> An ethicist who gave seminars at Enron reports the employees who are now complaining about their lost 401(k)s were fond of just the kind of pronouncements you are posting. They thought only the government could take away their security.
Enron 401(k) folks who had the bulk of their assets in one stock - Enron - got reamed.
They got reamed because their managers were corrupt, and locked them out of stock sales when the Shit Hit The Fan.
Enron 401(k) folks who diversified their investments - because they knew that a portfolio based on one stock, however bright the prospects for that stock might look at the time - was a Bad Idea... did fine.
> > In its broadest sense, IT is about taking things that exist in human minds (ideas) and expressing them in a form that machines (bare silicon, compilers, or CASE tools) can turn into code. Because that process always starts with a human, until machines develop sentience, there'll always be a need for humans in IT. > > Your survivle as an ITist depends on your ability to translate goofball marketing and ego-drunk PHB thinking into coded rules. Sometimes it is a painful process that sprains the frontal lobes.
If I hadn't already posted to this thread, I'd mod that (+1, Funsightful / +1, Inny). So true, and the dot-com days really did boggle my mind that anyone would pay anyone to code for some of the wackier business plans out there.
> Ever hear of 'hyperinflation?' It's made life savings essentially worthless overnight in places like Argentina, Peru, and Weimar Germany. It could happen here someday.
Precisely why I included the phrase "only your government can take it away" when referring to dollars in your own personal accounts. I originally wrote "where nobody can take it away" until I remembered that guys with guns can always take your stuff.
I pointed out a wealth tax as one way in which wealth could be destroyed, but hyperinflation is another.
The key is to watch, anticipate, and adjust accordingly. Does the value of a house drop in a hyperinflationary environment? No - it stays flat. If you anticipate hyperinflation, sell paper assets (stocks/bonds), get rid of paper liabilities (rent) and buy hard assets (houses, gold, jewelry).
The trick is doing it before capital controls get implemented by the guys with the guns. My original point - that if we get to this point, we're all fux0r3d anyways - still stands. And while it can happen here, I think it's exceedingly unlikely, even if the upcoming war doesn't go our way.
Do I have it all taken care of? Hell, no. I still have to save diligently and invest prudently, and that's a non-trivial task, particularly over a 20-year timeframe. Do I have enough of it taken care of that I think I'll be able to at least survive most economic scenarios? Yeah, I think I do. My point wasn't (and isn't!) to brag, but to point out that I don't think I'm doing anything special that can't be done by anyone else.
By way of analogy - geeks often say things like "There's nothing magical about computers" to nontechnical people. For those geeks to whom the world of money seems daunting, I was just pointing out that there's nothing magical about sound financial planning either.
Re:Most insightful thing I've read since New Years
on
Lifetime Careers in IT?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> The notion that smarter software converts knowledge work into service work is the truly scary part of this trend. Software won't replace people, because software will never be perfect; but it will REDUCE dramatically the number of people needed in the original task, and relegate the others to cleanup (help desk) type positions at much lower pay. In another country.
And until someone codes up the AI that creates the software, there will always be good work to be had in IT.
If you're talking CASE tools - until they write the AI that tells the CASE tool what the business plan is, and how to turn that business plan into something the CASE tool understands - there will still always be good work to be had in IT.
In its broadest sense, IT is about taking things that exist in human minds (ideas) and expressing them in a form that machines (bare silicon, compilers, or CASE tools) can turn into code.
Because that process always starts with a human, until machines develop sentience, there'll always be a need for humans in IT.
The level of abstraction rises - but that's a good thing. Would you want to design and code something like KDE using front panel switches? An assembler?
> If you don't retire, how are you going to have time to sit around all day and complain about
teenagers and thir violent music? > >
"True, in our day, Eminem was considered bad, but not even he promised to kill an enemy of yours for every cd you buy."
"Yeah, Grampa, and I remember you telling me the your generation's business leaders sitting around and whining about how everybody was downloading music off P2P instead of buying CDs.
Like, if it was about was the music, of course you'd just download it.
Like, Duh! Next thing you know, you'll be telling me about the time when people paid money to RIAA for music. As if. I mean, you're gonna tell me that you bought the 3-D h0l0pr0n for the news articles?
It took our generation's business leaders to do something about it!"
> Because at the rate IT firms close and layoff, we will have to keep working! Not all companies offer any retirement benefits at all. We will just have to keep on working, and do some smart investing if possible!
"Pension"? What's that? "Benefits"? What are those? Oh, right, those things that some floozy from Human Resources at FooCorp says FooCorp will provide for me 40 years from now. As if anyone thinks FooCorp will still exist in 10 years, let alone 40.
I expect and intend to live on my savings and investments, because those are the only assets I can trust. When it's a dollar figure in your account - whether it be a tax-deferred vehicle like an IRA, Roth, or 401(k), or whether it be your taxable savings or brokerage account, it's your property, and only your government can take it away. (And if we get to the point of a wealth tax gets put in place, the economy'll be so fucked by capital flight that it won't matter.)
Now, do I expect to retire with a "pension and benefits"? Hell, no. But I don't want a pension or benefits - because I don't trust the companies (...or governments! At least you can choose to work for employers that do 401(k)s instead of pensions, but try opting out of your government's pyramid scheme!) to make good on the implied promises. And why should they make good on such promises - it's not like there's any way to hold them accountable when they renege.
But that said, do I expect to retire with a high standard of living after a long and successful career in IT? Absolutely.
And I'm not convinced my career will have to be that long, either. In fact, if I'm still working at 65, it'll be because I fucked up bigtime somewhere along the line.
Anyone can cut down on unnecessary expenses, eliminate debt, and maintain positive cash flow over most of their working lives. Do that, and your career doesn't have to be "long" to afford you a decent standard of living.
> Imagine what we as a society could do with the billions and billions we piss away on vapor products like insurance if we spent it on something that benefits society in a tangible way like health care, or replacing our crumbling infrastructure.
Imagine the billions and billions we wouldn't have to piss away on insurance if we clamped down on the trial lawyers.
When a medical malpractice suit can cost $100M, a doctor can't afford to diagnose a common cold without malpractice insurance.
And when that lawsuit can cost his malpractice insurance company $100M, no insurance company is going to write a policy unless your doctor pays $100K/year in premiums.
And when your doctor's paying $100K/year in premiums, is it any wonder that he charges you $100 to diagnose a common cold?
Gee, when it costs you $100 to get a common cold diagnosed, anyone with sprog can't afford to get medical care... without insurance. (Gee, what a coincidence:)
We need to break the trial lawyers by putting caps on the Landshark Lottery.
> DVDA um, dual vaginal dual anal? God damn I am way to familliar with porn
Yeah, but if the image of Hilary Rosen doing DVDA - and let's get serious here, she wouldn't do it unless she was also doing it in a bed full of money - isn't that image, in your mind, before breakfast, enough to put you off pr0n - or even sex, for a lifetime?
> To that end, the library's extensive collection of
recordings and photos will soon be moved to a massive 41-acre complex built into the side of a mountain in Culpeper, Virginia. When construction on the site is completed - in about three years - anything stored in Culpeper should be available via computer at the library's Madison Building on
Capitol Hill.
January 27, 2006 - President Stallman and Gnu/FBI announce arrest and detention of terrorist group believed affiliated with Hilary Rosen
Giving public thanks to the constant vigilance on the part of tens of thousands of GNUTIA (Gnu's Not Total Information Awareness) server operators, President Stallman announced the disruption of a terrorist plot, allegedly involving weapons of mass destruction and notorious fugitive from justice, Hilary Rosen.
In his 2006 State of the Onion Speech, President Stallman announced:
"Since her departure from RIAA in 2003, Ms. Rosen and her band of followers have become increasingly militant in their outlook, and increasingly violent in their activities against anyone listening to audio recordings without payment of ransom to members of the RIAA cartel.
Starting with the KazaaSlammer worm attack of 2004, and then escalating to physical violence with the attempted truck bombing attempts against our allies in Vanatu in 2005, we knew the completion of the Culpeper complex would be a target of significant terrorist activity from the more extreme elements of the recording industry.
In December 2005, GNH (Gnu's Not HomeSec) officials working under auspices of GNUTIA, became aware that individuals affiliated with Ms. Rosen had attempted, or were attempting, to acquire weapons of mass destruction from deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and that they intended to use such weapons against the 41-acre complex of rare recordings at Culpeper. I am pleased to announce today that these plans have been foiled...
...and it's still called GNU/Linux, and that that law was passed for a damn good reason, no matter what the First Amendment or the Supreme Court says. God Bless America."
Responding after the President's remarks, Mr. Fritz Hollings, (appointed RIAA head after losing his seat in the GNU/Linux electoral victory of 2004), had this to say:
"Although we in RIAA have always disassociated ourselves from the actions against music listeners associated with certain more radical elements of our industry, but this ought to serve as a warning to the current administration that the longer the American people continue to listen to music without payment of protection money to RIAA, the more likely it is that such desperate acts will continue.
The occupation of Culpeper and the opening of public access to these recordings is nothing but a slap in the face to those of us so brutally oppressed. Out of cultural respect to us, we remind you of the root cause of terrorism - your failure to pay royalties to us whenever you even think about music.
What happened to Ms. Rosen after her departure from RIAA is a tragedy. Please - pay us lots of money, and help break the cycle of violence."
> Seriously, I think they should create a moderation system similar to what Slashdot has implemented here. So, no matter what is your citizenship - your Karma is what's important.
That's already been done. It's called "Karma: Lobbyist (mostly affected by donations to elected officials)".
> Let freedom of speech be independent from INS decisions!
That would imply INS makes decisions, which would in turn implies neural activity on the part of their employees.
The proper response to that is "Objection: Facts assumed not in evidence."
> Amen! The number of software DVD players that try to look my hardware DVD players is amazing. I mean, who actually uses the front panel of their hardware DVD player, other than the "eject" button? > At the very least, if you feel the need to make your software look like hardware, make it look like a hardware DVD player remote control, which people actually use...
"I did that for TackLinux-TV-Tuner, and these stupid users complain that they want to use the numbers on their keyboard when trying to select Channel 112, rather than mousing to the '1', '2', '3',... '0' icons! Stupid users!
So I made a new sk1n for the keyboard. Put a real keyboard on the scanner and made a 1600x400 bitmap of it! It looks just like an IBM keyboard, you can mouse over and click on the '1', through '0' keys, or the numeric keypad, provided you mouse over and click on the NumLock icon first! And the stupid users still didn't like my UI! One of them even complained because he was building a home theater with an LCD projector, and at 1280x1024 as his screen resolution and my image of the keyboard was too wide for his screen!
"Stupid user! Like duh he should have just gotten a bigger screen! (Like, doesn't everyone watch movies at 1600x1200?) I mean, what did he want me to do, scan in a Sinclair ZX-80 so the image of the keyboard sk1n would fit in his dinky 1280x1024 layout or what?
I told him I was sorry, but if he couldn't stay current with hardware, he should just go fuck himself and use Windows or something. Stupid ungrateful users! Sometimes I don't know why I bother to code for them!"
> if you listen carefully you can hear the death knell of many fat men with gold chains and big cigars... You can hear the rustling of the millions of dollars they've extorted from artists as they writhe in agony. They've lost control of the studios... now they're losing the marketing... how will they employ their nephews and nieces? Where will the faked-up jobs come from? Who will they scam points off of?
> Why not go the other way? Replace Britney Spears songs with, say, "Payback" by Slayer? "I'll rip your fucking heart out - payback's a bitch, motherfucker" coming out of the speakers would probably alert parents to their snotty kids' illegal activities faster than any other...:-}
January 24, 2004: RIAA CD sales down another 10%.
"We blame P2P networks for the decline in sales, with the difference this year being that we now know why Britney Spears can no longer generate sales the 13-16 demographic. They've heard stuff from people who can sing better."
> Mainly because he limited himself to RPM's and didnt specify what WM he was using. > > I use both mplayer and gmplayer on Mandrake just fine. It doesnt have resize problems, has resize ability, etc. That _may_ be because Im using windowmaker and/or blackbox, but it seems to work fine in KDE as well. Course, I installed the source for them, and compiled from scratch, after doing all the enable/disable flags the right way for my system.
Congratulations.
So write up an FAQ. Tell us:
1) What WMs work with what video programs.
2) What libraries are required.
3) What version of gcc you used *G*
4) What flags are set, where to set them, and what's "right" for a wide range of systems, say, a few nVIDIA and ATI systems on AMD and Intel chips, and/or any specific motherboard-related issues.
5) All the other variables I've overlooked, but that you didn't, that make the difference between "It Works" and "It Doesn't".
The problem JWZ is ranting about is usability, not functionality. You don't have a usability problem, because you already have a large base of knowledge, because you've made a large investment in time and energy to figure out how to make it work.
I made a similar comment the other day - and I've seen the same flames today, which pretty muchn boil down to "Hey, asshole, we code for the fun of it, not because we want to save the world from Microsoft! We code because we like to, and couldn't care less if anyone other than us ever uses our code!"
(The rest of this comment isn't addressed at you per se, it's addressed to the readership who've flamed JWZ for being a clueless and ungrateful twit - you've seen 'em - "hey, asshole, what have you coded for us lately", and "hey, be thankful you have any code at all, just 'cuz you're not 31337 enough to run it!")
Well, that's fine. Good to have you guys out of the closet. Billgatus will take over the world - and hey, that's fine, since it won't stop you from coding.
But if your code compiles in a forest where there are only 100 systems that can execute it (because those 100 systems all belong to the developers working on the project, as opposed to those of us who develop other things don't have time to keep up with the developments in every open source/free software video project), can you really be said to have created something useful in the first place? If code compiles on no machines, can it really be said to be code? And if you don't give a shit about your code running on a wide variety of platforms ("What, our code only runs on Distro X! You wanna run his app that needs Distro Y, and my app, you gotta dual-boot, or choose between his app and my app! Choose my app, 'cuz I'm cooler!") why should I give a shit about your code in the first place?
If that's how you want it, hey, it's your code, but under that scenario, what value does open source/free software offer me?
"Well", you say, "if you haven't coded anything for us, why should we give a fuck what you? It's open source, take it or fuckin' leave it."
Fair enough - but then why should any of us give a rat's fried patoot about freeing that DeCSS guy, or that Ogg Theora stuff, when it's plain as day that I'll never view a video with code based on it anyways?
The difference between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs offering me closed-source binaries on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, and you offering me code that I can't necessarily compile or use on a take-it-or-leave-it basis -- is that at least the frickin' movie plays on Windows and OS X.
> Do we really need Doom III or Lord of the Rings though? Wouldn't it be sensible to to at least factor the environmental cost into the playing and production of these things? It's like "free" network bandwidth - if they don't see the cost, people will waste it on things they don't really get value out of.
First - an emotional objection - who died and made you arbiter of what "we" need? Who's "we"? If you don't need Doom III or LOTR, don't buy computers to play the game, and don't see the movie. I am quite capable of deciding what I need. You're free to try to convince me I don't need those things - but if you fail and subsequently attempt to use laws to prevent me from getting those things, you can go stuff it.:)
Second - a better objection - given the actual cost-per-chip of DRAM, calculating the environmental remediation costs of the chips used in rendering LOTR could well exceed the cost of the chips, the movie, and the remediation combined.
It's the micropayment problem - the time/effort spent in calculated the electricity/bandwidth charges for making this post to Slashdot - would likely exceed any revenue recouped. And those are costs that are (in principle) easily-measured.
Third - and this is really just the rational phrasing of my gut objection - how do you propose we compute the "environmental cost" in any meaningful fashion? It's hard enough to compute a micropayment for the bandwidth we're using here, but Slashdot gets a (giga)byte-count every month with its bandwidth bill. How do you propose to factor in the costs of site remediation for chemicals leaked -- when you don't know (a) how much leaked, (b) how much it'll cost to clean up, (c)...because it may be cleaned up today at $10M per square mile using backhoes, or next year at $5 per square mile due to the development of bad-stuff-eating nanotech, and (d) whether it's worth cleaning up at all - is it worth burning 1000 gallons of diesel fuel by running backhoes near your favorite lake/river to reduce $CONTAMINANT from 10 ppm to 9 ppm? Depends on the $CONTAMINANT - but do we really know the risks associated with each specific level of each specific contaminant? (e) And I'm still only talking money - if you wanna add in the "environmental cost" of 10000 gallons of diesel fuel, all those nebulosities I objected to with regards to remediating the chip fab have to be re"calculated" for the backhoe operators and Caterpillar, Inc's equipment. Recurse ad-infinitum. We don't know the "environmental cost" of burning 10000 gallons of diesel fuel (to dig up the old fab grounds when building the new fab) vs. making a million new chips (that used new chemicals but consume less power) vs. reusing 16-million old chips (that use more power and work slower)... There are too many variables, and I'd argue that there are so many variables that we simply can't know.)
Fourth - even if you use "only the computing power needed" for a task, you can still produce a lot more '486 chips for the same amount of chemicals if you build them with an 0.13u process and 12" wafers, than if you tried to keep the original fabs running for all eternity. Something's gotta give, it's gotta give at a certain price point, and (back to reason #1/#3) - the market's the most efficient and effective way of determining that price point. Because the alternatives have too many variables to even approach consideration.
> The problem IMHO isn't that the chips use a lot of resources to create, it's that they're disposable and lose their value in a few years. I wouldn't be bothered so much if this level of resources was spent on a durable good, but within 5-10 years (being optimistic) most of these chips will be trashed.
Yeah, but what's the cost of not making the chips?
Suppose we threw out all the chips - went back to pencil and paper? How many kilowatt-hours would we consume in heating and lighting the rooms full of green-hatted accountants scratching figures onto paper with pens?
OK, perhaps that's a little too far. (But lots of enviros really hate it when we take their premises - that chipmaking is Evil - to their logical conclustions.)
Suppose we just threw out the 32M chips and 8-inch wafers and 0.13u processes. No new fabs after 1995. We'll stick with 4M chips on 4-inch wafers and 0.35u instead. That would give us a quarter of the memory (and our CPUs would top out at about 300 MHz), and (ta-dah!) use pretty much the same amount of resources as we're using today.
Throwing away that fab that builds 80486 chips and 16M sticks of FPM RAM (and throwing away the products it produced), and replacing it with a fab capable of cranking out 2.4G P4s and 512M sticks of DDR is a good thing, because you can do more with the P4 than you could have dreamt of doing with the 486s.
For running Office, maybe a '486 would be OK. Forget about Doom III, though. Or rendering Lord of the Rings.
And if those aren't "green enough" things to justify building faster/better computers (because, after all, if it's not Greener Than Thou, you Just Shouldn't Do It, Ever!), I'll remind you that you can also forget about the climate simulations and ozone hole analysis, and image processing for weather prediction and crop analysis. Scrap the weapons technology that turns "dumb" 500-pounders into GPS-guided missiles so that one bomb can do the job of 100 - back to carpet-bombing a whole city to powder with a fleet B-52s to hit just one bunker. No more passenger airplanes with wing and engine designs for low fuel consumption and low noise. No more fuel-efficient combustion chambers that help you get more power out of your 4-cylinder than your uncle got from his '68 Malibu. Gotta save the environment, y'know!
> [using fake subversive responses to provoke the Chinese government] sure as hell would make them think twice before sending out spam though...
And that's why I think it's a Good Idea.
You're a Chinese admin in charge of a chunk of Chinese netspace.
You regularly take money from Alan Ralsky and other American spammers and provide them with "bulletproof" hosting. One day, you get disappeared because the Chinese Government has discovered that your actions have been supporting counterrevolutionaries and mystics.
Your next-in-line admin - now has a very clear choice: (1) Continue to support American spammers, and be disappeared in the same way, or (2) Cease support of American spammers, and live.
Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas, I say.
If only there were some way to establish links between the spammers knowingly hosted by the uu.net/Level3/Verio/AT&T Axis of Spam, and middle-eastern terrorist groups.
> Lights are a nice idea but won't be very fun because the whole thing is going to be in daylight... I shoulda said that.
Three words for you:
"Dry Ice Fog."
(Or even two words: "Smoke generator".:)
Both go very well with laser pointers, day or night. (I suppose keeping the kids from aiming the laser pointers at nearby aircraft would be a problem, though. A smoke generator and a pile of laser pointers would be great at the reception, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, sorry, sir... this is Slashdot. Argument's three doors down, to your left. *G*
Enron 401(k) folks who had the bulk of their assets in one stock - Enron - got reamed.
They got reamed because their managers were corrupt, and locked them out of stock sales when the Shit Hit The Fan.
Enron 401(k) folks who diversified their investments - because they knew that a portfolio based on one stock, however bright the prospects for that stock might look at the time - was a Bad Idea... did fine.
>
> Your survivle as an ITist depends on your ability to translate goofball marketing and ego-drunk PHB thinking into coded rules. Sometimes it is a painful process that sprains the frontal lobes.
If I hadn't already posted to this thread, I'd mod that (+1, Funsightful / +1, Inny). So true, and the dot-com days really did boggle my mind that anyone would pay anyone to code for some of the wackier business plans out there.
Precisely why I included the phrase "only your government can take it away" when referring to dollars in your own personal accounts. I originally wrote "where nobody can take it away" until I remembered that guys with guns can always take your stuff.
I pointed out a wealth tax as one way in which wealth could be destroyed, but hyperinflation is another.
The key is to watch, anticipate, and adjust accordingly. Does the value of a house drop in a hyperinflationary environment? No - it stays flat. If you anticipate hyperinflation, sell paper assets (stocks/bonds), get rid of paper liabilities (rent) and buy hard assets (houses, gold, jewelry).
The trick is doing it before capital controls get implemented by the guys with the guns. My original point - that if we get to this point, we're all fux0r3d anyways - still stands. And while it can happen here, I think it's exceedingly unlikely, even if the upcoming war doesn't go our way.
Do I have it all taken care of? Hell, no. I still have to save diligently and invest prudently, and that's a non-trivial task, particularly over a 20-year timeframe. Do I have enough of it taken care of that I think I'll be able to at least survive most economic scenarios? Yeah, I think I do. My point wasn't (and isn't!) to brag, but to point out that I don't think I'm doing anything special that can't be done by anyone else.
By way of analogy - geeks often say things like "There's nothing magical about computers" to nontechnical people. For those geeks to whom the world of money seems daunting, I was just pointing out that there's nothing magical about sound financial planning either.
And until someone codes up the AI that creates the software, there will always be good work to be had in IT.
If you're talking CASE tools - until they write the AI that tells the CASE tool what the business plan is, and how to turn that business plan into something the CASE tool understands - there will still always be good work to be had in IT.
In its broadest sense, IT is about taking things that exist in human minds (ideas) and expressing them in a form that machines (bare silicon, compilers, or CASE tools) can turn into code.
Because that process always starts with a human, until machines develop sentience, there'll always be a need for humans in IT.
The level of abstraction rises - but that's a good thing. Would you want to design and code something like KDE using front panel switches? An assembler?
>
> "True, in our day, Eminem was considered bad, but not even he promised to kill an enemy of yours for every cd you buy."
"Yeah, Grampa, and I remember you telling me the your generation's business leaders sitting around and whining about how everybody was downloading music off P2P instead of buying CDs. Like, if it was about was the music, of course you'd just download it.
Like, Duh! Next thing you know, you'll be telling me about the time when people paid money to RIAA for music. As if. I mean, you're gonna tell me that you bought the 3-D h0l0pr0n for the news articles?
It took our generation's business leaders to do something about it!"
"Pension"? What's that? "Benefits"? What are those? Oh, right, those things that some floozy from Human Resources at FooCorp says FooCorp will provide for me 40 years from now. As if anyone thinks FooCorp will still exist in 10 years, let alone 40.
I expect and intend to live on my savings and investments, because those are the only assets I can trust. When it's a dollar figure in your account - whether it be a tax-deferred vehicle like an IRA, Roth, or 401(k), or whether it be your taxable savings or brokerage account, it's your property, and only your government can take it away. (And if we get to the point of a wealth tax gets put in place, the economy'll be so fucked by capital flight that it won't matter.)
Now, do I expect to retire with a "pension and benefits"? Hell, no. But I don't want a pension or benefits - because I don't trust the companies (...or governments! At least you can choose to work for employers that do 401(k)s instead of pensions, but try opting out of your government's pyramid scheme!) to make good on the implied promises. And why should they make good on such promises - it's not like there's any way to hold them accountable when they renege.
But that said, do I expect to retire with a high standard of living after a long and successful career in IT? Absolutely.
And I'm not convinced my career will have to be that long, either. In fact, if I'm still working at 65, it'll be because I fucked up bigtime somewhere along the line.
Anyone can cut down on unnecessary expenses, eliminate debt, and maintain positive cash flow over most of their working lives. Do that, and your career doesn't have to be "long" to afford you a decent standard of living.
Imagine the billions and billions we wouldn't have to piss away on insurance if we clamped down on the trial lawyers.
When a medical malpractice suit can cost $100M, a doctor can't afford to diagnose a common cold without malpractice insurance.
And when that lawsuit can cost his malpractice insurance company $100M, no insurance company is going to write a policy unless your doctor pays $100K/year in premiums.
And when your doctor's paying $100K/year in premiums, is it any wonder that he charges you $100 to diagnose a common cold?
Gee, when it costs you $100 to get a common cold diagnosed, anyone with sprog can't afford to get medical care... without insurance. (Gee, what a coincidence :)
We need to break the trial lawyers by putting caps on the Landshark Lottery.
These are PHBs we're talking about.
The answer is "$35,000, and $36,000 if he has an MCSE".
Yeah, but if the image of Hilary Rosen doing DVDA - and let's get serious here, she wouldn't do it unless she was also doing it in a bed full of money - isn't that image, in your mind, before breakfast, enough to put you off pr0n - or even sex, for a lifetime?
January 27, 2006 - President Stallman and Gnu/FBI announce arrest and detention of terrorist group believed affiliated with Hilary Rosen
Giving public thanks to the constant vigilance on the part of tens of thousands of GNUTIA (Gnu's Not Total Information Awareness) server operators, President Stallman announced the disruption of a terrorist plot, allegedly involving weapons of mass destruction and notorious fugitive from justice, Hilary Rosen.
In his 2006 State of the Onion Speech, President Stallman announced:
Responding after the President's remarks, Mr. Fritz Hollings, (appointed RIAA head after losing his seat in the GNU/Linux electoral victory of 2004), had this to say:
If you live in the States, Using the total calendar days of the 1988 and 1989 legislative sessions, the median U.S. legislature produced 4.7 laws per day..
That was 15 years ago, and that's just for State legislatures. You think those numbers have gone down since then?
Score: (+1/2, Would Have Been Plus One Funny If It Weren't So Damn Naive)
That's already been done. It's called "Karma: Lobbyist (mostly affected by donations to elected officials)".
> Let freedom of speech be independent from INS decisions!
That would imply INS makes decisions, which would in turn implies neural activity on the part of their employees.
The proper response to that is "Objection: Facts assumed not in evidence."
> At the very least, if you feel the need to make your software look like hardware, make it look like a hardware DVD player remote control, which people actually use...
"I did that for TackLinux-TV-Tuner, and these stupid users complain that they want to use the numbers on their keyboard when trying to select Channel 112, rather than mousing to the '1', '2', '3', ... '0' icons! Stupid users!
So I made a new sk1n for the keyboard. Put a real keyboard on the scanner and made a 1600x400 bitmap of it! It looks just like an IBM keyboard, you can mouse over and click on the '1', through '0' keys, or the numeric keypad, provided you mouse over and click on the NumLock icon first! And the stupid users still didn't like my UI! One of them even complained because he was building a home theater with an LCD projector, and at 1280x1024 as his screen resolution and my image of the keyboard was too wide for his screen!
"Stupid user! Like duh he should have just gotten a bigger screen! (Like, doesn't everyone watch movies at 1600x1200?) I mean, what did he want me to do, scan in a Sinclair ZX-80 so the image of the keyboard sk1n would fit in his dinky 1280x1024 layout or what?
I told him I was sorry, but if he couldn't stay current with hardware, he should just go fuck himself and use Windows or something. Stupid ungrateful users! Sometimes I don't know why I bother to code for them!"
Congress?
January 24, 2004: RIAA CD sales down another 10%.
"We blame P2P networks for the decline in sales, with the difference this year being that we now know why Britney Spears can no longer generate sales the 13-16 demographic. They've heard stuff from people who can sing better."
>
> I use both mplayer and gmplayer on Mandrake just fine. It doesnt have resize problems, has resize ability, etc. That _may_ be because Im using windowmaker and/or blackbox, but it seems to work fine in KDE as well. Course, I installed the source for them, and compiled from scratch, after doing all the enable/disable flags the right way for my system.
Congratulations.
So write up an FAQ. Tell us:
1) What WMs work with what video programs.
2) What libraries are required.
3) What version of gcc you used *G*
4) What flags are set, where to set them, and what's "right" for a wide range of systems, say, a few nVIDIA and ATI systems on AMD and Intel chips, and/or any specific motherboard-related issues.
5) All the other variables I've overlooked, but that you didn't, that make the difference between "It Works" and "It Doesn't".
The problem JWZ is ranting about is usability, not functionality. You don't have a usability problem, because you already have a large base of knowledge, because you've made a large investment in time and energy to figure out how to make it work.
I made a similar comment the other day - and I've seen the same flames today, which pretty muchn boil down to "Hey, asshole, we code for the fun of it, not because we want to save the world from Microsoft! We code because we like to, and couldn't care less if anyone other than us ever uses our code!"
(The rest of this comment isn't addressed at you per se, it's addressed to the readership who've flamed JWZ for being a clueless and ungrateful twit - you've seen 'em - "hey, asshole, what have you coded for us lately", and "hey, be thankful you have any code at all, just 'cuz you're not 31337 enough to run it!")
Well, that's fine. Good to have you guys out of the closet. Billgatus will take over the world - and hey, that's fine, since it won't stop you from coding.
But if your code compiles in a forest where there are only 100 systems that can execute it (because those 100 systems all belong to the developers working on the project, as opposed to those of us who develop other things don't have time to keep up with the developments in every open source/free software video project), can you really be said to have created something useful in the first place? If code compiles on no machines, can it really be said to be code? And if you don't give a shit about your code running on a wide variety of platforms ("What, our code only runs on Distro X! You wanna run his app that needs Distro Y, and my app, you gotta dual-boot, or choose between his app and my app! Choose my app, 'cuz I'm cooler!") why should I give a shit about your code in the first place?
If that's how you want it, hey, it's your code, but under that scenario, what value does open source/free software offer me?
"Well", you say, "if you haven't coded anything for us, why should we give a fuck what you? It's open source, take it or fuckin' leave it."
Fair enough - but then why should any of us give a rat's fried patoot about freeing that DeCSS guy, or that Ogg Theora stuff, when it's plain as day that I'll never view a video with code based on it anyways?
The difference between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs offering me closed-source binaries on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, and you offering me code that I can't necessarily compile or use on a take-it-or-leave-it basis -- is that at least the frickin' movie plays on Windows and OS X.
First - an emotional objection - who died and made you arbiter of what "we" need? Who's "we"? If you don't need Doom III or LOTR, don't buy computers to play the game, and don't see the movie. I am quite capable of deciding what I need. You're free to try to convince me I don't need those things - but if you fail and subsequently attempt to use laws to prevent me from getting those things, you can go stuff it. :)
Second - a better objection - given the actual cost-per-chip of DRAM, calculating the environmental remediation costs of the chips used in rendering LOTR could well exceed the cost of the chips, the movie, and the remediation combined. It's the micropayment problem - the time/effort spent in calculated the electricity/bandwidth charges for making this post to Slashdot - would likely exceed any revenue recouped. And those are costs that are (in principle) easily-measured.
Third - and this is really just the rational phrasing of my gut objection - how do you propose we compute the "environmental cost" in any meaningful fashion? It's hard enough to compute a micropayment for the bandwidth we're using here, but Slashdot gets a (giga)byte-count every month with its bandwidth bill. How do you propose to factor in the costs of site remediation for chemicals leaked -- when you don't know (a) how much leaked, (b) how much it'll cost to clean up, (c) ...because it may be cleaned up today at $10M per square mile using backhoes, or next year at $5 per square mile due to the development of bad-stuff-eating nanotech, and (d) whether it's worth cleaning up at all - is it worth burning 1000 gallons of diesel fuel by running backhoes near your favorite lake/river to reduce $CONTAMINANT from 10 ppm to 9 ppm? Depends on the $CONTAMINANT - but do we really know the risks associated with each specific level of each specific contaminant? (e) And I'm still only talking money - if you wanna add in the "environmental cost" of 10000 gallons of diesel fuel, all those nebulosities I objected to with regards to remediating the chip fab have to be re"calculated" for the backhoe operators and Caterpillar, Inc's equipment. Recurse ad-infinitum. We don't know the "environmental cost" of burning 10000 gallons of diesel fuel (to dig up the old fab grounds when building the new fab) vs. making a million new chips (that used new chemicals but consume less power) vs. reusing 16-million old chips (that use more power and work slower)... There are too many variables, and I'd argue that there are so many variables that we simply can't know.)
Fourth - even if you use "only the computing power needed" for a task, you can still produce a lot more '486 chips for the same amount of chemicals if you build them with an 0.13u process and 12" wafers, than if you tried to keep the original fabs running for all eternity. Something's gotta give, it's gotta give at a certain price point, and (back to reason #1/#3) - the market's the most efficient and effective way of determining that price point. Because the alternatives have too many variables to even approach consideration.
"SYSTEM/MANAGER"? Why, that's the stupidest password ever! It's the kind of password some VMS administrator might put on his DECserver's luggage!
Yeah, but what's the cost of not making the chips?
Suppose we threw out all the chips - went back to pencil and paper? How many kilowatt-hours would we consume in heating and lighting the rooms full of green-hatted accountants scratching figures onto paper with pens?
OK, perhaps that's a little too far. (But lots of enviros really hate it when we take their premises - that chipmaking is Evil - to their logical conclustions.)
Suppose we just threw out the 32M chips and 8-inch wafers and 0.13u processes. No new fabs after 1995. We'll stick with 4M chips on 4-inch wafers and 0.35u instead. That would give us a quarter of the memory (and our CPUs would top out at about 300 MHz), and (ta-dah!) use pretty much the same amount of resources as we're using today.
Throwing away that fab that builds 80486 chips and 16M sticks of FPM RAM (and throwing away the products it produced), and replacing it with a fab capable of cranking out 2.4G P4s and 512M sticks of DDR is a good thing, because you can do more with the P4 than you could have dreamt of doing with the 486s.
For running Office, maybe a '486 would be OK. Forget about Doom III, though. Or rendering Lord of the Rings.
And if those aren't "green enough" things to justify building faster/better computers (because, after all, if it's not Greener Than Thou, you Just Shouldn't Do It, Ever!), I'll remind you that you can also forget about the climate simulations and ozone hole analysis, and image processing for weather prediction and crop analysis. Scrap the weapons technology that turns "dumb" 500-pounders into GPS-guided missiles so that one bomb can do the job of 100 - back to carpet-bombing a whole city to powder with a fleet B-52s to hit just one bunker. No more passenger airplanes with wing and engine designs for low fuel consumption and low noise. No more fuel-efficient combustion chambers that help you get more power out of your 4-cylinder than your uncle got from his '68 Malibu. Gotta save the environment, y'know!
And that's why I think it's a Good Idea.
You're a Chinese admin in charge of a chunk of Chinese netspace. You regularly take money from Alan Ralsky and other American spammers and provide them with "bulletproof" hosting. One day, you get disappeared because the Chinese Government has discovered that your actions have been supporting counterrevolutionaries and mystics.
Your next-in-line admin - now has a very clear choice: (1) Continue to support American spammers, and be disappeared in the same way, or (2) Cease support of American spammers, and live.
Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas, I say.
If only there were some way to establish links between the spammers knowingly hosted by the uu.net/Level3/Verio/AT&T Axis of Spam, and middle-eastern terrorist groups.
This is Slashdot. The answer is "And that goes double if you're talkin' about the funky blue ultra-bright LED kind."
Three words for you:
"Dry Ice Fog."
(Or even two words: "Smoke generator". :)
Both go very well with laser pointers, day or night. (I suppose keeping the kids from aiming the laser pointers at nearby aircraft would be a problem, though. A smoke generator and a pile of laser pointers would be great at the reception, though.)
"...I just found out Hilary Rosen pirates more music than I do."
"...the only problem was, the leader of RIAA was a guy..."
- Rosenem: The Real Hilary Rosen.