"It is a two-way street, any manager expecting it to be a one-way street is fooling themselves."
It is a two-way street, but management has a big SUV that takes up both lanes.
I live in a rural area, and it has been known for the grapevine to "black list" certain people at potential employers, outside of official channels. When I lived in an urban area, it is common to find that most employers are equally crappy. It is very common for companies to want to pay practially nothing. Being a independent contractor could be great, but even that is highly volatile. The grass is always greener and all that.
"Still, I wonder if it is legal to fire someone just for having looked for alternate employment options."
IIRC, in some states it is legal, such as South Carolina ("will to work" or "right to work", I don't remember exactly).
Really rewarding and enjoyable workplaces are not particularly common. I worked briefly for one Fortune 500--but family run--company, and it was a great place to work (ample training, good benefits, etc.). Too bad it was in a part of the country I didn't want to live in.
I've gone about three years without cable living in an area where my TV reception depends on the weather (no line-of-sight signals), and even then I'm lucky to get three fuzzy channels...and it doesn't matter. I still watch the news to see the headlines, but that's mostly it. There's plenty of other things to do. Any shows that I really cared about, I can buy on DVD, anyway.
I agree about the cultural stuff. Recently, I saw a couple of sitcoms while visiting family, and I sat stunned wondering how anyone can find them entertaining. The jokes are so lame and the canned laughter is annoying. Most childrens' shows are just pointless timesinks, too. I feel bad for the kid when someone turns on the TV to cartoons and he/she just sits there like a powered-off robot.
"Plays and concerts are passive entertainment, and video games are active entertainment." "In any case, many video gamers are busy playing challenging games socially"
I don't agree. People go to plays surrounded by other people, you get to see real people on stage exhibit the best people can muster without retakes, you often get to see a live orchestra, and you get to see how the story affects other people. People who go out also often end up at a restaurant and enjoy good food, as well. It can be a good family night out that the kids will remember a long time.
With on line games, you at best see someone else's avatar and not the real person. It's all abstractions of real people, based upon a different and imagined set of standards.
Multi-player video games, where a number of people participate together in the same room aren't so bad. But that is primarily sports games and a few others...it'd probably be better to go to a field and play the real thing, unless it's storming.
By saying "passive", I'm primarily concerned about people with their butts glued to a chair or couch, not really acknowledging the people around them. It's too easy to zone out and ignore all the other things that are going on. It can create a warped sense of social interaction and an inaccurate perception of work and reward. By "active", I mean engaged with the real world, and participating with other people--for better and worse.
All this can be argued both ways, but it mainly boils down to: is interacting in an imagined world better than the real one. In my opinion, the imagined world is driven by escapism, which isn't bad in reasonable quantities--it's just that people often over-do it to an extreme.
I would argue that one weekend out as a family or with friends could be worth much more than 12 months of an on-line game subscription. Its a matter of choosing what to spend that money on, and most people don't have the cash flow to support every option.
This is why a brand new Opteron server motherboard with PCI-Express and other big-time features still ships with ATI Rage XL graphics and 8MB video RAM on-board. It is good enough for practially everything except CAD and gaming or super-big displays, and it consumes very little power.
2D cards need only enough RAM to store the framebuffer and some other goodies. With double buffering that's only 2*X*Y*RGB (e.g., 2*1280*1024*3 = 8MB!).
How much money are people supposed to spend on passive entertainment? It'd be better to spend the money not spent on gaming on tickets to a traveling Broadway play or a live concert. Pre-produced entertainment has become so common and without novelty that live entertainment is actually more worthwhile, now. Perhaps it'll help remind people they are actually alive and not stuck in a cube-shaped room with a glowing window to an imagined world.
It worries me when I talk to a teenager and the first thing they want to talk about is video games. Video games video games video games. The perfect thing to occupy a mind that doesn't want to engage real issues and real responsibility.
Games aren't all bad, but there is just way too much of them! Throw a game at a kid and he'll slink away to a room for the next two weeks. Do that 20 times a year, and it's as if there's no child at all! Do parents feel good about this?
Ultra 60s are sweet workstations. Still useful, too, thanks to UPA (decent bandwidth), SCSI (use newer bigger disks), and PCI (usb card). I still use an Ultra workstation for some things, too, but I realized recently that a single-core Athlon 64 with ECC RAM and SATA is about the same price as outfitting an Ultra to modern specs (DVD burner, 1GB RAM, etc.). Still, the Ultra will point out endian-related bugs in code quite nicely.
What fraction of that 19% will be able to watch movies in HD, with all the confusion surrounding HDMI or whatever it is called? Also, I'm not sure about that 19%. No one in my family has an HDTV. Perhaps we're just too cheap to spend more than $400 on a TV.
It's generally accepted that once you've escaped a special character a dozen times in a regular expression, two awk scripts, a looping construct, and within several variables, it's time to write the program in another language. This is the UNIX shell's way of telling a programmer he/she is wasting time, but only after that time is wasted;)
See, the escaping mechanisms are supposed to work that way!
"I always found that amusing because our whole society is based on technology and will always need people to run it."
This does not require university CS degrees. It requires technical training through technical colleges. At least, that's what companies are willing to pay for, and it's about what management expects.
In hindsight, I do wish I went the community college route. It would have given me more flexibility to re-train, if needed, without the burden of being "overqualified" for some of the decent-paying jobs out there. There actually are downsides to having good degrees from prestigious universities.
"...the biggest problem in the computer industry: unreliability."
Their T1 CPU does some of this. The temperature maps of it that get posted on various discussion boards show just how cool that chip is. It also has all sorts of ECC goodness. It would be interesting to compare the theoretical reliabililty of the T1 versus other 1RU server chips, like the Opteron and Xeon. This is all way over my head, so don't expect any such analysis from me!
Also, I'm not sure I've ever seen a move with better music selections than one of Kubrick's. He can go from absolute beauty in 2001 to completely creeping me out in Full Metal Jacket. The music always seems spot on.
Sorry, they run only on an abacus. Thankfully, UML is 2-D, because the 3-D acceleration routines cause carpal tunnel syndrome after abour four hours of modeling. In 2-D, well trained abacus operators can run at least 12 hours, covering a good work day.
"Usually only to de-prioritize some job that isn't playing well with others"
Once, while in college, I was sitting in the Solaris lab wondering why every workstation was slow as molasses. It quickly became apparent that an over-enthusiastic EE major was using every workstation in a cluster to do his bidding. He was not being 'nice' at all:(
"It ensures that the media companies can continue to make you re-buy all your content due to forced obsolesence."
Who is *making* me buy content? Lord of the Rings, for example, are certainly good movies and probably great movies, but would my life be any better or worse if I had never seen those movies? NO. Entertainment is everywhere, even as cheap as a walk around the block. To claim that entertainment has some sort of value, like company stock, is absurd. Infinite supply means zero cost, right? A movie is inaccessible, I go do something else.
Even if a 16 year old wouldn't say it, I think it's more than just puberty, girls, etc. I think the novelty has simply worn off, because there aren't going to be revolutionary changes in gaming for years. For example, Atari 2600 to NES (big change), NES to SNES/Genesis/early good PCs (big change), that bunch to 3D graphics cards in PCs/Playstation/Xbox (big change), then....incremental changes. Sure, PS3 looks better than PS2 looks better than PS1, but the games are basically the same. I'll skip PS3/XBox360 and hold out for the Holodeck 3000...I hear it'll be here in five years, now.
"FreeBSD and OpenBSD have excellent documentation, both for the core distribution as well as many of the ports."
Absolutely. One of my favorite features of OpenBSD was actually being able to use 'man -k...' to get useful information. They also write good intro pages for each section of the manual. This is why setting up firewalls and routers with OpenBSD is soooooooo much easier than with Linux. Just read the man pages, think "that's it? I'll be done by this afternoon", and edit a couple files and test it all out.
J2EE was always supported on Linux by BEA, Sun, etc. This adds Red Hat into the mix, which is good. Now Red Hat can pursue contracts that IBM, Sun, and HP might have dominated.
I don't think there will be a big impact on LAMP beyond what is already there. My experience is that LAMP and J2EE complement each other very well, as LAMP is perfect for small to medium sites and J2EE is better for large corporate sites. J2EE is just too big for small teams to master, but well managed IT departments can tackle it. (emphasis on well managed)
I think what it boils down to is that people are wary of the lagging understanding that follows massive discoveries. Technicians had their nuts cooked by RADAR when it was new tech, for example. Same for Radium/radiation in the 1800s.
It does not at all mean the new technology is bad--it's just not fully understood. That takes time.
Well, if you are talking in terms of big database companies being very good at opening and freeing our bank accounts of that pesky burden of calculating interest on our balances...then, yes, they are free and open.
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"It is a two-way street, any manager expecting it to be a one-way street is fooling themselves."
It is a two-way street, but management has a big SUV that takes up both lanes.
I live in a rural area, and it has been known for the grapevine to "black list" certain people at potential employers, outside of official channels. When I lived in an urban area, it is common to find that most employers are equally crappy. It is very common for companies to want to pay practially nothing. Being a independent contractor could be great, but even that is highly volatile. The grass is always greener and all that.
"Still, I wonder if it is legal to fire someone just for having looked for alternate employment options."
IIRC, in some states it is legal, such as South Carolina ("will to work" or "right to work", I don't remember exactly).
Really rewarding and enjoyable workplaces are not particularly common. I worked briefly for one Fortune 500--but family run--company, and it was a great place to work (ample training, good benefits, etc.). Too bad it was in a part of the country I didn't want to live in.
I've gone about three years without cable living in an area where my TV reception depends on the weather (no line-of-sight signals), and even then I'm lucky to get three fuzzy channels...and it doesn't matter. I still watch the news to see the headlines, but that's mostly it. There's plenty of other things to do. Any shows that I really cared about, I can buy on DVD, anyway.
I agree about the cultural stuff. Recently, I saw a couple of sitcoms while visiting family, and I sat stunned wondering how anyone can find them entertaining. The jokes are so lame and the canned laughter is annoying. Most childrens' shows are just pointless timesinks, too. I feel bad for the kid when someone turns on the TV to cartoons and he/she just sits there like a powered-off robot.
In this case: A wide view of many things far far away.
"Plays and concerts are passive entertainment, and video games are active entertainment." "In any case, many video gamers are busy playing challenging games socially"
I don't agree. People go to plays surrounded by other people, you get to see real people on stage exhibit the best people can muster without retakes, you often get to see a live orchestra, and you get to see how the story affects other people. People who go out also often end up at a restaurant and enjoy good food, as well. It can be a good family night out that the kids will remember a long time.
With on line games, you at best see someone else's avatar and not the real person. It's all abstractions of real people, based upon a different and imagined set of standards.
Multi-player video games, where a number of people participate together in the same room aren't so bad. But that is primarily sports games and a few others...it'd probably be better to go to a field and play the real thing, unless it's storming.
By saying "passive", I'm primarily concerned about people with their butts glued to a chair or couch, not really acknowledging the people around them. It's too easy to zone out and ignore all the other things that are going on. It can create a warped sense of social interaction and an inaccurate perception of work and reward. By "active", I mean engaged with the real world, and participating with other people--for better and worse.
All this can be argued both ways, but it mainly boils down to: is interacting in an imagined world better than the real one. In my opinion, the imagined world is driven by escapism, which isn't bad in reasonable quantities--it's just that people often over-do it to an extreme.
I would argue that one weekend out as a family or with friends could be worth much more than 12 months of an on-line game subscription. Its a matter of choosing what to spend that money on, and most people don't have the cash flow to support every option.
Nothing will be gained 2D-wise.
This is why a brand new Opteron server motherboard with PCI-Express and other big-time features still ships with ATI Rage XL graphics and 8MB video RAM on-board. It is good enough for practially everything except CAD and gaming or super-big displays, and it consumes very little power.
2D cards need only enough RAM to store the framebuffer and some other goodies. With double buffering that's only 2*X*Y*RGB (e.g., 2*1280*1024*3 = 8MB!).
How much money are people supposed to spend on passive entertainment? It'd be better to spend the money not spent on gaming on tickets to a traveling Broadway play or a live concert. Pre-produced entertainment has become so common and without novelty that live entertainment is actually more worthwhile, now. Perhaps it'll help remind people they are actually alive and not stuck in a cube-shaped room with a glowing window to an imagined world.
It worries me when I talk to a teenager and the first thing they want to talk about is video games. Video games video games video games. The perfect thing to occupy a mind that doesn't want to engage real issues and real responsibility.
Games aren't all bad, but there is just way too much of them! Throw a game at a kid and he'll slink away to a room for the next two weeks. Do that 20 times a year, and it's as if there's no child at all! Do parents feel good about this?
Ultra 60s are sweet workstations. Still useful, too, thanks to UPA (decent bandwidth), SCSI (use newer bigger disks), and PCI (usb card). I still use an Ultra workstation for some things, too, but I realized recently that a single-core Athlon 64 with ECC RAM and SATA is about the same price as outfitting an Ultra to modern specs (DVD burner, 1GB RAM, etc.). Still, the Ultra will point out endian-related bugs in code quite nicely.
Most of the standard library is in Java, too. (src.jar if I recall correctly)
I think the only thing that is significantly not Java is the VM and perhaps some native code for optimized library routines.
What fraction of that 19% will be able to watch movies in HD, with all the confusion surrounding HDMI or whatever it is called? Also, I'm not sure about that 19%. No one in my family has an HDTV. Perhaps we're just too cheap to spend more than $400 on a TV.
It's generally accepted that once you've escaped a special character a dozen times in a regular expression, two awk scripts, a looping construct, and within several variables, it's time to write the program in another language. This is the UNIX shell's way of telling a programmer he/she is wasting time, but only after that time is wasted ;)
See, the escaping mechanisms are supposed to work that way!
"I always found that amusing because our whole society is based on technology and will always need people to run it."
This does not require university CS degrees. It requires technical training through technical colleges. At least, that's what companies are willing to pay for, and it's about what management expects.
In hindsight, I do wish I went the community college route. It would have given me more flexibility to re-train, if needed, without the burden of being "overqualified" for some of the decent-paying jobs out there. There actually are downsides to having good degrees from prestigious universities.
"...the biggest problem in the computer industry: unreliability."
Their T1 CPU does some of this. The temperature maps of it that get posted on various discussion boards show just how cool that chip is. It also has all sorts of ECC goodness. It would be interesting to compare the theoretical reliabililty of the T1 versus other 1RU server chips, like the Opteron and Xeon. This is all way over my head, so don't expect any such analysis from me!
"Of what possible use is it?"
These things at least get decision makers to stop for a moment and have "Oracle" or "Red Hat" enter their thought stream.
Also, I'm not sure I've ever seen a move with better music selections than one of Kubrick's. He can go from absolute beauty in 2001 to completely creeping me out in Full Metal Jacket. The music always seems spot on.
Solaris and Java need tools to support developers, and those are compilers, IDEs, and sysadmin tools.
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org are mainly a spear in the side of Microsoft.
Their J2EE is the reference implementation others are measured by.
I'm not sure Sun has much superfluous software, outside of a couple projects here and there I haven't really figured out what they are for.
Sorry, they run only on an abacus. Thankfully, UML is 2-D, because the 3-D acceleration routines cause carpal tunnel syndrome after abour four hours of modeling. In 2-D, well trained abacus operators can run at least 12 hours, covering a good work day.
"Usually only to de-prioritize some job that isn't playing well with others"
:(
Once, while in college, I was sitting in the Solaris lab wondering why every workstation was slow as molasses. It quickly became apparent that an over-enthusiastic EE major was using every workstation in a cluster to do his bidding. He was not being 'nice' at all
"It ensures that the media companies can continue to make you re-buy all your content due to forced obsolesence."
Who is *making* me buy content? Lord of the Rings, for example, are certainly good movies and probably great movies, but would my life be any better or worse if I had never seen those movies? NO. Entertainment is everywhere, even as cheap as a walk around the block. To claim that entertainment has some sort of value, like company stock, is absurd. Infinite supply means zero cost, right? A movie is inaccessible, I go do something else.
Even if a 16 year old wouldn't say it, I think it's more than just puberty, girls, etc. I think the novelty has simply worn off, because there aren't going to be revolutionary changes in gaming for years. For example, Atari 2600 to NES (big change), NES to SNES/Genesis/early good PCs (big change), that bunch to 3D graphics cards in PCs/Playstation/Xbox (big change), then....incremental changes. Sure, PS3 looks better than PS2 looks better than PS1, but the games are basically the same. I'll skip PS3/XBox360 and hold out for the Holodeck 3000...I hear it'll be here in five years, now.
"FreeBSD and OpenBSD have excellent documentation, both for the core distribution as well as many of the ports."
...' to get useful information. They also write good intro pages for each section of the manual. This is why setting up firewalls and routers with OpenBSD is soooooooo much easier than with Linux. Just read the man pages, think "that's it? I'll be done by this afternoon", and edit a couple files and test it all out.
Absolutely. One of my favorite features of OpenBSD was actually being able to use 'man -k
J2EE was always supported on Linux by BEA, Sun, etc. This adds Red Hat into the mix, which is good. Now Red Hat can pursue contracts that IBM, Sun, and HP might have dominated.
I don't think there will be a big impact on LAMP beyond what is already there. My experience is that LAMP and J2EE complement each other very well, as LAMP is perfect for small to medium sites and J2EE is better for large corporate sites. J2EE is just too big for small teams to master, but well managed IT departments can tackle it.
(emphasis on well managed)
Or, perhaps, peace is war.
That sounds so nonsensically profound I will reward myself with another beer!
I think what it boils down to is that people are wary of the lagging understanding that follows massive discoveries. Technicians had their nuts cooked by RADAR when it was new tech, for example. Same for Radium/radiation in the 1800s.
It does not at all mean the new technology is bad--it's just not fully understood. That takes time.
Well, if you are talking in terms of big database companies being very good at opening and freeing our bank accounts of that pesky burden of calculating interest on our balances...then, yes, they are free and open.
"While they may not have the scope of the publicly listed databases, they do include books they haven't been published yet."
Bor-ing! My MTMD (Massive Typing Monkey Database) has books that haven't been written, yet!