> does anyone actually believe that microsoft attacking gpl could have any impact whatsoever [...]
Impact to the average slashdot reader? No.
Impact to business people who actually allocate money to buy things? Yes.
The average person assumes monetary success is the only success that matters. That's why people spend $$$ buying expensive status symbols like SUV's and huge houses.
Face it; even among slashdot readers, I doubt many people dream "I want to be poverty stricken my whole life while I write GPL'd software."
Business Logic: Microsoft makes lots of money. Therefore they must be successful. Therefore, they are the best people to help me be successful, make lots of money and waste it on a house in Atherton. If they tell me GPL'd software is bad, I'll give them more credit than some penniless granola telling me that MS is wrong. I mean really; if MS was wrong, they wouldn't make lots of money, would they?
I haven't had much experience with Cisco, but another company who blew me away with their support was Network Appliance, who make
really cool dedicated file servers at about 1/10 the cost of Auspex.
When we installed it, it asked for an email gateway and the email address of our network administrator. We thought this was so it could
email us about problems... Close, but even better...
One night, one of our NetApp's spontaniously rebooted itself. Came up just fine all by itself... One of those little hiccoughs that you normally wouln't even know about if you weren't doing monitoring...
We actually found out about the reboot when we came in at 8:00 that morning because there was an email in our inboxes (reconstruction, not quote):
From: xxx@netapp.com
Subject: Patch Notification
At 3:14 a.m., your file server "z003" crashed and rebooted. From the information that it sent to our autosupport service, we see this was due to bug #754783.
Please download patch http://..... and install it
to prevent further problems.
Regards,
Network Appliance Automatic Support
In other words, it emailed its logs and core files to the vendor, who had someone look at them, figure out the problem and give us a solution before we even *knew* we had the problem. Wow!
Same sort of thing when we had a disk in the
RAID array fail one night... We discovered it had
failed because there was a box on my desk with a
replacement disk. Yes, it sent the email and they fedex'ed out a replacement without me asking!
Or Empire (the Online Unix game, not the PC or Spectrum version)
Or any of 10,000 MUD's.
Quake / Doom / &c. were the first time you had
3-D (or 3-D'ish) versions of the old "shoot anything that moves" games (asteroids, space invaders, &c.) They had better graphics than most of their progeniters. But the ideas were all done before.
Quake and the like are perfect for the "I've spent 25%
of my life watching TV and am proud of it" generation. As for me, I got bored after the
first hour.
Personally, I'd rather fire up the old Atari 800 and play M.U.L.E. any day. Crappy graphics with awesome gameplay will always win out over simple gameplay with incredible graphics...
I also worked for a while for a grocery chain, starting as a bagger. I got $6 CDN an hour and 4 hours a week to start. My first paycheque was negative after UFCW union initiation fees.
I stuck it out because I had nothing better to do at that point in my life. But I approached the job with a level of professionalism; I always ironed my clothes before work, even though we didn't have to. I smiled and made conversation with the customers, rather than just uttering platitudes.
The number of hours I would be assigned were determined by my seniority in hours worked. But since I actually tried to do a better than average job, managment noticed and always called me first when they needed someone to fill in a shift.
After a year, my seniority ranked me for about 24 hours a week. I averaged 38 because of call-ins. Because I was working more hours, my pay went up faster than other people; the seniority was on hours worked. I was in fact the only part time employee (out of 300) who worked enough hours to qualify for the full-time benefits plan.
I got promoted to Cashier. This cut down on direct call-ins, because there were more "lifers" as cashiers. But there must have been some "old-girls" network going on, because I started getting call-ins from other departments like Bakery, Floral and Stock. The union contract specified that cross-departmental call-ins had to be paid at the higher of the two pay scales to discourage it, but the fact someone was trying to do a good job caught notice with the managment and didn't seem to offend the union.
I left after two years, deciding I needed something more challanging for a career. But now, fifteen years later, everytime someone makes that "only half a day?" crack when I leave work after only four hours of unpaid overtime, when the value of my "stock option compensation" has no relationship to my performance or my company's but rather to market trends, when the latest "We're changing our benefit package to be more competetive" email arrives, I think back to the days where there was a 1:1 relationship between work and compensation; I realize that that wouldn't have existed without the protection of the union.
If you're a bright star, you'll move up in any corporate/economic model. I think the real fear here is that people are afraid that managers might not recognize vitrolic diatrabes and political devotion to open source as the mark of a bright star.
Is that why they moved their head office to Chicago?
Re:Professional organizations, not a union
on
Dial U for Union
·
· Score: 1
Although I agree completly that we need something like the AMA, I'm quite surprised that you haven't been flamed to death for suggesting it:)
The AMA (and the associated local boards) are basically a union without seniority.
They do "collective bargaining" in the form of fee guides
They have "disciplanary procedures," both inside and outside malpractice.
But most importantly, they have the right and
obligation to either allow or prevent you from working. You need to be certified (boarded) in
order to practive medicine. This means long and painful internships at slave wages, plus writing
24 hour long exams to prove you understand not only how to do something but the implications, risks and alternatives of doing it. And your certification is in one branch of medicine, not everything.
To put it another way, if you needed a non-trivial medical procedure, who would you want to do it:
Someone who's had to prove they're qualified to do it, can explain the risks and alternatives and will do their absolute best because if they make a mistake due to negligence, they know they will likely never work in their field again, or
"Dude, I'm the guy who invoked the holy right to fork and came up with a more efficient and better looking way of cutting toenails. That proves I'm smart enough to do this periocentisis!
And if I screw up, I just won't put you on my resume."
The reason there are so few 40+ programmers around is not because they couldn't adapt, it's because they burnt themselves out being "baud elite d00dz" just like you.
Actually, if France wins, couldn't that little bit of jurisprudence be used to overturn U.S. laws like
Helms-Burton, which prohibits nationals of foreign countries who do not reside in the U.S. from doing business with Cuba??
No country is a paragon of virtue, no matter how many people are convinced it is.
Back when I was a first year CS student, the
languages were Pascal and PDP-11 assembly (on a simulator; I'm not that old.) Over the rather-long course of getting my degree, they changed Pascal to ML and then finally to Miranda.
There were two main reasons for delibratly choosing non-mainstream languages:
To make people focus on the problems, not the details of how to implement the solution, and
To level the playing field between the "baud d00dz" who already knew mainstream languages and the people who were new to programming.
Like Waterloo, you were basically expected to learn new languages on your own as you needed them, because that's what you're going to be doing throughout the ~40 years of your career.
It's more important to train a future computer scientist to
know how to reason about problems and analize the
benefits and costs of solutions than how to express themselves in the language of the compiler; The problems don't really change based
on the language.
In fact, in the OO course, we didn't even program at all; we were just graded on our data models and analysis.
To put it another way, it's no easier to solve the Halting problem in C++ than Java:)
It's more important to be able to recognize it
so you can _stop_ trying to solve it.
As an aside, the year after I graduated, there
was a battle in the faculty between the more "science" oriented professors and the more "training for industry" professors. I don't know who won.
Slashdot Mirror
Impact to the average slashdot reader? No.
Impact to business people who actually allocate money to buy things? Yes.
The average person assumes monetary success is the only success that matters. That's why people spend $$$ buying expensive status symbols like SUV's and huge houses.
Face it; even among slashdot readers, I doubt many people dream "I want to be poverty stricken my whole life while I write GPL'd software."
Business Logic: Microsoft makes lots of money. Therefore they must be successful. Therefore, they are the best people to help me be successful, make lots of money and waste it on a house in Atherton. If they tell me GPL'd software is bad, I'll give them more credit than some penniless granola telling me that MS is wrong. I mean really; if MS was wrong, they wouldn't make lots of money, would they?
When we installed it, it asked for an email gateway and the email address of our network administrator. We thought this was so it could email us about problems... Close, but even better...
One night, one of our NetApp's spontaniously rebooted itself. Came up just fine all by itself... One of those little hiccoughs that you normally wouln't even know about if you weren't doing monitoring...
We actually found out about the reboot when we came in at 8:00 that morning because there was an email in our inboxes (reconstruction, not quote):
From: xxx@netapp.com
Subject: Patch Notification
At 3:14 a.m., your file server "z003" crashed and rebooted. From the information that it sent to our autosupport service, we see this was due to bug #754783.
Please download patch http://..... and install it to prevent further problems.
Regards,
Network Appliance Automatic Support
In other words, it emailed its logs and core files to the vendor, who had someone look at them, figure out the problem and give us a solution before we even *knew* we had the problem. Wow!
Same sort of thing when we had a disk in the RAID array fail one night... We discovered it had failed because there was a box on my desk with a replacement disk. Yes, it sent the email and they fedex'ed out a replacement without me asking!
Now *that's* support!
Or Empire (the Online Unix game, not the PC or Spectrum version)
Or any of 10,000 MUD's.
Quake / Doom / &c. were the first time you had 3-D (or 3-D'ish) versions of the old "shoot anything that moves" games (asteroids, space invaders, &c.) They had better graphics than most of their progeniters. But the ideas were all done before.
Quake and the like are perfect for the "I've spent 25% of my life watching TV and am proud of it" generation. As for me, I got bored after the first hour.
Personally, I'd rather fire up the old Atari 800 and play M.U.L.E. any day. Crappy graphics with awesome gameplay will always win out over simple gameplay with incredible graphics...
I stuck it out because I had nothing better to do at that point in my life. But I approached the job with a level of professionalism; I always ironed my clothes before work, even though we didn't have to. I smiled and made conversation with the customers, rather than just uttering platitudes.
The number of hours I would be assigned were determined by my seniority in hours worked. But since I actually tried to do a better than average job, managment noticed and always called me first when they needed someone to fill in a shift.
After a year, my seniority ranked me for about 24 hours a week. I averaged 38 because of call-ins. Because I was working more hours, my pay went up faster than other people; the seniority was on hours worked. I was in fact the only part time employee (out of 300) who worked enough hours to qualify for the full-time benefits plan.
I got promoted to Cashier. This cut down on direct call-ins, because there were more "lifers" as cashiers. But there must have been some "old-girls" network going on, because I started getting call-ins from other departments like Bakery, Floral and Stock. The union contract specified that cross-departmental call-ins had to be paid at the higher of the two pay scales to discourage it, but the fact someone was trying to do a good job caught notice with the managment and didn't seem to offend the union.
I left after two years, deciding I needed something more challanging for a career. But now, fifteen years later, everytime someone makes that "only half a day?" crack when I leave work after only four hours of unpaid overtime, when the value of my "stock option compensation" has no relationship to my performance or my company's but rather to market trends, when the latest "We're changing our benefit package to be more competetive" email arrives, I think back to the days where there was a 1:1 relationship between work and compensation; I realize that that wouldn't have existed without the protection of the union.
If you're a bright star, you'll move up in any corporate/economic model. I think the real fear here is that people are afraid that managers might not recognize vitrolic diatrabes and political devotion to open source as the mark of a bright star.
Is that why they moved their head office to Chicago?
The AMA (and the associated local boards) are basically a union without seniority.
They do "collective bargaining" in the form of fee guides
They have "disciplanary procedures," both inside and outside malpractice.
But most importantly, they have the right and obligation to either allow or prevent you from working. You need to be certified (boarded) in order to practive medicine. This means long and painful internships at slave wages, plus writing 24 hour long exams to prove you understand not only how to do something but the implications, risks and alternatives of doing it. And your certification is in one branch of medicine, not everything.
To put it another way, if you needed a non-trivial medical procedure, who would you want to do it:
Someone who's had to prove they're qualified to do it, can explain the risks and alternatives and will do their absolute best because if they make a mistake due to negligence, they know they will likely never work in their field again, or
"Dude, I'm the guy who invoked the holy right to fork and came up with a more efficient and better looking way of cutting toenails. That proves I'm smart enough to do this periocentisis! And if I screw up, I just won't put you on my resume."
The reason there are so few 40+ programmers around is not because they couldn't adapt, it's because they burnt themselves out being "baud elite d00dz" just like you.
Actually, if France wins, couldn't that little bit of jurisprudence be used to overturn U.S. laws like Helms-Burton, which prohibits nationals of foreign countries who do not reside in the U.S. from doing business with Cuba??
No country is a paragon of virtue, no matter how many people are convinced it is.
There were two main reasons for delibratly choosing non-mainstream languages:
To make people focus on the problems, not the details of how to implement the solution, and
To level the playing field between the "baud d00dz" who already knew mainstream languages and the people who were new to programming.
Like Waterloo, you were basically expected to learn new languages on your own as you needed them, because that's what you're going to be doing throughout the ~40 years of your career.
It's more important to train a future computer scientist to know how to reason about problems and analize the benefits and costs of solutions than how to express themselves in the language of the compiler; The problems don't really change based on the language.
In fact, in the OO course, we didn't even program at all; we were just graded on our data models and analysis.
To put it another way, it's no easier to solve the Halting problem in C++ than Java :)
It's more important to be able to recognize it
so you can _stop_ trying to solve it.
As an aside, the year after I graduated, there was a battle in the faculty between the more "science" oriented professors and the more "training for industry" professors. I don't know who won.