It's easy to find a job if you have the magic resume: 3-5 years experience in exactly what's hot on the market (like Java Software Engineers).
This is true of tech support too -- if you have some experience in tech support, you can easily find another job doing tech support. But what's the point of that? You haven't gained anything by changing jobs if you've changed into something similarly bad. If you want to get a better job than the job you had, you'll have a hard time, because you won't have experience and people won't pay attention to you or give you a chance.
Finding a good job, a better job than the one you have, is still hard. If you have any ambition, you'll have to struggle to get the job that helps you in that ambition.
And recruiters filling up your answering machine means nothing -- recruiters are full of shit. They try to bring lots of people into their pool of potential employees, then skim a few people with the right resumes that employers are having a hard time finding. Half the time I don't even think the jobs they advertise exist.
Re:Apt IS great, now if we could USE it.
on
An RPM Port Of APT
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· Score: 2
The Red Hat approach of 'install 900Mbyte of crap' is better.
Debian has had something like this for a while (though perhaps it's not well advertised or fully implemented). There are virtual packages named task-* that require all the necessary files to perform some task, so if you do apt-get install task-science you will get a fairly appropriate set of packages installed for doing scientific work. There's quite a bit of granularity to this too, since there can be task packages for developing in certain languages, foreign languages tasks, etc., as well as more general configurations.
It's not exactly like what Redhat does, and there aren't as many of these tasks as might be appropriate -- but the idea will scale better than Redhat's, I think, because you can easily add and combine different sets of programs and do so at different levels of granularity. And it's easy, since apt can deal with all the interdependance so the task- packages can be very simple.
This is rather ironic when you consider that one of Java's most hyped features is platform independance, which is of almost no value on the server, since you can choose the architecture, operating system, and you can dictate the environment. And you usually have the source code, so source-level platform independance (largely present in Python and Perl, among others) is usually good enough anyway.
To me it looks very Logo-like. Using [] for lists and blocks of code is from Logo, for instance, as is the parsing that uses the arity of a function. I don't know REBOL well enough to give a real example, but in Logo you might have something like:
penup setxy 100 200 pendown
Which parses as (in a C-like syntax):
penup(); setxy(100, 200); pendown();
It knows that penup takes no arguments, so setxy must be a new statement, and so on. This avoids a lot of the parenthesis that exist in Lisp code (which is, of course, closely related to Logo).
I don't know what the semantics of REBOL are like -- I get the impression this might be more similar to Forth in some ways.
I think portable programming is more subtle than is really called for during an education. You should be exploring and pushing the limits -- often in directions that will be utter failures, but you won't know it until you've tried. Portable programming often comes down to conservative programming. You aren't likely to make anything that useful as a student -- at least at the point where decisions of OS, language, etc. are being made for you -- so it's not a big loss to be unportable.
Of course, it's also good to get the notion of what, as a programmer, you should write because it's the Right Way even if the Wrong Way would also work fine (for now). But there's a time for both -- you must follow the Wrong Way if you are to understand why the Right Way is Right.
And then there's the question of whether there is anything such as OS-independant. Sure, there's mini-OSes that create one OS layer ontop of an OS (Java, JavaScript, Squeak -- and even HTML and HTTP are an OS of sorts). And then there's lowest common denominator -- usually connected with the former, so you determine how many holes you'll fill in for the host OS, and how many things you'll just leave out. But you still aren't OS independant -- you can't be -- you've just generalized your program across a certain layer abstract layer which itself is an OS.
Truly novel OS notions -- like the resource fork on Macs -- just can't be used in a portable fashion. And if they aren't used, you aren't really creating a program that fits with the OS, you are just doing lowest-common-denominator. Will your Tk programm work well in a OS that provides orthogonal persistance? Will it run on a mainframe? Distributed? Probably not... when there's only a few OSes that are all more similar than not, portability isn't that hard. But it also isn't a very important achievement.
I don't want to seem too elitist, but not everyone makes a good programmer, and those who do often find it on their own. And so, while arcane command line tools aren't appealing to everyone, there are certainly aspects of them which should appeal to a good programmer. It allows one to express their abstract desires in a natural way -- at least, natural if you are a programmer. If you can't think abstractly -- you want GUIs with files you can see and drag around, tools with modal dialog boxes, etc., then programming might not be natural either.
That said, if you can't remember the name of all the bizzarely abreviated programs, and the slightly inconsistent option letters, that's another issue. I think MacOS X may have some good ideas of general cleanup (redoing the filesystem layout, etc) which could probably be expanded upon.
Still, for all its problems, Unix is still the best game in town for the programming-minded.
Only someone who's been completely indoctrinated to the New Jersey Cause would
honestly think that Unix is "natural"
I don't think he said "natural", but "natural appeal for programmers" which is much different. Unix, the OS and the tools, are transparent, which makes them appealing.
The documentation for programming the OS is generally available with the OS (man 3), not as a developers kit; source code for tools is widely distributed, even for proprietary versions; nearly all versions of Unix include a C compiler; programming is ubiquitous -- most serious programming-minded Unix users will quickly be creating short shell or perl scripts, utilizing the entire traditional Unix environment in their programming. You can recreate a number of these things in other OSes, but with Unix they are assumed, ubiquitous, and part of the culture. There is a low barrier to entry.
Windows is not like this. Mac is not like this. BeOS, etc... well, beats me. And while you can get the Cygnus tools for Windows, and turn your Windows OS into a mini version of Unix... what would that prove?
Imagine all of the Nader supporters going back to the polls... but THIS time, they
know just how incredibly important their vote is for getting a liberal into the White
House.
You mean like a runoff? That would certainly endanger our democracy. It's much safer when presidents are typically elected with less than 50% of the popular vote.
Re:another story - another slashdotted site
on
Keyless Keyboard
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· Score: 5
Silly me, for maximal usefulness I should have linked better pages:
What do you not understand? I am being serious; this would not intended to
be sarcastic.
I don't understand what would possibly meet your definition of free. Is public domain free? It certainly doesn't look like it to me. Public domain software quickly can be (and is) changed to proprietary licenses, which are most certainly not free. You are creating a notion of free that is impossible to attain, and then saying that GPL software doesn't live up to it.
Sorry, but people who actually care about Free Software aren't willing to render themselves impotent and their actions meaningless to satisfy a few people who can't understand that freedom is something you have to fight for.
No, it isn't called stealing. Go get a dictionary. It is impossible to
steal what is free.
You are confusing free beer with free speach -- though in a manner more subtle than usual. The "Free" in Free Software refers to the software itself -- that it is freed from proprietary restrictions. The GPL makes the software free not just in the original form, but in all derivative forms. It doesn't mean you are free to use it how you want. You are not allowed to make the software unfree -- if you were, the software would not be as free as possible.
The GPL tries as best it can to ensure the freedom of software. Part of protecting this freedom is to counteract the selfish hoarding of software. Anything less wouldn't ensure freedom.
And maybe you should read a dictionary (Webster's 2nd edition): free1. Not under the control or power of another; having liberty; independant
If the GPL claimed to create "Software For Free Use", then yes, that would be incorrect. Or "Software That Is Free From Restrictions". But Free Software is neither of those and has never claimed to be.
How many people have not experienced SOME kind of connection outage
in the last year? anyone???
Far too many times, like us all I'm sure.
But as times continue, the network becomes more essential anyway. What does it matter if you run Office on your local computer, but can't get to your files on the fileshare? More and more the data is on the network, and without the data the application is useless. So there's little loss of reliability in web services.
The only problem is when you might be able to connect to your locally networked resources, but not your application provider -- but as things become more distributed, your locally networked resources (besides your printer) may not be anymore local than anything else. It's only the last mile that suffers big reliability problems, and that has to be fixed with or without web servies.
So, a company that does not have a lot of
money decided to entice talented workers
to work for them with stock options - the
stock goes up and those workers get their money...
According to you that involves no labor.
The money you make in the margin -- the value by which the stock goes up -- isn't labor. You got the stock in return for your labor, and you became an investor in the company. The margin is money you made as an investor. The initial value of the stock was what you made in labor.
Either way, there's still no justification for capital gains tax to be lower than income tax.
This is a very difficult question to answer, and will be entirely unfair in certain situations. If you have a business in its early years, and you have a lot of expenditures, should you pay taxes on all the money you take in? Even if you are paying out nearly all that money in rent, equipment, and other expenses, are you still going to pay taxes on your gross income? That's a killer.
And even so, how are you going to rate gross income? If you get a company car, is that income? How is it valued? A company house? Company vacation? If you don't include these as income, you are creating a system ripe for manipulation. If you do count them, you are creating something complicated.
the fact that he [Nader] is a very one-faceted politician that stands for very little
and is not knowledgeable enough in the majority of issues that this group
want to discuss, let alone all of the issues that the country wants to discuss
and have answers from.
I think part of why Nader didn't himself specifically answer these questions is because he has written volumes (literally) on many of these issues.
Admittedly these don't cover certain questions. But I don't think that necessarily implies he simply doesn't care about them.
Maybe you were just being crudely sarcastic...
is there going to be a crisis on the middle east and Nader goes "well, it's
not what I'm all about so I won't deal with it" or "well, it doesn't have to
do with giving people a tax cut, so it must not be worth my time"?
I can imagine Bush saying this, but Nader seems to be serious and thorough about nearly everything he does (to a fault, even). And his parents are from Lebanon, so he's unlikely to apathetic on the Middle East.
Bush is stupid, easily manipulated, and connected with corporate and monied interests who will use him for their own nefarious goals. But still, it's only four years. And Gore is easily manipulated and connected with those very same corporate and monied interests anyway, so what do I care if he loses?
If Bush wins because of Nader, that's fine by me. The Democratic party doesn't represent progressives anymore, and Gore certainly doesn't. If nothing else, maybe in four years the Democratic party might actually offer a progressive candidate. That's worth suffering a slightly more conservative president for a few years.
I don't like being a pawn in the faux-struggle between two parties who don't represent me. I don't like being scared into voting for someone I can't respect.
I can't speak for Nader or the Green party, but I can offer definitions of my own (which seem to imply some of the positions that Nader does have).
CEO's who earn $100 million a year aren't making honest money from honest labor -- you just can't make that much money from labor. You can make it by selling your influence with businesses and politicians, but that's not honest. You are just manipulating a corrupt system.
Extra taxation on wages that excede the lowest paid worker by a certain factor is one way of taxing this sort of situation. For example, all wages above 20x the lowest paid worker are subject to corporate taxes. I believe Nader supports something like this (though I don't know the specifics).
Capital gains certainly isn't money from honest labor, since it doesn't involve any labor. Right now capital gains taxes are much lower than taxes for other sorts of income, which seems quite unfair.
I don't think Nader would propose special taxes on certain professions, but rather makes a distinction between money earn by labor and money you get otherwise.
Until we get
smart and implement a flat tax, people are just going to engage in
whatever sort of financial misdirection they can to avoid paying taxes
The flat tax is based on the premise that somehow the really tricky part of the tax code is when you have to look your income up on the tax table and write in the number next to it. I don't know about you, but I've had few problems with this portion of taxes.
There's some other details -- tax breaks, tax credits, special exemptions galore -- and yeah, I think those should be wiped. Mostly because they are sneaky ways to give welfare to the rich. But the flat tax doesn't really change anything about those.
Taxes will be complicated. Does the flat tax get rid of deductions? Depreciation? I haven't heard anyone talk about these, but I'm sure it doesn't, because these (complicated) rules are methods of calculating people's real income. All forms of the income tax require calculating income. All forms of the income tax are somewhat complicated. The flat tax isn't any better.
PHP.. PHP is in the same boat, but you can develop middle-sized
applications before grinding your teeth. The language itself feels likc one
giant hack
Is it just me, or can you really not do ($object1->method1())->method2() in PHP? Or $object['index']->method() . Like, really simple chaining of expressions.
Maybe it's just me (correct me, I'll thank you!) But I seriously fear that PHP doesn't follow the basic principles of parser construction, and that the object system was a total hack -- not even a messy language extension (which would be bad enough), but just a straight out hack.
Users must make a concerted effort to keep track of
the independently changing components of PHP they are using
I've just started doing development in PHP, and I've really noticed this as a problem. It's not the size of the API that's a problem -- it's the lack of organization. There's nothing like modules, there's no good naming convention, and there's so damn many functions.
PHP is an evolved language, and it really shows. There wasn't a conscious and conservative philosophy behind it. That's both a plus and a minus -- but I think more minus than plus. Everything is there, and that's great -- but it's hard to find it, or when reading code to figure out where it came from.
I can also understand why they didn't cover Perl or Python, because both of these aren't really web scripting languages, they are general purpose. Of course, there are HTML embedded versions of both of them but they don't seem to have caught on, which is too bad. And Zope/DTML/Python isn't really scripting either, but considerably more than that (though I'm under the impression that Cold Fusion attempts to be something similar).
multi-process management : don't need it in a game, simple threads work
fine.
[etc...]
Part of the point is that the Indrema doesn't try to predict everything people will try to do, at least in terms of I/O and inter-program communication. (for normal games, Sony et. al. probably do give enough flexibility)
An Indrema could be a much better WebTV -- though it probably won't ship as such. But with a solid infrastructure, that could happen later. Linux still wouldn't be necessary, though, if it wasn't for the HD. Once you have files -- collections of MP3's, emails, bookmarks, game mods, and downloaded games -- you have to have something to manage it. And then you start downloading games, upgrading software...
Now, if they can just keep it from becoming a PC...
Another example of emulation, I believe, would be any new IA86 chip (Pentium II+, Athlon, K6(?)), which has a RISC core and translates IA86 instructions into that internal representation.
Which would be to say that emulation is pretty much all there is, so "faster than emulation" doesn't mean that much.
Heck, gcc is just a highly aggressive C optimizer, capable of translating the C instruction architecture into a variety of other architectures (IA86, MIPS, etc). The magic of Turing-equivalence.
Truly free software is
released to the publlic domain. I don't think anyone could argue otherwise.
Didn't you notice that was pretty much what I was arguing? I mean, you don't have to agree with me, but it's certainly not beyond argument.
Public domain and meaningful freedom are not necessarily the same. IMO, truly free software can never be made unfree -- that's what the GPL tries to do. --
Slashdot Mirror
This is true of tech support too -- if you have some experience in tech support, you can easily find another job doing tech support. But what's the point of that? You haven't gained anything by changing jobs if you've changed into something similarly bad. If you want to get a better job than the job you had, you'll have a hard time, because you won't have experience and people won't pay attention to you or give you a chance.
Finding a good job, a better job than the one you have, is still hard. If you have any ambition, you'll have to struggle to get the job that helps you in that ambition.
And recruiters filling up your answering machine means nothing -- recruiters are full of shit. They try to bring lots of people into their pool of potential employees, then skim a few people with the right resumes that employers are having a hard time finding. Half the time I don't even think the jobs they advertise exist.
It's not exactly like what Redhat does, and there aren't as many of these tasks as might be appropriate -- but the idea will scale better than Redhat's, I think, because you can easily add and combine different sets of programs and do so at different levels of granularity. And it's easy, since apt can deal with all the interdependance so the task- packages can be very simple.
penup setxy 100 200 pendown
Which parses as (in a C-like syntax):
penup(); setxy(100, 200); pendown();
It knows that penup takes no arguments, so setxy must be a new statement, and so on. This avoids a lot of the parenthesis that exist in Lisp code (which is, of course, closely related to Logo).
I don't know what the semantics of REBOL are like -- I get the impression this might be more similar to Forth in some ways.
Of course, it's also good to get the notion of what, as a programmer, you should write because it's the Right Way even if the Wrong Way would also work fine (for now). But there's a time for both -- you must follow the Wrong Way if you are to understand why the Right Way is Right.
And then there's the question of whether there is anything such as OS-independant. Sure, there's mini-OSes that create one OS layer ontop of an OS (Java, JavaScript, Squeak -- and even HTML and HTTP are an OS of sorts). And then there's lowest common denominator -- usually connected with the former, so you determine how many holes you'll fill in for the host OS, and how many things you'll just leave out. But you still aren't OS independant -- you can't be -- you've just generalized your program across a certain layer abstract layer which itself is an OS.
Truly novel OS notions -- like the resource fork on Macs -- just can't be used in a portable fashion. And if they aren't used, you aren't really creating a program that fits with the OS, you are just doing lowest-common-denominator. Will your Tk programm work well in a OS that provides orthogonal persistance? Will it run on a mainframe? Distributed? Probably not... when there's only a few OSes that are all more similar than not, portability isn't that hard. But it also isn't a very important achievement.
That said, if you can't remember the name of all the bizzarely abreviated programs, and the slightly inconsistent option letters, that's another issue. I think MacOS X may have some good ideas of general cleanup (redoing the filesystem layout, etc) which could probably be expanded upon.
Still, for all its problems, Unix is still the best game in town for the programming-minded.
The documentation for programming the OS is generally available with the OS (man 3), not as a developers kit; source code for tools is widely distributed, even for proprietary versions; nearly all versions of Unix include a C compiler; programming is ubiquitous -- most serious programming-minded Unix users will quickly be creating short shell or perl scripts, utilizing the entire traditional Unix environment in their programming. You can recreate a number of these things in other OSes, but with Unix they are assumed, ubiquitous, and part of the culture. There is a low barrier to entry.
Windows is not like this. Mac is not like this. BeOS, etc... well, beats me. And while you can get the Cygnus tools for Windows, and turn your Windows OS into a mini version of Unix... what would that prove?
homepage
Research
Products
Ergonomics
Their keyboard comparison comes from information taken from www.keyalt.com.
You can always try the poor man's cache. While it doesn't have the pictures (which is unfortunate), Google caches it.
Software can have liberty, by not be tied down (now or ever) in a system of false scarcity, obscurity, and selfishness.
Sorry, but people who actually care about Free Software aren't willing to render themselves impotent and their actions meaningless to satisfy a few people who can't understand that freedom is something you have to fight for.
The GPL tries as best it can to ensure the freedom of software. Part of protecting this freedom is to counteract the selfish hoarding of software. Anything less wouldn't ensure freedom.
And maybe you should read a dictionary (Webster's 2nd edition): free 1. Not under the control or power of another; having liberty; independant
If the GPL claimed to create "Software For Free Use", then yes, that would be incorrect. Or "Software That Is Free From Restrictions". But Free Software is neither of those and has never claimed to be.
But as times continue, the network becomes more essential anyway. What does it matter if you run Office on your local computer, but can't get to your files on the fileshare? More and more the data is on the network, and without the data the application is useless. So there's little loss of reliability in web services.
The only problem is when you might be able to connect to your locally networked resources, but not your application provider -- but as things become more distributed, your locally networked resources (besides your printer) may not be anymore local than anything else. It's only the last mile that suffers big reliability problems, and that has to be fixed with or without web servies.
Either way, there's still no justification for capital gains tax to be lower than income tax.
And even so, how are you going to rate gross income? If you get a company car, is that income? How is it valued? A company house? Company vacation? If you don't include these as income, you are creating a system ripe for manipulation. If you do count them, you are creating something complicated.
Admittedly these don't cover certain questions. But I don't think that necessarily implies he simply doesn't care about them.
Maybe you were just being crudely sarcastic... is there going to be a crisis on the middle east and Nader goes "well, it's not what I'm all about so I won't deal with it" or "well, it doesn't have to do with giving people a tax cut, so it must not be worth my time"?
I can imagine Bush saying this, but Nader seems to be serious and thorough about nearly everything he does (to a fault, even). And his parents are from Lebanon, so he's unlikely to apathetic on the Middle East.
Bush is stupid, easily manipulated, and connected with corporate and monied interests who will use him for their own nefarious goals. But still, it's only four years. And Gore is easily manipulated and connected with those very same corporate and monied interests anyway, so what do I care if he loses?
If Bush wins because of Nader, that's fine by me. The Democratic party doesn't represent progressives anymore, and Gore certainly doesn't. If nothing else, maybe in four years the Democratic party might actually offer a progressive candidate. That's worth suffering a slightly more conservative president for a few years.
I don't like being a pawn in the faux-struggle between two parties who don't represent me. I don't like being scared into voting for someone I can't respect.
CEO's who earn $100 million a year aren't making honest money from honest labor -- you just can't make that much money from labor. You can make it by selling your influence with businesses and politicians, but that's not honest. You are just manipulating a corrupt system.
Extra taxation on wages that excede the lowest paid worker by a certain factor is one way of taxing this sort of situation. For example, all wages above 20x the lowest paid worker are subject to corporate taxes. I believe Nader supports something like this (though I don't know the specifics).
Capital gains certainly isn't money from honest labor, since it doesn't involve any labor. Right now capital gains taxes are much lower than taxes for other sorts of income, which seems quite unfair.
I don't think Nader would propose special taxes on certain professions, but rather makes a distinction between money earn by labor and money you get otherwise.
There's some other details -- tax breaks, tax credits, special exemptions galore -- and yeah, I think those should be wiped. Mostly because they are sneaky ways to give welfare to the rich. But the flat tax doesn't really change anything about those.
Taxes will be complicated. Does the flat tax get rid of deductions? Depreciation? I haven't heard anyone talk about these, but I'm sure it doesn't, because these (complicated) rules are methods of calculating people's real income. All forms of the income tax require calculating income. All forms of the income tax are somewhat complicated. The flat tax isn't any better.
Maybe it's just me (correct me, I'll thank you!) But I seriously fear that PHP doesn't follow the basic principles of parser construction, and that the object system was a total hack -- not even a messy language extension (which would be bad enough), but just a straight out hack.
PHP is an evolved language, and it really shows. There wasn't a conscious and conservative philosophy behind it. That's both a plus and a minus -- but I think more minus than plus. Everything is there, and that's great -- but it's hard to find it, or when reading code to figure out where it came from.
I can also understand why they didn't cover Perl or Python, because both of these aren't really web scripting languages, they are general purpose. Of course, there are HTML embedded versions of both of them but they don't seem to have caught on, which is too bad. And Zope/DTML/Python isn't really scripting either, but considerably more than that (though I'm under the impression that Cold Fusion attempts to be something similar).
An Indrema could be a much better WebTV -- though it probably won't ship as such. But with a solid infrastructure, that could happen later. Linux still wouldn't be necessary, though, if it wasn't for the HD. Once you have files -- collections of MP3's, emails, bookmarks, game mods, and downloaded games -- you have to have something to manage it. And then you start downloading games, upgrading software...
Now, if they can just keep it from becoming a PC...
Which would be to say that emulation is pretty much all there is, so "faster than emulation" doesn't mean that much.
Heck, gcc is just a highly aggressive C optimizer, capable of translating the C instruction architecture into a variety of other architectures (IA86, MIPS, etc). The magic of Turing-equivalence.
Public domain and meaningful freedom are not necessarily the same. IMO, truly free software can never be made unfree -- that's what the GPL tries to do.
--