I'm not sure if the parent post was being sarcastic, or if he was being dead serious, but either way... there are definately people who think like this in the (business) world.
Whenever I come across someone like this, I always recommend that everyone do their best to sabotage and/or destroy them.... out of a sense of sheer self-preservation.
Seriously, if you allow this type of total farkwad to get ahead, then everybody in the organization will suffer. People (who hold the attitudes expressed by the parent poster) who derive pleasure from exercising petty authority in an arbitrary way, and who think about work as a place to "drive right over" or "call out" their co-workers are dangerous. Like a wolf nosing around the hen house, looking to see who it can eat first.
Best to screw them over as quickly as possible... before they get a chance to do it to everyone else in the organization. Heck... businesses go down in flames when they get too many people in them with the attitude expressed by the parent post, so best to weed them out fast.
Unless, of course, the attitudes expressed by the parent poster belong to someone in Sales or Marketing... in which case they'd fits right in over there, and that attitude is normal within those departments.;)
I stopped playing WoW for four months or so, but re-activated my account when I heard about the cross-server battlegrounds and the upcoming revamp of the Honor system.
The wait times on Alterac Valley average about 2 minutes, across all hours of the day.
For Warsong or Arathi Basin, you might have to wait up to 8 minutes in queue in the off-hours, but during peak hours the queues for AB and WSG are less than two minutes.
Also, it looks like the upcoming changes to the honor system will eliminate DKs... so, more world PvP.
Well, since my main character in WoW is a Hunter, and my alternate character is a Druid... I'm somewhat underwhelmed by the "coming soon" notices contained in the link for those two classes.
People in town know me, and I know them. The people who run the other small bussinesses in town all know me, and I know them.
With a relatively small number of customers, I have to treat them right, or we'd be out of bussiness really really fast.
When I do treat the customer right, I know that they'll tell their friends... and I also know that the other small bussinesses in town will stear people my way, just like I send bussiness their way.
Occasionally, I'll get customers who are complete assholes. Over a certain level of assholeness, and they're not worth my time or trouble... and I make certain to send them off to some large corporate store so I can concentrate on the customers who actually respond to being treated well.
The customers I want, I treat like gold.
Now, take your typical corporate environment. The workers could give a fark about their customers, because almost none of the workers in a corporate environment have a direct stake in how well the bussiness does overall (beyond making sure that it doesn't go belly up).
Your typical corporate employee treats the customers at a certain minimum level of service, because he'll be fired if he doesn't.
So, EVERYONE who goes to do bussiness with the corporate places gets treated in a "lowest common denominator" sort of way. They're not quite treated as badly as garbage that blew in off the street, but they're never treated like the "good" customers that I treat like gold.
Everyone in the corporate places, employees and customers alike, gets treated as just another cog in a big machine.
So, if you spend your money at big corporate places, you're in effect voting with your dollars to be treated just slightly better than assholes get treated. But, if you spend your money at small bussinesses and act like a decent human being, then you'll be treated much better.
Every dollar you spend at Wallmart or Blockbuster, is a dollar that you're "voting" with, to be treated as a disposable nothing who gets the bare minimum of courtesy... and nothing else.
I guess if you're a complete asshole, then you'd come out ahead in that bargain;) Otherwise, you can only lose by giving your patronage to the big corporate places.
Is anyone actually dumb enough to think this is about child porn?
This is yet another attempt by the Bush administration to increase domestic surveilance, and to create a de-facto state of permanent constant survelliance on all Americans.
They're just trying to sell it as "anti child porn" in order to get the gullible people to go along with giving up the remaining shreds of personal privacy.... and to keep the gutless wonders (of both parties)in Congress from trying to oppose it.
Once a person stops working for a company (or the government!) they should stop getting money from them. It is a question of individual responsibility to save up enough for retirement, even if that means holding off on that second home, buying fewer new cars and taking fewer cruises during the working years.
Now hold on... a moment ago you were *supporting* non-compete agreements.
But now, you say that an there should be no ongoing obligations between a worker's former employer and himself. So... the employer should be obligated to provide nothing, and the employee should be obligated to continue doing things to benefit the employer??
Then, you pull out the tired dogmatic mantra of "personal responsibility".
Uh huh. It's always about "personal responsibility" when the employee is getting screwed, but why isn't it ever seen the other way around?
Maybe the EMPLOYERS should show some "personal responsibility" in the well-being of their own bussiness, and pay their employees enough and treat them well-enough so that they don't run off to work for a competitor. Why don't we ever hear the mantra "personal responsibility" ever used in connection with the employer?
Why is it that an employee who budgets badly is "irresponsible", but the corporation who employs him is always "a victim of a downturn in the economy" when it goes to borrow a few billion of our tax money to stay in bussiness?
Face it, you have a double standard. Mainly, because you worship those who have capital, and privately disdain those who work for a living as somehow being lesser people... and it shows in your arguments.
Not only do they demand 60 to 70 hour work-weeks of their employees during "crunch time" (which is about 50% of the time on any given project), but the internal processes in place are incredibly short-sighted and just plain dumb from a productivity standpoint.
"Oh, that can't be true", you might say, "EA cares about productivity, they'd fix that."
Not true... well, it's true that they care about productivity, but they care more about keeping everyone under the thumbs of some seriously clue-less folks in management.
So they have the most ass-backwards processes in place that have people working 60 or 70 hours in a week, when 40 hour workweeks done with rational processes in place, would produce more products of a higher quality.
As an example:
There was a team working on an Golf game, with the name of a major golfing star 's endorsement. The team making the golf game was on a tight schedule, and decided to re-use a graphics engine and physics engine from a previously-released game.
So far, so good... however, the code in the company repository was from the alpha-phase of the previous game's development... complete with ALL of the bugs and issues that the OTHER team had already been paid millions to fix.
The company procedures in place mandated that they second team go through the standard procedures, and basically spend the first two-to-three months of the project, having the QA folks do the exact same testing that they'd already done on the previous title, in order to find and fix the exact same bugs that they'd already found and fixed.
Oh, but wait... it gets better. One of the QA leads had himself worked on the previous title, and had access to the bug database from the first title (which was something that would not normally be allowed to the QA folks on the second title), so he grabbed all of the bugs from the old database that were solely physics and graphics engine-related, and put them into the fresh database for the new title.
Everybody (on the project that is) was overjoyed. They'd just saved weeks or months of effort at reduplicating previous efforts... and then management found out what had occured.
The QA lead was reprimanded for violating procedure, and the project head was reprimanded for allowing the QA lead to violate procedure, and it looked for a bit like the QA guy might get fired, but in the end he was let off with a warning.
Jeesh... one boggles at what his fate would have been if he'd actually had access to the fixed code itself, rather than just the QA database that showed where to look for problems in the code.
Now, perhaps some of the people here on Slashdot might be familiar with an obscure concept called "Open Source". In this thing called "Open Source", people around the world collaborate on finding and fixing bugs, and sharing code that has been proven to function well.
Heh... at EA, they don't even share code between projects, and they don't even bother to properly archive the fixed and tested code that they themselves have already paid money to fix and test.
"Well", you might say, "That just proves that they're incredibly stupid, but doesn't neccesarally prove that they're evil."
True... that one story doesn't prove they're evil... but I personally witnesses about 20 even worse stories, and heard about another 50 more from folks working in the same building.
Trust me... EA as a company is both stupid and evil... or, perhaps just so criminally stupid that it begins to border on evil.
Why should you.. or anyone care?: Slave Mentality.
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What does it matter what the GDP of your nation is?
If the nation's GDP goes up an extra 1%, do you get a dividend check for your share of the difference?
If the nation's GDP goes up 3% will you suddenly become more handsome, grow a larger penis overnight, and get a 20 point IQ boost?
Unless you're getting an equal and/or fair share of the increase in GDP, then crowing about how "GDP has gone up!!!11one" is simply a slave mentality... you're somehow happy that your masters who control the economy made some more profit, even though you'll get none of the fruits of that increase.
If you've got a 35-hour workweek, 6 weeks of paid vacation every year, free healthcare, free schooling through Bachelor's-level for your kids, and a guaranteed old-age pension.... would you give it all up so you could live in a country that had a slightly higher GDP????
Are you insane? What on god's green earth effect will a higher GDP have on your own personal life experience??
Adam Smith spoke about what the world would is like, when people ignore the common weal in order to exclusively persue short-term personal gain:
"Life, in a state of nature, is nasty, brutish, and short."
It's funny how many people who identify themselves as "Capitalists", would be completely appaled at the statements he made, if they actually bothered to read Adam Smith's books.
Maybe the parent poster is wise-cracking, but what he's he's saying is the logical next step in this little drama.
What? You think that the 24/7 coverage on Fox News about how the eviiil liberals are "destroying Amerikuh" isn't having an affect on the intented audience?
You think the newscasters chuckling about "college frat pranks" when speaking dismissively about ongoing torture and murder in Iraqi prisons isn't setting the tone for what is to come?
You think that fining Janet Jackson for showing a boob, while giving Pat Robertson a free pass while he calls for the assasination of a foreign head of state (a felony), isn't setting the tone for what is to come?
I work 40+ hours a week, managing a tiny mon-and-pop retail store.
I also spent 17 months writing my first Fantasy/Sci-Fi novel, basically during the nights and on my days off.
I wrote the book, because I *wanted* to write the book, and because I felt a driving need to do something creative and to MAKE something new.
I'm finishing up the final editing, and having a friend photoshop up a nice cover, and then I'll be publishing it through Lulu.com
Personally, my choice for liscensing is to use plain-old regular copyright for my first novel... but once I'm done writing my second novel (a sequel), I might consider the idea of offering the first one for free download in order to drive up sales of the second one.
Who knows? I'll decide on all that, once the second one is done... but since it is MY book, I'll use whatever liscense that I like.
If I actually make any money on the first book, then great. Maybe I'll be able to eventually support myself from my writing alone. That would be nice.
But if not, then I'll still continue writing... it'll just take a lot longer for each book to get finished, because the 40-hour-a-week "pay-the-bills" job cuts into my writing time.
So, yeah, actually making money by writing would be cool, and it'd be nice to actually support myself doing something that I love to do... but money alone isn't the primary motivating factor for creating things.
So *what* is the big deal with these guys that they so despise CC and act like it is something that it is not? I want to think it is more then trolling for hits, but there doesn't seem to be any other motive that I can tell...
The point is that those whose livelihoods depend upon acting as go-betweens between the creators of "IP", and the consumers of "IP", feel threatened by the possibilities of the internet in general, and the FOSS movement in particular.
For two thousand years, creative people wrote books. THey wrote these books because they wanted to write them, and because they wanted people to read them.
How much money do you think Livy made for writing "Discourses"? How much money did Julius Ceasar make from writing "The Gallic War", and "The Cival War"? How much did Machiavelli make from having written "The Prince"?
In all three cases, the answer is not very much. They didn't write those books to make money from renting out puplication rights... they each had other motives that did not involve money.
So now we fast-forward to 2005, where there is an ingrained cultural meme that ALL human interaction MUST be motivated by the exchange of folding money... except there are many creative people who have the same motives that the authors and creators of past centuries had. Thier motives for writing a book, or a play, or a computer program may not involve money.
This, of course, is very worrisome to those whose entire existence is predicated upon their ability to stick themselves inbetween creators and viewers, and to leech a living from that position.
The leeches see that their two-century-long free lunch on the blood of creative people may soon be coming to an end.
So they wiggle and whine about any liscense that cuts them out of the transaction. Oh, boo hoo hoo, the GPL will end the world, or boo hoo hoo, the CC liscense will end all existence. Heh, and for the leech-like middlemen, they're correct:)
It was the first thing I downloaded for my new Powerbook, once I did the initial updates to OSX.
I got used to using OpenOffice on my old now-dead HP laptop that I had dual-booted for Linux... and I much preferred using OpenOffice on the Linux partition than the clunky MS Word on the Windows partition.
It's not really even about "free as in freedom", or "free as in beer", or any OSS-worship motives.
While all those things are nice, the bottom line is that MS Word just plain sucks and would NOT do what I wanted it to do... and reading MS helpfiles is like a trip to purgatory.
OpenOffice and OpenOffice/J, by contrast, are clean, well-made, and do what the heck I want them to do.... and the helpfiles actually HELP me figure out how to get stuff done while using them.
As for people who HAVE to use MS Word, well too-bad so-sad. Sucks to be them. If they want me to read their documents, they can use HTML or PDF or.swx or even plain-old-text. Or they can use.doc and maybe it'll work (until the next time MS arbitrarally adds stuff to break their own compatibility).
Anyway... life is full of choices. If people choose to use inferior. buggy, and unfriendly programs made by Microsoft because they feel that they "have to", then that's their choice.... but I'm not inclined to play that game.
I use what works... and I also prefer things that are made by people who take some pride in their work and turn out good code because they'd feel bad if they turned out crap. That's why I use my shiny new Powerbook, and that's why it has OpenOffice/J installed on it, along with a program called Fink that lets me compile Linux apps to run on my Powerbook.
So I get a nice shiny machine, with nice shiny programs... both proprietary and Open Source, all working seamlessly and well, to do what I want them to do.
You ain't getting that from Microsoft any day soon.
Going around giving ambigious orders and overreacting when people show initiative is not something the military looks for in its officers.
Very true. You're absolutely correct.
However, judging by all of the stories I've been hearing about the results of various "zero tolerance" policies in high schools across America, giving ambiguous orders and overreacting when people show initiative is something that school districts apparently search for when selecting teachers and administrators;)
Looking back on it now, I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order... detention perhaps, or losing computer privileges for a week...
No. You deserved no punishment whatsoever for turning up the brightness on a monitor that had the brightness all the way down. Making that sort of adjustment is common sense.
In fact, anyone who would suggest that displaying common sense is a crime, or that military-type jargon such as "disobeying a direct order" is something that we should be using to educate school children, is not thinking correctly.
In fact, the whole idea that public schools should be run like a semi boot-camp type environment, with "direct orders" and "zero tolerance policies" and a complete and utter disdain for individual creative thinking, is just plain wrong.
I was in the military for many years, and I know exactly what military-style training can and can't achieve. It's excellent for turning out people who will do things EXACTLY as ordered, and PRECISELY according to a pre-determined plan. It's really not that great at teaching creative thinking, or instilling a system of personal ethics that aren't imposed by an outside authority. It's great for cranking out infantrymen, and pretty darn awfull for instilling any sort of American democratic and egalitarian ideals.
Heck, if the teacher in charge of that class had bothered to do her jo, and pre-check each machine and each monitor before class to ensure that the basic settings were correct, then the problem wouldn't have arisen in the first place. Oh, but wait, that would require people in positions of petty authority to take RESPONSIBILITY for their own actions.... definatelly a part of the military tradition that school authorities would want to run from like the plague;) I mean, making KIDS be responsible for their actions is cool, but actually holding teachers and administrators to the same standard? Heh.. it'll never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Dick Cheney.
;)
Carl Rove.
Alberto Ganzalez.
I'm not sure if the parent post was being sarcastic, or if he was being dead serious, but either way... there are definately people who think like this in the (business) world.
;)
Whenever I come across someone like this, I always recommend that everyone do their best to sabotage and/or destroy them.... out of a sense of sheer self-preservation.
Seriously, if you allow this type of total farkwad to get ahead, then everybody in the organization will suffer. People (who hold the attitudes expressed by the parent poster) who derive pleasure from exercising petty authority in an arbitrary way, and who think about work as a place to "drive right over" or "call out" their co-workers are dangerous. Like a wolf nosing around the hen house, looking to see who it can eat first.
Best to screw them over as quickly as possible... before they get a chance to do it to everyone else in the organization. Heck... businesses go down in flames when they get too many people in them with the attitude expressed by the parent post, so best to weed them out fast.
Unless, of course, the attitudes expressed by the parent poster belong to someone in Sales or Marketing... in which case they'd fits right in over there, and that attitude is normal within those departments.
I stopped playing WoW for four months or so, but re-activated my account when I heard about the cross-server battlegrounds and the upcoming revamp of the Honor system.
The wait times on Alterac Valley average about 2 minutes, across all hours of the day.
For Warsong or Arathi Basin, you might have to wait up to 8 minutes in queue in the off-hours, but during peak hours the queues for AB and WSG are less than two minutes.
Also, it looks like the upcoming changes to the honor system will eliminate DKs... so, more world PvP.
Well, since my main character in WoW is a Hunter, and my alternate character is a Druid... I'm somewhat underwhelmed by the "coming soon" notices contained in the link for those two classes.
I work in a small bussiness.
;) Otherwise, you can only lose by giving your patronage to the big corporate places.
People in town know me, and I know them. The people who run the other small bussinesses in town all know me, and I know them.
With a relatively small number of customers, I have to treat them right, or we'd be out of bussiness really really fast.
When I do treat the customer right, I know that they'll tell their friends... and I also know that the other small bussinesses in town will stear people my way, just like I send bussiness their way.
Occasionally, I'll get customers who are complete assholes. Over a certain level of assholeness, and they're not worth my time or trouble... and I make certain to send them off to some large corporate store so I can concentrate on the customers who actually respond to being treated well.
The customers I want, I treat like gold.
Now, take your typical corporate environment. The workers could give a fark about their customers, because almost none of the workers in a corporate environment have a direct stake in how well the bussiness does overall (beyond making sure that it doesn't go belly up).
Your typical corporate employee treats the customers at a certain minimum level of service, because he'll be fired if he doesn't.
So, EVERYONE who goes to do bussiness with the corporate places gets treated in a "lowest common denominator" sort of way. They're not quite treated as badly as garbage that blew in off the street, but they're never treated like the "good" customers that I treat like gold.
Everyone in the corporate places, employees and customers alike, gets treated as just another cog in a big machine.
So, if you spend your money at big corporate places, you're in effect voting with your dollars to be treated just slightly better than assholes get treated. But, if you spend your money at small bussinesses and act like a decent human being, then you'll be treated much better.
Every dollar you spend at Wallmart or Blockbuster, is a dollar that you're "voting" with, to be treated as a disposable nothing who gets the bare minimum of courtesy... and nothing else.
I guess if you're a complete asshole, then you'd come out ahead in that bargain
Is anyone actually dumb enough to think this is about child porn?
This is yet another attempt by the Bush administration to increase domestic surveilance, and to create a de-facto state of permanent constant survelliance on all Americans.
They're just trying to sell it as "anti child porn" in order to get the gullible people to go along with giving up the remaining shreds of personal privacy.... and to keep the gutless wonders (of both parties)in Congress from trying to oppose it.
Five million subscribers play World of Warcraft... and it runs just fine on OSX.
Nobody, and I do mean nobody, lacks an X chromosome.
Everybody has at least one, and some people even have two.
So... ...we should push to unionize the workers in India? :)
Perhaps I misread your initial comments.
keraneuology said:
Once a person stops working for a company (or the government!) they should stop getting money from them. It is a question of individual responsibility to save up enough for retirement, even if that means holding off on that second home, buying fewer new cars and taking fewer cruises during the working years.
Now hold on... a moment ago you were *supporting* non-compete agreements.
But now, you say that an there should be no ongoing obligations between a worker's former employer and himself. So... the employer should be obligated to provide nothing, and the employee should be obligated to continue doing things to benefit the employer??
Then, you pull out the tired dogmatic mantra of "personal responsibility".
Uh huh. It's always about "personal responsibility" when the employee is getting screwed, but why isn't it ever seen the other way around?
Maybe the EMPLOYERS should show some "personal responsibility" in the well-being of their own bussiness, and pay their employees enough and treat them well-enough so that they don't run off to work for a competitor. Why don't we ever hear the mantra "personal responsibility" ever used in connection with the employer?
Why is it that an employee who budgets badly is "irresponsible", but the corporation who employs him is always "a victim of a downturn in the economy" when it goes to borrow a few billion of our tax money to stay in bussiness?
Face it, you have a double standard. Mainly, because you worship those who have capital, and privately disdain those who work for a living as somehow being lesser people... and it shows in your arguments.
I worked at EA.
Not only do they demand 60 to 70 hour work-weeks of their employees during "crunch time" (which is about 50% of the time on any given project), but the internal processes in place are incredibly short-sighted and just plain dumb from a productivity standpoint.
"Oh, that can't be true", you might say, "EA cares about productivity, they'd fix that."
Not true... well, it's true that they care about productivity, but they care more about keeping everyone under the thumbs of some seriously clue-less folks in management.
So they have the most ass-backwards processes in place that have people working 60 or 70 hours in a week, when 40 hour workweeks done with rational processes in place, would produce more products of a higher quality.
As an example:
There was a team working on an Golf game, with the name of a major golfing star 's endorsement. The team making the golf game was on a tight schedule, and decided to re-use a graphics engine and physics engine from a previously-released game.
So far, so good... however, the code in the company repository was from the alpha-phase of the previous game's development... complete with ALL of the bugs and issues that the OTHER team had already been paid millions to fix.
The company procedures in place mandated that they second team go through the standard procedures, and basically spend the first two-to-three months of the project, having the QA folks do the exact same testing that they'd already done on the previous title, in order to find and fix the exact same bugs that they'd already found and fixed.
Oh, but wait... it gets better. One of the QA leads had himself worked on the previous title, and had access to the bug database from the first title (which was something that would not normally be allowed to the QA folks on the second title), so he grabbed all of the bugs from the old database that were solely physics and graphics engine-related, and put them into the fresh database for the new title.
Everybody (on the project that is) was overjoyed. They'd just saved weeks or months of effort at reduplicating previous efforts... and then management found out what had occured.
The QA lead was reprimanded for violating procedure, and the project head was reprimanded for allowing the QA lead to violate procedure, and it looked for a bit like the QA guy might get fired, but in the end he was let off with a warning.
Jeesh... one boggles at what his fate would have been if he'd actually had access to the fixed code itself, rather than just the QA database that showed where to look for problems in the code.
Now, perhaps some of the people here on Slashdot might be familiar with an obscure concept called "Open Source". In this thing called "Open Source", people around the world collaborate on finding and fixing bugs, and sharing code that has been proven to function well.
Heh... at EA, they don't even share code between projects, and they don't even bother to properly archive the fixed and tested code that they themselves have already paid money to fix and test.
"Well", you might say, "That just proves that they're incredibly stupid, but doesn't neccesarally prove that they're evil."
True... that one story doesn't prove they're evil... but I personally witnesses about 20 even worse stories, and heard about another 50 more from folks working in the same building.
Trust me... EA as a company is both stupid and evil... or, perhaps just so criminally stupid that it begins to border on evil.
What does it matter what the GDP of your nation is?
If the nation's GDP goes up an extra 1%, do you get a dividend check for your share of the difference?
If the nation's GDP goes up 3% will you suddenly become more handsome, grow a larger penis overnight, and get a 20 point IQ boost?
Unless you're getting an equal and/or fair share of the increase in GDP, then crowing about how "GDP has gone up!!!11one" is simply a slave mentality... you're somehow happy that your masters who control the economy made some more profit, even though you'll get none of the fruits of that increase.
If you've got a 35-hour workweek, 6 weeks of paid vacation every year, free healthcare, free schooling through Bachelor's-level for your kids, and a guaranteed old-age pension.... would you give it all up so you could live in a country that had a slightly higher GDP????
Are you insane? What on god's green earth effect will a higher GDP have on your own personal life experience??
European occupied?
;)
No.
Not since 1776 (or not since 1784, depending on what you're counting from)
Adam Smith spoke about what the world would is like, when people ignore the common weal in order to exclusively persue short-term personal gain:
"Life, in a state of nature, is nasty, brutish, and short."
It's funny how many people who identify themselves as "Capitalists", would be completely appaled at the statements he made, if they actually bothered to read Adam Smith's books.
Maybe the parent poster is wise-cracking, but what he's he's saying is the logical next step in this little drama.
What? You think that the 24/7 coverage on Fox News about how the eviiil liberals are "destroying Amerikuh" isn't having an affect on the intented audience?
You think the newscasters chuckling about "college frat pranks" when speaking dismissively about ongoing torture and murder in Iraqi prisons isn't setting the tone for what is to come?
You think that fining Janet Jackson for showing a boob, while giving Pat Robertson a free pass while he calls for the assasination of a foreign head of state (a felony), isn't setting the tone for what is to come?
It's no joke.
I work 40+ hours a week, managing a tiny mon-and-pop retail store.
I also spent 17 months writing my first Fantasy/Sci-Fi novel, basically during the nights and on my days off.
I wrote the book, because I *wanted* to write the book, and because I felt a driving need to do something creative and to MAKE something new.
I'm finishing up the final editing, and having a friend photoshop up a nice cover, and then I'll be publishing it through Lulu.com
Personally, my choice for liscensing is to use plain-old regular copyright for my first novel... but once I'm done writing my second novel (a sequel), I might consider the idea of offering the first one for free download in order to drive up sales of the second one.
Who knows? I'll decide on all that, once the second one is done... but since it is MY book, I'll use whatever liscense that I like.
If I actually make any money on the first book, then great. Maybe I'll be able to eventually support myself from my writing alone. That would be nice.
But if not, then I'll still continue writing... it'll just take a lot longer for each book to get finished, because the 40-hour-a-week "pay-the-bills" job cuts into my writing time.
So, yeah, actually making money by writing would be cool, and it'd be nice to actually support myself doing something that I love to do... but money alone isn't the primary motivating factor for creating things.
At least it isn't for me.
Guess I was wrong about Wikipedia's liscense.
But, um... Groklaw is under a Creative Commons liscense, and it's pretty large and well-done.
So *what* is the big deal with these guys that they so despise CC and act like it is something that it is not? I want to think it is more then trolling for hits, but there doesn't seem to be any other motive that I can tell...
The point is that those whose livelihoods depend upon acting as go-betweens between the creators of "IP", and the consumers of "IP", feel threatened by the possibilities of the internet in general, and the FOSS movement in particular.
For two thousand years, creative people wrote books. THey wrote these books because they wanted to write them, and because they wanted people to read them.
How much money do you think Livy made for writing "Discourses"? How much money did Julius Ceasar make from writing "The Gallic War", and "The Cival War"? How much did Machiavelli make from having written "The Prince"?
In all three cases, the answer is not very much. They didn't write those books to make money from renting out puplication rights... they each had other motives that did not involve money.
So now we fast-forward to 2005, where there is an ingrained cultural meme that ALL human interaction MUST be motivated by the exchange of folding money... except there are many creative people who have the same motives that the authors and creators of past centuries had. Thier motives for writing a book, or a play, or a computer program may not involve money.
This, of course, is very worrisome to those whose entire existence is predicated upon their ability to stick themselves inbetween creators and viewers, and to leech a living from that position.
The leeches see that their two-century-long free lunch on the blood of creative people may soon be coming to an end.
So they wiggle and whine about any liscense that cuts them out of the transaction. Oh, boo hoo hoo, the GPL will end the world, or boo hoo hoo, the CC liscense will end all existence. Heh, and for the leech-like middlemen, they're correct :)
www.groklaw.net (Groklaw)
:P
It is a VERY major work, and it's under the Creative Commons liscense.
en.wikipedia.org (Wikipedia)
It is also a VERY major work, and is also under the Creative Commons liscense.
So.. um, you're not only a bad bad AC, but you're also a wrong, wrong AC
So, I pretty much already have that "right". :)
There are no actors out there that are capable of playing MC
Dude..... *I* played the Master Chief.
;)
I like NeoOffice/J.
.swx or even plain-old-text. Or they can use .doc and maybe it'll work (until the next time MS arbitrarally adds stuff to break their own compatibility).
It was the first thing I downloaded for my new Powerbook, once I did the initial updates to OSX.
I got used to using OpenOffice on my old now-dead HP laptop that I had dual-booted for Linux... and I much preferred using OpenOffice on the Linux partition than the clunky MS Word on the Windows partition.
It's not really even about "free as in freedom", or "free as in beer", or any OSS-worship motives.
While all those things are nice, the bottom line is that MS Word just plain sucks and would NOT do what I wanted it to do... and reading MS helpfiles is like a trip to purgatory.
OpenOffice and OpenOffice/J, by contrast, are clean, well-made, and do what the heck I want them to do.... and the helpfiles actually HELP me figure out how to get stuff done while using them.
As for people who HAVE to use MS Word, well too-bad so-sad. Sucks to be them. If they want me to read their documents, they can use HTML or PDF or
Anyway... life is full of choices. If people choose to use inferior. buggy, and unfriendly programs made by Microsoft because they feel that they "have to", then that's their choice.... but I'm not inclined to play that game.
I use what works... and I also prefer things that are made by people who take some pride in their work and turn out good code because they'd feel bad if they turned out crap. That's why I use my shiny new Powerbook, and that's why it has OpenOffice/J installed on it, along with a program called Fink that lets me compile Linux apps to run on my Powerbook.
So I get a nice shiny machine, with nice shiny programs... both proprietary and Open Source, all working seamlessly and well, to do what I want them to do.
You ain't getting that from Microsoft any day soon.
Going around giving ambigious orders and overreacting when people show initiative is not something the military looks for in its officers.
Very true. You're absolutely correct.
However, judging by all of the stories I've been hearing about the results of various "zero tolerance" policies in high schools across America, giving ambiguous orders and overreacting when people show initiative is something that school districts apparently search for when selecting teachers and administrators ;)
Looking back on it now, I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order... detention perhaps, or losing computer privileges for a week...
No. You deserved no punishment whatsoever for turning up the brightness on a monitor that had the brightness all the way down. Making that sort of adjustment is common sense.
In fact, anyone who would suggest that displaying common sense is a crime, or that military-type jargon such as "disobeying a direct order" is something that we should be using to educate school children, is not thinking correctly.
In fact, the whole idea that public schools should be run like a semi boot-camp type environment, with "direct orders" and "zero tolerance policies" and a complete and utter disdain for individual creative thinking, is just plain wrong.
I was in the military for many years, and I know exactly what military-style training can and can't achieve. It's excellent for turning out people who will do things EXACTLY as ordered, and PRECISELY according to a pre-determined plan. It's really not that great at teaching creative thinking, or instilling a system of personal ethics that aren't imposed by an outside authority. It's great for cranking out infantrymen, and pretty darn awfull for instilling any sort of American democratic and egalitarian ideals.
Heck, if the teacher in charge of that class had bothered to do her jo, and pre-check each machine and each monitor before class to ensure that the basic settings were correct, then the problem wouldn't have arisen in the first place. Oh, but wait, that would require people in positions of petty authority to take RESPONSIBILITY for their own actions.... definatelly a part of the military tradition that school authorities would want to run from like the plague ;) I mean, making KIDS be responsible for their actions is cool, but actually holding teachers and administrators to the same standard? Heh.. it'll never happen.