I have a brain that works, and when I see a elementary school teacher getting paid $19,500 a year, and an athlete playing a child's game 3 months out of the year for $50 million, not only am I allowed to say "What the fuck?", it would be wrong not to.
Let's see, how many people can teach elementary school? How many people can perform a sport to the level where they are among the best 1% or less in the country? Pay rate is inversely proportional to the number of people who can do a job.
You probably have some kind of IT or programming type of job, right? You put time/effort/money into getting the education experience to know how to do that job, right? It was probably more difficult than people who get an Elementary Education degree to teach school. That is why you probably get paid more than the school teacher. There is a friend of mine who is a music teacher and complains about how teachers don't get respect and better pay, etc. That is just dictated by market forces because there are a lot more teachers out there trying to get jobs than architects, surgeons, engineers, etc. who get paid more....aaand the reason there are more teachers is that it is easier to get that degree, so people take the easier way, which gives them no right to complain. The other possibility is they really have a passion for what they do, but they should be aware that the job market is that way, so it should be evaluated and accepted if they are going to go down that path.
I know it seems appropriate to hate the pro athletes because many of them are not mature or responsible with their money and position. The fact remains, though, that neither you nor I could hit that curve ball, or make that 3-pointer with somebody's armpit in your face, or catch that puck coming in at 100+ mph.
"I also don't have a frigging CLUE what PPTP, MPPE, or MSCHAPv2 might be."
I was thinking the same thing. That's about the worst example of tech-skewed perception of normal I've ever heard.
I remember someone making a reply to Eric Raymond's now-famous description of problems setting up simple networking to a parallel printer on his wife's machine in Linux. The comment was to the effect of, "A parallel printer? What century is he in?"
It is a common thing sometimes that people who are very computer knowledgeable hang around mostly other computer knowledgeable people because of shared interest, so their ideas about what "most people" do are not very realistic. Samba? Most people don't know it by name, so they won't know what it does. ssh? No--they may have heard of Remote Desktop, which pretty much tells what it does. firewall? Most people haven't heard of it; they use antivirus software for cleaning up after the fact.
I have a long enough attention span to be able to read more than one post at a time, so I would like to be able to just read them without having to be interrupted to Google for something in every post.
I don't understand this. There have been several times when/. has published stories from misinformed information. Then later, the company the story was about denies the rumor. Instead of just putting a small "update" at the end of the story that says "Oh, this story is false." they should take down the story so people don't scan the headlines and read the incorrect info. If they won't pull the story, they should at least put [FALSE] in the headline to warn people.
Really? What are those Windows people going to do when they take the XP CD over to their second computer and it tells them it'll only work for 30 days unless they purchase another license?
That $90 is for the deluxe edition that has the Codeweaver/crossover stuff. Their regular edition is $39.00, which I think is about the same as most other purchased distros.
You say they don't have any real innovation, but read this article about XFM, the Xandros File Manager. It replaces Konqueror, the browser and file manager, which I have been less than thrilled about. It does have some great innovation. Some of its features have been created before separately, but it integrates them in great ways. It auto-mounts all removable media types, Samba shares, NFS file systems, etc. It also detects and shows local and remote printers so you can use them without having to separately configure them. It also enables the Win Explorer type functionality of enabling a Samba type share by right-clicking the folder and turning it on, without having to go to Samba configuration for it. It also integrates CD burning from the file manager if you want to just select a group of files and tell them to burn to CD-R.
Anyway, lots of features there. It seems the innovation they have done is to take a lot of things that Linux can do and made them more easily accessible from one location. I think that is a great idea, and a file manager is probably the most appropriate place to do it. I am just getting started in Linux and have been trying out several distros to see which I like. It would be nice to find downloadable ISOs of this to try out first to see if I like it.
This was the most disturbing part of the New York Post article to me:
However, Apple chief Steve Jobs stuck to his guns on his rule that artists are not allowed to only offer full albums for sale without offering singles. Some companies, especially EMI, had been pushing to allow artists to only sell albums.
LOOK AT THAT! They are trying it again. This buying of single songs is just killing their business strategy. They can't stand that they are not able to force people to buy the crap along with the songs people want.
Who has played Legend of the Red Dragon? (LORD) When I was in college, someone had a server of that set up. There was a town called, appropriately, BoneTown. There was a hooker there, and you could get an STD from her which would drain your health.
Yes, I would argue that a web browser is a much better
interface for all those things. So try to persuade your company to do that stuff in the web browser, convert to mozilla, then you'll be able to drop outlook.
You do not understand at all. Interface to what app? The Outlook program does those things like calendar integrating with meeting requests, scheduling, etc. "Use a browser interface" doesn't do squat if you don't have a program to interface to.
Yep, I had gotten a disc of that from somewhere for free. I never tried to install it, though. I guess I lost it or threw it away. I never really had a chance to install it because I was in high school living at home, and our only computer was a Slackard Bell 486 with no CD-ROM drive.
The driving in that game is pretty fun, and I really liked it, except here's where it sucked. As you started to get several levels into the game, their version of "increasing the difficulty" was that this one car, the orange one I think, would just turn into Superman. You would go about a lap and then this orange one would just decide, "Hey, I don't need to poke along with you guys, see ya!" and he would just start zooming along twice as fast as the cars were supposed to go--completely lap everybody in the time it took us to get halfway around. That pissed me off to no end!
That's my general complaint of worst thing about game difficulty, and I think the games on NES did this more than many. Apparently they didn't have good enough AI processing to increase the difficulty by making the computer opponent smarter, so they would just allow the CPU player to just cheat massively. Here's another example. I really loved Tecmo Super Bowl. As you tried to play through the season and got into the playoffs, the computer, in addition to playing a little smarter (like covering all my receivers on defense) would just be able to complete every pass when they were on offense. I would go back and know who he was going to, and triple cover him, and it would still just drop in there and complete anyway. Or their other one there was that they would strangely enough never fumble anymore, but my team starts "accidentally" fumbling three or four times a game.
Stuff like IANAL are cool, because they're used in context, but you mention a game only by its complex acronym with hardly any context (snipers? wartime tactical game?). What the heck is MOHAA?
That is what they do at my company. We get an email notice telling us that a new security patch needs to be installed, so we should reboot our computer as soon as possible. If we don't reboot before XXXXX, it will be automatically rebooted.
Whenever our systems boot up, they run through a config/virus update/install patch/ etc. script. That makes it easy, so we just start the reboot before heading off to a meeting or lunch or going home, and that's it.
I didn't like any of the other Star Trek series nearly as much as TOS. Enterprise is the only one I've found that seems to act similar to that one, so I like it pretty well. I may actually buy those, but I'll probably wait to see if I can get it cheaper on Amazon or Ebay after they've been out for a while.
OK, here's an interesting idea then. I do understand that the recording industry does have very good marketing systems set up. That gets the artists airplay, promotion, spots on MTV, etc. I think artists should start negotiating shorter-term contracts with the labels to get started--say a two-album deal. Then, they will be known, but they will be finished with the terms of their contract, so they can set up distribution on their own through a website for their future work, which they alone will own the rights to.
That way the RIAA can make their dough on the acts they want to over-hype, but then the artists don't have to be slaves and can live better on a greater percentage of the sales to their fan base.
"If they distribute the software they do." I know. That wasn't the point. "That leaves only using the software purely internally. That's not what companies are worried about, I don't think." I think that is a much more common usage than you give credit. Most companies that aren't in the software business have no interest in distributing or publishing computer programs. They just want to use software that will monitor and analyze things in their factories, or controller programs to regulate stuff, or maybe programs that will keep track of accounting or costs or inventories that will interface with other systems they have. Lots of those things could probably be served well by using some open source programs as a base, but needing some changes to make it apply more directly how they need it.
That seems to me to be one of the most beneficial uses to the industrial/corporate world. The companies are not allowed to use that to re-sell it as closed source, but they are encouraged to support and use OS because they can incorporate their trade secrets into the program to make it work better for themselves without fear of having to reveal those openly. I really hope they would not take away this capability in any future versions of the GPL.
It's obvious that sotck prices change minute-by-minute every day, and no one really has access to information about sales in that sort of resolution.
Ah, but they do. The public out here doesn't have that info, but the price is determined on the trading floor of the stock exchanges, which is where people are buying and selling blocks of shares. They are making the price offers which are reflected in the official price of the stocks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that will nail your credit rating. You may not be losing the money now, but your credit will go to crap.
You probably have some kind of IT or programming type of job, right? You put time/effort/money into getting the education experience to know how to do that job, right? It was probably more difficult than people who get an Elementary Education degree to teach school. That is why you probably get paid more than the school teacher. There is a friend of mine who is a music teacher and complains about how teachers don't get respect and better pay, etc. That is just dictated by market forces because there are a lot more teachers out there trying to get jobs than architects, surgeons, engineers, etc. who get paid more.
I know it seems appropriate to hate the pro athletes because many of them are not mature or responsible with their money and position. The fact remains, though, that neither you nor I could hit that curve ball, or make that 3-pointer with somebody's armpit in your face, or catch that puck coming in at 100+ mph.
"I also don't have a frigging CLUE what PPTP, MPPE, or MSCHAPv2 might be."
I was thinking the same thing. That's about the worst example of tech-skewed perception of normal I've ever heard.
I remember someone making a reply to Eric Raymond's now-famous description of problems setting up simple networking to a parallel printer on his wife's machine in Linux. The comment was to the effect of, "A parallel printer? What century is he in?"
It is a common thing sometimes that people who are very computer knowledgeable hang around mostly other computer knowledgeable people because of shared interest, so their ideas about what "most people" do are not very realistic. Samba? Most people don't know it by name, so they won't know what it does. ssh? No--they may have heard of Remote Desktop, which pretty much tells what it does. firewall? Most people haven't heard of it; they use antivirus software for cleaning up after the fact.
I have a long enough attention span to be able to read more than one post at a time, so I would like to be able to just read them without having to be interrupted to Google for something in every post.
OK, good point that Exchange provides most of the useful functionality. Is there an OS application that does what an Exchange server does?
I don't understand this. There have been several times when /. has published stories from misinformed information. Then later, the company the story was about denies the rumor. Instead of just putting a small "update" at the end of the story that says "Oh, this story is false." they should take down the story so people don't scan the headlines and read the incorrect info. If they won't pull the story, they should at least put [FALSE] in the headline to warn people.
Really? What are those Windows people going to do when they take the XP CD over to their second computer and it tells them it'll only work for 30 days unless they purchase another license?
That $90 is for the deluxe edition that has the Codeweaver/crossover stuff. Their regular edition is $39.00, which I think is about the same as most other purchased distros.
You say they don't have any real innovation, but read this article about XFM, the Xandros File Manager. It replaces Konqueror, the browser and file manager, which I have been less than thrilled about. It does have some great innovation. Some of its features have been created before separately, but it integrates them in great ways. It auto-mounts all removable media types, Samba shares, NFS file systems, etc. It also detects and shows local and remote printers so you can use them without having to separately configure them. It also enables the Win Explorer type functionality of enabling a Samba type share by right-clicking the folder and turning it on, without having to go to Samba configuration for it. It also integrates CD burning from the file manager if you want to just select a group of files and tell them to burn to CD-R.
Anyway, lots of features there. It seems the innovation they have done is to take a lot of things that Linux can do and made them more easily accessible from one location. I think that is a great idea, and a file manager is probably the most appropriate place to do it. I am just getting started in Linux and have been trying out several distros to see which I like. It would be nice to find downloadable ISOs of this to try out first to see if I like it.
LOOK AT THAT! They are trying it again. This buying of single songs is just killing their business strategy. They can't stand that they are not able to force people to buy the crap along with the songs people want.
Naw, chill. It's just da hood comin' through. I got wireless, G.
Who has played Legend of the Red Dragon? (LORD) When I was in college, someone had a server of that set up. There was a town called, appropriately, BoneTown. There was a hooker there, and you could get an STD from her which would drain your health.
You do not understand at all. Interface to what app? The Outlook program does those things like calendar integrating with meeting requests, scheduling, etc. "Use a browser interface" doesn't do squat if you don't have a program to interface to.
Yep, I had gotten a disc of that from somewhere for free. I never tried to install it, though. I guess I lost it or threw it away. I never really had a chance to install it because I was in high school living at home, and our only computer was a Slackard Bell 486 with no CD-ROM drive.
The driving in that game is pretty fun, and I really liked it, except here's where it sucked. As you started to get several levels into the game, their version of "increasing the difficulty" was that this one car, the orange one I think, would just turn into Superman. You would go about a lap and then this orange one would just decide, "Hey, I don't need to poke along with you guys, see ya!" and he would just start zooming along twice as fast as the cars were supposed to go--completely lap everybody in the time it took us to get halfway around. That pissed me off to no end!
That's my general complaint of worst thing about game difficulty, and I think the games on NES did this more than many. Apparently they didn't have good enough AI processing to increase the difficulty by making the computer opponent smarter, so they would just allow the CPU player to just cheat massively. Here's another example. I really loved Tecmo Super Bowl. As you tried to play through the season and got into the playoffs, the computer, in addition to playing a little smarter (like covering all my receivers on defense) would just be able to complete every pass when they were on offense. I would go back and know who he was going to, and triple cover him, and it would still just drop in there and complete anyway. Or their other one there was that they would strangely enough never fumble anymore, but my team starts "accidentally" fumbling three or four times a game.
Stuff like IANAL are cool, because they're used in context, but you mention a game only by its complex acronym with hardly any context (snipers? wartime tactical game?). What the heck is MOHAA?
That is what they do at my company. We get an email notice telling us that a new security patch needs to be installed, so we should reboot our computer as soon as possible. If we don't reboot before XXXXX, it will be automatically rebooted.
Whenever our systems boot up, they run through a config/virus update/install patch/ etc. script. That makes it easy, so we just start the reboot before heading off to a meeting or lunch or going home, and that's it.
There was no mention of actually changing to any other OS. It was just, "You need to patch even faster!"
OK, that sounds like a good solution. That would probably satisfy a company's concerns about "publishing" the modified source.
I didn't like any of the other Star Trek series nearly as much as TOS. Enterprise is the only one I've found that seems to act similar to that one, so I like it pretty well. I may actually buy those, but I'll probably wait to see if I can get it cheaper on Amazon or Ebay after they've been out for a while.
OK, here's an interesting idea then. I do understand that the recording industry does have very good marketing systems set up. That gets the artists airplay, promotion, spots on MTV, etc. I think artists should start negotiating shorter-term contracts with the labels to get started--say a two-album deal. Then, they will be known, but they will be finished with the terms of their contract, so they can set up distribution on their own through a website for their future work, which they alone will own the rights to.
That way the RIAA can make their dough on the acts they want to over-hype, but then the artists don't have to be slaves and can live better on a greater percentage of the sales to their fan base.
Well sure, haven't you heard any discussions here on Slashdot about religion?
booyeah!
s/Hitler/terrorist
"If they distribute the software they do."
I know. That wasn't the point.
"That leaves only using the software purely internally. That's not what companies are worried about, I don't think."
I think that is a much more common usage than you give credit. Most companies that aren't in the software business have no interest in distributing or publishing computer programs. They just want to use software that will monitor and analyze things in their factories, or controller programs to regulate stuff, or maybe programs that will keep track of accounting or costs or inventories that will interface with other systems they have. Lots of those things could probably be served well by using some open source programs as a base, but needing some changes to make it apply more directly how they need it.
That seems to me to be one of the most beneficial uses to the industrial/corporate world. The companies are not allowed to use that to re-sell it as closed source, but they are encouraged to support and use OS because they can incorporate their trade secrets into the program to make it work better for themselves without fear of having to reveal those openly. I really hope they would not take away this capability in any future versions of the GPL.