I worked for SGI when I was an intern. This was back when they were realizing that nobody wanted to pay $20k for a workstation anymore.
SGI had some pretty kick-ass server gear and had just purchased Cray, so naturally they responsed by coming up with a half-ass NT desktop that, likewise, nobody wanted. They played to their weakness rather than their strength, and the result was that they lost bigtime.
This strikes me as being similar: They're playing to their weakness, trying to get to where everyone else is doing well and not realizing that (a) the space is already fairly saturated and (b) the competitors waiting for them there are better than they are at the sort of thing they do.
And who gives a shit if he's a OSS zealot? The way to help out our common interest here is to succeed -- I don't care if the guy will only listen to 8-tracks, I want to hear his plan for turning the company around. This isn't like an airline where your ass can be bailed out by the cyclical nature of the business -- while people always need an airplane to get someplace, in the end they really don't need your distro. You can't just keep flying and charge $5 for snack boxes.
First off, please read close enough to discern which VISTA they are talking about - it's kinda spelled out there.
Yes, thank you. I caught that from the four posts above yours, all of which pointed that out and the first of which was posted one hour and one minute before this post.
I apologize for my appalling error of seeing the word "Vista" in an article about computing and making the unforgivable error of assuming they were talking about the current OS from the biggest software maker in the world, and I realize that this invalidates anything else I could possibly have to say. I'll flog myself when I get home.
Now, to the point of your post:
Second, this whole "don't touch it - it's new" mindset chafes me to no end. 2-3 years in IT is an EON. For most products that leaves you at 1 or 2 releases behind, with all the security problems and bugs of 2 years ago. (Yep, that product you rely on today has just as many bugs as that new one on the shelf - they're just DIFFERENT bugs.) A product matures by being IN the field, IN use, and ACTIVELY FIXED in response to support calls. It might surprise you that software companies DO actually test their products before releasing them - no amount of testing can hit every configuration of hardware/software/business needs/obscure requirements out there.
This is true. And you're exactly right when you say that a product matures in the field, in use and being ACTIVELY FIXED in response to support calls. In fact, that's almost exactly my point -- the spot where you're incorrect is when you suggest that an OS that's been in the field for 2-3 years will have bugs of the same potential impact as a new OS.
How can I say this? Because after 2-3 years of maturing in the field, in use and being ACTIVELY FIXED, the big serious holes in the OS are going to be found and either fixed by the vendor or at least known. And it's going to be the bugs that the vendor, despite the testing that they DO, will have by definition missed in new releases. No amount of testing can hit every configuration of hardware/software/business needs/obscure requirements out there, after all.
Now, if you're running a system to host your blog or serve as a file server or do any of the mundane tasks that most servers spend their lives doing, this is no big deal. This is not one of those tasks -- this is a MRS (Medical Records System), a system that has literal life-or-death ramifications associated with it. In that situation, it pays to play it safe even when it means you're left dealing with slightly older (and time-tested) tech.
Go to any company that has an absolute mission-critical system and you'll see this in action: Big HMOs and other MRS users are still on older Windows versions for those applications, airlines still use mainframes for their scheduling, etc. Now, that could just be a coincidence, but I doubt it.
Yeah, time to fire your IT organization's management. And a few of their leads, too. And maybe some of the
techs.
Couple of reasons: First, they're running Vista. I'm not trying to be all "You must only run
Linux or ur a n00b" here -- you can run Windows servers just fine, but no reasonable IT planner
should ever, *ever* consider using an OS that new for a mission-critical enterprise application.
If it doesn't have two or three years in the field, don't even consider it.
Second, their failover plan sucked. Live data syncs are good for physical disasters (fires,
earthquakes, zombie attacks) but, as the VA discovered, they leave you shitting your pants when
you run into an issue that may or may not be data-related. The solution to this, of course, is
to keep a day or week-old copy someplace along with an up-to-date (but not implemented!) transaction
log that you can go through and update with once you've sanity-checked it.
Third, letting the vendor run "tests" on your production system. Nobody, and I mean nobody, should ever
get to touch any production system unless they're implementing a specific change that's been tested
in an identical environment, passed QA and review by folks who know the system and then only with a published
implementation, testing and backout plan. If a system needs "tests", you pull it out of production before
you start messing with it.
Finally, their "virtualized team" approach (read: our people are scattered all over the place) is
moronic -- you see this sort of thing, and without fail it's the result of political pressures rather
than sane management. In this case, I'll bet my hat is was a situation where a bunch of middle managers
were allowed to maneuver to keep their fingers in the pie when centralization tool place, so instead of
having everyone you need on hand and in one group you're busy setting up conference calls.
Plus, now their solution is to bring in a bunch of consultants. Yeah, that always works. Good luck, guys! You're gonna need it.
It would have been nice to have zillions of dollars, but there are other things that are more important.
"Money can't buy happiness, but somehow it's more comfortable crying in a Porsche than a Hyundai."
Interesting to read that the Slashdot editor felt disconnected from the Dotcom thing... When I was living in Wisconsin, honestly hanging around this site and reading the posts people were making is part of the reason I was so eager to move out to the Bay Area (wish I could have picked a better time; July 2000 turned out to be kind of rough). I suppose I just figured that being here at, well, wunderkind central, it would have been like being plugged directly into the horse's mouth (or potentially the other end).
Guess it's just more proof that Your Mileage, lifewise, May Vary.
This is obviously going back a ways, but I *think* this may have been one of the extremely small number of Slashdot stories to have had comments disabled.
Which is good since, even at the time, everyone who read it was unified in thinking, "Geez, what a douchebag."
Thinking back on it, it strikes me that this may have been pretty much the last time people really took him seriously. Here you had a guy who'd written the popular manifesto of OSS development and played a major hand in the release of the Mozilla codebase, and suddenly he just seemed to lose his credibility. He just sort of went away.
That's how it went from my view of it, anyhow. Your mileage may vary.
Okay, I'll bite
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Something I've been sort of curious about for ages:
Can you talk a little about how you experienced some of the dotcom insanity, specifically as it unfolded here at Slashdot? For a while, it seemed like Slashdot was about to become wunderkind central -- the sale to VA, the infamous ESR post about uber-wealth, etc. I'd be interested to hear about how that experience translated from your side of the ball.
I know they sold a few of their buildings to a Canadian chip-maker called Celestica... I assume the other buildings got spun off when they regurgitated Cray, but I don't know for sure.
But hey, you're right there -- take a drive up and check it out. Hit the Leinie's brewery tour while you're there.
Try to imagine this guy's work day: He gets to wake up in the morning, hug his kids and then go into work and spend all day trying to figure out the right combination of security defaults that will (a) let people go out and do stuff while (b) protecting them from their own "I'm a average Windows user" level of abject stupidity.
Put another way, imagine that instead of just setting up a computer for your parents, you had to set one up for *everybody's* parents. All at once.
As much as it's fun to give MS shit for their products, I think I'd last about two hours in that position before I went into the executive washroom and slashed my wrists.
Back in 1997 I first logged onto Slashdot from my office at SGI's Chippewa Falls location (better known as 'Cray'). Back then we didn't even need to log in -- you just entered your username when you posted.
Ten years since I've been an intern. And, in certain respects, I'm still sitting here this morning doing that same sort of stuff. That's... depressing. I need to go open a bicycle shop or something.
I predict that, in the future, the web will be used to for
vast amounts of pornography, insane conspiricy theories,
niche interest "news" sites that protect their users from anything
that might challenge their worldview and to allow regular people
to flourish in the utter jackassery that results from anonymity.
It will also have an interesting side effect where long-time users
sit down to write a post intended to be humorous and end up making
themselves a little depressed.
That's a great theory except for the fact that it's crap.
China is dealing with the fact that their nuclear deterrent is very nearly obsolete -- they've only got about 18 warheads that could reach the United States, and the considerable improvements in the US's precision assault capabilities means that these could be taken out with a minimum of casualties with a very small loss of life (the Union of Concerned Scientists did an analysis -- the US could defang China and only kill a couple thousand Chinese in the process, versus the millions it would have knocked off even in the early 90's).
Add to this the missile shield, which is designed to knock down a small number of incoming missiles, and it's not impossible to foresee a day where a US President decides to take China out of the nuke game in the name of our own national security -- China is, after all, the emerging superpower of the moment and history says that friction is sure to follow.
Which is why they need boomers. Or, more accurately, is why they need everyone to *know* and never forget that they have boomers. Sure, it's possible that US fast-attacks that will no doubt follow these guys out of post will be able to sink all them all in the 15 minutes or so they'd need to fire their missiles, but it's also really possible that they wouldn't.
So this is Google Maps being a tool of China, showing us what the folks who run that country (aka, the people who put the "big" in "big brother") and set their nuclear policy want us to see. The might as well have made a see-from-space banner that says, "You can probably take us, sure, but it'll cost you Los Angeles".
It was starting to drag near the middle of last season, I'm glad to see they've identified an endpoint. It'd have been a shame to have to watch that show go into the toilet -- better to burn twice as bright for my viewing amusement.
For those of you keeping count, that's reason 2.02x10^63 + 1 to dislike Cuban.
Seriously, I wonder if he wakes up each day and says to himself, "You know, a lot of people hate my guts, but gosh darnit I'm still only the second-most hated owner of a sports team in Texas. What to do, what to do..."
Ya know, I'm only 20-something but my vision of the American Dream doesn't ever include getting laid-off - and certainly not by a company trying to reduce costs. How do you know these people views this job as dead end?
It involves working hard, making good money, building a family and a good life for all of us. White-picket fence and all of that (though I hate picket fences - I'll take a split-rail please).
I'm sorry that your version of the American Dream relies on such a sense of entitlement. Speaking as someone who is almost 30 and entered the job market right before the dotcom bust, I feel that it's my responsibility to point out that you're living in fantasyland.
In short, I think you'll find that nobody owes you jack shit. Your employer is paying you to work because it's a good investment for them -- you make them, or allow them to make, more money than they would without you. This is the way things work. Should this cease to be the case, your "expectations" don't amount to a hill of beans.
I'm sorry if that doesn't seem fair to you, that you feel like showing up to work everyday should earn you the house and the 2.5 kids and all that, but this doesn't change the reality of the situation.
Yeah, sorry -- the folks working at Circuit City
don't generally really qualify as being the "best in their field", unless you're
defining the "field" as "people who work at Circuit City". Besides, Circuit
City's not on commission anymore so you can't even argue that these folks were
necessarily their top performers.
But let's accept for a moment the premise of this article.
If these folks really are such great salesmen, this is opportunity
knockin' at their door -- they can get better jobs at higher-end stores, they
can start their own higher-end stores, they can get into selling something
that has worthwhile commissions involved with it like software or cars or
whatever. I mean, let's face it: Being the best sales associate at Circuit City
is along the same lines as being the best cook at McDonald's. If that's where
your vision ends, that's almost certainly where you belong.
That aside, what offends me most is that
this thread is this horrific notion that we've devolved to a point where the meaning
of the term "American dream" has mutated from
'boundless opportunity in the marketplace and the ability to move out of the economic
class you were born into' to 'lifetime employment at Circuit City'.
Speaking only for myself, if that really were the case then I'd want no part of it.
The American Dream as I understand it is that when you get laid off
from a shitty dead-end job you can go out and find or create something better
if you have the drive and/or ability for it. And hey, if your lack the skills or the ambition
to go out and work to better your situation, you can always reapply -- I'm sure
that red shirt will fit just as well in ten weeks as it does now.
I'm a schoolteacher. I *KNOW* because I'm a teacher who connects with kids, and has a knack for reaching troubled kids that my odds of being the target of an angry, weapon-holding students are *GOOD*... someday, I'm going to stare at that terrifying situation. I still teach - I know that I do good things, and I will not live in fear of evil ones.
Interestingly, I think you're encountering another aspect of our new-ish non-local culture.
Consider: Kathy's problem is one of communication. Those sickos who have developed an interest in her due to her degree of public figure status would be out there regardless (stalkers being nothing new), but the internet allows her to see them which, quite naturally, terrifies her.
You, likewise, are being made fearful by our non-local culture. You see a couple of school shootings a year spread out nationally, but since each gets attention and, as an attention-getting item, is reported nationally in the same way that you might expect a local incident to be covered. As such, you've come to the expectation that school shootings are in fact commonplace enough that you're expressing the absolute certainty that you will, someday, "stare at that terrifying situation".
Both of your fears seem to have the common root, and it's something I find interesting. I wonder if that's a problem that has a solution -- after all, reasonable people look for things that threaten them, and mass communication's only going to get easier... Maybe eventually we'll all life either in fear or blissful intentional ignorance.
Yeah, back in the day you never would have seen this sort of thing on the web, assuming that by "back in the day" you mean "the time between when Tim Berners-Lee came up with the web but before he told anyone about it".
Not to say this sort of thing is all right, of course, but while this is almost certainly a sad byproduct of the culture of the internet, there's nothing in the post she pointed to that I find disturbing or even all that unusual. As she noted, you get everybody online and give them anonymity, this sort of thing happens.
This doesn't mean, however, that it's happening *more* than it would have back before the internet, just that now it tends to be visible. Public figures, even minor ones, have always run the risk of attracting sickos, especially when they're decent looking women. Going so far as to suggest this is something new that's being caused by the internet just seems ridiculous, and trying to paint it as a byproduct of the culture of men in software development is even moreso.
I know it must be disturbing to realize you're the focus of this kind of thing, but let's try not to make more of it than it is.
I dunno about a witch identification, but I'm betting this thing could pretty easily spot the Walk of Shame. Head down? Check. Shuffling gait? Check. Obviously yesterday's clothes wrinkled from a night on the floor? Oh yeah.
In fact, I can think of a number of amusing things this could watch for: The 'ol Toilet Twostep, the Hemroid Hobble, the Slow-Up-Your-Walk-to-Stay-Behind-the-Chick-with-th e-Smokin'-Hot-Ass Walk (oh, sure, pretend you've never done it). I dunno if it'll prevent terrorism, mind you, but it'll keep those "funny video" TV shows in material for ages.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for SGI when I was an intern. This was back when they were realizing that nobody wanted to pay $20k for a workstation anymore.
SGI had some pretty kick-ass server gear and had just purchased Cray, so naturally they responsed by coming up with a half-ass NT desktop that, likewise, nobody wanted. They played to their weakness rather than their strength, and the result was that they lost bigtime.
This strikes me as being similar: They're playing to their weakness, trying to get to where everyone else is doing well and not realizing that (a) the space is already fairly saturated and (b) the competitors waiting for them there are better than they are at the sort of thing they do.
And who gives a shit if he's a OSS zealot? The way to help out our common interest here is to succeed -- I don't care if the guy will only listen to 8-tracks, I want to hear his plan for turning the company around. This isn't like an airline where your ass can be bailed out by the cyclical nature of the business -- while people always need an airplane to get someplace, in the end they really don't need your distro. You can't just keep flying and charge $5 for snack boxes.
Vista in this case doesn't have anything to do with Vista the Microsoft OS. I'm really sort of shocked that none of the above posters caught that.
First off, please read close enough to discern which VISTA they are talking about - it's kinda spelled out there.
Yes, thank you. I caught that from the four posts above yours, all of which pointed that out and the first of which was posted one hour and one minute before this post.
I apologize for my appalling error of seeing the word "Vista" in an article about computing and making the unforgivable error of assuming they were talking about the current OS from the biggest software maker in the world, and I realize that this invalidates anything else I could possibly have to say. I'll flog myself when I get home.
Now, to the point of your post:
Second, this whole "don't touch it - it's new" mindset chafes me to no end. 2-3 years in IT is an EON. For most products that leaves you at 1 or 2 releases behind, with all the security problems and bugs of 2 years ago. (Yep, that product you rely on today has just as many bugs as that new one on the shelf - they're just DIFFERENT bugs.) A product matures by being IN the field, IN use, and ACTIVELY FIXED in response to support calls. It might surprise you that software companies DO actually test their products before releasing them - no amount of testing can hit every configuration of hardware/software/business needs/obscure requirements out there.
This is true. And you're exactly right when you say that a product matures in the field, in use and being ACTIVELY FIXED in response to support calls. In fact, that's almost exactly my point -- the spot where you're incorrect is when you suggest that an OS that's been in the field for 2-3 years will have bugs of the same potential impact as a new OS.
How can I say this? Because after 2-3 years of maturing in the field, in use and being ACTIVELY FIXED, the big serious holes in the OS are going to be found and either fixed by the vendor or at least known. And it's going to be the bugs that the vendor, despite the testing that they DO, will have by definition missed in new releases. No amount of testing can hit every configuration of hardware/software/business needs/obscure requirements out there, after all.
Now, if you're running a system to host your blog or serve as a file server or do any of the mundane tasks that most servers spend their lives doing, this is no big deal. This is not one of those tasks -- this is a MRS (Medical Records System), a system that has literal life-or-death ramifications associated with it. In that situation, it pays to play it safe even when it means you're left dealing with slightly older (and time-tested) tech.
Go to any company that has an absolute mission-critical system and you'll see this in action: Big HMOs and other MRS users are still on older Windows versions for those applications, airlines still use mainframes for their scheduling, etc. Now, that could just be a coincidence, but I doubt it.
Yeah, time to fire your IT organization's management. And a few of their leads, too. And maybe some of the techs.
Couple of reasons: First, they're running Vista. I'm not trying to be all "You must only run Linux or ur a n00b" here -- you can run Windows servers just fine, but no reasonable IT planner should ever, *ever* consider using an OS that new for a mission-critical enterprise application. If it doesn't have two or three years in the field, don't even consider it.
Second, their failover plan sucked. Live data syncs are good for physical disasters (fires, earthquakes, zombie attacks) but, as the VA discovered, they leave you shitting your pants when you run into an issue that may or may not be data-related. The solution to this, of course, is to keep a day or week-old copy someplace along with an up-to-date (but not implemented!) transaction log that you can go through and update with once you've sanity-checked it.
Third, letting the vendor run "tests" on your production system. Nobody, and I mean nobody, should ever get to touch any production system unless they're implementing a specific change that's been tested in an identical environment, passed QA and review by folks who know the system and then only with a published implementation, testing and backout plan. If a system needs "tests", you pull it out of production before you start messing with it.
Finally, their "virtualized team" approach (read: our people are scattered all over the place) is moronic -- you see this sort of thing, and without fail it's the result of political pressures rather than sane management. In this case, I'll bet my hat is was a situation where a bunch of middle managers were allowed to maneuver to keep their fingers in the pie when centralization tool place, so instead of having everyone you need on hand and in one group you're busy setting up conference calls.
Plus, now their solution is to bring in a bunch of consultants. Yeah, that always works. Good luck, guys! You're gonna need it.
So, wow, but still, whats so special about it?
To sum up basic economics: Anything that people can't have has value to the people who can't have it.
Suddenly I find myself asking that exact same question.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/10/0821224
At least from my perspective, this one post almost completely destroyed his influence in the community. There's an object lesson in there someplace.
It would have been nice to have zillions of dollars, but there are other things that are more important.
"Money can't buy happiness, but somehow it's more comfortable crying in a Porsche than a Hyundai."
Interesting to read that the Slashdot editor felt disconnected from the Dotcom thing... When I was living in Wisconsin, honestly hanging around this site and reading the posts people were making is part of the reason I was so eager to move out to the Bay Area (wish I could have picked a better time; July 2000 turned out to be kind of rough). I suppose I just figured that being here at, well, wunderkind central, it would have been like being plugged directly into the horse's mouth (or potentially the other end).
Guess it's just more proof that Your Mileage, lifewise, May Vary.
This is obviously going back a ways, but I *think* this may have been one of the extremely small number of Slashdot stories to have had comments disabled.
Which is good since, even at the time, everyone who read it was unified in thinking, "Geez, what a douchebag."
Thinking back on it, it strikes me that this may have been pretty much the last time people really took him seriously. Here you had a guy who'd written the popular manifesto of OSS development and played a major hand in the release of the Mozilla codebase, and suddenly he just seemed to lose his credibility. He just sort of went away.
That's how it went from my view of it, anyhow. Your mileage may vary.
Something I've been sort of curious about for ages:
Can you talk a little about how you experienced some of the dotcom insanity, specifically as it unfolded here at Slashdot? For a while, it seemed like Slashdot was about to become wunderkind central -- the sale to VA, the infamous ESR post about uber-wealth, etc. I'd be interested to hear about how that experience translated from your side of the ball.
Thanks. And nice site you got here.
That's actually kind of creepy.
I know they sold a few of their buildings to a Canadian chip-maker called Celestica... I assume the other buildings got spun off when they regurgitated Cray, but I don't know for sure.
But hey, you're right there -- take a drive up and check it out. Hit the Leinie's brewery tour while you're there.
Try to imagine this guy's work day: He gets to wake up in the morning, hug his kids and then go into work and spend all day trying to figure out the right combination of security defaults that will (a) let people go out and do stuff while (b) protecting them from their own "I'm a average Windows user" level of abject stupidity.
Put another way, imagine that instead of just setting up a computer for your parents, you had to set one up for *everybody's* parents. All at once.
As much as it's fun to give MS shit for their products, I think I'd last about two hours in that position before I went into the executive washroom and slashed my wrists.
Ten years since I've been an intern. And, in certain respects, I'm still sitting here this morning doing that same sort of stuff. That's... depressing. I need to go open a bicycle shop or something.
I predict that, in the future, the web will be used to for vast amounts of pornography, insane conspiricy theories, niche interest "news" sites that protect their users from anything that might challenge their worldview and to allow regular people to flourish in the utter jackassery that results from anonymity.
It will also have an interesting side effect where long-time users sit down to write a post intended to be humorous and end up making themselves a little depressed.
That's a great theory except for the fact that it's crap.
China is dealing with the fact that their nuclear deterrent is very nearly obsolete -- they've only got about 18 warheads that could reach the United States, and the considerable improvements in the US's precision assault capabilities means that these could be taken out with a minimum of casualties with a very small loss of life (the Union of Concerned Scientists did an analysis -- the US could defang China and only kill a couple thousand Chinese in the process, versus the millions it would have knocked off even in the early 90's).
Add to this the missile shield, which is designed to knock down a small number of incoming missiles, and it's not impossible to foresee a day where a US President decides to take China out of the nuke game in the name of our own national security -- China is, after all, the emerging superpower of the moment and history says that friction is sure to follow.
Which is why they need boomers. Or, more accurately, is why they need everyone to *know* and never forget that they have boomers. Sure, it's possible that US fast-attacks that will no doubt follow these guys out of post will be able to sink all them all in the 15 minutes or so they'd need to fire their missiles, but it's also really possible that they wouldn't.
So this is Google Maps being a tool of China, showing us what the folks who run that country (aka, the people who put the "big" in "big brother") and set their nuclear policy want us to see. The might as well have made a see-from-space banner that says, "You can probably take us, sure, but it'll cost you Los Angeles".
Right. And what condition was his wife living with when he strangled her the night before again?
It was starting to drag near the middle of last season, I'm glad to see they've identified an endpoint. It'd have been a shame to have to watch that show go into the toilet -- better to burn twice as bright for my viewing amusement.
1/3rd of IT professionals poke through other employee's files? What are the other 2/3rds up to all day long?
Never hire an IT guy who couldn't pass the BOFH test.
For those of you keeping count, that's reason 2.02x10^63 + 1 to dislike Cuban.
Seriously, I wonder if he wakes up each day and says to himself, "You know, a lot of people hate my guts, but gosh darnit I'm still only the second-most hated owner of a sports team in Texas. What to do, what to do..."
Ya know, I'm only 20-something but my vision of the American Dream doesn't ever include getting laid-off - and certainly not by a company trying to reduce costs. How do you know these people views this job as dead end?
It involves working hard, making good money, building a family and a good life for all of us. White-picket fence and all of that (though I hate picket fences - I'll take a split-rail please).
I'm sorry that your version of the American Dream relies on such a sense of entitlement. Speaking as someone who is almost 30 and entered the job market right before the dotcom bust, I feel that it's my responsibility to point out that you're living in fantasyland.
In short, I think you'll find that nobody owes you jack shit. Your employer is paying you to work because it's a good investment for them -- you make them, or allow them to make, more money than they would without you. This is the way things work. Should this cease to be the case, your "expectations" don't amount to a hill of beans.
I'm sorry if that doesn't seem fair to you, that you feel like showing up to work everyday should earn you the house and the 2.5 kids and all that, but this doesn't change the reality of the situation.
"Work hard, become the best in your field..."
Yeah, sorry -- the folks working at Circuit City don't generally really qualify as being the "best in their field", unless you're defining the "field" as "people who work at Circuit City". Besides, Circuit City's not on commission anymore so you can't even argue that these folks were necessarily their top performers.
But let's accept for a moment the premise of this article. If these folks really are such great salesmen, this is opportunity knockin' at their door -- they can get better jobs at higher-end stores, they can start their own higher-end stores, they can get into selling something that has worthwhile commissions involved with it like software or cars or whatever. I mean, let's face it: Being the best sales associate at Circuit City is along the same lines as being the best cook at McDonald's. If that's where your vision ends, that's almost certainly where you belong.
That aside, what offends me most is that this thread is this horrific notion that we've devolved to a point where the meaning of the term "American dream" has mutated from 'boundless opportunity in the marketplace and the ability to move out of the economic class you were born into' to 'lifetime employment at Circuit City'.
Speaking only for myself, if that really were the case then I'd want no part of it.
The American Dream as I understand it is that when you get laid off from a shitty dead-end job you can go out and find or create something better if you have the drive and/or ability for it. And hey, if your lack the skills or the ambition to go out and work to better your situation, you can always reapply -- I'm sure that red shirt will fit just as well in ten weeks as it does now.
I'm a schoolteacher. I *KNOW* because I'm a teacher who connects with kids, and has a knack for reaching troubled kids that my odds of being the target of an angry, weapon-holding students are *GOOD*... someday, I'm going to stare at that terrifying situation. I still teach - I know that I do good things, and I will not live in fear of evil ones.
Interestingly, I think you're encountering another aspect of our new-ish non-local culture.
Consider: Kathy's problem is one of communication. Those sickos who have developed an interest in her due to her degree of public figure status would be out there regardless (stalkers being nothing new), but the internet allows her to see them which, quite naturally, terrifies her.
You, likewise, are being made fearful by our non-local culture. You see a couple of school shootings a year spread out nationally, but since each gets attention and, as an attention-getting item, is reported nationally in the same way that you might expect a local incident to be covered. As such, you've come to the expectation that school shootings are in fact commonplace enough that you're expressing the absolute certainty that you will, someday, "stare at that terrifying situation".
Both of your fears seem to have the common root, and it's something I find interesting. I wonder if that's a problem that has a solution -- after all, reasonable people look for things that threaten them, and mass communication's only going to get easier... Maybe eventually we'll all life either in fear or blissful intentional ignorance.
Yeah, back in the day you never would have seen this sort of thing on the web, assuming that by "back in the day" you mean "the time between when Tim Berners-Lee came up with the web but before he told anyone about it".
Not to say this sort of thing is all right, of course, but while this is almost certainly a sad byproduct of the culture of the internet, there's nothing in the post she pointed to that I find disturbing or even all that unusual. As she noted, you get everybody online and give them anonymity, this sort of thing happens.
This doesn't mean, however, that it's happening *more* than it would have back before the internet, just that now it tends to be visible. Public figures, even minor ones, have always run the risk of attracting sickos, especially when they're decent looking women. Going so far as to suggest this is something new that's being caused by the internet just seems ridiculous, and trying to paint it as a byproduct of the culture of men in software development is even moreso.
I know it must be disturbing to realize you're the focus of this kind of thing, but let's try not to make more of it than it is.
I dunno about a witch identification, but I'm betting this thing could pretty easily spot the Walk of Shame. Head down? Check. Shuffling gait? Check. Obviously yesterday's clothes wrinkled from a night on the floor? Oh yeah.
h e-Smokin'-Hot-Ass Walk (oh, sure, pretend you've never done it). I dunno if it'll prevent terrorism, mind you, but it'll keep those "funny video" TV shows in material for ages.
In fact, I can think of a number of amusing things this could watch for: The 'ol Toilet Twostep, the Hemroid Hobble, the Slow-Up-Your-Walk-to-Stay-Behind-the-Chick-with-t