Just FYI - the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not agree with your assessment that programming and engineering unemployment is at an all-time high.
FYI, an engineer employed as a truck driver does not count as unemployed, nor does an unemployed programmer working as a clerk. Neither do those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits but may still be unemployed count in government figures. I can't link to the data I'd like for non-members, but there's (pdf alert) this If you believe everything the government tells you . . . well, nevermind.
I mean, sheesh, can't they drum up enough funds for someone as brilliant and skilled as a $100K per year IT department manager.
Absolutely right. With a normal IT Dept. manager, they wouldn't have to worry about what to do with the funds. First, they wouldn't have any funds. Then they would have to figure out how to pay for the cost overruns and the three assistant department managers. And the donuts, and the office party, and the management awards and bonuses.
But good communist hippies have no need for the money of a capitalist-pig society!
I suppose the battery in my humor detector may need recharging, but it doesn't seem very funny, and some comment like this is always posted whenever the topic of OSS comes up.
There were plenty of capitalist musicians who made money before the advent of the RIAA. There are plenty of capitalist coders who make money either by writing OSS or by using OSS for in-house software/systems which support money-making operations and their own salaries. Anyone who believes that all software should be produced by Microsoft or any other for-profit company is not a capitalist - they're a card-carrying idiot.
Unless you're in college or under 18, you ought to be able to find a job easily enough.
I can't speak for PyWiz, but programming and engineering unemployment is at all-time highs. Even the new H-1B visas are not being grabbed up - that tells you how little interest there is in hiring.
Indeed, my DEAR COMR^H^H^H^HFRIEND, I am a very important national bank manager with many extra funds due to the sad death of our beloved dictator who ate all his children. Unfortunately, the minimum amount I can transfer is US $1000. If you send me $500, I will gladly make the transfer in your name, and you may keep ALL THE PROCEEDS. Please keep these informations VERY SECRET and reply only to my VERY SECRET contact address below.
Yours in all trust, BigInternationalBanker1427@aol.com
not until the RIAA starts suing kids for humming copywritten songs.
By that time the MS educational Thought Thieves program will have been donated to every elementary school and be required as a mandatory part of the "No Child Left Unprogrammed" act. After that, any little pirate humming a tune without coughing up his or her lunch money will deserve that perfunctory sentence from the RIAA and a quick hanging in the gym as a deterrent to any other little buggers with an urge to "share".
Well, I guess it depends on how many copies you can make from the original. In every sane scenario that I know of, you copy the original, store it safely, and then use the copy.
Any copy that is crippled is by definition not a copy, and would seem to me to violate fair use rights. It shouldn't matter which copy is lucky enough to survive. CDs don't have an infinite life span, you know. The current thought is that it's generally a lot less than a good quality book.
If you lose the original and still have the copy, look at is as a lesson that cost you a few bucks to learn but really taught you something useful.
What I'm learning is that some people are feeling the yoke of oppression settling and saying, "Hey, it's not that heavy you know, and we get this really cool cart to go with it."
Stripped to its essentials, what you really want is a free upgrade of your collection to CDs.
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but stripped to its essentials, it seems you're saying the RIAA has a right to use DRM to lock purchased music to a piece of media and do away with fair use rights. This is how people lose their rights - one small abdication at a time.
I'll paraphrase the GP and agree with him: If the industry doesn't provide a reasonable path for full fair use rights, then they deserve to lose the copyright protection for whatever product is on the DRM'd media. Corporations should not be able to claim protection under a law while disregarding part of it.
Wow, that's like the fourth time today that I've seen someday say a story made thier head hurt.
With the amount of hot carbon dioxide released in a typical Slashdot discussion, it's easy to get a headache. Hmm, I probably shouldn't have added the onions to the chili either. Sorry.
How about time? If games take longer to release because of extra work involving research and coding and testing because of AI, are you willing to wait? Is everyone else willing to wait?
Given the price of games and the fact that video games are closing in on movies as top money maker, I'd be willing to wait longer. Do they release movies before they're finished? MOH Rising Sun was a perfect example of ripping off the customers instead of finishing a game.
If superior technology was all it took to take down x86 we'd already be using something different for longer than x86 existed.
That's true enough. If superior technology was the main factor, Motorola would have supplanted Intel long ago. I remember reading an article that claimed more man-hours have been wasted fighting Intel's brain-damaged segmented addressing schemes than any other single computing problem. That doesn't make it true, of course, but from personal experience, I'm inclined to agree with it. The Wintel hegemony is a freak of happenstance and one that the IBM hivemind undoubtedly kicks itself for daily.
If you do the maths, you can calculate that 85 million years ago the moon was orbiting the earth at a distance of about 35 feet from the earth's surface.
This would explain the death of the dinosaurs.
At least the tallest ones.:-)
Woah! So all those craters are from dinosaur impacts? I feel an oil-exploration moon mission coming on. Where's Sigourney Weaver these days?
The market has stagnated. There aren't many new game CONCEPTS, that are appealing, that seem to require the horsepower of the new concoles.
How many new "concepts" have you seen in movies lately? Movie makers don't even try to disguise the fact that they don't have new ideas -- they're remaking movies from a couple of decades ago with a different cast. It's entertainment, and both the movie and game industries are raking in more billions every year, so they are hardly in a stagnant market. And as for using the added power to make games look better, that's justification enough. Better frame rates and load times make for a better experience as well.
There are valid reasons to have AC, though it is truly not anonymous.
As I said before, I don't think the reasons are valid, but we can agree to disagree. Anyone who removes cookies and connects from a non-static address will be anonymous unless I've missed something (which is often the case).
Ever notice that even though you post AC, you can not go back and moderate your own post?
Well, no. I've never tried it. If I were to post something AC and be unwilling to post under my ID, why would I want to waste mod points on it? I don't generally waste mod points on AC posts where karma doesn't accrue. Maybe I'm missing something here.
But I don't think doing away with AC will reduce the Crap out there. Email accounts are a dime a dozen.
It takes a couple of minutes to set up a new account. That would be enough to send most of the HADD pre-teen crap flooders elsewhere. Two minutes is not a big hardship if you have something you really want to say. It would be interesting if Slashdot put a short-term (one week?) ban on AC posting to see what happened. Otherwise, it's all just conjecture. My guess is that they'd get a lot of new registered users and a lot less garbage posts.
The question is should we keep playing it or give up now and just mail our souls in to Bill?
I'm hoping that's a joke (although it doesn't sound very funny), but my answer is why not keep our souls and self-respect by declining Bill's products whenever possible? Why waste time playing the catch-up game when Microsoft is busy buying legislation to prevent reverse-engineering, and it will all come to nothing? The window (forgive the groaner) on that kind of compatibility is rapidly closing, so should we just sit and cry, give up and embrace MS, or appreciate the people who did that work in the past while moving on and pushing for open standards?
The only real market locks Bill has are Word documents and broken web sites. Oh, yeah, there's the spyware, adware, viruses, and other crap, but most people don't actually want that. You can mail your soul in, but Bill isn't getting mine. He burned my trust and all the bridges years ago.
Well, it's generalized to all software development - actually, all engineering. The designer must accept the environment they can't change, and compensate for it, when they must, to get the results they need.
It seems it's just you who is claiming the MS "environment" can't be changed. It's sad to see young people who believe that Microsoft is some immutable power because they've never known anything else. There was a time when MS was a very minor player in software, and that will likely be the case again. The MS "environment" is already changing due to pressure from F/OSS, and it has certainly been a benefit to MS's customers.
This is, in fact, true of all human relationships, and no less so of open software development.
Urrpp. Please, I'll get my pop psychology from Dr. Phil, thanks anyway.
Perhaps the solution, then, is to make it so that when a "qualified" user replies to an "unqualified" post, the unqualified post gets grandfathered in and shows up as well, despite the filter?
That's a possiblity, but then you wind up with all the -1 troll AC comments, that some people just can't resist responding to, showing up again. Seriously, I think that doing away with AC posting would eliminate a lot of problems on Slashdot. I imagine the real reason for keeping it is the added traffic.
It's Microsoft's fault, but it's our problem. Unless you value only gloating, the one who can change is the one who must. OOo must support even Microsoft's secret formats . ..
So to generalize that to all F/OSS, you're saying we have to spend time and money reverse-engineering and supporting Microsoft's broken formats and extensions. That just allows MS to continue breaking and extending, with the OSS world constantly playing catch up and chasing a moving target. That's a loser's game.
With reverse-engineering becoming a legal gray area thanks to recent decisions, it's doubtful it will continue. Unless MS opens its standards or adopts open standards, MS-compatibility will soon be a dead end for OSS (and hopefully for MS as more governments and organizations demand their records be stored using open document standards).
The problem with that is that many posters don't bother to post what they're replying to, and the discussion becomes nearly unreadable. If you have sensitive stuff to reveal, set up an account with no personal information. I too favor the end to AC posting. The conversation would become more polite generally, and the crap floods and typical nonsense would be greatly reduced. It's not like there aren't more than enough comments even without the AC posts.
I thought everyone on Slashdot saw it opening night at midnight.
75% of Slashdotters are not allowed to go out after 9:00 pm.
Of that 75%, half are trying to download it using bittorrent over a dial-up connection. The other half is still trying to shut down adware popups while getting to a warez site.
Of the other 25%, half went to see the movie or plan to.
The rest of us will wait a month for the DVD to be released.
I made up all these numbers in case you're still wondering.
Slashdot Mirror
Just FYI - the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not agree with your assessment that programming and engineering unemployment is at an all-time high.
FYI, an engineer employed as a truck driver does not count as unemployed, nor does an unemployed programmer working as a clerk. Neither do those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits but may still be unemployed count in government figures. I can't link to the data I'd like for non-members, but there's (pdf alert) this If you believe everything the government tells you . . . well, nevermind.
I mean, sheesh, can't they drum up enough funds for someone as brilliant and skilled as a $100K per year IT department manager.
Absolutely right. With a normal IT Dept. manager, they wouldn't have to worry about what to do with the funds. First, they wouldn't have any funds. Then they would have to figure out how to pay for the cost overruns and the three assistant department managers. And the donuts, and the office party, and the management awards and bonuses.
But good communist hippies have no need for the money of a capitalist-pig society!
I suppose the battery in my humor detector may need recharging, but it doesn't seem very funny, and some comment like this is always posted whenever the topic of OSS comes up.
There were plenty of capitalist musicians who made money before the advent of the RIAA. There are plenty of capitalist coders who make money either by writing OSS or by using OSS for in-house software/systems which support money-making operations and their own salaries. Anyone who believes that all software should be produced by Microsoft or any other for-profit company is not a capitalist - they're a card-carrying idiot.
180 SCO licenses for that money...
At the going-out-of-business sale, that covers the 29 cents. Now what about the other $126,155?
Unless you're in college or under 18, you ought to be able to find a job easily enough.
I can't speak for PyWiz, but programming and engineering unemployment is at all-time highs. Even the new H-1B visas are not being grabbed up - that tells you how little interest there is in hiring.
Can't we just shoot them and put them out of everyone's missery?
Well, if there's missery, you didn't hit them, so no.
Indeed, my DEAR COMR^H^H^H^HFRIEND, I am a very important national bank manager with many extra funds due to the sad death of our beloved dictator who ate all his children. Unfortunately, the minimum amount I can transfer is US $1000. If you send me $500, I will gladly make the transfer in your name, and you may keep ALL THE PROCEEDS. Please keep these informations VERY SECRET and reply only to my VERY SECRET contact address below.
Yours in all trust,
BigInternationalBanker1427@aol.com
not until the RIAA starts suing kids for humming copywritten songs.
By that time the MS educational Thought Thieves program will have been donated to every elementary school and be required as a mandatory part of the "No Child Left Unprogrammed" act. After that, any little pirate humming a tune without coughing up his or her lunch money will deserve that perfunctory sentence from the RIAA and a quick hanging in the gym as a deterrent to any other little buggers with an urge to "share".
Well, I guess it depends on how many copies you can make from the original. In every sane scenario that I know of, you copy the original, store it safely, and then use the copy.
Any copy that is crippled is by definition not a copy, and would seem to me to violate fair use rights. It shouldn't matter which copy is lucky enough to survive. CDs don't have an infinite life span, you know. The current thought is that it's generally a lot less than a good quality book.
If you lose the original and still have the copy, look at is as a lesson that cost you a few bucks to learn but really taught you something useful.
What I'm learning is that some people are feeling the yoke of oppression settling and saying, "Hey, it's not that heavy you know, and we get this really cool cart to go with it."
Stripped to its essentials, what you really want is a free upgrade of your collection to CDs.
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but stripped to its essentials, it seems you're saying the RIAA has a right to use DRM to lock purchased music to a piece of media and do away with fair use rights. This is how people lose their rights - one small abdication at a time.
I'll paraphrase the GP and agree with him: If the industry doesn't provide a reasonable path for full fair use rights, then they deserve to lose the copyright protection for whatever product is on the DRM'd media. Corporations should not be able to claim protection under a law while disregarding part of it.
Wow, that's like the fourth time today that I've seen someday say a story made thier head hurt.
With the amount of hot carbon dioxide released in a typical Slashdot discussion, it's easy to get a headache. Hmm, I probably shouldn't have added the onions to the chili either. Sorry.
How about time? If games take longer to release because of extra work involving research and coding and testing because of AI, are you willing to wait? Is everyone else willing to wait?
Given the price of games and the fact that video games are closing in on movies as top money maker, I'd be willing to wait longer. Do they release movies before they're finished? MOH Rising Sun was a perfect example of ripping off the customers instead of finishing a game.
If superior technology was all it took to take down x86 we'd already be using something different for longer than x86 existed.
That's true enough. If superior technology was the main factor, Motorola would have supplanted Intel long ago. I remember reading an article that claimed more man-hours have been wasted fighting Intel's brain-damaged segmented addressing schemes than any other single computing problem. That doesn't make it true, of course, but from personal experience, I'm inclined to agree with it. The Wintel hegemony is a freak of happenstance and one that the IBM hivemind undoubtedly kicks itself for daily.
Scientists, in any field, are generally regarded as "nerds" by your typical MBA.
Sorry, your typical MBA never got that far into categorization. Anyone not in management is regarded as "disposable".
And we also find out that plants have "fingernails". I'm gonna be far more careful while weeding from now on.
If you do the maths, you can calculate that 85 million years ago the moon was orbiting the earth at a distance of about 35 feet from the earth's surface. :-)
This would explain the death of the dinosaurs.
At least the tallest ones.
Woah! So all those craters are from dinosaur impacts? I feel an oil-exploration moon mission coming on. Where's Sigourney Weaver these days?
The market has stagnated. There aren't many new game CONCEPTS, that are appealing, that seem to require the horsepower of the new concoles.
How many new "concepts" have you seen in movies lately? Movie makers don't even try to disguise the fact that they don't have new ideas -- they're remaking movies from a couple of decades ago with a different cast. It's entertainment, and both the movie and game industries are raking in more billions every year, so they are hardly in a stagnant market. And as for using the added power to make games look better, that's justification enough. Better frame rates and load times make for a better experience as well.
There are valid reasons to have AC, though it is truly not anonymous.
As I said before, I don't think the reasons are valid, but we can agree to disagree. Anyone who removes cookies and connects from a non-static address will be anonymous unless I've missed something (which is often the case).
Ever notice that even though you post AC, you can not go back and moderate your own post?
Well, no. I've never tried it. If I were to post something AC and be unwilling to post under my ID, why would I want to waste mod points on it? I don't generally waste mod points on AC posts where karma doesn't accrue. Maybe I'm missing something here.
But I don't think doing away with AC will reduce the Crap out there. Email accounts are a dime a dozen.
It takes a couple of minutes to set up a new account. That would be enough to send most of the HADD pre-teen crap flooders elsewhere. Two minutes is not a big hardship if you have something you really want to say. It would be interesting if Slashdot put a short-term (one week?) ban on AC posting to see what happened. Otherwise, it's all just conjecture. My guess is that they'd get a lot of new registered users and a lot less garbage posts.
The question is should we keep playing it or give up now and just mail our souls in to Bill?
I'm hoping that's a joke (although it doesn't sound very funny), but my answer is why not keep our souls and self-respect by declining Bill's products whenever possible? Why waste time playing the catch-up game when Microsoft is busy buying legislation to prevent reverse-engineering, and it will all come to nothing? The window (forgive the groaner) on that kind of compatibility is rapidly closing, so should we just sit and cry, give up and embrace MS, or appreciate the people who did that work in the past while moving on and pushing for open standards?
The only real market locks Bill has are Word documents and broken web sites. Oh, yeah, there's the spyware, adware, viruses, and other crap, but most people don't actually want that. You can mail your soul in, but Bill isn't getting mine. He burned my trust and all the bridges years ago.
Well, it's generalized to all software development - actually, all engineering. The designer must accept the environment they can't change, and compensate for it, when they must, to get the results they need.
It seems it's just you who is claiming the MS "environment" can't be changed. It's sad to see young people who believe that Microsoft is some immutable power because they've never known anything else. There was a time when MS was a very minor player in software, and that will likely be the case again. The MS "environment" is already changing due to pressure from F/OSS, and it has certainly been a benefit to MS's customers.
This is, in fact, true of all human relationships, and no less so of open software development.
Urrpp. Please, I'll get my pop psychology from Dr. Phil, thanks anyway.
Perhaps the solution, then, is to make it so that when a "qualified" user replies to an "unqualified" post, the unqualified post gets grandfathered in and shows up as well, despite the filter?
That's a possiblity, but then you wind up with all the -1 troll AC comments, that some people just can't resist responding to, showing up again. Seriously, I think that doing away with AC posting would eliminate a lot of problems on Slashdot. I imagine the real reason for keeping it is the added traffic.
It's Microsoft's fault, but it's our problem. Unless you value only gloating, the one who can change is the one who must. OOo must support even Microsoft's secret formats . . .
So to generalize that to all F/OSS, you're saying we have to spend time and money reverse-engineering and supporting Microsoft's broken formats and extensions. That just allows MS to continue breaking and extending, with the OSS world constantly playing catch up and chasing a moving target. That's a loser's game.
With reverse-engineering becoming a legal gray area thanks to recent decisions, it's doubtful it will continue. Unless MS opens its standards or adopts open standards, MS-compatibility will soon be a dead end for OSS (and hopefully for MS as more governments and organizations demand their records be stored using open document standards).
Preferences->Comments->Anonymous Modifier(-6)
The problem with that is that many posters don't bother to post what they're replying to, and the discussion becomes nearly unreadable. If you have sensitive stuff to reveal, set up an account with no personal information. I too favor the end to AC posting. The conversation would become more polite generally, and the crap floods and typical nonsense would be greatly reduced. It's not like there aren't more than enough comments even without the AC posts.
I thought everyone on Slashdot saw it opening night at midnight.
75% of Slashdotters are not allowed to go out after 9:00 pm.
Of that 75%, half are trying to download it using bittorrent over a dial-up connection. The other half is still trying to shut down adware popups while getting to a warez site.
Of the other 25%, half went to see the movie or plan to. The rest of us will wait a month for the DVD to be released.
I made up all these numbers in case you're still wondering.
I wouldn't consider myself a fan now, but I'll be sure to see the next one when it comes out too.
We certainly hope you enjoy the "next one" after this final episode. :)