I hopped on to post a similar (but snarkier, "Because unemployment benefits weren't affected.") comment when I saw your timeframe. That was the period when my company randomly laid off 5% of its workforce, me included. That was my last stint in IT - I've been in education since, and it's highly unlikely I'll ever go back.
The real truth is that the IT industry got well gutted in the last seven years or so. Hard to trim any more since a large amount is bare-bones. I don't know many IT people who say their dept is overstaffed - it's understaffed for just about everyone I know.
As I've posted here before, that's 1/2 of the problem. The other half is that the number on the sign at the gas station for diesel is larger than that for super. It doesn't matter that diesel has more energy, and you get better MPG out of it - the American public is stupid, and that higher cost per gallon is the other reason they won't be sold in the US.
And that, sir, is the problem. As long as you keep buying this shit, they'll keep making a profit on it, and they'll keep putting in this shitty-ass DRM.
Until some of these companies go under, the DRM will stay. So pirate their shit, and spend your money on publishers like Stardock, who have minimal to no DRM.
And interestingly, portables are the fastest growing segment of the computer market. I wonder how long it will take for publishers to realize that cd checking might be costing them substantial sales.
Now that you mention it, I know several people who use their MBP or beastly Dell as a gaming machine. In some cases, their primary gaming machine.
...I don't want to talk to anyone. I want to listen to music and think. I process things. There is absolutely no reason that every moment of our lives needs to be social.
And do you shake your cane at them, and yell at them when they walk on your lawn?
You come off like a grouchy old man, who doesn't understand what it is these kids see in this newfanged social-interweb thingie.
But for the record, I completely agree. My social networking is on my time, and I'm not beholden to it. I have no update or check-in schedule, and I only answer my phone when I feel like it. It's amazingly liberating.
The only way I can see to solve this would be to make a generic law which stated that breaking anything is legal, if: A) You didn't do it for profit, B) You informed the rightful owners, but no other 3rd parties, and C) You didn't do any real damage in the process.
However, that would end up being filled with abuse, and nobody in high places would let a law like that hit the books.
Actually, the NE also needs a couple hundred feet of well most of the time. My parents' well is 550', and the costs I stated in the sub $10k range were for that sort of well. 400-500' through rock, 20-40' of casing at the top, pump, pipe, and pressure tank. Hell, the general submersible pumps they still put in are a couple hundred bucks, perhaps $500 at most. Even a beefy one like yours is only $1000.
I never realized you could get ripped off that badly on that scale. That's truly impressive.
A decade ago I spent a summer drilling wells on the east coast. I know CA is expensive and all, and inflation and such happens, but at that time the average cost to drill a well and hook it to a house was $4000-$6000.
A geothermal well around here currently costs in the $12-$15,000 range, depending on capacity. And that's deeper and wider than a normal water well, and includes the heat exchanger.
I highly doubt that a water hookup costs that much, and I know damn well (heh) that it doesn't cost $40k to drill a well. If your numbers are accurate, that's one of the biggest rip-offs that I've ever heard of.
But as many here have already said, you're essentially punishing him for telling you. If he hadn't taken the time to inform you, he wouldn't have been punished. In the future, if anyone else does this they won't let you know, because that means jail time.
What they are doing is stupid. Legal, yes. But stupid. Far better they create an environment where the people who break in tell them how every time. And at a college, there will be people trying to break stuff on a regular basis.
The solution is a badass, omnipotent, omniscient being, able to smite at will, subscription bedamned. When the forest god assumes wolf form and eats you dead, dead, dead as you attempt to exterminate the wolves, everyone else will think twice about doing it.
While it doesn't work all that well IRL, on the internet, most everything is better with a vengeful dictator at the helm. Griefers and other problem users can be struck down with little else.
For a long time I've wondered how stable and accurate a stock exchange would be if you could only sell your stock after 1 month + 1month*rnd() after you bought it. If everyone knew that they were holding on for an average for 1.5 months, I'm guessing most of the short-term speculation and sniping would go away.
Left would be those people who were fine with long-term investments, based on sound research.
For a long time I've been tempted to start my own, personal, generically-named wiki for all the times when I might need a citation....in another wiki.
Because really, who checks the citations anyway? Certainly not the people who constantly dump that template in. They just look for the lack of citation.
Well said. The biggest issue really is the self-fulfilling prophecy of low PC game sales. A bunch of us waited anxiously for the next UT version from Epic. When it came out, it was riddled with bugs which had been well reported in the beta, the menus were still coded for console use only, and the it lacked a non-windows port, even though leading up to it there had been good talk about both a Mac port and a Linux port. And there was no Linux server port, meaning almost no good servers for the first few months.
Now Epic is talking about potentially getting out of the PC market due to the low sales. I'd be angry, but as a collective we've decided that the UT franchise which we've always loved for the modding is dead to us.
So yes, the PC market is dying. Because the publishers kicked it into a dark hole to wither and die.
You should ALWAYS have a way to receive over-the-air signals.
Well thanks for that bit of advice. Now, would you please come over here and move my house out of this valley? With rabbit ears I can sort-of see one channel, on clear days. With a bigass antenna on the roof, I might be able to get 2 fuzzy stations. Really, there are a fair number of people for whom this changeover won't make a god damn lick of difference.
It would be great to be able to get OTA signals - unfortunately for a fair number of us it isn't a possibility. And, of course, for those of us without generators it doesn't matter either.
I set my Asus EEE up this way. The SSD has the OS on it, only. I added in an SD card to hold the temp, var, swap, and home directories. While it's not super speedy, it saves the SSD from major use. And should I ever need to boot it under duress at the border, given a few seconds warning, the camera won't have any pictures on its SD card, and the laptop won't boot due to the pictures on its card.
Because North America is dragging its ass in legislating clean diesel fuel. Our current diesel fuel is full of sulfur and particulate emissions, and the generations of people who have grown up in the catalytic converter era of gasoline cars don't want that shit dumped out near them.
Wait until a few years after 2010 (IIRC) when some of the tougher diesel standards come into play, and you might see a shift in attitude in NA. But for the moment, diesel=dirty&smelly, and most consumers don't want that. Plus diesel costs far more per gallon at the moment, and when you are unable to do math, seeing that larger number on the sign a the fill-up station is scary.
I can type on my EEE - I only miss "c" 75% of the time, and I can't reliably hit ctrl-anything without dedicating an index finger for ctrl. And wtf was with putting the only function key on the opposite side of the keyboard from the keys you use it with?
But aside from that, I do love the thing. Use it all the time. I've typed hundreds of pages on it. With numerous corrections, of course. But it's usable. And it bounces. That's really the main selling point.
I really am amazed at how hard this is for so many people go grasp. It's almost like they've lived in suburbia or in cities all their lives....
I'm in rural hill country. Cable doesn't get closer than 15 hilly miles from my house. The only teleco which offers DSL is our local one up the road, 20 miles from me. Lucky for me, they chose to install a few repeaters a few years back, to gain access to the 2-3 dozen customers in my little hamlet. For $40 a month I get a massive download speed that maxes out at 90 kbps. I could spend a ton of money for the latency of satellite, or I could go with dialup. Those are my options.
Comcast would actually be a nice option around here, regardless of how slimy and sleazy they are.
Slashdot Mirror
I hopped on to post a similar (but snarkier, "Because unemployment benefits weren't affected.") comment when I saw your timeframe. That was the period when my company randomly laid off 5% of its workforce, me included. That was my last stint in IT - I've been in education since, and it's highly unlikely I'll ever go back.
The real truth is that the IT industry got well gutted in the last seven years or so. Hard to trim any more since a large amount is bare-bones. I don't know many IT people who say their dept is overstaffed - it's understaffed for just about everyone I know.
As I've posted here before, that's 1/2 of the problem. The other half is that the number on the sign at the gas station for diesel is larger than that for super. It doesn't matter that diesel has more energy, and you get better MPG out of it - the American public is stupid, and that higher cost per gallon is the other reason they won't be sold in the US.
And that, sir, is the problem. As long as you keep buying this shit, they'll keep making a profit on it, and they'll keep putting in this shitty-ass DRM.
Until some of these companies go under, the DRM will stay. So pirate their shit, and spend your money on publishers like Stardock, who have minimal to no DRM.
And interestingly, portables are the fastest growing segment of the computer market. I wonder how long it will take for publishers to realize that cd checking might be costing them substantial sales.
Now that you mention it, I know several people who use their MBP or beastly Dell as a gaming machine. In some cases, their primary gaming machine.
...I don't want to talk to anyone. I want to listen to music and think. I process things. There is absolutely no reason that every moment of our lives needs to be social.
And do you shake your cane at them, and yell at them when they walk on your lawn?
You come off like a grouchy old man, who doesn't understand what it is these kids see in this newfanged social-interweb thingie.
But for the record, I completely agree. My social networking is on my time, and I'm not beholden to it. I have no update or check-in schedule, and I only answer my phone when I feel like it. It's amazingly liberating.
The only way I can see to solve this would be to make a generic law which stated that breaking anything is legal, if: A) You didn't do it for profit, B) You informed the rightful owners, but no other 3rd parties, and C) You didn't do any real damage in the process.
However, that would end up being filled with abuse, and nobody in high places would let a law like that hit the books.
Actually, the NE also needs a couple hundred feet of well most of the time. My parents' well is 550', and the costs I stated in the sub $10k range were for that sort of well. 400-500' through rock, 20-40' of casing at the top, pump, pipe, and pressure tank. Hell, the general submersible pumps they still put in are a couple hundred bucks, perhaps $500 at most. Even a beefy one like yours is only $1000.
I never realized you could get ripped off that badly on that scale. That's truly impressive.
A decade ago I spent a summer drilling wells on the east coast. I know CA is expensive and all, and inflation and such happens, but at that time the average cost to drill a well and hook it to a house was $4000-$6000.
A geothermal well around here currently costs in the $12-$15,000 range, depending on capacity. And that's deeper and wider than a normal water well, and includes the heat exchanger.
I highly doubt that a water hookup costs that much, and I know damn well (heh) that it doesn't cost $40k to drill a well. If your numbers are accurate, that's one of the biggest rip-offs that I've ever heard of.
But he just said he wasn't a parent...
But as many here have already said, you're essentially punishing him for telling you. If he hadn't taken the time to inform you, he wouldn't have been punished. In the future, if anyone else does this they won't let you know, because that means jail time.
What they are doing is stupid. Legal, yes. But stupid. Far better they create an environment where the people who break in tell them how every time. And at a college, there will be people trying to break stuff on a regular basis.
It's a mac mini upstairs in the pantry, isn't it? And mom never uses the ssh account, does she?
{{Wikiformatting_doesn't_work_here}}
It's not reinventing the wheel if you don't know what the wheel is yet.
Wait...did you expect someone replying to you on slashdot to know what the hell they were talking about?
Well there's your problem...
The solution is a badass, omnipotent, omniscient being, able to smite at will, subscription bedamned. When the forest god assumes wolf form and eats you dead, dead, dead as you attempt to exterminate the wolves, everyone else will think twice about doing it.
While it doesn't work all that well IRL, on the internet, most everything is better with a vengeful dictator at the helm. Griefers and other problem users can be struck down with little else.
For a long time I've wondered how stable and accurate a stock exchange would be if you could only sell your stock after 1 month + 1month*rnd() after you bought it. If everyone knew that they were holding on for an average for 1.5 months, I'm guessing most of the short-term speculation and sniping would go away.
Left would be those people who were fine with long-term investments, based on sound research.
Currently that's spelled "half of the internet". The other half is flash.
Ditto. FF3 on my little Asus EEE can become unresponsive for several seconds at a time as it tries to chew through a few heavy scripts on a few pages.
Let me read slashdot while my radar weather loop loads, damnit!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
They didn't....contribute...enough.....
The man is Heir to a department store chain and owns his own NBA team.
Exactly WHAT is the cellular lobby supposed to bribe him with? Another major sports franchise? Perhaps Macy's?
For a long time I've been tempted to start my own, personal, generically-named wiki for all the times when I might need a citation....in another wiki. Because really, who checks the citations anyway? Certainly not the people who constantly dump that template in. They just look for the lack of citation.
Well said. The biggest issue really is the self-fulfilling prophecy of low PC game sales. A bunch of us waited anxiously for the next UT version from Epic. When it came out, it was riddled with bugs which had been well reported in the beta, the menus were still coded for console use only, and the it lacked a non-windows port, even though leading up to it there had been good talk about both a Mac port and a Linux port. And there was no Linux server port, meaning almost no good servers for the first few months.
Now Epic is talking about potentially getting out of the PC market due to the low sales. I'd be angry, but as a collective we've decided that the UT franchise which we've always loved for the modding is dead to us.
So yes, the PC market is dying. Because the publishers kicked it into a dark hole to wither and die.
Well thanks for that bit of advice. Now, would you please come over here and move my house out of this valley? With rabbit ears I can sort-of see one channel, on clear days. With a bigass antenna on the roof, I might be able to get 2 fuzzy stations. Really, there are a fair number of people for whom this changeover won't make a god damn lick of difference.
It would be great to be able to get OTA signals - unfortunately for a fair number of us it isn't a possibility. And, of course, for those of us without generators it doesn't matter either.
I set my Asus EEE up this way. The SSD has the OS on it, only. I added in an SD card to hold the temp, var, swap, and home directories. While it's not super speedy, it saves the SSD from major use. And should I ever need to boot it under duress at the border, given a few seconds warning, the camera won't have any pictures on its SD card, and the laptop won't boot due to the pictures on its card.
Because North America is dragging its ass in legislating clean diesel fuel. Our current diesel fuel is full of sulfur and particulate emissions, and the generations of people who have grown up in the catalytic converter era of gasoline cars don't want that shit dumped out near them.
Wait until a few years after 2010 (IIRC) when some of the tougher diesel standards come into play, and you might see a shift in attitude in NA. But for the moment, diesel=dirty&smelly, and most consumers don't want that. Plus diesel costs far more per gallon at the moment, and when you are unable to do math, seeing that larger number on the sign a the fill-up station is scary.
I can type on my EEE - I only miss "c" 75% of the time, and I can't reliably hit ctrl-anything without dedicating an index finger for ctrl. And wtf was with putting the only function key on the opposite side of the keyboard from the keys you use it with?
But aside from that, I do love the thing. Use it all the time. I've typed hundreds of pages on it. With numerous corrections, of course. But it's usable. And it bounces. That's really the main selling point.
I really am amazed at how hard this is for so many people go grasp. It's almost like they've lived in suburbia or in cities all their lives....
I'm in rural hill country. Cable doesn't get closer than 15 hilly miles from my house. The only teleco which offers DSL is our local one up the road, 20 miles from me. Lucky for me, they chose to install a few repeaters a few years back, to gain access to the 2-3 dozen customers in my little hamlet. For $40 a month I get a massive download speed that maxes out at 90 kbps. I could spend a ton of money for the latency of satellite, or I could go with dialup. Those are my options.
Comcast would actually be a nice option around here, regardless of how slimy and sleazy they are.