I recently wandered into a bottle shop to buy some beer. So I plonk it down on the counter and the checkout-chick scans it and I then notice that the PC she is using is running an app in KDE! Holy crap I think... then I think striking up a conversation with her about Linux and KDE would not impress. Ah well.
But if the task bar hadn't been visible I just would never have known.
A couple of hundred years ago in England minor crimes were punishable with death by hanging or transportation to Australia... the latter being considered the worse penalty... dumb poms. The minor crimes included: stealing a loaf of bread, stealing a handkerchief, or in the case of one of my relatives, who won the free one way holiday, stealing a watch. There was a common phrase in England at the time "better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb"... which means if the penalties are really harsh then since you're going to go to prison anyway then don't fuck about make it a big crime. I would imagine that the virus writers will now graduate from piddly annoying shit to pc armageddon because if they risk going to jail for maybe life then they might as well take a few people with them. Bit scary since we are all on the receiving end of the viruses one way or another.
There are positive aspects, well there can be not necessarily will be. Generally, the whole experience is massively painful and destabilising... the only way through it is to remember the adage that "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger", which it will. As for what happens when you come out the other side... Will the IT industry ever recover ? I'm having some very negative thoughts on this, I was out of work over a decade ago I didn't have my compsci degree then and the industry was depressed but would eventually recover, this time I am really getting the feeling that maybe all that effort will be for nothing (financially, but I still like programming) because it is not going to recover and maybe I should look around for something else... but what, there doesn't seem to be much demand for the considerable skills of a good programmer. The future looks decidedly risky to anyone who doesn't have a current IT job.
I've started doing some volunteer IT work, but you know what places that need this stuff are flooded with people offering their services... which is kind of spooky. I don't know what the solution is.
My big question is this: Has business decided that IT is no longer important ? And if they still think it is important then why aren't they hiring ?
Just my 2 cents, but I can oly afford a couple of rings from some beer cans I found.
but I would have thought that you could have added something to the debate since you are the target audience for such an "Ask Slashdot" question.
For myself. Before I was recently retrenched, at work I worked on a Win2K box, with X sessions to a Redhat server and a Linux test machine. The Win2K was because the mail network used Lotus Notes, marrying Linux and the Notes stuff just didn't work. I would guess for many people it is the groupware that keeps them on Windows, I would once have also said Office but I find that OOo is now pretty good... well good enough for developers.
At home I have a box running a Win2K partition and a RH9 partition. I use Win2K for games (mostly BF42) and one other closed software proggy that I occasionally use to fit in with other people. On the desktop for me Win2K is a secondary system.
I remember starting on Slackware in 1995. Not hard to install, well it was fun so I guess I didn't mind the effort... but X let me down cos I was using some weirdo video card that must have been handcrafted by a bunch of orcs. Ahem, anyways, I've been using Redhat since 4.2 with the occassional digression to Mandrake... and you know... the more bells and whistles the harder it seems to be to do anything constructive. I just spent way too much time trying to figure out how to customize the menus... I gave up... the obvious way of using the "add menu item" just plain doesn't work. And then I went to change the names of the workspaces and it didn't work.. because it seems that when you make the changes it is not stored in the same xml file that it reads from... sheesh... yeah I know this a gnome problem not redhat (or maybe I should just go back to KDE)... but you'd think Redhat would check these things. All I kept thinking was , if this was Enlightenment (may it rest in peace) or WindowMaker it would be simple. And I started thinking very wistfully of Slackware. Hmmm.
I would've gone Debian, but since I'm on a dialup I can just imagine how little time it would take me to hate apt-get. And I've tried Suse, nice and consistent... but I dunno irritating.
Um, yeah. Optimism is good but I think your approach here is just totally wrong.
Sure global warming will cause some benefits somewhere, but there are far bigger issues.
There is no guarantee that where you will live will stay the same... you probably live in a fertile area, since people prefer to build cities in places like that. What makes you think that as the climate changes your country will continue to be viable with its current population ?
What is the world's population right now, about 7 billion ? Its pretty crowded these days, if the climate changes and wheat no longer can grow in the current agricultural areas of the US or Canada or Russia or the monsoon fails in South East Asia or Australia enters a permanent drought... then what are you (meaning we) gonna do ? Will it trigger wars, famines... Many agricultural areas, in particular wheat are very sensitive to a 1 degree C temperature and rainfall shift. If it was gradual, we could adapt... but a century or 50 years isn't gradual.
Talking about the benefits of CO2. Well yes it can act like a fertiliser, but there is more to it than that. There is increased demand for water by the plants which means that if conditions in a marginal area do not get more water then the increased CO2 will be a negative not a positive.
Ice Caps. The sea level will go up slightly because of plain old thermal expansion of the oceans, already happening. If the Arctic melts, no problem since its already floating. But all that cold fresh water could play havoc with the global thermohaline circulation... think freezing winters and drought for America and Europe.. mini Ice Age. But if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melts then the sea level goes up about 6 metres... but that is a long term thing... centuries at least. The thermohaline circulation however can occur quickly and totally devastate the North Atlantic countries... and serious but less dire consequences for other places in the world.
Easy to use. Entertaining. And contains lots of information which is either wildly inaccurate or at least apocryphal but has a nice reassuring interface. Just need to add the "Don't Panic" flash screen to IE and Mozilla I guess.
The worst mistake I see around is that many assume one thing implies another different thing without evidence. Free markets don't imply freedom of speech. Everything would be a lot better if it did, but you don't have to look far to find booming capitalist dictatorships in history. As far as I can see Democracy seems to work best under capitalism (and may even need it), but capitalism does not need democracy.
The first city to change over and develop any specialist software for the German local government environment will have an opportunity to defray some of its costs by selling the application to other government bodies. After all their own apps don't have to be GPLed.
Conversion to metric went pretty smoothly here, phased in over 10 years. People still use Imperial sometimes, but its pretty rare. Trying to explain Imperial to my kids is pretty bizarre because I really really hated it. "Yeah, you know 16 ozs to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone. 28 pounds to a Quarter. 112 pounds to a hundredweight and 20 hundredweights to a ton. Nowhere as much fun as: 1000 gm to a kilo and 1000 kilos to a tonne." As for acres, rods, poles, perches... I never got the hang of that shit -- and a 100metres X 100 metres = 1 hectare is just bliss.
We used to have TV licensing in Australia, I guess to support the ABC (an Australian version of the BBC). These days the the licenses are gone but the money just comes straight out of the Fed budget. Which causes problems because the feds want to manipulate the ABC because it is too leftist / rightist, depending on who is in power. This is not a trivial issue, the ABC sort of represents the role of a free press here since the local press will gladly roll over for the government of the day. TV licenses were hated and considered stupid, but I'm not sure the current situation is actually better... seems worse to me.
As for British productions. If they dont seem very good then that is because the BBC has been progressively starved of funds, like the ABC. It is not a good time to be a government funded but notoriously independent body. Or then we could always do the ideological thing and privatise it... maybe give it to Rupert Murdoch or even Bill Gates... I'm sure they would act as decent keepers of the light of democracy.
And of course its much easier to just imprison people who may be guilty rather than having to go through the bother of finding the evidence. There's a reason these powers are to be feared. First, they will be used to cut corners, then ignore the law completely.
However, hydrogen bombs are design to kill millions of people in one go. There is no obvious good utility for an atomic weapon of any kind.
Not only that. I think it was Oppenheimer, who opposed the H bomb, who pointed out that America was a better target for H-bombs than the USSR because it was much more urbanised. That was why he opposed it. Teller thought that if the US developed it the Russkies would take ages to catch up.... no prizes in hindsight to see he was wrong on that.
At least Teller gave us the Arms Race and many kool end of the world SF movies. Oh wait that's a negative thing isn't it....
I think part of the problem is that now people think they know about these technologies. They are used to computers, but dont understand them. They are used to space travel, but dont understand it. They think we have explored the planets, when we definitely haven't.
Personally, I blame Hollywood. It made the future seem real and already experienced, when the future is always uncertain. Let "2001" be a warning the future depends on present actions, not a Hollywood script.
I now consider Scientology akin to a computer virus, exploiting a flaw in the human brain
Like a real "Snow Crash".
I got asked by one of them once to do a "test". And I started talking to him, but my answers must have been so non-standard he seemed like he was lost for an answer. And when I started describing the works of L. Ron Hubbard and his supposed bet with the editor of Astounding(?) about who could start a religion first.... he seemed to lose interest. Sigh. Its so hard to make friends when you bring up inconvenient facts.
For example, some companies run their whole production and financial planning in custom-built Excel spreadsheets
Quite true. But it always gives me the shudders when I see or hear about this. There is a frightening level of dependence here, even sometimes to particular versions of the suite. Still it's their decision... just one that I wouldn't make though.
A no-brainer. Obviously, the Matrix is embedded within another Matrix... and that within another and another and... Which leads to the Buddhist view that all reality is an illusion. Just another allegory. Though, if that is the case it should make for a really cool fight between Neo and Smith in the "real" world, maybe they switch bodies to highlight the ephemeral nature of "self" or something. I'll be disappointed if the movie doesn't try to seriously mess with my head.
I liked TTT, but was a bit disappointed with some of the changes. Some of the stuff with Arwen is taken from Appendix A about the death of Aragorn, one of my favourite parts of LoTR, but it wasnt true to the story. eg Aragorn says "but never more than a memory" in the movie to argue for Arwen to stay, but in the book he means that that they will be more than a memory because the Gift of Death means that they will be together and being mortal will return to Iluvatar, which the Elves can only wait wearily for until the end of the world.
I remember some/. poster once disparaged Windows by saying he expected "dancing monkeys along the window border" to appear one day. And I thinks to myself: "oooh cool". So I'm just waiting for the dancing monkeys. Enlightenment failed me, still waiting on Ximian,... and KDE too just wont come to the party.
But I feel better now, cos clearly Windows is *on track*.
What does a sponge need with such superior optical fibres ? Could they in fact use it for other purposes inside their bodies, such as optical communication ?... now that would be amazing!
Ok yeah the ocean has a lot of water in it. But guess what ? Before any pollutants can be dispersed into the deep abyss they hit the continental shelves, which is where a lot of the life is, and you know what the shelves are not that wide and not that deep so the pollutants are still pretty concentrated. Gees, sport, think before you type. Its a no-brainer. As for the rest of the ocean its mostly barren (or just not many critters per square metre). I don't know how much marine life depends on the continental shelves but I would think it would be a considerable amount since it is often the site of upwellings.
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I recently wandered into a bottle shop to buy some beer. So I plonk it down on the counter and the checkout-chick scans it and I then notice that the PC she is using is running an app in KDE! Holy crap I think ... then I think striking up a conversation with her about Linux and KDE would not impress. Ah well.
But if the task bar hadn't been visible I just would never have known.
A couple of hundred years ago in England minor crimes were punishable with death by hanging or transportation to Australia ... the latter being considered the worse penalty ... dumb poms. The minor crimes included: stealing a loaf of bread, stealing a handkerchief, or in the case of one of my relatives, who won the free one way holiday, stealing a watch. There was a common phrase in England at the time "better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb" ... which means if the penalties are really harsh then since you're going to go to prison anyway then don't fuck about make it a big crime. I would imagine that the virus writers will now graduate from piddly annoying shit to pc armageddon because if they risk going to jail for maybe life then they might as well take a few people with them. Bit scary since we are all on the receiving end of the viruses one way or another.
There are positive aspects, well there can be not necessarily will be. Generally, the whole experience is massively painful and destabilising ... the only way through it is to remember the adage that "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger", which it will. As for what happens when you come out the other side... Will the IT industry ever recover ? I'm having some very negative thoughts on this, I was out of work over a decade ago I didn't have my compsci degree then and the industry was depressed but would eventually recover, this time I am really getting the feeling that maybe all that effort will be for nothing (financially, but I still like programming) because it is not going to recover and maybe I should look around for something else ... but what, there doesn't seem to be much demand for the considerable skills of a good programmer. The future looks decidedly risky to anyone who doesn't have a current IT job.
I've started doing some volunteer IT work, but you know what places that need this stuff are flooded with people offering their services ... which is kind of spooky. I don't know what the solution is.
My big question is this: Has business decided that IT is no longer important ? And if they still think it is important then why aren't they hiring ?
Just my 2 cents, but I can oly afford a couple of rings from some beer cans I found.
but I would have thought that you could have added something to the debate since you are the target audience for such an "Ask Slashdot" question.
For myself. Before I was recently retrenched, at work I worked on a Win2K box, with X sessions to a Redhat server and a Linux test machine. The Win2K was because the mail network used Lotus Notes, marrying Linux and the Notes stuff just didn't work. I would guess for many people it is the groupware that keeps them on Windows, I would once have also said Office but I find that OOo is now pretty good ... well good enough for developers.
At home I have a box running a Win2K partition and a RH9 partition. I use Win2K for games (mostly BF42) and one other closed software proggy that I occasionally use to fit in with other people. On the desktop for me Win2K is a secondary system.
I remember starting on Slackware in 1995. Not hard to install, well it was fun so I guess I didn't mind the effort ... but X let me down cos I was using some weirdo video card that must have been handcrafted by a bunch of orcs. Ahem, anyways, I've been using Redhat since 4.2 with the occassional digression to Mandrake ... and you know ... the more bells and whistles the harder it seems to be to do anything constructive. I just spent way too much time trying to figure out how to customize the menus ... I gave up ... the obvious way of using the "add menu item" just plain doesn't work. And then I went to change the names of the workspaces and it didn't work .. because it seems that when you make the changes it is not stored in the same xml file that it reads from ... sheesh ... yeah I know this a gnome problem not redhat (or maybe I should just go back to KDE) ... but you'd think Redhat would check these things. All I kept thinking was , if this was Enlightenment (may it rest in peace) or WindowMaker it would be simple. And I started thinking very wistfully of Slackware. Hmmm.
I would've gone Debian, but since I'm on a dialup I can just imagine how little time it would take me to hate apt-get. And I've tried Suse, nice and consistent ... but I dunno irritating.
So I'll probably give Slackware another go.
Um, yeah. Optimism is good but I think your approach here is just totally wrong.
Sure global warming will cause some benefits somewhere, but there are far bigger issues.
There is no guarantee that where you will live will stay the same ... you probably live in a fertile area, since people prefer to build cities in places like that. What makes you think that as the climate changes your country will continue to be viable with its current population ?
What is the world's population right now, about 7 billion ? Its pretty crowded these days, if the climate changes and wheat no longer can grow in the current agricultural areas of the US or Canada or Russia or the monsoon fails in South East Asia or Australia enters a permanent drought ... then what are you (meaning we) gonna do ? Will it trigger wars, famines ... Many agricultural areas, in particular wheat are very sensitive to a 1 degree C temperature and rainfall shift. If it was gradual, we could adapt ... but a century or 50 years isn't gradual.
Talking about the benefits of CO2. Well yes it can act like a fertiliser, but there is more to it than that. There is increased demand for water by the plants which means that if conditions in a marginal area do not get more water then the increased CO2 will be a negative not a positive.
Ice Caps. The sea level will go up slightly because of plain old thermal expansion of the oceans, already happening. If the Arctic melts, no problem since its already floating. But all that cold fresh water could play havoc with the global thermohaline circulation ... think freezing winters and drought for America and Europe .. mini Ice Age. But if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melts then the sea level goes up about 6 metres ... but that is a long term thing ... centuries at least. The thermohaline circulation however can occur quickly and totally devastate the North Atlantic countries ... and serious but less dire consequences for other places in the world.
Easy to use. Entertaining. And contains lots of information which is either wildly inaccurate or at least apocryphal but has a nice reassuring interface. Just need to add the "Don't Panic" flash screen to IE and Mozilla I guess.
The worst mistake I see around is that many assume one thing implies another different thing without evidence. Free markets don't imply freedom of speech. Everything would be a lot better if it did, but you don't have to look far to find booming capitalist dictatorships in history. As far as I can see Democracy seems to work best under capitalism (and may even need it), but capitalism does not need democracy.
My 2c. But I'll sell it to you for 1.5c comrade.
I thought the parent post was over the top ... but this just reveals it as total crap.
The first city to change over and develop any specialist software for the German local government environment will have an opportunity to defray some of its costs by selling the application to other government bodies. After all their own apps don't have to be GPLed.
I could feign ignorance and say: "What! kidney stones ? Thats a hard way to lose weight".
Conversion to metric went pretty smoothly here, phased in over 10 years. People still use Imperial sometimes, but its pretty rare. Trying to explain Imperial to my kids is pretty bizarre because I really really hated it. "Yeah, you know 16 ozs to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone. 28 pounds to a Quarter. 112 pounds to a hundredweight and 20 hundredweights to a ton. Nowhere as much fun as: 1000 gm to a kilo and 1000 kilos to a tonne." As for acres, rods, poles, perches ... I never got the hang of that shit -- and a 100metres X 100 metres = 1 hectare is just bliss.
.. never trust a Windows email that says it will improve your security.
A quake unit: the Gibifrag !
We used to have TV licensing in Australia, I guess to support the ABC (an Australian version of the BBC). These days the the licenses are gone but the money just comes straight out of the Fed budget. Which causes problems because the feds want to manipulate the ABC because it is too leftist / rightist, depending on who is in power. This is not a trivial issue, the ABC sort of represents the role of a free press here since the local press will gladly roll over for the government of the day. TV licenses were hated and considered stupid, but I'm not sure the current situation is actually better ... seems worse to me.
As for British productions. If they dont seem very good then that is because the BBC has been progressively starved of funds, like the ABC. It is not a good time to be a government funded but notoriously independent body. Or then we could always do the ideological thing and privatise it ... maybe give it to Rupert Murdoch or even Bill Gates ... I'm sure they would act as decent keepers of the light of democracy.
And of course its much easier to just imprison people who may be guilty rather than having to go through the bother of finding the evidence. There's a reason these powers are to be feared. First, they will be used to cut corners, then ignore the law completely.
However, hydrogen bombs are design to kill millions of people in one go. There is no obvious good utility for an atomic weapon of any kind.
Not only that. I think it was Oppenheimer, who opposed the H bomb, who pointed out that America was a better target for H-bombs than the USSR because it was much more urbanised. That was why he opposed it. Teller thought that if the US developed it the Russkies would take ages to catch up .... no prizes in hindsight to see he was wrong on that.
At least Teller gave us the Arms Race and many kool end of the world SF movies. Oh wait that's a negative thing isn't it....
I think part of the problem is that now people think they know about these technologies. They are used to computers, but dont understand them. They are used to space travel, but dont understand it. They think we have explored the planets, when we definitely haven't.
Personally, I blame Hollywood. It made the future seem real and already experienced, when the future is always uncertain. Let "2001" be a warning the future depends on present actions, not a Hollywood script.
Well there are my 2c.
I now consider Scientology akin to a computer virus, exploiting a flaw in the human brain
Like a real "Snow Crash".
I got asked by one of them once to do a "test". And I started talking to him, but my answers must have been so non-standard he seemed like he was lost for an answer. And when I started describing the works of L. Ron Hubbard and his supposed bet with the editor of Astounding(?) about who could start a religion first .... he seemed to lose interest. Sigh. Its so hard to make friends when you bring up inconvenient facts.
For example, some companies run their whole production and financial planning in custom-built Excel spreadsheets
Quite true. But it always gives me the shudders when I see or hear about this. There is a frightening level of dependence here, even sometimes to particular versions of the suite. Still it's their decision ... just one that I wouldn't make though.
A no-brainer. Obviously, the Matrix is embedded within another Matrix ... and that within another and another and ... Which leads to the Buddhist view that all reality is an illusion. Just another allegory. Though, if that is the case it should make for a really cool fight between Neo and Smith in the "real" world, maybe they switch bodies to highlight the ephemeral nature of "self" or something. I'll be disappointed if the movie doesn't try to seriously mess with my head.
I liked TTT, but was a bit disappointed with some of the changes. Some of the stuff with Arwen is taken from Appendix A about the death of Aragorn, one of my favourite parts of LoTR, but it wasnt true to the story. eg Aragorn says "but never more than a memory" in the movie to argue for Arwen to stay, but in the book he means that that they will be more than a memory because the Gift of Death means that they will be together and being mortal will return to Iluvatar, which the Elves can only wait wearily for until the end of the world.
I remember some /. poster once disparaged Windows by saying he expected "dancing monkeys along the window border" to appear one day. And I thinks to myself: "oooh cool". So I'm just waiting for the dancing monkeys. Enlightenment failed me, still waiting on Ximian, ... and KDE too just wont come to the party.
But I feel better now, cos clearly Windows is *on track*.
What does a sponge need with such superior optical fibres ? Could they in fact use it for other purposes inside their bodies, such as optical communication ? ... now that would be amazing!
Ok yeah the ocean has a lot of water in it. But guess what ? Before any pollutants can be dispersed into the deep abyss they hit the continental shelves, which is where a lot of the life is, and you know what the shelves are not that wide and not that deep so the pollutants are still pretty concentrated. Gees, sport, think before you type. Its a no-brainer. As for the rest of the ocean its mostly barren (or just not many critters per square metre). I don't know how much marine life depends on the continental shelves but I would think it would be a considerable amount since it is often the site of upwellings.