Um, the distinct advantage the west has over the third world is that we can afford to eat. I don't think that they'll be any worse off because we get buff.
THANK YOU, I'm glad someone made this point before I came through. For, well, centuries now, one of the major 'advantages' western culture (and some eastern cultures!) have had over their less-fortunate third world neighbors has been adequate nutrition. Although I don't have any handy facts, I'll postulate that most cases of third world tech withstanding organized conquering efforts of colonialism were probably in areas where the natives ate well. When you aren't eating well, its really hard to do much of anything.
I am very sad that the Tiki drive is apparently no longer available from thinkgeek. I think my husband would have liked that for christmas:( Has anyone found this elsewhere? I haven't googled, I'm just being lazy!
Aw heck, you don't have to be a graybeard to be stuck working on a VAX:) I'm 23! I was hired to work on some new gov't systems, which have been tabled, so they stuck me on support for systems that are older than I am. Bummer. But I guess I'm learning a lot, although its not particularly marketable.. Then again, I guess a lot of people who worked on these systems when they were cutting-edge are retiring, so there's going to be a whole crop of people learning how to maintain them.
I keep expecting a hardware manufacturer to start making "old computer on a chip" for people who need access to older systems for legacy code and equipment, but want to get rid of the actual system. Maybe its not as big an issue as it seems here.
I was just thinking this myself. The versioned file system is the ONLY thing I like about the VAX I'm forced to get along with. But the versioning? pretty cool!
..... well, that's hyperbole for you. But you're making a point here which I'd like to expand on. If you want to go with the logic that people with low IQ (a measurement of 'brightness' in our current society: the ability to do a job, make rational decisions, follow cause and effect, function in society, etc.) end up outside the work system, then a further thing to consider is/welfare/. I used to have neighbors with way, way too many kids. Their entire income was welfare-based, because they professed an inability to get jobs due to lack of training. They had as many kids as they could, since that provided them more income.
If you want to make a connection between intelligence (based on an IQ test) and genetics, then you have to examine a situation like this. It's only encouraging people who could not fit into the system already to have MORE offspring, thus creating MORE people with the same problem. Meanwhile the rest of us are generally waiting until 'the time is right' to have our 1-3 (on average) children.
I want companies to treat their workers like human beings, not robots. That does not mean that they are "responsible for social lives" because I want them to stay the fuck out of my social life. Companies like Google would love it if you replace your social life with spending more time at work and they provide enticements to do so.
But they are not requiring you to stay there. Sure there is a corporate culture of people who like to hang out there, but they don't make you. I have never heard a report of an employee being unfairly treated because they didn't spend all day at the Google office, but instead decided to spend time elsewhere (assuming they got their work done). It sounded like in the original post there was a belief that Google was attempting to undermine people's ability to have a social life, by providing enticements and neat things at work.
I can understand that perhaps there are people who can't handle a workplace like Google's, and not because of 'forced long work hours'. Google doesn't have Lumberghs (sp?) wandering by your cube near closing on Friday to ask you to work during the weekend. If you want to come in and work on something because you are engaged in it, because you had an idea about it, because its a good time to get everyone on your time together, so be it. But they aren't requiring it, these people are choosing to do so. If someone is having marital troubles because one member of the marriage keeps spending all their time at work, that is NOT the company's fault unless the company is explicitly requiring their presence - if that person is choosing to go there instead of home, that's a PERSONAL problem. If some geek has no social life because he enjoys his work and stays there all the time, its not the company's fault for creating 'enticements' like a gym and laundry facilities at work, its that person's choice. If anything, Google might be 'faulted' for blurring the lines between 'social outside work' and 'social inside work', which might not be a terrible thing for your average codewarrior. I think it would be JUST TERRIBLE to be surrounded by people who enjoy my interests and understand what I'm saying, I'd really hate to spend time around them! I'd much rather work an environment where talking to your coworkers about anything other than work is forbidden, where time is strictly counted to the minute, and I don't have anything in common with my coworkers. I'd like to work in a place with no facilities for keeping my kids close by where I can visit them during the day, no access to food or drink if I don't feel like packing my lunch or driving somewhere and eating up more time out of my day (since I wouldn't be paid for that time I took to go get lunch, or eat it!), etc. etc. etc.
I think you're either totally overreacting, or you had a bad experience/socially/ at a company like this. I'm sure these sorts of companies have cliques, and I imagine there is a lot of peer pressure to act in certain ways. But that doesn't mean you have to take it, and you're not penalized if you don't. What's your real complaint?
I second this. My husband and I have been watching Desperate Housewives via iTM(V?)S but primarily on my iBook screen. We used to have a cable subscription with good quality (although not digital) and a TiVo. I'd say the compression on the video from iTunes was equivalent to what TiVo does with everything but pure-quality recordings (like 'Medium', I think it was called). It's hardly noticable at all unless you are looking for artifacts - the only one I regularly notice is a little bit of squared-offness of the text in the title during the title sequence, but I think the laptop screen makes it more noticable than it would be on a TV.
Soon I'll be getting my video adapter, and we'll see how it looks fed through our A/V receiver to the TV.
So you want companies to be responsible for the social lives outside of work of their employees in addition to their quality of life while at work? It's not like Google has some sort of ridiculous policy of being non-understanding of outside-of-work needs, in fact, they seem to be much more likely to accept needing to take off time to do things with your family than most companies, because of their flexible scheduling and 'enlightened' business practices. Need to leave for an hour in the middle of the day three times a week in order to spend time with your son before soccer practice or something? Probably not a problem at Google, but probably a problem at a lot of other companies.
When I was a student in Gainesville, FL, I needed to get a landline for a little while. By ordering from BellSouth via phone (which is funny to me, to order a phone line by phone, I had to use a payphone!), and regularly insisting I didn't even want long distance access, just 911 and local dialing, not regional, not state, not national, just local, I ended up getting a rate of.. $11/month! There was about another 2-3$ in taxes and fees, though.
Since then (like 4 years ago?) I've switched to cellphone only, although I think the price reaming is worse in cellphones than with other utilities. Mostly I switched over for the portability aspect, and the lack of sales calls.
Just imagine how horrible it is to drive in a state full of old people with Florida tags! Actually I live in N. Florida, where the retiree : normal people ratio is still ok, although people 20-30 only make up like 5% of the local population:( (the majority is baby boomers, who are quickly approaching 'always brakeing' age)
I was confused, too. I think I read it twice before I realized it was probably due to the lack of a helpful colon and/or better parallel structure in the comma'd list.
I second that complaint. I'm so tired of people lighting up the entire neighborhood with countless strands of tacky multicolored lights just strewn about in no pattern or reasonable fashion. There is one house down the street that looks like they just threw the lights at their bushes and then plugged them in. Tacky!
When I was growing up there was one street near where we lived where everyone was retired, and they competed every year for the most impressive christmas displays. They were always tasteful, if totally over the top. I think people are forgetting how to do that.
SecurityFocus is apparently owned by Symantec, so I'm unsure just how much salt you might want to throw on that article. I'm guessing at least a grain or two.
It would be nice if they were considering a la carte for a la carte's sake, instead of an appeal to parental groups and religious groups - "Think of the Children!". Back when I still paid for cable, I had this handy feature on every television I'd ever used, wherein you could DELETE channels from the lineup. Of course, you could still get to them if you punched in the channel numbers, but for all intents and purposes the channel was gone as far as I was concerned. Bye bye, religious 24 hour channel, spanish TV, and the 8 home shopping channels or whatever.
Unfortunately for the FCC, it has little to no authority or power over cable TV. They're just asking for it, here, and appealing to the popular religious power of today.
Part of me wonders how content providers would view this; perhaps they'd rather start selling their shows at $2/per instead of $2/month? Or would that provide too much power to Apple and iTunes?
I'd think most people already have a 'dummy but checked sometimes' email account these days, at least slashdotters. GMail makes it easy, I set one up for filling out internet forms and providing as plaintext in forums and comments and the like, and I set up another JUST for slashdot (see above!). They both get forwarded to my 'actual' email account, tagged with a label to tell me the source. Every so often, I sort through them for actual information.
There have been a LOT of good suggestions in this thread. I don't think I've seen anyone mention C.J. Cherryh, but she was one of my top-notch favorite authors from 5th grade through mid-highschool. She focuses a lot on alien cultures in her different series, and as far as I can recall, they are very 'clean'.
Some of the suggested authors have varying levels of 'clean'ness. McAffrey was typically quite clean in her earlier Pern novels, with the exception of a reference to the unf-unfing in the very first book. I read that when I was around 10, and I didn't pick up on it, so it wasn't explicit:) Authors like Andre Norton and most particularly Piers Anthony tend to be a little racier although not completely smutty (well, except for SOME anthony books. The Xanth books chalk everything up to the 'Adult Conspiracy' which is never explicitly discussed, but there is a LOT of blatent sexual flirting. Some of his other books have explicit scenes).
I'd vote for the Ender's Game books, even if the lead character is male. I thought they were absolutely fantastic, and dealt with some serious social issues in an easily read format (doesn't all good science fiction?). If the girls are interested in scifi/fant, I'd say get them anything classic and/or dealing with younger characters, and try not to worry too much about whether the main character(s) are female. That's just silly. I would be careful with the level of adult content (maybe read the books yourself first? That's what my parents did for me until I was around 15), especially since they aren't YOUR kids. There's a decent amount of evidence out on the net that explicit stories have more of an effect on young preteen/teen girls than they do on boys (I don't think so, but hey, there you go).
If they are very good readers and have patience, get them some Neal Stephenson (especially Cryptonomicon). I've decided he has a mental block against writing any sort of sex scenes (he only writes the foreplay, and then the characters always fall asleep or something).
What was really fantastic about the recount was that I was going to school at the University of Florida at the time. It has its own voting district, so all students/staff who live on campus are in that one district. Nader was a popular choice for liberals who didn't care for Gore (Nader actually campaigned there), and he got much more votes than the difference between the total Bush/Gore count for Florida.
This means, of course, Bush winning is Nader's fault, which is really unfortunate, since it would be nice to have a viable more-than-two-party system.
Why is there a state law mandating a cap on municipal internet services? What was the reasoning behind that? I'd guess it was lobbying by existing providers, who didn't want 'unfair competition' from the G.
Part of me wonders greatly at what good wifi will do the people in NO at the moment. Do they all have power? Do they all have running and potable water? Do they have roofs? Do they even have computers with wifi cards? The other part of me realizes that wifi could be very, very useful to ongoing efforts to clean things up and get things running, and it does represent a lot of hopefulness and maybe even an effort to take advantage of the situation to push through legislation that kept getting batted down for stupid reasons before (although that's not necessarily.. admirable).
If they continue with efforts like this, and with large portions of infrastructure being rebuilt and the possibility of deep discounts to get businesses to move back in to the area, NO could become a new tech center.
Manor is actually a word... so it would pass the spell checker... unfortunately. I think one day I will have to write an article, and then replace all possible homophones. Then I'll run the spell-check!
Maybe I should tell the Prof to just give some E-Tech student twenty bucks to make a PCB design...
Or just get them to assign it as a semester project for a tech elective / grad class. That way they get students to pay for the right to take the class, and then develop (or mostly develop) the product for them. Take the best components from the different submissions, improve on them with your greater experience, and voila! I swear to god this is how my databases professor was operating.
You shared your whole drive?? Are your system files etc. on another drive? I guess you must have good intra to inter network security, to go and do something like that. Another question: Does the iPod think its PC-formatted or Mac-formatted when you do this? I would assume Mac, since as far as it knows its getting the music from the iBook.
Thanks for this, I was planning on embarking on a similar project this week to move all the music files from my husband's and mine's laptops to our PC we hardly use any more except for some legacy apps. My laptop is an iBook, and I have an iPod, so I was curious about sync'ing/loading songs over the network. Good to hear that it will work. Did you have to set up the PC's mp3 folder(s) as a network drive, or just do a standard share of it over the network?
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Um, the distinct advantage the west has over the third world is that we can afford to eat. I don't think that they'll be any worse off because we get buff.
THANK YOU, I'm glad someone made this point before I came through. For, well, centuries now, one of the major 'advantages' western culture (and some eastern cultures!) have had over their less-fortunate third world neighbors has been adequate nutrition. Although I don't have any handy facts, I'll postulate that most cases of third world tech withstanding organized conquering efforts of colonialism were probably in areas where the natives ate well. When you aren't eating well, its really hard to do much of anything.
I am very sad that the Tiki drive is apparently no longer available from thinkgeek. I think my husband would have liked that for christmas :( Has anyone found this elsewhere? I haven't googled, I'm just being lazy!
I don't think so. I will have to try this out tonight, since it bugs me that I cannot remember!
Aw heck, you don't have to be a graybeard to be stuck working on a VAX :) I'm 23! I was hired to work on some new gov't systems, which have been tabled, so they stuck me on support for systems that are older than I am. Bummer. But I guess I'm learning a lot, although its not particularly marketable.. Then again, I guess a lot of people who worked on these systems when they were cutting-edge are retiring, so there's going to be a whole crop of people learning how to maintain them.
I keep expecting a hardware manufacturer to start making "old computer on a chip" for people who need access to older systems for legacy code and equipment, but want to get rid of the actual system. Maybe its not as big an issue as it seems here.
I was just thinking this myself. The versioned file system is the ONLY thing I like about the VAX I'm forced to get along with. But the versioning? pretty cool!
Thank you for posting that article. I found it very interesting.
..... well, that's hyperbole for you. But you're making a point here which I'd like to expand on. If you want to go with the logic that people with low IQ (a measurement of 'brightness' in our current society: the ability to do a job, make rational decisions, follow cause and effect, function in society, etc.) end up outside the work system, then a further thing to consider is /welfare/. I used to have neighbors with way, way too many kids. Their entire income was welfare-based, because they professed an inability to get jobs due to lack of training. They had as many kids as they could, since that provided them more income.
If you want to make a connection between intelligence (based on an IQ test) and genetics, then you have to examine a situation like this. It's only encouraging people who could not fit into the system already to have MORE offspring, thus creating MORE people with the same problem. Meanwhile the rest of us are generally waiting until 'the time is right' to have our 1-3 (on average) children.
I want companies to treat their workers like human beings, not robots. That does not mean that they are "responsible for social lives" because I want them to stay the fuck out of my social life. Companies like Google would love it if you replace your social life with spending more time at work and they provide enticements to do so.
/socially/ at a company like this. I'm sure these sorts of companies have cliques, and I imagine there is a lot of peer pressure to act in certain ways. But that doesn't mean you have to take it, and you're not penalized if you don't. What's your real complaint?
But they are not requiring you to stay there. Sure there is a corporate culture of people who like to hang out there, but they don't make you. I have never heard a report of an employee being unfairly treated because they didn't spend all day at the Google office, but instead decided to spend time elsewhere (assuming they got their work done). It sounded like in the original post there was a belief that Google was attempting to undermine people's ability to have a social life, by providing enticements and neat things at work.
I can understand that perhaps there are people who can't handle a workplace like Google's, and not because of 'forced long work hours'. Google doesn't have Lumberghs (sp?) wandering by your cube near closing on Friday to ask you to work during the weekend. If you want to come in and work on something because you are engaged in it, because you had an idea about it, because its a good time to get everyone on your time together, so be it. But they aren't requiring it, these people are choosing to do so. If someone is having marital troubles because one member of the marriage keeps spending all their time at work, that is NOT the company's fault unless the company is explicitly requiring their presence - if that person is choosing to go there instead of home, that's a PERSONAL problem. If some geek has no social life because he enjoys his work and stays there all the time, its not the company's fault for creating 'enticements' like a gym and laundry facilities at work, its that person's choice. If anything, Google might be 'faulted' for blurring the lines between 'social outside work' and 'social inside work', which might not be a terrible thing for your average codewarrior. I think it would be JUST TERRIBLE to be surrounded by people who enjoy my interests and understand what I'm saying, I'd really hate to spend time around them! I'd much rather work an environment where talking to your coworkers about anything other than work is forbidden, where time is strictly counted to the minute, and I don't have anything in common with my coworkers. I'd like to work in a place with no facilities for keeping my kids close by where I can visit them during the day, no access to food or drink if I don't feel like packing my lunch or driving somewhere and eating up more time out of my day (since I wouldn't be paid for that time I took to go get lunch, or eat it!), etc. etc. etc.
I think you're either totally overreacting, or you had a bad experience
I second this. My husband and I have been watching Desperate Housewives via iTM(V?)S but primarily on my iBook screen. We used to have a cable subscription with good quality (although not digital) and a TiVo. I'd say the compression on the video from iTunes was equivalent to what TiVo does with everything but pure-quality recordings (like 'Medium', I think it was called). It's hardly noticable at all unless you are looking for artifacts - the only one I regularly notice is a little bit of squared-offness of the text in the title during the title sequence, but I think the laptop screen makes it more noticable than it would be on a TV.
Soon I'll be getting my video adapter, and we'll see how it looks fed through our A/V receiver to the TV.
So you want companies to be responsible for the social lives outside of work of their employees in addition to their quality of life while at work? It's not like Google has some sort of ridiculous policy of being non-understanding of outside-of-work needs, in fact, they seem to be much more likely to accept needing to take off time to do things with your family than most companies, because of their flexible scheduling and 'enlightened' business practices. Need to leave for an hour in the middle of the day three times a week in order to spend time with your son before soccer practice or something? Probably not a problem at Google, but probably a problem at a lot of other companies.
When I was a student in Gainesville, FL, I needed to get a landline for a little while. By ordering from BellSouth via phone (which is funny to me, to order a phone line by phone, I had to use a payphone!), and regularly insisting I didn't even want long distance access, just 911 and local dialing, not regional, not state, not national, just local, I ended up getting a rate of.. $11/month! There was about another 2-3$ in taxes and fees, though.
Since then (like 4 years ago?) I've switched to cellphone only, although I think the price reaming is worse in cellphones than with other utilities. Mostly I switched over for the portability aspect, and the lack of sales calls.
I have Florida tags, you insensitive clod!
:( (the majority is baby boomers, who are quickly approaching 'always brakeing' age)
Just imagine how horrible it is to drive in a state full of old people with Florida tags! Actually I live in N. Florida, where the retiree : normal people ratio is still ok, although people 20-30 only make up like 5% of the local population
I was confused, too. I think I read it twice before I realized it was probably due to the lack of a helpful colon and/or better parallel structure in the comma'd list.
I second that complaint. I'm so tired of people lighting up the entire neighborhood with countless strands of tacky multicolored lights just strewn about in no pattern or reasonable fashion. There is one house down the street that looks like they just threw the lights at their bushes and then plugged them in. Tacky!
When I was growing up there was one street near where we lived where everyone was retired, and they competed every year for the most impressive christmas displays. They were always tasteful, if totally over the top. I think people are forgetting how to do that.
SecurityFocus is apparently owned by Symantec, so I'm unsure just how much salt you might want to throw on that article. I'm guessing at least a grain or two.
It would be nice if they were considering a la carte for a la carte's sake, instead of an appeal to parental groups and religious groups - "Think of the Children!". Back when I still paid for cable, I had this handy feature on every television I'd ever used, wherein you could DELETE channels from the lineup. Of course, you could still get to them if you punched in the channel numbers, but for all intents and purposes the channel was gone as far as I was concerned. Bye bye, religious 24 hour channel, spanish TV, and the 8 home shopping channels or whatever.
Unfortunately for the FCC, it has little to no authority or power over cable TV. They're just asking for it, here, and appealing to the popular religious power of today.
Part of me wonders how content providers would view this; perhaps they'd rather start selling their shows at $2/per instead of $2/month? Or would that provide too much power to Apple and iTunes?
I'd think most people already have a 'dummy but checked sometimes' email account these days, at least slashdotters. GMail makes it easy, I set one up for filling out internet forms and providing as plaintext in forums and comments and the like, and I set up another JUST for slashdot (see above!). They both get forwarded to my 'actual' email account, tagged with a label to tell me the source. Every so often, I sort through them for actual information.
There have been a LOT of good suggestions in this thread. I don't think I've seen anyone mention C.J. Cherryh, but she was one of my top-notch favorite authors from 5th grade through mid-highschool. She focuses a lot on alien cultures in her different series, and as far as I can recall, they are very 'clean'.
:) Authors like Andre Norton and most particularly Piers Anthony tend to be a little racier although not completely smutty (well, except for SOME anthony books. The Xanth books chalk everything up to the 'Adult Conspiracy' which is never explicitly discussed, but there is a LOT of blatent sexual flirting. Some of his other books have explicit scenes).
Some of the suggested authors have varying levels of 'clean'ness. McAffrey was typically quite clean in her earlier Pern novels, with the exception of a reference to the unf-unfing in the very first book. I read that when I was around 10, and I didn't pick up on it, so it wasn't explicit
I'd vote for the Ender's Game books, even if the lead character is male. I thought they were absolutely fantastic, and dealt with some serious social issues in an easily read format (doesn't all good science fiction?). If the girls are interested in scifi/fant, I'd say get them anything classic and/or dealing with younger characters, and try not to worry too much about whether the main character(s) are female. That's just silly. I would be careful with the level of adult content (maybe read the books yourself first? That's what my parents did for me until I was around 15), especially since they aren't YOUR kids. There's a decent amount of evidence out on the net that explicit stories have more of an effect on young preteen/teen girls than they do on boys (I don't think so, but hey, there you go).
If they are very good readers and have patience, get them some Neal Stephenson (especially Cryptonomicon). I've decided he has a mental block against writing any sort of sex scenes (he only writes the foreplay, and then the characters always fall asleep or something).
What was really fantastic about the recount was that I was going to school at the University of Florida at the time. It has its own voting district, so all students/staff who live on campus are in that one district. Nader was a popular choice for liberals who didn't care for Gore (Nader actually campaigned there), and he got much more votes than the difference between the total Bush/Gore count for Florida.
This means, of course, Bush winning is Nader's fault, which is really unfortunate, since it would be nice to have a viable more-than-two-party system.
Why is there a state law mandating a cap on municipal internet services? What was the reasoning behind that? I'd guess it was lobbying by existing providers, who didn't want 'unfair competition' from the G.
Part of me wonders greatly at what good wifi will do the people in NO at the moment. Do they all have power? Do they all have running and potable water? Do they have roofs? Do they even have computers with wifi cards? The other part of me realizes that wifi could be very, very useful to ongoing efforts to clean things up and get things running, and it does represent a lot of hopefulness and maybe even an effort to take advantage of the situation to push through legislation that kept getting batted down for stupid reasons before (although that's not necessarily.. admirable).
If they continue with efforts like this, and with large portions of infrastructure being rebuilt and the possibility of deep discounts to get businesses to move back in to the area, NO could become a new tech center.
Manor is actually a word... so it would pass the spell checker... unfortunately. I think one day I will have to write an article, and then replace all possible homophones. Then I'll run the spell-check!
Where are you from, regionally? It's entirely possible your common figure of speech isn't so common elsewhere.
Maybe I should tell the Prof to just give some E-Tech student twenty bucks to make a PCB design...
Or just get them to assign it as a semester project for a tech elective / grad class. That way they get students to pay for the right to take the class, and then develop (or mostly develop) the product for them. Take the best components from the different submissions, improve on them with your greater experience, and voila! I swear to god this is how my databases professor was operating.
You shared your whole drive?? Are your system files etc. on another drive? I guess you must have good intra to inter network security, to go and do something like that. Another question: Does the iPod think its PC-formatted or Mac-formatted when you do this? I would assume Mac, since as far as it knows its getting the music from the iBook.
Thanks for this, I was planning on embarking on a similar project this week to move all the music files from my husband's and mine's laptops to our PC we hardly use any more except for some legacy apps. My laptop is an iBook, and I have an iPod, so I was curious about sync'ing/loading songs over the network. Good to hear that it will work. Did you have to set up the PC's mp3 folder(s) as a network drive, or just do a standard share of it over the network?