I see nothing selfish in capitalism as a philosophy. A capitalist is a free being who receives energy (money) from other free beings by being useful to them through enterprise. The only way to receive money from other people is to use coercion and force them to give you their money, and this is purely soviet communism, not capitalism. The current economy is not capitalistic either. We don't live in a free market and we do not really experience pure capitalism, and companies are still run like communist states or slave-labour farms.
Coercion is economically ineffective and very soon the idea of free voluntary association will revolutionise economy, politics, and the whole society. The fact that we have GNU/Linux now is a direct effect of the democratic power of the Internet. If we manage to keep Internet a democratic environment, then democracy will be spread all over the planet. That may be too hard or even wishful thinking, however, as coercion may be an integral part of the human psyche as it has been evolved now. In fact, the destruction of the planet's environment is proportional to our use of coercion as a means to project our will to the world.
There is nothing in the Linux ideology that would prevent you make money. In fact, Linux is true capitalism. If you thought companies are capitalistic, then think again: Most of them aren't. Companies are like communist states internally. If you want capitalism, use Linux.
By comparing your travel destinations to world electricity maps you can minimise the clutter in your travel bag by taking only the absolutely necessary adapters and chargers.
How bout we stop this globalist track? Sovereign nations have gotten us this far. We have nothing to gain from giving up portions of our sovereignty to international treaties and organizations. I am sorry to say that, but I smell nationalistic tendencies.
Good luck, Mr Karparov! Anything you can do to modernise the Russian political landscape is a good thing. No one wants a nationalistic anti-West Russia on EU's and NATO's doorsteps. I certainly support a democratic Russia integrated into the EU (and why not NATO, too). Mr Putin should consider a West-Russia-Japan-India alliance against an increasingy powerful communist China which continues torturing Tibetan nuns and denies the Taiwan's independence.
Do you have a PC at home? More than one PC? Did you assemble your PCs yourself?
Do you have a laptop? Have you ever serviced its interior yourself?
BUT take care not to fall into the Expert Junior Trap: Companies look for talent, they find the talent and hire it to a junior position, but leave the talent in their junior position for months or even years. In the end the talent gets mad from boredom and does one of the following things:
Learn slacking skills to avoid the boring work and do something else with their 9-5 time instead, like e.g. contributing to open-source. This is common among underpaid or demotivated expert-junior staff (they would resign professionally if the company were paying them enough). Sometimes the expert-juniors may try to communicate their thoughts to the management in various ways, but they get either ridiculed or ignored.
Resign or cause you to fire them and get a better position elsewhere or start their own company.
Leave their brain at the gate at 9am and regain it at 5pm, usually for contributing to open-source.
Employers must understand this expert-junior complex and deal with it. Someone with no work experience, even without a degree, may be more skilled than their managers. Also note that the performance of an employee at work depends on pay, the other employees and managers, position, expectations, economic level, and the presence competitors in the job market. Even if they don't show their expert self at work, they may be experts in their own projects where they are intrisically motivated.
The management must seek to create such an atmosphere where employees, even junior ones, can be intrinsically motivated to do their job.
(BTW I study for an MSc in Management, including a good amount of HRM)
Don't be so negative towards space debris... if we leave lots of it in space, then it may act as a shield against sunlight, effectively reversing global warming!
There are some BIOSes that can play music and low-format hard disks. Therefore a PC without an OS is still useful with such a BIOS for playing music or pre-formatting hard disks. Also, all BIOSes can display the current date and time; therefore all PCs with any BIOS are capable of acting as a clock.
I, as a customer, would be very happy to see a law requiring all products to be hackable. Customers want to play with what they buy, too, not just use it.
They sell you an HP hardware product that needs another software product to operate. Instead of letting you choose, they force you to pay for a specific MS software product, which is not the best one available in the market. Would you want me to forcibly sell you a ton of expensive crappy A4 paper with your next printer purchase, even though you may already have found the perfect paper supplier who sells better and cheaper A4 sheets?
basic computer + linux + user who knows nothing about PCs = PROBLEM
That's wrong: basic computer + linux + user who knows nothing about PCs = a user who will do exactly what the user manual says, since they don't expect the OS to be Windows-like, so they will learn linux without misconceptions and grievances like "but I know that this must be done in THIS way!"
Sometimes previous learning makes new learning difficult because some people are just unable to unlearn. Take, for example, how difficult is for an OO or Imperative programmer who is used to Java or C to learn Functional Programming in Scheme or Lisp, or even Logical Programming in PROLOG.
Bill Gates is a capable and lucky man. He got the DOS contract because his family knew the IBM CEO or something like that IIRC. He used all of his ingenuity to take over the world, and he succeed. His company, however, operates in a purely 'cash cow' marketing mentality: Their only interest in life is to create moderate products and sell them to moderate customers. That's all. Too mainstream. No innovation. No technical advantage. The Microsoft Research department doesn't create anything newsworthy, either. The only advantage of M$ products is their compatibility with the computer systems of your peers, clients, employers, users, friends, or government, because they all use M$ products and M$ builds its products in such a way to make them incompatible with the competition. It isn't easy to read a.doc,.xls,.wmv,.wma,.mht file without M$ products installed. You have difficulty finding laptops without Windows installed, too. They have penetrated the market and created a series of cash cow software products, and now they make money by selling their compatibility advantage, not by selling useful features, robust software, or any other technical advantage. You will have difficulty refusing using some of M$ products if you want to function together with other computer users nowadays, except if you have lots of time in your hands to set up your GNU/Linux systems in such a way to make them compatible with most uses of M$ products (it is possible, but it takes time, especially for hardware that comes with Windows drivers only). This isn't a problem of GNU/Linux. The originator of this problem is M$ because they specifically want their products to be incompatible with the competition. Users like choices, and when they feel that they are forced to accept an M$ product, they tend to hate M$. It's natural. You want to be free, but M$ doesn't because they think that they have easier access to your wallet if they keep you into their compatibility prison. However, every marketing guy will tell you that forcing users to buy something will backfire at some point. People pay for what they truly want, and companies are set up to provide for their desires. If people start demanding freedom, companies will appear to satisfy this need, and people will buy their products instead of M$'s. This is already happening with GNU/Linux right now.
Corporate employees are usually not intrinsically motivated and may be underpaid, demotivated, or lazy. Usually they are forced to go to work and they leave their brains at the gate. This holds true for managers, too. MySpace users, on the other hand, enjoy what they are doing and are very motivated to do it well. I am not surprised, therefore, that MySpacers have stronger passwords than cubicle drones.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish, now applied to M$ critics. I don't trust Microsoft, and I think they are just trying to "buy out" their critics and shut them off.
As an MSc Management student I am taught that companies seek Rule of Law. But as an independent thinker, I argue that companies seek Rule of Law for Themselves, and I theorise that they outsource to countries where officials can be bribed. Some businesses (all of them? hopefully not) are afraid of a transparent, just government and court system. Essentially, what some business owners want is to be able to chase criminals and competitors, but save their business by bribing officials when they are being chased.
The professors are there to educate you (speaking of university, I suppose). They shouldn't, and they do not, seek to prepare you for a job. A job is what you get if you fail to enter the academia or are unable or afraid to start your own business. I see no reason why a university professor should prepare their students for the 9-to-5 slavery. There are two elements that lead to freedom: Education and wealth. You need both to be truly free. Professors are eager to give you education. Accept it and don't whine about "practical job skills". What do you prefer, be told how to operate a machine (like a monkey), or be told how to build the machine yourself? Skills are important and necessary, but theory is what makes you human.
Few companies hire programmers. Most just hire code monkeys. I say: Do not lose your life at work, unless your employer respects you (most do not, or only try to create the illussion of respect).
I suggest gaining some experience in free open-source software development. Goto high-priority projects assisted by GNU, or goto Savannah. Get an IRC account at FreeNode and meet other hackers.
Then, I suggest investing about $400 per year on a Safari subscription. This is a site where you can legally read O'Reilly IT e-books. It will come handy if you have a PDA, like HTC Universal with a 3G broadband connection for reading Safari while you commute (note: Here in Europe we commute by taking a taxi, riding a bus, or using a train, if you are in North America most probably you won't be able to use a PDA during commuting as you ought to drive, unless you are in New York City where mass transit is similar to Europe).
Finally, focus on the fundamentals. What's a queue and how it differs from an array? What is a relation? What is a finite state machine? What is a Turing machine, and what is a hypercube?
Armed with the fundamentals, assisted by a good e-books site like Safari, and practising on open-source projects, you will become a hacker in no time.
A caveat: Try to understand what kind of company your employer is. Do they pass the Joel Test? Do they have good Management and do they use Software Engineering methodologies, and if not why not? Many companies are just hiring a bunch of underpaid engineers, put them in a noisy environment, and tell them to write code all day. This is a recipe for bugs! Good companies act on bugs proactively, via test-driven development, etc.
Another important thing you must achieve is the state of flow, coding in the zone, or hack-mode. It is, in fact, more important to be able to achieve flow easily rather than have advanced degrees in computers.
The Chinese bought Sukhois from Russia but some features were locked down. They simply got a bunch of hackers and gave them a plane to play with. In no time they had all the codes at hand.
I couldn't disagree more. Open-source products are built by people all over the planet collaborating on different timezones and sleep schedules with wikis, email, IRC chat, IM, and bug tracking tools. And, newsflash, open-source software has higher quality than corporate spaghetti code created by enslaved clockwatching programmers (who may be great developers on open-source at night, actually). The companies will need another 1000 years to understand that freedom is the only way to motivate people and make friends.
Here in Greece we constantly suffer from nasty earthquakes. A company led by a well-known seismologist here sells products like the one mentioned. It also sells metallic boxes where you can hide inside during a quake. Too bad I haven't got any of these products, they could save my life one day. However, I believe there is no better protection against quakes than living in a flexible wooden house that 'moves' together with the seismic waves as they pass, instead of these stupid concrete boxes that break apart because they tend to resist against the seismic waves (and we all know nothing artificial can resist natural forces for too long, except for those things that are inspired by nature itself, like wooden houses). Also note that Ancient Greek temples never had any problem during 3000 years of earthquakes. Today building companies seek to maximise profits by keeping costs down, without researching how simple solutions like a stone over another stone sticked to it with some earth can drastically improve the behaviour of our houses to earthquakes.
If your university evaluates the companies then this is very good and should be spread out to other colleges as well. Good to hear your university cares about quality of internships. I am still, however, wary that some colleges seek just to 'sandwich' students in an internship without much evaluation of the standards of practice within the company. There are good companies and bad companies out there, and universities that wish to help students get rewarding interships ought to distinguish between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
I see nothing selfish in capitalism as a philosophy. A capitalist is a free being who receives energy (money) from other free beings by being useful to them through enterprise. The only way to receive money from other people is to use coercion and force them to give you their money, and this is purely soviet communism, not capitalism. The current economy is not capitalistic either. We don't live in a free market and we do not really experience pure capitalism, and companies are still run like communist states or slave-labour farms.
Coercion is economically ineffective and very soon the idea of free voluntary association will revolutionise economy, politics, and the whole society. The fact that we have GNU/Linux now is a direct effect of the democratic power of the Internet. If we manage to keep Internet a democratic environment, then democracy will be spread all over the planet. That may be too hard or even wishful thinking, however, as coercion may be an integral part of the human psyche as it has been evolved now. In fact, the destruction of the planet's environment is proportional to our use of coercion as a means to project our will to the world.
There is nothing in the Linux ideology that would prevent you make money. In fact, Linux is true capitalism. If you thought companies are capitalistic, then think again: Most of them aren't. Companies are like communist states internally. If you want capitalism, use Linux.
By comparing your travel destinations to world electricity maps you can minimise the clutter in your travel bag by taking only the absolutely necessary adapters and chargers.
Good luck, Mr Karparov! Anything you can do to modernise the Russian political landscape is a good thing. No one wants a nationalistic anti-West Russia on EU's and NATO's doorsteps. I certainly support a democratic Russia integrated into the EU (and why not NATO, too). Mr Putin should consider a West-Russia-Japan-India alliance against an increasingy powerful communist China which continues torturing Tibetan nuns and denies the Taiwan's independence.
- Do you have a PC at home? More than one PC? Did you assemble your PCs yourself?
- Do you have a laptop? Have you ever serviced its interior yourself?
BUT take care not to fall into the Expert Junior Trap: Companies look for talent, they find the talent and hire it to a junior position, but leave the talent in their junior position for months or even years. In the end the talent gets mad from boredom and does one of the following things:- Learn slacking skills to avoid the boring work and do something else with their 9-5 time instead, like e.g. contributing to open-source. This is common among underpaid or demotivated expert-junior staff (they would resign professionally if the company were paying them enough). Sometimes the expert-juniors may try to communicate their thoughts to the management in various ways, but they get either ridiculed or ignored.
- Resign or cause you to fire them and get a better position elsewhere or start their own company.
- Leave their brain at the gate at 9am and regain it at 5pm, usually for contributing to open-source.
Employers must understand this expert-junior complex and deal with it. Someone with no work experience, even without a degree, may be more skilled than their managers. Also note that the performance of an employee at work depends on pay, the other employees and managers, position, expectations, economic level, and the presence competitors in the job market. Even if they don't show their expert self at work, they may be experts in their own projects where they are intrisically motivated. The management must seek to create such an atmosphere where employees, even junior ones, can be intrinsically motivated to do their job. (BTW I study for an MSc in Management, including a good amount of HRM)Don't be so negative towards space debris... if we leave lots of it in space, then it may act as a shield against sunlight, effectively reversing global warming!
There are some BIOSes that can play music and low-format hard disks. Therefore a PC without an OS is still useful with such a BIOS for playing music or pre-formatting hard disks. Also, all BIOSes can display the current date and time; therefore all PCs with any BIOS are capable of acting as a clock.
I, as a customer, would be very happy to see a law requiring all products to be hackable. Customers want to play with what they buy, too, not just use it.
They sell you an HP hardware product that needs another software product to operate. Instead of letting you choose, they force you to pay for a specific MS software product, which is not the best one available in the market. Would you want me to forcibly sell you a ton of expensive crappy A4 paper with your next printer purchase, even though you may already have found the perfect paper supplier who sells better and cheaper A4 sheets?
That's wrong: basic computer + linux + user who knows nothing about PCs = a user who will do exactly what the user manual says, since they don't expect the OS to be Windows-like, so they will learn linux without misconceptions and grievances like "but I know that this must be done in THIS way!"
Sometimes previous learning makes new learning difficult because some people are just unable to unlearn. Take, for example, how difficult is for an OO or Imperative programmer who is used to Java or C to learn Functional Programming in Scheme or Lisp, or even Logical Programming in PROLOG.
Bill Gates is a capable and lucky man. He got the DOS contract because his family knew the IBM CEO or something like that IIRC. He used all of his ingenuity to take over the world, and he succeed. His company, however, operates in a purely 'cash cow' marketing mentality: Their only interest in life is to create moderate products and sell them to moderate customers. That's all. Too mainstream. No innovation. No technical advantage. The Microsoft Research department doesn't create anything newsworthy, either. The only advantage of M$ products is their compatibility with the computer systems of your peers, clients, employers, users, friends, or government, because they all use M$ products and M$ builds its products in such a way to make them incompatible with the competition. It isn't easy to read a .doc, .xls, .wmv, .wma, .mht file without M$ products installed. You have difficulty finding laptops without Windows installed, too. They have penetrated the market and created a series of cash cow software products, and now they make money by selling their compatibility advantage, not by selling useful features, robust software, or any other technical advantage. You will have difficulty refusing using some of M$ products if you want to function together with other computer users nowadays, except if you have lots of time in your hands to set up your GNU/Linux systems in such a way to make them compatible with most uses of M$ products (it is possible, but it takes time, especially for hardware that comes with Windows drivers only). This isn't a problem of GNU/Linux. The originator of this problem is M$ because they specifically want their products to be incompatible with the competition. Users like choices, and when they feel that they are forced to accept an M$ product, they tend to hate M$. It's natural. You want to be free, but M$ doesn't because they think that they have easier access to your wallet if they keep you into their compatibility prison. However, every marketing guy will tell you that forcing users to buy something will backfire at some point. People pay for what they truly want, and companies are set up to provide for their desires. If people start demanding freedom, companies will appear to satisfy this need, and people will buy their products instead of M$'s. This is already happening with GNU/Linux right now.
Corporate employees are usually not intrinsically motivated and may be underpaid, demotivated, or lazy. Usually they are forced to go to work and they leave their brains at the gate. This holds true for managers, too. MySpace users, on the other hand, enjoy what they are doing and are very motivated to do it well. I am not surprised, therefore, that MySpacers have stronger passwords than cubicle drones.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish, now applied to M$ critics. I don't trust Microsoft, and I think they are just trying to "buy out" their critics and shut them off.
As an MSc Management student I am taught that companies seek Rule of Law. But as an independent thinker, I argue that companies seek Rule of Law for Themselves, and I theorise that they outsource to countries where officials can be bribed. Some businesses (all of them? hopefully not) are afraid of a transparent, just government and court system. Essentially, what some business owners want is to be able to chase criminals and competitors, but save their business by bribing officials when they are being chased.
The professors are there to educate you (speaking of university, I suppose). They shouldn't, and they do not, seek to prepare you for a job. A job is what you get if you fail to enter the academia or are unable or afraid to start your own business. I see no reason why a university professor should prepare their students for the 9-to-5 slavery. There are two elements that lead to freedom: Education and wealth. You need both to be truly free. Professors are eager to give you education. Accept it and don't whine about "practical job skills". What do you prefer, be told how to operate a machine (like a monkey), or be told how to build the machine yourself? Skills are important and necessary, but theory is what makes you human.
Few companies hire programmers. Most just hire code monkeys. I say: Do not lose your life at work, unless your employer respects you (most do not, or only try to create the illussion of respect).
I suggest gaining some experience in free open-source software development. Goto high-priority projects assisted by GNU, or goto Savannah. Get an IRC account at FreeNode and meet other hackers.
Then, I suggest investing about $400 per year on a Safari subscription. This is a site where you can legally read O'Reilly IT e-books. It will come handy if you have a PDA, like HTC Universal with a 3G broadband connection for reading Safari while you commute (note: Here in Europe we commute by taking a taxi, riding a bus, or using a train, if you are in North America most probably you won't be able to use a PDA during commuting as you ought to drive, unless you are in New York City where mass transit is similar to Europe).
Finally, focus on the fundamentals. What's a queue and how it differs from an array? What is a relation? What is a finite state machine? What is a Turing machine, and what is a hypercube?
Armed with the fundamentals, assisted by a good e-books site like Safari, and practising on open-source projects, you will become a hacker in no time.
A caveat: Try to understand what kind of company your employer is. Do they pass the Joel Test? Do they have good Management and do they use Software Engineering methodologies, and if not why not? Many companies are just hiring a bunch of underpaid engineers, put them in a noisy environment, and tell them to write code all day. This is a recipe for bugs! Good companies act on bugs proactively, via test-driven development, etc.
Another important thing you must achieve is the state of flow, coding in the zone, or hack-mode. It is, in fact, more important to be able to achieve flow easily rather than have advanced degrees in computers.
The Chinese bought Sukhois from Russia but some features were locked down. They simply got a bunch of hackers and gave them a plane to play with. In no time they had all the codes at hand.
They have no will to communicate and they are just trying to get more money from your pocket. I say, sue them.
I couldn't disagree more. Open-source products are built by people all over the planet collaborating on different timezones and sleep schedules with wikis, email, IRC chat, IM, and bug tracking tools. And, newsflash, open-source software has higher quality than corporate spaghetti code created by enslaved clockwatching programmers (who may be great developers on open-source at night, actually). The companies will need another 1000 years to understand that freedom is the only way to motivate people and make friends.
You read things that I never said or thought. The names were totally random.
Here in Greece we constantly suffer from nasty earthquakes. A company led by a well-known seismologist here sells products like the one mentioned. It also sells metallic boxes where you can hide inside during a quake. Too bad I haven't got any of these products, they could save my life one day. However, I believe there is no better protection against quakes than living in a flexible wooden house that 'moves' together with the seismic waves as they pass, instead of these stupid concrete boxes that break apart because they tend to resist against the seismic waves (and we all know nothing artificial can resist natural forces for too long, except for those things that are inspired by nature itself, like wooden houses). Also note that Ancient Greek temples never had any problem during 3000 years of earthquakes. Today building companies seek to maximise profits by keeping costs down, without researching how simple solutions like a stone over another stone sticked to it with some earth can drastically improve the behaviour of our houses to earthquakes.
If your university evaluates the companies then this is very good and should be spread out to other colleges as well. Good to hear your university cares about quality of internships. I am still, however, wary that some colleges seek just to 'sandwich' students in an internship without much evaluation of the standards of practice within the company. There are good companies and bad companies out there, and universities that wish to help students get rewarding interships ought to distinguish between the two.