From the second slide: It's irritatingly true that many millenials can't pry themselves from their damn phones. Nobody should allow their phones to ring in class or during a date -- unless they're dope dealers, pimps, doctors, or on-call IT staff.
First of all, you are talking about a lot of on-call IT staff. Only some are officially on call, while others aren't paid for it. I was unpaid unofficially on call for 5 years at a former job. I didn't get many calls but was expected to have the mobile on at all times.
Secondly there was a time when being disconnected was an option. I am old enough (32) to remember not having a mobile phone, and I don't look back on that experience fondly. I remember missing friends due to miscommunication about when and where to meet. I remember driving long distances without any kind of safety net should the car break down on a long stretch of road - risk hiking or risk walking was all the option you had. Sure there are plenty of kids that text and talk when they shouldn't at work. The previous generation use to do other things they shouldn't before the mobile phone.
That's why I prefer the company of mature women: they say a lot less, but what they say actually counts!
I prefer mature women too. I married one within weeks of my own age. However how do you expect maturity when we keep ripping it away from children for their own safety? Instead of teaching them cars are dangerous, we create school zones. Young drivers crash their cars and we increase the driving age. By the time they're old enough that they should be mature and responsible people, they're still mollycoddled children. That's not their failing, its ours.
Not at all surprised to see that 59 % of "millenial" workers think they can install whatever they want, given that more of them are spoiled gimme-gimmes.
Oh yes they're all spoiled. I missed out on free university education by about 6 years. As has been pointed out health care has gotten worse. Your prospects of owning a house where I live (Australia) are quickly vanishing as housing is becoming unaffordable. Protection from working ridiculous hours and other unfair conditions have been stripped. Things that use to be free like fishing are now essentially taxed. Cheap crap poorly made tech gadets don't compensate for it. In any case it's not as if previous generations didn't display the same sense of entitlement until the harsh realities of life hit them.
how does better access to technology improve work/life balance?
I can do my banking in 10 minutes during my lunch hour instead of having to queue up for the whole hour. I can check up to date weather to work out what my family and I are likely to be doing over the weekend. I can do on call support from home so I don't have to come into work while on call, and can be on my computer 2 minutes after getting a call. (Hell my employer also benefits not having me at work unless I'm actually needed). I can stay more up to date with changing technology. I can tell if there's bad traffic and stay back an extra hour at work if I'm only going to be sitting in a car anyway. I could go on but I won't. Your lack of imagination and vision is incredible.
Boss: Why should we switch to Linux? Me: Because it's fun! Boss: Thanks for your input. You can go now. Boss (to the secretary): Please get me HR on the line. I think we're over-paying some staff.
This is possibly the lamest story I've ever seen on slashdot. The article then lists THREE other reasons - plural with an 's' - (not one) why the author uses Linux. By 'we' I think he's referring to himself, his blow up sex doll and his imaginary friends.
I've never understood the fascination with LOTR. I got about half way through the second book and realized I really wasn't enjoying it so I stopped. I WANTED to like it. I like a lot of sci fi and fantasy, but to me LOTR was just boring drivel. I hate not finishing things. The only other "classic" works that I've read that I have not finished Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The repetition seriously got on my nerves. LOTR reminded me of them, but not so much due to repetition as endless descriptive text. I have an image in my head by the end of the first or second page of description for any piece and further description is really difficult to incorporate into that vision. When I start having to revise what I've imagined so extensively that I have to throw that vision away and start again 3 times to make it match what's being described, I generally don't bother and the rest just doesn't sink in. For me LOTR was so bad I'd honestly use it as an example of how not to write.
Even the movies put me to sleep. I've never sat through them. Don't get me wrong a difficult piece I can stomach. I hate to admit it but I enjoyed the Shakespeare I did in highschool. However I'm afraid I'll never enjoy Tolkien. Don't get me wrong I don't begrudge anyone who can, but I do wonder how many people say they love Tolkien because it's trendy. (That isn't directed at your post - its clear from your enthusiasm you genuinely do like it).
Is it just me, or is becoming trendy in open source development to introduce changes your userbase hates because the active developers think they know what's good for them?
It's just you I'm afraid. This behaviour is no new trend. I believe it's THE core reason open source stagnates.
2 - Many of the "leaks" that people see are caused by poorly-coded extensions. Turn off your extensions and notice the difference.
You REALLY wonder why open source doesn't take off EVEN when it's got the superior product???
A brief summary.
Firefox Advocate 1: Our wonderful new browser Firefox supports extensions. User: Cool!!! I love these things! Developer: Cool!!! Web developer tools are much funkier than IE. User: Wait a second. This thing is bringing my system to its knees! Developer: Mine too. I just kill it Firefox Advocate 2: Morons! Firefox is fine. It's those extensions. Everyone knows the extensions can't be trusted. Turn them off! Why do you need so many extensions anyway? User: Um? Wait a second. You're calling me a moron and asking me to switch these off but I switched over because I was told these made the browser extensible. I'm going back to IE. Both browsers suck, but at least that's the one most people use and the IE community isn't as rude.
EVEN if it's the extensions causing the problem, the extension model implemented by Firefox allows this to happen. The developers have to take some responsibility for this, especially if they're touting the feature. One solution: Identify the extensions that leak and reject installing them until they're fixed.
If my operating system crashes for most apps, I'll blame the OS. If it's only one or two I'll blame the app. Same with the browser. If it crashes running most extensions it's a piece of shit.
So a user ends up doing 20-30 hours a week of unpaid overtime, and the company decides to block "time wasting" social network sites like myspace and facebook, ala some heinous net nanny, and you say their attitude sucks? If they're full on browsing porn or running a business it's one thing, but that's not my experience of what happens. What happens is that a lazy IT team can't work out how to educate their staff and don't trust them not to bring virii onto the network so they block all email, social networking, and sometimes even all "non-work-related" sites. Now when an employee wants to do their banking they have to do it when they get home at 10pm, or wait in a queue for an hour at lunch time only to have their boss bitch at them that they took too long a break (never mind that most days they don't take one at all). IT and management are usually the LAST people that should be whining about the poor attitudes of others.
The top execs are the true victims of the IT bubble
Oh yes. The poor execs. With their yachts, and their millions in severance pay, and their ability to move on and destroy a whole other company since they now have experience. Boo hoo. Poor execs. We should start a fund for them or something.
Have a "core" set of articles which is held to very high standards, and an "extended" set which is less stringent and which allows additional information on core content as well as completely unrelated non-core.
Isn't the whole point of doing this collaboratively allowing people to experiment, and breaking the bonds of the traditional encyclopedia?
That's the way it seems to go. If it's science for entertainment you have to leave out the math, over-simplify every idea so that an illiterate red-neck could follow the argument, and preferably have something explode spectacularly. In lieu of exploding chemicals you can occassionally subsitute a story about someone brilliant being oppressed by those pesky scientists that don't understand a thing.
If you want good science at a popular level you do fair better leaving out the popular press. There are some good books out there. Some of them even let math in the door. Take for example http://www.gravityfromthegroundup.org/
That's news to me. That's still what they're renting most of at the "video" store. How long it takes BD to be taken up is yet to be seen. As for download content, they're not offering it in a way that's worth the effort. When I can download it to home and watch it on my TV not the computer in my lounge room with my wife and a bag of microwave popcorn then we'll talk. DVD isn't dead. It's not even half dead yet.
I learnt to code in the late 80s and early 90s, when RAD was king. I went to uni and then got a job where J2EE wasn't used. I felt that J2EE had passed me by and my employability was in question.
I transitioned to being a J2EE programmer because I felt I was losing touch with the industry. I was writing front end code using Java 1.0 just 3 years ago and using old unsupported Smalltalk for the server side. I'd been with the company for 5 years starting with the boom. Their pay and conditions went down hill but we didn't lose our jobs and the company was self funded so I didn't regret my time there, but knew it was time to move on. They started to take on J2EE work but were hiring new programmers to do that work.
When I moved to my current job, knowing there was a learning curve, I thought it was just a matter of riding it out. What a rude awakening. No RAD tools. XML hell. Development with layer upon layer of crud that got in the way of doing the job and did little more than require huge amounts of boiler-plate and cookie-cutter wiring code. Even when I'd joined there had been a shift away from EJBs. Now the big thing is wow we have frameworks like Spring to remove the error prone code. Yippee? We're still hand writing visual code using JSP. We're still building monolithic files (jar,ears,wars) with lenghty build processes. What use to take a day to do client/server style takes a week to do in J2EE. Everyone's focused on the cosmetics of web pages instead of functionality.
Some days I think the world's coming off the rails and society's in rapid decline. When I have to code like this to make a living it doesn't help.
I hope so, because that would make me a fighter pilot, a train driver, and a theme park owner this week alone. I have after all used MS flight sim, MS Train sim and Trains, and Rollercoaster Tycooon. Oh I almost forgot I own a motorboat and a jet ski (Ship Sim 2008. We didn't say it had to be a GOOD simulation did we?). I'm so good I can ram a boat at high speed in a jet ski, duck under it instead of dying, and come out the other side!!! Come to think of it I rock, but only if simulations count!
Since when did releasing dam water get labeled "Terra-reformation". Intentional irrigation perhaps. Sounds too much like terraforming. This isn't happening on Mars, and Arnie's face isn't about to explode. Or did I misread the article? Is there some specialist use of the term I haven't heard of?
Heck I terra-reformed my back lawn this morning. The dogs needed a fresh bowl of water.
a) Because he insisted that all the details of his theory, such as that, despite Kepler, whose works he read but dismissed, planetary orbits are perfectly circular since circles are "perfect" and ellipses aren't, were absolute certainties, even though he couldn't prove any of them (the first actual proof of any version of Heliocentrism appeared only in the 19th century, 200+ years after Galileo's time); b) Because he thought that everyone should accept his hypothesis just because, no matter the lack of proofs; c) And because he did make the point clear by adding a character to his book, named "Simpleton", who "defended" Geocentrism by mocking actual speeches of his friend the Pope, what Galileo cluelessly hoped he would find funny, not offensive. Obviously, it didn't happen.
Yes! Absolutely! Put anyone in prison who comes up with a theory he can't immediately prove! Life sentences for anyone who displays any arrogance. Life sentences for anyone who comes up with a parody!
What's more the church is founded on the unprovable - things that must be taken on faith despite a lack of evidence.
Considering that at the time people were tortured and burned for doing much less, being held in his own house was a very soft punishment. The Church really wasn't harsh on him. It's only by comparing what Galileo was subjected to with 20th century style freedom of speech that one finds it "evil". But comparing it to what was the standard practices in the 17th century puts things in a very different light.
Ahhh the good old days! If only the church would return to them. If the people who had committed these attrocities had their way we'd still be in the dark ages.
I find your arguments offensive, misleading and full of factual inaccuracy.
once only found in the realms of religion and politics
Well you must be very young. This has all been going on for as long as we've had tech. Mac vs Apple. Vi vs Emacs. Brand vs brand. You name the brand, someone will be a brand zealot.
Slashdot Mirror
From the second slide: It's irritatingly true that many millenials can't pry themselves from their damn phones. Nobody should allow their phones to ring in class or during a date -- unless they're dope dealers, pimps, doctors, or on-call IT staff.
First of all, you are talking about a lot of on-call IT staff. Only some are officially on call, while others aren't paid for it. I was unpaid unofficially on call for 5 years at a former job. I didn't get many calls but was expected to have the mobile on at all times.
Secondly there was a time when being disconnected was an option. I am old enough (32) to remember not having a mobile phone, and I don't look back on that experience fondly. I remember missing friends due to miscommunication about when and where to meet. I remember driving long distances without any kind of safety net should the car break down on a long stretch of road - risk hiking or risk walking was all the option you had. Sure there are plenty of kids that text and talk when they shouldn't at work. The previous generation use to do other things they shouldn't before the mobile phone.
That's why I prefer the company of mature women: they say a lot less, but what they say actually counts!
I prefer mature women too. I married one within weeks of my own age. However how do you expect maturity when we keep ripping it away from children for their own safety? Instead of teaching them cars are dangerous, we create school zones. Young drivers crash their cars and we increase the driving age. By the time they're old enough that they should be mature and responsible people, they're still mollycoddled children. That's not their failing, its ours.
Not at all surprised to see that 59 % of "millenial" workers think they can install whatever they want, given that more of them are spoiled gimme-gimmes.
Oh yes they're all spoiled. I missed out on free university education by about 6 years. As has been pointed out health care has gotten worse. Your prospects of owning a house where I live (Australia) are quickly vanishing as housing is becoming unaffordable. Protection from working ridiculous hours and other unfair conditions have been stripped. Things that use to be free like fishing are now essentially taxed. Cheap crap poorly made tech gadets don't compensate for it. In any case it's not as if previous generations didn't display the same sense of entitlement until the harsh realities of life hit them.
how does better access to technology improve work/life balance?
I can do my banking in 10 minutes during my lunch hour instead of having to queue up for the whole hour. I can check up to date weather to work out what my family and I are likely to be doing over the weekend. I can do on call support from home so I don't have to come into work while on call, and can be on my computer 2 minutes after getting a call. (Hell my employer also benefits not having me at work unless I'm actually needed). I can stay more up to date with changing technology. I can tell if there's bad traffic and stay back an extra hour at work if I'm only going to be sitting in a car anyway. I could go on but I won't. Your lack of imagination and vision is incredible.
Boss: Why should we switch to Linux?
Me: Because it's fun!
Boss: Thanks for your input. You can go now.
Boss (to the secretary): Please get me HR on the line. I think we're over-paying some staff.
This is possibly the lamest story I've ever seen on slashdot. The article then lists THREE other reasons - plural with an 's' - (not one) why the author uses Linux. By 'we' I think he's referring to himself, his blow up sex doll and his imaginary friends.
Sounds like an extortion racket to me. "Nice music collection you have there! Shame if someone should report you to the MPAA"
I've never understood the fascination with LOTR. I got about half way through the second book and realized I really wasn't enjoying it so I stopped. I WANTED to like it. I like a lot of sci fi and fantasy, but to me LOTR was just boring drivel. I hate not finishing things. The only other "classic" works that I've read that I have not finished Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The repetition seriously got on my nerves. LOTR reminded me of them, but not so much due to repetition as endless descriptive text. I have an image in my head by the end of the first or second page of description for any piece and further description is really difficult to incorporate into that vision. When I start having to revise what I've imagined so extensively that I have to throw that vision away and start again 3 times to make it match what's being described, I generally don't bother and the rest just doesn't sink in. For me LOTR was so bad I'd honestly use it as an example of how not to write.
Even the movies put me to sleep. I've never sat through them. Don't get me wrong a difficult piece I can stomach. I hate to admit it but I enjoyed the Shakespeare I did in highschool. However I'm afraid I'll never enjoy Tolkien. Don't get me wrong I don't begrudge anyone who can, but I do wonder how many people say they love Tolkien because it's trendy. (That isn't directed at your post - its clear from your enthusiasm you genuinely do like it).
Does the name remind anyone else of Enchaladas or is it just me?
Water of Enchaladas....mmmmmm....lets bottle it!
Rob-U-Cab doesn't sound like a very nice thing...
When I work the late shift I get the cab home. Rob-U-Cab doesn't sound like anything new.
Is it just me, or is becoming trendy in open source development to introduce changes your userbase hates because the active developers think they know what's good for them?
It's just you I'm afraid. This behaviour is no new trend. I believe it's THE core reason open source stagnates.
You can still have it with oldbar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227
Stupid that it's not simply an option.
Oldbar is what you're after. Annoying that it takes an extension to do this. It should have been an option. The Mozilla developers have lost the plot.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227
Here you go:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227
For the record I think the Mozilla devs are on crack to do this without putting in an option to turn it off.
2 - Many of the "leaks" that people see are caused by poorly-coded extensions. Turn off your extensions and notice the difference.
You REALLY wonder why open source doesn't take off EVEN when it's got the superior product???
A brief summary.
Firefox Advocate 1: Our wonderful new browser Firefox supports extensions.
User: Cool!!! I love these things!
Developer: Cool!!! Web developer tools are much funkier than IE.
User: Wait a second. This thing is bringing my system to its knees!
Developer: Mine too. I just kill it
Firefox Advocate 2: Morons! Firefox is fine. It's those extensions. Everyone knows the extensions can't be trusted. Turn them off! Why do you need so many extensions anyway?
User: Um? Wait a second. You're calling me a moron and asking me to switch these off but I switched over because I was told these made the browser extensible. I'm going back to IE. Both browsers suck, but at least that's the one most people use and the IE community isn't as rude.
EVEN if it's the extensions causing the problem, the extension model implemented by Firefox allows this to happen. The developers have to take some responsibility for this, especially if they're touting the feature. One solution: Identify the extensions that leak and reject installing them until they're fixed.
If my operating system crashes for most apps, I'll blame the OS. If it's only one or two I'll blame the app. Same with the browser. If it crashes running most extensions it's a piece of shit.
So a user ends up doing 20-30 hours a week of unpaid overtime, and the company decides to block "time wasting" social network sites like myspace and facebook, ala some heinous net nanny, and you say their attitude sucks? If they're full on browsing porn or running a business it's one thing, but that's not my experience of what happens. What happens is that a lazy IT team can't work out how to educate their staff and don't trust them not to bring virii onto the network so they block all email, social networking, and sometimes even all "non-work-related" sites. Now when an employee wants to do their banking they have to do it when they get home at 10pm, or wait in a queue for an hour at lunch time only to have their boss bitch at them that they took too long a break (never mind that most days they don't take one at all). IT and management are usually the LAST people that should be whining about the poor attitudes of others.
The top execs are the true victims of the IT bubble
Oh yes. The poor execs. With their yachts, and their millions in severance pay, and their ability to move on and destroy a whole other company since they now have experience. Boo hoo. Poor execs. We should start a fund for them or something.
And I want these over the remeastered flacs I got off the net why exactly?
It's not like I haven't paid for every Beatles song many times over at this point.
YEAH! The pirate bay must have signed their agreement years ago. This isn't news.
I kid.
Have a "core" set of articles which is held to very high standards, and an "extended" set which is less stringent and which allows additional information on core content as well as completely unrelated non-core.
Isn't the whole point of doing this collaboratively allowing people to experiment, and breaking the bonds of the traditional encyclopedia?
That's the way it seems to go. If it's science for entertainment you have to leave out the math, over-simplify every idea so that an illiterate red-neck could follow the argument, and preferably have something explode spectacularly. In lieu of exploding chemicals you can occassionally subsitute a story about someone brilliant being oppressed by those pesky scientists that don't understand a thing.
If you want good science at a popular level you do fair better leaving out the popular press. There are some good books out there. Some of them even let math in the door. Take for example http://www.gravityfromthegroundup.org/
DVD came and went in about 10
That's news to me. That's still what they're renting most of at the "video" store. How long it takes BD to be taken up is yet to be seen. As for download content, they're not offering it in a way that's worth the effort. When I can download it to home and watch it on my TV not the computer in my lounge room with my wife and a bag of microwave popcorn then we'll talk. DVD isn't dead. It's not even half dead yet.
You're not alone in thinking that.
I learnt to code in the late 80s and early 90s, when RAD was king. I went to uni and then got a job where J2EE wasn't used. I felt that J2EE had passed me by and my employability was in question.
I transitioned to being a J2EE programmer because I felt I was losing touch with the industry. I was writing front end code using Java 1.0 just 3 years ago and using old unsupported Smalltalk for the server side. I'd been with the company for 5 years starting with the boom. Their pay and conditions went down hill but we didn't lose our jobs and the company was self funded so I didn't regret my time there, but knew it was time to move on. They started to take on J2EE work but were hiring new programmers to do that work.
When I moved to my current job, knowing there was a learning curve, I thought it was just a matter of riding it out. What a rude awakening. No RAD tools. XML hell. Development with layer upon layer of crud that got in the way of doing the job and did little more than require huge amounts of boiler-plate and cookie-cutter wiring code. Even when I'd joined there had been a shift away from EJBs. Now the big thing is wow we have frameworks like Spring to remove the error prone code. Yippee? We're still hand writing visual code using JSP. We're still building monolithic files (jar,ears,wars) with lenghty build processes. What use to take a day to do client/server style takes a week to do in J2EE. Everyone's focused on the cosmetics of web pages instead of functionality.
Some days I think the world's coming off the rails and society's in rapid decline. When I have to code like this to make a living it doesn't help.
I hope so, because that would make me a fighter pilot, a train driver, and a theme park owner this week alone. I have after all used MS flight sim, MS Train sim and Trains, and Rollercoaster Tycooon. Oh I almost forgot I own a motorboat and a jet ski (Ship Sim 2008. We didn't say it had to be a GOOD simulation did we?). I'm so good I can ram a boat at high speed in a jet ski, duck under it instead of dying, and come out the other side!!! Come to think of it I rock, but only if simulations count!
One way trip? *gulp*
The Russians did it first
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika
The US did it later
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_in_space
I don't think the PR would go down well sending a human into space. Well maybe if you chose a particularly unpopular lawyer or politician...
Since when did releasing dam water get labeled "Terra-reformation". Intentional irrigation perhaps. Sounds too much like terraforming. This isn't happening on Mars, and Arnie's face isn't about to explode. Or did I misread the article? Is there some specialist use of the term I haven't heard of?
Heck I terra-reformed my back lawn this morning. The dogs needed a fresh bowl of water.
Terri-ble reporting more like.
Why?
Statues of Galileo and Bruno by the church would be like statues of Martin Luther King by the KKK.
I find the whole sensationalist stunt offensive. They made their apology 400 years late. Let it go and stop trying to pretend you were the good guys.
Galileo wasn't tortured.
Actually there's quite a bit of dispute about whether he was...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F0CE4D6113FE63BBC4C51DFB5668383669FDE
In any case he was put under house arrest until his death and who he could see and what he could do were most certainly restricted.
Other Heliocentrists at the time didn't have any problem with the Church, and in fact some of them were funded by the Church itself.
Care to list these supportreed heliocentrists?
I can list one key player who was too afraid to publish until he was old and near death:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus
a) Because he insisted that all the details of his theory, such as that, despite Kepler, whose works he read but dismissed, planetary orbits are perfectly circular since circles are "perfect" and ellipses aren't, were absolute certainties, even though he couldn't prove any of them (the first actual proof of any version of Heliocentrism appeared only in the 19th century, 200+ years after Galileo's time);
b) Because he thought that everyone should accept his hypothesis just because, no matter the lack of proofs;
c) And because he did make the point clear by adding a character to his book, named "Simpleton", who "defended" Geocentrism by mocking actual speeches of his friend the Pope, what Galileo cluelessly hoped he would find funny, not offensive. Obviously, it didn't happen.
Yes! Absolutely! Put anyone in prison who comes up with a theory he can't immediately prove! Life sentences for anyone who displays any arrogance. Life sentences for anyone who comes up with a parody!
What's more the church is founded on the unprovable - things that must be taken on faith despite a lack of evidence.
Considering that at the time people were tortured and burned for doing much less, being held in his own house was a very soft punishment. The Church really wasn't harsh on him. It's only by comparing what Galileo was subjected to with 20th century style freedom of speech that one finds it "evil". But comparing it to what was the standard practices in the 17th century puts things in a very different light.
Ahhh the good old days! If only the church would return to them. If the people who had committed these attrocities had their way we'd still be in the dark ages.
I find your arguments offensive, misleading and full of factual inaccuracy.
once only found in the realms of religion and politics
Well you must be very young. This has all been going on for as long as we've had tech. Mac vs Apple. Vi vs Emacs. Brand vs brand. You name the brand, someone will be a brand zealot.
Perhaps RIAA doesn't have to submit it's evidence, but if it doesn't wish to do so, it should be ruled inadmissable. Can't have it both ways.