helping the handicapped illegal?
on
Hacking the XBox
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I would think that the Americans With Disabilities Act, combined with the many lobby groups for the disabled, would stomp all over anyone or any group attempting to block someone assisting the handicapped...
"I think those were the only coverage areas before they went under anyway"
I know that it was in operation in San Francisco and Phoenix, I've seen the little machines hanging from the light poles. I would assume that it was available in LA too, and maybe Tucson or Las Vegas.
Two cities is all well and good, but if it's not widely available, it's only a statistical abberation, not a service worth noting.
As implemented now, they use RFID for "loss prevention", and UPC codes for purchase. If they continue doing this, but use RFID to record individual items leaving, that's where the problem could occur.
Ricochet had a metro-area wireless solution that was very cell-like, and they failed. Someone will eventually pick up the slack, but it's not going to be quick. I wish that Ricochet were available, now that I have a laptop, for it would be perfect for me.
"If that's the case, then why is SCO going after IBM instead of Linus?"
Because Linus has no money, comparatively speaking. Even if SCO had sued Linus Torvalds, all other senior kernel developers, and Transmeta, they wouldn't have gotten much out of the deal. IBM has a lot of money.
If SCO had actually had real concern besides raw profit, they would have intervened when things were much less entrenched. They also would have ceased distributing Linux. They haven't even completely done that, since you can download source RPMs off of their site.
RFID isn't exactly perfect in itself...
on
Labelling RFID Products
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Remember. RFID isn't perfect. It's operation usually falls under Part 15 of the FCC rules, which is the whole "may not emit interference" and "must accept interference, even if it causes undesirable operation". RFID also uses 900MHz, 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and other public use frequencies, some of which are even also HAM bands. Amateur Radio isn't governed by part 15, so if a ham operator decides to operate on the frequency that RFID transceivers use, and if the HAM radio operator is operating legitimately, it's the RFID tranceiver's owner's problem, not the HAM's. Specific jamming is prohibited by the rules that amateur radio operators follow, but consumer use, nonlincensed devices are secondary users where both licensed and unlicensed spectrum overlap.
so, what happens when someone is checking out, and the computer fails to record all of the RFID tags because of interference, but the person has legitimately purchased something? When they go to return it, the computer could possibly say that it wasn't purchased, and then the individual is left with more headaches.
I think that the FCC should require that business-use devices like this be licensed, and each one individually identified in a publicly searchable database. I also believe that reissues of identification should be prohibited. This would work quite strongly to curtail use of RFID for tracking mechanisms.
I think that it's about time to call or write to my congressman, to trash on the USPTO.
Patenting Devices/Physical Things - Acceptable
Patenting Software Processes - Not great, but understandable why there would be interest. Implementation needs to be changed.
Patenting worldly operations - WTF?! Nothing machine is involved here. Wasn't a patent designed to cover an invention?
Software patents suck as they are implemented, but if the software at least exists, is available due to vendor's interest in making their money on selling their implementation rather than raking anyone else over the coals without making a product themselves, I'll live with it. It's part of a machine, functioning code. This complete and utter bullshit about patenting a business practice is an abomination, and makes a mockery of the entire reason that we have a patent system, which is to protect inventors. I do not look upon business transactions as something that would fit this, even if someone 'invented' the idea.
"You've just given a prime example of what's wrong with most debates about education. It's all idealogy, and no facts"
Okay, let's see your "facts"...
"You've got a lot of half-assed generalizations and pet theories. My lack of interest in these is extreme. Let's talk about real-world teachers. I've known good ones and bad ones. Good ones don't care about distractions -- they even use them. Bad ones blame their failures on distractions, immoral influences, "human nature" -- everything except their own lack of skill."
So, you're making a personal narrative on your own experiences. You reference teachers that you've known without even mentioning classes or names. Granted, I was a little vague, but the class that I mentioned was at least a Collegiate English class. It took place at ASU, in the fall of 1998, and was surprisingly taught by one of the more established professors, not by a graduate student.
You cite good teachers not caring about distractions, but I've not seen this myself, and you provide no data to back that up. So, again, it's your word against mine. I've found that good teachers do care about distractions, for they want to get the best out of every student in the class, and since different people have different attention spans, some teachers work to minimize the distractions.
And you're a bloody fool if you don't think about human nature. I, being a pessimist, prepare to be able to handle the worst-case scenario, even though the odds of it occurring are small, because sometimes those odds are met. In this instance, a teacher who goes in thinking that everything is bubbly great is going to be sorely disappointed when she or he has to curve a significant number of grades due to problems of low marks due to student distraction.
And as for "lack of skill", have you ever tried to teach a class? I sure as hell don't want to. I work in educational environments, and I see what teachers go through on a daily basis. I've seen teachers that are terrible, but by and large, they have a very tough job, especially in schools where students haven't been brought up to properly function in education.
"But I am grateful to you for one thing: you've made me invent a new epigram: Fascism is the last refuge of the inept."
You're truly amusing. I see that you've read "How to Win Arguments," by Dave Barry, but taken it a bit too literally. It was supposed to be a joke, after all.
State mandated education, for K-12, is facist, or at least dictatorial, since it is required. If you are required to do something, it may not be pleasant. Additionally, many colleges and universities are state funded, and have guidelines that they must follow from government to remain in operation. Private institutions, believe it or not, often have even stricter rules, and a student has little choice but to follow such rules if he or she wishes to remain enrolled.
Don't argue facts with me if you aren't going to produce any yourself.
Apple is transforming itself. Yes, they're still proprietary, but their OS isn't entirely so anymore. They're also supplying some kick ass hardware now, so there's a chance that even your average Linux user might find an OSX machine well enough built to be worth buying.
For myself, I want 64 bit. x86 offerings aren't really completely available to me as I have been able to find, but I could spend a couple thousand to have a very well built computer with a version of UNIX (abeit, a rather interestingly tweaked version) already prepared for the exact hardware, including the multimedia aspects. That's pretty damn slick.
Linux is awesome for anything I want to load it on to, but if I an buying the high-end hardware, I'd probably run OSX just for the fit.
That's what asinine fonts are for. I have better vision than most of my college professors, and "screen" is my friend. Ctrl-A-D is not always possible before they've noticed the non-curriculum content exists, but it gets the job done before they have time to read what is on the console, because of the nasty font.
I have to disagree. People will, by their very nature, take the path of least resistance, for what they want to do. If you provide a kid, an adolescent, or a college student with something that they would rather be doing, rather than the prescribed activity, they will do what they want, more often than not.
Education is dictatorial. You're not supposed to get what you want, you're supposed to get what the educational institution offers. By and large, students don't like this. The ones that do are usually in classes whose names are appended in "A", "AP", and "H", and even there you find the bored genius going insane. (S)he'll learn if you provide the knowledge, but if you provide a ready-made distraction, you've just lost.
English needs to be taught in an an immersive way, in my opinion. Computers do not help English instruction.
"Why not use a Yahoo group and subscribe them all."
Yahoo! Groups is not a good idea for something that is University Curriculum, especially if it is required. If someone managed to break into the system, there is not IT department to run to, and if Yahoo! changes policies, then you are left holding the bag. If you intend to use collaborative efforts digitally (which I strongly recommend against), at least use something that is available locally, provided or maintained by someone that you can go yell at if something goes wrong.
...and it degenerated into the teacher saying "stop touching the keyboard" every five minutes. No matter what concept for curriculum one comes up with, as long as the students can get onto the Internet, they will. I even was more creative than most, since I SSHed to the university solaris server, which was an arguably legitimate use, only to then launch a black and white console IRC session. I didn't get caught, but several other students with IM clients or GUI-based IRC clients did. Nothing punitive came of it though, because there were no real enforcement policies.
The class could have been much more efficiently run without computers, or at least without a live Internet connection. Some (like my case) will always find a way though the campus network, but if it can be minimized, that's the only way it will work.
Simply making them available would be a good start. GM released the Impact as the Saturn EV1, even though it was expensive, somewhat short on mileage, and somewhat experimental, and they still found a market for the lease program. Their success with simply getting them on the road helped to prototype technologies for newer cars, and it at least gave them some experience with how the technology behaved once implemented on a relatively decent scale. If fuel cell technologies don't make it into production-run, we won't really know how they'll behave. They might be considered fragile, but a real test could show that for 80% of electric car operators they'll be acceptable. This would lead to figuring out how to make them function for another fifteen to twenty percent, which would be enough for the market to bear.
"Well, if SCO hoped that IBM would settle or buy them out, they were clearly mistaken. Now that THAT plan has backfired, d u think they'll go after some one else next ? Maybe RedHat or SuSE ?"
Well, you see, this would require SCO to still exist as a functioning company after the IBM fiasco is all said and done. IBM's win would undoubtedly require SCO to pay IBM's legal fees, pay the court fees, and their own lawyers. IBM could also choose to countersue, citing numerous patent violations. If SCO runs out of money, they can't afford any more high-dollar lawyers, and they can't afford further court fees.
Also, don't forget, the court in Germany bitchslapped SCO already, so SuSE is out of the target area in German court.
"They've shown incredible lack of backbone in the past when push came to shove (OS/2 backing out of desktop market anyone?)..."
I don't think that IBM ever really had their heart set on the desktop market, even after PCs were demonstrated to be the new hotness. While they don't do individual sales anymore, they still maintain and support corporate and government customers. It's a tool to be put in when it's the best solution, like non-general use machines (kiosks, network terminals for point of sale, etc).
Linux isn't just a PC operating system for IBM. There are ports to S/390, and it runs on more than just low-end microcomputers. With AIX's age showing, they have even more reason to ensure that a suitable, industry supported replacement is ready, and if Linux provides that, they'll go with it. They show no sign of backing down.
"For weblogs, that is simple. Use a system that allows user comments."
What if I edit the text file containing my weblog information by hand? What if I manually type all of the <hr>, <i>, and <blockquote> tags by hand, to get the exact formatting that I want? Can I require that the replier submit their reply in a format that matches my existing site? Can I even stop them from sending me a MS-Word format doc, which I cannot open?
Weblogs are so bloody simple that it can all be done by hand, without any backend scripting, if one is patient enough to develop something initially and stick to it. I've been using my weblog format for more than two years, and it works quite well for my purposes. I'm sure that others don't like the lack of linkable comments until I recently added it, and the lack of interactive search capability, but it's my weblog, and if I want it to be based in stone-age HTML so it loads fast, I will.
So, if anyone wants to send a rebuttal to me, they can type it with my HTML formatting style.
Go for it anyway...
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Windmills are funky looking, sure. That section along I-10 in California is proof enough of that.
The thing is, they are quiet, clean, and often installed in places that there wouldn't be much other human habitation/recreation anyway. They're not good targets for terrorist attacks, since there's not really much to blow up, and jamming them isn't going to work either.
N.I.M.B.Y. syndrome needs to be reckoned with anyay. And yes, I do live near a power generating station. There is a Natural Gas facility that also does experimental development on the grounds, like solar, less than two miles from where I live. It's in the middle of the city, and not really close to a major industrial section. If you don't want to see it, there are three other cardinal directions to look toward. I'll take the cheap electricity, myself.
"Work sucks by definition. It's not all bad, but you are paid to sit through a lot of unsavory parts as well as the interesting pieces."
What?!
Don't take this the wrong way, but doesn't that make life suck? I mean, Depending on your commute time, you could be spending as much as eleven hours a day dealing with work related issues. If you're awake for sixteen hours a day, on average, then you only have five hours a day that is your time, to make your day un-suck from work sucking. The only days that you have all to yourself are weekends, and that's assuming that you don't have deadlines or overzealous bosses that need you to do weekend work.
I enjoy what I do, even field tech or bench tech work. It's not some "off in la-la land" type of enjoyment, either, I put forth a little bit of effort at one point to gain a lot of enjoyment out of it. If you don't like what you're doing, go get yourself a better job. Doing it for the money will leave you an empty shell of a person.
I *liked* QA more than field work, because I found it fun to make things break, especially when I could demonstrate them breaking, reproduce them breaking, and figure out what failed. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't have kept doing it for even the relatively short time that I was able to do it. For me, it was a rush, a small feeling of power, that the computer lost (or really, the programmer), and I won. This lead the company that I worked for to building better software, because the conflict was something between people and machines, not between people themselves, or between people and their desires to be elsewhere.
Seriously though, if you detest what you do this much, find something that you are passionate about, and do that.
"It may not level out if the jobs are flocking overseas. Those jobs could be gone for good."
I don't think that all of the jobs, or even a majority of them, will do that. Remember, it's good to have employees that you have at arms' reach, so you can throttle them when they screw up royally, metaphorically speaking. If they're physically in the same office as the corporation management, there is a lot greater quality control possible than if they're on the other side of the planet, working in a nearly opposing time zone. Easy to complete projects will be outsourced, but stuff requiring new developmental effort will remain. Also, if they're overseas, it might be more difficult to get financial restitution from them for something gone wrong, like the leaking of trade secrets, severe bugs that should have been fixed, and the like. The legal system there might not even give you a case. Here, there is precedent for dealing with employee misconduct, be it intentional or accidental, and restitution can sometimes be found.
"Speaking from experience, a lot of people that are left in the IT field actually DON'T have any idea of what a spreadsheet is."
I know. The sadder fact than that is that frequently people use spreadsheets, creating massive numbers of relational fields, macros, and processes, when they could use a programming language or shell script to achieve the same results in a fraction of the time.
" It's kinda sad that such a relatively young field has already bumped out the geeks that love and *know* software/hardware, and replaced them with drone opportunists."
Every field with high salaries is full of opportunists. The thing that computers/technology has as an advantage is that it's much harder to bullshit your way through. Sometimes people come into one of the Linux channels on IRC because they need help with a server they're responsible for, and they can't get this-or-that to work. When it's stuff documented at The Linux Documentation Project, or a Google Search away, I don't help them. I'll help those wanting to learn for themselves, but if they *need* my help to do a job, they shouldn't be doing it in the first place. They will eventually weed-out, because they'll find a problem that they can't beg for help to fix, and will expose themselves. Bosses don't like paying $129/hr or more for outside field help when they already have someone on staff who supposedly knows how to do it.
I do what I can to be the best technician/admin/computer guru that I can be. I work to show that my merit with what I do should give cause for me to be advanced, and it has worked several times. I'm fairly confident that it'll work again once the system has finished deflating from the bubble that blew.
"You are not remembering correctly. During WWII we were spending in excess of 60% of our GDP on the military. For all intents and purposes, it was all we did."
Which only goes to reinforce the point much, much further than I had realised...
"An ego is a very expensive thing to have. I'll have all that debt paid of within a year, and next time I'm out of a job I'll take that $28k tech job instead of turning my nose up at it. If you plan ahead (i.e., don't drive expensive cars or carry CC debt) you can easily pay your bills with $28k or even much less."
Definitely. That's the thing from when I was unemployed that I'm sure saved my butt, I didn't have any credit cards or credit card debt, and I had a reliable vehicle that I paid $2000 for that had low insurance because it was a decade old. Unemployment compensation paid for my rent and utilities, and my parents were willing to stock me with food that required me to learn to cook a little bit. Those four months sucked (including the two months after the WTC attacks especially), but not having significant expenses helped immensely.
... for companies to do so. Many were hiring people just to have them available to them for work. They never gave them anything revolutionary to work on (by and large), and ended up wasting them. It was a bad investment, planning for something that didn't pan out.
It didn't help that people *flocked* to technical programs at universities, forcing excessive weed-out classes to reduce admissions numbers. I ended up ceasing to ccontinue with my CSE major not because I didn't want to learn the trade to do something that I liked, working with computers in newer, exciting ways, but because I didn't want to do group projects with people who had no idea what a spreadsheet was, and we all were to be basically graded on the performance of the lowest member of the group. (yes, I am bitter)
People flocked to the programs for the money. There's no money now, and there are a lot of trained people who are very upset about not being able to make a five year career on a four year education. This is one fad that died.
I believe that it'll level out again, and that suitable numbers of college-training-required technical jobs will come back, but hopefully this period of bust will be remembered, and the trend won't repeat for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that the Americans With Disabilities Act, combined with the many lobby groups for the disabled, would stomp all over anyone or any group attempting to block someone assisting the handicapped...
One! One PC Modification site! Ha Ha Ha!
Two! Two PC Modification Sites! Ha Ha Ha!
Three! Three PC Modification Sites! Ha Ha Ha!
Four! Four PC Modification Sites! Ha Ha Ha!
With apologies to Jim Henson Productions...
"I think those were the only coverage areas before they went under anyway"
I know that it was in operation in San Francisco and Phoenix, I've seen the little machines hanging from the light poles. I would assume that it was available in LA too, and maybe Tucson or Las Vegas.
Two cities is all well and good, but if it's not widely available, it's only a statistical abberation, not a service worth noting.
"WHAT! So how does having every RFID tag ID registered in a central government database and unique curtail their use in tracking systems?"
It causes the system to never be implemented. If it's so hard to implement that retailers find it exhorbiantly expensive, it dies there.
As implemented now, they use RFID for "loss prevention", and UPC codes for purchase. If they continue doing this, but use RFID to record individual items leaving, that's where the problem could occur.
Ricochet had a metro-area wireless solution that was very cell-like, and they failed. Someone will eventually pick up the slack, but it's not going to be quick. I wish that Ricochet were available, now that I have a laptop, for it would be perfect for me.
"If that's the case, then why is SCO going after IBM instead of Linus?"
Because Linus has no money, comparatively speaking. Even if SCO had sued Linus Torvalds, all other senior kernel developers, and Transmeta, they wouldn't have gotten much out of the deal. IBM has a lot of money.
If SCO had actually had real concern besides raw profit, they would have intervened when things were much less entrenched. They also would have ceased distributing Linux. They haven't even completely done that, since you can download source RPMs off of their site.
Remember. RFID isn't perfect. It's operation usually falls under Part 15 of the FCC rules, which is the whole "may not emit interference" and "must accept interference, even if it causes undesirable operation". RFID also uses 900MHz, 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and other public use frequencies, some of which are even also HAM bands. Amateur Radio isn't governed by part 15, so if a ham operator decides to operate on the frequency that RFID transceivers use, and if the HAM radio operator is operating legitimately, it's the RFID tranceiver's owner's problem, not the HAM's. Specific jamming is prohibited by the rules that amateur radio operators follow, but consumer use, nonlincensed devices are secondary users where both licensed and unlicensed spectrum overlap.
so, what happens when someone is checking out, and the computer fails to record all of the RFID tags because of interference, but the person has legitimately purchased something? When they go to return it, the computer could possibly say that it wasn't purchased, and then the individual is left with more headaches.
I think that the FCC should require that business-use devices like this be licensed, and each one individually identified in a publicly searchable database. I also believe that reissues of identification should be prohibited. This would work quite strongly to curtail use of RFID for tracking mechanisms.
I think that it's about time to call or write to my congressman, to trash on the USPTO.
Patenting Devices/Physical Things - Acceptable
Patenting Software Processes - Not great, but understandable why there would be interest. Implementation needs to be changed.
Patenting worldly operations - WTF?! Nothing machine is involved here. Wasn't a patent designed to cover an invention?
Software patents suck as they are implemented, but if the software at least exists, is available due to vendor's interest in making their money on selling their implementation rather than raking anyone else over the coals without making a product themselves, I'll live with it. It's part of a machine, functioning code. This complete and utter bullshit about patenting a business practice is an abomination, and makes a mockery of the entire reason that we have a patent system, which is to protect inventors. I do not look upon business transactions as something that would fit this, even if someone 'invented' the idea.
Let's look at this piece by piece...
"You've just given a prime example of what's wrong with most debates about education. It's all idealogy, and no facts"
Okay, let's see your "facts"...
"You've got a lot of half-assed generalizations and pet theories. My lack of interest in these is extreme. Let's talk about real-world teachers. I've known good ones and bad ones. Good ones don't care about distractions -- they even use them. Bad ones blame their failures on distractions, immoral influences, "human nature" -- everything except their own lack of skill."
So, you're making a personal narrative on your own experiences. You reference teachers that you've known without even mentioning classes or names. Granted, I was a little vague, but the class that I mentioned was at least a Collegiate English class. It took place at ASU, in the fall of 1998, and was surprisingly taught by one of the more established professors, not by a graduate student.
You cite good teachers not caring about distractions, but I've not seen this myself, and you provide no data to back that up. So, again, it's your word against mine. I've found that good teachers do care about distractions, for they want to get the best out of every student in the class, and since different people have different attention spans, some teachers work to minimize the distractions.
And you're a bloody fool if you don't think about human nature. I, being a pessimist, prepare to be able to handle the worst-case scenario, even though the odds of it occurring are small, because sometimes those odds are met. In this instance, a teacher who goes in thinking that everything is bubbly great is going to be sorely disappointed when she or he has to curve a significant number of grades due to problems of low marks due to student distraction.
And as for "lack of skill", have you ever tried to teach a class? I sure as hell don't want to. I work in educational environments, and I see what teachers go through on a daily basis. I've seen teachers that are terrible, but by and large, they have a very tough job, especially in schools where students haven't been brought up to properly function in education.
"But I am grateful to you for one thing: you've made me invent a new epigram: Fascism is the last refuge of the inept."
You're truly amusing. I see that you've read "How to Win Arguments," by Dave Barry, but taken it a bit too literally. It was supposed to be a joke, after all.
State mandated education, for K-12, is facist, or at least dictatorial, since it is required. If you are required to do something, it may not be pleasant. Additionally, many colleges and universities are state funded, and have guidelines that they must follow from government to remain in operation. Private institutions, believe it or not, often have even stricter rules, and a student has little choice but to follow such rules if he or she wishes to remain enrolled.
Don't argue facts with me if you aren't going to produce any yourself.
Apple is transforming itself. Yes, they're still proprietary, but their OS isn't entirely so anymore. They're also supplying some kick ass hardware now, so there's a chance that even your average Linux user might find an OSX machine well enough built to be worth buying.
For myself, I want 64 bit. x86 offerings aren't really completely available to me as I have been able to find, but I could spend a couple thousand to have a very well built computer with a version of UNIX (abeit, a rather interestingly tweaked version) already prepared for the exact hardware, including the multimedia aspects. That's pretty damn slick.
Linux is awesome for anything I want to load it on to, but if I an buying the high-end hardware, I'd probably run OSX just for the fit.
That's what asinine fonts are for. I have better vision than most of my college professors, and "screen" is my friend. Ctrl-A-D is not always possible before they've noticed the non-curriculum content exists, but it gets the job done before they have time to read what is on the console, because of the nasty font.
I have to disagree. People will, by their very nature, take the path of least resistance, for what they want to do. If you provide a kid, an adolescent, or a college student with something that they would rather be doing, rather than the prescribed activity, they will do what they want, more often than not.
Education is dictatorial. You're not supposed to get what you want, you're supposed to get what the educational institution offers. By and large, students don't like this. The ones that do are usually in classes whose names are appended in "A", "AP", and "H", and even there you find the bored genius going insane. (S)he'll learn if you provide the knowledge, but if you provide a ready-made distraction, you've just lost.
English needs to be taught in an an immersive way, in my opinion. Computers do not help English instruction.
"Why not use a Yahoo group and subscribe them all."
Yahoo! Groups is not a good idea for something that is University Curriculum, especially if it is required. If someone managed to break into the system, there is not IT department to run to, and if Yahoo! changes policies, then you are left holding the bag. If you intend to use collaborative efforts digitally (which I strongly recommend against), at least use something that is available locally, provided or maintained by someone that you can go yell at if something goes wrong.
...and it degenerated into the teacher saying "stop touching the keyboard" every five minutes. No matter what concept for curriculum one comes up with, as long as the students can get onto the Internet, they will. I even was more creative than most, since I SSHed to the university solaris server, which was an arguably legitimate use, only to then launch a black and white console IRC session. I didn't get caught, but several other students with IM clients or GUI-based IRC clients did. Nothing punitive came of it though, because there were no real enforcement policies.
The class could have been much more efficiently run without computers, or at least without a live Internet connection. Some (like my case) will always find a way though the campus network, but if it can be minimized, that's the only way it will work.
Simply making them available would be a good start. GM released the Impact as the Saturn EV1, even though it was expensive, somewhat short on mileage, and somewhat experimental, and they still found a market for the lease program. Their success with simply getting them on the road helped to prototype technologies for newer cars, and it at least gave them some experience with how the technology behaved once implemented on a relatively decent scale. If fuel cell technologies don't make it into production-run, we won't really know how they'll behave. They might be considered fragile, but a real test could show that for 80% of electric car operators they'll be acceptable. This would lead to figuring out how to make them function for another fifteen to twenty percent, which would be enough for the market to bear.
"Well, if SCO hoped that IBM would settle or buy them out, they were clearly mistaken. Now that THAT plan has backfired, d u think they'll go after some one else next ? Maybe RedHat or SuSE ?"
Well, you see, this would require SCO to still exist as a functioning company after the IBM fiasco is all said and done. IBM's win would undoubtedly require SCO to pay IBM's legal fees, pay the court fees, and their own lawyers. IBM could also choose to countersue, citing numerous patent violations. If SCO runs out of money, they can't afford any more high-dollar lawyers, and they can't afford further court fees.
Also, don't forget, the court in Germany bitchslapped SCO already, so SuSE is out of the target area in German court.
"They've shown incredible lack of backbone in the past when push came to shove (OS/2 backing out of desktop market anyone?)..."
I don't think that IBM ever really had their heart set on the desktop market, even after PCs were demonstrated to be the new hotness. While they don't do individual sales anymore, they still maintain and support corporate and government customers. It's a tool to be put in when it's the best solution, like non-general use machines (kiosks, network terminals for point of sale, etc).
Linux isn't just a PC operating system for IBM. There are ports to S/390, and it runs on more than just low-end microcomputers. With AIX's age showing, they have even more reason to ensure that a suitable, industry supported replacement is ready, and if Linux provides that, they'll go with it. They show no sign of backing down.
"For weblogs, that is simple. Use a system that allows user comments."
What if I edit the text file containing my weblog information by hand? What if I manually type all of the <hr>, <i>, and <blockquote> tags by hand, to get the exact formatting that I want? Can I require that the replier submit their reply in a format that matches my existing site? Can I even stop them from sending me a MS-Word format doc, which I cannot open?
Weblogs are so bloody simple that it can all be done by hand, without any backend scripting, if one is patient enough to develop something initially and stick to it. I've been using my weblog format for more than two years, and it works quite well for my purposes. I'm sure that others don't like the lack of linkable comments until I recently added it, and the lack of interactive search capability, but it's my weblog, and if I want it to be based in stone-age HTML so it loads fast, I will.
So, if anyone wants to send a rebuttal to me, they can type it with my HTML formatting style.
Windmills are funky looking, sure. That section along I-10 in California is proof enough of that.
The thing is, they are quiet, clean, and often installed in places that there wouldn't be much other human habitation/recreation anyway. They're not good targets for terrorist attacks, since there's not really much to blow up, and jamming them isn't going to work either.
N.I.M.B.Y. syndrome needs to be reckoned with anyay. And yes, I do live near a power generating station. There is a Natural Gas facility that also does experimental development on the grounds, like solar, less than two miles from where I live. It's in the middle of the city, and not really close to a major industrial section. If you don't want to see it, there are three other cardinal directions to look toward. I'll take the cheap electricity, myself.
"Work sucks by definition. It's not all bad, but you are paid to sit through a lot of unsavory parts as well as the interesting pieces."
What?!
Don't take this the wrong way, but doesn't that make life suck? I mean, Depending on your commute time, you could be spending as much as eleven hours a day dealing with work related issues. If you're awake for sixteen hours a day, on average, then you only have five hours a day that is your time, to make your day un-suck from work sucking. The only days that you have all to yourself are weekends, and that's assuming that you don't have deadlines or overzealous bosses that need you to do weekend work.
I enjoy what I do, even field tech or bench tech work. It's not some "off in la-la land" type of enjoyment, either, I put forth a little bit of effort at one point to gain a lot of enjoyment out of it. If you don't like what you're doing, go get yourself a better job. Doing it for the money will leave you an empty shell of a person.
I *liked* QA more than field work, because I found it fun to make things break, especially when I could demonstrate them breaking, reproduce them breaking, and figure out what failed. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't have kept doing it for even the relatively short time that I was able to do it. For me, it was a rush, a small feeling of power, that the computer lost (or really, the programmer), and I won. This lead the company that I worked for to building better software, because the conflict was something between people and machines, not between people themselves, or between people and their desires to be elsewhere.
Seriously though, if you detest what you do this much, find something that you are passionate about, and do that.
"It may not level out if the jobs are flocking overseas. Those jobs could be gone for good."
I don't think that all of the jobs, or even a majority of them, will do that. Remember, it's good to have employees that you have at arms' reach, so you can throttle them when they screw up royally, metaphorically speaking. If they're physically in the same office as the corporation management, there is a lot greater quality control possible than if they're on the other side of the planet, working in a nearly opposing time zone. Easy to complete projects will be outsourced, but stuff requiring new developmental effort will remain. Also, if they're overseas, it might be more difficult to get financial restitution from them for something gone wrong, like the leaking of trade secrets, severe bugs that should have been fixed, and the like. The legal system there might not even give you a case. Here, there is precedent for dealing with employee misconduct, be it intentional or accidental, and restitution can sometimes be found.
"Speaking from experience, a lot of people that are left in the IT field actually DON'T have any idea of what a spreadsheet is."
I know. The sadder fact than that is that frequently people use spreadsheets, creating massive numbers of relational fields, macros, and processes, when they could use a programming language or shell script to achieve the same results in a fraction of the time.
" It's kinda sad that such a relatively young field has already bumped out the geeks that love and *know* software/hardware, and replaced them with drone opportunists."
Every field with high salaries is full of opportunists. The thing that computers/technology has as an advantage is that it's much harder to bullshit your way through. Sometimes people come into one of the Linux channels on IRC because they need help with a server they're responsible for, and they can't get this-or-that to work. When it's stuff documented at The Linux Documentation Project, or a Google Search away, I don't help them. I'll help those wanting to learn for themselves, but if they *need* my help to do a job, they shouldn't be doing it in the first place. They will eventually weed-out, because they'll find a problem that they can't beg for help to fix, and will expose themselves. Bosses don't like paying $129/hr or more for outside field help when they already have someone on staff who supposedly knows how to do it.
I do what I can to be the best technician/admin/computer guru that I can be. I work to show that my merit with what I do should give cause for me to be advanced, and it has worked several times. I'm fairly confident that it'll work again once the system has finished deflating from the bubble that blew.
"You are not remembering correctly. During WWII we were spending in excess of 60% of our GDP on the military. For all intents and purposes, it was all we did."
Which only goes to reinforce the point much, much further than I had realised...
"An ego is a very expensive thing to have. I'll have all that debt paid of within a year, and next time I'm out of a job I'll take that $28k tech job instead of turning my nose up at it. If you plan ahead (i.e., don't drive expensive cars or carry CC debt) you can easily pay your bills with $28k or even much less."
Definitely. That's the thing from when I was unemployed that I'm sure saved my butt, I didn't have any credit cards or credit card debt, and I had a reliable vehicle that I paid $2000 for that had low insurance because it was a decade old. Unemployment compensation paid for my rent and utilities, and my parents were willing to stock me with food that required me to learn to cook a little bit. Those four months sucked (including the two months after the WTC attacks especially), but not having significant expenses helped immensely.
... for companies to do so. Many were hiring people just to have them available to them for work. They never gave them anything revolutionary to work on (by and large), and ended up wasting them. It was a bad investment, planning for something that didn't pan out.
It didn't help that people *flocked* to technical programs at universities, forcing excessive weed-out classes to reduce admissions numbers. I ended up ceasing to ccontinue with my CSE major not because I didn't want to learn the trade to do something that I liked, working with computers in newer, exciting ways, but because I didn't want to do group projects with people who had no idea what a spreadsheet was, and we all were to be basically graded on the performance of the lowest member of the group. (yes, I am bitter)
People flocked to the programs for the money. There's no money now, and there are a lot of trained people who are very upset about not being able to make a five year career on a four year education. This is one fad that died.
I believe that it'll level out again, and that suitable numbers of college-training-required technical jobs will come back, but hopefully this period of bust will be remembered, and the trend won't repeat for a long time.