So you spend about half your waking hours doing stuff you don't care about? Let us know how that strategy works out for you after 10 or 20 wasted years.
If the GP doesn't, millions more people will. They'll have managed to survive that entire time in relative comfort: house, cars, sending kids off to college. And they'll contrast that with the life of pursuing their real passions: perpetual unemployment, living off friends' and relatives' couches, inability to financially support children.
There are only so many decently paying gigs for musicians, painters, sculptors, poets, computer game players, sports players, etc. Most of the stuff people "care about" pays squat. So those of us living in the Real World figure out how to tolerate or even marginally care about things like accounting, finance, management, sales, logistics, and even customer support in order to fund those 30-40 hours a week of actual living time. Sadly, even the stuff you DO "care about" -- such as computer programming -- might become blah after 10-20 years being paid to do it.
My company runs Sharepoint. As far as I can tell, it is a document store with version control, a business user's version of source code control minus defect/feature tracking. But I've also been told that we really don't use Sharepoint correctly, that it's got a lot of nice features and such.
Could someone explain briefly what Sharepoint really does?
A relevant example: Linus's uncompromisingly negative attitude toward Unicode normalization of filenames. OS X's HFS+ filesystem guarantees that all names are stored in normalized UTF-8;
I read that thread as saying that HFS+ tries to store UTF-8 but FAILS to do so consistently, such that mounting a hard drive between different versions of OS X could cause data loss. And data loss is the one thing a filesystem must NOT do, even at the expense of usability.
Where can a company go to find out authoritatively what the sales tax rate is for a customer address?
Wouldn't it be the computer's address rather than the customer's address?
If I go to the town next door and buy coffee, I pay 1% extra sales tax. Why can't people over there come to my house and use my computer (with their account) and get a lower sales tax rate?
Yeah, Slashdot seems to attract lots of libertarian-types who can't understand why strong unions were the tide that lifted everyone's boats.
Interestingly, in my current life I have become an engineer directly supporting the blue-collar folks, and I feel just a tad more secure. (I come up with ideas that save the company 3-7x my salary, generally in hard cash savings, plus I'm now directly in the advancement chain that has in the past led to the CEO position.)
Completely off topic here, but America needs to seriously reform the welfare system.
I totally agree. America's largest corporations are completely dependent on government welfare and seem proud to admit it. Subsidies for agribusiness, billions on military boondoggles that don't work, banks begging for public assistance but unwilling to open their books, medical insurers whose industry would fall flat if premiums were taxed like any other kind of income, sheesh that's *trillions* of dollars out of our pockets for those lazy executives...
So, they are offically asking to violate the Terms of Service of all of these services?
I think actually the city is asking people to violate the law by giving city hiring folks unauthorized access to computing facilities. Users of Facebook/Myspace/etc. are not legally owners (or agents acting on behalf of owners) who can declare what is and isn't authorized access.
That would be because Word 4.0 for Mac did everything a word processor ever needs to do and did it well.
Did it also do the WordPerfect "Reveal Codes" feature? Because AFAIK only WordPerfect managed to get that right, and for some uses it is a hard requirement. The nearest equivalent to "Reveal Codes" would be writing it in LaTeX.
If there were a country with minimal tax, strong protection from the government,
If by "strong protection from the government" you mean "a government strong enough to protect you physically and legally by enforcing contracts", then that protection requires far more revenue than you probably mean by "minimal tax".
If you mean instead "protection FROM the government" as in "government can't get in someone's way", then as others pointed out Somalia is your real-world example of how that works out.
I graduated BS in Computer Science in May 2000, and MS Chemical Engineering in May 2008. In the decade between a lot changed. At the undergraduate level in ChemE, there is almost exactly 1:1 male:female, about 80%+ American, with no real correlation of gender and skill (i.e. just as many top performing women as men). At the graduate level, it's more like 60/40 male:female, but also 90/10 foreign:domestic. Of the domestic students, it's still 1:1 male:female. I don't think Americans have abandoned engineering, they are (were) getting decent jobs with a BS and not seeing much point in grad school. It also doesn't help that few American companies will fund a MS/ME/PhD (but their foreign competitors will); US companies only seem to fund MBAs. (By "fund" I mean send their employee off to do full-time school for several years; most large employers will reimburse part-time university hours, but they still require their employee to work full-time.)
I agree that we need more Americans majoring in "hard" subjects, but I can't quite blame the students for that. We have fewer engineers I think because we have fewer manufacturing facilities needing them, which will eventually lead to having less need for engineering departments. Until we have the political will to re-industrialize, we'll continue seeing a general decline in engineering interest (as a percentage of total student population -- departments are still seeing good enrollment numbers, but nothing like "pre-med" or general business majors).
Have you been to college recently? In the current crop of 18-25 year-olds ("millenials" ?), women are quite well represented in engineering departments.
By the way, why the hell should my OS's sound interface be tied to some glorified applet suite?
[snark] But why should my OS even bother with sound? Sound clearly belongs at the application layer! The OS should just be doing file and network I/O! [/snark]
"Linux OS" has many more visible layers. Most people would consider X11 part of the OS, so why not the desktop environment too?
I think everyone with an IQ over room temperature got the point. But why write a whole scene to make that point when he could have just delivered one line at their meeting?
Hollywood's current generation of writers like to spend forty minutes on every episode of every show to spell out in agonizing detail the emotional map of a handful of characters. This is getting old. The audience gets it already.
The only explanation I find is that skynet is mildly retarded, it has the mind of a teenager from the 80's and think robots are cool.
I think the John Henry arc was heading that way: Skynet was basically a child-like emotional creature that happened to be a superfast AI. Low low EQ, high high IQ.
What I wish they had done was show that Skynet was more like Ellison's AC from I Have No Mouth Yet Must Scream: an AI that actively hates humanity and wants it to live long enough to be tortured for creating it in the first place. THAT would be a scary mofo Skynet, and explain why every plot has a (painful) escape route for the human protagonists.
I liked where they were before the introduction of Jesse. Riley was fine as a potential love interest / connection to 2008 humanity for John, but then they made her from the future too. John's first kill shaking him was good too, as was Sarah's constant paranoia. Those character limitations prevent the audience from deifying the cast. I could even handle the slow pacing -- lyrical isn't bad. But they were indeed in the process of throwing away a story with lots of potential.
We had clear hints that Future John is lonely, surrounded by re-programmed terminators, and behaving a lot like Skynet, so maybe Cameron had been sent back to re-direct him back onto a more human path. We saw clearly that Cameron was somehow different in a fundamental way -- that is until they ran with the John Henry arc and suddenly she's just another terminator.
It was beginning to look a lot like Cameron actually loved John and that made her capable of overriding her programming without outside interference. This makes is possible for terminators to transcend their programming, and "will you join us?" make much more sense. In fact, it could even make ALL of the "good" terminators rebels against Skynet, who sometimes change their minds again ("sometimes they go bad, we don't know why"). Humans like Jesse can never be told that there is NO reprogramming to the reprogrammed terminators, but they still desperately need those few terminators that do join them.
The sad thing is that Christian Bale's Connor is even less interesting than Dekker's. T4 was basically a fanfic where the humans get to say the terminator lines and the cyborg gets to say the human lines. Explosions. Terminator motorcycles (why? there are hardly any roads left). Overriding a Skynet door with a portable computer and alligator clips. Yawn.
T4 should have been all about the war, with no mention of Kyle Reese (and just how DID Skynet find out about that?) and no reference to time travel paradoxes. It should have been the rise of Connor, breaking people out of the work farms, forming the resistance, and some demonstration that humans can learn to fight differently enough to survive.
At this point it looks like Terminator just isn't a salvageable franchise. Character development in TSCC was good but taken too far; T3 was too campy; T4 was brainless.
You will love Terminator Salvation then. All it is is scary big robots, chase scenes, and big explosions. Add in the shaky cam, and I give it a B, compared to T2's clear A+. (In truth, the acting wasn't bad, but the script/plot read like an amateur fanfic.)
OTOH, I liked a lot of where TSCC was going. It was to me like Smallville: we know John Connor is supposed to be this fearless leader someday, but how did he get there? What started the transition from "Run! It's a terminator!" to "John had Skynet on the ropes and it knew it"? Like BSG, TSCC was also starting to dive into the "when can a machine be on our side?" question, and it was strongly hinting that John Connor of the future was never Sarah Connor's son afterall. Since John and Skynet are both self-fulfilling prophecy paradoxes, it makes sense to ask how much of Skynet is "human" and how much of John is "machine".
I think they were heading to a place where Skynet was basically an emotional creature trapped by its programming, like Cameron (Glau). This has lots of sci-fi parallels: the freed BSG Centurions most recently. Most closely would be Master System from Jack Chalker's Rings of the Master series.
It was a great story, but it wasn't profitable TV. Maybe they'll spin it off in novels.
Yeah I'm a bit surprised to see people here on Slashdot who have no recollection of Phil Zimmerman's battle with Clinton's administration, or the Clipper chip fiasco.
But it's OK, because the data was encrypted, right? RIGHT?
The data was encrypted, but the NSA had the keys in escrow. After the GOP took over the Executive, all of the escrowed keys were "accidentally" given to Halliburton. From there the data made its way to a laptop in the Middle East which was stolen by Al Qaeda. This data aided Al Qaeda in the planning of 9/11.
If only the Clinton White House had used PGP instead...
Slashdot Mirror
So you spend about half your waking hours doing stuff you don't care about? Let us know how that strategy works out for you after 10 or 20 wasted years.
If the GP doesn't, millions more people will. They'll have managed to survive that entire time in relative comfort: house, cars, sending kids off to college. And they'll contrast that with the life of pursuing their real passions: perpetual unemployment, living off friends' and relatives' couches, inability to financially support children.
There are only so many decently paying gigs for musicians, painters, sculptors, poets, computer game players, sports players, etc. Most of the stuff people "care about" pays squat. So those of us living in the Real World figure out how to tolerate or even marginally care about things like accounting, finance, management, sales, logistics, and even customer support in order to fund those 30-40 hours a week of actual living time. Sadly, even the stuff you DO "care about" -- such as computer programming -- might become blah after 10-20 years being paid to do it.
You might want to check out Chandler.
that SharePoint sucks,
My company runs Sharepoint. As far as I can tell, it is a document store with version control, a business user's version of source code control minus defect/feature tracking. But I've also been told that we really don't use Sharepoint correctly, that it's got a lot of nice features and such.
Could someone explain briefly what Sharepoint really does?
A relevant example: Linus's uncompromisingly negative attitude toward Unicode normalization of filenames. OS X's HFS+ filesystem guarantees that all names are stored in normalized UTF-8;
I read that thread as saying that HFS+ tries to store UTF-8 but FAILS to do so consistently, such that mounting a hard drive between different versions of OS X could cause data loss. And data loss is the one thing a filesystem must NOT do, even at the expense of usability.
Where can a company go to find out authoritatively what the sales tax rate is for a customer address?
Wouldn't it be the computer's address rather than the customer's address?
If I go to the town next door and buy coffee, I pay 1% extra sales tax. Why can't people over there come to my house and use my computer (with their account) and get a lower sales tax rate?
Yeah, Slashdot seems to attract lots of libertarian-types who can't understand why strong unions were the tide that lifted everyone's boats.
Interestingly, in my current life I have become an engineer directly supporting the blue-collar folks, and I feel just a tad more secure. (I come up with ideas that save the company 3-7x my salary, generally in hard cash savings, plus I'm now directly in the advancement chain that has in the past led to the CEO position.)
What the hell happened to that former colony ours that fought for freedom and began a war of independence over unfair taxation?
It followed your example and became an Empire, with similar results.
Completely off topic here, but America needs to seriously reform the welfare system.
I totally agree. America's largest corporations are completely dependent on government welfare and seem proud to admit it. Subsidies for agribusiness, billions on military boondoggles that don't work, banks begging for public assistance but unwilling to open their books, medical insurers whose industry would fall flat if premiums were taxed like any other kind of income, sheesh that's *trillions* of dollars out of our pockets for those lazy executives...
So, they are offically asking to violate the Terms of Service of all of these services?
I think actually the city is asking people to violate the law by giving city hiring folks unauthorized access to computing facilities. Users of Facebook/Myspace/etc. are not legally owners (or agents acting on behalf of owners) who can declare what is and isn't authorized access.
That would be because Word 4.0 for Mac did everything a word processor ever needs to do and did it well.
Did it also do the WordPerfect "Reveal Codes" feature? Because AFAIK only WordPerfect managed to get that right, and for some uses it is a hard requirement. The nearest equivalent to "Reveal Codes" would be writing it in LaTeX.
Where the hell have you been the last fifteen years? Does "he got busted for warez" mean anything to you?
I would only support this if violating copyright was criminalized.
Ummm...it already is. Woosh?
If there were a country with minimal tax, strong protection from the government,
If by "strong protection from the government" you mean "a government strong enough to protect you physically and legally by enforcing contracts", then that protection requires far more revenue than you probably mean by "minimal tax".
If you mean instead "protection FROM the government" as in "government can't get in someone's way", then as others pointed out Somalia is your real-world example of how that works out.
I graduated BS in Computer Science in May 2000, and MS Chemical Engineering in May 2008. In the decade between a lot changed. At the undergraduate level in ChemE, there is almost exactly 1:1 male:female, about 80%+ American, with no real correlation of gender and skill (i.e. just as many top performing women as men). At the graduate level, it's more like 60/40 male:female, but also 90/10 foreign:domestic. Of the domestic students, it's still 1:1 male:female. I don't think Americans have abandoned engineering, they are (were) getting decent jobs with a BS and not seeing much point in grad school. It also doesn't help that few American companies will fund a MS/ME/PhD (but their foreign competitors will); US companies only seem to fund MBAs. (By "fund" I mean send their employee off to do full-time school for several years; most large employers will reimburse part-time university hours, but they still require their employee to work full-time.)
I agree that we need more Americans majoring in "hard" subjects, but I can't quite blame the students for that. We have fewer engineers I think because we have fewer manufacturing facilities needing them, which will eventually lead to having less need for engineering departments. Until we have the political will to re-industrialize, we'll continue seeing a general decline in engineering interest (as a percentage of total student population -- departments are still seeing good enrollment numbers, but nothing like "pre-med" or general business majors).
That's why there's very few women in engineering.
Have you been to college recently? In the current crop of 18-25 year-olds ("millenials" ?), women are quite well represented in engineering departments.
By the way, why the hell should my OS's sound interface be tied to some glorified applet suite?
[snark]
But why should my OS even bother with sound? Sound clearly belongs at the application layer! The OS should just be doing file and network I/O!
[/snark]
"Linux OS" has many more visible layers. Most people would consider X11 part of the OS, so why not the desktop environment too?
What is "Slurp" such that it has twice as many Win98 users?
Does his homebrew code have a cache too? Because if not, he can very easily add it and be beating cached PHP again.
"you missed the point of the scene"
I think everyone with an IQ over room temperature got the point. But why write a whole scene to make that point when he could have just delivered one line at their meeting?
Hollywood's current generation of writers like to spend forty minutes on every episode of every show to spell out in agonizing detail the emotional map of a handful of characters. This is getting old. The audience gets it already.
The only explanation I find is that skynet is mildly retarded, it has the mind of a teenager from the 80's and think robots are cool.
I think the John Henry arc was heading that way: Skynet was basically a child-like emotional creature that happened to be a superfast AI. Low low EQ, high high IQ.
What I wish they had done was show that Skynet was more like Ellison's AC from I Have No Mouth Yet Must Scream: an AI that actively hates humanity and wants it to live long enough to be tortured for creating it in the first place. THAT would be a scary mofo Skynet, and explain why every plot has a (painful) escape route for the human protagonists.
Very good analysis.
I liked where they were before the introduction of Jesse. Riley was fine as a potential love interest / connection to 2008 humanity for John, but then they made her from the future too. John's first kill shaking him was good too, as was Sarah's constant paranoia. Those character limitations prevent the audience from deifying the cast. I could even handle the slow pacing -- lyrical isn't bad. But they were indeed in the process of throwing away a story with lots of potential.
We had clear hints that Future John is lonely, surrounded by re-programmed terminators, and behaving a lot like Skynet, so maybe Cameron had been sent back to re-direct him back onto a more human path. We saw clearly that Cameron was somehow different in a fundamental way -- that is until they ran with the John Henry arc and suddenly she's just another terminator.
It was beginning to look a lot like Cameron actually loved John and that made her capable of overriding her programming without outside interference. This makes is possible for terminators to transcend their programming, and "will you join us?" make much more sense. In fact, it could even make ALL of the "good" terminators rebels against Skynet, who sometimes change their minds again ("sometimes they go bad, we don't know why"). Humans like Jesse can never be told that there is NO reprogramming to the reprogrammed terminators, but they still desperately need those few terminators that do join them.
The sad thing is that Christian Bale's Connor is even less interesting than Dekker's. T4 was basically a fanfic where the humans get to say the terminator lines and the cyborg gets to say the human lines. Explosions. Terminator motorcycles (why? there are hardly any roads left). Overriding a Skynet door with a portable computer and alligator clips. Yawn.
T4 should have been all about the war, with no mention of Kyle Reese (and just how DID Skynet find out about that?) and no reference to time travel paradoxes. It should have been the rise of Connor, breaking people out of the work farms, forming the resistance, and some demonstration that humans can learn to fight differently enough to survive.
At this point it looks like Terminator just isn't a salvageable franchise. Character development in TSCC was good but taken too far; T3 was too campy; T4 was brainless.
You will love Terminator Salvation then. All it is is scary big robots, chase scenes, and big explosions. Add in the shaky cam, and I give it a B, compared to T2's clear A+. (In truth, the acting wasn't bad, but the script/plot read like an amateur fanfic.)
OTOH, I liked a lot of where TSCC was going. It was to me like Smallville: we know John Connor is supposed to be this fearless leader someday, but how did he get there? What started the transition from "Run! It's a terminator!" to "John had Skynet on the ropes and it knew it"? Like BSG, TSCC was also starting to dive into the "when can a machine be on our side?" question, and it was strongly hinting that John Connor of the future was never Sarah Connor's son afterall. Since John and Skynet are both self-fulfilling prophecy paradoxes, it makes sense to ask how much of Skynet is "human" and how much of John is "machine".
I think they were heading to a place where Skynet was basically an emotional creature trapped by its programming, like Cameron (Glau). This has lots of sci-fi parallels: the freed BSG Centurions most recently. Most closely would be Master System from Jack Chalker's Rings of the Master series.
It was a great story, but it wasn't profitable TV. Maybe they'll spin it off in novels.
Yeah I'm a bit surprised to see people here on Slashdot who have no recollection of Phil Zimmerman's battle with Clinton's administration, or the Clipper chip fiasco.
But it's OK, because the data was encrypted, right? RIGHT?
The data was encrypted, but the NSA had the keys in escrow. After the GOP took over the Executive, all of the escrowed keys were "accidentally" given to Halliburton. From there the data made its way to a laptop in the Middle East which was stolen by Al Qaeda. This data aided Al Qaeda in the planning of 9/11.
If only the Clinton White House had used PGP instead...
The only thing Word does better than LaTeX is pictures
Unless those pictures have captions, then LaTeX does then much better.