Well now, who really needs an excuse for bigotry against religious folks? Hell, they's been doin' it amongst themselves fo' so long now, I reckon us here atheists might as well chime in.
Why this post hasn't been modded +5 Insightful escapes me completely. Apple has never, ever been either cheap or particularly orthogonal, let alone both at the same time.
I know it's slightly off topic, and I haven't a clue how to moderate something, but would someone please mod the parent up insightful? The statement about the cams is 100% accurate and I would really like that crap to disappear off the net, because it gobbles up everyone's bandwidth and finding out I downed a cammed movie is indeed detrimental to my health.
I just watched the *whole* video. And it really really was that bad, I'm afraid. Don't quit your day jobs. Seriously. The score was monotonous as hell, and it sounded like, well, two guitar-on-overdrive-pedals copies. Which is exactly what it was.
I'm not at all against using the guitar hero controllers as instruments. Shit, people like Kevin Johansen can even make mouth harps sound cool, so why not?
But calling this drivel "Classical" music is kind of akin to calling Delius a "classical composer".
It strikes me as funny that a forum of techies like/. gives you such completely Neanderthal answers. You have to be responsible to your kid apparently means you have to bring in the bacon, and it is implied that your wife sits at home and needs taking care of.
Our situations are similar in that I have worked at HP for 12 years and went through the same arch of experience as you, meaning holding different jobs and having a wife and a kid and a good salary but doubting the point of it all. My wife however is a very intelligent woman who finished her army time in the VMS operator group, got into HP after the IDF and then became an ASM and later on support engineer for the EMEA region, just like me. This is, after all, how we met.
So having said that I would like to tackle two base assumptions/. has erroneously been making so far:
1) You want to start your own business. You never said that. You said you want to do something you love. I have been thinking of becoming a certified teacher so that I would teach English, Dutch or Lit. The other things I can come up with are starting to work as a chef or a record store employee. While all of these options would mean a drop in pay, they are by no means dis-honorable professions, and they do give you a pay check.
Making a career change might or might not mean a drop in income, but doesn't need to be less "stable" per se. Whatever that means. God knows they've been outsourcing people like us by the droves anyway, so "security" is all very relative.
2) Your wife is left out of the picture. I have a son of 3 months now. But my wife will definitely get back to work in August, and her salary almost equals mine. She's been with the company for 10 years, rather, so there's the explanation for the gap.
My wife and I function as a peer-level economical unit. If one wants to make executive decisions about career changes, the other needs to approve of said change. But at the end of the day, we grant each other the freedom to entertain these thoughts, because we know we could survive very comfortably on one HP salary and one "career-change-salary".
So depending on your relationship with your wife, her education level and her profession, I would argue that you could even take a 6 month to a year sabbatical to be with your kids while she brings home the bacon so that you can spend some time with your family and ponder what you want to do in life.
Now, having said that I must caution you about something. I've thought about the IT industry long and hard, and it beats working in a coal mine. I say this because the money and fringe benefits are good. I get to travel a bit, routinely speak to people from ~14 different countries or more, and have a diverse job.
Any other job that you will take because you have a passion for it will invariably also turn out to be just that. A Job. Because such is the nature of Jobs. So I think it might be worthwhile to adapt an attitude of "I work to live, I don't live to work" instead, and re-think why you are disappointed with your work. I switch jobs within HP every 2-3 years to keep motivated and to keep on my toes.
Depending on your options, you might find out IT ain't all that bad. Just get a hobby. Or two. This was my conclusion, but do as you will. You're not the only one that can bring home the bacon. I assume your wife is not a numbnut.
*Mentioning* Israel makes you a "sympathizer" (whatever that means)? While the author of the piece lives there? Shit man, I *live* in Israel and I wouldn't necessarily call me a sympathizer.
So "Danish scientists completed work on wave-generated electricity device" would mean the poster is a sympathizer of the Danish regime, and obviously wants to pitch that news to achieve world domination.
A rather amusing blog post about beards and programming languages turns into fodder for Al Jazeera... Pfff.... Square Snow Man, you seriously need to blow it out the other hole, because your brain isn't firing on all cylinders.
In my 27+ years of video gaming with a very culturally and geographically diverse crowd, I cannot say I or anyone I've ever known has shown tendencies to do the following:
- Jump from building to building, all the while sniping people in the head and shouting "HEADSHOT!", "UNSTOPPABLE" and "M-M-MONSTER KILL!" - Grow a 5 foot white beard, ride to Rohan to assist the cavalry while casting spells to turn certain parts of the landscape into lush greenery and shouting "I am the keeper of the fire of Udun!" at my troll enemies. - Mod my own car to become poisonously green with 100 neon tubes while drag racing through my city of residence with 12 other such cars and performing Giant Air Tricks. - Dress myself up in Axis uniform and run out into the middle of the square of any French town I come through, defending the center lamp post with my life and my MP-40 while shouting "Ich brauche Verstärkung!" - Find the planet with the Death Ray technology, build an army of fist-size, planet-destroying, 12-square-moves-in-one-turn space ships and blow Mars out of the sky. - Pulling random people out of their car to jack it, only to drive it up to San Fiero while listening to Master Sounds to get your Mini Gun from the bridge to mount an attack on a desert army base singlehandedly.
So no. That is *not* a familiar stereotype for me.
You are talking about the band that was rendered (like all metal bands) completely irrelevant by the Grunge and Manchester waves of the early nineties? The same band that managed to have a few hits with Ballads by the end of the nineties, but ultimately hasn't done jack shit since 1997 except de-fame napster?
The fact that nobody on this forum remembers them for their music after Master of Puppets is quite telling, don't you think? Metallica is a self inflated name, but I wouldn't call it big.
Seriously, metal has been dead for 25 or 30 years. Big names..... Tsss.... I would argue that in recent pop history, Radiohead has the biggest axe to swing of the three names. NiN is also fringe music, at the end of the day.
It would be a different story if the Apple (of the Beatles, that is), the Stones, U2 and the Frank Sinatra estate hopped on the "pay what you like" distribution model. Those are all bigger names in the music industry.
Damn. Frank Sinatra strikes me as more relevant than Metallica, and he's been dead for a long time now.
"Truth" is a tricky one too. What is True? A statement can be perfectly true under one set of circumstances/assumptions, yet completely false under another.
Truth is a label you need to attach to certain things in order not to go mad.
May I suggest you all read George Lakoff's "Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being" and "Metaphors we live by" before discussing this any further?
As an aside: I'd have to wonder if there is a difference between our "observation" and our "description" of the universe. How do we differentiate between describing a thing as having eerie symmetrical properties and our need to observe said properties? Are we even able to observe that which our minds can't fathom?
To cut a long story short, the universe pretty much exists in our minds' eye and any statement we make about its nature will invariably be subjective. Even if we choose to use the language of mathematics linked to empirical data.
Perhaps these geniuses that don't come along too often marvel at the beauty of the human mind and its constructs rather than the universe, and the tricky bit is that neither they nor anyone else can prove any of this either which way.
This whole discussion is one of semantics, and the original poster is right in that the answers that might or might not be forthcoming are not likely to change our existence overnight.
Yeah, I can second that motion, although I work for a vendor/manufacturer. I've been here 12 years and managed to get fired exactly once due to off-shoring (to Bangalore, as a matter of fact). However, since I know the right "stuff" and people, I managed to retain my position in spite of this and lately even get a more interesting one. The trick is not to take stuff like that personal.
But in general, I can't honestly say the summary is true. Because I've seen examples of talent moving on and dregs staying behind, but I've also seen countless examples of really talented people who are good to know staying with the company.
Any statement about Dead Sea Effects are an over-simplification, even when talking about the Dead Sea. Trust me, I've been there often enough too.:-D
As a Mass Storage man for HP, I was hoping to see something about cool Storage Area Network technology. Self-healing and fixing SAN's would indeed be a cool thing, because the way I see it I get more questions on the Infrastructure than the actual boxes in the SAN.
If you look at current offerings from a couple of the major vendors, you'll see that there are boxes that are already guaranteeing 100% uptime and have all the redundancies and diagnostics built in to actually deliver the goods.
The problem with Data storage hypes such as this (if it ever becomes a hype) is that people all of a sudden think that having such a box is a substitute for a decent support contract on the actual infrastructure or a backup.
Your DBA inserts incorrect data into a production database. Your exchange server becomes virus ridden due to insufficient patch management. Your users delete that project folder that is very important. Someone snags the cable in between the server and the storage device because they're having a bad day. Windows machines on a SAN do tape polling thus disrupting the bus.
The examples of configuration mishaps, logical data loss and sheer accidents far outstrip the instances where such a box would go down itself. So while it's nice that someone claims to have come up with a new Disk Box that will heal itself, the summary is misleading because it claims it will heal the SAN.
Which it won't, judging by the Marketing BS I just read.
>> transportation is among the most important factors keeping the economy running smoothly. >Quite true, and also where we are starting to break apart
You mean transportation is causing the US economic problems at the moment and not: - Arbitrary invasion of foreign countries - Deficits to the treasury - Collapsing housing market and currency because of (amongst others) the above ??
My hometown, Emmeloord, the Netherlands, is one of the sleepiest places on the earth. Initially it was a farming community. It was ocean until 1920 when the dyke was built to close the part of the ocean to form a brackish lake, and then in 1941 the area was mad into land just prior to the Germans invading the country. From the fifties, there was a boom of Farmers from Zeeland fleeing the south after the flooding of '53 which killed 5000+ people. My mother was one of those.
This town is populated with earthy farm folk. There is nothing to do. On any given Sunday you can fire guns downtown without anyone even hearing them. The streets are empty on Sundays. When I went to high school, 16 year old boys took their John Deeres and Massey Fergusons to school. The first thing I ever learnt how to drive was a small Massey Fergusson tractor from the late forties. The second thing I learnt how to drive was a fork lift.
Nico van Staveren was a long-time friend of my fathers. My father is now dead and gone, but to see Nico come up with this stuff is just more than bizarre. Figure my bewilderment of finding a story on/. about my home town, one of the least likely to be in the news places on the planet.
The only thing I wonder about is what this will mean to anyone with a Toyota or Mazda that happens to pull into the robotic pump. Like my townsman so aptly commented "Why not, but I hope they're insured well".:-D:-D
This really made my day. It brought tears to my eyes as I'm reading this in my living room in Haifa, Israel.
If they also cut the phone connections, the roads and the airways, Europe would be a happier, more relaxed place. I'm sure we can get houmous and couscous without bothering with the Middle East.
Slashdot Mirror
Well now, who really needs an excuse for bigotry against religious folks? Hell, they's been doin' it amongst themselves fo' so long now, I reckon us here atheists might as well chime in.
Why this post hasn't been modded +5 Insightful escapes me completely. Apple has never, ever been either cheap or particularly orthogonal, let alone both at the same time.
I'm not seeing it happen.
I know it's slightly off topic, and I haven't a clue how to moderate something, but would someone please mod the parent up insightful? The statement about the cams is 100% accurate and I would really like that crap to disappear off the net, because it gobbles up everyone's bandwidth and finding out I downed a cammed movie is indeed detrimental to my health.
I just watched the *whole* video. And it really really was that bad, I'm afraid. Don't quit your day jobs. Seriously. The score was monotonous as hell, and it sounded like, well, two guitar-on-overdrive-pedals copies. Which is exactly what it was.
I'm not at all against using the guitar hero controllers as instruments. Shit, people like Kevin Johansen can even make mouth harps sound cool, so why not?
But calling this drivel "Classical" music is kind of akin to calling Delius a "classical composer".
It strikes me as funny that a forum of techies like /. gives you such completely Neanderthal answers. You have to be responsible to your kid apparently means you have to bring in the bacon, and it is implied that your wife sits at home and needs taking care of.
/. has erroneously been making so far:
Our situations are similar in that I have worked at HP for 12 years and went through the same arch of experience as you, meaning holding different jobs and having a wife and a kid and a good salary but doubting the point of it all. My wife however is a very intelligent woman who finished her army time in the VMS operator group, got into HP after the IDF and then became an ASM and later on support engineer for the EMEA region, just like me. This is, after all, how we met.
So having said that I would like to tackle two base assumptions
1) You want to start your own business.
You never said that. You said you want to do something you love. I have been thinking of becoming a certified teacher so that I would teach English, Dutch or Lit. The other things I can come up with are starting to work as a chef or a record store employee. While all of these options would mean a drop in pay, they are by no means dis-honorable professions, and they do give you a pay check.
Making a career change might or might not mean a drop in income, but doesn't need to be less "stable" per se. Whatever that means. God knows they've been outsourcing people like us by the droves anyway, so "security" is all very relative.
2) Your wife is left out of the picture.
I have a son of 3 months now. But my wife will definitely get back to work in August, and her salary almost equals mine. She's been with the company for 10 years, rather, so there's the explanation for the gap.
My wife and I function as a peer-level economical unit. If one wants to make executive decisions about career changes, the other needs to approve of said change. But at the end of the day, we grant each other the freedom to entertain these thoughts, because we know we could survive very comfortably on one HP salary and one "career-change-salary".
So depending on your relationship with your wife, her education level and her profession, I would argue that you could even take a 6 month to a year sabbatical to be with your kids while she brings home the bacon so that you can spend some time with your family and ponder what you want to do in life.
Now, having said that I must caution you about something. I've thought about the IT industry long and hard, and it beats working in a coal mine. I say this because the money and fringe benefits are good. I get to travel a bit, routinely speak to people from ~14 different countries or more, and have a diverse job.
Any other job that you will take because you have a passion for it will invariably also turn out to be just that. A Job. Because such is the nature of Jobs. So I think it might be worthwhile to adapt an attitude of "I work to live, I don't live to work" instead, and re-think why you are disappointed with your work. I switch jobs within HP every 2-3 years to keep motivated and to keep on my toes.
Depending on your options, you might find out IT ain't all that bad. Just get a hobby. Or two. This was my conclusion, but do as you will. You're not the only one that can bring home the bacon. I assume your wife is not a numbnut.
*Mentioning* Israel makes you a "sympathizer" (whatever that means)? While the author of the piece lives there? Shit man, I *live* in Israel and I wouldn't necessarily call me a sympathizer.
So "Danish scientists completed work on wave-generated electricity device" would mean the poster is a sympathizer of the Danish regime, and obviously wants to pitch that news to achieve world domination.
A rather amusing blog post about beards and programming languages turns into fodder for Al Jazeera... Pfff.... Square Snow Man, you seriously need to blow it out the other hole, because your brain isn't firing on all cylinders.
In my 27+ years of video gaming with a very culturally and geographically diverse crowd, I cannot say I or anyone I've ever known has shown tendencies to do the following:
- Jump from building to building, all the while sniping people in the head and shouting "HEADSHOT!", "UNSTOPPABLE" and "M-M-MONSTER KILL!"
- Grow a 5 foot white beard, ride to Rohan to assist the cavalry while casting spells to turn certain parts of the landscape into lush greenery and shouting "I am the keeper of the fire of Udun!" at my troll enemies.
- Mod my own car to become poisonously green with 100 neon tubes while drag racing through my city of residence with 12 other such cars and performing Giant Air Tricks.
- Dress myself up in Axis uniform and run out into the middle of the square of any French town I come through, defending the center lamp post with my life and my MP-40 while shouting "Ich brauche Verstärkung!"
- Find the planet with the Death Ray technology, build an army of fist-size, planet-destroying, 12-square-moves-in-one-turn space ships and blow Mars out of the sky.
- Pulling random people out of their car to jack it, only to drive it up to San Fiero while listening to Master Sounds to get your Mini Gun from the bridge to mount an attack on a desert army base singlehandedly.
So no. That is *not* a familiar stereotype for me.
Suddenly I understand how come the USA, whose population is roughly 4.5% of the World Population, houses approximately 25% of the world's prisoners.
Gravity doesn't drop. At least not in that sense of the word. :-D
Metallica a big name?
You are talking about the band that was rendered (like all metal bands) completely irrelevant by the Grunge and Manchester waves of the early nineties? The same band that managed to have a few hits with Ballads by the end of the nineties, but ultimately hasn't done jack shit since 1997 except de-fame napster?
The fact that nobody on this forum remembers them for their music after Master of Puppets is quite telling, don't you think? Metallica is a self inflated name, but I wouldn't call it big.
Seriously, metal has been dead for 25 or 30 years. Big names..... Tsss.... I would argue that in recent pop history, Radiohead has the biggest axe to swing of the three names. NiN is also fringe music, at the end of the day.
It would be a different story if the Apple (of the Beatles, that is), the Stones, U2 and the Frank Sinatra estate hopped on the "pay what you like" distribution model. Those are all bigger names in the music industry.
Damn. Frank Sinatra strikes me as more relevant than Metallica, and he's been dead for a long time now.
"Truth" is a tricky one too. What is True? A statement can be perfectly true under one set of circumstances/assumptions, yet completely false under another.
Truth is a label you need to attach to certain things in order not to go mad.
I think what IntelliTubbie is trying to say is a slight modification of the earlier post by Adambomb:
- Skip the party and get the Girl alone.
- Alcohol.
- Barry White.
- Intercourse.
And please, don't drag Barton Fink into the mix until *after* said intercourse. If she's turned on by watching Barton Fink, dragons be there!
May I suggest you all read George Lakoff's "Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being" and "Metaphors we live by" before discussing this any further?
As an aside:
I'd have to wonder if there is a difference between our "observation" and our "description" of the universe. How do we differentiate between describing a thing as having eerie symmetrical properties and our need to observe said properties? Are we even able to observe that which our minds can't fathom?
To cut a long story short, the universe pretty much exists in our minds' eye and any statement we make about its nature will invariably be subjective. Even if we choose to use the language of mathematics linked to empirical data.
Perhaps these geniuses that don't come along too often marvel at the beauty of the human mind and its constructs rather than the universe, and the tricky bit is that neither they nor anyone else can prove any of this either which way.
This whole discussion is one of semantics, and the original poster is right in that the answers that might or might not be forthcoming are not likely to change our existence overnight.
I double dare you to find a country on this globe where you cannot have sex with underage prostitutes.
Human nature is a disaster.
Yeah, I can second that motion, although I work for a vendor/manufacturer. I've been here 12 years and managed to get fired exactly once due to off-shoring (to Bangalore, as a matter of fact). However, since I know the right "stuff" and people, I managed to retain my position in spite of this and lately even get a more interesting one. The trick is not to take stuff like that personal.
:-D
But in general, I can't honestly say the summary is true. Because I've seen examples of talent moving on and dregs staying behind, but I've also seen countless examples of really talented people who are good to know staying with the company.
Any statement about Dead Sea Effects are an over-simplification, even when talking about the Dead Sea. Trust me, I've been there often enough too.
That's the wrong question.
"Why do you *think* you have democracy?" would be a more apt one.
You have to be kidding me. Modding this post 2: Informative is just ridiculous.
/. standards.
Firstly it's incorrect. Some things are easier in Windows, some in Linux, some in HP-UX. Writing this post is just preposterous, even by
Secondly, it's not in the least informative. Which things? Where are the links?
WTF, guys?
You're so right.
As a Mass Storage man for HP, I was hoping to see something about cool Storage Area Network technology. Self-healing and fixing SAN's would indeed be a cool thing, because the way I see it I get more questions on the Infrastructure than the actual boxes in the SAN.
If you look at current offerings from a couple of the major vendors, you'll see that there are boxes that are already guaranteeing 100% uptime and have all the redundancies and diagnostics built in to actually deliver the goods.
The problem with Data storage hypes such as this (if it ever becomes a hype) is that people all of a sudden think that having such a box is a substitute for a decent support contract on the actual infrastructure or a backup.
Your DBA inserts incorrect data into a production database. Your exchange server becomes virus ridden due to insufficient patch management. Your users delete that project folder that is very important. Someone snags the cable in between the server and the storage device because they're having a bad day. Windows machines on a SAN do tape polling thus disrupting the bus.
The examples of configuration mishaps, logical data loss and sheer accidents far outstrip the instances where such a box would go down itself. So while it's nice that someone claims to have come up with a new Disk Box that will heal itself, the summary is misleading because it claims it will heal the SAN.
Which it won't, judging by the Marketing BS I just read.
And ye shall name it Steely Dan.
Did I just spot a Rick Astley reference on /.?
Oooohhh... I didn't realise there were Stock, Aitken and Waterman fans out here.
>> transportation is among the most important factors keeping the economy running smoothly.
>Quite true, and also where we are starting to break apart
You mean transportation is causing the US economic problems at the moment and not:
- Arbitrary invasion of foreign countries
- Deficits to the treasury
- Collapsing housing market and currency because of (amongst others) the above
??
You're confused.
LUNCH is four hours in France. With red wine or a beer, cheeses and Crème Brûlée for dessert.
If you're even thinking of modding this funny, think again. I kid not. Even at HP Grenoble and HP Isle D'Abeau this is the case.
Wait... How come you put Astrology in the same category as piercings and fetishes?
Damn. I have a woman. But I'd trade her in for a similar model except with the Piercing upgrade and the Fetish option.
My hometown, Emmeloord, the Netherlands, is one of the sleepiest places on the earth. Initially it was a farming community. It was ocean until 1920 when the dyke was built to close the part of the ocean to form a brackish lake, and then in 1941 the area was mad into land just prior to the Germans invading the country. From the fifties, there was a boom of Farmers from Zeeland fleeing the south after the flooding of '53 which killed 5000+ people. My mother was one of those.
/. about my home town, one of the least likely to be in the news places on the planet.
:-D :-D
This town is populated with earthy farm folk. There is nothing to do. On any given Sunday you can fire guns downtown without anyone even hearing them. The streets are empty on Sundays. When I went to high school, 16 year old boys took their John Deeres and Massey Fergusons to school. The first thing I ever learnt how to drive was a small Massey Fergusson tractor from the late forties. The second thing I learnt how to drive was a fork lift.
Nico van Staveren was a long-time friend of my fathers. My father is now dead and gone, but to see Nico come up with this stuff is just more than bizarre. Figure my bewilderment of finding a story on
The only thing I wonder about is what this will mean to anyone with a Toyota or Mazda that happens to pull into the robotic pump. Like my townsman so aptly commented "Why not, but I hope they're insured well".
This really made my day. It brought tears to my eyes as I'm reading this in my living room in Haifa, Israel.
If they also cut the phone connections, the roads and the airways, Europe would be a happier, more relaxed place. I'm sure we can get houmous and couscous without bothering with the Middle East.