I think there's some accuracy in that, not to say that all music types are creative types, or that by any stretch of the imagination that software types aren't(though the creativity is different), but the nature of the work is somewhat different.
Most of the instances of software development are "work for hire" in the sense that the company has an idea for a product they want to develop and much of that product has been mapped out and planned. Musicians for the most part are given much less direction as to exactly what is supposed to come out and many have created their own styles to begin with.
Is the survivial of the human race necessarily a good or necessary thing? Not to appear cynical or give the impression that I'm an environmentalist or some sort of hippie, but given that we started with what I have been lead to believe was once quite a nice planet, and have spend the last few millenia turning it into a somewhat less nice planet and an ever increasing rate(which I am as responsible as the next human), it's quite possible that we as a species aren't quite ready to play with other planets.I suppose in any even that we'll see what happens. I think that building a new space shuttle is probably a good idea, and that it might be good to design it in terms of longterm goals rather than being the cheapest thing available or some such. At the very least(even if this had nothing to do with tiles being lost before it took off), it would be a good idea to have the facilities/wherewithall to make repairs on the shuttle in space so that people who went up in it weren't pretty much doomed if things went wrong.
Well it's hard to really comment about the size of word processor style documents, especially not those from Microsoft Word. First you have to consider all the information which has to go into a file like that such as font, size, color to name a few, which has to take up some space, and then you have to remember the structure of a Word file. Now I'm not a huge fan of the structure of Word files since it makes recovering them a serious pain, but it does allow for incredibly quick file saves under the office suite, and considering the complexity of adding newly edited text to the end of a file and then linking it together properly through modifying the header(preferably without having to move data, which is the point), you're not going to get small files.
About 70 percent of all the queries were either identical, or repeat requests for addresses within the same domain. It is as if a telephone user were dialing directory assistance to get the phone numbers of certain businesses, and repeating the directory-assistance calls again and again.
This is somewhat of an invalid metaphor for both the way dns works, and the way computer caching works. Pretty much every local DNS server(unless my information is wrong), has some sort of caching system of varying degrees of efficiency. The problem is that unlike humans who are more likely to remember things if they are repeated, caching usually just consists of a series of entries which can quite easily be overwritten, older entries will be overwritten if they aren't updated or caching would never work for new frequently accessed sites. It's quite easy to get an access pattern which would remove even the most frequently accessed files from a list especially on a server with a great deal of users. By providing different servers for each chunk of users you can diminish this problem but then you'll get requests from each server. DNS is an ugly system because it does and ugly job.
Well we can't really say much on the car front, because cars in general, haven't been around all that long(about a century give or take), and sports/muscle cars(which are those which seem to be most sought after), are more recent than that. However I sincerly doubt that cars will seriously ever drop in collector price, just because I wasn't alive in 1963 doesn't mean I don't know that the 63 corvette with the split rear window isn't a cool car, nostalgia or not.
As for games, its hard to say, personally I find no collectable value in games, I have a lot of really old pc games simply because I never throw anything away(I'm a packrat not a collector), but I wouldn't seek to buy more of them because they aren't really functional. I don't have a pc capable of running half of these things(heck the updated version of Heros Quest calculates timing based on processor speed, as does Leisure Suit Larry 3, which makes them both almost impossible to finish(anyone who has the patience to click the up and down arrow something like 300 times for each of 4 excersizes to bulk up larry has well, just about as much patiences as me)). I don't understand the motivations of a game collector, and so I don't know how much of a role nostalgia plays in it, and how much just wanting to be associated with something that was viewed as cool plays a part.
I don't really agree with this idea, yes it is possible that if more people are able to use OSS on their existing operating systems, they will be less likely to switch over to OSS operating systems(though given the target audience of this CD, that's essentially reducing a very small number to an even smaller number which makes no real difference), but I don't really think that this will change which platforms companies develop their software for.
So long as linux requires serious modification to an exisiting code base, and so long as its focus is primarily anti-commercial software, it is unlikely most companies will cross-develop if only because many of they can't afford it. While OSS operating systems have some popularity, the number of people who are running a one and are not running Windows or a Macintosh OS(which has a much higher market share and is still predominantly screwed over by developers), is relatively small.
At the moment, linux is not ready for desktop adaptation on a scale large enough to cause companies to develop for it. Most peoples needs are satisfied by Windows, and while I think that Microsoft's Office Suites(and particularly Works which I think is grounds for its creator to burn in eternal hell fire) are annoying and somewhat evil products, which should be replaced by alternatives, windows isn't all that bad sometimes. I reformat my pc every couple of months(which with a dual partition system and a fast enough inet connection takes about three hours and which I almost enjoy), and Windows runs relatively stable. Admitedly it takes reformat to do this, but I screw up my system much more than most people do, what with development, trying beta software, using OSS, etc.
To sum up, the group at which this CD is aimed are inredibly unlikely to shift away from Windows in general(just as most people who seriously use OSS operating systems are unlikely to switch back because of it). OSS operating systems are unlikely to be treated seriously by most development studios till one of them has a sufficiently large number of people who use it and no commercial OS, which is going to take an change in usage of a much larger magnitude than this could ever cause.
The problem with that theory is that "voting with your feet" doesn't work with the music industry, people have been "voting with their feet" for at least a year now as music sales continue to go down due to lack of decent music and overpriced cd's. If you don't believe this, just think about how many cd's you've bought in the last year as oppposed to years previous and ask yourself why.
This hasn't worked because the industry just blames the loss on people stealing their music and goes on to get more and more mind boggling legislation and implement more crummy copy protection schemes, which like all copy protection schemes inconvenience legitimate users more than they prevent the theft of copyrighted materials.
In my opinion, companies which produce digital media of any kind, cd's dvd's, software, etc have really only a few choices left to them, they can invest in copy protection methods, they can lower the cost and increase the quality and variety of the product they sell, or they can as some software companies seem to do and as the dvd standard certainly did, increase the size of files to a point which effectively limits anything but personal exchanges of burned media.
The first option, which is the one which most companies are likely to pursue is, quite admitedly, a poor option in the long term, not only does it trample on fair use(which they don't like anyway), but it alienates consumers and isn't sustainable in the long run without legislation so draconian it makes the DMCA look like a fluff law. It is however the option which is easiest and cheapest "now", and many the digital media industries may think that in the future they can either create a truly uncopiable media, or that they can get the legislation they need.
The second option, is of course the option which most everyone would prefer, but it is the most difficult to achieve. Lowering costs would involve cutting into profits, and investing in ideas which weren't just derivatives of previously successful groups, or just flashy with no real substance is a risky investment. Personally I strongly believe, as has been posited by other groups, that if digital media, particularly software which is much more expensive and much harder to determine if you actually like it in advance, would sell much better, and get a lot more people willing to take risks on untried products if it were sold at a lower price. This method, which is pretty much the only sustainable option, is very difficult "now", and as such will probably never be implemented by the digital media industries.
The third option which I firmly believe people are actually doing, is just too ludicrous to sustain, and so I won't comment further on it.
If you have to deal with fixing the random garbage people do to their own machines, let alone what random unsupervised college students do to lab machines, you wouln't want to futz around for more than 15 minutes either.
Considering the vast amount of money Maxis has generated through the various sims "Expansion Packs" and the limited effort needed to produce such "Expansion Packs", I'd say it's more accurate to say that they found a way to generate more profit, but that's really neither here nor there.
Personally I think that people should be protesting the example of working conditions in the Sims. I mean what kind of slave driving boss won't let you go to the bathroom or eat one single time during an eight or more hour work day.
No it's probably not hard to find someone who knows linux or Unix these days, but it's somewhat harder to find staff for every lab who are both capable of fixing even limited problems on a *nix machine, and who are also able to, and have the time to, explain to every new user exactly how to use a Unix machine. Not to mention conflicts with files from a users home machine(Microsoft Works is the devil).
Setup is not really all that much of an issue since short of locking absolutely everything down which is more of a pain than it's worth with all the random courseware(also not linux compliant) which has to be installed at various points, it's not uncommon for a machine to not last very long before it needs to be redone(or at least restored to an original standing) so we have software to do that.
Except for certain specific applications(Major specific labs particularly in the Comp Sci and Enginnering fields), most open source systems just aren't terribly viable. In most universities these labs already use some sort of *nix system as much as possible anyway, so it's really a moot point.
In most cases it's not the contract that binds them to continuing the use of microsoft products, but the fact that after the initial relatively cheap contract, the university and its substructures have become totally dependent on Microsoft Operating Systems. It's very difficult for a large scale university to change policy over night and as such, Microsoft pretty much has a license to print money when it comes to renewing said contract.
Problem with Open source alternatives is simply that it's more expensive to administer them, it's fairly easy to find someone qualified to keep a Windows or Mac lab running fairly well, but *nix systems require a tad more expertise to run properly.
If you're talking about the original set actually written by Frank Herbert, I have to agree with you, except for the first one, most of his stuff is a little too much to bear. The three co-written by his son, House Harkonnen, House Attreides, and House Korino, on the other hand, are of a style much more like the original novel, if not a tad better.
Frank Herbert writes psuedo intellectual tripe, his son, oddly enough, IMO, turns his father's universe into something which is both entertaining and engrossing in a way which most of the other books in the series aren't.
I'm very much looking forward to giving this one a look.
Do you seriously believe that even if every single member of the tech community, however loosely you choose to define that, started using Jabber or some other sort of open protocol system to chat with, that it would amount to a portion of the total IM user base large enough for AOL or some other company to even notice? Instant Messaging software is probably one of the most broadly used software on the market. I'd say it's probably even more ingrained in the current market than Windows is because while most people have no real idea how to use any of the features of the OS, most people know how to use at least one messaging client. For that matter, most alternative clients(even gaim) are too complicated for the majority of their users, as is ICQ for that matter, but that's neither here nor there.
Admitedly it would be nice to see better *nix implementations of the instant messaging software, there is nothing terribly wrong with the current instant messengers(well excluding ads in icq which you can remove and invasive license agreements for msn which are for the most part expected for a part of passport). Plus other than annoying AOL discs, which I haven't recieved in quite a while, and tacky advertising which is typical these days and is still less annoying than the MSN bug man. AOL doesn't really intrude itself into my life all that much and outside of general anti-corporatism I personally have nothing much against it.
It's not just the Xers who are in trouble
on
Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 1
I'm 21 which for those of you with poor math skills(if there are any of those people on slashdot) that I was born in 1981. I'm by no means a generation Xer by this definition, though I've previously heard myself classified as one. I have never had a credit card, nor do I have any particular drive to spend money I don't have. However, partially due to poor planning on my part, but mostly due to my parents lacking the money to help out much, I'm going to be somewhere around $25,000 in debt when I graduate in May of next year.
With the way the economy is at the moment, and the fact that the current government seems to have absolutely no interest in doing anything to benefit people of my age bracket(probably because we're not exactly known for our political activism and even if we were we don't have the numbers the boomers did to have much impact), I don't have any idea what kind of employment I'm going to be able to get despite two degrees from a fairly prestigious university(U of Wisconsin).
The sad thing is that I'm not even close to being alone, no one graduating from college around this time has very good job prospects, and in an era of increasing costs and decreasing government assistance for education, most of us are to some degree or another in debt, not even taking into account things like credit cards and car payments and the like.
Personally I think that rather than trying to save the jobs of boomers, and even some of the older generation Xers, economic stimulus packages should be focused on building a job market for people around my age, a little older, and of course younger, not just because it would benefit me, but because it's going to be people like me who cover the costs of the people who currently have jobs, and homes, and savings. Most estimates for Social Security have it running out right around when I turn 64 which means I and people like me, will pay into it my entire life without ever getting a cent back.
As I said before we need to build the economy for the young so that there will be someone to support the old, how about tax breaks for hiring new college graduates to encourage companies to get over that, we won't hire you till you have two years of experience that no one wants to take the risk to give you problem which has been plaguing every graduating class for the last 50 years or so. Maybe something to enforce a maximum on how much more a CEO/executive can make than the lowest paid employee of his company? How about cutting off Social Security payments to people who have more than enough money without them? There are dozens of things the government could probably do in order to help people my age, and for that matter people the age of most slashdotters, but it probably won't because it would lose them the votes of the people who have been living off the current system all their lives.
Well you're, you shouldn't be logged in as root, or run rm -rf is really beside the point. I know that I've accidentally deleted an entire project without being root, which while not as fatal as deleting part of the system doesn't make it any less of a pain in the ass.
Quite admitedly I was using -f simply because I was tired of having to type y 25 times to delete 25 files and was too lazy to write a script which would allow me to confirm only the first delete, but when editing an rm line my finger missed (damned switching from sparc keyboards back to intel all the time) and I accidentally hosed the entire thing instead of the copies I was keeping in my public directory so that my partner could grab them.
Even putting aside such issues as whether you should be root, or whether you should be using rm -rf it's quite easy to accidentally delete the wrong file, or to delete something which you then realize you actually still needed even if you know exactly what you're doing and go through the confirmation process, and whether that something is a system directory or just the spreadsheet you just spent 6 hours working on and either you or someone else deleted it before it got to where it was going, it's nice to be able to restore it easily, especially since at the desktop level(which is where linux needs market share), most people don't have or use a tape backup system.
Personally I think this gaming limit idea is pretty great(though they'd probably have to lower the subscription cost accordingly). I remember back in my BBS days when I used to play LORD(Legend of the Red Dragon for those who don't know) and every bbs limited the number of battles(pretty much the only way to level up) which you could partake in in a given day. Admitedly at the time I thought this sucked because I was 14 and had a lot of free time on my hands, but if you want to make a game viable for people who aren't 14 or don't have a whole lot of time on their hands either because of a "life" or for other reasons, you have to do something to counteract that sort of thing.
The question you really have to ask yourself, is, rather simply, is it better to have a wider variety of people playing the game with whom you can interact, or to keep the best parts of the game for only yourselves and other people who want to, or are able to, dedicate large quantities of their lives to it.
Personally I'd rather be able to log on for a couple hours every now and then have a little fun, and leave without being totally separated from the majority of the people there, and would like to play with more people like that.
Well there will obviously be an initial cut in jobs, heck there are cuts in every single job these days even in jobs which are required, let alone jobs like network administration where if you're doing a good job it probably doesn't look like you're doing anything at all.
However these things probably won't have all that much of an impact since for the most part the errors which occur in computer systems are caused by human beings whose ability to do things which no one had ever thought of before is matchless. No computer, at least as we know them could possibly manage to keep up with every new problem which could ever occur.
It's all ridiculous anyway, unless you have completely predictable data access patterns, you're never going to get anywhere near optimal performance out of your drive, and if you had that it wouldn't be an issue since you could build your system to cache the data into memory before you even needed it.
Hard drives are constrained mostly by the fact that they're physical, there has been a great deal of technological advancement, and an even greater amount of research into how to optimize file systems and data access which is why hard drive delays are tolerable, but they're still restricted by the fact that in order to access data you have to move a little arm to a certain track and then wait till the data you want appears under the head.
That's why, while your processor gets faster and faster, your hard drive probably seems to be getting slower, chips don't have the same constraints on them so they can increase their speed in a way disks as we know them will never be able to do.
Doesn't matter how easy to use or intuitive you make programs, idiots will still have questions about how to use them. That's just life, and it's also why you don't see many qualified people on the tech lines, no company wants to pay a qualified tech when the majority of questions are probably the exact same ones you always get. Not to mention the fact that the moment you change anything, even to make it easier, half the users go into a panic and can't even manage what they used to be able to do.
In addition to that, unless we let one company produce every single product on someone's computer(and even that doesn't necessarily guarantee good intearction ex: visual studio), it's very difficult to track down the exact cause of a problem with all the different software which could be having problems. Phone tech support is a horrible, low paying, unrewarding job, and it probably always will be.
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Most of the instances of software development are "work for hire" in the sense that the company has an idea for a product they want to develop and much of that product has been mapped out and planned. Musicians for the most part are given much less direction as to exactly what is supposed to come out and many have created their own styles to begin with.
Is the survivial of the human race necessarily a good or necessary thing? Not to appear cynical or give the impression that I'm an environmentalist or some sort of hippie, but given that we started with what I have been lead to believe was once quite a nice planet, and have spend the last few millenia turning it into a somewhat less nice planet and an ever increasing rate(which I am as responsible as the next human), it's quite possible that we as a species aren't quite ready to play with other planets.I suppose in any even that we'll see what happens. I think that building a new space shuttle is probably a good idea, and that it might be good to design it in terms of longterm goals rather than being the cheapest thing available or some such. At the very least(even if this had nothing to do with tiles being lost before it took off), it would be a good idea to have the facilities/wherewithall to make repairs on the shuttle in space so that people who went up in it weren't pretty much doomed if things went wrong.
Well it's hard to really comment about the size of word processor style documents, especially not those from Microsoft Word. First you have to consider all the information which has to go into a file like that such as font, size, color to name a few, which has to take up some space, and then you have to remember the structure of a Word file. Now I'm not a huge fan of the structure of Word files since it makes recovering them a serious pain, but it does allow for incredibly quick file saves under the office suite, and considering the complexity of adding newly edited text to the end of a file and then linking it together properly through modifying the header(preferably without having to move data, which is the point), you're not going to get small files.
This is somewhat of an invalid metaphor for both the way dns works, and the way computer caching works. Pretty much every local DNS server(unless my information is wrong), has some sort of caching system of varying degrees of efficiency. The problem is that unlike humans who are more likely to remember things if they are repeated, caching usually just consists of a series of entries which can quite easily be overwritten, older entries will be overwritten if they aren't updated or caching would never work for new frequently accessed sites. It's quite easy to get an access pattern which would remove even the most frequently accessed files from a list especially on a server with a great deal of users. By providing different servers for each chunk of users you can diminish this problem but then you'll get requests from each server. DNS is an ugly system because it does and ugly job.
As for games, its hard to say, personally I find no collectable value in games, I have a lot of really old pc games simply because I never throw anything away(I'm a packrat not a collector), but I wouldn't seek to buy more of them because they aren't really functional. I don't have a pc capable of running half of these things(heck the updated version of Heros Quest calculates timing based on processor speed, as does Leisure Suit Larry 3, which makes them both almost impossible to finish(anyone who has the patience to click the up and down arrow something like 300 times for each of 4 excersizes to bulk up larry has well, just about as much patiences as me)). I don't understand the motivations of a game collector, and so I don't know how much of a role nostalgia plays in it, and how much just wanting to be associated with something that was viewed as cool plays a part.
So long as linux requires serious modification to an exisiting code base, and so long as its focus is primarily anti-commercial software, it is unlikely most companies will cross-develop if only because many of they can't afford it. While OSS operating systems have some popularity, the number of people who are running a one and are not running Windows or a Macintosh OS(which has a much higher market share and is still predominantly screwed over by developers), is relatively small.
At the moment, linux is not ready for desktop adaptation on a scale large enough to cause companies to develop for it. Most peoples needs are satisfied by Windows, and while I think that Microsoft's Office Suites(and particularly Works which I think is grounds for its creator to burn in eternal hell fire) are annoying and somewhat evil products, which should be replaced by alternatives, windows isn't all that bad sometimes. I reformat my pc every couple of months(which with a dual partition system and a fast enough inet connection takes about three hours and which I almost enjoy), and Windows runs relatively stable. Admitedly it takes reformat to do this, but I screw up my system much more than most people do, what with development, trying beta software, using OSS, etc.
To sum up, the group at which this CD is aimed are inredibly unlikely to shift away from Windows in general(just as most people who seriously use OSS operating systems are unlikely to switch back because of it). OSS operating systems are unlikely to be treated seriously by most development studios till one of them has a sufficiently large number of people who use it and no commercial OS, which is going to take an change in usage of a much larger magnitude than this could ever cause.
This hasn't worked because the industry just blames the loss on people stealing their music and goes on to get more and more mind boggling legislation and implement more crummy copy protection schemes, which like all copy protection schemes inconvenience legitimate users more than they prevent the theft of copyrighted materials.
In my opinion, companies which produce digital media of any kind, cd's dvd's, software, etc have really only a few choices left to them, they can invest in copy protection methods, they can lower the cost and increase the quality and variety of the product they sell, or they can as some software companies seem to do and as the dvd standard certainly did, increase the size of files to a point which effectively limits anything but personal exchanges of burned media.
The first option, which is the one which most companies are likely to pursue is, quite admitedly, a poor option in the long term, not only does it trample on fair use(which they don't like anyway), but it alienates consumers and isn't sustainable in the long run without legislation so draconian it makes the DMCA look like a fluff law. It is however the option which is easiest and cheapest "now", and many the digital media industries may think that in the future they can either create a truly uncopiable media, or that they can get the legislation they need.
The second option, is of course the option which most everyone would prefer, but it is the most difficult to achieve. Lowering costs would involve cutting into profits, and investing in ideas which weren't just derivatives of previously successful groups, or just flashy with no real substance is a risky investment. Personally I strongly believe, as has been posited by other groups, that if digital media, particularly software which is much more expensive and much harder to determine if you actually like it in advance, would sell much better, and get a lot more people willing to take risks on untried products if it were sold at a lower price. This method, which is pretty much the only sustainable option, is very difficult "now", and as such will probably never be implemented by the digital media industries.
The third option which I firmly believe people are actually doing, is just too ludicrous to sustain, and so I won't comment further on it.
If you have to deal with fixing the random garbage people do to their own machines, let alone what random unsupervised college students do to lab machines, you wouln't want to futz around for more than 15 minutes either.
Personally I think that people should be protesting the example of working conditions in the Sims. I mean what kind of slave driving boss won't let you go to the bathroom or eat one single time during an eight or more hour work day.
Setup is not really all that much of an issue since short of locking absolutely everything down which is more of a pain than it's worth with all the random courseware(also not linux compliant) which has to be installed at various points, it's not uncommon for a machine to not last very long before it needs to be redone(or at least restored to an original standing) so we have software to do that.
Except for certain specific applications(Major specific labs particularly in the Comp Sci and Enginnering fields), most open source systems just aren't terribly viable. In most universities these labs already use some sort of *nix system as much as possible anyway, so it's really a moot point.
Problem with Open source alternatives is simply that it's more expensive to administer them, it's fairly easy to find someone qualified to keep a Windows or Mac lab running fairly well, but *nix systems require a tad more expertise to run properly.
If you're talking about the original set actually written by Frank Herbert, I have to agree with you, except for the first one, most of his stuff is a little too much to bear. The three co-written by his son, House Harkonnen, House Attreides, and House Korino, on the other hand, are of a style much more like the original novel, if not a tad better. Frank Herbert writes psuedo intellectual tripe, his son, oddly enough, IMO, turns his father's universe into something which is both entertaining and engrossing in a way which most of the other books in the series aren't. I'm very much looking forward to giving this one a look.
Do you seriously believe that even if every single member of the tech community, however loosely you choose to define that, started using Jabber or some other sort of open protocol system to chat with, that it would amount to a portion of the total IM user base large enough for AOL or some other company to even notice? Instant Messaging software is probably one of the most broadly used software on the market. I'd say it's probably even more ingrained in the current market than Windows is because while most people have no real idea how to use any of the features of the OS, most people know how to use at least one messaging client. For that matter, most alternative clients(even gaim) are too complicated for the majority of their users, as is ICQ for that matter, but that's neither here nor there. Admitedly it would be nice to see better *nix implementations of the instant messaging software, there is nothing terribly wrong with the current instant messengers(well excluding ads in icq which you can remove and invasive license agreements for msn which are for the most part expected for a part of passport). Plus other than annoying AOL discs, which I haven't recieved in quite a while, and tacky advertising which is typical these days and is still less annoying than the MSN bug man. AOL doesn't really intrude itself into my life all that much and outside of general anti-corporatism I personally have nothing much against it.
I'm 21 which for those of you with poor math skills(if there are any of those people on slashdot) that I was born in 1981. I'm by no means a generation Xer by this definition, though I've previously heard myself classified as one. I have never had a credit card, nor do I have any particular drive to spend money I don't have. However, partially due to poor planning on my part, but mostly due to my parents lacking the money to help out much, I'm going to be somewhere around $25,000 in debt when I graduate in May of next year. With the way the economy is at the moment, and the fact that the current government seems to have absolutely no interest in doing anything to benefit people of my age bracket(probably because we're not exactly known for our political activism and even if we were we don't have the numbers the boomers did to have much impact), I don't have any idea what kind of employment I'm going to be able to get despite two degrees from a fairly prestigious university(U of Wisconsin). The sad thing is that I'm not even close to being alone, no one graduating from college around this time has very good job prospects, and in an era of increasing costs and decreasing government assistance for education, most of us are to some degree or another in debt, not even taking into account things like credit cards and car payments and the like. Personally I think that rather than trying to save the jobs of boomers, and even some of the older generation Xers, economic stimulus packages should be focused on building a job market for people around my age, a little older, and of course younger, not just because it would benefit me, but because it's going to be people like me who cover the costs of the people who currently have jobs, and homes, and savings. Most estimates for Social Security have it running out right around when I turn 64 which means I and people like me, will pay into it my entire life without ever getting a cent back. As I said before we need to build the economy for the young so that there will be someone to support the old, how about tax breaks for hiring new college graduates to encourage companies to get over that, we won't hire you till you have two years of experience that no one wants to take the risk to give you problem which has been plaguing every graduating class for the last 50 years or so. Maybe something to enforce a maximum on how much more a CEO/executive can make than the lowest paid employee of his company? How about cutting off Social Security payments to people who have more than enough money without them? There are dozens of things the government could probably do in order to help people my age, and for that matter people the age of most slashdotters, but it probably won't because it would lose them the votes of the people who have been living off the current system all their lives.
Well you're, you shouldn't be logged in as root, or run rm -rf is really beside the point. I know that I've accidentally deleted an entire project without being root, which while not as fatal as deleting part of the system doesn't make it any less of a pain in the ass. Quite admitedly I was using -f simply because I was tired of having to type y 25 times to delete 25 files and was too lazy to write a script which would allow me to confirm only the first delete, but when editing an rm line my finger missed (damned switching from sparc keyboards back to intel all the time) and I accidentally hosed the entire thing instead of the copies I was keeping in my public directory so that my partner could grab them. Even putting aside such issues as whether you should be root, or whether you should be using rm -rf it's quite easy to accidentally delete the wrong file, or to delete something which you then realize you actually still needed even if you know exactly what you're doing and go through the confirmation process, and whether that something is a system directory or just the spreadsheet you just spent 6 hours working on and either you or someone else deleted it before it got to where it was going, it's nice to be able to restore it easily, especially since at the desktop level(which is where linux needs market share), most people don't have or use a tape backup system.
Personally I think this gaming limit idea is pretty great(though they'd probably have to lower the subscription cost accordingly). I remember back in my BBS days when I used to play LORD(Legend of the Red Dragon for those who don't know) and every bbs limited the number of battles(pretty much the only way to level up) which you could partake in in a given day. Admitedly at the time I thought this sucked because I was 14 and had a lot of free time on my hands, but if you want to make a game viable for people who aren't 14 or don't have a whole lot of time on their hands either because of a "life" or for other reasons, you have to do something to counteract that sort of thing.
The question you really have to ask yourself, is, rather simply, is it better to have a wider variety of people playing the game with whom you can interact, or to keep the best parts of the game for only yourselves and other people who want to, or are able to, dedicate large quantities of their lives to it.
Personally I'd rather be able to log on for a couple hours every now and then have a little fun, and leave without being totally separated from the majority of the people there, and would like to play with more people like that.
Well there will obviously be an initial cut in jobs, heck there are cuts in every single job these days even in jobs which are required, let alone jobs like network administration where if you're doing a good job it probably doesn't look like you're doing anything at all. However these things probably won't have all that much of an impact since for the most part the errors which occur in computer systems are caused by human beings whose ability to do things which no one had ever thought of before is matchless. No computer, at least as we know them could possibly manage to keep up with every new problem which could ever occur.
It's all ridiculous anyway, unless you have completely predictable data access patterns, you're never going to get anywhere near optimal performance out of your drive, and if you had that it wouldn't be an issue since you could build your system to cache the data into memory before you even needed it. Hard drives are constrained mostly by the fact that they're physical, there has been a great deal of technological advancement, and an even greater amount of research into how to optimize file systems and data access which is why hard drive delays are tolerable, but they're still restricted by the fact that in order to access data you have to move a little arm to a certain track and then wait till the data you want appears under the head. That's why, while your processor gets faster and faster, your hard drive probably seems to be getting slower, chips don't have the same constraints on them so they can increase their speed in a way disks as we know them will never be able to do.
Doesn't matter how easy to use or intuitive you make programs, idiots will still have questions about how to use them. That's just life, and it's also why you don't see many qualified people on the tech lines, no company wants to pay a qualified tech when the majority of questions are probably the exact same ones you always get. Not to mention the fact that the moment you change anything, even to make it easier, half the users go into a panic and can't even manage what they used to be able to do. In addition to that, unless we let one company produce every single product on someone's computer(and even that doesn't necessarily guarantee good intearction ex: visual studio), it's very difficult to track down the exact cause of a problem with all the different software which could be having problems. Phone tech support is a horrible, low paying, unrewarding job, and it probably always will be.