BB Man: What is that, I've never heard of it. Why would we use that ratehr (sic) than the industry standard, Oracle?
Plebian: What sort of fucking idiot Boss are you if you've never even heard of SAP for fucks sake? Jesus Christ, why am I even talking with you about this, you're about as clueless as a shit smeared stick!
OK, here's the real reason some tech types are unemployed at the moment... soft "people" skills. (They seem to have the people skills of Jay and Silent Bob... well Jay really.)
BB Man: Hmm. I need to reduce head count. Jones over there isn't quite as technically astute as Paul Plebian, but at least HE hasn't compared me to a "shit smeared stick"... Paul! Could you come into my office for a minute?
Later that day...
Plebian: Whine, whine. Bitch, complain. Boss not fair. Capitalists all suck. I rock, they suck. Moan, moan. Mad skillz. LEET D00d. Bitch, complain. Whimper, whine...
Hmm. I believe he was pointing out that your tone implied you care much more for the concept of free software than you do for the people involved, and you certainly demonstrated an open hostility to someone who expressed an opinion with which you disagree. The fact that you even resorted to name-calling (in your subject line, no less), lends credence to the argument that perhaps you are in fact quite zealous about the cause being discussed.
As for accuracy, the Zealots were in fact fighting for freedom from the Roman Empire. So zealotry was originally related to a desire for freedom...;-)
The moral of this little story? Be nice to people, and they will sometimes be nice to you. Be heavy-handed and insulting, and you can bet someone will snipe you.
My thought is with an MP3 CD player I can have music, plus with a subscription to Audible.com I can have audio books and magazines.
No, it's not as fresh as a live call-in talk show, but I find them to be mostly banal and annoying. An Audible subscription is not much more expensive than XM's monthly fee ($12.95 for one book per month), and I've gotten to listen to some pretty cool stuff like God's Equation, Moby Dick (unabridged) and the Bible (no, I haven't listened to the whole thing...). Great Scott! I seem to be a puritan...;-)
As has been mentioned in other posts, I still have my car radio for news and the all important traffic update.
I mostly agree with you, but why do you suppose it would be earth vs. Mars? Why not Faction 1 on earth, Mars and Luna vs. Faction 2 on earth, Mars and Luna? If there is one thing archaeology and anthropology have taught us, it is that an idea spreads rapidly among humans as far as it can. It is surprising how quickly an idea (or ideology) would spread across a continent when people were limited to traveling on their feet... Now it is almost instantaneous.
If we've learned anything from the attack on the US, it is that an attack does NOT need to be launched from the home of the people who planned it. The terrorists came here first, then assembled the attack.
I would imagine that the same thing would be true in the case of someone wanting to take out humanity. Coordinate attacks on earth, luna, and Mars that would be carried out at the same time locally, not launched from the earth. Those colonies would be exceedingly fragile. In a lunar colony, you just need to poke holes in the walls!
Also, I'm not implying that we don't try to get bases on other planets, just that it will take MUCH longer to do so, and that we could be wiped out by a stray rock while we wait...
Nope. I don't mean to say that we don't go for a lunar or Martian colony, just that we could do earth-based "life-boats" MUCH more quickly and cheaply.
My guess is that if we were going guns-a-blazing for a Martian colony, we are at least 100 years out from a significant population (say enough to make a successful breeding population). A couple hundred scientists in a research station does NOT guarantee that the species would survive.
I saw a show on Discover (so take this with as much salt as is required...) that talked about DNA evidence that the human population on earth had been smacked down to about 10,000 individuals at somepoint in the last 100,000 years or so. I would hope we would have at least that many supported in whatever survival structures we build.
I believe that if we last long enough, we'll get to Mars. My point is that we had better make sure we last long enough... The rock with our name on it could show up any day...
I've been thinking about this "protect ourselves from disaster" idea for a while and am increasingly of the opinion that before we try to fling our eggs out to Mars, we should explore some quicker solutions.
There are two areas we could build self-sustaining colonies on Earth that would be able to hunker down through just about anything, be it nuclear, cosmic or biological... under the sea and under the ground.
If we had two or three underground towns and two or three undersea towns that could house 2,000 or 3,000 people each, you could perpetuate the species. Fuel cell technology could be helpful for running UV lights capable of growing enough food to support the town. Especially if we grow genetically engineered crops... The undersea towns could extract hydrogen and oxygen from the water for breathing and running the fuel cells.
The Earth (even after a good sized asteroid strike) should still be a hell of a lot more hospitable than anywhere else in our solar system. The fact that we have a breathable atmosphere puts us WAY ahead of the game.
I would just hate for us to get wiped out while trying to figure out how to overcome the obstacles of living on another planet...
The really good news of this article is that if you do lose a few digits, you can learn to compensate with the remaining ones...
As to the idea that this is a mutation... Let's think about evolution and natural selection...
Assuming that this activity has somehow mysteriously altered your DNA to the point you are a mutant... and no you don't get any fancy eye-beams or telekenetic powers...
Do you really think the ability to rapidly enter an email on your blackberry is going to excite the opposite sex to the point that you get the chance to pass your genes to offspring? or is your anti-social, nintendo playing, pasty white butt with your "mad skilz" at pushing buttons with your thumbs going to be a genetic dead-end since there's no way in Hell you are getting close enough to a person of the opposite sex to reproduce?
Isn't it ironic that this post assumes the use of Star Office implies technical competence when the heroic job seeker who used it had to explain why his presentation wasn't working?
Call me old fashioned but if I were applying for a CS teaching job that required me to make a presentation, I'd DAMNED sure want to use a product that didn't leave me looking like a ninny to the people I wanted to hire me!
Is it just possible that Microsoft Office has reached a position of dominance because for the most part it works and is pretty easy to use? Nah, must be some conspiracy...
Say what you will, but Word and Excel were the first really good products for Windows. Ami Pro was OK, but WordPerfect for Windows sucked (once it came out MUCH later than Word) and Lotus 123 just never kept up with Excel in usability or features. Under DOS, WordPerfect and 123 dominated (although I liked Quattro Pro better than 123...).
Don't forget that until Microsoft bundled Word/Excel/Powerpoint together as Office, each one could cost hundreds of dollars (as did their competitors). Granted it was a strategy to kill off the competition, but so far they haven't spiked the price after the demise of the competition. The whole XP licensing scheme could be the first sign they are about to drop that hammer, but I doubt it.
I personally use Microsoft products for the same reason I chose a VHS VCR instead of a Beta: compatibility. Yeah, if you work at it you can usually get Star Office (etc.) files to transfer back and forth with Office, but with MS Office, I don't have to screw around because 98%+ of the people I'll ever need to share files with are using MS Office...
If anyone wants to knock off MS (open source or otherwise), they'll have to do it by making a product that is dramatically better than MS Office. Being almost as good will simply not win the battle.
I find MS just as distasteful as anyone, but I am also a realist. Simply believing with all your heart that the enemy shouldn't have any bullets will not keep him from turning you into Swiss cheese.
The fellow who chose to prepare his presentation with a product other than the defacto standard (MS Office) did so at his own peril. His choice made a statement, but the software didn't back him up and left him looking like a chump... If he had used MS Office and the same thing happened, I suspect the hiring committee would have likely have been more understanding. If I were a betting sort of person, I'd bet he didn't get the job...
Pack your bags, buddy, we're shipping you out next week!
We're going to colonize Mars whether you "volunteer" to go or we have to round you up and stick you on a rocket.
And don't be whining about the conditions, either. There's some air on Mars! Granted not as much as you're used to with your mollycoddled earth upbringing, but some of the stronger "colonists" will survive and reproduce. You might be one of them!
One day, when the hyper-robust Martian colonists have had just about enough, they will return to earth and solve the over-population problem once and for all! It's a win-win situation.
Let's be honest with ourselves. It's not just FUD (although there is some FUD).
As much as I would like to say the world was simple enough to say "Open Source: Good, Closed Source: Bad", it just isn't that simple.
Of the three reasons you report your university as giving, I'd say numbers 1 and 2 are perfectly valid.
First they said it would cost too much to implement because of retraining users, etc. It would indeed be expensive. How expensive in comparison with the Microsoft contract we can't say without lots more facts. Quick, knee-jerk answers are seldom accurate. There are several good open alternatives to Office, but I have yet to see one that matches Office for the average worker. It doesn't matter if it works great for me if the bulk of the staff needs help. For open source software to succeed in the mainstream it has to replace Microsoft products. For any product to replace another it has to be a perceptibly better experience than the one being replaced, not just equivalent. At the moment I'd say the open alternatives to Office are almost equivalent. Does that mean I think open source sucks, Hell no, but let's not kid ourselves. There's a long way to go and we're up against a jugernaut whose products many users love.
Which brings us to the third argument given by the university: real world companies by and large do use Microsoft products and a kid graduating from a university had better know how to use them. Rant and rave all we like, this is a fact. Facts do not change themselves to suit us. If we wish to do battle successfully, we must do so with a clear understanding of what the battlefield conditions are, not what we would like them to be. (See Sun Tzu's Art Of War
The world of academia is a closed environment that gives a very skewed view of the world that most people will not be living in. 98% of graduates will work in the private sector or government, not academia. Let's take an example. Our (US) tax code is pretty universally disliked. There are many alternatives that have been proposed. Some people like the idea of a flat tax. A flat tax could save some people lots and lots of money. Let's say we are a university and we universally agree that a flat tax is better than the prevailing tax code. Do we do our students a disservice if we teach them only about the flat tax system we agree is more logical and beneficial than the current tax system? Even though the flat tax makes more sense and would save money, the students wouldn't be too happy the first year they have to file their income taxes! They would feel like we should have shown them how the real (ie mainstream) world works.
A better approach would be to find areas where you can get the IT people to agree that open source is a viable alternative. The criteria, obviously, need to be the counter of the reasons they gave. In other words, where can open source be plugged in without costing too much to implement, being hard to support or giving students a false impression of what they will see after graduation? Suddenly we're back in the "Linux on the server" arena. If the university is using bunches of Windows boxes as servers, they could greatly reduce their support and licensing bill with Microsoft by switching to open source.
However, don't expect to suddenly convert every server and save money. If the university is, for instance, using Microsoft Exchange as its primary mail service, it would be quite expensive to try to change. Even more so would be the hodge-podge of custom apps every organization public or private has accumulated over the years. Does Public Safety have an NT-only system for tracking fines and tickets? Good luck replacing that. The moment you say you are going to replace a custom app, blink your eyes, show little dollar signs in those peepers and say "Ka-Ching" because somebody's going to spend a bunch of money whether they buy or build the new system.
That's my essay for the day. Flame me if you will, but I'd rather see a well reasoned rebuttal... For anyone who would rather flame me, then Nyah Nyah Nyah, your mama is one too.
Good point. If they are in an area that is so rural that they need computers trucked in to teach them to be IT workers, then where the heck are they going to work when they are done if they don't leave?
"Clem, did you slop the hogs and apply them patches to the router?"
"No, sir, I had a firewall problem that was keepin' the cows from updating their website."
I'd definitely pay a small amount ($5-10/year) to have/. without ads. As I type this and watch that blinkin', stinkin' thinkgeek ad at the top of the page, I realize that banner ads have ALWAYS been annoying and I would definitely pay SOMETHING to get rid of them. Just not a lot...
But I'd be willing to pay more if I could pay one bill (as much as maybe $50/year) if that gave me a list of 5-10 different sites with no ads.
The last-best hope for content sites (in my opinion) is to band together and sell "all you can eat" group subscriptions. One payment, lotsa sites for one year. Hey, you want the Geek Package for $50 or the Porn Package for $200?
Personally I wouldn't go for micropayments. Too much thought involved to decide if I want to click a link. Give me one reasonable yearly rate, just like a print magazine.
As for the one comment I read about not wanting to pay for community sites, just remember the golden age of BBSs. People DID pay for community content, BUT very few people got rich! It was definitely something they did because they loved it.
To me the big lie of the dot-com era was that anyone who could sling some HTML/Javascript/Perl could expect to get rich, rich, rich. Fine. That is simply not true. A FEW people with really good business ideas will get rich, but that doesn't mean that lots of people can't earn some money. Not bloody much, mind you, but some. Sure the readership of/. would plummet if they required a subscription, but they might still make more than they can make from ads in the current economy...
One last comment. For all those Human Torches out there in/. land who cried "Flame On!" at the merest suggestion of subscription fees, do try to keep in mind that no matter how much Taco and co. love running the site, at the end of the day they have to eat.
Slashdot Mirror
Plebian: What sort of fucking idiot Boss are you if you've never even heard of SAP for fucks sake? Jesus Christ, why am I even talking with you about this, you're about as clueless as a shit smeared stick!
OK, here's the real reason some tech types are unemployed at the moment... soft "people" skills. (They seem to have the people skills of Jay and Silent Bob... well Jay really.)
BB Man: Hmm. I need to reduce head count. Jones over there isn't quite as technically astute as Paul Plebian, but at least HE hasn't compared me to a "shit smeared stick"... Paul! Could you come into my office for a minute?
Later that day...
Plebian: Whine, whine. Bitch, complain. Boss not fair. Capitalists all suck. I rock, they suck. Moan, moan. Mad skillz. LEET D00d. Bitch, complain. Whimper, whine...
As for accuracy, the Zealots were in fact fighting for freedom from the Roman Empire. So zealotry was originally related to a desire for freedom... ;-)
The moral of this little story? Be nice to people, and they will sometimes be nice to you. Be heavy-handed and insulting, and you can bet someone will snipe you.
I don't believe he was bashing anything, just offering constructive criticism.
Since when does saying "I think this system would be better if it had X" constitute bashing?
Also, free isn't a bargain if the tool doesn't meet the needs of the project. MySQL is great for some projects, but not for others.
A screwdriver makes a lousy hammer! That doesn't mean I'm bashing screwdrivers (unless I'm trying to use them as hammers...).
Just my $0.0002 (originally two cents, adjusted for inflation, deflation, recalibration, etc.)
My thought is with an MP3 CD player I can have music, plus with a subscription to Audible.com I can have audio books and magazines.
No, it's not as fresh as a live call-in talk show, but I find them to be mostly banal and annoying. An Audible subscription is not much more expensive than XM's monthly fee ($12.95 for one book per month), and I've gotten to listen to some pretty cool stuff like God's Equation, Moby Dick (unabridged) and the Bible (no, I haven't listened to the whole thing...). Great Scott! I seem to be a puritan... ;-)
As has been mentioned in other posts, I still have my car radio for news and the all important traffic update.
If we've learned anything from the attack on the US, it is that an attack does NOT need to be launched from the home of the people who planned it. The terrorists came here first, then assembled the attack.
I would imagine that the same thing would be true in the case of someone wanting to take out humanity. Coordinate attacks on earth, luna, and Mars that would be carried out at the same time locally, not launched from the earth. Those colonies would be exceedingly fragile. In a lunar colony, you just need to poke holes in the walls!
Also, I'm not implying that we don't try to get bases on other planets, just that it will take MUCH longer to do so, and that we could be wiped out by a stray rock while we wait...
My guess is that if we were going guns-a-blazing for a Martian colony, we are at least 100 years out from a significant population (say enough to make a successful breeding population). A couple hundred scientists in a research station does NOT guarantee that the species would survive.
I saw a show on Discover (so take this with as much salt as is required...) that talked about DNA evidence that the human population on earth had been smacked down to about 10,000 individuals at somepoint in the last 100,000 years or so. I would hope we would have at least that many supported in whatever survival structures we build.
I believe that if we last long enough, we'll get to Mars. My point is that we had better make sure we last long enough... The rock with our name on it could show up any day...
There are two areas we could build self-sustaining colonies on Earth that would be able to hunker down through just about anything, be it nuclear, cosmic or biological... under the sea and under the ground.
If we had two or three underground towns and two or three undersea towns that could house 2,000 or 3,000 people each, you could perpetuate the species. Fuel cell technology could be helpful for running UV lights capable of growing enough food to support the town. Especially if we grow genetically engineered crops... The undersea towns could extract hydrogen and oxygen from the water for breathing and running the fuel cells.
The Earth (even after a good sized asteroid strike) should still be a hell of a lot more hospitable than anywhere else in our solar system. The fact that we have a breathable atmosphere puts us WAY ahead of the game.
I would just hate for us to get wiped out while trying to figure out how to overcome the obstacles of living on another planet...
As to the idea that this is a mutation... Let's think about evolution and natural selection...
Assuming that this activity has somehow mysteriously altered your DNA to the point you are a mutant... and no you don't get any fancy eye-beams or telekenetic powers...
Do you really think the ability to rapidly enter an email on your blackberry is going to excite the opposite sex to the point that you get the chance to pass your genes to offspring? or is your anti-social, nintendo playing, pasty white butt with your "mad skilz" at pushing buttons with your thumbs going to be a genetic dead-end since there's no way in Hell you are getting close enough to a person of the opposite sex to reproduce?
A trolling we will go, a trolling we will go...
Call me old fashioned but if I were applying for a CS teaching job that required me to make a presentation, I'd DAMNED sure want to use a product that didn't leave me looking like a ninny to the people I wanted to hire me!
Is it just possible that Microsoft Office has reached a position of dominance because for the most part it works and is pretty easy to use? Nah, must be some conspiracy...
Say what you will, but Word and Excel were the first really good products for Windows. Ami Pro was OK, but WordPerfect for Windows sucked (once it came out MUCH later than Word) and Lotus 123 just never kept up with Excel in usability or features. Under DOS, WordPerfect and 123 dominated (although I liked Quattro Pro better than 123...).
Don't forget that until Microsoft bundled Word/Excel/Powerpoint together as Office, each one could cost hundreds of dollars (as did their competitors). Granted it was a strategy to kill off the competition, but so far they haven't spiked the price after the demise of the competition. The whole XP licensing scheme could be the first sign they are about to drop that hammer, but I doubt it.
I personally use Microsoft products for the same reason I chose a VHS VCR instead of a Beta: compatibility. Yeah, if you work at it you can usually get Star Office (etc.) files to transfer back and forth with Office, but with MS Office, I don't have to screw around because 98%+ of the people I'll ever need to share files with are using MS Office...
If anyone wants to knock off MS (open source or otherwise), they'll have to do it by making a product that is dramatically better than MS Office. Being almost as good will simply not win the battle.
I find MS just as distasteful as anyone, but I am also a realist. Simply believing with all your heart that the enemy shouldn't have any bullets will not keep him from turning you into Swiss cheese.
The fellow who chose to prepare his presentation with a product other than the defacto standard (MS Office) did so at his own peril. His choice made a statement, but the software didn't back him up and left him looking like a chump... If he had used MS Office and the same thing happened, I suspect the hiring committee would have likely have been more understanding. If I were a betting sort of person, I'd bet he didn't get the job...
Pack your bags, buddy, we're shipping you out next week!
We're going to colonize Mars whether you "volunteer" to go or we have to round you up and stick you on a rocket.
And don't be whining about the conditions, either. There's some air on Mars! Granted not as much as you're used to with your mollycoddled earth upbringing, but some of the stronger "colonists" will survive and reproduce. You might be one of them!
One day, when the hyper-robust Martian colonists have had just about enough, they will return to earth and solve the over-population problem once and for all! It's a win-win situation.
As much as I would like to say the world was simple enough to say "Open Source: Good, Closed Source: Bad", it just isn't that simple.
Of the three reasons you report your university as giving, I'd say numbers 1 and 2 are perfectly valid.
First they said it would cost too much to implement because of retraining users, etc. It would indeed be expensive. How expensive in comparison with the Microsoft contract we can't say without lots more facts. Quick, knee-jerk answers are seldom accurate. There are several good open alternatives to Office, but I have yet to see one that matches Office for the average worker. It doesn't matter if it works great for me if the bulk of the staff needs help. For open source software to succeed in the mainstream it has to replace Microsoft products. For any product to replace another it has to be a perceptibly better experience than the one being replaced, not just equivalent. At the moment I'd say the open alternatives to Office are almost equivalent. Does that mean I think open source sucks, Hell no, but let's not kid ourselves. There's a long way to go and we're up against a jugernaut whose products many users love.
Which brings us to the third argument given by the university: real world companies by and large do use Microsoft products and a kid graduating from a university had better know how to use them. Rant and rave all we like, this is a fact. Facts do not change themselves to suit us. If we wish to do battle successfully, we must do so with a clear understanding of what the battlefield conditions are, not what we would like them to be. (See Sun Tzu's Art Of War
The world of academia is a closed environment that gives a very skewed view of the world that most people will not be living in. 98% of graduates will work in the private sector or government, not academia. Let's take an example. Our (US) tax code is pretty universally disliked. There are many alternatives that have been proposed. Some people like the idea of a flat tax. A flat tax could save some people lots and lots of money. Let's say we are a university and we universally agree that a flat tax is better than the prevailing tax code. Do we do our students a disservice if we teach them only about the flat tax system we agree is more logical and beneficial than the current tax system? Even though the flat tax makes more sense and would save money, the students wouldn't be too happy the first year they have to file their income taxes! They would feel like we should have shown them how the real (ie mainstream) world works.
A better approach would be to find areas where you can get the IT people to agree that open source is a viable alternative. The criteria, obviously, need to be the counter of the reasons they gave. In other words, where can open source be plugged in without costing too much to implement, being hard to support or giving students a false impression of what they will see after graduation? Suddenly we're back in the "Linux on the server" arena. If the university is using bunches of Windows boxes as servers, they could greatly reduce their support and licensing bill with Microsoft by switching to open source.
However, don't expect to suddenly convert every server and save money. If the university is, for instance, using Microsoft Exchange as its primary mail service, it would be quite expensive to try to change. Even more so would be the hodge-podge of custom apps every organization public or private has accumulated over the years. Does Public Safety have an NT-only system for tracking fines and tickets? Good luck replacing that. The moment you say you are going to replace a custom app, blink your eyes, show little dollar signs in those peepers and say "Ka-Ching" because somebody's going to spend a bunch of money whether they buy or build the new system.
That's my essay for the day. Flame me if you will, but I'd rather see a well reasoned rebuttal... For anyone who would rather flame me, then Nyah Nyah Nyah, your mama is one too.
Note, if you don't want to see some guy's hairy butt, then DO NOT click the "this image" link.
"Clem, did you slop the hogs and apply them patches to the router?"
"No, sir, I had a firewall problem that was keepin' the cows from updating their website."
What I want is open source non-linear video editing software like Broadcast 2000... Shame it's no longer available.
But I'd be willing to pay more if I could pay one bill (as much as maybe $50/year) if that gave me a list of 5-10 different sites with no ads.
The last-best hope for content sites (in my opinion) is to band together and sell "all you can eat" group subscriptions. One payment, lotsa sites for one year. Hey, you want the Geek Package for $50 or the Porn Package for $200?
Personally I wouldn't go for micropayments. Too much thought involved to decide if I want to click a link. Give me one reasonable yearly rate, just like a print magazine.
As for the one comment I read about not wanting to pay for community sites, just remember the golden age of BBSs. People DID pay for community content, BUT very few people got rich! It was definitely something they did because they loved it.
To me the big lie of the dot-com era was that anyone who could sling some HTML/Javascript/Perl could expect to get rich, rich, rich. Fine. That is simply not true. A FEW people with really good business ideas will get rich, but that doesn't mean that lots of people can't earn some money. Not bloody much, mind you, but some. Sure the readership of /. would plummet if they required a subscription, but they might still make more than they can make from ads in the current economy...
One last comment. For all those Human Torches out there in /. land who cried "Flame On!" at the merest suggestion of subscription fees, do try to keep in mind that no matter how much Taco and co. love running the site, at the end of the day they have to eat.
Simple math: 0 revenue - x expenses = 0 /.