I am aware no one has ever found a way to do it, but I would love to live in a world where what you are paid was based on age, and not what you do..just as long as you are doing something. start a base income at 18, peak at 50, slope down to retirement level at 65.
It's called communism: "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs".
I don't think it's too popular with most US libertarian slashdotters: they're all intending to be billionaires by the time they're 25 and fuck the plebs.
Sorry, but work is boring, end of story. There are shades of boredom, but if you seriously would rather spend 8 hours a day doing your job rather than enjoying yourself, I feel sorry for you.
If you're one of the few whose job is what you would be doing for enjoyment anyway, you're a lucky man indeed, but that doesn't give you the right to lecture the rest of us who work to pay the bills.
Infix notation is fine for simple maths, i.e. all that 99% of the population ever use. If you're programming anything complicated, fine, use whatever notation you prefer. But just because it's easier for computers to parse doesn't mean that we should be teaching kids to count in binary.
I didn't learn programming because it was "fun" when I was 8 or so. I learned programming because it solved problems I was interested in. Namely, making games and creating animation.
Yes, but for you solving problems was fun. Fun isn't just throwing snowballs or farting when you're a kid, or getting drunk at parties when you're a teenager.
Musicians enjoy making music, athletes enjoy writing running. It's fun for them.
I might have been a good lawyer, but I never even considered that career, as it had a social stigma associated with it that I could not identify with
I don't think the phrase "social stigma" means what you think it means, unless your social circle consists of revolutionary anarchists. If you're a well paid programmer working for a big corporation, you're hardly in a position to look down on lawyers.
Yeah, and those crazy geniuses brought us the ipod and iphone. They really changed the world of over-priced consumer electrical goods, that's for sure.
We come down on things like this for the same reason classically trained musicians come down on someone who teaches "how to make music" by bringing in a bunch of people who say "I like music! It could be a great career for you!" and then offering a site where people can take the recording tracks of a few top 40 songs and mash them up themselves.
Except that classiclly trained musicians would mostly be glad that the kids were getting exposure to making music of any sort, on the principle that the ones who were really interested and talented would then go on to take proper music lessons and become real musicians.
When you teach kids programming, music, poetry, woodwork or football, you don't do it on the assumption that most of them are going to do it professionally. It's about expanding their horizons and providing glimpses of potential futures other than sitting staring at the TV.
A ninth grader already knows how to use Microsoft Word. Any kid picks up that without any problems, and it would simply be a waste of time to teach Word in schools. The same with most other generic software programs.
Bullshit. Left to themselves, kids can enter text, save a file and click on a few random formatting buttons, but that doesn't mean they know how to use it properly.
Also, it's easy for experienced computer users to say that you can just as easily use LibreOffice as Word/Excel, but we tend to forget just how confusing and overwhelming computers are to a lot of people, such that a few apparently minor changes mean they get completely stuck.
Look at all the fuss about the MS Office ribbon - it was only a different way of showing menu options, and yet even here on slashdot people still moan about how difficult/annoying it is.
Our work computers mostly are still Windows XP with Office 2003, and mostly with no compatibility pack (for reasons I can't fathom), and we can't install it ourselves (locked down working environment for IS reasons). We're a major UK company with 18,000 or so employees.
Without wishing to defend MS too much (since that is karmic suicide on slashdot) I do think it's not really their fault if customers won't use the free software they provide for them. Unless there is some sort of security flaw in the compatibility packs it seems hard to believe they couldn't have been installed by now.
If any of them replied telling me to "fuck off", they, as a supplier, would be toast.
It always amuses me when the armchair slashdot warriors say they do exactly that to their customers for daring to use Microsoft products. It must be nice to live in such an ideologically pure bubble.
That being said, I don't do a lot of writing. For 90% of my word processing, (like this) a text box in the browser is more than enough.
Personally, I tend to install an old version of MS-DOS in a virtual machine so that I can always switch to EDLIN for that back-to-basics text processing experience.
My son (8) and his circle of friends (6-16) all have smart phones
8 year olds shouldn't have 6 or 16 year old friends, it's unnatural. They should have 8 year old friends. Also, they shouldn't have fucking smartphones, as that's also unnatural.
Finally, anyone under the age of 12 who is using Skype is basically publishing a big sign on the internet "paedophiles, please come and rape me".
You are bringing up your son to be a monster. Don't be surprised when he starts torturing animals and setting fire to homeless people.
Think about what it would take to get you to shift from Google to Bing.
I think for most slashdotters, the only way they would switch from Google to Bing would be if Google bought and gutted Microsoft, leaving only the name Bing as a cruel reminder of the days of glory now past.
LaTeX produces a superior product... I don't know of anything that, on the back end, typesets so elegantly, and on the front end, allows an author to focus on content so well.
But think about it. Using LaTeX requires --- perish the thought --- a/brain/. An active, working one at that.
So it's a non-starter in about 99.9% of the world's office environments.
And, of course, you're part of the 0.1% of cool geniuses who can appreciate it. Good for you! In the meantime, unless you work in academic publishing, LaTex is overkill for 99.9% of office environments.
Seriously, MS Word is the Ford Focus of "productivity software". Now imagine businesses, instead of using a proper Caterpillar truck, hauls earth from the strip mine with convertible Ford Focuses instead. That's basically what's happening in offices across the globe right now.
No, using MS Word is more like using an all-purpose Ford pickup to haul a few bags of cement, rather than investing time, money, staff and training in a monster Caterpillar truck.
If you're a one man band builder, the pickup is all you need.
Clearly the analogy fails in the sense that 99% of businesses could use the free/Free LibreOffice instead of MS Office, but it is closer than your analogy. The problem with MS Office isn't that it's too simple, it's that it's too complicated and expensive for most small businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
Not worth pirating..
I'm sure they'll miss your valuable custom.
I am aware no one has ever found a way to do it, but I would love to live in a world where what you are paid was based on age, and not what you do..just as long as you are doing something. start a base income at 18, peak at 50, slope down to retirement level at 65.
It's called communism: "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs".
I don't think it's too popular with most US libertarian slashdotters: they're all intending to be billionaires by the time they're 25 and fuck the plebs.
Social media still has some growth left.
Dear god no.
I'm not sure that's any except in the same way that its true that most people can't learn a foreign language beyond a painfully basic level
It's like the old joke about Dutch and Swedish kids being so clever because they can speak more or less perfect English by the age of 10.
Coding is about evolving the activities of humanity and by so doing, directly making the world better.
It must be hard to write code when your head is so far up your own arse.
If your job is boring, find another one now.
Sorry, but work is boring, end of story. There are shades of boredom, but if you seriously would rather spend 8 hours a day doing your job rather than enjoying yourself, I feel sorry for you.
If you're one of the few whose job is what you would be doing for enjoyment anyway, you're a lucky man indeed, but that doesn't give you the right to lecture the rest of us who work to pay the bills.
Infix notation is fine for simple maths, i.e. all that 99% of the population ever use. If you're programming anything complicated, fine, use whatever notation you prefer. But just because it's easier for computers to parse doesn't mean that we should be teaching kids to count in binary.
I didn't learn programming because it was "fun" when I was 8 or so. I learned programming because it solved problems I was interested in. Namely, making games and creating animation.
Yes, but for you solving problems was fun. Fun isn't just throwing snowballs or farting when you're a kid, or getting drunk at parties when you're a teenager.
Musicians enjoy making music, athletes enjoy writing running. It's fun for them.
Come on guys, lets be honest, think about who they are marketing to, kids under the age of 18.
Yes, that's the general demographic for school children. Well spotted.
I might have been a good lawyer, but I never even considered that career, as it had a social stigma associated with it that I could not identify with
I don't think the phrase "social stigma" means what you think it means, unless your social circle consists of revolutionary anarchists. If you're a well paid programmer working for a big corporation, you're hardly in a position to look down on lawyers.
Yeah, and those crazy geniuses brought us the ipod and iphone. They really changed the world of over-priced consumer electrical goods, that's for sure.
Linus, RMS, James Gosling, Guido, Bjarne, Anders, Matsumoto, Brad Cox, Blake Ross. Robert McCool, Micheal Widenius, Brendan Eich, Rasmus Lerdorf, Brad Fitzpatrick, Avinash Lakshman, Doug Cutting, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Ben Hutchings
Only geeks would have heard of any of those. Whereas almost everyone has heard of Snoop Dog and Will.i.am. It's about publicity.
We come down on things like this for the same reason classically trained musicians come down on someone who teaches "how to make music" by bringing in a bunch of people who say "I like music! It could be a great career for you!" and then offering a site where people can take the recording tracks of a few top 40 songs and mash them up themselves.
Except that classiclly trained musicians would mostly be glad that the kids were getting exposure to making music of any sort, on the principle that the ones who were really interested and talented would then go on to take proper music lessons and become real musicians.
When you teach kids programming, music, poetry, woodwork or football, you don't do it on the assumption that most of them are going to do it professionally. It's about expanding their horizons and providing glimpses of potential futures other than sitting staring at the TV.
A ninth grader already knows how to use Microsoft Word. Any kid picks up that without any problems, and it would simply be a waste of time to teach Word in schools. The same with most other generic software programs.
Bullshit. Left to themselves, kids can enter text, save a file and click on a few random formatting buttons, but that doesn't mean they know how to use it properly.
Also, it's easy for experienced computer users to say that you can just as easily use LibreOffice as Word/Excel, but we tend to forget just how confusing and overwhelming computers are to a lot of people, such that a few apparently minor changes mean they get completely stuck.
Look at all the fuss about the MS Office ribbon - it was only a different way of showing menu options, and yet even here on slashdot people still moan about how difficult/annoying it is.
so teach them LaTeX then?
Teach them vi. That will sort out the real programmers from the trendy emacs fanboys.
Our work computers mostly are still Windows XP with Office 2003, and mostly with no compatibility pack (for reasons I can't fathom), and we can't install it ourselves (locked down working environment for IS reasons). We're a major UK company with 18,000 or so employees.
Without wishing to defend MS too much (since that is karmic suicide on slashdot) I do think it's not really their fault if customers won't use the free software they provide for them. Unless there is some sort of security flaw in the compatibility packs it seems hard to believe they couldn't have been installed by now.
If any of them replied telling me to "fuck off", they, as a supplier, would be toast.
It always amuses me when the armchair slashdot warriors say they do exactly that to their customers for daring to use Microsoft products. It must be nice to live in such an ideologically pure bubble.
If you're going to troll, you need to lead people on a bit more subtly than that.
In fact everyone I know I've shown Google Docs to is happy with the features.
Look, no one's saying that nursery school teachers don't do a great job...
Because Google is already disrupted the Game :)
Someone set us up the base.
That being said, I don't do a lot of writing. For 90% of my word processing, (like this) a text box in the browser is more than enough.
Personally, I tend to install an old version of MS-DOS in a virtual machine so that I can always switch to EDLIN for that back-to-basics text processing experience.
My son (8) and his circle of friends (6-16) all have smart phones
8 year olds shouldn't have 6 or 16 year old friends, it's unnatural. They should have 8 year old friends. Also, they shouldn't have fucking smartphones, as that's also unnatural.
Finally, anyone under the age of 12 who is using Skype is basically publishing a big sign on the internet "paedophiles, please come and rape me".
You are bringing up your son to be a monster. Don't be surprised when he starts torturing animals and setting fire to homeless people.
LOL.
Think about what it would take to get you to shift from Google to Bing.
I think for most slashdotters, the only way they would switch from Google to Bing would be if Google bought and gutted Microsoft, leaving only the name Bing as a cruel reminder of the days of glory now past.
LaTeX produces a superior product ... I don't know of anything that, on the back end, typesets so elegantly, and on the front end, allows an author to focus on content so well.
But think about it. Using LaTeX requires --- perish the thought --- a /brain/. An active, working one at that.
So it's a non-starter in about 99.9% of the world's office environments.
And, of course, you're part of the 0.1% of cool geniuses who can appreciate it. Good for you! In the meantime, unless you work in academic publishing, LaTex is overkill for 99.9% of office environments.
Seriously, MS Word is the Ford Focus of "productivity software". Now imagine businesses, instead of using a proper Caterpillar truck, hauls earth from the strip mine with convertible Ford Focuses instead. That's basically what's happening in offices across the globe right now.
No, using MS Word is more like using an all-purpose Ford pickup to haul a few bags of cement, rather than investing time, money, staff and training in a monster Caterpillar truck.
If you're a one man band builder, the pickup is all you need.
Clearly the analogy fails in the sense that 99% of businesses could use the free/Free LibreOffice instead of MS Office, but it is closer than your analogy. The problem with MS Office isn't that it's too simple, it's that it's too complicated and expensive for most small businesses.
Google advertise them at GBP229 (including VAT at 20%) in the UK, so I'm sure you can get them for $200 or less in the US.