I agree. I, as part of society, would also like to dictate how much gas you can buy, cable television you can watch, internet you can use, radio you can listen to, miles you can drive, children you can have, books you can read, light-bulbs you can buy, hours you can remain awake and food you can eat. After all, these are all resources and rather than cranking up supply to meet the demand, we'll just start forcing you to whatever limits we feel are best.
If there's not enough power to go around, build up the infrastructure. I pay for a service. You provide it. How many decades do you have to suffer poor infrastructure problems before you finally start investing in it? How the hell do you run a business (and it is) by providing only what your current systems can handle and to hell with a growing demand for those services in the future? Imagine if the phone company had decided that, instead of requiring you to dial the area code every time you make a call, they had simply said "sorry, no more phone lines!" and decided not to invest in any sort of build-out whatsoever?
This whole "oh my god, not enough power" thing is fine for a year or two, when it catches you off guard. Its' quite another more than a decade later.
That was my solution once upon a time. See, I am a devout collector of . . . um . . . certain material that takes up about 700mb to 1.37gb per . . . uh . . . file.
I kept buying USB enclosures. Then a USB adapter so I could plug all of them in as they grew. At one point, I had more than 30 USB enclosures connected to a single machine, with a total of about four or five terabytes of content. Obviously, this made the place noisey, warm and not very fault tolerant.
At this point, I'm waiting for mass storage to come along and drop in price. I have a shelf in my walk-in closet filled with about 50 full hard drives ranging from 80gb to 500gb. Just this week, I started moving up to 750gb drives (1tb drives haven't reached the price-break point yet).
Before 2008 is over (assuming 1tb drives drop low enough), I plan to put together a new dedicated file server with a dozen 1tb drives running in a RAID. This will be enough to contain my (currently 9-terabyte) collection and allow a tiny bit of expansion. What I'll do after *that*, I have no idea. The only other option I can think of is to hold off until I can get 1gb drives instead, so I'll have enough storage in that box to allow for another
And what I'll do with those 50 spare drives? I have absolutely no clue. Save them for the coming zombie apocolypse and hurl them from across the room or barricade a door?
Well, I had assumed that if you can't teach evolution, you can't teach creation. Actually, since it's a science class, creation shouldn't be taught under any circumstances. Not even as a "possible alternate explanation". Leave that for church.
It's unfortunate that the majority in this country seem to want to indoctrinate everyone under the control of their particular religion, at the expensive of progress and knowledge. Next thing you know, we'll be torturing and killing people for suggesting that the earth is round or that the sun doesn't revolve around us.
If they can't teach evolution, then they shouldn't be able to teach about gravity or anything else. Almost everything in science that is relatively established (beyond hypothesis) is a theory. So why have science classes at all? And then these same religious idiots are the ones who will bash the education system for not staying competitive with the rest of the world. How can you stay competitive when you are preventing your children from receiving a valid, proper, progressive education with such important things as... you know... math and science?
Your IT department and data center employees aren't writing your software and engineering your hardware, in the first place. When they encounter problems or desire certain features, they have to work with the developer and engineering groups like anyone else would. If someone else is managing these services for you and still using your products, they will still be reporting any encountered problems or feature requests to the exact same developer and engineering groups. And in both cases, any problems or downtime still affects you all the same.
Quite possibly the stupidest comment I have read in the entire discussion. Your content is your content. That's all there is to it. You have the right to dictate how someone can use your content, if at all, as well as being compensated for commercial use by a commercial application of your content. Just because I upload a photo for my profile on my website to represent myself doesn't mean that you deserve some self-assigned right to use it in an advertisement or sell it or redistribute it for your own purposes. It doesn't belong to you. The greedy people are the ones trying to take YOUR content and profit off it rather than creating their own content.
If you want content, create it yourself or specifically hunt out free content. Don't steal someone else's.
By your comments, I'm going to assume that you're probably a middle school student who has absolutely no concept of property or copyright or use licenses and thinks that you should get everything for free. Hell, by your reasoning someone should be able to just steal the linux source code and do whatever they want with it for profit, without adhering to any of the attached licenses (attribution, redistribution of source code, etc). After all, anyone who restricts you from doing whatever you want with THEIR content is just a greedy twat.
Content you create is instantly copyrighted by you. Period. A person must actively release something into a free-use license. Therefore, regardless of what any person thinks of the content they have generated, YOU have no right to use it for any reason unless specifically stated by the creator of that content. Period. This is not a complex science or vague art.
I've never seen the point of spending hundreds of bucks for a word processor when all you're really getting is some fancy fonting and pagination type stuff and maybe a little formatting assistance. I can write a perfectly submittable manuscript in KDEs 'kate'. Or even nano, ai, pico, vi. Just about anything. There may be one percent of people who truly need features that something like Microsoft Office offers and for that one percent, I'm sure Open Office would suffice. but for the other 99% - including professional writers, columnists and the like . . . why don't very low-profile, simple editors work just as well or better?
By the way, I have to say the best word processor I ever used was Word Perfect 4.1 that came on several 3.5" floppies and ran on DOS. I had a funky Batman "Joker" color scheme going with the ANSI graphics and it stayed out of the way of my work, offering me just the right tools I needed without going overboard.
Aside from all this, why does the Slashdot blurb/article just come across as one enormous self-serving advertisement full of bullshit words?
Right. That's my concern. I know that Amazon will let me redownload kindle content. But what happens when Amazon simply stops supporting it? Or changes their DRM system in such a way that previously purchased content won't work on new devices? Or Amazon itself goes away entirely? That might not happen in ten years. But maybe twenty. Or fifty. I can still read a real book in fifty or a hundred years. The same should be said of digital content I've purchased.
Except for a couple CDs from bands I know via CDBaby or a couple directly from the musicians themselves, I haven't bought a CD (especially at a store) since 1998. I don't need one more poorly manufactured piece of plastic crap sitting around my home and I certainly don't give a damn about liner notes or packaging or the CD cover or how they write their logo on the face of the CD.
Even with bands I know and care about, I prefer to buy their music digitally. If it isn't available that way, I'll go ahead and buy the physical CD from them. For big label artists, I just can't see myself being bothered to go to a store and picking up one of their overpriced pieces of shit - or even via Amazon for that matter.
Same goes for books. While I wouldn't sit reading a stack of novels or tech books on a computer screen, something a couple iterations and generations away from Amazon's kindle (as long as I can be reassured of my life-long access to my purchased content) will be right up my alley. No more tearing, ripping, yellowing pages and being worried about bending the spine of my precious $10 paperback or denting the corner of my precious $50 hard cover. No more room full of books that I could now fit into a tiny memory chip. No more lugging around 20lbs of books everywhere I go.
Give me digital and give it to me now, while I'm still (somewhat) young. It's 2008 for fuck's sake. Just don't fuck me in the ass with DRM and an unreliable archive system that will leave me robbed of the tens of thousands of dollars of stuff I've bought in a decade.
I'm not convinced that Apple hardware is superior in general. My powerbook is the most sturdy laptop I've ever had, but the soundboard died after the first month and the only way to get audio to work was to plug headphones into the speaker port (which was constantly glowing red).
But the appeal is that Apple's hardware and OS work very well together and are reliable and you can usually be assured that you can join any network or find any service you need wherever you are, without any annoying windows or linux hoops every time you change or add networks (even only temporarily). And my powerbook has just always worked. Other laptops would throw fits on occasion as was their nature.
I understand that the macbook is faster and has better hardware, but perhaps not sturdier and more durable hardware (especially for the actual external casing and components). For the price, might as well just get a thinkpad and throw linux on that instead of spending twice as much for a shiny mac to put linux on. It's not a bad idea, but . . . doesn't seem cost-effective.:)
I'll tell you where Apple does excel, though. Power adapters. I'm so fucking tired of losing an expensive laptop because the shitty power adapter on the laptop side snaps off or somehow breaks and is irreplaceable and you end up with an expensive paperweight because of a cheap three cent piece of metal. Powerbooks had a pretty decent (but still not perfect) adapter, and the macbooks seem to have some weird magnetic thing going on so that there's essentially no possible adapter-related damage. Everyone should be implementing something like that!
Here is what I want to be able to do on OSX, just as I'm able to do on debian and solaris:
#cpan #CPAN> #CPAN> install Bundle::SomeBundle (installs some bundle of modules).
It's the fact that I would have to traipse through countless landmines to get modules (and not obscure ones either) working on OSX is the problem. And it isn't that these things absolutely could not work, but you had to jump through weird hoops that were not so much a result of the uniqueness of the architecture it was on, but of weird little glitches and oversights that one had to be "mindful" of.
I'm a Solaris guy by trade and let me tell you, building my development environment on one of my Solaris 9 boxes was very much like doing so on my debian box. Doing so on OSX was like... well... doing it on OSX. I ran into a lot of landmines for obscure things and had to run to google. Sometimes there would be an available solution and sometimes there wasn't. While postgres and apache are relatively slick to install and configure, the perl stuff ran into major hurdles. Building a postgres/apache/perl environment should be nearly identical on each of these platforms. It's not like I was trying to use CPAN to install some obscure module on an embedded OS on a pocket watch.
I wish I could provide precise examples, but this was something I started doing on my powerbook almost three years ago, so I just don't recall the specifics. I tend to want to say one area of problems was imagemagick, but I might be wrong.
But as I say, even if I could replicate my dev environment as desired, I still find myself reduced to the internal argument (and trust me, as someone who really does like Apple stuff and is generally a big OSX fan, these are long internal conflicts) of "great, I can do this on OSX... now I have replicated my $1000 environment on a $3200 environment. Yay".
On the other hand, this was almost three years ago. Perhaps things have changed for the better since then, though I don't see a lot of discussion over perl stuff on OSX (as it seems like a vast sea of ruby guys).
Too bad they're doing this about a decade too late. I don't buy music anymore unless it's directly from a band or some service that gives the band control and significant share of the profits. The big labels wasted any good will they could have had from my part. Good riddance.
The one thing I hate about my OSX laptop is trying to get a lot of CPAN and perl related libs installed on it. If you just want to dump a pre-set LAMP (er.. OSXAMP? Whatever) on it, that's fine. But I was trying to replicate my development environment for a personal project onto my powerbook so I could carry it all with me and no longer have to telnet to my system to work on such things.
I found a lot of seemingly trivial things to be absolutely tedious and borderline impossible on OSX. Something I could have just installed with cpan or apt-get on debian required that I install this lib. Then that lib. Then FINK. Then tweak a bunch of stuff. Then, finally, if I'd sacrificed enough chickens, I could install the actual think I had wanted to in the first place.
I know that OSX is a huge platform among web developers, but I also know most of them are into dreamweaver crap and php, ruby, etc. But I know that it's big enough among them that it can't always be that difficult. For me, however, I simply wasn't willing to invest the absurd amount of energy and time to get my development environment going on it that would have taken me an hour from start to finish on any given linux system. And without that, there is absolutely no reason for me to own a mac (the unix underpinning being the reason I enjoy it so I can do my solaris/linux-ish stuff with it). The only exception being that I do love my powerbook, for ease of networkability in multiple environments and the rather rugged, durable, always-works consistency of it.
I know that I have had to pull myself away from apple.com on more than a few occasions where I was playing with the configurator and so ready to hand out my cash like an idiot, before I came to my senses and said "but you're just doing this so you can have a new shiny toy -- there's nothing you can do on this box that you can't already do on your powerhouse linux box at home... save your $3,000+ and get a hooker, some blow and a couple midgets".
I love Apple, but why anyone would choose a Mac over Linux is beyond me. I'm not pressed for cash by any means whatsoever, but I'm not going to spend $3k on a nice mac desktop when I could spend a third or a half of that on a powerful linux desktop. They're essentially the same thing, unless you have some weird textmate fetish (in which case running KDE's kate or kdevelop should serve you just as well). And having an Apple store nearby has never really seemed important to me (I do own a powerbook, because mac laptops are fantastic and you can't really reproduce the laptop experience). It's not like I'm going to buy any of their $700/gb "idiot tax" RAM and unless you're looking for advice on frosting your hair, the Apple "geniuses" are useless.
You'll be getting the vaccination yourself as soon as your car and life insurance carrier requires you to submit to it or face double the fees. And once your employer demands it for employment. And once it's required for citizenship. And once you are placed on a "cause for suspicion" list simply for not being vaccinated.
The original parent says that part of the effect of outsourcing is that it sobers employees up so they'll be more malleable and pliable to executive whim instead of demanding unreasonable things like (at least) cost of living increases.
Coming from a company that has had more layoffs than I can remember since 2000 (each taking about three to ten thousand people with it), I can tell you the changes I have witnessed in the local employees.
The change is that many are no longer excited, hard-working, enthusiastic, imaginative employees who love their job and their employer and feel pride in supporting their brand (as if it were a sports team, even) and look forward to their daily work and how it progresses them toward their own personal dreams as well as their professional aspirations to climb the ladder internally.
Instead, I find many who have been around for a very long time and feel demoralized, devalued and are in constant fear that they are going to be axed in the next round. Especially since there has often been little rhyme or reason to the people chosen to be dismissed. Most seem certain that THEY are next. And if not NEXT, then not soon after. And if it is inevitable, then why bother putting 110% of your energy and effort into it? I've seen formerly enthusiastic, extremely hard working, very intelligent, creative, productive, fantastic people become shells of themselves that mirror what I see when I'm standing in line at Carl's Junior and peeking into the back with the defeated fry-cook who feels he's just an automated process passing the minutes until he can clock out and go home.
If that's the sort of sobering result you want, may the fates have mercy on whatever company *you* (the original poster) run.
Right. That's exactly the problem with outsourcing. It is a whipping stick used to make everyone remaining in the company feel thankful just to have a job, rather than demanding things like raises for hard work and dedication and various other compensations. "Look, if you don't reduce yourself to the mentality of a wage-slave -- or even a real slave -- we'll just ship your position out to some guy in a country where his rent is cheaper than what you spend on milk for your cereal in a month". It is the most irrational and immature management tool available.
I can't wait until middle management and the slew of recent MBAs find themselves in the same position as so many of our engineering and support bretheren.
I will counter your "this data can't be accurate, because these nations have huge corporations in them which have privacy regulations to adhere to!" with "this data is entirely correct, precisely because they are home to huge corporations which sometimes have privacy regulations to adhere to, but often don't bother and are often not held responsible for it and at any rate have lobbiests in their employ to legislate for their advantage against the rights and privacy of the citizens of said country".
The thing that concerns me is that Americans tout "freedom" and "liberties" on a daily basis as part of often over-exaggerated patriotism or often an excuse to conduct military missions (to "protect our freedom"). Americans will often even forgive infringements and attacks on our "freedom" and "liberty" by citing the supposed fact that we have so much of both and can apparently thereby afford to let a little of it slip away here and there for causes they deem worthy.
Yet for those who are aware of the world around them, it is easy to see great chunks of freedom, liberty and privacy being wrestled from our grasps on a daily basis. Usually without much defense on our part. We just hand it over. It's like being a passenger on an ocean liner and touting the safety and reliability of the vessel even as you wade across the submerged deck, up to your hips in salt water.
What it all really means, is "I can still buy a $5 latte and my favorite sit-com with the offensively stereo-typed ethnic characters is still on television and I can still follow my favorite commercial sports team, so I *must* have an ass-load of freedom!".
I'm not suggesting rebuying anything. I'm suggesting you go with your own preferred format and get the movies you want for it. If the other format wins, then you can buy a player for that (or a dual player) and start choosing your movies on that platform when the time comes. It's not 1980. It's not either/or. Right now, I use bluray because i happen to have a bluray palyer. If HD wins in two years, I can start buying HD content. And I'll still be able to watch my bluray stuff.
I mean, come on -- people are acting like this is rocket science. People are still able to play records, casettes and CDs to this day. Just because CDs are the thing now doesn't prevent you from playing the other formats. BluRay (or HD) won't just disappear no matter what. And even if one wins, chances are they'll just eventually provide playability of both formats in a cheap *player* so you can watch whatever content you own.
I find it absurd that people are worried that if they "pick the wrong one" today, they'll have a stack of useless discs on their shelf in a few years. That is simply not the case. And in the mean time, where are you going to get your HD content for your HD television (which a lot of people ARE moving to)? Primarily, from HD and BluRay.
So relax, enjoy your movies and don't freak out. It's not worth it.
By the way, the attitude isn't flippant. DVD players aren't $400 today. In fact, they weren't $400 for very long at all. That's why I said PICK ONE today and enjoy it. And buy the other when both formats are cheaper. If you're spending $30 on DVD/HD/BluRay discs then you'll have no problem affording $100 for a bluray or HD player. I own bluray right now. When I can get a nice HD player for about $100 (which won't bee too long from now), then I will.
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I agree. I, as part of society, would also like to dictate how much gas you can buy, cable television you can watch, internet you can use, radio you can listen to, miles you can drive, children you can have, books you can read, light-bulbs you can buy, hours you can remain awake and food you can eat. After all, these are all resources and rather than cranking up supply to meet the demand, we'll just start forcing you to whatever limits we feel are best.
No, this is a terrible idea.
If there's not enough power to go around, build up the infrastructure. I pay for a service. You provide it. How many decades do you have to suffer poor infrastructure problems before you finally start investing in it? How the hell do you run a business (and it is) by providing only what your current systems can handle and to hell with a growing demand for those services in the future? Imagine if the phone company had decided that, instead of requiring you to dial the area code every time you make a call, they had simply said "sorry, no more phone lines!" and decided not to invest in any sort of build-out whatsoever?
This whole "oh my god, not enough power" thing is fine for a year or two, when it catches you off guard. Its' quite another more than a decade later.
That was my solution once upon a time. See, I am a devout collector of . . . um . . . certain material that takes up about 700mb to 1.37gb per . . . uh . . . file.
I kept buying USB enclosures. Then a USB adapter so I could plug all of them in as they grew. At one point, I had more than 30 USB enclosures connected to a single machine, with a total of about four or five terabytes of content. Obviously, this made the place noisey, warm and not very fault tolerant.
At this point, I'm waiting for mass storage to come along and drop in price. I have a shelf in my walk-in closet filled with about 50 full hard drives ranging from 80gb to 500gb. Just this week, I started moving up to 750gb drives (1tb drives haven't reached the price-break point yet).
Before 2008 is over (assuming 1tb drives drop low enough), I plan to put together a new dedicated file server with a dozen 1tb drives running in a RAID. This will be enough to contain my (currently 9-terabyte) collection and allow a tiny bit of expansion. What I'll do after *that*, I have no idea. The only other option I can think of is to hold off until I can get 1gb drives instead, so I'll have enough storage in that box to allow for another
And what I'll do with those 50 spare drives? I have absolutely no clue. Save them for the coming zombie apocolypse and hurl them from across the room or barricade a door?
Well, I had assumed that if you can't teach evolution, you can't teach creation. Actually, since it's a science class, creation shouldn't be taught under any circumstances. Not even as a "possible alternate explanation". Leave that for church.
It's unfortunate that the majority in this country seem to want to indoctrinate everyone under the control of their particular religion, at the expensive of progress and knowledge. Next thing you know, we'll be torturing and killing people for suggesting that the earth is round or that the sun doesn't revolve around us.
If they can't teach evolution, then they shouldn't be able to teach about gravity or anything else. Almost everything in science that is relatively established (beyond hypothesis) is a theory. So why have science classes at all? And then these same religious idiots are the ones who will bash the education system for not staying competitive with the rest of the world. How can you stay competitive when you are preventing your children from receiving a valid, proper, progressive education with such important things as ... you know... math and science?
A BigMac has, what, 1,200 calories?
A videogame has 0 calories.
Case closed. McDonald's might as well blame reading and studying and writing for obesity.
Your IT department and data center employees aren't writing your software and engineering your hardware, in the first place. When they encounter problems or desire certain features, they have to work with the developer and engineering groups like anyone else would. If someone else is managing these services for you and still using your products, they will still be reporting any encountered problems or feature requests to the exact same developer and engineering groups. And in both cases, any problems or downtime still affects you all the same.
Quite possibly the stupidest comment I have read in the entire discussion. Your content is your content. That's all there is to it. You have the right to dictate how someone can use your content, if at all, as well as being compensated for commercial use by a commercial application of your content. Just because I upload a photo for my profile on my website to represent myself doesn't mean that you deserve some self-assigned right to use it in an advertisement or sell it or redistribute it for your own purposes. It doesn't belong to you. The greedy people are the ones trying to take YOUR content and profit off it rather than creating their own content.
If you want content, create it yourself or specifically hunt out free content. Don't steal someone else's.
By your comments, I'm going to assume that you're probably a middle school student who has absolutely no concept of property or copyright or use licenses and thinks that you should get everything for free. Hell, by your reasoning someone should be able to just steal the linux source code and do whatever they want with it for profit, without adhering to any of the attached licenses (attribution, redistribution of source code, etc). After all, anyone who restricts you from doing whatever you want with THEIR content is just a greedy twat.
Content you create is instantly copyrighted by you. Period. A person must actively release something into a free-use license. Therefore, regardless of what any person thinks of the content they have generated, YOU have no right to use it for any reason unless specifically stated by the creator of that content. Period. This is not a complex science or vague art.
That's what happen when someone doesn't know how to write very well.
All the writer had to do was preface "the" with "and"; the entire thing would have made logical and readable sense.
I've never seen the point of spending hundreds of bucks for a word processor when all you're really getting is some fancy fonting and pagination type stuff and maybe a little formatting assistance. I can write a perfectly submittable manuscript in KDEs 'kate'. Or even nano, ai, pico, vi. Just about anything. There may be one percent of people who truly need features that something like Microsoft Office offers and for that one percent, I'm sure Open Office would suffice. but for the other 99% - including professional writers, columnists and the like . . . why don't very low-profile, simple editors work just as well or better?
By the way, I have to say the best word processor I ever used was Word Perfect 4.1 that came on several 3.5" floppies and ran on DOS. I had a funky Batman "Joker" color scheme going with the ANSI graphics and it stayed out of the way of my work, offering me just the right tools I needed without going overboard.
Aside from all this, why does the Slashdot blurb/article just come across as one enormous self-serving advertisement full of bullshit words?
Right. That's my concern. I know that Amazon will let me redownload kindle content. But what happens when Amazon simply stops supporting it? Or changes their DRM system in such a way that previously purchased content won't work on new devices? Or Amazon itself goes away entirely? That might not happen in ten years. But maybe twenty. Or fifty. I can still read a real book in fifty or a hundred years. The same should be said of digital content I've purchased.
Except for a couple CDs from bands I know via CDBaby or a couple directly from the musicians themselves, I haven't bought a CD (especially at a store) since 1998. I don't need one more poorly manufactured piece of plastic crap sitting around my home and I certainly don't give a damn about liner notes or packaging or the CD cover or how they write their logo on the face of the CD.
Even with bands I know and care about, I prefer to buy their music digitally. If it isn't available that way, I'll go ahead and buy the physical CD from them. For big label artists, I just can't see myself being bothered to go to a store and picking up one of their overpriced pieces of shit - or even via Amazon for that matter.
Same goes for books. While I wouldn't sit reading a stack of novels or tech books on a computer screen, something a couple iterations and generations away from Amazon's kindle (as long as I can be reassured of my life-long access to my purchased content) will be right up my alley. No more tearing, ripping, yellowing pages and being worried about bending the spine of my precious $10 paperback or denting the corner of my precious $50 hard cover. No more room full of books that I could now fit into a tiny memory chip. No more lugging around 20lbs of books everywhere I go.
Give me digital and give it to me now, while I'm still (somewhat) young. It's 2008 for fuck's sake. Just don't fuck me in the ass with DRM and an unreliable archive system that will leave me robbed of the tens of thousands of dollars of stuff I've bought in a decade.
I'm not convinced that Apple hardware is superior in general. My powerbook is the most sturdy laptop I've ever had, but the soundboard died after the first month and the only way to get audio to work was to plug headphones into the speaker port (which was constantly glowing red).
:)
But the appeal is that Apple's hardware and OS work very well together and are reliable and you can usually be assured that you can join any network or find any service you need wherever you are, without any annoying windows or linux hoops every time you change or add networks (even only temporarily). And my powerbook has just always worked. Other laptops would throw fits on occasion as was their nature.
I understand that the macbook is faster and has better hardware, but perhaps not sturdier and more durable hardware (especially for the actual external casing and components). For the price, might as well just get a thinkpad and throw linux on that instead of spending twice as much for a shiny mac to put linux on. It's not a bad idea, but . . . doesn't seem cost-effective.
I'll tell you where Apple does excel, though. Power adapters. I'm so fucking tired of losing an expensive laptop because the shitty power adapter on the laptop side snaps off or somehow breaks and is irreplaceable and you end up with an expensive paperweight because of a cheap three cent piece of metal. Powerbooks had a pretty decent (but still not perfect) adapter, and the macbooks seem to have some weird magnetic thing going on so that there's essentially no possible adapter-related damage. Everyone should be implementing something like that!
Here is what I want to be able to do on OSX, just as I'm able to do on debian and solaris:
#cpan
#CPAN>
#CPAN> install Bundle::SomeBundle
(installs some bundle of modules).
It's the fact that I would have to traipse through countless landmines to get modules (and not obscure ones either) working on OSX is the problem. And it isn't that these things absolutely could not work, but you had to jump through weird hoops that were not so much a result of the uniqueness of the architecture it was on, but of weird little glitches and oversights that one had to be "mindful" of.
I'm a Solaris guy by trade and let me tell you, building my development environment on one of my Solaris 9 boxes was very much like doing so on my debian box. Doing so on OSX was like... well... doing it on OSX. I ran into a lot of landmines for obscure things and had to run to google. Sometimes there would be an available solution and sometimes there wasn't. While postgres and apache are relatively slick to install and configure, the perl stuff ran into major hurdles. Building a postgres/apache/perl environment should be nearly identical on each of these platforms. It's not like I was trying to use CPAN to install some obscure module on an embedded OS on a pocket watch.
I wish I could provide precise examples, but this was something I started doing on my powerbook almost three years ago, so I just don't recall the specifics. I tend to want to say one area of problems was imagemagick, but I might be wrong.
But as I say, even if I could replicate my dev environment as desired, I still find myself reduced to the internal argument (and trust me, as someone who really does like Apple stuff and is generally a big OSX fan, these are long internal conflicts) of "great, I can do this on OSX... now I have replicated my $1000 environment on a $3200 environment. Yay".
On the other hand, this was almost three years ago. Perhaps things have changed for the better since then, though I don't see a lot of discussion over perl stuff on OSX (as it seems like a vast sea of ruby guys).
Too bad they're doing this about a decade too late. I don't buy music anymore unless it's directly from a band or some service that gives the band control and significant share of the profits. The big labels wasted any good will they could have had from my part. Good riddance.
The one thing I hate about my OSX laptop is trying to get a lot of CPAN and perl related libs installed on it. If you just want to dump a pre-set LAMP (er.. OSXAMP? Whatever) on it, that's fine. But I was trying to replicate my development environment for a personal project onto my powerbook so I could carry it all with me and no longer have to telnet to my system to work on such things.
I found a lot of seemingly trivial things to be absolutely tedious and borderline impossible on OSX. Something I could have just installed with cpan or apt-get on debian required that I install this lib. Then that lib. Then FINK. Then tweak a bunch of stuff. Then, finally, if I'd sacrificed enough chickens, I could install the actual think I had wanted to in the first place.
I know that OSX is a huge platform among web developers, but I also know most of them are into dreamweaver crap and php, ruby, etc. But I know that it's big enough among them that it can't always be that difficult. For me, however, I simply wasn't willing to invest the absurd amount of energy and time to get my development environment going on it that would have taken me an hour from start to finish on any given linux system. And without that, there is absolutely no reason for me to own a mac (the unix underpinning being the reason I enjoy it so I can do my solaris/linux-ish stuff with it). The only exception being that I do love my powerbook, for ease of networkability in multiple environments and the rather rugged, durable, always-works consistency of it.
I know that I have had to pull myself away from apple.com on more than a few occasions where I was playing with the configurator and so ready to hand out my cash like an idiot, before I came to my senses and said "but you're just doing this so you can have a new shiny toy -- there's nothing you can do on this box that you can't already do on your powerhouse linux box at home... save your $3,000+ and get a hooker, some blow and a couple midgets".
I love Apple, but why anyone would choose a Mac over Linux is beyond me. I'm not pressed for cash by any means whatsoever, but I'm not going to spend $3k on a nice mac desktop when I could spend a third or a half of that on a powerful linux desktop. They're essentially the same thing, unless you have some weird textmate fetish (in which case running KDE's kate or kdevelop should serve you just as well). And having an Apple store nearby has never really seemed important to me (I do own a powerbook, because mac laptops are fantastic and you can't really reproduce the laptop experience). It's not like I'm going to buy any of their $700/gb "idiot tax" RAM and unless you're looking for advice on frosting your hair, the Apple "geniuses" are useless.
You'll be getting the vaccination yourself as soon as your car and life insurance carrier requires you to submit to it or face double the fees. And once your employer demands it for employment. And once it's required for citizenship. And once you are placed on a "cause for suspicion" list simply for not being vaccinated.
The original parent says that part of the effect of outsourcing is that it sobers employees up so they'll be more malleable and pliable to executive whim instead of demanding unreasonable things like (at least) cost of living increases.
Coming from a company that has had more layoffs than I can remember since 2000 (each taking about three to ten thousand people with it), I can tell you the changes I have witnessed in the local employees.
The change is that many are no longer excited, hard-working, enthusiastic, imaginative employees who love their job and their employer and feel pride in supporting their brand (as if it were a sports team, even) and look forward to their daily work and how it progresses them toward their own personal dreams as well as their professional aspirations to climb the ladder internally.
Instead, I find many who have been around for a very long time and feel demoralized, devalued and are in constant fear that they are going to be axed in the next round. Especially since there has often been little rhyme or reason to the people chosen to be dismissed. Most seem certain that THEY are next. And if not NEXT, then not soon after. And if it is inevitable, then why bother putting 110% of your energy and effort into it? I've seen formerly enthusiastic, extremely hard working, very intelligent, creative, productive, fantastic people become shells of themselves that mirror what I see when I'm standing in line at Carl's Junior and peeking into the back with the defeated fry-cook who feels he's just an automated process passing the minutes until he can clock out and go home.
If that's the sort of sobering result you want, may the fates have mercy on whatever company *you* (the original poster) run.
Right. That's exactly the problem with outsourcing. It is a whipping stick used to make everyone remaining in the company feel thankful just to have a job, rather than demanding things like raises for hard work and dedication and various other compensations. "Look, if you don't reduce yourself to the mentality of a wage-slave -- or even a real slave -- we'll just ship your position out to some guy in a country where his rent is cheaper than what you spend on milk for your cereal in a month". It is the most irrational and immature management tool available.
I can't wait until middle management and the slew of recent MBAs find themselves in the same position as so many of our engineering and support bretheren.
I will counter your "this data can't be accurate, because these nations have huge corporations in them which have privacy regulations to adhere to!" with "this data is entirely correct, precisely because they are home to huge corporations which sometimes have privacy regulations to adhere to, but often don't bother and are often not held responsible for it and at any rate have lobbiests in their employ to legislate for their advantage against the rights and privacy of the citizens of said country".
The thing that concerns me is that Americans tout "freedom" and "liberties" on a daily basis as part of often over-exaggerated patriotism or often an excuse to conduct military missions (to "protect our freedom"). Americans will often even forgive infringements and attacks on our "freedom" and "liberty" by citing the supposed fact that we have so much of both and can apparently thereby afford to let a little of it slip away here and there for causes they deem worthy.
Yet for those who are aware of the world around them, it is easy to see great chunks of freedom, liberty and privacy being wrestled from our grasps on a daily basis. Usually without much defense on our part. We just hand it over. It's like being a passenger on an ocean liner and touting the safety and reliability of the vessel even as you wade across the submerged deck, up to your hips in salt water.
What it all really means, is "I can still buy a $5 latte and my favorite sit-com with the offensively stereo-typed ethnic characters is still on television and I can still follow my favorite commercial sports team, so I *must* have an ass-load of freedom!".
I'm not suggesting rebuying anything. I'm suggesting you go with your own preferred format and get the movies you want for it. If the other format wins, then you can buy a player for that (or a dual player) and start choosing your movies on that platform when the time comes. It's not 1980. It's not either/or. Right now, I use bluray because i happen to have a bluray palyer. If HD wins in two years, I can start buying HD content. And I'll still be able to watch my bluray stuff.
I mean, come on -- people are acting like this is rocket science. People are still able to play records, casettes and CDs to this day. Just because CDs are the thing now doesn't prevent you from playing the other formats. BluRay (or HD) won't just disappear no matter what. And even if one wins, chances are they'll just eventually provide playability of both formats in a cheap *player* so you can watch whatever content you own.
I find it absurd that people are worried that if they "pick the wrong one" today, they'll have a stack of useless discs on their shelf in a few years. That is simply not the case. And in the mean time, where are you going to get your HD content for your HD television (which a lot of people ARE moving to)? Primarily, from HD and BluRay.
So relax, enjoy your movies and don't freak out. It's not worth it.
By the way, the attitude isn't flippant. DVD players aren't $400 today. In fact, they weren't $400 for very long at all. That's why I said PICK ONE today and enjoy it. And buy the other when both formats are cheaper. If you're spending $30 on DVD/HD/BluRay discs then you'll have no problem affording $100 for a bluray or HD player. I own bluray right now. When I can get a nice HD player for about $100 (which won't bee too long from now), then I will.
We're not talking about massive investments here.