Am I saying death is a good idea? Well, yeah. I am.
If you think about it, the success of all life on this planet is predicated on the fact that, sooner or later, it dies. This necessitates the ability to reproduce, and reproduction is the key to evolution.
I don't just mean genetic evolution here, either. The advancement of human civilization has always been about the next generation surpassing the accomplishment of their parents. Science, philosophy, economics, art -- you name it. The progress we as a species have made have always come from the student looking at what has been accomplished before them and saying "That's great, but what if..."
Aside from the obvious population issues, allowing people (or far worse, some people) to outlive Methusela poses a very real danger of short-circuiting this vital process.
Understand, this is what has worked for eons -- ever since your ancestors and mine decided to gang up and be more than free-floating amino acids, this is the way it's been. Ask yourself: is your own inflated sense of self-importance worth short-circuiting that?
I'd rather die knowing my descendants would someday achieve things beyond my imagining than live and help ensure that they don't.
Yeah, because the old way just wasn't effective...
on
Live to be 1000 Years Old?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I wouldn't want to live to be 1000. That last century you spend in a nursing home
probably would Suck with a capital "S".
Seriously, given the likelyhood of an accident getting you, imagine the sort of life
people would have to live to average living to 1000.
Even if you could offer people a constant youthful physique and
extreme longevity, how many of us are really going to make it to even 200?
Unless you live your entire life underground in a room with little windows,
never venturing forth into the world, something's going to get you. While
this means that a huge number of/.'ers are relatively safe, the rest of us are still going
to get ourselves killed going over the handlebar on our bikes or crashing
our cars or walking in front of a bus or hitting trees skiing or etc.
Aside from that, try to imagine the social, scientific and political stagnation that would occur from having
old people not dying. Try to picture the economic devestation among young people
(you think following the boomers sucks...), the lock-in of power among a few
Very Oldsters...
If people do start living to 1000, I think our real duty would be to start
hunting them.
I know I'll probably be in the minority here, but I say: That God.
For too long the internet has been a haven for bad people engaging
in bad behavior.
Finally, we can get rid of all those terrorists, child porn mongers,
spammers, communists, hate groups, spyware writers, homosexuals, political
dissentors, darwinists, gamblers, sex-ed supporters, atheists, blue-staters, teenagers, abortionists,
people who confuse decent Americans by engaging in satire and especially
those people who question electronic voting. Finally we'll fix the internet and
make it safe for all the little children and honest hard-working Americans out there.
Heck, we've already got an FCC all set up, we can just put Michael Powell in charge.
Thank God we live in an age where we can finally
bring about the society we as Americans so richly deserve.
Seriously, is anyone actally still awake in Hollywood or are these
scripts actually being greenlighted by some giant evil Twilight-Zone-ish computer
that lives in a cave someplace on the back lot of Warner Brothers?
This news item seems like something they would have used as the basis of
an episode of The Critic, fer cryin' out loud.
Bossman Compatibility: Verifies that the hardware vendor has taken my
boss's boss out to dinner and purchased suitably expensive drinks. Rating based
on the number of stars the restaurant recieved, although points may be docked
if the filet mignon was a little overdone. This one is related to the...
CYA Verification: Vendor must have a name recognizable to people who
read periodicals such as "CTO Magazine" so, when it breaks down, I can say
"who ever hear of XVY Company's gear being bad?" If the vendor is a company
like Dell which also sells home PCs, this metric should also include going to
my boss's boss's house and verifying that his Dell is running okay so I don't
have to hear shit like "I don't know why we got Dell, my desktop at home has problems
all the time, too, and it's only six years old!"
Sweetness Factor: Not as much of a factor as it once was, depending on how
big of iron we're talking about. But it the thing has, say, requires a cooling
tower that happens to have a waterfall built into it, that's point right there.
May conflict with....
The Under-Desk Operation Profile: Since it'd take at least a month and a dozen SRs and books of useless paperwork just to get the
beastie screwed into a rack at our NOC, the server must both fit nicely under
the desk in my cube with all the other machines and not be too loud. Generation
of excess heat is a plus since the facilities people have set 61 degrees as a
reasonable temperature for my office in the winter.
Extra-App Capacity Testing: For when some moron in another department
comes in and convinces my boss's boss that "all that server is doing is running
the backend for our entire operation, so can we put our incredibly messy half-working
app on it too and treat it like QA?" If this server can alert a Terminator unit to
go to the aforementioned coworker's home in the middle of the night and slay him
and his family, this requirement can be waived (oh, I wait for the day this will
be waived....)
I'm sure there are a few other benchmarks you could run, but honestly these are the
Big Five that I decide on.
Okay, seriously, how the heck do you make *any* predictions about
what's going to be happening in the computing industry 20 years
from now? This seems like a definate "in other news, 84% of statistics
are made up on the spot" item.
Think about trying to predict 2004 back in '84. PCs were just starting
to take off, Al Gore was just starting to bury the first fiber connections
that would become the internet, IBM was going to be the big power in
personal computing...
Nobody could have foreseen that we'd all be
selling the shit out of our basements on eBay, listening to huge music
libraries on devices the size of a deck of cards and spending our
work days trolling Slashdot?
C'mon, Garner, who are we trying to fool here?
Re:Mixed feeling
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 4, Insightful
First, I think it's way too early to think this is a cure for HIV.
Aside from that, when you RTFA you'll see that this isn't a regular drug, it's more of a therapy -- as I understand it, you use cells from the patient's own body and basically train them to combat the HIV virus. Unless you can create a generic version that would work across populations, it's not as simple as just shipping a bunch of shots off to the third world like we were able to do with polio.
As for "open source" drugs: You should realize it isn't that simple. It costs a lot of money to find, test and approve new drugs. While I'd agree that our current system enriches the drug companies at the expense of the little people (among a myriad of other problems), it's really important not to assume you can think of the industry like you do computing.
Wait, a vaccine?
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm confused about the terminology: If it was used on patients who
already had HIV, wouldn't that be a treatment rather than a vaccine?
Or does the way if works -- apparently reconfiguring the immune
system to recognize HIV -- technically qualify it as a vaccine since
that's basically how vaccines work?
I'd imagine that this sort of therapy could be useful against a whole
range of viruses since (as I understand) it operates by training the immune system
rather than crippling something specific to the virus the way that other
HIV treatments do. If that'd work for most viruses, maybe someday people will be
able to just update their own
virus definitions a few times a year -- of course, most of them probably
wouldn't bother and then call me for support when they open some damn.exe file
they got in their friggin' email and... Sorry, started drifting there for a second.
Of course, it's awfully early to get too excited given this is just
18 people in Brazil so far, and "incredible effect" might be a bit strong since
only 44% of the very small number of test patients are still showing the full
benefit after one year, but I suppose any good news in this sort
of scenario is, well, good news.
PS: Am I the only one who finds it darkly ironic that "The Sexecutioner" submitted
this story?
If you're happy and comfortable with your program, you should be extremely
resistant to the idea of switching situations just for the sake of having
a big name school on the top of your degree.
Remember: *Learning* is what's important
here, especially when we're talking about an undergrad degree -- I went to
a small state school where there were 10-20 people in my classes and I
recieved a much, much better education than my peers who went to large
universities. Why? Because I could walk into my professor's office and
spend an hour talking to him about class material, advances in computing or the
state of the industry or whatever.
In my experience, the sort of jobs you'll get with an undergrad degree tend to value
understanding and skill over who your degree is from -- if you can do the work, you're
their person. If you're going to a job that requires a graduate degree,
well, you can go to a high-profile school for your grad work, eh?
Aside from all of that, I've learned the hard way that you should follow your instincts. Follow yours on this one and stay put.
Blogs aren't journalism. They aren't about reporting the news, they're about
commenting on it.
I realize that a lot of people these days have real trouble understanding
the difference between news and commentary, but there is a fairly
significant divide between the two.
Journalists go out and find out what's going on, they (hopefully) check
their sources out and get confirmation and input from both sides and then
report on it. Commentators -- and this includes bloggers -- are
consumers of what journalists generate. They add (or, some might argue,
remove) value by way of interpretation.
Remember way back in like 1996 when we all expected the internet to give voice to the
common man? Create a new golden age in the spirit of the pamphlet writer that would have
Patrick Henry and the rest of the printing press crew smiling down on us? Well, that's what the blogs are -- the fact that some are regularly
insightful/interesting/ignorant/funny/biased enough to gain relative popularity should
not obscure that fact or cause us to think they're something beyond that.
Aside from that, I think it's important not to get too carried away with this whole "we
busted Dan Rather" thing. Frankly, it reminds me of when Drudge got out
in front of the Monica Lewinski thing; he got the story out, sure, and
suddenly we were hearing all about how internet media was going to come
out and crush the slow lumbering ten-minute-ago types on TV. But, as it
turned out,
that was *one time* as opposed to the hundreds of times before and since
where he's been completely off-base and his "Flash!" stories have vanished
without a trace.
Forgive me, first thing that popped into my head. I'm bored.
Morpheus: Microsoft is our enemy, Firefox, but when you're on the internet, you look
around. What do you see? Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters.
The very people we are trying to save.
But until we do, these people are still IE users.
You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to switch to a browser that doesn't
come included on their desktop when they bring their computers home from Best Buy and pop in the
"2000 Free Hours!" AOL CD.
And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on Microsoft that they will fight to protect it.
Were you listening to me Firefox, or were you looking at the woman surfing the hot lesbo porn?
Firefox: I was...
Morpheus: Look again.
Woman has turned into Bill Gates, introducing new "standard" to break non-IE browsers. Morpheus: Freeze it!
Firefox: What is it?
Morpheus: IE-only standards. That means that anyone we haven't converted over is potential
audience for crappy sites who only QA against IE. On the internet, you see this everywhere. We
have survived by being standards-based, by working to be compatible.
But these false "standards" are the gatekeepers.
Firefox: Whoa.
Morpheus: I won't lie to you, Firefox. Every single company or product that has stood their
ground, everyone who was fought Microsoft has been crushed or aquired.
But where they have failed, you will succeed.
Firefox: Why?
Morpheus: I saw Microsoft crush Netscape's market share. Men have come up with fantastic
innovations only to find them incompatible or MS copies already included in the next version of Windows.
Yet their programs are still based on factory-style programming and decisions made by pointy-hairs.
Because of that, they will never be as secure or as functional as you can be.
Firefox: What are you trying to tell me, that I can block pop-ups?
Morpheus: I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.
It's not a biodegradible cell phone. It's a biodegradible cell phone case.
As in the thin plastic shell that covers the guts of the phone. As in maybe 5% of
the total bulk of the phone.
Don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing, but nobody who buys one of these disposible cell
phones are should think they're making an environmentally sound purchase because
it might sprout a pretty flower someday. There's a lot more to the phone than just the
case, and a lot of it isn't anything
you'd want to see buried in your backyard -- batteries, plastic circuit boards, etc.
In practice, it seems more likely that this will actually *harm* the environment as morons
bury the whole thing once their minutes are used up, the whole time thinking they're being
a responsible friend of the earth.
Even if you're smarter than the average bear and read the directions about only
burying the case, it's still *far* better to get yourself an cell phone on contract and
use it for a few years before trading up than it is to go through a few of these things
a year.
Of course, given the profession that tends to be the biggest customer for disposable phones,
if you're concerned about the environment I'd also suggest that you should encourage your
customers to recycle those glass vials you're selling them their crack in.
Sorry, but playing back in order of how the files are named? That makes the thing more or less completely useless unless you have a very, very short list of songs you always want to hear in the same order; how the heck do you get to market without the basics that you'd have expected from an MP3 player five years ago?
And bored_at_work and the other regulars from back before user accounts even existed -- just tap in your handle and you were on the honor system... A discussion that got 100 comments was absolutely huge... Back when "First Post" was amusing (well, okay, that was never)...
In my experience, the nature of IT work tends to rule out being able
to hold down a side job. The biggest obstacle is the fact that almost all IT work (or salaried work in
general, really) tends to have at least one or two "crunch times"
per year where you have to work weird hours.
Aside from that, I've noticed that the lion's share of part-time skilled labor
still takes place between 9 and 5. There are plenty of 10-15 hour a week
IT jobs, but very few where you're not on regular work hours. Even if you
find one, any bit of success tends to pull the work towards business hours -- I briefly had
a side gig as a trainer at night, but that quickly devolved into "can you
do this during the day?" once companies started demanding our services.
As a consequence, you are forced to look for jobs which are both off-hours and feature
very flexible schedules. This tends to translate into low skill and
thus low paying. I don't mean to sound elitist here, but when you're making
good money at a regular job I think you'll find that it's just not
worth surrendering your free time for what you can bring in working at Starbucks.
Remember: just because you're not paid when you're not at work doesn't mean that
time is worthless.
If you're not making enough money, it might be a better use of your time to continue
your education. Many universities cater to people who work a 9-5, and a lot of employers
will help pay for you to go. The payoff isn't as immediate, but in many situations
it's a far better plan overall.
Okay, let me start out by saying I'd understand if you don't keep up with the
new Trek shows, and if that's the case you should chalk my question up to
being those of a truly pathetic geek and possibly make
"magic xylophone" jokes about it.
That said, if you do still follow Trek I'd be curious to hear
your thoughts on the progress of "Enterprise" given your status as someone
framiliar with the entertainment industry (esp. as it relates to this particular
line of shows).
I have been so impressed by the last two seasons (except the Nazi arc at the
start of this season) that I'd go so far as to group them with some of the best
episodes of season 3 TNG. The characters are finally starting to fill out, the
plots have gotten away from the standard "it's the Borg again!" horseshit and
they've even had relatively decent dialog.
I get the impression, however, that it's not going
to be enough to save the series based on the timeslot it's been relegated to.
While my TiVO stays in Fridays even though I don't, I
can't believe that even Trek fans regularly stay home Friday nights in sufficiant numbers to save the show, not to mention all the people who stopped watching in season 1 or 2 and won't end up flipping past sometime to give it a second chance now.
Interesting how one would be able to apply all of those same terms to the state of
D&D itself ever since, well, second edition came out. Not that there weren't some
good rule tweaks, but that's where this "You need 1000 rulebooks to play a basic
game" mentality really emerged in earnest. I mean, c'mon, the illusionist's handbook?
"You make people see things". The *bard's* handbook? "Nobody plays this class, nitwit."
You enter a 10x10 room. Two orcs are guarding a chest. They leap to their feet
as you enter, one orc looks to the other and says "Looks like Dwarf for dinner
again", and the other responds "how come we never get any pork up here?". Roll initiative.
Will the new open source Solaris unseat Linux? The short answer: No.
This article is a pointless exercise, but since my alternative to commenting on it
is to go do actual work, let's consider:
In terms of Sun's conversion to open source: Too little, way too late. If Sun had pulled this seven or eight years ago they might have had a chance at
stopping Linux before it got rolling, but frankly I don't see any way
a system developed as proprietary in-house software is going to be able
to come out and defeat the reigning champion of the OSS movement. Everything else
aside, consider the simple fact that you
can't go open source overnight. Look at how long it took to
turn Mozilla into something useful -- by the time the open source version
finally hit the mainstream it was hugely reorganized and largely rewritten.
This process took years to complete, and that was just for a web browser.
So unless Sun's programmers had a *lot* more discipline than Netscape's (doubtful) and a lot fewer tangled licenses (impossible),
forget about it right there.
Aside from the huge initial development issue, consider the business side: What possible reason is there to
think that Solaris is going to be able to come out and impact Linux's market share?
The author himself uses language that doesn't support the idea that more people are
going to switch to Solaris as a result of this. In fact, the most logical outcome of
the points made in the article is that Sun *may* slow the erosion of their install base
over to Linux. Not exactly killing Linux there.
Then we get some more of the same 'ol. The reasons he states in the article
for the impending demise of Linux could have been (and were repeatedly) written ten years a
go and are just as wrong now as they were then -- sure, any of the fears he listed *could* happen, but
they haven't.
To sum up, this article makes incorrect assumptions, starts from a place of poor understanding
and leaps to unsupported conclusions. The greatest revelation is creates is probably that
YEALD needs to find themselves a new COO.
I've managed employees who "just wanted to get their work done and leave" and I've managed employees who took great pride in not only their work, but the success of the company/project. I've tended to reward the latter more than the former.
Hey, don't get me wrong: I enjoy what I do and I'm really damn good at it.
I just don't want to live at work. I figure that things like having a life and occassionally seeing my wife are goals that at least have parity in terms of importance with having a successful career. Suggesting that this implies a lack of dedication or work ethic on my part is insulting and, to be blunt, pretty fucking stupid.
Besides, in my experience the people who live at work don't get much more work done, anyhow -- they're socializing at the water cooler or taking a long lunch or getting dinner or bitching about how much time they spend at work, etc. I figure it's because a person just can't work more than a certain number of hours a day on a regular basis before they start filling in their other social needs regardless of if they're in the office or away from it.
Anyhow, I get my work done and then I go home because work is only one part of life (and definately not the most important part). I like to call this "having my priorities straight".
The Bay Area isn't all that expensive once you accept that the housing market is completely blown out of control at the moment and you almost certainly can't afford to buy a house.
There are a few other high items (gas is expensive), but beyond that things can be had here for the same price or lower than elsewhere in the country. And Bay Area salaries *are* higher than elsewhere, not to mention that this place is where all the tech companies are. If you're cool with renting, living here isn't out of reach by any means.
I suspect I'm in the same situation as a lot of/.'ers. The best way to
sum it up would be to say that it's much,
much better than it was but still not great.
I've spent about two and a half years now in a fairly stable job at a big
company. I work with people I either like or don't mind, the work is
sufficiantly satisfying even considering that I have to occassionally
deal with big company political bullshit, the hours are reasonable and I (obviously) still have time
to do some light/.'ing. All of this is a significant improvement over the
two startup jobs I had back in 2001 where the hours were insane, the
people were nutjobs and I was very, very unhappy.
OTOH, I've been more or less in limbo in terms of pay. Despite adding
considerably to my skillset, I've gotten extremely
modest raises that have more or less kept up with inflation if you don't
count in gas prices.
Aside from that: Items like Aeron chairs and foosball tables and game
systems in the break room and people keeping excessively odd hours
can stay gone. I never liked those -- maybe I'm an exception, but I'm at
work to *work*, I want to get my work done and leave.
I'm working so I can afford to have a life outside of work, not because I
really get off on plugging away on my TPS reports.
The absolute worst part
about all of those "perks" were that they slowed down the whole works
and as a side effect created an expectation that you should live at work
more than the 8-9 hours a day God intended. "Where's Bob? I need him to
look over something." "Oh, he's playing in the Wednesday Tekken Tourney,
he'll be out in an hour or two"...
Back to the subject at hand, though: The environment now is such that I could probably go make more money someplace else, but to be honest I
am *extremely* hesitant to stick my head back out there after getting
bitchslapped so badly last time.
Yeah, I got a letter about this one a few days ago:
--------
State of California
1 Aahnold St.
Sacramento, CA
Dear Skyshadow,
While we in the state of California appreciate your interest in our state and the
contributions you've made while living here the last fours years, it has become
increasingly apparent that you're not getting the message. So, let us be direct:
Get the hell out.
Frankly, all of you refugees from
Jesusland are seriously overpopulating our state, and we can't afford it anymore.
We figured you might have gotten the hint after we destroyed our public school
system with Prop 13. We thought you would have put it together when we started
referring to pet owners as "guardians" like they were our fucking kids or something.
And, really, we're stunned that electing the guy from "Commando" as
our governor didn't make you reassess living here.
C'mon, how much is nice weather, a neat bridge and decent wine really worth? A crappy 900 sq. ft.
house in Walnut Creek with a postage-stamp sized yard is a steal at $400k because of all you
idiots flooding in! Go home!
Anyhow, by now we're sure you've read about our plan to implant a GPS tracker on
your car and tax you for every mile you drive. We're proud of that one -- we know
you're driving an hour each way to and from work because of the sky-high housing
prices around the Bay Area (again: your fault), and we figure that nicely conveys our point. And frankly,
if this doesn't get our message across, we're going to have to resort to simply
grabbing you out of your bed in the middle of the night and feeding your to that Great
White we have on display down in Monterey. Don't think we won't. Hell,
we'll feed her your goddamn cheesehead cats, too. Try us.
Richard Clarke may have resigned before the war, but it shouldn't be too surprising that his fingerprints were all over the tactics that ended up being employed -- after all, this is the man who had been deeply involved with "writing the book" on these sort of emerging tactics for quite a while.
Aside from that, Clarke is a smart guy with some awfully impressive credentials. Regardless of what the GOP Smear Machine(tm) tried to do with him after he dared to testify that Iraq wasn't involved with 9-11, his input should not be disregarded lightly.
The concept of communicating directly with the guys out in the field -- the ones who were going to get their asses shot off by a tremendously superior force and knew it -- seems like a fairly well-proven idea. After all, it worked really well in Gulf War I. I have my doubts about how many Iraqi grunts had email, but we'll set those aside for now.
The truly unfortunate thing in my mind is that it apparently didn't occur to anyone to keep up this communication after the invasion when there was still a chance to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Maybe if we had continued to treat Iraqis with the same sort of basic level of respect we wouldn't be in this lovely guerilla warface mess we're faced with now.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think about it, the success of all life on this planet is predicated on the fact that, sooner or later, it dies. This necessitates the ability to reproduce, and reproduction is the key to evolution.
I don't just mean genetic evolution here, either. The advancement of human civilization has always been about the next generation surpassing the accomplishment of their parents. Science, philosophy, economics, art -- you name it. The progress we as a species have made have always come from the student looking at what has been accomplished before them and saying "That's great, but what if..."
Aside from the obvious population issues, allowing people (or far worse, some people) to outlive Methusela poses a very real danger of short-circuiting this vital process. Understand, this is what has worked for eons -- ever since your ancestors and mine decided to gang up and be more than free-floating amino acids, this is the way it's been. Ask yourself: is your own inflated sense of self-importance worth short-circuiting that?
I'd rather die knowing my descendants would someday achieve things beyond my imagining than live and help ensure that they don't.
Seriously, given the likelyhood of an accident getting you, imagine the sort of life people would have to live to average living to 1000. Even if you could offer people a constant youthful physique and extreme longevity, how many of us are really going to make it to even 200? Unless you live your entire life underground in a room with little windows, never venturing forth into the world, something's going to get you. While this means that a huge number of /.'ers are relatively safe, the rest of us are still going
to get ourselves killed going over the handlebar on our bikes or crashing
our cars or walking in front of a bus or hitting trees skiing or etc.
Aside from that, try to imagine the social, scientific and political stagnation that would occur from having old people not dying. Try to picture the economic devestation among young people (you think following the boomers sucks...), the lock-in of power among a few Very Oldsters... If people do start living to 1000, I think our real duty would be to start hunting them.
Finally, we can get rid of all those terrorists, child porn mongers, spammers, communists, hate groups, spyware writers, homosexuals, political dissentors, darwinists, gamblers, sex-ed supporters, atheists, blue-staters, teenagers, abortionists, people who confuse decent Americans by engaging in satire and especially those people who question electronic voting. Finally we'll fix the internet and make it safe for all the little children and honest hard-working Americans out there. Heck, we've already got an FCC all set up, we can just put Michael Powell in charge.
Thank God we live in an age where we can finally bring about the society we as Americans so richly deserve.
Seriously, is anyone actally still awake in Hollywood or are these scripts actually being greenlighted by some giant evil Twilight-Zone-ish computer that lives in a cave someplace on the back lot of Warner Brothers? This news item seems like something they would have used as the basis of an episode of The Critic, fer cryin' out loud.
Bossman Compatibility: Verifies that the hardware vendor has taken my boss's boss out to dinner and purchased suitably expensive drinks. Rating based on the number of stars the restaurant recieved, although points may be docked if the filet mignon was a little overdone. This one is related to the...
CYA Verification: Vendor must have a name recognizable to people who read periodicals such as "CTO Magazine" so, when it breaks down, I can say "who ever hear of XVY Company's gear being bad?" If the vendor is a company like Dell which also sells home PCs, this metric should also include going to my boss's boss's house and verifying that his Dell is running okay so I don't have to hear shit like "I don't know why we got Dell, my desktop at home has problems all the time, too, and it's only six years old!"
Sweetness Factor: Not as much of a factor as it once was, depending on how big of iron we're talking about. But it the thing has, say, requires a cooling tower that happens to have a waterfall built into it, that's point right there. May conflict with....
The Under-Desk Operation Profile: Since it'd take at least a month and a dozen SRs and books of useless paperwork just to get the beastie screwed into a rack at our NOC, the server must both fit nicely under the desk in my cube with all the other machines and not be too loud. Generation of excess heat is a plus since the facilities people have set 61 degrees as a reasonable temperature for my office in the winter.
Extra-App Capacity Testing: For when some moron in another department comes in and convinces my boss's boss that "all that server is doing is running the backend for our entire operation, so can we put our incredibly messy half-working app on it too and treat it like QA?" If this server can alert a Terminator unit to go to the aforementioned coworker's home in the middle of the night and slay him and his family, this requirement can be waived (oh, I wait for the day this will be waived....)
I'm sure there are a few other benchmarks you could run, but honestly these are the Big Five that I decide on.
Think about trying to predict 2004 back in '84. PCs were just starting to take off, Al Gore was just starting to bury the first fiber connections that would become the internet, IBM was going to be the big power in personal computing...
Nobody could have foreseen that we'd all be selling the shit out of our basements on eBay, listening to huge music libraries on devices the size of a deck of cards and spending our work days trolling Slashdot?
C'mon, Garner, who are we trying to fool here?
Aside from that, when you RTFA you'll see that this isn't a regular drug, it's more of a therapy -- as I understand it, you use cells from the patient's own body and basically train them to combat the HIV virus. Unless you can create a generic version that would work across populations, it's not as simple as just shipping a bunch of shots off to the third world like we were able to do with polio.
As for "open source" drugs: You should realize it isn't that simple. It costs a lot of money to find, test and approve new drugs. While I'd agree that our current system enriches the drug companies at the expense of the little people (among a myriad of other problems), it's really important not to assume you can think of the industry like you do computing.
I'd imagine that this sort of therapy could be useful against a whole range of viruses since (as I understand) it operates by training the immune system rather than crippling something specific to the virus the way that other HIV treatments do. If that'd work for most viruses, maybe someday people will be able to just update their own virus definitions a few times a year -- of course, most of them probably wouldn't bother and then call me for support when they open some damn .exe file
they got in their friggin' email and... Sorry, started drifting there for a second.
Of course, it's awfully early to get too excited given this is just 18 people in Brazil so far, and "incredible effect" might be a bit strong since only 44% of the very small number of test patients are still showing the full benefit after one year, but I suppose any good news in this sort of scenario is, well, good news.
PS: Am I the only one who finds it darkly ironic that "The Sexecutioner" submitted this story?
Remember: *Learning* is what's important here, especially when we're talking about an undergrad degree -- I went to a small state school where there were 10-20 people in my classes and I recieved a much, much better education than my peers who went to large universities. Why? Because I could walk into my professor's office and spend an hour talking to him about class material, advances in computing or the state of the industry or whatever.
In my experience, the sort of jobs you'll get with an undergrad degree tend to value understanding and skill over who your degree is from -- if you can do the work, you're their person. If you're going to a job that requires a graduate degree, well, you can go to a high-profile school for your grad work, eh?
Aside from all of that, I've learned the hard way that you should follow your instincts. Follow yours on this one and stay put.
Journalists go out and find out what's going on, they (hopefully) check their sources out and get confirmation and input from both sides and then report on it. Commentators -- and this includes bloggers -- are consumers of what journalists generate. They add (or, some might argue, remove) value by way of interpretation.
Remember way back in like 1996 when we all expected the internet to give voice to the common man? Create a new golden age in the spirit of the pamphlet writer that would have Patrick Henry and the rest of the printing press crew smiling down on us? Well, that's what the blogs are -- the fact that some are regularly insightful/interesting/ignorant/funny/biased enough to gain relative popularity should not obscure that fact or cause us to think they're something beyond that.
Aside from that, I think it's important not to get too carried away with this whole "we busted Dan Rather" thing. Frankly, it reminds me of when Drudge got out in front of the Monica Lewinski thing; he got the story out, sure, and suddenly we were hearing all about how internet media was going to come out and crush the slow lumbering ten-minute-ago types on TV. But, as it turned out, that was *one time* as opposed to the hundreds of times before and since where he's been completely off-base and his "Flash!" stories have vanished without a trace.
Morpheus: Microsoft is our enemy, Firefox, but when you're on the internet, you look around. What do you see? Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still IE users. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to switch to a browser that doesn't come included on their desktop when they bring their computers home from Best Buy and pop in the "2000 Free Hours!" AOL CD. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on Microsoft that they will fight to protect it. Were you listening to me Firefox, or were you looking at the woman surfing the hot lesbo porn?
Firefox: I was...
Morpheus: Look again.
Woman has turned into Bill Gates, introducing new "standard" to break non-IE browsers.
Morpheus: Freeze it!
Firefox: What is it?
Morpheus: IE-only standards. That means that anyone we haven't converted over is potential audience for crappy sites who only QA against IE. On the internet, you see this everywhere. We have survived by being standards-based, by working to be compatible. But these false "standards" are the gatekeepers.
Firefox: Whoa.
Morpheus: I won't lie to you, Firefox. Every single company or product that has stood their ground, everyone who was fought Microsoft has been crushed or aquired. But where they have failed, you will succeed.
Firefox: Why?
Morpheus: I saw Microsoft crush Netscape's market share. Men have come up with fantastic innovations only to find them incompatible or MS copies already included in the next version of Windows. Yet their programs are still based on factory-style programming and decisions made by pointy-hairs. Because of that, they will never be as secure or as functional as you can be.
Firefox: What are you trying to tell me, that I can block pop-ups?
Morpheus: I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.
Don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing, but nobody who buys one of these disposible cell phones are should think they're making an environmentally sound purchase because it might sprout a pretty flower someday. There's a lot more to the phone than just the case, and a lot of it isn't anything you'd want to see buried in your backyard -- batteries, plastic circuit boards, etc. In practice, it seems more likely that this will actually *harm* the environment as morons bury the whole thing once their minutes are used up, the whole time thinking they're being a responsible friend of the earth. Even if you're smarter than the average bear and read the directions about only burying the case, it's still *far* better to get yourself an cell phone on contract and use it for a few years before trading up than it is to go through a few of these things a year.
Of course, given the profession that tends to be the biggest customer for disposable phones, if you're concerned about the environment I'd also suggest that you should encourage your customers to recycle those glass vials you're selling them their crack in.
Sorry, but playing back in order of how the files are named? That makes the thing more or less completely useless unless you have a very, very short list of songs you always want to hear in the same order; how the heck do you get to market without the basics that you'd have expected from an MP3 player five years ago?
Them was the days.
Pft, where do *you* get off questioning someone's cred based on user ID, newbie?
Aside from that, I've noticed that the lion's share of part-time skilled labor still takes place between 9 and 5. There are plenty of 10-15 hour a week IT jobs, but very few where you're not on regular work hours. Even if you find one, any bit of success tends to pull the work towards business hours -- I briefly had a side gig as a trainer at night, but that quickly devolved into "can you do this during the day?" once companies started demanding our services.
As a consequence, you are forced to look for jobs which are both off-hours and feature very flexible schedules. This tends to translate into low skill and thus low paying. I don't mean to sound elitist here, but when you're making good money at a regular job I think you'll find that it's just not worth surrendering your free time for what you can bring in working at Starbucks. Remember: just because you're not paid when you're not at work doesn't mean that time is worthless.
If you're not making enough money, it might be a better use of your time to continue your education. Many universities cater to people who work a 9-5, and a lot of employers will help pay for you to go. The payoff isn't as immediate, but in many situations it's a far better plan overall.
That said, if you do still follow Trek I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the progress of "Enterprise" given your status as someone framiliar with the entertainment industry (esp. as it relates to this particular line of shows).
I have been so impressed by the last two seasons (except the Nazi arc at the start of this season) that I'd go so far as to group them with some of the best episodes of season 3 TNG. The characters are finally starting to fill out, the plots have gotten away from the standard "it's the Borg again!" horseshit and they've even had relatively decent dialog.
I get the impression, however, that it's not going to be enough to save the series based on the timeslot it's been relegated to. While my TiVO stays in Fridays even though I don't, I can't believe that even Trek fans regularly stay home Friday nights in sufficiant numbers to save the show, not to mention all the people who stopped watching in season 1 or 2 and won't end up flipping past sometime to give it a second chance now.
Is "Enterprise" as doomed as I think it is?
Interesting how one would be able to apply all of those same terms to the state of D&D itself ever since, well, second edition came out. Not that there weren't some good rule tweaks, but that's where this "You need 1000 rulebooks to play a basic game" mentality really emerged in earnest. I mean, c'mon, the illusionist's handbook? "You make people see things". The *bard's* handbook? "Nobody plays this class, nitwit."
You enter a 10x10 room. Two orcs are guarding a chest. They leap to their feet as you enter, one orc looks to the other and says "Looks like Dwarf for dinner again", and the other responds "how come we never get any pork up here?". Roll initiative.
This article is a pointless exercise, but since my alternative to commenting on it is to go do actual work, let's consider:
In terms of Sun's conversion to open source: Too little, way too late. If Sun had pulled this seven or eight years ago they might have had a chance at stopping Linux before it got rolling, but frankly I don't see any way a system developed as proprietary in-house software is going to be able to come out and defeat the reigning champion of the OSS movement. Everything else aside, consider the simple fact that you can't go open source overnight. Look at how long it took to turn Mozilla into something useful -- by the time the open source version finally hit the mainstream it was hugely reorganized and largely rewritten. This process took years to complete, and that was just for a web browser. So unless Sun's programmers had a *lot* more discipline than Netscape's (doubtful) and a lot fewer tangled licenses (impossible), forget about it right there.
Aside from the huge initial development issue, consider the business side: What possible reason is there to think that Solaris is going to be able to come out and impact Linux's market share? The author himself uses language that doesn't support the idea that more people are going to switch to Solaris as a result of this. In fact, the most logical outcome of the points made in the article is that Sun *may* slow the erosion of their install base over to Linux. Not exactly killing Linux there.
Then we get some more of the same 'ol. The reasons he states in the article for the impending demise of Linux could have been (and were repeatedly) written ten years a go and are just as wrong now as they were then -- sure, any of the fears he listed *could* happen, but they haven't.
To sum up, this article makes incorrect assumptions, starts from a place of poor understanding and leaps to unsupported conclusions. The greatest revelation is creates is probably that YEALD needs to find themselves a new COO.
Hey, don't get me wrong: I enjoy what I do and I'm really damn good at it. I just don't want to live at work. I figure that things like having a life and occassionally seeing my wife are goals that at least have parity in terms of importance with having a successful career. Suggesting that this implies a lack of dedication or work ethic on my part is insulting and, to be blunt, pretty fucking stupid.
Besides, in my experience the people who live at work don't get much more work done, anyhow -- they're socializing at the water cooler or taking a long lunch or getting dinner or bitching about how much time they spend at work, etc. I figure it's because a person just can't work more than a certain number of hours a day on a regular basis before they start filling in their other social needs regardless of if they're in the office or away from it.
Anyhow, I get my work done and then I go home because work is only one part of life (and definately not the most important part). I like to call this "having my priorities straight".
There are a few other high items (gas is expensive), but beyond that things can be had here for the same price or lower than elsewhere in the country. And Bay Area salaries *are* higher than elsewhere, not to mention that this place is where all the tech companies are. If you're cool with renting, living here isn't out of reach by any means.
I've spent about two and a half years now in a fairly stable job at a big company. I work with people I either like or don't mind, the work is sufficiantly satisfying even considering that I have to occassionally deal with big company political bullshit, the hours are reasonable and I (obviously) still have time to do some light /.'ing. All of this is a significant improvement over the
two startup jobs I had back in 2001 where the hours were insane, the
people were nutjobs and I was very, very unhappy.
OTOH, I've been more or less in limbo in terms of pay. Despite adding considerably to my skillset, I've gotten extremely modest raises that have more or less kept up with inflation if you don't count in gas prices.
Aside from that: Items like Aeron chairs and foosball tables and game systems in the break room and people keeping excessively odd hours can stay gone. I never liked those -- maybe I'm an exception, but I'm at work to *work*, I want to get my work done and leave. I'm working so I can afford to have a life outside of work, not because I really get off on plugging away on my TPS reports. The absolute worst part about all of those "perks" were that they slowed down the whole works and as a side effect created an expectation that you should live at work more than the 8-9 hours a day God intended. "Where's Bob? I need him to look over something." "Oh, he's playing in the Wednesday Tekken Tourney, he'll be out in an hour or two"...
Back to the subject at hand, though: The environment now is such that I could probably go make more money someplace else, but to be honest I am *extremely* hesitant to stick my head back out there after getting bitchslapped so badly last time.
--------
State of California
1 Aahnold St.
Sacramento, CA
Dear Skyshadow,
While we in the state of California appreciate your interest in our state and the contributions you've made while living here the last fours years, it has become increasingly apparent that you're not getting the message. So, let us be direct:
Get the hell out.
Frankly, all of you refugees from Jesusland are seriously overpopulating our state, and we can't afford it anymore. We figured you might have gotten the hint after we destroyed our public school system with Prop 13. We thought you would have put it together when we started referring to pet owners as "guardians" like they were our fucking kids or something. And, really, we're stunned that electing the guy from "Commando" as our governor didn't make you reassess living here.
C'mon, how much is nice weather, a neat bridge and decent wine really worth? A crappy 900 sq. ft. house in Walnut Creek with a postage-stamp sized yard is a steal at $400k because of all you idiots flooding in! Go home!
Anyhow, by now we're sure you've read about our plan to implant a GPS tracker on your car and tax you for every mile you drive. We're proud of that one -- we know you're driving an hour each way to and from work because of the sky-high housing prices around the Bay Area (again: your fault), and we figure that nicely conveys our point. And frankly, if this doesn't get our message across, we're going to have to resort to simply grabbing you out of your bed in the middle of the night and feeding your to that Great White we have on display down in Monterey. Don't think we won't. Hell, we'll feed her your goddamn cheesehead cats, too. Try us.
Move back to Wisconsin. We're not kidding.
Love, California
Aside from that, Clarke is a smart guy with some awfully impressive credentials. Regardless of what the GOP Smear Machine(tm) tried to do with him after he dared to testify that Iraq wasn't involved with 9-11, his input should not be disregarded lightly.
The truly unfortunate thing in my mind is that it apparently didn't occur to anyone to keep up this communication after the invasion when there was still a chance to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Maybe if we had continued to treat Iraqis with the same sort of basic level of respect we wouldn't be in this lovely guerilla warface mess we're faced with now.
Buy hey, there's always next time, right?