MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-03-02 |
| FROM | Steve Milo
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Starting a club at BC (report from the trenches).
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Is on the list of things that I didnt know what I was getting into until I
started doing it. Till this day I still do not have a club, there are
atleast two students who aim to sabotage everything I try to do. Any
dialogue I have with the management one of them has to make himself
present. To make matters worse I cant have any dialogue with this student
because he is here illegally. Ironically he is very familiar with
GNU/Linux but always seeks to marginalize it.
Any time I try to speak rationally with him he goes into a diatribe
about how bad it is in America.
The other students who show any signs of interest at all expect
me to do all the work. Their only interest in GNU/Linux is to see how
they can apply the knowledge they gain to a proprietary environment.
Those are the .Net developers/microsoft majors. I used to get into stupid debates
about how proprietary software is not the last word in software.
There are students who wonder why they cant get a job after having spent
four years learning java.
But what really frightens me is I have gotten an insight into the minds of
some of these so-called CompSci majors. It is scary that none of them
seek to try to hold themselves to a higher professional standard.
Anything that resembles a discussion that delves into the guts of a
technology, they immediately defer to the big names. But in a round about
fashion they display some elementary knowledge of CompSci. The schools
are churning out uninspired, disinterested software geeks with no interest
in how their actions affect society. Moral equivalency seems to be the
normal way of doing things. This is a sad display of American ingenuity.
The 'Dude did I steal your job' article is not even good enough to be
called a half truth. America didnt need to import qualified labor, and
they certainly are not the cornerstone in the high-tech(.bomb) of
yesteryear. HP, IBM, Compaq, Dell, to name but a mere few were founded by
Americans. Something happened in Silicon Valley in the 90's that made them
become so greedy.
Their actions and lack of consideration caused a stock market crash
that we are still paying for. Quite frankly I am not so sure this country
will ever recover from it. If someone has a plan that persons first step
would be to recognize the damage done to the industry and economy.
The disenchantment is past palable, dysfunctionality is so normal that
fatalism what we are to look forward to. Just look at that commercial
(AOL I think) where actors look naturally into the camera and talk
about virus protection. To me as a GNU/Linux user virus protection and
computers is an oxymoron.
I was recently at the Hillel at BC, they had a special presentation. The
guests were African Jews from Ethiopia. The women look pretty darn good,
I should go to Isreal the first chance I get.
But, upon my arrival there was a fellow giving out brochures of Israel,
from the tourism department. Inside was a little factoid leaflet, I will
paraphrase a few of the paragraphs:
Symantec got its start in Israel.
Checkpoint was developed in Israel.
Most of the NT kernel was developed in Israel.
No wonder I am looked at as unholy nut by some of my fellow Jews there,
look at what I have to work with. This virus carrying microsoft shit is beyond
reprehensible. Everyone has a so-called easier operating system for what?
So they can persue their ridiculous little clubs aimed to make every
little geek, nerd, immigrant, feel good about themselves.
But when a nerd, geek, immigrant like me comes along and wants to start a
club that could actually give students something they cant get elsewhere,
I am marignalized.
NYLXS better get itself back on track, we will have our work cut out for
us. I am sick of hearing about PHP(that peice of shit diarrhia of a
markup language that masqurades as a programming language designed by
idiots for idiots), javashit (that unholy resources sucking peice of
junk), C#(they thought they could do something right, but they still stole
it and its still sucks).
Steve M
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NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
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