If Linux is developed by geeks for geeks, then which of those geeks actually cares if Linux conquers the desktop?
I can tell you one thing - the distro that does conquer the desktop probably won't be the one the "geeks" use. And the distro that conquers the desktop will have been published by a company who hires people to obsess about the user experience rather than wait for geeks to give a damn.
There's some expression about not assuming malice that I think is pertinent here....
Congress is made up of many individuals, not all of whom are taking bribes from the DMA. To suggest otherwise would involve a conspiracy that is simply too large to be feasible.
CAN-SPAM is, over all, a decent law. It places restrictions on marketers that allow end-users to filter out what they don't want to see without completely making it illegal and thus denying either some unforseen but legitimate use for unsolicited email, or denying it to end-users who actually do want to see it. And let's face it - some people do want to see this spam because there would be no SPAM if there wasn't a segment of society making it economical.
The best way to deal with Iran is old fashioned patience. Something, too few people seem to have much of these days. Iran has a very young population, a population not happy with the status quo and the old cranks in power aren't going to live forever.
This is totally opposite to what I've found. I don't see any 4.0's whatsoever and the 3.0's and up are the most bitter bunch of people you'll ever meet. Always griping about how the world is unfair, how they coulda, shoulda, woulda, did this or done that. Nope, give me a good ol' 2.5'er anyday. There's a happy fella. Just glad to have a job working with the rest of us Sanitation Engineers.
Let me respond to this by saying that I am a programmer who loves his job and punches out code all day long... and yes, by the time I get home I don't want to touch a computer either.
No matter how much you love doing something, there comes a point where you just can't do it anymore. In my case, I get very focused in my work and at the end of the day my brain just says "Gyahh! Enough!" and shuts down. It's not that it gets old and tedious, I'm always finding new challenges because the technology is always advancing.
On the flip side, I hesitate to take holidays, because I go through "withdrawal" not being able to do my job. During these times I often find myself doing projects that are cutting edge but that I'd never get approval for at work, but then integrating them into the system when I get back. It can be a real high when something your boss didn't give you approval for becomes a big hit!
You say there is proof that the world is older than 10,000 years, but you fail to consider that God could have made everything look like its that old. You also fail to realise that a day of God's time isn't the same as a day in man's time.
But this makes no sense even from a biblical perspective. Sure god could have made the world look old - but why? Either the bible is wrong and therefore a work of man, or "God is deceitful" (what else would you call making something look like what its not) and the whole notion of "choice" a facade.
"Hey have faith and believe in what I've said through my 'faulty creations' (remember, only 'god' is perfect, Moses et al are not) despite my also creating a world in which I've gone to great lengths to not just 'hide the truths' that I'm telling but also making it appear that the oppostite of what I say is true! Bwahahahaha!".
If the bible is fact, then one must come to the conclusion that God has created a system whereby only the deaf, blind, and ignorant are admitted to heaven. The "smart" ones who try to interpet what they "see" and "feel" in the world he created and get "suckered in" by God's own illusions, are denied admittance. Sounds pretty inane to me, and thus following the principle of "Occam's Razor" I reject this interpretation for the simpler one: The creation story given in the bible is 'wrong'.
Hell, even the Vatican (arguably the institution with the greatest vested interest in literal biblical interpretation) doesn't accept creationism anymore.
But if people insist on believeing in God then perhaps this explanation will suffice: God realized his creation at that moment in history was too primitive to grasp the truth and made up a "child-like" explanations just too satisfy their curiosity until they progressed enough to explore the truth for themselves.
The labour laws that are applied in the west were "fought" for. Many people died in the workplace or wrestled with wages below the cost of living for many many years before we got to where they are today. There was a time, not too long ago, when dangerous exploitative factories and shanties like what you see in the third world were found all over what today is the 1st world. And just as things improved here, so will they improve around the third world, eventually.
Trying to "rush" it through legislation that penalizes what happens behind someone elses borders isn't going to make things better. In fact you may retard advancement instead of promoting it. If multinationals no longer have an economic advantage to moving operations to the third world, then you simply limit the economic growth of the third world, and probably the democratic progressions that go hand in hand with it. North America does not have a "right" to have jobs before the third world does. We are all better off if we all share in the pie. there's nothing wrong with some people get bigger pieces at different times - we'll all have the same share eventually.
Besides, why do so many people believe that the third world needs western help to get them out of where they are? Are people in the third world less intelligent or something? Are they incapable of solving their own problems? I blieve, they can do it on their own and probably better too, if we just kept our noses out of their business, stopped putting up trade barriers and protective legislation, and let the third world find the solutions that are good for them.
When I hear about people like this I can't help but think of "Dune" and it's Mentats.
I would like to know how much of this ability is genetically determined and how much is due to training and from what age did his "gifts" become apparent.
Either he needs to be stuck into some kinda breeding program (perhaps solving his virginity problem *hyuk hyuk*) or his training regimen needs to be studied and duplicated en masse. Imagine an advanced state-of-the-art military computer system that runs on 3-square meals a day and isn't susceptible to EMP bursts.
In the new building where I work IT has it's own closed off area so we can work in peace and harmony. Only problem is, to save money, the CEO decided IT doesn't need it own thermostat. One half of the room is controller by a thermostat down the hall in the IT manager's office, and the other half of the room is controller by the thermostat on the other side of the building in the accounting department's office right under a heating vent. I tell you... we either freeze to death or sweat our guts out. One of the girls here generally moves into the server room to do her work during the winter. At any rate, I was pretty miffed about IT having to suffer like this - I've had a cold non-stop for about the past year and half - just to save a few dollars on building costs. I'm forwarding this article to the powers that be and hope they take it to heart before I die of pneumonia.
Those are all good points but you're missing two of the most important ones: Multi-Platform capability and large ready-to-use library.
Large corporations tend to have multiple environments that applications are required to run on. Java solves this. Secondly, software development is not the bread-and-butter of the corporations that use Java. It's just an IT tool and Java comes with a very rich library. It's also very easy to plug-in third-party libraries (yeah, trying doing that with Cobol). Less reinventing of the wheel means faster development times means cheaper IT expenditures. It's hard to think of any other language that solves these two problems as effectively as Java.
Why would I as an employer want to take a risk with someone who didn't take the time to invest in themselves with a "proper" education, who didn't have the patience or commitment to work their asses off for 4 years to prove they have staying power, or who are so narrow-minded as to not see the value of learning anything outside of the core requirements for a degree. I've met many such people in the dot-com heyday and I have one word to describe them: BORING. And their output generally reflected their input: limited and unimaginative.
I might hire someone like that as an assistant to the server admin, but I definitely wouldn't want them on a software development team where the exchange of ideas and experiences, and the ability to think critically is at least as valuable (and probably more so) as knowing a programming language.
I write plenty of emails. Hell I'm writing THIS comment, and I never learned to "type". Can you read the words on this screen?
I guess in general, it depends upon context (as most things do). For developers, typing is not important whatsoever despite being plopped down at a keyboard all day to do one's job. Being an effective software developer is about designing good software. How fast you can type code has absolutely no relation that I can possibly think of to effective coding because good code is generally code that was well though out and designed prior to "typing" the first line. Typing faster without thinking about the design just means you make design mistakes all that much sooner. Furthermore, the keystrokes in a typical program usually resembles nothing like prose, so learning to type probably doesn't help much. I'm a developer. I'm considered a very good developer. But I never learned to type. Neither have most developers I know.
But for bosses? Ahhh... I dunno. None of my bosses could ever type and they seemed pretty effective. Don't know how they would have gotten where they were if they weren't.
These aren't the good ol' days where bosses dictate messages to a secretary who can type as fast as the boss could speek. And furthermore, even in the good ol'days speech went to "shorthand" usually before it went to the typewriter, so I think it's debatable how important it has been for a much longer time than the current "computer" era. Certainly more so, but I wouldn't say more so. Even with secretaries, organization skills are more important than typing skills. Being good or fast is just icing on the cake and I would think it has been since the very beginning.
OMG! Are suggesting that these people, who undoubtably have far better credentials than the average slashdot reader, somehow neglected to think of this very point or account for it? Wow. You better get in touch them real quick to let them know of the horrible mistake they're making!
So how about the confluences in North Korea, Tibet, Turkmenistan, Iran, etc... to name but a few. These aren't places you can just "go to". Even in places where you CAN go (politcally, legally) you still can't (logistically) like the whole north half of friggin Canada or Siberia.
Sounds like someone got drunk, had a brain fart and posted without thinking it through.
Don't fight it. Join it. Yup... when they start forcing RFID chips into my body, I'll add another 1,000,000 or so of my own all so the whitenoise will drown out the signal of the original. I should make sure that would work first though, shouldn't I.
Probably because you are the only user of your computer. People with families may not be so lucky. Sure "I" know and use good browsing habits, but that doesn't mean my wife does (or even cares enough to try) or my children who forget everything you teach them as soon as they see something they like. IE is inherently unsafe for the average uneducated (and uneducatable) user. THAT is but one reason why so many people bash it. Thus, despite my attempts to protect myself, I am still forced to clean my system regularly because of the crap that gets installed whenever a family member has logged on.
Blah blah blah blah... Apparently you don't watch the CBC. French bashing and Anglophone bashing is 30% of the humour on our STATE-SPONSORED television network. Canadians don't tolerate racism? Apparently we tolerate people with no sense of humour though. I wonder which is worse.
BTW.. I would appreciate it if in the future you didn't presume to speak on behalf of me.
I understand your point and agree with it somewhat. Nonetheless, I think this article has it's merits. Maybe not so much as a scientific piece. Perhaps it would find a better home in a sociological journal.
I just a bought a new graphics card and ended up choosing a low end card that seems to work great.
Part of my decision to not buy something better was basic psychology.. It's like how the average human brain can't percieve the difference between a 90watt and a 100watt light bulb.
Sure the high end card can pump out a shit load more FPS - BUT.. can my brain detect that difference? While the difference might be apparent between a really low-end vs. a really high-end, what about between two cards toward the high-end? Is it really worth the extra $100 for the best card on the market if a cheaper card differs by less than 10% FPS and consequently you don't notice that difference?
I've always stayed toward the lower end because I don't think the performance gains in a high end machine are worth the extra $$$ especially at the current rate of obsolescence. I upgrade when the cost of doing so falls to less than a $100.
I'm not a psychologist though and my understanding is really limited to the classroom discussion of lightbulbs. I would be really interested if a more knowledge person replied and explained if I'm on the right track or pulling thoughts out of my ass.
Slashdot Mirror
If Linux is developed by geeks for geeks, then which of those geeks actually cares if Linux conquers the desktop?
I can tell you one thing - the distro that does conquer the desktop probably won't be the one the "geeks" use. And the distro that conquers the desktop will have been published by a company who hires people to obsess about the user experience rather than wait for geeks to give a damn.
We "geeks" don't need to do or learn anything.
Just my 10 cents.
There's some expression about not assuming malice that I think is pertinent here....
Congress is made up of many individuals, not all of whom are taking bribes from the DMA. To suggest otherwise would involve a conspiracy that is simply too large to be feasible.
CAN-SPAM is, over all, a decent law. It places restrictions on marketers that allow end-users to filter out what they don't want to see without completely making it illegal and thus denying either some unforseen but legitimate use for unsolicited email, or denying it to end-users who actually do want to see it. And let's face it - some people do want to see this spam because there would be no SPAM if there wasn't a segment of society making it economical.
The best way to deal with Iran is old fashioned patience. Something, too few people seem to have much of these days. Iran has a very young population, a population not happy with the status quo and the old cranks in power aren't going to live forever.
This is totally opposite to what I've found. I don't see any 4.0's whatsoever and the 3.0's and up are the most bitter bunch of people you'll ever meet. Always griping about how the world is unfair, how they coulda, shoulda, woulda, did this or done that.
Nope, give me a good ol' 2.5'er anyday. There's a happy fella. Just glad to have a job working with the rest of us Sanitation Engineers.
Let me respond to this by saying that I am a programmer who loves his job and punches out code all day long... and yes, by the time I get home I don't want to touch a computer either.
No matter how much you love doing something, there comes a point where you just can't do it anymore. In my case, I get very focused in my work and at the end of the day my brain just says "Gyahh! Enough!" and shuts down. It's not that it gets old and tedious, I'm always finding new challenges because the technology is always advancing.
On the flip side, I hesitate to take holidays, because I go through "withdrawal" not being able to do my job. During these times I often find myself doing projects that are cutting edge but that I'd never get approval for at work, but then integrating them into the system when I get back. It can be a real high when something your boss didn't give you approval for becomes a big hit!
But with Florida gone, all us Canadians will be retiring to Texas instead. Which is worse? Bwahahahaha!
You say there is proof that the world is older than 10,000 years, but you fail to consider that God could have made everything look like its that old. You also fail to realise that a day of God's time isn't the same as a day in man's time.
But this makes no sense even from a biblical perspective. Sure god could have made the world look old - but why? Either the bible is wrong and therefore a work of man, or "God is deceitful" (what else would you call making something look like what its not) and the whole notion of "choice" a facade.
"Hey have faith and believe in what I've said through my 'faulty creations' (remember, only 'god' is perfect, Moses et al are not) despite my also creating a world in which I've gone to great lengths to not just 'hide the truths' that I'm telling but also making it appear that the oppostite of what I say is true! Bwahahahaha!".
If the bible is fact, then one must come to the conclusion that God has created a system whereby only the deaf, blind, and ignorant are admitted to heaven. The "smart" ones who try to interpet what they "see" and "feel" in the world he created and get "suckered in" by God's own illusions, are denied admittance. Sounds pretty inane to me, and thus following the principle of "Occam's Razor" I reject this interpretation for the simpler one: The creation story given in the bible is 'wrong'.
Hell, even the Vatican (arguably the institution with the greatest vested interest in literal biblical interpretation) doesn't accept creationism anymore.
But if people insist on believeing in God then perhaps this explanation will suffice: God realized his creation at that moment in history was too primitive to grasp the truth and made up a "child-like" explanations just too satisfy their curiosity until they progressed enough to explore the truth for themselves.
Some food for though.
The labour laws that are applied in the west were "fought" for. Many people died in the workplace or wrestled with wages below the cost of living for many many years before we got to where they are today. There was a time, not too long ago, when dangerous exploitative factories and shanties like what you see in the third world were found all over what today is the 1st world. And just as things improved here, so will they improve around the third world, eventually.
Trying to "rush" it through legislation that penalizes what happens behind someone elses borders isn't going to make things better. In fact you may retard advancement instead of promoting it. If multinationals no longer have an economic advantage to moving operations to the third world, then you simply limit the economic growth of the third world, and probably the democratic progressions that go hand in hand with it. North America does not have a "right" to have jobs before the third world does. We are all better off if we all share in the pie. there's nothing wrong with some people get bigger pieces at different times - we'll all have the same share eventually.
Besides, why do so many people believe that the third world needs western help to get them out of where they are? Are people in the third world less intelligent or something? Are they incapable of solving their own problems? I blieve, they can do it on their own and probably better too, if we just kept our noses out of their business, stopped putting up trade barriers and protective legislation, and let the third world find the solutions that are good for them.
When I hear about people like this I can't help but think of "Dune" and it's Mentats.
I would like to know how much of this ability is genetically determined and how much is due to training and from what age did his "gifts" become apparent.
Either he needs to be stuck into some kinda breeding program (perhaps solving his virginity problem *hyuk hyuk*) or his training regimen needs to be studied and duplicated en masse. Imagine an advanced state-of-the-art military computer system that runs on 3-square meals a day and isn't susceptible to EMP bursts.
They don't even do that... the female deposits her eggs and the male... nevermind.
In the new building where I work IT has it's own closed off area so we can work in peace and harmony. Only problem is, to save money, the CEO decided IT doesn't need it own thermostat. One half of the room is controller by a thermostat down the hall in the IT manager's office, and the other half of the room is controller by the thermostat on the other side of the building in the accounting department's office right under a heating vent. I tell you... we either freeze to death or sweat our guts out. One of the girls here generally moves into the server room to do her work during the winter. At any rate, I was pretty miffed about IT having to suffer like this - I've had a cold non-stop for about the past year and half - just to save a few dollars on building costs. I'm forwarding this article to the powers that be and hope they take it to heart before I die of pneumonia.
That's ok... we'll just wait until 70 years after he dies and remake the original three the WE want it to be.
Or do those copyright laws apply here?
Those are all good points but you're missing two of the most important ones: Multi-Platform capability and large ready-to-use library.
Large corporations tend to have multiple environments that applications are required to run on. Java solves this. Secondly, software development is not the bread-and-butter of the corporations that use Java. It's just an IT tool and Java comes with a very rich library. It's also very easy to plug-in third-party libraries (yeah, trying doing that with Cobol). Less reinventing of the wheel means faster development times means cheaper IT expenditures. It's hard to think of any other language that solves these two problems as effectively as Java.
Half the time, half the value.
Why would I as an employer want to take a risk with someone who didn't take the time to invest in themselves with a "proper" education, who didn't have the patience or commitment to work their asses off for 4 years to prove they have staying power, or who are so narrow-minded as to not see the value of learning anything outside of the core requirements for a degree. I've met many such people in the dot-com heyday and I have one word to describe them: BORING. And their output generally reflected their input: limited and unimaginative.
I might hire someone like that as an assistant to the server admin, but I definitely wouldn't want them on a software development team where the exchange of ideas and experiences, and the ability to think critically is at least as valuable (and probably more so) as knowing a programming language.
Vastly important? How so?
I write plenty of emails. Hell I'm writing THIS comment, and I never learned to "type". Can you read the words on this screen?
I guess in general, it depends upon context (as most things do). For developers, typing is not important whatsoever despite being plopped down at a keyboard all day to do one's job. Being an effective software developer is about designing good software. How fast you can type code has absolutely no relation that I can possibly think of to effective coding because good code is generally code that was well though out and designed prior to "typing" the first line. Typing faster without thinking about the design just means you make design mistakes all that much sooner. Furthermore, the keystrokes in a typical program usually resembles nothing like prose, so learning to type probably doesn't help much. I'm a developer. I'm considered a very good developer. But I never learned to type. Neither have most developers I know.
But for bosses? Ahhh... I dunno. None of my bosses could ever type and they seemed pretty effective. Don't know how they would have gotten where they were if they weren't.
These aren't the good ol' days where bosses dictate messages to a secretary who can type as fast as the boss could speek. And furthermore, even in the good ol'days speech went to "shorthand" usually before it went to the typewriter, so I think it's debatable how important it has been for a much longer time than the current "computer" era. Certainly more so, but I wouldn't say more so. Even with secretaries, organization skills are more important than typing skills. Being good or fast is just icing on the cake and I would think it has been since the very beginning.
OMG! Are suggesting that these people, who undoubtably have far better credentials than the average slashdot reader, somehow neglected to think of this very point or account for it? Wow. You better get in touch them real quick to let them know of the horrible mistake they're making!
Ever hear of "Hanlon's Razor"?
Oooooookaayyyy..
So how about the confluences in North Korea, Tibet, Turkmenistan, Iran, etc... to name but a few.
These aren't places you can just "go to".
Even in places where you CAN go (politcally, legally) you still can't (logistically) like the whole north half of friggin Canada or Siberia.
Sounds like someone got drunk, had a brain fart and posted without thinking it through.
It IS a secret API and the header file is hanlon.h
Don't fight it. Join it. Yup... when they start forcing RFID chips into my body, I'll add another 1,000,000 or so of my own all so the whitenoise will drown out the signal of the original.
I should make sure that would work first though, shouldn't I.
I hear you man. You are sooooo right.
Hey... Waaaaaiiiitttt a minute....
Probably because you are the only user of your computer. People with families may not be so lucky. Sure "I" know and use good browsing habits, but that doesn't mean my wife does (or even cares enough to try) or my children who forget everything you teach them as soon as they see something they like. IE is inherently unsafe for the average uneducated (and uneducatable) user. THAT is but one reason why so many people bash it. Thus, despite my attempts to protect myself, I am still forced to clean my system regularly because of the crap that gets installed whenever a family member has logged on.
Blah blah blah blah...
Apparently you don't watch the CBC. French bashing and Anglophone bashing is 30% of the humour on our STATE-SPONSORED television network. Canadians don't tolerate racism? Apparently we tolerate people with no sense of humour though. I wonder which is worse.
BTW.. I would appreciate it if in the future you didn't presume to speak on behalf of me.
I understand your point and agree with it somewhat. Nonetheless, I think this article has it's merits. Maybe not so much as a scientific piece. Perhaps it would find a better home in a sociological journal.
I just a bought a new graphics card and ended up choosing a low end card that seems to work great.
Part of my decision to not buy something better was basic psychology.. It's like how the average human brain can't percieve the difference between a 90watt and a 100watt light bulb.
Sure the high end card can pump out a shit load more FPS - BUT.. can my brain detect that difference? While the difference might be apparent between a really low-end vs. a really high-end, what about between two cards toward the high-end? Is it really worth the extra $100 for the best card on the market if a cheaper card differs by less than 10% FPS and consequently you don't notice that difference?
I've always stayed toward the lower end because I don't think the performance gains in a high end machine are worth the extra $$$ especially at the current rate of obsolescence. I upgrade when the cost of doing so falls to less than a $100.
I'm not a psychologist though and my understanding is really limited to the classroom discussion of lightbulbs. I would be really interested if a more knowledge person replied and explained if I'm on the right track or pulling thoughts out of my ass.