That article was a fucking scream. I'm more of an Onion-bot than a Satirewire-bot, but holy fuck did that Axis of Just as Evil make me laugh. For like 3 days. Especially the way we Canadians were put into the "Axis of not so evil but secretly harbours a dislike for America" (or something like that).
Though I can't remember who said it, it pretty much validated my favorite quote: "There are some things of such deadly earnest that they can only be safely told under cover of a joke." (It was that comedian, Rogers.. the cowboy... oh well, can't remember.)
But he conveniently neglects to mention all the other religions have aspects that no other religion shares. Each religion has nothing unique, or it wouldn't be a seperate religion. So theres nothing to stop me from saying religion X, which doesn't have Ressurected Christ (not sure why thats such a showstopper anyhow, but lets ignore that for now), but *does* have aspect Y, which no other religion has, is The One!
Thats my point. They're all unique, or they wouldn't be seperate reason. He might as well say, "I bought a Ford because it was the only car with the Ford logo on it!"
You basically described why Christianity cant be The One. You've chosen your religion based on an esotaric distinction between lots of other fairly similar religions. You've basically picked one in a million and proclaimed it to be It. Thats an act of a fool, or at least a lousy shopper.
Given the vision of unfettered and rapid innovation within the technology industry (I'm guessing this is one of the things pro-free-marketers list as a good result of a free-market), equal and unlimited access to information, ie the managers familiarity with the underlying technology is quite likely never going to be that of other industries.
So how does that work? It seems to me that the better your system gets at pushing the rate of innovation, the less transparent that market will be. It seems much better to assume that markets are *never* transparent, and to make the system must account for it.
> glad that things are moving in a direction so that criminals can be caught quicker (or even before the act)
Have you ever heard of the cliff metaphor when discussing technology as solutions to problems?
This town had a cliff. Kids kept falling off the cliff, so they put an ambulance and a few nurses at the bottom. So, people got less careful around the cliff, and more folks fell off. So they added more ambulances and more medical staff. A small group of people in the town wanted to put some signs up at the top of the cliff saying, "Do not approach the cliff. In doing so, you are at your own risk," and conducting some classes around the town on how the cliff is not to be triffled with. But they were ignored. More ambulances, more nurses, more technology were added. Soon, everybody in the town was falling off the cliff. Nobody could act in a responsible manner, since the technological barriers were in place to prevent real-world (tm) tragedy.
This is the real problem. In placing all our eggs in the technology basket, we might be better at catching criminals, but we're doing very little to try and resolve the problem of why people are criminals in the first place. If you ask me which is the smarter society, the one that treats the symptoms, or the one thay tolerates symptoms to deal with cause of the problem, I'll take the society that can exercise tolerance and sacrifice for the overall good of the future. Unfortunately, the cliff story above is particularly blasphemous to the lifeblood of the american economy, the entrepeneur, although it would be music to the ears of all the folks getting BA's in psychology and sociology. Think about it.. placing more emphasis on the analysis of why people do these things could save millions of BA grads from Starbucks and Footlocker jobs, and prevent the american economy from becoming 100% service/retail/maintenance based in the future.
Oh god, who slipped the libertarian-drug into your coffee this morning?
[sarcasm]Yeah, I'd much rather a private company have ahold of this. I defiantely support the use of this product as a means of spying in order to profit (why else would a company use it?) rather than using it for spying on citizens to enforce national security.[/sarcasm]
Here's a newsflash: If this thing came through your door, rippied out your internal organs, and spat on them, a private company would still sell to the highest bidder. At least the government is only interested in the supposed security of its citizens (ignoring for the moment that their attempts may be misguided).. NA would give this power to *anyone*, *without* the onus of being public regarding its use like your government must be.
Why retards^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople like you would rather place a gun in a hands of a group that needn't be transparent and accoutable regarding its use is abolutely beyond me. The market is big enough to support 'evil' consumers that would use this software in a way you wouldn't approve of, and to boot, wouldn't even have to tell you. Your government doesn't have that priviledge nearly to the extent that private corperations have, and still people shit on them for some stupid reason.
Or, in my words, "You cant pass the buck when theres no buck."
It infuriates me to no end. Think of all the min wage retail jockeys that could be making a little more in a tech job if these corps spread the love around a little more at the cost of some *gasp* accountability in their management ranks.
I'm waiting for any consulting company to drop the industry-wide facade and just name their outsourcing division, "Blame Outsourcing - let us take the blame for your lame!"
When shit fucks up, whoever commissioned it wants to be able to use the excuse, "But, I paid good money for this!"
You can't pass the buck when there's no buck. Why do you think CTOs love MS and are scared of OS? Because you can't say that you spent top dollar unless you do spend top dollar. It divests the commissioning employer from having to be held accountable if your work sucks; if they went for your contract, the dude above him could easily say "Well, of course it fucked up, you didn't spend a shitload of money on it."
The fact that theres little correlation between price and quality has little to do with the fact that its way easier to be unaccountable for a project if you pay a premium price. Its totally backwards, but hey, so's this continent, so just think of it as being a neccessary bit of stupidity for consistancy's sake.
(BTW, this is why its so hard to break into new markets using price as a differentiator. Yet another example of how classical free market economics don't exactly model the real world. When you are a newcomer to an industry, its hard to undercut the competition using price because people don't want to be left in a situation where they have to explain to their senior manager that the reason shit fucked up was that they went for a bargain.)
Easy: Developers listen to developers. If you can find a way to pitch such that the message is backed up by some normal run-of-the-mill geeks, I think thats one key. There's no advertising like word of mouth, so messages should play off word of mouth and basically a demonstrated base of support from the developer community.
Specs and competative differentiators were ruined long ago by the hyperbole in IT advertising, so those kinds of angles arn't usually so compelling to developers. We like what other developers like, so if you can play off that, that'd be a plus.
Also, I think developers often look at new products as inventions or software that was just sitting around waiting for somebody to invent them. Companies that act like they are technical gods are a turn off for me; much better to have a company that sells its ability to interact and co-operate with the development world rather than a company that acts like developers should worship them for discovering the 'holy grail' of whatever technology you are selling. We can see past superficial bull, so just act like the girl next door that knows shes nothing all that special, but that she wants to play and have some fun with *us*, and we'll be all over you.
Oops! Sorry, I forgot all programmers live lives just like you, so its entirely suitable to make sweeping generlizations like you did.
Yes, I did to (in saying that if you didnt program outside of work, you must not like coding), but it should be somewhat obvious that if you dont have *time* to code outside of work, because you have family to spend time with, or other hobbies, sure.. moot point. But to say that simply contributing to OSS means you arn't a good coder is going to produce a hell of alot of false positives.
I see what you're saying, but I think that time constraints that certain idividuals deal with are fairly obvious I willingly admit that I should have noted that in my generalization. Your corrallary, that OSS contibuters are bad programmers and not good programmers who dont have fam yet, or lots of other hobbies (or arnt contributing to OSS on the job), is somewhat more damning of people who would be fully capable in programming positions.
Makes you wonder how often companies silently steal code.. any famous examples from the past that never received widespread attention? I'm asking about GPL'd source specifically. I'm aware there is tons of BSD licence'd code in commercial projects, but the licence, being Bill Gates' wet dream, allows for this, right?
>in fact, the kind of programmers that are likely to contribute to OSS projects are probably those that CAN'T find a job
And you got an Insightful for this crack-head thought? Can I apply this to sports please? Obviously, the best athletes never engage in anything remotely outside of their chosen sport and league, right? And the best engineers never use their engineering skills outside of work. And doctors never offer their knowledge pro bono to friends and family outside of work.
God damnit, if I met a programmer who didn't do any programming outside of work, I'd assume he *didn't* like coding, he just liked the salary.
Also, please provide any collolation between job satisfaction (which depends, usually, on *what* you are building, in what environment, with who) and programming skills (your ability to implement a solution based on specs). Can't think of too many programmers who hated their jobs because they were bad programmers. Ironically, bad programmers tend to be much less aware of their inabilities and thus don't read so much into meeting their own personal goals as it relates to job satisfaction. The programmers we fired tended to be much more blissfully ignorant and happy with their position despite their lack of skills than us mainstays, who are much more emotionally tied to the success of our solutions and engineering and thus are less satisfied with our jobs when our environment conspires against us.
And so we are left with: KDE/Kernel/GNOME/etc/etc/etc developers obviously can't get a job in programming, so they just develop OSS projects, right? (Of course, you also conveniently forget to point out that there are tons of developers for whom developing OSS _is_ their job.)
I think when Jack Valenass compared VCRs to the boston strangler, all gloves were off. If they are going to compare their losses to real-world pain and suffering, well so will we.
Yeah, the digital devide of the future is going to include many folks who opt out of the degital device market simply due to any lack of control as to the use of those devices. Frankly, if all this competition (of which lobbying the government is supposedly a part of) and shit is supposed to encourage people to work harder and be innovative, screw that. I had a friend who stopped working on flight sims after he found out they were selling to governments to help them train pilots to bomb their own people. It's an unfair comparison, but its still the same forces at work that would make me question my involvement as an engineer in the development of technologies that are designed to remove the accountability and responsibility of obeying the law from an individual citizen. All this to appease a demonstratibly corrupt industry?
I will not contribute towards technology that does nothing to even the playing field in this plutocracy.
If you were part of the majority, you'd have posted as something other than AC.
The Coward means something; mostly that you won't be publicly accountable for your opinions, which historically speaking, places you in the minority that fears the majority opinion.
"Not only will I not recommend them, I'll go out of my way to tell people not to buy them?"
Jesus, really, thats slander?
slander Pronunciation Key (slndr) n.
1. Law. Oral communication of false statements injurious to a person's reputation. 2. A false and malicious statement or report about someone.
Can you point out the false statement in his quote, please? I'm assuming he's not going to go around saying, "Palm's Executive Board is comprised of mass murders and pedophiles." He's just saying he'll put effort into telling people not to buy Palm. If thats slander, get me the fuck off this continent.
Re:FUD just as bad when it comes from Linux crowd
on
Next-Generation Chip Fabs
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· Score: 3, Insightful
>If MS had stood for 3 months and Linux had gone down after 6 days, Slashdot would be making a whole different noise
No, had that been the case, the story wouldn't have been posted.;)
More seriously tho, IBM has a vested interest in Linux, plus probably has more internal native *nix expertise than Windows. If thats the case, they still chose the better OS for them.
Anybody can make any OS stand up for awhile; I think the point is that the market winner is the first one you can get to meet your performance and uptime requirements, not neccessarily or esotarically the best OS given a level config/admin playing field. People have to make decisions based on what they have, not what you or I they think they should have.
Re:FUD just as bad when it comes from Linux crowd
on
Next-Generation Chip Fabs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
There is no *best*. Only your setup, your software, your thing. There's nothing to say that their software doesn't hit some bits in Windows that your software doesn't, and thats what causes it to crash. Or they exploit various weaknesses in Windows that your software doesn't.
I dont think theres any intended *this is always better than that if you set it up properly* claim being made here, just the simple fact that the MS install stood for 6 days, and the Linux for 3 months. If I were in charge of the money, I'd go Linux. If the MS had stood for 3 months, and Linux gone down after 6 days, I'd go with Windows.
4 reboots a year aint bad, but we regularly push over a year (FreeBSD, if youre curious):
Slashdot Mirror
That article was a fucking scream. I'm more of an Onion-bot than a Satirewire-bot, but holy fuck did that Axis of Just as Evil make me laugh. For like 3 days. Especially the way we Canadians were put into the "Axis of not so evil but secretly harbours a dislike for America" (or something like that).
.. the cowboy ... oh well, can't remember.)
Though I can't remember who said it, it pretty much validated my favorite quote: "There are some things of such deadly earnest that they can only be safely told under cover of a joke." (It was that comedian, Rogers
But he conveniently neglects to mention all the other religions have aspects that no other religion shares. Each religion has nothing unique, or it wouldn't be a seperate religion. So theres nothing to stop me from saying religion X, which doesn't have Ressurected Christ (not sure why thats such a showstopper anyhow, but lets ignore that for now), but *does* have aspect Y, which no other religion has, is The One!
Thats my point. They're all unique, or they wouldn't be seperate reason. He might as well say, "I bought a Ford because it was the only car with the Ford logo on it!"
You basically described why Christianity cant be The One. You've chosen your religion based on an esotaric distinction between lots of other fairly similar religions. You've basically picked one in a million and proclaimed it to be It. Thats an act of a fool, or at least a lousy shopper.
And God is a piece of burnt toast. Its true because I said so.
Given the vision of unfettered and rapid innovation within the technology industry (I'm guessing this is one of the things pro-free-marketers list as a good result of a free-market), equal and unlimited access to information, ie the managers familiarity with the underlying technology is quite likely never going to be that of other industries.
So how does that work? It seems to me that the better your system gets at pushing the rate of innovation, the less transparent that market will be. It seems much better to assume that markets are *never* transparent, and to make the system must account for it.
> glad that things are moving in a direction so that criminals can be caught quicker (or even before the act)
.. placing more emphasis on the analysis of why people do these things could save millions of BA grads from Starbucks and Footlocker jobs, and prevent the american economy from becoming 100% service/retail/maintenance based in the future.
Have you ever heard of the cliff metaphor when discussing technology as solutions to problems?
This town had a cliff. Kids kept falling off the cliff, so they put an ambulance and a few nurses at the bottom. So, people got less careful around the cliff, and more folks fell off. So they added more ambulances and more medical staff. A small group of people in the town wanted to put some signs up at the top of the cliff saying, "Do not approach the cliff. In doing so, you are at your own risk," and conducting some classes around the town on how the cliff is not to be triffled with. But they were ignored. More ambulances, more nurses, more technology were added. Soon, everybody in the town was falling off the cliff. Nobody could act in a responsible manner, since the technological barriers were in place to prevent real-world (tm) tragedy.
This is the real problem. In placing all our eggs in the technology basket, we might be better at catching criminals, but we're doing very little to try and resolve the problem of why people are criminals in the first place. If you ask me which is the smarter society, the one that treats the symptoms, or the one thay tolerates symptoms to deal with cause of the problem, I'll take the society that can exercise tolerance and sacrifice for the overall good of the future. Unfortunately, the cliff story above is particularly blasphemous to the lifeblood of the american economy, the entrepeneur, although it would be music to the ears of all the folks getting BA's in psychology and sociology. Think about it
Oh god, who slipped the libertarian-drug into your coffee this morning?
.. NA would give this power to *anyone*, *without* the onus of being public regarding its use like your government must be.
[sarcasm]Yeah, I'd much rather a private company have ahold of this. I defiantely support the use of this product as a means of spying in order to profit (why else would a company use it?) rather than using it for spying on citizens to enforce national security.[/sarcasm]
Here's a newsflash: If this thing came through your door, rippied out your internal organs, and spat on them, a private company would still sell to the highest bidder. At least the government is only interested in the supposed security of its citizens (ignoring for the moment that their attempts may be misguided)
Why retards^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople like you would rather place a gun in a hands of a group that needn't be transparent and accoutable regarding its use is abolutely beyond me. The market is big enough to support 'evil' consumers that would use this software in a way you wouldn't approve of, and to boot, wouldn't even have to tell you. Your government doesn't have that priviledge nearly to the extent that private corperations have, and still people shit on them for some stupid reason.
Or, in my words, "You cant pass the buck when theres no buck."
It infuriates me to no end. Think of all the min wage retail jockeys that could be making a little more in a tech job if these corps spread the love around a little more at the cost of some *gasp* accountability in their management ranks.
I'm waiting for any consulting company to drop the industry-wide facade and just name their outsourcing division, "Blame Outsourcing - let us take the blame for your lame!"
> blowing smoke up my wazoo
;)
That sounds like an interesting lawn centerpiece. What are the bids for something like that like?
When shit fucks up, whoever commissioned it wants to be able to use the excuse, "But, I paid good money for this!"
You can't pass the buck when there's no buck. Why do you think CTOs love MS and are scared of OS? Because you can't say that you spent top dollar unless you do spend top dollar. It divests the commissioning employer from having to be held accountable if your work sucks; if they went for your contract, the dude above him could easily say "Well, of course it fucked up, you didn't spend a shitload of money on it."
The fact that theres little correlation between price and quality has little to do with the fact that its way easier to be unaccountable for a project if you pay a premium price. Its totally backwards, but hey, so's this continent, so just think of it as being a neccessary bit of stupidity for consistancy's sake.
(BTW, this is why its so hard to break into new markets using price as a differentiator. Yet another example of how classical free market economics don't exactly model the real world. When you are a newcomer to an industry, its hard to undercut the competition using price because people don't want to be left in a situation where they have to explain to their senior manager that the reason shit fucked up was that they went for a bargain.)
Easy: Developers listen to developers. If you can find a way to pitch such that the message is backed up by some normal run-of-the-mill geeks, I think thats one key. There's no advertising like word of mouth, so messages should play off word of mouth and basically a demonstrated base of support from the developer community.
Specs and competative differentiators were ruined long ago by the hyperbole in IT advertising, so those kinds of angles arn't usually so compelling to developers. We like what other developers like, so if you can play off that, that'd be a plus.
Also, I think developers often look at new products as inventions or software that was just sitting around waiting for somebody to invent them. Companies that act like they are technical gods are a turn off for me; much better to have a company that sells its ability to interact and co-operate with the development world rather than a company that acts like developers should worship them for discovering the 'holy grail' of whatever technology you are selling. We can see past superficial bull, so just act like the girl next door that knows shes nothing all that special, but that she wants to play and have some fun with *us*, and we'll be all over you.
I was going under the assumption that we'd be checking what he coded. Looking at the source of what he wrote is _obvious_! :)
Oops! Sorry, I forgot all programmers live lives just like you, so its entirely suitable to make sweeping generlizations like you did.
.. moot point. But to say that simply contributing to OSS means you arn't a good coder is going to produce a hell of alot of false positives.
Yes, I did to (in saying that if you didnt program outside of work, you must not like coding), but it should be somewhat obvious that if you dont have *time* to code outside of work, because you have family to spend time with, or other hobbies, sure
I see what you're saying, but I think that time constraints that certain idividuals deal with are fairly obvious I willingly admit that I should have noted that in my generalization. Your corrallary, that OSS contibuters are bad programmers and not good programmers who dont have fam yet, or lots of other hobbies (or arnt contributing to OSS on the job), is somewhat more damning of people who would be fully capable in programming positions.
It's pretty damning.
.. any famous examples from the past that never received widespread attention? I'm asking about GPL'd source specifically. I'm aware there is tons of BSD licence'd code in commercial projects, but the licence, being Bill Gates' wet dream, allows for this, right?
Makes you wonder how often companies silently steal code
>in fact, the kind of programmers that are likely to contribute to OSS projects are probably those that CAN'T find a job
And you got an Insightful for this crack-head thought? Can I apply this to sports please? Obviously, the best athletes never engage in anything remotely outside of their chosen sport and league, right? And the best engineers never use their engineering skills outside of work. And doctors never offer their knowledge pro bono to friends and family outside of work.
God damnit, if I met a programmer who didn't do any programming outside of work, I'd assume he *didn't* like coding, he just liked the salary.
Also, please provide any collolation between job satisfaction (which depends, usually, on *what* you are building, in what environment, with who) and programming skills (your ability to implement a solution based on specs). Can't think of too many programmers who hated their jobs because they were bad programmers. Ironically, bad programmers tend to be much less aware of their inabilities and thus don't read so much into meeting their own personal goals as it relates to job satisfaction. The programmers we fired tended to be much more blissfully ignorant and happy with their position despite their lack of skills than us mainstays, who are much more emotionally tied to the success of our solutions and engineering and thus are less satisfied with our jobs when our environment conspires against us.
And so we are left with: KDE/Kernel/GNOME/etc/etc/etc developers obviously can't get a job in programming, so they just develop OSS projects, right? (Of course, you also conveniently forget to point out that there are tons of developers for whom developing OSS _is_ their job.)
Don't forget how good we are at escaping any chance of having to own up to how susceptible to trolls we are! Thats the magic skill.
I think when Jack Valenass compared VCRs to the boston strangler, all gloves were off. If they are going to compare their losses to real-world pain and suffering, well so will we.
Yeah, the digital devide of the future is going to include many folks who opt out of the degital device market simply due to any lack of control as to the use of those devices. Frankly, if all this competition (of which lobbying the government is supposedly a part of) and shit is supposed to encourage people to work harder and be innovative, screw that. I had a friend who stopped working on flight sims after he found out they were selling to governments to help them train pilots to bomb their own people. It's an unfair comparison, but its still the same forces at work that would make me question my involvement as an engineer in the development of technologies that are designed to remove the accountability and responsibility of obeying the law from an individual citizen. All this to appease a demonstratibly corrupt industry?
I will not contribute towards technology that does nothing to even the playing field in this plutocracy.
If you were part of the majority, you'd have posted as something other than AC.
The Coward means something; mostly that you won't be publicly accountable for your opinions, which historically speaking, places you in the minority that fears the majority opinion.
How the fuck could that be slander?
"Not only will I not recommend them, I'll go out of my way to tell people not to buy them?"
Jesus, really, thats slander?
slander Pronunciation Key (slndr)
n.
1. Law. Oral communication of false statements injurious to a person's reputation.
2. A false and malicious statement or report about someone.
Can you point out the false statement in his quote, please? I'm assuming he's not going to go around saying, "Palm's Executive Board is comprised of mass murders and pedophiles." He's just saying he'll put effort into telling people not to buy Palm. If thats slander, get me the fuck off this continent.
I sure hope red is one of those 4096 colours ...
>If MS had stood for 3 months and Linux had gone down after 6 days, Slashdot would be making a whole different noise
;)
No, had that been the case, the story wouldn't have been posted.
More seriously tho, IBM has a vested interest in Linux, plus probably has more internal native *nix expertise than Windows. If thats the case, they still chose the better OS for them.
Anybody can make any OS stand up for awhile; I think the point is that the market winner is the first one you can get to meet your performance and uptime requirements, not neccessarily or esotarically the best OS given a level config/admin playing field. People have to make decisions based on what they have, not what you or I they think they should have.
There is no *best*. Only your setup, your software, your thing. There's nothing to say that their software doesn't hit some bits in Windows that your software doesn't, and thats what causes it to crash. Or they exploit various weaknesses in Windows that your software doesn't.
:)
I dont think theres any intended *this is always better than that if you set it up properly* claim being made here, just the simple fact that the MS install stood for 6 days, and the Linux for 3 months. If I were in charge of the money, I'd go Linux. If the MS had stood for 3 months, and Linux gone down after 6 days, I'd go with Windows.
4 reboots a year aint bad, but we regularly push over a year (FreeBSD, if youre curious):
2:37PM up 385 days, 10:18, 1 user, load averages: 0.75, 0.73, 0.79
4 reboots to me sounds like alot, but then again, we're doing different things on our boxen now, arn't we, so different behaviour can be expected?
Yeah, who on earth would make a decision based on whats better? Whats the engineering world coming to?
At least somebody gets it.