First, at the gym this morning. Two jocks talking about getting laptops. One bitching about Vista:
"If I knew how bad Vista was, I would have bought a mac."
The other: "My husband is so lucky, he gets to use a Mac at work. I'm stuck with Vista. I hate it, I wish I could have XP back."
Then, later on, at a presentation by our IT department about PDF files:
"We can't afford to buy Adobe Writer for everyone. There are open source solutions, which are higher quality, but our management won't let us use them. It makes my head want to explode; OpenOffice does everything we need but we have to use MS Office and Adobe Acrobat, and we can't afford to give you the tools you need."
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of closed, proprietary software?
And yes, you can write crap, as long as management is 'closed' about open source then they will buy it.
MS wants a clear break from Vista. Vista is such a flop, that calling the new version anything related to Vista is bad. Thus, MS Pinnacle might be bad. So might MS View. So might Vista II. Although the V-2 might be appropriate for all the wreckage it has caused. [Stretching the analogy here....]
When your product shits the bed as bad as Vista, you 'go back to basics'. And that's what Windows 7 harkens back to. It's simple, it's basic, it comes from a time when things just worked.
Ford Model T VW Type 1 (aka beetle or bug) Windows 7
Car makers didn't need fancy names when things just worked. It's only when cars started getting bloated that they needed fancy names like
Ford Explorer (which, AFAICT, is only used to explore the sales at the mall) Dodge Grand Caravan (same) Mercury Marquis
I think there is a lesson in this to the companies that sell DRM crap that depends on servers. It's a one-time purchase with a recurring cost to the seller. Ultimately, DRM is a losing proposition to the retailer - if you run the DRM servers long enough, you *will* lose money.
It's basically a ponzi scheme - to cover the cost of running the DRM servers, you have to keep finding new sales to prop up the running expenses on the old sales. Eventually you run out of new sales and you lose money.
The incremental cost / track of running those servers is miniscule, but as old sales add up you still have to pay for bandwidth, iron, and power to service them.
Seems that DRM based on servers is bad for retailers as well.
Well, the success of parenting is all about giving your kids choices. Take food, for example. My kids don't make bad food choices - because we don't have any 'bad' food in the house. So they can grab whatever they want, and we are assured that it's good.
Now take cars. Driving alone is an all-or-nothing thing; there is no way we as parents can insure our kids won't make bad choices. So we have to limit what they drive. When my kids are old enough to drive, I'm going to give them a 1984 diesel Merecedes or something like that. Big, slow, and heavy. You can't really get in too much trouble like that.
I live in the middle of 8 schools. I watch the high school kids and their driving is scary - they're on the phone, talking to their friends, cranking up the music, and not paying attention to driving. Worse, a significant number of them have powerful sports cars; the Ford Mustang seems to be the high schooler's choice. Many of these kids drive recklessly fast - 5 of those 8 schools are elementary schools and most kids here walk to school.
I don't see how putting an 80 MPH governor will help. What's needed is an ignition killer if the driver is talking on the phone or has his/her ipod on and in their ears, or has their head turned to the back seat.
Yabbut.... Any such system will be 'voluntary' - meaning each station/studio/whatever will be able to describe the latest murder-sex-mayhem sitcom as "wholesome family entertainment".
I'm with all the posters who just turn the TV off. Better yet, cut off the cable and spend time with your kids.
And yes, I have kids, and no, we don't use TV as a babysitter. Kids will find things to do if you provide them the opportunity to do so.
I cringe at the social messages in the commercials, even for kids' shows. The ads for the girls' toys on the 'tween shows are pretty shocking for me.... 11 year old girls, in tight clothing, miniskirts, full makeup and hair, dressed like they're ready to go man-shopping, playing at being 'executives'....
Mythtv is great. Next raise I get I'm cutting off live TV altogether and banishing commercials entirely.
All this is a long way to say that parents already are empowered to control what their kids watch. Get rid of cable, turn the TV off, and give them books, toys, blocks, crayons, whatever.
Morals and ethics are internal. Society may have some expectations, but ultimately the individual must act according to their own internal motivations.
If you are conflicted about something to the point of having to ask a bunch of strangers, then you are at odds with yourself. You may be tempted by the money but are struggling with the morality of the decision.
My own test is simple:
Will I sleep better at night for having done this? If the answer is yes, then go for it. Usually, just the act of having to ask is its own answer: no, it's not right to do this.
I intentionally kept my own opinion out of the original post. I've found it's best to tell the truth, treat others with respect, and live according to my own code of honor, ethics, and morals than to compromise any of that for money.
Now if the motivation is not money, but rather the ability to proceed with exciting, challenging work *and* get paid for it, that's different. It would be especially different if the project in question was struggling due to a lack of time available but that's not what I read into the post.
You're obviously conflicted about this; otherwise why be posting to/.?
So... Would the money allow you to do something more than you're doing now? Better house, bigger car? Is that important to you? Is it more important to you than your desire to be part of that particular community?
How critical are you to the success of the Open Source project? Would it die without you?
And, how critical are you to the success of this company's plans? Can they hire someone else for the job?
If it feels wrong, if it feels like it won't work for you, don't do it.
Unfortunately for MS, the FOSS genie can't be stuffed back in the bottle, and muddying the waters like this only serves to delay the inevitable - FOSS is cheaper and better than closed in a commodity market.
I do this commercially. I ship a small embedded box with custom firmware that works as a samba client and runs a VPN back to my server.
Then I run rsnapshot to rsync the remote.
That way the clients don't have to do any installation at all, I can admin my box remotely without any local representation, and it will work with any system as long as it supports samba.
The only setup required on the local site is a userid for the backup client.
They're mainly into gross bodily functions and destroying stuff.
So talk to them about the time a rat took a crap in the mainframe, and how it brought down the whole company network, and you had to clean the poop out of the computer.....
Or maybe the time the squirrel got into the main power panel and blew itself up, taking $50K of wiring with it, along with racks and racks of equipment.
(I made the first one up, but the second one really happened....)
Well, I take the opposite view. Allow them access when they ask for it, unfiltered, but monitored. Explain to them that they will get 'bad' email. Tell them what to do with it.
At some point you will have to push them out of the nest. It's best they learn how to cope while in the nest, and not when they leave for college.
Talk to your kids. My kids have had access to the web and email ever since they were old enough to type. As a result, they don't have much interest in it; it's not forbidden so it doesn't have that secret attraction. They use computers, but I've time-limited their logins so they can only log in evenings.
Anyway, parenting is about teaching your kids how to cope, not keeping then isolated and innocent. Then again, I don't have cable TV, so that festering cauldron of slop is not available to my kids. That, more than any other thing I've done, has kept them innocent.
I used to work developing new products for a manufacturing outfit. Too often we would get a call from shipping, asking for widget X. We'd say, what's a widget X? What does it do?
It would turn out that sales sold widget X to a customer based on customer demand. Widget X did not exist. They neglected to tell us engineers. We would find out only when the order was ready to ship.
Then we would design something, go out back, interrupt the production guys in the welding or machine shop, fab up a prototype, and carry it over to shipping.
Sales would get kudos for selling more stuff; we'd get dinged for poor productivity, and the production manager would be pissed off as all hell at us.
Sales just never really understood that these things take time, and that shipping a half-tested prototype isn't a good thing.
Diesels have become the new penis. Anyone who has a diesel must have a large, jacked up truck, preferrably a sixpack cab 4x4 with mud tires and a 6" lift, and all the soundproofing removed from the engine compartment so he can deafen all around.
And the diesel engine itself must be the largest engine available from any manufacturer; when another car maker comes out with a larger engine you must immediately trade yours in because it just doesn't have enough power.
No one wants to admit they have a small penis, so a small diesel will never sell.
I have a 1KB file that I want to store. So I send it up to the cloud. It gets stored as chunks that take up 6KB...
Now if I participate in the cloud, I need to offer up 6KB of storage.
Hmmm..
RAID6 needs less than 50% redundant drives. This stuff needs 600% redundant storage.
The storage needs don't add up, except in specialzed situations. Let's say I have information I don't want anyone to find if they steal my computer. I put it up there. But if it's so sensitive, do I really want it up on the web?
I see this as being useful for information smuggling. Hide the file in plain sight in little bits. Reassemble when you cross the border (or after the DHS goons leave...)
You say you are 26. That means you've never been trhough a stock market crash that wiped out 60% of your savings.
That means you've never been unemployed for long periods of time.
That means you've never been through a recession.
That means you've never had to sell a house for less than you bought it for - not because you overbought, but because a local employer - the military, GM, a textile mill - shut down and now there's no work in town.
That means you probably don't have kids, and almost certainly don't have kids in school, where you are expected to donate time and money because the Gov't cannot afford to staff and finance our public schools.
I could go on and on... At the risk of sounding patronizing, save your post and re-read it in 40 years and you'll realize just how naive it sounds.
Or perhaps the company that they put their OWN MONEY into raided the retirement fund and there's nothing left.... Or it went belly up. Or it managed to pawn the retirement fund off on the taxpayers. Or the stock market crashed.
Retirement should not be a crapshoot. It should be managed by an entity with the resources and accountability to actually pay what it promises.
I'm looking at SS, Military retirement, city retirement, and personal 401(K), IRA, etc. for retirement - and all of that still doesn't add up to the below-market wage I make today.
It's pretty hard these days to 'save up' for retirement. Not because people are living frivolously, but because wages have essentially been flat for the last 20 years in the broad mid-career band, while everything else has been going up, including the number of hours worked.
Yes, a lot of people are living beyond their means. But even responsible people are having a hard time making ends meet after retirement.
Heck, the contribution cap for an IRA hasn't changed in 20 years...
Think again.... Most people don't have the resources. I know people over 65 who work 2 jobs, 7 days a week, to pay medical bills, rent, and food.
A handful of people work because they want to. Most work because they have no choice. Do you think the greeters at Wal-Mart are there because they want to? Or because they have to eat?
Your statement is the sort of spin I'd expect from the neocons. Ultimately, people want to work because the alternative is starving, or not taking your meds, or living on the street....
As someone who is nearing that age, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to retire without working. It's not easy, and our broken medical system is a huge part of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Two separate conversations yesterday....
First, at the gym this morning. Two jocks talking about getting laptops. One bitching about Vista:
"If I knew how bad Vista was, I would have bought a mac."
The other: "My husband is so lucky, he gets to use a Mac at work. I'm stuck with Vista. I hate it, I wish I could have XP back."
Then, later on, at a presentation by our IT department about PDF files:
"We can't afford to buy Adobe Writer for everyone. There are open source solutions, which are higher quality, but our management won't let us use them. It makes my head want to explode; OpenOffice does everything we need but we have to use MS Office and Adobe Acrobat, and we can't afford to give you the tools you need."
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of closed, proprietary software?
And yes, you can write crap, as long as management is 'closed' about open source then they will buy it.
MS wants a clear break from Vista. Vista is such a flop, that calling the new version anything related to Vista is bad. Thus, MS Pinnacle might be bad. So might MS View. So might Vista II. Although the V-2 might be appropriate for all the wreckage it has caused. [Stretching the analogy here....]
When your product shits the bed as bad as Vista, you 'go back to basics'. And that's what Windows 7 harkens back to. It's simple, it's basic, it comes from a time when things just worked.
Ford Model T
VW Type 1 (aka beetle or bug)
Windows 7
Car makers didn't need fancy names when things just worked. It's only when cars started getting bloated that they needed fancy names like
Ford Explorer (which, AFAICT, is only used to explore the sales at the mall)
Dodge Grand Caravan (same)
Mercury Marquis
Or maybe because it's the system they wish they'd released in 2007?
I think there is a lesson in this to the companies that sell DRM crap that depends on servers. It's a one-time purchase with a recurring cost to the seller. Ultimately, DRM is a losing proposition to the retailer - if you run the DRM servers long enough, you *will* lose money.
It's basically a ponzi scheme - to cover the cost of running the DRM servers, you have to keep finding new sales to prop up the running expenses on the old sales. Eventually you run out of new sales and you lose money.
The incremental cost / track of running those servers is miniscule, but as old sales add up you still have to pay for bandwidth, iron, and power to service them.
Seems that DRM based on servers is bad for retailers as well.
The committee gave them a glowing recommendation....
They must be glowing with happiness.... .....
Well, I'm sure some will be civilian positions and some will be contractors. If you want to apply, start looking.
Reminds of the job interview for the F111 fighter pilots:
Colonel: "We want to offer you a job. We can't tell you what you'll be doing, where you will be, or anything else. Do you accept?"
Captain: "Yes."
Well, the success of parenting is all about giving your kids choices. Take food, for example. My kids don't make bad food choices - because we don't have any 'bad' food in the house. So they can grab whatever they want, and we are assured that it's good.
Now take cars. Driving alone is an all-or-nothing thing; there is no way we as parents can insure our kids won't make bad choices. So we have to limit what they drive. When my kids are old enough to drive, I'm going to give them a 1984 diesel Merecedes or something like that. Big, slow, and heavy. You can't really get in too much trouble like that.
I live in the middle of 8 schools. I watch the high school kids and their driving is scary - they're on the phone, talking to their friends, cranking up the music, and not paying attention to driving. Worse, a significant number of them have powerful sports cars; the Ford Mustang seems to be the high schooler's choice. Many of these kids drive recklessly fast - 5 of those 8 schools are elementary schools and most kids here walk to school.
I don't see how putting an 80 MPH governor will help. What's needed is an ignition killer if the driver is talking on the phone or has his/her ipod on and in their ears, or has their head turned to the back seat.
Yabbut.... Any such system will be 'voluntary' - meaning each station/studio/whatever will be able to describe the latest murder-sex-mayhem sitcom as "wholesome family entertainment".
I'm with all the posters who just turn the TV off. Better yet, cut off the cable and spend time with your kids.
And yes, I have kids, and no, we don't use TV as a babysitter. Kids will find things to do if you provide them the opportunity to do so.
I cringe at the social messages in the commercials, even for kids' shows. The ads for the girls' toys on the 'tween shows are pretty shocking for me.... 11 year old girls, in tight clothing, miniskirts, full makeup and hair, dressed like they're ready to go man-shopping, playing at being 'executives'....
Mythtv is great. Next raise I get I'm cutting off live TV altogether and banishing commercials entirely.
All this is a long way to say that parents already are empowered to control what their kids watch. Get rid of cable, turn the TV off, and give them books, toys, blocks, crayons, whatever.
Morals and ethics are internal. Society may have some expectations, but ultimately the individual must act according to their own internal motivations.
If you are conflicted about something to the point of having to ask a bunch of strangers, then you are at odds with yourself. You may be tempted by the money but are struggling with the morality of the decision.
My own test is simple:
Will I sleep better at night for having done this? If the answer is yes, then go for it. Usually, just the act of having to ask is its own answer: no, it's not right to do this.
I intentionally kept my own opinion out of the original post. I've found it's best to tell the truth, treat others with respect, and live according to my own code of honor, ethics, and morals than to compromise any of that for money.
Now if the motivation is not money, but rather the ability to proceed with exciting, challenging work *and* get paid for it, that's different. It would be especially different if the project in question was struggling due to a lack of time available but that's not what I read into the post.
You're obviously conflicted about this; otherwise why be posting to /.?
So... Would the money allow you to do something more than you're doing now? Better house, bigger car? Is that important to you? Is it more important to you than your desire to be part of that particular community?
How critical are you to the success of the Open Source project? Would it die without you?
And, how critical are you to the success of this company's plans? Can they hire someone else for the job?
If it feels wrong, if it feels like it won't work for you, don't do it.
Typically off-the-shelf wifi access points. Currently the Asus 500G Premium running OpenWrt.
I think my samba build is part of the openwrt distribution (they were using 2.x and I built 3.0.xx for it.)
Disable the wifi, take the antenna off, and you have a really capable embedded linux computer.
First there was "Embrace"
Now there is "Extend"
Next up...
Unfortunately for MS, the FOSS genie can't be stuffed back in the bottle, and muddying the waters like this only serves to delay the inevitable - FOSS is cheaper and better than closed in a commodity market.
I do this commercially. I ship a small embedded box with custom firmware that works as a samba client and runs a VPN back to my server.
Then I run rsnapshot to rsync the remote.
That way the clients don't have to do any installation at all, I can admin my box remotely without any local representation, and it will work with any system as long as it supports samba.
The only setup required on the local site is a userid for the backup client.
The devil, of course, is in the details.
Well, they're 4th graders!
They're mainly into gross bodily functions and destroying stuff.
So talk to them about the time a rat took a crap in the mainframe, and how it brought down the whole company network, and you had to clean the poop out of the computer.....
Or maybe the time the squirrel got into the main power panel and blew itself up, taking $50K of wiring with it, along with racks and racks of equipment.
(I made the first one up, but the second one really happened....)
Well, I take the opposite view. Allow them access when they ask for it, unfiltered, but monitored. Explain to them that they will get 'bad' email. Tell them what to do with it.
At some point you will have to push them out of the nest. It's best they learn how to cope while in the nest, and not when they leave for college.
Talk to your kids. My kids have had access to the web and email ever since they were old enough to type. As a result, they don't have much interest in it; it's not forbidden so it doesn't have that secret attraction. They use computers, but I've time-limited their logins so they can only log in evenings.
Anyway, parenting is about teaching your kids how to cope, not keeping then isolated and innocent. Then again, I don't have cable TV, so that festering cauldron of slop is not available to my kids. That, more than any other thing I've done, has kept them innocent.
The telcos limit the phones you can connect to their network.
They lock you into contracts you can't break.
They cripple features on the phones.
They charge ridiculous sums of money for things that should be free.
And then they wonder why people don't use all of the features?
Reality check!
Only those whos candidate lost, and well, they're not in power, are they?
So not much chance of getting it fixed. Those in power will favor staying in power, those out of power don't have much to say about it.
I used to work developing new products for a manufacturing outfit. Too often we would get a call from shipping, asking for widget X. We'd say, what's a widget X? What does it do?
It would turn out that sales sold widget X to a customer based on customer demand. Widget X did not exist. They neglected to tell us engineers. We would find out only when the order was ready to ship.
Then we would design something, go out back, interrupt the production guys in the welding or machine shop, fab up a prototype, and carry it over to shipping.
Sales would get kudos for selling more stuff; we'd get dinged for poor productivity, and the production manager would be pissed off as all hell at us.
Sales just never really understood that these things take time, and that shipping a half-tested prototype isn't a good thing.
Diesels have become the new penis. Anyone who has a diesel must have a large, jacked up truck, preferrably a sixpack cab 4x4 with mud tires and a 6" lift, and all the soundproofing removed from the engine compartment so he can deafen all around.
And the diesel engine itself must be the largest engine available from any manufacturer; when another car maker comes out with a larger engine you must immediately trade yours in because it just doesn't have enough power.
No one wants to admit they have a small penis, so a small diesel will never sell.
If my system is part of this network, then...
I have a 1KB file that I want to store. So I send it up to the cloud. It gets stored as chunks that take up 6KB...
Now if I participate in the cloud, I need to offer up 6KB of storage.
Hmmm..
RAID6 needs less than 50% redundant drives. This stuff needs 600% redundant storage.
The storage needs don't add up, except in specialzed situations. Let's say I have information I don't want anyone to find if they steal my computer. I put it up there. But if it's so sensitive, do I really want it up on the web?
I see this as being useful for information smuggling. Hide the file in plain sight in little bits. Reassemble when you cross the border (or after the DHS goons leave...)
Actually....
This looks like a perfect platform for Angstrom
angstrom-distribution.org
Lots of apps, and more machines like this the better. Fro $98 I expect this will sell like crazy. Beats the crap out of a Sharp Zaurus....
Heh... While K&R ain't exactly light reading, it's not bad for a general intro. Certainly with enough backup it would make a good text.
But then again I've met high school kids who are really bright. Or maybe they just had good teachers?
You say you are 26. That means you've never been trhough a stock market crash that wiped out 60% of your savings.
That means you've never been unemployed for long periods of time.
That means you've never been through a recession.
That means you've never had to sell a house for less than you bought it for - not because you overbought, but because a local employer - the military, GM, a textile mill - shut down and now there's no work in town.
That means you probably don't have kids, and almost certainly don't have kids in school, where you are expected to donate time and money because the Gov't cannot afford to staff and finance our public schools.
I could go on and on... At the risk of sounding patronizing, save your post and re-read it in 40 years and you'll realize just how naive it sounds.
Or perhaps the company that they put their OWN MONEY into raided the retirement fund and there's nothing left.... Or it went belly up. Or it managed to pawn the retirement fund off on the taxpayers. Or the stock market crashed.
Retirement should not be a crapshoot. It should be managed by an entity with the resources and accountability to actually pay what it promises.
I'm looking at SS, Military retirement, city retirement, and personal 401(K), IRA, etc. for retirement - and all of that still doesn't add up to the below-market wage I make today.
It's pretty hard these days to 'save up' for retirement. Not because people are living frivolously, but because wages have essentially been flat for the last 20 years in the broad mid-career band, while everything else has been going up, including the number of hours worked.
Yes, a lot of people are living beyond their means. But even responsible people are having a hard time making ends meet after retirement.
Heck, the contribution cap for an IRA hasn't changed in 20 years...
Think again.... Most people don't have the resources. I know people over 65 who work 2 jobs, 7 days a week, to pay medical bills, rent, and food.
A handful of people work because they want to. Most work because they have no choice. Do you think the greeters at Wal-Mart are there because they want to? Or because they have to eat?
Your statement is the sort of spin I'd expect from the neocons. Ultimately, people want to work because the alternative is starving, or not taking your meds, or living on the street....
As someone who is nearing that age, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to retire without working. It's not easy, and our broken medical system is a huge part of it.