It's not really zealotry; it's just that I am really tired of seeing Microsoft implementing something really old getting headlines as if it were something new and wonderful. To put this in perspective, what would your comment be if the headline were "Ford to integrate rainwater removal system in all 2011 model windshields"? I would probably say "it's a windshield wiper, move on already" except that I've been seeing this kind of thing happen for a long time. Depending on how old you are you won't even believe me, but this has happened when MS added networking to Windows; then TCP/IP networking; then real user accounts; Kerberos and LDAP... The list is endless. So instead of "move on" my comment is what you saw... here we go again...
This will hopefully pave the way for other vendors to also make use of Windows' existing patching infrastructure and eliminate the need for the multitude of custom updater applications and services that clutter most systems today.
Or just go to Linux, where most distributions have had something like this for over a decade now. The worst part is, I'm sure I will star hearing from Windows people how fantastic the new "innovation" is...
IMHO you're confusing religion with philosophy. A philosophy (or a way of life) is what you describe as a set of ideas or beliefs one may use to guide his or her moral choices. A religion OTOH is really more like a club that you may be a member of. Religions after all require more than beliefs; they require behavior, for instance - like not engaging in homosexuality and not having sex out of wedlock (and a huge list of other things) for most Christian religions, covering your hair if you are either a Jewish male or a Muslim female, wearing special underwear if you're Mormon, etc. There have also been religions requiring human sacrifice, slavery, going to war. Indeed because religion is usually a club that offers eternal life only to its members, membership to religion has been used throughout time to convince people to engage in all sorts of behavior. Religion is many things and it's also a form of marketing. A personal philosophy replaces the moral backbone provided by religion with some advantage, I think.
NO technology will do your thinking for you. NO product will protect you if you don't know enough to protect yourself. Antiviruses, deep packet inspection, intrusion detection, etc: they are all useless - worse than that: they are expensive useless, designed more to make somebody else money that to protect the end user. The ONLY thing that will protect you is knowledge. When will people learn that if they want the benefits of modern technology, understanding it is not optional?
But what ticks me off is that corporations are making bucketloads of money from information that belongs to me, at the same time as corporations are doing everything in their power to prevent me from using the information that belongs to them. All I want is some fundamental fairness. Part of the problem is that I cannot purchase some products and services with money alone; I am forced to fork over information in addition to money. On the other hand they make it as hard as possible, sometimes they make it illegal, for me to use products and services I payed for in any way I see fit - you know, as if what I purchased was actually my property. What's more, we have indeed lost this battle when most people here say "it's over - get used to it." It's *my* privacy you're selling for your own convenience, punk!
No, there are not. This is part of the mainstream trying to take the terms geek and nerd from us, after we made them cool. Geeks and nerds have no interest in sports whatsoever. They view them as the childish games they are. If you are interested in sports, you are certainly not a geek. Probably not even a nerd. No exceptions.
In the mid-80s I had a FIAT 147. It had been reliable ever since I had it. Then some day I found myself chasing my girlfriend's dad on the highway - she was going to college in another town and we were going to surprise her for her birthday. Now her dad drove a Dodge Charger and had a sick sense of humor, which made my task all but impossible. By pushing the gas pedal all the way down and keeping it there I managed to keep the Charger from completely disappearing ahead. Fortunately it was at night on an empty road. Anyway, the little Fiat's speedometer was pegged at its maximum of 160 Km/h - about 100 mph - for about 40 minutes. I have no idea what the speed actually was. On the one hand, I felt the speedometer wanted to go higher if it could; on the other had it was hard to believe the little 1.3 L engine had actually propelled me to 160 Km/h. In any event when the time came to exit the highway and I finally lifted my foot, the pedal just stayed there. I had to drive the final leg to her place by carefully controlling my speed with the clutch. Fortunately it was not an automatic. When we arrived and I had a chance to look under the hood the problem was obvious: the cable from the gas pedal connected to a lever on the carburetor and this lever was checked by a spring, so that when no one was pressing on the pedal the spring would pull the lever back. In this case, the spring had completely lost its strength, having been affected by the heat of the engine running under a completely unexpected regimen. This was definitely not a race car, but a little city hopper. Allowing the spring to cool down gave it back its usual shape and the car came back to normal. So I guess my point is, yes, even totally mechanical systems can fail dangerously. OTOH a mechanical system can be understood/fixed/acted upon by almost anyone. You wouldn't be able to understand a problem on an electronic system however just by looking, even if you are a electric engineer.
Don't get me wrong - I think they are right. It's about time CS enters the mainstream; it's good for the economy; it's important that this happens. But, this is another nail in the coffin of the "geek era." We will go back to being nerds and the extraordinary period when we were relevant and even sorta cool will be over. The question I'm interested in is, what's the next thing we will make our own? I hope it happens a little bit like Makers, by Cory Doctorow...
I have no idea how old you are, of course. I was 13 when I saw Episode IV on the big screen. I didn't know what to expect, I didn't particularly want to go to the movies with my dad and mom that day. It's safe to say however that that movie changed my life and has a great deal of responsibility in making me who I am. I saw the movie again 12 more times during its first theater run. I borrowed money, I worked, I sold raffles, all to afford spending every minute I could watching that movie. 12 x a movie ticket is a lot of money to the average 13 yo. Then I waited 20 years. It is extremely unlikely that anyone who has gone through the original trilogy in their teens would have skipped the latest 3 based on reviews. That is why it was such a blockbuster. I, and millions like me, just *had* to see it, even if we knew it was going to suck. Others have spoken here about why the original trilogy was amazing and why the latter one sucks so I'm not going there. Except to say that IMHO Lucas tried to keep the franchise's appeal to kids while trying to give the 1978 kids some grown-up material that would appeal to the middle-aged geeks they had become. To do that requires a sort of genius that Lucas does not possess. It's possible - just look at the Phineas and Ferb show on Disney Channel. But Lucas seems incapable of dealing with adult issues, let alone bridging the required age gap. His adult themes are not grave, they are boring - trade taxes indeed! So Star Wars fails to grow up with its audience.
Back in the '80s my friends and I produced a number of tapes that we jokingly called 'the magnum opii' (as obras primas for those who speak portuguese). The method to produce one of these was simple: start with something random on a turntable; then you have however long that song lasts to select the next song, find the album, put it on the second turntable and be ready to mix it in just at the right time. Not only the tapes sounded good (although sometimes really really bad or hilarious), but it was good exercise for the musical mind, having to keep a lot of info about music in our heads to be able to pull good mixes. Good times...:)
Precisely. For some reason though I've been seeing what almost looks like a campaign from users for the right to install software "on their own machines" (never mind these machines belong to the company, not them). This is being billed to management as an absolute necessity in order for people to be able to get work done. Windows is being used as an example by Linux users, who want something akin to the "power user" group Windows offers. I've spent hours this week explaining to managers why giving users full sudo is exactly the same thing as giving them the root password. The fact that Fedora comes up with this new "feature" precisely now raises flags all over my paranoid brain. I'm absolutely certain before the week is over some manager will suggest replacing all our Ubuntu workstations with Fedora as a way to solve the "problem" of users not being able to install software. This looks suspiciously similar to the way Windows took over the corporate desktop in the early-to-mid nineties.
On a related note, what happens in settings like computer labs, where users can be students in a school or patrons in a library, etc.?
Garbage in whose opinion? As Joseph Campbell said, mythology is what we call other people's religions. The same can very well apply to garbage. And I'm not discounting the protestants; this is an article about the Vatican, so it makes some sense to limit my comment to Catholics. That and the fact that I was raised Catholic -- which sort of gives me a license to poke fun at Catholics (besides having helped to make me an Agnostic).
Or maybe someone on this other planet 2,000 thousand years ago compiled a bunch of thousand-year-old stories and attributed the result to the creator of the Universe. Then over the next 500 years or so a group of people schemed to get to the top of their society by carefully editing the stories, leaving out whole books of it and only including what they could use. Then they controlled their world for the next 1,000 years or so by using careful doses of applying the resulting book and torturing and killing people who disagreed with them. Then some people finally started waking up and learning to think for themselves and maybe the original people who were oppressed by the holders of the book have now ascended to the top of the societal pyramid and are terrified of not having oppressors and tyrants telling them what to do, so they vote and influence policy to try and force everybody under the rule of that original book again, which in the meantime has lost all of its meaning and can be interpreted to mean anything at all. Just saying. This is just the kind of thing that could happen on an alien world in a bad Sci Fi plot, isn't it?
"A stranger walks up to you on the bus, and says 'My name is Rev. Kwame. I want a reliable person who could assist us to transfer the sum of... Do you give them your bank account number?"
An example that's more "real world" to the average user. Regrettably, in the real world, people (especially older folks) do fall prey to scams or otherwise obvious fraud.
No kidding. I still shudder when I remember what happened years ago to my aunt, who is over 70. I came to her house to visit and found a man in his 30s sitting in the living room drinking coffee. My aunt says "you remember so-and-so, I met him on the way to the grocery store and asked him in. Fancy that, he's now an antiques dealer and may be interested in buying some of my stuff." Well, this was NOT who she thought it was. It was a total stranger who realized she had mistaken him for somebody else and decided to take advantage of the situation. Now my aunt is a retired jeweler and "her stuff", some of which was exposed in the coffee table, consists of unique pieces and precious stones that she kept for sentimental reasons.
I didn't want to scare her by exposing the impostor, so I asked to have some coffee too. When she left I told the guy I knew what was going on and if he didn't want me to call the cops immediately he would show me his ID and, as soon as aunt was back, make an excuse and leave. Fortunately he was not a violent criminal, just a lowlife who saw an opportunity to scam an old lady. So he left and aunt never figured out what had happened.
When I read about old people giving thousands of $$ to Nigerian schemers, it reminds me of this story.
I actually blogged about this, and I don't blog that much. In short, I realized that Windows is thought to be user-friendly and the common denominator everybody uses and understands, when in practice every Windows user who is not a technically inclined person tends to have some relative (or an IT guy in corporations) who does the "hard" stuff for them. My conclusion was, if we all flat out refuse doing it, MS will be done and over it very fast.
There's only one reason to be in IT: because you love it. Anything else is the wrong reason. I used to say during the good old days that yes, I was making great money but if I loved poetry that's what I'd be doing instead. Money is just not enough to make up for doing something you don't like every single day. IT requires commitment, willingness to constantly upgrade your skills, a passion for problem-solving, organizational and interpersonal skills. It gives back long hours, unappreciative employers and customers and these days, not a great deal of money. So all of you people who joined the profession during one of the previous booms thinking only about money, yes, please, go find something else to do. Go poison some other field. This will mean I'll get to work with fewer noobs and wannabees who think some stupid acronym certification makes them something they're not. And of course with fewer people in the field the average $$ will go up for those of us who really like this and know what they're doing.
Agreed it's premature. But I don't think they're giving Obama the peace prize. They are actually giving Bush the anti-prize. Or they are giving this prize to the millions of people who supported Obama and helped turn America around. Changing the face of the biggest military power in the world from that of a bellicose, stupid and arrogant cowboy to that of an understanding and respectful partner is no easy feat. I'm not sure whom, but someone certainly deserve a prize for that.
OK, so this trend is full of the same thing that comes along every time an article about Linux vs. mainstream gets published. They don't know or care what an operating system is. They recognize the Microsoft brand but they don't really know what Microsoft does. They get bored by technical "details". They don't want to know how things work, they just want them to work. They don't care about logical arguments, it's all about emotional perception. OK. But that begs the question I put in the subject box. What do they care about? Where's the passion in their lives? What can they be proud of? What can they do that's unique? Please don't say they care about having sex with gorgeous partners; I'm not different from them in that respect - and I'm happily married and quite satisfied in that respect, thank you. I would make this an Ask Slashdot but they don't tend to publish my questions.
I second that. Naming machines with codes not only requires database maintenance when things change; it is also extremely boring. I'll never bother to remember the last time I touched K04-071223, I can't relate to something like that. But I can probably follow in my head the history of machine Wintermute and when it develops a strange behavior at its new position in Accounting I'll probably remember it did something similar when it was new and worked for the CEO's assistant...
You sound like the perfect employee that corporations love: willing to work really hard, but not interested in money.
Not at all. I'm very interested in money. All I'm saying is it's not my *only* interest.
My time is valuable to me. I choose to sell some of that time to the highest bidder. What's the problem? Why would I sell my time to a low-ball bidder when someone else is willing to pay more for my services?
Precisely my point: money is your only consideration. It shouldn't be. If you're just selling your time to others for them to do what they please no matter how you feel about the job, you're a whore. Besides the only way to make real money is to work for yourself. If you think you'll get rich as a salaried employee *you* are not only a whore but a cheap whore.
If I didn't need money for housing, food, etc., I wouldn't go to work at all. I have far more interesting things I could be doing with my time than working on some boring BS for a corporation. When I figure out how to make more money doing those things than my regular job nets me, I'll quit.
As someone who forces himself to work so he can pay the bills, you have my pity. Personally I prefer to work with what I love and that's what makes me great at it. Being great at it is what make people pay me money for my time. Money is incidental to loving what I do. You should really try it some day.
WTF? What corporate job are you ever going to have where you can build something to be "proud" of? Sorry, but most of us don't work at NASA, or on some great science project like the LHC, discovering the mysteries of the universe. Instead, we do much more boring and useless things, so the only yardstick to measure by is money.
It's really sad that you get modded up for being a frustrated whore. In 1996 I replaced a proprietary system at a bank with an open source-based one. It saved them millions. Yes, I did get a big bonus but that was not the best thing about it. The best thing about it was to be on the cover of a magazine and to tour the country showcasing my solution. Something I can be proud of, even if I don't work at NASA. But that's just me - if you think you can only be happy working for the LHC and instead of trying to be the best physicist you can be you're job-hopping for some extra cash you are a truly sorry excuse for a human being.
WTF? Who cares? Besides, my peers don't care about these employers either. All my friends from my last job were laid off the same day I was. I'm sure none of them are regretting spending more time at work.
And what are you doing about it besides whining on/.? You and your friends should be starting a company so you can maximize how much money you make; or you should be going back to school to try to realize your dream of working for the LHC
What about it? What about the responsibility of an employer to its employees? If they're not going to live up to that, then we have no responsibility back towards them. The only responsibility I have is to show up every day and do my duties for 8 hours, in exchange for a paycheck. This doesn't mean I'm going to completely slack off during that 8 hours, but I'm not going to put in heroic effort, or stay 12 hours either.
Once again, you have my pity if that's what your life is like. You know, you pick your employer just as much as your employer picks you. If you always pick the one with the biggest wallet you shouldn't complain when they treat you like a whore and send you packing after they've had their way with you. Next time try to look at an employers other qualities. I currently work for a company that is going through heroic effort not to lay anybody off. There are good companies out there, but they don't typically hire whores. When you start having some respect for yourself you may find that others start respecting you as well.
I was cured of that naivety long ago. I get satisfaction from doing interestin
Sure, if money is your only yardstick. IMO you are doing exactly what most corporations do, which is care about the bottom line and only the bottom line at the expense of everything else. And we know where that leads. What about building something you can be proud of? What about earning the respect of your peers? What about responsibility? Ever tried enjoying what you do and taking satisfaction from a job well done? Don't get me wrong, if you think you deserve more you should be able to negotiate more but who do you think gets the promotions and raises? Go ahead, keep on never going the extra mile and doing only the bare minimum. Then stop and try to guess why *you* need to job-hop every 2-3 years to get a raise, newbie.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really zealotry; it's just that I am really tired of seeing Microsoft implementing something really old getting headlines as if it were something new and wonderful. To put this in perspective, what would your comment be if the headline were "Ford to integrate rainwater removal system in all 2011 model windshields"? I would probably say "it's a windshield wiper, move on already" except that I've been seeing this kind of thing happen for a long time. Depending on how old you are you won't even believe me, but this has happened when MS added networking to Windows; then TCP/IP networking; then real user accounts; Kerberos and LDAP... The list is endless. So instead of "move on" my comment is what you saw... here we go again...
This will hopefully pave the way for other vendors to also make use of Windows' existing patching infrastructure and eliminate the need for the multitude of custom updater applications and services that clutter most systems today.
Or just go to Linux, where most distributions have had something like this for over a decade now. The worst part is, I'm sure I will star hearing from Windows people how fantastic the new "innovation" is...
IMHO you're confusing religion with philosophy. A philosophy (or a way of life) is what you describe as a set of ideas or beliefs one may use to guide his or her moral choices. A religion OTOH is really more like a club that you may be a member of. Religions after all require more than beliefs; they require behavior, for instance - like not engaging in homosexuality and not having sex out of wedlock (and a huge list of other things) for most Christian religions, covering your hair if you are either a Jewish male or a Muslim female, wearing special underwear if you're Mormon, etc. There have also been religions requiring human sacrifice, slavery, going to war. Indeed because religion is usually a club that offers eternal life only to its members, membership to religion has been used throughout time to convince people to engage in all sorts of behavior. Religion is many things and it's also a form of marketing. A personal philosophy replaces the moral backbone provided by religion with some advantage, I think.
NO technology will do your thinking for you. NO product will protect you if you don't know enough to protect yourself. Antiviruses, deep packet inspection, intrusion detection, etc: they are all useless - worse than that: they are expensive useless, designed more to make somebody else money that to protect the end user. The ONLY thing that will protect you is knowledge. When will people learn that if they want the benefits of modern technology, understanding it is not optional?
But what ticks me off is that corporations are making bucketloads of money from information that belongs to me, at the same time as corporations are doing everything in their power to prevent me from using the information that belongs to them. All I want is some fundamental fairness. Part of the problem is that I cannot purchase some products and services with money alone; I am forced to fork over information in addition to money. On the other hand they make it as hard as possible, sometimes they make it illegal, for me to use products and services I payed for in any way I see fit - you know, as if what I purchased was actually my property. What's more, we have indeed lost this battle when most people here say "it's over - get used to it." It's *my* privacy you're selling for your own convenience, punk!
No, there are not. This is part of the mainstream trying to take the terms geek and nerd from us, after we made them cool. Geeks and nerds have no interest in sports whatsoever. They view them as the childish games they are. If you are interested in sports, you are certainly not a geek. Probably not even a nerd. No exceptions.
In the mid-80s I had a FIAT 147. It had been reliable ever since I had it. Then some day I found myself chasing my girlfriend's dad on the highway - she was going to college in another town and we were going to surprise her for her birthday. Now her dad drove a Dodge Charger and had a sick sense of humor, which made my task all but impossible. By pushing the gas pedal all the way down and keeping it there I managed to keep the Charger from completely disappearing ahead. Fortunately it was at night on an empty road. Anyway, the little Fiat's speedometer was pegged at its maximum of 160 Km/h - about 100 mph - for about 40 minutes. I have no idea what the speed actually was. On the one hand, I felt the speedometer wanted to go higher if it could; on the other had it was hard to believe the little 1.3 L engine had actually propelled me to 160 Km/h. In any event when the time came to exit the highway and I finally lifted my foot, the pedal just stayed there. I had to drive the final leg to her place by carefully controlling my speed with the clutch. Fortunately it was not an automatic. When we arrived and I had a chance to look under the hood the problem was obvious: the cable from the gas pedal connected to a lever on the carburetor and this lever was checked by a spring, so that when no one was pressing on the pedal the spring would pull the lever back. In this case, the spring had completely lost its strength, having been affected by the heat of the engine running under a completely unexpected regimen. This was definitely not a race car, but a little city hopper. Allowing the spring to cool down gave it back its usual shape and the car came back to normal. So I guess my point is, yes, even totally mechanical systems can fail dangerously. OTOH a mechanical system can be understood/fixed/acted upon by almost anyone. You wouldn't be able to understand a problem on an electronic system however just by looking, even if you are a electric engineer.
Don't get me wrong - I think they are right. It's about time CS enters the mainstream; it's good for the economy; it's important that this happens. But, this is another nail in the coffin of the "geek era." We will go back to being nerds and the extraordinary period when we were relevant and even sorta cool will be over. The question I'm interested in is, what's the next thing we will make our own? I hope it happens a little bit like Makers, by Cory Doctorow...
I have no idea how old you are, of course. I was 13 when I saw Episode IV on the big screen. I didn't know what to expect, I didn't particularly want to go to the movies with my dad and mom that day. It's safe to say however that that movie changed my life and has a great deal of responsibility in making me who I am. I saw the movie again 12 more times during its first theater run. I borrowed money, I worked, I sold raffles, all to afford spending every minute I could watching that movie. 12 x a movie ticket is a lot of money to the average 13 yo. Then I waited 20 years. It is extremely unlikely that anyone who has gone through the original trilogy in their teens would have skipped the latest 3 based on reviews. That is why it was such a blockbuster. I, and millions like me, just *had* to see it, even if we knew it was going to suck. Others have spoken here about why the original trilogy was amazing and why the latter one sucks so I'm not going there. Except to say that IMHO Lucas tried to keep the franchise's appeal to kids while trying to give the 1978 kids some grown-up material that would appeal to the middle-aged geeks they had become. To do that requires a sort of genius that Lucas does not possess. It's possible - just look at the Phineas and Ferb show on Disney Channel. But Lucas seems incapable of dealing with adult issues, let alone bridging the required age gap. His adult themes are not grave, they are boring - trade taxes indeed! So Star Wars fails to grow up with its audience.
Back in the '80s my friends and I produced a number of tapes that we jokingly called 'the magnum opii' (as obras primas for those who speak portuguese). The method to produce one of these was simple: start with something random on a turntable; then you have however long that song lasts to select the next song, find the album, put it on the second turntable and be ready to mix it in just at the right time. Not only the tapes sounded good (although sometimes really really bad or hilarious), but it was good exercise for the musical mind, having to keep a lot of info about music in our heads to be able to pull good mixes. Good times... :)
Precisely. For some reason though I've been seeing what almost looks like a campaign from users for the right to install software "on their own machines" (never mind these machines belong to the company, not them). This is being billed to management as an absolute necessity in order for people to be able to get work done. Windows is being used as an example by Linux users, who want something akin to the "power user" group Windows offers. I've spent hours this week explaining to managers why giving users full sudo is exactly the same thing as giving them the root password. The fact that Fedora comes up with this new "feature" precisely now raises flags all over my paranoid brain. I'm absolutely certain before the week is over some manager will suggest replacing all our Ubuntu workstations with Fedora as a way to solve the "problem" of users not being able to install software. This looks suspiciously similar to the way Windows took over the corporate desktop in the early-to-mid nineties.
On a related note, what happens in settings like computer labs, where users can be students in a school or patrons in a library, etc.?
Garbage in whose opinion? As Joseph Campbell said, mythology is what we call other people's religions. The same can very well apply to garbage. And I'm not discounting the protestants; this is an article about the Vatican, so it makes some sense to limit my comment to Catholics. That and the fact that I was raised Catholic -- which sort of gives me a license to poke fun at Catholics (besides having helped to make me an Agnostic).
Or maybe someone on this other planet 2,000 thousand years ago compiled a bunch of thousand-year-old stories and attributed the result to the creator of the Universe. Then over the next 500 years or so a group of people schemed to get to the top of their society by carefully editing the stories, leaving out whole books of it and only including what they could use. Then they controlled their world for the next 1,000 years or so by using careful doses of applying the resulting book and torturing and killing people who disagreed with them. Then some people finally started waking up and learning to think for themselves and maybe the original people who were oppressed by the holders of the book have now ascended to the top of the societal pyramid and are terrified of not having oppressors and tyrants telling them what to do, so they vote and influence policy to try and force everybody under the rule of that original book again, which in the meantime has lost all of its meaning and can be interpreted to mean anything at all. Just saying. This is just the kind of thing that could happen on an alien world in a bad Sci Fi plot, isn't it?
...That I read the title as "Vulcan Debates Possibility of Alien Life?"
"A stranger walks up to you on the bus, and says 'My name is Rev. Kwame. I want a reliable person who could assist us to transfer the sum of ... Do you give them your bank account number?"
An example that's more "real world" to the average user. Regrettably, in the real world, people (especially older folks) do fall prey to scams or otherwise obvious fraud.
No kidding. I still shudder when I remember what happened years ago to my aunt, who is over 70. I came to her house to visit and found a man in his 30s sitting in the living room drinking coffee. My aunt says "you remember so-and-so, I met him on the way to the grocery store and asked him in. Fancy that, he's now an antiques dealer and may be interested in buying some of my stuff." Well, this was NOT who she thought it was. It was a total stranger who realized she had mistaken him for somebody else and decided to take advantage of the situation. Now my aunt is a retired jeweler and "her stuff", some of which was exposed in the coffee table, consists of unique pieces and precious stones that she kept for sentimental reasons.
I didn't want to scare her by exposing the impostor, so I asked to have some coffee too. When she left I told the guy I knew what was going on and if he didn't want me to call the cops immediately he would show me his ID and, as soon as aunt was back, make an excuse and leave. Fortunately he was not a violent criminal, just a lowlife who saw an opportunity to scam an old lady. So he left and aunt never figured out what had happened.
When I read about old people giving thousands of $$ to Nigerian schemers, it reminds me of this story.
I actually blogged about this, and I don't blog that much. In short, I realized that Windows is thought to be user-friendly and the common denominator everybody uses and understands, when in practice every Windows user who is not a technically inclined person tends to have some relative (or an IT guy in corporations) who does the "hard" stuff for them. My conclusion was, if we all flat out refuse doing it, MS will be done and over it very fast.
I know, brother. I agree. Do you know what my Windows support people reply to that? "Who cares? When it breaks, just clone it again."
If SIDs can be infinitely duplicated and it impacts nothing at all, then what's the point of having SIDs in the first place?
There's only one reason to be in IT: because you love it. Anything else is the wrong reason. I used to say during the good old days that yes, I was making great money but if I loved poetry that's what I'd be doing instead. Money is just not enough to make up for doing something you don't like every single day. IT requires commitment, willingness to constantly upgrade your skills, a passion for problem-solving, organizational and interpersonal skills. It gives back long hours, unappreciative employers and customers and these days, not a great deal of money. So all of you people who joined the profession during one of the previous booms thinking only about money, yes, please, go find something else to do. Go poison some other field. This will mean I'll get to work with fewer noobs and wannabees who think some stupid acronym certification makes them something they're not. And of course with fewer people in the field the average $$ will go up for those of us who really like this and know what they're doing.
Agreed it's premature. But I don't think they're giving Obama the peace prize. They are actually giving Bush the anti-prize. Or they are giving this prize to the millions of people who supported Obama and helped turn America around. Changing the face of the biggest military power in the world from that of a bellicose, stupid and arrogant cowboy to that of an understanding and respectful partner is no easy feat. I'm not sure whom, but someone certainly deserve a prize for that.
OK, so this trend is full of the same thing that comes along every time an article about Linux vs. mainstream gets published. They don't know or care what an operating system is. They recognize the Microsoft brand but they don't really know what Microsoft does. They get bored by technical "details". They don't want to know how things work, they just want them to work. They don't care about logical arguments, it's all about emotional perception. OK. But that begs the question I put in the subject box. What do they care about? Where's the passion in their lives? What can they be proud of? What can they do that's unique? Please don't say they care about having sex with gorgeous partners; I'm not different from them in that respect - and I'm happily married and quite satisfied in that respect, thank you. I would make this an Ask Slashdot but they don't tend to publish my questions.
I second that. Naming machines with codes not only requires database maintenance when things change; it is also extremely boring. I'll never bother to remember the last time I touched K04-071223, I can't relate to something like that. But I can probably follow in my head the history of machine Wintermute and when it develops a strange behavior at its new position in Accounting I'll probably remember it did something similar when it was new and worked for the CEO's assistant...
You sound like the perfect employee that corporations love: willing to work really hard, but not interested in money.
Not at all. I'm very interested in money. All I'm saying is it's not my *only* interest.
My time is valuable to me. I choose to sell some of that time to the highest bidder. What's the problem? Why would I sell my time to a low-ball bidder when someone else is willing to pay more for my services?
Precisely my point: money is your only consideration. It shouldn't be. If you're just selling your time to others for them to do what they please no matter how you feel about the job, you're a whore. Besides the only way to make real money is to work for yourself. If you think you'll get rich as a salaried employee *you* are not only a whore but a cheap whore.
If I didn't need money for housing, food, etc., I wouldn't go to work at all. I have far more interesting things I could be doing with my time than working on some boring BS for a corporation. When I figure out how to make more money doing those things than my regular job nets me, I'll quit.
As someone who forces himself to work so he can pay the bills, you have my pity. Personally I prefer to work with what I love and that's what makes me great at it. Being great at it is what make people pay me money for my time. Money is incidental to loving what I do. You should really try it some day.
WTF? What corporate job are you ever going to have where you can build something to be "proud" of? Sorry, but most of us don't work at NASA, or on some great science project like the LHC, discovering the mysteries of the universe. Instead, we do much more boring and useless things, so the only yardstick to measure by is money.
It's really sad that you get modded up for being a frustrated whore. In 1996 I replaced a proprietary system at a bank with an open source-based one. It saved them millions. Yes, I did get a big bonus but that was not the best thing about it. The best thing about it was to be on the cover of a magazine and to tour the country showcasing my solution. Something I can be proud of, even if I don't work at NASA. But that's just me - if you think you can only be happy working for the LHC and instead of trying to be the best physicist you can be you're job-hopping for some extra cash you are a truly sorry excuse for a human being.
WTF? Who cares? Besides, my peers don't care about these employers either. All my friends from my last job were laid off the same day I was. I'm sure none of them are regretting spending more time at work.
And what are you doing about it besides whining on /.? You and your friends should be starting a company so you can maximize how much money you make; or you should be going back to school to try to realize your dream of working for the LHC
What about it? What about the responsibility of an employer to its employees? If they're not going to live up to that, then we have no responsibility back towards them. The only responsibility I have is to show up every day and do my duties for 8 hours, in exchange for a paycheck. This doesn't mean I'm going to completely slack off during that 8 hours, but I'm not going to put in heroic effort, or stay 12 hours either.
Once again, you have my pity if that's what your life is like. You know, you pick your employer just as much as your employer picks you. If you always pick the one with the biggest wallet you shouldn't complain when they treat you like a whore and send you packing after they've had their way with you. Next time try to look at an employers other qualities. I currently work for a company that is going through heroic effort not to lay anybody off. There are good companies out there, but they don't typically hire whores. When you start having some respect for yourself you may find that others start respecting you as well.
I was cured of that naivety long ago. I get satisfaction from doing interestin
Sure, if money is your only yardstick. IMO you are doing exactly what most corporations do, which is care about the bottom line and only the bottom line at the expense of everything else. And we know where that leads. What about building something you can be proud of? What about earning the respect of your peers? What about responsibility? Ever tried enjoying what you do and taking satisfaction from a job well done? Don't get me wrong, if you think you deserve more you should be able to negotiate more but who do you think gets the promotions and raises? Go ahead, keep on never going the extra mile and doing only the bare minimum. Then stop and try to guess why *you* need to job-hop every 2-3 years to get a raise, newbie.
Man, talk about product placement. Makes me thing the whole article is just one big ad for AdBlock Plus!