Guess they better start going after stores that sell less thna they expected too, cause they're unfairly depriving government of sales tax. Hey, I made a character sheet for a roleplaying game and GAVE IT AWAY to be printed, instead of selling it and contributing taxes to the government. How dare I.
A tax on giving away the products of your hobbies is the most utterly ridiculous thing I can think of-- not to mention hardly enforceable, except against large companies that are already charging and paying tax on services instead of hardware. But of course, those large companies are the only ones that are their target. They wanted to get more money from Linux-using companies, and this is the only way they coudl think of. Dissapointing, if it's true (anyone else ready for the 1st to be over with?).
Exellent plan. No doubt next year we'll all be required by law to go in for RIAA-branded nanobots that will explode us on command... ah, the wonders of modern technology; think where the poor musicians would be without it.
Now the world will be free from pirates forever! No more swabbin' the deck and leerin' at young lasses at ports of call! Today is a great victory for democracy!
Personally, I suggest coating your subliminal CD's with material from your tin-foil hat... always worked for me! Otherwise, who knows what subliminal messages CD and burner manufacturers can slip in to your subliminal messages. Trust no one!
It's [i]humorous[/i]. You know, humor? Laugh? Ha ha? When you say things don't 'qualify' for April Fools by 'definition', you juuuust might need to lighten up a bit. Come on, smile for me, okay?
It isn't just for satellite or digital cable: Comcast has carried it in my area on regular old cable for quite a few years now. I also don't see the need for digital cable. As for thq quality of the programming, I'm sure opinions will widely vary. It definitely isn't targeting itself at the sysadmins, but I've generally found most parts of it entertaining. The various shows that review video games, however (think the current one is called X-play) bring about a level of cheese in acting not usually seen outside daytime drama.
Exactly why I secured a student web developer job here in the campus's library IT department. For the pay? Sorry, $5.50 an hour isn't quite worth it. The skills that I'll learn in the job and the contacts that I'll make starting my freshman year were the real reasons I went for it, and I think other people were thinking the same thing too; you don't have 9 applicants for a $5.50 web development position without some major other benefits.
The job has also given me a great hate for content management and put databases with special cases in my nightmares, but I don't suppose those really count as perks.
Nobody goes into comp-sci for the money any more, like they did in the dotcom craze
I wouldn't be so sure about that. To be sure, anyone reading Slashdot would realize that the boom has died and the $100K wages for straight-out-of-college CS majors are gone, but the perception that I mostly get from regular people when I tell them I'm a freshman majoring in CS is, "Oh, computers, there's a lot of money in that these days." I generally just nod and smile and say "No, there WAS a lot of money in that back then, but then everyone found out about that, and just when everyone and their brother had decided to work in computers people suddenly realized they didn't want groceries over the Internet..."
So don't think that no-one goes into it for the money. Only the people who don't have a touch on the technical community already; in other words, the types that would go for CompSci for the money. There's still a few of them kicking around here, at any rate.
I, of course, decided to major in CompSci after all the recent impediments the industry has had, and after heading a few dozen slashdot posts telling people not to major in CompSci anymore.... I definitely didn't do it for the money; I did it because I (think I) like it. I can tell from the people around me in the 100-level CS classes who's there because they have a passion for it, who's there because they couldn't think of anything else to major in (bad choice at my university; CS is 76 credit hours), and who's there because "them computer guys are making so much money." The money crowd actually seems to be fairly small; maybe they all changed their minds after the first C++ class.
Anyway, I'm thrilled. The fewer people pursuing my path, the more opportunities I'll have. I'll be able to get closer to the profs than I could if the classes were bloated with money-grabbers. And maybe, just maybe, in about 3 years the market will be looking desperately for CS majors again. Well, I can hope, anyway.
As a young, slighty-oblivious college CS major, I knew that working as a programmer would be a lot different than my first-year CS classes. So I applied for, and pushed for, a job as a student web developer in our library's IT department. Even though I just started the job about a month ago, I can tell it was a very good decision. I've had the opportunity so get a "sneak-peek", if you will, of what I'm getting myself into. I've very quickly learned the horrors of content management (Vignette, if you must know, universally hated by everyone in the department) and how quickly nice formatting and such fades away when you're throwing together ASP pages in vbscript(makes me feel vaguely dirty).
I have learned how much I have to learn. CS 120 and 121 weren't challenges, but trying to make a database for the library's staff directory that can be accessed two different ways, and still allow all the crazy little things that happen to pages when your only contraint is HTML is. I knew, intellectually, that I had much, much more to learn, but when I see men working at code that makes me do a double-take, I realize what I still need to learn. And it's given me a desire and a motivation to push forward and ahead more than sitting through 100-level classes could ever do, even though I'm not doing anything glamorous or ground-breaking or well-paid.
Maybe the worst thing to do with something you love is doing it for a living, but that's why I'd like to try it out first. For those without IT experience thinking of majoring in CS, I highly reccommend that you try to find someplace where you can "try before you buy", or possibly "try while you're still in the first year of buying." It may be a good or bad experience, but it should definitely give you a feel if this is what you really want to do with your life.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah, this one is obviously an April Fools joke...
The operation timed out when attempting to connect to mobilemag.com
That's not even a picture! Man, I'm getting good at ID'ing April Fools jokes...
Guess they better start going after stores that sell less thna they expected too, cause they're unfairly depriving government of sales tax. Hey, I made a character sheet for a roleplaying game and GAVE IT AWAY to be printed, instead of selling it and contributing taxes to the government. How dare I.
A tax on giving away the products of your hobbies is the most utterly ridiculous thing I can think of-- not to mention hardly enforceable, except against large companies that are already charging and paying tax on services instead of hardware. But of course, those large companies are the only ones that are their target. They wanted to get more money from Linux-using companies, and this is the only way they coudl think of. Dissapointing, if it's true (anyone else ready for the 1st to be over with?).
Exellent plan. No doubt next year we'll all be required by law to go in for RIAA-branded nanobots that will explode us on command... ah, the wonders of modern technology; think where the poor musicians would be without it.
Now the world will be free from pirates forever! No more swabbin' the deck and leerin' at young lasses at ports of call! Today is a great victory for democracy!
No no no no no... In Soviet Russia, Subliminal CD's are paranoid of industry-produced YOU!
Duh.
Personally, I suggest coating your subliminal CD's with material from your tin-foil hat... always worked for me! Otherwise, who knows what subliminal messages CD and burner manufacturers can slip in to your subliminal messages. Trust no one!
How does it qualify as April Fools, you say.
It's [i]humorous[/i]. You know, humor? Laugh? Ha ha? When you say things don't 'qualify' for April Fools by 'definition', you juuuust might need to lighten up a bit. Come on, smile for me, okay?
It isn't just for satellite or digital cable: Comcast has carried it in my area on regular old cable for quite a few years now. I also don't see the need for digital cable. As for thq quality of the programming, I'm sure opinions will widely vary. It definitely isn't targeting itself at the sysadmins, but I've generally found most parts of it entertaining. The various shows that review video games, however (think the current one is called X-play) bring about a level of cheese in acting not usually seen outside daytime drama.
Exactly why I secured a student web developer job here in the campus's library IT department. For the pay? Sorry, $5.50 an hour isn't quite worth it. The skills that I'll learn in the job and the contacts that I'll make starting my freshman year were the real reasons I went for it, and I think other people were thinking the same thing too; you don't have 9 applicants for a $5.50 web development position without some major other benefits.
The job has also given me a great hate for content management and put databases with special cases in my nightmares, but I don't suppose those really count as perks.
Nobody goes into comp-sci for the money any more, like they did in the dotcom craze
I wouldn't be so sure about that. To be sure, anyone reading Slashdot would realize that the boom has died and the $100K wages for straight-out-of-college CS majors are gone, but the perception that I mostly get from regular people when I tell them I'm a freshman majoring in CS is, "Oh, computers, there's a lot of money in that these days." I generally just nod and smile and say "No, there WAS a lot of money in that back then, but then everyone found out about that, and just when everyone and their brother had decided to work in computers people suddenly realized they didn't want groceries over the Internet..."
So don't think that no-one goes into it for the money. Only the people who don't have a touch on the technical community already; in other words, the types that would go for CompSci for the money. There's still a few of them kicking around here, at any rate.
I say hooray.
I, of course, decided to major in CompSci after all the recent impediments the industry has had, and after heading a few dozen slashdot posts telling people not to major in CompSci anymore.... I definitely didn't do it for the money; I did it because I (think I) like it. I can tell from the people around me in the 100-level CS classes who's there because they have a passion for it, who's there because they couldn't think of anything else to major in (bad choice at my university; CS is 76 credit hours), and who's there because "them computer guys are making so much money." The money crowd actually seems to be fairly small; maybe they all changed their minds after the first C++ class.
Anyway, I'm thrilled. The fewer people pursuing my path, the more opportunities I'll have. I'll be able to get closer to the profs than I could if the classes were bloated with money-grabbers. And maybe, just maybe, in about 3 years the market will be looking desperately for CS majors again. Well, I can hope, anyway.
As a young, slighty-oblivious college CS major, I knew that working as a programmer would be a lot different than my first-year CS classes. So I applied for, and pushed for, a job as a student web developer in our library's IT department. Even though I just started the job about a month ago, I can tell it was a very good decision. I've had the opportunity so get a "sneak-peek", if you will, of what I'm getting myself into. I've very quickly learned the horrors of content management (Vignette, if you must know, universally hated by everyone in the department) and how quickly nice formatting and such fades away when you're throwing together ASP pages in vbscript(makes me feel vaguely dirty).
I have learned how much I have to learn. CS 120 and 121 weren't challenges, but trying to make a database for the library's staff directory that can be accessed two different ways, and still allow all the crazy little things that happen to pages when your only contraint is HTML is. I knew, intellectually, that I had much, much more to learn, but when I see men working at code that makes me do a double-take, I realize what I still need to learn. And it's given me a desire and a motivation to push forward and ahead more than sitting through 100-level classes could ever do, even though I'm not doing anything glamorous or ground-breaking or well-paid.
Maybe the worst thing to do with something you love is doing it for a living, but that's why I'd like to try it out first. For those without IT experience thinking of majoring in CS, I highly reccommend that you try to find someplace where you can "try before you buy", or possibly "try while you're still in the first year of buying." It may be a good or bad experience, but it should definitely give you a feel if this is what you really want to do with your life.