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Comment: Re:How do we fight back against Beta? (Score 0) 253

by sqrt(2) (#46206023) Attached to: A Corporate War Against a Scientist, and How He Fought Back

It's clear that they have no intention of backing down or addressing user concerns. The only question now is, what site will we all move to after Beta stops being optional?

I'm doing the Slashcott, too, but I don't have any delusions that it'll get them to adopt the only course of action that would be acceptable: abandon the Beta site, keep "classic" Slashdot, issue an apology, and never try this shit again.

Dice doesn't care. They bought Slashdot for the name and the traffic. They'll end up ruining the former and driving away the latter.

Comment: Re:The Life We live (Score 1) 545

by sqrt(2) (#46156891) Attached to: Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source

1. Be willing to be on call 24/7... why should this be the case? Maybe this should change.
2. Spend free time researching and learning? Really... I need this for my job? No I don't and companies can train people.
3. Forgoing human contact? There is no reason for this again. Many tech jobs heavily involve communication be it for product planning, support, design meetings... ...

You're competing against people (mostly men) who ARE willing to do these things.

Comment: Re:Hire them at companies without experience (Score 3, Interesting) 545

by sqrt(2) (#46156801) Attached to: Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source

So she's not very qualified relative to the other applicants. She's no worse off than a man with the same qualifications. When the labor supply is so much larger than demand, employers just keep raising the bar. If we were struggling to find programmers, things would be different. This push to make more and more people into programmers is only going to worsen the situation for people seeking their first job, and will depress wages for the people who do get hired. ...it's almost like that's the point.

Comment: The Life We live (Score 5, Insightful) 545

by sqrt(2) (#46156553) Attached to: Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source

Spending 8+ hours a day isolated at a computer, forgoing human contact to spend most of your free time researching and learning, interacting with machines and electronics at the lowest and least intuitive levels, willing to be on call almost 24/7--takes a certain constellation of personality traits. For whatever reason, these traits skew male; not entirely, but heavily. You can debate about whether this is cultural, environmental, genetic, or some combination. Open for discussion is even the question if we should be concerned at all. You don't hear the same kind of panic about the lack of men in early education or nursing.

There are probably as many women in tech as want to be there. What's really stopping them other than themselves and their own preferences?

Comment: Re:In otherwards (Score 2) 664

by sqrt(2) (#46143779) Attached to: Virtual Boss Keeps Workers On a Short Leash

Do you think he did this out of the goodness of his anti-Semitic heart, or because he saw the writing on the wall and wanted to get out ahead of the labor movement? Things were heading in that direction anyway and he just preemptively implemented a policy which was rapidly approaching. Why was it approaching? The labor movement.

He probably avoided a lot of smashed windows.

Comment: Re:In otherwards (Score 5, Insightful) 664

by sqrt(2) (#46142813) Attached to: Virtual Boss Keeps Workers On a Short Leash

Happy workers are productive workers.

I have a hard time believing someone can be so ignorant of history. Do you think slaves were happy? What about feudal serfs? Or pre-unionized steel workers? Or the children working in textile factories?

Capital has never, and will never, care about the happiness of their workers unless those workers force them to care. We had to fight tooth and nail for the rights we have now; eight hour days, forty hour weeks, weekends, workplace safety, sick leave, maternity leave, minimum wage. These things make workers happy, and none of them were offered up voluntarily. They had to be bought with the blood and the lives of the working class from generations ago, and capital has been tirelessly waging a ceaseless campaign to take them back.

Comment: Re:In otherwards (Score 4, Interesting) 664

by sqrt(2) (#46142651) Attached to: Virtual Boss Keeps Workers On a Short Leash

I've mostly stopped typing out my own rebuttals and just started linking to the specific part of my .sig that addresses whatever particular libertarian fallacy someone is invoking. Rarely do I need to go offscript, and even more rarely is a competent rebuttal offered that doesn't distill down to a simple difference in values. Libertarians are, at heart, corporate fascists. They are simply working from a different value system--a horrifyingly barbarous one.

You can consider the debate over when you get them to affirm their subscription to the unadulterated version of those beliefs. For example, I've cornered one before and forced them to admit that rampant poverty is preferable to even a small amount of taxation to alleviate it.

I'll give them credit for their absolute devotion to ideological purity. That's real devotion.

Comment: Re:They should call it an anti-retention device (Score 5, Insightful) 664

by sqrt(2) (#46142355) Attached to: Virtual Boss Keeps Workers On a Short Leash

Not if this technology actually delivers and makes the workforce more efficient--even if it's through dehumanizing total control. Your hippy dippy startup won't be able to compete.

So while you're giving extravagant perks to your employees such as unmetered bathroom breaks and letting them skip their quarterly non-work related conversation log review, your competitors are brutalizing their employees and reaping the rewards associated with turning human beings into pliable, docile, terrified, machines.

The worst thing about fascism is that it can actually deliver; as long as you don't get side tracked by useless and expensive crusades of ethnic cleansing or territorial expansion.

Comment: Linux UI as drying cement (Score 1) 503

by sqrt(2) (#46130967) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Are Linux Desktop Users More Pragmatic Now Or Is It Inertia?

What exactly is a "classic" desktop anyway? Are we talking classic Windows? Classic Mac OS? There's a constellation of UI paradigms which work. Some of them are mutually incompatible, you can't use them simultaneously. If you want to come up with something new, it has to actually work better than what we had before. If it merely works "as good" as what it's replacing then users won't be happy. You're changing things for the sake of change. So from those choices you pick the ones you think work best together and create a DE out of them. So we get Gnome Shell, KDE, XFCE, et al. Then there are the numerous eccentrics, throwbacks, and masochists running things like Awesome, DWM, Trinty, or any of the others which don't even add up to 1% all together.

I don't think Linux users are getting more pragmatic. The different camps have mostly just solidified around their own "classic" vision. There's 3-4 different main camps now depending how you choose to slice it, and numerous sub groups and forks if you drill down deeper. It'll always be more fragmented, contentious, and fluid than Windows or OS X. That's a good thing, as long as you have the wherewithal to navigate your way between all the various spin-offs and cousin projects spawned when the devs make a boneheaded change for change's sake. Gnome 2 users need to know enough that MATE is their upgrade path, etc.

I've actually been using Unity these days. It's level of polish and completeness is better than anything else I've found and it replicates the features I most enjoy from OS X. I had to install a less offensive theme and icon pack, change the system font to Lucida Grande, but after that it's a very nice desktop. I only have a few criticisms: you can't move the dock to the bottom; the search features aren't as simple and elegant as Spotlight, lenses are over-engineered and pointlessly complicated for what the achieve even if it's a more powerful tool overall; and there are a couple minor GUI glitches which I've come to find unacceptable after spending so much time in the pixel-perfect world Apple has created.

Comment: Windows XP or security products? (Score 5, Insightful) 417

by sqrt(2) (#45971267) Attached to: Microsoft Extends Updates For Windows XP Security Products Until July 2015

In case some people don't RTFA,


Emphasis mine. XP updates ARE ending, but MSE/Forefront will still get updated. XP will still be susceptible to any zero day until it gets detected by MSE--if it's even installed at all. This is a marginal increase in safety for XP post-EOL, at best. The apocalypse is still nigh.

My advice for fellow ITAs. Don't mention this to your boss at all if you're still trying to migrate. It's not really relevant to the threat posed by XP's end of support. If they get wind of it on their own, emphasize that XP itself is still going to be wide open. At best all MSE does is let you know you've been owned after the fact once MS gets around to updating the definitions. MSE already has a pretty poor record for detecting even older threats. It's better than nothing but you shouldn't be relying on it.

Comment: Re:It's rigged (Score 1) 187

by sqrt(2) (#45970383) Attached to: FISA Judges Oppose Intelligence Reform Proposals Aimed At Court

It's theoretically possible that they don't bother submitting requests unless they are highly confident it will be accepted. I don't believe that, but it's at least possible. We need to know more about the process and the types of requests--unfortunately that's difficult with a secret court.
