How does calling some *GUY* a "cunt" have anything to do with misogyny? In fact, what would calling a woman a cunt have to do with it, either? Or a "bitch" for that matter?
Mysogyny is the literal hatred of women. Not the deserved hateful of one or more stupid individuals.
So, I'm just going to assume you were trying to be funny and none of us got the joke or something.
I've never heard of the blogs that were linked to in the blurb. I don't read blogs, unless you count Slashdot - which I dont' really since Slashdot is just a regular website (when was the last time Taco talked about his trip somewhere or hemos gave the breakdown on his relationship or.. anything from any of them in fact).
I didn't even know blogs have been around that many years. I didn't even really know about them as "blogs" until a year or two ago. And there aren't really blogs that I care to read. I look at engadget, but I dont' see how that's a blog either. It's more of a bunch of links than a blog. Or are we now calling collections of links "blogs" as well? And blogs that are links to blogs about blogs about blogs are blogs, too?
I couldn't care less what happens to blogs. Let all the 12 year olds and single moms flood the net with them. Nobody's forcing me to read that crap.
Blogs are just instant-sites for those with what they think is something important to say that don't have the intelligence or interest in setting up their own actual website.
In other words, I guess this sort of effects me the same way telling me Dawson's Creek is about to be canceled would. I simply wouldn't care because it has nothing to do with my life or my interests.
However, I don't have any more sympathy for some schmuck that gets reamed gambling online than I do for the same douchebag that gets reamed in vegas. If you're going to play cards or pull a slot lever, you should just assume your money is being poured in gas and set aflame and not expect to see a return.
And if you're playing *online* . . . Well, we all know the stereotype. Except you're also stupid because at least in person you can see the fucking cards and the fucking dealer and be reasonably certain less fishiness is going on.
You should develop an application that will take into account numerous global and business factors to show CEOs - in real time - what their total cost savings is based on their outsourced and offshored efforts over what they would have spent if they had not done so. Then it should give projected savings for "what-if" conditions, such as laying off more employees, moving more work overseas, ignoring more labor laws. You get the picture. It could even be a sweet little Dashboard Widget to make that dashboard crap useful for once!
You could even make a version for employees that shows them what the going rate of their work is elsewhere in the world so that they can begin to plan accordingly and start drinking that free(ish) water rather than that $4/gallon milk. Or start walking 50 miles to work instead of spending a week's salary on a day's worth of gas. Or start wearing yard trash bags instead of clothes. You know - to make the average American worker more competitive with the global labor force.
Or even better, you could build on existing TTS (text to speech) libraries by creating a utility that will modify input so that it sounds more twangish or nasal or laid back. That way call centers overseas could connect these to their PBX systems so their engineers sound more "American" to american end-users looking for tech support.
But perhaps you want to make something that will actually help *you* in the long run. In that case, perhaps you could develop some sort of program that will let you travel back in time to pick another major for a career that isn't so washed-out. I'm not sure what sort of schooling is available for janitorial work, but I'm sure there are vocational training centers you could look into!
If you can't find anyone with a cheap old box they don't want anymore (and you don't have one either), just hit pricewatch.com and find the cheapest stuff you can find that will seem to do the job. Unless you're going ancient, nothing is going to be terribly energy concious - but you can do better than a P4, probably.
If you checkout pricewatch.com, you can probably find a mobo/cpu/fan combo with a 1.5 ghz Athlon XP for under $100. Just throw in some cheap PC2100 (or whatever) ram, a $30 case, a $20 cdrom and a cheap hard drive. Probably cost you around $250 for the whole thing.
My understanding of the DS is that there are few - if any at all - games that actually take advantage of the second screen as anything more than a gimick. Like in Nintendogs, it keeps track of the date and time. And in other games, it shows the sky. And... well... that seems to be about it.
On the other hand, a company that gets massive tax breaks and general corporate welfare on the cost of american citizens should not be able to sell those same american citizens out for cheaper foreign labor that the citizens that helped get and keep the company running in the first place could not ever possibly compete with, simply because they had the misfortune of living in a top-society that values the Fortune 500 more than they value employing americans and keeping the economy strong?
How is the economy going to work out when the only jobs in this country are service jobs and everything that is consumed is produced overseas? Including knowledge and intellectual property.
No, nobody has a "right" to a job - but that doesn't mean anyone has the right to sell the entire country short, either. There is a serious difference between the freedom of the employer and the freedom of the employee in this country. You probably couldn't even live on the street for what they're paying in a lot of cases overseas. Are you suggesting that people in this country are just whiney and lazy because they can't compete with a position that requires 10 years of experience and a 4 year university degree on $6/hr?
Wake up and stop buying the Fox News Channel business-line hook and sinker. Not everything big business does is glorious and representative of democracy and freedom. A lot of it is underhanded, backstabbing and unpatriotic. Like using offshoring as a forceful threat to induce Americans to accept lower wages and worse working conditions.
Except the reason that people are now in the position of being willing to do the job for this pay and these circumstances is only because the alternative is for those jobs to go completely away thanks to globalization. I'm all for capitalism, but while my employer has a global work force to choose from, I do not have a global pool of employers to choose from.
This isn't a good thing. If we weren't so lax about allowing offshoring like there was no tomorrow, people would not be accepting these jobs for pennies on the dollar in the states.
This is nothing more than the result of corporate strong-arming. And capitalism is all about free enterprise and pursuit, yes? Yet I only see the free part being attributed to the corporations.
And as some whiney bitch posted elsewhere in this thread about "people need to find another line of work then" -- the fucking point is today it's tech jobs. Tomorrow, it might be your job. Or your mom's job. Again - find me a job that couldn't be outsourced? Pretty much all of them eventually could be. And if we don't stand up, check for our own nuts and stop buying the whole "but this is the way a free society works!" bullshit, we're going to send all of our jobs offshore. Then we're going to be stuck importing everything. All of our money will (and already is) going out... and not coming back in... We are reducing our own country's value for the same of a few lame ass CEOs and a small echelon of the investor-class.
Well, I don't know about that - but do you remember the story from Oregon (my home state) where McDonald's had outsourced the drive through ordering position to a call center in the midwest (North Dakota, I think?). There's no reason they couldn't outsource that overseas for even less money... except people overseas probably are developing a high enough standard that they likely wouldn't take such a menial job for $2/hr, while an American would lap it up for $5/hr.
How exactly do you buy a larger house on a smaller salary? Chances are, if they move you to a more remote and cheaper part of the country, they're going to reduce your salary to an adjusted range for that region.
So let me get this straight... you move away from your family and friends. You pull your children out of their school, away from their family and away from their friends. You go through the trouble of selling your house and moving to a new place and buying a new house on your reduced salary. You lose the conveniences and diversity of a big city.
And what do you end up with? A job that could still always be outsourced if someone gets that bug up their ass. And what happens when that position is no longer there? Well, now you're stuck in the middle of nowhere and will probably have to move again because your new little podunk town isn't where all the jobs are - just your current one.
But if you want to inconvenience your family and live like a nomad, at the beck, whim and call of your employer - go for it.
For the record, my employer did this recently, too. But I refused to follow along unless they not only retained my previous salary dollar for dollar (not just salary GRADE), but gave me an increase. Most people, however, are not in a position to make such demands and will be in the "do it or we give your job to some guy in Russia" category.
Even companies that are doing this then move on to the next step of outsourcing, because no matter how cheap they can find labor in America, it's cheaper elsewhere. There are places without OSHA. Places without the same expectation of benefits. Places without the same taxation requirements or insurance. Places with cheaper construction, electricity and maintenance costs. If you can hire an engineer for $4-$7/hr outside of this country, why would you ever waste your money hiring an American when they could make more than that at Burger King?
To stay employable in the future in this country, you need to have highly marketable skills that are unlikely to be shipped overseas. Brush up on your ability to push a broom or ring up a cash register.
Seriously, any and every job that can be outsourced, eventually will be. I can't think of many that could not be. Even surgery eventually (since we saw the story of a surgery taking place across the ocean, via a remote/robot). Management could be handled overseas. Product manufacturing can be done over seas. Taking orders at a fast food drive through can be done overseas. Gas pumping can be automated. Even cashier work will eventually be automated. I guess security guard work is probably a sure bet. Police work. Janitorial work. And, I suppose, hollywood/acting type of work. Maybe teaching?
And yes, I'm a little bitter because I was too young to get into the game to enjoy the dot-com insanity and profit from it and now it feels less like a career every day and more like an 8-5 burger flipping job.
While your mom probably loves it, I do not want a vibrating controller. I do not want force feedback in a *handheld* controller. I do not want a controller the size of a watermelon. I do not want a controller with 400 buttons. I do not want a controller that eats batteries like Naudia Nyce with a plate full of semen. I do not want a controller that breaks after two weeks. I do not want a controller that will make me want to chop off my hands after a few hours.
Give me a light, reasonably sized, fairly simple, ergonomically designed controller and do something else with your time besides trying to develop stupid whiz-bangs that nobody wants.
They can survive alienating the TechTV's "core" of, well, techies, by pandering to 9 year olds who watch just for the reject chicks from the Hot Topic catalog.
Okay, you gotta except Morgan Webb from that, though. I mean, she was in freaking Playboy afterall!
But yeah, I pretty much agree with everything else. And I stopped watching Sci-Fi for the longest time, because I was angry over the Farscape thing and the First Wave thing. Both were great and original shows from Sci-Fi and they just tossed them to do more Wonder Woman reruns. But I recently started watching after dissing Battle Star Galactica for two years and was amazed. What a great show - and I thought I hated it at first! And Edward James Olmos. Holy fucking hell. What a perfect choice for the commander. He's just awesome to watch. But even more than that - fucking Master Blasters. God damn that show kicks ass. I want to see more texans blowing stuff up with massive rocket engines.
Another thing about SciFi... Um... why do they have so many HORROR movies on?! Movies about vampire do not fucking fall under any scope of sci-fi whatso-fucking-ever...:/
Probably for the same reason they have Formula D about drifting (yawn) and Street Fury about... cars sitting around and naked asian pornstars and some punk trying to be DMX and a block of anime... and infomercials...
On the positive side, I haven't seen any half hour or one hour blocks of paid-for advertising from microsoft about their new media center and their dedication to security, masked as a television show, like I used to see on TechTV all the time...
I would rather watch some dorky basement dwelling videogame geek talk about games than some ditzy chick who just sees the show as more face time on her rise to fame in hollywood. Very few people on that network seem to give a damn about anything related to technology, with the possible exception of Kevin P. and Sarah Lane and probably Adam/Morgan. For everyone else, it's just another step to fame (look at that Kate chick, for example). And christ, they have Julie (the mormon chick from The Real World/MTV) as one of their reporters... No offense to her, but... what the fuck?!
Yeah, I've heard of that chick. She's been around for a LOOOONG time.
Our local station had a couple douchebags and one of them would routinely tell callers, when asking how they can deal with popups in their web browser, that the problem isn't the internet or their browser - it's that they're probably infected with a virus and then he'd go on this long diatribe about scanning for viruses and and trojans and so forth.
It never once occured to him to tell them "use firefox" or "install a popup blocker". No, he was absolutely CERTAIN that popups (like when you visit a website and you'd get a window popping up) were due to viruses and were an indication that there was something more wrong with the system.
What's even worse is that he would routinely tell people that free software and shareware was a bad idea, because nobody would give something away unless they had loaded it with something bad to screw up your system or spy on you.
And EVEN WORSE is when a parent would call in talking about their system acting wonky.. and the guy would inevitably find a way to blame the person's children for it. It's because they downloaded and installed firefox... or because they installed a chat client... or because they installed... whatever.. Whatever it was THAT had to have been the culprit. I can't even imagine how many poor kids got in trouble from their idiot parents because they listened to some idiot radio host who knew dick about PCs.
Slashdot Mirror
How does calling some *GUY* a "cunt" have anything to do with misogyny? In fact, what would calling a woman a cunt have to do with it, either? Or a "bitch" for that matter?
Mysogyny is the literal hatred of women. Not the deserved hateful of one or more stupid individuals.
So, I'm just going to assume you were trying to be funny and none of us got the joke or something.
I train Slashdot Editors for OSDN.
This sounds like... the work of SADBOT :(
A PHPPhD?
A PHP2D?
At least you got to college. :)
:)
I dropped out of the 9th grade.
I had an 8th grade GPA of 0.13 (yes, that's possible).
I just had my 5 year anniversary with my current employer.
I've never heard of the blogs that were linked to in the blurb. I don't read blogs, unless you count Slashdot - which I dont' really since Slashdot is just a regular website (when was the last time Taco talked about his trip somewhere or hemos gave the breakdown on his relationship or.. anything from any of them in fact).
I didn't even know blogs have been around that many years. I didn't even really know about them as "blogs" until a year or two ago. And there aren't really blogs that I care to read. I look at engadget, but I dont' see how that's a blog either. It's more of a bunch of links than a blog. Or are we now calling collections of links "blogs" as well? And blogs that are links to blogs about blogs about blogs are blogs, too?
I couldn't care less what happens to blogs. Let all the 12 year olds and single moms flood the net with them. Nobody's forcing me to read that crap.
Blogs are just instant-sites for those with what they think is something important to say that don't have the intelligence or interest in setting up their own actual website.
In other words, I guess this sort of effects me the same way telling me Dawson's Creek is about to be canceled would. I simply wouldn't care because it has nothing to do with my life or my interests.
Mod me flamebait - I don't really give a damn.
However, I don't have any more sympathy for some schmuck that gets reamed gambling online than I do for the same douchebag that gets reamed in vegas. If you're going to play cards or pull a slot lever, you should just assume your money is being poured in gas and set aflame and not expect to see a return.
And if you're playing *online* . . . Well, we all know the stereotype. Except you're also stupid because at least in person you can see the fucking cards and the fucking dealer and be reasonably certain less fishiness is going on.
Have you met this guy?.
Shut up, college boy. :P
You should develop an application that will take into account numerous global and business factors to show CEOs - in real time - what their total cost savings is based on their outsourced and offshored efforts over what they would have spent if they had not done so. Then it should give projected savings for "what-if" conditions, such as laying off more employees, moving more work overseas, ignoring more labor laws. You get the picture. It could even be a sweet little Dashboard Widget to make that dashboard crap useful for once!
You could even make a version for employees that shows them what the going rate of their work is elsewhere in the world so that they can begin to plan accordingly and start drinking that free(ish) water rather than that $4/gallon milk. Or start walking 50 miles to work instead of spending a week's salary on a day's worth of gas. Or start wearing yard trash bags instead of clothes. You know - to make the average American worker more competitive with the global labor force.
Or even better, you could build on existing TTS (text to speech) libraries by creating a utility that will modify input so that it sounds more twangish or nasal or laid back. That way call centers overseas could connect these to their PBX systems so their engineers sound more "American" to american end-users looking for tech support.
But perhaps you want to make something that will actually help *you* in the long run. In that case, perhaps you could develop some sort of program that will let you travel back in time to pick another major for a career that isn't so washed-out. I'm not sure what sort of schooling is available for janitorial work, but I'm sure there are vocational training centers you could look into!
If you can't find anyone with a cheap old box they don't want anymore (and you don't have one either), just hit pricewatch.com and find the cheapest stuff you can find that will seem to do the job. Unless you're going ancient, nothing is going to be terribly energy concious - but you can do better than a P4, probably.
If you checkout pricewatch.com, you can probably find a mobo/cpu/fan combo with a 1.5 ghz Athlon XP for under $100. Just throw in some cheap PC2100 (or whatever) ram, a $30 case, a $20 cdrom and a cheap hard drive. Probably cost you around $250 for the whole thing.
Everyone Is A Hacker In Training
Way to go getting everyone on the fucking terrorist watch list in America.
My understanding of the DS is that there are few - if any at all - games that actually take advantage of the second screen as anything more than a gimick. Like in Nintendogs, it keeps track of the date and time. And in other games, it shows the sky. And... well... that seems to be about it.
Lots of people didn't know they wanted a dual-screen handheld until after Nintendo came out with the DS.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm.
On the other hand, a company that gets massive tax breaks and general corporate welfare on the cost of american citizens should not be able to sell those same american citizens out for cheaper foreign labor that the citizens that helped get and keep the company running in the first place could not ever possibly compete with, simply because they had the misfortune of living in a top-society that values the Fortune 500 more than they value employing americans and keeping the economy strong?
How is the economy going to work out when the only jobs in this country are service jobs and everything that is consumed is produced overseas? Including knowledge and intellectual property.
No, nobody has a "right" to a job - but that doesn't mean anyone has the right to sell the entire country short, either. There is a serious difference between the freedom of the employer and the freedom of the employee in this country. You probably couldn't even live on the street for what they're paying in a lot of cases overseas. Are you suggesting that people in this country are just whiney and lazy because they can't compete with a position that requires 10 years of experience and a 4 year university degree on $6/hr?
Wake up and stop buying the Fox News Channel business-line hook and sinker. Not everything big business does is glorious and representative of democracy and freedom. A lot of it is underhanded, backstabbing and unpatriotic. Like using offshoring as a forceful threat to induce Americans to accept lower wages and worse working conditions.
Except the reason that people are now in the position of being willing to do the job for this pay and these circumstances is only because the alternative is for those jobs to go completely away thanks to globalization. I'm all for capitalism, but while my employer has a global work force to choose from, I do not have a global pool of employers to choose from.
This isn't a good thing. If we weren't so lax about allowing offshoring like there was no tomorrow, people would not be accepting these jobs for pennies on the dollar in the states.
This is nothing more than the result of corporate strong-arming. And capitalism is all about free enterprise and pursuit, yes? Yet I only see the free part being attributed to the corporations.
And as some whiney bitch posted elsewhere in this thread about "people need to find another line of work then" -- the fucking point is today it's tech jobs. Tomorrow, it might be your job. Or your mom's job. Again - find me a job that couldn't be outsourced? Pretty much all of them eventually could be. And if we don't stand up, check for our own nuts and stop buying the whole "but this is the way a free society works!" bullshit, we're going to send all of our jobs offshore. Then we're going to be stuck importing everything. All of our money will (and already is) going out... and not coming back in... We are reducing our own country's value for the same of a few lame ass CEOs and a small echelon of the investor-class.
Well, I don't know about that - but do you remember the story from Oregon (my home state) where McDonald's had outsourced the drive through ordering position to a call center in the midwest (North Dakota, I think?). There's no reason they couldn't outsource that overseas for even less money... except people overseas probably are developing a high enough standard that they likely wouldn't take such a menial job for $2/hr, while an American would lap it up for $5/hr.
How exactly do you buy a larger house on a smaller salary? Chances are, if they move you to a more remote and cheaper part of the country, they're going to reduce your salary to an adjusted range for that region.
So let me get this straight... you move away from your family and friends. You pull your children out of their school, away from their family and away from their friends. You go through the trouble of selling your house and moving to a new place and buying a new house on your reduced salary. You lose the conveniences and diversity of a big city.
And what do you end up with? A job that could still always be outsourced if someone gets that bug up their ass. And what happens when that position is no longer there? Well, now you're stuck in the middle of nowhere and will probably have to move again because your new little podunk town isn't where all the jobs are - just your current one.
But if you want to inconvenience your family and live like a nomad, at the beck, whim and call of your employer - go for it.
For the record, my employer did this recently, too. But I refused to follow along unless they not only retained my previous salary dollar for dollar (not just salary GRADE), but gave me an increase. Most people, however, are not in a position to make such demands and will be in the "do it or we give your job to some guy in Russia" category.
Even companies that are doing this then move on to the next step of outsourcing, because no matter how cheap they can find labor in America, it's cheaper elsewhere. There are places without OSHA. Places without the same expectation of benefits. Places without the same taxation requirements or insurance. Places with cheaper construction, electricity and maintenance costs. If you can hire an engineer for $4-$7/hr outside of this country, why would you ever waste your money hiring an American when they could make more than that at Burger King?
To stay employable in the future in this country, you need to have highly marketable skills that are unlikely to be shipped overseas. Brush up on your ability to push a broom or ring up a cash register.
Seriously, any and every job that can be outsourced, eventually will be. I can't think of many that could not be. Even surgery eventually (since we saw the story of a surgery taking place across the ocean, via a remote/robot). Management could be handled overseas. Product manufacturing can be done over seas. Taking orders at a fast food drive through can be done overseas. Gas pumping can be automated. Even cashier work will eventually be automated. I guess security guard work is probably a sure bet. Police work. Janitorial work. And, I suppose, hollywood/acting type of work. Maybe teaching?
And yes, I'm a little bitter because I was too young to get into the game to enjoy the dot-com insanity and profit from it and now it feels less like a career every day and more like an 8-5 burger flipping job.
While your mom probably loves it, I do not want a vibrating controller. I do not want force feedback in a *handheld* controller. I do not want a controller the size of a watermelon. I do not want a controller with 400 buttons. I do not want a controller that eats batteries like Naudia Nyce with a plate full of semen. I do not want a controller that breaks after two weeks. I do not want a controller that will make me want to chop off my hands after a few hours.
Give me a light, reasonably sized, fairly simple, ergonomically designed controller and do something else with your time besides trying to develop stupid whiz-bangs that nobody wants.
They can survive alienating the TechTV's "core" of, well, techies, by pandering to 9 year olds who watch just for the reject chicks from the Hot Topic catalog.
:/
Okay, you gotta except Morgan Webb from that, though. I mean, she was in freaking Playboy afterall!
But yeah, I pretty much agree with everything else. And I stopped watching Sci-Fi for the longest time, because I was angry over the Farscape thing and the First Wave thing. Both were great and original shows from Sci-Fi and they just tossed them to do more Wonder Woman reruns. But I recently started watching after dissing Battle Star Galactica for two years and was amazed. What a great show - and I thought I hated it at first! And Edward James Olmos. Holy fucking hell. What a perfect choice for the commander. He's just awesome to watch. But even more than that - fucking Master Blasters. God damn that show kicks ass. I want to see more texans blowing stuff up with massive rocket engines.
Another thing about SciFi... Um... why do they have so many HORROR movies on?! Movies about vampire do not fucking fall under any scope of sci-fi whatso-fucking-ever...
Probably for the same reason they have Formula D about drifting (yawn) and Street Fury about... cars sitting around and naked asian pornstars and some punk trying to be DMX and a block of anime... and infomercials...
On the positive side, I haven't seen any half hour or one hour blocks of paid-for advertising from microsoft about their new media center and their dedication to security, masked as a television show, like I used to see on TechTV all the time...
But she was Fook Mi!
And you have just landed on the problem.
I would rather watch some dorky basement dwelling videogame geek talk about games than some ditzy chick who just sees the show as more face time on her rise to fame in hollywood. Very few people on that network seem to give a damn about anything related to technology, with the possible exception of Kevin P. and Sarah Lane and probably Adam/Morgan. For everyone else, it's just another step to fame (look at that Kate chick, for example). And christ, they have Julie (the mormon chick from The Real World/MTV) as one of their reporters... No offense to her, but... what the fuck?!
And they're going to change the Canadian version to "Call For Help, Eh?"
You must be browsing at +1.
Yeah, I've heard of that chick. She's been around for a LOOOONG time.
Our local station had a couple douchebags and one of them would routinely tell callers, when asking how they can deal with popups in their web browser, that the problem isn't the internet or their browser - it's that they're probably infected with a virus and then he'd go on this long diatribe about scanning for viruses and and trojans and so forth.
It never once occured to him to tell them "use firefox" or "install a popup blocker". No, he was absolutely CERTAIN that popups (like when you visit a website and you'd get a window popping up) were due to viruses and were an indication that there was something more wrong with the system.
What's even worse is that he would routinely tell people that free software and shareware was a bad idea, because nobody would give something away unless they had loaded it with something bad to screw up your system or spy on you.
And EVEN WORSE is when a parent would call in talking about their system acting wonky.. and the guy would inevitably find a way to blame the person's children for it. It's because they downloaded and installed firefox... or because they installed a chat client... or because they installed... whatever.. Whatever it was THAT had to have been the culprit. I can't even imagine how many poor kids got in trouble from their idiot parents because they listened to some idiot radio host who knew dick about PCs.