doesn't make money selling to individuals. They make money selling to businesses.
2. Business desktops do not require multimedia codecs.
Other than that, the biggest change is that the US economy is now in recession. Linux adoption is strongly anti-cyclical. In a growing economy, you add features. In a shrinking economy, you cut costs. Linux desktops would not add features for the vast majority of users. Using Linux mostly cuts costs related to maintenance, licensing, and security breaches. Most of the problems with desktop Linux four years ago revolved around the misconception that Excel needed to be on every desktop, and that Linux was unsuited to provide that.
When RedHat made it's "workstation" more expensive than Windows XP, and ensured that Fedora was a buggy, unsupported test-bed for new technologies, it effectively abandoned the Linux business desktop market.
These "virtual desktops" are not new, either. RedHat had these types of systems as early as FC2. They just decided not to sell them. Had RedHat not abandoned this product line years ago, they would have made significant inroads in corporate Linux desktop deployment by now.
Instead they left the market to Ubuntu and SuSE/Novell, neither of whom have the clout to effect US corporate adoption of Linux on the desktop.
In the very, very long run, something like this has a good chance of being economically viable.
Okay well if you're talking about a span of thousands of years, then I suppose so. Otherwise, it would have to be an extremely weird mix of circumstances (high water prices, low electricity costs, high transport costs) to cause this to become economical any time before the Earth is entirely paved over with development.
So....your idea is that sudden global warming (a generation) will only require us to change electrical generation.
Of course not, that's absurd. And it's not even close to what I said. Global warming will require us to change the way we power our entire society, regardless of how sudden it is.
But I still don't see how losing farmland to drought would make anything more than single-story greenhouses cost-effective.
Read it again. The plants get light 24 hrs a day from grow lights. The people are just there to make use of all the wasted heat that the grow lights produce.
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I assumed that if he really wanted to work on compilers or kernels, then it must be a personal interest.
And that's a horrible assumption. He wants to work on compilers and kernels because he spent a lot of time and money being taught to work on compilers and kernels in college and he has also been taught that a college degree is a requirement for a job in the software field. So, naturally, he assumes that his time was not wasted and he might be required to put some of those skills to use in the real world.
Unfortunately, he likely won't ever get to even *look* at the code for a compiler, let alone write any in his career. In fact, he might not even be asked for a college degree. College is a waste of time and money for most people because they spend a lot of effort teaching things that are of little value in the real world.
It has nothing to do with "working for the man". It has to do with the fact that it doesn't take thousands of CS graduates per year to maintain the handful of compilers and kernels in widespread use in the world.
I am a tech writer, you insensitive clod!
Not for long! I'm programming robots to do technical writing.
You *are* old if you worked during college. These days, college is an expensive, full-time responsibility. Student loans come with high interest rates. The job market is treacherous, to say the least. Failure to obtain a degree, let alone get a job quickly after college, is financially crippling. Working a minimum wage job comes nowhere close to making up for the lost opportunity cost of time that could be spent studying, and making better grades. And college students aren't usually considered for jobs that make more than minimum wage.
I will agree that there is a huge disconnect between academia and the workplace. But it sounds like you aren't aware of the realities of college.
Additionally, speaking as someone who didn't graduate but who has lots of "front-line experience" that you claim to value, somehow I doubt you would even consider me for a job I have been doing quite successfully for over six years.
I'm sure by "xenophobic bullshit" you mean the "us versus them" "war on terror", preceded by the red scare. But there are different types of xenophobia, not all of which benefit the military/industrial complex.
Profit-seeking producers in a capitalistic society will seek to 1) monopolize natural resources and 2) use them to create low-quality products for as wide a market as possible. US companies are basically the experiment that proves this model almost without exception.
It's obvious how global military adventurism helps to realize this goal. It's not so obvious how opening the borders and importing third-worlders to the US creates a new market of consumers for American cheeze-whiz-inspired mass-produced garbage, opens foreign countries' resources to American control, and furthers the same goal of maximizing corporate profits.
Xenophobia can be quite healthy for Americans when it isn't being used to manipulate them against their own interests.
It's simply foolish to ignore the suggestions of new hires. By the time that I'm fully "trained" on the job, if there actually is training, I will be completely unmotivated to attempt to try to change the practices of the 40 other people in my department.
Instead I will be doing one of two things, depending on the state of the company at the time. If the company (and my salary) is growing, I will be working to entrench my position and responsibilities, so that I can kick my feet up every afternoon and demand an assistant along with everyone else in the company. If the company is not growing, I will be padding my resume with new skills and searching for someplace else to work. Depending on how inefficient your practices are, "someplace else" is likely to be your competitor who is more willing to listen to my suggestions.
This is how white-collar corporate America works. To pretend otherwise is naive.
I couldn't possibly agree more. The work environment in the vast majority of businesses is oppressive, to say the least. It is truly tragic that American businesses have adopted a culture that is opposed to telecommuting. But it's not just telecommuting. For a "capitalist" society, our businesses are completely unable to evaluate employees based on cost/performance, and instead work to weed out differences even when they are ultimately more productive.
With the current economic crisis, more recent graduates will choose to go into business for themselves rather than navigate the murky waters of corporate America. It is not easy, and requires a wide skillset far outside the narrowly-defined regimen of a CS degree. And while it will be difficult for many of them, it is vital to a functional market that businesses (even large ones) be deprived of human capital when the work environment and compensation they offer are not in line with the market.
Unfortunately, it is also not good for the economy as a whole when talented, educated people choose to be under-employed in small businesses rather than having access to the vast physical capital of corporate America. In a functional economy, (absent intervention, cronyism and bail-outs) that capital would eventually be re-allocated to successful small businesses more able to make effective use of it. I'm not so sure about ours, though.
When the hell did companies start hiring someone with out 5+ years [insert language/tech]?
When most companies stopped investing in using just one or two languages and instead jumped from language to language less than every five years.
This was around the same time that most of the value of a company began to be attributed to the "brand" rather than to the product.
You miss the subtle difference between effective system security and pointless, easily-bypassed corporate "policy" restrictions.
Linux admins promote the former and dismiss the latter. Windows admins just try to keep from drooling on themselves.
think. We know exactly what it's used for.
We also know that in 95% of deployments it can be bypassed trivially and only serves to piss off productive endusers. And in the other 5% of instances, a competent admin is present who can accomplish the exact same thing in Linux with just a bit more effort.
In short, it serves absolutely no purpose other than to give incompetent Windows admins a false sense of security and accomplishment, and Microsoft a legion of loyal bleating idiots willing to purchase their shoddy, overpriced software.
There is no option to not let users use terminals.
Um, yes there is. Have you ever even used Linux?
I know what it does. I just don't find any of it to be very compelling.
But since you keep asserting that Windows "domain infrastructure" is very valuable and cheap, why don't you tell us more about what you find so useful?
The only advantage you've pointed out so far is the ability to quickly move machines around between "customized departments", which I'm assuming is primarily related to printer settings.
Quite frankly, I'm aware of the epidemic of middle-managers who like to re-arrange their cubicles every six months, and I find the practice to be retarded. Even so, Linux package managers enable configuration settings (any configuration setting, not just printers) and installed software, as well as *groups* of configuration settings and installed software, *with dependencies*, to be defined and installed and removed easily and quickly.
Computers, at least those running Linux, should only rarely need to be physically moved. As I pointed out, Linux package managers are mature and flexible enough to completely redefine a given computer's role without physically moving it.
But, hey, I don't know. Maybe you have some good reason why weak pasty Linux admins should start migrating their desktop computers all over the building like Windows admins do? For exercise?
Windows admins typically need some checkboxes to click in order to give them a sense of authority and accomplishment, along with some buzzword-laden "policy enforcement" protocol-speak to regale their boss with, in order to give the impression that they impart value to the enterprise.
Whether any of it is necessary or actually accomplishes anything in the way of promoting productive work or preventing users from screwing up their systems is completely beside the point.
The only point is to give the impression that the admin is in "control" of the "network systems". The fact that a stray boot floppy or any of a handful of zero-day exploits (or even something as mundane as an end-user hacking around restrictions with links to cmd.exe and rundll) completely undermines their "authority" makes absolutely no difference. To the average pointy-haired-boss, Windows is a bastion of command and control (and therefore productive employees) and their trusty Windows admin is the gateway to maintaining law and order in the corporate environment.
(usually lithium carbonate -- $5-7/kg)... Show me where the expensive raw materials are in this list.
You're right that this isn't particularly expensive, but it is more expensive than steel at less than $0.50/lb or aluminum at approx. $1/lb which is what is used on every other car. Copper motor windings are also more expensive than steel and aluminum.
Secondly, since the battery is a bigger cost (which provides benefits in terms of operations costs), it makes more sense to build out of lighter materials in an EV than it does in a gasoline car -- you raise the body cost but lower the pack cost.
This is only true when the benefits of using an electric drivetrain (subsidies, lower operation costs) are large enough to make up for the increased cost of both the expensive drivetrain and the expensive body components. Otherwise, the economic viability of lightweight and aerodynamic body materials is completely independent of the economic viability of electric drivetrains.
Absent a large enough benefit in operational savings, choosing an expensive body part because you chose to use an expensive drivetrain will never make your car more economical than a car that uses a cheap drivetrain with the same expensive body parts.
And this seems to be the path the automotive industry is currently on. If carbon taxes are imposed, electricity prices are set to rise faster than the cost of gasoline and natural gas. The lower manufacturing costs of aerodynamic, lightweight gasoline cars already outweigh the operational cost savings of electric cars, and the operational cost benefits of electric vehicles appear to be shrinking.
Pontificating morons, talking of man and god and law while they suck up the most tax dollars and have the highest rates of divorce and general ass-backwardness in the entire nation.
I will point out that Oklahoma, at least, is probably the *only* state that consistently sends representatives to Congress who vote against sending more tax dollars to worthless morons in Oklahoma and elsewhere. So what's your excuse?
You give god too much credit to suppose that denial of his existence is a fundamental belief rather than a mere consequence of a belief in logical positivism.
The Bible never actually says anything about how long it took to create the world (unless, of course, you take a literal look at the Bible, and then it's 6 days).
You know, sometimes I marvel at how, despite the overwhelming odds of complete failure, evolution can create as complex a web of interdependent systems as a human.
I think that the vast majority of people would have to be seriously defective, somehow, for natural selection to have a strong effect. And yet I look around, and most people are quite healthy, and functional, and capable of working and reading and writing and reproducing. And the majority of children, even without the small amount of postnatal care that Western medicine provides, would survive into adulthood to be (by most criteria) perfectly functional people. And of the millions of children born annually, most of them do not have third arms or twelve toes or weird horns or hair on their eyeballs. And the vast majority can not only easily breathe air and digest foods but even heal wounds and withstand bacterial infection. It's really amazing when you think about it.
But then I see something like this; a post, in the middle of a rather serious public intellectual discussion about logic and religion and matters of deep consideration; a post, so utterly devoid of meaning or even review as to call into question not only the judgment of it's author, but the purely horrifying Lovecraftian processes that must have spawned it. Every once in a while I see something like this and it reminds me of how the rest of you drooling retards are mostly just thinly-veiled automatons masquerading as thinking people, barely managing to do a slightly better job of interpreting and regurgitating what you have heard than a twelve-line Perl script; that it's a miracle you manage to continue breathing and using indoor plumbing despite what should be crippling mental defects. And it temporarily restores my faith in evolution.
Legitimization of the CDS market is absolutely not a solution. As it is now, it is nothing more than fraud. But even with a clearing house, it is little more than unregulated insurance. Any bank or company stupid enough to have participated in it should have been sent to bankruptcy.
The same goes for the stock market, by the way. You idiots complaining that your 401k's have tanked, because your government encouraged you to invest in a derivative market of which 90% of people are completely ignorant, get what you deserve. We would all be better off if you invested in something more tangible.
That's right, I said stocks were derivatives. The value of a stock is dependent upon the first order derivative, or rate of change, of a company's assets. You are not buying a part of a company. You are betting that it's sales will go up.
Most of the problems with desktop Linux at that time revolved around the fact that you need to need to break the law to in Red Hat's country of origin to distribute a useable system
I won't argue with the other two, but this one is not correct.
1. Redhat doesn't make money selling to individuals. They make money selling to businesses.
2. Business desktops do not require multimedia codecs.
Other than that, the biggest change is that the US economy is now in recession. Linux adoption is strongly anti-cyclical. In a growing economy, you add features. In a shrinking economy, you cut costs. Linux desktops would not add features for the vast majority of users. Using Linux mostly cuts costs related to maintenance, licensing, and security breaches. Most of the problems with desktop Linux four years ago revolved around the misconception that Excel needed to be on every desktop, and that Linux was unsuited to provide that.
When RedHat made it's "workstation" more expensive than Windows XP, and ensured that Fedora was a buggy, unsupported test-bed for new technologies, it effectively abandoned the Linux business desktop market.
These "virtual desktops" are not new, either. RedHat had these types of systems as early as FC2. They just decided not to sell them. Had RedHat not abandoned this product line years ago, they would have made significant inroads in corporate Linux desktop deployment by now.
Instead they left the market to Ubuntu and SuSE/Novell, neither of whom have the clout to effect US corporate adoption of Linux on the desktop.
You mean, like a robot, that pushes stuff around, in space?
Acrobat 9 doesn't exist for *nix. That should have been a clue.
First, we assume a spherical limitless energy source in the sky...
In the very, very long run, something like this has a good chance of being economically viable.
Okay well if you're talking about a span of thousands of years, then I suppose so. Otherwise, it would have to be an extremely weird mix of circumstances (high water prices, low electricity costs, high transport costs) to cause this to become economical any time before the Earth is entirely paved over with development.
So....your idea is that sudden global warming (a generation) will only require us to change electrical generation.
Of course not, that's absurd. And it's not even close to what I said. Global warming will require us to change the way we power our entire society, regardless of how sudden it is.
But I still don't see how losing farmland to drought would make anything more than single-story greenhouses cost-effective.
Those aren't used to grow chinese people, they're used to collect chinese people from the country for harvest.
Read it again. The plants get light 24 hrs a day from grow lights. The people are just there to make use of all the wasted heat that the grow lights produce.