"The best education is that a child should play amongst beautiful things."
Yeah, right. Next time I go on a long flight, I'll make sure the plane was designed and maintained by people who "played amongst beautiful things" instead of learning their jobs.
To some degree that's true of IT workers as well. Many of the best advances in technology have been made by hackers who just enjoyed late
nights banging away at stuff in a very unstructured manner.
Non sequitur alert: "IT workers" != "hackers". C. R. Hoare wasn't a sysadmin. Neither were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, or any other significant innovator you can name.
Not one.
Playing video games in your office isn't the same thing as inventing new languages, my friend. Of course it's necessary for creative technical people to play with ideas, but that's got nothing to do with printer repairmen.
IT will never buy a product that eliminates itself.
True. But they can only stem the tide as long as management takes their word as gospel on all technical issues, and you can't fool all the people all the time.
They'll be fighting rearguard actions for years after the writing is on the wall, but their day will come, just like it did for the brontosaurus.
BTW, I'm not KTB.:) I've got eighty muddy doorstops all over my damn office . ..
everyone who has more creativity and technical expertise than yourself is a bad way to go
about making friends. And money.
You must've been one of those IT kids who dropped out of college to get rich on stock options at a company that went belly-up last year. Therefore, you missed out on . ..
Logic 101:
Non-sequiturs don't prove anything.
"Creativity" and "technical expertise" are the things I'm advocating, not the things I'm questioning. Your gibberish to the contrary is a cheap attempt to muddy the waters: You're attempting to claim that "creativity" and "technical expertise" are the same thing as laziness. And that's nonsense.
I approve very much of creativity and technical expertise, nor did I say a single word against them. I write C++ code for a living, and that requires more of both qualities than you'll ever have.
Playing video games instead of working does not demonstrate "creativity" or "technical expertise". It demonstrates laziness and irresponsibility. If you were creative -- and trust me, I've known a lot of creative people -- you'd feel a need to do create something. Get it?
Calling yourself "creative" because you can't hold a real job is pretty sad, you know that? If you spent half as much time learning a useful trade as you now spend excusing your shortcomings, you wouldn't have any shortcomings to excuse. And you'd be a lot happier.
Calling it a "troll" won't make it go away, Sparky. Sorry 'bout that.
I can't wait for the day that a secretary can configure an HP4000m in one of our outside offices
There's nothing you're doing to that thing that can't be done by a good setup program.
when she's done she can install that custom kernel and build our firewall
The "custom kernel" falls under "good setup program", and as for firewalls . . .
Firewalls! SECURITY!
Anybody ever notice how obsessed sysadmins are with security? Right. And here's why: It's the setup programs. They make things too easy. Any secretary can install her own copy of Word now, so the admins have to put a stop to that nonsense if they want to keep their jobs. Therefore they restrict installs to the admin user, and they stay on the payroll.
Sooner or later, of course, the people who have to pay the bills are going to figure that one out. In the meantime, hey -- I admire a good scam as much as anybody.:)
. . . uptight adults who've forgotten how to have a little fun each and every day. You need to lighten the
hell up!
Uh, right, right. "Lighten up". Sorry, guy, but what the venture capitalists learned last year is a funny little fact that a lot of people have known for a long time:
Somebody's gotta pay the fuckin' bills.
I know how mean it seems when Mommy and Daddy are tired after working all day and they don't have the energy to play cowboys and indians with you, but guess what?
How many 'professionals' are called into work on vacation by some luser^W co-worker saying that their printer
isn't working?
Okay, fine, you nap all week and then show up for an hour on Saturday. My heart bleeds for you, it really does -- but how much are you paid for this?! More than it's worth.
The simple fact is that any idiot can fix a printer. If there weren't an IT guy to handle that crap, people could do it for themselves. I'm not saying that you're an idiot or a bad person. I'm just saying that you're redundant and useless.
I have to say that I admire your tenacity, but let's face it: The day will come when somebody realizes that there's a lot of money going into your cube (office, whatever) and not a whole lot coming back out.
The future of IT is as a part-time hassle for non-specialists. Soon enough, the secretary will be able to handle 90% of the sysadmin's job, and the rest will be farmed out. At the cost of a few hours of overtime for the secretary every month, things will run just as smoothly as they do now.
Look at it this way: How many people employ a full-time driver/mechanic for their cars?
Not many. You have to have a lot of cars before hiring your own mechanic is cheaper than taking them to the garage.
Many, many studies (sorry, none at my fingertips) have shown that the most productive workers enjoy some level of "play time" in their jobs.
"Some level" != "absolutely any level".
Any competent professional enjoys his work. That's the difference between us and a burger flipper -- but it's not the same as doing nothing useful at all, which is what most IT people do.
Get it? Being hired to do fun, valuable work is fine. Being hired to do valuable work and then fucking off all dayis not fine.
How many companies have suffered because they can't afford the luxury of a wasteful, lazy, disruptive IT department?
How much money is squandered every year coddling overgrown kids who couldn't accept responsibility or do their jobs right?
Too busy playing with toys.
Sad, really.
Ironically, the death of the "dot com economy" -- another, much larger and more amusing manifestation of the same mindset -- has put a sufficient hurtin' on the economy that a) nobody can afford to humor these numbskulls any more, and b) nobody even has to worry about it, because all the numbskulls are suddenly pounding the pavement looking for jobs.
First let me say that I'm not trying to defend the anti-intellectual property zealots.
. . . and the fact that you have to say that proves that they've succeeded in clouding the issue to an alarming degree.
But I think that most slashdotters get all worked up about specific patents . . .
Yes, naturally: This is a standard propaganda tactic. Find a few rare, freakish "horror stories" -- or at least stories which seem horrible to a layman (which, let's face it, most Slashbots really are) -- and whip up some fear.
Standard stuff, if you're a demagogue. And it works: At this point, most Slashbots believe that all Intellectual Property rights are wrong. That's the message being sent, and they're eating it up.
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility,
-- Thomas Jefferson
You're right. Jefferson was surely no Communist: He was a relentless advocate of property rights, as regarded all properly then held to be property under the Constitution of the United States, which he helped draft.
Lincoln later rode roughshod over Jefferson's painstakingly established property rights in many ways, but that does not concern us at the moment.
The bottom line is this: Intellectual Property makes innovation and progress possible.
Period. End of story.
The sad, sick thing is that Slashbots have given themselves over so completely to the "my convenience above all" theory of "ethics" that they've actually succeeded in demonizing the word "innovation" around here, in their endless rhetorical assaults on the right of a business to . . . conduct business?! Yep.
Private property is the key difference between our system and Communism. I hope everyone is as disturbed as I am by Slashdot's bizarre and insupportable belief that intellectual property is a "special case" deserving of less protection under the law than any other kind of property.
It's a lot like the "drug exception" to Constitutional rights (primarily the Fourth Amendment, but also the Second and First in many cases), isn't it? And for the same reason: Mob hysteria abetted by scare-mongering propaganda. This article is a perfect example of the irresponsible demonization of private property rights w/r/t intellectual property.
Sorry, but you can't change the law and the truth just to suit your convenience.
Every friend of freedom . . . must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the U.S. into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
Ahh, "freedom" -- "for the children", no doubt.
Of course, you and Mr. Freedman don't mind people losing their freedom to the slavery of drug addiction. Nor do you mind the loss of freedom felt by those who are imprisoned in neighborhoods ruled by violent drug dealers. No, those losses of freedom don't bother you at all, do they? Of course not.
The true agenda of the Liberals is always laughably obvious.
Let's face it: Opposition to the war on drugs is entirely a matter of blind hysteria, media hype, and fudged or fictitious "facts". It's a boondoggle.
This year, I will propose a Drug Control Act to provide stricter penalties for those who traffic in LSD and other dangerous drugs with our people.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson (Democrat), 1968
And there it is, ladies and gentlemen. The "War on Drugs" has been a Democrat-inspired, Democrat-controlled crime spree from day one. They've attempted to conceal that fact with their relentless partisan mentality, but of course that's all that we've come to expect from Democrats.
Those of you with your heads still in the sand may now admit your error.
Funny, but the Clinton Administration conducted the "Drug War" fast and furious for eight long years -- yet Slashdot only gets around to complaining about it now that there's a conservative in office.
Gee, go figure.
The truth is, the Bush Administration is conservative -- meaning that they support individual rights and freedoms. They've got a lot of messes to clean up right now, but when they have time, it's quite obvious that they'll put an end to the "Drug War". How could they not? The "Drug War" is in violation of all their principles of freedom and individual responsibility.
The "Drug War" is a creature of the Democratic Party, and always was, so let's skip the propaganda for once.
Even if we could get somebody to be objective, their objectivity is bounded by their knowledge. Facts can be as easily distorted by ignorance as malevolence.
I hate to be rude, but that's a load of mindless drivel.
When contemplating large, commercially successful entities, objectivity is always the "least hypothesis": They couldn't have gotten where they are if they weren't objective in the first place. The principle of Enlightened Self-Interest proves this quite factitiously.
Why don't I see C, or C++, or Pike, or Scheme, or any of a number of other languages in here?
Thank you for mentioning Scheme, a sorely neglected gem of a language. In fact, until C and C++ support arbitrarily recursive macro substitution like Lisp does, I can't see any sense in taking them seriously as programming languages -- particularly for demanding real-world applications like CGI: C is unbeatable for writing trivial UNIX command-line utilities like ls, but it's just not scalable . . . and the fact that Perl was implemented in C should give us pause about that language as well.
Right: Conflict of interest. We'd be fools to trust anything IBM says on the subject. It's a very good point, and it raises serious questions about the independence of journalism in what could be called a "capitalist command economy" such as that of the USA: When vested interests control information, who can you trust?
This leaves aside the fact that IBM was Demon-of-the-Week in the hacker community fifteen years ago, but they've now been "rehabilitated", like Kruschev. Scary stuff, when you think about it.
Yeah, sure, it's "politically incorrect" to speak in public about technologies that are out of favor with the Open Source Taliban, but is it so wrong just to mention the most widely used dynamic content technology in the world?
Can we have just a little open-mindedness around here? Just a small dash of fairness and honesty in our reporting, for once?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, right. Next time I go on a long flight, I'll make sure the plane was designed and maintained by people who "played amongst beautiful things" instead of learning their jobs.
Non sequitur alert: "IT workers" != "hackers". C. R. Hoare wasn't a sysadmin. Neither were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, or any other significant innovator you can name.
Not one.
Playing video games in your office isn't the same thing as inventing new languages, my friend. Of course it's necessary for creative technical people to play with ideas, but that's got nothing to do with printer repairmen.
Next?
--
True. But they can only stem the tide as long as management takes their word as gospel on all technical issues, and you can't fool all the people all the time.
They'll be fighting rearguard actions for years after the writing is on the wall, but their day will come, just like it did for the brontosaurus.
BTW, I'm not KTB. :) I've got eighty muddy doorstops all over my damn office . . .
--
You must've been one of those IT kids who dropped out of college to get rich on stock options at a company that went belly-up last year. Therefore, you missed out on . . .
Logic 101:
"Creativity" and "technical expertise" are the things I'm advocating, not the things I'm questioning. Your gibberish to the contrary is a cheap attempt to muddy the waters: You're attempting to claim that "creativity" and "technical expertise" are the same thing as laziness. And that's nonsense.
I approve very much of creativity and technical expertise, nor did I say a single word against them. I write C++ code for a living, and that requires more of both qualities than you'll ever have.
Playing video games instead of working does not demonstrate "creativity" or "technical expertise". It demonstrates laziness and irresponsibility. If you were creative -- and trust me, I've known a lot of creative people -- you'd feel a need to do create something. Get it?
Calling yourself "creative" because you can't hold a real job is pretty sad, you know that? If you spent half as much time learning a useful trade as you now spend excusing your shortcomings, you wouldn't have any shortcomings to excuse. And you'd be a lot happier.
--
Calling it a "troll" won't make it go away, Sparky. Sorry 'bout that.
There's nothing you're doing to that thing that can't be done by a good setup program.
The "custom kernel" falls under "good setup program", and as for firewalls . . .
Firewalls! SECURITY!
Anybody ever notice how obsessed sysadmins are with security? Right. And here's why: It's the setup programs. They make things too easy. Any secretary can install her own copy of Word now, so the admins have to put a stop to that nonsense if they want to keep their jobs. Therefore they restrict installs to the admin user, and they stay on the payroll.
Sooner or later, of course, the people who have to pay the bills are going to figure that one out. In the meantime, hey -- I admire a good scam as much as anybody. :)
--
. . . uptight adults who've forgotten how to have a little fun each and every day. You need to lighten the hell up!
Uh, right, right. "Lighten up". Sorry, guy, but what the venture capitalists learned last year is a funny little fact that a lot of people have known for a long time:
I know how mean it seems when Mommy and Daddy are tired after working all day and they don't have the energy to play cowboys and indians with you, but guess what?
--
A little bit sensitive, aren't we?
Okay, fine, you nap all week and then show up for an hour on Saturday. My heart bleeds for you, it really does -- but how much are you paid for this?! More than it's worth.
The simple fact is that any idiot can fix a printer. If there weren't an IT guy to handle that crap, people could do it for themselves. I'm not saying that you're an idiot or a bad person. I'm just saying that you're redundant and useless.
--
I have to say that I admire your tenacity, but let's face it: The day will come when somebody realizes that there's a lot of money going into your cube (office, whatever) and not a whole lot coming back out.
The future of IT is as a part-time hassle for non-specialists. Soon enough, the secretary will be able to handle 90% of the sysadmin's job, and the rest will be farmed out. At the cost of a few hours of overtime for the secretary every month, things will run just as smoothly as they do now.
Look at it this way: How many people employ a full-time driver/mechanic for their cars?
Not many. You have to have a lot of cars before hiring your own mechanic is cheaper than taking them to the garage.
--
"Some level" != "absolutely any level".
Any competent professional enjoys his work. That's the difference between us and a burger flipper -- but it's not the same as doing nothing useful at all, which is what most IT people do.
Get it? Being hired to do fun, valuable work is fine. Being hired to do valuable work and then fucking off all day is not fine.
--
How many companies have suffered because they can't afford the luxury of a wasteful, lazy, disruptive IT department?
How much money is squandered every year coddling overgrown kids who couldn't accept responsibility or do their jobs right?
Too busy playing with toys.
Sad, really.
Ironically, the death of the "dot com economy" -- another, much larger and more amusing manifestation of the same mindset -- has put a sufficient hurtin' on the economy that a) nobody can afford to humor these numbskulls any more, and b) nobody even has to worry about it, because all the numbskulls are suddenly pounding the pavement looking for jobs.
Yes, I would like fries with that. Thank you.
--
. . . and the fact that you have to say that proves that they've succeeded in clouding the issue to an alarming degree.
Yes, naturally: This is a standard propaganda tactic. Find a few rare, freakish "horror stories" -- or at least stories which seem horrible to a layman (which, let's face it, most Slashbots really are) -- and whip up some fear.
Standard stuff, if you're a demagogue. And it works: At this point, most Slashbots believe that all Intellectual Property rights are wrong. That's the message being sent, and they're eating it up.
--
You're right. Jefferson was surely no Communist: He was a relentless advocate of property rights, as regarded all properly then held to be property under the Constitution of the United States, which he helped draft.
Lincoln later rode roughshod over Jefferson's painstakingly established property rights in many ways, but that does not concern us at the moment.
The bottom line is this: Intellectual Property makes innovation and progress possible.
Period. End of story.
The sad, sick thing is that Slashbots have given themselves over so completely to the "my convenience above all" theory of "ethics" that they've actually succeeded in demonizing the word "innovation" around here, in their endless rhetorical assaults on the right of a business to . . . conduct business?! Yep.
--
It's good to see a sensible view for once.
Private property is the key difference between our system and Communism. I hope everyone is as disturbed as I am by Slashdot's bizarre and insupportable belief that intellectual property is a "special case" deserving of less protection under the law than any other kind of property.
It's a lot like the "drug exception" to Constitutional rights (primarily the Fourth Amendment, but also the Second and First in many cases), isn't it? And for the same reason: Mob hysteria abetted by scare-mongering propaganda. This article is a perfect example of the irresponsible demonization of private property rights w/r/t intellectual property.
Sorry, but you can't change the law and the truth just to suit your convenience.
--
Ahh, "freedom" -- "for the children", no doubt.
Of course, you and Mr. Freedman don't mind people losing their freedom to the slavery of drug addiction. Nor do you mind the loss of freedom felt by those who are imprisoned in neighborhoods ruled by violent drug dealers. No, those losses of freedom don't bother you at all, do they? Of course not.
The true agenda of the Liberals is always laughably obvious.
Let's face it: Opposition to the war on drugs is entirely a matter of blind hysteria, media hype, and fudged or fictitious "facts". It's a boondoggle.
--
Thanks -- but have you seen this masterpiece? He's got chops.
--
And there it is, ladies and gentlemen. The "War on Drugs" has been a Democrat-inspired, Democrat-controlled crime spree from day one. They've attempted to conceal that fact with their relentless partisan mentality, but of course that's all that we've come to expect from Democrats.
Those of you with your heads still in the sand may now admit your error.
--
Funny, but the Clinton Administration conducted the "Drug War" fast and furious for eight long years -- yet Slashdot only gets around to complaining about it now that there's a conservative in office.
Gee, go figure.
The truth is, the Bush Administration is conservative -- meaning that they support individual rights and freedoms. They've got a lot of messes to clean up right now, but when they have time, it's quite obvious that they'll put an end to the "Drug War". How could they not? The "Drug War" is in violation of all their principles of freedom and individual responsibility.
The "Drug War" is a creature of the Democratic Party, and always was, so let's skip the propaganda for once.
--
I hate to be rude, but that's a load of mindless drivel.
When contemplating large, commercially successful entities, objectivity is always the "least hypothesis": They couldn't have gotten where they are if they weren't objective in the first place. The principle of Enlightened Self-Interest proves this quite factitiously.
--
Thank you for mentioning Scheme, a sorely neglected gem of a language. In fact, until C and C++ support arbitrarily recursive macro substitution like Lisp does, I can't see any sense in taking them seriously as programming languages -- particularly for demanding real-world applications like CGI: C is unbeatable for writing trivial UNIX command-line utilities like ls, but it's just not scalable . . . and the fact that Perl was implemented in C should give us pause about that language as well.
--
Right: Conflict of interest. We'd be fools to trust anything IBM says on the subject. It's a very good point, and it raises serious questions about the independence of journalism in what could be called a "capitalist command economy" such as that of the USA: When vested interests control information, who can you trust?
This leaves aside the fact that IBM was Demon-of-the-Week in the hacker community fifteen years ago, but they've now been "rehabilitated", like Kruschev. Scary stuff, when you think about it.
--
Hello?
Yeah, sure, it's "politically incorrect" to speak in public about technologies that are out of favor with the Open Source Taliban, but is it so wrong just to mention the most widely used dynamic content technology in the world?
Can we have just a little open-mindedness around here? Just a small dash of fairness and honesty in our reporting, for once?
--