Exactly. ISP's are primarily in the business of providing access, not individual applications (i.e., the pipe, not the shit that goes through it). This is why I think there needs to be a statutory separation of access provision versuscontent provision. Anything else, and it's nothing more than the fox watching the henhouse.
I'll come right out and say I can't stand Ayn Rand. She was a cocaine-addled hack. However, you might want to read Reflections on the Failure of Socialism by Max Eastman. He was an ardent socialist who embraced capitalism later in life.
It would be nice if IBM enumerated the various reasons. As it stands, the letter boils down to this:
'We're not open-sourcing OS/2 because we say so! Nanny-boo-boo!'
It has nothing to do with drive space or CPU cycles. It has everything to do with the fact that people receive dozens or hundreds of emails a day which are irrelevant and waste their time. Too many lazy people hit Reply All when the only person who cares is the original sender. The worst is when, say, a person emails with: 'Will the person with the green Hyundai please come to my office?' and my inbox gets flooded with dozens of messages all expressing variants of: 'Nope! I don't drive a Hyundai!' A lot of it is common sense, which isn't that common.
The CS department at the college I went to used to turn off all the PCs at night but now has them set up to start doing scientific calculations during the times when the labs are closed. They use power during this time, but it's not wasted. At a university (which typically isn't profit-driven), one can get away with this. But the CEO of a for-profit enterprise is going to ask, 'SETTI@Home? What's in it for us?' Simpl do-goodism isn't sufficient. Until most of these distributed computing projects implement some form of micropayment mechanism to compensate at the very least for energy usage, most businesses have no profit motive to let their systems stay on all night searching for the Goonaks from the planet Volkos.
Yeah, I'm sure they're working hard at it... they also work hard at delivering my mail to my address, but fail this simple task at a non-zero rate. When they can put the letter in the box, such that the words on the two match up - ensuring a successful delivery, then I'll contemplate a governments' ability to herd a populace with evil intent. Funny you mentioned this. I have a chronic problem with getting my post improperly delivered (receiving someone else's mail or vice versa). I call the Post Office repeatedly to complain, and one supervisor told me that 'there are intricacies to delivering mail.' I told him bullshit -- it involves simply know which street you're on, being able to read the number of the building where you're currently stopped, and reading the item for a match. It involves simple literacy. But I guess civil servants feel the constant need to justify their jobs.
Precisely. This country worships at the altar of the almighty stupid athlete. If you asked a child 35-40 years ago to name a hero, chances were decent that he'd throw out a name like Chuck Yeager or Buzz Aldrin. Now, it's almost universally an athlete who only knows his own name because his coach shouts it at him all day, or a washed-up 'musician' (Britney Britney or Snoop Dogg).
(As an aside, I wish Slashcode allowed one to edit his comments after submission....) What I was going to add: the 13 colonies were largely peopled by cast-offs, criminals, ruffians, people without means, &c. Lets not forget that it wasn't exactly Europe's leading lights who boarded rat-infested ships in those days, which it would be naive in the extreme to assume did not influence the burgeoning American culture.
Anti-intellectualism has been an attribute of American culture since colonial days. In Democracy In America, Alexis de Tocqueville states that whilst Europeans value erudition, Americans value wit and cleverness. Here is an exact quotation:
Taken as a whole, literature in democratic ages can never present, as it does in the periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity, science, and art; its form, on the contrary, will ordinarily be slighted, sometimes despised. Style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, over- burdened, and loose, almost always vehement and bold. Authors will aim at rapidity of execution more than at perfection of detail. Small productions will be more common than bulky books; there will be more wit than erudition, more imagination than profundity; and literary performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigor of thought, frequently of great variety and singular fecundity. The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste. Keep in mind that the first edition was published in 1835, so this phenomenon is hardly new.
But the requirements to pilot are significantly greater than the requirements to drive. Exactly. And as it is, 90% of the people on the road these days should never have been granted a DL. They can't drive for shit. I'd hate to think of them going airborne.
...going from good to great (DVD to Blu-Ray) isn't as big a step from crappy to good (regular broadcast TV to DVD.) Exactly, which is why SACD and DVD-Audio largely failed. The transition from cassettes (horrendous even with Dolby NR) or vinyl played on a shitty turntable (merely bad) to CD (good) was a huge leap and worth paying a few bucks extra per album. The transition from CD to SACD/DVD-A (great) does not justify paying double the price in the opinion of most people.
You know, maybe the GP is right, and you just happened to work for an asshole for some reason? I won't dispute that.
Or somewhere where the cost of living is so low that $30K isn't so bad and you haven't yet accepted that. I live in the Richmond, VA, metropolitan area where $30K/yr is OK for a bachelor such as myself, but not spectacular.
The least charitable option is that you're simply unqualified and don't know it (or perhaps you are qualified but you interview horrifically). Granted, I'm a bit of a generalist (my skills are broad but unfortunately shallow). However, this scenario plays out with many of my colleagues. So it can't simply be that we're all incompetent.
Kay: 'This is gonna replace CD's soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again....'
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders how much the 'record' companies are milking the vinyl renaissance in a crass attempt to make the listening public buy music in yet another format (albeit one that isn't novel, but resurrected from the scrap-heap). I bet the labels are salivating at the prospect of remastering their back catalogues on vinyl and extorting another $10/album. I wonder how long until we have 8-track and cassette retrolutions. And don't forget 78's -- damn the sound of a steel needle on shellac brings back such memories. Ahhhhh!
(And the conspiracist in me somewhat suspects that this rash of articles over the last year or so is one method of trying to manipulate prevailing social attitudes so that businesses don't *have* to do the work of changing). That, or an excuse they can use when they go to Congress and ask to have the H1B quota increased. After all, foreigners in fear of deportation are much more docile and pliant (and willing to work in shit conditions) than natives are.
Currently in the US there is a dramatic shortage of IT workers. This statement needs to be qualified. Here are two means of qualification:
1. There is a dramatic shortage of IT workers who have skills in obscure areas because companies typically aren't willing to provide any training and people can't exactly acquire the skills on their own when the application in question costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
2. There is a dramatic shortage of IT workers who are willing to work for absolute peanuts and be on-call 24/7/365 without any kind of compensation (monetary or non-).
In my last IT position (which I left as of last July), I was getting paid $30K a year (exempt, salaried) to do a combination of E-commerce development and on-site support. For the on-site support, I was expect to pay for my own fuel (@ $3/gallon) without any reimbursement. I quickly left because with all of the travel I was doing, I was barely breaking even. I now work at a restaurant doing delivery, and am making more money on an hourly basis (average of $25/hr) than I've ever made at any IT job I've ever had.
If you aren't growing your own food, do you expect someone to work a job off the farm, and then do the farming for you out of the goodness of their heart? I actually have a garden where I grow some of my own vegetables.
Does your mom still do your dishes for you? No, because I have this wonderful device known as a dish-washer.
...we'd drop our present employer in a heartbeat if something was in it for ourselves. Erm, and this is a bad thing how , exactly? Oh yeah, it's not. Unless family or close friends are involved, 'loyalty' is a dead letter in the modern workplace. Might as well look out for #1, because sure as fuck nobody else will....
If you outsource production, who benefits? Not that poor farmer in Bolivia or someone in backwoods China. They still get paid almost nothing for the work they do because their local economies don't require a large wage to live comfortably. NGO's exist to ensure that developing-world farmers have equitable access to commodities markets and are paid a living wage so that their children can receive adequate healthcare, education, &c. Their efforts are stymied, however, by a hotch-potch of antiquated rich-world tariffs and subsidies.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. ISP's are primarily in the business of providing access, not individual applications (i.e., the pipe, not the shit that goes through it). This is why I think there needs to be a statutory separation of access provision versuscontent provision. Anything else, and it's nothing more than the fox watching the henhouse.
I'll come right out and say I can't stand Ayn Rand. She was a cocaine-addled hack. However, you might want to read Reflections on the Failure of Socialism by Max Eastman. He was an ardent socialist who embraced capitalism later in life.
It would be nice if IBM enumerated the various reasons. As it stands, the letter boils down to this: 'We're not open-sourcing OS/2 because we say so! Nanny-boo-boo!'
It has nothing to do with drive space or CPU cycles. It has everything to do with the fact that people receive dozens or hundreds of emails a day which are irrelevant and waste their time. Too many lazy people hit Reply All when the only person who cares is the original sender. The worst is when, say, a person emails with: 'Will the person with the green Hyundai please come to my office?' and my inbox gets flooded with dozens of messages all expressing variants of: 'Nope! I don't drive a Hyundai!' A lot of it is common sense, which isn't that common.
Precisely. This country worships at the altar of the almighty stupid athlete. If you asked a child 35-40 years ago to name a hero, chances were decent that he'd throw out a name like Chuck Yeager or Buzz Aldrin. Now, it's almost universally an athlete who only knows his own name because his coach shouts it at him all day, or a washed-up 'musician' (Britney Britney or Snoop Dogg).
Grrrrr......strike Lets and substitute Let's.
(As an aside, I wish Slashcode allowed one to edit his comments after submission....)
What I was going to add: the 13 colonies were largely peopled by cast-offs, criminals, ruffians, people without means, &c. Lets not forget that it wasn't exactly Europe's leading lights who boarded rat-infested ships in those days, which it would be naive in the extreme to assume did not influence the burgeoning American culture.
OpenLina sounds more interesting....
Be happy it wasn't AOL tech support back in the day. If you were to tell them you had smoke emanating from your PC, they'd tell you to reboot.
...going from good to great (DVD to Blu-Ray) isn't as big a step from crappy to good (regular broadcast TV to DVD.) Exactly, which is why SACD and DVD-Audio largely failed. The transition from cassettes (horrendous even with Dolby NR) or vinyl played on a shitty turntable (merely bad) to CD (good) was a huge leap and worth paying a few bucks extra per album. The transition from CD to SACD/DVD-A (great) does not justify paying double the price in the opinion of most people.I mean after all, who likes wimpy, ineffectual ice-cream?
Yeah but if we're living in The Matrix, how do we really know what ice-cream tastes like?
...'How Shellac Got Her Groove Back'
Kay: 'This is gonna replace CD's soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again....'
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders how much the 'record' companies are milking the vinyl renaissance in a crass attempt to make the listening public buy music in yet another format (albeit one that isn't novel, but resurrected from the scrap-heap). I bet the labels are salivating at the prospect of remastering their back catalogues on vinyl and extorting another $10/album. I wonder how long until we have 8-track and cassette retrolutions. And don't forget 78's -- damn the sound of a steel needle on shellac brings back such memories. Ahhhhh!
1. There is a dramatic shortage of IT workers who have skills in obscure areas because companies typically aren't willing to provide any training and people can't exactly acquire the skills on their own when the application in question costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
2. There is a dramatic shortage of IT workers who are willing to work for absolute peanuts and be on-call 24/7/365 without any kind of compensation (monetary or non-).
In my last IT position (which I left as of last July), I was getting paid $30K a year (exempt, salaried) to do a combination of E-commerce development and on-site support. For the on-site support, I was expect to pay for my own fuel (@ $3/gallon) without any reimbursement. I quickly left because with all of the travel I was doing, I was barely breaking even. I now work at a restaurant doing delivery, and am making more money on an hourly basis (average of $25/hr) than I've ever made at any IT job I've ever had.
...we'd drop our present employer in a heartbeat if something was in it for ourselves. Erm, and this is a bad thing how , exactly? Oh yeah, it's not. Unless family or close friends are involved, 'loyalty' is a dead letter in the modern workplace. Might as well look out for #1, because sure as fuck nobody else will....