It's not depressing at all. Yes, millions of overpaid geeks are losing their jobs and having to settle for crappier ones, but millions of foreigners and lower-class people are rising up out of poverty and making something of themselves. This actually gives me a feeling of satisfaction, that the stereotypical "I'm smarter and better than you n00bies" geek is finally being humbled.
If there is a rise in 6-month education programs for IT people, that should tell you something about the increasing commodification of services and technology. Overpaid IT is like the watch repair shop. Once upon a time, people had their watches fixed when they broke, but then digitals came out and it wasn't worthwhile to repair anything except the most expensive ones. High-level tech workers have fought hard to protect their job security by pushing inferior, hard-to-maintain technologies (Unix, Windows, C...), and have managed to hold on surprisingly long, but they can't hold on forever. For most of them, I would recommend pursuing training in a new field before their salary drops below the point that they can't afford to anymore (at which point they'll really be screwed).
This is actually the system that's already in place. If A betrays you, you'll give B $50, but then you'll give A $100 when B betrays you, and B $200 when A betrays you. The numbers get really high when dealing with rich people and corporations. And this is one of the reasons there are so many rich white men in office.
The problem is that you're thinking along a geek train of thought. It's like a political person saying to an apolitical person, "Don't you see, it all makes sense!" and the apolitical person going, "???" Geeks slag off the social sciences all the time as not being "hard enough" or whatever, but they need to understand the subtextual discourses that are happening here that physics and comp sci can't help them with. Until then, they're not even communicating with "average people" on the same frequency. They're both speaking English or whatever their language is but one might as well be speaking Klingon for all the good it's doing them.
Cool thing is that with the source-code available like it is, nothing prevents someone from putting together a Linux distribution that does the same.
This is an example: I and most people don't care about potentials or conditionals, we just care about what is, right now. You can talk all you want about how great OSS is, the amazing possibilities it provides, but I don't care unless it is actually achieving those possibilities this very instant. Further down in your post you mention software philosophies. I guarantee you that very very very very few people care about this, or even would care if they knew there were actually people out there who debated this, of all things.
Cool thing is that with the source-code available like it is, nothing prevents someone from putting together a Linux distribution that does the same.
I've never used Lindows, but yes, that sounds like Lindows. Unfortunately Lindows has to fight an uphill battle. The whole computing experience running Lindows is new and unfamiliar and presents a questionable end-user cost/benefit ratio. (Gotta upgrade Lindows once in a while, too, if you want to be able to keep running the prepackaged stuff they provide and support the latest hardware.) The nub of it is that I and most people don't care about this whole situation, we don't care about supporting the underdogs, we just want something that works, that we can use instantly without messing with. Even the Mac is too foreign for a lot of people. Hastening Linux adoption is not a matter of making more incompatible hacked-together distros... I really don't know what it is, or if it's even possible in the next 10 years. Windows is so entrenched, it works pretty well, it runs ALL the software, and when a new version of it comes out, maybe it doesn't really cost $199 to upgrade after all - wink wink, yeah grandma of course I can burn you a copy. I'm not sure it's possible to compete against that.
In effect, Microsoft reduces your options and makes many decisions for you so ou can have "an easy, all-in-one upgrade", so all a project would need to do to compete with something like that would be to make the same types of choices for the user.
Don't you think that if it were that easy, it would have happened already, and Linux would have more than 1% desktop market share?
I think that if OSS people want the desktop, they need to spend less time writing manifestos and ideological defenses of their positions and more time working together to build solid, cohesive software. Don't tell me OSS is better, show me. OSS has already shown the network stack writers, and the web server writers, or whoever, but it still needs to show the average user.
It's not 9-5 that your body wasn't designed for. Cavepeople didn't have this problem of getting up later and later every day until they were getting up at night. Cavepeople moved around during the day and did shit that made them tired enough to want to go to bed at bedtime. Very different from sitting in a chair - not to mention a chair in a room with controlled lighting that overrides the natural cycle of the sun - and going clicky-click all day.
The only things preventing you from getting up a 4am and going to bed at 8pm on a consistent basis, or any times you choose about 8 hours apart, is 1) your lifestyle and 2) your own force of will. If you've gotta work 8 hours a day, 9-5 is actually almost ideal, I'd say, because it lets you catch the sunrise, the midday, and the sunset. Up with the sun and down with the sun. Who would have imagined? If you had to work, say, 2pm-10pm every day, you would find that soon enough, you'd be just as tired as a result of staying up til 7 or 8am and getting up at 1pm every day. The problem isn't the specific time during the day that the workday is scheduled, the problem is that when all you do all day is sit at the computer or whatever (not doing anything tiring, living inside an artificial, constructed reality detached from the natural cycle of the days and nights) it should come to no surprise that you're not tired at the end of the day. Pills, caffeine, stronger alarm clocks, that's all just a way to push your body into doing what it wasn't designed to do. (Nothing.) Being sedentary and out of shape is not what the human body was designed for. It's easy to spring out of bed every morning at 6 and fall asleep at the snap of a finger at 10 every night - you just have to want to structure your life properly.
You'll notice that when you're isolated and confined, you'll tend to have less energy and sleep in longer / go to bed later just because you're not exerting yourself and are becoming mildly depressed. Go outside and do stuff, be active, and a 24 hour day will seem longer because you'll be pooped at the end of it.
For some reason basically all the alarm clocks I can find come with impossible-to-operate-when-groggy switches, plastic tabs, hard-to-press tiny buttons, and so on, making every morning an adventure. I seriously shopped for something cool and new in these for about three weeks before I completely gave up. There's a nightmare of idiotic user interfaces out there, all meant to be used when sleepy. This is good news though, it means that if open-source software developers ever have to change jobs (or indeed, get jobs in the first place), they will be able to move into the field of alarm clock design with hardly any effort.
Yeah but it's called "Nitrus." I wouldn't want to use something called that. The name "iPod" may make it sound like it was designed for homosexuals, but "Nitrus" makes it sound like it was designed for testosterone-charged, pimply-faced, long-haired, fuzzy-chinned fat white teenage male geeks who fantasize about sticking their little stiffies into an elf babe, which is even worse.
Why on earth would anyone offer a sizable tech scholarship to a white middle-class male "potential" high school graduate? Unless you are a wicked smaht Doogie Howser, there are obviously a lot more students who need aid a lot more than you do.
Even though I can't see any of the slashdot posters, I can just imagine the snide looks on their faces as they chortle to themselves about how this latest service pack is further proof that M$ is doomed and OSS is poised to take over computing.
SP2 is: "too little, too late to stop the floodgates..." "a last gasp from a dying company..." "a halfhearted effort from an evil megacorp which probably helped plot 9/11..." "just more bloat on top of an already bloated OS-from-Hell..." "far inferior to the latest release of GNU/HURD, which, being microkernel-based, happens to be lightyears beyond Loseblowz ExPee technologically..."
Your points are valid, but the difference is upgrading Linux kernels costs nothing. For the vast majority of people, it costs considerable amounts of time, and time is money. If you don't know what a kernel is, you're going to be one tired-ass, frustrated-ass motherfucker when you "finish" your Linux upgrade process. (I put "finish" in quotes because Linux, no more or less than Windows, also demands perpetual updates if you want it to stay current.)
Windows lets you pay in money for an easy, all-in-one upgrade. Linux gives you the option of either doing that, or paying in time for a multitude of difficult, piecemeal upgrades. If Win98 users wanted to do things the messy way like that, they would switch to Linux. And indeed, some have... about what... 1%?
So Win98 users, the VAST VAST MAJORITY of whom do not have a lick of programming skill not to mention the time or desire to maintain their OS themselves, should enroll in a BS program in computer science at their nearest accredited university, a dramatic rearragement of their priorities, in order to maintain their OS themselves. Or else, they should pay someone else MORE THAN THE COST OF AN UPGRADE TO 2000 OR XP to continually develop patches for their shitty old OS and to provide support for it.
Microsoft "addicted" those users to Windows 98. As if the general public is full of raging drug-addicted idiots too poor and destitute to see after their own welfare. It's a good thing a person like you is around to show them the light, the One True Path! Well, fuck you. You would make more sense if you weren't so busy felching cum out of Dick Stallman's distended rectum.
Give me a fucking break you tool. Just try to get support from Red Hat for RH 5.0. On Slashdot if you criticize your ca. 2000 Linux distro with the 2.2 kernel, you get modded down and told to "get with the program" and stop running such an ancient OS, even though said OS is only the same age as Win 98 and is perhaps even younger. But when Microsoft commits the horrible crime of ALLOWING TIME TO LAPSE, it's like the end of the fucking world. Software gets old and obsolete after a period of time, deal with it. It doesn't matter if the source is available when 99.999% of Win98 users couldn't give half a shit.
I'm glad you divulged this theory of yours, as I've found it fascinating, and I hope you can further develop it in the future. I've also been working on a theory of my own. I call it the "theory of downward pull." That is, there is some kind of force that will naturally, and infallibly, pull everything down toward the ground, no matter the size or shape of the object.
What I am trying to resolve is the problem of how this force can operate on a round object such as the earth. When I drop a pen here, in North America, it goes down. But how come when a Chinese person in China drops a pen, it doesn't fall "up"? One of my hypotheses, and the strongest one, I think, is that there is an invisible "breath" being "blown" toward China upwards over the earth that acts as a substitute for this "downward force" when "down" in a particular location is not actually "down" relative to the actual "down." One explanation for this "breath" is a large, invisible dragon centered somewhere far down beneath North America. This theory is actually a little disconcerting - what happens when the dragon runs out of breath? I guess it eats all the Chinese. This is why we must pray to the dragon to never stop.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 0
There's nothing more effective in taking the air of a dumb cracker by gladly using the very term he intended to insult you with.
Thank you, finally, SOMEONE around here who knows the difference between "cracker" and "hacker."
we need to increase space exploration funding
on
Dreams of the Moon
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· Score: -1, Troll
Computers are pretty complicated. Smart people get them, stupid people don't, either 'cause they're too stupid or 'cause they're lazy. And that sucks. Thank you
Slashdot Mirror
It's not depressing at all. Yes, millions of overpaid geeks are losing their jobs and having to settle for crappier ones, but millions of foreigners and lower-class people are rising up out of poverty and making something of themselves. This actually gives me a feeling of satisfaction, that the stereotypical "I'm smarter and better than you n00bies" geek is finally being humbled.
If there is a rise in 6-month education programs for IT people, that should tell you something about the increasing commodification of services and technology. Overpaid IT is like the watch repair shop. Once upon a time, people had their watches fixed when they broke, but then digitals came out and it wasn't worthwhile to repair anything except the most expensive ones. High-level tech workers have fought hard to protect their job security by pushing inferior, hard-to-maintain technologies (Unix, Windows, C...), and have managed to hold on surprisingly long, but they can't hold on forever. For most of them, I would recommend pursuing training in a new field before their salary drops below the point that they can't afford to anymore (at which point they'll really be screwed).
We already have an OS like that. It's called Linux
This is actually the system that's already in place. If A betrays you, you'll give B $50, but then you'll give A $100 when B betrays you, and B $200 when A betrays you. The numbers get really high when dealing with rich people and corporations. And this is one of the reasons there are so many rich white men in office.
The problem is that you're thinking along a geek train of thought. It's like a political person saying to an apolitical person, "Don't you see, it all makes sense!" and the apolitical person going, "???" Geeks slag off the social sciences all the time as not being "hard enough" or whatever, but they need to understand the subtextual discourses that are happening here that physics and comp sci can't help them with. Until then, they're not even communicating with "average people" on the same frequency. They're both speaking English or whatever their language is but one might as well be speaking Klingon for all the good it's doing them.
Cool thing is that with the source-code available like it is, nothing prevents someone from putting together a Linux distribution that does the same.
This is an example: I and most people don't care about potentials or conditionals, we just care about what is, right now. You can talk all you want about how great OSS is, the amazing possibilities it provides, but I don't care unless it is actually achieving those possibilities this very instant. Further down in your post you mention software philosophies. I guarantee you that very very very very few people care about this, or even would care if they knew there were actually people out there who debated this, of all things.
Cool thing is that with the source-code available like it is, nothing prevents someone from putting together a Linux distribution that does the same.
I've never used Lindows, but yes, that sounds like Lindows. Unfortunately Lindows has to fight an uphill battle. The whole computing experience running Lindows is new and unfamiliar and presents a questionable end-user cost/benefit ratio. (Gotta upgrade Lindows once in a while, too, if you want to be able to keep running the prepackaged stuff they provide and support the latest hardware.) The nub of it is that I and most people don't care about this whole situation, we don't care about supporting the underdogs, we just want something that works, that we can use instantly without messing with. Even the Mac is too foreign for a lot of people. Hastening Linux adoption is not a matter of making more incompatible hacked-together distros... I really don't know what it is, or if it's even possible in the next 10 years. Windows is so entrenched, it works pretty well, it runs ALL the software, and when a new version of it comes out, maybe it doesn't really cost $199 to upgrade after all - wink wink, yeah grandma of course I can burn you a copy. I'm not sure it's possible to compete against that.
In effect, Microsoft reduces your options and makes many decisions for you so ou can have "an easy, all-in-one upgrade", so all a project would need to do to compete with something like that would be to make the same types of choices for the user.
Don't you think that if it were that easy, it would have happened already, and Linux would have more than 1% desktop market share?
I think that if OSS people want the desktop, they need to spend less time writing manifestos and ideological defenses of their positions and more time working together to build solid, cohesive software. Don't tell me OSS is better, show me. OSS has already shown the network stack writers, and the web server writers, or whoever, but it still needs to show the average user.
It's not 9-5 that your body wasn't designed for. Cavepeople didn't have this problem of getting up later and later every day until they were getting up at night. Cavepeople moved around during the day and did shit that made them tired enough to want to go to bed at bedtime. Very different from sitting in a chair - not to mention a chair in a room with controlled lighting that overrides the natural cycle of the sun - and going clicky-click all day.
The only things preventing you from getting up a 4am and going to bed at 8pm on a consistent basis, or any times you choose about 8 hours apart, is 1) your lifestyle and 2) your own force of will. If you've gotta work 8 hours a day, 9-5 is actually almost ideal, I'd say, because it lets you catch the sunrise, the midday, and the sunset. Up with the sun and down with the sun. Who would have imagined? If you had to work, say, 2pm-10pm every day, you would find that soon enough, you'd be just as tired as a result of staying up til 7 or 8am and getting up at 1pm every day. The problem isn't the specific time during the day that the workday is scheduled, the problem is that when all you do all day is sit at the computer or whatever (not doing anything tiring, living inside an artificial, constructed reality detached from the natural cycle of the days and nights) it should come to no surprise that you're not tired at the end of the day. Pills, caffeine, stronger alarm clocks, that's all just a way to push your body into doing what it wasn't designed to do. (Nothing.) Being sedentary and out of shape is not what the human body was designed for. It's easy to spring out of bed every morning at 6 and fall asleep at the snap of a finger at 10 every night - you just have to want to structure your life properly.
You'll notice that when you're isolated and confined, you'll tend to have less energy and sleep in longer / go to bed later just because you're not exerting yourself and are becoming mildly depressed. Go outside and do stuff, be active, and a 24 hour day will seem longer because you'll be pooped at the end of it.
bristle at that, cocksucking mods.
For some reason basically all the alarm clocks I can find come with impossible-to-operate-when-groggy switches, plastic tabs, hard-to-press tiny buttons, and so on, making every morning an adventure. I seriously shopped for something cool and new in these for about three weeks before I completely gave up. There's a nightmare of idiotic user interfaces out there, all meant to be used when sleepy.
This is good news though, it means that if open-source software developers ever have to change jobs (or indeed, get jobs in the first place), they will be able to move into the field of alarm clock design with hardly any effort.
Yeah but it's called "Nitrus." I wouldn't want to use something called that. The name "iPod" may make it sound like it was designed for homosexuals, but "Nitrus" makes it sound like it was designed for testosterone-charged, pimply-faced, long-haired, fuzzy-chinned fat white teenage male geeks who fantasize about sticking their little stiffies into an elf babe, which is even worse.
Closed-source software is killing people now? I hadn't heard that one.
the $300 federal iPod stipends were cancelled during the latest Bush tax cut.
damn that was informative. thanks
Why on earth would anyone offer a sizable tech scholarship to a white middle-class male "potential" high school graduate? Unless you are a wicked smaht Doogie Howser, there are obviously a lot more students who need aid a lot more than you do.
Even though I can't see any of the slashdot posters, I can just imagine the snide looks on their faces as they chortle to themselves about how this latest service pack is further proof that M$ is doomed and OSS is poised to take over computing.
SP2 is:
"too little, too late to stop the floodgates..."
"a last gasp from a dying company..."
"a halfhearted effort from an evil megacorp which probably helped plot 9/11..."
"just more bloat on top of an already bloated OS-from-Hell..."
"far inferior to the latest release of GNU/HURD, which, being microkernel-based, happens to be lightyears beyond Loseblowz ExPee technologically..."
Help me think of more!
Your points are valid, but the difference is upgrading Linux kernels costs nothing.
For the vast majority of people, it costs considerable amounts of time, and time is money. If you don't know what a kernel is, you're going to be one tired-ass, frustrated-ass motherfucker when you "finish" your Linux upgrade process. (I put "finish" in quotes because Linux, no more or less than Windows, also demands perpetual updates if you want it to stay current.)
Windows lets you pay in money for an easy, all-in-one upgrade. Linux gives you the option of either doing that, or paying in time for a multitude of difficult, piecemeal upgrades. If Win98 users wanted to do things the messy way like that, they would switch to Linux. And indeed, some have... about what... 1%?
So Win98 users, the VAST VAST MAJORITY of whom do not have a lick of programming skill not to mention the time or desire to maintain their OS themselves, should enroll in a BS program in computer science at their nearest accredited university, a dramatic rearragement of their priorities, in order to maintain their OS themselves. Or else, they should pay someone else MORE THAN THE COST OF AN UPGRADE TO 2000 OR XP to continually develop patches for their shitty old OS and to provide support for it.
Microsoft "addicted" those users to Windows 98. As if the general public is full of raging drug-addicted idiots too poor and destitute to see after their own welfare. It's a good thing a person like you is around to show them the light, the One True Path! Well, fuck you. You would make more sense if you weren't so busy felching cum out of Dick Stallman's distended rectum.
Give me a fucking break you tool. Just try to get support from Red Hat for RH 5.0. On Slashdot if you criticize your ca. 2000 Linux distro with the 2.2 kernel, you get modded down and told to "get with the program" and stop running such an ancient OS, even though said OS is only the same age as Win 98 and is perhaps even younger. But when Microsoft commits the horrible crime of ALLOWING TIME TO LAPSE, it's like the end of the fucking world. Software gets old and obsolete after a period of time, deal with it. It doesn't matter if the source is available when 99.999% of Win98 users couldn't give half a shit.
I'm glad you divulged this theory of yours, as I've found it fascinating, and I hope you can further develop it in the future. I've also been working on a theory of my own. I call it the "theory of downward pull." That is, there is some kind of force that will naturally, and infallibly, pull everything down toward the ground, no matter the size or shape of the object.
What I am trying to resolve is the problem of how this force can operate on a round object such as the earth. When I drop a pen here, in North America, it goes down. But how come when a Chinese person in China drops a pen, it doesn't fall "up"? One of my hypotheses, and the strongest one, I think, is that there is an invisible "breath" being "blown" toward China upwards over the earth that acts as a substitute for this "downward force" when "down" in a particular location is not actually "down" relative to the actual "down." One explanation for this "breath" is a large, invisible dragon centered somewhere far down beneath North America. This theory is actually a little disconcerting - what happens when the dragon runs out of breath? I guess it eats all the Chinese. This is why we must pray to the dragon to never stop.
There's nothing more effective in taking the air of a dumb cracker by gladly using the very term he intended to insult you with.
Thank you, finally, SOMEONE around here who knows the difference between "cracker" and "hacker."
feeding starving children is so passe.
Do you have a child? If so, please give me the address of your household, so I can send him some underage porn.
Nice dancing penguin you've got on your dresser there, FAG.
that's what your stupidwebregistrations@yahoo.com address is for.
Computers are pretty complicated. Smart people get them, stupid people don't, either 'cause they're too stupid or 'cause they're lazy. And that sucks. Thank you
I think he meant "use a crappy OS that doesn't get taken over by real programs"... it makes more sense that way.