I don't think it's as black and white as everyone _needing_ to be entertained. It's just a method.
Ok, my comment was probably a bit harsh - the point stands, though. The discipline it takes to sit through a class that isn't fun and entertaining, and learn material that is useful but dry, is the discipline that will make you stand out from the crowd.
...valuing a piece of paper acquired by any means over actual subject matter knowledge
Oh wait - you mean, like 99.9% of employers and the entire US "higher-learning" education system? It's not him at all that has the problem - quite the opposite, in fact. Sounds like he knows exactly what the piece of paper is worth, and just decided it wasn't worth signing over his arm and leg to get something that worthless. The only points I take issue with are the assumption that one needs a degree to get ahead in life (I don't have one and am doing just fine, thank you - and I'm not an anomaly in my field), and the small quibble that he probably could have gotten a straight-up associates from a community college for about the same money.
I'm as geeky as anyone here, trust me - but this crap is just wasting time, and not something I'm going to spend $80K+ for. If I'm paying for a college degree, I don't want some stupid kindergarten dress-up class.
And BTW, if you are really so undisciplined and trite as to need to be entertained at every turn, you don't need to be enrolled in a higher learning institution. Assembly line, etc ought to suit you just fine.
Someone (don't remember who and too lazy to look it up) in the 90's called her "Ayn Rand on 'shrooms." Funny, but "irrelevant hawker of gibberish for the shock value" might also be applicable.
Well, there's also the fact that a 747 isn't spying on you - or even potentially spying on you. If someone's flying a drone on your property with the intention of watching you without your permission, I think they've definitely crossed a line. Also, is shooting pigeons a crime? If not, this also clearly differentiates the action from police investigation (assuming it's legitimate/lawful monitoring).
Better, change the spelling of 5 or 6 random words (not correctly), and/or remove/add some punctuation. Always a good habit to do that when you're in a whistle-blowing position, even if you think your anonymity is bulletproof.
He's going to eliminate Obamacare on day 1? It's going to be an uphill battle to do it at all unless the gop take the senate too. Doing it on day 1? Dream on.
He won't do it at all - his ideas on healthcare are remarkably similar to Obama's.
No need for a one-man crusade (or a 15-man crusade for that matter - sorry, militia crazies - I admire your spirit but death by cop isn't a good way to go). Tyrannies never last - and in the west, they tend to fall quick, too. The longest one I can think of right off was less than a generation. Unfortunately, they do tend to end in violence, followed by at least a few years of hard livin'. The point, though, is that it's a cycle.
"Half sunk, a shattered visage lies...And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."
Or don't commit the illegal act in the first place, but that aside - just find the camera and see to it that any number of "accidents" keep occurring to disable the camera. Plenty of ways to do that without getting caught.
Sadly, the fourth ammendment does not cover explicitly cover your fields.
Meaning - what? Oh, I see, that means it's all ok then - nothing to see here, move along.
I know we're not disagreeing with each other, but what's sadly missing from most sentiments expressed so far is the true sense of rage this kind of thing should be causing. Too many good and decent citizens get caught in a "letter-of-the-law" argument, when the spirit of the law (or constitution) is mercilessly raped and pillaged, and we the people are left completely isolated and naked to whatever the almighty hand (or eye) of the state seeks to do to us.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - this kind of thing cannot be defeated or purged by a vote, or by a trial in court. The deck is stacked, folks; the trials are run and verdicts passed by the same government that daily pisses on your freedoms, and any candidate with a true chance of being placed in office is of the same ilk. There is no way to untie this Gordian knot except with a sword.
Voting for one of two parties accomplishes almost exactly nothing.
Actually, voting at all in the US accomplishes exactly nothing, since the two leading parties are nearly indistinguishable, and one of them will always win. A vote for someone other than the leading candidates is a complete waste of time since that vote won't even be noticed. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to vote at all in the US election; it's a rigged, forgone conclusion, with the same mathematical odds as the damn lottery (assuming votes are actually counted at all, which may be a stupid assumption). These poor folks who think that the people still have the power to change something with a vote are as deluded as the poor sots that think they'll win $500 million dollars by putting their kids' birthdays on a lottery ticket.
Honestly, given the nature of Chinese copying, plus the kind of overstated and shoddy output we've historically seen from State-Capitalist projects from Soviet governments, I think that the burden is more on the Chinese to make this boast a reality.
Ditto. Sounds like just more goose-stepping communist propaganda to me - if they can actually do it, good on them, but I'll believe it when I see it. For now, move along - nothing to see here.
Actually, you're exactly right, and if you think that's what I was trying to say you totally missed the point. Just because one isn't interested in computers doesn't mean they're a useless person, or not very smart - but I never said otherwise, did I? What I said was that most people aren't any of those things - not that people who aren't interested in computers are all of those things. All A's are B's, but not all B's are A's. Read it again without the foggy filter of your prejudices, and I think you'll find we agree.
The percentage of the world's population that can and do what you (and I) did in the 1970's is massively greater.
No, I disagree. There are still very few who can do what we did back then - no more than existed then. The idea that there are more now is an illusion - crutches exist that allow them to think they can really create something meaningful, but they can't - and they don't. I think the parent poster got it right - maybe the PC will due, but that's ok, and it will give way to a niche market, just as it was in the beginning. I personally don't have a problem with that; in fact it's kind of exciting to me. I miss the good old days.
Maybe Eternal September is finally ending - just because the masses are exiting the PC/technology market in favor of toys like *pads and *pods. I certainly won't cry about that.
This is a major reason why pads, pods, and phones are eating into PC sales.
Maybe, or maybe it's because PC sales have been over-inflated since sometime in the 90's. Just my opinion, but I think we should step back and take another look at this - TBH I'm not entirely sure that what we're seeing is such a bad thing - and that it's completely natural.
Most people aren't tinkerers, inventors, hackers, or scientists. Most people aren't curious about their world, investigative of the way things work, interested in science, or even all that intelligent. Most people don't have a scientific mind or any desire whatsoever to use technology for any more than canned entertainment (which, by the way, is also what they use most of everything else in their lives for). Not because they're inherently a sub-species - but because they just don't care. All respect to the author of the original article above, but I think he's missing something important - PC's are losing ground to tablets, etc in the market because most people don't have any use for PC's - and they never really did. PC's were always FAR more complicated than they were able to appreciate or take advantage of - and they don't have any use for them because they can perform their stupid, meaningless, and irrelevant tasks quite adequately on a phone/tablet/whatever. They also don't give two farts who legally owns the movie they just paid $9.99 for, as long as they get to watch it right now, and have never heard of DRM (and wouldn't understand it if you explained it to them). Jobs was a genius - he understood that, and by simplifying the PC down to a glorified toy, he knew that the entire world would throw their money at him - and they did.
And I say, more power to them. I don't care. Let them do their thing, and let Apple and Google and Amazon make bank off of them. Big deal. Me? I'll always have a PC of some kind, and a hundred other hacked and frankenstein'd gadgets - because my nature isn't to just consume, it's to create and arrange things to make them better. It doesn't really matter to me if Apple quits making Macbooks, or Microsoft quits writing operating systems that work on regular computers - at worst, it's a minor inconvenience, because I and many others like me will step in to fill the void - just as we created the beginnings of all this stuff to begin with, way back in the 80's and before. This move toward DRM and non-ownership of public entertainment is meaningless. Jobs and Gates and the rest took what was originally created and commercialized it; made it accessible to the masses - and the masses, because they don't know better or don't care, will eventually be controlled by draconian corporations or governments, or both. Those of us who care enough to invent, create, and make the world a better place, will not.
A pen and paper (remember those) is ideal for note taking, especially if you want to include charts, graphs, math, etc., take notes in a non-linear way, or need to make quick annotations to notes taken earlier.
Spot on. My preferred workflow currently is pen & paper in the meeting, a quick scan to PDF and store in an app like "Things" with a few key tags for future reference. Easy, quick, and no problem finding a note made weeks/months ago - a notes field attached to the PDF in the indexing software allows for future thoughts to be added, as well (and searched).
...cost reasons, religious objections, and because autopsies reveal medical mistakes, making doctors and hospitals uncomfortable.
Say what? Does anyone else see that last reason list as completely asinine with regards to not doing an autopsy? Ok, maybe the religious one is a silly objection, but there's no need to go against the religious beliefs of the deceased/close family members, at least as long as foul play isn't a concern. But, because it might reveal the f*ck-ups of the quack that took your tonsils out? Yeah, I'm not getting the point of that one...
But this was the argument 15 years against tying these systems to Windows.
True, and I'm guessing you were also one of the people making that argument. I said then and maintain that Windows isn't in the same class (and wasn't intended to be in the same class) as AS400, AIX, etc. Windows (server, SQL server, etc notwithstanding) is fine for a small business that intends to grow for 5 years and then sell, as it is fine for the consumer who has little (or at least least much less) need to think 15 years ahead. That doesn't mean that Windows has no place in the large enterprise. It just means that it's been adopted, many times, incorrectly.
15 years ago Linux wasn't a viable alternative, but I wonder if more attention should be paid to it now as a longer-term solution. The argument that Windows is easier to use, and therefore should be adopted wholesale on end-user systems in the enterprise just doesn't hold much weight for me; those of us who remember training nurses and techs on pre-Windows systems will tell you that people can and will learn the software they have to use in their day-to-day jobs; Windows isn't a magic bullet that makes a drastic difference in those training costs. It may reduce it somewhat, but at what penalty? Is millions of dollars in forced upgrades worth a slightly less aggressive learning curve? I don't think that's justifiable. Good Linux admins have become far easier to find in the past few years, so the support obstacle is not as formidable as it used to be - IMHO all that is lacking is the industry-specific software developed on a Linux platform.
And by the way, I'm not Microsoft-bashing, as you said they never intended to be considered in the same long-term-solution terms as solutions provided by IBM and others. The error was made by those companies that adopted Microsoft systems in the wrong ways.
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Being a good programmer takes discipline, no? It's a lot of work to get really good at what you do. That kind of dedication takes a lot of discipline.
I don't think it's as black and white as everyone _needing_ to be entertained. It's just a method.
Ok, my comment was probably a bit harsh - the point stands, though. The discipline it takes to sit through a class that isn't fun and entertaining, and learn material that is useful but dry, is the discipline that will make you stand out from the crowd.
...valuing a piece of paper acquired by any means over actual subject matter knowledge
Oh wait - you mean, like 99.9% of employers and the entire US "higher-learning" education system? It's not him at all that has the problem - quite the opposite, in fact. Sounds like he knows exactly what the piece of paper is worth, and just decided it wasn't worth signing over his arm and leg to get something that worthless. The only points I take issue with are the assumption that one needs a degree to get ahead in life (I don't have one and am doing just fine, thank you - and I'm not an anomaly in my field), and the small quibble that he probably could have gotten a straight-up associates from a community college for about the same money.
+100.
I'm as geeky as anyone here, trust me - but this crap is just wasting time, and not something I'm going to spend $80K+ for. If I'm paying for a college degree, I don't want some stupid kindergarten dress-up class.
And BTW, if you are really so undisciplined and trite as to need to be entertained at every turn, you don't need to be enrolled in a higher learning institution. Assembly line, etc ought to suit you just fine.
Someone (don't remember who and too lazy to look it up) in the 90's called her "Ayn Rand on 'shrooms." Funny, but "irrelevant hawker of gibberish for the shock value" might also be applicable.
Syrian government has been threatening cutoff for a while. My money says this is no accident.
Your state of mind as you sit down to eat, and your perception of what you're eating, are just as important
Sweet. So the secret to losing weight is just to make everything you pick up look like a giant dog turd...
Well, there's also the fact that a 747 isn't spying on you - or even potentially spying on you. If someone's flying a drone on your property with the intention of watching you without your permission, I think they've definitely crossed a line. Also, is shooting pigeons a crime? If not, this also clearly differentiates the action from police investigation (assuming it's legitimate/lawful monitoring).
Doesn't matter; either way that's a lead - and, I'll bet, more than he has now.
Better, change the spelling of 5 or 6 random words (not correctly), and/or remove/add some punctuation. Always a good habit to do that when you're in a whistle-blowing position, even if you think your anonymity is bulletproof.
He's going to eliminate Obamacare on day 1? It's going to be an uphill battle to do it at all unless the gop take the senate too. Doing it on day 1? Dream on.
He won't do it at all - his ideas on healthcare are remarkably similar to Obama's.
No need for a one-man crusade (or a 15-man crusade for that matter - sorry, militia crazies - I admire your spirit but death by cop isn't a good way to go). Tyrannies never last - and in the west, they tend to fall quick, too. The longest one I can think of right off was less than a generation. Unfortunately, they do tend to end in violence, followed by at least a few years of hard livin'. The point, though, is that it's a cycle.
"Half sunk, a shattered visage lies...And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."
This may help to support the rights of citizens to record police officers while they are on duty.
And if you really believe that, I have a bridge to sell you...
By, you know, doing your illegal act inside.
Or don't commit the illegal act in the first place, but that aside - just find the camera and see to it that any number of "accidents" keep occurring to disable the camera. Plenty of ways to do that without getting caught.
Sadly, the fourth ammendment does not cover explicitly cover your fields.
Meaning - what? Oh, I see, that means it's all ok then - nothing to see here, move along.
I know we're not disagreeing with each other, but what's sadly missing from most sentiments expressed so far is the true sense of rage this kind of thing should be causing. Too many good and decent citizens get caught in a "letter-of-the-law" argument, when the spirit of the law (or constitution) is mercilessly raped and pillaged, and we the people are left completely isolated and naked to whatever the almighty hand (or eye) of the state seeks to do to us.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - this kind of thing cannot be defeated or purged by a vote, or by a trial in court. The deck is stacked, folks; the trials are run and verdicts passed by the same government that daily pisses on your freedoms, and any candidate with a true chance of being placed in office is of the same ilk. There is no way to untie this Gordian knot except with a sword.
Voting for one of two parties accomplishes almost exactly nothing.
Actually, voting at all in the US accomplishes exactly nothing, since the two leading parties are nearly indistinguishable, and one of them will always win. A vote for someone other than the leading candidates is a complete waste of time since that vote won't even be noticed. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to vote at all in the US election; it's a rigged, forgone conclusion, with the same mathematical odds as the damn lottery (assuming votes are actually counted at all, which may be a stupid assumption). These poor folks who think that the people still have the power to change something with a vote are as deluded as the poor sots that think they'll win $500 million dollars by putting their kids' birthdays on a lottery ticket.
Honestly, given the nature of Chinese copying, plus the kind of overstated and shoddy output we've historically seen from State-Capitalist projects from Soviet governments, I think that the burden is more on the Chinese to make this boast a reality.
Ditto. Sounds like just more goose-stepping communist propaganda to me - if they can actually do it, good on them, but I'll believe it when I see it. For now, move along - nothing to see here.
Actually, you're exactly right, and if you think that's what I was trying to say you totally missed the point. Just because one isn't interested in computers doesn't mean they're a useless person, or not very smart - but I never said otherwise, did I? What I said was that most people aren't any of those things - not that people who aren't interested in computers are all of those things. All A's are B's, but not all B's are A's. Read it again without the foggy filter of your prejudices, and I think you'll find we agree.
The percentage of the world's population that can and do what you (and I) did in the 1970's is massively greater.
No, I disagree. There are still very few who can do what we did back then - no more than existed then. The idea that there are more now is an illusion - crutches exist that allow them to think they can really create something meaningful, but they can't - and they don't. I think the parent poster got it right - maybe the PC will due, but that's ok, and it will give way to a niche market, just as it was in the beginning. I personally don't have a problem with that; in fact it's kind of exciting to me. I miss the good old days.
Maybe Eternal September is finally ending - just because the masses are exiting the PC/technology market in favor of toys like *pads and *pods. I certainly won't cry about that.
This is a major reason why pads, pods, and phones are eating into PC sales.
Maybe, or maybe it's because PC sales have been over-inflated since sometime in the 90's. Just my opinion, but I think we should step back and take another look at this - TBH I'm not entirely sure that what we're seeing is such a bad thing - and that it's completely natural.
Most people aren't tinkerers, inventors, hackers, or scientists. Most people aren't curious about their world, investigative of the way things work, interested in science, or even all that intelligent. Most people don't have a scientific mind or any desire whatsoever to use technology for any more than canned entertainment (which, by the way, is also what they use most of everything else in their lives for). Not because they're inherently a sub-species - but because they just don't care. All respect to the author of the original article above, but I think he's missing something important - PC's are losing ground to tablets, etc in the market because most people don't have any use for PC's - and they never really did. PC's were always FAR more complicated than they were able to appreciate or take advantage of - and they don't have any use for them because they can perform their stupid, meaningless, and irrelevant tasks quite adequately on a phone/tablet/whatever. They also don't give two farts who legally owns the movie they just paid $9.99 for, as long as they get to watch it right now, and have never heard of DRM (and wouldn't understand it if you explained it to them). Jobs was a genius - he understood that, and by simplifying the PC down to a glorified toy, he knew that the entire world would throw their money at him - and they did.
And I say, more power to them. I don't care. Let them do their thing, and let Apple and Google and Amazon make bank off of them. Big deal. Me? I'll always have a PC of some kind, and a hundred other hacked and frankenstein'd gadgets - because my nature isn't to just consume, it's to create and arrange things to make them better. It doesn't really matter to me if Apple quits making Macbooks, or Microsoft quits writing operating systems that work on regular computers - at worst, it's a minor inconvenience, because I and many others like me will step in to fill the void - just as we created the beginnings of all this stuff to begin with, way back in the 80's and before. This move toward DRM and non-ownership of public entertainment is meaningless. Jobs and Gates and the rest took what was originally created and commercialized it; made it accessible to the masses - and the masses, because they don't know better or don't care, will eventually be controlled by draconian corporations or governments, or both. Those of us who care enough to invent, create, and make the world a better place, will not.
A pen and paper (remember those) is ideal for note taking, especially if you want to include charts, graphs, math, etc., take notes in a non-linear way, or need to make quick annotations to notes taken earlier.
Spot on. My preferred workflow currently is pen & paper in the meeting, a quick scan to PDF and store in an app like "Things" with a few key tags for future reference. Easy, quick, and no problem finding a note made weeks/months ago - a notes field attached to the PDF in the indexing software allows for future thoughts to be added, as well (and searched).
...cost reasons, religious objections, and because autopsies reveal medical mistakes, making doctors and hospitals uncomfortable.
Say what? Does anyone else see that last reason list as completely asinine with regards to not doing an autopsy? Ok, maybe the religious one is a silly objection, but there's no need to go against the religious beliefs of the deceased/close family members, at least as long as foul play isn't a concern. But, because it might reveal the f*ck-ups of the quack that took your tonsils out? Yeah, I'm not getting the point of that one...
...a crime worthy of punishment equal to manslaughter.
Remember, the death penalty for hacking has been seriously discussed. If such a discussion can be considered serious.
It's a multi-AZ outage, despite what Amazon is saying.
And/or AZ's aren't quite as physically isolated as Amazon makes out, which I've suspected for a while.
But this was the argument 15 years against tying these systems to Windows.
True, and I'm guessing you were also one of the people making that argument. I said then and maintain that Windows isn't in the same class (and wasn't intended to be in the same class) as AS400, AIX, etc. Windows (server, SQL server, etc notwithstanding) is fine for a small business that intends to grow for 5 years and then sell, as it is fine for the consumer who has little (or at least least much less) need to think 15 years ahead. That doesn't mean that Windows has no place in the large enterprise. It just means that it's been adopted, many times, incorrectly.
15 years ago Linux wasn't a viable alternative, but I wonder if more attention should be paid to it now as a longer-term solution. The argument that Windows is easier to use, and therefore should be adopted wholesale on end-user systems in the enterprise just doesn't hold much weight for me; those of us who remember training nurses and techs on pre-Windows systems will tell you that people can and will learn the software they have to use in their day-to-day jobs; Windows isn't a magic bullet that makes a drastic difference in those training costs. It may reduce it somewhat, but at what penalty? Is millions of dollars in forced upgrades worth a slightly less aggressive learning curve? I don't think that's justifiable. Good Linux admins have become far easier to find in the past few years, so the support obstacle is not as formidable as it used to be - IMHO all that is lacking is the industry-specific software developed on a Linux platform.
And by the way, I'm not Microsoft-bashing, as you said they never intended to be considered in the same long-term-solution terms as solutions provided by IBM and others. The error was made by those companies that adopted Microsoft systems in the wrong ways.