"Laura Croft is no more SciFi than Indiana Jones -- Its adventure. Buffy/Xena is Mytho. No Science involved at all, just adjusted beliefs leading to an alternate reality."
It's almost like you don't know that "Sci-Fi" is a well-established industry term that means more than science fiction, but is used to refer to all science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.
Some people even choose to pronounce it "Skiffy" but those people are just plain wrong.
Re:OK, that's obvious on the surface...
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
"If you can't compete get the hell out of the IT kitchen, I'm not going to pay for your lack of skill."
Lets not ignore that people come from other countries where their education is heavily subsidized by the government to take jobs from US citizens who have to pay their own way.
Sometimes their even paid to go to school *here*. I sat next to a very nice Indian gentleman back in 1988 when I was taking classes at Hartnell Community College in Salinas, CA. He was taking classes, and paying exorbitant non-resident tuition rates, presumably to do the two years and transfer to a real university. All this on his government's dime. I, of course, was working 30-35 hours a week to pay tuition, bills, rent, etc.
It should be said though, I work around a lot of H1-B workers, many from India of course but also many from Eastern Europe, and plenty of them are great workers. (Not all, of course, but not all US workers are either.) I have less of a problem with hiring foreign workers than I do with them not being paid a fair wage.
"If the tivo box allowed me to do that without having to pay their stupid subscription fee, then I would have bought one already. Sure, I wouldn't have their tv guide and preference matching and all that fancy shit, but I really don't care. If the tivo box would just let me set some start and end times to record, they would have made some money off of me."
Unless something significant has changed, that is *exactly* what Tivo does. The unit doesn't stop working when you don't have a subscription. You just don't get any program guide data or software updates.
I think you get a nag screen about your service not being active, but it still does exactly what you're describing.
You posit what happens if the computer doesn't have broadband. I posit what happens if it doesn't have available/working USB ports?
Portable storage devices also introduce the risk of physical damage, loss, or theft.
Portable vs online both have their merits, but you can't ignore the potential downsides of portable storage while highlighting those of online storage.
Also, in the Corporate IT field at least, there is strong selection for specialization. Most of our network guys are clueless about operating systems, and most of our O/S people are clueless about low level networking. Hell, most of them wouldn't even know how to do subnet math.
And the corporate environment encourages that. Naturally, nobody not in the network group is allowed to touch the networking equipment, so they'll likely never learn much beyond what they need to know for O/S support, etc etc. This silo-ing extends throughout much of Corporate IT in my experience. It discourages cross-training and encourages specialization to what imo is an excessive degree.
It's worth noting that the actual article is labelled as the top *Sci-Fi* shows of all time, not the top "Science Fiction". Sci-Fi is long established industry shorthand for "Science Fiction and Fantasy".
I guess I must have missed the memo informing me that a software developer can write one binary that will run on any version of linux, running any kernel, with any libraries?
My company makes software, and does support linux, but even our developers only "support" specific versions of two distros, Red Hat and (recently) Suse.
Which I grant is still probably easier than developing for Solaris and SCO and AIX and whatnot, but still, it's not exactly compile once, run everywhere in Linux either.
Holy crap those answers may be the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. If I didn't know better I'd think it was someone's parody of actual game company responses.
What I've heard of some businesses doing is giving developers/consultants/whatever two hard drives per laptop. One hard drive has the "corporate" image on it with full access to the network, email, etc. The second hard drive has the "developer" image, which they can mess with to their heart's content, but that has limited ability to affect the network.
As an long-time IT person myself, I can see the ways in which that would make my job easier, but it also just seemed ridiculously restritictive on the ability of people to do their work. Can't check email or your outlook calendar and write code at the same time?
Amen. I had some great teachers in my life. Some of them came from industry jobs (my community college programming professor, for one), but just as many of them were just plain good teachers who had always been teachers.
A couple of the *worst* teachers I ever had were young prodigys who clearly knew and understood the material better than most people twice their age, but they were *terrible* teachers. I'm talking the people who would walk into the classroom, face the chalkboard, and proceed to write and talk to the chalkboard for an hour, and then leave.
Having industry experience doesn't make you a good teacher, and not having it doesn't make you a bad teacher. I think the most important thing is a real love for teaching.
Someone who just takes the teaching gig as a better-paying retirement plan is at risk of being yet another teacher who would prefer to be somewhere else. We don't need any of them, whether they're from Industry or not.
I'm sure this young buck was very emotionally affected by his NES under the christmas tree, but what about those of us who came to the party with the family Pong console, even before we were blessed with our Atari 2600?
This Nintendo worship just seems inappropriate to me. They've done good stuff, lots of companies have done good stuff, but they didn't put the first game systems into homes. They didn't start the wave, they just rode it.
I'm sure someone will say "But Nintendo did it BETTER!" but I say whatever. My message to you youth of today is: People my age got over the death of Atari (and the Atari of old is most certainly dead no matter how much publishing happens under the brand name), someday you'll get over the death of Nintendo too. It may or may not happen now, and it won't necessarily be because of a fancy controller, but all things must pass, even the things you obsessed about in your youth.
The problem I see is that employees don't get "punished" for inappropriate security behavior as they should.
If I punch someone in the office, I would almost certainly be fired and if not at the very least it would go on my record and be reflected in my review.
Likewise, if I consistently showed up late, frequently lost my security badge, etc etc, all these things I would be called in the carpet for. They would be tracked and reported and come review time they would be remembered.
But people can infect the entire corporate network with a new virus, and not only does that not go in their record, in my experience even attempting to identify the person who compromised the network is discouraged.
Bottom line, people who do not execute company policies properly, and that includes security behaviors, should have such violations tracked and noted, just like when they violate other established policies of their job.
In my experience, this never happens, and I believe it's why so many people just think "Bah, IT will fix it".
I don't understand. Solaris is great, but Sun should have abandoned decades of work on their own engineered kernel and ported to Linux just because Linux is cool?
Why would the company with "the best *nix thing going out there" abandon that just to jump on the linux bandwagon?
It sounds like you're saying you wish they had done that so that they could contribute "scalability and other enhancements" to the linux kernel for the public, but what would that gain them? Hell, what if that alleged better scalability is based on the fundemental design of the kernel? Suns engineers may not be able to just write some "scalability modules" and plop them into Linux.
And if in fact their own kernel was already better than linux's kernel in that regard, again why would they want to abandon their own kernel? Just to say "Hey, look everyone, LINUX! LINUX! SQUAWK!"
None of this is a slam against linux, which is part of a perfectly fine OS as well. I just don't buy into the argument that linux is the ultimate end result of all OS evolution. Just because linux is good doesn't mean it's what everyone else has to be. Sometimes, different is even better than good.
Big sales like Seibel aren't sold to IT Directors any more. Most companies bypass IT entirely and go directly to the CEO or CFO. At best, they're pitching to the CIO, who is usually so far removed from any actual working IT personnel that we all look like ants to them.
This doom and gloom stuff from game industry people is becoming officially tiresome. So the game industry is becoming like other mass media industries. Whatever. Just because Hollywood spits out Fantastic Four or War of the Worlds doesn't mean someone still isn't making lots of smaller perfectly good independent films. And it doesn't even mean that the big budget hollywood films are always bad. (Though IMO they generally are.)
I could really give a crap about the latest Madden release or Final Fantasy XXXIV or most of the big gaming franchises. I still find lots of games coming out that I want to play, more than I even have time to play.
So yes, shocked, shocked I am to discover marketing and profiteering going on in this establishment. But so the fuck what? If you're in the game industry and you don't like games with billion dollar budgets and bleeding edge graphics, then make your own damn game on the cheap and publish it yourself. What's that? It's hard to get reliable income that way? Oops! Welcome to the entertainment industry. Where independent filmmakers have for decades been living on ketchup soup and maxed out credit cards to try and get their films in front of people.
Let's not forget what it says right there in the article. Many of these large animals (or at least related ancestors) were native to North America at one point. Their disappearance coincides very suspiciously with apparent arrivals of humans.
A similar suspicious coincidence happened to the megafauna of Australia also very near to the arrival of humans.
I toured the server farm at Pixar's HQ a few years ago. At that time the room was mostly Sun boxes. That was the time they were still rendering Monsters, Inc, if I recall the tour guide's commentary at the time.
Also, he said they actually leased their hardware, since it wasn't cost effective to purchase because generally they had to replace rendering hardware very frequently to stay on the cutting edge, and to keep rendering of frames fast enough to be done by the time the artists come back to work in the morning.
Seriously, it would be great for apple of 1 in 5 desktops of every corporation with more than 10,000 employees was running MacOS, but I really need to see the hard data supporting that, since it doesn't jibe with my experience at several companies nor the experiences of all the other sysadmins I've known and worked with over the years.
Would I believe that 21% of corporations had some MacOS systems, absolutely. It's been very rare for me to see a company that didn't have at least a few macs scattered around. But over 2,000 mac desktops in use at every business with over 10,000 people? Yes, I'm sure there are some businesses out there that are actually predominantly MacOS, especially if universities are being counted as large businesses, but if this is just a numbers exercise where a small handfull of predominantly MacOS shops are used to make it seem like there's a 20% install base across the board it becomes a bit disingenuine.
there are perfectly good softwar firewalls for windows. I use BlackIce, personally, but there are other perfectly good ones, not to mention the one built-in to Windows XP sp2.
And most decent cheap home routers provide prefectly usable hardware firewall services as well.
No reason for windows users to claim they don't have solutions available.
Slashdot Mirror
"Laura Croft is no more SciFi than Indiana Jones -- Its adventure.
Buffy/Xena is Mytho. No Science involved at all, just adjusted beliefs leading to an alternate reality."
It's almost like you don't know that "Sci-Fi" is a well-established industry term that means more than science fiction, but is used to refer to all science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.
Some people even choose to pronounce it "Skiffy" but those people are just plain wrong.
"If you can't compete get the hell out of the IT kitchen, I'm not going to pay for your lack of skill."
Lets not ignore that people come from other countries where their education is heavily subsidized by the government to take jobs from US citizens who have to pay their own way.
Sometimes their even paid to go to school *here*. I sat next to a very nice Indian gentleman back in 1988 when I was taking classes at Hartnell Community College in Salinas, CA. He was taking classes, and paying exorbitant non-resident tuition rates, presumably to do the two years and transfer to a real university. All this on his government's dime. I, of course, was working 30-35 hours a week to pay tuition, bills, rent, etc.
It should be said though, I work around a lot of H1-B workers, many from India of course but also many from Eastern Europe, and plenty of them are great workers. (Not all, of course, but not all US workers are either.) I have less of a problem with hiring foreign workers than I do with them not being paid a fair wage.
"If the tivo box allowed me to do that without having to pay their stupid subscription fee, then I would have bought one already. Sure, I wouldn't have their tv guide and preference matching and all that fancy shit, but I really don't care. If the tivo box would just let me set some start and end times to record, they would have made some money off of me."
Unless something significant has changed, that is *exactly* what Tivo does. The unit doesn't stop working when you don't have a subscription. You just don't get any program guide data or software updates.
I think you get a nag screen about your service not being active, but it still does exactly what you're describing.
"Some of the best estimates say that cutting CO2 by 50% will cost 1.5 BILLION LIVES by 2100."
Cite?
In what way are the people developing directly for the companies that use their software not developing proprietary software?
Open source software notwithstanding, what percent of corporations give out their internally-developed business code for free?
None of those things actually reduce *local* pollution, if you happen to live in a high Smog type area.
They're *broadly* better environmentally, but don't necessarily help the *local* environment.
You posit what happens if the computer doesn't have broadband. I posit what happens if it doesn't have available/working USB ports?
Portable storage devices also introduce the risk of physical damage, loss, or theft.
Portable vs online both have their merits, but you can't ignore the potential downsides of portable storage while highlighting those of online storage.
Also, in the Corporate IT field at least, there is strong selection for specialization. Most of our network guys are clueless about operating systems, and most of our O/S people are clueless about low level networking. Hell, most of them wouldn't even know how to do subnet math.
And the corporate environment encourages that. Naturally, nobody not in the network group is allowed to touch the networking equipment, so they'll likely never learn much beyond what they need to know for O/S support, etc etc. This silo-ing extends throughout much of Corporate IT in my experience. It discourages cross-training and encourages specialization to what imo is an excessive degree.
It's worth noting that the actual article is labelled as the top *Sci-Fi* shows of all time, not the top "Science Fiction". Sci-Fi is long established industry shorthand for "Science Fiction and Fantasy".
I guess I must have missed the memo informing me that a software developer can write one binary that will run on any version of linux, running any kernel, with any libraries?
My company makes software, and does support linux, but even our developers only "support" specific versions of two distros, Red Hat and (recently) Suse.
Which I grant is still probably easier than developing for Solaris and SCO and AIX and whatnot, but still, it's not exactly compile once, run everywhere in Linux either.
Holy crap those answers may be the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. If I didn't know better I'd think it was someone's parody of actual game company responses.
What I've heard of some businesses doing is giving developers/consultants/whatever two hard drives per laptop. One hard drive has the "corporate" image on it with full access to the network, email, etc. The second hard drive has the "developer" image, which they can mess with to their heart's content, but that has limited ability to affect the network.
As an long-time IT person myself, I can see the ways in which that would make my job easier, but it also just seemed ridiculously restritictive on the ability of people to do their work. Can't check email or your outlook calendar and write code at the same time?
Amen. I had some great teachers in my life. Some of them came from industry jobs (my community college programming professor, for one), but just as many of them were just plain good teachers who had always been teachers.
A couple of the *worst* teachers I ever had were young prodigys who clearly knew and understood the material better than most people twice their age, but they were *terrible* teachers. I'm talking the people who would walk into the classroom, face the chalkboard, and proceed to write and talk to the chalkboard for an hour, and then leave.
Having industry experience doesn't make you a good teacher, and not having it doesn't make you a bad teacher. I think the most important thing is a real love for teaching.
Someone who just takes the teaching gig as a better-paying retirement plan is at risk of being yet another teacher who would prefer to be somewhere else. We don't need any of them, whether they're from Industry or not.
I'm sure this young buck was very emotionally affected by his NES under the christmas tree, but what about those of us who came to the party with the family Pong console, even before we were blessed with our Atari 2600?
This Nintendo worship just seems inappropriate to me. They've done good stuff, lots of companies have done good stuff, but they didn't put the first game systems into homes. They didn't start the wave, they just rode it.
I'm sure someone will say "But Nintendo did it BETTER!" but I say whatever. My message to you youth of today is: People my age got over the death of Atari (and the Atari of old is most certainly dead no matter how much publishing happens under the brand name), someday you'll get over the death of Nintendo too. It may or may not happen now, and it won't necessarily be because of a fancy controller, but all things must pass, even the things you obsessed about in your youth.
The problem I see is that employees don't get "punished" for inappropriate security behavior as they should.
If I punch someone in the office, I would almost certainly be fired and if not at the very least it would go on my record and be reflected in my review.
Likewise, if I consistently showed up late, frequently lost my security badge, etc etc, all these things I would be called in the carpet for. They would be tracked and reported and come review time they would be remembered.
But people can infect the entire corporate network with a new virus, and not only does that not go in their record, in my experience even attempting to identify the person who compromised the network is discouraged.
Bottom line, people who do not execute company policies properly, and that includes security behaviors, should have such violations tracked and noted, just like when they violate other established policies of their job.
In my experience, this never happens, and I believe it's why so many people just think "Bah, IT will fix it".
Which part of the Michigan bill tells the population what they can't play?
As far as I know, it simply defines what you can't sell to minors.
You also can't sell alcohol, tobacco, or pornography to minors. So what?
If a parent wants their kid to play Grand Theft Slaughter Rape Party, they can still buy it themselves.
I don't understand. Solaris is great, but Sun should have abandoned decades of work on their own engineered kernel and ported to Linux just because Linux is cool?
Why would the company with "the best *nix thing going out there" abandon that just to jump on the linux bandwagon?
It sounds like you're saying you wish they had done that so that they could contribute "scalability and other enhancements" to the linux kernel for the public, but what would that gain them? Hell, what if that alleged better scalability is based on the fundemental design of the kernel? Suns engineers may not be able to just write some "scalability modules" and plop them into Linux.
And if in fact their own kernel was already better than linux's kernel in that regard, again why would they want to abandon their own kernel? Just to say "Hey, look everyone, LINUX! LINUX! SQUAWK!"
None of this is a slam against linux, which is part of a perfectly fine OS as well. I just don't buy into the argument that linux is the ultimate end result of all OS evolution. Just because linux is good doesn't mean it's what everyone else has to be. Sometimes, different is even better than good.
Big sales like Seibel aren't sold to IT Directors any more. Most companies bypass IT entirely and go directly to the CEO or CFO. At best, they're pitching to the CIO, who is usually so far removed from any actual working IT personnel that we all look like ants to them.
This doom and gloom stuff from game industry people is becoming officially tiresome. So the game industry is becoming like other mass media industries. Whatever. Just because Hollywood spits out Fantastic Four or War of the Worlds doesn't mean someone still isn't making lots of smaller perfectly good independent films. And it doesn't even mean that the big budget hollywood films are always bad. (Though IMO they generally are.)
I could really give a crap about the latest Madden release or Final Fantasy XXXIV or most of the big gaming franchises. I still find lots of games coming out that I want to play, more than I even have time to play.
So yes, shocked, shocked I am to discover marketing and profiteering going on in this establishment. But so the fuck what? If you're in the game industry and you don't like games with billion dollar budgets and bleeding edge graphics, then make your own damn game on the cheap and publish it yourself. What's that? It's hard to get reliable income that way? Oops! Welcome to the entertainment industry. Where independent filmmakers have for decades been living on ketchup soup and maxed out credit cards to try and get their films in front of people.
*Reintroduce*
Let's not forget what it says right there in the article. Many of these large animals (or at least related ancestors) were native to North America at one point. Their disappearance coincides very suspiciously with apparent arrivals of humans.
A similar suspicious coincidence happened to the megafauna of Australia also very near to the arrival of humans.
I toured the server farm at Pixar's HQ a few years ago. At that time the room was mostly Sun boxes. That was the time they were still rendering Monsters, Inc, if I recall the tour guide's commentary at the time.
Also, he said they actually leased their hardware, since it wasn't cost effective to purchase because generally they had to replace rendering hardware very frequently to stay on the cutting edge, and to keep rendering of frames fast enough to be done by the time the artists come back to work in the morning.
The press release mentions planet Aris, that's the planet the Lion voltrons were on.
Seriously, it would be great for apple of 1 in 5 desktops of every corporation with more than 10,000 employees was running MacOS, but I really need to see the hard data supporting that, since it doesn't jibe with my experience at several companies nor the experiences of all the other sysadmins I've known and worked with over the years.
Would I believe that 21% of corporations had some MacOS systems, absolutely. It's been very rare for me to see a company that didn't have at least a few macs scattered around. But over 2,000 mac desktops in use at every business with over 10,000 people? Yes, I'm sure there are some businesses out there that are actually predominantly MacOS, especially if universities are being counted as large businesses, but if this is just a numbers exercise where a small handfull of predominantly MacOS shops are used to make it seem like there's a 20% install base across the board it becomes a bit disingenuine.
Yes, and the box of tissues on the table aren't "Kleenex" and yet that's what everyone calls them.
there are perfectly good softwar firewalls for windows. I use BlackIce, personally, but there are other perfectly good ones, not to mention the one built-in to Windows XP sp2.
And most decent cheap home routers provide prefectly usable hardware firewall services as well.
No reason for windows users to claim they don't have solutions available.